*
BUT fortune was about to make a fool of Nero. For he credulously believed a lunatic Carthaginian named Caesellius Bassus. This man put faith in a dream, left for Rome, and bribed his way into the emperor’s presence. Addressing Nero, he alleged the discovery on his estate of an immensely deep cave containing masses of gold, not in coin but in ancient, unworked bullion. There were ponderous ingots lying about and standing like columns, he said – all hidden centuries ago. His explanation of this windfall from antiquity was this: after her flight from Troy and foundation of Carthage, Phoenician Dido had hidden the treasure in case too much wealth might corrupt her young nation, or the already hostile Numidian kings, coveting the gold, might go to war.
Nero failed to check the man’s credibility or to send investigators to confirm its trudifulness. Instead, his imagination exaggerated the report, and he dispatched men to fetch the spoils he believed were lying ready to hand. Warships were allocated, with picked rowers to accelerate their journey. This was the outstanding current subject of conversation. The public were optimistic, sensible people the reverse. It happened to be the year of the second five-yearly Neronian Games, and speakers, in their panegyrics of the emperor, made this a leading theme: ‘Earth’, they said, ‘is now producing not only her accustomed crops, not only gold mixed with other substances – she is teeming with a new kind of fertility! Wealth unsought is sent by the gods!’ – and every other invention which eloquent sycophants could devise. They were confident of their imperial listener’s credulity.
These vain hopes increased Nero’s extravagance. Existing resources were squandered as though the material for many more years of wastefulness were now accessible. Indeed, he already drew on this imaginary treasure for free distributions; his expectation of wealth actually contributed to the national impoverishment Meanwhile Bassus dug up his ground – and a wide area round about – declaring that this or that was the location of the promised cave. The soldiers accompanied him, together with a horde of rustics engaged to undertake the work. Finally, however, he recovered from his delusion – expressing amazement that, after all his other hallucinations had come true, this one alone had deceived him. He sought escape from his shame and fright in suicide. (According to other sources, he was arrested but soon released, his property however being confiscated in compensation for the imaginary Royal Treasure.)
The five-yearly Games were now close. The senate tried to avert scandal by offering the emperor, in advance, the first prize for song, and also conferred on him a crown ‘for eloquence’ to gloss over the degradation attaching to the stage. But Nero declared that there was no need for favouritism or the senate’s authority; he would compete on equal terms and rely on the conscience of the judges to award him the prize he deserved. First he recited a poem on the stage. Then, when the crowd shouted that he should ‘display all his accomplishments’ (those were their actual words), he made a second entrée as a musician.
Nero scrupulously observed harpists’ etiquette. When tired, he remained standing. To wipe away perspiration, he used nothing but the robe he was wearing. He allowed no moisture from his mouth or nose to be visible. At the conclusion, he awaited the verdict of the judges in assumed trepidation, on bended knee, and with a gesture of deference to the public. And the public at least, used to applauding the poses even of professional actors, cheered in measured, rhythmical cadences. They sounded delighted. Indeed, since the national disgrace meant nothing to them, perhaps they were.
But people from remote country towns of austere, old-fashioned Italy, or visitors from distant provinces on official or private business, had no experience of outrageous behaviour; they found the spectacle intolerable. Their unpractised hands tired easily and proved unequal to the degrading task, thereby disorganizing the expert applauders and earning many cuffs from the Guardsmen who, to prevent any momentary disharmony or silence, were stationed along the benches. Numerous knights, it is recorded, were crushed to death forcing their way up through the narrow exits against the crowd. Others, as they sat day and night, collapsed and died. For absence was even more dangerous than attendance, since there were many spies unconcealedly (and more still secretly) noting who was there – and noting whether their expressions were pleased or dissatisfied. Humble offenders received instant punishment. Against important people the grudge was momentarily postponed, but paid later. Vespasian, the story went, nodded somnolently; he was reprimanded by an ex-slave called Phoebus, and only rescued by enlightened intercession. Nor was this the last time he was in peril. But his imperial destiny saved him.
