Tacitus · a new plain-English translation from the original language
1| Gnaeus Domitius and Camillus Scribonianus entered the consulship while Tiberius, having crossed the strait between Capri and Surrentum, was coasting along Campania, uncertain whether to enter Rome — or, since he had already decided against it, only pretending he might come. He often landed nearby, visited gardens along the Tiber, then retreated again to his cliffs and the solitude of the sea, ashamed of the crimes and lusts he had let run so wild that, like some Eastern despot, he defiled freeborn youths. It was not just beauty and fine bodies that drew him, but in some boys their modest innocence, in others the ancestral portrait busts that marked their pedigree, as if that too were an incitement to desire. It was then that words unheard of before — 'sellarii' and 'spintriae' — were coined, from the filth of the place and the range of degradations performed there. Slaves were assigned to hunt down and drag in victims, with gifts for the willing and threats for those who refused; and if a relative or parent tried to hold one back, the slaves used force, seizing and abusing them as though they were captives to do with as they pleased.
2| At Rome, at the start of the year, as if Livia's crimes had only just come to light rather than being long known and already punished, harsh proposals were made even against her statues and her memory, and it was proposed that Sejanus's property, already confiscated to the treasury, be transferred instead into the emperor's private purse — as though that made any difference. The Scipios, the Silani, the Cassii pressed these motions in much the same words, with great earnestness, when suddenly Togonius Gallus, trying to attach his own obscure name to great ones, was heard out amid general mockery. He begged the emperor to choose senators, twenty of whom would be picked by lot and armed with swords to guard his safety whenever he entered the senate house. He had apparently taken too literally a letter in which Tiberius had asked one of the consuls for an escort so he could travel safely from Capri to Rome. Tiberius, who liked to mix mockery with serious business, thanked the senators for their goodwill — but then asked: which men could be left out, which chosen? Always the same ones, or a rotating cast? Men who had held office, or young men; private citizens or magistrates? And what a spectacle it would make, men buckling on swords at the threshold of the senate house! His life wasn't worth so much, he said, if it needed weapons to protect it. He answered Togonius with these measured words, without pressing for anything beyond quietly dropping the motion.
3| But he savaged Junius Gallio, who had proposed that praetorian guardsmen who had completed their service should be granted the right to sit in the fourteen rows reserved for knights. Tiberius rounded on him as if face to face, demanding what business Gallio had with soldiers, who ought to receive orders and rewards from the emperor alone. Had he really found something the deified Augustus had overlooked? Or was this rather discord and sedition stirred up by one of Sejanus's old agents, using the lure of honor to corrupt the raw minds of soldiers and undermine military discipline? This was the reward Gallio got for his calculated flattery: instant expulsion from the senate, then from Italy. And because it was thought he would tolerate exile easily, having chosen the pleasant, famous island of Lesbos, he was hauled back to Rome and kept under guard in the houses of magistrates. In the same letter Tiberius struck down Sextius Paconianus, an ex-praetor, to the senate's great delight — a bold, vicious man who dug into everyone's secrets and had been handpicked by Sejanus to help set a trap for Gaius Caesar. Once this came out, long-buried hatreds erupted, and the death penalty was voted unless he turned informer.
4| But when Tiberius turned to Latinius Latiaris, accuser and accused alike — both equally hated — made for a most satisfying show. Latiaris, as I have related, had once taken the lead in entrapping Titius Sabinus, and now was the first to pay for it. In the middle of this, Haterius Agrippa attacked the previous year's consuls, asking why, having threatened each other with prosecution, they now stayed silent — mutual fear and a shared guilty conscience, he said, was being passed off as a pact of friendship; but the senate should not stay quiet about things it had heard. Regulus answered that the time for revenge would come, and he would pursue it in the emperor's presence; Trio said it was best to let rivalries between colleagues, and whatever discord had stirred them up, fade quietly. As Agrippa pressed on, Sanquinius Maximus, an ex-consul, begged the senate not to pile fresh bitterness onto the emperor's burdens — he was capable of deciding the remedies himself. So Regulus was saved and Trio's ruin merely postponed. Haterius was the more hated of the two, since, sluggish from sleep or from lecherous all-night sessions, and unafraid of a cruel emperor only through sheer laziness, he plotted the destruction of eminent men in between his drinking and debauchery.
5| Next Cotta Messalinus — author of the harshest motion on every occasion, and so the target of long-standing hatred — was accused the moment opportunity arose, of many things: of speaking obscenely about Gaius Caesar's manhood, of calling a banquet held with the priests on Augusta's birthday a 'ninth-day funeral feast,' and of complaining about the power of Manius Lepidus and Lucius Arruntius, with whom he had a money dispute, adding, 'the senate will protect them, but my little Tiberius will protect me.' All these charges were pressed home by the city's leading men, and under their onslaught he appealed to the emperor. Not long after, a letter arrived in which Tiberius, in his own defense, recalled the beginnings of his friendship with Cotta and listed his many services, and asked that words twisted out of shape, or the loose talk of dinner parties, not be turned into a criminal charge.
6| The opening of that letter of the emperor's struck everyone as remarkable. He began with these words: 'What I should write to you, conscript fathers, or how I should write it, or what I should not write at all at this time — may the gods and goddesses destroy me more thoroughly than I feel myself perishing every day, if I know.' To such a degree had his own crimes and vices turned into his own punishment. And it was not for nothing that the greatest of the philosophers used to insist that if the minds of tyrants could be laid open, one would see wounds and lacerations there — for just as the body is torn by lashes, so the mind is torn apart by cruelty, lust, and evil designs. Neither his power nor his solitude could shield Tiberius from confessing, in effect, the torments of his own heart and his own self-inflicted punishment.
7| The senate was then given the power to decide the fate of the senator Caecilianus, who had testified extensively against Cotta; it was resolved to impose on him the same penalty given to Aruseius and Sanquinius, the accusers of Lucius Arruntius — nothing could have honored Cotta more, for though noble, he was impoverished by extravagance and notorious for his vices, and yet was now placed on equal footing with Arruntius's unimpeachable integrity when it came to the honor of revenge. After this Quintus Servaeus and Minucius Thermus were brought forward — Servaeus an ex-praetor and once a companion of Germanicus, Minucius a knight, both of whom had kept their friendship with Sejanus modest — which won them greater sympathy. Tiberius, by contrast, denounced them as ringleaders in crime and prompted Gaius Cestius the elder to tell the senate what he had written to him; Cestius took up the prosecution. What made those times most deadly was that leading senators took up even the basest kind of informing, some openly, many in secret; you could not tell strangers from kin, friends from people barely known, what was fresh from what was long forgotten: charges arose from anything said anywhere — in the forum, at a dinner party — depending on who rushed fastest to denounce someone and claim the credit, some to save themselves, more because they were infected as if by a contagious disease. Minucius and Servaeus, once condemned, joined the ranks of informers. Dragged down to the same fate were Julius Africanus, from the Santones in Gaul, and Seius Quadratus, whose origin I have not been able to find. I am aware that many historians have passed over the dangers and punishments of many people, either overwhelmed by the sheer volume, or fearing that what had seemed excessive and grim to them would weary readers with the same tedium. But much that came my way deserves to be known, even though other writers left it untold.
