Servius Sulpicius Galba reached Rome in June of 68. He was of noble birth, for he traced his lineage on his father’s side to Jupiter, and on his mother’s to Pasiphaë, wife of Minos and the bull. In this year of his exaltation he was already bald, and his hands and feet were so crooked with gout that he could not wear a shoe or hold a book.90 He had the usual vices, normal and abnormal, but it was not these that made his reign so brief. What shocked army and populace were his economy of the public funds and his strict administration of justice.91 When he ruled that those who had received gifts or pensions from Nero must return nine tenths to the Treasury, a thousand new enemies arose, and Galba’s days ran out.
A bankrupt senator, Marcus Otho, announced that he could pay his debts only by becoming emperor.92 The Guards declared for him, marched into the Forum, and met Galba riding in a litter. Galba offered his neck unresisting to their swords; they cut off his head, his arms, his lips; one of them carried the head to Otho, but as he could not hold it well by the sparse and blood-wet hair, he thrust his thumb into the mouth. The Senate hastened to accept Otho, just as Roman armies in Germany and Egypt were hailing as emperors their respective generals—Aulus Vitellius and Titus Flavius Vespasianus. Vitellius invaded Italy with his hardy legions, and swept away the weak resistance of the northern garrisons and the Praetorian Guard. Otho killed himself after a reign of ninety-five days, and Vitellius mounted the throne.
It does not speak well for the Roman military system that so senile a man as Galba should have commanded in Spain, or so slothful an epicurean as Vitellius in Germany. He was a gourmand who thought of the Principate chiefly as a feast, and made a banquet of every meal. He governed in the intervals; and as these grew shorter he left state affairs to his freedman Asiaticus, who in four months became one of the richest men in Rome. When Vitellius learned that Vespasian’s general Antonius was leading an army into Italy to dethrone him, he delegated his defense to subordinates and continued to feast. In October of 69 the troops of Antonius defeated the defenders of Vitellius at Cremona in one of the bloodiest battles of ancient times. They marched into Rome, where the remnants of Vitellius’ legions fought bravely for him while he took refuge in his palace. The populace, says Tacitus, “flocked in crowds to behold the conflict, as if a scene of carnage were no more than a public spectacle exhibited for their amusement”; while the battle raged some of them plundered shops and homes, and prostitutes plied their trade.93 The soldiers of Antonius triumphed, killed without quarter, and pillaged without stint; and the mob, as ready as history to applaud the victors, helped them to ferret out their enemies. Vitellius, dragged from his concealment, was led half naked through the city with a noose around his neck, was pelted with dung, was tortured without haste, and at last, in a moment of mercy, was slain (December, 69). The corpse was drawn through the streets with a hook and flung into the Tiber.94