But the first day’s work savoured more of impatience than of a 21 veteran army’s methods.  The men ventured under the walls without cover or precaution, drunk and overfed.  Meanwhile the amphitheatre, a fine building outside the walls, was burnt down.  It was set on fire either by the attacking force hurling torches and heated shot and fire-brands, or by the besieged in returning their fire.  The common people of the town harboured a suspicion that fuel for the fire had been surreptitiously introduced from one of the neighbouring colonies, and that the motive was jealousy, since no building in Italy could hold so many people.  However it happened, they thought little of it, while worse disasters threatened:  safety assured, they bewailed it as the worst calamity they could have suffered.  To return, however, to Caecina:  he was repulsed with heavy losses, and the night was spent in preparations.  The Vitellians provided mantlets, fascines, and penthouses,[258] to protect the assailants while undermining the walls:  the Othonians procured stakes and huge masses of stone or lead or brass, to break through the enemy’s formation and crush them to pieces.  Both parties were actuated by feelings of pride and ambition.  Various encouragements were used, one side praising the strength of the legions and the German army, the other the reputation of the Guards and the City Garrison.  The Vitellians decried their enemy as lazy effeminates demoralized by the circus and the theatre:  to which they replied that the Vitellians were a pack of foreigners and barbarians.  Meanwhile, Otho and Vitellius were held up to praise or blame, insult providing the more fruitful stimulus.

Hardly had day dawned before the walls of Placentia bristled with 22 defenders, and the fields glittered with the soldiers’ armour.  The Vitellian legions[259] advancing in close order with their auxiliaries in scattered bands assailed the higher portions of the walls with stones and arrows:  where the walls were in disrepair or crumbling from age they came close up to them.  The Othonians above, poising and aiming their weapons with surer effect, rained them down on the Germans, who came rashly charging under the walls with the wild songs and scanty dress of their country, brandishing their shields over their heads.  Meanwhile, the legionaries under cover of their mantlets and fascines set to work to undermine the walls, build up a mound, and assail the gates, while Otho’s Guards rolled on to them with terrific crashes huge millstones, which they had arranged for this purpose along the walls.  Of those beneath, some were crushed by the stones; others, wounded by darts, were left mangled and bleeding to death.  Panic redoubled the slaughter, and the rain of missiles came all the fiercer from the walls.  At last they sacrificed the honour of their party and beat a retreat.  Caecina, ashamed of his rash attempt at assault, was afraid of looking ridiculous and useless if he sat still in the same camp.  So he crossed the Po and made for Cremona.  As he was retiring, Turullius Cerialis with a large force of marines, and Julius Briganticus[260] with a few cavalry, came over to his side.  The latter, a Batavian born, had held a cavalry command:  the former was a senior centurion, who was known to Caecina, as he had served in that capacity in Germany.