When Rome Changes Its Mind Four Times in Twelve Months
It is January, AD 69, and Servius Sulpicius Galba has been emperor for approximately six months. In a modest office near the Forum, wedged between a wine merchant and a copying house, a man reviews his client list with the kind of attention usually reserved for battlefield maps. He is not a senator, not a soldier, not a priest. He is something less glamorous and, in this particular year, considerably more necessary. He manages money for people who have a great deal to lose.
The previous emperor, Nero, ended his reign with a knife and a borrowed hand. Galba, who replaced him, is seventy-three years old, austere, and has made the catastrophic decision not to pay the Praetorian Guard their expected bonus. The adviser does not need to consult an oracle to know what happens next. He has already begun drafting contingency documents.
His clients are not emperors. They are the men one rung below: senators with land in three provinces, equestrians with shipping interests, widows whose inheritances trace back to Augustus. They do not need someone to tell them that Galba’s position is precarious. They need someone to ensure that when the inevitable happens, their estates do not become collateral damage.
The challenge is not prediction. Anyone with functioning ears in January of 69 could tell you that Galba would not see spring. The challenge is positioning assets in ways that do not attract attention, do not signal disloyalty, and do not require explanations to whoever ends up holding power by summer.
By the fifteenth of January, Galba is dead. Otho, who had expected to be named heir and was not, has arranged a more direct succession. The Praetorian Guard, finally promised their money, have done what Praetorian Guards do when properly incentivised.
The adviser’s morning begins with three urgent messages, two cancelled appointments, and one client who has already fled to his estates in Hispania without so much as a forwarding address. This is, in the adviser’s experience, an overreaction. Otho is hardly an unknown quantity. He was Nero’s companion, briefly Poppaea’s husband, and has spent the last decade governing Lusitania with reasonable competence. He is not, by the standards of this particular year, especially frightening.
But fear is rarely proportional, and wealthy men with something to protect tend toward dramatic gestures. The adviser spends his morning drafting reassurance letters and his afternoon quietly converting one client’s urban property holdings into more portable assets. Not because Otho is dangerous, but because the legions in Germania have declared for their own candidate, a governor named Vitellius, and the arithmetic of civil war is already taking shape.
The skill in this work is not the conversion itself. Any competent clerk can sell property and purchase gold. The skill is in the documentation: ensuring that each transaction appears routine, that no pattern emerges that might suggest preparation for flight or hedging against the current regime. A senator who visibly repositions his wealth is a senator who has declared his doubts about the emperor’s longevity. Doubt, in Rome, has a way of becoming self-fulfilling.
Otho lasts three months. He meets Vitellius’s forces at Bedriacum in April, loses badly, and—in what even his critics acknowledge as an unexpectedly dignified exit—takes his own life rather than prolong the conflict. The adviser hears the news on a Tuesday morning and has updated his client strategy documents by Thursday afternoon.
Vitellius presents different challenges. He is, by all accounts, primarily interested in eating well and being left alone. He has no particular agenda beyond survival and no evident talent for the administrative demands of empire. This is, paradoxically, more dangerous than a tyrant with clear objectives. A tyrant you can predict. A man who simply wants to be comfortable will make erratic decisions based on whoever spoke to him most recently.
Three of the adviser’s clients have connections to Otho’s inner circle. One had lent money to the campaign. These relationships must now be reframed, not erased—erasure draws attention—but contextualised. The loan becomes a routine financial arrangement, the political implications downplayed, the client’s essential neutrality emphasised through a paper trail that has been, perhaps, slightly reorganised.
Meanwhile, the legions in the east have made their own calculations. Vespasian, currently handling the Jewish revolt, has the loyalty of the Egyptian grain supply, the Syrian legions, and a reputation for competence that neither Otho nor Vitellius could claim. The adviser does not yet shift his clients’ positions toward Vespasian—that would be premature and potentially fatal—but he begins noting which assets might prove most valuable in a prolonged disruption to Mediterranean trade routes.
