Annals · Histories · Agricola · Germania · Dialogus, Newly Translated from the Latin · First Edition (2026)
1| Handing down to posterity the deeds and character of famous men is an old practice, and even our own age, careless as it is about its own people, hasn't abandoned it whenever some great and noble virtue has beaten down the vice common to small states and large alike: ignorance of what is right, and envy. In earlier times, doing something worth recording was easier and more in the open, and every man of note was drawn to publish the memory of virtue by nothing but the reward of a good conscience, free of favor-seeking or ambition. Many even thought it no arrogance but simple confidence in their own character to narrate their own lives, and no one held it against Rutilius or Scaurus, or doubted them for it: virtues are best judged in the very times that produce them most easily. But now, about to narrate the life of a dead man, I have needed to ask permission — permission I would not have sought had I meant to attack him. So savage and so hostile to virtue are these times.
2| We have read that when Arulenus Rusticus praised Paetus Thrasea, and Herennius Senecio praised Helvidius Priscus, it cost them their lives, and the cruelty fell not only on the authors themselves but on their books too: a commission of three men was assigned the task of burning, in the Comitium and Forum, the monuments of the most brilliant minds. As though flames could silence the voice of the Roman people, snuff out the senate's freedom, and erase the conscience of mankind along with it — and on top of it they drove the teachers of philosophy into exile, banished every honest pursuit, so that nothing decent might turn up anywhere. We gave, indeed, a great demonstration of submission; and just as the old generation saw the furthest limit of liberty, we have seen the furthest limit of servitude, robbed even of the exchange of speech and hearing by the spy system. We would have lost our very memory along with our voice, if forgetting were as much in our power as staying silent.
3| Only now does our spirit return. Nerva Caesar, at the very dawn of this most blessed age, fused together things once incompatible — the principate and liberty — and Nerva Trajan increases the happiness of the times daily; public security has taken on not merely the hope and prayer but the confidence and strength of that prayer fulfilled. Yet by the nature of human weakness, remedies move slower than diseases: as our bodies grow slowly and die quickly, so it is easier to crush minds and their pursuits than to call them back — the very sweetness of idleness creeps in, and the sloth once hated comes at last to be loved. And what of this: for fifteen years — a huge stretch of a human life — many perished by chance accidents, and the boldest by the emperor's cruelty; the few of us who survive have outlived not only others but, in a sense, ourselves, with so many years torn out of the middle of life, years in which we passed from youth to old age, and the old almost to the very edge of their lives, in silence. Still, I won't be sorry to have put together, even in a rough and unpolished voice, a record of our former slavery and a testimony to our present blessings. This book meanwhile, meant to honor my father-in-law Agricola, will either be praised or excused as a declaration of devotion.
4| Gnaeus Julius Agricola was born in the old and distinguished colony of Forum Julii. Both his grandfathers were imperial procurators, which counts as equestrian rank. His father, Julius Graecinus, was of senatorial rank, known for his devotion to eloquence and philosophy — and it was precisely these virtues that earned him the anger of Gaius Caesar: ordered to prosecute Marcus Silanus, he refused, and was killed for it. His mother was Julia Procilla, a woman of rare purity. Raised in her care and affection, he spent his boyhood and youth wholly given over to honorable pursuits. What kept him from the temptations that ruin young men, besides his own sound and upright nature, was that from earliest childhood he had Massilia as the seat and teacher of his studies — a place that blends Greek courtesy with provincial frugality, and mixes them well. I remember him telling how in his early youth he drank rather too deeply of the study of philosophy, further than was proper for a Roman and a senator, until his mother's good sense checked his kindled and burning spirit. A lofty, upright mind, evidently, chases the beauty and splendor of great and towering glory more eagerly than cautiously. Reason and age soon tempered it, and he kept — the hardest thing of all — a sense of proportion out of his wisdom.
5| He got his first taste of army life in Britain under Suetonius Paulinus, a careful and disciplined commander, who chose him to share his own quarters so as to judge him. Agricola didn't treat his military tribunate, as young men often do, as a license for indulgence, an excuse to turn soldiering into partying, nor did he lazily use his rank as cover for pleasure and leave. Instead he set out to know the province, to be known by the army, to learn from experienced men, to follow the best examples, to seek nothing for show, to refuse nothing out of fear, and to act at once carefully and energetically. Britain was never more actively contested or more in doubt: veterans slaughtered, colonies burned, armies cut off — first they fought for survival, then for victory. All this was carried out under another man's plans and command, and the glory of the whole affair and of recovering the province went to that commander, but it gave the young Agricola skill, experience, and a spur; the desire for military glory entered his heart — an unwelcome passion in times when standing out invited a hostile interpretation, and great fame was every bit as dangerous as bad fame.
6| From there he came down to Rome to seek office, and married Domitia Decidiana, a woman of brilliant birth; the marriage brought him both honor and strength as he pushed toward greater things. They lived together in remarkable harmony, through mutual affection and by each putting the other first — though in a good wife the credit for this is all the greater, just as in a bad one the blame is. The lot of the quaestorship gave him the province of Asia, with Salvius Titianus as proconsul; neither the province, rich and ready-made for wrongdoing, nor the proconsul, inclined to every kind of greed and willing on easy terms to trade mutual cover-ups, corrupted him. There a daughter was born to him, a support and a comfort at once; for he had earlier lost a son not long after birth. The time between his quaestorship and his tribunate of the plebs, and even the year of the tribunate itself, passed in quiet and inactivity, since he knew well that under Nero doing nothing counted as wisdom. His praetorship went the same way, quiet and uneventful, since no judicial duties had fallen to him. The games and empty trappings of the office he handled with a balance between economy and generosity, keeping well clear of extravagance while staying close to popular favor. Then, chosen by Galba to inspect temple offerings, he carried out the inquiry so scrupulously that the state suffered no sacrilege beyond what Nero had already inflicted.
7| The following year struck a grievous blow to his heart and his household. Otho's fleet, roaming without restraint, plundered Intimilium — part of Liguria — like an enemy, and in the course of it killed Agricola's mother on her own estate, and looted the estate itself along with a large part of the family fortune, which had been the motive for the murder. Agricola was on his way to perform the funeral rites when news reached him that Vespasian was making a bid for the throne, and he went over to his side at once. Mucianus governed the beginnings of the new reign and the state of the city, since Domitian was still quite young and exploiting only the license his father's fortune gave him. Mucianus sent Agricola to conduct levies, and finding him honest and vigorous, put him in charge of the Twentieth Legion, which had been slow to swear allegiance, where his predecessor was said to be stirring up mutiny — a legion too strong and alarming even for commanders of consular rank, and its praetorian commander unable to restrain it, whether through his own weakness or the soldiers' temper is unclear. So Agricola, chosen as successor and avenger both, with a rare restraint chose to seem to have found the men already loyal rather than to have made them so.
8| Britain was then governed by Vettius Bolanus, more mildly than so unruly a province deserved. Agricola reined in his own energy and checked his eagerness, so it wouldn't grow too strong, skilled as he was at obedience and trained to blend the useful with the honorable. Soon after, Britain got a consular governor, Petilius Cerialis. Now there was scope for his virtues to show themselves in examples, but at first Cerialis shared with him only the labor and the danger, and only later the glory too: he often put him in charge of part of the army as a trial, and sometimes, based on results, of larger forces. Agricola never boasted of his own achievements for his own fame; as a subordinate he always credited his success to his commander and leader. So in his obedience he showed virtue, in his silence about it, modesty, and he kept clear of envy without falling short of glory.
9| When he returned from commanding his legion, the deified Vespasian enrolled him among the patricians, then put him in charge of the province of Aquitania—an especially brilliant post, both in the standing it carried and in the promise of a consulship, which Vespasian had already marked out for him. Most people assume that military minds lack subtlety, on the theory that camp jurisdiction, being blunt and straightforward and dealing mostly in force, doesn't train a man in the cunning of the courtroom. But Agricola, with his natural good sense, handled civilian business easily and fairly even among the toga-wearing crowd. He kept his hours of work and rest cleanly separated: when the assizes and the courts demanded him, he was serious, focused, strict, and often merciful; once his duty was done, he dropped every trace of the official. He carried none of the usual arrogance, sourness, or greed. And—rarest of things—neither his approachability weakened his authority nor his strictness cost him affection. To praise integrity and freedom from corruption in a man of his stature would almost insult his greater virtues. He didn't even chase reputation—something good men often indulge in—by advertising his merits or working the angles. He kept clear of rivalry with his colleagues and clear of quarrels with the procurators, thinking it inglorious to win such contests and shabby to be worn down by them. He was kept in that post less than three years before being recalled with the promise of a consulship close behind, and rumor already had it that Britain would be his province—not because he'd said anything to that effect, but because he simply looked right for it. Rumor isn't always wrong; sometimes it even chooses well. As consul, he betrothed his daughter, then a young woman of outstanding promise, to me, and after his consulship gave her to me in marriage; almost immediately he was put in charge of Britain, with the priesthood of the pontificate added to it.
10| I won't set down the geography and peoples of Britain, so often described by other writers, to compete with them in care or talent, but because Britain was only then, for the first time, fully subdued. So what earlier writers dressed up with eloquence, not yet having the facts straight, I will report with plain accuracy. Britain, the largest of the islands known to Rome, stretches in extent and climate opposite Germany on one side and Spain on the other, with Gaul across from its southern coast, close enough to be seen. Its northern parts, with no land opposite them, are battered by a vast, open sea. The shape of the whole island has been compared—by Livy, the most eloquent of the older writers, and Fabius Rusticus among the more recent—to an elongated dish, or a double axe-head. And that is indeed its shape as far as Caledonia, which is why that description has become the general one; but beyond that, an immense, irregular mass of land runs out and narrows, wedge-like, toward its furthest shore. A Roman fleet, sailing round this outermost coast for the first time, confirmed that Britain was in fact an island, and in the same voyage discovered and subdued the previously unknown islands called the Orkneys. Thule too was sighted, but no further, since that was the extent of the orders, and winter was coming on. They report the sea there is sluggish and heavy to row through, and doesn't even rise much under wind—probably because there is less land and fewer mountains, which are the source and material of storms, and because the sheer mass of open ocean is slower to be stirred. Investigating the nature of Ocean and its tides isn't the business of this work, and many have already done so; I'll only add this: nowhere does the sea hold wider sway, carrying its currents this way and that in many channels, and it doesn't merely rise and fall at the shoreline but pushes deep inland, wrapping around and even working its way into hills and mountains as if they were its own.
11| Who the original inhabitants of Britain were—natives or immigrants—is, as usual among barbarians, not well established. Physical types vary, and from that people draw their theories. The reddish hair and large limbs of the people of Caledonia point to a German origin; the swarthy faces and generally curly hair of the Silures, along with Spain's position opposite them, make it plausible that Iberians crossed over in the old days and took those lands for themselves; the tribes nearest to Gaul resemble the Gauls, whether because the force of shared ancestry still holds, or because lands jutting toward each other under similar skies shape bodies alike. On the whole, though, it's reasonable to guess that Gauls occupied the neighboring island. You can catch their religious rites and superstitious beliefs; their language isn't very different; they show the same boldness in courting danger and, once danger arrives, the same fear in dodging it. Still, the Britons show more ferocity, not yet having been softened by a long peace. We're told the Gauls too were once formidable in war; then came sluggishness along with ease, and they lost their courage together with their freedom. The Britons conquered long ago have gone the same way; the tribes still free are what the Gauls used to be.
12| Their strength lies in infantry; some tribes also fight from chariots. The nobleman drives, his dependents fight around him. They used to obey kings; now they're pulled apart by factions and rivalries among their chiefs. Nothing works more in our favor against such powerful peoples than their failure to act in concert. Rarely do two or three states come together to fend off a common danger; so they fight one by one, and are conquered as a whole. The sky is foul with frequent rain and cloud, but the cold isn't harsh. The days are longer than in our part of the world; the nights are bright, and in the far north of Britain so short that you can barely tell where daylight ends and begins. They claim that if clouds don't get in the way, the sun's glow can be seen through the night, and that it doesn't set and rise but simply passes along the horizon. The reason, apparently, is that the flat, outlying edges of the earth cast only a low shadow that doesn't lift the darkness very high, so night falls below the level of the sky and the stars. The soil can bear every crop except the olive and the vine and the other produce native to warmer lands, and it's fertile enough for livestock. Crops ripen slowly but grow quickly, both for the same reason—an abundance of moisture in the ground and the air. Britain yields gold, silver, and other metals—worth the conquest. The Ocean also produces pearls, though dull and grayish. Some think the gatherers simply lack the skill for it: in the Red Sea, they say, pearls are pried living and breathing off the rocks, while in Britain they're only collected once washed ashore. I would sooner believe that nature is stingy with the pearls there than that we are lacking in greed.
13| The Britons themselves handle the levy, the taxes, and the other duties the empire imposes on them without complaint, so long as there's no injustice mixed in; that they endure badly, being tamed enough to obey but not yet to be slaves. So it was the deified Julius who first of all Romans entered Britain with an army; though a successful battle frightened the inhabitants and he took the shore, he can be said to have shown the island to his successors, not handed it over to them. Then came the civil wars, and the arms of the leading men turned against the state, and a long neglect of Britain even in peacetime—the deified Augustus called it policy, Tiberius called it a legacy to be followed. That Gaius Caesar considered invading Britain is well established, but his quick, changeable temper and his failed efforts against Germany came to nothing. The deified Claudius was behind the renewal of the effort, shipping over legions and auxiliaries and bringing Vespasian in to share the command—which turned out to be the start of Vespasian's later rise to fortune. Peoples were subdued, kings taken captive, and fate marked out Vespasian.
14| Aulus Plautius was the first man of consular rank put in charge, followed soon after by Ostorius Scapula, both outstanding soldiers; and bit by bit the nearest part of Britain was reshaped into a proper province, with a colony of veterans added on top. Certain states were handed over to King Cogidumnus, who remained loyal right down to my own time—following the old, long-established Roman practice of using even kings as instruments of subjugation. Then Didius Gallus held on to what earlier governors had won, pushing forward only a few outposts, just enough to earn a reputation for having expanded the province's reach. Veranius succeeded Didius, and died within the year. After him Suetonius Paulinus had two successful years, subduing peoples and strengthening garrisons; and trusting in that success, he attacked the island of Mona, which was supplying the rebels with manpower, and in doing so left his rear exposed to opportunity.
15| For with the governor away and their fear removed, the Britons began talking among themselves about the miseries of servitude, comparing their grievances and inflaming each other by interpreting them: patience gained nothing except heavier burdens laid on people who bore things all too easily. They used to have one king each; now two were imposed on them, the governor to rage against their lives, the procurator against their property. Discord between these two officials was just as ruinous for their subjects as agreement between them. The governor's men, the centurions, and the procurator's men, the slaves, mixed violence with insult on both sides. Nothing now escaped greed, nothing escaped lust. In battle, at least, it's the braver man who plunders; but now it was mostly cowards and men unfit for war who tore homes apart, dragged off children, and imposed the levy—as if these were people who didn't even know how to die for their own country. How few soldiers had actually crossed over, after all, if the Britons only counted themselves! That was how the Germanies had thrown off the yoke, and they were only defended by a river, not by Ocean. For themselves, they had country, wives, and parents as reasons to fight; the Romans had nothing but greed and self-indulgence. The Romans would withdraw, just as the deified Julius had withdrawn, if only the Britons would match the courage of their ancestors. They shouldn't be frightened by the outcome of one battle or two: the fortunate have more dash, but greater steadfastness lies with the wretched. Even the gods, they said, now pitied the Britons, keeping the Roman general away and his army shut up on another island; and now they themselves were doing the hardest part—deliberating. And in plots of this kind, it's more dangerous to be caught planning than to act.
16| Stirred up by these grievances and others like them, the Britons all rose together under Boudicca, a woman of royal blood as their leader — for they draw no distinction of sex when it comes to command. They hunted down the soldiers scattered through the forts, stormed the garrisons, and overran the colony itself as the seat of their slavery. Anger and victory left no form of savagery untried. Had Paulinus not moved quickly on hearing of the province's uprising, Britain would have been lost. As it was, the luck of a single battle restored the old submission — though many still kept their weapons, driven by guilt over the revolt and personal fear of the governor, that he, admirable in everything else, might deal too harshly with those who surrendered, avenging in them wrongs done to himself. So Petronius Turpilianus was sent instead, a man thought more approachable, new to the enemy's crimes and therefore gentler toward their repentance. He settled the old troubles, risked nothing further, and handed the province to Trebellius Maximus. Trebellius, more sluggish and with no experience of the camp, held the province through a kind of easy good nature. Even the natives had by now learned to forgive the seductive vices of Roman rule, and the outbreak of civil war at home gave a ready excuse for slackness. But discord tore at the army, for soldiers used to campaigns grew unruly in idleness. Trebellius escaped the army's fury by hiding and fleeing, and afterward held command in disgrace and humiliation, on sufferance only, as if by an unspoken bargain: the soldiers got their licence, the general kept his life, and the mutiny passed without bloodshed. Nor did Vettius Bolanus, with the civil wars still ongoing, trouble Britain with discipline — the same indulgence toward the enemy, the same lawlessness in camp, except that Bolanus was blameless and, hated for no wrongdoing of his own, had won affection in place of authority.
17| But when Vespasian recovered Britain along with the rest of the world, great generals came, fine armies followed, and the enemy's hopes shrank. Petilius Cerialis struck terror at once by attacking the Brigantes — reputedly the province's most populous tribe. He fought battle after battle, some of them bloody, and through victory or through the sheer wearing effect of war he brought a large part of the Brigantes to heel. Cerialis would have overshadowed the effort and reputation of any successor, but Julius Frontinus took up and bore the weight of the task — a great man, so far as was then possible — and subdued by arms the strong and warlike Silures, fighting through the difficulty of the terrain as well as the enemy's courage.
18| This was the state of Britain, these the shifting fortunes of its wars, that Agricola found when he crossed over already in midsummer — at a time when the soldiers, thinking the campaigning season lost, were turning their minds to safety, and the enemy to opportunity. The Ordovices had, not long before his arrival, wiped out almost an entire cavalry squadron stationed on their borders, and this beginning had roused the province. Those who wanted war approved the example and waited to test the temper of the new governor. Though the summer was far gone, the troops scattered through the province, and the men had already resigned themselves to a quiet year — all factors that discouraged and worked against someone about to open a campaign, and made most advisers favor simply holding the defenses — Agricola decided to meet the danger head-on. He gathered detachments from the legions and a modest force of auxiliaries, and since the Ordovices did not dare come down onto level ground, he led the advance himself, so the rest would share his courage by sharing his risk. He cut down nearly the whole tribe, and knowing he must press his advantage — that early success would decide how the rest reacted — he resolved to bring the island of Mona back under Roman control, from whose possession, as I noted earlier, Paulinus had been called away by the revolt of all Britain. But as always with a sudden decision, ships were lacking. The general's judgment and resolve got his men across anyway. He had the baggage set aside and picked the best of his auxiliaries, men who knew the fords and had, by native custom, learned to swim while keeping hold of their weapons and horses at once, and sent them across so suddenly that the enemy, who were watching for a fleet, for ships, for the sea itself, believed that nothing could stand against men who came to war like this. So the islanders sued for peace and surrendered, and Agricola's fame grew great, since on entering the province — a time others spend on display and courting favor — he had chosen labor and danger instead. Nor did success turn him vain: he called it merely holding down men already beaten, not a campaign or a victory. He did not even dress up his report with laurels — but by playing down his own fame he only increased it, since people judged from his silence how much greater his hopes for the future must be.
19| He understood the province's temper, and had learned from others' failures that arms accomplish little if injustice follows behind them. So he set himself to root out the causes of war. Starting with himself and his own household, he first brought his own establishment under control — a task no less hard for most men than governing a province. He let no public business run through freedmen or slaves; he took on no centurion or soldier by private favor, recommendation, or entreaty, but judged the best men the most trustworthy. He knew everything, but did not act on everything. He forgave small faults and dealt firmly with large ones — content, more often, with repentance rather than punishment. He preferred to give office and responsibility to men unlikely to offend, rather than condemn them after they had. He eased the burden of grain and tax collection by spreading it fairly, and cut out the extra profiteering that had made the taxes themselves harder to bear than the taxes were. For as a mockery, people had been made to sit outside locked granaries and buy grain they did not need, then pay a price set for them. Detours and long, roundabout routes were ordered, so that communities had to communities with winter quarters close at hand had to deliver their grain to remote and inaccessible places instead — until what should have been available to everyone became a source of profit for a few.
20| Stamping out these abuses within his first year, he wrapped peace in a fine reputation, though before this peace had been feared almost as much as war, thanks to the negligence or the greed of earlier governors. But when summer came, he gathered his army and was everywhere on the march — praising discipline, keeping stragglers in line, choosing camp sites himself, personally scouting estuaries and forests ahead. He gave the enemy no rest, harrying them constantly with sudden raids, and once he had frightened them enough, he would hold back and show the appeal of peace instead. Because of this, many tribes who until then had dealt with Rome as equals laid down their anger, gave hostages, and let themselves be ringed with garrisons and forts — managed with such method and such care that no new part of Britain had ever before come over with so little provocation.
21| The following winter was spent on the most beneficial policies. To accustom a people scattered and primitive, and thus prone to war, to peace and quiet through the pleasures of civilized life, he urged them privately and helped them publicly to build temples, public squares, and proper houses, praising the eager and reprimanding the slow — so that competition for honor took the place of compulsion. He had the sons of the chiefs educated in the liberal arts, and openly rated British natural ability above the trained skill of the Gauls, so that people who had lately refused to learn the Roman language now became eager for eloquence in it. From this came honor for Roman dress too, and the toga became common. Little by little they slid toward the seductions of vice — colonnades, baths, elegant dinner parties. The ignorant called this civilization, when it was in fact a piece of their enslavement.
22| The third year of campaigning opened up new tribes, as he laid waste the lands as far as the Tanaus — that is the name of the estuary. The enemy, terrified by this, did not dare attack his army even though it had been battered by violent storms, and there was time besides to build additional forts. Those with experience noted that no other commander had shown better judgment in choosing strategic ground. Not one fort built by Agricola was ever taken by enemy assault or abandoned by surrender or flight, for they were stocked with a year's supplies against any prolonged siege. So the winters there passed without fear, with frequent sallies and each fort able to defend itself, and the enemy grew desperate, finding their efforts wasted — for whereas they had usually offset summer losses with winter successes, now they were pressed equally hard in both seasons. Agricola was never greedy to claim credit for deeds done by others: whether it was a centurion or a prefect, he had in Agricola an honest witness to the act. Some said he was rather too sharp-tongued in his reproofs, and it's true that, pleasant as he was to good men, he was unwelcome company for bad ones. But nothing of his anger lingered on in secret; you never had to fear his silence — he thought it more honorable to give offense openly than to hide his hatred.
23| The fourth summer was spent securing what he had already overrun, and had the courage of the armies and the glory of Rome's name allowed it, a natural boundary might have been found within Britain itself. For the Clyde and the Forth, carried far inland by the tides of two different seas, are separated only by a narrow neck of land. This was now made secure with garrisons, and the whole nearer coastline held, with the enemy pushed back as if onto another island entirely.
24| In the fifth year of the campaigns, Agricola crossed by ship, first of the Romans to do so, and in a series of successful engagements subdued tribes until then unknown. He stationed forces in the part of Britain that faces Ireland, more in hope than out of fear, since Ireland, lying between Britain and Spain and within reach of the Gallic sea as well, might well link the strongest parts of the empire together to great mutual advantage. In size it is smaller than Britain but larger than the islands of our own sea. Its soil, climate, and the character and habits of its people differ little from Britain's; its approaches and harbors are well known through traders and merchants. Agricola had given shelter to one of the local chieftains, driven out by a revolt at home, and kept him on hand under the guise of friendship, waiting for his chance. I have often heard him say that Ireland could be conquered and held with a single legion and a modest force of auxiliaries — and that this would also serve well against Britain, if Roman arms were seen on every side and liberty, so to speak, removed from view.
25| In the summer that opened his sixth year in command, Agricola took in the tribes beyond the Forth. Fearing a general uprising among the peoples further out and threatening moves by the enemy, he sent his fleet ahead to scout the harbors. This was the first time Agricola had used the fleet as part of his fighting force, and it made a fine sight, pressing the war by land and sea at once. Often infantry, cavalry, and marines shared the same camp, mixing rations and high spirits, each swapping stories of their own adventures — one moment the deep gloom of forest and mountain, the next the perils of storm and wave, this side boasting of beating the enemy on land, that side of conquering the Ocean. The Britons too, as the prisoners reported, were stunned at the sight of the fleet: it seemed to strip away the last secret refuge of the sea and shut the door on defeated men's final hiding place. The peoples of Caledonia turned to arms in force, with even greater rumor than force, as tends to happen with the unknown, and boldly attacked one of our forts, which only deepened the fear, since they had struck first. Timid men, dressed up as prudent ones, urged retreat south of the Forth and withdrawal rather than being driven back. Just then Agricola learned that the enemy meant to attack in several columns at once. To keep from being surrounded by their superior numbers and knowledge of the ground, he split his own army into three parts and advanced.
26| When the enemy learned of this, they suddenly changed plan and threw their whole force, by night, against the Ninth Legion, judged the weakest. They cut down the sentries in their sleep and burst in amid confusion and panic, and the fighting was already inside the camp itself when Agricola, informed of the enemy's route by his scouts and following their tracks, sent his fastest cavalry and infantry to fall on the attackers' rear, then had the whole army raise a shout together; and as dawn neared, the standards flashed into view. Caught between two dangers, the Britons panicked; the men of the Ninth took heart again, and now safe, fought on for glory instead of survival. They even sallied out, and there was fierce fighting in the very gateways, until the enemy was driven off, both our forces competing — one side to claim they had brought the rescue, the other to deny they had needed it. Had the marshes and woods not sheltered the fleeing enemy, that victory would have ended the war outright.
27| Word of this success made the army bold, roaring that nothing could stop their courage, that they must press into Caledonia and, at last, in one unbroken run of battles, find the very edge of Britain. Even the men who had just been cautious and full of caveats grew rash and boastful once the danger had passed — the most unfair thing about war: everyone claims credit for success, but failure is pinned on one man alone. The Britons, for their part, believed they had been beaten not by Roman courage but by luck and their general's cunning. They lost none of their pride: they kept arming their young men, moved wives and children to safe places, and sealed the alliance of their tribes with assemblies and sacrifices. So both sides parted with tempers raised on either side.
28| That same summer a cohort of Usipi, raised in Germany and shipped over to Britain, pulled off a bold and remarkable stunt. After killing the centurion and the soldiers posted among their ranks to train and command them, they forced three light warships' crews to take them aboard. With only one man able to steer, they killed the other two pilots on suspicion, and before word got out, they sailed along the coast as a kind of spectacle. Eventually, going ashore for water, they clashed in battle with Britons defending their own land, sometimes winning, sometimes beaten back, until at last they were reduced to such hunger that they ate the weakest among them, then men chosen by lot. So they sailed clear around Britain, but lost their ships through not knowing how to handle them, and were taken for pirates — first by the Suebi, then captured by the Frisii. Some of them were sold as slaves and, passing from buyer to buyer, ended up on our own side of the Rhine, and it was the tale of their extraordinary ordeal that made them known.
29| At the start of that summer Agricola suffered a private grief: he lost the son born to him the year before. He bore the loss neither with showy stoicism, as many brave men do, nor with womanish weeping and mourning; and war was part of how he coped with grief. He sent the fleet ahead to raid at several points and spread wide, uncertain terror, then marched with a lightly equipped army, reinforced by the bravest Britons whose loyalty long peace had proven, and reached Mount Graupius, which the enemy already held. The Britons, undaunted by the outcome of the earlier battle and expecting either vengeance or slavery, had finally learned that only unity could fend off a shared danger, and had rallied the strength of all their tribes through embassies and treaties. More than thirty thousand armed men could now be seen, and still more of the fighting-age young and the vigorous old kept streaming in, men famous in war, each wearing his own honors. Among their many leaders, one stood out for courage and birth, a man named Calgacus. Before the assembled mass, eager for battle, he is said to have spoken as follows:
30| 'Whenever I consider the causes of this war and the necessity that drives us, I feel a surge of confidence that this day, and your unity, will mark the beginning of freedom for all of Britain. You have all gathered here as men who have never known slavery, and there are no lands left beyond us — not even the sea is safe, with the Roman fleet threatening us. So battle and arms, honorable to brave men, are also the safest choice even for cowards. Earlier battles against the Romans, fought with mixed fortune, still left hope and help in our own hands, because we, the noblest people in all Britain, living in its very heart and seeing no shores of slaves, kept our eyes unspoiled by the sight of tyranny. We who live at the world's remotest edge, the last free people, have been protected until this day by the very obscurity of our fame. Now the far edge of Britain lies exposed, and whatever is unknown people imagine as glorious. But beyond us there is no other nation, nothing but waves and rocks, and the Romans, more dangerous than either, whose arrogance you cannot escape by submission and restraint, try as you might. Robbers of the world, now that no land is left for them to strip bare, they scour the sea as well. If the enemy is rich, they are greedy; if poor, they crave glory. Neither East nor West has ever satisfied them; alone among all men they covet wealth and poverty with equal hunger. To plunder, butcher, steal — these things they falsely call empire. They make a desert and call it peace.
31| 'Nature meant for each of us our children and kin to be the dearest things we have: these are torn away by conscription, to serve as slaves elsewhere. Our wives and sisters, even if they escape the enemy's lust, are defiled in the name of 'friendship' and 'hospitality.' Our goods and fortunes are drained as tribute, our fields and harvests as grain-levy, our very bodies and hands worn down clearing forests and swamps under the lash and abuse. Slaves born to slavery are sold once, and their masters even feed them afterward; but Britain buys her own slavery fresh every day, and feeds it every day. And just as in any household the newest slave is mocked even by his fellow slaves, so in this whole world's old-established system of servitude, we, the newest and least regarded, are marked out for destruction, since we have no fields or mines or harbors worth sparing us to work. And courage and fierce spirit in subjects only breed resentment in their rulers; and the more remote and hidden a place is, the more suspect it becomes precisely for its safety. So, since there is no hope of mercy left, find your courage at last — those who hold safety dearest as much as those who hold glory dearest. The Brigantes, led by a woman, managed to burn a colony and storm a camp, and could have thrown off the yoke entirely had success not turned to carelessness; we, still whole and unconquered, meaning to fight for freedom and not to regret our defeat, let us show from the very first clash what kind of men Caledonia has kept in reserve.
32| 'Do you really believe the Romans bring the same courage to war that they show self-indulgence in peace? It is our own quarrels and divisions that have made them famous — they turn the failings of their enemies into glory for their own army. That army is patched together out of the most different nations on earth: success holds it together, but defeat will tear it apart — unless you imagine that Gauls and Germans, and — shame to say — many Britons too, who lend their blood to a foreign tyranny, are held by loyalty and affection, when they have been enemies far longer than they have been slaves. Fear and terror are weak chains of loyalty: remove them, and men who have stopped fearing will start hating. Every incentive to victory is on our side: no wives spur the Romans on, no parents will be there to reproach them if they run; most of them have no homeland at all, or one that is not this one. Few in number, nervous in their ignorance, staring around at an unknown sky, sea, and forest — the gods have handed them to us, shut in and bound, so to speak. Don't be frightened by their hollow show, or by silver and gold gleaming — none of it can shield a man or land a blow. Even within the enemy's own ranks we will find hands eager to turn against them: Britons serving there will know our cause as theirs, Gauls will call to mind the freedom that was once theirs too, and the Germans still left will abandon them, the way the Usipi did not long ago. There is nothing more to fear beyond that: empty forts, colonies of old men, sick and quarreling townships caught between subjects who obey badly and rulers who govern unjustly. Here stands your general, here your army; there lies tribute, the mines, and all the other punishments of slavery — to endure forever, or to avenge on this very field, is the choice before you now. So, as you go into battle, think of your ancestors and of your children yet to come.'
33| They received the speech eagerly, with the shouting, singing, and discordant cries that are the barbarian custom. And now columns began to move and weapons to flash as the boldest men surged forward; the battle line was forming when Agricola, though he judged his men joyful and barely restrained by their fortifications, still felt they needed rousing further, and spoke as follows: 'Comrades, this is the seventh year since, through the courage and the fortune of Rome's empire, and your own loyalty and effort, you conquered Britain. Through so many campaigns, so many battles, whether the work demanded courage against the enemy or endurance and toil against nature herself, I have had no cause to be ashamed of my soldiers, nor you of your commander. So we have gone beyond the limits reached by earlier governors and earlier armies, and we now hold the edge of Britain — not by report or rumor, but with camps and arms. Britain has been found, and it has been subdued. Often on the march, when swamps and mountains and rivers wore you down, I heard the bravest of you asking: "When will we get the enemy? When will they come within reach?" Now they come, driven from their hiding places, and here is the open ground for your courage and your hopes — everything favors the victors, and the same conditions turn against the defeated. To have crossed such distance, to have made it through the forests, to have forded the estuaries — that is fine and honorable while advancing; but for men in flight, those very things become the most dangerous, since we would no longer have the same knowledge of the ground or the same supplies, only our hands, our weapons, and everything riding on them. For my part, I decided long ago that neither an army's nor a commander's back is ever safe. So an honorable death is better than a shameful life, and safety and glory stand in the very same place; nor would it be without glory to fall here, at the very edge of the earth and of nature.'
34| 'If we faced some new people, some unknown battle line, I would urge you on with the example of other armies. As it is, just recall your own honors, ask your own eyes. These are the men who last year attacked a single legion by treacherous night assault, and whom you overcame with a shout; these are the most cowardly of all the Britons, and that is why they have survived so long. Just as when men push into forests and thickets, the boldest animals charge out at them while the timid and weak are driven off merely by the noise of the column — so it is that the fiercest of the Britons fell long ago, and what remains is only a crowd of cowards and frightened men. As for the fact that you have finally caught up with them — they did not make a stand, they were simply overtaken; their extreme situation and utter dread have pinned their line rigid in its tracks on this very spot, where you are about to win a splendid and spectacular victory. Bring your campaigns to a close, crown fifty years with one great day, and prove to Rome that the army can never fairly be blamed for delays in war or for causes of rebellion.'
35| While Agricola was still speaking, the soldiers' eagerness was plain to see, and when he finished, tremendous enthusiasm followed, and the men rushed at once to arms. Eager and surging forward as they were, he arranged them so that the auxiliary infantry, eight thousand strong, formed the center of the line, while three thousand cavalry were spread out on the wings. The legions stood in front of the rampart — a mighty honor to win the victory without spilling Roman blood, and a reserve if the line should be pushed back. The British line had taken up position on higher ground, both for display and to inspire fear, arranged so that the first rank stood on level ground while the rest rose up the slope behind them, seemingly connected rank on rank; the middle of the plain was filled with the noise and dashing about of chariots. Then Agricola, worried by the enemy's superior numbers that his men might be attacked on the front and both flanks at once, spread his ranks out — though this would make the line thinner, and many advised him to bring up the legions — but he, more hopeful and steady in the face of difficulty, sent his horse away and took his stand on foot in front of the standards.
36| At the first clash the fighting was at range; and the Britons, with both discipline and skill, used their huge swords and small shields to dodge or knock aside our missiles, while pouring down a great volume of their own — until Agricola urged four cohorts of Batavians and two of Tungrians to bring the fight to close quarters, sword to sword. This was a maneuver these veteran troops were well practiced in, and one the enemy, carrying small shields and enormous swords, found hard to counter — for the British swords, being pointless, could not manage a close grip or fighting in a tight space. So as the Batavians began raining blows, striking with their shield-bosses, stabbing at faces, and cutting down the enemy standing on level ground, pushing their line up the slope, the other cohorts, matching their drive and eagerness, cut down whoever was nearest — leaving many half-dead or simply passed over in the rush to win. Meanwhile squadrons of cavalry, as the chariots fled, joined the infantry fight. And though they had brought fresh terror at first, they now became bogged down against the dense enemy ranks and the uneven ground; the fighting no longer went well for our men, forced as they were to struggle uphill while also being pressed by the bodies of horses; and often driverless chariots, and horses maddened with fear, without a rider, would crash sideways or head-on into whoever was in their path, wherever panic carried them.
37| And the Britons who had so far taken no part in the fighting, sitting on the hilltops, had begun looking down on our small numbers with contempt, and were slowly descending to circle around the backs of the winning side — until Agricola, fearing exactly this, threw four cavalry squadrons, held in reserve for sudden emergencies, against them as they came on; and the more fiercely they had charged, the more sharply he broke and scattered them in flight. So the Britons' own plan turned back on them, and the squadrons, sent around by the general's order from the front of the fighting, struck the enemy line from behind. Then, on the open ground, came a great and terrible spectacle: pursuing, wounding, capturing men, and then cutting them down the moment new targets appeared. Now, depending on each man's temperament, whole bands of armed men fled before fewer pursuers, while some, though unarmed, rushed forward of their own will to meet death. Everywhere lay weapons and bodies and mangled limbs, and the ground was soaked in blood; and even among the defeated there was, at times, anger and courage still. For once they neared the woods, those gathered there, who knew the ground, surrounded the leading pursuers when they grew careless. And had Agricola not, moving everywhere himself, posted strong and mobile cohorts to ring the woods like a hunting drive, and, where the ground grew too narrow, dismounted part of the cavalry to sweep the thinner stretches of forest on foot, some loss would have resulted from overconfidence. But once the Britons saw our men following again in firm, ordered ranks, they broke and fled — not in the massed bands of before, and no longer glancing back for each other, but scattered and wary, making for distant and trackless places one by one. Night and satiety put an end to the pursuit. About ten thousand of the enemy were killed; on our side three hundred and sixty fell, among them Aulus Atticus, a cohort commander, carried into the enemy ranks by youthful eagerness and the spirit of his horse.
38| That night was one of joy and plunder for the victors; the scattered Britons, amid the mingled wailing of men and women, dragged off their wounded, called out for the unhurt, abandoned their homes and in their rage set fire to them themselves, chose hiding places only to leave them at once, made plans together only to split apart again; sometimes they broke down at the sight of their loved ones, but more often were provoked to fury. It was well established that some, as if out of pity, turned savagely on their own wives and children. The next day laid open more fully the scale of the victory: an empty silence everywhere, deserted hills, houses smoking in the distance, not a soul met by our scouts. Once these had been sent out in every direction and it was learned that the tracks of the fleeing enemy were uncertain and that nowhere were they massing together again — and since summer was already spent and the war could not be spread further — Agricola led the army into the territory of the Boresti. There he took hostages and ordered the fleet's commander to sail around Britain. Sufficient forces were assigned for this, and word of the terror they inspired had already spread ahead. Agricola himself led the infantry and cavalry by a slow march, so that the delay of passing through might itself intimidate the minds of the newly conquered peoples, and settled them into winter quarters. At the same time the fleet, favored by weather and by its own reputation, reached Trucculensian Harbor, from which it had returned after coasting along the entire near side of Britain.
39| Domitian received news of this course of events — though Agricola's dispatches were, as always, free of boastful language — in his usual manner: a cheerful face, an anxious heart. He knew he was privately mocked for his recent sham triumph over Germany, for which slaves had been bought up through trade and dressed and groomed to look like captives; but now here was a real and great victory, with so many thousands of the enemy slain, being celebrated with enormous fame. This frightened him most of all: that a private citizen's name was being raised above the emperor's. In vain, he thought, had he driven the pursuits of the courts and the honors of civilian achievement into silence, if another man was going to seize military glory too; everything else could somehow be more easily disguised, but the virtue of a good general was an imperial quality. Tormented by such anxieties, and glutting himself in private solitude — itself a sign of savage brooding — he decided it was best for the moment to store up his hatred, until the excitement over Agricola's fame and the army's favor for him should fade; for at that time Agricola still held command in Britain.
40| So Domitian ordered the senate to decree Agricola triumphal honors, a public statue, and everything normally given for a triumph, all wrapped in extravagant language, and he added the further hint that Agricola was to be given the province of Syria — vacant just then by the death of the consular Atilius Rufus, and reserved for senior men. Many believed a freedman was sent from the emperor's private staff carrying the document that granted Agricola Syria, with instructions to deliver it only if Agricola was still in Britain; and that this freedman met Agricola right in the strait, and returned to Domitian without even approaching him — whether this is true or a story invented to fit the emperor's character, who can say. Meanwhile Agricola had handed his successor a province at peace and secure. And so his entry into the capital would not draw notice through crowds and welcoming parties, he avoided his friends' formal greeting and came into the city by night, into the palace by night, exactly as instructed; he was received with a brief kiss and no conversation, then absorbed into the crowd of courtiers. But to soften a military reputation, which sits heavy among men at leisure, with other qualities, he immersed himself completely in quiet retirement — modest in dress, easy in conversation, accompanied by one or two friends, so much so that most people, who are used to judging great men by their retinue, looked Agricola over and asked where his fame was; few understood it.
41| During those days he was repeatedly accused before Domitian in his absence, and acquitted in his absence. The danger came from no actual charge or complaint of injury, but from an emperor hostile to merit and to a man's glory, and from that worst kind of enemy — men who praise you. And then followed times for the state that would not let Agricola be forgotten: so many armies lost in Moesia, Dacia, Germany, and Pannonia through commanders' recklessness or cowardice, so many military men with so many cohorts stormed and captured; the fighting was no longer over the empire's frontier and riverbank but over the legions' winter quarters and their very hold on the ground. As losses piled on losses and every year was marked by funerals and disasters, the public voice demanded Agricola as commander, everyone comparing his vigor, steadiness, and battle-tested nerve with the incompetence and fear of the others. It's well established that these conversations reached Domitian's own ears too, while the best of his freedmen urged him on out of affection and loyalty, and the worst out of malice and envy, pushing a mind already inclined to the worse course. So Agricola was driven toward glory itself — partly by his own merits, partly by other men's vices.
42| The year had now come when he would be assigned by lot the proconsulship of Africa or Asia, and since Civica had recently been executed, Agricola had no shortage of warning, nor Domitian of precedent. Certain men skilled in reading the emperor's thoughts came to Agricola and asked, unprompted, whether he meant to take the province. At first they praised, discreetly, a quiet retired life; then they offered to help him find an excuse; finally, no longer hiding their purpose, with a mix of persuasion and threats they dragged him before Domitian. He, ready with his usual pretense, composed into an air of arrogance, heard out Agricola's excuses and, once he had agreed to them, allowed himself to be thanked — not even blushing at the ugliness of doing someone a favor. Still, he withheld from Agricola the proconsular salary that was customarily offered and that he himself had granted to others — whether offended that it hadn't been requested, or from a guilty conscience, not wanting it to look like he'd bought what he had actually forbidden. It's human nature to hate the man you've wronged: Domitian's temperament in particular ran headlong into anger, and the less open it was, the less it could be called back — yet it was softened by Agricola's own restraint and good sense, since he never provoked his fate or reputation with defiance or empty displays of independence. Let those who make a habit of admiring the forbidden know this: even under bad emperors great men can exist, and obedience and moderation, backed by energy and drive, can reach a level of honor that many achieve only by reckless defiance — dying an ambitious death of no use whatsoever to the state.
43| The end of his life brought grief to us, sorrow to his friends, and even to strangers and people who never knew him, no small concern. Ordinary people too, and the public that has other things on its mind, kept coming by his house and talked about it in the forums and social circles; no one who heard of Agricola's death was either glad or quick to forget it. The general sense of loss was deepened by a persistent rumor that he had been poisoned: I have nothing certain, nothing I would dare to affirm. But throughout his entire illness, more often than court custom required, the emperor's chief freedmen and closest physicians came to check on him by messenger — whether from concern or from surveillance. On his final day, the very stages of his decline were reported by a relay of couriers stationed for the purpose, no one believing that anyone would rush to bring news he was sad to hear. Still, Domitian wore on his face the appearance of grief, safely past hating him now, and better at hiding pleasure than fear. It was well established that when Agricola's will was read, naming Domitian co-heir along with his excellent wife and devoted daughter, the emperor was delighted, as if it were an honor and a mark of trust. His mind was so blinded and corrupted by constant flattery that he did not know: a good father names an heir like that only when the emperor is bad.
44| Agricola was born in the third consulship of Gaius Caesar, on the Ides of June; he died in his fifty-fourth year, on the tenth day before the Kalends of September, in the consulship of Collega and Priscinus. If posterity wants to know his appearance too: he was more handsome than imposing; nothing forceful in his face, but a great deal of grace. You would easily believe him a good man, and gladly believe him a great one. And he himself, though torn away in the middle of an unspent life, achieved, as far as glory goes, the longest possible span. He had fulfilled the real goods, the ones rooted in virtue, and having already received the consular and triumphal honors, what more could fortune add? He took no pleasure in excessive wealth, though a handsome sum had come his way. With his daughter and wife surviving him, he can even be counted fortunate — to have escaped, with his standing intact, his reputation flourishing, his family and friendships unharmed, whatever was still to come. For just as he was not allowed to live on into this most blessed age and see Trajan as emperor — which he used to predict to us by omen and prayer — so his early death carried this great consolation: he escaped that final stretch when Domitian drained the state not by fits and starts, with gaps to breathe, but continuously, as if with one single blow.
45| Agricola did not see the senate house under siege, the senate hemmed in by armed men, that same massacre killing so many ex-consuls, so many of the noblest women driven into exile and flight. Carus Mettius was still being credited with only one victory; Messalinus's ranting still echoed within the walls of the Alban citadel; Baebius Massa was already a defendant even then. Soon our own hands led Helvidius off to prison; we were the ones disgraced by the sight of Mauricus and Rusticus; Senecio drenched us in his innocent blood. Yet Nero at least looked away and ordered the crimes without watching them; under Domitian, the worst part of our suffering was to see and be seen, while our very sighs were recorded, while that savage face and its flush, which he used to shield himself from shame, were enough to mark the pallor of so many men. But you, Agricola, are fortunate — not only for the brilliance of your life, but for the timing of your death. As those who were present at your final conversations report, you met your fate steady and willing, as if offering up, for your own part, your innocence as a gift to the emperor. But for me and for his daughter, beyond the bitterness of losing a father, our grief is made sharper because it was not given to us to sit by his sickbed, to comfort him as he failed, to take our fill of his face and his embrace. We would surely have caught his final instructions and words, to fix them deep in our hearts. This is our pain, our wound — that he was lost to us four years before, by the misfortune of so long an absence. No doubt everything was done to honor you, best of fathers, with your most loving wife at your side; but you were mourned with fewer tears than you deserved, and in that last light your eyes looked for something more.
46| If there is any place for the spirits of the dutiful, and if, as thoughtful men hold, a great soul does not die together with its body, rest gently, and call us — your own household — back from a weak yearning and from womanish grief, turning us instead toward contemplation of your virtues, which it is not right to mourn or beat the breast over. Let us pay you tribute with wonder instead, with praise that does not fade, and, so far as our nature permits, by growing to resemble you: that is the real tribute, that is what devotion from those nearest you looks like. This I would press on his daughter and his wife alike — to keep faith with a father's and a husband's memory by turning over in thought everything he did and said, holding fast to the outline of his character rather than his features. It isn't that I would set aside busts carved in marble or cast in bronze, but human faces fade the way their likenesses do, weak and short-lived things both, whereas the shape of a mind lasts always — and it's that shape you can grasp and carry forward, not through some borrowed material or craftsman's art, but through the pattern of your own life. Everything in Agricola that earned our love, everything we admired in him, will go on living in the hearts of men, across every age still to come, carried in the story of his deeds. Many men of former times sink into oblivion, unmarked and unremembered; Agricola, his story set down and passed on to ages still ahead, will not.
1| The whole of Germany is separated from Gaul, Raetia, and Pannonia by the Rhine and Danube rivers, and from the Sarmatians and Dacians by mutual fear or by mountains. The rest is bounded by the Ocean, which embraces broad gulfs and vast stretches of islands, and among them peoples and kings only recently known to us, discovered when war opened the way. The Rhine rises from an inaccessible, sheer peak of the Raetian Alps, bends gently westward, and empties into the northern Ocean. The Danube pours out from the gentle, modestly raised ridge of Mount Abnoba and passes through many peoples before it breaks into the Black Sea through six channels; a seventh mouth is swallowed by marshes.
2| I am inclined to believe the Germans themselves are natives of the land, and very little mixed by the arrival and settlement of other peoples, because in the old days people seeking new homes came by sea, not by land, and the Ocean beyond them—vast, and, so to speak, hostile—is rarely reached by ships from our world. And who, besides the danger of that grim and unknown sea, would leave Asia, Africa, or Italy to make for Germany, shapeless in its land, harsh in its sky, grim to live in and look at, unless it were his homeland? In ancient songs—their only form of history or record—they celebrate the god Tuisto, born of the earth. They assign him a son, they assign him a son, Mannus, the origin of the race, and to Mannus three sons as its founders, from whose names the tribes nearest the Ocean are called Ingaevones, those in the middle Herminones, and the rest Istaevones. Some, since antiquity allows latitude, claim the god had more sons and so more names for the people—Marsi, Gambrivii, Suebi, Vandilii—and say these are the true, ancient names. But the name Germania is recent and newly applied, since the tribe that first crossed the Rhine and drove out the Gauls—now called the Tungri, then called Germani—gave its name to the whole. So a name that belonged to one tribe gradually prevailed as the name of the nation, until all were called Germani, first by the victor out of fear, then by themselves, once the name had been adopted.
3| They also tell of Hercules having been among them, and sing of him first of all brave men as they go into battle. They have other songs too, whose chanting—called the baritus—they use to stir their courage, and from the sound of it they foretell how the coming fight will go. It terrifies or unsettles them depending on how the battle-line roars; it comes across less as voices than as one massed sound of courage. What they aim for above all is a harsh, broken roar, achieved by holding their shields up before their mouths, so the sound swells fuller and deeper as it bounces back. Some also think that Ulysses, in that long and legendary wandering, was carried into this Ocean and reached the lands of Germany, and that Asciburgium—which stands on the bank of the Rhine and is still inhabited today—owed both its founding and its name to him; that on that very spot an altar once turned up bearing Ulysses' name alongside his father Laertes', and that Greek-lettered monuments and burial mounds can still be found along the frontier separating Germany from Raetia. I do not mean to prove or disprove these claims; let each reader believe or doubt them as he is inclined.
4| For my part I side with those who think the peoples of Germany have never been tainted by intermarriage with other nations, and stand out as a distinct, pure people, resembling only themselves. Hence, despite their great numbers, they all share the same physical type: fierce blue eyes, reddish hair, large bodies fit only for a sudden charge. They have less patience for hard labor and toil, and can hardly bear thirst and heat at all, though their climate and soil have accustomed them to cold and hunger.
5| The land, though it varies somewhat in appearance, is on the whole either bristling with forests or foul with marshes—wetter where it faces Gaul, windier where it faces Noricum and Pannonia. It is fertile enough for grain but will not grow fruit trees; it is rich in livestock, but the animals are mostly undersized. Not even the cattle have their natural pride of the brow: the Germans prize them for number, since herds are their one real, prized form of wealth. Whether the gods have withheld gold and silver out of favor or out of anger, I cannot say. Nor would I claim that no vein of Germany produces gold or silver—who has ever searched? They are not much moved by owning or using such things: you can see silver vessels among them, given as gifts to their envoys and chiefs, treated with no more regard than pottery. Though the tribes nearest us, because they trade, value gold and silver and recognize and prefer certain of our coin-types, those further inland keep to the simpler, older practice of barter. They favor old, long-familiar coin, the serrated kind and those stamped with a two-horse chariot. They go after silver more than gold, not from any particular liking, but because a stock of silver coins is easier to use for people who buy cheap, everyday goods.
6| Not even iron is plentiful among them, as one can tell from the kind of weapons they carry. Few use swords or long lances; instead they carry spears—framea is their own word for it—with a narrow, short iron head, but so sharp and handy that they can fight with the same weapon either at close range or at a distance, as the moment demands. The cavalryman is content with shield and framea; the infantry also hurl missiles, several apiece, and throw them a great distance, fighting naked or lightly covered by a cloak. There is no show of finery: only their shields are picked out in the brightest colors. Few have breastplates; barely one man in a group has a helmet of metal or hide. Their horses are unremarkable either in build or speed, and are not trained, as ours are, to wheel about; they are driven straight ahead or in a single turn to the right, in a tight formation so that no one is left behind. On the whole, judging the matter fairly, their strength lies more with the infantry, and so they fight with the two combined, choosing infantry from the whole body of young men for their speed, which suits it well to fighting alongside cavalry, and stationing them in front of the line. Even their numbers are fixed: a hundred men are drawn from each district, and that is what they are called among themselves, so that what began as a mere number has become a title of honor. Their line is drawn up in wedges. To give ground, provided you press forward again, they count as tactics, not cowardice. They carry off their dead even from indecisive battles. Losing one's shield is the height of disgrace; a man so disgraced may not attend the sacred rites or enter the assembly, and many survivors of war have ended such shame with a noose.
7| They choose kings for their noble birth, commanders for their courage. Even their kings do not hold unlimited or arbitrary power, and their commanders lead by example rather than by command, winning respect if they are bold, visible, and out in front of the line. But to punish, imprison, or even flog a man is allowed to no one but the priests, and even then not as punishment or at a commander's order, but as though by the command of the god they believe is present with them in battle. They carry into battle certain figures and standards taken from their sacred groves. And—this is a special spur to their courage—it is not chance or a random grouping that forms a troop or a wedge, but families and kinship groups; and close by are those dearest to them, so that the wailing of women and the crying of children can be heard nearby. These are, to each man, the most sacred witnesses and the highest praisers; they carry their wounds to their mothers and wives, who do not shrink from counting and inspecting the blows, and who bring food and encouragement to the fighters.
8| Tradition tells that some battle lines, already wavering and on the point of breaking, were rallied by the women, through the steadiness of their pleading, the baring of their breasts, and by pointing out to the men how close captivity was—something they dread far more fiercely on their women's behalf than their own. So much so that tribes bound by treaty are held more firmly to it when noble girls are demanded among the hostages. They even believe there is something holy and prophetic in women, and neither dismiss their advice nor do they brush off what these women foretell. Under the deified Vespasian, Veleda was among those we ourselves witnessed, treated by many for a long stretch as something divine; earlier still, Aurinia and a handful of others were held in similar reverence—not from mere flattery, nor as if the tribes were manufacturing goddesses.
9| Among the gods they worship Mercury most of all, to whom on certain fixed days they consider it right to offer even human sacrifice. Hercules and Mars they appease with permitted animal victims. Part of the Suebi also sacrifice to Isis: I have not been able to discover the reason or origin of this foreign rite, except that the image itself, shaped like a light warship, suggests the cult was imported. Beyond this, they think it beneath the greatness of heavenly beings to confine gods within walls or to model them in any human likeness; they consecrate groves and woods and call by the names of gods that hidden presence which they see only through reverence.
10| No people pays closer attention to omens and lots. Their method with lots is simple: they cut a branch from a fruit-bearing tree and slice it into strips, mark these with certain signs, and scatter them at random over a white cloth. Then, if the question is public, the priest of the community prays to the gods, looks up at the sky, and picks up three strips one at a time; if private, the head of the household does it himself. He reads them according to the mark cut into each. If the signs forbid, there's no further inquiry on the same matter that day; if they permit, further confirmation by omen is still required. They also, like others, know how to read the calls and flight of birds. But it's a habit unique to this people to consult the omens and warnings given by horses. White horses, touched by no human labor, are kept at public expense in the same sacred groves; yoked to a sacred chariot, with the priest walking alongside, and the king or the community's chief as well, marking closely how the animals neigh and snort. No omen wins fuller confidence — the common people trust it, yes, but so do the nobles, so do the priests, since they hold themselves to be the gods' attendants and the horses to be privy to divine intent. A second form of divination exists too, by which they test the outcome of serious wars: they get hold of a captive from the enemy nation, by whatever means, and pit him against a chosen man of their own, each armed in his people's fashion. The victory of one or the other is taken as a forecast.
11| On minor matters the chiefs deliberate; on major ones, the whole people — though even those questions reserved for the people's decision are first worked over by the chiefs. They assemble, barring some sudden emergency, on fixed days, at the new moon or the full moon, since they think this the luckiest time to begin any undertaking. They don't count by days, as we do, but by nights: their reckonings and their appointments are made this way, night treated as leading the day. It's a flaw that comes of freedom that they don't gather at once or on command — a second and even a third day is wasted through the slowness of the assembling. When the crowd is satisfied that enough have come, they take their seats, armed. Silence is called for by the priests, who on these occasions also hold the right to enforce order. Then the king or a chief is heard, by age, by rank, by glory in war, or by eloquence, each in his turn — with the authority of persuasion rather than the power to command. If his proposal displeases them, they reject it with a growl; if it pleases them, they clash their spears together. Approval by weapons is their most honored form of assent.
12| At the assembly one may also bring charges and press a capital case. The punishment varies with the offense: traitors and deserters they hang from trees; cowards, men unfit for battle, and those who disgrace their bodies they plunge into a bog and drown, with a hurdle thrown on top. The difference in punishment reflects a principle — crimes should be displayed as they're punished, shameful acts hidden away. For lighter offenses too the penalty fits the case: those convicted are fined in horses and cattle. Part of the fine goes to the king or the community, part to the injured man himself or his kin. At these same assemblies chiefs are also chosen who administer justice through the districts and villages; each is given a hundred companions from the common people, both as counsel and as backing for his authority.
13| They handle no business, public or private, except under arms. But custom forbids anyone from taking up arms until the community has judged him fit. Then, in the assembly itself, one of the chiefs, or the young man's father, or a relative, arms him with shield and spear. This is their equivalent of the toga — the young man's first honor. Up to this point he's seen as part of the household; from now on, of the state. Conspicuous nobility or great services by a man's father can win the rank of chief even for quite young men; others attach themselves to men of proven strength, long tested — and there's no shame in being counted among a leader's followers. Even within this retinue there are grades, set by the judgment of the man they follow; and there's fierce rivalry among the companions for first place beside their chief, and among the chiefs for who has the most and the fiercest followers. This is their standing, this their strength — to be always surrounded by a great band of chosen young men, an honor in peace and a defense in war. Nor is this reputation and glory confined to a man's own people; neighboring states know it too, if his following is outstanding in numbers and courage. Such men are sought out by embassies, honored with gifts, and their fame alone often settles a war.
14| Once battle is joined, it's shameful for the chief to be outdone in courage, shameful for his companions not to match their chief's courage. But it's a lifelong disgrace, an infamy, to survive one's chief and come back from the field. To defend him, to protect him, even to credit him with one's own brave deeds — that is their highest obligation. The chiefs fight for victory; the companions fight for their chief. If the community they were born into grows sluggish in long peace and idleness, many young nobles seek out, of their own will, whatever nation is currently at war, since peace is unwelcome to this people and they win renown more readily amid danger, and a large retinue cannot be kept up except by violence and war. They demand their chief's generosity — that fine war-horse, that blood-stained, victorious spear — for a table, however plain, lavishly supplied stands in for a soldier's pay. War and plunder are the source of this bounty. You'd sooner persuade them to challenge an enemy and earn wounds than to till the soil and wait on the harvest — indeed it seems to them slack and spiritless to win by sweat what could be won by blood.
15| When they're not at war, they spend some time hunting, but more idle, given over to sleep and food: the bravest and most warlike do nothing at all, leaving the care of house, home, and land to the women, the old, and the weakest of the family, while they themselves grow torpid — a strange contradiction in a single nature, that the same men should love idleness and hate quiet. It's a custom of the communities to bring gifts to their chiefs of their own accord, individually — cattle or grain — which, accepted as a mark of honor, also meets their needs. They especially delight in gifts from neighboring peoples, sent not by individuals only but by whole communities: choice horses, splendid arms, trappings, and torques. We have now taught them to accept money as well.
16| It's well known that none of the German peoples live in cities; they won't even tolerate houses built close together. They live scattered and apart, wherever a spring, a field, or a wood has taken their fancy. They lay out their villages not in our fashion, with buildings joined and connected — each man surrounds his house with open space, whether as a precaution against fire or from sheer lack of building skill. They don't even use quarried stone or tiles; they build everything out of rough timber, with no thought for appearance or comfort. Some spots they coat rather carefully with an earth so pure and gleaming it looks like painting, like patterns of color. They're also fond of digging underground chambers, which they heap over with great piles of dung — a refuge from winter and a storehouse for grain, since such places soften the harshness of the cold; and if an enemy ever comes, he plunders what's out in the open, while what's hidden and buried either goes unnoticed or escapes simply because it has to be searched for.
17| Everyone's covering is a cloak fastened with a pin, or, lacking that, a thorn; otherwise unclothed, they spend whole days by the hearth fire. The wealthiest are distinguished by a garment that isn't loose, as with the Sarmatians and Parthians, but fitted, tracing the shape of each limb. They also wear the skins of wild beasts — those near the river without much care, those farther off more carefully, since they have no trade to supply them finer dress. They pick out the animals and dapple the stripped hides with the spotted skins of the beasts bred by the outer ocean and its unknown sea. Women dress no differently from men, except that women more often wrap themselves in linen garments, which they dye with purple, and they don't extend the upper part of the dress into sleeves — their arms and shoulders are bare, though the nearest part of the chest is also left uncovered.
18| Yet marriage there is strict, and there's no part of their morals you could praise more. Almost alone among barbarians they're content with one wife each, except for the very few who, not from lust but for their high rank, are courted with several marriages. The dowry is offered not by the wife to the husband, but by the husband to the wife. Parents and relatives attend and approve the gifts — gifts chosen not to please a woman's vanity or to adorn a new bride, but oxen, a bridled horse, a shield, spear, and sword. For such gifts a wife is won, and in turn she herself brings some piece of weaponry to her husband. This exchange they consider the strongest bond, these the mystic rites, these the gods of marriage. So that the woman won't think herself set apart from thoughts of courage or the risks of war, she's reminded, in the very ceremonies that open her marriage, that she comes as a partner in toil and danger, destined to suffer and to dare the same things, in peace as in battle — that's the message of the yoked oxen, the harnessed horse, the given arms. So she must live, so bear children: she is to receive what she'll pass on to her children unspoiled and worthy, what her daughters-in-law will receive in turn and hand down again to her grandchildren.
19| So they live behind a wall of chastity, corrupted by no seductive spectacles, no provocative banquets. Men and women alike know nothing of secret letters. Adultery is very rare in so populous a people, and its punishment is swift and left to the husband: he cuts off her hair, strips her before the relatives, and drives her from the house, then whips her through the whole village. For unchastity once exposed finds no pardon; neither beauty, youth, nor wealth will win her another husband. No one there laughs at vice, and seducing or being seduced is not called "the way of the age." Still better are those tribes where only virgins marry, and a woman's hope and prayer for a husband are settled once and for all. So they take one husband as they take one body and one life: no thought beyond it, no lingering desire, so that they love him not merely as a husband but as marriage itself. To limit the number of children, or to kill any late-born child, is considered a crime, and good character counts for more there than good laws do elsewhere.
20| In every household the children grow up naked and unwashed into the limbs and bodies we admire. Each mother nurses her own child at her own breast; they are not handed off to maids and nurses. You cannot tell master from slave by any softness of upbringing: they live among the same animals, on the same ground, until age separates the free-born and merit marks them out. Young men come late to sex, and so their vigor is not used up; nor are the girls rushed into marriage. They are the same age, similarly tall, and pair off matched and strong, so that children reproduce their parents' strength. A sister's sons are honored by their uncle as much as by their father; some think this blood-tie even more sacred and binding, and insist on it especially when taking hostages, believing it grips the heart more firmly and the family more widely. Still, each man's own children are his heirs and successors, and there is no will. If there are no children, the next in line to inherit are brothers, then paternal uncles, then maternal uncles. The more relatives a man has, the larger his circle of kin by marriage, the more respected his old age; childlessness earns no rewards there.
21| A man must take up his father's or kinsman's feuds as much as his friendships. But hatreds do not last forever unappeased: even murder can be settled: a set tally of cattle and sheep is handed over, and the household as a whole takes the compensation and lets it go — a good thing for the community, since feuds are all the more dangerous where freedom runs unchecked. No people indulges more freely in feasting and hospitality. To turn any man away from your roof is thought a sin; each host serves a meal as lavish as he can afford. When the food runs out, the man who was host a moment ago now guides his guest to the next house and goes along with him; they arrive uninvited, and it makes no difference — they are welcomed with the same warmth. No one distinguishes known from unknown where the rights of a guest are concerned. If a departing guest asks for something, custom grants it, and he may ask just as freely in return. They enjoy giving gifts, but keep no account of what they give, and feel no debt for what they receive.
22| As soon as they wake — and they usually sleep well into the day — they bathe, often in warm water, since winter takes up most of their year. After washing they eat, each with his own seat and his own table. Then they go about their business, and just as often to their feasts, armed. Drinking through day and night without a break is no disgrace to anyone. Quarrels are frequent, as you'd expect among drinkers, and rarely end in mere insults — more often in blood and wounds. Yet it is mostly at these feasts that they discuss reconciling enemies, arranging marriages between families, choosing chiefs, and finally war and peace, as if at no other time is the mind more open to plain thoughts or more fired up for great ones. This people, neither cunning nor devious, lays bare the secrets of its heart in the freedom of the occasion; so every mind stands exposed and naked. The next day the matter is reconsidered, and each moment gets its due: they deliberate while incapable of pretense, and decide while incapable of being wrong.
23| Their drink is a liquor fermented from barley or wheat into something like wine; those nearest the river also buy actual wine. Their food is plain — wild fruit, fresh game, or curdled milk. They stave off hunger without fuss, without fine seasoning. Against thirst they show no such restraint. Indulge their drunkenness by supplying as much as they crave, and they will be beaten by their vices as easily as by weapons.
24| They have one kind of public spectacle, the same at every gathering: naked young men, for whom this is sport, leap and dance among swords and spears pointed at them. Practice has made them skilled, skill has made them graceful, but not for profit or pay — however daring the display, its only reward is the pleasure of the audience. Remarkably, they gamble while sober, as if it were serious business, with such reckless disregard for winning or losing that when everything else is gone, they stake their freedom and their body on one last throw of the dice. The loser submits to voluntary slavery: even if younger and stronger, he lets himself be bound and sold. Such is their stubbornness in a bad cause — they themselves call it "honor." Slaves won this way are traded off in commerce, so that the winners too can rid themselves of the shame of such a victory.
25| The rest of their slaves are not organized into household duties the way ours are: each has his own home and hearth to manage. The master requires a set amount of grain, livestock, or cloth from him, as from a tenant farmer, and the slave's obedience stops there; the rest of the household work is done by the master's wife and children. To beat a slave, or restrain him with chains and hard labor, is rare; killing them happens, though not out of discipline or severity but from a sudden fit of rage, as one might kill an enemy — except that it goes unpunished. Freedmen are not much above slaves; they rarely carry any weight in the household, and never in the tribe — except among those peoples ruled by kings. In those places freedmen actually outrank both the free-born and the nobles themselves; among other peoples their lesser standing is itself proof of freedom.
26| Lending money at interest is unknown, and so it is better guarded against than if it were forbidden. Land is claimed by the whole community according to the number of farmers, then divided among themselves by rank; the vast open spaces make the dividing easy. They shift their fields from year to year, and there is still land left over. They do not struggle against the richness and size of the soil by planting orchards, fencing off meadows, or irrigating gardens — they demand only a grain crop from the earth. So they do not even divide the year itself into as many seasons as we do: winter, spring, and summer are understood and named, but autumn's name and its blessings are alike unknown to them.
27| Funerals show no display: the only rule observed is that the bodies of famous men are burned with a particular kind of wood. They do not pile the pyre with fine clothes or incense; each man's arms are added to his own fire, and sometimes his horse as well. A mound of turf raises the grave; they scorn the difficult, elaborate honor of monuments as a burden upon the dead. They set aside wailing and tears quickly, but sorrow and grief slowly. For women, mourning is proper; for men, remembering. This is what we have learned in general about the origin and customs of all the Germans; now I will explain how the institutions and rites of the individual peoples differ, and which nations migrated from Germany into Gaul.
28| The deified Julius, greatest of authorities, records that the Gauls were once the stronger power — so it is believable that Gauls also crossed into Germany. How small a barrier a river was, after all, to keep any people, once it had grown strong, from seizing and exchanging territory still undivided and unclaimed by any powerful kingdoms! And so the Helvetii once occupied the ground lying between the Hercynian forest and the Rhine and Main rivers, and beyond them the Boii — both Gallic peoples. The name Boihaemum still survives, marking the ancient memory of the place even though its inhabitants have changed. But whether the Aravisci migrated into Pannonia from the Osi, a German nation, or the Osi from the Aravisci into Germany, is uncertain, since to this day they share the same language, institutions, and customs — because, when poverty and freedom were shared equally on both sides of the river, the good and bad of life were the same for both. The Treveri and Nervii, for their part, actively claim German origin, as if this glorious bloodline set them apart from the resemblance to the lazy Gauls. The banks of the Rhine itself are, without doubt, inhabited by peoples of German stock — the Vangiones, Triboci, and Nemetes. Even the Ubii, though they have earned the standing of a Roman colony and prefer to be called Agrippinenses after their founder, do not blush at their origin — they crossed the river long ago and, as proof of their loyalty, were settled right on the Rhine bank, to guard the frontier, not to be watched over by it.
29| The bravest of all these peoples are the Batavians. They occupy not much land on the riverbank but the island in the Rhine — once a Chattan people, driven by internal strife to migrate to these settlements, where they became part of the Roman empire. They still keep the honor and the mark of that old alliance: no one taxes them in scorn, no tax farmer wears them down. Exempt from tribute and levies, they're set aside for one use only — war — kept in reserve like weapons and arms. The Mattiaci hold that same rank; Rome's power is so great it has pushed our authority past the Rhine, beyond the old borders of the empire itself. So they live and hold their ground on their own bank, but their hearts and minds are with us — like the Batavians in every other way, except that they're stirred more fiercely still by the very soil and sky of their homeland. I wouldn't count among the peoples of Germany, though they've settled beyond the Rhine and Danube, those who farm the Tithe Lands. The most reckless of the Gauls, made bold by poverty, seized this land of doubtful ownership; then, once a frontier line was drawn and garrisons pushed forward, it became a pocket of empire and part of a province.
30| Beyond these, the Chatti begin their territory at the Hercynian forest. Their country isn't as flat and marshy as the other tribal lands where Germany opens out — hills run through it, thinning gradually, and the Hercynian forest both accompanies its Chatti and, in time, lets them go. Their bodies are tougher, their limbs compact, their faces threatening, their spirit unusually vigorous. For Germans, they have a good deal of judgment and skill: they pick out chosen leaders, they listen to those set over them, they know their ranks, they read opportunities, they hold back their charges, they plan out the day, they fortify the night, they count luck among uncertain things and courage among sure ones — and, rarest of all, a thing granted only to Roman discipline, they put more trust in their commander than in their army. Their whole strength is in the infantry, whom they load down with tools and supplies on top of weapons. You could watch other tribes go to a battle; the Chatti go to a war. Raids are rare for them, and fighting is not left to chance. That belongs properly to cavalry — quick to win, quick to give ground. The infantryman's speed lies close to fear, but his patience is closer to steadiness.
31| A practice that other German peoples take up only rarely, and then as a matter of private daring, has become a fixed custom among the Chatti: as soon as they come of age, they let their hair and beard grow, and they don't shed that vow-bound, look pledged to courage until they've killed an enemy. Only over blood and spoils do they bare their brow again; only then, they say, have they repaid the price of their birth and proved themselves worthy of their homeland and their parents. Cowards and men unfit for war stay shaggy. The bravest among them also wear an iron ring — a mark of disgrace among this people — as a kind of shackle, until they free themselves by killing an enemy. Most of the Chatti favor this custom, and already there are men gone gray still wearing it, pointed out to friend and foe alike. In every battle it's they who open the fighting; they always form the first line, a strange thing to see, for even in peacetime their faces never soften. None of them has a house, or land, or any concern of that kind — they're fed wherever they happen to arrive, careless with what belongs to others, contemptuous of what's their own, until bloodless old age leaves them unequal to such hard courage.
32| Next to the Chatti, where the Rhine now runs in a fixed channel steady enough to serve as a border, live the Usipi and Tencteri. The Tencteri, beyond the usual glory of war, excel especially in cavalry skill — infantry is no more praised among the Chatti than cavalry is among the Tencteri. Their ancestors set it up this way, and their descendants follow. It's the game of their children, the rivalry of their young men; old men keep it up still. Horses pass down with the household, the family gods, and the rights of inheritance — not to the eldest son, as with everything else, but to whichever son is fiercest in war and best.
33| Next to the Tencteri once lived the Bructeri; now, the story goes, the Chamavi and Angrivarii have moved in, having driven the Bructeri out and wiped them out entirely, with neighboring peoples joining in — whether from hatred of their arrogance, or love of plunder, or some favor the gods show us, for they didn't even grudge us the sight of the battle. More than sixty thousand fell, not to Roman weapons and arms, but — more magnificent still — for our entertainment and before our eyes. May it last, I pray, and endure among these peoples — if not love for us, then at least hatred for each other — since, with the fate of the empire pressing in on us, fortune can grant nothing greater than discord among our enemies.
34| Behind the Angrivarii and Chamavi, the Dulgubnii and Chasuarii close them in, along with other tribes less worth mentioning; in front, the Frisii take over. They're called the Greater and Lesser Frisii, named for the measure of their strength. Both peoples run along the Rhine all the way to the Ocean, and surround as well vast lakes that Roman fleets have sailed. We even ventured onto the Ocean itself there, and rumor has spread that the Pillars of Hercules still survive out there — whether Hercules actually reached that place, or whether we've simply agreed to credit his name with anything magnificent anywhere. Drusus Germanicus wasn't short of daring, but the Ocean stood in the way of any inquiry into itself or into Hercules. No one has tried since, and it's come to seem more reverent and proper to believe in the deeds of the gods than to know them.
35| This is as far as we know Germany toward the west; toward the north it curves away in a vast bend. Right away, first, comes the tribe of the Chauci. Though they begin at the Frisii and hold part of the coast, they border the flanks of all the peoples I've described, until their territory curves around as far as the Chatti. They don't just hold this immense stretch of land, they fill it — a people the most noble among the Germans, one that would rather protect its greatness by justice than by force. Without greed, without aggression, quiet and withdrawn, they provoke no wars, they ravage nothing by raiding or robbery. This above all is proof of their strength and courage: that they don't need to wrong others to prove they outrank them. Yet weapons stand ready for all of them, and an army too if the need arises — plenty of men, plenty of horses — and even at rest, their reputation stays the same.
36| On the flank of the Chauci and Chatti, the Cherusci nursed a peace, too long unchallenged, that grew slack and rotten. It was more pleasant than safe, because sitting quiet between the reckless and the strong is a false safety: when it comes down to force, restraint and honesty are just names for the weaker side. So the Cherusci, once called good and just, are now called lazy and foolish. For the victorious Chatti, luck passed for wisdom. The Fosi, a neighboring people, were dragged down in the Cherusci's ruin, sharing their disasters as equal partners, though in better times they had been the lesser ones.
37| The same stretch of Germany, nearest the Ocean, is held by the Cimbri — a small nation now, but of enormous fame. Wide traces of their old glory still remain: camps and encampment grounds on both banks, whose size even today lets you measure the bulk and manpower of that people and confirm the scale of their famous exodus. Rome had stood six hundred and forty years when word of Cimbrian arms first reached us, in the year Caecilius Metellus and Papirius Carbo were consuls. Reckon forward to Trajan's second consulship and you get something like two hundred and ten years since then — that long has the conquest of Germany been underway. In so long a stretch of time, losses have gone back and forth on both sides. Not the Samnites, not the Carthaginians, not Spain or Gaul, not even the Parthians have warned us more often — for the freedom of the Germans is fiercer than the rule of the Arsacid king. What, after all, can the East throw in our faces besides the slaughter of Crassus, when it lost Pacorus too and was struck down beneath Ventidius? But the Germans routed or captured Carbo, Cassius, Aurelius Scaurus, Servilius Caepio, and Mallius Maximus, stripping the Roman people of five consular armies all at once, and they took Varus and three legions with him from Caesar himself. Nor did they escape unpunished — Gaius Marius struck them down in Italy, the deified Julius in Gaul, Drusus and Nero and Germanicus on their own ground — but then Gaius Caesar's huge threats turned into a joke. After that came quiet, until, taking advantage of our own discord and civil war, they stormed the legions' winter camps and even made a try for the Gauls — and were driven back again. In recent times they've been triumphed over more than actually beaten.
38| Now I must speak of the Suebi, who are not a single people like the Chatti or Tencteri — they hold the greater part of Germany, still divided into distinct nations with their own names, though together they're called Suebi. It's a mark of the people to comb the hair back and knot it tight: this sets the Suebi apart from other Germans, and free-born Suebi apart from their slaves. Among other tribes — whether from some kinship with the Suebi or, more often, simple imitation — the same style shows up, but rarely, and only within the span of youth. Among the Suebi, the hair is twisted back bristling right up to gray old age, and often tied at the very crown. Their chiefs wear it even more elaborately — a concern for looks, but a harmless one, for they don't dress this way to attract love or invite it. They groom themselves as they go to war, rising to a certain height and terror, adorning themselves, so to speak, for the eyes of the enemy.
39| The Semnones are said to be the oldest and noblest of the Suebi; the claim is backed up by a religious tradition. At a set time, delegates from all the peoples of their blood gather in a forest sacred through the omens of their ancestors and ancient dread, and by publicly killing a man there the tribesmen open their grim rite. The grove commands another kind of reverence too: no one enters it except bound with a cord, as a way of showing himself lesser and acknowledging the god's power. If a man happens to fall, he's not allowed to be lifted or to rise on his own; he must roll himself out along the ground. The whole superstition points to one belief: that this is where the nation began, that here the god who rules everything lives, and everything else is subject and answerable to him. The Semnones' good fortune adds to their standing further still: they occupy a hundred districts, and their sheer size leads them to believe they're the head of the Suebi.
40| The Langobardi, by contrast, are made noble by their very fewness: surrounded by many powerful nations, they stay safe not through submission but through fighting and taking risks. Next come the Reudigni, the Aviones, the Anglii, the Varini, the Eudoses, the Suarines, and the Nuitones, protected by rivers or forests. None of them is individually remarkable, except that together they worship Nerthus, that is, Mother Earth, and believe she takes part in human affairs and rides out among the peoples. On an island in the ocean stands an untouched grove, and in it a consecrated wagon draped with cloth, which only the priest is allowed to touch. He alone perceives when the goddess is present in her shrine, and he accompanies her, drawn by cows, with deep reverence. Those are joyful days, and wherever she deigns to visit and stay is treated as a festival. No wars are begun, no weapons taken up; every piece of iron is locked away; peace and quiet are known and loved only at that time — until the same priest returns the goddess, now sated with mortal company, to her temple. After that, the wagon, the cloth, and — if you're willing to believe it — the deity herself are washed in a hidden lake. Slaves perform this service, and the same lake swallows them the moment it's done. From this comes a secret dread and a holy ignorance about what it is that only dying men ever see.
41| This portion of the Suebi stretches into the more remote parts of Germany. Closer to us — and since I traced the Rhine a little earlier, let me now follow the Danube — is the tribe of the Hermunduri, loyal to Rome. Because of that, they alone among the Germans trade not just on the riverbank but deep inland, even in the splendid colony of the province of Raetia. They cross over anywhere, unguarded, and while we show other tribes only our weapons and our camps, to these people we've opened our homes and country houses, and they show no desire to seize them. The Elbe rises in the land of the Hermunduri — a river once famous and well known; now it's only heard of.
42| Next to the Hermunduri live the Naristi, and then the Marcomani and the Quadi. The Marcomani's glory and strength stand out above the rest, and they won their very homeland by courage, driving out the Boii long ago. Nor do the Naristi or the Quadi fall short. This region forms, so to speak, the forehead of Germany, where it borders the Danube. Down to our own time the Marcomani and the Quadi have kept kings from their own royal line — the noble house of Maroboduus and Tudrus (though now they tolerate outsiders too) — but a king's real power and influence come from Rome's backing. Rarely are they helped by our arms, more often by our money, and they're no less strong for it.
43| Behind them, the Marsigni, Cotini, Osi, and Buri close off the rear of the Marcomani and Quadi. Of these, the Marsigni and Buri resemble the Suebi in language and way of life; but the Cotini's Gallic speech and the Osi's Pannonian speech prove they aren't Germans — as does the fact that they pay tribute. Part of that tribute is imposed by the Sarmatians, part by the Quadi, treating them as foreigners; and to their further shame, the Cotini even mine iron for it. All these peoples occupy little open plain and mostly hold the forests and mountain heights, since a continuous mountain range splits and divides Suebia. Beyond it live many more nations, among whom the name of the Lugii spreads widest, covering several tribes. It's enough to name the strongest of them: the Harii, Helvecones, Manimi, Helisii, and Naharvali. Among the Naharvali a grove of ancient worship is shown to visitors. A priest presides over it dressed as a woman, and by the Roman interpretation the gods worshipped there are said to be Castor and Pollux; their real power is the same, but their name is Alci. There are no images, no trace of foreign superstition — yet they're worshipped as brothers, as young men. As for the Harii, beyond their strength, which already puts them ahead of the peoples just listed, they play up their natural ferocity with tricks and timing: black shields, bodies dyed black, they pick dark nights for battle, and by sheer dread and shadow, this deathly-looking army spreads terror, since no enemy can bear a sight so strange, so nearly infernal — for in every battle the eyes are the first to be beaten. Beyond the Lugii the Gotones are ruled by kings, a bit more tightly already than the other German peoples, though not yet beyond the bounds of freedom. Right after them, along the coast, come the Rugii and Lemovii; and the mark of all these peoples is round shields, short swords, and obedience toward their kings.
44| From here begin the states of the Suiones, out in the ocean itself, strong not only in men and weapons but in fleets. Their ships differ in shape in that a prow at each end always keeps a front ready to land. They don't work with sails, and they don't fasten oars in a row along the sides; instead the rowing is loose, as on certain rivers, and shifted from side to side as needed. Among them, wealth is also honored, and for that reason one man rules, with no exceptions now and no need to ask permission to be obeyed. Weapons here aren't left in common use as among other Germans, but kept locked away, and guarded, in fact, by a slave — because the ocean keeps sudden enemy raids away, and idle bands of armed men easily run wild. So it actually serves the king's purposes to put no nobleman, no free man, not even a freedman, in charge of the weapons.
45| Beyond the Suiones lies another sea, sluggish and almost motionless, which is believed to ring and enclose the whole world — the evidence being that the last glow of the setting sun lingers on into sunrise, bright enough to dim the stars. Popular belief adds that a sound is heard as the sun rises, and that the shapes of horses and the rays around its head can be seen. Only as far as that point does report reach true — nature stops there. So now, along the right-hand shore of the Suebian Sea, live the tribes of the Aestii, whose customs and dress are like the Suebi's, though their speech, more than anything, resembles British. The mother of the gods is what they worship, and the boar-shape is the emblem of that cult: this, instead of weapons, protects the goddess's worshipper securely even among enemies. They rarely use iron, and often clubs instead. They work at growing grain and other crops with more patience than you'd expect from the usual German laziness. But they also search the sea, and they alone gather amber — which they themselves call glesum — among the shallows and right on the shore. As barbarians, they've never asked or found out what it is or how it forms; in fact it long lay among the other debris cast up by the sea, until our own extravagance gave it a name. They themselves have no use for it: they gather it raw, carry it off shapeless, and take the price for it in wonder. Yet you can tell it's tree sap, because certain land creatures, even winged ones, are often visible glinting inside it, having been trapped in the liquid and then sealed as the material hardened. So I'd guess that, just as in the hidden places of the East where frankincense and balsam ooze out, so too in the islands and lands of the West there are richer groves and forests, which, squeezed out and made liquid by the nearby sun's rays, flow down into the neighboring sea and are washed by the force of storms onto the opposite shores. If you test the nature of amber by bringing fire near it, it catches like a torch and feeds a thick, fragrant flame; then it softens like pitch or resin. Beyond the Suiones come the tribes of the Sitones, similar in everything else, but different in one thing: a woman rules them. That is how far they've fallen — not just below freedom, but below slavery itself.
46| Here Suebia ends. Whether to count the Peucini, the Venethi, and the Fenni as Germans or as Sarmatians, I'm not sure. Although the Peucini — whom some call Bastarnae — live like Germans in speech, dress, and settled homes. Filth marks them all, and sluggishness marks their leading men; through intermarriage they've grown somewhat corrupted, taking on the look of the Sarmatians. The Venethi have drawn heavily on Sarmatian ways too, for they roam and raid through all the forest and mountain country between the Peucini and the Fenni. Even so, they're better classed among the Germans, because they build fixed houses, carry shields, and delight in traveling fast on foot — all of which sets them apart from the Sarmatians, who live their lives in wagon and on horseback. The Fenni are astonishingly wild and wretchedly poor: no weapons, no horses, no homes; grass for food, hides for clothing, the bare ground for a bed. Their only hope lies in arrows, which for lack of iron they tip with bone. The same hunting feeds men and women alike, since the women go along everywhere and claim their share of the catch. The only shelter they have for their infants against wild animals and rain is some tangle of branches pulled together; that's where the young return, and that's the old people's refuge too. Yet they count this a happier life than groaning over farm work, laboring over houses, and juggling their own and other people's fortunes between hope and fear: safe from other men, safe from the gods, they've achieved the hardest thing of all — not even needing to wish for anything. Everything beyond this is now the stuff of legend: that the Hellusii and Oxiones have human faces and features but the bodies and limbs of wild beasts — this I'll leave unverified, an open question.
1| You often ask me, Justus Fabius, why earlier ages flourished with so many great orators, brilliant and famous, while our own age is barren, stripped of the glory of eloquence, and barely holds onto the name "orator" at all -- for we reserve that title for the ancients; the skilled talkers of our own day are called pleaders, advocates, counsel, anything but orators. To answer your question and take up the weight of so large a problem -- where either our talents must be judged poor, if we can't match the old orators, or our taste must be judged corrupt, if we won't -- I'd hardly dare do it in my own words. But I don't have to: I can repeat a conversation I heard as a young man, among some of the most eloquent men of our time, who worked through this very question. So what's needed isn't invention but memory -- to recall what these outstanding men worked out with such subtlety and stated with such weight, each bringing a different but plausible view shaped by his own mind and temperament. I'll follow the same order, the same reasoning, keeping the shape of the debate as it happened. And there was indeed someone who took the opposite side, and -- and after much harrying and ridiculing of antiquity, ranked the eloquence of our age above the genius of the ancients.
2| The day after Curiatius Maternus gave a reading of his Cato, word went round that he had offended some powerful people, since in shaping that tragedy's plot he seemed to have forgotten himself and thought only of Cato. While the city was buzzing with this, Marcus Aper and Julius Secundus came to see him -- the two most celebrated talents of our courts at the time. I attended both of them eagerly, not only in the courts but at home and in public, following them around with a young man's passionate enthusiasm, eager to catch even their private talk, their arguments, the secrets of a style they kept for themselves -- though plenty of people unkindly assumed that Secundus lacked fluency, and that Aper owed his reputation for eloquence to raw talent and force of nature rather than to training and learning. In fact Secundus's speech was clear, precise, and -- as much as was needed -- flowing; and Aper, steeped in every kind of learning, merely affected contempt for literature rather than lacking it, as though he'd win more credit for hard work if his gift seemed to stand on nothing but itself, with no help from other arts.
3| So when we walked into Maternus's room, we found him sitting there, holding in his hands the very book he had read aloud the day before. Secundus said, 'Maternus, scare you off from cherishing the offense your Cato has given? Or is that why you've picked the book back up -- to go over it more carefully, cut whatever gave a hostile reading its opening, and publish a Cato that's not better, maybe, but at least safer?' 'Read it,' Maternus said, 'and you'll see what Maternus owed to himself, and you'll recognize what you heard. And if Cato left anything unsaid, my Thyestes will say it at the next reading -- I've already planned that tragedy out and shaped it in my mind. That's exactly why I'm rushing to finish publishing this one: so that once this piece is off my hands, I can throw myself entirely into the new one.' 'So these tragedies still don't satisfy you,' said Aper, 'that you drop your speeches and courtroom work to spend all your time first on a Medea, and now on a Thyestes -- when so many friends' cases, so many colonies and towns depending on you as their patron, are calling you to the forum? You'd barely have time for them even without inventing new work for yourself -- piling a Domitius and a Cato, that is, our own history and Roman names, onto Greek-style fables.'
4| Maternus answered: 'Your severity would rattle me, if this back-and-forth between us hadn't become almost a habit by now. You never let up hounding the poets, and I, whom you accuse of laziness in taking cases, keep up my daily defense of poetry against you. So I'm glad we've got a judge here -- one who can either forbid me from writing verse ever again, or, as I've long hoped, use his own authority to push me to drop the narrow confines of courtroom cases -- where I've already sweated more than enough -- and cultivate that more sacred, more majestic form of eloquence.'
5| 'Before Aper can object to me as judge,' said Secundus, 'let me do what honest, fair-minded judges do: excuse myself from cases where it's obvious that favor tips the scale for one side. Who doesn't know that no one is closer to me, in friendship and constant companionship, than Saleius Bassus -- as fine a man as he is a complete poet? So if poetry is on trial, I can't think of a richer defendant to point to.' 'Let Saleius Bassus rest easy,' said Aper, 'and anyone else who nurses a love of poetry and the glory of verse, since he can't plead a case. As for me, since I've found an arbiter for this dispute, I won't let Maternus be defended by a crowd of others -- I'll accuse him alone, before this court, of this: born for a virile, oratorical eloquence, by which he could win, guard, and extend friendships, gather connections, and take whole provinces under his wing, he abandons that pursuit -- than which nothing in our state can be imagined more profitable for advantage, sweeter for pleasure, ampler for standing, finer for a reputation in the city, or more brilliant for fame across the whole empire and every nation. If all our plans and actions ought to be aimed at practical use, what is safer than to practice the one art that, always armed, lets you offer protection to friends, help to strangers, rescue to the endangered, and to the envious and hostile alike, fear and dread -- while you yourself stand secure, fortified as if by some permanent power and authority? Its force and value, in times when things run smoothly, is felt as a refuge and shelter for others; but if danger strikes home, no breastplate or sword in battle is a firmer defense for a man on trial and in peril than eloquence -- shield and weapon both, letting you defend and attack alike, whether in court, in the senate, or before the emperor. What else did Eprius Marcellus recently set against the hostile senators but his own eloquence? Armed and menacing with it, he made a fool of Helvidius's wisdom -- eloquent enough, but untrained and green in contests of that kind. I'll say no more about its usefulness -- a point I don't think my friend Maternus means to argue against.
6| Now I turn to the pleasure of oratorical eloquence -- a delight that comes not just at some one moment, but almost every day, almost every hour. What is sweeter to a free, high-minded spirit, born for honorable pleasures, than to see his own house always full and crowded with the most distinguished men flocking to it? And to know it's given not for his money, not because he has no heir, not for some office he administers, but for himself alone? Why, even the childless, the wealthy, the powerful, come as a rule to a young man, and a poor one, to entrust their own troubles or a friend's to him. Is there any pleasure in vast wealth or great power to match watching men grown old, weighed down with the deference of the whole world, and in the height of every abundance, admit that the one thing they lack is the best thing there is? And then -- the retinue and processions of the man in the toga! The figure he cuts in public! The reverence shown him in court! That joy of rising and standing forth among a silent crowd, all eyes turned to one man! The people gathering, crowding around, taking on whatever feeling the orator chooses to put on them! I'm only listing the joys of speaking that are common knowledge, visible even to the untrained eye; the more private ones, known only to the speakers themselves, are greater still. If he delivers a speech carefully worked out and rehearsed, there's a weight and steadiness to his joy that matches the weight of the words themselves; if he brings some fresh, newly-formed concern, not without a certain nervous excitement, that very anxiety enhances the outcome and adds spice to the pleasure. But the sheer daring of speaking off the cuff, the recklessness of it, brings perhaps the keenest delight of all -- for in talent, as in a field, though some things are long sown and cultivated, what springs up on its own is still the more welcome.'
7| Let me confess something about myself: no day made me happier than the day I received the broad purple stripe, or the day I, a new man born in a city not exactly eager to favor newcomers, won the quaestorship, the tribunate, or the praetorship. But even those days don't compare with the days when my own modest talent for speaking let me defend a client successfully, plead a case before the centumviral court with some luck, or stand up for an emperor's own freedmen and agents before the emperor himself. In those moments I feel I've climbed above the tribunate, the praetorship, even the consulship. In those moments I possess something that, if it doesn't spring from within a man, can't be handed to him by letters patent and doesn't arrive through influence. And what about fame and praise? What craft's reputation compares with an orator's glory? Aren't great speakers famous in the city not only among busy men absorbed in their affairs, but even among idle young men and boys, so long as they have decent instincts and good hopes for themselves? Whose names do parents drum into their children before any others? Whom does the ignorant mob, this tunic-wearing crowd, call out by name and point at as they pass? Even visitors and foreigners, once they reach the city, ask after speakers they've heard of back in their own towns and colonies, eager to recognize them as if they already knew them.
8| I'd go so far as to claim that Eprius Marcellus, whom I just mentioned, and Vibius Crispus (I prefer fresh, recent examples to distant, forgotten ones) would be no less great men at the ends of the earth than at Capua or Vercellae, where they're said to have been born. And it isn't the two hundred million sesterces of the one or the three hundred million of the other that accounts for this — though it might look as if they owe even that wealth to eloquence's favor — no, it's eloquence itself. Eloquence is a divine power, and every age has produced plenty of examples of the heights men have reached through sheer talent. But these two examples, as I said, are the closest to us, ones we don't have to take on hearsay but can watch with our own eyes. The lower and more obscure their birth, the more marked the poverty and narrow circumstances that surrounded their early years, the brighter and more striking their examples become, and the more they prove what oratory can do. Neither had the advantage of noble birth or inherited wealth; neither was outstanding in character; one of them was even physically unimpressive. Yet for many years now they've been the most powerful men in the state, and for as long as they cared to be, the leading men of the courts. Now they're leading men in Caesar's friendship, they carry all business before them, and the emperor himself treats them with a certain deference — because Vespasian, that venerable old man with no patience for illusions, understands perfectly well that his other friends depend on what they received from him and on what it costs them nothing to amass and lavish on others, whereas Marcellus and Crispus brought to his friendship something they didn't get from the emperor and that can't be given by him. Busts, inscriptions, and statues count for little among so many greater things — though even these aren't neglected, any more than wealth and riches are, which you'll find plenty of people criticizing but few actually turning down. So we see the houses of men who devoted themselves from early youth to the courtroom and to the study of oratory filled with these honors, these distinctions, these fortunes.
9| As for poetry and verse, on which Maternus wants to spend his whole life (that's what set off this whole conversation) — they win their authors no standing and support no fortunes. They bring only brief pleasure, and praise that's empty and unproductive. Even if you refuse to hear this, Maternus, and what I'm about to say besides — who benefits if, in your play, Agamemnon or Jason speaks eloquently? Who goes home defended and grateful to you because of it? Who escorts our friend Saleius, an outstanding poet, or — if that title honors him more — a truly great bard, home, or calls on him, or walks with him through the streets? If a friend or relative of his, or Saleius himself, runs into some legal trouble, he'll turn to Secundus here, or to you, Maternus — not because you're a poet, not to have you write verses for him. Verses like that are born at home for Bassus, lovely and delightful as they are — yet this is how it ends: after a whole year, day after day, much of the night, polishing and laboring over a single book, he's reduced to begging and canvassing people to deign to listen, and not even for free — he has to borrow a house, build a hall, rent benches, hand out copies. And even if the reading goes as well as it possibly could, all that praise is gathered in a day or two, like grass or a flower picked before it can ripen into any solid, lasting fruit. It brings him no friendship, no clients, no favor that lodges in anyone's mind — just vague applause, empty words, and fleeting delight. We recently praised as a marvelous, extraordinary act of generosity that Vespasian gave Bassus five hundred thousand sesterces. Fine — it's a fine thing to earn the emperor's indulgence through talent. But how much finer, if his own household finances demanded it, to cultivate himself, to court his own genius, to test his own generosity! And consider this too: poets, if they want to produce anything worthwhile, must give up the company of friends and the pleasures of the city, abandon their other duties, and, as they themselves put it, withdraw into the woods and groves — that is, into solitude.
10| Not even reputation and fame — the one reward they claim to serve, the one payment they admit is the whole point of their labor — favors poets the way it favors orators, since nobody knows a mediocre poet, and only a few know the good ones. How often does the fame of even the rarest recitation spread through the whole city, let alone reach into all the provinces? How many men, arriving in the city from Spain or Asia — not to mention our own Gaul — ask after Saleius Bassus? And even if someone does ask, once he's seen him he moves on, satisfied, the way he'd be satisfied after seeing a painting or a statue. I don't want what I'm saying to be taken as discouraging verse for men whose nature has denied them an orator's gift, if writing poetry is how they want to fill their leisure and attach their names to fame. I hold all eloquence, and every branch of it, sacred and worthy of reverence — not just your tragic buskin or the sound of epic verse, but the charm of lyric poets too, and the playfulness of elegy, and the bitterness of iambic, and the wit of epigram, and whatever other form eloquence can take — I believe all of it deserves to be ranked above every other art's pursuits. But my quarrel is with you, Maternus, because though your nature carries you toward the very citadel of oratory, you prefer to wander off course, and settle for less when you could reach the heights. It's as if you'd been born in Greece, where it's honorable to practice even the athletic arts, and the gods had given you Nicostratus's build and strength — I wouldn't stand by and let those huge arms, built for fighting, waste away on the featherweight javelin or the discus throw. In the same way, I'm calling you now, away from recital halls and theaters, into the forum, into real cases, into real battles — especially since you can't even fall back on the excuse that shields most men, the idea that the poet's calling gives less offense than the orator's. The force of your splendid nature boils over, and — more dangerous still — it isn't on behalf of some friend that you give offense, but on behalf of Cato. And the offense can't be excused as owed to some duty of kinship, or the good faith of an advocate, or the impulse of an unplanned, spur-of-the-moment speech: it looks as though you deliberately chose a controversial figure who would speak with real authority. I know what answer you'll give — that this is exactly what wins tremendous applause, that this is what gets praised above all in the recital halls themselves and soon carried on everyone's lips. So drop the excuse of wanting peace and quiet, when you're the one choosing a fight with a stronger opponent. As for me, I'm content to handle the private disputes of our own age — where, if it should ever be necessary to offend the ears of powerful men on behalf of a friend in danger, my loyalty will be proven and my outspokenness excused.
11| Aper had spoken sharply, as was his habit, with an intent look. Maternus answered him relaxed and smiling: 'I was preparing to attack the orators every bit as long as Aper had praised them—I expected that once he'd finished his praise of them he'd turn to running down poets and trampling on the love of poetry—but he softened that with a bit of art, allowing men who can't plead cases to write verse instead. As for me, while I can perhaps manage something and even push myself in pleading cases, it was by reciting tragedies that I first won a name, when I broke the shameless power of Vatinius, a man who profaned even the sacred things of literature, under Nero. And today, whatever reputation and name I have, I think I owe more to the glory of my poems than to my speeches. I've now decided to withdraw from courtroom labor. I don't crave those crowds of escorts, those public appearances, that mob of morning callers—no more than I crave the bronze busts and portrait masks that have forced their way into my house even against my will. A man's standing and safety are better guarded by innocence than by eloquence, and I don't fear ever having to speak in the Senate except to defend someone else in danger.'
12| 'The groves and the woods, and solitude itself, which Aper complained of—these bring me such pleasure that I count them among the chief rewards of poetry: that it isn't composed amid noise, with a litigant sitting at the door, amid the squalor and tears of defendants, but the mind withdraws to pure and untainted places and enjoys its own sacred haunts. These are the origins of eloquence, its inner sanctuary; in this dress and this bearing it first flowed its benefits into mortal hearts, hearts still chaste and untouched by vice: this is how the oracles once spoke. This profitable, blood-soaked eloquence of ours is a recent thing, born of bad morals, and, as you yourself said, Aper, invented to serve as a weapon. But that happy age—golden, to use our own phrase—empty of orators and of crimes, was rich in poets and seers who sang of good deeds done, not men who defended wrongs committed. No one enjoyed greater glory or a more honored place—first among the gods, whose responses they were said to deliver and at whose feasts they were said to sit, then among those kings sprung from gods and held sacred, among whom we hear of no pleader, but of Orpheus, and Linus, and, if you care to look deeper, Apollo himself. Or if that seems too much like fable and invention, you will at least grant me this, Aper: that Homer's honor among later ages is no less than Demosthenes', and that Euripides' or Sophocles' fame is not confined within narrower bounds than Lysias' or Hyperides'. You'll find more people today running down Cicero's glory than Virgil's, and no book of Asinius or Messalla shines as brightly as Ovid's Medea or Varius's Thyestes.'
13| 'And I wouldn't hesitate to set even the fortune of poets, that happy fellowship, against the restless, anxious life of orators. Grant that their struggles and dangers have carried some of them up to the consulship—I still prefer Virgil's safe and quiet retirement, in which he lacked neither the favor of the deified Augustus nor renown among the Roman people. Augustus's letters are witness to that, and so is the people itself, who, on hearing Virgil's verses read aloud in the theater, rose to their feet as one, and honored Virgil, who happened to be present watching, as if he were Augustus. Not even in our own day has Pomponius Secundus taken second place to Domitius Afer, whether in the dignity of his life or the lasting nature of his fame. As for that Crispus and that Marcellus, whose example you hold up to me—what do they actually have in their fortune worth wanting? That they live in fear, or that they are feared? That when they're begged for favors every day, the very people they oblige resent them for it? That, bound hand and foot by flattery, they never seem servile enough to their masters nor free enough to us? What is the sum of their power? Freedmen manage that much. As for me, let the 'sweet Muses,' as Virgil calls them, carry me off, far from anxieties and cares and the daily need to do something against my own conscience, into their sacred places and their springs. I won't go on trembling before the maddening, treacherous forum and its pale, fading fame. Let no crowd of morning callers rouse me with their noise, no panting freedman with news; let me not write my will out of uncertainty about the future as though it were collateral, and let me have no more than I can leave to whomever I choose—for my own fatal day will come sometime. And when I'm set up in my tomb, let it not be grim and gloomy, but cheerful and crowned with garlands; and let no one move a motion or call a vote in honor of my memory.'
14| Maternus had barely finished, still worked up and almost inspired, when Vipstanus Messalla came into the room. Guessing from how intently they'd all been listening that something deeper than usual had passed between them, he said: 'Have I come at a bad moment, breaking in on some private council, or on someone rehearsing a case?' 'Not at all, not at all,' said Secundus. 'In fact I wish you'd arrived sooner—you'd have enjoyed our friend Aper's very polished speech, urging Maternus to turn all his talent and energy to pleading cases, and then Maternus's cheerful defense of his own poetry, a speech more bold and more like a poet's than an orator's, as befitted a defense of poets.' 'That conversation,' Messalla replied, 'would have given me endless pleasure, and it delights me in itself that you—the finest men and the orators of our age—don't spend your talents only on courtroom business and declamatory exercises, but take up discussions of this kind, which both nourish the mind and bring the most delightful pleasure of learning and literature, to you who debate these things and to those whose ears they reach. And so, by Hercules, I see the same admiration given to you, Secundus, for raising people's hopes of more such books by writing the life of Julius Africanus, as to Aper, for not yet having broken free of school debates, and preferring to spend his leisure in the manner of the new-style rhetoricians rather than the old-style orators.'
15| Then Aper said: 'You never stop admiring nothing but the old and ancient, Messalla, and mocking and despising the pursuits of our own age. I've caught this line of yours before, when, forgetting your own eloquence and your brother's, you argued that there's no orator alive today—all the more boldly, I suppose, because you weren't afraid of seeming spiteful, since you were denying yourself the very glory others grant you.' 'I'm not sorry for anything I said then,' Messalla answered, 'and I don't believe that Secundus, or Maternus, or even you, Aper—though you sometimes argue the opposite side—really think otherwise. I'd be glad if one of you could be persuaded to examine and explain the causes of this vast difference, which I often puzzle over myself. And what comforts some people only deepens the question for me, because I see that even among the Greeks it's happened that Sacerdos Nicetes and others like him, who shake Ephesus or Mytilene with the applause and shouting of their schools, stand further from Aeschines and Demosthenes than Afer or Africanus, or you yourselves, stand from Cicero or Asinius.'
16| "You've raised a big question," Secundus said, "and one worth pursuing. But who could handle it more fairly than you, whose deep learning and outstanding talent are backed up by real study and reflection?" "I'll lay out my thoughts," Messalla said, "if I can first get one thing from you both: help me carry this conversation." "I promise on behalf of both of us," Maternus said. "Secundus and I will take up whatever parts we sense you've left to us rather than skipped. You yourself said a moment ago that Aper likes to disagree, and it's obvious enough he's already bracing to argue the other side — he can't stand watching us all agree in praise of the old masters." "I won't let our age," said Aper, "be condemned unheard and undefended just because you've all ganged up on it. But first I'll ask this: who exactly do you mean by 'the ancients'? What generation of orators does that word cover? When I hear 'the ancients,' I picture genuinely old men from long ago — Ulysses and Nestor come to mind, whose era predates ours by nearly thirteen hundred years. But you bring up Demosthenes and Hyperides, who plainly flourished in the time of Philip and Alexander — and outlived them both. Which means not much more than three hundred years separate us from Demosthenes' generation. Measured against the frailty of our bodies, that might look long. Measured against the true scale of the ages and this vast span of time, it's nothing at all, practically next door. If, as Cicero writes in the Hortensius, the great and true Year is the one in which the same arrangement of sky and stars now in place returns exactly as it was, and that Year contains twelve thousand nine hundred fifty-four of the years we count — then your Demosthenes, whom you paint as ancient and old, began not merely in the same year as us, but in the same month.
17| But let me turn to the Latin orators. Among them, you don't rank Menenius Agrippa — who really could pass for ancient — above the great speakers of our own day; you rank Cicero, Caesar, Caelius, Calvus, Brutus, Asinius, and Messalla. I don't see why you'd assign them to ancient times rather than to ours. Take Cicero himself. He died, so his freedman Tiro tells us, seven days before the December Ides fell, in the year Hirtius and Pansa were consuls — the same year the deified Augustus took their place as consul alongside Quintus Pedius. Count fifty-six years for Augustus's reign afterward; add Tiberius's twenty-three; nearly four years for Gaius; fourteen apiece for Claudius and Nero; the long single year shared by Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; and now the sixth year of this happy reign under which Vespasian nurses the state. That comes to a hundred twenty years from Cicero's death to today — one man's lifespan. I myself saw an old man in Britain who claimed to have fought in the battle where the Britons tried to drive Julius Caesar's invading forces back from their shores. So if the man who took up arms against Caesar had been dragged to Rome — by capture, by choice, by some accident of fate — he could have heard both Caesar and Cicero speak, and sat in on our own pleadings too. At the last public handout, you yourselves saw plenty of old men who told how they'd received Augustus's largess not once but twice. From this you can work out that Corvinus and Asinius, too, could have been heard by those same men — Corvinus lived on into the middle of Augustus's reign, Asinius nearly to its very end. So don't chop up the age, and don't keep calling 'ancient' and 'old' orators whom the very same living ears could recognize, could link together, could join as one continuous line.
18| I've laid all this out to show that whatever praise these orators' fame and glory earn from their era belongs to a time much closer to us than to Servius Galba or Gaius Carbo or others we might rightly call ancient — men who are, frankly, rough, unpolished, crude, shapeless, and I wish to God your Calvus or Caelius or Cicero himself had never imitated any part of them. Now I want to press harder and speak more boldly, once I've said this first: styles and genres of speech change along with the times. Compared with old Cato, Gaius Gracchus is fuller and richer; compared with Gracchus, Crassus is more polished and ornate; compared with both, Cicero is more distinct, more urbane, more elevated; and compared with Cicero, Corvinus is gentler, sweeter, more carefully crafted in his diction. I'm not asking who was the most eloquent — for now I'm content to have shown this much: eloquence doesn't wear one single face. Even among the men you call ancient, several different styles can be found, and something isn't automatically worse for being different. It's the fault of human pettiness that the old is always praised and the present always scorned. Do we doubt that some people were found who admired Appius Caecus over Cato? It's well known that even Cicero had his detractors, who found him bloated and swollen, not tight enough, exulting and overflowing past all measure, and not Attic enough. You've surely read the letters Calvus and Brutus sent to Cicero — from which it's easy to see that Calvus struck Cicero as bloodless and dry, and Brutus as slack and disjointed; while Cicero, in turn, was faulted by Calvus for being loose and flabby, and by Brutus — to use his own word — for being 'broken and spineless.' If you ask me, I think they were all telling the truth. But I'll get to individuals later; for now I have business with the whole group.
19| The admirers of the ancients like to set the boundary of antiquity at Cassius Severus, whom they put on trial, so to speak, as the first to swerve from that old, straight road of oratory. I say he turned to a different style of speaking not from any weakness of talent or ignorance of literature, but by judgment and understanding. As I said a moment ago, he saw that as the conditions of the times and the taste of listening ears changed, the shape and form of speech had to change too. That earlier generation, being untrained and unrefined, easily put up with speeches stretched to exhausting length, and actually praised a speaker for using up an entire day. Long, elaborate introductions, a narrative traced back to remote beginnings, an ostentatious display of endless subdivisions, a thousand rungs of argument, and whatever else gets prescribed in the bone-dry handbooks of Hermagoras and Apollodorus — all of that was held in high esteem. And if anyone showed the faintest whiff of philosophy and worked some scrap of it into his speech, he was praised to the skies. No wonder — all this was new and unfamiliar, and even among the orators themselves very few had actually studied the teachings of the rhetoricians or the doctrines of the philosophers. But now, by heaven, all that has become common knowledge — you'll scarcely find anyone standing at the speaker's platform who hasn't at least had a taste of these basic studies, even if not fully trained in them — so new and refined paths of eloquence are needed, paths by which an orator can escape the boredom of jaded ears. That's especially true before judges who decide by force and authority rather than by law and statute, who don't wait on the clock but set it themselves, who won't sit patiently while an orator gets around to the actual matter at hand — who instead interrupt on their own, call him back when he wanders off, and openly show they're in a hurry.
20| Who today would put up with a speaker prefacing his case with excuses about his poor health — the kind of opening Corvinus so often used? Who would sit through five books against Verres? Who would endure those endless volumes on a legal technicality that we read in the speeches for Marcus Tullius or Aulus Caecina? These days the judge races ahead of the speaker, and unless he's caught and carried along by the drive of the argument, the color of the phrasing, the polish and finish of the descriptions, he turns against him. The crowd standing around too, that shifting, drifting audience, has grown used to demanding pleasure and beauty from a speech; they no longer put up with grim, uncombed old-fashioned oratory in the courts any more than they would put up with someone doing the gestures of Roscius or Turpio Ambivius on stage in the old style. And the young men, still being hammered into shape on the anvil of their studies, who follow orators to advance their own careers, don't just want to listen — they want to carry something brilliant home, something worth remembering. They pass it on to each other, and often write it back to their home towns and provinces, whether some thought flashed out in a sharp, brief phrase, or some passage shone with rare, poetic polish. An orator today is expected to have poetic grace too — not the moldy stuff of Accius or Pacuvius, but something drawn from the shrine of Horace, Virgil, and Lucan. It's by answering to these ears and these judgments that our generation of orators has turned out more beautiful, more finished. And our speeches are no less effective for reaching the ears of judges with pleasure. Would you call temples of our day weaker because they aren't built of rough rubble and shapeless tiles, but gleam with marble and blaze with gold?
21| I'll admit to you plainly: with some of the old writers I can barely keep from laughing, and with others I can barely keep from falling asleep. And it's not just some man off the street, but Canutius and Attius, Furnius and Toranius, and the rest who share the same sickroom — these bare bones, this wasted frame — who bear this out. Take Calvus himself: he left behind, I believe, twenty-one books, and yet he barely satisfies me in one or two little speeches. And I don't see the rest of you disagreeing with my judgment — how many people actually read Calvus's speech against Asitius, or against Drusus? Yet by god, the prosecutions against Vatinius are in every student's hands, especially the second of them — it's rich in phrasing and in thought, well-suited to the judges' ears, proof that Calvus himself understood what would work better, and that what he lacked wasn't the will to speak with more grandeur and polish, but the talent and the strength. And take the speeches of Caelius — the ones we like, whole or in part, are exactly the ones where we recognize the polish and elevation of our own age. That stale, coarse vocabulary, that gaping, broken-jointed word order, those half-formed thoughts — those reek of old times, and I don't think anyone is so devoted to antiquity that he praises Caelius for the parts where he's antiquated. Let's grant, by all means, that Julius Caesar — given the scale of his thinking and the demands on his time — achieved less in eloquence than his divine talent demanded, just as we'll leave Brutus to his philosophy. In their speeches, even their admirers confess they fell short of their own reputations — unless someone actually reads Caesar's defense of Decius the Samnite, or Brutus's for King Deiotarus, and the other books of the same sluggish, lukewarm sort — unless he also admires their poetry. Yes, they wrote poetry too, and deposited it in libraries — no better than Cicero's, but luckier, because fewer people know they wrote it. Asinius too, though born closer to our own time, seems to me to have studied among the Menenii and the Appii of old. He certainly channeled Pacuvius and Accius, not just in tragedy but in his own speeches — he's that harsh and dry. But a speech, like a man's body, is only truly beautiful when the veins don't stand out and you can't count the bones, but a healthy, well-tempered flow of blood fills the limbs, swells over the muscle, and a warm color covers the very sinews and gives them grace. I don't want to attack Corvinus — it wasn't his fault that he failed to express the brightness and polish of our times; for we can see how far his force of mind or talent was equal to his judgment.
22| Now I come to Cicero, who fought the same battle with his contemporaries that I'm fighting with you. They admired the old writers; he himself ranked the eloquence of his own time higher. And in nothing did he outstrip the orators of his day more than in judgment. He was the first to refine oratory, the first to bring careful word choice and artful arrangement to it; he ventured into brighter passages too, and coined striking phrases — especially in the speeches he composed later in life, near its end, that is, once he had made more progress and had learned through use and experience what the best style of speaking really was. His earlier speeches aren't free of the flaws of the old school: he's slow in his openings, long-winded in his narratives, lazy in his digressions; he's slow to stir, rarely catches fire; few of his thoughts land neatly, with any real spark. You could pull nothing out to quote, nothing worth repeating — it's like a rough-built house: the wall is solid enough, will last, but isn't polished and gleaming. As for me, I want an orator, like a rich and elegant head of household, housed under a roof that doesn't merely keep out rain and wind, but pleases the eye to look at; I want him furnished not only with what bare necessity requires, but with gold and jewels among his fittings too, things you'd like to pick up and look at again and again. Certain things, though, should be kept well away as already faded and musty: no word should be tainted as if with rust, no thought arranged in the slow, lifeless structure of the old annalists; he should flee ugly, tasteless buffoonery, vary his rhythm, and not end every clause the same way.
23| I don't want to mock the "wheel of Fortune" or the "pig's-law justice" or that phrase — dropped in every third sentence in every speech as if it were a thought — "so it would seem." I've brought these up against my will, and left out plenty more, which are the very things admired and imitated by those who like to call themselves the old-style orators. I'll name no one — it's enough to point at the type — but you certainly have them before your eyes, the ones who read Lucilius instead of Horace, Lucretius instead of Virgil, who find the eloquence of Aufidius Bassus or Servilius Nonianus cheap next to Sisenna or Varro, who despise and loathe the textbooks of our own rhetoricians but admire Calvus. When these men drone on before a judge in the old-fashioned way, no audience follows them, no crowd listens, and even the litigant himself can barely endure it. That's how far their gloomy, unkempt style achieves the very soundness they boast of — not through real strength, but through starvation. After all, even in the body, doctors don't approve of a health that comes from anxiety of mind; it's not enough not to be sick — I want a man strong, cheerful, and full of energy. A health that's praised only for being sound is close to being an illness. But you, my most eloquent friends, as you can, as you do, bring luster to our age with the finest kind of eloquence. I see you, Messalla, imitating the very best qualities of the old writers, and you, Maternus and Secundus, blending gravity of thought with polish and refinement of language — such skill in choosing material, such order in arranging it, such richness whenever the case demands it, such economy whenever it allows it, such grace of rhythm, such clarity of thought, such power in expressing feeling, such restraint in exercising your freedom — that even if envy and ill will slow down the verdict of our own generation, posterity will speak the truth about you.'
24| When Aper had said this, Maternus spoke up: 'Do you recognize the force and fire of our friend Aper? What a torrent, what a drive, in defending our own age! How richly and variously he's harassed the ancients! And how much he's borrowed from them — not only their spirit and energy, but their learning and craft — in order to turn around and attack them with their own weapons! Still, Messalla, that shouldn't let you break your promise. We're not asking for a defender of the ancients, and none of us — though we've just been praised — would compare ourselves to the men Aper has been attacking. Aper himself doesn't really believe what he's said; he's simply taken up the opposing side in the old manner, the one our philosophers so often practice. So give us now — not praise of the ancients, their own fame praises them well enough — but the reasons why we've fallen so far short of their eloquence, especially since our reckoning of the years shows that a hundred and twenty have passed from Cicero's death down to this very day.'
25| Then Messalla spoke: 'I'll follow the outline you set, Maternus. I won't spend long arguing with Aper, who, I think, was the first to raise this quarrel over names, as if it were somehow improper to call men "the ancients" who, everyone agrees, lived only a hundred years ago. I'm not fighting over the word. Call them ancients, or forefathers, or whatever else he prefers, so long as we agree that eloquence was more distinguished in their time. Nor do I resist even that part of his argument where he admits, on closer questioning, that more than one style of speaking existed even within the same generation, let alone across different ones. Just as among the Attic orators the first place goes to Demosthenes, and the next to Aeschines, Hyperides, Lysias, and Lycurgus, while everyone agrees that this whole generation of orators is the most admired, so too among us: Cicero surpassed the other skilled speakers of his own time, while Calvus, Asinius, Caesar, Caelius, and Brutus are rightly ranked above both those before and those after them. It doesn't matter that they differ from each other in style, since they agree in kind. Calvus is tighter, Asinius more rhythmic, Caesar more brilliant, Caelius sharper, Brutus weightier, Cicero more forceful, fuller, and stronger — yet all show the same underlying soundness of eloquence, so that if you picked up all their works together, you'd recognize, despite their different talents, a kind of shared judgment and kinship of purpose. As for the fact that they attacked one another, and that some of their letters contain traces of mutual spite — that's a fault of the men, not of the orators. I imagine Calvus, Asinius, and Cicero himself were prone to envy, jealousy, and the other weaknesses common to human nature. Brutus alone among them, I think, revealed his honest judgment not out of malice or envy but simply and candidly. Would he, who I don't believe envied even Caesar, have envied Cicero? As for Servius Galba, Gaius Laelius, and any other of the older men Aper never stopped needling, they need no defense from me — I'll admit their eloquence, being still in its early growth and not fully mature, lacked certain things.
26| But if, setting aside that best and most perfect style of eloquence, I had to choose a manner of speaking, I would honestly prefer the drive of Gaius Gracchus or the ripeness of Lucius Crassus to the curling-irons of Maecenas or the jingling of Gallio. It's better to dress a speech in rough homespun than to deck it out in gaudy, whorish clothing. What most of today's speakers do isn't oratorical dress — by god, it isn't even manly dress — when through wanton wording, flighty ideas, and undisciplined arrangement they mimic an actor's rhythms. And — this is scarcely fit to say — many of them boast, as if it were praise, glory, and talent, that their speeches get sung and danced to. From this comes that ugly, backward, but common complaint: that our orators are said to speak limply while actors are said to dance eloquently. I won't deny that Cassius Severus — the only one our friend Aper dared to name — could be called an orator if compared to those who came after him, though in much of his work he has more bile than blood. He was the first to trample the proper order of things, abandon restraint and decency in language, and, undisciplined even with the very weapons he uses, so eager to strike that he often loses his footing — he doesn't fight, he brawls. Yet, as I said, compared to those who followed, he far outdoes the rest in range of learning, charm of wit, and sheer strength of style — and Aper didn't dare name a single one of those successors and march them out into the field. I was expecting that after attacking Asinius, Caelius, and Calvus, he would bring out another line of battle for us, naming as many or more names, so we could set one against Cicero, another against Caesar, one by one. Instead, content with having dismissed the ancient orators by name, he didn't dare praise any of his successors except in a vague, general way — afraid, I suppose, of offending many if he singled out a few. For how many aspiring rhetoricians don't privately believe themselves ahead of Cicero, though plainly behind Gabinianus? But I won't be afraid to name names, so that with concrete examples it will be easier to show by what stages eloquence has been broken and diminished.'
27| 'Go easy,' said Maternus, 'and get on with your promise instead. We don't need you to prove that the ancients were more eloquent — I already grant that. What we're after are the causes, which you said you were used to discussing — a little while ago you were milder, and less angry at the eloquence of our own time, before Aper provoked you by attacking your forebears.' 'I'm not offended,' he said, 'by my friend Aper's argument, and you shouldn't be offended either if something happens to grate on your ears, since you know this is the rule of such discussions — to give one's honest judgment without personal injury.' 'Go on,' said Maternus, 'and when you speak of the ancients, use their old freedom of speech — a quality we've degenerated from even more than we have from eloquence.'
28| And Messalla said: 'You're not asking for hidden causes, Maternus, nor ones unknown to you, or to Secundus here, or to Aper — even though you've assigned me the role of stating aloud what we all feel. Who doesn't know that eloquence and the other arts have fallen from that old glory not through any shortage of talented men, but through the laziness of the young, the carelessness of parents, the ignorance of teachers, and the neglect of old tradition? These failings, born first in Rome, then spread through Italy, are now seeping into the provinces — though you know your own provinces better than I do. I'll speak of Rome, and of these homegrown, native vices that seize children the moment they're born and pile up at every stage of life, but first let me say a little about the strictness and discipline our ancestors used in raising and shaping their children. In the old days, every man's son, born of a chaste mother, was raised not in the room of some hired nurse but in his mother's own lap and arms, whose highest praise was to keep the household and devote herself to her children. Some older female relative of proven, respected character would be chosen, to whom all the children of that family were entrusted; in her presence it was forbidden to say anything shameful or do anything improper. She governed not only the children's studies and duties but even their breaks and games with a certain holiness and modesty. This, we're told, is how Cornelia raised the Gracchi, how Aurelia raised Caesar, how Atia raised Augustus — mothers who oversaw their sons' upbringing and produced future leaders. This discipline and strictness aimed at this: that each child's nature, pure and whole and untwisted by any vice, could seize at once, with his whole heart, on honorable pursuits — and whether he leaned toward soldiering, law, or oratory, he would pursue that one thing wholly, and drink it in completely.
29| But nowadays the newborn infant is handed over to some little Greek slave-girl, assisted by one or two others chosen from the whole household — usually the most worthless, unfit for any serious task. Children's still-green, untrained minds are steeped from the start in these slaves' idle chatter and blunders; and no one in the whole house thinks it matters what is said or done in front of the young master. Even the parents themselves don't accustom their little ones to decency and modesty, but to impudence and sharp talk, through which shamelessness gradually creeps in, along with contempt for both self and others. And indeed, the vices peculiar to this city seem to me almost conceived in the mother's womb — the passion for actors, and the obsession with gladiators and horses. When a mind is seized and besieged by these, how little room is left for the finer arts? How many people will you find who talk of anything else at home? What other topics do we hear from young men, whenever we step into the lecture halls? Even the teachers have no more frequent conversations with their students than these; for they gather their pupils not through strict discipline or testing of talent, but through courting attention and the lure of flattery.'
30| I'll skip over the first steps of education, where too little effort is spent already—not enough work goes into knowing the great authors, or working through the classics, or learning the facts of history, the men, the times. Instead people go chasing after what they call rhetoricians. When I explain shortly when that profession was first brought into this city, and how little standing it had among our ancestors, I'll need to turn to the training that produced the orators we've heard about—men whose endless labor, daily practice, and constant drilling across every field of study are recorded even in their own books. You all know Cicero's book called the Brutus. In its final section—the earlier part reviews the old orators—he describes his own beginnings, his own progress, something like an education in eloquence: how he studied civil law under Quintus Mucius, and drank deep of every branch of philosophy under Philo the Academic and Diodotus the Stoic. Not content with the teachers Rome could offer, he traveled through Greece and Asia too, so as to take in the full range of every art. And indeed, you can see in Cicero's books that he lacked no knowledge of geometry, music, grammar, or any liberal art at all. He knew the fine points of logic, the uses of moral philosophy, the causes behind events. That's how it is, gentlemen, exactly how it is: that remarkable eloquence flows and overflows from deep learning, from many arts, from knowledge of everything. The orator's power isn't boxed in by narrow limits like other skills. The true orator is the one who can speak beautifully and elegantly on any question, persuasively, fitted to the dignity of the subject, useful to the moment, and pleasing to the audience.
31| That's what the ancients had convinced themselves of, and they understood that achieving it took more than declaiming in the rhetoric schools, more than exercising tongue and voice on invented disputes that never came near real life. It meant filling the chest with the arts that debate good and evil, honor and shame, justice and injustice—because that is the raw material an orator speaks on. In the courts we generally argue fairness, in deliberative speeches usefulness, in eulogies honor—though these usually blend together. No one can speak on such things fully, variously, and elegantly unless he has grasped human nature, the force of the virtues, the corruption of the vices, and understood the things that count as neither virtue nor vice. From these same springs flows the ability to stir a judge's anger or calm it—easier for someone who knows what anger is—and to move him more readily to pity, for someone who knows what pity is and what stirs it. An orator schooled in these arts and drills, whether he must speak before the hostile, the greedy, the envious, the grieving, or the fearful, will grasp the pulse of their feelings, and shape and temper his speech to fit each person's nature, with every tool ready and in reach for every use. Some audiences trust more in a tight, compressed style that nails down each point at once—for them, training in logic pays off. Others prefer a flowing, even style drawn from common feeling—to move them, we'll borrow ready-made arguments from the Peripatetics, fit for any debate. The Academics will lend us combativeness, Plato loftiness, Xenophon charm; and it won't hurt an orator to borrow, as the case demands, even certain honest outbursts from Epicurus and Metrodorus. We're not training a philosopher, or a disciple of the Stoics, but someone who should drink deeply from some arts and taste all of them. That's why the old orators mastered civil law too, and steeped themselves in grammar, music, geometry. Cases come up—most of them, nearly all—that call for knowledge of the law, and many that call for this other learning as well.
32| No one should object that it's enough to be taught something simple and uniform for the occasion. First, we use what's our own differently from what's borrowed—there's a plain difference between possessing what you offer and merely renting it. Second, knowledge of many arts adorns us even while we're doing something else, and shines through exactly where you'd least expect it. Not just the learned, discerning listener notices this—the general public does too, and praises it at once, admitting the speaker has studied properly, has covered every register of eloquence, is, in short, a true orator. And I maintain no one can be that, or ever has been, except a man who marches into the forum armed with every art, the way a soldier goes into battle armed with every weapon. The clever speakers of our day neglect this so badly that even in their courtroom speeches you catch them making ugly, embarrassing mistakes of everyday language. They don't know the laws, don't grasp the decrees of the senate, openly mock the civil law, and shrink in dread from the study and teachings of the wise. They squeeze eloquence down into the fewest possible ideas and the narrowest phrases—as if driving her out of her own kingdom. Once she filled hearts with the most splendid company, mistress of every art; now she's clipped and pruned, without pomp, without honor, almost without her free birth, as if she were something learned as one of the meanest trades. So I count this the first and chief reason we've fallen so far from the eloquence of the old orators. If witnesses are wanted, who better to name than Demosthenes among the Greeks, who is remembered as the most devoted student of Plato? And Cicero, in words I think I recall, says that whatever he achieved in eloquence, he owed not to the rhetoric shops but to the walks of the Academy. There are other causes too, weighty and serious, which it's only fair I lay open to you—since I've now discharged my own assignment, and, as is usual for me, offended quite enough people already, who I'm sure, if they happen to hear this, will say that in praising knowledge of law and philosophy as necessary to an orator, I've simply been applauding my own foolishness.'
33| Maternus said, 'As for me, you seem far from having completed the task you took on—you seem only to have begun it, sketching out, so to speak, the first outlines and traces. You've told us what arts the old orators trained in, and shown the gap between our own laziness and ignorance and their sharp, fertile studies. But I'm still waiting for the rest—having learned from you what they knew and we don't, I want to learn also what exercises young men, about to enter the forum, used to strengthen and nourish their talents. For eloquence rests not only on art and knowledge but far more on natural ability and practice—and I don't think you'll deny it, and these gentlemen seem to agree by their looks.' Then, when Aper and Secundus had likewise nodded, Messalla began again as if starting fresh: 'Since I seem to have shown enough about the beginnings and seeds of the old eloquence, teaching what arts trained and educated the ancient orators, I'll go on now to their exercises. Though practice is built into the arts themselves, and no one can grasp so many, such recondite and varied things unless the study of knowledge is joined to practice, practice to skill, and skill to the actual use of eloquence. From which it follows that grasping what you're going to say and delivering what you've grasped run on the same principle. But if this seems too obscure to anyone, and he separates knowledge from practice, he'll at least grant this much: a mind stocked and filled with these arts comes far better prepared to the exercises that properly belong to orators.'
34| So among our ancestors, the young man being groomed for the forum and for eloquence, already steeped in the discipline of his household and stocked with honest learning, was taken by his father or his relatives to whichever orator held the leading place in the state. Him he would follow, him he would attend, and he grew used to being present at every speech the man gave, in the courts or before public assemblies alike, catching even the cut-and-thrust of cross-examination and sitting in on quarrels, learning, so to speak, to fight by watching real battles. From this the young men gained great experience, a good deal of steadiness, and above all judgment, and gained it at once, studying in broad daylight amid real risk, where no one can say something foolish or contradictory without paying for it: the judge will reject it, the opponent will throw it back in his face, and even his own advocates will disown it. So they were schooled from the start in a true, uncorrupted eloquence. And though each followed one man in particular, still they came to know all the leading advocates of that generation, in case after case, court after court, and they had at their disposal the whole range of the people's ears, wildly different from one another, from which they could easily learn what pleased and what displeased in each speaker. So they never lacked a teacher -- and the best kind, the most select kind, one who showed them the living face of eloquence, not a mere portrait. Nor did they lack rivals and opponents fighting with real swords, not with wooden practice-blades, nor an audience that was always full, always fresh, made up of both the hostile and the friendly, so that neither a good line nor a bad one could pass unnoticed. For you know well that lasting, genuine fame for eloquence is built no less on the opposing benches than on one's own -- indeed it rises there more solidly and is proved there more thoroughly. And so, trained under teachers of that sort, the young man we are speaking of -- pupil of orators, listener in the forum, follower of trials, schooled and seasoned by other men's real experience, hearing the laws quoted every day until they were second nature, familiar with the judges' faces, constantly in the presence of public meetings, well acquainted with the people's ears -- whether he took up a prosecution or a defense, he stood, alone and by himself, equal to any case at once. At nineteen Lucius Crassus took on Gaius Carbo; Caesar at twenty-one took on Dolabella; Asinius Pollio at twenty-two took on Gaius Cato; Calvus, not much older, went after Vatinius -- and it is their speeches from those cases that we still read today with admiration.
35| But nowadays our young men are taken off to the schools of the people who call themselves rhetoricians -- men who, it's clear, appeared not long before Cicero's time and did not sit well with our ancestors, since the censors Crassus and Domitius ordered their school shut down, calling it, in Cicero's words, a "school of shamelessness." But as I was starting to say, our boys are taken off to these schools, and I could hardly say which does their talent more damage: the place itself, their fellow students, or the very kind of exercises they do. The place commands no respect, since no one enters it who isn't equally green. Their fellow students give them nothing to learn from, since boys speak to boys and young men to young men with the same reckless ease on both sides. And the exercises themselves are, for the most part, the wrong kind entirely. The rhetoricians deal in two types of material: persuasive speeches and controversial cases. Of these, the persuasive speeches, being lighter and requiring less real judgment, are handed to the boys, while the controversial cases go to the more advanced students -- and, heaven help us, how incredibly contrived they are! And naturally, once the subject matter has nothing to do with real life, the delivery follows suit and becomes just as false. So it happens that tyrannicides' rewards, the choices offered to violated women, remedies for plagues, mothers committing incest, and whatever else gets rehearsed daily in the schoolroom but is rarely or never heard in the actual forum -- these they pursue with enormous words. But when it comes time to face real judges...
36| [text breaks off; resumes mid-sentence] ...they had grander things in mind. Nothing low, nothing petty could they bring themselves to say. Great eloquence, like flame, is fed by fuel, roused by movement, and grows brighter by burning. This same principle drove the eloquence of the ancients forward in our own state as well. For although the orators of our own time too have achieved what a settled, peaceful, prosperous republic allows, still, in that earlier age of turmoil and license, men seemed to reach for more, since amid the general confusion, with no single ruler to hold things in check, each orator counted for exactly as much as he could talk a wandering people into believing. From this came the endless stream of new laws and the courting of popular favor; from this came magistrates haranguing crowds from the speaker's platform almost through the night; from this came prosecutions of powerful defendants and feuds handed down to whole households; from this came factions among the leading men and constant clashes between senate and commons. Each of these things, taken alone, tore the republic apart -- yet together they exercised the eloquence of that age and seemed to heap it with great rewards, because the more a man could achieve through speech, the more easily he won public office, the further he outpaced his colleagues once in office, the greater his favor with the leading men, his authority with the senators, his name and reputation with the common people. Such men overflowed even with clients from foreign nations; magistrates on their way to the provinces paid them respect, and on their return paid them court; the praetorship and the consulship themselves seemed to come looking for them; even as private citizens they were never without power, since they steered both people and senate by their advice and their weight. Indeed they had convinced themselves that no one could reach or hold a conspicuous, commanding place in the state without eloquence. And no wonder, since even reluctant men were dragged before the people to speak, since it wasn't enough in the senate to state one's opinion briefly -- one had to defend it with talent and eloquence -- since a man called out for some scandal or charge had to answer in his own voice, and witnesses in public trials were made to testify not from a distance or in writing, but in person, face to face. So alongside the highest rewards for eloquence came an equally great necessity for it, and just as being called eloquent was thought fine and glorious, so being thought mute and tongue-tied was considered shameful.
37| So they were driven no less by shame than by reward, afraid of being counted as mere clients rather than patrons, afraid of letting the connections handed down by their ancestors pass to other families, afraid of seeming too feeble to hold office and so either failing to win it or, having won it, defending it badly. I don't know whether these old records have ever come into your hands -- the ones still kept in the libraries of antiquarians and which Mucianus is right now busy collecting, and which have already been compiled and published, I believe, in eleven books of Proceedings and three of Letters. From these one can see that Gnaeus Pompey and Marcus Crassus owed their power not only to force and arms but to talent and oratory as well; that the Lentuli, the Metelli, the Luculli, the Curios, and the rest of that whole company of leading men put great effort and care into these same pursuits, and that no one in those days won great power without some measure of eloquence. To this was added the splendor of the defendants and the sheer scale of the cases, which by themselves contribute enormously to eloquence. For it makes a great difference whether you have to speak about a theft, or a legal formula, or an injunction, or instead about corruption in the elections, about allies plundered and citizens massacred. Such evils, of course, are better avoided altogether, and the best state of a republic is the one in which we suffer nothing of the kind -- yet when they did occur, they supplied enormous material for eloquence. For the power of talent grows with the greatness of its subject, and no one can produce a famous, brilliant speech unless he finds a cause equal to it. It isn't, I think, the speeches Demosthenes wrote against his guardians that make him famous, nor did defending Publius Quinctius or Licinius Archias make Cicero a great orator: it was Catiline and Milo and Verres and Antony who wrapped that fame around him -- not because it was worth it to the republic to put up with bad citizens just so orators would have rich material to speak on, but, as I keep reminding you, let's remember the question we're discussing and recognize that we're talking about something that arises more readily in troubled, restless times. Who doesn't know that it's better and more useful to enjoy peace than to be tormented by war? And yet war produces more good soldiers than peace does. Eloquence is in the same position. The more often it has stood, so to speak, in the battle line, the more blows it has both landed and taken, the greater and fiercer the opponents and fights it has chosen for itself, the higher and more exalted it stands, ennobled by those very dangers, in the mouths of men -- whose nature is such that they want safety for themselves ... [text breaks off].
38| I move on to the form and custom of the old courts. Even though our present arrangement suits current conditions better, that old forum gave eloquence far more exercise, since no one was forced to finish pleading within a few hours; adjournments were granted freely, each speaker set his own limits, and neither the number of days nor of advocates was fixed. Pompey, in his third consulship, was the first to tighten these rules and put a sort of bridle on eloquence — though he still had everything conducted in the forum, everything governed by law, everything heard before the praetors. And here is stronger proof than any other of how much greater the business handled before them once was: the centumviral cases, which now hold first place, used to be so overshadowed by the splendor of other trials that no published speech survives from that court by Cicero, Caesar, Brutus, Caelius, Calvus, or any great orator at all — except Asinius Pollio's speeches on behalf of Urbinia's heirs, and even those he delivered in the middle years of the deified Augustus, after a long peace, a continuous idleness among the people, an unbroken calm in the senate, and above all the emperor's discipline had pacified eloquence itself, along with everything else.
39| What I'm about to say may look trivial and even laughable, but I'll say it anyway, if only to be laughed at. Consider how much those cloaks we wrap ourselves in, sitting hemmed in and practically boxed up with the judges, have dragged eloquence down. Consider how much strength these lecture-halls and record-offices have stripped from oratory, now that most cases are argued out in them. Just as thoroughbred horses prove themselves on a racecourse with room to run, orators too have their own field, and unless they're allowed to move through it freely and unchecked, their eloquence weakens and breaks. In fact we find the very care and anxious polish of a written style works against us, because the judge often asks when you're going to begin, and you have to start the moment he asks. Frequently the advocate has to call for silence just to get through the evidence and witnesses. One or two people stand by while you speak, and the whole thing plays out as if in an empty room. But an orator needs shouting, applause, something like a theater — the kind old orators got every day, when so many, and such distinguished men, packed the forum together, when whole clienteles and tribes and even delegations from the towns stood by those on trial, when in most cases the Roman people believed their own interests were at stake in the verdict. It's well established that Gaius Cornelius, Marcus Scaurus, Titus Milo, Lucius Bestia, and Publius Vatinius were both prosecuted and defended before a crowd of the whole city — enthusiasm strong enough to fire up and set ablaze even the coldest orators. And indeed the speeches that survive from those cases are, by common judgment, the very ones by which their authors are best remembered.
40| Then there were the constant public assemblies, the license granted to hound even the most powerful men, and the glory attached to making enemies — so many eloquent men wouldn't spare even a Scipio, a Sulla, or a Pompey, and in attacking leading citizens, as envy naturally does, they played to the ears of the mob and the stage crowd alike. Think how much heat that stoked in men's talents, what torches it held to orators' ambitions... We're not talking about some quiet, peaceful pursuit content with honesty and restraint. That great, conspicuous eloquence is the child of license, which fools call liberty; it's the companion of unrest, the goad of an unbridled people, obedient to no one, respecting nothing, defiant, reckless, arrogant — it does not arise in well-ordered states. What orator do we know of from Sparta, or from Crete? Those states are famous for the strictest discipline and the strictest laws. Nor do we know of eloquence among the Macedonians, the Persians, or any people content with settled, stable rule. But a few Rhodians, and a great many Athenians, emerged as orators, in states where the people, the untrained masses, everyone — so to speak — held every kind of power. Our own state too, as long as it went astray, as long as it wore itself out with factions, quarrels, and discord, as long as there was no peace in the forum, no harmony in the senate, no moderation in the courts, no respect for one's betters, no limit to what magistrates could do, produced, without doubt, a more forceful eloquence — the way an untended field grows certain plants more luxuriantly. But the eloquence of the Gracchi was not worth so much to the republic that it should have had to endure their laws too, and Cicero did not pay for his reputation for eloquence with a good enough ending.
41| Even so, what survives of the old style among our orators today is itself proof of a state that isn't yet corrected, isn't yet brought fully into line with what we'd wish. Who calls on us for help, after all, except the guilty or the wretched? What town seeks our patronage except one harassed by a hostile neighbor or torn by internal strife? What province do we defend except one that has been plundered and abused? And yet it would have been better not to have suffered the wrong at all than to be avenged for it. If some state could be found in which no one did wrong, an orator would be as useless among the innocent as a doctor among the healthy. Just as the doctor's art finds least use and least occasion to prove itself among peoples blessed with the soundest health and the healthiest bodies, so too the orator's honor is smaller and his glory dimmer among people of good character, ready to obey their ruler. What need is there for long speeches in the senate, when the best men agree quickly? What need for many public assemblies, when the state's affairs are weighed not by the many and untrained but by one supremely wise man? What need for voluntary prosecutions, when wrongdoing is so rare and so restrained? What need for defenses bitter and excessive, when the mercy of the one who judges meets the accused halfway? Believe me, my excellent and — so far as needed — most eloquent friends: if either you had been born in earlier ages, or those men we admire had been born in ours, and some god had suddenly swapped your lives and your times, you would not have lacked their supreme praise and glory in eloquence, nor would they have lacked your restraint and moderation. As it is, since no one can achieve great fame and great tranquility at the same time, let each of us make the most of the good in his own age, without begrudging another's.'
42| Maternus had finished, when Messalla said: 'There were points I would have argued against, things I'd have liked discussed further, if the day weren't already spent.' 'That can happen,' Maternus said, 'later, whenever you like — and if anything in what I've said seemed unclear to you, we'll go over it again.' And rising at once, he embraced Aper and said, 'I'll denounce you to the poets, and Messalla here to the antiquarians.' 'And I'll denounce the both of you to the rhetoricians and the schoolmasters,' Messalla said. When we had all laughed, we went our separate ways.
1| My work begins with the second consulship of Servius Galba and Titus Vinius. The eight hundred and twenty years before them, from the founding of the city, found many historians, and as long as they wrote of the Roman people's affairs they matched them in eloquence and in freedom. But after the battle at Actium, when peace required that all power be concentrated in one man, those great talents vanished. Truth suffered in more ways than one: first from ignorance, since public affairs now felt like someone else's business; then from a taste for flattery, or else from hatred of the rulers. Neither camp cared about posterity — the hostile no more than the servile. But a writer's self-interest is easy to see through and dismiss; sneering and spite, on the other hand, find an eager audience. Flattery carries the ugly taint of servility, while malice wears a false face of independence. Galba, Otho, and Vitellius did me neither favor nor injury. My career, I won't deny, was begun under Vespasian, advanced under Titus, carried further still under Domitian — but a man who has pledged honest good faith must write of no one with love and of no one with hatred. If my life lasts, I have set aside the reign of the deified Nerva and the rule of Trajan for my old age — richer, safer material — for we now enjoy that rare good fortune of an age in which you may think what you like and say what you think.
2| The work I take up is rich in disasters, grim with battles, torn by rebellions, savage even in its stretches of peace. Four emperors died by the sword. There were three civil wars, more wars against foreign enemies, and often both kinds at once. Fortune smiled in the East and frowned in the West. Illyricum was in turmoil, the Gallic provinces wavered, Britain was conquered and then abandoned almost at once. The tribes of the Sarmatians and the Suebi rose against us; the Dacians won fame trading blows with us; even the Parthians nearly took up arms, made fools of by a fake Nero. And Italy itself was struck by disasters new or repeated after long ages of forgetting. Cities were swallowed by the sea or buried — the richest stretch of the Campanian coast. Rome was gutted by fires, her oldest shrines consumed, the very Capitol burned by the hands of its own citizens. Sacred rites were defiled, great adulteries committed; the sea was full of exiles, its rocks stained with the dead. In the city the cruelty ran even worse: noble birth, wealth, offices held or refused — all counted as crimes, and virtue was the surest road to ruin. The rewards paid to informers stirred as much hatred as their crimes, since some seized priesthoods and consulships as spoils of war, others provincial governorships and backstairs power, wrecking and upending everything out of hatred and dread. Masters found their own slaves bought off against them, and patrons their own freedmen; a man with no enemy could still be ruined by a friend.
3| Yet the age was not so barren of virtue that it produced no good examples. Mothers went with their children into exile; wives followed their husbands into banishment. Relatives showed courage, sons-in-law stood firm, and slaves kept faith even under torture that would not break. Great men faced their final necessity bravely, and matched in their deaths the celebrated deaths of the old Romans. Beyond the many blows that fell on human affairs, the sky and the earth both sent their warnings — portents, lightning-omens, signs of what was coming, some of them welcome, some grim, some murky, some unmistakable. Never has it been proved by crueler blows against the Roman people, or by clearer signs, that the gods care nothing for our safety, but a great deal for our punishment.
4| But before I set down what I mean to tell, it seems right to double back first: how did the city stand, what was the mood of the armies, how did the provinces lie, and where in the whole world was there health, where sickness — so that we understand not only the accidents and outcomes of events, which are mostly a matter of chance, but their reasoning and their causes. Nero's death, greeted at first with the raw joy of the moment, had stirred up all sorts of conflicting feelings — not only in the city, among the senate, the people, or the city garrison, but in every legion and every commander, once the secret of empire was out: that an emperor could be made somewhere other than Rome. The senate was delighted, and lost no time using its new freedom with a certain recklessness, since the new emperor was still far away. The leading knights shared in the senate's joy. The respectable part of the people, tied to the great households, felt the same; the clients and freedmen of the condemned and the exiled were roused to new hope. But the common rabble, devoted to the circus and the theaters, along with the worst of the slaves and those who had squandered their fortunes and now lived off Nero's shameful excesses, were gloomy, and hungry for rumors.
5| The city garrison, steeped for generations in loyalty to the house of the Caesars, had been led to abandon Nero more by scheming and pressure than by any impulse of its own; and now, learning that the donative promised in Galba's name would not be paid, and that in peacetime the same rewards and honors were not on offer as in war, and that the legions had gotten to the emperor's favor first, it was primed for revolution — stirred further by the crime of Nymphidius Sabinus, the Praetorian prefect, who was scheming to seize power for himself. Nymphidius was crushed in the very act, but though the head of the conspiracy was cut off, the guilty knowledge of it remained in the minds of most of the soldiers. Nor were there any lack of voices grumbling about Galba's old age and his stinginess. His severity, once praised and celebrated in his military reputation, now grated on men who despised the old discipline and had spent fourteen years under Nero learning to love the vices of their emperors no less than they had once respected their virtues. And Galba added a remark, honorable in principle, dangerous in practice: that he chose his soldiers, he did not buy them. The rest of his policies did not live up to that standard.
6| Galba was a frail old man, and Titus Vinius and Cornelius Laco — one the worst of men, the other the laziest — dragged him down, one weighed by hatred for his crimes, the other despised for his uselessness. His march on Rome was slow, and it left blood behind it: Cingonius Varro, consul-elect, and Petronius Turpilianus, a former consul, both died — Varro for backing Nymphidius, Turpilianus for having served among Nero's commanders — neither one heard, neither given any chance to speak in his own defense, innocent men though they were. His entry into the city, after the slaughter of so many thousands of unarmed soldiers, was a bad omen, and struck fear even into the men who had done the killing. A Spanish legion was brought in, while the one Nero had raised from the fleet remained; the city was crowded with an unfamiliar army. Many more troops besides came from Germany, Britain, and Illyricum — men Nero had picked out and sent ahead toward the passes of the Caspian for the war he was planning against the Albani, then recalled to crush Vindex's uprising. It was an enormous mass of material ready for revolution, not committed to any one man's cause, but ready for whoever dared seize it.
7| As it happened, news arrived at the same time of the deaths of Clodius Macer and Fonteius Capito. Macer, who was stirring up unmistakable trouble in Africa, was killed by the procurator Trebonius Garutianus on Galba's orders. Capito, attempting something similar in Germany, was killed by the legionary commanders Cornelius Aquinus and Fabius Valens before any order reached them. Some believed that Capito, foul and stained as he was by greed and lust, had nonetheless kept clear of any thought of revolution, and that when the commanders' urging to war failed to move him, they invented the charge and the plot themselves; and that Galba, either from natural inconstancy or to avoid digging deeper, approved what was done, since it could not now be undone. In any case both killings were badly received, and once a ruler is hated, whether his men act well or badly makes no difference — both bring equal resentment. Everything was for sale; his freedmen held excessive power; his slaves' hands grabbed greedily and hastily, as though hurrying to profit from an old man. The new court had the same vices as the old one, just as serious, and less excused. Galba's very age drew mockery and disdain from men used to Nero's youth, who compared emperors, as the crowd does, by looks and physical grace.
8| That, roughly, was the state of feeling at Rome — as much as feeling can be gauged in so vast a crowd. In the provinces: Spain was governed by Cluvius Rufus, a man of eloquence and skilled in the arts of peace, untested in war. The Gallic provinces, besides their memory of Vindex, were bound to Galba by the recent grant of Roman citizenship and by the future relief of tribute. But the Gallic communities nearest the German armies were not shown the same honor, and some even had territory taken from them; they measured others' gains and their own grievances with equal resentment. The German armies — the most dangerous thing, given their strength — were anxious and angry, proud of their recent victory and afraid that they had backed the losing side. They had been slow to abandon Nero, and Verginius had not moved for Galba right away; whether he had been unwilling to rule is uncertain, but it is agreed the soldiers had offered him the throne. Even those who could not complain of Fonteius Capito's death still resented it. There was no leader now, since Verginius had been recalled under the pretense of friendship; the men took his failure to be sent back, and his being treated as a suspect, as an accusation leveled at themselves.
