4. Commentary
The assigned portion of text begins in medias res. We parachute right into the middle of a meeting of the Roman senate that took place towards the end of the year 62 (15.20.1). Tacitus’ account of it began in the previous paragraph (15.19) and continues until 15.22.1. The set text carries on for a bit, covering the end of AD 62 and the beginning of AD 63 (15.22.2 – 15.23), before vaulting over nine sections (15.24 – 15.32). We re-enter the narrative in 15.33 (the beginning of AD 64) and are then asked to read continuously until the end of 15.45. The text breaks off with the unsuccessful attempt by Nero to have his old tutor Seneca poisoned. There is a certain rationale behind this stopping and starting. Those in charge of setting the text excised with surgical precision those portions of the Annals that cover the military situation in the Near East, specifically Rome’s ongoing conflict with Parthia (15.1–18; 24–32). The focus of the assigned portion is squarely on Italy and Rome – the city, the senate, and, not least, the imperial court, with the corresponding personnel, in particular the emperor Nero.66
Thematically, the four chapters of Annals 15.20–23 can be divided as follows:
- 20.1–22.1: Report of a senate meeting that took place towards the end of AD 62 (continuing on from 15.19).
- 22.2: Review of striking prodigies that occurred in the year AD 62.
- 23.1–4: Start of Tacitus’ account of AD 63, with extensive coverage of the birth and death of Nero’s daughter Claudia Augusta.
(I) 20.1–22.1: THE MEETING OF THE SENATE
Chapters 1–18 of Annals 15 cover developments in Rome’s war against Parthia. In 15.19 (i.e. the chapter before the set text starts), Tacitus’ focus shifts back to domestic matters. Unethical senatorial careerism comes back onto the agenda. He records that members of Rome’s ruling élite increasingly exploited a legal loophole to circumvent a stipulation of the lex Papia Poppaea de maritandis ordinibus (‘Papian-Poppaean law on marrying categories’). The law, which was part of Augustus’ legislative initiatives concerning morals and marriage, ensured preferential treatment of candidates for high-powered posts in the imperial administration who had one or more children.67 As Cassius Dio put it (53.13.2): ‘Next he [sc. Augustus] ordained that the governors of senatorial provinces should be annual magistrates, chosen by lot, except when a senator enjoyed a special privilege because of the large number of his children or because of his marriage.’68 To receive the legal benefits without going through the trouble of raising children, childless careerists began to adopt young men shortly before the appointment or election procedure, only to release them again soon after securing the desired post. This practice of ‘fictive adoption’ (ficta or simulata adoptio), which, as Tacitus notes in his inimitable style, enabled the practitioners to become fathers without anxiety and childless again without experiencing grief (sine sollicitudine parens, sine luctu orbus), caused massive resentment among those who invested time and effort in the raising of children. They appealed to the senate, which issued a decree that no benefits of any kind be derived from such sham adoptions (15.19.4, the last sentence of the chapter):
factum ex eo senatus consultum, ne simulata adoptio in ulla parte muneris publici iuvaret ac ne usurpandis quidem hereditatibus prodesset.
[A senatorial decree was thereupon passed, ruling that a feigned adoption should not assist in any way in gaining a public appointment, nor even be of use in taking up an inheritance.]
Then a sudden transition in narrative registers occurs. With the first word of the set text (exim), we join the senate meeting, in which this decree came to pass, and witness the next item on the agenda in ‘real time’ (as it were): the lawsuit against the Cretan power-broker Claudius Timarchus. From then on we we get a blow-by-blow account of the proceedings and are even treated to a direct speech from the Stoic Thrasea Paetus (20.3–21.4). This meeting of the senate, which suddenly comes to life, is the last event of AD 62 that Tacitus reports in detail. As such it harks back to how his account of the year began at 14.48: also with a lawsuit and a meeting of the senate in which the same figure starred as here – Thrasea Paetus. For a proper appreciation of 15.20–22, and in particular its protagonist, we therefore need to know of this earlier occasion – which we accordingly discuss at some length in our Introduction (see section 6).
