44 1 Shortly afterwards, Drusus was despatched to Illyricum, in order to serve his apprenticeship to war and acquire the favour of the army. At the same time, Tiberius believed that the young prince, who was running riot among the extravagances of the capital, was better in camp, and that he himself would be all the safer with both his sons at the head of legions. The pretext, however, was a Suebian request for help against the Cherusci: for, now that the Romans had withdrawn and the foreign menace was removed, the tribes — obedient to the national custom, and embittered in this case by their rivalry in prestige — had turned their weapons against each other. The power of the clans and the prowess of their leaders were upon a level; but while his kingly title rendered Maroboduus unpopular with his countrymen, Arminius aroused enthusiasm as the champion of liberty.
45 1 The result was that not only the veteran soldiery of Arminius — the Cherusci and their confederates — took up the campaign, but even from the dominions of Maroboduus two Suebian tribes, the Semnones and Langobardi, revolted to his cause. This accession assured him the preponderance, had not Inguiomerus with a band of his retainers deserted to the enemy, for the sole reason that as an old man and an uncle he scorned to obey the youthful son of his brother. Hope ran high on both sides as the lines of battle drew up, no longer to the old German accompaniment of charges either desultory or executed by scattered parties: for their long campaigns against ourselves had accustomed them to follow their standards, to secure their main body by reserves, and to give attention to their generals’ orders. So, in this instance, Arminius on horseback passed in review the whole of his forces, and, as he came to the several divisions, pointed to the liberties they had recovered, the legions they had butchered, and the spoils and spears, torn from Roman dead, which many of them carried in their hands. Maroboduus, in contrast, was described as “the fugitive who, without one stricken field, had lain safe in the coverts of the Hercynian Forest and then sued for a treaty with gifts and embassies, a betrayer of his country, a satellite of the Caesar; whom it was their duty to expel with as little compunction as they felt when they slew Quintilius Varus. Let them only recall the series of their stricken fields! The issue of those, and the final ejection of the Romans showed plainly enough with whom had rested the mastery in the war!”
46 1 Nor could Maroboduus refrain from a panegyric upon himself and an invective against the enemy, but holding Inguiomarus by the hand, “There was but one person,” he declared, “in whom resided the whole glory of the Cherusci — by whose counsels had been won whatsoever success they had achieved! Arminius was a fool, a novice in affairs, who usurped another man’s fame, because by an act of perfidy he had entrapped three straggling legions and a commander who feared no fraud: a feat disastrous to Germany and disgraceful to its author, whose wife and child were even yet supporting their bondage. For himself, when he was attacked by twelve legions, with Tiberius at their head, he had kept the German honour unstained, and soon afterwards the combatants had parted on equal terms: nor could he regret that it was now in their power to choose with Rome either a war uncompromised or a bloodless peace!” Fired by the oratory, the armies were stimulated also by motives of their own, as the Cherusci and Langobardi were striking for ancient fame or recent liberty; their adversaries for the extension of a realm. No field ever witnessed a fiercer onset or a more ambiguous event; for on both sides the right wing was routed. A renewal of the conflict was expected, when Maroboduus shifted his camp to the hills. It was the sign of a beaten man; and stripped gradually of his forces by desertions, he fell back upon the Marcomani and sent a deputation to Tiberius asking assistance. The reply ran that “to invoke the Roman arms against the Cherusci was not the part of a man who had brought no help to Rome when she was herself engaged against the same enemy.” Drusus, however, as we have mentioned, was sent out to consolidate a peace.
