6 1 All this Tiberius knew; and, to repress the comments of the crowd, he reminded them in a manifesto that “many illustrious Romans had died for their country, but none had been honoured with such a fervour of regret: a compliment highly valued by himself and by all, if only moderation were observed. For the same conduct was not becoming to ordinary families or communities and to leaders of the state and to an imperial people. Mourning and the solace of tears had suited the first throes of their affliction; but now they must recall their minds to fortitude, as once the deified Julius at the loss of his only daughter, and the deified Augustus at the taking of his grandchildren, had thrust aside their anguish. There was no need to show by earlier instances how often the Roman people had borne unshaken the slaughter of armies, the death of generals, the complete annihilation of historic houses. Statesmen were mortal, the state eternal. Let them return, therefore, to their usual occupations and — as the Megalesian Games would soon be exhibited — resume even their pleasures!”
7 1 The period of mourning now closed; men went back to their advocations, 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 — the notorious poisoner, despatched to Rome, as I have said, by Gnaeus Sentius — 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.
8 1 Meanwhile, Piso, sending his son in advance to the capital with a message designed to pacify the emperor, bent his way to Drusus; whom he hoped to find not so much angered at a brother’s death as reconciled to himself by the suppression of a rival. To make a display of impartiality, Tiberius gave the young envoy a civil reception, and treated him with the liberality he was in the habit of showing to the cadets of noble families. To the father, Drusus’ answer was that, “if the current imputations were true, his own resentment must rank foremost of all; but he preferred to believe they were false and unfounded, and that Germanicus’ death involved the doom of no one.” The reply was given in public, all secrecy having been avoided; and no doubts were felt that the phrasing was dictated by Tiberius, when a youth, who had otherwise the simple and pliant character of his years, resorted for the nonce to the disingenuities of age.
9 1 After crossing the sea of Dalmatia, Piso left his vessels at Ancona, and, travelling through Picenum, then by the Flaminian Road, came up with a legion marching from Pannonia to Rome, to join later on the garrison in Africa: an incident which led to much gossip and discussion as to the manner in which he had kept showing himself to the soldiers on the march and by the wayside. From Narnia, either to avoid suspicion or because the plans of a frightened man are apt to be inconsistent, he sailed down the Nar, then down the Tiber, and added to the exasperation of the populace by bringing his vessel to shore at the mausoleum of the Caesars. It was a busy part of the day and of the river-side; yet he with a marching column of retainers, and Plancina with her escort of women, proceeded beaming on their way. There were other irritants also; among them, festal decorations upon his mansion looming above the forum; guests and a dinner; and, in that crowded quarter, full publicity for everything.
10 1 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.
11 1 In the interval, Drusus returned from Illyricum. The Fathers had decreed him an ovation at his entry, in return for the submission of Maroboduus and his achievements of the preceding summer; but he postponed the honour and made his way into the capital privately.
As his advocates the defendant now specified Lucius Arruntius, Publius Vinicius, Asinius Gallus, Marcellus Aeserninus and Sextus Pompeius. They declined on various pretexts, and Manius Lepidus, Lucius Piso, and Livineius Regulus came to his support. The whole nation was eagerly speculating upon the loyalty of Germanicus’ friends, the criminal’s grounds for confidence, the chances that Tiberius would be able to keep his sentiments effectively under lock and key. Never had the populace been more keenly on the alert: never had it shown more freedom of whispered criticism and suspicious silence towards the emperor.
12 1 On the day the senate met, the Caesar spoke with calculated moderation. “Piso,” he said, “had been his father’s lieutenant 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 — and it would call for vengeance, were the victim the meanest of mankind — 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: — 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 — and among foreigners — 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.”
13 1 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 e
stablished, 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,º Veranius, and Vitellius followed — 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 — in order that he might be put on his trial — defeat upon a stricken field.”
14 1 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-in-chief. 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.
15 1 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.
16 1 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:—”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.
17 1 Tiberius followed by absolving the younger Piso from the charge of civil war, — for “the orders came from a father, and a son could not have disobeyed,” — 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:—”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.
18 1 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 ave
nging 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.
19 1 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 — 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.
Complete Works of Tacitus (Delphi Classics) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 24) Page 57