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Complete Letters of Pliny the Younger translated by P.G. Walsh (2006)

Gaius Pliny sends greetings to his friend Septicius Clarus
“On numerous occasions you have urged me to assemble and to publish such letters as I had composed with some care. I have now assembled them without maintaining chronological sequence, for I was not compiling a history, but as each happened to come to hand.”
(Opening of the first letter in Pliny’s Collected Letters)

The letters of Cicero

The letters of Pliny the Younger (61 to around 113 AD) are as famous as those if Cicero (106 to 43 BC) but different. Cicero lived in extremely turbulent times and was right at the centre of events, a personal friend of Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, Brutus and other key players in the political crises which led to the civil war of 49 BC. Plus he had a highly developed interest in rhetoric, poetry and philosophy, plus he had an exuberant gregarious showman personality, all of which makes his letters a joy to read 2,000 years later.

Pliny’s career

Pliny, by contrast, was a much more sober figure. His uncle (Pliny the Elder, 23 to 79 AD) was a confidante of the emperor Vespasian and a member of the imperial council. The nephew was a lifelong civil servant and administrator, moving smoothly up the ranks of the Roman administration: thus he progressed through the posts of quaestor, plebeian tribune and praetor during the reign of the emperor Domitian (ruled 81 to 96 AD) and then, under the long, peaceful rule of Trajan (98 to 117) his career really took off.

Pliny served as prefect to the military treasury then, after Domitian was assassinated in 96, prefect of the treasury of Saturn. Then, in 100, he was made suffect consul. It was on this occasion that he delivered a speech of thanks to Trajan in the senate and this speech has survived in its entirety; he called it the Panegyricus. In 103 Pliny was appointed to the college of augurs, all the more pleased because this was a position his hero, Cicero, had held. In 104, he was appointed curator of then Tiber (responsible for protecting against flooding etc). Finally, the peak of his career came with his appointment as governor of the province of Bithynia-Pontus in 109 (or 110), where he probably died in post a few years later (scholars think this because the letters abruptly cease in 113).

Pliny’s letters

Pliny’s letters are arranged into ten books. Books 1 to 9 contain 246 letters all from Pliny himself; book 10 contains 121 letters, some authored by himself, some by the emperor Trajan. All the letters were written between 97 and 112, during the principates of Nerva and Trajan.

The absolutely key fact to grasp is that, unlike Cicero’s letters, Pliny’s letters are not arranged in chronological order – instead, they have been carefully organised to display the breadth of Pliny’s interests and the wide range of recipients. In this respect the letters are a calculating form of autobiography.

(Autobiography as we understand it didn’t really appear in Latin until the Confessions of Saint Augustine in about 400 AD. Military and political figures had written commentaries on their careers and decisions – notably Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic Wars – and Cicero had pioneered a way of making a collection of letters build up into a kind of mosaic autobiography, a self portrait from multiple angles. But no autobiography as such till the Christian saint.)

Thus Pliny’s letters are artfully grouped to show the author to best advantage, as advocate in the courts, politician in the senate, knowledgeable man of letters, as owner of numerous properties and estates, as devoted husband to his wife.

(In fact Pliny married three times: firstly, when he was about 18, to a stepdaughter of Veccius Proculus, who died at age 37; secondly to the daughter of Pompeia Celerina; and thirdly to Calpurnia. Of these three it’s Calpurnia who we have letters to, in which Pliny recorded their marriage, conveys is love for her, and his grief when she miscarried a baby.)

Topics and subjects

The editor and translator of the Oxford University Press paperback edition of the letters, Professor P.G. Walsh, groups the letters under the following headings:

Advocate

Pliny as advocate in the law courts (book 2, letter11; 2.14; 4.9; 5.20).

Politician

Pliny as politician, speaking in the senate, working with the emperor (8.14; 9.13 and book 10 throughout).

His wife

Pliny married three times but we have few references to the first two, whereas there are plenty of letters to the third, Calpurnia (4.19; 6.4; 7.5; sadness about her miscarriage 8.10).

The death or illness of friends

And the way illness prompts thoughts of suicide in some (1.12; 1.22)

Diatribes against enemies

Such as Marcus Aquilius Regulus, the noted informer under Domitian’s tyranny, ‘wealthy, leader of a faction’ (1.5; 2.20; 4.2): the cumulative effect of the letters on this topic is to remind you how utterly toxic, rivalrous and dangerous Roman political life could be; everyone prosecuted everyone else for all manner of complex political or financial reasons, and if you lost the case you were liable to exile at best, execution at worst.

Roman social life

Visits to the theatre (7.24), dinner parties, particularly promoting the high-minded atmosphere at his dinner parties compared with the vulgarity of other peoples’ (1.15; 2.6; 9.17).

Slaves

Pliny takes a liberal humanitarian view (5.6; 5.19; 8.1; 8.16; 8.19), in one letter explaining that he is keen to manumit or free as many of his educated slaves as possible in order to populate his native town (Comum, by Lake Como in north Italy) with good citizens. No question of freeing his uneducated workers, though.

Education

The Roman system of education echoed the three-part system of the Greeks:

primary school under a litterator till the age of 7
secondary school under a grammaticus until the age of 11
upon receipt of the toga of manhood at 14, a boy proceeded to the school of rhetoric where me would stay till 18, maybe longer. Children of the wealthy were often taught at home by tutors

Literary life

Attendance at other peoples’ readings (1.13; 6.17) and his own works which include the Panegyricus (3.18) and his poems (9.34). Pliny describes the works of half a dozen contemporary poets, describes public readings, corresponds with his friends Tacitus and Suetonius.

He defends his poetry against the accusation of vulgarity, arguing that, if some of the subject matter is coarse and the language vulgar, this is to suit the genre, claiming like Catullus, Ovid and others, that his verse may be indecent but is no reflection of his upstanding life and morals (5.3).

Tacitus, Suetonius and Martial

The letters give the immodest impression that he is on friendly terms with all the major literary figures of the day. He is especially proud of his close friendship with Tacitus (born 56, 5 years before Pliny), to whom 11 letters are addressed. They worked together as prosecutors in the trial of Marius Priscus (2.11) and his description of the eruption of Vesuvius was written as a favour for Tacitus (see below). He sends his friend details of his involvement in another prosecution in the hope that Tacitus will include it in his Histories. Their relationship is one of ‘devoted pupil to master’.

By contrast his relationship with Suetonius (born 69 i.e. 8 years younger) is one of patron to protegé. Pliny helps the younger man secure posts in the administration (3.8) or buy property (1.24). The letters track Suetonius’s rising fame, as his early works of biography are published, till we find Pliny asking the younger man advice about technique for reading poetry in public recitations (9.34). Scholars think Pliny may have found Suetonius a job on his staff as governor of Pontus. And that Suetonius was close enough to the older man to have played a role in gathering his letters for publication.

Martial was about 20 years older than Pliny (born around 41 AD). He composed an obituary when he heard of Martial’s death (3.21). From this we learn that Pliny contributed to Martial’s travelling costs when the older man retired from Rome and went back to his home town in Spain in 97.

Speeches

Pliny considered himself an orator and spent his leisure time revising his speeches, of which he is inordinately proud, for publication, a process described in now fewer than 15 letters; in the centuries-old debate between the two main styles of rhetoric – the Attic style, compressed and factual, or the Asiatic style, more flowery – he comes down on the Asiatic side, defending it for greater richness of vocabulary and figures of speech (9.26).

Pliny’s style

Some of the letters comment on what the style of an ideal letter should be. In 7.98 he suggests to a young friend looking for advice about oratory that we look to letters ‘for language which is compressed and unadorned.’ In 1.16 he describes hearing someone else’s letters read out as being like listening to Plautus or Terence without the metre. Walsh summarises Pliny appeared to believe letters should be written in a plain but educated style. This, Walsh points out, is why Pliny’s letters make better material for teaching Latin than the more ornate and stylised speeches of Cicero or history of Livy (p.xxxii).

Pliny reveres Cicero

Walsh says Cicero was Pliny’s ‘idol’ (p.xxii). Pliny refers to Cicero’s integrity and also his, by this period, legendary eloquence. He was especially gratified to be appointed to the College of Augurs in 103 because this was a position Cicero had held some 170 years earlier.

Also, of course, in compiling a collection of his letters, Pliny must have had in mind the example of Cicero’s correspondence, published by his secretary soon after his death in the 43 BC, considering what did and did not work. As it happens Cicero’s 914 letters are the earliest surviving collection we have of the genre. Walsh makes the useful point that there can be considered three types of letter:

the verse letter, as developed by Horace in his Epistles and by Ovid, artfully in his Heroides, and then with pathetic pleading in his Black Sea letters
the philosophical letter, represented by the stodgy collection of Stoic teachings written by Seneca the Younger to his friend Lucilius
the genuine and general letter

But there’s another element which struck me, which is boastfulness. Cicero was famously and often ludicrously self-important. I base this on a reading of his legal speeches and letters, his endless reminders in these and his philosophical writings that he single-handedly saved the Roman state against the Catiline conspiracy, and the fact that he wrote a long poem about this feat which was ridiculed by his contemporaries and later readers.

Walsh appears to take Pliny at face value when he describes himself as modest (pxxii) but, personally, I found some of the letters rather boastful, where he talks about people stopping talking when he comes into a room or his acolytes and devotees. Pace Walsh I found him quite full of himself and his views and this, in a roundabout way, is indeed a tribute to his idol Cicero who was notoriously self-promoting and boastful.

Two standout topics

So his correspondence offers a variety of subject matter and insights into the lifestyle, responsibilities and opinions of a senior official of the first century Roman Empire, but never quite the acute intensity and excitement of Cicero’s letters. There are two standout moments in the correspondence:

1. Vesuvius

Pliny’s father died when he was young and he was adopted by his uncle, Pliny the Elder, who was the author, among other things, of a natural history. Young Pliny picked up an interest in the natural world from his uncle and this is demonstrated at various moments throughout the letters.

The most famous passage is his extended description of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius which buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in August 79 AD and which Pliny witnessed at first hand. I was fascinated to learn that Pliny wrote this at the request of his friend Tacitus who included it in a now-lost part of the Histories. Letter 6.16 describes how his uncle, as commander of the fleet at Micenum had ordered a galley to go close to the shore so he could observe the huge ash cloud emerging from the volcano. Here he received urgent messages for help from friends at the threatened town of Stabiae so he took the galley into port, and went to see them. With remarkable foolishness, he dined and slept the night as the condition of the volcano deteriorated. He was woken in the middle of the night to discover the state of the sea was too disordered to set sail and it was here, on the beach, that Pliny the Elder and his party of friends, bombarded with falling pumice stones, all died of asphyxiation.

Latter 6.20 reverts to the experience of Pliny himself. Just 17 years old and left at Misenum with his mother, overnight on 24-25 August they feel all the buildings shake and the lad guides his mother out of the town, accompanied by a stream of panic-stricken townspeople. When the thick black cloud descends he takes his mother to one side, so they don’t get trampled in the panic. When daylight comes they look about them at a landscape covered with ash as if by snow. At which point they trudge back into the town, to be greeted by blood-curdling prophecies of doom.

Absent from either letter is any description of the two towns famously devastated by the catastrophe, Pompeii and Herculaneum.

2. Christians

The famous exchange in a couple of letters where Pliny writes to his boss, the emperor Trajan, in his capacity as governor of Pontus, asking his advice what to do with the troublesome new sect of Christians which have begun to be noticeable in the province (Pliny’s enquiry is letter 10.96 and Trajan’s reply 10.97, introduction p.xxiii).

This raises the broader point that his correspondence with Trajan, which is gathered in the tenth and final book, is extremely illuminating for the directness and openness of their exchanges. Pliny writes to the emperor conveying his best wishes then briskly getting to the point of describing this or that problem; and we are sooo fortunate to have Trajan’s replies, which come back with equally brisk and practical advice. With regard to the Christians, this little exchange is ‘famous’ because it tends to be quoted or summarised in just about every account of early Christianity, which is a lot.

Walsh’s notes

The OUP World Classics edition strikes me as being outstanding. P.G. Walsh’s 26-page introduction is a model of clarity and thoughtful analysis. There’s a handy map of Bithynia and Pontus featuring all the places mentioned in book 10 when Pliny was governor there. There’s an up-to-date bibliography and a simple clear timeline of Pliny’s life.

But the glory of the book is its notes. The letters were arranged to offer a many-sided portrait of their author and the times he lived in. They are addressed to a very wide variety of friends, relatives, colleagues and so on and they make reference to all sorts of topics of contemporary interest, some of which are listed above. Walsh provides 80 pages of notes which give potted profiles of every one of the addresses and pick up and explicate every one of the numerous references, to people, places and events. Read slowly and carefully, Pliny’s letters and Walsh’s notes provide a fascinating overview of the man and his times.

Greek and French

Walsh explains that educated Romans frequently dropped Greek phrases or quotes from Greek classic literature (Homer or the playwrights) into their texts. It’s interesting that he chooses to replicate this by using French tags in his English translation (though obviously keeping and translating into English actual quotes from Homer et al). The interest being that French tags in English play a comparable role to Greek tags in Latin, namely to show off your education and intellectual credentials. To swank, meaning: ‘to display one’s wealth, knowledge, or achievements in a way that is intended to impress others.’

Credit

‘The Complete letters of Pliny the Younger’, translated and introduced by P.G. Walsh, was published by Oxford University Press in 2006. All references are to the OUP World Classics paperback edition.

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by Simon on January 25, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Autobiography

Tagged ancient Rome, Asiatic style, Attic style, autobiography, Bithynia, Bithynia-Pontus, Black sea Letters, Brutus, Calpurnia, Catullus, Christianity, Christians, Cicero, classics, college of augurs, Comum, Confessions of Saint Augustine, Domitian, emperor Trajan, Gaius Pliny, grammaticus, Herculaneum, Heroides, Julius Caesar, Lake Como, Latin, letters, Letters from a Stoic, Letters of Cicero, litterator, Livy, Lucilius, Marcus Aquilius Regulus, Martial, Micenum, Mount Vesuvius, OUP World Classics, Ovid, Oxford University Press, Panegyricus, PG Walsh, Plautus, Pliny, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Pliny's Collected Letters, Pompeia Celerina, Pompeii, Pompey the Great, Pontus, Professor P.G. Walsh, Roman education, Roman Empire, Roman literature, Seneca, Seneca the Younger, Septicius Clarus, speeches, St Augustine, Stabiae, Stoicism, Suetonius, Tacitus, Tacitus Histories, Terence, The Complete letters of Pliny the Younger, the Gallic Wars, the Panegyricus, toga of manhood, Trajan, Translation, Veccius Proculus, Vespasian, Vesuvius

Posted by Simon on January 25, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/01/25/letters-pliny-the-younger-p-g-walsh/

The Life of Domitian by Suetonius

A sub-edited version of the 1914 Loeb Classical Library translation of Suetonius’s Life of Domitian by J.C. Rolfe, with comments and clarifications.

Summary of Domitian’s life (from Wikipedia)

Domitianus (Domitian) lived from 51 to 96 AD and reigned as Roman emperor from 81 to 96. The son of Vespasian and the younger brother of Titus, his two predecessors on the throne, he was the third and final member of the Flavian dynasty. Domitian’s authoritarian style of ruling put him at odds with the senate, whose powers he drastically curtailed.

Domitian had an early moment of prominence in the Year of Four Emperors, 69 AD, aged just 18, after Vitellius was assassinated and before Vespasian arrived in Rome to take power, when he was acclaimed ‘Caesar’ and nominally ran the government. Once Vespasian arrived in Rome and was enthroned, though, Domitian reverted to playing a minor and largely ceremonial role during the reigns of his father and brother.

After Titus died on 13 September 81, Domitian was declared emperor by the Praetorian Guard. His 15-year reign was to be the longest since that of Tiberius. As emperor, Domitian:

strengthened the economy by revaluing the Roman coinage
expanded the border defences of the empire
initiated a massive building program to restore the damaged city of Rome

Significant wars were fought in Britain, where his general Agricola attempted to conquer Caledonia (Scotland), and in Dacia, where Domitian was unable to secure a decisive victory against King Decebalus.

Domitian’s government exhibited strong authoritarian characteristics. Religious, military, and cultural propaganda fostered a cult of personality. He nominated himself perpetual censor in an effort to control public and private morals.

As a result Domitian was popular with the people and the army but considered a tyrant by members of the senate. Domitian’s reign came to an end in 96 when he was assassinated by court officials. He was succeeded the same day by his advisor, Nerva.

After his death Domitian’s memory was condemned to oblivion by the Senate while senatorial and equestrian authors such as Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Suetonius propagated the view of Domitian as a cruel and paranoid tyrant. The later part of his rule was regularly described as a ‘tyranny’. (In the Penguin translation of the Epigrams of Martial, Peter Howell says that in his day, 1964, Domitian had a reputation little short of Hitler’s for evil tyranny.)

Modern revisionists have characterised Domitian as a ruthless but efficient autocrat whose cultural, economic and political programs laid the foundation of the peaceful second century.

The Life of Domitian by Suetonius

(1) Domitian was born on the ninth day before the Kalends of November [24 October] of the year when his father was consul elect and was about to enter on the office in the following month [51 AD] in a street of the sixth region called ‘the Pomegranate’, in a house which he afterwards converted into a temple of the Flavian family.

Domitian is said to have passed the period of his boyhood and early youth in great poverty and infamy for it is said that he did not possess a single piece of plate.

It is a well-known fact that Claudius Pollio, a man of praetorian rank, against whom Nero’s poem ‘The One-eyed Man’ is directed, preserved a letter in Domitian’s handwriting and sometimes exhibited it, in which the future emperor promised him an assignation [i.e. sex]. And some people claim that Domitian was also debauched [i.e. abused] by Nerva, who succeeded him.

In the war with Vitellius Domitian took refuge in the Capitol with his paternal uncle, Sabinus, and a part of the forces under him. When Vitellius’s forces stormed the hill and the temple of Jupiter was set alight, Domitian hid during the night with the guardian of the shrine. In the morning, disguised in the tunic of a follower of Isis and mingling with the priests of that fickle superstition, he went across the Tiber with a single companion to the mother of one of his school-fellows. There he was so effectually concealed that, although he was closely followed he could not be found, in spite of a thorough search. [For more on this episode, see Tacitus’s Histories.]

It was only after the Flavian forces took Rome that Domitian ventured out. After being hailed as ‘Caesar’, he assumed the office of city praetor with consular powers, but only in name, turning over all the judicial business to his next colleague.

Domitian exercised all the tyranny of his high position (i.e. son of the emperor) so lawlessly that it was even then apparent what sort of a man he was going to be. For example, after making free with the wives of many men, he went so far as to marry Domitia Longina who was the wife of Aelius Lamia. And in a single day he assigned more than twenty positions in the city and in the provinces, which led Vespasian to say more than once that he was surprised that his son did not appoint the emperor’s successor along with the rest.

(2) Domitian began an expedition against Gaul and the Germanies which was uncalled for and from which his father’s friends dissuaded him, simply to make himself equal to his brother Titus in power and rank. For this he was reprimanded and, to give him a better realisation of his youth (aged 18) and position, he was made to live with his father. When they appeared in public Domitian followed the emperor’s chair and that of his brother in a litter. He also attended their triumph over Judaea riding on a white horse. Of his six consulships before he became emperor only one was a regular one, and he obtained that only because his brother gave place to him and recommended his appointment.

Domitian made a pretence of modesty and especially of an interest in poetry, an art which had previously been as unfamiliar to him as it was later despised and rejected, and he even gave readings in public.

Yet in spite of all this, when Vologaesus, king of the Parthians, had asked for auxiliaries against the Alani and for one of Vespasian’s sons as their leader, Domitian made every effort to have himself sent rather than Titus and, when the affair came to nothing, he tried by gifts and promises to induce other eastern kings to make the same request.

On the death of his father and his older brother, Titus, succeeding, Domitian hesitated for some time whether to offer a largess to the soldiers twice as large as the one his brother gave. He often said that he had been left a partner in the imperial power [i.e. alongside his brother] but that the will had been tampered with.

And from that time on he never ceased to plot against his brother secretly and openly, until Titus was seized with a dangerous illness whereupon Domitian ordered that he be left for dead before he had actually drawn his last breath. And after Titus’s death Domitian bestowed no honour upon him, save that of deification, and he often attacked his memory in ambiguous phrases, both in his speeches and in his edicts.

(3) At the beginning of his reign Domitian used to spend hours in seclusion every day, doing nothing but catch flies and stab them with a keenly-sharpened stylus. Consequently, when someone once asked whether anyone was in there with Caesar, Vibius Crispus made the witty reply, ‘Not even a fly.’

He had his wife Domitia honoured with the title ‘Augusta’. He had had a son by her in his second consulship, whom he lost the second year after he became emperor. He divorced her because of her love for the actor, Paris, but could not bear the separation and soon took her back, alleging that the people demanded it. [It was for lampooning this actor, Paris, that the satirist Juvenal was, according to some biographies, exiled to Egypt.]

In his administration of the government Domitian for some time showed himself inconsistent, with about an equal number of virtues and vices, but eventually he turned the virtues into vices. For so far as one may guess, it was contrary to his natural disposition but he was made rapacious through need and cruel through fear.

(4) Domitian constantly gave grand costly entertainments, both in the amphitheatre and in the Circus, where in addition to the usual races between two-horse and four-horse chariots, he also exhibited two battles, one between forces of infantry and the other by horsemen, and he even gave a naval battle in the amphitheatre.

As well as these, he gave hunts of wild beasts, gladiatorial shows at night by the light of torches, and not only combats between men but between women as well. He was always present, too, at the games given by the quaestors, which he revived after they had been abandoned for some time, and invariably granted the people the privilege of calling for two pairs of gladiators from his own school, and brought them in last, in all the splendour of the court.

During the whole of every gladiatorial show there always stood at his feet a small boy clad in scarlet, with an abnormally small head, with whom he used to talk a great deal, and sometimes seriously. At any rate, he was overheard to ask him if he knew why he had decided at the last appointment day to make Mettius Rufus prefect of Egypt.

He often gave sea-fights almost with regular fleets, having dug a lake near the Tiber and surrounded it with seats. He continued to witness the contests even in heavy rains.

Domitian also celebrated the Secular games reckoning the time, not according to the year when Claudius had last given them, but by the previous calculation of Augustus. In the course of these, to make it possible to finish a hundred races on the day of contests in the Circus, he diminished the number of laps from seven to five.

Domitian also established a quinquennial contest in honour of Jupiter Capitolinus of a threefold character, comprising music, riding, and gymnastics, and with considerably more prizes than are awarded nowadays. For there were competitions in prose declamation both in Greek and in Latin, between lyre-players, between choruses of such players and in the lyre alone without singing. In the stadium there were races even between women.

Domitian presided at the competitions in half-boots, clad in a purple toga in the Greek fashion, and wearing upon his head a golden crown with figures of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. By his side sat the priest of Jupiter and the college of the Flaviales (established for the worship of the deified Flavian emperors) similarly dressed, except that their crowns bore his image as well.

Domitian celebrated the Quinquatria every year in honour of Minerva at his Alban villa, and established for her a college of priests, from which men were chosen by lot to act as officers and give splendid shows of wild beasts and stage plays, besides holding contests in oratory and poetry.

Domitian made a present to the people of three hundred sesterces each on three occasions, and in the course of one of his shows in celebration of the feast of the Seven Hills gave a plentiful banquet, distributing large baskets of victuals to the senate and knights and smaller ones to the commons, and he himself was the first to begin to eat. On the following day he scattered gifts of all sorts of things to be scrambled for, and since the greater part of these fell where the people sat, he had five hundred tickets thrown into each section occupied by the senatorial and equestrian orders.

(5) Domitian restored many splendid buildings which had been destroyed by fire, among them the Capitolium, which had again been burned [rebuilt after having been burned down in 69, the Capitoline temple was again burned down in 80]. In all cases he gave the new buildings the inscription of his own name only, with no mention of the original builder.

He also built a new temple on the Capitoline hill in honour of Jupiter Custos and the forum which now bears the name of Nerva [who finished and dedicated it]. He had built a temple to the Flavian family, a stadium, an Odeum [or music hall] and a pool for sea-fights. From the stone used in this last the Circus Maximus was afterwards rebuilt, when both sides of it had been destroyed by fire.

(6) Domitian’s campaigns he undertook partly without provocation and partly of necessity. That against the Chatti was uncalled for, while the one against the Sarmatians was justified by the destruction of a legion with its commander. He made two against the Dacians, the first when Oppius Sabinus an ex-consul was defeated, and the second on the overthrow of Cornelius Fuscus, prefect of the Praetorian Guard, to whom he had entrusted the conduct of the war. After several battles of varying success he celebrated a double triumph over the Chatti and the Dacians. [Tacitus says that Domitian’s unjustified triumph over the Germans (and the Dacians) was a laughing-stock; Agricola, chapter 39.] His victories over the Sarmatians he commemorated merely by the offering of a laurel crown to Jupiter of the Capitol.

A civil war which was set on foot by Lucius Antonius, governor of Upper Germany, was put down in the emperor’s absence by a remarkable stroke of good fortune; for at the very hour of battle the Rhine suddenly thawed and prevented his barbarian allies from crossing over to Antonius. Domitian learned of this victory through omens before he actually had news of it, for on the very day when the decisive battle was fought a magnificent eagle enfolded his statue at Rome with its wings, uttering exultant shrieks. Soon afterwards the report of Antony’s death became so current that several went so far as to claim that they had seen his head brought to Rome.

(7) Domitian made many innovations in common customs. He abolished the distribution of food to the people and revived the custom of holding formal dinners. He added two factions of drivers in the Circus, with gold and purple as their colours, to the four former ones. He forbade the appearance of actors on the stage, but allowed the practice of their art in private houses. He prohibited the castration of males, and kept down the price of the eunuchs that remained in the hands of the slave dealers.

Once, upon the occasion of a plentiful wine crop attended with a scarcity of grain, thinking that the fields were neglected through too much attention to the vineyards, he made an edict forbidding anyone to plant more vines in Italy and ordering that the vineyards in the provinces be cut down, or that only half of them should be left standing; but he did not persist in carrying out the measure.

Domitian opened some of the most important offices of the court [i.e. those that had formerly been restricted to the senatorial order] to freedmen and Roman knights.

He prohibited the uniting of two legions in one camp and the deposit of more than 1,000 sesterces by any one soldier at headquarters because it was clear that Lucius Antonius had been especially led to attempt a revolution by the amount of such deposits in the combined winter quarters of two legions.

He increased the pay of the soldiers one fourth, by the addition of three gold pieces each year [i.e. raised the amount from nine to twelve aurei: an aureus contained 100 sesterces.]

(8) Domitian administered justice scrupulously and conscientiously, frequently holding special sittings on the tribunal in the Forum. He rescinded such decisions of the Hundred Judges as were made from interested motives [i.e. to curry favour with the rich or powerful]. He often warned the arbiters not to grant claims for freedom made under false pretences. He degraded jurors who accepted bribes, together with all their associates.

He also induced the tribunes of the commons to prosecute a corrupt aedile for extortion, and to ask the senate to appoint jurors in the case. He took such care to exercise restraint over the city officials and the governors of the provinces, that at no time were they more honest or just, whereas after his time we have seen many of them charged with all manner of offences.

In his role as censor he undertook the correction of public morals. He:

put an end to the licence at the theatres, where the general public occupied the seats reserved for the knights
did away with the prevailing publication of scurrilous lampoons in which distinguished men and women were attacked, and imposed ignominious penalties on their authors
expelled an ex-quaestor from the senate because he was given to acting and dancing
deprived notorious women of the use of litters, as well as of the right to receive inheritances and legacies
struck the name of a Roman knight from the list of jurors because he had taken back his wife after divorcing her and charging her with adultery
condemned several men of both orders, offenders against the Scantinian law
the incest of Vestal virgins, condoned even by his father and his brother, he punished severely in divers ways, at first by capital punishment and afterwards in the ancient fashion

For while Domitian allowed the sisters Oculata and Varronilla free choice of the manner of their death and banished their lovers, he later ordered that Cornelia, a chief-vestal who had been acquitted once but after a long interval again arraigned and found guilty, be buried alive and her lovers were beaten to death with rods in the Comitium – with the exception of an ex-praetor whom he allowed to go into exile, because he admitted his guilt while the case was still unsettled and the examination and torture of the witnesses had led to no result.

To protect the gods from being dishonoured with impunity by any sacrilege, Domitian caused a tomb which one of his freedmen had built for his son from stones intended for the temple of Jupiter of the Capitol to be destroyed by the soldiers and the bones and ashes contained in it thrown into the sea.

(9) In the earlier part of his reign Domitian so shrank from any form of bloodshed that while his father was still absent from the city, he planned to issue an edict that no oxen should be offered up, recalling the line of Virgil:

‘Ever yet an impious race did slay and feast upon bullocks.’

He was equally free from any suspicion of love of gain or of avarice, both in private life and for some time after becoming emperor. On the contrary, he often gave strong proofs not merely of integrity, but even of liberality.

He treated all his intimates most generously and there was nothing which he urged them more frequently, or with greater insistence, than that they should be niggardly in none of their acts. He would not accept inheritances left him by those who had children. He even annulled a legacy in the will of Rustus Caepio, who had provided that his heir should yearly pay a specified sum to each of the senators on his entrance into the House.

He cancelled the suits against those who had been posted as debtors to the public treasury for more than five years and would not allow a renewal except within a year and on the condition that an accuser who did not win his suit should be punished with exile.

Scribes of the quaestors who carried on business, which had become usual although contrary to the Clodian law, he pardoned for past offences.

Parcels of land which were left unoccupied here and there after the assignment of lands to the veterans he granted to their former owners as by right of possession. He checked false accusations designed for the profit of the privy purse and inflicted severe penalties on offenders, and a saying of his was current, that an emperor who does not punish informers hounds them on.

(10) But Domitian did not continue this course of mercy or integrity, although he turned to cruelty somewhat more speedily than to avarice. He put to death a pupil of the pantomimic actor Paris, who was still a beardless boy and ill at the time, because in his skill and his appearance he seemed not unlike his master [who he had had executed for having an affair with his wife].

He executed Hermogenes of Tarsus because of some allusions in his History, besides crucifying even the slaves who had written it out.

A householder who said that a Thracian gladiator was a match for the murmillo, but not for the giver of the games, he caused to be dragged from his seat and thrown into the arena to dogs, with this placard: ‘A favourer of the Thracians who spoke impiously.’

Domitian put to death many senators, among them several ex-consuls, including Civica Cerealis, at the very time when he was proconsul in Asia; Salvidienus Orfitus; Acilius Glabrio while he was in exile — these on the ground of plotting revolution, the rest on any charge, however trivial.

He slew Aelius Lamia for joking remarks, which were reflections on him, it is true, but made long before and harmless. For when Domitian had taken away Lamia’s wife, the latter replied to someone who praised his voice: ‘I practise continence’, and when Titus urged him to marry again, he replied: ‘Are you too looking for a wife?’