47 1 In the same year, twelve important cities of Asia collapsed in an earthquake, the time being night, so that the havoc was the less foreseen and the more devastating. Even the usual resource in these catastrophes, a rush to open ground, was unavailing, as the fugitives were swallowed up in yawning chasms. Accounts are given of huge mountains sinking, of former plains seen heaved aloft, of fires flashing out amid the ruin. As the disaster fell heaviest on the Sardians, it brought them the largest measure of sympathy, the Caesar promising ten million sesterces, and remitting for five years their payments to the national and imperial exchequers. The Magnesians of Sipylus were ranked second in the extent of their losses and their indemnity. In the case of the Temnians, Philadelphenes, Aegeates, Apollonideans, the so-called Mostenians and Hyrcanian Macedonians, and the cities of Hierocaesarea, Myrina, Cyme, and Tmolus, it was decided to exempt them from tribute for the same term and to send a senatorial commissioner to view the state of affairs and administer relief. Since Asia was held by a consular governor, an ex-praetor — Marcus Ateius — was selected, so as to avoid the difficulties which might arise from the jealousy of two officials of similar standing.
48 1 The emperor supplemented his imposing benefaction on behalf of the state by an equally popular display of private liberality. The property of Aemilia Musa, a woman of means and intestate, which had been claimed as escheating to the imperial exchequer, he transferred to Aemilius Lepidus, in whose family she apparently belonged; and the inheritance of the wealthy Roman knight Pantuleius, though he was himself mentioned as part heir, he handed over to Marcus Servilius, on discovering that he had figured in an earlier and unsuspected testament. In both cases, he remarked before doing so, that high birth required the help of money. He entered upon no bequest unless he had earned it by his friendship: strangers, and persons who were at variance with others and consequently named the sovereign as their heir, he kept at a distance. But as he relieved the honourable poverty of the innocent, so he procured the removal, or accepted the resignation, of the following senators: — Vibidius Virro, Marius Nepos, Appius Appianus, Cornelius Sulla, and Quintus Vitellius; prodigals, beggared by their vices.
49 1 Nearly at the same time, he consecrated the temples, ruined by age or fire, the restoration of which had been undertaken by Augustus. They included a temple to Liber, Libera, and Ceres, close to the Circus Maximus, and vowed by Aulus Postumius, the dictator; another, on the same site, to Flora, founded by Lucius and Marcus Publicius in their aedileship, and a shrine of Janus, built in the Herb Market by Gaius Duilius, who first carried the Roman cause to success on sea and earned a naval triumph over the Carthaginians. The temple of Hope, vowed by Aulus Atilius in the same war, was dedicated by Germanicus.
50 1 Meanwhile, the law of treason was coming to its strength; and Appuleia Varilla, the niece of Augustus’ sister, was summoned by an informer to answer a charge under the statute, on the ground that she had insulted the deified Augustus, as well as Tiberius and his mother, by her scandalous conversations, and had sullied her connection with the Caesar by the crime of adultery. The adultery, it was decided, was sufficiently covered by the Julian Law; and as to the charge of treason, the emperor requested that a distinction should be drawn, conviction to follow, should she have said anything tantamount to sacrilege against Augustus: remarks levelled at himself he did not wish to be made the subject of inquiry. To the consul’s question: “What was his opinion of the reprehensible statements she was alleged to have made about his mother” he gave no answer; but at the next meeting of the senate he asked, in her name also, that no one should be held legally accountable for words uttered against her in any circumstances whatever. After freeing Appuleius from the operation of the statute, he deprecated the heavier penalty for adultery, and suggested that in accordance with the old-world precedents she might be handed to her relatives and removed to a point beyond the two-hundredth milestone. Her lover, Manlius, was banned from residence in Italy or Africa.
51 1 The appointment of a praetor to replace Vipstanus Gallus, cut off by death, gave rise to dispute. Germanicus and Drusus — for they were still at Rome — supporte
d Haterius Agrippa, a kinsman of Germanicus. On the other hand, many insisted that the deciding factor should be the number of a candidate’s children — legally the correct position. Tiberius was overjoyed to see the senate divided between his sons and the laws. The law was certainly defeated, but not immediately and by a few votes only, — the mode in which laws were defeated even in days when laws had force!
