7. Tacitus, Annals, 1.13, 1.46, 4.6, 5.4, 13.11, 14.12.1, 14.57, 15.74, 15.74.3, 16.6.2, 16.21, 16.21.2, 16.22.3, 16.23-16.35 (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
| 1.13. Lucius Arruntius, who followed in a vein not much unlike that of Gallus, gave equal offence, although Tiberius had no standing animosity against him: he was, however, rich, enterprising, greatly gifted, correspondingly popular, and so suspect. For Augustus, in his last conversations, when discussing possible holders of the principate â those who were competent and disinclined, who were inadequate and willing, or who were at once able and desirous â had described Manius Lepidus as capable but disdainful, Asinius Gallus as eager and unfit, Lucius Arruntius as not undeserving and bold enough to venture, should the opportunity arise. The first two names are not disputed; in some versions Arruntius is replaced by Gnaeus Piso: all concerned, apart from Lepidus, were soon entrapped on one charge or another, promoted by Tiberius. Quintus Haterius and Mamercus Scaurus also jarred that suspicious breast â Haterius, by the sentence, "How long, Caesar, will you permit the state to lack a head?" and Scaurus, by remarking that, as he had not used his tribunician power to veto the motion of the consuls, there was room for hope that the prayers of the senate would not be in vain. Haterius he favoured with an immediate invective: against Scaurus his anger was less placable, and he passed him over in silence. Wearied at last by the universal outcry and by individual appeals, he gradually gave ground, up to the point, not of acknowledging that he assumed the sovereignty, but of ceasing to refuse and to be entreated. Haterius, it is well known, on entering the palace to make his excuses, found Tiberius walking, threw himself down at his knees, and was all but dispatched by the guards, because the prince, either from accident or through being hampered by the suppliant's hands, had fallen flat on his face. The danger of a great citizen failed, however, to soften him, until Haterius appealed to Augusta, and was saved by the urgency of her prayers. 1.46. Before the upshot of events in Illyricum was known at Rome, word came that the German legions had broken out. The panic-stricken capital turned on Tiberius:â "While with his hypocritical hesitation he was befooling the senate and commons, two powerless and unarmed bodies, meantime the troops were rising and could not be checked by the unripe authority of a pair of boys. He ought to have gone in person and confronted the rebels with the majesty of the empire: they would have yielded at sight of a prince, old in experience, and supreme at once to punish or reward. Could Augustus, in his declining years, make so many excursions into the Germanies? and was Tiberius, in the prime of life, to sit idle in the senate, cavilling at the Conscript Fathers' words? Ample provision had been made for the servitude of Rome: it was time to administer some sedative to the passions of the soldiers, and so reconcile them to peace. 4.6. It will be opportune, I take it, as this year brought the opening stages of deterioration in the principate of Tiberius, to review in addition the other departments of state and the methods by which they were administered up to that period. First, then, public affairs â together with private affairs of exceptional moment â were treated in the senate, and discussion was free to the leading members, their lapses into subserviency being checked by the sovereign himself. In conferring offices, he took into view the nobility of a candidate's ancestry, the distinction of his military service, or the brilliance of his civil attainments, and left it sufficiently clear that no better choice had been available. The consulate had its old prestige; so had the praetorship: the powers even of the minor magistracies were exercised; and the laws, apart from the process in cases of treason, were in proper force. On the other hand, the corn-tribute, the monies from indirect taxation, and other public revenues, were handled by companies of Roman knights. The imperial property was entrusted by Caesar to men of tested merit, at times to a personal stranger on the strength of his reputation; and his agents, once installed, were retained quite indefinitely, many growing grey in the service originally entered. The populace, it is true, was harassed by exorbitant food-prices, but in that point no blame attached to the emperor: he spared, indeed, neither expense nor pains in order to neutralize the effects of unfruitful soils or boisterous seas. He saw to it that the provinces were not disturbed by fresh impositions and that the incidence of the old was not aggravated by magisterial avarice or cruelty: corporal punishment and the forfeiture of estates were not in vogue. His demesnes in Italy were few, his establishment of slaves unassuming, his household limited to a small number of freedmen; and, in the event of a dispute between himself and a private citizen, the decision rested with a court of justice. 