Annals — Book 2

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

1| In the consulship of Sisenna Statilius Taurus and Lucius Libo, the kingdoms and Roman provinces of the East were thrown into turmoil, the trouble starting among the Parthians. They had asked Rome for a king and gotten one — but for all he belonged to the Arsacid line, they now scorned him as a foreigner. This was Vonones, handed over to Augustus as a hostage by Phraates. Phraates had beaten Roman armies and generals in the field, yet he had turned to Augustus with every mark of deference and sent him one of his sons to seal the friendship — not so much out of fear of us as out of distrust of his own people.

2| After Phraates died, and his successors too, killed off one after another in the palace bloodletting, envoys came to Rome from the Parthian nobles asking for Vonones, the eldest of his sons, to be sent to be their king. Caesar thought this a fine compliment to himself and loaded the young man with wealth. The barbarians received him gladly, as people usually do a new regime. But shame soon crept in: they had fetched a king from another world, one steeped in enemy manners; now the throne of the Arsacids was being counted among the Roman provinces, handed out like a governorship. Where was the old glory now — the men who had cut down Crassus, driven out Antony — if a slave of Caesar's, one who had endured servitude for so many years, was to rule Parthians? And Vonones himself fed their resentment, being so unlike his ancestors: he hardly hunted, he cared little for horses, and whenever he moved through the towns he rode in a litter and turned up his nose at the old national feasts. They mocked his Greek attendants too, and the way he kept even his cheapest household goods locked under seal. Yet he was easy to approach, friendly to anyone who came near — virtues the Parthians had never seen, and took for vices, new and strange. Whatever was foreign to their own customs earned equal hatred, whether it was good or bad.

3| So Artabanus, of Arsacid blood, who had grown up among the Dahae, was roused to action. Beaten in his first encounter, he rallied his forces and seized the throne. Vonones, defeated, took refuge in Armenia — a country then without a king, and, thanks to Antony's crime, distrustful of both Parthian and Roman power alike. Antony had lured Artavasdes, king of Armenia, in under the pretense of friendship, then loaded him with chains and finally killed him. His son Artaxias, hating us for his father's memory, held on to himself and his kingdom by Arsacid force. When Artaxias was murdered by treachery among his own relatives, Caesar gave the Armenians Tigranes, who was installed on the throne by Tiberius Nero. Tigranes's rule did not last long, nor did his children's, even though they were joined in marriage and kingship in the foreign style.

4| Next, on Augustus's orders, Artavasdes was set up as king, and thrown down again, not without cost to us. Then Gaius Caesar was chosen to settle Armenia's affairs. He put Ariobarzanes in charge — a Mede by birth, but the Armenians accepted him gladly for his striking looks and fine character. When Ariobarzanes died by accident, they would not put up with his line; they tried a woman's rule instead, one named Erato, and soon drove her out too. Adrift and unmoored, more without a master than actually free, they took in the fugitive Vonones as king. But once Artabanus began making threats, and it was clear Armenia offered little support — and that defending Vonones by force meant war with Parthia — Creticus Silanus, governor of Syria, summoned him and kept him under guard, though he was left his luxuries and his royal title. How Vonones tried to escape this humiliating position we will tell in its place.

5| Meanwhile Tiberius was not at all displeased to see the East in turmoil, since it gave him an excuse to pull Germanicus away from the legions he knew so well and expose him, in unfamiliar provinces, to treachery and to accident alike. Germanicus, though, only grew more determined to finish the war quickly, the more the soldiers' devotion to him grew and his uncle's goodwill cooled. He weighed the different lines of attack, and what luck, good or bad, three years of campaigning had brought him. The Germans, he reasoned, were beaten in open battle on fair ground; woods and marshes helped them, along with the short summer and the early onset of winter. His own men suffered less from wounds than from the length of the marches and the wear on their equipment; Gaul was worn out supplying horses; a long baggage train invited ambush and was awkward to defend. But by sea, the advantage would be his alone, unknown to the enemy; the war could start earlier, legions and supplies could travel together, and cavalry and horses would arrive fresh, by way of river mouths and channels, deep into Germany.

6| So he set his sights that way, sending Publius Vitellius and Gaius Antius to take a census in Gaul. Silius, Anteius, and Caecina were put in charge of building the fleet. A thousand ships seemed enough, and they were built quickly — some short, narrow at bow and stern but broad in the belly, to ride the waves more easily; some flat-bottomed, so they could run aground without damage; many fitted with rudders at both ends, so the rowers could reverse and put in from either side at a moment's notice; many decked over, to carry catapults, and also fit for hauling horses or supplies; all handy under sail, and swift under oar, made swifter still by the soldiers' own eagerness, which lent them a fine and formidable look. The island of the Batavians was named as the muster point, since its shores were easy to land on and it was well placed both for receiving troops and launching the campaign. The Rhine, which flows in a single channel — or splits around minor islands — near the start of Batavian territory, divides as if into two rivers, keeping its name and its force on the branch that runs past Germany until it meets the ocean; but toward the Gallic bank it flows wider and calmer (the locals call it, under a changed name, the Waal), and soon changes name again to the Meuse, pouring at last through that river's vast mouth into the same ocean.

7| While the ships were being assembled, Caesar sent the general Silius with a light-armed force to raid the Chatti; he himself, hearing that a fort on the Lippe was under siege, led six legions there. Sudden downpours kept Silius from doing much beyond seizing a modest haul of plunder and the wife and daughter of Arpus, chief of the Chatti; and Caesar found no chance to fight either, since the besiegers scattered at the mere news he was coming. They had, though, torn down the mound recently raised for Varus's legions and the old altar set up to Drusus. Germanicus rebuilt the altar and personally led the legions past it in his father's honor; he decided not to raise the mound again. And the whole stretch between the fort at Aliso and the Rhine was strengthened with new lines and earthworks.

8| By now the fleet had arrived. Germanicus sent the supplies ahead, distributed ships among the legions and the allied troops, and entered the canal named for Drusus. He prayed to his father Drusus to lend him, willingly and with favor, the same help he had once given himself, now that his son had dared the same venture, following the example and memory of his plans and works. From there he sailed through the lakes and out onto the ocean, with a smooth passage all the way to the river Ems. The fleet was left at the mouth of the Ems, on its left bank — a mistake, since the troops meant to march on the right bank were not ferried across or transferred; as a result several days were lost building bridges. The cavalry and the legions crossed the first tidal shallows without trouble, before the water had begun to rise; but the rear column of the auxiliaries, and the Batavians among them, got into difficulty while splashing about and showing off their swimming, and some were dragged under and drowned. While Caesar was laying out camp, word came that the Angrivarii had revolted behind him; Stertinius was sent at once with cavalry and light infantry and avenged the treachery with fire and slaughter.

9| The river Weser ran between the Romans and the Cherusci. Arminius took his stand on its bank with the other chiefs, and asked whether Caesar had arrived; on hearing that Caesar had, he asked for a meeting with his brother — a man serving in Roman ranks under the name Flavus, a man known for his loyalty, who had lost an eye to a wound a few years before under Tiberius's command. Given permission, he came forward and was greeted by Arminius, who had his escort withdraw, and asked that our archers stationed along the bank pull back as well. Once they had gone, he asked his brother how he had come to lose the eye. Flavus told him the place and the battle, and Arminius then asked what reward he had gotten for it. Flavus listed his increased pay, a neck-chain, a crown, and other military honors — at which Arminius laughed, calling them the cheap wages of slavery.

10| From there each began to speak from his own side. Flavus spoke of Rome's greatness, Caesar's power, the harsh penalties waiting for the beaten, and the mercy ready for anyone who surrendered; his own wife and son, he said, were not treated as enemies. Arminius spoke of their fatherland's sacred cause, their ancestral freedom, the gods of Germany's inmost places, and their mother, who joined him in this appeal; he asked whether Flavus would rather be the deserter and betrayer of his kin, his in-laws, and his whole people than their leader. Little by little they slid into open insults, and not even the river between them was enough to keep them from coming to blows, until Stertinius ran up and held back Flavus, who was full of rage and demanding his weapons and his horse. Arminius could be seen across the water, shouting threats and calling for battle — much of it in Latin, since he had once served as a commander of his own countrymen in the Roman camp.

11| The next day the German line formed up on the far side of the Weser. Caesar judged it unworthy of a commander to risk his legions without bridges and defenses in place, and so sent the cavalry across the ford instead. Stertinius commanded it, along with Aemilius, one of the senior centurions, entering the river at separate points to spread the enemy out. Where the current ran fastest, Chariovalda, chief of the Batavians, charged across. The Cherusci drew him on with a feigned retreat into a plain ringed by woods, then rose up and poured in from every side, pressing those in front, hemming in those who fell back, some attacking a huddled ring of men hand to hand, others harrying them from a distance. Chariovalda held out a long time against the enemy's fury, urged his men to break through the closing packs in a tight wedge, and himself charged into the thickest of them — but buried under a hail of spears, his horse cut down beneath him, he fell, and many nobles with him; the rest were saved either by their own strength or by the cavalry of Stertinius and Aemilius, who rushed up in time.

12| After crossing the Weser, Germanicus learned from a deserter's tip where Arminius had chosen the battlefield. Other tribes, the man said, had gathered in a forest sacred to Hercules and meant to attack the camp that night. The report was believed: fires could be seen, and scouts who crept closer brought back word of horses whinnying and the vast, disordered murmur of a great host. With the decisive struggle now near, Germanicus decided he needed to test the troops' morale, and turned over in his mind how to do it without getting a false picture. Tribunes and centurions, he knew, tended to report what was cheering rather than what was true; freedmen had servile natures, and friends flattered. Call an assembly, and there too a few would set the tone and the rest would simply echo it. He needed to know men's minds at the root, when they spoke freely and unguarded, over their rations, of hope or fear.

