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

by Publius Cornelius Tacitus

  35 1 At the next meeting of the senate there was a letter from Tiberius; in which, after an indirect stricture upon the Fathers, “who transferred the whole of their responsibilities to the sovereign,” he nominated Manius Lepidus and Junius Blaesus, either of whom was to be chosen for the proconsulate of Africa. The two were then heard. Lepidus, excusing himself with particular earnestness, pleaded the state of his health, the age of his children, and his now marriageable daughter; while it was also understood, though not said, that Blaesus was Sejanus’ uncle, and therefore too powerful a competitor. The answer of Blaesus was in form a refusal; but it was a refusal less uncompromising, and unanimous flattery assisted him to change his mind.

  36 1 Now came the disclosure of a practice whispered in the private complaints of many. There was a growing tendency of the rabble to cast insult and odium on citizens of repute, and to evade the penalty by grasping some object portraying the Caesar. The freedmen and slaves, even, were genuinely feared by the patron or the owner against whom they lifted their voices or their hands. Hence a speech of the senator, Gaius Cestius:—”Princes, he admitted, were equivalent to deities; but godhead itself listened only to the just petitions of the suppliant, and no man fled to the Capitol or other sanctuary of the city to make it a refuge subserving his crimes. The laws had been abolished — overturned from the foundations — when Annia Rufilla, whom he had proved guilty of fraud in a court of justice, could insult and threaten him in the Forum, upon the threshold of the curia; while he himself dared not try the legal remedy because of the portrait of the sovereign with which she confronted him.” Similar and, in some cases, more serious experiences, were described by a din of voices around him; and appeals to Drusus, to set the example of punishment, lasted till he gave orders for her to be summoned and imprisoned, after conviction, in the public cells.

  37 1 In addition, Considius Aequus and Caelius Cursor, Roman knights, who had laid fictitious charges of treason against the praetor Magius Caecilianus, were at the emperor’s instance punished by decree of the senate. Both incidents were laid to the credit of Drusus; for it was believed that, moving in the capital among the gatherings and conversations of his fellow-men, he had a softening influence on the inscrutable designs of his father. In view of his youth, not even his laxities were too unpopular: better he should follow the bent he did — play the architect by day, the epicure by night — than live in solitude, deaf to the voice of pleasure, and immersed in sullen vigilance and sinister meditations.

  38 1 For Tiberius and the informers showed no fatigue. Ancharius Priscus had accused Caesius Cordus, proconsul of Crete, of malversation: a charge of treason, the complement now of all arraignments, was appended. Antistius Vetus, a grandee of Macedonia, had been acquitted of adultery: the Caesar reprimanded the judges and recalled him to stand his trial for treason, as a disaffected person, involved in the schemes of Rhescuporis during that period after the murder of Cotys when he had meditated war against ourselves. The defendant was condemned accordingly to interdiction from fire and water, with a proviso that his place of detention should be an island not too conveniently situated either for Macedonia or for Thrace. For since the partition of the monarchy between Rhoemetalces and the children of Cotys, who during their minority were under the tutelage of Trebellenus Rufus, Thrace — unaccustomed to Roman methods — was divided against herself; and the accusations against Trebellenus were no more violent than those against Rhoemetalces for leaving the injuries of his countrymen unavenged. Three powerful tribes, the Coelaletae, Odrysae, and Dii, took up arms, but under separate leaders of precisely equal obscurity: a fact which saved us from a coalition involving a serious war. One division embroiled the districts at hand; another crossed the Haemus range to bring out the remote clans; the most numerous, and least disorderly, besieged the king in Philippopolis, a city founded by Philip of Macedon.

  39 1 On receipt of the news, Publius Vellaeus, who was at the head of the nearest army, sent the auxiliary horse and light cohorts to deal with the roving bands who were in quest of plunder or recruits: he himself led the flower of the infantry to raise the siege. Success came everywhere at once: the marauders were put to the sword; differences broke out in the besieging force; the king made an opportune sally, and the legion arrived. Neither battle nor engagement is a term applicable to an affair in which half-armed men and fugitives were butchered with no effusion of Roman blood.

  40 1 The same year saw an incipient rebellion among the heavily indebted communities of the Gallic provinces. The most active promoters were Julius Florus among the Treviri and Julius Sacrovir among the Aedui. Each was a man of birth, with ancestors whose services had been rewarded by Roman citizenship in years when Roman citizenship was rare and bestowed upon merit only. At secret conferences, taking into their councils every desperado or any wretch whose beggary and guilty fears made crime a necessity, they arranged that Florus should raise the Belgae and Sacrovir the less distant Gauls. And so in assemblies and conventicles they made their seditious pronouncements on the continuous tributes, the grinding rates of interest, the cruelty and pride of the governors:—”The legions were mutinous since the news of Germanicus’ murder, and it was an unequalled opportunity for regaining their independence: they had only to look from their own resources to the poverty of Italy, the unwarlike city population, the feebleness of the armies except for the leavening of foreigners.”

