Tacitus · a new plain-English translation from the original language
1| Fortune next played a trick on Nero: his own conceit was to blame, along with the assurances of a man named Caesellius Bassus—Carthaginian by birth, and not entirely sound of mind—who took a dream from his own sleep and stretched it into certain hope. He sailed to Rome, bought his way into the emperor's presence, and announced that on his estate he had found a cave of immense depth holding a vast quantity of gold—not coined money but rough, ancient bullion. Heavy ingots lay there, he said, and columns stood off to one side, all hidden for so long an age only to swell present wealth. His guess was that Dido the Phoenician, fleeing Tyre and founding Carthage, had buried that treasure there, so that the new people would not run wild on too much money, or so that the Numidian kings, already hostile enough, would not be tempted by gold-lust into war.
2| So Nero, without properly testing the credibility of either the man or his claim, and without sending anyone to check whether the story was true, actively fed the rumor himself and dispatched men to bring back the treasure as if it were already secured. Triremes were provided, and picked oarsmen to speed the mission. In those days the common people talked of nothing else, believing it utterly; sensible men heard a very different story. As it happened, this was the second running of the quinquennial games, and the orators pounced on that fact as their choicest material for singing the emperor's praises. It wasn't just the usual crops, they said, or gold mixed in with ore that the earth now produced, but a new abundance springing up of its own accord, with the gods delivering riches unasked—and other flatteries of the same servile kind, dressed up in the highest eloquence, spoken without a qualm because the emperor was so easy to convince.
3| Meanwhile extravagance swelled on this empty hope, and the old wealth was spent as though the promised treasure had already arrived to replace, for years to come, whatever was squandered. Indeed Nero was already handing out gifts on the strength of it, and the very expectation of riches became one of the causes of public poverty. As for Bassus, he dug up his own land and the fields around it, insisting again and again that this or that spot held the promised cave, with not only soldiers but crowds of country people pressed into the digging. At last his madness left him. Amazed that his dreams, which he had never doubted before, had for the first time deceived him, he escaped the shame and the fear by taking his own life. Some say he was put in chains and later released, his property confiscated to make up for the royal treasure he had promised.
4| Meanwhile the senate, with the five-yearly contest now close at hand, offered the emperor the victory in the singing competition to head off the disgrace, and added the crown for eloquence as well, to cover up the shame of the performance. But Nero kept saying he needed no senatorial favoritism or influence—he would compete on equal terms with his rivals and let the judges rule honestly on his merits. He began by reciting a poem from the stage; afterward, the crowd called out—using this exact demand—for him to lay all his gifts before the public, so he walked out onto the theater's boards, submitting to every rule of the lyre-player's craft: not to sit down when tired, to wipe away sweat only with the garment he was already wearing, to let no trace of spit or mucus show. Finally he knelt, saluted the assembly with his hand, and waited for the judges' verdict with feigned nervousness. The city mob, well used to cheering on actors, roared back in set rhythms and orchestrated applause. You would have thought they were happy—and perhaps, through sheer carelessness about the public disgrace, they were.
5| But those who had come from remote towns, from an Italy still strict and holding to old-fashioned ways, and those who had arrived from distant provinces unused to such indecency, on official embassies or private business, could neither stomach the spectacle nor keep up the shameful effort. Their untrained hands grew exhausted, they threw off the rhythm of those who knew it, and soldiers posted in the aisles often beat them, to make sure not one moment passed without the proper enthusiastic noise or the proper obedient silence. It's established that many knights were crushed to death struggling through the narrow entrances against the surging crowd, and others fell fatally ill from sitting there day and night without a break. The fear of missing the show was in fact worse than the discomfort of attending it, since spies—many openly, more in secret—noted down names and faces, watching who looked eager and who looked gloomy as they gathered. Punishment for the lower classes followed at once; for men of rank, resentment was hidden for the time being, only to be paid back later. People said Vespasian, caught apparently dozing off, was scolded by the freedman Phoebus and only barely saved by the pleading of better men, and that he escaped the looming danger then only to meet a greater destiny later.
