Vitellius

• 1. Introduction

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  Vitellius ruled Rome for just eight months in AD 69, and his last words were spoken to soldiers who were about to kill him. "Yet I was once your emperor," he said. That year, 69, became known as the Year of the Four Emperors, a spiral of civil war so fast that each new ruler barely had time to sit on the throne before someone else claimed it. Vitellius was the third of those four men. He had been born on the 24th of September 15, in Nuceria Alfaterna, a town in Campania, to a family the ancient sources describe as relatively obscure. He rose to command the Rhine armies, then seized Rome in a campaign of feasting, riot, and bloodshed. What followed was a reign so brief and so violent that historians have been arguing about his true character ever since. Was he a willing glutton, a man shaped by bad advisors, or something more complicated? The answer lies in the details his accusers chose to record.

• 2. A Family of Uncertain Origins

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  Suetonius recorded two entirely contradictory accounts of where the gens Vitellia came from. One traced them to ancient rulers of Latium; the other described their origins as humble and lowly. Suetonius himself noted the sensible observation that both stories could have been invented by flatterers or enemies, except that both were already in circulation before Vitellius ever became emperor, which strips away the obvious motive for fabrication. His father, Lucius Vitellius, began life in the equestrian class and achieved senatorial rank only later, which meant Aulus Vitellius became the first Roman emperor not born into a senatorial family. Even his birth was read as ominous. Suetonius reports that his horoscope so horrified his parents that his father actively tried to prevent Aulus from ever becoming a consul. As a young man, he moved through the highest social circles all the same, numbered among the noble companions of Tiberius during the emperor's retirement on the island of Capri. There he befriended the young Caligula, an unlikely bond explained by their shared enthusiasm for chariot racing and dice. His brother was also named Lucius, and that brother would later host one of the most extravagant dinners in Roman recorded history.

• 3. The Road to Power

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  At the end of 68, the emperor Galba made what witnesses called a surprising choice: he appointed Vitellius to command the army of Germania Inferior. Vitellius responded by making himself popular with soldiers and officers alike through prodigal generosity and easy-going tolerance, which Suetonius says fatally undermined order and discipline. Two of his commanders, Caecina and Fabius Valens, led the revolt that put him on the throne. On the 1st of January 69, the Rhine legions refused to renew their vows of allegiance to Galba. Vitellius was proclaimed emperor at Cologne the next day, and again the day after that. By the time his armies marched south into Italy, Galba was already dead, assassinated by Otho, so it was Otho who faced Vitellius at the Battle of Bedriacum. Vitellius won. The Roman Senate accepted him and decreed the imperial honors on the 19th of April. Rather than take the title Caesar, Vitellius chose the honorific Germanicus, a pointed tribute to the Rhine legions that had carried him to power. He also expanded the Praetorian Guard and filled it with men from his Rhine army, a move that would later trap him.

• 4. Governing and Its Limits

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  Tacitus, writing in his Histories, recorded two administrative changes by Vitellius that outlasted his short reign. Vitellius ended the practice by which centurions sold furloughs and duty exemptions to their men, a reform Tacitus said was adopted by all good emperors after him. He also opened positions in the imperial civil service to members of the equestrian class, breaking the previous dependence on freedmen drawn from the emperor's personal household. On the 1st of October 69 he banned astrologers from Rome and Italy. Some astrologers responded by publishing an anonymous decree of their own, predicting that Vitellius himself would be gone on "the appointed date." He executed any astrologers he could find afterward. Suetonius, whose own father had fought for Otho at Bedriacum, gives a hostile account of everything else. He says Caecina and Valens nudged Vitellius toward excess and cruelty, drowning out whatever better instincts he had. A darker report claims he arranged for his mother to die, to fulfill a prophecy by a Chattian seeress that he would rule longer if she died first; an alternate version says his mother requested poison and he simply granted it. Vitellius also continued honoring Nero's memory as Otho had done, having Nero's songs performed in public, a calculated appeal to the emperor's persistent popularity among the lower classes.