  41 1 There was hardly a community in which the seeds of the movement had not fallen; but the first outbreak came from the Andecavi and Turoni. The former were quelled by the legate Acilius Aviola, who called out a cohort on garrison duty at Lugdunum: the Turoni were crushed by a body of legionaries sent by Visellius Varro, the legate of Lower Germany. The commander was again Aviola, supported by several Gaulish chieftains, who brought up auxiliaries with the intention of screening their defection for the moment and unmasking it at a more favourable juncture. Sacrovir himself was there, a conspicuous figure, urging his men to strike for Rome, and bare-headed,—”to let his courage be seen,” he explained. The prisoners, however, charged him with making his identity clear so as to avoid becoming a target for missiles. Tiberius, consulted on the point, rejected the information, and fostered the war by his indecision.

  42 1 Meanwhile, Florus pressed on with his designs and endeavoured to induce a troop of horse, enrolled in the neighbourhood of Treves but kept in our service and under our discipline, to open hostilities by a massacre of Roman financiers. A few men were actually won over, but the greater number remained loyal. Apart from these, a rabble of debtors and dependants took up arms, and were making for the forest country known as the Ardennes, when they were debarred by the legions which Visellius and Gaius Silius had detached from their two armies, by opposite roads, to intercept their march. Julius Indus, a countryman of the insurgents, at feud with Florus and hence the more eager to be of service, was sent ahead with a body of picked men, and dispersed the still orderless multitude. Florus eluded the conquerors in unknown coverts, to fall at last by his own hand, on descrying the soldiers who had occupied every egress.

  43 1 So ended the rising as far as the Treviri were concerned. Among the Aedui trouble came in the graver form to be expected from the superior wealth of the community and the remoteness of the suppressing force. The tribal capital, Augustodunum, had been seized by armed cohorts of Sacrovir, whose intention was to enlist those cadets of the great Gallic families who were receiving a liberal education at the city-schools, and to use them as pledges for the adhesion of their parents and relatives: simultaneously he distributed weapons, secretly manufactured, among the younger men. His followers amounted to forty thousand; one-fifth armed on the legionary model; the rest with boar-spears, hangers, and other implements of the hunting-field. To these he added a contingent of slaves, destined for the gladiatorial ring and encased in the continuous shell of iron usual in the country: the so-called “cruppelarians” — who, if too weighty to inflict wounds, are impregnably fortified against receiving
them. These forces were steadily increased: the neighbouring districts had not as yet openly committed themselves, but private enthusiasm ran high, and relations were strained between the Roman generals, then at issue over the conduct of the campaign, which was claimed by each as his own prerogative. Finally, Varro, now old and weakly, withdrew in favour of Silius, who was still in the prime of life.

  44 1 At Rome, however, the tale ran that not the Treviri and Aedui only were in revolt, but the four-and-sixty tribes of Gaul: the Germans had joined the league, the Spains were wavering, and, as in all rumours, every statement was amplified and credited. The patriot, anxious for the commonwealth, grieved; but in many hatred of the existing order and a craving for change were such that they exulted even in their own perils, and lavished reproaches on Tiberius, who, in this convulsion of affairs, could centre his attention on the memoranda of the informers:—”Was Sacrovir also to stand his trial for treason before the senate? At last, men had arisen to check these murderous epistles by the sword! War itself was a welcome exchange for the horrors of peace.” All the more resolute was his studied unconcern; he made no change of place, none of looks, but maintained his wonted behaviour through all those days, whether from deep reserve or because he had information that the disturbances were of moderate extent and slighter than reported.

  45 1 In the meantime, Silius, marching with two legions, had sent forward an auxiliary troop, and was devastating the villages of the Sequani; who lay on the extreme frontier, adjoining the Aedui and their allies under arms. Then he moved at full speed upon Augustodunum. The march was a race between the standard-bearers, and even the private soldiers protested angrily against pausing for the usual rest or the long nightly bivouac:—”Let them only see the rebels in front, and be seen: it was enough for victory!” At the twelfth milestone Sacrovir and his powers came into view on an open piece of ground. He had stationed his iron-clad men in the van, his cohorts on the wings, his half-armed followers in the rear. He himself, splendidly mounted, amid a group of chieftains, rode up to his troops, reminding them of the ancient laurels of the Gauls, and the reverses they had inflicted upon the Romans; how glorious their freedom, if they conquered; how much more insufferable their bondage, should they be vanquished once again.

  46 1 His words were few and to a cheerless audience: for the embattled legions were drawing on; and the undrilled townsmen, new to the trade of war, had little control over their eyes and ears. On the other side — though anticipated hope had removed the need for exhortation — Silius exclaimed that it was an insult to the conquerors of the Germanies to be led as though to meet an enemy and to be confronted with Gauls! “But recently one cohort shattered the rebel Turoni; one troop of horse, the Treviri; a few squadrons of this very army, the Sequani. The richer the Aedui, the more extravagant in their pleasures, the more unwarlike are they; put them to the rout, and have mercy on them when they flee.” The answer was returned in a great shout: the cavalry enveloped the flanks, and the infantry attacked the van. On the wings there was no delay; in front, the iron-clad men offered a brief impediment, as their plating was proof against javelin and sword. But the legionaries caught up their axes and picks and hacked at armour and flesh as if demolishing a wall: others overturned the inert masses with poles or forks, and left them lying like the dead without an effort to rise again. Sacrovir, with his staunchest adherents, made his way first to Augustodunum; then, apprehending his surrender, to an adjacent villa. Here he fell by his own hand, the rest by mutually inflicted wounds; the bodies were burnt by the house being fired over them.

