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

by Publius Cornelius Tacitus

  5 1 Italy, on either seaboard, was protected by fleets at Misenum and Ravenna; the adjacent coast of Gaul by a squadron of fighting ships, captured by Augustus at the victory of Actium and sent with strong crews to the town of Forum Julium. Our main strength, however, lay on the Rhine — eight legions ready to cope indifferently with the German or the Gaul. The Spains, finally subdued not long before, were kept by three. Mauretania, by the national gift, had been transferred to King Juba. Two legions held down the remainder of Africa; a similar number, Egypt: then, from the Syrian marches right up to the Euphrates, four sufficed for the territories enclosed in that enormous reach of ground; while, on the borders, the Iberian, the Albanian, and other monarchs, were secured against alien power by the might of Rome. Thrace was held by Rhoemetalces and the sons of Cotys; the Danube bank by two legions in Pannonia and two in Moesia; two more being posted in Dalmatia, geographically to the rear of the other four, and within easy call, should Italy claim sudden assistance — though, in any case, the capital possessed a standing army of its own: three urban and nine praetorian cohorts, recruited in the main from Etruria and Umbria or Old Latium and the earlier Roman colonies. Again, at suitable points of the provinces, there were the federate warships, cavalry divisions and auxiliary cohorts in not much inferior strength: but to trace them was dubious, as they shifted from station to station, and, according to the exigency of the moment, increased in number or were occasionally diminished.

  6 1 It will be opportune, I take it, as this year brought the opening stages of deterioration in the principate of Tiberius, to review in addition the other departments of state and the methods by which they were administered up to that period. First, then, public affairs — together with private affairs of exceptional moment — were treated in the senate, and discussion was free to the leading members, their lapses into subserviency being checked by the sovereign himself. In conferring offices, he took into view the nobility of a candidate’s ancestry, the distinction of his military service, or the brilliance of his civil attainments, and left it sufficiently clear that no better choice had been available. The consulate had its old prestige; so had the praetorship: the powers even of the minor magistracies were exercised; and the laws, apart from the process in cases of treason, were in proper force. On the other hand, the cornº-tribute, the monies from indirect taxation, and other public revenues, were handled by companies of Roman knights. The imperial property was entrusted by Caesar to men of tested merit, at times to a personal stranger on the strength of his reputation; and his agents, once installed, were retained quite indefinitely, many growing grey in the service originally entered. The populace, it is true, was harassed by exorbitant food-prices, but in that point no blame attached to the emperor: he spared, indeed, neither expense nor pains in order to neutralize the effects of unfruitful soils or boisterous seas. He saw to it that the provinces were not disturbed by fresh impositions and that the incidence of the old was not aggravated by magisterial avarice or cruelty: corporal punishment and the forfeiture of estates were not in vogue. His demesnes in Italy were few, his establishment of slaves unassuming, his household limited to a small number of freedmen; and, in the event of a dispute between himself and a private citizen, the decision rested with a court of justice.

  7 1 All of this, not gracefully indeed, but in his grim and often dreaded fashion, he nevertheless observed, until by the death of Drusus the whole was overthrown. For, while the prince survived, the old order remained; because Sejanus, yet in the infancy of his power, desired to win a name by good advice, and had still an avenger to dread — an avenger careless to conceal his hatred, and complaining perpetually that, “in the lifetime of the son, a stranger was styled coadjutor in the empire. And how short a step till the coadjutor was termed a colleague! The first designs upon a throne were beset with difficulty; but, the first step made, a faction and helpers were not far to seek. Already an encampment had risen at the fiat of the prefect, and the guards were delivered into his hand; his effigy was visible in the monuments of Gnaeus Pompeius; his grandsons would mingle the blood of the Drusi with his own. Henceforward they could only pray that he might be endowed with moderation, and rest content.” — Views such as these he proclaimed neither on rare occasions nor to a few auditors; and, since the seduction of his wife, his very confidences were betrayed.