13| So at nightfall he slipped out of his headquarters tent by hidden paths, unknown even to the sentries, with a single companion, his shoulders wrapped in an animal hide. He walked the camp's lanes, stood by the tents, and enjoyed hearing what men said of him: one praised his noble birth, another his good looks, but most his patience, his warmth, the same even temper whether things were serious or light-hearted. They admitted they owed him a debt to be repaid in battle, and that the treacherous truce-breakers deserved to be sacrificed to vengeance and to glory. In the middle of this, one of the enemy, who knew Latin, rode up to the rampart and shouted out, in Arminius's name, promises of wives, land, and a hundred sesterces a day for as long as the war lasted to any man who deserted. The insult only inflamed the legions' anger: let the day come, let there be a fight; the soldiers would seize the Germans' land and drag off their wives — they took it as an omen, and marked out the enemy's marriages and money for plunder in advance. About the third watch there was a rush at the camp, but no missiles were thrown, once the attackers found the cohorts massed thick behind the defenses and no slackening anywhere.

14| That same night brought Germanicus a happy dream: he saw himself performing a sacrifice, and when his toga, splashed with the victim's blood, was handed back to him, it was another, finer one, given by the hands of his grandmother Augusta. Encouraged by the omen, and with the auspices favorable, he called an assembly and laid out, with real foresight, what suited the coming battle. Open ground was not the only good fighting ground for a Roman soldier, he said; if handled right, woods and defiles served just as well. The barbarians' huge shields and their overlong spears could not be managed among tree trunks and undergrowth the way pila, swords, and close-fitting armor could. Let the men close ranks and strike for the face with their sword points: the German had no breastplate, no helmet, not even shields reinforced with iron or leather — just wickerwork or thin boards daubed with paint. Their front line, such as it was, carried spears; the rest had only fire-hardened or short weapons. And though fearsome to look at and strong for a quick rush, they had no stomach for taking wounds: they fled and ran without shame at the disgrace, without regard for their commanders, panicking in adversity, and even in success remembering neither divine law nor human. If the long marches and the sea had worn them out and they wanted it over, here was the battle to finish it: the Rhine now lay farther off than the Elbe, and past that river no fighting remained — provided only that, walking the path his father and his uncle had walked, they gave him victory on this very spot.

15| The general's speech was met with the soldiers' eager response, and the signal for battle was given. Nor did Arminius and the other German chiefs fail, each in his own quarter, to tell their men that these were the very Romans of Varus's army, the most cowardly of all, who instead of enduring war had chosen mutiny — men whose backs were loaded with wounds, some of them, others whose limbs had been broken by storms and waves, now facing hostile enemies again and hostile gods, with no hope of success. They had sought out a fleet and the trackless ocean, Arminius said, precisely so no one would meet them on the way in or press them when beaten; but once it came to hand-to-hand fighting, the wind and oars would be no help to the losers. Let them just remember Roman greed, cruelty, and arrogance: what was left to them but to hold their freedom or die before slavery?

16| Fired up like this and clamoring for battle, they were led down onto a plain called Idistaviso. It lies between the Weser and the hills, curving unevenly as the riverbank yields or the spurs of the hills push forward. Behind it rose a forest, its branches reaching high and the ground beneath the trunks bare and clear. The barbarian line held the plain and the forest's edge; only the Cherusci occupied the ridge, so as to charge down on the Romans from above once battle was joined. Our army advanced like this: Gallic and German auxiliaries in front, behind them foot archers; then four legions, and Germanicus himself with two praetorian cohorts and picked cavalry; then an equal number of other legions, light-armed troops with mounted archers, and the rest of the allied cohorts. The men were alert and ready, so that the marching order could form straight into battle line.

17| Once he saw the Cherusci bands, who in their eagerness had burst forward, Germanicus ordered his strongest cavalry to strike their flank, and Stertinius with the rest of the squadrons to wheel around and hit their rear, promising to be there himself at the right moment. Meanwhile a splendid omen caught the commander's eye: eight eagles seen flying toward the woods and going in. He cried out that the men should go, should follow the Roman birds, the legions' own guardian spirits. At the same moment the infantry advanced, and the cavalry, sent ahead, struck the enemy's rear and flanks. Remarkably, the two enemy columns fled in opposite directions: those who had held the forest ran into open ground, those who had stood in the open rushed into the forest. Between them the Cherusci were driven off the hills, Arminius conspicuous among them, holding up the fight with hand, voice, and wound. He had thrown himself at the archers and would have broken through, if the Raetian and Vindelician cohorts and the Gallic units had not blocked him with their standards. Even so, by sheer physical force and the drive of his horse he broke free, smearing his face with his own blood so as not to be recognized. Some say he was recognized by Chauci serving among the Roman auxiliaries and let go. The same courage, or the same trick, gave Inguiomerus his escape too. The rest were cut down everywhere. Many trying to swim the Weser were overwhelmed by missiles or the force of the current, and finally by the sheer press of men crowding in and the collapsing riverbank. Some, in shameful flight, climbed to the tops of trees and hid among the branches; archers were brought up and shot them down for sport. Others were crushed by trees that were felled on top of them.

18| It was a great victory, and it cost us little blood. From the fifth hour of the day until nightfall the enemy were slaughtered, and ten miles of ground were covered with corpses and weapons; among the spoils were chains they had brought along for the Romans, so certain had they been of the outcome. On the field of battle the soldiers hailed Tiberius as imperator, and they raised a mound and set up arms on it in the manner of a trophy, with the names of the defeated tribes inscribed beneath.

19| The Germans were struck less by their wounds, their grief, and their ruin than by that sight — and it filled them with pain and rage. Men who only just before had been preparing to leave their homes and withdraw beyond the Elbe now wanted to fight; they seized their weapons. Common people and nobles alike, the young and the old, suddenly attacked the Roman column on the march and threw it into confusion. Finally they chose a spot hemmed in by a river and woods, with a narrow, wet plain inside; the woods too were ringed by deep marsh, except on one side, where the Angrivarii had raised a broad earthwork to mark them off from the Cherusci. Here their infantry took its stand; their cavalry they hid in nearby groves, so as to fall on the legions from behind once they entered the forest.

20| None of this was hidden from Germanicus: he knew their plans and their ground, what was open and what concealed, and he turned the enemy's cunning back against them. He handed the cavalry and the open plain to his legate Seius Tubero, and drew up his infantry so that part advanced by the level approach into the forest, while part struggled up against the earthwork; the hard sector he took for himself, leaving the rest to his legates. Those given level ground broke in easily; those who had to storm the earthwork, as if scaling a wall, took a beating from blows raining down from above. Seeing the fight was unequal at close range, the general pulled the legions back a little and had slingers and artillery-men let fly, driving the enemy back. Spears were shot from the engines, and the more conspicuous the enemy's defenders made themselves, the more wounds brought them down. Germanicus himself, with the praetorian cohorts, was first to take the rampart and push the attack into the woods; there the fighting was hand to hand. The enemy had a marsh at their back, the Romans a river and hills hemming them in: both sides were trapped by the ground, both had hope only in courage, safety only in victory.

21| The Germans' spirit was no less, but they were beaten by the kind of fighting and the weapons involved: a huge mass of men, crammed into narrow ground, could neither level nor draw back their overlong spears, nor use their usual quick, darting rushes, and were forced into a static fight. The Roman soldier, by contrast, shield pressed to his chest and hand gripping the hilt, stabbed at the barbarians' broad bodies and exposed faces, and cut a path through the slaughtered enemy. Arminius, worn down by constant danger, or slowed by a wound he had just taken, was no longer his usual self. Inguiomerus too, darting all through the line, was failing more from bad luck than lack of courage. Germanicus, so as to be more easily recognized, had pulled the covering from his head and urged the men on to keep killing: there was no need for prisoners; only wiping the tribe out entirely would finish this war. By now the day was far gone, and he drew one legion out of the line to pitch camp, while the others kept gorging on enemy blood clear through to nightfall. The cavalry fight was inconclusive.

22| Germanicus praised the victors before the assembly and piled up the captured weapons into a mound, with an inscription proclaiming that Tiberius Caesar's army, once it had broken the peoples living between Rhine and Elbe, set up this monument for Mars, Jupiter, and Augustus. Of himself he added nothing — whether from fear of jealousy, or because he thought the knowledge of the deed was enough. He then handed Stertinius the task of making war on the Angrivarii, unless they hurried to surrender. And they, as suppliants, refused nothing and so obtained pardon for everything.

23| By now summer was well advanced, and some legions were sent back to winter quarters by land. Germanicus put the greater number on ships and led them down the river Ems into the open sea. At first the water was calm, ringing with the oars of a thousand vessels or driven by their sails. Then a black mass of cloud burst into hail, and gusting squalls came from every side, throwing up erratic waves that blotted out the view and fouled the steering. The soldiers, terrified and ignorant of the sea's dangers, got in the sailors' way or helped at the wrong moments, undoing the crews' skilled work. Then the whole sky and the whole sea turned south — a wind that gathers strength from Germany's swollen lands and deep rivers and vast banks of cloud, and is made harsher still by the cold of the neighboring north. It seized the ships and scattered them onto the open ocean or onto islands ringed with sheer rock or treacherous hidden shoals. They barely escaped these, and only briefly — for when the tide turned and ran the same way as the wind, the ships could no longer hold their anchors or bail out the water pouring in. Horses, pack animals, baggage, even weapons were thrown overboard to lighten the hulls, which were leaking at the seams under the pounding waves.

24| As much as the ocean outdoes every other sea in violence, and Germany's sky outdoes every other in savagery, by that much did this disaster exceed all others in strangeness and scale — hostile shores all around, or a sea so vast and deep it might be believed the last one, the edge of the world with no land beyond. Some ships simply sank; more were cast up on far-flung islands, where the soldiers, finding no human life, starved to death — except those who survived on the carcasses of horses washed up beside them. Only Germanicus's own galley made it to the coast of the Chauci. For all those days and nights he haunted the rocks and jutting headlands, crying out that he alone was to blame for so vast a disaster, and his friends could barely keep him from throwing himself into the same sea. At last, as the tide fell back and the wind turned favorable, the crippled ships limped home, some rowed by a handful of survivors, some rigged with makeshift sail cloth, some towed by the sturdier vessels. Germanicus had them hastily repaired and sent out again to search the islands. Many men were recovered that way. The Angrivarii, recently taken into alliance, ransomed a number from tribes further inland and returned them. Some had been carried off to Britain and were sent back by the local chieftains. Every man who returned from far away told wonders — of raging whirlwinds, birds never heard of, monsters of the deep, creatures half man and half beast — things seen, or believed out of fear.

