Annals — Book 15

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

1| Meanwhile Vologeses, king of the Parthians, had learned what Corbulo had done and that a foreigner, Tigranes, had been set on the throne of Armenia. That, together with the expulsion of his brother Tiridates, made him want to avenge the insult to the dignity of the Arsacid house. But the greatness of Rome and his respect for their long-standing treaty pulled him toward other concerns. He was cautious by nature, and he was tied down by wars against the Hyrcanians, a strong people who had just revolted from him. While he wavered, fresh news of an insult spurred him on: Tigranes had marched out of Armenia and ravaged the Adiabenians, a neighboring people, more widely and for longer than mere raiding would explain, and the leading men of the nations found this hard to bear. They had sunk so low in contempt, they said, that they were not even attacked by a Roman general, but by the recklessness of a man who had spent years as a hostage among slaves. Monobazus, who held power in Adiabene, fanned their resentment, asking what protection he could count on, or from whom. Armenia, he said, was already given up; the next lands were being dragged down too. If the Parthians would not defend them, surrender to Rome meant lighter servitude than being taken by force. Tiridates too, exiled from his kingdom, made his weight felt more by his silence, or by measured complaints, than an outburst would have: great empires are not held by cowardice, he said. Men and arms must settle the contest. In the highest fortunes, the stronger claim is the fairer one, and while private households may keep what is their own, it is a king's glory to fight for what belongs to others.

2| Stirred by all this, Vologeses called a council, set Tiridates next to himself, and began: 'This man, born of the same father as I, ceded me the highest title on account of my age, and I established him in possession of Armenia, which ranks as the third seat of power — Pacorus had already taken Media before him. I believed I had rightly settled our family's affairs against the old hatreds and rivalries between brothers. The Romans forbid it, and now, as always, they break a peace they have never disturbed with success, this time to their own ruin. I will not deny it: I preferred to hold what our ancestors won by fairness rather than blood, by claim rather than arms. If I have erred through delay, I will make it right through courage. Your strength and glory remain untouched, and to them is added a reputation for restraint, which even the greatest of men should not despise, and which the gods themselves take into account.' With that he bound the diadem around Tiridates's head, handed over a ready force of cavalry — the escort that customarily follows a king — to the nobleman Monaeses, added Adiabenian auxiliaries, and ordered him to drive Tigranes out of Armenia. He himself, having set aside his quarrel with the Hyrcanians, began mustering his main forces and the full weight of war, threatening the Roman provinces.

3| Once Corbulo had solid confirmation of the report, two legions went to reinforce Tigranes, led by Verulanus Severus and Vettius Bolanus, with private instructions to move cautiously rather than in haste — since he wanted the war prolonged, not actually fought. He had written to the emperor that Armenia needed its own dedicated commander, since Syria was now in graver danger with Vologeses bearing down on it. Meanwhile he stationed his remaining legions along the bank of the Euphrates, armed a makeshift force of provincials, and blocked the enemy's approaches with garrisons. And since the region was short of water, he built forts over the springs and buried some streams under heaps of sand.

4| While Corbulo made these arrangements to protect Syria, Monaeses pushed his column forward at speed to outrun his own reputation, but even so caught Tigranes neither ignorant nor unprepared. Tigranes had already occupied Tigranocerta, a city strong both in the number of its defenders and the size of its walls. Besides that, the river Nicephorius, of no small width, ran around part of the walls, and where the river could not be trusted a huge ditch had been dug. The garrison was in place, with supplies laid in beforehand; a few men, sent out too eagerly to bring in more, were surrounded by a sudden enemy attack, and their anger rather than fear fired up the rest. But the Parthians have no stomach for close combat when pressing a siege: their scattered arrows neither frighten the defenders behind walls nor accomplish anything, they merely waste themselves. When the Adiabenians began to bring up ladders and siege engines, they were easily driven off, and then cut down when our men made a sortie.

5| Corbulo, though, thought it wise to temper his success rather than press his luck, and sent men to Vologeses to protest the violence done to a Roman province: an allied and friendly king was under siege, along with Roman cohorts. Better to lift the siege — or he too would pitch camp on enemy soil. The centurion Casperius, chosen for this mission, approached the king at the town of Nisibis, thirty-seven miles from Tigranocerta, and delivered the message boldly. Vologeses had long held a deep aversion to clashing with Roman arms, and things were not going well for him at the moment either: the siege had failed, Tigranes stood secure with men and supplies intact, the force sent against the city had been beaten back, legions had been sent into Armenia, and others posted to cover Syria were ready to take the offensive themselves. His cavalry, meanwhile, was weakened for lack of fodder, since a plague of locusts had stripped every green and leafy thing bare. So he masked his fear in gentler language, replying that envoys would go to Caesar to ask for Armenia and negotiate a durable peace. He ordered Monaeses to abandon Tigranocerta, and he himself withdrew.

6| Many hailed this as a great achievement, brought about by fear of the king and Corbulo's threats. Others read it differently: that a secret bargain had been struck, so that both sides would drop the war, Vologeses would withdraw, and Tigranes too would leave Armenia. For why else was the Roman army pulled back from Tigranocerta? Why give up in peace what had been held by war? Was wintering in hastily built huts on the far Cappadocian frontier truly preferable to holding the very seat of the kingdom just won back? The war, they said, was simply postponed, so that Vologeses would face someone other than Corbulo, and Corbulo, whose glory had been earned over so many years, would risk it no further. As I have said, he had asked for a dedicated commander to defend Armenia, and word came that Caesennius Paetus was on his way. He was already there, in fact, with the forces divided so that Paetus took command of the Fourth and Twelfth Legions, together with the Fifth just transferred from Moesia and the Pontic, Galatian, and Cappadocian auxiliaries, while Corbulo kept the Third, Sixth, and Tenth, along with Syria's veteran troops. The rest were to be shared or divided as circumstances required. But Corbulo could not stand a rival, and Paetus, who would have counted it glory enough to rank second, instead looked down on what had been achieved, insisting it amounted to no killing and no plunder, and that the capture of cities was 'capture' in name only. He himself, he said, would impose tribute, laws, and Roman rule on the conquered, in place of the mere shadow of a king.

7| At about this time the envoys of Vologeses, whom I mentioned as sent to the emperor, returned having accomplished nothing, and the Parthians took up war openly. Paetus did not shrink from it: with two legions, the Fourth then commanded by Funisulanus Vettonianus, the Twelfth by Calavius Sabinus, he entered Armenia under a grim omen. While crossing the Euphrates on a bridge, the horse carrying the consular insignia bolted backward for no visible reason. And a sacrificial victim, standing beside the winter camp then under construction, broke free mid-sacrifice, burst through the half-finished works, and got clear of the rampart. The soldiers' javelins also caught fire — an especially striking portent, since the Parthian enemy fights with missile weapons of their own.

8| Paetus, however, ignored the omens. Before the winter camp was properly secured, and with no provision made for grain supply, he hurried his army across Mount Taurus, meaning, as he put it, to recover Tigranocerta and lay waste the regions Corbulo had left untouched. He did capture some forts and won a measure of glory and plunder — had he only kept the glory in proportion, or handled the plunder with care. Marching long distances over ground that could not actually be held, with the supplies he had seized already spoiling and winter now closing in, he led the army back and wrote to Caesar as if the war were finished — in grand language, but empty of substance.

9| Meanwhile Corbulo, who had never neglected the bank of the Euphrates, held it with denser garrisons. And to keep enemy cavalry from interfering with his bridge-building — for they were now ranging freely and conspicuously over the open plains below — he sent out especially large ships, lashed together with beams and fitted with towers, drove them along the river, and used catapults and ballistae to drive off the barbarians, whose arrows in return could not match the range of the stones and spears reaching them. Then the bridge was completed and the hills opposite were occupied, first by allied cohorts, then by legionary camps, with such speed and such a show of force that the Parthians abandoned their plan of invading Syria and turned all their hopes toward Armenia — where Paetus, unaware of the danger closing in, kept the Fifth Legion far off in Pontus and had weakened the rest by granting his soldiers indiscriminate leave, until word came that Vologeses was approaching with a huge and hostile force.

