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

by Publius Cornelius Tacitus

  61 1 At the close of the year, two distinguished men passed away: Asinius Agrippa, of an ancestry more honourable than old, from which his life had not degenerated; and Quintus Haterius, a member of a senatorial family, and master of an eloquence famous in his lifetime, though the extant memorials of his talent are not retained in equal esteem. The truth is that his strength lay more in vigour than in care; and, as the study and labour of others take an added value with time, so the melody and fluency of Haterius were extinguished with himself.

  62 1 In the consulate of Marcus Licinius and Lucius Calpurnius, the casualties of some great wars were equalled by an unexpected disaster. It began and ended in a moment. A certain Atilius, of the freedman class, who had begun an amphitheatre at Fidena, in order to give a gladiatorial show, failed both to lay the foundation in solid ground and to secure the fastenings of the wooden structure above; the reason being that he had embarked on the enterprise, not from a superabundance of wealth nor to court the favours of his townsmen, but with an eye to sordid gain. The amateurs of such amusements, debarred from their pleasures under the reign of Tiberius, poured to the place, men and women, old and young, the stream swollen because the town lay near. This increased the gravity of the catastrophe, as the unwieldy fabric was packed when it collapsed, breaking inward or sagging outward, and precipitating and burying a vast crowd of human beings, intent on the spectacle or standing around. Those, indeed, whom the first moment of havoc had dashed to death, escaped torture, so far as was possible in such a fate: more to be pitied were those whose mutilated bodies life had not yet abandoned, who by day recognized their wives or their children by sight, and at night by their shrieks and moans. The news brought the absent to the scene — one lamenting a brother, one a kinsman, another his parents. Even those whose friends or relatives had left home for a different reason still felt the alarm, and, as it was not yet known whom the catastrophe had destroyed, the uncertainty gave wider range for fear.

  63 1 When the fallen materials came to be removed, the watchers rushed to their dead, embracing them, kissing them, not rarely quarrelling over them, in cases where the features had been obliterated but a parity of form or age had led to mistaken identification. Fifty thousand persons were maimed or crushed to death in the disaster; and for the future it was provided by a decree of the senate that no one with a fortune less than four hundred thousand sesterces should present a gladiatorial display, and that no amphitheatre was to be built except on ground of tried solidity. Atilius was driven into banishment. It remains to be said that, on the morrow of the accident, the great houses were thrown open; dressings and doctors were supplied to all comers; and Rome throughout those days, however tragic her aspect, yet offered a parallel to the practice of the ancients, who were accustomed, after a stricken field, to relieve the wounded by their liberality and their care.

  64 1 The disaster had not yet faded from memory, when a fierce outbreak of fire affected the city to an unusual degree by burning down the Caelian Hill. “It was a fatal year, and the sovereign’s decision to absent himself had been adopted under an evil star” — so men began to remark, converting, as is the habit of the crowd, the fortuitous into the culpable, when the Caesar checked the critics by a distribution of money in proportion to loss sustained. Thanks were returned to him; in the senate, by the noble; in the streets, by the voice of the people: for without respect of persons, and without the intercession of relatives, he had aided with his liberality even unknown sufferers whom he had himself encouraged to apply. Proposals were added that the Caelian Hill should for the future be known as the Augustan, since, with all around on fire, the one thing to remain unscathed had been a bust of Tiberius in the house of the senator Junius. “The same,” it was said, “had happened formerly to Claudia Quinta; whose statue, twice escaped from the fury of the flames, our ancestors had dedicated in the temple of the Mother of the Gods. The Claudian race was sacrosanct and acceptable to Heaven, and additional solemnity should be given to the ground on which the gods had shown so notable an honour to the sovereign.”

  65 1 It may not be out of place to state that the hill was originally named the “Querquetulanus,” from the abundance of oak produced on it, and only later took the title of “Caelius” from Caeles Vibenna, an Etruscan chief; who, for marching to the aid of Rome, had received the district as a settlement, either from Tarquinius Priscus or by the gift of another of our kings. On that point the authors disagree: the rest is not in doubt — that Vibenna’s numerous forces established themselves on the level also, and in the neighbourhood of the forum, with the result that the Tuscan Street has taken its name from the immigrants.

