Piso, in the meantime, was overtaken at the isle of Cos by a message that Germanicus was sped. He received it with transport. Victims were immolated, temples visited; and, while his own joy knew no bounds, it was overshadowed by the insolence of Plancina, who had been in mourning for the loss of a sister, and now changed for the first time into the garb of joy.
76 1 Centurions came streaming in with their advice:—”The legions were eager to declare for him — he must return to the province illegally wrested from him and now masterless.” At a council, then, to decide what action should be taken, his son, Marcus Piso, held that he must hurry to the capital:—”So far, he had been guilty of nothing that was past expiation; nor were feeble suspicions or unsubstantial rumours a matter for alarm. His difference with Germanicus might perhaps earn him a measure of unpopularity, but not punishment; while the forfeiture of his province had satisfied his private enemies. To go back was to embark on a civil war, if Sentius resisted; nor would the centurions and private soldiers stand fast in his cause, since with them the yet recent memory of their commander, and their deep-seated affection for the Caesars, outweighed all else.”
77 1 Domitius Celer, one of his most intimate associates, argued upon the other side:—”He had better profit by the occasion: not Sentius, but Piso, had been created governor of Syria: to him had been entrusted the symbols of magistracy, the praetorian jurisdiction, — ay, and the legions. If hostilities threatened, who could more justly take the field than a man who had received the powers of a legate, in addition to private instructions? Besides, rumours ought to be allowed an interval in which to grow stale: innocence too often was unable to face the first blast of unpopularity. But if he kept the army and augmented his powers, chance would give a favourable turn to much that could not at present be foreseen. Or,” he continued, “are we racing to make the harbour at the same moment as the ashes of Germanicus, so that with the first breath of scandal you may be swept to your doom, unheard and undefended, by a sobbing wife and a fatuous crowd? You have the complicity of Augusta, the favour of the Caesar, — but only in private; and none more ostentatiously bewail the fate of Germanicus than they who most rejoice at it.”
78 1 There was no great difficulty in converting Piso, with his taste for audacity, to this opinion; and, in a letter forwarded to Tiberius, he accused Germanicus of luxury and arrogance: as for himself, “he had been expelled so as to leave scope for a revolution, but had now gone to resume charge of the army, with the same loyalty as he had shown when he was at its head.” At the same time, he placed Domitius on a warship, with orders to avoid the coasting-route and to make straight for Syria, past the islands and through the high seas. As deserters flocked in, he organized them by maniples; armed the camp-followers; then, crossing with his fleet to the mainland, intercepted a body of recruits bound for Syria, and wrote to the Cilician kinglets to support him with auxiliaries — the young Piso assisting actively in the preparations for war, though he had protested against engaging in it.
79 1 As they were skirting, then, the coast of Lycia and Pamphylia, they were met by the squadron convoying Agrippina. On each side the hostility was such that at first they prepared for action: then, owing to their mutual fears, the affair went no further than high words; in the course of which Vibius Marsus summoned Piso to return to Rome and enter his defence. He gave a sarcastic answer that he would be there when the praetor with cognizance of poisoning cases had notified a date to the accusers and accused.
Meanwhile, Domitius had landed at the Syrian town of Laodicea. He was making for the winter quarters of the sixth legion, which he thought the best adapted for his revolutionary designs, when he was forestalled by the commanding officer, Pacuvius. Sentius notified Piso of the incident by letter, and warned him to make no attempt upon the camp by his agents or upon the province by his arms. He then collected the men whom he knew to be attached to the memory of Germanicus, — or, at least, opposed to his enemies, — impressed upon them the greatness of the emperor and the fact that this was an armed attack on the state, then took the field at the head of a powerful force ready for battle.
80 1 Piso, too, though his enterprise was developing awkwardly, adopted the safest course in the circumstances by seizing an extremely strong post in Cilicia, named Celenderis. For by an admixture of the deserters, the recently intercepted recruits, and his own and Plancina’s slaves, he had arranged the Cilician auxiliaries, sent by the petty kings, in what was numerically a legion. He called them to witness that “he, the representative of the Caesar, was being excluded from the province which the Caesar had given, not by the legions — it was at their invitation he came! — but by Sentius, who was veiling his private hatred under a tissue of calumnies. They must take their stand in line of battle; the soldiers would never strike, when they had seen Piso; whom once they called Father; who, if the verdict went by justice, was the superior; and, if by arms, not wholly powerless.” He then deployed his maniples in front of the fortress lines on a high and precipitous hill (the rest of the position is secured by the sea): confronting them stood the veterans, drawn up in centuries and with reserves. On the one side was a grim soldiery; on the other, a position not less grim, — but no courage, no hope, not even weapons, apart from rustic spears or makeshifts improvised to meet the sudden demand. When the collision came, doubt only lasted until the Roman cohorts scrambled up to level ground: the Cilicians took to their heels and barricaded themselves in the fortress.
81 1 In the meantime, Piso attempted, without effect, to attack the fleet, which was waiting at some little distance. On his return, he took his station on the walls; and, now beating his breast, now summoning particular soldiers by name and weighting the call with a bribe, endeavoured to create a mutiny. He had, indeed, produced enough impression for one ensign of the sixth legion to come over with his standard, when Sentius ordered the cornets and trumpets to sound, the materials for a mound to be collected, ladders raised; the readiest to go forward to the escalade, others to discharge spears, stones, and firebrands, from the military engines. At last Piso’s obstinacy was broken, and he applied for permission to hand over his arms and remain in the fort while the Caesar’s award of the Syrian governorship was being ascertained. The terms were not accepted, and the only concessions made were a grant of ships and a safe-conduct to the capital.
