Assassination of Galba and Otho's Accession

Winter sharpened tempers in Rome. Galba’s refusal to pay the donative left the Praetorian Camp muttering, and Marcus Salvius Otho—an ambitious courtier passed over for adoption—cultivated their anger with promises. In the week before the Ides of January, plans took form in whispered barracks corners and on the Palatine’s shadowed stairways [18][19].

On January 15, 69, the plot moved. Praetorians surged into the Forum Romanum, their boots hard on stone, their shield rims bright bronze in the pale light. Galba, in a litter, was attacked near the Lacus Curtius; the scene collapsed into a roar and a spatter. Suetonius records the blunt tally: Galba “met his end in the seventy‑third year of his age and the seventh month of his reign” [3].

Otho, waiting at the Praetorian Camp outside the Servian Wall, was hoisted up and hailed imperator. He had won the Guard—his most important audience—by cash and calculation. The Senate, confronted with scarlet standards and drawn swords, voted recognition. The city exhaled in a single, stunned breath.

Otho’s first orders were for calm. He promised moderation and an end to bloodletting in the streets around the Capitoline Hill and the Via Sacra [19]. The sound shifted from the clash of blades to the clatter of litter poles as bodies were carried away. Rome had a new master by noon.

But messages were already on the road to the frontier posts along the Rhine and the Danube. There, legionary eagles would judge Otho not by the Forum’s verdict, but by their own. Inside the city, the day ended with standards lowered and torches guttering in the winter breeze. Beyond the Alps, another acclamation was brewing.