5.4. There was in the senate a certain Julius Rusticus, chosen by the Caesar to compile the official journal of its proceedings, and therefore credited with some insight into his thoughts. Under some fatal impulse â for he had never before given an indication of courage â or possibly through a misapplied acuteness which made him blind to dangers imminent and terrified of dangers uncertain, Rusticus insinuated himself among the doubters and warned the consuls not to introduce the question â "A touch," he insisted, "could turn the scale in the gravest of matters: it was possible that some day the extinction of the house of Germanicus might move the old man's penitence." At the same time, the people, carrying effigies of Agrippina and Nero, surrounded the curia, and, cheering for the Caesar, clamoured that the letter was spurious and that it was contrary to the Emperor's wish that destruction was plotted against his house. On that day, therefore, no tragedy was perpetrated. There were circulated, also, under consular names, fictitious attacks upon Sejanus: for authors in plenty exercised their capricious imagination with all the petulance of anonymity. The result was to fan his anger and to supply him with the material for fresh charges:â "The senate had spurned the sorrow of its emperor, the people had forsworn its allegiance. Already disloyal harangues, disloyal decrees of the Fathers, were listened to and perused: what remained but to take the sword and in the persons whose effigies they had followed as their ensigns to choose their generals and their princes? 13.11. In the consulate of Claudius Nero and Lucius Antistius, while the magistrates were swearing allegiance to the imperial enactments, the prince withheld his colleague Antistius from swearing to his own: a measure which the senate applauded warmly, in the hope that his youthful mind, elated by the fame attaching even to small things, would proceed forthwith to greater. There followed, in fact, a display of leniency towards Plautius Lateranus, degraded from his rank for adultery with Messalina, but now restored to the senate by the emperor, who pledged himself to clemency in a series of speeches, which Seneca, either to attest the exalted qualities of his teaching or to advertise his ingenuity, kept presenting to the public by the lips of the sovereign. 14.12.1. However, with a notable spirit of emulation among the magnates, decrees were drawn up: thanksgivings were to be held at all appropriate shrines; the festival of Minerva, on which the conspiracy had been brought to light, was to be celebrated with annual games; a golden statue of the goddess, with an effigy of the emperor by her side, was to be erected in the curia, and Agrippina's birthday included among the inauspicious dates. Earlier sycophancies Thrasea Paetus had usually allowed to pass, either in silence or with a curt assent: this time he walked out of the senate, creating a source of danger for himself, but implanting no germ of independence in his colleagues. Portents, also, frequent and futile made their appearance: a woman gave birth to a serpent, another was killed by a thunderbolt in the embraces of her husband; the sun, again, was suddenly obscured, and the fourteen regions of the capital were struck by lightning â events which so little marked the concern of the gods that Nero continued for years to come his empire and his crimes. However, to aggravate the feeling against his mother, and to furnish evidence that his own mildness had increased with her removal, he restored to their native soil two women of high rank, Junia and Calpurnia, along with the ex-praetors Valerius Capito and Licinius Gabolus â all of them formerly banished by Agrippina. He sanctioned the return, even, of the ashes of Lollia Paulina, and the erection of a tomb: Iturius and Calvisius, whom he had himself relegated some little while before, he now released from the penalty. As to Silana, she had died a natural death at Tarentum, to which she had retraced her way, when Agrippina, by whose enmity she had fallen, was beginning to totter or to relent. 