The country, ready to find a meaning in
every circumstance, regarded it as an omen of gloomy import that Vitellius,
on obtaining the office of supreme Pontiff, should have issued a
proclamation concerning the public religious ceremonial on the 18th of July,
a day which from old times the disasters of Cremera
and
Allia had marked as unlucky. Thus utterly
regardless of all law human and divine, with freedmen and friends as
reckless as himself, he lived as if he were among a set of drunkards. Still
at the consular elections he was present in company with the candidates like
an ordinary citizen, and by shewing himself as a spectator in the theatre,
as a partisan in the circus, he courted every breath of applause from the
lowest rabble. Agreeable and popular as this conduct would have been, had it
been
prompted by noble qualities, it was looked
upon as undignified and contemptible from the remembrance of his past life.
He habitually appeared in the Senate even when unimportant matters were
under discussion; and it once happened that Priscus Helvidius, the
prætor elect, had spoken against his wishes. Though at the moment
provoked, he only called on the tribunes of the people to support his
insulted authority, and then, when his friends, who feared his resentment
was deeper than it appeared, sought to appease him, he replied that it was
nothing strange that two senators in a Commonwealth should disagree: he had
himself been in the habit of opposing Thrasea. Most of them laughed at the
effrontery of such a comparison, though some were pleased at the very
circumstance of his having selected, not one of the most influential men of
the time, but Thrasea, as his model of true glory.
