6. Tacitus, Annals, 1.8, 1.73.1, 2.73, 2.82, 3.1-3.5, 3.7, 3.10, 3.12-3.19, 3.36, 3.36.1-3.36.2, 3.51, 3.58-3.59, 3.58.1, 3.61-3.62, 3.61.2, 3.71.2, 4.12, 4.16 (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
| 1.8. The only business which he allowed to be discussed at the first meeting of the senate was the funeral of Augustus. The will, brought in by the Vestal Virgins, specified Tiberius and Livia as heirs, Livia to be adopted into the Julian family and the Augustan name. As legatees in the second degree he mentioned his grandchildren and great-grandchildren; in the third place, the prominent nobles â an ostentatious bid for the applause of posterity, as he detested most of them. His bequests were not above the ordinary civic scale, except that he left 43,500,000 sesterces to the nation and the populace, a thousand to every man in the praetorian guards, five hundred to each in the urban troops, and three hundred to all legionaries or members of the Roman cohorts. The question of the last honours was then debated. The two regarded as the most striking were due to Asinius Gallus and Lucius Arruntius â the former proposing that the funeral train should pass under a triumphal gateway; the latter, that the dead should be preceded by the titles of all laws which he had carried and the names of all peoples whom he had subdued. In addition, Valerius Messalla suggested that the oath of allegiance to Tiberius should be renewed annually. To a query from Tiberius, whether that expression of opinion came at his dictation, he retorted â it was the one form of flattery still left â that he had spoken of his own accord, and, when public interests were in question, he would (even at the risk of giving offence) use no man's judgment but his own. The senate clamoured for the body to be carried to the pyre on the shoulders of the Fathers. The Caesar, with haughty moderation, excused them from that duty, and warned the people by edict not to repeat the enthusiastic excesses which on a former day had marred the funeral of the deified Julius, by desiring Augustus to be cremated in the Forum rather than in the Field of Mars, his appointed resting-place. On the day of the ceremony, the troops were drawn up as though on guard, amid the jeers of those who had seen with their eyes, or whose fathers had declared to them, that day of still novel servitude and freedom disastrously re-wooed, when the killing of the dictator Caesar to some had seemed the worst, and to others the fairest, of high exploits:â "And now an aged prince, a veteran potentate, who had seen to it that not even his heirs should lack for means to coerce their country, must needs have military protection to ensure a peaceable burial! 1.73.1. It will not be unremunerative to recall the first, tentative charges brought in the case of Falanius and Rubrius, two Roman knights of modest position; if only to show from what beginnings, thanks to the art of Tiberius, the accursed thing crept in, and, after a temporary check, at last broke out, an all-devouring conflagration. Against Falanius the accuser alleged that he had admitted a certain Cassius, mime and catamite, among the "votaries of Augustus," who were maintained, after the fashion of fraternities, in all the great houses: also, that when selling his gardens, he had parted with a statue of Augustus as well. To Rubrius the crime imputed was violation of the deity of Augustus by perjury. When the facts came to the knowledge of Tiberius, he wrote to the consuls that place in heaven had not been decreed to his father in order that the honour might be turned to the destruction of his countrymen. Cassius, the actor, with others of his trade, had regularly taken part in the games which his own mother had consecrated to the memory of Augustus; nor was it an act of sacrilege, if the effigies of that sovereign, like other images of other gods, went with the property, whenever a house or garden was sold. As to the perjury, it was on the same footing as if the defendant had taken the name of Jupiter in vain: the gods must look to their own wrongs. 2.73. His funeral, devoid of ancestral effigies or procession, was distinguished by eulogies and recollections of his virtues. There were those who, considering his personal appearance, his early age, and the circumstances of his death, â to which they added the proximity of the region where he perished, â compared his decease with that of Alexander the Great: â "Each eminently handsome, of famous lineage, and in years not much exceeding thirty, had fallen among alien races by the treason of their countrymen. But the Roman had borne himself as one gentle to his friends, moderate in his pleasures, content with a single wife and the children of lawful wedlock. Nor was he less a man of the sword; though he lacked the other's temerity, and, when his numerous victories had beaten down the Germanies, was prohibited from making fast their bondage. But had he been the sole arbiter of affairs, of kingly authority and title, he would have overtaken the Greek in military