The Works of Tacitus
tr. by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb
[1864-1877]
Tacitus: Annals Book 16 [1]
A.D. 65, 66
1. FORTUNE soon afterwards made a dupe of Nero through his own credulity and
the promises of Caesellius Bassus, a Carthaginian by birth and a man of a crazed
imagination, who wrested a vision seen in the slumber of night into a confident
expectation. He sailed to Rome, and having purchased admission to the emperor,
he explained how he had discovered on his land a cave of immense depth, which
contained a vast quantity of gold, not in the form of coin, but in the shapeless
and ponderous masses of ancient days. In fact, he said, ingots of great weight
lay there, with bars standing near them in another part of the cave, a treasure
hidden for so many ages to increase the wealth of the present. Phoenician Dido,
as he sought to show by inference, after fleeing from Tyre and founding Carthage,
had concealed these riches in the fear that a new people might be demoralised
by a superabundance of money, or that the Numidian kings, already for other
reasons hostile, might by lust of gold be provoked to war.
2. Nero upon this, without sufficiently examining the credibility of the
author of the story, or of the matter itself, or sending persons through whom
he might ascertain whether the intelligence was true, himself actually encouraged
the report and despatched men to bring the spoil, as if it were already acquired.
They had triremes assigned them and crews specially selected to promote speed.
Nothing else at the time was the subject of the credulous gossip of the people,
and of the very different conversation of thinking persons. It happened, too,
that the quinquennial games were being celebrated for the second time, and the
orators took from this same incident their chief materials for eulogies on the
emperor. “Not only,” they said, “were there the usual harvests, and the gold
of the mine with its alloy, but the earth now teemed with a new abundance, and
wealth was thrust on them by the bounty of the gods.” These and other servile
flatteries they invented, with consummate eloquence and equal sycophancy, confidently
counting on the facility of his belief.
3. Extravagance meanwhile increased, on the strength of a chimerical hope,
and ancient wealth was wasted, as apparently the emperor had lighted on treasures
he might squander for many a year. He even gave away profusely from this source,
and the expectation of riches was one of the causes of the poverty of the State.
Bassus indeed dug up his land and extensive plains in the neighbourhood, while
he persisted that this or that was the place of the promised cave, and was followed
not only by our soldiers but by the rustic population who were engaged to execute
the work, till at last he threw off his infatuation, and expressing wonder that
his dreams had never before been false, and that now for the first time he had
been deluded, he escaped disgrace and danger by a voluntary death. Some have
said that he was imprisoned and soon released, his property having been taken
from him as a substitute for the royal treasure.
4. Meanwhile the Senate, as they were now on the eve of the quinquennial
contest, wishing to avert scandal, offered the emperor the “victory in song,”
and added the “crown of eloquence,” that thus a veil might be thrown over a
shameful exposure on the stage. Nero, however, repeatedly declared that he wanted
neither favour nor the Senate’s influence, as he was a match for his rivals,
and was certain, in the conscientious opinion of the judges, to win the honour
by merit. First, he recited a poem on the stage; then, at the importunate request
of the rabble that he would make public property of all his accomplishments
(these were their words), he entered the theatre, and conformed to all the laws
of harp-playing, not sitting down when tired, nor wiping off the perspiration
with anything but the garment he wore, or letting himself be seen to spit or
clear his nostrils. Last of all, on bended knee he saluted the assembly with
a motion of the hand, and awaited the verdict of the judges with pretended anxiety.
And then the city-populace, who were wont to encourage every gesture even of
actors, made the place ring with measured strains of elaborate applause. One
would have thought they were rejoicing, and perhaps they did rejoice, in their
indifference to the public disgrace.
