Complete Works of Tacitus (Delphi Classics) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 24)

by Publius Cornelius Tacitus

  20 1 In the same year, Tacfarinas — whose defeat by Camillus in the previous summer I have already mentioned — resumed hostilities in Africa: at first, by desultory raids, too speedy for reprisals; then, by the destruction of villages and by plunder on a larger scale. Finally, he invested a Roman cohort not far from the river Pagyda. The position was commanded by Decrius, who, quick in action and experienced in war, regarded the siege as a disgrace. After an address to the men, he drew up his lines in front of the encampment so as to offer battle in the open. As the cohort broke at the first onset, he darted eagerly among the missiles, to intercept the fugitives, cursing the standard-bearers who could see Roman soldiers turn their backs to a horde of undrilled men or deserters. At the same time, he turned his wounded breast and his face — with one eye pierced — to confront the enemy, and continued to fight until he dropped forsaken by his troop.

  21 1 When the news reached Lucius Apronius (the successor of Camillus), perturbed more by the disgrace of his own troops than by the success of the enemy, he resorted to a measure rare in that period and reminiscent of an older world, drawing by lot and flogging to death every tenth man in the dishonoured cohort. And so effective was the severity that, when the same forces of Tacfarinas assaulted a stronghold named Thala, they were routed by a company of veterans not more than five hundred in number. During the engagement a private soldier, Helvius Rufus, earned the distinction of saving a Roman life, and was presented by Apronius with the collar and spear: the civic crown was added by the emperor; who regretted, more in sorrow than in anger, that the proconsul had not exercised his power to award this further honour. As the Numidians had both lost heart and disdained sieges, Tacfarinas fell back on guerilla warfare, yielding ground when the enemy became pressing, and then returning to harass the rear. Indeed, so long as the African adhered to this strategy, he befooled with impunity the ineffective and footsore Roman. But when he deviated to the coastal district and encumbered himself with a train of booty which kept him near a fixed encampment, Apronius Caesianus, marching at his father’s order with the cavalry and auxiliary cohorts reinforced by the most mobile of the legionaries, fought a successful engagement and chased the Numidians into the desert.

  22 1 At Rome, in the meantime, Lepida, who, over and above the distinction of the Aemilian family, owned Sulla and Pompey for great-grandsires, was accused of feigning to be a mother by Publius Quirinius, a rich man and childless. There were complementary charges of adulteries, of poisonings, and of inquiries made through the astrologers with reference to the Caesarian house. The defence was in the hands of her brother, Manius Lepidus. Despite her infamy and her guilt, Quirinius, by persisting in his malignity after divorcing her, had gained her a measure of sympathy. It is not easy to penetrate the emperor’s sentiments during this trial: so adroitly did he invert and confuse the symptoms of anger and of mercy. He began by requesting the senate not to deal with the charges of treason; then he lured the former consul, Marcus Servilius, with a number of other witnesses, into stating the very facts he had apparently wished to have suppressed. Lepida’s slaves, again, were being held in military custody; he transferred them to the consuls, and would not allow them to be questioned under torture upon the issues concerning his own family. Similarly, he exempted Drusus, who was consul designate, from speaking first to the question. By some this was read as a concession relieving the rest of the members from the need of assenting: others took it to mark a sinister purpose on the ground that he would have ceded nothing save the duty of condemning.

  23 1 In the course of the Games, which had interrupted the trial, Lepida entered the theatre with a number of women of rank; and there, weeping, wailing, invoking her ancestors and Pompey himself, whom that edifice commemorated, whose statues were standing before their eyes, she excited so much sympathy that the crowd burst into tears, with a fierce and ominous outcry against Quirinius, to whose doting years, barren bed, and petty family they were betraying a woman once destined for the bride of Lucius Caesar and the daughter-in-law of the deified Augustus. Then, with the torture of her slaves, came the revelation of her crimes; and the motion of Rubellius Blandus, who pressed for her formal outlawry, was carried. Drusus sided with him, though others had proposed more lenient measures. Later, as a concession to Scaurus, who had a son by her, it was decided not to confiscate her property. And now at last Tiberius disclosed that he had ascertained from Quirinius’ own slaves that Lepida had attempted their master’s life by poison.

