Tacitus · a new plain-English translation from the original language
1| In the consulship of Rubellius and Fufius, both surnamed Geminus, Julia Augusta died, at the very end of her life—a woman of the highest nobility through the Claudian family and, by adoption, through the Livian and Julian lines as well. Her first marriage and her children were with Tiberius Nero, who fled during the Perusine war and returned to Rome once peace was struck between Sextus Pompeius and the triumvirs. Then Caesar, seized by desire for her beauty, took her from her husband—whether against her will is uncertain—and moved with such haste that he brought her, pregnant, into his own house without even waiting for the birth. She bore no more children after that, but through Agrippina's marriage to Germanicus she was linked by blood to Augustus's line and shared great-grandchildren with him. In the strict, old-fashioned management of her household she was gracious beyond what earlier women were thought proper—an overbearing mother, an accommodating wife, well matched to her husband's cunning and her son's pretense. Her funeral was modest, and her will went unexecuted for a long time. She was praised from the Rostra by her great-grandson Gaius Caesar, who soon after came to power.
2| As for Tiberius, having failed in his final duties to his mother, he changed nothing in his comfortable way of life and excused the weight of his public business by letter. The generous honors the senate decreed for her memory he pared down, as if out of modesty—accepting only a few and adding that no divine cult be decreed for her: that, he said, had been her own wish. In part of the same letter he even attacked women's friendships, a sidelong jab at the consul Fufius, who had flourished in Augusta's favor, was skilled at winning women's affections, and had a sharp tongue—given to mocking Tiberius with biting jokes, the kind that the powerful remember for a long time.
3| From this point the tyranny, already steep, grew still more pressing. While Augusta lived there had still been a refuge, since Tiberius's long habit of deference to his mother held, and Sejanus did not dare outrank a parent's authority. Now, as if freed from the rein, they burst forward. Letters were sent against Agrippina and Nero which the common people believed had long since arrived and had been held back by Augusta—for they were read out not long after her death. The wording was contrived to be harsh, but it charged the grandson with no weapons, no plotting revolution—only love affairs with young men and shamelessness. Against the daughter-in-law he did not even dare invent that much; he accused her instead of arrogance of speech and a defiant spirit, to the senate's great fear and silence, until a few—men with no hope from honest means, for public misfortunes are always seized by individuals as chances for favor—demanded the matter be put to a vote, Cotta Messalinus readiest of all with a savage proposal. But the other leading men, and especially the magistrates, were uneasy, since Tiberius, though he had attacked bitterly, had left everything else ambiguous.
4| There was in the senate one Junius Rusticus, chosen by Caesar to compile the proceedings of the senate and so believed to have insight into his thinking. By some fatal impulse—he had never before shown any sign of firmness—or perhaps by a misguided cleverness, forgetting the dangers looming and fearing only the uncertain ones, he inserted himself among the wavering and warned the consuls not to open the motion, arguing that the greatest matters turn on small moments, and that the ruin of Germanicus's house might one day become an old man's regret. At the same moment the people, carrying images of Agrippina and Nero, surrounded the senate house, shouting good omens for Caesar and crying out that the letters were false and that ruin was being aimed at his family against his will. So nothing grim was done that day. Fabricated speeches against Sejanus also circulated under the names of ex-consuls, many men indulging their wit in secret and all the more recklessly for the secrecy. This inflamed Sejanus's anger further and gave him fresh grounds for accusation: the emperor's grievance, he claimed, had been scorned by the senate; the people had defected; now new speeches and new decrees of the senate were being heard and read—what remained but for them to take up arms and choose as leaders and commanders the men whose images they had followed like standards?
5| So Caesar, repeating his charges against his grandson and daughter-in-law and rebuking the plebs by edict, complained to the senate that the emperor's authority had been made a public mockery by one senator's deceit, yet demanded that the whole matter be left entirely in his own hands. No further debate followed as to whether they should decree—not the ultimate penalty, for that was forbidden—but a statement that they stood ready for vengeance and were being held back only by the emperor's own restraint.