He put to death:

Salvius Cocceianus because he had kept the birthday of the emperor Otho, his paternal uncle
Mettius Pompusianus because it was commonly reported that he had an imperial nativity and carried about a map of the world on parchment and speeches of the kings and generals from Titus Livius, besides giving two of his slaves the names of Mago and Hannibal
Sallustius Lucullus, governor of Britain, for allowing some lances of a new pattern to be named ‘Lucullean’ after his own name
Junius Rusticus because he had published eulogies of Paetus Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus and called them the most upright of men – and on the occasion of this charge he banished all the philosophers from the city and from Italy

He also executed the younger Helvidius, alleging that in a farce composed for the stage he had under the characters of Paris and Oenone censured Domitian’s divorce from his wife. He executed Flavius Sabinus, too, one of his cousins, because on the day of the consular elections the crier had inadvertently announced him to the people as emperor elect, instead of consul.

After his victory in the civil war Domitian became even more cruel and to discover any conspirators who were in hiding, tortured many of the opposite party by a new form of inquisition, inserting fire in their privates, and he cut off the hands of some of them.

Of the more conspicuous only two were pardoned, a tribune of senatorial rank and a centurion, who the more clearly to prove their freedom from guilt, showed that they were of shameless unchastity and could therefore have had no influence with the general or with the soldiers.

(11) Domitian’s savage cruelty was not only excessive, but also cunning and sudden. He invited one of his stewards to his bed-chamber the day before crucifying him, made him sit beside him on his couch, and dismissed him in a secure and gay frame of mind, even deigning to send him a share of his dinner.

When he was on the point of condemning the ex-consul Arrecinius Clemens, one of his intimates and tools, he treated him with as great favour as before, if not greater, and finally, as he was taking a drive with him, catching sight of his accuser he said: ‘Pray, shall we hear this base slave to‑morrow?’

To abuse men’s patience the more insolently, he never pronounced an unusually dreadful sentence without a preliminary declaration of clemency, so that there came to be no more certain indication of a cruel death than the leniency of his preamble.

Domitian had brought some men charged with treason into the senate and when he had introduced the matter by saying that he would find out that day how dear he was to the members, he had no difficulty in causing them to be condemned to suffer the ancient method of punishment. Then, appalled at the cruelty of the penalty, he interposed a veto, to lessen the odium, in these words (for it will be of interest to know his exact language): ‘Allow me, Fathers of the senate, to prevail on you by your love for me to grant a favour which I know I shall obtain with difficulty, namely that you allow the condemned men free choice of the manner of their death; for thus you will spare your own eyes and all men will know that I was present at the meeting of the senate.’

(12) Reduced to financial straits by the cost of his buildings and shows, as well as by the additions which he had made to the pay of the soldiers, Domitian tried to lighten the military expenses by diminishing the number of his troops. But perceiving that in this way he exposed himself to the attacks of the barbarians, and nevertheless had difficulty in easing his burdens, he had no hesitation in resorting to every sort of robbery. The property of the living and the dead was seized everywhere on any charge brought by any accuser. It was enough to allege any action or word derogatory to the majesty of the prince.

Estates of those in no way connected with him were confiscated if but one man came forward to declare that he had heard from the deceased during his lifetime that Caesar was his heir.

Besides other taxes, that on the Jews [Titus had imposed a tax of two drachmas per head on Jews for permission to practise their religion] was levied with the utmost rigour, and people were prosecuted who, without publicly acknowledging that faith, yet lived as Jews [a possible reference to Christians who the Romans didn’t distinguish from the Jews], as well as those who concealed their origin and did not pay the tribute levied upon their people.

I recall being present in my youth when the person of a man ninety years old was examined before the procurator and a very crowded court, to see whether he was circumcised.

From his youth Domitian was far from being of an affable disposition, but was on the contrary presumptuous and unbridled both in act and in word. When his father’s concubine Caenis returned from Histria and offered to kiss him as usual, he held out his hand to her.

(13) When he became emperor, Domitian did not hesitate to boast in the senate that he had conferred their power on both his father and his brother, and that they had but returned him his own; nor on taking back his wife after their divorce, that he had ‘recalled her to his divine couch’ [meaning the couch which held the household gods].

Domitian delighted to hear the people in the amphitheatre shout on his feast day: ‘Good Fortune attend our Lord and Mistress.’

Even more, in the Capitoline competition, when all the people begged him with great unanimity to restore Palfurius Sura who had been banished some time before from the senate, and on that occasion received the prize for oratory, he deigned no reply, but merely had a crier bid them be silent.

With no less arrogance he began a circular letter in the name of his procurators, ‘Our Master and our God bids that this be done.’ And so the custom arose of henceforth addressing him in no other way even in writing or in conversation.

He allowed no statues to be set up in his honour in the Capitol, except of gold and silver and of a fixed weight. He erected so many and such huge vaulted passage-ways and arches in the various regions of Rome, adorned with chariots and triumphal emblems, that on one of them someone wrote in Greek: ‘It is enough’ [the Greek word for enough sounds like the Roman word for arch].

Domitian held the consulship seventeen times, more often than any of his predecessors. Of these the seven middle ones were in successive years, but all of them he filled in name only, continuing none beyond the first of May and few after the Ides of January. Having assumed the surname Germanicus after his two triumphs, he renamed the months of September and October from his own names, calling them ‘Germanicus’ and ‘Domitianus’, because in the former he had come to the throne and was born in the latter.

(14) In this way Domitian became an object of terror and hatred to all, but he was overthrown at last by a conspiracy of his friends and favourite freedmen, to which his wife was also privy.

He had long since had a premonition of the last year and day of his life, and even of the very hour and manner of his death. In his youth astrologers had predicted all this to him, and his father once even openly ridiculed him at dinner for refusing mushrooms, saying that he showed himself unaware of his destiny in not rather fearing the sword. Therefore he was at all times timorous and worried, and was disquieted beyond measure by even the slightest suspicions. It is thought that nothing had more effect in inducing him to ignore his proclamation about cutting down the vineyards than the circulation of notes containing the following lines:

‘Gnaw at my root, an you will; even then shall I have juice in plenty
To pour upon thee, O goat, when at the altar you stand.’ [a quote from Ovid’s Fasti]

It was because of this same timorousness that although he was most eager for all such honours, he refused a new one which the senate had devised and offered to him, a decree that whenever he held the consulship Roman knights selected by lot should precede him among his lictors and attendants, clad in the trabea and bearing lances.

As the time when he anticipated danger drew near, becoming still more anxious every day, he lined the walls of the colonnades in which he used to walk with phengite stone, to be able to see in its brilliant surface the reflection of all that went on behind his back. And he did not give a hearing to any prisoners except in private and alone, even holding their chains in his hands. Further, to convince his household that one must not venture to kill a patron even on good grounds, he condemned Epaphroditus, his confidential secretary, to death, because it was believed that after Nero was abandoned Epaphroditus had actually held the dagger with which Nero stabbed himself.

(15) Finally Domitian put to death his own cousin Flavius Clemens, suddenly and on a very slight suspicion, almost before the end of his consulship. And yet Flavius was a man of most contemptible laziness and Domitian had openly named his sons, who were then very young, as his successors, changing their former names and calling the one Vespasian and the other Domitian. And it was by this deed in particular that he hastened his own destruction.

For eight successive months so many strokes of lightning occurred and were reported that at last he cried: ‘Well, let him now strike whom they will.’ The temple of Jupiter of the Capitol was struck and that of the Flavian family, as well as the Palace and the emperor’s own bedroom. The inscription on the base of a triumphal statue of his was torn off in a violent tempest and fell upon a neighbouring tomb. The tree which had been overthrown when Vespasian was still a private citizen but had sprung up anew suddenly fell down again. Fortune of Praeneste had throughout his whole reign, when he commended the new year to her protection, given him a favourable omen and always in the same words. Now at last she returned a most direful omen, not without the mention of bloodshed.

Domitian dreamed that Minerva, whom he worshipped with superstitious veneration, came forth from her shrine and declared that she could no longer protect him since she had been disarmed by Jupiter.

But there was nothing by which he was so much disturbed as a prediction of the astrologer Ascletarion and what befell him. When this man was accused before the emperor and did not deny that he had spoken of certain things which he had foreseen through his art, he was asked what his own end would be. When Ascletarion replied that he would shortly be rent by dogs, Domitian ordered him killed at once but, to prove the fallibility of his art, he ordered that Ascletarion’s funeral be attended to with the greatest care. While this was being done, it chanced that the pyre was overset by a sudden storm and that the dogs mangled the corpse, which was only partly consumed. An actor of farces called Latinus, who happened to pass by and see the incident, told it to Domitian at the dinner table, with the rest of the day’s gossip.

(16) The day before he was killed Domitian gave orders to have some apples which were offered to him kept until the following day, and added: ‘If only I am spared to eat them’. Then, turning to his companions, he declared that on the following day the moon would be stained with blood in Aquarius and that a deed would be done of which men would talk all over the world. At about midnight he was so terrified that he leaped from his bed. The next morning he conducted the trial of a soothsayer sent from Germany who, when consulted about the lightning strokes, had foretold a change of rulers and condemned him to death.

While he was vigorously scratching a festered wart on his forehead and had drawn blood, he said: ‘May this be all.’

Then he asked the time, and by pre-arrangement the sixth hour was announced to him, instead of the fifth, which he feared. Filled with joy at this, and believing all danger now past, he was hastening to the bath, when his chamberlain Parthenius changed his purpose by announcing that someone had called about a matter of great moment and would not be put off. Then he dismissed all his attendants and went to his bedroom, where he was slain.

(17) Concerning the nature of the plot and the manner of his death, this is about all that became known. As the conspirators were deliberating when and how to attack him, whether at the bath or at dinner, Stephanus, steward of his niece, Domitilla, and at the time under accusation for embezzlement, offered his aid and counsel.

To avoid suspicion, he wrapped up his left arm in woollen bandages for some days, pretending that he had injured it, and concealed in them a dagger. Then pretending to betray a conspiracy and for that reason being given an audience, he stabbed the emperor in the groin as he was reading a paper which the assassin handed him and stood in a state of amazement.

As the wounded prince attempted to resist, he was slain with seven wounds by Clodianus, a subaltern, Maximus, a freedman of Parthenius, Satur, decurion of the chamberlains, and a gladiator from the imperial school.

A boy who was engaged in his usual duty of attending to the Lares in the bedroom and so was a witness of the murder, gave this additional information. He was bidden by Domitian, immediately after he was dealt the first blow, to hand him the dagger hidden under his pillow and to call the servants. But he found nothing at the head of the bed save the hilt and in any case all the doors were closed.

Meanwhile the emperor grappled with Stephanus and bore him to the ground, where they struggled for a long time, Domitian trying now to wrest the dagger from his assailant’s hands and now to gouge out his eyes with his lacerated fingers.

Domitian was slain on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of October (18 September) in the forty-fifth year of his age and the fifteenth of his reign (96 AD).

His corpse was carried out on a common bier by those who bury the poor, and his nurse Phyllis cremated it at her suburban estate on the Via Latina. But his ashes she secretly carried to the temple of the Flavian family and mingled them with those of Julia, daughter of Titus, whom she had also reared.

(18) Domitian was tall of stature, with a modest expression and a high colour. His eyes were large, but his sight was somewhat dim. He was handsome and graceful too, especially when a young man, and in his whole body with the exception of his feet, the toes of which were somewhat cramped. In later life he had the further disfigurement of baldness, a protruding belly, and spindling legs, though the latter had become thin from a long illness.

Domitian was so conscious that the modesty of his expression was in his favour that he once made this boast in the senate: ‘So far, at any rate, you have approved my heart and my countenance.’

He was so sensitive about his baldness that he regarded it as a personal insult if anyone else was twitted with that defect in jest or in earnest.

(19) Domitian was incapable of exertion and seldom went about the city on foot, while on his campaigns and journeys he rarely rode on horseback but was regularly carried in a litter.

He took no interest in arms, but was particularly devoted to archery. There are many who have more than once seen him slay a hundred wild beasts of different kinds on his Alban estate, and purposely kill some of them with two successive shots in such a way that the arrows gave the effect of horns. Sometimes he would have a slave stand at a distance and hold out the palm of his right hand for a mark, with the fingers spread; then he directed his arrows with such accuracy that they passed harmlessly between the fingers.

(20) At the beginning of his rule Domitian neglected liberal studies although he provided for having the libraries, which were destroyed by fire, renewed at very great expense, seeking everywhere for copies of the lost works, and sending scribes to Alexandria to transcribe and correct them.

Yet he never took any pains to become acquainted with history or poetry or even to acquire an ordinarily good style.

He read nothing except the memoirs and transactions of Tiberius Caesar. For his letters, speeches and proclamations he relied on others’ talents.

Yet his conversation was not inelegant and some of his sayings were even noteworthy.

‘How I wish that I were as fine looking as Maecius thinks he is.’

He declared too that the head of a certain man, whose hair had changed colour in such a way that it was partly reddish and partly grey, was like ‘snow on which mead had been poured.’

(21) Domitian used to say that the lot of princes was most unhappy, since when they discovered a conspiracy, no one believed them unless they had been killed.

Whenever he had leisure he amused himself with playing at dice, even on working days and in the morning hours. He went to the bath before the end of the forenoon and lunched to the point of satiety, so that at dinner he rarely took anything except a Matian apple and a moderate amount of wine from a jug. He gave numerous and generous banquets, but usually ended them early; in no case did he protract them beyond sunset, or follow them by a drinking bout. In fact, he did nothing until the hour for retiring except walk alone in a retired place.

(22) Domitian was excessively lustful. His constant sexual intercourse he called ‘bed-wrestling’ as if it were a kind of exercise.

It was reported that he depilated his concubines with his own hand and swam with common prostitutes.

After persistently refusing his niece, who was offered him in marriage when she was still a maid, because he was entangled in an intrigue with Domitia, he seduced her shortly afterwards when she became the wife of another, and that too during the lifetime of Titus.

Later, when she was bereft of father and husband, he loved her ardently and without disguise, and even became the cause of her death by compelling her to get rid of a child of his by abortion.

(23) The people received the news of his death with indifference but the soldiers were greatly grieved and at once attempted to call him the Deified Domitian. They insisted on the execution of his murderers.

The senators, on the contrary, were so overjoyed that they raced to fill the House where they did not refrain from attacking the dead emperor with the most insulting and stinging reproaches. They even had ladders brought and his shields and images torn down before their eyes and smashed on the ground. Finally they passed a decree that his inscriptions should everywhere be erased and all record of him obliterated.

A few months before he was killed, a raven perched on the Capitolium and cried ‘All will be well,’ an omen which some interpreted as follows:

‘High on the gable Tarpeian a raven but lately alighting,
Could not say “It is well,” only declared “It will be.”‘

Domitian himself, it is said, dreamed that a golden hump grew out on his back, and he regarded this as an infallible sign that the condition of the empire would be happier and more prosperous after his time. And this was soon shown to be true through the uprightness and moderate rule of the emperors who succeeded him.

Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars

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Posted by Simon on January 18, 2023

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The Life of Titus by Suetonius

A sub-edited version of the 1914 Loeb Classical Library translation of Suetonius’s Life of Titus by J.C. Rolfe, with a few comments and clarifications.

Summary of Titus’s life (from Wikipedia)

Titus Caesar Vespasianus (39 to 81 AD) was Roman emperor from 79 to 81. A member of the Flavian dynasty, Titus succeeded his father Vespasian upon his death.

Before becoming emperor, Titus gained renown as a military commander, serving under his father in Judea during the First Jewish–Roman War. The campaign came to a brief halt with the death of emperor Nero in 68, launching Vespasian’s bid for the imperial power during the Year of the Four Emperors. When Vespasian was declared Emperor on 1 July 69, Titus was left in charge of ending the Jewish rebellion. In 70, he besieged and captured Jerusalem, and destroyed the city and the Second Temple. For this achievement Titus was awarded a triumph – the Arch of Titus commemorates his victory to this day.

During his father’s rule, Titus gained notoriety in Rome in his role as prefect of the Praetorian Guard, and for carrying on a controversial relationship with the Jewish queen, Berenice. Despite concerns over his character, Titus ruled to great acclaim following the death of Vespasian in 79, and was considered a good emperor by Suetonius and other contemporary historians.

As emperor, Titus is best known for completing the Colosseum and for his generosity in relieving the suffering caused by two disasters, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 and a fire in Rome in 80. After barely two years in office, Titus died of a fever on 13 September 81. He was deified by the Roman Senate and succeeded by his younger brother Domitian.

The Life of Titus by Suetonius

(1) Titus, of the same surname as his father, was the delight and darling of the human race, such surpassing ability had he, by nature, art or good fortune, to win the affections of all men and, what was harder, to do so while he was emperor. For as a private citizen, and even during his father’s rule, he did not escape hatred, much less public criticism.

Titus was born on the third day before the Kalends of January (30 December, 41 AD) in a mean house near the Septizonium and in a very small dark room besides. It still remains and is on exhibition.

(2) Titus was brought up at court in company with [Claudius’s son] Britannicus and taught the same subjects by the same masters. At that time, so they say, a physiognomist was brought in by Narcissus, the freedman of Claudius, to examine Britannicus and declared most positively that he would never become emperor but that Titus, who was standing nearby at the time, would surely rule.

The boys were so intimate that it is believed that when Britannicus drained the fatal draught that poisoned him, Titus, who was reclining at his side, also tasted of the potion and for a long time suffered from an obstinate disorder. Titus did not forget all this, but later set up a golden statue of his friend in the Palace and dedicated another equestrian statue of ivory, which is to this day carried in the procession in the Circus, and he attended it on its first appearance.

(3) Even in boyhood Titus’s bodily and mental gifts were conspicuous and they became more and more so as he advanced in years. He had a handsome person in which there was no less dignity than grace, and was uncommonly strong, although he was not tall of stature and had a rather protruding belly. His memory was extraordinary and he had an aptitude for almost all the arts, both of war and of peace.

Skilful in arms and horsemanship, Titus made speeches and wrote verses in Latin and Greek with ease and readiness, and even extempore. He was not unacquainted with music but sang and played the harp agreeably and skilfully.

I have heard from many sources that he used also to write shorthand with great speed and would amuse himself by playful contests with his secretaries. Also that he could imitate any handwriting that he had ever seen and often declared that he might have been the prince of forgers.

(4) Titus served as military tribune both in Germany and in Britain, winning a high reputation for energy and no less integrity, as is evident from the great number of his statues and busts in both those provinces and from the inscriptions they bear.

After his military service Titus pleaded in the Forum, rather for glory than as a profession. He married Arrecina Tertulla, whose father, though only a Roman knight, had once been prefect of the praetorian cohorts. On her death he replaced her with Marcia Furnilla, a lady of a very distinguished family, but divorced her after he had acknowledged a daughter which she bore him.

Then, after holding the office of quaestor, as commander of a legion he subjugated the two strong cities of Tarichaeae and Gamala in Judaea, having his horse killed under him in one battle and mounting another, whose rider had fallen fighting by his side.

(5) Titus was sent to congratulate Galba on becoming ruler of the state [in January 69) and attracted attention wherever he went, through the belief that he had been sent for to be adopted by the new emperor. But observing that everything was once more in a state of turmoil, he turned back. He visited the oracle of the Paphian Venus to consult it about his voyage and was encouraged to hope for imperial power.

[His father, Vespasian, put him in charge of the siege of Jerusalem.] In the final attack on the city he slew twelve of the defenders with as many arrows. He took the city on his daughter’s birthday, so delighting the soldiers and winning their devotion that they hailed him as ‘Imperator’ and detained him when he wanted to leave the province, urging him with prayers and even with threats either to stay or to take them all with him.

This aroused the suspicion that he had tried to revolt from his father and make himself king of the East and he strengthened this suspicion on his way to Alexandria by wearing a diadem at the consecration of the bull Apis in Memphis, an act in accord with the usual ceremonial of that ancient religion, but unfavourably interpreted by some.

Because of this he hastened to Italy and, putting in at Regium and then at Puteoli in a transport ship, he went with all speed from there to Rome, where as if to show that the reports about him were groundless, he surprised his father with the greeting, ‘I am here, father; I am here.’

(6) From that moment onwards Titus never ceased to act as the emperor’s partner and even as his protector. He took part in his father’s triumph and was censor with him. He was also his colleague in the tribunicial power and in seven consulships. He took upon himself the discharge of almost all duties, personally dictated letters and wrote edicts in his father’s name and even read his speeches in the senate in lieu of a quaestor.

Titus also assumed the command of the praetorian guard, which before that time had never been held except by a Roman knight. In this office he conducted himself in a somewhat arrogant and tyrannical fashion for whenever he regarded anyone with suspicion, he would secretly send some of the Guard to the various theatres and camps to demand their punishment as if by consent of all who were present and then he would put them out of the way without delay.

Among these was Aulus Caecina, an ex-consul whom he invited to dinner and then ordered to be stabbed almost before he left the dining-room. But in this case he was led by a pressing danger, having got possession of an autograph copy of a harangue which Caecina had prepared to deliver to the soldiers. Although by such conduct he provided for his safety in the future, he incurred such odium at the time that hardly anyone ever came to the throne with so evil a reputation or so much against the desires of all.

(7) Besides cruelty, Titus was also suspected of riotous living, since he protracted his revels until the middle of the night with the most prodigal of his friends. Likewise of unchastity because of his troops of catamites and eunuchs and his notorious passion for Queen Berenice, to whom it was even said that he promised marriage.

He was suspected of greed as well for it was well known that in cases which came before his father he put a price on his influence and accepted bribes. In short, people not only thought but openly declared that he would be a second Nero. But this reputation turned out to his advantage and gave place to the highest praise when, on coming to power, no fault was discovered in him but, on the contrary, the highest virtues.

Titus’s banquets were pleasant rather than extravagant. He chose as his friends men whom succeeding emperors also retained as indispensable alike to themselves and to the State, and of whose services they made special use. Berenice he sent from Rome at once, against her will and against his own. Some of his most beloved paramours, although they were such skilful dancers that they later became stage favourites, he not only ceased to cherish any longer but even to attend their public performances.

Titus took away nothing from any citizen. He respected others’ property, if anyone ever did. In fact, he would not accept even proper and customary presents. And yet he was second to none of his predecessors in munificence. At the dedication of his amphitheatre and of the baths which were hastily built near it he gave a most magnificent and costly gladiatorial show. He presented a sham sea-fight too in the old naumachia, and in the same place a combat of gladiators, exhibiting 5,000 wild beasts of every kind in a single day.

(8) Titus was most kindly by nature, and whereas in accordance with a custom established by Tiberius, all the Caesars who followed him refused to regard favours granted by previous emperors as valid, unless they had themselves conferred the same ones on the same individuals, Titus was the first to ratify them all in a single edict, without allowing himself to be asked.

Moreover, in the case of other requests made of him, it was his fixed rule not to let anyone go away without hope. Even when his household officials warned him that he was promising more than he could perform, he said that it was not right for anyone to go away sorrowful from an interview with his emperor. On another occasion, remembering at dinner that he had done nothing for anybody all day, he gave utterance to that memorable and praiseworthy remark: ‘Friends, I have lost a day.’

The whole body of the people in particular Titus treated with such indulgence on all occasions that once, at a gladiatorial show, he declared that he would give it ‘not after his own inclinations but those of the spectators’ and, what is more, he kept his word. For he refused nothing which anyone asked, and even urged them to ask for what they wished.

Titus openly displayed his partiality for Thracian gladiators and bantered the people about it by words and gestures (i.e. by humorously pretending to wrangle with those who favoured other gladiators than the Thracians). However, he always preserved his dignity, as well as observing justice. Not to omit any act of condescension, he sometimes bathed in the baths which he had built, in company with the common people.

There were some dreadful disasters during Titus’s reign, such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Campania, a fire at Rome which continued three days and as many nights, and a plague the like of which had hardly ever been known before. In these many great calamities he showed not merely the concern of an emperor but even a father’s surpassing love, now offering consolation in edicts, and now lending aid so far as his means allowed.

Titus chose commissioners by lot from among the ex-consuls for the relief of Campania and the property of those who lost their lives by Vesuvius and had no heirs left alive he applied to the rebuilding of the buried cities.

During the fire in Rome he made no remark except, ‘I am ruined,’ and he set aside all the ornaments of his villas for the public buildings and temples and put several men of the equestrian order in charge of the work, that everything might be done with the greater dispatch.

For curing the plague and diminishing the force of the epidemic there was no aid, human or divine, which he did not employ, searching for every kind of sacrifice (i.e. to propitiate the gods who were supposed to inflict such evils upon mankind by way of punishment) and all kinds of medicines.

Among the evils of the times were the informers and their instigators who had enjoyed a long-standing licence. After these had been soundly beaten in the Forum with scourges and cudgels and finally led in procession across the arena of the amphitheatre, he had some of them put up and sold and others deported to the wildest of the islands.

(9) Having declared that he would accept the office of pontifex maximus for the purpose of keeping his hands unstained, he was true to his promise for after that he neither caused nor connived at the death of any man, although he sometimes had no lack of reasons for taking vengeance, but he swore that he would rather be killed than kill.

When two men of patrician family were found guilty of aspiring to the throne, he satisfied himself with warning them to abandon their attempt, saying that imperial power was the gift of fate and promising that if there was anything else they desired, he himself would bestow it. Then he sent his couriers with all speed to the mother of one of them, for she was some distance off, to relieve her anxiety by reporting that her son was safe. And he not only invited the men themselves to dinner among his friends but on the following day, at a gladiatorial show, he purposely placed them near him and when the swords of the contestants were offered him handed them over for their inspection. It is even said that, inquiring into the horoscope of each of them, he declared that danger threatened them both, but at some future time and from another – as turned out to be the case.

Although his brother, Domitian, never ceased plotting against him, but almost openly stirred up the armies to revolt and meditated flight to them, he had not the heart to put him to death or banish him from the court or even to hold him in less honour than before. On the contrary, as he had done from the very first day of his rule, he continued to declare that Domitian was his partner and successor, and sometimes he privately begged him with tears and prayers to be willing at least to return his affection.

(10) Titus was cut off by death, to the loss of mankind rather than to his own. After finishing the public games, at the close of which he wept bitterly in the presence of the people, he went down to the Sabine territory, somewhat cast down because a sacrificial animal had escaped as he was sacrificing, and because it had thundered from a clear sky [i.e. bad omens]. Then at the very first stopping place he was seized with a fever and, as he was being carried onwards in a litter, it is said that he pushed back the curtains, looked up to heaven, and lamented bitterly that his life was being taken from him contrary to his deserts. For he said that there was no act of his life of which he had cause to repent, save one only.

What this was he did not himself disclose at the time nor could anyone easily divine. Some think that he meant the intimacy which he had with his brother’s wife; but Domitia swore most solemnly that this did not exist (and she would not have denied it if it had been in the least true, but on the contrary would have boasted of it, as she was most ready to do of all her scandalous actions).

11. Titus died in the same farmhouse as his father, on the Ides of September [13 September], two years two months and twenty days after succeeding Vespasian [81 AD], in the forty-second year of his age.

When his death was made known the whole populace mourned as they would for a loss in their own families, the senate hastened to the House before it was summoned by proclamation and, with the doors still shut, and then with them open, rendered such thanks to him and heaped such praise on him after death as they had never done even when he was alive and present.

Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars

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by Simon on January 16, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Biography, Translation

Posted by Simon on January 16, 2023

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The Life of Vitellius by Suetonius

A sub-edited version of the 1914 Loeb Classical Library translation of Suetonius’s Life of Vitellius by J.C. Rolfe, with notes and comments.

Summary

Aulus Vitellius (15 to 69 AD) was Roman emperor for eight months, from 19 April to 20 December 69. Vitellius was proclaimed emperor following the quick succession of the previous emperors Galba and Otho in the year of civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors. Like his direct predecessor, Otho, Vitellius attempted to rally public support to his cause by honouring Nero who remained widely popular in the empire.

Vitellius had been a companion of Tiberius’ retirement on Capri and there befriended Caligula. He was elected consul in 48, and served as proconsular governor of Africa in either 60 or 61. In 68, he was chosen to command the army of Germania Inferior. In January 69 he was proclaimed emperor by the armies of Germania Inferior and Superior, beginning a revolt against Galba. In Rome Galba was murdered in the coup of Marcus Otho and Vitellius then marched his army south to face Otho in battle. Vitellius defeated Otho’s army at the Battle of Bedriacum on 14 April 69 and, although he had enough troops in reserve and reinforcements on the way, Otho chose to commit suicide rather than fight on. With Otho out of the way the senate recognised Vitellius as emperor.

However, Vitellius’s claim to the throne was soon challenged by the legions stationed in the eastern provinces, who proclaimed their commander Vespasian emperor instead. Vespasian sent his armies through Greece and the Balkans into northern Italy where a complex series of military engagements followed, climaxing with a crushing defeat for Vitellius at the Second Battle of Bedriacum on 24 October 69.

Vitellius tried to abdicate in favour of Vespasian but was prevented by his political supporters, the praetorian guard and many of the people. This meant that instead of peacefully marching into Rome the armies of Vespasian had to fight their way into the city, with much destruction and loss of life. When Vespasian’s soldiers came upon Vitellius, he was lynched on 20 December 69.

The Life of Vitellius by Suetonius

(1) Different and widely varying accounts are given of the origin of the Vitellii, some saying that the family was ancient and noble, others that it was new and obscure, if not of mean ex traction. I should believe that these came respectively from the flatterers and detractors of the emperor, were it not for a difference of opinion about the standing of the family at a considerably earlier date.

We have a book of Quintus Elogius addressed to Quintus Vitellius, quaestor of the Deified Augustus, in which it is written that:

the Vitellii were sprung from Faunus, king of the Aborigines, and Vitellia, who was worshipped as a goddess in many places
that they ruled in all Latium
that the surviving members of the family moved from the Sabine district to Rome and were enrolled among the patricians
that traces of this stock endured long afterwards in the Vitellian Road, running from the Janiculum all the way to the sea, as well as in a colony of the same name, which in ancient days the family had asked the privilege of defending against the Aequicoli with troops raised from their own line
that when, afterwards, a force was sent into Apulia at the time of the Samnite war, some of the Vitellii settled at Nuceria,
that after a long time their descendants returned to the city and resumed their place in the senatorial order

(2) On the other hand, several have written that the founder of the family was a freedman, while Cassius Severus and others say further that he was a cobbler and that his son, after making a considerable fortune from the sale of confiscated estates and the profession of informer, married a common strumpet, daughter of one Antiochus who kept a bakery, and became the father of a Roman knight. But this difference of opinion may be left unsettled.

In any event, Publius Vitellius of Nuceria, whether of ancient stock or of parents and forefathers in whom he could take no pride, unquestionably a Roman knight and a steward of Augustus’s property, left four sons of high rank with the same name and differing only in their forenames: Aulus, Quintus, Publius and Lucius. Aulus, who was given to luxury and especially notorious for the magnificence of his feasts, died a consul, appointed to the office with Domitius, father of the emperor Nero. Quintus lost his rank at the time when it was decided, at the suggestion of Tiberius, to depose and get rid of undesirable senators.

Publius, a member of Germanicus’ staff, arraigned Gnaeus Piso, the enemy and murderer of his commander, and secured his condemnation. Arrested among the accomplices of Sejanus, after holding the praetorship, and handed over to his own brother to be kept in confinement, he opened his veins with a penknife but allowed himself to be bandaged and restored, not so much from unwillingness to die as because of the entreaties of his friends; and he met a natural death while still in confinement.

Lucius attained the consulate and then was made governor of Syria where, with supreme diplomacy he not only induced Artabanus, king of the Parthians, to hold a conference with him, but even to do obeisance to the standards of the legion. Later he held, with the emperor Claudius, two more regular consulships and the censorship. He also bore the charge of the empire while Claudius was away on his expedition to Britain. He was an honest and active man but gained a bad reputation because of his passion for a freedwoman which went so far that he used her spittle mixed with honey to rub on his throat and jaws as a medicine, not secretly nor seldom, but openly and every day.