Soon after the Games Poppaea died. She was pregnant, and her husband, in a chance fit of anger, kicked her. Some writers record that she was poisoned; but this sounds malevolent rather than truthful, and I do not believe it – for Nero wanted children and loved his wife. She was buried in the Mausoleum of Augustus. Her body was not cremated in the Roman fashion, but was stuffed with spices and embalmed in the manner of foreign potentates. At the State funeral, Nero mounted the platform to praise her looks, her parenthood of an infant now deified, and her other lucky assets which could be interpreted as virtues.
Publicly Poppaea’s death was mourned. But those who remembered her immorality and cruelty welcomed it. However, Nero’s action caused disgust, which was accentuated when he forbade Gaius Cassius Longinus to attend the funeral. This was the first sign of impending trouble: and it came quickly. Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus (II) became involved. His only offence was to be a respectable young member of the highest nobility; those of Cassius were his remarkable ancestral wealth and outstanding character. Nero wrote to the senate requesting that both should be expelled from public life. He charged Cassius with revering, among the statues of his ancestors, a representation of Gaius Cassius, labelled ‘Leader of the Cause’1 – thus planting the seeds of civil war and treason to the house of the Caesars.
But (the emperor added) a hated name was not enough material for revolution, so Cassius had taken on the unbalanced young nobleman Lucius Silanus as the rebellion’s figurehead. Then Nero attacked Silanus (as he had earlier attacked his uncle, Decimus Junius Silanus Torquatus) for already allocating imperial responsibilities by designating his exslaves Financial Secretary, Petitions Secretary, and Secretary-General. The charge was fatuous. It was also untrue. For Silanus, besides feeling the effects of the prevalent terror, had been frightened by his uncle’s death into extreme caution. Next, so-called informers fabricated against Cassius’ wife, Junia Lepida, accusations of black magic and incest with her brother’s son – Lucius Silanus. Two senators, Volcacius Tertullinus and Cornelius Marcellus, and a knight, Gaius Calpurnius Fabatus, were charged with complicity. But they avoided imminent condemnation by appealing to Nero. For he was preoccupied with important crimes, and they were eventually saved by their insignificance.
For Cassius and Silanus, the senate decreed banishment. Concerning Junia Lepida the emperor was to decide. Cassius was deported to Sardinia, where old age was left to do its work. Silanus was first removed to Ostia, with Naxos as his supposed destination; but he was instead confined in the Apulian country town of Barium. There, as he philosophically endured his thoroughly undeserved misfortune, a company-commander of the Guard was sent to kill him. Seized and told to open his veins, he answered that he was ready to die but would not excuse his assassin the glorious duty. The officer, however, noting that though unarmed he was very strong and far from intimidated, ordered his men to overpower him. Silanus did not fail to resist, hitting back as much as his bare hands allowed. Finally the commander’s sword struck him down, and he fell, wounded in front, as in battle.
Lucius Antistius Vetus, and his mother-in-law Sextia and daughter Antistia Pollitta, died just as courageously. All three appeared detestable to the emperor as living reproaches for his murder of Vetus’ son-in-law, Rubellius Plautus. A chance for Nero to display his brutality was afforded by a former slave of Vetus named Fortunatus. This person, after stealing his patron’s money, turned accuser, mobilizing an individual named Claudius Demianus who had been imprisoned for criminal actions by Vetus during his governorship of Asia but subsequently released by Nero as a reward for this accusation. When Vetus heard this, and knew he had to face the ex-slave on equal terms, he withdrew to his estate at Formiae, under secret military surveillance.
With him was his daughter. Besides the imminent peril, she was embittered by sorrow. This had lasted unceasingly ever since she had seen her husband Rubellius Plautus assassinated. She had clasped his bleeding neck, and kept his bloodstained clothes – an unkempt widow grieving incessantly, eating barely enough to stay alive. Now, at her father’s plea, she went to Neapolis. Refused access to Nero, she lay in wait for him at the door. When he came, she entreated him to hear an innocent man, and not surrender his former fellow-consul to a man who had been a slave. She cried like a woman. She also screamed in unwomanly fury. But appeals and reproaches alike left the emperor cold.
So she sent her father word to abandon hope and accept the inevitable. Simultaneously there came forewarning of a trial in the senate, and a harsh verdict. Some advised Vetus to name the emperor as his principal heir, thus securing the residue for his grandchildren. But he scorned to spoil what had mostly been a life of freedom by servility at its close. So he distributed his ready cash among his slaves, and bade them remove everything portable for themselves, keeping only three couches for the end.
