Year of the Four Emperors

• 1. Introduction

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  The Year of the Four Emperors began not with a coronation but with a whisper. In the winter of 67-68, a Roman official named Gaius Julius Vindex began quietly writing letters to governors across the empire, feeling out who might help him bring down Nero. What followed in the single year of AD 69 would be the Roman Empire's first civil war: four men would claim the title of emperor in succession, armies would march across Italy, a temple to Jupiter would burn, and the ancient Julio-Claudian dynasty that traced itself back to Julius Caesar would collapse entirely. How did a secretive letter-writing campaign spiral into one of Rome's most chaotic years? What kind of men were Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian? And how did a general fighting rebels in distant Judaea end up founding the dynasty that would govern Rome for nearly three decades?

• 2. Vindex and Nero's Fall

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  Gaius Julius Vindex was the legate of Gallia Lugdunensis, and he was acutely aware of his relatively humble origins. He did not want the throne for himself, and crucially, he named no candidate when he began recruiting. Plutarch records that nearly every governor Vindex contacted forwarded his letters directly to Nero. Only one man kept quiet: Servius Sulpicius Galba, the elderly governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, Rome's largest Spanish province.

  In mid-March 68, Vindex moved anyway, raising an army from Gallic warriors. That choice immediately limited him. The seven legions stationed on the Rhine would not fight alongside Gauls, so Vindex could not win them over. He turned exclusively to Galba, and in early April 68, Galba accepted, being acclaimed emperor in Carthago Nova, the city now called Cartagena in Spain. Officials from the other two Iberian provinces, Baetica and Lusitania, quickly supplied him money to raise a second legion, the VII Galbiana, alongside the VI Victrix already under his command.

  Vindex meanwhile found himself besieging Lugdunum, whose citizens were fiercely loyal to Nero. That siege drew out Lucius Verginius Rufus, governor of Germania Superior, who marched to relieve the city. The two commanders actually met and reportedly agreed to combine their forces against Nero. But Verginius' legions did not honor the agreement: they charged Vindex's unprepared troops, killing up to 20,000. Vindex died by suicide. The Rhine legions then offered the throne to Verginius himself, and he refused, partly because those same soldiers harbored deep resentment toward Galba, going back to his harsh command of Germania Superior in 39-41.

  Nero, meanwhile, could not organize any resistance in Rome. The fatal blow came from an insider: Nymphidius Sabinus, deputy prefect of the Praetorian Guard, who convinced the guardsmen to abandon Nero by promising each man 30,000 sesterces, roughly ten years of wages, as a gift from Galba. On the 9th of June 68, the Senate declared Nero a public enemy and proclaimed Galba emperor. Nero took his own life.

• 3. Galba's Short, Bloody Reign

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  Galba was still in Spain when word of his new title arrived. He spent at least a month consolidating control there before setting out, and even on this journey he began accumulating enemies. He executed a string of opponents, including a man believed to be the governor of Baetica. He relieved Verginius Rufus from his Rhine command, worried the popular general might become a rival. In Gaul he executed Betuus Cilo, who had fought against Vindex on Nero's behalf.

  Arriving in Rome during the first half of October 68, Galba was met not with celebration but with bloodshed. Nero had created a legion, the I Adiutrix, from naval sailors as a last-ditch military measure. Those new legionaries pressed Galba to confirm their status when he reached the city. He responded by ordering his troops to charge them, killing thousands. He then accepted their petition only after forcing them through decimation, a punishment not used since the reign of Tiberius, which gutted morale across the army.

  Galba compounded these problems through whom he trusted. He relied on three men from his time in Spain: Titus Vinius, Cornelius Laco, and Icelus. All three had accumulated wealth in ways that mirrored Nero's circle, stirring resentment. He also refused to pay the Praetorian Guard the 30,000 sesterces that Nymphidius had promised on his behalf. One of his military appointments would prove catastrophic in a different way: he sent Aulus Vitellius, described at the time mainly as a penniless glutton, to govern Germania Inferior.

  On the 1st of January 69, the legions of Germania Inferior refused their oath of allegiance to Galba. The following day they acclaimed Vitellius as emperor. Galba panicked and made one last disastrous decision: he adopted a young senator named Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus as his heir. This choice infuriated Marcus Salvius Otho, an influential nobleman who had supported Galba from the beginning and expected the honor himself. Otho bribed the Praetorian Guard and moved fast. On the 15th of January 69, guardsmen killed Galba in the Forum, along with Piso, and impaled their heads on poles.

• 4. Otho's Three-Month Gamble

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  On the day of Galba's murder, the Senate recognized Otho as emperor with what Tacitus described as relief. Otho had no record of cruelty or tyranny, and contemporaries expected a fair hand. He moved quickly to distance himself from Galba's austerity, bestowing favors and deliberately invoking the successful early years of Nero's reign.

