Tacitus · a new plain-English translation from the original language
1| The first death of the new reign was that of Junius Silanus, proconsul of Asia, arranged through Agrippina's treachery without Nero's knowledge. It was not that Silanus's violent temper had provoked his own destruction — he was sluggish and so despised even by domineering men that Caligula used to call him "the golden sheep." No, Agrippina had engineered the murder of his brother Lucius Silanus, and she feared an avenger. There was constant talk among the people that a man of settled years, blameless, well-born, and — what mattered then — a descendant of the Caesars, deserved the throne more than Nero, who had barely left boyhood and had gotten his power through crime. For Silanus too was a great-great-grandson of the deified Augustus. That was the cause of his death. the Roman knight Publius Celer and the freedman Helius — both overseers of the emperor's Asian estates — carried out the deed. At a banquet they poisoned the proconsul, so brazenly that hiding it was hopeless. Just as quickly, Narcissus — Claudius's freedman, whose feuding with Agrippina I have already recounted — was forced into suicide through brutal confinement and dire necessity, though the emperor had wished otherwise; for the man's greed and extravagance suited Nero's still-concealed vices remarkably well.
2| Killing would have continued, had Afranius Burrus and Annaeus Seneca not stepped in. These men, guiding the emperor's youth, worked in rare harmony for partners in power, each strong in a different way and equally influential — Burrus through military discipline and severity of character, Seneca through the teaching of eloquence and gracious good manners — helping each other so as to hold the slippery years of the prince in check more easily, by allowing permitted pleasures if he spurned virtue. Both had one shared struggle: against the savagery of Agrippina, who, burning with every desire that fuels bad rule, had Pallas on her side, the man whose influence had ruined Claudius through an incestuous marriage and a disastrous adoption. But Nero's temper did not stoop to slaves, and Pallas, with his grim arrogance overstepping a freedman's proper limits, had made himself tiresome. Still, publicly, every honor was heaped on Agrippina, and when a tribune, following military custom, asked for the watchword, Nero gave "Best of Mothers." The senate voted her two lictors and the priesthood of Claudius, along with a censorial funeral for Claudius and, soon after, his deification.
3| The emperor himself delivered the eulogy on the day of the funeral. While he ran through the antiquity of Claudius's lineage and the consulships and triumphs of his ancestors, he and everyone else listened intently; mention of Claudius's cultivation of the liberal arts, and the claim that under his rule Rome had suffered no misfortune from abroad, was also heard with approval. But when the eulogy shifted to praise of his foresight and wisdom, laughter broke out uncontrollably among the listeners — this despite an oration, Seneca's composition, that displayed real polish, for the man's gifts suited the era's taste well. Older men, who have the leisure to compare past and present, noted that Nero was the first ruler to need someone else's eloquence. The dictator Caesar had rivaled the greatest orators; Augustus had a ready, flowing style fit for an emperor. Tiberius too had mastered the art of weighing his words, powerful in thought or deliberately obscure. Even Caligula's disordered mind had not ruined his power of speech. And with Claudius, whenever he spoke from preparation, you would not find the delivery lacking in polish. Nero, from his earliest boyhood, turned his lively mind elsewhere — to engraving, painting, singing, or handling horses — and now and then, in composing verses, he showed he had at least the rudiments of learning.
4| Once the show of grief was finished, he entered the senate house, and after opening with remarks on the authority of the senators and the goodwill of the soldiers, he recalled the advice and examples that had guided him in taking up this great office magnificently: his youth had not been stained by civil war or family feuds; he brought no hatreds, no grievances, no desire for revenge. Then he laid out the shape his reign would take, avoiding above all whatever had most recently drawn resentment. He would not, he said, be judge of every matter, so that accusers and defendants would not be shut up together within one house, letting the power of a few run riot; nothing in his household would be for sale or open to influence-peddling; his private household and the state would be kept separate. Let the senate hold to its ancient duties: let Italy and the public provinces attend the tribunals of the consuls, and let the consuls grant access to the senators, while he himself would concern himself with the armies entrusted to him.
5| He kept his word, and much was settled at the senate's discretion. No one was to be hired with money or gifts to plead a case; quaestors-elect were freed of the obligation to put on gladiatorial games. Agrippina opposed this, claiming it undid Claudius's measures, but the senators carried it — the same senators who were now summoned to the Palace so that Agrippina could stand in attendance, a curtain hung behind added doors, hiding her from sight without shutting off her hearing. Indeed, when Armenian envoys arrived to argue their nation's case in front of Nero, she very nearly climbed up to sit beside him on the imperial dais; disaster was averted only when Seneca, as everyone else stood paralyzed with fear, urged Nero to rise and meet his approaching mother. So, under the guise of filial devotion, disgrace was averted.
6| At the end of the year, word arrived amid unsettled rumors that the Parthians had again broken out and were seizing Armenia, after driving out Radamistus, who had held that kingdom more than once, then fled it, and this time too had abandoned the fight rather than wage it. So in Rome, a city hungry for talk, people asked how an emperor barely past seventeen could take up or fend off so great a burden, what support there could be in one ruled by a woman, and whether battles, sieges, and the rest of warfare could really be managed by tutors. Others argued the opposite: better this than if the weak, aged, cowardly Claudius had been called to the labors of campaigning, obedient to whatever his slaves commanded. Burrus and Seneca, at least, were men of proven experience in many fields; and how much strength was really lacking in an emperor, when Pompey at eighteen and Octavian at nineteen had carried the weight of civil wars? Most things at the summit of power are managed by authority and counsel rather than by weapons and hands. Nero would soon give clear proof of whether his friends were honest men or not, depending on whether he chose an outstanding commander free of favoritism, or a rich one propped up by influence and intrigue.
7| While such talk spread, Nero ordered young men levied from the neighboring provinces to reinforce the legions of the East, and had the legions themselves moved closer to Armenia; he had two aging kings, Agrippa and Antiochus, ready their forces to strike first into Parthian territory, ordered bridges built across the Euphrates, and assigned Lesser Armenia to Aristobulus and the region of Sophene to Sohaemus, along with royal insignia. And, opportunely, a rival to Vologeses arose in his son Vardanes, so the Parthians withdrew from Armenia, as if only postponing the war.
8| But in the senate everything was blown up beyond its worth, in the motions of those who proposed thanksgivings, and that on the days of thanksgiving the emperor should wear triumphal dress, that he should enter the city in ovation, and that his statue should stand, equal in size to that of Mars the Avenger, in the same temple — all beyond the usual flattery, and gladly, because he had put Domitius Corbulo in charge of holding Armenia, and it seemed a field had opened for real merit. The eastern forces were split: Ummidius Quadratus, governing Syria, kept part of the auxiliaries together with two legions, while Corbulo received a matching force of Roman and allied soldiers, plus the infantry and cavalry cohorts wintering in Cappadocia. The allied kings were ordered to obey whichever commander suited the campaign, but their sympathies leaned more readily toward Corbulo. Eager to build his reputation quickly — reputation being most valuable at the start of a new command — he made a rapid march and met Quadratus, who had come out to him, at Aegae, a city of Cilicia; Quadratus had advanced that far so that if Corbulo entered Syria to take over the troops, all eyes would not turn to him alone. Corbulo was a man of huge physique, grand in speech, and, beyond real experience and good sense, imposing even in mere show.
