will which all three have expressed, is by meeting them in the character of a victorious general who has driven the German legions back beyond the Alps.'
'So young and yet so stern,' he replied. 'I'd like to get drunk, but I can't, however much wine I take. If I could get drunk, then I might sleep. And if I could sleep, my resolution might return.'
Otho's weakness and indecision were pitiful. It is therefore, surely, the more to his credit that he was able to overcome his fears, or at least to give his troops the impression that he felt none. Summoning up whatever resolution he could command, he gave the order to advance and seek out the enemy. As he buckled his armour on, he sighed. Then he wept a little, when he had dismissed the slave who had helped dress him as a man of war, and told me that he wished to keep me by his side throughout the forthcoming campaign.
You may bring me good fortune,' he said. 'I have a notion that you may.'
'I have read,' I said, 'that Caesar himself used to say that Fortune was the only goddess a commander should concern himself with.'
Having come to a decision Otho embarked on the campaign with the utmost urgency, lest, perhaps, he should have second thoughts, or his nerve should fail him again. The speed with which he now determined to move disturbed many. For one thing the shields had not yet been returned to the Temple of Mars after the annual procession; which, a centurion assured me, was 'traditionally a bad sign, sir, if that is you take any heed of such traditions. I don't meself of course. To my mind it's a lot of balls, but I'm bound to say many of the men don't like it, sir.' It didn't please them either that the order to move was given on the day when the worshippers of Cybele, the Great Mother, commenced their annual wailings and lamentations, as they mourned the death of her lover Attis, nor that the priest who took the auspices after a sacrifice to the God of the Underworld, found the victim's intestines were in prime healthy condition – just what they shouldn't be on such an occasion – in the opinion of the superstitious anyway. More to the point, as I saw it, was that the march north was delayed by floods in the vicinity of the twentieth milestone from the city, and that we then found the road blocked by the rubble from buildings which had collapsed as a result of the flooding. All this disturbed the nervous.
For my part, however, I was in a state of high but controlled excitement. All my life I had longed for the chance to emulate the achievements in war of my Claudian ancestors, and now this was being given me at an enviably early age. I sang as we marched, and the soldiers cheered to see an officer (even an honorary one) in such high spirits. But they could not fail to observe that the Emperor's face twitched and that he rode silent and seemingly indifferent to what happened around him. Since soldiers are as affected by the mood of their commanders as schoolboys are by their master's temper, this was an omen far more serious than any of those which had excited the fears of the superstitious.
Yet the news of the first actions was good. A detachment sent north to try to intercept the army which Valens was leading down the valley of the Rhone gained a victory near the colony of the Forum Julii. Then there were rumours of a mutiny in the camp of the enemy; these were premature, though in truth such a mutiny did break out in a few days, for reasons which I have never discovered. The word came to us that the advance of Caecina and his legions through north Italy was resented by the citizens of the towns where he quartered his troops, and that they were particularly angered by the conduct of his wife Salonina, who rode through their towns garbed in the imperial purple. Of course, the dissatisfaction of these citizens could be of little immediate benefit to our cause. Yet the unpopularity of an invading enemy is always to be welcomed. For one thing, it may demoralise the troops who, in a civil war, always hope to be received as liberators.
Then came the news that Caecina's assault on Placentia, which the Vitellianists considered of the first importance, had been repulsed after a desperate struggle, in the course of which the beautiful amphitheatre beyond the city walls was set on fire and utterly destroyed. The ardour of our troops within the city was however such that Caecina despaired of taking it and so raised the siege. And then, as we moved to concentrate our forces near Cremona, we learned that one of Otho's most able lieutenants Martius Macer had won a victory to the north of the city.
It seemed therefore as if success attended our arms everywhere, and I began to be anxious lest the Vitellianists should soon see the hopelessness of their position, and either surrender or withdraw beyond the Alps, and that I might therefore be denied the chance to add lustre to my family name in battle.