  47 1 And now at last a letter from Tiberius informed the senate of the outbreak and completion of a war. He neither understated nor overstated the facts, but remarked that the fidelity and courage of his generals, and his own policy, had gained the day. At the same time, he added the reasons why neither Drusus nor himself had left for the campaign, insisting on the extent of the empire and on the loss of prestige to the sovereign if the disaffection of one or two communities could make him abandon the capital, which was the centre of government for the whole. However, now that fear was not the motive-force, he would go, view matters on the spot, and arrange a settlement. The Fathers decreed vows for his return, supplications, and other compliments: Cornelius Dolabella alone, intent upon distancing his competitors, carried sycophancy to the absurd point of proposing that he should enter the city from Campania with an ovation. The sequel was a missive from Caesar, who asserted, with a touch of pride, that “after subduing some of the fiercest of nations, and receiving or rejecting so many triumphs in his youth, he was not so bankrupt in fame as to court in his age a futile honour conferred for an excursion in the suburbs.”

  48 1 About the same time, he asked the senate to allow the death of Sulpicius Quirinius to be solemnized by a public funeral. With the old patrician family of the Sulpicii Quirinius — who sprang from the municipality of Lanuvium — had no connection; but as an intrepid soldier and an active servant he won a consulate under the deified Augustus, and, a little later, by capturing the Homonadensian strongholds beyond the Cilician frontier, earned the insignia of triumph. After his appointment, again, as adviser to Gaius Caesar during his command in Armenia, he had shown himself no less attentive to Tiberius, who was then residing in Rhodes. This circumstance the emperor now disclosed in the senate, coupling a panegyric on his good offices to himself with a condemnation of Marcus Lollius, whom he accused of instigating the cross-grained and provocative attitude of Gaius Caesar. In the rest of men, however, the memory of Quirinius awoke no enthusiasm, in view of his attempt (already noticed) to ruin Lepida, and the combination of meanness with exorbitant power which had marked his later days.

  49 1 At the end of the year, Clutorius Priscus, a Roman knight, who had been presented by the emperor with a sum of money in return for a widely circulated poem deploring the death of Germanicus, was attacked by an informer; the charge being that during an illness of Drusus he had composed another set of verses, to be published, in the event of his death, with a yet more lucrative result. Clutorius, with foolish loquacity, had boasted of his performance in the house of Publius Petronius, before his host’s mother-in-law, Vitellia, and many women of rank. When the informer appeared, the rest were terrified into giving evidence; Vitellia alone insisted that she had heard nothing. However, the witnesses who supported the fatal charge were considered the more credible; and, on the motion of the consul designate, Haterius Agrippa, the last penalty was invoked against the culprit.

  50 1 Opposition came from Manius Lepidus, whose speech ran thus:—”If, Conscript Fathers, we regard one point only, — the enormity of the utterance by which Clutorius Priscus has defiled his own soul and the ears of men, — neither the cell, nor the noose, nor even the torments reserved for slaves are adequate to his punishment. But if, while vice and crime are limitless, the penalties and remedies of both are tempered by the sovereign’s moderation and by the example of your ancestors and yourselves; if there is a difference between fatuity and villainy, between evil-speaking and evil-doing; then there is room for a proposal which neither leaves the defendant’s guilt unpunished nor gives us cause to rue either our softness or our hardness of heart. Time and again I have heard our prince express his regret when anyone by taking his own life had forestalled his clemency. Clutorius’ life is still intact: he is a man whom to spare can involve no public menace; whom to slay can create no public deterrent. His occupations are as futile and erratic as they are charged with folly; nor can any grave and considerable danger be expected from a person who by betraying his own infamy insinuates himself into the favour not of men but of silly women. Expel him, however, from Rome, confiscate his property, ban him from fire and water: this is my proposal, and I make it precisely as though he were guilty under the law of treason.”

  51 1 A single ex-consul, Rubellius Blandus, concurred with Lepidus: the remainder followed Agrippa’s motion; and Priscus was led to the cells and immediately executed. This promptitude drew a ty
pically ambiguous reprimand from Tiberius in the senate. He commended the loyalty of members, who avenged so sharply insults, however slight, to the head of the state, but deprecated such a hurried punishment of a verbal offence. Lepidus he praised; Agrippa he did not blame. It was therefore resolved that no senatorial decree should be entered in the Treasury before the lapse of nine full days, all prisoners under sentence of death to be reprieved for that period. But the senate had not liberty to repent, nor was Tiberius usually softened by the interval.