Tacitus: Annals: Book 6 [20]

The Works of Tacitus

tr. by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb

[1864-1877]

Tacitus: Annals Book 6 [20]

20. About this time Caius Caesar, who became his grandfather’s companion on
his retirement to Capreae, married Claudia, daughter of Marcus Silanus. He was
a man who masked a savage temper under an artful guise of self-restraint, and
neither his mother’s doom nor the banishment of his brothers extorted from him
a single utterance. Whatever the humour of the day with Tiberius, he would assume
the like, and his language differed as little. Hence the fame of a clever remark
from the orator Passienus, that “there never was a better slave or a worse master.”
I must not pass over a prognostication of Tiberius respecting Servius Galba,
then consul. Having sent for him and sounded him on various topics, he at last
addressed him in Greek to this effect: “You too, Galba, will some day have a
taste of empire.” He thus hinted at a brief span of power late in life, on the
strength of his acquaintance with the art of astrologers, leisure for acquiring
which he had had at Rhodes, with Thrasyllus for instructor. This man’s skill
he tested in the following manner.

21. Whenever he sought counsel on such matters, he would make use of the
top of the house and of the confidence of one freedman, quite illiterate and
of great physical strength. The man always walked in front of the person whose
science Tiberius had determined to test, through an unfrequented and precipitous
path (for the house stood on rocks), and then, if any suspicion had arisen of
imposture or of trickery, he hurled the astrologer, as he returned, into the
sea beneath, that no one might live to betray the secret. Thrasyllus accordingly
was led up the same cliffs, and when he had deeply impressed his questioner
by cleverly revealing his imperial destiny and future career, he was asked whether
he had also thoroughly ascertained his own horoscope, and the character of that
particular year and day. After surveying the positions and relative distances
of the stars, he first paused, then trembled, and the longer he gazed, the more
was he agitated by amazement and terror, till at last he exclaimed that a perilous
and well-nigh fatal crisis impended over him. Tiberius then embraced him and
congratulated him on foreseeing his dangers and on being quite safe. Taking
what he had said as an oracle, he retained him in the number of his intimate
friends.

22. When I hear of these and like occurrences, I suspend my judgment on the
question whether it is fate and unchangeable necessity or chance which governs
the revolutions of human affairs. Indeed, among the wisest of the ancients and
among their disciples you will find conflicting theories, many holding the conviction
that heaven does not concern itself with the beginning or the end of our life,
or, in short, with mankind at all; and that therefore sorrows are continually
the lot of the good, happiness of the wicked; while others, on the contrary,
believe that though there is a harmony between fate and events, yet it is not
dependent on wandering stars, but on primary elements, and on a combination
of natural causes. Still, they leave us the capacity of choosing our life, maintaining
that, the choice once made, there is a fixed sequence of events. Good and evil,
again, are not what vulgar opinion accounts them; many who seem to be struggling
with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable,
if only the first bear their hard lot with patience, and the latter make a foolish
use of their prosperity. Most men, however, cannot part with the belief that
each person’s future is fixed from his very birth, but that some things happen
differently from what has been foretold through the impostures of those who
describe what they do not know, and that this destroys the credit of a science,
clear testimonies to which have been given both by past ages and by our own.
In fact, how the son of this same Thrasyllus predicted Nero’s reign I shall
relate when the time comes, not to digress too far from my subject.

23. That same year the death of Asinius Gallus became known. That he died
of starvation, there was not a doubt; whether of his own choice or by compulsion,
was a question. The emperor was asked whether he would allow him to be buried,
and he blushed not to grant the favour, and actually blamed the accident which
had proved fatal to the accused before he could be convicted in his presence.
Just as if in a three years’ interval an opportunity was wanting for the trial
of an old ex-consul and the father of a number of ex-consuls. Next Drusus perished,
after having prolonged life for eight days on the most wretched of food, even
chewing the stuffing, his bed. According to some writers, Macro had been instructed
that, in case of Sejanus attempting an armed revolt, he was to hurry the young
prince out of the confinement in which he was detained in the Palace and put
him at the head of the people. Subsequently the emperor, as a rumour was gaining
ground that he was on the point of a reconciliation with his daughter-in-law
and his grandson, chose to be merciless rather than to relent.