25| The report of the lost fleet raised German hopes for war just as it spurred Germanicus to put it down. He ordered Gaius Silius to march against the Chatti with thirty thousand infantry and three thousand cavalry, while he himself, with a larger force, invaded the Marsi. Their chief, Mallovendus, who had recently surrendered, revealed that the eagle of Varus's lost legion lay buried near a nearby grove, guarded by only a small detachment. Germanicus sent one column to draw the enemy off from the front and another to circle around and dig behind their lines, and luck favored both. Emboldened, Germanicus pressed on inland, laying waste and destroying, meeting an enemy who never dared face him, or who broke and ran the instant he made a stand — and, as the prisoners told it, an enemy more frightened now than ever. For they had been saying the Romans were unconquerable, immune to disaster — that after losing their fleet, losing their weapons, after piling the shores with the bodies of men and horses, they had burst in again with the same courage, the same ferocity, as if their numbers had actually grown.

26| The troops were then led back into winter quarters, cheered in spirit that the setbacks at sea had been balanced out by success on land. Germanicus added to their cheer by paying, in full, whatever losses each man reported. There was no doubt the enemy was wavering and weighing whether to sue for peace, and that one more summer's campaign could finish the war. But Tiberius kept writing letter after letter urging him to return for the triumph already decreed: there had been successes enough, and setbacks enough. His victories had been great and glorious — but he should remember, too, the losses inflicted by wind and wave, through no fault of the commander, yet grave and cruel all the same. He himself, Tiberius said, had been sent into Germany nine times by the deified Augustus, and had accomplished more by policy than by force — that was how the Sugambri had been brought to surrender, how the Suebi and King Maroboduus had been bound by peace. The Cherusci and the other rebel tribes, now that Rome's vengeance had been satisfied, could be left to tear themselves apart in their own quarrels. When Germanicus asked for one more year to finish what he had begun, Tiberius pressed his modesty harder still, offering him a second consulship whose duties he would have to return to Rome to take up in person. He added, as if in passing, that if fighting still had to be done, Germanicus should leave some of the glory for his brother Drusus, who had no other enemy through whom to win the title of imperator and bring home the laurel except in Germany. Germanicus no longer hesitated, though he understood well enough that this was all a pretext, and that he was being pulled away from glory already within his grasp out of jealousy.

27| About this same time, Libo Drusus, of the Scribonian family, was accused of plotting revolution. I will set out the origin, course, and end of this affair with some care, because it was then that the methods first appeared which for so many years afterward would eat away at the state. Firmius Catus, a senator and one of Libo's closest friends, pushed the young man — reckless and easily taken in by empty promises — toward the predictions of astrologers, the rites of magicians, and even interpreters of dreams, all the while dangling before him his great-grandfather Pompey, his great-aunt Scribonia, once the wife of Augustus, his cousins the Caesars, and a house full of ancestral portraits. He urged him on to extravagance and debt, joining him in his pleasures and his troubles alike, the better to entangle him in evidence from every side.

28| Once Catus had gathered enough witnesses, including slaves who could confirm the same facts, he asked for an audience with the emperor, laying out the charge and the accused through Flaccus Vescularius, a Roman knight who had closer dealings with Tiberius. Tiberius did not dismiss the information, but refused a meeting, saying that messages could pass just as well through the same go-between, Flaccus. Meanwhile he honored Libo with a praetorship, invited him to his table, showed no change in his face, no sharpness in his words — so completely had he buried his anger — and though he could have stopped Libo's every word and deed, he preferred simply to know them. This went on until a man named Junius, who had been asked to summon the shades of the dead by incantation, brought the information to Fulcinius Trio. Trio's talent among prosecutors was well known, and he was hungry for notoriety. He seized on the accused at once, went to the consuls, and demanded a hearing before the Senate. The senators were summoned, told only that they were to deliberate on a matter of great and terrible import.

29| Libo, meanwhile, changed into mourning clothes and went from house to house with leading women of Rome, begging his relatives, pleading for someone to speak for him against the danger — and all refused, each pretending a different excuse, though the fear behind them was the same. On the day of the Senate meeting, worn down by fear and sickness — or, as some have it, feigning illness — he was carried to the doors of the senate house on a litter, leaning on his brother, stretching out his hands and pleading voice toward Tiberius, who received him with an unmoved face. Then Caesar read out the accusations and the names behind them, taking care to seem neither to soften nor sharpen the charges.

30| Besides Trio and Catus, two more accusers had joined in, Fonteius Agrippa and Gaius Vibius, and they were quarreling over who would have the right to make the closing case against the accused, until Vibius — since none of them would yield to the others, and Libo had come in without an advocate — announced he would present the charges one by one, and produced documents so absurd that among them Libo was said to have asked whether he would ever have wealth enough to pave the road to Brundisium in coin. There were other things of the same sort, foolish and empty, pitiable if taken kindly. But on one document, in Libo's own hand, the prosecutor claimed, next to the names of members of the imperial family and senators, sinister or cryptic marks had been added. Libo denied it, and it was decided that the slaves who could identify the handwriting should be questioned under torture. But since an old decree of the Senate forbade torturing a slave in a case touching his master's life, Tiberius — shrewd, and an innovator in the law — ordered each slave sold individually to the public agent, so that, the letter of the decree preserved, evidence against Libo could be extracted from what were now, technically, someone else's slaves. Libo asked for a day's postponement on these grounds, and went home, sending his relative Publius Quirinius to carry his last plea to the emperor.

31| The answer came back: he should petition the Senate. Meanwhile soldiers surrounded his house and made noise even in the entrance hall, loud enough to be heard and seen. Libo, at the very banquet he had arranged for what he meant to be his last pleasure, now in agony, called for someone to kill him, seized his slaves by the hand, tried to force a sword on them. As they scrambled back in panic, they knocked over the lamp on the table, and in the darkness that now seemed fitting for his own death, he drove two blows into his own body. His freedmen ran to him at the sound of his groaning as he collapsed, and the soldiers, seeing the killing was done, withdrew. Even so the prosecution went forward before the Senate with the same severity as before, and Tiberius swore that he would have begged for Libo's life, guilty as he was, had he not rushed to take it himself.

32| His estate was divided among his accusers, and praetorships outside the normal order were granted to those of senatorial rank among them. Cotta Messalinus then proposed that Libo's death mask never be carried in his descendants' funerals; Gnaeus Lentulus, that no Scribonius should ever take the surname Drusus. Days of public thanksgiving were fixed on the motion of Pomponius Flaccus; offerings to Jupiter, Mars, and Concord were decreed, and Lucius Piso, Asinius Gallus, Papius Mutilus, and Lucius Apronius moved that the Ides of September, the day Libo had killed himself, be kept as a holiday. I have recorded these men's proposals and their flatteries so that it may be known how old this rot in the state already was. The Senate also passed decrees against astrologers and magicians, expelling them from Italy. Under this decree Lucius Pituanius was thrown from the Tarpeian rock, and Publius Marcius was executed by the consuls outside the Esquiline Gate, after the trumpet call had been sounded — the old traditional form.

33| At the next meeting of the Senate, the former consul Q. Haterius and the former praetor Octavius Fronto spoke at length against the city's extravagance. It was decreed that solid gold vessels should no longer be used to serve food, and that silk should no longer disgrace men's bodies. Fronto went further and demanded limits on silver, furniture, and household slaves — for it was still common enough for senators, if they believed something served the public interest, to raise it in place of a formal motion. Asinius Gallus spoke against him: as the empire had grown, he said, private fortunes had grown with it, and this was nothing new but among the oldest of customs. Wealth had meant one thing among the Fabricii, another among the Scipios; everything is measured against the state, and where the state was poor, citizens' houses were cramped, but as it rose to greatness, individuals rose too. There was no fixed excess or moderation in household goods or silver — everything depends on the fortune of the owner. The census requirements that separate senators from knights exist not because their natures differ, but so that those who outrank others in rank and standing might also outrank them in the comforts that ease the mind and preserve the body — unless, that is, the most distinguished men are expected to bear the greatest burdens and the greatest dangers while being denied the comforts that make burdens and dangers bearable. Gallus won easy assent, because under respectable names he had confessed to vices his listeners shared. Tiberius added that this was no time for a censor's crackdown, and that if morals ever slipped badly enough, someone would be found to correct them.

34| In the midst of this, Lucius Piso denounced the corruption of the courts, the bribery of the forum, and the savagery of orators who threatened prosecutions, declaring that he would leave and quit Rome to live out his life in some remote, hidden corner of the countryside — and with that he walked out of the Senate house. Tiberius was shaken. Though he soothed Piso with gentle words, he also pressed Piso's relatives to hold him back, by authority or by pleading, from leaving. Piso soon gave another proof of the same blunt anger: he summoned Urgulania to court, a woman whom her friendship with the empress Augusta had placed above the law. Urgulania did not comply — she rode instead to Caesar's house, ignoring Piso — nor did Piso back down, even though Augusta complained that she was being insulted and diminished. Tiberius judged it proper to indulge his mother only this far: he said he would go to the praetor's tribunal himself and support Urgulania there. He set out from the Palace, ordering his soldiers to follow at a distance. The crowd gathered to watch him make his composed way through the streets, drawing out the time and the journey with idle talk, until Piso's relatives, having failed to restrain him, persuaded Augusta to pay the sum being claimed. That ended the matter — and neither man came out of it worse: Piso kept his reputation, and Caesar's grew larger still. But Urgulania's power over the city had grown so excessive that when called as a witness in a case before the Senate, she refused to appear. A praetor was sent instead to question her at home — though the old custom had always been that even the Vestal Virgins gave testimony in the forum and the courts whenever required.