8| For at that very time when everyone else was falsely disowning any friendship with Sejanus, a Roman knight, Marcus Terentius, though himself on trial for exactly that, dared to embrace it, opening his speech to the senate like this: 'For a man in my position it may perhaps be less prudent to admit the charge than to deny it; but whatever the outcome, I will confess: yes, I was Sejanus's friend, I sought to become one, and once I had, I was glad of it. I had seen him as my father's colleague in commanding the praetorian cohorts, then holding civil and military duties together. His relatives and connections by marriage rose in honors; the closer one stood to Sejanus, the stronger one's claim on the emperor's friendship — while those he disliked struggled with fear and neglect. I single no one out by name: I will defend, at my own sole risk, all of us who had no part in his final scheme. For it was not Sejanus of Vulsinii we courted, but the man who had married into the houses of Claudius and Julia — your son-in-law, Caesar, your partner in the consulship, a man carrying out your own duties in the state. It is not for us to judge whom you raise above the rest, or why: the gods gave you supreme judgment over all things; to us is left only the glory of obedience. We look, besides, only at what is plain before us — who holds wealth and honors from you, who has the greatest power to help or harm — and no one could deny that was Sejanus. To probe the emperor's hidden thoughts, or whatever he plans in secret, is forbidden, and dangerous besides — nor would you ever succeed at it. Do not, conscript fathers, weigh only Sejanus's last day, but the sixteen years before it. We even paid our respects to Satrius and Pomponius; even to be known by his freedmen and doorkeepers was counted a fine thing. What then? Is this defense to be applied without distinction, indiscriminately? No — let it be divided by just limits. Let plots against the state, schemes of murder against the emperor, be punished. But as for friendship and its ordinary duties — let the same limit that acquits you, Caesar, acquit us as well.'
9| The firmness of his speech, and the fact that someone had finally said what everyone had been thinking, went far enough that his accusers were punished with exile or death, along with the addition of their own past crimes. Next came a letter from Tiberius against Sextus Vistilius, an ex-praetor, a great favorite of his brother Drusus, whom Tiberius had transferred into his own retinue. Vistilius had offended, it was said, either by writing something branding Gaius Caesar as a man of unchaste habits, or by having a false charge believed against him. For this he was barred from the emperor's company, and he cut his veins with an old man's feeble hand and then bound them up again. He begged for mercy in a note, but the reply that came back was pitiless, so he untied the bandages and let his veins run. After that came a rush of prosecutions: Annius Pollio, Appius Silanus, Scaurus Mamercus, and Sabinus Calvisius together were charged with treason, and Vinicianus was added to the case against his father Pollio — men of noble birth, some of them holders of the highest offices. The senators trembled, for hardly a man among them lacked some tie of marriage or friendship to so many distinguished men. Only Celsus, tribune of the city cohort and now one of the informers, managed to pull Appius and Calvisius clear of the danger. Tiberius put off the case of Pollio, Vinicianus, and Scaurus, saying he would judge it himself along with the senate, though he had already dropped some grim hints about Scaurus.
10| Not even women were spared the danger. Since they couldn't be accused of plotting against the state, they were accused of shedding tears instead. The old woman Vitia, mother of Fufius Geminus, was put to death for weeping over her son's execution. That was the senate's business. At the emperor's court, meanwhile, Vescularius Flaccus and Julius Marinus were driven to their deaths — two of his oldest friends, men who had followed him to Rhodes and stayed close to him on Capri. Vescularius had carried messages in the plot against Libo; Marinus had helped Sejanus crush Curtius Atticus. It was received with some satisfaction that Tiberius's own methods had come back around on those who had once advised him to use them. Around this time the pontiff Lucius Piso died — a rare thing among men of such high standing — a natural death. He had never volunteered a servile opinion, and whenever necessity forced his hand he managed it wisely. I have already mentioned that his father had been censor. Piso himself lived to nearly eighty, and had earned a triumphal decoration in Thrace. But his greatest glory was this: as prefect of the city, holding a newly continuous form of power made harder to bear by men's resentment at obeying it, he handled the office with remarkable moderation.
11| In earlier times, once the kings and later the magistrates had left the city, someone was chosen for the interval to administer justice and handle emergencies, so the city would not be left without authority. It's said Romulus appointed Denter Romulius for this, Tullus Hostilius later appointed Numa Marcius, and Tarquinius Superbus appointed Spurius Lucretius. Later the consuls made the appointment, and a trace of the old custom survives to this day — whenever the Latin Festival is held, someone is put in charge to exercise the consul's powers for the occasion. Augustus, during the civil wars, put Cilnius Maecenas, a Roman knight, in charge of all of Rome and Italy. Later, once he held full power, given the sheer size of the population and the slow reach of the law, he took a man of consular rank to keep the slaves in check and to control whatever unruliness among citizens needed the threat of force to be checked. Messala Corvinus was the first to hold this authority, and he gave it up within days, as if he didn't know how to wield it. Then Statilius Taurus, despite his advanced age, carried it out admirably. After him came Piso, who held it with equal distinction for twenty years and was honored, by decree of the senate, with a public funeral.
12| Next the tribune Quintilianus brought before the senate the matter of a book of Sibylline verses which Caninius Gallus, one of the Fifteen in charge of such things, had asked to have admitted among the others attributed to the same prophetess, requesting a senatorial decree to that effect. This had already been passed by simple vote when Tiberius sent a letter mildly rebuking the tribune for his ignorance of ancient custom, excusable in a young man. He reproached Gallus because a matter of sacred law and ancient ritual, resting on an uncertain authority, had been brought before a thinly attended senate before the priestly college had given its opinion — instead of following the usual practice of having the verses read and evaluated by the priests first. He reminded them, too, that because so much spurious material circulated under the famous name of the Sibyl, Augustus had set a deadline by which such verses must be handed over to the urban praetor, and had forbidden anyone to keep them privately. This rule went back even further, to the elders, after the Capitol burned in the Social War: verses attributed to the Sibyl — whether there was one or several — had been gathered from Samos, Ilium, Erythrae, and even from Africa, Sicily, and the Italian colonies, and the priests had been given the task of judging, as far as human skill allowed, which were genuine. So now too, this book was submitted for examination by the Fifteen.
