11 1 Accordingly, she carried word to her father to abandon hope and accept the inevitable. At the same time, news came that arrangements were being made for a trial in the senate and a merciless verdict. Nor were there wanting those who advised him to name the Caesar as a principal heir, and thus safeguard the residue for his grandchildren. Rejecting the proposal, however, so as not to sully a life, passed in a near approach to freedom, by an act of servility at the close, he distributed among his slaves what money was available: all portable articles he ordered them to remove for their own uses, reserving only three couches for the final scene. Then, in the same chamber, with the same piece of steel, they severed their veins; and hurriedly, wrapped in the single garment which decency prescribed, they were carried to the baths, the father gazing on his daughter, the grandmother on her grandchild and she on both; all praying with rival earnestness for a quick end to the failing breath, so that they might leave their kith and kin still surviving, and assured of death. Fate observed the proper order; and the two eldest passed away the first, then Pollitta in her early youth. They were indicted after burial; the verdict was that they should be punished in the fashion of our ancestors; and Nero, interposing, allowed them to die unsupervised. Such were the comedies that followed, when the deed of blood was done.
12 1 Publius Gallus, a Roman knight, for being intimate with Faenius Rufus and not unacquainted with Vetus, was interdicted from fire and water: the freedman, and accuser, was rewarded for his service by a seat in the theatre among •the tribunician runners. The months following April — otherwise known as “Neroneus” — were renamed, May taking the style of “Claudius,” June that of “Germanicus.” According to the testimony of Cornelius Orfitus, the author of the proposal, the alteration in the case of June was due to the fact that already the execution of two Torquati for their crimes had made “Junius” a sinister name.
13 1 Upon this year, disgraced by so many deeds of shame, Heaven also set its mark by tempest and disease. Campania was wasted by a whirlwind, which far and wide wrecked the farms, the fruit trees, and the crops, and carried its fury to the neighbourhood of the capital, where all classes of men were being decimated by a deadly epidemic. No outward sign of a distempered air was visible. Yet the houses were filled with lifeless bodies, the streets with funerals. Neither sex nor age gave immunity from danger; slaves and the free-born populace alike were summarily cut down, amid the laments of their wives and children, who, themselves infected while tending or mourning the victims, were often burnt upon the same pyre. Knights and senators, though they perished on all hands, were less deplored — as if, by undergoing the common lot, they were cheating the ferocity of the emperor.
In the same year, levies were held in Narbonese Gaul, Africa, and Asia, to recruit the legions of Illyricum, in which all men incapacitated by age or sickness were being discharged fromº the service. The emperor alleviated the disaster at Lugdunum by a grant of four million sesterces to repair the town’s losses: the same amount which Lugdunum had previously offered in aid of the misfortunes of the capital.
14 1 In the consulate of Gaius Suetonius and Luccius Telesinus, Antistius Sosianus, who had, as I have said, been sentenced to exile for composing scurrilous verses upon Nero, heard of the honour paid to informers and of the emperor’s alacrity for bloodshed. Reckless by temperament, with a quick eye for opportunities, he used the similarity of their fortunes in order to ingratiate himself with Pammenes, who was an exile in the same place and, as a noted astrologer, had wide connections of friendship. He believed it was not for nothing that messengers were for ever coming to consult Pammenes, to whom, as he discovered at the same time, a yearly pension was allowed by Publius Anteius. He was further aware that Pammenes’ affection for Agrippina had earned him the hatred of Nero; that his riches were admirably calculated to excite cupidity; and that this was a circumstance which proved fatal to many. He therefore intercepted a letter from Anteius, stole in addition the papers, concealed in Pammenes’ archives, which contained his horoscope and career, and, lighting at the same time on the astrologer’s calculations with regard to the birth and life of Ostorius Scapula, wrote to the emperor that, could he be granted a short respite from his banishment, he would bring him grave news conducive to his safety; for Anteius and Ostorius had designs upon the empire, and were peering into their destinies and that of the prince. Fast galleys were at once sent out, and Sosianus arrived in haste. The moment his information was divulged, Anteius and Ostorius were regarded, not as incriminated, but as condemned: so much so, that not a man would become signatory to the will of Anteius until Tigellinus came forward with his sanction, first warning the testator not to defer his final dispositions. Anteius swallowed poison; but, disgusted by its slowness, found a speedier death by cutting his arteries.