10| The twelfth legion was summoned, and the very move Paetus had hoped would swell his army's reputation instead exposed how thin it was. Even so, the camp might have held and the Parthian could have been strung along, if Paetus had shown any consistency—either in his own plans or in following someone else's. But once soldiers of real experience had steadied him against the mounting danger, he swung back the other way to avoid looking dependent on another man's judgment, and things got worse. So now he abandoned his winter camp, shouting that he needed no ditch or rampart—his men's bodies and weapons were his defense against the enemy—and led the legions out as though marching to a pitched battle. Then a centurion and a handful of scouts he'd sent to gauge enemy numbers were lost, and he scurried back in a panic. And because Vologeses had not pressed him very hard, his confidence swelled again, groundlessly, and he posted three thousand picked infantry on the nearest ridge of the Taurus range to block the king's crossing, and posted his Pannonian cavalry, the mainstay of his mounted force, out on the plain. His wife and son went into hiding at a fort called Arsamosata, a cohort left to guard them—and his troops scattered, when kept together they would have held off a roving enemy more readily. They say he was barely brought to admit that Vologeses was pressing him and to call on Corbulo. Corbulo was in no hurry, so that the danger, by growing worse, would make the credit for rescue all the greater. Still, he ordered a thousand men each from his three legions and eight hundred cavalry, with an equal number from the auxiliary cohorts, made ready to march.

11| Vologeses, though he'd learned the roads were blocked by Paetus—infantry on one side, cavalry on the other—changed nothing in his plan. He simply terrified the cavalry with force and threats and crushed the legionaries, except for one centurion, Tarquitius Crescens, who dared defend the tower he was guarding, breaking out repeatedly and cutting down the barbarians who came too close, until he was surrounded by hurled fire. Any infantry who came through unhurt fled to remote, trackless country; the wounded made it back to camp, and out of fear they magnified everything—the king's courage, the enemy's savagery and numbers—and found ready believers in men already just as frightened. Even the commander stopped fighting the disaster; he abandoned every duty of his post, and sent to Corbulo again, begging him to come quickly and save the standards, the eagles, and what was left of the name of an unlucky army: they would hold out, he said, as long as life allowed.

12| Corbulo, unshaken, left part of his forces in Syria to hold the fortifications along the Euphrates, and set out by the shortest route with no shortage of supplies—through Commagene, then Cappadocia, then into Armenia. Along with the army's usual war train came a great number of camels loaded with grain, so he could fend off hunger along with the enemy. The first of the beaten men he met was Paccius, a senior centurion, then a great many soldiers. As they offered various excuses for their flight, he told them to return to the standards and try Paetus's mercy—he himself, he said, was only harsh to men who won. At the same time he went to his own legions, encouraged them, reminded them of past glory, and pointed to a new kind of glory now in reach: not Armenian villages or towns but a Roman camp with two legions inside were the prize of this effort. If an emperor's own hand gave the special crown for saving a single citizen to each ordinary soldier, what honor, how great, when the men who brought rescue would equal in number the men who received it! Roused together by this and more—and some were driven by their own stake, having brothers or kinsmen in danger—they pressed on, marching day and night without stop.

13| Vologeses pressed the besieged even harder for this, attacking now the legions' rampart, now the small fort where the noncombatants were sheltered, coming in closer than Parthians usually do, hoping the rashness would draw the enemy into open battle. But the Romans could barely be pulled from their tents, and defended nothing but their fortifications—some on the commander's orders, others from their own cowardice or because they were waiting for Corbulo, and, in case real force came at them, they kept in mind the disasters of the Caudine Forks and Numantia: the Samnites, after all, were only an Italian people, not rivals of the Roman empire like the Parthians. Even strong and celebrated ancient Rome, whenever fortune turned against it, had looked to its own survival. Driven by this despair over his army, the commander still wrote his first letter to Vologeses not as a suppliant but in the tone of a man with a grievance: that the king was making war against Armenia, which had always belonged to Rome or to a king of Rome's own choosing; peace on equal terms would serve them both; Vologeses shouldn't look only at the present moment—he himself had come against just two legions with the whole strength of his kingdom, but Rome still had the rest of the world to draw on for this war.

14| To this Vologeses replied with nothing about the actual dispute, only that he had to wait for his brothers Pacorus and Tiridates: the place and time were set for their council to decide on Armenia; and the gods had added something worthy of the Arsacids—that they should also decide the fate of the Roman legions. After this messengers went to Paetus, and a meeting with the king was requested; Vologeses sent his cavalry commander, Vasaces. Paetus brought up the Luculli, the Pompeys, and whatever the Caesars had done to hold or grant Armenia; Vasaces answered that we had only the appearance of holding or granting it—the real power lay with the Parthians. After much back-and-forth argument, Monobazus of Adiabene was brought in for the next day as witness to whatever they agreed. It was settled: the siege would be lifted from the legions, the whole force would quit Armenian soil, and the forts along with their stores would pass into Parthian hands; only then could Vologeses freely send envoys on to Nero.

15| Meanwhile, over the river Arsanias, which ran alongside the camp, he threw a bridge—ostensibly to ease his own crossing, though the Parthians had it built as a trophy of victory, since it suited their purposes; our men took a different road. Rumor added that the legions had been sent under the yoke, and other details from the same run of bad news, which the Armenians then acted out for real. They entered the fortifications before the Roman column had even finished leaving, and lined the roads, recognizing and dragging off men or animals that had once been captives of theirs; clothes were even torn off, weapons seized, while the frightened soldiers let it happen rather than give any excuse for a fight. Vologeses had the arms and bodies of the fallen piled up as proof of our defeat, but he spared himself the sight of our legions in flight—he was already after a reputation for restraint, now that his pride had been satisfied. He crossed the river Arsanias mounted on an elephant, while those closest to the king forced their horses through by main strength, since a rumor had spread that the bridge would give way under the weight through the treachery of its builders; but those who dared cross found it solid and reliable.

16| As for the besieged men, it's established they actually had so much grain left that they set fire to their own storehouses—while Corbulo, by contrast, reported that the Parthians were themselves running short of supplies, their fodder used up, and would have given up the siege, and that he himself had been no more than three days' march away. He adds that Paetus swore an oath before the standards, with witnesses the king had sent to record it, that no Roman would enter Armenia until word came back from Nero on whether he agreed to peace. If that detail was invented to deepen the disgrace, the rest is no less well known: that Paetus covered forty miles in a single day, abandoning the wounded everywhere along the way, and that the panic of men in flight was as shameful a sight as if they had actually broken and run in battle. Corbulo went to meet them with his own troops on the Euphrates bank, but took care that his standards and gear not be paraded in a way that would rub in the contrast. His men, grieving and pitying their comrades' fate, could not even hold back tears; the greeting between the two forces was barely spoken through the weeping. Gone now was any rivalry in courage or hunger for glory—the feelings of fortunate men; only pity remained, and it ran stronger in the lower ranks.

17| A brief exchange followed between the two commanders, Paetus complaining that all his effort had been wasted, that the war could have been ended by the Parthians' flight; Corbulo answered that both their forces were still whole and untouched: let them turn the eagles around and together invade Armenia, weakened now by Vologeses's withdrawal. He had no such orders from the emperor, Corbulo said; he had left his province because the legions were in danger; since the Parthians' next move was uncertain, he would head back to Syria: even so, they would need real luck for his infantry, worn out from long marches, to catch up with cavalry moving fresh and fast across open plains. So Paetus wintered in Cappadocia; meanwhile messengers came from Vologeses to Corbulo, asking him to dismantle the forts beyond the Euphrates and, as before, make the river the boundary between them. Corbulo demanded in turn that Armenia be cleared of all garrisons on both sides. In the end the king gave way; Corbulo tore down what he had built beyond the Euphrates, and the Armenians were left without either side controlling them.

18| At Rome meanwhile trophies over the Parthians and an arch were being raised in the middle of the Capitoline hill—voted by the senate while the war was still undecided, and not called off even now, so long as it looked good, with no regard for the truth. And to hide his worries about foreign affairs, Nero dumped grain spoiled by age into the Tiber, to keep up the appearance that the food supply was secure. Its price went up not at all, even though a storm had destroyed nearly two hundred ships right in the harbor, and a chance fire had consumed another hundred that had been brought up the Tiber. He then put three former consuls—Lucius Piso, Ducenius Geminus, and Pompeius Paulinus—in charge of the public revenues, criticizing earlier emperors who had let heavy spending eat up the state's legitimate income: he himself, he said, was giving the treasury sixty million sesterces a year.

19| A corrupt fashion had spread by this time: when elections drew near or provinces were being assigned by lot, many childless men would take on fake adopted sons, then, once they'd drawn their praetorships and provinces among the fathers, promptly emancipate the men they'd adopted. Real fathers came to the senate in a storm of resentment, laying out the law of nature, the labor of actually raising children, against this fraud and its shortcut adoptions. Being childless, they argued, was reward enough already — security, no burdens, favor and honors falling into your lap. The promises of the laws, long waited for, were being turned into a joke, when a man could become a father without any worry and childless again without any grief, matching in an instant what real fathers had spent years hoping for. As a result the senate decreed that a sham adoption would count for nothing in public appointments, and would not even help in claiming an inheritance.