The adviser’s role in this environment is not to choose sides. Choosing sides is for soldiers and senators and men who believe they can influence outcomes. The adviser’s role is to ensure that whoever wins, his clients retain enough of their wealth to remain clients.
This requires a certain moral flexibility that some might find distasteful. When Vitellius’s supporters begin identifying Otho’s financial backers, the adviser provides documentation showing his client’s loan was commercial, not political, secured against property and bearing standard interest. That this documentation has been somewhat enhanced since April is not something anyone needs to discuss. The original records, which contained rather more effusive language about Otho’s prospects, have suffered an unfortunate filing accident.
When the same client expresses interest in making quiet contact with Vespasian’s camp—just in case—the adviser arranges an introduction through a shipping merchant in Alexandria who owes him a favour. The introduction is deniable. If Vitellius prevails, the merchant was simply discussing grain contracts. If Vespasian prevails, the client was an early supporter, and the adviser has the correspondence to prove it.
Is this dishonest? Perhaps. But honesty in the Year of Four Emperors is a luxury most people cannot afford, and the adviser’s job is not to impose moral standards on his clients. His job is to ensure they survive with their fortunes intact, regardless of which particular general happens to be wearing the purple when the calendar turns.
By December, Vespasian’s forces have taken Rome, Vitellius is dead, and the adviser is reviewing his client list with something approaching satisfaction. Not all survived, of course. One senator chose the wrong moment to make a public declaration of loyalty to Vitellius and is now explaining himself to Vespasian’s judicial appointees. Another simply disappeared during the street fighting in Rome—whether dead, fled, or in hiding, the adviser cannot say.
But most are intact. Their estates remain. Their reputations, carefully managed, suggest men who weathered a difficult year with appropriate discretion. None of them are marked as collaborators, none as resisters, none as anything other than prudent Romans who kept their heads down and their affairs in order.
The adviser permits himself a modest celebration: a better wine than usual, a dinner with his wife, an early night. Tomorrow there will be new challenges. Vespasian is consolidating power, which means new taxes, new favourites, new risks. The Jewish revolt has financial implications that will take years to fully understand. Several clients will need to renegotiate their positions in the new order.
But that is tomorrow’s problem. Tonight, the adviser reflects on what this year has taught him—or rather, confirmed. The clients who survived were not the wealthiest, nor the best connected, nor the most politically astute. They were the ones who understood that in times of genuine uncertainty, the goal is not to win but to remain in the game. They made small adjustments rather than dramatic gestures. They maintained relationships across factional lines without committing to any faction. They trusted their adviser to handle the details they would rather not know about.
There is no monument to the financial advisers of AD 69. No historian records their names or their methods. Tacitus, when he writes about this year, will focus on the emperors, the battles, the senatorial debates. The men who quietly preserved fortunes through the chaos are, at best, a footnote.
This is, the adviser suspects, exactly as it should be. Visibility in his profession is rarely an advantage. The best work is invisible: the client who never realises how close he came to ruin, the estate that passes intact to the next generation, the reputation that somehow remains unsullied despite associations that should have proved fatal.
Those who thrive in this work tend to share certain characteristics. They are patient. They are discreet. They understand that their own opinions about emperors and policies are irrelevant to the task at hand. They recognise that a client’s interests and a client’s stated wishes are not always the same thing, and they navigate that gap with care. They keep records, but they also know which records should not be kept. They have contacts in places that respectable men do not discuss.
And when January comes around again, and the political situation shifts, and the rules change once more—as they always do, eventually—they are not surprised. They have been preparing. Quietly. Invisibly. In ways that will never be recorded but will matter enormously to the families whose futures depend on their judgment.
Because in Rome, where emperors come and go but estates must endure, the wisest advisers are not merely prepared for change. They assume it.
They are, without exception, always future ready.