9| The upper army despised its commander, Hordeonius Flaccus, weak with age and lame in the feet, without firmness or authority; even when the soldiers were calm he could not control them, and his very weakness in trying to restrain them made their fury worse. The legions of Lower Germany went a long time without a consular commander, until Galba sent Aulus Vitellius, son of the censor Vitellius who had been consul three times; that, it seemed, was recommendation enough. In the army of Britain there was no anger at all. Indeed no other legions behaved more innocently through all the upheavals of the civil wars, whether because they were cut off far away by the Ocean, or because frequent campaigns had taught them to save their hatred for the enemy. Illyricum too was quiet, though the legions Nero had called up from there had approached Verginius with delegations while they lingered in Italy. But armies separated by great distances — the surest safeguard for keeping military loyalty intact — were not drawn into either the vices or the strength of the others.
10| In the East, everything was still quiet. Licinius Mucianus held Syria and four legions—a man as famous for his failures as for his successes. As a young man he had cultivated influential friendships ambitiously. Then, his fortune worn down, his position shaky, and even Claudius's temper turned against him, he was banished to a remote corner of Asia—as near then to being an exile as he later was to being emperor. He was a mix of self-indulgence and energy, charm and arrogance, good qualities and bad. When he had nothing to do, his vices ran wild; whenever there was work to do, his virtues were considerable. In public you would have praised him; his private life was ill spoken of. But over his subordinates, his associates, his colleagues, he held power through all sorts of charms, and he was a man readier to hand over supreme command than to hold it himself. The Jewish war was being run by Flavius Vespasian, whom Nero had chosen to command it, with three legions. Vespasian had made no vow against Galba, harbored no grudge—in fact he sent Titus, his own son, to greet him and pay respects, a matter we shall take up later. We believe that the empire was destined for Vespasian and his sons by the hidden workings of fate, by omens and oracles—though we believe it only after the event proved it true.
11| Egypt and the forces that keep it in check have been held, ever since the deified Augustus, by Roman knights standing in the place of kings. This was thought the wise course: to keep in the emperor's own hands a province hard to reach, rich in grain, torn and volatile with superstition and license, ignorant of law, unfamiliar with regular magistrates. At this time it was governed by Tiberius Alexander, himself of that same people. Africa and its legions, after the killing of Clodius Macer, had taken a smaller master's lesson to heart, and would put up with any emperor now. As for the two Mauretanias, with Raetia, Noricum, and Thrace, and the other provinces run by procurators, whichever nearby army carried weight tipped them toward love or loathing accordingly. The unarmed provinces—Italy above all—lay exposed to whatever servitude was imposed on them, and would become the prize of whoever won the coming war. Such was Rome's condition on the day Servius Galba, now consul for a second term, and Titus Vinius began a year that was to be the last for them both—and very nearly finished the Republic too.
12| Only a few days into January, word came by letter from Pompeius Propinquus, procurator of Belgica: the Upper German legions had cast off the reverence owed their oath and were calling for a new emperor, though—to make the mutiny look less like one—they left the actual choice up to the senate and people of Rome. This news pushed forward a decision Galba had already been turning over for some time with his closest advisers—the question of adoption. Indeed no topic had been talked about more, all through those months, across the whole city: first out of sheer license and love of gossip, then because Galba was visibly failing with age. Few cared about sound judgment or love of the state; many, out of foolish hope, backed one man or another according as each man was a friend or a client, floating ambitious rumors—and some did it simply out of hatred for Titus Vinius, who grew more resented by the day in exact proportion as he grew more powerful. Galba's own easygoing nature only sharpened the greed of friends already hungry in the face of great fortune, since wrongdoing against a weak and trusting master carries less risk and greater reward.
13| Power under the new regime was split between Titus Vinius, the consul, and Cornelius Laco, prefect of the praetorian guard. Not far behind them in influence was Icelus, Galba's freedman, who had been given the equestrian ring and gone by the name Marcianus. These three did not get along, and each pursued his own interests in smaller matters, but on the question of choosing a successor they split into two camps. Vinius backed Marcus Otho; Laco and Icelus, in agreement for once, did not so much support anyone in particular as oppose Otho. Galba was well aware of the friendship between Otho and Titus Vinius, and rumor—which never lets anything pass in silence—had already marked the two out as father-in-law and son-in-law, since Vinius had a widowed daughter and Otho was unmarried. I believe, too, that Galba felt some concern for the state, reasoning it pointless to have taken the empire from Nero only to leave it to Otho. For Otho had spent his boyhood carelessly and his youth recklessly, and had won Nero's favor by rivaling him in extravagance. It was for this reason that Nero had entrusted him with Poppaea Sabina, his chief mistress, as a man in on the secret of his lust—until he could get rid of his wife Octavia. Later, suspecting Otho of designs on the same Poppaea, Nero packed him off to the province of Lusitania under the guise of a governorship. Otho ran the province decently, and was the first man of any standing to come over to Galba's side; he was far from idle, and while the war lasted he was the most dazzling figure among those present. The hope of adoption, conceived from the start, he pursued more and more eagerly by the day, backed by most of the soldiers and by Nero's old court, which naturally leaned toward a man so much like their former master.
14| But once Galba received word of the mutiny in Germany—though as yet nothing certain about Vitellius—he grew anxious about which way the armies' violence would break, and, not even trusting the city troops, he pushed through the choosing of an heir, which he thought the one remedy, he pushed through the formal process of choosing an heir. Along with Vinius and Laco he called in Marius Celsus, consul-designate, and Ducenius Geminus, prefect of the city. After a few words about his own old age, he ordered Piso Licinianus sent for—whether by his own choice, or, as some believed, at Laco's urging, who had cultivated a friendship with Piso through Rubellius Plautus. Laco was careful to promote him as a man he barely knew, and Piso's good reputation lent weight to the plan. Piso was the son of Marcus Crassus and Scribonia, noble on both sides, with the face and bearing of the old style—serious in the fair reading, gloomy in the unkind one. That very trait, which made suspicious minds uneasy, was exactly what recommended him to Galba as he chose.
15| So Galba, taking Piso by the hand, is said to have spoken to him in these terms: 'If I were adopting you as a private citizen, before the pontiffs by the customary formal law, it would already be a fine thing for me to bring the descendant of Gnaeus Pompeius and Marcus Crassus into my household, and a distinction for you to add the honors of the Sulpician and Lutatian houses to your own nobility. But as it is, called to power by the agreement of gods and men, it is your outstanding character and your love of country that move me to offer you—while you remain at peace—the supreme power our ancestors fought wars to win, and which I myself won by war. I follow the example of the deified Augustus, who lifted men one after another to the rank just below his own: Marcellus, his sister's boy, came first; Agrippa, his son-in-law, followed; then his own grandsons; and at the last, his stepson Tiberius Nero. But Augustus looked for a successor within his own house; I look within the state—not because I lack relatives or companions from the war, but because I did not seek power through ambition myself, and I want the proof of my judgment to include not only the claims of my own family, which I have set aside for you, but yours as well. You have a brother, equally noble, older than you, worthy of this fortune—were you not more worthy still. You are at an age that has already outgrown the appetites of youth, and your past holds nothing you need excuse. Until now you have known only adversity: success tests the spirit with sharper goads, for hardship can be endured, but good fortune corrupts. Loyalty, freedom, friendship—the finest goods of the human soul—you yourself will hold to with the same constancy, but others will wear them down through flattery. Sycophancy will force its way in, along with soft words and self-interest, the worst poison to genuine feeling. Even though you and I are speaking with complete honesty today, everyone else will prefer to talk with our position in life rather than with us directly—for persuading an emperor to do what is right takes real effort, while flattering any emperor at all takes none, and no real feeling.'
16| 'If the vast body of the empire could stand and balance itself without someone to steer it, I would have been a fit man for the Republic to begin again with. But we have come to a point now where the best gift my old age has left to give Rome is a worthy successor, and the best your youth can offer is to be a worthy emperor. Under Tiberius and Gaius and Claudius we were, in effect, the inherited property of a single family; now that the choice has begun to fall to us, it will stand in the place of freedom—and now that the house of the Julians and Claudians has ended, adoption will find the best man available. To be born and bred of an emperor is a matter of chance, and counts for nothing more; but the judgment involved in adoption is unclouded, and if you wish to choose, general agreement points the way. Keep Nero before your eyes—puffed up by the long line of Caesars behind him, and brought down not by Vindex with his unarmed province, nor by me with a single legion, but by his own monstrous cruelty and extravagance, pulled down by the weight of his own crimes on the public's neck. And there had been no precedent before that for condemning an emperor. We ourselves have been raised up by war and by the judgment of men who weighed our merits, and however outstanding we prove, we will draw envy for it. Still, do not be alarmed that two legions have not yet settled down, in the midst of this shaking of the whole world. I myself did not come to power under easy circumstances, and once word of your adoption is heard, I will stop being seen as merely an old man—which is the one thing held against me now. Nero will always be missed by the worst sort of people; it is up to you and me to see that he is not missed by the good as well. To advise you further would take more time than this moment allows, and my whole purpose is fulfilled if I have chosen you well. The most useful test of good and bad courses, and the shortest, is to ask yourself what you would have wanted, or not wanted, under a different emperor. For this is not, as in nations ruled by kings, a matter of one fixed household of masters and everyone else slaves: you will rule over men who can bear neither total slavery nor total freedom.' Galba spoke these words and others like them, as a man making an emperor; everyone else spoke to Piso as though the thing were already done.
17| They say Piso, from the moment eyes turned on him and then converged on him from every side, betrayed no sign of shock or elation. His words to his father and emperor were respectful, and about himself measured. Nothing in his face or bearing changed, as though he could command rather than merely wished to. They then debated whether the adoption should be proclaimed from the Rostra, in the senate, or in the camp. The camp won out: it would flatter the soldiers, whose favor, though ill-gotten by bribery and courting, was not to be scorned when won by honest means. Meanwhile the public had ringed the Palace, impatient for the great secret, and by half-suppressing the rumor only fed it.
18| On the tenth of January — a foul day of rain — thunder, lightning, and unusual portents from the sky threw everything into greater confusion. Custom held that this should call off any public business, but it did not stop Galba from going to the camp; he scorned such things as mere chance, or else believed that what fate has fixed cannot be avoided however plainly signaled. Before a packed assembly of soldiers he announced, with an emperor's brevity, that he was adopting Piso, following the example of the deified Augustus and the military custom by which one soldier chooses another. And so the mutiny would not be thought worse than it was by being passed over in silence, he volunteered that the Fourth and Twenty-Second legions, led astray by a few ringleaders, had gone no further than words and shouting, and would soon return to duty. He added no flattery to his speech, and no bribe. The tribunes, centurions, and the men nearest him answered with words pleasing to hear; the rest met it with gloom and silence, as if they had lost in war the donative that had become obligatory even in peacetime. It is agreed that their goodwill could have been won by even a modest show of generosity from the stingy old man. What hurt him was his old-fashioned rigor and a severity too strict for an age that can no longer match it.
19| Before the senate, Galba's speech was no more polished and no longer than it had been to the soldiers; Piso's was gracious. The senators' favor was plain to see — genuine in many, more lavish in those who had least wanted this outcome, and in the majority, the largest group, a compliant show of obedience while they pursued their own private hopes, indifferent to the public good. In the four days that followed, between the adoption and the murder, Piso said and did nothing else in public. As reports of the German revolt grew daily more frequent, and the city — ready as always to believe and accept any bad news — grew restless, the senators voted to send envoys to the army in Germany. It was debated privately whether Piso too should go, to lend the mission greater weight: the envoys would speak with the senate's authority behind them, Piso with the weight of the emperor's own name. A further motion called for Laco, the praetorian prefect, to travel with them too; he vetoed it. The envoys themselves — since the senate had been left the choice — were named, excused, replaced, in a shameful display of inconsistency, as fear or hope of staying or going moved each man.
20| The next concern was money. On close examination, the fairest solution seemed to be to reclaim it from wherever the shortage had come from. Nero had squandered two thousand two hundred million sesterces in gifts. Galba ordered each recipient summoned and made to return all but a tenth of what he had received. But even that tenth was barely left to most of them, since they had wasted other people's money as freely as their own, and the greediest and most dissolute among them had nothing left — neither land nor capital, only the tools of their vices. Thirty Roman knights were put in charge of the collection, a new kind of office, made burdensome by the intrigue and the sheer number of men involved. Everywhere the auctioneer's spear was up and property was sold off; the city was in constant turmoil over lawsuits. Yet there was real satisfaction that those Nero had given to turned out to be as poor as those he had robbed. During these days several tribunes were dismissed: from the praetorian guard, Antonius Taurus and Antonius Naso; from the urban cohorts, Aemilius Pacensis; from the watch, Julius Fronto. This did nothing to fix matters elsewhere, but only sowed fear — as if men were being purged one by one through cunning and intimidation, everyone grew suspicious.
21| Meanwhile Otho — who had no hope if things stayed settled, and everything to gain from chaos — was driven by many spurs at once: a taste for luxury burdensome even to an emperor, poverty scarcely bearable even for a private citizen, rage at Galba, envy of Piso. He even invented fears to sharpen his ambition: he had been too great a threat to Nero, he told himself, and could not face another exile like his time in Lusitania. Whoever is marked out as next in line is always suspected and hated by the man in power — that had already hurt him with an old emperor, and would hurt him more with a young one whose temper was savage and had grown feral through long exile: Otho could be killed. So he must act, and dare, while Galba's authority was still shaky and Piso's not yet solid. Times of upheaval offer their openings to great undertakings, and there was no room for delay, since inaction is more dangerous than recklessness here. Death comes equally to all by nature, but obscurity or fame among those who come after sets men apart; and if the same end awaits the guilty and the innocent alike, a man of spirit ought at least to deserve his death.
22| Otho's spirit was not soft to match his soft body. His closest freedmen and slaves, kept with a laxity worse than in any private household, kept dangling before him the court of Nero — its luxury, its adulteries, its scandalous marriages, all the other license of absolute power — presenting these, to a man greedy for such things, as his for the taking if only he dared, and as lost to him, reproachfully, while he sat idle. The astrologers pressed him too, insisting from their reading of the stars that a new upheaval was coming and that this would be Otho's banner year — a breed of men untrustworthy to the powerful, deceptive to the hopeful, one that in our society will always be banned and always be kept around. Poppaea's secret circle had employed many astrologers, the worst possible accessory to an emperor's marriage; among them was Ptolemy, who had accompanied Otho to Spain and had predicted he would outlive Nero. When events proved him right, he built on that credit — piecing together from guesswork and gossip, weighing Galba's old age against Otho's youth — to persuade him that he would be raised to power. Otho took the forecast as the fruit of expert skill and the warning of the fates, since it is human nature to believe more readily in what is obscure. And Ptolemy was there at his side, no longer just a fortune-teller but now an instigator of crime — a step easily taken from that kind of prophecy.
23| Whether the plan for the crime itself was long considered or sudden is uncertain. For a long time already Otho had been courting the soldiers' favor, whether hoping for the succession or preparing the deed, greeting the oldest veterans by name on the march, in camp, on guard duty, calling them comrades in memory of his days in Nero's entourage; recognizing some, asking after others, helping men with money or influence, and often slipping in complaints and pointed remarks about Galba, along with whatever else stirs up a crowd. The hardships of the march, the shortage of supplies, the harshness of the new regime were all felt more bitterly by men used to sailing the lakes of Campania and the cities of Greece, now struggling under arms across the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the endless stretches of road.
24| To soldiers whose passions were already burning, Maevius Pudens, one of Tigellinus's inner circle, added fuel like a torch. By drawing in the most excitable men, or those short of money and quick to reach for new ambitions, he gradually went so far that, under the guise of a dinner party, whenever Galba dined at Otho's house, he would hand out a hundred coins a head to the cohort standing guard. Otho then turned this seeming public generosity into something more, adding private gifts to individual men — so bold a corrupter that when Cocceius Proculus, one of the bodyguard, was in a boundary dispute with a neighbor, Otho bought the neighbor's entire property with his own money and gave it to him outright, thanks to the negligence of the prefect, who was blind to what was common knowledge just as much as to what was hidden.
25| Then Otho put one of his freedmen, Onomastus, in charge of the coming crime. Through him Barbius Proculus, watch-officer of the bodyguard, and Veturius, deputy of the same unit, were brought in; once Otho had tested them in wide-ranging conversation and found them shrewd and bold, he loaded them with money and promises, and gave them funds to sound out the loyalty of many more. Two ordinary soldiers took it upon themselves to transfer the rule of the Roman people — and they did transfer it. Only a few were let in on full knowledge of the plot; the wavering loyalty of the rest they worked on by different means — the leading soldiers through Nymphidius's old favors, which now made them objects of suspicion, the rank and file through anger and despair at the donative postponed so many times. Some were fired up by memory of Nero and longing for the old license; but all alike were gripped by a common fear of being reassigned to different units.
26| This rot infected the legions and the auxiliaries too, whose loyalty was already unsettled once word spread that the German army's allegiance was wavering. Mutiny was so ready to hand among the disaffected, and pretense so easy even among the loyal, that on the day after the Ides they were prepared to seize Otho as he returned from dinner — had they not feared the uncertainty of night, the soldiers' camps scattered across the whole city, and the difficulty of getting drunk men to agree on anything. It was not concern for the state — which they were sober enough to plan staining with their own emperor's blood — but fear that in the dark, whoever from the Pannonian or German armies happened to be met, since most of the men did not know each other, might be picked out as emperor in Otho's place. Many signs of the brewing mutiny were suppressed by those in on it; some reached Galba's ears, but the prefect Laco brushed them off — ignorant of the soldiers' true mood, hostile to any plan, however sound, that did not originate with him, and stubbornly at odds with anyone who actually knew the situation.
27| It was January 15th. Galba stood sacrificing before the temple of Apollo when the haruspex Umbricius announced that the entrails were unfavorable, that treachery was imminent, and that an enemy lurked within the household — Otho standing right there and listening, since he was next to the priest. He took this, on the contrary, as a good sign, promising for his own plans. Not long after, his freedman Onomastus told him he was expected by his architect and contractors — a prearranged signal that the soldiers were now gathering and the conspiracy was ready. When people asked why he was leaving, Otho invented a story about buying an old estate that needed inspecting first. Leaning on his freedman, he went through the Domus Tiberiana into the Velabrum, then on to the Golden Milestone by the temple of Saturn. There twenty-three bodyguards hailed him as emperor. He was alarmed at how few had turned out to greet him, and they hastily set him in a chair and rushed him off with drawn swords. Roughly the same number of soldiers joined along the way — some in on the plot, most out of astonishment, some shouting with swords raised, others silent, waiting to see how it turned out before committing themselves.
28| The tribune on duty in camp was Julius Martialis. Whether from shock at the scale of the sudden crime, or fear that the camp was more deeply corrupted than he knew and that resisting would mean his own death, he did nothing — and so gave most people the impression he was in on it. The other tribunes and centurions likewise chose the safety of the present moment over an uncertain course of honor, and this was the general mood: a few dared the worst crime, more wanted it done, and everyone let it happen.
29| Galba, meanwhile, knew nothing, absorbed in worship, wearing out the gods of a power no longer his. Then word arrived that some senator, no one knew who, was being dragged off to camp — soon it was clear the man being dragged off was Otho. From every corner of the city, as each messenger happened to meet him, reports came in — some exaggerating out of fear, a few playing it down below the truth, though even then people couldn't resist flattering him. In council it was decided to test the loyalty of the cohort standing guard at the Palace, but not through Galba himself, whose authority they wanted to keep intact for a greater crisis. Piso addressed the men, summoned before the palace steps, in these words: 'Six days ago, soldiers, not knowing what the future held — whether the name of Caesar was something to hope for or fear — I was adopted. What fate now awaits our house and the state lies in your hands. I say this not because I dread a harsher outcome for myself — having already known misfortune, I'm learning that good fortune, too, carries no less risk — but because I grieve for my father, for the senate, and for the empire itself, if we must either die today or, just as wretched in the eyes of decent men, kill. The one comfort we had after the recent upheaval was a city unstained by blood and a transfer of power without civil strife: the adoption seemed to guarantee that not even after Galba would there be room for war.'
30| 'I will claim no special nobility or restraint for myself; there's no need to compare my virtues against Otho's, since it's his vices alone he can boast of — vices that would have wrecked the empire even while he still played the emperor's friend. Would his walk, his bearing, his effeminate dress qualify him to rule? Those who mistake his extravagance for generosity are fooling themselves: that man knows how to squander, not how to give. Right now his mind is full of adulteries, drunken parties, gangs of women — these are what he thinks the rewards of power are, where the lust and pleasure are his alone and the shame and disgrace fall on everyone else. No one has ever exercised, by honest means, a power seized through crime. The consensus of the human race made Galba emperor; Galba, with your agreement, named me Caesar. If the state, the senate, and the people are empty names to you, then it matters to you, soldiers, that the worst of men not be allowed to make an emperor. Mutinies of legions against their commanders have happened before; but your loyalty and reputation have stayed unblemished to this day. Even Nero abandoned you — you did not abandon him. Shall fewer than thirty runaways and deserters — men no one would tolerate choosing their own centurion or tribune — now hand out the empire? Will you condone this precedent and, by staying silent, make the crime everyone's? This lawlessness will spread to the provinces, and while the crimes will fall on us, the wars that follow will fall on you. There is no more to be gained from killing an emperor than from sparing the innocent — you will receive exactly the same donative from us for loyalty as you would from others for treason.'
31| The bodyguards slipped away, but the rest of the cohort did not reject the speech. As happens in times of upheaval, they seized the standards more by chance than by any settled plan — not, as was later believed, through treachery and pretense. Marius Celsus was sent to the picked troops of the Illyrian army, camped in the Portico of Vipsania; the senior centurions Amullius Serenus and Domitius Sabinus were ordered to summon the German soldiers from the Hall of Liberty. The marine legion was distrusted, hostile over the killing of their comrades whom Galba had massacred right on his entry into the city. Cetrius Severus, Subrius Dexter, and Pompeius Longinus, the tribunes, likewise made their way to the Praetorian camp, in hopes that the mutiny, being still new and not yet fully grown, could be swayed toward wiser counsel. Subrius and Cetrius were met with threats and set upon by the soldiers; Longinus, however, they laid hands on and stripped of his weapons, because — not being one of their own officers but a friend of Galba's — his loyalty to his emperor made him more suspect to men now breaking away. The marine legion, without hesitation, joined the Praetorians; the picked troops of the Illyrian army drove Celsus off with leveled spears. The German detachments wavered a long time, their bodies still weak and their tempers calmed, since Galba had nursed them with special care after Nero sent them off to Alexandria and a long sickly voyage brought them back.
32| By now the whole populace filled the Palatine, a mix of slaves and free mingling their voices, demanding the death of Otho and his fellow conspirators as if calling for some spectacle in the circus or theater. They had no real judgment or honesty in it — the same people would demand the opposite with equal enthusiasm on the very same day — but they followed the age-old custom of flattering whoever holds power, through empty acclamations and pointless enthusiasm.
33| Meanwhile two opinions pulled Galba in different directions. Titus Vinius argued he should stay inside the palace, set the household slaves to guard it, secure the entrances, and not go out to face an angry mob: give time for wrongdoers to repent, time for loyal men to rally. Crimes, he said, gain strength from a sudden rush, good decisions from delay; besides, if reason called for it, he could still go out later, whereas retreat, once regretted, would no longer be in his own power.
34| The others thought speed was essential, before the still-weak conspiracy of a few could grow. Otho too would panic, they said — he had slipped away secretly and been carried off to men who barely knew him; by delaying and dawdling now he was only learning, too late, how to act like an emperor. They must not wait until the mutineers had organized their camp and stormed the Forum, with Galba looking helplessly on as they marched on the Capitol, while their splendid emperor and his brave friends barricaded the doorway of his own house — bracing, apparently, to sit out a siege. Fine help indeed to expect from slaves, if the unity of so vast a crowd, and that first surge of outrage — the most powerful force of all — were allowed to cool. Anything shameful, they argued, was also unsafe; and if death was inevitable, better to meet the danger head-on — that would make Otho more hated for it, and Galba's own men more honorable. Vinius argued against this view, and Laco turned on him with threats, egged on by Icelus, whose stubborn private grudge served the public ruin.
35| Galba hesitated no longer and gave in to those urging the bolder course. Still, Piso was sent ahead to the camp, being a young man of great name, recent popularity, and open hostility to Titus Vinius — whether deserved or simply because angry men wanted it that way; and hatred is always the easier thing to believe. Piso had scarcely left when a rumor spread — vague at first and unconfirmed — that Otho was dead, killed there in the camp. Then, as tends to happen with big lies, some people were soon swearing they had witnessed it with their own eyes, and the credulous story spread readily among a crowd eager to believe it and careless of checking. Many thought the rumor had been deliberately made up and spread by Otho's own partisans already mixed in the crowd, who had put the false good news about in order to lure Galba out.
36| Then it was not just the common people and the ignorant crowd bursting into applause and unrestrained enthusiasm, but many knights and senators too, casting off caution now that fear was gone, broke down the doors of the Palace and rushed in to show themselves to Galba, complaining that their revenge had been snatched away from them — the very men who were the most cowardly and, as events proved, would never have dared face real danger were now loudest in words and fiercest of tongue. No one actually knew anything, yet everyone swore to it, until Galba, worn down by the lack of any solid truth and swept along by the general delusion, put on a breastplate and, unable to stand against the surging crowd because of his age and frailty, was lifted up in his chair. He met the bodyguard Julius Atticus in the Palace, who showed him a bloody sword and shouted that he had killed Otho. 'Comrade,' Galba said, 'who gave the order?' — a remarkable spirit in checking military lawlessness, fearless before threats, incorruptible before flattery.
37| By now there was no doubt left in anyone's mind at the camp, and such was the enthusiasm that, not content with simply marching in ranks, they crowded onto the platform where Galba's golden statue had stood only a little before, and surrounded Otho with their standards right in the middle of the ranks. There was no room for tribunes or centurions to get near; the common soldiers even ordered that their own officers be watched closely. Everything rang with shouting, uproar, and men urging each other on — not like the vague, half-hearted flattery of an ordinary crowd, but as each newly arriving soldier came into view, they grabbed him by the hand, embraced him in full armor, set him beside them, led him in the oath, commending the emperor to the soldiers and the soldiers to the emperor by turns. Otho did his part too, stretching out his hands to bow to the mob, throwing kisses, playing the slave in every way to win mastery. After the entire marine legion had sworn the oath to him, trusting now in his strength, and thinking it best to fire up as a body those he had so far won over one by one, he began to speak like this before the camp's rampart.
38| 'I can't tell you what to call myself as I come before you, fellow soldiers. I can't call myself a private citizen, since you have named me emperor, and I can't call myself emperor while another man holds power. Even your own name will hang in doubt until it's decided whether you have the emperor of Rome in your camp, or an enemy. Do you hear that my execution and your punishment are demanded in the same breath? That's how plain it is: we can't perish and we can't be safe except together. And Galba, gentle as he is, has probably already promised it — the man who butchered thousands of the most blameless soldiers without anyone even asking him to. A shudder runs through me whenever I remember that deadly entrance of his, and that one victory of Galba's: ordering, in full view of the city, the decimation of men who had surrendered and been taken under his protection. Those were the omens under which he entered Rome. What has his reign brought us, in the way of glory, apart from a string of killings — Obultronius Sabinus and Cornelius Marcellus cut down in Spain, Betuus Cilo slain in Gaul, Fonteius Capito murdered in Germany, Clodius Macer in Africa, Cingonius killed on the road, Turpilianus within the city, Nymphidius in the very camp? What province anywhere, what camp, is not bloodied and stained — or, as he himself puts it, "corrected and reformed"? What others call crimes, he calls remedies, dressing things up with false names: severity for savagery, thrift for greed, and your executions and humiliations he calls discipline. Seven months since Nero's death, and Icelus has already stolen more than Polyclitus, Vatinius, and Aegialus together squandered. Had Titus Vinius worn the purple himself, his greed and his license would have run less wild — instead he treats us like his own chattel, and cheap chattel at that, as men belonging to somebody else are treated. That one household alone could cover the bonus that is never paid to you, and thrown in your faces every day.'
39| 'And so that there wouldn't even be hope left in Galba's successor, he fetched from exile a man he judged the very image of his own gloom and greed. You saw it yourselves, fellow soldiers — even the heavens, with a notable storm, turned against that ill-omened adoption. The Senate feels the same, the Roman people feel the same: your courage is what's waited for. In you lies all the strength behind honest resolutions, and without you the noblest of them are powerless. I'm not calling you to war, or to danger — every soldier's weapons are already on our side. A single toga-clad cohort isn't defending Galba now, only holding him in place; and once it catches sight of you, once it takes my signal, the only contest left will be who can claim the most credit with me. There's no room for hesitation in a plan that can only be praised once it's done.' Then he ordered the armory opened. Weapons were seized at once, with none of the order or method of proper soldiering — praetorian and legionary alike went unmarked by their own insignia, mixed in with auxiliary helmets and shields. No tribune or centurion urged them on; each man was his own leader and instigator. And the chief spur to the worst of them was the grief of the decent ones.
40| Piso, by now terrified by the roar of the swelling mutiny and by shouts echoing all the way into the city, finally reached Galba, who by then had quit the palace and was already close to the Forum. Meanwhile Marius Celsus was back, bearing news that was anything but reassuring. Some counseled returning to the Palatine, others taking the Capitol, most thought the speakers' platform should be seized; the majority simply argued against whatever others proposed — and, as happens in desperate councils, the best course always seemed to be the one whose moment had already passed. Laco is said to have considered killing Titus Vinius without Galba's knowledge, either to calm the soldiers' temper with his death, or because he believed him complicit with Otho, or in the end simply out of hatred. The time and place gave him pause, since once a killing begins it's hard to stop it, and the plan was thrown into confusion by panicked messengers and by those nearest fleeing — the enthusiasm of everyone who had at first eagerly shown loyalty and spirit now flagging.
41| Galba was dragged this way and that by the shifting surges of the crowd, the basilicas and temples filling up on every side — a grim spectacle. There was no voice from the people or the crowd, only stunned faces and ears straining toward every sound; not riot, not calm, but the silence peculiar to great fear and great rage. Word reached Otho, though, that the people were arming. He ordered his men to rush ahead and seize the danger first. And so Roman soldiers, looking for all the world as though they meant to tear Vologaeses or Pacorus down from the Arsacid throne of their forefathers — when in truth they were on their way to slaughter their own old, unarmed emperor — scattered the crowd, rode down senators, and stormed into the Forum, weapons bristling, horses at a gallop. Not even the sight of the Capitol, the sanctity of the looming temples, the emperors past and future, could deter them from a crime that whoever succeeds is bound to avenge.
42| When the armed column came into close view, the standard-bearer of the cohort escorting Galba — said to have been Atilius Vergilio — tore Galba's image from his standard and dashed it to the ground. That was the signal: every soldier's loyalty swung openly to Otho, the Forum emptied as the people fled, and swords were drawn against anyone who hesitated. Beside the Lake of Curtius, in the panic of the men carrying him, Galba was thrown from his chair and rolled onto the ground. His last words were reported differently, depending on whether the teller hated or admired him. Some said he asked, pleading, what wrong he had done, and begged a few days to pay the bonus; more said he offered his throat freely to the killers — let them do it, strike, if that was what the state required. It made no difference to the men killing him what he said. Who struck the blow isn't entirely certain: some say it was Terentius, a veteran recalled to service, others Laecanius; the more common story is that Camurius, a soldier of the Fifteenth Legion, drove his sword straight into his throat and cut it. The rest hacked savagely at his legs and arms — his chest was protected by armor — most of the wounds inflicted on the body only after it was already a headless trunk, out of sheer brutality.
43| Next they fell on Titus Vinius, and here too it's disputed whether terror simply choked off his voice, or whether he cried out that Otho had given no order for his death. Whether he invented that out of fear, or confessed by it his part in the conspiracy, his life and reputation lean more toward guilt — that he was in on the crime whose cause he had been. He fell in front of the Temple of the Divine Julius, struck first behind the knee, then run through both sides by Julius Carus, a legionary soldier.
44| Our own age saw one man distinguish himself that day: Sempronius Densus. A centurion of the praetorian cohort, assigned by Galba to guard Piso, he drew his dagger and rushed at the armed men, denouncing their crime, and by turning their blows onto himself — now with his hand, now with his voice — gave the wounded Piso a chance to escape. Piso made it into the Temple of Vesta, and was taken in out of pity by a public slave and hidden in his quarters; it was not sanctity or ritual but simply a hiding place that delayed his looming death, until Sulpicius Florus of the British cohorts — recently granted citizenship by Galba himself — and Statius Murcus, a scout, arrived, sent by Otho and burning to kill him by name. They dragged Piso out and cut him down in the temple doorway.
45| It's said Otho received no killing with greater joy, gazed on no severed head with such insatiable eyes — whether because his mind, for the first time freed of all anxiety, was only then beginning to make room for delight, or because the memory of Galba's dignity and of his own friendship with Titus Vinius troubled even his callous heart with a grim image, while Piso's death, as an enemy and rival, he believed he had every right, human and divine, to enjoy. Heads fixed on spears were carried among the cohorts' standards, alongside the legion's eagle, while the killers, and those who had merely been present, vied in displaying their bloody hands, boasting — truthfully or falsely — of it as a fine and memorable deed. Vitellius later found more than a hundred and twenty petitions asking for reward for some notable service that day; he ordered every one of the petitioners hunted down and killed — not out of honor for Galba, but by the custom handed down among emperors: protection for the present, vengeance for the future.
46| You would have thought it a different Senate, a different people. Everyone rushed to the camp, each trying to outrun his neighbor, racing those already ahead, cursing Galba, praising the soldiers' judgment, kissing Otho's hand — and the more false it all was, the more of it they did. Otho did not spurn any of them individually, restraining with voice and look the soldiers' greedy, threatening mood. They clamored for the execution of Marius Celsus, consul-designate and Galba's loyal friend to the very end, hating his diligence and honesty as if they were crimes. It was plain that this was the start of killing and plunder, aimed at destroying every decent man, but Otho did not yet have the authority to stop the crime — though he could already order one. So, pretending anger, he had Celsus put in chains, declaring he was reserved for worse punishments, and by that pretense rescued him from immediate death.
47| After that everything was done at the soldiers' discretion. They chose their own praetorian prefects: Plotius Firmus, once a rank-and-file soldier, later commander of the watch, who had backed Otho while Galba still lived; and, joined with him, Licinius Proculus, suspected of having fostered Otho's plans through close intimacy with him. As city prefect they installed Flavius Sabinus, following Nero's judgment, under whom Sabinus had held the same post — though most people saw in the choice a nod to his brother Vespasian. The soldiers demanded that the customary furlough fees paid to centurions be abolished, since the ordinary soldier had been paying them like an annual tax. A quarter of each company would be scattered on leave or wandering idle in camp, so long as it paid off its centurion, and no one cared how heavy the burden was or how it was raised: soldiers bought their leisure through banditry, theft, or menial labor. Meanwhile the wealthiest soldiers were worn down by hard labor and abuse until they could buy their exemption. Once his money ran out and, worse, his energy sagged with it, a man who had gone in rich and vigorous would return to the ranks poor and slack — only for another man, corrupted by the same poverty and license, to take his place. It was this cycle that drove men toward mutiny, discord, and finally civil war. But Otho, not wanting to alienate the centurions by currying favor with the rank and file, promised to pay the annual furlough fees from his own purse — a genuinely useful reform, later made permanent by good emperors for the sake of discipline. Laco the prefect, under the pretense of exile to an island, was run through by a veteran Otho had sent ahead to kill him. Marcianus Icelus, being only a freedman, was executed openly.
48| The day, spent in crimes, ended in something worse: rejoicing. The urban praetor convened the senate; the other magistrates competed in flattery; the senators came running. They voted Otho tribunician power, the name Augustus, and every honor of the principate, all striving to erase the insults and abuse they had flung at him not long before — though no one could tell whether any of it had actually stuck in his memory, or whether he had simply forgiven the offenses, or merely postponed them, given how short his reign would prove. Otho, carried across a Forum still soaked in blood, past the heaps of the slain, up to the Capitol and then to the Palace, allowed the bodies to be given burial and cremation. Piso was laid to rest by his wife Verania and his brother Scribonianus; Titus Vinius by his daughter Crispina — both families having to seek out and buy back the heads, which the killers had kept to sell.
49| Piso was completing his thirty-first year, a man of better reputation than fortune. Claudius had killed his brother Magnus; Nero had killed his brother Crassus. Piso himself had lived long in exile, then been Caesar for four days — adopted in haste and preferred over his elder brother for no purpose but to die before him. Titus Vinius lived fifty-seven years of mixed character. His father came from a praetorian family, his maternal grandfather from the proscribed. His first military service was disgraced: he served under the governor Calvisius Sabinus, whose wife, driven by a perverse urge to inspect the camp's layout, entered by night in soldier's dress, tried her hand at the sentry rounds and other military duties with the same wantonness, and dared to commit adultery inside the headquarters itself — and Titus Vinius was accused of being her accomplice in this. So by order of Gaius Caesar he was thrown into chains, then released when the times changed. His career afterward ran smoothly; after his praetorship he was given command of a legion and approved — until he was smeared with a slave's disgrace, accused of stealing a gold cup at a dinner of Claudius's, after which Claudius ordered that Vinius alone, of all the guests, be served from earthenware the next day. Yet as proconsul Vinius governed Gallia Narbonensis with strictness and integrity; then Galba's friendship dragged him to ruin. He was bold, shrewd, quick — and, depending on where he aimed his energy, either wicked or industrious with the same force. His will, given the size of his fortune, was voided; Piso's dying wishes were honored precisely because he had died poor.
50| Galba's body lay neglected for a long time, subjected to endless abuse in the license of darkness, until Argius, a steward and one of his old slaves, gave it humble burial in his own gardens. His head, stuck on a pole and mutilated by camp servants and grooms, was set up before the tomb of Patrobius — a freedman of Nero's whom Galba had put to death — and only found the next day, at last joined to the corpse already burned. So ended Servius Galba: across seventy-three years he lived under five emperors and prospered, faring better as another man's subject than ever he did as ruler himself. He came of old noble stock and great wealth; he himself had a middling character, more free of vices than possessed of virtues. He was neither careless of his reputation nor a self-promoter; he had no appetite for others' money, was frugal with his own, and stingy with the state's. Toward friends and freedmen, when he found good ones, he was tolerant without reproach; when they were bad, his blindness went as far as complicity. But the distinction of his birth and the fear of the times served as a cover, so that what was really sluggishness got called wisdom. While he was in his prime he won military renown in Germany. As proconsul he governed Africa with moderation, and, older now, held Hispania Citerior with the same fair justice — seeming greater than a private citizen while he remained one, and, by everyone's agreement, capable of ruling, had he never ruled.
51| The city, already trembling at the brutal crime just committed and at memories of Otho's old ways, was further terrified by fresh news of Vitellius — news that had been suppressed before Galba's murder, so that only the upper German army was believed to have revolted. Grief now spread openly, and not only among the senators and knights who had a real stake in the state's fortunes — ordinary people mourned too, seeing that two of the most shameless, cowardly, and dissolute men alive had, as if by some deliberate curse of fate, been chosen to bring the empire down. And it was no longer only the recent examples of a savage peace they recalled, but the old memory of civil wars: how the city had been captured so many times by its own armies, the devastation of Italy, the plundering of the provinces, Pharsalus, Philippi, Perusia, Mutina — names notorious for public disaster. They said that even when the fight over power was between good men, the world had nearly been overturned — yet empire had survived under Julius, had survived under Augustus as victor; the Republic would have survived under Pompey or Brutus. But now, would they go to the temples to pray for Otho, or for Vitellius? Both prayers were impious, both vows detestable, between two men of whose war the only certainty was that the winner would be the worse. Some began to guess at Vespasian and the armies of the East; and though Vespasian seemed preferable to either rival, people dreaded yet another war, yet more disaster. Reports about Vespasian were mixed — though he alone, of all the emperors before him, would prove to have changed for the better.
52| Now I will lay out the origins and causes of the Vitellian uprising. After Julius Vindex had been crushed along with all his forces, the army — flushed with plunder and glory, as if it had won the richest of wars without effort or danger — preferred campaigning and battle to garrison pay. They had long endured a hard, unrewarding service, owing to the harshness of the region and climate and to the severity of discipline — a discipline unbearable enough in peacetime, and now dissolved by civil discord, with agents of corruption ready on both sides and treachery going unpunished. They had men, weapons, and horses enough, for use and for show. But before the war they had known only their own centuries and squadrons; the armies were kept apart by provincial boundaries. Then, mustered against Vindex, the legions had tested their strength against both themselves and the Gallic provinces, and now sought fresh weapons and fresh quarrels — no longer calling the Gauls allies, as before, but enemies and the conquered. Nor was there any lack of support from the part of Gaul bordering the Rhine, which had taken the same side and now proved the fiercest instigator against the 'Galbans' — the name they had coined once Vindex fell out of favor. So, hostile first to the Sequani and Aedui, and then, in proportion to each community's wealth, to others in turn, they set their minds on storming towns, ravaging farmland, and plundering households — driven not only by greed and arrogance, the besetting vices of the strong, but further provoked by Gallic defiance, since the Gauls kept boasting of the quarter of their tribute Galba had remitted and of the public gifts they had received, to the army's disgrace. There was also the rumor, cleverly spread and recklessly believed, that the legions were to be decimated and their most capable centurions dismissed. From every side came grim reports and ill omens out of the city; the colony of Lugdunum, hostile to Galba's party and stubbornly loyal to Nero's memory, was a rich source of rumors. But the greatest material for invention and belief lay in the camp itself, bred of hatred, fear, and — once the soldiers had counted their own strength — a reckless sense of security.
53| Right around the first of December the previous year, Aulus Vitellius had entered Lower Germany and gone to work carefully on the legions' winter camps: ranks were restored to many, disgrace lifted, black marks erased. Some of this was favor-currying, some was sound judgment—in particular he had honestly reversed the corrupt, grasping decisions Fonteius Capito had made in stripping or granting military rank. None of it was read as the ordinary conduct of a consular governor; everything was taken as something greater. Where strict men saw Vitellius as beneath his station, his admirers called it warmth and generosity—that he gave away his own money without limit or judgment, and other people's just as freely. And their own itch to see him rule made them read his very vices as virtues. Both armies were full of men who were, alongside the quiet and disciplined, corrupt and reckless. But it was the legionary commanders Caecina and Fabius Valens who stood out for extravagant ambition and glaring recklessness. Valens, furious at Galba—he felt he'd gotten no thanks for exposing Verginius's hesitation and crushing Capito's schemes—began stirring up Vitellius, pointing to the troops' enthusiasm: Vitellius's name, he said, was famous everywhere, while Hordeonius Flaccus would put up no resistance; Britain would come over, the German auxiliaries would follow; the provinces were unreliable, an old man's rule was fragile and would soon pass anyway—Vitellius need only open his arms and step forward to meet Fortune as she came. Verginius, he said, had been right to hesitate: son of an unknown father, from an equestrian family, he'd have been unequal to power if he'd taken it, but safe if he refused it. Vitellius was different—his father's three consulships, his censorship, his partnership in office with a Caesar, had already conferred on him the standing of an emperor, and stripped him of the safety of private life. These arguments worked on a sluggish nature, stirring him to want the throne more than to actually hope for it.
54| Meanwhile in Upper Germany, Caecina—handsome, young, a huge man, reckless in spirit, sharp-tongued, carrying himself proudly—had won over the troops. Galba had made this young man, a quaestor in Baetica who had switched to his side without hesitation, commander of a legion; then, on discovering he had embezzled public funds, ordered him prosecuted for theft. Caecina took this badly, and decided to throw everything into confusion and cover his private injuries with public disaster. Nor did the army lack seeds of discord: it had gone into the war against Vindex as a united force, and had only been transferred to Galba's side after Nero's death—and even then, the standards of Lower Germany had beaten them to the oath. The Treviri and Lingones, and other communities Galba had crushed with harsh edicts or territorial losses, mixed freely with the legions' winter quarters nearby, and this bred seditious talk; among civilians the soldiers grew more corrupted still, and sympathy for Verginius—which would have helped any other candidate—only added fuel.
55| The Lingones, following an old custom, had sent the legions gifts of clasped right hands, the token of hospitality. Their envoys, dressed in mourning and grief, moved through headquarters and barracks, complaining now of their own wrongs, now of the rewards given to neighboring communities, and—wherever soldiers' ears were receptive—stoking anger by dwelling on the army's own dangers and humiliations. They were not far from provoking mutiny when Hordeonius Flaccus ordered the envoys to leave, and to make their departure less conspicuous, had them go by night. This produced an ugly rumor: many insisted they had been killed, and that unless the boldest soldiers looked out for themselves, they too would be murdered in the dark by ignorant hands, just for having complained about present conditions. The legions bound themselves together in a silent pact; the auxiliary troops were drawn in too—suspected at first, since it looked as though cohorts and cavalry wings were being positioned to encircle and attack the legions, then, turning the same fear over more fiercely, drawn into the plot itself. Bad men find it easier to agree on war than good men do on peace.
56| The legions of Lower Germany were still made to take the customary oath to Galba on the first of January, though only after much hesitation, with a few of the senior centurions speaking up while the rest kept silent, each waiting to see how bold his neighbor would be—it is human nature to rush toward what one was reluctant to begin. But even within the legions themselves feelings differed: the First and Fifth were so unruly that some men threw stones at Galba's images; the Fifteenth and Sixteenth did no more than grumble and threaten, watching for someone else to make the first move. In Upper Germany, though, the Fourth and Twenty-Second legions, quartered together, tore down Galba's images on New Year's Day itself—the Fourth eagerly, the Twenty-Second more hesitantly, then in agreement. To avoid seeming to throw off all respect for imperial authority, they swore instead to that long-forgotten pair, the Senate and the Roman People—no officer or tribune pushing for Galba, though some, as happens in chaos, made themselves conspicuous by stirring things up. Still, no one spoke as if addressing an assembly, or from a platform—there was as yet no one to credit for it.
57| Hordeonius Flaccus, the consular governor, stood by and watched the outrage—too weak to hold back the reckless, too weak to steady the wavering, too weak to encourage the loyal; sluggish, timid, innocent only through inertia. Four centurions of the Twenty-Second—Nonius Receptus, Donatius Valens, Romilius Marcellus, Calpurnius Repentinus—were seized and put in chains by the soldiers' violence while trying to protect Galba's images. No one any longer kept faith with, or even remembered, the earlier oath. As happens in mutinies, whichever side had the greater numbers became everyone's side.
58| On the night after New Year's Day, while Vitellius was at dinner in Cologne, the standard-bearer of the Fourth Legion brought him news: the Fourth and Twenty-Second had thrown down Galba's images and sworn to the Senate and People of Rome. That oath looked hollow. It seemed the moment to seize a wavering fortune and put forward a candidate. Vitellius sent men to the legions and their commanders announcing that the army of Upper Germany had broken with Galba; therefore either they must fight the rebels, or, if peace and unity were preferred, they must make an emperor—and it was less risky to accept one than to go looking for one.
59| The winter camp of the First Legion was nearest, and Fabius Valens was the most eager of the commanders. The next day he entered Cologne with the legion's cavalry and auxiliary horse and hailed Vitellius as emperor. The legions of the same province followed, with tremendous enthusiasm; and on the third of January the army of Upper Germany dropped its high-sounding talk of Senate and Roman People and went over to Vitellius—proof enough that for the two days before, they hadn't really been thinking about the state at all. The people of Cologne, the Treviri, and the Lingones matched the army's fervor, offering troops, horses, arms, and money, each according to his strength, resources, and ingenuity. It wasn't only the leading men of the colonies and camps—who had great hopes from present abundance and an assured victory—but the rank and file too, ordinary soldiers, who handed over their travel funds, their belts, and their silver-decorated harness ornaments in place of coin, driven by impulse, momentum, and greed.
60| So Vitellius, praising the soldiers' enthusiasm, replaced the freedmen who usually ran the imperial administration with Roman knights, paid centurions' exemption fees out of the treasury, and again and again approved the savagery of soldiers demanding executions, only rarely tricking them out of a victim by pretending to have him imprisoned instead. Pompeius Propinquus, procurator of Belgica, was killed at once; Julius Burdo, prefect of the German fleet, he cunningly spirited away. The army's fury had been kindled against Burdo for allegedly framing, then plotting against, Fonteius Capito. Capito's memory was fondly kept, and among men in this kind of rage, killing openly was easy, but pardoning could only be done by deception—so Burdo was kept under guard and released only after the victory, once the soldiers' hatreds had cooled. Meanwhile a centurion named Crispinus was thrown to them as a scapegoat—he had stained his own hands with Capito's blood, which made him both an obvious target for the soldiers' demands and cheap enough for Vitellius to sacrifice.
61| Julius Civilis was next rescued from danger—he held great sway among the Batavians, and there was fear that punishing him would alienate that fierce people. There were, in the territory of the Lingones, eight cohorts of Batavians, auxiliaries of the Fourteenth Legion, who had split off from the legion amid the general turmoil; depending on which way they leaned, they carried real weight either for or against the cause. Vitellius ordered the execution of the centurions Nonius, Donatius, Romilius, and Calpurnius, mentioned above, convicting them of loyalty—the gravest possible charge among rebels. Valerius Asiaticus, governor of Belgica, whom Vitellius soon made his son-in-law, joined the cause, as did Junius Blaesus, governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, bringing the Italian legion and the Tauriana cavalry wing stationed at Lyon. Nor was there any delay before the forces in Raetia joined as well; even in Britain there was no hesitation.
62| The governor there was Trebellius Maximus, held in contempt and hated by the army for his greed and corruption. His unpopularity was fed by Roscius Coelius, commander of the Twentieth Legion, long at odds with him—but the chaos of civil war let their quarrel erupt more viciously than before. Trebellius accused Coelius of stirring mutiny and wrecking discipline; Coelius accused Trebellius of plundering and impoverishing the legions. Amid this ugly feuding between commanders, the army's discipline broke down, and things went so far that Trebellius, jeered even by the auxiliary troops and abandoned as cohorts and cavalry wings flocked to Coelius, fled to Vitellius. The province stayed quiet despite losing its governor: the legionary commanders ran it, equal in legal authority, though Coelius held more real power through sheer boldness.
63| With the British army now added to his side, Vitellius—formidable in manpower and resources—assigned two commanders and two lines of advance for the war: Fabius Valens was to win over the Gallic provinces, or ravage them if they refused, and break into Italy by the Cottian Alps; Caecina was ordered to take the shorter route, descending by the Pennine passes. Valens was given picked troops from the army of Lower Germany, along with the eagle of the Fifth Legion and various cohorts and cavalry wings—some forty thousand armed men in all; Caecina led thirty thousand out of Upper Germany, the core of them the Twenty-First Legion. German auxiliaries were added to each force, and from them Vitellius also reinforced his own reserves, intending to follow behind with the full weight of the war.
64| A strange contrast between the army and its commander: the soldiers pressed forward, demanding weapons, while the Gauls trembled and the Spanish provinces hesitated—winter was no obstacle, nor the delays of a slack peace. Italy must be invaded, Rome seized: in civil war nothing is safer than speed, where action matters more than deliberation. Vitellius lay idle, savoring in advance the fortune of the principate through lazy luxury and extravagant feasts, drunk by midday and heavy with gorging, while the fire and drive of his soldiers took over the general's duties on their own, as if their commander were present, spurring the eager and the reluctant alike with hope or fear. Drawn up and eager, they demanded the signal to march. The name Germanicus was tacked onto Vitellius at once; even in victory he refused to be called Caesar. A happy omen came to Fabius Valens and the army he was leading to war: on the very day they set out, an eagle flew gently ahead of the column, as if guiding the march, matching its pace to theirs. So long and so joyful was the soldiers' shouting, so calm the fearless bird, that no one doubted it was a sign of a great and prosperous outcome.
65| They approached the Treveri without concern, as allies. But at Divodurum, a town of the Mediomatrici, though the people received them with every courtesy, a sudden panic seized the troops. They grabbed their weapons on the spot to massacre an innocent population—not for plunder or the itch to loot, but out of a wild, unreasoning fury, all the harder to check for having no clear cause. Only the general's pleas checked them short of destroying the town, but still some four thousand people were killed. The terror spread through Gaul, so that as the column advanced, whole communities came out to meet it with their magistrates and prayers, their women and children lying prostrate in the roads—and every other appeal that might soften an enemy's rage, offered up not in war but simply to keep the peace.
66| Fabius Valens received news of Galba's murder and Otho's accession while among the Leuci. It stirred no joy or fear in his soldiers' hearts—they were still turning war over in their minds. For the Gauls, hesitation vanished: they hated Otho and Vitellius equally, but feared Vitellius as well. Next came the territory of the Lingones, loyal to the Vitellian cause. They were welcomed warmly and vied with the troops in good behavior, but the joy was short-lived, spoiled by the unruliness of the cohorts that Fabius Valens had detached from the Fourteenth Legion, as mentioned earlier, and attached to his own army. Quarrels broke out first between the Batavians and the legionaries, then outright brawling, as each side gathered its own partisans, and it nearly came to open battle—until Valens punished a few offenders and reminded the Batavians, who had all but forgotten military discipline, of their obligations. A pretext for war was sought against the Aedui, but in vain: ordered to hand over money and weapons, they threw in free supplies besides. What the Aedui did from fear, the people of Lyon did gladly. But the Italian Legion and the Tauriana cavalry wing were withdrawn from Lyon; the Eighteenth Cohort was left there, in its usual winter quarters, as agreed. Manlius Valens, commander of the Italian Legion, despite having served the Vitellian cause well, received no honor from Vitellius: Fabius had slandered him behind his back, all the while praising him openly, so that he would be caught off guard, unsuspecting.
67| An old rivalry between Lyon and Vienne had been rekindled by the recent war. Each side had inflicted losses on the other, more frequent and bitter than could be explained simply by the fighting over Nero and Galba. Galba, seizing on his anger as the occasion, had diverted Lyon's revenues into the imperial treasury, while showing great favor to Vienne—hence the rivalry, the resentment, and, with only a river between them, a hatred that linked the two towns. So the people of Lyon set about stirring up individual soldiers, pushing them toward the destruction of Vienne—recalling how their own colony had been besieged by the Viennese, how they had aided Vindex's efforts, and how they had lately enrolled legions to garrison Galba's cause. Having laid out their grievances, they dangled the size of the plunder before the soldiers—no longer whispered encouragement now, but open public pleading: go as avengers, they said, wipe out this nest of Gallic rebellion; everything there is foreign and hostile; don't abandon us—a Roman colony, part of your own army, partners in your fortunes good and bad, to their fury if the tide should turn against you.
68| These arguments and many more in the same vein had so worked on the soldiers that not even the officers and commanders of the party thought the army's fury could be put out. Aware of their own peril, the people of Vienne, carrying olive branches and the sacred fillets of suppliants, met the advancing column, clutching at weapons, knees, and footsteps, and so turned the soldiers' hearts; Valens added three hundred sesterces per man as further persuasion. Then the antiquity and standing of the colony carried weight, and Fabius's words in support of the safety and preservation of Vienne fell on receptive ears. Still, the town was formally stripped of its weapons, and private citizens contributed provisions of every kind to help supply the soldiers. But it was widely and steadily rumored that Valens himself had been bought off with a great sum of money. Long known for shabby means, he had suddenly grown rich, and hid the change in his fortunes badly—his appetites, sharpened by long poverty, now knew no bounds, an old man made prodigal by a youth spent in want. The army then advanced by slow marches through the territory of the Allobroges and the Vocontii, the commander himself turning each day's route and the pick of campsites into merchandise, squeezing corrupt payoffs out of landowners and town magistrates—so openly threatening that he set torches to the town of Luc (a municipality of the Vocontii) until he was bought off with money. And whenever money ran short as a bribe, he let himself be appeased with seduction and adultery instead. So they came at last to the Alps.
69| Caecina drew more blood and plunder still. His already turbulent temper had been provoked by the Helvetii, a Gallic people once famous for arms and manpower, and still known by reputation, though they knew nothing of Galba's murder and refused to accept Vitellius as emperor. The war began with the greed and haste of the Twenty-First Legion, which seized money meant to pay the garrison of a fort that the Helvetii had long guarded and paid for with their own soldiers. The Helvetii, deeply resentful, intercepted letters being carried in the name of the army of Germany to the Pannonian legions, and held a centurion and some of the soldiers under arrest. Caecina, hungry for war, moved to punish every offense the moment it occurred, before there was time for regret: camp was struck at once, the fields laid waste, and a place built up over a long peace into something like a town, popular for its pleasant hot springs, was plundered. Messengers were sent to summon the Raetian auxiliaries to attack the Helvetii from the rear once they turned to face the legion.
70| The Helvetii, bold before the danger came, grew fearful once it arrived. Though in the first confusion they had chosen Claudius Severus as their leader, they did not know how to handle weapons, keep formation, or agree on any single plan. A battle against veteran troops was ruinous; a siege was hopeless too, their walls crumbled with age. On one side stood Caecina with a strong army; on the other, the Raetian cavalry and cohorts and the young men of Raetia itself, trained to arms and accustomed to military discipline. Everywhere there was ravaging and slaughter: the Helvetii themselves wandered aimlessly, weapons thrown aside, many wounded or scattered, and fled to Mount Vocetius. A cohort of Thracians was sent in at once and drove them off; Germans and Raetians hunted them down, cutting them apart through the woods and wherever they had gone to ground. Thousands upon thousands died; thousands upon thousands more were dragged off into slavery. When, with everything else destroyed, the army marched in force on Aventicum, the tribal capital, envoys were sent to surrender the town, and the surrender was accepted. Caecina put to death Julius Alpinus, one of the leading men, as the instigator of the war; the rest he left to Vitellius's mercy or cruelty.
71| It's hard to say whether the Helvetian envoys found the emperor or his soldiers less willing to be appeased. The soldiers demanded the destruction of the whole people, brandishing weapons and fists in the envoys' faces. Even Vitellius did not hold back his words and threats—until Claudius Cossus, one of the envoys, a man of known eloquence, masked his skill in speaking behind a show of fitting anxiety, which made him all the more persuasive, and calmed the soldiers' temper. As is the way with a crowd, fickle and given to sudden shifts, they were as quick to pity now as they had been extreme in cruelty before. Weeping freely and pressing their better case with steady insistence, the envoys won pardon and safety for their people.
72| Caecina spent a few days among the Helvetii waiting for word of Vitellius's decision, while also preparing to cross the Alps, when he received welcome news from Italy: the Silian cavalry wing, stationed along the Po, had sworn allegiance to Vitellius. The Silians had known Vitellius as proconsul in Africa; later summoned by Nero to be sent ahead into Egypt, then recalled because of the war with Vindex, they had remained in Italy, and now, urged on by their squadron commanders—who knew nothing of Otho but were bound to Vitellius—they were swayed by the strength of the approaching legions and the reputation of the army of Germany, and went over to his side. As a kind of gift to the new emperor, they brought with them the strongest towns of the region beyond the Po: Milan, Novara, Ivrea, and Vercelli. Caecina learned of this directly from the men themselves. Since the greater part of Italy could not be defended by the garrison of a single cavalry wing, he sent ahead cohorts of Gauls, Lusitanians, and Britons, and detachments of Germans along with the Petriana cavalry wing. He himself hesitated briefly over whether to turn through the Raetian mountains into Noricum against the procurator Petronius Urbicus, who had called up auxiliary troops and broken down the river bridges, and was thought loyal to Otho. But fearing he might lose the cohorts and cavalry already sent ahead, and calculating too that holding Italy would bring the greater glory—besides, wherever the decisive fighting fell out, Noricum would end up swept in among the victor's other spoils regardless—he led his infantry reserves and the heavy column of the legions over the Pennine Pass, through Alps still deep in winter snow.
73| Meanwhile Otho, against everyone's expectation, did not sink into indulgence or idleness. He put off his pleasures, hid his taste for luxury, and arranged everything to look the part of an emperor — and that only made him more alarming, since virtues that were false and vices bound to return are always more frightening than open ones. He ordered Marius Celsus, the consul-designate, brought up to the Capitol — Celsus had only been kept chained for show, to shield him from the soldiers' fury — and there, at the cost of a man both famous and loathed within his own party, Otho angled for a name for mercy. Celsus openly admitted the charge: that he had stayed loyal to Galba. He turned it into a badge of honor rather than a confession. Otho did not act as though forgiving him; instead he called on the gods to witness their reconciliation, took him at once among his closest friends, and later chose him as one of his commanders in the war. To Celsus it seemed almost fated: his loyalty stayed intact and unlucky even under Otho. His survival pleased the leading men of the state, was celebrated by the common people, and even the soldiers were not sorry for it — they admired in him the very quality that had made them furious with him before.
74| An equal but very differently caused rejoicing followed the killing of Tigellinus, which the crowd had demanded and got. Ofonius Tigellinus, born of obscure parents, filthy in his boyhood, shameless in his old age, had won command of the night watch and of the praetorian guard — and other rewards usually earned by virtue — through vice instead, because that was the quicker road. He went on to practice cruelty, then greed, then crimes fit for a man, corrupting Nero to every kind of outrage, daring some things Nero never knew about, and finally deserting and betraying him. For that reason no one was demanded for punishment more insistently than he was — by people moved by opposite feelings, some out of hatred for Nero, some out of longing for him. Under Galba he was protected by the influence of Titus Vinius, who claimed Tigellinus had once saved his daughter. He had indeed saved her — not out of mercy, since he had killed so many others, but as insurance for the future; for the worst men, distrusting the present and dreading change, are always buying private favor against public hatred. So it was never innocence he cared about, only immunity in turn. This made the people angrier still, and the old hatred of Tigellinus was sharpened by fresh resentment of Titus Vinius. They swarmed from every part of the city into the Palace and the forums, and, wherever the mob has the most license, poured into the circus and theaters, shouting seditious slogans, until Tigellinus, receiving news at the springs of Sinuessa that his final hour had come, fouled his already infamous life with a death as late and as shameful as the rest of it — cutting his throat with a razor amid the kisses and embraces of his mistresses, dragging the act out in disgusting delay.
75| Around the same time Calvia Crispinilla was called to account and demanded for punishment, but escaped the danger through various evasions and because the emperor pretended not to notice — his reputation suffered for it. She had been the tutor of Nero's vices, had crossed to Africa to stir up Clodius Macer to rebellion, and had worked, none too subtly, to starve the Roman people. Yet afterward she won the goodwill of the whole state, propped up by a consular marriage, and remained untouched under Galba, Otho, and Vitellius alike — later powerful again through money and childlessness, both of which count equally in good times and bad.
76| Meanwhile letters passed frequently between Otho and Vitellius, laced with flattery fit for courting a woman, offering money, favor, and any quiet retreat Vitellius might choose for a life of extravagant ease. Vitellius made the same kind of offers in return — at first with some restraint, in a foolish and undignified pretense on both sides — but soon, as if quarreling, they began hurling each other's sexual scandals and crimes back and forth, and neither one was lying. Otho recalled the envoys Galba had sent out and dispatched them again, in the Senate's name, to both German armies, to the Italian legion, and to the forces stationed at Lyon. The envoys stayed on with Vitellius — too readily for it to look like they'd been detained. The praetorian soldiers Otho had attached to them as a show of courtesy were sent back before they could mix with the legions. Fabius Valens, writing in the German army's name, sent letters of his own to the praetorian and city cohorts, boasting of his party's strength and offering reconciliation — while pointedly reproaching them, too, for handing the empire over to Otho when it had long since been given to Vitellius.
77| So both sides tried to win over the troops with promises and threats together — on the grounds that they were no match in war and would lose nothing by peace — yet none of this shook the loyalty of the praetorians. Still, assassins were sent by Otho into Germany and by Vitellius into Rome. Both attempts failed, but Vitellius's men escaped without harm, since in a city of such size men could deceive each other simply through mutual anonymity; Otho's agents were betrayed by their unfamiliar faces, in a camp where everyone knew everyone. Vitellius wrote to Titianus, Otho's brother, threatening death to him and his son unless Vitellius's own mother and children were kept safe. Both households survived — under Otho perhaps out of fear; Vitellius, as the eventual winner, got the credit for mercy.
78| The first thing to give Otho confidence was news from Illyricum that the legions of Dalmatia, Pannonia, and Moesia had sworn allegiance to him. The same news came from Spain, and Cluvius Rufus was praised in an official edict — but it was soon learned that Spain had already gone over to Vitellius. Even Aquitania, though bound to Otho's cause by Julius Cordus, did not stay loyal long. Nowhere was there real loyalty or affection: provinces swung one way and another out of fear and necessity. The same dread turned the province of Narbonensis to Vitellius, since it was an easy crossing to the armies nearest and strongest. The distant provinces, and whatever forces were separated by sea, remained with Otho — not from devotion to his cause, but because the name of Rome and the pretext of the Senate carried real weight, and because he had been the first one they heard of. Vespasian brought the army in Judea, and Mucianus the legions of Syria, to swear the oath to Otho; at the same time Egypt and all the provinces turned toward the East were held in his name. Africa fell in line too, the movement starting at Carthage without even waiting for the authority of the proconsul Vipstanus Apronianus: Crescens, a freedman of Nero — for even men like this make themselves part of the state in bad times — had given the people a public feast to celebrate the new reign, and the crowd rushed to embrace it all without restraint. The rest of the African towns followed Carthage's lead.
79| With the armies and provinces thus split, Vitellius needed war to seize the fortune of the principate, while Otho carried out the duties of emperor as though at full peace — some of it done for the dignity of the state, but much of it, in his haste, done at the cost of decency for the sake of present advantage. He took the consulship himself with his brother Titianus for the term up to the Kalends of March; he assigned the following months to Verginius, as some consolation to the German army, and paired Pompeius Vopiscus with Verginius on the pretext of an old friendship — though most people read it as a favor to the people of Vienne. The remaining consulships stood as Nero or Galba had already arranged them: Caelius and Flavius Sabinus for the term into July, Arrius Antoninus and Marius Celsus for the term into September — offices that not even Vitellius, once victorious, took away. But Otho added priesthoods and augurships, crowning honors already given to old men who had earned them, or restored to young nobles just back from exile the ancestral priesthoods of their fathers and grandfathers, as some comfort for what they had suffered. He restored senatorial rank to Cadius Rufus, Pedius Blaesus, and [a name lost in the text], Saevinus — men who had fallen under Claudius and Nero on charges of extortion. It suited those forgiving them to relabel what had been greed as treason instead, a charge so hated at the time that even good laws were dying because of it.
80| With the same open-handedness he tried to win over the loyalty of towns and provinces as well: he granted new families of settlers to Hispalis and Emerita, full Roman citizenship to the whole people of the Lingones, and the towns of the Moors to the province of Baetica as a gift; he handed out new legal privileges to Cappadocia and to Africa — more for show than to last. Amid all this, though the pressing demands of the moment and urgent business might have excused it, he had not even then forgotten his old attachments: by decree of the Senate he restored the statues of Poppaea. He is also believed to have considered reviving the memory of Nero, hoping to win over the crowd by it. Indeed some people did put up images of Nero, and there were days when the people and soldiers hailed Otho as 'Nero Otho,' as if adding that name lent him distinction and glory. He himself left the matter hanging, afraid to forbid it and ashamed to accept it.
81| With everyone's attention turned to the civil war, foreign threats went unwatched. That made the Rhoxolani, a Sarmatian people, bolder: having cut down two cohorts the previous winter, they invaded Moesia in great hope, some nine thousand horsemen strong, driven more by confidence and the taste for plunder after their earlier success than by any wish to fight. So, catching them scattered and off guard, the Third Legion and its auxiliaries struck without warning. The Romans stood fully prepared for battle, while the Sarmatians were caught scattered, or slowed under the plunder they'd greedily piled onto their horses; their mounts, losing footing on the slick ground, lost speed too — and they went down as though bound hand and foot. It's remarkable to say, but all of a Sarmatian's fighting power lies, so to speak, outside himself: nothing is so useless as they are on foot, but when they charge in squadrons almost no line can stand against them. This time, though, on a wet day with the ice thawed, neither their lances nor their swords — which they wield two-handed, extremely long — were of any use, since their horses kept slipping and the weight of their armored coats dragged them down. That armor, worn by their chiefs and noblest men, is stitched together from iron plates or the hardest leather; it turns aside a blow perfectly well, but once its wearer is thrown down by the enemy's charge he cannot get back up, and men sank helplessly into the deep, soft snow besides. The Roman soldier, light in his breastplate, would close in with a javelin or lance as needed, then finish off the defenseless Sarmatian at close range with a light sword — for it is not their custom to carry a shield — until the few who survived the battle hid themselves away in the marshes, where the savagery of the winter, or their wounds, finished them off. When this news reached Rome, Marcus Aponius, governor of Moesia, was honored with a triumphal statue, and Fulvus Aurelius, Julianus Tettius, and Numisius Lupus, the legionary commanders, were awarded the ornaments of a consul — Otho delighted, and claiming the glory for himself, as though he too had brought the state good fortune in war through his own generals and his own armies.
82| Meanwhile a small incident, from a quarter where nobody expected trouble, nearly destroyed the city. Otho had ordered the Seventeenth Cohort brought up from the colony at Ostia; arming it was entrusted to Varius Crispinus, a tribune of the Praetorians. To get the job done while the camp was quiet, he had the cohort's wagons loaded at nightfall, with the armory left open. The hour bred suspicion, the errand bred accusation, and an attempt at quiet efficiency turned into a riot: the sight of weapons among drunken men stirred their appetite for weapons. The soldiers grumbled and accused the tribunes and centurions of treachery, claiming the arms were meant to equip senators' households for Otho's destruction. Some were simply ignorant and heavy with wine; the worst of them saw a chance for plunder; the rank and file, as always, were eager for any kind of upheaval, and night had stripped away the restraint that keeps better men in line. They cut down the tribune who tried to stop the riot, and the sternest of the centurions with him; they seized weapons, bared their swords, mounted up, and rode for the city and the Palace.
83| Otho was hosting a large dinner party, full of the city's leading men and women, when the news came. They panicked, unsure whether this was a random soldiers' frenzy or a plot by the emperor, unsure whether it was more dangerous to stay and be caught or to flee and be scattered. One moment they feigned composure, the next their fear showed through, and all the while they watched Otho's face. As happens when minds are already tipped toward suspicion, Otho was feared because he was afraid. But he was as alarmed for the senate's danger as for his own: he sent the Praetorian prefects at once to calm the soldiers' anger, and ordered everyone to leave the banquet quickly. Then indeed the magistrates scattered in every direction, throwing off the badges of office, avoiding the crowds of attendants and slaves; old men and women crept through back streets in the dark, few reaching their own homes, most seeking the houses of friends, or, according to how humble a client each man had, some uncertain hiding place.
84| The soldiers' rush was not even stopped at the doors of the Palace; they burst into the banquet, demanding to be shown Otho, and wounded the tribune Julius Martialis and Vitellius Saturninus, commander of a legion, as the two tried to block their way. Weapons and threats were everywhere, aimed now at centurions and tribunes, now at the whole senate, minds crazed with blind panic; and because they could fix on no single target for their rage, they demanded license against everyone, until Otho, standing on his couch against all imperial dignity, barely held them back with pleading and tears. They went back to camp unwilling, and no less guilty than before. The next day the city lay shut up as if captured: streets nearly empty, the common people gloomy, the soldiers' faces cast down, showing more sullenness than repentance. The prefects Licinius Proculus and Plotius Firmus addressed them company by company, each in his own manner, one gentler, one harsher. The upshot was a payment of five thousand sesterces to every soldier; only then did Otho dare enter the camp. There the tribunes and centurions crowded around him, throwing down their badges of rank, begging for peace and safety. The men sensed the resentment this stirred and, falling back into obedience, themselves demanded the ringleaders of the mutiny be put to death.
85| Otho faced a turbulent situation and a divided army: the best of the soldiers wanted the present license curbed, but the mass of them, the majority, took pleasure in riot and in an emperor who courted their favor, and could easily be pushed toward civil war through disorder and plunder. He also reasoned that power won by crime could not be held by sudden restraint and old-fashioned severity. Torn by anxiety over the city's danger and the senate's peril, he finally spoke to them: 'It is not to kindle your affection for me, fellow soldiers, nor to spur your courage — both are already superb — that I have come, but to ask you to temper your own boldness and set some limit to your devotion to me. The recent uproar began not from greed or hatred, the usual causes that drive armies into disorder, nor from cowardice or fear of danger: your excessive loyalty stirred you up more fiercely than wisely. Honorable motives, if judgment is not applied, often lead to disastrous outcomes. We are marching to war. Does the situation, does the speed events demand, allow every report to be heard openly, every plan discussed with everyone present? Soldiers sometimes need not to know certain things as much as to know others. That is how a commander's authority works, how strict discipline works: much must simply be ordered, even to centurions and tribunes, without their being told why. If every man is free to ask why he is ordered, obedience dies, and with it, command itself. Or will weapons be seized again in the dead of night? Will one or two ruined, drunken men — for I cannot believe more than that went mad in the recent panic — stain their hands with a centurion's or a tribune's blood, and burst into their own emperor's tent?'
86| 'You did that, in your minds, for my sake. But amid confusion, darkness, and general chaos, an opportunity can open up against me as well. If Vitellius and his followers were given the choice of what state of mind, what disposition to wish on us, what would they pray for but mutiny and discord — that soldier not obey centurion, centurion not obey tribune, so that infantry and cavalry, thrown into confusion, rush together to destruction? Obedience, fellow soldiers, not interrogation of your commanders' orders, is what holds military affairs together, and the bravest army in the actual crisis is the one that was quietest before the crisis. Keep your weapons and your courage; leave judgment and the direction of your valor to me. The fault was a few men's; the punishment will fall on two. The rest of you, wipe out the memory of that shameful night. Let no army anywhere ever hear such words raised against the senate. The head of the empire, the glory of every province — by Hercules, not even the Germans whom Vitellius is now stirring up against us would dare call it to account. Would any true sons of Italy, any genuine Roman youth, demand blood and slaughter against the order whose splendor and glory outshine the squalor and obscurity of the Vitellian faction? Vitellius has seized a few tribes and holds something like an army; the senate is with us. So it stands: on this side the republic, on that the republic's enemies. And do you think this beautiful city stands on houses and roofs and piles of stone? Those mute, lifeless things can perish and be rebuilt easily enough; but the permanence of our affairs, the peace of the nations, my safety and yours, are secured by the senate's survival. This order, founded under good omens by the father and founder of our city, and continued unbroken from the kings down to the emperors, as we received it from our ancestors, let us hand on to those who come after us. For as senators are born from you, so emperors are born from senators.'
87| The speech, aimed at calming and softening the soldiers' feelings, along with the measured severity of the punishment — he had ordered execution of no more than two men — was received with gratitude, and for the moment those who could not be restrained were pacified. Still, quiet did not return to the city: the clatter of weapons and the look of war remained. Though the soldiers caused no general disturbance, they were scattered through private houses in plain clothes, and there was a spiteful watchfulness turned on anyone whom rank, wealth, or some conspicuous distinction had exposed to rumor. Many even believed that Vitellian soldiers had come into the city to sound out party sympathies. So everything was full of suspicion, and hardly any household felt safe even behind closed doors. But the greatest anxiety was in public, where people's expressions and moods shifted with whatever rumor reached them, for fear of seeming to doubt in uncertain times or to show too little joy at good news. When the senate was finally forced to convene, striking the right note on everything was a delicate business: too stubborn a silence looked suspicious, too much freedom of speech looked suspect, and for a man so recently a private citizen saying the same things, flattery was easily recognized. So they turned their statements this way and that, calling Vitellius an enemy and a parricide; the most cautious among them used only conventional insults, while a few hurled genuine accusations, but always amid noise, where many voices spoke at once, drowning each other out in a confusion of words.
88| Prodigies too added to the terror, reported from various sources: in the forecourt of the Capitol, the reins of the chariot on which the statue of Victory stood had slipped from her hands; a figure larger than human had burst from the shrine of Juno; on the island in the Tiber, the statue of the deified Julius swung round on its own — no wind stirring, the day dead calm — and ended up facing east instead of west; an ox had spoken in Etruria; there were unusual births among animals, and many other things that in earlier, cruder ages were noted even in peacetime but now are reported only in times of fear. But the chief terror, one that threatened destruction both present and future, was a sudden flood of the Tiber: swollen immensely, it tore down the wooden bridge, and, thrown back by the wreckage blocking its way, poured out not only over the low, flat parts of the city but even over places normally thought safe from such disasters. Many were swept away in the open streets, more caught in shops and in their beds. Famine struck the common people through loss of work and shortage of food. The foundations of the tenement blocks were undermined by the standing water, then collapsed as the river receded. And as soon as minds were free from immediate danger, the very fact that the flood had blocked the Campus Martius and the Flaminian Way — Otho's route as he prepared his campaign — was twisted from chance or natural cause into a prodigy and omen of disasters to come.
89| Otho purified the city and weighed his war plans. Since the Pennine and Cottian Alps and the other approaches to Gaul were blocked by Vitellius's forces, he decided to attack Narbonese Gaul with a strong fleet loyal to his cause. He had enrolled the survivors of the massacre at the Milvian Bridge, along with those Galba had cruelly kept under guard, into a legion, giving everyone else hope of honored service later on. He added to the fleet the urban cohorts and most of the praetorians - men who were the strength and sinew of the army, and who served the commanders themselves as advisers and as watchmen. Overall command of the expedition went to the senior centurions Antonius Novellus and Suedius Clemens, and to Aemilius Pacensis, whose tribunate Galba had stripped and Otho had restored. Charge of the ships stayed with the freedman Moschus, kept on to keep an eye on the loyalty of his social betters. Suetonius Paulinus, Marius Celsus, and Annius Gallus were named commanders of the infantry and cavalry, but the greatest trust fell on Licinius Proculus, prefect of the Praetorian Guard. Tireless in city soldiering but green in real war, he undercut Paulinus's authority, Celsus's energy, and Gallus's steadiness by slandering each in turn - the easiest thing in the world to do - and so this crooked, clever man got ahead of better, more modest ones.
90| Around this time Cornelius Dolabella was removed to the colony at Aquinum - not held under close or secret guard, and charged with no crime, but marked out simply because of his old name and his kinship with Galba. Otho ordered many magistrates and a large share of the ex-consuls to accompany him on campaign, not as partners or aides in the war but dressed up as his entourage - among them Lucius Vitellius, treated exactly like the rest, neither as an emperor's brother nor as an enemy. So anxiety stirred through the city; no rank was free of fear or danger. The Senate's foremost men, weakened by age and dulled by long peace; the nobility, sluggish and having forgotten war; knights ignorant of soldiering - the harder all of them tried to hide and bury their fear, the more plainly it showed. On the other hand there was no shortage of men whose foolish vanity made them buy conspicuous weapons and showy horses, and some who bought lavish banquets and instruments of pleasure as if these were the equipment of war. Sensible men worried about peace and the state; the shallowest, blind to what was coming, swelled with empty hope; many, their credit already wrecked, had been anxious in peacetime and now, with everything in turmoil, felt eager - safest, in fact, amid the uncertainty.
91| But the common people, and the populace, whose very numbers left it with no share in the common concerns, began little by little to feel the war's damage, as all the money got diverted to the soldiers' use and food prices tightened - hardships that Vindex's uprising, with the city then untouched and the war a provincial affair, had not inflicted on ordinary people in the same way, since that had seemed almost a foreign war fought between the legions and the Gauls. For from the time the deified Augustus settled the state of the Caesars, the Roman people had fought its wars far off, for one man's worry or glory alone. Under Tiberius and Gaius only setbacks in peace touched the republic. Scribonianus's attempt against Claudius was crushed the moment word of it broke. Nero was toppled more by messages and rumors than by arms. But now legions and fleets, and - rare in other times - the praetorian and urban soldiers too, were being marched into battle, with the East and the West and every force on both sides left behind them: had other commanders been fighting, there was material here for a long war. Some tried to delay Otho's departure, citing the religious scruple that the sacred shields had not yet been put away; he brushed aside all delay, as he said it had also destroyed Nero. And Caecina had already crossed the Alps and was pressing him on.
92| On the day before the Ides of March, having commended the state to the senators, Otho granted to recalled exiles what remained of Nero's confiscated property not yet paid into the treasury - a most just gift, and impressive to look at, but by then, after the long-ago rush to collect it, of little practical value. Then, calling an assembly, he praised the majesty of the city and the united will of people and Senate on his behalf, and spoke moderately against the Vitellian side, blaming the legions' folly rather than any daring on their part, and making no mention of Vitellius at all - whether from restraint on Otho's own part, or because the speechwriter, fearing for himself, held back from insulting Vitellius, since it was believed that just as Suetonius Paulinus and Marius Celsus guided Otho's war councils, so Galerius Trachalus's talent shaped his public business. Some in fact recognized the very style of the speech, familiar from frequent use in the forum, broad and resonant, well suited to filling the crowd's ears. The shouts and cries of the mob followed the usual pattern of excessive, false flattery: they competed in enthusiasm and prayers as if escorting the dictator Caesar or the emperor Augustus, not out of fear or love but from sheer appetite for servility - as happens in households, each man driven by his own private motive, with the public honor already grown cheap. Otho then set out, leaving the city's peace and the cares of government to his brother Salvius Titianus.
1| Now fortune, in another part of the world, was laying the groundwork and causes of a new imperial power—one that mixed fortune would make now a blessing, now a horror for the state, and for the emperors themselves either triumph or ruin. Titus Vespasian had been sent by his father from Judaea, while Galba still lived, and gave as his reason for the journey his duty to the emperor and his own ripening age for seeking office. But the crowd, always eager to invent, had spread the story that he'd been summoned for adoption. The gossip fed on the emperor's age and childlessness and on the state's habit of restlessness until one man is chosen—too many candidates in play. Titus's own reputation added fuel: a character equal to any fortune, a handsome face carrying a certain majesty, his father's run of success, prophetic omens, and—since minds inclined to believe turn even accidents into signs—chance events read as portents. When at Corinth, a city of Achaia, he received sure news of Galba's death, and there were those on hand insisting that Vitellius had taken up arms and war was underway, he grew anxious and, calling in a few friends, weighed every angle. If he pressed on to Rome, he'd win no credit for the courtesy, since it would be paid to someone else's honor, and he'd become a hostage to either Vitellius or Otho. If he turned back, the victor's resentment was certain—but the victory itself was still uncertain, and if his father joined the winning side, the son would be excused. But if Vespasian himself seized power, then in the business of war, old grievances would have to be forgotten.
2| Tossed between hope and fear by these and similar thoughts, hope won out. Some believed that longing for Queen Berenice turned him back; his youthful heart was not indifferent to Berenice, but that never got in the way of business—he'd spent his youth enjoying its pleasures, more restrained under his own command than his father's. So he sailed along the coast of Achaia and Asia, keeping the left shore of the sea, and made for the islands of Rhodes and Cyprus, then pushed on toward Syria in bolder stretches. There the urge struck him to visit the temple of Paphian Venus, famous among natives and foreigners alike. It won't take long to lay out, briefly, the origins of the cult, the temple's rites, and the goddess's form—for nowhere else is she worshipped quite this way.
3| Old tradition says the temple's founder was King Aerias; some claim that name belongs to the goddess herself. A more recent story holds that Cinyras consecrated the temple, and that the goddess was conceived from the sea and washed ashore here; but that the skill and lore of the haruspices were imported, brought by Tamiras the Cilician, under an agreement that the descendants of both families would preside over the rites. Later, so the royal line wouldn't be outranked in honor by a foreign stock, the guest family gave up the very knowledge they had brought: only a priest of the line of Cinyras is now consulted. Victims are chosen as each worshipper vows, but males only; the surest guidance comes from the entrails of kid goats. Pouring blood on the altar is forbidden—offerings are burned with prayers and pure fire, and though the altar stands in the open, it's never wet by rain. The goddess's image bears no human shape: it's an unbroken circle, wide at the base and narrowing upward like a cone, but the reason for this is unclear.
4| Titus, having inspected the temple's wealth and the gifts of kings and all the other things a Greek people, delighted in antiquities, attaches to uncertain origins, first asked about his voyage. Once told the way was open and the sea favorable, he asked, in veiled terms, about himself, after many victims had been slaughtered. Sostratus—that was the priest's name—seeing the entrails favorable and matching the grand questions, that the goddess was giving her assent, gave a brief, conventional answer for the moment, then, asking for a private audience, revealed the future. Titus, his spirits lifted, sailed on to his father, bringing to the anxious minds of the provinces and armies an immense new confidence.
5| By this point Vespasian had crushed the main strength of the Jewish revolt; nothing remained but to take Jerusalem itself—a grim, uphill task that owed less to any fight still left in the besieged than to the ruggedness of their mountain stronghold and their stubborn, superstitious refusal to yield. Vespasian himself, as noted earlier, had three legions, battle-tested; Mucianus held four in Syria, at peace—but rivalry, and envy of the glory won by the nearby army, had shaken off any sluggishness; and just as danger and hardship had built strength in the one, …untroubled rest and inexperience of war had added keenness to the other […text corrupt…]. Both had auxiliary cohorts and cavalry wings and fleets, and kings, and a name renowned though in different ways.
6| Vespasian was a keen soldier: he marched at the head of the column, chose the ground for camp, wrestled with the enemy night and day by strategy and, when needed, by force, ate whatever food came to hand, and in dress and bearing was barely distinguishable from a common soldier—in short, but for his greed, he matched the generals of old. Mucianus, by contrast, was set apart by splendor, wealth, and a scale to everything that went beyond what a private citizen should have; he was the better speaker, skilled in organizing and planning civil affairs. Together they'd have made an ideal ruler, if you could strip the flaws from each and blend only their virtues. As it was, one commanded Syria, the other Judaea, and as neighboring governors they'd clashed in jealousy—until, at last, with Nero's death, they set their grudges aside and worked together, first through friends, then—and this did more than anything to seal their harmony—through Titus, who dissolved their petty rivalry for the common good, being by nature and by cultivation suited even to winning over a man like Mucianus's temperament. Tribunes, centurions, and the ranks of common soldiers were won over by hard work, by license, by virtues, by pleasures—whatever suited each man's character.
7| Before Titus arrived, both armies had already sworn allegiance to Otho, given how fast such news travels, however slow the machinery of civil war—and the East, quiet through long peace, was for the first time gearing up for it. In the past, the fiercest wars among citizens had started in Italy or Gaul, driven by the strength of the West; and for Pompey, Cassius, Brutus, Antony—all of whom civil war followed across the sea—the outcomes had not been kind. In Syria and Judaea, emperors had more often been heard of than seen. No legion had mutinied there—only threats against the Parthians, with mixed results; and in the most recent civil war, while everything else was in turmoil, peace there had held unshaken, then loyalty to Galba. But once word spread that Otho and Vitellius were dragging Roman power into their criminal war, and that the rewards of empire would go to others while they themselves were left with nothing but the burden of obedience, the soldiers began to grumble and take stock of their own strength. There were seven legions at once, with enormous auxiliary forces, in Syria and Judaea; next door, Egypt with two legions; on the other side, Cappadocia and Pontus and whatever garrisons faced the Armenians. Asia and the other provinces were neither short of men nor poor in money. And all the islands ringed by that sea, and the sea itself, meanwhile, made preparing for war both easy and safe.
8| Their commanders read the men's eagerness plainly enough, yet chose to hold back and let the rest fight it out first. In civil war, they reasoned, victors and vanquished never truly come together in good faith, and it made little difference whether fortune left Vitellius or Otho standing. Success turns even outstanding commanders arrogant; discord, laziness, excess, and their own vices would doom one of the two—war for one, victory itself for the other. So they put off taking up arms until the moment was right—Vespasian and Mucianus only recently, the rest much earlier, their plans already intertwined. The best men were driven by love of the republic; many were spurred by the sweetness of plunder; others by shaky finances at home. So good men and bad, for entirely different reasons but with equal zeal, all wanted the war.
9| Around the same time, Achaia and Asia were thrown into a false panic, as though Nero were on his way—rumors about his death varied so much that plenty of people were inventing and believing that he was still alive. We'll tell the fates and attempts of the others as the story unfolds; for now: a slave from Pontus, or, as others report, a freedman from Italy, skilled with the lyre and in singing—which, along with a facial resemblance, made the imposture more convincing—took to the sea, joined by deserters whom poverty had left drifting and whom huge promises had corrupted. Driven by storms onto the island of Cythnus, he recruited some soldiers passing through from the East, or had those who refused killed, and after robbing merchants he armed the strongest of their slaves. He worked on a centurion named Sisenna, who was carrying clasped right hands—tokens of friendship—from the Syrian army to the praetorians, trying every trick, until Sisenna slipped off the island in secret, fearful and dreading violence. From there terror spread far and wide: many, drawn by the fame of the name, were stirred by a longing for upheaval and hatred of the present order. But the story, swelling day by day, was scattered by chance.
10| Galba had entrusted the provinces of Galatia and Pamphylia to Calpurnius Asprenas to govern. Two triremes from the fleet at Misenum had been assigned to escort him, and with these he put in at the island of Cythnus—and there was no shortage of men urging the ship-captains, in Nero's name, to come to him. He, composing his face into sorrow and invoking the loyalty of his former soldiers, begged them to set him down in Syria or Egypt. The captains, wavering—whether from doubt or from cunning—assured him they would speak to their men and return once everyone was ready. But everything was faithfully reported to Asprenas, and on his orders the ship was stormed and whoever the man really was, he was killed. His body—striking for its eyes, its hair, its grim expression—was carried to Asia and from there to Rome.
11| In a state torn by discord, where the rapid turnover of emperors left the line between liberty and license unclear, even small matters stirred great commotion. Vibius Crispus—famous for his money, his power, and his talent, though not for his character—hauled Annius Faustus, a Roman knight who had made a career of informing under Nero, before the senate for judgment. The senate had recently decreed, in the early days of Galba's reign, that the cases of informers should be examined. That decree had been applied unevenly, strong or weak depending on whether the accused was powerful or poor, but it still carried some terror. Crispus threw his personal weight behind destroying the man who had informed against his own brother, and he swayed a large part of the senate to demand that Faustus be condemned undefended and unheard. Others, though, argued that nothing helped a defendant more than an accuser with too much power: they said he should be given time, the charges should be published, and even a man both hated and guilty deserved a hearing by custom. This view prevailed at first, and the trial was put off for a few days. Faustus was soon condemned, but not with anything like the public approval his depraved conduct had earned him—people remembered that Crispus himself had run the very same rackets, for the very same profit. What displeased them was not the punishment of the crime, but the man punishing it.
12| Meanwhile Otho's prospects for war looked bright, as the armies of Dalmatia and Pannonia moved to back his rule. There were four legions; two thousand men from each went ahead, while the main bodies followed at a measured pace—the Seventh, raised by Galba; the veteran Eleventh and Thirteenth; and above all the famous Fourteenth, which had crushed the British rebellion. Nero had added to their glory by handpicking them as his best troops, which left them long loyal to Nero and now eager for Otho. But the very confidence that gave them strength also made them slow. Ahead of the legions marched the cavalry wings and auxiliary cohorts. From Rome itself came no small force: five praetorian cohorts, cavalry squadrons, the First Legion, and—an uglier addition—two thousand gladiators, a disgraceful kind of help, but one even strict commanders had used in civil wars. Annius Gallus was put in command of these forces and sent ahead with Vestricius Spurinna to seize the banks of the Po, since the first plan—to stop Caecina inside Gaul—had already failed, Caecina having crossed the Alps. Otho himself was accompanied by a handpicked corps of scouts, the rest of the praetorian cohorts, veterans of the guard, and a huge number of marines. His own march was neither lazy nor soft with luxury: he wore an iron breastplate and walked on foot ahead of the standards, rough, unkempt, nothing like his reputation.
13| Fortune smiled on the venture at first. Otho's forces held the sea and the fleet, and most of Italy as far as the start of the Maritime Alps, which Suedius Clemens, Antonius Novellus, and Aemilius Pacensis had been sent to probe, along with the province of Narbonese Gaul. But Pacensis was put in chains by mutinous troops, Antonius Novellus carried no authority, and Suedius Clemens ruled by courting the soldiers' favor—as corrupt against discipline as he was eager for a fight. It was as if they weren't marching through Italy, through their own homeland, but foreign shores and enemy cities—they burned, plundered, and ravaged, and all the more savagely because nothing had been arranged anywhere to check the terror. Fields lay full, houses stood open; and when owners came out to meet the soldiers, wives and children in tow, they found themselves trapped—caught between peace's false security and war's real evil. At that time the Maritime Alps were held by the procurator Marius Maturus. He raised the local tribes—there was no shortage of young men—and tried to keep Otho's forces out of the province. But at the first clash the hill people were cut down and scattered, since they had been gathered in haste, knew neither camp discipline nor commander, and found neither honor in winning nor shame in fleeing.
14| Angered by that fight, Otho's soldiers turned their fury on the town of Albintimilium. There was no plunder to be had from the battle itself—the country folk were poor and their weapons worthless, and being swift and knowing the ground, they couldn't be caught. So the soldiers' greed fed instead on the miseries of the innocent. What made this worse was one striking example: a Ligurian woman had hidden her son, and when the soldiers, assuming she was hiding money as well, tortured her to learn where the boy was, she pointed to her womb and said that was where he was hidden. No threat, not even death, ever shook the courage of that remarkable answer.
15| Terrified messengers reached Fabius Valens with word that Otho's fleet was threatening Narbonese Gaul—a province sworn to Vitellius—while the colonies sent their own envoys, begging for help. Valens sent two Tungrian cohorts, four cavalry squadrons, and the entire Treviran cavalry wing under the prefect Julius Classicus. Part of this force was kept back at the colony of Forum Julii, so that the fleet would not race ahead across an undefended sea while all his troops marched overland. Twelve cavalry squadrons and picked men from the cohorts went out against the enemy, joined by a Ligurian cohort—long the local defense force—and five hundred Pannonians not yet formally enrolled. Battle came without delay. The line was drawn up so that some of the marines, mixed with local civilians, held the hills near the sea; the praetorian troops filled the flat ground between hills and shore; and out at sea itself the fleet lay ready for battle, drawn up and facing menacingly toward the shore. The Vitellians, weaker in infantry but strong in cavalry, placed their Alpine troops on the nearest ridges and packed their cohorts in dense ranks behind the horsemen. The Treviran squadrons charged the enemy carelessly, only to be met head-on by the veteran troops, while from the flank they were pelted with stones—even the local civilians proved handy at throwing them, brave and cowardly alike daring the same when victory seemed near. Terror struck the shaken Vitellians when the fleet sailed in behind their fighting line; hemmed in on every side, their whole force would have been wiped out had the darkness of night not held back the victorious army and screened the fugitives.
16| Beaten as they were, the Vitellians did not stay quiet. They called up reinforcements and struck at an enemy grown careless and overconfident from success. They cut down the sentries, broke into the camp, and threw the ships' crews into panic, until fear gradually settled and the Othonians, holding a nearby hill, defended themselves and then broke out in turn. Brutal slaughter followed; the prefects of the Tungrian cohorts, after holding their line a long time under fire, were finally overwhelmed. The Othonians' victory was not bloodless either—their cavalry, wheeling about, surrounded the men who had pursued too recklessly. Then, as if by some unspoken truce, so that neither the fleet on one side nor the cavalry on the other could spring sudden terror on the other, the Vitellians withdrew to Antipolis, a town of Narbonese Gaul, and the Othonians to Albingaunum in inner Liguria.
17| Corsica, Sardinia, and the other islands of that sea stayed loyal to Otho's side simply on the strength of his fleet's reputation. But Corsica nearly came to ruin through the recklessness of the procurator Decumus Pacarius—an act that, however great the war as a whole, could never have helped the cause, and only destroyed himself. Out of hatred for Otho, he decided to use Corsican manpower to aid Vitellius, though the help would have been useless even if it had come off. He called together the island's leading men and laid out his plan; those who dared object—Claudius Pyrrichus, captain of the Liburnian warships stationed there, and Quintius Certus, a Roman knight—he had put to death. Their deaths terrified the rest, and the crowd present, ignorant of the facts and sharing the fear of men who knew no better, swore allegiance to Vitellius. But once Pacarius began holding a levy and wearing out these untrained men with the burdens of military duty, they came to hate this unfamiliar labor and think hard about their own weakness: they lived on an island, they said, while Germany and the strength of the legions lay far away; even places protected by cohorts and cavalry wings had been plundered and ravaged by a fleet. Their feelings turned suddenly, though not into open revolt—they chose instead the right moment for treachery. Once Pacarius's usual attendants had left him, he was murdered, naked and defenseless, in the baths; his companions were slaughtered too. The killers carried the heads to Otho as if they were enemies'. But Otho neither rewarded them nor did Vitellius punish them, lost as they were in the general filth of the times amid far greater crimes.
18| Italy had already been thrown open and the war carried across it, as noted earlier, by the Silian cavalry wing—not out of any love for Otho among the men, nor because they preferred Vitellius, but because long peace had worn them down into readiness for any master, easy prey for whoever seized the moment and indifferent to who was better. The richest strip of Italy, all the plains and cities between the Po and the Alps, was now held by Vitellius's forces, since the cohorts Caecina had sent ahead had also arrived. Near Cremona a Pannonian cohort was taken prisoner; between Placentia and Ticinum, a thousand marines together with a hundred horsemen were cut off and lost. Buoyed by this success, the Vitellian troops were no longer held back by river or riverbank—indeed, the Po itself provoked the Batavians and the men from beyond the Rhine, who suddenly crossed it opposite Placentia, snatched a few scouts, and so frightened the rest that they ran off in a panic, falsely reporting that Caecina's whole army was at hand.
19| Spurinna, who held Placentia, was certain Caecina had not yet arrived, and resolved that if he drew near, he would keep his troops inside the fortifications rather than throw three praetorian cohorts, a thousand auxiliaries, and a handful of cavalry against a veteran army. But his soldiers, unruly and ignorant of war, seized the standards and colors and rushed out, brandishing their weapons at the commander who tried to hold them back, ignoring their centurions and tribunes—shouting that Otho was being betrayed and that Caecina had been called in. Spurinna, swept along by a recklessness not his own, went with them—forced at first, then pretending he wanted it, so that his advice would carry more weight once the mutiny began to cool.
20| Once the Po came into view and night was closing in, they decided to fortify the camp. This labor was unfamiliar to soldiers used to city life, and it crushed their spirits. The oldest hands began scolding their own credulity, pointing out how frightening and dangerous it would be if Caecina, with his whole army, surrounded so few cohorts in open country. Soon the whole camp was full of subdued talk, and the centurions and tribunes, joining in, praised their commander's foresight in choosing a colony strong in men and resources as their base for the war. Spurinna himself, in the end, blamed less than he explained, and leaving scouts behind, led the rest back to Placentia, now calmer and more willing to obey orders. The walls were reinforced, ramparts added, towers raised higher; they saw to it that they had not just weapons but discipline and a readiness to obey — the one thing that side had lacked, since courage was never in short supply.
21| Caecina, meanwhile, as if he'd left his savagery and license behind in the Alps, marched through Italy in good order. Yet the towns and colonies took offense at his own appearance, since he addressed men in togas while wearing a cloak of many colors and trousers, the barbarian's covering. They also resented his wife Salonina, though she rode along causing no one any harm, simply because she was conspicuous on her horse in purple — it's human nature to eye other people's good fortune with sharp resentment and to demand moderation most strictly from those we've seen as our equals. Caecina crossed the Po, tested the loyalty of Otho's men through talks and promises, and was tested in turn by them; but once peace and harmony had been bandied about as fine-sounding, empty words, he turned his plans and energies toward assaulting Placentia, to great terror — knowing that however a war began, that reputation would color everything after.
22| The first day went more on the strength of the assault than the skill of a veteran army: the attackers approached the walls exposed and careless, heavy with food and wine. In that fighting the amphitheater, a magnificent structure standing outside the walls, burned down — whether set alight by the attackers hurling torches, firebrands, and incendiary missiles at the defenders, or by the defenders throwing them back. The townspeople, prone to suspicion, believed the fire had been deliberately started by people from neighboring colonies out of envy and rivalry, since no other building in Italy was so vast. Whatever the actual cause, while they feared worse things it seemed a small matter, but once safety was restored they grieved over it as though it were the worst thing that could have happened to them. In any case Caecina was driven back with heavy losses among his own men, and the night was spent preparing siege works. The Vitellians got mantlets, wicker screens, and sheds ready for undermining the walls and shielding the attackers; Otho's men prepared stakes and huge masses of stone, lead, and bronze to crush and bury the enemy. Both sides burned with pride and craved glory, and each had its own battle-cry to rally behind — one side boasting the might of its legions and of Germany's army, the other the city's pride troops and the Praetorian cohorts. The one side mocked the other as soldiers gone soft and lazy, corrupted by the circus and theater; the other mocked them as foreign outsiders. At the same time, cheering for Otho or Vitellius, or damning them, they goaded each other with insults more than praise.
23| Day had barely broken when the walls were crowded with defenders, and the fields blazed with weapons and men: the dense column of the legions, the scattered bands of auxiliaries, attacked the higher parts of the walls with arrows and stones, and closed in hand-to-hand where the defenses were weak or crumbling with age. From above, Otho's men rained javelins down with a more deliberate, steady aim on the German cohorts as they rushed in recklessly, chanting their fierce war-cry, in the custom of their people, bare-chested, beating their shields against their shoulders. The legionaries, protected by mantlets and wicker screens, undermined the walls, built ramps, and worked at the gates; the Praetorians, in response, sent millstones — kept ready for exactly this purpose — crashing down with tremendous weight and noise. Some of the attackers were crushed, others pierced through and bled white or torn apart; as panic increased the carnage, and they were wounded all the more savagely from the walls because of it, they fell back, their reputation damaged. Caecina, ashamed of having launched the attack so rashly, and unwilling to sit mocked and beaten before the same camp, crossed the Po again and made for Cremona. As he withdrew, Turullius Cerialis surrendered to him along with a good number of marines, and Julius Briganticus with a few cavalrymen — the latter a prefect of a cavalry wing, born among the Batavians, the former a former chief centurion not unfriendly to Caecina, since he'd served under him in the ranks in Germany.
24| When Spurinna learned of the enemy's movements, he wrote to Annius Gallus, informing him that Placentia had been defended and reporting what had happened and what Caecina was planning next. Gallus was bringing the First Legion to help defend Placentia, distrusting the small number of the cohorts already there, worried they couldn't hold out against a long siege and the force of the German army. But when he learned Caecina had been repulsed and was heading for Cremona, he halted the legion at Bedriacum — with difficulty, since it had grown so eager for battle it nearly mutinied. Bedriacum is a village between Verona and Cremona, already made notorious by two Roman disasters.
25| In those same days, Martius Macro fought successfully not far from Cremona. Bold by nature, Martius ferried gladiators across by boat and suddenly unleashed them on the far bank of the Po. The Vitellian auxiliaries there were thrown into confusion, and while the rest fled toward Cremona, those who stood their ground were cut down. But he held back his men's momentum in victory, so the enemy couldn't be reinforced with fresh troops and turn the battle around. Otho's men grew suspicious of this restraint, since they judged every move their commanders made in the worst light. Whoever was most cowardly in spirit was most reckless in speech, and they vied with each other flinging every accusation they could think of against Annius Gallus and Suetonius Paulinus and Marius Celsus, for Otho had given these men command as well. The fiercest instigators of this mutinous discord were the killers of Galba, driven half-mad by guilt and fear, stirring everything into chaos, sometimes with open, inflammatory speeches, sometimes with secret letters to Otho. And Otho, always ready to believe the lowliest men and fearful of the honorable ones, wavered anxiously — uncertain in success, but stronger amid adversity. So he sent for his brother Titianus and put him in charge of the war.
26| Meanwhile, under the leadership of Paulinus and Celsus, things went remarkably well. Caecina was troubled that all his efforts had come to nothing and that his army's reputation was fading. Driven back from Placentia, his auxiliaries recently cut down, worn down even in the frequent but not particularly noteworthy skirmishes between scouting parties, and outmatched — with Fabius Valens drawing near, he hurried to recover his glory, more eager than wise, so that all the war's honor wouldn't fall to Valens instead. About twelve miles from Cremona, at a place called Castores, he hid his fiercest auxiliary troops in the woods overhanging the road: the cavalry were ordered to advance further out, provoke a fight, then feign a retreat, drawing on the pursuit until it rushed headlong into the trap. Word of the scheme reached Otho's commanders beforehand, and command was split: Paulinus over the infantry, Celsus over the cavalry. The standard of the Thirteenth Legion, four auxiliary cohorts, and five hundred cavalry were positioned on the left; three Praetorian cohorts, drawn up in deep ranks, held the raised road; on the right flank the First Legion advanced with two auxiliary cohorts and five hundred cavalry. Above these, a thousand cavalry from the Praetorian Guard and the auxiliaries were held in reserve, to exploit success or reinforce the struggling.
27| Before the battle lines clashed, the Vitellians turned to flee, but Celsus, seeing through the trick, held his men back. The Vitellians, rashly growing bold, pursued Celsus as he slowly gave ground, and pursued too far and of their own accord plunged into an ambush: cohorts closed in from the flanks, the legions faced them head-on, and cavalry suddenly swept around behind and encircled them. Suetonius Paulinus did not immediately give the infantry the signal to attack: cautious by nature, and preferring careful plans grounded in reason over gambles on luck, he ordered the ditches filled in, the field opened up, and the line spread out, reckoning that victory begun late enough was won soon enough, so long as care had been taken not to lose. This delay gave the Vitellians time to flee into vineyards tangled with vine-trellises, and a small patch of woods lay nearby, from which they dared to rally and killed some of the boldest of the Praetorian cavalry. King Epiphanes was wounded there, fighting energetically for Otho's cause.
28| Then Otho's infantry burst forward; the enemy's line was crushed and put to flight, and even the reinforcements coming up turned and ran with them. For Caecina had not brought up his cohorts together but one at a time, which only increased the panic in the fighting, as terror swept away troops scattered thin and nowhere strong enough. A mutiny broke out even in the camp because not everyone had been led out to fight: the camp prefect Julius Gratus was put in chains, accused of betraying his own side to his brother, who was serving under Otho — while Otho's men, on the same charge, had chained that brother, the tribune Julius Fronto. In any case, there was such widespread panic everywhere among the fleeing and those rushing to meet them, in the battle line and before the rampart, that it was widely said on both sides afterward that Caecina and his entire army could have been wiped out, had Suetonius Paulinus not sounded the retreat. Paulinus himself claimed he had feared the extra strain of marching and fighting on top of all that, in case fresh Vitellian troops, just out of camp, fell on his exhausted men with no reserves behind them if they broke. Few approved of his reasoning; among the common soldiers, the rumor turned against him.
29| This setback didn't so much frighten the Vitellians as sober them up. It wasn't just among Caecina's men, where he'd blamed the trouble on soldiers more ready for mutiny than battle — Fabius Valens's forces too (he had by now reached Ticinum) dropped their contempt for the enemy, and eager to redeem their reputation, obeyed their commander with more respect and discipline. A serious mutiny had in fact broken out among them, and I need to go back further to explain it properly — I couldn't interrupt the account of Caecina's campaign to do so. The Batavian cohorts, which as I've mentioned had split from the Fourteenth Legion during Nero's war, and on their way to Britain heard of Vitellius's uprising and joined Fabius Valens among the Lingones, had been swaggering — boasting to every legion's tents they visited that they'd humbled the men of the Fourteenth, stripped Italy from Nero, and now held the whole fortune of the war in their own hands. The soldiers found this insulting, the commander found it galling; discipline broke down in quarrels and brawls; and eventually Valens's suspicion of their insolence hardened into suspicion of outright treachery.
30| Then word arrived that Otho's fleet had routed the Treviran and Tungrian cavalry and was raiding around Narbonese Gaul. Anxious both to protect the allies and — with soldierly cunning — to break up the turbulent cohorts, which united would be too dangerous, Valens ordered part of the Batavians to go as reinforcements. When this got out, the allies grieved and the legions roared with anger. They were being robbed, they said, of their bravest men's help — veterans, winners of countless wars, dragged away like troops pulled off the battle line just as the enemy came in sight. If a province mattered more than Rome and the survival of the empire, then everyone should follow them there; but if victory, sound judgment, the whole support and pillar of their cause rested in Italy, then the strongest limbs shouldn't be torn from the body.
31| While they were shouting this defiantly, Valens sent in his lictors to put down the disturbance — and the soldiers turned on him instead, throwing stones, chasing him as he fled. Shouting that he was hiding the plunder of Gaul and the gold of Vienne, the wages of their labor, they ripped open the baggage, tore apart the commander's tent, and probed the very ground with spears and lances — for Valens was hiding, disguised in a slave's clothes, at a cavalry officer's quarters. Then Alfenus Varus, the camp prefect, as the mutiny gradually burned itself out, added a shrewd move: he forbade the centurions to make their rounds and stopped the trumpet call that summoned soldiers to duty. So everyone went still, staring at one another in bewilderment, and frightened above all by the very fact that no one was in command. Through silence, patience, and finally prayers and tears, they sought pardon. And when Valens himself appeared, disheveled, weeping, alive against all expectation, joy and pity and goodwill swept through them: as mobs do, swinging wildly from one extreme to the other, they broke into celebration — cheering him, embracing him, ringing him round with the eagles and standards, then bearing him off to the tribunal. He, wisely restrained, demanded punishment for no one, and to avoid looking suspiciously indifferent, he blamed a few men by name — knowing well that in civil wars soldiers have more license than their commanders.
32| While they were fortifying camp at Ticinum, news came of Caecina's defeat, and the mutiny nearly flared up again — the men claiming that Valens's treachery and delays had kept them from the battle. They refused rest, wouldn't wait for their commander, pushed ahead of the standards, hurried the standard-bearers on; in a rapid march they joined up with Caecina's forces. Valens's reputation stood low with Caecina's army: they complained they'd been left exposed, so heavily outnumbered, against an enemy at full strength — while also, to excuse themselves, flatteringly exaggerating the strength of the reinforcements now arriving, so as not to be looked down on as beaten cowards. And though Valens actually had more men, nearly double the legions and auxiliaries, the soldiers' sympathies still leaned toward Caecina — not only for the generosity he was known for, but for his youthful vigor, his tall build, and a certain hollow popularity. From this came rivalry between the two commanders: Caecina mocked as disgraced and stained, the other as puffed-up and empty. But having buried their hatred, they nursed the same self-interest, both writing frequent letters heaping abuse on Otho with no thought of ever being pardoned — while Otho's own commanders, for all the rich material for insult that Vitellius offered, held their tongues.
33| To be fair, before either man met his end — Otho earning a splendid reputation, Vitellius the foulest — people feared Vitellius's lazy self-indulgence less than Otho's blazing appetites. Otho carried the added weight of hatred and dread from Galba's murder; no one held the war's outbreak against Vitellius. Vitellius was thought disgraceful for his belly and his gluttony; Otho, for his extravagance, cruelty, and recklessness, was judged more dangerous to the state.
34| Once Caecina's and Valens's forces had joined, nothing further held the Vitellians back from fighting with everything they had. Otho, for his part, debated whether to drag the war out or risk everything on a battle.
35| Then Suetonius Paulinus, judging it worthy of his reputation — no one at the time was thought a shrewder military mind — argued the whole strategic case: delay favored them, haste favored the enemy. Vitellius's entire army had already arrived, he pointed out, with little left in reserve behind them, since the Gallic provinces were restless and it wouldn't do to strip the Rhine frontier bare with such hostile tribes ready to break across it. The British legions were tied down by an enemy and the sea; Spain wasn't overflowing with troops; Narbonese Gaul had just been shaken by a naval raid and a lost battle; Cisalpine Italy, hemmed in by the Alps and with no help by sea, was already stripped bare by the army's own passage through it. There was no grain to be found anywhere for that army, and an army can't be held together without supplies. The Germans, too — the fiercest troops the enemy had — wouldn't take it well if the war dragged into summer, their bodies softening, unused to the change of soil and climate. Many wars, fierce in their first rush, had fizzled out through delay and drawn-out waiting. On their own side, by contrast, everything was rich and reliable: Pannonia, Moesia, Dalmatia, the East, all with their armies intact; Italy, the capital itself, the Senate and people — names never truly dim, even when for a time overshadowed; public and private wealth, and vast sums of money, which in civil strife counted for more than the sword; troops either native to Italy's climate or used to the heat. The Po lay as a barrier before them; their cities were safe behind men and walls, and Placentia's successful defense had already proven none of them would fall to the enemy. So — let the war be drawn out. Within a few days the Fourteenth Legion, itself of great renown, would arrive with the Moesian forces; then they could deliberate again, and if battle still seemed wise, fight it with greater strength.
36| Marius Celsus backed Paulinus's view; as for Annius Gallus — laid up for several days now after a fall from his horse — the messengers sent to sound him out reported that he held the same opinion. Otho leaned toward fighting it out at once. His brother Titianus and the Praetorian prefect Proculus, rushing ahead out of sheer inexperience, kept insisting that fortune, the gods, and Otho's own guiding spirit stood behind his plans and would favor his efforts — and no one dared speak against them, since everyone else had slid into flattery. Once battle was decided on, the question was whether the emperor should be present at the fighting or kept out of it. Paulinus and Celsus no longer objected, not wanting to seem to be exposing the emperor to danger — and it was those same authors of the worse advice, Titianus and Proculus, who pushed Otho to withdraw to Brixellum, to keep himself out of the uncertainty of battle and preserve himself for the larger business of empire. That was the first day that crippled Otho's cause: a strong force of Praetorian cohorts, scouts, and cavalry left with him, and the spirit of those who stayed behind was broken, since the commanders were now under suspicion, and Otho — the one man the soldiers trusted — had, by trusting only soldiers himself, left the generals' authority hanging in doubt.
37| None of this escaped the Vitellians, thanks to the frequent desertions typical of civil war, and their scouts, probing with equal eagerness on both sides, made no secret of their business. Caecina and Valens stayed calm and watchful — since the enemy was rushing to ruin through recklessness, which passed for wisdom on their part, they simply waited for the other side's folly to run its course. They began building a bridge, pretending to force a crossing of the Po against the gladiator unit stationed opposite, both to keep up appearances and to keep their own men from idling. Ships were set at equal intervals from one another, lashed together with sturdy timbers on both sides and pointed upstream, anchors thrown out to hold the bridge steady — but the anchor cables were left slack so that as the river rose, the line of boats could rise with it unhindered. A tower was set up to close off the bridge, built out on the last ship, from which catapults and siege engines could drive the enemy back. The Othonians on the bank built a tower of their own, and hurled stones and firebrands.
38| There was an island in the middle of the river, which the gladiators tried to reach by boat while the Germans swam across ahead of them. As it happened, a good number had gotten across when Macer, filling Liburnian galleys with his best gladiators, attacked them. But gladiators don't have the same steadiness in a fight as soldiers, and striking from boats that pitched under them, they couldn't land blows as well as men standing firm on the bank. As the rowers and fighters, thrown into confusion by the various panicked lurches, got tangled together, the Germans leapt down into the shallows on their own, seized the sterns, climbed onto the decks, or grappled men down into the water at close range — all of it in full view of both armies, and the more it delighted the Vitellians, the more bitterly the Othonians cursed the man responsible for the disaster.
39| The fight ended when the remaining ships were cut loose and the men fled. Macer was marked for death, and once he had been wounded from a distance by a lance, men had already rushed at him with drawn swords, when tribunes and centurions rushed in and shielded him. Not long after, Vestricius Spurinna, on Otho's orders, left a small garrison at Placentia and came up with his cohorts. Otho then sent Flavius Sabinus, the consul-designate, to take command of the forces Macer had led — the soldiers glad at the change of commanders, and the commanders themselves, given how often mutinies had made the post so dangerous, just as glad to be rid of it.
40| I find in some authors that dread of war, or disgust with both emperors—whose crimes and disgraces were becoming more openly known every day—made the armies hesitate: should they lay down the contest and settle things among themselves, or leave the senate to choose an emperor? And that this made the Othonian commanders favor delay, with special hope placed in Paulinus, since he was the most senior of the consulars and had won fame and a name in the British campaigns through his soldiering. I would grant that a few, in a silent wish, preferred peace to discord, and wanted a good and blameless emperor instead of the two worst and most disgraceful men alive. But I do not think that Paulinus, wise as he was, could have hoped for such restraint from the mob in so corrupt an age—that men who had disturbed peace out of love of war would lay down war out of love of peace. Nor could armies so different in speech and habits have come together in such agreement, nor would the legates and commanders—most of them guilty in their own consciences of extravagance, poverty, and crime—have tolerated any emperor who was not himself tainted and bound to them by favors owed.
41| The old craving for power, long planted in human hearts, grew along with the size of the empire and finally burst out. When resources were modest, equality was easy to maintain. But once the world had been subdued and rival cities and kings destroyed, so that men had leisure to covet wealth without fear, the first struggles broke out between senate and people. Now turbulent tribunes, now overbearing consuls, and in the city and forum the first trials of civil war. Then, from the lowest ranks, Gaius Marius, and from the nobility the most savage of all, Lucius Sulla, turned liberty, defeated by arms, into domination. After them came Gnaeus Pompey, more secretive but no better, and from then on the fight was never about anything but supreme power. The citizen legions did not lay down their arms after Pharsalus or Philippi—so how much less likely were the armies of Otho and Vitellius to give up war of their own will? The same anger of the gods, the same madness of men, the same causes of crime drove them into discord. That these wars were each settled in a single blow was due to the cowardice of the emperors involved. But this reflection on old and new customs has carried me too far. Now I return to the order of events.
42| After Otho left for Brixellum, the honor of command belonged to his brother Titianus, but the actual power and authority lay with the prefect Proculus. Celsus and Paulinus, whose good judgment no one made use of, were held out as commanders in name only, screens for blame that belonged to others. The tribunes and centurions were uncertain, resentful that the worst men prevailed while the better ones were despised. The soldiers were eager, but preferred to interpret their commanders' orders rather than simply carry them out. It was decided to move the camp forward to the fourth milestone from Bedriacum—so incompetently that, though it was springtime and rivers surrounded them on every side, the men suffered from lack of water. There they hesitated over whether to fight: Otho kept demanding by letter that they hurry, while the soldiers demanded that their emperor be present for the battle. Most called for the forces stationed across the Po to be summoned. It is hard to say what would have been the best course, only that what was actually done could hardly have been worse.
43| They set out not as if to fight a battle but as if merely to make war, heading for the meeting point of the Po and the Adda, sixteen miles off. Celsus and Paulinus objected: the soldiers were worn out from the march and weighed down with baggage—why hand them over to an enemy who would not fail to attack them, unencumbered and having advanced barely four miles, while they were either strung out in column or scattered and building a rampart? But Titianus and Proculus, once outvoted in council, fell back on their formal authority to overrule. A Numidian courier arrived at a gallop with a harsh message: Otho, sick of the delay and unable to bear the suspense, rebuked the commanders' slowness and ordered that the matter be brought to a decision at once.
44| That same day two tribunes of the praetorian cohorts came to Caecina, who was busy with his bridge-building, asking for a conference. He was preparing to hear their terms and offer his own when scouts rushed in reporting the enemy was near. The conversation with the tribunes broke off, leaving it unclear whether they had been attempting treachery, or betrayal, or some honorable plan. Caecina sent the tribunes away and rode back to camp, where he found the signal for battle already given by order of Fabius Valens, and the men under arms. While the legions were still sorting out their marching order, the cavalry burst forward—and, remarkable to say, though outnumbered, the Vitellian horse, routed by fewer Othonians, was kept from being driven back onto its own rampart only by the courage of the Italic legion, which at swordpoint forced the fugitives to turn and renew the fight, which drove them back at swordpoint and forced the fight to resume. The Vitellian legions formed their line without alarm, for though the enemy was close, the thick woods hid them from sight. Among the Othonians the commanders were panicked, the soldiers hostile to their commanders, the wagons and camp-followers all mixed together, and with ditches cut steep on both sides of the road, the way was narrow even for a column marching calmly. Some men crowded around their standards, others hunted for them; a confused shouting rose from every side as men ran up calling out to each other. Wherever boldness or fear took them, they surged toward the front line or the rear, or fell back again.
45| Minds already shaken by sudden terror turned false joy into paralysis, when some men were found spreading the lie that the Vitellian army had gone over to Otho's side. Whether this rumor was spread by Vitellius's scouts or arose within Otho's own ranks, by trickery or by accident, is not established. The Othonians, their fighting spirit dropped, went so far as to greet the enemy as friends—and were answered with hostile murmurs. Since most of their own men had no idea why the greeting was given, it bred fear of betrayal. Then the enemy line, still in unbroken order and superior in strength and numbers, bore down on them. The Othonians, though scattered, fewer, and exhausted, still took up the fight fiercely. In terrain broken by trees and vineyards, the battle took many shapes at once: they clashed hand to hand and at a distance, in bands and in wedge formations. On the raised roadway they closed ranks and pushed shield-boss against shield-boss, abandoned throwing their javelins, and hacked through helmets and breastplates with swords and axes. Recognizing each other, visible to all the rest, they fought as if the outcome of the whole war hung on them alone.
46| By chance, in the open plain between the Po and the road, two legions met: on Vitellius's side the Twenty-first, known as the Rapax, distinguished by old glory; on Otho's side the First Adiutrix, never before led into battle but fierce and hungry for a first taste of honor. Slashing through the Twenty-first's front line, the First's men seized its eagle outright. The disgrace stung, and the Twenty-first hit back hard, cutting down the First's commander Orfidius Benignus and hauling off a great many of the enemy's standards and banners. Elsewhere the Thirteenth legion was pushed back by the charge of the Fifth, and the men of the Fourteenth were surrounded by the rush of several legions together. Otho's commanders had long since fled the field, but Caecina and Valens strengthened their own men with reserves. Fresh support arrived too—Alfenus Varus with the Batavian cohorts, who scattered a band of gladiators. These men had been ferried across by ship, but cohorts posted to block them slaughtered them right in the river. So, victorious, the Batavians struck the enemy's flank.
47| With the center of their line broken through, the Othonians fled in every direction, making for Bedriacum. The distance was immense, and the roads were choked with piles of bodies—which only made the slaughter worse, since in civil wars prisoners are not turned into plunder. Suetonius Paulinus and Licinius Proculus took separate routes and avoided the camp altogether. Vedius Aquila, commander of the Thirteenth legion, was delivered by his own reckless panic straight into the soldiers' fury. Entering the rampart while it was still broad daylight, he was surrounded by the shouting of mutineers and fugitives; they held back neither insults nor blows, calling him deserter and traitor—not because of any particular crime of his, but in the way of the mob, each man throwing his own disgrace onto someone else. Night saved Titianus and Celsus, for by then the watches had been posted and the soldiers restrained—Annius Gallus had won them over with advice, appeals, and the weight of his authority, urging them not to add slaughter of their own to the disaster of a lost battle, whether the war was now over or they chose to take up arms again: unity was the one comfort left to the defeated. The rest were broken in spirit. The praetorian soldiers grumbled that they had been beaten not by courage but by betrayal: even the Vitellians, they said, had not won without bloodshed—their cavalry had been driven off, one of their legion's eagles taken. There were still the troops that remained with Otho across the Po; the Moesian legions were on their way; a large part of the army had stayed behind at Bedriacum. These, at least, were not yet defeated, and if it came to that, it would be more honorable to die in battle. Fierce or fearful with such thoughts, and driven by utter desperation, they were spurred more often to rage than to fear.
48| The Vitellian army, meanwhile, halted five miles from Bedriacum, its commanders not daring to attack the camp that same day; besides, they hoped for a voluntary surrender. But the men had marched out light, equipped only for battle, and their weapons and their victory were rampart enough. The next day the will of the Othonian army was in no doubt, and those who had been fiercest before now leaned toward regret, so a delegation was sent. Among the Vitellian commanders there was no hesitation about granting peace. The envoys were held back for a while, and this delay caused uneasiness among men who did not yet know whether they had succeeded. Then the delegation was sent back, and the rampart was thrown open. At that, victors and vanquished alike broke into tears, cursing the fate of civil war even amid their wretched joy. In the same tents, some men tended the wounds of brothers, others of relatives. Hope and reward were uncertain; death and grief were certain, and no one was so free of loss that he did not mourn some death. The body of the legate Orfidius was recovered and cremated with the usual honors; a few men buried their own kin; the rest of the common dead were left lying on the ground.
49| Otho waited for news of the battle without fear, his mind made up. First came grim rumors, then fugitives from the field revealing the ruin outright. The soldiers' fervor did not wait for their commander's word: they told him to keep his spirits up — fresh forces still remained, and they themselves were ready to suffer and dare anything to the end. It was no flattery: they burned to march into battle, to revive their party's fortune with something like frenzy and inspiration. Those standing farther off stretched out their hands; those nearer clutched his knees, Plotius Firmus foremost among them. He, the praetorian prefect, begged again and again that Otho not abandon so loyal an army, soldiers who had deserved so well of him: it took more courage to endure misfortune than to walk away from it; the brave and vigorous held to hope even against fortune, while the timid and cowardly rushed into despair out of fear. As Otho's face softened or hardened at these words, cries and groans answered him. And it was not only the praetorians, Otho's own household troops, but men sent ahead from Moesia who reported the same stubborn resolve in the army now approaching, and that the legions had already reached Aquileia — so that no one could doubt the grim war might have been renewed, mournful and uncertain for winners and losers alike.
50| But Otho himself, turned away from plans for war, said: 'This spirit of yours, this courage — to throw it into further danger seems to me too high a price to pay for my life. The more hope you show me, if I chose to live, the more glorious my death will be. Fortune and I have had our trial of each other. Do not measure it by how long it lasted: it is harder to master good fortune you don't expect to keep for long. This civil war began with Vitellius, and it was he who started the armed contest over the principate. That we should fight it more than once will not be my example to set — let posterity judge Otho by this. Vitellius keeps his brother, his wife, his children — I want no revenge, and I need no comfort. Others have gripped power for longer stretches than I did, but none will have laid it down with more courage. Shall I let so much of Rome's youth, so many fine armies, be cut down again and torn from the republic? Let that spirit die with mine — treat it as though you had already given your lives for me — but you, go on living. Let us not delay: I your safe departure, you my resolve. To say more about the end is itself a kind of cowardice. Take this as the surest proof of my resolve: that I blame no one. To accuse gods or men is the business of someone who wants to go on living.'
51| Having said this, he spoke kindly to each man according to his age or rank, telling them to leave quickly and not sharpen the victor's anger by lingering. He moved the young with authority, the old with pleading — his face calm, his words fearless, checking his men's ill-timed tears. He ordered ships and carriages given to those departing; he destroyed petitions and letters marked by devotion to himself or insults against Vitellius; he distributed money sparingly, not as a man about to die. Then he turned to comfort Salvius Cocceianus, his brother's son, still very young, who was frightened and grieving — praising his loyalty, chiding his fear: would Vitellius really be so pitiless that, in exchange for sparing his whole family, he would not grant even this one favor? By dying quickly, Otho said, he was earning the victor's clemency; for he had not given up the republic's last hope out of utter despair, but because his army demanded battle. He had won enough fame for himself, enough distinction for his descendants. After the Julii, the Claudii, the Servii, he was the first to bring imperial power to a new family. So the boy should take up life with confidence, and never forget — nor dwell too much — on the fact that Otho had been his uncle.
52| After this, once everyone had been sent away, he rested a while. But as he turned over his final thoughts, a sudden uproar interrupted him: word came of disorder and lawlessness among the soldiers, who were threatening those departing with death, showing especially savage violence toward Verginius, whom they besieged, shut up in his house. Otho rebuked the ringleaders of the unrest, then returned and gave his time to farewells with those leaving, until all had gone unharmed. When evening came he drank cold water to ease his thirst. Two daggers were then brought in; he tried the edge of each and slid one beneath his pillow. Having confirmed his friends had already left, he passed a quiet night — and, it is said, not a sleepless one. At first light he fell on the blade. At the dying man's groan, freedmen and slaves rushed in, along with Plotius Firmus the praetorian prefect, and found a single wound. His funeral was hurried; he had earnestly begged that his head not be cut off to become an object of mockery. The praetorian cohorts carried his body with praise and tears, kissing his wound and his hands. Some soldiers killed themselves beside his pyre, not from guilt or fear, but from a longing to match his glory and love for their commander. Afterward this kind of death became common at Bedriacum, Placentia, and other camps. A modest tomb, meant to last, was built for Otho. Such was the end of his life, in his thirty-seventh year.
53| He came from the town of Ferentium; his father had been consul, his grandfather praetor. His mother's family was of lesser rank but not disgraceful. His boyhood and youth were as we have described. By two acts — one utterly disgraceful, the other admirable — he earned with posterity as much good repute as bad. I would not stoop to gather up fanciful tales to entertain readers, which would be beneath the seriousness of this work, but neither would I dare to strip belief from what is widely reported and handed down. On the day the battle was fought at Bedriacum, people at Regium Lepidum recall that a bird of strange appearance settled in a crowded grove and neither the crowds pressing around it nor the other birds wheeling overhead could scare it off or drive it away, not until the very moment Otho took his own life — then it vanished from sight. And those who reckoned the timing found that the beginning and end of this wonder matched exactly with Otho's death.
54| At his funeral, the soldiers' grief and sorrow flared into renewed mutiny, and there was no one to check it. They turned on Verginius, alternately begging and threatening that he take up the command, or else go as their envoy to Caecina and Valens. Verginius slipped away by a back door of his house, evading them as they broke in. Rubrius Gallus carried the pleas of the cohorts that had been stationed at Brixellum, and pardon was granted at once, the troops he had commanded going over to the victor through Flavius Sabinus.
55| With the war laid to rest everywhere, much of the senate faced its most dangerous moment, having set out from Rome with Otho and then been left behind at Mutina. There the news of the defeat reached them; but the soldiers, dismissing it as a false rumor because they believed the senate was hostile to Otho, watched the senators' every word, twisted their looks and bearing into something sinister, and finally, with insults and abuse, sought grounds and a pretext for slaughter. The senators had another fear pressing on them besides: that with Vitellius's party now clearly dominant, they might be thought to have accepted his victory too grudgingly. So, anxious on both sides, they gathered together — no one felt safe working out a plan alone, but there was more safety among many sharing the same guilt. The town council of Mutina added to their worry, offering arms and money and addressing them as 'conscript fathers' with honors that were badly timed.
56| A notable quarrel arose when Licinius Caecina attacked Eprius Marcellus for speaking evasively. No one else was voicing an opinion openly; but Marcellus's name, hated for his career as an informer and exposed to general resentment, had provoked Caecina, still new to the senate and eager to make a name through a grand feud. Cooler heads separated them. All returned to Bononia to deliberate again, expecting meanwhile that more news would arrive. At Bononia, men were sent out along the roads to question anyone bringing the freshest word. One of Otho's freedmen, asked why he was leaving, answered that he carried his master's last instructions; Otho, he said, had been left alive, but caring only for the future and having cut himself off from life's comforts. This answer drew astonishment and left them too abashed to ask more, and the mood of everyone there swung toward Vitellius.
57| His brother Lucius Vitellius took part in their deliberations and began offering himself to those already flattering him, when suddenly Coenus, a freedman of Nero, threw everyone into panic with a shocking lie, insisting that the Fourteenth Legion, joined by forces from Brixellum, had arrived and cut down the victors, and that the tide of the war had turned. His motive for inventing this was to revive interest in Otho's now-neglected safe-conducts with more cheerful news. Coenus himself was rushed to Rome, and a few days later paid for it by Vitellius's order; but meanwhile the danger to the senators grew, since Otho's soldiers believed the false report to be true. Their fear was heightened because their withdrawal from Mutina, under the guise of an official decision, looked like the desertion of Otho's cause. They no longer met as a body but each looked to his own safety, until letters sent by Fabius Valens relieved their fear. And the news of Otho's death, the more praiseworthy it was, traveled all the faster.
58| At Rome, meanwhile, there was no alarm; the Games of Ceres were watched as usual. When reliable witnesses brought word to the theater that Otho had given up, and that Flavius Sabinus, prefect of the city, had sworn the troops stationed in Rome to Vitellius's name, the crowd broke into applause for Vitellius; people bore Galba's images through the temples decked in laurel and flowers, heaping garlands into a mound by the Curtian Lake, the spot where Galba, dying, had stained the ground with his blood. In the senate, every honor that had taken long reigns to accumulate for other emperors was voted at once; they added praise and thanks for the army of Germany and sent a delegation to share in the rejoicing. Letters from Fabius Valens to the consuls were read aloud, written without excessive pretension; Caecina's restraint in not having written at all was received even more favorably.
59| But Italy suffered worse and more savagely than in the war itself. Vitellius's men, scattered through the towns and colonies, plundered, robbed, and defiled with violence and rape. Greedy or venal, they respected nothing sacred or profane in their pursuit of gain. Some even killed personal enemies under the pretext of being soldiers. And the soldiers themselves, who knew the country, marked out fertile fields and rich landowners for plunder — or for destruction, if resisted — while their commanders, compromised, did not dare stop them. Caecina was less greedy but more vain; Valens was notorious for graft and profit, and for that reason overlooked the crimes of others too. Italy's resources, already worn thin, could barely bear the weight, damage, and abuse of so many infantry and cavalry.
60| Meanwhile Vitellius, not yet knowing of his victory, kept drawing the remaining forces of the German armies to him as if for a fresh war. Only a few veterans were left in winter quarters, while hasty levies were made throughout Gaul to fill out the names of the depleted legions. Guarding the Rhine frontier was left to Hordeonius Flaccus; Vitellius himself took eight thousand picked men from the army of Britain. After marching only a few days he learned that the battle at Bedriacum had gone well and that the war had collapsed with Otho's death. He called an assembly and heaped praise on his soldiers' courage. When the army asked him to grant his freedman Asiaticus equestrian rank, he refused the shameless flattery — but then, true to his fickle character, granted it privately at a dinner party that same thing he had publicly declined, and honored Asiaticus with the equestrian ring, a vile slave who had risen by disgraceful methods.
61| In those same days word arrived that both Mauretanias had joined his side, after the killing of the procurator Albinus. Lucceius Albinus, appointed by Nero over Mauretania Caesariensis and later given charge of Tingitana under Galba as well, commanded no negligible force — nineteen cohorts, five cavalry wings, and a huge number of Moorish irregulars, a band well suited to war through habits of raiding and plunder. After Galba's murder he had leaned toward Otho, and not content with Africa, he was eyeing Spain across the narrow strait. This alarmed Cluvius Rufus, who ordered the tenth legion to move toward the coast as if to cross over, and sent centurions ahead to win the Moors over to Vitellius. It wasn't hard — the German army's reputation ran high in the provinces. It was also rumored that Albinus, scorning the title of procurator, had taken to using the royal insignia and the name of Juba.
62| With loyalties shifting, Asinius Pollio, commander of a cavalry wing and one of Albinus's most trusted men, was overpowered, along with Festus and Scipio, the cohort commanders. Albinus himself, while crossing from Tingitana to Mauretania Caesariensis, was cut down as he came ashore; his wife, who threw herself before the killers, was slaughtered along with him. Vitellius made no inquiry into any of it — he passed lightly over even great matters, unequal to weightier concerns.
63| He ordered the army to march overland while he himself sailed down the Saône, with none of the pomp of a ruler, but conspicuous instead for his old poverty — until Junius Blaesus, governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, of noble birth, generous in spirit and wealth to match, surrounded the emperor with a proper retinue and accompanied him lavishly. For this very generosity Blaesus earned Vitellius's ingratitude, though Vitellius masked his hatred with servile flattery. At Lyon the leaders of both the winning and the losing sides came to pay respects. Vitellius praised Valens and Caecina before an assembly and seated them on either side of his curule chair. Then he ordered the whole army to march out to meet his infant son; the boy was brought forward, and Vitellius, wrapping him in a general's cloak and holding him close, named him Germanicus and decked him out in every emblem of imperial rank. In prosperity the honor would have been excessive; amid disaster it became a kind of consolation.
64| Then the most spirited centurions of Otho's army were put to death — the chief cause of the deep hatred that turned the Illyrian legions against Vitellius. At the same time the other legions, infected by the same feeling and resentful toward the German soldiers, were already brewing rebellion. Suetonius Paulinus and Licinius Proculus he kept in miserable suspense, unwashed and shabby, until they were finally heard — and used defenses more expedient than honorable. They went so far as to claim credit for the defeat as if it were treachery: the long march before the battle, the exhaustion of Otho's men, the column tangled with baggage wagons — they attributed all these accidents to their own scheming. Vitellius believed the tale of treachery and pardoned them their loyalty. Salvius Titianus, Otho's brother, faced no danger at all, excused by his family loyalty and his sheer incompetence. Marius Celsus was confirmed in his consulship — though rumor held, and it was later raised in the Senate against Caecilius Simplex, that Simplex had tried to buy that office with money, at the cost of Celsus's life. Vitellius resisted the move and afterward gave Simplex the consulship anyway, untainted and unbought. Trachalus was shielded from his accusers by Galeria, Vitellius's wife.
65| Amid the crises of great men — shameful to record — a certain Mariccus, a commoner of the Boii, dared to thrust himself into the game of fortune and challenge Roman arms under the pretense of divine power. Already calling himself the champion of the Gauls and a god (for he had given himself that title), he had gathered eight thousand men and was ravaging the nearby districts of the Aedui, when that leading tribe, with picked young men reinforced by cohorts sent by Vitellius, scattered the fanatical mob. Mariccus was captured in the fighting; thrown afterward to wild beasts, he came through untorn, and the credulous mob took it as proof he could not be harmed — a belief that held only until Vitellius himself watched him put to death.
66| No further cruelty touched the rebels or what they owned: men who had died fighting for Otho had their wills upheld, and wherever no will existed, the ordinary rule of intestate succession took over. Indeed, if only Vitellius had restrained his gluttony, one need not have feared his greed. His appetite for feasting was foul and insatiable: delicacies were hauled in from Rome and all Italy, and the roads rang with traffic from both seas. The leading men of the towns were bled dry supplying his banquets; the towns themselves were laid waste; the soldiers grew soft, drifting from discipline and courage into a habit of pleasure and contempt for their commander. He sent an edict ahead to Rome postponing the title Augustus and declining Caesar, though he gave up none of the power itself. Astrologers were expelled from Italy; strict measures forbade Roman knights from disgracing themselves in gladiatorial games and the arena. Earlier emperors had driven knights to it with money, and more often by force, and many towns and colonies had likewise competed to lure the most corrupt of their young men into the arena with cash.
67| But Vitellius, made more arrogant and savage by his brother's arrival and by the tutors in tyranny now creeping close to him, ordered the killing of Dolabella, whom we noted earlier had been sent by Otho to the colony at Aquinum. Dolabella, on hearing of Otho's death, had entered Rome. Plancius Varus, a former praetor and one of Dolabella's closest friends, denounced him to Flavius Sabinus, the city prefect, claiming Dolabella had broken his confinement and put himself forward as a leader for the defeated cause; he further alleged that Dolabella had tried to win over a cohort stationed at Ostia. None of these grave charges was ever proved, and Varus, in something like remorse, sought a pardon too late, after the wrong was already done. While Flavius Sabinus hesitated over so weighty a matter, Triaria, wife of Lucius Vitellius — fiercer than any woman should be — frightened him into acting, warning that by risking the emperor's safety he would only be angling for a reputation for mercy. Sabinus, gentle by nature, but once fear took hold quick to change course, and — anxious for his own skin amid another man's peril — afraid of seeming to have shown him favor, pushed the doomed man on to his fate.
68| So Vitellius, driven by fear and by hatred — since Dolabella had gone on to marry his own former wife Petronia — summoned him by letter, had him avoid the busy Flaminian Way and turn aside to Interamna, and ordered him killed there. Even that seemed too long a wait to his executioner: he cut Dolabella's throat on the road, in a roadside tavern, throwing him to the ground — a killing that drew great resentment against the new regime, whose character was judged by this first token of it. And Triaria's ruthlessness was made to look worse by the restrained example set close beside her: Galeria, the emperor's wife, took no part in these grim doings; and with equal decency Sextilia, mother of the Vitellii, kept to the old ways. She was even said to have remarked, on reading her son's first letters as emperor, that she had borne a Vitellius, not a Germanicus. And afterward, unmoved by any lure of fortune or the city's flattery, her household felt only the hardships of her son's rise, never any joy in it.
69| As Vitellius left Lyon, Cluvius Rufus caught up with him, having left Spain behind, wearing an expression of joy and congratulation while inwardly anxious, knowing he was the target of accusations. Hilarus, a freedman of the emperor, had reported that on hearing of the joint rule of Vitellius and Otho, Cluvius had tried to seize power and possession of the Spanish provinces for himself, and had therefore left no emperor's name on official documents; Hilarus also read insults to Vitellius, and self-promoting appeals to the people, into certain passages of Cluvius's speeches. Cluvius's own standing prevailed, and Vitellius ordered his freedman punished instead. Cluvius was attached to the emperor's retinue, though Spain was not taken from him — he governed it in absence, following the precedent of Lucius Arruntius. But where Tiberius Caesar had kept Arruntius close out of fear, Vitellius kept Cluvius close without any such dread. Trebellius Maximus received no such honor: he had fled Britain because of the soldiers' anger, and Vettius Bolanus, chosen from those in the emperor's suite, was sent to replace him.
70| Vitellius was troubled that the defeated legions' spirit was nowhere near broken. Scattered through Italy and mixed in among the victors, they talked like enemies — the Fourteenth's men were especially fierce, refusing to admit defeat: at Bedriacum, they said, only their detachments had been beaten, the legion itself hadn't even set foot on the field. The decision was made to ship them back to Britain, the place Nero had first pulled them from, and meanwhile to quarter the Batavian cohorts together with them because of the old feud between the Batavians and the Fourteenth. Quiet didn't last long among men who hated each other so much under arms: at Augusta Taurinorum, a Batavian went after some craftsman as a cheat, a legionary defended him as his host, and their comrades rallied around each man and turned insults into killing. A savage battle would have broken out if two Praetorian cohorts hadn't taken the Fourteenth's side, giving them confidence and putting fear into the Batavians. Vitellius, trusting the Batavians, attached them to his own column, and ordered the legion to be marched over the Graian Alps by a route that avoided Vienne — the people of Vienne were also feared. The night the legion left, fires were left burning here and there and part of the colony of Turin was scorched — a loss that, like most wartime harm, was swallowed up by worse disasters elsewhere. Once the men of the Fourteenth came down from the Alps, the most rebellious of them wanted to carry their standards to Vienne; the better sort overruled them, and the legion was shipped over to Britain.
71| Vitellius's next worry was the Praetorian cohorts. First they were separated out, then, softened by the promise of an honorable discharge, they handed their weapons in to their tribunes — until word spread that Vespasian's war was growing. Then they took up service again and turned into the Flavian party's backbone. The First Legion of marines got shipped off to Spain to cool off in peace and idleness; the Eleventh and Seventh were returned to their old winter quarters; the Thirteenth was ordered to build amphitheaters — Caecina was preparing a gladiator show at Cremona, Valens one at Bononia. Vitellius was never so absorbed in his worries that he forgot his pleasures.
72| He had broken up the defeated side's forces with moderation; among the victors, though, a mutiny broke out — trivial in how it started, except that the number of dead made Vitellius look bad. Vitellius was dining at Ticinum with Verginius as his guest. Legates and tribunes take on the character of their commanders — some copy their strictness, some enjoy well-timed banquets; the soldiers follow suit, either disciplined or unruly. With Vitellius everything was disorderly, drunken, closer to an all-night bacchanal than to army discipline. So when two soldiers — one from the Fifth Legion, one a Gallic auxiliary — got worked up into a wrestling match for fun, and the legionary went down, the Gaul jeered, and the spectators split into rival camps, the legionaries burst out and slaughtered the auxiliaries — two cohorts were wiped out. The cure for one riot was another riot: dust and weapons were spotted in the distance, and a shout went up that the Fourteenth Legion had turned back to attack. In fact it was only the rear guard of the column; once recognized, the alarm died down. Meanwhile a slave of Verginius, met by chance, was accused of being Vitellius's would-be assassin, and the soldiers rushed to the banquet demanding Verginius's death. Even Vitellius, jumpy as he was about every suspicion, never doubted the man's innocence — but it was hard to hold back those baying for the death of a former consul and their own former commander. No one was attacked by every mutiny so often as Verginius: the men still admired him and his reputation, but hated him for it, the way people hate someone they feel looked down on by.
73| The next day Vitellius heard out the senate's delegation, which he'd made wait there, then went over to the camp and — unprompted — praised the soldiers' loyalty, while the auxiliaries grumbled that so much impunity and arrogance had been handed to the legionaries. The Batavian cohorts, to keep them from any rasher move, were sent back to Germany, just as fate was setting the stage for a war both civil and foreign at once. The Gallic auxiliary troops were returned to their home communities — a huge number, taken on right at the start of the revolt among the empty show of war. But so that the resources of an empire already drained by his handouts would stretch further, Vitellius ordered the legions and auxiliaries cut down, banned replacements, and offered discharges indiscriminately. This was ruinous for the state and unpopular with the soldiers, who found the same duties, dangers, and labor falling more often on fewer men; and their strength was being rotted by luxury, against the old discipline and the ways of their ancestors, under whom Rome's fortunes stood better on courage than on money.
74| From there Vitellius turned toward Cremona, and after watching Caecina's games he wanted to walk the plain of Bedriacum and see with his own eyes the traces of the recent victory — a foul, grim sight. Within forty days of the battle: mangled bodies, severed limbs, the rotting shapes of men and horses, ground soaked with gore, trees and crops crushed flat, a grim wasteland. Just as inhuman was that stretch of road, which the Cremonese had covered in laurel and roses, altars raised and victims slaughtered as though for a king — cheerful gestures for the moment that would soon bring ruin on the very people who made them. Valens and Caecina were there, pointing out the battle's landmarks: here the legions' column had broken through, here the cavalry had charged, there the auxiliary units had swarmed round; and now the tribunes and prefects, each puffing up his own part, mixed lies with truth or exaggerated the truth. The rank and file too turned off the road with shouts and cheers, taking in the ground where the fighting had raged, gawking at the heap of weapons and the piles of bodies, amazed; and some, moved by the shifting fortunes of life, felt tears and pity rise. But Vitellius did not turn his eyes away, did not shudder at so many thousands of unburied citizens: cheerful, indeed, and blind to how close his own fate lay, he went ahead and offered sacrifice to the local gods.
75| Next, at Bononia, Fabius Valens put on a gladiator show, with the trappings brought in from Rome. And the closer they got to the city, the more corrupt the march became, mixed in with actors, troops of eunuchs, and every other feature of Nero's court — for Vitellius even praised Nero himself, and used to follow him around when he sang, not out of necessity, the way most respectable men did, but bought and enslaved by gluttony and excess. So that he could open up vacant months of office for Valens and Caecina, other men's consulships were squeezed shorter, and Marcus Macer's claim was quietly passed over as a leader of the Othonian side; and he postponed Valerius Marinus, whom Galba had marked for consul — not out of any grudge, but because Marinus was mild and would take the insult without complaint. Pedanius Costa was dropped altogether — unwelcome to the emperor for having dared to move against Nero and for having spurred Verginius on — though other reasons were given publicly; and thanks were even offered to Vitellius for it, as servility had become the habit.
76| The lie started boldly but held up for only a handful of days. Someone had appeared claiming to be Scribonianus Camerinus, said to have been hidden away in Histria out of fear during Nero's reign, since the old Crassi family still had clients and estates there and the name still carried weight. So, with the worst sort of people recruited to back up the story, the credulous crowd and even some soldiers — whether genuinely fooled or eager for trouble — flocked to him competitively, until he was hauled before Vitellius and asked who on earth he was. When his story held no water and his own master recognized him — a runaway slave named Geta — he was punished for it the way a slave is punished.
77| It's hard to believe how much arrogance and laziness grew in Vitellius once scouts from Syria and Judaea reported that the East had sworn allegiance to him. For even though the reports were still vague and their sources uncertain, Vespasian's name was already on everyone's lips and in the air, and Vitellius was repeatedly stirred up just by hearing it: then he and his army, as though they had no rival, broke out in cruelty, lust, and plunder, degenerating into foreign ways.
78| Vespasian, meanwhile, was surveying the war and its forces, near and far. His own soldiers were so ready that they listened in silence as he led them through the oath and prayers for Vitellius's good fortune. Mucianus's feelings were not hostile to Vespasian, and leaned more toward Titus; the prefect of Egypt, Tiberius Alexander, had joined the plan; the Third Legion counted itself as Vespasian's own, having transferred from Syria to Moesia; the rest of the Illyrian legions were expected to follow — the whole army had been inflamed by the arrogance of the soldiers coming from Vitellius, who, being fierce in build and rough in speech, mocked the others as no match for them. But in so vast an undertaking, hesitation was common; and Vespasian was sometimes lifted into hope, sometimes weighing the risks: what would that day be like, when he committed his sixty years and his two young sons to war? Private ambitions could advance step by step, taking more or less from fortune as they pleased; but for men who want the throne, there is nothing in between the summit and the fall.
