27 1 On the following morning, however, two praetorian cohorts in full equipment occupied the temple of Venus Genetrix; a body of men wearing the toga, but with swords unconcealed, had beset the approach to the senate; and companies of soldiers were scattered through the fora and basilicae. Under their eyes and their menaces the senators entered their meeting-place, and listened to the emperor’s speech, as read by his quaestor. Without mentioning any person by name, he taxed the Fathers with deserting the public service and setting the example of indolence to Roman knights. For what wonder that members failed to appear from distant provinces, when many who had attained the consulate and priesthoods preferred to spend their energies upon the embellishment of their pleasure-grounds? — It was a weapon for the accusers, and they grasped it.
28 1 The attack was opened by Cossutianus; then Marcellus declaimed with greater violence:—”Supreme interests of state were at issue: the contumacity of his inferiors was wearing down the lenience of the sovereign. Hitherto the Fathers had been over-indulgent, permitting themselves, as they did, to be mocked with impunity by Thrasea, who was meditating revolt; by his son-in-law, Helvidius Priscus, who affected the same insanity; by Paconius Agrippinus, again, heir of his father’s hatred for emperors; and by that scribbler of abominable verses, Curtius Montanus. In the senate he missed an ex-consul; in the national vows, a priest; at the oath of allegiance, a citizen — unless, defiant of the institutions and rites of their ancestors, Thrasea had openly assumed the part of traitor and public enemy. To be brief, let him come — this person who was accustomed to enact the complete senator and to protect the slanderers of the prince — let him come and state in a motion what he would have amended or altered: they would bear more easily with his censures of this or that than they now bore with his all-condemning silence! Was it the world-wide peace, or victories gained without loss of the armies, that met with his displeasure? A man who mourned over the nation’s happiness, who treated forum and theatre and temple as a desert, who held out his own exile as a threat, must not have his perverse ambition gratified! In Thrasea’s eyes, these were no senatorial resolutions; there were no magistracies, no Rome. Let him break with life, and with a country which he had long ceased to love and now to look upon!”
29 1 While Marcellus spoke to this and the like effect, grim and menacing as always, there reigned in the senate, not that familiar sadness, grown habitual now through the rapid succession of perils, but a new and deeper terror, as they saw the hands of the soldiers on their weapons. At the same time, the venerable form of Thrasea himself rose before the mind; and there were those who pitied Helvidius also, soon to pay the penalty of an innocent connection. What had been alleged against Agrippinus, except the tragic fate of his father; since he, too, though equally guiltless, had fallen by the cruelty of Tiberius? As to Montanus, a youth without vice, a poet without venom, he was being driven from the country, purely because he had given evidence of his talent.
30 1 In the meantime, Ostorius Sabinus, the accuser of Soranus, entered and began his speech, dwelling upon the friendship of the defendant with Rubellius Plautus, and upon his governorship of Asia, “which he had treated rather as a position conveniently adapted to his own distinction than with a view to the public interest; as he had shown by fostering the seditious tendencies of the cities.” This was an old story: what was new, and used for implicating the daughter of Soranus in her father’s danger, was a charge that she had distributed money to magicians. That had, in fact, happened, owing to the filial piety of Servilia (for so the girl was called), who, influenced by love for her father and at the same time by the imprudence of her years, had consulted them, though on no other point than the safety of her family and the chances that Nero would prove placable and the trial by the senate produce no tragic result. She was, therefore, summoned before the senate and at opposite ends of the consular tribunal stood an aged parent and, facing him, his daughter, who had not yet reached her twentieth year; condemned to widowhood and loneliness by the recent exile of her husband Annius Pollio, and not even lifting her eyes to her father, whose dangers she seemed to have aggravated.
31 1 When the accuser then demanded if she had sold her bridal ornaments, if she had stripped the necklace from her neck, in order to gather money for the performance of magic rites, she at first threw herself to the ground, in a long and silent fit of weeping; then, embracing the altar steps, and the altar, exclaimed: “I have resorted to no impious gods, to no spells; nor in my unblest prayers have I asked for anything but that you, Caesar, and that you, sirs, should preserve in safety this best of fathers. My jewels and robes and the emblems of my rank I gave as I should have given my blood and life, had they demanded them. It is for those men, strangers to me before, to see to it what repute they bear, what arts they practise: the emperor I never mentioned except as deity. But my most unhappy father knows nothing; and, if there is crime, I have sinned alone.”
