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

by Publius Cornelius Tacitus

  47 1 Meanwhile, at Rome the seeds were being sown of bloodshed destined to outlast Tiberius. Laelius Balbus had brought a charge of treason against Acutia, formerly the wife of Publius Vitellius. After her condemnation, a reward was on the point of being decreed to the accuser, when Junius Otho, the plebeian tribune, opposed his veto: whence a feud between the pair, terminated later by the destruction of Otho. Next, Albucilla, made notorious by a multitude of lovers, and at one time married to Satrius Secundus, the divulger of the plot, was arraigned for a breach of piety towards the sovereign: associated in the indictment as her accomplices and adulterers were Gnaeus Domitius, Vibius Marsus, Lucius Arruntius. On the nobility of Domitius I have touched above; Marsus also could claim ancestral honours as well as some distinction in letters. But the documents forwarded to the senate stated that Macro had presided at the examination of witnesses and the torture of the slaves; and the absence of the emperor’s usual letter against the accused gave rise to a suspicion that much of the evidence had been fabricated during his illness, and possibly without his knowledge, on account of the prefect’s well-known hostility to Arruntius.

  48 1 Domitius and Marsus, therefore, continued to live — the former studying his defence, the latter ostensibly bent on self-starvation. Arruntius, whose friends advised procrastination and delays, replied that “not the same things were becoming to all men. For himself he had lived long enough; and it was his one regret that he had borne with an old age of anxieties amid flouts and perils, long detested by Sejanus, now by Macro, always by one or other of the mighty, not through his fault, but because he was impatient of villanies. True, he might steer through the few days before the passing of the sovereign: but how to escape the youth of the sovereign who loomed ahead? Or, if absolute sway had power to convulse and transform the character of Tiberius after his vast experience of affairs, should Gaius Caesar, barely out of his boyhood, ignorant of all things or nurtured amid the worst, apply himself to better ways under the tutelage of Macro; who had been chosen, as the worse villain of the pair, to crush Sejanus, and had tormented the state by crimes more numerous than his? Even now he foresaw a yet harder servitude, and for that reason he was fleeing at once from the past and from the future.” So speaking, with something of a prophetic accent, he opened his veins. — That Arruntius did well to die the sequel will demonstrate. Albucilla, after dealing herself an ineffective wound, was borne to the dungeon by order of the senate. Of those who had subserved her amours, Carsidius Sacerdos, an ex-praetor, was condemned to deportation to an island, Pontius Fregellanus to forfeiture of his senatorial rank; and the same penalties were decreed against Laelius Balbus: one verdict, at least, which was pronounced with joy, since he was regarded as the master of a truculent eloquence — the ever-ready foe of innocence.

  49 1 During these days, Sextus Papinius, member of a consular family, chose an abrupt and indecent end by throwing himself from a window. The motive was referred to his mother, long ago divorced, who, by flattering his taste for dissipation, was supposed to have driven the youth to extremities from which he could find no issue except by death. Arraigned accordingly in the senate, though she threw herself at the knees of the Fathers and pleaded at length the common heritage of grief and the greater weakness of the female heart under such a blow, with much else in the same harrowing strain, she was nevertheless forbidden the capital for ten years, till her younger son should leave behind him the slippery period of youth.

