The Fifteenth of January — AD 69 I: You Don’t Buy Soldiers
Otho says it outright: he cannot stay on his feet unless he becomes emperor. It makes no difference whether he falls at the hand of an enemy in battle or at the hands of creditors in the Forum.
The entire capital for the coup is one million sesterces. A few days earlier, Suetonius writes, Otho had extorted it from an imperial slave for getting him a post as steward. He entrusts the matter to five soldiers of the bodyguard, and each of them picks two more. They get ten thousand each on the spot and a promise of fifty thousand.
On the morning of January 15, Galba offers sacrifice before the temple of Apollo on the Palatine. The haruspex Umbricius examines the entrails and warns: treason, an enemy in the house. Otho stands right beside him. He hears everything and reads the omen in his own favor.
The freedman Onomastus approaches him and speaks the agreed words: “The architect and the builders are waiting.” Otho explains to those around him that he is going to look at an old house for sale. He leaves through the palace of Tiberius to the Velabrum and goes to the golden milestone by the temple of Saturn. Twenty-three soldiers are waiting there.
They hail him as emperor. Otho trembles at how few they are. They put him in a litter, draw their swords and run. Suetonius tells it his own way: the litter is closed, a woman’s, the bearers tire, Otho gets out and runs, his shoe comes undone. Then the soldiers lift him onto their shoulders.
You already know the rest of the morning. The rumor of Otho’s death was spread — as many believed — by his own men, to lure the emperor out of the palace. Meanwhile in the camp the soldiers set Otho on the plinth where a gilded statue of Galba had stood only recently. Otho stretches out his hands, bows and blows kisses to the crowd. He plays the slave in order to become the master.
Galba’s litter sways in the crush of the Forum. The temples and porticoes are full of people. No one shouts. There is only the silence of great fear and great anger.
Then cavalry gallops into the Forum. The standard-bearer of the cohort escorting the emperor tears the emperor’s image from its pole and throws it to the ground. It is a signal for all the soldiers. The crowd flees.
At the Lacus Curtius the terrified bearers overturn the litter. The old man tumbles onto the paving.
The dispute ends with a sentence that hurts more than any of the versions: the killers did not care what he said. Galba dies there, in the middle of the Forum. The killer was reportedly Camurius of the Fifteenth Legion, but no one is certain.
One name, however, is certain: the man who did not back down. The centurion Sempronius Densus. Dio writes that he defended the emperor as long as he could and fell beside him. Tacitus remembers him differently: Densus blocked the path of Piso’s killers and gave him a moment to flee. Piso takes refuge in the temple of Vesta. They drag him out of it. The adoption gave him only this: he died before his older brother. Vinius also dies by the temple of the Divine Julius.
That evening the Senate grants Otho tribunician power, the name of Augustus and all the imperial honors. The senators who that morning had rejoiced at the rumor of Otho’s death now compete in flattery. Dio reckons Galba’s age at seventy-two years and twenty-three days, and his rule, counting from Hispania, at nine months and thirteen days. Tacitus gives him seventy-three years and an epitaph for all time.
Rome has a new emperor. On the Rhine, for two weeks now, there has been another.