Otho

In her notes to the Poems of 1817 Mary S. wrote: ‘He had this year also projected a poem on the subject of Otho, inspired by the pages of Tacitus’ (1839 iii 70). However it is not impossible that the ‘Otho’ draft, which interrupts that of R&H between lines 239 and 240, was written in 1816, as R&H 40–73 (see headnote) and ‘Mont Blanc’ were. But it is more likely that the writing of R&H was resumed from line 73 in September 1817 after the completion of L&C, and S. had to skip the draft of ‘Otho’, which could have been abandoned just as serious work began on L&C. The stanzas appear in the draft in the order 4, 5,1 (with title), 2, 3, 6, 7; if the order assumed below is correct, S. must have turned back beyond stanza 1 of ‘Otho’ on f. 25 in order to add stanzas 4 and 5 on f. 24, and R&H 239–40 could not have then existed. ‘Otho’ then probably 567dates from early summer 1817 (there is a detailed sketch of a may-fly on f. 26). Otho’s story is in Tacitus, Histories I xxi–II 1, Suetonius, On the Lives of the Caesars VII, and Plutarch’s Lives. After Nero’s assassination in a.d. 68, his successor Servius Galba was quickly eliminated on the orders of Marcus Otho, but the latter’s rule was contested by Aulus Vitellius, and the Roman people lamented ‘that two men, the worst in the world for their shamelessness, indolence, and profligacy, had been apparently chosen by fate to ruin the empire’ (Tacitus, Hist. 11). But after many atrocities and a military setback at the Battle of Bedriacum, although Otho could still have triumphed in the end, he stabbed himself in order to avoid any more civil bloodshed, declaring: ‘Others may cling to the imperial power longer, no one shall relinquish it more bravely. Do you want me to allow so much Roman youth, such fine armies, to be struck down and torn from the community?’ (Hist. II xlvii). S. saw a parallel here with his own oppressive times (lines 21–4), and a faint hope that England’s rulers might themselves find the magnanimity to surrender power in order to spare their people the horrors of revolution. The ink draft is very difficult, except for the two last stanzas, and some readings are doubtful. All five pages of draft are cancelled by vertical strokes.