20.1 Exim Claudius Timarchus Cretensis reus agitur, ceteris criminibus ut solent praevalidi provincialium et opibus nimiis ad iniurias minorum elati: una vox eius usque ad contumeliam senatus penetraverat, quod dictitasset in sua potestate situm an pro consulibus qui Cretam obtinuissent grates agerentur.
The section consists of two sentences:
a. exim … elati;
b. una … agerentur.
They feature more or less parallel syntax: in each case, a main clause (exim … agitur; una … penetraverat) is followed by a sequence of subordinate clauses. In thematic terms, however, the design is obliquely asymmetrical. The first main clause sets up the entire scene, whereas the second main clause harks back not to the first main clause (its apparent syntactic counterpart) but to the subordinate constructions that follow it: una vox correlates antithetically with ceteris criminibus. The design downplays the generalizing cetera crimina: they are awkwardly tagged on in an ablative absolute and further elaborated in an elliptical ut-clause, in contrast to the one specific vox, which is the subject and in first position. Sandwiched as they are between two main clauses that lead from the introduction of the defendant to the one offence (the una vox) that brought him to the attention of the senate, they are syntactically glossed over.
exim Claudius Timarchus Cretensis reus agitur, ceteris criminibus ut solent praevalidi provincialium et opibus nimiis ad iniurias minorum elati: The main clause – exim Claudius Timarchus Cretensis reus agitur – is straightforward enough. But then the syntax starts to get difficult. Tacitus continues, awkwardly, with a nominal ablative absolute, i.e. an ablative absolute that is missing the participle (in this case the present participle of esse, which does not exist in Latin): ‘the rest of the charges being…’ The subsequent ut-clause, too, has its problems. Against standard word order, Tacitus places the verb at the beginning (solent). The fact that it is in the indicative helps to clarify the meaning of ut (‘as’). But an infinitive that would complete the main verb solent is nowhere to be seen. The entire rest of the ut-clause is taken up by one long subject phrase: praevalidi provincialium et opibus nimiis ad iniurias minorum elati. The missing infinitive with the verb soleo is not in itself unusual (it frequently has to be supplied from context), but here it generates an exceptionally open-ended construction:
‘the rest of the charges being such as provincial strongmen tend to…’
Well? What is the infinitive that has gone absent without leave? Two possible options are accusari (‘tend to be accused of’) or, with a slight semantic slippage from crimina in the sense of ‘charges’ to crimina in the sense of ‘crimes’, committere (‘tend to perpetrate’). Since there is a break after the ut-clause (una vox starts the second main clause), we have to make up our own minds – or remain studiously and elegantly ambiguous in our translation, as does Woodman: ‘Next, Claudius Timarchus, a Cretan, appeared as a defendant on the general charges customary for those paramount provincials whose elevation to excessive wealth results in injury to lesser people.’69
exim: The temporal marker (‘thereupon’, ‘thereafter’) is typical of Tacitus’ habit to flag up the generic affiliations of his text, as he purports to record events in their order of occurrence and gives the impression (arguably correct) that he used archival data, such as official records of the senate’s business (the acta senatus) in compiling his Annals. But his formal commitment to annalistic writing ought not to obscure that he proceeded selectively and arranged his material in such a way that further meaningful patterns emerge. The two lawsuits that frame his account of AD 62, each starring Thrasea Paetus, are an excellent example of his practice. An interesting tension ensues between Tacitus’ artful design and strategic selectivity on the one hand and, on the other, the apparently artless recording of events in chronological order implied by temporal markers such as exim.