9| Both, however, sent word to King Vologeses, urging him to prefer peace to war, and to give hostages and keep up the respect for the Roman people shown by his predecessors. And Vologeses — whether to prepare for war at his own convenience, or to remove men he suspected of rivaling him under the pretext of hostages — handed over the noblest members of the Arsacid house. They were received by the centurion Insteius, sent by Ummidius, who happened to have approached the king first on this matter. When Corbulo learned of this, he ordered the prefect of a cohort, Arrius Varus, to go and reclaim the hostages. This led to a quarrel between the prefect and the centurion, and so as not to keep foreigners watching the spectacle any longer, the decision was left to the hostages themselves and to the envoys escorting them. They preferred Corbulo, drawn by his fresh glory and by a certain leaning toward him even among the enemy. From this arose discord between the two commanders — Ummidius complaining that credit for what his own planning had achieved had been snatched from him, Corbulo insisting in turn that the king had turned to offering hostages only once he himself had been chosen to lead the war, which changed the king's hopes into fear. To settle the rivalry, Nero had it proclaimed that laurels would be added to the imperial fasces for victories achieved jointly by Quadratus and Corbulo. Here I have grouped together events that actually extended into later consular terms.
10| That same year the emperor asked the senate for a statue of Gnaeus Domitius, his father, and consular honors for Asconius Labeo, who had been his guardian; for himself he refused the solid silver or gold statues that were offered. And though the senators had voted that the year should begin in December, the month of Nero's birth, he kept to the old religious practice of starting the year on the first of January. Neither Carrinas Celer, a senator accused by his own slave, nor Julius Densus, a knight charged with the crime of favoring Britannicus, were brought to trial.
11| In the consulship of Claudius Nero and Lucius Antistius, when the magistrates took their oath to uphold the acts of past emperors, Nero forbade his colleague Antistius to swear to Nero's own acts — a move the senate praised extravagantly, hoping his young mind, flattered even by trivial glories, might go on to greater ones. Mercy followed: he restored to the senate Plautius Lateranus, who had been struck from its rolls for adultery with Messalina, and he made much of his own clemency in frequent speeches, which Seneca wrote and the emperor's voice broadcast — whether to show off how honorably he counseled Nero, or to show off his own talent.
12| Meanwhile his mother's power was quietly cracking as Nero fell for a freedwoman named Acte, taking into his confidence two well-favored young men, Marcus Otho and Claudius Senecio — Otho from a consular family, Senecio the son of one of the emperor's own freedmen. Without his mother's knowledge, and then despite her futile resistance, the affair wormed its way in through luxury and furtive secrecy, and even the emperor's older friends did not object: a lowly girl was satisfying the emperor's desires without hurting anyone, since he could not stand his wife Octavia — high-born and of proven virtue, yet somehow repellent to him, whether by fate or because forbidden things simply hold more power. And people feared that if he were kept from this affair he might break out into assaults on women of rank.
13| But Agrippina raged, in a woman's way, that a freedwoman was her rival and a slave-girl her daughter-in-law, and more of the same, and she would not wait for her son's regret or his boredom with the girl. The uglier her reproaches, the hotter they made his passion burn, until, overpowered by love, he threw off his deference to his mother and gave himself over to Seneca — one of whose circle, Annaeus Serenus, had screened the young man's first passion for the freedwoman by pretending to love her himself, lending his name so that what the emperor gave the girl in secret, Serenus could give her openly. Then Agrippina switched tactics: she tried to win the young man over with flattery, offering her own bedroom and her own embrace to cover whatever his youth and supreme fortune craved. She even admitted her severity had come at the wrong time, and handed over the resources of her wealth — nearly equal to the emperor's own — as freely now as she had recently been strict with her son. This reversal did not fool Nero, and his closest friends grew afraid and begged him to be on guard against the schemes of a woman always dangerous, and now false as well. Around this time Nero, looking over the jewelry that had once adorned the wives and mothers of emperors, picked out a robe and gems and sent them to his mother as a gift, unstintingly, giving her first choice of the finest pieces others might have wanted. But Agrippina announced that this was not enriching her wardrobe but shutting her out from everything else, and that her son was merely doling out to her what was, all of it, already hers.
14| There was no shortage of people to twist this into something worse. Nero, angry at those on whom his mother's arrogance leaned for support, removed Pallas from control of the finances, the post Claudius had given him and from which he had run things almost like a regent. It was said that as Pallas left, trailed by a great crowd of well-wishers, Nero quipped, not unwittily, that Pallas was headed off to take an oath discharging himself from office. And Pallas had indeed secured a deal: no act of his past would ever be questioned, and his accounts with the treasury would count as closed for good. After this Agrippina rushed headlong into threats and terror, not sparing the emperor's ears: she declared that Britannicus was grown now, the true and worthy heir to receive his father's power — power that an adopted outsider was currently wielding, and wielding through wrongs done to his own mother. She was ready, she said, to let the whole rotten history of that unhappy house come out into the open — her own marriage, her own poisoning included. The one thing the gods and her own foresight had arranged, she said, was that her stepson still lived. She would go with him to the army camp; let them hear, on one side, the daughter of Germanicus, and on the other, Burrus with his crippled hand and Seneca the exiled professor, demanding, of all things, to govern the human race. As she spoke she flung out her hands, piled on the insults, invoked the deified Claudius, and called up the ghosts of the murdered Silani from the underworld, and all their wasted deaths.
15| Nero was shaken by this, and with Britannicus's fourteenth birthday approaching, he turned it over in his mind — sometimes his mother's violence, sometimes Britannicus's own character, which a small recent test had revealed, though it had won the boy wide sympathy. During the Saturnalia, amid the other games young people play, drawing lots for a mock king, the lot fell to Nero. So for the others he devised harmless amusements that would bring no blush to their cheeks; but when he ordered Britannicus to stand up, come to the middle of the room, and start a song, he was hoping to make a fool of him — reasoning that a boy unused even to sober company, let alone drunken, would be helpless. But Britannicus began, without faltering, a song that spoke plainly of being cast out from his father's throne and his rightful place. This won him open pity, all the more visible because night and license had stripped away people's usual pretense. Nero read the resentment in the room and hated him the more for it. Under Agrippina's mounting threats, and with no charge he could bring, not daring to order his brother's murder openly, he worked in secret and had poison prepared, using as his agent Julius Pollio, tribune of a praetorian cohort, who had in his custody a woman condemned for poisoning, Locusta, notorious for her crimes. That everyone close to Britannicus should have no scruple and no loyalty had long since been arranged. The first dose he got from his own tutors, and it passed through him too weak to work, since his bowels flushed it out — perhaps it had been deliberately diluted so as not to kill too suddenly. But Nero, growing impatient at how slowly the crime was working, threatened the tribune and gave the order to have the poisoner put to death — telling them that while they fretted over rumor and shored up their defenses, they were stalling on the one thing that actually mattered: his safety. They then promised a death as swift as if by the sword, and next to Caesar's own bedroom they brewed a poison already known to be fast-acting from earlier trials.