13| In the same consulship, the high price of grain brought the city close to riot, and for several days demands were shouted out in the theater with more license than usual, directed against the emperor. Stung by this, Tiberius rebuked the magistrates and senate for not using the state's authority to control the people, and he added a list of the provinces from which, and the vastly greater quantity of grain compared to what Augustus had managed, he was bringing in. So a senatorial decree was drawn up to discipline the common people with old-fashioned severity, and the consuls issued an edict no less strict. Tiberius's own silence on the matter, which he had expected to be taken as restraint, was instead read as arrogance.
14| At the close of the year, the Roman knights Geminius, Celsus, and Pompeius fell on a charge of conspiracy. Of these, Geminius, a friend of Sejanus's, was guilty of nothing more serious than extravagance and a soft way of living. Julius Celsus, a tribune, loosened his chain while in prison, looped it around his own neck, and pulling in opposite directions broke his own neck. Rubrius Fabatus had guards set over him on the suspicion that, believing Rome's fortunes hopeless, he meant to flee to the mercy of the Parthians. He was in fact found near the strait of Sicily and dragged back by a centurion, and could give no convincing reason for such a long journey. Still, he came through unharmed — more from being forgotten than from any mercy shown.
15| Under the consuls Servius Galba and Lucius Sulla, after a long search for husbands for his granddaughters, Tiberius, seeing the girls' age pressing, chose Lucius Cassius and Marcus Vinicius. Vinicius came from a country town, Cales, his father and grandfather both consuls, though the rest of his family was of the equestrian class; he was gentle by nature and polished in speech. Cassius came from a plebeian Roman family, but an old and honored one, raised under his father's strict discipline, and known more for his easygoing manner than for hard work. To Cassius he gave Drusilla, and to Vinicius Julia, both daughters of Germanicus, and he wrote to the senate about it, adding a modest word of honor for the young men. Then, after offering some very vague reasons for his own absence, he turned to weightier matters — grievances arisen in the public interest — and asked that Macro, the prefect, along with only a few tribunes and centurions, be allowed to enter with him whenever he came into the senate house. A decree was passed granting this broadly, without specifying rank or number, but even so he never once set foot in the city, let alone the senate, and mostly wandered by roundabout routes, circling and avoiding his own homeland.
16| Meanwhile a great swarm of accusers descended on those who had been increasing their fortunes through moneylending, in violation of the dictator Caesar's law setting limits on lending and holding property within Italy — a law long since let lapse, because private profit outweighs the public good. It's true that lending at interest was an old evil in Rome, and a frequent cause of unrest and discord, and so it had been restrained even in earlier, less corrupt times. At first the Twelve Tables forbade charging more than one-twelfth interest, when before it had been set purely by the greed of the wealthy; then by a tribunician bill it was cut to one twenty-fourth, and finally lending at interest was banned outright. Many plebiscites were passed against the fraud that kept springing back up in remarkable new forms no matter how often it was suppressed. But this time the praetor Gracchus, to whom the case fell, was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people at risk and referred it to the senate. The senators, alarmed — for hardly one of them was free of the same fault — begged the emperor for leniency, and he granted them a year and six months to put their private finances in order according to the law's demands.
17| This brought on a shortage of ready cash, since everyone's debts were called in at once, and because so much coined silver, after the conviction of so many men and the sale of their property, was locked up in the treasury or the privy purse. To make matters worse, the senate had ordered that every lender must invest two-thirds of his loan capital in land in Italy. But creditors were demanding full repayment, and it seemed shameful to let good faith slip once demanded. So first came a scramble of pleading, then an uproar at the praetor's tribunal, and the very remedy that had been sought — buying and selling land — turned into its opposite, since the moneylenders had sunk all their cash into buying up land. As the supply of land for sale grew, prices fell, and the deeper a man was in debt, the harder he found it to sell; many were ruined outright, and the collapse of their private fortunes dragged down their standing and reputation with it — until Caesar came to the rescue, distributing a hundred million sesterces through the banks and allowing loans, interest-free, for three years, provided the borrower gave the state security in land worth double the sum. In this way credit was restored, and gradually private lenders too came forward again. But the buying of land was never carried out to match the senate's decree — as usually happens with such things, the beginning was sharp and the end careless.
18| Then the old fears returned, with the treason charge brought against Considius Proculus, who was seized in the senate house while celebrating his birthday without a trace of fear, and was condemned and executed on the very same day. His sister Sancia was banned from fire and water, on the accusation of Quintus Pomponius — a restless character who claimed he did such things, and others like them, in order to win the emperor's favor and use it to help his brother Pomponius Secundus out of danger. Pompeia Macrina, too, was sentenced to exile; Caesar had already crushed her husband Argolicus and her father-in-law Laco, both leading men of Achaea. Her father, a distinguished Roman knight, and her brother, a former praetor, killed themselves as their own conviction closed in. The charge against them was that their great-grandfather Theophanes of Mytilene had been among the closest friends of Pompey the Great, and that when Theophanes died, Greek flattery had granted him divine honors.
19| After these came Sextus Marius, the richest man in Spain, charged with incest with his own daughter, and thrown from the Tarpeian Rock. To leave no doubt that it was the size of his fortune that had turned into his ruin, Tiberius kept his copper and gold mines for himself, even though they were technically confiscated to the state. Provoked now by these executions, he ordered the deaths of everyone still held in prison on charges of conspiring with Sejanus. The slaughter that followed was immense — every sex, every age, the famous and the obscure, lying scattered or piled in heaps. Relatives and friends were not allowed to stand by them, to weep, or even to look on for long; guards ringed the bodies, watching each person's grief, and followed the rotting corpses until they were dragged into the Tiber, where they floated or washed up on the banks, and no one dared burn them or touch them. Fear had cut the ordinary bonds between human beings so completely that, the crueler things grew, the more pity itself was driven off.
20| Around this same time Gaius Caesar, who had gone with his grandfather to Capri, took Claudia, daughter of Marcus Silanus, in marriage — hiding a monstrous nature under a sly show of modesty. Not his mother's condemnation, not his brothers' deaths, ever broke his composure; whatever mood Tiberius wore on a given day, he wore the same, in almost the same words. This later gave rise to the well-known remark of the orator Passienus, that there had never been a better slave or a worse master. I should not omit Tiberius's prediction about Servius Galba, then consul. Having summoned him and tested him with various conversations, he finally said to him in Greek, in effect: 'You too, Galba, will one day taste power' — meaning a late and brief reign, speaking from his knowledge of astrology, an art he had leisure to master at Rhodes under his teacher Thrasyllus, whose skill he had tested in this way.
21| Whenever he wanted to consult about such a matter, he used a room high up in the house, with only one freedman in on the secret. This man, illiterate but physically strong, would lead the way — over trackless, sheer ground, since the house overhung cliffs — ahead of whoever Tiberius had decided to test, and on the way back, if any suspicion of trickery or fraud had arisen, would throw the man over into the sea below, so he could never reveal the secret. So Thrasyllus was brought over those same rocks, and after he had impressed the emperor with his questioning, cleverly laying open Tiberius's future rule and what was to come, he was asked whether he had also worked out his own birth-hour — what year, what day he was then in. Thrasyllus, having plotted the positions and distances of the stars, hesitated at first, then grew afraid, and the more he looked into it the more he trembled with wonder and fear, until at last he cried out that an uncertain and nearly fatal crisis was upon him. At that Tiberius embraced him, congratulating him on having foreseen his dangers and on being safe after all, and taking what he had said as an oracle, kept him afterward among his closest friends.