Claudius Timarchus Cretensis: Claudius Timarchus is otherwise unknown, yet is clearly a powerful Cretan, whose name specifies a hybrid freedman combining hints of the doddery emperor with Greek ‘Ruling-Élite’ (as Tacitus’ indignant remarks on jumped-up nouveaux provincial types caustically spell out: see below).70 Crete (along with Cyrenaica) was a ‘senatorial’ province governed by an ex-praetor (‘pro-consul’) – as opposed to an ‘imperial’ province under the direct control of the princeps. In his Geography, Strabo (c. 63 BC – AD 23) includes an extensive discussion of this split, which was a key feature of the reorganization of the Roman empire under Augustus. The passage is worth citing in full since it yields valuable insights into the logic of the Augustan settlement that defined the career opportunities of the senatorial élite under the principate (17.3.25):71
But the Provinces have been divided in different ways at different times, though at the present time they are as Augustus Caesar arranged them; for when his native land committed to him the foremost place of authority and he became established for life as lord of war and peace, he divided the whole empire into two parts, and assigned one portion to himself and the other to the Roman people; to himself, all parts that had need of a military guard (that is, the part that was barbarian and in the neighbourhood of tribes not yet subdued, or lands that were sterile and difficult to bring under cultivation, so that, being unprovided with everything else, but well provided with strongholds, they would try to throw off the bridle and refuse obedience), and to the Roman people all the rest, in so far as it was peaceable and easy to rule without arms; and he divided each of the two portions into several Provinces, of which some are called ‘Provinces of Caesar’ and the others ‘Provinces of the People.’ And to the ‘Provinces of Caesar’ Caesar sends legati and procurators, dividing the countries in different ways at different times and administering them as the occasion requires, whereas to the ‘Provinces of the People’ the people send praetors or proconsuls, and these Provinces also are brought under different divisions whenever expediency requires.
Put differently, Augustus arranged things in such a way that the emperor retained exclusive control over the army, without denying other members of the ruling élite the opportunity to enrich themselves and enhance their careers by taking up positions in provincial government.72 The administration of what Strabo calls the ‘Provinces of the People’ was ultimately the responsibility of the senate, and cases that could not be decided by the governor on the spot were referred back to Rome.
praevalidi provincialium et opibus nimiis ad iniurias minorum elati: The massive subject-phrase of the ‘ut solent…’ clause. Tacitus has placed the key words at the beginning (praevalidi) and the end (elati). praevalidi is an adjective functioning as a noun (‘the supremely powerful’) and takes a partitive genitive (provincialium). elati is the perfect passive participle of effero, also functioning as a noun and governing the ablative phrase opibus nimiis together with prepositional phrase ad iniuriam minorum. The overall design is therefore chiastic. Tacitus uses this phrase to type-cast Timarchus. He is not interested in the accused as an individual, but as the representative of a specific social group: the provincial super-élite. Several stylistic touches reinforce the tremendous power and wealth that this élite has at its disposal, notably the strengthened adjective prae-validus (in nice alliteration with provincialium, deftly reproduced by Woodman in English with ‘paramount provincials’: see above), the emphasis on excessive (nimiis) wealth, and the choice of the vivid participle elati, which suggests elevation above common mortals. Tacitus contrasts the excessively powerful with their inferiors (minorum) and implies that such a differential in power and resources almost inevitably results in harm for those at the lower end of the pecking order: the preposition ad here conveys a sense of function, purpose, or result (OLD G). These are men ‘raised by their excessive wealth so as to inflict harm on their inferiors.’ The construction hints at Tacitus’ pessimistic view of human nature.
For those of you who have read Cicero, in Verrem 2.1.53–69, at AS-level, provincial exploitation during the late republic will be a familiar topic. Tacitus mentions it at the very beginning of the Annals, where he surveys different social groups and their reasons for welcoming, or at least accepting, the new world order of the Augustan principate (1.2.2):
`neque provinciae illum rerum statum abnuebant, suspecto senatus populique imperio ob certamina potentium et avaritiam magistratuum, invalido legum auxilio, quae vi ambitu, postremo pecunia turbabantur.
[Neither were the provinces ill-disposed towards that state of affairs, given that they had become disillusioned by the regime of the senate and the people on account of the warring among the powerful and the greed of the magistrates and because of the ineffective protection afforded by the laws: they tended to be rendered invalid by sheer force, political manipulation, and, ultimately, bribery.]