35| I would not bother recording that certain business was postponed that year, except that it is worth knowing the opposing views of Gnaeus Piso and Asinius Gallus on the matter. Piso argued that precisely because Caesar had said he would be absent, the business should be pushed forward all the more — it would reflect well on the state to show that the Senate and the knights could carry out their duties without the emperor present. Gallus, since Piso had already claimed the appearance of championing liberty, argued that nothing was truly distinguished or worthy of the Roman people's dignity except what was done in Caesar's presence, under his own eyes — and that it was for the sake of preserving that presence that all Italy gathered and the provinces flocked to Rome. Tiberius listened to all this in silence; both sides argued with great heat, but the business was postponed regardless.

36| A contest also broke out between Gallus and Caesar. Gallus proposed that elections for magistracies be held five years at a time, and that legionary commanders who had already held military posts qualifying them for the praetorship should be nominated as future praetors on the spot, with the emperor naming twelve candidates a year. There was no doubt this proposal reached deeper, probing the hidden mechanics of imperial power. Tiberius, though the scheme appeared to enlarge his own authority, argued against it: it would be a heavy burden on his restraint, he said, to choose so many and defer so many others. Even from year to year it was hard to avoid giving offense, though the prospect of a near chance at office softened a rejection — how much resentment would there be from men cast five years into the future? How could anyone foresee, over so long a stretch, what a man's state of mind, household, or fortune would be? Men grew arrogant even with a year's advance notice of office — what if they held that expectation for five years? The scheme would multiply magistracies fivefold and overturn the laws that set fixed terms for candidates to prove themselves and to seek or secure office. With this speech, plausible enough on its surface, he kept his grip on power intact.

37| He also helped several senators whose property had fallen below the required census. All the more surprising, then, that he received the plea of Marcus Hortalus, a young man of noble birth, with such haughtiness, though his poverty was plain to see. Hortalus was the grandson of the orator Hortensius; the god Augustus had persuaded him with a gift of a million sesterces to marry and raise children, so that so distinguished a family would not die out. So now, with his four sons standing at the threshold of the Senate house — for the Senate was meeting on the Palatine — he rose to speak in place of a formal motion, looking now at the bust of Hortensius set among the orators, now at that of Augustus, and began: 'Conscript Fathers, I did not raise these children — whose number and youth you can see — of my own will, but because the emperor urged it; and also because my ancestors had earned the right to leave descendants behind. As for me, I could not, given how the times had changed, acquire or inherit money, popular favor, or eloquence — that hereditary gift of our house — and I was content if my modest means brought shame on neither myself nor anyone else. I married on the emperor's order. Here stand the offspring of so many consuls, so many dictators. I say this not to provoke resentment, but to win your pity. Under your prosperous rule, Caesar, they will attain whatever honors you grant them; in the meantime, protect the great-grandsons of Quintus Hortensius, the wards of the god Augustus, from poverty.'

38| The Senate's sympathy only spurred Tiberius to oppose him more openly, and he spoke roughly these words: 'If every poor man begins coming here to demand money for his children, individuals will never be satisfied and the treasury will run dry. Our ancestors did not grant us the license to stray from the matter at hand and, under cover of speaking for the common good, use this floor to enrich our own private households and family fortunes — earning the Senate and its emperors resentment either way, whether they grant such gifts freely or refuse them. What we have just heard is not a plea but an extortion — and an untimely, unexpected one at that, coming when the Fathers had gathered to discuss other business: to stand up and press the Senate's restraint with the mere number and age of one's children, and to turn that same pressure on me, as if to break open the treasury by force. If we drain it through favoritism, we will only have to refill it through crime. The god Augustus gave you money, Hortalus, but he was not compelled to, nor was there any law that he must always give. Otherwise ambition will wither and idleness will spread, if no one has anything to fear or hope from his own efforts, and everyone waits securely for help from elsewhere — useless to themselves, a burden to us.' These words and others like them, though heard with apparent approval by those whose habit is to praise everything a ruler says, honorable or not, were received by most in silence or a muffled murmur. Tiberius noticed. After a brief pause he said that he had given Hortalus his answer — but that if the Fathers thought it proper, he would give two hundred thousand sesterces to each of his sons who was male. Others offered thanks; Hortalus said nothing, whether from fear or because even amid such straitened fortune he still clung to the pride of his ancient house. Tiberius never showed him pity again, even as the house of Hortensius sank into shameful poverty.

39| That same year, the audacity of a single slave — had it not been checked in time — would have shaken the state with civil discord and armed conflict. A slave of Postumus Agrippa named Clemens, on learning of Augustus's death, formed a plan with nothing servile about it: to sail to the island of Planasia, seize Agrippa by trick or force, and carry him to the armies in Germany. The slowness of his cargo ship thwarted the attempt; meanwhile the murder had already been carried out. Undeterred, he turned to something bolder and more reckless still — he stole Agrippa's ashes, sailed to the promontory of Cosa in Etruria, and hid himself in obscure places until he had let his hair and beard grow long, for he was close enough to his former master in age and looks. Then, through suitable men sworn to his secret, the rumor spread that Agrippa was alive — first in whispers, as forbidden things usually spread, then as a wandering rumor that found ready ears among the most credulous, and again among the restless and those hungry for change. Clemens himself visited the towns under cover of darkness, never showing himself openly nor lingering long in the same place; but because truth gains strength from being seen and given time, while falsehood thrives on haste and uncertainty, he either left the rumor behind him or outran it.

40| Meanwhile a rumor spread through Italy that Agrippa had been saved by the will of the gods, and it was believed at Rome too. He had already been carried into Ostia, and enormous crowds were celebrating him there; clandestine gatherings honored him in the city itself. Tiberius was torn by conflicting worries: should he crush his own slave with military force, or let the empty credulity fade away on its own with time? Wavering between shame and fear, he weighed now that nothing should be dismissed, now that not everything need be feared. In the end he handed the matter to Sallustius Crispus. Crispus chose two of his own clients (some say they were soldiers) and told them to approach the man pretending to be in on the plot, offer him money, and promise loyalty and shared risk. They did as ordered. Then, watching for an unguarded night, they got hold of a suitable force, bound him, gagged him, and dragged him to the Palatine. When Tiberius asked him how he had become Agrippa, he is said to have answered, 'The same way you became Caesar.' He could not be forced to name accomplices. Tiberius did not dare punish him openly; he had him killed in a hidden part of the palace and his body secretly removed. And although many in the imperial household, and knights and senators too, were said to have backed him with money and advice, no inquiry was made.

41| At year's end an arch was dedicated near the temple of Saturn for the recovery of the standards lost with Varus, won back under Germanicus's command and Tiberius's auspices; also a temple to Fors Fortuna beside the Tiber, in the gardens the dictator Caesar had bequeathed to the Roman people; a shrine to the Julian family; and a statue to the deified Augustus at Bovillae. In the consulship of Gaius Caelius and Lucius Pomponius, Germanicus Caesar celebrated his triumph on May 26 over the Cherusci, the Chatti, the Angrivarii, and the other peoples as far as the Elbe. Spoils were paraded, captives, models of mountains, rivers, and battles; and because he had been forbidden to finish the war, it was accepted as finished anyway. His own remarkable bearing, and his chariot loaded with five children, heightened the spectacle for onlookers. But underneath ran a quiet dread, as people recalled that the crowd's favor had brought his father Drusus no luck, that his uncle Marcellus had been snatched away in youth despite the people's burning devotion — the Roman people's affections are brief and unlucky.

42| For the rest, Tiberius gave three hundred sesterces a head to the common people in Germanicus's name, and named himself his colleague for the consulship. Even this did not win him credit for genuine affection; he resolved to remove the young man under the guise of honor, and either built pretexts or seized ones that offered themselves. King Archelaus had held Cappadocia for fifty years, and Tiberius hated him for failing to pay him any court while he lived at Rhodes. Archelaus had not neglected this out of arrogance, but on the advice of Augustus's inner circle, since while Gaius Caesar flourished and had been sent out to manage the East, friendship with Tiberius was thought unsafe. Once the line of the Caesars had turned over and Tiberius had gained power, he lured Archelaus with a letter from his mother, who, without concealing her son's grievances, offered clemency if he came to beg for it. Archelaus, unaware of the trap — or fearing violence if he were thought to have seen through it — hurried to Rome. He was received harshly by the emperor and soon accused before the senate, and worn out not by the charges, which were fabricated, but by anguish, and further by old age and by the fact that because kings are unused to being treated as equals, let alone as inferiors, he ended his life, whether by his own will or by fate. The kingdom was reduced to a province, and since the emperor declared that its revenues allowed the one percent sales tax to be reduced, he set it at half a percent going forward. Around the same time, with Antiochus king of Commagene and Philopator king of Cilicia both dead, their peoples were in turmoil, most wanting Roman rule, others wanting a king; and the provinces of Syria and Judaea, worn down by their burdens, petitioned for a reduction in tribute.