79| Before his eyes hovered the strength of the army of Germany, well known to a soldier like him: his own legions had no experience of civil war, Vitellius's were the victors, and among the defeated there was more complaint than actual strength. Loyalty worn thin by mutiny, and danger lurking in every man alone: what good would cohorts and cavalry wings do, if one or two men sought reward from the other side by some sudden act? So Scribonianus had been killed under Claudius, so his killer Volaginius had been promoted from the ranks to the top of the army: it's easier to sway a whole crowd than to guard against individuals.
80| Vespasian wavered under these fears, and the other officers and friends worked to steady him, Mucianus most of all — after many private conversations, now speaking openly: 'Everyone who takes up plans for great affairs ought to weigh whether what they're starting is good for the state, glorious for themselves, and either easy to carry out or at least not too hard. The man giving the advice also has to be weighed — does he add his own risk to the plan, and if fortune favors the venture, who gets the highest honor from it? I am calling you to power, Vespasian — power that is as good for the state as it is magnificent for you, and, next to the gods, lies in your own hands. Don't shrink from this as flattery: being chosen after Vitellius is closer to an insult than a compliment. We are not rising against the sharp mind of the deified Augustus, nor the cautious old age of Tiberius, nor even against a house made secure by the long reigns of Gaius or Claudius or Nero — you stepped aside even for the portraits of Galba. To keep lying low now, while the state is fouled and ruined, looks like nothing but sleep and cowardice — even if servitude were as safe for you as it is shameful. Whatever chance you had of seeming not to want this is already gone, past. You must take refuge in power. Have you forgotten Corbulo, butchered? He was of more brilliant birth than we are, I admit — but Nero too outranked Vitellius in noble blood. Whoever is feared is famous enough to the man who fears him. And Vitellius himself is proof that an emperor can be made by an army: he had no service record, no military reputation, he was raised up by hatred of Galba. Even Otho was beaten not by generalship or military force but by his own premature despair — and that has already made him seem, by comparison, a great and much-missed emperor. Meanwhile Vitellius scatters the legions, disarms the cohorts, and every day sows fresh seeds of war. Whatever fire and fierceness his soldiers had is wearing away in taverns, in drinking bouts, in aping their emperor. You have nine legions from Judea, Syria, and Egypt, untouched — none worn down in battle, none corrupted by mutiny, but soldiers hardened by real service and seasoned in a foreign war: the strength of fleets, cavalry wings, and cohorts, the most loyal client kings, and your own experience above everyone else's.'
81| 'For myself I will claim nothing beyond not being ranked after Valens and Caecina — but don't scorn Mucianus as your partner just because you don't find him a rival. I rank myself above Vitellius, and you above me. Your house has the name of triumph, two young sons — one already capable of ruling, and already known, in his first years of service, even to the armies stationed along the Rhine frontier. For me to withhold power from a man like you, whose son I'd adopt as my own if I wore the purple myself, would be absurd. Besides, our shares in success and failure won't be equal: if we win, I'll have whatever honor you grant me; the danger and the risk we'll bear equally. Better still — you command your armies, and leave the war and the uncertainties of battle to me. Today the defeated live under stricter discipline than the victors. Anger, hatred, the desire for revenge spur our side to courage; theirs grow dull through arrogance and contempt. This war itself will tear open and expose the wounds of the winning side, still covered over and festering. I have no more confidence in your vigilance, your restraint, your wisdom than I have in Vitellius's laziness, ignorance, and cruelty. But war serves our cause better than peace — men who stop to deliberate have already deserted him.'
82| After Mucianus's speech the others crowded around him with bolder encouragement, citing prophecies and reading the stars in his favor. Vespasian himself was not free of this superstition — once he ruled the world, he kept the astrologer Seleucus openly at his side as guide and forecaster. Old omens came back to his mind: a cypress tree on his estate, remarkably tall, had suddenly toppled, and the next day had risen again from the same spot, growing back tall and even fuller than before. The soothsayers agreed it was a great and favorable sign, promising the highest distinction to Vespasian, then still a young man. At first his triumphal honors, his consulship, and the glory of his victory in Judea seemed to have fulfilled the omen; but once he had achieved all that, he came to believe it foretold power itself. Between Judea and Syria lies Carmel — that is the name of both the mountain and the god. There is no statue of the god, nor any temple, so tradition has it — only an altar, and reverence. There, while Vespasian was sacrificing and turning over hidden hopes in his mind, the priest Basilides, after repeatedly examining the entrails, said: 'Whatever it is you are planning, Vespasian — whether to build a house, extend your land, or add to your slaves — you are granted a great seat, vast boundaries, and a great number of men.' This riddling answer had already been picked up by rumor, and now it was being spelled out openly; nothing was more talked about among the people. The conversations grew thicker around Vespasian himself, the more was said to men who were already hoping. With their course now firmly set, Mucianus left for Antioch, Vespasian for Caesarea — the one the capital of Syria, the other of Judea.
83| The move to bring imperial power to Vespasian began at Alexandria, where Tiberius Alexander acted swiftly, putting the legions under oath to him on the first of July. That day was afterward kept as the first day of his reign, though the legions in Judea had sworn allegiance on the third of July, so eager that they did not pause even for Titus, his son, then on his way back from Syria with messages passing between Mucianus and the father. The whole thing was done by the soldiers' own impulse, without a prepared assembly, without the legions even being gathered together.
84| While they were still looking for the right time and place, and for that hardest thing in such an affair — who would speak first — while hope and fear, calculation and chance, were all turning over in men's minds, Vespasian came out of his quarters. A few soldiers, standing in their usual order to greet him as their governor, hailed him instead as emperor. Then the rest came running up, piling on the titles Caesar, Augustus, and every name that belongs to imperial power. His mind passed from fear to fortune in a moment; in the man himself there was nothing swollen or arrogant, nothing new in this new turn of events. As soon as he had shaken off the daze that clouded his eyes at such a height, he spoke to the soldiers in plain military style and accepted all their joyful enthusiasm — for this was exactly what Mucianus had been waiting for, and he now put the eager soldiers under oath to Vespasian. Then Vespasian entered the theater at Antioch, where the people were used to holding their public discussions, and addressed the crowd streaming in and pouring out flattery — carrying it off well enough even in Greek, and showing in everything he said and did a certain calculated skill at performance. Nothing fired up the province and the army more than Mucianus's claim that Vitellius had decided to move the German legions to Syria, into rich and easy service, while sending the Syrian legions to the German winter quarters, harsh in climate and hardship. The provincials, after all, were happy with their familiar billeting of troops, many bound to the soldiers by ties of friendship and kinship, and the soldiers themselves loved their long-familiar camps like a second home.
85| Before the ides of July all of Syria had taken the same oath. Sohaemus joined them, bringing no negligible forces along with his kingdom, and Antiochus, immense in ancient wealth, the richest of the client kings. Soon Agrippa, summoned by secret messengers from his own men while Vitellius still knew nothing, hurried back from Rome by fast ship. Queen Berenice supported their cause with no less spirit, in the flower of youth and beauty, and welcome even to the aging Vespasian for the magnificence of her gifts. Every province washed by the sea as far as Asia and Achaea, and everything opening inland toward Pontus and Armenia, took the oath — but they were governed by legates without troops, since the legions had not yet been added to Cappadocia. A council on the whole state of affairs was held at Berytus. There Mucianus came with the legates and tribunes and the most distinguished of the centurions and soldiers, along with picked men chosen from the army in Judea; the sheer mass of infantry and cavalry gathered together, and the kings competing with one another in splendor, created the appearance of imperial majesty.
86| The first concern of the war was raising troops and recalling veterans. Strong cities were assigned to run weapons factories; at Antioch gold and silver coin was minted, and all these things were pushed forward through capable agents, each in its proper place. Vespasian himself went about in person, encouraging, praising the diligent, spurring on the slack more by example than by punishment, overlooking his friends' faults far more readily than their virtues. He honored many with prefectures and procuratorships, and many more with senatorial rank — outstanding men, most of whom went on to the highest offices; for a few, luck stood in for merit. As for the soldiers' bonus, Mucianus had shown only modest amounts at the first assembly, and even Vespasian offered no more in this civil war than others had given in peacetime — remarkably firm against the temptation to buy his soldiers, and his army was the better for it. Envoys were sent to the Parthians and to Armenia, and care was taken that, with the legions turned toward civil war, their rear should not be left exposed. It was decided that Titus should press on with the war in Judea, while Vespasian secured the gateways of Egypt; a portion of the forces, with Mucianus as commander and the mere name of Vespasian, seemed enough against Vitellius, since nothing is too hard for destiny. Letters were written to every army and every governor, with instructions to win over the praetorians who hated Vitellius with the promise of being restored to service.
87| Mucianus, moving with a light column and acting more like a partner in power than a subordinate, marched neither slowly, so as not to seem to be dragging his feet, nor fast either—he let the distance itself feed his reputation, knowing his real strength was modest and that people credit absent forces with more than they have. But the Sixth Legion and thirteen thousand picked troops followed behind in a huge column. He had ordered the fleet brought from the Black Sea to Byzantium, still undecided whether to bypass Moesia and seal off Dyrrachium with infantry and cavalry, while also closing the sea route to Italy with his warships, leaving Achaia and Asia safe behind him—provinces that would be exposed to Vitellius unless garrisoned—and keeping Vitellius himself unsure which part of Italy to defend, if hostile fleets threatened Brundisium, Tarentum, and the coasts of Calabria and Lucania at once.
88| So the provinces rang with the building of ships, the arming of soldiers, the mustering of weapons—but nothing wore people down like the hunt for money. Mucianus kept saying money was the sinew of civil war, and in hearing cases he looked not at justice or truth but only at the size of a man's fortune. Informers swarmed everywhere, and every wealthy man became prey. These abuses were harsh and hard to bear, but they were excused by the demands of war—and they outlasted the war, continuing even in peacetime, though Vespasian himself, early in his reign, was slower to indulge such injustices, until fortune's favors and bad advisers taught him to dare it too. Mucianus also funded the war from his own pocket, generous with his private wealth precisely so he could draw more greedily on the public purse. Others followed his example of contributing money, but almost none matched his freedom in taking it back.
89| Meanwhile Vespasian's cause was accelerated by the eagerness of the Illyrian armies to change sides. The Third Legion set the example for the other legions in Moesia; so did the Eighth and the Seventh Claudian, both steeped in loyalty to Otho, though they had missed his battle. Having advanced to Aquileia, they drove off the couriers bringing news of Otho's defeat, tore up the standards bearing Vitellius's name, and finally seized money and divided it among themselves—acting like an army at war with its own side. Fear followed, and from fear came calculation: what needed excusing under Vitellius could be credited to Vespasian instead. So the three Moesian legions began writing letters to win over the Pannonian army, and prepared to force those who refused. In this upheaval Aponius Saturninus, governor of Moesia, dared a monstrous crime: he sent a centurion to kill Tettius Julianus, commander of the Seventh Legion, over personal grudges he dressed up as loyalty to the cause. Julianus, learning of the danger and guided by locals who knew the country, fled through the Moesian wilderness beyond Mount Haemus. He took no further part in the civil war, dragging out his journey toward Vespasian through various delays, hesitating or hurrying depending on the news he heard.
90| In Pannonia, meanwhile, the Thirteenth Legion and the Seventh Galbian, still nursing their grief and rage over Bedriacum, went over to Vespasian without hesitation, driven above all by Antonius Primus. This man, guilty under the laws and convicted of forgery under Nero, had—among the war's other evils—won back his senatorial rank. Placed by Galba in command of the Seventh Legion, he was believed to have written to Otho offering himself as a leader for his cause; Otho ignored him, and he played no part in that war. But as Vitellius's fortunes crumbled, he joined Vespasian and added real weight to his cause—vigorous in action, quick with words, skilled at sowing hatred against others, powerful in stirring discord and mutiny, a plunderer, a spendthrift, worthless in peace but not to be underestimated in war. The combined Moesian and Pannonian armies then drew in the Dalmatian troops as well, though the consular governors did nothing to stir up trouble. Tampius Flavianus held Pannonia and Pompeius Silvanus held Dalmatia—both rich old men. But there was also the procurator Cornelius Fuscus, a man in the vigor of youth and of distinguished birth. In his early youth, out of a longing for a quiet life, he had given up his senatorial rank; later he led his home colony in support of Galba, and through that service gained his procuratorship. Taking up Vespasian's cause, he carried the fiercest torch for war—not so much delighted by the rewards of danger as by danger itself, preferring new, uncertain, risky ventures to safe and long-held certainties. So he and Antonius set about stirring and shaking every sore spot they could find anywhere. Letters went out to Britain's Fourteenth Legion and to Spain's First, both of which had stood with Otho against Vitellius; more letters spread through the Gallic provinces; and within moments a full-scale war was catching fire, the Illyrian armies breaking away in the open while the rest waited to see which way fortune leaned.
91| While all this was happening in the provinces under Vespasian and his party's commanders, Vitellius grew more contemptible and more sluggish by the day, stopping to enjoy every pleasant town and villa along the way as he made for Rome with a heavy, slow-moving column. Sixty thousand armed men followed him, their discipline ruined by license; the crowd of camp servants was even larger, and among the slaves the sutlers' hangers-on were the most shameless of all. The huge retinue of commanders and friends would have been unmanageable even under the strictest discipline. The mass swelled further with senators and knights who came out from the city to meet him—some out of fear, many out of flattery, and the rest, gradually, everyone, simply so as not to be the ones left behind while others went. From the disreputable classes came men known to Vitellius through their service to his vices—clowns, actors, charioteers—in whose degrading company he took strange delight. Not only towns and municipalities were drained by the gathering of supplies, but the farmers themselves and their fields, ripe now with the harvest, were plundered as if this were enemy soil.
92| There were many savage killings among the soldiers themselves, the discord between legionaries and auxiliaries persisting after it first broke out at Ticinum—though when it came to fighting civilians, they were all in agreement. The worst slaughter happened seven miles from Rome. There Vitellius handed out prepared food to the soldiers one by one, like fattening gladiators for the ring, and the crowd poured out and mixed freely through the whole camp. Some of them—with the crude wit typical of city dwellers—robbed the unwary soldiers, cutting their belts off in secret and then asking, mockingly, whether they were even wearing one. The soldiers' pride couldn't stand the insult of being mocked, and they fell on the unarmed crowd with swords. Among others killed was a father accompanying his soldier son; he was later recognized, and once word of the killing spread, the troops held back from harming the innocent. Still, panic gripped the city as soldiers scattered in every direction; the Forum drew them above all, everyone wanting a look at the place where Galba had died. And the soldiers were a frightening sight in their own right—shaggy in animal pelts, loaded down with huge weapons, shoving clumsily through crowds they scarcely bothered to dodge—and whenever they slipped on the wet stones or knocked into someone, cursing gave way fast to fists, then to swords. Even the tribunes and prefects went darting about in terror, trailed by armed gangs.
93| Vitellius himself, riding a splendid horse from the Milvian Bridge, in full military cloak and armed, drove the senate and people ahead of him. Talked out by his friends from entering the city as though it were a captured town, he put on the toga praetexta instead and marched in with his column in proper order. The eagles of four legions went in front, with the standards of other legions' detachments beside them in equal number; then came the standards of twelve cavalry wings, and behind them cavalry riding after the ranks of infantry; then thirty-four cohorts, arranged by nationality or type of arms. In front of the eagles marched the camp prefects, tribunes, and senior centurions, dressed in white; the rest marched beside their own centuries, gleaming with arms and decorations, and the soldiers' medals and neck-chains shone bright. It was a splendid sight—an army too fine for an emperor like Vitellius. In this style he entered the Capitol, and there, embracing his mother, honored her with the title of Augusta.
94| The following day, speaking as though the senate and people before him belonged to some other city entirely, he gave a lofty speech in his own honor, extolling his diligence and self-restraint—though the men in the room, and all of Italy, which had watched him march through in a disgraceful fog of sleep and excess, knew otherwise. Even so, the common crowd, free of real cares and blind to the difference between truth and flattery, shouted its usual applause on cue. And though he refused the title of Augustus, they pressed it on him until he took it—as pointlessly as he had refused it in the first place.
95| Among a people that reads omens into everything, it was taken as a mark of doom that Vitellius, on becoming Pontifex Maximus, issued his decree on religious ceremonies on the fifteenth day before the Kalends of August—a date long held unlucky since the disasters at the Cremera and the Allia. So utterly ignorant was he of all law, human and divine, and so were his freedmen and friends in their carelessness, that he governed as if surrounded by drunks. Yet he presided over the consular elections with the candidates in a show of civility, and played at courting every rumor of the lowest rabble—spectator in the theater, partisan in the circus. These might have been charming, popular touches if they had sprung from real virtue; given the memory of his past life, they seemed shabby and cheap instead. He kept coming to the senate, even when the matters under discussion were trivial. It happened once that Helvidius Priscus, praetor-elect, voted against his wishes. Vitellius was angered at first, but did no more than call on the tribunes of the plebs to defend his slighted authority; then, when friends who feared a deeper anger in him worked to calm him down, he said nothing new had happened—it was normal for two senators to disagree in public affairs; he himself, he said, had often spoken against Thrasea. Most people mocked the shamelessness of the comparison; others were pleased precisely because he had chosen, not one of the powerful, but Thrasea, as his model of true glory.
96| Vitellius had put Publilius Sabinus, formerly a cohort prefect, and Julius Priscus, then a centurion, in command of the Praetorians. Priscus owed his standing to Valens, Sabinus to Caecina; between the two rivals Vitellius himself had no authority at all. Caecina and Valens ran the business of empire, and their old mutual resentment—badly hidden even during the campaign and in camp, and swollen by the corruption of their friends and by a city fertile ground for breeding hatreds—now grew as they competed and were compared, jockeying for followers, retinues, and vast crowds of well-wishers, with Vitellius's favor tilting first to one, then the other. Power shared is never trusted enough when it runs too high. And they despised Vitellius himself even as they feared him—unpredictable as he was, given to sudden fits of anger or badly timed flattery. None of this made them slower to seize palaces, gardens, and the wealth of empire, while a tearful, destitute crowd of nobles—the very men and their children whom Galba had restored to their country—got no help at all from the emperor's pity. The leading men of the state were pleased, and even the common people approved, that he had granted returning exiles the legal rights over their own freedmen—though servile natures found every way to corrupt even that, hiding money in secret or ingratiating pockets, and some freedmen actually moved into Caesar's own household and grew more powerful than their former masters.
97| The camp was packed, the men overflowing into the porticoes, temples, and every part of the city, wandering loose. They did not know their own headquarters, did not keep watch, were not toughened by work. Through the city's temptations and things shameful to name, they wasted their bodies in idleness and their minds in lust. Finally, careless even of their health, a large number pitched tents in the notoriously unhealthy Vatican district, and deaths among the ranks followed thick and fast. With the Tiber right there, the Germans and Gauls, bodies already prone to sickness, wore themselves down further with their thirst for the river and their inability to bear the heat. On top of this the whole structure of the service was thrown into disorder by favoritism and corruption: sixteen praetorian and four urban cohorts were being enrolled, each meant to hold a thousand men. Valens took more liberties in this recruiting, as if he alone had rescued Caecina from danger. It's true his arrival had strengthened their cause, and a bad rumor about his slow march had been turned around by a successful battle. All the troops of Lower Germany attached themselves to Valens, which is thought to be the first crack in Caecina's loyalty.
98| But Vitellius did not favor his generals so much that the ordinary soldier got less license. Every man chose his own service: however unworthy, if he wanted it, he could get himself enrolled in the urban cohorts; and, conversely, good men who wanted to stay with the legions or the cavalry wings were allowed to. Nor were there few who wanted to leave, worn out by sickness and blaming the climate. But this stripped the legions and cavalry of their best men, and wrecked the pride of the camps—twenty thousand men drawn from the whole army, mixed together rather than picked.
99| Vitellius was in the middle of addressing the troops when the men shouted for the deaths of three chieftains of Gaul — Asiaticus, Flavus, Rufinus — for having taken Vindex's side. He made no move to silence them. Aware of his own weakness and cowardice, and knowing a donative was due but the money wasn't there, he gave the soldiers everything else instead. The freedmen of past emperors were ordered to contribute according to the number of their slaves, as a kind of tax. Vitellius himself, with his one obsession being how to waste money, built stables for his chariot drivers, filled the Circus with gladiator and wild-beast shows, and played the fool as if money were in endless supply.
100| Caecina and Valens even celebrated Vitellius's birthday with gladiator shows staged street by street across the whole city, at enormous and unprecedented expense. But what pleased the worst sort disgusted every decent man: he had built altars on the Campus Martius and offered funeral sacrifices to Nero. Victims were slaughtered and burned at public expense; the Augustales lit the fire—a priesthood which Caesar Tiberius consecrated to the Julian house, just as Romulus had done for King Tatius. Not yet four months since his victory, and Vitellius's freedman Asiaticus already ranked alongside Polyclitus, Patrobius, and the other old names of hatred. No one in that court competed in honesty or hard work; there was only one road to power—glutting Vitellius's insatiable appetites with extravagant banquets, spending, and debauchery. Vitellius himself, thinking it enough to enjoy the present without planning for later, is believed to have squandered nine hundred million sesterces in a very few months. Great and wretched city, having endured Otho and Vitellius in the same year, tossed between the likes of Vinius, Fabius, Icelus, and Asiaticus in a shifting, shameful lottery—until Mucianus and Marcellus succeeded them, bringing different men, though hardly different morals.
101| The first news to reach Vitellius was the defection of the Third Legion, in a letter from Aponius Saturninus, sent before Aponius himself also joined Vespasian's side. But Aponius, flustered by the sudden crisis, had not written the full story, and flattering friends softened it further in the telling: it was only one legion's mutiny, they said, while the other armies stayed loyal. Vitellius spoke to the soldiers in the same terms, attacking the recently discharged Praetorians as the source of false rumors, and insisting there was no danger of civil war—all while suppressing Vespasian's name and sending soldiers roaming the city to silence public talk. That, more than anything, only fed the rumor.
102| Even so, he summoned auxiliaries from Germany, Britain, and the Spanish provinces, sluggishly and trying to hide the urgency. The governors and provinces dragged their feet accordingly: Hordeonius Flaccus was anxious over his own war, with the Batavians already under suspicion; Vettius Bolanus never found Britain quiet enough to spare men; and both were of divided loyalty besides. Nothing came quickly from Spain either, since there was no consular governor there at the time; the legates of the three legions, equal in rank, would have competed to obey if Vitellius's fortunes had been rising, but with them falling, all held back equally. In Africa, the legion and cohorts raised by Clodius Macer, then disbanded by Galba, took up service again on Vitellius's order, and the rest of the young men there enlisted eagerly too—because Vitellius's term as proconsul there had been clean and popular, while Vespasian's had been notorious and hated. The allies accordingly guessed how each man's rule would go; events proved the opposite.
103| At first Valerius Festus, the governor, backed the province's enthusiasm loyally. Then he began to waver, openly favoring Vitellius in his letters and edicts while secretly courting Vespasian, ready to back whichever side prevailed. Some soldiers and centurions caught carrying Vespasian's letters and edicts through Raetia and Gaul were sent to Vitellius and executed; more escaped detection, hidden by loyal friends or their own cunning. So Vitellius's preparations were well known, while most of Vespasian's plans stayed hidden—at first from Vitellius's own laziness, then because garrisons holding the Pannonian Alps blocked the messengers. Even the sea favored those sailing east with the Etesian winds, and turned against those sailing the other way.
104| Finally, terrified by enemy incursions and grim news from every side, Vitellius ordered Caecina and Valens to make ready for war. Caecina was sent ahead; Valens, only just rising from a severe illness, was held back by weakness. The army of Germany that now set out from the city looked nothing like the one that had marched before: no vigor in their bodies, no fire in their spirits; a slow, thin column, slack weapons, sluggish horses—soldiers who couldn't bear sun, dust, or bad weather, and the duller they were at enduring hardship, the readier they were for quarrels. On top of this came Caecina's old ambition and his new lethargy, the men grown soft with too much good fortune and given over to luxury—or perhaps it suited a man planning treachery to sap the army's fighting spirit deliberately. Most believed Caecina's mind had been unsettled by Flavius Sabinus's schemes, with Rubrius Gallus acting as go-between, and that the terms of his defection would be honored by Vespasian. At the same time he was reminded of his hatred and jealousy toward Fabius Valens, and urged to secure standing and strength with the new emperor, since he was falling behind in Vitellius's favor.
105| Caecina took his leave of Vitellius amid great ceremony, pushing part of the cavalry forward to grab Cremona first. Behind them marched detachments drawn from four legions—the First, Fourth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth—with the Fifth and Twenty-Second following; the column's rear was made up of the Twenty-First Rapax and the First Italica, together with contingents from the three legions in Britain and a body of picked auxiliaries. Once Caecina was on the road, Fabius Valens sent word to the troops he had formerly commanded, urging them to wait for him along the way—insisting this matched an understanding he'd reached with Caecina. But Caecina, being there in person and holding the stronger hand, bent that message into something else: a plan for the whole force to converge for the coming fight. Accordingly the legions were told to press on toward Cremona, with some diverted instead toward Hostilia; Caecina himself veered off to Ravenna, supposedly to speak to the fleet, and from there arranged a secret meeting at Patavium to set his betrayal in motion. For Lucilius Bassus, after commanding a cavalry wing, had been put by Vitellius in charge of both the Ravenna and Misenum fleets together, and, resentful at not being made praetorian prefect outright, was avenging his petty grievance with outrageous treachery. It cannot be known whether he drew Caecina in, or whether—since it so often happens that bad men are alike—the same rottenness drove them both to it.
106| The historians who wrote of this war while the Flavian house held power passed down a tale of concern for peace and love of the republic, motives corrupted into flattery. To me it seems that beyond his natural fickleness, and the loyalty he had already made cheap by betraying Galba, it was rivalry and jealousy—the fear of being outdone by others in Vitellius's favor—that finally destroyed Vitellius himself. Caecina, once he reached the legions, worked by various tricks to undermine the men's and centurions' stubborn loyalty to Vitellius. Bassus, attempting the same thing, had less trouble, since the fleet's loyalty was already shaky, given how recently it had served for Otho.
1| The Flavian commanders were weighing their plans of war with better luck and better faith. They had gathered at Poetovio, the winter camp of the Thirteenth Legion. There they debated whether to block the Pannonian Alps until their full strength assembled behind them, or to advance and fight for Italy without delay. Those who wanted to wait for reinforcements and stretch the war out pointed to the German legions' strength and name — and to this too: Vitellius now had the pick of Britain's army standing behind him. Their own beaten legions were fewer, and however boldly men talk, defeat drains the heart out of them. But meanwhile, if they held the Alps, Mucianus would arrive with the forces of the East; Vespasian still had the sea, the fleet, and the loyalty of the provinces, from which he could raise what amounted to a second war. So a healthy delay would bring fresh strength, and nothing they already had would be lost.
2| Against this, Antonius Primus — the fiercest advocate for war — argued that speed would help them and ruin Vitellius. The victors had gained more laziness than confidence: they had not been kept under arms and in camp, but had grown soft in every town of Italy, feared only by their hosts, and the more savagely they had once behaved, the more greedily they now gulped down unfamiliar pleasures. The circus, the theaters, the charms of the city had melted them, or sickness had worn them down. But given time they too would recover their strength through the discipline of war. Germany was not far off, the source of their power; Britain was only separated by a strait; Gaul and Spain lay close by on both sides, supplying men, horses, and money, not to mention Italy itself and the wealth of Rome. And if the enemy chose to take the offensive, there were two fleets and an undefended Illyrian sea. What good then would mountain barriers do? What good would come of dragging the war into another summer? Where would the money and supplies come from meanwhile? Better instead to use exactly what they had: the Pannonian legions, tricked rather than beaten, were eager to rise again for revenge, and the army of Moesia brought fresh strength untouched by defeat. If you counted soldiers rather than legions, there was more real force here and none of the corruption; their very shame had worked in favor of discipline. As for the cavalry, they had not even been beaten then — only the Vitellian line had been scattered while fortune ran against it. 'Then, two squadrons of Pannonian and Moesian horse broke the enemy; now sixteen combined squadrons will crash into them, overwhelm them with noise and dust, and drown riders and horses alike who have forgotten what battle is. Unless someone stops me, I will be both the one who urges this plan and the one who carries it out. You, whose fortunes are still untested, hold the legions back — light cohorts will be enough for me. Soon you will hear that Italy stands open and that Vitellius's cause is shattered. It will be a pleasure to follow and to tread in the footsteps of the winning side.'
3| He poured all this out with blazing eyes and a harsh voice, pitched to carry — for centurions and some of the soldiers had pushed into the council — and it moved even the cautious and careful, while the rank and file and the rest praised him alone as their man and leader, scorning the sluggishness of everyone else. He had built this reputation for himself already at an earlier assembly, where, after Vespasian's letters were read out, he had not, like most, spoken vaguely so as to twist his words later whichever way suited him — he had come out openly for the cause, and so his soldiers found him a weightier partner, whether in blame or in glory.
4| Next in authority was the procurator Cornelius Fuscus. He too had been in the habit of attacking Vitellius harshly, and had left himself no hope if things went badly. Tampius Flavianus, cautious by nature and by age, stirred the soldiers' suspicions, as though he still remembered his family ties to Vitellius; and because he had fled when the legions first stirred and then come back on his own, people believed he had been looking for a chance to betray them. In fact Flavianus, having left Pannonia and entered Italy to escape the danger, had been driven by a hunger for revolution to resume the title of governor and involve himself in the civil war — urged on by Cornelius Fuscus, not because the cause needed Flavianus's energy, but so that a consular name might lend a respectable face to a party just then rising.
5| To make the crossing into Italy safe and useful, word was sent to Aponius Saturninus to hurry there with the Moesian army. And so the unarmed provinces would not be exposed to the barbarian tribes, the chiefs of the Sarmatian Iazyges, who held power among their people, were taken on as allies. They also offered their commons and their cavalry — the only arm in which they were strong — but this was declined, so that they would not exploit the civil discord to stir up foreign trouble, or, bidding higher on the other side, cast off all sense of right and wrong. King Sido and King Italicus of the Suebi were drawn into the party; their people had long been loyal to Rome, and their people had long been loyal to Rome, and their race was more patient in keeping faith [text corrupt]. Auxiliaries were posted on the flank, since Raetia was hostile, its procurator Porcius Septiminus being unshakably loyal to Vitellius. Sextilius Felix was therefore sent with the Auriana wing, eight cohorts, and the young men of Noricum to seize the bank of the river Inn, which runs between Raetia and Noricum. Neither side risked battle there, and the fortunes of the war were decided elsewhere.
6| As Antonius rushed detachments from the cohorts and part of the cavalry to invade Italy, he was joined by Arrius Varus, a vigorous soldier whose reputation had been built both by Corbulo's command and by his own success in Armenia. The same man was said to have privately slandered Corbulo's courage to Nero; the disgraceful favor this won him won him the rank of chief centurion, welcome at the time but ill-gotten, and it later turned to his ruin. But Primus and Varus, having seized Aquileia, were received with joy at every town along the way, at Opitergium and Altinum. A garrison was left at Altinum against any move by the fleet at Ravenna, since its defection had not yet been heard of. From there they brought Patavium and Ateste over to their side. There they learned that three Vitellian cohorts and the Sebosian cavalry wing had settled at Forum Alieni, where a bridge had been thrown across the river. The chance to strike while they were off guard seemed too good to miss — word of their carelessness had reached them too. At first light they overwhelmed most of them still unarmed. Orders had been given to kill only a few and terrify the rest into changing sides. Some surrendered at once; more, breaking down the bridge, cut off their own escape from the advancing enemy. The opening moves of the war went to the Flavians.
7| News of the victory spread, and the Seventh Galbian and Thirteenth Gemina legions, under their commander Vedius Aquila, marched eagerly into Patavium. There a few days were spent resting, and Minicius Justus, camp prefect of the Seventh Legion, was pulled out of reach of his soldiers' anger — for he had commanded them with a strictness better suited to peacetime than civil war — and sent off to Vespasian. A move long wished for was made to seem grander than it was, through the way it was presented: Antonius ordered the images of Galba, thrown down amid the turmoil of the times, restored and honored again in every town, judging it fitting for the cause — it would suggest that Galba's rule had been popular and that the party was reviving.
8| Next they debated where to make their base for the war. Verona seemed the better choice, with open plains around it suited to cavalry fighting, their strongest arm; and it seemed likely to strip Vitellius of a colony rich in resources, both practically and for its propaganda value. Vicenza fell into their hands simply by passing through it — a small thing in itself, since the town had modest strength, but it carried weight when people considered that Caecina had been born there, and that the enemy general's own homeland had been snatched from him. Verona was worth more still: its people helped the cause with their example and their wealth, and the army posted there blocked off Raetia and the Julian Alps, sealing that route against the German armies. Vespasian either did not know of these moves or had forbidden them: his orders were that the war should halt at Aquileia and wait for Mucianus, and he backed the order with sound reasoning — since Egypt, which controlled the grain supply, and the revenues of the wealthiest provinces were in his hands, Vitellius's army could be starved into surrender for lack of pay and food. Mucianus urged the same in letter after letter, giving as his excuse a bloodless, mourning-free victory and other fine phrases of that kind — but in truth he was greedy for glory and meant to keep all credit for the war to himself. In any case, given the vast distances involved, his advice always arrived after events had already overtaken it.
9| So Antonius made a sudden strike and broke through the enemy's outposts; both sides tested each other in a light skirmish and drew apart evenly matched. Soon after, Caecina fortified a camp between Hostilia, a village of Verona's territory, and the marshes of the river Tartarus, well protected by position, with the river at his back and the marsh guarding his flanks. Had he been loyal, the two legions there — before the Moesian army had joined the rest — could either have been crushed by the full Vitellian force, or, driven back, might have abandoned Italy in disgraceful flight. But Caecina, through a series of delays, handed the enemy their first opening in the war, wasting time berating by letter men he could easily have driven off by arms, until through go-betweens he sealed the terms of his own treachery. Meanwhile Aponius Saturninus reached camp with the Seventh Claudian legion; its tribune, Vipstanus Messala, came from a distinguished line, was himself a man of real standing, and alone brought genuine skill to this war. Against this force — still no match for the Vitellians, since they themselves as yet had only three legions — Caecina sent letters accusing them of recklessness in taking up arms already beaten. At the same time he praised the courage of the German army to the skies, mentioned Vitellius only modestly and in passing, and said nothing insulting about Vespasian — nothing, in short, that might either corrupt or frighten the enemy. The Flavian commanders, for their part, dropped any defense of their earlier bad luck, spoke grandly for Vespasian, confidently for the cause, securely of their army, and attacked Vitellius as declared enemies, giving the tribunes and centurions hope of keeping whatever privileges Vitellius had granted them; and they urged Caecina himself, not too subtly, toward defection. Reading his letters out before the assembly only strengthened their confidence, since Caecina had written so submissively, as if afraid of offending Vespasian, while their own commanders had written of Vitellius with open contempt, as though mocking him.
10| When two legions arrived — the Third, led by Dillius Aponianus, and the Eighth, led by Numisius Lupus — the commanders decided to show off their strength and ring Verona with a military rampart. As it happened, the Galbian legion had been assigned the work on the side of the wall facing the enemy, and when allied cavalry were spotted in the distance, they were mistaken for the enemy, sparking needless panic. Men grabbed their weapons, fearing betrayal. Their anger fell on Tampius Flavianus — with no proof of any crime, but he had long been hated, and now some sudden storm demanded his destruction. They shouted that he was Vitellius's relative, Otho's betrayer, the man who had stolen their bonus. There was no room for defense, though he stretched out his hands as a suppliant, again and again throwing himself on the ground, his clothes torn, his chest and face heaving with sobs. That very display only inflamed the hostile crowd further — as if such excessive fear proved his guilt. Aponius was shouted down when he tried to speak; the men rejected everyone else with roars and yells. Only to Antonius would the soldiers listen, for he had the gift of eloquence, the skill of soothing a mob, and real authority. When the mutiny began to boil over and turned from curses and insults to weapons and violence, he ordered chains put on Flavianus. The soldiers saw through the trick, scattered the men guarding the platform, and prepared a final assault. Antonius bared his own chest against their drawn swords, swearing he would die either by the soldiers' hands or his own, and calling by name on every man he recognized who bore some mark of military honor, urging him to help. Then he turned to the standards and the gods of war, praying that they would hurl that same madness, that same discord, onto the enemy's armies instead — until the mutiny finally wore itself out, and as the day ended each man slipped back to his own tent. That same night Flavianus set out and, meeting a letter from Vespasian on the road, was saved from danger.
11| The legions, as if infected by the same disease, turned on Aponius Saturninus, commander of the army of Moesia, even more savagely than before — not because they were worn out by labor and fieldwork this time, but because they flared up in the middle of the day, once letters supposedly written by Saturninus to Vitellius had been made public. Where once there had been a contest in courage and discipline, now it was a contest in insolence and defiance, each side determined to demand Aponius's execution no less violently than Flavianus's. The Moesian legions claimed they had helped avenge the Pannonians before, and the Pannonians, as if excused by another unit's mutiny, were glad to repeat the offense. They marched on the gardens where Saturninus was staying. It was not so much Primus, Aponianus, and Messala — though they tried every means — who saved Saturninus, as the darkness of the hiding place where he was concealed: the furnace room of some baths that happened to be empty. Soon after, dismissing his lictors, he withdrew to Patavium. With the departure of the two consulars, all power over both armies fell to Antonius alone, as his colleagues stepped back and the soldiers' loyalty turned toward him. Some believed both mutinies had been engineered by Antonius's own treachery, so that he alone would reap the rewards of the war.
12| Nor were minds at rest on Vitellius's side either: a more ruinous discord unsettled them — not the crowd's suspicions this time, but the treachery of their own commanders. Lucilius Bassus, prefect of the fleet at Ravenna, had won over the wavering loyalty of the sailors — a large portion of them Dalmatians and Pannonians, from provinces held by Vespasian — and brought them over to his side. He chose a night for the betrayal, so that the defectors could gather alone at headquarters while everyone else remained unaware. Bassus himself, from shame or fear of how it might turn out, waited it out at home. The ship captains tore down Vitellius's images amid great uproar; a few who resisted were cut down, and the rest of the crowd, eager for revolution, swung toward Vespasian. Then Lucilius came forward and openly declared himself the instigator. The fleet chose Cornelius Fuscus as their prefect, and he hurried to join them. Bassus, held under a mark of respect, was carried by Liburnian galleys to Atria, where he was put in chains by Vibennius Rufinus, commander of a cavalry squadron stationed there — but the chains were struck off at once when Hormus, a freedman of Caesar's, intervened. Hormus too was counted among the leaders.
13| Meanwhile Caecina, once the fleet's defection became known, singled out the senior centurions and a handful of soldiers — the rest had been scattered on various duties — and, wanting the privacy of the camp, summoned them to headquarters. There he praised Vespasian's courage and the strength of his party: the fleet had gone over, supplies were tight, Gaul and Spain were hostile, nothing in Rome could be trusted — and he painted everything about Vitellius in the worst light. Then, with his co-conspirators taking the lead, he swore in the rest, who were stunned by the sudden turn, to Vespasian's name. At the same time Vitellius's images were torn down and messengers sent to inform Antonius. But once word of the betrayal spread through the whole camp, soldiers came running back to headquarters and saw Vespasian's name posted and Vitellius's statues thrown down. At first there was a vast silence; then everything broke out at once. Had it come to this — that the glory of the army of Germany should surrender its arms and hand over its men bound, without a fight, without a wound? What legions, after all, stood against them on the other side? Beaten ones — and even then the one true strength of Otho's army, the First and Fourteenth legions, was absent, though they themselves had routed and crushed those very legions on that same battlefield. Were so many thousands of armed men to be handed over as a gift to the exile Antonius, like a herd sold at auction? Did they really think eight legions were nothing more than an appendage to one fleet? This was what Bassus wanted, what Caecina wanted — after stripping the emperor of his homes, his gardens, his wealth, now to steal his soldiers too. Unharmed and unbloodied, cheap even in Flavian eyes, what would they say when asked to account for either victory or defeat?
14| These things men shouted, singly and all together, each driven by his own grievance, until the outcry began with the Fifth legion; Vitellius's images were put back up and chains thrown on Caecina. They chose as their leaders Fabius Fabullus, commander of the Fifth legion, and Cassius Longus, camp prefect. Soldiers from three Liburnian galleys who happened to cross their path, innocent and unaware of what was happening, were slaughtered. Then, abandoning the camp and destroying the bridge, they marched back to Hostilia and from there to Cremona, to join the First Italic and Twenty-First Rapax legions, which Caecina had already sent ahead with part of the cavalry to hold Cremona.
15| When Antonius learned of this, he decided to attack the enemy armies while their minds were divided and their forces scattered, before their commanders could recover authority, their soldiers obedience, or the reunited legions their confidence. He guessed that Fabius Valens, who had already left Rome, would hurry his march once he learned of Caecina's treachery — and Fabius was loyal to Vitellius and no stranger to warfare. At the same time a huge force of Germans was feared, coming through Raetia. Vitellius had also called up reinforcements from Britain, Gaul, and Spain — an immense flood of war, unless Antonius, fearing exactly that, could force a battle quickly and seize victory first. So with his whole army he marched two days from Verona and reached Bedriacum. The next day he kept the legions back to fortify the camp, and sent the auxiliary cohorts into the countryside around Cremona, ostensibly to gather supplies, but really to blood the troops on plunder from Roman citizens; he himself advanced with four thousand cavalry to a point eight miles from Bedriacum, so they could raid more freely. His scouts, as usual, ranged farther out.
16| It was about the fifth hour of the day when a fast-riding cavalryman reported that the enemy was approaching, a few men riding ahead, and that movement and noise could be heard far off. While Antonius was still weighing what to do, Arrius Varus, eager to get something done, charged out with his keenest horsemen and drove the Vitellians back with modest losses. But once their larger numbers rallied, fortune reversed, and the men who had pursued hardest were now the last in the flight. Antonius had not ordered the charge, but he judged that what happened was bound to happen anyway. He urged his men to take up the fight boldly, spread his cavalry squadrons out to either side, and left a clear path down the middle to receive Varus and his horsemen. He ordered the legions to arm, and sent word through the fields that every man, wherever nearest, should abandon his plunder and rush to the fight. Meanwhile a panicked Varus got tangled up with his own scattered men and spread the fear further. The routed troops, mixed in with the wounded, clashed with their own unhurt comrades, hampered by their own fear and the narrow roads.
17| In all that confusion, Antonius left nothing undone that a steady commander or a brave soldier should do. He ran to the frightened, held back the retreating, and wherever the strain was greatest, wherever there was any hope, he stood out — by judgment, by hand, by voice — visible to the enemy, conspicuous to his own men. He was carried away by the heat of it to the point of spearing a standard-bearer who was fleeing, then snatching up the standard himself and turning it against the enemy. Shamed by this, no more than a hundred cavalrymen stood their ground — but the terrain helped: the road narrowed there, and a bridge over a stream running between the banks had been broken, its uncertain channel and steep banks blocking the fugitives' escape. That necessity, or perhaps chance, restored the side that had already begun to slip. Rallying together in close ranks, they met the Vitellians, who had scattered themselves recklessly in pursuit, and threw them into confusion. Antonius pressed the shaken enemy, cutting down whoever stood in his way, while the rest, each according to his taste, stripped bodies, took prisoners, and seized weapons and horses. And the men who only moments before had been scattered in flight across the fields, drawn back by the cheer of victory, rejoined the fight.
18| About four miles from Cremona the standards of the Rapax and Italic legions gleamed into view, having advanced that far on the strength of an early, cheering success by their own cavalry. But once fortune turned against them, they could not loosen their ranks, could not take in the routed men, could not march out to meet and attack the enemy — who by now were exhausted from covering that whole distance at a run and fighting the whole way. As it happened, the beaten men had not missed their commander's presence in success nearly as much as they now felt his absence in defeat. The victorious cavalry charged their wavering line, and the tribune Vipstanus Messala arrived with the Moesian auxiliaries, matched by many legionaries who, though hastily gathered, kept pace with them; so infantry and cavalry mixed together broke the legions' formation. And the nearness of Cremona's walls gave them less courage to resist the closer it offered hope of escape. Antonius pressed no further, mindful of the exhaustion and wounds that had battered his cavalry and their horses through so uncertain a battle, however fortunate its end.
19| As evening cast its shadow, the full strength of the Flavian army arrived. When they saw the heaps of dead and the fresh traces of slaughter, they demanded, as if the war were already won, to press on to Cremona and either accept the surrender of the beaten enemy or storm the town. That was the talk in the open, and it sounded fine. But privately each man was thinking something else: that a town on level ground could be taken by a single rush. Breaking in under cover of darkness gave them the same boldness and more license to plunder. If they waited for daylight, they'd get peace instead, and pleas for mercy — clemency and glory for their toil and wounds, empty rewards, while the real wealth of Cremona would end up in the pockets of the prefects and commanders. The plunder of a stormed city belongs to the soldiers; of a surrendered one, to the generals. So they scorned their centurions and tribunes, and to keep any other voice from being heard they clashed their weapons, ready to break ranks if not led forward.
20| Then Antonius pushed in among the companies, and where his presence and authority won silence, he insisted he wasn't trying to rob such deserving men of glory or reward — only that duties were divided between army and commanders. It suited soldiers to crave battle; commanders served best by foresight, deliberation, and caution more often than recklessness. Just as he had done his share with arms and hands toward the victory, so he would now contribute by judgment and planning — the proper skills of a general. The dangers ahead weren't in doubt: night, an unfamiliar city's layout, the enemy inside, everything set up for ambush. Even if the gates stood open, they should not enter without reconnaissance, without daylight. Or did they mean to start an assault with no way to see anything — what ground was favorable, how high the walls were, whether the city should be attacked with artillery and missiles or with siege-works and mantlets? Then, turning to individual men, he kept asking whether they'd brought axes and pickaxes and the other gear needed to storm a city. When they said no, he said: 'Can any hands break through and undermine walls with swords and javelins? If we have to build a ramp, or shelter under sheds and wicker screens, are we going to stand there uselessly, like some clueless mob, gawking at the height of the towers and someone else's fortifications? Wouldn't it be better to wait out one night, bring up the artillery and siege-engines, and carry force and victory in with us?' At the same time he sent the camp-servants and grooms, along with the freshest of the cavalry, to Bedriacum to bring up supplies and everything else needed.
21| The soldiers took this badly, and it nearly came to mutiny, when cavalry who had ridden ahead right up to the walls seized some stray Cremonese, and from their information it was learned that all six Vitellian legions and the entire army stationed at Hostilia had covered thirty miles that very day, and, learning of their side's defeat, were arming for battle and would soon arrive. This alarm broke through the deadlock and opened the men's minds to their commander's plans. He ordered the Thirteenth Legion to take position on the raised roadbed of the Via Postumia itself; next to it on the left the Seventh Galbiana stood in open field, then the Seventh Claudia, protected by a rough ditch (that was the lay of the land); on the right the Eighth held an open stretch, and beyond it the Third, hidden among thick woods. Such was the arrangement of eagles and standards; but the soldiers themselves, however chance had scattered them, were jumbled together in the darkness. The praetorian banner stood nearest the men of the Third; the auxiliary cohorts held the wings, with cavalry ringing the flanks and rear. Sido and Italicus, Suebian chiefs, moved with their picked countrymen in the front line.
22| The Vitellian army, meanwhile, whose sensible plan would have been to rest at Cremona, restore their strength with food and sleep, and the next day crush an enemy worn down by cold and hunger, instead — lacking a real commander, with no coherent plan — collided with the Flavians, who were already deployed and ready, at around the third hour of the night. I would not dare to swear to the order of their marching column, thrown into disarray by rage and darkness, though some have recorded that the Fourth Macedonica held their right wing, the Fifth and Fifteenth together with detachments from the Ninth, Second, and Twentieth British legions held the center, and the Sixteenth, Twenty-second, and First made up the left. The men of the First Italica and the Rapax had mixed themselves in with every company; the cavalry and auxiliaries chose their own ground. The battle raged all night, shifting, uncertain, savage — deadly first to one side, then the other. Courage and strength counted for nothing, nor even eyesight to guide them. Both armies carried the same weapons, the watchword was learned by constant questioning back and forth, and standards got mixed together as each group dragged off whatever it had seized from the enemy this way or that. The Seventh Legion, newly raised by Galba, took the worst of it. Six centurions of the first rank were killed, some standards were snatched away; the eagle itself was saved by Atilius Verus, chief centurion, who inflicted heavy losses on the enemy and, dying in the end, kept it safe.
23| Antonius shored up his wavering line by calling in the praetorians. When they joined the fight they drove the enemy back — and were then driven back themselves. For the Vitellians had massed their artillery on the roadbed so their missiles could be fired across open, clear ground; at first the shots scattered, striking the trees without harm to the enemy. But the exceptional size of the Fifteenth Legion's ballista let it smash the enemy line with huge stones, and it would have caused wide slaughter had not two soldiers dared a splendid feat: grabbing shields from among the fallen, they went unrecognized and cut the ropes and counterweights of the engines. They were killed on the spot, and so their names were lost with them; the deed itself is not in doubt. Fortune tipped toward neither side until, well into the night, the rising moon showed the battle lines — and deceived them too. It favored the Flavians more, coming up behind them: from that angle the shadows of their men and horses looked larger, and the enemy's weapons, aimed as if at real bodies, fell short. The Vitellians, lit up by the light in front of them, made easy targets, as if for men throwing from hiding.
24| So Antonius, wherever he could recognize his own men and be recognized by them, fired them up — some with shame and reproach, many with praise and encouragement, and every one of them with hope and promises. Why, he asked the Pannonian legions, had they taken up arms again, if not for this — these were the very fields where they might erase the stain of their earlier disgrace and reclaim their glory. Then, turning to the Moesian legions, he called out the men who had started this war, its ringleaders: it was pointless to have provoked the Vitellians with threats and words if they couldn't now stand up to their fists and their stares. He tailored his words to each group as he reached them; but he said the most to the men of the Third, reminding them of old victories and new — how they'd beaten the Parthians under Mark Antony, the Armenians under Corbulo, and just recently the Sarmatians. Then, turning sharply to the praetorians: 'Unless you win,' he said, 'you civilians — what other emperor, what other camp will take you in? Your standards and your arms are over there, and death awaits the defeated, since you've already used up your disgrace.' From every side came a shout, and the men of the Third — as is the custom in Syria — saluted the rising sun.
25| A rumor then spread, whether by chance or planted by the commander's design, that Mucianus had arrived and that the armies had exchanged greetings. The Flavians advanced as if reinforced by fresh troops, just as the Vitellian line was thinning out, since with no one directing them each man was being pulled together or scattered by his own drive or his own fear. Once Antonius sensed they were wavering, he pressed them with a dense formation. Their ranks loosened and broke apart, and could not be reformed, hampered as they were by their own wagons and artillery. They scattered along the roadside in the rush of the pursuing victors. The slaughter gained further notoriety from a son's killing of his father. For the facts and names, I rely on the authority of Vipstanus Messala. Julius Mansuetus, a Spaniard, had enrolled in the Rapax legion, leaving behind a young son at home. That son, now grown, had been conscripted into the Seventh, and happened to come across his father, struck down and wounded; while going through the half-dead man's belongings he recognized him — and was recognized in turn. Embracing the lifeless body, he cried out, begging his father's spirit for peace, and pleading not to be shunned as a murderer: this was a crime shared by everyone, and what portion of a civil war's guilt could fall on one soldier? At the same time he lifted the body, opened the earth, and performed the last duties owed to a parent. Those nearby noticed, then more men; and from that the whole army was struck with wonder, grief, and curses on this most vicious of wars. And yet it made them no gentler about butchering and stripping their own relatives, kin, and brothers: they talked about it as a crime, and kept doing it.
26| When they reached Cremona, a huge new obstacle met them. During the war against Otho the German troops had pitched their camp against Cremona's walls and thrown a rampart around the camp, and had since strengthened those fortifications further. At the sight of them the victors halted, their commanders unsure what to order. Beginning an assault with an army worn out from a full day and night of fighting looked risky, with no support nearby; but if they fell back to Bedriacum, the march was unbearably long, and the victory would be thrown away for nothing. Fortifying a camp of their own was frightening too, with the enemy so close — they might be caught scattered and busy building when a sudden sally hit them. But above everything else, what alarmed the leaders was their own soldiers, less patient with delay than with danger: for them, safety held no appeal, and hope only came from recklessness; every killing, every wound, every drop of blood was offset in their minds by greed for plunder.
27| Antonius came down on this side and ordered the rampart ringed for assault. At first they exchanged arrows and stones at a distance, with heavier losses on the Flavian side, since missiles were being hurled down on them from above; then he assigned the rampart and gates to specific legions, so that the divided task would separate the brave from the cowardly, and the rivalry itself would spur them on to win honor. The men of the Third and Seventh took the stretch nearest the Bedriacum road, the Eighth and Seventh Claudia the right side of the rampart, and the Thirteenth was carried by its own drive toward the Brixian gate. There was a brief pause while men gathered mattocks and axes from the nearby fields, and others hooks and ladders; then, raising their shields above their heads in a close tortoise-formation, they advanced. Roman tactics faced Roman tactics on both sides: the Vitellians rolled down heavy stones, probing the broken and wavering tortoise-shell with lances and pikes until the wall of shields gave way and they laid men out, dead or mangled, with heavy losses. Hesitation would have taken hold, had the commanders not pointed out Cremona to the exhausted troops to the exhausted troops, who were refusing further exhortation as useless.
28| Whether this was Hormus's own cleverness, as Messalla reports, or whether Pliny the Elder is the better source in blaming Antonius, I can't easily say — except that neither Antonius nor Hormus ever did anything, in his life or reputation, out of keeping with this, the worst outrage of the war. Blood and wounds no longer slowed the men from undermining the rampart and battering the gates; propped on comrades' shoulders, climbing over a shield-wall built on another shield-wall, they grabbed at the enemy's weapons and arms. The unhurt tumbled down with the wounded, the half-dead with the dying, men perishing in every shape and every form death takes.
29| The fiercest fighting was between the Third and Seventh legions, and Antonius the commander had thrown himself into that spot with picked auxiliaries. When the Vitellians could no longer hold against their stubbornness, and the missiles hurled down slid off the shield-wall, the defenders finally shoved a siege-engine itself down onto the men coming up. For the moment it scattered and crushed whoever it landed on, but as it fell it took the battlements down with it, and the rampart's crest along with them. In that same instant, next to it, another tower buckled and came apart under a battering of stones; the Seventh's men worked that opening with crowbars, while the Third's men hacked the gate apart with axes and swords. All sources agree that Gaius Volusius, a soldier of the Third legion, was first inside. He mounted the rampart, threw down those still resisting, and, conspicuous by gesture and voice, shouted that the camp was taken; the rest broke through while the now-panicked Vitellians flung themselves off the wall. The whole open ground between camp and city walls filled with slaughter.
30| And now a new shape of hardship: the city's high walls, its stone towers, the iron-barred gates, soldiers hurling weapons, and a Cremonese population thick and firmly bound to the Vitellian cause — a great part of Italy, too, gathered there for the fair regularly held at that season, which meant a large crowd to help the defenders and a rich haul to spur on the attackers. Antonius ordered fire seized and carried into the finest buildings outside the city, hoping the loss of their property would drag the people of Cremona into switching sides. He packed the buildings near the walls, and those tall enough to overtop the ramparts, with his bravest soldiers; from these the defenders were driven off with beams, roof-tiles, and torches.
31| Now the legions were massing into a shield-wall, and men kept hurling spears and stones, when little by little the spirit of the Vitellians began to fail. The higher a man's rank, the readier he was to yield to fortune — for fear that if Cremona too were destroyed there would be no pardon left, and that all the victor's fury, instead of falling on the helpless rank and file, would turn back on the tribunes and centurions, where killing them paid a price. The common soldier, careless of the future and safer in his obscurity, held on: they wandered the streets or hid in houses, not even begging for peace once they had laid down the war. The camp's leading men tore down Vitellius's name and images; they struck the chains off Caecina — for he was still a prisoner even then — and begged him to stand up and plead their cause. He refused, swelling with contempt, but they wore him down with tears — the last indignity, that so many brave men should invoke a traitor's help. Then they held out olive branches and priestly fillets over the walls. When Antonius had ordered a halt to the missiles, they brought out the standards and eagles; a sad column of unarmed men followed, eyes cast to the ground. The victors had ringed them in and at first hurled insults, aimed blows; but soon, seeing the beaten men offer their faces to abuse and endure everything with all their fierceness laid down, the memory returned that these were the men who had shown restraint after their recent victory at Bedriacum. But when Caecina came forward, conspicuous in his consul's purple and attended by lictors, the crowd parting for him, the victors blazed up again: they hurled at him arrogance, cruelty — crimes so hateful — and treachery too. Antonius stood in the way, gave him an escort, and sent him off to Vespasian.
32| Meanwhile the common people of Cremona were caught in the middle among the armed troops; they came close to slaughter before the soldiers were softened by their commanders' pleading. Antonius called the men to assembly and addressed them — magnificent toward the victors, merciful toward the vanquished, on the subject of Cremona, saying nothing either way. But the army, driven by its ingrained lust for plunder as much as by old hatred, threw itself into destroying Cremona. The town was believed to have helped the Vitellian side back in the war against Otho too; and later, when men of the Thirteenth legion had been left behind to build an amphitheater, the town's people, with the insolence typical of city crowds, had mocked them with taunting jibes. What deepened the hatred further was that Caecina had staged a gladiator show there, that the town had twice now been the seat of war, that it had supplied the Vitellian troops with food in the field, and that some women, caught up in partisan zeal, had gone out to the battle and been killed there. The season of the fair, too, filled a colony already wealthy with an even greater show of riches. The other commanders stayed in the shadows; fortune and reputation had set Antonius alone in full view of everyone. Off he went to the baths, to scrub away the blood, and there a remark of his was overheard — when he complained the water was lukewarm, he said it would soon be hot enough: a slave's crude joke that turned all the town's hatred onto him, as if he had given the signal to set Cremona on fire — which was already burning.
33| Forty thousand armed men burst in, and an even greater number of camp-servants and sutlers, more given over yet to lust and cruelty. Neither rank nor age offered protection against rape mixing with murder, murder with rape. Old men worn out with age, women past their prime, worthless as plunder, were dragged off for sport; but whenever a grown girl, or anyone striking in looks, fell into their hands, she was torn apart by the hands of the men grabbing for her, and this in the end drove the plunderers themselves to destroy one another. While each man hauled off money or the heavy gold offerings of the temples for himself, others, stronger, cut them down and took it. Some, scorning what lay in plain sight, whipped and tortured the owners to make them dig out hidden things, unearth what was buried; torches in hand, once they had carried off the plunder, they hurled them for sheer wantonness into empty houses and gutted temples. And since the army was a mixture of tongues and customs, made up of citizens, allies, and foreigners together, their desires ran in every direction, and each man had his own notion of what was permitted — nothing was forbidden. For four days Cremona sufficed them. Everything went down in the flames, temples and homes alike — except the shrine of Mefitis outside the walls, left standing, whether by the accident of its site or by the goddess's own protection.
34| Such was the end of Cremona, in the two hundred eighty-sixth year from its founding. Its founding fell in the year Tiberius Sempronius and Publius Cornelius held the consulship, just as Hannibal bore down on Italy — meant to stand guard against the Gauls settled beyond the Po, and against whatever else might sweep down out of the Alps. So through the number of its settlers, the advantage of its rivers, the richness of its soil, and its intermarriage and ties with neighboring peoples, it grew and flourished — untouched by foreign wars, unlucky in civil ones. Antonius, ashamed of the outrage as resentment against him spread, issued an order that no one should hold a Cremonese captive. And the plunder in captives was made worthless to the soldiers by the agreement of all Italy, which refused to buy such slaves; so they began to be killed instead. When this became known, relatives and kin secretly bought them back. Afterward the surviving population returned to Cremona; the forum and temples were rebuilt with the town's old civic splendor, and Vespasian encouraged the work.
35| But the soil, poisoned with the rot of a buried city, did not let the army linger long among the ruins. They advanced to the third milestone, gathered up the scattered and frightened Vitellians, each to his own standard, and dispersed the defeated legions through Illyricum, so they would not act as an uncertain force while the civil war still lingered. They then sent word and rumor of the news ahead into Britain and the Spanish provinces; into Gaul went the tribune Julius Calenus, into Germany the cohort commander Alpinius Montanus, sent for show since one was a Treveran and the other, Calenus, an Aeduan — both had been Vitellians. At the same time the Alpine passes were seized and garrisoned, and Germany was watched with suspicion, as if it were arming to help Vitellius.
36| Meanwhile Vitellius, having sent Caecina off and, a few days later, pushed Fabius Valens out to the war as well, was masking his anxieties with indulgence: he made no preparations for war, gave the soldiers no encouraging word or drill, showed himself nowhere before the public, but hid away in the shade of his garden pavilions — like some sluggish animal that, given food, simply lies there and grows torpid — and let past, present, and future slip alike into forgetfulness. It was there, idle and wasting away in the grove at Aricia, that the treachery of Lucilius Bassus and the defection of the fleet at Ravenna struck him down. Not long after, news came of Caecina too — a report mixing joy with grief, that he had both defected and been put in chains by his own army. In his dull mind, delight outweighed worry. He rode back into the city amid great celebration and, before a packed assembly, heaped praise on the soldiers' loyalty; he ordered Publilius Sabinus, the Praetorian prefect, put in chains for his friendship with Caecina, and put Alfenus Varus in his place.
37| Next he addressed the senate in a speech dressed up for grandeur, and was lifted up by the fathers' elaborately contrived flattery. The savage motion against Caecina was opened by Lucius Vitellius; then the rest, with rehearsed indignation, brought forward their own outrage as if pleading Vitellius's cause — that a consul had betrayed the state, a commander had betrayed his emperor, a man loaded with such wealth and so many honors had betrayed a friend. No one in any speech spoke ill of the Flavian commanders; blaming instead the armies' error and rashness, they circled warily around Vespasian's name, avoiding it. Nor was there missing a man who, with everyone laughing, wheedled for himself the single remaining day of the consulship — for one day was left in Caecina's term — both giver and taker mocked for it alike. On the day before the Kalends of November, Rosius Regulus entered office and resigned it the same day. Men learned in such things noted that never before had a substitute consul been appointed without the previous magistrate being formally stripped of office or a law passed — except that Caninius Rebilus had once been consul for a single day, under Caesar's dictatorship, when the rewards of civil war were being rushed out.
38| The death of Junius Blaesus, notorious in those days, deserves telling as we have it. Vitellius, sick with a serious illness, noticed from his bed a tower near the Servilian Gardens ablaze night after night with lamp after lamp. He asked why, and word came back: Caecina Tuscus was throwing a lavish dinner, and Junius Blaesus sat there as the guest of honor. The rest was exaggerated further — talk of extravagant spreads and loose, indulgent spirits. Some blamed Tuscus and the other guests, but blamed Blaesus more, on the grounds that he was living it up while the emperor lay ill. Once it was clear enough to those who watch closely for a prince's grudges that Vitellius was angered and that Blaesus could be brought down, Lucius Vitellius was given the job of informer. He hated Blaesus out of a corrupt rivalry, resenting that a man stained by every kind of disgrace should be outshone by another's clean reputation. He forced his way into the emperor's bedroom, threw himself at his brother's knees, clutching the emperor's son to his chest. Asked the reason for his distress, he said he had come in tears not out of fear for himself, but pleading for his brother and his brother's children. It was pointless to fear Vespasian, he said, held off as he was by so many Germanic legions, so many loyal and capable provinces, and by the sheer vastness of land and sea between. The enemy to watch was here, in the city, in Vitellius's own household — a man who boasted Junii and Antonii for ancestors, who paraded himself before the soldiers as affable and grand, a man of imperial blood. Everyone's attention had turned to him, while Vitellius, careless of both friends and enemies, coddled a rival who watched the emperor's labors from his own dinner table. For his ill-timed celebration he should be repaid with a night of grief and mourning — so that he would know and feel that Vitellius was alive, and ruling, and, whatever fate might bring, had a son.
39| Torn between the crime and his fear that delaying Blaesus's death would hasten his own ruin, while an open order would provoke bitter resentment, Vitellius decided to work by poison. He gave the crime credibility with a notably conspicuous show of joy, visiting Blaesus in person. Indeed his most brutal remark was overheard — I will give his exact words — boasting that he had feasted his eyes on the sight of his enemy dying. Blaesus, besides the distinction of his birth and the polish of his manners, held firm to his loyalty. Even while affairs still stood whole, when Caecina and the leading men of the party were already turning against Vitellius, he refused to court advancement. Upright, unruffled, seeking no sudden honor, so far from grasping at the throne that he barely escaped being thought worthy of it.
40| Meanwhile Fabius Valens, marching with a long, soft train of mistresses and eunuchs, more slowly than a man heading to war should, learned by fast couriers that Lucilius Bassus had betrayed the fleet at Ravenna. Had he pressed on with the march he had begun, he could have gotten ahead of the wavering Caecina, or reached the legions before the decisive battle. Some advised him to take his most trustworthy men by hidden paths, avoid Ravenna, and make for Hostilia or Cremona. Others favored summoning the praetorian cohorts from the city and breaking through with a strong force. He himself wasted the time for action in useless hesitation, weighing the options; then, rejecting both plans — the worst course when facing a dilemma — he tried to steer a middle path, and so acted neither boldly enough nor with any foresight.
41| He sent letters to Vitellius asking for help. Three cohorts arrived with a British cavalry wing — too large a number to slip past unnoticed, too small to break through. But even in so grave a crisis Valens did not escape scandal, being widely believed to be snatching illicit pleasures and defiling his hosts' homes with adultery and debauchery, backed by force, money, and the last desperate appetite of a collapsing fortune. Only with the arrival of the infantry and cavalry did the folly of the plan become clear, since he could not force his way through the enemy with so small a band, even a wholly loyal one, and these men had not brought full loyalty with them. Shame, though, and respect for their commander's presence held them back for a while — bonds that never last long among men who are frightened of danger but unconcerned about disgrace. Fearing this, he sent the cohorts ahead to Ariminum and ordered the cavalry wing to guard the rear. He himself, with a few companions whom the reversal of fortune had not changed, turned toward Umbria and then Etruria, where, learning the outcome of the battle at Cremona, he formed a plan that was not cowardly, and would have been formidable if it had succeeded: to seize ships, land somewhere in the province of Gallia Narbonensis, and stir up the Gauls, the armies, the peoples of Germany, and a fresh war.
42| After Valens had gone, Cornelius Fuscus brought up his army and sent Liburnian galleys along the nearby coastline, surrounding by land and sea the frightened men holding Ariminum. The plains of Umbria were occupied, as was the stretch where the region of Picenum is washed by the Adriatic, and all Italy was now divided between Vespasian and Vitellius along the ridge of the Apennines. Fabius Valens, driven from the Gulf of Pisa by sluggish seas or headwinds, was pushed on to the harbor of Monoecus. Not far off Marius Maturus, procurator of the Maritime Alps, was in command, still loyal to Vitellius, not yet having broken his oath even though everyone around him was hostile. He received Valens courteously, but frightened him out of rashly entering Gallia Narbonensis by warning him of the danger; at the same time the loyalty of the rest was shaken by fear.
43| For the procurator Valerius Paulinus — an able soldier and a friend of Vespasian's from before his rise — had already bound the surrounding communities to Vespasian's cause. He rallied everyone who, discharged by Vitellius, was eager to take up arms on their own account, and held the colony of Forum Julii, the key to the coast, under guard — his authority all the weightier because Forum Julii was his home town and he had standing with the praetorians, whose tribune he had once been; and the townspeople themselves, out of local pride and hopes of future advantage, worked hard to help the cause. As these preparations, solid in themselves and swollen further by rumor, spread among the wavering minds of the Vitellians, Fabius Valens withdrew to the ships with four scouts, three friends, and as many centurions. Maturus and the rest chose to stay behind and take the oath to Vespasian. But though the sea was safer for Valens than the shore or the towns, he remained unsure of his future course, clearer about what to avoid than about whom to trust, and a storm carried him to the Stoechades, the islands off Massilia. There Liburnian ships sent by Paulinus caught and overwhelmed him.
44| With Valens captured, everything turned toward the strength of the victor. It began in Spain, with the First Legion Adiutrix, which, still resentful of Vitellius on Otho's account, drew in the Tenth and Sixth as well. Gaul did not hesitate either. Britain, too, joined the rest — not without some unrest — carrying an ingrained goodwill toward Vespasian, since he had once commanded the Second Legion there under Claudius and won distinction in the war; among the troops, many centurions and soldiers whom Vitellius had promoted grew uneasy and switched allegiance to an emperor already proven in the field.
45| Amid this discord and the constant rumors of civil war, the Britons took heart, encouraged by Venutius, who — beyond his natural ferocity and hatred of the Roman name — was further inflamed by a personal grievance against Queen Cartimandua. Cartimandua ruled the Brigantes, powerful through noble birth, and had increased her power after capturing King Caratacus by treachery, an act that seemed to furnish Claudius Caesar's triumph. From this came wealth and the excess that comes with good fortune. She spurned Venutius, her husband, and took his armor-bearer Vellocatus as husband and consort in the kingdom. Her household was shaken at once by the scandal: the people's loyalty stood with the husband, the queen's passion and cruelty with the adulterer. So Venutius called in outside forces, and, aided by a revolt of the Brigantes themselves, brought Cartimandua to the brink of ruin. She then asked Rome for protection, and our cohorts and cavalry, through a series of engagements, managed to save the queen from danger, though at a cost: the kingdom was left to Venutius, the war to us.
46| In those same days Germany was thrown into turmoil, and Rome's position there was nearly wrecked by the incompetence of its commanders, mutiny among the legions, outside force, and the treachery of allies. That war, with its causes and outcomes — for it ran on far longer — we shall recount later. The Dacians too, a people never to be trusted, stirred, emboldened now that the army had been withdrawn from Moesia. At first they only watched quietly; but once they heard that Italy was ablaze with war and that everything everywhere had turned hostile, they overran the winter camps of the cohorts and cavalry wings and took control of both banks of the Danube. They were already preparing to destroy the legionary camps when Mucianus threw the Sixth Legion in their path, knowing of the victory at Cremona and anxious that a double outside threat might crush Rome if the Dacians and Germans broke in from opposite directions at once. As so often before, the fortune of the Roman people came to the rescue, bringing Mucianus and the strength of the East to the spot just when needed, and which had meanwhile brought matters at Cremona to a close. Fonteius Agrippa, who had governed Asia as proconsul for a year, was put in charge of Moesia, with reinforcements added from the Vitellian army — for scattering that army through the provinces and tying it down in a foreign war was part of the policy for securing peace.
47| The other nations were not quiet either. Sudden fighting broke out around Pontus, stirred up by a barbarian ex-slave, once commander of the royal fleet. This was Anicetus, a freedman of Polemon — once powerful, and unable to accept the change when the kingdom was turned into a province. So, invoking the name of Vitellius, he rallied the tribes living along Pontus, corrupting the most destitute of them with hopes of plunder, and — leading a force not to be dismissed — burst suddenly into Trapezus, a city of old renown founded by Greeks at the far edge of the Pontic coast. There he cut down a cohort, once a royal auxiliary unit; later granted Roman citizenship, they had kept Roman standards and arms but the Greeks' laziness and indiscipline. He also set fire to the fleet, ranging freely over an empty sea, since Mucianus had pulled the pick of the Liburnian galleys and every soldier off to Byzantium. Even the barbarians roamed about contemptuously, in ships they had knocked together on the spot. They call them camarae — narrow-sided, broad-bellied hulls, joined without bronze or iron fastenings; and when the sea swells, as the waves rise they build up the ships' sides with planking until they close them over like a roof. So they roll among the waves, with a prow at each end and oars that can be shifted from side to side, so that landing from either direction is equally safe.
48| This news caught Vespasian's attention, and he chose detachments from the legions along with a commander, Virdius Geminus, a man of proven soldiering. He attacked the enemy, disordered and scattered in their greed for plunder, and drove them onto their ships; then, having Liburnian galleys built in haste, he caught up with Anicetus at the mouth of the river Chobus, where he had taken shelter under the protection of the king of the Sedochezi, whom he had bribed with money and gifts into alliance. At first the king shielded his suppliant with threats and arms; but once he was shown the reward for betrayal, or war instead, he struck a bargain — barbarian loyalty being as fickle as it is — and handed over the deserters for Anicetus's death, putting an end to the slave war.
49| Vespasian, delighted by this victory, with everything running beyond his hopes, received news of the battle at Cremona while in Egypt. He pushed on to Alexandria all the faster, meaning to squeeze Vitellius's broken armies and the city — which had no resources of its own — with famine. He was also preparing to invade Africa, which lay on the same side, by land and sea, so that by cutting off the grain supply he would bring hunger and discord down on the enemy.
50| While the empire's fortune shifted amid this upheaval of the whole world, Antonius Primus, after Cremona, behaved with nothing like the same restraint, reckoning the war as good as won and the rest easy — or perhaps his good luck simply exposed the greed, arrogance, and other hidden vices in a nature like his. He strutted through conquered Italy as if it were his own; he courted his legions as his own; in everything he said and did he was building himself a road to power. And to steep his soldiers in license, he offered the legions the vacant centurions' posts left by the dead. By that vote the most turbulent men were chosen; the soldiers were no longer under their commanders' control — the commanders were dragged along by military violence. What began as mutiny and the corruption of discipline he soon turned to plunder, fearing nothing from the approaching Mucianus — which was more dangerous than despising Vespasian outright.
51| With winter close and the plains along the Po waterlogged, the army moved light. The standards and eagles of the victorious legions, the wounded and the older soldiers, and indeed most of those still fit, were left behind at Verona: the cohorts and cavalry wings and picked men from the legions seemed enough, now that the war was practically finished. The Eleventh Legion had joined them — hesitant at first, but anxious once things went well that it had missed out; six thousand Dalmatians, a fresh levy, went along too, led by the ex-consul Pompeius Silvanus, though real control of decisions lay with Annius Bassus, the legion's commander. Bassus managed Silvanus, a lazy soldier who wasted the days in talk, with a show of deference, quietly and efficiently handling everything that needed doing. To these forces were added the best men from the marines of the Ravenna fleet, who were asking for legionary service; Dalmatians filled out the fleet in their place. The army and its commanders halted their march at Fanum Fortunae, hesitating over overall strategy, because they had heard that the praetorian cohorts had been sent out from Rome and believed the Apennines were held by garrisons; and they themselves, in a region worn out by war, were frightened by shortages and by mutinous soldiers demanding their 'nail money' — the name for a bonus payment. No one had arranged money or grain in advance, and haste and greed got in the way, as men simply grabbed whatever could be had.
52| I have it on the best authority that the victors showed such contempt for right and wrong that a common cavalryman, claiming to have killed his own brother in the recent fighting, actually asked the commanders for a reward. Neither human decency nor the logic of war let them honor or punish that killing. They put it off, as though his service deserved more than could be paid on the spot; nothing further is recorded. But a crime just as monstrous had happened before, in earlier civil wars. In the battle fought at the Janiculum against Cinna, a soldier of Pompey's side killed his own brother, then, on realizing what he had done, killed himself — as Sisenna records. So much sharper among our ancestors, it seems, was remorse for wickedness, just as glory was for virtue. But such stories, drawn from old records, I will bring in without apology whenever the moment calls for an example of right conduct or comfort in the face of wrong.
53| Antonius and the other commanders on his side decided to send cavalry ahead and scout the whole of Umbria, to see if the Apennine ridges could be crossed anywhere more easily; the eagles and standards and whatever troops remained at Verona were to be summoned, and the Po and the sea filled with supply convoys. Among the commanders there were some working to cause delay: Antonius was already too powerful, and more certain instructions were hoped for from Mucianus. Mucianus, anxious over how fast the victory was coming and reckoning that unless he took possession of Rome in person he would have no share in the war's glory, kept writing ambiguous letters to Primus and Varus, arguing now for pressing on, now for the advantages of delay, positioning himself so that, depending how things turned out, he could disown the setbacks or claim the successes. He warned Plotius Grypus more openly — a man Vespasian had lately lifted into the Senate and given a legion to command — and others loyal to him, and all of them wrote back putting an unfavorable spin on Primus's and Varus's haste, in terms that suited Mucianus. Sending these letters on to Vespasian, he managed to have Antonius's plans and actions judged very differently from how Antonius himself hoped.
54| Antonius took this badly and blamed Mucianus, feeling his own dangers had been cheapened by Mucianus's accusations; nor did he hold back in what he said, being reckless with his tongue and impatient of deference. He wrote a letter to Vespasian that read more like a boast than a report to an emperor, with a barely hidden attack on Mucianus running through it: it was he who had roused the Pannonian legions to arms; his prodding that had stirred the commanders in Moesia; his resolve that had forced a way through the Alps, taken Italy, and severed the German and Raetian reinforcements from Vitellius. As for scattering his divided, disorganized legions — first with a cavalry charge, then crushing the infantry through a day and a night of fighting — that, he said, was his own finest work, entirely his doing. The disaster at Cremona should be blamed on the war itself: worse damage, the ruin of more cities, had come from old civil discords before this. He himself served his commander not with messages and letters but with his own hand and arms; nor did he begrudge the glory of those who, meanwhile, had settled Dacia — they had cared about peace in Moesia, he about the safety and security of Italy. It was his own urging that had turned Gaul and Spain, the strongest regions on earth, over to Vespasian. But all that effort would come to nothing if the rewards for the dangers went only to men who had never faced the dangers. None of this was lost on Mucianus; from it grew a bitter rivalry, which Antonius nursed openly and carelessly, and Mucianus cultivated craftily — and so all the more implacably.
55| Meanwhile Vitellius, his fortunes broken at Cremona, hid the news of the defeat, and by this foolish concealment merely postponed the cure for his troubles rather than the troubles themselves. If he had admitted the truth and taken counsel, he still had hope and strength left; instead, by pretending everything was fine, he made matters worse with his lies. A strange silence about the war reigned in his own presence; talk of it was forbidden throughout the city, and for that very reason more people talked — and, being forbidden to tell the truth, spread rumors more terrible than the truth. Nor did the enemy commanders fail to feed the rumor, sending back Vitellius's captured scouts after marching them around so they could see the strength of the winning army for themselves; Vitellius had each one brought to him alone and questioned, then put to death. One centurion, Julius Agrestis, showed remarkable resolve. Having tried again and again, uselessly, to put some courage into Vitellius, he finally won leave to go himself and see with his own eyes what the enemy's strength was and what had truly happened at Cremona. Rather than steal in disguise to trick Antonius, he announced plainly who had sent him and why, and asked that everything be shown to him. He was shown the battlefield, the traces of Cremona, the captured legions. Agrestis returned to Vitellius, and when Vitellius refused to believe what he reported and even accused him outright of having been bought off, he said: 'Since, it seems, you need solid proof, and there's nothing more I can do for you with my life or my death, I'll give you something you can trust.' And with that he left, and confirmed his words with a voluntary death. Some say Vitellius had him killed instead — but they agree just as firmly on his loyalty and resolve.
56| Vitellius, as if jolted from sleep, ordered Julius Priscus and Alfenus Varus to hold the Apennines with fourteen praetorian cohorts and all the cavalry squadrons; a legion of marines followed. So many thousand armed men, picked in horse and manpower, would have been strength enough even for an offensive war, under a different commander. The remaining cohorts he gave to his brother Lucius to guard the city. Vitellius himself cut nothing from his usual luxury, and in his anxiety rushed to hold the elections, naming consuls years in advance; he handed out treaties to allies and Latin rights to foreigners, canceled tribute for some, granted immunities to others—in short, tore the empire apart with no thought for what came after. But the crowd gaped at the size of his gifts; only fools paid money for them, while sensible men counted worthless anything that could not be given or received without harming the state. At last, badgered by the army camped at Mevania, he came to the camp with a great train of senators—many dragged along by ambition, more by fear—unsure of his own mind and at the mercy of untrustworthy advisers.
57| While he was addressing the troops—strange to tell—such a mass of foul birds flew overhead that they blotted out the daylight like a black cloud. Then came a grim omen: a bull tore loose from the altar, scattering the sacrificial gear, and fell dead at a distance, struck down in no manner fit for the rite. But the worst omen of all was Vitellius himself: ignorant of soldiering, careless in planning, asking others how the column should march, how scouting should be done, how hard or how gently to press the war, and at every dispatch showing his fear in his face and his walk—and then getting drunk. Finally, sick of camp life and hearing that the fleet at Misenum had defected, he went back to Rome, dreading each fresh wound while ignoring the gravest danger of all. For while he could have crossed the Apennines with his army's full strength intact and struck the enemy while they were worn down by winter and shortage, in open country, instead he scattered his forces and handed over to slaughter and capture the fiercest of his soldiers, men who would have held out to the last—even though his most seasoned centurions objected and would have spoken the truth to him, had he only asked. It was his inner circle that kept them away: they had trained the emperor's ears to reject anything harsh, however useful, and accept nothing but what was pleasant and would hurt him.
58| But the fleet at Misenum—so much can even one bold individual do amid civil strife—was drawn into defection by the centurion Claudius Faventinus, dishonorably discharged by Galba, who dangled forged letters from Vespasian promising a reward for the betrayal. In command of the fleet was Claudius Apollinaris, a man neither reliably loyal nor energetic in treachery; and Apinius Tiro, a former praetor who happened to be at Minturnae at the time, offered himself as leader to the defectors. Under their prompting the towns and colonies were stirred up—Puteoli especially eager for Vespasian, while Capua, in rivalry, stayed loyal to Vitellius—dragging municipal jealousies into the civil war. Vitellius chose Claudius Julianus, who had recently commanded the Misenum fleet with a light hand, to calm the soldiers' tempers; a city cohort and a troop of gladiators under Julianus's command were sent to help him. But when the two camps met, Julianus went over to Vespasian's side with hardly a moment's hesitation, and together they seized Tarracina, a place made safe more by its walls and position than by any skill of its defenders.
59| When this news reached Vitellius, he left part of his forces with the praetorian prefects at Narnia and sent his brother Lucius with six cohorts and five hundred cavalry to meet the war advancing through Campania. He himself, sick at heart, was revived by the soldiers' enthusiasm and the crowd's shouts demanding weapons—calling an idle mob that would never dare more than words his 'army' and his 'legions,' though the show was false. On his freedmen's urging—for among his friends, the more distinguished a man was, the less loyal—he ordered the tribes summoned and made those who enrolled swear the military oath. As the numbers overflowed, he split the task of recruiting between the consuls; he demanded slaves and silver by weight from the senators. Roman knights offered their service and their money, and even freedmen volunteered the same, unprompted. This show of duty, born of fear, turned gradually into real sympathy—and most people pitied not Vitellius himself so much as the wretched state of the throne he held. He himself was not above using his face, his voice, his tears to win pity, lavish with promises, and, as fear tends to be, excessive. He even wanted to be called Caesar, a title he had once scorned, but now took up out of superstitious hope in the name—and because in times of fear, the advice of the wise and the rumors of the crowd get listened to equally. But as everything begun in a rash burst is strong at the start and fades with time, senators and knights began slipping away, at first cautiously and only when he was not present, then openly and without discretion, until Vitellius, ashamed of his failed effort, stopped demanding what was no longer given.
60| Just as the seizure of Mevania had struck terror through Italy, as though the war had been reborn from scratch, so Vitellius's panicked retreat left no doubt about where loyalty to the Flavian cause now lay. The Samnites, the Paeligni, and the Marsi, roused to compete because Campania had gotten there first, threw themselves eagerly into every task of the war, like men new to an alliance proving themselves. But the army suffered badly crossing the Apennines in foul winter weather, and even with the column moving undisturbed, struggling through the snow showed how great the danger would have been had fortune not turned Vitellius back—fortune which helped the Flavian commanders no less often than good judgment did. There they met Petilius Cerialis, who had slipped past Vitellius's guards in peasant dress, using his knowledge of the country. Cerialis was closely related to Vespasian, and no mean soldier himself, so he was taken on among the commanders. Many say that Flavius Sabinus and Domitian, too, had a chance to escape; messengers sent by Antonius made their way in through various tricks of disguise, pointing out places and protection. Sabinus pleaded that his health was unfit for the hardship and daring required. Domitian had the nerve for it, but the guards Vitellius had set on him, though they promised to flee with him, were feared as likely traitors. And Vitellius himself, out of regard for his own family ties, was planning nothing violent against Domitian.
61| When the Flavian commanders reached Carsulae, they took a few days' rest, waiting for the eagles and standards of the legions to catch up. The camp's location itself pleased them—wide views, safe supply lines, and prosperous towns behind them—while they also hoped for talks, and perhaps betrayal, with the Vitellians camped ten miles off. The soldiers took this badly; they wanted victory, not peace, and would not even wait for their own legions, preferring comrades for plunder rather than for danger. Antonius called them to assembly and told them Vitellius still had forces—forces that would waver if they hesitated, but fight fiercely if driven to despair. The openings of civil wars should be left to fortune; victory is achieved by planning and reason. Already the Misenum fleet and the loveliest coast of Campania had defected, and Vitellius had nothing left in the whole world but the strip of land between Tarracina and Narnia. Glory enough had been won at the battle of Cremona, and too much resentment earned by Cremona's destruction; they should not crave to capture Rome rather than save it. Greater rewards, and by far the greatest honor, awaited them if they secured the safety of the senate and people of Rome without bloodshed. These words, and others like them, calmed their tempers.
62| Not long after, the legions arrived. Swelled by rumor and the terror of the enlarged army, the Vitellian cohorts began to waver; no one urged them to fight, while many competed to desert, each eager to hand over his century or squadron as a gift to the victor and a favor banked for the future. From these deserters came word that a cavalry garrison four hundred strong held Interamna, on the plains nearby. At once Varus set out with a small detachment; he cut down the handful who resisted, while the rest threw down their weapons and begged for mercy. Some fled back to camp, filling it with panic, exaggerating by rumor the enemy's strength and numbers to soften the shame of the lost outpost. Among the Vitellians no penalty was imposed for such disgrace, and since rewards went to deserters, loyalty flipped, and what remained was a contest in treachery. Tribunes and centurions deserted constantly; the common soldiers, though, had hardened in support of Vitellius, until Priscus and Alfenus abandoned the camp and went back to Vitellius, releasing everyone else from any shame in following them.
63| In those same days Fabius Valens was executed in custody at Urbino. His head was displayed to the Vitellian cohorts to crush any lingering hope, for they believed Valens had made it through to the Germanies and was raising both the old armies and new ones there; seeing the severed head, they sank into despair. For the Flavian side, word of Valens's death was taken as marking the war's end, and their confidence swelled beyond measure. Valens, born at Anagnia to a family of knights, was reckless by nature and not without wit, and chased a reputation for sophistication through indecency. In Nero's Juvenalia he had performed as if forced to it, then later took to acting in farces by choice, with more skill than decency. As legion commander he both supported Verginius and slandered him; he corrupted Fonteius Capito—or, unable to corrupt him, killed him instead. He betrayed Galba, stayed loyal to Vitellius, and was made to look good only by comparison with other men's treachery.
64| With every hope cut off from every side, the Vitellian troops prepared to go over to the other side — and did even that with a certain dignity, marching down under their standards and banners into the plain below Narnia. The Flavian army stood drawn up in dense ranks along the road, armed and alert as if for battle. The Vitellians were received into their midst, and Primus Antonius, once they were surrounded, addressed them kindly. Some were ordered to halt at Narnia, others at Interamna. Legions from the winning side were left with them too — not so heavy a presence as to trouble men who stayed quiet, but strong enough against any defiance. All through those days Primus and Varus kept sending Vitellius message after message, offering him safety, money, and a quiet retreat in Campania if he would lay down his arms and hand himself and his children over to Vespasian. Mucianus wrote to the same effect. Vitellius mostly believed these offers, and fell to discussing how many servants he'd keep and which stretch of coast he'd choose. Such numbness had settled over his mind that if others hadn't remembered he'd once been emperor, he himself would have forgotten it.
65| Meanwhile the city's leading men were pressing Flavius Sabinus, the prefect of the city, in private conversations, urging him to claim his share of the victory and the glory. He had troops of his own, they said — the urban cohorts — and the watch cohorts wouldn't fail him either, nor would his own household slaves; fortune favored his side, and everything leaned toward the winners. Why concede all the credit to Antonius and Varus? Vitellius had only a few cohorts left, and they were rattled by grim news arriving from every direction. The mob's loyalty was fickle — if Sabinus stepped forward as leader, the same flattery now aimed at Vitellius would turn toward Vespasian. Vitellius himself had never matched up to good fortune, and now, with everything collapsing, he was even more broken. Whoever seized the city would get the credit for ending the war. It suited Sabinus to keep the throne in reserve for his brother, and it suited Vespasian that everyone else, after Sabinus, should rank behind him.
66| Sabinus, weakened by old age, took in these words without much spirit. But some muttered dark suspicions that jealousy and rivalry made him drag his feet on his brother's fortune. Flavius Sabinus, being the elder, had outranked Vespasian in prestige and wealth back when both were private citizens, and it was believed he'd been stingy in propping up Vespasian's shaky credit, taking his house and land as collateral. So although the two kept up an appearance of harmony, people feared old grievances lay hidden beneath it. A kinder reading is that Sabinus, a gentle man, recoiled from bloodshed and killing, and so kept holding frequent talks with Vitellius about peace and about laying down arms on agreed terms. They met often at each other's houses, and finally, so the story goes, struck their bargain in the Temple of Apollo. Two witnesses had heard their words: Cluvius Rufus and Silius Italicus. Onlookers watching from a distance noted their expressions — Vitellius's slack and abject, Sabinus's not gloating, closer to pity.
67| If Vitellius had been able to bend the minds of his own men as easily as he himself had given in, Vespasian's army would have entered the city without a drop of blood spilled. But the more loyal a man was to Vitellius, the harder he pushed back against peace and terms, pointing to the danger and disgrace of it, and to how little a victor's word could be trusted once his lust for power took hold. Vespasian, they said, wasn't so arrogant as to let Vitellius live as a private citizen — even the defeated wouldn't stand for that; so mercy itself was a danger. Vitellius was an old man, they granted, worn out by both good luck and bad — but what name, what standing, would be left for his son Germanicus? For now they promised money, household, and the pleasant bays of Campania — but once Vespasian held power, not he, not his friends, not even his own legions would ever sleep easy while his rival still breathed. Fabius Valens, a mere captive held in reserve for whatever fate brought, had already proven too dangerous to them — so how much less would Primus, Fuscus, and Mucianus, the very face of the Flavian party, allow Vitellius anything but death? Pompey hadn't been left alive by Caesar, nor Antony by Augustus — unless Vespasian, of all people, meant to rise above that pattern, he who'd been Vitellius's own client while Vitellius sat as Claudius's colleague in office. No — to honor his father's censorship, his three consulships, the many distinguished honors of his house, he ought at least, out of sheer desperation, to nerve himself to boldness. The soldiers still stood firm, the people's goodwill remained; nothing worse could happen than what they'd bring on themselves by rushing in. The defeated must die, and so must those who surrender — the only question left was whether they'd breathe their last amid mockery and abuse, or with courage.
68| Vitellius's ears were deaf to bold counsel. His spirit was crushed by pity and by worry that stubborn resistance would leave the victor less inclined to spare his wife and children. He still had a mother too, worn out with age, though she died a timely death a few days before, sparing her the ruin of her house — she'd gained nothing from her son's reign but grief and a good name. On December 18th, hearing that the legion and cohorts that had surrendered at Narnia had gone over, he came down from the Palace dressed in mourning black, his household grieving around him. His small son was carried in a litter as if in a funeral procession. The people's cries were fawning and badly timed; the soldiers kept a menacing silence.
69| No one so forgot what it is to be human that the sight didn't move him — a Roman emperor, lord of the human race only a moment before, leaving the seat of his own power, walking out through the people and the city, resigning his rule. Nothing like it had ever been seen or heard of. A sudden burst of violence had struck down the dictator Caesar; a hidden conspiracy had done for Gaius; night and an unknown countryside had hidden Nero's flight; Piso and Galba had fallen as if in battle. But Vitellius, before his own assembly, among his own soldiers, with even the women watching, spoke a few words fitting his grim moment — he was stepping down for the sake of peace and the republic; let them only keep his memory, and pity his brother, his wife, and his children too young to have done wrong. Then he held out his son, urging him first on one man, then on the crowd as a whole, and finally, tears choking his voice, he unbuckled the dagger at his side and offered it to the consul standing beside him, Caecilius Simplex, as if handing over the power of life and death over citizens. The consul refused it, and the crowd at the assembly cried out against it, so Vitellius set off, meaning to lay the imperial insignia in the Temple of Concord and go to his brother's house. But an even louder outcry rose from those blocking him near private houses, calling him back to the Palace. Every other route was closed; only the road onto the Sacred Way stood open. Then, out of ideas, he turned back to the Palace.
70| Rumor had run ahead that he'd renounced power, and Flavius Sabinus had already written to the tribunes of the cohorts telling them to hold their men back. So, as if the whole state had already dropped into Vespasian's lap, the leading men of the senate, most of the equestrian order, and all the urban troops and watchmen crowded into Flavius Sabinus's house. Word reached them there of the crowd's mood and of threats from the German cohorts. He'd gone too far now to pull back; and each man, out of his own fear that the scattered and weakened Vitellians might hunt them down, kept pushing the hesitant Sabinus toward armed action. But as usually happens in such matters, everyone gave advice and few took the risk. As those with Sabinus marched down near the Fundanian lake, they ran into the most eager of the Vitellian troops. A small fight broke out in the sudden chaos, but it went the Vitellians' way. In the confusion Sabinus took refuge in the one safe place left — the Capitoline citadel — with a mixed force of soldiers and some senators and knights, whose names aren't easy to give, since after Vespasian's victory many pretended to this service to his cause. Even women endured the siege, most notably Verulana Gratilla, who followed the war not for children or kin but for its own sake. The Vitellian soldiers surrounded them, though their guard was careless, and so, deep in the night, Sabinus called his own children and his brother's son Domitian up into the Capitol, sending word through the gaps in the blockade to the Flavian commanders that they were under siege and, without relief, in dire straits. He passed so quiet a night that he could have slipped away unharmed — the Vitellian soldiers, fierce enough facing real danger, were careless about watch-duty and sentry work, and a sudden winter downpour blinded eyes and muffled ears.
71| At first light, before the two sides could come to blows, Sabinus sent Cornelius Martialis, one of the senior centurions, to Vitellius with instructions and a complaint that the agreement was being broken — the whole show of laying down power had been nothing but a trick to deceive so many distinguished men. Why else go from the Rostra to his brother's house, right over the Forum and in plain view of everyone, instead of to the Aventine and his wife's home? That would have suited a private man trying to avoid every appearance of power. Instead Vitellius had gone back to the Palace, the very stronghold of his rule; from there he'd sent out an armed column, strewn the busiest part of the city with the bodies of the innocent, and not even spared the Capitol. Sabinus, Martialis reminded him, was a civilian, one senator among many; while the contest between Vespasian and Vitellius was being decided by battles of legions, the capture of cities, the surrender of cohorts, with Spain, the Germanies, and Britain already breaking away, Vespasian's own brother had stayed loyal until he himself was invited to make terms. Peace and concord were useful to the defeated, but to the victors merely glorious. If Vitellius regretted the bargain, he shouldn't turn his sword on the man his own broken faith had deceived, nor on Vespasian's son, barely past boyhood — what would be gained by killing one old man and one youth? Let him go out and meet the legions instead, and fight the whole contest out there; everything else would follow from how that battle went. Vitellius, flustered, answered with a few words in his own defense, laying the blame on his soldiers, whose excess of zeal, he said, his own restraint couldn't match. He warned Martialis to slip away by a hidden passage through the house, for fear the soldiers would kill the messenger of a peace they hated. As for himself, he was no longer in a position to command or forbid anything — no longer emperor, just a reason for the war to go on.
72| Martialis had barely got back to the Capitol when the soldiers were on them in a fury, with no commander, each man his own leader. Sweeping fast through the Forum, past the temples that overlooked it, they formed up on the slope across the way, right to the gates of the Capitoline citadel. There were old colonnades on the right side of the climb; the attackers got up onto their roofs and pelted the Vitellians below with stones and tiles. Their only weapons were swords, and it seemed too slow to send for catapults or javelins, so they threw torches instead, following the flames. They would have burst through the Capitol's scorched gates had Sabinus not pulled down statues from every side — monuments of the ancestors — and piled them across the entrance as a makeshift wall. Then they attacked the other approaches to the Capitol at once, by the grove of the Asylum and by the hundred steps up the Tarpeian Rock. Both assaults caught the defenders off guard; the one through the Asylum came harder and faster. Men climbing over the connecting buildings, which in the long peace had been raised as high as the level of the Capitol itself, could not be stopped. Here it is disputed whether the attackers set fire to the roofs or the besieged did, in beating back men who kept pressing forward and climbing — that is the more common account. From there the fire spread to the colonnades next to the temples; then the eagles supporting the pediment, being of old timber, caught and fed the flames. So the Capitol burned with its doors shut, undefended and unplundered.
73| This was the most grievous and shameful disaster to befall the Roman state since the city was founded. No foreign enemy was involved — the gods, so far as our conduct allowed, were well disposed — and yet the shrine of Jupiter Best and Greatest — founded by our ancestors under favorable auspices as the pledge of empire — was destroyed by the madness of our own leaders, though neither Porsenna managed to defile it when the city yielded to him, nor the Gauls when they captured it. The Capitol had burned once before, in civil war, but that was private treachery; this time it was besieged openly, burned openly. And for what cause of arms? At what price was so great a disaster bought? Was this fought for our country? It was King Tarquinius Priscus who vowed the temple during the Sabine war and laid its foundations, driven more by hope for Rome's future greatness than by what the still-modest resources of the Roman people could then match. Later Servius Tullius completed it with the help of Rome's allies, then Tarquinius Superbus with spoils from the enemy after the capture of Suessa Pometia. But the glory of finishing it was reserved for liberty: after the kings were expelled, Horatius Pulvillus, in his second consulship, dedicated it with a magnificence that the immense wealth of Rome would later adorn rather than increase. It was rebuilt on the same site after burning again, four hundred and fifteen years later, in the consulship of Lucius Scipio and Gaius Norbanus. Sulla took charge of the rebuilding as victor but did not live to dedicate it — the one thing fortune denied him. The name of Lutatius Catulus remained on it, amid all the great works of the Caesars, right up to Vitellius. It was this temple that now burned.
74| But the fire caused more panic among the besieged than among the besiegers. The Vitellian soldiers, amid the confusion, were short on neither cunning nor nerve; on the other side, the men were frightened, their commander sluggish and seemingly stupefied — he could neither follow what he heard nor make himself heard, could not be guided by others' advice nor settle on his own, was spun this way and that by the enemy's shouting, forbidding what he had just ordered and ordering what he had just forbidden. Soon, as happens when things fall apart, everyone gave orders and no one obeyed them; in the end they threw down their arms and looked only for ways to run and to hide. The Vitellians broke in and mixed everything together with blood, iron, and fire. A few soldiers dared to fight — among them notably Cornelius Martialis, Aemilius Pacensis, Casperius Niger, and Didius Scaeva — and were cut down. Flavius Sabinus, unarmed and not trying to flee, was surrounded, along with the consul Quintius Atticus, who was marked out by the shadow of his office and by his own vanity — he had put up proclamations, magnificent toward Vespasian and abusive toward Vitellius. The rest escaped through various strokes of luck, some disguised as slaves, others hidden by the loyalty of dependents or stowed among the baggage. Some, by learning the password the Vitellians used to recognize one another, brazenly asked it or answered it and made their audacity their hiding place.
75| Domitian, at the first break-in, was hidden by the temple caretaker; through the cleverness of a freedman he was disguised in a linen robe and mixed in unrecognized among a crowd of temple attendants, then took refuge with Cornelius Primus, a client of his father's, near the Velabrum. When his father came to power, he had the caretaker's lodging pulled down and set up a small shrine there to Jupiter the Preserver, with an altar showing his own escape carved in marble; later, once he himself became emperor, he built a huge temple to Jupiter the Guardian and dedicated himself within the god's embrace. Sabinus and Atticus, loaded with chains, were brought before Vitellius, who received them with words and looks that were not hostile at all — to the fury of men demanding the right to kill and rewards for their service. A shout rose from the crowd nearby, and the meaner sort of the mob demanded Sabinus's execution, mixing threats with flattery. Vitellius stood on the steps of the palace and was about to plead for him when they forced him to give way; then Sabinus's body was stabbed, mutilated, and beheaded, and the headless trunk was dragged to the Gemonian Stairs.
76| Such was the end of a man not to be dismissed lightly. He had served thirty-five years in public life, distinguished both at home and in the field. His honesty and fairness could not be faulted; he talked too much — that was the one thing rumor could pin on him in the seven years he governed Moesia and the twelve he held the prefecture of Rome. Toward the end of his life, some thought him lazy, many thought him restrained and sparing of citizens' blood. On one point everyone agreed: before Vespasian's reign began, the honor of the family belonged to Sabinus. We are told that Mucianus was glad to hear of his death. Many said it also served peace, by removing the rivalry between two men, one of whom thought of himself as the emperor's brother, the other as his partner in power. But Vitellius resisted the people's demand for the consul's execution, in a placating mood and, as it were, settling a debt: when asked who had set the Capitol ablaze, Atticus had claimed responsibility himself, and whether that confession was a convenient lie or not, he seemed by it to have drawn the blame and the hatred onto his own head, clearing Vitellius of it.
77| In these same days Lucius Vitellius, camped near Feronia, threatened Tarracina with destruction; the gladiators and oarsmen shut up inside dared neither leave the walls nor risk a fight in the open. In command, as noted earlier, were Julianus over the gladiators and Apollinaris over the oarsmen, men who in their laxness and carelessness resembled their gladiators more than commanders. They kept no watches, strengthened no weak points in the walls; night and day they lounged about, loud over the pleasures of the shore, scattering the soldiers to serve their appetites, and only talked of the war over their dinners. A few days before, Apinius Tiro had left, and by harshly extorting gifts and money from the towns he was adding more resentment than strength to their cause.
78| Meanwhile a slave of Vergilius Capito deserted to Lucius Vitellius and promised, if given a force, to hand over the citadel undefended. Deep in the night Vitellius stationed light-armed cohorts on the heights above the enemy's heads; from there the troops rushed down more to slaughter than to fight. They cut down unarmed men, men just reaching for their weapons, some still roused from sleep, all thrown into confusion by darkness, panic, the blare of trumpets, and the enemy's shouting. A few gladiators resisted and did not fall unavenged; the rest rushed for the ships, where everything collapsed in the same terror, mixed in with civilians whom the Vitellians slaughtered without distinction. Six light warships escaped in the first chaos, carrying the fleet commander Apollinaris; the rest were caught on the shore, or swamped and swallowed by the sea under the crush of men climbing aboard. Julianus was brought before Lucius Vitellius, beaten bloody, and had his throat cut in front of him. Some accused Vitellius's wife Triaria of having girded herself with a soldier's sword and behaved with arrogant cruelty amid the slaughter and the capture of Tarracina. Vitellius himself sent word of his success to his brother, asking at once whether he should return immediately or press on to subdue Campania. This turned out to be a stroke of luck not only for Vespasian's cause but for the state itself. For if his soldiers, flush with a fresh victory and, on top of their natural stubbornness, emboldened by success, had marched straight on Rome, the fighting would have been no small affair, and the city would hardly have escaped ruin. For Lucius Vitellius, disreputable as he was, had real energy — not strong through virtues, as good men are, but the way the very worst men are strong through their vices.
79| While this was happening on Vitellius's side, Vespasian's army had left Narnia and was spending the festival of Saturn idly at Ocriculum. The reason for so ill-timed a delay was that they were waiting for Mucianus. Some suspected Antonius of dragging things out deliberately, after secret letters from Vitellius offering him a consulship, his marriageable daughter, and a rich dowry as the price of betrayal. Others called this invention, made up to please Mucianus. Some thought it the deliberate plan of all the commanders, to display the threat of war against the city rather than actually wage it, since Vitellius's strongest cohorts had already deserted him, and with every resource cut off he seemed bound to give up his power anyway. But the whole plan was undone, first by haste, then by Sabinus's cowardice — he had taken up arms without due thought and proved unable to hold the massively fortified Capitoline citadel, one that even large armies could scarcely have stormed, against a mere three cohorts. It would not be easy to lay the blame on any one man for a fault that was everyone's. Mucianus, with his ambiguous letters, was holding back the victors; Antonius, through untimely deference — or perhaps while trying to shift the blame onto others — earned some of it himself; and the rest of the commanders, thinking the war already finished, in fact only marked its true end. Not even Petilius Cerialis, sent ahead with a thousand cavalry to enter the city by the Salarian Way, cutting across through Sabine territory, had moved fast enough — not until the news of the Capitol under siege roused everyone at once.
80| Antonius reached Saxa Rubra by the Via Flaminia very late at night, coming too late to help. There he learned that Sabinus had been killed, the Capitol had burned, the city was in turmoil, everything was grim. He also heard that Vitellius now had the common people and the slaves under arms. As for Petilius Cerialis, a cavalry battle had gone badly for him: careless, he had charged in as though facing a beaten enemy, and the Vitellians met him with infantry interspersed among their own cavalry. The fighting happened close to the city, among buildings, gardens, and winding streets — ground the Vitellians knew and their enemies did not, which bred fear. Nor was all the cavalry united; some who had recently surrendered at Narnia had joined them, still watching to see which side fortune would favor. The prefect of a cavalry squadron, Julius Flavianus, was captured; the rest were routed in disgraceful flight, though the victors did not pursue past Fidenae.
81| This success fired up the people. The city mob took up arms. A few got military shields; more grabbed whatever weapon came to hand and demanded the signal to fight. Vitellius thanked them and ordered a sortie to defend the city. Soon he called the senate and chose envoys to go to the armies, to urge unity and peace under cover of the public interest. The envoys met different fates. Those who reached Petilius Cerialis came to the brink of disaster — the soldiers rejected any terms of peace. The praetor Arulenus Rusticus was wounded; the outrage was made worse, on top of the violation owed an envoy and a praetor, by the man's own personal standing. His attendants were beaten, and the lictor nearest him was killed for daring to push back the crowd. Had the general not sent a guard to protect them, the civil frenzy would have trampled even the sacred rights of envoys — honored among foreign peoples — right at the gates of their own homeland, and driven it to the death. Those who went to Antonius were received more civilly, not because his soldiers were gentler, but because their commander had more authority.
82| Musonius Rufus, a man of equestrian rank devoted to philosophy and Stoic doctrine, had mixed himself in with the envoys. Pushing among the armed companies, he began lecturing on the blessings of peace and the dangers of war, trying to counsel the soldiers. Most found it ridiculous, more found it tiresome; some would have shoved and trampled him had the calmer men not warned him off and others threatened him, so he dropped his ill-timed wisdom. The Vestal Virgins also came out to meet them, bearing a letter from Vitellius to Antonius: he asked for one day's delay before the final battle — if they granted the postponement, he said, everything would be more easily settled. The virgins were sent back with honor; but the answer written to Vitellius said plainly that Sabinus's killing and the Capitol's burning had put an end to any dealing over the war.
83| Still, Antonius sought to calm the legions; he called an assembly and proposed that they pitch camp by the Mulvian Bridge and wait until the next day to enter the city. He delayed out of fear that troops hardened by fighting would show mercy to no one — not the people, not the senate, not even the gods' temples and shrines. Yet the soldiers took any delay to be victory's enemy; and besides, standards gleaming along the hills, though only unwarlike civilians followed them, had already given the look of a hostile army. The column advanced in three divisions: one, as it had been positioned, along the Via Flaminia; one along the bank of the Tiber; the third approached the Colline Gate by the Via Salaria. The common people were scattered by a cavalry charge; the Vitellian soldiers met them with three defensive positions of their own. Many scattered clashes took place before the city, but the Flavian side, better led, generally had the better of them. The only troops who ran into real trouble were those who had veered off to the left toward the Gardens of Sallust, through narrow and slippery streets. The Vitellians, standing on the garden walls, kept them off with stones and javelins until late in the day, until they were surrounded by cavalry that had broken in through the Colline Gate. There was also fighting between opposing lines on the Campus Martius. Fortune and a long run of victories favored the Flavians; the Vitellians charged in from sheer desperation, and though beaten back, kept regrouping within the city.
84| The people watched the fighting as spectators, and as in a staged contest, cheered and applauded first one side, then the other. Whenever one side gave ground, men hiding in shops or houses they'd fled to were dragged out and demanded to be killed — and the crowd got the greater share of the plunder that way, since the soldiers, bent on blood and slaughter, let the spoils go to the mob. The whole city wore a savage, grotesque face: in one place battle and wounds, in another baths and cookshops; blood and heaps of corpses side by side with whores and men who looked like whores. All the lusts of a life of luxury and idleness, all the crimes of the most brutal captivity, together — you would have thought the same city was raging with fury and running wild with pleasure at once. Armed armies had clashed in the city before — twice under Sulla, once under Cinna — and there had been no less cruelty then. But now there was an inhuman indifference, and not for one instant did the pleasures stop; as if it were a holiday and this violence just one more delight added to it, people rejoiced, indulged themselves, cared nothing for either side, glad of the nation's disasters.
85| The hardest fighting of all was the assault on the [Praetorian] camp, which the fiercest men held onto as their last hope. This made the victors press harder, especially the veteran cohorts, who brought up together every device ever devised for destroying the strongest cities — the tortoise formation, siege engines, earthworks, firebrands — shouting that all the toil and danger of so many battles would be crowned by this one action. The city, they said, belonged to the senate and the Roman people; the temples had been restored to the gods; a soldier's own glory lay in his camp — that was his homeland, those were his household gods. If they weren't let back in at once, they'd spend the night under arms. On the other side, the Vitellians, though outnumbered and doomed, clung to the last comfort left the defeated: disturbing the victory, delaying the peace, drenching homes and altars in blood. Many, half-dead, breathed their last atop the towers and battlements of the walls. When the gates were finally torn down, the remaining knot of them faced the victors and fell, every one, with wounds to the front, turned toward the enemy — even in dying, they took care that their end should be honorable.
86| When the city was taken, Vitellius was carried in a litter through the back of the Palatium to his wife's house on the Aventine, meaning to slip away to Tarracina and his brother's cohorts if he could survive the day in hiding. But then, with the fickleness natural to him — and it's the nature of fear that whatever is present seems worst to a man dreading everything — he went back to the Palatium, now vast and deserted, even the lowest of the slaves having slipped away or avoiding the sight of him. The emptiness and the silent rooms terrified him; he tried locked doors, shuddered at empty ones; exhausted by his miserable wandering, he hid himself away in a shameful hiding place, from which the tribune Julius Placidus dragged him out. His hands were bound behind his back, his clothes torn, and he was led through the streets, a wretched sight, while many hurled abuse and no one wept — the ugliness of his end had drained away any pity. One of the German soldiers who met him struck at him savagely in anger — or perhaps meaning to spare him the mockery sooner — it was never clear whether he had really been aiming at the tribune; he cut off the tribune's ear and was cut down himself on the spot.
87| They forced Vitellius, at sword-point, to keep lifting his face and offering it to their insults — to watch his own statues come crashing down, to stare over and over at the Rostra and at the place where Galba had died — and at last they drove him toward the Gemonian Stairs, the very spot where Flavius Sabinus's body had lain. One remark of his was remembered as not unworthy of the man: when a tribune taunted him, he answered that he had, after all, once been that tribune's emperor. Then he went down under a rain of blows. And the mob abused him dead with the very same shameless zeal with which they had once flattered him living.
88| His father was from Luceria. He was in his fifty-seventh year. His consulship, his priesthoods, his name and rank among the leading men — none of it he had earned by his own effort; all of it came from his father's fame. Men who had never known him gave him the throne. Rarely has any man won the devotion of an army through good qualities as thoroughly as this man won it through sheer laziness. Still, there was a simplicity and generosity in him which, without restraint, turn ruinous. Because he thought friendships were held together by the size of his gifts rather than by steadiness of character, he earned more goodwill than he ever kept. It was unquestionably in the state's interest that Vitellius be beaten — but those who betrayed Vitellius to Vespasian, having already deserted Galba, cannot claim credit for loyalty.
89| As night fell fast, the senate could not be convened, because the magistrates and senators, terrified, had scattered from the city or were hiding in the houses of their clients. Once there was no more fear of the enemy, a crowd of soldiers, still under arms as they were, brought Domitian forward to the leaders of their party, hailed him as Caesar, and escorted him in a great throng to his father's house.
1| With Vitellius dead, the fighting had stopped, but peace hadn't started. Armed victors roamed the city hunting down the defeated with implacable hatred. The streets were choked with bodies, the fora and temples bloody, men cut down wherever chance put them in the way. Soon, as license grew, they began hunting the hidden out, dragging them from their hiding places. If they spotted anyone who looked well-born and young, they killed him without asking whether soldiers or civilians had a claim on him. This savagery, first fed by fresh hatred and blood, turned before long into greed. They let nothing stay private or locked, always pretending they were rooting out Vitellians. That became the excuse to break into houses — or, if the owner resisted, the excuse to kill him. There was no shortage of the city's poorest ready to betray rich masters on their own initiative, and worse, some of the worst household slaves did the same. Others were pointed out by their own friends. Everywhere there was wailing and outcry, the whole feel of a captured city — so much so that people actually missed the merely obnoxious insolence of the old Othonian and Vitellian soldiers. The leaders of the factions had been fierce at stoking civil war but were no match for moderating victory, since in times of chaos and discord the worst men have the most power, while peace and calm need better qualities than that.
2| Domitian had taken the name and rank of Caesar, but he wasn't yet applying himself to public business — he was playing the emperor's son through seductions and adulteries. Command of the Praetorian Guard rested with Arrius Varus, but the real power lay with Antonius Primus. He looted money and slaves from the imperial household as if it were plunder from Cremona. The rest, either modest or simply unimportant, had been obscure in the war and got no share of the rewards either. The city, frightened and ready to submit to anyone, demanded that Lucius Vitellius, who was returning from Tarracina with his cohorts, be seized, and that the last embers of the war be stamped out. Cavalry were sent ahead to Aricia; the legions' column halted at Bovillae. Vitellius did not hesitate — he surrendered himself and his cohorts to the victor's mercy, and his soldiers threw down their unlucky weapons out of anger as much as fear. A long column of the surrendered marched through the city hemmed in by armed men; not one wore a pleading face — they were grim and hard, unmoved by the jeering and mockery of the insulting crowd. A few tried to break away and were crushed by the men surrounding them; the rest were locked up, and not one of them said anything unworthy of himself — even in defeat, their reputation for courage stayed intact. Then Lucius Vitellius was executed — a man who shared his brother's vices, though more alert during his brother's reign, and less carried away by good fortune than dragged down by bad.
3| In these same days Lucilius Bassus was sent with a flying squadron of cavalry to pacify Campania, where the towns were more at odds with each other than defiant toward the emperor. The sight of soldiers restored calm, and the smaller colonies went unpunished. The Third Legion was quartered at Capua for the winter, and the great houses there suffered for it, while the people of Tarracina, by contrast, got no help at all. It's so much easier to pay back an injury than a favor, because gratitude feels like a burden, while revenge is counted as profit. There was some small comfort: the slave of Vergilius Capito who had betrayed Tarracina, as I mentioned earlier, was nailed to a cross still wearing the rings he'd taken as his reward from Vitellius. Meanwhile at Rome the senate voted Vespasian all the honors usually given emperors, glad and confident of the future — for after civil war had broken out through Gaul and Spain, after the German provinces and then Illyricum had been stirred to war, and after Egypt, Judaea, Syria, and every province and army had gone through the fire, it looked as if the whole world, having paid its price, was finally at peace. A letter from Vespasian added to the cheer, though it was written as though the war were still going on. At first glance it seemed a modest document; but as the emperor spoke of himself, it was all restraint, and about the state, all excellence. Nor was the senate slow to fall in line — consulships were voted to Vespasian and his son Titus, and a praetorship with consular power to Domitian.
4| Mucianus too had sent letters to the senate, and they gave people plenty to talk about. If he was only a private citizen, why speak in public terms? He could have said the same things a few days later, in his turn to give an opinion. Even his attack on Vitellius came late and showed no real independence. But what truly seemed arrogant toward the state and insulting toward the emperor was his boast that the empire had been in his own hands and that he had made a gift of it to Vespasian. Still, the resentment stayed hidden, while the flattery was open: with great ceremony Mucianus was granted the honors of a triumph, technically for the civil war though it was dressed up as a campaign against the Sarmatians. Antonius Primus was given consular honors, Cornelius Fuscus and Arrius Varus praetorian ones. Then they turned their thoughts to the gods — it was decided to rebuild the Capitol. All these measures were proposed by Valerius Asiaticus, the consul designate. The rest agreed with looks and gestures — a few, whose standing or wit made their flattery conspicuous, agreed in carefully composed speeches. When it came to Helvidius Priscus, the praetor designate, he gave an opinion that honored the new emperor without falsehood, and it won him the enthusiastic support of the senate. That day marked the beginning both of the great resentment against him and of his great glory.
5| Since we've come back around to mentioning a man who will be named often again, it seems right to sketch briefly his life, his interests, and the fortune he met. Helvidius Priscus came from the town of Cluviae in the Caracene district of Italy; his father had commanded a senior centurionate. As a young man he devoted his considerable talent to the higher branches of philosophy — not, as most do, to hide idle uselessness behind a grand-sounding label, but so he could face public life more firmly against whatever fortune brought. He followed the teachers who hold that only what is honorable is good, only what is base is bad, and that power, noble birth, and everything else outside the soul count as neither good nor bad. While still only a quaestor, Paetus Thrasea chose him as a son-in-law, and of everything he absorbed from his father-in-law's character, nothing sank in more deeply than a passion for freedom. Whether acting as citizen, senator, husband, son-in-law, or friend, he never wavered in any role life demanded of him — scorning wealth, clinging stubbornly to what was right, and refusing to bend before fear.
6| Some thought him rather too eager for fame — for even in wise men the craving for glory is the last thing to be shed. Driven into exile by his father-in-law's ruin, he returned when Galba became emperor and set about prosecuting Eprius Marcellus, the man who had informed against Thrasea. That act of vengeance — whether the greater motive was justice or ambition is hard to say — split the senate into factions, for if Marcellus fell, a whole line of the accused would go down with him. At first it was a threatening confrontation, remembered for the brilliant speeches on both sides; but then, with Galba's wishes uncertain and many senators pleading for restraint, Priscus dropped the case — to a mixed chorus, as people's characters differ, some praising his moderation, others complaining he'd lacked resolve.
7| On the day, however, when the senate was voting on Vespasian's rule, it had been decided to send envoys to the new emperor. This sparked a sharp quarrel between Helvidius and Eprius: Priscus wanted the envoys chosen by name by the sworn magistrates, Marcellus wanted the choice made by lot from an urn — which had been the recommendation of the consul designate.
8| Marcellus's eagerness sprang from a private embarrassment — he feared that if others were chosen by name, it would look as if he'd been passed over. Little by little the argument escalated from bickering into full, hostile speeches, with Helvidius demanding to know why Marcellus was so afraid of a vote by the magistrates: he had money and eloquence enough to outdo most men, if he weren't dogged by the memory of his crimes. Drawing lots doesn't sort out character, Helvidius said — voting and the senate's judgment exist precisely so they can look into a man's life and reputation. It mattered to the good of the state, it mattered to Vespasian's honor, that the men who met him be the ones the senate judged most blameless, men who could fill the new emperor's ears with honest talk. Vespasian, he said, had been a friend of Thrasea, of Soranus, of Sentius; even if their accusers shouldn't be punished, they shouldn't be put on display either. This vote of the senate would be, in effect, a signal to the emperor about whom he should trust and whom he should fear. No tool serves good government better than good friends. It should be enough for Marcellus that he'd driven so many innocent men to their deaths under Nero — let him enjoy his rewards and his impunity, and leave Vespasian to better men.
9| Marcellus answered that it wasn't his own proposal under attack, but that of the consul designate, who had simply followed old precedent in assigning envoys by lot, so there'd be no room for ambition or personal grudges. Nothing had happened to justify scrapping long-established custom, or to turn an honor to the emperor into an insult to anyone; everyone's compliance was enough. What needed to be avoided, rather, was letting a few men's stubbornness provoke a mind still unsettled by a new reign and watching everyone's face and word with suspicion. He remembered the times he was born into, he said, and the form of government their fathers and grandfathers had built; he admired the distant ideal but followed the present reality; he prayed for good emperors but put up with whatever kind he got. It wasn't his speech any more than the senate's own verdict that had brought Thrasea down; Nero's cruelty had toyed with them both through exactly this kind of theater, and a friendship like that had cost him as much anxiety as exile cost others. Let Helvidius be ranked with the Catos and Brutuses for firmness and courage — he himself was just one man from that same senate that had, all together, played the slave. He advised Priscus, too, not to try to climb above the emperor, not to try to rein in with his own precepts a Vespasian who was an old man, a man who had celebrated a triumph, a father of grown sons. Just as the worst emperors want limitless power, he said, so even the best of them want some limit set on liberty. These arguments, thrown back and forth with great heat on both sides, were received according to each man's leanings. The side favoring the lottery won, with even the moderates in the senate pushing to keep the old custom; and every man of real distinction leaned the same way, from the same fear of resentment if he were the one chosen by name.
10| Another fight followed. The praetors of the treasury (for the treasury was then run by praetors) complained of the state's poverty and asked for a cap on spending. The consul-elect, given the size of the burden and the difficulty of any fix, wanted to leave it to the emperor. Helvidius moved that the senate handle it itself. As the consuls were polling opinions, the tribune of the people Vulcacius Tertullinus vetoed any decision on so great a matter while the emperor was away. Helvidius had also proposed that the Capitol be rebuilt at public expense, with Vespasian contributing. The most cautious senators let that proposal pass in silence, and then it was forgotten — though some remembered.
11| Then Musonius Rufus attacked Publius Celer, charging that Barea Soranus had been destroyed by his false testimony. The inquiry threatened to reopen old hatreds from the prosecutions. But a worthless, guilty defendant could find no shelter: Soranus's memory was sacred, while Celer, who professed philosophy, had then testified against Barea — betraying and corrupting the friendship whose teacher he claimed to be. The case was set for the next day. But it was not so much Musonius or Publius that people waited for as Priscus and Marcellus and the rest, whose thoughts were bent on revenge.
12| Things stood like this — discord among the senators, rage among the defeated, no authority among the victors, no laws, no emperor in the state — when Mucianus entered the city and pulled everything toward himself at once. The power of Antonius Primus and Arrius Varus was broken, and Mucianus's anger at them, though he tried to hide it, was poorly disguised. But the city, quick to sniff out who was in and who was out, had already turned and shifted its attention: Mucianus alone was courted and flattered now. He did his part, moving through houses and gardens surrounded by armed men, wrapping himself in the trappings, the walk, the guards of an emperor while declining the title. The killing of Calpurnius Galerianus caused the greatest terror. He was the son of Gaius Piso and had done nothing rash, but his famous name and his own good looks kept him on everyone's lips, and in a city still restless and hungry for new gossip there were those who wrapped him in an empty rumor of imperial ambition. On Mucianus's order he was surrounded by a military guard, and — so his death would not draw too much notice within the city itself — he was taken to the fortieth milestone on the Appian Way and bled to death through opened veins. Julius Priscus, prefect of the praetorian cohorts under Vitellius, killed himself, more from shame than necessity. Alfenus Varus lived on, saddled with his own cowardice and disgrace. Asiaticus — a freedman — paid for his wicked power with a slave's execution.
13| In those same days a growing report of disaster in Germany reached a city that took it in without much grief: that armies had been cut down, legionary winter camps captured, and the Gallic provinces had broken away — people spoke of it as if it were merely bad news, not calamity. I will explain in more depth what started that war and how great a stir it kindled among foreign and allied peoples. The Batavians, while they still lived across the Rhine, were part of the Chatti; driven out by internal strife, they seized the empty edge of Gaul and, along with it, a nearby island, which the Ocean washes on one side and the Rhine river surrounds on the back and flanks. Their strength was not worn down — rare for a people allied to a stronger power — and they supply the empire only with men and arms, having long been tested in wars in Germany and later gaining greater glory in Britain, where cohorts of them served, traditionally led by the noblest of their own people. At home too they kept a picked force of cavalry, especially skilled at swimming, able to cross the Rhine in full squadrons without losing their weapons or horses.
14| Julius Paulus and Julius Civilis, of royal stock, stood far above the rest of their people. Paulus was killed by Fonteius Capito on a trumped-up charge of rebellion. Civilis was thrown in chains, sent to Nero, and acquitted by Galba, but under Vitellius faced danger again, since the army was demanding his execution — and from this came his grievances and his hopes, born of our own misfortunes. But Civilis, shrewder than most barbarians and fancying himself a Sertorius or a Hannibal (he even resembled them, having lost an eye like they had), avoided appearing to face Rome as an open enemy. So rather than openly break with the Roman people, he claimed friendship with Vespasian and support for his cause — and indeed a letter had come to him from Primus Antonius, instructing him to divert the auxiliary troops summoned by Vitellius and to hold back the legions under the pretext of a German uprising. Hordeonius Flaccus, on the spot, had urged the same course, since he leaned toward Vespasian and worried for the state, which faced ruin if the war were renewed and so many thousands of armed men poured into Italy.
15| So Civilis, set on rebellion but keeping his deeper plan hidden for now, ready to decide the rest as events unfolded, began to stir things up like this. By Vitellius's order, young Batavians were being called up for the draft, a burden already harsh by its nature and made worse by the greed and self-indulgence of the recruiting officers, who rounded up the old and infirm to sell their discharge for a price, while dragging off good-looking boys — and many Batavian boys are tall for their age — for sexual abuse. This bred resentment, and the men behind the planned revolt used it to push the people into refusing the draft. Civilis invited the leading men of the tribe and the boldest of the common people to a sacred grove under the pretext of a feast, and once he saw them warmed by night and drink, he began by praising the glory and honor of their people, then listed the wrongs, the plundering, and the rest of the miseries of servitude: they were no longer treated as allies, as before, but as slaves. When did a legate ever come to them invested with imperium—burdensome and arrogant though his retinue would be? No — they were handed over to prefects and centurions, who, once they'd gorged themselves on plunder and blood, were simply replaced, and new pockets to fill and new names for robbery kept being invented. And now the draft was pressing in, tearing children from parents and brothers from brothers as if for a final farewell. Rome had never been in worse shape; there was nothing in the winter camps but plunder and old men — let them just lift their eyes and stop fearing the empty name of the legions. As for themselves, they had strong infantry and cavalry, kinsmen among the Germans, and the Gauls wanting the same thing they wanted. Even the Romans would not mind this war, since its uncertain outcome could be blamed on Vespasian — no one has to account for a victory.
16| He was heard with loud approval, and bound them all together with a barbarian rite and their ancestral curses. Envoys were sent to the Canninefates to draw them into the plan. That people occupies part of the island, matching the Batavians in origin, language, and courage, though fewer in number. Next, by secret messages, he won over the British auxiliary troops, the Batavian cohorts that had been sent to Germany, as I mentioned earlier, and were then stationed at Mainz. Among the Canninefates there was one Brinno, a man of reckless stupidity but striking noble birth; his father had dared many acts of hostility and had mocked Caligula's expeditions with impunity. So, simply because his family had a name for rebellion, he was chosen as leader, hoisted on a shield in the tribal custom and swayed on the shoulders of the men holding him up. He immediately summoned the Frisians (a people from across the Rhine) and burst upon the winter camp of two cohorts [text corrupt] nearest the Ocean. The soldiers had not foreseen the attack, and even if they had, they lacked the strength to stop it: so the camp fell and was stripped bare. Next came the Roman sutlers and merchants, caught unarmed and unsuspecting as they went about their ordinary trade, scattered here and there. At the same time they threatened to destroy the forts, which the prefects of the cohorts burned themselves, since they could not be defended. The standards, the banners, and whatever soldiers remained gathered in the upper part of the island under the command of Aquilius, a former chief centurion — an army in name more than in strength, since Vitellius had drained the cohorts of their real fighting men and padded out the sluggish remainder with troops from the nearby districts of the Nervii and the Germans.
17| Civilis, deciding to proceed by trickery, went so far as to accuse the prefects of having abandoned the forts, saying that he himself, with the cohort under his command, would put down the Canninefates' uprising, and that they should each go back to their own winter quarters. It became clear there was deceit behind this advice, and that the scattered cohorts would be easier to crush — and that Brinno was not really the leader of this war, but Civilis was, as clues gradually surfaced, since the Germans, a people who relish war, had not kept quiet for long. When trickery achieved too little, he turned to open force, arranging the Canninefates, Frisians, and Batavians into their own separate units. A battle line was drawn up not far from the Rhine, facing the enemy, with ships turned toward them — ships they had brought there after burning the forts. The fighting did not last long: a cohort of Tungrians carried its standards over to Civilis, and the stunned soldiers were cut down by this sudden betrayal from allies turned enemies. The same treachery showed itself on the ships: some of the rowers, who were Batavians, hindered the work of the sailors and marines as if through clumsiness, then began rowing against them and turning the sterns toward the enemy shore. In the end they slaughtered the helmsmen and centurions who would not go along with them, until the whole fleet of twenty-four ships deserted or was captured.
18| The victory was showy at the time and useful afterward: they gained the weapons and ships they needed, and the men who'd led the fight for freedom were celebrated far and wide through Germany and Gaul. German tribes at once sent envoys offering help. Civilis worked at winning Gaul over with cunning and gifts, sending home the captured cohort prefects to their own communities, and letting the cohorts choose whether to leave or stay. Those who stayed got an honored place in his ranks; those who left were given Roman spoils as parting gifts. All the while he reminded them in private conversations of the miseries they'd suffered for so many years, calling their wretched servitude by the false name of peace. The Batavians, he said, though exempt from tribute, had taken up arms against masters common to them all — and in the first battle the Romans had been routed and beaten. What if Gaul threw off the yoke too? How much was left in Italy to fight with? Provinces are conquered with the blood of other provinces. Let them not think of Vindex's battle: it was Batavian cavalry that had trampled the Aedui and Arverni, and Belgians had fought among Verginius's auxiliaries too — anyone who thought it through would see that Gaul had been crushed by its own strength. Now, he said, everyone stood on the same side, with the added advantage of whatever discipline the Roman camps had ever taught them: he had veteran cohorts with him, the very ones that had recently brought down Otho's legions. Let Syria and Asia be slaves, and the East, used to kings — many men were still alive in Gaul who had been born before there was any tribute at all. Hadn't the killing of Quintilius Varus driven servitude out of Germany for good? And back then it was no Vitellius they provoked to war, but Caesar Augustus. Freedom, he said, was given by nature even to dumb animals; courage was the peculiar good of men, and the gods stood by the stronger side. So let them, unencumbered and fresh, seize their moment against men already tied up elsewhere and worn out. While some backed Vespasian and some Vitellius, there was room to move against both. So it was that Civilis, aiming at Gaul and Germany together, was — if his plans worked out — reaching for the kingship of the richest and strongest nations there.
19| Meanwhile Hordeonius Flaccus fed Civilis's first moves along by pretending not to notice them. But once frightened messengers brought word that the camp had been stormed, the cohorts wiped out, and Roman power driven off the island of the Batavians, he ordered the commander Munius Lupercus — who was in charge of the winter quarters of two legions — to march out against the enemy. Lupercus hurried across the legionaries he had on hand, the Ubii from nearby, and the Treviran cavalry stationed not far off, adding a squadron of Batavian horse that had already gone over to the enemy in spirit and was only feigning loyalty, meaning to betray the Romans in the thick of battle itself and desert for a higher price. Civilis surrounded himself with the captured standards of the cohorts, so that his own men would see fresh glory before their eyes while the enemy would be terrified by the memory of their defeat; he also had his mother and sisters, along with the wives and small children of all his men, stand behind the line — an encouragement to victory, or, if they were beaten, a source of shame. When the battle line rang with the men's war-chant and the women's wailing, the shout that came back from the legions and cohorts was nowhere near as loud. The Batavian squadron had already stripped the left wing bare by deserting and turning at once against us. But the legionary soldiers, though things had gone badly, kept their weapons and their ranks. The Ubian and Treviran auxiliaries scattered in an ugly rout across the whole plain; the Germans threw themselves at them, and this gave the legions a chance meanwhile to reach the camp known as Vetera. Claudius Labeo, prefect of the Batavian squadron, a rival of Civilis from their hometown feuds, was carried off to the Frisii — lest he be killed and stir up ill will among his own people, or, if kept alive, become a seed of division.
20| In these same days the Batavian and Canninefate cohorts, on their way to Rome under Vitellius's orders, were overtaken by a messenger sent from Civilis. They swelled at once with pride and defiance, and demanded, as the price of their march, a bonus, double pay, and an increase in cavalry numbers — things Vitellius had indeed promised, though they weren't asking in order to get them, only for a pretext to mutiny. Flaccus, by giving way on many points, had achieved nothing but sharpen their demand for the one thing they knew he'd refuse. Spurning Flaccus, they set out for Lower Germany to join Civilis. Hordeonius called in the tribunes and centurions and debated whether to force their obedience by arms; then, held back by his own natural timidity and by officers who were themselves uneasy — troubled by the doubtful loyalty of the auxiliaries and by legions freshly filled out through a hasty levy — he decided to keep his men inside camp. Then, having second thoughts, and needled by the very men who had urged that course, he wrote to Herennius Gallus, commander of the First Legion, who held Bonn, as if he meant to follow through: Gallus was to block the Batavians' passage, and he himself would press on their rear with his army. They could have been crushed if Hordeonius from one side and Gallus from the other had moved their forces and closed in on them from both directions. But Flaccus dropped the plan and sent Gallus a second letter warning him not to provoke men who were only leaving. This raised the suspicion that the commanders themselves were stirring up the war of their own accord, and that everything that had happened, or was feared, came not from the soldiers' slackness nor the enemy's strength, but from the treachery of their leaders.
21| As the Batavians drew near the camp at Bonn, they sent men ahead to lay out the cohorts' demands to Herennius Gallus. They had no quarrel with the Romans, they said, for whom they had fought so many times; it was long, fruitless service that wore them down, and now they longed for home and rest. If no one stood in their way, their march would be harmless; but if weapons met them, they'd cut their way through with the sword. The soldiers pressed their hesitant commander to try his luck in battle. Three thousand legionaries, hastily gathered Belgian cohorts, and a cowardly but loud-mouthed crowd of camp followers and sutlers, bold enough before the danger came, burst out through every gate to surround the outnumbered Batavians. But these were seasoned soldiers: they massed into wedges, tight on every side, safe in front, back, and flank, and so broke clean through our thin line. As the Belgians gave way, the legion was driven back, and men scrambled in panic for the rampart and gates. That was where the slaughter was worst: the ditches filled up with bodies, and many died not only from slaughter and wounds but from the crush and from their own side's weapons. The victors avoided the colony of the Agrippinenses and attempted nothing hostile for the rest of their march, excusing the fight at Bonn by claiming they had asked for peace, and only looked to their own safety once it was refused them.
22| With the arrival of the veteran cohorts, Civilis now led a proper army, but he was still unsure of his course and mindful of Roman strength. So everyone present was made to swear the oath to Vespasian, while envoys went out to the two legions — beaten in the earlier battle and now shut up at Vetera — urging them to swear the same. Back came their answer: a traitor's counsel, or an enemy's, they would take from no one; Vitellius was their emperor, and to him their loyalty and their weapons would hold to the last breath. A Batavian deserter had no business arbitrating Rome's affairs — let him wait instead for whatever punishment his crime had earned him. Word of this reached Civilis, and it threw him into a rage: he called the whole Batavian nation to arms, the Bructeri and Tencteri fell in alongside him, and Germany, stirred by the news, answered the summons to plunder and glory.
23| Against this gathering storm of war, the legionary commanders Munius Lupercus and Numisius Rufus strengthened the rampart and walls. The works of a long peace — buildings put up not far from camp in the style of a town — were torn down, so the enemy could not use them. But too little was done to bring supplies into the camp; the men were allowed to plunder instead, so that in a few days, through this free-for-all, what would have lasted a long time against real need was used up. Civilis, holding the center of his line with the strength of the Batavians, occupied both banks of the Rhine so as to look more terrifying, filling them with bands of Germans, while cavalry charged about over the plains; at the same time ships were brought up against the current. On one side stood the standards of veteran cohorts, on the other the images of wild beasts, drawn from woods and groves, each nation according to its own custom of going into battle — and the mingled look of civil and foreign war left the besieged stunned. What raised the attackers' hopes further was the great size of the rampart, which barely five thousand armed Romans were left to defend, though it had been built for two legions. But a great crowd of camp followers, thrown together by the disruption of peace, was there too and served the war effort.
24| Part of the camp rose on a gentle slope, part could be approached on level ground. Augustus had believed that these winter quarters would be enough to besiege and hem in the German tribes, and had never imagined the horror of legions of ours being attacked outright — so no extra effort had gone into their position or their defenses; force and arms alone had seemed enough. The Batavians and the tribes from across the Rhine took up positions each nation on its own, so that their separate courage could be seen more clearly, and harassed the camp from a distance. Then, once most of their missiles stuck uselessly in the towers and battlements and they themselves began taking wounds from stones thrown down on them, they rushed the rampart with shouts and a charge, many setting up ladders, others advancing under a shield-roof formed by their own men. Some were already climbing when they were struck down by stakes and spears along with sword-blows and blows from Roman weapons — men who had started out too fierce and too confident from earlier success. But now, driven by greed for plunder, they endured even setbacks, and dared even to try siege engines, unfamiliar as these were to them; deserters and prisoners taught them how to build timber structures like a bridge, then mount them on wheels and push them forward, so that some men standing on top could fight as if from a rampart, while others hidden inside undermined the walls. But stones hurled from the ballistae smashed the clumsy contraption to pieces. And as they made ready wicker screens and siege-sheds, blazing spears shot from the catapults struck them, and the attackers themselves were now targeted with fire, until, giving up on force, they turned their plan to delay — well aware that only a few days' food remained inside, and that there was a great crowd unfit for war. At the same time they hoped that hunger would bring betrayal, that the loyalty of slaves would prove shaky, and that the fortunes of war would offer other chances.
25| Meanwhile Flaccus, learning of the siege of the camp and having sent men through Gaul to raise auxiliaries, handed over picked troops from the legions to Dillius Vocula, commander of the Twenty-second Legion, with orders to march by the fastest possible stages along the riverbank. Flaccus himself, weak in body and hated by his soldiers, went by boat. The men grumbled openly and without disguise: the Batavian cohorts had been sent away from Mainz on Flaccus's own orders, Civilis's schemes had been covered up, the Germans were being drawn into alliance. It wasn't the help of Primus Antonius or Mucianus that had built up Vespasian's cause so much as this. Open hatred and open weapons, they said, could be fought off; but treachery and deceit worked in the dark and so couldn't be stopped. Civilis stood in the open, drawing up his battle line; Hordeonius, from his sickbed, gave orders that suited the enemy. So many companies of the bravest men, ruled by the sickness of one old man — better to kill the traitor and clear their own luck and courage of the bad omen hanging over them. Fired up by these words among themselves, they were further inflamed by a letter that had arrived from Vespasian. Since it couldn't be hidden, Flaccus read it out to the assembled troops, and sent the men who had delivered it, in chains, to Vitellius.
26| With tempers somewhat cooled by this, they came to Bonn, winter quarters of the First Legion. There the soldiers were angrier still, laying the blame for the disaster on Hordeonius: it was on his order, they said, that the battle line had been drawn up against the Batavians as if the legions from Mainz were coming up in support; it was through his betrayal that men had been cut down with no reinforcements arriving. None of this, they said, was known to the other armies, nor reported to their own emperor — when a swift, sudden treachery could have been stamped out by help pouring in from provinces on every side. To the assembled army Hordeonius read out copies of every letter in which he had begged for aid across Gaul, Britain, and Spain, and he began the wretched practice of handing such letters straight to the legions' eagle-bearers, so that ordinary soldiers read them before the commanders themselves had even set eyes on them. He then ordered one of the ringleaders of the mutiny put in chains — more to assert his authority than because the fault was his alone. The army then moved from Bonn to Cologne, with Gallic auxiliaries flowing in, who at first eagerly supported the Roman cause. But as the Germans grew stronger, most of the tribes took up arms against us, hoping for freedom, or — once they'd thrown off servitude — hungry to rule in our place. The legions' anger kept building; the chaining of one soldier had cast no fear over them — indeed that same man went on to accuse the commander himself of complicity, claiming that a messenger between Civilis and Flaccus was being framed as a false witness to silence the truth. Vocula mounted the platform with remarkable steadiness, seized the shouting soldier, and ordered him led off to execution. While the troublemakers cowered, all the better men obeyed. After that, by common consent, the troops demanded Vocula as their commander, and Flaccus handed him full authority.
27| But much was driving their divided tempers to savagery: shortage of pay and grain, and at the same time the Gauls' resentment at the levy and the tribute; the Rhine, in a drought unheard of in that climate, was barely navigable, cramping supply lines; sentry posts strung along the whole riverbank to keep the Germans from the fords meant fewer crops and more mouths to feed. Among the ignorant, the very scarcity of water was taken as an omen — as though the rivers too, and the ancient bulwarks of the empire, were deserting us. In peacetime this would have been put down to chance or nature; now it was called fate and the anger of a god.
28| When they reached Neuss, the Sixteenth Legion joined them. Herennius Gallus, a legionary legate, was added to share command with Vocula, but they didn't dare advance against the enemy; they made camp at a place called Gelduba. There they toughened the troops by drawing up battle lines, building ramparts and ditches, and other drills of war. And to spur their courage with plunder, Vocula led the army into the nearest districts of the Cugerni, who had gone over to Civilis; part of the force stayed behind with Herennius Gallus.
29| As it happened, a grain-laden ship ran aground in the shallows not far from camp, and the Germans on their own bank began hauling it in. Gallus couldn't stand for this and sent a cohort to the rescue; the Germans' numbers grew too, and as reinforcements gathered on both sides a pitched fight broke out. The Germans, at heavy cost to our men, dragged the ship away. The defeated soldiers — as had by then become the habit — blamed not their own cowardice but their commander's treachery. They dragged Gallus from his tent, tore his clothes, beat him, and demanded he say for what price, and with whose complicity, he had betrayed the army. Suspicion then swung back to Hordeonius: they called Gallus the instrument and Hordeonius the mastermind, until, terrified by threats of death, Gallus himself accused Hordeonius of treason. Gallus was put in chains and only released when Vocula arrived. The next day Vocula put the ringleaders of the mutiny to death — such was the gulf in that army between license and endurance. There was no doubt the ordinary soldier was loyal to Vitellius, while the most distinguished men leaned toward Vespasian; hence this alternating cycle of crimes and punishments, fury mixed with obedience, so that men who could be punished couldn't also be controlled.
30| Civilis, meanwhile, was being lifted up by immense reinforcements from all Germany, his alliance secured with hostages from the noblest families. He ordered each district ravaged by whichever force was nearest — the Ubii and Treveri — and sent another force across the Meuse to strike the Menapii, the Morini, and the farthest edges of Gaul. Plunder was taken on both fronts, more savagely among the Ubii, because that people, though of German origin, had renounced their homeland and taken a Roman name and were called Agrippinenses. Their cohorts were cut down at the village of Marcodurum, caught off guard because they were far from the riverbank. Even so the Ubii didn't stop raiding into Germany for plunder — unpunished at first, then surrounded and cut off; through this whole war they showed better loyalty than luck. With the Ubii crushed, Civilis, fiercer now with success, pressed the siege of the legions harder, keeping close watch so no secret message about approaching relief could get through. He put the Batavians in charge of siege engines and earthworks, and when the tribesmen from across the Rhine demanded battle, he sent them to tear down the rampart, and when they were driven back, ordered them to renew the fight — since they had numbers to spare and little to lose.
31| Night brought no end to the struggle. Wood was piled up around the camp and set alight, and as the men feasted and grew warm with wine, each in turn was carried by reckless drunkenness into the fight. Their own weapons, thrown blind through the dark, mostly missed; the Romans, by contrast, could see the barbarians' line clearly outlined, and marked for a hit anyone shining bright with boldness or decoration. Civilis saw this and ordered the fires put out, so that everything — men and weapons alike — was thrown into darkness and confusion. What followed was real confusion, a jumble of clashing sounds and blind luck: nobody could see well enough to land a blow or dodge one, and men spun and flailed their limbs toward wherever a shout came from; courage counted for nothing, chance ruled everything, and it was often the bravest who fell to a coward's weapon. Among the Germans the fury was blind; the Roman soldier, wise to the dangers, threw his iron-tipped stakes and heavy stones with aim, not at random. Whenever the sound of men working the machines, or ladders set against the wall, put the enemy within reach, they shoved them back with their shield-bosses and followed up with the javelin; many who had climbed onto the walls were stabbed with daggers. So the night was spent, and daylight opened a new battle.
32| The Batavians had built a two-storey siege tower, and as it drew near the main gate — the most level ground — the defenders pushed out strong poles and rammed beams against it and broke it apart, killing many of the men standing on top. A sudden, successful sally struck the shaken attackers while they reeled. At the same time the legionaries, with superior skill and craft, were building more devices of their own. One device brought special terror — a hanging, swinging contraption that would drop without warning right in front of its own operators, hook one or more of the enemy, and then, its weight swinging back the other way, hurl them bodily into the camp. Civilis gave up hope of taking the camp by storm and went back to a slow siege, working instead to undermine the legions' loyalty with messages and promises.
33| All this happened in Germany before the battle of Cremona; news of that battle's outcome reached them through a letter from Primus Antonius, along with a copy of Caecina's proclamation, and a cohort commander from the losing side, Alpinius Montanus, was there in person to confirm the fortunes of the parties. From this came divided reactions. The auxiliaries from Gaul, who had neither love nor hatred for either side and served without feeling, broke from Vitellius at once at their officers' urging; the old-guard legionaries hesitated. But under pressure from Hordeonius Flaccus and the insistence of the tribunes, they took the oath — though their faces and their hearts showed little conviction. And while they mouthed the rest of the oath's words together, they stumbled over the name of Vespasian, or let it pass in a low murmur, or mostly in silence.
34| Then a letter from Antonius to Civilis was read out before the assembly, and it stirred the soldiers' suspicions — it seemed written to an ally of their cause and spoke of the army of Germany in hostile terms. Soon the same reports and the same reaction reached the camp at Gelduba, and Montanus was sent with instructions to Civilis to lay down arms and stop dressing up a foreign war in a false Roman cause: if he had only meant to help Vespasian, he'd done enough already for that purpose. Civilis at first answered cunningly; but seeing that Montanus was hot-tempered by nature and ready for revolution, he began instead with a complaint about the dangers he'd endured through twenty-five years in Roman camps. 'A fine reward I've gotten for my labors,' he said, 'my brother's murder, my own chains, the savage cries of this army demanding my death — for which, by the law of nations, I now demand payment in kind. And you Treveri, and the rest of you slavish souls — what reward do you expect for all the blood you've poured out so many times, except thankless service, endless taxes, the rods and the axe, and the whims of your masters? Look at me: commander of a single cohort, with the Canninefates and Batavians, a tiny sliver of Gaul — we're cutting down those vast camp-fortifications of yours, or hemming them in with iron and starvation. In the end, either freedom will follow those who dared, or, if we're beaten, we'll be no worse off than we are now.' Having stirred Montanus to this pitch, Civilis sent him off with instructions to report something milder. Montanus went back as a failed envoy, hiding the rest — which soon burst out into the open.
35| Civilis held back part of his forces and sent the veteran cohorts, along with the most eager of the Germans, against Vocula and his army, under the command of Julius Maximus and Claudius Victor, his sister's son. On the march they seized the winter camp of the cavalry wing stationed at Asciburgium, and they burst into the camp so unexpectedly that Vocula had no chance to address his men or even form a battle line. All he could manage in the chaos was to order the legionary reserves to hold the center; the auxiliaries were scattered everywhere. The cavalry charged out, but ran into the enemy's ordered ranks and turned back on their own side. What followed was slaughter, not battle. The Nervian cohorts, whether from fear or treachery, left our flanks exposed, and the enemy reached the legions, which, having lost their standards, were being cut down inside the rampart—when suddenly the fortune of the fight changed with fresh help. Cohorts of Vascones, raised by Galba and now summoned, were approaching the camp when they heard the noise of battle and struck the enemy from behind, unaware they were under attack; they created more panic than their numbers warranted, since some believed a whole army had arrived from Novaesium, others from Mainz. This mistake gave the Romans heart, and trusting in strength they didn't actually have, they recovered their own. The bravest of the Batavian infantry were cut down; their cavalry escaped with the standards and prisoners they had seized in the first clash. More men died that day on our side, though they were the less capable troops; among the Germans, it was their finest who fell.