20| Next Claudius Timarchus of Crete was put on trial, on the usual charges brought against provincials grown too powerful and too rich, who then abuse their standing over lesser men. One remark of his had gone so far as to insult the senate itself: word had gotten around that he alone could settle, at his own whim, whether the men who had governed Crete as proconsuls received a vote of thanks. Thrasea Paetus turned the occasion to the public good. Having moved that the man be banned from the province of Crete, he added this: 'Experience has shown, conscript fathers, that good laws and honorable precedents are born out of other men's crimes. That's how the license of orators produced the Cincian law, the corruption of candidates the Julian laws, the greed of magistrates the Calpurnian decree — for the offense always comes before the penalty, and correction always comes after the wrongdoing. So, against this new arrogance in our provincials, let us take a course worthy of Roman good faith and firmness, one that takes nothing away from the protection of our allies but frees us from having our reputations judged anywhere but by our fellow citizens.

21| 'Once, not just a praetor or consul but even private citizens were sent out to inspect the provinces and report back on how each governor's conduct looked. Whole nations shook at the thought of that verdict. These days it's foreigners we court and flatter — a nod from them gets thanks voted, and just as easily gets a man accused. Let it stay that way — let provincials keep this means of showing their power. But let false praise, squeezed out by begging, be reined in just as much as malice and cruelty are. We sin more often, in fact, by currying favor than by giving offense. Some virtues are actually hated — an unbending strictness, a spirit that won't bend to favor-seeking. That's why the start of a governor's term is usually better than its end, since by the end we're chasing votes like candidates for office. If that's cut off, provinces will be governed more evenly and more consistently. Just as greed has been checked by fear of extortion charges, so ambition will be checked by banning votes of thanks.'

22| His motion was received with great applause. Even so, the decree could not be finalized, since the consuls refused to put the matter forward. Later, at the emperor's prompting, it was enacted that no one should raise before the provincial assembly the question of votes of thanks to be moved in the senate for propraetors or proconsuls, nor should anyone serve on such a delegation. In the same consulship, the gymnasium was struck by lightning and burned, and the statue of Nero inside it melted down to a shapeless lump of bronze. And an earthquake largely destroyed Pompeii, the well-known town in Campania. The Vestal Virgin Laelia died, and Cornelia, of the Cossus family, was chosen to take her place.

23| In the year Memmius Regulus and Verginius Rufus held the consulship, Poppaea bore Nero a daughter, and his joy at it went beyond anything human, and named her Augusta, giving Poppaea the same title. The birth took place at the colony of Antium, where he himself had been born. The senate had already commended Poppaea's pregnancy to the gods and made public vows on her behalf, which were now multiplied and paid in full. Supplications were added, a Temple of Fertility decreed, and a contest modeled on the religious festival at Actium; golden images of the Fortunes were to be placed on the throne of Capitoline Jupiter; circus games were ordered, to honor the Claudian and Domitian houses at Antium just as the Julian house was honored at Bovillae. It all came to nothing — within four months the infant was dead. Then flattery sprang up again, with proposals for the honors of a goddess, a shrine, a temple, a priest. Nero, who had known no restraint in his joy, showed none now in his grief either, and threw himself into the part completely. It was noted that while the whole senate poured out to Antium right after the birth, Thrasea alone was forbidden to go — and took the insult, an omen of the killing to come, without flinching. They say Caesar afterward boasted to Seneca that he was reconciled with Thrasea, and that Seneca congratulated Caesar on it — which only swelled the glory, and the danger, of these two outstanding men.

24| Meanwhile, at the start of spring, envoys of the Parthians arrived bringing King Vologeses' instructions and letters to the same effect: he was now dropping his earlier, oft-repeated demand to hold Armenia, since the gods, arbiters even of the mightiest nations, had handed possession to the Parthians — not without dishonor to Rome. He recalled recently trapping Tigranes; and later, when he could have crushed Paetus and his legions, letting them go unharmed. He had proved his strength well enough; he had also given a demonstration of mercy. And Tiridates would not refuse to come to Rome to receive the diadem, if not held back by his priestly duties. He would go to the standards and the emperor's images, and take up his kingship there in front of the legions.

25| Since Paetus, in his own dispatches, had written the opposite as though nothing had been lost, Nero questioned the centurion who had come with the envoys about the actual state of Armenia. He answered that all Romans had withdrawn from it. Then, realizing the mockery in the barbarians' demand — asking to be given what they had already seized — Nero consulted the leading men of the state on whether to choose a doubtful war or a dishonorable peace. There was no hesitation over war. Corbulo, who through so many years had come to know both our soldiers and the enemy, was put in command of the campaign, so that no fresh blunder by some other man's incompetence would repeat what Paetus's failure had caused. So the envoys were sent back empty-handed, though with gifts, to give some hope that Tiridates' same requests would not go unanswered if he brought his pleas in person. Syria's administration was given to Gaius Cestius, the military forces to Corbulo; and the Fifteenth Legion was added, brought from Pannonia under Marius Celsus. Letters went out to tetrarchs, kings, prefects, and procurators, and to the praetors governing the neighboring provinces, ordering them to obey Corbulo, with his authority enlarged to roughly the scope the Roman people had once granted Gnaeus Pompeius for the war against the pirates. When Paetus returned, fearing something far worse, Caesar was content to needle him with jokes — telling him, more or less, that he was pardoning him at once, so that a man so quick to panic wouldn't fall ill from worrying any longer.

26| Corbulo, meanwhile, transferred the Fourth and Twelfth legions to Syria — they had lost their best men and the rest were too shaken to be fit for battle — and instead led into Armenia the Sixth and Third legions, whose men were untouched and whose training had been hardened by frequent, successful campaigns. He added the Fifth Legion, which had been stationed in Pontus and had escaped the disaster entirely, along with the newly arrived men of the Fifteenth, detachments of picked troops from Illyricum and Egypt, whatever cavalry wings and auxiliary cohorts he had, and the forces supplied by the allied kings — the whole mass assembled at Melitene, the point he'd chosen for crossing the Euphrates. There, once the army had been purified with the customary rites, he called an assembly and opened with a grand account of the emperor's auspices and his own achievements, brushing off the setbacks as Paetus's incompetence — speaking with the kind of weighty authority that, in a soldier, stands in for eloquence.

27| He then pressed on along the route once opened by Lucius Lucullus, clearing what age had let grow over. Envoys arrived from Tiridates and Vologeses to discuss peace; Corbulo gave them a hearing rather than a refusal, and had centurions escort them back carrying terms that were far from harsh — things had not yet reached the point of needing a final showdown. Fortune had favored the Romans in many things, the Parthians in some, and that was a lesson against arrogance on either side. It would suit Tiridates, then, to receive as a gift a kingdom untouched by devastation; and Vologeses would do better to look out for the Parthian nation through an alliance with Rome than through mutual losses. He knew how much discord lay within Parthia, and how unruly and fiercely proud the peoples he ruled were; his own emperor, by contrast, faced unbroken peace everywhere else, and this was his only war. At the same time, Corbulo added intimidation to persuasion: he drove out the Armenian nobles who had been first to desert us, tore down their strongholds, and struck equal fear into strong and weak alike across the plains and the highlands.

28| Even among the barbarians, Corbulo's name carried no hatred, no hostility, and so they trusted his counsel as honest. Vologeses, accordingly, without pressing hard overall, asked for a truce covering certain districts; Tiridates asked for a place and a day to meet. The barbarians chose a time close at hand and a place — the very spot where Paetus and his legions had recently been besieged — for the memory of their happier outcome there; Corbulo did not avoid it either, reckoning that the contrast in fortunes would only add to his glory. Nor was he troubled by Paetus's disgrace — which was clear enough from the fact that he ordered Paetus's own son, a tribune, to lead his company and cover the remnants of that bad defeat. On the appointed day, Tiberius Alexander, a distinguished Roman knight assigned as an aide for the campaign, and Annius Vinicianus, Corbulo's son-in-law, not yet of senatorial age and placed in command of the Fifth Legion as acting legate, came to Tiridates' camp — an honor to him, and a pledge against any fear of treachery. Twenty horsemen were then added on each side. At the sight of Corbulo, the king leapt down from his horse first; Corbulo did not hesitate either, and both men, on foot, clasped right hands.

