Ahhay and welcome to Emperor of Rome, a podcast about the rulers of the ancient Roman Empire.

I'm your host Matt Smith and with me as always is Dr.

Rianna Evans, a lecturer in ancient Mediterranean studies at Latrobe University.

This is episode X, X, I, X, Otho.

The civil war continues and with the death of Galba, his one-time supporter Otho, now becomes

Emperor.

He doesn't have a long time to establish himself as Emperor, but

considering his previously close relationship to Nero, many believe that he would

continue in those kind of footsteps. But when you're the emperor for 95 days it's really hard to say

what you could have been. Here's Rianin Evans.

Otho's the second in the year of many emperors at Rome after Nero dies the civil war and we get four

emperors in one year. So we've already had Galba. Now we come to the second one, Otho,

who's very young when he becomes emperor in 69 because he was born in 32 CE.

So that means that he's only 37. Not as young as Nero, but still relatively young and the youngest of the four who become

Emperor that year. And he's from a reasonably well connected family but not historically an aristocratic one, which is actually quite

typical of this period that you can make it through if you're in the military and especially if you've got

connections with the imperial family of some sort so you don't have to be from the

highest most patrician family in Rome to make it to be Emperor.

His family was rather recently promoted, weren't they?

It was his grandfather who was promoted to a question by Augustus.

Yes, and that's a signal of the kind of social change that we're seeing at Rome and also that if you're in some way close to the imperial family, then you can make it to prominence. You're likely to get high status

roles you'd like to be appointed as a general or maybe even get to be

...