fame with an ease proportioned to his superiority in clemency, self-command, and all other good qualities." The body, before cremation, was exposed in the forum of Antioch, the place destined for the final rites. Whether it bore marks of poisoning was disputable: for the indications were variously read, as pity and preconceived suspicion swayed the spectator to the side of Germanicus, or his predilections to that of Piso. 2.82. But at Rome, when the failure of Germanicus' health became current knowledge, and every circumstance was reported with the aggravations usual in news that has travelled far, all was grief and indignation. A storm of complaints burst out:â "So for this he had been relegated to the ends of earth; for this Piso had received a province; and this had been the drift of Augusta's colloquies with Plancina! It was the mere truth, as the elder men said of Drusus, that sons with democratic tempers were not pleasing to fathers on a throne; and both had been cut off for no other reason than because they designed to restore the age of freedom and take the Roman people into a partnership of equal rights." The announcement of his death inflamed this popular gossip to such a degree that before any edict of the magistrates, before any resolution of the senate, civic life was suspended, the courts deserted, houses closed. It was a town of sighs and silences, with none of the studied advertisements of sorrow; and, while there was no abstention from the ordinary tokens of bereavement, the deeper mourning was carried at the heart. Accidentally, a party of merchants, who had left Syria while Germanicus was yet alive, brought a more cheerful account of his condition. It was instantly believed and instantly disseminated. No man met another without proclaiming his unauthenticated news; and by him it was passed to more, with supplements dictated by joy. Crowds were running in the streets and forcing temple-doors. Credulity throve â it was night, and affirmation is boldest in the dark. Nor did Tiberius check the fictions, but left them to die out with the passage of time; and the people added bitterness for what seemed a second bereavement. 3.1. Without once pausing in her navigation of the wintry sea, Agrippina reached the island of Corcyra opposite the Calabrian coast. There, frantic with grief and unschooled to suffering, she spent a few days in regaining her composure. Meanwhile, at news of her advent, there was a rush of people to Brundisium, as the nearest and safest landing-place for the voyager. Every intimate friend was present; numbers of military men, each with his record of service under Germanicus; even many strangers from the local towns, some thinking it respectful to the emperor, the majority following their example. The moment her squadron was sighted in the offing, not only the harbour and the points nearest the sea but the city-walls and house-roofs, all posts, indeed, commanding a wide enough prospect, were thronged by a crowd of mourners, who asked each other if they ought to receive her landing in silence, or with some audible expression of feeling. It was not yet clear to them what the occasion required, when little by little the flotilla drew to shore, not with the accustomed eager oarsmanship, but all with an ordered melancholy. When, clasping the fatal urn, she left the ship with her two children, and fixed her eyes on the ground, a single groan arose from the whole multitude; nor could a distinction be traced between the relative and the stranger, the wailings of women or of men; only, the attendants of Agrippina, exhausted by long-drawn sorrow, were less demonstrative than the more recent mourners by whom they were met. 3.2. The Caesar had sent two cohorts of his Guard; with further orders that the magistrates of Calabria, Apulia, and Campania should render the last offices to the memory of his son. And so his ashes were borne on the shoulders of tribunes and centurions: before him the standards went unadorned, the Axes reversed; while, at every colony they passed, the commons in black and the knights in official purple burned raiment, perfumes, and other of the customary funeral tributes, in proportion to the resources of the district. Even the inhabitants of outlying towns met the procession, devoted their victims and altars to the departed spirit, and attested their grief with tears and cries. Drusus came up to Tarracina, with Germanicus' brother Claudius and the children who had been left in the capital. The consuls, Marcus Valerius and Marcus Aurelius (who had already begun their magistracy), the senate, and a considerable part of the people, filled the road, standing in scattered parties and weeping as they pleased: for of adulation there was none, since all men knew that Tiberius was with difficulty dissembling his joy at the death of Germanicus. 