36 1 There the question of remedies was debated. For reports were coming in that a mission was being organized to bring the upper army into line, that the Ubian capital had been marked down for destruction, and that after this preliminary experiment in pillage the mutineers proposed to break out and loot the Gallic provinces. To add to the alarm, the enemy was cognizant of the disaffection in the Roman ranks, and invasion was certain if the Rhine bank was abandoned. Yet to arm the auxiliaries native and foreign against the seceding legions was nothing less than an act of civil war. Severity was dangerous, indulgence criminal: to concede the soldiery all or nothing was equally to hazard the existence of the empire. Therefore, after the arguments had been revolved and balanced, it was decided to have letters written in the name of the emperor, directing that all men who had served twenty years should be finally discharged; that any who had served sixteen should be released from duty and kept with the colours under no obligation beyond that of assisting to repel an enemy; and that the legacies claimed should be paid and doubled.
37 1 The troops saw that all this was invented for the occasion, and demanded immediate action. The discharges were expedited at once by the tribunes: the monetary grant was held back till the men should have reached their proper quarters for the winter. The fifth and twenty-first legions declined to move until the sum was made up and paid where they stood, in the summer camp, out of the travelling-chests of the Caesar’s suite and of the prince himself. The legate Caecina led the first and twentieth legions back to the Ubian capital: a disgraceful march, with the general’s plundered coffers borne flanked by ensigns and by eagles. Germanicus set out for the upper army, and induced the second, thirteenth, and sixteenth legions to take the oath of fidelity without demur; the fourteenth had shown some little hesitation. The money and discharges, though not demanded, were voluntarily conceded.
38 1 Among the Chauci, however, a detachment, drawn from the disaffected legions, which was serving on garrison duty, made a fresh attempt at mutiny, and was repressed for the moment by the summary execution of a couple of soldiers. The order had been given by Manius Ennius, the camp-marshal, and was more a wholesome example than a legal exercise of authority. Then as the wave of disorder began to swell, he fled, was discovered, and as his hiding offered no security, resolved to owe salvation to audacity:—”It was no camp-marshal, he cried, “whom they were affronting; it was Germanicus, their general — Tiberius, their emperor.” At the same time, overawing resistance, he snatched up the standard, turned it towards the Rhine, and, proclaiming that anyone falling out of the ranks would be regarded as a deserter, led his men back to winter-quarters, mutinous enough but with training ventured.
39 1 Meanwhile the deputation from the senate found Germanicus, who had returned by then, at the Altar of the Ubians. Two legions were wintering there, the first and twentieth; also the veterans recently discharged and now with their colours. Nervous as they were and distraught with the consciousness of guilt, the fear came over them that a senatorial commission had arrived to revoke all the concessions extorted by their rebellion. With the common propensity of crowds to find a victim, however false the charge, they accused Munatius Plancus, an ex-consul who was at the head of the deputation, of initiating the decree. Before the night was far advanced, they began to shout for the colours kept in Germanicus’ quarters. There was a rush to the gate; they forced the door, and, dragging the prince from bed, compelled him on pain of death to hand over the ensign. A little later, while roving the streets, they lit on the envoys themselves, who had heard the disturbance and were hurrying to Germanicus. They loaded them with insults, and contemplated murder; especially in the case of Plancus, whose dignity had debarred him from flight. Nor in his extremity had he any refuge but the quarters of the first legion. There, clasping the standards and the eagle, he lay in sanctuary; and had not the eagle-bearer Calpurnius shielded him from the crowning violence, then — by a crime almost unknown even between enemies — an ambassador of the Roman people would in a Roman camp have defiled with his blood the altars of heaven. At last, when the dawn came and officer and private and the doings of the night were recognized for what they were, Germanicus entered the camp, ordered Plancus to be brought to him, and took him on to the tribunal. Then, rebuking the “fatal madness, rekindled not so much by their own anger as by that of heaven,” he gave the reasons for the deputies’ arrival. He was plaintively eloquent upon the rights of ambassadors and the serious and undeserved outrage to Plancus, as also upon the deep disgrace contracted by the legion. Then, after reducing his hearers to stupor, if not to peace, he dismissed the deputies under a guard of auxiliary cavalry.
40 1 During these alarms, Germanicus was universally blamed for not proceeding to the upper army, where he could count on obedience and on help against the rebels:—”Discharges, donations, and soft-hearted measures had done more than enough mischief. Or, if he held his own life cheap, why keep an infant son and a pregnant wife among madmen who trampled on all laws, human or divine? These at any rate he ought to restore to their grandfather and the commonwealth.” He was long undecided, and Agrippina met the proposal with disdain, protesting that she was a descendant of the deified Augustus, and danger would not find her degenerate. At last, bursting into tears, he embraced their common child, together with herself and the babe to be, and so induced her to depart. Feminine and pitiable the procession began to move — the commander’s wife in flight with his infant son borne on her breast, and round her the tearful wives of his friends, dragged like herself from their husbands. Nor were those who remained less woe-begone.