Our passage suggests that the principate did by no means bring an end to provincial exploitation, even though the type of suffering inflicted on subject peoples changed: under imperial rule, the provinces were at least no longer ransacked by civil-war parties (cf. certamina potentium) fighting it out on their territory, with at times terrible costs to the indigenous population. Greed of magistrates, however, seems to have remained a constant.73
una vox eius usque ad contumeliam senatus penetraverat, quod dictitasset in sua potestate situm [sc. esse] an pro consulibus qui Cretam obtinuissent grates agerentur: In contrast to what precedes it, the syntax of this sentence is reasonably straightforward, if intricate:
– we have a main clause (verb: penetraverat)
– this leads up to the subordinate quod-clause (verb: dictitasset; for the subjunctive, see below)
– dictitasset in turn introduces an indirect statement, with situm (sc. esse) as infinitive and an implied id as subject accusative, which takes the an-clause as predicate (‘… that it resided in his power whether…’)
– within the an-sentence, finally, we have a relative clause (qui Cretam obtinuissent), with pro consulibus as antecedent.
Yet despite the intricate syntax, the meaning of this clause is crystal clear: an insolent utterance earned the uppity Cretan provincial a court-appearance in Rome. The contrast between the hazy syntax that characterizes the stretch ceteris criminibus … minorum elati and the precise syntax in the sentence that follows is thematically appropriate. Tacitus distinguishes two types of accusations by means of the antithesis ceteris criminibus and una vox. The cetera crimina, so he suggests, are charges that tend to be levied against provincial strongmen as a matter of course (solent), with the strong implication being (which does not, however, amount to an assertion) that the charges are genuine. But Tacitus never specifies what Timarchus’ abuse and exploitation of his fellow-provincials consisted in. On the other hand, he goes into great detail about the one utterance (yes, a mere utterance, however arrogant and frequently repeated) that rubbed the Roman overlords the wrong way. The switch from opaque to precise syntax gives Tacitus’ Latin an insidious spin: the casual indifference of the obscure and elliptical sentence construction that characterizes his presentation of the cetera crimina would seem to suggest that the Romans do not really care all that much about Timarchus’ acts of transgression against his fellow-provincials, whereas the detailed elaboration of the one (seemingly inconsequential) boast that affected Roman majesty reflects the hyper-attentive indignation that ensues as soon as Roman sentiments are at stake. Taken thus, Tacitus’ syntax would seem to mock the priorities of the senate when it comes to the administration of justice in the provinces and to expose its over-blown sense of self-importance – without of course in any way whitewashing Timarchus, who emerges as another specimen in his pessimistic ‘anthropology of power’: in Tacitus’ book, all sheep are black.
una vox eius usque ad contumeliam senatus penetraverat: The sentence, which follows in stark asyndeton, contains a fourfold contrast to what precedes: (i) una vox picks up ceteris criminibus; and usque ad contumeliam senatus harks back to ad iniuriam minorum, correlating and contrasting (ii) iniuriam and contumeliam as well as (iii) the objective genitives minorum and senatus. In addition, while both elati and penetraverat contain the sense of crossing a boundary or norm, (iv) solent suggests that the cetera crimina are par for the course, whereas penetraverat underscores the apparent singularity of this one particular transgression. Tacitus makes the perceived gravity of this ‘crime’ very clear – it is the one that made Timarchus’ case different from the usual: both usque ad (‘right up to’, ‘as far as’) and penetraverat suggest that this additional offence outweighs the others in seriousness. But the correlation of contumeliam senatus with iniuriam minorum hints at irony: one is made to wonder what sort of political system it is, in which a verbal slight of superiors counts as a more serious transgression than the systematic exploitation of the powerless. (It is worth bearing in mind that Tacitus composed the Annals after a long public career that included the administration of the plum province.)
dictitasset: (= dictitavisset) Normal Latin verbs can be re-formed with -to or -so (first conjugation) to produce so-called ‘frequentative’ forms. This indicates that the action keeps happening: so rogito = I keep asking, ask persistently (from ‘rogo’); curso = I run about constantly (from ‘curro’). Here, dictito re-doubles the frequentative form ‘dicto’ (formed from ‘dico’) to bring out that Timarchus kept bragging about his power incessantly. The subjunctive mood indicates that it is not a fact that Timarchus said these things but an accusation (with an implied verb that governs the indirect statement): ‘because (people claimed) he had kept saying that…’ Miller calls it ‘subjunctive of the charge, virtual oblique.’74 This subtlety of Latin is one of the ways in which Tacitus can report scurrilous allegations in his history without actually endorsing them himself.