29| Then the Roman commander praised the young man for abandoning rash courses and taking up safe and salutary ones. Tiridates, after a long preamble on the nobility of his line, added the rest more moderately: he would go to Rome, he said, and bring Nero fresh glory — an Arsacid coming as a suppliant not because Parthian fortunes had turned against him. It was then agreed that Tiridates would lay his royal diadem before Caesar's image and take it up again only from Nero's own hand; and the conference ended with a kiss. A few days later, with great display on both sides, the cavalry drew up in squadrons on one side, arrayed in their native finery, while on the other stood the legions in their ranks, eagles and standards gleaming, and images of the gods set up as in a temple. In the middle a tribunal held a curule chair, and the chair held an image of Nero. Tiridates advanced to it, offered the customary sacrifice, then took the diadem off his own head and laid it down at the image's feet. Everyone watching was moved, for the memory of Roman armies cut down or besieged still lay close to the surface. But now, they thought, fortune had reversed itself: Tiridates was about to be paraded before the nations, and how much less than a captive was that?

30| Corbulo added to the glory of the occasion with his own graciousness and with banquets; and the king, whenever he noticed something new, kept asking the reasons for it — how the start of the night watches was announced by a centurion, how a trumpet call broke up the feast, how the altar set up before the general's headquarters was lit by a torch thrust beneath it. Corbulo magnified everything, and his admiration for the old Roman customs left a deep impression on Tiridates. The next day the king asked for time before setting out on so long a journey, so that he might first visit his brothers and his mother. Meanwhile he handed over his daughter as a hostage, along with a letter of supplication to Nero.

31| Setting off, he found Pacorus among the Medes and Vologaeses at Ecbatana — a brother not indifferent to his fate. Vologaeses had in fact sent his own messengers to Corbulo asking that Tiridates be spared any mark of servitude: that he not be made to hand over his sword, nor be barred from embracing the provincial governors, nor be made to stand at their doors — that he receive in Rome the same honor given to consuls. Evidently a man raised on foreign pride had no notion of us: among Romans real power matters, empty show is let pass.

32| That same year the emperor extended Latin rights to the peoples of the maritime Alps. He also gave the seats of the Roman knights precedence over those of the common people at the circus, for until then they had gone in without distinction, since the Roscian law dealt only with the fourteen rows. The gladiatorial games that year were as splendid as before, but more women of rank and more senators disgraced themselves in the arena than ever.

33| Under the consulship of Gaius Laecanius and Marcus Licinius, Nero was driven by a daily sharpening appetite to perform before the public. Until then he had only sung at home or in his gardens, at the Juvenile Games — which he now scorned as too small an audience, too narrow a stage for so great a voice. Still, he did not dare to begin at Rome. He chose Naples instead, as a Greek city, meaning to make it the starting point: from there he would cross into Achaea, win the ancient and honored crowns, and, with greater fame behind him, draw out the enthusiasm of the citizens at home. So a crowd of townspeople gathered, along with people summoned from the nearby colonies and towns by word of the event, and those who followed Caesar out of duty or for various uses of their own — even companies of soldiers — and filled the theater of Naples.

34| What happened there most people took as an ill omen; Nero himself called it providential and a sign of favor from the gods, for after the audience that had been present left, the theater collapsed, empty, and no one was hurt. So he composed songs of thanks to the gods and celebrated his own good fortune in the recent disaster, and, on his way to cross the Adriatic, stopped meanwhile at Beneventum, where Vatinius was putting on a lavish gladiatorial show. Vatinius was one of the most disgusting figures at that court — raised in a shoemaker's shop, with a twisted body and a talent for crude jokes. He was first taken up as a target for mockery, but grew so powerful by informing against the best men that in influence, in wealth, and in his capacity to do harm, he outranked even the worst.

35| While Nero attended Vatinius's show, even his pleasures did not keep him from crime. In those very days Torquatus Silanus was driven to his death, because along with the distinction of the Junian family he claimed the deified Augustus as a great-great-grandfather. His accusers were ordered to charge him with squandering money in bribes, with no hope left him but revolution — that he even kept freedmen he called by the titles of secretary, petitions officer, and accountant: names, they said, that pointed to high ambitions and its preparations. His closest freedmen were at once bound and dragged off; and as condemnation drew near, Torquatus cut the veins of his arms. Nero followed with his customary speech: that though guilty, and with good reason distrustful of his defense, Torquatus would still have lived had he waited for the mercy of his judge.

36| Not long after, having set Achaea aside for the present — the reasons for this are unclear — Nero returned to Rome, his mind privately turning over the provinces of the East, Egypt above all. He then issued an edict promising he would not be gone long, and that the state would stay just as stable and flourishing throughout; then he climbed to the Capitol to mark his departure. There he paid his respects to the gods; but on entering the temple of Vesta as well, he suddenly began trembling in every limb — whether frightened by the divine presence, or never free of fear because of the memory of his crimes — and gave up the plan, saying repeatedly that every other concern weighed less with him than his love of his country. He claimed to have seen the sorrowful faces of the citizens, to have heard their private complaints, that he meant to go so far away when they could not bear even his brief absences, accustomed as they were to draw comfort from the sight of their emperor against life's misfortunes. Just as in private ties the closest bonds carry the most weight, he said, so the Roman people held the greatest claim on him and must be obeyed when it held him back. Such talk pleased the common people, eager for their entertainments and, their chief worry, fearing shortages of grain if he were away. The senate and the leading men could not decide whether he was more to be feared at a distance or close at hand; and then, as tends to happen with great fears, they judged the worse had actually happened.

37| Nero himself, to make his claim convincing that nothing pleased him so much as Rome, set up banquets in public places and used the whole city as if it were his own house. The most notorious of these feasts for extravagance and reputation were the ones arranged by Tigellinus — I will describe them as a single example, so as not to have to recount the same excess again and again. On the pool of Agrippa he built a raft on which the banquet was set, to be towed about by other boats. The boats were inlaid with gold and ivory, and the rowers were male prostitutes arranged by age and by skill in vice. He had sent for birds and wild beasts from foreign lands, and creatures of the sea from as far as the Ocean. Along the edges of the pool stood brothels filled with women of rank, and across from them naked prostitutes could be seen. Then came obscene gestures and movements; and once darkness fell, the whole grove nearby and the surrounding buildings rang with song and blazed with light. Nero himself, defiled by every excess licit and illicit, had left nothing more depraved to indulge in — except that a few days later he was formally married, in the manner of a solemn wedding, to one of that polluted crowd, a man named Pythagoras. The bridal veil was placed on the emperor, witnesses were sent for the omens, there was a dowry, a marriage bed, wedding torches — everything, in short, that even in a woman's case the night usually conceals.

38| Next came a disaster — whether by chance or by the emperor's design is uncertain, for authors have reported both — but it was worse and more terrible than anything else that has ever happened to this city through the violence of fire. It began in the part of the Circus adjoining the Palatine and Caelian hills, where, among shops stocked with goods that feed a flame, the fire caught and, at once strong and driven by the wind, swept the whole length of the Circus. There were no walled mansions, no temples ringed by stone, no barrier of any kind in its way. Racing on unchecked, it consumed the level ground first, then rose to the heights, then ravaged the lower districts again, outrunning every countermeasure by its sheer speed, in a city exposed by its narrow, twisting streets and irregular blocks — the pattern of old Rome. Added to this were the wails of terrified women, the helpless very old and the very young, people trying to save themselves and others trying to save their families, some dragging the disabled, some waiting for them — some delaying, some hurrying — all of it slowing everything down. Often, while people looked back over their shoulders, they were surrounded from the sides or in front; or if they escaped into a nearby district, that too caught fire, and even places they had thought far enough away turned out to be caught in the same ruin. In the end, unsure what to avoid and what to seek, they crowded the roads or threw themselves down in the fields. Some, having lost everything, even their daily bread, chose to die rather than live, though the way out lay open; others died for love of relatives they had failed to save. No one dared fight the flames — there were repeated threats from many who forbade putting it out, and others openly threw torches, shouting that they had orders to do so — whether to loot more freely or on actual instructions.

39| Nero was at Antium when it started, and stayed away until the flames were closing in on the house he had used to link the Palatine to Maecenas's gardens. Even so it could not be stopped from devouring the Palatine, his house, and everything around it. But as comfort to a people driven out and homeless, he threw open the Campus Martius and Agrippa's monuments, even his own gardens, and had makeshift shelters thrown up for the destitute crowds; supplies were brought in from Ostia and the neighboring towns, and he pushed the price of grain down to three sesterces. Popular as these measures were, they came to nothing, because a rumor had spread that while the city was actually burning, he had gone on stage in his own house and sung of the fall of Troy, likening the present disaster to the calamities of old.

