Vitellia gens
Roman gens
The gens Vitellia was a family of ancient Rome, which rose from obscurity in imperial times, and briefly held the Empire itself in AD 69. The first of this gens to obtain the consulship was Aulus Vitellius, uncle of the emperor Vitellius, in AD 32.
Origin
Suetonius relates two conflicting accounts of the Vitellii, which he ascribes to the emperor's flatterers and his detractors, respectively. According to the first account, the family was descended from Faunus, King of the Aborigines, and Vitellia, who ruled over Latium in the distant past, and were later regarded as two of the indigenous deities. The Vitellii were Sabines, who migrated to Rome under the monarchy, and were enrolled among the patricians. One family of the Vitellii settled at Nuceria Apulorum (Luceria) or possibly at Nuceria Alfaterna in the time of the Samnite Wars, and it was from this family that the emperor Vitellius was sprung.
A less flattering story reports that the emperor's family was descended from a freedman, a cobbler according to Cassius Severus. His son was a delator, who earned his fortune selling confiscated property, and married a wanton woman, the daughter of a baker named Antiochus. With the help of these ill-gotten gains, his grandson became an eques.
Suetonius offers no opinion on which of these accounts is true, other than to say that Publius Vitellius of Nuceria, the emperor's grandfather, was indeed an eques, that he was entrusted with administering the property of Augustus, and that he left four sons, who all made names for themselves in the Roman aristocracy.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vitellia gens” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.