16| It was the custom for the emperor's children to dine, sitting with other young nobles of their age, in view of their relatives, at their own simpler, smaller table. Britannicus was eating there; because his food and drink were tasted first by a chosen attendant, and so that the custom would not be dropped or the murder given away by killing them both, this trick was devised: an innocent, very hot drink was tasted and handed to Britannicus first; then, when he pushed it away as too hot, cold water containing the poison was poured in. It spread through his whole body so fast that his voice and breath were cut off together. Those sitting around him panicked; the ones who didn't understand fled in confusion, but those with sharper minds sat frozen, watching Nero. He, reclining as usual and seeming to notice nothing, said this was ordinary — Britannicus had suffered from epilepsy since infancy, and his sight and senses would gradually return. But Agrippina's terror, the shock plain on her face despite her efforts to hide it, flashed out so clearly that it was obvious she had known nothing about it — just as it was clear Britannicus's sister Octavia had known nothing either. She understood she had lost her last support, and had seen a precedent set for murdering one's own family. Octavia too, though still young, had already learned to hide grief, affection, every feeling. So after a brief silence, the feast's gaiety resumed.
17| The same night joined Britannicus's death to his funeral pyre, the burial arrangements having been made in advance — modest ones. He was buried, all the same, on the Campus Martius, in such violent rain that the common people believed it a sign of the gods' anger at a crime which even many humans were ready to forgive, reckoning it just the old, familiar hostility between brothers and the impossibility of shared rule. Most writers of that period report that in the days before his death Nero had repeatedly toyed with and mocked Britannicus's youth, so that his death cannot be called premature or brutal — though in fact, in the middle of a sacred family meal, without even time given to embrace his sisters, before the eyes of his enemy, the last blood of the Claudian line was hurried to its death, defiled by rape before it was defiled by poison. Nero defended the haste of the funeral in a public edict, citing the old custom of removing painful funerals quickly from public view and not dragging them out with eulogies and processions. He added that, having lost his brother's support, he now placed his remaining hopes in the state, and that the senate and people ought to cherish all the more the one emperor left of a family born to the highest rank.
18| After this he enriched his closest friends with lavish gifts. There was no shortage of people to accuse men who claimed to be so principled of dividing up houses and estates at such a time as if it were plunder. Others believed the emperor had forced it on them, conscious of his own crime and hoping to buy the loyalty of the most powerful men by generosity. But his mother's anger no generosity could soften; instead she clung to Octavia, held frequent private meetings with friends, and, beyond her natural greed, grabbed money from every direction as if stockpiling a war chest. She received tribunes and centurions warmly, and honored the names and merits of the nobles still surviving, as if she were looking for a leader and a party. Nero learned of this, and ordered withdrawn the military guard that had been kept for her, first as the emperor's wife and then as his mother, along with the German bodyguards recently added to the same honor. And so that she would not be thronged by crowds of well-wishers, he gave her a separate residence, moving her to the house that had once been Antonia's; whenever he visited her there, he came surrounded by a crowd of centurions and left after a brief kiss.
19| Nothing in human affairs is so unstable and fleeting as a reputation for power that rests on no strength of its own. Agrippina's threshold emptied at once. No one came to console her, no one came to visit, except a few women — whether out of love or hatred was unclear. Among them was Junia Silana, whom I mentioned earlier as driven from her marriage to Gaius Silius by Messalina — a woman of notable birth, beauty, and looseness, and for a long time very dear to Agrippina. But a hidden grudge had grown between them, because Agrippina had talked Sextius Africanus, a young noble, out of marrying Silana, calling her promiscuous and past her prime — not to keep Africanus for herself, but to stop him from getting his hands on Silana's fortune once she died childless. Given this chance for revenge, Silana lined up accusers from among her clients, Iturius and Calvisius. They brought no old, oft-repeated charge — that she mourned Britannicus's death, or broadcast Octavia's mistreatment — but claimed Agrippina meant to raise Rubellius Plautus, who through his mother's line stood as close to the deified Augustus as Nero did, to power, and through marriage to him seize the state again. Iturius and Calvisius took this to Atimetus, a freedman of Nero's aunt Domitia, who — delighted at the gift, since a bitter rivalry ran between Agrippina and Domitia — pushed the actor Paris, himself also Domitia's freedman, to go at once and lay the charge in the most alarming terms.
20| It was late in the night, and Nero was deep in his wine, when Paris came in. Normally at that hour he worked to whip up the emperor's appetite for pleasure, but this time he came composed, wearing grief. He laid out the accusation point by point and so terrified his listener that Nero resolved not only to kill his mother and Plautus, but to strip Burrus of his command as well, on the theory that Burrus owed his advancement to Agrippina and was now repaying the debt. Fabius Rusticus says a letter was actually drafted, handing the command of the praetorian cohorts to Caecina Tuscus, and that it was only through Seneca's influence that Burrus kept his rank. Pliny and Cluvius report that the prefect's loyalty was never in doubt at all; Fabius, admittedly, leans toward praising Seneca, in whose friendship his career flourished. I will follow the consensus of the sources, and note the divergent version under its author's name. Nero, panicked and eager to kill his mother, could not be talked out of it until Burrus promised her death himself, if she were proven guilty — but insisted that everyone, let alone a parent, deserved a defense; that there were no real accusers present, only the word of one person from a hostile household; and that Nero should think of the darkness, the sleepless night spent at a banquet, and how much of this smelled of recklessness and ignorance rather than truth.
21| The emperor's fear thus calmed, at daybreak men went to Agrippina so she might learn the charges and either clear herself or pay the price. Burrus carried out this commission with Seneca present; some freedmen stood by as witnesses to the conversation. Burrus laid out the charges and their source, then spoke with open menace. Agrippina, her old fierceness intact, said: 'I'm not surprised that Silana, who has never borne a child, knows nothing of a mother's feelings — a parent doesn't drop her children the way an adulteress drops her lovers. And if Iturius and Calvisius, having eaten through every last penny they had, are now repaying an old woman for her final service by bringing an accusation, that doesn't mean I must bear the shame of plotting murder, or Caesar the guilt of believing it. As for Domitia's hostility, I'd actually be grateful for it, if she competed with me in devotion to my Nero. Instead she stages this like a play, through her bedfellow Atimetus and the actor Paris. She was busy building up the fishponds at her Baiae estate while I was arranging Nero's adoption, his proconsular power, his designation as consul, and everything else needed to secure him the throne. Let someone come forward who can prove I tampered with the cohorts in Rome, or undermined the loyalty of the provinces, or bribed slaves or freedmen into crime. Could I have lived if Britannicus had come to power? And if Plautus or anyone else should end up ruling the state, do you think I'd lack accusers then — not for words that impatient love sometimes lets slip carelessly, but for real crimes, the kind only a son could forgive?' Those present were moved and, unprompted, worked to calm her further. She demanded a meeting with her son, at which she said nothing in her own defense, as if she doubted it was needed, and nothing about her services to him, as if she were reproaching him with them — but she did secure vengeance on her accusers, and for her friends their rewards.
22| The grain supply was handed to Faenius Rufus, care of the games the emperor was preparing went to Arruntius Stella, Egypt to Tiberius Balbillus. Syria was meant for Publius Anteius, but he was maneuvered out of it by various tricks and in the end kept in Rome. Silana was driven into exile; Calvisius and Iturius too were banished. Atimetus was put to death; Paris was too valuable to the emperor's pleasures to be punished. Plautus, for the moment, was passed over in silence.
