47 1 Sabinus, till he could muster his forces, returned soft answers; but when Pomponius Labeo arrived from Moesia with a legion, and King Rhoemetalces with a body of native auxiliaries who had not renounced their allegiance, he added his own available troops and moved against the enemy, by now concentrated in the wooded gorges. A few, more daring, showed themselves on the open hills, but were driven from them without difficulty, when the Roman commander advanced in battle-order, though cover was so near that little barbarian blood was spilt. Then, after fortifying a camp on the spot, Sabinus with a strong detachment made himself master of a narrow mountain-ridge running without a break to the nearest tribal fortress, which was held by a considerable force of armed men and irregulars. Simultaneously, he sent a picked body of archers to deal with the bolder spirits who, true to the national custom, were gambolling with songs and war-dances in front of the rampart. The bowmen, so long as they operated at long range, inflicted many wounds with impunity; on advancing closer, they were thrown into disorder by an unlooked-for sally, and fell back on the support of a Sugambrian cohort, drawn up a short distance away by the Roman general, since the men were prompt in danger, and, as regards the din produced by their songs and weapons, not less awe-inspiring than the enemy.
48 1 The camp was then moved a stage nearer the adversary; and the Thracians, whom I mentioned as having joined us, were left in charge of the earlier lines. They had licence to ravage, burn, and plunder, so long as their depredations were limited to the daylight, and the night spent safely and wakefully behind entrenchments. At first, the rule was kept: then, turning to luxury and enriched by their booty, they began to leave their posts for some wild orgy, or lay tumbled in drunken slumber. The enemy, therefore, who had information of their laxity, arranged two columns, by one of which the raiders were to be attacked, while another band demonstrated against the Roman encampment; not with any hope of capture, but in order that, amid the shouting and the missiles, every man engrossed by his own danger might be deaf to echoes of the other conflict. Darkness, moreover, was chosen for the blow, so as to intensify the panic. The attempt on the earthworks of the legions was, however, easily repelled: the Thracian auxiliaries, a few of whom were lying along their lines, while the majority were straggling outside, lost their nerve at the sudden onset, and were cut down all the more ruthlessly because they were branded as renegades and traitors carrying arms for the enslavement of themselves and their fatherland.
49 1 On the following day, Sabinus paraded his army in the plain, in the hope that the barbarians, elated by the night’s success might venture battle. As they showed no signs of descending from their stronghold or from the adjacent hills, he began their investment, with the help of the fortified posts which, opportunely enough, he was already constructing; then drew a continuous fosse and breastwork, with a circumference of •four miles; and lastly, step by step, contracted and tightened his lines of circumvallation, so as to cut off the supplies of water and forage; while an embankment began to rise, from which stones, spears, and fire-brands could be showered on the no longer distant enemy. But nothing told on the defence so much as thirst, since the one spring remaining had to serve the whole great multitude of combatants and non-combatants. At the same time, horses and cattle — penned up with their owners in the barbarian style — were dying for lack of fodder; side by side with them lay the bodies of men, victims of wounds or thirst, and the whole place was an abomination of rotting blood, stench, and infection.
50 1 To the confusion was added the last calamity, discord; some proposing surrender, some to fall on each other and die; while there were those, again, who commended, not unavenged destruction, but a last sortie. Others, and not the multitude only, dissented from each of these views: one of the leaders, Dinis, now advanced in years, and familiar through long experience with the power and the clemency of Rome, urged them to lay down their arms — it was the one resource in their extremity — and took the initiative by placing himself, his wife, and his children, at the disposal of the victor. He was followed by those who laboured under the disabilities of age or sex, or who were more passionately attached to life than to glory. On the other hand, the younger fighting men were divided between Tarsa and Turesis. Both were resolute not to outlive their freedom; but Tarsa, crying out for a quick despatch, a quietus to hope and fear alike, gave the example by plunging his weapon into his breast: nor were others lacking to choose the same mode of death. Turesis and his followers waited for the night: a fact of which the Roman commander was not ignorant. The outposts, accordingly, were secured by denser masses of men. — Night was falling, with a storm of rain; and the wild shouting on the enemy’s side, alternating as it did with deathly stillnesses, had begun to perplex the besiegers, when Sabinus made a tour of his lines and urged the men to be misled neither by ambiguous sound nor by simulated quiet into giving the ambuscaded foe his opening: every man should attend to his duties without budging from his post or expending javelins on an illusory mark.
