The Year of the Four Emperors

Recommended reading:

Timeline:

April 68 - Galba and Vindex revolt against Nero

May 68 - Vindex killed in Gaul

June 68 - Nero takes his own life, Galba becomes emperor

January 69 - Rhineland regions declare Vitellius emperor

January 69 - Praetorian Guard murder Galba and declare Otho emperor

April 69 - Battle of Bedriacum, Otho takes his own life, Vitellius recognised as emperor

July 69 - Egypt legions declare Vespasian emperor

December 69 - Vitellius killed in Rome, Vespasian recognised as emperor

Transcript:

Okay, so we have a wonderful episode for you today.  We're going back to Rome for our episode,  and our special guest has very kindly agreed  to talk to us all about what's going on  in a very special year.  Would you like to introduce yourself, please? 

  Sure, so I'm Nathaniel Katz or Nat.  I'm a Roman historian teaching  at the University of Arizona.  I mostly do like imperial messaging,  propaganda, regime change stuff,  lots of assassinations and civil wars.  So I'm excited to talk about  the year of the four emperors today.   

So let's start off with the year 68.  We've had a long period  of Julio-Claudian emperors.  What happens when the last one of them dies?   

A whole lot of chaos is going to happen.  I mean, the chaos began before Nero died.  The last few months of his life  are already a mess where he is facing,  I mean, depending on how you do the math,  one to three rival emperors.  But that's actually really just the prelude.  Nero, as I'm sure we're gonna get more into soon,  is going to die facing  what he thinks is one rebellion.  Unfortunately, for the Romans at least,  this is not gonna be a time when like,  there's an emperor, there's rebellion.  Oh, we have a new emperor.  Carry on business as usual.  Instead, nobody's that sure  the new guy's good at the job either.  So three more guys are gonna throw their hats  in the ring and we're gonna end up with,  well, the year of the four emperors. 

I love a bit of chaos.  So I'm really excited about this.  So Nero, I think it's fair to say  that his reputation isn't great even now.  You mentioned that the end of his reign  is quite chaotic.  Who were the main people that are complaining about him  and maybe setting themselves up as potential rivals?   

Yeah, so the problem by this point  is that Nero has alienated almost everyone.  So the military is really upset at him.  There's been a lot of recent purges of the officer corps.  Right, you end up in a vicious cycle.  People are mad at me  so I'm gonna kill the people who don't like me,  but well, that just makes more people mad at you.  The military also thinks Nero's obsession  with like being an actor and a singer and an athlete,  they think this is just the most embarrassing thing  that has ever happened.  And the Senate agrees with them, that's humiliating.  Now the plebs, the common people,  some of them like the performance aspect,  but they also are furious at Nero.  There was recently a giant fire in Rome,  huge chunk of the city burned down.  And there's a rumor that Nero started the fire,  which to be clear, he almost certainly did it,  but they're really mad at him for it anyway.  So he has basically no fans at this point.   

Oh, that sucks.  I mean, it's hard to feel sorry for the guy  on the other hand.  So Nero is feeling threatened.  What are the causes of his death?  Is he attacked?   

Yeah, so the like final set of dominoes,  which is gonna play out in a really weird way,  but it begins with a man in Gaul named Gaius Julius Vindex.  Or if we pronounce the Latin properly  where the V's are W's, he's Windex,  but I just can't do that to the guy.  That's just, you can't 2,000 years later  be a window cleaner.  That's just too sad.  So Vindex, he's a aristocrat in Gaul.  He's not a Roman Senator,  though he does have citizenship.  He is going to lead this revolt in Gaul.  And he's aware there's no way he can replace Nero, right?  He's Roman, but he's not really Roman enough,  at least at this point in Roman history  to throw his hat into the ring as emperor.  So he sends these letters  to different provincial governors  trying to get them to join.  And in particular, he wants one of the governors  in Spain, Galba, to join him.  And we're gonna see that Galba,  I mean, beyond anything else,  the guy is like a black belt at like propaganda  or political messaging or whatever you wanna call it.  He's really good at getting his point across.  So Galba not only agrees,  but he announces he's gonna be emperor  at this mock manumission ceremony, right?  So, I mean, one of the unpleasant things  about Rome that we always have to remember, right?  It's a slave-owning society for them.  Liberty is not just a political metaphor.  It's a very real thing.  But Galba's really toeing the line here.  He basically announces, I'm gonna go free some slaves.  And then it becomes clear the slaves he's talking about  are the Roman people enslaved by Nero  and he's going to free them all.   

That's quite the turn of phrase he's got there.   

Yeah, yeah.  We're gonna see he's got some flaws of his own,  but showmanship he's got in his own weird way.  So Galba joins in and Nero, when it was just Vindex,  Nero kind of dismissed it.  Now that Galba's joined in, Nero's terrified.  Galba is, he's kind of the opposite of Nero, right?  Nero is on the younger side.  Galba is old.  Nero, depending on who you ask,  maybe could use some more dignity.  Galba is so dignified.  And Galba, okay, he's not a Julio-Claudian.  Nobody else is, we're running out of those.  But Galba has an incredible ancestor of his own,  not only in the Republic,  but he even claims his family goes back to a pacify,  so the mother of the Minotaur and Greek myth. 

  So he's got pedigree.   

Yes.   

Can we see the Roman people thinking,  yeah, he is the replacement that we want?  Are they calling for him  or is this kind of him forcing himself?   

Well, so Plutarch has this phrase that I really like  that Galba becomes emperor more by his reputation  than by his might.  Because this doesn't play out  the way you're gonna think it does, right?  You're like, oh, at this point,  there's a war and Galba and Vindex win.  No, actually what happens is there's a battle.  Nero's general beats Vindex.  Vindex commits suicide.  Galba is off in Spain like, well, that's that.  I really shouldn't have announced  that I was gonna try to be emperor.  I guess I'm gonna kill myself as well.  But he gets the biggest lucky break of all,  which is enough people were furious about Nero  and don't want him  that they actually all end up abandoning Nero.  The Praetorian Guard abandons Nero  and the military abandons him in the Senate.  It's like, ah, this is our moment.  Nero's a public enemy of Rome.  And so Galba, after losing the war,  basically gets a message in Spain,  you won, actually.  You lost every military engagement,  but everybody abandoned Nero anyway.  So it really is almost purely this like community consensus  that carries Galba to the throne.  Militarily, it's a disaster.   

Right, well, that's interesting.  I mean, it's perhaps not so surprising  because of Nero's reputation.  So Galba, does he immediately go to Rome?  Is he making big changes?  Is he a great emperor?  What can we see him doing?   

I think for Galba,  there's this incredible, devastating Tacitus sum up  when Galba dies.  Well, I was gonna say, spoiler warning, he dies.  I guess they're all dead by now.  He's gonna die prematurely.  What he does, getting slightly ahead here,  but Tacitus says,  Galba seemed too great to be a subject  so long as he was a subject  and all would have agreed  he was equal to the Imperial office  if he had never held it.  And in the way of the best Tacitus lines, right?  This is like, it seems complimentary,  but it's so damning when you think about it.  Everybody thought he was gonna be a good emperor  and then he becomes emperor and,  no, he's a disaster at it.  He's basically the anti-Nero,  but well, right, just flipping everything on its head  doesn't mean it's gonna be good.  Galba decides he's gonna go 10 out of 10  like old school Republicans severity.  And the Senate kind of likes it after Nero  and nobody else does.  So for instance, Rome's bankrupt  because Nero spent too much money  and gave too many gifts.  So Galba has the idea that  everybody who received a present from Nero has to return it.  What?  That's not how that works.  There's another time that he's going to Rome  and there's this custom, there's a new emperor.  Cities can present them with a gold crown  and some city, I think it's in Spain,  somewhere between Spain and Rome  gives Galba a gold crown.  They're like, Galba, we're so happy you're emperor.  This is 15 pounds of gold.  Galba's here, he's holding it.  He's like, huh, I don't know.  So Galba has it melted down and weighed  and then Galba comes back  and he's like, your three ounce is short.  I expect you to make up the difference.   