14.57. With Seneca brought low, it was a simple matter to undermine Faenius Rufus, the charge in his case being friendship with Agrippina. Tigellinus, too, growing stronger with every day, and convinced that the mischievous arts, which were his one source of power, would be all the more acceptable, could he bind the emperor to himself by a partnership in crime, probed his fears, and, discovering the main objects of his alarm to be Plautus and Sulla â both lately removed, the former to Asia, the latter to Narbonese Gaul â began to draw attention to their distinguished lineage and their nearness, respectively, to the armies of the East and of Germany. "Unlike Burrus," he said, "he had not in view two irreconcilable hopes, but purely the safety of Nero. In the capital, where he could work on the spot, the imperial security was more or less provided for; but how were outbreaks at a distance to be stifled? Gaul was alert at the sound of the Dictator's name; and equally the peoples of Asia were unbalanced by the glory of such a grandsire as Drusus. Sulla was indigent, therefore greatly daring, and wore the mask of lethargy only till he could find an occasion for temerity. Plautus, with his great fortune, did not even affect a desire for peace, but, not content to parade his mimicries of the ancient Romans, had taken upon himself the Stoic arrogance and the mantle of a sect which inculcated sedition and an appetite for politics." There was no further delay. On the sixth day following, the slayers had made the crossing to Massilia, and Sulla, who had taken his place at the dinner-table, was despatched before a whisper of alarm had reached him. The head was carried back to Rome, where the premature grey hairs disfiguring it provoked the merriment of Nero. 15.74. offerings and thanks were then voted to Heaven, the Sun, who had an old temple in the Circus, where the crime was to be staged, receiving special honour for revealing by his divine power the secrets of the conspiracy. The Circensian Games of Ceres were to be celebrated with an increased number of horse-races; the month of April was to take the name of Nero; a temple of Safety was to be erected on the site . . . from which Scaevinus had taken his dagger. That weapon the emperor himself consecrated in the Capitol, and inscribed it:â To Jove the Avenger. At the time, the incident passed unnoticed: after the armed rising of the other"avenger," Julius Vindex, it was read as a token and a presage of coming retribution. I find in the records of the senate that Anicius Cerialis, consul designate, gave it as his opinion that a temple should be built to Nero the Divine, as early as possible and out of public funds. His motion, it is true, merely implied that the prince had transcended mortal eminence and earned the worship of mankind; but it was vetoed by that prince, because by other interpreters it might be wrested into an omen of, and aspiration for, his decease; for the honour of divine is not paid to the emperor until he has ceased to live and move among men. 16.21. After 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 have mentioned, during the discussion on Agrippina, and at the festival of the Juvenalia his services had not been conspicuous â a grievance which went the deeper that in Patavium, his native place, the same Thrasea had sung in tragic costume at the . . . 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. 16.23. As to Barea Soranus, the Roman knight, Ostorius Sabinus, had already claimed him for his own, in a case arising from Soranus' proconsulate of Asia; during which he increased the emperor's malignity by his fairness and his energy, by the care he had spent upon clearing the harbour of Ephesus, and by his failure to punish the city of Pergamum for employing force to prevent the loot of its statues and paintings by the Caesarian freedman, Acratus. But the charges preferred were friendship with Plautus and popularity-hunting in his province with a view of the winning it for the cause of revolution. The time chosen for the condemnation was the moment when Tiridates was on the point of arriving to be invested with the crown of Armenia; the object being that, with public curiosity diverted to foreign affairs, domestic crime might be thrown into shadow, or, possibly, that the imperial greatness might be advertised by the royal feat of slaughtering illustrious men. 16.24. The whole city, then, streamed out to welcome the emperor and inspect the king, but Thrasea was ordered to avoid the reception. He showed no dejection, but drew up a note to Nero, asking for the allegations against him and stating that he would rebut them, if he was allowed cognizance of the charges and faculties for reply. Nero took the note eagerly, in hopes that Thrasea, in a moment of panic, had written something which might enhance the glory of the emperor and sully his own reputation. As this proved not to be the case, and he himself took alarm at the looks and spirit and frankness of an innocent man, he ordered the senate to be convened. 16.25. Thrasea now consulted with his closest friends whether to attempt or to scorn defence. The advice offered was conflicting. Those who favoured his entering the senate-house argued that they were certain of his firmness:â "He would say nothing but what increased his glory. It was for the spiritless and the timid to draw a veil over their latter end: let the nation see a man who could face his death; let the senate listen to words inspired, it might be thought, by some deity, and superior to human utterance. Even Nero might be moved by the sheer miracle; but, if he persisted in his cruelty, the after-world at least must discriminate between the record of an honourable death and the cowardice of those who perished in silence. 