The Empresses of Rome

by Joseph McCabe

The name of Vitellius is already familiar to us. His father was the fulsome courtier who had inspired Caligula with the idea that he was a god, and who had worn one of Messalina’s little silk shoes under his tunic. His wife, Sextilia, was a woman of strict morality and unambitious temper, but their son, the younger Vitellius, lived in too tainted an atmosphere to prefer the plainness of his mother to the craft and greed of his father. He had learned vice in the band of young men who brought so evil a fame on Tiberius’s villa at Capri, and had made his way astutely through the successive reigns of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. He had made a considerable fortune as proconsul of Africa, and had, on his return to Rome, married Petronia, the daughter of a wealthy consul. She settled her large fortune on her son, and when Vitellius, having consumed his own wealth in luxury and riot, went on to sacrifice his son for the purpose of securing the fortune held in his name, Petronia angrily remonstrated, and was divorced.

He then married Galeria Fundana. She was, says Tacitus, “a pattern of virtue,” and since this defect—as Vitellius would find it—was united with plainness of person, modesty of taste, and dull, if not defective, conversation, the match was a singularly unhappy one. Vitellius had so far squandered his money that he was unable to pay his expenses to Lower Germany when Galba gave him the command of the troops there. How he obtained that important appointment is not clear. Some say that Galba selected him because he was not ambitious; others that he secured it through the influence of the “blue” faction at the Circus, of which he was a partisan. He mortgaged his house, and Sextilia sold her jewels, to obtain funds for the journey. Fundana and her child were left in a poor tenement at Rome, little dreaming that they would be summoned from it to Nero’s “golden house” in a few weeks.

It is expressly recorded that Sextilia and Fundana had no ambition, and dreaded lest Vitellius should aspire to reach the dizzy heights which some early prophet had promised him. They were, therefore, dismayed to hear, shortly after his arrival on the Rhine, that the troops were offering to secure the throne for him. His genial and indulgent treatment of the soldiers was a betrayal of his trust to the stern Galba, and may have been deliberately effected to win their support. He became very popular, and was hailed as a second “Germanicus.” Galba was presently murdered, and, as the German legions had had no part in the choice of Otho, they urged Vitellius to lead them against him. Vitellius wavered for a time between the safe and considerable means of self-indulgence, which he had as commander, and the uncertain, but immeasurably greater, prospect which the throne suggested to his sensual dreams. The officers conquered his hesitation, and he set out for Rome in the rear of the eight legions who had declared for him.

Sextilia and Fundana seemed to be in peril when the news came to Rome that Vitellius was marching upon the city. It is said that Vitellius threatened reprisals if his family were injured, but there is no indication that Otho would stoop to take a revenge on women and children. They saw him march out at the head of his troops to give battle to Vitellius, and waited anxiously, with all Rome, to hear the issue of the civil war. And while Senate and people were enjoying the mummery of the theatre, a horseman rode in with the news that Otho had taken his own life, and Vitellius was leading his German troops upon Rome. Senate and people united at once to receive him, and sent him the title of Augustus. He politely declined it for the time, and continued his leisurely march upon the city. There had been many a triumphant march over the roads of Italy in the annals of Rome, but never one so singular as that of the new monarch. “The roads from sea to sea groaned with the burden of his luxuries,” says Tacitus; and, if we distrust Tacitus, as an admirer of Vitellius’s rival and successor, all the Roman writers agree that his first use of supreme power was to command a stupendous ministration to his sensual appetites. He ordered his legions to move slowly southward, while he, in their train, exhausted each successive region of its delicacies, and filled the days and nights with his princely feasting. His example encouraged his wild German troops, and their line of march could be traced across Gaul and Italy by their pillage, cruelty, and debauchery.

The repeated messages from the provinces filled Rome with laughter, in spite of its anxiety. People remembered this princely epicure sheltering, a few months before, in the poorer quarter of the town and evading the duns. The modest and virtuous Sextilia and Fundana shrank in pain from the hollow flattery which was paid them, and followed the march of the Emperor with disgust. He was approaching Rome at the head of sixty thousand men. Legions of tall, fierce, fur-clad Germans, with heavy javelins, were thundering along the Italian roads and terrifying the peasantry. In their rear was a vast army of slaves, cooks, comedians, charioteers, and other ministers to the Imperial appetite. He had sent for the whole of Nero’s servants and appointments. It was said that he even intended to outrage one of the most sacred traditions of the city by entering it in full armour, at the head of an army with drawn swords; but the friends who met him at the Milvian Bridge persuaded him to change his costume, and sheathe the swords of his soldiers. He entered, in civil toga, at the head of the terrible Germans, his officers clad in white as they bore the eagles. After visiting the Capitol, and addressing the Senate in terms of pleasant submissiveness to that body and of somewhat nauseating praise of himself, he settled in Nero’s magnificent palace with Fundana and her child. His troops, debauched with the license of their march, scattered in disorder through the city; and Rome resigned itself to the inauspicious rule of its eighth Emperor.