Wow.  Okay.  That is such an illustrative anecdote.   

Yeah, it's, all right.  You're technically correct here.  Now we have to remember these people gave you this  because they like you  and I don't think they do anymore  but you're technically correct.  They got the weight wrong. 

  Okay, so Nero died in the summer of 68.  Galba's now emperor.    Yes.    It's the year of the four emperors  and like the hundred years war,  it's a bit more than 12 months  but how long does Galba last?   

Galba is going to last just a few months.  He's going to die in January.  So all of this so far has taken place in 68  which is Galba versus Nero  and there's some more chaos going on in Africa  that's probably not even worth getting into.  Shouldn't even brought that up.  So Galba is going to be gone in January of the year 69  and so the year 69 is properly speaking  the year of the four emperors  we're going to have Galba  and the three people who,  well, some of them challenge him,  some of them come around after he's already dead.   

Okay, so the year of the four emperors,  he's been the emperor for six, seven, eight months  but as for this year,  he's out in the first month of the year.    He's out in January. 

It's a pretty spectacular flame out.   

So let's get into a bit of context.  What's happening to cause this?  Is there another rival payment that's coming along?  What's happening?   

Well, poor Galba is going to have two rivals  that come along.  So yeah, it's tough being an emperor.  So the first problem happens in Germany  or I guess more accurately the Roman armies, right?  Sitting on the border of Germany.  So there's this huge concentration of Roman legions there  and they kind of suspect that Galba hates them  in part because this is the army that beat Vindex, right?  So Galba announces he's emperor.  This army goes and beats his guys.  Galba comes up for anywhere.  They're like, so he must dislike us, right?  I mean, we were on the wrong side of this.  So in January, all Roman soldiers have to swear  their basically loyalty oath to the emperor  and the army doesn't do it.  Instead, they look at their leader, Vitellius.  So Vitellius is actually Galba's appointment.  Galba doesn't trust the guy in Germany,  replaces him with Vitellius.  Vitellius gets up there and the army's like,  we're not going to swear to Galba.  Do you want to be emperor?  So if you believe the sources,  who absolutely detest Vitellius.  So, you know, that's an important caveat there.  But if you believe them, Vitellius is basically dragged  into being an emperor because his soldiers  just really hate Galba, they're like, all right,  you'll do.   

Okay, yeah, you're better than that guy.   

Yep.   

Lesser of two evils, okay. 

  So back in Rome, Galba is at this point aware,  okay, things are going south, right?  We have a serious problem here.  And he decides the solution is he needs to adopt an heir.  Galba is relatively old.  When you have an older emperor,  people kind of naturally are thinking,  what's going to come next?  I want to position myself for that.  So he decides he's going to adopt an heir.  And everybody thinks they know who he's going to say,  Otho.  And this guy, I mean, in a year full of great characters,  Otho is another one.  Otho actually comes up as Nero's drinking buddy.  Nero and Otho were like best buds,  went out partying all the time.  And then the problem is Nero fell in love  with Otho's wife.  Yeah, this is obviously going back a few years back,  you know, when Nero's alive.  Nero wants to marry Otho's wife.  This is actually back when Rome is in large part  being run by Nero's mother, kind of behind the scenes,  Agrippina the younger and some other of Nero's advisors.  You're doing a lot of the actual governance.  And if you believe Tacitus, which, you know,  again, the story is like maybe too good,  but it's really fun.  If you believe Tacitus,  Nero goes to his mom Agrippina and is like,  I'm going to marry my best friend's wife.  His mom's like, don't do that.  Terrible idea.  Don't do that.  And so Nero has her assassinated.  Complete mess.  Marries the wife and Otho is promoted  and promoted here is in just gigantic quotation marks,  right?  The emperor steals his wife  and to get him out of the way,  he sends him off to be a governor in Spain. 

Far away, okay. 

Just awkward to have him around at this point.  The love story is not happily ever after.  The wife, unfortunately, Papaya passes away,  not that long thereafter,  maybe complications from miscarriage,  maybe unfortunately domestic violence.  Hard to say.  So, all right.  So Otho was off in Spain  and when this revolt against Nero happens,  Otho was like the first guy in line because,  well, that guy stole his wife.  He's done with Nero.  So Otho was the number one guy back in Galba.  As soon as Galba's emperor, Otho's like, I'm in.   

I mean, wouldn't you be?   

Yeah.  This is payback.  So everyone thinks, all right,  well, it's obviously gonna be that Otho guy.  But Galba takes a look at Otho.  He's like, well, did I get rid of Nero  just to put his drinking buddy in charge?  No.  He decides I'm not gonna do Otho.  Instead, he picks this guy, Piso,  full name Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi Licinianus.  Incredible name.  He's like Galba, a guy who was primarily notable  because he has a really fancy Republican background.  He's actually several previous members of his family,  have been executed for treason.  I don't know if that's prestigious or a negative,  maybe both.  But he's this really severe old school aristocrat.  Kind of like a mini Galba, which is the problem.  Basically, if you liked Galba before, you like Piso.  If you didn't like Galba before,  you're like, well, I don't like the junior version either.  So nobody is won over by this whatsoever. 

Fair enough. 

So that's where Otho comes into it.  Otho actually has these gigantic debts  he's been spending money like crazy,  figuring I'm gonna be emperor.  And at this point, he decides,  well, I'm either gonna be emperor or I'm gonna die.  I'm gonna basically get my knees broken  by the ancient Roman equivalent of the mafia  or I'm gonna have all the money in the world,  one in one way or the other.  And so the missing piece of the puzzle  or maybe like lever even is the Praetorian Guard.  So these are the military unit in Rome.  And the Praetorian Guard gets a really bad reputation today  for constantly killing emperors.  And we're gonna say some stuff today  that's gonna make that seem really deserved.  But I actually,  I think that reputation is sometimes overblown.  I think the leaders of the Praetorian Guard  are sometimes maybe a little bit political opportunists.  By and large, the rank and file of the Praetorian Guard  appears to have been fiercely loyal to the emperor.  And they actually only betray Nero for two reasons.  So the first reason is they are promised  a spectacularly huge bonus.  So basically when there's a new emperor,  they get what's called a donative.  Basically a bonus that is many times  a multiple of their salary.  The Praetorian Prefect under Nero,  who was trying to betray Nero for Galba,  promises them 30,000 sesterces.  And I mean, this is just a gigantic sum.  It is twice the previous highest donative.   

Wow, okay.   

So he promises a huge amount of money.  And even for that, the Praetorians were wavering.  And then the reason they finally really abandoned Nero  is that Praetorian Prefect, he lies to them.  He tells them, oh, Nero's gonna run away  and move to Alexandria, Egypt,  and leave you guys behind.  So they actually thought Nero betrayed them first,  which no, he didn't.  He almost certainly wasn't going to Egypt,  but you see how the lie works, right?  They're so loyal, but well, if we kind of break that loyalty,  okay, now the giant truck full of money  is looking really tempting.  So the donative is actually a bit of a sticking point  for Galba, though.  Galba gets to Rome,  and one of the first things he's told is,  oh, by the way, you owe this Praetorian guard  just this titanic sum of money.  And Galba says no.  What Galba says is,  I'm accustomed to levy soldiers not to buy them.  Right, in his mind, and everything he does  is I want to be this old school Republican.  He's like, no, I recruit soldiers.  Maybe I could script soldiers,  and then I train them really hard.  I don't give them giant piles of money.  So the Praetorian guard has promised a donative  twice as high as any that was ever given.  They receive zero.   

So not even the normal donative?   

Nope, straight up zero.   

Wow, okay.  So they're not gonna be particularly happy.  What's the Praetorian guard's role in Rome?  Are they bodyguards?  Who are they?   