  66 1 But while the good-will of the nobles and the liberality of the emperor had been able to mitigate accidents, the violence of the informers, more pronounced and more venomous every day, ran riot without a palliative. Quintilius Varus, a rich man and a relation of the Caesar, had been attacked by the same Domitius Afer who procured the condemnation of his mother Claudia Pulchra. No surprise was felt that Afer, who after years of indigence had now made a scandalous use of his recently earned reward, should be girding himself to fresh enormities: the astonishing point was that Publius Dolabella should have come forward as his partner in the accusation: for, with his high descent and his family connection with Varus, he was now setting out to destroy his own nobility and his own blood. The senate, however, stood its ground, and decided to await the emperor, the only course offering a momentary respite from the imminent horrors.

  67 1 Meanwhile, the Caesar, after dedicating the temples in Campania; though he had warned the public by edict not to invade his privacy, and the crowds from the country-towns were being kept at distance by troops appropriately disposed; yet conceived so intense a loathing for the municipalities, the colonies, and all things situated on the mainland, that he vanished into the Isle of Capreae, which three miles of strait divide from the extreme point of the Surrentine promontory. The solitude of the place I should suppose to have been its principal commendation, as it is surrounded by a harbourless sea, with a few makeshift roadsteads hardly adequate for small-sized vessels, while it is impossible to land unobserved by a sentry. In winter, the climate is gentle, owing to the mountain barrier which intercepts the cold sweep of the winds; its summers catch the western breeze and are made a delight by the circling expanse of open sea; while it overlooked the most beautiful of bays, until the activity of Vesuvius began to change the face of the landscape. The tradition goes that Campania was held by Greek settlers, Capreae being inhabited by Teleboans. At this time, however, the islet was occupied by the imposing fabric of the twelve villas — with their twelve names — of Tiberius; who, once absorbed in the cares of state, was now unbending with equal zest in hidden vice and flagitious leisure.

  For his rashness of suspicion and belief remained, and Sejanus, who even in the capital had habitually encouraged it, was now more actively unsettling his mind; for there was no longer any concealment of his plots against Agrippina and Nero. Soldiers dogged their steps, and recorded their messages, their interviews, their doings open and secret, with the exactitude of annalists; while agents were even set at work to advise the pair to take refuge with the armies of Germany, or, at the most crowded hour of the forum, to clasp the effigy of the deified Augustus and call the senate and people to aid. And, since they rejected any such action, it was imputed to them as in contemplation.

  68 1 With the consulate of Junius Silanus and Silius Nerva, the opening year came charged with disgrace; and the great Roman knight, Titius Sabinus, was dragged to the dungeon to expiate his friendship with Germanicus. For he had abated nothing of his scrupulous attentions to the widow and children of the dead, but remained their visitor at home, their companion in public — the one survivor of that multitude of clients, and rewarded, as such, by the admiration of the good and the hatred of the malevolent. He was singled out for attack by Latinius Latiaris, Porcius Cato, Petilius Rufus, and Marcus Opsius, ex-praetors enamoured of the consu
late: an office to which there was no avenue but through Sejanus, while the complaisance of Sejanus was only to be purchased by crime. The arrangement among the four was that Latiaris, who was connected with Sabinus by some little intimacy, should lay the trap; that the rest should be present as witnesses; and that only then should the accusation be set on foot. Latiaris, therefore, began with casual remarks in conversation, then passed to eulogies on the constancy of Sabinus, who, unlike the rest, had not abandoned in its affliction the house to which he had been attached in its prosperity: at the same time, he referred to Germanicus in terms of honour, and to Agrippina in a strain of pity. Then, as Sabinus, with the usual weakness of the human heart in sorrow, broke into tears coupled with complaints, he grew bolder and showered reproaches on Sejanus, his cruelty, his arrogance, his ambition. Even Tiberius was not spared, and these conversations, regarded as an exchange of forbidden sentiments, gave the appearance of intimate friendship. — And now Sabinus began himself to seek the company of Latiaris, to frequent his house, and to convey his griefs to that seemingly faithful breast.

