Complete Works of Tacitus (Delphi Classics) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 24)
Page 68
6 1 The beginning of this letter from the Caesar was considered notable; for he opened with the following words: — If I know what to write to you, Conscript Fathers, or how to write it, or what not to write at all at this time, may gods and goddesses destroy me more wretchedly than I feel myself to be perishing every day! So surely had his crimes and his infamies turned to the torment even of himself; nor was it in vain that the first of sages was accustomed to affirm that, could the souls of tyrants be laid open, lacerations and wounds would meet the view; since, as the body is torn by the lash, so is the spirit of man by cruelty and lust and evil purposes. For not his station nor his solitudes could save Tiberius from himself confessing the rack within his breast and his own punishments.
7 1 The Fathers were then empowered to decide upon the case of Gaius Caecilianus, a senator who had produced most of the evidence against Cotta; and it was agreed that the same penalty should be inflicted as on Aruseius and Sanquinius, the accusers of Lucius Arruntius. It was the most signal compliment that ever fell to the share of Cotta; who, noble undoubtedly, but beggared by his prodigality and degraded by his vices, was now honoured with a vengeance that placed him on a level with the spotless character of Arruntius.
Next, Quintus Servaeus and Minucius Thermus were brought to judgement — Servaeus, an ex-praetor formerly included in Germanicus’ suite; Minucius, of equestrian rank. Each had refrained from abusing his friendship with Sejanus; a fact which gained them peculiar sympathy. Tiberius, on the other hand, denouncing them as ringleaders in crime, instructed the elder Gaius Cestius to repeat to the senate what he had written to himself; and Cestius duly undertook the prosecution. It was, indeed, the most deadly blight of the age that prominent senators practised even the basest forms of delation, some with perfect openness, and many in private. Nor could any distinction be traced between alien and relative, between friend and stranger, between the events of to-day and those of the dim past. Alike in the Forum or at a dinner-party, to speak of any subject was to be accused: for every man was hastening to be first in the field and to mark down his victim, occasionally in self-defence, generally through infection with what seemed a contagious disease. However, Minucius and Servaeus, on being found guilty, joined the informers; and the same ruin involved Julius Africanus, from the Gallic community of the Santones, and Seius Quadratus, whose antecedents I have not discovered. — Nor am I unaware that the perils and penalties of many are passed over by a number of historians; who either lose heart from the abundance of their materials or apprehend that a list which they themselves found long and depressing may produce equal disgust in their readers. For my own part, much has come my way that deserves a record, even though unchronicled by others.
8 1 For instance, at the very period when all others had falsely disclaimed the friendship of Sejanus, the Roman knight Marcus Terentius, accused on that score, dared to embrace the accusation:—”In my plight,” so ran his exordium in the senate, “it may perhaps be less profitable to avow than to deny the charge; but, however the event is to fall, I shall confess that not only was I the friend of Sejanus, but that I strove for his friendship, and that, when I attained it, I rejoiced. I had seen him the colleague of his father in command of the praetorian cohorts; and, later, discharging civil duties as well as military. His relatives by blood and marriage were honoured with offices; the closer a man’s intimacy with Sejanus, the stronger his claim to the emperor’s friendship; while, in contrast, danger and the garb of supplication were the troubled lot of his enemies. I take no man for my text: all who, like myself, were without part in his ultimate design, I shall defend at my own risk only. For we courted, not Sejanus of Vulsinii, but the member of those Claudian and Julian houses into which his alliances had won him entry; your son-in-law, Caesar; the partner of your consulate; the agent who discharged your functions in the state. It is not ours to ask whom you exalt above his fellow, or why: you the gods have made the sovereign arbiter of things; to us has been left the glory of obedience. Moreover, we see only what is laid before our eyes, — the person who holds wealth and dignities from you, — those who have the greatest power to help or to injure, — and that Sejanus had all, no man will deny! To search out the hidden thoughts of the emperor and the designs he may shape in secret, is unlawful and is dangerous: nor would the searcher necessarily find. Conscript Fathers, think not of the last day of Sejanus, but of the sixteen years of Sejanus! We venerated even Satrius and Pomponius; it was accounted nobly done, if we grew known to his very freedmen and his janitors! What then? Is this defence to be allowed without discrimination to all and sundry? Not so: let the dividing line be drawn true; let treason against the realm, projected assassination of the sovereign, meet their punishment; but, when friendship and its duties are in question, if we terminate them at the same moment as you, we are vindicated, Caesar, along with yourself!”