36| Both commanders, by equal fault, deserved their reverses, and both failed to make anything of their successes. If Civilis had drawn up his line with larger forces, so few cohorts could not have surrounded him, and he would have broken through the camp and destroyed it. Vocula, for his part, never scouted the enemy's approach, and so was caught marching out and beaten; then, lacking confidence in victory, he wasted days before moving his camp against the enemy—if he had moved at once to press the advantage and follow through, he could have broken the siege of the legions in that same push. Meanwhile Civilis had been testing the resolve of the besieged, spreading word that Roman fortunes were ruined and that his own side had won: he paraded standards and banners around, even displaying prisoners. One of these prisoners dared a remarkable act—he cried out the truth of what had happened in a loud voice, and was immediately run through by the Germans, which only made his report more credible. At the same time, the burning and devastation of farmhouses in flames signaled that a victorious army was approaching. Within sight of the camp, Vocula ordered the standards planted and a ditch and rampart thrown up, with the baggage set aside so the men could fight unencumbered. At this the men shouted at their commander, demanding battle, and they had grown used to threatening him. Without even time to form a proper line, disordered and exhausted, they went into battle—for Civilis was there, relying as much on his enemy's faults as on his own men's courage. Fortune wavered among the Romans, and the most mutinous troops proved the most cowardly; but some, remembering their recent victory, held their ground, struck at the enemy, urged themselves and those beside them on, and as the line re-formed, stretched their hands toward the besieged men so as not to fail them at the critical hour. Those men, watching everything from the walls, burst out through every gate. And as chance would have it, Civilis was thrown from his horse and fell, and the rumor spread through both armies that he was wounded or killed—this filled his own men with immense fear and the enemy with equal excitement. But Vocula, instead of pursuing the fleeing enemy, kept strengthening the rampart and towers of the camp, as if a fresh siege were coming—and, having botched victory so many times already, he was not wrongly suspected of preferring war to peace.
37| Nothing wore down our armies as much as the shortage of supplies. The legions' baggage, along with a crowd of non-combatants, was sent to Novaesium so grain could be brought back overland, since the enemy controlled the river. The first column marched unopposed, Civilis not yet being fully ready. But when he learned that the grain-foraging party had again been sent to Novaesium, and cohorts assigned as escort, marching as if in full peace—soldiers rarely at their posts, weapons stowed in the wagons, everyone wandering about at will—he attacked them in tight formation, having sent men ahead to hold the narrow points of bridges and roads. The fighting stretched along the long column with the outcome uncertain, until night broke it off. The cohorts pushed on to Gelduba, while the camp remained garrisoned as before by the troops left behind there. There was no doubt about the danger the foragers would face on their way back, burdened with grain and already shaken. From the Fifth and Fifteenth legions, still under siege at Vetera, Vocula drew a thousand handpicked men to reinforce his own—soldiers who obeyed no one and despised their officers. More men set out than had been ordered, openly grumbling in the ranks that they would no longer put up with hunger and their commanders' treachery; meanwhile those who stayed behind complained they had been abandoned when part of the legion was taken away. So there was a double mutiny: some calling Vocula back, others refusing to return to camp.
38| Meanwhile Civilis laid siege to Vetera. Vocula withdrew to Gelduba and then to Novaesium; Civilis took Gelduba, and soon after fought a successful cavalry engagement not far from Novaesium. But whether things went well or badly, the soldiers were driven all the same toward destroying their commanders. With the arrival of the men from the Fifth and Fifteenth legions, the reinforced legions demanded their donative, having learned that money had been sent by Vitellius. Hordeonius, without much delay, gave it out in the name of Vespasian, and that became the chief fuel of the mutiny. Given over to drinking, feasting, and nighttime gatherings, they revived their old anger against Hordeonius, and since none of the legates or tribunes dared stand in their way—shame having vanished entirely with the night—they dragged him from his bed and killed him. The same fate was being prepared for Vocula, but he escaped in the dark disguised as a slave, unrecognized.
39| Once the frenzy had subsided and fear returned, they sent centurions with letters to the communities of Gaul to beg for troops and pay. As for themselves—since a mob without a leader is reckless, fearful, and thoughtless all at once—when Civilis approached, they snatched up their weapons in a panic and then just as quickly threw them down again, turning to flight. Their setbacks bred discord: those who belonged to the upper army tried to distance themselves from the others' cause. Yet images of Vitellius were set up again in the camp and in the nearby Belgian towns, even though Vitellius was already dead. Then the First, Fourth, and Twenty-second legions had a change of heart and rejoined Vocula in remorse; under him, having sworn allegiance to Vespasian once more, they were led out to relieve the siege of Mainz. The besiegers had already withdrawn—a mixed force of Chatti, Usipi, and Mattiaci, glutted with plunder and not without losses, since our soldiers had ambushed them scattered and unwary along the road. The Treviri, for their part, built a wall and rampart across their own territory, and traded heavy losses with the Germans back and forth—until their genuine service to Rome was later fouled by their own rebellion.
40| Meanwhile Vespasian, for the second time, and Titus entered upon the consulship while both were absent, and the city hung suspended in gloom and manifold fear, having, on top of its real troubles, worked itself into groundless panics as well—word spread that Africa had revolted, with Lucius Piso plotting an uprising. Piso, the province's proconsul, was in fact nothing like a troublemaker by temperament; but because storms kept ships from sailing, and the common people were used to buying their food day by day, with their only concern in the whole state being the grain supply, they took it as certain—since they were afraid—that the coast was closed and the shipments blocked. Vitellian sympathizers, who had not yet given up their party's cause, fed the rumor further, since it was not unwelcome news even to the victors, whose greed—insatiable even in foreign wars—no civil war victory has ever satisfied.
41| On the first of January, in a Senate summoned by the city praetor Julius Frontinus, honors and thanks were voted to the armies, their commanders, and the client kings. Tettius Julianus was stripped of his praetorship, on the charge that he had abandoned his legion as it went over to Vespasian's side, so that it could be transferred to Plotius Grypus instead; Hormus was granted equestrian rank. And soon, when Frontinus resigned his post, Domitianus Caesar took up the praetorship. His name headed letters and edicts, but real power lay with Mucianus—except that Domitian, egged on by friends or by his own impulses, dared a good deal on his own. Mucianus's chief fear, though, was of Antonius Primus and Arrius Varus, men whose recent fame and popularity with the soldiers even the common people favored, since they had shown no cruelty to anyone once the fighting was over. It was said that Antonius had urged Scribonianus Crassus—a man shining with distinguished ancestors and his brother's reputation—to make a bid for power, with no shortage of accomplices ready, had Scribonianus not refused; not even ready support could tempt him, so wary was he of anything uncertain. So Mucianus, unable to strike Antonius down openly, heaped him with praise in the Senate while burdening him with private promises, dangling nearer Spain before him as vacant since Cluvius Rufus's departure; at the same time he lavished tribunates and prefectures on Antonius's friends. Then, once he had filled Antonius's empty vanity with hope and desire, he stripped him of real power by sending the Seventh Legion—most devoted to Antonius—off to winter quarters. The Third Legion, too, close to Arrius Varus's soldiers, was sent back to Syria; part of the army was marched off to the Germanies. So, once every source of unrest had been drained away, the city returned to its ordinary shape, its laws, and the routine functions of its magistrates.
42| On the day Domitian entered the senate, he spoke briefly and modestly about his father's and brother's absence and his own youth, carrying himself well; and since his character was not yet known, his frequent facial confusion was taken for modesty. When Caesar raised the question of restoring Galba's honors, Curtius Montanus proposed that Piso's memory also be honored. The senators voted for both; the motion for Piso came to nothing. Then men were chosen by lot to return property seized in the war, to examine and re-post bronze law-tablets worn away by age, to purge the calendar of the flattery that had disfigured it in past times, and to set limits on public spending. Tettius Julianus was restored to his praetorship once it was learned he had fled to Vespasian; Grypus kept the honor he already held. It was then decided to reopen the inquiry between Musonius Rufus and Publius Celer; Publius was condemned, and Soranus's shade was thus satisfied. A day marked by public severity was not without private praise either. Musonius seemed to have carried out a just prosecution; opinion was divided about Demetrius, a professed Cynic, for having defended a plainly guilty man more for show than for honesty. Publius himself had neither the nerve to face danger nor the words to speak in it. Once the signal had been given for vengeance against informers, Junius Mauricus asked Caesar to let the senate see the imperial records, so they might learn who had asked whom to be prosecuted. Domitian answered that such a matter required the emperor's own judgment.
43| At the prompting of the leading senators, the senate drew up an oath, which all the magistrates and then the rest, as each was asked his opinion, competed to swear, calling the gods to witness that they had done nothing to harm anyone's safety, and had taken no reward or honor from a citizen's ruin — men trembling and twisting the words of the oath in various ways, aware of their own guilt. The senators approved this show of religion and denounced the perjury in it; and this censure landed heaviest, so to speak, on three men notorious under Nero for their constant denunciations: Sariolenus Vocula, Nonius Attianus, and Cestius Severus. Sariolenus was pressed further by a recent charge, that he had been up to the same tricks under Vitellius; the senate did not stop shaking its fists at Vocula until he left the chamber. They turned next to Paccius Africanus and drove him out too, on the charge that he had pointed Nero toward the Scribonius brothers, whose harmony and wealth had brought them to ruin. Africanus dared not admit it and could not deny it; turning instead on Vibius Crispus, whose questions were wearing him down, he tried to spread the blame by mixing in charges he could not otherwise defend against.
44| Vipstanus Messala won great fame that day for devotion and eloquence, though not yet of senatorial age, by daring to plead for his brother Aquilius Regulus. Regulus had brought upon himself deep hatred by helping bring down the houses of the Crassi and Orfitus; he seemed to have taken up the prosecution as a very young man not out of any need to avert danger to himself, but in hope of future power. Sulpicia Praetextata, Crassus's widow, and her four children stood ready as avengers if the senate would hear the case. So Messala did not defend the charge or the accused, but by placing himself in the path of his brother's danger, he won some over. Curtius Montanus met him with a savage speech, going so far as to charge that after Galba's murder Regulus had paid Piso's killer and had bitten at Piso's severed head. 'This much at least,' he said, 'Nero did not force on you, and you did not buy your rank or your safety with that savagery. Let us tolerate, if we must, the defenses of those who preferred to destroy others rather than risk themselves — but an exiled father had left you free of danger, his property divided among creditors, your age not yet fit for office, nothing about you for Nero to covet, nothing to fear. Out of bloodlust and a hunger for reward you steeped a talent still unknown, untested by any defense work, in a noble man's murder — when, amid the funeral of the republic, snatching the spoils of a consular, gorged on seven million sesterces and glittering with a priesthood, you struck down innocent boys, distinguished old men, and eminent women in the same ruin — when you mocked Nero's laziness, for wearing himself and his informers out house by house, when the whole senate could be brought down with a single word. Keep this man, conscript fathers, and preserve him — a man of such ready resource that every age can learn from him, so that our old men may imitate Marcellus and Crispus, and our young men Regulus. Even a wretched vice finds imitators; what if it should flourish and thrive? A man we don't yet dare offend as a mere ex-quaestor — will we dare to offend him as an ex-praetor, an ex-consul? Do you think Nero was the last of tyrants? Those who outlived Tiberius, who outlived Gaius, believed the same, and yet meanwhile one still more intolerable and savage arose. We do not fear Vespasian; such is the emperor's age, such his restraint — but examples outlast character. We have gone soft, conscript fathers: this is no longer the senate that once, right after Nero fell, insisted the informers and their agents be punished as our ancestors would have punished them. The best day after a bad emperor is the first one.'
45| Montanus was heard with such approval from the senate that Helvidius began to hope even Marcellus could be brought down. So, opening with praise of Cluvius Rufus, who though just as rich and just as famous for his eloquence had never brought danger on anyone under Nero, he pressed Eprius Marcellus with both the charge and the precedent, while the senators' anger flared. When Marcellus sensed this, he made as if to leave the chamber, saying, 'We are going, Priscus, and we leave you your senate — go reign, with Caesar looking on.' Vibius Crispus followed him, both men angry, their faces different — Marcellus with threatening eyes, Crispus smiling — until friends rushed up and pulled them back. As the quarrel grew, on one side many good men, on the other a few but powerful ones, pressed on with stubborn hatred, and the day was consumed in discord.
46| At the next session, when Caesar opened by urging that resentment and anger and the necessities of past times be set aside, Mucianus spoke at length in defense of the informers, and gently, almost as if pleading, warned those renewing prosecutions they had begun and then dropped to think again. The senators, once opposed, let drop the freedom of speech they had begun to claim. Mucianus, so it would not seem that the senate's judgment was being scorned and that everything done under Nero was going unpunished, sent Octavius Sagitta and Antistius Sosianus, both of senatorial rank who had left their places of exile, back to the same islands. Octavius, driven mad with love, had murdered Pontia Postumina after seducing her, when she refused to marry him; Sosianus, through sheer viciousness, had ruined many. Both had been condemned and expelled by a severe decree of the senate; though others were allowed to return, these two were kept under the same penalty. Even so, resentment against Mucianus did not ease — for Sosianus and Sagitta were nobodies even if they came back, while it was the talent, wealth, and practiced power of the informer class, honed by evil arts, that people feared.
47| A senate inquiry run in the old-fashioned way briefly patched over the feelings of its members. Manlius Patruitus, himself a senator, complained that a crowd, acting on the magistrates' orders, had beaten him in the colony of Sena — and the injury didn't end there: they staged mourning, wailing, and the full trappings of a funeral in front of him, hurling insults and abuse not just at him but at the whole senate. Those accused were summoned, and once the case was examined, the guilty were punished, and a decree of the senate was added instructing the people of Sena to behave themselves. In the same days Antonius Flamma, prosecuted by the people of Cyrene, was condemned under the extortion law and sent into exile for his cruelty.
48| Meanwhile a mutiny among the soldiers nearly broke out. Men discharged by Vitellius, who had rallied to Vespasian, were demanding reinstatement in the Praetorian Guard; and men picked from the legions, hoping for the same, were shouting for the pay promised them. Driving the Vitellians out was impossible without heavy bloodshed, yet feeding and keeping such a mass of men would drain enormous sums. Mucianus went into the camp, so as to judge each man's service more fairly, and had the victors stand in ranks with their own badges and weapons, spaced apart from one another. Then the Vitellian soldiers — those who, as I mentioned, had surrendered at Bovillae, and the rest rounded up from the city and its surroundings — were brought out nearly stripped bare. Mucianus ordered them separated, and had the men from the German and British legions, and any from other armies, made to stand apart. The very sight of it stunned them at first, seeing across from them, as it were, a battle line bristling with weapons, while they themselves stood penned in, naked, and filthy. But once they began to be pulled this way and that, fear spread through all of them, and above all through the German troops, terrified that this separation marked them out for slaughter. They clutched at their comrades' chests, threw their arms around their necks, begged for last kisses, pleading not to be abandoned alone or made to suffer a different fate for the same offense; they called now on Mucianus, now on the absent emperor, and finally on heaven and the gods — until Mucianus, addressing them all as soldiers of the same oath, the same commander, met their groundless fear head-on; and indeed the victorious army's shouts helped ease their tears. That settled matters for the day. Some days on, Domitian spoke to them, and by then they had steadied and gave him a hearing; they refused the land grants on offer and asked instead for military service and pay. It was a plea that could not well be refused, so they were taken into the Praetorian camp. Then those of proper age and full service were discharged with honor; others for misconduct, but a few at a time and one by one, the safest way to weaken a mass movement of solidarity.
49| Whether from real poverty or only for appearance's sake, it was decided in the senate that sixty million sesterces should be borrowed from private citizens, and Pompeius Silvanus was put in charge of the matter. Not long after, the need vanished, or the pretense was dropped. Then, on Domitian's motion, a law annulled the consulships that Vitellius had granted, and a censor's funeral was held for Flavius Sabinus — great proof of how unstable fortune is, and how it mixes the highest with the lowest.
50| Around the same time, Lucius Piso, proconsul, was killed. I'll lay out this killing as accurately as I can, but first I need to go back a little to the beginning and the causes—not unreasonable ones—of crimes like this. In Africa, the legion and the auxiliary troops guarding the empire's borders answered to the proconsul under the emperors Augustus and Tiberius. Then Gaius Caesar, a restless spirit who feared Marcus Silanus, the governor of Africa, took the legion away from the proconsul and handed it to a legate sent for that purpose. The two offices were given equal shares of patronage, and mixing their jurisdictions created friction, which grew worse through their perverse rivalry. The legates' authority grew over time in office, partly because lesser men are keener to compete, while the most distinguished proconsuls cared more about their own safety than about power.
51| Command of the legion in Africa at that time belonged to Valerius Festus—a young man given to excess, driven by boundless ambition, and made uneasy by his marriage tie to Vitellius. Whether he repeatedly tried, in private conversations, to draw Piso into revolution, or whether he resisted Piso's own overtures, is uncertain—no one was present at their private talks—and once Piso was killed, most people leaned toward flattering the killer. What is not in doubt is that the province and its soldiers had turned hostile toward Vespasian. Some Vitellians who had fled Rome kept telling Piso that the Gallic provinces were wavering, that Germany was ready, that he himself was in danger, and that even in peacetime he was under suspicion—so war was the safer course. Meanwhile Claudius Sagitta, prefect of the Petrian cavalry wing, had a fast crossing and got ahead of the centurion Papirius, whom Mucianus had sent. He assured Piso that the centurion carried orders to kill him: that Piso's cousin and son-in-law Galerianus was already dead; that Piso's only hope of safety lay in boldness, and there were two paths open—take up arms at once, or make for Gaul by ship and present himself to the Vitellian armies as their leader. Piso was unmoved by any of this. The centurion sent by Mucianus, on reaching the port of Carthage, loudly and joyfully proclaimed everything to Piso as if he were already emperor, and urged the bystanders, stunned by the sudden news, to raise the same shout. The credulous crowd rushed to the forum demanding Piso appear; joy and shouting mixed everything together, out of carelessness for the truth and eagerness to flatter. Piso, warned by Sagitta's report—or simply from his natural restraint—did not go out in public or give himself over to the crowd's enthusiasm. He questioned the centurion, and once he learned that the charge against him was invented and that murder was intended, he ordered the man executed—less to save his own skin than out of rage at the man who wanted him dead—a man who, having already helped murder Clodius Macer, now brought a legate's blood on his hands to the slaying of a proconsul as well. Then, in an anxious edict rebuking the people of Carthage, he did not even carry out his usual duties, but shut himself in his house, so that no chance incident might spark further unrest.
52| But once Festus learned—through the way rumor always exaggerates—of the crowd's panic, the centurion's execution, and a mixture of truth and falsehood, he sent cavalry to kill Piso. They rode fast and, while it was still barely light, burst into the proconsul's house with swords drawn—most of them not even knowing Piso by sight, since Festus had picked Punic and Moorish auxiliaries for the killing. Not far from the bedroom they happened to meet a slave and asked him who and where Piso was. With a splendid lie the slave said he was Piso himself, and was instantly cut down. Piso was killed not long after; someone was there who recognized him—Baebius Massa, one of the procurators of Africa, already at that time a menace to every good man, and someone who would recur often among the causes of the troubles we later endured. Festus, who had stopped at Hadrumetum to watch how things unfolded, hurried to the legion and ordered the camp prefect Caetronius Pisanus put in chains—officially calling him Piso's accomplice, but really settling a personal grudge. He punished some soldiers and centurions and rewarded others, neither group on real merit, simply to be seen as having crushed a rebellion. He then settled a quarrel between the people of Oea and Lepcis, which had started small, over stolen crops and livestock among the country folk, and had grown into open warfare. The Oeans, outnumbered, had called in the Garamantes, an untamable people notorious among their neighbors for banditry. This left the Lepcitans hard-pressed; their fields were laid waste far and wide, and they cowered inside their walls until cohorts and cavalry wings arrived, scattered the Garamantes, and recovered all the plunder—except what the raiders, wandering through inaccessible desert camps, had already sold farther off.
53| Meanwhile, after the battle at Cremona and news of success pouring in from every side, word reached Vespasian that Vitellius was dead—brought by many men of every rank who had braved the winter sea with equal daring and equal luck. Envoys from King Vologaeses also arrived, offering forty thousand Parthian cavalry. It was a splendid and gratifying thing to be courted by such powerful allies and yet not need them: thanks were given to Vologaeses, with instructions to send envoys to the Senate and to know that peace prevailed. Vespasian, now focused on Italy and the affairs of Rome, heard an unfavorable report about Domitian—that he was overstepping the bounds proper to his age and to what had been granted his son. So he handed over the strongest part of the army to Titus, to finish what remained of the Jewish war.
54| Before Titus set out, it's said he spoke at length with his father, urging him not to be quick to anger at reports from accusers, and to stay open and forgiving toward his son. Neither legions nor fleets, he said, were as solid a defense of power as a number of children—friends could be diminished, shifted, or lost through time, chance, ambition, or sometimes mistakes, but one's own blood could not be taken from anyone, least of all from emperors, whose good fortune others enjoy but whose misfortunes fall hardest on those closest to them. Even brothers would not stay in harmony unless their father set the example. Vespasian was not so much won over on Domitian's account as pleased by Titus's devotion; he told him to keep his spirits up and build the state's strength through war and arms—peace and the household would be his own concern. Then he sent the fastest grain ships out onto a sea still rough with winter storms, because the crisis in Rome was so severe that the granaries held no more than ten days' supply of grain when Vespasian's shipments came to the rescue.
55| He put Lucius Vestinus in charge of restoring the Capitol—a man of equestrian rank, but with the authority and reputation to stand among the greatest. The soothsayers he consulted advised that the remains of the old temple should be carried off to the marshes and the new temple raised on the very same site: the gods did not want the old design changed. On the eleventh day before the Kalends of July, under a clear sky, the whole area marked out for the temple was wrapped in ribbons and garlands. Soldiers with auspicious names entered carrying branches of good omen; then the Vestal Virgins, together with boys and girls whose parents were both still living, sprinkled the ground with water drawn from springs and rivers. Then the praetor Helvidius Priscus, guided by the pontiff Plautius Aelianus, purified the site with the sacrifice of a pig, a sheep, and a bull, laid the entrails on turf, and prayed to Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, and the guardian gods of the empire to bless the work in progress and, through human devotion, to raise by divine power the dwelling they had begun. Then he touched the ribbons that bound the foundation stone and the ropes attached to it; and at the same moment the other magistrates, the priests, the senate, the knights, and a great part of the people, straining together in eager delight, hauled the huge stone into place. From every side coins of silver and gold, and unworked ores of metal fresh from the earth, were thrown into the foundations—the soothsayers had warned that the work must not be defiled with stone or gold meant for any other purpose. The building was raised higher than before; that was the only change religion approved, and it was thought the one thing lacking from the splendor of the old temple.
56| Meanwhile, once news of Vitellius's death reached Gaul and Germany, it doubled the war. Civilis dropped all pretense and threw himself against Rome; the Vitellian legions said they would rather serve even a foreign master than obey Vespasian as emperor. The Gauls' spirits rose; they assumed our armies everywhere were faring the same way, since rumor had spread that the winter camps in Moesia and Pannonia were under siege by the Sarmatians and Dacians, and similar tales were invented about Britain. But nothing drove them to believe the empire's end was at hand quite like the burning of the Capitol. The city had once been captured by the Gauls, they said, but because Jupiter's temple had stood untouched, the empire survived; now, though, this fated fire was a sign of heavenly wrath, and—so the Druids chanted, in their empty superstition—it foretold that control of human affairs was passing to the peoples beyond the Alps. Rumor had also spread that the leading men of Gaul, sent by Otho against Vitellius, had pledged before they parted not to abandon their people's freedom if a continuous series of civil wars and internal troubles should ever break Rome.
57| Before the killing of Hordeonius Flaccus, nothing had come to light that would reveal a conspiracy; but once Hordeonius was dead, messengers began moving between Civilis and Classicus, prefect of the Treviran cavalry wing. Classicus surpassed the others in noble birth and wealth; his family was royal, and his line was distinguished in both peace and war—he himself boasted more of ancestors who had been enemies of Rome than allies. Two more joined the conspiracy, Julius Tutor and Julius Sabinus—one a Treviran, the other a Lingonian. Vitellius had already given Tutor charge of the Rhine bank. Sabinus, on top of his natural vanity, was further inflamed by pride in a false lineage: he claimed his great-grandmother had caught the eye of the deified Julius during his campaigns in Gaul and become his mistress. These men sounded out the loyalties of the rest in private talks, and once they had bound to their cause those they judged suitable, they met in a private house in the colony of Cologne—since publicly the community shrank from such schemes. Even so, some Ubii and Tungri were present. But the greatest strength lay with the Treviri and Lingones, and they would not tolerate delay in deciding. They proclaimed, each outdoing the other, that the Roman people were raging with internal discord, that legions had been cut down, Italy laid waste, the very city on the verge of capture, every army tied down by its own war; if the Alps were secured with garrisons, then Gaul, once united in freedom, could decide for itself what limit to set on its own strength.
58| This was said and approved alike. What to do with the remnants of Vitellius's army was another matter. Most argued for killing them — a turbulent, treacherous lot, stained with the blood of their own commanders. But the policy of mercy won out: killing off all hope of pardon would only harden their resistance. Better to draw them into the alliance. Only the legionary commanders would be executed; the rank and file, guilty as they were and eager for immunity, would come over easily. That was the shape of the first council. Agents were sent through Gaul to stir up war, feigning obedience to the Romans so as to catch Vocula off guard. Some did warn Vocula, but he lacked the strength to act — his legions were thin and untrustworthy. Caught between wavering soldiers and hidden enemies, he judged his best move, given the circumstances, was to match deception with deception and attack them with the same methods being used against him. He marched down to Cologne. There Claudius Labeo — the man we said was captured and quietly shipped off among the Frisians — bribed his guards and escaped. He promised that, given a garrison, he would go among the Batavians and win back the better part of the tribe for Rome. Given a modest force of infantry and cavalry, he accomplished nothing among the Batavians, but did draw some of the Nervii and Baetasii into arms, and raided the Cannenefates and Marsaci more by stealth than open war.
59| Vocula, misled by Gallic trickery, advanced toward the enemy. He was not far from Vetera when Classicus and Tutor, going ahead on the pretext of scouting, met with the German commanders and sealed a pact. That was the first time they set their own camp apart from the legions, behind its own rampart, despite Vocula's protest that Rome's cause was not so shattered by civil war that even the Treviri and Lingones could hold it in contempt. Loyal provinces still stood, victorious armies still stood, the empire's fortune and its avenging gods still stood. Sacrovir and the Aedui had once collapsed in a single battle, and Vindex and the Gauls more recently, the same. The same divine powers, the same fate, awaited these breakers of treaties. Divus Julius and Divus Augustus had known their spirit better; it was Galba, and the lightening of tribute, that had put hostile ideas into their heads. They were enemies now because servitude was easy; once stripped and plundered, they'd be friends again. He spoke boldly, but seeing Classicus and Tutor still set on treachery, he changed course and withdrew to Novaesium. The Gauls camped two miles off, in open country. There, passing centurions and soldiers had their loyalty bought — an unheard-of disgrace — so that a Roman army swore allegiance to a foreign power, sealing so great a crime with the death or imprisonment of its own commanders. Vocula, though most urged flight, judged that boldness was called for, called an assembly, and spoke as follows.
60| 'Never have I addressed you more anxious on your account or more careless of my own. I hear gladly that death is being prepared for me, and amid so many miseries I look for it as an end to suffering. It is you I pity and am ashamed for — you, against whom no battle line, no proper fight is being readied (that at least would be the fair law of war and the right of enemies): Classicus hopes to wage war on the Roman people with your hands, and dangles before you an empire and an oath of loyalty to Gaul. Have fortune and courage deserted us for the moment so completely that even the old examples fail us — how often Roman legions have chosen death over giving ground? Our allies have often endured their cities razed, themselves burned alive with wives and children, gaining nothing from their end but loyalty and reputation. At this very moment the legions at Vetera are enduring want and siege, unmoved by terror or promises. We, besides arms and men and the excellent defenses of this camp, have grain and supplies enough for a long war. Even money — for a donative, no less — reached us not long ago; whether you prefer to credit Vespasian or Vitellius for it, you received it, at any rate, from a Roman emperor. You who have won so many wars, at Gelduba, at Vetera, routing the enemy again and again — if you now dread a pitched battle, shameful as that would be, there is still the rampart, the walls, the arts of delay, until help and armies gather from the nearest provinces. Suppose I displease you — there are other legates, tribunes, even a centurion or a common soldier will do. But do not let this monstrosity be broadcast to the whole world: that you served as Civilis's and Classicus's escort into Italy. Suppose the Germans and Gauls march their forces right up to Rome's walls — would you actually draw your weapons on your own homeland? My mind recoils at the very image of such an outrage. Will Tutor the Trevian set the watch? Will a Batavian give the signal for war, while you fill out the ranks of German warbands? What end can such a crime have, when Roman legions stand arrayed against you? Deserters from deserters, traitors among traitors, hated by the gods, you will wander between an old oath and a new one. You, Jupiter, best and greatest, whom we have worshiped through eight hundred and twenty years and so many triumphs; you, Quirinus, father of the city of Rome — I beg and beseech you: if you did not wish this camp, under my command, to stay pure and unbreached, then at least spare it from being fouled and defiled by Tutor and Classicus. Grant these Roman soldiers either innocence, or a swift repentance without harm.'
61| The speech met a mixed reception — hope, fear, and shame all at once. Vocula withdrew and was weighing his final options when his freedmen and slaves stopped him from forestalling a shameful death by his own hand. So Classicus sent Aemilius Longinus, a First Legion deserter, to hurry his death; for the legates Herennius and Numisius, mere binding was judged sufficient. Then, taking up the insignia of Roman command, Classicus entered the camp. Hardened as he was to every crime, he found no more words than were needed to recite the oath — those present swore allegiance to the empire of Gaul. Vocula's killer he raised to high rank; the rest, according to how each had distinguished himself in villainy, he rewarded.
62| The work was then divided between Tutor and Classicus. Tutor, with a strong force, surrounded the people of Cologne and forced them, along with all the soldiers on the upper bank of the Rhine, into the same oath, killing the tribunes at Mainz and driving out the camp commander, who had refused. Classicus ordered the most corrupted of those who had surrendered to go to the besieged, dangling pardon if they would follow the new order — otherwise nothing but hope of starvation, the sword, and the worst extremities. Those sent added their own example as persuasion.
63| The besieged were torn, on one side by loyalty, on the other by hunger, between honor and disgrace. As they hesitated, food both ordinary and extraordinary ran out; pack animals, horses, and every other creature had been consumed — things vile and forbidden that necessity turned to use. In the end they were pulling up shrubs, roots, and grass sprouting between the stones — proof of their suffering and endurance, until they stained a noble record with a shameful end, sending envoys to Civilis to beg for their lives. Their plea was not admitted until they swore the oath to Gaul. Only then, having struck his bargain for the plunder of the camp, did he post guards to hold back the money, camp-servants, and baggage, and men to escort the lightly-laden garrison out. At about the fifth milestone the Germans rose up and fell on the unsuspecting column. The bravest died where they stood; many, scattered, fell as they fled. The rest ran back to the camp — with Civilis loudly complaining and rebuking the Germans for breaking faith through such a crime. Whether this was staged, or he simply could not restrain their fury, is not clearly established. They plundered the camp, set it ablaze, and fire consumed all who had survived the fighting.
64| Civilis, in fulfillment of a barbarian vow made when he first took up arms against Rome, had let his hair grow long and dyed it red; only now, with the slaughter of the legions accomplished, did he cut it. It was said he offered up some of the captives to his small son, to be pierced with a child's arrows and darts. But he never forced himself, nor any Batavian, to swear the oath to Gaul — trusting instead in German strength, and, should it come to a contest with the Gauls over supremacy, confident in his own greater fame and standing. Munius Lupercus, a legionary commander, was sent as a gift, among other offerings, to Veleda. She was a virgin of the Bructeri who held wide sway, by the old German custom of regarding many women as prophetic and, as superstition grew, even as goddesses. Veleda's authority was then at its height, for she had foretold both German success and the destruction of the legions. But Lupercus was killed on the way. A few centurions and tribunes born in Gaul were kept back as pledges of the alliance. The winter camps of the auxiliary cohorts, cavalry wings, and legions were torn down and burned, all but those at Mainz and Windisch.
65| The Sixteenth Legion, along with the auxiliaries who had surrendered with it, was ordered to move from Novaesium to the colony of the Treveri, with a fixed day set by which it had to be out of camp. They spent the whole intervening time in various kinds of anguish. The most cowardly among them, remembering the slaughter at Vetera, were afraid; the better men felt shame and disgrace. What kind of march was this? Who would lead the way? Everything now lay in the hands of men they themselves had made masters of their life and death. Some, with no thought for their dignity, packed up money or whatever they held most dear; others got their weapons ready, arming themselves as if for battle. While they brooded on all this, the hour of departure arrived, grimmer than anything they had imagined — for behind the rampart their disgrace had not been so plain to see, but the open field and daylight exposed the shame fully. The images of the emperors were torn down, the standards stripped of honor, while the banners of the Gauls flashed on every side. Without a sound the column moved, resembling nothing so much as a lengthy funeral cortege. Their leader, Claudius Sanctus, was missing an eye — his stern face rendered still grimmer by a dull mind. The disgrace doubled when the men from the abandoned camp at Bonn merged with this legion. And once word spread that the legions had been captured, everyone who not long before had trembled at the name of Rome came pouring out of the fields and houses, gathering from every direction to gorge themselves on this unfamiliar spectacle. The Picentine cavalry wing could not stomach the crowd's gloating and, ignoring both Sanctus's promises and his threats, rode off to Mainz. There they happened to run into Longinus, the killer of Vocula, and by hurling their spears at him made a start — for the future — at working off their guilt. The legions changed their route not at all, and made camp before the walls of the Treveri.
66| Civilis and Classicus, elated by their successes, debated whether to let their armies plunder the colony of Cologne. Their savage tempers and greed for loot pulled them toward destroying the city; against that stood military calculation, and, for men just starting a new regime, the value of a reputation for mercy. Civilis, too, was swayed by remembering a kindness done him — for at the very start of the uprising his son had been seized in Cologne and kept there in honorable custody. But the tribes across the Rhine hated the city for its wealth and growth, and thought the war could end no other way than by throwing that settlement open to all Germans, or, failing that, by scattering it and driving out the Ubii as well.
67| So the Tencteri, a people separated from Cologne by the Rhine, sent envoys with instructions to be read out before the city's council. The fiercest of the envoys delivered them in these words: 'We thank the gods we hold in common, and above all Mars, chief of the gods, that you have returned to the body and the name of Germany, and we congratulate you that at last you will be free among free peoples. Until this day the Romans had somehow shut off rivers, land, and even the sky itself, to keep us from meeting and talking together — or, what is more insulting to men born for war, made us come together unarmed and all but stripped, under guard and for a price. But so that our friendship and alliance may stand forever, we demand that you tear down the walls of your colony, those fortifications of slavery — even wild animals forget their courage if you keep them penned up — and that you kill every Roman within your borders: freedom and masters do not mix easily. Let the property of the slain be pooled in common, so no one can hide anything away or look after his own interest alone. Let both of us, you and we, be free to live on either bank, as our ancestors once did. Just as nature opened light and day to all men alike, so she opened every land to brave men. Take back the customs and ways of your fathers, and cut yourselves off from the pleasures by which the Romans hold power over their subjects more than by force of arms. A people pure, untainted, and free of the memory of servitude will either live as equals or rule over others.'
68| The people of Cologne took time to deliberate, since fear of what might come kept them from simply submitting to the terms, while their present situation kept them from openly rejecting them either. In the end they answered like this: 'The first chance at freedom that came our way, we seized too eagerly and too little cautiously, hoping to join you and the rest of the Germans, our kinsmen. As it is, with Roman armies gathering close by, it is safer for us to strengthen our city's walls than to tear them down. If there were any foreigners among us from Italy or the provinces, the war has already used them up, or each has fled back to his own home. This is the homeland now of those who settled here long ago and were joined to us by marriage, and of their children born since. We do not think you so unjust as to want us to kill our own parents, brothers, and children. We are lifting the tax and the burdens on trade: let crossings be unguarded, but only by day and unarmed, until new and still-fresh arrangements harden into settled custom over time. We will accept Civilis and Veleda as arbiters, and before them our agreement will be sealed.' So the Tencteri were won over, and envoys were sent to Civilis and Veleda bearing gifts, and they carried out everything exactly as Cologne wished. But they were not allowed to approach Veleda or speak with her face to face — she was kept from their sight so as to inspire more awe. She herself stayed up in a high tower; a chosen relative carried questions and answers back and forth, like a messenger between men and a god.
69| Strengthened by his alliance with Cologne, Civilis decided to win over the neighboring peoples, or make war on any who resisted. He occupied the territory of the Sunuci and organized their young men into cohorts. Claudius Labeo tried to stop him going any further, with a scratch force of Baetasii, Tungri, and Nervii, relying on his position, since he had already seized the bridge over the Meuse. The fighting in that narrow ground went back and forth until Germans swam across and struck Labeo from behind. At the same moment Civilis — whether on impulse or by arrangement, it is unclear — rode in among the Tungrian ranks and called out: 'We did not take up this war so that the Batavi and Treveri could rule over other peoples — such arrogance is far from us. Accept our alliance: I am coming over to your side, whether you want me as your commander or as an ordinary soldier.' The crowd wavered and began sheathing their swords, when Campanus and Iuvenalis, leading men of the Tungri, surrendered the whole people to him. Labeo fled before he could be surrounded. Civilis took the Baetasii and Nervii into his good graces as well and added them to his own forces — his power now immense, since the spirit of these peoples was either already broken or bending willingly.
70| Meanwhile Julius Sabinus threw away every record of the treaty with Rome and had himself hailed as Caesar. He swept a huge, disorganized mass of his countrymen into the territory of the Sequani, a neighboring people loyal to us, and the Sequani did not shrink from the fight. Fortune favored the better side: the Lingones were routed. Sabinus abandoned the battle, fought rashly and in haste, gripped by the same panic as his men, and to spread word of his own death he burned down the villa he had fled to, so that people would believe he had died there by his own hand. By what tricks and hiding places he in fact dragged out his life for the next nine years, and the remarkable loyalty of his friends, and the striking example set by his wife Epponina, we will tell in their proper place. After the Sequani's victory the momentum of the war stalled. The tribes gradually came to their senses and looked back to duty and treaty obligations, led by the Remi, who sent word throughout the Gallic provinces that envoys should be sent to a common council to decide, together, whether they wanted freedom or peace.
71| At Rome, all the news, growing steadily worse, weighed on Mucianus — worried that his commanders, outstanding though they were (he had already chosen Annius Gallus and Petilius Cerialis), might not be equal to bearing the full weight of the war. Nor could the city be left without someone in charge; and Domitian's unchecked appetites were a source of real worry, along with suspicions, as already mentioned, about Antonius Primus and Arrius Varus. Varus, in command of the Praetorians, still held real force and arms in his grip; Mucianus removed him from that post, but so he would not go without some consolation, made him prefect of the grain supply instead. And to soothe Domitian, who was not unfriendly to Varus, Mucianus put Arrecinus Clemens in command of the Praetorians — a man tied to Vespasian's household by marriage and very much in Domitian's favor — pointing out that Clemens's father had held the same post with distinction under Caligula, that the soldiers would welcome the same family name again, and that Clemens himself, though of senatorial rank, was equal to both duties. The most distinguished men of the city were recruited to the cause, along with others driven by ambition. At the same time Domitian and Mucianus were both preparing to move, though in very different spirits — Domitian eager, fired by hope and youth; Mucianus dragging his feet, looking for ways to hold back a young man burning with impatience, for fear that if he got hold of an army, his youthful recklessness, egged on by bad advisers, would handle both peace and war badly. The victorious legions — the Eighth, Eleventh, and Thirteenth, along with the Twenty-first, once Vitellius's own — were brought across, together with the newly raised Second, some over the Pennine and Cottian Alps, others by the Graian pass; from Britain came the summons for the Fourteenth Legion, while Spain sent the Sixth and the First.
72| So, hearing news of the approaching army and inclined by their own temper toward milder counsels, the Gallic tribes gathered at Reims. The Treveran delegation was already waiting there, spurred on hardest by Julius Valentinus, the fiercest advocate of war. In a carefully rehearsed speech he poured out every complaint usually leveled at great empires, along with insults and resentment against the Roman people, a man skilled at stirring up unrest and popular with the crowd for his reckless eloquence.
73| But Julius Auspex, one of the leading men of the Remi, spoke of Rome's power and the benefits of peace, arguing that war could be started even by cowards but had to be fought out at the risk of the bravest, and that the legions were already all but on top of them. By this he held back the wisest men through respect and loyalty, and the younger ones through fear of danger. People praised Valentinus's spirit, but followed Auspex's advice. It is well established that among the Gallic peoples the Treveri and Lingones were held back by the memory that they had sided with Verginius during Vindex's uprising. Rivalry among the provinces put off most of the rest as well: who would lead this war? From whom would authority and the right to take the auspices come? If everything went well, what city would they choose as the seat of empire? Before any victory was even won, discord had already set in — some boasting of their treaties, others of their wealth and manpower or the antiquity of their origins, and quarreling over it. Weariness with these prospects made the present situation seem preferable. Letters were sent to the Treveri in the name of the Gallic peoples urging them to lay down arms, with pardon easily obtainable and men ready to plead their case if they had a change of heart. Valentinus alone stood firm against this and shut his people's ears to it, less intent on actually preparing for war than on constantly haranguing public meetings.
74| So neither the Treveri nor the Lingones nor the other rebel states acted in a way that matched the scale of the danger they'd taken on; not even their leaders could agree on a common plan. Civilis was off wandering the Belgic backcountry, trying to capture or drive out Claudius Labeo. Classicus mostly drifted in idle ease, enjoying his supposed empire as if it were already won. Not even Tutor hurried to close off the upper bank of the Rhine and the mountain passes of the Alps with garrisons. Meanwhile the Twenty-First Legion broke in from Vindonissa, and Sextilius Felix with his auxiliary cohorts through Raetia, joined by the Singularian cavalry wing, once raised by Vitellius and later gone over to Vespasian's side. It was commanded by Julius Briganticus, son of Civilis's sister — and, as the bitterest hatreds are usually between close kin, he despised his uncle and was despised in turn. Tutor strengthened the Treveran forces, freshly reinforced by levies of Vangiones, Caeracates, and Triboci, with veteran infantry and cavalry, having won over the legionaries with a mix of hope and fear. These troops first killed a cohort Sextilius Felix had sent ahead; but soon, as the Roman commanders and army drew near, they deserted back with an honorable show, and the Triboci, Vangiones, and Caeracates followed them. Tutor, with the Treveri accompanying him, avoided Mainz and pulled back to Bingen, trusting the position because he'd broken the bridge over the Nahe — but he was betrayed and routed when the cohorts under Sextilius Felix charged in after finding a ford. Shaken by this defeat, the Treveri scattered, the common people throwing down their weapons and fleeing across the fields; some of the leading men, wanting to look like they'd been first to end the war, fled for refuge to states that had never broken with Rome. The legions that had been moved from Novaesium and Bonn into Treveran territory, as noted earlier, swore themselves back to Vespasian on their own initiative. All this happened while Valentinus was away. When he returned, furious, ready to plunge everything back into chaos and ruin, the legions withdrew into the territory of the Mediomatrici, an allied state. Valentinus and Tutor dragged the Treveri back into the war, killing the commanders Herennius and Numisius so that the bond of shared guilt would leave them less hope of pardon.
75| That was the state of the war when Petilius Cerialis arrived at Mainz. His coming lifted spirits. He himself was eager for battle and better at scorning the enemy than being cautious of them; his fierce talk fired up the troops, and he meant to lose no time once battle could be joined. He sent the men levied across Gaul back to their own communities, with word that the legions were enough to guard the empire: the allies could return to the tasks of peace, safe now, as if the war were already finished once Roman hands had taken it up. This move increased the Gauls' compliance — having their young men back, they bore the taxes more easily, and were readier to do their duty now that they weren't being treated with contempt. But when Civilis and Classicus heard that Tutor had been beaten, the Treveri cut down, everything going the Romans' way, they panicked and hurried to gather their scattered forces, sending Valentinus repeated warnings in the meantime not to risk everything on one throw. Cerialis moved all the faster: he sent word to the legions in Mediomatrican territory to turn against the enemy by the shorter road, gathered what troops he had at Mainz along with what he'd brought over with him, and in three days' march reached Rigodulum, where Valentinus had dug in with a large Treveran force, the position shielded by mountains and the Moselle, and further strengthened with ditches and barricades of stone. These defenses didn't stop the Roman commander from ordering his infantry to break straight through and sending his cavalry up the hill, ignoring the enemy — hastily assembled and no better served by the ground than his own men were by their courage. There was some delay in the climb while enemy missiles flew past; but once it came to close fighting, the enemy was toppled and sent tumbling down like a collapsing wall. And part of the cavalry, riding round by gentler slopes, captured the noblest of the Belgae, including their leader Valentinus.
76| The next day Cerialis entered the Treveran capital, his soldiers eager to raze the town. This, they said, was the home of Classicus and of Tutor; it was their crime that had trapped and slaughtered the legions. What had Cremona done to deserve worse — Cremona, torn from Italy's own bosom, simply for having cost the victors one night's delay? Yet here stood this place, untouched, on the very border of Germany, gloating over the spoils of Roman armies and the massacre of their commanders. Let the plunder go to the treasury, they said — they themselves would be satisfied with fire, and with the ruin of this rebel colony, to make up for the destruction of so many camps. Cerialis, fearing the disgrace of being thought to let his men run wild in savagery, held back his anger — and they obeyed, now that the war against fellow citizens was over, more restrained when the enemy was foreign. Then their attention turned to the pitiable sight of the legions summoned back from the Mediomatrici. They stood there, weighed down by the shame of their own disgrace, eyes fixed on the ground; there was no exchange of greetings as the armies came together, and they gave no answer to those who tried to comfort or encourage them, but hid in their tents, avoiding even the daylight. It wasn't danger or fear that had stunned them so much as shame and humiliation — the victors themselves were struck silent too, not daring to speak or plead on their behalf, begging forgiveness only with tears and silence. At last Cerialis calmed their spirits, telling them that what had happened through the discord of soldiers and commanders, or through the enemy's treachery, should be blamed on fate. Let them count this as the first day of their service and their oath; of their earlier crimes, neither the emperor nor he himself would remember a thing. They were then taken back into the same camp, and an order went round the ranks that no one, in quarrel or dispute, was to throw a comrade's shame or disaster in his face.
77| Soon after, having called an assembly of the Treveri and Lingones, he spoke to them like this: 'I have never made a show of eloquence, and I've backed the greatness of the Roman people with arms rather than words — but since among you words carry the most weight, and good and bad are judged not by their own nature but by the voices of troublemakers, I've decided to say a few things which, now the war is nearly beaten, it will do you more good to hear than it does me to say. Roman generals and emperors entered your land and the rest of Gaul not out of any greed, but because your own ancestors called them in — worn down as they were by internal quarrels to the point of ruin, and because the Germans, summoned in to help, had imposed servitude on ally and enemy alike, without distinction. How many battles we fought against the Cimbri and Teutones, how great the toil of our armies, and with what outcome we carried on the German wars — that's well known enough. We didn't settle on the Rhine to protect Italy, but so that no second Ariovistus could seize control of the kingdom of the Gauls. Do you really believe you're dearer to Civilis and the Batavians and the tribes across the Rhine than your fathers and grandfathers were to their ancestors? The reason Germans have always crossed into Gaul is the same: appetite, greed, and the itch to change their homeland — to leave behind their own swamps and wastelands and take possession of this rich soil, and of you along with it. Freedom and fine-sounding names are just the pretext; no one has ever wanted to enslave and rule over others without wrapping it in exactly those same words.'
78| 'Kingdoms and wars were the constant condition of Gaul until you came under our authority. We, though provoked time and again, have used our right as victors to impose on you only what was needed to preserve the peace — for nations cannot be kept quiet without arms, arms cannot be kept up without pay, and pay cannot be raised without taxes: everything else you share equally with us. You yourselves very often command our legions, you yourselves govern these and other provinces; nothing is set apart or closed off to you. And you benefit just as much from good emperors even when you live far away, while it's those nearby who suffer under cruel ones. Just as you put up with drought or excessive rain or other natural evils, so too you must put up with the extravagance or greed of those who rule — such faults will exist as long as there are men, but they aren't constant, and they're balanced out when better men come along. Unless perhaps you imagine that under the rule of Tutor and Classicus you'd have a gentler government, or that smaller taxes than now would raise the armies needed to keep out the Germans and the Britons? Because if the Romans were driven out — which the gods forbid — what else would follow except wars among every nation against every other? The good fortune and discipline of eight hundred years have built up this structure, and it cannot be torn apart without ruining those who tear it. And the greatest danger falls on you, in whose hands lie the gold and the wealth — the chief causes of wars. So love and cherish the peace, and the city, which conquered and conquerors alike hold by the same right; let the lessons of both kinds of fortune warn you not to prefer defiance and ruin over obedience and safety.' With this speech he calmed and encouraged men who had feared much worse.
79| The Treveri were being held in check by the victorious army when Civilis and Classicus sent Cerialis letters, the gist of which was this: Vespasian, though they were suppressing the news, had died; Rome and Italy were being consumed by civil war; the names of Mucianus and Domitian were empty and powerless. If Cerialis wanted the rule of the Gauls for himself, they said, they would be content to stay within the borders of their own states; if he preferred battle, they wouldn't refuse that either. Cerialis gave Civilis and Classicus no answer at all; instead he sent the man who had carried the letters, along with the letters themselves, straight to Domitian.
80| The enemy came on from every side, their forces split up. Many blamed Cerialis for letting them join together when he could have caught them apart and cut them off. The Roman army surrounded its camp with a ditch and rampart, where before it had recklessly settled in without defenses.
81| Among the Germans opinions clashed. Civilis preferred to hold off until the tribes beyond the Rhine arrived, reckoning that the sheer terror they inspired would by itself the sheer terror they inspired would break and grind down the strength of the Roman people—for what were the Gauls, after all, but plunder waiting for the victors? And yet whatever real strength existed lay with the Belgae, who stood with them openly or in sympathy. Tutor argued that delay only let Rome grow stronger, as armies converged from every side: a legion had crossed from Britain, troops had been summoned from Spain, more were coming from Italy—and these were not raw recruits but veterans tested in war. As for the Germans they themselves hoped for, they took no orders, obeyed no commander, did everything on a whim; and money and gifts, the only things that could buy them, were on offer in greater amounts from Rome, and no man was so eager for battle that he wouldn't prefer the price of staying quiet to the price of danger. And if they engaged now, Cerialis had nothing but the remnants of the German army's legions, bound by treaties to the Gauls. The very fact that they had just routed Valentinus's disorganized band beyond their own expectation would only feed their recklessness and their commander's rashness: they would dare again, and this time run into the hands not of some green boy who rehearsed speeches and assemblies rather than iron and battle, but of Civilis and Classicus themselves—men whose mere sight would bring back into their hearts the old fear, the flight, the hunger, the precarious survival of men so often captured. Nor were the Treveri or the Lingones held by loyalty; they would take up arms again the moment fear lifted. Classicus ended the disagreement by backing Tutor's view, and they acted on it at once.
82| The center of the line was given to the Ubii and Lingones; on the right wing the Batavian cohorts, on the left the Bructeri and Tencteri. Some came down from the hills; others through the ground between the road and the river Moselle, and the attack fell so fast that Cerialis, who happened not to be sleeping in camp that night, learned from his own bed and bedchamber that his men were already fighting and already losing. At first he scolded the messengers as panic-mongers, until the full disaster came into view before him: the legions' camp broken into, the cavalry scattered, and the bridge over the Moselle, which linked the far bank to the colony, seized by the enemy. Undaunted amid the chaos, Cerialis grabbed fleeing men and hauled them back, exposed his body freely among the missiles, and by reckless luck and the rush of every brave man to his side, won back the bridge and held it with a picked force. Returning then to camp, he found the maniples of the legions lost at Novaesium and Bonn scattered and demoralized, few soldiers left at the standards, the eagles nearly surrounded. Burning with anger he cried: 'It's not Flaccus you're abandoning, not Vocula—there's no treachery here. I have no excuse to offer except that I foolishly believed you had forgotten your pact with the Gauls and remembered your oath to Rome. Count me among the Numisii and the Herennii, so that every one of your commanders falls either by his own men's hands or the enemy's. Go on, tell Vespasian—or tell Civilis and Classicus, since they're closer—that you left your commander on the battlefield. Legions will come that will see me avenged and you punished.'
83| It was all true, and the tribunes and prefects hammered the same point home. The men formed up by cohort and maniple; the line couldn't spread out, since the enemy was pouring in and the tents and baggage were in the way—the fighting was happening inside the rampart itself. Tutor, Classicus, and Civilis each drove the battle forward in their own sector, urging on the Gauls with the cause of freedom, the Batavians with glory, the Germans with plunder. And everything favored the enemy, until the Twenty-First Legion, massed together in a stretch of ground more open than the rest, held the charge and then threw it back. Not without something like divine help, the victors' spirits suddenly broke and they turned and ran. They themselves later said they had panicked at the sight of some cohorts which, scattered at the first onset, had regrouped on the high ridges and looked like fresh reinforcements arriving. But what really stopped the winning side was a shameful rivalry among themselves, abandoning the enemy to chase after loot. Cerialis, whose carelessness had nearly ruined everything, restored it by sheer resolve; and pressing his luck, he captured and destroyed the enemy camp that same day.
84| The troops got no rest for long. The people of Cologne begged for help and offered up Civilis's wife and sister and Classicus's daughter, hostages left in their keeping as pledges of alliance. Meanwhile they had already massacred the Germans scattered through their houses—hence their fear, and the urgency of their pleas, made before the enemy could regroup and turn to hope or revenge. For Civilis had indeed been heading that way, and not weakly, with the fiercest of his cohorts still intact, a unit made up of Chauci and Frisii stationed at Tolbiacum on the borders of Cologne's territory; but grim news turned him aside—that cohort had been wiped out by a trick of the Cologne people, who got the Germans drunk on lavish food and wine, then shut the doors and set the place on fire; Cerialis, meanwhile, came to their aid with a forced march. Another fear surrounded Civilis: that the Fourteenth Legion, joined by the British fleet, might strike the Batavians where the ocean surrounds their land. But the legion's commander Fabius Priscus led it overland instead against the Nervii and Tungri, and those peoples were received in surrender; the fleet, meanwhile, was attacked unprovoked by the Canninefates, who sank or captured most of its ships. The same Canninefates also routed a large body of Nervii who had risen up on their own to fight for Rome. Classicus too won a small victory over the cavalry Cerialis had sent ahead to Novaesium: these were modest but frequent losses, and they were tearing at the fresh glow of the victory just won.
85| In those same days Mucianus ordered Vitellius's son killed, claiming that discord would linger on unless he stamped out the seeds of war. Nor did he let Domitian bring Antonius Primus into his inner circle, anxious as he was over the soldiers' favor for the man and his arrogance—Primus was intolerant even of his equals, let alone his superiors. When Antonius went to Vespasian, he was received neither as warmly as he'd hoped nor with open hostility. Vespasian was pulled two ways: on one side by Antonius's service, since it was under his leadership beyond doubt that the war had been finished; on the other by Mucianus's letters. And everyone else attacked Antonius too, as dangerous and swollen with pride, piling on the charges of his earlier life. Antonius himself did nothing to help, provoking resentment through sheer arrogance, endlessly reminding people of what he'd earned, sneering at others as unwarlike and at Caecina as a captive and a turncoat. So little by little he came to be thought less of and valued less, though a show of friendship was kept up on the surface.
86| During the months when Vespasian was waiting at Alexandria for the fixed season of summer winds and settled seas, many marvels occurred, seeming to show heaven's favor and a certain leaning of the gods toward him. A man of the Alexandrian common people, known for his wasted eyes, fell at his knees begging with groans for a cure for his blindness, on the instruction of the god Serapis, whom this superstition-steeped people worships above all others; he asked the emperor to deign to moisten his cheeks and eye sockets with his spit. Another man, with a crippled hand, asked, on the same god's prompting, that Caesar tread on it with his foot. Vespasian at first laughed it off and refused; then, as they kept pressing, he grew afraid of being mocked for vanity, and at other moments was drawn toward hope by their pleading and the flattering voices around him. Finally he ordered doctors to judge whether such blindness and such lameness could be overcome by human means. The doctors weighed it out: in the blind man's case, sight itself hadn't been destroyed and would come back once whatever blocked it was cleared; in the other, the joint had merely slipped from its proper place and could be made whole again if a healing force were applied. Perhaps, they said, this was the gods' pleasure, and the emperor had been chosen as heaven's instrument; in any case, if the cure worked, the glory would go to Caesar, and if it failed, the mockery would fall only on the poor wretches. So Vespasian, thinking that everything now lay open to his fortune and that nothing was too incredible anymore, put on a cheerful face before the expectant crowd and did as he was told. At once the hand recovered its use, and light returned to the blind man's eyes. Both events are still told today by people who were there, now that there's no reward left in lying about it.
87| From there Vespasian felt a stronger urge to visit the sacred shrine, to consult it about the state of the empire, and he ordered everyone kept out of the temple. Once inside, absorbed in prayer to the god, he glanced back and saw, among the leading Egyptians, a man named Basilides—a man he knew for certain was laid up by sickness, several days' journey from Alexandria. He questioned the priests on whether Basilides had come into the temple that day; he questioned everyone he met on whether the man had been spotted anywhere in the city; and at last he dispatched horsemen, who confirmed that at that same hour Basilides had been eighty miles distant. Then he took it as a divine vision, then he took it as a divine apparition, and read the force of the oracle in the name Basilides itself.
88| The god's origin has not yet been treated by our own writers. The priests of Egypt tell it this way. King Ptolemy, the first of the Macedonians to put Egypt's wealth on a firm footing, was adding walls, temples, and cults to his newly founded Alexandria when, in a dream, a young man of extraordinary beauty and more than human stature appeared to him. The figure told him to send his most trusted friends to Pontus and fetch his image from there; this would bring good fortune to the kingdom, and the place that received it would become great and famous. In the same vision he saw the young man borne up into the sky in a blaze of fire. Shaken by the omen and the marvel, Ptolemy laid the night's visions before the Egyptian priests, whose business it was to interpret such things. Since they knew little of Pontus or foreign lands, he turned to Timotheus, an Athenian of the Eumolpid clan, whom he had brought from Eleusis to oversee the sacred rites, and asked him what that cult was, what god it belonged to. Timotheus questioned men who had traveled to Pontus and learned that there was a city there called Sinope, and near it an old temple which the local people, by long tradition, held sacred to Jupiter Dis; a female figure stood beside the god, whom most called Proserpina. But Ptolemy, like most kings, was quick to fear and, once the fear passed, more inclined to pleasure than to religion. He let the matter slide and turned his mind to other business, until the same vision came again, more terrifying and more insistent now, threatening ruin to him and his kingdom unless his orders were carried out. He then ordered envoys and gifts prepared for King Scydrothemis, who ruled Sinope at the time, and instructed them, before sailing, to consult the Pythian Apollo. They had a smooth crossing, and the oracle's answer left no doubt: go, bring back the image of his father, and leave his sister behind.
89| When they reached Sinope, they laid their king's gifts, requests, and instructions before Scydrothemis. He wavered for a long time, torn between fear of the god and fear of his own people's hostile threats; often the envoys' gifts and promises nearly won him over. Three years passed, and still Ptolemy did not let up his effort or his pleading: he raised the rank of his envoys, the number of his ships, the weight of his gold. Then a menacing vision appeared to Scydrothemis, warning him not to delay any longer what the god had decreed. As he still hesitated, disasters and sicknesses of every kind, and the unmistakable anger of heaven, wore him down more each day. He called an assembly and laid out the god's commands, the visions he and Ptolemy had shared, and the misfortunes closing in on him. The common people turned against their king, resenting Egypt, fearing for themselves, and surrounded the temple. A grander version of the story that has come down to us holds that the god himself, of his own will, boarded the ships waiting at the shore. Strange to report, though the crossing was a long one, they reached Alexandria on the third day. A temple was built to match the greatness of the city, on a site called Rhacotis, where an old shrine to Serapis and Isis had stood since ancient times. This is the most widely told account of the god's origin and arrival. I am not unaware that some say he was brought instead from Seleucia in Syria, in the reign of the third Ptolemy; others name the same Ptolemy as the one responsible, but say his starting point was Memphis, once famous and the pride of ancient Egypt. As for the god himself, many take him for Aesculapius, since he heals the sick; some for Osiris, the oldest god of that people; most for Jupiter, as ruler of all things; but the majority take him for Father Dis, going by the emblems plainly visible on his image, or by inference where they are not.
90| Before Domitian and Mucianus drew near the Alps, they received news of successful operations in the territory of the Treviri. The clearest proof of the victory was Valentinus, the enemy leader, who showed in his face, far from any broken spirit, the same defiance he had always carried. He was granted a hearing only so his character could be seen for what it was; and when he was condemned, and someone taunted him with the fall of his homeland, and during the execution itself someone taunted him with the fall of his homeland, he answered that he took that as a consolation for his own death. Mucianus, meanwhile, brought out at last a plan he had long kept hidden. Since the enemy's strength, he said, had been broken by the kindness of the gods, it would hardly be fitting for Domitian to step in now, with the war all but finished, and claim credit that belonged to another. If the stability of the empire, or the safety of the Gallic provinces, had truly hung in the balance, then Caesar ought to have taken his place in the battle line, leaving the Canninefates and the Batavians to lesser commanders; as it was, he could better display the power and fortune of his position from close by, at Lugdunum, without exposing himself to small risks while still being ready for the greater ones.
91| The scheme was plain enough, but part of playing along lay in not letting it show; so they went on to Lugdunum. From there, it is believed, Domitian sent secret messages to Cerialis to test his loyalty—whether he would hand over his army and command to him in person, should he appear. Whether this scheme aimed at war against his father, or at gathering strength and resources against his brother, remained unclear; Cerialis, with prudent restraint, brushed it off as the idle wish of a boy playing at grown-up ambitions. Domitian, seeing that his youth was dismissed by his elders, gave up even the modest duties of command he had previously taken on, burying himself deep behind a show of simplicity and restraint, feigning devotion to literature and a love of poetry, to mask his real intentions and remove himself from rivalry with his brother—whose gentler, milder nature he read, in his own mind, as something quite different.
1| At the start of that same year, Titus Caesar, chosen by his father to complete the conquest of Judea and already distinguished by his own service before that, now operated with greater force and greater fame, as the provinces and armies vied to win his favor. He himself, wanting to be thought greater than his fortune, made a show of looking sharp and ready under arms, winning devotion through friendliness and easy talk, often mixing with the common soldiers at work or on the march, all without cheapening his rank as commander. Three legions received him in Judea — the Fifth, the Tenth, and the Fifteenth, veterans of Vespasian's army. He added the Twelfth from Syria, and men of the Twenty-Second and the Third brought from Alexandria. With him marched twenty allied cohorts, eight cavalry wings, the kings Agrippa and Sohaemus, auxiliaries from King Antiochus, and a strong band of Arabs, hostile to the Jews with the usual hatred of neighbors. Many others came from Rome and Italy, each drawn by hope of getting close to a prince whose favor was still up for grabs. With these forces he crossed into enemy territory in tight formation, scouting everything, ready for battle, and made camp not far from Jerusalem.
2| But since we are about to tell of that famous city's last day, it seems right to first open up its origins.
3| Some say the Jews were refugees from Crete who settled the far edge of Libya, in the age when Saturn was driven from his kingdom by the force of Jupiter — an argument they draw from the name: Crete's famous Mount Ida, whose inhabitants, the Idaei, had their name barbarized into Judaei. Others say that under Isis's reign, Egypt's overflowing population was unloaded into neighboring lands under the leaders Hierosolymus and Judas. Many hold them for children of Ethiopia, driven from their homes by fear and hatred under King Cepheus. Still others claim they were a mixed Assyrian people, landless, who seized part of Egypt before settling their own cities and Hebrew lands and the country nearer Syria. Others give the Jews a more distinguished origin: the Solymi, a people celebrated in Homer's poems, who founded a city and named it Hierosolyma after themselves.
4| Most authors agree on this: a plague broke out across Egypt that disfigured bodies, and King Bocchoris, seeking a cure at the oracle of Ammon, was told to purge his kingdom and cart off this race, hateful to the gods, into other lands. So this crowd was rounded up and gathered, and once abandoned in the wasteland, while the rest sat helpless in tears, one exile, Moses, urged them to expect no help from gods or men, since both had abandoned them, but to trust in a leader sent from heaven — himself, since his aid had already ended their present misery. They agreed, and, knowing nothing of where they were, set out at random. Nothing wore them down like thirst, and they had already collapsed across the plains, close to death, when a herd of wild asses left their pasture and made for a rock shaded by trees. Moses followed them and, guessing from the green ground, uncovered rich veins of water. That was their relief; and after marching six days straight, on the seventh they drove out the inhabitants and took the land, in which they built their city and consecrated their temple.
5| To bind the people to himself for the future, Moses gave them new rites, the opposite of everyone else's. What we hold sacred, they treat as profane; what is forbidden to us, they allow. In their innermost shrine they set up the image of the animal that had led them out of their wandering and their thirst, and they sacrifice a ram, as if to insult Ammon; they sacrifice a bull too, since the Egyptians worship Apis. They avoid pork, remembering a plague of scabs that once disfigured them, an affliction that animal carries. They still confess to a long-ago famine through their frequent fasts, and their bread, made without leaven, is a lasting reminder of the grain they seized in haste. They say they chose to rest on the seventh day because it ended their toils; then, tempted further by idleness, they gave over a whole seventh year to laziness as well. Others say the honor belongs to Saturn, either because the Idaei, whom we take to have been driven out along with Saturn and to have founded this people, passed down the first principles of the religion, or because of the seven stars that govern human affairs, Saturn's star moves in the highest orbit with the greatest power, and most heavenly bodies complete their courses in cycles of seven.
6| Whatever their origin, these rites are defended by their age. But their other customs are sinister, filthy, and have spread through sheer depravity. The worst sort of people, scorning their ancestral religions, poured tribute and gifts there, swelling Jewish wealth — and besides, the Jews are stubbornly loyal to one another, quick to pity their own, but they hold a hostile hatred for everyone else. They eat apart, sleep apart, and though as a people utterly given to lust, they abstain from sex with foreign women; among themselves nothing is forbidden. They adopted circumcision so as to be known by their difference. Converts to their ways take up the same practice, and the first things they're taught are to despise the gods, renounce their country, and hold their parents, children, and brothers cheap. Still, they take care to increase their numbers: it is a crime among them to kill any child born to them, and a soul lost in war or on the executioner's block, so they believe, does not perish but lives forever — hence their love of having children and their contempt for death. They bury rather than burn their dead, following Egyptian custom, and share the Egyptian concern and belief about the underworld, though their view of the heavens is the opposite. The Egyptians worship many animals and manufactured images; the Jews conceive of only one god, and that with the mind alone. They call it profane to make images of god in human form out of perishable material; that supreme and eternal being, they hold, can neither be portrayed nor destroyed. So they set up no statues in their cities, much less in their temples; they grant no such flattery to their kings, no such honor to the Caesars. But their priests played on pipe and drum and wore ivy crowns, and once a golden vine turned up in their temple — from which some have guessed the god they worship is Father Liber, conqueror of the East — though nothing else about their practices fits, since Liber established joyful, festive rites, while the Jewish custom is grim and squalid.
7| The land and its borders: to the east it is bounded by Arabia, to the south lies Egypt, to the west Phoenicia and the sea, and to the north it looks out across a long stretch of Syria. The people are healthy in body and able to bear hard labor. Rain is scarce, the soil rich: it yields our own crops in abundance, and besides these, balsam and palms. The palms are tall and handsome; the balsam is a modest tree — when a branch swells and you cut into it with iron, the sap-veins shrink back in fear, so it must be opened with a stone chip or a shard of pottery; the sap is used in medicine. The chief of the mountains, Lebanon, rises remarkably, keeping its shade and its snow faithfully even amid such heat; it also feeds and pours out the river Jordan. The Jordan does not flow into the sea but passes whole through one lake and then another, and is finally swallowed by a third. That lake, of vast circumference and resembling a sea, has a foul taste, and its heavy stench is harmful to those living nearby; it is never stirred by wind, and it supports neither fish nor the birds accustomed to water. Sluggish waves carry anything thrown on them as if it were solid ground; those who can swim and those who cannot are held up just the same. At a certain season it gives up bitumen, and the skill of gathering it, like every other craft, was learned by experience. The substance is naturally black and floats when vinegar is sprinkled on it; men whose task this is catch it by hand and haul it onto the deck, where it flows in on its own and weighs the boat down until you cut it loose — and it cannot be cut with bronze or iron, for it shrinks from anything stained with blood, even the blood women shed each month. So the old writers tell it; but those who actually know the region say that the floating masses of bitumen are driven by hand to shore, and once dried by the heat of the earth and the force of the sun, are split like timber or stone with axes and wedges.
8| Not far from there lie plains said once to have been fertile and covered with great cities, until they were burned by a stroke of lightning; traces remain, they say, and the soil itself, scorched in appearance, has lost its power to bear fruit. Whatever grows there on its own or is planted by hand, whether it rises only to grass or flower or reaches its usual full form, turns black and hollow, crumbling away like ash. For my part, I would grant that these once-famous cities burned by fire from heaven, but I think it is the lake's own vapor that poisons the ground, corrupting the air above it, and that this is why the crops and the autumn harvest rot, since both soil and sky alike carry the same sickness. The river Belus also flows into the Jewish sea; around its mouth fine sand is gathered and, mixed with soda, smelted into glass. The stretch of shore that yields it is small, but it never runs dry no matter how much is taken.
9| Most of Judea is scattered with villages, though it also has towns; Jerusalem is the capital of the nation. There stands a temple of immense wealth. The city itself is protected by an outer ring of fortifications, then the royal palace, and the temple enclosed within the innermost walls. Only Jews may approach its doors; the threshold itself is barred to all but priests. While the East belonged to the Assyrians, Medes, and Persians, no subject people was held in lower regard. After the Macedonians rose to power, King Antiochus tried to strip away their superstition and bring in Greek customs, and might well have reformed this thoroughly repellent nation for the better, had he not been stopped by war with the Parthians, since Arsaces had just then broken away. With the Macedonians weakened and the Parthians not yet grown strong — and Rome still far off — the Jews set up kings of their own. These kings, driven out by the fickleness of the mob, seized back power by force, and dared everything typical of kings: exiling citizens, tearing down cities, murdering brothers, wives, and parents. All the while they encouraged the old superstition, since holding the priesthood gave their power its foundation.
10| The first Roman to subdue the Jews was Gnaeus Pompey. Conquest gave him the right of entry into their temple, and that is the source of the tale that no divine image stood within — just an empty room, nothing worth calling a secret. Jerusalem's walls came down, though the shrine was spared. Later, in the course of our civil wars, after the province had passed under Mark Antony's control, the Parthian king Pacorus took Judea for himself, only to be killed by Ventidius, and the Parthians were pushed back across the Euphrates. It was Gaius Sosius who broke the Jews' resistance. Herod received the kingdom from Antony, and Augustus, once he had won out, made it larger still. After Herod's death, a certain Simon, without waiting to see what Caesar would decide, seized the royal title. He was punished by Quintilius Varus, governor of Syria, and the nation, brought back under control, was ruled by Herod's three sons together. Under Tiberius things were quiet. Then, ordered by Gaius Caesar to set up his statue in the temple, the Jews took up arms instead — and only Caesar's death called off that crisis. Once the line of kings had died out or been cut down to size, Claudius handed Judea over as a province to Roman knights or freedmen to govern. One of these, Antonius Felix, exercised royal power with a slave's instincts, indulging every cruelty and lust — he had married Drusilla, granddaughter of Cleopatra and Antony, which made Felix, oddly enough, the grandson-in-law of the same Antony whose grandson Claudius was.
11| The Jews' patience held out until Gessius Florus became procurator. Under him the war broke out. Cestius Gallus, governor of Syria, tried to put it down but met with a string of battles, mostly losses. When he died — fate or exhaustion, take your pick — Nero sent Vespasian, who with luck, reputation, and excellent officers had, within two summers, brought the whole open country and every city but Jerusalem under his army's control. The next year was taken up with civil war, and as far as the Jews were concerned it passed quietly. Once peace was restored in Italy, attention returned to foreign matters, and anger grew sharper at the thought that the Jews alone had not submitted. At the same time it seemed useful, given how uncertain any new reign could be, for Titus to remain with the army.
12| So, camp pitched before the walls of Jerusalem as already mentioned, Titus put his legions on display in battle order. The Jews formed their line right up against the walls, ready to press further if things went well, and with a safe retreat if they were pushed back. Cavalry with light infantry were sent against them and fought an uncertain engagement; the enemy soon gave ground, and over the following days kept up frequent skirmishes before the gates, until steady losses drove them back inside the walls for good. The Romans turned to a siege — it seemed beneath them to simply wait the enemy out with hunger, and the men wanted the danger, some out of genuine courage, many out of aggression and hunger for plunder. Titus himself had Rome, its wealth and pleasures, before his eyes, and any delay before Jerusalem fell felt like time stolen from him. But the city's position was formidable, and its fortifications strong enough to have made even flat ground defensible. Two enormously high hills were enclosed by walls built with real skill, angled or curving inward so that any attacker's flank was exposed to fire. The cliff edges were sheer, and towers rose sixty feet where the mountain already helped, and up to a hundred and twenty where the ground fell away — a striking sight, and from a distance they looked all the same height. Inside stood another ring of walls around the royal palace, and towering over it all, the Antonia fortress, named by Herod in honor of Mark Antony.
13| The temple itself was built like a citadel, with its own walls, worked and fortified with more effort than anywhere else; even the colonnades that ran around it made a formidable defensive line on their own. There was a spring that never ran dry, mountains hollowed out underground, and pools and cisterns to store rainwater. The founders had foreseen, from the very nature of a people so different from their neighbors, that wars would be frequent, so everything was built to withstand a long siege. What Pompey's conquest taught them, both from fear and from practical need, shaped most of it. And by buying, through the greed of Claudius's officials, the right to fortify, they built walls in peacetime as if for war — strengthened by the great flood of refugees swelling their numbers as other cities fell, since every diehard had fled there, which only made them more prone to internal strife. Three leaders, three armies: Simon held the outer and largest stretch of the walls, John — also called Bargioras — held the middle of the city, and Eleazar had fortified the temple. In numbers and weapons John and Simon had the advantage; Eleazar had position. But between themselves there was fighting, treachery, fires, and a great store of grain burned to ash. Eventually John, sending men in under the pretense of offering sacrifice, had Eleazar and his men cut down, and took the temple for himself. So the city split into two factions, until the approach of the Romans forced an external war to produce internal peace.
14| Portents had occurred which this people — bound to superstition, hostile to religion — considered it unlawful to appease with sacrifice or vow. Armies were seen clashing in the sky, weapons flashing red, and the temple suddenly lit by fire from the clouds. The doors of the shrine flew open on their own, and a voice greater than human was heard saying the gods were leaving — and at the same moment came a great rush of departure. Few read this as a warning; most were convinced that ancient priestly writings held a prophecy that at that very time the East would grow strong, and men setting out from Judea would rule the world. This riddle had actually foretold Vespasian and Titus. But the common people, as people tend to do, twisted so great a destiny to fit their own hopes, and not even disaster could shake them from believing it. We are told the besieged numbered six hundred thousand of every age and both sexes; all who could bear arms did, and more were willing than their numbers would suggest. Men and women showed the same stubborn resolve — if forced to leave their homes, they feared that more than death itself. Against this city and this people, Caesar Titus, since neither a swift assault nor sudden action suited the ground, decided to fight it out with earthworks and siege-sheds. The legions split the work between them, and the fighting eased off until every device ever devised for taking cities, old or newly invented, had been brought to bear.
15| Meanwhile Civilis, after his defeat among the Treveri, rebuilt his army from across Germany and made camp at Vetera, a position that was safe in itself and also let the memory of past success there swell the confidence of his barbarian troops. Cerialis followed him to that same position; the Second, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth legions had now joined him, doubling his strength, and the auxiliary cohorts and cavalry wings summoned earlier had likewise hurried up once the victory was won. Neither commander was inclined to delay, but the sheer breadth of the naturally waterlogged plain held them back. Civilis had added to this by building an angled dam into the Rhine, which threw the river back to flood the surrounding land. The ground, treacherous with uncertain shallows, favored them and worked against us — the Roman soldier, weighed down by arms and no swimmer, was at a disadvantage, while the Germans, used to rivers, were helped by their light equipment and tall frames.
16| So when the Batavians provoked them, our fiercest men rushed into the fight, and confusion followed as horses and weapons sank into the deep marsh. The Germans, knowing the shallows, bounded across them, mostly bypassing the front line to circle round the flanks and rear. This was nothing like an infantry battle fought face to face — men drifted through the water as if in a naval fight, or, where solid ground turned up, threw their whole weight into the struggle there; wounded men tangled with the unhurt, swimmers with those who couldn't swim, dragging each other down to mutual ruin. The slaughter, though, was smaller than the chaos suggested, since the Germans didn't dare come out of the marsh and pulled back to camp. The outcome of that fight pushed both commanders, for opposite reasons, to force a decisive engagement soon. Civilis wanted to press his luck; Cerialis wanted to wipe out the disgrace. The Germans were emboldened by success, the Romans stung by shame. That night the barbarians passed in singing and shouting; ours in anger and threats.
17| At first light Cerialis drew up his cavalry and auxiliary cohorts in the front line, with the legions placed behind them; he kept a picked reserve of his own for emergencies. Civilis did not spread his line out but formed it in wedges: the Batavians and Cugerni on the right, and on the left, nearer the river, the tribes from across the Rhine. The commanders' exhortations were not delivered as one speech to the whole army but given man to man as they rode along the ranks. Cerialis spoke of the old glory of the Roman name, of victories ancient and recent; he urged them to wipe out this treacherous, cowardly, already-beaten enemy for good — this called for vengeance more than a battle. A smaller Roman force had recently fought a larger German one, and still routed them — that was the true measure of German strength; what remained now were men who carried flight in their hearts and wounds on their backs. To the legions he added arguments of their own: he called the Fourteenth the conquerors of Britain, reminded the Sixth that Galba had been made emperor on their authority, and told the Second that in this, their first battle, they would dedicate their new standards and their new eagle. Then, riding past to the army from Upper Germany, he stretched out his hands, urging them to win back their own riverbank, their own camp, with enemy blood. A livelier shout rose from the whole army — some hungry for battle after a long peace, others, worn out by war, longing for peace, and all hoping for rewards and rest to come.
18| Civilis did not draw up his line in silence. He called the battlefield itself to witness their courage: the Germans and Batavians, he said, stood on the ground of their own glory, treading the ashes and bones of legions. Wherever the Romans looked, they would see captivity, disaster, everything horrible. They should not be frightened by the mixed outcome of the battle at the Treveran country: their own victory there had been ruined by the Germans themselves, who dropped their weapons to grab plunder with both hands; everything since had gone well, and badly for the enemy. Whatever a shrewd commander ought to have foreseen, he had foreseen: the ground was wet, and while his men knew it, the marshes would be poison to the Romans. The Rhine and the gods of Germany were right there in view; fighting under their power, and remembering their wives, their parents, their homeland, this day would be either the most glorious in their history or the most shameful before their descendants. When this speech won approval — by the clash of weapons and the war-dance, their custom — the battle opened with stones, sling-bullets, and other missiles, our soldiers refusing to enter the marsh and the Germans provoking them to try.
19| Once the missiles ran out and the fighting caught fire, the enemy pressed forward more fiercely: huge men with very long spears speared our soldiers from a distance as they floundered and slipped in the mud. At the same time a wedge of Bructeri swam across from the mole we mentioned earlier, built out into the Rhine. Things fell into confusion there, and the line of allied cohorts was being driven back, until the legions took up the fight and, once the enemy's ferocity was checked, the battle evened out. Meanwhile a Batavian deserter approached Cerialis, promising to expose the enemy's rear if cavalry were sent to the far edge of the marsh: the ground there was firm, he said, and the Cugerni posted to guard it were careless. Two squadrons of cavalry were sent with the deserter and surrounded the unsuspecting enemy. When the shout revealed what was happening, the legions pressed forward from the front, and the beaten Germans fled for the Rhine. The war would have ended that day if the Roman fleet had moved quickly enough to pursue; not even the cavalry followed up, because rain suddenly poured down and night was near.
20| The next day the Fourteenth Legion was sent to the upper province under Annius Gallus; the Tenth Legion, arriving from Spain, brought Cerialis's army back to strength; auxiliaries from the Chauci came to Civilis. He did not, however, dare to defend the Batavian stronghold by force. He seized what could be carried, burned the rest, and withdrew to the island, knowing the Romans lacked ships to build a bridge and had no other way across. He even tore down the dam built by Drusus Germanicus, which had kept the Rhine's current in check, and let the river pour toward Gaul unobstructed once the barriers were cleared away. With the river's force drained off this way, the shrunken channel made the island look like part of the mainland, joined to German territory. Tutor and Classicus also crossed the Rhine, along with a hundred and thirteen Treveran senators, among them Alpinius Montanus, whom we mentioned earlier as sent by Primus Antonius into Gaul. His brother Decimus Alpinius went with him; and the rest, by playing on pity and handing out gifts, stirred up support among tribes hungry for danger.
21| So much war remained that Civilis struck the garrisons of cohorts, cavalry wings, and legions in four separate places within one day: Arenacum, where the Tenth Legion lay; Batavodurum, held by the Second; and the twin camps of Grinnes and Vada, garrisoned by cohorts and horsemen. He split his forces so that he himself, his sister's son Verax, Classicus, and Tutor each led their own band — not confident of succeeding everywhere, but trusting that daring much would bring luck somewhere. At the same time, he reasoned, Cerialis was careless and kept dashing from place to place on scattered reports, so he might be caught somewhere in between. Those sent against the Tenth Legion's camp judged a frontal attack too dangerous, and instead ambushed the woodcutting party outside: the camp prefect died there, along with five senior centurions and a handful of soldiers, while the survivors held the ramparts. Meanwhile a German force at Batavodurum tried to break up the half-finished bridge; night cut short the indecisive fighting.
22| The greater danger was at Grinnes and Vada. Civilis attacked Vada, Classicus attacked Grinnes. Nothing halted them until the defenders' bravest men were dead — Briganticus among them, the cavalry prefect we noted earlier as faithful to Rome and no friend to his uncle Civilis. But then Cerialis came up with a chosen body of horse, and the tide of luck reversed: the Germans were flung headlong toward the river. Civilis tried to rally the men now running for their lives; recognized and targeted, he left his horse behind and swam for it. Verax got clear the same way, while Tutor and Classicus were taken off by boats that had put ashore. Even then the Roman fleet was not on hand for the battle, though it had been ordered out — fear held it back, and the rowers were scattered on other duties. Cerialis, it's true, gave too little time for carrying out his orders, quick to act and lucky in the outcome rather than careful in planning; fortune stood by him even where skill was lacking, and this bred carelessness about discipline in both him and his army. A few days later, though he had escaped the danger of capture, he did not escape disgrace.
23| Cerialis had traveled to Novaesium and Bonn to check on the winter camps being raised there for the legions; now he was sailing back, his vessels strung out in a straggling line and the watch kept without care. The Germans noticed this and set an ambush: they chose a night black with cloud, and swept downstream with the current, unopposed, they entered the camp. Trickery aided the first killing: they cut the tent ropes and slaughtered men trapped under their own canvas. Another band threw the fleet into disorder, hurling grappling lines and towing off ships; and though they had begun in silence to avoid detection, once the killing started they filled the air with shouting on purpose, to spread more terror. The Romans, roused by their wounds, groped for weapons and ran through the lanes, few in proper uniform, most with cloaks wound around their arms and swords drawn. Their commander, half-asleep and nearly naked, was saved by the enemy's own mistake: they seized the flagship, marked by its pennant, thinking the commander was aboard. Cerialis, as most people believed, had spent the night elsewhere, over an affair with Claudia Sacrata, a woman of the Ubii. The sentries covered up their own failure by blaming their commander's disgrace, claiming they had been ordered to keep quiet so as not to disturb his rest; that was why the trumpet signal and the watch-calls had lapsed, and they too had drifted off to sleep. Well after daylight the enemy withdrew with captured ships, towing the flagship trireme down the river Lippe as a gift for Veleda.
24| Civilis was seized with a desire to put on a display of naval strength. He manned every two-banked and single-banked ship he had, and added a huge number of small boats, each carrying thirty or forty men and rigged like Liburnian galleys; captured boats were fitted out too, using colored cloaks in place of sails, which did not look bad at all. He chose, as it were, an open stretch of water where the Meuse pours the Rhine's flow into the Ocean. His reason for assembling a fleet, apart from his people's natural love of show, was to use the display to frighten off supply convoys coming from Gaul. Cerialis brought out his own fleet, more out of astonishment than fear — fewer ships, but stronger in trained rowers, skilled helmsmen, and larger vessels. His ships had the current with them, the enemy's the wind; they sailed past each other, exchanged a few light missiles, and then drew apart. Civilis attempted nothing further and withdrew across the Rhine. Cerialis ravaged the Batavian island as an enemy would, but by the familiar trick of commanders left Civilis's own farms and villas untouched. Meanwhile, with the turn of autumn and the heavy rains around the equinox, the river overflowed and covered the low, marshy island until it looked like a lake. Neither fleet nor supplies were on hand, and the camp, pitched on level ground, kept being swept away by the force of the water.
25| Civilis later claimed that the legions could have been crushed then, and that his Germans wanted to do it, but that he had turned them aside by a trick — a claim not implausible, since surrender followed only a few days later. For Cerialis, through secret messengers, was holding out peace to the Batavians and pardon to Civilis, while warning Veleda and her relatives that the fortunes of war, which had gone against them through so many defeats, could be changed by a timely service to the Roman people: the Treveri had been cut down, the Ubii taken back into favor, the Batavians' own homeland stripped from them; friendship with Civilis had brought nothing but wounds, flight, and grief. Taking in an exile and an outcast would only burden them, and they had already sinned enough by crossing the Rhine so many times. If they tried anything further, the wrong and the blame would be theirs, the vengeance and the gods on the Roman side.
26| Promises mixed with threats. The loyalty of the peoples across the Rhine wavered, and talk began among the Batavians too: this ruin should not be dragged out any further — one nation could not hold back the enslavement of the whole world. What had they gained by slaughtering legions and burning camps, except to bring more and stronger ones down on themselves? If they had fought this war for Vespasian's sake, then Vespasian now held power; but if they were taking up arms against the Roman people itself, how small a fraction of the human race were the Batavians? Let them look to the Raeti and the Norici and the burdens borne by other allied peoples: from the Batavians Rome demanded not tribute but courage and men — the condition closest to freedom; and if a choice of masters had to be made, it was more honorable to put up with Roman emperors than German women. This was the talk of the common people; the leading men spoke more harshly still: Civilis's madness had driven them into war, and he had set the ruin of his people against his own private troubles. The gods had turned against the Batavians precisely when the legions were besieged and the envoys murdered — a war necessary for one man alone, and fatal to his own people, had been taken up. They had come to the last extremity, unless they began to come to their senses and, by punishing the guilty man, confessed their regret.
27| That shift in mood did not escape Civilis, and he decided to get ahead of it — driven not only by weariness of the war's miseries but by hope of life, which usually breaks even great spirits. He asked for a conference. The bridge over the river Nabalia was cut apart, and the two commanders advanced onto the broken ends. Civilis began: 'If I were defending myself before a governor of Vitellius, my actions would deserve no pardon and my words no credit. Everything between us was hostile: he began the enmity, and I only enlarged it. Toward Vespasian I have long shown respect, and when he was still a private citizen we were called friends. Primus Antonius knew this — it was his letters that drove me to war, so that the German legions and the young men of Gaul would not cross the Alps. What Antonius urged by letter, Hordeonius Flaccus urged in person. I raised arms in Germany, as Mucianus did in Syria, Aponius in Moesia, and Flavianus in Pannonia [text breaks off]
1| Kings ruled the city of Rome from the beginning. Lucius Brutus gave it liberty and the consulship. Dictatorships were taken up only for the moment; the power of the decemvirs did not last beyond two years, nor did the consular authority of the military tribunes hold long. Neither Cinna's nor Sulla's domination was lasting, and the power of Pompey and Crassus quickly gave way to Caesar, and the arms of Lepidus and Antony to Augustus, who took under his own rule, with the title of emperor, a state exhausted by civil discord. But the successes and failures of the old Roman people have been recorded by famous writers, and the times of Augustus did not lack able minds to tell of them, until growing flattery drove them off. The affairs of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius, and Nero were falsified out of fear while they still lived, and written up afterward from fresh hatred once they were dead. So I have resolved to tell a little about Augustus, chiefly his end, and then the reign of Tiberius and what followed, without anger and without favor, since I have no stake in the causes of either.
2| After Brutus and Cassius were killed there was no army left fighting for the republic. Pompey was crushed off Sicily; Lepidus was stripped of power; Antony was killed; and even the party of the Caesarians had no leader left but Caesar. He dropped the title of triumvir, presented himself as consul, and claimed to be content, for the people's protection, with a tribune's powers. Once he had won over the soldiers with gifts, the people with grain, and everyone with the sweetness of peace, he began step by step to rise, drawing to himself the functions of senate, magistrates, and laws, with no one opposing him — the fiercest spirits had fallen in battle or in the proscriptions, and the rest of the nobles, the readier they were to serve, the more they were raised up with wealth and honors, and, enriched by the new order, preferred the safety of the present to the danger of the old ways. Nor did the provinces object to this state of affairs, since they distrusted the rule of senate and people, worn down as it was by the rivalries of the powerful and the greed of magistrates, while the laws gave feeble protection, being thrown into confusion by violence, favoritism, and finally money.
3| For the rest, to prop up his rule Augustus raised up Claudius Marcellus, his sister's son, still quite young, with the pontificate and the curule aedileship; and Marcus Agrippa, of humble birth but a good soldier and his partner in victory, he lifted with consulship after consulship, and later, when Marcellus died, took him as a son-in-law. Tiberius Nero and Claudius Drusus, his stepsons, he honored with the titles of commander, though his own house was still unbroken. For he had brought Gaius and Lucius, Agrippa's sons, into the family of the Caesars, and even before they had put off the boy's toga he had most ardently wished — while making a show of refusing — that they be called leaders of the youth and be marked out as consuls. When Agrippa died, Lucius Caesar, on his way to the armies in Spain, and Gaius, returning from Armenia weakened by a wound, were carried off by an untimely death — or by the scheming of their stepmother Livia — and with Drusus long since dead, Nero was the only stepson left, and everything tilted his way: he was adopted as son, made partner in power, given a share of the tribune's authority, and paraded before every army — no longer through his mother's hidden maneuvering, as before, but openly, at her urging. For she had bound the aging Augustus so completely that he banished his only grandson, Agrippa Postumus, to the island of Planasia — a young man untrained in any refinement and stupidly proud of his physical strength, but guilty of no real crime. Yet by heaven, Augustus set Germanicus, Drusus's son, over eight legions on the Rhine, and ordered Tiberius to adopt him, even though Tiberius already had a grown son of his own in his household — all so that the succession would rest on more supports. At that time the only war left was against the Germans, meant more to wipe out the disgrace of the army lost with Quintilius Varus than from any desire to extend the empire or hope of worthwhile gain. At home things were calm; the old titles of the magistracies remained; the younger men had been born after the victory at Actium, and most of the older ones during the civil wars. How few were left who had ever seen the republic?
4| So with the state of the city turned upside down, nothing anywhere kept the old, unspoiled ways. All, stripped of equality, looked to the orders of the emperor, with no fear for the present so long as Augustus, still vigorous in age, held up himself, his household, and the peace. But once old age came on heavy and his failing body wore him down, and the end was near along with new hopes, a few talked uselessly about the blessings of liberty, more dreaded war, and others wanted it. The great majority passed around various rumors about their coming masters: that Agrippa was savage and, embittered by his disgrace, was no match, in age or experience, for so great a burden; that Tiberius Nero was ripe in years and tested in war, but had the old, deep-rooted pride of the Claudian family, and that many signs of cruelty, though suppressed, kept breaking out. He had been raised from earliest infancy in a ruling household; consulships and triumphs had been heaped on him while still young; and not even in those years when he lived a self-styled retirement, exiled at Rhodes, had he practiced anything but resentment, pretense, and secret vices. To this was added his mother, with a woman's lack of restraint: they would have to be slaves to a woman, and on top of that to two young men, who for the time being would burden the state and would eventually tear it apart.
5| While people debated these and similar things, Augustus's health grew worse, and some suspected his wife's crime. For a rumor had gone round that a few months before, Augustus, with only a few in on the secret and Fabius Maximus as his sole companion, had sailed to Planasia to see Agrippa; that there had been many tears there on both sides and signs of affection, and hope that the young man might be restored to his grandfather's household. Maximus, it was said, had let this slip to his wife Marcia, and she to Livia. Caesar learned of it, and not long after Maximus died — whether by a death he sought himself was uncertain — and at his funeral Marcia was heard sobbing and blaming herself for having caused her husband's ruin. Whatever the truth of the matter, Tiberius had barely entered Illyricum when he was summoned back by urgent letters from his mother, and it is not clearly known whether he found Augustus, at the town of Nola, still breathing or already dead. Livia had ringed the house and the roads with tight guards, and cheerful reports were put about from time to time, until, once what the moment required had been arranged, one and the same announcement carried the news that Augustus had died and that Nero held power.
6| The first crime of the new reign was the killing of Agrippa Postumus, who, unarmed and unsuspecting, was still barely finished off by a centurion nerved for the task. Tiberius said nothing about it in the senate. He pretended his father had given orders, by which he had instructed the tribune set to guard him not to hesitate to put Agrippa to death whenever he himself reached his last day. Augustus had indeed complained often and bitterly about the young man's character, and had gotten the senate to sanction his exile by decree; but he had never in his life brought himself to kill any of his own family, and it was not credible that he had ordered a grandson's death to secure a stepson's safety. It is nearer the truth that Tiberius and Livia — he from fear, she from a stepmother's hatred — hurried the killing of a young man they mistrusted and disliked. When the centurion reported, in soldier's fashion, that his orders had been carried out, Tiberius answered that he had given no such order, and that an account of the deed would have to be given before the senate. When Sallustius Crispus, who shared in the secret — he was the one who had sent the written order to the tribune — learned of this, fearing he might be made the scapegoat, since it was dangerous either way to reveal the truth or a lie, he warned Livia that the secrets of the household, the counsels of friends, and the services of soldiers should not be made public, and that Tiberius should not undercut the strength of his rule by referring everything to the senate: for the condition of ruling was that the accounts would balance only if rendered to one man alone.
7| At Rome meanwhile consuls, senators, and knights rushed into servility. The more distinguished a man was, the more false and eager he seemed, composing his face so as neither to look glad at the emperor's death nor too gloomy at the start of the new one, mixing tears with joy and complaint with flattery. The consuls Sextus Pompeius and Sextus Appuleius were the first to swear the oath in the name of Tiberius Caesar, and in their presence so did Seius Strabo and Gaius Turranius, the one prefect of the praetorian cohorts, the other of the grain supply; then the senate, the soldiers, and the people followed. For Tiberius began everything through the consuls, as though the old republic still stood and he were unsure about ruling. Even the edict summoning the senators to the house he issued only under the authority of the tribune's power, which he had received under Augustus. The words of the edict were few and very modest in tone: he would consult about honors for his father, and would not leave the body — this was the one public duty he claimed for himself. Yet on Augustus's death he had already given the watchword to the praetorian cohorts as commander; there were guards, arms, and all the other trappings of a court; soldiers escorted him to the forum, soldiers to the senate house. He sent letters to the armies as though he had already taken power, and showed hesitation nowhere except when he spoke in the senate. The chief reason was his fear that Germanicus, who held so many legions in his hand, immense allied forces, and remarkable popularity with the people, might prefer to seize power rather than wait for it. He also wanted it to look, for the sake of his reputation, as though he had been called and chosen by the state rather than having crept in through a wife's scheming and an old man's adoption. It was learned later that his show of hesitation was also meant to probe the intentions of the leading men, since he twisted their words and looks into evidence against them and stored it away.
8| On the first day the senate met, Tiberius let nothing be discussed except Augustus's funeral arrangements. His will, brought in by the Vestal Virgins, named Tiberius and Livia as heirs. Livia was adopted into the Julian family and took the name Augusta. As secondary heirs he named his grandsons and great-grandsons; in a third rank, the leading men of the state — most of whom he disliked, but he named them anyway for the sake of his reputation with posterity. His bequests were modest by public standards, except that he left the Roman people and plebs 43,500,000 sesterces, a thousand sesterces to each Praetorian guardsman, five hundred to the urban cohorts, and three hundred to the legionaries and citizen cohorts. Then the senate debated honors. Of the proposals, the most striking were from Gallus Asinius, who wanted the funeral procession to pass through the triumphal gate, and Lucius Arruntius, who wanted the titles of laws Augustus had passed and the names of the nations he had conquered carried ahead of the bier. Valerius Messala added that the oath of loyalty to Tiberius should be renewed every year. Asked by Tiberius whether he had spoken at his instruction, Messala replied that he had spoken on his own initiative, and that in matters touching the state he would follow no one's judgment but his own, whatever the risk of giving offense. That was the one form flattery still had left. The senators shouted that senators themselves should carry the body to the pyre on their shoulders. Caesar declined, with arrogant modesty, and warned the people by edict not to disrupt Augustus's funeral with excessive displays of grief the way they once had for the deified Julius, and to let him be cremated in the Campus Martius, his appointed place, rather than in the Forum. On the day of the funeral soldiers stood guard, to the considerable mockery of those who remembered — either from having seen it themselves or from their parents' accounts — that earlier day, when the wounds of slavery were still fresh and freedom had been recovered without success, when the murder of the dictator Caesar seemed to some the worst of crimes and to others the noblest. Now an old emperor, after a long reign, having even secured his heirs' hold on the state, apparently needed military protection to ensure his burial went off peacefully.
9| Afterward there was much talk about Augustus himself, most of it marveling at trivial coincidences: that the day he first took power was the same day he died; that he died at Nola, in the house and room where his father Octavius had also died. People also made much of the number of his consulships, which equaled the combined total of Valerius Corvus and Gaius Marius; of his tribunician power, held continuously for thirty-seven years; of his title of imperator, won twenty-one times; and of his other honors, multiplied or newly invented. But among more thoughtful people his life drew both praise and blame. Some said that devotion to his adoptive father and the needs of a state where law no longer had any place had driven him into civil war — a war that could not have been prepared for, or won, by honest means. He had made many concessions to Antony, while avenging his father's killers, and many to Lepidus. Once Lepidus had sunk into feeble old age and Antony had been ruined by his own vices, there was no other remedy for a divided country than rule by one man. Yet he had set up the state not as a monarchy or a dictatorship, but under the name of "first citizen." The empire was bounded by ocean and distant rivers; the legions, provinces, fleets, everything was bound together as one system; there was justice for citizens, moderation toward allies; the city itself was magnificently adorned; very little was done by force, and that only to keep the rest at peace.
10| Others argued the opposite: that his devotion to his father and the crisis of the state were mere pretexts. In truth, ambition for power had driven him to win over the veterans with bribes, to raise a private army while still a young civilian, to corrupt a consul's legions, and to fake sympathy for the Pompeian faction. Then, once the senate's decree had handed him the fasces and a praetor's authority, and Hirtius and Pansa had died — whether killed by the enemy, or Pansa by poison poured into his wound, and Hirtius by his own soldiers with Caesar himself engineering the plot — he had seized both their armies. He had extorted the consulship from an unwilling senate, and turned the weapons given him against Antony instead against the state. There followed the proscription of citizens and the confiscation of land, acts not even praised by those who carried them out. Granted, the deaths of Cassius and the Bruti could be put down to paying off his father's enemies, even though private grudges ought to yield to the public good — but Pompey had been deceived by a pretense of peace, and Lepidus by a show of friendship; then Antony, lured in by the treaties of Tarentum and Brundisium and by marriage to Octavian's sister, had paid with his life for that deceitful alliance. Peace followed, no doubt, but it was a bloody peace: the disasters of Lollius and Varus, the killings in Rome of men like Varro, Egnatius, and Iullus. Nor was his own household spared: he had taken Nero's wife away from him, and mockingly consulted the priests whether it was proper for her to remarry while pregnant with a child not yet born; there was the extravagance of […] Vedius Pollio [text corrupt]; and finally Livia, a burden to the state as its "mother" and a stepmother to the house of the Caesars. He left nothing to the honor of the gods, wanting to be worshipped himself in temples, with statues, by priests and flamens. Not even Tiberius, they said, had been chosen as his successor out of affection or concern for the state, but because Augustus had seen through his arrogance and cruelty, and wanted to enhance his own glory by the contrast with the worst possible heir. Indeed, a few years earlier, when Augustus had again asked the senate to grant Tiberius tribunician power, he had — in an otherwise respectful speech — dropped a few remarks about Tiberius's bearing, habits, and way of life that amounted to reproach disguised as excuse. In any case, the burial was carried out according to custom, and a temple and divine honors were then decreed for Augustus.
11| The senate's pleas then turned to Tiberius. He spoke at length, with feigned modesty, about the sheer scale of the empire. Only the mind of the deified Augustus, he said, had been equal to a burden so vast; he himself, called by Augustus to share in the work, had learned from experience how hard and how much at fortune's mercy the task of governing everything was. So in a state supported by so many distinguished men, they should not lay everything on one man; several, sharing the labor, would manage the state's business more easily. There was more dignity than sincerity in this speech. Even where he was not trying to hide anything, Tiberius's words — whether by nature or habit — were always guarded and obscure; and now, straining to conceal his real feelings entirely, they became even more tangled in vagueness and ambiguity. The senators, whose only fear was that they might seem to understand him too well, poured out complaints, tears, and vows; they stretched out their hands to the gods, to the statue of Augustus, to Tiberius's own knees — until he ordered a document brought in and read aloud. It contained an account of the public resources: how many citizens and allies were under arms, how many fleets, kingdoms, provinces, what taxes and revenues there were, and what expenses and grants were owed. Augustus had written all of it out in his own hand, and had added the advice that the empire be kept within its current borders — whether from caution or from jealousy of any successor's glory is unclear.
12| While the senate was collapsing into the most abject pleading, Tiberius happened to remark that although he was not equal to the whole burden of the state, he would take responsibility for whatever part might be entrusted to him. At this Asinius Gallus said, "I ask you, Caesar, which part of the state you wish to be entrusted with." Startled by the unexpected question, Tiberius paused briefly; then, recovering himself, he answered that it would hardly suit his sense of modesty to pick and choose parts of a burden from which he would rather be excused altogether. Gallus — who had read the offense in Tiberius's face — replied that he had not asked in order to have him divide up something that could not be divided, but so that Tiberius would admit, in his own words, that the state was a single body and had to be governed by a single mind. He went on to praise Augustus, and reminded Tiberius himself of his own victories and of all he had achieved so admirably in civilian life over so many years. None of this softened Tiberius's anger. He had long disliked Gallus, suspecting that by marrying Vipsania, Marcus Agrippa's daughter and Tiberius's own former wife, he was aiming at more than a citizen's ambitions and had inherited his father Asinius Pollio's defiant temper.
13| After this, Lucius Arruntius, in a speech not very different from Gallus's, gave similar offense, even though Tiberius bore him no old grudge. Rather, he was suspicious of Arruntius simply because the man was rich, capable, possessed of fine talents, and correspondingly well regarded by the public. In fact, in his final conversations, Augustus, discussing who might be capable of reaching the highest position but would refuse it, or who was unequal to it but wanted it, or who was both equal to it and eager for it, had said that Manius Lepidus was capable but would decline, Asinius Gallus was eager but too small a man for it, and Lucius Arruntius was not unworthy and, given the chance, would dare to try. About the first two there is general agreement; some sources report Gnaeus Piso in Arruntius's place instead. All of them except Lepidus were eventually brought down by various charges engineered by Tiberius. Quintus Haterius and Mamercus Scaurus also touched a nerve in his suspicious mind — Haterius by saying, "How long, Caesar, will you allow the state to go without a head?", and Scaurus by remarking that there was hope the senate's pleas would not go unanswered, since Tiberius had not used his tribunician power to veto the consuls' motion. Tiberius immediately turned on Haterius; Scaurus, whom he in fact resented more bitterly, he passed over in silence. Worn down by the shouting of the whole senate and the pleading of individuals, he gradually gave way — not so far as to admit he was accepting the empire, but far enough to stop refusing and being asked. It is well known that Haterius, having gone to the Palatine to beg forgiveness and thrown himself at the knees of Tiberius as he walked, was nearly killed by the guards when Tiberius stumbled, whether tripped by Haterius's hands or by accident. Even this danger to so distinguished a man did not soften Tiberius, until Haterius appealed to Augusta and was protected by her earnest pleading on his behalf.
14| The senators lavished flattery on Livia too. Some proposed calling her Parent of the Country, others Mother of the Country; most thought Caesar's name should carry the addition "son of Julia." Tiberius kept insisting that honors for women should be kept modest, and that he would show the same restraint about honors offered to himself — but underneath he was anxious about jealousy, and read a woman's exalted rank as a diminishment of his own. He would not even allow her a lictor, and he blocked an altar to mark her adoption into the Julian family, along with other proposals of that sort. For Germanicus Caesar, though, he requested proconsular power, and sent envoys to confer it and at the same time console him for his grief at Augustus's death. He did not ask the same for Drusus, on the grounds that Drusus was already consul-elect and present in Rome. He nominated twelve candidates for the praetorship, the number handed down from Augustus, and when the senate urged him to increase it, he bound himself by oath never to exceed it.
15| Then for the first time elections were transferred from the Field of Mars to the senate. Until that day, though the emperor's judgment carried the most weight, some things had still been decided by the enthusiasm of the tribal assemblies. The people did not complain at losing this right, except in idle grumbling, and the senate, relieved of the bribery and squalid begging that elections had involved, held onto the new arrangement gladly — Tiberius keeping it moderate by recommending no more than four candidates who were to be elected without rejection or canvassing. Meanwhile the plebeian tribunes petitioned to stage games at their own expense, to be added to the calendar under Augustus's name and called the Augustalia. But the senate voted the money from the treasury and allowed the tribunes to wear triumphal dress through the circus — riding in a chariot was not permitted. Soon the annual staging of the festival passed to whichever praetor happened to hold jurisdiction over cases between citizens and foreigners.
16| That was the state of affairs in Rome when mutiny struck the legions in Pannonia. There was no new grievance behind it, only that a change of emperor seemed to offer license for disorder and the hope of rewards such as civil war brings. Three legions were together in summer camp under the command of Junius Blaesus, who, on hearing of Augustus's death and Tiberius's accession, had suspended the normal routine — whether out of mourning or celebration. From that point the soldiers grew unruly, quarrelsome, ready to listen to whoever spoke worst, and finally hungry for luxury and idleness, contemptuous of discipline and hard work. In the camp was a man named Percennius, once a leader of theater claques, then a common soldier, foul-mouthed and, from his old trade, skilled at stirring up crowds. He worked on minds too ignorant to know what their prospects were after Augustus, unsettling them little by little in nighttime talks, or as the day wore toward evening and the better men had drifted off, gathering the worst of them around him.
17| At last, with others now ready to help spread the mutiny, he began haranguing them like a man addressing a public meeting: why did they obey a handful of centurions and a smaller handful of tribunes like slaves? When would they dare demand a remedy, if not now, by approaching a new emperor still unsteady on his feet, with petitions or with weapons? Cowardice had done enough damage over the years — old men, many with bodies maimed by wounds, enduring thirty or forty years of service. Even discharge brought no end to soldiering: attached to the reserve standard under a different name, they went on suffering the same labors. And if a man survived all that, he was still dragged off to some distant land to receive, under the name of a farm allotment, nothing but waterlogged marsh or barren hillside. Soldiering itself was a brutal, unprofitable business: a life and a body priced at ten asses a day, and out of that they had to buy clothing, weapons, tents, and buy off the cruelty of centurions and exemption from fatigue duty. But floggings and wounds, harsh winters, grueling summers, savage war or a barren peace — those came free, forever. There was no relief except if soldiering were entered under fixed terms: a denarius a day in pay, discharge after sixteen years, no further holding under the standards, and the bonus paid out in cash right there in camp. Did the praetorian cohorts, who got two denarii a day and went home to their families after sixteen years, face greater dangers? He did not disparage guard duty in Rome — but here they themselves, among savage tribes, saw the enemy from their own tent flaps.
18| The crowd roared approval, each man goaded by his own grievance — some pointing to scars from the lash, others to their gray hair, most to their threadbare clothes and bare skin. At last their fury reached the point of plotting to merge three legions into one. Blocked by rivalry, since each man wanted that honor for his own legion, they turned instead to setting up all three eagles and the cohort standards together in one place. At the same time they piled up turf and built a platform, to make the gathering spot more conspicuous. While they were hurrying at this, Blaesus arrived. He rebuked them and held men back one by one, shouting: "Stain your hands with my blood instead — you will be committing a lesser crime by killing your commander than by deserting your emperor. Either I keep the loyalty of the legions alive, or by dying I hasten your repentance."
19| The turf kept piling up nonetheless, and had already risen chest-high, when at last, worn down by his stubbornness, they gave up the project. Blaesus, with considerable rhetorical skill, told them that the soldiers' demands ought to be carried to Caesar not through mutiny and riot; neither the old soldiers under the emperors of the past, nor they themselves under the deified Augustus, had ever asked for anything so unprecedented; and it was a poor moment to burden a new emperor just beginning his reign with such cares. But if they were determined to press, in peacetime, for concessions that not even the victors in the civil wars had demanded, why plot violence against the tradition of obedience, against the very law of discipline? Let them choose delegates and give their instructions in his presence. They shouted back that Blaesus's own son, a tribune, should undertake that mission and ask on the soldiers' behalf for discharge after sixteen years — the rest they would instruct him to raise once the first request had succeeded. With the young man gone, there was a modest lull; but the soldiers grew proud that the legate's son, as spokesman for the public cause, showed plainly enough that force had wrung from necessity what quiet request would never have obtained.
20| Meanwhile the companies sent ahead to Nauportum before the mutiny began, for road and bridge work and other duties, on hearing that the camp was in turmoil tore up their standards, plundered the neighboring villages and Nauportum itself — which was as good as a town — and when the centurions tried to restrain them, hounded them with mockery and abuse and finally with blows. Their fury fell hardest on Aufidienus Rufus, the camp prefect: they dragged him from his cart, loaded him with baggage, and drove him at the head of the column, jeering and asking whether he enjoyed carrying such immense loads on such long marches. Rufus, in fact, had long been a common soldier, then a centurion, then camp prefect, and he had been trying to bring back the old, harsh style of soldiering — a veteran of toil and hardship himself, and all the harsher for having endured it.
21| Their arrival reignited the mutiny, and roving bands began pillaging the surrounding country. Blaesus ordered a few of them, mainly those loaded down with plunder, flogged as a warning to the rest and locked up — for even then the legate still commanded the obedience of the centurions and the better men in the ranks. The prisoners struggled against the men dragging them off, clutched at the knees of bystanders, cried out the names of individuals, or the company, cohort, and legion each of them belonged to, shouting that the same fate hung over everyone. They heaped abuse on the legate, called on heaven and the gods, and left nothing undone to stir up resentment, pity, fear, and rage. The whole camp came running; they broke open the jail, freed the prisoners, and now mixed in with themselves deserters and men condemned on capital charges.
22| From there the violence blazed hotter, and the mutiny found more leaders. A common soldier named Vibulenus, hoisted on the shoulders of the men around him before Blaesus's platform, addressed the agitated crowd, tense to see what he would do: "You have given back light and breath to these innocent, wretched men — but who gives me back my brother, who gives me my brother's life? He was sent to you by the army of Germanicus about matters of common concern, and last night Blaesus had his throat cut by the gladiators he keeps and arms for the purpose of killing soldiers. Answer, Blaesus — where did you throw the body? Not even enemies begrudge burial. When I have poured out my grief with kisses, with tears, order me killed too, as long as these men are allowed to bury us — killed for no crime, but because we were looking out for the legions' interests."
23| He fanned the flames further, beating his chest and face with his hands as he wept. Then, once the men holding him up on their shoulders scattered, he flung himself headlong and rolled at the feet of one soldier after another, stirring up such panic and outrage that some soldiers seized the gladiators from Blaesus's household staff, others seized the rest of his slaves, while still others rushed off to search for the body. Had it not quickly become clear that no body could be found anywhere, that the slaves under torture denied any killing, and that Vibulenus had never had a brother at all, they would have come close to destroying the legate. Even so, they drove out the tribunes and the camp prefect, plundered the baggage of the men fleeing, and killed the centurion Lucilius, whom the soldiers had nicknamed "Fetch Another" in barracks humor, because when he broke a vine-staff over a soldier's back he would call out loudly for another, and then another again. The rest escaped by hiding, except for one man they kept, Julius Clemens, judged the right man to carry the soldiers' demands, thanks to his quick wit. Indeed the Eighth and Fifteenth legions were on the verge of drawing swords against each other, one demanding the death of a centurion nicknamed Sirpicus, the other defending him, until soldiers of the Ninth stepped in with pleas and, against those who scorned the pleas, with threats.
24| This news drove Tiberius—secretive as he was, and especially good at hiding grim developments—to send his son Drusus with the leading men of the state and two praetorian cohorts, without any firm instructions beyond acting as the situation required. The cohorts were reinforced with picked men beyond their usual strength. A large body of the praetorian cavalry was added, along with the pick of the Germans who then served as the emperor's bodyguard. With Drusus went Aelius Sejanus, prefect of the praetorians, made colleague to his father Strabo, a man of great influence with Tiberius, who was to guide the young man and hold out to everyone else the prospect of dangers and rewards. As Drusus approached, the legions came out to meet him as though on duty, but not joyfully, as was usual, and not gleaming with their decorations—instead squalid and grim-faced, their expressions, though meant to look like grief, closer to defiance.
25| Once he had entered the rampart, they set guards to secure the gates and posted armed bands at fixed points around the camp; the rest crowded around the tribunal in one huge mass. Drusus stood, motioning for silence. Whenever they looked back at the crowd, they roared out savage threats; then, catching sight of Caesar, they went quiet with fear. There was a confused murmur, a fierce shout, then sudden stillness—conflicting impulses made them by turns afraid and frightening. At last, when the uproar broke off, he read out his father's letter, which said that Tiberius held these bravest of legions, with whom he had endured so many campaigns, in special regard; that as soon as his grief allowed his mind to rest he would bring their demands before the Senate; that meanwhile he had sent his son to grant at once whatever could be granted immediately; the rest must be left to the Senate, which it was only right to regard as lacking neither generosity nor severity.
26| The assembly answered that they had given their demands to the centurion Clemens to deliver. He opened with discharge after sixteen years, rewards for completed service, a denarius as daily pay, and an end to keeping veterans under the standard. When Drusus pleaded that these were matters for the Senate and his father to decide, he was shouted down in confusion. Why had he come at all, if not to raise the soldiers' pay or ease their burdens—if he had no authority to grant any relief? Yet, by god, anyone had authority to flog and kill them! Tiberius used to fob off the legions' demands in Augustus's name; now Drusus had brought back the same old tricks. Would no one but sons under their fathers' thumb ever be sent to them? It was a fine new thing that a commander should refer only the soldiers' benefits to the Senate. Then let the Senate be consulted every time punishments or battles were ordered too—were rewards to lie with the masters and punishments with no judge at all?
27| Finally they left the tribunal, and whenever a praetorian soldier or a friend of Caesar crossed their path they shook their fists at him, as the cause of the discord and the start of the mutiny—most furious of all at Gnaeus Lentulus, since he, ahead of the others in age and military reputation, was believed to be stiffening Drusus's resolve and to have been first to reject these disgraceful demands on military discipline. Not long after, as he was leaving with Caesar and, foreseeing danger, making for the winter camp, they surrounded him, demanding to know where he was going—to the commander or to the Senate—so he could work against the legions' interests there too. At the same moment they pressed in and hurled stones. Already bleeding from a blow and certain he would die, he was saved only by the rush of the crowd that had come with Drusus.
28| A night heavy with menace and on the verge of breaking into violence was calmed by chance: the moon, in a clear sky, was suddenly seen to fade. The soldiers, not understanding the cause, took it as an omen bearing on their own situation, likening the eclipse to their own hardships, and believing their cause would prosper if the goddess's brightness and light were restored. So they raised a din of bronze clashing and the blare of trumpets and horns together; as the moon grew brighter or dimmer they rejoiced or grieved in turn. Then clouds rose and blocked the view, and, believing the moon buried in darkness, minds already shaken and prone to superstition once panic set in concluded that endless toil was being foretold them, and lamented that the gods had turned away from their crimes. Caesar decided to use this shift in mood, turning what chance had offered into a stroke of policy, and ordered the tents to be gone among. The centurion Clemens was summoned, along with others popular with the rank and file for honest conduct. These men worked their way in among the sentries, the pickets, the guards at the gates, offering hope and stirring fear. 'How long will we keep the emperor's son under siege? What end is there to this? Are we going to swear our oath to Percennius and Vibulenus? Will Percennius and Vibulenus hand out pay to the soldiers and land to those who've served their time? Will they, instead of the Neros and Drusi, seize the empire of the Roman people? Why not rather be first to repent, as we were last into blame? Demands made in common move slowly—earn favor for yourself alone, and you'll have it at once.' Stirred by this, and growing suspicious of one another, the men split apart—recruit from veteran, legion from legion. Then, little by little, their old habit of obedience returned: they abandoned the gates and carried back to their proper places the standards that had been gathered together when the mutiny began.
29| At daybreak Drusus called an assembly and, though no practiced speaker, with the bearing natural to his birth condemned what had happened before and approved the present mood. He said he would not be broken by threats and intimidation: if he saw them turning back to obedience, if he heard them as suppliants, he would write to his father urging him to receive the legions' pleas with a forgiving spirit. At their renewed request, Blaesus, along with Lucius Aponius, a Roman knight of Drusus's staff, and Justus Catonius, a senior centurion, were sent to Tiberius. Opinions were then divided: some thought they should wait for the envoys and in the meantime soothe the soldiers with kindness; others argued for harsher measures. A mob knows no moderation, they said—they must be terrified if they will not fear; once thoroughly cowed, they can be safely despised; while superstition still pressed on them, the commander should add fear of his own by removing the ringleaders of the mutiny. Drusus was by nature inclined to the harsher course: he had Vibulenus and Percennius summoned and ordered killed. Most accounts say their bodies were buried inside the commander's tent; others say they were thrown outside the rampart on display.
30| Then every man who had stood out as a chief troublemaker was hunted down, and some, wandering outside the camp, were cut down by centurions or by soldiers of the praetorian cohorts; others were handed over by their own companies as proof of loyalty. The soldiers' misery was made worse by an early winter with relentless, savage rain, so heavy that they could barely leave their tents, gather together, or even keep the standards upright as they were dragged about by wind and flood. Fear of divine anger lingered too—it seemed no accident that the stars dimmed and the storms raged against men who had sinned. There seemed no relief for their troubles except to abandon this cursed, polluted camp and, freed of the guilt, return each to his own winter quarters. First the Eighth Legion returned, then the Fifteenth; the Ninth had cried out that they should wait for Tiberius's letter, but then, left isolated when the others departed, chose on its own to anticipate the inevitable. And Drusus, without waiting for the envoys to return, since matters at hand had settled well enough, went back to Rome.
31| At almost the same time, and for the same reasons, the legions in Germany mutinied—more violently, the more numerous they were—with great hope that Germanicus Caesar would refuse to tolerate another man's rule and would put himself at the head of the legions, whose strength would carry everything before it. There were two armies on the bank of the Rhine: the upper, under the command of Gaius Silius; the lower, under the charge of Aulus Caecina. Overall command lay with Germanicus, who was then busy conducting the census of Gaul. Those under Silius watched the outcome of another army's mutiny with divided minds, waiting to see how fortune fell; but the lower army's soldiers slid into outright rage, the trouble starting with the Twenty-first and the Fifth, and drawing in the First and Twentieth Legions as well, since they were quartered together in the territory of the Ubii, idle or performing only light duties for the season. So, on hearing of Augustus's death, the home-bred rabble—recently levied in the city, used to a soft life, unable to bear hardship—filled the untried minds of the rest with their notions: now was the time for veterans to demand prompt discharge, for the young to demand higher pay, for all of them to demand an end to their miseries and revenge for the centurions' cruelty. This was not the work of one man, as Percennius had been among the Pannonian legions, nor spoken to timid soldiers glancing nervously at stronger armies elsewhere—here there were many mouths and many voices of mutiny: the fate of Rome, they said, lay in their own hands, the state grew through their victories, and it was to them that emperors owed their titles.
32| The commander did nothing to stop them: the madness of the many had stripped him of his resolve. Suddenly, in a frenzy, the men drew their swords and fell on the centurions—the oldest source of grievance among soldiers and the starting point of their savagery. They beat them down and flogged them, sixty men each, one for every centurion, to match the number; then, torn and mangled, some already dead, they threw them over the rampart or into the Rhine. Septimius, who had taken refuge at the tribunal and thrown himself at Caecina's feet, was hounded until he was handed over to be killed. Cassius Chaerea—later to win lasting fame among later generations for killing Gaius Caesar—then a fierce-spirited young man, cut his way through the armed men blocking him with his sword. No tribune, no camp prefect held any authority any longer; the men divided among themselves the watches, the guard duties, and whatever else current need required. To those who probed deeper into the soldiers' mood, this was the clearest sign of how vast and unappeasable the disturbance was: that they did not break into scattered groups or act on the impulse of a few, but flared up together and fell silent together, with such uniformity and steadiness that one would have thought them under command.
33| Meanwhile, as we said, word reached Germanicus in Gaul while he was taking the census that Augustus was dead. He was married to Augustus's granddaughter Agrippina and had several children by her; he himself was the son of Tiberius's brother Drusus, grandson of the empress Augusta. But he lived under the shadow of hidden hatred from his uncle and grandmother — hatred all the sharper for being unjust. Drusus was still remembered fondly by the Roman people, who believed that had he come to power, he would have restored the republic; and that same hope and goodwill now attached itself to Germanicus. He had a common touch, a remarkable warmth, utterly unlike Tiberius's guarded speech and haughty, inscrutable face. On top of this came the petty spite of women — Livia's stepmotherly needling of Agrippina, and Agrippina herself, a little too excitable, though her devotion to chastity and to her husband turned even her restless spirit toward good.
34| But the closer Germanicus stood to the height of hope, the harder he worked for Tiberius. He bound the neighboring Sequani and the Belgic tribes to Tiberius's name by oath. Then, hearing of mutiny among the legions, he set out at once and met them just outside the camp, eyes fixed on the ground as if in shame. Once inside the rampart, discordant complaints rose up on every side. Some men grabbed his hand as if to kiss it, then pushed his fingers into their mouths so he could feel their bare, toothless gums; others showed limbs bent with age. Since the assembled crowd seemed too jumbled to make sense of, he ordered them to break into their companies, so they would hear his answer better; and had the standards brought forward so the cohorts could at least be told apart. They obeyed slowly. Then he began by honoring Augustus and moved on to Tiberius's victories and triumphs, dwelling with special praise on the glorious things Tiberius had done with these very legions in Germany. He praised the unity of Italy and the loyalty of Gaul: nowhere any unrest or discord. This they heard in silence, or with only a low murmur.
35| But when he touched on the mutiny — where was military discipline now, where the honor of the old order, what had become of the tribunes and centurions — they all bared their bodies at once, pointing to scars from wounds and marks from the lash. Then, in a jumble of voices, they cried out about the price they paid for leave, their meager pay, the harshness of the labor, naming it all: the rampart, the ditches, hauling fodder, timber, firewood — every task demanded either by necessity or simply to keep idle camps busy. Loudest of all was the shout of the veterans, men with thirty years' service or more, begging him to give the worn-out some relief, not to let them die doing the same labor, but to end such long service with some provision, not poverty, at the finish. Some even demanded the money left them in Augustus's will, calling down blessings on Germanicus — and hinted they were ready to make him emperor if he wanted it. At that, as though the very suggestion contaminated him, he leapt headlong from the platform. They blocked his way with their weapons, threatening him if he didn't turn back; but he shouted he would rather die than break faith, tore a sword from his side, and was raising it to plunge into his own chest when the men nearest him seized his hand and held it back by force. The mob at the fringes, packed together — and, hard as it is to believe — some individuals pressed closer and urged him to strike; and a soldier named Calusidius offered his own drawn sword, saying it was sharper. Even to men in their fury this seemed savage and depraved, and in the pause his friends managed to hustle Caesar into his tent.
36| There they debated a remedy, for word came that envoys were being sent to draw the upper army into the same cause, and that the town of the Ubii was marked for destruction, with hands already stained by plunder ready to break loose into Gaul. Fear grew worse because the enemy knew of the Roman mutiny and would invade if the river frontier were abandoned; yet arming the auxiliaries and allies against the withdrawing legions risked civil war. Strict punishment was dangerous, blanket concession disgraceful: whether nothing or everything was granted the soldiers, the state hung in the balance either way. So, weighing it all, they agreed to write letters in the emperor's name: discharge for those with twenty years' service, release from oath (but retained under the standard, exempt from all but defending against the enemy) for those with sixteen, and the legacies they had demanded paid out, doubled.
37| The soldiers sensed this was invented for the moment and demanded it at once. Discharge was hurried through by the tribunes; the payment was put off until each man reached winter quarters. The Fifth and Twenty-first would not budge until the money was paid on the spot, in their summer camp, scraped together from the travel-funds of Germanicus's friends and Caesar's own purse. The commander Caecina led the First and Twentieth legions back into the territory of the Ubii — a shameful march, with the plundered war-chests of the emperor carried among the standards and eagles. Germanicus then went on to the upper army and had the Second, Thirteenth, and Sixteenth legions swear the oath without any hesitation. The men of the Fourteenth had wavered briefly, but were offered the money and discharge before they even demanded it.
38| Among the Chauci, meanwhile, detachments drawn from the mutinous legions on garrison duty began stirring up trouble themselves, and were checked for a while by the immediate execution of two soldiers. The camp prefect Manius Ennius had ordered it — more on his own authority than by any right granted him. But when the unrest swelled again, he fled, was found out, and finding no safe hiding place, turned to boldness for his defense: it was not the prefect they were assaulting, he told them, but Germanicus their general, Tiberius their emperor. Those blocking him fell back in fright; he grabbed a standard, turned it toward the river, and shouting that any man who left the ranks would be treated as a deserter, led the troubled, cowed men back to winter quarters, having dared nothing further.
39| Meanwhile the senate's envoys arrived, finding Germanicus already back at the Altar of the Ubii, where the First and Twentieth legions had gone into winter quarters together with the recently discharged veterans still held under the standard. Fear seized these men, already jumpy and half out of their minds with guilty conscience: the envoys, they thought, had come by the senate's order to undo everything the mutiny had wrung from them. As the mob is quick to pin the blame on someone, even falsely, they accused Munatius Plancus, a former consul and head of the delegation, of being the author of the senate's decree. In the dead of night they surrounded the house where Germanicus kept the standard and began clamoring for it, then rushed the door and broke it down, dragged Caesar from his bed, and forced him at the point of death to hand the standard over. Afterward, roaming the streets, they ran into the envoys, who had heard the uproar and were hurrying toward Germanicus. They heaped abuse on them and made ready to kill them, Plancus above all, whose rank had kept him from fleeing fast enough; his only refuge was the camp of the First Legion. There he clung to the standards and the eagle, trusting to their sanctity to protect him, and had the eagle-bearer Calpurnius not fended off the worst of the violence — a thing rare even among enemies — a Roman envoy would have stained a Roman altar with his own blood, in a Roman camp. Only at daybreak, once commander and soldiers and what had truly happened were plain to see, did Germanicus enter the camp, order Plancus brought to him, and receive him on the tribunal. There he denounced the whole business as a mad fit of self-destruction — not the soldiers' anger rising again, he said, but the anger of the gods — and explained why the envoys had come. He spoke movingly and at length of the sanctity owed an embassy, and of the grave, undeserved ordeal Plancus himself had suffered, and of the disgrace now weighing on the legion; and, with the assembly more stunned than calm, he sent the envoys off under escort of the auxiliary cavalry.
40| In that atmosphere of fear, everyone blamed Germanicus for not marching straight to the upper army, where obedience held and he could find support against the rebels: there had already been more than enough error in the discharges, the money, the soft handling. And if he cared nothing for his own safety, why keep his infant son and pregnant wife among madmen who trampled every human right? Let him at least return them to their grandfather and to the state. For a long time his wife refused, protesting that she was Augustus's own descendant and no coward before danger; but at last, weeping, he embraced her pregnant body and their little son together and forced her to leave. A pitiful procession of women moved off — the general's wife in flight, carrying their small son at her breast, the wives of his friends around her in tears, dragged along with her, and those left behind no less mournful.
41| It was not the look of a triumphant Caesar, nor of his own camp, but something like a captured city — the groans and wailing reached even the soldiers' ears and drew them from their tents. What was that pitiful sound? What was so terrible? Look — women of high rank, with no centurion for escort, no soldier, none of the retinue due a commander's wife, setting off for the Treviri and the protection of foreigners. Shame followed, and pity, and the memory of her father Agrippa, her grandfather Augustus, her father-in-law Drusus; and of Agrippina herself, so famously fertile and so unimpeachably chaste. And then the infant, born in camp and raised among the tents of the legions, whom the soldiers called by their own nickname, Caligula, because he was usually dressed in the little soldier's boots to win over the rank and file. But nothing moved them so much as their resentment at the Treviri: they begged her, they blocked her way, pleading with her to turn back and stay — some running to Agrippina, most streaming back to Germanicus. And he, still raw with grief and anger, began to speak to the men gathered around him.
42| 'My wife and son are not dearer to me than my father and the state. But he has his own majesty to protect him, and the rest of Rome's armies to defend him. My wife and children I would gladly offer up to death for your glory — but now I am sending them far away from your madness, so that whatever crime is about to happen falls only on my blood, and so that killing the great-grandson of Augustus and murdering the daughter-in-law of Tiberius does not make you more guilty than you already are. What have you left undone or unviolated these past days? What name shall I give this gathering? Shall I call you soldiers — you who have surrounded your commander's son with a rampart and weapons? Or citizens — you who have thrown the Senate's authority into the dirt like this? You have broken the rights that even enemies respect, the sanctity of an envoy, the law of nations. The deified Julius put down a mutiny with a single word, calling the men who refused their oath citizens instead of soldiers. The deified Augustus terrified the legions at Actium with a look, a glance. We are not yet what they were — but even so, coming from them as we do, it would already be strange and shameful if the soldiers of Spain or Syria despised us. And you — the First Legion and the Twentieth, you who received your standards from Tiberius himself, you who have fought beside me in so many battles, been rewarded so richly — is this the thanks you bring your commander? Is this the news I must carry to my father while he hears only good news from every other province — that his own recruits, his own veterans, are not satisfied with discharge, not satisfied with money, that here alone centurions are killed, tribunes driven out, legates locked up, camps and rivers stained with blood, and I myself drag out a precarious life among men who hate me?
43| 'Why, on the first day of this assembly, did you snatch away the sword I meant to drive into my own chest, my thoughtless friends? The man who offered me his blade was kinder and more loving. At least I would have died before I knew the full extent of my army's crimes. You would have chosen a leader who, while letting my death go unpunished, would still have avenged Varus and his three legions. God forbid that the honor and glory of saving the Roman name and crushing the tribes of Germany should fall to the Belgians, however eagerly they offer. Your spirit, deified Augustus, now received into heaven — yours, father Drusus, your memory — should work through these very soldiers, in whom shame and the old glory are beginning to stir again, to wash away this stain and turn their rage against the enemy instead of against their own. And you too, whose faces I now see changed, whose hearts I see changed — if you will give back the envoys to the Senate, obedience to your commander, my wife and son to me, then separate yourselves from the troublemakers, break away from the mutinous. That will be lasting proof of repentance; that will be the bond of your loyalty.'
44| At this they begged, on their knees, admitting the truth of every charge against them: let him punish the guilty, forgive those who had merely stumbled, and lead them against the enemy. Let his wife be recalled, let the legions' foster-child return, and let him not be handed over to the Gauls as a hostage. Germanicus made excuses for Agrippina's return — her advanced pregnancy and the winter — but promised his son would come; the rest, he said, they must settle themselves. Transformed, they scattered, and dragged the worst ringleaders in chains to Gaius Caetronius, commander of the First Legion, who tried and sentenced each man in this fashion: the legions stood assembled with swords drawn; the accused was displayed on the platform by a tribune; if the men shouted him guilty, he was thrown down and cut to pieces. The soldiers took pleasure in the killing, as if it absolved them, and Germanicus did not stop them, since he had given no order himself and so bore neither the blame for the cruelty nor the resentment it earned. Following this example, the veterans were soon after sent into Raetia, ostensibly to defend the province against the threatening Suebi, but really to pull them away from a camp still savage — though the cure was hardly gentler than the memory of the crime. Then Germanicus dealt with the centurionate. Each man was called by the commander, who asked his name, rank, birthplace, years of service, his conduct in battle, and displayed any decorations he held. If the tribunes and the legion approved his diligence and integrity, he kept his rank; where they charged him, by common agreement, with greed or cruelty, he was discharged.
45| With order restored among the troops present, no small task remained because of the savagery of the Fifth and Twenty-first legions, wintering at the sixtieth milestone, in the place called Vetera. These had been the first to begin the mutiny; the most atrocious crimes had been committed by their hands; and unlike the others, they were neither frightened by the punishment of their fellow soldiers nor moved to repentance — they kept their rage. So Caesar prepared to send arms, a fleet, and allied troops down the Rhine, ready to settle the matter by war if they refused to obey.
46| Meanwhile at Rome, where the outcome in Illyricum was not yet known, and word had come of the mutiny of the German legions, the anxious city blamed Tiberius: while he toyed with the senate and people — weak, unarmed — with pretended delay, the army was in open discord, and the immature authority of two young men could not contain it. He himself should have gone and confronted them with the majesty of the emperor; men who had known through long experience a ruler at once supremely severe and supremely generous would have yielded before him. Could Augustus, worn out with age, travel to Germany again and again, while Tiberius, in the prime of life, sat in the Senate quibbling over the senators' words? Enough had been done to secure the obedience of the city; the soldiers' spirits needed soothing if they were to accept peace willingly.
47| Against such talk Tiberius stood immovable and fixed in his resolve: he would not abandon the capital, nor stake himself and the state on chance. Many different anxieties gnawed at him. The army in Germany was the stronger, that in Pannonia the nearer; the one was backed by the resources of Gaul, the other threatened Italy itself. Which should he favor? And he must not inflame either by seeming to slight it. But by approaching both through his sons, his own majesty stayed intact — and majesty commands more respect the further off it is. At the same time, the young men had the excuse of referring certain matters to their father, and those who resisted Germanicus or Drusus could still be softened or broken by Tiberius himself — what other resource would there be if they had spurned the emperor? Still, as though on the very point of setting out, he chose his companions, gathered baggage, fitted out ships — then, pleading winter or business in one excuse after another, he deceived first the shrewd, then the common people, and longest of all, the provinces.
48| Germanicus, meanwhile, though his army was now assembled and vengeance against the mutineers prepared, thought it best to give them more time, in case a recent example led them to save themselves. He sent word ahead to Caecina that he was coming with a strong force, and that unless the guilty were punished beforehand, he would resort to indiscriminate slaughter. Caecina read this secretly to the eagle-bearers, standard-bearers, and the most loyal men in camp, and urged them to spare everyone from disgrace and themselves from death — for in peacetime motives and merits were weighed, but once war broke out, the innocent fell alongside the guilty without distinction. They sounded out those they judged suitable, and once they saw the greater part of the legions still loyal, they fixed, with the legate's approval, a time to fall with the sword on the worst men, the ones most inclined to mutiny. At a given signal they burst into the tents and cut down the unsuspecting, and no one but those in on the plot knew where the slaughter began or where it would end.
49| Of all the civil bloodshed that has ever occurred, this had the strangest face. It came not in battle, not from opposing camps, but from the very same tents — men who had eaten together by day and slept side by side by night now split into factions and hurled weapons at one another. The shouting, the wounds, the blood were plain to see; the cause stayed hidden; chance ruled the rest. Some good men, too, were cut down, once it became clear who the target was and the worst men had also snatched up arms. No legate, no tribune was there to check it; the mob was left free to act, to take revenge, to glut itself. Soon after, Germanicus entered the camp and, weeping openly, called it not a cure but a catastrophe, and ordered the bodies burned. Even now the men's fierce spirits were seized with a longing to march against the enemy, as atonement for their madness — the only way, they felt, to appease the ghosts of their fellow soldiers was to take honorable wounds in guilty chests. Caesar followed the men's eagerness, and, having bridged the river, sent across twelve thousand men from the legions, twenty-six allied cohorts, and eight squadrons of cavalry — troops whose discipline had stayed untouched by the mutiny.
50| The Germans nearby were relaxed and unsuspecting, kept apart from us first by mourning for Augustus, then by our own quarrels. But the Roman column moved fast, cut through the Caesian Forest and the frontier line begun by Tiberius, pitched camp on the line itself, with a rampart at front and rear and felled timber protecting the flanks. From there it passed through dark forest tracts, and debated between two routes — the short, familiar one, or the more difficult, untried one, and therefore unwatched by the enemy. They chose the longer road and hurried everything else along, since scouts had reported that this was a festival night for the Germans, given over to feasting and celebration. Caecina was ordered to go ahead with the light-armed cohorts and clear away obstacles in the woods; the legions followed at a modest distance. The night helped them, bright with stars, and they reached the villages of the Marsi and threw a ring of outposts around them while the Germans still lay sprawled in their beds and by their tables, with no fear, no sentries posted — everything was so carelessly scattered, with no dread of war, and not even peace except the loose, slack peace of drunken men.
51| To spread the devastation wider, Caesar split his eager legions into four columns and laid waste a stretch of country fifty miles across with sword and fire. Neither sex nor age drew any pity: shrines and profane places alike, and the temple famous among those tribes that they called Tanfana's, were leveled to the ground. The soldiers took no wounds, only cut down men half-asleep, unarmed, or scattered in flight. The slaughter roused the Bructeri, the Tubantes, and the Usipetes, who occupied the forest passes through which the army had to return. The general knew this and advanced ready for march and battle together. Part of the cavalry and the auxiliary cohorts led the way, then the First Legion; in the middle, guarding the baggage, the Twenty-first held the left flank and the Fifth the right; the Twentieth Legion secured the rear, and the rest of the allies followed behind. The enemy stayed still while the column was still stretched out through the forest passes, then made light attacks on the flanks and front before hurling their whole force at the rear. The light cohorts were thrown into disorder by the dense German masses, until Caesar rode up to the Twentieth and shouted that this was the moment to wipe out the memory of their mutiny: press on, hurry, turn their guilt into glory. Their spirits caught fire; in a single charge they broke through the enemy, drove them into open ground, and cut them down. Meanwhile the vanguard cleared the forest and fortified a camp. After that the march was quiet, and the soldiers, trusting their recent success and forgetting the earlier one, were settled into winter quarters.
52| The news reached Tiberius and stirred both joy and worry: he was glad the mutiny had been crushed, but it galled him that Germanicus had won the soldiers' favor by handing out money and speeding up their discharge, and that he had also won glory in war. Still, he reported the achievements to the senate and said a good deal about Germanicus's courage, though the words seemed more dressed up for show than felt from the heart. He praised Drusus and the end of the Illyrian revolt more briefly, but in a more earnest and heartfelt speech. And he kept in force everything Germanicus had granted the troops, even among the armies in Pannonia.
53| That same year Julia died, the woman her father Augustus had long ago shut away on the island of Pandateria for her immorality, and later in the town of the Regini on the Sicilian strait. She had once been married to Tiberius, back when Gaius and Lucius Caesar were still thriving, and she had scorned him as beneath her — the real reason, more than any other, that Tiberius withdrew to Rhodes. Once he gained power, he let her die of poverty and slow wasting, exiled, disgraced, and — after the killing of Postumus Agrippa — stripped of any hope, reckoning that a death so far from Rome, after so long an exile, would pass unnoticed. He showed the same cruelty toward Sempronius Gracchus, a man of noble family, sharp-witted, and eloquent in a corrupt way, who had seduced this same Julia while she was married to Marcus Agrippa. And that was not the end of his lust: once she was given to Tiberius, the stubborn adulterer kept stoking her defiance and her hatred of her husband; and the letter Julia wrote to her father Augustus attacking Tiberius was believed to have been composed by Gracchus. So he was banished to Cercina, an island in the African sea, where he endured fourteen years of exile. Then soldiers were sent to kill him, and found him on a headland, expecting nothing good. When they arrived he asked for a short time to write his last wishes to his wife Alliaria, and then offered his neck to the executioners — dying with a steadiness not unworthy of the name Sempronius, though his life had fallen far short of it. Some say the soldiers were sent not from Rome but by Lucius Asprenas, proconsul of Africa, on Tiberius's orders, since he had hoped, vainly, that the blame for the killing could be turned onto Asprenas.
54| That same year saw a new priesthood added, the Augustal Brotherhood, just as Titus Tatius long ago had founded the Titian Brotherhood to preserve the Sabine rites. Twenty-one men were chosen by lot from the leading citizens; Tiberius, Drusus, Claudius, and Germanicus were added besides. The Augustal Games, held then for the first time, were disrupted by a quarrel between rival actors. Augustus had indulged that kind of entertainment to please Maecenas, who was infatuated with Bathyllus; and Augustus himself was not averse to such pursuits, thinking it fitting for a ruler to mix in the pleasures of the common people. Tiberius took a different path in his own conduct, but did not yet dare turn a people softened by so many years toward sterner ways.
55| Under the consulship of Drusus Caesar and Gaius Norbanus, a triumph was voted for Germanicus while the war was still going on. He had been preparing with all his strength for a summer campaign, but he moved it up, striking the Chatti suddenly at the start of spring. Hope had arisen that the enemy was split between Arminius and Segestes, both men notorious — one for his treachery toward us, the other for his loyalty. Arminius was the troublemaker of Germany; Segestes had warned more than once that rebellion was being planned, most recently at the final banquet before the tribes took up arms, and had urged Varus to arrest him, Arminius, and the other chiefs together, arguing that the common people would dare nothing once their leaders were removed, and that this would give Varus time to sort the guilty from the innocent. But Varus fell to fate and to the violence of Arminius. Segestes, though drawn into the war by the consensus of his people, remained at odds with it, his private grudge sharpened by the fact that Arminius had carried off his daughter, who had been promised to another man: a hated son-in-law to a hostile father-in-law, so that what would bind loving families together only stoked the anger between enemies.
56| So Germanicus handed over to Caecina four legions, five thousand auxiliaries, and hastily gathered bands of Germans living on our side of the Rhine. He himself led an equal number of legions and twice as many allied troops; after building a fort on the site of his father's old post on Mount Taunus, he pushed a lightly equipped army swiftly into the country of the Chatti, leaving Lucius Apronius behind to secure the roads and river crossings. The weather — rare for that region — was dry, the rivers low, and his advance went smoothly, though he feared rain and rising rivers on the way back. But he caught the Chatti so completely by surprise that those too weak by age or sex to flee were captured or killed on the spot. The younger men had swum across the river Adrana and tried to keep the Romans from building a bridge; driven off by catapults and arrows, and after fruitless attempts to negotiate peace, some deserted to Germanicus while the rest abandoned their villages and scattered into the forests. Caesar burned Mattium, the tribe's chief town, ravaged the open country, and turned back toward the Rhine — the enemy not daring to harass the retreating column, as was their habit whenever they yielded more from cunning than fear. The Cherusci had meant to help the Chatti, but Caecina's marching and countermarching frightened them off; and when the Marsi ventured to fight, he beat them back in a successful engagement.
57| Not long after, envoys came from Segestes asking for help against the force of his own people, who had him under siege, since Arminius carried more weight among them for urging war — for among barbarians, the bolder a man is, the more trusted he is, and the more he counts when trouble stirs. Segestes had sent his son Segimundus along with the envoys, but the young man hesitated out of guilty conscience: in the year the Germans revolted he had been made a priest at the altar of the Ubii and had torn off his priestly bands to flee to the rebels. Still, drawn by hope of Roman clemency, he carried his father's message and, once received kindly, was sent with an escort to the Gallic bank. For Germanicus it was worth turning his column around: he fought against the besiegers and rescued Segestes along with a large band of relatives and dependents. Among them were women of high birth, including the wife of Arminius, who was also the daughter of Segestes — she showed the spirit of a wife rather than a daughter, neither breaking into tears nor pleading aloud, her hands folded across her lap, staring at the belly swollen with child. They also brought spoils from Varus's disaster, given as plunder to many of those now surrendering; and Segestes himself came, an imposing figure, fearless in the memory of his good faith toward us.
58| His words ran something like this: 'This is not the first day I have shown loyalty and constancy toward the Roman people. Ever since the deified Augustus gave me citizenship, I have chosen my friends and enemies by what served your interests — not out of hatred for my own country, since traitors are despised even by those they favor, but because I judged that Romans and Germans shared the same good, and that peace served better than war. So I accused Arminius, the man who carried off my daughter and violated your treaty, before Varus, who then commanded the army. Put off by the general's slowness, and finding too little protection in the law, I demanded that he arrest me, Arminius, and our fellow conspirators — that night is my witness, and I wish to God it had been my last. What followed can only be mourned, not defended. Still, I put Arminius in chains myself, and endured chains put on me by his faction. And now, at the first chance to reach you, I put the old order ahead of the new, quiet ahead of turmoil — not for reward, but to clear myself of treachery, and also to serve as a fit go-between for the German people, should they prefer regret to ruin. For my son's youth and error I beg forgiveness; my daughter, I admit, was brought here by necessity. It will be for you to judge which weighs more — what she conceived from Arminius, or what she was born from me.' Caesar answered gently, promising safety to Segestes's children and relatives and a home for the man himself in the old province. He led his army back and, on Tiberius's proposal, took the title of Imperator. Arminius's wife bore a son: the boy was raised at Ravenna, and I will tell in due course what mockery he later suffered.
59| News spread of Segestes's surrender and his kind reception, and it was received with hope or grief depending on whether each man had wanted the war or not. Arminius, already violent by nature, was driven half-mad by the loss of his wife and the child she carried into slavery with her. He raced through the Cherusci demanding war against Segestes, war against Caesar. He held nothing back: what a fine father, he sneered, what a great commander, what a brave army — and all those hands together had carried off one poor woman. He himself had brought down three legions, three commanders. He wasn't fighting by treachery or against pregnant women, but openly, against armed men. Roman standards could still be seen hanging in the groves of Germany, offered up to the gods of the fathers. Let Segestes go on farming that conquered riverbank, let him get his son's priesthood back — the Germans would never forgive the sight of rods and axes and the toga between the Elbe and the Rhine. Other nations, ignorant of Roman rule, knew nothing of its punishments or its taxes; but the Germans had thrown that off, and the one they worshipped as a god, Augustus, had gone away empty-handed, and so had Tiberius, his chosen heir — so why should they fear a green boy or a mutinous army? If they loved their homeland, their ancestors, their old ways, more than masters and new colonies, let them follow Arminius toward glory and freedom rather than Segestes toward shameful slavery.
60| These words stirred not only the Cherusci but the neighboring tribes as well, and drew in Inguiomerus, Arminius's uncle, who carried old standing with the Romans — which frightened Germanicus all the more. To keep the war from crashing down on him all at once, he sent Caecina with forty Roman cohorts through the Bructeri to the river Ems, splitting the enemy's attention, while the prefect Pedo led the cavalry along the borders of the Frisians. Germanicus himself loaded four legions onto ships and carried them across the lakes; infantry, cavalry, and fleet all met at the appointed river. The Chauci offered auxiliaries and were taken into the ranks. Lucius Stertinius, sent by Germanicus with a light detachment, scattered the Bructeri as they were burning their own land, and in the middle of the killing and plundering, recovered the eagle that the Nineteenth Legion had lost when Varus fell. From there the troops pressed on into the farthest Bructeran lands, ravaging the whole stretch between the Ems and the Lippe, close by the Teutoburg Forest, where Varus and his legions were said to lie still unburied.
61| A longing seized Germanicus to pay the last honors to the soldiers and their commander, and the whole army with him was moved to pity, thinking of relatives, friends, and the plain hazards of war that fall on every man. He sent Caecina ahead to scout the hidden paths of the forest and lay bridges and causeways over the wet marshland and treacherous plains. Then they entered the grim place, ugly to see and to remember. Varus's first camp, with its broad sweep and measured headquarters, showed the work of three full legions. Further on, a half-fallen rampart and shallow ditch marked where the shrunken remnant had made its last stand. In the middle of the field lay whitening bones, scattered or piled up, just as the men had fled or stood their ground. Broken weapons lay nearby, and the limbs of horses, and skulls nailed to tree trunks. In the neighboring groves stood the barbarians' altars, where they had slaughtered the tribunes and senior centurions. Survivors of the disaster, men who had escaped the fighting or their chains, pointed out where the commanders had fallen, where the eagles had been seized, where Varus took his first wound, and where he found death by his own unlucky hand; from what platform Arminius had made his speech, how many gallows he'd raised for prisoners, which pits he'd used, and how he had mocked the standards and the eagles in his arrogance.