40| Only on the sixth day, near the foot of the Esquiline, did the fire finally stop, after buildings across a huge stretch had been torn down so that the fire's relentless advance would meet an open field, a stretch of empty sky. Fear had not yet settled, nor had the people's hope returned, when the fire broke out again, this time in more open parts of the city. Fewer people died as a result, but temples of the gods and porticoes built for pleasure fell more widely. This second fire caused more scandal because it started on land belonging to Tigellinus at the Aemilian estate, and it seemed Nero wanted the credit of raising a new city and stamping his own name on it. Fourteen districts make up Rome. Of these, four were still standing whole, three were leveled to the ground, and in the remaining seven only a few traces of buildings survived, torn and half-burned.

41| It would not be easy to count the number of houses, apartment blocks, and temples that were lost. But among the most ancient and sacred were the shrine that Servius Tullius had dedicated to the Moon, the great altar and temple that the Arcadian Evander had consecrated to Hercules present among men, the temple of Jupiter the Stayer vowed by Romulus, the Regia of Numa, and the shrine of Vesta with the household gods of the Roman people. Also burned were riches gained through so many victories, the finest works of Greek art, and old, untouched monuments of literary genius — so that even amid all the beauty of the city rising again, older people could still recall much that could never be replaced. Some noted that the fire began on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of August, the same date on which the Senones had burned the captured city centuries before. Others went further still, counting out the exact same number of years, months, and days between the two fires.

42| Nero, meanwhile, made use of his country's ruin. He built himself a house whose wonder lay not so much in gems and gold — long familiar, made common by luxury — as in fields and lakes, and, in the manner of a wilderness, woods here and open vistas there, designed by his engineers Severus and Celer, men with the ingenuity and nerve to try through art what nature had denied and to squander an emperor's resources for sport. They had promised to dig a navigable canal from Lake Avernus all the way to the mouth of the Tiber, running across barren shoreline or through opposing mountains — for there is no water in that region to feed it apart from the Pontine marshes; everything else is sheer cliff or parched soil, and cutting through it, even if possible, would demand labor no one could bear, for little gain. Nero nonetheless, being a man drawn to the impossible, made the effort to dig through the hills nearest Avernus. The traces of that failed hope still remain.

43| As for the part of the city left over from his house, the rebuilding was not, as after the Gallic fire, done without plan or order, thrown up wherever people happened to be standing. Instead, streets were laid out in measured blocks, with wide avenues, buildings kept to a limited height, open courtyards, and porticoes added to shield the front of the apartment blocks. Nero pledged that he would build these porticoes himself and hand the cleared sites over to their owners. He added rewards scaled to each person's rank and means, and set a deadline within which houses or blocks had to be finished to collect them. He designated the Ostian marshes to receive the rubble, and ordered that ships which had brought grain up the Tiber should go back downriver loaded with debris. Buildings themselves were required, in a fixed portion, to be built solid with Gabine or Alban stone rather than wood beams, since that stone resists fire. Water, formerly diverted by private abuse, was now to flow more freely and in more places for public use, watched over by officials; and everyone was required to keep firefighting equipment ready in the open. Houses were no longer to share party walls but each to be surrounded by its own. These measures, adopted for practical reasons, also gave the new city a certain beauty. Still, there were those who believed the old layout had actually been healthier, since the narrow streets and tall buildings had not let the sun's heat through so easily, whereas now the open, unshaded spaces baked under a heavier, more punishing sun.

44| Such were the precautions taken by human planning. Soon after, expiatory rites were sought from the gods, and the Sibylline Books were consulted. On their instruction, prayers were offered to Vulcan, Ceres, and Proserpina, and Juno was propitiated by married women, first on the Capitol, then at the nearest stretch of sea, where water was drawn to sprinkle the goddess's temple and image; and women whose husbands were living held banquets of the gods and all-night vigils. But no human effort, no largess from the emperor, no offerings to the gods could shake off the belief that the fire had been ordered. So, to kill the rumor, Nero produced culprits and inflicted the most exquisite punishments on a group hated for their vices, whom the crowd called Christians. The man who gave them that name, Christus, had been executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. Checked for a moment, that deadly superstition broke out again, not only through Judea, where the evil first began, but even through Rome, where every horrifying and shameful thing from all over the world collects and finds a following. First those who admitted to being Christians were arrested; then, on their information, a huge number were convicted, not so much on the charge of arson as for hatred of the human race. Their deaths were made a mockery: some were dressed in the skins of wild animals and torn apart by dogs, others were nailed to crosses, others set ablaze and, when daylight faded, burned to serve as torches for the night. Nero offered his own gardens for the show and put on games in the Circus, mingling with the crowd dressed as a charioteer or standing in a chariot himself. And so, though these were guilty men deserving the harshest punishment, pity for them began to stir, because they seemed to be destroyed not for the public good but to satisfy one man's cruelty.

45| Meanwhile, to raise money, Italy was stripped bare, the provinces ruined, and with them the allied peoples and the so-called free cities. Even the gods were plundered for this purpose: temples in Rome were stripped, and the gold that generations of Romans had dedicated in triumph or in vow, in prosperity or in fear, was carried off. Throughout Asia and Achaea it was not just offerings but the very statues of the gods that were seized, once Acratus and Secundus Carrinas had been sent to those provinces. The one was a freedman ready for any outrage; the other had picked up Greek learning only on his lips, without ever letting it shape his character for the better. Seneca, it was said, asked to withdraw to some distant country estate to turn suspicion of the sacrilege away from himself, and when that was refused, pretended illness — sickness of the nerves — and did not leave his bedroom. Some report that poison, prepared by Nero's order, was brought to him by his own freedman, named Cleonicus, but that Seneca avoided it, either because the freedman warned him or through his own wariness, living meanwhile on the simplest food and wild fruit, drinking, when thirst pressed him, from running water.

46| Around the same time, gladiators at the town of Praeneste attempted a breakout but were held in check by the garrison of soldiers stationed to guard them. Already the people, as is their way — eager for upheaval and just as quickly frightened by it — were spreading rumors of another Spartacus and the old disasters. Not long after, news came of a naval disaster — not from war, peace had rarely held so steady — but Nero had fixed a deadline for the fleet's return to Campania and would brook no delay, whatever risk the sea posed. So the pilots, despite a raging sea, set out from Formiae; and battling a heavy southwest wind as they tried to round the headland of Misenum, they were driven onto the shore at Cumae and lost most of their triremes and many smaller vessels scattered along the coast.

47| At the end of the year, omens spread that were said to foretell coming disasters: lightning struck more often than ever before, and a comet appeared — always, for Nero, atoned for with noble blood. Babies were born to humans and to animals with two heads and abandoned in public, or found among the sacrificial victims, since it is customary to sacrifice pregnant animals. And near Placentia, right along the roadside, a calf came into the world with its head sprouting from one of its legs. The soothsayers interpreted this to mean that another head was being prepared for the state, but that it would not be strong, and would not remain hidden, since it had been suppressed in the womb and born beside the road rather than in the normal place.

48| The consulship now passed to Silius Nerva and Atticus Vestinus, and in that same span a conspiracy already underway swelled in size. Senators, knights, soldiers, even women, competed to join it, driven partly by hatred of Nero and partly by favor for Gaius Piso. Piso, born of the Calpurnian family and connected through his father's noble blood to many distinguished houses, had a shining reputation with the common people, thanks either to real virtue or to something that looked very much like it. He used his eloquence in defending citizens, was generous to his friends, and spoke pleasantly and easily even with strangers. He also had the advantages of fortune: a tall build, a handsome face. But he had no real depth of character, no restraint in his pleasures; he indulged in frivolity, extravagance, and sometimes outright excess — and many approved of exactly that, wanting, amid such widespread fondness for vice, a supreme ruler who was neither too strict nor too severe.

49| The conspiracy did not begin from Piso's own ambition. Nor could I easily say who first started it, or whose urging stirred up what so many later took up. Judging by how bravely they faced death, the boldest were a praetorian tribune, Subrius Flavus, and a centurion, Sulpicius Asper. Fierce hatred also drew in Annaeus Lucanus and Plautius Lateranus. Lucanus was driven by personal grievances, since Nero, in his vanity, was suppressing the fame of his poems and had forbidden him to perform them publicly. Lateranus, consul-elect, joined not out of any personal injury but from love of the republic. Flavius Scaevinus and Afranius Quintianus, both of senatorial rank, took up so great a crime in a way that ran against their own reputations: Scaevinus's mind was slack with luxury, and his life accordingly sluggish with sleep; Quintianus was notorious for effeminacy and had been publicly mocked in a scurrilous poem by Nero, and set out to avenge the insult.