3.3. He and Augusta abstained from any appearance in public, either holding it below their majesty to sorrow in the sight of men, or apprehending that, if all eyes perused their looks, they might find hypocrisy legible. I fail to discover, either in the historians or in the government journals, that the prince's mother, Antonia, bore any striking part in the ceremonies, although, in addition to Agrippina and Drusus and Claudius, his other blood-relations are recorded by name. Ill-health may have been the obstacle; or a spirit broken with grief may have shrunk from facing the visible evidence of its great affliction; but I find it more credible that Tiberius and Augusta, who did not quit the palace, kept her there, in order to give the impression of a parity of sorrow â of a grandmother and uncle detained at home in loyalty to the example of a mother. 3.4. The day on which the remains were consigned to the mausoleum of Augustus was alternately a desolation of silence and a turmoil of laments. The city-streets were full, the Campus Martius alight with torches. There the soldier in harness, the magistrate lacking his insignia, the burgher in his tribe, iterated the cry that "the commonwealth had fallen and hope was dead" too freely and too openly for it to be credible that they remembered their governors. Nothing, however, sank deeper into Tiberius' breast than the kindling of men's enthusiasm for Agrippina â "the glory of her country, the last scion of Augustus, the peerless pattern of ancient virtue." So they styled her; and, turning to heaven and the gods, prayed for the continuance of her issue â "and might they survive their persecutors! 3.5. There were those who missed the pageantry of a state-funeral and compared the elaborate tributes rendered by Augustus to Germanicus' father, Drusus:â "In the bitterest of the winter, the sovereign had gone in person as far as Ticinum, and, never stirring from the corpse, had entered the capital along with it. The bier had been surrounded with the family effigies of the Claudian and Livian houses; the dead had been mourned in the Forum, eulogized upon the Rostra; every distinction which our ancestors had discovered, or their posterity invented, was showered upon him. But to Germanicus had fallen not even the honours due to every and any noble! Granted that the length of the journey was a reason for cremating his body, no matter how, on foreign soil, it would only have been justice that he should have been accorded all the more distinctions later, because chance had denied them at the outset. His brother had gone no more than one day's journey to meet him; his uncle not even to the gate. Where were those usages of the ancients â the image placed at the head of the couch, the set poems to the memory of departed virtue, the panegyrics, the tears, the imitations (if no more) of sorrow? 3.7. The period of mourning now closed; men went back to their avocations, and Drusus left for the armies of Illyricum. All minds were elated at the prospect of calling Piso to account, and complaints were frequent that, during the interval, he should be roaming amid the landscapes of Asia and Achaia, destroying the evidences of his guilt by presumptuous and fraudulent delays. For news had spread that Martina â the notorious poisoner, despatched to Rome, as I have said, by Gnaeus Sentius â had suddenly yielded up the ghost at Brundisium; that poison had been concealed in a knot of her hair; and that no indications of self-murder had been found on the body. 3.10. Next day, Fulcinius Trio applied to the consuls for authority to prosecute Piso. He was opposed by Vitellius, Veranius, and the other members of Germanicus' suite: Trio, they argued, had no standing in the case; nor were they themselves acting as accusers, but as deponents and witnesses to the facts, carrying out the instructions of the prince. Waiving the indictment on this head, Trio secured the right of arraigning Piso's previous career, and the emperor was asked to take over the trial. To this even the defendant made no demur, as he distrusted the prepossessions of the people and senate; while Tiberius, he knew, had the strength of mind to despise scandal, and was involved in his mother's accession to the plot. Besides, truth was more easily distinguished from accepted calumny by one judge; where there were more, odium and malevolence carried weight. The difficulties of the inquiry, and the rumours busy with his own character, were not lost upon Tiberius. Therefore with a few intimate friends for assessor, he heard the threats of the accusers, the prayers of the accused; and remitted the case in its integrity to the senate. 