Then, in one room, with a single weapon, all three of them – Vetus, his mother-in-law, and his daughter – opened their veins. Wearing a single garment each for decency’s sake, they were hastily carried into the bath. The young woman gazed long at her father and grandmother, and they at her. All three prayed to cease their feeble breathing speedily and be the first to die – but not be long outived. Fate observed the right order. First the two eldest perished, then the young Antistia. After burial, they were denounced, and condemned to punishment in the ancient fashion. Nero intervened, allowing them to the unsupervised. But thus farce was subsequent to their deaths.
A knight called Publius Gallus was outlawed for being on good terms with Vetus as well as a close friend of Faenius Rufus. The ex-slave who had preferred the charge against Vetus was rewarded by a seat in the theatre among the attendants of the tribunes. The names of the months following ‘Neroneus’ – otherwise April – were changed. May became ‘Claudius’, June ‘Germanicus’. According to the originator of the proposal, Servius Cornelius Orfitus by name, the latter change was necessary because the execution of two Junii Torquati had made the name ‘June’ ill-omened.
Heaven, too, marked this crime-stained year with tempest and pestilence. Campania was ravaged by a hurricane which destroyed houses, orchards, and crops over a wide area and almost extended its fury to the city. At Rome, a plague devastated the entire population. No miasma was discernible in the air. Yet the houses were full of corpses, and the streets of funerals. Neither sex nor age conferred immunity. Slave or free, all succumbed just as suddenly. Their mourning wives and children were often cremated on the very pyres by which they had sat and lamented. Senators and knights were not spared. But their deaths seemed less tragic; for by dying like other men they merely seemed to be forestalling the emperor’s blood-thirstiness.
In this year the Roman army in the Illyrian provinces, weakened by discharges due to age and unfitness, was replenished by recruiting in Narbonese Gaul, Africa, and Asia.
A disastrous fire at Lugdunum was alleviated by an imperial gift of four million sesterces to repair the town’s damage – the same sum as its people had contributed to Rome’s similar misfortunes.
When, in the following year, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus and Gaius Luccius Telesinus became consuls, Antistius Sosianus, who, as I have mentioned, was in exile for writing offensive poems about Nero, noted the rewards paid to informers and the emperor’s readiness for bloodshed. A restless opportunist by nature, he utilized the similarity of their fortunes to make friends with a fellow-exile at the same place, called Pammenes. The latter’s fame as an astrologer had won him many friends. Sosianus noted that messengers were continually arriving to consult him – and deduced that there must be a purpose behind their visits.
He also learnt that Pammenes received an annual subsidy from Publius Anteius. Nero hated Anteius (Sosianus knew) as a friend of Agrippina, and might well covet his wealth – a frequent cause of fatalities. Sosianus therefore intercepted a letter from Anteius. He also stole from Pammenes’ secret files documents giving Anteius’ horoscope and destiny. He likewise found there papers relating to the birth and life of Marcus Ostorius Scapula. Then he wrote to the emperor, intimating that, if he were granted a brief respite from his banishment, he would bring information vital to Nero’s safety. For Anteius and Ostorius, he said, were studying their own and the emperor’s destinies – and thus imperilling the empire.
Fast ships were immetiately sent, and Sosianus was soon there. When his denunciation became known, Anteius and Ostorius were regarded less as defendants than as persons already condemned. Indeed, no one would witness Anteius’ will until Tigellinus sanctioned this – after warning the testator to complete the formalities speedily. Anteius took poison, but impatient with its slowness obtained a quicker death by cutting his veins.
Ostorius was at the time at a remote estate on the Ligurian border. There a staff-officer of the Guard was dispatched to kill him rapidly. The reason for this haste was Nero’s fear of a personal attack. Always cowardly, he was more terrified than ever since the recently discovered conspiracy. Besides, Ostorius was of huge physique and an expert with weapons – his distinguished military record included the oak-wreath for saving a citizen’s life in Britain. The officer arrived; and closing every exit from the house, he told Ostorius of the emperor’s orders. The courage he had often demonstrated against the enemy Ostorius turned upon himself. Because his veins, when opened, let the blood out too slowly, he ordered a slave to hold up his hand firmly with a dagger in it – nothing more. Then Ostorius pulled the slave’s hand on to his own throat.