Yeah, so we talk about them today  as the emperor's bodyguard.  And that's true, but kind of misleading.  The exact number of the Praetorian guard  is debated based on some really technical arguments  based on some frankly terrible evidence either way.  So we don't have to worry about the exact number.  Let's say ballpark 10,000 guys.  Which is a simply comical number of bodyguards.  You don't need 10,000 bodyguards.  Nobody would ever require that quantity of bodyguards.  What they're there for in practice  is that they're basically a private army, right?  The idea is no military commander can pop into Rome  with a body of soldiers and ambush the emperor.  The emperor has 10,000 guys, they're waiting.  So they keep security in the city.  They respond to things like riots.  If the emperor thinks you've committed treason,  it might be the Praetorian guard who comes for you.  But above all, they're there to prevent coups.   

Right.  Doesn't sound like it's gonna work this year.  It doesn't sound like they're doing  a particularly good job so far. 

  Their record in this year is a really bleak one.  Yeah.  It's gonna get worse.  So this whole time,  back when Otho thought he was gonna get adopted  by Galba, back when everybody thought that,  Otho's having dinner with Galba almost every night.  And Otho is very different from Galba, right?  Galba is a good showman in the sense  that he can come up with really good rhetoric  to like put on a coin.  Interpersonally though, that's not where he shines.  But Otho has a bit of like Nero's charisma.  Otho at dinner befriends the Praetorian guard,  like the whole thing, they're his buddies.  And they actually get really close.  Otho starts giving them presents,  which by the way is illegal.  There's laws that senators cannot give soldiers anything  or it's treason and those laws are to prevent,  well, exactly this, right?  Those laws prevent soldiers being more loyal  to a senator than to the emperor.  But Galba and the new people he's put in charge  of the Praetorian guard, either they don't notice  or they don't think it's a big deal.  And so Otho is passing out his own little donatives  to soldiers this whole time. 

Smart. 

Yeah.  And when one of the Praetorians has legal trouble,  Otho represents him in court.  In Roman terms, he's the guy's patron,  except hold on, Praetorians are not supposed  to have a patron besides the emperor  for extremely obvious reasons  that you don't want their loyalty divided.  Right.  So when Galba adopts Piso, Otho goes to the Praetorians  and he's like, so what if we do something about this?  And well, they do.  The Praetorian guard at Otho's behest  is going to kill Galba  and they kill him in broad daylight  in the middle of the forum.  He is run down by Praetorian cavalry. 

Wow. 

When I tell my students to try and get this across,  it's like if the president was assassinated  by the secret service, like in Times Square.  It is like the most public betrayal imaginable. 

Wow.  And it could not be stressed enough, right?  That the forum is the center of Rome.  It's the most public area. 

This is not hiding at all. 

This is, wow, this is insane. 

Yeah.  So this is the Praetorians have just killed the emperor  in broad daylight in favor of this other guy. 

Okay.  So Galba's dead.  Otho's positioned himself.  He's in Rome and he's positioning himself to take over.  Is that what happens? 

So Otho becomes emperor.  Basically the Praetorians are extremely enthusiastic.  The people like him,  because Otho very quickly capitalizes  on Nero's reputation.  He's like, hey, I'm his buddies with Nero.  You guys miss Nero, right?  I know we were tired of him at the end,  but we saw what the alternative is  and Nero was way better than that, right?  Right.  At least he was fun.  Yeah, at least he was fun.  So for instance, people start calling Otho,  Otho Nero, that's also his name  and he just lets them do it. 

So that's clear messaging. 

Yeah.  And the Senate, it's really skeptical,  but what else are they gonna do?  I mean, they don't have an army.  So, Otho gets made emperor  and he actually does a better job than you'd think.  Basically all of the sources are like,  Otho should have been a disaster,  but somehow wasn't.  Now, he's gonna rule for a very short time,  as we're going to see,  but in that time, he seems to do a pretty good job.  It is popular in Rome, the city of Rome,  maybe not so far outside of it.  Unlike Galba, he really seems  more interpersonally charismatic.  Like if you meet him,  he could probably get you on his side. 

So what are the kinds of things  that we can see him being good at  or that we're being told that he was good at? 

So I think part of it is he's really good  at diffusing tension between different groups  and kind of playfully working between the expectations  of these different groups, right?  And so this is one of the difficulties  of being a Roman emperor, right?  You have these different audiences,  the people, the military, the Senate,  and they want different things.  And everybody thought Otho was gonna be  like 100% Praetorians,  but actually he does a good job  of balancing these things.  So for instance, there are some officials  from Galba's reign that people are furious at  and want to execute.  Now, some of them who really were involved  in what Galba was doing,  either ended up getting killed during the coup  or Otho does allow the executions.  But some of them he's like,  actually, I don't think those guys deserve to die.  And Otho basically manages to diffuse the tension  and persuade people,  hey, a bloodbath is like not gonna be  in anybody's best interest here.  And I think that actually impressed the Senate.  The Senate thought he was gonna just kind of go along  with what the mob wanted.  And no, the guy, for instance,  that Galba wanted to make a council,  no, we're gonna let that guy live.  We don't need to kill him.  That's not gonna help anything. 

I think de-escalation is an undervalued skill  in politicians ancient and modern. 

Yes. 

So he's doing a fairly good job,  but you say it didn't last very long.  What happens?  How brief are we talking? 

Otho becomes emperor on January 15th.  He's going to die on April 16th. 

Oh, wow.  That's a short time. 

So the problem is that Vitellius guy, right?  The first guy to rebel against Galba was Vitellius  up by the German armies.  And Vitellius has just been an open rebellion  this entire time that Galba's getting murdered.  And then, and I love this,  Vitellius rebels against Galba.  Galba gets murdered.  And then Vitellius is like,  well, this is like a propaganda gold mine for me.  Otho's not the rightful emperor.  He's an assassin.  He's a usurper.  Vitellius now changes his tune and says,  I'm rebelling to avenge Galba. 

Oh, wow.  Okay.  Yeah.  And can we see people swallowing this  because I'm not buying it?  Can we see people saying,  okay, wait a minute, buddy.  That's a bit of an about turn. 

I could have sworn you rebelled  against that guy like last week.  I actually think Vitellius might be the hardest person  in the year of the four emperors to get a handle on.  Part of that is the sources.  I know we're gonna talk about them more later,  but all of the sources are written after the fact,  which, well, I guess inevitably  they can't be written before the fact.  But they're written after the fact,  which means that a lot of the narrative  is gonna get set in the dynasty  that comes after this, the Flavian dynasty.  And as we're gonna go into the Flavian dynasty  is founded by Vespasian who is,  well, he's gonna beat Vitellius before very long.  Which means Galba, whatever, Galba can be good.  Galba can be bad, not directly relevant.  Otho, Otho can be good.  Otho can be bad, not directly relevant.  But Vitellius has to be a villain, right?  If Vitellius is a good emperor,  then wait, Vespasian, why'd you kill him?  He has to be awful.  And so the sources just hate Vitellius.  We're gonna see clearly some people really liked him.  He clearly had popularity.  He's going to get it.  Not yet in our story, but soon with the people of Rome.  And clearly the legions he's leading are big fans of his.  So he must've had some good qualities,  but Tacitus really doesn't wanna tell you what they are. 

Right, okay.  So what's happening with Vitellius?  So he's in Germany. 

Yes. 

Is he planning on moving towards Rome?  Should Otho be, you know, starting to panic? 

Otho should definitely be starting to panic.  If you're advising Otho, now is the time to panic.  So Vitellius marches south  and Otho marches north to meet him.  And the two armies meet  and they fight the Battle of Bedriacum.  And Vitellius wins.  So Vitellius wins the battle  and Otho is in his camp afterward.  And Otho's generals tell him, it's not that bad.  You're the rightful emperor, right?  Willingly or otherwise, the Senate,  the people of Rome, et cetera, are on your side.  You're gonna retreat.  You're gonna get another army.  We're gonna fight again next week.  And Otho says no.  And this is actually the one thing  that all of the sources really admire.  The sources are very mixed on Otho.  He has some good qualities.  He has some bad qualities.  But all of them really admire this.  Otho says, I don't wanna see any more civil war.  Too many people have died over this.  And Otho actually is going to commit suicide  to end the fighting or, well, so he thought.  In a cruel joke, the fighting doesn't end.  But Otho is gonna try and end the civil war  and just say, all right, I'm dead.  If Vitellius is emperor,  it's not worth more Romans losing their lives. 