Lucius also had a wonderful gift for flattery and was the first to begin to worship Gaius Caesar as a god; for on his return from Syria he did not presume to approach the emperor except with veiled head, turning himself about and then prostrating himself.

To neglect no means of gaining the favour of Claudius, who was a slave to his wives and freedmen, Lucius begged of Messalina as the highest possible favour that she would allow him to take off her shoes. And when he had taken off her right slipper he constantly carried it about between his toga and his tunic and sometimes kissed it. He also honoured Claudius’s powerful advisers, Narcissus and Pallas, by cherishing their golden images among his household gods. It was Lucius who made the famous remark, ‘May you often do it,’ when he was congratulating Claudius at the celebration of the Secular games.

(3) Lucius died of a paralytic stroke on the second day after he was seized, leaving two sons (begotten of Sestilia, a most worthy woman and of no mean family) and having lived to see them consuls both in the same year, and for the whole year, since the younger succeeded the elder for six months. On his decease the senate honoured Lucius with a public funeral and with a statue on the rostra with this inscription: ‘Of unwavering loyalty to his emperor.’

The emperor Aulus Vitellius, son of Lucius, was born on the eighth day before the Kalends of October (or, according to some, on the seventh day before the Ides of September) in the consulship of Drusus Caesar and Norbanus Flaccus (15 AD).

His parents were so aghast at his horoscope as announced by the astrologer that his father tried his utmost, while he lived, to prevent the assignment of any province to his son; and when he was sent to the legions and hailed as emperor, his mother immediately mourned over him as lost.

Vitellius spent his boyhood and early youth at Capri among the wantons of Tiberius, being branded for all time with the nickname ‘Spintria’ and suspected of having been the cause of his father’s first advancement at the expense of his own chastity.

(4) Stained by every sort of baseness as he advanced in years, Vitellius held a prominent place at court, winning the intimacy of Gaius (Caligula) by his devotion to driving and of Claudius by his passion for dice. But he was still dearer to Nero, not only because of these same qualities, but because of a special service besides. For when he was presiding at the contests of the Neronia and Nero wished to compete among the lyre-players but did not venture to do so although there was a general demand for him and accordingly left the theatre, Vitellius called him back, alleging that he came as an envoy from the insistent people and thus gave Nero a chance to yield to their entreaties.

(5) Having in this way through the favour of three emperors been honoured not only with political positions but with distinguished priesthoods as well, Vitellius afterwards governed Africa as proconsul and served as curator of public works, but with varying purpose and reputation.

In his province he showed exceptional integrity for two successive years, for he served as deputy to his brother who succeeded him. But in his city offices he was said to have stolen some of the offerings and ornaments from the temples and changed others, substituting tin and brass for gold and silver.

(6) Vitellius married Petronia, daughter of an ex-consul, and had by her a son Petronianus, who was blind in one eye. Since this son was named as his mother’s heir on condition of being freed from his father’s authority, he manumitted him, but shortly afterwards killed him, according to the general belief, charging him with attempted parricide and alleging that (his son’s) guilty conscience had led him to drink the poison which he had mixed for his intended crime (of murdering Vitellius).

Soon afterwards Vitellius married Galeria Fundana, daughter of an ex-praetor, and from her too he had a son and a daughter, but the former stammered so that he was all but dumb and tongue-tied.

(7) Galba surprised everyone by sending Vitellius to Lower Germany. Some think that it was due to Titus Vinius, who had great influence at the time and whose friendship Vitellius had long since won through their common support of the Blues (one of the teams in the chariot races). But since Galba openly declared that no men were less to be feared than those who thought of nothing but eating, and that Vitellius’s bottomless gullet might be filled from the resources of the province, it was clear to everyone that he was chosen rather through contempt than favour.

It is notorious that when he was about to set off he lacked means for his travelling expenses and that his need of funds was such, that after consigning his wife and children, whom he left in Rome, to a hired garret, he rented out his house for the rest of the year. And that he took a valuable pearl from his mother’s ear and pawned it to defray the expenses of his journey.

He had to resort to false accusation to get rid of the throng of creditors that lay in wait for him and tried to detain him, including the people of Sinuessa and of Formiae whose public revenues he had embezzled. For he brought an action for damages against a freedman who was persistent in demanding what was due to him, alleging that he had been kicked by him, and would not let him off until he had squeezed him to the tune of 50,000 sesterces.

On Vitellius’s arrival in Germany the army, which was disaffected towards the emperor and inclined to mutiny, received him gladly with open arms as if he had come to them as a gift from the gods, since he was the son of a man who had thrice been consul, in the prime of life, and of an easy-going and lavish disposition.

Vitellius took care to boost good opinion of himself by recent acts, for throughout the march he kissed even the common soldiers whom he met and at the posthouses and inns he was unusually affable to the mule drivers and travellers, asking each of them in the morning whether they had breakfasted and even showing by belching that he had done so.

(8) As soon as he had entered the camp, Vitellius granted every request that anyone made and even of his own accord freed those in disgrace from their penalties, defendants of suits from their mourning, and the convicted from punishment. Therefore hardly a month had passed, when one evening the soldiers took him from his bedroom, just as he was, in his common house-clothes, and hailed him as emperor. Then he was carried about the most populous villages, holding a drawn sword of the Deified Julius, which someone had taken from a shrine of Mars and handed him during the first congratulations.

He did not return to headquarters until the dining-room caught fire from the stove and was ablaze and then, when all were shocked and troubled at what seemed a bad omen, he said: ‘Be of good cheer; to us light is given,’ and this was his only address to the soldiers.

When he presently received the support of the army of the upper province too, which had previously transferred its allegiance for Galba to the senate, he eagerly accepted the surname of Germanicus, which was unanimously offered him, put off accepting the title of Augustus, and forever refused that of Caesar.

(9) Hearing of the murder of Galba [15 January 69] Vitellius settled affairs in Germany and made two divisions of his forces, one to send on against Otho, and the other to lead in person. The former was greeted with a lucky omen at the start, for an eagle suddenly flew towards them from the right and after hovering about the standards, slowly preceded their line of march. But, on the contrary, when he himself began his advance, the equestrian statues which were being set up everywhere in his honour on a sudden all collapsed with broken legs, and the laurel crown which he had put on with due ceremony fell into a running stream. Later, as he was sitting in judgment on the tribunal at Vienna, a cock perched on his shoulder and then on his head. And the outcome corresponded with these omens for it turned out that he was not by his own efforts able to retain the power which his lieutenants secured for him.

(10) Vitellius heard of the victory at Betriacum and of the death of Otho (16 April 69) while he was still in Gaul, and without delay by a single edict he disbanded all the praetorian cohorts, as having set a pernicious example, and bade them hand over their arms to their tribunes. Furthermore, he gave orders that 120 of them should be hunted up and punished, having found petitions which they had written to Otho, asking for a reward for services rendered in connection with Galba’s murder. These acts were altogether admirable and noble, and such as to give hope that he would be a great prince, had it not been that the rest of his conduct was more in harmony with his natural disposition and his former habits of life than with imperial dignity.

For when he had begun his march, Vitellius rode through the middle of the cities like a triumphing general, and on the rivers he sailed in most exquisite craft wreathed with various kinds of garlands, amid lavish entertainments, with no discipline among his household or the soldiers, making a jest of the pillage and wantonness of all his followers. For not content with the banquets which were furnished them everywhere at public expense, they set free whatever slaves they pleased, paying those who protested with blows and stripes, often with wounds, and sometimes with death.

When Vitellius came to the plains where the battle was fought and some shuddered with horror at the mouldering corpses, he had the audacity to encourage them by the abominable saying that the odour of a dead enemy was sweet and that of a fellow-citizen sweeter still. But nevertheless, the better to bear the awful stench, he openly drained a great draught of unmixed wine and distributed some among the troops.

With equal bad taste and arrogance, gazing upon the stone inscribed to the memory of Otho, he declared that he deserved such a Mausoleum, and sent the dagger with which his rival had killed himself to the Colony of Agrippina, to be dedicated to Mars. He also held an all-night festival on the heights of the Apennines.

(11) Finally, Vitellius entered Rome to the sound of the trumpet, wearing a general’s mantle and a sword at his side, amid standards and banners, with his staff in military cloaks and his troops with drawn swords.

Then showing greater and greater disregard for the laws of gods and men, he assumed the office of high priest on the day of Allia, held elections for ten years to come, and made himself consul for life. And to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind what model he chose for the government of the state, he made funerary offerings to Nero in the middle of the Campus Martius, attended by a great throng of the official priests. And when, at the accompanying banquet a flute-player was received with applause, he openly urged him ‘to render something from the Master’s Book as well’, and when he began the songs of Nero, Vitellius was the first to applaud him and even jumped for joy.

(12) Beginning in this way, Vitellius regulated the greater part of his rule wholly according to the advice and whims of the commonest of actors and chariot-drivers, and in particular of his freedman Asiaticus. This fellow had immoral relations with Vitellius in his youth but later grew weary of him and ran away. When Vitellius came upon him selling posca at Puteoli, he put him in irons, but at once freed him again and made him his favourite. His vexation was renewed by the man’s excessive insolence and thievishness and he sold him to an itinerant keeper of gladiators. When, however, he was once reserved for the end of a gladiatorial show, Vitellius suddenly spirited him away, and finally on getting his province set him free. On the first day of his reign Vitellius presented Asiaticus with the golden ring at a banquet, although in the morning, when there was a general demand that Asiaticus be given that honour, he had deprecated in the strongest terms such a blot on the equestrian order.

(13) But Vitellius’s besetting sins were luxury and cruelty. He divided his feasts into three, sometimes into four a day – breakfast, luncheon, dinner, and a drinking bout – and he was readily able to do justice to all of them through his habit of taking emetics. Moreover, he had himself invited to each of these meals by different men on the same day, and the materials for any one of them never cost less than 400,000 sesterces.

Most notorious of all was the dinner given by his brother to celebrate the emperor’s arrival in Rome, at which 2,000 of the choicest fishes and 7,000 birds are said to have been served. He himself eclipsed even this at the dedication of a platter, which, on account of its enormous size, he called the ‘Shield of Minerva, Defender of the City.’ In this he mingled the livers of pike, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, the tongues of flamingos and the milt of lampreys, brought by his captains and triremes from the whole empire, from Parthia to the Spanish strait.

Possessing an appetite that was not only boundless but also regardless of time or decency, Vitellius could never refrain, even when he was sacrificing or making a journey, from snatching bits of meat and cakes amid the altars, almost from the very fire, and devouring them on the spot, and in the cookshops along the road, viands smoking hot or even those left over from the day before and partly consumed.

(14) Vitellius delighted in inflicting death and torture on anyone whatsoever and for any cause whatever, putting to death several men of rank, fellow students and comrades of his, whom he had solicited to come to court by every kind of deception, all but offering them a share in the rule. This he did in various treacherous ways, even giving poison to one of them with his own hand in a glass of cold water, for which the man had called when ill of a fever.

Vitellius spared hardly one of the money-lenders, contractors, and tax-gatherers who had ever demanded of him the payment of a debt at Rome or of a toll on a journey. When one of these had been handed over for execution just as he was paying his morning call and at once recalled, as all were praising the emperor’s mercy, Vitellius gave orders to have him killed in his presence, saying that he wished to feast his eyes. In another case he had two sons who attempted to intercede for their father put to death with him.

A Roman knight, who cried as he was being taken off to execution, ‘You are my heir,’ he compelled to show his will and, reading that one of the man’s freedmen was put down as joint-heir with himself, he ordered the death of both the knight and the freedman.

Vitellius even killed some of the common people merely because they had openly spoken ill of the Blue faction, judging that they had ventured to do this from contempt of himself and in anticipation of a change of rulers.

Vitellius was especially hostile to writers of lampoons and to astrologers and whenever any of them was accused, he put him to death without trial. He was particularly incensed because after a proclamation of his in which he ordered the astrologers to leave the city and Italy before the Kalends of October, a placard was at once posted, reading: ‘By proclamation of the Chaldeans, God bless the State! Before the same day and date let Vitellius Germanicus have ceased to live.’

When his mother died, Vitellius was suspected of having forbidden her being given food when she was ill, because a woman of the Chatti, in whom he believed as he would in an oracle, prophesied that he would rule securely and for a long time, but only if he should survive his parent. Others say that, through weariness of present evils and fear of those which threatened, she asked her son for poison and obtained it with no great difficulty.

(15) In the eighth month of his reign the armies of the Moesian provinces and Pannonia revolted against Vitellius, and also the provinces of Judaea and Syria, the former swearing allegiance to Vespasian in his absence and the latter in his presence. Therefore, to retain the devotion and favour of the rest of the people, there was nothing that Vitellius did not lavish publicly and privately, without any limit.

Vitellius held a levy in Rome, promising those who volunteered not only their discharge upon his victory but also the rewards and privileges given to veterans after their regular term of service. Later, when his enemies were pressing him hard by land and sea, he opposed to them in one quarter his brother with a fleet manned by raw recruits and a band of gladiators, and in another the forces and leaders who had fought at Bedriacum. And after he was everywhere either worsted or betrayed, he made a bargain with Flavius Sabinus, the brother of Vespasian, that he should have his own life and a hundred million sesterces.

As the tide turned against him, Vitellius declared from the steps of the palace before his assembled soldiers that he withdrew from the rule which had been given him against his will. But when all cried out against this, he postponed the matter and, after a night had passed, went at daybreak to the rostra in mourning clothes and with many tears made the same declaration, but from a written document.

When the people and soldiers again interrupted him and begged him not to lose heart, vying with one another in promising him all their efforts in his behalf, Vitellius again took courage and by a sudden onslaught drove Sabinus and the rest of the Flavians, who weren’t expecting an attack, into the Capitol. Then he set fire to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and destroyed them, viewing the battle and the fire from the house of Tiberius, where he was feasting. [Suetonius’s account should be compared with Tacitus’s much longer and more detailed account of the same events in his Histories.]

Not long afterwards he repented of his action and throwing the blame upon others, called an assembly and took oath, compelling the rest to do the same, that there was nothing for which he would strive more earnestly than for the public peace.

Then he took a dagger from his side and offered it first to the consul, and when he refused it, to the magistrates, and then to the senators, one by one. When no one would take it, he went off as if to place it in the temple of Concord. But when some cried out that he himself was Concord, he returned and declared that he would not only retain the steel but would also adopt the surname Concordia.

(16) Vitellius also persuaded the senate to send envoys with the Vestal virgins to sue for peace or at least to gain time for conference.

The following day, as he was waiting for a reply, word was brought by a scout that the enemy were drawing near. Then he was at once hurried into a sedan with only two companions, a baker and a cook, and secretly went to his father’s house on the Aventine, intending to flee from there to Campania. Presently, on a slight and dubious rumour that peace had been granted, he allowed himself to be taken back to the palace. Finding everything abandoned there, and that even those who were with him were making off, he put on a girdle filled with gold pieces and took refuge in the lodge of the door-keeper, tying a dog before the door and putting a couch and a mattress against it.

(17) The advance guard of the Flavian army had now forced their way into the city and, since no one opposed them, were ransacking everything in the usual way. They dragged Vitellius from his hiding-place and when they asked him his name (for they did not know him) and if he knew where Vitellius was, he attempted to escape them by a lie. Being soon recognised, he did not cease to beg that he be confined for a time, even in the prison, alleging that he had something to say of importance to the safety of Vespasian. But they bound his arms behind his back, put a noose about his neck, and dragged him with rent garments and half-naked to the Forum. All along the Sacred Way he was greeted with mockery and abuse, his head held back by the hair, as is common with criminals, and even the point of a sword placed under his chin, so that he could not look down but must let his face be seen.

Some pelted him with dung and ordure, others called him incendiary and glutton, and some of the mob even taunted him with his bodily defects. He was in fact abnormally tall, with a face usually flushed from hard drinking, a huge belly and one thigh crippled from being struck by a four-horse chariot when he was in attendance on Gaius (Caligula) as he was driving. At last, on the Stairs of Wailing, he was tortured for a long time, then killed and dragged off with a hook to the Tiber.

(18) Vitellius met his death, along with his brother and his son, in the fifty-seventh year of his age, fulfilling the prediction of those who had declared from the omen which befell him at Vienna that he was destined to fall into the power of some man of Gaul. For he was slain by Antonius Primus, a leader of the opposing faction, who was born at Tolosa [modern-day Toulouse].

[Suetonius’s Life of Vitellius should be read alongside Tacitus’s account of the same events in his Histories.]

Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars

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by Simon on January 11, 2023 • Permalink

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Tagged Aequicoli, ancient Britain, ancient Rome, ancient world, Antonius Primus, Artabanus, Asiaticus, assassination, Augustus, Aulus Vitellius, Battle of Bedriacum, Biography, Caligula, Capri, Cassius Severus, coup, Decadence, Domitius, Drusus Caesar, emperor Claudius, Flavius Sabinus, Formiae, Galba, Galeria Fundana, Germania Inferior, Germanicus, gluttony, Gnaeus Piso, history, J. C. Rolfe, Latin, life of Vitellius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Loeb Classical Library, Luxury, Marcus Otho, Moesia, Narcissus, Nero, Norbanus Flaccus, Nuceria, Otho, Pallas, Pannonia, Petronia, Petronianus, Praetorian Guard, Publius Vitellius of Nuceria, Puteoli, Quintus Elogius, Quintus Vitellius, river Tiber, Roman army, Roman Britain, Roman Empire, Roman history, Roman literature, Rome, Second Battle of Bedriacum, Sejanus, Sestilia, Sinuessa, Spintria, Suetonius, suicide, Syria, Tacitus, Tacitus Histories, temple of Concord, temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the Capitol, the Chatti, the Deified Julius, the Flavians, the Forum, the Neronia, the Parthians, the Sacred Way, the Secular Games, the Stairs of Wailing, the Vitellii, Tiberius, Titus Vinius, Tolosa, Toulouse, Translation, Vespasian, Vitellius Germanicus, Year of the Four Emperors

Posted by Simon on January 11, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/01/11/the-life-of-vitellius-by-suetonius/

The Life of Otho by Suetonius

A sub-edited version of the 1914 Loeb Classical Library translation of Suetonius’s Life of Otho by J.C. Rolfe, with added notes and comments.

Summary

Marcus Otho (April 32 to April 69) was the seventh Roman emperor. He ruled for three months from 15 January to 16 April 69. He was the second emperor of the Year of the Four Emperors (69).

A member of a noble Etruscan family, Otho was, as a young man, a friend and courtier of the young emperor Nero. But when Nero wanted to have an affair with Otho’s wife, Poppaea Sabina, the emperor dispatched him to the governorship of the remote province of Lusitania (roughly modern-day Portugal) in 58. By all accounts Otho ruled there moderately and well.

During the revolts of 68, Otho allied himself with Galba, the governor of neighbouring Hispania Tarraconensis, and accompanied him on his march to Rome, where he Galba was acclaimed emperor on 8 June. Six months later, at the start of 69, Otho mounted a coup during which Galba was murdered.

Otho inherited the problem of the rebellion of Vitellius, commander of the army in Germania Inferior, who had also risen against Galba, at the start of the year (69). To crush this rebellion, Otho led an army north to meet Vitellius’s legions marching south from Germany. The two sides met at the Battle of Bedriacum on 14 April 69. Initial fighting resulted in 40,000 casualties and the retreat of his forces. His officers and supporters urged him to fight on but Otho refused and, early the next morning, committed suicide in his tent rather than spill more Roman blood, an act which was hailed as a noble sacrifice. As a result Vitellius was proclaimed emperor, the third of the year 69 so far.

The Life of Otho by Suetonius

[Like most Roman texts, this is divided up into short, numbered sections called ‘chapters’.]

1. The ancestors of Otho came from an old and illustrious family in the town of Ferentium and were descended from the princes of Etruria. His grandfather, Marcus Salvius Otho, whose father was a Roman knight but whose mother was of lowly origin and perhaps not even free-born, became a senator through the influence of Livia Augusta in whose house he was reared, but did not advance beyond the grade of praetor.

His father, Lucius Otho, came from a distinguished family on his mother’s side, with many powerful connections, and was so beloved by Tiberius and so like him in appearance, that he was believed by many to be the emperor’s son.

In the regular offices at Rome, the proconsulate of Africa, and several special military commands, Lucius conducted himself with extreme severity. In Illyricum he even had the courage to punish some soldiers with death, because in the rebellion of Camillus, repenting of their defection, they had killed their officers on the ground that these officers were the ringleaders in the revolt against Claudius. Lucius had them executed in his presence at his headquarters, because of this act of mutiny, although he knew that they had been promoted by Claudius precisely because of this very act. By this deed, while he increased his reputation, Otho’s father lost favour at court.

But then he speedily regained it by detecting the treachery of a Roman knight, whose slaves betrayed their master’s plan to assassinate the emperor. As reward for this, the senate conferred a very unusual honour on him by setting up his statue in the palace and Claudius enrolled him among the patricians and, after praising him in the highest terms, added these words: ‘He is a man of greater loyalty than I can even pray for in my own children.’

By Albia Terentia, a woman of an illustrious line, Lucius had two sons, Lucius Titianus and a younger, called Marcus, who had the same surname as himself. (He also had a daughter whom he betrothed to Drusus, son of Germanicus, almost before she was of marriageable age).

2. The future emperor Otho was born on the fourth day before the Kalends of May [28 April] in the consulate of Camillus Arruntius and Domitius Ahenobarbus [32 AD]. From his earliest youth Otho was so extravagant and wild that his father often flogged him. They say that he used to rove about Rome at night and lay hands on anyone whom he met who was feeble or drunk and toss him in a blanket.

After his father’s death, Otho pretended love for an influential freedwoman of the court, although she was an old woman and almost decrepit, so that he might win her favour. Having, through her, wormed his way into Nero’s good graces, Otho easily took the first place among the emperor’s friends because of the similarity of their characters – although some people claim it was also through having immoral relations with the emperor.

3. Otho was privy to all the emperor’s plans and secrets and on the day which Nero had chosen for the murder of his mother he gave both of them a most elaborate banquet in order to avert suspicion.

Also, when Poppaea Sabina, who up to that time had been Nero’s mistress, was separated from her husband, on the emperor’s orders Otho pretended marriage with her to prove cover for their affair. In the event, Otho became so devoted to Poppaea that he couldn’t endure the thought of having Nero as a rival. The result was that he not only wouldn’t admit servants whom Nero sent to fetch Poppaea, but that on one occasion he even shut out the emperor himself, who stood before his door mingling threats and entreaties and demanding the return of his trust.

Therefore Nero annulled the marriage and, under colour of appointment as governor, banished Otho to Lusitania, worried that if he inflicted a severer punishment he would make the whole farce public. Even as it was, the affair was published abroad in this couplet:

‘Why, do you ask, in feigned honour does Otho in banishment languish?
With his own wedded wife he had begun an intrigue.’

With the rank of quaestor, Otho governed Lusitania for ten years with remarkable moderation and integrity.

4. Then, at last, an opportunity for revenge arose. Otho was the first to espouse Galba’s cause [when the latter rose in rebellion against Nero], but at the same time conceived ambitions of imperial power for himself due to the troubled state of the times. He was encouraged in his hopes by the astrologer Seleucus for this astrologer had not only promised Otho some time before that he would survive Nero but now unexpectedly appeared and made the further promise that he, Otho, would soon become emperor himself.

Accordingly, Otho let slip no opportunity for flattery or attention to anyone. Whenever he entertained the prince at dinner he gave a gold piece to each man of the cohort on guard and put all the soldiers under obligation in one form or another. Chosen to be judge by a man who was involved in a law case with his neighbour about a part of his estate, Otho bought the whole property and presented it to him. As a result there was hardly anyone who did not both think and openly declare that he alone was worthy to succeed to the empire.

5. After the fall of Nero, Otho hoped to be adopted by Galba and looked forward to it from day to day. But when Galba adopted Piso instead [on 10 January 69] and Otho at last lost that hope, he resorted to force, spurred on not merely by feelings of resentment but also by the greatness of his debts. For he flatly declared that he could not keep on his feet unless he became emperor, and that it made no difference whether he fell at the hands of the enemy in battle or at those of his creditors in the Forum.

Otho had extorted a million sesterces from one of the emperor’s slaves a few days before for getting him a stewardship. This was the entire capital for his great undertaking. At first the enterprise was entrusted to five of his bodyguard, then to ten others, two being chosen by each of the first five. To all of them 10,000 sesterces were paid at once and they were promised 50,000 more. These then won others over to Otho’s cause, giving him confidence that more would join him when the business was afoot.

6. Otho had been inclined to seize the army camp immediately after the adoption of Piso and set upon Galba as he was dining in the palace, but he had been deterred out of consideration for the cohort which was on guard at the time, and a reluctance to increase its ill repute. For it was while that same cohort was at its post that both Galba had been slain and Nero had been abandoned. The intervening time was lost owing to bad omens and the warnings of Seleucus.

Accordingly, when the day was set [15 January 69], after admonishing his confederates to await him in the Forum at the golden mile-post near the temple of Saturn, Otho called upon Galba in the morning and was welcomed as usual with a kiss. He also attended the emperor as he was offering sacrifice and heard the predictions of the soothsayer.

Then a freedman announced that the architects had come, which was the signal agreed on, and going off as if to inspect a house which was for sale, he rushed from the palace by a back door and hastened to the appointed place. Others say that he feigned an attack of fever and asked those who stood near him to give that excuse, in case he should be missed.

Then, hurriedly entering a closed sedan such as women use, Otho hurried to the camp but got out when the bearers’ strength flagged and started to run. His shoe came untied and he stopped, whereupon without delay he was at once taken up on the shoulders of his companions and hailed as emperor. In this way he arrived at headquarters, amid acclamations and drawn swords, while everyone whom he met fell in, just as though he were an accomplice and a participator in the plot. He then sent emissaries to kill Galba and Piso and made no further promises in the assembly to win the loyalty of the soldiers than to declare that he would only take whatever [i.e. as much power as] they would give him.

7. Next, as the day was drawing to its close, Otho entered the senate and, after giving a brief account of himself, alleging that he had been carried off in the streets and forced to undertake the throne. He promised that he would exercise power in accordance with the general will then proceeded to the palace.

When in the midst of the other adulations of those who congratulated and flattered him, he was hailed by the common mob as Nero, he made no sign of dissent. On the contrary, according to some writers he even made use of that surname in his commissions and his first letters to some of the governors of the provinces. He allowed Nero’s busts and statues to be set up again and reinstated his procurators and freedmen in their former posts, while the first grant that he signed as emperor was one of 50 million to complete the construction of Nero’s Golden House.

It is said that he had a fearful dream that night, uttered loud groans, and was found by those who ran to his aid lying on the ground beside his couch. It is said that he tried by every kind of expiatory rite to propitiate the shade of Galba, by whom he dreamed that he was ousted and thrown out and that, on the next day, as he was taking the auspices, a great storm arose and he had a bad fall.

8. Now at about this same time the armies in Germany swore allegiance to Vitellius [Otho overthrew Galba on 15 January 69; the German legions had acclaimed Vitellius on 1 January].

When Otho learned of this, he persuaded the senate to send a deputation to say that an emperor had already been chosen and to counsel peace and harmony. But in spite of this he offered Vitellius by messengers and letters a share in the imperial dignity and proposed to become his son-in‑law. But when it became clear that war was inevitable and the generals and troops which Vitellius had sent in advance were approaching Rome he was given a proof of the affection and loyalty of the praetorians towards himself which almost resulted in the destruction of the senate.

It had been resolved that some arms should be removed and carried back on shipboard by the marines but as these were being taken out in the camp towards nightfall, some suspected treachery and started a riot. Then, suddenly, all the soldiers hastened to the palace without any particular leader, demanding the death of the senators. After putting to flight some of the tribunes who attempted to stop them, and killing others just as they were, all blood-stained, the soldiers burst right into the dining-room demanding to know where the emperor was and they could not be quieted until they had seen him.

Otho began his expedition against Vitellius with energy and in fact too hastily, without any regard even for the omens, and in spite of the fact that the sacred shields had been taken out but not yet put back, which for ages has been considered unlucky.

He began on the very day, too, when the worshippers of the Mother of the Gods begin their wailing and lamentation, and also with most unfavourable auspices. For having offered up a victim to father Dis he had good omens whereas in such a sacrifice, adverse indications are more favourable.
And when he first left Rome, Otho was delayed by floods of the Tiber, while at the twentieth milestone he found the road blocked by fallen buildings.

9. Although no one doubted that the proper course was to protract the war, since the enemy were hard pressed by hunger and by the narrowness of their quarters – Otho rashly decided to fight a decisive battle as soon as possible, either because he could not endure the continued worry and hoped that the war could be ended before the arrival of Vitellius, or from inability to resist the impetuosity of his soldiers, who clamoured for the fight. He himself did not take part in any of the battles but remained behind at Brixellum.

He was victorious in three minor battles – in the Alps, near Placentia, and ‘at Castor’s’, as the place is called – but they were irrelevant to the main contest. In the final and decisive struggle at Bedriacum he was defeated, but through treachery. For hope of a conference was offered and when his soldiers were led out in the belief that they were to discuss terms of peace a battle was forced upon them unexpectedly, just as they were exchanging greetings with the foe.

After the defeat, Otho at once resolved to take his own life, rather from a feeling of shame (as many have thought with good reason) and an unwillingness to persist in a struggle for imperial power at the expense of such danger to life and property, than from any despair of success or distrust of his troops. For despite the defeat, he still had a fresh and strong force which he had held in reserve for a second attempt, while other legions were on their way from Dalmatia, Pannonia, and Moesia. Even the defeated troops were not so crushed as not to be able to fight on and, even without further support, undertake to avenge their disgrace.

10. My father Suetonius Laetus took part in that war as a tribune of the equestrian order in the Thirteenth legion. He used often to say afterwards that Otho, even when he was a private citizen, so loathed civil strife that at the mere mention of the fate of Brutus and Cassius at a banquet he shuddered and that he would not have engaged with Galba if he had not felt confident that the affair could be settled peacefully. Moreover that Otho was led to hold his life cheap at that time by the example of a common soldier. This man on bringing news of the defeat of the army was believed by no one but was accused by the soldiers of falsehood and cowardice and fleeing the battle. At which, to prove his honesty, the soldier fell on his sword at the emperor’s feet. My father used to say that at this sight Otho cried out that he would no longer endanger the lives of such brave men who had deserved so well.

Having therefore advised his brother, his nephew, and his friends one by one to look out each for his own safety as best they could, Otho embraced and kissed them all and sent them away. Then, going to a retired place, he wrote two notes, one of consolation to his sister, and one to Nero’s widow Messalina, whom he had intended to marry, commending to her his corpse and his memory. Then he burned all his letters to prevent them from bringing danger or harm to anyone at the hands of the victor. He also distributed what money he had with him among his servants.

11. When Otho had thus made his preparations and was resolved to die, learning from a disturbance which meantime arose that those who were beginning to depart and leave the camp were being seized and detained as deserters, he said: ‘Let us add this one more night to our life’ (these were his very words), and he forbade the offering of violence to anyone. Leaving the door of his bedroom open until a late hour, he gave the privilege of speaking with him to all who wished to come in.