  50 1 By now his constitution and his strength were failing Tiberius, but not yet his powers of dissimulation. The unbending mind remained; still energetic in word and look, he strove every now and then to cover the manifest breaking-up by a forced sociability. After repeated changes of residence, he came to rest at last on the promontory of Misenum, in a villa which once had Lucius Lucullus for its master. There it was discovered, by the following means, that he was nearing the end. There was a doctor, of repute in his calling, by the name of Charicles, who had been accustomed not to treat the illnesses of the emperor but to offer him opportunities for consulting him. While taking his departure on the plea of private business, he clasped the Caesar’s hand, apparently as an act of respect, and felt the pulse. The device was detected. Tiberius — possibly offended, and therefore making a special effort to conceal his anger — ordered the dinner to proceed, and, ostensibly out of compliment to a departing friend, remained at table until after his usual hour. Still, Charicles assured Macro that the respiration was failing and that he would not last above a couple of days. Immediately all arrangements were hurried through; at interviews, if the parties were present; by couriers, in the case of the generals and the armies. On the sixteenth of March, owing to a stoppage in his breathing, it was believed that he had paid the debt of nature; and Gaius Caesar, in the midst of a gratulatory crowd, was leaving the villa to enter on the preliminaries of empire, when suddenly word came that Tiberius was recovering his speech and sight and calling for someone to bring him food as a restorative after his swoon. A general panic followed: the others began to scatter in all directions, each face counterfeiting grief or ignorance; only the Caesar, frozen into silence, stood dashed from the height of hope and expecting the worst. Macro, undaunted, ordered the old man to be suffocated under a pile of bedclothes, while all left the threshold. — Thus Tiberius made an end in the seventy-eighth year of his age.

  51 1 The son of Nero, on both sides he traced his origin to the Claudian house, though his mother, by successive acts of adoption, had passed into the Livian and, later, the Julian families. From earliest infancy he experienced the hazards of fortune. At first the exiled attendant of a proscribed father, he entered the house of Augustus in the quality of step-son; only to struggle against numerous rivals during the heyday of Marcellus and Agrippa and, later, of Gaius and Lucius Caesar; while even his brother Drusus was happier in the love of his countrymen. But his position was the most precarious after his preferment to the hand of Julia, when he had to tolerate, or to elude, the infidelities of his wife. Then came the return from Rhodes; and he was master of the heirless imperial house for twelve years, and later arbiter of the Roman world for virtually twenty-three. His character, again, has its separate epochs. There was a noble season in his life and fame while he lived a private citizen or a great official under Augustus; an inscrutable and disingenuous period of hypocritical virtues while Germanicus and Drusus remained: with his mother alive, he was still an amalgam of good and evil; so long as he loved, or feared, Sejanus, he was loathed for his cruelty, but his lust was veiled; finally, when the restraints of shame and fear were gone, and nothing remained but to follow his own bent, he plunged impartially into crime and into ignominy.

  BOOK XI

  1 1 . . . For she believed that Valerius Asiaticus, twice a consul, had formerly been her paramour; and, as she coveted equally the gardens which Lucullus had laid down and Asiaticus was embellishing with conspicuous splendour, she unleashed Suillius to indict the pair. With him was associated Britannicus’ tutor Sosibius; who ostensibly out of good-will, was to warn Claudius to be on his guard against a power and a purse which boded no good to emperors:—”The prime mover in the killing of Gaius Caesar, Asiaticus had not trembled to avow his complicity in a gathering of the Roman people and even to arrogate the glory of the assassination. Famous, in consequence, at Rome, with a reputation that pervaded the provinces, he was preparing an excursion to the armies of Germanicus; for the reason that, born as he was at Vienne and backed by a multitude of powerful connections, he had every facility for creating trouble among the peoples of his native land.” Claudius made no further scrutiny; but, as though to quell an incipient war, despatched at full speed a body of soldiers under the praetorian prefect Crispinus, who found Asiaticus at Baiae, threw him into irons, and haled him to the capital.

  2 1 Nor was access to the senate allowed: he was heard inside a bedroom, with Messalina looking on and Suillius formulating the charges: corruption of the military, who, he alleged, were bound in return
for money — and worse — to every form of infamy; adultery with Poppaea; and, finally, sexual effeminacy. The last imputation was too much for the defendant’s taciturnity:—”Question thy sons, Suillus, he broke out; “they will confess me man!” And entering on his defence, he moved Claudius deeply, and even elicited tears from Messalina; who, on quitting the room to wash them away, cautioned Vitellius not to let the prisoner slip through their fingers. She herself set hurriedly about the destruction of Poppaea, and suborned agents to drive her to a voluntary death by menace of the dungeon; the ignorance of the Caesar being so complete that, when her husband Scipio dined with him a few days later, he inquired why he had taken his place without his wife, and received the answer that she had gone the way of all flesh.