Now that's really, really striking, isn't it?  Because for those of us who have been reading  the previous bits and bobs of Roman history books,  we've had the fall of the Roman Republic,  which was essentially a century of civil war on and off.  The Julio-Claudians arrived out of the ends  of that century of civil war.  So it's not as if we've ever had,  that I can pinpoint,  someone who said, no, that's enough before.  Is this the first guy that we can see  who is putting the fates of common people  above his own ambition?  Because that's weird, right?

  It is.  No, it's really an unusual, striking gesture.  In some ways, it's un-Roman turning away from this glory,  but then in other ways,  I think it really resonates with them.  And I think that's why our sources  are so blown away by it.  I mean, Otho is truly putting Rome,  the res publica, whatever that means, the empire,  whatever you wanna call it.  He's putting that over his own life.  I mean, so many Romans write about the horrors of civil war,  and I think Otho is one of the very few to go,  all right, it's just not worth it. 

Wow.  Well, that's astonishing.  So he takes his own life.  What happens next?  Is it all easy for Vitellius after this? 

The good news for Vitellius is, for a brief moment,  Vitellius seems unopposed, fighting seems over.  Vitellius goes to Rome.  Now, I've already mentioned the difficulties with the sources,  but the one thing that they cannot hide  is how fervently the common people of Rome  come to love Vitellius.  Like, their picks in this year  very clearly seem to be Vitellius, maybe Otho,  but he's gone, okay, we're happy with Vitellius.  So they love him, but the Senate,  I mean, this is difficult with the sources.  If you believe the sources, the Senate always dislikes  and was always hoping somebody would take him out.  Is that true?  Who's to say?  The military that marched south with Vitellius  is very loyal to him.  The Praetorians, on the other hand, he actually fires.  He fires the entire Praetorian Guard  because, well, they weren't trustworthy.  They killed Galba,  and they killed Galba for Otho, the guy I just beat.  So he fires the Praetorians,  and he basically makes a new Praetorian Guard  promoting people out of his legions  who wanna serve in the Praetorian Guard. 

Is it dangerous to fire roughly 10,000 men  who are trained killers?  Is that a sensible thing?  Is that coming to bite him on the arse in the near future? 

Well, huge numbers of them are going to go east  when Vespasian joins the Civil War  and sign up for Vespasian's army,  so you're right, there's consequences.  The fact that they joined an opposing army,  honestly might show he was right to fire them.  These guys were not gonna defend Vitellius  with their lives. 

Right, okay.  So Vitellius, is he gonna last  a little bit longer than Otho?  Because, I mean, he's only been there for,  what, three months, right?  Vitellius, is he gonna be longer than three months?  Because, I mean, anyone's gotta be longer than that, right? 

Yes, longer, I don't know if I'd say long.  Vitellius is gonna make it all the way to December. 

Wow, so what's that, eight months?  Yeah, so it's like what?  April 16th to December 22nd, yeah.  Wow.  Okay, so that's not long. 

No, no. 

What can we see him doing in this period?  Is there anything that we can see  that's a definite something that he's introduced  or something that he's improved? 

So, I think very quickly he's going to get  sucked into further civil war, unfortunately.  We do see him trying to kind of digest  and reprocess some of the ideas about the empire  that Galba was bringing up.  So basically, Galba has all of these ideas  about what the empire should be,  and he's gonna choose all these themes  into imperial self-presentation  that are gonna be unbelievably influential  and appear for hundreds of years after this.  And Otho, I think, very understandably  doesn't want much to do with it,  because everybody knows Otho killed Galba.  You can't try to be Galba 2.0.  We all saw you stab him or your guys stab him.  So Vitellius is now following Galba  by trying to figure out what does it mean  to be emperor after the Julio-Claudians?  Do you still call yourself Caesar?  It seems like there's a little period  when Vitellius does.  He's like, well, that's not me.  That's not my family name.  And then he goes, okay, no,  the people really like Caesar.  Okay, okay, I can be Caesar.  I'll be Caesar, but maybe I'm not gonna be  quite the same kind of Caesar as, say, Nero was. 

So all of a sudden,  a personal name starts becoming a title?

  Yeah, exactly.  And I think that this is where we really see  those personal names like Caesar and Augustus  stop being personal names,  because the Julio-Claudians,  you can at least say, well, they were a family.  Vitellius, there's no way that Vitellius,  you can claim, is like a descendant of Augustus.  We talk about the sources  with Vitellius being a bit dodgy.  What are the main attacks  that they're making towards his character?  So for Vitellius, the two main things  they are gonna focus on are cruelty and gluttony.  Basically, I mean, this is like a 1% exaggeration,  but barely 1%.  They basically depict Vitellius coming to Rome  as like him sitting on the back of his wagon  or whatever, eating snacks  while he enjoys looking at all the bloody battlefields  of people who've died in this war.  It's an extremely unflattering depiction of him. 

Wow.  Is that something that we think  might be a slight exaggeration? 

I think there's room to wonder.  I think had Vespasian not entered the fight,  had the fight ended here and Vitellius won,  I think the story would be told very differently.  Interesting.  I mean, I think Otto,  first of all, would have to be a much darker character.  There's already darkness in his character.  I mean, the betrayal of Galba is hard to morally justify,  but he has positive elements.  And I think a lot of those would be downplayed  because just like how Flavian historians  are gonna have to denigrate Vitellius  to justify the rebellion against him,  Vitellius would have to make Otto  out to be this horrible villain  to justify killing all these people to get rid of him. 

Sure, okay.  So there's obviously considerations to be taken  by anyone who's going to attempt to become emperor.  They're gonna have to think very hard about optics.  So if we're looking at Vitellius,  the sources are painting him negatively,  but the sources also, as you say,  can't deny that he's not actually that bad  and people quite like him.  So how is it that he's not going to see 70? 

Yeah, that's a fair question.  And I think the answer really comes down  to one guy, Vespasian.  This is also actually where  the Year of the Four Emperors intersects another huge war  and another one of those wars  that you actually always think about  when you think about Rome,  but you don't think about it together  with the Year of the Four Emperors,  which is the Jewish War.  Right.  All right, we got to rewind a few years.  Where in the mid-60s CE,  and the people of Judea rebelled against Nero.  They want to be independent from Rome.  Now, most provincial rebellions  actually start off going great  because the empire is huge.  You can't garrison the whole thing.  So as often happens,  they kick the Romans out of their province.  They start celebrating,  but the problem with fighting Rome  is that the Romans just never stop coming.  So, okay, Rome's going to send an army  and Nero picks Vespasian to lead it.  And he actually particularly picks Vespasian  because he thinks he's a nobody.  Vespasian is a novus homo,  so a new man, the first guy in his family  to enter the Senate,  alongside his brother who's actually  doing cool political things now too.  But they don't have the kind of pedigree  that Nero has, or Galba has,  or even that Vitellius has.  So Vespasian is off leading the Jewish war.  And while he's doing it,  he's, you know, looking back toward Rome,  and Rome is just on fire this whole time, right?  So Vespasian is fighting in Judea when Nero dies.  He's fighting in Judea when Galba dies.  He's fighting in Judea when Otho dies.  And then he finally decides to act.    Maybe because he thought Vitellius  was just such a horrible leader,  he couldn't possibly witness Rome suffer that.  Maybe because he thought,  well, I could beat this one.  Who knows?  So on July 3rd, 69,  Vespasian is acclaimed emperor by his soldiers.  And this is a big deal  because he is actually commanding  a very formidable army,  seeing as he was in the middle of a war.  He's actually going to leave the war  to his son Titus,  who will become emperor after Vespasian.  So Titus is gonna keep fighting the war.  He will eventually win it  after the conclusion of the civil war.  Other famous moments from Roman history  like Titus's sack of Jerusalem  and the destruction of the second temple  are all part of that story.  But Vespasian is gonna go take the majority of the army  and try and go become emperor. 