3.12. On the day the senate met, the Caesar spoke with calculated moderation. "Piso," he said, "had been his father's lieutet and friend; and he himself, at the instance of the senate, had assigned him to Germanicus as his coadjutor in the administration of the East. Whether, in that position, he had merely exasperated the youthful prince by perversity and contentiousness, and then betrayed pleasure at his death, or whether he had actually cut short his days by crime, was a question they must determine with open minds. For" (he proceeded) "if the case is one of a subordinate who, after ignoring the limits of his commission and the deference owed to his superior, has exulted over that superior's death and my own sorrow, I shall renounce his friendship, banish him from my house, and redress my grievances as a man without invoking my powers as a sovereign. But if murder comes to light â and it would call for vengeance, were the victim the meanest of mankind â then do you see to it that proper requital is made to the children of Germanicus and to us, his parents. At the same time, consider the following points:â Did Piso's treatment of the armies make for disorder and sedition? Did he employ corrupt means to win the favour of the private soldiers? Did he levy war in order to repossess himself of the province? Or are these charges falsehoods, published with enlargements by the accusers; at whose zealous indiscretions I myself feel some justifiable anger? For what was the object in stripping the corpse naked and exposing it to the degrading contact of the vulgar gaze? Or in diffusing the report â and among foreigners â that he fell a victim to poison, if that is an issue still uncertain and in need of scrutiny? True, I lament my son, and shall lament him always. But far from hampering the defendant in adducing every circumstance which may tend to relieve his innocence or to convict Germanicus of injustice (if injustice there was), I beseech you that, even though the case is bound up with a personal sorrow of my own, you will not therefore receive the assertion of guilt as a proof of guilt. If kinship or a sense of loyalty has made some of you his advocates, then let each, with all the eloquence and devotion he can command, aid him in his hour of danger. To the accusers I commend a similar industry, a similar constancy. The only extra-legal concession we shall be found to have made to Germanicus is this, that the inquiry into his death is being held not in the Forum but in the Curia, not before a bench of judges but the senate. Let the rest of the proceedings show the like restraint: let none regard the tears of Drusus, none my own sadness, nor yet any fictions invented to our discredit. 3.13. It was then resolved to allow two days for the formulation of the charges: after an interval of six days, the case for the defence would occupy another three. Fulcinius opened with an old and futile tale of intrigue and cupidity during Piso's administration of Spain. The allegations, if established, could do the defendant no harm, should he dispel the more recent charge: if they were rebutted, there was still no acquittal, if he was found guilty of the graver delinquencies. Servaeus, Veranius, and Vitellius followed â with equal fervour; and Vitellius with considerable eloquence. "Through his hatred of Germanicus and his zeal for anarchy," so ran the indictment, "Piso had, by relaxing discipline and permitting the maltreatment of the provincials, so far corrupted the common soldiers that among the vilest of them he was known as the Father of the Legions. On the other hand, he had been ruthless to the best men, especially the companions and friends of Germanicus, and at last, with the help of poison and the black arts, had destroyed the prince himself. Then had come the blasphemous rites and sacrifices of Plancina and himself, an armed assault on the commonwealth, and â in order that he might be put on his trial â defeat upon a stricken field. 3.14. On all counts but one the defence wavered. There was no denying that he had tampered with the soldiery, that he had abandoned the provinces to the mercies of every villain, that he had even insulted the commander-inâchief. The single charge which he seemed to have dissipated was that of poisoning. It was, indeed, none too plausibly sustained by the accusers, who argued that, at a dinner given by Germanicus, Piso (who was seated above him) introduced the dose into his food. Certainly, it seemed folly to assume that he could have ventured the act among strange servants, under the eyes of so many bystanders, and in the presence of the victim himself: also, he offered his own slaves for torture, and insisted on its application to the attendants at the meal. For one reason or other, however, the judges were inexorable: the Caesar, because war had been levied on a province; the senate, because it could never quite believe that Germanicus had perished without foul play. . . . A demand for the correspondence was rejected as firmly by Tiberius as by Piso. At the same time, shouts were heard: it was the people at the senate-doors, crying that, if he escaped the suffrages of the Fathers, they would take the law into their own hands. They had, in fact, dragged his effigies to the Gemonian Stairs, and were engaged in dismembering them, when they were rescued and replaced at the imperial command. He was therefore put in a litter and accompanied home by an officer of one of the praetorian cohorts; while rumour debated whether the escort was there for the preservation of his life or the enforcement of his death. 