  3 1 When, however, Claudius requested his advice as to the acquittal of Asiaticus, Vitellius tearfully recalled their long-standing friendship and the equal devotion they had shown to the sovereign’s mother Antonia: then, running over the services of Asiaticus to the state, his recent work in the field against the Britons, and all else that seemed calculated to inspire compassion, he proposed that he should be allowed a free choice as to the form of his death; and a pronouncement from Claudius followed in the same spirit of clemency. When some of his friends then recommended the gradual exit by starvation, Asiaticus remarked that he was declining that boon; went through the gymnastic exercises which had become habitual with him; bathed; dined in good spirits; and, after observing that it would have been more respectable to perish by the subtlety of Tiberius or the onslaught of Gaius Caesar than to fall by female fraud and the lecherous tongue of Vitellius, opened his arteries; but not before he had visited his pyre and given orders for it to be moved to another site, so that his trees with their shady leafage might not be affected by the heat. So complete was his composure to the end!

  4 1 The Fathers were then convened; and Suillius proceeded to add to the list of accused two Roman knights of the highest rank, surnamed Petra. The cause of death lay in the allegation that they had lent their house as a trysting-place for Mnester and Poppaea. It was, however, for a vision during his night’s sleep that one of them was indicted, the charge being that he had seen Claudius crowned with a wheaten diadem, the ears inverted, and on the strength of his vision had predicted a shortage in the cornº-supply. It has been stated by some that the thing seen was a vine-wreath with whitening leaves; which he read as an indication of the emperor’s decease at the wane of autumn. The point not disputed was that it was a dream, whatever its character, which brought ruin to himself and to his brother. A million and a half sesterces, with the decorations of the praetorship, were voted to Crispinus. Vitellius proposed a million more for Sosibius, for assisting Britannicus by his instructions and Claudius by his counsels. Scipio, who was also asked for his view, replied: “As I think what all think of Poppaea’s offences, take me as saying what all say!” — an elegant compromise between conjugal love and senatorial obligation.

  5 1 And now Suillius, steady and pitiless, continued his prosecutions, his boldness finding a multitude of imitators: for the concentration of all legal and magisterial functions in the person of the sovereign had opened a wide field to the plunderer. Nor was any public ware so frankly on sale as the treachery of advocates: so much so that Samius, a Roman knight of distinction, after paying Suillius four hundred thousand sesterces and finding him in collusion with the opponents, fell on his sword in the house of his counsel. Hence, following the lead of the consul designate, Gaius Silius, whose power and whose ruin I shall describe in their place, the Fathers rose in a body, demanding the Cincian law, with its ancient stipulation that no person shall accept either money or gift for pleading a cause.

  6 1 Then, as the members for whom the stigma was designed began to protest, Silius, who was at variance with Suillius, delivered a bitter attack and appealed to the example of the old orators, who had regarded fame and the future as the only wages of eloquence:—”What would otherwise be the fairest and foremost of the liberal arts was degraded by mercenary service: even good faith could not remain unaffected, when the size of the fees was the point regarded. If lawsuits were so conducted that no one profited by them, lawsuits would be fewer: as matters stood, enmities and accusations, ill blood and injustice, were being fostered, in order that, as the prevalence of disease brought rewards to the physician, so the corruption of the courts should bring money to the advocate. Let them remember Asinius, Messala, and, of the moderns, Arruntius and Aeserninus: they had reached the summits of their profession without a stain upon their life or their eloquence!” With the consul designate speaking in this strain and others indicating assent, steps were taken to draft a resolution making offenders liable under the law of extortion, when Suillius, Cossutianus, and the rest, who saw that to them the vote implied not trial — their guilt was too manifest for that — but punishment, surrounded the emperor, imploring an amnesty for the past.