15 1 Ostorius, at the moment, was on a remote estate on the Ligurian frontier; and thither a centurion was despatched to do the murder quickly. A motive for speed was given by the fact that Ostorius, the owner of a considerable military reputation and a civic crown earned in Britain, had, by his great bodily powers and skill in arms, inspired Nero with a fear that he might possibly attack his sovereign, always cowardly and more than ever terrified by the lately discovered plot. The centurion, then, after guarding the exits from the villa, disclosed the imperial orders to Ostorius. The victim turned against himself the courage which he had often evinced in face of the enemy. Finding that, although he had opened his veins, the blood ran slowly, he had recourse to a slave for one service alone, to hold up a dagger steadily; then he drew his hand nearer, and met the steel with his throat.
16 1 Even had I been narrating campaigns abroad and lives laid down for the commonwealth, and narrating them with the same uniformity of incident, I should myself have lost appetite for the task, and I should expect the tedium of others, repelled by the tale of Roman deaths, honourable perhaps, but tragic and continuous. As it is, this slave-like patience and the profusion of blood wasted at home weary the mind and oppress it with melancholy. The one concession I would ask from those who shall study these records is that they would permit me not to hate the men who died with so little spirit! It was the anger of Heaven against the Roman realm — an anger which you cannot, as in the case of beaten armies or captured towns, mention once and for all and proceed upon your way. Let us make this concession to the memory of the nobly born: that, as in the last rites they are distinguished from the vulgar dead, so, when history records their end, each shall receive and keep his special mention.
17 1 For, in the course of a few days, there fell, in a single band, Annaeus Mela, Anicius Cerialis, Rufrius Crispinus, and Titus Petronius. Mela and Crispinus were Roman knights of senatorial rank. The latter, once commander of the praetorian guards and decorated with the consular insignia, but latterly banished to Sardinia on a charge of conspiracy, committed suicide on reception of the news that his death had been ordered. Mela, son of the same parents as Gallio and Seneca, had refrained from seeking office, as he nursed the paradoxical ambition of equalling the influence of a consular while remaining a simple knight: at the same time, he held that the shorter road to the acquiry of wealth lay in the pro-curatorships handling private business of the sovereign. He was also the father of Lucan — a considerable enhancement of his fame. After his son’s death, he called in the debts owing to the estate with a vigour which raised up an accuser in Fabius Romanus, one of Lucan’s intimate friends. A fictitious charge, that knowledge of the plot had been shared between father and son, was backed by a forged letter from Lucan. Nero, after inspecting it, gave orders that it was to be carried to Mela. Mela took what was then the favoured way of death, and opened an artery, first penning a codicil by which he bequeathed a large sum to Tigellinus and his son-in-law Cossutianus Capito, in hopes of saving the rest of the will. A postscript to the codicil, written in appearance as a protest against the iniquity of his doom, stated that, while he himself was dying without a cause for his execution, Rufrius Crispinus and Anicius Ce
rialis remained in the enjoyment of life, though bitterly hostile to the emperor. The statement was considered to be a fiction, invented in the case of Crispinus, because death had been inflicted; in that of Cerialis, to make certain its infliction. For not long afterwards he took his own life, exciting less pity than the others, as memories remained of his betrayal of the conspiracy to Gaius Caesar.
18 1 Petronius calls for a brief retrospect. He was a man whose day was passed in sleep, his nights in the social duties and amenities of life: others industry may raise to greatness — Petronius had idled into fame. Nor was he regarded, like the common crowd of spendthrifts, as a debauchee and wastrel, but as the finished artist of extravagance. His words and actions had a freedom and a stamp of self-abandonment which rendered them doubly acceptable by an air of native simplicity. Yet as proconsul of Bithynia, and later as consul, he showed himself a man of energy and competent to affairs. Then, lapsing into the habit, or copying the features, of vice, he was adopted into the narrow circle of Nero’s intimates as his Arbiter of Elegance; the jaded emperor finding charm and delicacy in nothing save what Petronius had commended. His success awoke the jealousy of Tigellinus against an apparent rival, more expert in the science of pleasure than himself. He addressed himself, therefore, to the sovereign’s cruelty, to which all other passions gave pride of place; arraigning Petronius for friendship with Scaevinus, while suborning one of his slaves to turn informer, withholding all opportunity of defence, and placing the greater part of his household under arrest.
