Otho

• 1. Introduction

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  Marcus Salvius Otho stabbed himself in the heart on the 16th of April 69 AD, one day after losing the Battle of Bedriacum. He was 36 years old. He had been emperor for just 91 days. What makes his death remarkable is not the brevity of the reign, but the reason he gave for ending it. He told the soldiers gathered around him that it was far more just to perish one for all than many for one. Then he went to sleep, and in the early hours of the morning he pressed a dagger he had hidden under his pillow into his chest.

  This was not a man known for self-sacrifice. Otho had spent years in the court of Nero, renowned as a companion in luxury and excess. He had married Nero's mistress, then watched as Nero took her back. He had waited a decade in a remote province for his moment. When it finally came, he seized it through murder. So who was this emperor who chose death over a second battle, and why did soldiers weep at his funeral pyre and follow him into the flames?

• 2. The Courtier and the Exile

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  Otho was born on the 28th of April AD 32 into a family with deep roots in Etruscan nobility. His grandfather had been a senator, and the emperor Claudius had granted patrician status to his father, Lucius Salvius Otho. That pedigree opened the doors of Nero's court, and Otho walked through them readily. According to the historian Greenhalgh, he was addicted to luxury and pleasure to a degree remarkable even among Romans, a high bar in any era.

  Suetonius, in The Lives of the Caesars, describes Otho in striking physical detail: of moderate height, splay-footed and bandy-legged, but almost feminine in his care of his person. He had the hair of his body plucked out, wore a carefully fitted wig that no one suspected, shaved every day, and smeared his face with moist bread to keep his skin smooth. Juvenal, writing to ridicule male vanity, singled Otho out by name, depicting him looking in a mirror before battle and plastering his face with dough.

  The pivot in Otho's life came through a woman named Poppaea Sabina. Otho married her, but Nero desired her. Nero forced Otho to divorce Poppaea so that he himself could take her. Then, rather than kill a man he had once counted a friend, Nero sent Otho to Lusitania in 58 or 59 as its governor. It was a banishment dressed as a promotion, to a province at the far western edge of the empire. Otho served there capably, according to later accounts, but he never forgave Nero for the marriage to Poppaea.

• 3. The Road to Rome

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  For roughly a decade, Otho governed Lusitania without incident. When revolt came in 68, it arrived from a neighboring province. Galba, governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, rose against Nero. Otho joined him. This was not sentiment. Nero's rule had grown murderous, and Otho had a personal debt to settle. Nero committed suicide later that year, and the Senate proclaimed Galba emperor. Otho accompanied Galba on his march to Rome in October 68, traveling with a man he expected to reward him.

  Galba did not reward him. On the 1st of January 69, the day Galba took the office of consul alongside Titus Vinius, two legions of Germania Superior refused to swear loyalty to the new emperor. They knocked down his statues and demanded a replacement. The following day, soldiers in Germania inferior went further, proclaiming their own commander, Aulus Vitellius, as emperor. Galba's response was to adopt a nobleman named Piso Licinianus as his chosen successor. That decision cost Galba his life. Otho, who had expected to be the heir, had Galba killed by the praetorian guard on the 15th of January. Vinius and Piso died the same day. Their heads were placed on poles, and Otho was proclaimed emperor in their place.

• 4. Three Months of Power

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  Otho's reign opened with a deliberate appeal to the memory of Nero. Nero's statues were set up again, his freedmen and household officers were reinstalled, and even Sporus, the young castrated boy whom Nero had taken in marriage, came to live intimately with Otho. The populace acclaimed him as Nero Otho, though Otho himself did not appear to welcome the title.

  At the same time, Otho moved to reassure the more cautious citizens. He promised to govern equitably and demonstrated what Suetonius records as judicious clemency toward Aulus Marius Celsus, a consul-designate who had been a devoted supporter of Galba. He assumed the consulate alongside his brother Lucius Salvius Otho Titianus, though only until the 1st of March. Otho remarked, according to Suetonius, that with long pipes he had little concern, a saying he used to acknowledge taking on something beyond his ability. That remark proved prophetic. Reading through Galba's private correspondence, he discovered the full scale of the Germanic revolt. Vitellius's forces, under commanders Aulus Caecina Severus and Fabius Valens, had already crossed the Alps into northern Italy.

• 5. Bedriacum

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  Otho answered Vitellius by drawing on the empire's eastern garrisons. He dispatched forces from Pannonia and Dalmatia, among them the Legio XIV Gemina, a veteran unit that had helped suppress the revolt of Boudica in Britain. It was a formidable army. The decisive engagement came at Bedriacum on the 14th of April 69, approximately 35 kilometers from Cremona.

  The battle went against Otho. Some of his units performed well enough to capture a Vitellian eagle standard, a significant prize in Roman warfare. But the Praetorian Guard, the core of his military strength, broke before engaging in close combat. His forces retreated to the camp at Bedriacum. The two sides together suffered around 40,000 casualties.

  Reinforcements from the Balkans were still on the march. The Dalmatian legions had reached Aquileia. His officers urged him to fight on. Otho refused. He told those around him that he would not allow the Roman people to bear further bloodshed on his behalf. He bade farewell in a speech, slept soundly through what remained of the night, and died the next morning. A plain tomb was erected at Brixellum, bearing the inscription Diis Manibus Marci Othonis.

• 6. What the Death Meant

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  Tacitus recorded that some of Otho's soldiers burned themselves alive beside his funeral pyre because they loved their emperor and wished to share his glory. That detail, which might seem like battlefield legend, points to something genuine in the way Romans received the news of how he died. Few could believe, Tacitus wrote, that a renowned former companion of Nero had chosen such an honorable end.

  The poet Martial, writing during the reign of Domitian between AD 81 and 96, expressed admiration for Otho's decision to spare the empire from civil war by sacrificing himself. Otho's 91-day reign was the shortest in Roman history until Pertinax, whose reign lasted 87 days in 193 during the Year of the Five Emperors. His ashes were placed within a modest monument and his funeral was held immediately, as he had requested. The tomb at Brixellum carried no titles of glory, just his name and the traditional dedication to the spirits of the dead. It was a quiet end for a man who had once hoped to inherit the world.

• 7. On Stage and Screen

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  Otho became a figure in European opera almost immediately in historical terms. In 1643, Claudio Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea placed Otho at the center of a love triangle with Poppaea and Nero. In Monteverdi's telling, Otho loves Poppaea but she rejects him; at the empress Ottavia's command, he attempts to kill Poppaea, fails, and ends the opera in exile with a noblewoman named Drusilla.

  Handel returned to the same world in his 1709 opera Agrippina, where Otho appears as the genuine love interest of Poppaea amid a web of political scheming driven by Nero's mother. Vivaldi gave him a title role in Ottone in villa, composed in 1713, though that opera shifts the story into a different romantic entanglement entirely. On film, L'incoronazione di Poppea was recorded multiple times across later decades. The Zurich Opera produced a version in 1979 with Paul Esswood in the role. Iestyn Davies played Otho in the 2008 Glyndebourne production. Max Emanuel Cencic took the role in the 2010 production at the Teatro Real in Madrid, which was released on DVD in 2012. The 2013 Polish film Imperator, shot entirely in Latin, cast Robert Wrzosek as Otho, giving the emperor one of the stranger afterlives of any ancient Roman ruler.