  7 1 At his signal of consent, they began to state their case:—”Where was the man whose presumption was such that he could anticipate in hope an eternity of fame? It was a boon to defendants themselves that help should be made available, so that no one need be left at the mercy of the strong through the lack of an advocate. But eloquence was not a happy accident costing nothing: private business was neglected in proportion as a man applied himself to the affairs of others. Many supported themselves by military service; not a few by the cultivation of their estates: no man embraced any avocation, unless he had made sure that it would yield him a return. It was easy for Asinius and Messala, glutted with the prizes of the duel between Antony and Augustus, or for the heirs of wealthy houses — Aeserninus, Arruntius, and their like — to assume a pose of magnanimity: they had themselves obvious precedents in the rewards for which Publius Clodius or Gaius Curio were in the habit of delivering their harangues. Personally, they were senators of modest means, who, in a tranquil state, sought none but the emoluments of peace: Let him consider also the common people who won distinction by the gown! If the rewards of the art they studied were annulled, the art too would perish.” — The emperor, who considered that these arguments, if less high-minded, were still not pointless, fixed ten thousand sesterces as the maximum fee to be accepted; those exceeding it to be liable on the count of extortion.

  8 Nearly at the same time, Mithridates, whose tenure of the Armenian crown and arrest by order of Caligula I have already mentioned, followed the advice of Claudius and returned to his kingdom, in reliance on the powers of Pharasmanes. That prince, king of Iberia and also brother of Mithridates, kept announcing that the Parthians were divided among themselves — the crown was in question, minor matters unregarded. For Gotarzes, among his numerous cruelties, had procured the murder of his brother Artabanus and his wife and son, with the result that the rest took alarm and called in Vardanes. He, with his usual alacrity for great adventures, covered three thousand stadia in two days; drove the unsuspecting and terrified Gotarzes into flight, and without hesitation seized the nearest satrapies — Seleucia alone refusing to acknowledge his supremacy. Less from considerations of his immediate interest than from anger at a community which had also deserted his father, he hampered himself with the siege of a powerful city, secured by the barrier of an intervening river, fortified, and provisioned. Meanwhile, Gotarzes, strengthened by the forces of the Dahae and Hyrcanians, renewed hostilities; and Vardanes, compelled to abandon Seleucia, pitched his court opposite to him on the plains of Bactria.

  9 1 This juncture, when the powers of the East were divided and it was still uncertain which way the scales would fall, gave Mithridates his opportunity of seizing Armenia, thanks to the energy of the Roman troops in demolishing the hill fortresses, while the Iberian army overran the plains; for the natives offered no resistance after the rout of the prefect Demonax, who had risked a battle. Some little delay was occasioned by Cotys, the king of Lesser Armenia, to whom a section of the nobles had turned: then he was repressed by a despatch from the Caesar, and the cur
rent set full towards Mithridates, who showed more severity than was conducive to the stability of his new throne. — Meanwhile, as the Parthian commanders were preparing for battle, they suddenly concluded an agreement on their discovery of a national conspiracy, disclosed by Gotarzes to his brother. They met, hesitantly at first; then with right hands clasped, they pledged themselves before the altars of the gods to avenge the treachery of their enemies and each to make concessions to the other. Vardanes was considered the better fitted to retain the crown: Gotarzes, to avoid all chance of rivalry, withdrew into the depths of Hyrcania. On the return of Vardanes, Seleucia capitulated in the seventh year after its revolt; not without some dishonour to the Parthians, whom a single town had so long defied.

  10 1 Vardanes then visited the principal satrapies, and was burning to recover Armenia, when he was checked by a threat of war from Vibius Marsus, the legate of Syria. In the meantime, Gotarzes, repenting of his cession of the throne, and invited by the grandees, whose vassalage is always more irksome in peace, gathered an army. On the other side, a counter-advance brought Vardanes to the river Erindes. A severe struggle at the crossing ended in his complete victory, and in successful actions he reduced the intervening tribes up to the Sindes, which forms the boundary-line between the Dahae and Arians. There his triumphs came to a close, as the Parthians, though victorious, were in no mood for a distant campaign. Consequently, after raising a number of monuments recording his power and the fact that no Arsacid before him had levied tribute from those nations, he returned full of glory and therefore more arrogant and more arbitrary towards his subjects; who, by a prearranged act of treachery, assassinated him while off his guard and absorbed in his hunting, — a prince still in his earliest manhood, but in renown, had he sought the love of his people as he sought the fear of his enemies, unequalled but by a few of veteran kings.