far more welcome than a frugal emperor. On the morning of the 15th of January, Galba was present at a sacrifice, and Otho in attendance on him. The entrails of the victims betokened risk to the emperor—"in his own household there lurked a foe." That foe, it had been prearranged, was summoned by a freedman to keep an appointment with a surveyor of works. With this excuse he quitted the emperor's presence and hurried to the place of tryst already agreed on—the Golden Milestone beneath the Capitol in front of the Roman Forum. It may have been by chance, it may have been by design, to prevent premature alarm in the city, that only three-and-twenty common soldiers there saluted Otho as "emperor." Certainly he had expected more, since, dismayed at the thin attendance, he seems for a moment to have wavered in his purpose. But his partisans, better informed, drew their swords, thrust him into a litter, and bore him off to the prætorian camp.
Arrived at the camp, the commander on that day—one Julius Martialis, a tribune—it is uncertain whether he were an accomplice, or merely alarmed at so unlooked-for a visit—opened the gates, and admitted the pretender into the enclosure. There the other tribunes and centurions, regarding their own safety alone, and perhaps sharing in the delusion of Martialis—that this feeble body of traitors to Galba was but an advanced guard of numerous and powerful conspirators—forgot at once their duty and their military oath, and joined in, or at least connived at, an enterprise of whose aim they were still uncertain, and of the existence of which they had been ignorant a few minutes before. In fact, the privates alone seem to have been in