16.26. Those, on the other hand, who held that he ought to wait at home, expressed the same opinion of Thrasea himself, but urged that he was threatened with mockery and humiliation: it would be better not to lend his ear to invectives and to insults. "Cossutianus and Eprius were not the only men ready and eager for villainy: there were others besides who, in their brutality, might perhaps venture upon physical violence; and even the respectable might follow through fear. Let him rather spare the senate, of which he had been so great an ornament, the ignominy of such a crime, and leave it uncertain what would have been the decision of the Fathers when they saw Thrasea upon his trial! To touch Nero with shame for his infamies was an idle dream, and it was much more to be feared that he would exercise his cruelty on Thrasea's wife, his daughter, and the other objects of his affection. Therefore, let him seek, unstained and unpolluted, an end as glorious as theirs by whose walk and pursuits he had guided his life!" Arulenus Rusticus, young and ardent, was present at the conclave, and, in his thirst for fame, offered to veto the resolution of the senate; for he was a plebeian tribune. Thrasea checked his enthusiasm, dissuading him from an attempt, futile in itself and profitless to the accused, but fatal to its maker. "His own time," he said, "was over, and he must not abandon the method of life which he had observed without a break for so many years. But Rusticus was at the beginning of his official career, and his future was uncompromised he must weigh well beforehand in his own mind what course of public life he would embark upon in such an age." The question, whether it was proper for him to enter the senate, he reserved for his private consideration. 16.27. On the following morning, however, two praetorian cohorts in full equipment occupied the temple of Venus Genetrix; a body of men wearing the toga, but with swords unconcealed, had beset the approach to the senate; and companies of soldiers were scattered through the fora and basilicae. Under their eyes and their menaces the senators entered their meeting-place, and listened to the emperor's speech, as read by his quaestor. Without mentioning any person by name, he taxed the Fathers with deserting the public service and setting the example of indolence to Roman knights. For what wonder that members failed to appear from distant provinces, when many who had attained the consulate and priesthoods preferred to spend their energies upon the embellishment of their pleasure-grounds? â It was a weapon for the accusers, and they grasped it. 16.28. The attack was opened by Cossutianus; then Marcellus declaimed with greater violence:â "Supreme interests of state were at issue: the contumacity of his inferiors was wearing down the lenience of the sovereign. Hitherto the Fathers had been over-indulgent, permitting themselves, as they did, to be mocked with impunity by Thrasea, who was meditating revolt; by his son-inâlaw, Helvidius Priscus, who affected the same insanity; by Paconius Agrippinus, again, heir of his father's hatred for emperors; and by that scribbler of abominable verses, Curtius Montanus. In the senate he missed an ex-consul; in the national vows, a priest; at the oath of allegiance, a citizen â unless, defiant of the institutions and rites of their ancestors, Thrasea had openly assumed the part of traitor and public enemy. To be brief, let him come â this person who was accustomed to enact the complete senator and to protect the slanderers of the prince â let him come and state in a motion what he would have amended or altered: they would bear more easily with his censures of this or that than they now bore with his all-condemning silence! Was it the world-wide peace, or victories gained without loss of the armies, that met with his displeasure? A man who mourned over the nation's happiness, who treated forum and theatre and temple as a desert, who held out his own exile as a threat, must not have his perverse ambition gratified! In Thrasea's eyes, these were no senatorial resolutions; there were no magistracies, no Rome. Let him break with life, and with a country which he had long ceased to love and now to look upon! 16.29. While Marcellus spoke to this and the like effect, grim and menacing as always, there reigned in the senate, not that familiar sadness, grown habitual now through the rapid succession of perils, but a new and deeper terror, as they saw the hands of the soldiers on their weapons. At the same time, the venerable form of Thrasea himself rose before the mind; and there were those who pitied Helvidius also, soon to pay the penalty of an innocent connection. What had been alleged against Agrippinus, except the tragic fate of his father; since he, too, though equally guiltless, had fallen by the cruelty of Tiberius? As to Montanus, a youth without vice, a poet without venom, he was being driven from the country, purely because he had given evidence of his talent. 