62| So the Roman army that was present, in the sixth year after the disaster, buried the bones of three legions — no one could tell whether he was covering a stranger's remains or his own — treating them all as kin, as blood relations, their grief mixed with rising fury at the enemy. Germanicus laid the first turf on the burial mound himself, offering the dead a most welcome tribute and sharing in the grief of those present. Tiberius did not approve. Perhaps he read everything Germanicus did in the worst light, or perhaps he believed the army, faced with the image of the unburied dead, would be slower to fight and more afraid of the enemy — and that a commander invested with the augurate and its ancient rites should not have touched funeral rites himself.
63| But Germanicus, following Arminius as he withdrew into pathless country, ordered the cavalry forward the moment the chance came, to seize the plain the enemy held. Arminius had warned his men to gather and stay close to the woods, then suddenly wheeled around; next he gave the signal to those he had hidden in the forest to burst out. The cavalry, thrown by this new formation, panicked; the reserve cohorts sent to help were themselves swept up and driven back by the fleeing horsemen, deepening the chaos. They were being pushed into a marsh well known to the winning side, treacherous to those who didn't know it, until Germanicus brought the legions up in battle order — this struck fear into the enemy and gave the soldiers confidence, and both sides drew apart on equal terms. Soon after, he led the army back to the Ems and shipped the legions home the way he had brought them; part of the cavalry was ordered to make for the Rhine along the ocean shore. Caecina, leading his own troops, was warned — though he was returning by a route he knew — to cross the Long Bridges as quickly as possible. This was a narrow causeway through vast marshes, built long ago by Lucius Domitius; the rest of the ground was muddy, clinging with heavy mire or crossed by uncertain streams. Around it rose gently sloping woods, and Arminius now filled them, having outpaced the Romans by taking shortcuts while their men marched slowly, weighed down with packs and weapons. Caecina, unsure how to repair the bridges rotted by age and beat off the enemy at the same time, decided to pitch camp where he stood, so some men could begin the work while others began the fight.
64| The barbarians tried to break through the pickets and fall on the men working the fortifications; when checked, they circled round and struck from every side, and the shouts of laborers and fighters mixed together. Everything favored the barbarians and worked against the Romans: the ground was a deep bog, unstable underfoot, slick for men advancing, and their bodies were weighed down by armor; they couldn't even hurl their javelins properly standing in water. The Cherusci, by contrast, were used to fighting in marshes, tall of limb, with long spears that could wound even from a distance. Night finally pulled the legions, already giving ground, out of a losing fight. The Germans, tireless in success, took no rest even then, but diverted every stream flowing down from the surrounding ridges onto the low ground, drowning what the Romans had built and doubling the soldiers' labor to undo the flooding. This was Caecina's fortieth year of service, whether obeying orders or giving them; he knew how uncertain fortune could be, both good and bad, and so he wasn't rattled. Turning the situation over, he found only one solution: pen the enemy inside the woods until the wounded and the heavier baggage train could go ahead. Between the mountains and the marshes stretched a plain wide enough to hold a thin battle line. He placed the Fifth Legion on the right flank, the Twenty-First on the left, the First to lead the column, the Twentieth to guard the rear.
65| The night passed uneasily for both sides, but differently. The barbarians filled the valleys and echoing woods below with feasting, joyful singing, and savage howls; among the Romans the fires burned low, voices came broken and scattered, and the men lay scattered along the rampart or wandered among the tents, more sleepless than watchful. A grim dream terrified the commander: he seemed to see Quintilius Varus, smeared with blood, rising out of the marshes, and to hear him calling — but Caecina did not follow, and pushed away the hand Varus reached toward him. At first light the legions sent to the flanks abandoned their position, whether from fear or defiance, and hastily seizing the open ground beyond the marshes. Arminius, though he had a clear path to charge, did not rush in at once. But once he saw the baggage train stuck in the mud and ditches, the soldiers thrown into disorder around it, the ranks losing their order, and everyone — as happens at such moments — acting for himself and slow to hear commands, he ordered the Germans to break in, shouting, 'There is Varus, and legions bound by the same fate again!' As he spoke he cut through the column with his picked men, aiming his blows above all at the horses. Slipping in their own blood and the slick mud of the marsh, the horses threw their riders and scattered everyone in their path, trampling the fallen. The worst struggle was around the eagles, which could neither be carried forward against the storm of spears nor planted firm in the miry ground. Caecina, while trying to hold the line together, had his horse killed under him and was about to be surrounded when the First Legion threw itself in the way. The enemy's own greed helped the Romans — they broke off the killing to chase plunder — and the legions struggled through, as evening fell, onto open, solid ground. But this was not the end of their miseries. They had to build a rampart and gather earth for it, though they had lost most of the tools for digging or cutting turf; there were no tents for the companies, no dressings for the wounded. Sharing out food fouled with mud or blood, they mourned in the deathly darkness, with so many thousands of men left, it seemed, only one more day to live.
66| By chance a horse broke loose and, panicked by the shouting, ran wild, knocking down some men in its path. This caused such alarm — men believing the Germans had broken in — that everyone rushed for the gates, the rear gate above all, since it faced away from the enemy and offered a safer escape. Caecina, learning the fear was groundless, still couldn't stop the men with authority, pleading, or even force, so he threw himself across the threshold of the gate; pity finally held them back, since they would have had to trample their commander's body to pass. At the same time the tribunes and centurions convinced them the panic was false.
67| He gathered the men at headquarters and told them to hear him out in silence, given the hour and the danger. Their only safety, he said, lay in fighting—but fighting with judgment. They should stay inside the rampart until the enemy, hoping to storm it, came close enough; then they would break out on every side, and that breakout would carry them to the Rhine. If they ran instead, they'd find more forest, deeper swamps, and the enemy's fury waiting for them—while victory meant honor and glory. He reminded them of everything dear at home and everything honorable in camp, and said nothing of their setbacks. Then, starting with his own horse, he handed over the horses—his own first, then those of the legates and tribunes—without favoritism, to the bravest fighters, so that they, and then the infantry, could charge the enemy.
68| The Germans were no less restless, driven by hope, greed, and clashing advice from their leaders. Arminius wanted to let the Romans march out and then trap them again in the wet, broken ground; Inguiomerus, harsher and more to the liking of the tribesmen, urged storming the rampart outright—the place would fall easily, he said, yielding more prisoners and plunder left untouched. So at daybreak they filled in the ditches, threw hurdles across, and clawed at the top of the rampart, while only a few soldiers stood above them, seemingly frozen with fear. But once the Germans were caught in the fortifications, the signal was given to the cohorts, and horns and trumpets blared together. Then, with a shout and a charge, the Romans swarmed around the Germans' rear, taunting them—no forests or swamps here, but level ground and evenly matched gods. The enemy had been picturing an easy massacre of a handful of half-armed men; instead the blast of trumpets and the flash of weapons hit them all the harder for being unexpected, and they fell—as reckless in defeat as they'd been greedy in success. Arminius escaped unhurt; Inguiomerus, badly wounded, left the fight. The common warriors were slaughtered as long as rage and daylight lasted. Only at night did the legions turn back, and though they had more wounded and the same lack of food weighing on them, they found in victory all the strength, health, and supplies they needed.
69| Meanwhile word had spread that the trapped army was surrounded, and that a hostile German column was heading for Gaul—and had Agrippina not stopped the bridge over the Rhine from being torn down, some in their panic would have done that very disgraceful thing. But this woman, of extraordinary spirit, took on a commander's duties those days, handing out clothing and bandages to soldiers as their need required, whether poverty or wounds. Gaius Plinius, who wrote a history of the German wars, records that she stood at the head of the bridge, offering praise and thanks to the returning legions. This cut deep into Tiberius. Such concern, he thought, was not innocent, nor was courting the soldiers' favor really aimed at foreigners. Nothing was left for generals to do when a woman went among the companies, approached the standards, tried her hand at largess—as if it weren't ambitious enough already to parade the commander's son around in a common soldier's dress and want him called Caesar Caligula. Agrippina now stood higher with the armies than the legates, than the generals; a woman had put down a mutiny that the emperor's own name had failed to stop. Sejanus fed and inflamed these suspicions, knowing Tiberius's character well enough to plant grudges that would take root slowly, to be stored away and brought out later.
70| Meanwhile Germanicus handed over the Second and Fourteenth legions, whom he had carried by ship, to Publius Vitellius for the overland march, so the fleet would ride lighter through the shallow, tidal sea. Vitellius had an easy first stretch, the ground dry or only lightly touched by the tide. But soon a north wind struck, coinciding with the equinox, when the ocean swells highest, and the column was seized and tossed about. The land was swallowed up—sea, shore, and fields all looked the same, and there was no telling solid ground from treacherous, shallows from deep water. Men were knocked down by the waves, sucked under by the currents; pack animals, baggage, and corpses drifted past and collided with each other. Companies were thrown together, some men visible only to the chest, some only to the mouth, sometimes swept away or buried when the ground gave way beneath them. Shouting and mutual encouragement were no use against the water; nothing distinguished the brave from the coward, the wise from the reckless—all were caught up in the same violence alike. Finally Vitellius struggled to higher ground and led the column there. They spent the night without supplies, without fire, many with bodies bare or battered—no less pitiable than men besieged by the enemy, for there at least an honorable death was possible, while here the end would have brought no glory. Daylight brought back solid ground, and they pushed through to the river Weser, where Germanicus had made for with the fleet. The legions were then loaded aboard, while rumor spread that they had drowned; and no one believed they were safe until they saw Caesar and the army return.
71| By now Stertinius, sent ahead to receive the surrender of Segimerus, brother of Segestes, had brought him and his son into the territory of the Ubii. Both were pardoned—Segimerus easily, the son more reluctantly, since he was said to have mocked the body of Quintilius Varus. Meanwhile Gaul, Spain, and Italy competed to make good the army's losses, each offering what it had ready—weapons, horses, gold. Germanicus praised their eagerness, but took only the weapons and horses needed for the war, and helped the soldiers out of his own pocket. And to soften the memory of the disaster with kindness as well, he went around visiting the wounded, praising each man's deeds; as he examined their wounds he steadied one with hope, another with the promise of glory, and all of them with his words and his care, binding them to himself and to the fight ahead.
72| That year triumphal honors were voted to Aulus Caecina, Lucius Apronius, and Gaius Silius for their actions alongside Germanicus. Tiberius refused the title Father of the Country, though the people pressed it on him again and again, and he would not let the senate's decree bind men by oath to his official acts, saying that everything human was uncertain, and the higher he rose, the more precarious his footing. But this did not prove he had a modest, citizen's heart—he had revived the treason law, which under the old usage carried the same name but covered different matters, applying only when a man betrayed an army, stirred up the people to riot, or otherwise mismanaged the state in ways that diminished the majesty of the Roman people. Deeds were prosecuted then; words went unpunished. Augustus was the first to treat libelous pamphlets as falling under that law, provoked by Cassius Severus's habit of defaming distinguished men and women in scurrilous writings. Later, when the praetor Pompeius Macer asked whether treason trials should be reinstated, Tiberius answered that the laws should be enforced. He too was further embittered by anonymous verses circulating about his cruelty, his arrogance, and his discord with his mother.
73| It's worth recounting the cases first tested against Falanius and Rubrius, ordinary Roman knights, so people can see how, from what small beginnings and by what cunning on Tiberius's part, this deadliest of afflictions crept in—then was checked for a while, and finally blazed up and consumed everything. The accuser charged Falanius with admitting into the fellowship of Augustus's worshippers—organized in every household like religious guilds—a certain Cassius, an actor notorious for his body, and also with having sold his gardens along with a statue of Augustus included in the sale. Rubrius was accused of perjuring himself by Augustus's divine name. Once word of these charges reached Tiberius, he sent the consuls a letter: divine status had not been granted his father so that this honor could become a snare for the ruin of citizens. Cassius the actor, he said, regularly took part with others of his profession in games his own mother had consecrated to Augustus's memory, and it was no offense against religion for the god's image, like other divine likenesses, to be included in the sale of gardens and houses. As for the oath, it should be judged no differently than if the man had deceived Jupiter—wrongs against the gods are the gods' own concern.
74| Soon afterward Granius Marcellus, governor of Bithynia, faced a treason charge brought by his own quaestor, Caepio Crispinus, joined by Romanus Hispo as co-accuser. Hispo pioneered a way of life that later, thanks to the misery of the times and the boldness of certain men, became all too common: a man with nothing, unknown, restless, who wormed his way toward the emperor's savagery through secret denunciations, then threatened every man of distinction, gaining power with one man and hatred from everyone else—setting an example that others followed, turning from poor men to rich, from despised to feared, bringing ruin on others and, in the end, on themselves. He accused Marcellus of making unfavorable remarks about Tiberius—an inescapable charge, since the accuser could pick out the emperor's worst traits and pin them on the defendant as his own words. Because the traits were real, the words were believed too. Hispo added that Marcellus had set up a statue of himself higher than the statues of the Caesars, and that in another statue he had cut off Augustus's head and replaced it with Tiberius's likeness. At this Tiberius blazed up so fiercely that he broke his usual silence and declared he too would vote in that case, openly and under oath, so the rest would feel the same obligation. Even then, traces of dying liberty remained. So Gnaeus Piso said: 'In what order will you vote, Caesar? If first, I'll have something to follow; if last, I'm afraid I might unknowingly disagree with you.' Stung by this, and repenting how carelessly he had let his temper flare, Tiberius let the defendant be acquitted of the treason charges; the extortion charges were sent to a panel of assessors.
75| Not content with the senate's own inquiries, he took to sitting in on trials, at the corner of the tribunal so as not to displace the praetor from his official chair; and many rulings were made in his presence against favoritism and the influence of the powerful. But while truth was being served, liberty was being corroded. Around this time the senator Pius Aurelius complained that his house had been undermined by the construction of a public road and an aqueduct, and appealed to the senate for help. When the treasury praetors resisted, Caesar stepped in and paid Aurelius the value of his house, eager to spend money on honorable causes—a virtue he kept up long after he had shed the others. To Propertius Celer, an ex-praetor asking to be excused from senatorial rank on grounds of poverty, he granted a million sesterces, having confirmed that his poverty was inherited from his father. When others tried the same request, he ordered them to prove their case to the senate, so eager for strictness that he was harsh even in matters he handled properly. As a result, the rest chose silence and poverty over confession, even at the cost of the benefit.
76| That same year, swollen by continuous rains, the Tiber flooded the low parts of the city; as the water withdrew it left behind a wreck of buildings and people. Asinius Gallus proposed consulting the Sibylline Books. Tiberius refused, keeping matters divine as veiled as matters human. But he entrusted the task of controlling the river to Ateius Capito and Lucius Arruntius. Achaea and Macedonia asked to have their tax burden lightened, and it was decided to relieve them for the present of proconsular rule and hand them to Caesar's own administration. Drusus presided over the gladiator games he had offered in his own name and that of his brother Germanicus, though he took too much pleasure in cheap bloodshed—something the crowd found alarming, and his father was said to have criticized him for it. Why Tiberius himself stayed away from the spectacle, people explained differently: some said he was weary of crowds, others that his gloomy temperament feared comparison, since Augustus had always attended amiably. I would not believe he handed his son the occasion on purpose, to display cruelty and stir up popular resentment—though that too was said.
77| The disorder at the theaters, which had begun the previous year, broke out more seriously now: people were killed, not only from the common crowd but soldiers too, along with a centurion, and a tribune of the praetorian cohort was wounded while trying to stop insults hurled at the magistrates and the general uproar. The senate debated the riot, and some proposed giving the praetors power to flog actors. The tribune of the plebs Haterius Agrippa vetoed this, and was rebuked in a speech by Asinius Gallus, while Tiberius stayed silent, offering the senate this charade of freedom. The veto stood anyway, because the deified Augustus had once ruled that actors were exempt from flogging, and Tiberius did not think it right to overturn his words. Many measures were passed on actors' pay and on curbing the excesses of their fan factions. The most notable: no senator was to enter a pantomime actor's house; Roman knights were not to crowd around them when they appeared in public; they were not to be watched anywhere but in the theater; and the praetors were given the power to punish unruly spectators with exile.
78| A delegation from Spain sought leave to raise, in the colony of Tarraco, a temple honoring Augustus; permission was given, and every province afterward followed that example. When the people protested the one-percent tax on auction sales, imposed after the civil wars, Tiberius declared by edict that the military treasury depended on that revenue; and besides, the state could not bear the burden unless veterans were discharged after twenty years' service, not sixteen. So the ill-considered concessions of the recent mutiny, which had forced the sixteen-year term, were undone for the future.
79| Arruntius and Ateius then raised in the senate whether, to check the Tiber's floods, the rivers and lakes feeding it should be diverted. Delegations from the towns and colonies were heard. The people of Florentia begged that the Clanis not be turned from its usual channel into the Arno, which would ruin them. The people of Interamna argued along the same lines: Italy's richest farmland would be destroyed if the river Nar—this was the plan under discussion—were split into channels and left to flood. Nor were the people of Reate silent: they refused to let the outlet where Lake Velinus empties into the Nar be blocked, since it would simply burst out over the neighboring land instead. Nature, they said, had best arranged human affairs by giving rivers their own mouths, their own courses, their own beginnings and their own ends, just as she gave them. The allies' religious claims deserved respect too—those who had dedicated shrines, groves, and altars to their native rivers. And the Tiber itself, they said, would hardly want to flow with less glory once stripped of the streams that feed it. Whether it was the pleading of the colonies, the difficulty of the engineering, or plain superstition that carried the day, the senate came around to the view of Piso, who had argued nothing should be changed.
80| Poppaeus Sabinus had his governorship of Moesia extended, with Achaea and Macedonia added to it. This too was characteristic of Tiberius: to prolong commands and keep most men in the same armies or jurisdictions until the end of their lives. Various reasons were given for it. Some said he simply disliked the bother of fresh appointments and treated a decision once made as permanent; others put it down to jealousy, not wanting too many men to enjoy such honors. Some think it reflected a mind as cautious as it was shrewd: he did not chase after conspicuous merit, yet he also hated vice—fearing danger to himself from the best men, and public disgrace from the worst. This hesitation eventually carried him so far that he assigned provinces to men he had no intention of ever letting leave Rome.
81| About the consular elections—which under this princeps took the form they did, then and afterward—I would hardly dare state anything with confidence, so contradictory are the accounts, not only among the historians but in Tiberius's own speeches. Sometimes, withholding the candidates' names, he described each man's origin, career, and military service well enough that people could tell who was meant. At other times he withheld even that much, urged the candidates not to disrupt the elections by canvassing, and promised to see to the matter himself. Mostly he simply stated that only those whose names he had submitted to the consuls had declared themselves to him as candidates, though others were free to declare too if they trusted their own influence or merits. It sounded fine in words, but in substance was empty or deceitful—and the more it was dressed up in the appearance of freedom, the more brutal the servitude it would eventually break out into.
1| In the consulship of Sisenna Statilius Taurus and Lucius Libo, the kingdoms and Roman provinces of the East were thrown into turmoil, the trouble starting among the Parthians. They had asked Rome for a king and gotten one — but for all he belonged to the Arsacid line, they now scorned him as a foreigner. This was Vonones, handed over to Augustus as a hostage by Phraates. Phraates had beaten Roman armies and generals in the field, yet he had turned to Augustus with every mark of deference and sent him one of his sons to seal the friendship — not so much out of fear of us as out of distrust of his own people.
2| After Phraates died, and his successors too, killed off one after another in the palace bloodletting, envoys came to Rome from the Parthian nobles asking for Vonones, the eldest of his sons, to be sent to be their king. Caesar thought this a fine compliment to himself and loaded the young man with wealth. The barbarians received him gladly, as people usually do a new regime. But shame soon crept in: they had fetched a king from another world, one steeped in enemy manners; now the throne of the Arsacids was being counted among the Roman provinces, handed out like a governorship. Where was the old glory now — the men who had cut down Crassus, driven out Antony — if a slave of Caesar's, one who had endured servitude for so many years, was to rule Parthians? And Vonones himself fed their resentment, being so unlike his ancestors: he hardly hunted, he cared little for horses, and whenever he moved through the towns he rode in a litter and turned up his nose at the old national feasts. They mocked his Greek attendants too, and the way he kept even his cheapest household goods locked under seal. Yet he was easy to approach, friendly to anyone who came near — virtues the Parthians had never seen, and took for vices, new and strange. Whatever was foreign to their own customs earned equal hatred, whether it was good or bad.
3| So Artabanus, of Arsacid blood, who had grown up among the Dahae, was roused to action. Beaten in his first encounter, he rallied his forces and seized the throne. Vonones, defeated, took refuge in Armenia — a country then without a king, and, thanks to Antony's crime, distrustful of both Parthian and Roman power alike. Antony had lured Artavasdes, king of Armenia, in under the pretense of friendship, then loaded him with chains and finally killed him. His son Artaxias, hating us for his father's memory, held on to himself and his kingdom by Arsacid force. When Artaxias was murdered by treachery among his own relatives, Caesar gave the Armenians Tigranes, who was installed on the throne by Tiberius Nero. Tigranes's rule did not last long, nor did his children's, even though they were joined in marriage and kingship in the foreign style.
4| Next, on Augustus's orders, Artavasdes was set up as king, and thrown down again, not without cost to us. Then Gaius Caesar was chosen to settle Armenia's affairs. He put Ariobarzanes in charge — a Mede by birth, but the Armenians accepted him gladly for his striking looks and fine character. When Ariobarzanes died by accident, they would not put up with his line; they tried a woman's rule instead, one named Erato, and soon drove her out too. Adrift and unmoored, more without a master than actually free, they took in the fugitive Vonones as king. But once Artabanus began making threats, and it was clear Armenia offered little support — and that defending Vonones by force meant war with Parthia — Creticus Silanus, governor of Syria, summoned him and kept him under guard, though he was left his luxuries and his royal title. How Vonones tried to escape this humiliating position we will tell in its place.
5| Meanwhile Tiberius was not at all displeased to see the East in turmoil, since it gave him an excuse to pull Germanicus away from the legions he knew so well and expose him, in unfamiliar provinces, to treachery and to accident alike. Germanicus, though, only grew more determined to finish the war quickly, the more the soldiers' devotion to him grew and his uncle's goodwill cooled. He weighed the different lines of attack, and what luck, good or bad, three years of campaigning had brought him. The Germans, he reasoned, were beaten in open battle on fair ground; woods and marshes helped them, along with the short summer and the early onset of winter. His own men suffered less from wounds than from the length of the marches and the wear on their equipment; Gaul was worn out supplying horses; a long baggage train invited ambush and was awkward to defend. But by sea, the advantage would be his alone, unknown to the enemy; the war could start earlier, legions and supplies could travel together, and cavalry and horses would arrive fresh, by way of river mouths and channels, deep into Germany.
6| So he set his sights that way, sending Publius Vitellius and Gaius Antius to take a census in Gaul. Silius, Anteius, and Caecina were put in charge of building the fleet. A thousand ships seemed enough, and they were built quickly — some short, narrow at bow and stern but broad in the belly, to ride the waves more easily; some flat-bottomed, so they could run aground without damage; many fitted with rudders at both ends, so the rowers could reverse and put in from either side at a moment's notice; many decked over, to carry catapults, and also fit for hauling horses or supplies; all handy under sail, and swift under oar, made swifter still by the soldiers' own eagerness, which lent them a fine and formidable look. The island of the Batavians was named as the muster point, since its shores were easy to land on and it was well placed both for receiving troops and launching the campaign. The Rhine, which flows in a single channel — or splits around minor islands — near the start of Batavian territory, divides as if into two rivers, keeping its name and its force on the branch that runs past Germany until it meets the ocean; but toward the Gallic bank it flows wider and calmer (the locals call it, under a changed name, the Waal), and soon changes name again to the Meuse, pouring at last through that river's vast mouth into the same ocean.
7| While the ships were being assembled, Caesar sent the general Silius with a light-armed force to raid the Chatti; he himself, hearing that a fort on the Lippe was under siege, led six legions there. Sudden downpours kept Silius from doing much beyond seizing a modest haul of plunder and the wife and daughter of Arpus, chief of the Chatti; and Caesar found no chance to fight either, since the besiegers scattered at the mere news he was coming. They had, though, torn down the mound recently raised for Varus's legions and the old altar set up to Drusus. Germanicus rebuilt the altar and personally led the legions past it in his father's honor; he decided not to raise the mound again. And the whole stretch between the fort at Aliso and the Rhine was strengthened with new lines and earthworks.
8| By now the fleet had arrived. Germanicus sent the supplies ahead, distributed ships among the legions and the allied troops, and entered the canal named for Drusus. He prayed to his father Drusus to lend him, willingly and with favor, the same help he had once given himself, now that his son had dared the same venture, following the example and memory of his plans and works. From there he sailed through the lakes and out onto the ocean, with a smooth passage all the way to the river Ems. The fleet was left at the mouth of the Ems, on its left bank — a mistake, since the troops meant to march on the right bank were not ferried across or transferred; as a result several days were lost building bridges. The cavalry and the legions crossed the first tidal shallows without trouble, before the water had begun to rise; but the rear column of the auxiliaries, and the Batavians among them, got into difficulty while splashing about and showing off their swimming, and some were dragged under and drowned. While Caesar was laying out camp, word came that the Angrivarii had revolted behind him; Stertinius was sent at once with cavalry and light infantry and avenged the treachery with fire and slaughter.
9| The river Weser ran between the Romans and the Cherusci. Arminius took his stand on its bank with the other chiefs, and asked whether Caesar had arrived; on hearing that Caesar had, he asked for a meeting with his brother — a man serving in Roman ranks under the name Flavus, a man known for his loyalty, who had lost an eye to a wound a few years before under Tiberius's command. Given permission, he came forward and was greeted by Arminius, who had his escort withdraw, and asked that our archers stationed along the bank pull back as well. Once they had gone, he asked his brother how he had come to lose the eye. Flavus told him the place and the battle, and Arminius then asked what reward he had gotten for it. Flavus listed his increased pay, a neck-chain, a crown, and other military honors — at which Arminius laughed, calling them the cheap wages of slavery.
10| From there each began to speak from his own side. Flavus spoke of Rome's greatness, Caesar's power, the harsh penalties waiting for the beaten, and the mercy ready for anyone who surrendered; his own wife and son, he said, were not treated as enemies. Arminius spoke of their fatherland's sacred cause, their ancestral freedom, the gods of Germany's inmost places, and their mother, who joined him in this appeal; he asked whether Flavus would rather be the deserter and betrayer of his kin, his in-laws, and his whole people than their leader. Little by little they slid into open insults, and not even the river between them was enough to keep them from coming to blows, until Stertinius ran up and held back Flavus, who was full of rage and demanding his weapons and his horse. Arminius could be seen across the water, shouting threats and calling for battle — much of it in Latin, since he had once served as a commander of his own countrymen in the Roman camp.
11| The next day the German line formed up on the far side of the Weser. Caesar judged it unworthy of a commander to risk his legions without bridges and defenses in place, and so sent the cavalry across the ford instead. Stertinius commanded it, along with Aemilius, one of the senior centurions, entering the river at separate points to spread the enemy out. Where the current ran fastest, Chariovalda, chief of the Batavians, charged across. The Cherusci drew him on with a feigned retreat into a plain ringed by woods, then rose up and poured in from every side, pressing those in front, hemming in those who fell back, some attacking a huddled ring of men hand to hand, others harrying them from a distance. Chariovalda held out a long time against the enemy's fury, urged his men to break through the closing packs in a tight wedge, and himself charged into the thickest of them — but buried under a hail of spears, his horse cut down beneath him, he fell, and many nobles with him; the rest were saved either by their own strength or by the cavalry of Stertinius and Aemilius, who rushed up in time.
12| After crossing the Weser, Germanicus learned from a deserter's tip where Arminius had chosen the battlefield. Other tribes, the man said, had gathered in a forest sacred to Hercules and meant to attack the camp that night. The report was believed: fires could be seen, and scouts who crept closer brought back word of horses whinnying and the vast, disordered murmur of a great host. With the decisive struggle now near, Germanicus decided he needed to test the troops' morale, and turned over in his mind how to do it without getting a false picture. Tribunes and centurions, he knew, tended to report what was cheering rather than what was true; freedmen had servile natures, and friends flattered. Call an assembly, and there too a few would set the tone and the rest would simply echo it. He needed to know men's minds at the root, when they spoke freely and unguarded, over their rations, of hope or fear.
13| So at nightfall he slipped out of his headquarters tent by hidden paths, unknown even to the sentries, with a single companion, his shoulders wrapped in an animal hide. He walked the camp's lanes, stood by the tents, and enjoyed hearing what men said of him: one praised his noble birth, another his good looks, but most his patience, his warmth, the same even temper whether things were serious or light-hearted. They admitted they owed him a debt to be repaid in battle, and that the treacherous truce-breakers deserved to be sacrificed to vengeance and to glory. In the middle of this, one of the enemy, who knew Latin, rode up to the rampart and shouted out, in Arminius's name, promises of wives, land, and a hundred sesterces a day for as long as the war lasted to any man who deserted. The insult only inflamed the legions' anger: let the day come, let there be a fight; the soldiers would seize the Germans' land and drag off their wives — they took it as an omen, and marked out the enemy's marriages and money for plunder in advance. About the third watch there was a rush at the camp, but no missiles were thrown, once the attackers found the cohorts massed thick behind the defenses and no slackening anywhere.
14| That same night brought Germanicus a happy dream: he saw himself performing a sacrifice, and when his toga, splashed with the victim's blood, was handed back to him, it was another, finer one, given by the hands of his grandmother Augusta. Encouraged by the omen, and with the auspices favorable, he called an assembly and laid out, with real foresight, what suited the coming battle. Open ground was not the only good fighting ground for a Roman soldier, he said; if handled right, woods and defiles served just as well. The barbarians' huge shields and their overlong spears could not be managed among tree trunks and undergrowth the way pila, swords, and close-fitting armor could. Let the men close ranks and strike for the face with their sword points: the German had no breastplate, no helmet, not even shields reinforced with iron or leather — just wickerwork or thin boards daubed with paint. Their front line, such as it was, carried spears; the rest had only fire-hardened or short weapons. And though fearsome to look at and strong for a quick rush, they had no stomach for taking wounds: they fled and ran without shame at the disgrace, without regard for their commanders, panicking in adversity, and even in success remembering neither divine law nor human. If the long marches and the sea had worn them out and they wanted it over, here was the battle to finish it: the Rhine now lay farther off than the Elbe, and past that river no fighting remained — provided only that, walking the path his father and his uncle had walked, they gave him victory on this very spot.
15| The general's speech was met with the soldiers' eager response, and the signal for battle was given. Nor did Arminius and the other German chiefs fail, each in his own quarter, to tell their men that these were the very Romans of Varus's army, the most cowardly of all, who instead of enduring war had chosen mutiny — men whose backs were loaded with wounds, some of them, others whose limbs had been broken by storms and waves, now facing hostile enemies again and hostile gods, with no hope of success. They had sought out a fleet and the trackless ocean, Arminius said, precisely so no one would meet them on the way in or press them when beaten; but once it came to hand-to-hand fighting, the wind and oars would be no help to the losers. Let them just remember Roman greed, cruelty, and arrogance: what was left to them but to hold their freedom or die before slavery?
16| Fired up like this and clamoring for battle, they were led down onto a plain called Idistaviso. It lies between the Weser and the hills, curving unevenly as the riverbank yields or the spurs of the hills push forward. Behind it rose a forest, its branches reaching high and the ground beneath the trunks bare and clear. The barbarian line held the plain and the forest's edge; only the Cherusci occupied the ridge, so as to charge down on the Romans from above once battle was joined. Our army advanced like this: Gallic and German auxiliaries in front, behind them foot archers; then four legions, and Germanicus himself with two praetorian cohorts and picked cavalry; then an equal number of other legions, light-armed troops with mounted archers, and the rest of the allied cohorts. The men were alert and ready, so that the marching order could form straight into battle line.
17| Once he saw the Cherusci bands, who in their eagerness had burst forward, Germanicus ordered his strongest cavalry to strike their flank, and Stertinius with the rest of the squadrons to wheel around and hit their rear, promising to be there himself at the right moment. Meanwhile a splendid omen caught the commander's eye: eight eagles seen flying toward the woods and going in. He cried out that the men should go, should follow the Roman birds, the legions' own guardian spirits. At the same moment the infantry advanced, and the cavalry, sent ahead, struck the enemy's rear and flanks. Remarkably, the two enemy columns fled in opposite directions: those who had held the forest ran into open ground, those who had stood in the open rushed into the forest. Between them the Cherusci were driven off the hills, Arminius conspicuous among them, holding up the fight with hand, voice, and wound. He had thrown himself at the archers and would have broken through, if the Raetian and Vindelician cohorts and the Gallic units had not blocked him with their standards. Even so, by sheer physical force and the drive of his horse he broke free, smearing his face with his own blood so as not to be recognized. Some say he was recognized by Chauci serving among the Roman auxiliaries and let go. The same courage, or the same trick, gave Inguiomerus his escape too. The rest were cut down everywhere. Many trying to swim the Weser were overwhelmed by missiles or the force of the current, and finally by the sheer press of men crowding in and the collapsing riverbank. Some, in shameful flight, climbed to the tops of trees and hid among the branches; archers were brought up and shot them down for sport. Others were crushed by trees that were felled on top of them.
18| It was a great victory, and it cost us little blood. From the fifth hour of the day until nightfall the enemy were slaughtered, and ten miles of ground were covered with corpses and weapons; among the spoils were chains they had brought along for the Romans, so certain had they been of the outcome. On the field of battle the soldiers hailed Tiberius as imperator, and they raised a mound and set up arms on it in the manner of a trophy, with the names of the defeated tribes inscribed beneath.
19| The Germans were struck less by their wounds, their grief, and their ruin than by that sight — and it filled them with pain and rage. Men who only just before had been preparing to leave their homes and withdraw beyond the Elbe now wanted to fight; they seized their weapons. Common people and nobles alike, the young and the old, suddenly attacked the Roman column on the march and threw it into confusion. Finally they chose a spot hemmed in by a river and woods, with a narrow, wet plain inside; the woods too were ringed by deep marsh, except on one side, where the Angrivarii had raised a broad earthwork to mark them off from the Cherusci. Here their infantry took its stand; their cavalry they hid in nearby groves, so as to fall on the legions from behind once they entered the forest.
20| None of this was hidden from Germanicus: he knew their plans and their ground, what was open and what concealed, and he turned the enemy's cunning back against them. He handed the cavalry and the open plain to his legate Seius Tubero, and drew up his infantry so that part advanced by the level approach into the forest, while part struggled up against the earthwork; the hard sector he took for himself, leaving the rest to his legates. Those given level ground broke in easily; those who had to storm the earthwork, as if scaling a wall, took a beating from blows raining down from above. Seeing the fight was unequal at close range, the general pulled the legions back a little and had slingers and artillery-men let fly, driving the enemy back. Spears were shot from the engines, and the more conspicuous the enemy's defenders made themselves, the more wounds brought them down. Germanicus himself, with the praetorian cohorts, was first to take the rampart and push the attack into the woods; there the fighting was hand to hand. The enemy had a marsh at their back, the Romans a river and hills hemming them in: both sides were trapped by the ground, both had hope only in courage, safety only in victory.
21| The Germans' spirit was no less, but they were beaten by the kind of fighting and the weapons involved: a huge mass of men, crammed into narrow ground, could neither level nor draw back their overlong spears, nor use their usual quick, darting rushes, and were forced into a static fight. The Roman soldier, by contrast, shield pressed to his chest and hand gripping the hilt, stabbed at the barbarians' broad bodies and exposed faces, and cut a path through the slaughtered enemy. Arminius, worn down by constant danger, or slowed by a wound he had just taken, was no longer his usual self. Inguiomerus too, darting all through the line, was failing more from bad luck than lack of courage. Germanicus, so as to be more easily recognized, had pulled the covering from his head and urged the men on to keep killing: there was no need for prisoners; only wiping the tribe out entirely would finish this war. By now the day was far gone, and he drew one legion out of the line to pitch camp, while the others kept gorging on enemy blood clear through to nightfall. The cavalry fight was inconclusive.
22| Germanicus praised the victors before the assembly and piled up the captured weapons into a mound, with an inscription proclaiming that Tiberius Caesar's army, once it had broken the peoples living between Rhine and Elbe, set up this monument for Mars, Jupiter, and Augustus. Of himself he added nothing — whether from fear of jealousy, or because he thought the knowledge of the deed was enough. He then handed Stertinius the task of making war on the Angrivarii, unless they hurried to surrender. And they, as suppliants, refused nothing and so obtained pardon for everything.
23| By now summer was well advanced, and some legions were sent back to winter quarters by land. Germanicus put the greater number on ships and led them down the river Ems into the open sea. At first the water was calm, ringing with the oars of a thousand vessels or driven by their sails. Then a black mass of cloud burst into hail, and gusting squalls came from every side, throwing up erratic waves that blotted out the view and fouled the steering. The soldiers, terrified and ignorant of the sea's dangers, got in the sailors' way or helped at the wrong moments, undoing the crews' skilled work. Then the whole sky and the whole sea turned south — a wind that gathers strength from Germany's swollen lands and deep rivers and vast banks of cloud, and is made harsher still by the cold of the neighboring north. It seized the ships and scattered them onto the open ocean or onto islands ringed with sheer rock or treacherous hidden shoals. They barely escaped these, and only briefly — for when the tide turned and ran the same way as the wind, the ships could no longer hold their anchors or bail out the water pouring in. Horses, pack animals, baggage, even weapons were thrown overboard to lighten the hulls, which were leaking at the seams under the pounding waves.
24| As much as the ocean outdoes every other sea in violence, and Germany's sky outdoes every other in savagery, by that much did this disaster exceed all others in strangeness and scale — hostile shores all around, or a sea so vast and deep it might be believed the last one, the edge of the world with no land beyond. Some ships simply sank; more were cast up on far-flung islands, where the soldiers, finding no human life, starved to death — except those who survived on the carcasses of horses washed up beside them. Only Germanicus's own galley made it to the coast of the Chauci. For all those days and nights he haunted the rocks and jutting headlands, crying out that he alone was to blame for so vast a disaster, and his friends could barely keep him from throwing himself into the same sea. At last, as the tide fell back and the wind turned favorable, the crippled ships limped home, some rowed by a handful of survivors, some rigged with makeshift sail cloth, some towed by the sturdier vessels. Germanicus had them hastily repaired and sent out again to search the islands. Many men were recovered that way. The Angrivarii, recently taken into alliance, ransomed a number from tribes further inland and returned them. Some had been carried off to Britain and were sent back by the local chieftains. Every man who returned from far away told wonders — of raging whirlwinds, birds never heard of, monsters of the deep, creatures half man and half beast — things seen, or believed out of fear.
25| The report of the lost fleet raised German hopes for war just as it spurred Germanicus to put it down. He ordered Gaius Silius to march against the Chatti with thirty thousand infantry and three thousand cavalry, while he himself, with a larger force, invaded the Marsi. Their chief, Mallovendus, who had recently surrendered, revealed that the eagle of Varus's lost legion lay buried near a nearby grove, guarded by only a small detachment. Germanicus sent one column to draw the enemy off from the front and another to circle around and dig behind their lines, and luck favored both. Emboldened, Germanicus pressed on inland, laying waste and destroying, meeting an enemy who never dared face him, or who broke and ran the instant he made a stand — and, as the prisoners told it, an enemy more frightened now than ever. For they had been saying the Romans were unconquerable, immune to disaster — that after losing their fleet, losing their weapons, after piling the shores with the bodies of men and horses, they had burst in again with the same courage, the same ferocity, as if their numbers had actually grown.
26| The troops were then led back into winter quarters, cheered in spirit that the setbacks at sea had been balanced out by success on land. Germanicus added to their cheer by paying, in full, whatever losses each man reported. There was no doubt the enemy was wavering and weighing whether to sue for peace, and that one more summer's campaign could finish the war. But Tiberius kept writing letter after letter urging him to return for the triumph already decreed: there had been successes enough, and setbacks enough. His victories had been great and glorious — but he should remember, too, the losses inflicted by wind and wave, through no fault of the commander, yet grave and cruel all the same. He himself, Tiberius said, had been sent into Germany nine times by the deified Augustus, and had accomplished more by policy than by force — that was how the Sugambri had been brought to surrender, how the Suebi and King Maroboduus had been bound by peace. The Cherusci and the other rebel tribes, now that Rome's vengeance had been satisfied, could be left to tear themselves apart in their own quarrels. When Germanicus asked for one more year to finish what he had begun, Tiberius pressed his modesty harder still, offering him a second consulship whose duties he would have to return to Rome to take up in person. He added, as if in passing, that if fighting still had to be done, Germanicus should leave some of the glory for his brother Drusus, who had no other enemy through whom to win the title of imperator and bring home the laurel except in Germany. Germanicus no longer hesitated, though he understood well enough that this was all a pretext, and that he was being pulled away from glory already within his grasp out of jealousy.
27| About this same time, Libo Drusus, of the Scribonian family, was accused of plotting revolution. I will set out the origin, course, and end of this affair with some care, because it was then that the methods first appeared which for so many years afterward would eat away at the state. Firmius Catus, a senator and one of Libo's closest friends, pushed the young man — reckless and easily taken in by empty promises — toward the predictions of astrologers, the rites of magicians, and even interpreters of dreams, all the while dangling before him his great-grandfather Pompey, his great-aunt Scribonia, once the wife of Augustus, his cousins the Caesars, and a house full of ancestral portraits. He urged him on to extravagance and debt, joining him in his pleasures and his troubles alike, the better to entangle him in evidence from every side.
28| Once Catus had gathered enough witnesses, including slaves who could confirm the same facts, he asked for an audience with the emperor, laying out the charge and the accused through Flaccus Vescularius, a Roman knight who had closer dealings with Tiberius. Tiberius did not dismiss the information, but refused a meeting, saying that messages could pass just as well through the same go-between, Flaccus. Meanwhile he honored Libo with a praetorship, invited him to his table, showed no change in his face, no sharpness in his words — so completely had he buried his anger — and though he could have stopped Libo's every word and deed, he preferred simply to know them. This went on until a man named Junius, who had been asked to summon the shades of the dead by incantation, brought the information to Fulcinius Trio. Trio's talent among prosecutors was well known, and he was hungry for notoriety. He seized on the accused at once, went to the consuls, and demanded a hearing before the Senate. The senators were summoned, told only that they were to deliberate on a matter of great and terrible import.
29| Libo, meanwhile, changed into mourning clothes and went from house to house with leading women of Rome, begging his relatives, pleading for someone to speak for him against the danger — and all refused, each pretending a different excuse, though the fear behind them was the same. On the day of the Senate meeting, worn down by fear and sickness — or, as some have it, feigning illness — he was carried to the doors of the senate house on a litter, leaning on his brother, stretching out his hands and pleading voice toward Tiberius, who received him with an unmoved face. Then Caesar read out the accusations and the names behind them, taking care to seem neither to soften nor sharpen the charges.
30| Besides Trio and Catus, two more accusers had joined in, Fonteius Agrippa and Gaius Vibius, and they were quarreling over who would have the right to make the closing case against the accused, until Vibius — since none of them would yield to the others, and Libo had come in without an advocate — announced he would present the charges one by one, and produced documents so absurd that among them Libo was said to have asked whether he would ever have wealth enough to pave the road to Brundisium in coin. There were other things of the same sort, foolish and empty, pitiable if taken kindly. But on one document, in Libo's own hand, the prosecutor claimed, next to the names of members of the imperial family and senators, sinister or cryptic marks had been added. Libo denied it, and it was decided that the slaves who could identify the handwriting should be questioned under torture. But since an old decree of the Senate forbade torturing a slave in a case touching his master's life, Tiberius — shrewd, and an innovator in the law — ordered each slave sold individually to the public agent, so that, the letter of the decree preserved, evidence against Libo could be extracted from what were now, technically, someone else's slaves. Libo asked for a day's postponement on these grounds, and went home, sending his relative Publius Quirinius to carry his last plea to the emperor.
31| The answer came back: he should petition the Senate. Meanwhile soldiers surrounded his house and made noise even in the entrance hall, loud enough to be heard and seen. Libo, at the very banquet he had arranged for what he meant to be his last pleasure, now in agony, called for someone to kill him, seized his slaves by the hand, tried to force a sword on them. As they scrambled back in panic, they knocked over the lamp on the table, and in the darkness that now seemed fitting for his own death, he drove two blows into his own body. His freedmen ran to him at the sound of his groaning as he collapsed, and the soldiers, seeing the killing was done, withdrew. Even so the prosecution went forward before the Senate with the same severity as before, and Tiberius swore that he would have begged for Libo's life, guilty as he was, had he not rushed to take it himself.
32| His estate was divided among his accusers, and praetorships outside the normal order were granted to those of senatorial rank among them. Cotta Messalinus then proposed that Libo's death mask never be carried in his descendants' funerals; Gnaeus Lentulus, that no Scribonius should ever take the surname Drusus. Days of public thanksgiving were fixed on the motion of Pomponius Flaccus; offerings to Jupiter, Mars, and Concord were decreed, and Lucius Piso, Asinius Gallus, Papius Mutilus, and Lucius Apronius moved that the Ides of September, the day Libo had killed himself, be kept as a holiday. I have recorded these men's proposals and their flatteries so that it may be known how old this rot in the state already was. The Senate also passed decrees against astrologers and magicians, expelling them from Italy. Under this decree Lucius Pituanius was thrown from the Tarpeian rock, and Publius Marcius was executed by the consuls outside the Esquiline Gate, after the trumpet call had been sounded — the old traditional form.
33| At the next meeting of the Senate, the former consul Q. Haterius and the former praetor Octavius Fronto spoke at length against the city's extravagance. It was decreed that solid gold vessels should no longer be used to serve food, and that silk should no longer disgrace men's bodies. Fronto went further and demanded limits on silver, furniture, and household slaves — for it was still common enough for senators, if they believed something served the public interest, to raise it in place of a formal motion. Asinius Gallus spoke against him: as the empire had grown, he said, private fortunes had grown with it, and this was nothing new but among the oldest of customs. Wealth had meant one thing among the Fabricii, another among the Scipios; everything is measured against the state, and where the state was poor, citizens' houses were cramped, but as it rose to greatness, individuals rose too. There was no fixed excess or moderation in household goods or silver — everything depends on the fortune of the owner. The census requirements that separate senators from knights exist not because their natures differ, but so that those who outrank others in rank and standing might also outrank them in the comforts that ease the mind and preserve the body — unless, that is, the most distinguished men are expected to bear the greatest burdens and the greatest dangers while being denied the comforts that make burdens and dangers bearable. Gallus won easy assent, because under respectable names he had confessed to vices his listeners shared. Tiberius added that this was no time for a censor's crackdown, and that if morals ever slipped badly enough, someone would be found to correct them.
34| In the midst of this, Lucius Piso denounced the corruption of the courts, the bribery of the forum, and the savagery of orators who threatened prosecutions, declaring that he would leave and quit Rome to live out his life in some remote, hidden corner of the countryside — and with that he walked out of the Senate house. Tiberius was shaken. Though he soothed Piso with gentle words, he also pressed Piso's relatives to hold him back, by authority or by pleading, from leaving. Piso soon gave another proof of the same blunt anger: he summoned Urgulania to court, a woman whom her friendship with the empress Augusta had placed above the law. Urgulania did not comply — she rode instead to Caesar's house, ignoring Piso — nor did Piso back down, even though Augusta complained that she was being insulted and diminished. Tiberius judged it proper to indulge his mother only this far: he said he would go to the praetor's tribunal himself and support Urgulania there. He set out from the Palace, ordering his soldiers to follow at a distance. The crowd gathered to watch him make his composed way through the streets, drawing out the time and the journey with idle talk, until Piso's relatives, having failed to restrain him, persuaded Augusta to pay the sum being claimed. That ended the matter — and neither man came out of it worse: Piso kept his reputation, and Caesar's grew larger still. But Urgulania's power over the city had grown so excessive that when called as a witness in a case before the Senate, she refused to appear. A praetor was sent instead to question her at home — though the old custom had always been that even the Vestal Virgins gave testimony in the forum and the courts whenever required.
35| I would not bother recording that certain business was postponed that year, except that it is worth knowing the opposing views of Gnaeus Piso and Asinius Gallus on the matter. Piso argued that precisely because Caesar had said he would be absent, the business should be pushed forward all the more — it would reflect well on the state to show that the Senate and the knights could carry out their duties without the emperor present. Gallus, since Piso had already claimed the appearance of championing liberty, argued that nothing was truly distinguished or worthy of the Roman people's dignity except what was done in Caesar's presence, under his own eyes — and that it was for the sake of preserving that presence that all Italy gathered and the provinces flocked to Rome. Tiberius listened to all this in silence; both sides argued with great heat, but the business was postponed regardless.
36| A contest also broke out between Gallus and Caesar. Gallus proposed that elections for magistracies be held five years at a time, and that legionary commanders who had already held military posts qualifying them for the praetorship should be nominated as future praetors on the spot, with the emperor naming twelve candidates a year. There was no doubt this proposal reached deeper, probing the hidden mechanics of imperial power. Tiberius, though the scheme appeared to enlarge his own authority, argued against it: it would be a heavy burden on his restraint, he said, to choose so many and defer so many others. Even from year to year it was hard to avoid giving offense, though the prospect of a near chance at office softened a rejection — how much resentment would there be from men cast five years into the future? How could anyone foresee, over so long a stretch, what a man's state of mind, household, or fortune would be? Men grew arrogant even with a year's advance notice of office — what if they held that expectation for five years? The scheme would multiply magistracies fivefold and overturn the laws that set fixed terms for candidates to prove themselves and to seek or secure office. With this speech, plausible enough on its surface, he kept his grip on power intact.
37| He also helped several senators whose property had fallen below the required census. All the more surprising, then, that he received the plea of Marcus Hortalus, a young man of noble birth, with such haughtiness, though his poverty was plain to see. Hortalus was the grandson of the orator Hortensius; the god Augustus had persuaded him with a gift of a million sesterces to marry and raise children, so that so distinguished a family would not die out. So now, with his four sons standing at the threshold of the Senate house — for the Senate was meeting on the Palatine — he rose to speak in place of a formal motion, looking now at the bust of Hortensius set among the orators, now at that of Augustus, and began: 'Conscript Fathers, I did not raise these children — whose number and youth you can see — of my own will, but because the emperor urged it; and also because my ancestors had earned the right to leave descendants behind. As for me, I could not, given how the times had changed, acquire or inherit money, popular favor, or eloquence — that hereditary gift of our house — and I was content if my modest means brought shame on neither myself nor anyone else. I married on the emperor's order. Here stand the offspring of so many consuls, so many dictators. I say this not to provoke resentment, but to win your pity. Under your prosperous rule, Caesar, they will attain whatever honors you grant them; in the meantime, protect the great-grandsons of Quintus Hortensius, the wards of the god Augustus, from poverty.'
38| The Senate's sympathy only spurred Tiberius to oppose him more openly, and he spoke roughly these words: 'If every poor man begins coming here to demand money for his children, individuals will never be satisfied and the treasury will run dry. Our ancestors did not grant us the license to stray from the matter at hand and, under cover of speaking for the common good, use this floor to enrich our own private households and family fortunes — earning the Senate and its emperors resentment either way, whether they grant such gifts freely or refuse them. What we have just heard is not a plea but an extortion — and an untimely, unexpected one at that, coming when the Fathers had gathered to discuss other business: to stand up and press the Senate's restraint with the mere number and age of one's children, and to turn that same pressure on me, as if to break open the treasury by force. If we drain it through favoritism, we will only have to refill it through crime. The god Augustus gave you money, Hortalus, but he was not compelled to, nor was there any law that he must always give. Otherwise ambition will wither and idleness will spread, if no one has anything to fear or hope from his own efforts, and everyone waits securely for help from elsewhere — useless to themselves, a burden to us.' These words and others like them, though heard with apparent approval by those whose habit is to praise everything a ruler says, honorable or not, were received by most in silence or a muffled murmur. Tiberius noticed. After a brief pause he said that he had given Hortalus his answer — but that if the Fathers thought it proper, he would give two hundred thousand sesterces to each of his sons who was male. Others offered thanks; Hortalus said nothing, whether from fear or because even amid such straitened fortune he still clung to the pride of his ancient house. Tiberius never showed him pity again, even as the house of Hortensius sank into shameful poverty.
39| That same year, the audacity of a single slave — had it not been checked in time — would have shaken the state with civil discord and armed conflict. A slave of Postumus Agrippa named Clemens, on learning of Augustus's death, formed a plan with nothing servile about it: to sail to the island of Planasia, seize Agrippa by trick or force, and carry him to the armies in Germany. The slowness of his cargo ship thwarted the attempt; meanwhile the murder had already been carried out. Undeterred, he turned to something bolder and more reckless still — he stole Agrippa's ashes, sailed to the promontory of Cosa in Etruria, and hid himself in obscure places until he had let his hair and beard grow long, for he was close enough to his former master in age and looks. Then, through suitable men sworn to his secret, the rumor spread that Agrippa was alive — first in whispers, as forbidden things usually spread, then as a wandering rumor that found ready ears among the most credulous, and again among the restless and those hungry for change. Clemens himself visited the towns under cover of darkness, never showing himself openly nor lingering long in the same place; but because truth gains strength from being seen and given time, while falsehood thrives on haste and uncertainty, he either left the rumor behind him or outran it.
40| Meanwhile a rumor spread through Italy that Agrippa had been saved by the will of the gods, and it was believed at Rome too. He had already been carried into Ostia, and enormous crowds were celebrating him there; clandestine gatherings honored him in the city itself. Tiberius was torn by conflicting worries: should he crush his own slave with military force, or let the empty credulity fade away on its own with time? Wavering between shame and fear, he weighed now that nothing should be dismissed, now that not everything need be feared. In the end he handed the matter to Sallustius Crispus. Crispus chose two of his own clients (some say they were soldiers) and told them to approach the man pretending to be in on the plot, offer him money, and promise loyalty and shared risk. They did as ordered. Then, watching for an unguarded night, they got hold of a suitable force, bound him, gagged him, and dragged him to the Palatine. When Tiberius asked him how he had become Agrippa, he is said to have answered, 'The same way you became Caesar.' He could not be forced to name accomplices. Tiberius did not dare punish him openly; he had him killed in a hidden part of the palace and his body secretly removed. And although many in the imperial household, and knights and senators too, were said to have backed him with money and advice, no inquiry was made.
41| At year's end an arch was dedicated near the temple of Saturn for the recovery of the standards lost with Varus, won back under Germanicus's command and Tiberius's auspices; also a temple to Fors Fortuna beside the Tiber, in the gardens the dictator Caesar had bequeathed to the Roman people; a shrine to the Julian family; and a statue to the deified Augustus at Bovillae. In the consulship of Gaius Caelius and Lucius Pomponius, Germanicus Caesar celebrated his triumph on May 26 over the Cherusci, the Chatti, the Angrivarii, and the other peoples as far as the Elbe. Spoils were paraded, captives, models of mountains, rivers, and battles; and because he had been forbidden to finish the war, it was accepted as finished anyway. His own remarkable bearing, and his chariot loaded with five children, heightened the spectacle for onlookers. But underneath ran a quiet dread, as people recalled that the crowd's favor had brought his father Drusus no luck, that his uncle Marcellus had been snatched away in youth despite the people's burning devotion — the Roman people's affections are brief and unlucky.
42| For the rest, Tiberius gave three hundred sesterces a head to the common people in Germanicus's name, and named himself his colleague for the consulship. Even this did not win him credit for genuine affection; he resolved to remove the young man under the guise of honor, and either built pretexts or seized ones that offered themselves. King Archelaus had held Cappadocia for fifty years, and Tiberius hated him for failing to pay him any court while he lived at Rhodes. Archelaus had not neglected this out of arrogance, but on the advice of Augustus's inner circle, since while Gaius Caesar flourished and had been sent out to manage the East, friendship with Tiberius was thought unsafe. Once the line of the Caesars had turned over and Tiberius had gained power, he lured Archelaus with a letter from his mother, who, without concealing her son's grievances, offered clemency if he came to beg for it. Archelaus, unaware of the trap — or fearing violence if he were thought to have seen through it — hurried to Rome. He was received harshly by the emperor and soon accused before the senate, and worn out not by the charges, which were fabricated, but by anguish, and further by old age and by the fact that because kings are unused to being treated as equals, let alone as inferiors, he ended his life, whether by his own will or by fate. The kingdom was reduced to a province, and since the emperor declared that its revenues allowed the one percent sales tax to be reduced, he set it at half a percent going forward. Around the same time, with Antiochus king of Commagene and Philopator king of Cilicia both dead, their peoples were in turmoil, most wanting Roman rule, others wanting a king; and the provinces of Syria and Judaea, worn down by their burdens, petitioned for a reduction in tribute.
43| So Tiberius laid these matters before the senate, along with what I mentioned above about Armenia, saying the unrest in the East could be settled only by Germanicus's wisdom: his own years were declining, and Drusus's were not yet ripe enough. The senate then decreed that the provinces beyond the sea be entrusted to Germanicus, with authority greater, wherever he went, than that held by governors chosen by lot or appointed by the emperor. But Tiberius had already removed Creticus Silanus from Syria — a man tied to Germanicus by marriage, since Silanus's daughter was engaged to Germanicus's eldest son, Nero — and put Gnaeus Piso in his place, a man of violent temper and no gift for obedience, with an inborn arrogance inherited from his father, who in the civil war had served with fierce zeal the party reviving in Africa against Caesar, then followed Brutus and Cassius, and even after being allowed to return had kept out of public office until he was courted into accepting the consulship Augustus offered him. Beyond his father's spirit, he was also fired by the high birth and wealth of his wife Plancina; he barely deferred to Tiberius and looked down on Tiberius's children as far beneath him. He had no doubt he had been chosen to govern Syria precisely to check Germanicus's ambitions. Some believed Tiberius had given him secret instructions as well; and Livia, without question, urged Plancina, out of a woman's rivalry, to persecute Agrippina. For the court was split and at odds, with silent factions favoring either Drusus or Germanicus. Tiberius cherished Drusus as his own blood; Germanicus's estrangement from his uncle had only increased everyone else's love for him, and he had the further advantage of a more brilliant maternal line, counting Mark Antony as grandfather and Augustus as great-uncle. Against this, Drusus's own great-grandfather, the Roman knight Pomponius Atticus, seemed to some a blot on the Claudian family portraits; and Germanicus's wife Agrippina outshone Drusus's wife Livia in fertility and reputation. Yet the brothers themselves remained remarkably united, unshaken by the rivalries around them.
44| Not long after, Drusus was sent to Illyricum to get used to military life and win the army's favor; Tiberius also thought it better for a young man given to the softness of city life to be kept in camp, and felt safer himself with a son commanding legions on each front. The pretext was that the Suebi were asking for help against the Cherusci: for with the Romans gone and no outside threat to fear, the tribes, driven by habit and now by rivalry for glory, had turned their weapons on each other. The two nations were equally strong, their leaders equally brave; but Maroboduus's royal title was hated among his own people, while Arminius, fighting for freedom, had their favor.
45| So not only the Cherusci and their allies, Arminius's old soldiers, took up arms, but tribes from Maroboduus's own kingdom, the Semnones and Langobardi, deserted to him as well. With these added, he would have had the upper hand, had Inguiomerus not fled to Maroboduus with his own band of followers — for no reason but that he, an old man and an uncle, scorned to obey his young nephew. The armies formed up in battle order, each side hoping equally, and not, as once among the Germans, in scattered raids or loose bands: for their long campaigns against us had trained them to follow their standards, back each other with reserves, and take orders from commanders. And now Arminius, riding along the whole line, pointed out as he passed each group the freedom won back, the legions cut down, the Roman spoils and weapons still in the hands of many; and he mocked Maroboduus as a coward, untested in battle, hiding safe in the depths of the Hercynian forest; and one who had then sought an alliance through gifts and embassies — a traitor to his country, a lackey of Caesar, deserving to be driven out with no less hatred than they had killed Quinctilius Varus. Let them only remember their many battles, whose outcome — and the final expulsion of the Romans — proved well enough in whose hands the mastery of the war really lay.
46| Nor did Maroboduus hold back from boasting of himself and insulting his enemy. Gripping Inguiomerus, he declared that in that one man's body lay all the glory of the Cherusci, that it was by his counsel that their successes had fallen out as they did; Arminius was a madman who understood nothing, claiming another man's glory for himself, since he had merely tricked three wandering legions and a commander who suspected no treachery — at a heavy cost to Germany and to his own disgrace, since even now his wife and son endured slavery. As for himself, attacked by twelve legions under Tiberius's command, he had kept the glory of the Germans unstained, and had then withdrawn on equal terms; nor did he regret that it now rested in their own hands whether they wanted an unbroken war against Rome or a bloodless peace. Roused by these words, the armies were further driven by their own separate causes, the Cherusci and Langobardi fighting for ancient honor or newly won freedom, the others for the growth of their power. Never had a greater force clashed, nor with a more uncertain result, each side routing the other's right wing. Battle seemed about to resume, had Maroboduus not withdrawn his camp to the hills. This was taken as a sign of collapse; and, gradually stripped bare by desertions, he withdrew among the Marcomanni and sent envoys to Tiberius begging for help. The answer came back that he had no right to call on Roman arms against the Cherusci, having given no help to the Romans when they fought that same enemy. Still, Drusus was sent, as we have related, to secure the peace.
47| In the same year twelve famous cities of Asia collapsed in a nighttime earthquake, which made the disaster all the more unforeseen and severe. Even the usual escape in such a calamity — rushing into open ground — was no help, since the earth split open and swallowed people whole. They say immense mountains sank, that what had been level ground was seen raised on high, and that fires flashed out amid the ruin. The disaster struck the people of Sardis hardest, and drew them the most sympathy: the emperor promised them ten million sesterces and remitted for five years whatever they owed the treasury or the imperial purse. The people of Magnesia by Sipylus were judged next worst hit and next most in need of relief. It was decided that the Temnians, Philadelphians, Aegeans, Apollonidians, the people called Mostenians or Macedonian Hyrcanians, and the towns of Hierocaesarea, Myrina, Cyme, and Tmolus should likewise be relieved of tribute for the same period, and that a senator be sent out to see conditions on the ground and offer relief. Marcus Ateius, a former praetor, was chosen, so that having a former consul govern Asia would not create rivalry between equals and, from that, delay.
48| Caesar also increased public giving in a way people found equally welcome. The estate of Aemilia Musa, a wealthy woman who died without a will, had been claimed for the treasury, but Tiberius handed it over to Aemilius Lepidus, since it appeared to belong to his family. And when the rich Roman knight Pantuleius died, though Tiberius himself was named an heir under the will, he passed the inheritance to Marcus Servilius, whom he found named in an earlier and undisputed will, remarking that the noble birth of both men deserved help from money. He never accepted an inheritance unless he had earned it through friendship; strangers, and people hostile to others who named him heir simply to win favor, he kept firmly at arm's length. But just as he relieved honest poverty in the innocent, so he removed the spendthrift and those ruined by their own disgraceful conduct — Vibidius Varro, Marius Nepos, Appius Appianus, Cornelius Sulla, and Quintus Vitellius — from the senate, or let them resign on their own.
49| Around this same time he dedicated temples of the gods that had fallen into ruin through age or fire, works begun under Augustus: one to Liber, Libera, and Ceres near the Circus Maximus, vowed by the dictator Aulus Postumius; in the same place a temple of Flora, built by the aediles Lucius and Marcus Publicius; and a temple to Janus in the Forum Holitorium, raised by Gaius Duilius, the first man to win a naval success for Rome and to earn a triumph at sea over the Carthaginians. Germanicus consecrated the temple of Hope, which Aulus Atilius had vowed in the same war.
50| Meanwhile the law of treason kept growing. An informer brought a charge of treason against Appuleia Varilla, granddaughter of Augustus's sister, on the grounds that she had mocked the deified Augustus, Tiberius, and his mother in scandalous talk, and that she was involved in an affair while related to the emperor. The adultery charge seemed adequately covered by the Julian law. But Tiberius asked that the treason charge be separated out and that she be convicted only if she had spoken irreverently of Augustus; as for words thrown at himself, he wanted no formal inquiry. Asked by the consul what he thought about the accusation that she had spoken ill of his mother too, he said nothing. Then, at the next meeting of the senate, he asked in his mother's name as well that no one be charged over words spoken about her, whatever they were. He cleared Appuleia of the treason charge; on the adultery charge he asked for a lighter penalty, urging that, following ancestral precedent, she simply be sent more than two hundred miles from her relatives. Her lover Manlius was barred from Italy and Africa.
51| A contest arose over choosing a praetor to replace Vipstanus Gallus, who had died. Germanicus and Drusus, still in Rome at the time, backed Haterius Agrippa, a relative of Germanicus. Most of the senate, however, pushed to give weight to the number of children a candidate had, as the law required. Tiberius was delighted to watch the senate debate between his sons and the laws. The law was beaten, no doubt about it — but not at once, and only by a few votes, the way laws used to be beaten even when they still had force.
52| That same year war broke out in Africa, led by the enemy commander Tacfarinas. A Numidian by birth, he had served in the Roman auxiliary ranks, then deserted. At first he gathered roving bands used to banditry for plunder and raids; then he organized them military-style into companies and squadrons; and finally came to be seen not as leader of a disorganized mob but as chief of the Musulamii. That people, strong and living near the empty wastes of Africa, with no experience yet of city life, took up arms and drew in their Moorish neighbors as well, under their own leader, Mazippa. The force split: Tacfarinas kept picked men armed in Roman fashion in a fixed camp, training them to discipline and command, while Mazippa ranged about with a light force spreading fire, killing, and terror. They had driven the Cinithii, a people not to be dismissed lightly, into the same cause, when Furius Camillus, proconsul of Africa, led out his legion and the allied troops gathered under standard against the enemy — a modest force set against the numbers of Numidians and Moors, but nothing was guarded against so carefully as letting the enemy dodge battle out of fear. Hope of victory lured them instead into defeat. So the legion was placed in the center, with light cohorts and two cavalry wings on the flanks. Tacfarinas did not shy from the fight. The Numidians were routed, and after many years the Furius name won military glory again — for since the great Furius who recovered Rome, and his son Camillus, honor in war had belonged to other families, and this Camillus we speak of had been thought a stranger to warfare. Tiberius was all the readier to praise the achievement before the senate, and the senators voted him the triumphal insignia — which, given the modesty of his life, brought him no harm.
53| The next year had Tiberius as consul for the third time and Germanicus for the second. But Germanicus took up that office away from Rome, in Nicopolis in Achaea, where he had arrived after sailing along the Illyrian coast, visiting his brother Drusus in Dalmatia, and enduring a rough crossing of the Adriatic and then the Ionian Sea. He spent a few days refitting the fleet; meanwhile he visited the bay made famous by the victory at Actium, the spoils and camp Augustus had consecrated there, and thought of his own ancestors as he did — for, as I have noted, his uncle was Augustus and his grandfather was Antony, and the place held for him a vivid picture of both grief and triumph. From there he went on to Athens, and out of respect for the treaty with that allied and ancient city, he kept to a single lictor and nothing more. The Greeks met him with every extravagant honor their ingenuity could produce, trotting out the ancient deeds and sayings of their forefathers to give their flattery extra weight.
54| From there he made for Euboea and crossed to Lesbos, where Agrippina, in her last childbirth, gave birth to Julia. Then he touched the far edge of Asia, and the Thracian cities of Perinthus and Byzantium, then passed through the narrows of the Propontis and into the mouth of the Black Sea, driven by a wish to know these ancient places of legendary fame — and along the way he brought relief to provinces worn down by internal quarrels or by the abuses of their governors. On his way back he tried to visit the shrine of the Samothracian mysteries, but headwinds drove him off course. So he went instead to Troy, to view its site, sacred both for its shifting fortunes and as the origin of our own people, then made his way back across Asia and put in at Colophon to consult the oracle of Apollo of Claros. There, unlike at Delphi, it is not a woman but a priest chosen from certain families, usually summoned from Miletus, who merely hears the number and names of those consulting; then he goes down into a cave, drinks water from a hidden spring, and — though he is generally ignorant of letters and poetry — delivers oracles in verse on the matters each person had in mind. It was said that, in riddling fashion typical of oracles, he foretold an early death for Germanicus.
55| Meanwhile Gnaeus Piso, eager to get his own plans moving faster, terrified the city of Athens with a violent arrival and lashed it with a harsh speech, taking a sideways swipe at Germanicus for showing such excessive courtesy — beneath the dignity of the Roman name — not to the Athenians, long since wiped out by disaster after disaster, but to that mongrel mix of peoples now occupying the place: for these, he said, were the very people who had sided with Mithridates against Sulla and with Antony against the deified Augustus. He even dredged up old grievances — their poor showing against the Macedonians, their violence against their own people — and he had a personal grudge against the city too, because they had refused his request to pardon a certain Theophilus, convicted of forgery by the court of the Areopagus. From there, sailing swiftly through the Cyclades by the shortest sea routes, he caught up with Germanicus at the island of Rhodes, well aware of the attacks he was under for his conduct. Yet Germanicus behaved with such restraint that when a storm arose and swept Piso's ship toward the rocks, and his enemy's death could easily have been chalked up to accident, he sent triremes to pull him out of danger. Piso was not softened by this; he barely tolerated a single day's delay before leaving Germanicus and hurrying on ahead. Once he reached Syria and its legions, through bribery, currying favor, and doing favors for the lowest-ranking soldiers, removing veteran centurions and strict tribunes and giving their posts to his own clients or to the worst men available, he let slackness take hold in camp and lawlessness in the towns, with soldiers wandering and running wild through the countryside — corruption so far advanced that ordinary talk called him father of the legions. Nor did Plancina keep herself within the bounds proper to a woman: she attended cavalry drills and cohort maneuvers, and hurled insults at Agrippina and Germanicus, while some among even the good soldiers grew disturbingly willing to follow bad orders — a quiet rumor spreading that this was happening with the commander's own tacit approval. Germanicus knew of all this, but his more pressing concern was to deal with Armenia first.
56| That nation has always been unpredictable, both in the temperament of its people and in its geography, since it stretches from close along our provinces deep into Median territory. Caught between the greatest empires, and often divided among themselves, the Armenians feel hatred toward Rome and jealousy toward Parthia alike. At that time they had no king, Vonones having been removed; but popular opinion favored Zeno, son of the Pontic king Polemon: since childhood he had embraced Armenian dress and customs, and by hunting, feasting, and whatever else barbarians prize, he had won the loyalty of nobles and commoners alike. So Germanicus, in the city of Artaxata, with the nobles' approval and crowds gathered around, placed the royal diadem on his head. The rest, paying homage, hailed him as King Artaxias, a name they gave him after the city itself. Cappadocia, meanwhile, was reduced to the form of a province and received Quintus Veranius as governor; and some of the royal tribute was lowered, to encourage hope that Roman rule would prove milder. Quintus Servaeus was placed over Commagene, which was then for the first time transferred to the authority of a praetorian governor.
57| All the allied kingdoms had been settled successfully, but this brought Germanicus no joy, because of Piso's arrogance. Ordered to lead part of the legions into Armenia himself, or send his son, Piso had ignored both instructions. The two men finally met at Cyrrhus, in the winter camp of the tenth legion, each with his face set — Piso against showing fear, Germanicus against seeming to threaten. Germanicus, as I have said, was the milder of the two. But their friends, skilled at fanning grievances, exaggerated the truth, piled on lies, and accused Piso himself, Plancina, and their sons in various ways. Finally, with only a few intimates present, Caesar opened a conversation of the kind that anger and concealment together produce; Piso answered with defiant pleading. They parted open enemies. After that Piso rarely appeared at Germanicus's tribunal, and when he did sit in on proceedings, his hostility and disagreement were plain. His voice was heard, too, at a banquet, when the king of the Nabataeans presented heavy gold crowns to Caesar and Agrippina and lighter ones to Piso and the rest — Piso remarked that a Roman prince's son, not a Parthian king's, was the one being honored at this table, then flung his crown to the floor and added a good many more words against extravagance. Germanicus found this bitter but bore it.
58| Meanwhile envoys came from Artabanus, king of the Parthians. He had sent them to recall the friendship and treaty between the two peoples, saying he wished to renew the pledge, and that in honor of Germanicus he would come to the bank of the Euphrates. He asked meanwhile that Vonones not be kept in Syria, where he might draw the leading men of the tribes into factional strife through secret messages. Germanicus answered grandly on the alliance between Rome and Parthia, and with dignified restraint on the king's proposed visit and the honor due himself. Vonones was moved to Pompeiopolis, a coastal city of Cilicia. This was granted not only to Artabanus's request but as an insult to Piso, to whom Vonones had made himself very welcome through many favors and gifts with which he had bound Plancina to him.
59| Marcus Silanus and Lucius Norbanus were now consuls, and it was in their year that Germanicus set out for Egypt, drawn by its ancient sites. The official reason given was provincial business, and he did ease grain prices by opening the public granaries, and won popular favor by walking about without soldiers, feet bare, dressed like a Greek — in imitation of Publius Scipio, who we are told did the same in Sicily, even while the war with Carthage still raged. Tiberius rebuked his dress and manner with mild words, but came down hard on one point: against Augustus's rule, Germanicus had entered Alexandria without the emperor's leave. For among the other secrets of his rule, Augustus had set Egypt apart, forbidding senators or prominent Roman knights to enter without permission, so that no one who seized that province and its land-and-sea gateways could starve Italy by holding it, even with a modest garrison, against a vast army.
60| Germanicus, not yet aware that his journey was under attack, sailed up the Nile, starting from the town of Canopus. The Spartans founded it in honor of Canopus, the helmsman who lay buried there — this from the days when Menelaus, on his way home to Greece, got driven off course into another sea, toward the land of Libya. From there he reached the nearest mouth of the river, sacred to Hercules, whom the natives claim was born among them and is the oldest of that name, with later men of equal courage taking his title afterward. Next he visited the vast ruins of ancient Thebes. Egyptian writing still stood on the massive structures, recording the city's former wealth, and one of the elder priests, ordered to translate his ancestral tongue, reported that the city had once held seven hundred thousand men of military age, and with that army King Rhamses had conquered Libya, Ethiopia, the Medes and Persians and Bactria and Scythia, and had held under his rule the lands of the Syrians, the Armenians, and the neighboring Cappadocians, stretching from Bithynia on one side to Lycia and the sea on the other. The tribute imposed on these nations was also recorded there — weights of silver and gold, numbers of weapons and horses, gifts of ivory and incense for the temples, and quantities of grain and other goods each nation owed — no less magnificent than what is now exacted by Parthian force or Roman power.
61| Germanicus also turned his attention to other wonders, chief among them the stone statue of Memnon, which gives off a vocal sound when struck by the sun's rays; the pyramids, rising like mountains among sands nearly impassable, built through the rivalry and wealth of kings; and the man-made lakes dug to catch the Nile's overflow. Elsewhere he saw narrow gorges of such depth that no explorer could reach the bottom. From there he came to Elephantine and Syene, once the boundary of the Roman empire, which now extends to the Red Sea.
62| While Germanicus spent that summer traveling through several provinces, Drusus won no small glory by inciting the Germans to fight among themselves, pressing the advantage now that Maroboduus was broken, to finish him off entirely. Among the Gotones there was a nobleman named Catualda, once driven out by Maroboduus's power, who now dared to seek revenge while Maroboduus's fortunes were uncertain. With a strong force he entered the territory of the Marcomanni, bribed the chief men into alliance, and burst into the royal residence and the fortress beside it. There were found the old plunder of the Suebi, and sutlers and traders from our own provinces, whom the right of commerce, then the desire to increase their wealth, and finally forgetfulness of their homeland had drawn each from his own place into enemy territory.
63| Maroboduus, abandoned on every side, had nothing left but Caesar's mercy. Crossing the Danube where it runs along the province of Noricum, he wrote to Tiberius — not like a fugitive or a suppliant, but as one recalling his former greatness: many nations had once invited him, then the famous king, to join them, yet he had chosen friendship with Rome instead. Caesar's reply was that a safe and honored home would be his in Italy if he stayed; but if his interests lay elsewhere, he could leave with the same safe conduct he had come with. In the senate, though, Tiberius said that neither Philip had been so feared by the Athenians, nor Pyrrhus nor Antiochus by the Roman people, as Maroboduus had been. A speech survives in which he extolled the man's greatness, the violence of the tribes under him, how close a threat he had stood to Italy, and his own strategy in bringing him down. Maroboduus was kept at Ravenna, and whenever the Suebi grew restless he was held up as a threat that he might return to the throne. But he never left Italy in eighteen years, and grew old there, his fame much diminished by his excessive attachment to life. Catualda met the same fate and found no other refuge either. Driven out not long after by the power of the Hermunduri under their leader Vibilius, he was taken in and sent to Forum Julii, a colony of Narbonese Gaul. So that neither band of followers could stir up trouble by mingling with the peaceful provinces, both were resettled beyond the Danube, in the country between the Marus and Cusus rivers, under a king assigned to rule them, Vannius of the Quadi.
64| At the same time it was announced that Germanicus had installed Artaxias as king of Armenia, and the senate decreed that Germanicus and Drusus should enter the city in ovation. Arches were also built flanking the temple of Mars the Avenger, bearing images of the two Caesars — Tiberius all the more pleased that he had secured peace through wisdom than if he had ended a war through battle. So he now moved craftily against Rhescuporis, king of Thrace, as well. That whole nation had been held by Rhoemetalces; on his death Augustus gave part of Thrace to his brother Rhescuporis and part to his son Cotys. In that division, the farmland, cities, and territory near the Greeks went to Cotys, while the wild, uncultivated land bordering enemies went to Rhescuporis — and the two kings' temperaments matched their shares, the one gentle and easygoing, the other fierce, grasping, and impatient of partnership. At first they kept an uneasy peace. But soon Rhescuporis began crossing his borders, seizing land given to Cotys, and using force when he resisted — cautiously while Augustus lived, since he feared Augustus as the guarantor of both kingdoms and its avenger if defied. But once he heard of the change of emperor, he sent in bands of raiders, destroyed forts, and manufactured pretexts for war.
65| Nothing troubled Tiberius so much as the fear that settled affairs might be thrown into disorder. He chose a centurion to tell the two kings not to settle their dispute by arms. Cotys at once disbanded the auxiliary forces he had raised. Rhescuporis, feigning restraint, proposed they meet at the same place, saying their disputes could be settled by conference. There was little delay over the time or place, and then over the terms, since one side gave way from good faith and the other took advantage through deceit — each side conceding and accepting everything between them. Rhescuporis, to seal the treaty as he claimed, added a banquet, and after the feasting and drinking had dragged deep into the night, he seized Cotys off guard; and once Cotys understood the trick, and appealed to the sacred bonds of the kingdom, the gods of their shared family, and the rights of hospitality, Rhescuporis loaded him with chains anyway. Having seized the whole of Thrace, he wrote to Tiberius that a plot had been laid against him and he had struck first against the plotter. At the same time, using a pretended war against the Bastarnae and Scythians as cover, he strengthened himself with new forces of infantry and cavalry. The reply came back mild: if there had been no deceit, he could trust in his own innocence; but neither he nor the senate would judge right and wrong without knowing the full case — so he should hand over Cotys, come to Rome, and shift the blame for the crime onto whoever deserved it.
66| Latinius Pandusa, propraetor of Moesia, sent that letter into Thrace along with soldiers to whom Cotys was to be handed over. Rhescuporis, torn between fear and rage, decided he would rather stand accused of a completed crime than an attempted one: he ordered Cotys killed, and falsely claimed he had taken his own life. Even so, Caesar did not abandon the strategy he had already settled on. When Pandusa died — a man Rhescuporis charged with being hostile to him — Tiberius appointed Pomponius Flaccus to Moesia, choosing him above all because his long military service and close friendship with the king made him better suited to deceive him.
67| Flaccus crossed into Thrace and, through enormous promises, pushed Rhescuporis—hesitant, weighing his own crimes—into entering the Roman camp. There a strong guard was thrown around the king, dressed up as an honor guard; tribunes and centurions kept at him with warnings and persuasion, and the farther he was drawn from home the less the confinement bothered to hide itself, until at last, understanding what was inevitable, they hauled him off to Rome. Cotys's widow accused him in the Senate, and he was condemned—kept far from his kingdom. Thrace was split between Rhoemetalces, his son, who was known to have opposed his father's schemes, and the children of Cotys; since they were not yet grown, Trebellenus Rufus, an ex-praetor, was appointed to run the kingdom meanwhile, following the precedent by which earlier generations had sent Marcus Lepidus to Egypt as guardian for Ptolemy's children. Rhescuporis was shipped to Alexandria and killed there, trying to escape—or on a trumped-up charge; it's unclear which.
68| Around the same time Vonones, whom I mentioned had been moved to Cilicia, bribed his guards and tried to flee to the Armenians, then to the Albani and Heniochi, and to the king of the Scythians, his kinsman. Under cover of a hunting trip he left the coast and struck into trackless country, then rode hard for the river Pyramus; but the locals, hearing the king had fled, had broken down the bridges, and the river couldn't be forded. So he was captured on the bank by Vibius Fronto, commander of cavalry; then Remmius, a veteran recalled to duty and placed in charge of guarding the king, ran him through with a sword—supposedly in a fit of anger. This made people more inclined to believe Vonones had been deliberately killed, and that Remmius, aware of his own guilt and afraid of being informed on, silenced him.
69| Germanicus, sailing back from Egypt, found that everything he had ordered among the legions and the cities had been cancelled or reversed. This led to bitter insults against Piso, matched by equally sharp attacks Piso aimed at Caesar. Piso then decided to leave Syria. But Germanicus fell ill, and Piso stayed on; when he learned Germanicus had recovered and people were paying the vows made for his health, Piso sent his lictors to break up the sacrificial animals, the ritual preparations, and the festive crowd of Antioch. Then he withdrew to Seleucia to wait and see how the illness that had struck Germanicus again would turn out. The savagery of the sickness was made worse by the conviction that Piso had poisoned him; and indeed searchers found, dug out of the floor and walls, the remains of human bodies, spells, curses, and Germanicus's name inscribed on lead tablets, half-burned ashes smeared with blood, and other implements of witchcraft by which souls are believed to be consecrated to the powers of the underworld. At the same time men sent by Piso were accused of spying out how the illness was progressing.
70| Germanicus took this with as much anger as fear. If his own doorway was under siege, if he had to breathe his last under his enemies' eyes, what then would happen to his miserable wife, to his infant children? Poison was slow—Piso should just hurry things along and seize the province and the legions for himself. But Germanicus wasn't so far gone, he said, and the rewards of murder wouldn't stay long with the murderer. He wrote letters formally renouncing his friendship with Piso; many add that he also ordered him to leave the province. Piso did not linger; he set sail, but held his course back at a measured pace, so as to be closer at hand to return quickly if Germanicus's death should open Syria to him.
71| Caesar rallied briefly, giving hope, but then his body gave out, and as the end approached he spoke to the friends standing by him: 'If I were dying a natural death, I'd have just cause for grief even against the gods, for tearing me away from my parents, my children, my country by an early death in the middle of my youth. But now, cut off by the crime of Piso and Plancina, I leave my last request in your hearts: tell my father and my brother with what agonies I was torn apart, by what treachery I was surrounded, and how I ended a wretched life with the worst of deaths. Anyone who hoped in me, anyone bound to me by blood, even those who envied me while I lived, will weep to hear that a man once flourishing, who survived so many wars, fell to a woman's treachery. You will have grounds to complain before the Senate, to invoke the law. It is not a friend's chief duty to follow the dead with useless mourning, but to remember what he wanted and carry it out. Even strangers will weep for Germanicus; you will avenge me, if it was me you loved and not just my fortune. Show the Roman people the granddaughter of the deified Augustus, who is also my wife; count out our six children. Sympathy will side with the accusers, and if my killers plead they only followed criminal orders, people will either not believe it or not forgive it.' His friends swore, touching the dying man's hand, that they would sooner lose their lives than their revenge.
72| Then, turning to his wife, he begged her, by his memory and by their children together, to put aside her fierceness, to bow her spirit before this savage turn of fortune, and not, on returning to Rome, to provoke those stronger than herself by competing for power. This he said openly; other things he said in private, through which he was believed to have shown his fear of Tiberius. Not long after, he died, to immense grief throughout the province and the peoples around it. Foreign nations and kings mourned him: such was his warmth toward allies, his gentleness toward enemies; he was revered equally in sight and in speech, and though he kept the dignity and weight owed to his high rank, he had escaped both envy and arrogance.
73| His funeral, without the customary ancestor masks and procession, was made memorable instead by the praise and the remembrance of his virtues. There were those who compared his looks, his age, and the manner of his death—helped along by the closeness of the places where each had died—to the fate of Alexander the Great. Both men, they said, were handsome, of distinguished birth, not much past thirty, and died among foreign peoples through the treachery of their own. But Germanicus had been gentle to his friends, moderate in his pleasures, faithful to one marriage, with legitimate children—and no less a fighter, even without Alexander's recklessness, though he had been held back from grinding into submission Germany, already shattered by so many of his victories. And if he had been sole master of affairs, with a king's right and title, he would have won military glory all the faster for surpassing Alexander in mercy, self-control, and every other virtue. Before the burning, they laid him out naked in Antioch's forum, at the spot picked for his burial, so all could see whether the body bore marks of poison—a question never truly settled, since people read the signs according to their pity for Germanicus, their prior suspicions, or their leanings toward Piso.
74| The legates and the other senators present then debated who should take charge of Syria. The rest made only modest bids, but between Vibius Marsus and Gnaeus Sentius the contest ran long; finally Marsus yielded to Sentius, the elder man and the more forceful contender. Sentius sent to Rome a woman named Martina, notorious in that province for poisoning and very close to Plancina—at the demand of Vitellius, Veranius, and the others who were building the case and the charges as if against defendants already as good as convicted.
75| Agrippina, though worn down by grief and physically ill, could not bear anything that delayed vengeance, and boarded ship with Germanicus's ashes and their children. Everyone pitied her: a woman of the highest nobility, once seen amid a beautiful marriage surrounded by people paying her homage and congratulations, now carrying the grim remains against her breast, uncertain whether she would get her revenge, anxious for herself, and made vulnerable again and again by an ill-starred fertility. Meanwhile, on the island of Cos, news reached Piso that Germanicus had died. He received it with no restraint at all—slaughtering victims, visiting temples—and made no effort to hide his joy, while Plancina went even further, exchanging the mourning clothes she had worn for her sister's death, only that day, for festive dress.
76| Centurions came flocking to Piso, telling him the legions were eager and ready: he should retake the province, they said, which had been taken from him unlawfully and now stood empty. So when he asked what to do, his son Marcus Piso urged speed to Rome: nothing unforgivable had been done yet, and there was no need to fear weak suspicions or empty rumor. His hostility to Germanicus might deserve resentment, perhaps, but not punishment; and losing the province had already satisfied his enemies. But if he went back, and Sentius resisted, that would start a civil war; and the centurions and soldiers would not stay loyal to his side, since the fresh memory of their own commander and their deep-rooted love for the house of the Caesars would win out.
77| Against this, Domitius Celer, one of Piso's closest friends, argued that he should make the most of the moment: it was Piso, not Sentius, who had been placed over Syria; Piso who held the fasces and a praetor's authority, Piso who had been given the legions. If any hostile move came, who had better right to take up arms than the man who held a legate's authority and his own specific orders? Time should also be allowed for rumors to fade—the innocent are usually no match for fresh outrage, but time favors them. And if Piso held the army and built up his strength, many things impossible to foresee would fall out for the better by chance. 'Are we really in such a hurry to arrive alongside Germanicus's ashes, so that you can be dragged down, unheard and undefended, by Agrippina's wailing and the ignorant mob's first impression? You have Augusta's backing, you have Caesar's favor—though kept quiet; and no one mourns Germanicus's death more loudly than those who are secretly most delighted by it.'
78| It did not take much effort to push Piso, already inclined that way, toward this fiercer course. He sent letters to Tiberius accusing Germanicus of extravagance and arrogance, and claimed that he himself had been driven out to make room for revolution, and had only reclaimed command of the army with the same loyalty he'd always shown. At the same time he ordered Domitius, put aboard a trireme, to avoid the coastline and cut straight across open water to Syria past the islands. He gathered up deserters flocking to him and organized them into companies, armed the camp servants, ferried his ships across to the mainland, intercepted a detachment of recruits on their way to Syria, wrote to the petty kings of Cilicia asking for reinforcements—young Piso proving no slouch himself at the business of war, even though he had argued against undertaking it.
79| So they sailed along the coast of Lycia and Pamphylia, and when they met the ships carrying Agrippina, both sides at first drew weapons in mutual hostility. Then, each fearing the other, it went no further than shouting, and Vibius Marsus told Piso to come to Rome and answer for himself. Piso dodged the demand, replying he would appear once the praetor in charge of poisoning cases had set a date for accuser and accused. Meanwhile Domitius, having put in at Laodicea in Syria, tried to reach the winter camp of the sixth legion, which he judged the likeliest to be won over to a new venture — but the legate Pacuvius got there first. Sentius reported this to Piso by letter, warning him not to try corrupting the camp or making war on the province. He gathered everyone he knew to be loyal to Germanicus's memory or hostile to Piso, hammering home the greatness of the dead commander and the point that the state itself was under attack by force of arms. He led out a strong force, ready for battle.
80| Piso, though his plans were going badly, did not abandon the safest option left to him: he seized a well-fortified stronghold in Cilicia called Celenderis. By mixing in deserters, a recently intercepted batch of recruits, his own household and Plancina's slaves, and the Cilician auxiliaries sent by local kings, he had made up something like a legion. He kept insisting he was Caesar's governor, shut out of the province Caesar had given him — not by the legions, since he claimed he came at their invitation, but by Sentius, who was dressing up a private grudge as public charges. Let them form up for battle, he said — the soldiers wouldn't fight once they saw that Piso, whom they had once called their father, held the stronger claim if this were settled by law, and was no weak opponent if it came to arms. He then drew up his companies in front of the fort's defenses, on a steep, broken hill — the rest of the position was ringed by sea. Facing him stood the veterans, formed in proper ranks with reserves behind. On one side, tough soldiers; on the other, rough ground — but no real spirit, no hope, not even proper weapons, only rustic ones hastily made for the moment. When it came to close fighting, there was no doubt beyond how long it took the Roman cohorts to fight their way onto level ground. The Cilicians turned and ran, shutting themselves inside the fort.
81| Meanwhile Piso tried, uselessly, to attack the fleet waiting not far off. Falling back, he stood before the walls and tried to start a mutiny — one moment beating his breast in despair, the next calling out soldiers by name, offering bribes — and he stirred things up enough that the standard-bearer of the sixth legion carried his standard over to him. At that Sentius ordered the horns and trumpets sounded, the earthworks stormed, ladders raised, the boldest men to go first, others to hurl spears, stones, and firebrands from siege engines. Finally, his stubbornness broken, Piso asked to be allowed to give up his arms and stay in the fort while word was sent to Caesar about who should govern Syria. The terms were refused; he was granted nothing but ships and safe passage to the city.
82| At Rome, once word spread that Germanicus was ill, and every report — as happens with news from far away — arrived worse than the last, grief turned to anger, and complaints broke out. Of course he'd been banished to the ends of the earth, of course Piso had been given the province — this was what Augusta's private talks with Plancina had been about. The older generation had spoken the plain truth about Drusus: rulers dislike sons with the common touch, and Germanicus and Drusus had been cut down for no reason but that they meant to treat the Roman people as equals once liberty was restored. This gossip was already running hot when news of his death set it ablaze — so much so that before any edict from the magistrates, before any decree of the senate, people declared a public mourning on their own: the courts emptied, houses shut their doors. Everywhere there was silence and weeping, nothing staged for show; and though people did not avoid the outward marks of mourning, their grief ran deeper than that. By chance, merchants who had left Syria while Germanicus was still alive arrived with better news of his health. It was believed at once, spread at once: everyone who met another passed on what he'd half-heard, and each retelling added to the last out of sheer joy. People ran through the streets, forced open temple doors — night makes credulity easier, and certainty comes more readily in the dark. Tiberius did nothing to stop the false rumor, letting time and distance wear it down; and the people, feeling as though they had lost Germanicus a second time, grieved even harder.
83| Honors were proposed and voted according to each man's love for Germanicus or skill at invention: that his name be sung in the Salian hymn; that curule chairs be set up for him among the seats of the priests of Augustus, with oak wreaths above them; that an ivory image of him lead the procession at the circus games; that no one but a member of the Julian family be chosen priest or augur in his place. Arches were added at Rome, on the bank of the Rhine, and on Mount Amanus in Syria, inscribed with his achievements and the fact that he had died in the service of the state. A tomb was built at Antioch, where he was cremated, and a memorial platform at Epidaphne, where he had died. No one could easily count all the statues and shrines decreed in his honor. When a shield of gold, remarkable for its size, was proposed among those honoring great orators, Tiberius declared he would dedicate one of the ordinary kind, equal to the others — eloquence, he said, was not a matter of rank, and it was honor enough to be counted among the old writers. The order of knights renamed the squadron of younger men "Germanicus's Squadron," and decreed that on the Ides of July the troops of cavalry should follow his image in procession. Most of these honors still stand; some were dropped at once, others simply faded with time.
84| While grief was still fresh, Germanicus's sister Livia, married to Drusus, gave birth to twin boys. Such a thing is rare and welcome even in a modest household, and it pleased the emperor so much that he could not resist boasting to the senate that no Roman of such high rank had ever before had twin sons — for he turned everything, even chance events, into occasions for glory. But to a people in such a mood, even this brought pain, as if Drusus, now blessed with more children, threatened to overshadow the house of Germanicus all the more.
85| That same year the senate passed strict decrees to curb the licentiousness of women, ruling that no woman whose grandfather, father, or husband had been a Roman knight could register as a prostitute. Vistilia, born into a praetorian family, had advertised herself for sale to the aediles under the old custom, by which women who confessed to such disgrace openly were thought sufficiently punished by the admission itself. Her husband, Titidius Labeo, was also called to account for failing to prosecute her clear offense under the law. When he pleaded that the sixty days allowed for deliberation had not yet run out, the senate decided it was enough simply to deal with Vistilia; she was banished to the island of Seriphos. The senate also debated expelling Egyptian and Jewish rites, and decreed that four thousand descendants of freed slaves tainted with this superstition, of suitable age, be shipped to Sardinia to suppress banditry there — and if the harsh climate killed them, it was reckoned no great loss. The rest were to leave Italy unless they gave up their foreign rites by a fixed date.
86| After this Caesar reported that a virgin must be chosen to replace Occia, who for fifty-seven years had presided over the Vestal rites with the utmost purity, and he thanked Fonteius Agrippa and Domitius Pollio for competing to offer their daughters in service to the state. Pollio's daughter was chosen, for no other reason than that her mother still lived with her father in the same marriage — Agrippa had weakened his household's claim through divorce. Caesar comforted the girl who was passed over with a dowry of a million sesterces.
87| When the common people complained of the brutal cost of grain, he fixed a price for buyers to pay and promised to make up two sesterces per bushel to the grain dealers himself. Even so he refused the title "Father of the Country," which had been offered to him before as well, and sharply rebuked those who called his duties divine and called him "lord." This left little safe room for speech under a ruler who feared liberty yet hated flattery.
88| I find in the writers and senators of that time that a letter from Adgandestrius, chief of the Chatti, was read out in the senate, promising the death of Arminius if poison were sent to carry out the killing. The answer given was that the Roman people took revenge on their enemies not by treachery or in secret, but openly and by force of arms. In making this claim Tiberius put himself on a level with the commanders of old who had refused and exposed a plot to poison King Pyrrhus. As for Arminius, once the Romans had withdrawn and Maroboduus had been driven out, he reached for a kingdom of his own and found his own people's love of freedom turned against him; attacked with arms, he fought on with fortune running now for him, now against, and at last went down to treachery from kin of his own blood. Beyond all doubt he stood as Germany's liberator — a man who challenged not the infancy of Roman power, as other kings and generals had, but Rome at the height of its strength; uneven in battle, never beaten in war. He lived thirty-seven years, twelve of them in power, and songs of him are still sung among the barbarian tribes, though the Greek historians never heard of him — they admire only their own — and even among Romans he is not as celebrated as he deserves, since we praise the old and pay too little attention to the recent.
1| Agrippina, without a break in her winter voyage, put in at Corcyra, the island facing the Calabrian shore. There she spent a few days composing herself, still wild with grief and unpracticed in bearing it. Meanwhile word of her arrival spread, and everyone close to her, most of the soldiers who had served under Germanicus, and many strangers from the nearby towns besides, rushed to Brundisium—the fastest and safest landing for her—some out of duty to the emperor's house, more simply following the crowd. The moment her fleet was sighted from the open sea, the harbor and the shoreline filled, and so did the walls and rooftops and every point that offered a view, with a grieving crowd asking one another whether they should receive her landing in silence or with some cry. No one was quite sure what the moment called for. Then the ships drew slowly in, the rowing not brisk as usual but everything arranged for sorrow. When Agrippina came ashore with her two children, holding the funeral urn, and fixed her eyes on the ground, one groan rose from everyone alike—you could not tell family from strangers, men's weeping from women's, except that those who had come to meet her, fresh in their grief, outdid Agrippina's own escort, worn down by long mourning.
2| The emperor dispatched two cohorts of the praetorian guard, and directed the magistrates of Calabria, Apulia, and Campania to pay his son's memory every last honor. So the ashes were carried on the shoulders of tribunes and centurions; the standards went ahead unadorned, the fasces reversed. Wherever the procession passed through a colony, the common people wore black and the knights their ceremonial robes, and, according to what each town could afford, burned clothing, incense, and the other customary funeral offerings. Even towns off the route came out to meet it, offering victims and altars to the spirits of the dead, testifying their grief with tears and cries. Drusus, along with his brother Claudius and the children of Germanicus still in Rome, went as far as Terracina to meet it. By then the consuls Marcus Valerius and Marcus Aurelius held office, and they, together with the senate and much of the people, crowded the road in scattered groups, each weeping as feeling moved him; none of it was flattery, for everyone could see Tiberius struggling, and badly, to mask how pleased he was that Germanicus had died.
3| Tiberius and Augusta stayed away from the public eye, judging it beneath their dignity to mourn openly, or else fearing that if every eye searched their faces, the grief would be seen through as false. I find no record, either in the historians or in the daily register of public acts, that Antonia, Germanicus's mother, took any conspicuous part, though Agrippina, Drusus, Claudius, and the rest of the family are named individually. Either illness held her back, or her spirit, broken by grief, could not bear to look the full scale of the disaster in the face. I find it easier to believe that Tiberius and Augusta, who never left the house, kept her there too, so that her grief would match theirs and it would look as though the boy's grandmother and uncle were being held back by the same example as the mother.
4| The day the remains were placed in the tomb of Augustus was by turns a vast silence and a restless burst of wailing. The city's streets were packed, torches blazed across the Field of Mars. There the soldiers stood under arms, the magistrates without their badges of office, and the people, tribe by tribe, cried out that the state had fallen, that nothing was left to hope for—more openly and more boldly than anyone would believe they'd dare say of their rulers. Nothing cut into Tiberius more than the people's passion for Agrippina, whom they called the glory of the country, the last of the blood of Augustus, the one surviving model of the old virtue, turning to the heavens and the gods to pray that her children be kept safe and outlive their enemies.
5| Some complained that there had been no public funeral procession, comparing it with the honor and splendor Augustus had shown Drusus, Germanicus's father. Augustus himself, they recalled, had pushed on through the harshest winter weather all the way to Ticinum, and had not left the body's side even on entering the city; the death-masks of the Claudii and the Julii had ringed the bier; he had been mourned in the Forum, praised from the rostra, and every honor the ancestors had devised, or that later generations could invent, had been heaped on him. But Germanicus had not even received the ordinary honors owed to any nobleman. True, the length of the journey meant his body had to be burned however the foreign land allowed—but all the more reason, they said, to have piled on honors afterward to make up for what chance had denied him at first. His brother had come only a single day's journey to meet him; his uncle not even to the city gate. Where were the old customs now—the effigy laid out on a couch, the verses composed to keep his courage in memory, the eulogies, the tears, or even a show of grief?
6| Tiberius knew what people were saying. To quiet the talk, he issued an edict noting that many distinguished Romans had died for the state, and none had been mourned with such burning devotion. That devotion did credit to him and to everyone—so long as it kept some restraint. What suited ordinary households or ordinary towns, he said, did not suit men who ruled, or a people that ruled an empire. Grief and the comfort that comes from mourning were fitting while the wound was fresh; but now it was time to steady the mind again, as the deified Julius had done after losing his only daughter, and the deified Augustus after losing his grandsons, both burying their sorrow. There was no need to reach for older examples—think how often the Roman people had borne, without breaking, the ruin of armies, the deaths of generals, whole noble families wiped out. Rulers die; the state is eternal. Let the people, he said, return to their ordinary business, and since the Megalesian games were coming up, take up their pleasures again too.
7| So the period of public mourning was lifted and life returned to its business, and Drusus set out for the armies in Illyricum. Everyone's mind was fixed on pursuing Piso for vengeance, and there was constant complaint that he was wandering at leisure through the pleasant country of Asia and Achaea, using arrogant delay and cunning to undermine the proof of his crimes. It had become common knowledge that Martina, the woman notorious for poisoning whom Gnaeus Sentius had sent to Rome as I mentioned, had died suddenly at Brundisium, poison hidden in a knot of her hair, and no marks on her body to show how she had died.
8| Piso, meanwhile, sent his son ahead to Rome with instructions on how to soften the emperor toward him, and himself made for Drusus, hoping to find him not enraged by his brother's death but, with a rival removed, better disposed toward him. Tiberius, wanting to seem impartial, received the young man kindly and, following his usual generosity toward the sons of noble houses, showered him with favors. Drusus told Piso that if the charges being made were true, his own grief came first in this above all others; but he would rather believe them false and groundless, and that Germanicus's death should be the ruin of no one. He said this openly, avoiding any private meeting, and no one doubted Tiberius had coached him—for Drusus, otherwise artless and easygoing in his youth, was showing an old man's cunning.
9| Piso crossed the Adriatic, left his ships at Ancona, and traveled through Picenum and then the Flaminian Way to catch up with a legion being marched from Pannonia to Rome and on to garrison duty in Africa. This stirred rumors, since he was said to have shown himself repeatedly to the soldiers along the march. From Narnia—whether to avoid suspicion, or simply because a frightened man's plans are never settled—he sailed down the Nar and then the Tiber, which only inflamed the public's anger further, since he brought his ship in near the tomb of the Caesars, and, with the riverbank crowded in broad daylight, disembarked with a great train of clients, Plancina with her escort of women, both of them looking pleased with themselves. Adding to the resentment was his house overlooking the Forum, decked out for a celebration, with a banquet and feasting in full view—nothing hidden, given how public the spot was.
10| The next day Fulcinius Trio brought a formal charge against Piso before the consuls. But Vitellius, Veranius, and the others who had accompanied Germanicus objected that Trio had no standing in the case; they were not there as accusers but as witnesses reporting facts and carrying out Germanicus's instructions. Trio gave up that part of the prosecution but won the right to attack Piso's earlier conduct instead, and it was requested that the emperor himself hear the case. Even the accused did not object to this, fearing the passions of the people and the senate; Tiberius, by contrast, was thought strong enough to shrug off rumor, and was, besides, bound up in his mother's involvement—truth, or a version twisted for the worse, could more easily be sorted out by a single judge, while hatred and prejudice carried more weight with a crowd. Tiberius was well aware how heavy the case would be, and how it would drag his own reputation down with it. So, calling in a few of his intimates, he heard the threats of the prosecution and the pleas of the defense, then sent the whole matter, untouched, back to the senate.
11| Meanwhile Drusus, returning from Illyricum, entered the city without the ovation the senate had voted him for recovering Maroboduus and for his achievements the previous summer—the honor was postponed. After this, the defendant asked Lucius Arruntius, Publius Vinicius, Asinius Gallus, Aeserninus Marcellus, and Sextus Pompeius to act as his advocates; when they made various excuses, Manius Lepidus, Lucius Piso, and Livineius Regulus stood by him instead, while the whole city watched intently—how loyal would Germanicus's friends prove, how confident was the defendant, and could Tiberius keep his own feelings sufficiently in check and under control. Never before had the people allowed themselves so much unspoken criticism of their ruler, or such suspicious silence.
12| On the day the Senate met, Tiberius gave a carefully measured speech. Piso, he said, had been his father's governor and friend, and he himself, on the Senate's authority, had appointed him to assist Germanicus in managing affairs in the East. Whether Piso had provoked the young man there by defiance and quarrels, and then rejoiced at his death, or had actually murdered him — that was for unbiased minds to judge. 'If a governor overstepped the bounds of duty and threw off obedience to his commander, and then rejoiced at that commander's death and my grief, I will hate him for it, shut him out of my house, and avenge a private wrong without using my power as emperor. But if a crime is uncovered — a crime that would demand justice no matter who the victim was — then you, indeed, owe Germanicus's children and us, his parents, a fair reckoning. At the same time, weigh this: did Piso mishandle the army in turmoil and sedition, buy the soldiers' loyalty through favoritism, try to retake the province by force? Or have his accusers inflated these charges beyond the truth — accusers whose excessive zeal I rightly resent? What was the point of stripping the body bare and exposing it to the crowd's eyes, of spreading the rumor, even among foreigners, that he'd been poisoned, if the facts are still uncertain and need investigating? I mourn my son — I will always mourn him. But I will not stop the defendant from presenting everything that might support his innocence, or expose any wrong Germanicus himself may have done. And I ask you not to take the charges as already proven simply because they touch my grief. If any of you are his advocates by blood or loyalty, help him in his danger, each with whatever skill and diligence you have. I urge the same effort, the same persistence, on his accusers. The one privilege we will grant Germanicus beyond the law is this: that his death is examined in the Senate house rather than the forum, before the Senate rather than ordinary judges. Everything else should proceed with equal restraint. Let no one weigh Drusus's tears, or my own grief, or any slanders invented against us.'
13| Two days were then set for laying out the charges, and after a six-day pause, three days for the defense. Fulcinius opened with old, weak material — that Piso had governed Spain greedily and corruptly. Even if the defendant cleared himself of the recent charges, this old business proved nothing against him; and if he were convicted on the graver counts, it hardly needed defending either way. After him came Servaeus, Veranius, and Vitellius, all pressing the case with matching zeal, Vitellius with real eloquence. They charged that out of hatred for Germanicus and a hunger for revolution, Piso had corrupted the common soldiers through unchecked license and abuses against the allies, until the worst of them hailed him as 'father of the legions'; that against the best men, especially Germanicus's companions and friends, he had turned savage; that finally he had destroyed Germanicus himself with curses and poison; that he and Plancina had performed unspeakable sacrifices and offerings; that he had made war on the state, and only after being defeated in battle could he be brought to trial at all.
14| On the rest, the defense faltered. Piso could not deny buying the soldiers' favor, nor that he'd let the province fall prey to the worst men, nor even the insults against his commander. Only the poison charge did he seem to clear — and even the accusers hadn't pressed it very hard. They claimed that at a banquet of Germanicus's, with Piso reclining above him, the food had been tainted by Piso's own hands. But it seemed absurd that he'd dare such a thing among strangers' slaves, with so many onlookers, right in front of Germanicus himself. The defendant offered up his household and demanded his servants be put to torture. But the judges were implacable, each for a different reason: Tiberius because war had been brought on the province, the Senate because it could never quite believe Germanicus had died without foul play. Both sides had wanted to write letters of protest, which Tiberius refused no less firmly than Piso did. Meanwhile the crowd's voices could be heard outside the Senate house: they would not hold back their hands if he escaped the Senate's judgment. They had already dragged Piso's statues toward the Gemonian Stairs and were tearing them apart, until the emperor ordered them protected and put back. So Piso was placed in a litter and escorted home by a tribune of the praetorian cohort — though rumor differed on whether the man went along to guard his safety or to see him dead.
15| Plancina drew the same hostility, but far greater favor, so it was unclear how far Tiberius's power over her actually reached. As long as Piso had some hope, she promised to share his fortune, whatever it turned out to be, and to join him even in death if it came to that. But once she secured a pardon through Livia's private pleading, she began, little by little, to separate herself from her husband and split off her own defense. When Piso realized this spelled his ruin — still unsure whether to keep fighting — his sons urged him on, and he steeled himself to return to the Senate. He endured the renewed accusation, the Senate's hostile voices, every hardship and cruelty thrown at him, but nothing frightened him more than the sight of Tiberius: without pity, without anger, closed off and rigid, guarded against any feeling breaking through. Brought home, as if to prepare his defense for the next day, he wrote a few lines, sealed them, and gave them to a freedman. Then he attended to his body as usual. Late in the night, after his wife had left the bedroom, he ordered the doors watched from outside. At daybreak he was found with his throat cut and a sword lying on the floor.
16| I remember hearing from older men that a document was often seen in Piso's hands, one he never made public himself; but his friends used to say it contained letters and instructions from Tiberius concerning Germanicus, and that he meant to produce it before the Senate and accuse the emperor — had he not been tricked by Sejanus with empty promises. They said he hadn't killed himself at all, but that an assassin had been sent in. I can vouch for neither story; but I felt I shouldn't hide what was told by those who lived on into my own youth. Tiberius, his face set in sorrow, told the Senate he understood the suspicion such a death would bring on him, and pressed Piso's freedman with repeated questions about how Piso had spent his last day and night. The man's answers were mostly sensible, some less guarded, and Tiberius then read out a document Piso had written, composed roughly as follows: 'Crushed by a conspiracy of enemies and by hatred born of a false charge, since there is nowhere left for truth and my innocence to be heard, I call the immortal gods to witness that I lived, Caesar, in loyalty to you, and in no less devotion to your mother. I ask you to look after my children — of whom Gnaeus Piso had no part in whatever fortune has befallen me, since he spent this whole time in Rome, while Marcus Piso urged me not to return to Syria. Would that I, the old father, had yielded to my young son, rather than he to me. I beg all the more earnestly that he not pay, innocent, for my wrongdoing. By my forty-five years of loyal service, by the consulship I once shared, as a man trusted by your father the deified Augustus and a friend to you, and asking nothing further, I beg for the safety of my unhappy son.' Of Plancina he added nothing.
17| After this, Tiberius cleared the younger son of the charge of waging war, since as a son he could hardly have refused his father's orders; and he also pitied the family's noble standing and the grave misfortune Piso himself had earned, however deserved. For Plancina he spoke with visible shame and discomfort, citing his mother's pleas on her behalf — pleas that only sharpened the private complaints of every honest man. Was it right, they muttered, that a grandmother should look upon her grandson's murderer, speak with her, snatch her away from the Senate's judgment? That the protection the law gave every citizen should be denied to Germanicus alone? Vitellius and Veranius had voiced grief for Caesar's son; Plancina had been defended by the emperor and his mother. Let her simply turn those poisons and tricks, so successfully tested once, against Agrippina and her children, and let this admirable grandmother and uncle glut themselves on the blood of that most wretched house. Two more days were wasted on this charade of a hearing, with Tiberius pressing Piso's sons to defend their mother. When the accusers and witnesses competed to press their case with no one answering, pity grew stronger than hostility. Aurelius Cotta the consul, asked first for his opinion (for when the emperor presided, the magistrates still performed this duty), moved that Piso's name be struck from the public record, part of his property confiscated, part granted to his son Gnaeus, who should change his first name; that Marcus Piso, stripped of rank, be given five million sesterces and banished for ten years; and that Plancina be granted immunity, in deference to Livia's pleading.
18| Tiberius softened much of this proposal. He would not let Piso's name be struck from the record, since the names of Mark Antony, who had waged war on his own country, and Iullus Antonius, who had violated Augustus's household, still stood. He spared Marcus Piso the disgrace and let him keep his father's property — for Tiberius, as I have often noted, was proof enough against greed, and in this case all the more lenient out of shame at Plancina's acquittal. Two further honors came up next: Valerius Messalinus wanted a golden statue raised inside the Temple of Mars the Avenger, while Caecina Severus called instead for an altar to Vengeance. Tiberius refused them both, insisting that such consecrations belonged only to victories won over foreign enemies — a household's grief, he said, ought to be draped in mourning, not staged for public view. Messalinus had also proposed thanks to Tiberius, Livia, Antonia, Agrippina, and Drusus for avenging Germanicus, but had left out any mention of Claudius. Lucius Asprenas asked him publicly in the Senate whether he'd left Claudius out on purpose — and only then was Claudius's name added. The more I turn over events, recent or old, the more I see how mockingly fortune plays with human affairs. By reputation, by hope, by public reverence, everyone seemed marked out for power sooner than the man fate was quietly holding in reserve to become emperor.
19| A few days later Tiberius proposed to the senate that priesthoods be granted to Vitellius, Veranius, and Servaeus. To Fulcinius he promised support for office, but warned him not to let his eloquence run away into violence. That was the end of the reckoning for Germanicus's death—not just among the men living then, but tossed about by rumor of every kind in the years that followed too. So it is with the greatest events: they stay uncertain, since some take whatever they've heard, however it came to them, as established fact, while others turn the truth into its opposite, and both versions grow with time. Drusus, meanwhile, left the city to renew the auspices and soon returned in an ovation. A few days after that his mother Vipsania died—the only one of all Agrippa's children to die peacefully, since the rest were killed openly by the sword or, it was believed, by poison or starvation.
20| That same year Tacfarinas, whom I mentioned as driven back by Camillus the previous summer, renewed the war in Africa. At first he raided at random, too quick to be caught and punished; then he began destroying villages and hauling off heavy plunder; finally he laid siege to a Roman cohort not far from the river Pagyda. In command of the fort was Decrius, a vigorous man, seasoned by military service, who judged that siege a disgrace. He rallied his soldiers and drew up his line in front of the camp to force an open fight. At the first clash the cohort was driven back; Decrius rushed forward among the weapons to meet the fleeing men, shouting at the standard-bearers that it was shameful for Roman soldiers to turn their backs to a rabble of deserters. He took wound after wound, and even with an eye pierced through, he kept his face turned toward the enemy and would not quit the fight until his own men abandoned him and he fell.
21| When Lucius Apronius—who had succeeded Camillus—learned of this, he was troubled less by the enemy's glory than by his own men's disgrace. Reviving a harsh punishment rare in that age, drawn from old tradition, he had every tenth man of the disgraced cohort chosen by lot and clubbed to death. The severity paid off: a unit of veterans, no more than five hundred strong, routed that same force of Tacfarinas's men when they attacked a garrison called Thala. In that battle the common soldier Helvius Rufus won the honor of having saved a citizen's life, and Apronius rewarded him with neck-chains and a spear. Tiberius added the civic crown, complaining—more in disappointment than anger—that Apronius had not already granted it himself by right of his proconsular authority. But Tacfarinas, with his Numidians shaken and unwilling to face another siege, scattered the war instead, retreating wherever the Romans pressed and then doubling back behind them. As long as he kept to that method, he mocked the frustrated and exhausted Romans with impunity. But once he turned toward the coast, weighed down with plunder and tied to a fixed camp, Apronius Caesianus—sent by his father with cavalry and auxiliary cohorts, reinforced with the fastest men from the legions—won a victory over the Numidians and drove them into the desert.
22| At Rome, meanwhile, Lepida—who beyond the distinction of the Aemilii could claim Lucius Sulla and Gnaeus Pompey as great-grandfathers—was charged with having faked a pregnancy by Publius Quirinius, a rich and childless man. Charges of adultery and poisoning were added, along with consulting Chaldean astrologers against the imperial house, while her brother Manius Lepidus defended her. Quirinius, still bitter after their divorce, had helped stir up pity for her despite her disgrace and guilt. It was hard for anyone to read the emperor's mind in that trial—so thoroughly did he mix and shift the signs of anger and mercy. At first he asked the senate not to pursue the treason charges; then he induced Marcus Servilius, an ex-consul, and other witnesses to bring forward the very evidence he had seemed to want set aside. He also transferred Lepida's slaves, who were being held under military guard, to the consuls, and would not allow them to be tortured for questioning about anything touching his own household. He even excused Drusus, the consul-designate, from having to give his opinion first, so the others would not feel bound to agree with him—some called this considerate, others read it as cruelty, since Drusus, they said, would not have shrunk from the duty of voting to condemn her.
23| During the games, which had interrupted the trial, Lepida entered the theater with women of high rank and, weeping and wailing, invoked her ancestors and Pompey himself, whose monuments and statues stood in plain view. She moved the crowd to such pity that they burst into tears and cried out curses against Quirinius, whose old age and childlessness and obscure family, they shouted, had once been given a bride once destined for Lucius Caesar and a daughter-in-law for the deified Augustus. Then torture of her slaves brought her crimes to light, and the senate voted for Rubellius Blandus's motion, which barred her from fire and water. Drusus supported this, though others had proposed milder terms. Later Scaurus, who had had a daughter by her, was granted an exemption from confiscation of her property. Only then did Tiberius reveal that he too had learned, from Publius Quirinius's own slaves, that Lepida had sought to poison him.
24| These misfortunes among great houses—for not long before, the Calpurnii had lost Piso and the Aemilii had lost Lepida—were offset by the restoration of Decimus Silanus of the Junian family. Let me recall his case briefly. Augustus's fortune, so strong in matters of state, was unlucky at home, on account of the shameless conduct of his daughter and granddaughter, whom he banished from the city, punishing their lovers with death or exile. By dressing what was, among men and women alike, a common failing with the grave names of violated religion and treason, he went beyond both the mercy of his ancestors and his own laws. I will recount the fates of others alongside the rest of that period's events, if I live long enough, amid my many labors, to complete what I have set out to do. Decimus Silanus had been the lover of Augustus's granddaughter, and though the punishment went no further than exclusion from the emperor's friendship, he understood this to mean exile was being urged on him. Only once Tiberius was in power did he dare, through the influence of his brother Marcus Silanus—outstanding for both his noble birth and eloquence—petition the senate and the emperor. But Tiberius, when Silanus offered thanks before the assembled senators, replied that he too was glad his brother had returned from his long travels abroad, and that this was rightfully permitted since he had been banished by neither senatorial decree nor law—yet as far as he himself was concerned, his father's grievances against him stood unchanged, and Silanus's return did nothing to undo what Augustus had wished. After this Silanus lived on in the city but never attained office.
25| The senate next took up the question of easing the Papia Poppaea law, which the elder Augustus had established after the Julian statutes to sharpen the penalties on the unmarried and swell the treasury. Yet marriages and the raising of children did not grow more common—childlessness was too deeply entrenched—while the number of people at risk kept climbing, since every household was being undermined by the twisted interpretations of informers. Where once it had been vice that caused suffering, now it was the law itself. This calls for a deeper account of the origins of law and the paths by which we arrived at this endless mass and variety of statutes.
26| The earliest people on earth lived without any wicked desire, without shame, without crime, and so without punishment or coercion. Rewards were unnecessary, since decent behavior came naturally; and since they wanted nothing against custom, nothing needed to be forbidden through fear. But once equality was cast off and ambition and force crept in to replace restraint and shame, absolute rule arose, and among many peoples it lasted forever. Some peoples chose laws from the start, others only once they had grown weary of kings. These first laws were simple, suited to unsophisticated minds; the most famous were those of Crete, given by Minos, those of Sparta, given by Lycurgus, and later, more elaborate and more numerous, those Solon drew up for Athens. Among us, Romulus ruled as he pleased; then Numa bound the people with religious observance and divine law, and Tullus and Ancus added a few provisions of their own. But it was Servius Tullius who stood out above all as lawgiver—laws that even kings had to obey.
27| After Tarquin was driven out, the people, resisting the factions of the senators, took many measures to protect their freedom and secure harmony: decemvirs were appointed, and drawing together whatever was best from anywhere, they compiled the Twelve Tables, the final word in equal justice. The laws that followed, though sometimes aimed against wrongdoers for actual crimes, were more often passed by force to settle conflicts between the classes, to seize forbidden offices, to drive out prominent men, or for other corrupt ends. From this came the Gracchi and Saturninus, agitators of the common people, and Drusus, no less lavish a spender though acting in the senate's name; allies were bribed with hope or cheated by having their appeals blocked. Not even the Italian war, and soon after the civil war, stopped the passage of many contradictory measures—until the dictator Sulla, abolishing or reworking earlier laws and adding a great many of his own, brought only a brief calm to the business. Almost at once came the turbulent proposals of Lepidus, and not long after tribunes regained the license to stir up the people however they pleased. And now laws were being passed not just for the public good but against individuals by name, and it was precisely when the state was most corrupt that laws were most numerous.
28| Then Gnaeus Pompey, chosen consul for a third term to reform public morals, proved a harsher remedy than the disease, and became both the author and the destroyer of his own laws—losing by arms what he defended by arms. From then on came twenty years of unbroken discord: no custom, no law survived. The worst crimes went unpunished, and many honest acts brought ruin. Finally, in his sixth consulship, Augustus Caesar, secure in power, abolished the measures he had ordered as triumvir and gave us the laws we live by in peace under an emperor. From that point the chains grew tighter: watchers were set over us, and the Papian-Poppaean law used rewards to enforce it—so that if people neglected the privileges of parenthood, the state, as everyone's universal parent, would seize whatever was left unclaimed. But the law reached deeper than that. It gripped the city, Italy, and every citizen anywhere, and it wrecked the fortunes of many. Terror hung over everyone until Tiberius, to fix the problem, had the senate draw by lot five ex-consuls, five ex-praetors, and an equal number from the rest of the senate. Before this panel many people got release from the law's snares—a modest relief, for the moment.
29| Around the same time Tiberius commended to the senators Nero, one of Germanicus's sons, who had just come of age. He asked that Nero be excused from serving on the board of twenty and be allowed to seek the quaestorship five years earlier than the law permitted—not without some mockery from those listening. Tiberius pointed out that he and his brother had received the same honors when Augustus asked for them. But I would not doubt that even then there were people who mocked such requests behind closed doors. Still, these were only the first steps toward greatness for members of the imperial family, and the old custom carried more weight in people's eyes—since a stepfather's bond with his stepsons is looser than a grandfather's with his grandson. Nero was also given a priesthood, and on the day he first entered the forum, a cash gift was distributed to a plebs delighted to see Germanicus's line now grown to manhood. Joy increased further with Nero's marriage to Julia, daughter of Drusus. Yet however well that news was received, people took badly the news that Sejanus was to be father-in-law to Claudius's son. It seemed to taint the family's nobility and to raise Sejanus—already suspected of overreaching ambition—even higher still.
30| At the end of the year two distinguished men died: Lucius Volusius and Sallustius Crispus. Volusius came from an old family that had never risen past the praetorship; he himself brought it the consulship, and also held the censorial power of choosing the panels of jurors from the equestrian order—he was the first to build the immense wealth on which that house later throve. Crispus came from equestrian stock; Gaius Sallustius, the celebrated historian of Rome, had adopted his sister's grandson and passed on his name. Though the way to public honors lay open before him, Crispus, in imitation of Maecenas, held no senatorial rank yet outdid many men of consular and triumphal distinction in influence. He differed from the old style in his refinement and elegance, leaning toward luxury in his wealth and extravagance. Yet underneath he had a vigor of mind equal to great affairs—sharper, in fact, for the show he made of sleep and idleness. So while Maecenas lived he ranked next to him; afterward he became foremost, the man on whom the emperors' secrets rested, and he shared knowledge of the killing of Postumus Agrippa. In his later years he kept the appearance of the emperor's friendship more than its substance—the same thing that had happened to Maecenas. Perhaps lasting power is rarely granted by fate, or perhaps satiety sets in—on the givers' side once they have given everything, or on the receivers' side once nothing is left to want.
31| Next came Tiberius's fourth consulship and Drusus's second, notable because father and son held it together. Three years earlier Germanicus had shared the honor with Tiberius, but that had pleased his uncle less, and the bond of nature was not as close. At the start of that year Tiberius withdrew to Campania, ostensibly to strengthen his health, but really beginning to prepare for a long, continuous absence—perhaps also so that, with his father removed, Drusus could fill the duties of the consulship alone. By chance a small matter grew into a major contest and gave the young man material for winning favor. Domitius Corbulo, an ex-praetor, complained to the senate about Lucius Sulla, a young noble, for not yielding him a seat at the gladiatorial games. On Corbulo's side stood his age, ancestral custom, and the support of the older senators; against him stood Mamercus Scaurus, Lucius Arruntius, and other relatives of Sulla. They argued back and forth, citing precedents of ancestors who had punished youthful disrespect with harsh decrees, until Drusus spoke words fit to calm tempers. Corbulo was satisfied through the mediation of Mamercus, who was both Sulla's uncle and stepfather and the most eloquent speaker of his generation. This same Corbulo then loudly complained that most of the roads throughout Italy were broken and impassable through the fraud of contractors and the negligence of officials, and he eagerly took charge of fixing the problem—a task that did less public good than it did harm to many, whose property and reputation suffered ruin through fines and forced auctions.
32| Not long after, Tiberius sent a letter to the senate reporting that Africa was again disturbed by an incursion of Tacfarinas, and that the senators should choose, by their own judgment, a proconsul experienced in warfare, physically strong, and equal to the task. Sextus Pompeius seized on this as an opening to pursue his grudge against Marcus Lepidus, attacking him as lazy, poor, a disgrace to his ancestors, and for that reason unfit even for the governorship of Asia that had fallen to him by lot. The senate opposed him, holding that Lepidus was gentle rather than idle, that his father's poverty and the unblemished nobility he had maintained deserved honor rather than disgrace. So he was sent to Asia, and as for Africa, it was decreed that Caesar should choose who would be given the command.
33| Amid this, Severus Caecina proposed that no magistrate assigned to a province should be accompanied by his wife. He first recalled at length that his own wife had lived in harmony with him and borne him six children, yet he had kept at home, confined within Italy, the very policy he now urged in public—even though he himself had completed forty years of service across many provinces. It was not for nothing, he said, that it had once been decided women should not be dragged among allies or foreign peoples: a company of women brings luxury that delays peace and fear that delays war, and turns a Roman column into something resembling a barbarian march. The female sex was not only weak and unequal to hardship, but, given free rein, cruel, ambitious, and greedy for power; women paraded among the soldiers and had centurions at their beck and call; recently one had even presided over the exercises of the cohorts and the marching drills of the legions. Let the senators themselves recall how often, when men were charged with extortion, more accusations were brought against their wives. It was to wives that the worst of the provincials attached themselves at once; through wives business was undertaken and settled; two people were courted on their outings, there were two seats of authority, and the more stubborn and uncontrollable orders were a woman's—women once bound by the Oppian and other laws, now freed from those chains, ruling homes, the forum, and now even armies.
34| Only a few applauded this speech; most objected—that the matter had not been raised for debate, and that Caecina was no fit judge of so weighty a question. Then Valerius Messalinus, son of Messala and gifted with something of his father's eloquence, replied that much of the old harshness had changed for the better and the happier. Rome was no longer besieged by wars, he said, nor were the provinces hostile as before. A few concessions were made to women's needs that did not burden even their husbands' households, much less the allies; everything else women shared with their husbands, and none of it hindered peace. Wars, of course, must be waged by men in fighting trim—but on returning from hardship, what comfort was more honorable than a wife's? True, some women had slipped into ambition or greed—but were not many magistrates themselves prone to various vices? That was no reason to send no one to a province at all. Husbands were often corrupted by their wives' wickedness—did that mean all unmarried men stayed honest? The Oppian laws had once been thought necessary, suited to the needs of the state at that time; later they were relaxed and softened because it proved expedient. It was pointless to dress up our own laxity under other names: if a woman overstepped the bounds, the fault lay with the man. Besides, because of the weak character of one or two women, it was wrong to strip all husbands of their partnership in good times and bad. And the sex, naturally frail, would be abandoned to its own extravagance and to the desires of others if left unguarded. Marriages were scarcely kept intact even under a husband's watchful eye—what would happen if, for years on end, they were effectively dissolved by separation? Rome should counter the sins that happened elsewhere by remembering the scandals of its own city. Drusus added a few words about his own marriage: for men in the imperial family must often travel to distant parts of the empire. How many times had the deified Augustus journeyed east and west with Livia at his side! He himself had gone to Illyricum, and would go to other peoples too if it served the purpose—though not always gladly, if he had to be torn from a dearly loved wife, the mother of so many children they shared. In this way Caecina's proposal was turned aside.
35| At the senate's next meeting Tiberius, in a letter that obliquely rebuked the senators for shifting every burden of decision onto the emperor, named Manius Lepidus and Junius Blaesus as candidates from whom a proconsul for Africa should be chosen. Both men then spoke: Lepidus excused himself more insistently, pleading poor health, the age of his children, and a daughter of marriageable age—though it was understood, even in what he left unsaid, that Blaesus was Sejanus's uncle and thereby too powerful a rival. Blaesus answered with the appearance of declining too, but with less conviction, and he was helped along by the united chorus of flatterers.
36| Next came something that had long festered in private complaints, now finally aired. The worst sort of people had gotten away with abusing and slandering decent men, simply by snatching up an image of the emperor. Even freedmen and slaves had taken to threatening their patrons or masters, voice and fist alike, and being feared for it. So the senator Gaius Cestius spoke up: emperors, he said, were indeed like gods, but even the gods listen only to just prayers from suppliants; no one should be allowed to flee to the Capitol or any other temple in the city and use that refuge as cover for crimes. The laws, he said, had been abolished and turned completely upside down, since in the Forum itself, on the very threshold of the senate house, Annia Rufilla — whom he had had convicted of fraud before a judge — had hurled abuse and threats at him, and he did not dare seek justice because she held up an image of the emperor against him. Others around him raised similar complaints, some even worse, and they begged Drusus to make an example by punishing her, until he finally had her brought in, convicted, and held in public custody.
37| Also punished, on the emperor's initiative and by decree of the senate, were the Roman knights Considius Aequus and Caelius Cursor, for having brought trumped-up treason charges against the praetor Magius Caecilianus. Both punishments were credited to Drusus's good influence: moving as he did through the city, among its gatherings and conversations, he was said to soften his father's harsher instincts. Nor was the young man's taste for pleasure held too much against him. Better, people said, that he throw himself into that — spend his days on building projects and his nights at dinner parties — than live alone, cut off from every pleasure, cultivating gloomy sleeplessness and dark suspicions.
38| Neither Tiberius nor the informers were slowing down. Ancharius Priscus had charged Caesius Cordus, proconsul of Crete, with extortion, adding a charge of treason for good measure — by now the standard garnish on every prosecution. Tiberius himself dragged Antistius Vetus, a leading man of Macedonia who had just been acquitted of adultery, back before the court to answer for treason, having first berated the jury; he claimed Vetus was politically dangerous and entangled with the schemes of Rhescuporis, at the time when Rhescuporis had killed his brother Cotys and was planning war against Rome. So Vetus was banished — fire and water forbidden him — and confined to an island chosen precisely because it was convenient for neither Macedonia nor Thrace. As for Thrace, its rule had been split between Rhoemetalces and the children of Cotys, whose guardian, since they were still infants, was Trebellenus Rufus; and the country was in turmoil, resentful of our interference, blaming both Rhoemetalces and Trebellenus equally for leaving wrongs against the local people unpunished. The Coelaletae, the Odrusae, and the Dii — strong tribes — took up arms, led by rival chiefs who were too obscure individually to unite the revolt into one serious war. Some stirred up trouble where they stood; others crossed Mount Haemus to rally more distant peoples; but most, and the best organized among them, laid siege to the king and to the city of Philippopolis, founded by Philip of Macedon.
39| When Publius Vellaeus, who commanded the nearest army, learned of this, he sent auxiliary cavalry and light infantry cohorts against the bands who were roaming about plundering or trying to recruit allies, while he himself led the main body of infantry to lift the siege. Everything went well at once: the raiders were cut down, discord broke out among the besiegers, the king made a well-timed sortie, and the legion arrived. It hardly deserves to be called a battle or even a fight — the enemy, half-armed and scattered, were simply slaughtered, without a drop of our own blood spilled.
40| That same year the Gallic states, crushed by debt, began plotting rebellion. The fiercest instigators were Julius Florus among the Treveri and Julius Sacrovir among the Aedui. Both men came from noble families whose ancestors had done Rome good service, and had long ago been granted Roman citizenship — back when that was rare and given only for merit. In secret meetings, recruiting the most reckless men and those whom poverty and fear of exposure pushed hardest toward crime, they divided the work: Florus would stir up the Belgae, Sacrovir the Gauls nearer Rome. So in council-halls and public gatherings they spread seditious talk — about the endless burden of tribute, the crushing rate of interest, the cruelty and arrogance of Roman officials, and the army's discontent since news of Germanicus's death. Now, they said, was the perfect moment to reclaim their freedom, if only they would consider how strong they were compared to an impoverished Italy, an unwarlike city mob, and armies with nothing solid in them except foreign troops.
41| Almost no state was untouched by the seeds of this unrest, but the Andecavi and the Turoni broke out first. The governor Acilius Aviola put down the Andecavi with a cohort he called up from the garrison at Lyon. The Turoni were crushed by legionary troops sent by Visellius Varro, governor of Lower Germany, under the same Aviola, with help from some leading Gauls who lent aid in order to disguise their own disloyalty and reveal it later, at a better moment. Sacrovir too was seen in the fighting, bareheaded, urging men on for Rome — supposedly to show off his courage; but prisoners later claimed he had made himself recognizable on purpose so the rebels would not shoot at him. When Tiberius was consulted about this, he brushed the accusation aside, and by his hesitation let the war grow.
42| Meanwhile Florus pressed on with his plans, trying to win over a cavalry squadron recruited from the Treveri that was trained and disciplined in the Roman style, hoping to start the war by having them massacre Roman traders. A few of the horsemen were corrupted, but most stayed loyal. A different crowd — debtors and dependents — took up arms and made for the forest called the Ardennes, but the legions sent from both directions by Visellius and Gaius Silius blocked their path. Julius Indus, from the same tribe as Florus but his rival and therefore all the more eager to prove himself, was sent ahead with a picked force and scattered the disorganized mob before it could even form. Florus eluded the victors for a while by shifting from one hiding place to another, finally saw soldiers closing off every escape and killed himself. That was the end of the Treveran uprising.
43| Among the Aedui, the trouble grew far worse, in proportion to how much wealthier that state was and how far help was from reaching it. Sacrovir seized Autun, the tribal capital, with armed cohorts, aiming to win over the noblest youth of Gaul — who were studying there in the liberal arts — and through them, as hostages of a kind, their parents and relatives too; at the same time he secretly distributed weapons he had had made for these young men. He had forty thousand men, a fifth of them armed like legionaries, the rest carrying hunting spears, knives, and whatever else served for the chase. To these were added slaves destined for the gladiator schools, covered head to foot in continuous iron armor in the local fashion — men they call crupellarii, clumsy at landing a blow but impossible to wound. This force kept growing as neighboring states, without yet openly joining the cause, sent volunteers one by one; and it was helped further by rivalry among the Roman commanders, each claiming the war for himself. Eventually the aged and failing Varro yielded command to the more vigorous Silius.
44| Meanwhile at Rome, rumor — as rumor does — inflated everything: not just the Treveri and Aedui but sixty-four Gallic states were said to have revolted, the Germans to have joined the cause, Spain to be wavering. The best citizens grieved for the state, but many, out of hatred for the present order and a taste for upheaval, actually welcomed their own danger and mocked Tiberius for wasting his time on informers' petty accusations amid such a crisis. Would Sacrovir, they asked, really be charged with treason before the senate? At last, they said, real men had appeared who would answer bloody letters with weapons. Even a miserable war was better than a miserable peace. Tiberius, all the more deliberately, composed himself into an image of calm — he changed neither his routine nor his expression, going about those days exactly as he always had — whether from sheer depth of will, or because he had learned the danger was modest, less serious than reported.
45| Meanwhile Silius advanced with two legions, sending an auxiliary force ahead to lay waste the villages of the Sequani, who lived on the border nearest the Aedui and were allied in arms with them. He then made straight for Autun in a forced march, his standard-bearers competing with each other, the ordinary soldiers grumbling that they shouldn't have to wait for their usual rest or for nightfall — just let them see the enemy and be seen; that alone would be enough for victory. About twelve miles out, Sacrovir and his forces appeared in open country. He had drawn up his armored men in front, regular cohorts on the wings, and half-armed men in the rear. He himself rode among the front ranks on a fine horse, recalling the old glories of the Gauls and all the defeats they had once inflicted on Rome — how splendid freedom would be if they won, how much harsher slavery if they were beaten again.
46| This speech did not last long, nor did it land well: the legionary line was already closing in, and the townsmen, undisciplined and unused to war, could barely trust their own eyes or ears. Silius, though his confidence in victory left him little need for a speech, still called out that it was shameful for men who had conquered Germany to be marched out against Gauls as if against a real enemy. 'Just one cohort recently crushed the rebel Turoni, one squadron the Treveri, a few troops of this very army routed the Sequani. The richer the Aedui are in money and pleasure, the less fight they have in them — beat them down, and spare the ones who run.' A great shout answered him; the cavalry swept around the flanks, the infantry struck the front, and there was no delay on the wings either. The armored men caused a brief holdup, their metal plates deflecting javelins and swords, but the soldiers grabbed axes and picks and hacked at their armor and bodies as if breaking through a wall; some knocked the helpless, lumbering hulks down with poles and pitchforks, and left them lying there, unable to rise, as good as dead. Sacrovir first made for Autun, then, fearing surrender, fled with his most loyal men to a nearby villa. There he died by his own hand, and the rest by each other's blows; and the villa was set on fire over them, consuming them all.
47| Only then did Tiberius write to the senate about the start and finish of the war. He neither subtracted from nor added to the truth, crediting the governors' loyalty and courage, and his own oversight of the strategy. He also explained why neither he nor Drusus had set out to fight it themselves, extolling the empire's vastness: it would be beneath an emperor's dignity to leave the capital, the seat of government over everything, just because one or two states were in revolt. As it was, he said, now that fear was not driving him, he would go himself to see the situation firsthand and settle it. The senators voted prayers for his safe return, thanksgivings, and other honors. Only Cornelius Dolabella, trying to outdo everyone else, carried his flattery to an absurd extreme, proposing that Tiberius enter the city in an ovation from Campania. A letter from Caesar followed, in which he declared he was not so starved for glory that, after subduing the fiercest nations and either accepting or declining so many triumphs in his youth, he would now, in old age, chase the empty prize of a jaunt through the suburbs.
48| Around the same time he asked the senate that the death of Sulpicius Quirinius be marked with a state funeral. Quirinius had no connection to the old patrician family of the Sulpicii — he came from the town of Lanuvium. But through tireless service and sharp administration he won a consulship under the deified Augustus, then earned triumphal honors by storming the strongholds of the Homonadenses in Cilicia, and was given as an adviser to Gaius Caesar when he governed Armenia. He had also courted Tiberius during his time on Rhodes, a fact Tiberius now revealed to the senate, praising Quirinius's service to him and attacking Marcus Lollius, whom he blamed for corrupting and dividing Gaius Caesar. But most people remembered Quirinius less fondly, recalling the dangers he had brought on Lepida, as I mentioned earlier, and his mean, domineering old age.
49| At the end of the year an informer went after Clutorius Priscus, a Roman knight who had earlier been rewarded with money by Caesar for a celebrated poem mourning Germanicus's death. The charge: while Drusus lay ill, Clutorius had written a poem for the event of his death too, meaning to profit more handsomely if it happened. Clutorius, in his vanity, had read it aloud at the house of Publius Petronius, in front of Petronius's mother-in-law Vitellia and many other prominent women. Once the informer came forward, the other witnesses were too frightened to testify, and only Vitellia insisted she had heard nothing. But the accusers were believed over her, to Clutorius's ruin, and on the motion of the consul-designate Haterius Agrippa he was sentenced to death.
50| Manius Lepidus rose to answer him: 'Senators, if all we consider is how vile the words were with which Clutorius Priscus fouled his own mind and other men's ears, then prison, the noose — not even the tortures used on slaves — would be punishment enough. But crimes and outrages have no natural limit, so it is the emperor's own restraint, and the precedents set by our ancestors and by ourselves, that temper punishment and correction, and that distinguish idle talk from real crimes, words from deeds. There is room here for a judgment that neither leaves the offense unpunished nor leaves us regretting either our mercy or our severity. I have often heard our emperor complain when someone forestalled his clemency by taking his own life. Clutorius's life still hangs in the balance: sparing him poses no danger to the state, and killing him sets no useful example. His pursuits, however deranged, are empty and worthless; there is nothing serious to fear from a man who betrays his own disgraceful acts not to men of substance but to a circle of foolish women. Still, let him leave the city, forfeit his property, and be barred from fire and water. That is my proposal — the same penalty as under the treason law.'
51| Of the ex-consuls, only Rubellius Blandus sided with Lepidus; the rest followed Agrippa's motion, and Priscus was led to prison and executed at once. Tiberius, in his usual roundabout way, criticized this to the senate — praising the loyalty that struck back so fiercely at even minor injuries to an emperor, yet deprecating such hasty punishment for mere words, praising Lepidus while not condemning Agrippa. As a result the senate decreed that its resolutions should not be filed at the treasury until ten days had passed, giving condemned men that much longer to live. But the senate had lost the freedom to change its mind, and time never softened Tiberius.
52| The consuls that followed were Gaius Sulpicius and Decimus Haterius — a year quiet abroad, but at home marked by suspicion over strict measures against the extravagance that had broken out on all sides, with money squandered on everything. Some expenses, though heavier, were mostly hidden by concealing their true cost; but the lavish spending on food and feasting, endlessly talked about, had raised worries that the emperor, with his old-fashioned frugality, might crack down harshly. When the aedile Gaius Bibulus opened the subject, the other aediles agreed: the sumptuary law was being flouted, the fixed prices on goods were being defied and rising daily, and no modest remedy could stop it. The senate, consulted, referred the whole matter to the emperor. Tiberius weighed it privately many times — whether such runaway appetites could even be checked, whether the crackdown would do the state more harm than the shame of tackling something he could not control, or of pursuing it and only bringing disgrace and infamy on prominent men. In the end he sent the senate a letter to this effect.
53| 'On other matters, senators, it might suit better for me to be questioned face to face and to say what I think serves the state. But on this subject it was better to keep my eyes averted, so that I would not have to watch you singling out, by your stares, the faces and the fear of individuals caught in shameful excess — as if I myself were catching them in the act. If those energetic men, the aediles, had consulted me beforehand, I am not sure I would not have advised leaving well-established, deep-rooted vices alone rather than achieving this: making public just how many disgraceful habits we are powerless to stop. Still, they have done their duty, as I would wish every magistrate to fulfill his own. But for me it is neither honorable to stay silent nor easy to speak out, since I do not hold the office of aedile, praetor, or consul. Something greater and loftier is expected of an emperor: when things go well, each man claims credit for himself, but when one man is resented, everyone else's faults are blamed on him alone. Where should I even begin, to forbid things and drag us back to the old ways? The endless sprawl of country villas? The size and nationality of household staffs? The weight of silver and gold? The marvels in bronze and painting? Clothing worn indiscriminately by men and women alike, and that peculiarly female extravagance — the jewels for which our money is shipped off to foreign, even hostile, nations?
54| 'I am well aware that at dinners and in social circles people denounce all this and call for limits. But if anyone actually passed a law and set penalties, those same people would cry that the state was being overturned, that ruin was being plotted for all the finest citizens, that no one was free of the charge. And yet not even chronic bodily diseases, long established, can be cured except by harsh and painful treatment: a mind both corrupted and corrupting, sick and inflamed, needs remedies no gentler than the passions burning it up. So many laws devised by our ancestors, so many passed by the deified Augustus — the old ones forgotten, the new ones, worse still, openly scorned — have only made extravagance feel safer. If you want something not yet forbidden, you fear it may be; but once you cross a ban without punishment, there is no more fear, no more shame. Why then did frugality once prevail? Because each man restrained himself, because we were citizens of a single city; even the temptations were not the same when our power was confined to Italy. Through foreign conquests we learned to consume what belonged to others; through civil wars, even what was our own. How small a thing is what the aediles are pointing out, compared with everything else — how trivial it should be judged! Yet, by heaven, no one mentions that Italy depends on outside supplies, that the Roman people's life is tossed daily on the uncertainties of sea and storm. If the resources of the provinces do not come to the aid of our masters, our slaves, and our farmland, then I suppose our own woods and our own villas will support us. This is the burden the emperor carries, senators; neglect it, and it will drag the state down completely. For everything else, the cure must come from within: let shame reform us, necessity reform the poor, and satiety reform the rich. If any magistrate can promise the energy and severity needed to confront this, I both praise him and admit I would gladly be relieved of part of my burden. But if men wish only to denounce vice, and then, having won glory for it, create enmities and leave them to me — believe me, senators, I too am not eager for enmities. I take on grave and often unfair ones for the state's sake, and I have every right to decline pointless, empty ones that would do neither you nor me any good.'
55| When Caesar's letter was read out, the aediles were relieved of that particular duty. Extravagance at the table—lavishly indulged for a hundred years, from the end of the Actian war down to the arms that brought Servius Galba to power—gradually died out. It's worth asking why. In the old days, families rich or distinguished by birth slid into ostentation because it was still permitted—commoners, allies, and kings all courted and were courted, and a man was judged more illustrious by name and clientele the more dazzling his wealth, his house, his display. But once savage killings began and a great reputation became a death sentence, the rest turned to wiser habits. At the same time, new men kept entering the Senate from the towns and colonies, even the provinces, and they brought their homegrown frugality with them. Though many of them, through luck or hard work, reached a moneyed old age, the old cast of mind held. But the chief author of this stricter style was Vespasian, himself a man of old-fashioned dress and living. From then on, deference to the emperor and the wish to imitate him did more than any law's penalty or fear. Or perhaps there's simply a kind of cycle built into everything, so that morals turn like the seasons. Not everything was better under our forebears—our own age too has produced much worth admiring and imitating by those who come after. But let this rivalry with our ancestors, at least, stay an honorable one.
56| Tiberius, having won a reputation for restraint by curbing the informers who were closing in, sent a letter to the Senate requesting tribunician power for Drusus. Augustus had invented that title for the pinnacle of power, so as not to take the name of king or dictator and yet still, by some title, tower over every other office. He first made Marcus Agrippa his partner in that power; when Agrippa died, he chose Tiberius Nero, so there would be no doubt about the succession. He believed that this checked other men's improper hopes, and it also showed his confidence both in Nero's restraint and in his own greatness. Following that precedent, Tiberius now advanced Drusus to the summit of power, though while Germanicus still lived he had kept an open choice between the two. But at the start of his letter, having invoked the gods to bless his plans for the state, he gave a modest account of the young man's character, not padded with falsehoods. Drusus had a wife and three children, he said, and had reached the age at which Tiberius himself had once been summoned by the deified Augustus to take up this office. And he was not being rushed into it: only after eight years of proven service, after putting down mutinies and settling wars, was this man—celebrated with a triumph and twice consul—being made a partner in labors he already knew well.
57| The senators had their speeches ready in their minds, which only made the flattery more elaborate. Still, nothing was voted beyond the usual: statues of the imperial family, altars to the gods, temples, arches. Except that Marcus Silanus, treating the consulship itself as beneath him, sought honor for the imperial house instead, proposing that public and private records should date events not by the names of the consuls but by whoever held tribunician power. Quintus Haterius, meanwhile, moved that the day's decrees be inscribed in gold letters in the Senate house—and made himself an old fool's laughingstock, the only reward for such disgusting flattery.
58| Amid all this, Junius Blaesus had his governorship of Africa extended, and Servius Maluginensis, the flamen of Jupiter, asked to be allowed to draw Asia by lot. He argued, against the common belief, that it was in fact a mere rumor that flamens of Jupiter could not leave Italy, and that his rights were no different from those of the flamens of Mars and Quirinus. Besides, he said, if those priests could govern provinces, why should it be forbidden to him? There was no formal decree of the people on the matter, nothing to be found in the books of ceremonies. Pontiffs had often performed the rites of Jupiter's flamen when illness or public duty kept him away. Seventy-five years had passed since the death of Cornelius Merula without a replacement being appointed, and yet the rites had never lapsed. If the office could go unfilled for so many years without any harm to the sacred rites, how much easier to leave it vacant for a single year's proconsulship? The old restriction that kept flamens of Jupiter from provincial commands, he said, had come from private feuds among the pontifices maximi; now, by the gift of the gods, the highest priesthood and the highest civil power were held by the same man, no longer at the mercy of rivalry, hatred, or personal grudges.
59| Against this the augur Lentulus and others argued at length in various directions, and it was finally decided to wait for the opinion of the pontifex maximus. Tiberius put off ruling on the flamen's legal right, but he did trim back the ceremonies that had been voted in honor of Drusus's tribunician power, specifically criticizing the presumption of the motion and the gold lettering as against ancestral custom. A letter of Drusus's was also read aloud, and though it was pitched toward modesty, it was taken as the height of arrogance. Things had sunk so low, people said, that not even a young man granted so great an honor could be bothered to visit the city's gods, enter the Senate, or so much as take the auspices on his own native soil. He was supposedly detained by war, or off wandering the shores and lakes of Campania at the very time. This was the training being given to the future ruler of mankind—the first lesson he was learning from his father's example. An old emperor might reasonably shrink from the sight of his citizens and plead his weary age and past labors as excuse—but what excuse did Drusus have, except arrogance?