3.15. Plancina, equally hated, had more than equal influence; so that it was considered doubtful how far the sovereign would be allowed to proceed against her. She herself, so long as hope remained for Piso, protested that she would share his fortune for good or ill, or, if the need arose, would meet destruction in his company. But once her pardon had been procured by the private intercessions of Livia, she began step by step to dissociate herself from her husband and to treat her own defence as a distinct issue. It was a fatal symptom, and the defendant knew it. He was doubtful whether to make another effort or not; but, as his sons pressed him, he hardened his heart and entered the senate once more. He faced the repetition of the charges, the hostile cries of the Fathers, the fierce opposition evident in every quarter; but nothing daunted him more than the sight of Tiberius, pitiless and angerless, barred and bolted against the ingress of any human emotion. After being carried home, he wrote a little, apparently notes for his defence the next day; sealed the paper, and handed it to a freedman. Then he gave the usual attention to his person; and finally, late at night, when his wife had left the bedroom, he ordered the door to be closed, and was found at daybreak with his throat cut and a sword lying on the floor. 3.16. I remember hearing my elders speak of a document seen more than once in Piso's hands. The purport he himself never disclosed, but his friends always asserted that it contained a letter from Tiberius with his instructions in reference to Germanicus; and that, if he had not been tricked by the empty promises of Sejanus, he was resolved to produce it before the senate and to put the emperor upon his defence. His death, they believed, was not self-inflicted: an assassin had been let loose to do the work. I should hesitate to endorse either theory: at the same time, it was my duty not to suppress a version given by contemporaries who were still living in my early years. With his lineaments composed to melancholy, the Caesar expressed to his regret to the senate that Piso should have chosen a form of death reflecting upon his sovereign . . . and cross-examined him at length on the manner in which his father had spent his last day and night. Though there were one or two indiscretions, the answers were in general adroit enough, and he now read a note drawn up by Piso in nearly the following words:â "Broken by a confederacy of my enemies and the hatred inspired by their lying accusation, since the world has no room for my truth and innocence, I declare before Heaven, Caesar, that I have lived your loyal subject and your mother's no less dutiful servant. I beg you both to protect the interests of my children. Gnaeus has no connexion with my affairs, good or ill, since he spent the whole period in the capital; while Marcus advised me against returning to Syria. And I can only wish that I had given way to my youthful son, rather than he to his aged father! I pray, therefore, with added earnestness that the punishment of my perversity may not fall on his guiltless head. By my five-and-forty years of obedience, by the consulate we held in common, as the man who once earned the confidence of your father, the deified Augustus, as the friend who will never ask favour more, I appeal for the life of my unfortunate son." of Plancina not a word. 3.17. Tiberius followed by absolving the younger Piso from the charge of civil war, â for "the orders came from a father, and a son could not have disobeyed," â and at the same time expressed his sorrow for a noble house and the tragic fate of its representative, whatever his merits or demerits. In offering a shamefaced and ignominious apology for Plancina, he pleaded the entreaties of his mother; who in private was being more and more hotly criticized by every person of decency:â "So it was allowable in a grandmother to admit her husband's murderess to sight and speech, and to rescue her from the senate! The redress which the laws guaranteed to all citizens had been denied to Germanicus alone. The voice of Vitellius and Veranius had bewailed the Caesar: the emperor and Augusta had defended Plancina. It remained to turn those drugs and arts, now tested with such happy results, against Agrippina and her children, and so to satiate this admirable grandmother and uncle with the blood of the whole calamitous house!" Two days were expended on this phantom of a trial, with Tiberius pressing Piso's sons to defend their mother; and as the accusers and witnesses delivered their competing invectives, without a voice to answer, pity rather than anger began to deepen. The question was put in the first instance to Aurelius Cotta, the consul; for, if the reference came from the sovereign, even the magistrates went through the process of registering their opinion. Cotta proposed that the name of Piso should be erased from the records, one half of his property confiscated, and the other made over to his son Gnaeus, who should change his first name; that Marcus Piso should be stripped of his senatorial rank, and relegated for a period of ten years with a gratuity of five million sesterces: Plancina, in view of the empress's intercession, might be granted immunity. 