Like his predecessor, Otho, Vitellius attempted to rally public support to his cause by honoring and imitating Nero who remained popular in the empire.

At the end of 68, Galba, to the general astonishment, selected him to command the army of Germania Inferior, and here Vitellius made himself popular with his subalterns and with the soldiers by outrageous prodigality and excessive good nature, which soon proved fatal to order and discipline.

In fact, he was never acknowledged as emperor by the entire Roman world, though at Rome the Senate accepted him and decreed to him the imperial honours on 19 April.

[13] He advanced into Italy at the head of a licentious and rough soldiery, and Rome became the scene of riot and massacre, gladiatorial shows and extravagant feasting.

Suetonius is particularly responsible for giving Vitellius the reputation of being an obese glutton, using emetics so as to be able to indulge in banquets four times a day, and often having himself invited over to a different noble's house for each one.

In this dish there were tossed up together the livers of pike, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, with the tongues of flamingos, and the entrails of lampreys, which had been brought in ships of war as far as from Parthia and the Spanish Straits.

[19] A noted gourmet of that time, Marcus Gavius Apicius, named after the emperor a less exotic dish of peas or broad beans mashed with sweet and sour ingredients.

[21]In July 69, Vitellius learned that the armies of the eastern provinces had proclaimed a rival emperor: their commander, Titus Flavius Vespasianus.

The terms of abdication had actually been agreed upon with Marcus Antonius Primus, the commander of the sixth legion serving in Pannonia and one of Vespasian's chief supporters.

However, as he was on his way to deposit the insignia of empire in the Temple of Concord, the Praetorian Guard refused to allow him to carry out the agreement, and forced him to return to the palace.

[7] On the entrance of Vespasian's troops into Rome, Vitellius' supporters (mostly civilians) organized heavy resistance, resulting in a brutal battle.

Entrenched on the city's buildings, they threw stones, javelins, and tiles on Vespasian's soldiers who consequently suffered heavy casualties in the urban fighting.

[23] Vitellius was eventually dragged out of a hiding-place (according to Tacitus a door-keeper's lodge), driven to the fatal Gemonian stairs, and there struck down by Vespasian's supporters.

His body was thrown into the Tiber according to Suetonius; Cassius Dio's account is that Vitellius was beheaded and his head paraded around Rome, and his wife attended to his burial.

Suetonius, in writing of Vitellius' execution, offers his physical description: "...He was in fact abnormally tall, with a face usually flushed from hard drinking, a huge belly, and one thigh crippled from being struck once by a four-horse chariot, when he was in attendance on Gaius as he was driving..."[24] Years before there was a prediction that he would fall into the power of a man from Gaul.

[29] Busts from the time of Vitellius, particularly the one in the Capitoline Museums,[32] represent him as broad-faced with several double chins, and it is this type which informs paintings of the emperor from the Renaissance on.

[34] The Grimani portrait bust also served as the model for one by Giovanni Battista and Nicola Bonanome (ca.1565), one of a series of The Twelve Caesars that were once fashionable in large households.

The stairs are covered with the rubbish with which the deposed emperor has been pelted and, as Suetonius describes the scene, a long blade is held at his throat so that he cannot look down.

[39] Others paintings show the moment of his execution, of which there are examples by fr:Charles-Gustave Housez,[40] Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry (1847),[41] Jules-Eugène Lenepveu (1847),[42] and an engraving by Edouard Vimont (1876–1930).

[43] Much as the appearance of Vitellius prefigured approaching doom in earlier centuries, Thomas Couture pictures him in shadow to the left of centre in the painting The Romans in their Decadence (1847).

[46] The son of Lucius, Aulus Vitellius, played a minor part in Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel Quo Vadis, set at the end of Nero's reign.

[50] His fall features in M C Scott's Rome, The Art of War (2013),[51] and he also appears in James Mace's two-part series, The Year of the Four Emperors.