Plutarch was a Greek biographer writing around AD 100. Parallel Lives pairs famous Greeks with Romans to show character, virtue, and vice. This short life is Marcus Salvius Otho, a Roman who became emperor in Italy in AD 69, after Nero and then Galba.

Otho had shared Nero’s luxury and was Galba’s most disappointed friend when the succession went elsewhere. Twelve days after Galba’s murder he was emperor. The Praetorians, the emperor’s guard in Rome, liked him; Vitellius’s German legions from the Rhine did not. Otho marched north and lost at Bedriacum in northern Italy. The next morning he killed himself so the civil war might stop with one death. It did not. Vitellius took power, and that year still had more emperors ahead.