After that, quenching his thirst with a draught of cold water, he caught up two daggers and, having tried the point of both of them, put one under his pillow. Then, closing the doors, he slept very soundly. When he at last woke up at about daylight he stabbed himself with a single stroke under the left breast and breathed his last. He was hastily buried (for such were his orders) in the thirty-eighth year of his age and on the ninety-fifth day of his reign.

12. Neither Otho’s person nor his bearing suggested such great courage. He is said to have been of moderate height, splay-footed and bandy-legged, but almost feminine in his care of his person. He had the hair of his body plucked out, and because of the thinness of his locks wore a wig so carefully fashioned and fitted to his head that no one suspected it. They say that he used to shave every day and smear his face with moist bread, beginning the practice with the appearance of the first down so as never to have a beard. Also that he used to celebrate the rites of Isis publicly in the linen garment prescribed by the cult.

I am inclined to think that it was because of these habits that a death so little in harmony with his life excited the greater wonder. Many of the soldiers who were present kissed his hands and feet as he lay dead, weeping bitterly and calling him the bravest of men and an incomparable emperor, and then at once slew themselves beside his bier. Many of those who were absent too, on receiving the news attacked and killed one another from sheer grief.

In short, the greater part of those who had hated Otho most bitterly while he lived, praised him to the skies when he was dead. It was even commonly declared that he had put an end to Galba not so much for the sake of ruling as of restoring the republic and liberty.

Thought

Nothing became Otho’s life so much as the leaving it. When you read that many of his soldiers committed suicide to copy and honour him, your first reaction is simply to disbelieve it. But the Roman cult of principled suicide goes way beyond what we can really understand.

[Suetonius’s Life of Otho should be read alongside Tacitus’s account of the same events in his Histories.]

Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars

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by Simon on January 9, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Biography, Translation

Posted by Simon on January 9, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/the-life-of-otho-by-suetonius/

The Life of Galba by Suetonius

As an experiment I’m juxtaposing an edited-down version of the Wikipedia article about Galba with an edited-down version of an online English translation of Suetonius’s Life of Galba. Suetonius’s lives are often inaccurate and omit important facts. On the other hand, they contain much detail and comment which is omitted by encyclopedia articles. So I’ve set the two side by side to see how they complement each other. The most obvious learning is discovering just how much of the Wikipedia article is taken almost verbatim from Suetonius.

Servius Sulpicius Galba (3 BC to 69 AD) was the sixth Roman emperor, ruling briefly from the suicide of Nero on 8 June 68 AD to his own assassination on 15 January 69. After his adoption by his stepmother, and before becoming emperor, Galba was known as Livius Ocella Sulpicius Galba. He was the first of the emperors who ruled in the chaotic Year of the Four Emperors (69 AD).

1. Galba Wikipedia article

Background

Galba was born into a wealthy and distinguished family. His father and brother, both named Gaius, were consul in 5 BC and AD 22 respectively. Galba held at various times the positions of praetor, consul, and governor to the provinces of Aquitania, Upper Germany, and Africa during the first half of the first century AD. He retired from his positions during the latter part of Claudius’ reign (with the advent of Agrippina the Younger as Claudius’s fourth wife), but Nero later granted him the governorship of Hispania.

Taking advantage of the defeat of the uprising against Nero of Gaius Julius Vindex, governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, in early 68, Galba marched with his army on Rome, prompting Nero’s suicide on 9 June 68 whereupon Galba was declared emperor by the senate, with the support of the Praetorian Guard.

Galba’s physical weakness and general apathy led to him being easily led by favorites. Unable to gain popularity with the people or maintain the support of the Praetorian Guard (not least by not paying them the bounty he had promised), Galba was murdered by troops supporting Marcus Otho, governor of the neighbouring province of Lusitania, who had accompanied Galba in the march on Rome but was aggrieved at being passed over for high office.

Galba was distantly related to the empress Livia, who he respected and who, in turn, advanced his career. In her will Livia left him 50 million sesterces. Emperor Tiberius, however, cheated Galba by reducing the amount to 500,000 sesterces and never even paid Galba the reduced amount.

Galba was gay. According to Suetonius ‘he was more inclined to … the hard-bodied and those past their prime.’ Nevertheless, he married a woman named Aemilia Lepida and had two sons. Aemilia and their sons died during the early years of the reign of Claudius and Galba never remarried.

Career

In 39 Galba was appointed general of the Upper German legions. According to one report, Galba curried favour with the emperor Caligula by running alongside his chariot for twenty miles. As commander of the legions of Upper Germany, Galba gained a reputation as a disciplinarian. Suetonius writes that Galba was advised to seize the throne following the assassination of Caligula in 41, but instead loyally served Caligula’s uncle and successor Claudius.

Claudius appointed Galba governor of Africa in 44 or 45. He retired at an unknown point during the reign of Claudius, possibly in 49. He was recalled in 59 or 60 by the emperor Nero to govern Hispania.

Revolt

A rebellion against Nero was orchestrated by Gaius Julius Vindex in Gaul on the anniversary of the death of Nero’s mother, Agrippina the Younger, in 68. Shortly afterwards, Galba, in Spain, disavowed the title ‘General of Caesar’ in favour of ‘General of The Senate and People of Rome’.

Among several contenders for the throne who arose in light of Vindex’s revolt, Galba was supported by the influential imperial official Tigellinus. At midnight on 8 June, another imperial official, Nymphidius Sabinus, falsely announced to the Praetorian Guard that Nero had fled to Egypt, and the Senate proclaimed Galba emperor. Nero, who had fled to a suburban villa, committed assisted suicide with help from his secretary.

Reign

Galba was 72 when he came to the throne. Upon becoming emperor, he was faced by the rebellion of Nymphidius Sabinus, who had his own aspirations for the imperial throne. However, Sabinus was killed by the Praetorians before he could take the throne.

While Galba was arriving at Rome with the Lusitanian governor Marcus Salvius Otho, his army was attacked by a legion that had been organized by Nero. A number of Galba’s troops were killed in the fighting.

Galba surrounded himself with a group of cronies who gave him bad advice. He seized the property of Roman citizens, disbanded the German legions, and didn’t pay the Praetorian Guard and the soldiers who fought for him against Vindex. He condemned to death distinguished men of both orders on trivial suspicions without a trial. He became unpopular.

Mutiny on the frontier and assassination

On 1 January 69, the day Galba and Vinius took the office of consul, the fourth and twenty-second legions of Upper Germany refused to swear loyalty to Galba. They toppled his statues, demanding that a new emperor be chosen. On the following day, the soldiers of Lower Germany also refused to swear their loyalty and proclaimed the governor of the province, Aulus Vitellius, as emperor.

Galba tried to ensure his authority as emperor by adopting a successor, the young handsome nobleman Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus. But it was too little too late. Galba was killed by the Praetorian Guard on 15 January.

Marcus Salvius Otho was angry that he had been passed over for adoption and had organised a conspiracy with a small number of Praetorian Guards to murder the aged emperor and elevate himself. The soldiery in the capital, composed not just of Praetorians but of Galba’s legion from Spain and several detachments of men from the Roman fleet, Illyria, Britain, and Germany, were angered at not having received a donative i.e. reward for supporting him.

They also resented Galba’s purges of their officers and fellow soldiers (this was especially true of the men from the fleet). Many in the Praetorian Guard were shaken by the recent murder of their Prefect, Nymphidius Sabinus – some of the waverers were convinced to come over to Otho’s side out of fear that Galba might yet take revenge on them for their connection to Sabinus.

120 men later petitioned Otho that they had killed Galba. They would all be executed by Vitellius. A company of German soldiers to whom he had once done a kindness rushed to help Galba, however they took a wrong turn and arrived too late. He was killed near the Lacus Curtius.

Of Galba’s cronies: Vinius tried to run away, calling out that Otho had not ordered him killed, but was run through with a spear. Laco was banished to an island where he was later murdered by soldiers sent by Otho. Icelus was publicly executed. Piso was also killed; his head along with Galba’s and Vinius’s were placed on poles and mocked by the soldiers.

Galba’s head was brought by a soldier to Otho’s camp where camp boys mocked it. Vinius’s head was sold to his daughter for 2,500 drachmas. Piso’s head was given to his wife. Galba’s head was bought for 100 gold pieces by a freedman who threw it at Sessorium where his master, Patrobius Neronianus, had been killed by Galba. So much killing.

2. Suetonius’s Life of Galba

Suetonius gives Galba’s life in 23 short ‘chapters’ (compare with the 56 for Nero). I’ve copied and sub-edited the 1914 Loeb Classical Library translation by J. C. Rolfe.

Nero was the last who bore the name ‘Caesar’ because of his connection with the family of Augustus; after him it turned from being a family name into a designation of rank.

1. With Nero the line of the Caesars became extinct. [Suetonius is as superstitious as Plutarch or Tacitus and so records a crop of the usual bad omens.]

the holy laurel tree from which the emperors had their wreaths made wilted
the temple of the Caesars was struck by lightning which decapitated all the statues at the same time
Augustus’s sceptre was dashed from his hand

2. When he became emperor, Galba displayed a family tree in his hall claiming his ancestry went back on his father’s side to Jupiter and on his mother’s to Pasiphae, the wife of Minos.

3. Nobody knows how the name Galba was introduced into the clan Sulpicii which he belonged to. One theory is that after a long siege of some Spanish town the Sulpicius in question set fire to it with torches smeared with resin (galbanum). Others because this ancestor during a long illness resorted to galbeum, a sort of poultice, that is to say of remedies wrapped in wool. Others think he was very fat man, the Gallic word for which is galba. Others that he was, on the contrary, like the galba, a creature which breeds in oak trees. [Shows you how wild and inaccurate Roman attempts at etymology were.]

His ancestor, Servius Galba, served as consul, was the most eloquent speaker of his time and triggered the war with Viriathus because, while governing Spain, he treacherously massacred 30,000 Lusitanians.

Galba’s great-grandfather was blocked by Julius Caesar in his campaign for the consulship in 49 BC and so joined Brutus’s conspiracy and was one of Caesar’s assassins. From him were descended the grandfather and the father of the emperor Galba. The former published a voluminous and painstaking history.

Galba’s father attained the consulship and, despite being a hunchback, was an effective advocate. He had two wives: Mummia Achaica, great-granddaughter of Lucius Mummius who destroyed Corinth, bore him two sons, Gaius and Servius (our protagonist). Gaius committed suicide because Tiberius would not allow him to take part in the allotment of the provinces in his year (i.e. following immediately his consulship). When Achaica died, Galba’s father married Livia Ocellina, a very rich and beautiful woman, who adopted Servius as her step-son.

4. The future emperor Servius Galba was born in the consulship of Marcus Valerius Messala and Gnaeus Lentulus (3 BC), on the ninth day before the Kalends of January i.e. 24 December, in a country house situated on a hill near Tarracina.

Adopted by his stepmother Livia, he took her name and the surname Ocella, and also changed his forename, using Lucius instead of Servius from that time until he became emperor.

Suetonius has some entertaining anecdotes. It was, he says, well known in his day that when Galba was a boy and called to pay his respects to Augustus with others of his age, the emperor pinched his cheek and said in Greek: ‘You too will taste a little of my power, child.’

And Tiberius too, when he heard that Galba was destined to be emperor, but in his old age, said: ‘Well, let him live then, since that does not concern me.’

When he reached adult years, Galba dreamed that Fortune said that she was tired of waiting outside his door and, unless he let her in, she would be fair game for the next passerby. When he awoke and opened the door into the hall he found a bronze statue of Fortune about two feet high. This he carried lovingly to his summer house a Tusculum, and consecrated it in a room there, worshiping it from that time on with monthly sacrifices and an annual vigil. [Compare and contrast with Nero’s alleged attachment to a small figure of a girl sent him by an unnamed commoner.]

As a young man he persisted in keeping up an old and forgotten custom which survived only in his own household, of having his freedmen and slaves appear before him twice a day in a body, greeting him in the morning and bidding him goodnight at evening, one by one.

5. Galba applied himself to liberal studies, particularly the law.

He took marriage seriously but after his wife Lepida and the two sons he had by her died, he remained a widower. He could not be tempted afterwards by any match, not even with the redoubtable Agrippina [mother of Nero], who no sooner lost [her first husband] Domitius by death than she made such shameless advances to him, while his wife was still alive, that Lepida’s mother gave her a public reprimand, going so far as to slap her.

Galba showed marked respect to Livia Augusta, to whose favour he owed great influence during her lifetime and by whose last will he almost became a rich man; for he had the largest bequest among her legatees, one of 50 million sesterces. But because the sum was designated in figures and not written out in words, Tiberius, who was her heir, reduced the bequest to 500,000, and Galba never received even that amount.

6. Galba began his career of office before the legal age, and in celebrating the games of the Floralia in his praetorship he gave a new kind of exhibition, namely of elephants walking the rope. Then he governed the province of Aquitania for nearly a year and soon afterwards held a regular consulship for six months. It chanced that in this office he succeeded Lucius Domitius, the father of Nero, and was succeeded by Salvius Otho, the father of the emperor Otho, a kind of omen of what happened later, when he became emperor between the reigns of the sons of these two men.

Appointed governor of Upper Germany by Gaius Caesar, the day after he appeared before the legions Galba put a stop to their applause at a festival which chanced to fall at that time, by issuing a written order to keep their hands under their cloaks; and immediately this verse was bandied about the camp:

‘Soldier, learn to play the soldier; ’tis Galba, not Gaetulicus.’

With equal strictness Galba put a stop to the requests for furloughs. He got both the veterans and the new recruits into condition by plenty of hard work, speedily checked the barbarians, who had already made inroads even into Gaul. When Gaius (Caligula) arrived on a tour of inspection, Galba and his army made such a good impression that out of the great body of troops assembled from all the provinces none received greater commendation or richer rewards. Galba particularly distinguished himself while directing the military manoeuvres shield in hand, by running for twenty miles close beside Caligula’s chariot.

7. When the murder of Caligula was announced, although many urged Galba to take advantage of the opportunity, he preferred quiet. Hence he was in high favour with Claudius, became one of his staff of intimate friends, and was treated with such consideration that the departure of the expedition to Britain was put off because Galba was taken with a sudden illness (of no great severity).

Galba governed Africa for two years with the rank of proconsul, being specially chosen to restore order in the province, which was disturbed both by internal strife and by a revolt of the barbarians. He was successful owing to his insistence on strict discipline and his observance of justice even in trifling matters. When provisions were very scarce during a foray and a soldier was accused of having sold for a hundred denarii a peck of wheat which was left from his rations, Galba gave orders that when the man began to lack food, no one should help him and so he starved to death.

On another occasion, when Galba was holding court and the question of the ownership of a beast of burden was laid before him, as the evidence on both sides was slight and the witnesses unreliable so that it was difficult to get at the truth, Galba ruled that the beast should be led with its head muffled up to the pool where it was usually watered, that it should then be unmuffled, and should belong to which of the men it returned to of its own accord.

8. Galba’s services in Africa at that time, and previously in Germany, were recognised by the triumphal regalia and three priesthoods, for he was chosen a member of the Fifteen, of the brotherhood of Titius, and of the priests of Augustus.

After that he lived for the most part in retirement until about the middle of Nero’s reign, never going out even for recreation without taking a million sesterces in gold with him in a second carriage. Finally, while he was staying in the town of Fundi, the province of Hispania Tarraconensis was offered to him.

It happened that as he was offering sacrifice in a public temple after his arrival in the province, the hair of a young attendant who was carrying an incense-box suddenly turned white all over his head. Some interpreted this as a sign of a change of rulers and of the succession of an old man to a young one, that is to say, of Galba to Nero. Not long after this, lightning struck a lake of Cantabria and twelve axes were found there, an unmistakable token of supreme power.

9. For eight years Galba governed the province in a variable and inconsistent manner. At first he was vigorous and energetic and even over-severe in punishing offences. For example, he cut off the hands of a money-lender who carried on his business dishonestly and nailed them to his counter. He crucified a man for poisoning his ward, whose property he was to inherit in case of his death and when the man invoked the law and declared that he was a Roman citizen, Galba, pretending to lighten his punishment by some consolation and honour, ordered that a cross much higher than the rest and painted white be set up, and the man transferred to it.

But he gradually changed to sloth and inaction, not to give Nero any cause for jealousy and, as he used to say himself, because no one could be forced to render an account for doing nothing.

As he was holding the assizes at New Carthage, Galba learned of the rebellion of the Gallic provinces through an urgent appeal for help from the governor of Aquitania. Then came letters from Vindex, calling on Galba to make himself the liberator and leader of mankind. So, without much hesitation, Galba accepted the proposal, led by fear as well as by hope. For he had intercepted despatches ordering his own death, which had been secretly sent by Nero to his agents.

Galba was encouraged too, in addition to most favourable auspices and omens, by the prediction of a young girl of high birth; and also because the priest of Jupiter at Clunia, directed by a dream, had found in the inner shrine of his temple the very same prediction, likewise spoken by an inspired girl 200 years before. The drift of the verses was that one day there would come out of Spain the ruler and lord of the world.

10. Accordingly, pretending that he was going to attend to the manumitting of slaves, Galba mounted the tribunal, on the front of which he had set up as many images as he could find of those who had been condemned and put to death by Nero – and having by his side a boy of noble family whom he had summoned for that very purpose from his place of exile hard by in the Balearic Isles – he deplored the state of the times.

Being hailed as emperor by his troops, Galba declared that he was their governor, representing the senate and people of Rome. Then, proclaiming a holiday, he enrolled from the people of the province legions and auxiliaries in addition to his former force of one legion, two divisions of cavalry and three cohorts.

But from the oldest and most experienced of the nobles Galba chose a kind of senate who he might refer matters of special importance to whenever it was necessary. He also chose young men of the order of knights, who were to have the title of volunteers and guard his bedchamber in place of the regular soldiers, without losing their right to wear the gold ring. He also sent proclamations throughout the province, urging all men individually and collectively to join the revolution and aid the common cause in every possible way.

More omens and portents:

During the fortification of a town which he had chosen as the seat of war, a ring of ancient workmanship was found, containing a precious stone engraved with a Victory and a trophy.
Immediately afterwards a ship from Alexandria loaded with arms arrived at Dertosa without a pilot, without a single sailor or passenger, removing all doubt in anyone’s mind that the war was just and holy and undertaken with the approval of the gods.

Then suddenly and unexpectedly the whole plan almost failed. One of Galba’s two divisions of cavalry, repenting of its change of allegiance, attempted to desert Galba as he was approaching his camp and was only with difficulty prevented.

Some slaves too, whom one of Nero’s freedmen had given to Galba with treachery in view, nearly assassinated him as he was going to the bath through a narrow passage-way. They would have succeeded had they not been overheard discussing ‘the opportunity’ and, when interrogated about what ‘the opportunity’ referred to, confessed.

11. To these great perils was added the defeat and death of Vindex by forces loyal to Nero. This made Galba panic and even contemplate taking his own life, believing the cause of insurrection was lost. But when some messengers came from Rome, reporting that Nero was dead and that all the people had sworn allegiance to him, Galba, he laid aside the title of governor and assumed that of Caesar.

He then began his march to Rome in a general’s cloak with a dagger hanging from his neck in front of his breast and he did not resume the toga until he had overthrown his opponents, Nymphidius Sabinus, prefect of the praetorian guard at Rome, and in Germany and Africa the governors Fonteius Capito and Clodius Macer.

12. Galba’s double reputation for cruelty and avarice had gone before him. Men said that he had punished the cities of the Spanish and Gallic provinces which had hesitated about taking sides with him by imposing heavier taxes and even razing the walls of some of them, executing the governors and imperial deputies along with their wives and children.

It was further alleged that he had melted down a golden crown of fifteen pounds weight, which the people of Tarraco had taken from their ancient temple of Jupiter and presented to him; he ordered that the three ounces which it fell short by should be exacted from them.

Galba’s reputation for harshness was confirmed immediately on his arrival in Rome. He compelled some marines whom Nero had made regular soldiers to return to their former position as rowers and, when they refused and obstinately demanded an eagle and standards, Galba not only dispersed them by a cavalry charge but had them decimated.

Galba also disbanded a cohort of Germans, whom the previous Caesars had made their bodyguard and had found absolutely faithful in many emergencies, and sent them back to their native country without any rewards. He alleged that they were favourably inclined towards Gnaeus Dolabella, near whose gardens they had their camp.

The following tales were told in mockery of him, whether truly or falsely:

that when an unusually elegant dinner was set before him, he groaned aloud
that when his duly appointed steward presented his expense account, he handed him a dish of beans in return for his industry
that when the flute player Canus greatly pleased him, he presented him with five denarii, which he took from his own purse with his own hand i.e. he acquired a reputation for being stingy

13. Accordingly Galba’s arrival in Rome was not so welcome as it might have been. This was apparent at the first performance in the theatre, for when the actors of an Atellan farce began the familiar lines:

‘Here comes Onesimus from his farm’

all the spectators at once finished the song in chorus and repeated it several times with appropriate gestures, as if it mockingly referred to Galba.

14. Thus Galba’s popularity and prestige were greater when he won than while he ruled the empire, although he gave many proofs of being an excellent prince. But he was more hated for his bad acts than loved for his wise ones.

Galba was wholly under the control of three men who were commonly known as his tutors because they lived with him in the palace and never left his side. These were:

Titus Vinius, one of his generals in Spain, a man of unbounded covetousness
Cornelius Laco, advanced from the position of judge’s assistant to that of prefect of the Guard and intolerably haughty and indolent
his own freedman Icelus, who had only just before received the honour of the gold ring and the surname of Marcianus, yet already aspired to the highest office open to the equestrian order

Galba was so under the influence of these men with their different agendas that his conduct was inconsistent: sometimes he was exacting and niggardly, other times more extravagant and reckless than became a prince chosen by the people and of his time of life.

Galba condemned to death various distinguished men of both orders on trivial suspicions without a trial. He rarely granted Roman citizenship, and granted the privileges of threefold paternity to hardly one or two men, and even to those only for a fixed and limited time.

When the jurors petitioned that a sixth division be added to their number, he not only refused but even deprived them of the privilege, granted by Claudius, of not being summoned for court duty in winter and at the beginning of the year.

15. It was thought too that Galba intended to limit the offices open to senators and knights to a period of two years, and to give them only to such as did not wish them and declined them.

He had all the grants of Nero revoked, allowing only a tenth part to be retained and he demanded repayment with the help of fifty Roman knights, stipulating that even if the actors and athletes had sold anything that had formerly been given them (by Nero), it should be taken away from the purchases, in case the recipient had spent the money and could not repay it.

On the other hand, there was nothing that he did not allow his friends and freedmen to sell at a price or bestow as a favour, taxes and freedom from taxation, the punishment of the guiltless and impunity for the guilty.

More, when the Roman people called for the punishment of Halotus and Tigellinus, the most abandoned of Nero’s creatures, not content with saving their lives, Galba honoured Halotus with an important stewardship and, in the case of Tigellinus, issued an edict rebuking the people for their cruelty in criticising him.

16. Having thus incurred the hatred of almost all men of every class, Galba was especially detested by the soldiers, for although their officers had promised them a larger gift than common when they swore allegiance to Galba in his absence, so far from keeping the promise, Galba declared more than once that it was his habit to levy troops, not to buy them. With this policy he embittered the soldiers all over the empire. He filled the praetorians with fear and indignation by discharging many of them from time to time as under suspicion of being partisans of Nymphidius.

But loudest of all was the grumbling of the army in Upper Germany, because it was defrauded of the reward for its services against the Gauls and Vindex. This is why these troops were the first to venture on mutiny, refusing on the Kalends of January to swear allegiance to anyone save the senate, and at once resolving to send a deputation to the praetorians with the following message: that the emperor created in Spain did not suit them and the Guard must choose one who would be acceptable to all the armies.

17. When this was reported to Galba, thinking that it was not so much his age as his lack of children that was criticised, he picked out Piso Frugi Licinianus from the throng at one of his morning receptions, a young man of noble birth and high character, who had long been one of his special favourites and always named in his will as heir to his property and his name.

Calling him ‘son’, Galba led Piso to the praetorian camp and adopted him before the assembled soldiers. But even then he made no mention of largess (i.e. money for the soldiers), thus making it easier for Marcus Salvius Otho to overthrow him just six days after the adoption.

18. Many prodigies from the start of his reign had foretold Galba’s end exactly as it happened:

when animals were being slain to right and left all along his march to Rome in every town, an ox, maddened by the stroke of an axe, broke its bonds and charged the emperor’s chariot and deluged him with blood
as Galba dismounted, one of his guards, pushed forward by the crowd, almost wounded him with his lance
as he entered Rome, and later the Palace, he was met by a shock of earthquake and a sound like the lowing of cattle

There followed even clearer signs: he had set apart from all the treasure a necklace made of pearls and precious stones, for the adornment of his image of Fortune at Tusculum. This on a sudden impulse he consecrated to the Capitoline Venus, thinking it worthy of a more august position. The next night Fortune appeared to him in his dreams, complaining of being robbed of the gift intended for her and threatening to take away what she had bestowed. When day came Galba hastened in terror to Tusculum to offer expiatory sacrifices because of the dream, and sent men ahead to make preparations for the ceremony. But on arrival, he found on the altar nothing but warm ashes and beside it an old man dressed in black, holding the incense in a glass dish and the wine in an earthen cup.

It was also noticed that as Galba was sacrificing on the Kalends of January, the garland fell from his head and that, as he took the auspices, the sacred chickens flew away.

As he was on the point of addressing the soldiers on the day of the adoption, his camp chair, through the forgetfulness of his attendants, was not placed on the tribunal, as is customary. In the senate his curule chair was set wrong side foremost.

19. As Galba was offering sacrifice on the morning before he was killed, a soothsayer warned him to look out for danger, since assassins were not far off.

Not long after this Galba learned that Otho had taken possession of the camp of the Praetorian Guard. When advisers recommended that Galba go there as soon as possible — for they said that he could win the day by his presence and prestige — he decided to do no more than hold his present position and strengthen it by assembling a guard of the legionaries, who were camped around Rome.

Galba did put on a linen cuirass, though he admitted it would give little protection against so many swords. But he was lured out by false reports, circulated by the conspirators, to induce him to appear in public. They assured him that the trouble was over, that the rebels had been overthrown, and that the rest were coming in a body to offer their congratulations, ready to submit to all his orders.

So Galba went out to meet them with so much confidence that when one of the soldiers boasted that he had slain Otho, he asked him, ‘On whose authority?’ and then he went on to the Forum. There the cavalry who had been bidden to slay him, spurring their horses through the streets and dispersing the crowd of civilians, caught sight of him from a distance and halted for a moment. Then they rushed upon him again and butchered him, abandoned by his followers.

20. Some say that at the beginning of the disturbance Galba cried out, ‘What mean you, fellow soldiers? I am yours and you are mine,’ and that he even promised them largess. But the more general account is that he offered them his neck without resistance, urging them to do their duty and strike, since it was their will.

It might seem surprising that none of those present tried to help their emperor, and that everyone who Galba sent for treated the summons with contempt, except for a company of German troops. These responded because of his recent kindness in showing them great indulgence when they were weakened by illness, and they ran to his help but, not knowing their way round Rome, took a roundabout way and arrived too late.

Galba was killed beside the Lake of Curtius and was left lying just as he was, until a common soldier, returning from a distribution of grain, threw down his load and cut off the head. Since there was no hair by which to grasp it, the soldier put it under his robe, but later thrust his thumb into the mouth and so carried it to Otho.

Otho handed the head over to his servants and camp-followers, who stuck it on a lance and paraded it about the camp with jeers, crying out from time to time: ‘Galba, thou Cupid, exult in thy vigour!’ The point of this joke was that the report had gone around a few days earlier that when someone had congratulated him on still looking young and vigorous, Galba had replied:

‘As yet my strength is unimpaired.’

The head was bought from these camp followers by a freedman of Patrobius Neronianus for 100 pieces of gold and thrown in the place where his patron had been executed on Galba’s orders.

At last, however, Galba’s steward, Argivus, consigned it, with the rest of the body, to the tomb in Galba’s private gardens on the Aurelian Road.

21. Galba was of average height, very bald, with blue eyes and a hooked nose. His hands and feet were so distorted by gout that he couldn’t bear to wear a shoe for long, to unroll a book, or even to hold one. The flesh on his right side too had grown out and hung down to such an extent that it could only with difficulty be held in place by a bandage.

22. It’s said that Galba was a heavy eater and in winter time used to take food even before daylight, while at dinner he helped himself so lavishly that he would have the leftovers placed in front of him to finish off before he distributed it among his attendants.

Galba was more inclined in his sexual tastes to men and, of those, vigorous and older ones. They say that when Icelus, one of his old favourites, brought him news in Spain of Nero’s death, he not only received him openly with the fondest kisses, but begged him to ‘prepare himself’ without delay and took him to one side [i.e. buggered him].

23. Galba met his end in the seventy-third year of his age and the seventh month of his reign. The senate, as soon as it was allowed to do so, voted him a statue standing on a column decorated with the beaks of ships, in the part of the Forum where he was killed. But Vespasian [after he came to power in July 69] annulled this decree, believing that Galba had sent assassins from Spain to Judaea to murder him.

[Suetonius’s Life of Galba should be read alongside Tacitus’s account of the same events in his Histories.]

Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars

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by Simon on January 6, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Biography, Translation

Tagged Aemilia Lepida, Agrippina the Younger, Alexandria, Ancient history, ancient Rome, ancient world, Aquitania, Argivus, Atellan farce, Augustus, Aulus Vitellius, Britain, brotherhood of Titius, Caligula, Canus, Claudius, Clodius Macer, Corinth, Cornelius Laco, Dertosa, Domitius, emperor Caligula, emperor Galba, emperor Tiberius, Fonteius Capito, Fortune, Gaius Caesar, Gaius Julius Vindex, Galba, Gallia Lugdunensis, Germany, Gnaeus Dolabella, Gnaeus Lentulus, Halotus, Hispania, Hispania Tarraconensis, history, homosexuality, Icelus, Illyria, J. C. Rolfe, Julius Caesar, Lacus Curtius, Lake of Curtius, Life of Galba, Livia, Livia Augusta, Livia Ocellina, Livius Ocella Sulpicius Galba, Lower Germany, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus, Lucius Domitius, Lucius Mummius, Lusitania, Marcianus, Marcus Otho, Marcus Salvius Otho, Marcus Valerius Messala, Minos, Mummia Achaica, Nero, New Carthage, Nymphidius, Nymphidius Sabinus, omens, Otho, Pasiphaë, Patrobius Neronianus, Piso, Piso Frugi Licinianus, Plutarch, Portents, Praetorian Guard, Roman Empire, Roman history, Rome, Sabinus, Salvius Otho, Servius Galba, Servius Sulpicius Galba, Slavery, slaves, Suetonius, Suetonius Life of Galba, suicide, Tacitus, Tarracina, Tarraco, The Floralia, Tiberius, Tigellinus, Titus Vinius, Translation, Tusculum, Upper Germany, Vespasian, Vinius, Viriathus, Year of the Four Emperors

Posted by Simon on January 6, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/01/06/the-life-of-galba-by-suetonius/

The Pharsalia by Lucan – 1: Introduction

O mighty the sacred labour of the poet! He rescues
all from fate, and grants immortality to mortal beings.
(Pharsalia Book 9, lines 980 to 981)

Lucan biography

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (39 to 65 AD), generally referred to in English simply as ‘Lucan’, was a Roman poet, born in Corduba (modern-day Córdoba) in the Roman province of Hispania. Although he was ordered to kill himself by the emperor Nero at the age of just 25, Lucan is regarded as one of the outstanding figures of the Imperial Latin period, particularly for his (unfinished) epic poem, Pharsalia.