  69 1 The partners, whom I have mentioned, now discussed the means of ensuring that these conversations should have a wider audience. For the trysting-place had necessarily to retain an air of solitude; and, if they stood behind the doors, there was a risk of detection by sight, by sound, or by a casually roused suspicion. Between roof and ceiling — an ambuscade as humiliating as the ruse was detestable — three senators inserted themselves, and applied their ears to chinks and openings. Meanwhile, Latiaris had discovered Sabinus in the streets, and, on the pretext of communicating news just received, dragged him home and into the bedroom, where he rehearsed a list of troubles past and present — there was no paucity of material! — accompanied by newly-arisen motives of terror. Sabinus replied in the same vein, but at greater length: for grief, when once it has overflowed, becomes more difficult to repress. The accusation was now hurried forward; and in a letter to the Caesar the associates exposed the sequence of the plot together with their own degradation. In Rome, the anxiety and panic, the reticences of men towards their nearest and dearest, had never been greater: meetings and conversations, the ears of friend and stranger were alike avoided; even things mute and inanimate — the very walls and roofs — were eyed with circumspection.

  70 1 However, in a letter read on the first of January, the Caesar, after the orthodox prayers for the new year, turned to Sabinus, charging him with the corruption of several of his freedmen, and with designs against himself; and demanded vengeance in terms impossible to misread. Vengeance was decreed without loss of time; and the doomed man was dragged to his death, crying with all the vigour allowed by the cloak muffling his head and the noose around his neck, that “these were the ceremonies that inaugurated the year, these the victims that bled to propitiate Sejanus!” In whatever direction he turned his eyes, wherever his words reached an ear, the result was flight and desolation, an exodus from street and forum. Here and there a man retraced his steps and showed himself again, pale at the very thought that he had manifested alarm. “For what day would find the killers idle, when amid sacrifices and prayers, at a season when custom prohibited so much as an ominous word, chains and the halter come upon the scene? Not from want of thought had odium such as this been incurred by Tiberius: it was a premeditated and deliberate act, that none might think that the new magistrates were precluded from inaugurating the dungeon as they did the temples and the altars.” — A supplementary letter followed: the sovereign was grateful that they had punished a mann who was a danger to his country. He added that his own life was full of alarms, and that he suspected treachery from his enemies. He mentioned none by name; but no doubt was felt that the words were levelled at Agrippina and Nero.

  71 1 If it were not my purpose to enter each event under its year, I should be tempted to anticipate, and to record at once the endings made by Latinius and Opsius and the remaining inventors of this atrocity, not only after the accession of Gaius Caesar, but in the lifetime of Tiberius; who, disinclined though he was to see the ministers of his villainy destroyed by others, yet often wearied of their ministrations, and, when fresh workers in the same field presented themselves, struck down the old and burdensome. However, these and other punishments of the guilty I shall chronicle at their proper time. Now, Asinius Gallus, of whose children Agrippina was the aunt, proposed that the emperor should be requested to disclose his fears to the senate and permit their removal. Of all his virtues, as he regarded them, there was none which Tiberius held in such esteem as his power of dissimulation; whence the chagrin with which he received this attempt to reveal what he chose to suppress. Sejanus, however, mollified him; not from love of Gallus, but in order to await the issue of the emperor’s hesitations: for he knew that, leisurely as he was in deliberation, once he had broken out, he left little interval between ominous words and reckless deeds.

  About this time, Julia breathed her last. Convicted of adultery, she had been sentenced by her grandfather Augustus, and summarily deported to the island of Trimerus, a little way from the Apulian coast. There she supported her exile for twenty years, sustained by the charity of Augusta; who had laboured in the dark to destroy her step-children while they flourished, and advertised to the world her compassion when they fell.

