Rome, but was executed by order of Vitellius a few days later.  However, the senate’s danger was augmented because the soldiers believed the news.  Their fears were the more acute, because it looked as if their departure from Mutina was an official move of the Council of State, which thus seemed to have deserted the party.  So they refrained from holding any more meetings, and each shifted for himself, until a letter arrived from Fabius Valens which quieted their fears.  Besides, the news of Otho’s death travelled all the more quickly because it excited admiration.

At Rome, however, there was no sign of panic.  The festival of 55 Ceres[334] was celebrated by the usual crowds.  When it was reported in the theatre on reliable authority that Otho had renounced his claim,[335] and that Flavius Sabinus,[336] the City Prefect, had made all the troops in Rome swear allegiance to Vitellius, the audience cheered Vitellius.  The populace decked all the busts of Galba with laurel-leaves and flowers, and carried them round from temple to temple.  The garlands were eventually piled up into a sort of tomb near Lake Curtius,[337] on the spot which Galba had stained with his life-blood.  In the senate the distinctions devised during the long reigns of other emperors were all conferred on Vitellius at once.[338] To these was added a vote of thanks and congratulation to the German army, and a deputation was dispatched to express the senate’s satisfaction.  Letters were read which Fabius Valens had addressed to the consuls in very moderate terms.  But Caecina’s moderation was still more gratifying:  he had not written at all.[339]

However, Italy found peace a more ghastly burden than the war. 56 Vitellius’ soldiers scattered through all the boroughs and colonial towns, indulging in plunder, violence, and rape.  Impelled by their greed or the promise of payment, they cared nothing for right and wrong:  kept their hands off nothing sacred or profane.  Even civilians put on uniform and seized the opportunity to murder their enemies.  The soldiers themselves, knowing the countryside well, marked down the richest fields and wealthiest houses for plunder, determined to murder any one who offered resistance.  Their generals were too much in their debt to venture any opposition.  Of the two Caecina showed less greed and more ambition.  Valens had earned a bad name by his own ill-gotten gains, and was therefore bound to shut his eyes to others’ shortcomings.[340] The resources of Italy had long been exhausted; all these thousands of infantry and cavalry, all this violence and damage and outrage was almost more than the country could bear.