19 1 In those days, as it chanced, the Caesar had migrated to Campania; and Petronius, after proceeding as far as Cumae, was being there detained in custody. He declined to tolerate further the delays of fear or hope; yet still did not hurry to take his life, but caused his already severed arteries to be bound up to meet his whim, then opened them once more, and began to converse with his friends, in no grave strain and with no view to the fame of a stout-hearted ending. He listened to them as they rehearsed, not discourses upon the immortality of the soul or the doctrines of philosophy, but light songs and frivolous verses. Some of his slaves tasted of his bounty, a few of the lash. He took his place at dinner, and drowsed a little, so that death, if compulsory, should at least resemble nature. Not even in his will did he follow the routine of suicide by flattering Nero or Tigellinus or another of the mighty, but — prefixing the names of the various catamites and women — detailed the imperial debauches and the novel features of each act of lust, and sent the document under seal to Nero. His signet-ring he broke, lest it should render dangerous service later.
20 1 While Nero doubted how the character of his nights was gaining publicity, there suggested itself the name of Silia — the wife of a senator, and therefore a woman of some note, requisitioned by himself for every form of lubricity, and on terms of the closest intimacy with Petronius. She was now driven into exile for failing to observe silence upon what she had seen and undergone. Here the motive was a hatred of his own. But Minucius Thermus, an ex-praetor, he sacrificed to the animosities of Tigellinus. For a freedman of Thermus had brought certain damaging charges against the favourite, which he himself expiated by the pains of torture, his patron by an unmerited death.
21 1 After the slaughter of so many of the noble, Nero in the end conceived the ambition to extirpate virtue herself by killing Thrasea Paetus and Barea Soranus. To both he was hostile from of old, and against Thrasea there were additional motives; for he had walked out of the senate, as I have mentioned, during the discussion on Agrippina, and at the festival of the Juvenalia his services had not been conspicuous — a grievance which went the deeper that in Patavium, his native place, the same Thrasea had sung in tragic costume at the . . . Games instituted by the Trojan Antenor. Again, on the day when sentence of death was all but passed on the praetor Antistius for his lampoons on Nero, he proposed, and carried, a milder penalty; and, after deliberately absenting himself from the vote of divine honours to Poppaea, he had not assisted at her funeral. These memories were kept from fading by Cossutianus Capito. For, apart from his character with its sharp trend to crime, he was embittered against Thrasea, whose influence, exerted in support of the Cilician envoys prosecuting Capito for extortion, had cost him the verdict.
22 1 He preferred other charges as well:—”At the beginning of the year, Thrasea evaded the customary oath; though the holder of a quindecimviral priesthood, he took no part in the national vows; he had never offered a sacrifice for the welfare of the emperor or for his celestial voice. Once a constant and indefatigable member, who showed himself the advocate or the adversary of the most commonplace resolutions of the Fathers, for three years he had not set foot within the curia; and but yesterday, when his colleagues were gathering with emulous haste to crush Silanus and Vetus, he had preferred to devote his leisure to the private cases of his clients. Matters were come already to a schism and to factions: if many made the same venture, it was war! ‘As once,’ he said, ‘this discord-loving state prated of Caesar and Cato, so now, Nero, it prates of yourself and Thrasea. And he has his followers — his satellites, rather — who affect, not as yet the contumacity of his opinions, but his bearing and his looks, and whose stiffness and austerity are designed for an impeachment of your wantonness. To him alone your safety is a thing uncared for, your talents a thing unhonoured. The imperial happiness he cannot brook: can he not even be satisfied with the imperial bereavements and sorrows? Not to believe Poppaea deity bespeaks the same temper that will not swear to the acts of the deified Augustus and the deified Julius. He contemns religion, he abrogates law. The journal of the Roman people is scanned throughout the provinces and armies with double care for news of what Thrasea has not done! Either let us pass over to his creed, if it is the better, or let these seekers after a new world lose their chief and their instigator. It is the sect that produced the Tuberones and the Favonii — names unloved even in the old republic. In order to subvert the empire, they make a parade of liberty: the empire overthrown, they will lay hands on liberty itself. You have removed Cassius to little purpose, if you intend to allow these rivals of the Bruti to multiply and flourish! A word in conclusion: write nothing yourself about Thrasea — leave the senate to decide between us!’ “ Nero fanned still more the eager fury of Cossutianus, and reinforced him with the mordant eloquence of Eprius Marcellus.