Lucan was the son of Marcus Annaeus Mela, younger brother of Seneca the Younger i.e. he was Seneca’s nephew.

Lucan’s father was wealthy, a member of the knightly class, and sent him to study rhetoric at Athens and he was probably tutored in philosophy, and especially Stoic philosophy, by his uncle (maybe by Seneca’s freedman, Cornutus, who also tutored the slightly older poet, Persius).

Lucan was a precocious talent and was welcomed into the literary and philosophical circles around the young emperor Nero, who was only two years older than him (born 37 AD). In 60 AD i.e. aged barely 21, Lucan won prizes for extemporising poems at Nero’s new Quinquennial Games. Nero rewarded him by appointing him to the office of augur, a plum position in Rome’s religious hierarchy.

Soon afterwards Lucan began circulating the first three books of what was intended to be an epic poem about the civil war between Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (generally referred to as Pompey). This has come down to us with the title Pharsalia, or De Bello civili (‘On the civil war’) in other manuscripts. It’s titled Pharsalia because the action focuses on the decisive Battle of Pharsalus, fought on 9 August 48 BC, at which Caesar decisively defeated Pompey’s army.

At some point Nero and Lucan fell out. According to Tacitus (Annals, book 15, section 49) Nero became jealous of Lucan and ordered him to stop publishing the Pharsalia. According to Suetonius (in his brief Life of Lucan, cited in full at the end of this blog post), Nero disrupted a public reading by Lucan by leaving and calling a meeting of the senate. Lucan responded by writing insulting poems about Nero – which is always a bad thing to do against a tyrant. The grammarian Vacca mentions that one of Lucan’s works was entitled De Incendio Urbis (‘On the Burning of the City’) which presumably contained criticism of Nero’s role in the Great Fire of Rome (July 64). This is confirmed by a reference in a poem by Lucan’s younger contemporary, Publius Papinius Statius (45 to 96 AD).

As further proof, after the pro-Nero eulogy of the opening book, nearly all the subsequent references to emperors and the empire are vitriolically anti-imperial and pro-republic in tone. To take an example at random, Lucan’s biting criticism of not only Alexander the Great’s achievements, but of the cult of imperial Alexander which followed his death.

For, if the world had regained a shred of liberty
his corpse would have been retained as an object
of derision, not shown as an example to the world
of how a host of lands were subjected to one man.
He left his Macedonian obscurity, spurned Athens
that his father had conquered, and spurred on by
the power of destiny ran amok among the realms
of Asia, slaying humankind, putting every land
to the sword. He stained far-off rivers, Persia’s
Euphrates, India’s Ganges with blood; a plague
on earth, a lightning bolt that struck all peoples
alike, a fateful comet flaring over every nation.

But what ended Lucan’s life was his involvement in Gaius Calpurnius Piso’s conspiracy against Nero, uncovered in 65. Lucan was one of many conspirators revealed by torturing suspects. According to Suetonius he miserably truckled to his persecutors, giving them names of further conspirators, including even his own mother, in the vain hope of winning a pardon.

Once his guilt was established Nero ordered Lucan to commit suicide by opening a vein (the alternative being arrest, torture and public execution). According to Tacitus, as Lucan bled to death he recited some lines he had written about a wounded soldier. I wonder if they were from the passage about the 600 Caesarians who chose suicide rather than surrender to Pompey, in book 4:

how simple it is to escape captivity by suicide
(4.577)

Alternatively, according to Suetonius, Lucan in his dying minutes wrote a letter to his father containing corrections to some of his verses and, after eating heartily, offered his arms to a physician to cut his veins. Lucan’s father and both his uncles, i.e all three sons of Seneca the Elder, were also compelled to kill themselves.

(Statius wrote an elegy to Lucan, the Genethliacon Lucani, which was addressed to his widow, Polla Argentaria, on the dead man’s birthday. It was written during the reign of Domitian (81 to 96) and included in Statius’s collection, Silvae).

Themes in the Pharsalia

De Bello Civili (‘On the Civil War’) or the Pharsalia is long and dense with themes and ideas, some of which I will now consider:

1. No gods

The traditional epic poem is packed with gods, supporting various protagonists and intervening in the events. The entire narrative of the Aeneid exists because of the enmity of the queen of the gods, Juno, to the hero, Aeneas, who she continually enters the story to block and stymy, in doing so setting herself against fellow goddess, Venus, who, for her part, does everything she can to support Aeneas (who is her son). This leads to great set-piece debates in heaven between the rival gods, adjudicated by the king of the heavens, Jupiter.

There’s none of this in Lucan. Lucan took the decision to dispense with all the divine interventions associated with traditional epic. Lucan replaces them with the more up-to-date Stoic notions of Fate and Fortune. These two forces, sometimes blurring into each other and overlapping, at other moments appear as clearly distinct entities, names for two different forces operating at different levels of the universe.

Fate, fatum or fata is Destiny – the fixed, foreordained course of events which underpins the universe. Fate is the name given to the working through of the deep plan for the world and the nations in it.

And now, as light dispersed the chill shades of night,
Destiny lit the flames of war, setting the spur to Caesar’s
wavering heart, shattering the barriers shame interposed
and driving him on to conflict. Fate worked to justify
his rebellion, and found a pretext for his use of arms.
(Book 1, lines 261 to 265)

What but the power of destiny, that tragic fate
decreed by the eternal order, drew him, doomed
to die, to that shore…Yet
Pompey yielded to fate, obeying when requested
to leave his ship, choosing to die rather than show
fear…
(8.571 ff.)

By contrast, Fortune, fortuna, is Chance, a fickle, unpredictable force, continually turning her wheel, ensuring that anyone at the peak of professional or social success, can never be certain that Fortune won’t turn her wheel and plunge them down to the pits of failure.

At a deep level, Fate determines the occurrence of a civil war and that Caesar will win. But Fortune decides the outcome of specific events and details.

Caesar, finding civil war so eagerly welcomed by his men,
and finding fortune favourable, granted destiny no delay
due to idleness, but summoned all his forces scattered
throughout Gaul, moving every legion towards Rome.
(1.392 to 395)

Susan Braund explains all this in the introduction to her translation of the Pharsalia published by the Oxford University Press. The distinct operational levels of the two forces are sometimes made particularly clear:

Caesar, finding civil war so eagerly welcomed by his men,
and finding fortune favourable, granted destiny no delay
(1.392-3)

Where Destiny is the overall force or plan but whether individual elements of the plan fall this way or that, depends on Fortune. Or:

Fate stirred the peoples and sent them as companions
to a great disaster, as a funeral train fit for Pompey’s
exequies. Even horned Ammon was not slow to send
squadrons from Africa to battle, from all parched Libya,
from Morocco in the west to Egyptian Syrtes in the east.
So that Caesar, fortune‘s favourite, might win all with
a single throw, Pharsalia brought all the world to battle.
(3.291 to 297)

The distinction is made particularly clear in the long speech by the witch Erictho in book 6, where she makes a distinction between ‘the chain of events fixed from the beginning of the world’ which nobody can change or alter, and ‘lesser decrees of fate’, which witches like her can alter. Level 1 and Level 2. (6.609 to 621)

However, at other moments I found the concepts a lot less clear cut, for example in this passage where you’d expect the Pompey’s ultimate death, the deep pattern of his life, to be described as his Fate not his Fortune.

Pompey by then, had gained the open sea, but the luck
that aided his past hunts for pirates was his no longer,
and Fortune, wearied by his triumphs, proved untrue.

And sometimes the two concepts seem interchangeable:

Greedy quicksand and spongy marshes hid the secret
Fate had placed there; yet later that aged general’s flesh
was scarred by iron fetters reduced by long vile imprisonment.
He was to die though as Fortune’s friend, as consul in a Rome
he had ruined.
(2.71 to 75)

Anyway, Lucan’s neglect of the traditional apparatus of gods and his focus on Fate and Fortune do two things for the poem:

Lots of gods would have distracted attention away from what was a very human catastrophe and away from the all-too-human human protagonists.
Also the gods can, in some sense, be appealed to and swayed by humans. Whereas Fate and Fortune are profoundly impersonal forces and so bring out the horror of the unstoppable nature of civil war, Fate emphasising the deep inevitability of the outcome, with Fortune standing for the many chance victims along the way.

There is a simpler explanation, which is that the introduction of the kind of gods found in Virgil was simply inappropriate – would have appeared gauche and clumsy – in a poem dealing with very events almost within living memory. Roman literature – Classical literature generally – was very concerned with what was and wasn’t appropriate for every genre, in terms of subject matter, tone and even individual words. Including the gods in a historical epic would have breached the conventions of the genre.

2. No heroes

Epic poems feature the adventures of more-than-human heroes, from Gilgamesh, through Achilles and Aeneas, to Beowulf, humans not only with superhuman power but often the progeny of the gods. Whereas a historical epic like the Pharsalia is concerned with real historical personages, many of whose relatives were still alive when Lucan wrote.

Not only that, but epics generally feature one obvious central protagonist (Gilgamesh, Achilles, Beowulf) but just as there are no gods or divine intervention in the Pharsalia, so there is no one hero or central protagonist. Instead there are three leading but not totally dominating figures:

1. Gaius Julius Caesar

Caesar is the most prominent character in the first part of the poem, active, clear-sighted, ambitious, a force of nature – but not likeable. Lucan’s Caesar approaches closest to the figure of traditional epic hero. He has no moderating feminine influence on him until right at the end, in book 10, where his encounter with Cleopatra is a meeting of two cynical players. After the climactic battle of Pharsalus, however, Caesar is depicted as becoming more ambitious and imperial.

2. Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus

Pompey is portrayed as the opposite – vacillating, indecisive, and past his prime (‘the mere shadow of a mighty name’) but, in scenes with friends, followers and especially his wife, Cornelia, far more human than Caesar. At the end, after Pharsalus, Pompey is transformed into a stoic martyr, receiving a kind of visionary treatment as he nears his tragic death on the beach in Egypt which he meets with Stoic calm acceptance.

3. Marcus Porcius Cato

And, after the death of Pompey in book 8, Cato emerges as the strongest leader of the Republican cause, holed up with Republican legions in north Africa. Cato epitomises stern old-fashioned values. He stands for Roman patriotism and Stoic contempt for death, notably in the episode in book 9 where he scorns to consult the oracle of Ammon, saying God gave us all the knowledge we need to live a virtuous life at birth; which triggers adulation from Lucan:

Behold, the true father of his
country, a man worthy to be worshipped,
Rome, at your altars; by whom none need
blush to swear, and who, if you ever free
your neck from the yoke, shall be made a god.

In fact, in a striking episode on the march across the desert, Cato not only embodies Stoic resolution in the face of death but inspires it in others:

Alone he was present at every
death; whenever they call, he goes, and confers that
mighty benefit, more than life: the courage to die;
so that, with him as witness, any man was ashamed
to die with a groan on his lips.
(9.882)

When Cato’s first wife, Marcia, returns to him the narrative emphasises that their marriage is sexless; it symbolises his adherence to defunct, sterile values. Many critics think Lucan intended Cato to develop into the central figure of the poem, with the narrative designed to end with his famous suicide in the besieged garrison town of Utica, symbolising the moral victory of Stoic principle and Freedom against Tyranny.

Description of the lead-up to Cato’s death on the Cato Chronicles blog

There’s a case for saying the three figures are on a spectrum: Caesar is over-balanced in one direction, all energy and decision and lust (‘impetuous in everything’ 2.657); Cato stands at the other pole, arid, sexless, aloof; with Pompey standing in the middle, reasonable and given scenes of touching married love with Cornelia. As this blog shrewdly suggests, it’s as if the heroic protagonist of Virgil’s epic, Aeneas, has decomposed into three characters, none of which are heroic.

3. The gruesome and the macabre

The supernatural

If the Pharsalia doesn’t have gods, what it does have in abundance is the Supernatural – the poem is awash with visions, dreams, ghosts, magic, rituals and so on. Braund sees the supernatural as falling into two categories, ‘dreams and visions’ and ‘portents, prophecies and consultations of supernatural powers’.

a) Dreams and visions

There are four important dream or vision sequences in the poem:

Caesar’s vision of Roma as he is about to cross the Rubicon.
The ghost of Julia (his beloved dead wife) appearing to Pompey (3.1 to 45)
Pompey’s dream of his happy past (7.1 to 30)
Caesar and his troops’ dream of battle and destruction.

All four of these dream-visions are placed strategically throughout the poem to provide structure, and to dramatise key turning points in the narrative.

b) Portents, prophecies and consultations of supernatural powers

Lucan describes a number of portents, with two specifically oracular episodes. What is a portent? “A sign or warning that a momentous or calamitous event is likely to happen.” So, on the morning of the fateful battle:

Now Fortune too did not hesitate to reveal the future
by diverse signs. When the army made for Thessaly’s
fields, the whole sky opposed their march, hurling
meteors against them, columns of flame, whirlwinds
sucking up water and trees together, blinding their
eyes with lightning, striking crests from their helms,
melting the swords in their scabbards, tearing spears
from their grasp while fusing them, their evil blades
smoking with air-borne sulphur. The standards too
could barely be plucked from the soil, their great
weight bowing the heads of the standard-bearers;
and the standards wept real tears…
(7.151 to 162)

The central example is the necromancy which takes up half of book 6, when Pompey’s son, Sextus, goes to consult the witch Erachtho. Lucan’s description of the witch and her ritual take up half the entire book (lines 413 to 830).

All this appealed to contemporary taste for the macabre. Braund cites events in one of the tragedies of Lucan’s uncle, Seneca, his Oedipus, which contains a) a visit to the Delphic oracle, b) a gruesome description of the sacrifice and entrail examination of a bull and heifer (haruspicy), and c) the even more macabre magical rituals by which Tiresias raises the ghost of dead King Laius to accuse Oedipus of his murder.

Chaos on earth reflected in heaven

It is a central feature of the histories that war and disruption on earth must inevitably be accompanied by chaos in the heavens – just as in his uncle Seneca’s tragedies where mayhem on earth is matched and mimicked by cosmic catastrophes. In both Lucan and Seneca the entire universe often seems to be trembling on the brink of complete dissolution.

So when the fabric
of the world dissolves, in that final hour that gathers in the ages,
reverting to primal chaos, star will clash with star in confusion,
the fiery constellations will sink into the sea, and earth heaving
upwards her flat shores will throw off the ocean, the moon will
move counter to her brother, and claiming the rule of day disdain
to drive her chariot on its slanting path, and the whole discordant
frame of the shattered firmament will break free of every law.
(1.72 to 79)

This worldview, the intimate parallelism between human and supernatural affairs, is very prevalent in the biographers Plutarch and Suetonius, writing a generation later.

Haruspicy and necromancy

Along the way, Braund gives useful definitions of two key Roman practices:

haruspicy (haruspicies) is the art of studying animal entrails, usually the victims of ritual sacrifices
necromancy is the art of getting the dead to speak prophecy; necromancy is not only the general practice of this craft, but you perform a necromancy

4. Extreme rhetoric

Education for Roman aristocrats focused on rhetoric, the ability to speak eloquently and make a persuasive argument. We know from contemporary comments and satires that under the empire many of the exercises which students were given became steadily more extreme and exaggerated. This was reflected in the poetry of the age; from what survives the most extreme example might be the bloodthirsty and over-written tragedies of Seneca.

A central part of the curriculum was the suasoria, an exercise where students wrote speeches advising an historical figure on a course of action. This obviously fed into the largely invented speeches which fill Tacitus’s histories as much as Lucan’s poem.

Lucan is sometimes criticised for the extremity of his rhetoric and the luridness of scenes and imagery. But Susan Braund comes to his defence, with two arguments. One is that Lucan was a product of his times. There was a taste for melodrama and Gothic hyperbole which Lucan catered to.

More interesting is the second argument. This is to do with Virgil. Virgil was the undisputed king of Roman poets and his epic, the Aeneid, was acknowledged as a classic even as he was writing it. The problem for ambitious poets in all the succeeding generations was how to escape Virgil’s dominating influence, how to do anything new. Braund says Ovid found one way, in his Metamorphoses, which was to drop the notion of one, unified, linear narrative and instead string together hundreds of stories and episodes.

Lucan adopted another strategy which was to import into his text the ‘discourse of contemporary rhetoric’, in all its exaggeration and extremity. For there’s another aspect here, which is not to forget that a poem like this was meant to be recited aloud to audiences. Before the rule of Augustus, poetry was recited to group of like-minded friends or patrons. During Augustus’s reign it became common to recite it to larger audiences. We have accounts of Virgil reciting to the emperor and his extended family. Horace was commissioned to write odes to be declaimed at public games.

Braund argues that this trend for declamation had two consequences: it tended to promote more striking and vibrant imagery/style. And it incentivised the poet to think in terms of episodes.

5. Episodic structure

The Aeneid is very carefully constructed and susceptible to many types of structural analysis. Although critics have, of course, made a case for the existence of a deep structure in the Pharsalia (for example, a tetradic structure whereby the first four books focus on Caesar, the next four on Pompey and the final four on Cato) Braund disagrees. She thinks the narrative is far more episodic. In this respect it is like the highly episodic structure of Ovid’s Metamorphoses with one story leading to another, then another, then another – itself a strategy for escaping the highly unified and centralised narrative of the Aeneid.

Like the Metamorphoses, this lack of a single unifying narrative in the Pharsalia allows for more episodes, more adventures, more flicking between channels – episodes which contain are like mini-genres, containing their own appropriate languages, structure and style.

Lucan is fond of discontinuity. He presents his narrative as a series of discrete scenes, often without any transitional or scene-changing lines. Rather than a continuous narrative, it often feels like scenes are balanced within a book or between books, working by correspondence, similarity and difference between them.

We can imagine how well these dramatic episodes would have gone down as stand-alone recitations to a sophisticate audience of Roman aristocrats. I’m thinking of Appius’s confrontation with the priestess at Delphi or the terrific storm scene or Caesar’s speech of defiance to his mutinous troops, all in book 5.

6. Lucan and Virgil

Lucan frequently appropriates ideas from Virgil’s epic and inverts them to undermine their original, heroic purpose. Sextus’ visit to the Thracian witch Erictho in book 6 is the most obvious example, the scene and language clearly referencing Aeneas’ descent into the underworld (in Book 6 of the Aeneid), but while Virgil’s description, despite its gloomy setting, is an optimistic, nay triumphant vision of the future heroes of Rome leading up to the glories of Augustan rule, Lucan uses his scene to convey a bitter and bloody pessimism about the loss of liberty under the coming empire.

7. Epic similes

Braund and other critics emphasis the way that Lucan seeks to break free from the epic conventions, in particular the way he references Virgil in order to reverse or invert his technique and meaning. But in one respect Lucan strongly conforms with the tradition, which is in his use of epic similes. Straight-up epic similes really litter the narrative. Here’s the famous extended comparison of Pompey, larded with triumphs, to a venerable oak tree:

So some oak-tree towers in a rich grove,
hung with a nation’s ancient trophies, sacred gifts of the victors,
and though its clinging roots have lost their strength, their weight
alone holds it, spreading naked branches to the sky, casting shade
not with leaves but its trunk alone, and though it quivers, doomed
to fall at the next gale, among the host of sounder trees that rise
around it, still it alone is celebrated.
(1.137 to 143)

Or the inhabitants of towns which Caesar’s army approached were conflicted about who to support.

Though loyalty contended with the threat of danger,
they still favoured Pompey, as when a southerly rules
the waves, and all the sea is stirred by its vast power,
so that even if Aeolus’ trident opens the solid earth,
and lets an easterly loose on the mounting breakers,
the ocean, though struck by that second force, stays
true to the first, and though the sky surrenders itself
to the rain-filled easterly, the sea asserts the southerly’s
power.
(2.452 to 460)

Describing Octavius’s naval strategy:

…So the hunter works,
holding back the net of coloured feathers that scares
the deer with its scent, till he can pen them all, or
quieting the noise of the swift Molossian hounds,
leashing the dogs of Crete and Sparta, till he has set
his stakes and nets, leaving one hound alone to range
the ground, it puzzling out the scent and only barking
when the prey is found, content then to point toward
the creature’s lair while tugging at the leash.
(4.436 to 444)

Or describing the way Cato’s speech in book 9 persuades the allies to remain with the anti-Caesarian army:

So, when hosts of bees
depart the hive, where their young have hatched,
they neglect the waxy cells, their wings no longer
brush one another, each takes its own way, idling,
refraining now from sipping the flowering thyme
with its bitter taste; yet if the sound of Phrygian
cymbals rises, they interrupt their flight, in alarm,
returning to the performance of their flowery task,
and their love of gathering pollen. The shepherd
in Hybla’s meadows is relieved, delighted that
his honey harvest is secured. So Cato’s speech
persuaded his men to endure the lawful conflict.
(9.282 to 293)

Nothing particularly lurid or extreme or melodramatic or supernatural about these. Very conventional epic similes.

8. Geographical descriptions

Before I started reading the poem I was impressed by Braund’s introduction and its emphasis on the macabre and bloodthirsty in Lucan. But once I began reading, I realised there were a lot of other, more low-key, less sensational elements that go to make up the text. More frequent than descriptions of battle, let alone supernatural visions, are the frequent very long passages describing the precise geography of a particular location, such as the region around Capua where Pompey first took his army or, in book 6, this very long description of Thessaly.

Mount Pelion’s ridge bounds Thessaly in the quarter where
the winter sun rises, Mount Ossa where in high summer
its shade obstructs the rays of Phoebus rising in the dawn;
while wooded Othrys dispels the flames of the southern sky,
at midsummer, opposing the brow of the all-devouring Lion;
and Mount Pindus outfacing westerlies and north-westerlies,
where daylight ebbs hastens evening on; while those who live
at the foot of Olympus never dreading the northerlies, know
nothing of the Great Bear’s stars shining a whole night long.
The low-lying lands in the region between these mountains
were once covered with endless marshes; since the plains
retained the waters, and the Vale of Tempe was insufficient
for them to reach the sea they formed continuous swampland,
and their only course was to rise. But when Hercules lifted
Ossa’s weight from Olympus, the sea felt a sudden onrush
of waters as Thessalian Pharsalos, that realm of Achilles
the hero born of a sea-goddess, rose above the surface,
a realm better drowned forever. There rose too, Phylace
whose king was first to land in the war at Troy; Pteleos;
Dorion, that laments the Muses’ anger and blind Thamyris;
Trachis; Meliboea whose Philoctetes received Hercules’
bow, for lighting that hero’s funeral pyre; Larisa, powerful
once; and the sites where the plough now passes over famed
Argos, where Echion’s Thebes once stood, to which Agave
howling bore the head of Pentheus giving it to the funeral
pyre, grieving to have carried off no other part of his flesh.
Thus the swamp was drained forming a host of rivers. From
there the Aeas, clear in its flow but of little volume, runs
westward to the Ionian Sea, the Inachus glides with no more
powerful a current (he was the river-god, father of ravished Io)
nor the Achelous (he almost won Deianeira, Oeneus’ daughter)
that silts the Echinades islands; there, the Euhenos, stained
as it is with Nessus’ blood runs through Meleager’s Calydon;
there Spercheos’ swift stream meets the Malian Gulf’s wave,
and the pure depths of the Amphrysos water those pastures
where Apollo herded cattle. There, the Asopos starts its flow,
and the Black River, and the Phoenix; there, the Anauros,
free of moist vapours, dew-drenched air, capricious breezes.
There too are the rivers which do not reach the sea themselves
but are tributaries of Peneus – the Apidanus, robbed of its flow,
the Enipeus never swift until it finds Peneus, and the Titaresos,
which alone, meeting with that river, keeps its waters intact,
glides on the surface, as though the greater river were dry land,
for legend says its stream flows from the pool of Styx, and so,
mindful of its source, scorns commingling with common water,
inspiring still that awe of its current the gods themselves feel.
Once the waters had flowed away leaving dry land, the fertile
soil was furrowed by the ploughs of the Bebryces; the labour
of Leleges drove the share deep; the ground was broken by
Aeolidae and Dolopians, by Magnesians breeders of horses,
Minyae builders of ships.
(6.398 to 416)

Long, isn’t it? A tourist’s guide to the region. I imagine the long list of not only place names but myths and legends associated with them were a) appropriate to the grandeur of the epic genre, magnifying the action b) awed Lucan’s readers or auditor’s with the poet’s impressive erudition c) made those in the aristocratic audience who had visited some or many of those sites nod with smug recognition.

9. Natural history

In his last few years, Lucan’s uncle, Seneca the Younger, composed an enormous work of natural history, the Naturales quaestiones, an encyclopedia of the natural world. A decade later, 77, Pliny the Elder published the first 10 books of his compendious Naturalis Historia (Natural History) (the largest single work to have survived from the Roman Empire to the modern day).

I mention these works to indicate that a taste for ‘natural history’ was obviously in the air and maybe explains the presence of the extended passages of natural history in the Pharsalia. The obvious example is the really extended passage about the snakes of Libya which takes up over 300 lines in book 9.

10. Is the Pharsalia unfinished?

Almost all scholars agree that the Pharsalia as we now have it is unfinished. Lucan was working in book 10 when Nero’s order to commit suicide came through. Book 10 breaks off with Caesar in Egypt. There are numerous theories about this as about all other aspects of the poem. Here are some:

Some argue that Lucan intended to end his poem with the Battle of Philippi (42 BC).
Some critics speculate that the narrative was intended to continue all the way to the assassination of Julius Caesar four years after the Battle of Pharsalus, in 44 BC.
Some even think it was meant to continue all the way to the Battle of Actium in 31 BC.

The latter two theories, in particular, suppose that Lucan intended to write a work many times larger than what we have. The 10-book poem we have today covers a total of 20 months i.e. roughly a book per 2 months; so the 48 months to Caesar’s assassination would imply another 24 books; the 17 years (204 month) to Actium, imply another 102 books!

Another problem with the timeline continuing as far as Caesar’s assassination is that, with both Pompey and Cato dead, Lucan would have had to embark on building up a new set of characters, in particular the leaders of Caesar’s assassination, Cassius and Brutus.

Which is why Braund ends up going with the simplest hypothesis which is that Lucan’s original intent was a 12-book poem, mirroring the length of the Aeneid. The strongest piece of evidence for Lucan consciously modelling the Pharsalia on Virgil is the way Lucan introduces an extended necromantic ritual in his sixth book that deliberately parallels and inverts many of the motifs found in Virgil’s sixth book. Thus Braund goes with the view that the poem was to be 12 books long and was heading towards the suicide of Cato (as the army of Julius Caesar approached his stronghold of Utica in North Africa) held up as a model of Stoic dignity rising above tyranny.

There are a few more scenarios: one is that the Pharsalia in in fact finished, was meant to end at the end of the tenth book, and is complete as we have it. This is the view of Classicist Jamie Masters but most other scholars disagree.

But there is one last logical possibility, which is that Lucan did in fact complete the poem but, for whatever reason, the final few books of the work were lost at some point. Braund notes that little evidence has been found one way or the other, so this question will remain a matter of speculation.

11. The Roman cult of suicide

Throughout the poem suicide is praised as a noble and dignified way to take control of your life. Nothing becomes a true Roman man so much as either a) dying in battle or b) controlling the time and place of his death, especially when faced with tyranny. Thus Afranius contemplates suicide before surrendering to Caesar (book 4), Vulteius and his men actually do commit suicide, en masse, rather than be captured:

No instant is too short for a man
to kill himself; suicide is no less glorious when death
at another’s hand approaches.
(4.480)

Even Julius Caesar unashamedly tells his mutinying soldiers that, if they lose, he will commit suicide:

I shall seek
my own salvation in suicide; whoever looks back
if the foe is unbeaten, will see me stab my breast.
(7.308)

From which Lucan draws the general lesson that suicide is the ultimate way to escape from tyranny:

Yet even after the example set
by such heroes, nations of cowards still do not comprehend
how simple it is to escape captivity by suicide; so the tyrant’s
power is feared, freedom is constrained by savage weapons,
while all remain ignorant that the sword is there to deliver
every man from slavery.

For me, the careful seeding of examples of, and praise of, and defences of, suicide, strongly suggest the poem was building up to the suicide of Cato as its climax and crowning example of resistance. Thus it is that Cato himself sternly celebrates Pompey’s death after defeat:

O happy was he, whose ending
followed on defeat, the Egyptian swords
offering the death he should have sought.
He might perhaps have lived on instead
under Caesar’s rule

Because:

the highest fate
is to know when to die, and the second
best to have such death forced upon one.

The ‘highest fate’, the best thing a man can do, the greatest achievement of human reason, is to know when to die. All the more ghoulishly ironic that Lucan himself was forced to commit suicide before he could complete the depiction of his Stoic hero committing suicide.

12. Lucan and Seneca

I finished reading Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic weeks after reading the Pharsalia. Reviewing my notes I realise the tremendous overlap in ‘philosophy’, namely the absolutely central role played in both texts by suicide as escape from tyranny. It is the central theme of both works. But as I point out in my review of the letters, suicide my be an acceptable theme for a poem, but not for a really long work of moral exhortation (the letters) which claim to be instructions on how to live and think. Personally, I recommend not thinking about suicide every moment of every day, as a healthier way to live.

Modern views

Since the Enlightenment the Pharsalia has commonly been considered a second rank offering, not in the same league as the king of the Roman epics, the Aeneid. But in recent decades more sophisticated literary analysis has brought out how the poem’s ‘studied artifice enacts a complex relationship between poetic fantasy and historical reality’.

His narrative of the civil war is pared down to a bare minimum; but this is overlaid with a rich and varied virtuoso display of learning which reflected contemporary interests. (Braund, Introduction, page 37)

All I can add is that I found the Pharsalia a surprisingly gripping and interesting read.

Caesar crossing the Rubicon by Adolphe Yvon (1875)

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by Simon on December 28, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Poetry, Translation

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The Apocolocyntosis by Seneca

Seneca

Seneca the Younger (4 BC to 65 AD) was recalled from exile by Agrippina, the emperor Claudius’s fourth and final wife, in 54 AD, to be appointed tutor to her son, Domitius Ahenobarbus who would, 10 years later, ascend the throne to become the emperor Nero.

Seneca was a prolific author, producing a dozen philosophical works, about the same number of blood-curdling tragic plays, the 120 or so Letters to Lucilius and a work of Natural History. He was, for the first 5 or so years of Nero’s rule, the emperor’s speech writer and wrote the moving eulogy which Nero delivered at his uncle (Claudius’s) funeral. (This is described in Tacitus’s Annals 13.3).

The Apocolocyntosis

But scholars also think that Seneca was the author of a short satire about Claudius produced shortly after the late emperor’s death. It is referred to by the Greek historian of the early imperial era, Cassius Dio, by the title the Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii. This is a pun, of sorts, on the Latin for the deification or apotheosis of Claudius which (as for previous emperors) was carried out soon after his death. It literally means ‘The Gourdification of (the Divine) Claudius’, although many translators, including the translator of the Penguin edition, J.P. Sullivan, prefer the more ludicrous word ‘Pumpkinification’.