32 1 She was still speaking, when Soranus caught up her words and cried that “she had not gone with him to his province; from her age, she could not have been known to Plautus; and she was not implicated in the charges against her husband. They should take her case separately (she was guilty only of an overstrained sense of duty); and, as for himself, let him undergo any and every fate!” At the same moment, he rushed to the arms of his daughter, who ran to meet him; but the lictors threw themselves between, and prevented both. Next, the evidence was called; and the pity awakened by the barbarity of the prosecution found its equal in the anger caused by Publius Egnatius in the part of witness. A client of Soranus, now bought to procure the destruction of his friend, he affected the grave pose of the Stoic school, trained as he was to catch by manner and by look the very features of integrity, while at heart treacherous, wily, a dissembler of cupidity and lust. Those qualities gold laid bare, and he became an example pointing men to caution, not more against the villain clothed in dishonesty or stained by crime, than against those who seek in honourable attainments a cloak for falsehood and for treason in friendship.
33 1 The same day, however, produced also an example of honour. It was furnished by Cassius Asclepiodotus, by his great wealth the first citizen of Bithynia; who, with the same devotion as he had accorded to Soranus in his heyday, refused to desert him when near his fall, was stripped of his entire fortune, and was driven into exile, as a proof of heaven’s impartiality towards good and evil. Thrasea, Soranus, and Servilia were accorded free choice of death; Helvidius and Paconius were expelled from Italy; Montanus was spared out of consideration for his father, with the proviso that his official career should not be continued. Of the accusers, Eprius and Cossutianus received a grant of five million sesterces each; Ostorius, one of twelve hundred thousand with the quaestorian decorations.
34 1 The consul’s quaestor was then sent to Thrasea: he was spending the time in his gardens, and the day was already closing in for evening. He had brought together a large party of distinguished men and women, his chief attention been given to Demetrius, a master of the Cynic creed; with whom — to judge from his serious looks and the few words which caught the ear, when they chanced to raise their voices — he was debating the nature of the soul and the divorce of spirit and body. At last, Domitius Caecilianus, an intimate friend, arrived, and informed him of the decision reached by the senate. Accordingly, among the tears and expostulations of the company, Thrasea urged them to leave quickly, without linking their own hazardous lot to the fate of a condemned man. Arria, who aspired to follow her husband’s ending and the precedent set by her mother and namesake, he advised to keep her life and not deprive the child of their union of her one support.
35 1 He now walked on to the colonnade; where the quaestor found him nearer to joy than to sorrow, because he had ascertained that Helvidius, his son-in-law, was merely debarred from Italy. Then, taking the decree of the senate, he led Helvidius and Demetrius into his bedroom, offered the arteries of both arms to the knife, and, when the blood had begun to flow, spri
nkled it upon the ground, and called the quaestor nearer: “We are making a libation,” he said, “to Jove the Liberator. Look, young man, and — may Heaven, indeed, avert the omen, but you have been born into times now it is expedient to steel the mind with instances of firmness.” Soon, as the slowness of his end brought excruciating pain, turning his gaze upon Demetrius . . .
MAPS
The Latin Texts
Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. Tacitus advanced steadily through a range of distinguished public offices, becoming praetor in 88 and a quindecimvir, a member of the priest college in charge of the Sibylline Books and the Secular games. It was in the Temple of Jupiter that Tacitus was responsible for safeguarding the Sibylline Books — a collection of oracular utterances, set out in Greek hexameters, purchased from a sibyl by the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus.
LIST OF LATIN TEXTS
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CONTENTS
DE VITA IULII AGRICOLAE - The Life of Agricola
DE ORIGINE ET SITU GERMANORUM - Germania
DIALOGUS DE ORATORIBUS - Dialogue on Oratory
HISTORIAE – The Histories
AB EXCESSU DIVI AUGUSTI – The Annals
DE VITA IULII AGRICOLAE - The Life of Agricola
[1] Clarorum virorum facta moresque posteris tradere, antiquitus usitatum, ne nostris quidem temporibus quamquam incuriosa suorum aetas omisit, quotiens magna aliqua ac nobilis virtus vicit ac supergressa est vitium parvis magnisque civitatibus commune, ignorantiam recti et invidiam. Sed apud priores ut agere digna memoratu pronum magisque in aperto erat, ita celeberrimus quisque ingenio ad prodendam virtutis memoriam sine gratia aut ambitione bonae tantum conscientiae pretio ducebantur. Ac plerique suam ipsi vitam narrare fiduciam potius morum quam adrogantiam arbitrati sunt, nec id Rutilio et Scauro citra fidem aut obtrectationi fuit: adeo virtutes isdem temporibus optime aestimantur, quibus facillime gignuntur. At nunc narraturo mihi vitam defuncti hominis venia opus fuit, quam non petissem incusaturus: tam saeva et infesta virtutibus tempora.