43| So Tiberius laid these matters before the senate, along with what I mentioned above about Armenia, saying the unrest in the East could be settled only by Germanicus's wisdom: his own years were declining, and Drusus's were not yet ripe enough. The senate then decreed that the provinces beyond the sea be entrusted to Germanicus, with authority greater, wherever he went, than that held by governors chosen by lot or appointed by the emperor. But Tiberius had already removed Creticus Silanus from Syria — a man tied to Germanicus by marriage, since Silanus's daughter was engaged to Germanicus's eldest son, Nero — and put Gnaeus Piso in his place, a man of violent temper and no gift for obedience, with an inborn arrogance inherited from his father, who in the civil war had served with fierce zeal the party reviving in Africa against Caesar, then followed Brutus and Cassius, and even after being allowed to return had kept out of public office until he was courted into accepting the consulship Augustus offered him. Beyond his father's spirit, he was also fired by the high birth and wealth of his wife Plancina; he barely deferred to Tiberius and looked down on Tiberius's children as far beneath him. He had no doubt he had been chosen to govern Syria precisely to check Germanicus's ambitions. Some believed Tiberius had given him secret instructions as well; and Livia, without question, urged Plancina, out of a woman's rivalry, to persecute Agrippina. For the court was split and at odds, with silent factions favoring either Drusus or Germanicus. Tiberius cherished Drusus as his own blood; Germanicus's estrangement from his uncle had only increased everyone else's love for him, and he had the further advantage of a more brilliant maternal line, counting Mark Antony as grandfather and Augustus as great-uncle. Against this, Drusus's own great-grandfather, the Roman knight Pomponius Atticus, seemed to some a blot on the Claudian family portraits; and Germanicus's wife Agrippina outshone Drusus's wife Livia in fertility and reputation. Yet the brothers themselves remained remarkably united, unshaken by the rivalries around them.

44| Not long after, Drusus was sent to Illyricum to get used to military life and win the army's favor; Tiberius also thought it better for a young man given to the softness of city life to be kept in camp, and felt safer himself with a son commanding legions on each front. The pretext was that the Suebi were asking for help against the Cherusci: for with the Romans gone and no outside threat to fear, the tribes, driven by habit and now by rivalry for glory, had turned their weapons on each other. The two nations were equally strong, their leaders equally brave; but Maroboduus's royal title was hated among his own people, while Arminius, fighting for freedom, had their favor.

45| So not only the Cherusci and their allies, Arminius's old soldiers, took up arms, but tribes from Maroboduus's own kingdom, the Semnones and Langobardi, deserted to him as well. With these added, he would have had the upper hand, had Inguiomerus not fled to Maroboduus with his own band of followers — for no reason but that he, an old man and an uncle, scorned to obey his young nephew. The armies formed up in battle order, each side hoping equally, and not, as once among the Germans, in scattered raids or loose bands: for their long campaigns against us had trained them to follow their standards, back each other with reserves, and take orders from commanders. And now Arminius, riding along the whole line, pointed out as he passed each group the freedom won back, the legions cut down, the Roman spoils and weapons still in the hands of many; and he mocked Maroboduus as a coward, untested in battle, hiding safe in the depths of the Hercynian forest; and one who had then sought an alliance through gifts and embassies — a traitor to his country, a lackey of Caesar, deserving to be driven out with no less hatred than they had killed Quinctilius Varus. Let them only remember their many battles, whose outcome — and the final expulsion of the Romans — proved well enough in whose hands the mastery of the war really lay.

46| Nor did Maroboduus hold back from boasting of himself and insulting his enemy. Gripping Inguiomerus, he declared that in that one man's body lay all the glory of the Cherusci, that it was by his counsel that their successes had fallen out as they did; Arminius was a madman who understood nothing, claiming another man's glory for himself, since he had merely tricked three wandering legions and a commander who suspected no treachery — at a heavy cost to Germany and to his own disgrace, since even now his wife and son endured slavery. As for himself, attacked by twelve legions under Tiberius's command, he had kept the glory of the Germans unstained, and had then withdrawn on equal terms; nor did he regret that it now rested in their own hands whether they wanted an unbroken war against Rome or a bloodless peace. Roused by these words, the armies were further driven by their own separate causes, the Cherusci and Langobardi fighting for ancient honor or newly won freedom, the others for the growth of their power. Never had a greater force clashed, nor with a more uncertain result, each side routing the other's right wing. Battle seemed about to resume, had Maroboduus not withdrawn his camp to the hills. This was taken as a sign of collapse; and, gradually stripped bare by desertions, he withdrew among the Marcomanni and sent envoys to Tiberius begging for help. The answer came back that he had no right to call on Roman arms against the Cherusci, having given no help to the Romans when they fought that same enemy. Still, Drusus was sent, as we have related, to secure the peace.

47| In the same year twelve famous cities of Asia collapsed in a nighttime earthquake, which made the disaster all the more unforeseen and severe. Even the usual escape in such a calamity — rushing into open ground — was no help, since the earth split open and swallowed people whole. They say immense mountains sank, that what had been level ground was seen raised on high, and that fires flashed out amid the ruin. The disaster struck the people of Sardis hardest, and drew them the most sympathy: the emperor promised them ten million sesterces and remitted for five years whatever they owed the treasury or the imperial purse. The people of Magnesia by Sipylus were judged next worst hit and next most in need of relief. It was decided that the Temnians, Philadelphians, Aegeans, Apollonidians, the people called Mostenians or Macedonian Hyrcanians, and the towns of Hierocaesarea, Myrina, Cyme, and Tmolus should likewise be relieved of tribute for the same period, and that a senator be sent out to see conditions on the ground and offer relief. Marcus Ateius, a former praetor, was chosen, so that having a former consul govern Asia would not create rivalry between equals and, from that, delay.

48| Caesar also increased public giving in a way people found equally welcome. The estate of Aemilia Musa, a wealthy woman who died without a will, had been claimed for the treasury, but Tiberius handed it over to Aemilius Lepidus, since it appeared to belong to his family. And when the rich Roman knight Pantuleius died, though Tiberius himself was named an heir under the will, he passed the inheritance to Marcus Servilius, whom he found named in an earlier and undisputed will, remarking that the noble birth of both men deserved help from money. He never accepted an inheritance unless he had earned it through friendship; strangers, and people hostile to others who named him heir simply to win favor, he kept firmly at arm's length. But just as he relieved honest poverty in the innocent, so he removed the spendthrift and those ruined by their own disgraceful conduct — Vibidius Varro, Marius Nepos, Appius Appianus, Cornelius Sulla, and Quintus Vitellius — from the senate, or let them resign on their own.

49| Around this same time he dedicated temples of the gods that had fallen into ruin through age or fire, works begun under Augustus: one to Liber, Libera, and Ceres near the Circus Maximus, vowed by the dictator Aulus Postumius; in the same place a temple of Flora, built by the aediles Lucius and Marcus Publicius; and a temple to Janus in the Forum Holitorium, raised by Gaius Duilius, the first man to win a naval success for Rome and to earn a triumph at sea over the Carthaginians. Germanicus consecrated the temple of Hope, which Aulus Atilius had vowed in the same war.

50| Meanwhile the law of treason kept growing. An informer brought a charge of treason against Appuleia Varilla, granddaughter of Augustus's sister, on the grounds that she had mocked the deified Augustus, Tiberius, and his mother in scandalous talk, and that she was involved in an affair while related to the emperor. The adultery charge seemed adequately covered by the Julian law. But Tiberius asked that the treason charge be separated out and that she be convicted only if she had spoken irreverently of Augustus; as for words thrown at himself, he wanted no formal inquiry. Asked by the consul what he thought about the accusation that she had spoken ill of his mother too, he said nothing. Then, at the next meeting of the senate, he asked in his mother's name as well that no one be charged over words spoken about her, whatever they were. He cleared Appuleia of the treason charge; on the adultery charge he asked for a lighter penalty, urging that, following ancestral precedent, she simply be sent more than two hundred miles from her relatives. Her lover Manlius was barred from Italy and Africa.

51| A contest arose over choosing a praetor to replace Vipstanus Gallus, who had died. Germanicus and Drusus, still in Rome at the time, backed Haterius Agrippa, a relative of Germanicus. Most of the senate, however, pushed to give weight to the number of children a candidate had, as the law required. Tiberius was delighted to watch the senate debate between his sons and the laws. The law was beaten, no doubt about it — but not at once, and only by a few votes, the way laws used to be beaten even when they still had force.

52| That same year war broke out in Africa, led by the enemy commander Tacfarinas. A Numidian by birth, he had served in the Roman auxiliary ranks, then deserted. At first he gathered roving bands used to banditry for plunder and raids; then he organized them military-style into companies and squadrons; and finally came to be seen not as leader of a disorganized mob but as chief of the Musulamii. That people, strong and living near the empty wastes of Africa, with no experience yet of city life, took up arms and drew in their Moorish neighbors as well, under their own leader, Mazippa. The force split: Tacfarinas kept picked men armed in Roman fashion in a fixed camp, training them to discipline and command, while Mazippa ranged about with a light force spreading fire, killing, and terror. They had driven the Cinithii, a people not to be dismissed lightly, into the same cause, when Furius Camillus, proconsul of Africa, led out his legion and the allied troops gathered under standard against the enemy — a modest force set against the numbers of Numidians and Moors, but nothing was guarded against so carefully as letting the enemy dodge battle out of fear. Hope of victory lured them instead into defeat. So the legion was placed in the center, with light cohorts and two cavalry wings on the flanks. Tacfarinas did not shy from the fight. The Numidians were routed, and after many years the Furius name won military glory again — for since the great Furius who recovered Rome, and his son Camillus, honor in war had belonged to other families, and this Camillus we speak of had been thought a stranger to warfare. Tiberius was all the readier to praise the achievement before the senate, and the senators voted him the triumphal insignia — which, given the modesty of his life, brought him no harm.

53| The next year had Tiberius as consul for the third time and Germanicus for the second. But Germanicus took up that office away from Rome, in Nicopolis in Achaea, where he had arrived after sailing along the Illyrian coast, visiting his brother Drusus in Dalmatia, and enduring a rough crossing of the Adriatic and then the Ionian Sea. He spent a few days refitting the fleet; meanwhile he visited the bay made famous by the victory at Actium, the spoils and camp Augustus had consecrated there, and thought of his own ancestors as he did — for, as I have noted, his uncle was Augustus and his grandfather was Antony, and the place held for him a vivid picture of both grief and triumph. From there he went on to Athens, and out of respect for the treaty with that allied and ancient city, he kept to a single lictor and nothing more. The Greeks met him with every extravagant honor their ingenuity could produce, trotting out the ancient deeds and sayings of their forefathers to give their flattery extra weight.

