2. Tacitus, Annals, 14.12.1, 16.21-16.27, 16.22.3, 16.29-16.35 (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
| 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. 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. 16.22. He preferred other charges as well:â "At the beginning of the year, Thrasea evaded the customary oath; though the holder of a quindecimviral priesthood, he took no part in the national vows; he had never offered a sacrifice for the welfare of the emperor or for his celestial voice. Once a constant and indefatigable member, who showed himself the advocate or the adversary of the most commonplace resolutions of the Fathers, for three years he had not set foot within the curia; and but yesterday, when his colleagues were gathering with emulous haste to crush Silanus and Vetus, he had preferred to devote his leisure to the private cases of his clients. Matters were come already to a schism and to factions: if many made the same venture, it was war! 'As once,' he said, 'this discord-loving state prated of Caesar and Cato, so now, Nero, it prates of yourself and Thrasea. And he has his followers â his satellites, rather â who affect, not as yet the contumacity of his opinions, but his bearing and his looks, and whose stiffness and austerity are designed for an impeachment of your wantonness. To him alone your safety is a thing uncared for, your talents a thing unhonoured. The imperial happiness he cannot brook: can he not even be satisfied with the imperial bereavements and sorrows? Not to believe Poppaea deity bespeaks the same temper that will not swear to the acts of the deified Augustus and the deified Julius. He contemns religion, he abrogates law. The journal of the Roman people is scanned throughout the provinces and armies with double care for news of what Thrasea has not done! Either let us pass over to his creed, if it is the better, or let these seekers after a new world lose their chief and their instigator. It is the sect that produced the Tuberones and the Favonii â names unloved even in the old republic. In order to subvert the empire, they make a parade of liberty: the empire overthrown, they will lay hands on liberty itself. You have removed Cassius to little purpose, if you intend to allow these rivals of the Bruti to multiply and flourish! A word in conclusion: write nothing yourself about Thrasea â leave the senate to decide between us!' " Nero fanned still more the eager fury of Cossutianus, and reinforced him with the mordant eloquence of Eprius Marcellus. 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. 16.29. 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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3. Tacitus, Histories, 4.5-4.8 (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
| 4.5. Since I have again had occasion to mention a man of whom I shall have cause to speak many times, I think that I ought to give a brief account of his life and interests, and of the vicissitudes of fortune that he experienced. Helvidius Priscus was born in the town of Cluviae [in the district of Caracina]. His father had been a centurion of the first rank. In his early youth Helvidius devoted his extraordinary talents to the higher studies, not as most youths do, in order to cloak a useless leisure with a pretentious name, but that he might enter public life better fortified against the chances of fortune. He followed those teachers of philosophy who count only those things "good" which are morally right and only those things "evil" which are base, and who reckon power, high birth, and everything else that is beyond the control of the will as neither good nor bad. After he had held only the quaestorship, he was selected by Paetus Thrasea to be his son-inâlaw; from the character of his father-inâlaw he derived above everything the spirit of freedom; as citizen, senator, husband, son-inâlaw, and friend he showed himself equal to all of life's duties, despising riches, determined in the right, unmoved by fear. 4.6. Some thought that he was rather too eager for fame, since the passion for glory is that from which even philosophers last divest themselves. Driven into exile by the ruin of his father, he returned under Galba and brought charges against Marcellus Eprius, who had informed against Thrasea. This attempt to avenge him, at once notable and just, divided the senators: for if Marcellus fell, it was the ruin of a host of the guilty. At first the struggle was threatening, as is proved by the elsewhere speeches on both sides; later, since Galba's attitude was uncertain, Priscus yielded to many appeals from his fellow senators and gave up the prosecution. This action called forth varied comments according to the nature of those who made them, some praising his moderation, others regretting his lack of firmness. However, at the meeting of the senate at which Vespasian was voted the imperial power, the senators decided to send a delegation to the emperor. This gave rise to a sharp difference between Helvidius and Eprius, for Helvidius demanded that the representatives be chosen by the magistrates under oath, Marcellus demanded a selection by lot, as the consul designate had proposed. 4.7. The interest that Marcellus felt was prompted by his personal vanity and his fear that others might be chosen and so he might seem neglected. Gradually the disputants were swept on in their wrangling to make long and bitter speeches. Helvidius asked Marcellus why he was so afraid of the decision of the magistrates. "You have," he said, "wealth and eloquence in which you would be superior to many, if you were not burdened with men's memory of your crimes. The lot and urn do not judge character; voting and the judgment of the senate have been devised as means to penetrate into the life and reputation of the individual. It is for the interests of the state and it touches the honour to be done Vespasian to have the delegation that meets him made up of the men whom the senate considers freest from reproach, that they may fill the emperor's ears with honourable counsels. Vespasian was once the friend of Thrasea, Soranus, and Sentius. Even if it is not well to punish their accusers, we ought not to make a display of them. By its decision in this matter the senate will, in a way, suggest to the emperor whom to approve, whom to fear. For a good government there is no greater instrument at hand than the possession of good friends. You, Marcellus, must be satisfied with the fact that you induced Nero to put to death so many innocent men. Enjoy your rewards and immunity; leave Vespasian to better men. 4.8. Marcellus replied that it was not his proposal, but that of the consul designate that was attacked; and it was a proposal that conformed to the ancient precedents, which prescribed that delegates should be chosen by lot, that there might be no room for self-seeking or for hate. Nothing had occurred to give reason for abandoning long-established customs or for turning the honour due an emperor into an insult to any man: they could all pay homage. What they must try to avoid was allowing the wilfulness of certain individuals to irritate the mind of the emperor, who was as yet unbiassed, being newly come to power and watchful of every look and every word. For his own part he remembered the time in which he was born, the form of government that their fathers and grandfathers had established; he admired the earlier period, but adapted himself to the present; he prayed for good emperors, but endured any sort. It was not by his speech any more than by the judgment of the senate that Thrasea had been brought to ruin; Nero's cruel nature found its delight in such shows of justice, and such a friendship caused him no less anxiety than exile in others. In short, let them set Helvidius on an equality with Cato and Brutus in firmness and courage: for himself, he was only one of a senate which accepted a common servitude. He would also advise Priscus not to exalt himself above an emperor, not to try to check by his precepts a man of ripe age as Vespasian was, a man who had gained the insignia of a triumph, and who had sons grown to man's estate. Just as the worst emperors wish for absolute tyrannical power, even the best desire some limit to the freedom of their subjects. These arguments, which were hurled back and forth with great vehemence, were received with different feelings. The party prevailed that favoured the selection of the envoys by lot, for even the ordinary senators were eager to preserve precedent, and all the most prominent also inclined to the same course, fearing to excite envy if they should be selected themselves. |
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