51 1 Meanwhile, the barbarians, speeding down in their bands, now battered the palisade with hand-flung stones, stakes pointed in the fire, and oak-boughs hewn from the tree; now filled the moats with brushwood, hurdles, and lifeless bodies; while a few with bridges and ladders, fabricated beforehand, advanced against the turrets, clutching them, tearing them down, and struggling hand to hand with the defenders. The troops, in return, struck them down with spears, dashed them back with their shield-bosses, hurled on them siege-javelins and piles of massive stone. On each side were incentives enough to courage: on ours, hope that victory was won, and the more flagrant ignominy which would attend a defeat; on theirs, the fact that they were striking the last blow for deliverance — many with their wives and mothers close at hand and their lamentations sounding in their ears. Night, screening the audacity of some, the panic of others; blows dealt at random, wounds unforeseen; the impossibility of distinguishing friend from foe; cries echoed back from the mountain ravines, and so coming apparently from the rear — all this had produced such general confusion that the Romans abandoned some of their positions as forced. Yet actually none but a handful of the enemy made their way through; while the remainder, with their bravest either dead or disabled, were at the approach of daylight pushed back to their stronghold on the height, where surrender at last became compulsory. The districts adjourning were taken over with the concurrence of the inhabitants: the rest were saved from reduction, whether by assault or investment, by the premature and stern winter of the Haemus range.
52 1 But in Rome, the imperial house was already shaken; and now, to open the train of events leading to the destruction of Agrippina, her second cousin, Claudia Pulchra, was put on trial, with Domitius Afer as accuser. Fresh from a praetorship, with but a modest standing in the world, and hurrying towards a reputation by way of any crime, he indicted her for unchastity, for adultery with Furnius, for practices by poison and spell against the life of the sovereign. Agrippina, fierce-tempered always and now inflamed by the danger of her kinswoman, flew to Tiberius, and, as chance would have it, found him sacrificing to his father. This gave the occasion for a reproachful outburst:—”It was not,” she said, “for the same man to offer victims to the deified Augustus and to persecute his posterity. Not into speechless stone had that divine spirit been transfused: she, his authentic effigy, the issue of his celestial blood, was aware of her peril and assumed the garb of mourning. It was idle to make a pretext of Pulchra, the only cause of whose destruction was that in utter folly she had chosen Agrippina as the object of her affection, forgetful of Sosia, who was struck down for the same offence.” Her words elicitedº one of the rare deliverances of that impenetrable breast. He seized her, and admonished her in a line of Greek that she was not necessarily “A woman injured, if she lacked a throne.” Pulchra and Furnius were condemned. Afer took rank with the great advocates: his genius had found publicity, and there had followed a pronouncement from the Caesar, styling him “an orator by natural right.” Later, whe
ther as conductor of the prosecution or as mainstay of the defence, he enjoyed a fame which stood higher for eloquence than for virtue. Yet even of that eloquence age took heavy toll, sapping as it did his mental power and leaving his incapacity for silence.
53 1 Meanwhile Agrippina, obstinately nursing her anger, and attacked by physical illness, was visited by the emperor. For long her tears fell in silence; then she began with reproaches and entreaties:—”He must aid her loneliness and give her a husband; she had still the requisite youth, and the virtuous had no consolation but in marriage — the state had citizens who would stoop to receive the wife of Germanicus and his children.” The Caesar, however, though he saw all that was implied in the request, was reluctant to betray either fear or resentment, and therefore, in spite of her insistence, left her without an answer. — This incident, not noticed by the professed historians, I found in the memoirs of her daughter Agrippina (mother of the emperor Nero), who recorded for the after-world her life and the vicissitudes of her house.