22| But as for me, hearing such things, I remain uncertain whether the affairs of mortals turn on fate and unchangeable necessity, or on chance. For you will find the wisest men of antiquity, and those who follow their schools, disagreeing: many hold the fixed belief that the gods care nothing for our beginning, nothing for our end, nothing for us at all — which is why misfortune so often falls on the good and prosperity on the wicked. Others think that fate does indeed govern events, but not through wandering stars — rather through the first principles and chains of natural causes; and yet they leave us the choice of how to live, and once that choice is made, a fixed order of what follows. Neither good nor bad, in their view, is what the crowd thinks it is: many who seem to struggle under adversity are in fact fortunate, and many more, for all their great wealth, are utterly wretched — the first bearing hard luck with steadiness, the second using good fortune foolishly. Still, most people cannot shake the belief that what will happen is fixed from the moment of each person's birth, but that some things turn out differently from what was foretold through the ignorant errors of those who tell them — and so the reliability of the art itself gets discredited, though both ancient times and our own have given clear proof of it. As it happens, the prediction made by this same Thrasyllus's son concerning Nero's rule will be recorded in its place — I will not stray further from my subject now.
23| In the same consulship the death of Asinius Gallus was made public. That he had been killed by starvation was beyond doubt; whether by his own choice or by force was uncertain. Asked whether he would allow burial, Tiberius did not blush to grant it, and even complained openly of the accident that had carried the man off before he could be convicted face to face — as if, over three whole years, there had been no time for an old consular, father of so many consulars, to stand trial! Next Drusus died, having kept himself alive for nine pitiful days by chewing the stuffing of his bed. Some reported that Macro had been given instructions that if Sejanus's faction ever tried to take up arms, the young man — held prisoner in the Palace itself — should be pulled out and set up as leader before the people. Later, a rumor went round that Tiberius was softening toward his daughter-in-law and grandson — but rather than let mercy in, he doubled down on cruelty.
24| He even went so far as to attack the dead man, charging him with physical vices, a nature deadly to his own family, and hostile to the state, and ordered a day-by-day record of Drusus's words and deeds to be read aloud — nothing about it seemed more appalling than this: that for so many years men had stood by to catch his expression, his groans, even his muffled murmurs, and that a grandfather could have listened to it, read it, and put it before the public. It would scarcely be believable, except that the letters of the centurion Attius and the freedman Didymus listed the names of the slaves who had struck or terrified Drusus as he came out of his room. The centurion had even added his own words, brutal ones, as if they were something to be proud of, along with the dying man's last cries — Drusus, who at first feigned madness, hurling curses at Tiberius as though out of his senses, but later, once he had lost all hope of living, called down deliberate, carefully composed curses: that just as Tiberius had filled his house with the blood of his brother's daughter-in-law and son and their children, so might he pay the penalty to his own name and line, and to his descendants. The senators shouted him down, as if in horror — but dread and astonishment ran through them, that a man once so cunning, so skilled at hiding his crimes, had come to such boldness that he seemed to tear down the very walls and show them his grandson under the centurion's lash, begging in vain, amid the blows of slaves, for the last scraps that kept him alive.
25| That grief had not yet faded when word came of Agrippina — whom I take to have kept herself alive, after Sejanus's death, on hope, and then, once the cruelty against her showed no sign of easing, to have chosen death by her own will — unless, having been denied food, she was made to look as if she had ended her life by choice. Tiberius, in any case, burst into the foulest accusations, charging her with promiscuity and with Asinius Gallus as her lover, and claiming his death had driven her to weariness of life. But Agrippina, impatient of any equal, greedy for power, had long since traded women's failings for a man's ambitions. She died, he pointed out, on the very day, two years later, that Sejanus had paid for his crimes, and he insisted this be recorded for memory, and boasted that she had not been strangled with a rope nor thrown onto the Stairs of Mourning. Thanks were voted for this, and the senate decreed an annual offering to Jupiter, to be made every eighteenth of October, the anniversary marking when each of them had died.
26| Not long after, Cocceius Nerva, constantly at the emperor's side and versed in every point of divine and human law, though sound in health and unhurt in body, resolved to die. When Tiberius learned of it, he sat by him, pressed him for his reasons, added his pleadings, and finally admitted it would weigh heavily on his conscience and his reputation if the closest of his friends fled life with no cause to give. Nerva turned away from the conversation and simply refused all food. Those who knew his mind said that the closer he saw the state's troubles coming, the more, out of anger and fear, he wanted an honorable end while he was still untouched and untested. As for Agrippina's ruin, hard as it is to believe, it dragged Plancina down with it. Once married to Gnaeus Piso, and openly delighted at Germanicus's death, she had been protected, when Piso fell, by the pleading of Augusta and no less by Agrippina's own hostility toward her. Once hatred and favor alike had faded, the law took its course; charged with crimes that were no secret, she paid the penalty by her own hand — late, but not undeserved.
27| In a city already in mourning from so many deaths, part of the grief was that Julia, daughter of Drusus, once the wife of Nero, married down into the house of Rubellius Blandus, whose grandfather many still remembered as a mere Roman knight from Tibur. At the end of the year came the death of Aelius Lamia, honored with a censor's funeral — a man who, released at last from the empty title of governing Syria, had spent his time as prefect of the city. He came of a distinguished family and kept a vigorous old age; being denied his province had only added to his standing. Then, on the death of Pomponius Flaccus, propraetor of Syria, Tiberius's letter was read out, in which he complained that every man of real distinction, fit to command armies, refused the post, and that he was forced by this to beg some of the ex-consuls to take up provinces — forgetting that he himself had kept Arruntius from going out to Spain for nearly ten years now. Manius Lepidus also died that year, a man whose moderation and wisdom I have already given ample space to in earlier books; his nobility needs no further proof, for the Aemilian family has been rich in good citizens, and even those of that same house whose characters went bad still kept its brilliant fortune.