in sua potestate situm an pro consulibus qui Cretam obtinuissent grates agerentur: Here we have the insult that grated with the senate (via the proconsular governor, the senate’s representative in the province): Timarchus claimed that it was his decision whether votes of thanks were given to the proconsuls in charge of the province. The exposed position of in sua potestate underscores the hubris of Timarchus. Meanwhile, age-old myth maintained that ‘All Cretans are liars’ – and made merry with the paradox that arises when a Cretan tells you so…
pro consulibus … grates agerentur: pro and consulibus (in the dative) are to be taken together (‘proconsuls’ – originally ‘stand-ins for consuls’). grates is in the nominative plural; the word is a poeticism: ‘grates was originally a religious term for thanks to a god but was first used = gratias by poets and then (from Curtius) by writers of elevated prose. In [the Annals] Tacitus greatly prefers it to gratias, which he reserves for speeches.’75 At the time, provincial assemblies could decree a vote of thanks for their Roman governors, which a delegate would then convey to Rome and announce in the senate. The practice has republican roots. At in Verrem 2.2.13, for example, Cicero notes that from all of Sicily only Messana sent a legate to Rome to praise Verres for his provincial administration (and this legate, Heius, combined praise with demands to have the personal property that Verres had stolen from him returned). Given that ex-governors had to give an account of their term in office, such votes of thanks could come in handy – apart from offering a neat opportunity for aristocratic self-promotion. Votes, of course, can be bought or manipulated, and this is the form of corruption at issue here.
20.2 quam occasionem Paetus Thrasea ad bonum publicum vertens, postquam de reo censuerat provincia Creta depellendum, haec addidit: quam is a connecting relative (= eam). The subordinate postquam-clause, seemingly introduced as a mere afterthought, again allows Tacitus to underscore Roman priorities by way of syntax: just as with the ablative absolute ceteris criminibus and the incomplete ut-solent clause in the previous sentence, the construction conveys the sense that those matters of most urgent and direct concern to the provincials do not hold anyone’s attention at Rome. By reporting the verdict on the defendant (note that Timarchus is not mentioned by name again – he is just ‘reus’) in a postponed subordinate clause, Tacitus gives the impression that Paetus dispatched briskly and dismissively with the case at hand. One could argue that the pluperfect with postquam here ‘implies not only temporal precedence, but a logical relationship’;76 and that is true insofar as the wider reflections to follow presuppose the satisfactory closure of the specific case at issue. But Paetus (and Tacitus) very much focus on the general principles that ought to define the Roman approach to imperial rule rather than the particular crimes of the provincial Timarchus or the plight of the Cretans. There is, then, arguably no logical relationship in place. Rather, the punishment imposed on the culprit – the main concern from the point of view of the provincials – is quickly glossed over on the way to Paetus’ main concern, the behavioural standards of Rome’s ruling élite.
