Galba

• 1. Introduction

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  Galba put on a linen corset on the morning of the 15th of January AD 69, knowing it would offer little protection against so many swords. He had been emperor for just seven months. Within hours, soldiers he had refused to pay would hack him down near the Lacus Curtius in the Forum, pass his severed head around on a lance, and sell it for spare change. How did a man who had governed provinces for decades, who had outlasted Caligula and Claudius and Nero, end his life like that? And why, when his turn finally came to rule Rome, did nearly everything he did make enemies of the people who should have been his allies?

• 2. A Name and Its Ancestors

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  Servius Sulpicius Galba was born near Terracina on the 24th of December, 3 BC, into a family whose consulships stretched back centuries. One ancestor had held the consulship in 200 BC; another in 144 BC. His own father and brother, both named Gaius, would each reach the same office, in 5 BC and AD 22 respectively.

  The cognomen Galba itself puzzled ancient scholars. Suetonius recorded several guesses: the name might derive from a Latin word the Romans used to describe the Gauls, or it might come from an insect called galbae. No firm answer survives.

  Galba's grandfather was a historian, and his father a barrister whose first wife, Mummia Achaica, was the granddaughter of Quintus Lutatius Catulus and the great-granddaughter of Lucius Mummius Achaicus. Galba prided himself on that descent from Catulus in particular. He pressed the connection even further by fabricating, according to Suetonius, a genealogy claiming paternal descent from the god Jupiter and maternal descent from the legendary Pasiphaë, wife of Minos.

  The family's connection to imperial power was real enough without mythology. Galba was reportedly a distant relative of Livia, the wife of Augustus, who advanced his career and left him fifty million sesterces in her will. The emperor Tiberius reduced that bequest to five hundred thousand sesterces and never paid even that reduced amount.

• 3. Decades of Service

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  Galba became praetor around AD 30, then governor of Aquitania for roughly a year, then consul in 33. His career was, for decades, a demonstration of competent service under difficult emperors.

  In 39, the emperor Caligula discovered a conspiracy involving Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Gaetulicus, the general commanding the legions of Germania Superior. Galba was installed in Gaetulicus's place. According to one account, Galba literally ran alongside Caligula's chariot for twenty miles. As commander of those legions, he earned a reputation as a strict disciplinarian.

  Suetonius wrote that after Caligula's assassination in 41, advisors urged Galba to seize the throne. He refused and served Caligula's successor Claudius loyally instead, though Suetonius himself suspected the story might be fiction. Galba was appointed governor of Africa around 44 or 45, then retired sometime during Claudius's reign, possibly around 49.

  His retirement did not last. The emperor Nero recalled him in 59 or 60 to govern Hispania. It was from that post that Galba would eventually launch his bid for the throne, after a rebellion in Gaul by Gaius Julius Vindex gave him his opening. Vindex rose up on the anniversary of the death of Nero's mother Agrippina the Younger in 68. Galba, joining the rebellion, rejected the title General of Caesar and took instead the title General of the Senate and People of Rome.

• 4. The Road to Rome

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  The night of the 8th of June AD 68 was the turning point. At midnight, an imperial official named Nymphidius Sabinus falsely told the Praetorian Guard that Nero had fled to Egypt. The Senate proclaimed Galba emperor. Nero then died by assisted suicide with help from his secretary.

  Galba was not yet in Rome. He was traveling with Marcus Salvius Otho, the governor of Lusitania. On the way, a legion organized by Nero attacked Galba's army and killed a number of his troops.

  The new emperor arrived burdened by a reputation that had preceded him. Word had spread that he had punished Spanish and Gallic cities that hesitated to support him by imposing heavier taxes and razing walls. He had executed governors and their wives and children. In one particularly reported incident, the people of Tarraco had presented him with a golden crown weighing fifteen pounds; when Galba found the crown three ounces short, he demanded the missing weight be paid back.