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. The only indulgence I would ask the reader for the inglorious victims is that he should forbear to censure them. For the fault was not theirs. The cause was rather heaven’s anger with Rome – and not an isolated burst of anger such as could be passed over with a single mention, as when armies are defeated or cities captured. And let us at least make this concession to the reputation of famous men: just as in the manner of their burial they are distinguished from the common herd, so when their deaths are mentioned let each receive his separate, permanent record.
Within a few days there fell, one after another, Annaeus Mela, Gaius Anicius Cerealis, Rufrius Crispinus, and Petronius. Mela and Crispinus were Roman knights who enjoyed the status of senators1. The latter, formerly commander of the Guard – and an honorary consul – but recently exiled to Sardinia on a charge of conspiracy, received the order to die, and committed suicide. Mela, brother of Seneca and of Lucius Annaeus Junius Gallio, had refrained from seeking office owing to his perverse ambition to achieve a consul’s influence while remaining a knight. He had also seen a shorter road to wealth in becoming an agent handling the emperor’s business. The fact that he was Lucan’s father greatly enhanced his reputation. But after his son’s death Mela called in Lucan’s debts so harshly that one of the latter’s intimate friends, Fabius Romanus, denounced him, fabricating a charge that father and son had shared complicity in the plot. The evidence was a forged letter from Lucan, which Nero examined: then he sent it to Mela, whose wealth he coveted.
Mela died in the fashionable way, opening his veins. First, however, he recorded large bequests to Tigellinus and the latter’s son-in-law Cossutianus Capito – hoping to save the residue. He added a postscript protesting against his unfair fate, and contrasting his undeserved death with the survival of Crispinus and Cerealis, the emperor’s enemies. But the postscript was regarded as a fabrication, Crispinus figuring because capital punishment had already been inflicted on him, and Cerealis to ensure its infliction. Soon afterwards Cerealis duly committed suicide – less pitied than the rest, because he was remembered to have betrayed a conspiracy to Gaius.
Petronius2 deserves a brief obituary. He spent his days sleeping, his nights working and enjoying himself. Others achieve fame by energy, Petronius by laziness. Yet he was not, like others who waste their resources, regarded as dissipated or extravagant, but as a refined voluptuary. People liked the apparent freshness of his unconventional and unselfconscious sayings and doings. Nevertheless, as governor of Bithynia and later as consul, he had displayed a capacity for business.
Then, reverting to a vicious or ostensibly vicious way of life, he had been admitted into the small circle of Nero’s intimates, as Arbiter of Taste: to the blasé emperor nothing was smart and elegant unless Petronius had given it his approval. So Tigellinus, loathing him as a rival and a more expert hedonist, denounced him on the grounds of his friendship with Flavius Scaevinus. This appealed to the emperor’s outstanding passion – his cruelty. A slave was bribed to incriminate Petronius. No defence was heard. Indeed, most of his household were under arrest.
The emperor happened to be in Campania. Petronius too had reached Cumae; and there he was arrested. Delay, with its hopes and fears, he refused to endure. He severed his own veins. Then, having them bound up again when the fancy took him, he talked with his friends – but not seriously, or so as to gain a name for fortitude. And he listened to them reciting, not discourses about the immortality of the soul or philosophy, but light lyrics and frivolous poems. Some slaves received presents – others beatings. He appeared at dinner, and dozed, so that his death, even if compulsory, might look natural.
Even his will deviated from the routine death-bed flatteries of Nero, Tigellinus, and other leaders. Petronius wrote out a list of Nero’s sensualities – giving names of each male and female bed-fellow and details of every lubricious novelty – and sent it under seal to Nero. Then Petronius broke his signet-ring, to prevent its subsequent employment to incriminate others. Nero could not imagine how his nocturnal ingenuities were known. He suspected Silia, a woman of note (she was a senator’s wife) who knew all his obscenities from personal experience – and was a close friend of Petronius. For breaking silence about what she had seen and known, she was exiled. Here the grievance was Nero’s own. It was to Tigellinus’ malevolence, however, that he sacrificed a former praetor, Minucius Thermus (II). A freed slave made criminal charges against this man; the ex-slave’s penalty was torture, the patron’s an undeserved death.