  72 1 In the same year, the Frisians, a tribe on the further bank of the Rhine, violated the peace, more from our cupidity than from their own impatience of subjection. In view of their narrow resources, Drusus had imposed on them a moderate tribute, consisting in a payment of ox-hides for military purposes. No one had given particular attention to their firmness or size, until Olennius, a leading centurion appointed to the Frisian governorship selected the hide of the aurochs as the standard for the contributions. The demand, onerous enough to any people, was the less endurable in Germany; where the forests teem with huge animals, but the domesticated herds are of moderate size. First their cattle only, next their lands, finally the persons of their wives or children, were handed over to servitude. Hence, indignation and complaints; then, as relief was not accorded, an appeal to arms. The soldiers stationed to supervise the tribute were seized and nailed to the gibbet. Olennius forestalled the rage of his victims by flight, finding shelter in a fort by the name of Flevum, where a respectable force of Romans and provincials was mounting guard on the coast of the North Sea.

  73 1 As soon as the intelligence reached Lucius Apronius, the governor of Lower Germany, he summoned detachments of legionaries from the Upper Province, with picked bodies of auxiliary foot and horse, and conveyed both armies simultaneously down the Rhine into Frisian territory; where the siege of that fortress had already been raised, and the insurgents had left for the defence of their own possessions. He therefore provided a solid road of causeways and bridges through the neighbouring estuaries, to facilitate the transit of his heavy columns: in the meantime, as a ford had been discovered, he gave orders for the Canninefate cavalry, with the whole of the German foot serving in our ranks, to work round the rear of the enemy; who, now drawn up in order of battle, forced back the auxiliary squadrons and the legionary horse despatched to their help. Next, three light-armed cohorts, then two more, and finally, after some time had intervened, the whole of the mounted auxiliaries were thrown into the struggle. The forces were powerful enough, if they had been launched on the enemy simultaneously; but, arriving as they did at intervals, so far from communicating steadiness to the broken troops, they were on the point of being carried away by the panic of the fugitives, when Apronius put the last of the auxiliaries under the command of Cethegus Labeo, the legate of the fifth legion. Labeo, whom the critical position of his side involved in serious danger, sent off messengers with an urgent request for the full strength of the legions. The men of the fifth dashed forward in advance of the others, drove back the enemy in a sharp engagement, and brought off the cohorts and cavalry squadrons in a state of exhaustion from their wounds. The Roman general made no attempt at revenge; nor did he bu
ry his dead, though a considerable number of tribunes, prefects, and centurions of mark had fallen. Shortly afterwards, it was ascertained from deserters that nine hundred Romans, who had prolonged the struggle till next day, had been despatched in the so-called Grove of Baduhenna; while another detachment of four hundred, after occupying the villa of Cruptorix, formerly a soldier in our pay, had been driven by fears of treachery to die on each other’s swords.

  74 1 Thus the Frisian name won celebrity in Germany; while Tiberius, rather than entrust anyone with the conduct of the war, suppressed our losses. The senate, too, had other anxieties than a question of national dishonour on the confines of the empire: an internal panic had preoccupied all minds, and the antidote was being sought in sycophancy. Thus, although their opinion was being taken on totally unrelated subjects, they voted an altar of Mercy and an altar of Friendship with statues of the Caesar and Sejanus on either hand, and with reiterated petitions conjured the pair to vouchsafe themselves to sight. Neither of them, however, came down so far as Rome or the neighbourhood of Rome: it was deemed enough to emerge from their isle and present themselves to view on the nearest shore of Campania. To Campania went senators and knights, with a large part of the populace, their anxieties centred round Sejanus; access to whom had grown harder, and had therefore to be procured by interest and by a partnership in his designs. It was evident enough that his arrogance was increased by the sight of this repulsive servility so openly exhibited. At Rome, movement is the rule, and the extent of the city leaves it uncertain upon what errand the passer-by is bent: there, littering without distinction the plain or the beach, they suffered day and night alike the patronage or the insolence of his janitors, until that privilege, too, was vetoed, and they retraced their steps to the capital — those whom he had honoured neither by word nor by look, in fear and trembling; a few, over whom hung the fatal issue of that infelicitous friendship, with misplaced cheerfulness of heart.