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Galba laid the matter before his friends, some of whom thought it fit to wait, and see what movement there might be and what inclinations displayed at Rome for the revolution. But Titus Vinius, captain of his praetorian guard, spoke thus: "Galba, what means this inquiry? To question whether we shall continue faithful to Nero is, in itself, to cease to be faithful.
Galba now consulting whether he should go out, Vinius dissuaded him, but Celsus and Laco encouraged him by all means to do so, and sharply reprimanded Vinius.
After this, even reasonable acts were censured; as, for example, the treatment of the Gauls who had been in the conspiracy with Vindex. For people looked upon their abatement of tribute and admission to citizenship as a piece, not of clemency on the part of Galba, but of money-making on that of Vinius. And thus the mass of the people began to look with dislike upon the government.
Only he appointed himself consul, and Vinius his colleague, and it was the general expectation that he would declare his successor at the beginning of the new year. And the soldiers desired nothing more than that Otho should be the person. But the forces in Germany broke out into their mutiny whilst he was yet deliberating, and anticipated his design.
Nymphidius, therefore, called together the officers of the troops, and declared to them that Galba of himself was a good, well-meaning old man, but did not act by his own counsel, and was ill-guided by Vinius and Laco; and lest, before they were aware, they should engross the authority Tigellinus had with the troops, he proposed to them to send deputies from the camp, acquainting him that if he pleased to remove only these two from his counsel and presence, he would be much more welcome to all at his arrival.
But he who had made Nero what he became, and afterwards deserted and betrayed him whom he had so corrupted, was allowed to survive as an instance that Vinius could do anything, and an advertisement that those that had money to give him need despair of nothing.
And in more than one way the old man let it gradually appear that he had put himself under Vinius's disposal. Vinius was a person of an excessive covetousness, and not quite free from blame in respect to women.
She concealed her husband Titus Vinius, who was proscribed, at first in a chest at the house of a freedman named Philopoemen and so made it appear that he had been killed. Later she waited for a national festival, which a relative of hers was to direct, and through the influence of his sister Octavia brought it about that Caesar alone of the three entered the theatre.
The end and the beginning of the cask. And Vinius, seeing his patron old and decaying, made the most of what he considered to be at once the first of his fortune and the last of it. Thus the aged man suffered in two ways: first, through the evil deeds which Vinius did himself, and, next, by his preventing or bringing into disgrace those just acts which he himself designed.
So Galba consulting about a successor, Vinius introduced Otho, yet not even this gratis, but upon promise that he would marry his daughter, if Galba should make him his adopted son and successor to the empire.
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