9 1 The firmness of this speech, and the fact that a man had been discovered to utter what the world was thinking, made so powerful an impression that his accusers, whose former delinquencies were added to the reckoning, were penalized by banishment or death.
Now followed a letter from Tiberius directed against the former praetor Sextus Vistilius, whom, as the close friend of his brother Drusus, he had transferred to his own retinue. The ground of displeasure against Vistilius was either his authorship of certain attacks on the morals of Gaius Caesar or a false statement credited by the emperor. Excluded on this score from the emperor’s society, after first making trial of the dagger with a senile hand, he bound up his veins, then sent a written plea for pardon, and, on receiving a pitiless reply, opened them again. Next, in one group, Annius Pollio and Appius Silanus were indicted for treason side by side with Mamercus Scaurus and Calvisius Sabinus, while Vinicianus was coupled with his father Pollio. All were of distinguished family, some of the highest official standing; and the Fathers had begun to tremble — for how few were clear of a connection by marriage or by friendship with so many famous men! — when Celsus, tribune of an urban cohort, and now among the prosecutors, freed Appius and Calvisius from danger. The cases of Pollio, Vinicianus, and Scaurus were adjourned by the emperor for his personal decision in company with the senate, though there were certain ominous indications attached to his mention of Scaurus.
10 1 Even women were not exempt from peril. As they could not be accused of grasping at sovereignty, they were indicted for their tears; and the aged Vitia, mother of Fufius Geminus, was put to death because she had wept at the killing of her son. This in the senate: similarly, at the emperor’s tribunal, Vescularius Flaccus and Julius Marinus were hurried to their death — two of his ancient friends, who had followed him to Rhodes and at Capreae, were not divided from him: Vescularius, his intermediary in the plot against Libo; Marinus, the partner of Sejanus in the destruction of Curtius Atticus; whence the greater joy, when it was learned that the precedents had recoiled upon their contrivers.
About the same time, the pontiff Lucius Piso — rare accident in one of his great fame — died in the course of nature. Never the willing author of any slavish proposal, if ever necessity pressed too hard, he was still a discreet and restraining influence. His father, as I have mentioned, had held the censorship; his life was prolonged to the eightieth year; and he had earned in Thrace the honour of a triumph. But his main distinction was the remarkable judgement with which, as Urban Prefect, he exercised an authority, only of late continuous, and disliked the more because the habit of obedience was lacking.
11 1 For previously, to avoid leaving the capital without a compete authority, when the kings — or, later, the magistrates — had to absent themselves from home, it was usual to choose a temporary official to preside in the courts and deal with emergencies; and the tradition runs that Denter Romulius was appointed by Romulus, and, subsequently, Numa Marcius by Tullus Hostilius, and Spurius Lucretius by Tarquinius Superbus. Then the right of delegation passed to the consuls; and a shade of the old order lingers whenever, on account of the Latin Fe
stival, a Prefect is commissioned to discharge the consular functions. Again, in the civil wars, Augustus placed Cilnius Maecenas of the equestrian order at the head of all affairs in Rome and Italy. Then, upon his advent to power, as the population was large and legal remedies dilatory, he took from the body of ex-consuls an official to coerce the slaves as well as that class of the free-born community whose boldness renders it turbulent, unless it is overawed by force. Messala Corvinus was the first to receive those powers, only to forfeit them within a few days on the ground of his incapacity to exercise them. Next, Statilius Taurus upheld the position admirably in spite of his advanced age; and finally Piso, after acquitting himself with equal credit for twenty years, was honoured by decree of the senate with a public funeral.