41 1 The picture recalled less a Caesar at the zenith of force and in his own camp than a scene in a taken town. The sobbing and wailing drew the ears and eyes of the troops themselves. They began to emerge from quarters:—”Why,” they demanded, “the sound of weeping? What calamity had happened? Here were these ladies of rank, and not a centurion to guard them, not a soldier, no sign of the usual escort or that this was the general’s wife! They were bound for the Treviri — handed over to the protection of foreigners.” There followed shame and pity and memories of her father Agrippa, of Augustus her grandfather. She was the daughter-in-law of Drusus, herself a wife of notable fruitfulness and shining chastity. There was also her little son, born in the camp and bred the playmate of the legions; whom soldier-like they had dubbed “Bootikins” — Caligula — because, as an appeal to the fancy of the rank and file, he generally wore the footgear of that name. Nothing, however, swayed them so much as their jealousy of the Treviri. They implored, they obstructed:—”She must come back, she must stay,” they urged; some running to intercept Agrippina, the majority hurrying back to Germanicus. Still smarting with grief and indignation, he stood in the centre of the crowd, and thus began: —
42 1 “Neither my wife nor my son is dearer to me than my father and my country; but his own majesty will protect my father, and its other armies the empire. My wife and children I would cheerfully devote to death in the cause of your glory; as it is, I am removing them from your madness. Whatever this impending villainy of yours may prove to be, I prefer that it should be expiated by my own blood only, and that you should not treble your guilt by butchering the great-grandson of Augustus and murdering the daughter-in-law of Tiberius. For what in these latter days have you left unventured or unviolated? What name am I to give a gathering like this? Shall I call you soldiers — who have besieged the son of your emperor with your earthworks and your arms? Or citizens — who have treated the authority of the senate as a thing so abject? You have outraged the privileges due even to an enemy, the sanctity of ambassadors, the law of nations. The deified Julius crushed the insurrection of an army by one word: they refused the soldiers’ oath, and he addressed them as Quirites. A look, a glance, from the deified Augustus, and the legions of Actium quailed. I myself am not yet as they, but I spring of their line, and if the garrisons of Spain or Syria were to flout me, it would still be a wonder and an infamy. And is it the fir
st and twentieth legions, — the men who took their standards from Tiberius, and you who have shared his many fields and thriven on his many bounties, — that make this generous return to their leader? Is this the news I must carry to my father, while he hears from other provinces that all is well — that his own recruits, his own veterans, are not sated yet with money and dismissals; that here only centurions are murdered, tribunes ejected, generals imprisoned; that camp and river are red with blood, while I myself linger out a precarious life among men that seek to take it away?
43 1 “For why, in the first day’s meeting, my short-sighted friends, did you wrench away the steel I was preparing to plunge in my breast? Better and more lovingly the man who offered me his sword! At least I should have fallen with not all my army’s guilt upon my soul. You would have chosen a general, who, while leaving my own death unpunished, would have avenged that of Varus and his three legions. For, though the Belgians offer their services, God forbid that theirs should be the honour and glory of vindicating the Roman name and quelling the nations of Germany! May thy spirit, Augustus, now received with thyself into heaven, — may thy image, my father Drusus, and the memory of thee, be with these same soldiers of yours, whose hearts are already opening to the sense of shame and of glory, to cancel this stain and convert our civil broils to the destruction of our enemies! And you yourselves — for now I am looking into changed faces and changed minds — if you are willing to restore to the senate its deputies, to the emperor your obedience, and to me my wife and children, then stand clear of the infection and set the malignants apart: that will be a security of repentance — that a guarantee of loyalty!”
44 1 His words converted them into suppliants; they owned the justice of the charges and begged him to punish the guilty, forgive the erring, and lead them against the enemy. Let him recall his wife; let the nursling of the legions return: he must not be given in hostage to Gauls! His wife, he answered, must be excused: she could hardly return with winter and her confinement impending. His son, however, should come back to them: what was still to be done they could do themselves. — They were changed men now; and, rushing in all directions, they threw the most prominent of the mutineers into chains and dragged them to Gaius Caetronius, legate of the first legion, who dealt out justice — and punishment — to them one by one by the following method. The legions were stationed in front with drawn swords; the accused was displayed on the platform by a tribune; if they cried “Guilty,” he was thrown down and hacked to death. The troops revelled in the butchery, which they took as an act of purification; nor was Germanicus inclined to restrain them — the orders had been none of his, and the perpetrators of the cruelty would have to bear its odium. The veterans followed the example, and shortly afterwards were ordered to Raetia; nominally to defend the province against a threatened Suevian invasion, actually to remove them from a camp grim even yet with remembered crimes and the equal horror of their purging. Then came a revision of the list of centurions. Each, on citation by the commander-in-chief, gave his name, company, and country; the number of his campaigns, his distinctions in battle and his military decorations, if any. If the tribunes and his legion bore testimony to his energy and integrity, he kept his post; if they agreed in charging him with rapacity or cruelty, he was dismissed fromº the service.