23| Next came a charge that Pallas and Burrus were plotting to put Cornelius Sulla on the throne — a man of noble stock, and Claudius's son-in-law through his marriage to Antonia. The man behind the accusation was one Paetus, notorious for buying up confiscated property at the treasury auctions, and by now plainly exposed as a fraud. Pallas's innocence brought less satisfaction than his arrogance brought offense: when his freedmen were named as his accomplices, he answered that he had never given a household order except by a nod or a gesture, and that when more needed explaining he put it in writing, so as never to let his voice join in with theirs. Burrus, though himself accused, sat as a judge and gave his verdict along with the rest. The accuser was sentenced to exile, and the records he had used to dredge up forgotten claims against the treasury were burned.
24| As the year drew to a close, the cohort of soldiers regularly posted to guard the games was pulled back, meant to give a fuller look of liberty — keeping troops away from the theater's corrupting license, and testing whether the people, left unwatched, would hold to discipline on their own. Lightning had struck the temples of both Jupiter and Minerva, and on the advice of the soothsayers the emperor had the city ritually purified.
25| Quintus Volusius and Publius Scipio held the consulship that year, a year peaceful abroad but shameful for its license at home, as Nero, dressed as a slave to disguise himself, roamed the city's streets, brothels, and back alleys, with companions who snatched up goods set out for sale and beat passersby, striking at random so that he himself sometimes took a blow and showed the bruise on his face. Once it became widely known that it was the emperor doing the roaming, the assaults on prominent men and women grew worse, and some, given license once under Nero's name, ran their own gangs doing the same thing unpunished; nights in the city took on the feel of a captured town. Julius Montanus, a man of senatorial rank who had not yet held office, happened to run into the emperor in the dark; when Nero attacked him violently, Montanus fought back hard and drove him off, then, recognizing him, begged his pardon — but because this looked like an accusation, he was forced to die. Nero, more cautious afterward, surrounded himself with soldiers and a good number of gladiators, who let brawls start small and seemingly private, but stepped in with weapons if the injured party fought back too hard. He also turned the license of the theater and the factions backing actors into something like open warfare, through impunity and rewards, watching himself, sometimes hidden, sometimes openly, until the people grew so divided and the fear of worse unrest so great that the only remedy found was to expel the actors from Italy and put the soldiers back on guard at the theater.
26| Around the same time the senate took up the matter of freedmen's frauds, and it was demanded that patrons be given the right to revoke the freedom of those who had proven ungrateful. There was no shortage of support for the idea. But the consuls, not daring to open the debate without the emperor's knowledge, nonetheless wrote up the senate's general agreement. [Whether he became the author of a formal measure — since only a few opposed the motion, some grumbling that a freedom shared with so many had bred an insolence that had now burst out so far that they weighed matters against their patrons on equal terms, or even raised a hand to strike them — drove them to it, or those arguing against their own penalty won them over instead.] For what else was left to an injured patron except to banish his freedman a hundred miles into the Campanian coast? All other legal remedies were open equally to both sides; the patrons should be given some weapon that could not simply be brushed aside. It was no great burden for freedmen to keep their liberty through the same good conduct that had won it for them; but those clearly guilty of crimes deserved to be dragged back into slavery, so that fear might restrain those whom kindness had failed to change.
27| Against this it was argued that the fault of a few should ruin only themselves, and nothing should be taken from the rights of the whole body — for that body was spread very wide. From it came most of the city tribes, staff for magistrates and priests, even the cohorts enrolled in Rome; and most of the equestrian order, along with a good many senators, had no other origin than this. Set freedmen apart from the rest, and the thinness of freeborn stock would show at once. It was not for nothing that the ancestors, when dividing the ranks by status, had placed freedom itself in common. Besides, two forms of manumission had been established precisely so that there would remain room for a change of heart, or for a fresh grant of favor. Those a patron had not freed formally, by the touch of the rod, were still held as if bound by the chain of slavery. Each man's case deserved judgment on its own facts, and a grant, once made, could not be undone — so it should not be made lightly. This view prevailed, and the emperor wrote to the senate that they should judge each freedman's case on its own merits whenever patrons brought a complaint, but should take nothing away from the general body of rights. Not long after, the freedman Paris was taken from Domitia as if by process of civil law, not without disgrace to the emperor, at whose order the finding of his free birth had been staged.
28| Some semblance of republican government still survived. A dispute arose between the praetor Vibullius and the plebeian tribune Antistius, because the tribune had ordered the release of unruly partisans of actors whom the praetor had thrown in chains. The senate backed the praetor and censured Antistius's high-handedness. At the same time the tribunes were barred from usurping the powers of praetors and consuls, or summoning from Italy anyone who could be sued under the ordinary law. The consul-elect Lucius Piso added a rule that tribunes could take no action against anyone inside their own homes under color of office, and that any fine they imposed should not be entered on the public treasury rolls by the quaestors until four months had passed — during which time an appeal could be lodged and the consuls would rule on it. The aediles' powers were likewise tightened, and limits set on how much property the curule and plebeian aediles could seize as security or impose as penalty. The plebeian tribune Helvidius Priscus carried on a personal feud with Obultronius Sabinus, quaestor of the treasury, accusing him of pressing the auction-spear too harshly against the poor. The emperor then transferred oversight of the public accounts from the quaestors to prefects.
29| This arrangement had varied and changed often. Augustus had let the senate choose the prefects; then, when election by ballot came under suspicion of corruption, they were chosen by lot from among the ex-praetors. That did not last either, since the lot sometimes fell on unfit men. Claudius then put quaestors back in charge, and to keep them from being too timid for fear of giving offense, promised them promotion out of the normal order — but men taking up their first magistracy lacked the maturity for it. So Nero chose men who had already served as praetor and proved themselves.
30| That same year Vipsanius Laenas was found guilty of plundering Sardinia through corrupt governance while he held the province. Cestius Proculus, facing an extortion charge brought by the Cretans, was cleared. Clodius Quirinalis, who as prefect of the rowers stationed at Ravenna had abused Italy — as if it were the lowest of nations — with his debauchery and cruelty, took poison to forestall conviction. Caninius Rebilus, a leading man for his legal learning and vast wealth, escaped the pains of failing old age by opening his veins — though no one believed he had the resolve to choose death for its own sake, given his notorious womanish vices. Lucius Volusius, by contrast, died in high repute, having lived ninety-three years, with great wealth honestly gained and unbroken friendship with a succession of emperors.
31| In the second consulship of Nero, with Lucius Piso as colleague, little happened worth recording — unless one cares to devote pages to the beams and foundations of the amphitheater Caesar raised on the Campus Martius, matters better left to Rome's daily register, since the Annals should be kept for events that actually carry weight, as befits the dignity of the Roman people. The colonies of Capua and Nuceria were reinforced with veteran settlers; the common people were given a handout of four hundred sesterces each; and forty million sesterces were paid into the treasury to shore up public confidence. The four percent tax on slave sales was also remitted — in appearance more than in substance, since though the seller was nominally liable, in practice the buyer ended up paying it as part of the price. Nero also decreed that no magistrate or procurator in a province under his charge should put on gladiatorial games, beast-hunts, or any other public show — for previously such largess had oppressed the provincials as much as outright extortion, since officials used popularity contests to cover crimes committed out of greed.
