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

by Publius Cornelius Tacitus

  20 1 Meanwhile there were the companies dispatched to Nauportus before the beginning of the mutiny. They had been detailed for the repair of roads and bridges, and on other service, but the moment news came of the disturbance in camp, they tore down their ensigns and looted both the neighbouring villages and Nauportus itself, which was large enough to claim the standing of a town. The centurions resisted, only to be assailed with jeers and insults, and finally blows; the chief object of anger being the camp-marshal, Aufidienus Rufus; who, dragged from his car, loaded with baggage, and driven at the head of the column, was plied with sarcastic inquiries whether he found it pleasant to support these huge burdens, these weary marches. For Rufus, long a private, then a centurion, and latterly a camp-marshal, was seeking to reintroduce the iron discipline of the past, habituated as he was to work and toil, and all the more pitiless because he had endured.

  21 1 The arrival of this horde gave the mutiny a fresh lease of life, and the outlying districts began to be overrun by wandering marauders. To cow the rest — for the general was still obeyed by the centurions and the respectable members of the rank and file — Blaesus ordered a few who were especially heavy-laden with booty to be lashed and thrown into the cells. As the escort dragged them away, they began to struggle, to catch at the knees of the bystanders, to call on the names of individual friends, their particular century, their cohort, their legion, clamouring that a similar fate was imminent for all. At the same time they heaped reproaches on the general and invoked high heaven, — anything and everything that could arouse odium or sympathy, alarm or indignation. The crowd flew to the rescue, forced the guard-room, unchained the prisoners, and now took into fellowship deserters and criminals condemned for capital offences.

  22 1 After this the flames burned higher; sedition found fresh leaders. A common soldier, Vibulenus by name, was hoisted on the shoulders of the bystanders in front of Blaesus’ tribunal, and there addressed the turbulent and curious crowd:—”You, I grant,” he said, “have restored light and breath to these innocent and much wronged men; but who restores the life to my brother — who my brother to me? He was sent to you by the army of Germany to debate our common interest — and yesterday night he did him to death by the hands of those gladiators whom he keeps and arms for the extermination of his soldiers. Answer me, Blaesus: — Whither have you flung the body? The enemy himself does not grudge a grave! Then, when I have sated my sorrow with kisses, and drowned it with tears, bid them butcher me as well: only, let our comrades here lay us in earth — for we died, not for crime, but because we sought to serve the legions.”

  23 1 He added to the inflammatory effect of his speech by weeping and striking his face and breast: then, dashing aside the friends on whose shoulders he was supported, he threw himself headlong and fawned at the feet of man after man, until he excited such consternation and hatred that one party flung into irons the gladiators in Blaesus’ service; another, the rest of his household; while the others poured out in search of the corpse. In fact, if it had not come to light very shortly that no body was discoverable, that the slaves under torture denied the murder, and that Vibulenus had never owned a brother, they were within measurable distance of making away with the general. As it was, they ejected the tribunes and camp-marshal and plundered the fugitives’ baggage. The centurion Lucilius also met his end. Camp humorists had surnamed him “Fetch-Another,” from his habit, as one cane broke over a private’s back, of calling at the top of his voice for a second, and ultimately a third. His colleagues found safety in hiding: Julius Clemens alone was kept, as the mutineers considered that his quick wits might be of service in presenting their claims. The eighth and fifteenth legions, it should be added, were on the point of turning their swords against each other upon the question of a centurion named Sirpicus, — demanded for execution by the eighth and protected by the fifteenth, — had not the men of the ninth intervened with entreaties and, in the event of their rejection, with threats.

  24 1 In spite of his secretiveness, always deepest when the news was blackest, Tiberius was driven by the reports from Pannonia to send out his son Drusus, with a staff of nobles and two praetorian cohorts. He had no instructions that could be called definite: he was to suit his measures to the emergency. Drafts of picked men raised the cohorts to abnormal strength. In addition, a large part of the praetorian horse was included, as well as the flower of the German troops, who at that time formed the imperial bodyguard. The commandant of the household troops, Aelius Sejanus, who held the office jointly with his father Strabo and exercised a remarkable influence over Tiberius, went in attendance, to act as monitor to the young prince and to keep before the eyes of the rest the prospects of peril or reward. As Drusus approached, the legions met him, ostensibly to mark their loyalty; but the usual demonstrations of joy and glitter of decorations had given place to repulsive squalor and to looks that aimed at sadness and came nearer to insolence.