6| After the games ended, Poppaea died—killed by chance in a fit of her husband's temper, when, pregnant, she was struck by a kick from him. I cannot believe it was poison, as some writers claim, more out of hatred for Nero than from real evidence, since he wanted children and was devoted to his wife. Her body was not burned, as was the Roman custom, but packed with spices in the manner of foreign kings and laid to rest in the tomb of the Julii. Even so, a public funeral was held, and Nero himself delivered the eulogy at the Rostra, praising her beauty, the fact that she had been mother to a divine infant, and other gifts of fortune as though they were virtues.
7| Poppaea's death was mourned openly, but those who looked back on her cruelty and shamelessness were secretly glad of it. Nero, though, piled fresh resentment on top by barring Gaius Cassius from the funeral rites—the first sign of trouble to come. It wasn't long delayed either: Silanus was added to the charge, on no crime at all except that Cassius stood out for his ancient wealth and moral gravity, and Silanus for the distinction of his family and his modest youth. So Nero sent a message to the senate arguing that both men should be removed from public life, and accused Cassius of keeping among his family portrait busts an image of Gaius Cassius the tyrannicide, inscribed 'to the leader of the cause'—as though he were sowing the seeds of civil war and courting rebellion against the house of the Caesars. And so that he wouldn't rely only on the memory of that hated name to stir up discord, Nero claimed, he had recruited young Lucius Silanus, a man of noble birth and reckless spirit, to hold up as the figurehead of revolution.
8| Next Nero attacked Silanus himself with the same charges he had used against his uncle Torquatus—that he was already arranging the business of empire, appointing freedmen to manage accounts, petitions, and correspondence—empty and false accusations, since Silanus, terrified by his uncle's death and destruction, was in fact more focused on staying out of trouble than anything else. After this, informers were brought in, so called, who invented a charge that Lepida—Cassius's wife and Silanus's aunt—had committed incest with her nephew and performed monstrous rites of black magic. Dragged in as accomplices were the senators Vulcacius Tullinus and Marcellus Cornelius, and the Roman knight Calpurnius Fabatus; these men appealed to the emperor and managed to dodge the conviction hanging over them, and later, while Nero was busy with graver crimes, escaped notice as if too minor to bother with.
9| Then, by a decree of the senate, exile was pronounced against Cassius and Silanus, while Lepida's fate was left for Nero to decide. Cassius was deported to the island of Sardinia, where people simply waited for old age to finish him off. Silanus was removed under the pretense of being taken to Naxos, but was put ashore at Ostia and then confined in a town in Apulia called Barium. There, bearing his utterly unjust fate with dignity, he was seized by a centurion sent to kill him. When the man urged him to open his veins, Silanus said his mind was indeed made up to die, but he wouldn't spare his executioner the credit for the job. The centurion, seeing that though unarmed the man was still powerfully built and closer to rage than fear, ordered his soldiers to pin him down. Silanus did not give up the struggle; he fought back and struck out as hard as he could with his bare hands, until the centurion cut him down with wounds to the front, as though he had fallen in battle.
10| Just as readily, Lucius Vetus went to his death, and with him his mother-in-law Sextia and daughter Pollitta; the emperor hated them simply because their being alive felt like a reproach for his having killed Vetus's son-in-law, Rubellius Plautus. The occasion for exposing this cruelty was the freedman Fortunatus, who, after embezzling his patron's property, turned informer against him, joined by Claudius Demianus, a man Vetus, as proconsul of Asia, had once imprisoned for crimes—whom Nero now freed as a reward for the accusation. When Vetus learned that he and his own freedman were being weighed on equal terms, he withdrew to his estate near Formiae; soldiers surrounded him there under secret guard. His daughter was with him, made fierce by long grief on top of the danger now closing in, ever since she had watched the killers of her husband Plautus. She had clung to his bloodied neck, keeping the blood and the spattered clothes, and lived on afterward as a widow, hair uncombed in continuous mourning, eating nothing but what kept her from starving to death outright. Now, urged on by her father, she went to Naples, and when denied access to Nero, waited outside his door, crying out to be heard—an innocent woman—and begging him not to hand over his own former consular colleague to a freedman's mercy; sometimes wailing like a woman, sometimes raising her voice beyond her sex in furious protest—until the emperor showed himself unmoved by either her pleading or the public outrage against him.
