Ninety Days — AD 69 I: You Don’t Buy Soldiers
You know him. In the episode about Nero we asked: remember this Otho. Now you know why.
Marcus Salvius Otho was born on April 28, AD 32. As a boy he was so spoiled that his father often flogged him. At night he roamed the city, grabbing drunks and tossing them in a blanket. Later he became Nero’s closest friend and Poppaea’s husband, until Nero took his wife away.
You already know Lusitania: an honor that looked like exile. And here the story takes a turn. The rake governs the province for ten years with moderation and honesty. When Galba rebels, Otho is the first governor to side with him. He gives him all his table silver and gold to be minted into coins.
His astrologer Ptolemy once predicted that he would outlive Nero and, under Galba, become emperor. Suetonius calls the astrologer Seleucus, but the promise is the same. On his first day in power Otho tells the Senate he was seized in the street and forced to rule. The people greet him with the cry “Nero!” and he does not protest. Reportedly, in his first letters to the governors he adds that name to his own. He restores the statues of Poppaea. The first expenditure he signs is fifty million sesterces to finish the Golden House.
On the first night he wakes up screaming. He dreams of Galba’s ghost throwing him out of bed. The guards find the emperor on the floor. In the morning, as the omens are taken, he mutters a proverb: what business did I have playing the long flutes? It means roughly: why did I get into this?
And yet Otho surprises. He puts his pleasures aside and hides his debauchery. He pardons Marius Celsus, loyal to Galba to the end, and makes him one of his generals. Tigellinus, Nero’s prefect, receives word at his estate in Sinuessa that his last hour has come, and dies. Rome celebrates. And the emperor himself? Suetonius describes him without mercy: of middle height, bandy-legged, as fussy about his looks as few men are. His hair is thin, so he wears a wig fitted so well that no one suspects.
The hardest thing to manage is the Guard. The soldiers now know what they are worth. One evening a tribune of the Guard loads weapons onto wagons in the camp to ship them to the cohort at Ostia. The Praetorians decide the senators are plotting a coup. They rush to the palace, where the emperor is at that moment dining with eighty senators. The guests flee through side doors. Otho stands on his couch and, with tears in his eyes, begs the soldiers to return to the camp. The next day each of them gets five thousand sesterces.
Galba gave the Guard nothing for the throne. Otho pays it even for mutiny.
To Vitellius he first writes honeyed letters. He proposes to share power and wants to become his son-in-law. Vitellius answers in kind. Then each accuses the other of debauchery and crimes. And both, Tacitus remarks, spoke the truth. The war can no longer be called off. On March 14 Otho leaves Rome. The dandy who cared for his looks like few others marches on foot, in an iron cuirass, ahead of the standards — nothing like what was said of him.
From Gaul, two armies of Vitellius come down across the Alps. The wife of one of the commanders, Salonina, rides through the Italian towns on horseback, in purple, and the towns resent her for it. Suetonius will record one more omen later. Over the field at Bedriacum before the battle, two eagles fought, and the victor was driven off by a third, flying in from the east. True, or added after the fact? Remember that east.
News reaches Brixellum that no one wants to believe.