, after he became emperor, unless the fortunes of the family
varied before. There is extant a memoir addressed by Quintus Eulogius to
Quintus Vitellius, quaestor to the Divine Augustus, in which it is said,
that the Vitellii were descended from Faunus, king of the aborigines, and
Vitellia [689], who was worshipped in many places as a goddess, and that
they reigned formerly over the whole of Latium: that all who were left of
the family removed out of the country of the Sabines to Rome, and were
enrolled among the patricians: that some monuments of the family
continued a long time; as the Vitellian Way, reaching from the Janiculum
to the sea, and likewise a colony of that name, which, at a very remote
period of time, they desired leave from the government to defend against
the Aequicolae [690], with a force raised by their own family only: also
that, in the time of the war with the Samnites, some of the Vitellii who
went with the troops levied for the security of Apulia, settled at
Nuceria [691], and their descendants, a long time afterwards, returned
again to Rome, and were admitted (428) into the patrician order. On the
other hand, the generality of writers say that the founder of the family
was a freedman. Cassius Severus [692] and some others relate that he was
likewise a cobbler, whose son having made a considerable fortune by
agencies and dealings in confiscated property, begot, by a common
strumpet, daughter of one Antiochus, a baker, a child, who afterwards
became a Roman knight. Of these different accounts the reader is left to
take his choice.

II. It is certain, however, that Publius Vitellius, of Nuceria, whether
of an ancient family, or of low extraction, was a Roman knight, and a
procurator to Augustus. He left behind him four sons, all men of very
high station, who had the same cognomen, but the different praenomina of
Aulus, Quintus, Publius, and Lucius. Aulus died in the enjoyment of the
consulship [693], which office he bore jointly with Domitius, the father
of Nero Caesar. He was elegant to excess in his manner of living, and
notorious for the vast expense of his entertainments. Quintus was
deprived of his rank of senator, when, upon a motion made by Tiberius, a
resolution passed to purge the senate of those who were in any respect
not duly qualified for that honour. Publius, an intimate friend and
companion of Germanicus, prosecuted his enemy and murderer, Cneius Piso,
and procured sentence ag