52 1 In the course of the same year, war broke out in Africa; where the enemy was commanded by Tacfarinas. By nationality a Numidian, who had served as an auxiliary in the Roman camp and then deserted, he began by recruiting gangs of vagrants, accustomed to robbery, for the purposes of plunder and of rapine: then he marshalled them into a body in the military style by companies and troops; finally, he was recognized as the head, not of a chaotic horde, but of the Musulamian people. That powerful tribe, bordering on the solitudes of Africa, and even then innocent of city life, took up arms and drew the adjacent Moors into the conflict. They, too, had their leader, Mazippa; and the confederate army was so divided that Tacfarinas could retain in camp a picked corps, equipped on the Roman model, and there inure it to discipline and obedience, while Mazippa, with a light-armed band, disseminated fire, slaughter, and terror. They had forced the Cinithians, by no means a negligible tribe, to join them, when Furius Camillus, proconsul of Africa, combined his legion with the whole of the auxiliaries under the standards, and led them towards the enemy — a modest array in view of the multitude of Numidians and Moors; yet the one thing he was anxious above all to avoid was that they should take fright and evade a trial of arms. The hope of victory, however, lured them into defeat. The legion, then, was posted in the centre; the light cohorts and two squadrons of horse on the wings. Nor did Tacfarinas decline the challenge: the Numidians were routed; and after many years the Furian name won martial honours. For, since the days of Rome’s great recoverer and his son, the laurels of high command had passed to other houses; and the Camillus with whom we are here concerned was not regarded as a soldier. Tiberius, therefore, was the readier to laud his exploits before the senate; while the Fathers voted him the insignia of triumph — to the unassuming Camillus an innocuous compliment.
53 1 The following year found Tiberius consul for a third time; Germanicus, for a second. The latter, however, entered upon that office in the Achaian town of Nicopolis, which he had reached by skirting the Illyrian coast after a visit to his brother Drusus, then resident in Dalmatia: the passage had been stormy both in the Adriatic and, later, in the Ionian Sea. He spent a few days, therefore, in refitting the fleet; while at the same time, evoking the memory of his ancestors, he viewed the gulf immortalized by the victory of Actium, together with the spoils which Augustus had consecrated, and the camp of Antony. For Augustus, as I have said, was his great-uncle, Antony his grandfather; and before his eyes lay the whole great picture of disaster and of triumph. — He next arrived at Athens; where, in deference to our treaty with an allied and time-honoured city, he made use of one lictor alone. The Greeks received him with most elaborate compliments, and, in order to temper adulation with dignity, paraded the ancient doings and sayings of their countrymen.
54 1 From Athens he visited Euboea, and crossed over to Lesbos; where Agrippina, in her last confinement, gave birth to Julia. Entering the outskirts of Asia, and the Thracian towns of Perinthus and Byzantium, he then struck through the straits of the Bosphorus and the mouth of the Euxine, eager to make the acquaintance of those ancient and storied regions, though simultaneously he brought relief to provinces outworn by internecine feud or official tyranny. On the return journey, he made an effort to visit the Samothracian Mysteries, but was met by northerly winds, and failed to make the shore. So, after an excursion to Troy and those venerable remains which attest the mutability of fortune and the origin of Rome, he skirted the Asian coast once more, and anchored off Colophon, in order to consult the oracle of the Clarian Apollo. Here it is not a prophetess, as at Delphi, but a male priest, chosen out of a restricted number of families, and in most cases imported from Miletus, who hears the number and the names of the consultants, but no more, then descends into a cavern, swallows a draught of water from a mysterious spring, and — though ignorant generally of writing and of metre — delivers his response in set verses dealing with the subject each inquirer had in mind. Rumour said that he had predicted to Germanicus his hastening fate, though in the equivocal terms which oracles affect.
