1The city was in alarm, dreading at once the atrocity of the recent crime and Otho's old habits, when it was terrified besides by fresh news about Vitellius, which had been suppressed before Galba's murder so that only the army of Upper Germany was believed to have revolted. 1Then not only the senate and the knights, who had some share in and concern for the state, but the common people too openly lamented that two men, the worst of all mortals in unchastity, sloth and extravagance, had been chosen by fate, as it were, to ruin the empire. 1They spoke no longer of the recent examples of a cruel peace, but, recalling the memory of the civil wars, of the city so often captured by its own armies, the devastation of Italy, the plundering of the provinces, Pharsalia, Philippi, Perusia and Mutina, names notorious for public disasters.
1The world had been all but overturned even when good men contended for the principate, but the empire had survived the victory of Gaius 1Julius, had survived the victory of Caesar Augustus; 1the republic would have survived under Pompey and Brutus: were they now to go to the temples to pray for Otho or for Vitellius? 1Impious would be the prayers for either, accursed the vows for either, between two men of whose war you could know only this, that the winner would be the worse. 1There were some who foresaw Vespasian and the armies of the East, and though Vespasian was better than either, still they shuddered at another war and other disasters.
1And Vespasian's reputation was ambiguous, and he alone of all the emperors before him was changed for the better.