54| From there he made for Euboea and crossed to Lesbos, where Agrippina, in her last childbirth, gave birth to Julia. Then he touched the far edge of Asia, and the Thracian cities of Perinthus and Byzantium, then passed through the narrows of the Propontis and into the mouth of the Black Sea, driven by a wish to know these ancient places of legendary fame — and along the way he brought relief to provinces worn down by internal quarrels or by the abuses of their governors. On his way back he tried to visit the shrine of the Samothracian mysteries, but headwinds drove him off course. So he went instead to Troy, to view its site, sacred both for its shifting fortunes and as the origin of our own people, then made his way back across Asia and put in at Colophon to consult the oracle of Apollo of Claros. There, unlike at Delphi, it is not a woman but a priest chosen from certain families, usually summoned from Miletus, who merely hears the number and names of those consulting; then he goes down into a cave, drinks water from a hidden spring, and — though he is generally ignorant of letters and poetry — delivers oracles in verse on the matters each person had in mind. It was said that, in riddling fashion typical of oracles, he foretold an early death for Germanicus.

55| Meanwhile Gnaeus Piso, eager to get his own plans moving faster, terrified the city of Athens with a violent arrival and lashed it with a harsh speech, taking a sideways swipe at Germanicus for showing such excessive courtesy — beneath the dignity of the Roman name — not to the Athenians, long since wiped out by disaster after disaster, but to that mongrel mix of peoples now occupying the place: for these, he said, were the very people who had sided with Mithridates against Sulla and with Antony against the deified Augustus. He even dredged up old grievances — their poor showing against the Macedonians, their violence against their own people — and he had a personal grudge against the city too, because they had refused his request to pardon a certain Theophilus, convicted of forgery by the court of the Areopagus. From there, sailing swiftly through the Cyclades by the shortest sea routes, he caught up with Germanicus at the island of Rhodes, well aware of the attacks he was under for his conduct. Yet Germanicus behaved with such restraint that when a storm arose and swept Piso's ship toward the rocks, and his enemy's death could easily have been chalked up to accident, he sent triremes to pull him out of danger. Piso was not softened by this; he barely tolerated a single day's delay before leaving Germanicus and hurrying on ahead. Once he reached Syria and its legions, through bribery, currying favor, and doing favors for the lowest-ranking soldiers, removing veteran centurions and strict tribunes and giving their posts to his own clients or to the worst men available, he let slackness take hold in camp and lawlessness in the towns, with soldiers wandering and running wild through the countryside — corruption so far advanced that ordinary talk called him father of the legions. Nor did Plancina keep herself within the bounds proper to a woman: she attended cavalry drills and cohort maneuvers, and hurled insults at Agrippina and Germanicus, while some among even the good soldiers grew disturbingly willing to follow bad orders — a quiet rumor spreading that this was happening with the commander's own tacit approval. Germanicus knew of all this, but his more pressing concern was to deal with Armenia first.

56| That nation has always been unpredictable, both in the temperament of its people and in its geography, since it stretches from close along our provinces deep into Median territory. Caught between the greatest empires, and often divided among themselves, the Armenians feel hatred toward Rome and jealousy toward Parthia alike. At that time they had no king, Vonones having been removed; but popular opinion favored Zeno, son of the Pontic king Polemon: since childhood he had embraced Armenian dress and customs, and by hunting, feasting, and whatever else barbarians prize, he had won the loyalty of nobles and commoners alike. So Germanicus, in the city of Artaxata, with the nobles' approval and crowds gathered around, placed the royal diadem on his head. The rest, paying homage, hailed him as King Artaxias, a name they gave him after the city itself. Cappadocia, meanwhile, was reduced to the form of a province and received Quintus Veranius as governor; and some of the royal tribute was lowered, to encourage hope that Roman rule would prove milder. Quintus Servaeus was placed over Commagene, which was then for the first time transferred to the authority of a praetorian governor.

57| All the allied kingdoms had been settled successfully, but this brought Germanicus no joy, because of Piso's arrogance. Ordered to lead part of the legions into Armenia himself, or send his son, Piso had ignored both instructions. The two men finally met at Cyrrhus, in the winter camp of the tenth legion, each with his face set — Piso against showing fear, Germanicus against seeming to threaten. Germanicus, as I have said, was the milder of the two. But their friends, skilled at fanning grievances, exaggerated the truth, piled on lies, and accused Piso himself, Plancina, and their sons in various ways. Finally, with only a few intimates present, Caesar opened a conversation of the kind that anger and concealment together produce; Piso answered with defiant pleading. They parted open enemies. After that Piso rarely appeared at Germanicus's tribunal, and when he did sit in on proceedings, his hostility and disagreement were plain. His voice was heard, too, at a banquet, when the king of the Nabataeans presented heavy gold crowns to Caesar and Agrippina and lighter ones to Piso and the rest — Piso remarked that a Roman prince's son, not a Parthian king's, was the one being honored at this table, then flung his crown to the floor and added a good many more words against extravagance. Germanicus found this bitter but bore it.

58| Meanwhile envoys came from Artabanus, king of the Parthians. He had sent them to recall the friendship and treaty between the two peoples, saying he wished to renew the pledge, and that in honor of Germanicus he would come to the bank of the Euphrates. He asked meanwhile that Vonones not be kept in Syria, where he might draw the leading men of the tribes into factional strife through secret messages. Germanicus answered grandly on the alliance between Rome and Parthia, and with dignified restraint on the king's proposed visit and the honor due himself. Vonones was moved to Pompeiopolis, a coastal city of Cilicia. This was granted not only to Artabanus's request but as an insult to Piso, to whom Vonones had made himself very welcome through many favors and gifts with which he had bound Plancina to him.

59| Marcus Silanus and Lucius Norbanus were now consuls, and it was in their year that Germanicus set out for Egypt, drawn by its ancient sites. The official reason given was provincial business, and he did ease grain prices by opening the public granaries, and won popular favor by walking about without soldiers, feet bare, dressed like a Greek — in imitation of Publius Scipio, who we are told did the same in Sicily, even while the war with Carthage still raged. Tiberius rebuked his dress and manner with mild words, but came down hard on one point: against Augustus's rule, Germanicus had entered Alexandria without the emperor's leave. For among the other secrets of his rule, Augustus had set Egypt apart, forbidding senators or prominent Roman knights to enter without permission, so that no one who seized that province and its land-and-sea gateways could starve Italy by holding it, even with a modest garrison, against a vast army.

60| Germanicus, not yet aware that his journey was under attack, sailed up the Nile, starting from the town of Canopus. The Spartans founded it in honor of Canopus, the helmsman who lay buried there — this from the days when Menelaus, on his way home to Greece, got driven off course into another sea, toward the land of Libya. From there he reached the nearest mouth of the river, sacred to Hercules, whom the natives claim was born among them and is the oldest of that name, with later men of equal courage taking his title afterward. Next he visited the vast ruins of ancient Thebes. Egyptian writing still stood on the massive structures, recording the city's former wealth, and one of the elder priests, ordered to translate his ancestral tongue, reported that the city had once held seven hundred thousand men of military age, and with that army King Rhamses had conquered Libya, Ethiopia, the Medes and Persians and Bactria and Scythia, and had held under his rule the lands of the Syrians, the Armenians, and the neighboring Cappadocians, stretching from Bithynia on one side to Lycia and the sea on the other. The tribute imposed on these nations was also recorded there — weights of silver and gold, numbers of weapons and horses, gifts of ivory and incense for the temples, and quantities of grain and other goods each nation owed — no less magnificent than what is now exacted by Parthian force or Roman power.

61| Germanicus also turned his attention to other wonders, chief among them the stone statue of Memnon, which gives off a vocal sound when struck by the sun's rays; the pyramids, rising like mountains among sands nearly impassable, built through the rivalry and wealth of kings; and the man-made lakes dug to catch the Nile's overflow. Elsewhere he saw narrow gorges of such depth that no explorer could reach the bottom. From there he came to Elephantine and Syene, once the boundary of the Roman empire, which now extends to the Red Sea.

62| While Germanicus spent that summer traveling through several provinces, Drusus won no small glory by inciting the Germans to fight among themselves, pressing the advantage now that Maroboduus was broken, to finish him off entirely. Among the Gotones there was a nobleman named Catualda, once driven out by Maroboduus's power, who now dared to seek revenge while Maroboduus's fortunes were uncertain. With a strong force he entered the territory of the Marcomanni, bribed the chief men into alliance, and burst into the royal residence and the fortress beside it. There were found the old plunder of the Suebi, and sutlers and traders from our own provinces, whom the right of commerce, then the desire to increase their wealth, and finally forgetfulness of their homeland had drawn each from his own place into enemy territory.

63| Maroboduus, abandoned on every side, had nothing left but Caesar's mercy. Crossing the Danube where it runs along the province of Noricum, he wrote to Tiberius — not like a fugitive or a suppliant, but as one recalling his former greatness: many nations had once invited him, then the famous king, to join them, yet he had chosen friendship with Rome instead. Caesar's reply was that a safe and honored home would be his in Italy if he stayed; but if his interests lay elsewhere, he could leave with the same safe conduct he had come with. In the senate, though, Tiberius said that neither Philip had been so feared by the Athenians, nor Pyrrhus nor Antiochus by the Roman people, as Maroboduus had been. A speech survives in which he extolled the man's greatness, the violence of the tribes under him, how close a threat he had stood to Italy, and his own strategy in bringing him down. Maroboduus was kept at Ravenna, and whenever the Suebi grew restless he was held up as a threat that he might return to the throne. But he never left Italy in eighteen years, and grew old there, his fame much diminished by his excessive attachment to life. Catualda met the same fate and found no other refuge either. Driven out not long after by the power of the Hermunduri under their leader Vibilius, he was taken in and sent to Forum Julii, a colony of Narbonese Gaul. So that neither band of followers could stir up trouble by mingling with the peaceful provinces, both were resettled beyond the Danube, in the country between the Marus and Cusus rivers, under a king assigned to rule them, Vannius of the Quadi.