  25 1 The moment he passed the outworks, they held the gates with sentries, and ordered bodies of armed men to be ready at fixed positions within the camp: the rest, in one great mass, flocked round the tribunal. Drusus stood, beckoning with his hand for silence. One moment, the mutineers would glance back at their thousands, and a roar of truculent voices followed; the next, they saw the Caesar and trembled: vague murmurings, savage yells and sudden stillnesses marked a conflict of passions which left them alternately terrified and terrible. At last, during a lull in the storm, Drusus read over his father’s letter, in which it was written that “he had personally a special regard for the heroic legions in whose company he had borne so many campaigns; that as soon as his thoughts found a rest from grief, he would state their case to the Conscript Fathers; meantime he had sent his son to grant without delay any reforms that could be conceded on the spot; the others must be reserved for the senate, a body which they would do well to reflect, could be both generous and severe.”

  26 1 The assembly replied that Clemens, the centurion, was empowered to present their demands. He began to speak of discharge at the end of sixteen years, gratuities for service completed, payment on the scale of a denarius a day, no retention of time-expired men with the colours. Drusus attempted to plead the jurisdiction of the senate and his father. He was interrupted with a shout:—”Why had he come, if he was neither to raise the pay of the troops nor to ease their burdens — if, in short, he had no leave to do a kindness? Yet death and the lash, Heaven was their witness, were within the competence of anyone! It had been a habit of Tiberius before him to parry the requests of the legions by references to Augustus, and now Drusus had reproduced the old trick. Were they never to be visited by any but these young persons with a father? It was remarkable indeed that the emperor should refer the good of his troops, and nothing else, to the senate. If so, he ought to consult the same senate when executions or battles were the order of the day. Or were rewards to depend on masters, punishments to be without control?”

  27 1 At last they left the tribunal, shaking their fists at any guardsman, or member of the Caesar’s staff, who crossed their road, in order to supply a ground of quarrel and initiate a resort to arms. They were bitterest against Gnaeus Lentulus, whose superior age and military fame led them to believe that he was hardening Drusus’ heart and was the foremost opponent of this degradation of the service. Before long they caught him leaving with the prince: he had foreseen the danger and was making for the winter-camp. Surrounding him, they demanded whither he was going? To the emperor? — or to his Conscript Fathers, there also to work against the good of the legions? Simultaneously they closed in and began to stone him. He was bleeding already from a cut with a missile and had made up his mind that the end was come, when he was saved by the advent of Drusus’ numerous escort.

  28 1 It was a night of menace and foreboded a day of blood, when chance turned peace-maker: for suddenly the moon was seen to be losing light in a clear sky. The soldiers, who had no inkling of the reason, took it as an omen of the present state of affair
s: the labouring planet was an emblem of their own struggles, and their road would lead them to a happy goal, if her brilliance and purity could be restored to the goddess! Accordingly, the silence was broken by a boom of brazen gongs and the blended notes of trumpet and horn. The watchers rejoiced or mourned as their deity brightened or faded, until rising clouds curtained off the view and she set, as they believed, in darkness. Then — so pliable to superstition are minds once unbalanced — they began to bewail the eternal hardships thus foreshadowed and their crimes from which the face of heaven was averted. This turn of the scale, the Caesar reflected, must be put to use: wisdom should reap where chance had sown. He ordered a round of the tents to be made. Clemens, the centurion, was sent for, along with any other officer whose qualities had made him popular with the ranks. These insinuated themselves everywhere, among the watches, the patrols, the sentries at the gates, suggesting hope and emphasizing fear. “How long must we besiege the son of our emperor? What is to be the end of our factions? Are we to swear fealty to Percennius and Vibulenus? Will Percennius and Vibulenus give the soldier his pay — his grant of land at his discharge? Are they, in fine, to dispossess the stock of Nero and Drusus and take over the sovereignty of the Roman People? Why, rather, as we were the last to offend, are we not the first to repent? Reforms demanded collectively are slow in coming: private favour is quickly earned and as quickly paid.” The leaven worked; and under the influence of their mutual suspicions they separated once more recruit from veteran, legion from legion. Then, gradually the instinct of obedience returned; they abandoned the gates and restored to their proper places the ensigns which they had grouped together at the beginning of the mutiny.