We don't need a spoiler alert on here  because Vespasian, he's got some name recognition.  I think we know what happened,  but how did it happen? 

One thing we're seeing here  is that these different groups of soldiers  actually have some group identity.  The German legions feel like,  yeah, we're a group, we're the German legions.  They have an identity with their legion  and with that broader group.  And we've already seen this a little bit  in the year of the four emperors  where the German legions were like,  well, we're not gonna have an emperor  picked by the Praetorian guard.  Who cares about them?  They just sit around in Rome all day.  We're the rear soldiers.  And now we have that dynamic again  where these Eastern armies,  both the armies Vespasian was leading in Judea,  but also soldiers in other provinces  doing things like making sure the Parthians don't attack  are like, we're gonna have an emperor  picked by the German legions?  Who cares about the German legions?  The Eastern legions are where it's at.  And so Vespasian is gonna get  a lot of support in the East.  One really interesting source of that support  is a fellow Tiberius Julius Alexander.  This guy has incredible career.  He is actually a Jewish Roman citizen.  He is the nephew of the philosopher Philo.  Lives in Egypt.  He's always the example I use for my students  when talking about the Jewish war  about how like simultaneously  there are many ancient Jewish people  who hate Rome and are fighting a war against them,  but we don't wanna lump them on that category.  At the same time, there are many other Jewish people  who are perfectly happy to make a life  within the Roman empire.  And Tiberius Julius Alexander is one of these.  So at various points in his long career,  he is a translator for the Romans during the Jewish war.  So between like Latin, Greek and Hebrew,  he's helping the Romans.  Eventually, he's gonna go on  and become Vespasian's Praetorian prefect.  There's some guesswork in that,  but I think it's reasonably clear  that he is going to be a Praetorian prefect.  Actually, I think it's Titus rather than Vespasian.  My apologies, but for the Flavian dynasty,  he's close to both father and son.  And we know there's some dislike of him.  There's a line in the satirist Juvenal about how there is a statue in the forum  from basically some Egyptian nobody.  And the right thing to do is not only piss on it,  which yikes.  I mean, okay, we're at a few layers of guesswork here.  We think that is referring to the Praetorian prefects  who is Tiberius Julius Alexander, probably.  Okay.  But enough of what he might do later.  What he's definitely doing right now  is he is the governor of Egypt.  As governor of Egypt,  the first thing he did is he supported Galba.  He was actually an early guy to break for Galba.  And we have this inscription he puts up  about backing Galba.  And now he's gonna support Vespasian.  And that's a really big deal  because Rome, like most ancient cities,  is way too big to feed itself.  So it's predominantly fed by grain that's shipped in,  especially from Egypt.  And so what Vespasian could do now  is just say, all right, we're done with grain.  Rome's gonna starve. 

That's quite a threat. 

Yeah.  Now on the one hand,  that's an incredible amount of power.  And they do it, right?  Egypt's on our side.  We're not sending grain to Rome.  And yet he realized he doesn't wanna wait  for that to happen.  Because, well, if you starve Rome into submission,  the people who live in Rome are gonna really hate you.  And if you wanna be the emperor of Rome,  maybe you don't wanna start off by smurfing everybody.  It's gonna be a bad luck. 

Hearts and minds, right?

  Hearts and minds.  So, all right.  We got Egypt on our side.  That's great.  Maybe if we really need to, we'll starve them out.  But instead, he sends an army ahead into Italy.  And he actually doesn't go with them.  Some historians speculate that maybe the idea  is he wants to distance himself  a little bit from the violence.  Like there's gonna be a lot of fighting.  And then Vespasian shows up and things get better,  rather than Vespasian being the first guy  to charge in killing people. 

Okay, clean hands. 

Exactly.  So he sends an army into Northern Italy  and there's some pretty fierce fighting.  An Italian city, Cremona, is entirely destroyed.  So it's rough.  It's tough fighting.  But it becomes clear Vespasian's gonna win the war.  The Italians can't stop him.  And then crazy twist to this story, like 15.  We gotta meet the urban prefect of Rome.  So the urban prefect kind of,  or emphasized kind of a few times,  kind of like the mayor of Rome.  He runs the urban cohorts.  He does a lot of like urban upkeep and maintenance stuff.  Like make sure the city's running smoothly.  And the urban prefect this entire year  is Flavius Sabinus, which is to say Vespasian's brother.  And I love that.  Vespasian and Vitellius are fighting a war.  Vitellius is based in Rome.  Meanwhile, the urban prefect is his enemy's brother.  And that somehow just did cause a problem.  Not only is Vespasian's brother in Rome  his younger son, Domitian,  the guy that everybody's gonna hate  when he becomes emperor, but he's not there yet.  He's still young now.  He's also in Rome.  So Vespasian's family's like in Rome rooting for him.  So the reason this comes up now  is that as Vespasian soldiers are getting near the city,  Flavius Sabinus has a meeting with Vitellius.  And Flavius Sabinus is like,  look man, you gave it a good shot,  but we all know you're gonna lose the war.  What if we just end things peacefully?  And Vitellius says yes.  Vitellius decides to be the first Roman emperor  to ever abdicate or try to abdicate. 

Okay, so he's got good intentions. 

Yeah, so we have this ceremony.  We assemble everybody at the capital, right?  We're by the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus,  like the heart of Roman religion.  We get everybody together.  Vitellius is there, Flavius Sabinus is there.  The Praetorians are there.  The urban cohorts that Flavius Sabinus leads are there.  Very roughly analogous, I guess you could say,  to the police, though obviously not.  We don't wanna press that comparison too far,  but roughly speaking.  And there's also a huge crowd of the common people  who really love Vitellius.  And Vitellius gets up and he says,  you know, I'm not gonna be emperor anymore.  We don't want any more death.  I'm gonna lose the war.  I abdicate, Vespasian's emperor.  And the people in the Praetorians say no.  They say no so ferociously that a riot breaks out  in which the urban cohorts try and back up  Flavius Sabinus and the Praetorians are, of course,  opposing him.  Flavius Sabinus gets killed in the fighting.  Huge numbers of people get killed in the fighting.  And in the fighting,  the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus  is accidentally burned down. 

Wow.  Okay, and just so that everyone is aware,  this is like the main temple of Rome, right?  It's the heart of Roman religion.  That seems like a big deal. 

Yeah, and the Romans are, of course,  the people who are really interested in omens.  I mean, Tacitus's account of this whole year  begins with just huge lists of omens and prodigies.  Of course.  Well, we accidentally burnt down our main temple  is like a 10 out of 10 bad omen. 

Right, so the riot is obviously a disaster.  The temple's burned down.  What does it look like as the ashes are smoldering  and the violence is dying down?  Who's left standing? 

Well, the guy who's left standing temporarily is Vitellius.  He was like, I guess I'm still emperor.  Resignation not accepted.  So Vitellius is still emperor.  And the next day, Vespasian's soldiers enter Rome  and Vitellius is going to be captured, mutilated,  paraded through the streets and publicly executed. 

Wow, okay. 

Yeah, and  Vespasian's emperor.  Civil War over.  We fought for about a year and a half.  There were at least four guys  who claimed they were emperor  with a few other minor people on the margins  who maybe gave it a shot.  A lot of people have lost their lives.  Several people have tried to stop the fighting  unsuccessfully and finally it's done.  Vespasian wins. 

So do we have like a description  about Vitellius's execution?  Was that public thing? 