24. He even bitterly reviled him after his death, taunting him with nameless
abominations and with a spirit bent on his family’s ruin and hostile to the
State. And, what seemed most horrible of all, he ordered a daily journal of
all that he said and did to be read in public. That there had been spies by
his side for so many years, to note his looks, his sighs, and even his whispered
thoughts, and that his grandfather could have heard read, and published all,
was scarce credible. But letters of Attius, a centurion, and Didymus, a freedman,
openly exhibited the names of slave after slave who had respectively struck
or scared Drusus as he was quitting his chamber. The centurion had actually
added, as something highly meritorious, his own language in all its brutality,
and some utterances of the dying man in which, at first feigning loss of reason,
he imprecated in seeming madness fearful things on Tiberius, and then, when
hope of life was gone, denounced him with a studied and elaborate curse. “As
he had slain a daughter-in-law, a brother’s son, and son’s sons, and filled
his whole house with bloodshed, so might he pay the full penalty due to the
name and race of his ancestors as well as to future generations.” The Senate
clamorously interrupted, with an affectation of horror, but they were penetrated
by alarm and amazement at seeing that a hitherto cunning prince, who had shrouded
his wickedness in mystery, had waxed so bold as to remove, so to speak, the
walls of his house and display his grandson under a centurion’s lash, amid the
buffetings of slaves, craving in vain the last sustenance of life.

25. Men’s grief at all this had not died away when news was heard of Agrippina.
She had lived on, sustained by hope, I suppose, after the destruction of Sejanus,
and, when she found no abatement of horrors, had voluntarily perished, though
possibly nourishment was refused her and a fiction concocted of a death that
might seem self-chosen. Tiberius, it is certain, vented his wrath in the foulest
charges. He reproached her with unchastity, with having had Asinius Gallus as
a paramour and being driven by his death to loathe existence. But Agrippina,
who could not endure equality and loved to domineer, was with her masculine
aspirations far removed from the frailties of women. The emperor further observed
that she died on the same day on which Sejanus had paid the penalty of his crime
two years before, a fact, he said, to be recorded; and he made it a boast that
she had not been strangled by the halter and flung down the Gemonian steps.
He received a vote of thanks, and it was decreed that on the seventeenth of
October, the day on which both perished, through all future years, an offering
should be consecrated to Jupiter.

26. Soon afterwards Cocceius Nerva, a man always at the emperor’s side, a
master of law both divine and human, whose position was secure and health sound,
resolved to die. Tiberius, as soon as he knew it, sat by him and asked his reasons,
adding intreaties, and finally protesting that it would be a burden on his conscience
and a blot on his reputation, if the most intimate of his friends were to fly
from life without any cause for death. Nerva turned away from his expostulations
and persisted in his abstinence from all food. Those who knew his thoughts said
that as he saw more closely into the miseries of the State, he chose, in anger
and alarm, an honourable death, while he was yet safe and unassailed on. Meanwhile
Agrippina’s ruin, strange to say, dragged Plancina with it. Formerly the wife
of Cneius Piso, and one who had openly exulted at the death of Germanicus, she
had been saved, when Piso fell, by the intreaties of Augusta, and not less by
the enmity of Agrippina. When hatred and favour had alike passed away, justice
asserted itself. Pursued by charges universally notorious, she suffered by her
own hand a penalty tardy rather than undeserved.