Yet, it was at this moment that Fortune first frowned on our cause. Having scattered the enemy, Martius Macer prudently checked the pursuit, for fear that the enemy might be strengthened by reinforcements, which spies had warned him they were bringing up. I say 'prudently', for by every law of war, his action was indeed prudent. And yet its consequence was evil. For there were those in our army who immediately described this act of prudence as a display of cowardice, while others said that it showed Martius Macer to be less than wholly committed to the cause, and even a traitor who had deliberately refrained from destroying the main army of the enemy. This was ridiculous, but good sense is an early casualty of any war.
The soldiers were disturbed. They did not know whom they could trust. They were uncertain whether the generals who gambled with their lives were determined on victory, or whether some at least were already preparing to defect to the enemy. Such was the evil consequence of the rumours circulated by his personal rivals concerning Martius Macer's conduct. So harsh things were said of the other generals, Annius Gallus, Suetonius Paullinus and Marius Celsus. The officers of the Guard who were guilty – or most guilty – of the murder of Galba, however that might have been prompted by the old man's arrogance and folly, were chief amongst those who now employed the wildest of language. They alone, in their own minds, were fully committed to Otho's victory, and, in their disordered state, were ready to accuse others of treason. In so doing they undermined the cause, the success of which offered them their only hope of security and future prosperity.
Otho could not fail to be affected by the mood of suspicion that surrounded him. Without good reason, he fell into distrust of some of his most able commanders. I cannot blame him altogether for this; the rumours of treason had thrown him into a state of perpetual alarm. He sat for hours in his tent, sipping the wine that failed to intoxicate him, but which nevertheless numbed his critical faculties. Time and again, I heard him bewail his unhappy lot. 'If you ever dream of wearing the purple, dear boy,' he said to me, with many heavy sighs, and on the verge of tears, 'wake from that dream. It is a crown of thorns, not of laurel, that presses on my brow.' Yet in public he strove, not always in vain, to appear cheerful.
There was a consequence of the dissension and the rumours still more damaging to his cause than their effect on his state of mind. That is not the best way of putting it, for the consequence was provoked by the distrust and dismay that clouded his judgement. Believing that if so many men spoke ill of his generals he could not know whom to trust, he resolved to hand over the management of affairs, and indeed the whole conduct of the campaign, to his brother Titianus, a man with neither experience of victory nor the capacity to inspire the soldiers with confidence. Of all Otho's mistakes, this was the most serious. Soldiers who trust their commanders will fight bravely, to the death, even when the cause is failing. Those who neither trust nor respect them will lose the battle in their hearts, even when the disposition of the forces may yet be in their favour. For the truth, Tacitus, is that morale is the determining factor in war; perhaps you have heard your father-in-law Agricola say so.
Yet on the ground things still appeared to go well. Caecina, perhaps because he was unnerved by the failure to take Placentia and his discomfiture in other lesser actions, perhaps because Valens was now bringing his untested army up and Caecina feared that he would gain the glory of the campaign, now made a rash attempt to regain the credit he had lost with his troops and with his imperial candidate, Vitellius.
He posted some of his veterans – auxiliaries as we later learned -concealed in the woods that overhang the road twelve miles from Cremona, at a place called Castors. Then he sent forward a cloud of cavalry, with orders to provoke a battle and then withdraw to lure our men into the trap he had laid for them. It was a pretty scheme, but dangerous in the circumstances of a civil war in which spies and deserters abound. No doubt, had he been engaged against a foreign enemy, his plan would have met with success. But in a civil war there are always many men whose commitment is wavering; they have friends and relations in the opposing army, and so there is habitually a communication between the armies of a sort which is not found in foreign wars. So his scheme was betrayed, or revealed to us.
Titianus was, fortunately, some miles in the rear, and neither Paullinus nor Celsus felt the need, or desire, to consult him. As it happened I was then in the front line, having been sent forward with a message from the Emperor. I was therefore in a position to observe the disposition of our troops and to admire the assurance with which this was made.
Paullinus commanded the infantry, Celsus the cavalry. The veterans of the 13th legion, men who had fought with Corbulo in Armenia before that greatest of generals was discharged, disgraced and destroyed by Nero on
