Page:Tacitus; (IA tacituswilliam00donnrich).pdf/148

Vitellius made a vain attempt to escape. His wife Galeria had a house on the Aventine, and thither he was conveyed in a litter, purposing to fly in the night-time to his brother's camp at Terracina. But, infirm of purpose, he returned to the palace, whence even the meanest slaves had fled, or where those who remained in it shunned his presence. He wandered through its long corridors and halls, shrinking from every sound: "he tried the closed doors, he shuddered in the empty chambers," he trembled at the echo of his own footfalls. In the morning he was discovered; "his hands were bound behind his back; he was led along with tattered robes; many reviled, no one pitied him." He was cut down by a German soldier, who may have owed him a grudge, or have wished to release him from insult. The soldiers pricked him on with their weapons when his pace slackened, or stopped him to witness his own statues hurled from their pedestals and broken by their fall. He was compelled to gaze on the spot where a few months before Galba had fallen. A sword placed beneath his chin kept his head erect, exposing to a brutal mob his haggard looks; his visage was besmeared with mud and filth; and, wounded as he already was, he was smitten on the cheek as he passed through the long files of his persecutors. When he reached the Gemoniæ, where the corpse of Flavius Sabinus had so recently lain, he fell under a shower of blows; "and the mob," says Tacitus (and he might probably have added senators and knights also), "reviled him when dead with the same heartlessness with which they had flattered him living. One speech, it was his last, showed a spit not utterly degraded. To a tribune who in-