Welcome to Imperial History, the podcast where we explore the epic stories of empires that shaped the world, from their triumphant rises to their dramatic falls. I’m your host, Eric Alexander.
In our last episode, the first of the four emperors of the chaotic year 69 met his end at the hands of Otho. But who was Otho?
A man of noble Etruscan blood, Otho was no stranger to the intrigues of the imperial court. He had once stood among Nero’s closest confidants—a companion in excess, a fellow reveler in the extravagant world of the young emperor. For a time, he basked in the glow of imperial favor, indulging in the limitless pleasures that came with proximity to absolute power. But in Rome, favor was as fleeting as a whisper in the Senate halls, and friendships among emperors were nothing more than illusions, dissolving the moment they became inconvenient.
Otho’s great misfortune—if misfortune is the right word—was falling in love with the wrong woman. Or perhaps, more accurately, having a woman whom the wrong man desired. That woman was Poppaea Sabina, a vision of beauty and ambition, the same Poppaea who had ensnared Nero himself. And when an emperor desires something, desire does not remain merely a wish—it becomes law.
Nero, with the effortless cruelty of a godling toying with mortals, ordered Otho to step aside. He was not merely asked to surrender his wife—he was commanded to. His marriage was to be erased, not by his will, but by the emperor’s whim. And Otho? He was not just discarded—he was exiled.
But Nero, ever theatrical, did not send him away in chains. No, that was too crude. Instead, Otho was handed the governorship of Lusitania, a province on the far western fringes of the empire. On paper, it was an honor. In reality, it was a gilded cage, a polite banishment to a provincial backwater—a place where old ambitions were meant to wither and die.
Yet, Otho did something unexpected. He thrived.
Unlike so many disgraced courtiers who faded into obscurity, he did not wallow in self-pity or plot reckless revenge. Instead, he ruled Lusitania with surprising competence and discipline. For a decade, he proved himself an able administrator, a man capable of governing wisely, not merely indulging in luxury. He became something few in Rome would have expected—a statesman.
But a man like Otho, a man who had once stood in the shadow of emperors, does not simply forget the taste of power. And when the empire trembled once more, when Rome found itself on the brink of another upheaval, Otho was ready.
He played the part of the loyal provincial administrator, a governor content with his quiet exile. But beneath the surface, a wound festered, one that time did not heal—it only deepened.
If Otho had truly loved Poppaea, one can only imagine his reaction upon hearing of her death. The rumors were grotesque—whispers that Nero, in one of his infamous fits of rage, had struck her down himself. A brutal, ignoble end for the woman he had once called his wife. Nero had stolen everything from him—his marriage, his position, his future. And Otho would never forget.
So when rebellion flared in the year of 68, when the governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, a grizzled old senator named Galba, dared to defy the emperor, Otho saw more than just a coup. He saw revenge. He pledged his forces, his wealth—his very soul—to Galba’s cause. He marched with the rebel legions toward Rome, his heart burning with the thought that soon, Nero would pay for what he had done.
Then the news came. The Senate had declared Nero a public enemy. The Praetorian Guard had abandoned him. And then, at the final moment, Nero took his own life.
One wonders how Otho reacted to this. Did he rejoice at the downfall of his old enemy? Or was there a flicker of disappointment that he had been denied the satisfaction of seeing it for himself? Did he curse fate for robbing him of the chance to drive the dagger into Nero’s chest with his own hands?
But revolutions are fickle things. One moment, a rebel is a liberator—the next, just another tired old man on a crumbling throne. And Galba was very much an old man. He was rigid, austere—too stiff-backed to navigate the bloody tides of Roman politics. And then, he made a fatal mistake.
Otho had gambled everything on Galba’s rebellion. He had expected a reward, a recognition of his loyalty. Surely he would be named heir. Surely his sacrifices had not been in vain. But when Galba chose his successor, it was not Otho. It was another.
Otho turned to the Praetorian Guard—the true kingmakers of Rome. He whispered promises of gold and power, rekindling the greed that had always lurked within their ranks. And on January 15, in the year of 69, they answered his call.
Galba was cut down, his body was butchered, his severed head paraded on a pike. His lifeless corpse was left for the mob to trample underfoot. And in the span of a single bloody day, Otho was emperor.
Ironically, despite the hatred he bore for Nero, Otho knew that the people of the city had loved the fallen emperor, especially in comparison to Galba. And so, with the calculating mind of a man who understood the weight of public favor, he ordered Nero’s statues restored. His freedmen and household officers—men Galba had cast aside—were given back their positions. It was a move not of sentiment, but of strategy.
For all his thirst for vengeance, Otho knew that emperors did not rule by strength alone. They ruled by perception. And in a city as treacherous as Rome, perception was everything.
Otho had barely settled into the imperial purple before reality came crashing down—a truth so stark, so immutable, that no amount of political cunning or backroom maneuvering could change it. His reign was nearly over before it had even begun.
The moment he cracked open Galba’s private correspondence, the illusion of stability shattered. In the frigid north, far from the marble halls of Rome, the legions had already made their choice. And it was not him.
Their loyalty belonged to another—Aulus Vitellius, the commander of the Rhine legions. A man of indulgence, yes, but also a man backed by some of the toughest, most battle-hardened soldiers in the empire. And worse still, they weren’t waiting for senatorial decrees or diplomatic overtures. They were already marching south.