28| Paulus Fabius and Lucius Vitellius held the consulship the year the phoenix, after a cycle of centuries so vast it beggared memory, came back to Egypt — and gave the learned men of that country, and of Greece too, no end of material to argue over. On some points they agree, though much remains uncertain — still, it's worth setting down what can reasonably be known. All who have depicted the bird agree it is sacred to the Sun and distinct from every other bird in its face and the pattern of its feathers. Accounts of its lifespan vary widely. Five hundred years is the figure most commonly given, but others put the number far higher, claiming fourteen hundred and sixty-one between visits, and that in earlier ages the birds made their way to the city known as Heliopolis — once in the reign of Sesosis, again under Amasis, and last of all under Ptolemy, third of the Macedonian kings — with a great crowd of other birds trailing behind each time, marveling at this strange new shape. But the old accounts are murky: between Ptolemy and Tiberius there were fewer than two hundred and fifty years. So some believe this recent phoenix was a fraud, not really from Arabia at all, and that it borrowed none of the features old tradition insists on. The story goes that when its long life nears its end, it builds a nest in its own land and pours into it a generative force from which a chick is born; and the young bird's first task, once grown, is to bury its father — not carelessly, but by first lifting a weight of myrrh and testing it over a long flight until it can bear both the weight and the distance, at which point it carries the father's body and lays it on the altar of the Sun to burn. All this is uncertain and dressed up with legend. But that the bird is sometimes seen in Egypt is not in doubt.
29| Meanwhile in Rome the killing went on without pause. Pomponius Labeo, whom I mentioned as having governed Moesia, opened his veins and bled to death; his wife Paxaea followed his example. Deaths of this kind came easily because people feared the executioner, and because the condemned, once their property was confiscated, were denied burial — whereas those who took their own lives were buried and their wills stood, which was reason enough to hurry. But Tiberius, in a letter to the Senate, argued that it had been the custom of their ancestors, whenever they broke off a friendship, to forbid the man their house and let that mark the end of favor: this was what he himself had done to Labeo, whose guilt over mismanaging his province and other charges pressing on him had been covered over by playing the victim — his wife's terror had been pointless, since though guilty, she had faced no real danger. Next Mamercus Scaurus was again put on trial — a man of famous lineage, skilled at pleading cases, but disgraceful in his life. It wasn't friendship with Sejanus that ruined him; Macro's hatred, no less deadly, brought him down, working the same tricks more quietly. Macro laid information about a tragedy Scaurus had written, pointing to lines that could be twisted as an attack on Tiberius. The prosecutors Servilius and Cornelius then added charges of adultery with Livia and of practicing magic. Scaurus, as befit the old Aemilian family, forestalled his conviction by suicide, urged on by his wife Sextia, who both spurred him to death and shared in it.
30| And yet the accusers themselves, when the chance arose, paid for their work: Servilius and Cornelius, having brought down Scaurus and grown notorious for it, had taken money from Varius Ligus to drop a prosecution, and for this they were banished to islands and stripped of fire and water. Abudius Ruso, a former aedile, tried to endanger Lentulus Gaetulicus, under whom he had commanded a legion, on the charge that Gaetulicus had promised his daughter to Sejanus's son — but instead it was Ruso who was condemned and driven from the city. Gaetulicus at that time commanded the legions of Upper Germany and had won remarkable devotion from them, being generous to a fault, moderate in discipline, and — thanks to his father-in-law Lucius Apronius — well regarded by the neighboring army too. It was steadily rumored that he had dared to write to Tiberius, saying that his connection to Sejanus had begun not by his own choice but on Tiberius's own advice; that he could have been deceived just as easily as Tiberius had been, and that and that the same mistake ought not to be blameless in Tiberius's case but fatal in other men's; that his own loyalty remained unbroken and would stay that way unless he were attacked without cause; but that he would take a successor as nothing less than a death sentence. Let them strike, he said, a kind of bargain: the emperor could keep control of everything else, while he kept his province. Strange as this story was, it gained credibility from one fact — of all Sejanus's connections, Gaetulicus alone survived unharmed and in high favor, since Tiberius, weighing the public hatred against himself and his own advanced age, knew his power now rested more on reputation than on force.
31| In the consulship of Gaius Cestius and Marcus Servilius, Parthian nobles came to Rome without the knowledge of King Artabanus. Fear of Germanicus had once made Artabanus loyal to Rome and fair to his own people; but he had since grown arrogant toward us and savage toward his subjects, emboldened by successful wars against neighboring nations, and contemptuous of Tiberius's old age as though it left Rome defenseless. Eager for Armenia, when its king Artaxias died he set his own eldest son Arsaces on the throne there — adding insult by sending men to demand back the treasure Vonones had left in Syria and Cilicia. At the same time he boasted, in empty threats, of the old boundaries of the Persians and Macedonians, and of his intent to seize whatever Cyrus and later Alexander had once held. But the man most responsible for the Parthians sending secret envoys to Rome was Sinnaces, from a distinguished and correspondingly wealthy family, and next to him Abdus, a eunuch — a condition that among barbarians carries no disgrace, but rather a measure of power. These two, joined by other leading men, found they had no one of the Arsacid line to set up as king, since Artabanus had killed most of them or left the rest too young; so they asked Rome for Phraates, son of King Phraates. All that was needed, they said, was a name and Rome's backing — for a man of Arsaces's blood to appear, by Caesar's will, on the bank of the Euphrates.
32| This was exactly what Tiberius wanted. He honored Phraates and equipped him for his father's throne, holding firm to his usual method — to work at foreign affairs through calculation and cunning, and to keep armies at a distance. Meanwhile Artabanus, learning of the plot, wavered between fear that made him delay and bursts of anger that drove him to want revenge at once. To barbarians, hesitation looks like weakness; acting at once looks like a king. But practical calculation won out: he invited Abdus to a banquet under the guise of friendship and poisoned him slowly, and kept Sinnaces occupied and off guard with pretended goodwill and gifts. Meanwhile Phraates, in Syria, abandoned the Roman habits he had grown used to over so many years and took up Parthian customs instead — and being unequal to his own ancestral ways, he died of illness. But Tiberius did not drop his plans. He chose Tiridates, of the same royal blood, to rival Artabanus, and Mithridates of Iberia to recover Armenia, reconciling him with his brother Pharasmanes, who held the kingship of their people. He put Lucius Vitellius in charge of the whole eastern enterprise. I'm well aware that this man had a poor reputation in Rome, and that much scandal is told of him; yet in governing provinces he acted with the virtue of an earlier age. After his return, though, fear of Caligula and then intimacy with Claudius turned him into a shameful example of servility, held up to later generations as a model of disgraceful flattery — his good early years wiped out by a disgraceful old age.
33| Among the client kings, Mithridates moved first and prevailed on Pharasmanes to back his attempt with both guile and force; agents were found to corrupt some of Arsaces's own officers with heavy bribes into treachery. At the same time the Iberians burst into Armenia with a large force and seized the city of Artaxata. When Artabanus learned of this, he sent his son Orodes to take revenge, giving him Parthian troops and dispatching men to hire auxiliaries for pay. Pharasmanes, in response, brought in the Albanians and summoned the Sarmatians, whose chieftains, taking gifts from both sides as is their people's custom, put on different loyalties for different occasions. But the Iberians, controlling the terrain, rushed a band of Sarmatians into Armenia by the Caspian route. The reinforcements coming to help the Parthians, though, were easily blocked: every other approach was closed off by the enemy, and the one remaining route, along the sea near the far mountains of Albania, was impassable in summer, since the etesian winds fill the shallows with water — while the winter south wind rolls the waves back and, pushing the strait inward, exposes the flats along the shore.