11| So she sent word to her father to give up hope and accept necessity: at the same time news arrived that a senate hearing was being arranged, and a brutal verdict with it. Some advised him to name Caesar as heir to most of his estate, and so at least secure what remained for his grandchildren. He refused, unwilling to stain a life lived so close to freedom with one last act of servility, and instead gave away to his slaves whatever cash he had on hand, telling each to carry off for himself whatever could be moved, and keeping back only three couches for the end. Then, in the same room, with the same blade, they cut their veins; hastily wrapped, each in a single garment for decency's sake, they were carried into the baths—father watching daughter, grandmother watching granddaughter, the girl watching them both—all praying in competition that their failing life would end quickly, so they might leave their family living on and not have to watch each other die. Fortune kept the order fitting: the eldest died first, then the youngest. After burial they were formally charged, and the senate decreed they should be punished in the ancestral manner, but Nero intervened, allowing them death without further formality—a mockery added on top of the killings, now that the killings were already done.
12| Publius Gallus, a Roman knight, was banned from fire and water because he had been close to Faenius Rufus and no stranger to Vetus. The informer, a freedman, got his reward: a seat in the theater among the tribunes' attendants. And the months following April — itself renamed for Nero — were renamed too: May became 'Claudius,' June became 'Germanicus.' Cornelius Orfitus, who proposed it, testified that June was changed because two Torquati already put to death for their crimes had made the name Junius unlucky.
13| The gods marked this year, foul with so many crimes, with storms and plague besides. A whirlwind ravaged Campania, scattering villas, orchards, and crops far and wide, and carried its violence to the outskirts of Rome. There a plague of extraordinary force was ravaging every class of person, with no change in the weather to explain it. Houses filled with corpses, the streets with funerals. Neither sex nor age was spared. Slaves and free citizens alike died suddenly, amid the wailing of spouses and children, who, sitting with the dying and weeping over them, were often burned on the same pyre. Deaths among knights and senators, however common, drew fewer tears — as though they were forestalling the emperor's cruelty by dying naturally. That same year levies were held through Gallic Narbonensis, Africa, and Asia to fill out the Illyrian legions; men too old or too sick for service were let go. The emperor made good Lyon's disaster with forty million sesterces to rebuild what the city had lost — money the people of Lyon had themselves once offered Rome after its own fires.
14| In the consulship of Gaius Suetonius and Lucius Telesinus, Antistius Sosianus — punished, as I have said, with exile for writing scurrilous verses against Nero — saw how well informing paid and how quick the emperor was to kill. Restless and never slow to seize an opening, he cultivated Pammenes, an exile in the same place, famous for his skill in astrology and so tied by friendship to many people; their shared misfortune drew them together, and Sosianus reasoned that visitors and consultations came to him for good reason. He also learned that Pammenes received an annual stipend from Publius Anteius. Sosianus knew well that Anteius, hated by Nero for his devotion to Agrippina, and possessed of great wealth to feed the emperor's greed, was for that very reason a marked man like many others. So he intercepted Anteius's letters, stole the papers in which his birth date and horoscope lay hidden among Pammenes's secret records, and, after turning up further documents on Ostorius Scapula's birth date and career besides, he wrote to Nero with promises of great revelations for the emperor's own safety, if only a brief release from exile could be won: for Anteius and Ostorius, he claimed, threatened the state and were probing his fate and Caesar's. Fast boats were sent, and Sosianus was hurried back to Rome. Once his charge became known, Anteius and Ostorius were treated less like the accused than like the already condemned — so much so that no one would witness Anteius's will until Tigellinus stepped forward to do it, having first warned Anteius not to delay his final arrangements. Anteius drank poison, then, disgusted at how slowly it worked, cut his veins to hasten death.
15| Ostorius was at the time on a distant estate near the border of Liguria. A centurion was sent to speed his death. The urgency arose because Ostorius, celebrated for his military reputation and having earned the civic crown in Britain, was a huge man skilled in arms, and had frightened Nero — always a coward, and now more terrified than ever after the recent conspiracy — with the fear that he might attack him. So the centurion, once he had blocked the villa's escape routes, revealed the emperor's orders to Ostorius. Ostorius turned against himself the courage he had so often shown against enemies; and because his cut veins bled too little, he had a slave hold a dagger up motionless, gripped the slave's right hand firmly, and ran his throat onto the blade.
