The Twelve Caesars (28 page)

Galba
: Servius Sulpicius Galba Roman emperor, murdered by Otho, Mary Evans Picture Library

G
alba was an old man, a childless widower. Inflexible and gouty, of middle height and stooping, skull-faced and hook-nosed,
hands and feet distorted with age, bald as an egg, but still, rising seventy-three, in thrall to primitive lusts and evil counsellors, this aristocratic son of a dwarfish hunchback betrayed the
weaknesses of age but none of the spirit of the age. His seven-month reign overlapped Nero’s life by a single day in June 68: he was stern in his rejection of Nero’s legacy.

In this year of tumult (Nero dead, Vespasian a distant prospect), a secret of empire was revealed. It was Tacitus who made this grandiloquent pronouncement. An emperor could be created elsewhere
than at Rome (championed by legions and a groundswell of disaffection carefully exploited: bribes in the right places, the senate tactfully wooed – these conditions Tacitus omitted). There
were other revelations, too, in the maelstrom of Nero’s fall, namely that the principate was not an old man’s game nor responsive to old-fashioned ideas of empire, though these would
emerge only later. ‘What mean you, fellow soldiers? I am yours and you are mine’ is one version of Galba’s dying words. But he was wrong. Galba did not belong to the soldiers nor
they to him. Vigorous in mind he may have been, as Dio insists; also marked for greatness from childhood
by none other than Augustus, as Suetonius offers; even an
‘excellent prince’: yet his political instincts were fallible. At the moment of acclamation he had disdained to pay the troops’ accession donative: as a result, their loyalty
clung to the memory of Augustus’ open-handed progeny. Miserly and sour with rectitude, Galba remained a geriatric usurper.

As he sowed, so in time he reaped. No matter that his reign had been presaged in 200-year-old prophecies: omens were not breastplates and Galba’s head would be hacked from his body by
those with no interest in the numinous. Perhaps Galba’s flaw was that, at a time for new departures, and in the light of Tacitus’ ‘secret’, he remained in every important
respect a quintessentially Roman creation: his mental landscape extended no further than the city of his birth. His were Republican qualities. His virtues were as austere and uncompromising as that
Republican visual idiom he embraced in his portraiture, an imagery of patrician remoteness and heroic hauteur, sunken cheeks, furrowed brow, lips tight with disapproval: the clock turned back, an
eschewal of populist deceits. But the Republic was dead – one of Galba’s own family, opposed to Julius Caesar, had joined the conspiracy of Brutus and Cassius and died in its defence;
and the idealized good looks of Augustus and his successors suited better the paternalism at the heart of the principate. Tacitus’ summary is pithy: ‘He was ruined by his old-fashioned
inflexibility, and by an excessive sternness which we are no longer able to endure.’
¹

Not unusually, Suetonius’ Galba is attended by portents throughout his long life. At the moment of greatest daring, forsaking the easy backwater of provincial governorship for fully armed
conspiracy, he sees a foaling mule. And so his reign is foretold (as his grandfather had said it would be), bounty born of barrenness: impossible to turn back now or
resist.
It is the sort of logic-defying natural phenomenon the Romans loved as an alternative clairvoyance. In this, one of Suetonius’ bleakest portraits, that miracle of the arid made fertile seems
at odds with the aura of desiccation which emerges from Galba’s rigid record. Suetonius suggests that we are wrong to regard him thus, wizened beyond any quickening of the blood, inhuman with
age, though it is his own behaviour as emperor which compels this assessment. His appetite, he notes, foraging for examples, was impressive. In winter, his heavy eating began even before daybreak
(for age did not prevent him from early rising and long days of endeavour in Rome’s service). Impressive, too, in a man unable to endure the pressure of shoes on gout-swollen feet, were his
intermittent sexual athletics. His homosexuality was of Rome’s taboo-breaking variety: a preference for strong, full-grown men over the pert-arsed youths who were traditionally the older
Roman’s quarry. Suetonius offers a single, striking instance. News that the senate had ratified Galba’s accession was delivered by his freedman and bedfellow (and former prisoner of
Nero) Icelus. Overcome with the exhilaration of the moment, this dry-lipped old martinet took Icelus to one side and quickly fucked him. For his indignity, Icelus was rewarded with a leg-up to the
knighthood.