  That reputation was confirmed almost immediately on arrival. When former marines whom Nero had promoted to regular soldiers refused Galba's order to return to rowing duty, he dispersed them by cavalry charge and decimated the unit, meaning he had every tenth man killed. He dismissed his Germanic bodyguards and sent them home with no rewards, claiming they favored a rival. And critically, he refused to pay the Praetorian Guard the donative they had expected in exchange for supporting his accession.

• 5. The Men Who Ran Him

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  Galba suffered from chronic gout by the time he reached the throne. His hands and feet were so distorted that he could not endure wearing a shoe for long, unroll a book, or hold one. The flesh on his right side had grown out enough that it required a bandage to hold in place.

  Three men filled the space his infirmity left open. Titus Vinius was the general who had commanded one of the legions in Hispania. Cornelius Laco was the praetorian prefect. Icelus was a freedman of Galba himself. Suetonius wrote that Galba handed himself over to these men as their tool, and his conduct lurched between excessive harshness and reckless generosity. He condemned distinguished men of both the senatorial and equestrian orders on trivial suspicions, without trial.

  His frugality became a subject of mockery. When an unusually fine dinner was set before him, Galba reportedly groaned aloud. He once rewarded a steward who presented careful expense accounts by handing him a dish of beans. When the flute player Canus greatly pleased him, he gave the musician five denarii from his own purse with his own hand.

  Tacitus, who had no sympathy for men who squandered good fortune, summed up Galba with a line that has lasted: he seemed too great to be a subject so long as he remained a subject, and all would have agreed he was equal to the imperial office if he had never held it.

• 6. Mutiny and Murder

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  On the 1st of January AD 69, the day Galba and Vinius assumed the consulship, the fourth and twenty-second legions of Germania Superior refused to swear loyalty to Galba. They toppled his statues. On the following day, the soldiers of Germania Inferior followed and proclaimed their own governor, Aulus Vitellius, as emperor.

  Facing revolt from the frontier, Galba tried to secure his position by adopting Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus as his heir and successor. The choice bypassed Otho, the governor who had marched alongside him from Lusitania and had expected to be chosen. Otho organized a conspiracy with a small number of Praetorian Guards.

  The soldiers in Rome were already angry. The Praetorians had never received their donative. Men from the fleet resented that Galba had demoted their colleagues back to rowers. Soldiers from Hispania, Illyria, Britannia, and Germania who made up the capital garrison had not been paid what they were owed. Many in the Guard were also afraid. Nymphidius Sabinus, the prefect who had helped Galba take power, had since been killed, and some Praetorians feared Galba might still punish them for their past connection to Sabinus.

  Galba was lured into the Forum by a false report. He reportedly asked whether he should be beheaded or offered to pay the withheld bounty. A single centurion, Sempronius Densus, tried to defend him with a pugio and was killed in the attempt. A company of Germanic soldiers who owed Galba a personal kindness rushed to help but took a wrong turn and arrived too late. He was killed in the seventy-third year of his age and the seventh month of his reign.

• 7. After the Forum

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  One hundred and twenty people later petitioned Otho claiming each had personally killed Galba. Vitellius, when he came to power, had all of them executed.

  The disposal of the bodies told its own story about who mattered. Vinius, who had tried to run calling out that Otho had not ordered his death, was run through with a spear. His head was sold to his daughter for 2,500 drachmas. Piso's head was given to his wife. Galba's head was bought for 100 gold pieces by a freedman who threw it at a place called Sessorium, where his master Patrobius Neronianus had once been executed on Galba's orders. The body was eventually recovered by Priscus Helvidius with Otho's permission; at night, Galba's steward Argivus carried both head and body to a tomb in Galba's private gardens on the Aurelian Way.

  The Senate voted to honor Galba with a statue on a column decorated with the beaks of ships, placed in the part of the Forum where he had been killed. The emperor Vespasian later annulled the decree, on the grounds that Galba had once sent assassins from Spain to Judaea to kill him. The column was never built. Suetonius recorded one final detail: Galba had been visited in his dreams twice by the Roman goddess Fortuna, and on the second occasion she withdrew her support. That dream, Suetonius noted, came just before his fall.