After the massacre of so many distinguished men, Nero finally coveted the destruction of Virtue herself by killing Thrasea and Marcius Barea Soranus. He had long hated them both. Against Thrasea there were additional motives. He had, as I mentioned, walked out of the senate during the debate about Agrippina. He had also been inconspicuous at the Youth Games. This gave all the more offence because during Games (the festival instituted by Antenor the Trojan) at his birthplace, Patavium, he had participated by singing in tragic costume. Besides, on the day when the praetor Antistius Sosianus was virtually condemned to death for writing offensive verses about Nero, he had proposed and carried a more lenient sentence. Again, after Poppaea’s death, he had deliberately stayed away when divine honours were voted to her, and was not present at her funeral.
Cossutianus Capito kept these memories fresh. For that criminal bore Thrasea a grudge for helping a Cilician deputation to convict him for extortion. So now Capito added further charges: ‘At the New Year, Thrasea evaded the regular oath. Though a member of the Board of Fifteen for Religious Ceremonies, he absented himself from the national vows. He has never sacrificed for the emperor’s welfare or his divine voice. Once an indefatigable and invariable participant in the senate’s discussions – taking sides on even the most trivial proposal – now, for three years, he has not entered the senate. Only yesterday, when there was universal competition to strike down Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus (II) and Lucius Antistius Vetus, he preferred to take time off helping his dependants.
‘This is party-warfare against the government. It is secession. If many more have the same impudence, it is war. As this faction-loving country once talked of Caesar versus Cato, so now, Nero, it talks of you versus Thrasea. And he has his followers – or his courtiers rather. They do not yet imitate his treasonable voting. But they copy his grim and gloomy manner and expression: they rebuke your amusements. He is the one man to whom your safety is immaterial, your talents unadmired. He dislikes the emperor to be happy. But even your unhappiness, your bereavements, do not appease him. Disbelief in Poppaea’s divinity shows the same spirit as refusing allegiance to the acts of the divine Augustus and divine Julius. Thrasea rejects religion, abrogates law.
‘In every province and army the official Gazette is read with special care – to see what Thrasea has refused to do. If his principles are better, let us adopt them. Otherwise, let us deprive these revolutionaries of their chief and champion. This is the school which produced men like Quintus Aelius Tubero and Marcus Favonius – unpopular names even in the old Republic.1 They acclaim Liberty to destroy the imperial régime. Having destroyed it, they will strike at Liberty too. Your removal of a Cassius was pointless if you propose to allow emulators of the Brutuses to multiply and prosper. Finally – write no instructions about Thrasea yourself. Leave the senate to decide between us.’ Nero whipped up Cossutianus’ hot temper still further, and associated with him the bitingly eloquent Titus Clodius Eprius Marcellus.
The prosecution of Marcius Barea Soranus had been claimed by Ostorius Sabinus, a knight, on the grounds of alleged incidents during the defendant’s governorship of Asia. The energy and fairness of Barea Soranus in that post had increased the emperor’s malevolence. He had industriously cleared the harbour of Ephesus, and had refrained from punishing Pergamum for forcibly preventing an ex-slave of Nero called Acratus from removing its statues and pictures. However the charges against him were friendship with Rubellius Plautus and courting the provincials with revolutionary intentions. His conviction was timed just before Tiridates’ arrival to receive the Armenian crown. This was to divert attention from domestic outrages to foreign affairs – or, perhaps, to display imperial grandeur to the visitor by a truly royal massacre of distinguished men.
All Rome turned out to welcome the emperor and inspect the king. Thrasea’s presence, however, was forbidden. Undismayed, he wrote to Nero inquiring what the charges against him were and insisting that he would clear himself if he were told them and given an opportunity to dispose of them. Nero took the letter eagerly, hoping Thrasea had been frightened into some humiliating statement that would enhance the imperial prestige. But this was not so. Indeed, it was Nero who took fright, at the innocent Thrasea’s spirited independence; so he convened the senate.
