“Cæsar is fled!” said he, looking wildly round. “You seek Cæsar?” then perceiving the dark smile on the tribune’s face, and abandoning all hope of disguise, he folded his arms with a certain dignity that his coarse garments and disordered state could not wholly neutralise, and added—
“I am Cæsar! Strike! since there is no mercy and no escape!”
The tribune paused an instant and pondered. Already the dawn was stealing through the palace, and the dead upturned face of Spado looked grey and ghastly in the pale cold light. Master of the situation, he did but deliberate whether he should slay Cæsar with his own hand, thus bidding high for the gratitude of his successor, or whether, by delivering him over to an infuriated soldiery, who would surely massacre him on the spot, he should make his death appear an act of popular justice, in the furtherance of which he was himself a mere dutiful instrument. A few moments’ reflection on the character of Vespasian, decided him to pursue the latter course. He turned to the gladiators, and bade them secure their prisoner.
Loud shouts and the tramp of many thousand armed feet announced that the disaffected legions were converging on the palace, and had already filled its courtyard with masses of disciplined men, ranged under their eagles in all the imposing precision and the glittering pomp of war. The increasing daylight showed their serried files, extending far beyond the gate, over the spacious gardens of the palace, and the cold morning breeze unfurled a banner here and there, on which were already emblazoned the initials of the new emperor, “Titus Flavius Vespasian Cæsar.” As Vitellius with his hands bound, led between two gladiators, passed out of the gate which at midnight had been his own, one of these gaudy devices glittered in the rising sun before his eyes. Then his whole frame seemed to collapse, and his head sank upon his breast, for he knew that the bitterness of death had indeed come at last.
But it was no part of the tribune’s scheme that his victim’s lineaments should escape observation. He put his own sword beneath the Emperor’s chin, and forced him to hold his head up while the soldiers hooted and reviled, and ridiculed their former lord.
“Let them see thy face,” said the tribune brutally. “Even now thou art still the most notorious man in Rome.”
Obese in person, lame in gait, pale, bloated, dishevelled, and a captive, there was yet a certain dignity about the fallen emperor, while he drew himself up, and thus answered his enemy—
“Thou hast eaten of my bread and drunk from my cup. I have loaded thee with riches and honours. Yesterday I was thine emperor and thy host. To-day I am thy captive and thy victim. But here, in the jaws of death, I tell thee that not to have my life and mine empire back again, would I change places with Julius Placidus the tribune!”
They were the last words he ever spoke, for while they paraded him along the Sacred Way, the legions gathered in and struck him down, and hewed him in pieces, casting the fragments of his body into the stream of Father Tiber, stealing calm and noiseless by the walls of Rome. And though the faithful Galeria collected them for decent interment, few cared to mourn the memory of Vitellius the glutton; for the good and temperate Vespasian reigned in his stead.