Paetus Thrasea: Tacitus here reverses his names, from the usual Thrasea Paetus to Paetus Thrasea. We may wonder why. Are we simply dealing with a further instance of variatio, which is such a hallmark of his style, keeping his prose distinctive, unpredictable and interesting? Or is Tacitus perhaps making an oblique point that under the principate matters are not as they ought to be (or traditionally were)? We may at any rate savour the nomenclature (with the help of observations supplied by John Henderson): what are we are dealing with in the case of Thrasea Paetus are two cognomina. To appreciate this point calls for a brief excursion on Roman naming conventions. The cognomen was the third element in a Roman name, coming after the praenomen (‘given name’) and the nomen gentile (‘family name’). It was often a nickname, but could, like the nomen gentile, become hereditary. Here are some (famous) examples:
And here is John Henderson on the role of the cognomen in Roman (invective) rhetoric: ‘Now equating a fellow-citizen of some distinction with his cognomen was the most cliché topos in all Roman civic discourse (sermo), and their wonderfully rustic mos of cultivating peasant gibes at features of the body had even defined Roman liberty as levelling obloquy. Hung with glee, and worn with pride, round the necks of highest and lowest in society, this habitual “standing epithet” was there ready to be trotted out, at any instant, in whatever context. The “informal” pet name picking out a self, there to hug or to hurt its bearer, picked on a blunt and crude archaic image-repertoire of deformity and dysfunction to stamp them, stomp on them, stamp them into the ground.’77
As it happens, both Paetus and Thrasea are cognomina, the former Latin, the latter Graecizing, each highly appropriate to the character in question: paetus means ‘squinty’, θρασύς (thrasus) means ‘reckless.’ They compound to make our philosophizing senator Mr. Squinty-Bold: a Roman politician with a Greek philosophical mindset, who just so happens to ‘spot’ (askance) and ‘boldly’ seize an opportunity to pull off… a ‘reverse’ (cf. vertens). Put differently, Tacitus’ inversion of his character’s two nicknames reflects what Paetus is doing here. It is also the case that there was but one ‘Thrasea’, but several figures called Paetus. Caesennius Paetus, for example, has been busy messing up as a proconsular commander on the Eastern Front earlier in Annals 15.
ad bonum publicum vertens: Tacitus here anticipates Thrasea’s sly re-definition of the issue under negotiation: Thrasea concentrates not on the specific case at hand, the diminished Roman dignitas, or the rights of provincials: his concern is rather with the overall ethos and behavioural standards of Rome’s senatorial élite.
de reo censuerat provincia Creta depellendum: censuerat introduces an indirect statement. Its subject accusative has to be supplied from de reo, i.e. eum or Timarchum (the elision reinforces the sense that Thrasea does not really care all that much about the details of this case); the verb is the gerundive depellendum (sc. esse). Arguably the most famous instance of this construction is the notorious habit of Cato the Elder (234 – 149 BC) to close his speeches with the statement ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam (‘and by the way, I think that Carthage ought to be razed to the ground’). This may not be coincidental: Paetus’ speech contains stylistic reminiscences of Cato the Elder’s oratory (see below), and Tacitus may here be gently hinting at what is in store – as well as highlighting the affinity in character between Cato the Elder and Thrasea Paetus.
haec addidit: What follows is the longest direct speech in Annals 15. We do not know whether it is based on (in the sense of re-invents) one that Paetus actually delivered. (Officialdom rarely records unsuccessful proposals that are – as this one here – set aside as impertinent and out-of-order; Tacitus does – if it suits his aims of scandalized satire and his portrayal of Thrasea Paetus as an anachronistic throw-back to republican times.) The use of (often freely invented) direct speech is at any rate one of the areas in which ancient historiography differs from modern historiography. Virtually all Greek and Roman historiographers put speeches into the mouths of their characters. Tacitus uses this device comparatively rarely, but when he does he tries to give the speaker a distinctive style that differs from that of the surrounding narrative. The structure of the speech is as follows:
20.3:
a. Appeal to experience (usu…)
b. Illustration (sic…)
c. Gnomic generalization (nam…)
20.4:
d. Conclusions to be drawn/type of decision to be made (ergo…)
21.1–4:
e. Elaboration of why this decision is necessary and beneficial (olim quidem…)
Thrasea’s speech is shot through with formulations that point back to Cato the Elder and Sallust (86 – c. 35 BC) – two ‘moralizing’ authors from the middle and late republic, i.e. exactly the period in Roman history that Thrasea evokes as normative.
20.3: ‘usu probatum est, patres conscripti, leges egregias, exempla honesta apud bonos ex delictis aliorum gigni. sic oratorum licentia Cinciam rogationem, candidatorum ambitus Iulias leges, magistratuum avaritia Calpurnia scita pepererunt; nam culpa quam poena tempore prior, emendari quam peccare posterius est.
usu probatum est: Thrasea opens by claiming that his argument is grounded in historical fact: ‘proved by experience’ is a strong claim to make and, if true, would instantly stamp his discourse on Roman moral legislation with special authority.