60| But Tiberius, while quietly tightening his grip on power, kept up an appearance of old republican forms by referring provincial petitions to the Senate for review. Across the Greek cities, an unchecked, unpunished habit of declaring sanctuaries was spreading fast. Temples were filling up with the worst kind of slaves; debtors sheltered there from their creditors, and men under suspicion of capital crimes found refuge too, under the same protection—and no government was strong enough to check riots by a populace that shielded human crimes as if they were sacred rites. So it was decided that the cities should send their charters and envoys to Rome. Some abandoned claims they had made without real right, doing so of their own accord; many others rested confidently on ancient superstition or on services rendered to Rome. And it made quite a spectacle, that day when the Senate examined the benefactions of their ancestors, the treaties with allies, even the decrees of kings who had held power before Rome's, and the religious claims of the gods themselves—free, as in the old days, to confirm or overturn whatever it liked.
61| First of all came the people of Ephesus, claiming—against the common belief—that Diana and Apollo were not born on Delos. They had, they said, a river called the Cenchrius and a grove called Ortygia, where Latona, heavy with child, leaned against an olive tree still standing there and gave birth to those two gods; the grove had been consecrated at the gods' own command, and there Apollo himself, after killing the Cyclopes, had escaped the wrath of Jupiter. Later Father Liber, victorious in war, had spared the suppliant Amazons who had taken refuge at the altar. The temple's sanctity was further increased, they said, with Hercules's consent when he held power over Lydia, and its rights were not diminished under Persian rule; after that Macedon, and then Rome, had preserved them.
62| Next after them the people of Magnesia rested their case on rulings of Lucius Scipio and Lucius Sulla, the one having driven out Antiochus, the other Mithridates, both of whom had honored the Magnesians' loyalty and courage by making the temple of Diana Leucophryne an inviolable refuge. Then the people of Aphrodisias and Stratonicea produced a grant from the dictator Caesar, in reward for their old service to his cause, along with a recent decree of the deified Augustus praising them for holding firm to Rome, unshaken, through a Parthian invasion. But Aphrodisias upheld the cult of Venus, Stratonicea that of Jupiter and Diana of the Crossroads. The people of Hierocaesarea went further back still, claiming a Persian Diana, whose shrine had been dedicated by King Cyrus himself; and they cited the names of Perpenna, Isauricus, and many other Roman commanders who had granted the same sanctity not just to the temple but to a zone two miles around it. Then came the Cypriots, speaking for three shrines—the oldest founded by Aerias for Venus of Paphos, then by his son Amathus for Venus of Amathus and for Jupiter of Salamis, this last founded by Teucer, fleeing his father Telamon's wrath.
63| Delegations from other cities were heard as well. Worn out by the sheer volume, and because the claims were pressed so competitively, the senators handed the matter to the consuls, letting them examine the legal basis and, if they found anything unjust, refer the case back to the full Senate. Beyond the cities already mentioned, the consuls reported finding a genuine right of sanctuary at Pergamum's temple of Aesculapius; the rest, they said, rested on origins too obscure with age to verify. The people of Smyrna, for instance, cited an oracle of Apollo, on whose command they had dedicated a temple to Venus Stratonicis; the people of Tenos cited a verse from the same god, ordering them to consecrate a statue and shrine of Neptune. The Sardians had a more recent claim: a gift from Alexander the victor. The Milesians relied no less on King Darius. Yet in both cases the actual cult practiced was of Diana or Apollo. The Cretans, too, put in a claim, based on a statue of the deified Augustus. In the end the Senate passed decrees that granted much honor but still set limits, and ordered the cities to fix bronze tablets in the temples themselves, both to preserve the record and to keep them from sliding, under cover of religion, into raw ambition.
64| Around this same time, a grave illness struck Julia Augusta, forcing the emperor to hurry his return to Rome—whether mother and son were still on genuinely good terms, or their hatred was simply well hidden, is another matter. Some time earlier Julia had set up a statue to the deified Augustus by the theater built under Marcellus's name, and on its inscription she'd put her own name before Tiberius's—which he was thought to have taken as an affront to an emperor's dignity, though he kept the grudge buried and said nothing. But now the Senate decreed supplications to the gods and the Great Games, to be conducted jointly by the pontiffs, augurs, and the board of fifteen along with the septemviri and the Augustal brotherhood. Lucius Apronius had proposed that the fetial priests also preside at these games. Caesar spoke against it, drawing a sharp line between the rights of the various priesthoods and citing precedent after precedent: the fetiales, he said, had never held such standing. The Augustales had been added only because that priesthood belonged specifically to the house on whose behalf the vows were being paid.
65| I have not made a practice of recording every senator's opinion unless it stood out for its honor or its notable disgrace — that, I think, is the historian's chief duty: to keep virtues from being passed over in silence, and to make sure that base words and deeds fear infamy with posterity. But those times were so tainted, so filthy with flattery, that not only the leading men of the state — who had to shield their own eminence by servility — but every ex-consul, most of the ex-praetors, and even many junior senators competed to rise and propose the most shameless, extravagant motions. It is recorded that Tiberius, every time he left the Senate house, would say in Greek: 'Men ready-made for slavery!' Evidently even a man who did not want public liberty was sickened by such abject readiness to grovel.
66| From there they moved by degrees from the merely shameful to the openly savage. Gaius Silanus, proconsul of Asia, was charged with extortion by the provincials, and Mamercus Scaurus, an ex-consul, Junius Otho, a praetor, and Bruttedius Niger, an aedile, pounced on him together, accusing him of outraging Augustus's divinity and scorning Tiberius's majesty. Mamercus dredged up old precedents — Lucius Cotta prosecuted by Scipio Africanus, Servius Galba by Cato the Censor, Publius Rutilius by Marcus Scaurus. As if Scipio and Cato were avenging anything like this, or as if that Scaurus were the ancestor whose memory Mamercus, his own great-grandson, was now dishonoring with such shabby work. Junius Otho had once run a schoolroom for a living; later, riding Sejanus's power, he polished up his obscure beginnings with shameless boldness. Bruttedius, a man rich in honest talents who, had he kept to the straight path, was headed for the very top, was driven instead by impatience — determined to outrun first his peers, then his betters, and finally his own hopes. That ambition has ruined many good men too, men who scorn the slow road that comes with safety and rush instead toward a premature success, or toward ruin.
67| Gellius Publicola and Marcus Paconius swelled the ranks of the accusers, the one Silanus's quaestor, the other his deputy. There was no doubt the defendant was guilty of cruelty and extortion; but many charges were piled on that would have been dangerous even for an innocent man. Facing so many hostile senators, and the most eloquent men of all Asia handpicked to prosecute him, he had to answer alone, with no skill in public speaking — and fear cripples even a trained eloquence. Tiberius did nothing to restrain himself either, pressing him with voice and expression, questioning him himself over and over, giving him no room to rebut or evade, and often forcing him to confess outright rather than have asked in vain. The state's agent had even bought Silanus's own slaves by formal sale so they could be interrogated under torture. And so that none of his friends could help him in his peril, charges of treason were tacked onto the case — a chain and a compulsion to silence. So, having asked for a few days' delay, he gave up his own defense, and dared to send Caesar a letter mixing resentment with pleading.
68| To make what he was preparing against Silanus seem more excusable by precedent, Tiberius ordered the reading of the deified Augustus's own notes about Volesus Messalla, another proconsul of Asia, and the Senate's decree against him. Then he asked Lucius Piso for his opinion. Piso, after a long preamble on the emperor's clemency, proposed that Silanus be barred from fire and water and banished to the island of Gyarus. The rest agreed, except that Gnaeus Lentulus said Silanus's maternal property, since he was born of Atia, should be set aside and given to his son — and Tiberius agreed.
69| But Cornelius Dolabella, pushing flattery further still, after denouncing Gaius Silanus's character, added that no man of disgraceful, infamous life should be allowed to draw a province by lot at all — the emperor should judge that beforehand. For while the laws punish crimes after the fact, how much milder for the men themselves, and better for the provincials, to prevent the crime in the first place? Against this Caesar spoke: he was not, he said, ignorant of what was said about Silanus, but decisions should not be made on rumor. Many men had governed provinces quite differently from what had been hoped or feared of them; the weight of great responsibility roused some men to better conduct, and dulled others. Nor could an emperor personally know everything, nor was it wise for him to be dragged along by other men's ambitions. Laws are fixed on deeds already done precisely because the future is uncertain. That was the wisdom of the ancestors: punishment should follow crime, not precede it. Do not overturn what was wisely established and has always held good — emperors carry burden and power enough already. Rights shrink every time power swells; and authority should not be used where the law can do the job. The rarer such popular sentiments were from Tiberius, the more gladly they were received. And being, when not driven by his own anger, a shrewd moderator, he added that Gyarus was a harsh island without any comforts, and that out of respect for the Junian family, and for a man who had once held the same rank, they might let him go to Cythnus instead. Silanus's sister Torquata, a Vestal of old-fashioned purity, had also asked for this. The Senate voted accordingly.
70| Afterward the people of Cyrene were heard, and on Ancharius Priscus's prosecution, Caesius Cordus was convicted of extortion. Lucius Ennius, a Roman knight charged with treason for melting down an image of the emperor for ordinary silverware, was not permitted by Caesar to be tried — a decision Ateius Capito openly criticized, as if in the name of free speech: the Senate's right to decide such things, he said, should not be snatched away, nor should so grave a crime go unpunished. Let Tiberius be slow to avenge his own wrongs, but he should not go easy on wrongs done to the state. Tiberius understood these words for what they were, more than for what they said, and kept insisting on the veto. Capito came off worse for the disgrace of it, since a man learned in both human and divine law had disgraced a distinguished public career and the fine arts he practiced at home.
71| A religious question then arose: in which temple should the offering be placed that the Roman knights had vowed, for the recovery of the Augusta's health, to Equestrian Fortune? For though that goddess had many shrines in Rome, none bore that particular title. It was discovered that there was a temple at Antium called by that name, and that all the shrines, temples, and divine images in the towns of Italy fell under Roman law and authority. So the offering was set up at Antium. And since religious matters were under discussion, Caesar brought forward a ruling that had recently been postponed, against Servius Maluginensis, the flamen of Jupiter, and had the pontiffs' decree read aloud: whenever illness struck the flamen of Jupiter, he could be absent, at the chief pontiff's discretion, for more than two nights, provided it fell on no day of public sacrifice and no more than twice a year. What had been settled under Augustus showed clearly enough that a full year's absence, and the running of a province, was not permitted to the flamens of Jupiter. The precedent of Lucius Metellus, chief pontiff, who had kept Aulus Postumius, flamen, from leaving, was also recalled. So the lot for Asia passed to the man next in seniority among the ex-consuls to Maluginensis.
72| Around the same time Lepidus asked the Senate for leave to restore and decorate, at his own expense, the Basilica of Paulus, the monument of the Aemilii. Public generosity of this kind was still customary then; Augustus had not stopped Taurus, Philippus, or Balbus from spending the spoils of war or their own overflowing wealth to adorn the city, for glory with posterity. Following that example, Lepidus, though modest in means, restored his family's ancient honor. But when the Theatre of Pompey burned down by accident, Caesar promised to rebuild it, since no one in Pompey's family had the means to restore it, though the name of Pompey would remain. At the same time he heaped praise on Sejanus, as if it were his effort and vigilance alone that had kept the fire from spreading further; and the senators voted a statue of Sejanus to be placed by Pompey's theater. Not long after, when Caesar honored Junius Blaesus, proconsul of Africa, with the emblems of a triumph, he said he was granting it as an honor to Sejanus, whose uncle Blaesus was. And yet Blaesus's achievements were worthy of such distinction in their own right.
73| For Tacfarinas, though driven back many times, had rebuilt his forces deep in the African interior and grown so arrogant that he sent envoys to Tiberius, demanding land for himself and his army, or else threatening an endless war. They say Caesar was never more stung, on his own behalf and Rome's, than by the thought of a deserter and a bandit making war like a regular enemy. Not even against Spartacus, after so many consular armies had been wiped out and he was burning Italy unavenged — even while the state was reeling under the vast wars of Sertorius and Mithridates — was it ever allowed that he be received under a truce; still less should the pinnacle of Roman glory now be bought off from a bandit like Tacfarinas with peace and a grant of land. He handed the matter to Blaesus: let him lure the rest into hoping they could lay down arms unharmed, but the leader himself must be captured by any means possible. Many did surrender on those terms. The war against Tacfarinas's guerrilla tactics then continued in much the same fashion as before.
74| Tacfarinas' force couldn't match a Roman army in strength, but he was better at raiding — striking in scattered bands, slipping away, and setting ambushes all at once. So three columns were prepared, each on its own line of advance. The legate Cornelius Scipio commanded on the side facing the raids into Leptis and the Garamantes' bolt-holes; on the other flank, so the villages around Cirta would not be plundered unpunished, Blaesus's son led a force of his own. In the center, with picked troops, Blaesus himself set forts and strongpoints at key positions, hemming the enemy in on every side — wherever they turned, some body of Roman soldiers was in front of them, on their flank, and often at their back. Many were cut down or surrounded this way. He then split the army into three and broke it further into smaller units, putting centurions of proven courage in command. And unlike custom, he did not pull his troops back once summer ended or settle them into winter quarters in the old province. Instead, with forts placed as if on the very edge of the war, he used light, fast troops who knew the wasteland to keep hounding Tacfarinas as he shifted camp from place to place, until Tacfarinas' brother was captured and Blaesus turned back — too hastily, though, for the allies' good, since he left behind the very conditions that let the war flare up again. Tiberius, however, treated the campaign as finished, and on that basis let Blaesus be hailed imperator by his legions — the old honor paid to commanders, back when a victorious army's joy and enthusiasm at a war well fought would acclaim them on the spot, with several men holding the title of imperator at once, none ranked above the rest. Augustus too had granted that title to a few men; and now Tiberius granted it to Blaesus — the last time it was ever given.
75| Two distinguished men died that year: Asinius Saloninus, grandson of Marcus Agrippa and Asinius Pollio, brother of Drusus, and marked out to marry into Caesar's family; and Ateius Capito, whom I've mentioned before, who had risen to the front rank in the state through his legal scholarship, though his grandfather had been a Sullan centurion and his father a praetor. Augustus had rushed his consulship through so that he would outrank in seniority Antistius Labeo, who excelled in the same field. That age produced these two ornaments of peace together, but very differently regarded: Labeo's independence was uncompromised, and this brought him greater fame; Capito's compliance was more welcome to those in power. Labeo's reputation grew because the wrong done to him kept him stuck at the praetorship; Capito's ill will grew from envy, because he reached the consulship.
76| And Junia died that year, in the sixty-fourth year after the battle of Philippi — niece of Cato, wife of Gaius Cassius, sister of Marcus Brutus. Her will caused a great stir among the public: though she was enormously wealthy and named nearly every leading man of Rome with proper honor in it, she left out Caesar. Tiberius took this graciously and did not stop her funeral from being conducted with full honors, including a eulogy from the Rostra. The busts of twenty of the most illustrious families were carried before her bier — the Manlii, the Quinctii, and other names of the same nobility. But it was Cassius and Brutus who shone brightest of all, precisely because their images were nowhere to be seen.
1| In the consulship of Gaius Asinius and Gaius Antistius, Tiberius entered his ninth year of settled rule and a flourishing house — he counted even Germanicus's death among his successes — when fortune suddenly began to turn savage, either through his own cruelty or by handing others the means to be cruel. The start and the cause lay with Aelius Sejanus, commander of the praetorian cohorts, whose rise to power I have already noted. Now I will lay out his origins, his character, and the crime by which he set about seizing mastery of the state. He was born at Vulsinii, son of Seius Strabo, a Roman knight, and in his early youth attached himself to Gaius Caesar, grandson of the deified Augustus — rumor had it he sold his body to the rich, dissolute Apicius. Later he bound Tiberius to him by every kind of skill, until he had made himself the one man Tiberius trusted and left unguarded while remaining dark to everyone else — not so much through his own cleverness, since he was later brought down by the same arts, but through the gods' anger at Rome, which rose and fell together with him. He had a body that could bear hard labor and a mind that dared anything; he concealed his own affairs and accused others of theirs; he mixed flattery with arrogance; in public he wore a studied modesty, but inside him burned an overriding hunger to seize power, and to feed it he was sometimes lavish and self-indulgent, more often hardworking and watchful — qualities no less dangerous when put to work securing a throne.
2| At first he stretched the modest power of his office by gathering the cohorts, scattered through the city, into one camp, so they would take orders together and, through their numbers, strength, and visible unity, gain confidence in themselves while striking fear into everyone else. His pretext was that troops spread out grew undisciplined; that if some sudden crisis broke out, help would come faster if they were massed together; and that they would behave better once their camp stood apart from the city's temptations. Once the camp was built, he crept little by little into the soldiers' hearts, visiting them, greeting them by name, and personally choosing the centurions and tribunes. Nor did he stay out of senatorial politics, decorating his own clients with offices and provinces — Tiberius indulged him, going so far as to call him, not only in private talk but before the senate and people, his partner in labor, and letting his statues be honored in theaters and forums and set up among the legions' headquarters.
3| But the house of the Caesars was full — a grown son, adult grandsons — and this held back what Sejanus wanted; since seizing so many at once by force was unsafe, treachery called for spacing the crimes out. He settled on a more hidden path, starting with Drusus, against whom his anger was freshest. Drusus, unable to bear a rival and quick-tempered, had once in a quarrel raised his hand against Sejanus and struck him in the face when Sejanus pushed back. So, weighing every option, the readiest course seemed to be turning to Drusus's wife, Livia — sister of Germanicus, plain as a girl but growing strikingly beautiful. Pretending to burn with love, Sejanus seduced her into adultery, and once he had won that first disgrace — a woman who has lost her honor will refuse nothing else — he pushed her on toward hopes of marriage, a share in the throne, and her husband's murder. And she, whose great-uncle was Augustus, whose father-in-law was Tiberius, who had children by Drusus, defiled herself and her ancestors and descendants alike with a small-town adulterer, trading an honorable, secure present for a shameful, uncertain future. Eudemus, Livia's friend and physician, was brought into the secret, his profession giving him constant access to her privacy. Sejanus drove his wife Apicata from his house — the mother of his three children — so that he would not fall under suspicion with his mistress. But the sheer scale of the crime brought fear, delay, and shifting plans.
4| Meanwhile, at the year's start, Drusus, son of Germanicus, put on the toga of manhood, and the senate renewed for him the honors it had voted his brother Nero. The emperor added a speech full of praise for his own son, for showing such loyal goodwill toward his brother's children — for though it is hard for power and harmony to occupy the same ground, Drusus was thought fair to the young men, or at least not hostile. Next came the old, often-postponed plan for the emperor to travel to the provinces. He pleaded the great number of veterans and the need to fill the legions through fresh levies, since volunteers were scarce, and those who did come showed less courage and discipline, since it was mostly the poor and homeless who enlisted willingly. He then ran quickly through the number of legions and which provinces they guarded — a survey I think worth repeating here: what Roman forces stood under arms at that time, which kings were allies, and how much narrower the empire's reach was then than now.
5| Italy was guarded on both seas by two fleets, at Misenum and at Ravenna, and the nearby coast of Gaul by beaked warships that Augustus, after capturing them at Actium, had sent with strong crews to the town of Forum Julii. But the chief strength lay along the Rhine — eight legions, the shared bulwark against Germans and Gauls. Spain, only recently subdued, held three. The Moors had been given to King Juba as a gift of the Roman people. The rest of Africa was held by two legions, Egypt by an equal number; then, starting from Syria all the way to the Euphrates, an enormous sweep of territory was held in check by four legions, with the peoples on its borders — the Iberians, the Albanians, and other kings — protected by our greatness against foreign powers. Thrace was in the hands of Rhoemetalces and the children of Cotys; along the Danube two legions held Pannonia, two held Moesia, and the same number were stationed in Dalmatia — positioned, by the lay of the land, behind those others, so that if Italy needed sudden help they were not far off, though the city itself was garrisoned by troops closer at hand: three urban cohorts, nine praetorian, recruited mostly from Etruria and Umbria or from old Latium and Rome's oldest colonies. In the useful provinces, allied triremes, cavalry wings, and auxiliary cohorts filled out the forces, not much weaker in strength than the legions — but their exact numbers are impossible to pin down, since they shifted from place to place as need demanded, growing and shrinking by turns.
6| I think it fitting to survey the other parts of the state as well, and how they were run down to that point, since it was that year which began Tiberius's rule turning for the worse. Up to then, public business, and most private matters too, were handled before the senate; leading men were free to speak, and Tiberius himself checked those who slid into flattery; he awarded honors weighing a man's ancestry, his record in war, and his distinguished skills at home, so that it was clear enough no better choices existed. Consuls kept their proper standing, praetors kept theirs; even the lesser magistrates exercised real authority; and the laws worked well, except where charges of treason were involved. Grain and tax revenue and the rest of the public income were managed by companies of Roman knights. Tiberius entrusted his own affairs to the most respected men, and sometimes to lesser-known ones chosen by reputation, and once taken on they kept the post indefinitely, so that many grew old in the same job. The common people did suffer under sharp grain shortages, but none of this was the emperor's fault — indeed he worked against poor harvests and rough seas as hard as money and effort could manage. He also took care that the provinces should not be shaken by new burdens, and that they should bear the old ones without governors' greed or cruelty: there was no flogging, no confiscation of property. Caesar owned few estates in Italy, his household slaves were modest, his personal staff limited to a handful of freedmen; and if he ever had a dispute with a private citizen, it went to the courts, by the law.
7| All of this he held to — not warmly, for he was harsh and generally feared, but he held to it nonetheless — until Drusus's death turned things around. While Drusus lived, these things stayed in place, because Sejanus, with his power still growing, wanted to be known for good advice, and because he feared an avenger who did not hide his hatred, complaining openly that with his own son alive, another man should be called the emperor's helper. "And how much further is there to go before he's called colleague outright? The first hopes of seizing power are the hard part — once you've made that step, allies and helpers appear on their own. Already the prefect has built himself a camp unbidden, and put the soldiers in his own hand; his image is set up among the monuments of Pompey; his grandchildren will share blood with the family of the Drusi. After that, we'll have to pray he stays content with restraint." Such words he threw out often, and not just to a few — and even his private talk was betrayed, once his wife had been corrupted.
8| Sejanus, deciding it was time to act, chose a poison that would creep in gradually and mimic a natural illness. It was given to Drusus by the eunuch Lygdus, as became known eight years later. Yet through every day of Drusus's sickness Tiberius went into the Senate as usual—whether fearless, or simply to display strength of mind—and even after his son died, before he was buried. He found the consuls sitting in the ordinary seats as a show of mourning and reminded them of the dignity of their office and place, and when the Senate broke into tears, he steadied them, mastering his own grief, with a continuous speech: he was well aware, he said, that he could be criticized for facing the Senate's eyes so soon after such fresh sorrow—most mourners could barely bear the comfort of relatives, could barely stand to see daylight—and he did not condemn them for that weakness; but he himself had sought stronger consolation in the embrace of the state. Then, pitying Augusta's great age, his grandsons' youth, and his own declining years, he asked that Germanicus's children be brought in, the only comfort left for present troubles. The consuls went out, steadied the boys with encouraging words, and brought them before Caesar. Taking hold of them, he said: 'Conscript fathers, I gave these boys, now bereft of their father, to their uncle, and begged him, though he had a son of his own, to cherish and raise them as his own blood, and to shape them for himself and for posterity. Now that Drusus has been taken, I turn my prayers to you, and before gods and country I appeal to you: take up these great-grandsons of Augustus, born of the most distinguished ancestors, guide and raise them, fill my place and yours. Nero and Drusus, these boys stand to you in place of parents. You were born such that your virtues and failings belong to the state.'
9| This was heard with a great outpouring of tears, and then with prayers of good omen; and if he had stopped there, he would have filled his listeners' hearts with pity and admiration for him. But he returned to his empty, endlessly mocked theme—of restoring the republic, of the consuls or someone else taking up its government—and by doing so he stripped credibility even from what was true and honorable in his words. The same honors decreed for Germanicus's memory were voted for Drusus, with many more added, as later flattery tends to do. The funeral procession was made especially splendid by the parade of ancestral images—Aeneas, who founded the Julian house, every king of Alba, and Romulus, the city's own founder; after them came the Sabine nobility, Attus Clausus, and the long train of Claudian likenesses.
10| For the death of Drusus, I have relied on the sources that are most numerous and carry the most trust. But a rumor circulating at the time should not go unmentioned, so persistent that it still has not died out. It was said that Sejanus, having corrupted Livia into crime, had also bound the eunuch Lygdus to himself through seduction, since Lygdus, young and handsome, was dear to his master and among his chief attendants; and that once the accomplices had settled the place and time for the poisoning, Sejanus grew so bold as to reverse the plot, secretly accusing Drusus of poisoning his own father and warning Tiberius to avoid the first cup offered him by his son at a banquet. Taken in by this trick, the old man, once at the feast, took the cup handed to him and passed it to Drusus—who, unaware, drank it down like a young man, which only deepened the suspicion: it seemed Drusus, from fear and shame, had inflicted on himself the death he had set for his father.
11| These stories, circulated widely and backed by no reliable authority, could easily be refuted, beyond the fact that no named source vouches for them. What man of even ordinary sense—let alone Tiberius, seasoned by such great affairs—would offer his son death unheard, and with his own hand, leaving no room to reconsider? Surely he would have tortured the one who administered the poison, sought out who was behind it, applied to his only son—never before charged with any crime—the same hesitation and delay he showed even toward strangers. But because Sejanus was regarded as the inventor of every crime, and because of the emperor's excessive fondness for him and everyone else's hatred of them both, even the most fantastic and monstrous tales were believed—rumor is always more savage about the deaths of rulers. In any case, the true sequence of the crime was betrayed by Apicata, Sejanus's wife, and brought fully to light under torture of Eudemus and Lygdus. No writer, however hostile to Tiberius, ever laid this charge against him, though they hunted down and pressed every other accusation. My reason for reporting and refuting the rumor is to set a clear example against believing false reports, and to ask those into whose hands this work may come not to prefer sensational, incredible stories, eagerly seized on, over the truth that has not been twisted into a marvel.
12| Meanwhile, as Tiberius praised his son from the Rostra, the Senate and people put on the look and words of mourning more out of pretense than genuine feeling, and secretly rejoiced that the house of Germanicus was reviving. This growing favor, together with his mother Agrippina's poorly hidden hope, hastened its own ruin. For when Sejanus saw that Drusus's death went unavenged on the killers and stirred no public grief, emboldened by crime and encouraged by his early success, he began turning over in his mind how to destroy Germanicus's children, whose succession was beyond doubt. Poison could not be spread among all three—the guards' loyalty was excellent and Agrippina's virtue impenetrable. So he attacked her defiance instead, stirred up Augusta's old hatred of her and Livia's fresh complicity, urging them to charge before Caesar that, proud of her fertility and backed by popular support, she was reaching for power. These charges were pressed by cunning accusers, among them Julius Postumus, who through his affair with Mutilia Prisca—close to the emperor's mother and well suited to Sejanus's schemes—had influence, since Prisca's standing with Augusta made the old woman, naturally anxious about her own power, hostile to her daughter-in-law. Agrippina's closest friends, too, were drawn in and goaded, through poisonous talk, to inflame her already proud spirit further.
13| Tiberius, meanwhile, never let up his attention to affairs, treating business as consolation, handling citizens' legal claims and the petitions of allied peoples. On his motion the Senate decreed that the cities of Cibyra in Asia and Aegium in Achaea, damaged by earthquake, be relieved with a three-year tax remission. Vibius Serenus, proconsul of Farther Spain, was convicted of public violence for the brutality of his conduct and deported to the island of Amorgos. Carsidius Sacerdos, charged with supplying grain to the enemy Tacfarinas, was acquitted, as was Gaius Gracchus on the same charge. Gracchus, still an infant, had been carried into exile by his father Sempronius to the island of Cercina. Growing up there among exiles with no education in the liberal arts, he later supported himself trading cheap goods across Africa and Sicily; even so he did not escape the dangers that come with great birth. Had Aelius Lamia and Lucius Apronius, who governed Africa, not protected him though innocent, he would have been swept away by the notoriety of his ill-fated family and his father's misfortunes.
14| That same year also brought embassies from Greek cities: the Samians petitioning that the ancient right of asylum at the temple of Juno be confirmed, and the Coans the same for the temple of Aesculapius. The Samians rested their case on a decree of the Amphictyonic Council, which had been the chief authority in all matters at the time the Greeks were founding cities across Asia and controlling the coast. The Coans' claim to antiquity was no less strong, and they had an added merit from local history: they had once sheltered Roman citizens in the temple of Aesculapius when, on King Mithridates's orders, Romans were being slaughtered across every island and city of Asia. After various complaints from the praetors, often raised and often ignored, Caesar finally brought before the Senate the matter of the actors' unruliness: much seditious behavior in public and shameful conduct in private homes was being attempted by them; the old Oscan farce, once a trivial amusement for the common people, had grown so scandalous and violent that it needed to be curbed by the Senate's authority. The actors were then expelled from Italy.
15| That same year brought Tiberius another grief, the death of one of Drusus's twin sons, and no less the death of a friend. That friend was Lucilius Longus, who had shared every sorrow and joy with him and was the only senator to accompany him into exile on Rhodes. So, although he was a new man, the Senate voted him a censor's funeral and a statue in the Forum of Augustus at public expense—the Senate still handling all such matters at that time, so much so that Lucilius Capito, procurator of Asia, had to answer charges brought by the province itself, with Tiberius firmly declaring that he had granted Capito authority only over slaves and the imperial household's finances; if Capito had usurped a praetor's power and used soldiers, he had disregarded his instructions in doing so—let the allies be heard. So the defendant, his case examined, was condemned. In gratitude for this act of justice, and because the previous year vengeance had been taken on Gaius Silanus as well, the cities of Asia voted to build a temple to Tiberius, his mother, and the Senate; and permission to build it was granted. Nero gave thanks to the Senate and to his grandfather for this, to the delighted approval of listeners who, remembering Germanicus so recently, felt they were seeing and hearing him again. The young man had a modesty and bearing worthy of a future ruler, made all the more appealing by the well-known hatred Sejanus bore him, which put him in danger.
16| Around the same time, Caesar addressed the senate about choosing a new priest of Jupiter (flamen Dialis) to replace the dead Servius Maluginensis, and at the same time proposed a new law. The old custom was that three patricians born of parents married by the ancient confarreatio rite be nominated together, and one chosen from them. But that pool no longer existed as it once had, since the practice of confarreate marriage had either lapsed or survived only among a few families. He gave several reasons for this — chiefly the carelessness of men and women alike — and added that the ceremony itself was burdensome, which people deliberately avoided; besides, whoever won the priesthood, and the woman who married into the flamen's household, passed out of their father's legal control. So the problem needed fixing, either by senatorial decree or by law, just as Augustus had adapted certain harsh old customs to present needs. After the religious questions had been examined, it was decided to leave the office of the priesthood itself untouched, but a law was passed that the flamen's wife should be under her husband's authority only for sacred purposes, and in everything else hold the ordinary legal status of women. Maluginensis's son was appointed to succeed his father. And to raise the standing of priesthoods and make people more willing to take them on, it was decreed that the Vestal Cornelia, chosen to replace Scantia, receive two million sesterces, and that whenever Augusta entered the theater she should sit among the Vestal Virgins.
17| In the consulship of Cornelius Cethegus and Visellius Varro, the priests, and other priesthoods following their lead, when making vows for the emperor's safety, commended Nero and Drusus too to the same gods — not so much from affection for the young men as from flattery, which in corrupt times is dangerous whether withheld or excessive. Tiberius had never been kind to Germanicus's family, and now he was pained and impatient to see young men set on a level with his own old age. He summoned the priests and asked whether they had done this at Agrippina's request or under her threats. They denied it, though he only mildly rebuked them, since many of them were his own relatives or leading men of the state. But in the senate he warned, in a speech, that no one in future should puff up the restless minds of young men with premature honors and make them arrogant. Sejanus kept pressing the point, complaining that the state was split as if by civil war: there were people, he said, who called themselves partisans of Agrippina, and unless checked there would be more; the only remedy for the growing discord was to strike down one or two of the most eager ringleaders.
18| For this reason he went after Gaius Silius and Titius Sabinus. Friendship with Germanicus was dangerous for both, but especially for Silius, who had commanded a huge army for seven years, won triumphal honors in Germany, and crushed Sacrovir's rebellion — the greater his fall, the more fear it would spread among others. Most people believed his offense was made worse by his own lack of restraint, since he boasted endlessly that his soldiers had stayed loyal while others slid into mutiny, and that Tiberius's power would not have survived if those legions too had wanted change. Caesar thought this talk was undermining his own position, and that he could never repay a service so large. Favors are welcome only as long as they seem repayable; once they far outrun gratitude, they are repaid with hatred instead.
19| Silius's wife was Sosia Galla, hated by the emperor for her closeness to Agrippina. It was decided to strike at them and put off Sabinus for a later time. The consul Varro was set on them, using his father's old feud as cover while doing Sejanus's dirty work under his own disgrace. Silius, on trial, asked for a short delay until the accuser had left his consulship; Caesar opposed it — magistrates, he said, regularly summoned private citizens to court on their own days in office, and the consul's authority, on whose vigilance the state's welfare depended, must not be weakened. It was typical of Tiberius to dress up freshly invented crimes in old-fashioned language. So, with great show of principle — as if this were an ordinary lawsuit against Silius, or Varro were an ordinary consul, or this an ordinary case of state — the senators were compelled to proceed while the accused stayed silent, or, if he tried to defend himself, made no secret of whose anger was crushing him. His knowledge of Sacrovir's revolt, long concealed, his victory tainted by greed, and his wife as his accomplice — these were the charges brought. There was no doubt they really amounted to extortion, but the whole case was tried as treason, and Silius forestalled his certain condemnation by taking his own life.
20| Still, his property was savagely pursued — not to repay the provincials, none of whom claimed anything back, but to strip away Augustus's earlier gift to him, with everything owed to the treasury counted out item by item. This was the first time Tiberius showed such careful attention to other people's money. Sosia was driven into exile on the motion of Asinius Gallus, who proposed that part of her property be confiscated and part left to her children. Manius Lepidus, against this, proposed that a quarter go to the accusers, as the law required, and the rest be left to the children. I find that this Lepidus was a serious and wise man for his time, since he steered many matters away from others' vicious flattery toward something better — yet he lacked nothing in balance either, since he kept steady standing and favor with Tiberius throughout. This makes me wonder whether the rise of some men in an emperor's favor and the fall of others is a matter of fate and the luck of birth, as with everything else, or whether there is something in our own judgment, and room to walk a path between reckless defiance and degrading submission, free of both ambition and danger. Messalinus Cotta, of no less noble birth but of a very different temper, proposed that a senatorial decree provide that governors, though innocent themselves and unaware of a wife's guilt in the provinces, should be punished for their wives' crimes as if for their own.
21| Next came the case of Calpurnius Piso, a noble and hot-tempered man. As I have recorded, he had loudly declared in the senate that he would leave the city because of the accusers' factional plotting, and had dared, in defiance of Augusta's power, to drag Urgulania into court and summon her out of the emperor's own house. Tiberius took this politely at the time, but though the first flash of anger had faded, the memory of it stayed with him as he turned it over in his mind. Quintus Granius accused Piso of treasonous remarks made in private conversation, and added that there was poison in his house and that he wore a sword when he entered the senate house. The sword charge was dismissed as too outlandish to be believed; but on the many other charges piled up against him, he was accepted as a defendant, though the case never ran its course, since he died at a convenient moment. There was also a report concerning the exile Cassius Severus — a man of low birth and vicious life, but a formidable speaker — who through excessive quarrels had gotten himself banished to Crete by a sworn verdict of the senate. There he stirred up fresh hatred by the same behavior as before, added to old grudges, and, stripped of his property and formally denied fire and water, grew old on the rock of Seriphos.
22| Around this time the praetor Plautius Silvanus threw his wife Apronia off a height for reasons never made clear. Dragged before Caesar by his father-in-law Lucius Apronius, he answered in confusion, claiming he had been sound asleep and knew nothing, and that his wife must have taken her own life. Tiberius went at once to the house without hesitation and inspected the bedroom, where signs of a struggle and of the woman being forced were visible. He reported this to the senate. Once judges were assigned, Silvanus's grandmother Urgulania sent her grandson a dagger — a gesture widely believed to have come at the emperor's prompting, given his friendship with Urgulania through Augusta. The accused tried the blade in vain and then had his veins opened instead. Later his first wife, Numantina, was charged with driving her former husband mad through spells and poisons, but was found innocent.
23| That year at last freed the Roman people from the long war against the Numidian Tacfarinas. Earlier commanders, once they judged their achievements enough to earn triumphal honors, had let the enemy go; three laurel-crowned statues already stood in Rome, and still Tacfarinas was ravaging Africa, now reinforced by Moorish auxiliaries who, since Ptolemy son of Juba paid no attention to them in his youth, had traded the king's freedmen and slave-like rule for war instead. He had as a partner and receiver of plunder the king of the Garamantes — not that this king marched with an army, but he sent light raiding parties, whose exploits grew larger the further the news traveled. Men from the province itself, whoever was destitute or violent by nature, rushed to join all the more eagerly, because Caesar, after Blaesus's campaigns, thinking there were no more enemies left in Africa, had ordered the ninth legion withdrawn, and Publius Dolabella, that year's proconsul, had not dared keep it, fearing the emperor's orders more than the uncertainties of war.
24| So Tacfarinas spread the rumor that Rome's power was being torn apart by other nations too, and was gradually withdrawing from Africa, and that the rest could be surrounded if all who preferred freedom to slavery would press the attack together. He built up his forces and, pitching camp, laid siege to the town of Thubuscum. Dolabella, gathering what troops he had, broke the siege on his first approach, aided by the terror of Rome's name and by the fact that the Numidians could not withstand a line of infantry; he then fortified the key positions in the area. At the same time he had the leaders of the Musulamii, who were beginning to revolt, put to death by the axe. Then, since repeated campaigns against Tacfarinas had shown that such an elusive enemy could not be run down by one heavy strike, he called up King Ptolemy with his people and organized four columns, given to legates or tribunes to command; picked bands of Moors led the raiding parties, while he himself stayed on hand to advise them all.
25| Not long after, word came that the Numidians had settled at a half-ruined fort called Auzea, which they themselves had once burned, pitching their huts there and trusting the place because it was ringed by wild forest. At once the light cohorts and cavalry, not told where they were headed, were rushed there at a fast march. They arrived at dawn, trumpets blaring and a fierce shout going up, catching the barbarians half-asleep, their horses hobbled or scattered across distant pastures. On the Roman side the infantry stood massed, the cavalry squadrons in position, everything ready for battle. The enemy, caught wholly unprepared, had no weapons, no order, no plan — they were dragged out, killed, or captured like cattle. The soldiers, furious at the memory of their hardships and at an enemy who had so often dodged the fight they longed for, each glutted himself with vengeance and blood. Word passed through the ranks: everyone should hunt down Tacfarinas, well known from so many battles — there would be no end to the war until their leader was dead. But he, with his bodyguard cut down around him, his son already bound in chains, and Romans closing in from every side, escaped captivity by throwing himself onto their spears and dying — a death, at least, that was not unavenged. That put an end to the fighting.
26| Tiberius refused Dolabella's request for triumphal honors, out of deference to Sejanus, so as not to dim the fame of Blaesus, Sejanus's uncle. But this did nothing to raise Blaesus's standing, and denying Dolabella the honor only sharpened his glory: with a smaller army he had still brought back notable captives, the death of the enemy leader, and the credit for finishing the war. Envoys from the Garamantes also came, a rare sight in Rome — sent by a people shaken by Tacfarinas's death, who, though not implicated in his guilt, wished to make amends to the Roman people. Learning also of Ptolemy's support during the war, Tiberius revived the old custom of honoring him: a senator was sent to present the ivory scepter and embroidered toga, the ancestral gifts, and to hail him as king, ally, and friend.
27| That same summer, the seeds of a slave uprising sprang up in Italy and were crushed only by luck. The instigator was Titus Curtisius, once a soldier in the praetorian cohort. He began with secret gatherings at Brundisium and the towns nearby, then openly posted notices calling the rough, wild slave-gangs of the remote forests to freedom — just as, as if sent by the gods, three warships happened to put in on that coast for the use of travelers. In the same region was the quaestor Cutius Lupus, whose province by old custom included the highland pastures; he mustered a force of marines and broke up the conspiracy just as it was forming. Caesar quickly sent the tribune Staius with a strong detachment, who hauled the ringleader and his boldest followers off to Rome — a city already uneasy over the sheer number of slaves, which kept swelling enormously while the free population shrank by the day.
28| In the same consulship, a grim spectacle of misery and cruelty was brought before the Senate: a father as the accused, his son as the accuser — both named Vibius Serenus. The father, dragged back from exile, filthy and unkempt, and now bound in chains, was set opposite his son, who begged to speak. The young man, groomed and eager-faced, laid out as both informer and witness a plot against the emperor and agents sent to Gaul to stir up rebellion, adding that Caecilius Cornutus, an ex-praetor, had supplied the money — a charge that drove Cornutus, weary of the whole ordeal and treating mere danger as ruin, to hasten his own death. The father, though, faced his son with unbroken spirit, shaking his chains, calling on the avenging gods to give him back his exile, where he could live far from such conduct, and warning that punishment would catch up with his son one day. He insisted Cornutus was innocent, frightened into false confession, and said this would be easy to see if the others named were produced — for he had never planned the emperor's murder and a revolution with only one accomplice.
29| At this the accuser named Gnaeus Lentulus and Seius Tubero — to Caesar's great embarrassment, since these were leading men of the state and his own close friends, Lentulus in extreme old age, Tubero in failing health, now called in as agents of armed uprising and public disorder. Both were cleared at once. As for the father, his slaves were put to torture, and the interrogation went against the accuser. Driven half-mad by his own crime, and terrified by rumors that the mob was threatening him with the Rock or the punishments reserved for parricides, he left Rome. Dragged back from Ravenna, he was forced to press his charge, while Tiberius made no secret of his long-standing hatred for the exile Serenus — for after Libo's condemnation, Serenus had written to Caesar complaining that his own zeal had gone unrewarded, adding remarks bolder than was safe for ears both proud and quick to take offense. Caesar brought these letters up eight years later, in the meantime interpreting Serenus's conduct in various unfavorable ways, even when torturing his stubborn slaves turned up nothing against him.
30| When the senators voted that Serenus be punished in the old manner, Tiberius stepped in to soften the outcry this would cause. Asinius Gallus proposed confining him on Gyaros or Donusa instead; Tiberius rejected that too, noting that both islands lacked water, and that a man allowed to live should be given what life requires. So Serenus was sent back to Amorgos. And because Cornutus had died by his own hand, the Senate debated abolishing the rewards paid to accusers whenever someone charged with treason took his own life before the trial was finished. The motion was heading toward passage until Caesar, more bluntly than was his habit, complained openly on behalf of the accusers that the laws would become dead letters and the state would be left on the edge of ruin — better to tear up the laws outright than remove their guardians. And so informers, a breed bred for public ruin and never adequately checked even by punishment, were lured on instead by rewards.
31| Amid so much relentless gloom, a small moment of relief broke through: Caesar, at the pleading of his brother, a senator, pardoned Gaius Cominius, a Roman knight convicted of writing a scurrilous poem against him. This was thought all the more surprising given that Tiberius knew perfectly well what reputation mercy would earn him, yet usually preferred the harsher course. It was not carelessness on his part — everyone knew when an emperor's acts of kindness were sincere and when they were merely staged. In fact Tiberius, ordinarily guarded and seeming to force out his words, spoke more freely and readily whenever he was granting relief. But Publius Suillius, once Germanicus's quaestor, convicted of taking a bribe to influence a judgment, was, on Tiberius's own motion, to be removed to an island, and with such intensity that he swore an oath it was in the state's interest. That harsh judgment, met with resentment at the time, was later turned into praise when Suillius returned — a man the next generation would see grow immensely powerful, venal, and long fortunate, though never honorable, in his friendship with the emperor Claudius. The same penalty was set for the senator Catus Firmius, for having brought false charges of treason against his sister. Catus, as I have already related, had lured Libo into his ruinous scheme and then betrayed him with an accusation. Tiberius, remembering this service, pleaded — under a different pretext — to spare him exile, but did not object to his expulsion from the Senate.
32| I am well aware that much of what I have recorded, and will go on recording, may seem small and trivial to relate. But no one should measure my Annals against the work of those who wrote the ancient history of Rome. They told of great wars, the storming of cities, kings routed and captured, or, when they turned to affairs at home, of consuls clashing with tribunes, land laws and grain laws, the struggles of commoners and nobles — subjects that gave their writing free range. My task, by contrast, is confined and without glory: the peace was undisturbed or only mildly troubled, affairs in the capital were grim, and the emperor showed no interest in extending the empire. Still, it may not be useless to look closely at things that seem trivial at first glance, since great upheavals often arise from just such small beginnings.
33| Every nation and city is governed by the people, by the nobility, or by one man. A constitution chosen and blended from all three is easier to praise than to achieve — and even if achieved, it cannot last long. So just as, in the days when the common people held power, or when the senators did, it was necessary to understand the temper of the masses and how best to manage them, and those who had studied most deeply the character of the Senate and the nobility were reckoned shrewd and wise in their times — so now, with the state transformed and Rome effectively ruled as if by one man alone, it will serve a purpose to gather and hand down these events. For few men can tell, through their own judgment, what is honorable from what is corrupt, or what is useful from what is harmful; most learn from watching what happens to others. Yet however useful such history may be, it offers very little pleasure. The geography of nations, the shifting fortunes of battles, the famous deaths of commanders — these hold a reader's attention and refresh it. What I offer instead is a chain of savage orders, endless prosecutions, false friendships, the ruin of the innocent, and trials that end the same way for the same reasons every time — a wearying sameness that breeds only satiety. And besides, ancient writers rarely faced hostile critics; no one much cares whether you praised the Carthaginian battle line or the Roman one more warmly. But the descendants of the many men who suffered punishment or disgrace under Tiberius's rule are still with us. And even where whole families have died out, you will find people who, because their own habits resemble those of the dead, feel that another's misdeeds are being thrown in their face. Even glory and virtue make enemies, by condemning their opposite from too close at hand. But I return to my subject.
34| In the consulship of Cornelius Cossus and Asinius Agrippa, Cremutius Cordus was put on trial for a charge new and never heard before: that in his published annals, by praising Marcus Brutus, he had called Gaius Cassius the last of the Romans. His accusers were Satrius Secundus and Pinarius Natta, clients of Sejanus. That alone doomed him. Tiberius listened to his defense with a grim face. Cremutius, resolved to end his life, began like this: 'My words are on trial, senators — so innocent am I of deeds. But even these words touch neither the emperor nor the emperor's parent, whom the treason law protects. I am said to have praised Brutus and Cassius. Many have written of their deeds, and no one wrote of them without honor. Titus Livy, a man of the first rank for eloquence and honesty, praised Pompey so highly that Augustus called him a Pompeian — and it did no harm to their friendship. He speaks of Scipio, Afranius, this very Cassius, this very Brutus — never as robbers and assassins, the names now given them — but often as outstanding men. The writings of Asinius Pollio hand down a splendid memory of the same men. Messalla Corvinus used to call Cassius his commander, and both men lived out their lives thick with wealth and honors. When Cicero wrote the book that raised Cato to the skies, what did the dictator Caesar do but answer it with a speech of his own, as if pleading before judges? The letters of Antony, the speeches of Brutus, carry insults against Augustus that are false, yes, but bitter. The verses of Bibaculus and Catullus, packed with abuse of the Caesars, are still read. Yet the deified Julius, the deified Augustus, both bore it and let it stand — whether more from restraint or from wisdom, I could not easily say. What is scorned fades away; get angry, and it looks like an admission.'
35| 'I will not touch the Greeks, whose freedom — indeed whose license — went unpunished, or where someone did take notice, avenged words with words. But it was above all a free and uncontested thing to write of those whom death had removed from hatred or favor. Am I inflaming the people at public meetings toward civil war, with Cassius and Brutus under arms and holding the fields of Philippi? They died seventy years ago. Just as they are still known by their busts, which not even the victor destroyed, so they keep a share of memory among writers. Posterity gives each man his due honor. And if condemnation falls on me, there will be those who remember not only Cassius and Brutus, but me as well.' He then left the senate and ended his life by refusing food. The senators voted that his books be burned by the aediles. But they survived, hidden and later published. All the more reason to laugh at the stupidity of men who think that present power can extinguish the memory of the next age too. On the contrary, persecuted talent only grows in authority. Foreign kings, and all who have used that same cruelty, have won nothing for themselves but disgrace, and for their victims, glory.
36| For the rest, the year was so continuously filled with prosecutions that during the Latin Festival, when Drusus, as prefect of the city, entered the tribunal to take the auspices, Calpurnius Salvianus approached him with a charge against Sextus Marius. Tiberius rebuked him openly for it, and that rebuke was the cause of Salvianus's exile. The people of Cyzicus were publicly charged with neglecting the rites of the deified Augustus, with added charges of violence against Roman citizens. They lost the freedom they had earned in the war against Mithridates, when, besieged, they had driven off the king by their own resolve as much as by Lucullus's relief force. Fonteius Capito, who had governed Asia as proconsul, was acquitted, once it was discovered that the charges against him had been invented by Vibius Serenus. Yet this did Serenus no harm — the public hatred he inspired only made him safer. The more ruthless the prosecutor, the more untouchable he seemed; it was the weak and obscure who paid the penalties.
37| Around this same time, Farther Spain sent envoys to the senate asking to build a temple to Tiberius and his mother, following the example of Asia. On this occasion Tiberius — a man generally firm in spurning honors, and thinking he ought to answer those whose gossip accused him of drifting toward vanity — began a speech of this kind: 'I know, senators, that many have found fault with my consistency, because I did not oppose the same request lately made by the cities of Asia. So I will explain both my earlier silence and what I have decided for the future. Since the deified Augustus did not forbid a temple being raised to himself and to the city of Rome at Pergamum, I, who treat all his acts and words as law, followed a precedent already set, and did so more readily because reverence for the senate was joined to worship of me. But while it may be excused once, to be consecrated in the image of a god throughout every province would be vanity, and arrogance. And the honor paid to Augustus will fade if it is cheapened by being handed out to everyone alike.
38| 'I call you to witness, senators, that I am a mortal, that I perform the duties of a man, and that I am content if I fill the first place among men — and I want posterity to remember this too. They will grant enough and more than enough to my memory if they judge me worthy of my ancestors, careful of your interests, steady in dangers, and unafraid to give offense for the public good. These are the temples I want in your hearts, these the finest and most lasting statues. What is built of stone, if the verdict of later generations turns to hatred, is despised like a tomb. So I pray to our allies, to our citizens, and to the gods themselves: to the gods, that they grant me, to the end of my life, a mind at peace and clear-sighted about human and divine law; to my fellow citizens and allies, that when I am gone, they follow my deeds and the fame of my name with praise and kind memory.' And afterward, even in private conversation, he kept refusing such worship of himself. Some read this as modesty; many, as a lack of confidence; some, as a mean spirit. The best of men, they said, desire the highest things — so Hercules and Bacchus were numbered among the gods by the Greeks, and Quirinus among us. Augustus did better, since he merely hoped for it. Everything else comes at once to an emperor; the one thing he must strive for without end is a good name after death — for to despise fame is to despise virtue itself.
39| Meanwhile Sejanus, made careless by his excess of fortune and further inflamed by a woman's desire — Livia was pressing him about the marriage he had promised — drew up a memorandum to Caesar; for it was then the custom to approach even a ruler who was present by letter. It ran something like this: through the goodwill of the father, Augustus, and then through Tiberius's many marks of favor, he had grown so accustomed to bringing his hopes and wishes to the emperor's ears before he brought them to the gods. He had never prayed for the glitter of honors; like any common soldier, he preferred the watches and the labors spent for the emperor's safety. And yet he had won the finest thing of all — to be thought worthy of a match with Caesar's family. That was where his hope first took root. He had also heard that Augustus, when settling his daughter, had once weighed Roman knights among the candidates — and on that basis he wanted it known: should Livia need a husband, the man he had in mind was a friend content to gain nothing from the match but the honor of the bond itself. He was not trying to shed the duties laid on him; it was enough, he thought, to strengthen his household against the unjust hostility of Agrippina, and that for his children's sake — for himself, he would count it more than enough of a life, that he had lived it out under such an emperor.
40| To this Tiberius, after praising Sejanus's devotion and touching lightly on his own favors toward him, said he would take time, as if for full deliberation, and then added: other men could base their plans simply on what suited themselves, but emperors were in a different position, since their chief actions had to be measured against fame. So he would not take the easy way out by simply saying that Livia herself could decide whether, after Drusus, she should marry again or remain in the same household; she had a mother and a grandmother, closer counselors than he. He would speak more plainly. First, about Agrippina's hostility — it would burn far more fiercely if Livia's marriage were, so to speak, to split the house of the Caesars into factions. Even as things stood, the rivalry of the women broke out, and that discord tore at his grandsons; what would happen if the contest were sharpened by such a marriage? 'For you deceive yourself, Sejanus, if you think you would stay in the same rank, and that Livia, who was wife first to Gaius Caesar, then to Drusus, would be content to grow old beside a Roman knight. Even if I allowed it, do you think the men would tolerate it who have seen her brother, her father, and our ancestors hold the highest commands? You wish to keep yourself within your present station, but the magistrates and leading men who force themselves upon you against your will, and consult you on everything, already say openly that you have long since passed beyond the rank of a knight and far outstripped my father's friendships — and out of envy of you, they attack me as well. But, you say, Augustus considered giving his daughter to a Roman knight. Small wonder, by Hercules, that when torn by every kind of care, and foreseeing the immense rise of whoever he lifted above others by such a match, he once mentioned in conversation men like Gaius Proculeius, men of notably tranquil lives, mixed up in no public business. But if we are to be swayed by Augustus's hesitation, how much stronger is the fact that he settled his daughter first on Marcus Agrippa, then on me? I have not hidden any of this from you, out of friendship. But I will not stand in the way of your own plans or Livia's. What I have turned over in my own mind, and by what further ties I might yet join you to myself, I will leave unsaid for now. This much I will reveal: nothing is too high for such virtues as yours, and for your devotion to me, to deserve — and when the time comes, whether in the senate or before an assembly, I will not stay silent about it.'
41| Sejanus now feared something deeper than the marriage question. He worked to smother the whispers of suspicion, the gossip of the crowd, the resentment building against him. But to avoid crippling his power by barring the constant crowds from his house, or handing his accusers ammunition by admitting them, he took a different tack: he pushed Tiberius toward a life spent far from Rome, in pleasant retreats. He had good reasons of his own. Access to the emperor would run through him, and he would control most of his correspondence, since it would pass by soldiers under his command. And soon enough, with Caesar's old age advancing and softened further by seclusion, the business of empire would slide more easily into Sejanus's hands. His own unpopularity would shrink once the crowds of morning callers were cut off, and stripping away the empty show of power would only increase the real thing. So bit by bit he began to run down the business of the city, the crush of the people, the flood of visitors, praising instead the peace and solitude where irritation and offense had no place and where the important matters got the most attention.
42| Around this time a trial happened to be held involving Votienus Montanus, a man of some renown for his eloquence, and it pushed the already hesitant Tiberius to believe he should avoid the Senate's gatherings and the speeches — often true and weighty — that were hurled at him there in person. Votienus was charged with insulting Caesar. A witness, Aemilius, a military man, in his eagerness to prove the charge, repeated everything in full and, despite the uproar around him, insisted on it with great force. Tiberius had to sit and listen to the insults by which he was being savaged in private. He was so shaken that he cried out he would clear himself at once, or at least during the trial, and it took the pleading of those close to him, and everyone's flattery, to settle his mind. Votienus was condemned under the treason law. Caesar, meanwhile, embraced all the more stubbornly the charge of harshness toward the accused that had been thrown at him: he punished Aquilia with exile for adultery with Varius Ligur — even though the consul-designate Lentulus Gaetulicus had already convicted her under the Julian law — and he struck Apidius Merula from the senatorial rolls for failing to swear the oath to the acts of the deified Augustus.
43| Next, embassies from Sparta and Messene were heard on the question of who owned the temple of Diana Limnatis. The Spartans maintained it had been dedicated by their ancestors on their own soil, backed by the record of their annals and the songs of their poets, but that it had been seized from them by force in their war with Philip of Macedon and later restored by the ruling of Gaius Caesar and Mark Antony. The Messenians countered with the ancient division of the Peloponnese among the descendants of Hercules, arguing that the Denthaliate territory, where the shrine stood, had fallen to their own king; and they pointed to monuments of this carved in stone and old bronze still standing. If it came down to the testimony of poets and annals, they said, theirs were more numerous and more reliable — and Philip had not ruled by power but by truth; King Antigonus had judged the same way, so had the general Mummius; the Milesians, given the arbitration by public agreement, had ruled the same, and finally so had Atidius Geminus, praetor of Achaea. So the case went to the Messenians. The people of Segesta also asked that the temple of Venus on Mount Eryx, fallen into ruin with age, be restored, recalling the well-known story of its origin — a story pleasing to Tiberius. He took up the project gladly, as a kinsman of the goddess. Then the petitions of Marseille were handled, and the precedent of Publius Rutilius was approved: he had been driven out by the laws of Rome and the people of Smyrna had made him one of their own citizens. On that same principle, the exile Vulcacius Moschus had been received as a citizen of Marseille, and had left his property to their state as to his own homeland.
44| Two noblemen died that year, Gnaeus Lentulus and Lucius Domitius. Lentulus, beyond his consulship and his triumphal honors from the war against the Getae, had borne poverty well, then acquired great wealth honestly and held it modestly. Domitius's glory came from his father, who had commanded at sea in the civil war before joining first Antony's side, then Caesar's. His grandfather had died fighting for the optimates at Pharsalus. Domitius himself had been chosen to marry the younger Antonia, daughter of Octavia, and later led an army across the Elbe, penetrating further into Germany than any Roman before him — a feat that won him triumphal honors. Lucius Antonius also died, a man of great but unfortunate lineage. His father, Iullus Antonius, had been put to death for adultery with Julia, and Augustus had sent this son, still very young, the grandson of his own sister, off to live in Marseille, where the pretense of studying abroad disguised what was really exile. Still, he received full funeral honors at his death, and by decree of the Senate his ashes were placed in the tomb of the Octavii.
45| That same year, during the consulship just named, a brutal crime was committed in nearer Spain by a peasant of the Termestine tribe. He attacked the province's governor, Lucius Piso, who was traveling without any thought of danger, taking him by surprise and killing him with a single blow. The killer escaped on a fast horse, and once he reached wooded country he let the horse go and threw off his pursuers on foot across broken, trackless ground. He was not free for long: the horse was caught and led through the nearby villages until its owner was identified. When they found the man and put him to torture to make him name his accomplices, he shouted in his native tongue that the questioning was useless — his companions could stand there and watch, no pain, however great, would ever force the truth out of him. The next day, as he was being dragged back for further questioning, he tore himself free from his guards with such violence that he smashed his head against a rock and died on the spot. Even so, Piso is generally believed to have been killed through a plot of the Termestini, since he had been squeezing them harder than the natives could bear for money embezzled from the public treasury.
46| In the consulship of Lentulus Gaetulicus and Gaius Calvisius, triumphal honors were voted to Poppaeus Sabinus for crushing the Thracian tribes, who lived on high, wild mountains and were all the fiercer for it. The uprising had a cause beyond mere savagery: they refused to submit to the levy, or to hand over their strongest men for our army's service — they were not used to obeying even their own kings except on their own terms, and if they did send auxiliaries, they insisted on their own commanders and would fight only against their neighbors, never anyone else. A rumor had also spread that they would be broken up, mixed with other peoples, and dragged off to scattered lands. But before taking up arms, they sent envoys to recall their friendship and loyalty, promising it would continue if no new burden were placed on them. But if slavery was to be the reward of the conquered, they said, they had iron, and young men, and spirits ready either for freedom or for death. At the same time they pointed to their strongholds set among the cliffs, where they had gathered their parents and wives, and they threatened a war that would be difficult, steep, and bloody.
47| Sabinus, while gathering his forces into one body, gave mild answers, and once Pomponius Labeo arrived from Moesia with his legion, and King Rhoemetalces with auxiliaries drawn from loyal tribesmen, he moved against the enemy, now dug in among narrow mountain passes, with the strength now at hand. Some of the bolder ones could be seen on the open hills; the Roman commander advanced his line against them and drove them off without much trouble, the barbarians' losses light thanks to nearby refuges. Then, having fortified a camp on the spot, he seized with a strong force a narrow mountain ridge running level all the way to the next stronghold, which a large body of armed men, disorganized as they were, held. At the same time he sent picked archers against the fiercest of the enemy, who according to their custom were leaping and dancing before the rampart with songs. Shooting from a distance, the archers inflicted many wounds without loss to themselves; but as they moved closer, a sudden sally threw them into confusion, and they were pulled back and covered by a cohort of Sugambri, which the Roman commander, ready for danger and no less fierce with their own war-songs and clashing arms, had drawn up not far off.
48| The camp was then moved nearer the enemy, leaving the Thracians — the loyal ones I mentioned earlier — at the old fortifications, with permission to plunder, burn, and drive off spoils, provided their raiding kept to daylight and they returned safely to camp for the watchful night. At first this was observed. But soon, turned reckless by plunder and grown rich with loot, they abandoned their guard posts, sprawling in the excess of feasting or collapsing in sleep and drink. The enemy, learning of their carelessness, prepared two columns, one to fall on the plunderers, the other to attack the Roman camp — not in hope of taking it, but so that, with everyone absorbed in his own danger amid the shouting and weapons, the noise of the other battle would go unheard. Darkness was chosen on top of this to deepen the terror. Those who tested the legions' rampart were easily beaten back; but the Thracian auxiliaries, terrified by the sudden attack — some camped close to the fortifications, more scattered outside them — were cut down all the more savagely because they were accused of bearing arms as deserters and traitors, in the service of their own enslavement and their country's.
49| The next day Sabinus drew up his army on level ground, in case the barbarians, emboldened by the night's success, dared to give battle. But since they would not come down from their stronghold or the connected hills, he began a siege, using the strongpoints he was already conveniently fortifying; then, digging a ditch and building a rampart, he enclosed a circuit of four miles. Little by little he tightened the blockade to cut off their water and forage, drawing the ring in close around them; and a siege-mound was built from which stones, spears, and fire could now be hurled at the enemy close by. But nothing wore them down like thirst, since the vast crowd of fighters and non-combatants alike had only one spring left to them. At the same time their herds, penned close by as is the barbarian custom, were dying of starvation for lack of fodder; the bodies of men killed by wounds or thirst lay scattered about; and everything was fouled with rot, stench, and contagion.
50| To the chaos was added the worst evil of all: discord. Some wanted to surrender, others to die, or to cut each other down; and some argued against dying unavenged, urging a breakout instead. It wasn't only common men who split into these camps. Among the chiefs, Dinis—old, and long taught by experience the force and the mercy of Rome—argued that laying down arms was the one remedy left for men so beaten, and he was the first to give himself up, with his wife and children, to the victor. Those weak with age or sex followed him, along with those who wanted life more than glory. But the young men were torn between Tarsa and Turesis. Both were resolved to die free rather than live in chains, but Tarsa shouted that they should end it quickly, cutting off hope and fear together, and set the example by driving a sword into his own chest. Others died the same way. Turesis waited through the night with his band, well aware our commander was waiting too. So the sentry posts were reinforced with denser clusters of men. Night fell, black with storm, and the enemy's confused shouting—now roaring, now dead silent—kept the besiegers guessing. Sabinus went around, encouraging the men not to open a gap for the ambushers by reacting to uncertain noise or feigned quiet, but to hold their posts, unmoving, and not waste their weapons on shadows.
51| Meanwhile the barbarians came pouring down in bands, hurling stones by hand at the rampart, and stakes hardened in fire, and hacked logs; and they piled the ditches with brushwood, wattles, and the bodies of the dead. Some brought up bridges and ladders they had built beforehand, set them against the defenses, and grabbed hold of them, trying to tear them down and force their way through against the men resisting hand to hand. The soldiers, in turn, knocked them off with spears, shoved them back with their shields, hurled siege-javelins, and rolled down heaped stones. Hope of victory won already, and greater disgrace if they gave way, fired the Romans; for the barbarians it was their last chance of survival, made sharper by the mothers and wives standing beside many of them, wailing. Night favored boldness in some, fear in others; blows landed blind, wounds came from nowhere; men couldn't tell friend from foe, and voices bouncing off the mountain's folds seemed to come from behind, so everything was thrown into such confusion that the Romans abandoned some defenses they thought had actually been breached. Yet very few of the enemy actually broke through: the rest, once their boldest men had been cut down or wounded, were driven back as daylight came into the topmost part of the fort, where they finally surrendered as a body. The nearest villages surrendered too, on their own initiative; for the rest, the early onset of winter on Mount Haemus, savage as it was, did the work of force or siege for us.
52| Meanwhile in Rome the emperor's household was in turmoil, and the chain of ruin that would end in Agrippina's destruction began: her cousin Claudia Pulchra was put on trial, prosecuted by Domitius Afer. He had just left the praetorship, was of modest standing, and eager to make a name for himself by any crime that would do it. He charged her with adultery, naming Furnius as her lover, and with poisoning the emperor and practicing black magic against him. Agrippina, always fierce, and now inflamed by the danger to her kinswoman, went straight to Tiberius and happened to find him sacrificing to his adoptive father. This gave her an opening: she said it made no sense for the same man to offer victims to the divine Augustus and to persecute his descendants. The divine spirit, she said, had not passed into dumb statues; she herself was his true image, born of his blood, and she understood the danger and was putting on mourning clothes. Pulchra was being used as a pretext; her only real crime was foolishly choosing Agrippina to attach herself to, forgetting what had happened to Sosia, ruined for the very same reason. This outburst drew a rare remark from Tiberius's guarded heart: he rebuked her and warned her, in a line of Greek, that she wasn't wronged simply because she wasn't queen. Pulchra and Furnius were condemned. Afer was now ranked among the foremost orators, his talent made public, and confirmed further when Caesar himself, with real weight, called him eloquent in his own right. Afterward, taking up prosecutions or defending the accused, his reputation for eloquence outran his reputation for character—except that in extreme old age even his eloquence failed him greatly, while his mind, though exhausted, kept its old impatience of silence.
53| Agrippina, still stubborn in her anger and now weighed down by physical illness, was visited by Caesar. She wept long and silently, then began to complain and plead: he should relieve her loneliness, give her a husband; she was still young enough, and a decent woman had no comfort but marriage; there were men in Rome he might think fit to receive Germanicus's widow and children. But Caesar, well aware how much was really being asked of him politically, and not wanting to show open offense or fear, left her without an answer, even though she pressed him. This detail, not recorded by the annalists, I found in the memoirs of Agrippina's daughter—the mother of the emperor Nero—who set down for later generations the story of her own life and the fates of her family.
54| As for Sejanus, he struck the grieving, unguarded Agrippina harder still, sending men who, under the guise of friendship, warned her that poison had been prepared for her and that she should avoid her father-in-law's table. Agrippina, no good at concealment, took her place at the meal beside him, showed no change in face or word, and touched no food at all—until Tiberius noticed, whether by chance or because he'd been told. To test her more sharply, he praised some fruit set before him and, with his own hand, passed it to his daughter-in-law. Agrippina's suspicion grew, and she passed the fruit on to the slaves, untouched. Even so, Tiberius said nothing aloud in front of others, but turned to his mother and said it was no wonder he had decided to deal more harshly with a woman who accused him of poisoning her. From this came a rumor that her destruction was being planned, and that the emperor did not dare do it openly, but was looking for a way to do it in secret.
55| Caesar, meanwhile, to turn public talk elsewhere, attended the Senate often, and for several days heard out the envoys from Asia who were disputing which city should have the honor of building a temple to him. Eleven cities competed, equally ambitious, unequally strong. There was little to distinguish their claims about the antiquity of their line, or their devotion to Rome shown in the wars against Perseus, Aristonicus, and other kings. But Hypaepa and Tralles, along with Laodicea and Magnesia, were passed over as too weak; not even Ilium, though it called Rome's founding city Troy its own parent, could claim more than the glory of old age. Halicarnassus prompted some hesitation: the city claimed that across twelve centuries no tremor had ever toppled its buildings, and that its temple's footing would rest on solid bedrock. Pergamum was thought to have already gained enough, since it had a temple to Augustus there—that was in fact their whole argument. Ephesus and Miletus seemed too taken up already with the worship of Diana and Apollo respectively. So the choice came down to Sardis and Smyrna. The Sardians read out a decree from Etruria, claiming kinship: Tyrrhenus and Lydus, they said, were sons of King Atys, and when their people grew too numerous they split it; Lydus stayed in the family lands, Tyrrhenus was given the task of founding a new home; and from the names of these two leaders came the names of the peoples—one across Asia, the other in Italy—and the wealth of the Lydians grew still further when they sent colonists to Greece, to the land later named for Pelops. They also brought up old letters from Roman commanders, treaties struck with us in the war against Macedon, the richness of their rivers, the mildness of their climate, and the wealth of the lands around them.
56| The people of Smyrna, for their part, went back to their own antiquity—claiming their city was founded either by Tantalus, son of Jupiter, or by Theseus, himself of divine stock, or by one of the Amazons—but then moved to the ground they trusted most: their service to Rome, having sent a fleet not only for foreign wars but for the war fought on Italian soil itself. Theirs, they insisted, was the very first temple ever raised to the city of Rome—built back in the consulship of Marcus Porcius, at a time when Roman strength, though considerable already, had not yet crested, when Carthage still stood upright and mighty kings still held sway over Asia. They also called Lucius Sulla as their witness: in a moment of extreme danger for his army, worn down by brutal winter and lacking clothing, when this was announced at a public meeting in Smyrna, everyone present stripped the clothes from their own backs and sent them to our legions. Asked to give their judgment, the senators preferred Smyrna over Sardis. Vibius Marsus proposed that an extra legate be appointed, beyond the usual number, to Manius Lepidus, whose province this was, to take charge of building the temple; and since Lepidus himself, out of modesty, declined to choose the man, Valerius Naso, a former praetor, was picked by lot.
57| Amid all this, after long deliberation and repeated postponement, Caesar finally left for Campania, on the pretext of dedicating temples—one to Jupiter at Capua, one to Augustus at Nola—but in truth determined to live far from Rome. For the reason behind his withdrawal, though most writers have traced it to Sejanus's scheming, I find myself, given that he kept up the same seclusion for six more years after Sejanus's death, more often inclined to think the truer explanation lay in the man himself—that he was simply hiding, in remote places, the cruelty and lust his actions would otherwise reveal. Some believed that in his old age he had also grown ashamed of his own appearance: he was extremely thin, stooped and tall, bald on top, his face pitted with sores and often covered in ointments; and on Rhodes he had already grown used to avoiding company and indulging his pleasures in private. It was also said that he had been driven out by his mother's overbearing will—he could not stand sharing power with her, yet could not push her aside either, since he had received that very power as her gift. For Augustus had hesitated over whether to place his sister's grandson Germanicus, praised by everyone, at the head of the state, but had been won over by his wife's pleading, and adopted Germanicus for Tiberius's sake, and Tiberius for his own. Augusta never let him forget it, and kept demanding he pay the debt.
58| The departure was with a small retinue: one ex-consul, Cocceius Nerva, skilled in law; one Roman knight of rank besides Sejanus, Curtius Atticus; the rest men of liberal learning, mostly Greeks, whose conversation was meant to ease his mind. Those skilled in reading the stars claimed that Tiberius had left Rome under a configuration of the heavens that would deny him any return. This proved fatal to many who guessed and spread word that his end was near — they never imagined anything so improbable as that he would willingly stay away from his homeland for eleven years. In time it became clear how thin the line is between art and fraud, and how obscure the truth that cloaks both. That he would never come back to the city was no random guess: as for the rest, they had no idea, since he lived out his final years near the city, by the coast or in the countryside, and often close by its walls.
59| It happened that in those very days a two-edged danger befell Caesar, which idle rumor inflated, and which gave him fresh reason to trust more deeply in Sejanus's friendship and steadiness. They were dining at a villa called the Grotto, between the sea at Amyclae and the Fundanian hills, in a natural cave. Its mouth suddenly collapsed under falling rock, crushing some of the attendants; terror seized everyone and those at the banquet fled. Sejanus, braced on his knees, face, and hands above Caesar, shielded him from the falling stones — and it was in that posture that the soldiers who came to help found him. From that moment his standing grew greater, and though his advice led to ruin, it was heard as coming from a man who cared nothing for himself. He played the judge against the line of Germanicus, planting men to act as accusers and to go hardest after Nero, next in line for succession. Nero, though modest in his youth, often forgot what suited the moment, egged on by freedmen and clients eager to grab power fast, who urged him to show himself bold and confident: the Roman people wanted this, the armies longed for it, and no one would dare oppose it — not against Sejanus, who now mocked equally the old man's patience and the young man's lack of nerve.
60| As Nero listened to talk like this, nothing crooked entered his mind, but sometimes rash and unguarded words slipped out, which the watchers set to spy on him caught, exaggerated, and reported — and since he had no chance to defend himself, new forms of anxiety kept arising. One man would avoid meeting him; another would return his greeting and turn away at once; most broke off conversation half-begun, while Sejanus's supporters stood by, pressing in and sneering. And Tiberius himself was either grim-faced or wore a smile that was plainly false: whether the young man spoke or stayed silent, his silence was a crime, and so was his speech. Not even the night brought safety, since his wife reported his wakeful hours, his sleep, his sighs to her mother Livia, who passed them on to Sejanus. Sejanus also drew Nero's brother Drusus into his schemes, dangling before him the hope of the first place if he could unseat his older, already weakened brother. Drusus's fierce temper, on top of his hunger for power and the ordinary jealousy between brothers, was further inflamed by resentment that their mother Agrippina favored Nero. Yet Sejanus did not cultivate Drusus so warmly that he failed to plant, in him too, the seeds of a future downfall, knowing him headstrong and thus more exposed to treachery.
61| At the year's end two notable men died: Asinius Agrippa, of a family more distinguished than ancient, whose life matched his birth, and Quintus Haterius, of a senatorial house, celebrated for eloquence while he lived — though the monuments of his talent have not lasted as well. He owed his power more to force than to craftsmanship; and just as the careful, labored work of other men gains strength with time, so that ringing, flowing style of Haterius died with him.
62| Marcus Licinius and Lucius Calpurnius were consuls when disaster struck without warning, a blow as costly as any great war — beginning and ending in a single instant. A man named Atilius, a freedman by birth, had begun building an amphitheater at Fidenae to stage a gladiator show, but he laid no solid foundation and bolted the wooden framework together with no proper bracing — the mark of a man who took on the project not from wealth or ambition for local office, but for cheap profit. People eager for such spectacles flocked in — under Tiberius's rule they had been starved of entertainment — men, women, every age, and all the more thickly for the site's closeness to Rome. That made the disaster worse: the packed structure first buckled, then collapsed, spilling inward and outward and dragging down and burying a vast mass of people, both those absorbed in the show and those standing around it. Those killed outright in the first collapse escaped torment, given such a fate; more pitiable were those left alive with part of their bodies torn away, who by day recognized their spouses or children by sight, and by night by their screams and groans. Soon others, drawn by the news, wailed — this one for a brother, that one for a relative, another for parents. Even those whose friends or kin were away for unrelated reasons felt dread all the same; and since it wasn't yet known who exactly had been struck down, the uncertainty spread the fear wider.
63| As they began clearing the wreckage, crowds rushed to embrace and kiss the dead; and often disputes broke out when a disfigured face but matching build or age led different families to claim the same body. Fifty thousand people were maimed or crushed in that disaster. For the future the Senate decreed that no one could put on a gladiator show unless worth at least four hundred thousand sesterces, and that no amphitheater could be built except on ground proven solid. Atilius was driven into exile. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the great houses stood open, bandages and doctors were provided everywhere, and for those days the city, despite its grief, resembled the old custom of our ancestors, who after great battles supported the wounded with generosity and care.
64| That disaster had not yet faded from memory when a raging fire struck the city harder than usual, burning out the Caelian Hill. People called it a disastrous year, begun under bad omens with the emperor's decision to stay away — the common view being to blame chance events on someone's fault, had Caesar not stepped in and handed out money in proportion to each person's losses. He was thanked for it in the Senate by leading men, and gained a reputation among the people, since without seeking favor or being pressed by those close to him, he had helped even strangers he sought out on his own with his generosity. Some proposed that the Caelian Hill should thereafter be called the Augustan Hill, since amid the fire raging all around, only the statue of Tiberius, kept in the house of the senator Junius, had remained untouched. The same thing, they said, had once happened to Claudia Quinta, whose statue had twice come through fire unscathed; our forebears afterward consecrated it in the Mother of the Gods' temple. The Claudians, people said, were a sacred house favored by heaven, and since the gods had shown the emperor such regard at this chosen site, a still grander ceremony was owed to it.
65| It would not be out of place to record that this hill was anciently called the Querquetulan, from the name meaning 'oak-grove,' since such woods there were thick and fruitful; later it was renamed the Caelian after Caeles Vibenna, an Etruscan chieftain who, having brought aid, received the site from Tarquinius Priscus — or, as some say, from another of the kings, for the sources disagree on this point. What is not in dispute is that his large forces settled even on the level ground close to the forum, from which the Tuscan Quarter took its name, after these newcomers.
66| But while the concern of leading men and the emperor's generosity had brought comfort against these disasters, the power of the informers grew daily worse and ran unchecked, with no relief in sight. Domitius Afer had seized on Quintilius Varus, a rich man and Caesar's relative — the same Afer who had secured the conviction of Varus's mother, Claudia Pulchra — and no one was surprised that a man so long in debt, and who had put his recent reward to bad use, was gearing up for more crimes. That Publius Dolabella joined him as a partner in the charge was a surprise, since, born of a distinguished family and related to Varus, he was throwing away his own noble name and his own blood. Still, the Senate resisted and voted to wait for the emperor's return — the only refuge available for the moment against these pressing evils.
67| Caesar, meanwhile, dedicated temples throughout Campania, and though he had ordered by edict that no one disturb his peace, and posted soldiers to keep the local crowds away, he grew so weary of the towns and colonies and everything on the mainland that he withdrew to the island of Capri, separated from the tip of the Sorrentine peninsula by three miles of strait. I am inclined to believe its isolation appealed to him most, since the sea around it has no harbors and only a few landing spots even for small boats, and no one could put in without the guard's knowledge. Its climate is mild in winter, sheltered by a mountain that blocks the harsh winds; in summer it faces the west wind and, with open sea all around, is most pleasant, and it looked out on a beautiful bay before Mount Vesuvius, catching fire, changed the face of the land. Legend has it that Greeks once held it and that the Teleboans lived on Capri. But by then Tiberius had settled into it with twelve villas, each bearing its own name and its own bulk, and just as he had once thrown himself fully into public affairs, he now sank, all the more secretly, into indulgence and ruinous idleness. His readiness to suspect and to believe suspicion still remained, and Sejanus, who had long fed it even while in Rome, stirred it up all the more fiercely, no longer hiding his plots against Agrippina and Nero. Soldiers assigned to watch them reported their messages, their visitors, everything open or secret, as if keeping a chronicle, and agents were planted to push them toward fleeing to the German armies, or toward clasping the deified Augustus's statue amid the crowded forum while calling on Senate and people for help. When they scorned these suggestions, they were charged as though they had been about to act on them.
68| In the consulship of Junius Silanus and Silius Nerva, the year began badly: a distinguished Roman knight, Titius Sabinus, was dragged off to prison for his friendship with Germanicus. He had never stopped honoring Germanicus's wife and children — attending on Agrippina at home, escorting her in public, the last of a crowd of former clients, and so praised by good men and hated by their opposites. Four ex-praetors, Latinius Latiaris, Porcius Cato, Petilius Rufus, and M. Opsius, went after him, hungry for the consulship, which was reachable only through Sejanus — and Sejanus's favor was bought only with crime. They agreed among themselves: Latiaris, who had a slight acquaintance with Sabinus, would set the trap, the others would stand by as witnesses, and then they would launch the prosecution. So Latiaris began with casual talk, then praised Sabinus's loyalty for not deserting a fallen house the way others deserted the friends of the fortunate; he spoke warmly of Germanicus, and pitied Agrippina. Sabinus — for grief softens most men — broke into tears, then complaints, and, growing bolder, loaded blame on Sejanus: his cruelty, his arrogance, his ambitions. He did not even spare Tiberius from abuse. These exchanges, forbidden as they were, created the appearance of close friendship. Soon Sabinus himself sought Latiaris out, came often to his house, and brought his sorrows to him as to his most trusted friend.
69| The men I have named now discussed how to get several witnesses to hear this. The place where they met had to look undisturbed — if men stood outside the door, the sight, the sound, or a chance suspicion might give it away. So three senators wedged themselves into the space between the ceiling and the roof, a hiding place as squalid as the fraud was vile, and pressed their ears to the cracks and gaps. Meanwhile Latiaris found Sabinus in public and, as if he had fresh news to report, drew him home to his bedroom, then piled on old grievances and new fears — there was no shortage of either. Sabinus repeated the same things, at greater length; grief, once it breaks out, grows harder to hold back the longer it has festered. The accusation was then rushed forward: a letter went to the emperor laying out the whole scheme of the trap, to their own shame. The city was never more anxious or fearful, guarding itself even against those closest to it. People avoided meetings and conversations, ears they knew and ears they didn't; even mute, lifeless things — a roof, a wall — were eyed with suspicion.
70| But Tiberius, in a letter of New Year's greetings for the first of January, turned from the customary prayers to attack Sabinus, charging that certain of his own freedmen had been suborned and that he himself had been the target, and demanding, none too subtly, revenge. There was no delay in the decree. Sabinus, condemned, was dragged off, his cloak thrown over his head and his throat gripped tight, straining as much as he could to cry out that this was how the year began, these were the victims falling for Sejanus. Wherever he turned his eyes, wherever his words reached, there was flight and emptiness; streets and forums were abandoned. Some who had already fled back showed themselves again, betraying by that very fear the thing they had been afraid of. What day, after all, was free of punishment, when even profane words were customarily avoided amid prayers and sacrifices, and yet chains and the noose were brought out? Tiberius, no fool, had not walked into such hatred by accident; it was calculated and deliberate, so no one could think anything stopped the new magistrates from opening the prison, just as they opened the shrines and altars. A further letter followed, thanking the senate for having punished a man hostile to the state, adding that his own life was full of anxiety and that he suspected the plots of his enemies — naming no one, yet no one doubted it was aimed at Nero and Agrippina.
71| Were I not committed to keeping each event under its own year, I would gladly leap ahead and tell now the fates that befell Latinius, Opsius, and the other inventors of this outrage — not only after Gaius Caesar took power, but even while Tiberius still lived; for though he had no wish to see the agents of his crimes brought down by others, he often grew sick of them and, once fresh men offered themselves for the same work, crushed the old and now burdensome ones. But I will report these and other punishments of the guilty in their proper time. At this point Asinius Gallus, whose children counted Agrippina as their aunt, proposed that the senate ask the emperor to declare his fears openly and let them be dispelled. Of all his virtues, none did Tiberius prize as highly, in his own estimation, as his gift for concealment; so he took it all the harder to have hidden things forced into the open. But Sejanus smoothed things over — not out of any love for Gallus, but so as to wait for the emperor's own moment, knowing that Tiberius was slow to decide but that once he broke out, he coupled grim words with savage acts. Around this same time Julia died — the granddaughter whom Augustus had convicted of adultery and banished to the island of Trimerus, off the Apulian coast. There she endured twenty years of exile, kept alive by help from Livia, who, having secretly ruined her stepchildren while they flourished, made a public show of pity for them once they had fallen.
72| That same year the Frisii, a people across the Rhine, threw off peace — driven less by any impatience with obedience than by our own greed. Drusus had set them a modest tribute suited to their poor resources: ox-hides, for military use. No one had ever bothered about their thickness or size, until Olennius, a former chief centurion put in charge of the Frisii, chose the hides of wild aurochs as the standard to be accepted. This was hard enough for other peoples, but harder still for the Germans, whose forests breed huge beasts while their own herds at home are modest. First they handed over the cattle themselves, then their fields, and finally their wives and children into slavery. From this came anger and complaints, and when no relief came, they sought the remedy in war. The soldiers stationed to collect the tribute were seized and hanged; Olennius fled their fury and took refuge in a fort called Flevum, where a sizable force of citizen and allied troops guarded the shore of the Ocean.
73| When Lucius Apronius, propraetor of Lower Germany, learned of this, he summoned detachments of the legions from the upper province, along with picked infantry and cavalry auxiliaries, and brought both forces down the Rhine into Frisian territory — by which time the siege of the fort had already been lifted, the rebels having withdrawn to defend their own homes. He then strengthened the nearest causeways across the marshes with earthworks and bridges so his heavier column could cross, and meanwhile, having found fords, ordered the Canninefate cavalry wing and the German infantry serving among his troops to circle around the enemy's rear. But the enemy, already drawn up for battle, routed the allied squadrons and the legionary cavalry sent to their support. Three light cohorts were sent in, then two more, and after a pause a squadron of allied horse — troops strong enough if they had struck together, but arriving piecemeal they gave no steadiness to the men already thrown into confusion and were swept along by the panic of the fleeing. Apronius handed over what remained of the auxiliaries to Cethegus Labeo, commander of the Fifth Legion. Labeo, finding his own men in a doubtful position, was drawn into a crisis and sent word begging for the strength of the legions. The men of the Fifth burst forward ahead of the rest, drove off the enemy in fierce fighting, and brought back the cohorts and cavalry wings exhausted with wounds. The Roman commander made no move to avenge them or to bury the dead, though many tribunes, prefects, and notable centurions had fallen. It was later learned from deserters that nine hundred Romans had been wiped out the next day in a battle drawn out near a grove called the grove of Baduhenna, and that another band of four hundred, having occupied the villa of a former tributary named Cruptorix, killed each other by mutual blows once they feared betrayal.
74| From this the name of the Frisii grew famous among the Germans, while Tiberius suppressed news of the losses so as not to hand anyone a pretext for war. The senate, too, showed no concern over whether the empire's frontiers were being disgraced; an inner dread had seized their minds, for which the remedy sought was flattery. So, although consulted on entirely different matters, they voted an altar to Clemency, an altar to Friendship, and statues of Caesar and Sejanus around them, and begged with repeated pleas that the two would grant them the chance to be seen. Yet neither man came into the city, or even near it; it seemed enough to leave the island and be seen somewhere close to Campania. There the senators, knights, and a great part of the common people came, anxious above all about Sejanus, whose company was harder to obtain and therefore sought all the more through favor-seeking and shared schemes. It was well known that his arrogance grew all the greater from watching that shameful servility on open display; for at Rome people were used to moving about, and in a city so vast no one could tell what business anyone else was on. There, though, men lay about on the field or the shore, enduring night and day alike, at the mercy of his doorkeepers' favor or disdain — until even that was forbidden. And so they returned to the city in fear, those he had not deigned to speak to or even look at, while some who had been too eagerly welcomed felt only dread, for a grim end hung over their ill-fated friendship.
75| For the rest, Tiberius, having formally betrothed his granddaughter Agrippina — Germanicus's daughter — to Gnaeus Domitius in his own presence, ordered the wedding celebrated at Rome. In choosing Domitius he had looked beyond the antiquity of his family to his blood-kinship with the Caesars, for Domitius could claim Octavia as his grandmother and, through her, Augustus as his great-uncle.
1| In the consulship of Rubellius and Fufius, both surnamed Geminus, Julia Augusta died, at the very end of her life—a woman of the highest nobility through the Claudian family and, by adoption, through the Livian and Julian lines as well. Her first marriage and her children were with Tiberius Nero, who fled during the Perusine war and returned to Rome once peace was struck between Sextus Pompeius and the triumvirs. Then Caesar, seized by desire for her beauty, took her from her husband—whether against her will is uncertain—and moved with such haste that he brought her, pregnant, into his own house without even waiting for the birth. She bore no more children after that, but through Agrippina's marriage to Germanicus she was linked by blood to Augustus's line and shared great-grandchildren with him. In the strict, old-fashioned management of her household she was gracious beyond what earlier women were thought proper—an overbearing mother, an accommodating wife, well matched to her husband's cunning and her son's pretense. Her funeral was modest, and her will went unexecuted for a long time. She was praised from the Rostra by her great-grandson Gaius Caesar, who soon after came to power.
2| As for Tiberius, having failed in his final duties to his mother, he changed nothing in his comfortable way of life and excused the weight of his public business by letter. The generous honors the senate decreed for her memory he pared down, as if out of modesty—accepting only a few and adding that no divine cult be decreed for her: that, he said, had been her own wish. In part of the same letter he even attacked women's friendships, a sidelong jab at the consul Fufius, who had flourished in Augusta's favor, was skilled at winning women's affections, and had a sharp tongue—given to mocking Tiberius with biting jokes, the kind that the powerful remember for a long time.
3| From this point the tyranny, already steep, grew still more pressing. While Augusta lived there had still been a refuge, since Tiberius's long habit of deference to his mother held, and Sejanus did not dare outrank a parent's authority. Now, as if freed from the rein, they burst forward. Letters were sent against Agrippina and Nero which the common people believed had long since arrived and had been held back by Augusta—for they were read out not long after her death. The wording was contrived to be harsh, but it charged the grandson with no weapons, no plotting revolution—only love affairs with young men and shamelessness. Against the daughter-in-law he did not even dare invent that much; he accused her instead of arrogance of speech and a defiant spirit, to the senate's great fear and silence, until a few—men with no hope from honest means, for public misfortunes are always seized by individuals as chances for favor—demanded the matter be put to a vote, Cotta Messalinus readiest of all with a savage proposal. But the other leading men, and especially the magistrates, were uneasy, since Tiberius, though he had attacked bitterly, had left everything else ambiguous.
4| There was in the senate one Junius Rusticus, chosen by Caesar to compile the proceedings of the senate and so believed to have insight into his thinking. By some fatal impulse—he had never before shown any sign of firmness—or perhaps by a misguided cleverness, forgetting the dangers looming and fearing only the uncertain ones, he inserted himself among the wavering and warned the consuls not to open the motion, arguing that the greatest matters turn on small moments, and that the ruin of Germanicus's house might one day become an old man's regret. At the same moment the people, carrying images of Agrippina and Nero, surrounded the senate house, shouting good omens for Caesar and crying out that the letters were false and that ruin was being aimed at his family against his will. So nothing grim was done that day. Fabricated speeches against Sejanus also circulated under the names of ex-consuls, many men indulging their wit in secret and all the more recklessly for the secrecy. This inflamed Sejanus's anger further and gave him fresh grounds for accusation: the emperor's grievance, he claimed, had been scorned by the senate; the people had defected; now new speeches and new decrees of the senate were being heard and read—what remained but for them to take up arms and choose as leaders and commanders the men whose images they had followed like standards?
5| So Caesar, repeating his charges against his grandson and daughter-in-law and rebuking the plebs by edict, complained to the senate that the emperor's authority had been made a public mockery by one senator's deceit, yet demanded that the whole matter be left entirely in his own hands. No further debate followed as to whether they should decree—not the ultimate penalty, for that was forbidden—but a statement that they stood ready for vengeance and were being held back only by the emperor's own restraint.
6| Forty-four speeches were delivered on this matter—few out of fear, most out of habit—[text breaks off] '...I thought it would bring me shame or bring Sejanus resentment. Fortune has turned, and the very man who took him as colleague and son-in-law now forgives himself, while the rest pursue with cruelty the man they cultivated through disgrace. Which is more pitiable, to be accused for friendship's sake or to accuse a friend, I cannot say. I will not put anyone's cruelty or clemency to the test; instead, free and satisfied with myself, I will go ahead of the danger. I beg you not to remember me with grief rather than gladness, and to count me among those who escaped public misfortunes by an honorable end.'
7| Then he spent part of the day speaking to each man in turn as the mood took him, holding some back, dismissing others; and with a large crowd still gathered and all watching his fearless face, thinking there was still time left for his final words, he fell on a sword he had hidden in his robe. Caesar did not pursue him after his death with charges or reproaches, though he had heaped many foul accusations on Blaesus.
8| Next came the cases of Publius Vitellius and Pomponius Secundus. Informers charged the former—who was in charge of the treasury's reserves—with having offered its keys and military funds for revolution. The latter was charged by Considius, an ex-praetor, with friendship with Aelius Gallus, who after Sejanus's punishment had fled to Pomponius's gardens as if to his most trusted refuge. Neither man had any help in his peril beyond the steadfastness of his brothers, who stood surety for them. Then, worn down equally by hope and fear through repeated postponements, Vitellius asked for a penknife on the pretext of his studies and made a shallow cut into his veins, ending his life through sheer sickness of spirit. Pomponius, however, a man of great refinement and brilliant talent, bore his adverse fortune with composure and outlived Tiberius.
9| After this it was decided that the rest of Sejanus's children should be put to death, though the people's anger had by now faded and most had been appeased by the earlier executions. So they were carried to the prison—the son aware of what was coming, the girl so innocent that she kept asking what crime she had committed and where she was being taken, saying she would not do it again and could be corrected with a child's beating. Writers of that time record that, because it was considered unheard of for a virgin to suffer the traditional punishment, the executioner raped her beside the noose; then, their throats crushed, the bodies of children that age were thrown onto the Gemonian Stairs.
10| Around the same time Asia and Achaia were thrown into terror by a rumor sharp but short-lived, that Drusus, son of Germanicus, had been seen among the Cyclades and then on the mainland. There was indeed a young man of about the right age, recognized—or so it seemed—by some of Caesar's own freedmen, who joined him in the deception; and people ignorant of the truth were drawn in by the fame of the name and by the readiness of Greek minds for anything new and marvelous: they invented and believed at once that he had slipped his guard and was making for his father's armies, about to invade Egypt or Syria. Already he was gathering crowds of young men and public enthusiasm, delighting in his present success and in empty hopes, when word of it reached Poppaeus Sabinus, who at the time, occupied with Macedonia, also had charge of Achaia. So, to get ahead of the story whether true or false, he raced past the gulfs of Torone and Therme, then past Euboea in the Aegean and Piraeus on the Attic coast, then cleared the Corinthian shore and the narrows of the Isthmus; and crossing by another sea he entered Nicopolis, the Roman colony, where he finally learned, on more careful questioning, that the man had claimed to be a son of Marcus Silanus, and that after most of his followers had melted away he had boarded a ship as if making for Italy. Sabinus wrote all this to Tiberius, and we have learned nothing further of the origin or the end of the affair.
11| At the end of the year the long-growing discord between the consuls broke into the open. Trio, quick to pick quarrels and practiced in the courts, had obliquely attacked Regulus as sluggish in hunting down Sejanus's agents; Regulus, restrained unless provoked, not only beat back his colleague but tried to drag him before an inquiry as guilty of complicity in the conspiracy. Though many senators begged them to set aside a hatred that would end in ruin, they remained hostile and full of threats until they left office.
1| Gnaeus Domitius and Camillus Scribonianus entered the consulship while Tiberius, having crossed the strait between Capri and Surrentum, was coasting along Campania, uncertain whether to enter Rome — or, since he had already decided against it, only pretending he might come. He often landed nearby, visited gardens along the Tiber, then retreated again to his cliffs and the solitude of the sea, ashamed of the crimes and lusts he had let run so wild that, like some Eastern despot, he defiled freeborn youths. It was not just beauty and fine bodies that drew him, but in some boys their modest innocence, in others the ancestral portrait busts that marked their pedigree, as if that too were an incitement to desire. It was then that words unheard of before — 'sellarii' and 'spintriae' — were coined, from the filth of the place and the range of degradations performed there. Slaves were assigned to hunt down and drag in victims, with gifts for the willing and threats for those who refused; and if a relative or parent tried to hold one back, the slaves used force, seizing and abusing them as though they were captives to do with as they pleased.
2| At Rome, at the start of the year, as if Livia's crimes had only just come to light rather than being long known and already punished, harsh proposals were made even against her statues and her memory, and it was proposed that Sejanus's property, already confiscated to the treasury, be transferred instead into the emperor's private purse — as though that made any difference. The Scipios, the Silani, the Cassii pressed these motions in much the same words, with great earnestness, when suddenly Togonius Gallus, trying to attach his own obscure name to great ones, was heard out amid general mockery. He begged the emperor to choose senators, twenty of whom would be picked by lot and armed with swords to guard his safety whenever he entered the senate house. He had apparently taken too literally a letter in which Tiberius had asked one of the consuls for an escort so he could travel safely from Capri to Rome. Tiberius, who liked to mix mockery with serious business, thanked the senators for their goodwill — but then asked: which men could be left out, which chosen? Always the same ones, or a rotating cast? Men who had held office, or young men; private citizens or magistrates? And what a spectacle it would make, men buckling on swords at the threshold of the senate house! His life wasn't worth so much, he said, if it needed weapons to protect it. He answered Togonius with these measured words, without pressing for anything beyond quietly dropping the motion.
3| But he savaged Junius Gallio, who had proposed that praetorian guardsmen who had completed their service should be granted the right to sit in the fourteen rows reserved for knights. Tiberius rounded on him as if face to face, demanding what business Gallio had with soldiers, who ought to receive orders and rewards from the emperor alone. Had he really found something the deified Augustus had overlooked? Or was this rather discord and sedition stirred up by one of Sejanus's old agents, using the lure of honor to corrupt the raw minds of soldiers and undermine military discipline? This was the reward Gallio got for his calculated flattery: instant expulsion from the senate, then from Italy. And because it was thought he would tolerate exile easily, having chosen the pleasant, famous island of Lesbos, he was hauled back to Rome and kept under guard in the houses of magistrates. In the same letter Tiberius struck down Sextius Paconianus, an ex-praetor, to the senate's great delight — a bold, vicious man who dug into everyone's secrets and had been handpicked by Sejanus to help set a trap for Gaius Caesar. Once this came out, long-buried hatreds erupted, and the death penalty was voted unless he turned informer.
4| But when Tiberius turned to Latinius Latiaris, accuser and accused alike — both equally hated — made for a most satisfying show. Latiaris, as I have related, had once taken the lead in entrapping Titius Sabinus, and now was the first to pay for it. In the middle of this, Haterius Agrippa attacked the previous year's consuls, asking why, having threatened each other with prosecution, they now stayed silent — mutual fear and a shared guilty conscience, he said, was being passed off as a pact of friendship; but the senate should not stay quiet about things it had heard. Regulus answered that the time for revenge would come, and he would pursue it in the emperor's presence; Trio said it was best to let rivalries between colleagues, and whatever discord had stirred them up, fade quietly. As Agrippa pressed on, Sanquinius Maximus, an ex-consul, begged the senate not to pile fresh bitterness onto the emperor's burdens — he was capable of deciding the remedies himself. So Regulus was saved and Trio's ruin merely postponed. Haterius was the more hated of the two, since, sluggish from sleep or from lecherous all-night sessions, and unafraid of a cruel emperor only through sheer laziness, he plotted the destruction of eminent men in between his drinking and debauchery.
5| Next Cotta Messalinus — author of the harshest motion on every occasion, and so the target of long-standing hatred — was accused the moment opportunity arose, of many things: of speaking obscenely about Gaius Caesar's manhood, of calling a banquet held with the priests on Augusta's birthday a 'ninth-day funeral feast,' and of complaining about the power of Manius Lepidus and Lucius Arruntius, with whom he had a money dispute, adding, 'the senate will protect them, but my little Tiberius will protect me.' All these charges were pressed home by the city's leading men, and under their onslaught he appealed to the emperor. Not long after, a letter arrived in which Tiberius, in his own defense, recalled the beginnings of his friendship with Cotta and listed his many services, and asked that words twisted out of shape, or the loose talk of dinner parties, not be turned into a criminal charge.
6| The opening of that letter of the emperor's struck everyone as remarkable. He began with these words: 'What I should write to you, conscript fathers, or how I should write it, or what I should not write at all at this time — may the gods and goddesses destroy me more thoroughly than I feel myself perishing every day, if I know.' To such a degree had his own crimes and vices turned into his own punishment. And it was not for nothing that the greatest of the philosophers used to insist that if the minds of tyrants could be laid open, one would see wounds and lacerations there — for just as the body is torn by lashes, so the mind is torn apart by cruelty, lust, and evil designs. Neither his power nor his solitude could shield Tiberius from confessing, in effect, the torments of his own heart and his own self-inflicted punishment.
7| The senate was then given the power to decide the fate of the senator Caecilianus, who had testified extensively against Cotta; it was resolved to impose on him the same penalty given to Aruseius and Sanquinius, the accusers of Lucius Arruntius — nothing could have honored Cotta more, for though noble, he was impoverished by extravagance and notorious for his vices, and yet was now placed on equal footing with Arruntius's unimpeachable integrity when it came to the honor of revenge. After this Quintus Servaeus and Minucius Thermus were brought forward — Servaeus an ex-praetor and once a companion of Germanicus, Minucius a knight, both of whom had kept their friendship with Sejanus modest — which won them greater sympathy. Tiberius, by contrast, denounced them as ringleaders in crime and prompted Gaius Cestius the elder to tell the senate what he had written to him; Cestius took up the prosecution. What made those times most deadly was that leading senators took up even the basest kind of informing, some openly, many in secret; you could not tell strangers from kin, friends from people barely known, what was fresh from what was long forgotten: charges arose from anything said anywhere — in the forum, at a dinner party — depending on who rushed fastest to denounce someone and claim the credit, some to save themselves, more because they were infected as if by a contagious disease. Minucius and Servaeus, once condemned, joined the ranks of informers. Dragged down to the same fate were Julius Africanus, from the Santones in Gaul, and Seius Quadratus, whose origin I have not been able to find. I am aware that many historians have passed over the dangers and punishments of many people, either overwhelmed by the sheer volume, or fearing that what had seemed excessive and grim to them would weary readers with the same tedium. But much that came my way deserves to be known, even though other writers left it untold.
8| For at that very time when everyone else was falsely disowning any friendship with Sejanus, a Roman knight, Marcus Terentius, though himself on trial for exactly that, dared to embrace it, opening his speech to the senate like this: 'For a man in my position it may perhaps be less prudent to admit the charge than to deny it; but whatever the outcome, I will confess: yes, I was Sejanus's friend, I sought to become one, and once I had, I was glad of it. I had seen him as my father's colleague in commanding the praetorian cohorts, then holding civil and military duties together. His relatives and connections by marriage rose in honors; the closer one stood to Sejanus, the stronger one's claim on the emperor's friendship — while those he disliked struggled with fear and neglect. I single no one out by name: I will defend, at my own sole risk, all of us who had no part in his final scheme. For it was not Sejanus of Vulsinii we courted, but the man who had married into the houses of Claudius and Julia — your son-in-law, Caesar, your partner in the consulship, a man carrying out your own duties in the state. It is not for us to judge whom you raise above the rest, or why: the gods gave you supreme judgment over all things; to us is left only the glory of obedience. We look, besides, only at what is plain before us — who holds wealth and honors from you, who has the greatest power to help or harm — and no one could deny that was Sejanus. To probe the emperor's hidden thoughts, or whatever he plans in secret, is forbidden, and dangerous besides — nor would you ever succeed at it. Do not, conscript fathers, weigh only Sejanus's last day, but the sixteen years before it. We even paid our respects to Satrius and Pomponius; even to be known by his freedmen and doorkeepers was counted a fine thing. What then? Is this defense to be applied without distinction, indiscriminately? No — let it be divided by just limits. Let plots against the state, schemes of murder against the emperor, be punished. But as for friendship and its ordinary duties — let the same limit that acquits you, Caesar, acquit us as well.'
9| The firmness of his speech, and the fact that someone had finally said what everyone had been thinking, went far enough that his accusers were punished with exile or death, along with the addition of their own past crimes. Next came a letter from Tiberius against Sextus Vistilius, an ex-praetor, a great favorite of his brother Drusus, whom Tiberius had transferred into his own retinue. Vistilius had offended, it was said, either by writing something branding Gaius Caesar as a man of unchaste habits, or by having a false charge believed against him. For this he was barred from the emperor's company, and he cut his veins with an old man's feeble hand and then bound them up again. He begged for mercy in a note, but the reply that came back was pitiless, so he untied the bandages and let his veins run. After that came a rush of prosecutions: Annius Pollio, Appius Silanus, Scaurus Mamercus, and Sabinus Calvisius together were charged with treason, and Vinicianus was added to the case against his father Pollio — men of noble birth, some of them holders of the highest offices. The senators trembled, for hardly a man among them lacked some tie of marriage or friendship to so many distinguished men. Only Celsus, tribune of the city cohort and now one of the informers, managed to pull Appius and Calvisius clear of the danger. Tiberius put off the case of Pollio, Vinicianus, and Scaurus, saying he would judge it himself along with the senate, though he had already dropped some grim hints about Scaurus.
10| Not even women were spared the danger. Since they couldn't be accused of plotting against the state, they were accused of shedding tears instead. The old woman Vitia, mother of Fufius Geminus, was put to death for weeping over her son's execution. That was the senate's business. At the emperor's court, meanwhile, Vescularius Flaccus and Julius Marinus were driven to their deaths — two of his oldest friends, men who had followed him to Rhodes and stayed close to him on Capri. Vescularius had carried messages in the plot against Libo; Marinus had helped Sejanus crush Curtius Atticus. It was received with some satisfaction that Tiberius's own methods had come back around on those who had once advised him to use them. Around this time the pontiff Lucius Piso died — a rare thing among men of such high standing — a natural death. He had never volunteered a servile opinion, and whenever necessity forced his hand he managed it wisely. I have already mentioned that his father had been censor. Piso himself lived to nearly eighty, and had earned a triumphal decoration in Thrace. But his greatest glory was this: as prefect of the city, holding a newly continuous form of power made harder to bear by men's resentment at obeying it, he handled the office with remarkable moderation.
11| In earlier times, once the kings and later the magistrates had left the city, someone was chosen for the interval to administer justice and handle emergencies, so the city would not be left without authority. It's said Romulus appointed Denter Romulius for this, Tullus Hostilius later appointed Numa Marcius, and Tarquinius Superbus appointed Spurius Lucretius. Later the consuls made the appointment, and a trace of the old custom survives to this day — whenever the Latin Festival is held, someone is put in charge to exercise the consul's powers for the occasion. Augustus, during the civil wars, put Cilnius Maecenas, a Roman knight, in charge of all of Rome and Italy. Later, once he held full power, given the sheer size of the population and the slow reach of the law, he took a man of consular rank to keep the slaves in check and to control whatever unruliness among citizens needed the threat of force to be checked. Messala Corvinus was the first to hold this authority, and he gave it up within days, as if he didn't know how to wield it. Then Statilius Taurus, despite his advanced age, carried it out admirably. After him came Piso, who held it with equal distinction for twenty years and was honored, by decree of the senate, with a public funeral.
12| Next the tribune Quintilianus brought before the senate the matter of a book of Sibylline verses which Caninius Gallus, one of the Fifteen in charge of such things, had asked to have admitted among the others attributed to the same prophetess, requesting a senatorial decree to that effect. This had already been passed by simple vote when Tiberius sent a letter mildly rebuking the tribune for his ignorance of ancient custom, excusable in a young man. He reproached Gallus because a matter of sacred law and ancient ritual, resting on an uncertain authority, had been brought before a thinly attended senate before the priestly college had given its opinion — instead of following the usual practice of having the verses read and evaluated by the priests first. He reminded them, too, that because so much spurious material circulated under the famous name of the Sibyl, Augustus had set a deadline by which such verses must be handed over to the urban praetor, and had forbidden anyone to keep them privately. This rule went back even further, to the elders, after the Capitol burned in the Social War: verses attributed to the Sibyl — whether there was one or several — had been gathered from Samos, Ilium, Erythrae, and even from Africa, Sicily, and the Italian colonies, and the priests had been given the task of judging, as far as human skill allowed, which were genuine. So now too, this book was submitted for examination by the Fifteen.
13| In the same consulship, the high price of grain brought the city close to riot, and for several days demands were shouted out in the theater with more license than usual, directed against the emperor. Stung by this, Tiberius rebuked the magistrates and senate for not using the state's authority to control the people, and he added a list of the provinces from which, and the vastly greater quantity of grain compared to what Augustus had managed, he was bringing in. So a senatorial decree was drawn up to discipline the common people with old-fashioned severity, and the consuls issued an edict no less strict. Tiberius's own silence on the matter, which he had expected to be taken as restraint, was instead read as arrogance.
14| At the close of the year, the Roman knights Geminius, Celsus, and Pompeius fell on a charge of conspiracy. Of these, Geminius, a friend of Sejanus's, was guilty of nothing more serious than extravagance and a soft way of living. Julius Celsus, a tribune, loosened his chain while in prison, looped it around his own neck, and pulling in opposite directions broke his own neck. Rubrius Fabatus had guards set over him on the suspicion that, believing Rome's fortunes hopeless, he meant to flee to the mercy of the Parthians. He was in fact found near the strait of Sicily and dragged back by a centurion, and could give no convincing reason for such a long journey. Still, he came through unharmed — more from being forgotten than from any mercy shown.
15| Under the consuls Servius Galba and Lucius Sulla, after a long search for husbands for his granddaughters, Tiberius, seeing the girls' age pressing, chose Lucius Cassius and Marcus Vinicius. Vinicius came from a country town, Cales, his father and grandfather both consuls, though the rest of his family was of the equestrian class; he was gentle by nature and polished in speech. Cassius came from a plebeian Roman family, but an old and honored one, raised under his father's strict discipline, and known more for his easygoing manner than for hard work. To Cassius he gave Drusilla, and to Vinicius Julia, both daughters of Germanicus, and he wrote to the senate about it, adding a modest word of honor for the young men. Then, after offering some very vague reasons for his own absence, he turned to weightier matters — grievances arisen in the public interest — and asked that Macro, the prefect, along with only a few tribunes and centurions, be allowed to enter with him whenever he came into the senate house. A decree was passed granting this broadly, without specifying rank or number, but even so he never once set foot in the city, let alone the senate, and mostly wandered by roundabout routes, circling and avoiding his own homeland.
16| Meanwhile a great swarm of accusers descended on those who had been increasing their fortunes through moneylending, in violation of the dictator Caesar's law setting limits on lending and holding property within Italy — a law long since let lapse, because private profit outweighs the public good. It's true that lending at interest was an old evil in Rome, and a frequent cause of unrest and discord, and so it had been restrained even in earlier, less corrupt times. At first the Twelve Tables forbade charging more than one-twelfth interest, when before it had been set purely by the greed of the wealthy; then by a tribunician bill it was cut to one twenty-fourth, and finally lending at interest was banned outright. Many plebiscites were passed against the fraud that kept springing back up in remarkable new forms no matter how often it was suppressed. But this time the praetor Gracchus, to whom the case fell, was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people at risk and referred it to the senate. The senators, alarmed — for hardly one of them was free of the same fault — begged the emperor for leniency, and he granted them a year and six months to put their private finances in order according to the law's demands.
17| This brought on a shortage of ready cash, since everyone's debts were called in at once, and because so much coined silver, after the conviction of so many men and the sale of their property, was locked up in the treasury or the privy purse. To make matters worse, the senate had ordered that every lender must invest two-thirds of his loan capital in land in Italy. But creditors were demanding full repayment, and it seemed shameful to let good faith slip once demanded. So first came a scramble of pleading, then an uproar at the praetor's tribunal, and the very remedy that had been sought — buying and selling land — turned into its opposite, since the moneylenders had sunk all their cash into buying up land. As the supply of land for sale grew, prices fell, and the deeper a man was in debt, the harder he found it to sell; many were ruined outright, and the collapse of their private fortunes dragged down their standing and reputation with it — until Caesar came to the rescue, distributing a hundred million sesterces through the banks and allowing loans, interest-free, for three years, provided the borrower gave the state security in land worth double the sum. In this way credit was restored, and gradually private lenders too came forward again. But the buying of land was never carried out to match the senate's decree — as usually happens with such things, the beginning was sharp and the end careless.
18| Then the old fears returned, with the treason charge brought against Considius Proculus, who was seized in the senate house while celebrating his birthday without a trace of fear, and was condemned and executed on the very same day. His sister Sancia was banned from fire and water, on the accusation of Quintus Pomponius — a restless character who claimed he did such things, and others like them, in order to win the emperor's favor and use it to help his brother Pomponius Secundus out of danger. Pompeia Macrina, too, was sentenced to exile; Caesar had already crushed her husband Argolicus and her father-in-law Laco, both leading men of Achaea. Her father, a distinguished Roman knight, and her brother, a former praetor, killed themselves as their own conviction closed in. The charge against them was that their great-grandfather Theophanes of Mytilene had been among the closest friends of Pompey the Great, and that when Theophanes died, Greek flattery had granted him divine honors.
19| After these came Sextus Marius, the richest man in Spain, charged with incest with his own daughter, and thrown from the Tarpeian Rock. To leave no doubt that it was the size of his fortune that had turned into his ruin, Tiberius kept his copper and gold mines for himself, even though they were technically confiscated to the state. Provoked now by these executions, he ordered the deaths of everyone still held in prison on charges of conspiring with Sejanus. The slaughter that followed was immense — every sex, every age, the famous and the obscure, lying scattered or piled in heaps. Relatives and friends were not allowed to stand by them, to weep, or even to look on for long; guards ringed the bodies, watching each person's grief, and followed the rotting corpses until they were dragged into the Tiber, where they floated or washed up on the banks, and no one dared burn them or touch them. Fear had cut the ordinary bonds between human beings so completely that, the crueler things grew, the more pity itself was driven off.
20| Around this same time Gaius Caesar, who had gone with his grandfather to Capri, took Claudia, daughter of Marcus Silanus, in marriage — hiding a monstrous nature under a sly show of modesty. Not his mother's condemnation, not his brothers' deaths, ever broke his composure; whatever mood Tiberius wore on a given day, he wore the same, in almost the same words. This later gave rise to the well-known remark of the orator Passienus, that there had never been a better slave or a worse master. I should not omit Tiberius's prediction about Servius Galba, then consul. Having summoned him and tested him with various conversations, he finally said to him in Greek, in effect: 'You too, Galba, will one day taste power' — meaning a late and brief reign, speaking from his knowledge of astrology, an art he had leisure to master at Rhodes under his teacher Thrasyllus, whose skill he had tested in this way.
21| Whenever he wanted to consult about such a matter, he used a room high up in the house, with only one freedman in on the secret. This man, illiterate but physically strong, would lead the way — over trackless, sheer ground, since the house overhung cliffs — ahead of whoever Tiberius had decided to test, and on the way back, if any suspicion of trickery or fraud had arisen, would throw the man over into the sea below, so he could never reveal the secret. So Thrasyllus was brought over those same rocks, and after he had impressed the emperor with his questioning, cleverly laying open Tiberius's future rule and what was to come, he was asked whether he had also worked out his own birth-hour — what year, what day he was then in. Thrasyllus, having plotted the positions and distances of the stars, hesitated at first, then grew afraid, and the more he looked into it the more he trembled with wonder and fear, until at last he cried out that an uncertain and nearly fatal crisis was upon him. At that Tiberius embraced him, congratulating him on having foreseen his dangers and on being safe after all, and taking what he had said as an oracle, kept him afterward among his closest friends.
22| But as for me, hearing such things, I remain uncertain whether the affairs of mortals turn on fate and unchangeable necessity, or on chance. For you will find the wisest men of antiquity, and those who follow their schools, disagreeing: many hold the fixed belief that the gods care nothing for our beginning, nothing for our end, nothing for us at all — which is why misfortune so often falls on the good and prosperity on the wicked. Others think that fate does indeed govern events, but not through wandering stars — rather through the first principles and chains of natural causes; and yet they leave us the choice of how to live, and once that choice is made, a fixed order of what follows. Neither good nor bad, in their view, is what the crowd thinks it is: many who seem to struggle under adversity are in fact fortunate, and many more, for all their great wealth, are utterly wretched — the first bearing hard luck with steadiness, the second using good fortune foolishly. Still, most people cannot shake the belief that what will happen is fixed from the moment of each person's birth, but that some things turn out differently from what was foretold through the ignorant errors of those who tell them — and so the reliability of the art itself gets discredited, though both ancient times and our own have given clear proof of it. As it happens, the prediction made by this same Thrasyllus's son concerning Nero's rule will be recorded in its place — I will not stray further from my subject now.
23| In the same consulship the death of Asinius Gallus was made public. That he had been killed by starvation was beyond doubt; whether by his own choice or by force was uncertain. Asked whether he would allow burial, Tiberius did not blush to grant it, and even complained openly of the accident that had carried the man off before he could be convicted face to face — as if, over three whole years, there had been no time for an old consular, father of so many consulars, to stand trial! Next Drusus died, having kept himself alive for nine pitiful days by chewing the stuffing of his bed. Some reported that Macro had been given instructions that if Sejanus's faction ever tried to take up arms, the young man — held prisoner in the Palace itself — should be pulled out and set up as leader before the people. Later, a rumor went round that Tiberius was softening toward his daughter-in-law and grandson — but rather than let mercy in, he doubled down on cruelty.
24| He even went so far as to attack the dead man, charging him with physical vices, a nature deadly to his own family, and hostile to the state, and ordered a day-by-day record of Drusus's words and deeds to be read aloud — nothing about it seemed more appalling than this: that for so many years men had stood by to catch his expression, his groans, even his muffled murmurs, and that a grandfather could have listened to it, read it, and put it before the public. It would scarcely be believable, except that the letters of the centurion Attius and the freedman Didymus listed the names of the slaves who had struck or terrified Drusus as he came out of his room. The centurion had even added his own words, brutal ones, as if they were something to be proud of, along with the dying man's last cries — Drusus, who at first feigned madness, hurling curses at Tiberius as though out of his senses, but later, once he had lost all hope of living, called down deliberate, carefully composed curses: that just as Tiberius had filled his house with the blood of his brother's daughter-in-law and son and their children, so might he pay the penalty to his own name and line, and to his descendants. The senators shouted him down, as if in horror — but dread and astonishment ran through them, that a man once so cunning, so skilled at hiding his crimes, had come to such boldness that he seemed to tear down the very walls and show them his grandson under the centurion's lash, begging in vain, amid the blows of slaves, for the last scraps that kept him alive.
25| That grief had not yet faded when word came of Agrippina — whom I take to have kept herself alive, after Sejanus's death, on hope, and then, once the cruelty against her showed no sign of easing, to have chosen death by her own will — unless, having been denied food, she was made to look as if she had ended her life by choice. Tiberius, in any case, burst into the foulest accusations, charging her with promiscuity and with Asinius Gallus as her lover, and claiming his death had driven her to weariness of life. But Agrippina, impatient of any equal, greedy for power, had long since traded women's failings for a man's ambitions. She died, he pointed out, on the very day, two years later, that Sejanus had paid for his crimes, and he insisted this be recorded for memory, and boasted that she had not been strangled with a rope nor thrown onto the Stairs of Mourning. Thanks were voted for this, and the senate decreed an annual offering to Jupiter, to be made every eighteenth of October, the anniversary marking when each of them had died.
26| Not long after, Cocceius Nerva, constantly at the emperor's side and versed in every point of divine and human law, though sound in health and unhurt in body, resolved to die. When Tiberius learned of it, he sat by him, pressed him for his reasons, added his pleadings, and finally admitted it would weigh heavily on his conscience and his reputation if the closest of his friends fled life with no cause to give. Nerva turned away from the conversation and simply refused all food. Those who knew his mind said that the closer he saw the state's troubles coming, the more, out of anger and fear, he wanted an honorable end while he was still untouched and untested. As for Agrippina's ruin, hard as it is to believe, it dragged Plancina down with it. Once married to Gnaeus Piso, and openly delighted at Germanicus's death, she had been protected, when Piso fell, by the pleading of Augusta and no less by Agrippina's own hostility toward her. Once hatred and favor alike had faded, the law took its course; charged with crimes that were no secret, she paid the penalty by her own hand — late, but not undeserved.
27| In a city already in mourning from so many deaths, part of the grief was that Julia, daughter of Drusus, once the wife of Nero, married down into the house of Rubellius Blandus, whose grandfather many still remembered as a mere Roman knight from Tibur. At the end of the year came the death of Aelius Lamia, honored with a censor's funeral — a man who, released at last from the empty title of governing Syria, had spent his time as prefect of the city. He came of a distinguished family and kept a vigorous old age; being denied his province had only added to his standing. Then, on the death of Pomponius Flaccus, propraetor of Syria, Tiberius's letter was read out, in which he complained that every man of real distinction, fit to command armies, refused the post, and that he was forced by this to beg some of the ex-consuls to take up provinces — forgetting that he himself had kept Arruntius from going out to Spain for nearly ten years now. Manius Lepidus also died that year, a man whose moderation and wisdom I have already given ample space to in earlier books; his nobility needs no further proof, for the Aemilian family has been rich in good citizens, and even those of that same house whose characters went bad still kept its brilliant fortune.
28| Paulus Fabius and Lucius Vitellius held the consulship the year the phoenix, after a cycle of centuries so vast it beggared memory, came back to Egypt — and gave the learned men of that country, and of Greece too, no end of material to argue over. On some points they agree, though much remains uncertain — still, it's worth setting down what can reasonably be known. All who have depicted the bird agree it is sacred to the Sun and distinct from every other bird in its face and the pattern of its feathers. Accounts of its lifespan vary widely. Five hundred years is the figure most commonly given, but others put the number far higher, claiming fourteen hundred and sixty-one between visits, and that in earlier ages the birds made their way to the city known as Heliopolis — once in the reign of Sesosis, again under Amasis, and last of all under Ptolemy, third of the Macedonian kings — with a great crowd of other birds trailing behind each time, marveling at this strange new shape. But the old accounts are murky: between Ptolemy and Tiberius there were fewer than two hundred and fifty years. So some believe this recent phoenix was a fraud, not really from Arabia at all, and that it borrowed none of the features old tradition insists on. The story goes that when its long life nears its end, it builds a nest in its own land and pours into it a generative force from which a chick is born; and the young bird's first task, once grown, is to bury its father — not carelessly, but by first lifting a weight of myrrh and testing it over a long flight until it can bear both the weight and the distance, at which point it carries the father's body and lays it on the altar of the Sun to burn. All this is uncertain and dressed up with legend. But that the bird is sometimes seen in Egypt is not in doubt.
29| Meanwhile in Rome the killing went on without pause. Pomponius Labeo, whom I mentioned as having governed Moesia, opened his veins and bled to death; his wife Paxaea followed his example. Deaths of this kind came easily because people feared the executioner, and because the condemned, once their property was confiscated, were denied burial — whereas those who took their own lives were buried and their wills stood, which was reason enough to hurry. But Tiberius, in a letter to the Senate, argued that it had been the custom of their ancestors, whenever they broke off a friendship, to forbid the man their house and let that mark the end of favor: this was what he himself had done to Labeo, whose guilt over mismanaging his province and other charges pressing on him had been covered over by playing the victim — his wife's terror had been pointless, since though guilty, she had faced no real danger. Next Mamercus Scaurus was again put on trial — a man of famous lineage, skilled at pleading cases, but disgraceful in his life. It wasn't friendship with Sejanus that ruined him; Macro's hatred, no less deadly, brought him down, working the same tricks more quietly. Macro laid information about a tragedy Scaurus had written, pointing to lines that could be twisted as an attack on Tiberius. The prosecutors Servilius and Cornelius then added charges of adultery with Livia and of practicing magic. Scaurus, as befit the old Aemilian family, forestalled his conviction by suicide, urged on by his wife Sextia, who both spurred him to death and shared in it.
30| And yet the accusers themselves, when the chance arose, paid for their work: Servilius and Cornelius, having brought down Scaurus and grown notorious for it, had taken money from Varius Ligus to drop a prosecution, and for this they were banished to islands and stripped of fire and water. Abudius Ruso, a former aedile, tried to endanger Lentulus Gaetulicus, under whom he had commanded a legion, on the charge that Gaetulicus had promised his daughter to Sejanus's son — but instead it was Ruso who was condemned and driven from the city. Gaetulicus at that time commanded the legions of Upper Germany and had won remarkable devotion from them, being generous to a fault, moderate in discipline, and — thanks to his father-in-law Lucius Apronius — well regarded by the neighboring army too. It was steadily rumored that he had dared to write to Tiberius, saying that his connection to Sejanus had begun not by his own choice but on Tiberius's own advice; that he could have been deceived just as easily as Tiberius had been, and that and that the same mistake ought not to be blameless in Tiberius's case but fatal in other men's; that his own loyalty remained unbroken and would stay that way unless he were attacked without cause; but that he would take a successor as nothing less than a death sentence. Let them strike, he said, a kind of bargain: the emperor could keep control of everything else, while he kept his province. Strange as this story was, it gained credibility from one fact — of all Sejanus's connections, Gaetulicus alone survived unharmed and in high favor, since Tiberius, weighing the public hatred against himself and his own advanced age, knew his power now rested more on reputation than on force.
31| In the consulship of Gaius Cestius and Marcus Servilius, Parthian nobles came to Rome without the knowledge of King Artabanus. Fear of Germanicus had once made Artabanus loyal to Rome and fair to his own people; but he had since grown arrogant toward us and savage toward his subjects, emboldened by successful wars against neighboring nations, and contemptuous of Tiberius's old age as though it left Rome defenseless. Eager for Armenia, when its king Artaxias died he set his own eldest son Arsaces on the throne there — adding insult by sending men to demand back the treasure Vonones had left in Syria and Cilicia. At the same time he boasted, in empty threats, of the old boundaries of the Persians and Macedonians, and of his intent to seize whatever Cyrus and later Alexander had once held. But the man most responsible for the Parthians sending secret envoys to Rome was Sinnaces, from a distinguished and correspondingly wealthy family, and next to him Abdus, a eunuch — a condition that among barbarians carries no disgrace, but rather a measure of power. These two, joined by other leading men, found they had no one of the Arsacid line to set up as king, since Artabanus had killed most of them or left the rest too young; so they asked Rome for Phraates, son of King Phraates. All that was needed, they said, was a name and Rome's backing — for a man of Arsaces's blood to appear, by Caesar's will, on the bank of the Euphrates.
32| This was exactly what Tiberius wanted. He honored Phraates and equipped him for his father's throne, holding firm to his usual method — to work at foreign affairs through calculation and cunning, and to keep armies at a distance. Meanwhile Artabanus, learning of the plot, wavered between fear that made him delay and bursts of anger that drove him to want revenge at once. To barbarians, hesitation looks like weakness; acting at once looks like a king. But practical calculation won out: he invited Abdus to a banquet under the guise of friendship and poisoned him slowly, and kept Sinnaces occupied and off guard with pretended goodwill and gifts. Meanwhile Phraates, in Syria, abandoned the Roman habits he had grown used to over so many years and took up Parthian customs instead — and being unequal to his own ancestral ways, he died of illness. But Tiberius did not drop his plans. He chose Tiridates, of the same royal blood, to rival Artabanus, and Mithridates of Iberia to recover Armenia, reconciling him with his brother Pharasmanes, who held the kingship of their people. He put Lucius Vitellius in charge of the whole eastern enterprise. I'm well aware that this man had a poor reputation in Rome, and that much scandal is told of him; yet in governing provinces he acted with the virtue of an earlier age. After his return, though, fear of Caligula and then intimacy with Claudius turned him into a shameful example of servility, held up to later generations as a model of disgraceful flattery — his good early years wiped out by a disgraceful old age.
33| Among the client kings, Mithridates moved first and prevailed on Pharasmanes to back his attempt with both guile and force; agents were found to corrupt some of Arsaces's own officers with heavy bribes into treachery. At the same time the Iberians burst into Armenia with a large force and seized the city of Artaxata. When Artabanus learned of this, he sent his son Orodes to take revenge, giving him Parthian troops and dispatching men to hire auxiliaries for pay. Pharasmanes, in response, brought in the Albanians and summoned the Sarmatians, whose chieftains, taking gifts from both sides as is their people's custom, put on different loyalties for different occasions. But the Iberians, controlling the terrain, rushed a band of Sarmatians into Armenia by the Caspian route. The reinforcements coming to help the Parthians, though, were easily blocked: every other approach was closed off by the enemy, and the one remaining route, along the sea near the far mountains of Albania, was impassable in summer, since the etesian winds fill the shallows with water — while the winter south wind rolls the waves back and, pushing the strait inward, exposes the flats along the shore.
34| Meanwhile Pharasmanes, reinforced and finding Orodes short of allies, kept challenging him to battle, and when Orodes refused, harassed him instead — riding up to his camp, wrecking his foraging, and often surrounding him with pickets as if laying siege, until the Parthians, unable to bear the insults any longer, closed in on their king and demanded battle. Their only real strength lay in cavalry; Pharasmanes was strong in infantry too, since the Iberians and Albanians, living in wooded, mountainous country, were more hardened to endurance and toughness. They claim descent from the Thessalians, from the time when Jason, after carrying off Medea and the children she bore him, returned to find Aeetes's palace empty and Colchis deserted. Many local customs and an oracle of Phrixus are traced to that story, and no one there will sacrifice a ram, believing it carried Phrixus — whether that means the animal itself or a ship bearing its image. In any case, with the two lines drawn up facing each other, the Parthian side spoke of their command of the East, the fame of the Arsacid line, and, by contrast, the obscure Iberian relying on hired soldiers; Pharasmanes's side answered that they themselves were untouched by Parthian rule, that the higher their ambitions the greater their glory in victory or their shame and danger in flight, and pointed — on one side — to their own men's rough, unadorned battle line, and — on the other — to the Medes' gold-embroidered ranks: here real men, there mere plunder.
35| Among the Sarmatians there was no single command from their leader: each man egged on his neighbor, urging that they not let the fight be settled by arrows but rush in close with a headlong charge. This produced a mixed kind of battle, as the Parthian, equally skilled at pursuit and flight, tried to pull the squadrons apart and open room for his shots, while the Sarmatians dropped the bow, which serves them poorly at short range, and rushed in with lance and sword; sometimes it went like ordinary cavalry fighting, with each side taking turns showing front and back, sometimes the lines locked together and men shoved and were shoved by the weight of bodies and clashing weapons. Now the Albanians and Iberians too joined in, grappling, shoving, forcing the enemy to fight on two fronts, while their cavalry harried the Parthians from above and their infantry, at closer range, did worse damage still. Through it all Pharasmanes and Orodes, moving to back up the bold or steady the wavering, stood out and so were marked men; they charged each other with shouts, spears, and horses, Pharasmanes pressing harder — he even drove a wound through the other's helmet. He couldn't strike again: his horse carried him past, and Orodes's bravest guards shielded their wounded lord. But a false rumor that he'd been killed spread panic through the Parthians, and they conceded the victory.
36| Soon Artabanus came seeking vengeance with the whole weight of his kingdom. Thanks to their knowledge of the terrain, the Iberians fought the better battle; even so Artabanus would not have pulled back, had Vitellius not mustered his legions and, by spreading a rumor that he meant to invade Mesopotamia, struck fear of a Roman war into him. Then Artabanus gave up on Armenia and his cause collapsed, as Vitellius worked to lure men away from a king who was savage in peace and ruinous in the aftermath of defeat. So Sinnaces, whose hostility I mentioned earlier, drew in his father Abdagaeses and other secret conspirators, who after a string of disasters were readier now to defect; and gradually more flocked in — men who had submitted more from fear than loyalty and, once they found leaders, found their courage too. Nothing was left to Artabanus but the foreign bodyguards around him, men driven from their own homes, who understood neither good nor cared about evil but served crime for pay. Taking these with him, he hurried into flight toward the distant lands bordering Scythia, hoping for help there, since he was tied by marriage to the Hyrcanians and Carmanians; and meanwhile he reckoned the Parthians might turn fair-minded toward him once he was gone and fickle if he stayed, and so come round to regret.
37| Vitellius, with Artabanus a fugitive and the loyalty of the people swayed toward the new king, urged Tiridates to seize what lay ready for him, and led the strength of the legions and allied troops to the bank of the Euphrates. As they sacrificed — Vitellius offering the suovetaurilia in the Roman manner, Tiridates decking out a horse to appease the river — the local people reported that the Euphrates, with no rainfall to explain it, was rising of its own accord to a great height, and at the same time curling its white foam into loops shaped like a diadem — an omen of a fortunate crossing. Others read it more shrewdly: that the venture would start well but not last, since signs given by earth or sky were more reliable, while the unstable nature of rivers could throw up an omen and snatch it away just as fast. In any case, a bridge of boats was built and the army crossed. Ornospades arrived first at the camp with many thousand horsemen — once an exile, he had been no small help to Tiberius during the Dalmatian war and was rewarded with Roman citizenship; later he won back the king's friendship and stood high in his favor, and now governed the plains that lie between the famous rivers Euphrates and Tigris and take from them the name Mesopotamia. Not long after, Sinnaces added to the forces, and Abdagaeses, pillar of the faction, brought the royal treasure and equipment. Vitellius, judging he had shown Roman arms enough, advised Tiridates and his nobles: Tiridates, to remember his grandfather Phraates and his foster-father the emperor, and whatever was admirable in each; the nobles, to keep their obedience to their king, their respect for Rome, and each man's own honor and good faith. Then he marched the legions back into Syria.
38| I have joined together events spanning two summers so that the reader's mind might rest a while from troubles at home. For Tiberius — even three years after Sejanus's execution, though time, pleading, and simple weariness usually soften other men — was not softened; he went on punishing what was doubtful or long forgotten as if it were fresh and grave. Fulcinius Trio, unable to bear the accusers closing in on him, wrote in his will a long and savage attack on Macro and Caesar's leading freedmen, and threw in charges against Tiberius himself — that his mind had gone slack with age, and that his long absence amounted to a kind of self-imposed exile. His heirs suppressed it, but Tiberius ordered it read aloud — whether to show off his tolerance for someone else's free speech and his contempt for his own bad name, or because he had long been ignorant of Sejanus's crimes and now preferred whatever was said about him to be made public regardless, so that if flattery kept him from the truth, at least abuse might get it to him. In these same days the senator Granius Marcianus, charged with treason by Gaius Gracchus, took his own life, and Tarius Gratianus, a former praetor, was condemned to death under the same law.
39| Trebellenus Rufus and Sextius Paconianus met similarly grim ends: Trebellenus died by his own hand, Paconianus was strangled in prison for verses he had kept composing there against the emperor. Tiberius no longer received this news across the sea and through distant messengers, as before, but from right beside the city, so that he could write his replies to the consuls the same day, or within a night — almost as if he could watch the blood spilling through the houses, or the hands of the executioners at work. At the year's end Poppaeus Sabinus died — a man of modest birth who won the consulship and triumphal honors through the friendship of emperors, and who was placed over the greatest provinces for twenty-four years, not for any outstanding skill but because he was equal to the work and no more than that.
40| Quintus Plautius and Sextus Papinius followed as consuls. That year the deaths of men like Lucius Aruseius no longer struck people as monstrous — they had grown used to such horrors — but there was real shock when Vibulenus Agrippa, a Roman knight, drew poison from a fold of his robe right in the senate house once the prosecutors had finished speaking, drank it, and collapsed; dying, he was dragged off to prison by hurried lictors, and the noose was put to his throat even though he was already gone. Not even Tigranes, once ruler of Armenia and now a defendant, escaped a citizen's punishment on the strength of his royal title. The consular Gaius Galba and the two Blaesi brothers died by their own choice — Galba after a grim letter from Tiberius barred him from the lottery for a province; the Blaesi had been designated priesthoods while their house still stood; when it was shattered he put the appointments off, but Tiberius had put off confirming them, and now, with the family's fortunes fallen, handed the posts to others — a sign of death they understood and acted on. And Aemilia Lepida, whom I mentioned as married to the young Drusus, had hounded her husband with repeated accusations; though utterly disreputable, she went unpunished as long as her father Lepidus lived. Afterward the informers seized on her over a slave with whom she had committed adultery, and the disgrace was beyond doubt; so she gave up her defense and ended her own life.
41| Around the same time the Clitae, a tribe subject to Archelaus of Cappadocia, were being forced to register a census and pay tribute in the Roman fashion, and so withdrew into the ridges of Mount Taurus, where the lay of the land let them hold out against their unwarlike king's forces — until Marcus Trebellius, sent by Vitellius, governor of Syria, with four thousand legionaries and picked auxiliaries, surrounded two hills the barbarians had occupied (the smaller called Cadra, the other Davara) with siegeworks, cut down those who dared break out, and starved the rest into surrender. Meanwhile Tiridates, with the Parthians willing, took possession of Nicephorium, Anthemusias, and the other cities that bear Greek names from their Macedonian founders, as well as the Parthian towns of Halus and Artemita, amid general rejoicing — for those who had grown up under Artabanus, raised among the Scythians, cursed his cruelty and hoped that Tiridates's gentler nature, shaped by Roman ways, would bring something better.
42| No one wore flattery more thickly than the people of Seleucia, a powerful city, walled, and never corrupted into barbarian ways but still holding to the customs of its founder Seleucus. Three hundred men, chosen for wealth or wisdom, form a senate there, and the people have power of their own. As long as the two act together, the Parthian king is held in contempt; but once they split, and each side calls in outside help against its rivals, whoever is brought in to take one side grows strong over both. That had happened recently under Artabanus's reign — he had handed the common people over to the nobles for his own advantage, since rule by the people is close to freedom, while rule by the few is nearer to a king's own tyranny. Now, as Tiridates approached, they showered him with the honors due the old kings and whatever more recent times had devised besides; at the same time they poured abuse on Artabanus — on his mother's side an Arsacid, but otherwise beneath the name. Tiridates left the affairs of Seleucia in the people's hands. Then, while he was weighing on what day to take up the formal ceremonies of kingship, he received letters from Phraates and Hiero, who held the two most powerful governorships, asking for a short delay. It was agreed to wait for these leading men, and meanwhile the capital, Ctesiphon, was made the seat of government. But as they kept putting the day off, before a large crowd, with general approval, Surena bound the royal diadem on Tiridates in the ancestral manner.
43| Had he pressed straight on into the interior and the other nations, the doubts of the hesitant would have been crushed and all would have fallen in behind him as one; but by camping at the fortress where Artabanus had stored his money and his concubines, he gave men time to slip free of their commitments. For Phraates and Hiero, and any others who had not shown up to share in choosing the day of the coronation, turned back to Artabanus — some out of fear, others out of resentment against Abdagaeses, who now controlled the court and the new king. Artabanus was found among the Hyrcanians, filthy and unkempt, scraping a living with his bow. At first he was terrified, thinking a trap was being set for him; but once he was assured they had come to restore his rule, his spirits lifted, and he asked what had brought this sudden change. Then Hiero mocked Tiridates's youth, saying the power did not truly rest with the Arsacid but was an empty name held by a weakling softened by foreign ways, while the real force lay in the house of Abdagaeses.
44| An old hand at kingship, he sensed that hatred, unlike love, is never counterfeited. He wasted no more time than it took to raise Scythian auxiliaries, then pressed forward fast, outrunning both his enemies' tricks and his friends' second thoughts. He hadn't even shed his mourning squalor — it drew pity from the common people. Nothing was left untried, no deceit, no appeal, to win over the wavering and steady the loyal. He was already close to Seleucia with a large force when Tiridates, shaken both by rumor and by Artabanus himself, was pulled apart by conflicting advice — should he march to meet him, or drag out the war by delay? Those who favored battle and a quick roll of the dice argued that troops scattered and worn out by a long march hadn't had time to bond well enough for obedience, and that they were recent traitors and enemies of the very man they were now being asked to support again. But Abdagaeses urged withdrawal into Mesopotamia, so that with a river as a barrier, and with the Armenians, Elymaeans, and others stirred up meanwhile in Artabanus's rear, they could build up their allied strength — plus whatever the Roman commander might send — and then try their luck. This view won out, since Abdagaeses carried the most authority and Tiridates had no stomach for risk. But the withdrawal looked like flight: the Arabs led the way, and the rest went home or over to Artabanus's camp, until Tiridates, with a handful of men, rode back into Syria, and so released them all from the disgrace of betrayal.
45| That same year a serious fire struck the city, burning the part of the Circus next to the Aventine, and the Aventine itself. Caesar turned the disaster to his own credit by paying full value for the destroyed houses and apartment blocks. A hundred million sesterces went into that generosity, and it was all the more welcome to the crowd because he was so modest in his own building — in fact even at public expense he had put up only two structures the whole reign, a temple to Augustus and the stage-building of Pompey's theater. And even those, once finished, he never dedicated — whether from contempt for self-promotion or simply old age. To assess everyone's losses, four of Caesar's step-grandsons-in-law were chosen — Gnaeus Domitius, Cassius Longinus, Marcus Vinicius, Rubellius Blandus — with Publius Petronius added on the consuls' nomination. Honors for the emperor were proposed and voted, each in proportion to the proposer's ambition; whether he declined or accepted them stayed uncertain, given how close he now was to the end of his life. Not long after, the last consuls of Tiberius's reign, Gnaeus Acerronius and Gaius Pontius, took office, by which time Macro's power was already excessive. He had never let his standing with Gaius Caesar slip, and cultivated it more eagerly by the day. After the death of Claudia — whose marriage to Gaius I mentioned earlier — he had pushed his own wife Ennia to fake love for the young man and bind him with a promise of marriage. Gaius refused nothing, so long as it got him the throne; for though quick-tempered by nature, he had thoroughly learned, in his grandfather's household, how to bury his true feelings under a mask.
46| Tiberius knew this well, which is why he hesitated over handing on the state. First he weighed his two grandsons: the son of Drusus was closer to him by blood and by affection, but hadn't yet reached manhood; Germanicus's son had the vigor of youth and the people's favor — and that, in his grandfather's eyes, was exactly why he was hated. He also considered Claudius, a man of settled years and eager for the finer pursuits, but his impaired mind ruled him out. And if he looked for a successor outside the family, he feared turning Augustus's memory and the name of the Caesars into a mockery and a disgrace — for what mattered to Tiberius was never gratitude in the present so much as ambition for how he'd be judged by later generations. In the end, uncertain in mind and worn out in body, he left to fate a decision he no longer had the strength for — though he dropped hints that showed he foresaw what was coming. To Macro he said, in words thin enough to see through, that he was deserting the setting sun to look toward the rising one. And to Gaius Caesar, when the young man happened to mock Sulla in conversation, he predicted that Gaius would have all of Sulla's vices and none of his virtues. At the same time, in tears, he often embraced the younger of his two grandsons, while the other watched with a grim face; to him he said, 'You will kill this one — and someone else will kill you.' But as his health worsened he gave up none of his pleasures, forcing himself to look robust through sheer endurance, and made a habit of mocking the doctors' craft, and anyone who, past the age of thirty, still needed someone else's advice to tell what was good or bad for his own body.
47| Meanwhile in Rome, the seeds were already being sown for killings that would outlast Tiberius himself. Laelius Balbus had charged Acutia, once the wife of Publius Vitellius, with treason; when she was convicted and a reward was voted to her accuser, the tribune of the people Junius Otho blocked it — which planted hatred between the two men, and soon after, ruin for Otho. Then Albucilla, notorious for her many affairs, once married to Satrius Secundus the informer of the conspiracy, was charged with impiety toward the emperor. Named as her accomplices and lovers were Gnaeus Domitius, Vibius Marsus, and Lucius Arruntius. I have already noted Domitius's distinction; Marsus too came from old honors and was known for his learning. But the record sent to the senate showed that Macro had presided over the questioning of witnesses and the torture of slaves, and the absence of any letter from the emperor naming them raised suspicion that most of the charges against Arruntius were fabricated, exploiting a dying, perhaps unwitting old man, out of Macro's well-known hostility toward him.
48| So Domitius, preparing his defense, and Marsus, apparently resolved to starve himself, dragged out their lives. Arruntius, when friends urged delay and caution, replied that the same course was not honorable for every man: he had lived long enough, he said, and had nothing to regret except having endured an anxious old age amid mockery and danger — hated for years by Sejanus, now by Macro, always by whoever held power, not through any fault of his own but because he couldn't stomach their crimes. True, he might dodge the emperor's last few days — but how would he escape the youth now closing in? If Tiberius, after all his experience of affairs, had been twisted and remade by the sheer force of absolute rule, was Gaius Caesar — barely out of boyhood, ignorant of everything or raised on the worst of examples — likely to turn out better, with Macro as his guide, a man chosen for being even worse than Sejanus when it came to crushing him, and who had already battered the state through plenty of crimes of his own? He said he could already see harsher servitude looming, and so he was fleeing both what had already happened and what was still to come. Saying this again and again like a prophet, he opened his veins. What followed would prove that Arruntius had made good use of his death. Albucilla, wounding herself with a botched stroke, was carried to prison on the senate's order. The men who had served her debaucheries — Carsidius Sacerdos, an ex-praetor, was sentenced to deportation to an island; Pontius Fregellanus was stripped of senatorial rank; and the same penalties were decreed for Laelius Balbus — this last to general rejoicing, since Balbus was known for a savage eloquence, always quick to turn on the innocent.
49| In those same days Sextus Papinius, from a consular family, chose a sudden and ugly death, hurling himself from a height. The blame was laid on his mother, who, having once been divorced, was said to have driven the young man, through flattery and extravagance, into troubles he could escape only by dying. She was accused before the senate, and though she flung herself at the senators' knees, pleading the grief all mothers share and the special weakness of a woman's mind under such a blow, and other sad and pitiable arguments to the same effect, she was nonetheless banned from the city for ten years, until her younger son had passed through the treacherous years of youth.
50| By now his body and his strength were failing Tiberius, though not yet his gift for hiding it. His iron will held; sharp in speech and expression, he masked his clearly failing health at times with studied affability. After moving from place to place several times, he finally settled at a villa near the promontory of Misenum that had once belonged to Lucullus. There it became clear he was nearing his end, in this way: there was a doctor of notable skill named Charicles, who, though not normally in charge of the emperor's health, was often consulted. As he was taking his leave, apparently on his own business, he took Tiberius's hand as a courtesy and, in doing so, felt his pulse. He wasn't fooled: Tiberius, whether offended or simply hiding his anger all the more, ordered the banquet to resume and reclined longer than usual, as if to honor his departing friend. But Charicles told Macro plainly that the emperor's breath was failing and wouldn't last two more days. From then on everything was rushed — conferences among those present, dispatches to the governors and armies abroad. On the sixteenth of March his breathing stopped, and he was believed to have completed his mortal span; and amid a great crowd converging to congratulate him, Gaius Caesar was stepping out to seize the reins of empire when word suddenly came that Tiberius's voice and sight had returned, and that he was calling for food to revive his failing strength. Panic seized everyone; the rest scattered in every direction, each pretending grief or ignorance; Caesar stood frozen in silence, plunged in an instant from the height of hope to the depths. Macro, unshaken, ordered the old man smothered under a heap of blankets, and everyone to leave the doorway. So Tiberius ended his life in his seventy-eighth year.
51| His father was Nero, and on both sides his line ran back to the Claudian family, though his mother had passed by adoption first into the Livian house and then the Julian. From infancy his fortunes were uncertain: he followed his proscribed father into exile, and when he entered Augustus's household as a stepson he had to contend with many rivals, while Marcellus and Agrippa, and later Gaius and Lucius Caesar, were in their prime; his own brother Drusus, too, stood higher in the people's affection. But his footing was most treacherous of all when he took Julia in marriage, forced to either endure or overlook his wife's adulteries. Then, returning from Rhodes, he found the emperor's household empty of rivals, and for twelve years he ruled it; after that he held mastery over the Roman state for nearly twenty-three years. His character, too, passed through distinct phases. While he was a private citizen, or held commands under Augustus, his life and reputation were outstanding. While Germanicus and Drusus still lived, he was secretive and cunning, counterfeiting virtues he did not have. As long as his mother lived, he was a mixture of good and bad. While he loved, or feared, Sejanus, his cruelty was unspeakable but his lusts stayed hidden. At the end he plunged into crime and degradation together, once shame and fear were stripped away and he answered to nothing but his own nature.
1| [text breaks off at the start] For she believed that Valerius Asiaticus, twice consul, had once been her lover, and she also had her eye on his gardens, which he had extended from Lucullus's original grounds with striking magnificence. So she set Suillius on them to prosecute both. Sosibius, tutor to Britannicus, joined in, warning Claudius under the guise of goodwill to beware of a man whose power and wealth threatened emperors: Asiaticus, he said, had been a leading figure in the killing of Gaius Caesar, and had not been afraid to admit it before an assembly of the Roman people, even claiming the glory of the deed for himself. He was famous in the city for this, and word was spreading through the provinces that he was preparing to travel to the armies in Germany — not surprising, since he had been born at Vienne, had many powerful relatives, and would find it easy to stir up his countrymen. Claudius investigated no further. He sent Crispinus, the praetorian prefect, with soldiers at speed, as if to crush a war in progress. Crispinus found Asiaticus at Baiae, put him in chains, and hauled him to Rome.
2| He was given no hearing before the Senate: he was heard inside Claudius's bedroom, with Messalina present and Suillius pressing the charges — first that he had corrupted soldiers, binding them to every kind of crime with money and sexual favors, then that he had committed adultery with Poppaea, and finally that he was effeminate. At that last charge the accused broke his silence and burst out: "Ask your sons, Suillius — they'll admit I'm a man." He then launched into his defense; Claudius was visibly moved by it, and Messalina too found herself in tears. Yet the moment she stepped out to dry her eyes, she told Vitellius not to let the accused slip free. She herself hurried to destroy Poppaea, sending men to terrify her into suicide with threats of prison — and Claudius knew so little of it that a few days later, dining with Poppaea's husband Scipio, he asked why he had come to table without his wife, and Scipio answered that she had died a natural death.
