1Now I shall set out the beginnings and causes of the Vitellian movement. 1After Julius Vindex had been cut down with all his forces, the army, flushed with booty and glory, as men to whom victory in a very rich war had come without toil or danger, preferred campaigning and battle, and rewards to pay. 1They had long endured an unprofitable and harsh service, owing to the nature of the region and the climate and the strictness of discipline, which, inexorable in peace, civil discord relaxes, with corrupters ready on both sides and treachery unpunished. 1Men, arms and horses they had in abundance, both for use and for show. 1But before the war they had known only their own centuries and squadrons; 1the armies were kept apart by the boundaries of the provinces: then the legions, gathered together against Vindex, having tested themselves and the Gauls, were looking for war again and new discord; 1and they called them no longer allies, as formerly, but enemies and conquered.
1Nor was that part of the Gauls lacking which lives along the Rhine, which had followed the same side and was then the fiercest instigator against the Galbians; 1for they had given them this name in disdain for Vindex. 1So, hostile to the Sequani and Aedui, and then to other states in proportion to their wealth, they drank in with their minds the storming of cities, the ravaging of fields, the plundering of homes, provoked, over and above the greed and arrogance that are the special vices of the stronger, by the defiance of the Gauls, who boasted, to the army's disgrace, that a quarter of their tribute had been remitted by Galba and that they had been granted citizenship as communities.
1There was added a report, cunningly spread and rashly believed, that the legions were being decimated and all the most energetic centurions dismissed. 1From everywhere came dreadful news, from the city ominous rumour; 1the colony of Lugdunum was hostile and, from its stubborn loyalty to Nero, fertile in rumours; 1but the richest material for inventing and believing lay in the camp itself, in hatred, in fear, and, when they considered their own strength, in confidence.