32| A senate decree was also passed serving both vengeance and safety alike: if a man was murdered by his own slaves, then those freed under his will who had been living under the same roof should suffer punishment along with the slaves. Lurius Varus, an ex-consul once ruined by charges of greed, was restored to the senate. And Pomponia Graecina, a woman of distinction, wife of Aulus Plautius — whose ovation over the Britons I have already recorded — was accused of practicing a foreign superstition and left to her husband's judgment. Following ancient custom, he heard the case concerning his wife's life and reputation before their kinsmen, and pronounced her innocent. Pomponia's life, by contrast, was one long unbroken grief: once Messalina's treachery destroyed her friend Julia, Drusus's daughter, she spent the next forty years dressed only in mourning, her spirit never lifting from sorrow — a stance Claudius left unpunished, and one that later even brought her honor.
33| The same year brought many defendants to trial. Publius Celer, accused by the province of Asia, was one Nero could not bring himself to acquit, so he let the case drag on until old age brought Celer's death — for Celer, having murdered the proconsul Silanus as I have already told, used the sheer enormity of that crime to obscure his other offenses. Cossutianus Capito was denounced by the Cilicians as a corrupt and disgraceful man who had claimed in his province the same license for wrongdoing he had practiced at Rome; worn down by relentless prosecution, he finally abandoned his defense and was convicted under the extortion law. But for Eprius Marcellus, whom the people of Lycia were suing to recover their property, corrupt influence proved so overwhelming that some of his own accusers were sentenced to exile, as though they had endangered an innocent man.
34| In Nero's third consulship, Valerius Messala served as his colleague; Messala's great-grandfather was the orator Corvinus, a man few of the old survivors could still recall sharing that same office with the deified Augustus, Nero's great-great-grandfather. The honor of this noble family was enhanced by a grant of five hundred thousand sesterces a year, to support Messala's honest poverty. The emperor likewise settled an annual pension on Aurelius Cotta and Haterius Antoninus, though both had squandered their ancestral fortunes through extravagance. At that year's start, the long half-hearted contest between Rome and Parthia over Armenia turned serious: Vologeses refused to see his brother Tiridates stripped of the throne he himself had bestowed on him, or forced to hold it merely as another power's gift, while Corbulo held that Roman greatness demanded reclaiming what Lucullus and Pompey had once won. The Armenians, meanwhile, wavered in their loyalty and courted both sides — drawn to the Parthians by geography, shared customs, and intermarriage, and, having never known liberty, inclined more readily toward submission.
35| Corbulo, however, found more trouble in his own soldiers' cowardice than in the enemy's treachery. The legions transferred from Syria, grown soft in long peace, could barely stomach the routine of camp life. It was well established that this army included veterans who had never stood watch or mounted guard, who looked on rampart and ditch as strange novelties, who went without helmets or breastplates, sleek and profiteering, having spent their service in the comforts of towns. So he discharged those worn out by age or ill health and requested reinforcements. Levies were held through Galatia and Cappadocia, and a legion was brought up from Germany with its allied cavalry and cohort infantry. The whole army was kept under canvas despite a winter so savage that the ground, sheathed in ice, had to be dug out before tents could even be pitched. Many men's limbs were frostbitten by the sheer cold, and some died on sentry duty. One soldier was noted who, carrying a bundle of firewood, had frozen his hands so stiff that they stuck to the load and snapped off at the wrists as he collapsed. Corbulo himself, lightly dressed and bareheaded, was constantly present on the march and at hard labor, praising the vigorous, comforting the weak, and setting an example for all. But when many, unable to bear the harsh climate and the hardship of service, began deserting, he resorted to severity as a remedy. Unlike other armies, where a first or second offense was met with pardon, here any man who abandoned his standard paid with his life on the spot. This proved sound in practice and, for all its seeming harshness, more merciful — for far fewer deserted that camp than camps where offenses were forgiven.
36| Meanwhile Corbulo kept the legions inside camp until spring came on, and posted auxiliary cohorts at suitable points with orders not to risk battle first. He gave Paccius Orfitus, a former chief centurion, charge of these outposts. Though Orfitus wrote that the barbarians were careless and a good opportunity for action had presented itself, he was ordered to hold his position and wait for larger forces. But he broke orders: once a few squadrons arrived from the nearest forts and, through inexperience, clamored for a fight, he engaged the enemy and was routed. Those who should have brought support were so unnerved by his losses that each man fled back to his own camp in panicked disorder. Corbulo took this badly. He rebuked Paccius and ordered the officers and men to camp outside the rampart — and they were kept in that disgrace, released only at the pleading of the whole army.
37| Tiridates, backed not only by his own supporters but by the forces of his brother Vologaeses, now attacked Armenia openly instead of by stealth. He ravaged the territory of tribes we counted loyal, and whenever our troops marched against him he slipped away, darting here and there, spreading more terror by rumor than by actual fighting. Corbulo spent a long time trying to force a battle, in vain, and was finally driven by the enemy's own tactics to spread the war across several fronts at once. He split his forces so his legates and prefects could strike different places simultaneously, and told King Antiochus to attack the districts nearest him. Meanwhile Pharasmanes, having had his own son Radamistus killed as a supposed traitor, pursued his old grudge against the Armenians more eagerly than ever, as proof of his loyalty to us. It was then, for the first time, that the Moschi — a people more loyal to Rome than any other — were drawn in and raided the remote parts of Armenia. So Tiridates's plans began working against him, and he sent envoys to protest, in his own name and that of the Parthians, why — after hostages had recently been given and friendship renewed, opening the door to fresh favors — he was being driven from Armenia's ancient possession. Vologaeses himself, they said, had not yet been provoked, since the Parthians preferred to argue their case rather than fight for it; but if Rome insisted on war, the House of Arsaces would not lack for courage or luck, having already tasted Roman defeat more than once. To this Corbulo, knowing for certain that Vologaeses was tied up by a revolt in Hyrcania, urged Tiridates to approach the emperor with a petition instead: he could have a stable kingdom and a bloodless outcome, if he gave up on a distant, uncertain hope and turned to the one at hand, which was also the stronger.
38| Since messages back and forth were getting nowhere toward peace, it was agreed the two commanders should meet in person, at a time and place to be fixed. Tiridates said he would bring an escort of a thousand horsemen; he did not specify how many troops of any kind Corbulo could bring, only that both should come to this meeting of peace without breastplates or helmets. Any man alive — let alone an old and cautious commander — would have seen through such barbarian cunning: the small number was fixed on one side and the larger allowed on the other precisely so a trap could be laid; for if unarmored men were exposed to cavalry skilled with the bow, sheer numbers would do them no good. Corbulo hid the fact that he understood this, and answered that matters of public importance were better discussed with both armies present in full. He chose a site where one side rose in gentle hills, suited to receiving ranks of infantry, and the other opened onto a plain, suited to deploying squadrons of cavalry. On the agreed day Corbulo arrived first, stationing on the wings the allied cohorts together with the auxiliaries supplied by the kings, and putting the Sixth Legion in the center; overnight it had been built up with three thousand men drawn from the Third and brought over from another camp, a single eagle carried along with them so the whole would pass for one legion. Tiridates, as the day was already fading, took his position far off, where he could be seen more than heard. So, without any meeting at all, the Roman commander ordered his men back to camp.