The manuscript gives the satire the title Ludus de morte Divi Claudii (‘Play on the Death of the Divine Claudius’) and most scholars think this is the same work as Dio was referring to, although the identification is not absolutely certain and some scholars disagree. The strongest argument against identifying the two is that the text as we have it nowhere mentions the transformation of Claudius into either a gourd or a pumpkin. Instead it describes Claudius’s trial in heaven and then his journey down to hell.

To confuse the picture a bit more, the similarity of the work’s format (Menippean satire) and tone (deliberately colloquial) have led some scholars to attribute the Ludus to the author of the only other Latin Menippean satire we have, the Satyricon by Petronius – which explains why they’re both published in the same Penguin paperback volume.

So is the Ludus we have the same as the Apocolocyntosis mentioned by Dio? Is it by Seneca or could it just possibly be by Petronius? Qui sait?

Menippean satire

As a literary form, the piece belongs to the class called Satura Menippea or Menippean satire, being a satiric medley in prose and verse. This form was developed in ancient Greece and named after its chief practitioner, Menippus. Menippus of Gadara (3rd century BC) was a Cynic satirist. All of his works are lost but later authors described him as both an important purveyor of Cynic philosophy and a major comic influence. The Roman satirist, Lucian, in particular, claimed to be directly imitating Menippus.

According to later summarisers, Menippus discussed serious subjects in a spirit of ridicule; he particularly mocked the two main philosophical schools of Epicureans and Stoics. Strabo and Stephanus call him the ‘earnest-jester’ i.e. taking potentially serious subjects and mocking them.

Claudius the Clod

The translator of this Penguin edition, J.P. Sullivan, appears to have invented the title he gives to the work, the equally witty and satirical ‘The Deification of Claudius the Clod’, capturing both a play on apotheosis (‘deification of’) and a reference to Robert Graves’s famous historical novel, Claudius the God.

Some critics think the poem is so vulgar and crude as to be beneath the dignity of the author who wrote the earnest moral exhortations of the Letters to Lucilius. But it seems just about plausible that Seneca might have knocked off this short squib to entertain the new young emperor (Nero was just 17 when he ascended the throne) and his cronies.

Certainly there’s nothing new in the satire; its author repeats criticism of Claudius also made in Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio: that he was a figure of fun, part fussy pedant, part capricious tyrant. In the poem his head shakes and his speech is unclear (the difficulty of understanding anything he says is repeatedly emphasised). Claudius is portrayed as a slave to his freedmen and absent-mindedly consigns senior Romans he’s jealous of to death almost at random.

Sullivan points out that the satire is as notable for what it omits as what it includes, namely that Claudius was a great womaniser. This might have been too close to the bone for Nero, who was showing similar tastes even as a teenager. The poem also includes the specific claim that Claudius died while watching a troupe of comedians, whereas in fact he was dead by that point (probably murdered by his fourth wife, Agrippina) and the troupe was invited to his palace as a cover, to give the impression he was still alive, while Agrippina finalised the details for the smooth accession of her son.

Above all, the text describes and then, in its final passages, really focuses in on Claudius’s record as a tyrant and murderer.

The plot

The narrative takes a while to get going, is a bit laboured in the middle – where part of it is missing – and then hurries to an abrupt end, so abrupt that some scholars think it isn’t actually complete. Like most Roman prose texts, it is divided into short numbered sections, conventionally called ‘chapters’.

The narrative is told in the first person by a jokey, mocking narrator who swears what he is going to tell is the honest truth, so help him God, and if we don’t believe him, go and ask the fellow who swore he saw the soul of Julia Drusilla ascend into heaven: that’s his source. (Drusilla was the sister and, it was widely thought, lover of the emperor Caligula, who paid the senator Livius Germinius 250,000 sestercii to swear he saw her soul ascend into heaven.)

(3) It’s 13 October and Claudius is struggling to die so Mercury goes to visit the Fates and says can’t they hurry things up a bit and put Claudius, and his country, out of its misery. The Fate Clotho makes a joke, saying she’s delaying his death because Claudius hasn’t quite granted Italian citizenship to every possible nationality. (This is a jokey reference to Claudius’s famous speech to the senate defending the right of Gauls, living in Roman Gaul, to stand for magistracies in Rome, arguing that this policy of assimilation is what made Rome great.)

But Clotho gives in and agrees to let Claudius die, ensuring it happens at the same time as two other notorious buffoons pass away, so that he’ll have appropriate company on the path to heaven.

(4) There’s now a section of poetry which describes how the Fates, having dispensed with Claudius (‘cut from the imperial line one doddering life’) turn to weaving the thread of life of his successor and this turns into a cloyingly sycophantic paean to the new emperor, Nero:

To a weary folk
He brings glad days, to muted law a tongue,
As the Morning Star, setting the stars to flight,
As the shining sun, when his chariot moves first from the line,
So Caesar comes, so Nero appears to Rome,
His bright face glowing with gentle radiance,
His neck all beauty under his glowing hair.

The poem describes how the Fate Lachesis, influenced by the young man’s beauty, gives him a long life. So much for flattering the teenage successor.

Back to Claudius and he finally expires (watching a troupe of comedians, a fact the narrator says, which explains his terror of comedians). In the poem his last words are: ‘Oh I appear to have shat myself.’

Whether he had, I don’t know. He certainly shat on everything else.

(5) The narrator takes it for granted how happy people were at this news, so he moves on to describe what happens next, in heaven. It was announced to Jupiter that a new visitor had arrived. He was shaking his head and limping. When asked who he was, his reply was unintelligible.

Jupiter dispatches Hercules to deal with him but even Hercules, who’s faced and overcome every monster known to man, is intimidated by the new arrival’s strange face, weird walk and unintelligible mumble. He asks the new arrival who he is in Greek, in fact quoting a line of Homer. Claudius is reassured to find there are literary men up here, as there might find an appreciative audience for his ‘Histories’. (As a young man Claudius began researching and writing a history of the civil wars, a typically clumsy and tactless undertaking seeing as it involved assessment and judgement on so many people still living, not least the emperor Augustus.)

(6) Claudius has been accompanied to heaven by the goddess Fever also known as Our Lady of Malaria. She now tells Hercules about Claudius, repeatedly asserting that he was born in Lugdunum (modern Lyons) so is a Gaul and this explains why, like a vengeful Gaul, he ‘conquered Rome’. (Ever since the sack of Rome by Gaulish tribes in 390 BC the Romans lived in exaggerated fear of the Gauls; this was part of the feeling behind the many senators who opposed the granting to Gauls of full Roman citizenship.)

This angers Claudius who makes the biggest growl he can manage but no-one can understand what he’s saying. Instead he repeatedly makes ‘the familiar gesture with which he had people’s heads cut off’, a grim indication of Claudius’s practice. But, the narrative humorously goes on, you’d have thought the people present were all his freedmen from the way they completely ignored his request (another satirical jab, this time at the common accusation that Claudius was the pawn of a handful of freedmen who held senior positions in his household).

(7) Hercules then repeats the question, who is Claudius, this time in the form of mock epic verse (notable for, once again, repeating the claim that Claudius a) mumbles so badly he can’t be understood and b) is continually shaking his head).

Claudius finally realises he is no longer lord and master, up here in heaven. He replies to Hercules that he’s surprised he doesn’t recognise him, seeing as how he, Claudius, spent many long days judging law cases brought to him, sitting in front of the Temple of Hercules in the Roman resort of Tibur. He assures Hercules he had to deal with as much bullshit as when the hero had to sort out the Augean Stables.

At this point the text breaks off and there’s a lengthy gap. Sullivan says we can be confident it describes how Claudius wins over Hercules who forces his way into the Senate of Olympus and pleads the case for Claudius to be deified. There is uproar at the suggestion so Jupiter throws the matter open to the House. The text resumes in the speech of one of the gods refuting Hercules’ claims.

(8) The text resumes with this unnamed god making a joke about contemporary philosophy, asking what kind of god Claudius should be: he can’t be an Epicurean god, since they are ‘untroubled and trouble none’ i.e. are completely disengaged from the world. But nor can he be a Stoic god since they are, according to one description, globular with no head or other protuberance. [For Stoics, God is coterminate with the universe, so has no separate shape.] Although (joke) there is something of the Stoic god about Claudius…as he has no head and no heart (boom boom!).

Another joke suggesting Claudius was a drunk, referring to the fact that he added one day to the traditional four-day festival of the Saturnalia, and was, indeed, a heavy drinker.

There’s a tortuous reference to incest among the gods, presumably a hit at the way Claudius was persuaded to falsely accuse the fiancé of his daughter, Octavia, Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus, with incest with his sister (Junia Calvina), the idea being to discredit him and call off the wedding, thus leaving Octavia free to marry Claudius’s new step-son, the future Nero. Also possibly referring to the fact that Claudius’s fourth marriage was to Agrippina, who was his niece.

The unnamed god goes on to ask why it isn’t enough that Claudius has temples to himself as a god in Britain and have savages worship him there. [Interestingly, according to Tacitus, the huge size of the temple to Claudius in Camulodunum was one of the grievances of the tribes who rose against Roman rule under Boudicca in 60.]

(9) Jupiter tries to restore order. He remembers the old Senate rule that debates shouldn’t be held with members of the public present and so has Claudius escorted out. The god Janus takes the floor. The narrator mocks Roman values by describing Janus as a canny operator, having eyes in the back as well as front of his head, living in the Forum (where his temple was) and therefore accustomed to public speaking.

Janus’s line is simple: too many people are being made into ‘gods’ and it’s making a laughing stock of the whole thing. Once it was a great thing to become a god [he doesn’t mention it, but one thinks of Hercules]; now it’s become a farce. Janus proposes that no-one who eats ordinary food grown in fields should be allowed to become a god. In fact anyone who has the presumption to do so should be handed over to ‘the Infernal Agents’ and, at the next public show, be flogged with a birch amongst the new gladiators.

Next to speak was Diespiter, son of Vica Pota, he also being consul elect, and a moneylender on the side. Diespiter makes a speech defending Claudius’s right to be a god, which starts out reasonably serious – pointing out his family links to Augustus and Livia who were both made gods – but then morphs into more satirical territory, claiming he ‘far surpasses all mortal men in wisdom’, then proceeding to outright mockery, pointing out that Rome’s venerable founder, Romulus, needs company in pursuing his humble peasant diet of eating ‘boiled turnips’. The speech ends with the surprising request that, once he’s deified, ‘that a note to that effect be added to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. [This is interesting. Is it a dig at Ovid for having ended his long collection of Greek myths with a grovellingly sycophantic description of the apotheosis of Julius Caesar and much praise of Augustus?]

The gods then fall to debating the matter and opinion is evenly matched.

(10) Then Augustus rises to his feet to speak. He explains that ever since his elevation to the pantheon of the gods he has kept silent, but the prospect of Claudius being deified appals him. He is given pretty straight lines of moral indignation:

But now I can keep on the mask no longer, nor conceal the sorrow which shame makes all the greater. Is it for this I made peace by land and sea? For this that I put an end to civil war? Was it for this I brought law and order to Rome and beautified the city with public works? And now… words fail me.

He then proceeds to a grim and serious indictment of Claudius’s record as emperor: He accuses Claudius of ordering the chopping off of heads as easily as a dog sits down; accuses him of murdering two Julias, great-granddaughters of his, one by cold steel and one by starvation. [One of these, Julius Livilla, was the one accused of adultery with Seneca, which resulted in Seneca’s banishment in 41 AD]. Augustus also accuses Claudius of killing one great-grandson, Lucius Silanus. He directly asks Claudius why he had so many people put to death without ever hearing their side of the story.

(11) Augustus continues that although Jupiter has been king of heaven for all these years the worst he’s done to any other god was break Vulcan’s leg. Even when he was furious with his wife, Juno, he never harmed her. Whereas Claudius had his third wife, Messalina, who was Augustus’s great-niece, executed. Augustus makes the further accusation that if, as the stories go, Claudius didn’t even realise the murder had taken place, it makes him all the more damnable. [This is a reference to Claudius’s notorious absent-mindedness; according to Tacitus he once asked a senator who he’d invited to dinner where his wife was, having forgotten that he had ordered the man’s wife executed the day before.]

Augustus lists Claudius’s murders. He had killed Appius Silanus, his step-father, Lucius Junius Silanus, his intended son-in-law, and Gnaius Pompeius Magnus, who had married Claudius’s daughter, Antonia. In one family he destroyed Crassus, Magnus, Scribonia, the Tristionias and Assario.

Augustus’s speech turns into a diatribe: he asks the other gods whether they can possibly be serious about turning this monster into a god? ‘Look at him! Who’s going to worship him as a god? Who’s going to believe in him? While you create such gods, no-one will believe that you yourselves are gods.’

Augustus repeats the list of crimes, that Claudius murdered:

his father-in-law Appius Silanus
his two sons-in-law, Pompeius Magnus and Lucius Silanus
his daughter’s father-in-law Crassus Frugi
his daughter’s mother-in-law, Scribonia
his wife Messalina

and others too numerous to mention, and calls for him to be banished, deported from heaven within thirty days, and from Olympus within thirty hours. The motion is quickly passed and Mercury seizes Claudius by the scruff of the neck and hauls him down to hell. [The fact that Claudius is apparently present for Augustus’s speech (‘Look at him!’) is taken by some scholars of the satire’s hurried, unrevised state.]

(12) On the way lower regions Mercury and Claudius pass an impressive procession going along the Via Sacra.

It was the most handsome cortège ever with no expense spared to let you know that a god was being buried, horn players, and every kind of brass instrumentalist that even Claudius could hear it.

The narrator remarks that ‘people walked about like free men’. A few famous advocates who thrived under Claudius were weeping, and for once, they actually meant it! But out of the shadows creep real lawyers, men with principle, thin and pale from having hidden for the duration of Claudius’s reign. When these honest lawyers see the creepy ones crying, they say: “Told you the Saturnalia [the four-day festival of misrule held in December but, by extension, the mad period of Claudius’s rule] couldn’t last forever.”

The text then includes a comic parody of a funeral dirge in verse. The satire comes in the way the dirge is a pack of lies, claiming that Claudius was witty, fleet of foot, brave in battle, defeated the Persians and Parthians, quick to decide law suits – all of which are the precise opposite of the case.

(13) Claudius was understandably please to hear himself so lavishly praised as Mercury dragged him along through the Field of Mars (with his head covered so no-one would recognise him). Somewhere between the Tiber and the Via Tecta they descended into the Infernal Regions.

On arrival he finds himself greeted by his freedman, Narcissus. The text jokes that he had taken a short cut, referencing the fact that almost as soon as he came to power, Nero had Narcissus compelled to commit suicide. Mercury tells him to go ahead of them and announce their arrival.

They come to the gate of Hell (or Dis, in Roman mythology), guarded by Cerberus, ‘certainly not the sort of thing you’d like to meet in the dark’. Interestingly, the text tells us Claudius had a white dog for a pet.

Here is assembled a welcoming committee of eminent Romans who Claudius had had executed, many for involvement in the mock marriage of his third wife, Messalina to Gaius Siliuis, which was taken as the start of a coup attempt and so led to mass executions of conspirators. Amid the throng was Mnester the mime, very popular with Caligula and, for a time, with Claudius, before he had him beheaded.

Forward come Messalina, his freedmen (Polybius, Myron, Harpocras, Amphaeus, Pheronactus), two prefects (Justus Catonius and Rufrius Pollio), his friends (Saturninus, Lusius and Pedo Pompeius and Lupus and Celer Asinius, of consular rank), his brother’s daughter, his sister’s daughter, sons-in-law, fathers and mothers-in-law – all people Claudius had had executed or forced to kill themselves.

With typical dithery absent-mindedness, Claudius is made to ask them how they all got here? To which Pedo Pompeius replies: ‘What do you mean, you cruel bastard? Who else sent us here but you, you cruel butcher of every friend you ever had,’

(14) Pedo brings Claudius before the judgement seat of Aeacus, who was holding court. The text humorously says the legal procedures in Hell are modelled on, and use the exact same laws, as Rome, especially surrounding murder, in this instance the Lex Cornelia.

Pedo reads out the charges against Claudius: charged with killing 35 senators, 221 knights and others as numerous as the sands of the sea-shore. At first nobody could be found to defend Claudius, until an old crony, Publius Petronius stepped forward for the defence. He immediately asked for an adjournment which was as quickly refused. the prosecution made its case then, without waiting for a response, Aeacus, finds Claudius guilty and announces the sentence:

There was then debate about an appropriate sentence and, humorously, it is said that some of the old lags in hell could do with a break and be replaced with Claudius, such as Sisyphus endlessly pushing his stone uphill, Tantalus dying of thirst surrounded by water he cannot reach or Ixion eternally punished on a wheel.

The punishment eventually chosen is like these ones. Claudius is condemned to eternally throw dice from a dice cup with a hole in it so he can never actually get them into it and every time he goes to pick them up they slip through his fingers.

(15) All of a sudden who should turn up but Caligula, who claims Claudius as his slave. [This is a humorous reference to the way Caligula kept Claudius alive during the four years of his rule, to torment and mock him.] Caligula now claims Claudius as his slave, and brings witnesses who say they’d seen him being flogged, caned and punched by him which, apparently, proves his case [and is yet another insight into the brutal mistreatment of slaves in ancient Rome].

But even this isn’t quite the end of the narrative. Having satirised a) Claudius’s addiction to dice and gambling and b) his humiliating treatment by Caligula, the narrative ends with a third punishment c), appropriate to two other aspects of Claudius’s character, the notorious length of time it took him to reach legal decisions, and his notorious subjugation to the opinions of his own freedmen.

So right at the end of the text Caligula hands Claudius over to Aeacus, who hands him on to his freedman Menander, to be his subordinate and legal secretary for all time.

Thoughts

I can see why critics who associate Seneca with the high-minded tone of the Letters to Lucilius would be reluctant to associate him with this very uneven satire. But for a lay reader it’s really interesting. It is, at some points, genuinely funny, as when Claudius tells Hercules that he had to deal with more shit adjudicating law cases in Tibur than Hercules did when he cleaned out the Augean stables. It is useful to know that Claudius’s limp, palsied head and incomprehensible mumbling speech were so well known as to be elements of popular comedy. And then there is the light shed on Roman customs, for example rules in the Senate, or the description of Claudius’s funeral procession, and so on. It isn’t great literature but I enjoyed it.

Ironic conclusion

The whole squib is devoted to describing what a shocking, immoral, murderous emperor Claudius had been, and to welcoming his young successor, Nero, with 20 lines of fulsome poetic praise about how he will restore freedom and justice.

So Caesar comes, so Nero appears to Rome,
His bright face glowing with gentle radiance,
His neck all beauty under his glowing hair.

Ha ha ha. Nero was not only ten times worse than Claudius but, if the author of this piece was Seneca, Nero was to compel the author of this fulsome praise to kill himself 11 years later.

Robert Graves

Robert Graves included a translation of the Apocolocyntosis in the annexes at the end of his historical novel, Claudius the God. Graves’s translation is better than Sullivan’s, more fun and fluent.

There’s one notable structural difference which is that, in the passage immediately after the gap, Sullivan attributes the speech to one (unnamed) god. Graves, far more imaginatively, and following the suggestion in the text that the gods, plural, burst into uproar, breaks the same passage down into a series of smaller segments, each being spoken by (unnamed) gods.

Doing this creates a much more dramatic effect and, incidentally, makes sense of the fact that some of the sentiments expressed contradict each other – a problem if it’s all spoken by one person but perfect sense if attributed to half a dozen squabbling speakers.

Credit

J.P. Sullivan’s translation of the Apocolocyntosis by Seneca was published in America in 1966, before being incorporated into the Penguin edition of Petronius’s Satyricon in 1977. I flipped between this translation and the online translation by W.H.D. Rouse, published in 1920.

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by Simon on December 26, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Comedy, Literature, Translation

Tagged Aeacus, Agrippina, Amphaeus, ancient Greece, annals, Antonia, Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii, Appius Silanus, Boudicca, Britain, burlesque, Caligula, Camulodonum, Cassius Dio, Celer Asinius, Cerberus, Claudius, Claudius the Clod, Claudius the God, Clotho, Crassus Frugi, Cynic, Cynic philosophy, Diespiter, Dio, Dis, Domitius Ahenobarbus, Emperor Augustus, emperor Claudius, emperor Nero, Epicureans, Gaius Siliuis, Gaul, Gauls, gladiators, Gnaius Pompeius Magnus, Gourdification of the Divine Claudius, Harpocras, Hell, Hercules, Homer, irony, Ixion, J.P. Sullivan, Janus, Julia Drusilla, Julius Caesar, Julius Livilla, Junia Calvina, Juno, Jupiter, Justus Catonius, Letters to Lucilius, Lex Cornelia, Livius Germinius, Lucian, Lucius Junius Silanus, Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus, Lucius Silanus, Ludus de morte Divi Claudii, Lugdunum, Lusius, Lyons, Menander, Menippean satire, Menippus, Menippus of Gadara, Messalina, Metamorphoses, Mnester, Myron, Nero, Octavia, Olympus, Our Lady of Malaria, Ovid, Pedo Pompeius, Petronius, Pheronactus, Polybius, Pompeius Magnus, Pumpkinification, river Tiber, Robert Graves, Romulus, Rufrius Pollio, satire, Satura Menippea, Saturnalia, Saturninus, Satyricon, Scribonia, Seneca, Seneca the Younger, Sisyphus, Slavery, slaves, Stoics, Suetonius, Tacitus, Tantalus, The Apocolocyntosis, the Augean Stables, the Fates, the Field of Mars, the Saturnalia, Tibur, Via Sacra, Via Tecta, Vica Pota, Vulcan

Posted by Simon on December 26, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/12/26/the-apocolocyntosis-seneca/

The Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus – 2

Introduction

In the first of these two reviews of Tacitus’s Annals I briefly explained the background to the Annals and the development of ‘history’ as a genre up to Tacitus’s time, then went on to summarise Tacitus’s account of the reign of Tiberius, 14 to 37 AD.

Frustratingly, the manuscript we have of the Annals breaks off at the death of Tiberius and omits the four-year rule of Gaius (Caligula) from 37 to 41 AD, and the first six years of Gaius’s successor and uncle, Claudius i.e. from 41 to 47. Gaius’s reign is colourfully depicted in Suetonius’s Life of Caligula but Tacitus is invaluable because he embeds the scandal which Suetonius focuses on into a much more sober, year-by-year account of the humdrum legal and administrative acts of each emperor. They complement each other perfectly, which makes it all the more vexing that there’s such a big lacuna for the vital years of these key emperors.

To summarise the missing early part of Claudius, which we know from other sources: In 38 or early 39 AD, Claudius had married a third wife, Valeria Messalina, who was his first cousin once removed. Soon afterwards she gave birth to a daughter, Claudia Octavia. A son, initially named Tiberius Claudius Germanicus, and later known as Britannicus, was born just after Claudius’s accession in 41.

The translator of the Penguin edition of the Annals, Michael Grant, divides his text into two big parts, separated by this huge gap in the original text. Within each part he groups clumps of annals, or individual years, into long ‘chapters’, and gives these informative, dramatic titles. Grant’s divisions over-write Tacitus’s division of his work into 16 books and specific years. Grant’s chapters are as follows. (My previous review summarised part one of Grant’s text. This review addresses part two.)

Part two: Claudius and Nero

The fall of Messalina (book 11)
The Mother of Nero (book 12)
The fall of Agrippina (book 13 to book 14 section 13)
Nero and his helpers (book 14 sections 14 to 65)
Eastern settlement (book 14 sections 1 to 32)
The burning of Rome (book 15, sections 32 to 47)
The plot (book 15, sections 48 to 74)
Innocent victims (book 16)

As I described in my previous post, on a careful rereading of the text I think it would have been better to have divided the text up by year rather than chapter, as Grant does. Starting a new section/chapter for each new year would reflect Tacitus’s intention, of producing a year-by-year ‘chronological sequence of events’, in Tacitus’s own words (p.269).

The annalistic approach is very formulaic: the account of each year starts with the announcement of who were the two consuls for that year (still, despite decades of imperial rule, very important figures, not least as the Romans’ main way of dating events). Then each year ends with a short list of notable Romans who died during that year. In between the two, Tacitus lists key events of that year in foreign policy and military campaigns, its notable laws and prosecutions, fires, food shortages and so on. That is the basic annalistic scaffold on which Tacitus then hangs his longer, more flowing descriptions of the activities of the emperors and royal family, along with (generally scathing) comments on their characters.

There is another, distinct strand to Tacitus’s work, which is his interest in foreign affairs i.e. the management of the Roman provinces (the appointment of new governors, the impeachment of existing governors for corruption). This covers the numerous tribal rebellions and wars on the borders, be they on the Rhine with the Germans, in the Middle East against the Parthians, or elsewhere. Tacitus devotes a lot of space to these, giving detailed accounts of diplomatic manoeuvrings, envoys to Rome etc, as well as vivid accounts of military campaigns and battles. Notable is the section about Britain under Claudius, including Caractacus’s noble plea for mercy when he was led in triumph through Rome (pages 264 to 269). But this whole area is so complex that (with the exception of Boudicca’s revolt) I’ve omitted it from my summary.

Claudius (reigned 41 to 54)

Historians nowadays consider Claudius to have been a ‘painstaking and bold administrator and reformer’ but, in Tacitus’s hands, the most memorable aspects of his reign are the portraits of his scheming and amoral third and fourth wives, Messalina and Agrippina.

(Just a reminder: these chapter titles are not in Tacitus, they are Michael Grant’s additions. And the years I give are also not in the text. The system of dating by BC or AD wasn’t invented until 500 years later, and wasn’t widely adopted till the Middle Ages. See M.I. Finley’s essay on the subject.)

In the summary that follows, the chapter titles in Heading 2 are Michael Grant’s. Sitting under them, in heading 3, are the years which Tacitus covers. I’ve made these. They are not clearly indicated in Grant’s text, or the original Tacitus. (Remember, Tacitus didn’t use the BC/AD system, he dated every year by the two consuls who served during it; whereas I have just used the year as per our Christian calendar). Where the year is notable for something important, such as the murder of Claudius or the revolt of Boudicca, I’ve added these into my year headings.

Chapter 9 The Fall of Messalina

47 AD

The big gap in Tacitus’s text resumes in 47 AD, in the middle of hectic events, as Claudius’s third wife, Messalina, takes aim at a rival, Poppaea Sabina.

Chronologers reckoned it was the 800th year since the founding of Rome (traditionally 753 BC) and so Claudius held Secular Games. Prominent in them were Claudius’s son, Britannicus, who was six years old (b.41) and Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, who was 10 (b.37) who would soon be adopted as Claudius’s son and heir.

(Nero’s mother was Agrippina the Younger, who was herself the daughter of Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder. So Nero was popular with the mob for being the only surviving male descendant – the grandson – of the hugely popular Germanicus. Agrippina was also one of three sisters to Gaius, who had ruled as the emperor Caligula from 37 till he was assassinated in 41. Gaius was said to have had incestuous relations with all three of his sisters. Agrippina managed to survive Gaius’s short reign and lived on into Claudius’s, when she became one of the many targets of Claudius’s malevolent third wife, Messalina. However, Agrippina not only survived Messalina but, after the latter’s downfall and execution, replaced her as Claudius’s fourth and final wife.)

At about this time Messalina became infatuated with the best-looking man in Rome, Gaius Silius. She forced him to divorce his wife, Julia Silana, and host her at not particularly concealed assignations. They carried on their affair openly while the obtuse Claudius pursued his responsibilities as Censor.

Tacitus portrays Claudius as responsible and sensible: he carries out the census, he commands the building of a new aqueduct, he suggests three new letters are added to the Roman alphabet, he proposes to the senate the creation of a Board to support the art of soothsaying. In foreign policy Claudius forbade further aggression against the Germans and ordered Roman troops – who were building camps in recently occupied German territory – back across to the west bank of the Rhine.

48 AD

Claudius makes his famous intervention in a debate in the senate about whether Gauls, by now Roman citizens for three or four generations, should be allowed to run for office in Rome. Claudius argued strongly that they should, pointing out how Rome’s strength derived from its policy of assimilating neighbouring towns and tribe and then entire regions, turning enemies into loyal citizens. (This speech is regularly cited by historians as exemplifying the core secret of Rome’s success, which was assimilating territories and peoples into the empire.)

Claudius promoted senators of long standing to patrician rank as many patrician families had died out. He concluded his census which showed a citizen body of 5,984,072 (which presumably included all men, women and children; neither Tacitus nor Grant clarify whether this included slaves or not).

Meanwhile, Messalina pursued her affair, and while Claudius was busy at Ostia, she openly and bigamously married Silius. It might seem incredible that a consul designate and the emperor’s wife should marry:

But I am not inventing marvels. What I have told, and shall tell, is the truth. Older men heard and recorded it. (p.246)

According to Grant the reign of Claudius saw a great increase in the power of the secretaries of state, often ex-slaves, and three of these now informed Claudius, not only that his wife had bigamously remarried but had, in legal terms, divorced him – and that this opened the way for her new husband, Silius, to seize power.

The commander of ‘the Guard’ was summoned, confirmed the story and said Claudius must move fast to retain their loyalty. Claudius was panicking thinking this was a real coup attempt. Command was taken by Narcissus, ex-slave and secretary general. He it was who lined up a series of witnesses to testify to Messalina’s promiscuity, many affairs, degenerate behaviour, and now this bigamous marriage. Tacitus describes a bloodbath of officials who had helped or slept with Messalina and then how, at dinner that evening Claudius began to soften against his (absent) wife and so Narcissus moved quickly, instructing another slave to go to her house where he found her wretched, weeping on the ground beside her mother, and quickly run her through with a sword. The senate ordered all statues and public memorials to her name to be removed. Claudius never referred to her again.

This two or three pages of breathless narrative are rightly considered among Tacitus’s greatest passages, by which scholars mean it has the immediacy, pace and bloody inevitability of a thriller.

Chapter 10 The Mother of Nero (Agrippina)

Central to Tacitus’s critique is that Claudius was in thrall to the advice of his secretaries who were all freedmen, namely Narcissus who took the lead in getting rid of Messalina. Now they all proposed to Claudius various candidates for his next wife. But Agrippina took advantage of being Claudius’s niece and so often being in his company, plus being allowed to give him caresses and kisses. She seduced him and won the competition. Weak and easily led, Claudius asked the senate to pass a law allowing an uncle to marry his niece (Claudius was brother of the long-dead Germanicus, whose daughter Agrippina was.)

Tacitus describes how Lucius Vitellius worked his way into Agrippina’s good books by a) managing to derail the marriage of Claudius’s daughter, Octavia, to Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus by falsely accusing the latter and having him dismissed – thus making Octavia available to be engaged to Agrippina’s son; and b) making a big speech in the senate asking for the law to be changed to allow uncles to marry nieces and for the senate to give Agrippina to Claudius as a kind of national gift.

Once in post Agrippina sought power in every way she could. This included recalling Lucius Annaeus Seneca, from exile. He had been banished by Claudius for adultery with Germanicus’s daughter, Julia Livilla. Now Agrippa recalled him (earning his gratitude) and made him tutor to her son. She enforced the suicide of one of her rivals, Lollia Paulina. Another lady whom the emperor casually praised, Calpurnia, was struck down.

Claudius decided to extend the boundaries of Rome, leading Tacitus into an interesting digression about the various sets of boundary markers (p.262).

50 AD

Responding to pressure from Agrippina’s agents Claudius adopted her son, Lucius Domitius, as his own. It was at this moment that the boy, previously a member of the Ahenobarbus clan, was awarded a name which ran in the Claudian clan, ‘Nero’, marking his entry into the prestigious (haughty and arrogant) gens Claudii. At the same time Agrippina was given the honorific ‘Augusta’.