• 5. The Feasts and Their Meaning

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  Suetonius built the enduring image of Vitellius as a man who consumed four banquets a day, using emetics between meals to keep going. One feast hosted by his brother Lucius is recorded as having featured two thousand choice fish and seven thousand birds. Vitellius reportedly outdid even that at his own dinner, served in a dish so large he called it the Shield of Minerva. Into it went the livers of pike, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, the tongues of flamingos, and the entrails of lampreys brought by warship from Parthia and the Spanish Straits. A gourmet of the era, Marcus Gavius Apicius, named a dish of peas or broad beans mashed with sweet and sour ingredients after the emperor, a notably less extravagant tribute. Edward Gibbon, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, placed Vitellius among the unworthy successors of Augustus, estimating in a footnote that Vitellius consumed what Gibbon calculated as at least six millions in money over roughly seven months. Gibbon added that Tacitus had described Vitellius plainly as a hog, but used a finer image to say so. The physical description Suetonius recorded matches the portrait busts: abnormally tall, a face flushed from drinking, a large belly, and a thigh crippled by a chariot accident that occurred while he was in attendance on Caligula.

• 6. Collapse and Execution

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  In July 69, Vitellius learned that the eastern legions had proclaimed Titus Flavius Vespasianus emperor. He sent Caecina with legions to block the Eastern armies from entering Italy, but Caecina, reportedly dissatisfied with Vitellius's rule, tried and failed to defect to Vespasian. That betrayal broke Vitellian morale, and the armies were crushed at the Second Battle of Bedriacum. Fabius Valens was sent to Gaul to gather reinforcements; Vespasian's forces captured and executed him shortly after. Vitellius, deserted by many of his supporters, negotiated terms of abdication with Marcus Antonius Primus, the commander of the sixth legion in Pannonia and a leading Vespasianic general. He was on his way to leave the imperial insignia at the Temple of Concord when the Praetorian Guard stopped him and forced him back to the palace. The battle for Rome that followed was savage. Cassius Dio records that fifty thousand people died. The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was destroyed. Vitellius was eventually pulled from a hiding place that Tacitus identifies as a door-keeper's lodge, and driven to the Gemonian stairs where he was killed. His body was thrown into the Tiber, though Cassius Dio records an alternate account in which his wife arranged for his burial after his head was paraded through the city. His brother and son were killed as well. Marcus Antonius Primus, the man who delivered his defeat, was from Toulouse in Gaul; his nickname was Becco, meaning rooster's beak. Gallus means both a cock and a Gaul, fulfilling a prediction Suetonius says was recorded more than fifty years later, that Vitellius would fall into the power of a man from Gaul.

• 7. Art, Coins, and Afterlife

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  Vitellius struck his first coins not in Rome but at the Spanish mint of Tarraco, the city now known as Tarragona, from January 69, then at Lugdunum, the city now known as Lyon. Every coin from every mint carries the title Germanicus, and numismatist C. H. V. Sutherland observed that Vitellius used it almost as a personal surname. Coins struck before his official senatorial proclamation on the 19th of April do not carry the title Augustus. Coins minted after the 18th of July, when he was elected Pontifex Maximus, carry that title. The final type issued, gold aurei and silver denarii, showed the goddess Victory building a trophy, an image of hoped-for victory against Vespasian that arrived too late to matter. The bust of Vitellius in the Capitoline Museums, broad-faced and heavy-jowled, became the template for how painters imagined him from the Renaissance onward. The so-called Grimani Vitellius, which later scholarship identified as someone else entirely, was used by painters across centuries to signal that a character faces a dark fate. It even appears in a Baroque genre piece by Michiel Sweerts, in which a young art student draws a copy of it. Several 19th-century French artists returned to his violent death: Georges Rochegrosse in 1883 painted him being dragged down the Gemonian stairs by a crowd, a blade held at his throat so he cannot look down, just as Suetonius described the scene. Thomas Couture placed him in the shadows in The Romans in their Decadence, shown at the Paris Salon in 1847, the year before the French Revolution of 1848 ended the July Monarchy.