Produced by Tapio Riikonen and David Widger
By
C. Suetonius Tranquillus;
To which are added,
The Translation of
Alexander Thomson, M.D.
revised and corrected by
T.Forester, Esq., A.M.
AULUS VITELLIUS.(427)
I. Very different accounts are given of the origin of the Vitellianfamily. Some describe it as ancient and noble, others as recent andobscure, nay, extremely mean. I am inclined to think, that these severalrepresentations have been made by the flatterers and detractors ofVitellius, after he became emperor, unless the fortunes of the familyvaried before. There is extant a memoir addressed by Quintus Eulogius toQuintus Vitellius, quaestor to the Divine Augustus, in which it is said,that the Vitellii were descended from Faunus, king of the aborigines, andVitellia [689], who was worshipped in many places as a goddess, and thatthey reigned formerly over the whole of Latium: that all who were left ofthe family removed out of the country of the Sabines to Rome, and wereenrolled among the patricians: that some monuments of the familycontinued a long time; as the Vitellian Way, reaching from the Janiculumto the sea, and likewise a colony of that name, which, at a very remoteperiod of time, they desired leave from the government to defend againstthe Aequicolae [690], with a force raised by their own family only: alsothat, in the time of the war with the Samnites, some of the Vitellii whowent with the troops levied for the security of Apulia, settled atNuceria [691], and their descendants, a long time afterwards, returnedagain to Rome, and were admitted (428) into the patrician order. On theother hand, the generality of writers say that the founder of the familywas a freedman. Cassius Severus [692] and some others relate that he waslikewise a cobbler, whose son having made a considerable fortune byagencies and dealings in confiscated property, begot, by a commonstrumpet, daughter of one Antiochus, a baker, a child, who afterwardsbecame a Roman knight. Of these different accounts the reader is left totake his choice.
II. It is certain, however, that Publius Vitellius, of Nuceria, whetherof an ancient family, or of low extraction, was a Roman knight, and aprocurator to Augustus. He left behind him four sons, all men of veryhigh station, who had the same cognomen, but the different praenomina ofAulus, Quintus, Publius, and Lucius. Aulus died in the enjoyment of theconsulship [693], which office he bore jointly with Domitius, the fatherof Nero Caesar. He was elegant to excess in his manner of living, andnotorious for the vast expense of his entertainments. Quintus wasdeprived of his rank of senator, when, upon a motion made by Tiberius, aresolution passed to purge the senate of those who were in any respectnot duly qualified for that honour. Publius, an intimate friend andcompanion of Germanicus, prosecuted his enemy and murderer, Cneius Piso,and procured sentence against him. After he had been made proctor, beingarrested among the accomplices of Sejanus, and delivered into the handsof his brother to be confined in his house, he opened a vein with apenknife, intending to bleed himself to death. He suffered, however, thewound to be bound up an