Yeah, it was extremely public.  This is a morbid topic,  but I actually have a chapter coming out soon.  I hope soon.  In an edited volume about basically the treatment  of imperial corpses in these regime changes.  And one of the things I talk about in that chapter  is that there seems to be a pattern  where if the previous guy gets assassinated,  you don't wanna dwell on the violence, right?  You wanna be like, all right, we're done with that.  And so you tend to give him a quiet burial off stage.  That's what happens with Nero.  Meanwhile, if the previous guy loses the Civil War,  you tend to get these triumphalist bloody displays  where, yeah, he's gonna be mutilated.  He's gonna be denied burial.  His corpse is gonna be thrown into the Tiber River.  And I think it's in part showing, right?  Vitellius was believed to be this supernatural figure.  Is the Roman emperor a god?  Well, it's kind of hard to give a clear yes, no answer.  Technically speaking, while alive, probably no,  but there are temples to him.  And we all know when he dies,  because well, he's gonna become a god.  And there clearly is this idea of him being sacrosanct.  And so this mutilation is really driving home,  no, this man's not emperor.  This man never was emperor.  We're gonna treat him like the lowest criminal. 

So what exactly do they do to him? 

That's a good question.  I'm trying to remember the exact things they do.  I mean, so I know public parade.  I know we're throwing him into the Tiber.  And I know mutilation.  Some of his mutilation are things like chopping off  somebody's nose.  Some of it are gonna be public decapitations  and you display the violated corpse.  It's grisly. 

Oh, poor Vitellius.  So he's not lasted particularly long.  He's lasted longer than Otho,  probably about the same amount as Galba,  but he's not lasted for long.  Vespasian now becomes emperor at the end of December. 

Yes. 

If the pattern was to continue,  we might expect him to be dead in three months.  How long is he emperor for? 

Vespasian is going to be emperor until the year 79.  He's peacefully followed by his son Titus,  who's followed by his younger brother Domitian.  And we've got the Flavian dynasty.  So Vespasian pulls it off  and manages to end the violence.  Maybe because by this point,  his military force was just so clear and overwhelming.  Maybe everybody who wanted to try  and throw their hat in the ring was dead.  Maybe everybody was just really sick of fighting.  Maybe everybody believed Vespasian  was the best man for the job.  Maybe a little bit of all of the above. 

So we've had a recap of the year of the four emperors.  It does sound like absolute chaos.  Are we getting all of this from one source  or are we getting them from multiple sources,  which is what every historian wants?  And are any of those sources  going to be a bit more useful to us than others? 

Yeah.  So when it comes to sources,  there's a lot of good news  and then there's some bad news.    So I'm going to start with the main sources.  The good news, there are four of them. 

Excellent!

Yeah, excellent! Four of them!  We could cross-check.  We could compare things.  If something's in all four,  that means it must have happened, right? 

Right. 

No. 

Oh. 

The problem is that all four sources  are based on a single previous source. 

Oh God, as usual.  Okay. 

Yeah.  The fact that something's in all four  doesn't necessarily mean four,  depending if people confirmed it.  They all read it in the same book.  We're not totally sure what the original source was.  There's a lot of debate.  Some people I get suggested are Pliny the Elder.  We know he wrote a history.  Cluvius Rufus.  We don't know. 

And Pliny the Elder, he was alive at the time, right?  So he would have been around during all of this happening. 

Yeah.

  That's important to point out. 

Yeah.  Now, I should say though,  we have four sources all based on one source,  but they do add a bit of their own spin.  So the biggest of them by far is Tacitus.  So Tacitus' histories,  I think if you want to learn about the Year of the Four Emperors,  that is the best primary source to go to.  It's by far the most detailed.  And Tacitus is also just a great writer, right?  He's the guy with those really cynical,  devastating summaries of people.  Everyone thought Galba was going to be a good emperor,  till he was emperor.  And so Tacitus, based on that previous source,  he is supplementing it,  probably with stuff like the Acts of the Senate.  And Tacitus was also 13 in 69.  So on the one hand,  he's probably not doing a lot himself at 13,  but he would have been aware  at least a bit of what was happening.  And more importantly,  he certainly would have known people  who were like adults engaged in politics at that time  that he could have talked to  to supplement this written record. 

Sure.  And that's important, right?  That he was able to actually speak to people  rather than just visit an archive. 

Yeah.  And I think that is,  that's like the good news  that helps compensate from the bad news of,  oh, they're all based on one guy.  Suetonius, similarly,  he has biographies of everybody involved,  which are great.  And Suetonius, his father actually fought for Otho.  So, like Tacitus, he's not a source,  but supplemented with presumably  some pretty good information.  Suetonius could have been like,  hey dad, what was Otho thinking on that last day?  And Suetonius' dad might have actually known  he could have been there.  Well, he was there.  I guess we don't know exactly  which tent he was in or whatever,  but he was at the battle.  That's incredible.  Growing up hearing stories  and then writing them down as you're getting older,  who's next in our sources that we have?  Two more in this parallel tradition  and we've got a few other guys we can pull in for bits.  So, in that parallel group, we have Plutarch.  Now everybody thinks of Plutarch's biographies  as the paired Greek and Roman lives.  He also wrote a series of biographies  about the Roman emperors.  And we've lost all but two of them.  And the two that we have are Galba and Otho.  I mean, that's quite helpful for us.  Yeah.  Yeah, so you don't get the whole year,  but you get the first two guys.  And like the others Plutarch is supplementing  their shared source,  he actually mentions he talked to somebody,  a former consul who visited Bedriacum,  that battle between Otho and Vitellius after the battle.  So, okay.  Not as good as Suetonius being like my dad was there,  but okay, a guy who went there.  That's something.  Okay.  So he's still managing an interview with an actual witness.  Yes.  Finally, of these main ones,  and I think by far the least important is Cassius Dio.  And look, it pains me to say that.  I mean, I love Cassius Dio.  He's one of my faves.  Great.  I think he's seriously underrated,  both as a source and as like a historian and thinker.  But this isn't his best bit.  Not due to, it's not his fault at all actually.  This is the portion of this book  that we don't have the original.  We basically have excerpts  that somebody in the Byzantine Empire made of his work.  And the excerpts for the Year of the Four Emperors  leave it in such a fragmentary state  that like there are very important players  who just don't appear at all in Cassius Dio's version.  Presumably they were there, but they weren't excerpted.  So what you're done with the other three,  if you want a fourth perspective, take a look at him.  But if you only read Cassius Dio,  you might be pretty confused about how this year went  and why any of this happened the way it did. 

So he could have written  the world's most excellent account,  but because we've just got so little of it  left surviving, we can't tell, right? 

Yeah, exactly.  And he's also, he also does have a downside.  He's quite a bit later than the others.  He's writing in the 200 CE. 

So unlike the others,  he's definitely not interviewing any living witnesses.  By using one source,  can we see them all kind of agreeing with each other  or are there any areas  where they have really conflicting accounts  that we should be wary of? 

They mostly agree.  I would say mostly very close.  I mean, so close that there's the occasional time  when there's the same sentence in multiple sources,  which is how we know,  okay, you all read the same book here, right?  When you're grading a student paper  and then all of a sudden,  hey, wait a minute, I just read that sentence.  Sure.  So mostly they're very close.  They do have some of their own emphases.  By and large though,  you're not gonna find a ton of disagreement between them.  They all basically agree, right?  Galiba, great ideals, maybe.  I mean, I don't wanna say he doesn't live up to them.  He does exactly what he says he's gonna do,  but maybe like old school Republican severity is good,  but is it the only thing you need as emperor?  They all really thought Otho was gonna be terrible  and then are maybe almost against their will,  pleasantly surprised that, oh, he wasn't that bad.  They all absolutely detest Vitellius,  but that original source was writing under the Flavian,  so it had to detest Vitellius. 

Yeah, it's got an inbuilt bias, right? 

Yeah, it's just not an option writing under Vespasian  to go, man, I wish that other guy had won the civil war.  You can't say that. 

