Vespasian (A.D. 69-79), the first Roman Emperor not to have emerged from the old urban aristocracy. Born in A.D. 9 to an equestrian family in the central Italian town of Reate, he
enjoyed a distinguished military career before his victory in the civil wars of 68-9. His portraits stress qualities of hard-headedness and experience in place of the hellenizing
idealism of the Julio-Claudians.
Events now moved far more quickly than anyone could have expected. The southward march of the Vitellian army from Germany to north Italy had savagely scarred the regions
which it traversed, and Vitellius himself behaved more like a conqueror than a saviour. He also made the mistake of humiliating Otho's troops, but not disbanding them. The bulk of
the powerful Danubian armies had not arrived in time to make their "weight felt decisively at Bedriacum. The meteoric Marcus Antonius Primus now took a hand, and what an
Aquitanian Roman had begun a Roman from Toulouse finished. Something of a rapscallion, he had been exiled under Nero for his part in a scandalous testamentary fraud, but
recalled by Galba and given the command of one of the Pannonian legions.
War, confusion, and intrigue were his true metier; he had little difficulty in getting the disgruntled Danubian troops to declare for Vespasian, and he used them with a speed and elan
worthy of Julius Caesar himself. Scorning caution and delay, which could also have strengthened the enemy, he declined to await the arrival of the eastern armies and drove at full
speed into Italy, catching his opponents off guard and crushing Vitellius' army, itself demoralized by the recent dismissal of its general Caecina on suspicion of treachery, in a second
battle at Bedriacum in October. Vitellius fell back on Rome, where Vespasian's brother Sabinus all but persuaded him to abdicate, but was himself killed when rampaging German
auxiliaries overran the Capitol. After a furious resistance and some murderous street-fighting, Primus stormed to victory. Vitellius was hunted down and butchered, and a few days
later Mucianus at last reached Rome, cut Primus down to size, and established a provisional government for the sixty-year-old Vespasian, whose two grown sons Titus and Domitian
offered a prospect of continuity which the childless Mucianus could not match. 'The long year' ended at last in December 69. The task of rebuilding the shattered Empire was now in
the hands of a hard-headed, down-to-earth, experienced, and immensely capable man who was to prove himself the first truly worthy successor to Augustus and who was, like
Augustus, princeps by his own making and on his own merits.