3.18. Much in these suggestions was mitigated by the emperor. He would not have Piso's name cancelled from the records, when the names of Mark Antony, who had levied war on his fatherland, and of Iullus Antonius, who had dishonoured the hearth of Augustus, still remained. He exempted Marcus Piso from official degradation, and granted him his patrimony: for, as I have often said, he was firm enough against pecuniary temptations, and in the present case his shame at the acquittal of Plancina made him exceptionally lenient. So, again, when Valerius Messalinus proposed to erect a golden statue in the temple of Mars the Avenger, and Caecina Severus an altar of Vengeance, he vetoed the scheme, remarking that these memorials were consecrated after victories abroad; domestic calamities called for sorrow and concealment. Messalinus had added that Tiberius, Augusta, Antonia, Agrippina, and Drusus ought to be officially thanked for their services in avenging Germanicus: Claudius he had neglected to mention. Indeed, it was only when Lucius Asprenas demanded point-blank in the senate if the omission was deliberate that the name was appended. For myself, the more I reflect on events recent or remote, the more am I haunted by the sense of a mockery in human affairs. For by repute, by expectancy, and by veneration, all men were sooner marked out for sovereignty than that future emperor whom destiny was holding in the background. 3.19. A few days later, the Caesar recommended the senate to confer priesthoods on Vitellius, Veranius, and Servaeus. To Fulcinius he promised his support, should he become a candidate for preferment, but warned him not to let impetuosity become the downfall of eloquence. This closed the punitive measures demanded by Germanicus' death: an affair which, not only to the generation which witnessed it, but in the succeeding years, was a battle-ground of opposing rumours. So true it is that the great event is an obscure event: one school admits all hearsay evidence, whatever its character, as indisputable; another perverts the truth into its contrary; and, in each case, posterity magnifies the error. Drusus, who had left the capital, in order to regularize his command, entered it shortly afterwards with an ovation. A few days later, his mother Vipsania died â the only one of all Agrippa's children whose end was peace. The rest perished, part, it is known, by the sword, part, it was believed, by poison or starvation. 3.36. Now came the disclosure of a practice whispered in the private complaints of many. There was a growing tendency of the rabble to cast insult and odium on citizens of repute, and to evade the penalty by grasping some object portraying the Caesar. The freedmen and slaves, even, were genuinely feared by the patron or the owner against whom they lifted their voices or their hands. Hence a speech of the senator, Gaius Cestius:â "Princes, he admitted, were equivalent to deities; but godhead itself listened only to the just petitions of the suppliant, and no man fled to the Capitol or other sanctuary of the city to make it a refuge subserving his crimes. The laws had been abolished â overturned from the foundations â when Annia Rufilla, whom he had proved guilty of fraud in a court of justice, could insult and threaten him in the Forum, upon the threshold of the curia; while he himself dared not try the legal remedy because of the portrait of the sovereign with which she confronted him." Similar and, in some cases, more serious experiences, were described by a din of voices around him; and appeals to Drusus, to set the example of punishment, lasted till he gave orders for her to be summoned and imprisoned, after conviction, in the public cells. 3.36.1. Now came the disclosure of a practice whispered in the private complaints of many. There was a growing tendency of the rabble to cast insult and odium on citizens of repute, and to evade the penalty by grasping some object portraying the Caesar. The freedmen and slaves, even, were genuinely feared by the patron or the owner against whom they lifted their voices or their hands. Hence a speech of the senator, Gaius Cestius:â "Princes, he admitted, were equivalent to deities; but godhead itself listened only to the just petitions of the suppliant, and no man fled to the Capitol or other sanctuary of the city to make it a refuge subserving his crimes. The laws had been abolished â overturned from the foundations â when Annia Rufilla, whom he had proved guilty of fraud in a court of justice, could insult and threaten him in the Forum, upon the threshold of the curia; while he himself dared not try the legal remedy because of the portrait of the sovereign with which she confronted him." Similar and, in some cases, more serious experiences, were described by a din of voices around him; and appeals to Drusus, to set the example of punishment, lasted till he gave orders for her to be summoned and imprisoned, after conviction, in the public cells. 