Annals — Book 1

Tacitus · a new plain-English translation from the original language

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.

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