patres conscripti: patres conscripti is the formal term of address for the senators, dating back to the beginning of the republic. It is a shortened version of patres et conscripti, i.e. the original (patrician) members (patres) and those (plebeian) members enlisted (in Latin: conscribo, -ere, -psi, -ptum) at a later stage. See e.g. Livy 2.1.10 (we are in 509 BC, i.e. the year after the expulsion of the kings) – a passage that is worth citing in full since it brings out the powerful republican ideology built into the expression:
Deinde, quo plus virium in senatu frequentia etiam ordinis faceret, caedibus regis deminutum patrum numerum primoribus equestris gradus lectis ad trecentorum summam explevit; traditumque inde fertur ut in senatum vocarentur qui patres quique conscripti essent: conscriptos, videlicet novum senatum, appellabant lectos. Id mirum quantum profuit ad concordiam civitatis iungendosque patribus plebis animos.
[Then, to augment the strength of the senate by an increase of the order, he (sc. Brutus) filled up to the sum-total of 300 the number of the fathers, which had been depleted by the murders committed by the king, by enlisting leading men of the equestrian rank. From that time it is said to have been handed down that there be summoned into the senate those who were the ‘Fathers’ and those who were the ‘Conscripted’: they called the ‘Conscripted’ (i.e. the new members of the senate) the Enrolled. It is wonderful how useful this measure was for the harmony of the senate and for uniting the plebs with the senators (patres).]
leges egregias, exempla honesta apud bonos ex delictis aliorum gigni: An indirect statement introduced by usu probatum est, with leges egregias, exempla honesta (in asyndetic sequence) as subject accusative and gigni as infinitive. The adjectives egregius (‘outstanding’, from ex + grex) and, especially, honestus (etymologically related to honor, -oris m., ‘high esteem’, ‘public office’) recall the type of the noble Roman of old to which Thrasea tries to conform – as does the adjective bonus, here used as a noun (‘the good’). But Thrasea’s retrospective is also brutally realistic insofar as he sacrifices a good deal of historical nostalgia for a pessimistic anthropology. Even benchmarks of excellence achieved in the past, he submits, did not come about from some moral fibre inherent in the ancient Romans, but rather in reaction to criminal conduct. His exempla are not outstanding deeds of shining glory but rather legal measures and punitive sanctions. (See OLD s.v. exemplum 3 for the sense of ‘a warning example, deterrent; an exemplary punishment.’) Put differently, the norms that Thrasea evokes point to a social dynamic at variance with an unambiguous glorification of the past. Even in republican and early imperial times, sound legal measures arose ‘among the good’ (apud bonos) only (?) as punitive responses to the crimes and transgressions of others (ex delictis aliorum). While Thrasea thus contrasts the good, right-thinking, proper Romans (boni) with unspecified ‘others’ (alii), the good themselves come across as strangely passive insofar as they prove their moral fibre only in reaction to negative stimuli. By invoking ‘the good’ Thrasea puts moral pressure on his addressees, the senators, implying that they do not merit this desirable label unless they vote in favour of his motion.
leges egregias, exempla honesta: Note the staccato-like asyndeton, the strict parallel construction (noun + adjective; noun + adjective), and comparative lack of adornment (apart from the whiff of alliteration in egregias ~ exempla). This is very un-Tacitean style but perhaps adds a flavour of Stoic ‘rhetoric’ or ‘Catonic simplicity’ to Thrasea’s speech. (The Stoics were all about logic, not rhetoric. Likewise, Cato the Elder disapproved of flowery rhetoric as something alien to Roman common sense: his advice to public speakers was rem tene, verba sequentur – ‘stick to the topic, and the words will come automatically.’)