34| Meanwhile Pharasmanes, reinforced and finding Orodes short of allies, kept challenging him to battle, and when Orodes refused, harassed him instead — riding up to his camp, wrecking his foraging, and often surrounding him with pickets as if laying siege, until the Parthians, unable to bear the insults any longer, closed in on their king and demanded battle. Their only real strength lay in cavalry; Pharasmanes was strong in infantry too, since the Iberians and Albanians, living in wooded, mountainous country, were more hardened to endurance and toughness. They claim descent from the Thessalians, from the time when Jason, after carrying off Medea and the children she bore him, returned to find Aeetes's palace empty and Colchis deserted. Many local customs and an oracle of Phrixus are traced to that story, and no one there will sacrifice a ram, believing it carried Phrixus — whether that means the animal itself or a ship bearing its image. In any case, with the two lines drawn up facing each other, the Parthian side spoke of their command of the East, the fame of the Arsacid line, and, by contrast, the obscure Iberian relying on hired soldiers; Pharasmanes's side answered that they themselves were untouched by Parthian rule, that the higher their ambitions the greater their glory in victory or their shame and danger in flight, and pointed — on one side — to their own men's rough, unadorned battle line, and — on the other — to the Medes' gold-embroidered ranks: here real men, there mere plunder.
35| Among the Sarmatians there was no single command from their leader: each man egged on his neighbor, urging that they not let the fight be settled by arrows but rush in close with a headlong charge. This produced a mixed kind of battle, as the Parthian, equally skilled at pursuit and flight, tried to pull the squadrons apart and open room for his shots, while the Sarmatians dropped the bow, which serves them poorly at short range, and rushed in with lance and sword; sometimes it went like ordinary cavalry fighting, with each side taking turns showing front and back, sometimes the lines locked together and men shoved and were shoved by the weight of bodies and clashing weapons. Now the Albanians and Iberians too joined in, grappling, shoving, forcing the enemy to fight on two fronts, while their cavalry harried the Parthians from above and their infantry, at closer range, did worse damage still. Through it all Pharasmanes and Orodes, moving to back up the bold or steady the wavering, stood out and so were marked men; they charged each other with shouts, spears, and horses, Pharasmanes pressing harder — he even drove a wound through the other's helmet. He couldn't strike again: his horse carried him past, and Orodes's bravest guards shielded their wounded lord. But a false rumor that he'd been killed spread panic through the Parthians, and they conceded the victory.
36| Soon Artabanus came seeking vengeance with the whole weight of his kingdom. Thanks to their knowledge of the terrain, the Iberians fought the better battle; even so Artabanus would not have pulled back, had Vitellius not mustered his legions and, by spreading a rumor that he meant to invade Mesopotamia, struck fear of a Roman war into him. Then Artabanus gave up on Armenia and his cause collapsed, as Vitellius worked to lure men away from a king who was savage in peace and ruinous in the aftermath of defeat. So Sinnaces, whose hostility I mentioned earlier, drew in his father Abdagaeses and other secret conspirators, who after a string of disasters were readier now to defect; and gradually more flocked in — men who had submitted more from fear than loyalty and, once they found leaders, found their courage too. Nothing was left to Artabanus but the foreign bodyguards around him, men driven from their own homes, who understood neither good nor cared about evil but served crime for pay. Taking these with him, he hurried into flight toward the distant lands bordering Scythia, hoping for help there, since he was tied by marriage to the Hyrcanians and Carmanians; and meanwhile he reckoned the Parthians might turn fair-minded toward him once he was gone and fickle if he stayed, and so come round to regret.
37| Vitellius, with Artabanus a fugitive and the loyalty of the people swayed toward the new king, urged Tiridates to seize what lay ready for him, and led the strength of the legions and allied troops to the bank of the Euphrates. As they sacrificed — Vitellius offering the suovetaurilia in the Roman manner, Tiridates decking out a horse to appease the river — the local people reported that the Euphrates, with no rainfall to explain it, was rising of its own accord to a great height, and at the same time curling its white foam into loops shaped like a diadem — an omen of a fortunate crossing. Others read it more shrewdly: that the venture would start well but not last, since signs given by earth or sky were more reliable, while the unstable nature of rivers could throw up an omen and snatch it away just as fast. In any case, a bridge of boats was built and the army crossed. Ornospades arrived first at the camp with many thousand horsemen — once an exile, he had been no small help to Tiberius during the Dalmatian war and was rewarded with Roman citizenship; later he won back the king's friendship and stood high in his favor, and now governed the plains that lie between the famous rivers Euphrates and Tigris and take from them the name Mesopotamia. Not long after, Sinnaces added to the forces, and Abdagaeses, pillar of the faction, brought the royal treasure and equipment. Vitellius, judging he had shown Roman arms enough, advised Tiridates and his nobles: Tiridates, to remember his grandfather Phraates and his foster-father the emperor, and whatever was admirable in each; the nobles, to keep their obedience to their king, their respect for Rome, and each man's own honor and good faith. Then he marched the legions back into Syria.
38| I have joined together events spanning two summers so that the reader's mind might rest a while from troubles at home. For Tiberius — even three years after Sejanus's execution, though time, pleading, and simple weariness usually soften other men — was not softened; he went on punishing what was doubtful or long forgotten as if it were fresh and grave. Fulcinius Trio, unable to bear the accusers closing in on him, wrote in his will a long and savage attack on Macro and Caesar's leading freedmen, and threw in charges against Tiberius himself — that his mind had gone slack with age, and that his long absence amounted to a kind of self-imposed exile. His heirs suppressed it, but Tiberius ordered it read aloud — whether to show off his tolerance for someone else's free speech and his contempt for his own bad name, or because he had long been ignorant of Sejanus's crimes and now preferred whatever was said about him to be made public regardless, so that if flattery kept him from the truth, at least abuse might get it to him. In these same days the senator Granius Marcianus, charged with treason by Gaius Gracchus, took his own life, and Tarius Gratianus, a former praetor, was condemned to death under the same law.
39| Trebellenus Rufus and Sextius Paconianus met similarly grim ends: Trebellenus died by his own hand, Paconianus was strangled in prison for verses he had kept composing there against the emperor. Tiberius no longer received this news across the sea and through distant messengers, as before, but from right beside the city, so that he could write his replies to the consuls the same day, or within a night — almost as if he could watch the blood spilling through the houses, or the hands of the executioners at work. At the year's end Poppaeus Sabinus died — a man of modest birth who won the consulship and triumphal honors through the friendship of emperors, and who was placed over the greatest provinces for twenty-four years, not for any outstanding skill but because he was equal to the work and no more than that.