27. Amid the many sorrows which saddened Rome, one cause of grief was the
marriage of Julia, Drusus’s daughter and Nero’s late wife, into the humbler
family of Rubellius Blandus, whose grandfather many remembered as a Roman knight
from Tibur. At the end of the year the death of Aelius Lamia, who, after being
at last released from the farce of governing Syria, had become city-prefect,
was celebrated with the honours of a censor’s funeral. He was a man of illustrious
descent, and in a hale old age; and the fact of the province having been withheld
gained him additional esteem. Subsequently, on the death of Flaccus Pomponius,
propraetor of Syria, a letter from the emperor was read, in which he complained
that all the best men who were fit to command armies declined the service, and
that he was thus necessarily driven to intreaties, by which some of the ex-consuls
might be prevailed on to take provinces. He forgot that Arruntius had been kept
at home now for ten years, that he might not go to Spain. That same year Marcus
Lepidus also died. I have dwelt at sufficient length on his moderation and wisdom
in my earlier books, and I need not further enlarge on his noble descent. Assuredly
the family of the Aemilii has been rich in good citizens, and even the members
of that house whose morals were corrupt, still lived with a certain splendour.

28. During the consulship of Paulus Fabius and Lucius Vitellius, the bird
called the phoenix, after a long succession of ages, appeared in Egypt and furnished
the most learned men of that country and of Greece with abundant matter for
the discussion of the marvellous phenomenon. It is my wish to make known all
on which they agree with several things, questionable enough indeed, but not
too absurd to be noticed. That it is a creature sacred to the sun, differing
from all other birds in its beak and in the tints of its plumage, is held unanimously
by those who have described its nature. As to the number of years it lives,
there are various accounts. The general tradition says five hundred years. Some
maintain that it is seen at intervals of fourteen hundred and sixty-one years,
and that the former birds flew into the city called Heliopolis successively
in the reigns of Sesostris, Amasis, and Ptolemy, the third king of the Macedonian
dynasty, with a multitude of companion birds marvelling at the novelty of the
appearance. But all antiquity is of course obscure. From Ptolemy to Tiberius
was a period of less than five hundred years. Consequently some have supposed
that this was a spurious phoenix, not from the regions of Arabia, and with none
of the instincts which ancient tradition has attributed to the bird. For when
the number of years is completed and death is near, the phoenix, it is said,
builds a nest in the land of its birth and infuses into it a germ of life from
which an offspring arises, whose first care, when fledged, is to bury its father.
This is not rashly done, but taking up a load of myrrh and having tried its
strength by a long flight, as soon as it is equal to the burden and to the journey,
it carries its father’s body, bears it to the altar of the Sun, and leaves it
to the flames. All this is full of doubt and legendary exaggeration. Still,
there is no question that the bird is occasionally seen in Egypt.

29. Rome meanwhile being a scene of ceaseless bloodshed, Pomponius Labeo,
who was, as I have related, governor of Moesia, severed his veins and let his
life ebb from him. His wife, Paxaea, emulated her husband. What made such deaths
eagerly sought was dread of the executioner, and the fact too that the condemned,
besides forfeiture of their property, were deprived of burial, while those who
decided their fate themselves, had their bodies interred, and their wills remained
valid, a recompense this for their despatch. The emperor, however, argued in
a letter to the Senate that it had been the practice of our ancestors, whenever
they broke off an intimacy, to forbid the person their house, and so put an
end to friendship. “This usage he had himself revived in Labeo’s case, but Labeo,
being pressed by charges of maladministration in his province and other crimes,
had screened his guilt by bringing odium on another, and had groundlessly alarmed
his wife, who, though criminal, was still free from danger.” Mamercus Scaurus
was then for the second time impeached, a man of distinguished rank and ability
as an advocate, but of infamous life. He fell, not through the friendship of
Sejanus, but through what was no less powerful to destroy, the enmity of Macro,
who practised the same arts more secretly. Macro’s information was grounded
on the subject of a tragedy written by Scaurus, from which he cited some verses
which might be twisted into allusions to Tiberius. But Servilius and Cornelius,
his accusers, alleged adultery with Livia and the practice of magical rites.
Scaurus, as befitted the old house of the Aemilii, forestalled the fatal sentence
at the persuasion of his wife Sextia, who urged him to die and shared his death.

Next: Book 6 [30]