  8 1 Sejanus, therefore, decided to lose no time, and chose a poison so gradual in its inroads as to counterfeit the progress of a natural ailment. It was administered to Drusus by help of the eunuch Lygdus, a fact brought to light eight years later. Tiberius, however, through all the days of his son’s illness, either unalarmed or to advertise his firmness of mind, continued to visit the senate, doing so even after his death, while he was still unburied. The consuls were seated on the ordinary benches as a sign of mourning: he reminded them of their dignity and their place. The members broke into tears: he repressed their lamentation, and at the same time revived their spirits in a formal speech:—”He was not, indeed, unaware that he might be criticized for appearing before the eyes of the senate while his grief was still fresh. Mourners in general could hardly support the condolences of their own kindred — hardly tolerate the light of day. Nor were they to be condemned as weaklings; but personally he had sought a manlier consolation by taking the commonwealth to his heart.” After deploring the extreme old age of his august mother, the still tender years of his grandsons, and his own declining days, he asked for Germanicus’ sons, their sole comfort in the present affliction, to be introduced. The consuls went out, and, after reassuring the boys, brought them in and set them before the emperor. “Conscript Fathers, “ he said, “when these children lost their parent, I gave them to their uncle, and begged him, though he had issue of his own, to use them as if they were blood of his blood — to cherish them, build up their fortunes, form them after his own image and for the welfare of posterity. With Drusus gone, I turn my prayers to you; I conjure you in the sight of Heaven and of your country: — These are the great-grandchildren of Augustus, scions of a glorious ancestry; adopt them, train them, do your part — and do mine! Nero and Drusus, these shall be your father and your mother: it is the penalty of your birth that your good and your evil are the good and the evil of the commonwealth.”

  9 1 All this was listened to amid general tears, then with prayers for a happy issue; and, had he only set a limit to his speech, he must have left the minds of his hearers full of compassion for himself, and of pride: instead, by reverting to those vain and oft-derided themes, the restoration of the republic and his wish that the consuls or others would take the reins of government, he destroyed the credibility even of the true and honourable part of his statement. — The memorials decreed to Germanicus were repeated for Drusus, with large additions, which as sycophancy commonly favours at a second essay. The most arresting feature of the funeral was the parade of ancestral images, while Aeneas, author of the Julian line, with the whole dynasty of Alban kings, and Romulus, the founder of the city, followed by the Sabine nobles, by Attus Clausus, and by the rest of the Claudian effigies, filed in long procession past the spectator.

  10 1 In recording the death of Drusus, I have given the version of the most numerous and trustworthy authorities; but I am reluctant to omit a contemporary rumour, so strong that it persists to-day. It asserts that, after seducing Livia to crime, Sejanus, by an indecent connection, also attached to himself the eunuch Lygdus, whose years and looks had won him the affection of his master and a prominent place among his attendants; that later, when the conspirators had agreed upon a place and time for the mortal dose, he carried audacity to the point of altering the arrangements, and, giving private warning to Tiberius that Drusus meditated the poisoning of his father, counselled him to avoid the first draught offered to him when he dined with his son; that, falling into the trap, the old emperor, on taking his place at the banquet, accepted the cup and passed it to Drusus; and that when Drusus, in complete ignorance, drained it as a young man would, suspicion
only grew the darker — the assumption being that, out of fear and shame, he was inflicting upon himself the doom invented for his father.

  11 1 This commonly repeated account, apart from the fact that it is supported by no definite authority, may be summarily refuted. For what man of ordinary prudence, to say nothing of Tiberius with his training in great affairs, would force death upon a son whose defence was unheard — and force it by his own hand, with the door closed against any change of purpose? Why not, rather, torture the giver of the poison, search out the prompter behind him, proceed in short against an only son, never as yet found guilty of a crime, with that inveterate and scrupulous deliberation which he manifested even to strangers? But Sejanus was held the inventor of all villainies: therefore, as the Caesar loved him over-well and the rest of the world hated both, the most fabulous horrors found credence, rumour being never so lurid as when princes quit the scene. Moreover, the sequence of the crime was betrayed by Sejanus’ wife Apicata, and disclosed in detail by Eudemus and Lygdus under torture; nor was there found one historian malevolent enough to lay it to the charge of Tiberius at a time when historians were collecting and aggravating all other circumstances. My own motive in chronicling and refuting the scandal has been to discredit by one striking instance the falsities of oral tradition, and to request those into whose hands my work may have fallen not too eagerly to accept a widely circulated and incredible tale in place of truth not corrupted into romance.

  12 1 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,º 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 — 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 — 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.

  13 1 Meanwhile Tiberius had in no way relaxed his attention to public business, but, accepting work as a consolation, was dealing with judicial cases at Rome and petitions from the provinces. On his proposal, senatorial resolutions were passed to relieve the towns of Cibyra in Asia and Aegium in Achaia, both damaged by earthquake, by remitting their tribute for three years. Vibius Serenus, too, the proconsul of Further Spain, was condemned on a charge of public violence, and deported, as the result of his savage character, to the island of Amorgus. Carsidius Sacerdos, accused of supplying grain to a public enemy in the person of Tacfarinas, was acquitted; and the same charge failed against Gaius Gracchus. Gracchus had been taken in earliest infancy by his father Sempronius to share his banishment in the company of landless men, destitute of all liberal achievements; later, he eked out a livelihood by mean trading transactions in Africa and Sicily: yet even so he failed to escape the hazards reserved for rank and fortune. Indeed, had not Aelius Lamia and Lucius Apronius, former governors of Africa, come to the rescue of his innocence, he would have been swept to ruin by the fame of his calamitous house and the disasters of his father.