45 1 This brought the immediate troubles to a standstill; but there remained an obstacle of equal difficulty in the defiant attitude of the fifth and twenty-first legions, which were wintering •some sixty miles away at the post known as the Old Camp. They had been the first to break into mutiny; the worst atrocities had been their handiwork; and now they persisted in their fury, undaunted by the punishment and indifferent to the repentance of their comrades. The Caesar, therefore, arranged for the dispatch of arms, vessels, and auxiliaries down the Rhine, determined, if his authority were rejected, to try conclusions with the sword.
46 1 Before the upshot of events in Illyricum was known at Rome, word came that the German legions had broken out. The panic-stricken capital turned on Tiberius:—”While with his hypocritical hesitation he was befooling the senate and commons, two powerless and unarmed bodies, meantime the troops were rising and could not be checked by the unripe authority of a pair of boys. He ought to have gone in person and confronted the rebels with the majesty of the empire: they would have yielded at sight of a prince, old in experience, and supreme at once to punish or reward. Could Augustus, in his declining years, make so many excursions into the Germanies? and was Tiberius, in the prime of life, to sit idle in the senate, cavilling at the Conscript Fathers’ words? Ample provision had been made for the servitude of Rome: it was time to administer some sedative to the passions of the soldiers, and so reconcile them to peace.”
47 1 To all this criticism Tiberius opposed an immutable and rooted determination not to endanger himself and the empire by leaving the centre of affairs. He had, indeed, difficulties enough of one sort or another to harass him. The German army was the stronger; that of Pannonia the nearer: the one was backed by the resources of the Gallic provinces; the other threatened Italy. Which, then, should come first? And what if those postponed should take fire at the slight? But in the persons of his sons he could approach both at once, without hazarding the imperial majesty, always most venerable from a distance. Further, it was excusable in the young princes to refer certain questions to their father, and it was in his power to pacify or crush resistance offered to Germanicus or Drusus; but let the emperor be scorned, and what resource was left? — However, as though any moment might see his departure, he chose his escort, provided the equipage, and fitted out vessels. Then with a variety of pleas, based on the wintry season or the pressure of affairs, he deceived at first the shrewdest; the populace, longer; the provinces, longest of all.
48 1 Meanwhile Germanicus had collected his force and stood prepared to exact reckoning from the mutineers. Thinking it best, however, to allow them a further respite, in case they should consult their own safety by following the late precedent, he forwarded a letter to Caecina, saying that he was coming in strength, and, unless they forestalled him by executing the culprits, would put them impartially to the sword. Caecina read it privately to the eagle-bearers, the ensigns, and the most trustworthy men in the camp, urging them to save all from disgrace, and themselves from death. “For in peace,” he said, “cases are judged on their merits; when war threatens, the innocent and the guilty fall side by side.” Accordingly they tested the men whom they considered suitable, and, finding that in the main the legions were still dutiful, with the general’s assent they fixed the date for an armed attack upon the most objectionable and active of the incendiaries. Then, passing the signal to one another, they broke into the tents and struck down their unsuspecting victims; while no one, apart from those in the secret, knew how the massacre had begun or where it was to end.
49 1 No civil war of any period has presented the features of this. Not in battle, not from opposing camps, but comrades from the same bed — men who had eaten together by day and rested together at dark — they took their sides and hurled their missiles. The yells, the wounds, and the blood were plain enough; the cause, invisible: chance ruled supreme. A number of the loyal troops perished as well: for, once it was clear who were the objects of attack, the malcontents also had caught up arms. No general or tribune was there to restrain: licence was granted to the mob, and it might glut its vengeance to the full. Before long, Germanicus marched into the camp. “This is not a cure, but a calamity,” he said, with a burst of tears, and ordered the bodies to be cremated.
Even yet the temper of the soldiers remained savage and a sudden desire came over them to advance against the enemy: it would be the expiation of their madness; nor could the ghosts of their companions be appeased till their own impious breasts had been marked with honourable wounds. Falling in with the enthusiasm of his troops, the Caesar laid a bridge over the Rhine, and threw across twelve thousand legionaries, with twenty-six cohorts of auxiliaries and e
ight divisions of cavalry, whose discipline had not been affected by the late mutiny.
50 1 Throughout the pause, which the mourning for Augustus had begun and our discords prolonged, the Germans had been hovering gleefully in the neighbourhood. By a forced march, however, the Roman columns cut through the Caesian Forest and the line of delimitation commenced by Tiberius. By this line they pitched the camp, with their front and rear protected by embankments and the flanks by a barricade of felled trees. Then came a threading of gloomy forests and a consultation which of two roads to follow; the one short and usual, the other more difficult and unexplored, and therefore left unguarded by the enemy. The longer route was chosen, but otherwise all speed was made: for scouts had brought in news that the night was a German festival and would be celebrated with games and a solemn banquet. Caecina was ordered to move ahead with the unencumbered cohorts and clear a passage through the woods: the legions followed at a moderate interval. The clear, starry night was in our favour; the Marsian villages were reached, and a ring of pickets was posted round the enemy, who were still lying, some in because, others beside their tables, without misgivings and with no sentries advanced. All was disorder and improvidence: there was no apprehension of war, and even their peace was the nerveless lethargy of drunkards.
Complete Works of Tacitus (Delphi Classics) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 24) Page 48