  24 1 For the disasters of the great houses (for at no great distance of time Piso had been lost to the Calpurnii and Lepida to the Aemilii) there was some consolation in the return of Decimus Silanus to the Junian family. His mischance deserves a brief retrospect. Fortune, staunch to the deified Augustus in his public life, was less propitious to him at home, owing to the incontinence of his daughter and granddaughter, whom he expelled from the capital while penalizing their adulterers by death or banishment. For designating as he did the besetting sin of both the sexes by the harsh appellations of sacrilege and treason, he overstepped both the mild penalties of an earlier day and those of his own laws. But the fate of other delinquents I shall record together with the general history of that age, should I achieve the task I have set before me and be spared for yet other themes. Decimus Silanus, the lawless lover of Augustus’ granddaughter, though subjected to no harsher penalty than forfeiture of the imperial friendship, realized that the implication was exile; nor was it until the accession of Tiberius that he ventured to appeal to the senate and sovereign through his influential brother, Marcus Silanus, whose high descent and eloquence gave him a commanding position. Even so, while Silanus was expressing his gratitude before the senate, Tiberius replied that “he also was glad that his brother had returned from his distant pilgrimage: he had an indefeasible right to do so, as he had been exiled neither by resolution of the senate nor by form of law. At the same time, he retained his father’s objections to him intact; and the repatriation of Silanus had not cancelled the wishes of Augustus.” Accordingly he resided for the future in Rome, but without holding office.

  25 1 A motion was then introduced to qualify the terms of the Lex Papia Poppaea. This law, complementary to the Julian rogations, had been passed by Augustus in his later years, in order to sharpen the penalties of celibacy and to increase the resources of the exchequer. It failed, however, to make marriage and the family popular — childlessness remained the vogue. On the other hand, there was an ever-increasing multitude of persons liable to prosecution, since every household was threatened with subversion by the arts of the informers; and where the country once suffered from its vices, it was now in peril from its laws. This circumstance suggests that I should discuss more deeply the origin of legislation and the processes which have resulted in the countless and complex statutes of to-day.

  26 1 Primeval man, untouched as yet by criminal passion, lived his life without reproach or guilt, and, consequently, without penalty or coercion: rewards were needless when good was sought instinctively, and he who coveted nothing unsanctioned by custom had to be withheld from nothing by a threat. But when equality began to be outworn, and ambition and violence gained ground in place of modesty and self-effacement, there came a crop of despotisms, which with many nations has remained perennial. A few communities, either from the outset or after a surfeit of kings, decided for government by laws. The earliest specimens were the artless creations of simple minds, the most famous being those drawn up in Crete by Minos, in Sparta by Lycurgus, and in Athens by Solon — the last already more recondite and more numerous. In our own case, after the absolute sway of Romulus, Numa imposed on his people the bonds of religion and a code dictated by Heaven. Other discoveries were due to Tullus and Ancus. But, foremost of all, Servius Tullius became an ordainer of laws, to which kings themselves were to owe obedience.

  27 Upon the expulsion of Tarquin, the commons, to check senatorial factions, framed a large number of regulations for the protection of their libert
ies or the establishment of concord; the Decemvirs came into being; and, by incorporating the best features of the foreign constitutions, the Twelve Tables were assembled, the final instance of equitable legislation. For succeeding laws, though occasionally suggested by a crime and aimed at the criminal, were more often carried by brute force in consequence of class-dissension — to open the way to an unconceded office, to banish a patriot, or to consummate some other perverted end. Hence our demagogues: our Gracchi and Saturnini, and on the other side a Drusus bidding as high in the senate’s name; while the provincials were alternately bribed with hopes and cheated with tribunician vetoes. Not even the Italian war, soon replaced by the Civil war, could interrupt the flow of self-contradictory legislation; until Sulla, in his dictatorship, by abolishing or inverting the older statutes and adding more of his own, brought the process to a standstill, but not for long. The calm was immediately broken by the Rogations of Lepidus, and shortly afterwards the tribunes were repossessed of their licence to disturb the nation as they pleased. And now bills began to pass, not only of national but of purely individual application, and when the state was most corrupt, laws were most abundant.