Otho was no fool. He recognized the danger immediately. In a rare moment of restraint, he attempted a compromise, extending an offer to Vitellius—perhaps they could share power, rule as joint emperors, divide the vast Roman world between them. It was a desperate bid for stability, an attempt to halt the march of war before it reached Italy’s doorstep.
But men like Vitellius don’t share. His legions weren’t marching for diplomacy. They were marching for spoils. The die had been cast as Julius Caesar would say. Or, for a more modern perspective, when you play the game of thrones, you either win or you die.
And so, Otho prepared for war.
His position wasn’t entirely hopeless—not yet. The distant provinces remained indifferent, their governors watching, waiting to see who would emerge victorious before pledging their allegiance. But the legions of Dalmatia, Pannonia, and Moesia? They had sworn loyalty to him. The Praetorians, those elite household troops who had put him on the throne in the first place, were still his to command, their devotion secured by silver and imperial favor. And, crucially, Otho held control over the imperial fleet, giving him mastery of the Italian seas.
It wasn’t an overwhelming force. It wasn’t even an even fight. But it was enough—if he played his cards right.
The problem was, Otho’s court was anything but disciplined. Inside his war camp, debate raged like a wildfire. His seasoned officers—men who had fought real wars, who had seen empires rise and fall—urged caution. Time, they argued, was on their side. The legions from Dalmatia were still marching, reinforcements that could shift the balance if only Otho could wait.
But patience is a virtue rarely afforded to those who sit on a stolen throne.
His brother, Titianus, and the hotheaded prefect of the Praetorians, Proculus, whispered poison into his ear. Waiting was weakness, they insisted. Delay would only embolden Vitellius. Every moment wasted was a moment their enemy grew stronger. Otho had seized power through boldness—why hesitate now?
And Otho listened.
The result was catastrophe.
Desperate to crush the rebellion before it could properly take root, Otho ordered his forces into the field. The two armies met in the plains of northern Italy. The Battle of Bedriacum. It should have been the moment that secured his rule. Instead, it was his undoing.
Forty thousand men left dead in the mud.
And in the end, it was Otho’s army that broke and collapsed into retreat.
Yet even now, even in defeat, all was not lost. The war could have continued. His forces were still considerable. The battle-hardened legions of Dalmatia had already reached Aquileia. His soldiers—men who had followed him into this desperate gamble—were still loyal, still willing to fight. The setbacks had wounded them, yes, but they had not lost faith in the cause. They were ready for another round.
But Otho was not.
It was a decision that seemed almost un-Roman in its selflessness. A man who had schemed, who had plunged a dagger into Galba’s rule, who had seized the empire with blood and iron, now chose to relinquish it.
Not through exile.
Not through negotiation.
But through an act that would etch his name into history.
He gathered his officers—his closest men—and spoke his final words. The line, recorded by historians, is haunting in its simplicity:
“It is far more just to perish one for all, than many for one.”
And with that, Otho withdrew.
He did not rage. He did not despair. He did not flee.
Instead, he lay down to rest, as though all the weight of empire—the crushing burden of ruling a world teetering on the brink—had already lifted from his shoulders. When the morning came, he reached for a dagger hidden beneath his pillow, pressed it against his chest, and with one swift, decisive motion, ended it.
By the time his attendants rushed in, it was already too late. The man who had seized an empire with blood had now relinquished it in blood—his own.
They burned his body swiftly, just as he had commanded. No grand spectacle, no elaborate funeral games, no triumphant oratory about divine favor or the eternal glory of Rome. Just flames and ashes. And that was it.
Ninety-one days on the throne. And then—nothing.
But that’s not quite true, is it? Because the manner of his death—that was what transformed him.
In life, Otho had been a usurper, a schemer, a man whose name was whispered with disdain in the halls of power. To the Senate, he had been a parvenu, a man who had slithered his way into the imperial purple by bribing the Praetorian Guard and cutting down Galba in the streets. To the aristocracy, he had been an unremarkable shadow of Nero, tainted by his association with the debauched excesses of the fallen emperor’s court.
But in death, he became something else entirely.
Because Romans, ever attuned to the ideals of virtus, of noble sacrifice, began to see Otho through a different lens. Here was a man who could have prolonged the war, could have let his legions fight another battle, spill more Roman blood, unleash another round of horror upon an already fractured empire. But he chose not to. He chose to die so that others might live, to end the bloodshed before it spiraled into something far worse.
Even Tacitus, no great admirer of imperial usurpers, was struck by the weight of this act. He tells us that some of Otho’s soldiers—hardened veterans of Rome’s endless campaigns—chose to die alongside him. They threw themselves upon their own swords at his funeral pyre, unwilling to live in a world where their emperor, their commander, no longer existed. These were not court sycophants or desperate politicians looking to preserve favor—these were warriors, men who had spent their lives in the business of death. And yet, something in Otho’s final moments stirred them. It meant something.
It is one of the great ironies of history that men often become more in death than they ever were in life. Nero, a man who had ruled for fourteen years, left behind little more than a trail of infamy. Otho, a man who ruled for three months, left behind a legacy of self-sacrifice, of an emperor who chose death over civil war.
And so, his story came to an end.
But Rome? Rome was not done tearing itself apart.
With Otho gone, the imperial throne passed to Vitellius, the man for whom so much blood had already been spilled. But this was The Year of the Four Emperors—and the empire was still in turmoil.
Because even as Vitellius settled into his rule, another contender was rising in the east. A general. A veteran of Rome’s wars. A man whose name would not only end this period of chaos but lay the foundation for a new dynasty.
His name was Vespasian.