16| Even if I were recounting foreign wars and deaths met for the republic, with so uniform a run of disasters I would grow weary myself and expect the reader's fatigue too, however honorable the deaths of citizens — readers turn away from a grim, unbroken parade of them. But here it is the servile submission and the vast bloodshed at home that wear down the spirit and press it into grief. I ask no defense from those who will read of these things beyond this: that I not be blamed for hating men who died so tamely. That was the gods' anger against Rome — an anger one cannot, as with the destruction of armies or the fall of cities, note once and move past. Let this at least be granted to the memory of these distinguished men: that just as they are set apart in burial from the common dead, so in the record of their final hours they receive and keep their own distinct place.
17| Within a few days, in the same slaughter, fell Annaeus Mela, Anicius Cerialis, Rufrius Crispinus, and Gaius Petronius — Mela and Crispinus knights of senatorial rank. Crispinus had once commanded the Praetorian Guard and been awarded the rank of consul; only recently exiled to Sardinia on suspicion of conspiracy, he took his own life the instant the death order reached him. Mela, brother by the same parents to Gallio and Seneca, had avoided seeking office out of a perverse ambition — to remain a Roman knight while matching consulars in power. He also thought procuratorships administering the emperor's business a quicker road to wealth. He had fathered Annaeus Lucan, a great addition to his renown. After Lucan's death, while pursuing his estate with sharp persistence, Mela provoked an accuser, Fabius Romanus, one of Lucan's closest friends. A story was concocted of shared knowledge of the conspiracy between father and son, backed by forged letters supposedly Lucan's; Nero, examining them, ordered them sent to Mela — his eye on Mela's fortune. Mela chose the quickest road to death then available and opened his veins, but first drew up a will that handed a vast sum to Tigellinus and to Tigellinus's son-in-law, Cossutianus Capito, so that what remained of his estate would be spared. It was added that, complaining of the injustice of his death, he had written that he at least died with no grounds for punishment, while Rufrius Crispinus and Anicius Cerialis, who hated the emperor, still lived. This was believed invented regarding Crispinus, since he was already dead, but concerning Cerialis, invented so that he would be killed. And indeed, not long after, he took his own life, drawing less pity than the others, since people remembered he had betrayed a conspiracy to Gaius Caesar.
18| A little must be said again about Gaius Petronius. He spent his days sleeping, his nights on business and the pleasures of life. Where diligence brought others fame, idleness brought it to him, and he was regarded not as a wastrel and spendthrift like most who squander their fortunes, but as a connoisseur of refined luxury. His words and deeds, the more relaxed and marked by a certain carelessness, were taken all the more warmly for it, as marks of an unaffected nature. Yet when he governed Bithynia as proconsul, and afterward when he held the consulship, he proved himself vigorous and fully equal to business. Then, sliding back into vice — or into an imitation of it — he was taken up by Nero among his small circle of intimates, as arbiter of taste, until nothing was thought charming or elegant unless Petronius had approved it. This drew the jealousy of Tigellinus, who saw in him a rival, and one more skilled in the science of pleasure. So Tigellinus went after the one thing that outweighed all the emperor's other appetites — his cruelty — charging Petronius with friendship for Scaevinus; a slave was bribed to testify, Petronius was denied any defense, and most of his household was thrown into chains.
19| It happened that Caesar had gone to Campania around that time, and Petronius, having traveled as far as Cumae, was detained there. He would not bear the delay of fear or hope any longer, yet he did not rush headlong out of life either. He had his veins cut, then, as he pleased, bound up again and reopened, all the while talking with friends — not seriously, and not to win a reputation for firmness. He listened to them reciting, not discourses on the soul's immortality or the sayings of philosophers, but light songs and playful verses. Some slaves he rewarded generously, others he had whipped. He dined, he slept, so that his death, though forced, looked like an accident. Not even in his will, as most of the dying did, did he flatter Nero or Tigellinus or any other powerful man; instead he wrote out, in full, the emperor's crimes under the names of his male and female partners and the novelty of each perversion, sealed the document, and had it delivered to Nero. Then he snapped his signet ring in two, so no one could use it afterward to harm others.