  28 1 Then came Pompey’s third consulate. But this chosen reformer of society, operating with remedies more disastrous than the abuses, this maker and breaker of his own enactments, lost by the sword what he was holding by the sword. The followed twenty crowded years of discord, during which law and custom ceased to exist: villainy was immune, decency not rarely a sentence of death. At last, in his sixth consulate, Augustus Caesar, feeling his power secure, cancelled the behests of his triumvirate, and presented us with laws to serve our needs in peace and under a prince. Thenceforward the fetters were tightened: sentries were set over us and, under the Papia-Poppaean law, lured on by rewards; so that, if a man shirked the privileges of paternity, the state, as universal parent, might step into the vacant inheritance. But they pressed their activities too far: the capital, Italy, every corner of the Roman world, had suffered from their attacks, and the positions of many had been wholly ruined. Indeed, a reign of terror was threatened, when Tiberius, for the fixing of a remedy, chose by lot five former consuls, five former praetors, and an equal number of ordinary senators: a body which, by untying many of the legal knots, gave for the time a measure of relief.

  29 1 About the same date, he commended Germanicus’ son Nero, who had now entered on man’s estate, to the good offices of the Fathers, and taxed the gravity of his audience by asking them to relieve him from the duty of serving on the Vigintivirate and to allow his candidature for the quaestorship five years before the legal age. His plea was that the same concessions had been voted to himself and his brother at the instance of Augustus. But even then, I should imagine, there must have been some who secretly scoffed at these princely petitions; and yet those were the early days of the Caesarian domination, early custom was more in the eyes of men, and the relationship of a stepfather and his stepsons is a slighter thing than that of a grandfather and a grandchild. Nero was granted a pontificate in addition, and on the day of his first entry into the Forum, a largess was distributed to the lower orders, who were overjoyed to see a scion of Germanicus arrived already at maturity. Their delight was soon increased by his marriage with Drusus’ daughter, Julia; but the satisfaction expressed at these events was balanced by a dislike for the choice of Sejanus as the future father-in-law of the son of Claudius. The impression was that the emperor had sullied the dignity of his house, while needlessly exalting Sejanus, who even then was suspected of more than legitimate ambitions.

  30 1 At the close of the year, two famous Romans gave up the ghost, Lucius Volusius and Sallustius Crispus. Volusius belonged to an old family which, none the less, had never advanced beyond the praetorship. He himself enriched it with the consulate, and, besides discharging the duties of the censorship in the selection of the equestrian decuries, became the first accumulator of the wealth which raised the family fortunes to such unmeasured heights. Crispus, a knight by extraction, was the grandson of a sister of Gaius Sallustius, the brilliant Roman historian, who adopted him into his family and name. Thus for him the avenue to the great offices lay clear; but, choosing to emulate Maecenas, without holding senatorial rank he outstripped in influence many who had won a triumph or the consulate; while by his elegancy and refinements he was sundered from the old Roman school, and in the ample and generous scale of his establishment approached extravagance. Yet under it all lay a mental energy, equal to gigantic tasks, and all the more active from the display he made of somnolence and apathy. Hence, next to Maecenas, while Maecenas lived, and later next to none, he it was who sustained the burden of the secrets of emperors. He was privy to the killing of Agrippa Postumus; but with advancing years he retained more the semblance than the reality of his sovereign’s friendship. The same lot had fallen to Maecenas also, — whether influence, rarely perpetual, dies a natural death, or there comes a satiety, sometimes to the monarch who had no more to give, sometimes to the favourite with no more to crave.

  31 1 Now came the fourth consulate of Tiberius and the second of Drusus — a noticeable association of father and son. For, three years earlier, the same official partnership of Germanicus and Tiberius had been neither grateful to the uncle nor knit so closely by the ties of blood.

  In the beginning of the year, Tiberius, with the professed object of restoring his health, withdrew to Campania; either to train himself step by step for a protracted and continuous absence, or to cause Drusus, through the retirement of his father, to fulfil his consular duties alone. It chanced, indeed, that a trivial affair which developed into a serious conflict supplied the prince with the material of popularity. Domitius Corbulo, who had held the praetorship, complained to the senate that the young aristocrat, Lucius Sulla, had not given up his seat to him at a gladiatorial exhibition. On Corbulo’s side were his age, national custom, and the partialities of the older men; Mamercus Scaurus, Lucius Arruntius, and other of Sulla’s connections were active in the opposite cause. There was a sharp exchange of speeches, with references to the example of our ancestors, who had censured youthful irreverence in grave decrees; until Drusus made a speech calculated to ease the tension, and Corbulo was accorded satisfaction by Mamercus, who was at once the uncle of Sulla, his stepfather, and the most fluent orator of that generation.