  The problem was already marching toward him. Vitellius had dispatched half his Rhine army into Italy before Otho was even recognized. Those legions were not ordinary troops. Backing Vitellius were units with long battle experience in the Germanic wars, including I Germanica and XXI Rapax, among the most formidable soldiers in the empire. Otho sent envoys to propose peace and even offered to marry Vitellius's daughter. The offer went nowhere: Vitellius's generals were already in motion.

  After a run of smaller victories, Otho's forces suffered a decisive defeat at the First Battle of Bedriacum on the 14th of April 69. Rather than fall back and attempt a counter-attack, Otho chose to end what he called the anarchy. He took his own life the next day. His entire reign had lasted a little more than three months. The Senate recognized Vitellius as emperor on the 19th of April.

• 5. Vitellius and the Road to Ruin

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  Vitellius entered Rome under a shadow of his own making. He chose to take the office of Pontifex Maximus on the anniversary of the Battle of the Allia, the date in 390 BC when a Gallic army had sacked Rome. To Romans steeped in ritual superstition, that date was deeply inauspicious.

  Suetonius records that Vitellius settled into a routine of three banquets a day: morning, afternoon, and night. The cost of this entertaining, combined with triumphal parades, drove the imperial treasury to the edge of bankruptcy. When creditors demanded repayment, Vitellius ordered their torture and execution. He then began murdering citizens who had named him their heir, often killing co-heirs alongside them. He invited potential rivals to the palace under the guise of offering them power, then had them assassinated.

  His grip on the empire outside Rome was far weaker. The legions in Egypt and the eastern provinces of Iudaea and Syria had never warmed to him. By the summer of 69 they were moving toward a different candidate entirely. Vitellius tried in desperation to levy allied tribes by force, including the Batavians. They refused. When the Danubian army reached the gates of Rome, Vitellius sent Vestal Virgins to negotiate a truce, then went into hiding. He returned to the palace for one last visit and was caught by Vespasian's men. They killed him on the 20th of December 69. In the fighting to take the capital, Vespasian's forces burned down the temple of Jupiter.

• 6. Vespasian's Eastern Gambit

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  Vespasian was in Judaea when he became a contender. Nero had sent him there in AD 67 specifically to suppress the First Jewish-Roman War. He was a general with a concrete military task, not a political schemer idling in Rome. That distance from the capital turned out to be an advantage.

  On the 1st of July 69, Vespasian was acclaimed emperor in Alexandria. That timing was not accidental. Alexandria was the key to Egypt's grain supply, and controlling that supply meant leverage over Rome's food. His ally Gaius Licinius Mucianus, governor of Syria, marched toward Italy with a strong force drawn from the Judaean and Syrian legions. Vespasian's son Titus stayed behind in Judaea to continue fighting the rebellion.

  Before Mucianus could arrive, a different commander acted. Marcus Antonius Primus led the Danubian legions, which had declared for Vespasian in August, into Italy on his own initiative. In October, Primus crushed Vitellius's forces at the Second Battle of Bedriacum. Primus had not waited for orders. Mucianus arrived in Rome days after Vitellius's death and secured Vespasian's position, though the relationship between the two generals was strained by Primus's independent streak.

  The Senate recognized Vespasian as emperor on the 21st of December 69. He went on to die of natural causes in 79, an almost unremarkable end for a man who had climbed to power through one of Rome's most violent years. The Flavian dynasty he founded held the throne from AD 69 to AD 96.

• 7. The War That Did Not End

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  Vitellius's death did not close the civil war. The Rhine legions refused to accept Vespasian and the new Flavian dynasty even after Vitellius was gone. They had no credible alternative, which ultimately forced their surrender through negotiation in 70, not battlefield defeat.

  Tangled into the Rhine standoff was a conflict scholars know as the Revolt of the Batavi. The Batavians, a Germanic people living as Roman provincials, had been fighting the Rhine legions since Vitellius's own acclamation, under the leadership of a man named Civilis. The new Flavian regime depended on the Batavians to help subdue Roman legions, a dependence that was embarrassing to admit.

  Some scholars argue that the Flavian writers, most notably the historian Tacitus, then reshaped the narrative. In this reading, the regime characterized the Batavians as rebels against Rome rather than as Rome's allies against disloyal legions, scrubbing the awkward fact that Roman soldiers had needed Batavian help to bring other Roman soldiers to heel. Whether or not that scholarly interpretation holds fully, the question it raises is itself a window into how the Year of the Four Emperors continued to reverberate: not just as a period of chaos, but as an episode powerful enough that those who survived it felt compelled to manage how history would remember it.