The Works of Tacitus
tr. by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb
[1864-1877]
Tacitus: Annals Book 13 [50]
50. That same year, repeated demands on the part of the people, who denounced
the excessive greed of the revenue collectors, made Nero doubt whether he should
not order the repeal of all indirect taxes, and so confer a most splendid boon
on the human race. But this sudden impulse was checked by the senators, who,
having first heartily praised the grandeur of his conception, pointed out “that
the dissolution of the empire must ensue if the revenues which supported the
State were to be diminished; for as soon as the customs were swept away, there
would follow a demand for the abolition of the direct taxes. Many companies
for the collection of the indirect taxes had been formed by consuls and tribunes,
when the freedom of the Roman people was still in its vigour, and arrangements
were subsequently made to insure an exact correspondence between the amount
of income and the necessary disbursements. Certainly some restraint, they admitted,
must be put on the cupidity of the revenue collectors, that they might not by
new oppressions bring into odium what for so many years had been endured without
a complaint.”
51. Accordingly the emperor issued an edict that the regulations about every
branch of the public revenue, which had hitherto been kept secret, should be
published; that claims which had been dropped should not be revived after a
year; that the praetor at Rome, the propraetor or proconsul in the provinces,
should give judicial precedence to all cases against the collectors; that the
soldiers should retain their immunities except when they traded for profit,
with other very equitable arrangements, which for a short time were maintained
and were subsequently disregarded. However, the repeal of the two per cent.
and two-and-a-half per cent. taxes remains in force, as well as that of others
bearing names invented by the collectors to cover their illegal exactions. In
our transmarine provinces the conveyance of corn was rendered less costly, and
it was decided that merchant ships should not be assessed with their owner’s
property, and that no tax should be paid on them.
52. Two men under prosecution from Africa, in which province they had held
proconsular authority, Sulpicius Camerinus and Pomponius Silvanus, were acquitted
by the emperor. Camerinus had against him a few private persons who charged
him with cruelty rather than with extortion. Silvanus was beset by a host of
accusers, who demanded time for summoning their witnesses, while the defendant
insisted on being at once put on his defence. And he was successful, through
his wealth, his childlessness, and his old age, which he prolonged beyond the
life of those by whose corrupt influence he had escaped.
53. Up to this time everything had been quiet in Germany, from the temper
of the generals, who, now that triumphal decorations had been vulgarised, hoped
for greater glory by the maintenance of peace. Paulinus Pompeius and Lucius
Vetus were then in command of the army. Still, to avoid keeping the soldiers
in idleness, the first completed the embankment begun sixty-three years before
by Drusus to confine the waters of the Rhine, while Vetus prepared to connect
the Moselle and the Arar by a canal, so that troops crossing the sea and then
conveyed on the Rhone and Arar might sail by this canal into the Moselle and
the Rhine, and thence to the ocean. Thus the difficulties of the route being
removed, there would be communication for ships between the shores of the west
and of the north. Aelius Gracilis, the governor of Belgica, discouraged the
work by seeking to deter Vetus from bringing his legions into another man’s
province, and so drawing to himself the attachment of Gaul. This result he repeatedly
said would excite the fears of the emperor, an assertion by which meritorious
undertakings are often hindered.
54. Meantime, from the continued inaction of our armies, a rumour prevailed
that the commanders had been deprived of the right of leading them against the
enemy. Thereupon the Frisii moved up their youth to the forests and swamps,
and their non-fighting population, over the lakes, to the river-bank, and established
themselves in unoccupied lands, reserved for the use of our soldiers, under
the leadership of Verritus and Malorix, the kings of the tribe, as far as Germans
are under kings. Already they had settled themselves in houses, had sown the
fields, and were cultivating the soil as if it had been their ancestors’, when
Dubius Avitus, who had succeeded Paulinus in the province, by threatening them
with a Roman attack if they did not retire into their old country or obtain
a new territory from the emperor, constrained Verritus and Malorix to become
suppliants. They went to Rome, and while they waited for Nero, who was intent
on other engagements, among the sights shown to the barbarians they were admitted
into Pompey’s theatre, where they might behold the vastness of the Roman people.
There at their leisure (for in the entertainment, ignorant as they were, they
found no amusement) they asked questions about the crowd on the benches, about
the distinctions of classes, who were the knights, where was the Senate, till
they observed some persons in a foreign dress on the seats of the senators.
Having asked who they were, when they were told that this honour was granted
to envoys from those nations which were distinguished for their bravery and
their friendship to Rome, they exclaimed that no men on earth surpassed the
Germans in arms or in loyalty. Then they went down and took their seat among
the senators. The spectators hailed the act goodnaturedly, as due to the impulsiveness
of a primitive people and to an honourable rivalry. Nero gave both of them the
Roman franchise, and ordered the Frisii to withdraw from the territory in question.