So if we've got sources  that are generally agreeing with each other,  does that mean that it's a really strong picture  that we can build that's accurate  because they're all agreeing?

  I would say yes.  As it was the ancient history, right?  There are caveats.  There's things you can't know.  There's times when clearly like somebody's  putting their finger on the scales.  I think especially with Vitellius.  That being said, I think yes.  I think we have these four accounts.  We do have some other information  in writers like Josephus who's focused on the Jewish war,  but the stories intersect.  And Josephus actually has his own interaction  with Vespasian that is incredible.  And we should talk about,  but I'm gonna knock it off in a tangent  in the middle of answering this question.  We have some scattered details, people like plenty,  but then corroborating this,  we also have inscriptions and maybe above all coins,  which are actually really incredible  for seeing how these different emperors  are portraying themselves during this year.  And you get a view of their self-presentation  not filtered through maybe a hostile literary source,  right?  You get Galba trying to explain  how he's different from Nero or Vitellius now  not being caricatured as a gluttonous sadist.  Okay, what was he trying to communicate to the people?  So I think putting it all together,  standard caveats for ancient history apply,  but I think this is a period we know better than most.  There's even a French historian  who would say that the day Galba dies  is the day we know best in ancient history.  I don't know if I'd go that far,  but like it's not a wild claim to make.

  So for anyone who wants to really feel  that they can get a grip on a period of Roman history,  this one would be a really, really good one  to read up on because we have such good sources.  They're fairly reliable by the sounds of it.  And it's one year,  so you can get a good grip on this very chaotic,  but quite a short period.  So this sounds like a really, really strong area  to do some further reading on.  What are modern historians saying about this period? 

So I think one of the parts  that has been most reevaluated  is actually Galba's initial rebellion  and especially Vindex's role in it.  If you go to older history,  you're gonna see ideas  that maybe it was a Gallic nationalist movement, right?  Maybe Vindex was rebelling  because he was like a Gaul who wanted to be independent  and was trying to lead the Gauls to that.  So you have this idea of it as a nationalist movement,  and then you have an idea  of Galba trying to restore the Republic,  a lot of older scholarship,  because Galba talks all the time  about liberating the Roman people.  And he brings in all these Republican ideas  and he actually, he kind of takes out of cold storage  all of these old Republican coin types  that nobody's thought of in decades or a century  and reuses them.  And so older scholarship would say,  oh, Galba tried to restore the Republic.  And I think what people have realized more recently is,  well, no, he didn't.  He's using those same words, but he's redefined them.  So first of all, Vindex as a Gallic separatist,  I'm sorry to say,  it just doesn't make a ton of sense as a theory  because if you're a Gallic separatist,  why did you want Galba who is not from Gaul  to be emperor of the,  what does that have to do with anything?  So we discard that.  The idea of Galba as like a proto-Republican,  or I guess not proto,  but like almost posthumous Republican,  is more tempting because you do have  all of that Republican rhetoric,  but I think what it is is he's redefined it.  What Galba is doing is saying,  we're gonna have a kind of liberty  within the imperial system.  And so I think unpacking that is,  I think one of the changes  in how we've really thought about this period.  Yeah, repackaging being emperor  is not the same as dismantling the post, right?  Exactly.  And I think for me,  I think where the he's a Republican idea  really falls apart is that,  well, so he has all these Republican statements,  then he becomes emperor and conspicuously  does not restore the Republic.  And you could say maybe he got greedy,  but there's not even a hint of a single person saying,  hey, wait, Galba, what about the Republic?  Which indicates to me that no,  what he meant and what people understood was,  we're gonna have a different kind of empire,  not we're back to the Republic,  we're done with that. 

Is it fair to say that one of the reasons for this  is because at this point,  are there any people left alive  who remember what the Republican system was like  actually living under the Republican system  instead of just hearing about it from their grandparents?  So they've grown up in this system. 

Yeah, that's actually a point our sources make,  they came out these Republican movements,  it's kind of a really big deal  when the last people who lived in the Republic died,  it almost stops being a living choice.  There's debate over when the last attempt  to like really recreate the Republic is,  I personally think after Caligula's death,  there's a sincere attempt by the Senate  to go back to the Republic,  it doesn't work.  And I think Galba is kind of what comes after that.  The Republic is truly dead,  but for those of us who really liked it,  what aspects of it can we integrate into the principle? 

Right, okay.  And is it fair to say that there are some historians  who are perhaps not fans of monarchical kinds of power  who are living in Republics,  who are pushing this idea of having a Republic  because that's what the historians are living under  and familiar with. 

Oh, 100%, yeah.  I think very much so, yeah.  But I think one incredible example of this,  Mommsen, who obviously is like 10 out of 10  in his, I don't know, his like historian stats,  skills, incredible historian.  There's this footnote in one of his books  that he's writing during the American Civil War  and there's a footnote where he's like,  well, obviously the South is gonna win  because the land holding aristocrats  always beat townspeople manufacturers or whatever.  And it's like, well, no.  We're kind of in this different world.  You see like the world he comes from,  the world he's studying  and the way that the world he comes from is changing,  all intersecting in these fascinating ways. 

I mean, I love this because it's as interesting to me,  I think, reading the historians  of the last couple of centuries  than it is to read the primary sources.  Because it sounds like they disagree far more  than the primary sources are doing  about this particular event, right? 

I think that is true, yeah.  I think the primary sources,  at least the ones we have,  don't seem to have a ton of questions about the event.  They're like, this is a crazy story,  but we all agreed maybe because we all read the same book  and are heavily basing our book off of it.  But yeah, the modern historians are much more likely to go,  wait a minute, what are we missing here?  What questions are there? 

So for any listeners,  including particularly students  who might be writing about this,  when we're using the sources like Tacitus and Suetonius,  what are the kinds of things  that you really should stress about using these sources?  What are some of the pitfalls  that we need to be aware of  as we're reading and writing about this? 

Yeah, oh, great question.  I think for me, some things that would come to mind,  remember the perspective they're writing from  and where they're coming from.  And I feel like you boil that down to bias.  And I feel like when I tell students,  they're like, oh, so the source is biased,  so we don't believe it.  And it's like, well, it's more complicated than that.  One of my history professors in undergrad asked us like,  oh, should we use biased sources?  And we're all like, no.  And he's like, well, the sources that are biased  are also the sources who have a stake in it, right?  The opposite of biased sources  are people who don't know anything and don't care.  Well, that's not gonna be any good either.  You can't escape the biased sources.  Every source is biased.  We have to figure out what their biases are  and how it impacts what they're saying.  So I think that's a huge part of it.  And then I think I was just remembering ancient history  as it was written in the ancient world.  It was literature.  That doesn't mean they're just making up a story.  It doesn't mean there's no factual basis.  But what you can embellish is decided  on some very different rules than we have today.  And you gotta keep that in mind.  You gotta ask yourself questions like,  now, how could Tacitus know this? 

Right, okay.  So when we think about, as you say,  these sources being literature,  who are they writing for?  Who's reading Tacitus and Suetonius? 

I think other educated elites.  I mean, we have to remember the vast majority  of the population in the ancient world  are subsistence farmers, are illiterate.  Ancient literature, I mean, as incredible as it is,  it's something enjoyed by an incredibly miniscule fraction  of the population who are writing  to other educated elites.  Tacitus is writing for senators,  maybe like equestrians or other rich people  who aren't in the Senate.  He's not writing for like the common man.  And does this affect what they're saying?  Absolutely.  And I think maybe most fundamentally  in like an unconscious manner of just what they notice  and what they think is worth talking about, right?  I mean, they have the concerns of political elites.  They don't have the concerns of subsistence farmers.  They barely report anything about that life,  even though that's what the vast majority  of the population is living through  because it's not their life and they frankly don't care. 

For an ordinary person like me  who's living in the year 69,  is all of this gonna affect me?  Am I gonna be particularly invested?  Do I care?  Is this changing my life at all? 

