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Rh what answer could the plain, uneloquent, and lowborn townsmen of Reatè have returned?

Vespasian, by delaying his entrance into the capital, obtained two advantages. Firstly, he incurred no immediate unpopularity, as the unfortunate Galba had done, through the cruelties and misconduct of his soldiers.

"When Vitellius was dead," writes the historian, "the war indeed had come to an end; but peace had yet to begin. Sword in hand, throughout the capital, the conquerors hunted down the conquered with merciless hatred. The streets were choked with carnage, the squares and temples reeked with blood; for men were massacred everywhere as chance threw them in the way. Soon, as their licence increased, they began to search for and drag forth hidden foes. Whenever they saw a man tall and young they cut him down, making no distinction between soldiers and civilians. But the ferocity which, in the first impulse of hatred, could be gratified only by blood, soon passed into the greed of gain. They let nothing be kept secret, nothing be closed. Vitellianists, they pretended, might thus be concealed. Here was the first step to breaking open private houses—here, if resistance were made, a pretext for slaughter. The most needy of the populace and the most worthless of the slaves did not fail to come forward and betray their wealthy masters; others were denounced by their friends. Everywhere were lamentations and wailings, and all the miseries of a captured city, till the licence of the troops of Otho and Vitellius, once so odious, was remembered with regret. The leaders of the party, so energetic in kindling strife, were incapable of checking the abuse of victory."