3.51. A single ex-consul, Rubellius Blandus, concurred with Lepidus: the remainder followed Agrippa's motion; and Priscus was led to the cells and immediately executed. This promptitude drew a typically ambiguous reprimand from Tiberius in the senate. He commended the loyalty of members, who avenged so sharply insults, however slight, to the head of the state, but deprecated such a hurried punishment of a verbal offence. Lepidus he praised; Agrippa he did not blame. It was therefore resolved that no senatorial decree should be entered in the Treasury before the lapse of nine full days, all prisoners under sentence of death to be reprieved for that period. But the senate had not liberty to repent, nor was Tiberius usually softened by the interval. 3.58. Meanwhile, after the governorship of Junius Blaesus in Africa had been extended, the Flamen Dialis, Servius Maluginensis, demanded the allotment of Asia to himself. "It was a common fallacy," he insisted, "that the flamens of Jove were not allowed to leave Italy; nor was his own legal status different from that of the flamens of Mars and Quirinus. If, then, they had had provinces allotted them, why was the right withheld from the priests of Jove? There was no national decree to be found on the point â nothing in the Books of Ceremonies. The pontiffs had often performed the rites of Jove, if the flamen was prevented by sickness or public business. For seventy-five years after the self-murder of Cornelius Merula no one had been appointed in his room, yet the rites had not been interrupted. But if so many years could elapse without a new creation, and without detriment to the cult, how much more easily could he absent himself for twelve months of proconsular authority? Personal rivalries had no doubt in former times led the pontiffs to prohibit his order from visiting the provinces: toâday, by the grace of Heaven, the chief pontiff was also the chief of men, beyond the reach of jealousy, rancour, or private inclinations. 3.58.1. Meanwhile, after the governorship of Junius Blaesus in Africa had been extended, the Flamen Dialis, Servius Maluginensis, demanded the allotment of Asia to himself. "It was a common fallacy," he insisted, "that the flamens of Jove were not allowed to leave Italy; nor was his own legal status different from that of the flamens of Mars and Quirinus. If, then, they had had provinces allotted them, why was the right withheld from the priests of Jove? There was no national decree to be found on the point â nothing in the Books of Ceremonies. The pontiffs had often performed the rites of Jove, if the flamen was prevented by sickness or public business. For seventy-five years after the self-murder of Cornelius Merula no one had been appointed in his room, yet the rites had not been interrupted. But if so many years could elapse without a new creation, and without detriment to the cult, how much more easily could he absent himself for twelve months of proconsular authority? Personal rivalries had no doubt in former times led the pontiffs to prohibit his order from visiting the provinces: toâday, by the grace of Heaven, the chief pontiff was also the chief of men, beyond the reach of jealousy, rancour, or private inclinations. 3.59. Since various objections to the argument were raised by the augur Lentulus and others, it was determined, in the upshot, to wait for the verdict of the supreme pontiff himself. Tiberius postponed his inquiry into the legal standing of the flamen, but modified the ceremonies with which it had been resolved to celebrate the tribunician power of Drusus; criticizing specifically the unprecedented motion of Haterius and the gold lettering so repugt to Roman custom. A letter, too, from Drusus was read, which, though tuned to a modest key, left an impression of extreme arrogance. "So the world," men said, "had come to this, that even a mere boy, invested with such an honour, would not approach the divinities of Rome, set foot within the senate, or, at the least, take the auspices on his native soil. War, they must assume, or some remote quarter of the world detained him; though at that instant he was perambulating the lakes and beaches of Campania! Such was the initiation of the governor of the human race, these the first lessons derived from the paternal instruction! A grey-haired emperor might, if he pleased, recoil from the view of his fellow-citizens, and plead the fatigue of age and the labours he had accomplished: but, in the case of Drusus, what impediment could there be save pride? 3.61. The Ephesians were the first to appear. "Apollo and Diana," they stated, "were not, as commonly supposed, born at Delos. In Ephesus there was a river Cenchrius, with a grove Ortygia; where Latona, heavy-wombed and supporting herself by an olive-tree which remained to that day, gave birth to the heavenly twins. The grove had been hallowed by divine injunction; and there Apollo himself, after slaying the Cyclopes, had evaded the anger of Jove. Afterwards Father Liber, victor in the war, had pardoned the suppliant Amazons who had seated themselves at the altar. Then the sanctity of the temple had been enhanced, with the permission of Hercules, while he held the crown of Lydia; its privileges had not been diminished under the Persian empire; later, they had been preserved by the Macedonians â last by ourselves. 