  14 1 This year also brought delegations from two Greek communities, the Samians and Coans desiring the confirmation of an old right of asylum to the temples of Juno and Aesculapius respectively. The Samians appealed to a decree of the Amphictyonic Council, the principal tribunal for all questions in the period when the Greeks had already founded their city-states in Asia and were dominant upon the sea-coast. The Coans had equal antiquity on their side, and, in addition, a claim associated with the place itself: for they had sheltered Roman citizens in the temple of Aesculapius at a time when, by order of King Mithridates, they were being butchered in every island and town of Asia. Next, after various and generally ineffective complaints from the praetors, the Caesar at last brought up the question of the effrontery of the players:—”They were frequently the fomenters of sedition against the state and of debauchery in private houses; the old Oscan farce, the trivial delight of the crowd, had come to such a pitch of indecency and power that it needed the authority of the senate to check it.” The players were then expelled from Italy.

  15 1 The same year brought still another bereavement to the emperor, by removing one of the twin children of Drusus, and an equal affliction in the death of a friend. This was Lucilius Longus, his comrade in evil days and good, and the one member of the senate to share his isolation at Rhodes. Hence, in spite of his modest antecedents, a censorian funeral and a statue erected in the Forum of Augustus at the public expense were decreed to him by the Fathers, before whom, at that time, all questions were still dealt with; so much so, that Lucilius Capito, the procurator of Asia, was obliged, at the indictment of the province, to plead his cause before them, the emperor asserting forcibly that “any powers he had given to him extended merely to the slaves and revenues of the imperial domains; if he had usurped the governor’s authority and used military force, it was a flouting of his orders: the provincials must be heard.” The case was accordingly tried and the defendant condemned. In return for this act of retribution, as well as for the punishment meted out to Gaius Silanus the year before, the Asiatic cities decreed a temple to Tiberius, his mother, and the senate. Leave to build was granted, and Nero returned thanks on that score to the senate and his grandfather — a pleasing sensation to his listeners, whose memory of Germanicus was fresh enough to permit the fancy that his were the features they saw and the accents to which they listened. The youth had, in fact, a modesty and beauty worthy of a prince: endowments the more attractive from the peril of their owner, since the hatred of Sejanus for him was notorious.

  16 1 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.” — 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.—”. . . 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 readin
ess 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.

  17 1 In the consulate of Cornelius Cethegus and Visellius Varro, the pontiffs and — after their example — the other priests, while offering the vows for the life of the emperor, went further and commended Nero and Drusus to the same divinities, not so much from affection for the princes as in that spirit of sycophancy, of which the absence or the excess is, in a corrupt society, equally hazardous. For Tiberius, never indulgent to the family of Germanicus, was now stung beyond endurance to find a pair of striplings placed on a level with his own declining years. He summoned the pontiffs, and asked if they had made this concession to the entreaties — or should he say the threats? — of Agrippina. The pontiffs, in spite of their denial, received only a slight reprimand (for a large number were either relatives of his own or prominent figures in the state); but in the senate, he gave warning that for the future no one was to excite to arrogance the impressionable minds of the youths by such precocious distinctions. The truth was that Sejanus was pressing him hard:—”The state,” so ran his indictment, “was split into two halves, as if by civil war. There were men who proclaimed themselves of Agrippina’s party: unless a stand was taken, there would be more; and the only cure for the growing disunion was to strike down one or two of the most active malcontents.”

  18 1 On this pretext he attacked Gaius Silius and Titius Sabinus. The friendship of Germanicus was fatal to both; but in the case of Silius there was the further point that, as he had commanded a great army for seven years, had earned the emblems of triumph in Germany, and was the victor of the war with Sacrovir, the greater ruin of his fall must spread a wider alarm among others. Many considered his offence to have been aggravated by his own indiscretion: he boasted too loudly that “his troops had stood loyal while others were rushing into mutiny; nor could Tiberius have retained the throne, if those legions too had caught the passion for revolution.” Such claims, the Caesar thought, were destructive of his position, and left it inadequate to cope with such high deserts. For services are welcome exactly so long as it seems possible to requite them: when that stage is left far behind, the return is hatred instead of gratitude.