82 1 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:—”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 — 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.
83 1 Affection and ingenuity vied in discovering and decreeing honours to Ger
manicus: his name was to be chanted in the Saliar Hymn; curule chairs surmounted by oaken crowns were to be set for him wherever the Augustal priests had right of place; his effigy in ivory was to lead the procession at the Circus Games, and no flamen or augur, unless of the Julian house, was to be created in his room. Arches were added, at Rome, on the Rhine bank, and on the Syrian mountain of Amanus, with an inscription recording his achievements and the fact that he had died for his country. There was to be a sepulchre in Antioch, where he had been cremated; a funeral monument in Epidaphne, the suburb in which he had breathed his last. His statues, and the localities in which his cult was to be practised, it would be difficult to enumerate. When it was proposed to give him a gold medallion, as remarkable for the size as for the material, among the portraits of the classic orators, Tiberius declared that he would dedicate one himself “of the customary type, and in keeping with the rest: for eloquence was not measured by fortune, and its distinction enough if he ranked with the old masters.” The equestrian order renamed the so-called “junior section” in their part of the theatre after Germanicus, and ruled that on the fifteenth of July the cavalcade should ride behind his portrait. Many of these compliments remain: others were discontinued immediately, or have lapsed with the years.
84 1 While the public mourning was still fresh, Germanicus’ sister, Livia, who had married Drusus, was delivered of twin sons. The event, a rare felicity even in modest households, affected the emperor with so much pleasure that he could not refrain from boasting to the Fathers that never before had twins been born to a Roman of the same eminence: for he converted everything, accidents included, into material for self-praise. To the people, however, coming when it did, even this incident was a regret; as though the increase in Drusus’ family was a further misfortune for the house of Germanicus.
85 1 In the same year, bounds were set to female profligacy by stringent resolutions of the senate; and it was laid down that no woman should trade in her body, if her father, grandfather, or husband had been a Roman knight. For Vistilia, the daughter of a praetorian family, had advertised her venality on the aediles’ list — the normal procedure among our ancestors, who imagined the unchaste to be sufficiently punished by the avowal of their infamy. Her husband, Titidius Labeo, was also required to explain why, in view of his wife’s manifest guilt, he had not invoked the penalty of the law. As he pleaded that sixty days, not yet elapsed, were allowed for deliberation, it was thought enough to pass sentence on Vistilia, who was removed to the island of Seriphos. — Another debate dealt with the proscription of the Egyptian and Jewish rites, and a senatorial edict directed that four thousand descendants of enfranchised slaves, tainted with that superstition and suitable in point of age, were to be shipped to Sardinia and there employed in suppressing brigandage: “if they succumbed to the pestilential climate, it was a cheap loss.” The rest had orders to leave Italy, unless they had renounced their impious ceremonial by a given date.
86 1 The emperor then moved for the appointment of a Virgin to replace Occia, who for fifty-seven years had presided over the rites of Vesta with unblemished purity: Fonteius Agrippa and Domitius Pollio he thanked for the public-spirited rivalry which had led them to proffer their own daughters. Pollio’s child was preferred, for no reason save that her mother was still living with the same husband, while Agrippa’s divorce had impaired the credit of his house. As a solatium to the rejected candidate, the Caesar presented her with a dowry of a million sesterces.
87 1 As the commons protested against the appalling dearness of corn, he fixed a definite price to be paid by the buyer, and himself guaranteed the seller a subsidy of two sesterces the peck. Yet he would not on that score accept the title “Father of his Country,” which had indeed been offered previously; and he administered a severe reprimand to those who had termed his occupations “divine,” and himself “Lord.” The speaker, consequently, had to walk a strait and slippery road under a prince who feared liberty and detested flattery.
88 1 I find from contemporary authors, who were members of the senate, that a letter was read in the curia from the Chattan chief Adgandestrius, promising the death of Arminius, if poison were sent to do the work; to which the reply went back that “it was not by treason nor in the dark but openly and in arms that the Roman people took vengeance on their foes”: a high saying intended to place Tiberius on a level with the old commanders who prohibited, and disclosed, the offer to poison King Pyrrhus. Arminius himself, encouraged by the gradual retirement of the Romans and the expulsion of Maroboduus, began to aim at kingship, and found himself in conflict with the independent temper of his countrymen. He was attacked by arms, and, while defending himself with chequered results, fell by the treachery of his relatives. Undoubtedly the liberator of Germany; a man who, not in its infancy as captains and kings before him, but in the high noon of its sovereignty, threw down the challenge to the Roman nation, in battle with ambiguous results, in war without defeat; he completed thirty-seven years of life, twelve of power, and to this day is sung in tribal lays, though he is an unknown being to Greek historians, who admire only the history of Greece, and receives less than his due from us of Rome, who glorify the ancient days and show little concern for our own.
BOOK III
1 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.
2 1 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 1 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 st
riking 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 — of a grandmother and uncle detained at home in loyalty to the example of a mother.
4 1 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—”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—”and might they survive their persecutors!”
5 1 There were those who missed the pageantry of a state-funeral and compared the elaborate tributes rendered by Augustus to Germanicus’ father, Drusus:—”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 — 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?”
Complete Works of Tacitus (Delphi Classics) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 24) Page 56