We may dismiss the nine months in which Galeria Fundana was Empress of Rome in a phrase: she was a helpless and disgusted spectator of the most imperial debauch that Rome had yet witnessed. Dio strangely accuses her of haughtily complaining of the poverty of the robes she found in Nero’s golden house, but the testimony to her modesty is too strong for us to admit this. A more credible statement in the chroniclers is that she begged to be allowed to retire to a humble dwelling of her own, and Vitellius refused. His mother did not long survive her mortification. One rumour preserved in Suetonius is that Vitellius had her starved to death, as it was predicted that she would outlive him; another version says that he sent her poison, at her own request. Fundana was left alone to bewail his colossal gluttony. She saw his chief officers encourage him in his stupefying orgies, while they enriched themselves; and she had to submit in silence while his sister-in-law, Triaria, “a woman of masculine fierceness,” goaded him to continued excesses. During the few months of his reign he spent 900,000,000 sesterces (about £7,000,000) in eating, drinking, and entertainment. He had three meals during the day, and ended with a costly and drunken supper. His brother one day entertained him at a banquet, at which two thousand choice fishes and seven thousand rare birds were served. Vitellius in return gave a banquet, at which one dish—a compound of the livers of pheasants, the tongues of flamingoes, the brains of peacocks, the entrails of lampreys, and the roes of mullets—cost more than the whole of his brother’s dinner.

From this loathsome and stupid dream of Imperial power Vitellius was at length awakened by the echoes of rebellion in the provinces. After a few futile executions, and several relapses into his besetting gluttony, he was forced to set out for the north. He quickly returned, however, and wandered about Rome in hysterical impotence, while the followers of Vespasian closed upon the city. Civil war had broken out, and the Romans gazed with horror on the sacred Capitol besieged by the German troops and bursting into flames. At last Vitellius came out with Fundana and her child, in mourning dress, and announced that he would resign. The consul refused his sword, and the mournful procession directed its steps towards his brother’s house. He was persuaded to return to the palace, but the Vespasianists captured Rome, and he was taken to Fundana’s house on the Aventine. From this he somehow wandered back to the palace. “The awful silence terrified him; he tried the closed doors, and shuddered at the empty chambers,” says Tacitus. Dazed and incapable of flight, he hid in the sordid room where the dogs were kept. Here the soldiers found him, torn and bleeding, and forced him to walk the streets, while they kept his head erect with the point of a sword, and the people flung filth and epithets at him. They then inflicted on him a slow and painful death, and flung his remains in the Tiber.

Fundana was spared, and her daughter honourably given in marriage, by his magnanimous successor. From the brief and unwelcome splendour of the “golden house” she passed into private life, and lived only to bemoan the cruel fate that had lifted her husband to the intoxicating height of the Roman throne.

There was no Empress in the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, but a word may be said of the two remarkable women who shared their power to some extent. Vespasian, whose sober and solid administration it would be pleasant to contrast with the orgiastic reigns of his predecessors, was a rough soldier, of humble extraction and homely ways. He had, in the time of Caligula, married the mistress of a knight, Flavia Domitilla, who remains little more than a name in the chronicles. He had won distinction under Narcissus, but the triumph of Agrippina drove him and Domitilla into exile. Nero employed him to crush the rebellion in Judæa, and it was during this campaign that his wife died, leaving him with her two sons—his successors—Titus and Domitian. He was, therefore, a widower when the Eastern troops made him Emperor, but he took into his palace, and treated as Empress, an emancipated slave of the name of Cænis.

The mistress of Vespasian has the distinction of being associated—actively and usefully associated—with him in one of the soundest attempts to restore the decaying Empire. She had been in the service of Antonia, the grandmother of Agrippina, and is said to have been the one who first disclosed to Tiberius the perfidy of Sejanus. From the first she was a dangerous rival of Domitilla, and, when his wife died, Vespasian entered into the quasi-matrimonial relation with her which is known in Roman law as contubernium. She would probably have been Empress if the law had permitted him to contract a solemn marriage with her. She had considerable ability, but an unhappy reputation for extortion and the sale of offices. It is not clear, however, that the wealth she obtained did not contribute to Vespasian’s rehabilitation of the resources of the Empire. They abandoned and destroyed the golden house of Nero, the central site of which is now marked by the Flavian Amphitheatre, or Coliseum. In their quiet gardens in the Quirinal they received any citizen who cared to visit them, and maintained no timorous hedge of soldiers between themselves and their people. They wished to see money spent on public purposes, or hoarded for public emergencies, rather than squandered. “My hand is the base of the statue: give me the money,” Cænis is said to have told a wealthy man who proposed to raise a statue to her; but Dio informs us that this and other stories of Cænis’s avarice properly belong to Vespasian. She died, however—if the date assigned in Dio is correct—in the second year of Vespasian’s reign, and must not be credited with too large a share in that great purification of Rome and reinvigoration of its life with healthy provincial blood which Tacitus regards as the beginning of the recovery of the Empire.