40| Quintus Plautius and Sextus Papinius followed as consuls. That year the deaths of men like Lucius Aruseius no longer struck people as monstrous — they had grown used to such horrors — but there was real shock when Vibulenus Agrippa, a Roman knight, drew poison from a fold of his robe right in the senate house once the prosecutors had finished speaking, drank it, and collapsed; dying, he was dragged off to prison by hurried lictors, and the noose was put to his throat even though he was already gone. Not even Tigranes, once ruler of Armenia and now a defendant, escaped a citizen's punishment on the strength of his royal title. The consular Gaius Galba and the two Blaesi brothers died by their own choice — Galba after a grim letter from Tiberius barred him from the lottery for a province; the Blaesi had been designated priesthoods while their house still stood; when it was shattered he put the appointments off, but Tiberius had put off confirming them, and now, with the family's fortunes fallen, handed the posts to others — a sign of death they understood and acted on. And Aemilia Lepida, whom I mentioned as married to the young Drusus, had hounded her husband with repeated accusations; though utterly disreputable, she went unpunished as long as her father Lepidus lived. Afterward the informers seized on her over a slave with whom she had committed adultery, and the disgrace was beyond doubt; so she gave up her defense and ended her own life.
41| Around the same time the Clitae, a tribe subject to Archelaus of Cappadocia, were being forced to register a census and pay tribute in the Roman fashion, and so withdrew into the ridges of Mount Taurus, where the lay of the land let them hold out against their unwarlike king's forces — until Marcus Trebellius, sent by Vitellius, governor of Syria, with four thousand legionaries and picked auxiliaries, surrounded two hills the barbarians had occupied (the smaller called Cadra, the other Davara) with siegeworks, cut down those who dared break out, and starved the rest into surrender. Meanwhile Tiridates, with the Parthians willing, took possession of Nicephorium, Anthemusias, and the other cities that bear Greek names from their Macedonian founders, as well as the Parthian towns of Halus and Artemita, amid general rejoicing — for those who had grown up under Artabanus, raised among the Scythians, cursed his cruelty and hoped that Tiridates's gentler nature, shaped by Roman ways, would bring something better.
42| No one wore flattery more thickly than the people of Seleucia, a powerful city, walled, and never corrupted into barbarian ways but still holding to the customs of its founder Seleucus. Three hundred men, chosen for wealth or wisdom, form a senate there, and the people have power of their own. As long as the two act together, the Parthian king is held in contempt; but once they split, and each side calls in outside help against its rivals, whoever is brought in to take one side grows strong over both. That had happened recently under Artabanus's reign — he had handed the common people over to the nobles for his own advantage, since rule by the people is close to freedom, while rule by the few is nearer to a king's own tyranny. Now, as Tiridates approached, they showered him with the honors due the old kings and whatever more recent times had devised besides; at the same time they poured abuse on Artabanus — on his mother's side an Arsacid, but otherwise beneath the name. Tiridates left the affairs of Seleucia in the people's hands. Then, while he was weighing on what day to take up the formal ceremonies of kingship, he received letters from Phraates and Hiero, who held the two most powerful governorships, asking for a short delay. It was agreed to wait for these leading men, and meanwhile the capital, Ctesiphon, was made the seat of government. But as they kept putting the day off, before a large crowd, with general approval, Surena bound the royal diadem on Tiridates in the ancestral manner.
43| Had he pressed straight on into the interior and the other nations, the doubts of the hesitant would have been crushed and all would have fallen in behind him as one; but by camping at the fortress where Artabanus had stored his money and his concubines, he gave men time to slip free of their commitments. For Phraates and Hiero, and any others who had not shown up to share in choosing the day of the coronation, turned back to Artabanus — some out of fear, others out of resentment against Abdagaeses, who now controlled the court and the new king. Artabanus was found among the Hyrcanians, filthy and unkempt, scraping a living with his bow. At first he was terrified, thinking a trap was being set for him; but once he was assured they had come to restore his rule, his spirits lifted, and he asked what had brought this sudden change. Then Hiero mocked Tiridates's youth, saying the power did not truly rest with the Arsacid but was an empty name held by a weakling softened by foreign ways, while the real force lay in the house of Abdagaeses.
44| An old hand at kingship, he sensed that hatred, unlike love, is never counterfeited. He wasted no more time than it took to raise Scythian auxiliaries, then pressed forward fast, outrunning both his enemies' tricks and his friends' second thoughts. He hadn't even shed his mourning squalor — it drew pity from the common people. Nothing was left untried, no deceit, no appeal, to win over the wavering and steady the loyal. He was already close to Seleucia with a large force when Tiridates, shaken both by rumor and by Artabanus himself, was pulled apart by conflicting advice — should he march to meet him, or drag out the war by delay? Those who favored battle and a quick roll of the dice argued that troops scattered and worn out by a long march hadn't had time to bond well enough for obedience, and that they were recent traitors and enemies of the very man they were now being asked to support again. But Abdagaeses urged withdrawal into Mesopotamia, so that with a river as a barrier, and with the Armenians, Elymaeans, and others stirred up meanwhile in Artabanus's rear, they could build up their allied strength — plus whatever the Roman commander might send — and then try their luck. This view won out, since Abdagaeses carried the most authority and Tiridates had no stomach for risk. But the withdrawal looked like flight: the Arabs led the way, and the rest went home or over to Artabanus's camp, until Tiridates, with a handful of men, rode back into Syria, and so released them all from the disgrace of betrayal.
45| That same year a serious fire struck the city, burning the part of the Circus next to the Aventine, and the Aventine itself. Caesar turned the disaster to his own credit by paying full value for the destroyed houses and apartment blocks. A hundred million sesterces went into that generosity, and it was all the more welcome to the crowd because he was so modest in his own building — in fact even at public expense he had put up only two structures the whole reign, a temple to Augustus and the stage-building of Pompey's theater. And even those, once finished, he never dedicated — whether from contempt for self-promotion or simply old age. To assess everyone's losses, four of Caesar's step-grandsons-in-law were chosen — Gnaeus Domitius, Cassius Longinus, Marcus Vinicius, Rubellius Blandus — with Publius Petronius added on the consuls' nomination. Honors for the emperor were proposed and voted, each in proportion to the proposer's ambition; whether he declined or accepted them stayed uncertain, given how close he now was to the end of his life. Not long after, the last consuls of Tiberius's reign, Gnaeus Acerronius and Gaius Pontius, took office, by which time Macro's power was already excessive. He had never let his standing with Gaius Caesar slip, and cultivated it more eagerly by the day. After the death of Claudia — whose marriage to Gaius I mentioned earlier — he had pushed his own wife Ennia to fake love for the young man and bind him with a promise of marriage. Gaius refused nothing, so long as it got him the throne; for though quick-tempered by nature, he had thoroughly learned, in his grandfather's household, how to bury his true feelings under a mask.
