the time of Pontius Pilate. It is he who figures in Gustave Flaubert's novella Hérodias (1877) and in Hérodiade, the 1881 opera based on it by Jules Massenet. The same character also makes an appearance in the 1930 novel by Iwan Naschiwin (1874-1940), A Certain Jesus: the Gospel According to Thomas : an Historical Novel of the First Century. The son of Lucius, Aulus Vitellius, played a minor part in Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel Quo Vadis, set at the end of Nero's reign. Although he survived as a character in the 1900 Broadway production, and in the Italian films based on it of 1913 and 1924, he disappeared from later adaptations. But some later novels deal with incidents in the military career of this Vitellius. In Simon Scarrow's Eagles of the Empire series, he is introduced as a rival to Vespasian during the Roman invasion of Britain. And in later chapters of Henry Venmore-Rowland's novel The Last Caesar (2012) he figures as the newly appointed Governor of Lower Germania and something of a glutton. Naturally Vitellius is a character in the rash of recent novels dealing with the Year of the Four Emperors. He is in the background in Kate Quinn's novel Daughters of Rome (2011), and shares a section of Steven Saylor's Empire: The Novel of Imperial Rome (2010). His fall features in M C Scott's Rome, The Art of War (2013), and he also appears in James Mace's two-part series, The Year of the Four Emperors. References Bibliography Primary sources Cassius Dio, Roman History, fragments of Book 64 (English translation by Earnest Cary on LacusCurtius). Plutarch, Life of Galba (English translation by A.H. Clough on Wikisource). Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, Vitellius (English translation by John Carew Rolfe on Wikisource). Tacitus, Annales (Tacitus) (English translation by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (1876) on Wikisource). Secondary sources Biography at Livius Biography at De Imperatoribus Romanis C. H. V. Sutherland & R. A. G. Carson, The Roman Imperial Coinage, volume I, revised edition, London, Spink, 1984 [originally published in 1923]. 15 births 69 deaths 1st-century executions 1st-century murdered monarchs 1st-century Roman emperors Executed Roman emperors Filicides Imperial Roman consuls People executed by the Roman Empire People of the Year of the Four Emperors Roman governors of Africa Roman governors of Germania Inferior Vitellii