[2] Legimus, cum Aruleno Rustico Paetus Thrasea, Herennio Senecioni Priscus Helvidius laudati essent, capitale fuisse, neque in ipsos modo auctores, sed in libros quoque eorum saevitum, delegato triumviris ministerio ut monumenta clarissimorum ingeniorum in comitio ac foro urerentur. Scilicet illo igne vocem populi Romani et libertatem senatus et conscientiam generis humani aboleri arbitrabantur, expulsis insuper sapientiae professoribus atque omni bona arte in exilium acta, ne quid usquam honestum occurreret. Dedimus profecto grande patientiae documentum; et sicut vetus aetas vidit quid ultimum in libertate esset, ita nos quid in servitute, adempto per inquisitiones etiam loquendi audiendique commercio. Memoriam quoque ipsam cum voce perdidissemus, si tam in nostra potestate esset oblivisci quam tacere.
[3] Nunc demum redit animus; et quamquam primo statim beatissimi saeculi ortu Nerva Caesar res olim dissociabilis miscuerit, principatum ac libertatem, augeatque cotidie felicitatem temporum Nerva Traianus, nec spem modo ac votum securitas publica, sed ipsius voti fiduciam ac robur adsumpserit, natura tamen infirmitatis humanae tardiora sunt remedia quam mala; et ut corpora nostra lente augescunt, cito extinguuntur, sic ingenia studiaque oppresseris facilius quam revocaveris: subit quippe etiam ipsius inertiae dulcedo, et invisa primo desidia postremo amatur. Quid, si per quindecim annos, grande mortalis aevi spatium, multi fortuitis casibus, promptissimus quisque saevitia principis interciderunt, pauci et, ut ita dixerim, non modo aliorum sed etiam nostri superstites sumus, exemptis e media vita tot annis, quibus iuvenes ad senectutem, senes prope ad ipsos exactae aetatis terminos per silentium venimus? Non tamen pigebit vel incondita ac rudi voce memoriam prioris servitutis ac testimonium praesentium bonorum composuisse. Hic interim liber honori Agricolae soceri mei destinatus, professione pietatis aut laudatus erit aut excusatus.
[4] Gnaeus Iulius Agricola, vetere et inlustri Foroiuliensium colonia ortus, utrumque avum procuratorem Caesarum habuit, quae equestris nobilitas est. Pater illi Iulius Graecinus senatorii ordinis, studio eloquentiae sapientiaeque notus, iisque ipsis virtutibus iram Gai Caesaris meritus: namque Marcum Silanum accusare iussus et, quia abnuerat, interfectus est. Mater Iulia Procilla fuit, rarae castitatis. In huius sinu indulgentiaque educatus per omnem honestarum artium cultum pueritiam adulescentiamque transegit. Arcebat eum ab inlecebris peccantium praeter ipsius bonam integramque naturam, quod statim parvulus sedem ac magistram studiorum Massiliam habuit, locum Graeca comitate et provinciali parsimonia mixtum ac bene compositum. Memoria teneo solitum ipsum narrare se prima in iuventa studium philosophiae acrius, ultra quam concessum Romano ac senatori, hausisse, ni prudentia matris incensum ac flagrantem animum coercuisset. Scilicet sublime et erectum ingenium pulchritudinem ac speciem magnae excelsaeque gloriae vehementius quam caute adpetebat. Mox mitigavit ratio et aetas, retinuitque, quod est difficillimum, ex sapientia modum.
[5] Prima castrorum rudimenta in Britannia Suetonio Paulino, diligenti ac moderato duci, adprobavit, electus quem contubernio aestimaret. Nec Agricola licenter, more iuvenum qui militiam in lasciviam vertunt, neque segniter ad voluptates et commeatus titulum tribunatus et inscitiam rettulit: sed noscere provinciam, nosci exercitui, discere a peritis, sequi optimos, nihil adpetere in iactationem, nihil ob formidinem recusare, simulque et anxius et intentus agere. Non sane alias exercitatior magisque in ambiguo Britannia fuit: trucidati veterani, incensae coloniae, intercepti exercitus; tum de salute, mox de victoria certavere. Quae cuncta etsi consiliis ductuque alterius agebantur, ac summa rerum et recuperatae provinciae gloria in ducem cessit, artem et usum et stimulos addidere iuveni, intravitque animum militaris gloriae cupido, ingrata temporibus quibus sinistra erga eminentis interpretatio nec minus periculum ex magna fama quam ex mala.