55 1 Meanwhile Gnaeus Piso, in haste to embark upon his schemes, first alarmed the community of Athens by a tempestuous entry, then assailed them in a virulent speech, which included an indirect attack on Germanicus for “compromising the dignity of the Roman name by his exaggerated civilities, not to the Athenians (whose repeated disasters had extinguished the breed) but to the present cosmopolitan rabble. For these were the men who had leagued themselves with Mithridates against Sulla, with Antony against the deified Augustus!” He upbraided them even with their ancient history; their ill-starred outbreaks against Macedon and their violence towards their own countrymen. Private resentment, also, embittered him against the town, as the authorities refused to give up at his request a certain Theophilus, whom the verdict of the Areopagus had declared guilty of forgery. After this, quick sailing by a short route through the Cyclades brought him up with Germanicus at Rhodes. The prince was aware of the invectives with which he had been assailed; yet he behaved with such mildness that, when a rising storm swept Piso toward the rock-bound coast, and the destruction of his foe could have been referred to misadventure, he sent warships to help in extricating him from his predicament. Even so, Piso was not mollified; and, after reluctantly submitting to the loss of a single day, he left Germanicus and completed the journey first. Then, the moment he reached Syria and the legions, by bounties and by bribery, by attentions to the humblest private, by dismissals of the veteran centurions and the stricter commanding officers, whom he replaced by dependants of his own or by men of the worst character, by permitting indolence in the camp, licence in the towns, and in the country a vagrant and riotous soldiery, he carried corruption to such a pitch that in the language of the rabble he was known as the Father of the Legions. Nor could Plancina contain herself within the limits of female decorum: she attended cavalry exercises and infantry manoeuvres; she flung her gibes at Agrippina or Germanicus; some even of the loyal troops being ready to yield her a disloyal obedience; for a whispered rumour was gaining ground that these doings were not unacceptable to the emperor. The state of affairs was known to Germanicus, but his more immediate anxiety was to reach Armenia first.
56 1 That country, from the earliest period, has owned a national character and a geographical situation of equal ambiguity, since with a wide extent of frontier conterminous with our own provinces, it stretches inland right up to Media; so that the Armenians lie interposed between two vast empires, with which, as they detest Rome and envy the Parthian, they are too frequently at variance. At the moment they lacked a king, owing to the removal of Vonones, but the national sentiment leaned to Zeno, a son of the Pontic sovereign Polemo: for the prince, an imitator from earliest infancy of Armenian institutions and dress, had endeared himself equally to the higher and the lower orders by his affection for the chase, the banquet, and the other favourite pastimes of barbarians. Accordingly, in the town of Artaxata, before the consenting nobles and a great concourse of the people, Germanicus placed on his head the emblem of royalty. All save the Romans did homage and acclaimed King Artaxias — an appellation suggested by the name of the city. On the other hand, Cappadocia, reduced to the rank of a province, received Quintus Veranius as governor; and, to encourage hope in the mildness of Roman sway, a certain number of the royal tributes were diminished. Quintus Servaeus was appointed to Commagene, now for the first time transferred to praetorian jurisdiction.
57 1 Complete and happy as was his adjustment of the allies’ affairs, it gave Germanicus no satisfaction, in view of the insolence of Piso; who, when ordered to conduct part of the legions int
o Armenia either in his own person or in that of his son, had ignored both alternatives. In Cyrrus, the winter-quarters of the tenth legion, they met at last, their features schooled to exclude, in Piso’s case, all evidence of alarm; in the Caesar’s, all suggestion of a threat. He was, in fact, as I have stated, indulgent to a fault. But his friends had the craft to inflame his resentments: they aggravated truths, accumulated falsehoods, levelled a miscellany of charges at Piso, Plancina, and their sons. Finally, in the presence of a few intimates, the prince opened the conversation in the key always struck by dissembled anger; Piso returned a defiant apology, and they parted in open hatred. From now onward, Piso’s appearances at the tribunal of Germanicus were rare; and, on the occasions when he took his seat, it was with the sullen air of undisguised opposition. Again he was heard to remark in a banquet at the Nabataean court, when massive golden crowns were offered to Germanicus and Agrippina, and lighter specimens to Piso and the rest, that this was a dinner given to the son, not of a Parthian king, but of a Roman prince. At the same time, he tossed his crown aside, and added a diatribe on luxury, which Germanicus, in spite of its bitterness, contrived to tolerate.
Complete Works of Tacitus (Delphi Classics) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 24) Page 54