64| At the same time it was announced that Germanicus had installed Artaxias as king of Armenia, and the senate decreed that Germanicus and Drusus should enter the city in ovation. Arches were also built flanking the temple of Mars the Avenger, bearing images of the two Caesars — Tiberius all the more pleased that he had secured peace through wisdom than if he had ended a war through battle. So he now moved craftily against Rhescuporis, king of Thrace, as well. That whole nation had been held by Rhoemetalces; on his death Augustus gave part of Thrace to his brother Rhescuporis and part to his son Cotys. In that division, the farmland, cities, and territory near the Greeks went to Cotys, while the wild, uncultivated land bordering enemies went to Rhescuporis — and the two kings' temperaments matched their shares, the one gentle and easygoing, the other fierce, grasping, and impatient of partnership. At first they kept an uneasy peace. But soon Rhescuporis began crossing his borders, seizing land given to Cotys, and using force when he resisted — cautiously while Augustus lived, since he feared Augustus as the guarantor of both kingdoms and its avenger if defied. But once he heard of the change of emperor, he sent in bands of raiders, destroyed forts, and manufactured pretexts for war.

65| Nothing troubled Tiberius so much as the fear that settled affairs might be thrown into disorder. He chose a centurion to tell the two kings not to settle their dispute by arms. Cotys at once disbanded the auxiliary forces he had raised. Rhescuporis, feigning restraint, proposed they meet at the same place, saying their disputes could be settled by conference. There was little delay over the time or place, and then over the terms, since one side gave way from good faith and the other took advantage through deceit — each side conceding and accepting everything between them. Rhescuporis, to seal the treaty as he claimed, added a banquet, and after the feasting and drinking had dragged deep into the night, he seized Cotys off guard; and once Cotys understood the trick, and appealed to the sacred bonds of the kingdom, the gods of their shared family, and the rights of hospitality, Rhescuporis loaded him with chains anyway. Having seized the whole of Thrace, he wrote to Tiberius that a plot had been laid against him and he had struck first against the plotter. At the same time, using a pretended war against the Bastarnae and Scythians as cover, he strengthened himself with new forces of infantry and cavalry. The reply came back mild: if there had been no deceit, he could trust in his own innocence; but neither he nor the senate would judge right and wrong without knowing the full case — so he should hand over Cotys, come to Rome, and shift the blame for the crime onto whoever deserved it.

66| Latinius Pandusa, propraetor of Moesia, sent that letter into Thrace along with soldiers to whom Cotys was to be handed over. Rhescuporis, torn between fear and rage, decided he would rather stand accused of a completed crime than an attempted one: he ordered Cotys killed, and falsely claimed he had taken his own life. Even so, Caesar did not abandon the strategy he had already settled on. When Pandusa died — a man Rhescuporis charged with being hostile to him — Tiberius appointed Pomponius Flaccus to Moesia, choosing him above all because his long military service and close friendship with the king made him better suited to deceive him.

67| Flaccus crossed into Thrace and, through enormous promises, pushed Rhescuporis—hesitant, weighing his own crimes—into entering the Roman camp. There a strong guard was thrown around the king, dressed up as an honor guard; tribunes and centurions kept at him with warnings and persuasion, and the farther he was drawn from home the less the confinement bothered to hide itself, until at last, understanding what was inevitable, they hauled him off to Rome. Cotys's widow accused him in the Senate, and he was condemned—kept far from his kingdom. Thrace was split between Rhoemetalces, his son, who was known to have opposed his father's schemes, and the children of Cotys; since they were not yet grown, Trebellenus Rufus, an ex-praetor, was appointed to run the kingdom meanwhile, following the precedent by which earlier generations had sent Marcus Lepidus to Egypt as guardian for Ptolemy's children. Rhescuporis was shipped to Alexandria and killed there, trying to escape—or on a trumped-up charge; it's unclear which.

68| Around the same time Vonones, whom I mentioned had been moved to Cilicia, bribed his guards and tried to flee to the Armenians, then to the Albani and Heniochi, and to the king of the Scythians, his kinsman. Under cover of a hunting trip he left the coast and struck into trackless country, then rode hard for the river Pyramus; but the locals, hearing the king had fled, had broken down the bridges, and the river couldn't be forded. So he was captured on the bank by Vibius Fronto, commander of cavalry; then Remmius, a veteran recalled to duty and placed in charge of guarding the king, ran him through with a sword—supposedly in a fit of anger. This made people more inclined to believe Vonones had been deliberately killed, and that Remmius, aware of his own guilt and afraid of being informed on, silenced him.

69| Germanicus, sailing back from Egypt, found that everything he had ordered among the legions and the cities had been cancelled or reversed. This led to bitter insults against Piso, matched by equally sharp attacks Piso aimed at Caesar. Piso then decided to leave Syria. But Germanicus fell ill, and Piso stayed on; when he learned Germanicus had recovered and people were paying the vows made for his health, Piso sent his lictors to break up the sacrificial animals, the ritual preparations, and the festive crowd of Antioch. Then he withdrew to Seleucia to wait and see how the illness that had struck Germanicus again would turn out. The savagery of the sickness was made worse by the conviction that Piso had poisoned him; and indeed searchers found, dug out of the floor and walls, the remains of human bodies, spells, curses, and Germanicus's name inscribed on lead tablets, half-burned ashes smeared with blood, and other implements of witchcraft by which souls are believed to be consecrated to the powers of the underworld. At the same time men sent by Piso were accused of spying out how the illness was progressing.

70| Germanicus took this with as much anger as fear. If his own doorway was under siege, if he had to breathe his last under his enemies' eyes, what then would happen to his miserable wife, to his infant children? Poison was slow—Piso should just hurry things along and seize the province and the legions for himself. But Germanicus wasn't so far gone, he said, and the rewards of murder wouldn't stay long with the murderer. He wrote letters formally renouncing his friendship with Piso; many add that he also ordered him to leave the province. Piso did not linger; he set sail, but held his course back at a measured pace, so as to be closer at hand to return quickly if Germanicus's death should open Syria to him.

71| Caesar rallied briefly, giving hope, but then his body gave out, and as the end approached he spoke to the friends standing by him: 'If I were dying a natural death, I'd have just cause for grief even against the gods, for tearing me away from my parents, my children, my country by an early death in the middle of my youth. But now, cut off by the crime of Piso and Plancina, I leave my last request in your hearts: tell my father and my brother with what agonies I was torn apart, by what treachery I was surrounded, and how I ended a wretched life with the worst of deaths. Anyone who hoped in me, anyone bound to me by blood, even those who envied me while I lived, will weep to hear that a man once flourishing, who survived so many wars, fell to a woman's treachery. You will have grounds to complain before the Senate, to invoke the law. It is not a friend's chief duty to follow the dead with useless mourning, but to remember what he wanted and carry it out. Even strangers will weep for Germanicus; you will avenge me, if it was me you loved and not just my fortune. Show the Roman people the granddaughter of the deified Augustus, who is also my wife; count out our six children. Sympathy will side with the accusers, and if my killers plead they only followed criminal orders, people will either not believe it or not forgive it.' His friends swore, touching the dying man's hand, that they would sooner lose their lives than their revenge.

72| Then, turning to his wife, he begged her, by his memory and by their children together, to put aside her fierceness, to bow her spirit before this savage turn of fortune, and not, on returning to Rome, to provoke those stronger than herself by competing for power. This he said openly; other things he said in private, through which he was believed to have shown his fear of Tiberius. Not long after, he died, to immense grief throughout the province and the peoples around it. Foreign nations and kings mourned him: such was his warmth toward allies, his gentleness toward enemies; he was revered equally in sight and in speech, and though he kept the dignity and weight owed to his high rank, he had escaped both envy and arrogance.

73| His funeral, without the customary ancestor masks and procession, was made memorable instead by the praise and the remembrance of his virtues. There were those who compared his looks, his age, and the manner of his death—helped along by the closeness of the places where each had died—to the fate of Alexander the Great. Both men, they said, were handsome, of distinguished birth, not much past thirty, and died among foreign peoples through the treachery of their own. But Germanicus had been gentle to his friends, moderate in his pleasures, faithful to one marriage, with legitimate children—and no less a fighter, even without Alexander's recklessness, though he had been held back from grinding into submission Germany, already shattered by so many of his victories. And if he had been sole master of affairs, with a king's right and title, he would have won military glory all the faster for surpassing Alexander in mercy, self-control, and every other virtue. Before the burning, they laid him out naked in Antioch's forum, at the spot picked for his burial, so all could see whether the body bore marks of poison—a question never truly settled, since people read the signs according to their pity for Germanicus, their prior suspicions, or their leanings toward Piso.

74| The legates and the other senators present then debated who should take charge of Syria. The rest made only modest bids, but between Vibius Marsus and Gnaeus Sentius the contest ran long; finally Marsus yielded to Sentius, the elder man and the more forceful contender. Sentius sent to Rome a woman named Martina, notorious in that province for poisoning and very close to Plancina—at the demand of Vitellius, Veranius, and the others who were building the case and the charges as if against defendants already as good as convicted.

75| Agrippina, though worn down by grief and physically ill, could not bear anything that delayed vengeance, and boarded ship with Germanicus's ashes and their children. Everyone pitied her: a woman of the highest nobility, once seen amid a beautiful marriage surrounded by people paying her homage and congratulations, now carrying the grim remains against her breast, uncertain whether she would get her revenge, anxious for herself, and made vulnerable again and again by an ill-starred fertility. Meanwhile, on the island of Cos, news reached Piso that Germanicus had died. He received it with no restraint at all—slaughtering victims, visiting temples—and made no effort to hide his joy, while Plancina went even further, exchanging the mourning clothes she had worn for her sister's death, only that day, for festive dress.

