From this loathsome and stupid dream of Imperial power Vitellius was at length awakened by the echoes of rebellion in the provinces. After a few futile executions, and several relapses into his besetting gluttony, he was forced to set out for the north. He quickly returned, however, and wandered about Rome in hysterical impotence, while the followers of Vespasian closed upon the city. Civil war had broken out, and the Romans gazed with horror on the sacred Capitol besieged by the German troops and bursting into flames. At last Vitellius came out with Fundana and her child, in mourning dress, and announced that he would resign. The consul refused his sword, and the mournful procession directed its steps towards his brother’s house. He was persuaded to return to the palace, but the Vespasianists captured Rome, and he was taken to Fundana’s house on the Aventine. From this he somehow wandered back to the palace. “The awful silence terrified him; he tried the closed doors, and shuddered at the empty chambers,” says Tacitus. Dazed and incapable of flight, he hid in the sordid room where the dogs were kept. Here the soldiers found him, torn and bleeding, and forced him to walk the streets, while they kept his head erect with the point of a sword, and the people flung filth and epithets at him. They then inflicted on him a slow and painful death, and flung his remains in the Tiber. Fundana was spared, and her daughter honourably given in marriage, by his magnanimous successor. From the brief and unwelcome splendour of the “golden house” she passed into private life, and lived only to bemoan the cruel fate that had lifted her husband to the intoxicating height of the Roman throne. There was no Empress in the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, but a word may be said of the two remarkable women who shared their power to some extent. Vespasian, whose sober and solid administration it would be pleasant to contrast with the orgiastic reigns of his predecessors, was a rough soldier, of humble extraction and homely ways. He had, in the time of Caligula, married the mistress of a knight, Flavia Domitilla, who remains little more than a name in the chronicles. He had won distinction under Narcissus, but the triumph of Agrippina drove him and Domitilla into exile. Nero employed him to crush the rebellion in Judæa, and it was during this campaign that his wife died, leaving him with her two sons--his successors--Titus and Domitian. He was, therefore, a widower when the Eastern troops made him Emperor, but he took into his palace, and treated as Empress, an emancipated slave of the name of Cænis.