6| Forty-four speeches were delivered on this matter—few out of fear, most out of habit—[text breaks off] '...I thought it would bring me shame or bring Sejanus resentment. Fortune has turned, and the very man who took him as colleague and son-in-law now forgives himself, while the rest pursue with cruelty the man they cultivated through disgrace. Which is more pitiable, to be accused for friendship's sake or to accuse a friend, I cannot say. I will not put anyone's cruelty or clemency to the test; instead, free and satisfied with myself, I will go ahead of the danger. I beg you not to remember me with grief rather than gladness, and to count me among those who escaped public misfortunes by an honorable end.'
7| Then he spent part of the day speaking to each man in turn as the mood took him, holding some back, dismissing others; and with a large crowd still gathered and all watching his fearless face, thinking there was still time left for his final words, he fell on a sword he had hidden in his robe. Caesar did not pursue him after his death with charges or reproaches, though he had heaped many foul accusations on Blaesus.
8| Next came the cases of Publius Vitellius and Pomponius Secundus. Informers charged the former—who was in charge of the treasury's reserves—with having offered its keys and military funds for revolution. The latter was charged by Considius, an ex-praetor, with friendship with Aelius Gallus, who after Sejanus's punishment had fled to Pomponius's gardens as if to his most trusted refuge. Neither man had any help in his peril beyond the steadfastness of his brothers, who stood surety for them. Then, worn down equally by hope and fear through repeated postponements, Vitellius asked for a penknife on the pretext of his studies and made a shallow cut into his veins, ending his life through sheer sickness of spirit. Pomponius, however, a man of great refinement and brilliant talent, bore his adverse fortune with composure and outlived Tiberius.
9| After this it was decided that the rest of Sejanus's children should be put to death, though the people's anger had by now faded and most had been appeased by the earlier executions. So they were carried to the prison—the son aware of what was coming, the girl so innocent that she kept asking what crime she had committed and where she was being taken, saying she would not do it again and could be corrected with a child's beating. Writers of that time record that, because it was considered unheard of for a virgin to suffer the traditional punishment, the executioner raped her beside the noose; then, their throats crushed, the bodies of children that age were thrown onto the Gemonian Stairs.
10| Around the same time Asia and Achaia were thrown into terror by a rumor sharp but short-lived, that Drusus, son of Germanicus, had been seen among the Cyclades and then on the mainland. There was indeed a young man of about the right age, recognized—or so it seemed—by some of Caesar's own freedmen, who joined him in the deception; and people ignorant of the truth were drawn in by the fame of the name and by the readiness of Greek minds for anything new and marvelous: they invented and believed at once that he had slipped his guard and was making for his father's armies, about to invade Egypt or Syria. Already he was gathering crowds of young men and public enthusiasm, delighting in his present success and in empty hopes, when word of it reached Poppaeus Sabinus, who at the time, occupied with Macedonia, also had charge of Achaia. So, to get ahead of the story whether true or false, he raced past the gulfs of Torone and Therme, then past Euboea in the Aegean and Piraeus on the Attic coast, then cleared the Corinthian shore and the narrows of the Isthmus; and crossing by another sea he entered Nicopolis, the Roman colony, where he finally learned, on more careful questioning, that the man had claimed to be a son of Marcus Silanus, and that after most of his followers had melted away he had boarded a ship as if making for Italy. Sabinus wrote all this to Tiberius, and we have learned nothing further of the origin or the end of the affair.
11| At the end of the year the long-growing discord between the consuls broke into the open. Trio, quick to pick quarrels and practiced in the courts, had obliquely attacked Regulus as sluggish in hunting down Sejanus's agents; Regulus, restrained unless provoked, not only beat back his colleague but tried to drag him before an inquiry as guilty of complicity in the conspiracy. Though many senators begged them to set aside a hatred that would end in ruin, they remained hostile and full of threats until they left office.