Galba

Demades, indeed, after Alexander had died, likened the Macedonian army to the blinded Cyclops, observing the many random and disorderly movements that it made; but the Roman Empire was a prey to convulsions and disasters like those caused by the Titans of mythology, being torn into many fragments, and again in many places collapsing upon itself, not so much through the ambition of those who were proclaimed emperors, as through the greed and licence of the soldiery, which drove out one commander with another as nail drives out nail.[*](An allusion to the proverb ἥλῳ ὁ ἧλος ἐκκρούεται..)

And yet the Pheraean[*](Alexander, tyrant of Pherae. See the Pelopidas, xxiv.-xxxv.) who ruled Thessaly for ten months and was then promptly killed, was called the tragedy-tyrant by Dionysius, with scornful reference to the quickness of the change. But the house of the Caesars, the Palatium, in a shorter time than this received four emperors, the soldiery ushering one in and another out, as in play. But the suffering people had one consolation at least in the fact that they needed no other punishment of the authors of their sufferings, but saw them slain by one another’s hands, and first and most righteously of all, the man who ensnared the soldiery and taught them to expect from the deposition of a Caesar all the good things which he promised them, thus defiling a most noble deed by the pay he offered for it, and turning the revolt from Nero into treachery.

It was Nymphidius Sabinus, prefect of the court guard along with Tigellinus, as I have already stated,[*](Probably in the lost Life of Nero.) who, when Nero’s case was altogether desperate, and it was clear that he was going to run away to Egypt, persuaded the soldiery, as though Nero were no longer there but had already fled, to proclaim Galba emperor,

and promised as largess seventy-five hundred drachmas apiece for the court, or praetorian, guards, as they were called, and twelve hundred and fifty drachmas[*](Plutarch uses the Greek word drachma for the corresponding Roman denarius, a silver coin about equivalent to the franc. But a Roman writer would reckon by sestertii, the sestertius being worth about a quarter of the denarius.) for those in service outside of Rome, a sum which it was impossible to raise without inflicting ten thousand times more evils upon the world than those inflicted by Nero.