4. Tacitus, Annals, 13.15, 14.11, 14.52-14.56, 14.63-14.64, 15.37, 15.62, 16.19 (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
| 13.15. Perturbed by her attitude, and faced with the approach of the day on which Britannicus completed his fourteenth year, Nero began to revolve, now his mother's proclivity to violence, now the character of his rival, â lately revealed by a test which, trivial as it was, had gained him wide sympathy. During the festivities of the Saturnalia, while his peers in age were varying their diversions by throwing dice for a king, the lot had fallen upon Nero. On the others he imposed various orders, not likely to put them to the blush: but, when he commanded Britannicus to rise, advance into the centre, and strike up a song â this, in the hope of turning into derision a boy who knew little of sober, much less of drunken, society â his victim firmly began a poem hinting at his expulsion from his father's house and throne. His bearing awoke a pity the more obvious that night and revelry had banished dissimulation. Nero, once aware of the feeling aroused, redoubled his hatred; and with Agrippina's threats becoming instant, as he had no grounds for a criminal charge against his brother and dared not openly order his execution, he tried secrecy and gave orders for poison to be prepared, his agent being Julius Pollio, tribune of a praetorian cohort, and responsible for the detention of the condemned poisoner Locusta, whose fame as a criminal stood high. For that no one about the person of Britannicus should regard either right or loyalty was a point long since provided for. The first dose the boy received from his own tutors, but his bowels were opened, and he passed the drug, which either lacked potency or contained a dilution to prevent immediate action. Nero, however, impatient of so much leisure in crime, threatened the tribune and ordered the execution of the poisoner, on the ground that, with their apprehensions of scandal and their preparations for defence, they were delaying his release from anxiety. They now promised that death should be as abrupt as if it were the summary work of steel; and a potion â its rapidity guaranteed by a private test of the ingredients â was concocted hard by the Caesar's bedroom. 14.11. He appended a list of charges drawn from the remoter past:â "She had hoped for a partnership in the empire; for the praetorian cohorts to swear allegiance to a woman; for the senate and people to submit to a like ignominy. Then, her ambition foiled, she had turned against the soldiers, the Fathers and the commons; had opposed the donative and the largess, and had worked for the ruin of eminent citizens. At what cost of labour had he succeeded in preventing her from forcing the door of the senate and delivering her answers to foreign nations!" He made an indirect attack on the Claudian period also, transferring every scandal of the reign to the account of his mother, whose removal he ascribed to the fortunate star of the nation. For even the wreck was narrated: though where was the folly which could believe it accidental, or that a ship-wrecked woman had despatched a solitary man with a weapon to cut his way through the guards and navies of the emperor? The object, therefore, of popular censure was no longer Nero â whose barbarity transcended all protest â but Seneca, who in composing such a plea had penned a confession. 14.52. The death of Burrus shook the position of Seneca: for not only had the cause of decency lost in power by the removal of one of its two champions, but Nero was inclining to worse counsellors. These brought a variety of charges to the assault on Seneca, "who was still augmenting that enormous wealth which had transcended the limits of a private fortune; who was perverting the affection of his countrymen to himself; who even in the charm of his pleasure-grounds and the splendour of his villas appeared bent on surpassing the sovereign. The honours of eloquence," so the count proceeded, "he arrogated to himself alone; and he was writing verse more frequently, now that Nero had developed an affection for the art. For of the emperor's amusements in general he was an openly captious critic, disparaging his powers when he drove his horses and deriding his notes when he sang! How long was nothing to be counted brilliant in Rome, unless it was believed the invention of Seneca? Beyond a doubt, Nero's boyhood was finished, and the full vigour of youth had arrived: let him discharge his pedagogue â he had a sufficiently distinguished staff of teachers in his own ancestors. 14.53. Seneca was aware of his maligners: they were revealed from the quarters where there was some little regard for honour, and the Caesar's avoidance of his intimacy was becoming marked. He therefore asked to have a time fixed for an interview; it was granted, and he began as follows:â "It is the fourteenth year, Caesar, since I was associated with your hopeful youth, the eighth that you have held the empire: in the time between, you have heaped upon me so much of honour and of wealth that all that is lacking to complete my happiness is discretion in its use. I shall appeal to great precedents, and I shall draw them not from my rank but from yours. Augustus, the grandfather of your grandfather, conceded to Marcus Agrippa the privacy of Mytilene, and to Gaius Maecenas, within the capital itself, something tantamount to retirement abroad. One had been the partner of his wars, the other had been harassed by more numerous labours at Rome, and each had