20| While Nero puzzled over how his nighttime exploits had become known, Silia was offered up — a woman known through her marriage to a senator, herself given over to every kind of vice, and a close intimate of Petronius. She was sent into exile, on the pretext that she had not kept quiet about what she had seen and endured, but really out of Nero's own personal hatred. And Minucius Thermus, an ex-praetor, was handed over to Tigellinus's grudges, because Thermus's freedman had made criminal accusations against Tigellinus — accusations the freedman paid for under torture, and his patron paid for with an unjust death.
21| Having slaughtered so many eminent men, Nero at last set out to destroy virtue itself, by killing Thrasea Paetus and Barea Soranus. He had long been hostile to both, and against Thrasea more grievances still had piled up: he had left the senate chamber while the debate over Agrippina's case was going on — a matter I have already described — and he had made too poor a showing at the Juvenalian games. This offense cut deeper because this same Thrasea had once sung, in tragic costume, at the games called 'Cetasti' founded by the Trojan Antenor at Patavium, his birthplace. Also, on the day when the praetor Antistius was condemned to death for verses composed against Nero, Thrasea had proposed and carried a milder penalty; and when divine honors were voted for Poppaea, he had absented himself of his own accord, and had not attended her funeral. Cossutianus Capito would not let these things be forgotten — a man whose mind ran headlong toward crime anyway, and who bore Thrasea a personal grudge because Thrasea's influence had brought him down when envoys from Cilicia charged him with extortion.
22| He added more charges: that Thrasea avoided the customary oath-taking at the start of the year; that he was absent from the vows for the emperor, though he held a place among the Fifteen priests; that he had never sacrificed for the emperor's welfare or for his divine voice; that though once tireless in attendance, ready to declare himself for or against even routine motions of the Senate, he had not entered the chamber in three years; and that most recently, when everyone rushed to condemn Silanus and Vetus, he had chosen instead to attend to his clients' private business. This, he said, was already secession — a faction breaking away — and if many others dared the same, it would be civil war. 'Once it was Gaius Caesar and Marcus Cato,' he said. 'Now a city hungry for discord speaks of you, Nero, and of Thrasea. And he has followers — satellites, rather — who imitate not yet his defiant votes but his bearing and his face, stern and gloomy, so as to reproach you for your excesses. To him alone your safety is no concern, your accomplishments no honor. He rejects the emperor's successes — does he not tire even of his griefs and sorrows? It is the same spirit that refuses to believe Poppaea divine as refuses to swear by the acts of the deified Augustus and the deified Julius. He scorns religion, he sets law aside. The daily gazette of Rome is read more carefully in the provinces and the armies now, just to learn what Thrasea has failed to do. Either let us adopt his ways, if they are better, or strip from those who crave revolution their leader and inspiration. That sect bred the Tuberones and Favonii — names hateful even under the old Republic. They wear liberty as a mask to overthrow the empire; if they succeed, they will attack liberty itself next. You removed Cassius for nothing, if the heirs of the Bruti are now free to flourish and multiply. Finally, put nothing in writing yourself concerning Thrasea; let the Senate itself pass judgment on him.' Nero fanned Cossutianus's readiness for malice, and added Eprius Marcellus, sharp of tongue, to the attack.
23| Meanwhile a Roman knight, Ostorius Sabinus, had by now taken up, on his own initiative, the case against Barea Soranus over his term as proconsul of Asia, where his justice and diligence had stirred the emperor's resentment — by working to open the harbor of Ephesus, and by failing to punish the people of Pergamum for using force to stop Acratus, Caesar's freedman, from carrying off their statues and paintings. But the formal charge was friendship with Plautus and currying favor in the province to further new hopes. The time chosen for his condemnation was when Tiridates was approaching to receive the kingdom of Armenia, so that the rumors of foreign affairs might cloak the crime at home — or perhaps so that Nero could display his imperial greatness through the killing of distinguished men, as if it were itself a kingly act.
24| So with the whole city pouring out to receive the emperor and gaze on the king, Thrasea, barred from the reception, did not lose heart, but wrote a letter to Nero asking to know the charges against him and affirming he would clear himself if given knowledge of the accusations and a chance to answer them. Nero seized on this letter eagerly, hoping Thrasea, frightened, had written something that would exalt the emperor's glory and disgrace his own reputation. When this did not happen, and Nero found himself instead dreading the look, the spirit, and the free bearing of an innocent man, he ordered the Senate convened.