54 1 Sejanus, however, struck a deeper dismay into her harassed and improvident breast by sending agents to warn her, under the colour of friendship, that poison was ready for her: she would do well to avoid the dinners of her father-in-law. And she, a stranger to all pretence, as she reclined next to him at table, relaxed neither her features nor her silence, and refused to touch her food; until at last, either by accident or from information received, Tiberius’ attention was arrested, and, to apply a more searching test, he took some fruit as it had been set before him and with his own hand passed it to his daughter-in-law, with a word of praise. The act increased Agrippina’s suspicions, and without tasting the dish she passed it over to the slaves. Even so, no overt remark followed from Tiberius: he turned, however, to his mother, and observed that it was not strange if he had resolved on slightly rigorous measures against a lady who accused him of murder by poison. Hence a rumour that her destruction was in preparation, and that the emperor lacked courage to do the deed openly: a quiet setting for the crime was being considered.
55 1 To divert criticism, the Caesar attended the senate with frequency, and for several days listened to the deputies from Asia debating which of their communities was to erect his temple. Eleven cities competed, with equal ambition but disparate resources. With no great variety each pleaded national antiquity, and zeal for the Roman cause in the wars with Perseus, Aristonicus, and other kings. But Hypaepa and Tralles, together with Laodicea and Magnesia, were passed over as inadequate to the task: even Ilium, though it appealed to Troy as the parent of Rome, had no significance apart from the glory of its past. Some little hesitation was caused by the statement of the Halicarnassians that for twelve hundred years no tremors of earthquake had disturbed their town, and the temple foundations would rest on the living rock. The Pergamenes were refuted by their main argument: they had already a sanctuary of Augustus, and the distinction was thought ample. The state-worship in Ephesus and Miletus was considered to be already centred on the cults of Diana and Apollo respectively: the deliberations turned, therefore, on Sardis and Smyrna. The Sardians read a decree of their “kindred country” of Etruria. “Owing to its numbers,” they explained, “Tyrrhenus and Lydus, sons of King Atys, had divided the nation. Lydus had remained in the territory of his fathers, Tyrrhenus had been allotted the task of creating a new settlement; and the Asiatic and Italian branches of the people had received distinctive titles from the names of the two leaders; while a further advance in the Lydian power had come with the despatch of colonists to the peninsula which afterwards took its name from Pelops.” At the same time, they recalled the letters from Roman commanders, the treaties concluded with us in the Macedonian war, their ample rivers, tempered climate, and the richness of the surrounding country.
56 1 The deputies from Smyrna, on the other hand, after retracing the antiquity of their town — whether founded by Tantalus, the seed of Jove; by Theseus, also of celestial stock; or by one of the Amazons — passed on to the arguments in which they rested most confidence: their good offices towards the Roman people, to whom they had sent their naval force to aid not merely in foreign wars but in those with which we had to cope in Italy, while they had also been the first to erect a temple to the City of Rome, at a period (the consulate of Marcus Porcius) when the Roman fortunes stood high indeed, but had not yet mounted to their zenith, as the Punic capital was yet standing and the kings were still powerful in Asia. At the same time, Sulla was called to witness that “with his army in a most critical position through the inclement winter and scarcity of clothing, the news had only to be announced at a public meeting in Smyrna, and the whole of the bystanders stripped the garments from their bodies and sent them to our legions.” The Fathers accordingly, when their opinion was taken, gave Smyrna the preference. Vibius Marsus proposed that a supernumerary legate, to take responsibility for the temple, should be assigned to Manius Lepidus, to whom the province of Asia had fallen; and since Lepidus modestly declined to make the selection himself, Valerius Naso was chosen by lot among the ex-praetors and sent out.