50| So while they traded talk—among themselves and with friends—of the emperor's crimes and how the end of his rule was near, and of who should be chosen to rescue a state in ruins, they drew in a group of Roman knights: Claudius Senecio, Cervarius Proculus and Vulcacius Araricus, Julius Augurinus and Munatius Gratus, Antonius Natalis and Marcius Festus. Chief among these, Senecio, had once been among Nero's closest intimates and still kept up a show of friendship with him, which put him at the greatest risk of all. Natalis shared every secret with Piso. As for the rest, they pinned their hopes on a change of regime. Military men were brought in too, in addition to Subrius and Sulpicius, already mentioned: the praetorian tribunes Gavius Silvanus and Statius Proximus, along with the centurions Maximus Scaurus and Venetus Paulus. Yet they believed their greatest strength lay in Faenius Rufus, the praetorian prefect, a man praised for his character and reputation, whom Tigellinus—through sheer viciousness and shamelessness—was outdoing in the emperor's favor, wearing him down with accusations and repeatedly terrifying him with the charge that he had been Agrippina's lover and now, missing her, was bent on revenge. So once it became clear, from Rufus's own frequent remarks, that even the praetorian prefect had joined the conspirators, they began discussing the time and place of the murder more boldly. Subrius Flavus was said to have been seized by the urge to attack Nero while he was singing on stage, or when, unguarded, he ran about at night as his house burned. In the first case the solitude offered its chance; in the second, the very crowd of witnesses to so glorious a deed spurred him on—if only the wish to escape unpunished, always the enemy of great undertakings, had not held him back.

51| Meanwhile they hesitated, stretching hope and fear alike, a certain Epicharis—no one knows quite how she learned of the plot, for she had never before shown any concern for honorable causes—began to fire up the conspirators and reproach them. At last, worn out by their slowness, and being in Campania at the time, she set about undermining the loyalty of the leading officers of the fleet at Misenum and binding them to the secret, starting this way. There was a ship's captain in that fleet, Volusius Proculus, who had helped Nero murder his mother, though he felt he had never been rewarded in proportion to the size of his crime. He had known the woman before, or their friendship was newly struck up; either way, as he told her of his services to Nero and how they had come to nothing, adding complaints and a declared wish for revenge if the chance arose, she began to hope he could be won over and could bring others in. The fleet would be no small help, and its officers offered many opportunities, since Nero delighted in spending time on the sea around Puteoli and Misenum. So Epicharis said more, laying out the emperor's crimes one after another, and how nothing remained for the Senate. But, she said, a way had been found to make him pay for wrecking the state: he need only gird himself for action and bring the fiercest of the soldiers over to their side, and he could expect a fitting reward. She kept the conspirators' names to herself, though. So Proculus's information, when he carried what he had heard to Nero, came to nothing. Epicharis was summoned and confronted with her accuser, and since he had no witnesses to back him, she easily talked her way out of it. But she herself was kept in custody, Nero suspecting that even claims he could not prove might not be false.

52| Fear of betrayal, though, pushed the conspirators to move up the killing, planning it now at Baiae, in Piso's villa, whose charms drew the emperor there often, where he would bathe and dine, dropping his guard and the weight of his rank. But Piso refused, pleading that it would look bad if the sanctity of his table and the gods of hospitality were stained with the blood of any emperor, however unworthy: better to carry out, in the city, in that house so hated and built from the spoils of citizens' fortunes—or in public—what they had undertaken for the republic's sake. That was the reason he gave openly. But privately he also feared that Lucius Silanus, a man of outstanding birth, trained by Gaius Cassius (in whose household he had been raised) to every kind of distinction, might seize power instead—since those who had taken no part in the conspiracy, and those who would pity Nero as a victim of crime, would readily hand it to him. Many also believed Piso avoided Vestinus the consul, a man of sharp temper, for fear he might push things toward liberty, or, if another were chosen emperor, might turn the state into a gift of his own giving. In fact Vestinus had no part in the conspiracy at all, though Nero used the charge to satisfy an old hatred against an innocent man.

53| In the end they fixed on the day of the Circus games in honor of Ceres to carry out their plan, since Nero, who rarely went out and kept himself shut up at home or in his gardens, made a point of attending the circus shows, and access to him was easier amid the excitement of the spectacle. They had worked out the order of the ambush: Lateranus, pretending to beg help for his finances, would fall pleading at the emperor's knees and, being strong of spirit and huge of body, would knock him down and pin him while he was off guard; then, as he lay there struggling, the tribunes and centurions and any of the rest bold enough would rush in and cut him down, with Scaevinus claiming the lead for himself. He had taken his dagger—so the story went—from the temple of Salus in Etruria, or, according to others, of Fortuna in the town of Ferentinum, and he carried it about as though consecrated to a great purpose. Meanwhile Piso was to wait at the temple of Ceres, from where the prefect Faenius and the others would fetch him to the praetorian camp, accompanied by Antonia, daughter of the emperor Claudius, to win over the crowd's favor—so Pliny records. I have no wish to suppress the story, however it has come down, though it seems absurd either that Antonia would have lent her name and risked her life for an empty hope, or that Piso, known for his devotion to his wife, would have bound himself to another marriage—unless the lust for power burns hotter than every other passion.

54| It is remarkable how the secret was kept among people of such different rank, age, sex, and wealth, until betrayal began in Scaevinus's own household. The day before the plot was to be carried out, he talked at length with Antonius Natalis, then went home and sealed his will. He drew the dagger mentioned earlier from its sheath, complained it was dulled with age, and had his freedman Milichus sharpen it on a whetstone to a fine edge. That same day he threw a dinner more lavish than his custom, freed a few of his favorite slaves, and gave money to others; he himself seemed downcast, plainly absorbed in some weighty thought, though he tried to feign cheer with rambling talk. Finally he told this same Milichus to prepare bandages and whatever would stop bleeding from wounds—whether Milichus already knew of the conspiracy and had been loyal to it all along, or knew nothing and only then, as most accounts have it, grew suspicious from what followed. For as his servile mind weighed the rewards of betrayal, and vast wealth and power rose before him, right and the safety of his patron and the memory of the freedom he had been given all gave way. He had even taken his wife into his confidence—worse advice, and typical of a woman: she went further and stoked his fear, pointing out that many other freedmen and slaves had stood by and seen the same things; one man's silence would help nothing, but the reward would go to whoever informed first.

55| So at first light Milichus set off for the Gardens of Servilius. Turned away at the gate, he kept insisting he brought news, great and terrible, until the doorkeepers led him to Nero's freedman Epaphroditus, and from him to Nero himself, where he pressed the danger and laid out, heavily, the conspirators and everything else he had heard or guessed. He also showed the weapon prepared for the murder, and Nero ordered the accused summoned. Scaevinus was dragged in by soldiers and began his defense: the dagger he was charged with, he said, had long been honored in his family and kept in his bedroom, and had been stolen by the freedman's trickery. As for his will, he had signed and resealed it many times before, without keeping careful track of the days. The money and freedom he had given his slaves he had given before too, only more generously this time, because his fortune was thin and creditors were pressing, and he no longer trusted the will to hold up. As for lavish dinners, he had always kept a generous table, living a pleasant life that stern judges found little to approve of. As for the bandages, he had ordered none himself—but since everything else Milichus had thrown at him openly fell flat, the man tacked on this last charge, in which he made himself both informer and witness. He added firmness to his words, going so far as to attack the wretched, criminal freedman with such steady voice and face that the accusation nearly collapsed—had not Milichus's wife reminded him that Antonius Natalis had held long, secret talks with Scaevinus, and that both men were close to Gaius Piso.

56| So Natalis was summoned, and the two were questioned separately about what that conversation had been and what it concerned. Their answers did not match, and suspicion arose; they were put in chains. They could not bear the sight of the instruments of torture, nor the threats. Natalis broke first—he knew more of the whole conspiracy and was also quicker at accusing others—and named Piso, then added Annaeus Seneca, either because Seneca really had gone between him and Piso, or to win Nero's favor, since Nero, hostile to Seneca, was hunting for any means to destroy him. When Scaevinus learned of Natalis's confession, he too, with the same weakness—or perhaps believing everything was already out and there was no profit left in silence—gave up the rest. Of these, Lucan, Quintianus, and Senecio held out for a long time denying it; but once bribed with the promise of immunity, and to excuse their delay, they each named someone close to them: Lucan his own mother Acilia, Quintianus Glitius Gallus, Senecio Annius Pollio—all among their dearest friends.