12 1 A proposal was now put to the Fathers by the plebeian tribune Quintilianus with regard to a Sibylline book; Caninius Gallus, of the Fifteen, demanding its admission among the other verses of the same prophetess, and a senatorial decree on the point. This had been accorded without discussion, when the emperor forwarded a letter, in which he passed a lenient criticism on the tribune “whose youth accounted for his ignorance of old custom”: to Gallus he expressed his displeasure that he, “long familiar with religious theory and ritual, had on dubious authority forestalled the decision of his College, and, before the poem had, as usual, been read and considered by the Masters, had brought up the question in a thinly attended senate.” He reminded him at the same time that, because of the many apocryphal works circulated under the famous name, Augustus had fixed a day within which they were to be delivered to the Urban Praetor, private ownership becoming illegal. — A similar decision had been taken even at an earlier period, after the burning of the Capitol during the Social War; when the verses of the Sibyl, or Sibyls, as the case may be, were collected from Samos, Ilium, and Erythrae, and even in Africa, Sicily, and the Graeco-Italian colonies; the priests being entrusted with the task of sifting out the genuine specimens, so far as should have been possible by human means. Hence, in this case also, the book in question was submitted to the examination of the Quindecimvirate.
13 1 Under the same consuls, the excessive price of cornº all but ended in rioting; and large demands were for several days made in the theatre with a freedom not usually employed towards the sovereign. Aroused by this, he upbraided the magistrates and the senate for having failed to restrain the populace by the authority of the state; and, in addition, pointed to the provinces from which he imported the corn-supply, and to the fact that he did so on a far greater scale than Augustus. In the hope, then, of reducing the commons to order, the senate framed a resolution of old-fashioned severity; while an edict not less drastic was issued by the consuls. The silence of Tiberius himself was not, as he had thought, taken for democratic forbearance but for pride.
14 1 At the end of the year, the Roman knights, Geminius, Celsus, and Pompeius, succumbed to the charge of conspiracy. One of them, Geminius, through his prodigal expenditure and effeminacy of life, was certainly a friend of Sejanus, but to no serious purpose. The tribune Julius Celsus, again, when imprisoned, slackened his chain, and by slipping it over his head and pulling at the two ends broke his neck. On the other hand, Rubrius Fabatus was placed under surveillance on the ground that, in despair at the state of Rome, he was contemplating flight to the mercy of the Parthians. Certainly he was discovered in the neighbourhood of the Sicilian Strait, and, when haled back by a centurion, could give no plausible reasons for his distant pilgrimage. He kept his life, however, more through forgetfulness than through clemency.
15 1 In the consulate of Servius Galba and Lucius Sulla, the Caesar, after long debating whom to appoint as husbands for his grand-daughters, found the age of the girls advancing, and selected Lucius Cassius and Marcus Vinicius. Vinicius came of country stock: born at Cales, with a father and grandfather of consular rank, but of equestrian family otherwise, he was gentle in disposition and the master of a polished eloquence. Cassius, of a plebeian but old and honoured house at Rome, and trained under strict paternal discipline, recommended himself more often by an accommodating temper than by energy. To him and to Vinicius Tiberius plighted respectively Drusilla and Julia, the daughters of Germanicus, and wrote to the senate on the subject with a perfunctory eulogy of the young men. Then, after giving a number of extremely indelicate reasons for his absence, he turned to the graver subject of “enmities incurred for his country’s good,” and asked that the prefect Macro and a few tribunes and centurions should be admitted with himself as often as he entered the curia. Yet, notwithstanding that the senate passed a comprehensive decree without any proviso as to the composition or numbers of his escort, not once did he even approach the roofs of Rome, far less the deliberative assembly of the state, but time and again, by devious roads, encircled, and avoided, his native city.
