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Rh more assuring himself that all who wished had left the town, he passed the night in quiet. At the dawn of day, he stabbed himself through the heart. One wound sufficed, but his dying groans caught the ears of his freedmen and slaves. They rushed into his chamber, and among them Plotius Firmus. In compliance with his earnest request, his body was burnt without delay. The ghastly spectacle of Galba's and Piso's heads fixed on lances and exhibited to a brutal soldiery and populace was doubtless present to his mind when ordering this speedy passage to the funeral pyre. The corpse was borne to it by the prætorians "with praises and tears, covering his wound and his hands with kisses." Some killed themselves near the pyre—"not moved," says Tacitus, "by remorse or by fear, but by the desire to emulate his glory, and by love of their prince." "Over his ashes was built a tomb, unpretending, and therefore likely to stand." He ended his life in the thirty-seventh year of his age, and had reigned just three months. Rarely, if ever, does history present an example of swifter retribution for treachery and treason.

The Vitellian generals moved in three divisions. Valens advanced through Gaul, and so by the Mont Genèvre into Italy; Cæcina through the eastern cantons of Switzerland, and over the Great St Bernard; while Vitellius followed more leisurely in the rear of his legates. Every district through which they respectively passed was ravaged; villages, and sometimes large towns, were sacked or burnt; but the richer land south of the Alps was the principal sufferer. The soldiers of Otho, it was said, had exhausted Italy, but it was desolated by the Vitellians. The