3| When Claudius consulted him about acquitting Asiaticus, Vitellius wept, recalled their long friendship and how they had both attended on Antonia, the emperor's mother, then ran through Asiaticus's services to the state and his recent campaign against Britain, and everything else that might win sympathy — and so secured him the free choice of how to die. Claudius's own words followed in the same merciful vein. When some urged Asiaticus to starve himself for a gentle end, he said he would not accept the favor. He kept up his usual exercises, bathed, dined cheerfully, and remarked that he would rather have died by Tiberius's cunning or Gaius's violence than by a woman's treachery and Vitellius's shameless mouth. Then he opened his veins — but first inspected the funeral pyre and had part of it moved, so the shade of the trees would not weaken the heat of the flames. That was how composed he was, right to the end.
4| After this the senators were summoned, and Suillius went on to name as defendants two distinguished Roman knights, both surnamed Petra. What actually killed them was that Mnester and Poppaea had used their house for their meetings. But the charge brought against one of them concerned a dream: he had supposedly seen Claudius wearing a crown of wheat with the ears turned backward, and from that image had predicted a grain shortage. Others said the crown he saw was of vine leaves, gone white, and that he had read it as foretelling the emperor's death as autumn drew on. What is not in doubt is that some dream or other, whichever it was, brought ruin on the man and his brother. Fifteen hundred thousand sesterces and the insignia of a praetor were voted to Crispinus. Vitellius added a million sesterces for Sosibius, for helping Britannicus with his lessons and Claudius with his counsel. Scipio too was asked his opinion, and answered, "Since I feel the same as everyone else about Poppaea's conduct, assume I say the same as everyone else" — a graceful balance between a husband's love and a senator's duty.
5| From then on Suillius kept up a relentless, savage run of prosecutions, and many rivaled him in daring; for the emperor, having drawn all the functions of the laws and the magistrates to himself, had opened up rich ground for plunder. Nothing in public life was so openly for sale as the treachery of advocates — so much so that Samius, a prominent Roman knight, having paid Suillius four hundred thousand sesterces and then discovered he had been sold out, fell on his sword in Suillius's own house. So when Gaius Silius, the consul-elect — whose power and downfall I will describe in due course — raised the matter, the senators rose as one and demanded enforcement of the Cincian law, which from ancient times forbids anyone to take money or gifts for pleading a case.
6| Then, over the protests of those for whom this insult was being prepared, Silius, at odds with Suillius, attacked him fiercely, citing the example of orators of old who had thought of fame and posterity as the true rewards of eloquence. Otherwise, he said, a noble art, the foremost of the liberal pursuits, was being fouled by sordid trafficking; not even honesty could survive intact where the size of the fee was what mattered. Strip out the profit and lawsuits would grow scarce; instead, feuds, indictments, hatreds and injuries were being deliberately kept alive — the way a doctor profits from a worsening illness, the courts' corruption was lining the advocates' pockets. Let them remember Asinius and Messala, and in more recent times Arruntius and Aeserninus: men who had risen to the top through an uncorrupted life and eloquence alone. As the consul-elect spoke, others agreeing, a motion was being prepared to make advocates liable under the law against extortion, when Suillius and Cossutianus and the rest — who saw not a trial in prospect, since they were plainly guilty, but a punishment already decided — surrounded Claudius, begging pardon for the past.
7| And once he had nodded assent, they began their case: who was so arrogant as to presume on the hope of eternal fame? Practical needs required that a fallback be provided, so that no one, for want of an advocate, be left at the mercy of the powerful. Eloquence, besides, did not come free: pursuing it meant neglecting one's own affairs to attend to other people's business. Soldiering fed some men, farming fed others; nobody gives anything away without reckoning on some return first. As for Asinius and Messala — grown rich on plunder from the wars of Antony and Augustus — or the Aeserninus and Arruntius families, born into wealth, striking such a lofty pose cost them nothing. They had examples ready to hand — the huge fees Publius Clodius or Gaius Curio used to command for their speeches. They themselves were ordinary senators who, in a state now at peace, sought nothing beyond the profits peace allowed. Let Claudius think of the common people who made their living from the courts: strip away the rewards for effort, and effort itself would die out. Though less becoming, this argument struck the emperor as not without merit, and he set a cap on fees, up to ten thousand sesterces, beyond which advocates would be liable under the extortion law.
8| At about this time Mithridates — whom I have mentioned as having ruled Armenia and then been sent in chains on Gaius Caesar's orders — returned to his kingdom with Claudius's blessing, relying on the resources of Pharasmanes. Pharasmanes, king of Iberia and Mithridates's brother, was reporting that the Parthians were divided and the supreme power in dispute, so lesser matters were being neglected. Gotarzes, among many other savage acts, had arranged the killing of his brother Artabanus, along with his wife and son, and the fear this spread among the rest led them to summon Vardanes. Vardanes, always ready for bold ventures, covered three thousand stades in two days and drove out Gotarzes, who was caught unaware and terrified. He wasted no time in seizing the nearest provinces, and only the people of Seleucia refused to accept his rule. Enraged against them more from anger — since they had also deserted his father — than from any practical need, he found himself bogged down besieging a strong city, protected by a river across its approaches and secured by walls and supplies. Meanwhile Gotarzes, reinforced by the Dahae and Hyrcanians, renewed the war, and Vardanes was forced to abandon Seleucia and pitch camp in the plains of Bactria.
9| With the forces of the East thus divided and their direction uncertain, the chance fell to Mithridates to seize Armenia, using Roman troops to storm the steep hill-forts while Pharasmanes's army swept the plains. The Armenians offered no resistance, once their commander Demonax, who had dared to give battle, was routed. Cotys, king of Lesser Armenia, caused a brief delay when some of the nobles turned to him, but a letter from Claudius checked him, and everything then flowed toward Mithridates, who proved harsher than suited a newly won throne. As for the Parthian commanders, just as they were preparing to fight, they suddenly struck a truce on learning of a plot by their own countrymen, which Gotarzes revealed to his brother. They met first with hesitation, then embraced, and at the altars of the gods swore to avenge the treachery of their enemies and to make concessions to one another. Vardanes was judged the stronger claimant to keep the throne, while Gotarzes, to avoid any rivalry, withdrew deep into Hyrcania. When Vardanes returned, Seleucia surrendered to him in the seventh year after its revolt — not without disgrace to the Parthians, whom a single city had defied for so long.
10| Next he visited the strongest garrison provinces and was eager to recover Armenia, but Vibius Marsus, governor of Syria, held him back with the threat of war. Meanwhile Gotarzes, regretting having given up the throne, and summoned back by the nobility—who find peace harder to bear than war—gathered his forces. The two sides met at the river Erindes; after a hard fight in the crossing, Vardanes won, and successful battles let him subdue the peoples between there and the river Sindes, the boundary between the Dahae and the Arii. There his successes stopped: even in victory, the Parthians had no taste for a long campaign far from home. So he set up monuments proclaiming his power—no earlier Arsacid had ever won tribute from those nations—and returned home in immense glory, all the more arrogant for it and harder on his subjects. They killed him by a plot laid in advance, catching him off guard while out hunting—still barely into manhood, yet famous among few kings even in old age, if only he had sought his people's love as eagerly as their fear. Vardanes' murder threw Parthia into confusion, torn between rival claimants. Many leaned toward Gotarzes, some toward Meherdates, son of Phraates, held by us as a hostage. Gotarzes won out in the end, but once he had the throne his cruelty and excess drove the Parthians to send secret pleas to the Roman emperor, begging that Meherdates be allowed to claim his father's crown.
11| In the same consulship the Secular Games were held, eight hundred years after Rome's founding, and sixty-four after Augustus had staged his own. I pass over the reckoning behind each emperor's dating—it is fully told in the books I wrote on the reign of Domitian, who also held Secular Games; I attended those closely myself, holding a place among the Fifteen priests and serving as praetor at the time. I mention this not to boast but because that priestly college has always overseen this duty, and its members most often carried out the ceremonial offices. While Claudius sat at the circus games, and noble boys rode in the mock battle known as the Troy game, among them Britannicus, the emperor's own son, and Lucius Domitius, soon to be adopted into the imperial house and renamed Nero, the crowd's sharper enthusiasm for Domitius was taken as an omen. It was said that snakes had guarded him as an infant like watchmen—a fable dressed up to match foreign wonders; Nero himself, no man to downplay his own legend, used to say only that a single snake had been seen in his bedroom.
12| Still, the people's sympathies leaned toward the memory of Germanicus, whose last surviving male line this was; and pity for his mother Agrippina grew because of Messalina's cruelty. Messalina was always hostile to her, and just then more restless than usual, kept from plotting charges and accusers only by a fresh, near-mad passion. She had fallen for Gaius Silius, the handsomest young man in Rome, so violently that she drove his wife, the noblewoman Junia Silana, out of the marriage to have him free for herself. Silius was well aware of the scandal and the danger, but refusing her meant certain ruin, while there was some hope of concealment, and the rewards were enormous—so he chose to shut his eyes to the future and enjoy the present as consolation. She came to his house not in secret but with a large retinue, clung to his side when he went out, showered him with wealth and honors. In the end, as if fortune itself had already changed hands, the emperor's slaves, freedmen, and furnishings were seen at her lover's home.
13| Claudius, meanwhile, knew nothing of his own marriage and busied himself playing censor: he issued strict edicts scolding the theater crowd's rowdiness, after they had hurled insults at the ex-consul Publius Pomponius, who wrote plays for the stage, and at some well-known women. He passed a law curbing the cruelty of moneylenders, forbidding money to be lent at interest to sons still under their fathers' authority, repayable on the fathers' deaths. He brought the springs of the Simbruine hills into the city as an aqueduct. And he introduced and put into use new letters of the alphabet, having learned that even Greek writing had not been complete and finished from the start.
14| The Egyptians were the first to render thoughts through animal figures—the oldest records of human memory, still visible carved in stone—and they claim to be the inventors of writing itself. From there, the Phoenicians, dominant at sea, are said to have brought it to Greece and won the credit, as though they had discovered what they had only received. The story goes that Cadmus, sailing with a Phoenician fleet, brought the art to the Greeks, who at that time had no letters of their own. Other traditions instead name Athens' Cecrops, Thebes' Linus, or — in the age of the Trojan War — Palamedes of Argos as the inventor of sixteen letter-forms, with the rest added later, chiefly, it is said, by Simonides. In Italy, the Etruscans learned from Demaratus of Corinth, and the native peoples from Evander the Arcadian; and the shape of Latin letters matches the oldest Greek forms. Even our own alphabet had few letters at first, and more were added later. Following that precedent, Claudius added three new letters, which were in use during his reign and, though dropped afterward, can still be seen today on bronze notices posted in the forums and temples.
15| He then brought before the senate the matter of the college of soothsayers, urging that Italy's oldest discipline not be allowed to fade through neglect: in past crises of the state they had often been consulted, and on their advice rites had been restored and thereafter better observed; the leading families of Etruria, either of their own will or urged by the Roman senate, had kept up the knowledge and passed it down within their households—something now done more carelessly amid general public indifference to worthy skills, and because foreign superstitions were gaining ground. For now, he said, all was well, but the gods' goodwill should be repaid, so that in good times the rites, kept up in uncertain ones, would not simply be forgotten. The senate accordingly decreed that the pontiffs should decide what needed to be kept and strengthened concerning the soothsayers.
16| That same year the Cherusci people asked Rome for a king, having lost their nobles in civil wars and having left only one survivor of the royal line, a man named Italicus who was living in Rome. On his father's side he descended from Flavus, Arminius's brother; his mother came from Actumerus, chief of the Chatti. He himself was handsome, and trained in weapons and horsemanship in both his ancestors' style and ours. So Claudius, having given him money and a bodyguard, urged him to take up his family's honor with good spirit—the first man born at Rome, he said, to go out not as a hostage but as a citizen to rule a foreign people. At first the Germans welcomed his arrival gladly, since, untouched by any factional loyalty, he treated everyone alike; he was praised and courted, showing sometimes an affability and moderation that offended no one, more often the drinking and appetites that barbarians find appealing. His fame grew first among those nearest, then farther afield, until the men who had thrived on faction, suspicious of his growing power, withdrew to neighboring peoples and protested that Germany's old freedom was being stripped away and Roman power was rising up again. Was there truly no one born in that land fit to rule, they asked, that the offspring of Flavus the informer should be exalted above all others? Arminius's name was invoked in vain: had his son, raised on hostile soil, come to take the throne, he might reasonably be feared—shaped as he was by a foreign upbringing, by servitude, by alien customs. But if Italicus had his father's cast of mind, they said, no man had ever waged fiercer war on his own country and its household gods than that father of his.
17| With these and similar arguments they raised a large force, and no fewer followed Italicus. He reminded them that he had not forced his way in against their will but had been summoned, since he outranked all others in noble birth; let them test his courage, he said, and judge for themselves whether he lived up to his uncle Arminius and his grandfather Actumerus. As for his father, he felt no shame: Flavus had chosen his loyalty to Rome freely, and never abandoned it, at a time when the Germans themselves wanted it so. The word 'freedom,' he said, was falsely used as a cover by men who were personally degenerate and ruinous to the public good, with no hope left except through discord. The crowd cheered him on eagerly, and after a great battle among the barbarians the king won—only to be swept by his good fortune into arrogance, driven out, then restored again through the strength of the Lombards, and through good times and bad kept troubling the Cherusci.
18| At about this same time, with no trouble at home and emboldened by Sanquinius's death, the Chauci launched raids into Lower Germany before Corbulo had even arrived, led by Gannascus—a man of the Canninefates who had once served in an auxiliary unit, then deserted, and now, in light raiding boats, plundered mainly the coast of Gaul, knowing it rich and unguarded. Corbulo took charge of the province with great caution and, before long, great renown—this campaign was where it began. He moved his triremes along the Rhine channel and dispatched the remaining vessels, each suited to its own waterway, through the estuaries and canals; the enemy's light boats he sank, and Gannascus he drove off. Once the immediate situation was settled, he brought the legions—grown lazy at drill and labor and all too fond of plundering—back to old discipline, letting no one leave the column or fight without orders. Sentries, watches, and daily and nightly duties were all carried out under arms. It was said that he had soldiers put to death, one for digging a rampart trench without his sword belted on, another for wearing only his dagger while at work. These stories were extreme, and perhaps false, but they took root all the same because of the commander's known severity; and one could judge how relentless he must be over serious offenses from a man credited with such harshness even over trifles.
19| That terror affected us and the enemy in opposite ways: it raised our courage, while it broke the barbarians' spirit. The Frisian nation, hostile or unreliable ever since the rebellion that began with the defeat of L. Apronius, gave hostages and settled on the lands Corbulo had marked out for them. He also set up for them a senate, magistrates, and laws. And to make sure they didn't shake off these arrangements, he fortified a garrison, sending men to lure the greater Chauci into surrender, and at the same time to strike at Gannascus by treachery. The ambush was neither wasted nor beneath its target, since the man was a deserter and an oath-breaker. But his killing stirred up the Chauci, and Corbulo was sowing the seeds of a revolt — welcomed by most as a happy development, but seen by some as an ominous one. Why stir up an enemy? If things went badly, the disaster would fall on the state; if he succeeded, a man of such distinction would be a threat to peace and a burden to a spineless emperor. So Claudius forbade any new offensive action in Germany so firmly that he ordered the garrisons pulled back to this side of the Rhine.
20| Corbulo was already pitching camp on enemy soil when that letter reached him. Caught off guard, with several fears crowding in at once — fear of the emperor, contempt from the barbarians, mockery among the allies — he said nothing but 'Happy were the Roman commanders of old,' and gave the signal to withdraw. Still, to keep his soldiers from falling idle, he had them dig a canal twenty-three miles long between the Meuse and the Rhine, to avoid the unpredictable open sea. Even so, Caesar granted him the honors of a triumph, though he had refused him the war itself. Not long after, Curtius Rufus received the same honor, for having opened mine shafts in the territory of the Mattiaci in search of silver veins — a thin and short-lived profit, while the legions paid for it with hard labor: digging channels, and pushing underground work that was grueling even in the open air. The soldiers, worn down by this, and knowing that similar hardships were being endured across many provinces, put their names to a secret letter, sent in the armies' name, asking that from now on, before he gave anyone a command, the emperor grant the triumphal honors first.
21| As for the origins of Curtius Rufus, whom some claim was the son of a gladiator, I would neither report as fact something false, nor am I comfortable tracing out what may be true. After he grew up, he was attending a quaestor who had been assigned to Africa; one day, wandering alone through the empty colonnades of the town of Hadrumetum at midday, a female figure of more than human size appeared to him, and he heard a voice say, 'You, Rufus, are the man who will come to this province as proconsul.' Lifted by this omen into hope, he went down to Rome, and through friends' generosity and his own sharp talent won the quaestorship, and later, as a candidate of some note, the praetorship through the emperor's backing. Tiberius papered over the disgrace of his birth with a quip: 'Curtius Rufus, it seems to me, fathered himself.' He lived to a great age, gloomy and sycophantic toward his superiors, arrogant toward those below him, and difficult with his equals; he held consular command, the honors of a triumph, and finally the governorship of Africa — and there he died, fulfilling the omen of his fate.
22| Meanwhile at Rome, for no reason known or made public, Cn. Nonius, a Roman knight, was found armed with a sword among the crowd greeting the emperor. When put to torture, he admitted his own guilt but did not give up any accomplices — whether because he had none, or was hiding them, is unclear. In the same consulship, P. Dolabella proposed that gladiatorial games be held every year, funded by those about to enter the quaestorship. Among our ancestors this office had been a reward for merit, and any citizen who trusted in his own good qualities was free to seek public office; age itself was no bar, so that men in their first youth could enter on the consulship or the dictatorship. But quaestors were established even under the kings, as the curiate law, later reenacted by L. Brutus, shows. The power to choose them remained with the consuls, until the people took over that appointment as well. The first elected, in the sixty-third year after the expulsion of the Tarquins, were Valerius Potitus and Aemilius Mamercus, to accompany the army on campaign. Then, as duties multiplied, two more were added to manage affairs at Rome; later the number was doubled, once Italy paid tribute and the revenues of the provinces came in. After that, Sulla's law created twenty, to fill out the senate to which he had handed over the courts. And although the knights later recovered the courts, the quaestorship still continued to be granted freely, based on a candidate's standing or the voters' good will — until, under Dolabella's proposal, it was practically put up for sale.
23| In the consulship of A. Vitellius and L. Vipstanus, when the question of filling out the senate came up, the leading men of Gallia Comata, who had long held treaty rights and Roman citizenship, sought the right to stand for office at Rome. There was much varied talk about this. Opinions clashed before the emperor: some insisted Italy was not so weak that it could not supply its own capital with senators. In the past, they said, native-born men had sufficed for kindred peoples, and no one regretted the old republic; indeed, examples were still recalled of the excellence and glory the ancient Roman character had produced under the old customs. Was it not enough that Veneti and Insubres had already broken into the senate house, without now bringing in a flood of foreigners like some kind of conquest? What honor would be left for the remaining nobles, or for some poor senator from Latium? Those rich provincials would fill up everything — men whose grandfathers and great-grandfathers had led hostile nations, cutting down our armies by the sword, and besieging the deified Julius at Alesia. That was recent history: what if the memory died of those who had perished at the hands of these same peoples beneath the Capitol and the citadel of Rome? Let them enjoy the name of citizenship, by all means — but let them not vulgarize the badges of the senate and the honors of high office.
24| The emperor, unmoved by these and similar arguments, spoke against them at once, and having summoned the senate, began like this: 'My ancestors, the oldest of whom, Clausus, was of Sabine origin and was admitted at once to Roman citizenship and to the patrician families, urge me to follow the same policy in governing the state — to bring here whatever excellence exists anywhere. I know well enough that the Julii trace to Alba, the Coruncanii to Camerium, the Porcii to Tusculum — and, without raking over ancient history, that Etruria, Lucania, and Italy as a whole supplied men to the senate, until finally Italy itself was extended to the Alps, so that not only individuals one by one, but whole lands and peoples, merged into our name. It was when the Transpadanes were admitted to citizenship, when — under the guise of legions settled around the world — the strongest of the provincials were added to reinforce our exhausted empire, that we had solid peace at home and flourished abroad. Do we regret that the Balbi came from Spain, or other men of no less distinction from Narbonese Gaul? Their descendants remain among us, and their love for this country as their homeland is no less than ours. What else destroyed the Spartans and Athenians, for all their military strength, except that they shut out the conquered as foreigners? Our founder Romulus, by contrast, was wise enough to make of most nations, in a single day, first enemies and then citizens. Foreigners have ruled over us as kings; giving public offices to the sons of freedmen is not, as many mistakenly think, some recent innovation, but was common practice among our forebears. Yes, we fought the Senones — but did the Volsci and Aequi never form a battle line against us? The Gauls once took our city — yet we too handed hostages to the Etruscans, and bowed under the Samnite yoke. And yet, if you review all our wars, none was finished in a shorter time than the one against the Gauls; and ever since, peace with them has been constant and reliable. Now that they are blended with us by custom, culture, and marriage, let them bring in their gold and their wealth rather than hold it apart from us. Conscript fathers, whatever now passes for oldest tradition was new once: patrician magistrates came first, then plebeian ones, then Latin, then finally magistrates drawn from the rest of Italy. This too will grow old with time, and what we defend today by precedent will itself become a precedent.'
25| Following the emperor's speech, a decree of the senate gave the Aedui the first right among the Gauls to hold senatorial rank at Rome — granted because of their ancient treaty, and because they alone among the Gauls claim the title of brothers of the Roman people. In the same days Caesar enrolled among the patricians every senator of longest standing, or whose parents had been distinguished, since few were now left of the families that Romulus had called the greater houses and L. Brutus the lesser, and even those which the dictator Caesar had chosen under the lex Cassia, and Augustus under the lex Saenia, were now used up. He took up this welcome public duty as censor with great pleasure. Anxious about how to remove from the senate those with disgraceful records, he chose a gentle and newly devised method rather than the old severity: he advised each man to weigh his own conduct privately and request the right to resign his rank himself, promising easy indulgence in the matter; and he would announce together both those removed from the senate and those who had asked to be excused, so that the censors' judgment and the shame of men stepping down voluntarily would blend together and soften the disgrace. For this the consul Vipstanus proposed that Claudius be named Father of the Senate, since the title Father of the Country was already common to all; new services to the state, he said, deserved to be honored with unusual titles. But Claudius himself restrained the consul for flattering him too much. He also closed the census, in which the number of citizens registered was 5,984,072. And this was the end of his blindness about his own household: not long after, he was forced to learn of, and punish, his wife's crimes — only to be drawn afterward into an incestuous marriage.
26| By now Messalina, sated with the ease of her adulteries, was drifting toward untried pleasures, and it was Silius who pressed hardest to drop the pretense — whether from some fatal recklessness or because he judged the surest cure for looming danger was to court it outright. They had gone too far, he argued, to wait for the emperor to die of old age. For the innocent, harmless plans were enough; but where the crimes were already flagrant, safety had to be sought in audacity. They had accomplices who feared the same fate they did. He himself was unmarried, childless, ready to marry her and adopt Britannicus. Messalina would keep the same power she held now, with the added comfort of security, if they struck first — Claudius was easy to catch off guard but quick to anger once roused. Messalina took this coolly, not out of love for her husband, but from fear that Silius, once he had everything, would spurn his mistress and reassess a crime undertaken in uncertainty at its true cost once it had paid off. Still, she wanted the name of wife, for the sheer scale of the scandal — the last pleasure left to the reckless. Waiting only until Claudius left for Ostia on a sacrificial errand, she went through the full ceremony of a wedding.
27| I am well aware this will look like a fable — that anyone could feel so secure in a city that knows everything and hides nothing, let alone a consul-designate marrying the emperor's wife on an announced day, with witnesses brought in to seal the contract, as though for the begetting of legitimate children; that she listened to the words of the augurs, took her place, offered sacrifice to the gods; that they reclined among guests, exchanged kisses and embraces, and finally passed the night with a bride's license. But I invent nothing for effect — I report only what was heard and written down by those older than myself.
28| So the palace shuddered, and above all those who held real power and, if things turned, had real cause to fear — no longer whispering among themselves but grumbling openly: while an actor had merely defiled the emperor's bedroom, that was a disgrace, but ruin had stayed far off; now a young nobleman, outstanding in looks, force of mind, and a consulship close at hand, was arming himself for a far greater hope. What lay ahead after such a marriage was no secret. Fear crept in, of course, when they weighed how dull Claudius was, how bound to his wife, and how many deaths had already been carried out on Messalina's orders. But then again, the emperor's very complacency gave them confidence: if they could overwhelm him first with the sheer horror of the charge, she could be crushed as condemned before she was even formally accused. Everything turned on one point — whether her defense would be heard at all, and whether his ears could be kept shut even to a confession.
29| At first Callistus — whom I have already mentioned in connection with the killing of Gaius Caesar — and Narcissus, engineer of Appius's death, and Pallas, at that moment riding the height of favor, discussed whether to drive Messalina from her love for Silius by private threats, while covering up everything else. Then, fearing they might drag themselves down in the attempt, they backed off — Pallas out of cowardice, Callistus because he knew the old court too, and reckoned that power was held more safely by cautious counsel than by sharp action. Narcissus alone held firm, changing only his approach: he would say nothing that might tip her off and make her wary of both the charge and the accuser. Watching for his moment, and helped by Claudius's long stay at Ostia, he worked on two of the emperor's mistresses — the ones he was most attached to physically — with gifts, promises, and the argument that a wife's fall would only enlarge their own influence, until he talked them into laying the information.
30| So Calpurnia — that was the mistress's name — once she got a private audience, threw herself at Caesar's knees and cried out that Messalina had married Silius. At the same moment she asked Cleopatra, who stood by waiting for the cue, whether she had heard the same; Cleopatra nodded, and Calpurnia demanded Narcissus be summoned. He begged pardon for having concealed the affairs of Vettius and Plautius in the past, and said he would not now bring up mere adulteries either, since he had no wish to reclaim for Claudius the house, the slaves, and the rest of imperial state that Silius had appropriated — let him keep all that, only let him give back the wife and tear up the marriage contract. 'Do you know,' he said, 'that you're divorced? For the marriage of Silius was witnessed by the people, the senate, the army — and unless you act at once, the husband holds the city.'
31| Then Claudius summoned in turn his closest friends, questioning first Turranius, prefect of the grain supply, then Lusius Geta, commander of the Praetorians. When they confirmed it, the rest crowded around him urging that he go to the camp, secure the Praetorian cohorts, and see to his safety before his revenge. It is well established that Claudius was struck with such panic that he kept asking, over and over, whether he himself still held the empire, or whether Silius was now a private citizen. Messalina, meanwhile, had never been more abandoned to pleasure: it was late autumn, and she was staging a mock grape-harvest through the house. The presses were being worked, the vats ran over; women girt in animal skins leapt about like Bacchantes at sacrifice or in frenzy, Messalina herself with hair loose, shaking a thyrsus, and beside her Silius, crowned with ivy, wearing the buskins, tossing his head, while a lewd chorus roared around them. They say Vettius Valens, in his high spirits, climbed a very tall tree, and when asked what he could see, answered that he saw a fierce storm coming from Ostia — whether that really was what appeared to him, or whether a chance remark simply turned out to be a prophecy.
32| No longer rumor, now — messengers were arriving from every side to say that Claudius knew everything and was coming, ready for vengeance. So Messalina withdrew to the Gardens of Lucullus, and Silius, masking his fear, went off to attend to business in the forum. As the rest scattered in every direction, centurions appeared and fettered them wherever they were found, in the open or in hiding. Messalina, though her situation left little room for planning, still made up her mind, briskly, to go and meet her husband face to face — a tactic that had often saved her before — and sent word that Britannicus and Octavia should run to their father's arms. She also begged Vibidia, most senior among the Vestals, to reach the chief priest and plead her cause. Meanwhile, her isolation had come on so fast that only three companions remained with her; on foot she crossed the city, then took the cart used for hauling garden refuse and set out on the road to Ostia, without anyone showing her the slightest pity, so overwhelming was the ugliness of her crimes.
33| There was panic too around Caesar. Geta, the Praetorian prefect, was a man they did not fully trust, equally pliable toward good or bad. So Narcissus, joined by others who shared his fears, insisted the emperor's only hope of safety lay in transferring command of the soldiers, for that one day, to one of the freedmen — and offered himself for the task. And so that Claudius would not be talked back into forgiving her on the ride into the city by Lucius Vitellius and Largus Caecina, he demanded a seat in the same carriage, and got it.
34| Afterward there was persistent talk that amid Claudius's shifting outbursts — now denouncing his wife's crimes, now drifting back to memories of the marriage and the youth of his children — Vitellius said nothing but 'What an outrage! What a crime!' Narcissus kept pressing him to drop the evasions and speak plainly, but he could not make Vitellius do more than give ambiguous answers that would bend toward whatever direction things took — and Largus Caecina followed his lead. Messalina was already in sight, calling out for Claudius to hear the mother of his own Octavia and Britannicus, but the accuser shouted her down, raising instead the matter of Silius and the wedding; at the same time he handed over notes cataloguing her debaucheries, to keep Caesar's eyes from her. Not long after, as he entered the city, their shared children were brought forward to meet him, but Narcissus had them removed. Vibidia he could not fully push aside; bitterly she kept insisting no wife should be condemned without a hearing. His reply was that she would get her hearing, that room would be made for her to answer the charge — but for now the virgin should withdraw and return to her sacred duties.
35| Through all this, Claudius's silence was remarkable; Vitellius seemed hardly less in the dark. Everyone obeyed the freedman. He ordered the adulterer's house thrown open and the emperor brought there. Right at the entrance he singled out the statue of Silius's father — the one the senate had condemned to destruction — and then pointed out, piece by piece, whatever ancestral property of the Nerones and Drusi had passed to him as the price of her disgrace. Inflamed now and bursting into threats, he brought Claudius to the camp, where a gathering of soldiers had been arranged. Before them, on Narcissus's advice, Claudius spoke only a few words — shame checked even his justified anger. Then came a steady roar from the cohorts, demanding the names and punishment of the guilty. Silius, brought before the tribunal, attempted neither defense nor delay, and begged only that his death be hastened. The same resolve, the same eagerness for a quick end, showed in several distinguished Roman knights. Titius Proculus, who had been set by Silius to guard Messalina and now offered evidence, Vettius Valens, who confessed, and Pompeius Urbicus and Saufeius Trogus, named as accomplices, were all ordered handed over for execution. Decrius Calpurnianus, prefect of the watch, Sulpicius Rufus, manager of the games, and Iuncus Vergilianus, a senator, met the same punishment.
36| Only Mnester caused hesitation. Tearing his clothes, he cried out that they should look at the whip-marks on his body and remember the words with which he had bound himself to obey Messalina's commands — for others, the fault came from bribery or great ambition, for him from sheer necessity; and no one would have had to die before him, had Silius come to power. Claudius was moved by this and leaning toward mercy, but the freedmen pushed him not to spare a mere actor after so many distinguished men had been put to death — whether Mnester had sinned willingly or under compulsion made no difference. Not even the defense of Traulus Montanus, a Roman knight, was accepted. He was a young man of modest habits but striking looks, who had been summoned by Messalina on her own initiative and then discarded within a single night, her lust turning as quickly to distaste as it had turned to craving. Suillius Caesoninus and Plautius Lateranus were spared death — the latter thanks to his uncle's outstanding service; Caesoninus was shielded by his own vices, since in that filthiest of gatherings he was said to have played the woman's part.
37| Meanwhile Messalina, in the Gardens of Lucullus, tried to stretch out her life. She drafted an appeal, moved sometimes by hope, sometimes by anger — even at the extreme edge of ruin, she still carried her pride. If Narcissus had not rushed her death forward, the disaster would have turned back on her accuser. Claudius went home, and a well-timed dinner soothed him; once the wine had warmed him, he ordered that word be sent to "the poor woman" (that is the word they say he used) to appear the next day and answer the charge. When this was heard and it seemed his anger was cooling and his affection returning — and the men feared that if they delayed, night was near and he might remember the bedroom they had shared — Narcissus burst out and ordered the centurions and the tribune on duty to carry out the execution at once: this, he said, was the emperor's command. A freedman, Euodus, was sent to guard and oversee it. He hurried ahead into the gardens and found her stretched on the ground, her mother Lepida sitting beside her. Lepida had never gotten along with her daughter while she flourished, but now, at the final crisis, pity won her over, and she urged Messalina not to wait for the executioner: her life was over, and nothing was left to seek but a decent death. But a mind corrupted by indulgence held nothing honorable in it; she went on weeping and making useless complaints, until the doors were shoved open by the men rushing in, and the tribune stood there in silence — while the freedman shouted abuse at her, coarse and slave-like.
38| Only then did she finally see her situation clearly and take up the blade. In her panic she tried it against her throat and then her chest, achieving nothing, until the tribune ran her through with a single thrust. Her body was given to her mother. Word was brought to Claudius at dinner that Messalina was dead, without saying whether by her own hand or another's. He did not ask. He called for a cup and went on with the party as usual. Not once in the days after did any hatred show on his face, nor any joy; no anger, no grief, nothing that looked like human feeling — not when he watched her accusers gloating, not when he watched her children in tears. The senate helped him forget her: it decreed that her name and her images be removed from all places, public and private. Narcissus was awarded the insignia of a quaestor — a small thing to a man so full of contempt, given that he now ranked above Pallas and Callistus. honorable enough, though from such things the worst consequences would arise … ⟨the text breaks off here⟩
1| The emperor's household was shaken by Messalina's killing, and a contest broke out among the freedmen over who should choose Claudius a wife — a man who couldn't stand living single and always fell under his wives' thumb. The women burned with no less ambition, each pressing her own noble birth, beauty, and wealth as proof she deserved so great a match. But the real contest was between Lollia Paulina, daughter of the consular Marcus Lollius, and Julia Agrippina, daughter of Germanicus: Pallas backed the one, Callistus the other; while Aelia Paetina, from the Tuberones, had Narcissus in her corner. Claudius himself swung one way, then the other, depending on whose advice he'd heard last, and finally called the rivals into council and ordered each to state his case and give his reasons.
2| Narcissus argued for the old marriage — Claudius already had a daughter by Paetina, Antonia — and said there would be nothing new in his household if his familiar wife came back; she'd hardly view Britannicus and Octavia, so close to her own children, with a stepmother's hatred. Callistus said Paetina had been rejected once already after a long divorce, and if taken back would only grow proud from it; far better to bring in Lollia, who had no children and so no rivalry to fear, and would stand toward the emperor's children simply as a parent. But Pallas praised Agrippina above all for this: she would bring Germanicus's grandson into the household with her — a match truly worthy of imperial fortune. She would join a noble line to the descendants of the Julian and Claudian houses, and keep a woman of proven fertility, still young, from carrying the glory of the Caesars into some other family.
3| These arguments won out, helped along by Agrippina's own seductions. Under the pretext of family closeness she visited her uncle again and again, drawing him in, until — favored above the other candidates and not yet his wife — she already wielded a wife's power. Once sure of the marriage, she began building for bigger things, working to join her son Domitius, born to Gnaeus Ahenobarbus, to Octavia, Claudius's daughter. It could not be done without a crime, since Claudius had already promised Octavia to Lucius Silanus, a young man he'd promoted to popular favor with the splendor of a triumphal decoration and a gladiatorial show he'd sponsored. But nothing looked hard to an emperor whose mind held no judgment and no hatred except what was planted and ordered into it.
4| So Vitellius, hiding his servile tricks behind the title of censor and watching ahead for the next regime, entangled himself in Agrippina's schemes to win her favor, and brought charges against Silanus — whose sister, the striking and forward Junia Calvina, had not long before been Vitellius's own daughter-in-law. That was the seed of the accusation, and he twisted the siblings' affection — not incestuous, only unguarded — into a charge of incest. Claudius lent an ear, readier to accept suspicions against his future son-in-law out of love for his daughter. Silanus, unaware of the plot and by chance praetor that year, was suddenly stripped of his senatorial rank by an edict of Vitellius, even though the senate roll had long since been drawn up and the census closed. Claudius, in that same stroke, called off the betrothal; Silanus had to give up his magistracy, and what remained of the praetorship passed to Eprius Marcellus.
5| In the consulship of Gaius Pompeius and Quintus Veranius, the match between Claudius and Agrippina, already fixed by rumor, was made firmer still by illicit love. Yet they did not dare celebrate a wedding openly — no precedent existed for a niece being brought into her uncle's house; it would count as incest, and there was fear that if the idea were spurned it might blow up into public trouble. The hesitation held until Vitellius took it on himself, by his own methods, to push it through. He asked Claudius outright whether he would bow to the people's demand or the senate's authority; when Claudius answered that he was only one citizen among many and couldn't stand against a general will, Vitellius told him to wait inside the palace. He himself went into the senate house, and claiming the highest matters of state were at stake, begged leave to speak before anyone else, then began: the emperor's crushing labors, carrying the weight of the whole world, needed support, so that free of private cares he could attend to the public good. And what more fitting relief for a censor's mind than to take a wife — a partner in good times and bad, someone to entrust with his innermost thoughts and his young children — a man never given to luxury or pleasure, but one who from his youth had obeyed the laws.
6| After opening with this crowd-pleasing speech, which drew heavy flattery from the senators, he took up the thread again: since everyone urged the emperor to marry, the woman chosen ought to stand out for noble birth, proven motherhood, and moral seriousness. And there was no need to look far — Agrippina outranked all others in the nobility of her blood; she had already proved her fertility, and her character matched. It was, in fact, remarkable that by providence she'd been left a widow to be joined to an emperor who had known only his own marriages. They had all heard from their parents, and seen themselves, wives snatched away to satisfy a Caesar's whims — far from the restraint of the present day. Let a precedent instead be set for how an emperor should take a wife. True, marriage to a brother's daughter was new to Roman custom — but it was standard practice among other peoples, forbidden by no law, and marriages between cousins, long unfamiliar, had become common enough once time normalized them. Custom bends to convenience, and this too would soon be counted among accepted practices.
7| There were no shortage of men ready to burst from the senate house declaring, if Claudius hesitated, that they'd force the matter by violence. A mixed crowd gathered, shouting the same demand in the name of the Roman people. Claudius waited no longer, went out to the forum to meet their congratulations in person, then entered the senate and asked for a decree establishing that marriages between an uncle and a brother's daughter would be lawful from then on as well. Yet genuine enthusiasm for such a marriage came from just one man — the Roman knight Alledius Severus — though most assumed he did it to curry favor with Agrippina. From that point the state turned on its axis and everything obeyed a woman — not through wanton indulgence, the way Messalina had toyed with Roman affairs, but with a tight, almost masculine grip. In public, severity, and often arrogance; nothing indecent at home, unless it served her power. Her greed for gold was boundless, always covered by the excuse that she was laying up reserves for the throne.
8| On the wedding day Silanus took his own life — whether he had held on to some hope of surviving until then, or picked that very day on purpose, to deepen the shame. Calvina, his sister, was driven out of Italy, and Claudius piled on further still by ordering rites drawn from the laws of King Tullus and atonements performed at Diana's grove by the pontiffs — while everyone mocked the fact that penalties and purifications for incest were being dredged up at that particular moment. Agrippina, for her part, not wanting to be known only for cruelty, won a pardon from exile for Annaeus Seneca, along with a praetorship for him — a move she judged would please the public because of his fame as a scholar, and one that would let Domitius grow up under such a teacher, so that mother and son could use his advice in their reach for power, since Seneca was thought loyal to Agrippina in gratitude for her favor and hostile to Claudius from the sting of his injury.
9| It was then decided to delay no further. With enormous promises they got the consul-designate, Mammius Pollio, to propose a motion asking Claudius to betroth Octavia to Domitius — not unreasonable given their ages, and a step that opened the way to bigger things. Pollio spoke in much the same terms Vitellius had used before, and Octavia was betrothed. Now, on top of their earlier bond, Domitius, as her intended and future son-in-law, was made equal to Britannicus in his mother's efforts and by the scheming of those who feared revenge on Messalina's behalf might come through her son.
10| Around this time the envoys the Parthians had sent to request Meherdates, as I mentioned earlier, entered the senate and opened their message like this: they had not come forgetting the treaty, nor breaking away from the house of the Arsacids, but to fetch the son of Vonones, grandson of Phraates, against the rule of Gotarzes, unbearable alike to the nobility and the common people. Already he had exhausted his brothers, his relatives, and those more distantly connected, with killings; pregnant wives and small children were added to the slaughter, while at home he was sluggish and in war unlucky, hiding his cowardice under cruelty. Their friendship with Rome was old and begun as a public matter, and allies who yielded out of respect to a rival power deserved support. Kings sent their children as hostages precisely so that, if they grew weary of rule at home, they had a way back to the emperor and senate — men shaped by Roman customs, giving them a better king to adopt.
11| After they had argued this and more, Claudius began his own speech on the majesty of Rome and the deference of the Parthians, setting himself alongside the deified Augustus, recalling that Augustus too had once been asked for a king by them — passing over Tiberius's precedent, though he too had sent one. He added instructions — Meherdates himself was present — telling him to think not of ruling over slaves but of governing citizens, and to embrace clemency and justice all the more gladly since barbarians knew them so little. Then, turning to the envoys, he praised at length this foster son of Rome, whose restraint up to now had been well tested — yet even so, a king's temperament had to be endured, and frequent changes of ruler served no purpose. Rome, he said, had reached such a fullness of glory that it now wished even foreign nations to have peace. Afterward the task of escorting the young man to the bank of the Euphrates was given to Gaius Cassius, then governor of Syria.
12| In that period Cassius stood out above the rest for his knowledge of the law: military skill goes unlearned in peacetime, and peace levels the diligent and the lazy alike. Yet whatever scope remained without actual war, he kept reviving old discipline, drilling the legions, watching and planning as though an enemy stood right at the gates — behavior that matched his forebears and did honor to the Cassian name, admired even among these foreign tribes. He now summoned the men on whose advice the new king had been sought, and made camp at Zeugma, the point where the river is most easily crossed. Once the leading Parthians and Acbarus, king of the Arabs, had arrived, he warned Meherdates that the fierce impulses of barbarians fade with delay or curdle into treachery: he should press ahead with what he had begun. Acbarus ignored the advice — out of treachery. He kept the young man, who understood nothing and thought his high fortune meant a life of ease, tied up for many days at the town of Edessa. When Carenes called on him, showing how ready things were if he came quickly, Meherdates did not head straight for Mesopotamia but turned aside for Armenia — the worst possible timing, since winter was setting in.
13| Worn out by snow and mountains, as they neared the plains they joined forces with Carenes, crossed the Tigris, and marched through the territory of the Adiabeni, whose king Izates had openly declared himself for Meherdates while secretly, and more genuinely, leaning toward Gotarzes. On the way they took the city of Nineveh, the oldest seat of Assyria, and a fortress famous because it was there that Persian power finally collapsed in the last battle between Darius and Alexander. Meanwhile Gotarzes was at a mountain called Sanbulos, offering vows to the local gods, above all to Hercules, who at a fixed time warns his priests in a dream to set out horses fitted for the hunt near his temple. When the horses' quivers have been loaded with arrows, they wander the woods and return only at night, quivers empty, breathing hard. The god then reveals in a night vision where they ranged through the forest, and wild beasts are found scattered everywhere along the way.
14| Gotarzes, however, with his army not yet strong enough, used the river Corma as a shield, and though goaded by taunts and messages to fight, kept delaying, shifting position, and sending agents to buy the loyalty out from under his enemy. Of these, Izates of Adiabene and then Acbarus of the Arabs withdrew with their forces — fickleness typical of their people, and because experience had taught that barbarians prefer to beg kings from Rome rather than keep them. Meherdates, stripped of his strongest support and suspecting betrayal from the rest, decided — since it was all that was left — to risk everything and settle it in battle. Gotarzes, emboldened now that his enemy's numbers had shrunk, did not refuse the fight. They clashed with great slaughter and an uncertain outcome, until Carenes, having routed those in his path and been carried too far forward, was surrounded from behind by a fresh body of troops. With all hope gone, Meherdates trusted the promises of Parraces, a client of his father's, and was betrayed by his treachery and handed over to the victor. Gotarzes, taunting him as no kinsman, no member of the house of Arsaces, but a foreigner and a Roman, cut off his ears and let him live — a display of his own mercy and a mark of shame for us. Gotarzes then died of illness, and Vonones, at that time ruling the Medes, was summoned to the throne. Nothing memorable, good or bad, is recorded of him: he held a brief, inglorious reign, and Parthian power passed to his son Vologeses.
15| Meanwhile Mithridates of Bosporus, his power gone and himself a wanderer, learned that the Roman commander Didius and the bulk of the army had left, leaving behind in the new kingdom Cotys, still young and untested, and a few cohorts under the Roman knight Julius Aquila. Holding both in contempt, he set out to stir up the local tribes and lure away deserters, and at last, once he had raised an army, pushed the Dandaridae's king off his throne and took it for himself. When this became known, and it looked as if he was about to strike at Bosporus itself, Aquila and Cotys, distrusting their own strength — all the more since Zorsines, king of the Siraci, had resumed hostilities — sought outside help of their own, sending envoys to Eunones, who ruled the Aorsi. There was no difficulty in forming the alliance, since they could point to Roman power standing behind them against the rebel Mithridates. So they agreed: Eunones would fight the cavalry battles, the Romans would take charge of besieging the towns.
16| They then advanced in ordered formation, the Aorsi covering the front and rear, the cohorts and the Bosporans, armed in our fashion, holding the center. The enemy was driven back, and they reached Soza, a town of Dandarica which Mithridates had abandoned because the loyalty of its people was doubtful; it seemed best to leave a garrison there and hold it. From there they pushed on into the country of the Siraci, crossed the river Panda, and surrounded the city of Uspe, set on high ground and fortified with walls and ditches — except that the walls were not stone but wattle and wickerwork with earth packed between, weak against an assault. Towers raised higher than the walls threw the defenders into confusion with torches and spears, and had night not broken off the fighting, the attack begun that day would have taken the city by the day's end.
17| The next day the townspeople sent envoys begging freedom for the free-born; ten thousand slaves they offered up. The victors refused: it was cruel to slaughter men who had surrendered, and hard to guard so vast a number under watch; better they should fall by the law of war. The signal for slaughter was given to the soldiers who had already scaled the walls. The destruction of Uspe struck fear into everyone else: nothing could be counted safe when weapons, fortifications, difficult or elevated ground, rivers, and cities were all being broken through alike. Zorsines weighed for a long time whether to stand by Mithridates in his desperate straits or look to his own ancestral kingdom; when the interest of his people won out, he handed over hostages and prostrated himself before an image of Caesar — a great triumph for the Roman army, which was found to have come within three days' march of the river Don without losing a man and victorious throughout. But on the way back fortune turned: some of the ships sailing home by sea were driven onto the shores of the Tauri, and barbarians surrounded and killed the cohort's commander along with most of the auxiliaries.
18| Meanwhile Mithridates, with no armed force to fall back on, weighed whose mercy he might test. His brother Cotys, once a betrayer and now an enemy, he feared; among the Romans there was no one whose authority could make promises to him count for much. So he turned to Eunones, who bore him no personal grudge and whose friendship with us, newly formed, gave him weight. Dressed and got up as much as possible to suit his present fortune, he entered the palace, threw himself at Eunones' knees, and said: 'Mithridates, hunted by the Romans on land and sea for so many years, stands before you of his own will. Do with me as you please — I am all that is left of the great line of Achaemenes, the one thing my enemies could not take from me.'
19| Eunones, moved by the man's renown, by the reversal of his fortune, and by an appeal made without any loss of dignity, raised the suppliant up, praising him for choosing the Aorsian people, and his own right hand, as the one to beg mercy from. At the same time he sent envoys and a letter to Caesar to this effect: between commanders of the Roman people and kings of great nations, friendship comes first from likeness of fortune; between himself and Claudius there was, further, a shared victory. The finest end to any war was when it was settled by forgiveness: so nothing had been taken from Zorsines once beaten. As for Mithridates — though he deserved worse — Eunones asked not for power or a throne for him, but only that he not be led in triumph or pay for it with his life.
20| Claudius, though generally gentle toward foreign nobility, hesitated even so over whether it was better to accept the captive on a pledge of safety or to demand him back by force. On one side, resentment at the wrongs done and the urge for revenge pushed him on; on the other it was argued against taking up a war down a road hard to travel, across a hostile sea, with fierce kings and roaming peoples to deal with besides, a land bare of grain, weariness from delay, danger from haste, and, for the victors, modest glory but plenty of disgrace if they were driven back. Better to take what was offered and keep him alive in exile: the longer a man lived stripped of everything, the more punishment it amounted to. Moved by this, Claudius wrote to Eunones that Mithridates had indeed earned the harshest fate, and that he himself lacked no power to carry it out; but their ancestors had set this rule — to meet an enemy's stubbornness with equal severity, and a suppliant's plea with equal generosity, since triumphs are won over peoples and kingdoms still whole.
21| Mithridates was afterward handed over and brought to Rome by Junius Cilo, procurator of Pontus. He was said to have addressed Caesar with more defiance than his situation warranted, and word of what he said spread among the people in these terms: 'I have not been sent back to you — I have returned. Or if you don't believe it, let me go and see.' His face, too, stayed unafraid when he was displayed to the crowd beside the Rostra, ringed by guards. Consular honors were voted to Cilo, praetorian honors to Aquila.
22| In the same year of these consuls, Agrippina, savage in her hatred and furious at Lollia for having competed with her for marriage to the emperor, worked up charges against her and found an accuser to bring up astrologers, magicians, and a consultation of the statue of Clarian Apollo about the emperor's marriage. Claudius then, without hearing the accused, spoke at length before the senate of Lollia's distinguished birth — daughter of the sister of Lucius Volusius, great-niece of Cotta Messalinus, once married to Memmius Regulus (he passed over in careful silence her marriage to Gaius Caesar) — and added that her schemes were dangerous to the state and that the means for further crime must be taken from her: her property should be confiscated and she must leave Italy. So of her once-immense fortune, only five million sesterces remained for her in exile. Calpurnia, a woman of equally high rank, was likewise destroyed, because the emperor had praised her beauty — with no desire behind it, only a chance remark — which was enough to rouse Agrippina's anger, though it stopped short of the worst. A tribune was sent to Lollia to drive her to her death. Cadius Rufus was also condemned, under the extortion law, on the accusation of the people of Bithynia.
23| Narbonese Gaul was granted, in honor of its exceptional respect for the Senate, the right its senators had long claimed: they could visit their own estates without first asking the emperor's leave, the same privilege Sicily enjoyed. Ituraea and Judaea, after the deaths of their kings Sohaemus and Agrippa, were added to the province of Syria. The augury of Safety, dropped for seventy-five years, was revived by decree and set to continue. Caesar also extended the sacred boundary of the city, following the old custom that let those who had extended the empire's borders extend the city's boundary too. Yet no Roman commander, however great the nations he had conquered, had claimed this right except Sulla and the deified Augustus.
24| Historians have told the ambition or glory of kings in this matter in various ways, but it seems worth knowing how the city began and where Romulus set its boundary. It started at the Cattle Market, where we still see the bronze statue of a bull — that animal being the one yoked to the plow — and the furrow marking out the town was drawn to take in the great altar of Hercules. From there, boundary stones went up one after another, tracing the Palatine's base as far as the altar of Consus, on to the Old Curiae, then the shrine of the Lares, and finally into the Roman Forum. The Forum and the Capitol, tradition holds, were added to the city not by Romulus but by Titus Tatius. Later the boundary was widened as Rome's fortune grew. The limits Claudius set at this time are easy enough to learn — they are recorded in the public records.
25| Under the consuls Gaius Antistius and Marcus Suillius, the adoption of Domitius was pushed through by Pallas's influence. Bound to Agrippina as the man who had arranged her marriage, and soon after entangled in an affair with her, he kept urging Claudius to think of the state's welfare, to give Britannicus's young age the support of a grown man's strength: this was how it had worked under the deified Augustus — even with grandsons of his own to lean on, his stepsons had flourished; Tiberius, over and above his own line, had taken up Germanicus. Claudius, he said, should likewise arm himself with a young man ready to share the burdens of government. Won over by this, Claudius set Domitius, three years older, ahead of his own son, and delivered a speech to the Senate repeating what he had heard from his freedman. Those who knew such things noted that no adoption had ever before occurred among the patrician Claudii, who had kept an unbroken line since Attus Clausus.
26| Thanks were duly voted to the emperor, with flattery toward Domitius laid on even thicker, and a law was passed transferring him into the Claudian family under the name Nero. Agrippina too was honored, with the title Augusta added to her name. Once this was done, no one was so lacking in pity as not to feel for Britannicus's plight. Left more and more alone, stripped even of his slave attendants, he turned his stepmother's badly timed courtesies into a joke, seeing through the pretense. People say he was not, in fact, a dull boy — whether that is true, or whether the dangers around him simply won him a reputation never actually tested, is another matter.
27| Meanwhile Agrippina, wanting to display her power to foreign peoples as well, obtained the founding of a colony of veterans in the town of the Ubii, where she herself had been born, naming it after herself. It happened that her grandfather Agrippa had once taken this same tribe under Roman protection when they crossed the Rhine. Around this time Upper Germany was thrown into alarm by the arrival of the Chatti, out raiding. The governor Publius Pomponius sent the Vangiones and Nemetes, backed by allied cavalry, against them, with orders to get ahead of the raiders or to surround them by surprise if they scattered. The soldiers carried out their commander's plan with energy: split into two columns, those who took the left route caught the raiders just back from a recent raid, heavy with plunder and sleep after their carousing, and surrounded them. Their joy was doubled because among the captives freed were some who had been enslaved for forty years, since the disaster of Varus.
28| Those who had gone by the shorter route on the right met the enemy head-on; the enemy dared to give battle and paid for it more heavily still. Laden with plunder and glory, the Romans returned to Mount Taunus, where Pomponius waited with the legions in case the Chatti, eager for revenge, offered the chance of a pitched battle. But fearing they would be caught between the Romans on one side and the Cherusci — their perpetual enemies — on the other, they sent envoys and hostages to Rome instead. Pomponius was awarded triumphal honors — a modest part of the fame he holds with later generations, among whom his glory as a poet stands out more.
29| Around the same time Vannius, whom Drusus Caesar had set over the Suebi, was driven from his kingdom. In his early years of rule he had been admired and popular with his own people; but as time went on he turned arrogant, was hated by his neighbors, and was finally undone by quarrels within his own house. The men behind it all: Vibilius, the Hermunduran king, along with Vannius's own nephews, Vangio and Sido. Though pressed repeatedly, Claudius would not use force to settle this quarrel among barbarians, but he did promise Vannius shelter if he lost his throne; he wrote to Palpellius Hister, governor of Pannonia, to station a legion and picked auxiliary troops from the province along the riverbank, both to support the defeated and to intimidate the victors, in case success went to their heads and they disturbed our own peace too. For a huge force was gathering — the Lugii and other peoples — drawn by the rumor of a rich kingdom, which Vannius had built up over thirty years of plunder and tribute. His own strength lay in infantry; his cavalry came from the Sarmatian Iazyges and was too small to match the enemy's numbers, so he decided to hold out in his fortresses and drag out the war.
30| But the Iazyges could not bear a siege, and roaming the open plains nearby they forced a battle, since the Lugii and Hermunduri had already massed there. So Vannius left his forts and was routed in the field, though he won praise even in defeat for fighting hand to hand and taking his wounds facing the enemy. He escaped to the fleet waiting on the Danube; his followers soon joined him and were given land to settle in Pannonia. Vangio and Sido divided the kingdom between them — showing excellent loyalty to Rome, and toward their subjects, whether by their own nature or through the habit of servitude, great affection while they were struggling to gain power, and far greater hatred once they had it.
31| In Britain meanwhile the propraetor Publius Ostorius found trouble waiting for him: the enemy had poured into the territory of our allies with all the more violence because they assumed a new commander, unfamiliar with his army and with winter setting in, would not march against them. Ostorius, knowing that first encounters breed either fear or confidence, moved his light cohorts fast, cut down those who stood and fought, and hunted down the scattered rest — determined they should not regroup, and that an uneasy, untrustworthy peace should give neither commander nor soldier any rest. He set about disarming those he suspected and pinning down the whole region between the rivers Avon and Severn with a chain of camps. The Iceni were the first to refuse this — a strong tribe, never broken in battle, since they had come into alliance with us willingly. On their lead the surrounding peoples chose a battlefield hedged by a rough earthwork with a narrow approach, closed to cavalry. The Roman commander, though he had only allied troops with him and no legionary strength, moved to break through these defenses; he divided his cohorts and put even his cavalry squadrons to work on foot. At the signal they broke through the rampart and threw the enemy, hampered by their own barricade, into confusion. Trapped, and aware of their own rebellion, with no way out, the Britons fought with remarkable, celebrated courage — in that battle the governor's son, Marcus Ostorius, won the honor of saving a citizen's life.
32| The Iceni's defeat steadied those who had been wavering between war and peace, and the army was then led against the Decangi. Their lands were ravaged, plunder taken everywhere, the enemy not daring to meet them in the field, and any attempt to snipe at the marching column from ambush was punished. They had already come within sight of the sea that faces Ireland when unrest among the Brigantes pulled the commander back — he was determined not to start anything new until what he had already gained was secure. Among the Brigantes only a few who had begun to take up arms were killed; the rest were pardoned and settled down. But the Silures could not be changed either by harsh measures or by mercy — they kept fighting, and had to be held down by legionary camps. To bring this about more quickly, a colony of veterans, a strong force of them, was planted at Camulodunum on captured land — a support against rebellion and a place to school the allies in the duties of the law.
33| From there the army moved against the Silures, who, beyond their own natural ferocity, trusted in the strength of Caratacus. Many uncertain turns and many successes had lifted him above every other British commander. Now, superior in cunning about the terrain, though weaker in soldiers, he shifted the war onto the Ordovices, and with those who feared peace with us added to his ranks, he risked one last throw of the dice. He chose ground for the battle where every approach and retreat would favor his own side and work against us — steep mountains on one side, and wherever the slope allowed an easier approach, he piled up stones like a wall. In front ran a river with an uncertain ford, and bands of armed men stood in place along the defenses.
34| Besides this, the tribal leaders went round encouraging their men, steadying their spirits, playing down fear and building up hope with other calls to battle. Caratacus himself darted here and there, declaring that this day, this battle, would mark either the recovery of their freedom or the beginning of eternal slavery; he called on the names of their ancestors who had driven off the dictator Caesar, by whose courage they still lived free of the axe and of tribute, keeping the bodies of their wives and children untouched. As he spoke this and more, the crowd roared approval — every man bound himself by his tribe's own sacred oath never to give way to weapons or wounds.
35| That eagerness stunned the Roman commander. On top of it there was a river in his way, a rampart raised behind it, and steep ridges bristling with defenders — everything about it looked grim. But the soldiers demanded battle, shouting that courage could take anything. The prefects and tribunes said the same, and their words only sharpened the army's fire. So Ostorius scanned the ground for what could be forced and what could not, then led his furious men across the river without much trouble. Once they reached the rampart, the exchange of missiles cost us more wounds and more dead. But when the men locked shields into a testudo, the crude, roughly-piled stone barricade came apart, and the fight turned hand to hand; the Britons fell back onto the ridges. Even there our men broke in — light troops harassing with javelins, heavy infantry advancing in close order — and the British ranks, who wore no breastplates or helmets, were thrown into confusion. If they stood against the auxiliaries they were cut down by the swords and javelins of the legionaries; if they turned on the legionaries, the auxiliaries' long swords and spears finished them. It was a brilliant victory. Caratacus's wife and daughter were captured, and his brothers surrendered.
36| Caratacus himself, since misfortune rarely finds safety, sought protection from Cartimandua, queen of the Brigantes — and was put in chains and handed over to the victors, in the ninth year since the war in Britain began. His fame had by then spread beyond the islands into the neighboring provinces and was talked of even in Italy; people were eager to see the man who had defied our power for so many years. Even in Rome the name Caratacus was no small thing, and Claudius, while building up his own glory, added to that of the man he had beaten. The people were summoned as if to some great spectacle: the praetorian cohorts stood under arms in the plain before their camp. First came the king's petty retainers in procession, displaying the ornaments, torques, and spoils he had won in his foreign wars; then his brothers, his wife, and his daughter; and last of all, Caratacus himself was put on show. The others, out of fear, made degrading pleas — but not Caratacus. Without a bowed head or begging words, he stood before the tribunal and spoke like this.
37| 'If my rank and fortune had been matched by moderation in success, I would have come to this city as a friend, not a captive, and you would not have scorned to receive in peace, by treaty, a man of famous ancestors ruling many nations. As it is, my present state disgraces me, but glorifies you. I had horses, men, weapons, wealth — is it any wonder I was unwilling to lose them? If you Romans mean to rule everyone, does it follow that everyone must accept slavery? Had I been surrendered right after my defeat, no fame would have come of it, neither my ruin nor your victory — my death would have simply sunk into oblivion. But if you let me live, I will be an eternal example of your mercy.' At this Claudius granted pardon to him, his wife, and his brothers. Freed from their chains, they paid the same homage — praise and thanks — to Agrippina, seated in plain view on another platform nearby. It was a strange thing, unheard of among the old customs, for a woman to preside over Roman standards; but she claimed for herself a share in the empire her ancestors had won.
38| The senators were then summoned and made many grand speeches about the capture of Caratacus, calling it no less glorious than when Publius Scipio displayed Syphax to the Roman people, or Lucius Paulus displayed Perseus, or any of the other kings paraded in chains. Triumphal honors were voted to Ostorius. His fortunes had been good up to that point, but then turned uncertain — whether because, with Caratacus removed, our men relaxed their effort as though the war were finished, or because the enemy, pitying so great a king, burned all the fiercer for revenge. They surrounded the camp prefect and the legionary cohorts left behind to build forts among the Silures. Had help not come quickly from the nearest strongholds, the whole force would have been wiped out under siege; even so the prefect, eight centurions, and the bravest men of the ranks fell. Not long after, they also routed our men out foraging, along with the cavalry sent to relieve them.
39| Ostorius then threw in light-armed cohorts, but even that did not stop the rout until the legions took up the fight; their strength evened the battle, and then turned it in our favor. The enemy escaped with light losses, since night was falling. From then on there were constant clashes, more like raids than battles, fought through woods and marshes as chance or courage dictated — reckless, unplanned, driven by anger or plunder, sometimes ordered, sometimes with the commanders unaware. The Silures fought with special stubbornness, inflamed by a remark of the Roman general's that had gotten around: that just as the Sugambri had once been wiped out or transplanted into Gaul, so the very name of the Silures should be erased. So they ambushed and cut off two auxiliary cohorts that had grown careless while plundering — their prefects' greed was to blame — and by handing out the spoils and prisoners they drew other tribes toward revolt as well. Worn out by the strain of it all, Ostorius died, and the enemy rejoiced, believing that even if no single battle had destroyed him, the war itself had worn down a commander not to be underestimated.
40| When Claudius learned of his governor's death, he sent Aulus Didius to replace him, so the province would not be left without someone in command. Didius hurried, yet still arrived to find matters in disorder — in the meantime a legion commanded by Manlius Valens had suffered defeat, and rumor of it grew in enemy hands, swollen to unsettle the new commander; Didius too played up what reached his ears, reckoning that greater credit would fall to him for restoring order, and a readier excuse if the trouble persisted. The Silures had caused this loss too, and were ranging widely, until Didius's arrival drove them back. But after Caratacus was captured, the man most skilled in warfare was Venutius of the Brigantes — as I mentioned earlier, long loyal and defended by Roman arms while he was married to Queen Cartimandua. Once their marriage broke down, war followed at once, and he turned hostile toward us as well. At first it was only a struggle between the two of them, and Cartimandua, by cunning, captured Venutius's brother and other relatives. Enraged at this, and stung by the disgrace of submitting to a woman's rule, his enemies — strong, chosen fighting men — invaded her kingdom. We had foreseen this, and the cohorts sent to help fought hard; the battle opened uncertainly but ended well for us. A legion under Caesius Nasica fought with similar success, since Didius, weighed down by age and heavy with honors, was content to act through subordinates and simply keep the enemy at bay. I have joined together events that actually stretched over several years under two propraetors, so that, told separately, they would not stick as well in the memory. Now I return to the order of events.
41| In the consulship of Tiberius Claudius, for the fifth time, and Servius Cornelius Orfitus, Nero's coming of age was hastened so that he would appear fit to take up public life. Claudius, glad to yield to the senate's flattery, let Nero enter the consulship in his twentieth year; meanwhile, as consul-designate, he was to hold proconsular power outside the city and be styled Prince of the Youth. A donative was announced to the soldiers and a handout to the people in his name. At the circus games, staged to win over popular favor, Britannicus rode in the boy's toga, Nero in triumphal dress — so the people could see one dressed as a boy and the other with the trappings of command, and read each one's future accordingly. At the same time, any centurions or tribunes who showed sympathy for Britannicus's situation were removed, some on invented pretexts, others under the guise of promotion; even freedmen of unshaken loyalty to him were pushed out on some such excuse. Meeting by chance, Nero greeted Britannicus by name, and Britannicus greeted him back as Domitius. Agrippina seized on this, complaining loudly to her husband that it was the start of open discord: his adoption was being mocked, and what the senate had decreed and the people ordered was being unraveled inside their own household — and unless the malice of those teaching him this were stamped out, it would erupt into public disaster. Stirred by what sounded like real charges, Claudius drove the best of his son's tutors into exile or death, and put him under guardians chosen by his stepmother.
42| Even so, Agrippina did not yet dare to make her final move until Lusius Geta and Rufrius Crispinus were removed from command of the praetorian cohorts — she believed them loyal to the memory of Messalina and bound to her children. So, arguing that the cohorts were split by the rivalry of two commanders and that discipline would be tighter under one, she got her husband to transfer command of the cohorts to Burrus Afranius, a man of excellent military reputation who nonetheless knew exactly whose favor had put him there. Agrippina also raised her own standing higher still: she rode up to the Capitol in a carriage, an honor traditionally reserved for priests and sacred objects, which only deepened the reverence paid to a woman who — daughter of an emperor, sister of one, wife of one, and now mother of one — stood without parallel to this day. Meanwhile Vitellius, her chief champion and a man of enormous influence though very old (so uncertain is the standing of the powerful), was hit with an accusation brought by the senator Junius Lupus, charging him with treason and designs on the throne. Claudius would have given the charge a hearing, but Agrippina, more through threats than pleading, turned him instead to banning the accuser from fire and water. That was as far as Vitellius wanted it taken.
43| Many omens occurred that year. Birds of ill fortune settled on the Capitol; repeated earthquakes brought down houses, and as the panic spread wider, the crowd's own terror trampled anyone too weak to keep up. A grain shortage and the famine that followed were read as omens too. The complaints weren't just muttered in private—when Claudius sat hearing cases, an angry mob surrounded him shouting, and drove him back into the far corner of the forum, pressing hard until a body of soldiers cut a path through the hostile crowd. It was established that the city had food for only fifteen days more, and it was only the gods' great kindness and a mild winter that saved the situation at the last moment. Yet in the old days Italy used to ship supplies to the legions in distant provinces, and it's not that the land has grown less fertile now—it's that we work Africa and Egypt instead, and the life of the Roman people has been staked on ships and chance.
44| That same year a war broke out between the Armenians and the Iberians, and it dragged Parthia and Rome into a very serious conflict of their own. Vologeses ruled the Parthians—his mother was a Greek concubine, and he'd gained the throne with his brothers' consent. Pharasmanes held Iberia by long possession; his brother Mithridates held Armenia, propped up by Roman support. Pharasmanes had a son named Radamistus—tall and striking, physically powerful, trained in his people's warrior skills, and famous among the neighboring peoples. He kept complaining, more loudly and more often than a man hiding his ambition would, that his father clung too fiercely to the small kingdom of Iberia in his old age. So Pharasmanes, worried about this young man—eager for power and backed by popular support—as his own years advanced, steered him toward another goal: he dangled Armenia in front of him, reminding him that he himself had driven out the Parthians and handed it to Mithridates. But force, he said, should wait; treachery would work better against an unsuspecting victim. So Radamistus staged a quarrel with his father, as if he couldn't bear a stepmother's hatred, and went to his uncle. There, treated with great warmth and given the standing of a son, he used it to lure Armenia's leading men into a plot, while Mithridates, oblivious, kept honoring him further.
45| Once he'd kept up this show of reconciliation, Radamistus went back to his father and reported what could be managed by treachery, leaving the rest to be finished by force. Meanwhile Pharasmanes invented pretexts for war: he claimed that when he'd fought the king of the Albanians and called on the Romans for help, his brother had opposed him, and that he meant to avenge that wrong by destroying him. At the same time he handed his son a large force. Radamistus, striking suddenly, caught Mithridates off guard, chased him off open ground and pinned him inside the fortress of Gorneas—a place made safe both by its position and by its Roman garrison, commanded by the prefect Caelius Pollio with the centurion Casperius under him. Nothing is more foreign to barbarians than siege engines and the tricks of assault warfare—but that branch of soldiering is exactly what we know best. So Radamistus tried the walls, failed, took losses, and settled into a siege instead. When force got him nowhere, he bought off the prefect's greed, while Casperius protested that an allied king and Armenia, a gift of the Roman people, should not be handed over through crime and money. In the end, since Pollio kept citing the enemy's numbers and Radamistus kept citing his father's orders, a truce was struck and Casperius withdrew—planning that if he couldn't talk Pharasmanes out of the war, he'd report the state of Armenia to Ummidius Quadratus, governor of Syria.
46| Once the centurion had left—as if that had been the only thing restraining him—the prefect began urging Mithridates to make peace, reminding him of the bond between brothers, of Pharasmanes' seniority, and of all their other family ties: that Pharasmanes' daughter was Mithridates' wife, and that Mithridates himself was Radamistus's father-in-law. The Iberians weren't refusing peace, he said, even though they had the stronger hand for now; and Armenian treachery was well known—the fortress, short on supplies, offered no real refuge. Better not to risk uncertain battle when bloodless terms were on offer. Mithridates hesitated, suspicious of the prefect's motives—Pollio had seduced the royal mistress and was known to be for sale to any indulgence. Meanwhile Casperius made his way to Pharasmanes and demanded that the Iberians lift the siege. Pharasmanes gave vague, evasive answers, sometimes softer than others in public, but sent secret messages urging Radamistus to press the assault by any means. The price of the crime went up, and Pollio, bribed in secret, pushed the soldiers to clamor for peace and threaten to abandon the fortress. Under that pressure Mithridates agreed on a day and place for the treaty, and left the fortress.
47| At first Radamistus threw himself into his uncle's arms, feigning devotion, calling him father-in-law and father. He swore an oath that he would use neither sword nor poison against him. Then he led him to a nearby grove, saying a sacrifice had been prepared there so the peace could be sealed with the gods as witnesses. It is the custom of kings, whenever they form an alliance, to clasp right hands and bind their thumbs together, tightening the knot; then, once blood has flowed down into the fingertips, they prick it out with a light cut and each licks the other's blood. This bond is considered especially sacred, as if consecrated by shared blood. But the man fastening the cord that time pretended to stumble, seized Mithridates by the knees and slammed him down onto the ground; in that same instant others burst forward and bound him in chains. He was dragged off in fetters—a disgrace among barbarians—and then, because the common people had grown hardened under harsh rule, he was met with insults and blows besides. Yet there were also those who pitied such a reversal of fortune; and his wife, following with her small children, filled the air with lamentation. They were hidden away in separate, covered wagons while Pharasmanes' orders were sought. For Pharasmanes, desire for the throne outweighed both brother and daughter, and his mind was ready for crime; still, he was careful about appearances, so as not to have him killed in front of him. And Radamistus, as if mindful of his oath, used neither sword nor poison on his sister and uncle—he had them thrown to the ground and smothered under heavy layers of cloth instead. Mithridates' sons, too, were slaughtered, because they had wept over their parents' murder.
48| Word of Mithridates' betrayal reached Quadratus, along with news that his killers now controlled the kingdom; he called a council, laid out what had happened, and asked whether to take action. A few argued that the public honor of Rome demanded it; more argued for playing it safe: any crime committed abroad should be met with satisfaction, they said—seeds of discord among the barbarians were even worth sowing deliberately, since Roman leaders had often stirred up trouble in Armenia under the guise of generosity, precisely to unsettle native minds. Let Radamistus keep his ill-gotten gains, they said, as long as he was hated and disgraced for it—that served Rome's interests better than if he'd won the throne with honor. This view carried the day. Still, so as not to look as if they'd approved the crime, and in case the emperor ordered otherwise, messengers were sent to Pharasmanes demanding that he withdraw from Armenian territory and pull his son out.
49| The procurator of Cappadocia at the time was Julius Paelignus, a man contemptible both for his cowardly spirit and his ridiculous appearance, but a close friend of Claudius from the days when, as a private citizen, he had whiled away his idle life in the company of buffoons. This Paelignus gathered provincial auxiliaries as if he meant to recover Armenia, but instead of plundering the enemy he plundered Rome's allies, until, abandoned by his own men and harassed by the barbarians, he went, defenseless, to Radamistus—and, won over by his gifts, actually urged him to take the royal insignia, and stood by as sponsor and accomplice when he did. When this shameful story got out, and to keep others from being judged by Paelignus's example, the legate Helvidius Priscus was sent with a legion to handle the unsettled situation as the moment required. He crossed the Taurus range promptly and, working more by restraint than by force, had settled most matters when, on his way back to Syria, he was ordered not to give the Parthians a pretext for war.
50| For Vologeses judged that a chance to seize Armenia had fallen into his lap—a land his ancestors had once held, now controlled disgracefully by a foreign king. He gathered his forces and prepared to install his brother Tiridates on the throne, so that no branch of his house would be left without a kingdom. At the Parthian advance the Iberians were driven out without a battle, and the Armenian cities of Artaxata and Tigranocerta submitted. Then a brutal winter, poorly stocked supplies, and the sickness that grew out of both forced Vologeses to abandon what he'd gained for the moment. Radamistus moved back into the now-empty Armenia, more savage than before, treating the people as rebels who would revolt again given the chance. And the Armenians, hardened as they were to servitude, finally lost patience and rose up in arms around the palace.
51| Radamistus had no way out but the speed of his horses, which carried him and his wife away. His wife was pregnant, and somehow endured the first stage of the flight, driven by fear of the enemy and love for her husband; but as the headlong ride went on, and her womb was jolted and her insides shaken, she begged to be allowed an honorable death rather than face the humiliations of captivity. At first he embraced her, tried to lift her spirits, urged her on—admiring her courage one moment, sick with fear that someone might take her if left behind the next. In the end, driven by a violent love and no stranger to crime, he drew his dagger and stabbed her, then hauled her down to the Araxes and gave her over to the current, so that even her corpse would vanish downstream. Then he himself fled headlong on into Iberia, to his father's kingdom. Meanwhile shepherds found Zenobia—that was the woman's name—still breathing, drifting gently in the shallows and clearly alive. Recognizing from her beauty that she was no common woman, they bound her wound, applied rough country remedies, and once they learned her name and story, carried her into the city of Artaxata. From there she was brought, under public care, to Tiridates, who received her kindly and had her treated with the honor due a queen.
52| Faustus Sulla and Salvius Otho held the consulship that year, and it was then that Furius Scribonianus went into exile, accused of asking astrologers when the emperor would die. His mother Vibia was dragged into the charge too, as one who could not accept her earlier misfortune - she had already been banished once. Scribonianus's father Camillus had once raised arms in Dalmatia, and Claudius made a show of clemency out of this, sparing an enemy's line a second time. But the exile did not live long afterward: whether he died by accident or by poison, people reported according to what they were already inclined to believe. The senate also passed a decree, savage and useless, expelling astrologers from Italy. In the same session the emperor praised those senators who, hard up for money, resigned their rank voluntarily, and censured those who stayed on and let poverty breed shamelessness.
53| Among other business, Claudius brought before the senate the question of punishing women who took up with slaves. It was decided that a woman who fell into this without her master's knowledge would herself become a slave; if she consented, she would be treated as a freedwoman. Pallas, whom Claudius named as the source of this proposal, was voted the honorary rank of a praetor and fifteen million sesterces, on the motion of the consul-designate Barea Soranus. Cornelius Scipio added that public thanks should be given him, since though descended from the ancient kings of Arcadia he set that noble blood aside for the public good and let himself be counted among the emperor's servants. Claudius declared that Pallas was content with the honor alone and would go on living as poor as before. And so a bronze tablet was set up bearing the senate's decree, in which a freedman worth three hundred million sesterces was showered with praise for his old-fashioned frugality.
54| His brother, known as Felix, showed none of that restraint. He had long held power over Judaea and believed that, backed by such influence, he could commit any crime and get away with it. The Jews had indeed given some appearance of unrest, rising up when they learned of the death of the emperor Claudius was named for, they had refused to obey once Gaius's murder was known, and the fear remained that some emperor might impose the same command; but in truth it was Felix, applying remedies at the wrong moments, who kept fanning the flames of trouble, with Ventidius Cumanus, who held part of the province, his rival in every worst excess. The province was so divided that Cumanus governed the Galileans and Felix the Samaritans, peoples long at odds and now, with less respect for their rulers, less restrained in their hatred. So they raided each other, sent out gangs of bandits, laid ambushes, and now and then fought pitched battles, carrying off the spoils to their procurators. At first the two officials were pleased by this; but as the ruin spread and they threw in troops to stop it, soldiers were killed, and the province would have burst into open war had Quadratus, governor of Syria, not intervened. He wasted no time deciding that the Jews who had risen up and killed soldiers should pay with their heads; Cumanus and Felix tried to stall the process, since Claudius, after hearing the causes of the revolt, had given Quadratus authority to judge the procurators as well. But Quadratus put Felix among the judges, seating him on the tribunal so that accusers would be too intimidated to speak against him; Cumanus alone was condemned for the crimes the two had shared, and quiet returned to the province.
55| Not long after, the wild mountain tribes of Cilicia known as the Clitae, often restless before, now rose again under their leader Troxobore. They seized rugged strongholds in the hills and from there swept down to the coast and the towns, attacking farmers and townspeople and above all merchants and sailors. They besieged the town of Anemurium, and the cavalry sent from Syria to relieve it, under the prefect Curtius Severus, was thrown into disorder, since the rough terrain around suited infantry for fighting but not cavalry. Then Antiochus, king of that region, by flattering the common people and tricking their leader, managed to split the barbarian forces; Troxobore and a few of the chief men were killed, and he settled the rest with clemency.
56| About the same time a tunnel was driven through the mountain separating Lake Fucinus from the river Liris - a project meant to display its own scale to as wide an audience as possible - and a mock sea-fight was mounted on the lake, in the manner of Augustus, who had once staged a lesser version, with lighter vessels, on an artificial pool across the Tiber. Claudius armed triremes and quadriremes and nineteen thousand men, ringing the lake with rafts to prevent escape, while still leaving room enough for the force of the rowing, the skill of the helmsmen, the charges of the ships, and all the usual features of a real battle. On the rafts stood companies and squadrons of the praetorian cohorts, with breastworks in front from which catapults and ballistas could be fired. The rest of the lake was held by marines in decked ships. The banks, the hills, and the mountain peaks were packed like a theater with an enormous crowd, drawn from the nearby towns and even the city itself, some to watch, some out of duty to the emperor. Claudius himself presided in a splendid military cloak, and not far off Agrippina in a cloak of gold thread. The fighters, though condemned men, fought with the spirit of brave soldiers, and after heavy losses those who survived were spared from slaughter.
57| When the spectacle was over, the outlet for the water was opened. It became obvious the work had been done carelessly - the channel had not been cut deep enough to reach the bottom or even the middle of the lake. Time was allowed to dig the tunnels deeper, and to draw the crowds back again a gladiatorial show was staged on the drained lakebed, with bridges laid down for infantry combat. A banquet was even held beside the outflow, and it filled everyone with terror, because the rushing water swept away everything nearby, while people further off were shaken by the crash and roar or had their footing torn from under them. Agrippina used the emperor's fright to accuse Narcissus, the man in charge of the project, of greed and profiteering. He did not stay silent, charging her in turn with a woman's overreaching ambition and inflated hopes.
58| In the consulship of Decimus Junius and Quintus Haterius, the sixteen-year-old Nero married Octavia, Claudius's daughter. To make a name for himself in honorable pursuits and win glory for eloquence, he pleaded the case of the people of Ilium: invoking the Roman line's descent from Troy, Aeneas as forefather of the Julian house, and other tales bordering on legend, he won Ilium exemption from every public burden. The same speaker also won relief for the colony of Bononia, gutted by fire, with a grant of ten million sesterces. Freedom was restored to Rhodes, a status often given and taken away depending on their conduct in foreign wars or their offenses in internal strife; and the people of Apamea, whose land had been shaken by an earthquake, were excused from tribute for five years.
59| Meanwhile Claudius was pushed into ever harsher measures by the scheming of that same Agrippina, who brought down Statilius Taurus, a man made conspicuous by his wealth, because she coveted his gardens. She used Tarquitius Priscus as her accuser. He had served as Taurus's legate when Taurus governed Africa with proconsular power, and on their return he brought a few charges of extortion but relied chiefly on accusations of magical superstitions. Taurus would not endure a lying accuser and the shame of it any longer, and took his own life before the senate could pass judgment. Tarquitius, however, was expelled from the senate house - the senators, out of hatred for the informer, overruled Agrippina's efforts on his behalf.
60| That same year the emperor was heard more than once declaring that decisions made by his procurators should carry the same force as if he himself had made them. And so this would not look like a careless slip, a senate decree confirmed it in fuller and broader terms than before. The deified Augustus had ordered that legal proceedings before the equestrian prefects who governed Egypt should be handled as if their decisions had been made by Roman magistrates; later, in other provinces and largely in Rome itself, powers once belonging to the praetors were granted in the same way. Claudius handed over the whole of this authority - a matter so often fought over by sedition and arms, when the Sempronian laws put the equestrian order in possession of the courts, or later the Servilian laws gave judgment back to the senate, and when Marius and Sulla once made this the chief cause of their wars. But in those days it was rival orders contending, and whichever side won held power in the state's name. Gaius Oppius and Cornelius Balbus were the first men who, through the elder Caesar's resources, could dictate terms of peace and decide matters of war. It is hardly worth mentioning the Matii and Vedii and other once-powerful equestrian names that came after, since Claudius raised freedmen he had put in charge of his household finances to a level equal to himself and to the laws.
61| He then brought before the senate the question of granting tax exemption to the people of Cos, and recalled much of their ancient history: that the island's earliest inhabitants were Argives, or Coeus, father of Latona; that later, with the arrival of Aesculapius, the art of healing was introduced there and became especially renowned among his descendants, and he named each of them and the ages in which they had flourished. He even said that Xenophon, whose medical skill he himself made use of, came from that same family, and asked that, for his sake, the people of Cos be freed from all tribute forever and left to live as a sacred island devoted solely to the service of the god. There is no doubt the Coans could have shown many services and allied victories on Rome's behalf as further grounds; but Claudius, with his usual easy generosity, left what he had granted to one man's request unsupported by any outside reasons.
62| The people of Byzantium were then given a hearing, and while pleading to have their heavy burdens reduced, they went back over their whole history. They began with the treaty they had made with us in the days we fought against the king of Macedon, who for his low birth was nicknamed Pseudophilip; they recalled the troops they had later sent against Antiochus, Perseus, and Aristonicus, and their help in the war against the pirates and for Antony; then what they had offered Sulla, Lucullus, and Pompey; and finally their recent services to the Caesars, since they held a position so useful to generals and armies crossing by land and sea, and so convenient for moving supplies.
63| Where Europe and Asia come closest together, the Greeks founded Byzantium, on the far edge of Europe. When its founders consulted Pythian Apollo about where to build the city, the oracle told them to seek a home opposite the land of the blind. That riddle pointed to Chalcedon: its founders had arrived first, seen the advantages of the site across the water, and chosen the worse one anyway. Byzantium has rich soil and an even richer sea, since the huge shoals of fish that pour out of the Black Sea, startled by the slanting rocks beneath the waves, abandon the curve of the far shore and run straight into these harbors. So the Byzantines grew wealthy at first from the fishing. Later, crushed by the weight of the taxes it brought them, they asked for relief or a cap, and the emperor backed them, noting that they had just come through the exhausting Thracian and Bosporan wars and needed help. So their tribute was suspended for five years.
64| Marcus Asinius and Manius Acilius were consuls that year, and a string of bad omens signaled worse to come. Lightning struck the soldiers' standards along with their tents; a swarm of bees came down to roost on the Capitol's summit; people spoke of a birth that was part human, part beast, and of a piglet born with a hawk's talons for feet. Among the portents was counted the sudden thinning of the magistrates' ranks: within a few months a quaestor, then an aedile, a tribune, a praetor, a consul — all had died. But it was Agrippina who felt the worst dread. She remembered something Claudius had blurted out drunk — that it was his fate to endure his wives' crimes and then punish them — and, afraid of what that meant for her, she decided to act, and quickly. She struck first at Domitia Lepida, for reasons that were entirely about rivalry between women: Lepida, daughter of the younger Antonia, granddaughter of Augustus's sister, was Agrippina's cousin once removed and sister of Agrippina's first husband, Gnaeus, and she believed herself Agrippina's equal in rank. They were not far apart in looks, age, or wealth either, and both were shameless, disgraced, and violent — rivals in vice just as much as in whatever good fortune had given them. The sharpest contest between them was over which of the two, aunt or mother, would have more influence over Nero. Lepida worked on his young mind with flattery and gifts; Agrippina, by contrast, was harsh and threatening — she could give her son the throne, but she could not stand to see him actually rule it.
65| The charges brought against Lepida were that she had used curses against the emperor's wife, and that by failing to control her gangs of slaves in Calabria she was disturbing the peace of Italy. On these grounds her death was ordered, over strong opposition from Narcissus, who by now suspected Agrippina more and more and was said to have told his intimates that his own ruin was certain, whether Britannicus or Nero came to power — but that he owed the emperor so much that he would spend his life in his service. Messalina and Silius had been convicted, he said, and the same grounds for accusation would exist again if Nero were emperor; with Britannicus as successor there would be nothing for the emperor to fear. But now the whole household was being torn apart by a stepmother's plotting, a worse scandal than if he had simply kept quiet about the shamelessness of Claudius's earlier wife. And in fact shamelessness was not even absent now, with Pallas as her lover — proof, if anyone needed it, that she valued nothing, not honor, not modesty, not even her own body, above power. Saying such things again and again, Narcissus embraced Britannicus and prayed that he would come to full manhood as soon as possible, lifting his hands now to the gods, now to the boy himself, begging him to grow up, drive off his father's enemies, and avenge his mother's murderers too.
66| In the midst of this weight of worries Claudius fell ill, and to restore his strength he went to Sinuessa for the mild air and the healthful waters. Agrippina, who had long since made up her mind to the crime and was eager to seize the chance now offered, needed no help finding accomplices. She discussed what kind of poison to use — nothing sudden or violent, in case the act gave itself away, but not something slow and wasting either, in case Claudius, near the end and sensing the trick, turned back toward love for his son. She wanted something exquisite, that would confuse his mind and delay his death. She chose an expert in such things named Locusta, recently convicted of poisoning and kept for a long time as one of the instruments of the regime. This woman's skill produced the poison; it was administered by one of the eunuchs, Halotus, whose job was to bring in the food and taste it first.
67| Everything about it soon became so well known that the historians of the time reported that the poison was mixed into a delicious mushroom dish, and that its effect was not felt at once — whether from his own stupor or from Claudius's drunkenness — since a loosening of his bowels seemed at first to have saved him. Agrippina, terrified, and now fearing the worst, disregarded the disgrace of being caught and turned to the physician Xenophon, whose complicity she had already arranged. He is believed to have pushed a feather smeared with fast-acting poison down Claudius's throat, pretending to help him vomit — well aware that the worst crimes are dangerous to begin but rewarding to finish.
68| Meanwhile the senate was summoned, and the consuls and priests were offering vows for the emperor's recovery, even as he lay already lifeless, covered with blankets and hot compresses, while the arrangements for securing Nero's power were being made. Agrippina, as if overcome with grief and seeking comfort, held Britannicus close, called him his father's living likeness, and by every device she could manage kept him from leaving his room. She also kept hold of his sisters, Antonia and Octavia, and had every entrance sealed with guards. Again and again she put it about that the emperor's health was improving, so that the soldiers would stay hopeful and the favorable moment predicted by the Chaldean astrologers would arrive.
69| Then, at midday on the third day before the Ides of October, the doors of the palace suddenly swung open and Nero came out, with Burrus at his side, to the cohort that stood on guard as usual. There, on a signal from the prefect, he was greeted with cheers and put into a litter. Some, it's said, hesitated, looking back and asking where Britannicus was; but soon, with no one leading them the other way, they fell in with what was offered. Nero was carried into the camp, made a speech fitted to the occasion, and, promising a bonus in the style of his father's generosity, was hailed as emperor. The senate's decree simply confirmed what the soldiers had already decided, and the provinces fell in line just as readily. Claudius was voted divine honors, and his funeral was celebrated with the same solemnity as that of the deified Augustus, Agrippina rivaling the magnificence of her great-grandmother Livia. His will, though, was not read out, so that the people would not be stirred to anger and resentment at seeing the stepson placed ahead of the son.
1| The first death of the new reign was that of Junius Silanus, proconsul of Asia, arranged through Agrippina's treachery without Nero's knowledge. It was not that Silanus's violent temper had provoked his own destruction — he was sluggish and so despised even by domineering men that Caligula used to call him "the golden sheep." No, Agrippina had engineered the murder of his brother Lucius Silanus, and she feared an avenger. There was constant talk among the people that a man of settled years, blameless, well-born, and — what mattered then — a descendant of the Caesars, deserved the throne more than Nero, who had barely left boyhood and had gotten his power through crime. For Silanus too was a great-great-grandson of the deified Augustus. That was the cause of his death. the Roman knight Publius Celer and the freedman Helius — both overseers of the emperor's Asian estates — carried out the deed. At a banquet they poisoned the proconsul, so brazenly that hiding it was hopeless. Just as quickly, Narcissus — Claudius's freedman, whose feuding with Agrippina I have already recounted — was forced into suicide through brutal confinement and dire necessity, though the emperor had wished otherwise; for the man's greed and extravagance suited Nero's still-concealed vices remarkably well.
2| Killing would have continued, had Afranius Burrus and Annaeus Seneca not stepped in. These men, guiding the emperor's youth, worked in rare harmony for partners in power, each strong in a different way and equally influential — Burrus through military discipline and severity of character, Seneca through the teaching of eloquence and gracious good manners — helping each other so as to hold the slippery years of the prince in check more easily, by allowing permitted pleasures if he spurned virtue. Both had one shared struggle: against the savagery of Agrippina, who, burning with every desire that fuels bad rule, had Pallas on her side, the man whose influence had ruined Claudius through an incestuous marriage and a disastrous adoption. But Nero's temper did not stoop to slaves, and Pallas, with his grim arrogance overstepping a freedman's proper limits, had made himself tiresome. Still, publicly, every honor was heaped on Agrippina, and when a tribune, following military custom, asked for the watchword, Nero gave "Best of Mothers." The senate voted her two lictors and the priesthood of Claudius, along with a censorial funeral for Claudius and, soon after, his deification.
3| The emperor himself delivered the eulogy on the day of the funeral. While he ran through the antiquity of Claudius's lineage and the consulships and triumphs of his ancestors, he and everyone else listened intently; mention of Claudius's cultivation of the liberal arts, and the claim that under his rule Rome had suffered no misfortune from abroad, was also heard with approval. But when the eulogy shifted to praise of his foresight and wisdom, laughter broke out uncontrollably among the listeners — this despite an oration, Seneca's composition, that displayed real polish, for the man's gifts suited the era's taste well. Older men, who have the leisure to compare past and present, noted that Nero was the first ruler to need someone else's eloquence. The dictator Caesar had rivaled the greatest orators; Augustus had a ready, flowing style fit for an emperor. Tiberius too had mastered the art of weighing his words, powerful in thought or deliberately obscure. Even Caligula's disordered mind had not ruined his power of speech. And with Claudius, whenever he spoke from preparation, you would not find the delivery lacking in polish. Nero, from his earliest boyhood, turned his lively mind elsewhere — to engraving, painting, singing, or handling horses — and now and then, in composing verses, he showed he had at least the rudiments of learning.
4| Once the show of grief was finished, he entered the senate house, and after opening with remarks on the authority of the senators and the goodwill of the soldiers, he recalled the advice and examples that had guided him in taking up this great office magnificently: his youth had not been stained by civil war or family feuds; he brought no hatreds, no grievances, no desire for revenge. Then he laid out the shape his reign would take, avoiding above all whatever had most recently drawn resentment. He would not, he said, be judge of every matter, so that accusers and defendants would not be shut up together within one house, letting the power of a few run riot; nothing in his household would be for sale or open to influence-peddling; his private household and the state would be kept separate. Let the senate hold to its ancient duties: let Italy and the public provinces attend the tribunals of the consuls, and let the consuls grant access to the senators, while he himself would concern himself with the armies entrusted to him.
5| He kept his word, and much was settled at the senate's discretion. No one was to be hired with money or gifts to plead a case; quaestors-elect were freed of the obligation to put on gladiatorial games. Agrippina opposed this, claiming it undid Claudius's measures, but the senators carried it — the same senators who were now summoned to the Palace so that Agrippina could stand in attendance, a curtain hung behind added doors, hiding her from sight without shutting off her hearing. Indeed, when Armenian envoys arrived to argue their nation's case in front of Nero, she very nearly climbed up to sit beside him on the imperial dais; disaster was averted only when Seneca, as everyone else stood paralyzed with fear, urged Nero to rise and meet his approaching mother. So, under the guise of filial devotion, disgrace was averted.
6| At the end of the year, word arrived amid unsettled rumors that the Parthians had again broken out and were seizing Armenia, after driving out Radamistus, who had held that kingdom more than once, then fled it, and this time too had abandoned the fight rather than wage it. So in Rome, a city hungry for talk, people asked how an emperor barely past seventeen could take up or fend off so great a burden, what support there could be in one ruled by a woman, and whether battles, sieges, and the rest of warfare could really be managed by tutors. Others argued the opposite: better this than if the weak, aged, cowardly Claudius had been called to the labors of campaigning, obedient to whatever his slaves commanded. Burrus and Seneca, at least, were men of proven experience in many fields; and how much strength was really lacking in an emperor, when Pompey at eighteen and Octavian at nineteen had carried the weight of civil wars? Most things at the summit of power are managed by authority and counsel rather than by weapons and hands. Nero would soon give clear proof of whether his friends were honest men or not, depending on whether he chose an outstanding commander free of favoritism, or a rich one propped up by influence and intrigue.
7| While such talk spread, Nero ordered young men levied from the neighboring provinces to reinforce the legions of the East, and had the legions themselves moved closer to Armenia; he had two aging kings, Agrippa and Antiochus, ready their forces to strike first into Parthian territory, ordered bridges built across the Euphrates, and assigned Lesser Armenia to Aristobulus and the region of Sophene to Sohaemus, along with royal insignia. And, opportunely, a rival to Vologeses arose in his son Vardanes, so the Parthians withdrew from Armenia, as if only postponing the war.
8| But in the senate everything was blown up beyond its worth, in the motions of those who proposed thanksgivings, and that on the days of thanksgiving the emperor should wear triumphal dress, that he should enter the city in ovation, and that his statue should stand, equal in size to that of Mars the Avenger, in the same temple — all beyond the usual flattery, and gladly, because he had put Domitius Corbulo in charge of holding Armenia, and it seemed a field had opened for real merit. The eastern forces were split: Ummidius Quadratus, governing Syria, kept part of the auxiliaries together with two legions, while Corbulo received a matching force of Roman and allied soldiers, plus the infantry and cavalry cohorts wintering in Cappadocia. The allied kings were ordered to obey whichever commander suited the campaign, but their sympathies leaned more readily toward Corbulo. Eager to build his reputation quickly — reputation being most valuable at the start of a new command — he made a rapid march and met Quadratus, who had come out to him, at Aegae, a city of Cilicia; Quadratus had advanced that far so that if Corbulo entered Syria to take over the troops, all eyes would not turn to him alone. Corbulo was a man of huge physique, grand in speech, and, beyond real experience and good sense, imposing even in mere show.
9| Both, however, sent word to King Vologeses, urging him to prefer peace to war, and to give hostages and keep up the respect for the Roman people shown by his predecessors. And Vologeses — whether to prepare for war at his own convenience, or to remove men he suspected of rivaling him under the pretext of hostages — handed over the noblest members of the Arsacid house. They were received by the centurion Insteius, sent by Ummidius, who happened to have approached the king first on this matter. When Corbulo learned of this, he ordered the prefect of a cohort, Arrius Varus, to go and reclaim the hostages. This led to a quarrel between the prefect and the centurion, and so as not to keep foreigners watching the spectacle any longer, the decision was left to the hostages themselves and to the envoys escorting them. They preferred Corbulo, drawn by his fresh glory and by a certain leaning toward him even among the enemy. From this arose discord between the two commanders — Ummidius complaining that credit for what his own planning had achieved had been snatched from him, Corbulo insisting in turn that the king had turned to offering hostages only once he himself had been chosen to lead the war, which changed the king's hopes into fear. To settle the rivalry, Nero had it proclaimed that laurels would be added to the imperial fasces for victories achieved jointly by Quadratus and Corbulo. Here I have grouped together events that actually extended into later consular terms.
10| That same year the emperor asked the senate for a statue of Gnaeus Domitius, his father, and consular honors for Asconius Labeo, who had been his guardian; for himself he refused the solid silver or gold statues that were offered. And though the senators had voted that the year should begin in December, the month of Nero's birth, he kept to the old religious practice of starting the year on the first of January. Neither Carrinas Celer, a senator accused by his own slave, nor Julius Densus, a knight charged with the crime of favoring Britannicus, were brought to trial.
11| In the consulship of Claudius Nero and Lucius Antistius, when the magistrates took their oath to uphold the acts of past emperors, Nero forbade his colleague Antistius to swear to Nero's own acts — a move the senate praised extravagantly, hoping his young mind, flattered even by trivial glories, might go on to greater ones. Mercy followed: he restored to the senate Plautius Lateranus, who had been struck from its rolls for adultery with Messalina, and he made much of his own clemency in frequent speeches, which Seneca wrote and the emperor's voice broadcast — whether to show off how honorably he counseled Nero, or to show off his own talent.
12| Meanwhile his mother's power was quietly cracking as Nero fell for a freedwoman named Acte, taking into his confidence two well-favored young men, Marcus Otho and Claudius Senecio — Otho from a consular family, Senecio the son of one of the emperor's own freedmen. Without his mother's knowledge, and then despite her futile resistance, the affair wormed its way in through luxury and furtive secrecy, and even the emperor's older friends did not object: a lowly girl was satisfying the emperor's desires without hurting anyone, since he could not stand his wife Octavia — high-born and of proven virtue, yet somehow repellent to him, whether by fate or because forbidden things simply hold more power. And people feared that if he were kept from this affair he might break out into assaults on women of rank.
13| But Agrippina raged, in a woman's way, that a freedwoman was her rival and a slave-girl her daughter-in-law, and more of the same, and she would not wait for her son's regret or his boredom with the girl. The uglier her reproaches, the hotter they made his passion burn, until, overpowered by love, he threw off his deference to his mother and gave himself over to Seneca — one of whose circle, Annaeus Serenus, had screened the young man's first passion for the freedwoman by pretending to love her himself, lending his name so that what the emperor gave the girl in secret, Serenus could give her openly. Then Agrippina switched tactics: she tried to win the young man over with flattery, offering her own bedroom and her own embrace to cover whatever his youth and supreme fortune craved. She even admitted her severity had come at the wrong time, and handed over the resources of her wealth — nearly equal to the emperor's own — as freely now as she had recently been strict with her son. This reversal did not fool Nero, and his closest friends grew afraid and begged him to be on guard against the schemes of a woman always dangerous, and now false as well. Around this time Nero, looking over the jewelry that had once adorned the wives and mothers of emperors, picked out a robe and gems and sent them to his mother as a gift, unstintingly, giving her first choice of the finest pieces others might have wanted. But Agrippina announced that this was not enriching her wardrobe but shutting her out from everything else, and that her son was merely doling out to her what was, all of it, already hers.
14| There was no shortage of people to twist this into something worse. Nero, angry at those on whom his mother's arrogance leaned for support, removed Pallas from control of the finances, the post Claudius had given him and from which he had run things almost like a regent. It was said that as Pallas left, trailed by a great crowd of well-wishers, Nero quipped, not unwittily, that Pallas was headed off to take an oath discharging himself from office. And Pallas had indeed secured a deal: no act of his past would ever be questioned, and his accounts with the treasury would count as closed for good. After this Agrippina rushed headlong into threats and terror, not sparing the emperor's ears: she declared that Britannicus was grown now, the true and worthy heir to receive his father's power — power that an adopted outsider was currently wielding, and wielding through wrongs done to his own mother. She was ready, she said, to let the whole rotten history of that unhappy house come out into the open — her own marriage, her own poisoning included. The one thing the gods and her own foresight had arranged, she said, was that her stepson still lived. She would go with him to the army camp; let them hear, on one side, the daughter of Germanicus, and on the other, Burrus with his crippled hand and Seneca the exiled professor, demanding, of all things, to govern the human race. As she spoke she flung out her hands, piled on the insults, invoked the deified Claudius, and called up the ghosts of the murdered Silani from the underworld, and all their wasted deaths.
15| Nero was shaken by this, and with Britannicus's fourteenth birthday approaching, he turned it over in his mind — sometimes his mother's violence, sometimes Britannicus's own character, which a small recent test had revealed, though it had won the boy wide sympathy. During the Saturnalia, amid the other games young people play, drawing lots for a mock king, the lot fell to Nero. So for the others he devised harmless amusements that would bring no blush to their cheeks; but when he ordered Britannicus to stand up, come to the middle of the room, and start a song, he was hoping to make a fool of him — reasoning that a boy unused even to sober company, let alone drunken, would be helpless. But Britannicus began, without faltering, a song that spoke plainly of being cast out from his father's throne and his rightful place. This won him open pity, all the more visible because night and license had stripped away people's usual pretense. Nero read the resentment in the room and hated him the more for it. Under Agrippina's mounting threats, and with no charge he could bring, not daring to order his brother's murder openly, he worked in secret and had poison prepared, using as his agent Julius Pollio, tribune of a praetorian cohort, who had in his custody a woman condemned for poisoning, Locusta, notorious for her crimes. That everyone close to Britannicus should have no scruple and no loyalty had long since been arranged. The first dose he got from his own tutors, and it passed through him too weak to work, since his bowels flushed it out — perhaps it had been deliberately diluted so as not to kill too suddenly. But Nero, growing impatient at how slowly the crime was working, threatened the tribune and gave the order to have the poisoner put to death — telling them that while they fretted over rumor and shored up their defenses, they were stalling on the one thing that actually mattered: his safety. They then promised a death as swift as if by the sword, and next to Caesar's own bedroom they brewed a poison already known to be fast-acting from earlier trials.
16| It was the custom for the emperor's children to dine, sitting with other young nobles of their age, in view of their relatives, at their own simpler, smaller table. Britannicus was eating there; because his food and drink were tasted first by a chosen attendant, and so that the custom would not be dropped or the murder given away by killing them both, this trick was devised: an innocent, very hot drink was tasted and handed to Britannicus first; then, when he pushed it away as too hot, cold water containing the poison was poured in. It spread through his whole body so fast that his voice and breath were cut off together. Those sitting around him panicked; the ones who didn't understand fled in confusion, but those with sharper minds sat frozen, watching Nero. He, reclining as usual and seeming to notice nothing, said this was ordinary — Britannicus had suffered from epilepsy since infancy, and his sight and senses would gradually return. But Agrippina's terror, the shock plain on her face despite her efforts to hide it, flashed out so clearly that it was obvious she had known nothing about it — just as it was clear Britannicus's sister Octavia had known nothing either. She understood she had lost her last support, and had seen a precedent set for murdering one's own family. Octavia too, though still young, had already learned to hide grief, affection, every feeling. So after a brief silence, the feast's gaiety resumed.
17| The same night joined Britannicus's death to his funeral pyre, the burial arrangements having been made in advance — modest ones. He was buried, all the same, on the Campus Martius, in such violent rain that the common people believed it a sign of the gods' anger at a crime which even many humans were ready to forgive, reckoning it just the old, familiar hostility between brothers and the impossibility of shared rule. Most writers of that period report that in the days before his death Nero had repeatedly toyed with and mocked Britannicus's youth, so that his death cannot be called premature or brutal — though in fact, in the middle of a sacred family meal, without even time given to embrace his sisters, before the eyes of his enemy, the last blood of the Claudian line was hurried to its death, defiled by rape before it was defiled by poison. Nero defended the haste of the funeral in a public edict, citing the old custom of removing painful funerals quickly from public view and not dragging them out with eulogies and processions. He added that, having lost his brother's support, he now placed his remaining hopes in the state, and that the senate and people ought to cherish all the more the one emperor left of a family born to the highest rank.
18| After this he enriched his closest friends with lavish gifts. There was no shortage of people to accuse men who claimed to be so principled of dividing up houses and estates at such a time as if it were plunder. Others believed the emperor had forced it on them, conscious of his own crime and hoping to buy the loyalty of the most powerful men by generosity. But his mother's anger no generosity could soften; instead she clung to Octavia, held frequent private meetings with friends, and, beyond her natural greed, grabbed money from every direction as if stockpiling a war chest. She received tribunes and centurions warmly, and honored the names and merits of the nobles still surviving, as if she were looking for a leader and a party. Nero learned of this, and ordered withdrawn the military guard that had been kept for her, first as the emperor's wife and then as his mother, along with the German bodyguards recently added to the same honor. And so that she would not be thronged by crowds of well-wishers, he gave her a separate residence, moving her to the house that had once been Antonia's; whenever he visited her there, he came surrounded by a crowd of centurions and left after a brief kiss.
19| Nothing in human affairs is so unstable and fleeting as a reputation for power that rests on no strength of its own. Agrippina's threshold emptied at once. No one came to console her, no one came to visit, except a few women — whether out of love or hatred was unclear. Among them was Junia Silana, whom I mentioned earlier as driven from her marriage to Gaius Silius by Messalina — a woman of notable birth, beauty, and looseness, and for a long time very dear to Agrippina. But a hidden grudge had grown between them, because Agrippina had talked Sextius Africanus, a young noble, out of marrying Silana, calling her promiscuous and past her prime — not to keep Africanus for herself, but to stop him from getting his hands on Silana's fortune once she died childless. Given this chance for revenge, Silana lined up accusers from among her clients, Iturius and Calvisius. They brought no old, oft-repeated charge — that she mourned Britannicus's death, or broadcast Octavia's mistreatment — but claimed Agrippina meant to raise Rubellius Plautus, who through his mother's line stood as close to the deified Augustus as Nero did, to power, and through marriage to him seize the state again. Iturius and Calvisius took this to Atimetus, a freedman of Nero's aunt Domitia, who — delighted at the gift, since a bitter rivalry ran between Agrippina and Domitia — pushed the actor Paris, himself also Domitia's freedman, to go at once and lay the charge in the most alarming terms.
20| It was late in the night, and Nero was deep in his wine, when Paris came in. Normally at that hour he worked to whip up the emperor's appetite for pleasure, but this time he came composed, wearing grief. He laid out the accusation point by point and so terrified his listener that Nero resolved not only to kill his mother and Plautus, but to strip Burrus of his command as well, on the theory that Burrus owed his advancement to Agrippina and was now repaying the debt. Fabius Rusticus says a letter was actually drafted, handing the command of the praetorian cohorts to Caecina Tuscus, and that it was only through Seneca's influence that Burrus kept his rank. Pliny and Cluvius report that the prefect's loyalty was never in doubt at all; Fabius, admittedly, leans toward praising Seneca, in whose friendship his career flourished. I will follow the consensus of the sources, and note the divergent version under its author's name. Nero, panicked and eager to kill his mother, could not be talked out of it until Burrus promised her death himself, if she were proven guilty — but insisted that everyone, let alone a parent, deserved a defense; that there were no real accusers present, only the word of one person from a hostile household; and that Nero should think of the darkness, the sleepless night spent at a banquet, and how much of this smelled of recklessness and ignorance rather than truth.
21| The emperor's fear thus calmed, at daybreak men went to Agrippina so she might learn the charges and either clear herself or pay the price. Burrus carried out this commission with Seneca present; some freedmen stood by as witnesses to the conversation. Burrus laid out the charges and their source, then spoke with open menace. Agrippina, her old fierceness intact, said: 'I'm not surprised that Silana, who has never borne a child, knows nothing of a mother's feelings — a parent doesn't drop her children the way an adulteress drops her lovers. And if Iturius and Calvisius, having eaten through every last penny they had, are now repaying an old woman for her final service by bringing an accusation, that doesn't mean I must bear the shame of plotting murder, or Caesar the guilt of believing it. As for Domitia's hostility, I'd actually be grateful for it, if she competed with me in devotion to my Nero. Instead she stages this like a play, through her bedfellow Atimetus and the actor Paris. She was busy building up the fishponds at her Baiae estate while I was arranging Nero's adoption, his proconsular power, his designation as consul, and everything else needed to secure him the throne. Let someone come forward who can prove I tampered with the cohorts in Rome, or undermined the loyalty of the provinces, or bribed slaves or freedmen into crime. Could I have lived if Britannicus had come to power? And if Plautus or anyone else should end up ruling the state, do you think I'd lack accusers then — not for words that impatient love sometimes lets slip carelessly, but for real crimes, the kind only a son could forgive?' Those present were moved and, unprompted, worked to calm her further. She demanded a meeting with her son, at which she said nothing in her own defense, as if she doubted it was needed, and nothing about her services to him, as if she were reproaching him with them — but she did secure vengeance on her accusers, and for her friends their rewards.
22| The grain supply was handed to Faenius Rufus, care of the games the emperor was preparing went to Arruntius Stella, Egypt to Tiberius Balbillus. Syria was meant for Publius Anteius, but he was maneuvered out of it by various tricks and in the end kept in Rome. Silana was driven into exile; Calvisius and Iturius too were banished. Atimetus was put to death; Paris was too valuable to the emperor's pleasures to be punished. Plautus, for the moment, was passed over in silence.
23| Next came a charge that Pallas and Burrus were plotting to put Cornelius Sulla on the throne — a man of noble stock, and Claudius's son-in-law through his marriage to Antonia. The man behind the accusation was one Paetus, notorious for buying up confiscated property at the treasury auctions, and by now plainly exposed as a fraud. Pallas's innocence brought less satisfaction than his arrogance brought offense: when his freedmen were named as his accomplices, he answered that he had never given a household order except by a nod or a gesture, and that when more needed explaining he put it in writing, so as never to let his voice join in with theirs. Burrus, though himself accused, sat as a judge and gave his verdict along with the rest. The accuser was sentenced to exile, and the records he had used to dredge up forgotten claims against the treasury were burned.
24| As the year drew to a close, the cohort of soldiers regularly posted to guard the games was pulled back, meant to give a fuller look of liberty — keeping troops away from the theater's corrupting license, and testing whether the people, left unwatched, would hold to discipline on their own. Lightning had struck the temples of both Jupiter and Minerva, and on the advice of the soothsayers the emperor had the city ritually purified.
25| Quintus Volusius and Publius Scipio held the consulship that year, a year peaceful abroad but shameful for its license at home, as Nero, dressed as a slave to disguise himself, roamed the city's streets, brothels, and back alleys, with companions who snatched up goods set out for sale and beat passersby, striking at random so that he himself sometimes took a blow and showed the bruise on his face. Once it became widely known that it was the emperor doing the roaming, the assaults on prominent men and women grew worse, and some, given license once under Nero's name, ran their own gangs doing the same thing unpunished; nights in the city took on the feel of a captured town. Julius Montanus, a man of senatorial rank who had not yet held office, happened to run into the emperor in the dark; when Nero attacked him violently, Montanus fought back hard and drove him off, then, recognizing him, begged his pardon — but because this looked like an accusation, he was forced to die. Nero, more cautious afterward, surrounded himself with soldiers and a good number of gladiators, who let brawls start small and seemingly private, but stepped in with weapons if the injured party fought back too hard. He also turned the license of the theater and the factions backing actors into something like open warfare, through impunity and rewards, watching himself, sometimes hidden, sometimes openly, until the people grew so divided and the fear of worse unrest so great that the only remedy found was to expel the actors from Italy and put the soldiers back on guard at the theater.
26| Around the same time the senate took up the matter of freedmen's frauds, and it was demanded that patrons be given the right to revoke the freedom of those who had proven ungrateful. There was no shortage of support for the idea. But the consuls, not daring to open the debate without the emperor's knowledge, nonetheless wrote up the senate's general agreement. [Whether he became the author of a formal measure — since only a few opposed the motion, some grumbling that a freedom shared with so many had bred an insolence that had now burst out so far that they weighed matters against their patrons on equal terms, or even raised a hand to strike them — drove them to it, or those arguing against their own penalty won them over instead.] For what else was left to an injured patron except to banish his freedman a hundred miles into the Campanian coast? All other legal remedies were open equally to both sides; the patrons should be given some weapon that could not simply be brushed aside. It was no great burden for freedmen to keep their liberty through the same good conduct that had won it for them; but those clearly guilty of crimes deserved to be dragged back into slavery, so that fear might restrain those whom kindness had failed to change.
27| Against this it was argued that the fault of a few should ruin only themselves, and nothing should be taken from the rights of the whole body — for that body was spread very wide. From it came most of the city tribes, staff for magistrates and priests, even the cohorts enrolled in Rome; and most of the equestrian order, along with a good many senators, had no other origin than this. Set freedmen apart from the rest, and the thinness of freeborn stock would show at once. It was not for nothing that the ancestors, when dividing the ranks by status, had placed freedom itself in common. Besides, two forms of manumission had been established precisely so that there would remain room for a change of heart, or for a fresh grant of favor. Those a patron had not freed formally, by the touch of the rod, were still held as if bound by the chain of slavery. Each man's case deserved judgment on its own facts, and a grant, once made, could not be undone — so it should not be made lightly. This view prevailed, and the emperor wrote to the senate that they should judge each freedman's case on its own merits whenever patrons brought a complaint, but should take nothing away from the general body of rights. Not long after, the freedman Paris was taken from Domitia as if by process of civil law, not without disgrace to the emperor, at whose order the finding of his free birth had been staged.
28| Some semblance of republican government still survived. A dispute arose between the praetor Vibullius and the plebeian tribune Antistius, because the tribune had ordered the release of unruly partisans of actors whom the praetor had thrown in chains. The senate backed the praetor and censured Antistius's high-handedness. At the same time the tribunes were barred from usurping the powers of praetors and consuls, or summoning from Italy anyone who could be sued under the ordinary law. The consul-elect Lucius Piso added a rule that tribunes could take no action against anyone inside their own homes under color of office, and that any fine they imposed should not be entered on the public treasury rolls by the quaestors until four months had passed — during which time an appeal could be lodged and the consuls would rule on it. The aediles' powers were likewise tightened, and limits set on how much property the curule and plebeian aediles could seize as security or impose as penalty. The plebeian tribune Helvidius Priscus carried on a personal feud with Obultronius Sabinus, quaestor of the treasury, accusing him of pressing the auction-spear too harshly against the poor. The emperor then transferred oversight of the public accounts from the quaestors to prefects.
29| This arrangement had varied and changed often. Augustus had let the senate choose the prefects; then, when election by ballot came under suspicion of corruption, they were chosen by lot from among the ex-praetors. That did not last either, since the lot sometimes fell on unfit men. Claudius then put quaestors back in charge, and to keep them from being too timid for fear of giving offense, promised them promotion out of the normal order — but men taking up their first magistracy lacked the maturity for it. So Nero chose men who had already served as praetor and proved themselves.
30| That same year Vipsanius Laenas was found guilty of plundering Sardinia through corrupt governance while he held the province. Cestius Proculus, facing an extortion charge brought by the Cretans, was cleared. Clodius Quirinalis, who as prefect of the rowers stationed at Ravenna had abused Italy — as if it were the lowest of nations — with his debauchery and cruelty, took poison to forestall conviction. Caninius Rebilus, a leading man for his legal learning and vast wealth, escaped the pains of failing old age by opening his veins — though no one believed he had the resolve to choose death for its own sake, given his notorious womanish vices. Lucius Volusius, by contrast, died in high repute, having lived ninety-three years, with great wealth honestly gained and unbroken friendship with a succession of emperors.
31| In the second consulship of Nero, with Lucius Piso as colleague, little happened worth recording — unless one cares to devote pages to the beams and foundations of the amphitheater Caesar raised on the Campus Martius, matters better left to Rome's daily register, since the Annals should be kept for events that actually carry weight, as befits the dignity of the Roman people. The colonies of Capua and Nuceria were reinforced with veteran settlers; the common people were given a handout of four hundred sesterces each; and forty million sesterces were paid into the treasury to shore up public confidence. The four percent tax on slave sales was also remitted — in appearance more than in substance, since though the seller was nominally liable, in practice the buyer ended up paying it as part of the price. Nero also decreed that no magistrate or procurator in a province under his charge should put on gladiatorial games, beast-hunts, or any other public show — for previously such largess had oppressed the provincials as much as outright extortion, since officials used popularity contests to cover crimes committed out of greed.
32| A senate decree was also passed serving both vengeance and safety alike: if a man was murdered by his own slaves, then those freed under his will who had been living under the same roof should suffer punishment along with the slaves. Lurius Varus, an ex-consul once ruined by charges of greed, was restored to the senate. And Pomponia Graecina, a woman of distinction, wife of Aulus Plautius — whose ovation over the Britons I have already recorded — was accused of practicing a foreign superstition and left to her husband's judgment. Following ancient custom, he heard the case concerning his wife's life and reputation before their kinsmen, and pronounced her innocent. Pomponia's life, by contrast, was one long unbroken grief: once Messalina's treachery destroyed her friend Julia, Drusus's daughter, she spent the next forty years dressed only in mourning, her spirit never lifting from sorrow — a stance Claudius left unpunished, and one that later even brought her honor.
33| The same year brought many defendants to trial. Publius Celer, accused by the province of Asia, was one Nero could not bring himself to acquit, so he let the case drag on until old age brought Celer's death — for Celer, having murdered the proconsul Silanus as I have already told, used the sheer enormity of that crime to obscure his other offenses. Cossutianus Capito was denounced by the Cilicians as a corrupt and disgraceful man who had claimed in his province the same license for wrongdoing he had practiced at Rome; worn down by relentless prosecution, he finally abandoned his defense and was convicted under the extortion law. But for Eprius Marcellus, whom the people of Lycia were suing to recover their property, corrupt influence proved so overwhelming that some of his own accusers were sentenced to exile, as though they had endangered an innocent man.
34| In Nero's third consulship, Valerius Messala served as his colleague; Messala's great-grandfather was the orator Corvinus, a man few of the old survivors could still recall sharing that same office with the deified Augustus, Nero's great-great-grandfather. The honor of this noble family was enhanced by a grant of five hundred thousand sesterces a year, to support Messala's honest poverty. The emperor likewise settled an annual pension on Aurelius Cotta and Haterius Antoninus, though both had squandered their ancestral fortunes through extravagance. At that year's start, the long half-hearted contest between Rome and Parthia over Armenia turned serious: Vologeses refused to see his brother Tiridates stripped of the throne he himself had bestowed on him, or forced to hold it merely as another power's gift, while Corbulo held that Roman greatness demanded reclaiming what Lucullus and Pompey had once won. The Armenians, meanwhile, wavered in their loyalty and courted both sides — drawn to the Parthians by geography, shared customs, and intermarriage, and, having never known liberty, inclined more readily toward submission.
35| Corbulo, however, found more trouble in his own soldiers' cowardice than in the enemy's treachery. The legions transferred from Syria, grown soft in long peace, could barely stomach the routine of camp life. It was well established that this army included veterans who had never stood watch or mounted guard, who looked on rampart and ditch as strange novelties, who went without helmets or breastplates, sleek and profiteering, having spent their service in the comforts of towns. So he discharged those worn out by age or ill health and requested reinforcements. Levies were held through Galatia and Cappadocia, and a legion was brought up from Germany with its allied cavalry and cohort infantry. The whole army was kept under canvas despite a winter so savage that the ground, sheathed in ice, had to be dug out before tents could even be pitched. Many men's limbs were frostbitten by the sheer cold, and some died on sentry duty. One soldier was noted who, carrying a bundle of firewood, had frozen his hands so stiff that they stuck to the load and snapped off at the wrists as he collapsed. Corbulo himself, lightly dressed and bareheaded, was constantly present on the march and at hard labor, praising the vigorous, comforting the weak, and setting an example for all. But when many, unable to bear the harsh climate and the hardship of service, began deserting, he resorted to severity as a remedy. Unlike other armies, where a first or second offense was met with pardon, here any man who abandoned his standard paid with his life on the spot. This proved sound in practice and, for all its seeming harshness, more merciful — for far fewer deserted that camp than camps where offenses were forgiven.
36| Meanwhile Corbulo kept the legions inside camp until spring came on, and posted auxiliary cohorts at suitable points with orders not to risk battle first. He gave Paccius Orfitus, a former chief centurion, charge of these outposts. Though Orfitus wrote that the barbarians were careless and a good opportunity for action had presented itself, he was ordered to hold his position and wait for larger forces. But he broke orders: once a few squadrons arrived from the nearest forts and, through inexperience, clamored for a fight, he engaged the enemy and was routed. Those who should have brought support were so unnerved by his losses that each man fled back to his own camp in panicked disorder. Corbulo took this badly. He rebuked Paccius and ordered the officers and men to camp outside the rampart — and they were kept in that disgrace, released only at the pleading of the whole army.
37| Tiridates, backed not only by his own supporters but by the forces of his brother Vologaeses, now attacked Armenia openly instead of by stealth. He ravaged the territory of tribes we counted loyal, and whenever our troops marched against him he slipped away, darting here and there, spreading more terror by rumor than by actual fighting. Corbulo spent a long time trying to force a battle, in vain, and was finally driven by the enemy's own tactics to spread the war across several fronts at once. He split his forces so his legates and prefects could strike different places simultaneously, and told King Antiochus to attack the districts nearest him. Meanwhile Pharasmanes, having had his own son Radamistus killed as a supposed traitor, pursued his old grudge against the Armenians more eagerly than ever, as proof of his loyalty to us. It was then, for the first time, that the Moschi — a people more loyal to Rome than any other — were drawn in and raided the remote parts of Armenia. So Tiridates's plans began working against him, and he sent envoys to protest, in his own name and that of the Parthians, why — after hostages had recently been given and friendship renewed, opening the door to fresh favors — he was being driven from Armenia's ancient possession. Vologaeses himself, they said, had not yet been provoked, since the Parthians preferred to argue their case rather than fight for it; but if Rome insisted on war, the House of Arsaces would not lack for courage or luck, having already tasted Roman defeat more than once. To this Corbulo, knowing for certain that Vologaeses was tied up by a revolt in Hyrcania, urged Tiridates to approach the emperor with a petition instead: he could have a stable kingdom and a bloodless outcome, if he gave up on a distant, uncertain hope and turned to the one at hand, which was also the stronger.
38| Since messages back and forth were getting nowhere toward peace, it was agreed the two commanders should meet in person, at a time and place to be fixed. Tiridates said he would bring an escort of a thousand horsemen; he did not specify how many troops of any kind Corbulo could bring, only that both should come to this meeting of peace without breastplates or helmets. Any man alive — let alone an old and cautious commander — would have seen through such barbarian cunning: the small number was fixed on one side and the larger allowed on the other precisely so a trap could be laid; for if unarmored men were exposed to cavalry skilled with the bow, sheer numbers would do them no good. Corbulo hid the fact that he understood this, and answered that matters of public importance were better discussed with both armies present in full. He chose a site where one side rose in gentle hills, suited to receiving ranks of infantry, and the other opened onto a plain, suited to deploying squadrons of cavalry. On the agreed day Corbulo arrived first, stationing on the wings the allied cohorts together with the auxiliaries supplied by the kings, and putting the Sixth Legion in the center; overnight it had been built up with three thousand men drawn from the Third and brought over from another camp, a single eagle carried along with them so the whole would pass for one legion. Tiridates, as the day was already fading, took his position far off, where he could be seen more than heard. So, without any meeting at all, the Roman commander ordered his men back to camp.
39| The king — whether suspecting a trick, since Roman columns were moving toward several places at once, or hoping to cut off our supplies coming from the Black Sea through the town of Trapezus — withdrew in haste. But he could not strike at our supply lines, since they were carried through mountains held by our garrisons. And Corbulo, unwilling to let the war drag on without result, and wanting to force the Armenians to defend their own homes, moved to destroy their strongholds. He took on the strongest one in that district himself, called Volandum, and left the smaller ones to the legate Cornelius Flaccus and the camp prefect Insteius Capito. After surveying the defenses and identifying the weak points, he urged his men to strip this enemy of his homeland — an enemy who wandered without settling for peace or battle, whose flight was a confession of treachery and cowardice — and to think of glory and plunder in equal measure. He divided the army into four columns: one he sent forward in a tortoise formation to undermine the rampart, others to bring up scaling ladders against the walls, and many more to hurl firebrands and spears from siege engines. Slingers and catapult crews were positioned to rain shot from a distance, so that no quarter of the wall could send help to another under equal pressure everywhere. The army fought with such fire that within a third of the day the walls stood stripped of defenders, the barricades at the gates were torn down, the fortifications were taken by storm, and every adult male was killed — without the loss of a single Roman soldier, and only a few wounded. The unwarlike population was sold under the crown, and the rest of the spoils went to the victors. The legate and the prefect had equal success, and with three strongholds stormed in a single day, the remaining towns surrendered — some out of terror, others of their own accord. This success gave rise to confidence enough to attack Artaxata, the capital of the nation. The legions did not, however, take the most direct route: crossing the river Araxes, which washes the city walls, by the nearby bridge would have put them within range of attack, so they crossed farther off, at broader, safer fords.
40| Tiridates, torn between shame and fear — fearing that if he allowed the siege he would look useless, and that if he tried to stop it he would tangle himself and his cavalry in difficult ground — finally decided to show his army in the open, and either fight a set battle on a chosen day or, by feigning flight, set up a trap. So he suddenly surrounded the Roman column — though our commander was not caught off guard, having arranged the army for both marching and fighting at once. The Third Legion held the right flank, the Sixth the left, with picked men of the Tenth in the center; the baggage was drawn in among the ranks, and a thousand cavalry guarded the rear, ordered to hold their ground against any close attack but not to chase off those who fled. On the wings marched foot archers and the rest of the cavalry, with the left wing extended further along the base of the hills, so that if the enemy broke through he would be caught both in front and on the flank. Tiridates charged from various directions, never quite within range, sometimes threatening, sometimes feigning panic, hoping to loosen our ranks and pick off scattered men. But when none of this recklessness paid off — only a single cavalry officer, having pressed forward too boldly, was shot down with arrows, and his fate only steadied the rest in their discipline — Tiridates withdrew as darkness came on.
41| Corbulo pitched camp on the spot and weighed whether to press on to Artaxata by night with lightly equipped legions and lay siege, thinking that was where Tiridates had pulled back. His scouts, though, brought word that the king had gone far off, and no one could say whether his march was toward Media or toward Albania; so Corbulo held off until daylight and pushed light-armed troops ahead, to ring the walls in the meantime and set a long-range assault going. The townspeople, for their part, needed no siege at all: they flung their gates open unprompted and handed themselves and their city over to Rome, which is what spared their lives. Artaxata itself they burned and razed flat, for a strong garrison would have been needed to hold it, and troops enough for that and for carrying on the war besides could not be spared — and if left standing and unguarded, capturing it would have brought neither use nor glory. To this was added a wonder that seemed sent by heaven: everywhere up to Artaxata the sun shone bright, but the ring of the city walls was suddenly wrapped in black cloud and torn by lightning, as if the gods themselves were delivering it to destruction in anger. For this Nero was hailed as imperator, the senate decreed thanksgivings, statues, arches, and unbroken consulships for the emperor, and ordered that the day the victory was won, the day it was reported, and the day it was formally recorded should all be kept as festivals — along with other honors in the same vein, carried to such excess that Gaius Cassius, while agreeing to the rest, observed that if thanks were to be offered to the gods in proportion to Rome's good fortune, a whole year of thanksgivings would not suffice, and so sacred days and working days ought to be kept separate, so that religious observance would not crowd out the business of the state.
42| Tossed about by various turns of fortune and having earned the hatred of many, a defendant was nonetheless convicted through Seneca's influence, not without ill will attaching to it. This was Publius Suillius, a man feared and venal under Claudius's rule, and one whom the change of regime had humbled less than his enemies wished — a man who preferred to look guilty than to look like he was begging for mercy. It was believed that the old senatorial decree, and the penalty of the Lex Cincia against those who took payment for pleading cases, was revived chiefly to bring him down. Suillius did not hold back his complaints and accusations; besides the fierce temper of extreme old age, he spoke freely and attacked Seneca as an enemy of Claudius's friends, under whom Seneca had endured a thoroughly deserved exile. He was, Suillius said, a man used to idle pursuits and the ignorance of the young, and envious of those who exercised a vigorous, uncorrupted eloquence in defending their fellow citizens. He himself had been Germanicus's quaestor; Seneca had been the adulterer in that man's household. Which, he asked, deserved harsher judgment — earning a fee, freely offered by a litigant, for honest work, or seducing the bedchambers of imperial women? By what wisdom, by what precepts of philosophy, had Seneca amassed three hundred million sesterces within four years of imperial favor? At Rome, he said, wills and childless old men were caught as if in a net cast by Seneca; Italy and the provinces were being drained by his monstrous interest rates. His own money, by contrast, had been earned by hard work and was modest. He would rather face the charge, the danger, anything at all, than bow the standing he had built up over a lifetime at home to someone else's sudden good fortune.
43| There were people ready to carry these same words to Seneca, twisted for the worse. Accusers turned up who charged that when Suillius governed the province of Asia, he had plundered its people and embezzled public money. Then, since they had been granted a year to investigate, it seemed quicker to open with the charges rooted in Rome itself, for which witnesses were close at hand. They claimed his ferocious prosecutions had driven Quintus Pomponius into a civil war he had no choice but to join, had pushed Julia, daughter of Drusus, and Poppaea Sabina to their deaths, and had destroyed Valerius Asiaticus, Lusius Saturninus, and Cornelius Lupus. They threw at Suillius entire ranks of condemned Roman knights and the whole cruelty of Claudius's reign. He defended himself by insisting he had taken up none of it on his own initiative, but only obeyed the emperor — until Nero cut off that line of defense, announcing that he had checked his father's own records and found no accusation Claudius had ever forced on anyone. Then the defense shifted to claiming Messalina had ordered it all, and it grew shaky: why, after all, had no one else been chosen to lend his voice to a cruel, shameless woman? The instruments of atrocity deserve punishment, once they have collected their price for the crimes and try to pin the crimes on others. So part of his estate was confiscated — his son and granddaughter were allowed to keep a share, and anything they had inherited from their mother's or grandmother's will was exempted — and he was driven into exile on the Balearic Islands. He was not broken, either at the moment of danger or after his conviction, and it was said he bore his isolation on a rich, soft way of living. When accusers came after his son Nerullinus, pressing charges of extortion out of hatred for the father, the emperor stepped in, saying vengeance had already been satisfied enough.
44| In this same period, Octavius Sagitta — a tribune of the plebs — fell headlong in love with a married woman named Pontia. With lavish gifts he bought her adultery, then bought her separation from her husband, promising to marry her and striking a bargain for the wedding. But once the woman was free, she began stalling, blaming her father's opposition, and, having found hope of a richer husband, shed her promises. Octavius alternated between complaints and threats, protesting that his reputation was ruined and his money spent, and finally putting into her hands the one thing he had left — his life. When she spurned him even then, he begged for one last night as a comfort, claiming it would help him accept limits afterward. The night was set, and Pontia put her maid, who was in on it, on guard at the bedroom door. He came in with a single freedman, a dagger hidden under his clothes. Then, as happens in love and rage, there were quarrels, pleas, accusations, apologies — and part of the darkness was set aside for passion. Out of that, as if suddenly inflamed, he ran her through with the dagger while she suspected nothing, drove off the maid who rushed in with a wound, and burst out of the bedroom. The next day the killing was plain and the killer in no real doubt, since it was proven he had spent the night there. But the freedman claimed the crime as his own, saying he had avenged his patron's wrongs, and his story moved some people by its sheer scale of loyalty — until the maid, recovered from her wound, told the truth. The father of the murdered woman brought Octavius before the consuls once he had left office, and by a vote of the senate and the law against assassins, he was condemned.
45| No less notorious was the shamelessness that, in that same year, planted the seed of great disasters for the state. There was in the city a woman named Sabina Poppaea, born to a father named Titus Ollius, but she had taken the name of her mother's father, the illustrious Poppaeus Sabinus, who shone with the honors of a consulship and a triumph — for Ollius, before he could hold high office, was ruined by his friendship with Sejanus. This woman had everything except a decent character. Her mother, who had outshone the women of her generation in beauty, had passed on to her both fame and looks in equal measure; wealth matched the distinction of her family. Her conversation was charming, her wit far from dull: she wore modesty as a mask while indulging in vice. She rarely appeared in public, and when she did, she kept part of her face veiled — whether to leave onlookers unsatisfied, or because it simply suited her. She never spared her own reputation, drawing no line between husbands and lovers, and she was slave neither to her own feelings nor to anyone else's; wherever advantage pointed, that was where she turned her desire. So even while she was Rufrius Crispinus's wife — a Roman knight who had given her a son — Otho won her away, trading on his youth, his lavish living, and his place as Nero's closest friend. No time was lost before the affair turned into marriage.
46| Otho — whether carelessly in love, praising his wife's beauty and elegance before the emperor, or meaning to inflame him, so that if they both possessed the same woman, the bond would only add to his own power — was often heard, rising from Caesar's table, declaring that he, at least, was off to her, boasting that nobility and beauty, the envy and joy of every fortunate man, had been granted to him alone. Prompted by this and other such goading, no long delay followed: once given her opening, Poppaea began first to strengthen her hold through flattery and craft, pretending she could not resist her passion and had been captivated by Nero's looks. Then, once the emperor's passion had caught fire, she grew haughty: kept on beyond a night or two, she said, she was still a wife and could not simply set her marriage aside — she was bound to Otho by a manner of living no other man could equal. He, she said, was magnificent in spirit and in style; with him she saw herself worthy of the highest fortune. But Nero, tied to a mistress who was a slave and to his habit with Acte, had picked up nothing from that servile company but what was cheap and low. Otho was pushed out of his usual closeness with Nero, then out of his company and entourage altogether, and finally, so he would not carry on his rivalry inside the city, he was put in charge of the province of Lusitania. There he governed, right up to the civil wars, not in the spirit of his earlier scandal but honestly and cleanly — reckless in leisure, but more restrained once given power.
47| Up to this point Nero had sought some cover for his outrages and crimes. He was above all suspicious of Cornelius Sulla, twisting the man's dullness of mind into its opposite and reading him as cunning and a master of pretense. Graptus, one of Caesar's freedmen, schooled by long experience going back to Tiberius in the ways of the imperial household, fed that fear with a lie of this kind. The Mulvian Bridge was at that time a well-known haunt of nighttime pleasures, and Nero used to go there so he could run wild outside the city with fewer restraints. So Graptus invented a story: that as Nero returned along the Flaminian Way an ambush had been laid for him and escaped only by fate, since he had actually come back to the Sallustian gardens by a different route — and he named Sulla as the man behind the plot, all because some young men, indulging in the wild license of the time, had by chance given the emperor's returning attendants a groundless scare. No slave or client of Sulla's was recognized among them, and his character, thoroughly despised and incapable of daring anything, made the charge implausible. Even so, as though he had been convicted, he was ordered to leave his homeland and confine himself within the walls of Marseille.
48| In that same consulship the senate gave audience to delegations from Puteoli, sent independently by the town council and by the common people — one accused the mob of violence, the other accused the magistrates and leading men of greed. The unrest had escalated to stone-throwing and threats of fire, and to keep it from spilling into killing and armed violence, Gaius Cassius was chosen to apply a remedy. Because the townspeople could not stomach his severity, at his own request the task was handed over to the Scribonius brothers instead, backed by a praetorian cohort whose menace, and the punishment of a few, restored harmony among the townsfolk.
49| I would not bother recording a perfectly routine decree of the senate — one letting the people of Syracuse exceed the set limit on gladiators for their games — except that Paetus Thrasea spoke against it, and in doing so gave his critics material to attack his motives. Why, they asked, if he believed the state needed the senate to speak freely, did he chase after such trivial things? Why not, instead, offer his advice for or against war and peace, taxes and laws, and everything else that holds the Roman state together? Fathers of the senate, they said, were free, whenever they were granted the right to speak their view, to say what they wished and demand that it be put to debate. Was this the only thing worth correcting — that Syracuse not be too generous with its shows — while everything else, across every part of the empire, was left exactly as excellent as if Thrasea, not Nero, held the reins? But if the greatest matters were let pass with total silence, all the more reason to leave the trivial ones alone too. Thrasea, when friends pressed him for his reasoning, answered that he was not unaware of present conditions, but that he corrected decrees of this sort as a mark of respect for the senate's honor, so it would be plain that men who paid attention even to the smallest matters would not hide their concern for the great ones either.
50| In the same year, worn down by the people's constant complaints about the misconduct of the tax farmers, Nero wondered whether to abolish all indirect taxes outright and hand mankind that as the most splendid of gifts. But the senators, after first praising his generosity of spirit at length, held back his impulse, showing him that it would unravel the empire if the revenues that sustained the state were cut away — since abolishing the customs duties would only lead to demands that direct taxes be scrapped next. Most of the companies that collected taxes, they pointed out, had been set up by consuls and tribunes of the plebs back when Roman liberty was still fierce; the rest had since been arranged so that income and necessary spending matched each other. Still, the greed of the tax farmers plainly needed reining in, so that a system tolerated without complaint for so many years would not turn to resentment through fresh abuses.
51| So the emperor decreed that the rules governing each tax, which until then had been kept secret, should be posted publicly; that claims left unpursued could not be revived after a year had passed; that in Rome the praetor, and in the provinces whoever held the powers of praetor or consul, should give summary justice in cases against the tax farmers; that soldiers should keep their exemption, except on goods they traded for profit; and various other quite fair measures, which were observed for a while and then, before long, ignored. Still, the abolition of the two-and-a-half and two-percent levies stands, along with other charges the tax farmers had invented under illicit names. Grain shipments to the overseas provinces were regulated more gently, and it was decreed that merchants' ships should not be counted among their taxable property, so that they would not have to pay tax on them.
52| Nero acquitted the defendants from the province of Africa who had held proconsular power there, Sulpicius Camerinus and Pompeius Silvanus. Camerinum's accusers were private citizens and few, charging him more with cruelty than with extortion. Silvanus was surrounded by a large crowd of prosecutors who asked for time to summon witnesses; the defendant demanded to be tried at once, and he won, helped by his wealth, his childlessness, and an old age he outlived the men whose scheming had let him escape.
53| Germany had stayed quiet up to this point, thanks to its commanders' temperament: since triumphal honors had become common, they hoped for greater glory by keeping the peace. Pompeius Paulinus and Lucius Vetus commanded the army at that time. But so as not to leave the soldiers idle, Paulinus finished the embankment begun sixty-three years earlier by Drusus to hold back the Rhine, while Vetus was preparing to link the Moselle and the Saône with a canal dug between them, so that supplies could travel by sea, then up the Rhône and Saône, through the canal, then down the Moselle into the Rhine, and on to the Ocean — removing the difficulties of overland transport and connecting the shores of West and North by water. Aelius Gracilis, governor of Belgica, begrudged him the project, discouraging Vetus from bringing legions into a province not his own and courting favor in Gaul, and kept calling it something the emperor would find alarming — the usual way honest undertakings get blocked.
54| But once the armies stayed idle for a long stretch, a rumor spread that governors had been stripped of the right to lead them against the enemy. So the Frisians moved their young men, fit for war, into the forests and marshes, and their unwarlike population to the lakeshore, and settled on empty land set aside for the army's use, on the urging of Verritus and Malorix, who ruled that tribe as much as Germans are ever ruled. They had already built homes and sown crops, working the land as if it were their own, when Dubius Avitus, having taken over the province from Paulinus, threatened them with Roman force unless the Frisians withdrew to their old territory or got a new settlement granted by the emperor. This pushed Verritus and Malorix into pleading their case. They went to Rome, and while waiting for Nero, who was occupied with other matters, they were shown around, among the sights offered to visiting barbarians, and entered the theater of Pompey to see the greatness of the Roman people. There, having time on their hands — they were not ignorant enough to be entertained by the shows — they asked about the seating arrangement, the divisions by rank, who the knights were, where the senate sat. Noticing some men in foreign dress sitting among the senators, they asked who these were, and on hearing that this honor was given to envoys from nations that excelled in courage and in friendship with Rome, they shouted that no mortals surpassed the Germans in arms or loyalty, came down, and sat among the senators. The onlookers took this good-naturedly, as an old-fashioned impulse and honest rivalry. Nero granted both men Roman citizenship and ordered the Frisians off the land. When they refused, a sudden cavalry charge from the auxiliaries forced the issue, killing or capturing those who resisted too stubbornly.
55| The Ampsivarii then occupied that same land, a stronger tribe not only through their own numbers but through the sympathy of neighboring peoples, since they had been driven out by the Chauci and, lacking a home, were begging for safe exile. With them was a man well known among those tribes and trusted by us too, named Boiocalus, who recalled being imprisoned during the Cheruscan rebellion on Arminius's orders, and later serving under the commands of Tiberius and Germanicus, adding to fifty years of loyal service the fact that he was now bringing his own tribe under our authority. Why, he asked, should so much open plain lie idle, meant only for soldiers' cattle and herds to graze someday? Let them keep that reserve for the animals amid human hunger, so long as they didn't prefer waste and emptiness to friendly peoples. That land had once belonged to the Chamavi, then the Tubantes, and after them the Usipi. Just as the sky was given to the gods, so the earth was given to mortal kind; and land lying empty belonged to everyone. Then, looking up at the sun and naming the other stars, he asked them, as if they were present, whether they wished to gaze down on empty ground: better they pour the sea over the men who were stealing the land.
56| Avitus, moved by this, answered that they must accept the rule of their betters; it pleased the gods they appealed to that the Romans should decide what to give and what to take away, and that they endure no judges other than the Romans themselves. That was his public answer to the tribe. To Boiocalus himself he would grant land, in memory of their friendship. Boiocalus rejected this as the price of betrayal, adding, 'Land to live on may fail us — land to die on cannot.' And so they parted with hostility on both sides. The Ampsivarii called on the Bructeri, the Tencteri, and even more distant tribes to join their war. Avitus sent word to Curtilius Mancia, who led the upper army, asking him to bring his troops over the Rhine and menace the enemy's rear, while Avitus himself marched his own legions onto Tencteran soil, warning them of ruin if they did not abandon the Ampsivarii's cause. So the Tencteri backed off, and the Bructeri, frightened by the same threat, did the same; and as the rest likewise abandoned a danger not their own, the Ampsivarii alone withdrew back toward the Usipi and Tubantes. Driven from their land too, they sought refuge first among the Chatti, then the Cherusci; after long wandering as guests, destitute, and enemies on foreign soil, their fighting men were cut down, and their non-combatants divided up as spoil.
57| That same summer a major battle broke out between the Hermunduri and the Chatti over a river rich in salt deposits, which lay on their common border, and which they fought to seize by force — not only out of the usual eagerness to settle everything by arms, but from a belief, deeply held, that this ground lay especially close to heaven, and that nowhere were human prayers heard by the gods more directly. That was why, they believed, the gods' favor made salt rise in that river and those woods — not, as elsewhere among other peoples, from seawater drying up, but poured over a burning pile of timber, formed from opposite elements, fire and water, combining together. The war went well for the Hermunduri, worse for the Chatti, because the victors dedicated the defeated army to Mars and Mercury, a vow that condemns horses, men, everything conquered to slaughter. And indeed the enemy's threats turned back on themselves. But the tribe of the Ubii, allied to us, was struck by an unexpected disaster: fire broke out from the ground and swept through farmhouses, fields, and villages everywhere, spreading right up to the walls of the colony recently founded there. It could not be put out, not by rain, not by river water or any other liquid, until, out of options and enraged by the destruction, some country people began throwing stones at it from a distance, then, as the flames pushed back, moved in closer and beat at it with clubs and other blows as if driving off wild animals; finally they stripped off their clothes and threw them on it, and the more profane and worn by use the cloth was, the more it succeeded in smothering the fire.
58| That same year the Ruminal fig tree in the Comitium, which eight hundred and thirty years before had sheltered the infancy of Remus and Romulus, was seen with its branches dead and its trunk withering, and this was taken as an omen — until it sprouted new growth and came back to life.
1| In the consulship of Gaius Vipstanus and Gaius Fonteius, Nero delayed no longer a crime he had long been planning. His boldness had grown with his years in power, and his passion for Poppaea burned hotter every day. She had no hope of marrying him and seeing Octavia divorced while Agrippina lived, so she attacked the emperor with constant accusations, sometimes with mocking jokes, calling him a ward under guardianship, a man who took orders from someone else and lacked not just power but freedom itself. Why else, she asked, was their marriage being put off? Was it her looks that displeased him, or her ancestors' triumphs? Or was it her fertility, her honest devotion? No — he was afraid that a wife, at least, might expose his mother's arrogance and greed to the anger of the senate and the hatred of the people. And if Agrippina could only stand a daughter-in-law who hated her son, then let Poppaea go back to Otho's bed — she would go anywhere on earth rather than watch, from close up, the humiliations heaped on the emperor. Such talk, delivered with tears and a mistress's cunning, worked on Nero unopposed, since everyone wanted his mother's power broken, and no one believed his hatred of her would ever go as far as murder.
2| Cluvius records that Agrippina's hunger to keep her grip on power drove her so far that at midday, when wine and feasting had Nero warmed up, she would come to him often, dressed and ready, prepared for incest. The people around them noticed lascivious kisses and caresses that hinted at coming scandal. Seneca, seeing this, sought a woman's help against a woman's seduction: he sent in the freedwoman Acte, who — worried both for her own safety and for Nero's reputation — was to warn him that the incest was common talk, that his mother was going around bragging of it, and that soldiers would not tolerate a prince marked by so foul a crime. Fabius Rusticus tells it differently: it was Nero who wanted the affair, not Agrippina, and the same freedwoman's cleverness broke it off. But the version Cluvius gives is confirmed by every other source, and public rumor leans that way too — whether Agrippina really conceived such monstrous desires, or whether people simply found it easier to believe fresh depravity of a woman who, as a girl, had committed adultery with Lepidus in hopes of power, and with the same appetite had thrown herself at Pallas and trained herself in every kind of vice through her marriage to her uncle.
3| So Nero began avoiding private meetings with her. When she left for her gardens, or her estate at Tusculum or Antium, he praised her for taking a rest. Finally, wherever she was, he found her presence unbearable and decided to kill her — debating only the method: poison, the sword, or some other form of violence. Poison was his first choice. But given at the emperor's own table, it could not be passed off as accident after Britannicus had already died that way. Winning over accomplices seemed hard too, given a woman so practiced in crime and so alert to plots against her; besides, she had built up her body's resistance by taking antidotes in advance. As for the sword and open murder, no one could think how to hide it, and Nero feared that whoever was chosen for so monstrous a deed might refuse the order. Then the freedman Anicetus, commander of the fleet at Misenum and once Nero's boyhood tutor, hated by Agrippina and hating her in return, offered a clever plan. He explained that a ship could be built with a section that would come apart at sea through a hidden mechanism, throwing her into the water without warning: nothing swallows accidents so readily as the sea, and if she were lost in a shipwreck, who would be unfair enough to blame a crime on what winds and waves had done? The emperor, Anicetus added, could then build his dead mother a temple and altars and put on a show of devotion.
4| The scheme was approved, and the timing helped: the festival of the Quinquatrus was being celebrated at Baiae. Nero lured his mother there, telling everyone that a child ought to bear a parent's outbursts and try to smooth things over — the aim being to spread word of a reconciliation, which Agrippina, with the easy credulity of women where good news is concerned, was glad to believe. He went down to meet her as she arrived by boat from Antium, took her hand, embraced her, and led her to Bauli, a villa that sits where the sea curves in between the headland of Misenum and the lake of Baiae. Among the other ships moored there stood one more finely built than the rest, as if this too were meant to honor his mother — since she usually traveled by trireme, rowed by marine crews. Now she was invited to a banquet, so that night would cover the crime. It is well established that someone gave the plot away, and that Agrippina, hearing of the danger and unsure whether to believe it, was carried to Baiae by litter. There flattery calmed her fears: she was received warmly and given the seat of honor above Nero himself. Through a long meal, talking now with youthful familiarity, now turning serious as if sharing confidences, he drew things out, then walked her out as she left, clinging to her eyes and her chest longer than usual — whether to complete the act, or because even his brutal heart could not help a last look at a mother about to die.