received his reward â a magnificent reward, it is true, but proportioned to immense deserts. For myself, what incentive to your generosity have I been able to apply except some bookish acquirements, cultivated, I might say, in the shadows of the cloister? Acquirements to which fame has come because I am thought to have lent a helping hand in your own first youthful efforts â a wage that overpays the service! But you have invested me with measureless influence, with countless riches; so that often I put the question to myself:â 'Is it I, born in the station of a simple knight and a provincial, who am numbered with the magnates of the realm? Among these nobles, wearing their long-descended glories, has my novel name swum into ken? Where is that spirit which found contentment in mediocrity? Building these terraced gardens? â Pacing these suburban mansions? â Luxuriating in these broad acres, these world-wide investments?' â A single defence suggests itself â that I had not the right to obstruct your bounty. 14.54. "But we have both filled up the measure: you, of what a prince may give to his friend; and I, of what a friend may take from his prince. All beyond breeds envy! True, envy, like everything mortal, lies far beneath your greatness; but by me the burden is felt â to me a relief is necessary. As I should pray for support in warfare, or when wearied by the road, so in this journey of life, an old man and unequal to the lightest of cares, I ask for succour: for I can bear my riches no further. Order my estates to be administered by your procurators, to be embodied in your fortune. Not that by my own action I shall reduce myself to poverty: rather, I shall resign the glitter of wealth which dazzles me, and recall to the service of the mind those hours which are now set apart to the care of my gardens or my villas. You have vigour to spare; you have watched for years the methods by which supreme power is wielded: we, your older friends, may demand our rest. This, too, shall redound to your glory â that you raised to the highest places men who could also accept the lowly. 14.55. Nero's reply, in effect, was this:â "If I am able to meet your studied eloquence with an immediate answer, that is the first part of my debt to you, who have taught me how to express my thought not merely after premeditation but on the spur of the moment. Augustus, the grandfather of my grandfather, allowed Agrippa and Maecenas to rest after their labours, but had himself reached an age, the authority of which could justify whatever boon, and of whatever character, he had bestowed upon them. And even so he stripped neither of the rewards conferred by himself. It was in battle and jeopardy they had earned them, for such were the scenes in which the youth of Augustus moved; and, had my own days been spent in arms, your weapons and your hand would not have failed me; but you did what the actual case demanded, and fostered first my boyhood, then my youth, with reason, advice, and precept. And your gifts to me will be imperishable, so long as life may last; but mine to you â gardens, capital, and villas â are vulnerable to accident. They may appear many; but numbers of men, not comparable to you in character have held more. Shame forbids me to mention the freedmen who flaunt a wealth greater than yours! And hence I even blush that you, who have the first place in my love, do not as yet excel all in fortune. Or is it, by chance, the case that you deem either Seneca lower than Vitellius, who held his three consulates, or Nero lower than Claudius, and that the wealth which years of parsimony won for Volusius is incapable of being attained by my own generosity to you? 14.56. "On the contrary, not only is yours a vigorous age, adequate to affairs and to their rewards, but I myself am but entering the first stages of my sovereignty. Why not recall the uncertain steps of my youth, if here and there they slip, and even more zealously guide and support the manhood which owes its pride to you. Not your moderation, if you give back your riches; not your retirement, if you abandon your prince; by my avarice, and the terrors of my cruelty, will be upon all men's lips. And, however much your abnegation may be praised, it will still be unworthy of a sage to derive credit from an act which sullies the fair fame of a friend." He followed his words with an embrace and kisses â nature had fashioned him and use had trained him to veil his hatred under insidious caresses. Seneca â such is the end of all dialogues with an autocrat â expressed his gratitude: but he changed the established routine of his former power, banished the crowds from his antechambers, shunned his attendants, and appeared in the city with a rareness ascribed to his detention at home by adverse health or philosophic studies. 