39| The king — whether suspecting a trick, since Roman columns were moving toward several places at once, or hoping to cut off our supplies coming from the Black Sea through the town of Trapezus — withdrew in haste. But he could not strike at our supply lines, since they were carried through mountains held by our garrisons. And Corbulo, unwilling to let the war drag on without result, and wanting to force the Armenians to defend their own homes, moved to destroy their strongholds. He took on the strongest one in that district himself, called Volandum, and left the smaller ones to the legate Cornelius Flaccus and the camp prefect Insteius Capito. After surveying the defenses and identifying the weak points, he urged his men to strip this enemy of his homeland — an enemy who wandered without settling for peace or battle, whose flight was a confession of treachery and cowardice — and to think of glory and plunder in equal measure. He divided the army into four columns: one he sent forward in a tortoise formation to undermine the rampart, others to bring up scaling ladders against the walls, and many more to hurl firebrands and spears from siege engines. Slingers and catapult crews were positioned to rain shot from a distance, so that no quarter of the wall could send help to another under equal pressure everywhere. The army fought with such fire that within a third of the day the walls stood stripped of defenders, the barricades at the gates were torn down, the fortifications were taken by storm, and every adult male was killed — without the loss of a single Roman soldier, and only a few wounded. The unwarlike population was sold under the crown, and the rest of the spoils went to the victors. The legate and the prefect had equal success, and with three strongholds stormed in a single day, the remaining towns surrendered — some out of terror, others of their own accord. This success gave rise to confidence enough to attack Artaxata, the capital of the nation. The legions did not, however, take the most direct route: crossing the river Araxes, which washes the city walls, by the nearby bridge would have put them within range of attack, so they crossed farther off, at broader, safer fords.
40| Tiridates, torn between shame and fear — fearing that if he allowed the siege he would look useless, and that if he tried to stop it he would tangle himself and his cavalry in difficult ground — finally decided to show his army in the open, and either fight a set battle on a chosen day or, by feigning flight, set up a trap. So he suddenly surrounded the Roman column — though our commander was not caught off guard, having arranged the army for both marching and fighting at once. The Third Legion held the right flank, the Sixth the left, with picked men of the Tenth in the center; the baggage was drawn in among the ranks, and a thousand cavalry guarded the rear, ordered to hold their ground against any close attack but not to chase off those who fled. On the wings marched foot archers and the rest of the cavalry, with the left wing extended further along the base of the hills, so that if the enemy broke through he would be caught both in front and on the flank. Tiridates charged from various directions, never quite within range, sometimes threatening, sometimes feigning panic, hoping to loosen our ranks and pick off scattered men. But when none of this recklessness paid off — only a single cavalry officer, having pressed forward too boldly, was shot down with arrows, and his fate only steadied the rest in their discipline — Tiridates withdrew as darkness came on.
41| Corbulo pitched camp on the spot and weighed whether to press on to Artaxata by night with lightly equipped legions and lay siege, thinking that was where Tiridates had pulled back. His scouts, though, brought word that the king had gone far off, and no one could say whether his march was toward Media or toward Albania; so Corbulo held off until daylight and pushed light-armed troops ahead, to ring the walls in the meantime and set a long-range assault going. The townspeople, for their part, needed no siege at all: they flung their gates open unprompted and handed themselves and their city over to Rome, which is what spared their lives. Artaxata itself they burned and razed flat, for a strong garrison would have been needed to hold it, and troops enough for that and for carrying on the war besides could not be spared — and if left standing and unguarded, capturing it would have brought neither use nor glory. To this was added a wonder that seemed sent by heaven: everywhere up to Artaxata the sun shone bright, but the ring of the city walls was suddenly wrapped in black cloud and torn by lightning, as if the gods themselves were delivering it to destruction in anger. For this Nero was hailed as imperator, the senate decreed thanksgivings, statues, arches, and unbroken consulships for the emperor, and ordered that the day the victory was won, the day it was reported, and the day it was formally recorded should all be kept as festivals — along with other honors in the same vein, carried to such excess that Gaius Cassius, while agreeing to the rest, observed that if thanks were to be offered to the gods in proportion to Rome's good fortune, a whole year of thanksgivings would not suffice, and so sacred days and working days ought to be kept separate, so that religious observance would not crowd out the business of the state.
42| Tossed about by various turns of fortune and having earned the hatred of many, a defendant was nonetheless convicted through Seneca's influence, not without ill will attaching to it. This was Publius Suillius, a man feared and venal under Claudius's rule, and one whom the change of regime had humbled less than his enemies wished — a man who preferred to look guilty than to look like he was begging for mercy. It was believed that the old senatorial decree, and the penalty of the Lex Cincia against those who took payment for pleading cases, was revived chiefly to bring him down. Suillius did not hold back his complaints and accusations; besides the fierce temper of extreme old age, he spoke freely and attacked Seneca as an enemy of Claudius's friends, under whom Seneca had endured a thoroughly deserved exile. He was, Suillius said, a man used to idle pursuits and the ignorance of the young, and envious of those who exercised a vigorous, uncorrupted eloquence in defending their fellow citizens. He himself had been Germanicus's quaestor; Seneca had been the adulterer in that man's household. Which, he asked, deserved harsher judgment — earning a fee, freely offered by a litigant, for honest work, or seducing the bedchambers of imperial women? By what wisdom, by what precepts of philosophy, had Seneca amassed three hundred million sesterces within four years of imperial favor? At Rome, he said, wills and childless old men were caught as if in a net cast by Seneca; Italy and the provinces were being drained by his monstrous interest rates. His own money, by contrast, had been earned by hard work and was modest. He would rather face the charge, the danger, anything at all, than bow the standing he had built up over a lifetime at home to someone else's sudden good fortune.
43| There were people ready to carry these same words to Seneca, twisted for the worse. Accusers turned up who charged that when Suillius governed the province of Asia, he had plundered its people and embezzled public money. Then, since they had been granted a year to investigate, it seemed quicker to open with the charges rooted in Rome itself, for which witnesses were close at hand. They claimed his ferocious prosecutions had driven Quintus Pomponius into a civil war he had no choice but to join, had pushed Julia, daughter of Drusus, and Poppaea Sabina to their deaths, and had destroyed Valerius Asiaticus, Lusius Saturninus, and Cornelius Lupus. They threw at Suillius entire ranks of condemned Roman knights and the whole cruelty of Claudius's reign. He defended himself by insisting he had taken up none of it on his own initiative, but only obeyed the emperor — until Nero cut off that line of defense, announcing that he had checked his father's own records and found no accusation Claudius had ever forced on anyone. Then the defense shifted to claiming Messalina had ordered it all, and it grew shaky: why, after all, had no one else been chosen to lend his voice to a cruel, shameless woman? The instruments of atrocity deserve punishment, once they have collected their price for the crimes and try to pin the crimes on others. So part of his estate was confiscated — his son and granddaughter were allowed to keep a share, and anything they had inherited from their mother's or grandmother's will was exempted — and he was driven into exile on the Balearic Islands. He was not broken, either at the moment of danger or after his conviction, and it was said he bore his isolation on a rich, soft way of living. When accusers came after his son Nerullinus, pressing charges of extortion out of hatred for the father, the emperor stepped in, saying vengeance had already been satisfied enough.