When they disdained obedience, some auxiliary cavalry by a sudden attack made
it a necessity for them, capturing or slaughtering those who obstinately resisted.
55. Of this same territory, the Ampsivarii now possessed themselves, a tribe
more powerful not only from their numbers, but from having the sympathy of the
neighbouring peoples, as they had been expelled by the Chauci and had to beg,
as homeless outcasts, a secure exile. Their cause was pleaded by a man, famous
among those nations and loyal to Rome, Boiocalus by name, who reminded us that
on the Cheruscan revolt he had been imprisoned by the order of Arminius, that
afterwards he had served under the leadership of Tiberius and of Germanicus,
and that to a fifty years’ obedience he was adding the merit of subjecting his
tribe to our dominion. “What an extent of plain,” he would say, “lies open into
which the flocks and herds of the Roman soldiers may some day be sent! Let them
by all means keep retreats for their cattle, while men are starving; only let
them not prefer a waste and a solitude to friendly nations. Once these fields
belonged to the Chamavi; then to the Tubantes; after them to the Usipii. As
heaven is for the gods, so the earth has been given to mankind, and lands uninhabited
are common to all.” Then looking up to the sun and invoking the other heavenly
bodies, he asked them, as though standing in their presence, “whether they wished
to behold an empty soil; rather let them submerge it beneath the sea against
the plunderers of the land.”
56. Avitus was impressed by this language and said that people must submit
to the rule of their betters; that the gods to whom they appealed, had willed
that the decision as to what should be given or taken from them, was to rest
with the Romans, who would allow none but themselves to be judges. This was
his public answer to the Ampsivarii; to Boiocalus his reply was that in remembrance
of past friendship he would cede the lands in question. Boiocalus spurned the
offer as the price of treason, adding, “We may lack a land to live in; we cannot
lack one to die in.” And so they parted with mutual exasperation. The Ampsivarii
now called on the Bructeri, the Tencteri, and yet more distant tribes to be
their allies in war. Avitus, having written to Curtilius Mancia, commander of
the Upper army, asking him to cross the Rhine and display his troops in the
enemy’s rear, himself led his legions into the territory of the Tencteri, and
threatened them with extermination unless they dissociated themselves from the
cause. When upon this the Tencteri stood aloof, the Bructeri were cowed by a
like terror. And so, as the rest too were for averting perils which did not
concern them, the Ampsivarian tribe in its isolation retreated to the Usipii
and Tubantes. Driven out of these countries, they sought refuge with the Chatti
and then with the Cherusci, and after long wanderings, as destitute outcasts,
received now as friends now as foes, their entire youth were slain in a strange
land, and all who could not fight, were apportioned as booty.
57. The same summer a great battle was fought between the Hermunduri and
the Chatti, both forcibly claiming a river which produced salt in plenty, and
bounded their territories. They had not only a passion for settling every question
by arms, but also a deep-rooted superstition that such localities are specially
near to heaven, and that mortal prayers are nowhere more attentively heard by
the gods. It is, they think, through the bounty of divine power, that in that
river and in those forests salt is produced, not, as in other countries, by
the drying up of an overflow of the sea, but by the combination of two opposite
elements, fire and water, when the latter had been poured over a burning pile
of wood. The war was a success for the Hermunduri, and the more disastrous to
the Chatti because they had devoted, in the event of victory, the enemy’s army
to Mars and Mercury, a vow which consigns horses, men, everything indeed on
the vanquished side to destruction. And so the hostile threat recoiled on themselves.
Meanwhile, a state in alliance with us, that of the Ubii, suffered grievously
from an unexpected calamity. Fires suddenly bursting from the earth seized everywhere
on country houses, crops, and villages, and were rushing on to the very walls
of the newly founded colony. Nor could they be extinguished by the fall of rain,
or by river-water, or by any other moisture, till some countrymen, in despair
of a remedy and in fury at the disaster, flung stones from a distance, and then,
approaching nearer, as the flames began to sink, tried to scare them away, like
so many wild beasts, with the blows of clubs and other weapons. At last they
stript off their clothes and threw them on the fire, which they were the more
likely to quench, the more they had been soiled by common use.
58. That same year, the fact that the tree in the Comitium, which 840 years
before had sheltered the infancy of Romulus and Remus, was impaired by the decay
of its boughs and by the withering of its stem, was accounted a portent, till
it began to renew its life with fresh shoots.
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