In this year Tacitus gives detailed description of uprisings and wars in Britain.

51 AD

On the basis of a supposedly trivial incident – when Britannicus and Nero met and Nero greeted the other by his name but Britannicus greeted Nero as ‘Domitius’ – Agrippina claimed this was a alight against the decision of the senate and people of Rome and persuaded Claudius to banish or execute all Britannicus’s tutors. His guards and slaves loyal to him were dismissed. Some of the Guard commanders were loyal to Britannicus so they were replaced by Sextus Afranius Burrus, who knew who his boss was: Agrippina.

52 AD

Senators who couldn’t comply with the House’s financial requirements were expelled. Lucius Arruntius Furius Scribonianus was exiled for enquiring from astrologers about the emperor’s death. Claudius suggested a law that any woman marrying a slave should herself be enslaved. A tunnel was built linking the Fucine lake and the river Liris. Claudius held naval games on the lake to celebrate. Rebellion broke out in Judaea.

53 AD

Nero, now aged 16, married the emperor’s daughter, Claudia Octavia, born in 40 and so aged 12 or 13. This was arranged by Agrippina to solidify Nero’s position as the heir apparent. Agrippina continued her power-hungry and aggressive behaviour. She coveted the gardens of Titus Statilius Taurus and so got his deputy as governor of Africa to accuse and discredit him in the senate. Titus committed suicide. Agrippina got his gardens.

Claudius handed over sweeping powers to the order of knights, the issue at the heart of the civil war between Marius and Sulla back in the 80s BC. He exempted the island of Cos from taxation. The city of Byzantium pleaded for a remission of their taxes and this was granted.

54 AD – Murder of Claudius

Bad omens. Bees landed on the Capitol. Deformed animals were born. Agrippina decided to dispose of Domitia Lepida, her cousin once removed and Nero’s aunt, mother to Claudius’s previous wife, Messalina. She manoeuvred Claudius into having her executed (p.282).

Britannicus was now approaching his 14th birthday, traditionally the age when a Roman aristocrat began to play a part in public life. Agrippina began to worry that Claudius was beginning to regret adopting Nero and coming round to preferring his own son as successor so she moved quickly to poison her husband. She had poison supplied by the arch-poisoner, Locusta, and administered by the emperor’s taster, Halotus. She blocked anyone coming to see the body, giving out a story that the emperor was alive but ill, while she organised the smooth accession of Nero.

On 13 October 54 the palace doors were opened, and Nero appeared accompanied by a battalion of the palace guard and their commander, Sextus Afranius Burrus (who owed his position to Agrippina). Nero was carried in a litter to the Guards’ camp where he was acclaimed emperor, a decision quickly ratified by the senate and then the provinces.

Chapter 11 The Fall of Agrippina

The final section of the Annals is devoted to the reign of Nero. It is quite substantial (70 pages in the Penguin translation). Grant divides it into five chapters:

Nero and his helpers (book 14 sections 14 to 65)
Eastern settlement (book 14 sections 1 to 32)
The burning of Rome (book 15, sections 32 to 47)
The plot (book 15, sections 48 to 74)
Innocent victims (book 16)

The Nero chapters are notable for the kind of melodramatic set-pieces which Tacitus excelled at, in this case describing the Great Fire of Rome or Agrippina’s murder. At moments like this you can very much see how, for the ancients, no amount of dedication to the ‘historical truth’ or the moralising urge to judge and assess, can trump the more basic aim of inflaming awe and wonder with dramatic effects.

Nero’s reign opened with a flurry of murders. Agrippina got agents to poison governor of Asia Marcus Junius Silanus because he was brother to Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus, whose engagement with Octavia she had broken and forced to commit suicide, and because Marcus was a descendant of Augustus. Then she secured the imprisonment and suicide of Narcissus, freedman and secretary to Claudius, the central figure in the downfall of Messalina.

Tactitus notes the restraining effect of two key figures, the commander of the Guard Sextus Afranius Burrus, and Nero’s tutor Lucius Annaeus Sextus. Burrus was all soldierly efficiency and seriousness of character; Agrippina had appointed Seneca Nero’s tutor in which role he taught the teenager Stoic principles and public speaking.

It was Seneca who wrote the funeral oration for Claudius which Nero delivered. Nero went on to insist the senate would reassert its ancient rights and decisions. Nero’s first acts were all leniency and forgiveness.

55 AD – Murder of Britannicus

Quite quickly Nero fell in love with a former slave girl, Acte, and became slowly alienated from the virtuous wife, Claudia Octavia, who Agrippina had engineered his marriage to. Agrippina was infuriated at Nero’s love for a common slave girl and tried to ban it. Division grew between mother and son. Nero next deposed the freedman Pallas, who had virtually run the empire for Claudius and been instrumental in Claudius choosing Agrippina as his fourth wife.

Tacitus gives a vivid almost farcical account of the florid events surrounding Nero’s decision to poison his rival, Claudius’s biological son, Britannicus (p.290). Britannicus was the last male heir of the Claudian clan whereas Nero was a Claudian only by adoption.

Realising her position was now seriously threatened, Agrippina made common cause with Nero’s spurned wife Octavia, and cast around for supporters. To isolate Agrippina, Nero withdrew her guard and expelled her from the imperial palace. Then her rival, Junia Silana, had a spy report to Nero that Agrippina was conspiring with one Rubellius Plautus to overthrow and replace him. Nero was terrified, but spared Plautus, for the time being. Tacitus tells us one of his sources claims Seneca restrained the emperor, and also from executing Burrus as being somehow implicated. The plot rebounded and Junia Silana was exiled, her accomplices executed.

56 AD

Echoing Suetonius, Tacitus claims Nero dressed up and went about the streets, from tavern to brothel, beating up passersby, stealing stuff from shops. The emperor’s example emboldened other criminals. ‘Rome at night came to resemble a conquered city.’ A senator who beat up Nero when he assaulted him, apologised when he realised his identity but was forced to commit suicide.

Nero egged on disputes among rival gangs of ballet dancers, encouraging them to degenerate into real gang fights. Tacitus devotes a page to a debate in the senate about whether misbehaving freed slaves should be re-enslaved.

57 AD

Tacitus takes the opportunity to differentiate his kind of history from mere almanacs. Talking of the completion of a huge amphitheatre in the Field of Mars, he says:

But that is material for official gazettes, whereas it has traditionally been judged fitting to Rome’s grandeur that its histories should contain only important events. (p.298)

An interesting indication of the way that history was conceived as a literary genre, with appropriate tone and subject matter; lofty subject matter; important events and imperial players.

A law was passed that provincial officials were banned from giving gladiator or animal shows. These a) cost provincials a fortune b) were used as cover by governors to hide their irregularities.

Another law decreed that if a man was murdered by a slave, not only all the slaves, but all the freed slaves in his household would be executed as punishment.

58 AD

The endless war between Rome and Parthia for possession of the kingdom of Armenia heated up.

A detailed account of how Nero was introduced by his fellow libertine, Otho, to his lover Poppaea, how she then seduced Nero and eclipsed Acte as his chief concubine. As a result Nero fell out with Otho, eventually consigning him to Lusitania as governor. (This Otho was to return and seize power in the Year of Four Emperors, 69 AD, following Nero’s death, events Tacitus describes in detail in his ‘Histories’.)

Various cities (Puteoli, Syracuse) petitioned Rome for favours. Persistent complaints about tax farmers led Nero to contemplate scrapping all indirect taxes. Rebellious tribes in Germany fought the Romans or each other.

59 AD – Murder of Agrippina

Tacitus puts Nero’s decision to finally eliminate his mother down to the taunts of his new lover Poppaea. Agrippina tried to counter this by appearing before Nero in lascivious clothes and seduced him to incest. Seneca commissioned Acte to re-enter his life and warm him that such sacrilege would alienate the Guards on whom his power rested. Interestingly, Tacitus openly states various versions of these stories attributed to other historians (whose works are now lost).

Tacitus openly states in several places that when the sources agree he won’t mention them; but where they disagree he will cite them and the disagreements and let the reader decide.

The death of Agrippina takes 6 pages to describe and is semi-farcical. After rejecting poison and the dagger, Nero settled on the madcap scheme of getting Agrippina onto a ship with a collapsible section which would fall on her. And this is what he did, inviting her to a long friendly banquet at Baiae, then seeing her off in a beautifully appointed ship whose ceiling, at a signal, caved in. This killed Agrippina’s attendant and when another cried out that she was the emperor’s mother, she was beaten to death by the crew, so Agrippina disguised herself. Then the galley slaves all went to one side of the ship in order to capsize it, but Agrippina managed to get free and swim to safety. This sounds like a fairy story.

Nero was waiting for news and was appalled to learn it hadn’t worked. So he called in his most senior advisers, Seneca and Burrus. Burrus declared the Guard would not touch a member of the imperial family and descendant of Germanicus. So they conceived a plot whereby Nero would drop a sword by the feet of the servant Agrippina had sent to tell Nero she had survived this terrible accident – and then claim he was an assassin sent by Agrippina.

This is as farcical and laughable as the collapsible boat gambit.

Nero promptly had a freedman, Anicetus, take soldiers and surround Agrippina’s house. Slaves fled. Anicetus, a naval captain and lieutenant then beat and stabbed Agrippina to death. Her body was quickly cremated with no ceremony.

Nero cringed in fear all night long until Burrus got colonels and captains of the Guard to come and congratulate him on escaping the conspiracy, at which he recovered his spirits. Nero then sent a long letter to be read out in the senate justifying his actions with a long list of Agrippina’s incriminating behaviour leading up to the supposed ‘conspiracy’. This was written by Seneca and reflected badly on him.

Many bad omens. And Nero was scared of the public response. But there was much thanksgiving for his safety and he returned to Rome amid cheering crowds as at a triumph.

Chapter 12 Nero and his Helpers

With Agrippina out of the way, Nero finally let rip. ‘There was no stopping him.’ (p.320) Tacitus describes Nero’s addiction to singing to his own accompaniment on the lyre, and chariot racing. He goes into less detail than Suetonius but is much more damning. When Nero institutes the ‘Youth Games’ and:

In the wood which Augustus had planted around his Naval Lake, places of assignation and taverns were built, and every stimulus to vice was displayed for sale…Promiscuity and degradation throve…Never was there so favourable a climate for debauchery as among this filthy crowd. (p.321)

Nero performed for the crowd on the lyre. He formed a corp of young knights known as the Augustiani, to maintain ‘a din of applause day and night’. He fancied himself a poet and sat around at dinner parties extemporising verses with cronies.

This method is apparent from Nero’s poems themselves which lack vigour, inspiration and homogeneity.

Tacitus, like Suetonius, had copies of these poems, all now lost to us. Meanwhile, back in the annalistic list of political events: the senate settled a riot which had broken out between citizens of Pompeii and Nuceria. Cyrene secured the expulsion of a governor. Two famous men died (Cnaeus Domitius Afer and Marcus Servilius Nonianus). It’s Tacitus’s listing of these kinds of humdrum events which provide the scaffolding or background hum of his year-by-year annals.

60 AD

Nero institutes 5-yearly games on the Greek model. Tacitus stages a set-piece debate between its critics who thought games should only be held in temporary buildings put up for the events, and that permanent buildings were an incitement to sloth and vice; and its proponents who thought they had to change with the times and permanent buildings saved money in the long run. (p.323).

It’s worth mentioning that ‘ballet dancers’, in all these ancient accounts, are closely associated with booing, hissing, throwing chairs and rioting. In a note, Grant explains that:

These were the highly popular, sophisticated dances of the pantomimi who danced traditional themes in dumb-show, with music and chorus. These performances were first seen in Rome under Augustus. (p.402)

Many bad omens and portents. A comet, which was universally taken as the sign of a change of emperors. Much talk that Nero’s successor would be Rubellius Plautus. Rumour spread that a bolt of lightning had hit and split a table at which Nero was sitting (!). Nero, with notable restraint, didn’t have Plautus killed, simply told him to move with his family to their estate in Asia. According to his Wikipedia article:

Plautus appears to have been a follower of Stoicism. According to Tacitus, Tigellinus wrote to Nero: ‘Plautus again, with his great wealth, does not so much as affect a love of repose, but he flaunts before us his imitations of the old Romans, and assumes the self-consciousness of the Stoics along with a philosophy, which makes men restless, and eager for a busy life.’ When he was exiled from Rome by Nero, Plautus was accompanied by the famous Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus. He was associated with a group of Stoics who criticized the perceived tyranny and autocratic rule of certain emperors, referred to today as the Stoic Opposition.

What interest me about this passage is the idea that Stoicism, as well as being a reputable philosophy, was also a fashionable pose and allowed its proponents to swank and pride themselves on maintaining the values of ‘the old Romans’. So I noticed when, later on, the corrupt head of the Guard, Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus, in calumniating Plautus, says:

Plautus is rich and does not pretend to like retirement. He parades an admiration of the ancient Romans but he has the arrogance of the Stoics, who breed sedition and intrigue. (p.339)

‘The arrogance of the Stoics’, eh?

More about the never-ending war in Armenia, prosecuted by Cnaeus Domitius Corbulo. The ancient town of Puteoli was given the status of a Roman settlement and named after Nero. Tacitus describes the challenge of keeping colonies of Roman soldiers consistently populated since many didn’t marry or have children, and many came from different regiments and were even different nationalities.

Nero sorts out a squabble about who’s elected praetor (15 men apply for 12 places). A knight called Vibius Secundus was convicted for extortion when governor of Mauretania and expelled from Italy.

61 AD – Boudicca’s revolt

Disaster in Britain. The ambitious new governor, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, appointed in 58, continued his predecessor’s policy of aggressively subduing the tribes of modern Wales, and was successful for his first two years in the post. Tacitus gives a vivid description of his amphibious assault on the island of Mona (modern-day Anglesey), its shores lined with the enemy, shrieking women and spooky druids. The Romans conquer the island and chop down the groves sacred to the Druids, who conducted human sacrifices there.

But while he was Paullinus was subduing Anglesey rebellion broke out on the other side of the province. Since this is a legendary part of our history it’s worth citing at length:

Prasutagus, king of the Icenii, after a life of long and renowned prosperity, had made the emperor co-heir with his two daughters. Prasutagus hoped by this submissiveness to preserve his kingdom and household from attack. But it turned out otherwise. Kingdom and household alike were plundered like prizes of war, the one by Roman officers, the other by Roman slaves. As a start his widow, Boudicca, was flogged and their two daughters raped. The Icenian chiefs were deprived of their hereditary estates as if the Romans had been given the entire country. The king’s own relatives were treated like slaves.

The huge temple to the god Claudius could be seen from everywhere, symbolising their oppression, and its priests used their power to bleed households dry with taxes and levies. The greed of the Roman agent, Catus Decianus, had driven the entire province to rebellion.

So the Iceni rebelled and raised neighbouring tribes. They stormed the Roman settlement of Camulodonum. Omens were, of course, seen everywhere. The empty theatre echoed with shrieks. At the mouth of the Thames a phantom settlement was seen in ruins. The sea turned blood red and left human corpses on the ebb tide. The garrison and a small cohort of reinforcements sent from London were massacred.

Suetonius marched his army all the way back from Wales to London. Interestingly:

Londinium did not rank as a Roman settlement, but was an important centre for business men and merchandise.

Nonetheless Suetonius realised he couldn’t hold it against massed tribes, so abandoned it. When Boudicca’s forces stormed into it all the men were killed and all the women raped. Same happened at St Albans (Verulamium). Tacitus says 70,000 perished, for the Britons did not take prisoners with a view to exchanges:

They could not wait to cut throats, hang, burn and crucify, as though avenging in advance, the retribution which was on its way. (p.329)

Tacitus gives us a typical rhetorical set-piece: first he gives Boudicca a genuinely inspiring speech as she rouses her troops to face the Roman army, which has followed and now set up opposite them. Then he gives verbatim what he claims is the pre-battle speech of Suetonius. Both are effective in their different ways. It was a massacre. The Romans killed all the Britons and their camp followers. Boudicca poisoned herself.

However, the Romans then fell out among themselves. The newly arrived imperial agent didn’t like Suetonius and briefed against him. A former imperial slave, Polyclitus, was sent to assess the situation. Suetonius was relieved of duty and his replacement took a softly-softly approach. Peace of a sort returned to the province.

Tacitus returns to his annalistic approach with notes on two noteworthy trials. What strikes me is that, despite existing for hundreds of years, the Romans were continually finding loopholes or omissions in their laws, which the senate patched up and emperors approved or modified.

The City Prefect, Lucius Pedianus Secundus, was murdered by one of his slaves. The traditional punishment was that every other slave in the household would be executed. Popular sentiment protested against this, rioting began and the senate house was surrounded. Tacitus uses this to give us another of his verbatim speeches, this time by Gaius Cassius Longinus in favour of enforcing the traditional law. The speech reveals that Pedianus had 400 slaves. His peroration is striking:

Our ancestors distrusted their slaves. Yet slaves were then born on the same estates, in the same homes, as their masters, who had treated them kindly from birth. But nowadays our huge households are international. They include every alien religion – or none at all. The only way to keep down this scum is by intimidation…Exemplary punishment always contains an element of injustice. But individual wrongs are outweighed by the advantage of the community. (p.334)

Many argued to spare the innocent, or the women slaves, but Cassius’s view prevailed, and the emperor Nero backed it up, lining with troops the route along which those condemned for execution were taken.

Bithynia secured the condemnation of its governor. In Gaul a census was carried out. The noble Publius Memmius Regulus passed away. Nero dedicated a new gymnasium.

62 AD

Big fuss about an ex-praetor who read out verses satirising Nero at a dinner party. He is condemned by the senate and Tacitus summarises the positions of various senators to show how the politics of the time worked, with some arguing for execution, others for exile. The senate referred their decision for leniency to Nero who was cross but accepted it. Another aristocrat included in a so-called will insults against senators and priests. Nero ordered him exiled from Italy and his writings burned.

Commander of the Guard Burrus died, probably of a throat tumour, though maybe poisoned by Nero. He was replaced by two commanders, one responsible, the other a crony of Nero’s private debaucheries.

Burrus’s death weakened Seneca’s position. One mentor is less powerful than two. His critics queued up to bad-mouth him to the emperor, attacking:

his wealth, enormous and excessive for any subject
the grandeur of his mansions and beauty of his gardens, which exceeded the emperors (!)
his alleged bids for popularity

Nero listened to Seneca’s detractors and began distancing himself from him. This is the opportunity for Tacitus to put into Seneca’s mouth a noble and persuasive speech, asking to be allowed to retire (he was now 64 years old and had been tutor to Nero for 14 years) and happily handing most of his property over to Nero. Tacitus then has Nero reply with a speech even more eloquent and organised. Nero refuses to take back his gifts lest it reflect badly on him. But Seneca withdrew from Rome, terminated his large receptions and dismissed his entourage, in a bid to deflect criticism.

Tigellinus achieves sole command of the palace Guard and plays on Nero’s fears. As a result of his calumnies, Nero orders the killing of two exiles, Faustus Cornelius Sulla Felix at Massilia. When his head is brought to Nero the emperor jokes that he’s gone grey. More elaborate are the measures taken to kill Plautus, in exile in Asia, but he too was killed and decapitated. When Nero was given his head, he is said to have exclaimed: ‘Nero! How could a man with such a long nose have frightened you!’

Nero wrote a letter to the senate denouncing Plautus and Sulla as traitors at which the senate voted him a thanksgiving. This occasioned disgust among freethinking men and led Nero to believe he could do anything. So he divorced his wife, Octavia and married Poppaea. The new wife swiftly set about disposing of the old one, concocting an accusation that Octavia was guilty of adultery and getting her exiled to Campania. (As usual, it’s the fact that Octavia’s slaves were tortured to extract false confessions, which I find so upsetting.) But this set off protests among the people who clamoured for Octavia’s return, overturning new statues of Poppaea. For a while Nero appeared to cave in – wild rejoicing – but then returned to his former stance – protests and rioting.

Poppaea is beside herself and renews her please to be rid of Octavia. So Nero concocts a second adultery confession, this time persuading admiral of the fleet Anicetus (who had played a leading role in dispatching Agrippina) to admit to adultery with Octavia. He was rewarded with peaceful retirement in Sardinia. Octavia was banished to the island of Pandateria. Much sympathy for another innocent royal woman exiled cf Julia the Elder, the Younger, Agrippina the Elder and Julia Livila.

Within days she was ordered dead. Soldiers arrived and forced the opening of veins all over her body in a hot bath. She was just 20. The senate ordered another thanksgiving and Tacitus breaks cover to record how disgustingly sycophantic that body had become.

Chapter 13 Eastern Settlement

63 AD

Latest episode of the war with Parthia over Armenia. Corn ships are destroyed by fire or storm, and some has rotted. Some people were adopting ‘children’ in order to count as fathers and so gain advantage in elections for posts where fatherhood gave an advantage (ever since Augustus’s laws designed to increase the population). Then, once elected, they repealed the adoptions. The senate decreed that these fictitious adoptions should carry no weight.

Prosecution of a governor of Crete who suggested his power was above the senate. At Nero’s prompting a decree was passed forbidding votes of thanks to governors at provincial assemblies. I’m including stuff like this to show what the nuts and bolts of ruling the empire really consisted of.

The Gymnasium was struck by lightning and burned down. A statue of Nero inside was melted into a shapeless mass. An earthquake demolished Pompeii (not the famous volcanic eruption of 79 AD).

Poppaea gave Nero a daughter. Both were awarded the honorific ‘Augusta’, according to the law of inflation of titles (at first rare and precious, eventually standard and ordinary). The senate voted a thanksgiving (of course), Nero instituted some games. Four months later the baby died, but the sycophancy continued. The dead baby was declared a goddess and a temple and priest created.

Latest episode of the war against the Parthians, also known as The Armenian Question. The figure to emerge most clearly from this is the Roman general, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, now awarded plenary powers comparable to those awarded to Pompey to fight the pirate menace in 67 BC. Corbulo brings off an honourable truce with the Parthian prince Tiridates.

Back in Italy, Latin rights are awarded to the tribes of the Maritime Alps. Magnificent gladiatorial displays but Tacitus deprecates the number of women and senators ‘disgracing themselves in the arena.’

Chapter 14 The Burning of Rome

64 AD

Frustrated at giving only private performances of his singing and lyre playing, Nero now vows to take part in public performances. First one is Naples then he crosses to Greece. In the event Nero abruptly cancelled his trip to Greece, and another one to Egypt. Maybe he was scared. he gave it out that he couldn’t let the people of Rome be without him.

Tacitus describes a typical public banquet. Nero gave magnificent ones but the most extravagant was given by his creature, Tigellinus. It was held on a raft in the middle of a lake. On the shore were brothels populated by aristocratic women, opposite them naked women posing. Tigellinus had collected birds and animals from remote countries.

Nero went through a public wedding with one of his pervert cronies named Pythagoras, in which Nero wore a bridal dress, and then marriage night sex was performed in view of the invited guests.

Then the Great Fire of Rome, ten days in July 64. When it was finally brought under control two-thirds of Rome had been destroyed. Nero was at Antium when it started. He took steps: he threw open the Field of Mars and his own gardens and constructed emergency accommodation for the homeless. He reduced the price of corn.

Of Rome’s 14 districts only 4 remained intact. Three were completely destroyed. The other seven were reduced to a few mangled ruins. Nero determined to build back better. He had a huge new palace built full of extravagance. New streets were built on an orderly plan. Houses had a height limit. Nero sagely offered to pay for the building of many of these and to ensure builders rubble was cleared away before houses were occupied.

Sensible fire provisions were put into place: a fixed proportion of each house was to be of stone; guards were appointed to ensure a better water supply; each building had to keep firefighting equipment.

But old timers remembered the huge number of ancient shrines and temples and treasures from the earliest times which had been consumed. And thought the old plan was healthier because the winding narrow alleys provided many bits of shade whereas the new more open streets were more exposed.

Nonetheless, despite all Nero’s wise ordinances, his reputation still suffered. It was said that while the city burned he took to his private stage and performed a song about the Fall of Troy. Others said he had actively started the fire because he wanted to rebuild the city and name it after himself. To distract attention away from himself he blamed the Christians. This is so important I quote at length:

To suppress this rumour [that he started the fire] Nero fabricated scapegoats – and punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were popularly called). Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius’ reign by the governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate. But in spite of this temporary setback the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judaea (where the mischief had started) but even in Rome. (All degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish in the capital.)

First, Nero had self-acknowledged Christians arrested. Then, on their information, large numbers of others were condemned – not so much for incendiarism as for their anti-social tendencies apparently the original Latin could also be translated ‘because the human race detested them’].

Their deaths were made farcical. Dressed in wild animals’ skins, they were torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or made into torches to be ignited after dark as substitutes for daylight. Nero provided his Gardens for the spectacle, and exhibited displays in the Circus, at which he mingled with the crowd – or stood in a chariot, dressed as a charioteer. Despite their guilt as Christians and the ruthless punishment it deserved, the victims were pitied. For it was felt that they were being sacrificed to one man’s brutality rather than to the national interest. (15.44)

Meanwhile Italy was ransacked for funds and all the provinces ruined by exactions to pay for the rebuilding of Rome. Gold statues and offerings were stolen and melted down. Agents were sent out to plunder Greece and Asia, emptying temples of all their valuables.

Seneca tried to avoid the unpopularity of being involved in any of this policy by asking leave to go to his country retreat. When this was forbidden he very publicly kept to his house, feigning illness. Rumour had it that a slave was despatched to poison him but Seneca forestalled all such efforts by living on fruit and running water.

A group of gladiators revolted at Praenaste and there was a naval disaster, caused by Nero ordering the fleet to return on a set date, when a storm drove it ashore at Cumae, destroying many ships. Many omens portended mighty changes!

Chapter 15 The Plot (65 AD)

Gaius Calpurnius Piso had going for him that he was a member of the aristocratic gens Calpurnii with an extensive network of influential connections; he was popular, he defended his fellow citizens in court; he was a loyal friend, affable to all including strangers; and he was tall and handsome. On the downside, he lacked seriousness and self control, was superficial, ostentatious and sometimes dissolute. But then, as Tacitus remarks in a telling comment:

Many people are fascinated by depravity and disinclined for austere morals on the throne.

Maybe the common people, then as now, enjoy royal gossip and identify with ‘bad’ behaviour. As Tacitus himself remarks at several points – people enjoy gossip and scandal (‘Discreditable versions are always popular’, p.376).

Tacitus describes in detail the growth of the conspiracy to assassinate Nero and replace him with Piso, the Pisonian Consipracy, listing the recruitment of the main conspirators, but then the problems: delay while they squabbled about where the murder should take place, and Piso’s fears that several equally well-qualified alternatives might replace him (accurately anticipating the anarchy of 69).

They decided to kill Nero at some games, in front of the crowd, but the night before, the lead conspirator, Flavius Scaevinus, had a banquet, freed all his favourite slaves, made his will and ordered a freedman, Milichus, to take his dagger to the sharpeners. This Milichus saw all these signs and nerved himself to go, next morning, to Nero’s gardens and ask for an interview with the emperor’s freedman and secretary.

After initial scepticism, Nero was persuaded, and suspects were brought in who, under terrible torture, implicated each other. The conspiracy unravelled. Men implicated their family and friends. One strand was the implication of Seneca, who probably wasn’t in the conspiracy, but Nero had wanted to get rid of for some time. On flimsy evidence an officer was sent to execute him. Seneca had time to address his household and tell them to follow his Stoic philosophy and staunch their tears. His wife insisted on dying with him and they both cut open the veins in their arms.

Seneca took some time to die, his blood flowing weakly, he ordered veins to also be opened at his ankles and behind his knees. He had time to dictate a dissertation (!). Seeing as he was not dying, he asked for poison (hemlock) to be administered, but this didn’t work, either. Then he was placed in a bath of warm water, which didn’t work. And then into ‘a vapour-bath, where he suffocated’. What is a vapour-bath?

Nero ordered Seneca’s wife’s wounds to be bound and she lived on for several years. Tacitus lists all the conspirators and their ends. The most famous one to posterity, beside Seneca, was Seneca’s nephew, the poet Lucan, who was just 25 and had joined the conspiracy because he was angry at Nero for blocking his career.

At least 41 individuals were accused, 19 senators, seven knights, 11 soldiers, and four women. 20 were executed or forced to commit suicide, 13 were sent into exile.

There was an outbreak of sycophancy with various senators calling for a thanksgiving, a Triumph, creation of a temple specifically to thank the gods for Nero’s survival and lots of other bum kissing.

Chapter 16 Innocent Victims

Nero believed the fantasies of a Carthaginian, Caesellius Bassus, who swore he had discovered the ancient treasure of Dido on his land and would give it to Nero. This encouraged the emperor to even more spendthrift behaviour, digging the nation deeper into debt.

Nero presided over the second five-yearly games and insisted on competing as a singer and lyre player. Tacitus echoes the claim made in Suetonius that audiences weren’t allowed to leave the theatre during Nero’s performances, and some fell sick and died, others were killed in the crush. He adds that Guards were stationed throughout the audience to cuff anyone who didn’t cheer loudly enough. Aristocrats such as Vespasian were reported for not cheering enthusiastically enough, but he was destined to survive and become emperor himself in 69.

Poppaea died. She was pregnant. In Tacitus’s account Nero, in a fit of anger, kicked her just once and that was enough (Suetonius gives the impression that Nero kicked her to death). Tacitus thinks it was an accident because a) he genuinely loved her b) he was desperate for a son and she was pregnant. Nero read her eulogy. She was buried in the Mausoleum Augustus built.

Nero continues enforcing the deaths of those he suspects, forcing the senate to denounce some of its own members. The gruesome triple suicide of Lucius Antistius Vetus, his daughter Antistia Pollitta and mother-in-law Sextia. Bum-licking toadyism reached new heights: one Servius Cornelius Orfitus suggested the names of the months should be changed to celebrate Nero’s family, so that April became ‘Neroneus’, May ‘Claudius’ and June ‘Germanicus’.

Campania was hit by a hurricane. Rome was hit by a plague. A disastrous fire at Lugdunum (modern Lyons) was alleviated when Nero assigned 4 million sesterces to its reconstruction (the same amount its people had contributed to Rome’s rebuilding after the fire). This kind of incident gives a welcome break from the hothouse, blood-soaked atmosphere of imperial politics, but also remind us that a lot of the political events were of sublime indifference to the 60 million or so citizens who just got on with their day-to-day lives, working, shopping, trading, eating, teaching children, managing households, across the vast expanse of the huge empire.

66 AD

A sordid conspiracy by banished Antistius Sosianus to alleviate his punishment by incriminating Publius Anteius and Marcus Ostorius Scapula, who paranoid Nero suspected, both of whom were forced to commit suicide. If this succession of worthy citizens who are snitched on by informers who pandered to Nero’s paranoia and jealousy of anyone richer than him gets a little wearing, Tacitus agrees:

Even if I were describing foreign wars and patriotic deaths, this monotonous series of events would have become tedious both for me and for my readers. For I should expect them to feel as surfeited as myself by the tragic sequence of citizen deaths – even if they had been honourable deaths. but this slavish passivity, this torrent of wasted bloodshed far from active service, wearies, depresses and paralyses the mind. (p.388; book 16, section 14).