44| In this same period, Octavius Sagitta — a tribune of the plebs — fell headlong in love with a married woman named Pontia. With lavish gifts he bought her adultery, then bought her separation from her husband, promising to marry her and striking a bargain for the wedding. But once the woman was free, she began stalling, blaming her father's opposition, and, having found hope of a richer husband, shed her promises. Octavius alternated between complaints and threats, protesting that his reputation was ruined and his money spent, and finally putting into her hands the one thing he had left — his life. When she spurned him even then, he begged for one last night as a comfort, claiming it would help him accept limits afterward. The night was set, and Pontia put her maid, who was in on it, on guard at the bedroom door. He came in with a single freedman, a dagger hidden under his clothes. Then, as happens in love and rage, there were quarrels, pleas, accusations, apologies — and part of the darkness was set aside for passion. Out of that, as if suddenly inflamed, he ran her through with the dagger while she suspected nothing, drove off the maid who rushed in with a wound, and burst out of the bedroom. The next day the killing was plain and the killer in no real doubt, since it was proven he had spent the night there. But the freedman claimed the crime as his own, saying he had avenged his patron's wrongs, and his story moved some people by its sheer scale of loyalty — until the maid, recovered from her wound, told the truth. The father of the murdered woman brought Octavius before the consuls once he had left office, and by a vote of the senate and the law against assassins, he was condemned.
45| No less notorious was the shamelessness that, in that same year, planted the seed of great disasters for the state. There was in the city a woman named Sabina Poppaea, born to a father named Titus Ollius, but she had taken the name of her mother's father, the illustrious Poppaeus Sabinus, who shone with the honors of a consulship and a triumph — for Ollius, before he could hold high office, was ruined by his friendship with Sejanus. This woman had everything except a decent character. Her mother, who had outshone the women of her generation in beauty, had passed on to her both fame and looks in equal measure; wealth matched the distinction of her family. Her conversation was charming, her wit far from dull: she wore modesty as a mask while indulging in vice. She rarely appeared in public, and when she did, she kept part of her face veiled — whether to leave onlookers unsatisfied, or because it simply suited her. She never spared her own reputation, drawing no line between husbands and lovers, and she was slave neither to her own feelings nor to anyone else's; wherever advantage pointed, that was where she turned her desire. So even while she was Rufrius Crispinus's wife — a Roman knight who had given her a son — Otho won her away, trading on his youth, his lavish living, and his place as Nero's closest friend. No time was lost before the affair turned into marriage.
46| Otho — whether carelessly in love, praising his wife's beauty and elegance before the emperor, or meaning to inflame him, so that if they both possessed the same woman, the bond would only add to his own power — was often heard, rising from Caesar's table, declaring that he, at least, was off to her, boasting that nobility and beauty, the envy and joy of every fortunate man, had been granted to him alone. Prompted by this and other such goading, no long delay followed: once given her opening, Poppaea began first to strengthen her hold through flattery and craft, pretending she could not resist her passion and had been captivated by Nero's looks. Then, once the emperor's passion had caught fire, she grew haughty: kept on beyond a night or two, she said, she was still a wife and could not simply set her marriage aside — she was bound to Otho by a manner of living no other man could equal. He, she said, was magnificent in spirit and in style; with him she saw herself worthy of the highest fortune. But Nero, tied to a mistress who was a slave and to his habit with Acte, had picked up nothing from that servile company but what was cheap and low. Otho was pushed out of his usual closeness with Nero, then out of his company and entourage altogether, and finally, so he would not carry on his rivalry inside the city, he was put in charge of the province of Lusitania. There he governed, right up to the civil wars, not in the spirit of his earlier scandal but honestly and cleanly — reckless in leisure, but more restrained once given power.
47| Up to this point Nero had sought some cover for his outrages and crimes. He was above all suspicious of Cornelius Sulla, twisting the man's dullness of mind into its opposite and reading him as cunning and a master of pretense. Graptus, one of Caesar's freedmen, schooled by long experience going back to Tiberius in the ways of the imperial household, fed that fear with a lie of this kind. The Mulvian Bridge was at that time a well-known haunt of nighttime pleasures, and Nero used to go there so he could run wild outside the city with fewer restraints. So Graptus invented a story: that as Nero returned along the Flaminian Way an ambush had been laid for him and escaped only by fate, since he had actually come back to the Sallustian gardens by a different route — and he named Sulla as the man behind the plot, all because some young men, indulging in the wild license of the time, had by chance given the emperor's returning attendants a groundless scare. No slave or client of Sulla's was recognized among them, and his character, thoroughly despised and incapable of daring anything, made the charge implausible. Even so, as though he had been convicted, he was ordered to leave his homeland and confine himself within the walls of Marseille.
48| In that same consulship the senate gave audience to delegations from Puteoli, sent independently by the town council and by the common people — one accused the mob of violence, the other accused the magistrates and leading men of greed. The unrest had escalated to stone-throwing and threats of fire, and to keep it from spilling into killing and armed violence, Gaius Cassius was chosen to apply a remedy. Because the townspeople could not stomach his severity, at his own request the task was handed over to the Scribonius brothers instead, backed by a praetorian cohort whose menace, and the punishment of a few, restored harmony among the townsfolk.
49| I would not bother recording a perfectly routine decree of the senate — one letting the people of Syracuse exceed the set limit on gladiators for their games — except that Paetus Thrasea spoke against it, and in doing so gave his critics material to attack his motives. Why, they asked, if he believed the state needed the senate to speak freely, did he chase after such trivial things? Why not, instead, offer his advice for or against war and peace, taxes and laws, and everything else that holds the Roman state together? Fathers of the senate, they said, were free, whenever they were granted the right to speak their view, to say what they wished and demand that it be put to debate. Was this the only thing worth correcting — that Syracuse not be too generous with its shows — while everything else, across every part of the empire, was left exactly as excellent as if Thrasea, not Nero, held the reins? But if the greatest matters were let pass with total silence, all the more reason to leave the trivial ones alone too. Thrasea, when friends pressed him for his reasoning, answered that he was not unaware of present conditions, but that he corrected decrees of this sort as a mark of respect for the senate's honor, so it would be plain that men who paid attention even to the smallest matters would not hide their concern for the great ones either.
50| In the same year, worn down by the people's constant complaints about the misconduct of the tax farmers, Nero wondered whether to abolish all indirect taxes outright and hand mankind that as the most splendid of gifts. But the senators, after first praising his generosity of spirit at length, held back his impulse, showing him that it would unravel the empire if the revenues that sustained the state were cut away — since abolishing the customs duties would only lead to demands that direct taxes be scrapped next. Most of the companies that collected taxes, they pointed out, had been set up by consuls and tribunes of the plebs back when Roman liberty was still fierce; the rest had since been arranged so that income and necessary spending matched each other. Still, the greed of the tax farmers plainly needed reining in, so that a system tolerated without complaint for so many years would not turn to resentment through fresh abuses.