23 1 As to Barea Soranus, the Roman knight, Ostorius Sabinus, had already claimed him for his own, in a case arising from Soranus’ proconsulate of Asia; during which he increased the emperor’s malignity by his fairness and his energy, by the care he had spent upon clearing the harbour of Ephesus, and by his failure to punish the city of Pergamum for employing force to prevent the loot of its statues and paintings by the Caesarian freedman, Acratus. But the charges preferred were friendship with Plautus and popularity-hunting in his province with a view of the winning it for the cause of revolution. The time chosen for the condemnation was the moment when Tiridates was on the point of arriving to be invested with the crown of Armenia; the object being that, with public curiosity diverted to foreign affairs, domestic crime might be thrown into shadow, or, possibly, that the imperial greatness might be advertised by the royal feat of slaughtering illustrious men.
24 1 The whole city, then, streamed out to welcome the emperor and inspect the king, but Thrasea was ordered to avoid the reception. He showed no dejection, but drew up a note to Nero, asking for the allegations against him and stating that he would rebut them, if he was allowed cognizance of the charges and faculties for reply. Nero took the note eagerly, in hopes that Thrasea, in a moment of panic, had written something which might enhance the glory of the emperor and sully his own reputation. As this proved not to be the case, and he himself took alarm at the looks and spirit and frankness of an innocent man, he ordered the senate to be convened.
25 1 Thrasea now consulted with his closest friends whether to attempt or to scorn defence. The advice offered was conflicting. Those who favoured his entering the senate-house
argued that they were certain of his firmness:—”He would say nothing but what increased his glory. It was for the spiritless and the timid to draw a veil over their latter end: let the nation see a man who could face his death; let the senate listen to words inspired, it might be thought, by some deity, and superior to human utterance. Even Nero might be moved by the sheer miracle; but, if he persisted in his cruelty, the after-world at least must discriminate between the record of an honourable death and the cowardice of those who perished in silence.”
26 1 Those, on the other hand, who held that he ought to wait at home, expressed the same opinion of Thrasea himself, but urged that he was threatened with mockery and humiliation: it would be better not to lend his ear to invectives and to insults. “Cossutianus and Eprius were not the only men ready and eager for villainy: there were others besides who, in their brutality, might perhaps venture upon physical violence; and even the respectable might follow through fear. Let him rather spare the senate, of which he had been so great an ornament, the ignominy of such a crime, and leave it uncertain what would have been the decision of the Fathers when they saw Thrasea upon his trial! To touch Nero with shame for his infamies was an idle dream, and it was much more to be feared that he would exercise his cruelty on Thrasea’s wife, his daughter, and the other objects of his affection. Therefore, let him seek, unstained and unpolluted, an end as glorious as theirs by whose walk and pursuits he had guided his life!” Arulenus Rusticus, young and ardent, was present at the conclave, and, in his thirst for fame, offered to veto the resolution of the senate; for he was a plebeian tribune. Thrasea checked his enthusiasm, dissuading him from an attempt, futile in itself and profitless to the accused, but fatal to its maker. “His own time,” he said, “was over, and he must not abandon the method of life which he had observed without a break for so many years. But Rusticus was at the beginning of his official career, and his future was uncompromised he must weigh well beforehand in his own mind what course of public life he would embark upon in such an age.” The question, whether it was proper for him to enter the senate, he reserved for his private consideration.
Complete Works of Tacitus (Delphi Classics) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 24) Page 92