8. Tacitus, Annals, 3.76, 14.12.1, 14.48-14.49, 16.8-16.11, 16.21.1-16.21.2 (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
| 3.76. Junia, too, born niece to Cato, wife of Caius Cassius, sister of Marcus Brutus, looked her last on life, sixty-three full years after the field of Philippi. Her will was busily discussed by the crowd; because in disposing of her great wealth she mentioned nearly every patrician of note in complimentary terms, but omitted the Caesar. The slur was taken in good part, and he offered no objection to the celebration of her funeral with a panegyric at the Rostra and the rest of the customary ceremonies. The effigies of twenty great houses preceded her to the tomb â members of the Manlian and Quinctian families, and names of equal splendour. But Brutus and Cassius shone brighter than all by the very fact that their portraits were unseen. 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. 14.48. In the consulate of Publius Marius and Lucius Afinius, the praetor Antistius, whose licence of conduct in his plebeian tribuneship I have already mentioned, composed a number of scandalous verses on the sovereign, and gave them to the public at the crowded table of Ostorius Scapula, with whom he was dining. He was thereupon accused of treason by Cossutianus Capito, who, by the intercession of his father-inâlaw Tigellinus, had lately recovered his senatorial rank. This was the first revival of the statute; and it was believed that the object sought was not so much the destruction of Antistius as the glorification of the emperor, whose tribunician veto was to snatch him from death when already condemned by the senate. Although Ostorius had stated in evidence that he had heard nothing, the witnesses on the other side were credited; and the consul designate, Junius Marullus, moved for the accused to be stripped of his praetorship and executed in the primitive manner. The other members were expressing assent, when Thrasea Paetus, after a large encomium upon the Caesar and a most vigorous attack on Antistius, took up the argument:â "It did not follow that the full penalty which a guilty prisoner deserved to undergo was the one that ought to be decided upon, under an excellent emperor and by a senate not fettered by any sort of compulsion. The executioner and the noose were forgotten things; and there were punishments established by various laws under which it was possible to inflict a sentence branding neither the judges with brutality nor the age with infamy. In fact, on an island, with his property confiscated, the longer he dragged out his criminal existence, the deeper would be his personal misery, and he would also furnish a number example of public clemency. 14.49. The independence of Thrasea broke through the servility of others, and, on the consul authorizing a division, he was followed in the voting by all but a few dissentients â the most active sycophant in their number being Aulus Vitellius, who levelled his abuse at all men of decency, and, as is the wont of cowardly natures, lapsed into silence when the reply came. The consuls, however, not venturing to complete the senatorial decree in form, wrote to the emperor and stated the opinion of the meeting. He, after some vacillation between shame and anger, finally wrote back that "Antistius, unprovoked by any injury, had given utterance to the most intolerable insults upon the sovereign. For those insults retribution had been demanded from the Fathers; and it would have been reasonable to fix a penalty proportioned to the gravity of the offence. Still, as he had proposed to check undue severity in their sentence, he would not interfere with their moderation; they must decide as they pleased â they had been given liberty even to acquit." These observations, and the like, were read aloud, and the imperial displeasure was evident. The consuls, however, did not change the motion on that account; Thrasea did not waive his proposal; nor did the remaining members desert the cause they had approved; one section, lest it should seem to have placed the emperor in an invidious position; a majority, because there was safety in their numbers; Thrasea, through his usual firmness of temper, and a desire not to let slip the credit he had earned. 16.8. He then attacked Silanus himself in the same strain as his uncle Torquatus, alleging that he was already apportioning the responsibilities of empire, and appointing freedmen to the charge of "accounts, documents, and correspondence": an indictment at once frivolous and false; for the prevalent alarms had made Silanus vigilant, and his uncle's doom has terrified him into especial caution. Next, soâcalled informers were introduced to forge against Lepida â wife of Cassius, aunt of Silanus â a tale of incest, committed with her brother's son, and of magical ceremonies. The senators Vulcacius Tullinus and Cornelius Marcellus were brought in as accomplices, with the Roman knight Calpurnius Fabatus. Their imminent condemnation they cheated by appealing to the emperor, and later, as being of minor importance, made good their escape from Nero, now fully occupied by crimes of the first magnitude. 16.9. Then, by decree of the senate, sentences of exile were registered against Cassius and Silanus: on the case of Lepida the Caesar was to pronounce. Cassius was deported to the island of Sardinia, and old age left to do its work. Silanus, ostensibly bound for Naxos, was removed to Ostia, and afterwards confined in an Apulian town by the name of Barium. There, while supporting with philosophy his most unworthy fate, he was seized by a centurion sent for the slaughter. To the suggestion that he should cut an artery, he replied that he had, in fact, made up his mind to die, but could not excuse the assassin his glorious duty. The centurion, however, noticing that, if unarmed, he was very strongly built and betrayed more anger than timidity, ordered his men to overpower him. Silanus did not fail to struggle, and to strike with what vigour his bare fists permitted, until he dropped under the sword of the centurion, as upon a field of battle, his wounds in front. 16.10. With not less courage Lucius Vetus, his mother-inâlaw Sextia, and his daughter Pollitta, met their doom: they were loathed by the emperor, who took their life to be a standing protest against the slaying of Rubellius Plautus, the son-inâlaw of Vetus. But the opportunity for laying bare his ferocity was supplied by the freedman Fortunatus; who, after embezzling his patron's property, now deserted him to turn accuser, and called to his aid Claudius Demianus, imprisoned for heinous offences by Vetus in his proconsulate of Asia, but now freed by Nero as the recompense of delation. Apprized of this, and gathering that he and his freedman were to meet in the struggle as equals, the accused left for his estate at Formiae. There he was placed under a tacit surveillance by the military. He had with him his daughter, who apart from the impending danger, was embittered by a grief which had lasted since the day when she watched the assassins of her husband Plautus â she had clasped the bleeding neck, and still treasured her blood-flecked robe, widowed, unkempt, unconsoled, and fasting except for a little sustece to keep death at bay. Now, at the prompting of her father, she went to Naples; and, debarred from access to Nero, besieged his doors, crying to him to give ear to the guiltless and not surrender to a freedman the one-time partner of his consulate; sometimes with female lamentations, and again in threatening accents which went beyond her sex, until the sovereign showed himself inflexible alike to prayer and to reproach. 16.11. Accordingly, she carried word to her father to abandon hope and accept the inevitable. At the same time, news came that arrangements were being made for a trial in the senate and a merciless verdict. Nor were there wanting those who advised him to name the Caesar as a principal heir, and thus safeguard the residue for his grandchildren. Rejecting the proposal, however, so as not to sully a life, passed in a near approach to freedom, by an act of servility at the close, he distributed among his slaves what money was available: all portable articles he ordered them to remove for their own uses, reserving only three couches for the final scene. Then, in the same chamber, with the same piece of steel, they severed their veins; and hurriedly, wrapped in the single garment which decency prescribed, they were carried to the baths, the father gazing on his daughter, the grandmother on her grandchild and she on both; all praying with rival earnestness for a quick end to the failing breath, so that they might leave their kith and kin still surviving, and assured of death. Fate observed the proper order; and the two eldest passed away the first, then Pollitta in her early youth. They were indicted after burial; the verdict was that they should be punished in the fashion of our ancestors; and Nero, interposing, allowed them to die unsupervised. Such were the comedies that followed, when the deed of blood was done. 16.21.1. 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. |
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