Thrasea consulted his friends whether he should attempt or disdain to defend himself. The advice he received was contradictory. Some said he should attend the senate. ‘We know you will stand firm,’ they said. ‘Everything you say will enhance your renown! A secret end is for the feeble-spirited and timid. Let the people see a man who can face death. Let the senate hear inspired, superhuman utterances. Even Nero might be miraculously moved. But if his brutality persists, at least posterity will distinguish a noble end from the silent, spiritless deaths we have been seeing.’
Other friends, while equally complimentary to himself, urged him to wait at home, forecasting jeers and insults if he attended the senate. ‘Avert your ears from taunts and slanders,’ they advised. ‘Cossutianus and Eprius are not the only criminals. Others are savage enough not to stop at physical violence – and fear makes even decent men follow their lead. You have been the senate’s glory. Spare them this degrading crime: leave their verdict on Thrasea uncertain. To make Nero ashamed of his misdeeds is a vain hope. Much more real is the danger of his cruelty to your wife and daughter and other dear ones. No – die untarnished, unpolluted, as gloriously as those in whose footsteps and precepts you have lived!’
One of those present, the fervent young Lucius Junius Arulenus Rusticus, sought glory by proposing, as tribune, to veto the senate’s decree. Thrasea rejected his enthusiastic plan as futile – fatal to its author, and not even any help to the accused. ‘My time is finished,’ he said. ‘I must not abandon my longstanding, unremitting way of life. But you are starting your official career. Your future is uncompromised, so you must consider carefully beforehand what political cause you intend to adopt in such times.’ The advisability of his own presence or absence he reserved for personal decision.
Next morning, two battalions of the Guard, under arms, occupied the temple of Venus Genetrix.1 The approach to the senate-house was guarded by guards in civilian clothes displaying their swords. Troops too were arrayed round the principal forums and the law-courts. Under their menacing glares, the senators entered the building. The emperor’s address was read by his quaestor. Without mentioning any name he rebuked members for neglecting their official duties and setting the knights a slovenly example. What wonder, he said, if senators from distant provinces stayed away, when many ex-consuls and priests showed greater devotion to the embellishment of their gardens?
The accusers seized the weapon which this gave them. Cossutianus began the attack. Eprius Marcellus, following with even greater violence, claimed that the issue was one of prime national importance. The emperor’s indulgence, he said, was hampered by the insubordination of those beneath him, and the senate had hitherto been over-lenient. ‘For you have allowed yourselves’, he said, ‘to be ridiculed with impunity – by the rebellious Thrasea, his equally infatuated son-in-law Helvidius Priscus (II), Gaius Paconius Agrippinus (heir to his father’s hatred of emperors), and that scribbler of detestable verses Curtius Montanus. I insist that a former consul should attend the senate; a priest take the national vows; a citizen swear the oath of allegiance. Or has Thrasea renounced our ancestral customs and rites in favour of open treachery and hostility?
‘In a word: let this model senator, this protector of the emperor’s critics, appear and specify the reforms and changes that he wants. His detailed carpings would be more endurable than the universal censure of his silence. Does world-peace give him no satisfaction, or victories won without a Roman casualty? Do not gratify the perverted ambitions of a man who deplores national success, thinks of courts, theatres, and temples as deserts – and threatens to exile himself. Here is a man to whom senatorial decrees, public office, Rome itself, mean not a thing. Let him sever all connection with the place he has long since ceased to love, and has now ceased even to honour with his attendance!’
While Eprius Marcellus spoke in this vein, grim and blustering as ever, fanatical of eye, voice, and features, the senators did not feel any genuine sadness: repeated perils had made the whole business all too familiar. And yet as they saw the Guardsmen’s hands on their weapons, they felt a new, sharper terror. They thought of Thrasea’s venerable figure. Some also pitied Helvidius, to suffer for his guiltless marriage relationship. And what was there against Agrippinus except his father’s downfall? – for he too, though as innocent as his son, had succumbed to imperial cruelty under Tiberius.1 The worthy young Montanus, too, was no libellous poet. The cause of his banishment was his manifest talent.