57| Meanwhile Nero, recalling that Volusius Proculus's information named Epicharis as under arrest, and reckoning a woman's body unequal to pain, ordered her broken on the rack. But neither the lash, nor fire, nor the anger of men torturing all the harder for fear of being outdone by a woman, could make her admit what was charged against her. So the first day of interrogation was defied. The next day, as she was dragged back to the same torments carried in a chair — for her dislocated limbs could no longer support her — she took the band she had torn from her breast, tied it in a noose to the arch of the chair, put her neck through it, and, straining against the weight of her own body, choked out what little breath remained. A freedwoman, shielding strangers and near-strangers in such extremity, set the brighter example, while freeborn men, Roman knights and senators, untouched by torture, betrayed their own dearest kin one after another. Lucanus too, and Senecio, and Quintianus kept naming accomplices without letup, and Nero grew more and more frightened, though he had hedged himself in with doubled guards.

58| He even set soldiers over the city as if under occupation — companies holding the walls, the sea and river likewise patrolled. Infantry and cavalry, Germans mixed among them (Nero trusted them precisely because they were foreigners), swarmed through the forums, through houses, even through the countryside and nearby towns. Chained columns of prisoners were dragged along continuously and made to wait at the gates of the Gardens. Once brought in to answer, a show of friendliness toward the conspirators, an offhand remark, a chance meeting, having shared a dinner or a show with one of them — all counted as guilt. On top of Nero's and Tigellinus's savage interrogations, Faenius Rufus pressed just as hard, not yet named by the informers, and, to buy himself a reputation for ignorance, was especially brutal toward his fellow conspirators. When Subrius Flavus, standing beside him, signaled by a nod asking whether he should draw his sword during the very hearing and strike, Rufus shook his head and checked him just as he was reaching for the hilt.

59| Some, once the plot was exposed, while Milichus was still being heard and Scaevinus still wavering, urged Piso not to hesitate — to head for the camp, or climb the Rostra, and sound out the loyalty of soldiers and people alike. If others in on the plan rallied to his effort, men still uncommitted would follow too; a bold move, once set in motion, carries great weight, especially in a sudden crisis. Nero had prepared nothing against such a move. Even brave men are shaken by the unexpected — how much more that stage actor, with Tigellinus and his mistresses as his only company should he try to raise arms against it? Much that looks impossible to the timid gets done simply by trying. It was vain to hope for silence and loyalty among so many minds and bodies under threat: torture or reward could break any of them open. Men would come to bind Piso himself too, and finally kill him in some shameful way. How much nobler to die embracing the republic, calling on men to fight for liberty. Better the soldiers fail him and the people desert him, so long as he, if his life were to be cut short, could still make his death something his ancestors and descendants would approve. Unmoved by all this, he showed himself briefly in public, then withdrew alone at home, steadying his mind for the end, until the detachment of soldiers arrived — recruits or men of recent enlistment, Nero's choice, since he distrusted the veterans as too fond of Piso. He died by slitting the veins of his arms. His will, full of foul flattery toward Nero, he left out of love for his wife, whom he had taken from a friend's marriage — a shallow woman, recommended only by her beauty. The woman's name was Satria Galla; her former husband was Domitius Silus. The husband's tolerance and the wife's shamelessness together spread Piso's disgrace further.

60| Nero next ordered the death of Plautius Lateranus, the consul-designate, done so hastily that he was not even allowed to embrace his children or given the brief moment usually allowed before death. Hauled off to the place set aside for executing slaves, he was killed by the hand of the tribune Statius, meeting it with steady silence, and not even reproaching the tribune for sharing his own guilt in the plot. Next came the killing of Annaeus Seneca, which pleased the emperor greatly — not because he had proof Seneca knew of the conspiracy, but because he wanted to use the sword, since poison had failed. Only Natalis had gone so far as to say that he had been sent to the ailing Seneca to visit him and complain that Seneca was refusing to see Piso — better, he'd said, if they kept their friendship alive through personal meetings; and that Seneca had answered that frequent talk and meetings would do neither of them any good, but that his own safety, in any case, hinged on Piso staying unharmed. Gavius Silvanus, a tribune commanding a praetorian cohort, received orders to deliver this report and ask Seneca whether he acknowledged Natalis's account and his own answer to it. Seneca, whether by chance or design, had come back that very day from Campania, stopping at a country house just four miles from the city. The tribune reached it toward evening and ringed the villa with troops; then, finding Seneca dining with two friends and his wife Pompeia Paulina, delivered the emperor's order.

61| Seneca answered that Natalis had indeed been sent to him, complaining in Piso's name that he had been kept from visiting, and that he had excused himself on grounds of poor health and love of quiet. He had no reason to put a private man's welfare above his own safety, nor was flattery in his nature — a fact no one knew better than Nero, who had had more experience of Seneca's plain speech than of his servility. When the tribune reported this to Poppaea and Tigellinus in person — the emperor's inner council in his fits of savagery — he was asked whether Seneca was preparing to take his own life. The tribune assured them he had seen no signs of fear, nothing troubled in Seneca's words or expression. He was ordered back, to tell Seneca he must die. Fabius Rusticus records that he did not return by the way he had come but went by way of Faenius the prefect, and, having laid out Caesar's orders, asked whether he should obey them — and was told by Faenius to carry them out, through the fatal cowardice that gripped them all. For Silvanus too was among the conspirators, and was now adding to the very crimes he had joined the plot to avenge. But he could not bring himself to speak the order or face Seneca himself, and sent in one of the centurions to announce the final necessity.

62| Seneca, unshaken, asked for the tablets of his will; when the centurion refused, he turned to his friends and declared that, since he was forbidden to repay them as they deserved, he would leave them the one thing he still had, and the finest thing of all — the pattern of his life. If they kept it in memory, they would win, as the reward of their loyal friendship, a name for good character. At the same time he checked their tears, now with words, now more sternly, calling them back to firmness, asking again and again where their philosophy had gone, where the reasoning they had spent so many years preparing against just such a blow. Who could not have known Nero's cruelty? What was left, after he had killed his mother and his brother, but to add the murder of his tutor and teacher?

63| Having said this and more, meant for them all alike, he embraced his wife, and, softening a little from his composure in the face of what lay before him, asked and begged her to temper her grief, not to make it endless, but to find, in contemplating a life lived virtuously, honest comfort for the loss of her husband. She, in answer, insisted that she too had resolved on death, and demanded the executioner's hand. Then Seneca, not standing in the way of her glory, and moved besides by love — not wanting to leave the woman he loved uniquely exposed to injury — said: 'I had shown you the comforts of life; you prefer the honor of death. I will not begrudge you the example. Let the firmness of this end, so brave, be shared equally between us both — but let there be more glory in yours.' After this, they opened the veins of their arms with the same stroke. Seneca's aged body, thinned by a spare diet, let the blood escape too slowly, so he also cut the veins of his legs and knees behind the joints. Worn down by the savage pain, and fearing that his own suffering would break his wife's resolve, and that watching her agony would break his own, he persuaded her to withdraw into another room. And even in his last moments his eloquence did not fail him: he called in secretaries and dictated a great deal, which, since it has been published in his own words, I forbear to recast in mine.

64| Nero, bearing Paulina no personal grudge, and not wanting the odium of cruelty to grow, ordered her death stopped. Prompted by the soldiers, her slaves and freedmen bandaged her arms and staunched the flow of blood — though whether she was even conscious of it remains unclear. For, as the crowd is always quick to think the worst, there were those who believed that as long as she feared an implacable Nero she had sought the glory of dying with her husband, but then, offered a gentler hope, let herself be won over by the sweetness of life — to which a few more years were then added, years she spent honoring her husband's memory, her face and limbs so pale that it was plain how much of her life's blood had drained away. Seneca meanwhile, as his death dragged on slow and lingering, asked Statius Annaeus, long proven a trusted friend and skilled physician, to bring out the poison he had procured long before — the same used to kill men condemned by public judgment at Athens. It was brought and he drank it, in vain: his limbs were already cold, his body closed against the poison's force. At last he entered a pool of warm water, sprinkling the nearest slaves and remarking that this water was his libation to Jupiter the Liberator. From there he was carried into a bath and suffocated by its steam, and burned without any funeral rites, exactly as he had directed in the codicil to his will, drawn up even then, at the height of his wealth and power, with his final arrangements in mind.

65| It was rumored that Subrius Flavus, with the centurions, had secretly resolved — Seneca not unaware of it — that after Nero was killed through Piso's efforts, Piso too should be killed, and the empire handed to Seneca, as a man chosen for the very summit of power on the strength of his virtues, being himself innocent of the plot's worst aims. Flavus's own words were repeated widely: that it made no difference to his disgrace whether a lyre-player was removed and a tragic actor put in his place, since Nero sang to the lyre and Piso, just as much, sang in tragic costume.