Yet Galba’s appetites, in contrast to those who had gone before, were neither omnivorous nor unrestrained. His response to Icelus was at variance with his reaction to Agrippina the Younger
three decades earlier. That ambitious termagant set her cap at Galba during the latter’s marriage to Aemilia Lepida (probably at the time Claudius made good a bequest to Galba of fifty
million sesterces from the empress Livia, unpaid by Tiberius and Gaius).
²
Galba not only resisted the advances of the future empress, but failed to intervene when, at a gathering of Roman
matrons, to considerable scandal his mother-in-law slapped her for her temerity. Given Agrippina’s ability to cling to a grudge, this robust vignette may account for the
relative quietness of Galba’s career during the second half of Claudius’ reign, as well as his later attitude towards Nero, Agrippina’s son.

Indulgent only to his intimates, forbearing with friends and freedmen, forbidding in demeanour, Galba extolled the discipline of former times. If only he could have summoned to his cause an
illusion of barrack-room camaraderie. But he was always the general and never the soldier. He took no pleasure in bloodshed, yet was liberal with the death sentence; without recourse to torture,
still he killed. Once a soldier on an expedition sold his rations at an extortionate rate. Galba ordered that should the guilty man fall hungry, none must feed him. Hunger struck and the soldier
starved to death. On another occasion, he cut off the hands of a dishonest moneylender and nailed them to his counter. The very chill of his authority is sinister. Even the lessons he had learned
from Augustus’ example misfired: a preference for simple living and lip-service to Republican nostalgia. In Galba’s case, lack of ostentation compounded his reputation for meanness, his
refusal to put on the raiment of magnificence which fitted the emperor’s role; while the Republic he coveted was one of martial vigour in which the ordinary Roman was no more than a cog in a
wheel, wooed with little bread and fewer circuses. He had no truck with Nero’s sumptuous profligacy, those extravagant displays in the theatre, the nights of gaudy subversion when misrule
torched the streets of Rome with blazing hedonism – though as a young man he had distinguished himself in the praetorship with a novel innovation at the Floralian Games: elephants walking a
tightrope. The taste for whimsy was short-lived. Little wonder that, as Suetonius tells us, he ‘incurred the
hatred of almost all men of every class’. This rapid
dégringolade
took seven months, only five of which were spent in Rome.

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. The charms of Laco, ‘intolerably haughty and indolent’ in Suetonius’
account, are less easily fathomed: his overriding characteristic was a knee-jerk need to oppose any plan not his own. Inexperience notwithstanding, Galba would appoint him Praetorian prefect.
Perhaps he intended to retain effective control of the imperial guard himself, Laco no more than a cipher.

Stubborn and intractable, ‘so weak and so credulous’, as Tacitus dismissed him, the old man too often allowed himself to be guided by these gimcrack intimates, negligent of the odour
of nefariousness that tainted each of them and compounded his own quickly acquired reputation for cruelty. Probably all three were more intelligent than contemporary sources
are prepared to acknowledge: their success depended on successfully directing Galba and manipulating that intransigence which was one result of his age and outlook. If so, their intelligence was of
a small-beer variety. At loggerheads with one another, ‘being at variance and in smaller matters pursuing their own aims’, Icelus, Vinius and Laco advised the emperor badly.
⁴
‘He
so entrusted and handed himself over as their tool,’ Suetonius writes, ‘that his conduct was far from consistent: for now he was more exacting and niggardly, and now more extravagant
and reckless, than became a prince chosen by the people and of his time of life.’ In his downfall, they met their own day of reckoning.