16.30. In 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. 16.31. When the accuser then demanded if she had sold her bridal ornaments, if she had stripped the necklace from her neck, in order to gather money for the performance of magic rites, she at first threw herself to the ground, in a long and silent fit of weeping; then, embracing the altar steps, and the altar, exclaimed: "I have resorted to no impious gods, to no spells; nor in my unblest prayers have I asked for anything but that you, Caesar, and that you, sirs, should preserve in safety this best of fathers. My jewels and robes and the emblems of my rank I gave as I should have given my blood and life, had they demanded them. It is for those men, strangers to me before, to see to it what repute they bear, what arts they practise: the emperor I never mentioned except as deity. But my most unhappy father knows nothing; and, if there is crime, I have sinned alone. 16.32. She was still speaking, when Soranus caught up her words and cried that "she had not gone with him to his province; from her age, she could not have been known to Plautus; and she was not implicated in the charges against her husband. They should take her case separately (she was guilty only of an overstrained sense of duty); and, as for himself, let him undergo any and every fate!" At the same moment, he rushed to the arms of his daughter, who ran to meet him; but the lictors threw themselves between, and prevented both. Next, the evidence was called; and the pity awakened by the barbarity of the prosecution found its equal in the anger caused by Publius Egnatius in the part of witness. A client of Soranus, now bought to procure the destruction of his friend, he affected the grave pose of the Stoic school, trained as he was to catch by manner and by look the very features of integrity, while at heart treacherous, wily, a dissembler of cupidity and lust. Those qualities gold laid bare, and he became an example pointing men to caution, not more against the villain clothed in dishonesty or stained by crime, than against those who seek in honourable attainments a cloak for falsehood and for treason in friendship. 16.33. The same day, however, produced also an example of honour. It was furnished by Cassius Asclepiodotus, by his great wealth the first citizen of Bithynia; who, with the same devotion as he had accorded to Soranus in his heyday, refused to desert him when near his fall, was stripped of his entire fortune, and was driven into exile, as a proof of heaven's impartiality towards good and evil. Thrasea, Soranus, and Servilia were accorded free choice of death; Helvidius and Paconius were expelled from Italy; Montanus was spared out of consideration for his father, with the proviso that his official career should not be continued. of the accusers, Eprius and Cossutianus received a grant of five million sesterces each; Ostorius, one of twelve hundred thousand with the quaestorian decorations. 16.34. The consul's quaestor was then sent to Thrasea: he was spending the time in his gardens, and the day was already closing in for evening. He had brought together a large party of distinguished men and women, his chief attention been given to Demetrius, a master of the Cynic creed; with whom â to judge from his serious looks and the few words which caught the ear, when they chanced to raise their voices â he was debating the nature of the soul and the divorce of spirit and body. At last, Domitius Caecilianus, an intimate friend, arrived, and informed him of the decision reached by the senate. Accordingly, among the tears and expostulations of the company, Thrasea urged them to leave quickly, without linking their own hazardous lot to the fate of a condemned man. Arria, who aspired to follow her husband's ending and the precedent set by her mother and namesake, he advised to keep her life and not deprive the child of their union of her one support. 16.35. He now walked on to the colonnade; where the quaestor found him nearer to joy than to sorrow, because he had ascertained that Helvidius, his son-inâlaw, was merely debarred from Italy. Then, taking the decree of the senate, he led Helvidius and Demetrius into his bedroom, offered the arteries of both arms to the knife, and, when the blood had begun to flow, sprinkled it upon the ground, and called the quaestor nearer: "We are making a libation," he said, "to Jove the Liberator. Look, young man, and â may Heaven, indeed, avert the omen, but you have been born into times now it is expedient to steel the mind with instances of firmness." Soon, as the slowness of his end brought excruciating pain, turning his gaze upon Demetrius . . . |
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