43 1 There was no lack of auditors to report his remarks, word for word or with changes for the worse, to Seneca. Accusers were discovered, and they laid their charges — that the provincials had been plundered during Suillius’ government of Asia, and that there had been embezzlement of public money. Then, as the prosecution had obtained a year for inquiries, it seemed shorter to begin upon his delinquencies at home, witnesses to which were ready to hand. By these the venomous indictment which had driven Quintus Pomponius to the necessity of civil war; the hounding to death of Drusus’ daughter Julia, and of Poppaea Sabina; the trapping of Valerius Asiaticus, of Lusius Saturninus, and of Cornelius Lupus; finally, the conviction of an army of Roman knights, and the whole tale of Claudius’ cruelty, — were laid to the account of Suillius. In defence he urged that none of these acts had been undertaken voluntarily and that he had merely obeyed the sovereign; until the Caesar cut short his speech by stating that he had definite knowledge from his father’s papers that he had compelled no prosecution of any person. Orders from Messalina were now alleged, and the defence began to totter:—”For why had none other been chosen to put his voice at the disposal of that homicidal wanton? Punishment must be measured out to these agents of atrocity, when, after handling the wages of crime, they imputed the crime to others.” Hence, after the forfeiture of half his estate — for his son and granddaughter were allowed the other half, and a similar exemption was extended to the property they had derived from their mother’s will or their grandmother’s — he was banished to the Balearic Isles. Neither with his fate in the balance nor with his condemnation recorded did his spirit break; and it was asserted later that a life of luxury and abundance had made his seclusion not intolerable. When his son Nerullinus was attacked by the accusers, who relied on his father’s unpopularity and on charges of extortion, the emperor interposed his veto, on the ground that vengeance was satisfied.
44 1 Nearly at the same time, the plebeian tribune Octavius Sagitta, madly in love with a wedded woman called Pontia, purchased by immense gifts first the act of adultery, then her desertion of her husband. He promised marriage on his own part, and had secured a similar pledge on hers. Once free, however, the woman began to procrastinate, to plead the adverse wishes of her father, and, when hopes of a wealthier match presented themselves, to shuffle off her promise. Octavius, on the other side, now remonstrated, now threatened, appealing to the ruin of his reputation, to the exhaustion of his fortune, and finally placing his life, all that he could yet call his own, at her absolute disposal. As he was flouted, he asked for the consolation of one night, to allay his fever and enable him to control himself in future. The night was fixed, and Pontia entrusted the watch over her bedroom to a maid in their confidence. Octavius entered with one freedman, a dagger concealed in his dress. Love and anger now ran their usual course in upbraidings and entreaties, reproach and reparation; and a part of the night was set aside to passion; inflamed by which, as it seemed, he struck her through with his weapon, while she suspected nothing; drove off with a wound the maid who came running up, and broke out of the room. Next day, the murder was manifest, and the assassin not in doubt: for that he had been with her was demonstrated. None the less, the freedman asserted that the crime was his own; he had avenged, he said, the injuries of his patron; and so startling was this example of devotion that he had shaken the belief of some, when the maid’s recovery from her wound enabled her to disclose the truth. Octavius, after laying down his tribunate, was arraigned before the consuls by the father of the victim, and sentenced by verdict of the senate and under the law of assassination.
45 1 A no less striking instance of immorality proved in this year the beginning of grave public calamities. There was in the capital a certain Poppaea Sabina, daughter of Titus Ollius, though she had taken the name of her maternal grandfather, Poppaeus Sabinus, of distinguished memory, who, with the honours of his consulate and triumphal insignia, outshone her father: for Ollius had fallen a victim to his friendship with Sejanus before holding the major offices. She was a woman possessed of all advantages but a character. For her mother, after eclipsing the beauties of it her day, had endowed her alike with her fame and her looks: her wealth was adequate to the distinction of her birth. Her conversation was engaging, her wit not without point; she paraded modesty, and practised wantonness. In public she rarely appeared, and then with her face half-veiled, so as not quite to satiate the beholder, — or, possibly, because it so became her. She was never sparing of her reputation, and drew no distinctions between husbands and adulterers: vulnerable neither to her own nor to alien passion, where material advantage offered, thither she transferred her desires. Thus, whilst living in the wedded state with Rufrius Crispinus, a Roman knight by whom she had had a son, she was seduced by Otho, with his youth, his voluptuousness, and his reputed position as the most favoured of Nero’s friends: nor was it long before adultery was supplemented by matrimony. 46 1 Otho, possibly by an amorous indiscretion, began to praise the looks and the graces of his wife in presence of the emperor; or, possibly, his object was to inflame the sovereign’s desire, and, by the additional bond of joint ownership in one woman, to reinforce his own influence. His voice was often heard, declaring, as he rose from the Caesar’s table, that he at least must be returning to his wife — that to him had fallen that rank and beauty which the world desired and the fortunate enjoyed. In view of these and the like incitements, there was no tedious interval of delay; and Poppaea, admitted to the presence, proceeded to establish her ascendancy; at first, by cajolery and artifice, feigning that she was too weak to resist her passion and had been captured by Nero’s beauty; then — as the emperor’s love grew fervent — changing to haughtiness, and, if she was detained for more than a second night, insisting that she was a wife and could not renounce her married status, linked as she was to Otho by a mode of life which none could parallel:—”His was a true majesty of mind and garb; in him she contemplated the princely manner; while Nero, enchained by his menial paramour and the embraces of an Acte, had derived from that servile cohabitation no tincture of anything but the mean and the shabby.” Otho was debarred from his usual intimacy with the sovereign; then from his levées and his suite: finally, to prevent his acting as Nero’s rival in Rome, he was appointed to the province of Lusitania; where, till the outbreak of the civil war, he lived, not in the mode of his notorious past, but uprightly and without reproach, frivolous where his leisure was concerned, more self-controlled as regarded his official powers.