51| So the emperor decreed that the rules governing each tax, which until then had been kept secret, should be posted publicly; that claims left unpursued could not be revived after a year had passed; that in Rome the praetor, and in the provinces whoever held the powers of praetor or consul, should give summary justice in cases against the tax farmers; that soldiers should keep their exemption, except on goods they traded for profit; and various other quite fair measures, which were observed for a while and then, before long, ignored. Still, the abolition of the two-and-a-half and two-percent levies stands, along with other charges the tax farmers had invented under illicit names. Grain shipments to the overseas provinces were regulated more gently, and it was decreed that merchants' ships should not be counted among their taxable property, so that they would not have to pay tax on them.
52| Nero acquitted the defendants from the province of Africa who had held proconsular power there, Sulpicius Camerinus and Pompeius Silvanus. Camerinum's accusers were private citizens and few, charging him more with cruelty than with extortion. Silvanus was surrounded by a large crowd of prosecutors who asked for time to summon witnesses; the defendant demanded to be tried at once, and he won, helped by his wealth, his childlessness, and an old age he outlived the men whose scheming had let him escape.
53| Germany had stayed quiet up to this point, thanks to its commanders' temperament: since triumphal honors had become common, they hoped for greater glory by keeping the peace. Pompeius Paulinus and Lucius Vetus commanded the army at that time. But so as not to leave the soldiers idle, Paulinus finished the embankment begun sixty-three years earlier by Drusus to hold back the Rhine, while Vetus was preparing to link the Moselle and the Saône with a canal dug between them, so that supplies could travel by sea, then up the Rhône and Saône, through the canal, then down the Moselle into the Rhine, and on to the Ocean — removing the difficulties of overland transport and connecting the shores of West and North by water. Aelius Gracilis, governor of Belgica, begrudged him the project, discouraging Vetus from bringing legions into a province not his own and courting favor in Gaul, and kept calling it something the emperor would find alarming — the usual way honest undertakings get blocked.
54| But once the armies stayed idle for a long stretch, a rumor spread that governors had been stripped of the right to lead them against the enemy. So the Frisians moved their young men, fit for war, into the forests and marshes, and their unwarlike population to the lakeshore, and settled on empty land set aside for the army's use, on the urging of Verritus and Malorix, who ruled that tribe as much as Germans are ever ruled. They had already built homes and sown crops, working the land as if it were their own, when Dubius Avitus, having taken over the province from Paulinus, threatened them with Roman force unless the Frisians withdrew to their old territory or got a new settlement granted by the emperor. This pushed Verritus and Malorix into pleading their case. They went to Rome, and while waiting for Nero, who was occupied with other matters, they were shown around, among the sights offered to visiting barbarians, and entered the theater of Pompey to see the greatness of the Roman people. There, having time on their hands — they were not ignorant enough to be entertained by the shows — they asked about the seating arrangement, the divisions by rank, who the knights were, where the senate sat. Noticing some men in foreign dress sitting among the senators, they asked who these were, and on hearing that this honor was given to envoys from nations that excelled in courage and in friendship with Rome, they shouted that no mortals surpassed the Germans in arms or loyalty, came down, and sat among the senators. The onlookers took this good-naturedly, as an old-fashioned impulse and honest rivalry. Nero granted both men Roman citizenship and ordered the Frisians off the land. When they refused, a sudden cavalry charge from the auxiliaries forced the issue, killing or capturing those who resisted too stubbornly.
55| The Ampsivarii then occupied that same land, a stronger tribe not only through their own numbers but through the sympathy of neighboring peoples, since they had been driven out by the Chauci and, lacking a home, were begging for safe exile. With them was a man well known among those tribes and trusted by us too, named Boiocalus, who recalled being imprisoned during the Cheruscan rebellion on Arminius's orders, and later serving under the commands of Tiberius and Germanicus, adding to fifty years of loyal service the fact that he was now bringing his own tribe under our authority. Why, he asked, should so much open plain lie idle, meant only for soldiers' cattle and herds to graze someday? Let them keep that reserve for the animals amid human hunger, so long as they didn't prefer waste and emptiness to friendly peoples. That land had once belonged to the Chamavi, then the Tubantes, and after them the Usipi. Just as the sky was given to the gods, so the earth was given to mortal kind; and land lying empty belonged to everyone. Then, looking up at the sun and naming the other stars, he asked them, as if they were present, whether they wished to gaze down on empty ground: better they pour the sea over the men who were stealing the land.
56| Avitus, moved by this, answered that they must accept the rule of their betters; it pleased the gods they appealed to that the Romans should decide what to give and what to take away, and that they endure no judges other than the Romans themselves. That was his public answer to the tribe. To Boiocalus himself he would grant land, in memory of their friendship. Boiocalus rejected this as the price of betrayal, adding, 'Land to live on may fail us — land to die on cannot.' And so they parted with hostility on both sides. The Ampsivarii called on the Bructeri, the Tencteri, and even more distant tribes to join their war. Avitus sent word to Curtilius Mancia, who led the upper army, asking him to bring his troops over the Rhine and menace the enemy's rear, while Avitus himself marched his own legions onto Tencteran soil, warning them of ruin if they did not abandon the Ampsivarii's cause. So the Tencteri backed off, and the Bructeri, frightened by the same threat, did the same; and as the rest likewise abandoned a danger not their own, the Ampsivarii alone withdrew back toward the Usipi and Tubantes. Driven from their land too, they sought refuge first among the Chatti, then the Cherusci; after long wandering as guests, destitute, and enemies on foreign soil, their fighting men were cut down, and their non-combatants divided up as spoil.
57| That same summer a major battle broke out between the Hermunduri and the Chatti over a river rich in salt deposits, which lay on their common border, and which they fought to seize by force — not only out of the usual eagerness to settle everything by arms, but from a belief, deeply held, that this ground lay especially close to heaven, and that nowhere were human prayers heard by the gods more directly. That was why, they believed, the gods' favor made salt rise in that river and those woods — not, as elsewhere among other peoples, from seawater drying up, but poured over a burning pile of timber, formed from opposite elements, fire and water, combining together. The war went well for the Hermunduri, worse for the Chatti, because the victors dedicated the defeated army to Mars and Mercury, a vow that condemns horses, men, everything conquered to slaughter. And indeed the enemy's threats turned back on themselves. But the tribe of the Ubii, allied to us, was struck by an unexpected disaster: fire broke out from the ground and swept through farmhouses, fields, and villages everywhere, spreading right up to the walls of the colony recently founded there. It could not be put out, not by rain, not by river water or any other liquid, until, out of options and enraged by the destruction, some country people began throwing stones at it from a distance, then, as the flames pushed back, moved in closer and beat at it with clubs and other blows as if driving off wild animals; finally they stripped off their clothes and threw them on it, and the more profane and worn by use the cloth was, the more it succeeded in smothering the fire.
58| That same year the Ruminal fig tree in the Comitium, which eight hundred and thirty years before had sheltered the infancy of Remus and Romulus, was seen with its branches dead and its trunk withering, and this was taken as an omen — until it sprouted new growth and came back to life.