66| The plot among the soldiers didn't stay hidden much longer either, since informers were now eager to hand over Faenius Rufus — they couldn't stand having him as both fellow-conspirator and interrogator. So when he pressed Scaevinus and threatened him, Scaevinus smiled back and said no one knew more than Rufus himself, and urged him to pay back so good an emperor. Faenius had no answer to that — not a word, not even silence, but stumbled over his own speech, plainly terrified. The others, especially Cervarius Proculus, a Roman knight, worked hard to nail him, and on the emperor's order he was seized and bound by the soldier Cassius, who stood nearby because of his remarkable build.

67| Next, on the same informers' word, the tribune Subrius Flavus went down. At first he tried to defend himself by pointing out how unlike the others he was — a soldier, he said, would never join such a crime with unarmed, effeminate men. But once the pressure mounted, he embraced the glory of confessing instead. When Nero asked him what had driven him to forget his oath, he said: 'I hated you. No soldier was more loyal to you than I was, as long as you deserved to be loved. I started hating you after you became your mother's and your wife's murderer, a chariot-driver, an actor, and an arsonist.' I've given his exact words, because unlike Seneca's they were never made public, and it seemed right that people should know the rough, forceful thoughts of a soldier too. Nothing in the whole conspiracy struck Nero's ears harder — a man quick enough to commit crimes but unused to hearing them named. Flavus's execution was handed to the tribune Veianius Niger. Niger ordered a grave dug in a nearby field; Flavus, seeing it was shallow and narrow, complained even about that — 'not even this is by the book,' he said to the soldiers standing around. Told to stretch his neck out bravely, he answered, 'I wish you'd strike as bravely!' And Niger, trembling badly, barely managed to take off his head in two blows, and later boasted to Nero of his cruelty, claiming he'd killed the man with a single stroke and a half.

68| The next display of steady nerve came from the centurion Sulpicius Asper. When Nero asked why he'd conspired to kill him, he answered bluntly: there was no other way to help against so many crimes. Then he took the punishment ordered for him. None of the other centurions flinched under execution either — but Faenius Rufus showed no such spirit, and even carried his self-pity into his will. Nero was waiting for a chance to drag the consul Vestinus into the charge too, thinking him violent and hostile; but the conspirators had never let Vestinus in on their plans — some because of old grudges against him, more because they thought him reckless and impossible to work with. Nero's hatred of Vestinus actually grew out of their close friendship: Vestinus had come to see through the emperor's cowardice and despised him for it, while Nero feared his friend's fierce temper, having often been mocked by his sharp jokes — jokes that, drawing too much on the truth, leave a bitter memory behind. And a fresh grievance had just been added: Vestinus had married Statilia Messalina, well aware that Caesar was among her lovers.

69| So, with no charge and no accuser — since Nero couldn't pretend to play judge here — he turned to raw force instead. He sent the tribune Gerellanus with a cohort of soldiers, ordering him to beat the consul to the punch, seize what amounted to his stronghold, and crush his handpicked young men, since Vestinus kept a house overlooking the forum staffed with fine, matched slaves all the same age. That day Vestinus had carried out every duty of his office and was hosting a dinner party, either fearing nothing or hiding his fear well, when soldiers came in and said the tribune was calling for him. He got up at once without delay, and everything happened in a rush: he was shut into a bedroom, a doctor was ready, his veins were opened, and while still strong he was carried to the bath and plunged in warm water, without a single word of self-pity. Meanwhile the guests who had been reclining with him were placed under guard, and not released until well into the night, after Nero had pictured their terror — waiting for death straight from the dinner table — and, laughing at it, said they'd paid enough for a consul's banquet.

70| Next he ordered the death of Annaeus Lucan. As his blood flowed and he felt his feet and hands going cold, life slowly retreating from his extremities while his chest and mind stayed clear a while longer, he remembered a poem he'd written describing a wounded soldier dying in just this way — and he recited those very verses. They were his last words. After him died Senecio, Quintianus, and Scaevinus, none of them showing the softness of their earlier lives; then the rest of the conspirators followed, with nothing worth recording in word or deed.

71| Meanwhile the city filled up with funerals, and the Capitol with sacrifices: people whose son, brother, relative, or friend had been killed now gave thanks to the gods, decked their houses with laurel, threw themselves at Nero's knees, and wore out his hand with kisses. Taking this for genuine joy, Nero rewarded Antonius Natalis and Cervarius Proculus with immunity for their prompt informing. Milichus, enriched with his reward, took for himself the Greek word for 'savior.' Among the tribunes, Gavius Silvanus took his own life despite being cleared of guilt; Statius Proximus, granted a pardon by the emperor, discarded it for a pointless, showy death. Pompeius, Cornelius Martialis, Flavius Nepos, and Statius Domitius were then stripped of their tribunates — not because they actually hated the emperor, but because people might think they did. Novius Priscus, because of his friendship with Seneca, and Glitius Gallus and Annius Pollio, more slandered than actually convicted, were sent into exile. Priscus was joined by his wife Artoria Flaccilla; Gallus by Egnatia Maximilla, whose great fortune, intact at first, was later confiscated — both facts adding to her honor. Rufrius Crispinus too was expelled, using the conspiracy as an excuse, though Nero had really hated him ever since he'd once been married to Poppaea. Verginius Flavus and Musonius Rufus were driven out simply for the fame of their names — Verginius by stirring young men's ambitions with his eloquence, Musonius by schooling them in philosophy. Cluvidienus Quietus and Julius Agrippa, Blitius Catulinus and Petronius Priscus, and with them Julius Altinus were shipped off to the islands of the Aegean, seemingly there only to pad the tally. Caedicia, Scaevinus's wife, and Caesennius Maximus were barred from Italy — their only real punishment being that they'd had to stand trial at all. Acilia, Lucan's mother, was quietly set aside — neither acquitted nor punished.

72| With all this done, Nero held an assembly of the soldiers and handed out two thousand sesterces to each man in the ranks, adding free grain on top of what they'd previously bought at the market rate. Then, as if about to report on some war he'd won, he summoned the senate and awarded triumphal honors to the ex-consul Petronius Turpilianus, to Cocceius Nerva the praetor-designate, and to Tigellinus, prefect of the guard — exalting Tigellinus and Nerva so far that, beyond triumphal statues in the forum, he set up their images in the Palace as well. Nymphidius received the consular insignia; since he appears here for the first time, I'll go back briefly over his history, since he too will play a part in Rome's coming disasters. His mother was a freedwoman who had traded on her beauty with imperial slaves and freedmen, and he put himself about as the son of Gaius Caesar — since he happened to be tall and grim-faced like him, or perhaps because Gaius, who chased after prostitutes too, had also had his way with the mother.

73| Nero then called the senate together, delivered a speech to the senators, and followed it with an edict to the people, along with the written record of the informers' evidence and the confessions of the condemned collected into books. He was, in fact, being torn apart by constant public rumor that he'd destroyed distinguished, innocent men out of jealousy or fear. But those who cared to learn the truth never doubted, even at the time, that the conspiracy had been begun, had grown, and had been fully exposed — and those who returned to Rome after Nero's death confirm it too. In the senate, meanwhile, everyone bent toward flattery in proportion to their own grief, but Salienus Clemens attacked Junius Gallio, who was trembling over his brother Seneca's death and pleading for his own safety, calling him an enemy and a traitor — until the senators, acting together, talked him down, warning him not to exploit the public disaster for a private grudge, or drag back into savage cruelty a moment when the emperor's mercy had been settled and its bitterness forgotten.

74| Then thank offerings and gifts to the gods were decreed, with special honor given to the Sun, who had an old temple by the Circus where the crime was to have been carried out, for having brought the hidden conspiracy to light through his divine power. It was also decreed that the Circus games of Ceres should be celebrated with more horse races, and that the month of April should take Nero's name. A temple to Safety was to be built on the spot [text lost] from which Scaevinus had drawn his dagger. Nero himself consecrated that dagger on the Capitol and had it inscribed 'To Jupiter the Avenger' — a phrase that meant nothing at the time, but was later read, after the uprising of Julius Vindex, as an omen and a prophecy of the vengeance to come. I find in the senate's records that Anicius Cerialis, consul-designate, proposed that a temple to the god Nero be built as quickly as possible at public expense — as though voting Nero beyond mortal rank and worthy of men's worship. Nero himself blocked it, fearing that some would twist it into a bad omen for his own death; for divine honors are never paid to an emperor until he has stopped living among men.

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