[6] Hinc ad capessendos magistratus in urbem degressus Domitiam Decidianam, splendidis natalibus ortam, sibi iunxit; idque matrimonium ad maiora nitenti decus ac robur fuit. vixeruntque mira concordia, per mutuam caritatem et in vicem se anteponendo, nisi quod in bona uxore tanto maior laus, quanto in mala plus culpae est. Sors quaesturae provinciam Asiam, pro consule Salvium Titianum dedit, quorum neutro corruptus est, quamquam et provincia dives ac parata peccantibus, et pro consule in omnem aviditatem pronus quantalibet facilitate redempturus esset mutuam dissimulationem mali. Auctus est ibi filia, in subsidium simul ac solacium; nam filium ante sublatum brevi amisit. Mox inter quaesturam ac tribunatum plebis atque ipsum etiam tribunatus annum quiete et otio transiit, gnarus sub Nerone temporum, quibus inertia pro sapientia fuit. Idem praeturae tenor et silentium; nec enim iurisdictio obvenerat. Ludos et inania honoris medio rationis atque abundantiae duxit, uti longe a luxuria ita famae propior. Tum electus a Galba ad dona templorum recognoscenda diligentissima conquisitione effecit, ne cuius alterius sacrilegium res publica quam Neronis sensisset.
[7] Sequens annus gravi vulnere animum domumque eius adflixit. Nam classis Othoniana licenter vaga dum Intimilium (Liguriae pars est) hostiliter populatur, matrem Agricolae in praediis suis interfecit, praediaque ipsa et magnam patrimonii partem diripuit, quae causa caedis fuerat. Igitur ad sollemnia pietatis profectus Agricola, nuntio adfectati a Vespasiano imperii deprehensus ac statim in partis transgressus est. Initia principatus ac statum urbis Mucianus regebat, iuvene admodum Domitiano et ex paterna fortuna tantum licentiam usurpante. Is missum ad dilectus agendos Agricolam integreque ac strenue versatum vicesimae legioni tarde ad sacramentum transgressae praeposuit, ubi decessor seditiose agere narrabatur: quippe legatis quoque consularibus nimia ac formidolosa erat, nec legatus praetorius ad cohibendum potens, incertum suo an militum ingenio. Ita successor simul et ultor electus rarissima moderatione maluit videri invenisse bonos quam fecisse.
[8] Praeerat tunc Britanniae Vettius Bolanus, placidius quam feroci provincia dignum est. Temperavit Agricola vim suam ardoremque compescuit, ne incresceret, peritus obsequi eruditusque utilia honestis miscere. Brevi deinde Britannia consul
arem Petilium Cerialem accepit. Habuerunt virtutes spatium exemplorum, sed primo Cerialis labores modo et discrimina, mox et gloriam communicabat: saepe parti exercitus in experimentum, aliquando maioribus copiis ex eventu praefecit. Nec Agricola umquam in suam famam gestis exultavit; ad auctorem ac ducem ut minister fortunam referebat. Ita virtute in obsequendo, verecundia in praedicando extra invidiam nec extra gloriam erat.
[9] Revertentem ab legatione legionis divus Vespasianus inter patricios adscivit; ac deinde provinciae Aquitaniae praeposuit, splendidae inprimis dignitatis administratione ac spe consulatus, cui destinarat. Credunt plerique militaribus ingeniis subtilitatem deesse, quia castrensis iurisdictio secura et obtusior ac plura manu agens calliditatem fori non exerceat: Agricola naturali prudentia, quamvis inter togatos, facile iusteque agebat. Iam vero tempora curarum remissionumque divisa: ubi conventus ac iudicia poscerent, gravis intentus, severus et saepius misericors: ubi officio satis factum, nulla ultra potestatis persona[; tristitiam et adrogantiam et avaritiam exuerat]. Nec illi, quod est rarissimum, aut facilitas auctoritatem aut severitas amorem deminuit. Integritatem atque abstinentiam in tanto viro referre iniuria virtutum fuerit. Ne famam quidem, cui saepe etiam boni indulgent, ostentanda virtute aut per artem quaesivit; procul ab aemulatione adversus collegas, procul a contentione adversus procuratores, et vincere inglorium et atteri sordidum arbitrabatur. Minus triennium in ea legatione detentus ac statim ad spem consulatus revocatus est, comitante opinione Britanniam ei provinciam dari, nullis in hoc ipsius sermonibus, sed quia par videbatur. Haud semper errat fama; aliquando et eligit. Consul egregiae tum spei filiam iuveni mihi despondit ac post consulatum collocavit, et statim Britaniae praepositus est, adiecto pontificatus sacerdotio.
Complete Works of Tacitus (Delphi Classics) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 24) Page 93