25| Thrasea then consulted his closest friends on whether to attempt a defense or ignore the charge. Opinions differed. Those who favored entering the Senate argued they were confident of his composure — he would say nothing except what would add to his glory. It was the weak and fearful, they said, who wrapped their final hours in secrecy. Let the people see a man walking to meet his death, let the Senate hear words that sounded almost superhuman: the very wonder of it might move even Nero. But should his cruelty continue regardless, posterity at least would tell apart the memory of a death met with honor from the shame of those who died saying nothing.
26| Others, who thought he should wait at home, agreed about Thrasea himself but foresaw mockery and insult awaiting him: he should spare his ears the abuse and slander. It was not only Cossutianus and Eprius who were ready for crime — there might be others who, in their savagery, would dare violence and blows, and even good men might follow out of fear. Better to spare the Senate, which he himself had done so much to honor, the shame of such an outrage — and better, too, to leave it unknown what the senators might have chosen, had Thrasea stood there before them facing the charge. As for touching Nero's shame over his crimes — that hope was vain; far more to be feared was that he would vent his fury on Thrasea's wife, his daughter, and his other kin. Let him instead end his life untainted, unstained, with the same glory that had guided the footsteps and pursuits of his whole life. Present at this council was Arulenus Rusticus, a young man burning with eagerness, who out of desire for praise offered to veto the senatorial decree — for he was a tribune of the people. Thrasea checked his ardor, telling him not to attempt something vain, of no use to the accused, and fatal to the one who intervened. His own life, he said, was spent, and he could not abandon a lifelong, unbroken course of conduct; Rusticus was only beginning his career, with everything still ahead of him. He should weigh carefully, long before such a moment, what path he meant to take in public life. As for himself, whether it was even fitting to appear in the Senate, he left to his own reflection.
27| At dawn the following day, armed praetorian cohorts — two of them — took possession of the temple of Venus Genetrix. Civilians carrying weapons openly, making no effort to hide them, barred the Senate's doors, and squads of soldiers were scattered through the forums and basilicas. Under their stares and threats the senators entered the chamber, and the emperor's speech, read out by his quaestor, was heard: without naming anyone, he accused the senators of neglecting their public duties, and said their example had turned Roman knights toward idleness too — small wonder men did not come from distant provinces, when so many who had won the consulship and priesthoods preferred the pleasures of their gardens instead. The accusers seized on this as a weapon.
28| Cossutianus opened, and then Marcellus, with greater violence, kept shouting that the whole state of the Republic was at stake; that the defiance of inferiors was eroding the mildness of their ruler. The senators, he said, had been far too lenient until now, letting Thrasea break away, letting his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus share the same madness, and with them Paconius Agrippinus, heir to his father's hatred of emperors, and Curtius Montanus, who churned out detestable verses, mock them all with impunity. He missed, in the Senate, a man of consular rank; among the vow-takers, a priest; in the oath, a citizen — unless Thrasea had openly put on, against the customs and rites of their ancestors, the guise of traitor and enemy. Let him come, then, act the senator, and — since he was so used to shielding the emperor's detractors — propose openly what he thought should be corrected or changed: they would bear more easily a man who criticized particulars than they now bore one who condemned everything by his silence. Did peace across the whole world displease him, or victories won without loss to the armies? Let them not allow a man made gloomy by the state's blessings, who treated the forums, the theaters, the temples as a wasteland, who kept threatening his own exile, to indulge his perverse ambition. To him, none of this looked like the Senate's decrees, the magistrates, or the city of Rome. Let him break off his life from a state whose affection he had long since shed, and now even its sight.
29| As Marcellus, grim and menacing as he was, blazed through all this with voice, face, and eyes, the Senate's habitual gloom — familiar by now from the sheer frequency of such dangers — gave way to something new: a deeper dread, at the sight of the soldiers' weapons and hands. At the same time the image of Thrasea's own venerable dignity hovered before them, and some pitied Helvidius as well, soon to suffer for a kinship that harmed no one, wondering what charge could be brought against Agrippinus beyond his father's grim fate — for he too, every bit as innocent, had gone down to Tiberius's cruelty. And Montanus, a young man of decent character with no scandalous poem to his name, was being driven into exile simply for showing his talent.