5. All, however, who were present from remote towns, and still retained the
Italy of strict morals and primitive ways; all too who had come on embassies
or on private business from distant provinces, where they had been unused to
such wantonness, were unable to endure the spectacle or sustain the degrading
fatigue, which wearied their unpractised hands, while they disturbed those who
knew their part, and were often struck by soldiers, stationed in the seats,
to see that not a moment of time passed with less vigorous applause or in the
silence of indifference. It was a known fact that several knights, in struggling
through the narrow approaches and the pressure of the crowd, were trampled to
death, and that others while keeping their seats day and night were seized with
some fatal malady. For it was a still worse danger to be absent from the show,
as many openly and many more secretly made it their business to scrutinize names
and faces, and to note the delight or the disgust of the company. Hence came
cruel severities, immediately exercised on the humble, and resentments, concealed
for the moment, but subsequently paid off, towards men of distinction. There
was a story that Vespasian was insulted by Phoebus, a freedman, for closing
his eyes in a doze, and that having with difficulty been screened by the intercessions
of the well disposed, he escaped imminent destruction through his grander destiny.
6. After the conclusion of the games Poppaea died from a casual outburst
of rage in her husband, who felled her with a kick when she was pregnant. That
there was poison I cannot believe, though some writers so relate, from hatred
rather than from belief, for the emperor was desirous of children, and wholly
swayed by love of his wife. Her body was not consumed by fire according to Roman
usage, but after the custom of foreign princes was filled with fragrant spices
and embalmed, and then consigned to the sepulchre of the Julii. She had, however,
a public funeral, and Nero himself from the rostra eulogized her beauty, her
lot in having been the mother of a deified child, and fortune’s other gifts,
as though they were virtues.
7. To the death of Poppaea, which, though a public grief, was a delight to
those who recalling the past thought of her shamelessness and cruelty, Nero
added fresh and greater odium by forbidding Caius Cassius to attend the funeral.
This was the first token of mischief. Nor was it long delayed. Silanus was coupled
with Cassius, no crime being alleged, but that Cassius was eminent for his ancestral
wealth and dignity of character, Silanus for the nobility of his birth and the
quiet demeanour of his youth. The emperor accordingly sent the Senate a speech
in which he argued that both ought to be removed from the State, and made it
a reproach against Cassius that among his ancestors’ busts he had specially
revered that of Caius Cassius, which bore the inscription “to the Party-Leader.”
In fact, he had thereby sought to sow the seeds of civil war and revolt from
the House of the Caesars. And that he might not merely avail himself of the
memory of a hated name to stir up strife, he had associated with him Lucius
Silanus, a youth of noble birth and reckless spirit, to whom he might point
as an instrument of revolution.
8. Nero next denounced Silanus himself in the same terms as he had his uncle
Torquatus, implying that he was already arranging the details of imperial business,
and setting freedmen to manage his accounts, papers, and correspondence, imputations
utterly groundless and false. Silanus, in truth, was intensely apprehensive,
and had been frightened into caution by his uncle’s destruction. Nero then procured
persons, under the name of informers, to invent against Lepida, the wife of
Cassius and aunt of Silanus, a charge of incest with her brother’s son, and
of some ghastly religious ceremonial. Volcatius Tullinus, and Marcellus Cornelius,
senators, and Fabatus, a Roman knight, were drawn in as accomplices. By an appeal
to the emperor these men eluded an impending doom and subsequently, as being
too insignificant, escaped from Nero, who was busy with crimes on a far greater
scale.
9. The Senate was then consulted and sentences of exile were passed on Cassius
and Silanus. As to Lepida, the emperor was to decide. Cassius was transported
to the island of Sardinia, and he was quietly left to old age. Silanus was removed
to Ostia, whence, it was pretended, he was to be conveyed to Naxos. He was afterwards
confined in a town of Apulia named Barium. There, as he was wisely enduring
a most undeserved calamity, he was suddenly seized by a centurion sent to slay
him. When the man advised him to sever his veins, he replied that, though he
had resolved in his heart to die, he would not let a cutthroat have the glory
of the service. The centurion seeing that, unarmed as he was, he was very powerful,
and more an enraged than a frightened man, ordered his soldiers to overpower
him. And Silanus failed not to resist and to strike blows, as well as he could
with his bare hands, till he was cut down by the centurion, as though in battle,
with wounds in his breast.
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