  It was Corbulo, again, who raised the outcry that numbers of roads throughout Italy were broken and impracticable owing to the rascality of the contractors and the remissness of the magistrates. He readily undertook to carry out the prosecution; but the results were considered to be less a benefit to the community than a catastrophe to the many whose property and repute suffered from the ruthless condemnations and forced sales.

  32 1 Not long afterwards, a letter from Tiberius apprized the senate that Africa had been disturbed once more by an inroad of Tacfarinas, and that the Fathers were to use their judgment in choosing a proconsul, with military experience, and of a physique adequate to the campaign. Sextus Pompeius improved the occasion by airing his hatred of Marcus Lepidus, whom he attacked as a spiritless and poverty-stricken degenerate, who should consequently be debarred from the Asiatic province as well. The senate disapproved: Lepidus, it held, was gentle rather than cowardly; and, as his patrimony was embarrassed, an honoured name carried without reproach was a title of honour, not of disgrace. To Asia accordingly he went; and, as for Africa, it was decided to leave the emperor to choose a man for the post.

  33 1 In the course of the debate, Caecina Severus moved that no magistrate, who had been allotted a province, should be accompanied by his wife. He explained beforehand at some length that “he had a consort after his own heart, who had borne him six children: yet he had conformed in private to the rule he was proposing for the public; and, although he had served his forty campaigns in one province or other, she had always been kept within the boundaries of Italy. There was point in the old regulation which prohibited the dragging of women to the provinces
or foreign countries: in a retinue of ladies there were elements apt, by luxury or timidity, to retard the business of peace or war and to transmute a Roman march into something resembling an Eastern procession. Weakness and a lack of endurance were not the only failings of the sex: give them scope, and they turned hard, intriguing, ambitious. They paraded among the soldiers; they had the centurions at beck and call. Recently a woman had presided at the exercises of the cohorts and the manoeuvres of the legions. Let his audience reflect that, whenever a magistrate was on trial for malversation, the majority of the charges were levelled against his wife. It was to the wife that the basest of the provincials at once attached themselves; it was the wife who took in hand and transacted business. There were two potentates to salute in the streets; two government-houses; and the more headstrong and autocratic orders came from the women, who, once held in curb by the Oppian and other laws, had now cast their chains and ruled supreme in the home, the courts, and by now the army itself.”

  34 1 A few members listened to the speech with approval: most interrupted with protests that neither was there a motion on the subject nor was Caecina a competent censor in a question of such importance. He was presently answered by Valerius Messalinus, a son of Messala, in whom there resided some echo of his father’s eloquence:—”Much of the old-world harshness had been improved and softened; for Rome was no longer environed with wars, nor were the provinces hostile. A few allowances were now made to the needs of women; but not such as to embarrass even the establishment of their consorts, far less our allies: everything else the wife shared with her husband, and in peace the arrangement created no difficulties. Certainly, he who set about a war must gird up his loins; but, when he returned after his labour, what consolations more legitimate than those of his helpmeet? — But a few women had lapsed into intrigue or avarice. — Well, were not too many of the magistrates themselves vulnerable to temptation in more shapes than one? Yet governors still went out to governorships! — Husbands had often been corrupted by the depravity of their wives. — And was every single man, then, incorruptible? The Oppian laws in an earlier day were sanctioned because the circumstances of the commonwealth so demanded: later remissions and mitigations were due to expediency. It was vain to label our own inertness with another title: if the woman broke bounds, the fault lay with the husband. Moreover, it was unjust that, through the weakness of one or two, married men in general should be torn from their partners in weal and woe, while at the same time a sex frail by nature was left alone, exposed to its own voluptuousness and the appetites of others. Hardly by surveillance on the spot could the marriage-tie be kept undamaged: what would be the case if, for a term of years, it were dissolved as completely as by divorce? While they were taking steps to meet abuses elsewhere, it would be well to remember the scandals of the capital! Drusus added a few sentences upon his own married life:—”Princes not infrequently had to visit the remote parts of the empire. How often had the deified Augustus travelled to west and east with Livia for his companion! He had himself made an excursion to Illyricum; and, if there was a purpose to serve, he was prepared to go to other countries — but not always without a pang, if he were severed from the well-beloved wife who was the mother of their many common children.” Caecina’s motion was thus evaded.