46| Tiberius knew this well, which is why he hesitated over handing on the state. First he weighed his two grandsons: the son of Drusus was closer to him by blood and by affection, but hadn't yet reached manhood; Germanicus's son had the vigor of youth and the people's favor — and that, in his grandfather's eyes, was exactly why he was hated. He also considered Claudius, a man of settled years and eager for the finer pursuits, but his impaired mind ruled him out. And if he looked for a successor outside the family, he feared turning Augustus's memory and the name of the Caesars into a mockery and a disgrace — for what mattered to Tiberius was never gratitude in the present so much as ambition for how he'd be judged by later generations. In the end, uncertain in mind and worn out in body, he left to fate a decision he no longer had the strength for — though he dropped hints that showed he foresaw what was coming. To Macro he said, in words thin enough to see through, that he was deserting the setting sun to look toward the rising one. And to Gaius Caesar, when the young man happened to mock Sulla in conversation, he predicted that Gaius would have all of Sulla's vices and none of his virtues. At the same time, in tears, he often embraced the younger of his two grandsons, while the other watched with a grim face; to him he said, 'You will kill this one — and someone else will kill you.' But as his health worsened he gave up none of his pleasures, forcing himself to look robust through sheer endurance, and made a habit of mocking the doctors' craft, and anyone who, past the age of thirty, still needed someone else's advice to tell what was good or bad for his own body.
47| Meanwhile in Rome, the seeds were already being sown for killings that would outlast Tiberius himself. Laelius Balbus had charged Acutia, once the wife of Publius Vitellius, with treason; when she was convicted and a reward was voted to her accuser, the tribune of the people Junius Otho blocked it — which planted hatred between the two men, and soon after, ruin for Otho. Then Albucilla, notorious for her many affairs, once married to Satrius Secundus the informer of the conspiracy, was charged with impiety toward the emperor. Named as her accomplices and lovers were Gnaeus Domitius, Vibius Marsus, and Lucius Arruntius. I have already noted Domitius's distinction; Marsus too came from old honors and was known for his learning. But the record sent to the senate showed that Macro had presided over the questioning of witnesses and the torture of slaves, and the absence of any letter from the emperor naming them raised suspicion that most of the charges against Arruntius were fabricated, exploiting a dying, perhaps unwitting old man, out of Macro's well-known hostility toward him.
48| So Domitius, preparing his defense, and Marsus, apparently resolved to starve himself, dragged out their lives. Arruntius, when friends urged delay and caution, replied that the same course was not honorable for every man: he had lived long enough, he said, and had nothing to regret except having endured an anxious old age amid mockery and danger — hated for years by Sejanus, now by Macro, always by whoever held power, not through any fault of his own but because he couldn't stomach their crimes. True, he might dodge the emperor's last few days — but how would he escape the youth now closing in? If Tiberius, after all his experience of affairs, had been twisted and remade by the sheer force of absolute rule, was Gaius Caesar — barely out of boyhood, ignorant of everything or raised on the worst of examples — likely to turn out better, with Macro as his guide, a man chosen for being even worse than Sejanus when it came to crushing him, and who had already battered the state through plenty of crimes of his own? He said he could already see harsher servitude looming, and so he was fleeing both what had already happened and what was still to come. Saying this again and again like a prophet, he opened his veins. What followed would prove that Arruntius had made good use of his death. Albucilla, wounding herself with a botched stroke, was carried to prison on the senate's order. The men who had served her debaucheries — Carsidius Sacerdos, an ex-praetor, was sentenced to deportation to an island; Pontius Fregellanus was stripped of senatorial rank; and the same penalties were decreed for Laelius Balbus — this last to general rejoicing, since Balbus was known for a savage eloquence, always quick to turn on the innocent.
49| In those same days Sextus Papinius, from a consular family, chose a sudden and ugly death, hurling himself from a height. The blame was laid on his mother, who, having once been divorced, was said to have driven the young man, through flattery and extravagance, into troubles he could escape only by dying. She was accused before the senate, and though she flung herself at the senators' knees, pleading the grief all mothers share and the special weakness of a woman's mind under such a blow, and other sad and pitiable arguments to the same effect, she was nonetheless banned from the city for ten years, until her younger son had passed through the treacherous years of youth.
50| By now his body and his strength were failing Tiberius, though not yet his gift for hiding it. His iron will held; sharp in speech and expression, he masked his clearly failing health at times with studied affability. After moving from place to place several times, he finally settled at a villa near the promontory of Misenum that had once belonged to Lucullus. There it became clear he was nearing his end, in this way: there was a doctor of notable skill named Charicles, who, though not normally in charge of the emperor's health, was often consulted. As he was taking his leave, apparently on his own business, he took Tiberius's hand as a courtesy and, in doing so, felt his pulse. He wasn't fooled: Tiberius, whether offended or simply hiding his anger all the more, ordered the banquet to resume and reclined longer than usual, as if to honor his departing friend. But Charicles told Macro plainly that the emperor's breath was failing and wouldn't last two more days. From then on everything was rushed — conferences among those present, dispatches to the governors and armies abroad. On the sixteenth of March his breathing stopped, and he was believed to have completed his mortal span; and amid a great crowd converging to congratulate him, Gaius Caesar was stepping out to seize the reins of empire when word suddenly came that Tiberius's voice and sight had returned, and that he was calling for food to revive his failing strength. Panic seized everyone; the rest scattered in every direction, each pretending grief or ignorance; Caesar stood frozen in silence, plunged in an instant from the height of hope to the depths. Macro, unshaken, ordered the old man smothered under a heap of blankets, and everyone to leave the doorway. So Tiberius ended his life in his seventy-eighth year.
51| His father was Nero, and on both sides his line ran back to the Claudian family, though his mother had passed by adoption first into the Livian house and then the Julian. From infancy his fortunes were uncertain: he followed his proscribed father into exile, and when he entered Augustus's household as a stepson he had to contend with many rivals, while Marcellus and Agrippa, and later Gaius and Lucius Caesar, were in their prime; his own brother Drusus, too, stood higher in the people's affection. But his footing was most treacherous of all when he took Julia in marriage, forced to either endure or overlook his wife's adulteries. Then, returning from Rhodes, he found the emperor's household empty of rivals, and for twelve years he ruled it; after that he held mastery over the Roman state for nearly twenty-three years. His character, too, passed through distinct phases. While he was a private citizen, or held commands under Augustus, his life and reputation were outstanding. While Germanicus and Drusus still lived, he was secretive and cunning, counterfeiting virtues he did not have. As long as his mother lived, he was a mixture of good and bad. While he loved, or feared, Sejanus, his cruelty was unspeakable but his lusts stayed hidden. At the end he plunged into crime and degradation together, once shame and fear were stripped away and he answered to nothing but his own nature.