16 1 Meanwhile, an army of accusers broke loose on the persons who habitually increased their riches by usury, in contravention of a law of the dictator Caesar, regulating the conditions of lending money and holding property within the boundaries of Italy: a measure dropped long ago, since the public good ranks second to private utility. The curse of usury, it must be owned, is inveterate in Rome, a constant source of sedition and discord; and attempts were accordingly made to repress it even in an older and less corrupt society. First came a provision of the Twelve Tables that the rate of interest, previously governed by the fancy of the rich, should not exceed one-twelfth per cent for the month; later a tribunician rogation lowered it to one-half of that amount; and at length usufruct was unconditionally banned; while a series of plebiscites strove to meet the frauds which were perpetually repressed, only, by extraordinary evasions, to make their appearance once more. In the present instance, however, the praetor Gracchus, to whose jurisdiction the case had fallen, was forced by the numbers implicated to refer it to the senate; and the Fathers in trepidation — for not one member was clear from such a charge — asked an indulgence from the prince. It was granted; and the next eighteen months were assigned as a term of grace within which all accounts were to be adjusted in accordance with the prescriptions of the law.
17 1 The result was a dearth of money: for not only were all debts called in simultaneously; but after so many convictions and sales of forfeited estates, the cash which had been realized was locked in the treasury or the imperial exchequer. To meet this difficulty, the senate had prescribed that every creditor was to invest two-thirds of his capital, now lying at interest, in landed property in Italy;
18 1 Old fears now returned with the indictment for treason of Considius Proculus; who, while celebrating his birthday without a qualm, was swept off to the senate-house and in the same moment condemned and executed. His sister Sancia was banned from fire and water, the accuser being Quintus Pomponius: a restless character, who pleaded that the obj
ect of his activity in this and similar cases was, by acquiring favour with the emperor, to palliate the dangers of his brother Pomponius Secundus. Exile was also the sentence of Pompeia Macrina, whose husband Argolicus and father-in-law Laco, two of the most prominent men in Achaia had been struck down by the Caesar. Her father, too, a Roman knight of the highest rank, and her brother, a former praetor, finding their condemnation at hand, committed suicide. The crime laid to their account was that Theophanes of Mytilene (great-grandfather of Pompeia and her brother) had been numbered with the intimates of Pompey, and that, after his death, Greek sycophancy had paid him the honour of deification.
19 1 After these, Sextus Marius, the richest man of Spain, was arraigned for incest with his daughter and flung from the Tarpeian Rock; while, to leave no doubt that it was the greatness of his wealth which had redounded to his ruin, his copper-mines and gold-mines, though forfeit to the state, were reserved by Tiberius for himself. And as executions had whetted his appetite, he gave orders for all persons in custody on the charge of complicity with Sejanus to be killed. On the ground lay the huge hecatomb of victims: either sex, every age; the famous, the obscure; scattered or piled in mounds. Nor was it permitted to relatives or friends to stand near, to weep over them, or even to view them too long; but a cordon of sentries, with eyes for each beholder’s sorrow, escorted the rotting carcasses, as they were dragged to the Tiber, there to float with the current or drift to the banks, with none to commit them to the flames or touch them. The ties of our common humanity had been dissolved by the force of terror; and before each advance of cruelty compassion receded.
20 1 About the same time, Gaius Caesar, who had accompanied his grandfather on the departure to Capreae, received in marriage Claudia, the daughter of Marcus Silanus. His monstrous character was masked by a hypocritical modesty: not a word escaped him at the sentencing of his mother or the destruction of his brethren; whatever the mood assumed for the day by Tiberius, the attitude of his grandson was the same, and his words not greatly different. Hence, a little later, the epigram of the orator Passienus — that the world never knew a better slave, nor a worse master.