47 1 Henceforward Nero sought no veil for his debaucheries and crimes. He had a peculiar suspicion of Cornelius Sulla, whose natural slowness of wit he totally misunderstood, reading him as an astute character with a gift for simulation. His fears were deepened by the mendacity of Graptus, a Caesarian freedman, whom experience and age had familiarized with the household of the emperors from Tiberius downward. The Mulvian Bridge at that period was famous for its nocturnal attractions, and Nero was in the habit of frequenting it, so as to allow his extravagances a freer rein outside the city. Graptus accordingly invented the fiction that an ambuscade had been arranged for the prince in the event of his returning by the Flaminian Way; that it had been providentially avoided, as he had come back by the other route to the Gardens of Sallust; and that the author of the plot was Sulla — the foundation of the story being that, as chance would have it, a few rioters, in one of the juvenile escapades then so generally practised, had thrown the emperor’s servants, on the road home, into a groundless panic. Neither a slave nor a client of Sulla’s had been recognised; and his contemptible nature, incapable of daring in any form, was utterly incompatible with the charge: yet, precisely as though he had been proved guilty, he received orders to leave his country and confine himself within the walls of Massilia.
48 1 Under the same consuls, audience was given to deputations from Puteoli, despatched separately to the senate by the decurions and the populace, the former inveighing against the violence of the mob, the latter aga
inst the rapacity of the magistrates and of the leading citizens in general. Lest the quarrels, which had reached the point of stone-throwing and threats of arson, should end by provoking bloodshed under arms, Gaius Cassius was chosen to apply the remedy. As the disputants refused to tolerate his severity, the commission at his own request was transferred to the brothers Scribonius; and these were given a praetorian cohort, the terrors of which, together with a few executions, restored the town to concord.
49 1 I should not record a commonplace decree of the senate which authorized the town of Syracuse to exceed the numbers prescribed for gladiatorial exhibitions, had not Thrasea Paetus, by opposing it, presented his detractors with an opportunity for censuring his vote. “Why,” it was demanded, “if he believed senatorial freedom a necessity to the state, did he fasten on such frivolities? Why not reserve his suasion or dissuasion for the themes of which war or peace, of finance and law, and for the other matters on which hinged the welfare of Rome? Every member, each time that he received the privilege of recording his opinion, was free to express what views he desired and to demand a debate. — Or was it the one desirable reform, that shows at Syracuse should not be too liberal? and were all things else in all departments of the empire as entirely admirable as if not Nero’s, but Thrasea’s hand, were at the helm? But if the highest questions were to be slurred over by ignoring their existence, how much more was it a duty not to touch irrelevances!” Thrasea, on the other side, as his friends pressed for his explanation, answered that it was not ignorance of existing conditions which made him amend decrees of this character, but he was paying members the compliment of making it clear that they would not dissemble their interest in great affairs when they could give attention even to the slightest.
50 1 In the same year, as a consequence of repeated demands from the public, which complained of the exactions of the revenue-farmers, Nero hesitated whether he ought not to decree the abolition of all indirect taxation and present the reform as the noblest of gifts to the human race. His impulse, however, after much preliminary praise of his magnanimity, was checked by his older advisers, who pointed out that the dissolution of the empire was certain if the revenues on which the state subsisted were to be curtailed:—”For, the moment the duties on imports were removed, the logical sequel would be a demand for the abrogation of the direct taxes. To a large extent, the collecting companies had been set up by consuls and plebeian tribunes while the liberty of the Roman nation was still in all its vigour: later modifications had only been introduced in order that the amount of income and the necessary expenditure should tally. At the same time, a check ought certainly to be placed on the cupidity of the collectors; otherwise a system which had been endured for years without a complaint might be brought into ill odour by new-fashioned harshnesses.”