Tacitus goes onto lament the death of the author, Petronius, devoting a page to his unconventional life, his dissipation, and witty popularity. Without trying Petronius was admitted to Nero’s inner circle and became his arbiter of taste. However, this inflamed Nero’s chief crony, Tigellinus, against him, and Tigellinus concocted the usual accusations, which easily triggered Nero to order his court arbiter’s death. Petronius opened his veins but continued attending a banquet and listening to light verse as he expired. Then he dictated a letter detailing all Nero’s sexual partners and perversions which he had sent to the emperor, who was shaken to see how much was known about him.

The final passage of the Annals describes yet another indictment of a good man, Thrasea, and his family, by the sycophantic toadies in the senate, inspired by Nero. Then the manuscript breaks off.

The missing portion of the work described the visit of King Tiridates to Rome, the start of the Jewish Revolt, Nero’s visit to Greece, the revolt of military commander Gaius Julius Vindex in Gaul, which triggers a general revolt against Nero and the selection by the senate of Servius Sulpicius Galba, governor of Hispania, to replace Nero. Nero fled to the villa of a freed slave, Phaon, and there got slaves to help him commit suicide.

Thoughts

Suetonius’s Life of Nero is a more enjoyable read than the Tacitus. It’s shorter and more to the point. It goes into more detail about Nero’s addiction to singing, playing the lyre and chariot racing than Tacitus does, and presents a more coherent and persuasive profile of the emperor. Tacitus embeds all this in annals which report all the important events of each year so that the sheer welter of events becomes tiring and, as Tacitus himself concedes, towards the end, really wearing.

I suppose the Annals is a great work, but probably best read in chapters or sections: the cumulative effect of so many cruel murders, villainous informers, of so much slavish sycophancy to the emperor and the suicides of so many aristocrats, eventually becomes numbing.

Credit

Michael Grant’s fluent, energetic translation of Tacitus’s Annals was published by Penguin Books in 1956. References are to the revised 1971 edition, as reprinted in 1988.

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The Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus – 1

The more I think about history, ancient or modern, the more ironical all human affairs seem.
(Annals of ancient Rome by Tacitus, page 127)

Publius Cornelius Tacitus (56 to 120 AD)

Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a Roman historian and politician. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians. He held high official positions, being consul in 97 and governor of Anatolia in 113.

His two major works – the Annals and the Histories – cover the history of the Roman Empire from the death of Augustus (14 AD) to the death of Domitian (96 AD), although there are substantial gaps in the surviving texts.

Saint Jerome stated that The Histories and Annals together amounted to 30 books. Scholars traditionally assign 16 books to the Annals and 14 books to the Histories. Of the 30 books mentioned by Jerome only about half have survived.

Three other, lesser works by Tacitus survive in their entirety:

a dialogue about oratory, in which two lawyers and two literary men discuss the claims of oratory against literature (published 102)
a study of Germany and the German tribes (the Germania, published about 98)
a biography of his father-in-law, Agricola (the Agricola, published about 98)

Incomplete

The Annals were Tacitus’s final work. The Histories, although published earlier, cover the later part of his period, from 68 to 96 AD. The Annals, though published later, cover the earlier period, from the end of the reign of Augustus, through those of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero, covering the years 14 to 68 AD, the year when Nero committed suicide.

But the absolutely key thing about the Annals is that half of them are missing. There are dirty great gaps in the narrative, big holes in the story.

We have the first part, a good continuous narrative from the end of Augustus’s reign (14) through most of Tiberius’s rule (14 to 37) in detail. But the text breaks off after the death of Tiberius and the entire reign of Caligula (37 to 41) and the first six years of Claudius (41 to 47) are missing. The narrative then resumes for the last seven or so years of Claudius (47 to 54) and the entire reign of Nero (54 to 68), at which point the narrative of the Annals connects with that of the Histories.

The best

Tacitus’s is the earliest and best account we have of this crucial period in western history. We do also possess the biographies of the first 12 emperors by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (69 to 122), Tacitus’s younger contemporary, which cover the exact same period and were published around 120 AD; and it’s true that Suetonius was an imperial secretary (to Hadrian) and so had access to imperial archives and was able to amass much curious and colourful material in his biographies. But Suetonius followed the conventions of his time in thinking ‘biography’ a much less serious genre than ‘history’ and so didn’t attempt the deeper analysis and wider scope which Tacitus achieves.

The other main source for this period is the Greek historian Lucius Cassius Dio (155 to 235) who wrote a vast history of Rome from its foundation up to his own time in no fewer than 80 volumes. But Michael Grant, the translator of the Penguin edition of the Annals, considers Dio ‘pedestrian’ and lacking ‘the imagination to grasp the affairs of the early empire’.

So although there are these two other sources, nonetheless Tacitus:

is the best literary source for the events of the early principate that we possess.

The purpose of history

Like everyone in the ancient world, Tacitus thought writing had a moral purpose. Grant’s introduction spends some time untangling the complicated relationship in Tacitus’s time between history, rhetoric and philosophy.

For a start all these genres – poetry, history, tragedy and comedy, eulogy and lyric poetry – were pioneered by the ancient Greeks. The Romans only began to copy these genres hundreds of years after the Greeks had brought them to a first perfection. (The first Greek historian, Herodotus, wrote his Histories about 430 BC, whereas the first Roman historian, Cato the Elder, wrote his Origines 250 years later, about 180 BC.)

Grant tells us that history, as a genre, grew out of poetry. First came Homer and Hesiod (700 BC?) and only centuries later, the first of the Greek historians – Thucydides b.460 and Herodotus b.430. For a very long time ‘history’ was regarded as a subsidiary form of literature.

This explains the elements of the dramatic found in Tacitus, for example the extended speeches he gives characters at various points which, scholars think, were almost all entirely invented by Tacitus. He attributed to leading characters in the narrative beautifully structured speeches which expressed the kinds of things they ought to have said at the most dramatic or pivotal moments.

And from the tradition of Greek tragedy comes an urge to make events seem tragic and terrible. You can feel this at moments in the narrative where, after trundling through a list of law cases and official appointments, Tacitus returns to the year’s activities of Tiberius or Nero and, suddenly, the narrative takes on a more colourful, sometimes stricken, tone, as he talks up the appalling reign of terror which Tiberius assembled or the terrible acts of the sadist and murderer Nero. You can almost hear him cranking up the horror. Which is why some scholars question whether things really were as bad under Tiberius and Nero as Tacitus claimed or whether some, at least, of the horror is included for dramatic effect.

Alongside drama went didacticism, the urge to teach and instruct, which grew, according to Grant, in popularity in the Greek world from the 4th century BC onwards. Tacitus takes a deeply moral line. He is concerned not only with recording everything which happened in a specific year, but giving his opinion about it.

Tacitus’s history is a succession of issues by which I mean a record of each year’s military campaigns, appointments of officials, promulgating of laws, prosecuting of officials or criminals, the character of particular officials (governors, generals, the emperors themselves) and so on – all of which Tacitus gives his opinion about. It is a very opinionated history.

Tacitus is in no doubt that the fundamental purpose of his writing is didactic. The aim of history is to teach men to know themselves better and behave better by showing them great examples – of good and terrible behaviour – from the past.

It seems to me a historian’s foremost duty to ensure that merit is recorded and to confront evil deeds and words with the fear of posterity’s denunciations.
(p.150; book 3, 64)

Which brings us to another massive topic, which is rhetoric, the art of persuasion, in writing and speaking. Rhetoric was the central element of the educational syllabus of the well-educated in the ancient world, and was explained in a stream of famous and complex manuals.

Thus a writer like Cicero, in his De legibus, says that history’s first concern may be recording the truth, but very close afterwards comes the need to a) persuade his audience and b) to sound well. This brings us back in a circle to history’s origins as a child of poetry. By Tacitus’s time it had travelled a long way from its parent but hadn’t shaken off the expectation that the historian would, as well as being a good researcher of facts, be an artist of prose.

Hence (to repeat a bit) the importance of the set-piece speeches Tacitus invented for his historical personages. The speeches are not only appropriate for the personage and the situation, they exploit the personage and the situation to put on a good show – in order to demonstrate the author’s skill at making a case, and to tickle the taste buds of the educated Roman audience who enjoyed savouring and judging well-made rhetoric and oratory.

Many of the set-piece passages in Tacitus were almost certainly written to be declaimed i.e. read aloud to an audience trained to its fingertips in the art of rhetoric, who would spot and appreciate the author’s various tricks and skills.

Conceived as accurate depictions of what actually happened, written in order to promote good behaviour and deprecate bad behaviour, Tacitus’s writings also had an interest in bringing out dramatic moments and presenting successive cases and arguments with all the skills of an orator. (For example, the passage in book 1, sections 7 to 10, where Tacitus puts the case for, and then the case against, Augustus’s achievements.) It’s a colourful, rich and often highly artistic combination.

Sententiae

Alongside and accompanying this overtly didactic aim, Tacitus from time to time throws in sententiae or pithy comments on history, society and human nature. these were a well-known part of his style and were quoted and excerpted for a millennium and a half afterwards. However, the modern reader may feel that, beneath their air of profundity, they are often strangely anodyne.

So the avenging of Germanicus ended. Contradictory rumours have raged around it among contemporaries and later generations alike. Important events are obscure. Some believe all manner of hearsay evidence; others twist truth into fiction; and both sorts of errors are magnified by time. (p.128, book 3, section 18)

It would be easy to enjoy and dismiss the sententiae without realising their true significance. Tacitus is trying to understand human nature by stepping back and commenting on aspects of what he sees, which arise naturally from his subject matter (the origins of tyranny) or his researches (how very prone people are to believe all kinds of rumours and lies).

He is investigating the nature of what is remembered, and why, and how fictions so quickly arise to fulfil people’s expectations.

Sejanus, too much loved by Tiberius and hated by everyone else, passed for the author of every crime; and rumours always proliferate around the downfalls of the great. For such reasons even the most monstrous myths found believers…My own motive in mentioning and refuting the rumour has been to illustrate by one conspicuous instance the falsity of hearsay gossip, and to urge those who read this book not to prefer incredible tales – however widely current and readily accepted – to the truth unblemished by marvels.
(p.162, book 4, section 9)

Fairly obvious though they seem to us, these kinds of reflection on human nature and the psychology of society was much rarer in ancient times. Although they were to some extent expected in history as a genre, it is always fascinating to read these occasional insights, not into society as such, but into how ancient authors thought about their society and about social change.

No chapter markers

I read the Annals in the translation by Michael Grant published by Penguin in 1956. It is a clear, forceful translation making for an enjoyable read (if you like Roman and military history) but with one massive flaw. Most Roman texts were divided by the author into numbered sections which modern editors, not entirely accurately, often call ‘chapters’.

The Annals and Histories are divided into these numbered sections, which are themselves gathered into ‘books’. But Grant or his editor took the decision not to include these chapter numbers in the text, which is inconvenient. It would have been useful to know which book and which section various events occur in.

Robert Graves’s translation of Suetonius and Kenneth Wellesley’s translation of Tacitus’s Histories, both for Penguin, do keep the section numbers in –so that every other paragraph or so starts with a number – and this allows you to compare their texts with other translations available online by referring to these numbers. You can go straight to the precise section of the other translations and make comparisons very easily. And, when I quote a sentence or two in my blog, I can cite the precise section it occurs in, for everyone’s convenience.

You simply can’t do that with the Grant translation. The book number and chapter number are given in the header at the top of each page, but this covers all the contents of both pages and so is very imprecise, and leaves you having to guess which chapter number applies to a particular paragraph. Very irritating.

Annalistic

What is an annal, anyway? Merriam-Webster defines an annal as ‘a record of the events of one year’ and annals in the plural as a record of events arranged in a year-by-year sequence. Thus Tacitus proceeds, rather pedantically, a year at a time. This means he doesn’t describe long-running themes which ran over successive years, as a whole. Instead he tells you everything which happened in 14 AD. Then everything which happened in 15 AD. And so on.

Sources

1. Apparently, the initial scaffolding of the work was based on annual notices called the ‘Records of the Priests’. These were primarily religious in nature but since the Roman year was packed with celebrations and festivals a lot of the other business of the state (elections, wars, trials) began to be mentioned and then actively recorded in the Records. By the second century BC historians who used these sources had become known generally as the Annalists. They provide an obvious precedent for Tacitus’s work.

2. Tacitus also mentions searching ‘histories and official journals as part of his researches (p.120), a note from Grant telling us this latter refers to the acta diurna which began to be kept in the year of Julius Caesar’s first consulship (59 BC).

3. He also, like Suetonius, at some points refers to stories he himself heard from those alive at the time, and so gives a version of Piso’s eventual death ‘given by people who were alive when I was young’ (p.126).

4. And he balances the written record with hearsay, the oral tradition which is so often lost and so is valuable that Tacitus recorded:

In describing Drusus’ death I have followed the most numerous and reputable authorities. But I should also record a contemporary rumour, strong enough to remain current today…’ (p.163, book 4 section 10)

(This rumour was that Sejanus not only seduced Drusus’s wife, Livilla, into becoming his lover and helping him poison her husband, Drusus – but also seduced Drusus’ eunuch, Lygdus, to help in the conspiracy.)

Sallust

Grant sees the key figure in the Roman tradition before Tacitus as being Sallust, author of a lost history as well as studies of the Jugurthine War and the Catiline conspiracy, which have survived. Sallust was popular because of the drama and energy of his narratives, spliced with exciting speeches, most notably the long speeches he attributes to Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger in the Catiline conspiracy – combining artistry and rhetoric.

‘Next’

This explains why one of the key words in Grant’s translation is ‘next’. Tiberius did this. ‘Next’ x and y were installed as consuls for the year. ‘Next’ the Senate debated a motion to prosecute this or that governor. ‘Next’ there were rebellions by the following tribes on the following borders of the empire. ‘Next’ Tiberius announced a new policy to enforce z.

The summary of each year opens by naming the consuls for that year:

In the next year the consuls were Servius Cornelius Cetegus and Lucius Visellius Varro… (p.165)
In the following year the consuls were Cossus Cornelius Lentulus and Marcus Asinius Agrippa… (p.173)

And ends with a brief list of notable figures who died during it:

At the end of the year two notable Romans died… (p.134)
Two eminent men died this year…’ (p.155)

And so on. On one level it is a record of events which really is just ‘one damn thing after another’. As I got into the text I realised that, although broad chapter titles Grant assigns to big blocks of narrative (see below) are zippy and dramatic, it would make a lot more sense to layout the narrative by year, starting a new ‘chapter’ with each year to really bring out the year-by-year annalistic nature of the text.

By ‘everything’ I mean a fairly narrow, limited range of concerns. Tacitus frequently refers to his own researches in state records. The point being that his narrative appears to be based on the brief records which Roman officials had been keeping for centuries of a) appointments to the key magistracies; b) debates and decisions of the Senate, regarding new laws or the prosecution of leading figures for breaching various laws; c) military campaigns; d) important court cases, often the prosecution of provincial governors for corruption.

Tacitus lays out a list of these kinds of events for each year and then expands on them, giving further background where required, especially about the individuals concerned, their family and character, and explaining what happened in each instance. These kinds of things form what you could call the background hum of the narrative.

No social or economic history

There is very little about a subject which has become central to modern history, which is economics. The ancients had little or no understanding of economics. Like his peers, Tacitus will say ‘in this year there was a shortage of wheat or grain’ and that food prices went up or there was scarcity leading to riots, prompting the emperor to intervene and buy up huge amounts to be distributed cheaply to the population of Rome. But that’s about it.

And there’s nothing at all about the lives or experiences of the common people, except for occasional references to the mob or riots. It is very much a personal history of the very top echelons of society, the senatorial class and the so-called ‘knights’. And it is a moral history of their personal attitudes and behaviour.

The emperors

But laid over the top of the background hum of the year-to-year events is what you could call the juiciest element of the Annals, which is the cumulative portrait of the emperors being (since we lack Caligula altogether) Tiberius, Claudius and Nero.

The most famous biographer of this period, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (69 to 122) has left us, among copious other writings, a famous set of biographies of the first 12 emperors (Lives of the Caesars) which covers the exact same period as Tacitus’s Annals and Histories. The two works can be read side by side.

Suetonius’s biographies are relatively brief (40 or so pages in the Penguin translation). After a shortish chronological section detailing the objective historical events of their reigns, Suetonius moves onto personal aspects of his subjects, arranged like a PowerPoint presentation under specific headings (personal attributes, appearance, wives and offspring and so on) under which he groups facts or events to illustrate each of his topics. These often contain juicy gossip and quirky facts (such as Augustus’s distinctive birthmarks or his habit of wearing a big floppy hat when he went out to protect him from the sun) which make them pithy and memorable.

Tacitus, by contrast, presents us with one long continuous narrative. This means there is a great deal more content, especially in two particular areas: domestic policy and military campaigns.

Suetonius lists the aspects of the emperors and then illustrates them by anecdotes, jumping around place and time to provide evidence. Tacitus, by contrast, proceeds, in a slightly plodding way, through the key events of each year, as he’s derived them from studying the official records of the senate, the elections, the law courts etc. And out of this list of events grows his analysis of the emperor. The prosecution of this or that official brings out this side of the emperor. The handling of a military campaign highlights that side of his personality. And so on. Far more historical information.

Books and titles

As I’ve mentioned Grant doesn’t structure his narrative by the books and sections of the original text. Instead he creates his own ‘chapters’, giving them titles (which I’m pretty sure aren’t in the original). The aim is to add drama and give his narrative the feel of a novel. They are:

Part one: Tiberius

From Augustus to Tiberius (book 1, sections 1 to 15)
Mutiny on the Frontiers (book 1, sections 16 to 49)
War with the Germans (book 1 section 49 to book 2 section 26)
The First Treason Trials (book 2 sections 27 to 52)
The Death of Germanicus (book 2 section 53 to book 3 section 19)
Tiberius and the Senate (book 3 sections 19 to 76)
‘Partner of my labours’ (p.158) [about Sejanus] (books 4 and 5)
The reign of terror (book 6)

Part two: Claudius and Nero:

The fall of Messalina (book 11)
The Mother of Nero (book 12)
The fall of Agrippina (book 13 to book 14 section 13)
Nero and his helpers (book 14 sections 14 to 65)
Eastern settlement (book 14 sections 1 to 32)
The burning of Rome (book 15, sections 32 to 47)
The plot (book 15, sections 48 to 74)
Innocent victims (book 16)

Tiberius

Unlike sociable Augustus, Tiberius comes over as ‘profoundly secretive’ (p.140), ‘cryptic’ (p.143) ambiguous and unpredictable. In his introduction Grant points out that Tacitus attributes to Tiberius all the qualities of a villain of melodrama, the stock tyrant of ancient literature: he is portrayed as unjust, sensual, cruel and, above all, suspicious and cunning.

Livia

His mother, Augustus’s widow, Livia – who was given the ominous title ‘the Augusta’ – is, if anything, worse, a monster of malicious manipulation. It’s often difficult to spot the moment at which the transition takes place, but quite often, when reading about these two, you realise the text has turned into a pantomime and the audience is meant to be booing and hissing the baddies.

Germanicus

Every panto needs a hero and this deep tendency – to cast things into dramatic shape – explains the tremendous shininess with which the young prince, Germanicus, is depicted, Tacitus emphasising his graciousness, openness, honesty, his ability to get on with people and his great military victories in Germany, in order to contrast all of this with Tiberius’s negative versions of the same virtues, with Tiberius’s surliness, suspicion, duplicity, holing up in Rome (and then retirement to Capri).

Germanicus in Germany

In his notes Grant brings out something I had sensed or felt in the narrative but wasn’t sure about, which is that Germanicus’s campaigns in Germany (against the Cherusci, led by Arminius, the Chatti, the Marsi and other rebel tribes), dramatic and extended through they were, were ultimately an expensive waste of time resulting in no permanent conquests or treaties.

The most memorable part of these early books is Tacitus’s descriptions of the very hard-fought battles in the mud and undergrowth of the endless German forest and then, above all else, the terrific description of the huge storm in the North Sea which wrecked Germanicus’s fleet, which destroyed many ships and drowned many soldiers. Tacitus’s account has a Hollywood blockbuster feel to it (pages 87 to 88).

The North Sea is the roughest in the world and the German climate the worst. The disaster was proportionately terrible – indeed, it was unprecedented. (p.87)

All the more horrifying that Tacitus presents the evidence for and against the widely held suspicion that Germanicus was poisoned by the governor of Syria, Cnaius Calpurnius Piso, where Germanicus had been sent to lead the military campaign in Armenia. (Germanicus dies on page 113, book 2 section 69, warning his wife against Tiberius’s malevolence.)

Tiberius’s decline

The headline story of Tiberius’s reign (14 to 37) is that it was in two parts. While he was finding his feet Tiberius was cautious and stuck to the letter of the law, abiding by all of Augustus’s decisions. But slowly, slowly, in a score of ways – through the way he managed and cowed the Senate, made appointments to the army, in his spiky relations with his biological son (Drusus) and adopted son (Germanicus), in his revival of the treason law (p.73) and encouragement of informers and spies (‘It was a sort of contagion, like an epidemic’, p.203), and especially on his growing reliance on the creepy figure of Lucius Aelius Sejanus, head of the Praetorian Guard – Tiberius became slowly more tyrannical.

Although the treason trials (for ‘crimes’ as trivial as swearing in the vicinity of a statue of Augustus) began as early as 16 (p.90), Tacitus cites 23 AD as the year when Tiberius’s rule began to deteriorate (p.159, book 4, section 3) and he is quite brutal in describing the total compliance which Tiberius created:

The impressiveness of the Republican facade only meant that the slave-state, which was to grow out of them, would be all the more loathsome. (p.77, 1.77)

Tiberius is so important to Tacitus because it was under him that the weakness and corruption of one-man rule became clear. Tiberius set the pattern that later autocrats and tyrants copied.

It was under Tiberius that freedom suffered its most fatal losses. (Grant, Introduction, p.21)

Augustus had spent half his life in the Republic and had the immense skill to retain a tactful facade of republicanism even as he took more and more control of things. And he was canny with people.

He seduced the army with bonuses and his cheap food policy was successful bait for civilians. He attracted everybody’s goodwill by the enjoyable gift of peace. Then he gradually pushed ahead and absorbed the functions of the senate, the officials and even the law. (p.32, book 1 section 1)

Tiberius was high-minded and principled in many ways but lacked Augustus’s social and interpersonal skills. Cold and distant, he alienated people.

What Tiberius said, even when he did not aim at concealment, was – by habit or nature – always hesitant, always cryptic. (p.39, 1.10)

And had never known the republic. All he knew was his own wishes, which slowly became an unreliable guide to rule by and the result was a slow descent into a reign of terror. As he has a character say:

‘In spite of all his experience of public affairs, Tiberius was transformed and deranged by absolute power.’ (book 6, section 48)

As witnessed by the fact that it was widely believed that he conspired in the deaths of his adopted (and too popular) son, Germanicus (widely held to have commissioned Piso to poison him out in the Middle East) and then of his own son, Drusus, who Tacitus frankly claims was poisoned by Tiberius’s creature, Sejanus (p.161, book 4, section 6).

The first couple of books focus, memorably and vividly, on Germanicus’s campaigns in god-forsaken mud and forest of tribal Germany. But the institution Tacitus most analyses is the Senate, recording event after event, debates, and decisions, and consular elections, which step by step mark its descent into grovelling sycophancy towards the increasingly terrifying emperor. It is from Tacitus that we learn that Tiberius frequently left the Senate muttering, ‘Men fit to be slaves!’ (p.150)

Tiberius retires to Capri, 28 AD

Finally Tiberius quit the Italian mainland and, in 28 AD, retired to the island of Capri where he stayed holed up for the last 11 years of his life (he died in 37 AD, aged 77). He no longer attended the senate, as he had done assiduously, or the law courts, as he had done, inspiring fear and intimidation. Now all government business was conducted by letter.

Access to him was harder now. It was only procurable by intrigue and complicity. (p.194)

Tacitus thinks he did it partly to get away from his nagging mother, Livia, partly because he genuinely found the daily task of attending the senate or the law courts and so on gruelling. And partly to indulge the sensual lusts and perversions which became harder to control as he aged.

For his criminal lusts shamed him. Their uncontrolled activity was worthy of an oriental tyrant. Free-born children were his victims. He was fascinated by beauty, youthful innocence, and aristocratic birth. New names for types of perversions were invented. (p.200 cf p.202)

And so on. More details are given in Suetonius’s deliberately scandalous Life of Tiberius.

Death of Livia, 29 AD

She was a compliant wife to Augustus but an overbearing mother to Tiberius. Tacitus thinks part of his motivation in retiring to Capri was to be free of her endless nagging. (That and his wish to indulge his disreputable personal behaviour.) With her death Tiberius’s restraint was thrown to the wind.

Now began a time of sheer crushing tyranny. (p.196)

Tiberius and Sejanus began to persecute Germanicus’s widow, Agrippina (the Elder). He sent a letter to Rome denouncing her and her son, Nero Caesar, Tiberius’s daughter-in-law and grandson.

Here there is a gap in the text covering two years. During those key years, first Agrippina (Germanicus’s widow), Nero Caesar and Drusus Caesar (her young sons) were exiled, and Nero Caesar died. More seismically, Tiberius began to suspect his right-hand man, Sejanus, instrumental in so many plots against his enemies, to be conspiring against Tiberius himself. So Tiberius had him arrested in the senate and executed. At which point Sejanus’s divorced wife revealed to Tiberius that it was Sejanus and his lover Livilla (Drusus’s own wife) who had conspired to poison Drusus (Tiberius’s son). After this was revealed Livilla died, either killing herself or executed.

The fall of Sejanus was brutal but so was the aftermath. Previously consuls and senators and aristocrats had vied with each other to fall in with the emperor’s henchman to curry favour. Now all that arse-licking came to be regarded in a diametrically opposite light and many who had associated with Sejanus were now accused of being part of his plot to overthrow the emperor.

Frenzied with bloodshed, the emperor now ordered the execution of all those arrested for complicity with Sejanus. It was a massacre. Without discrimination of sex or age, eminence or obscurity, there they lay, strewn about – or in heaps. (p.209)

With great brutality Sejanus’s two young children were executed. Tacitus reports that, since capital punishment for a virgin was forbidden, she was first raped by the public executioner, then garotted. Both their bodies were then thrown onto the Gemonian steps (where the bodies of criminals and the disgraced were thrown in ignominy; p.199).

The deaths Germanicus’s widow, Agrippina the Elder (p.212) and then of two of her children: Nero Julius Caesar was accused of treason, declared by the senate an enemy of the state, banished to the island of Pontia where he was either killed or encouraged to kill himself in 31.

His brother, Drusus Caesar, Tiberius’s grandson was accused by Cassius Severus of plotting against Tiberius. He was imprisoned and confined to a dungeon on the Palatine in 30. He starved to death in prison in 33 after, according to Tacitus, being reduced to chewing the stuffing of his mattress.

This left young Gaius as their only surviving brother and at an early age he was sent to be Tiberius’s companion on Capri. Here he learned thorough-going debauchery from the old man and how to recognise and manage his moods. He was to succeed Tiberius on the latter’s death in 37 and is known to history by his nickname, Caligula.

The long description of Tiberius ends with ever-increasing terror, with scores of senators and knights accused of all kinds of crimes and queuing up to commit suicide. Tacitus describes Rome as awash with blood and piled with bodies which must have been an exaggeration. But it felt like that to those who lived through it.

Gaius Vibius Marsius is accused of adultery and decides to starve himself to death. Tacitus gives him a grim speech explaining to his friends that he doesn’t want to hang on the last few weeks until the obviously ill emperor dies, because he prophesies that the reign of Tiberius’s successor will be even worse (p.225).

The deaths of Nero Julius Caesar and his brother, Drusus Caesar left Tiberius Gemellus, the son of Drusus and Livilla, the grandson of the Emperor Tiberius, as hair. In 35 Gemellus, along with his cousin Gaius, were named joint-heirs by Tiberius. Upon Tiberius’s death in March 37, Gaius assumed the throne and had Gemellus killed (or forced to kill himself) in late 37 or early 38.

Degenerate times

Tacitus shares the universal belief among all ancient writers that the world was going to the dogs and that the age they were living in was witness to unprecedented degeneracy. Decline and fall. Sallust complained about the degenerate times he was describing in the 50s BC and Tacitus expresses exactly the same feeling 150 years later.

I am aware that much of what I have described, and shall describe, may seem unimportant and trivial. But my chronicle is quite a different matter from histories of early Rome. Their subjects were great wars, cities stormed, kings routed and captured. Or, if home affairs were their choice, they could turn freely to conflicts of consuls with tribunes, to land- and corn-laws, feuds of conservatives and commons. Mine, on the other hand, is a circumscribed, inglorious field. Peace was scarcely broken – if at all. Rome was plunged in gloom, the ruler uninterested in expanding the empire. (p.173, book 4, section 31)

The futility of tyranny

As part of the general reign of terror and intimidation of every form of free speech and opinion, in 25 the historian Aulus Cremutius Cordus was charged with, in his Histories, praising Brutus and describing Cassius as ‘the last of the Romans’. Cremutius put up a stirring defence in the senate (probably another speech invented by Tacitus), went home and starved himself to death. Which prompts Tacitus to reflect:

The senate ordered his books to be burned by the aediles. But they survived, first hidden and later republished. This makes one deride the stupidity of people who believe that today’s authority can destroy tomorrow’s memories. On the contrary, repressions of genius increase its prestige. All that tyrannical conquerors, and imitators of their brutalities, achieve is their own disrepute and their victims’ renown.
(p.175, book 4, section 35)

Tacfarinas

Credit

Michael Grant’s fluent, energetic translation of Tacitus’s Annals was published by Penguin Books in 1956. References are to the revised 1971 edition, as reprinted in 1988.

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by Simon on December 14, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, History, Translation

Tagged acta diurnal, Agricola, Agrippina, Agrippina the Elder, Ancient history, ancient Rome, ancient world, annal, Annalists, Annals of ancient Rome, Armenia, Arminius, Augustus, Aulus Cremutius Cordus, Caligula, Capri, Cassius, Cassius Severus, Catiline Conspiracy, Cato the Elder, Cato the Younger, Cicero, Claudius, Cnaius Calpurnius Piso, Cremutius, De legibus, decline and fall, Domitian, Drusus, Drusus Caesar, emperor Tiberius, fire of Rome, Gaius, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, Gaius Vibius Marsius, Gemellus, Germanicus, Germany, Hadrian, Herodotus, Hesiod, history, Homer, human nature, Jugurthine War, Julius Caesar, knights, Latin, libertas, Lives of the Caesars, Livia, Livilla, Lucius Aelius Sejanus, Lucius Cassius Dio, Lygdus, Messalina, Michael Grant, Nero, Nero Julius Caesar, North Sea, oratory, Penguin books, Piso, Pontia, Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Records of the Priests, rhetoric, Robert Graves, Roman Empire, Roman history, Roman Republic, Rome, saint Jerome, Sallust, Sejanus, senatorial class, Sententiae, Suetonius, suicide, Tacitus, Tacitus's Annals, the Agricola, the Augusta, the Catiline conspiracy, the Chatti, the Cherusci, the Germania, the Marsi, the Palatine, the Senate, Thucydides, Tiberius, Tiberius Gemellus, Translation, treason trials, tyranny, war

Posted by Simon on December 14, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/12/14/tacitus-annals-1/

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