57 1 Meanwhile, after long meditating and often deferring his plan, the Caesar at length departed for Campania, ostensibly to consecrate one temple to Jupiter at Capua and one to Augustus at Nola, but in the settled resolve to fix his abode far from Rome. As to the motive for his withdrawal, though I have followed the majority of historians in referring it to the intrigues of Sejanus, yet in view of the fact that his isolation remained equally complete for six consecutive years after Sejanus’ execution, I am often tempted to doubt whether it could not with greater truth be ascribed to an impulse of his own, to find an inconspicuous home for the cruelty and lust which his acts proclaimed to the world. There were those who believed that in his old age he had become sensitive also to his outward appearances. For he possessed a tall, round-shouldered, and abnormally slender figure, a head without a trace of hair, and an ulcerous face generally variegated with plasters; while, in the seclusion of Rhodes, he had acquired the habit of avoiding company and taking his pleasures by stealth. The statement is also made that he was driven into exile by the imperious temper of his mother, whose partnership in his power he could not tolerate, while it was impossible to cut adrift one from whom he held that power in fee. For Augustus had hesitated whether to place Germanicus, his sister’s grandson and the theme of all men’s praise, at the head of the Roman realm, but, overborne by the entreaties of his wife, had introduced Germanicus into the family of Tiberius, and Tiberius into his own: a benefit which the old empress kept recalling and reclaiming.
58 1 His exit was made with a slender retinue: one senator who had held a consulship (the jurist Cocceius Nerva) and — in addition to Sejanus — one Roman knight of the higher rank, Curtius Atticus; the rest being men of letters, principally Greeks, in whose conversation he was to find amusement. The astrologers declared that he had left Rome under a conjunction of planets excluding the possibility of return: a fatal assertion to the many who concluded that the end was at hand and gave publicity to their views. For they failed to foresee the incredible event, that through eleven years he would persist self-exiled from his fatherland. It was soon to be revealed how close are the confines of science and imposture, how dark the veil that covers truth. That he would never return to Rome was not said at venture: of all else, the seers were ignorant; for in the adjacent country, on neighbouring beaches, often hard under the city-walls, he reached the utmost limit of old age.
59 1 It chanced in those days that a serious accident which occurred to the Caesar encouraged these idle speculations and gave the prince himself a reason for greater faith in the friendship and firmness of Sejanus. They were at table in a villa known as the Grotto, built in a natural cavern between the Gulf of Amyclae and the mountains of Fundi. A sudden fall of rock at the mouth buried a number of servants, the consequence being a general panic and the flight of the guests present. Sejanus alone hung over the Caesar with knee, face and hands, and opposed himself to the falling
stones — an attitude in which he was found by the soldiers who had come to their assistance. This brought an accession of greatness, and, fatal though his advice might be, yet, as a man whose thoughts were not for himself, he found a confiding listener. Towards the family of Germanicus he began to assume the pose of judge, suborning agents to support the character of accusers, their main attack to be delivered on Nero, who stood next in the line of succession, and, in spite of the modesty of his youth, too often forgot what the times demanded, while his freedmen and clients, bent on the rapid acquisition of power, urged him to a display of spirit and confidence:—”It was this the nation desired and the armies yearned for, and Sejanus, who now trampled alike on the patience of an old man and the tameness of a young one, would not risk a counter-stroke!”
60 1 To all this and the like he listened with no malice in his mind; but at intervals there fell from him defiant and unconsidered phrases; and as these were seized upon and reported with enlargements by the watchers posted round his person, no chance of refutation being allowed him, other forms of anxiety began in addition to make their appearance. One man would avoid meeting him; some went through the formality of salutation, then promptly turned away; many broke off any attempt at conversation; while, in contrast, any adherents of Sejanus who happened to be present stood their ground and jeered. As to the Tiberius, he met him either with gloomy brows or with a hypocritical smile on his countenance; whether the boy spoke or held his peace, there was guilt in silence, guilt in speech. Even night itself was not secure, since his wakeful hours, his slumbers, his sighs, were communicated by his wife to her mother Livia, and by Livia to Sejanus; who had actually made a convert of his brother Drusus by holding before his eyes the prospect of supremacy, once he should have ousted his senior from his already precarious position. Over and above the lust of power and the hatred habitual to brothers, the savage temper of Drusus was inflamed by envy, as the preferences of his mother Agrippina were for Nero. None the less, Sejanus’ solicitude for Drusus was not so great but that, even against him, he was pondering the measures which should ripen to his destruction: for he knew the rash hardihood which laid him peculiarly open to treachery.
Complete Works of Tacitus (Delphi Classics) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 24) Page 65