5| The night was bright with stars, the sea calm and still, as if the gods themselves had arranged it to expose the crime. The ship had not gone far — two of Agrippina's household were with her, Crepereius Gallus standing near the tiller, Acerronia reclining at her mistress's feet and happily recalling how the son's anger had cooled and the mother's favor been restored — when, at a signal, the canopy above them, weighted heavily with lead, collapsed. Crepereius was crushed and died instantly. As for Agrippina and Acerronia, the couch's raised sides held firm enough to take the weight, and that chance saved them. The ship did not break apart as planned, since in the confusion most of the crew — not in on the plot — got in the way of those who were. The rowers then decided to tip the vessel over on one side and sink it that way, but they could not agree quickly enough on this sudden change of plan, and others pulling the opposite way gave the two women a chance to slip into the sea more gently. Acerronia, foolishly shouting that she was Agrippina and begging for help for the emperor's mother, was killed with poles, oars, and whatever ship's tackle came to hand. Agrippina, silent and so less recognized — though she took one wound to the shoulder — swam clear, then was picked up by small boats and carried into the Lucrine lake and so to her own villa.
6| There she thought it through: the flattering letter that had summoned her, the special honor she had been shown, the fact that the ship had collapsed at its upper part like some mechanical contraption on dry land, right by the shore, with no wind and no rocks to explain it. She noted, too, Acerronia's death, and, looking at her own wound, concluded there was only one way to answer a plot: pretend it had gone unnoticed. Her freedman Agerinus was dispatched to her son, with word that thanks to heaven's favor and Nero's own luck, she had come through a grave mishap alive. She asked that he, however frightened by his mother's danger, put off any visit — she needed rest for now. Meanwhile, feigning calm, she treated her wound and warmed her body, and gave orders that Acerronia's will be found and her property sealed — the one thing she did without any pretense at all.
7| Nero, meanwhile, waiting for word that the deed was done, was told instead that she had escaped with a light wound, having come close enough to danger that there could be no doubt who was behind it. Terrified, he cried out that she would be here any moment, burning for revenge — arming the slaves, perhaps, or stirring up the soldiers, or making straight for the senate and the people to accuse him of the shipwreck, her wound, the deaths of her friends. What defense did he have, unless Seneca and Burrus could think of something? He had summoned them the moment he woke — though it is unclear whether they already knew. For a long time both men said nothing, unwilling to argue against something that could not be stopped, or perhaps believing things had gone so far that if Agrippina were not struck first, Nero himself would die. At last Seneca spoke first, only far enough to turn to Burrus and ask whether the soldiers could be ordered to kill her. Burrus answered that the praetorians, bound to the whole house of the Caesars and still loyal to the memory of Germanicus, would never bring themselves to any violence against his daughter — let Anicetus carry out what he had promised. Anicetus did not hesitate: let the whole business be entrusted to him, he said. Nero's answer was that only now, on this very day, had he truly received an empire — and that it was a freedman, of all people, who had given him so vast a gift; Anicetus should move at once and pick the boldest men he had for it. As for Nero, when he learned that Agerinus had come as Agrippina's messenger, he set up a frame of his own: right as Agerinus was still speaking, a sword went down at the man's feet, thrown there by Nero, and orders followed to seize him as though caught red-handed — so that he could later claim his mother had schemed to murder the emperor and, caught out, had killed herself from shame.
8| Meanwhile word of Agrippina's danger spread, and people rushed to the shore as though it had all been an accident, everyone doing what they could: some climbed onto the breakwaters, some onto nearby boats, others waded into the sea as far as they could go, some stretched out their hands. The whole shore filled with cries, prayers, and shouting — people asking different questions, others giving uncertain answers. A huge crowd gathered with torches, and once it became known she was safe, they were ready to come and offer their congratulations, until the sight of an armed and threatening column scattered them. Anicetus surrounded the villa with a guard, broke down the door, and seized any slaves he met until he reached the door of her bedroom. A handful of people were left standing there; fear of the men crashing in had sent the rest running. Inside the bedroom, only a faint light was burning, and one maid was with Agrippina, growing more and more uneasy that no one came from her son — not even Agerinus. A happy outcome, she thought, would look different; this was silence, sudden noise, the signs of the worst. As the maid left her, Agrippina said, 'You too are deserting me' — and turned to see Anicetus, with the ship's captain Herculeius and the marine centurion Obaritus. She told him that if he had come to see her, he could report she was recovering; if he had come to do murder, she could not believe her son had ordered it — he had not commanded matricide. The killers closed around the bed. First the captain struck her on the head with a club. Then, as the centurion drew his sword to kill her, she thrust out her body and cried, 'Strike the womb' — and was finished off with many wounds.
9| All this is reported with agreement. Whether Nero looked at his mother's corpse and praised her body—some say yes, some deny it. That very night, on a couch meant for dining, her body was burned in a cheap, hurried funeral; and as long as Nero remained in power, no mound went up and no grave was ever closed over her. Later her household servants gave her a modest tomb, near the road to Misenum and the villa of the dictator Caesar, which looks down from its height over the bays below. When the pyre was lit, her freedman Mnester ran himself through with a sword—whether from love for his patroness or fear of ruin is unclear. Agrippina had foreseen this end for herself many years before, and had scorned it. When she once asked the Chaldean astrologers about Nero, they answered that he would become emperor and kill his mother. 'Let him kill me,' she said, 'so long as he rules.'
10| But only once Caesar had completed the crime did he grasp its magnitude. For the rest of that night he sat rigid in silence, now and then starting up in terror, out of his mind, waiting for daylight as though it would bring his death. Burrus encouraged him, and the first flattery of the centurions and tribunes gave him confidence—they grasped his hand and congratulated him for surviving a plot of his own mother's, sprung on him without warning. His friends then made their way to the temples, and the towns of Campania nearby, taking the cue, celebrated with sacrifices and sent delegations of their own. He himself, by a contrary pretense, seemed grief-stricken, as if angry at his own survival and weeping for his parent's death. But places do not change their look the way men's faces do, and the grim sight of that sea and shore kept confronting him (some believed a trumpet's blast was heard on the surrounding hills, and wailing from his mother's tomb). So he left for Naples, from where he wrote to the senate. The letter's substance: Agerinus, one of Agrippina's most trusted freedmen, had been caught as her hired killer, dagger in hand, and she, aware of her own guilt, had paid for it—as if the plot against Nero's life had been hers.
11| He added charges reaching further back: that she had wanted a share in the empire, had hoped the Praetorian cohorts would swear allegiance to a woman, and that the senate and people would suffer the same disgrace; that once thwarted, she had turned against the soldiers, the senators, and the people, and had argued against the donative to the troops and the largesse to the people, and had plotted against distinguished men. He described what effort it had cost him to stop her from bursting into the senate house or giving answers to foreign delegations. He also attacked the Claudian era obliquely, transferring every outrage of that reign onto his mother, reporting that she had been carried off by the good fortune of the state. He even told the story of the shipwreck—as if anyone were so dull as to believe that was an accident, or that a woman who had just survived a shipwreck could then dispatch some lone armed man to punch through the guard and fleet surrounding an emperor. So it was no longer Nero, whose monstrousness outran every complaint, but Seneca who bore the ill repute, for having written such a confession in a speech.
12| Yet the leading men competed in a strange contest: they decreed thanksgivings at every shrine, that the festival of Minerva, during which the plot had been uncovered, be celebrated annually with games, that a golden statue of Minerva be set up in the senate house with the emperor's image beside it, and that Agrippina's birthday be marked among the unlucky days. Thrasea Paetus, who used to let earlier flatteries pass in silence or brief assent, now walked out of the senate, risking himself but giving no one else the courage to follow. Portents, too, came thick and useless: a woman gave birth to a snake, another was struck dead by lightning in her husband's bed; the sun went dark without warning, and lightning struck every one of the city's fourteen districts. All this happened with so little concern from the gods that Nero went on ruling and committing crimes for many years after. To ease the ill feeling against him now that his mother was removed, and to show his newfound mildness, he restored to their homes the noblewomen Junia and Calpurnia and the ex-praetors Valerius Capito and Licinius Gabolus—all of them people Agrippina had once had exiled. He likewise permitted Lollia Paulina's ashes to return home and a tomb to be raised over them, and released from punishment Iturius and Calvisius, whom he himself had recently exiled. Silana had already died, having returned from long exile to Tarentum once Agrippina's power was failing—the very enmity that had ruined her now relaxed, or perhaps had softened.
13| He stayed on in the Campanian towns even so, unsure how Rome would receive him—would the senate obey, would the people cheer? Meanwhile the worst men in his circle (and no court ever had more of them) assured him that Agrippina's name was loathed, that her death had made him more popular, not less: he should go boldly and see their devotion for himself. And they insisted on going ahead of him. They found the welcome even warmer than promised: crowds meeting him by the roadside, the senate in festive dress, wives and children lined up by sex and age, tiered platforms built along his route as for viewing a triumph. Puffed up by this, victorious over a whole city's servility, he went up to the Capitol, gave thanks, and gave himself over to every indulgence, which some remnant of respect for his mother, however feeble, had until then held in check.
14| He had long wanted to drive a four-horse chariot in the arena, and an equally shameful desire to sing to the lyre, performer-style. He would point out that racing horses was a royal pastime, practiced by generals of old, celebrated in the praises of poets and given as an honor to the gods; and that song was sacred to Apollo, and that this god, in such attire, stood as a great and prophetic presence not only in Greek cities but at Roman temples too. He could no longer be restrained, and Seneca and Burrus decided that since they could not stop both, they would give way on one. An enclosed space was made in the Vatican valley where he could drive his horses without a public audience. Soon the Roman people were themselves invited, and praised him lavishly—the crowd being what it is, greedy for pleasures, and glad when the emperor shares its tastes. But this public exposure of his shame brought not satisfaction, as they expected, but further appetite. Thinking to lessen the disgrace by spreading it among more people, he brought onto the stage the impoverished descendants of noble families, bought for money—those who have since died I will not name, out of respect for their ancestors, though the real disgrace belongs to him who paid them to sin rather than paying them not to. He also forced well-known Roman knights to promise to perform in the arena, with huge gifts—though when the one giving the orders can also compel, a gift is really just coercion.
15| But to avoid disgracing himself yet in a public theater, he founded games called the Juvenalia, for which people signed up from everywhere. No one's rank, age, or past honors kept them from practicing the arts of the Greek or Latin stage, down to gestures and tunes fit for no man. Even distinguished women rehearsed shameful roles. In the grove that Augustus had planted around his artificial lake, little pavilions were built, taverns, and stalls selling incitements to vice. Money was handed out, which the decent spent under compulsion and the dissolute for glory. From this, vice and disgrace grew, and nothing did more to corrupt already-corrupted morals than that filthy mess. Modesty is barely kept alive even by honest pursuits—how much less could chastity or restraint or any decent custom survive amid a contest of vices? Last of all Nero himself walked onto the stage, working hard over his lyre and rehearsing with the music teachers standing by. A company of soldiers was there too, centurions and tribunes, and Burrus, grieving yet praising him. This was the occasion on which Roman knights were first signed up under the title Augustiani—men who stood out for their youth and vigor, some brazen by nature, others hoping for advancement. Day and night they thundered applause, calling the emperor's looks and voice divine, as if they were famous and honored for their own merit.
16| So that his theatrical talents alone would not be all that was known of him, he also took up an interest in poetry, gathering around him men with some small skill in composition, not yet well known. After dinner these men would sit together, stringing together verses they brought with them or made up on the spot, and filling out whatever lines Nero himself tossed off—as the style of the verses shows, not flowing from one continuous impulse or inspiration. He also gave time after meals to teachers of philosophy, enjoying watching them argue and contradict each other. And there was no shortage of men eager to be seen with a solemn face and grave look amid the emperor's entertainments.
17| About this same time, a minor spark set off a savage bloodbath between Nuceria's settlers and those of Pompeii, at a gladiatorial show staged by Livineius Regulus—the same man whose expulsion from the senate I have already noted. In typical small-town rowdiness they traded insults, then stones, then swords, the Pompeians having the stronger numbers since the show was held in their town. Many of the Nucerians were carried back to Rome with mutilated wounds, and many mourned the deaths of children or parents. The emperor left the judgment of the matter to the senate, and the senate passed it to the consuls. When it came back before the senate, the Pompeians were banned for ten years from holding any such gathering, and whatever unlawful associations they had set up were broken apart. As for Livineius and the rest who had incited the riot, exile was their punishment.
18| Pedius Blaesus was also removed from the senate, accused by the people of Cyrene of violating the treasury of Aesculapius and of corrupting the military levy through bribery and favoritism. The same Cyrenians brought charges against Acilius Strabo, who had held praetorian authority and been sent by Claudius to settle a land dispute: fields once belonging to King Apion's ancestors, left to the Roman people along with his kingdom, had been seized one after another by whoever held them next, and long-standing abuse and lawlessness were being defended as if they were legal right. When the land was taken from them by judgment, resentment fell on the judge, and the senate replied that it did not know the terms of Claudius's original commission and that the emperor should be consulted. Nero, approving Strabo's judgment, wrote back that he would nonetheless come to the aid of the allies and let them keep the land they had occupied.
19| Next came the deaths of illustrious men: Domitius Afer and Marcus Servilius, both of whom had reached the highest honors and were famous for eloquence — Afer for pleading cases, Servilius first for a long career at the bar, then for his celebrated history of Rome, and for a refinement of life that made him even more distinguished. They matched in talent but were opposites in character.
20| In the fourth consulship of Nero, with Cornelius Cossus as his colleague, a festival of games on a five-year cycle was established at Rome in the Greek style. Opinion was divided, as it usually is about anything new. Some recalled that even Pompey the Great had been criticized by the older generation for building a permanent theater. Before that, games had been staged on makeshift stands with a temporary stage, or, going back further, the audience had watched standing up, so that if they sat in a theater they wouldn't waste whole days in idleness. As for the games themselves, tradition was to be kept: whenever the praetors put them on, no citizen was required to compete. But now the ancestral customs, already fading, were being torn up by the roots through imported decadence, so that whatever could corrupt or be corrupted anywhere was now on display in Rome, and the young were degenerating through foreign pursuits — gymnasiums, idleness, and shameful love affairs — encouraged by the emperor and senate, who not only allowed vice free rein but actually pressured Rome's leading men to disgrace themselves on stage under the pretext of speeches and poems. What was left, people asked, but to strip their bodies naked too, put on boxing gloves, and train for that instead of soldiering? Would justice improve, would the juries of knights perform their solemn duty of judgment better, for having learned to appreciate broken cadences and sweet voices? Nights, too, were now given over to this disgrace, so that no hour was left for shame — instead, in the mixed crowd, whatever the most degenerate had craved by day, they now dared in the dark.
21| Most people simply liked the license itself, though they draped it in respectable language. Their ancestors, they argued, hadn't shunned the pleasures of spectacle either, given the resources of their time — hence actors brought in from Etruria, horse races from Thurii; and once Achaia and Asia were under Roman control, games were staged there with even more care, and no Roman of good birth had ever stooped to the theatrical arts, in the two hundred years since Lucius Mummius's triumph, the first man to bring that kind of spectacle to the city. It was also economical, they said, to build a permanent theater rather than spend a fortune putting one up and tearing it down every year. Nor would the magistrates drain their own fortunes as they had before, or the people pressure officials to fund Greek-style contests, since the state itself now covered the expense. Victories in oratory and poetry would spur talent; and no judge should feel burdened by devoting his ears to honest pursuits and permitted pleasures. The few nights out of the whole five-year cycle were given to festivity, not license, since with so much light from the torches nothing improper could stay hidden. In fact the show passed without any glaring disgrace, and even the common people showed no great enthusiasm, since although pantomime actors were restored to the stage, they were barred from the sacred competitions. No one won first prize for oratory — instead, Caesar was declared the victor. The Greek-style cloaks that many had taken to wearing during the festival went out of fashion soon after.
22| Meanwhile a comet blazed in the sky, which popular belief holds portends a change of ruler. So, as if Nero were already deposed, people began asking who would replace him, and the name on everyone's lips was Rubellius Plautus, noble on his mother's side through the Julian family. Plautus himself lived by the old-fashioned standards, austere in bearing, his household chaste and withdrawn, and the more he shunned attention, the greater the reputation he gained. This talk was fed further by an equally baseless reading of a lightning strike: because while Nero was dining at his villa called Sublaqueum by the Simbruine lakes, the food and table were struck, and this happened in the territory of Tibur, from which Plautus's family originally came, people believed this marked him out as chosen by divine will — and many who eagerly, if often wrongly, read omens into anything new and uncertain began to court him out of ambition. Alarmed by this, Nero wrote to Plautus advising him to look to the peace of the city and remove himself from those spreading ugly rumors about him: he had ancestral estates in Asia where he could enjoy his youth safely and undisturbed. So Plautus withdrew there with his wife Antistia and a few of his household. Around the same time, an excessive taste for luxury brought Nero disgrace and danger, when he swam in the source of the Marcian aqueduct as it entered the city; by swimming there he seemed to have profaned the holy waters and the place's sanctity alike. The grave illness that followed was taken as confirmation of the gods' anger.
23| Meanwhile Corbulo, having destroyed Artaxata, judged it best to use the fresh terror to seize Tigranocerta — razing it would deepen the enemy's terror, while sparing it would earn him a name for mercy — so he marched there, keeping his troops from open hostility so as not to close off hope of pardon, but staying alert, knowing this was a people quick to shift loyalties, as sluggish in the face of danger as they were treacherous when opportunity arose. The barbarians reacted each according to his nature: some offered submission, some abandoned their villages and fled into the wilds, and some hid themselves and their most treasured possessions in caves. So the Roman commander used different methods for each — mercy toward those who submitted, speed against those who fled, and ruthlessness toward those who had holed up in hiding, burning the mouths and passages of their caves after packing them with brushwood and kindling. As he advanced past their own borders, the Mardi, a people practiced in raiding, attacked him, a people practiced in raiding and shielded by their mountains against his advance; Corbulo sent in the Hiberi to lay waste to them, punishing their reckless daring with foreign blood.
24| Corbulo and his army, though they had suffered no losses in battle, were wearing down from want and hardship, forced to fend off hunger with the meat of pack animals. On top of that came a shortage of water, blistering summer heat, and long marches, all made bearable only by the commander's own endurance, which he shared — and more — with the common soldiers. They then reached cultivated land where the crops had already been harvested, and of two forts where the Armenians had taken refuge, one was captured by direct assault; the defenders who had beaten off the first attack were then forced into submission by siege. From there Corbulo crossed into the territory of the Tauraunitae and narrowly avoided an unforeseen danger: not far from his tent a barbarian of some standing was found armed, and under torture revealed the whole plot, naming himself as its author along with his accomplices; those who under a pretense of friendship had been preparing treachery were convicted and punished. Not long after, envoys arrived from Tigranocerta reporting that the city's gates stood open, its people awaiting orders, and presenting a golden crown as a gift of hospitality. Corbulo received it with honor and took nothing from the city, so its people would keep their goodwill undiminished and give obedience the more readily.
25| The garrison at Legerda, however, which fierce young defenders had shut up, was taken only after a real fight: they had dared to give battle before the walls, and when driven back, held out behind their fortifications until they finally yielded to a siege ramp and the swords of the attackers. This all went more smoothly because the Parthians were tied down by a war with Hyrcania. The Hyrcanians even sent envoys to the Roman commander seeking alliance, pointing out that they were holding Vologaeses in check as a pledge of their friendship. As they made their way back, Corbulo, to keep them from being surrounded by enemy patrols after crossing the Euphrates, gave them an escort to the shores of the Red Sea, from where, avoiding Parthian territory, they returned home.
26| Corbulo also drove off Tiridates, who was entering the far reaches of Armenia through Media, sending the legate Verulanus ahead with auxiliary troops and then following swiftly with the legions himself, forcing Tiridates to retreat and abandon hope of war. Wherever he found the local population hostile to Rome, Tiridates ravaged with fire and slaughter, trying to seize control of Armenia — until Tigranes arrived, chosen by Nero to take the throne. He was of the Cappadocian nobility, grandson of King Archelaus, but having spent many years as a hostage at Rome, his spirit had been broken down to something like a slave's submissiveness. His acceptance was not unanimous, since loyalty to the Arsacid line still lingered among some; but most people, sick of Parthian arrogance, preferred a king given to them by Rome. A garrison was also assigned to him — a thousand legionaries with three allied cohorts and two wings of cavalry — and to help him hold his new kingdom more securely, the neighboring regions of Armenia were ordered to obey Pharasmanes, Polemo, Aristobulus, and Antiochus respectively, according to which bordered them. Corbulo withdrew to Syria, left vacant and placed under his authority by the death of the governor Ummidius.
27| That same year Laodicea, one of the great cities of Asia, was leveled by an earthquake and recovered on its own, with no help from us. Meanwhile in Italy, Puteoli, an old town, received from Nero the rights and title of a colony. Veterans were enrolled at Tarentum and Antium, but this did nothing to relieve those towns' emptiness, since most of the settlers drifted off to the provinces where they had served out their years, unused to taking wives or raising children, and left childless households behind with no heirs. It was no longer as it had once been, when whole legions were settled together with their tribunes and centurions and the men of their own units, so that shared feeling and comradeship built a real community. Now they were strangers to one another, drawn from scattered companies, with no leader and no bonds of affection, thrown together suddenly as if from different tribes of mankind — a mere crowd, not a colony.
28| Elections for praetor had usually been left to the senate's judgment, but competition for the posts had grown so fierce that the emperor stepped in, putting the three candidates who exceeded the quota in command of a legion instead. He also enhanced the senate's standing by ruling that anyone who appealed from a private judge's verdict to the senate would risk the same sum as if he had appealed to the emperor — previously such appeals had cost nothing and carried no penalty. At year's end the Roman knight Vibius Secundus was convicted of extortion on charges brought by Moors and expelled from Italy; only his brother Vibius Crispus's influence spared him a harsher sentence.
29| In the consulship of Caesennius Paetus and Petronius Turpilianus, Britain suffered a serious defeat. The governor Aulus Didius, as I have noted, had done no more than hold what earlier commanders had won, and his successor Veranius, after some modest raids on the Silures, was stopped by death before he could press the war further — he had a great reputation for severity while he lived, but his will betrayed his vanity: he flattered Nero extravagantly, claiming he would have conquered the whole province for him had he lived two more years. At this point Britain was governed by Suetonius Paulinus, a man skilled in warfare and, thanks to public opinion, which never lets anyone go unrivaled, cast as Corbulo's rival — he wanted glory to rival Corbulo's Armenian triumph, and crushing Britain's enemies would give it to him. So he set his sights on Mona, an island thick with fighting men and sheltering fugitives, and had flat-bottomed boats built for the shallow, shifting channel there. Foot soldiers went across in these; the horsemen either forded the strait or, in the deeper stretches, swam beside their mounts.
30| A hostile force stood massed along the shore, dense with men and weapons, women running among them — dressed in black like the Furies, hair streaming, they brandished torches. Around them the Druids raised their hands to heaven and poured out terrible curses, and the strangeness of the sight froze the soldiers, who stood rooted and exposed to wounds as if their limbs had failed them. But urged on by their commander, and goading each other not to fear a mob of women and fanatics, they advanced the standards, cut down everyone in their path, and swallowed the enemy in their own fire. A garrison was then placed over the conquered, and the groves sacred to their savage superstitions were cut down — for the Druids believed it right to drench their altars in captive blood and consult the gods through human entrails. While Suetonius was occupied with this, news reached him that the province had suddenly risen in revolt.
31| Prasutagus, whose long reign over the Iceni had made him famous for his wealth, had made the emperor co-heir with his two daughters, believing that gesture would shield his household and kingdom from harm. It turned out otherwise: his kingdom was plundered by centurions, his household by slaves, as if both had been taken by conquest. His wife Boudicca was flogged, and his daughters raped. The leading men of the Iceni were stripped of their ancestral property as though the whole territory had been handed over as spoils, and the king's relatives were treated as slaves. Driven by this outrage and the fear of worse — for they had now been reduced to the status of a province — they took up arms, and stirred the Trinobantes to join the revolt, along with others who had not yet been broken by servitude and had secretly pledged themselves to recover their freedom. Their hatred burned fiercest against the veterans, who had lately been settled as colonists at Camulodunum: these men drove people from their homes, evicted them from their land, and called them captives and slaves, encouraged in their arrogance by soldiers who shared their way of life and hoped for the same license. Worse still, the temple built to the deified Claudius stood there like a citadel of everlasting tyranny, and the priests appointed to serve it drained the province's wealth under the pretext of religion. Destroying the colony seemed no great task, since it had no fortifications — a matter our commanders had given too little thought to, more concerned with pleasant living than practical defense.
32| Meanwhile, for no discernible reason, Camulodunum's statue of Victory toppled and lay with its face to the ground, as though it were fleeing the enemy. Women worked themselves into a frenzy, chanting that destruction was near; strange cries had been heard in their senate house, they said, the theater had echoed with wailing, and a phantom city lay overturned in the estuary of the Thames. The sea, too, had turned the color of blood, and at low tide left behind shapes like human corpses — omens the Britons read as hope and the veterans as dread. But since Suetonius was far away, they appealed for help to the procurator Catus Decianus. He sent barely two hundred men, and those without proper weapons, along with the small garrison already there. Trusting to the temple's protection, and hampered by secret sympathizers with the revolt who sabotaged their plans, they built neither ditch nor rampart, nor did they send away the old and the women, leaving only the young men to defend the place — as careless as if it were peacetime, until they were surrounded by a horde of barbarians. Everything outside the temple was looted or burned in the first rush; the temple itself, where the soldiers had gathered, held out under siege for two days before it fell. Riding that success, the Britons then encountered the Ninth Legion's commander, Petilius Cerialis, moving up to relieve the town; they crushed his legion and cut down every foot soldier he had. Cerialis escaped with his cavalry to the camp and held out behind its defenses. Shaken by this disaster, and by the province's hatred, which his own greed had done much to provoke, the procurator Catus fled to Gaul.
33| Suetonius, meanwhile, with remarkable nerve, pushed through enemy territory to reach Londinium — a town not distinguished by the title of colony, but thriving with merchants and supplies. There he hesitated over whether to make it his base, but weighing the thinness of his forces and the costly lesson taught by Petilius's rashness, he decided to save the larger cause by sacrificing this one town. He was unmoved by the tears and pleas of those begging for protection; he gave the signal to march, taking along any who could join the column. Those held back by weakness, old age, or attachment to the place were slaughtered by the enemy. The municipality of Verulamium suffered the same fate, since the barbarians, bypassing forts and garrisons, went gladly after the richest and least defended targets, eager for plunder and too lazy for hard fighting. It is generally agreed that some seventy thousand citizens and allies died in the places I have named. The enemy took no interest in capturing or selling prisoners, or in any of war's usual exchanges — they rushed straight to slaughter, gallows, fire, and crucifixion, as if hastening to take their revenge before having to pay for it themselves.
34| By now Suetonius had the Fourteenth Legion with him, along with detachments of the Twentieth and auxiliaries drawn from nearby posts — roughly ten thousand armed men in all — and he resolved to end his delay and offer battle. He chose ground approached through a narrow defile and closed off behind by a forest, confident that the enemy held nothing but open plain in front, with no danger of ambush. So the legionaries stood massed in close ranks, light-armed troops around them, and cavalry gathered thick on the wings. The British forces, meanwhile, surged everywhere in bands and squadrons, a greater host than had ever gathered before, and so fierce in spirit that they brought their wives along to witness the victory, setting them in wagons ranged around the field's outer edge.
35| Boudicca, driving her daughters before her in a chariot, declared to each tribe as she reached it that it was common enough for Britons to fight under a woman's leadership — but this time she came not as a queen of great ancestry avenging her lost kingdom and wealth, but as one more woman of the people, avenging lost freedom, a body broken by the lash, and the violated honor of her daughters. Roman greed had gone so far, she said, that they left nothing untouched — not bodies, not old age, not virgin innocence. But the gods stood by a just cause: the legion that had dared to fight had already fallen; the rest cowered in their camps or looked for a way to flee. They would never withstand the roar and shout of so many thousands, let alone the shock of their charge — if they weighed their numbers and the justice of their cause, they must see that on this field they had to win or die. That was a woman's resolve; the men could live and be slaves if they chose.
36| Suetonius, too, did not stay silent at this critical moment. Though confident of his men's courage, he mixed encouragement with appeal, urging them to ignore the barbarians' noise and empty threats — there were more women than fighting men in that horde. Unwarlike, unarmed, they would break the moment they recognized the steel and courage of troops who had beaten them so many times before. Even in a large army, he said, only a few actually decide the battle, and it would add to their glory that so small a force could win the fame of a whole army. Let them only stay in close order, hurl their javelins, and then keep up the killing with shield-boss and sword, without a thought for plunder — once victory was won, everything would be theirs. Such was the fire that followed his words; the veteran soldiers, so practiced in battle, made ready to hurl their javelins with such assurance that Suetonius, certain of the outcome, gave the signal to engage.
37| The legion first held its ground, using the narrow approach as a shield, and once the enemy had closed in near enough for their volleys to find their mark and run out, they burst forward in wedge formation. The auxiliaries charged the same way, and the cavalry, lances leveled, broke through whatever resistance stood firm before them. The rest of the Britons turned to flee, but escape was difficult, since their own wagons, ringed around the field, blocked the way out. The soldiers spared no one, not even the women; the baggage animals too, pierced with javelins, added to the heaps of dead. It was a victory as brilliant as any won in earlier days — some accounts claim nearly eighty thousand Britons fell, against barely four hundred Roman soldiers killed and not many more wounded. Boudicca ended her life with poison. And Poenius Postumus, camp prefect of the Second Legion, on hearing of the success won by the men of the Fourteenth and Twentieth, and ashamed at having denied his own legion an equal share of the glory by disobeying his commander's orders against military custom, ran himself through with his sword.
38| The whole army was then concentrated and kept under tents to finish off the rest of the war. Nero reinforced it, sending from Germany two thousand legionaries, eight auxiliary cohorts, and a thousand cavalry. Their arrival brought the Ninth Legion back up to strength, the cohorts and cavalry wings were settled in new winter quarters, and whatever tribes had been wavering or hostile were laid waste with fire and sword. But nothing hurt worse than famine, since the Britons had neglected to sow their fields, every age group having gone to war instead, counting on seizing our supplies for themselves. And these fiercest of peoples were slower still to bend toward peace, because Julius Classicianus, sent out to replace Catus and at odds with Suetonius, let his personal quarrels obstruct the public good. He had spread word that people should wait for a new governor, one who, without an angry conqueror's arrogance, would deal gently with those who surrendered. At the same time he wrote to Rome that they should expect no end to the fighting unless Suetonius were replaced, attributing his setbacks to the man's own perversity and his successes to luck.
39| So Polyclitus, one of the freedmen, was sent to inspect the state of Britain. Nero had great hopes that his authority could not only patch up the discord between the governor and the procurator but also pacify the rebellious tempers of the natives. Polyclitus did not fail to make himself a burden, moving through Italy and Gaul with an enormous train, and once he had crossed the Ocean he made himself a terror even to our own soldiers. But among the enemy he was a joke, for their freedom still burned fresh and they had never yet learned the power of freedmen; it amazed them that slaves could give the orders, with a general and an army standing behind them who had just brought so vast a war to its close. Still, everything was reported to the emperor in a softened light. Suetonius was kept on in command, but after he later lost a few ships on the shore along with their crews, he was ordered to hand over the army to Petronius Turpilianus, who had just laid down his consulship, on the pretext that the war was still going on. Turpilianus, provoking the enemy not at all and provoked by them just as little, dressed up his lazy inaction with the respectable name of peace.
40| That same year at Rome two notorious crimes were committed, one by a senator's daring, the other by a slave's. Domitius Balbus was a former praetor, exposed to schemers both by his great old age and by his childlessness and wealth. A relative of his, Valerius Fabianus, who was aiming at high office, forged a will for him, bringing in as accomplices the Roman knights Vinicius Rufinus and Terentius Lentinus. Between them they had already drawn in two more, Antonius Primus and Asinius Marcellus. Antonius would try any daring scheme; Marcellus, distinguished by his great-grandfather Asinius Pollio, was not thought a bad man himself, except that he believed poverty the worst of evils. So Fabianus sealed the forged document with these accomplices I have named and with others less prominent. The matter was proven before the senate, the Cornelian law then brought down Fabianus and Antonius, and Rufinus and Terentius with them. Marcellus was spared the penalty, though not the disgrace, out of respect for his ancestors and at Nero's personal request.
41| That same day's business also struck down Pompeius Aelianus, a young ex-quaestor, on the grounds that he had known of Fabianus's crimes, and he was banned from Italy and from Spain, his native province. Valerius Ponticus suffered an equal disgrace, for having brought the accused before the praetor rather than the city prefect, to keep them from being tried there — a maneuver meant, under cover of legal form, to dodge justice later through collusion. The senate added a decree that anyone who bought or sold such services should be liable to the same penalty as one convicted in open court of malicious prosecution.
42| Not long after, the city prefect Pedanius Secundus was murdered by his own slave, either because the man had been refused the freedom he had already bargained for, or because he burned with love for another slave and could not bear his master as a rival. But since ancient custom required that every slave who had lived under the same roof be put to death, a crowd gathered to shield so many innocent people, and things came close to riot; the senate house itself was besieged. Inside, opinion was divided too, some recoiling from such severity, though most held that nothing should be changed. Among these, Gaius Cassius, when his turn came to speak, argued as follows:
43| 'Many times, conscript fathers, I have sat in this body when new decrees were proposed against the institutions and laws of our ancestors, and I did not object — not because I doubted that things had once been arranged better and more rightly, and that whatever was changed was changed for the worse, but because I did not want to seem to be pushing my devotion to old custom too far. At the same time I thought I should not wear down whatever authority I have by constant objection, so that it would remain intact for the day the state truly needed it. That day has come today, with a man of consular rank murdered in his own house by a slave's treachery, a plot no one betrayed or prevented, even though the senate's decree threatening the whole household with death has not yet been shaken. Go ahead, then, vote for impunity — but whom will his own rank protect, when it did not protect the city prefect? Whom will a crowd of slaves guard, when four hundred did not guard Pedanius Secundus? Who will get help from his household, when ours does not even notice our danger out of fear for itself? Or, as some are shameless enough to imagine, did the killer avenge his own wrongs, because he had struck a bargain over his father's money or was being deprived of an inherited slave? Let us go ahead and declare that a master was rightly killed.'
44| 'Are we to go hunting for arguments against something wiser men before us already settled? But even if we had to decide this question for the first time now, do you believe a slave formed the resolve to kill his master without a threatening word escaping him, without blurting anything out rashly? Grant that he kept his plan hidden, that he got his weapon among people who suspected nothing: could he really slip past the night watch, force open the bedroom door, bring in a light, and commit the murder with everyone in ignorance? A crime gives off many warning signs beforehand. If slaves betray them, we can live singly among the many, safe among the anxious, and, if it comes to the worst, at least not die unavenged among the guilty. Even a slave born on the family estate, raised in the same household, nursing an inherited fondness for his master from childhood on — even him our ancestors did not trust. But now that we keep whole nations as our household slaves, people of different customs, with foreign rites or none at all, you will never control that mixed rabble except by fear. True, some innocent men will die. But even when a defeated army is punished by decimation, and every tenth man is clubbed to death by lot, the brave fall along with the rest. Every great example carries some injustice in it, one that is repaid to individuals by the benefit it brings the public as a whole.'
45| Not one man dared to speak directly against Cassius's opinion, but a discordant chorus answered him, voices pitying the sheer number, the age, the sex, and the plain innocence of most of the condemned; still, the vote for execution won out. Carrying it out was another matter — a mob had massed together, hurling stones and brandishing torches. Nero then rebuked the people by edict and lined the whole route along which the condemned were led to punishment with military guards. Cingonius Varro had proposed that the freedmen who had lived under the same roof should also be deported from Italy. This the emperor forbade, so that an old custom which mercy had not softened should not now be made harsher out of cruelty.
46| In the same consulship the Bithynians brought a complaint of extortion against Tarquitius Priscus and won his condemnation, to the senate's great delight — they had not forgotten that Tarquitius himself had once prosecuted his own proconsul, Statilius Taurus. Quintus Volusius, Sextius Africanus, and Trebellius Maximus conducted a census across the Gallic provinces; Volusius and Africanus, matched in noble blood, each refused to give ground to the other, and Trebellius, thanks to their rivalry, finished ahead of them both.
47| That year Memmius Regulus died, a man distinguished by authority, steadiness, and reputation, so far as such things can shine at all in the shadow cast by an emperor's greatness — so distinguished that once, when Nero fell ill and the flatterers around him were saying the empire would end if anything happened to him by fate, Nero answered that the state had a resource. Asked in whom above all, he had named Memmius Regulus. Yet Regulus lived on after this, protected by his own quiet manner and by the fact that his rank, though newly won, carried no wealth to provoke envy. That same year Nero dedicated a gymnasium and, with Greek open-handedness, supplied oil for the knights and the senate.
48| Under the consulship of Publius Marius and Lucius Afinius, the praetor Antistius, whom I have already mentioned as having behaved recklessly while tribune of the plebs, took to composing scurrilous verses against the emperor and read them aloud before a packed table at a dinner in the house of Ostorius Scapula. Cossutianus Capito brought the charge of treason against him — Capito, only lately returned to the senate after his father-in-law Tigellinus interceded on his behalf. Not since the old days had that law been invoked, and it was widely believed that the aim was not so much Antistius's destruction as glory for the emperor, who could then use a tribune's veto to save from death a man condemned by the senate. When Ostorius testified under oath that he had heard nothing, the witnesses against Antistius were believed instead, and the consul-elect Junius Marullus proposed stripping the defendant of his praetorship and putting him to death in the ancient manner. As the rest fell in line with this, Paetus Thrasea, after paying Nero great honor and denouncing Antistius sharply, argued that whatever a guilty defendant deserved to suffer, it was not for the senate, under so excellent an emperor and bound by no compulsion, to decree it: the executioner and the noose had long since been abolished, and the laws provided punishments that could be imposed without cruelty on the judges' part or disgrace to the age. Rather, Antistius should be sent to an island, his property confiscated — the longer he dragged out his guilty life, the more wretched he would be in private, and the more striking an example of the state's public mercy.
49| Thrasea's independence broke the servility of the others. Once the consul allowed a vote by division, they crossed the floor to his side, all but a few — among them Aulus Vitellius, quickest of all to flatter, who baited every honest man with insults and fell silent whenever one answered back, as timid natures do. But the consuls did not dare carry out the senate's decree; instead they wrote to Caesar reporting the consensus. Nero, torn between shame and anger, finally wrote back that Antistius, provoked by no injury, had spoken the gravest insults against the emperor; the senators had demanded punishment for this, and a penalty proportioned to so great an offense would have been just. But he himself, though he might have blocked their severity, would not stand in the way of their restraint — let them decide as they wished; they were free to acquit as well. When this letter, and others like it, were read out, the emperor's displeasure was plain — yet the consuls did not withdraw the motion, nor did Thrasea back down, nor did the others abandon what they had approved: some, so as not to seem to have exposed the emperor to public resentment; more of them, simply because their numbers made them safe; Thrasea, from his usual firmness of spirit, and because he would not let his reputation slip.
50| Fabricius Veiento was caught up in a similar charge, for having written much slander against the senators and priests in books he called his 'Codicils.' His accuser, Tullius Geminus, added that he had sold imperial appointments and the right to office. This gave Nero grounds to take up the case himself. Veiento, convicted, was banished from Italy, and his books were ordered burned — which only made people hunt them down and read them eagerly while the danger lasted; once it became legal to own them, they were forgotten.
51| But as the public evils worsened day by day, the props holding things up grew fewer. Burrus died, whether from illness or poison is uncertain. Illness was suggested by the fact that his throat gradually swelled and closed until it choked off his breath. Many claimed that on Nero's orders his palate had been smeared, as if for treatment, with a poisonous drug, and that Burrus, sensing the crime, when the emperor came to visit him, turned his face away and, when asked how he was, answered only: 'I am well enough.' The city long felt his loss, remembering his virtue and comparing it to the sluggish harmlessness of one successor and the blazing vices of the other. For Caesar had set two men over the praetorian cohorts: Faenius Rufus, who enjoyed popular favor because he ran the grain supply without profiteering, and Sofonius Tigellinus, chosen for his long-standing shamelessness and disgrace. Each lived up to his known character — Tigellinus stronger in the emperor's favor, taken into his most intimate vices; Rufus enjoying the goodwill of people and soldiers, which told against him with Nero.
52| Burrus's death broke Seneca's power, since the good in Nero had lost half its strength once one of its guides was removed, and Nero began leaning toward worse men. These attacked Seneca with various charges: that he kept piling up wealth already grown beyond any private measure, still increasing it; that he was drawing the loyalty of citizens to himself; that in the beauty of his gardens and the splendor of his villas he seemed to outdo the emperor himself. They also charged that he claimed the glory of eloquence for himself alone and had taken to writing poetry more often now that Nero had developed a taste for it. For he openly mocked the emperor's amusements, disparaging his skill at driving horses and jeering whenever he sang. How much longer, they asked, would nothing count as distinguished in the state unless it was believed to have come from Seneca? Nero's boyhood was surely over, his young manhood at full strength — let him dismiss his tutor; he had ancestors enough to serve as teachers.
53| Seneca, well aware of his accusers — for some who still cared for decency told him, and Caesar's growing coldness toward his company confirmed it — asked for a private audience, and when it was granted began: 'It is now the fourteenth year, Caesar, since I was attached to your rising hopes, the eighth since you have held power. In that time you have heaped so many honors and so much wealth on me that nothing is lacking to my good fortune except moderation in it. Let me use great precedents — not from my own standing, but from yours. Your great-great-grandfather Augustus allowed Marcus Agrippa the retreat of Mytilene, and Gaius Maecenas a kind of exile within Rome itself; one had been his partner in war, the other worn down by many labors in the city — both received rewards ample enough, though hardly equal to their vast services. What have I offered your generosity in return, except studies raised, so to speak, in the shade? The credit I have gained comes from seeming to have assisted the first steps of your youth — a great enough reward in itself. Yet you have surrounded me with immense favor, with countless money, so that I often turn this over in my mind: I, born to equestrian and provincial standing, am counted among the foremost men of the state. Has my newness shone out among nobles who parade generations of honors? Where is that spirit once content with little? Does it build such gardens, walk through these suburban estates, swell with such vast lands, such wide-flung interest on loans? Only one defense occurs to me — that I ought not to have resisted your gifts.
54| But each of us has filled his measure — you, of what an emperor can grant a friend; I, of what a friend can receive from an emperor. Anything beyond that only feeds envy — which, like everything mortal, lies far beneath your greatness, but weighs on me; it is I who must be relieved. Just as a man exhausted by soldiering or by the road asks for a support to lean on, so in this journey of life, an old man unequal even to the lightest cares, unable to carry my wealth any further, I ask for help. Order my estate managed through your own agents, absorbed into your fortune. I will not be thrusting myself into poverty, but having handed over what dazzles me with its glitter, I will reclaim for my mind the time now spent tending gardens or villas. You still have strength, and for so many years now have shown yourself capable of the highest command; we older friends may fairly ask to be allowed our rest. This too will add to your glory — that you raised to the heights men who could also bear moderate circumstances.'
55| To this Nero replied more or less as follows: 'That I can answer your prepared speech at once — this I owe first to you, who taught me to handle not only what is foreseen but what is sudden. My great-great-grandfather Augustus granted Agrippa and Maecenas rest after their labors, but he himself had reached an age whose authority could back up whatever he chose to give, of whatever kind; and even so he stripped neither man of the rewards he had given. They had earned theirs in war and danger — Augustus's youth was spent amid such things; had I been living under arms, your hand and your weapons would not have been lacking to me either. But what my situation called for, you supplied — reason, counsel, guidance — first for my boyhood, then for my youth. And your gifts to me will last as long as life remains; what you have from me — gardens, interest on loans, villas — are exposed to accident. They may look like much, but many men in no way equal to you in ability have held more. I am ashamed to mention the freedmen who are seen as richer than you. It even makes me blush that you, who stand first in my affection, do not yet outstrip everyone else in fortune.
56| No, your strength is still equal to your affairs and to enjoying what they bring, and I myself am only entering the first stretch of my reign — unless perhaps you rank yourself below Vitellius, three times consul, or me below Claudius, and think my generosity cannot fill for you what Volusius's long thrift gained for himself. If anything in my youth slips toward the treacherous, why not correct it and guide my strengthening years with even closer support? It will not be your moderation people talk of if you give back the money, nor your peace and quiet if you abandon the emperor, but my greed, the fear of my cruelty, on every tongue. And even if your restraint were praised to the skies, it would still be unworthy of a wise man to win glory for himself out of what would bring infamy on his friend.' To this he added an embrace and kisses, being by nature and long practice skilled at masking hatred with deceitful warmth. Seneca — for such is how every conversation with a ruler ends — gave thanks. But he changed the habits of his former power: he barred the crowds that came to pay respects, avoided those who wished to accompany him, appeared rarely in the city, as though poor health or devotion to philosophy kept him at home.
57| With Seneca struck down, it was easy work to undermine Faenius Rufus, since informers accused him of friendship with Agrippina. Tigellinus, growing stronger by the day and reckoning that his sinister talents, the only ones he had, would win more favor if he bound the emperor to him in shared crime, probed at Nero's fears. He found two men Nero dreaded above all others: Plautus, banished lately to Asia, and Sulla, sent off to Narbonese Gaul — and he dwelt on their noble birth and their nearness to armies, Plautus to those of the East, Sulla to those of Germany. He himself, he said, unlike Burrus, looked to no divided hopes but only to Nero's safety: against plots in the city he could be guarded on the spot, but how could distant uprisings be checked? Gaul was primed by the name of Dictator, and Asia's people were no less unsettled by the fame of Plautus's grandfather Drusus. Sulla was poor — hence his outstanding boldness — and only feigned laziness while he waited for an opening for recklessness. Plautus, rich, did not even pretend to want a quiet life, but paraded old-Roman airs, adding the arrogance of the Stoics and their sect, which breeds men restless and hungry for action. There was no more delay. Six days after the killers reached Marseilles, Sulla was murdered before he had time to fear or even hear rumor of it, reclining at a dinner party. His head was brought back, and Nero mocked it, saying his premature gray hair disfigured him.
58| The plot against Plautus could not be kept so quiet, since many were concerned for his safety, and the distance by land and sea, with the time that passed, gave rumor room to grow. People invented stories that he had appealed to Corbulo, then commanding large armies — for if famous, innocent men were killed, he stood first in line for danger. They said too that Asia had taken up arms out of favor for the young man, and that the soldiers sent to do the murder, too few in number and unwilling in spirit, had gone over to the cause of revolution once they found they could not carry out their orders. Such idle talk, as usual, grew fatter on the credulity of idle people. But a freedman of Plautus, faster than the wind itself, outran the centurion, carrying word from his father-in-law, Lucius Antistius: let him flee rather than die a coward's death, while flight was still open; pity for so great a name would win him good men, and rally the bold; meanwhile no help should be scorned. If he beat off sixty soldiers — for that was the number coming — before the news reached Nero, before another force could arrive, much might follow that could grow into open war. In short, either this course found safety, or a man who dared it would suffer nothing worse than a man who did nothing.
59| But none of this moved Plautus — whether because, unarmed and an exile, he saw no real help; or from weariness with uncertain hope; or from love of his wife and children, thinking the emperor would be gentler if not stirred by any alarm. Some say other messages came from his father-in-law, saying nothing terrible was imminent, and that his teachers of philosophy, Coeranus the Greek and Musonius of Etruscan stock, urged him to face death steadily rather than live an uncertain, fearful life. Certainly he was found, at midday, naked and exercising his body. So the centurion struck him down, with the eunuch Pelago looking on — a man Nero had placed in charge over the centurion and his detachment, as if a palace servant were fit to command soldiers. The severed head was brought back; and at the sight of it — I will give the emperor's very words — Nero said, 'Why, Nero …' [the emperor's words break off here in the manuscript] Then, fear laid aside, he pressed on to bring forward his marriage to Poppaea, delayed till now by such alarms, and to remove his wife Octavia — who, modest as her conduct was, still troubled him — her father's name and the people's fondness for her a constant weight on him. To the senate he sent a letter about the deaths of Sulla and Plautus, admitting nothing outright, but claiming both men had been dangerously restless, and that he himself watched constantly over the state's safety. Thanksgivings were voted on this pretext, and both Sulla and Plautus were struck from the senate's rolls — mockery heaped on murder.
60| So, once he had the senate's decree in hand, and saw that all his crimes were being received as splendid achievements, he drove out Octavia, calling her barren, and married Poppaea. She, long his mistress and Nero's partner in adultery, now his wife and in power, pushed one of Octavia's own servants to charge her with a slave's love affair. The man named as the guilty party was called Eucaerus, an Alexandrian by birth, skilled at playing the flute. Her maids were put to torture over this, and though the violence of it broke some into agreeing to false statements, most held firm in defending their mistress's honor. One of them, pressed hard by Tigellinus, answered that Octavia's private parts were purer than his mouth. Even so, Octavia was removed at first under the appearance of an ordinary divorce, and received Burrus's house and Plautus's estates — ill-omened gifts. Soon she was driven to Campania, kept under military guard. From this came constant complaints, openly voiced among ordinary people, whose limited wisdom and modest fortunes leave them with fewer risks to fear. These complaints made it seem as if Nero, repenting his crime, had recalled his wife Octavia.
61| So the crowds, rejoicing, went up to the Capitol and finally offered thanks to the gods. Poppaea's statues they pulled down; Octavia's likenesses they hoisted onto their shoulders, scattering flowers, and set them up in the forum and in temples. They even broke into praises of the emperor … [the Latin here is corrupt] They were already filling the Palace with their numbers and shouting when squads of soldiers, sent out with whips and drawn swords, scattered the disorderly crowd. What the riot had overturned was set right again, and Poppaea's honors were restored. She, always cruel from hatred, now savage too from fear — fear that the mob's violence might grow fiercer, or that Nero might be swayed by the people's sympathy — threw herself at his knees. Her own position, she said, was not the issue here, though it mattered more to her than life; what was truly in extreme danger was her very life, threatened by the dependents and slaves of Octavia, who had given themselves the name of 'the people' and dared, in peacetime, what would scarcely happen in war. Those were arms taken up against the emperor himself; only a leader was missing, and one would easily be found once things were stirred up — Octavia need only leave Campania and come to Rome in person, where her mere nod, even from a distance, could summon riots. What wrong, after all, had she herself done, what offense to anyone — except that she was about to give the house of the Caesars true offspring? Did the Roman people prefer the child of an Egyptian flute-player raised to imperial rank? In short, if it served the state's interest, let him summon his mistress home willingly rather than under pressure — or else look to his own safety. A just punishment and moderate remedies had quieted the first disturbances; but if people despaired of Octavia ever being Nero's wife, they would find her a husband.
62| Her speech, varied and calculated to provoke both fear and anger, terrified Nero as he listened and inflamed him at once. But suspicion resting on a slave carried little weight, and had already been discredited by the torture of the maids. So it was decided to seek a confession from someone onto whom a charge of revolution could also be pinned. Anicetus seemed suited to the task — the same man who had carried out the murder of Nero's mother, as I have told, and who commanded the fleet at Misenum. For a while after that crime he had enjoyed some favor, but later fell into deeper hatred, since men who serve in evil deeds are looked on as if they were a standing reproach. So Nero summoned him and reminded him of his earlier service: he alone, Nero said, had come to the emperor's rescue against a plotting mother; now an equal chance for gratitude awaited him if he would drive away a hostile wife. No violence or weapon was needed this time — only that he confess to adultery with Octavia. Nero promised rewards, secret for now but substantial, along with a pleasant place of retirement, if he confessed; if he refused, he threatened him with death. Anicetus, with his native shamelessness and made easy by his earlier crimes, invented even more than he was told to and confessed before friends the emperor had assembled, as if to take counsel. Afterward he was sent into exile on Sardinia, where want never touched him, and he died there of natural causes.
63| Nero, meanwhile, put out an edict claiming that the prefect had been bribed with hope of winning the fleet's support, and — forgetting that he had shortly before accused her of barrenness — now said Octavia had procured abortions out of consciousness of her own lust, facts he claimed to have discovered himself. On these grounds he confined her to the island of Pandateria. No exile ever moved the eyes of onlookers to greater pity. Some still remembered Agrippina, banished by Tiberius; a more recent memory was Julia, driven out by Claudius. But those women had been in the strength of their years; they had known some happiness, and could ease present cruelty with the memory of a once-better fortune. For this girl, her wedding day had been like a funeral from the start, brought into a house that held nothing but grief for her — her father taken by poison, and soon after her brother; then a servant girl grown stronger than her mistress, and Poppaea married for no purpose but the ruin of the wife; and finally, an accusation more crushing than any death.
64| And so the girl, in her twentieth year, surrounded by centurions and soldiers — already, by grim foreboding, cut off from life though not yet at rest in death — was, after a few days more, ordered to die. She protested that she was now only a widow, only a sister, and invoked the shared name of the Germanicus family and, at the last, the name of Agrippina — in whose lifetime her marriage, though unhappy, had at least been survived without ruin. She was bound with cords and her veins opened in every limb; and because her blood, slowed by terror, flowed too slowly, she was killed by the steam of an overheated bath. To this was added a crueler cruelty still: her severed head was carried to Rome, where Poppaea saw it. For all this, offerings were decreed in the temples — how long shall we go on recording such things? Whoever comes to know the events of those times, from my account or another's, should take it as understood: as often as the emperor ordered exile or death, so often thanks were given to the gods, and what had once marked good fortune had now become the sign of public disaster. Even so I will not stay silent, whenever a senate's decree marked some new low in flattery or some final depth of submission.
65| In that same year, In that same year he was believed to have poisoned the most powerful of his freedmen: Doryphorus, killed for opposing the emperor's marriage to Poppaea, and Pallas, killed for the vast fortune he had hoarded through a long old age. Romanus had privately accused Seneca of complicity with Gaius Piso, but Seneca turned the same charge back on him with greater force. This left Piso afraid, and out of that fear grew the great and ill-fated conspiracy against Nero.
1| Meanwhile Vologeses, king of the Parthians, had learned what Corbulo had done and that a foreigner, Tigranes, had been set on the throne of Armenia. That, together with the expulsion of his brother Tiridates, made him want to avenge the insult to the dignity of the Arsacid house. But the greatness of Rome and his respect for their long-standing treaty pulled him toward other concerns. He was cautious by nature, and he was tied down by wars against the Hyrcanians, a strong people who had just revolted from him. While he wavered, fresh news of an insult spurred him on: Tigranes had marched out of Armenia and ravaged the Adiabenians, a neighboring people, more widely and for longer than mere raiding would explain, and the leading men of the nations found this hard to bear. They had sunk so low in contempt, they said, that they were not even attacked by a Roman general, but by the recklessness of a man who had spent years as a hostage among slaves. Monobazus, who held power in Adiabene, fanned their resentment, asking what protection he could count on, or from whom. Armenia, he said, was already given up; the next lands were being dragged down too. If the Parthians would not defend them, surrender to Rome meant lighter servitude than being taken by force. Tiridates too, exiled from his kingdom, made his weight felt more by his silence, or by measured complaints, than an outburst would have: great empires are not held by cowardice, he said. Men and arms must settle the contest. In the highest fortunes, the stronger claim is the fairer one, and while private households may keep what is their own, it is a king's glory to fight for what belongs to others.
2| Stirred by all this, Vologeses called a council, set Tiridates next to himself, and began: 'This man, born of the same father as I, ceded me the highest title on account of my age, and I established him in possession of Armenia, which ranks as the third seat of power — Pacorus had already taken Media before him. I believed I had rightly settled our family's affairs against the old hatreds and rivalries between brothers. The Romans forbid it, and now, as always, they break a peace they have never disturbed with success, this time to their own ruin. I will not deny it: I preferred to hold what our ancestors won by fairness rather than blood, by claim rather than arms. If I have erred through delay, I will make it right through courage. Your strength and glory remain untouched, and to them is added a reputation for restraint, which even the greatest of men should not despise, and which the gods themselves take into account.' With that he bound the diadem around Tiridates's head, handed over a ready force of cavalry — the escort that customarily follows a king — to the nobleman Monaeses, added Adiabenian auxiliaries, and ordered him to drive Tigranes out of Armenia. He himself, having set aside his quarrel with the Hyrcanians, began mustering his main forces and the full weight of war, threatening the Roman provinces.
3| Once Corbulo had solid confirmation of the report, two legions went to reinforce Tigranes, led by Verulanus Severus and Vettius Bolanus, with private instructions to move cautiously rather than in haste — since he wanted the war prolonged, not actually fought. He had written to the emperor that Armenia needed its own dedicated commander, since Syria was now in graver danger with Vologeses bearing down on it. Meanwhile he stationed his remaining legions along the bank of the Euphrates, armed a makeshift force of provincials, and blocked the enemy's approaches with garrisons. And since the region was short of water, he built forts over the springs and buried some streams under heaps of sand.
4| While Corbulo made these arrangements to protect Syria, Monaeses pushed his column forward at speed to outrun his own reputation, but even so caught Tigranes neither ignorant nor unprepared. Tigranes had already occupied Tigranocerta, a city strong both in the number of its defenders and the size of its walls. Besides that, the river Nicephorius, of no small width, ran around part of the walls, and where the river could not be trusted a huge ditch had been dug. The garrison was in place, with supplies laid in beforehand; a few men, sent out too eagerly to bring in more, were surrounded by a sudden enemy attack, and their anger rather than fear fired up the rest. But the Parthians have no stomach for close combat when pressing a siege: their scattered arrows neither frighten the defenders behind walls nor accomplish anything, they merely waste themselves. When the Adiabenians began to bring up ladders and siege engines, they were easily driven off, and then cut down when our men made a sortie.
5| Corbulo, though, thought it wise to temper his success rather than press his luck, and sent men to Vologeses to protest the violence done to a Roman province: an allied and friendly king was under siege, along with Roman cohorts. Better to lift the siege — or he too would pitch camp on enemy soil. The centurion Casperius, chosen for this mission, approached the king at the town of Nisibis, thirty-seven miles from Tigranocerta, and delivered the message boldly. Vologeses had long held a deep aversion to clashing with Roman arms, and things were not going well for him at the moment either: the siege had failed, Tigranes stood secure with men and supplies intact, the force sent against the city had been beaten back, legions had been sent into Armenia, and others posted to cover Syria were ready to take the offensive themselves. His cavalry, meanwhile, was weakened for lack of fodder, since a plague of locusts had stripped every green and leafy thing bare. So he masked his fear in gentler language, replying that envoys would go to Caesar to ask for Armenia and negotiate a durable peace. He ordered Monaeses to abandon Tigranocerta, and he himself withdrew.
6| Many hailed this as a great achievement, brought about by fear of the king and Corbulo's threats. Others read it differently: that a secret bargain had been struck, so that both sides would drop the war, Vologeses would withdraw, and Tigranes too would leave Armenia. For why else was the Roman army pulled back from Tigranocerta? Why give up in peace what had been held by war? Was wintering in hastily built huts on the far Cappadocian frontier truly preferable to holding the very seat of the kingdom just won back? The war, they said, was simply postponed, so that Vologeses would face someone other than Corbulo, and Corbulo, whose glory had been earned over so many years, would risk it no further. As I have said, he had asked for a dedicated commander to defend Armenia, and word came that Caesennius Paetus was on his way. He was already there, in fact, with the forces divided so that Paetus took command of the Fourth and Twelfth Legions, together with the Fifth just transferred from Moesia and the Pontic, Galatian, and Cappadocian auxiliaries, while Corbulo kept the Third, Sixth, and Tenth, along with Syria's veteran troops. The rest were to be shared or divided as circumstances required. But Corbulo could not stand a rival, and Paetus, who would have counted it glory enough to rank second, instead looked down on what had been achieved, insisting it amounted to no killing and no plunder, and that the capture of cities was 'capture' in name only. He himself, he said, would impose tribute, laws, and Roman rule on the conquered, in place of the mere shadow of a king.
7| At about this time the envoys of Vologeses, whom I mentioned as sent to the emperor, returned having accomplished nothing, and the Parthians took up war openly. Paetus did not shrink from it: with two legions, the Fourth then commanded by Funisulanus Vettonianus, the Twelfth by Calavius Sabinus, he entered Armenia under a grim omen. While crossing the Euphrates on a bridge, the horse carrying the consular insignia bolted backward for no visible reason. And a sacrificial victim, standing beside the winter camp then under construction, broke free mid-sacrifice, burst through the half-finished works, and got clear of the rampart. The soldiers' javelins also caught fire — an especially striking portent, since the Parthian enemy fights with missile weapons of their own.
8| Paetus, however, ignored the omens. Before the winter camp was properly secured, and with no provision made for grain supply, he hurried his army across Mount Taurus, meaning, as he put it, to recover Tigranocerta and lay waste the regions Corbulo had left untouched. He did capture some forts and won a measure of glory and plunder — had he only kept the glory in proportion, or handled the plunder with care. Marching long distances over ground that could not actually be held, with the supplies he had seized already spoiling and winter now closing in, he led the army back and wrote to Caesar as if the war were finished — in grand language, but empty of substance.
9| Meanwhile Corbulo, who had never neglected the bank of the Euphrates, held it with denser garrisons. And to keep enemy cavalry from interfering with his bridge-building — for they were now ranging freely and conspicuously over the open plains below — he sent out especially large ships, lashed together with beams and fitted with towers, drove them along the river, and used catapults and ballistae to drive off the barbarians, whose arrows in return could not match the range of the stones and spears reaching them. Then the bridge was completed and the hills opposite were occupied, first by allied cohorts, then by legionary camps, with such speed and such a show of force that the Parthians abandoned their plan of invading Syria and turned all their hopes toward Armenia — where Paetus, unaware of the danger closing in, kept the Fifth Legion far off in Pontus and had weakened the rest by granting his soldiers indiscriminate leave, until word came that Vologeses was approaching with a huge and hostile force.
10| The twelfth legion was summoned, and the very move Paetus had hoped would swell his army's reputation instead exposed how thin it was. Even so, the camp might have held and the Parthian could have been strung along, if Paetus had shown any consistency—either in his own plans or in following someone else's. But once soldiers of real experience had steadied him against the mounting danger, he swung back the other way to avoid looking dependent on another man's judgment, and things got worse. So now he abandoned his winter camp, shouting that he needed no ditch or rampart—his men's bodies and weapons were his defense against the enemy—and led the legions out as though marching to a pitched battle. Then a centurion and a handful of scouts he'd sent to gauge enemy numbers were lost, and he scurried back in a panic. And because Vologeses had not pressed him very hard, his confidence swelled again, groundlessly, and he posted three thousand picked infantry on the nearest ridge of the Taurus range to block the king's crossing, and posted his Pannonian cavalry, the mainstay of his mounted force, out on the plain. His wife and son went into hiding at a fort called Arsamosata, a cohort left to guard them—and his troops scattered, when kept together they would have held off a roving enemy more readily. They say he was barely brought to admit that Vologeses was pressing him and to call on Corbulo. Corbulo was in no hurry, so that the danger, by growing worse, would make the credit for rescue all the greater. Still, he ordered a thousand men each from his three legions and eight hundred cavalry, with an equal number from the auxiliary cohorts, made ready to march.
11| Vologeses, though he'd learned the roads were blocked by Paetus—infantry on one side, cavalry on the other—changed nothing in his plan. He simply terrified the cavalry with force and threats and crushed the legionaries, except for one centurion, Tarquitius Crescens, who dared defend the tower he was guarding, breaking out repeatedly and cutting down the barbarians who came too close, until he was surrounded by hurled fire. Any infantry who came through unhurt fled to remote, trackless country; the wounded made it back to camp, and out of fear they magnified everything—the king's courage, the enemy's savagery and numbers—and found ready believers in men already just as frightened. Even the commander stopped fighting the disaster; he abandoned every duty of his post, and sent to Corbulo again, begging him to come quickly and save the standards, the eagles, and what was left of the name of an unlucky army: they would hold out, he said, as long as life allowed.
12| Corbulo, unshaken, left part of his forces in Syria to hold the fortifications along the Euphrates, and set out by the shortest route with no shortage of supplies—through Commagene, then Cappadocia, then into Armenia. Along with the army's usual war train came a great number of camels loaded with grain, so he could fend off hunger along with the enemy. The first of the beaten men he met was Paccius, a senior centurion, then a great many soldiers. As they offered various excuses for their flight, he told them to return to the standards and try Paetus's mercy—he himself, he said, was only harsh to men who won. At the same time he went to his own legions, encouraged them, reminded them of past glory, and pointed to a new kind of glory now in reach: not Armenian villages or towns but a Roman camp with two legions inside were the prize of this effort. If an emperor's own hand gave the special crown for saving a single citizen to each ordinary soldier, what honor, how great, when the men who brought rescue would equal in number the men who received it! Roused together by this and more—and some were driven by their own stake, having brothers or kinsmen in danger—they pressed on, marching day and night without stop.
13| Vologeses pressed the besieged even harder for this, attacking now the legions' rampart, now the small fort where the noncombatants were sheltered, coming in closer than Parthians usually do, hoping the rashness would draw the enemy into open battle. But the Romans could barely be pulled from their tents, and defended nothing but their fortifications—some on the commander's orders, others from their own cowardice or because they were waiting for Corbulo, and, in case real force came at them, they kept in mind the disasters of the Caudine Forks and Numantia: the Samnites, after all, were only an Italian people, not rivals of the Roman empire like the Parthians. Even strong and celebrated ancient Rome, whenever fortune turned against it, had looked to its own survival. Driven by this despair over his army, the commander still wrote his first letter to Vologeses not as a suppliant but in the tone of a man with a grievance: that the king was making war against Armenia, which had always belonged to Rome or to a king of Rome's own choosing; peace on equal terms would serve them both; Vologeses shouldn't look only at the present moment—he himself had come against just two legions with the whole strength of his kingdom, but Rome still had the rest of the world to draw on for this war.
14| To this Vologeses replied with nothing about the actual dispute, only that he had to wait for his brothers Pacorus and Tiridates: the place and time were set for their council to decide on Armenia; and the gods had added something worthy of the Arsacids—that they should also decide the fate of the Roman legions. After this messengers went to Paetus, and a meeting with the king was requested; Vologeses sent his cavalry commander, Vasaces. Paetus brought up the Luculli, the Pompeys, and whatever the Caesars had done to hold or grant Armenia; Vasaces answered that we had only the appearance of holding or granting it—the real power lay with the Parthians. After much back-and-forth argument, Monobazus of Adiabene was brought in for the next day as witness to whatever they agreed. It was settled: the siege would be lifted from the legions, the whole force would quit Armenian soil, and the forts along with their stores would pass into Parthian hands; only then could Vologeses freely send envoys on to Nero.
15| Meanwhile, over the river Arsanias, which ran alongside the camp, he threw a bridge—ostensibly to ease his own crossing, though the Parthians had it built as a trophy of victory, since it suited their purposes; our men took a different road. Rumor added that the legions had been sent under the yoke, and other details from the same run of bad news, which the Armenians then acted out for real. They entered the fortifications before the Roman column had even finished leaving, and lined the roads, recognizing and dragging off men or animals that had once been captives of theirs; clothes were even torn off, weapons seized, while the frightened soldiers let it happen rather than give any excuse for a fight. Vologeses had the arms and bodies of the fallen piled up as proof of our defeat, but he spared himself the sight of our legions in flight—he was already after a reputation for restraint, now that his pride had been satisfied. He crossed the river Arsanias mounted on an elephant, while those closest to the king forced their horses through by main strength, since a rumor had spread that the bridge would give way under the weight through the treachery of its builders; but those who dared cross found it solid and reliable.
16| As for the besieged men, it's established they actually had so much grain left that they set fire to their own storehouses—while Corbulo, by contrast, reported that the Parthians were themselves running short of supplies, their fodder used up, and would have given up the siege, and that he himself had been no more than three days' march away. He adds that Paetus swore an oath before the standards, with witnesses the king had sent to record it, that no Roman would enter Armenia until word came back from Nero on whether he agreed to peace. If that detail was invented to deepen the disgrace, the rest is no less well known: that Paetus covered forty miles in a single day, abandoning the wounded everywhere along the way, and that the panic of men in flight was as shameful a sight as if they had actually broken and run in battle. Corbulo went to meet them with his own troops on the Euphrates bank, but took care that his standards and gear not be paraded in a way that would rub in the contrast. His men, grieving and pitying their comrades' fate, could not even hold back tears; the greeting between the two forces was barely spoken through the weeping. Gone now was any rivalry in courage or hunger for glory—the feelings of fortunate men; only pity remained, and it ran stronger in the lower ranks.
17| A brief exchange followed between the two commanders, Paetus complaining that all his effort had been wasted, that the war could have been ended by the Parthians' flight; Corbulo answered that both their forces were still whole and untouched: let them turn the eagles around and together invade Armenia, weakened now by Vologeses's withdrawal. He had no such orders from the emperor, Corbulo said; he had left his province because the legions were in danger; since the Parthians' next move was uncertain, he would head back to Syria: even so, they would need real luck for his infantry, worn out from long marches, to catch up with cavalry moving fresh and fast across open plains. So Paetus wintered in Cappadocia; meanwhile messengers came from Vologeses to Corbulo, asking him to dismantle the forts beyond the Euphrates and, as before, make the river the boundary between them. Corbulo demanded in turn that Armenia be cleared of all garrisons on both sides. In the end the king gave way; Corbulo tore down what he had built beyond the Euphrates, and the Armenians were left without either side controlling them.
18| At Rome meanwhile trophies over the Parthians and an arch were being raised in the middle of the Capitoline hill—voted by the senate while the war was still undecided, and not called off even now, so long as it looked good, with no regard for the truth. And to hide his worries about foreign affairs, Nero dumped grain spoiled by age into the Tiber, to keep up the appearance that the food supply was secure. Its price went up not at all, even though a storm had destroyed nearly two hundred ships right in the harbor, and a chance fire had consumed another hundred that had been brought up the Tiber. He then put three former consuls—Lucius Piso, Ducenius Geminus, and Pompeius Paulinus—in charge of the public revenues, criticizing earlier emperors who had let heavy spending eat up the state's legitimate income: he himself, he said, was giving the treasury sixty million sesterces a year.
19| A corrupt fashion had spread by this time: when elections drew near or provinces were being assigned by lot, many childless men would take on fake adopted sons, then, once they'd drawn their praetorships and provinces among the fathers, promptly emancipate the men they'd adopted. Real fathers came to the senate in a storm of resentment, laying out the law of nature, the labor of actually raising children, against this fraud and its shortcut adoptions. Being childless, they argued, was reward enough already — security, no burdens, favor and honors falling into your lap. The promises of the laws, long waited for, were being turned into a joke, when a man could become a father without any worry and childless again without any grief, matching in an instant what real fathers had spent years hoping for. As a result the senate decreed that a sham adoption would count for nothing in public appointments, and would not even help in claiming an inheritance.
20| Next Claudius Timarchus of Crete was put on trial, on the usual charges brought against provincials grown too powerful and too rich, who then abuse their standing over lesser men. One remark of his had gone so far as to insult the senate itself: word had gotten around that he alone could settle, at his own whim, whether the men who had governed Crete as proconsuls received a vote of thanks. Thrasea Paetus turned the occasion to the public good. Having moved that the man be banned from the province of Crete, he added this: 'Experience has shown, conscript fathers, that good laws and honorable precedents are born out of other men's crimes. That's how the license of orators produced the Cincian law, the corruption of candidates the Julian laws, the greed of magistrates the Calpurnian decree — for the offense always comes before the penalty, and correction always comes after the wrongdoing. So, against this new arrogance in our provincials, let us take a course worthy of Roman good faith and firmness, one that takes nothing away from the protection of our allies but frees us from having our reputations judged anywhere but by our fellow citizens.
21| 'Once, not just a praetor or consul but even private citizens were sent out to inspect the provinces and report back on how each governor's conduct looked. Whole nations shook at the thought of that verdict. These days it's foreigners we court and flatter — a nod from them gets thanks voted, and just as easily gets a man accused. Let it stay that way — let provincials keep this means of showing their power. But let false praise, squeezed out by begging, be reined in just as much as malice and cruelty are. We sin more often, in fact, by currying favor than by giving offense. Some virtues are actually hated — an unbending strictness, a spirit that won't bend to favor-seeking. That's why the start of a governor's term is usually better than its end, since by the end we're chasing votes like candidates for office. If that's cut off, provinces will be governed more evenly and more consistently. Just as greed has been checked by fear of extortion charges, so ambition will be checked by banning votes of thanks.'
22| His motion was received with great applause. Even so, the decree could not be finalized, since the consuls refused to put the matter forward. Later, at the emperor's prompting, it was enacted that no one should raise before the provincial assembly the question of votes of thanks to be moved in the senate for propraetors or proconsuls, nor should anyone serve on such a delegation. In the same consulship, the gymnasium was struck by lightning and burned, and the statue of Nero inside it melted down to a shapeless lump of bronze. And an earthquake largely destroyed Pompeii, the well-known town in Campania. The Vestal Virgin Laelia died, and Cornelia, of the Cossus family, was chosen to take her place.
23| In the year Memmius Regulus and Verginius Rufus held the consulship, Poppaea bore Nero a daughter, and his joy at it went beyond anything human, and named her Augusta, giving Poppaea the same title. The birth took place at the colony of Antium, where he himself had been born. The senate had already commended Poppaea's pregnancy to the gods and made public vows on her behalf, which were now multiplied and paid in full. Supplications were added, a Temple of Fertility decreed, and a contest modeled on the religious festival at Actium; golden images of the Fortunes were to be placed on the throne of Capitoline Jupiter; circus games were ordered, to honor the Claudian and Domitian houses at Antium just as the Julian house was honored at Bovillae. It all came to nothing — within four months the infant was dead. Then flattery sprang up again, with proposals for the honors of a goddess, a shrine, a temple, a priest. Nero, who had known no restraint in his joy, showed none now in his grief either, and threw himself into the part completely. It was noted that while the whole senate poured out to Antium right after the birth, Thrasea alone was forbidden to go — and took the insult, an omen of the killing to come, without flinching. They say Caesar afterward boasted to Seneca that he was reconciled with Thrasea, and that Seneca congratulated Caesar on it — which only swelled the glory, and the danger, of these two outstanding men.
24| Meanwhile, at the start of spring, envoys of the Parthians arrived bringing King Vologeses' instructions and letters to the same effect: he was now dropping his earlier, oft-repeated demand to hold Armenia, since the gods, arbiters even of the mightiest nations, had handed possession to the Parthians — not without dishonor to Rome. He recalled recently trapping Tigranes; and later, when he could have crushed Paetus and his legions, letting them go unharmed. He had proved his strength well enough; he had also given a demonstration of mercy. And Tiridates would not refuse to come to Rome to receive the diadem, if not held back by his priestly duties. He would go to the standards and the emperor's images, and take up his kingship there in front of the legions.
25| Since Paetus, in his own dispatches, had written the opposite as though nothing had been lost, Nero questioned the centurion who had come with the envoys about the actual state of Armenia. He answered that all Romans had withdrawn from it. Then, realizing the mockery in the barbarians' demand — asking to be given what they had already seized — Nero consulted the leading men of the state on whether to choose a doubtful war or a dishonorable peace. There was no hesitation over war. Corbulo, who through so many years had come to know both our soldiers and the enemy, was put in command of the campaign, so that no fresh blunder by some other man's incompetence would repeat what Paetus's failure had caused. So the envoys were sent back empty-handed, though with gifts, to give some hope that Tiridates' same requests would not go unanswered if he brought his pleas in person. Syria's administration was given to Gaius Cestius, the military forces to Corbulo; and the Fifteenth Legion was added, brought from Pannonia under Marius Celsus. Letters went out to tetrarchs, kings, prefects, and procurators, and to the praetors governing the neighboring provinces, ordering them to obey Corbulo, with his authority enlarged to roughly the scope the Roman people had once granted Gnaeus Pompeius for the war against the pirates. When Paetus returned, fearing something far worse, Caesar was content to needle him with jokes — telling him, more or less, that he was pardoning him at once, so that a man so quick to panic wouldn't fall ill from worrying any longer.
26| Corbulo, meanwhile, transferred the Fourth and Twelfth legions to Syria — they had lost their best men and the rest were too shaken to be fit for battle — and instead led into Armenia the Sixth and Third legions, whose men were untouched and whose training had been hardened by frequent, successful campaigns. He added the Fifth Legion, which had been stationed in Pontus and had escaped the disaster entirely, along with the newly arrived men of the Fifteenth, detachments of picked troops from Illyricum and Egypt, whatever cavalry wings and auxiliary cohorts he had, and the forces supplied by the allied kings — the whole mass assembled at Melitene, the point he'd chosen for crossing the Euphrates. There, once the army had been purified with the customary rites, he called an assembly and opened with a grand account of the emperor's auspices and his own achievements, brushing off the setbacks as Paetus's incompetence — speaking with the kind of weighty authority that, in a soldier, stands in for eloquence.
27| He then pressed on along the route once opened by Lucius Lucullus, clearing what age had let grow over. Envoys arrived from Tiridates and Vologeses to discuss peace; Corbulo gave them a hearing rather than a refusal, and had centurions escort them back carrying terms that were far from harsh — things had not yet reached the point of needing a final showdown. Fortune had favored the Romans in many things, the Parthians in some, and that was a lesson against arrogance on either side. It would suit Tiridates, then, to receive as a gift a kingdom untouched by devastation; and Vologeses would do better to look out for the Parthian nation through an alliance with Rome than through mutual losses. He knew how much discord lay within Parthia, and how unruly and fiercely proud the peoples he ruled were; his own emperor, by contrast, faced unbroken peace everywhere else, and this was his only war. At the same time, Corbulo added intimidation to persuasion: he drove out the Armenian nobles who had been first to desert us, tore down their strongholds, and struck equal fear into strong and weak alike across the plains and the highlands.
28| Even among the barbarians, Corbulo's name carried no hatred, no hostility, and so they trusted his counsel as honest. Vologeses, accordingly, without pressing hard overall, asked for a truce covering certain districts; Tiridates asked for a place and a day to meet. The barbarians chose a time close at hand and a place — the very spot where Paetus and his legions had recently been besieged — for the memory of their happier outcome there; Corbulo did not avoid it either, reckoning that the contrast in fortunes would only add to his glory. Nor was he troubled by Paetus's disgrace — which was clear enough from the fact that he ordered Paetus's own son, a tribune, to lead his company and cover the remnants of that bad defeat. On the appointed day, Tiberius Alexander, a distinguished Roman knight assigned as an aide for the campaign, and Annius Vinicianus, Corbulo's son-in-law, not yet of senatorial age and placed in command of the Fifth Legion as acting legate, came to Tiridates' camp — an honor to him, and a pledge against any fear of treachery. Twenty horsemen were then added on each side. At the sight of Corbulo, the king leapt down from his horse first; Corbulo did not hesitate either, and both men, on foot, clasped right hands.
29| Then the Roman commander praised the young man for abandoning rash courses and taking up safe and salutary ones. Tiridates, after a long preamble on the nobility of his line, added the rest more moderately: he would go to Rome, he said, and bring Nero fresh glory — an Arsacid coming as a suppliant not because Parthian fortunes had turned against him. It was then agreed that Tiridates would lay his royal diadem before Caesar's image and take it up again only from Nero's own hand; and the conference ended with a kiss. A few days later, with great display on both sides, the cavalry drew up in squadrons on one side, arrayed in their native finery, while on the other stood the legions in their ranks, eagles and standards gleaming, and images of the gods set up as in a temple. In the middle a tribunal held a curule chair, and the chair held an image of Nero. Tiridates advanced to it, offered the customary sacrifice, then took the diadem off his own head and laid it down at the image's feet. Everyone watching was moved, for the memory of Roman armies cut down or besieged still lay close to the surface. But now, they thought, fortune had reversed itself: Tiridates was about to be paraded before the nations, and how much less than a captive was that?
30| Corbulo added to the glory of the occasion with his own graciousness and with banquets; and the king, whenever he noticed something new, kept asking the reasons for it — how the start of the night watches was announced by a centurion, how a trumpet call broke up the feast, how the altar set up before the general's headquarters was lit by a torch thrust beneath it. Corbulo magnified everything, and his admiration for the old Roman customs left a deep impression on Tiridates. The next day the king asked for time before setting out on so long a journey, so that he might first visit his brothers and his mother. Meanwhile he handed over his daughter as a hostage, along with a letter of supplication to Nero.
31| Setting off, he found Pacorus among the Medes and Vologaeses at Ecbatana — a brother not indifferent to his fate. Vologaeses had in fact sent his own messengers to Corbulo asking that Tiridates be spared any mark of servitude: that he not be made to hand over his sword, nor be barred from embracing the provincial governors, nor be made to stand at their doors — that he receive in Rome the same honor given to consuls. Evidently a man raised on foreign pride had no notion of us: among Romans real power matters, empty show is let pass.
32| That same year the emperor extended Latin rights to the peoples of the maritime Alps. He also gave the seats of the Roman knights precedence over those of the common people at the circus, for until then they had gone in without distinction, since the Roscian law dealt only with the fourteen rows. The gladiatorial games that year were as splendid as before, but more women of rank and more senators disgraced themselves in the arena than ever.
33| Under the consulship of Gaius Laecanius and Marcus Licinius, Nero was driven by a daily sharpening appetite to perform before the public. Until then he had only sung at home or in his gardens, at the Juvenile Games — which he now scorned as too small an audience, too narrow a stage for so great a voice. Still, he did not dare to begin at Rome. He chose Naples instead, as a Greek city, meaning to make it the starting point: from there he would cross into Achaea, win the ancient and honored crowns, and, with greater fame behind him, draw out the enthusiasm of the citizens at home. So a crowd of townspeople gathered, along with people summoned from the nearby colonies and towns by word of the event, and those who followed Caesar out of duty or for various uses of their own — even companies of soldiers — and filled the theater of Naples.
34| What happened there most people took as an ill omen; Nero himself called it providential and a sign of favor from the gods, for after the audience that had been present left, the theater collapsed, empty, and no one was hurt. So he composed songs of thanks to the gods and celebrated his own good fortune in the recent disaster, and, on his way to cross the Adriatic, stopped meanwhile at Beneventum, where Vatinius was putting on a lavish gladiatorial show. Vatinius was one of the most disgusting figures at that court — raised in a shoemaker's shop, with a twisted body and a talent for crude jokes. He was first taken up as a target for mockery, but grew so powerful by informing against the best men that in influence, in wealth, and in his capacity to do harm, he outranked even the worst.
35| While Nero attended Vatinius's show, even his pleasures did not keep him from crime. In those very days Torquatus Silanus was driven to his death, because along with the distinction of the Junian family he claimed the deified Augustus as a great-great-grandfather. His accusers were ordered to charge him with squandering money in bribes, with no hope left him but revolution — that he even kept freedmen he called by the titles of secretary, petitions officer, and accountant: names, they said, that pointed to high ambitions and its preparations. His closest freedmen were at once bound and dragged off; and as condemnation drew near, Torquatus cut the veins of his arms. Nero followed with his customary speech: that though guilty, and with good reason distrustful of his defense, Torquatus would still have lived had he waited for the mercy of his judge.
36| Not long after, having set Achaea aside for the present — the reasons for this are unclear — Nero returned to Rome, his mind privately turning over the provinces of the East, Egypt above all. He then issued an edict promising he would not be gone long, and that the state would stay just as stable and flourishing throughout; then he climbed to the Capitol to mark his departure. There he paid his respects to the gods; but on entering the temple of Vesta as well, he suddenly began trembling in every limb — whether frightened by the divine presence, or never free of fear because of the memory of his crimes — and gave up the plan, saying repeatedly that every other concern weighed less with him than his love of his country. He claimed to have seen the sorrowful faces of the citizens, to have heard their private complaints, that he meant to go so far away when they could not bear even his brief absences, accustomed as they were to draw comfort from the sight of their emperor against life's misfortunes. Just as in private ties the closest bonds carry the most weight, he said, so the Roman people held the greatest claim on him and must be obeyed when it held him back. Such talk pleased the common people, eager for their entertainments and, their chief worry, fearing shortages of grain if he were away. The senate and the leading men could not decide whether he was more to be feared at a distance or close at hand; and then, as tends to happen with great fears, they judged the worse had actually happened.
37| Nero himself, to make his claim convincing that nothing pleased him so much as Rome, set up banquets in public places and used the whole city as if it were his own house. The most notorious of these feasts for extravagance and reputation were the ones arranged by Tigellinus — I will describe them as a single example, so as not to have to recount the same excess again and again. On the pool of Agrippa he built a raft on which the banquet was set, to be towed about by other boats. The boats were inlaid with gold and ivory, and the rowers were male prostitutes arranged by age and by skill in vice. He had sent for birds and wild beasts from foreign lands, and creatures of the sea from as far as the Ocean. Along the edges of the pool stood brothels filled with women of rank, and across from them naked prostitutes could be seen. Then came obscene gestures and movements; and once darkness fell, the whole grove nearby and the surrounding buildings rang with song and blazed with light. Nero himself, defiled by every excess licit and illicit, had left nothing more depraved to indulge in — except that a few days later he was formally married, in the manner of a solemn wedding, to one of that polluted crowd, a man named Pythagoras. The bridal veil was placed on the emperor, witnesses were sent for the omens, there was a dowry, a marriage bed, wedding torches — everything, in short, that even in a woman's case the night usually conceals.
38| Next came a disaster — whether by chance or by the emperor's design is uncertain, for authors have reported both — but it was worse and more terrible than anything else that has ever happened to this city through the violence of fire. It began in the part of the Circus adjoining the Palatine and Caelian hills, where, among shops stocked with goods that feed a flame, the fire caught and, at once strong and driven by the wind, swept the whole length of the Circus. There were no walled mansions, no temples ringed by stone, no barrier of any kind in its way. Racing on unchecked, it consumed the level ground first, then rose to the heights, then ravaged the lower districts again, outrunning every countermeasure by its sheer speed, in a city exposed by its narrow, twisting streets and irregular blocks — the pattern of old Rome. Added to this were the wails of terrified women, the helpless very old and the very young, people trying to save themselves and others trying to save their families, some dragging the disabled, some waiting for them — some delaying, some hurrying — all of it slowing everything down. Often, while people looked back over their shoulders, they were surrounded from the sides or in front; or if they escaped into a nearby district, that too caught fire, and even places they had thought far enough away turned out to be caught in the same ruin. In the end, unsure what to avoid and what to seek, they crowded the roads or threw themselves down in the fields. Some, having lost everything, even their daily bread, chose to die rather than live, though the way out lay open; others died for love of relatives they had failed to save. No one dared fight the flames — there were repeated threats from many who forbade putting it out, and others openly threw torches, shouting that they had orders to do so — whether to loot more freely or on actual instructions.
39| Nero was at Antium when it started, and stayed away until the flames were closing in on the house he had used to link the Palatine to Maecenas's gardens. Even so it could not be stopped from devouring the Palatine, his house, and everything around it. But as comfort to a people driven out and homeless, he threw open the Campus Martius and Agrippa's monuments, even his own gardens, and had makeshift shelters thrown up for the destitute crowds; supplies were brought in from Ostia and the neighboring towns, and he pushed the price of grain down to three sesterces. Popular as these measures were, they came to nothing, because a rumor had spread that while the city was actually burning, he had gone on stage in his own house and sung of the fall of Troy, likening the present disaster to the calamities of old.
40| Only on the sixth day, near the foot of the Esquiline, did the fire finally stop, after buildings across a huge stretch had been torn down so that the fire's relentless advance would meet an open field, a stretch of empty sky. Fear had not yet settled, nor had the people's hope returned, when the fire broke out again, this time in more open parts of the city. Fewer people died as a result, but temples of the gods and porticoes built for pleasure fell more widely. This second fire caused more scandal because it started on land belonging to Tigellinus at the Aemilian estate, and it seemed Nero wanted the credit of raising a new city and stamping his own name on it. Fourteen districts make up Rome. Of these, four were still standing whole, three were leveled to the ground, and in the remaining seven only a few traces of buildings survived, torn and half-burned.
41| It would not be easy to count the number of houses, apartment blocks, and temples that were lost. But among the most ancient and sacred were the shrine that Servius Tullius had dedicated to the Moon, the great altar and temple that the Arcadian Evander had consecrated to Hercules present among men, the temple of Jupiter the Stayer vowed by Romulus, the Regia of Numa, and the shrine of Vesta with the household gods of the Roman people. Also burned were riches gained through so many victories, the finest works of Greek art, and old, untouched monuments of literary genius — so that even amid all the beauty of the city rising again, older people could still recall much that could never be replaced. Some noted that the fire began on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of August, the same date on which the Senones had burned the captured city centuries before. Others went further still, counting out the exact same number of years, months, and days between the two fires.
42| Nero, meanwhile, made use of his country's ruin. He built himself a house whose wonder lay not so much in gems and gold — long familiar, made common by luxury — as in fields and lakes, and, in the manner of a wilderness, woods here and open vistas there, designed by his engineers Severus and Celer, men with the ingenuity and nerve to try through art what nature had denied and to squander an emperor's resources for sport. They had promised to dig a navigable canal from Lake Avernus all the way to the mouth of the Tiber, running across barren shoreline or through opposing mountains — for there is no water in that region to feed it apart from the Pontine marshes; everything else is sheer cliff or parched soil, and cutting through it, even if possible, would demand labor no one could bear, for little gain. Nero nonetheless, being a man drawn to the impossible, made the effort to dig through the hills nearest Avernus. The traces of that failed hope still remain.
43| As for the part of the city left over from his house, the rebuilding was not, as after the Gallic fire, done without plan or order, thrown up wherever people happened to be standing. Instead, streets were laid out in measured blocks, with wide avenues, buildings kept to a limited height, open courtyards, and porticoes added to shield the front of the apartment blocks. Nero pledged that he would build these porticoes himself and hand the cleared sites over to their owners. He added rewards scaled to each person's rank and means, and set a deadline within which houses or blocks had to be finished to collect them. He designated the Ostian marshes to receive the rubble, and ordered that ships which had brought grain up the Tiber should go back downriver loaded with debris. Buildings themselves were required, in a fixed portion, to be built solid with Gabine or Alban stone rather than wood beams, since that stone resists fire. Water, formerly diverted by private abuse, was now to flow more freely and in more places for public use, watched over by officials; and everyone was required to keep firefighting equipment ready in the open. Houses were no longer to share party walls but each to be surrounded by its own. These measures, adopted for practical reasons, also gave the new city a certain beauty. Still, there were those who believed the old layout had actually been healthier, since the narrow streets and tall buildings had not let the sun's heat through so easily, whereas now the open, unshaded spaces baked under a heavier, more punishing sun.
44| Such were the precautions taken by human planning. Soon after, expiatory rites were sought from the gods, and the Sibylline Books were consulted. On their instruction, prayers were offered to Vulcan, Ceres, and Proserpina, and Juno was propitiated by married women, first on the Capitol, then at the nearest stretch of sea, where water was drawn to sprinkle the goddess's temple and image; and women whose husbands were living held banquets of the gods and all-night vigils. But no human effort, no largess from the emperor, no offerings to the gods could shake off the belief that the fire had been ordered. So, to kill the rumor, Nero produced culprits and inflicted the most exquisite punishments on a group hated for their vices, whom the crowd called Christians. The man who gave them that name, Christus, had been executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. Checked for a moment, that deadly superstition broke out again, not only through Judea, where the evil first began, but even through Rome, where every horrifying and shameful thing from all over the world collects and finds a following. First those who admitted to being Christians were arrested; then, on their information, a huge number were convicted, not so much on the charge of arson as for hatred of the human race. Their deaths were made a mockery: some were dressed in the skins of wild animals and torn apart by dogs, others were nailed to crosses, others set ablaze and, when daylight faded, burned to serve as torches for the night. Nero offered his own gardens for the show and put on games in the Circus, mingling with the crowd dressed as a charioteer or standing in a chariot himself. And so, though these were guilty men deserving the harshest punishment, pity for them began to stir, because they seemed to be destroyed not for the public good but to satisfy one man's cruelty.
45| Meanwhile, to raise money, Italy was stripped bare, the provinces ruined, and with them the allied peoples and the so-called free cities. Even the gods were plundered for this purpose: temples in Rome were stripped, and the gold that generations of Romans had dedicated in triumph or in vow, in prosperity or in fear, was carried off. Throughout Asia and Achaea it was not just offerings but the very statues of the gods that were seized, once Acratus and Secundus Carrinas had been sent to those provinces. The one was a freedman ready for any outrage; the other had picked up Greek learning only on his lips, without ever letting it shape his character for the better. Seneca, it was said, asked to withdraw to some distant country estate to turn suspicion of the sacrilege away from himself, and when that was refused, pretended illness — sickness of the nerves — and did not leave his bedroom. Some report that poison, prepared by Nero's order, was brought to him by his own freedman, named Cleonicus, but that Seneca avoided it, either because the freedman warned him or through his own wariness, living meanwhile on the simplest food and wild fruit, drinking, when thirst pressed him, from running water.
46| Around the same time, gladiators at the town of Praeneste attempted a breakout but were held in check by the garrison of soldiers stationed to guard them. Already the people, as is their way — eager for upheaval and just as quickly frightened by it — were spreading rumors of another Spartacus and the old disasters. Not long after, news came of a naval disaster — not from war, peace had rarely held so steady — but Nero had fixed a deadline for the fleet's return to Campania and would brook no delay, whatever risk the sea posed. So the pilots, despite a raging sea, set out from Formiae; and battling a heavy southwest wind as they tried to round the headland of Misenum, they were driven onto the shore at Cumae and lost most of their triremes and many smaller vessels scattered along the coast.
47| At the end of the year, omens spread that were said to foretell coming disasters: lightning struck more often than ever before, and a comet appeared — always, for Nero, atoned for with noble blood. Babies were born to humans and to animals with two heads and abandoned in public, or found among the sacrificial victims, since it is customary to sacrifice pregnant animals. And near Placentia, right along the roadside, a calf came into the world with its head sprouting from one of its legs. The soothsayers interpreted this to mean that another head was being prepared for the state, but that it would not be strong, and would not remain hidden, since it had been suppressed in the womb and born beside the road rather than in the normal place.
48| The consulship now passed to Silius Nerva and Atticus Vestinus, and in that same span a conspiracy already underway swelled in size. Senators, knights, soldiers, even women, competed to join it, driven partly by hatred of Nero and partly by favor for Gaius Piso. Piso, born of the Calpurnian family and connected through his father's noble blood to many distinguished houses, had a shining reputation with the common people, thanks either to real virtue or to something that looked very much like it. He used his eloquence in defending citizens, was generous to his friends, and spoke pleasantly and easily even with strangers. He also had the advantages of fortune: a tall build, a handsome face. But he had no real depth of character, no restraint in his pleasures; he indulged in frivolity, extravagance, and sometimes outright excess — and many approved of exactly that, wanting, amid such widespread fondness for vice, a supreme ruler who was neither too strict nor too severe.
49| The conspiracy did not begin from Piso's own ambition. Nor could I easily say who first started it, or whose urging stirred up what so many later took up. Judging by how bravely they faced death, the boldest were a praetorian tribune, Subrius Flavus, and a centurion, Sulpicius Asper. Fierce hatred also drew in Annaeus Lucanus and Plautius Lateranus. Lucanus was driven by personal grievances, since Nero, in his vanity, was suppressing the fame of his poems and had forbidden him to perform them publicly. Lateranus, consul-elect, joined not out of any personal injury but from love of the republic. Flavius Scaevinus and Afranius Quintianus, both of senatorial rank, took up so great a crime in a way that ran against their own reputations: Scaevinus's mind was slack with luxury, and his life accordingly sluggish with sleep; Quintianus was notorious for effeminacy and had been publicly mocked in a scurrilous poem by Nero, and set out to avenge the insult.
50| So while they traded talk—among themselves and with friends—of the emperor's crimes and how the end of his rule was near, and of who should be chosen to rescue a state in ruins, they drew in a group of Roman knights: Claudius Senecio, Cervarius Proculus and Vulcacius Araricus, Julius Augurinus and Munatius Gratus, Antonius Natalis and Marcius Festus. Chief among these, Senecio, had once been among Nero's closest intimates and still kept up a show of friendship with him, which put him at the greatest risk of all. Natalis shared every secret with Piso. As for the rest, they pinned their hopes on a change of regime. Military men were brought in too, in addition to Subrius and Sulpicius, already mentioned: the praetorian tribunes Gavius Silvanus and Statius Proximus, along with the centurions Maximus Scaurus and Venetus Paulus. Yet they believed their greatest strength lay in Faenius Rufus, the praetorian prefect, a man praised for his character and reputation, whom Tigellinus—through sheer viciousness and shamelessness—was outdoing in the emperor's favor, wearing him down with accusations and repeatedly terrifying him with the charge that he had been Agrippina's lover and now, missing her, was bent on revenge. So once it became clear, from Rufus's own frequent remarks, that even the praetorian prefect had joined the conspirators, they began discussing the time and place of the murder more boldly. Subrius Flavus was said to have been seized by the urge to attack Nero while he was singing on stage, or when, unguarded, he ran about at night as his house burned. In the first case the solitude offered its chance; in the second, the very crowd of witnesses to so glorious a deed spurred him on—if only the wish to escape unpunished, always the enemy of great undertakings, had not held him back.
51| Meanwhile they hesitated, stretching hope and fear alike, a certain Epicharis—no one knows quite how she learned of the plot, for she had never before shown any concern for honorable causes—began to fire up the conspirators and reproach them. At last, worn out by their slowness, and being in Campania at the time, she set about undermining the loyalty of the leading officers of the fleet at Misenum and binding them to the secret, starting this way. There was a ship's captain in that fleet, Volusius Proculus, who had helped Nero murder his mother, though he felt he had never been rewarded in proportion to the size of his crime. He had known the woman before, or their friendship was newly struck up; either way, as he told her of his services to Nero and how they had come to nothing, adding complaints and a declared wish for revenge if the chance arose, she began to hope he could be won over and could bring others in. The fleet would be no small help, and its officers offered many opportunities, since Nero delighted in spending time on the sea around Puteoli and Misenum. So Epicharis said more, laying out the emperor's crimes one after another, and how nothing remained for the Senate. But, she said, a way had been found to make him pay for wrecking the state: he need only gird himself for action and bring the fiercest of the soldiers over to their side, and he could expect a fitting reward. She kept the conspirators' names to herself, though. So Proculus's information, when he carried what he had heard to Nero, came to nothing. Epicharis was summoned and confronted with her accuser, and since he had no witnesses to back him, she easily talked her way out of it. But she herself was kept in custody, Nero suspecting that even claims he could not prove might not be false.
52| Fear of betrayal, though, pushed the conspirators to move up the killing, planning it now at Baiae, in Piso's villa, whose charms drew the emperor there often, where he would bathe and dine, dropping his guard and the weight of his rank. But Piso refused, pleading that it would look bad if the sanctity of his table and the gods of hospitality were stained with the blood of any emperor, however unworthy: better to carry out, in the city, in that house so hated and built from the spoils of citizens' fortunes—or in public—what they had undertaken for the republic's sake. That was the reason he gave openly. But privately he also feared that Lucius Silanus, a man of outstanding birth, trained by Gaius Cassius (in whose household he had been raised) to every kind of distinction, might seize power instead—since those who had taken no part in the conspiracy, and those who would pity Nero as a victim of crime, would readily hand it to him. Many also believed Piso avoided Vestinus the consul, a man of sharp temper, for fear he might push things toward liberty, or, if another were chosen emperor, might turn the state into a gift of his own giving. In fact Vestinus had no part in the conspiracy at all, though Nero used the charge to satisfy an old hatred against an innocent man.
53| In the end they fixed on the day of the Circus games in honor of Ceres to carry out their plan, since Nero, who rarely went out and kept himself shut up at home or in his gardens, made a point of attending the circus shows, and access to him was easier amid the excitement of the spectacle. They had worked out the order of the ambush: Lateranus, pretending to beg help for his finances, would fall pleading at the emperor's knees and, being strong of spirit and huge of body, would knock him down and pin him while he was off guard; then, as he lay there struggling, the tribunes and centurions and any of the rest bold enough would rush in and cut him down, with Scaevinus claiming the lead for himself. He had taken his dagger—so the story went—from the temple of Salus in Etruria, or, according to others, of Fortuna in the town of Ferentinum, and he carried it about as though consecrated to a great purpose. Meanwhile Piso was to wait at the temple of Ceres, from where the prefect Faenius and the others would fetch him to the praetorian camp, accompanied by Antonia, daughter of the emperor Claudius, to win over the crowd's favor—so Pliny records. I have no wish to suppress the story, however it has come down, though it seems absurd either that Antonia would have lent her name and risked her life for an empty hope, or that Piso, known for his devotion to his wife, would have bound himself to another marriage—unless the lust for power burns hotter than every other passion.
54| It is remarkable how the secret was kept among people of such different rank, age, sex, and wealth, until betrayal began in Scaevinus's own household. The day before the plot was to be carried out, he talked at length with Antonius Natalis, then went home and sealed his will. He drew the dagger mentioned earlier from its sheath, complained it was dulled with age, and had his freedman Milichus sharpen it on a whetstone to a fine edge. That same day he threw a dinner more lavish than his custom, freed a few of his favorite slaves, and gave money to others; he himself seemed downcast, plainly absorbed in some weighty thought, though he tried to feign cheer with rambling talk. Finally he told this same Milichus to prepare bandages and whatever would stop bleeding from wounds—whether Milichus already knew of the conspiracy and had been loyal to it all along, or knew nothing and only then, as most accounts have it, grew suspicious from what followed. For as his servile mind weighed the rewards of betrayal, and vast wealth and power rose before him, right and the safety of his patron and the memory of the freedom he had been given all gave way. He had even taken his wife into his confidence—worse advice, and typical of a woman: she went further and stoked his fear, pointing out that many other freedmen and slaves had stood by and seen the same things; one man's silence would help nothing, but the reward would go to whoever informed first.
55| So at first light Milichus set off for the Gardens of Servilius. Turned away at the gate, he kept insisting he brought news, great and terrible, until the doorkeepers led him to Nero's freedman Epaphroditus, and from him to Nero himself, where he pressed the danger and laid out, heavily, the conspirators and everything else he had heard or guessed. He also showed the weapon prepared for the murder, and Nero ordered the accused summoned. Scaevinus was dragged in by soldiers and began his defense: the dagger he was charged with, he said, had long been honored in his family and kept in his bedroom, and had been stolen by the freedman's trickery. As for his will, he had signed and resealed it many times before, without keeping careful track of the days. The money and freedom he had given his slaves he had given before too, only more generously this time, because his fortune was thin and creditors were pressing, and he no longer trusted the will to hold up. As for lavish dinners, he had always kept a generous table, living a pleasant life that stern judges found little to approve of. As for the bandages, he had ordered none himself—but since everything else Milichus had thrown at him openly fell flat, the man tacked on this last charge, in which he made himself both informer and witness. He added firmness to his words, going so far as to attack the wretched, criminal freedman with such steady voice and face that the accusation nearly collapsed—had not Milichus's wife reminded him that Antonius Natalis had held long, secret talks with Scaevinus, and that both men were close to Gaius Piso.
56| So Natalis was summoned, and the two were questioned separately about what that conversation had been and what it concerned. Their answers did not match, and suspicion arose; they were put in chains. They could not bear the sight of the instruments of torture, nor the threats. Natalis broke first—he knew more of the whole conspiracy and was also quicker at accusing others—and named Piso, then added Annaeus Seneca, either because Seneca really had gone between him and Piso, or to win Nero's favor, since Nero, hostile to Seneca, was hunting for any means to destroy him. When Scaevinus learned of Natalis's confession, he too, with the same weakness—or perhaps believing everything was already out and there was no profit left in silence—gave up the rest. Of these, Lucan, Quintianus, and Senecio held out for a long time denying it; but once bribed with the promise of immunity, and to excuse their delay, they each named someone close to them: Lucan his own mother Acilia, Quintianus Glitius Gallus, Senecio Annius Pollio—all among their dearest friends.
57| Meanwhile Nero, recalling that Volusius Proculus's information named Epicharis as under arrest, and reckoning a woman's body unequal to pain, ordered her broken on the rack. But neither the lash, nor fire, nor the anger of men torturing all the harder for fear of being outdone by a woman, could make her admit what was charged against her. So the first day of interrogation was defied. The next day, as she was dragged back to the same torments carried in a chair — for her dislocated limbs could no longer support her — she took the band she had torn from her breast, tied it in a noose to the arch of the chair, put her neck through it, and, straining against the weight of her own body, choked out what little breath remained. A freedwoman, shielding strangers and near-strangers in such extremity, set the brighter example, while freeborn men, Roman knights and senators, untouched by torture, betrayed their own dearest kin one after another. Lucanus too, and Senecio, and Quintianus kept naming accomplices without letup, and Nero grew more and more frightened, though he had hedged himself in with doubled guards.
58| He even set soldiers over the city as if under occupation — companies holding the walls, the sea and river likewise patrolled. Infantry and cavalry, Germans mixed among them (Nero trusted them precisely because they were foreigners), swarmed through the forums, through houses, even through the countryside and nearby towns. Chained columns of prisoners were dragged along continuously and made to wait at the gates of the Gardens. Once brought in to answer, a show of friendliness toward the conspirators, an offhand remark, a chance meeting, having shared a dinner or a show with one of them — all counted as guilt. On top of Nero's and Tigellinus's savage interrogations, Faenius Rufus pressed just as hard, not yet named by the informers, and, to buy himself a reputation for ignorance, was especially brutal toward his fellow conspirators. When Subrius Flavus, standing beside him, signaled by a nod asking whether he should draw his sword during the very hearing and strike, Rufus shook his head and checked him just as he was reaching for the hilt.
59| Some, once the plot was exposed, while Milichus was still being heard and Scaevinus still wavering, urged Piso not to hesitate — to head for the camp, or climb the Rostra, and sound out the loyalty of soldiers and people alike. If others in on the plan rallied to his effort, men still uncommitted would follow too; a bold move, once set in motion, carries great weight, especially in a sudden crisis. Nero had prepared nothing against such a move. Even brave men are shaken by the unexpected — how much more that stage actor, with Tigellinus and his mistresses as his only company should he try to raise arms against it? Much that looks impossible to the timid gets done simply by trying. It was vain to hope for silence and loyalty among so many minds and bodies under threat: torture or reward could break any of them open. Men would come to bind Piso himself too, and finally kill him in some shameful way. How much nobler to die embracing the republic, calling on men to fight for liberty. Better the soldiers fail him and the people desert him, so long as he, if his life were to be cut short, could still make his death something his ancestors and descendants would approve. Unmoved by all this, he showed himself briefly in public, then withdrew alone at home, steadying his mind for the end, until the detachment of soldiers arrived — recruits or men of recent enlistment, Nero's choice, since he distrusted the veterans as too fond of Piso. He died by slitting the veins of his arms. His will, full of foul flattery toward Nero, he left out of love for his wife, whom he had taken from a friend's marriage — a shallow woman, recommended only by her beauty. The woman's name was Satria Galla; her former husband was Domitius Silus. The husband's tolerance and the wife's shamelessness together spread Piso's disgrace further.
60| Nero next ordered the death of Plautius Lateranus, the consul-designate, done so hastily that he was not even allowed to embrace his children or given the brief moment usually allowed before death. Hauled off to the place set aside for executing slaves, he was killed by the hand of the tribune Statius, meeting it with steady silence, and not even reproaching the tribune for sharing his own guilt in the plot. Next came the killing of Annaeus Seneca, which pleased the emperor greatly — not because he had proof Seneca knew of the conspiracy, but because he wanted to use the sword, since poison had failed. Only Natalis had gone so far as to say that he had been sent to the ailing Seneca to visit him and complain that Seneca was refusing to see Piso — better, he'd said, if they kept their friendship alive through personal meetings; and that Seneca had answered that frequent talk and meetings would do neither of them any good, but that his own safety, in any case, hinged on Piso staying unharmed. Gavius Silvanus, a tribune commanding a praetorian cohort, received orders to deliver this report and ask Seneca whether he acknowledged Natalis's account and his own answer to it. Seneca, whether by chance or design, had come back that very day from Campania, stopping at a country house just four miles from the city. The tribune reached it toward evening and ringed the villa with troops; then, finding Seneca dining with two friends and his wife Pompeia Paulina, delivered the emperor's order.
61| Seneca answered that Natalis had indeed been sent to him, complaining in Piso's name that he had been kept from visiting, and that he had excused himself on grounds of poor health and love of quiet. He had no reason to put a private man's welfare above his own safety, nor was flattery in his nature — a fact no one knew better than Nero, who had had more experience of Seneca's plain speech than of his servility. When the tribune reported this to Poppaea and Tigellinus in person — the emperor's inner council in his fits of savagery — he was asked whether Seneca was preparing to take his own life. The tribune assured them he had seen no signs of fear, nothing troubled in Seneca's words or expression. He was ordered back, to tell Seneca he must die. Fabius Rusticus records that he did not return by the way he had come but went by way of Faenius the prefect, and, having laid out Caesar's orders, asked whether he should obey them — and was told by Faenius to carry them out, through the fatal cowardice that gripped them all. For Silvanus too was among the conspirators, and was now adding to the very crimes he had joined the plot to avenge. But he could not bring himself to speak the order or face Seneca himself, and sent in one of the centurions to announce the final necessity.
62| Seneca, unshaken, asked for the tablets of his will; when the centurion refused, he turned to his friends and declared that, since he was forbidden to repay them as they deserved, he would leave them the one thing he still had, and the finest thing of all — the pattern of his life. If they kept it in memory, they would win, as the reward of their loyal friendship, a name for good character. At the same time he checked their tears, now with words, now more sternly, calling them back to firmness, asking again and again where their philosophy had gone, where the reasoning they had spent so many years preparing against just such a blow. Who could not have known Nero's cruelty? What was left, after he had killed his mother and his brother, but to add the murder of his tutor and teacher?
63| Having said this and more, meant for them all alike, he embraced his wife, and, softening a little from his composure in the face of what lay before him, asked and begged her to temper her grief, not to make it endless, but to find, in contemplating a life lived virtuously, honest comfort for the loss of her husband. She, in answer, insisted that she too had resolved on death, and demanded the executioner's hand. Then Seneca, not standing in the way of her glory, and moved besides by love — not wanting to leave the woman he loved uniquely exposed to injury — said: 'I had shown you the comforts of life; you prefer the honor of death. I will not begrudge you the example. Let the firmness of this end, so brave, be shared equally between us both — but let there be more glory in yours.' After this, they opened the veins of their arms with the same stroke. Seneca's aged body, thinned by a spare diet, let the blood escape too slowly, so he also cut the veins of his legs and knees behind the joints. Worn down by the savage pain, and fearing that his own suffering would break his wife's resolve, and that watching her agony would break his own, he persuaded her to withdraw into another room. And even in his last moments his eloquence did not fail him: he called in secretaries and dictated a great deal, which, since it has been published in his own words, I forbear to recast in mine.
64| Nero, bearing Paulina no personal grudge, and not wanting the odium of cruelty to grow, ordered her death stopped. Prompted by the soldiers, her slaves and freedmen bandaged her arms and staunched the flow of blood — though whether she was even conscious of it remains unclear. For, as the crowd is always quick to think the worst, there were those who believed that as long as she feared an implacable Nero she had sought the glory of dying with her husband, but then, offered a gentler hope, let herself be won over by the sweetness of life — to which a few more years were then added, years she spent honoring her husband's memory, her face and limbs so pale that it was plain how much of her life's blood had drained away. Seneca meanwhile, as his death dragged on slow and lingering, asked Statius Annaeus, long proven a trusted friend and skilled physician, to bring out the poison he had procured long before — the same used to kill men condemned by public judgment at Athens. It was brought and he drank it, in vain: his limbs were already cold, his body closed against the poison's force. At last he entered a pool of warm water, sprinkling the nearest slaves and remarking that this water was his libation to Jupiter the Liberator. From there he was carried into a bath and suffocated by its steam, and burned without any funeral rites, exactly as he had directed in the codicil to his will, drawn up even then, at the height of his wealth and power, with his final arrangements in mind.
65| It was rumored that Subrius Flavus, with the centurions, had secretly resolved — Seneca not unaware of it — that after Nero was killed through Piso's efforts, Piso too should be killed, and the empire handed to Seneca, as a man chosen for the very summit of power on the strength of his virtues, being himself innocent of the plot's worst aims. Flavus's own words were repeated widely: that it made no difference to his disgrace whether a lyre-player was removed and a tragic actor put in his place, since Nero sang to the lyre and Piso, just as much, sang in tragic costume.
66| The plot among the soldiers didn't stay hidden much longer either, since informers were now eager to hand over Faenius Rufus — they couldn't stand having him as both fellow-conspirator and interrogator. So when he pressed Scaevinus and threatened him, Scaevinus smiled back and said no one knew more than Rufus himself, and urged him to pay back so good an emperor. Faenius had no answer to that — not a word, not even silence, but stumbled over his own speech, plainly terrified. The others, especially Cervarius Proculus, a Roman knight, worked hard to nail him, and on the emperor's order he was seized and bound by the soldier Cassius, who stood nearby because of his remarkable build.
67| Next, on the same informers' word, the tribune Subrius Flavus went down. At first he tried to defend himself by pointing out how unlike the others he was — a soldier, he said, would never join such a crime with unarmed, effeminate men. But once the pressure mounted, he embraced the glory of confessing instead. When Nero asked him what had driven him to forget his oath, he said: 'I hated you. No soldier was more loyal to you than I was, as long as you deserved to be loved. I started hating you after you became your mother's and your wife's murderer, a chariot-driver, an actor, and an arsonist.' I've given his exact words, because unlike Seneca's they were never made public, and it seemed right that people should know the rough, forceful thoughts of a soldier too. Nothing in the whole conspiracy struck Nero's ears harder — a man quick enough to commit crimes but unused to hearing them named. Flavus's execution was handed to the tribune Veianius Niger. Niger ordered a grave dug in a nearby field; Flavus, seeing it was shallow and narrow, complained even about that — 'not even this is by the book,' he said to the soldiers standing around. Told to stretch his neck out bravely, he answered, 'I wish you'd strike as bravely!' And Niger, trembling badly, barely managed to take off his head in two blows, and later boasted to Nero of his cruelty, claiming he'd killed the man with a single stroke and a half.
68| The next display of steady nerve came from the centurion Sulpicius Asper. When Nero asked why he'd conspired to kill him, he answered bluntly: there was no other way to help against so many crimes. Then he took the punishment ordered for him. None of the other centurions flinched under execution either — but Faenius Rufus showed no such spirit, and even carried his self-pity into his will. Nero was waiting for a chance to drag the consul Vestinus into the charge too, thinking him violent and hostile; but the conspirators had never let Vestinus in on their plans — some because of old grudges against him, more because they thought him reckless and impossible to work with. Nero's hatred of Vestinus actually grew out of their close friendship: Vestinus had come to see through the emperor's cowardice and despised him for it, while Nero feared his friend's fierce temper, having often been mocked by his sharp jokes — jokes that, drawing too much on the truth, leave a bitter memory behind. And a fresh grievance had just been added: Vestinus had married Statilia Messalina, well aware that Caesar was among her lovers.
69| So, with no charge and no accuser — since Nero couldn't pretend to play judge here — he turned to raw force instead. He sent the tribune Gerellanus with a cohort of soldiers, ordering him to beat the consul to the punch, seize what amounted to his stronghold, and crush his handpicked young men, since Vestinus kept a house overlooking the forum staffed with fine, matched slaves all the same age. That day Vestinus had carried out every duty of his office and was hosting a dinner party, either fearing nothing or hiding his fear well, when soldiers came in and said the tribune was calling for him. He got up at once without delay, and everything happened in a rush: he was shut into a bedroom, a doctor was ready, his veins were opened, and while still strong he was carried to the bath and plunged in warm water, without a single word of self-pity. Meanwhile the guests who had been reclining with him were placed under guard, and not released until well into the night, after Nero had pictured their terror — waiting for death straight from the dinner table — and, laughing at it, said they'd paid enough for a consul's banquet.
70| Next he ordered the death of Annaeus Lucan. As his blood flowed and he felt his feet and hands going cold, life slowly retreating from his extremities while his chest and mind stayed clear a while longer, he remembered a poem he'd written describing a wounded soldier dying in just this way — and he recited those very verses. They were his last words. After him died Senecio, Quintianus, and Scaevinus, none of them showing the softness of their earlier lives; then the rest of the conspirators followed, with nothing worth recording in word or deed.
71| Meanwhile the city filled up with funerals, and the Capitol with sacrifices: people whose son, brother, relative, or friend had been killed now gave thanks to the gods, decked their houses with laurel, threw themselves at Nero's knees, and wore out his hand with kisses. Taking this for genuine joy, Nero rewarded Antonius Natalis and Cervarius Proculus with immunity for their prompt informing. Milichus, enriched with his reward, took for himself the Greek word for 'savior.' Among the tribunes, Gavius Silvanus took his own life despite being cleared of guilt; Statius Proximus, granted a pardon by the emperor, discarded it for a pointless, showy death. Pompeius, Cornelius Martialis, Flavius Nepos, and Statius Domitius were then stripped of their tribunates — not because they actually hated the emperor, but because people might think they did. Novius Priscus, because of his friendship with Seneca, and Glitius Gallus and Annius Pollio, more slandered than actually convicted, were sent into exile. Priscus was joined by his wife Artoria Flaccilla; Gallus by Egnatia Maximilla, whose great fortune, intact at first, was later confiscated — both facts adding to her honor. Rufrius Crispinus too was expelled, using the conspiracy as an excuse, though Nero had really hated him ever since he'd once been married to Poppaea. Verginius Flavus and Musonius Rufus were driven out simply for the fame of their names — Verginius by stirring young men's ambitions with his eloquence, Musonius by schooling them in philosophy. Cluvidienus Quietus and Julius Agrippa, Blitius Catulinus and Petronius Priscus, and with them Julius Altinus were shipped off to the islands of the Aegean, seemingly there only to pad the tally. Caedicia, Scaevinus's wife, and Caesennius Maximus were barred from Italy — their only real punishment being that they'd had to stand trial at all. Acilia, Lucan's mother, was quietly set aside — neither acquitted nor punished.
72| With all this done, Nero held an assembly of the soldiers and handed out two thousand sesterces to each man in the ranks, adding free grain on top of what they'd previously bought at the market rate. Then, as if about to report on some war he'd won, he summoned the senate and awarded triumphal honors to the ex-consul Petronius Turpilianus, to Cocceius Nerva the praetor-designate, and to Tigellinus, prefect of the guard — exalting Tigellinus and Nerva so far that, beyond triumphal statues in the forum, he set up their images in the Palace as well. Nymphidius received the consular insignia; since he appears here for the first time, I'll go back briefly over his history, since he too will play a part in Rome's coming disasters. His mother was a freedwoman who had traded on her beauty with imperial slaves and freedmen, and he put himself about as the son of Gaius Caesar — since he happened to be tall and grim-faced like him, or perhaps because Gaius, who chased after prostitutes too, had also had his way with the mother.
73| Nero then called the senate together, delivered a speech to the senators, and followed it with an edict to the people, along with the written record of the informers' evidence and the confessions of the condemned collected into books. He was, in fact, being torn apart by constant public rumor that he'd destroyed distinguished, innocent men out of jealousy or fear. But those who cared to learn the truth never doubted, even at the time, that the conspiracy had been begun, had grown, and had been fully exposed — and those who returned to Rome after Nero's death confirm it too. In the senate, meanwhile, everyone bent toward flattery in proportion to their own grief, but Salienus Clemens attacked Junius Gallio, who was trembling over his brother Seneca's death and pleading for his own safety, calling him an enemy and a traitor — until the senators, acting together, talked him down, warning him not to exploit the public disaster for a private grudge, or drag back into savage cruelty a moment when the emperor's mercy had been settled and its bitterness forgotten.
74| Then thank offerings and gifts to the gods were decreed, with special honor given to the Sun, who had an old temple by the Circus where the crime was to have been carried out, for having brought the hidden conspiracy to light through his divine power. It was also decreed that the Circus games of Ceres should be celebrated with more horse races, and that the month of April should take Nero's name. A temple to Safety was to be built on the spot [text lost] from which Scaevinus had drawn his dagger. Nero himself consecrated that dagger on the Capitol and had it inscribed 'To Jupiter the Avenger' — a phrase that meant nothing at the time, but was later read, after the uprising of Julius Vindex, as an omen and a prophecy of the vengeance to come. I find in the senate's records that Anicius Cerialis, consul-designate, proposed that a temple to the god Nero be built as quickly as possible at public expense — as though voting Nero beyond mortal rank and worthy of men's worship. Nero himself blocked it, fearing that some would twist it into a bad omen for his own death; for divine honors are never paid to an emperor until he has stopped living among men.
1| Fortune next played a trick on Nero: his own conceit was to blame, along with the assurances of a man named Caesellius Bassus—Carthaginian by birth, and not entirely sound of mind—who took a dream from his own sleep and stretched it into certain hope. He sailed to Rome, bought his way into the emperor's presence, and announced that on his estate he had found a cave of immense depth holding a vast quantity of gold—not coined money but rough, ancient bullion. Heavy ingots lay there, he said, and columns stood off to one side, all hidden for so long an age only to swell present wealth. His guess was that Dido the Phoenician, fleeing Tyre and founding Carthage, had buried that treasure there, so that the new people would not run wild on too much money, or so that the Numidian kings, already hostile enough, would not be tempted by gold-lust into war.
2| So Nero, without properly testing the credibility of either the man or his claim, and without sending anyone to check whether the story was true, actively fed the rumor himself and dispatched men to bring back the treasure as if it were already secured. Triremes were provided, and picked oarsmen to speed the mission. In those days the common people talked of nothing else, believing it utterly; sensible men heard a very different story. As it happened, this was the second running of the quinquennial games, and the orators pounced on that fact as their choicest material for singing the emperor's praises. It wasn't just the usual crops, they said, or gold mixed in with ore that the earth now produced, but a new abundance springing up of its own accord, with the gods delivering riches unasked—and other flatteries of the same servile kind, dressed up in the highest eloquence, spoken without a qualm because the emperor was so easy to convince.
3| Meanwhile extravagance swelled on this empty hope, and the old wealth was spent as though the promised treasure had already arrived to replace, for years to come, whatever was squandered. Indeed Nero was already handing out gifts on the strength of it, and the very expectation of riches became one of the causes of public poverty. As for Bassus, he dug up his own land and the fields around it, insisting again and again that this or that spot held the promised cave, with not only soldiers but crowds of country people pressed into the digging. At last his madness left him. Amazed that his dreams, which he had never doubted before, had for the first time deceived him, he escaped the shame and the fear by taking his own life. Some say he was put in chains and later released, his property confiscated to make up for the royal treasure he had promised.
4| Meanwhile the senate, with the five-yearly contest now close at hand, offered the emperor the victory in the singing competition to head off the disgrace, and added the crown for eloquence as well, to cover up the shame of the performance. But Nero kept saying he needed no senatorial favoritism or influence—he would compete on equal terms with his rivals and let the judges rule honestly on his merits. He began by reciting a poem from the stage; afterward, the crowd called out—using this exact demand—for him to lay all his gifts before the public, so he walked out onto the theater's boards, submitting to every rule of the lyre-player's craft: not to sit down when tired, to wipe away sweat only with the garment he was already wearing, to let no trace of spit or mucus show. Finally he knelt, saluted the assembly with his hand, and waited for the judges' verdict with feigned nervousness. The city mob, well used to cheering on actors, roared back in set rhythms and orchestrated applause. You would have thought they were happy—and perhaps, through sheer carelessness about the public disgrace, they were.
5| But those who had come from remote towns, from an Italy still strict and holding to old-fashioned ways, and those who had arrived from distant provinces unused to such indecency, on official embassies or private business, could neither stomach the spectacle nor keep up the shameful effort. Their untrained hands grew exhausted, they threw off the rhythm of those who knew it, and soldiers posted in the aisles often beat them, to make sure not one moment passed without the proper enthusiastic noise or the proper obedient silence. It's established that many knights were crushed to death struggling through the narrow entrances against the surging crowd, and others fell fatally ill from sitting there day and night without a break. The fear of missing the show was in fact worse than the discomfort of attending it, since spies—many openly, more in secret—noted down names and faces, watching who looked eager and who looked gloomy as they gathered. Punishment for the lower classes followed at once; for men of rank, resentment was hidden for the time being, only to be paid back later. People said Vespasian, caught apparently dozing off, was scolded by the freedman Phoebus and only barely saved by the pleading of better men, and that he escaped the looming danger then only to meet a greater destiny later.
6| After the games ended, Poppaea died—killed by chance in a fit of her husband's temper, when, pregnant, she was struck by a kick from him. I cannot believe it was poison, as some writers claim, more out of hatred for Nero than from real evidence, since he wanted children and was devoted to his wife. Her body was not burned, as was the Roman custom, but packed with spices in the manner of foreign kings and laid to rest in the tomb of the Julii. Even so, a public funeral was held, and Nero himself delivered the eulogy at the Rostra, praising her beauty, the fact that she had been mother to a divine infant, and other gifts of fortune as though they were virtues.
7| Poppaea's death was mourned openly, but those who looked back on her cruelty and shamelessness were secretly glad of it. Nero, though, piled fresh resentment on top by barring Gaius Cassius from the funeral rites—the first sign of trouble to come. It wasn't long delayed either: Silanus was added to the charge, on no crime at all except that Cassius stood out for his ancient wealth and moral gravity, and Silanus for the distinction of his family and his modest youth. So Nero sent a message to the senate arguing that both men should be removed from public life, and accused Cassius of keeping among his family portrait busts an image of Gaius Cassius the tyrannicide, inscribed 'to the leader of the cause'—as though he were sowing the seeds of civil war and courting rebellion against the house of the Caesars. And so that he wouldn't rely only on the memory of that hated name to stir up discord, Nero claimed, he had recruited young Lucius Silanus, a man of noble birth and reckless spirit, to hold up as the figurehead of revolution.
8| Next Nero attacked Silanus himself with the same charges he had used against his uncle Torquatus—that he was already arranging the business of empire, appointing freedmen to manage accounts, petitions, and correspondence—empty and false accusations, since Silanus, terrified by his uncle's death and destruction, was in fact more focused on staying out of trouble than anything else. After this, informers were brought in, so called, who invented a charge that Lepida—Cassius's wife and Silanus's aunt—had committed incest with her nephew and performed monstrous rites of black magic. Dragged in as accomplices were the senators Vulcacius Tullinus and Marcellus Cornelius, and the Roman knight Calpurnius Fabatus; these men appealed to the emperor and managed to dodge the conviction hanging over them, and later, while Nero was busy with graver crimes, escaped notice as if too minor to bother with.
9| Then, by a decree of the senate, exile was pronounced against Cassius and Silanus, while Lepida's fate was left for Nero to decide. Cassius was deported to the island of Sardinia, where people simply waited for old age to finish him off. Silanus was removed under the pretense of being taken to Naxos, but was put ashore at Ostia and then confined in a town in Apulia called Barium. There, bearing his utterly unjust fate with dignity, he was seized by a centurion sent to kill him. When the man urged him to open his veins, Silanus said his mind was indeed made up to die, but he wouldn't spare his executioner the credit for the job. The centurion, seeing that though unarmed the man was still powerfully built and closer to rage than fear, ordered his soldiers to pin him down. Silanus did not give up the struggle; he fought back and struck out as hard as he could with his bare hands, until the centurion cut him down with wounds to the front, as though he had fallen in battle.
10| Just as readily, Lucius Vetus went to his death, and with him his mother-in-law Sextia and daughter Pollitta; the emperor hated them simply because their being alive felt like a reproach for his having killed Vetus's son-in-law, Rubellius Plautus. The occasion for exposing this cruelty was the freedman Fortunatus, who, after embezzling his patron's property, turned informer against him, joined by Claudius Demianus, a man Vetus, as proconsul of Asia, had once imprisoned for crimes—whom Nero now freed as a reward for the accusation. When Vetus learned that he and his own freedman were being weighed on equal terms, he withdrew to his estate near Formiae; soldiers surrounded him there under secret guard. His daughter was with him, made fierce by long grief on top of the danger now closing in, ever since she had watched the killers of her husband Plautus. She had clung to his bloodied neck, keeping the blood and the spattered clothes, and lived on afterward as a widow, hair uncombed in continuous mourning, eating nothing but what kept her from starving to death outright. Now, urged on by her father, she went to Naples, and when denied access to Nero, waited outside his door, crying out to be heard—an innocent woman—and begging him not to hand over his own former consular colleague to a freedman's mercy; sometimes wailing like a woman, sometimes raising her voice beyond her sex in furious protest—until the emperor showed himself unmoved by either her pleading or the public outrage against him.
11| So she sent word to her father to give up hope and accept necessity: at the same time news arrived that a senate hearing was being arranged, and a brutal verdict with it. Some advised him to name Caesar as heir to most of his estate, and so at least secure what remained for his grandchildren. He refused, unwilling to stain a life lived so close to freedom with one last act of servility, and instead gave away to his slaves whatever cash he had on hand, telling each to carry off for himself whatever could be moved, and keeping back only three couches for the end. Then, in the same room, with the same blade, they cut their veins; hastily wrapped, each in a single garment for decency's sake, they were carried into the baths—father watching daughter, grandmother watching granddaughter, the girl watching them both—all praying in competition that their failing life would end quickly, so they might leave their family living on and not have to watch each other die. Fortune kept the order fitting: the eldest died first, then the youngest. After burial they were formally charged, and the senate decreed they should be punished in the ancestral manner, but Nero intervened, allowing them death without further formality—a mockery added on top of the killings, now that the killings were already done.
12| Publius Gallus, a Roman knight, was banned from fire and water because he had been close to Faenius Rufus and no stranger to Vetus. The informer, a freedman, got his reward: a seat in the theater among the tribunes' attendants. And the months following April — itself renamed for Nero — were renamed too: May became 'Claudius,' June became 'Germanicus.' Cornelius Orfitus, who proposed it, testified that June was changed because two Torquati already put to death for their crimes had made the name Junius unlucky.
13| The gods marked this year, foul with so many crimes, with storms and plague besides. A whirlwind ravaged Campania, scattering villas, orchards, and crops far and wide, and carried its violence to the outskirts of Rome. There a plague of extraordinary force was ravaging every class of person, with no change in the weather to explain it. Houses filled with corpses, the streets with funerals. Neither sex nor age was spared. Slaves and free citizens alike died suddenly, amid the wailing of spouses and children, who, sitting with the dying and weeping over them, were often burned on the same pyre. Deaths among knights and senators, however common, drew fewer tears — as though they were forestalling the emperor's cruelty by dying naturally. That same year levies were held through Gallic Narbonensis, Africa, and Asia to fill out the Illyrian legions; men too old or too sick for service were let go. The emperor made good Lyon's disaster with forty million sesterces to rebuild what the city had lost — money the people of Lyon had themselves once offered Rome after its own fires.
14| In the consulship of Gaius Suetonius and Lucius Telesinus, Antistius Sosianus — punished, as I have said, with exile for writing scurrilous verses against Nero — saw how well informing paid and how quick the emperor was to kill. Restless and never slow to seize an opening, he cultivated Pammenes, an exile in the same place, famous for his skill in astrology and so tied by friendship to many people; their shared misfortune drew them together, and Sosianus reasoned that visitors and consultations came to him for good reason. He also learned that Pammenes received an annual stipend from Publius Anteius. Sosianus knew well that Anteius, hated by Nero for his devotion to Agrippina, and possessed of great wealth to feed the emperor's greed, was for that very reason a marked man like many others. So he intercepted Anteius's letters, stole the papers in which his birth date and horoscope lay hidden among Pammenes's secret records, and, after turning up further documents on Ostorius Scapula's birth date and career besides, he wrote to Nero with promises of great revelations for the emperor's own safety, if only a brief release from exile could be won: for Anteius and Ostorius, he claimed, threatened the state and were probing his fate and Caesar's. Fast boats were sent, and Sosianus was hurried back to Rome. Once his charge became known, Anteius and Ostorius were treated less like the accused than like the already condemned — so much so that no one would witness Anteius's will until Tigellinus stepped forward to do it, having first warned Anteius not to delay his final arrangements. Anteius drank poison, then, disgusted at how slowly it worked, cut his veins to hasten death.
15| Ostorius was at the time on a distant estate near the border of Liguria. A centurion was sent to speed his death. The urgency arose because Ostorius, celebrated for his military reputation and having earned the civic crown in Britain, was a huge man skilled in arms, and had frightened Nero — always a coward, and now more terrified than ever after the recent conspiracy — with the fear that he might attack him. So the centurion, once he had blocked the villa's escape routes, revealed the emperor's orders to Ostorius. Ostorius turned against himself the courage he had so often shown against enemies; and because his cut veins bled too little, he had a slave hold a dagger up motionless, gripped the slave's right hand firmly, and ran his throat onto the blade.
16| Even if I were recounting foreign wars and deaths met for the republic, with so uniform a run of disasters I would grow weary myself and expect the reader's fatigue too, however honorable the deaths of citizens — readers turn away from a grim, unbroken parade of them. But here it is the servile submission and the vast bloodshed at home that wear down the spirit and press it into grief. I ask no defense from those who will read of these things beyond this: that I not be blamed for hating men who died so tamely. That was the gods' anger against Rome — an anger one cannot, as with the destruction of armies or the fall of cities, note once and move past. Let this at least be granted to the memory of these distinguished men: that just as they are set apart in burial from the common dead, so in the record of their final hours they receive and keep their own distinct place.
17| Within a few days, in the same slaughter, fell Annaeus Mela, Anicius Cerialis, Rufrius Crispinus, and Gaius Petronius — Mela and Crispinus knights of senatorial rank. Crispinus had once commanded the Praetorian Guard and been awarded the rank of consul; only recently exiled to Sardinia on suspicion of conspiracy, he took his own life the instant the death order reached him. Mela, brother by the same parents to Gallio and Seneca, had avoided seeking office out of a perverse ambition — to remain a Roman knight while matching consulars in power. He also thought procuratorships administering the emperor's business a quicker road to wealth. He had fathered Annaeus Lucan, a great addition to his renown. After Lucan's death, while pursuing his estate with sharp persistence, Mela provoked an accuser, Fabius Romanus, one of Lucan's closest friends. A story was concocted of shared knowledge of the conspiracy between father and son, backed by forged letters supposedly Lucan's; Nero, examining them, ordered them sent to Mela — his eye on Mela's fortune. Mela chose the quickest road to death then available and opened his veins, but first drew up a will that handed a vast sum to Tigellinus and to Tigellinus's son-in-law, Cossutianus Capito, so that what remained of his estate would be spared. It was added that, complaining of the injustice of his death, he had written that he at least died with no grounds for punishment, while Rufrius Crispinus and Anicius Cerialis, who hated the emperor, still lived. This was believed invented regarding Crispinus, since he was already dead, but concerning Cerialis, invented so that he would be killed. And indeed, not long after, he took his own life, drawing less pity than the others, since people remembered he had betrayed a conspiracy to Gaius Caesar.
18| A little must be said again about Gaius Petronius. He spent his days sleeping, his nights on business and the pleasures of life. Where diligence brought others fame, idleness brought it to him, and he was regarded not as a wastrel and spendthrift like most who squander their fortunes, but as a connoisseur of refined luxury. His words and deeds, the more relaxed and marked by a certain carelessness, were taken all the more warmly for it, as marks of an unaffected nature. Yet when he governed Bithynia as proconsul, and afterward when he held the consulship, he proved himself vigorous and fully equal to business. Then, sliding back into vice — or into an imitation of it — he was taken up by Nero among his small circle of intimates, as arbiter of taste, until nothing was thought charming or elegant unless Petronius had approved it. This drew the jealousy of Tigellinus, who saw in him a rival, and one more skilled in the science of pleasure. So Tigellinus went after the one thing that outweighed all the emperor's other appetites — his cruelty — charging Petronius with friendship for Scaevinus; a slave was bribed to testify, Petronius was denied any defense, and most of his household was thrown into chains.
19| It happened that Caesar had gone to Campania around that time, and Petronius, having traveled as far as Cumae, was detained there. He would not bear the delay of fear or hope any longer, yet he did not rush headlong out of life either. He had his veins cut, then, as he pleased, bound up again and reopened, all the while talking with friends — not seriously, and not to win a reputation for firmness. He listened to them reciting, not discourses on the soul's immortality or the sayings of philosophers, but light songs and playful verses. Some slaves he rewarded generously, others he had whipped. He dined, he slept, so that his death, though forced, looked like an accident. Not even in his will, as most of the dying did, did he flatter Nero or Tigellinus or any other powerful man; instead he wrote out, in full, the emperor's crimes under the names of his male and female partners and the novelty of each perversion, sealed the document, and had it delivered to Nero. Then he snapped his signet ring in two, so no one could use it afterward to harm others.
20| While Nero puzzled over how his nighttime exploits had become known, Silia was offered up — a woman known through her marriage to a senator, herself given over to every kind of vice, and a close intimate of Petronius. She was sent into exile, on the pretext that she had not kept quiet about what she had seen and endured, but really out of Nero's own personal hatred. And Minucius Thermus, an ex-praetor, was handed over to Tigellinus's grudges, because Thermus's freedman had made criminal accusations against Tigellinus — accusations the freedman paid for under torture, and his patron paid for with an unjust death.
21| Having slaughtered so many eminent men, Nero at last set out to destroy virtue itself, by killing Thrasea Paetus and Barea Soranus. He had long been hostile to both, and against Thrasea more grievances still had piled up: he had left the senate chamber while the debate over Agrippina's case was going on — a matter I have already described — and he had made too poor a showing at the Juvenalian games. This offense cut deeper because this same Thrasea had once sung, in tragic costume, at the games called 'Cetasti' founded by the Trojan Antenor at Patavium, his birthplace. Also, on the day when the praetor Antistius was condemned to death for verses composed against Nero, Thrasea had proposed and carried a milder penalty; and when divine honors were voted for Poppaea, he had absented himself of his own accord, and had not attended her funeral. Cossutianus Capito would not let these things be forgotten — a man whose mind ran headlong toward crime anyway, and who bore Thrasea a personal grudge because Thrasea's influence had brought him down when envoys from Cilicia charged him with extortion.
22| He added more charges: that Thrasea avoided the customary oath-taking at the start of the year; that he was absent from the vows for the emperor, though he held a place among the Fifteen priests; that he had never sacrificed for the emperor's welfare or for his divine voice; that though once tireless in attendance, ready to declare himself for or against even routine motions of the Senate, he had not entered the chamber in three years; and that most recently, when everyone rushed to condemn Silanus and Vetus, he had chosen instead to attend to his clients' private business. This, he said, was already secession — a faction breaking away — and if many others dared the same, it would be civil war. 'Once it was Gaius Caesar and Marcus Cato,' he said. 'Now a city hungry for discord speaks of you, Nero, and of Thrasea. And he has followers — satellites, rather — who imitate not yet his defiant votes but his bearing and his face, stern and gloomy, so as to reproach you for your excesses. To him alone your safety is no concern, your accomplishments no honor. He rejects the emperor's successes — does he not tire even of his griefs and sorrows? It is the same spirit that refuses to believe Poppaea divine as refuses to swear by the acts of the deified Augustus and the deified Julius. He scorns religion, he sets law aside. The daily gazette of Rome is read more carefully in the provinces and the armies now, just to learn what Thrasea has failed to do. Either let us adopt his ways, if they are better, or strip from those who crave revolution their leader and inspiration. That sect bred the Tuberones and Favonii — names hateful even under the old Republic. They wear liberty as a mask to overthrow the empire; if they succeed, they will attack liberty itself next. You removed Cassius for nothing, if the heirs of the Bruti are now free to flourish and multiply. Finally, put nothing in writing yourself concerning Thrasea; let the Senate itself pass judgment on him.' Nero fanned Cossutianus's readiness for malice, and added Eprius Marcellus, sharp of tongue, to the attack.
23| Meanwhile a Roman knight, Ostorius Sabinus, had by now taken up, on his own initiative, the case against Barea Soranus over his term as proconsul of Asia, where his justice and diligence had stirred the emperor's resentment — by working to open the harbor of Ephesus, and by failing to punish the people of Pergamum for using force to stop Acratus, Caesar's freedman, from carrying off their statues and paintings. But the formal charge was friendship with Plautus and currying favor in the province to further new hopes. The time chosen for his condemnation was when Tiridates was approaching to receive the kingdom of Armenia, so that the rumors of foreign affairs might cloak the crime at home — or perhaps so that Nero could display his imperial greatness through the killing of distinguished men, as if it were itself a kingly act.
24| So with the whole city pouring out to receive the emperor and gaze on the king, Thrasea, barred from the reception, did not lose heart, but wrote a letter to Nero asking to know the charges against him and affirming he would clear himself if given knowledge of the accusations and a chance to answer them. Nero seized on this letter eagerly, hoping Thrasea, frightened, had written something that would exalt the emperor's glory and disgrace his own reputation. When this did not happen, and Nero found himself instead dreading the look, the spirit, and the free bearing of an innocent man, he ordered the Senate convened.
25| Thrasea then consulted his closest friends on whether to attempt a defense or ignore the charge. Opinions differed. Those who favored entering the Senate argued they were confident of his composure — he would say nothing except what would add to his glory. It was the weak and fearful, they said, who wrapped their final hours in secrecy. Let the people see a man walking to meet his death, let the Senate hear words that sounded almost superhuman: the very wonder of it might move even Nero. But should his cruelty continue regardless, posterity at least would tell apart the memory of a death met with honor from the shame of those who died saying nothing.
26| Others, who thought he should wait at home, agreed about Thrasea himself but foresaw mockery and insult awaiting him: he should spare his ears the abuse and slander. It was not only Cossutianus and Eprius who were ready for crime — there might be others who, in their savagery, would dare violence and blows, and even good men might follow out of fear. Better to spare the Senate, which he himself had done so much to honor, the shame of such an outrage — and better, too, to leave it unknown what the senators might have chosen, had Thrasea stood there before them facing the charge. As for touching Nero's shame over his crimes — that hope was vain; far more to be feared was that he would vent his fury on Thrasea's wife, his daughter, and his other kin. Let him instead end his life untainted, unstained, with the same glory that had guided the footsteps and pursuits of his whole life. Present at this council was Arulenus Rusticus, a young man burning with eagerness, who out of desire for praise offered to veto the senatorial decree — for he was a tribune of the people. Thrasea checked his ardor, telling him not to attempt something vain, of no use to the accused, and fatal to the one who intervened. His own life, he said, was spent, and he could not abandon a lifelong, unbroken course of conduct; Rusticus was only beginning his career, with everything still ahead of him. He should weigh carefully, long before such a moment, what path he meant to take in public life. As for himself, whether it was even fitting to appear in the Senate, he left to his own reflection.
27| At dawn the following day, armed praetorian cohorts — two of them — took possession of the temple of Venus Genetrix. Civilians carrying weapons openly, making no effort to hide them, barred the Senate's doors, and squads of soldiers were scattered through the forums and basilicas. Under their stares and threats the senators entered the chamber, and the emperor's speech, read out by his quaestor, was heard: without naming anyone, he accused the senators of neglecting their public duties, and said their example had turned Roman knights toward idleness too — small wonder men did not come from distant provinces, when so many who had won the consulship and priesthoods preferred the pleasures of their gardens instead. The accusers seized on this as a weapon.
28| Cossutianus opened, and then Marcellus, with greater violence, kept shouting that the whole state of the Republic was at stake; that the defiance of inferiors was eroding the mildness of their ruler. The senators, he said, had been far too lenient until now, letting Thrasea break away, letting his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus share the same madness, and with them Paconius Agrippinus, heir to his father's hatred of emperors, and Curtius Montanus, who churned out detestable verses, mock them all with impunity. He missed, in the Senate, a man of consular rank; among the vow-takers, a priest; in the oath, a citizen — unless Thrasea had openly put on, against the customs and rites of their ancestors, the guise of traitor and enemy. Let him come, then, act the senator, and — since he was so used to shielding the emperor's detractors — propose openly what he thought should be corrected or changed: they would bear more easily a man who criticized particulars than they now bore one who condemned everything by his silence. Did peace across the whole world displease him, or victories won without loss to the armies? Let them not allow a man made gloomy by the state's blessings, who treated the forums, the theaters, the temples as a wasteland, who kept threatening his own exile, to indulge his perverse ambition. To him, none of this looked like the Senate's decrees, the magistrates, or the city of Rome. Let him break off his life from a state whose affection he had long since shed, and now even its sight.
29| As Marcellus, grim and menacing as he was, blazed through all this with voice, face, and eyes, the Senate's habitual gloom — familiar by now from the sheer frequency of such dangers — gave way to something new: a deeper dread, at the sight of the soldiers' weapons and hands. At the same time the image of Thrasea's own venerable dignity hovered before them, and some pitied Helvidius as well, soon to suffer for a kinship that harmed no one, wondering what charge could be brought against Agrippinus beyond his father's grim fate — for he too, every bit as innocent, had gone down to Tiberius's cruelty. And Montanus, a young man of decent character with no scandalous poem to his name, was being driven into exile simply for showing his talent.
30| Meanwhile Ostorius Sabinus, Soranus's accuser, came forward and began with his friendship with Rubellius Plautus, and the charge that Soranus, as proconsul of Asia, had used the post to build his own reputation rather than serve the common good, by encouraging unrest among the cities. These were old charges — but a fresh one, tying his daughter to her father's peril, was that she had given away money too freely. In truth the cause was devotion — the girl's name was Servilia — who, moved by love for her father and by the carelessness natural to youth, had sought counsel only about her household's safety — whether Nero could be appeased, whether a Senate inquiry might bring nothing terrible. She was summoned to the Senate, and the two stood apart before the consuls' tribunal: the father, advanced in years, and opposite him the daughter, not yet twenty, recently widowed and left desolate when her husband Annius Pollio was driven into exile, not even looking at her father, whose dangers she seemed to have made heavier.
31| When the accuser asked whether she had sold her wedding jewelry, or the necklace taken from her own neck, to raise money for magical rites, she first lay prostrate on the ground, weeping long in silence; then, clasping the altar, she said: 'I have invoked no wicked gods, no curses, nothing in my unhappy prayers except that you, Caesar, and you, senators, would keep this best of fathers safe. So I gave my jewels, my clothes, the marks of my rank, just as I would have given my blood and my life, had they been asked for. Let those men — strangers to me until now — answer for what they are called and what arts they practice: I never mentioned the emperor except among the gods. Yet my father, wretched as he is, knows nothing whatsoever of it — and if a crime has been committed here, the guilt is mine alone.'
32| Servilia was still speaking when Soranus broke in, crying out that she had never gone into the province with him... that she had never gone into his province with him, that she couldn't have known Plautus at her age, and that she had no part in her husband's alleged crimes—only her excess of devotion should be charged against her, and she would accept whatever fate came. As she said this At the same time he rushed to embrace his daughter as she ran toward him, but the lictors stepped between them and kept them apart. Then witnesses were called. Whatever pity the savagery of the prosecution had stirred up, the witness Publius Egnatius stirred up an equal measure of anger. He was Soranus's own client, now bought to destroy his friend, and he paraded the authority of the Stoic school, wearing the look and bearing of a man practiced in projecting integrity—while underneath he was treacherous, deceitful, hiding greed and lust. Once money had exposed these, he became a lesson: just as men can be guilty of fraud or stained by crime, so too they can wear the mask of virtue and friendship falsely.
33| Yet that same day also produced an honorable example: Cassius Asclepiodotus, a man of outstanding wealth among the Bithynians, who had honored Soranus with deference while he prospered, did not abandon him when he fell. Stripped of his entire fortune and driven into exile, he became proof that the gods weigh good and bad conduct fairly. Thrasea, Soranus, and Servilia were given leave to die by their own hand; Italy was closed to Helvidius and to Paconius by banishment; and Montanus went back to his father, but only on condition that he be shut out of public life. The accusers Eprius and Cossutianus were each awarded five million sesterces, and Ostorius twelve hundred thousand along with the insignia of a quaestor.
34| Then evening came on, and the consul dispatched his quaestor to Thrasea, who was out in his gardens. He had spent the day surrounded by a large gathering of distinguished men and women, giving most of his attention to Demetrius, a teacher of the Cynic school. With him—judging by the intensity of his expression and the fragments overheard when voices rose—he was discussing the nature of the soul and the separation of spirit from body, until Domitius Caecilianus, one of his closest friends, arrived and told him what the Senate had decreed. At this, Thrasea urged the weeping, protesting company to leave at once, and not to mix their own danger with the fate of a condemned man. He told Arria, who wanted to follow her husband's last hours and her own mother's example, to hold on to her life and not strip their daughter of her only support.
35| He then walked out onto the portico, where the quaestor found him—looking almost cheerful, because he had just learned that his son-in-law Helvidius was only being banished from Italy. After hearing the Senate's decree read to him, he led Helvidius and Demetrius into his bedroom. There he opened the veins of both arms, and once the blood had flowed, he sprinkled it on the ground, called the quaestor closer, and said: "This libation is for Jupiter the Liberator. Look well, young man—the gods forbid it prove an omen, but the times you've been born into are ones where a mind needs steadying, and examples of firmness are worth having." Afterward, as the slowness of his death brought on heavy suffering, he turned to Demetrius [text breaks off]