  29 1 At break of day Drusus called a meeting. He was no orator, but blamed their past and commended their present attitude with native dignity. He was not to be cowed, he said, by intimidation and threats; but if he saw them returning to their duty, if he heard them speaking the language of suppliants, he would write to his father and advise him to lend an indulgent ear to the prayers of the legions. They begged him to do so, and as their deputies to Tiberius sent the younger Blaesus as before, together with Lucius Aponius, a Roman knight on Drusus’ staff, and Justus Catonius, a centurion of the first order. There was now a conflict of opinions, some proposing to wait for the return of the deputies and humour the troops in the meantime by a show of leniency, while others were for sterner remedies:—”A crowd was nothing if not extreme; it must either bluster or cringe; once terrified, it could be ignored with impunity; now that it was depressed by superstition was the moment for the general to inspire fresh terror by removing the authors of the mutiny.” Drusus had a natural bias toward severity: Vibulenus and Percennius were summoned and their execution was ordered. Most authorities state that they were buried inside the general’s pavilion: according to others, the bodies were thrown outside the lines and left on view.

  30 1 There followed a hue and cry after every ringleader of note. Some made blindly from the camp and were cut down by the centurions or by members of the praetorian cohorts: others were handed over by the companies themselves as a certificate of their loyalty. The troubles of the soldiers had been increased by an early winter with incessant and pitiless rains. It was impossible to stir from the tents or to meet in common, barely possible to save the standards from being carried away by hurricane and flood. In addition their dread of the divine anger still persisted: not for nothing, it whispered, was their impiety visited by fading planets and rushing storms; there was no relief from their miseries but to leave this luckless, infected camp, and, absolved from guilt, return every man to his winter-quarters. First the eighth legion, then the fifteenth, departed. The men of the ninth had insisted loudly on waiting for Tiberius’ letter: soon, isolated by the defection of the rest, they too made a virtue of what threatened to become a necessity. Drusus himself, since affairs were settled enough at present, went back to Rome without staying for the return of the deputies.

  31 1 During the same days almost, and from the same causes, the legions of Germany mutinied, in larger numbers and with proportionate fury; while their hopes ran high that Germanicus Caesar, unable to brook the sovereignty of another, would throw himself into the arms of his legions, whose force could sweep the world. There were two armies on the Rhine bank: the Upper, under the command of Gaius Silius; the Lower, in charge of Aulus Caecina. The supreme command rested with Germanicus, then engaged in assessing the tribute of the Gaulish provinces. But while the forces under Silius merely watched with doubtful sympathy the fortunes of a rising which was none of theirs, the lower army plunged into delirium. The beginning came from the twenty-first and fifth legions: then, as they were all stationed, idle or on the lightest of duty, in one summer camp on the Ubian frontier, the first and twentieth as well were drawn into the current. Hence, on the report of Augustus’ death, the swarm of city-bred recruits swept from the capital by the recent levy, familiar with licence and chafing at hardship, began to influence the simple minds of the rest:—”The time had come when the veteran should seek his overdue discharge, and the younger man a less niggardly pay; when all should claim relief from their miseries and take vengeance on the cruelty of their centurions.” These were not the utterances of a solitary Percennius declaiming to the Pannonian legions; nor were they addressed to the uneasy ears of soldiers who had other and more powerful armies to bear in view: it was a sedition of many tongues and voices:—”Theirs were the hands that held the destinies of Rome; theirs the victories by which the empire grew; theirs the name which Caesars assumed!”