51 1 The emperor, therefore, issued an edict that the regulations with regard to each tax, hitherto kept secret, should be posted for public inspection. Claims once allowed to lapse were not to be revived after the expiry of a year; at Rome, the praetor — in the provinces, the propraetors or proconsuls — were to waive the usual order of trial in favour of actions against collectors; the soldiers were to retain their immunities except in the case of goods which they offered for sale: and there were other extremely fair rulings, which were observed for a time and then eluded. The annulment, however, of the “fortieth,” “fiftieth,” and other irregular exactions, for which the publicans had invented titles, is still in force. In the provinces over sea, the transport of grain was made less expensive, and it was laid down that cargo-boats were not to be included in the assessment of a merchant’s property nor treated as taxable.
52 1 Two defendants from the province of Africa, in which they had held proconsular power, were acquitted by the Caesar: Sulpicius Camerinus and Pompeius Silvanus. The opponents of Camerinus were private persons and not numerous, while the offences alleged were acts of cruelty rather than of embezzlement: around Silvanus had gathered a swarm of accusers, who were demanding time for the production of their witnesses. The defendant insisted on presenting his case at once, and carried his point, thanks to his wealth, his childlessness, and his advanced age, which he prolonged, however, beyond the lifetime of the fortune-hunters by whose intrigues he had escaped.
53 1 Up to this period, quiet had prevailed in Germany, thanks to the temper of our commanders; who, now that triumphal emblems were staled, expected greater distinction from the maintenance of peace. The heads of the army at the time were Pompeius Paulinus and Lucius Vetus. Not to keep the troops inactive, however, the former finished the embankment for checking the inundations of the Rhine, begun sixty-three years earlier by Drusus; while Vetus prepared to connect the Moselle and the Arar by running a canal between the two; so that goods shipped by sea and then up the Rhone and Arar could make their way by the canal, and in due course into the ocean: a method which would remove the natural difficulties of the route and create a navigable highway between the shores of the West and North. The scheme was nullified by the jealousy of Aelius Gracilis, the governor of Belgica, who discouraged Vetus from introducing his legions into a province outside his competence and so courting popularity in Gaul, “a proceeding,” he said, “which would awaken the misgivings of the emperor” — the usual veto upon honourable enterprise.
54 1 However, through the continuous inaction of the armies a rumour took rise that the legates had been divested of authority to lead them against an enemy. The Frisians accordingly moved their population to the Rhine bank; the able-bodied men by way of the forests and swamps, those not of military age by the Lakes. Here they settled in the clearings reserved for the use of the troops, the instigators being Verritus and Malorix, who exercised over the tribe such kingship as exists in Germany. They had already fixed their abodes and sown the fields, and were tilling the soil as if they had been born on it, when Dubius Avitus, — who had taken over the province from Paulinus, — by threatening them with the Roman arms unless they withdrew to their old district or obtained the grant of a new site from the emperor, forced Verritus and Malorix to undertake the task of presenting the petition. They left for Rome, where, in the interval of waiting for Nero, who had other cares to occupy him, they visited the usual places shown to barbarians, and among them the theatre of Pompey, where they were to contemplate the size of the population. There, to kill time (they had not sufficient knowledge to be amused by the play), they were putting questions as to the crowd seated in the auditorium — the distinctions between the orders — which were the knights? — where was the senate? — when they noticed a few men in foreign dress on the senatorial seats. They inquired who they were, and, on hearing that this was a compliment paid to the envoys of nations distinguished for their courage and for friendship to Rome, exclaimed that no people in the world ranked before Germans in arms or loyalty, went down, and took their seats among the Fathers. The action was taken in good part by the onlookers, as a trait of primitive impetuosity and generous rivalry. Nero presented both with the Roman citizenship, and instructed the Frisians to leave the district. As they ignored the order, compulsion was applied by the unexpected despatch of a body of auxiliary horse, which captured or killed the more obstinate of those who resisted.
55 1 The same ground was then seized by the Ampsivarii, a more powerful clan, not only in numbers, but in consequence of the pity felt for them by the adjacent tribes, as they had been expelled by the Chauci, and were now a homeless people imploring an unmolested exile. They had also the advocacy of Boiocalus, as he was called, a celebrated personage among those clans, and at the same time loyal to ourselves:—”In the Cheruscan rebellion,” he reminded us, “he had been thrown into chains by order of Arminius; next, he had served under the leadership of Tiberius and Germanicus; and now he was crowning an obedience of fifty years by subjecting his people to our rule. Why should such an extent of clear ground lie waste, merely that on some distant day the flocks and herds of the soldiers could be brought over to it? By all means let the
m keep reservations for cattle in the midst of starving men, but not to the extent of choosing a desert and a solitude for neighbours in preference to friendly nations! Once on a time those fields had been held by the Chamavi; then by the Tubantes, and later by the Usipi. As heaven had been given to the gods, so had earth to the race of mortal men, and what lacked a tenant was common property.” Then, raising his eyes to the sun and invoking the rest of the heavenly host, he demanded, as if face to face with them, “if they wished to look down on an empty earth. Sooner let them flood it with the sea and arrest these ravishers of the land!”
Complete Works of Tacitus (Delphi Classics) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 24) Page 81