Next Ostorius Sabinus, the accuser of Barea Soranus, entered and began to speak. He denounced the defendant’s friendship with Rubellius Plautus, and claimed that Barea’s governorship of Asia had been planned not to serve the public interest but to win popularity for himself – by encouraging the cities to rebellion. That was stale. But there was also a new charge involving Barea’s daughter, Servilia, in his ordeal. She was said to have given large sums to magicians. This was true; but the cause was filial affection. Young and imprudent, she had consulted the magicians out of love for her father – but only about the prospects of her family’s survival, and of Nero’s compassion, and of a happy outcome to the senate’s investigation. So she too was summoned before the senate. There, at opposite ends of the consul’s dais, stood the elderly father and his teenage daughter, unconsolable for the loss of her exiled husband Annius Pollio – and unable even to look at her father, whose perils she had clearly intensified.
The accuser demanded whether she had sold her trousseau and taken the necklace from her neck in order to raise money for magical rites. At first she collapsed on the ground, weeping incessantly and not answering. But then she grasped the altar and its steps, and cried: ‘Never have I called upon forbidden gods or spells! My unhappy prayers have had a single aim: that you, Caesar, and you, senators, should spare my dear father. I gave my jewels and clothes – the things that a woman in my position owns – as I would have given my blood and my life if the magicians had wanted them! I did not know the men before. They must answer for their own reputations and methods; that is not for me to do. I never mentioned the emperor except as a god. And everything was done without my poor father’s knowledge. If it was a crime, I alone am to blame!’
Soranus broke in with the plea that she had not gone with him to the province, was too young to have known Rubellius Plautus, and was unimplicated in the charges against her husband. ‘Her only crime is too much family affection,’ he urged. ‘Take her case separately – for me any fate will be acceptable.’ Then he moved towards his daughter to embrace her, and she towards him. But attendants intervened and kept them apart.
Evidence was then heard. The brutality of the prosecution aroused compassion – which was only equalled by the indignation felt against one of the witnesses, Publius Egnatius Celer. He was a dependant of Soranus bribed to ruin his friend. Though professing the Stoic creed, he was crafty and deceitful at heart, using a practised demeanour of rectitude as a cover for viciousness and greed. But money was capable of stripping off the mask. Egnatius became a standard warning that men of notorious depravity or obvious deceit yield nothing in nastiness to hypocritical pseudo-philosophers and treacherous friends. However, the same day provided a model of integrity – Cassius Asclepiodotus, the richest man in Bithynia. Having honoured Soranus when he prospered, he would not desert him in his fall. So he was deprived of his whole fortune and ordered into exile – thus affording a demonstration of heaven’s impartiality between good and evil.
Thrasea, Soranus, and Servilia were allowed to choose their own deaths. Helvidius and Paconius were banned from Italy. Montanus was spared for his father’s sake, with the stipulation that his official career should be discontinued. The accusers Eprius and Cossutianus received five million sesterces each, Ostorius twelve hundred thousand and an honorary quaestorship.
The consul’s quaestor, sent to Thrasea, found him in the evening in his garden. In his company were numerous distinguished men and women. His attention, however, was concentrated on a Cynic1 professor, Demetrius. To judge from Thrasea’s earnest expression, and audible snatches of their conversation, they were discussing the nature of the soul and the dichotomy of spirit and body. A close friend, Domitius Caecilianus, came and informed him of the senate’s decision. Thrasea urged the weeping and protesting company to leave rapidly and avoid the perils of association with a doomed man. His wife Arria, like Arria her mother, 2 sought to share his fate. But he told her to stay alive and not deprive their daughter of her only protection.
Thrasea walked to the colonnade. There the quaestor found him, happy rather than sorrowful, because he had heard that his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus was merely banned from Italy. Then, taking the copy of the senate’s decree, he led Helvidius and Demetrius into his bedroom, and offered the veins of both his arms. when the blood began to flow, he sprinkled it on the ground, and called the quaetor nearer. ‘This is a libation’, he said, ‘to Jupiter the Liberator. Look, young man! For you have been born (may heaven avert the omen!) into an age when examples of fortitude may be a useful support’
Then, as his lingering death was very painful, he turned to Demetrius…
[The manuscript breaks off here. The lost part of the work described the visit of King Tiridates, the beginning of the Jewish revolt, Nero’s visit to Greece, the suppression of the revolt of Gaius Julius Vindex in Gaul, and the final desertion of Nero by the senate in favour of Galba, imperial governor of Nearer Spain. Nero fled to a villa of his freed slave Phaon, four miles outside Rome. There he died, his hand guided by another former slave Epaphroditus.]