That's a good question and kind of hard to answer  because our sources are so uninterested in it.  So I think a huge part of that  would depend on where you live.  If you were an ordinary person who lives  in the city of Rome, this matters a great deal.  I think the ordinary people of the city of Rome  are politically involved in a way  that like nobody else in the Mediterranean is.  If you're not, I think a lot of it comes down  to where you happen to be.  If you happen to live in like Alexandria,  when the city decides it's going to support Vespasian.  Okay, maybe that's like a meaningful moment for you.  You're part of history there.  If you live out in the countryside in Egypt,  no, I would guess it's probably not  gonna have a terribly immediate impact on your life.  And then there could be ripple effects.  The Roman emperor is in some ways a religious figure.  I mean, the guy you swear oaths to  when you do your taxes has changed.  Does that emotionally matter to you?  I don't know, kind of hard to say.  The guy whose face is on the money is different.  Maybe that matters, maybe it doesn't.  Some tax laws might get changed,  but it's certainly not gonna matter  to you the way it matters to Tassimus.  Sure.  And it's such a shame, isn't it?  That as usual, it's the small group of people  whose opinions and thoughts matter more than anyone else  and everyone else gets ignored. 

Yep.  Okay, so it's a chaotic year.  How does it affect the rest of Roman history?  Are there emperors that we can see  who are reading Tacitus or Suetonius or Cassius,  reading and thinking, okay, I'm gonna do X, Y, and Z  to prevent this happening?  And is there another chaotic year  that happens in Roman history afterwards? 

Yeah, so I think this has a really outsized impact  on Roman history later.  I think that's probably why I'm so fascinated  by this year.  It's one year, but it's a year that I think  both reveals a lot about the Roman political system  and changes a lot about the Roman political system.  So I'll start with Tacitus' answer and then I'll add to it.  But I mean, if Tacitus answered the question,  I gotta give it to him.  I mean, he knows more about the Year of the Four Emperors  than I do, that's for sure.  So Tacitus says that the Year of the Four Emperors  revealed what he calls the secret of the empire.  The secret of the empire being that emperors  could be made elsewhere than at Rome.  And I think what he really means by this  is suddenly the legions matter for the succession.  Suddenly the army is picking who the emperor is yet.  And they haven't done that in the prince bit yet.  To be clear, they haven't done it  because the opportunity hasn't presented itself.  Every succession before now has either  gone according to plan and peaceful,  or in the case of the assassination of Caligula,  was resolved quickly enough  that the legions never get involved.  But for the first time the legions pick an emperor  and once that genie is out of the bottle,  you can never put it back in.  Suddenly who the legions wanna be emperor matters a lot.  And they're gonna exercise that right in the future.  More broadly, I think we can see  the Year of the Four Emperors as a question  not only of who should be emperor,  but what should an emperor be?  These different people have different visions  of what an emperor's job is.  And I think that that is part of  how they try and persuade people to make them emperor  and part of how they succeed and fail.  So for instance, should we rule as like an Augustus,  like princeps first man,  the Republic's totally still here.  I don't know what you're saying.  Or should we embrace the example of Nero?  And we see people go both ways.  Otho, I mean, he calls himself Otho Nero.  Vespasian on the other hand,  well, we're gonna tear down the Nero's Golden Palace  and build the Colosseum for the people on top of it.  So we have some very different approaches to that.  Finally, and I've kind of brought this up before,  but I think Galba's self-presentation,  the way that Galba understands the imperial position  in particular is so influential.  And I think Galba is really one of those guys  that shows what you can do  in terms of political messaging  with things like the coinage  in a way that's gonna be very influential  on later emperors.  So just one example, scholars like Clifford Ando  have talked about how there's this change  in the relationship between Rome and the provinces.  Where if you look early in the Principate,  the depiction of the provinces basically seems to be,  ha ha, we beat you, you suck.  So for instance, there are reliefs  showing the conquest of Britain  by depicting this heroic statue of Claudius  raping a personification of Britain.  I mean, pretty clearly,  if you're a British person looking at that,  I mean, this is not gonna fill you with pride.

  No. 

The message is, you lost. 

Not subtle. 

Yeah, not subtle.  And by Hadrian, so I'm going a fair bit  ahead of the era of the four emperors,  but I promise I'm coming back.  By Hadrian, you have this very different idea  of the provinces where Britain is now depicted  as a woman sitting on a throne with a spear.  And yeah, if you're British, you could be proud of that.  We're partners in this empire.  We're all Romans together.

  I mean, we still have that image on our coins now. 

Yeah, yeah.  So I mean, as far as imaging works,  that was really successful.  Yeah, and so that one in particular is Hadrian,  but Galba is actually kind of laying  the foundations for this.  So when Galba rebels, Gaul and Spain are on his side.  And Galba mince coins showing Gaul and Spain  and talking about them.  And it's kind of this first time  that you have an emperor saying,  yeah, I'm like with these two provinces,  we're all in this together.  And all right, Galba loses.  This image kind of dies down for a bit,  but yeah, I think it's something that Hadrian  and later emperors noticed and went back to.  Actually, that's a really good way  to communicate with the provinces  and maybe things will be more stable  and they'll like us more if we show them  as like cool goddesses with spears  and not being beaten up. 

  I think at this point, we understand  the era of the four emperors  in the events that happened and why they happened.  We understand what the writers are saying about it  and why they're saying certain things.  That's great.  We're also understanding the aftermath  and the ripple effect,  which is really, really crucial.  So does this mean that Rome did manage to avoid  a really, really chaotic year after 69? 

It does not, it does not at all.  I think unfortunately, I mean, what's hard to say, right?  People learned the secret.  An emperor can be made elsewhere than at Rome  and people are gonna put that into effect.  There is actually a later civil war  called the year of the five emperors  in which five guys try to be emperor.  And then there's the year of the six emperors. 

Poor Romans.  I mean, thinking about it,  I mean, it makes it easier to remember, doesn't it?  They're all kind of logical.  It's just more people per year.  It's easy to remember.  It's more and more chaotic.  Okay, well, that is an amazing discussion.  Thank you so much for coming to talk to us about this  because as you say, it's chaos,  but it's chaos that we can build  a truly accurate picture of, which is quite strange.  It's quite unusual to have this much information  and be able to trust most of it.  So I'm quite pleased.

  Yeah, it's a fascinating year in ancient history.  I mean, I hear you say that right now.  Yeah, you're totally right.  And we're incredibly lucky  to have the sources we have.  I mean, the picture we have of the year of the six emperors  is so much blurrier.  And you know, we lose a manuscript of Tacitus  or something and we would be here for,  the year of the four emperors as well, so. 

So before I let you go,  if you were to give one piece of advice  to anyone who wants to read more  about this particular subject,  where should they be going? 

That's a great question.  So just some good starting places.  So if you want a modern treatment of it,  Gwyn Morgan has a book,  69 AD, the Year of Four Emperors.  And I think that is the best modern treatment.  He's not making like an argument per se.  He's not gonna prove this one thing.  Instead, he's basically just like,  I'm gonna take the year from beginning to end  and try to chart what happened.  It's a book based on him writing  just an absurd number of super technical articles  about Tacitus.  And then I guess there's words like,  all right, I wanna just have fun and tell the story.  So that's a great place to go.  Or if you wanna go right into the ancient stuff,  I would say dive in with Tacitus's history  or Suetonius. 

And are there any particular translations  that you would recommend someone pick up?  That is a good question.  I don't think I have like one particular translation.  I would say if you want something  that does a good job of being readable and accessible,  The Penguins are always a pretty good starting place.  Alternatively, if you wanna just dip your toe in  or you don't wanna spend the money,  you can find online translations of these  with the caveat that the English might be  a little outdated and tougher to wade through. 

Wonderful, wonderful.    Huge, huge thank you to you now  for coming onto the show  and talking about the year of the four emperors.  So unbelievably messy, but so much fun to listen to.  Thank you so much.