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Rh lawful or unlawful, they were ready to seize or to sell, sparing nothing, sacred or profane. Some persons under the soldiers' garb murdered their private enemies. The soldiers themselves, who knew the country well, marked out rich estates and wealthy owners for plunder, or for death in case of resistance; their commanders were in their power, and dared not check them."

Otho did not answer the expectations of his partisans in Rome. He was no longer the Otho of the Neronian time. He deferred his pleasures to a more convenient season: he moulded his new life to accord with the duties and dignity of his new position. Yet he got little credit by the change, for men not unnaturally thought that his virtues were a mask for the moment, and that, if he returned victorious, his vices would revive. Perhaps they were wrong in their apprehensions. No indolence or riot disgraced Otho's march. "He wore a cuirass of iron, and was to be seen in front of the standards, on foot, rough and negligent in dress, and utterly unlike what common report had pictured him." In a few preliminary skirmishes the fortunes of the Othonian and Vitellian armies were pretty evenly balanced. But the emperor had hurried into the field with very insufficient forces; he seems, indeed, from the first to have despaired of the issue. His excesses in early life had enfeebled, not his courage, but his power of will. He had indecently exulted when the head of Piso was shown to him, but the spectre of Galba is said to have haunted him in the solitude of the night after the murder. Within twenty hours after his usurpation, he began to presage his own fall. In one thing