30| Meanwhile Ostorius Sabinus, Soranus's accuser, came forward and began with his friendship with Rubellius Plautus, and the charge that Soranus, as proconsul of Asia, had used the post to build his own reputation rather than serve the common good, by encouraging unrest among the cities. These were old charges — but a fresh one, tying his daughter to her father's peril, was that she had given away money too freely. In truth the cause was devotion — the girl's name was Servilia — who, moved by love for her father and by the carelessness natural to youth, had sought counsel only about her household's safety — whether Nero could be appeased, whether a Senate inquiry might bring nothing terrible. She was summoned to the Senate, and the two stood apart before the consuls' tribunal: the father, advanced in years, and opposite him the daughter, not yet twenty, recently widowed and left desolate when her husband Annius Pollio was driven into exile, not even looking at her father, whose dangers she seemed to have made heavier.
31| When the accuser asked whether she had sold her wedding jewelry, or the necklace taken from her own neck, to raise money for magical rites, she first lay prostrate on the ground, weeping long in silence; then, clasping the altar, she said: 'I have invoked no wicked gods, no curses, nothing in my unhappy prayers except that you, Caesar, and you, senators, would keep this best of fathers safe. So I gave my jewels, my clothes, the marks of my rank, just as I would have given my blood and my life, had they been asked for. Let those men — strangers to me until now — answer for what they are called and what arts they practice: I never mentioned the emperor except among the gods. Yet my father, wretched as he is, knows nothing whatsoever of it — and if a crime has been committed here, the guilt is mine alone.'
32| Servilia was still speaking when Soranus broke in, crying out that she had never gone into the province with him... that she had never gone into his province with him, that she couldn't have known Plautus at her age, and that she had no part in her husband's alleged crimes—only her excess of devotion should be charged against her, and she would accept whatever fate came. As she said this At the same time he rushed to embrace his daughter as she ran toward him, but the lictors stepped between them and kept them apart. Then witnesses were called. Whatever pity the savagery of the prosecution had stirred up, the witness Publius Egnatius stirred up an equal measure of anger. He was Soranus's own client, now bought to destroy his friend, and he paraded the authority of the Stoic school, wearing the look and bearing of a man practiced in projecting integrity—while underneath he was treacherous, deceitful, hiding greed and lust. Once money had exposed these, he became a lesson: just as men can be guilty of fraud or stained by crime, so too they can wear the mask of virtue and friendship falsely.
33| Yet that same day also produced an honorable example: Cassius Asclepiodotus, a man of outstanding wealth among the Bithynians, who had honored Soranus with deference while he prospered, did not abandon him when he fell. Stripped of his entire fortune and driven into exile, he became proof that the gods weigh good and bad conduct fairly. Thrasea, Soranus, and Servilia were given leave to die by their own hand; Italy was closed to Helvidius and to Paconius by banishment; and Montanus went back to his father, but only on condition that he be shut out of public life. The accusers Eprius and Cossutianus were each awarded five million sesterces, and Ostorius twelve hundred thousand along with the insignia of a quaestor.
34| Then evening came on, and the consul dispatched his quaestor to Thrasea, who was out in his gardens. He had spent the day surrounded by a large gathering of distinguished men and women, giving most of his attention to Demetrius, a teacher of the Cynic school. With him—judging by the intensity of his expression and the fragments overheard when voices rose—he was discussing the nature of the soul and the separation of spirit from body, until Domitius Caecilianus, one of his closest friends, arrived and told him what the Senate had decreed. At this, Thrasea urged the weeping, protesting company to leave at once, and not to mix their own danger with the fate of a condemned man. He told Arria, who wanted to follow her husband's last hours and her own mother's example, to hold on to her life and not strip their daughter of her only support.
35| He then walked out onto the portico, where the quaestor found him—looking almost cheerful, because he had just learned that his son-in-law Helvidius was only being banished from Italy. After hearing the Senate's decree read to him, he led Helvidius and Demetrius into his bedroom. There he opened the veins of both arms, and once the blood had flowed, he sprinkled it on the ground, called the quaestor closer, and said: "This libation is for Jupiter the Liberator. Look well, young man—the gods forbid it prove an omen, but the times you've been born into are ones where a mind needs steadying, and examples of firmness are worth having." Afterward, as the slowness of his death brought on heavy suffering, he turned to Demetrius [text breaks off]