  32 1 The legate made no counter-move: indeed, the prevalent frenzy had destroyed his nerve. In a sudden paroxysm of rage the troops rushed with drawn swords on the centurions, the traditional objects of military hatred, and always the first victims of its fury. They threw them to the ground and applied the lash, sixty strokes to a man, one for every centurion in the legion; then tossed them with dislocated limbs, mangled, in some cases unconscious, over the wall or into the waters of the Rhine. Septimius took refuge at the tribunal and threw himself at the feet of Caecina, but was demanded with such insistence that he had to be surrendered to his fate. Cassius Chaerea, soon to win a name in history as the slayer of Caligula, then a reckless stripling, opened a way with his sword through an armed and challenging multitude. Neither tribune nor camp-marshal kept authority longer: watches, patrols, every duty which circumstances indicated as vital, the mutineers distributed among themselves. Indeed, to a careful observer of the military temperament, the most alarming sign of acute and intractable disaffection was this: there were no spasmodic outbreaks instigated by a few firebrands, but everywhere one white heat of anger, one silence, and withal a steadiness and uniformity which might well have been accredited to discipline.

  33 1 In the meantime, Germanicus, as we have stated, was traversing the Gallic provinces and assessing their tribute, when the message came that Augustus was no more. Married to the late emperor’s granddaughter Agrippina, who had borne him several children, and himself a grandchild of the dowager (he was the son of Tiberius’ brother Drusus), he was tormented none the less by the secret hatred of his uncle and grandmother — hatred springing from motives the more potent because iniquitous. For Drusus was still a living memory to the nation, and it was believed that, had he succeeded, he would have restored the age of liberty; whence the same affection and hopes centred on the young Germanicus with his unassuming disposition and his exceptional courtesy, so far removed from the inscrutable arrogance of word and look which characterized Tiberius. Feminine animosities increased the tension as Livia had a stepmother’s irritable dislike of Agrippina, whose own temper was not without a hint of fire, though purity of mind and wifely devotion kept her rebellious spirit on the side of righteousness.

  34 1 But the nearer Germanicus stood to the supreme ambition, the more energy he threw into the cause of Tiberius. He administered the oath of fealty to himself, his subordinates, and the Belgic cities. Then came the new
s that the legions were out of hand. He set out in hot haste, and found them drawn up to meet him outside the camp, their eyes fixed on the ground in affected penitence. As soon as he entered the lines, a jangle of complaints began to assail his ears. Some of the men kissed his hand, and with a pretence of kissing it pushed the fingers between their lips, so that he should touch their toothless gums; others showed him limbs bent and bowed with old age. When at last they stood ready to listen, as there appeared to be no sort of order, Germanicus commanded them to divide into companies: they told him they would hear better as they were. At least, he insisted, bring the ensigns forward; there must be something to distinguish the cohorts: they obeyed, but slowly. Then, beginning with a pious tribute to the memory of Augustus, he changed to the victories and the triumphs of Tiberius, keeping his liveliest praise for the laurels he had won in the Germanies at the head of those very legions. Next he enlarged on the unanimity of Italy and the loyalty of the Gallic provinces, the absence everywhere of turbulence or disaffection.

  35 1 All this was listened to in silence or with suppressed murmurs. But when he touched on the mutiny and asked where was their soldierly obedience? where the discipline, once their glory? whither had they driven their tribunes — their centurions? with one impulse they tore off their tunics and reproachfully exhibited the scars of battle and the imprints of the lash. Then, in one undistinguished uproar, they taunted him with the fees for exemption from duty, the miserly rate of pay, and the severity of the work, — parapet-making, entrenching, and the collection of forage, building material and fuel were specifically mentioned, along with the other camp drudgeries imposed sometimes from necessity, sometimes as a precaution against leisure. The most appalling outcry arose from the veterans, who, enumerating their thirty or more campaigns, begged him to give relief to outworn men and not to leave them to end their days in the old wretchedness, but fix a term to this grinding service and allow them a little rest secured from beggary. There were some even who claimed the money bequeathed to them by the deified Augustus, with happy auguries for Germanicus; and, should he desire the throne, they made it manifest that they were ready. On this he leapt straight from the platform as if he was being infected with their guilt. They barred his way with their weapons, threatening to use them unless he returned: but he, exclaiming that he would sooner die than turn traitor, snatched the sword from his side, raised it, and would buried it in his breast, if the bystanders had not caught his arm and held it by force. The remoter and closely packed part of the assembly, and — though the statement passes belief — certain individual soldiers, advancing close to him, urged him to strike home. One private, by the name of Calusidius, drew his own blade and offered it with the commendation that “it was sharper.” Even to that crowd of madmen the act seemed brutal and ill-conditioned, and there followed a pause long enough for the Caesar’s friends to hurry him into his tent.