3.62. The Magnesians, who followed, rested their case on the rulings of Lucius Scipio and Lucius Sulla, who, after their defeats of Antiochus and Mithridates respectively, had honoured the loyalty and courage of Magnesia by making the shrine of Leucophryne Diana an inviolable refuge. Next, Aphrodisias and Stratonicea adduced a decree of the dictator Julius in return for their early services to his cause, together with a modern rescript of the deified Augustus, who praised the unchanging fidelity to the Roman nation with which they had sustained the Parthian inroad. Aphrodisias, however, was championing the cult of Venus; Stratonicea, that of Jove and Diana of the Crossways. The statement of Hierocaesarea went deeper into the past: the community owned a Persian Diana with a temple dedicated in the reign of Cyrus; and there were references to Perpenna, Isauricus, and many other commanders who had allowed the same sanctity not only to the temple but to the neighbourhood for two miles round. The Cypriotes followed with an appeal for three shrines â the oldest erected by their founder Aërias to the Paphian Venus; the second by his son Amathus to the Amathusian Venus; and a third by Teucer, exiled by the anger of his father Telamon, to Jove of Salamis. 4.12. However, while Tiberius on the Rostra was pronouncing the panegyric upon his son, the senate and people, from hypocrisy more than impulse, assumed the attitude and accents of mourning, and exulted in secret that the house of Germanicus was beginning again to flourish. This incipient popularity, together with Agrippina's failure to hide her maternal hopes, hastened its destruction. For Sejanus, when he saw the death of Drusus passing unrevenged upon the murders, unlamented by the nation, grew bolder in crime, and, since his first venture had prospered, began to revolve ways and means of eliminating the children of Germanicus, whose succession was a thing undoubted. To distribute poison among the three was impossible; for their custodians were patterns of fidelity, Agrippina's chastity impenetrable. He proceeded, therefore, to declaim against her contumacy, and, by playing upon Augusta's old animosity and Livia's recent sense of guilt, induced them to carry information to the Caesar that, proud of her fruitfulness and confident in the favour of the populace, she was turning a covetous eye to the throne. In addition, Livia, with the help of skilled calumniators â one of the chosen being Julius Postumus, intimate with her grandmother owing to his adulterous connection with Mutilia Prisca, and admirably suited to her own designs through Prisca's influence over Augusta â kept working for the total estrangement from her grandson's wife of an old woman, by nature anxious to maintain her power. Even Agrippina's nearest friends were suborned to infuriate her haughty temper by their pernicious gossip. 4.16. Nearly at the same date, the Caesar spoke on the need of choosing a flamen of Jupiter, to replace the late Servius Maluginensis, and of also passing new legislation. "Three patricians," he pointed out, "children of parents wedded 'by cake and spelt,' were nominated simultaneously; and on one of them the selection fell. The system was old-fashioned, nor was there now as formerly the requisite supply of candidates, since the habit of marrying by the ancient ritual had been dropped, or was retained in few families." â Here he offered several explanations of the fact, the principal one being the indifference of both sexes, though there was also a deliberate avoidance of the difficulties of the ceremony itself. â ". . . and since both the man obtaining this priesthood and the woman passing into the marital control of a flamen were automatically withdrawn from paternal jurisdiction. Consequently, a remedy must be applied either by a senatorial resolution or by special law, precisely as Augustus had modified several relics of the rough old world to suit the needs of the present." It was decided, then, after a discussion of the religious points, that no change should be made in the constitution of the flamenship; but a law was carried, that the flamen's wife, though under her husband's tutelage in respect of her sacred duties, should otherwise stand upon the same legal footing as any ordinary woman. Maluginensis' son was elected in the room of his father; and to enhance the dignity of the priests and increase their readiness to perform the ritual of the various cults, two million sesterces were voted to the Virgin Cornelia, who was being appointed to succeed Scantia; while Augusta, whenever she entered the theatre, was to take her place among the seats reserved for the Vestals. |
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