14.63. Nero, for his part, announced by edict that Octavia had seduced the prefect in the hope of gaining the co-operation of his squadron; that, conscious of her infidelities, she had procured abortion, â he failed to remember his recent charge of sterility! â and that these were facts ascertained by himself. He then confined her in the island of Pandateria. No woman in exile ever presented a more pitiful spectacle to the eye of the beholder. There were yet some who recollected the banishment of Agrippina by Tiberius; the more recent memory of Julia's expulsion by Claudius still dwelt in the minds of men. But to these the maturity of life had come; they had seen some little happiness, and could soften the cruelty of the present by recalling the brighter fortunes of the past. To Octavia, first of all, her day of marriage had been tantamount to a day of burial, entering as she did a house where mourning alone awaited her â where her father was snatched away by poison, to be followed at once by her brother. Then had come the maid, more potent than her mistress, and Poppaea turning bride only to destroy a wife; last of all, an accusation more bitter than any doom. 14.64. And so this girl, in the twentieth year of her age, surrounded by centurions and soldiers, cut off already from life by foreknowledge of her fate, still lacked the peace of death. There followed an interval of a few days; then she was ordered to die â though she protested she was husbandless now, a sister and nothing more, evoking the Germanici whose blood they shared, and, in the last resort, the name of Agrippina, in whose lifetime she had supported a wifehood, unhappy enough but still not fatal. She was tied fast with cords, and the veins were opened in each limb: then, as the blood, arrested by terror, ebbed too slowly, she was suffocated in the bath heated to an extreme temperature. As a further and more hideous cruelty, the head was amputated and carried to Rome, where it was viewed by Poppaea. For all these things offerings were decreed to the temples â how often must those words be said? Let all who make their acquaintance with the history of that period in my narrative or that of others take so much for granted: as often as the emperor ordered an exile or a murder, so often was a thanksgiving addressed to Heaven; and what formerly betokened prosperity was now a symbol of public calamity. Nevertheless, where a senatorial decree achieved a novelty in adulation or a last word in self-abasement, I shall not pass it by in silence. 15.37. He himself, to create the impression that no place gave him equal pleasure with Rome, began to serve banquets in the public places and to treat the entire city as his palace. In point of extravagance and notoriety, the most celebrated of the feasts was that arranged by Tigellinus; which I shall describe as a type, instead of narrating time and again the monotonous tale of prodigality. He constructed, then, a raft on the Pool of Agrippa, and superimposed a banquet, to be set in motion by other craft acting as tugs. The vessels were gay with gold and ivory, and the oarsmen were catamites marshalled according to their ages and their libidinous attainments. He had collected birds and wild beasts from the ends of the earth, and marine animals from the ocean itself. On the quays of the lake stood brothels, filled with women of high rank; and, opposite, naked harlots met the view. First came obscene gestures and dances; then, as darkness advanced, the whole of the neighbouring grove, together with the dwelling-houses around, began to echo with song and to glitter with lights. Nero himself, defiled by every natural and unnatural lust had left no abomination in reserve with which to crown his vicious existence; except that, a few days later, he became, with the full rites of legitimate marriage, the wife of one of that herd of degenerates, who bore the name of Pythagoras. The veil was drawn over the imperial head, witnesses were despatched to the scene; the dowry, the couch of wedded love, the nuptial torches, were there: everything, in fine, which night enshrouds even if a woman is the bride, was left open to the view. 15.62. Seneca, nothing daunted, asked for the tablets containing his will. The centurion refusing, he turned to his friends, and called them to witness that "as he was prevented from showing his gratitude for their services, he left them his sole but fairest possession â the image of his life. If they bore it in mind, they would reap the reward of their loyal friendship in the credit accorded to virtuous accomplishments." At the same time, he recalled them from tears to fortitude, sometimes conversationally, sometimes in sterner, almost coercive tones. "Where," he asked, "were the maxims of your philosophy? Where that reasoned attitude towards impending evils which they had studied through so many years? For to whom had Nero's cruelty been unknown? Nor was anything left him, after the killing of his mother and his brother, but to add the murder of his guardian and preceptor. 16.19. In those days, as it chanced, the Caesar had migrated to Campania; and Petronius, after proceeding as far as Cumae, was being there detained in custody. He declined to tolerate further the delays of fear or hope; yet still did not hurry to take his life, but caused his already severed arteries to be bound up to meet his whim, then opened them once more, and began to converse with his friends, in no grave strain and with no view to the fame of a stout-hearted ending. He listened to them as they rehearsed, not discourses upon the immortality of the soul or the doctrines of philosophy, but light songs and frivolous verses. Some of his slaves tasted of his bounty, a few of the lash. He took his place at dinner, and drowsed a little, so that death, if compulsory, should at least resemble nature. Not even in his will did he follow the routine of suicide by flattering Nero or Tigellinus or another of the mighty, but â prefixing the names of the various catamites and women â detailed the imperial debauches and the novel features of each act of lust, and sent the document under seal to Nero. His signet-ring he broke, lest it should render dangerous service later. |
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