1Further, Caecina and Valens celebrated Vitellius' birthday by putting on gladiatorial shows throughout the whole city, district by district, with huge preparations unheard of before that day. 1It delighted all the most disgraceful, and roused odium among good men, that he had altars set up on the Campus Martius and made offerings to the shade of Nero. 1Victims were slaughtered and burned at public expense; 1the Augustales lit the fire beneath, a priesthood which Tiberius Caesar dedicated to the Julian family, as Romulus did one to King Tatius. 1Not yet was it the fourth month after the victory, and Vitellius' freedman Asiaticus was already rivalling the Polyclituses and Patrobiuses and the old names of hatred.
1No one in that court competed in honesty or industry: there was one road to power, to sate Vitellius' insatiable appetites with prodigal banquets, expense and gluttony. 1He himself, thinking it enough if he enjoyed the present, and taking no thought for the future, is believed to have squandered nine hundred million sesterces in a very few months. 1The great and wretched city, having endured Otho and Vitellius in the same year, lived through varied and shameful fortunes among men like Vinius, Fabius, Icelus and Asiaticus, until Mucianus and Marcellus succeeded them, other men rather than other ways.