76| Centurions came flocking to Piso, telling him the legions were eager and ready: he should retake the province, they said, which had been taken from him unlawfully and now stood empty. So when he asked what to do, his son Marcus Piso urged speed to Rome: nothing unforgivable had been done yet, and there was no need to fear weak suspicions or empty rumor. His hostility to Germanicus might deserve resentment, perhaps, but not punishment; and losing the province had already satisfied his enemies. But if he went back, and Sentius resisted, that would start a civil war; and the centurions and soldiers would not stay loyal to his side, since the fresh memory of their own commander and their deep-rooted love for the house of the Caesars would win out.

77| Against this, Domitius Celer, one of Piso's closest friends, argued that he should make the most of the moment: it was Piso, not Sentius, who had been placed over Syria; Piso who held the fasces and a praetor's authority, Piso who had been given the legions. If any hostile move came, who had better right to take up arms than the man who held a legate's authority and his own specific orders? Time should also be allowed for rumors to fade—the innocent are usually no match for fresh outrage, but time favors them. And if Piso held the army and built up his strength, many things impossible to foresee would fall out for the better by chance. 'Are we really in such a hurry to arrive alongside Germanicus's ashes, so that you can be dragged down, unheard and undefended, by Agrippina's wailing and the ignorant mob's first impression? You have Augusta's backing, you have Caesar's favor—though kept quiet; and no one mourns Germanicus's death more loudly than those who are secretly most delighted by it.'

78| It did not take much effort to push Piso, already inclined that way, toward this fiercer course. He sent letters to Tiberius accusing Germanicus of extravagance and arrogance, and claimed that he himself had been driven out to make room for revolution, and had only reclaimed command of the army with the same loyalty he'd always shown. At the same time he ordered Domitius, put aboard a trireme, to avoid the coastline and cut straight across open water to Syria past the islands. He gathered up deserters flocking to him and organized them into companies, armed the camp servants, ferried his ships across to the mainland, intercepted a detachment of recruits on their way to Syria, wrote to the petty kings of Cilicia asking for reinforcements—young Piso proving no slouch himself at the business of war, even though he had argued against undertaking it.

79| So they sailed along the coast of Lycia and Pamphylia, and when they met the ships carrying Agrippina, both sides at first drew weapons in mutual hostility. Then, each fearing the other, it went no further than shouting, and Vibius Marsus told Piso to come to Rome and answer for himself. Piso dodged the demand, replying he would appear once the praetor in charge of poisoning cases had set a date for accuser and accused. Meanwhile Domitius, having put in at Laodicea in Syria, tried to reach the winter camp of the sixth legion, which he judged the likeliest to be won over to a new venture — but the legate Pacuvius got there first. Sentius reported this to Piso by letter, warning him not to try corrupting the camp or making war on the province. He gathered everyone he knew to be loyal to Germanicus's memory or hostile to Piso, hammering home the greatness of the dead commander and the point that the state itself was under attack by force of arms. He led out a strong force, ready for battle.

80| Piso, though his plans were going badly, did not abandon the safest option left to him: he seized a well-fortified stronghold in Cilicia called Celenderis. By mixing in deserters, a recently intercepted batch of recruits, his own household and Plancina's slaves, and the Cilician auxiliaries sent by local kings, he had made up something like a legion. He kept insisting he was Caesar's governor, shut out of the province Caesar had given him — not by the legions, since he claimed he came at their invitation, but by Sentius, who was dressing up a private grudge as public charges. Let them form up for battle, he said — the soldiers wouldn't fight once they saw that Piso, whom they had once called their father, held the stronger claim if this were settled by law, and was no weak opponent if it came to arms. He then drew up his companies in front of the fort's defenses, on a steep, broken hill — the rest of the position was ringed by sea. Facing him stood the veterans, formed in proper ranks with reserves behind. On one side, tough soldiers; on the other, rough ground — but no real spirit, no hope, not even proper weapons, only rustic ones hastily made for the moment. When it came to close fighting, there was no doubt beyond how long it took the Roman cohorts to fight their way onto level ground. The Cilicians turned and ran, shutting themselves inside the fort.

81| Meanwhile Piso tried, uselessly, to attack the fleet waiting not far off. Falling back, he stood before the walls and tried to start a mutiny — one moment beating his breast in despair, the next calling out soldiers by name, offering bribes — and he stirred things up enough that the standard-bearer of the sixth legion carried his standard over to him. At that Sentius ordered the horns and trumpets sounded, the earthworks stormed, ladders raised, the boldest men to go first, others to hurl spears, stones, and firebrands from siege engines. Finally, his stubbornness broken, Piso asked to be allowed to give up his arms and stay in the fort while word was sent to Caesar about who should govern Syria. The terms were refused; he was granted nothing but ships and safe passage to the city.

82| At Rome, once word spread that Germanicus was ill, and every report — as happens with news from far away — arrived worse than the last, grief turned to anger, and complaints broke out. Of course he'd been banished to the ends of the earth, of course Piso had been given the province — this was what Augusta's private talks with Plancina had been about. The older generation had spoken the plain truth about Drusus: rulers dislike sons with the common touch, and Germanicus and Drusus had been cut down for no reason but that they meant to treat the Roman people as equals once liberty was restored. This gossip was already running hot when news of his death set it ablaze — so much so that before any edict from the magistrates, before any decree of the senate, people declared a public mourning on their own: the courts emptied, houses shut their doors. Everywhere there was silence and weeping, nothing staged for show; and though people did not avoid the outward marks of mourning, their grief ran deeper than that. By chance, merchants who had left Syria while Germanicus was still alive arrived with better news of his health. It was believed at once, spread at once: everyone who met another passed on what he'd half-heard, and each retelling added to the last out of sheer joy. People ran through the streets, forced open temple doors — night makes credulity easier, and certainty comes more readily in the dark. Tiberius did nothing to stop the false rumor, letting time and distance wear it down; and the people, feeling as though they had lost Germanicus a second time, grieved even harder.

83| Honors were proposed and voted according to each man's love for Germanicus or skill at invention: that his name be sung in the Salian hymn; that curule chairs be set up for him among the seats of the priests of Augustus, with oak wreaths above them; that an ivory image of him lead the procession at the circus games; that no one but a member of the Julian family be chosen priest or augur in his place. Arches were added at Rome, on the bank of the Rhine, and on Mount Amanus in Syria, inscribed with his achievements and the fact that he had died in the service of the state. A tomb was built at Antioch, where he was cremated, and a memorial platform at Epidaphne, where he had died. No one could easily count all the statues and shrines decreed in his honor. When a shield of gold, remarkable for its size, was proposed among those honoring great orators, Tiberius declared he would dedicate one of the ordinary kind, equal to the others — eloquence, he said, was not a matter of rank, and it was honor enough to be counted among the old writers. The order of knights renamed the squadron of younger men "Germanicus's Squadron," and decreed that on the Ides of July the troops of cavalry should follow his image in procession. Most of these honors still stand; some were dropped at once, others simply faded with time.

84| While grief was still fresh, Germanicus's sister Livia, married to Drusus, gave birth to twin boys. Such a thing is rare and welcome even in a modest household, and it pleased the emperor so much that he could not resist boasting to the senate that no Roman of such high rank had ever before had twin sons — for he turned everything, even chance events, into occasions for glory. But to a people in such a mood, even this brought pain, as if Drusus, now blessed with more children, threatened to overshadow the house of Germanicus all the more.

85| That same year the senate passed strict decrees to curb the licentiousness of women, ruling that no woman whose grandfather, father, or husband had been a Roman knight could register as a prostitute. Vistilia, born into a praetorian family, had advertised herself for sale to the aediles under the old custom, by which women who confessed to such disgrace openly were thought sufficiently punished by the admission itself. Her husband, Titidius Labeo, was also called to account for failing to prosecute her clear offense under the law. When he pleaded that the sixty days allowed for deliberation had not yet run out, the senate decided it was enough simply to deal with Vistilia; she was banished to the island of Seriphos. The senate also debated expelling Egyptian and Jewish rites, and decreed that four thousand descendants of freed slaves tainted with this superstition, of suitable age, be shipped to Sardinia to suppress banditry there — and if the harsh climate killed them, it was reckoned no great loss. The rest were to leave Italy unless they gave up their foreign rites by a fixed date.

86| After this Caesar reported that a virgin must be chosen to replace Occia, who for fifty-seven years had presided over the Vestal rites with the utmost purity, and he thanked Fonteius Agrippa and Domitius Pollio for competing to offer their daughters in service to the state. Pollio's daughter was chosen, for no other reason than that her mother still lived with her father in the same marriage — Agrippa had weakened his household's claim through divorce. Caesar comforted the girl who was passed over with a dowry of a million sesterces.

87| When the common people complained of the brutal cost of grain, he fixed a price for buyers to pay and promised to make up two sesterces per bushel to the grain dealers himself. Even so he refused the title "Father of the Country," which had been offered to him before as well, and sharply rebuked those who called his duties divine and called him "lord." This left little safe room for speech under a ruler who feared liberty yet hated flattery.

88| I find in the writers and senators of that time that a letter from Adgandestrius, chief of the Chatti, was read out in the senate, promising the death of Arminius if poison were sent to carry out the killing. The answer given was that the Roman people took revenge on their enemies not by treachery or in secret, but openly and by force of arms. In making this claim Tiberius put himself on a level with the commanders of old who had refused and exposed a plot to poison King Pyrrhus. As for Arminius, once the Romans had withdrawn and Maroboduus had been driven out, he reached for a kingdom of his own and found his own people's love of freedom turned against him; attacked with arms, he fought on with fortune running now for him, now against, and at last went down to treachery from kin of his own blood. Beyond all doubt he stood as Germany's liberator — a man who challenged not the infancy of Roman power, as other kings and generals had, but Rome at the height of its strength; uneven in battle, never beaten in war. He lived thirty-seven years, twelve of them in power, and songs of him are still sung among the barbarian tribes, though the Greek historians never heard of him — they admire only their own — and even among Romans he is not as celebrated as he deserves, since we praise the old and pay too little attention to the recent.

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