1. Tacitus, Annals, 2.32, 16.16.2, 16.21.1-16.21.2, 16.30.2 (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
Tagged with subjects: • Barea Soranus • Soranus, Barea, death • Soranus, Quintus Marcius Barea
Found in books: Ando and Ruepke (2006), Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome, 61; Davies (2004), Rome's Religious History: Livy, Tacitus and Ammianus on their Gods, 201; Shannon-Henderson (2019), Power Play in Latin Love Elegy and its Multiple Forms of Continuity in Ovid’s , 340, 345; Talbert (1984), The Senate of Imperial Rome, 329
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2.32 Bona inter accusatores dividuntur, et praeturae extra ordinem datae iis qui senatorii ordinis erant. tunc Cotta Messalinus, ne imago Libonis exequias posterorum comitaretur, censuit, Cn. Lentulus, ne quis Scribonius cognomentum Drusi adsumeret. supplicationum dies Pomponii Flacci sententia constituti, dona Iovi, Marti, Concordiae, utque iduum Septembrium dies, quo se Libo interfecerat, dies festus haberetur, L. Piso et Gallus Asinius et Papius Mutilus et L. Apronius decrevere; quorum auctoritates adulationesque rettuli ut sciretur vetus id in re publica malum. facta et de mathematicis magisque Italia pellendis senatus consulta; quorum e numero L. Pituanius saxo deiectus est, in P. Marcium consules extra portam Esquilinam, cum classicum canere iussissent, more prisco advertere.' ' None | sup>
2.32 \xa0His estate was parcelled out among the accusers, and extraordinary praetorships were conferred on those of senatorial status. Cotta Messalinus then moved that the effigy of Libo should not accompany the funeral processions of his descendants; Gnaeus Lentulus, that no member of the Scribonian house should adopt the surname of Drusus. Days of public thanksgiving were fixed at the instance of Pomponius Flaccus. Lucius Piso, Asinius Gallus, Papius Mutilus, and Lucius Apronius procured a decree that votive offerings should be made to Jupiter, Mars, and Concord; and that the thirteenth of September, the anniversary of Libo's suicide, should rank as a festival. This union of sounding names and sycophancy I\xa0have recorded as showing how long that evil has been rooted in the State.\xa0â\x80\x94 Other resolutions of the senate ordered the expulsion of the astrologers and magic-mongers from Italy. One of their number, Lucius Pituanius, was flung from the Rock; another â\x80\x94 Publius Marcius â\x80\x94 was executed by the consuls outside the Esquiline Gate according to ancient usage and at sound of trumpet. <" 16.16.2 \xa0Even had\xa0I been narrating campaigns abroad and lives laid down for the commonwealth, and narrating them with the same uniformity of incident, I\xa0should myself have lost appetite for the task, and I\xa0should expect the tedium of others, repelled by the tale of Roman deaths, honourable perhaps, but tragic and continuous. As it is, this slave-like patience and the profusion of blood wasted at home weary the mind and oppress it with melancholy. The one concession I\xa0would ask from those who shall study these records is that they would permit me not to hate the men who died with so little spirit! It was the anger of Heaven against the Roman realm â\x80\x94 an anger which you cannot, as in the case of beaten armies or captured towns, mention once and for all and proceed upon your way. Let us make this concession to the memory of the nobly born: that, as in the last rites they are distinguished from the vulgar dead, so, when history records their end, each shall receive and keep his special mention. <
16.21.1 \xa0After the slaughter of so many of the noble, Nero in the end conceived the ambition to extirpate virtue herself by killing Thrasea Paetus and Barea Soranus. To both he was hostile from of old, and against Thrasea there were additional motives; for he had walked out of the senate, as I\xa0have mentioned, during the discussion on Agrippina, and at the festival of the Juvenalia his services had not been conspicuous â\x80\x94 a\xa0grievance which went the deeper that in Patavium, his native place, the same Thrasea had sung in tragic costume at the .\xa0.\xa0. Games instituted by the Trojan Antenor. Again, on the day when sentence of death was all but passed on the praetor Antistius for his lampoons on Nero, he proposed, and carried, a milder penalty; and, after deliberately absenting himself from the vote of divine honours to Poppaea, he had not assisted at her funeral. These memories were kept from fading by Cossutianus Capito. For, apart from his character with its sharp trend to crime, he was embittered against Thrasea, whose influence, exerted in support of the Cilician envoys prosecuting Capito for extortion, had cost him the verdict. 16.21.2 \xa0After the slaughter of so many of the noble, Nero in the end conceived the ambition to extirpate virtue herself by killing Thrasea Paetus and Barea Soranus. To both he was hostile from of old, and against Thrasea there were additional motives; for he had walked out of the senate, as I\xa0have mentioned, during the discussion on Agrippina, and at the festival of the Juvenalia his services had not been conspicuous â\x80\x94 a\xa0grievance which went the deeper that in Patavium, his native place, the same Thrasea had sung in tragic costume at the .\xa0.\xa0. Games instituted by the Trojan Antenor. Again, on the day when sentence of death was all but passed on the praetor Antistius for his lampoons on Nero, he proposed, and carried, a milder penalty; and, after deliberately absenting himself from the vote of divine honours to Poppaea, he had not assisted at her funeral. These memories were kept from fading by Cossutianus Capito. For, apart from his character with its sharp trend to crime, he was embittered against Thrasea, whose influence, exerted in support of the Cilician envoys prosecuting Capito for extortion, had cost him the verdict. <
16.30.2 \xa0In the meantime, Ostorius Sabinus, the accuser of Soranus, entered and began his speech, dwelling upon the friendship of the defendant with Rubellius Plautus, and upon his governorship of Asia, "which he had treated rather as a position conveniently adapted to his own distinction than with a view to the public interest; as he had shown by fostering the seditious tendencies of the cities." This was an old story: what was new, and used for implicating the daughter of Soranus in her father\'s danger, was a charge that she had distributed money to magicians. That had, in fact, happened, owing to the filial piety of Servilia (for so the girl was called), who, influenced by love for her father and at the same time by the imprudence of her years, had consulted them, though on no other point than the safety of her family and the chances that Nero would prove placable and the trial by the senate produce no tragic result. She was, therefore, summoned before the senate and at opposite ends of the consular tribunal stood an aged parent and, facing him, his daughter, who had not yet reached her twentieth year; condemned to widowhood and loneliness by the recent exile of her husband Annius Pollio, and not even lifting her eyes to her father, whose dangers she seemed to have aggravated. <'" None |
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