Vitellius, compelled by threatening swords, first to raise his face and offer it to insulting blows, then to behold his own statues falling around him, and more than once to look at the Rostra and the spot where Galba was slain, was then driven along till they reached the Gemoniae, the place where the corpse of Flavius Fabinus had lain. One speech was heard from him showing a spirit not utterly degraded, when to the insults of a tribune he answered: “Yet I was your emperor.” Then he fell under a shower of blows, and the mob reviled the dead man with the same heartlessness with which they had flattered him when he was alive.

From Tacitus’ Annals and Histories, New York: Everyman’s Library, 2009 (first published in 1908), pp. 550-551.