The Twelve Caesars by Matthew Dennison

Author:Matthew Dennison
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857897800
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Like the protagonist in a work of literature, the Galba of the sources contains within himself seeds of his own downfall: character as plot. Historians traditionally ascribe to him a trio of mistakes: his brutal purges of the army; his refusal to pay the soldiers’ donative; his misguided choice of successor. Each arises from discernible character traits: the love of discipline, money and noble birth. As a combination they failed to win adherents and cost Galba his reputation and his life. Compared with that of his predecessors, Galba’s was a throne without foundations, built on a fragile consensus at a moment of crisis and unable, even at the outset, to unite all factions (the legions in Germany, as we shall see, offered support that was at best grudging). Nero had fallen despite every safeguard of the Julio-Claudian inheritance. How easily then might Galba, lacking those entitlements, fall too.

Did Galba understand that secret of empire revealed by Tacitus – or did he justify his elevation as the deserts of aristocratic birth? Certainly he failed to grasp the extent to which emperor-making powers belonged not to the would-be emperor (a mistake also made by Otho) but to those legions whose focus of loyalty was not Rome, the Empire or even a concept of Roman greatness but the present incumbent of the throne – a symbol. With Nero’s death, the thread that bound Rome’s scattered armies to the Palatine momentarily snapped. For Galba, loyalty was not a prize to be won but an enforceable aspect of military discipline. And so, recognizing its importance, he refused to fix the broken connection, prepared neither to bribe his soldiers with gifts of money nor to tender for their favour: ‘I levy my soldiers, I do not buy them.’ A comatose senate, accustomed now to fear and fawning, could no longer help him: there is evidence that eminent men, more aware than Galba of the direction the wind was blowing, hung back from supporting his ever-tottering regime. First in Germany, afterwards in the East, the thanes flew from him. His was assuredly not the spirit of the age.

It might have been different in the absence of a fourth mistake, namely the counsel he kept. Galba’s consilium was effectively shrunk to a body of three. With certain irony Suetonius referred to these trusted, all-powerful attendants who never left his side as his ‘tutors’. They were a curious trio, lambasted for corruption though none of the sources offers evidence. Successfully they held the world at bay for Galba. First, that burly bedfellow Icelus, who rewarded himself for pains in the discharge of duty by enriching himself at breakneck speed, the gains all his, the opprobrium for his misdeeds Galba’s. Second, Titus Vinius and, third, Cornelius Laco, ‘the one most worthless, the other most spiritless’, according to Tacitus.3 Vinius was a low-grade senator, ‘a man of unbounded covetousness’. His claim to the emperor’s ear rested on the sort of military experience and provincial governorship guaranteed to appeal to Galba; he had led Galba’s army and his record as governor was a good one.

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