oratorum licentia Cinciam rogationem, candidatorum ambitus Iulias leges, magistratuum avaritia Calpurnia scita pepererunt: Thrasea continues asyndetically, listing three examples to illustrate the principle that misdeeds or moral failings tend to bring forth corrective legislative measures. The style has the simplicity of a catalogue, an impression reinforced by the remorselessly parallel design of the tricolon. Three nouns in the genitive plural (oratorum, candidatorum, magistratuum) specify the offending group. They depend on three nouns in the nominative singular, which indicate the nature of the offence (licentia, ambitus, avaritia). The three accusative objects follow the same pattern: in each case we first get the attribute that identifies the name of the measure taken (Cinciam, Iulias, Calpurnia) and then the legislative term that the attribute modifies (rogationem, leges, scita, though here at least Thrasea aims for variety: see below). A tabled display brings out the systematic approach to rhetorical illustration that Thrasea adopts:
Again, Tacitus uses style as means of ethopoiea (‘projection of character’): Thrasea is utterly disinterested in dressing up his discourse with rhetorical flourishes. (As you may remember from reading Cicero at AS-level, Cicero, for one, likes to introduce some variety into his tricola, for instance by putting the last colon in chiastic order to the preceding two or using a tricolon crescens, where the cola increase in length.) Thrasea does not list the laws in chronological order:
lex Cincia de donis et muneribus:
passed 204 BC
leges Iuliae de ambitu:
passed 18 and 8 BC,
lex Calpurnia de rebus repetundis:
passed 149 BC
Rather, he has designed his tricolon climactically with respect to the offending group: we move from public speakers (oratores), to candidates for public office (candidati), to office holders (magistratus). Thrasea chooses his examples carefully. All three pieces of legislation turn out to be relevant to the issue at hand.
Cinciam rogationem: The lex Cincia de donis et muneribus (‘Cincian law on gifts and fees’) was a plebiscite of 204 BC that, among other stipulations, prohibited gifts or payments of any kind to advocates. Tacitus already had occasion to mention the law at Annals 11.5–7 and 13.42.1 – indicating that financial compensation for acting as orator in court remained a hot-button issue under the principate.
Iulias leges: The leges Iuliae de ambitu (‘Julian laws on bribery’) were passed by Augustus in 18 BC and 8 BC. Cassius Dio 54.16.1: ‘Among the laws that Augustus enacted was one which provided that those who had bribed anyone in order to gain office should be debarred from office for five years. He laid heavier assessments upon the unmarried men and upon the women without husbands, and on the other hand offered prizes for marriage and the begetting of children.’ See also Suetonius, Augustus 34.1: Leges retractavit et quasdam ex integro sanxit, ut sumptuariam et de adulteriis et de pudicitia, de ambitu, de maritandis ordinibus (‘He revised existing laws and enacted some new ones, for example, on extravagance, on adultery and chastity, on bribery, and on the encouragement of marriage among the various classes of citizens’). Put differently, by invoking this particular piece of Augustan legislation, Thrasea harks back to a previous item on the agenda of this particular senate-meeting, i.e. the tricksing of childless senators to reap the benefits Augustus accorded to procreating members of the ruling élite.
magistratuum avaritia: The phrase recalls Sallust, Bellum Iugurthinum 43.5, especially since Thrasea’s speech will shortly rework another formulation from the same passage (see below 21.3: invictus adversum gratiam animus):78
Itaque ex sententia omnibus rebus paratis conpositisque in Numidiam proficiscitur, magna spe civium cum propter artis bonas tum maxime quod adversum divitias invictum animum gerebat et avaritia magistratuum ante id tempus in Numidia nostrae opes contusae hostiumque auctae erant.
[Therefore, after everything was prepared and arranged to his satisfaction, Metellus left for Numidia, bearing with him the high hopes of the citizens, which were inspired not only by his good qualities in general, but especially because he possessed a mind superior to riches; for it had been the avarice of magistrates that before this time had blighted our prospects in Numidia and advanced those of the enemy.]
Calpurnia scita: The lex Calpurnia de repetundis (‘Calpurnian law on the recovery of public funds’) of 149 BC, proposed by the tribune of the people Lucius Calpurnius Piso, established Rome’s first permanent court, the quaestio de repetundis, the same court in which Verres stood trial. One of its main functions was to try governors for extortion committed during their term of office.
rogationem … leges … scita: The procedure for passing each of the laws mentioned will have been similar, but Tacitus/Thrasea opts for lexical variation. rogatio refers to a proposed measure that is put before a Roman assembly for approval – our ‘bill.’ Once approved, a rogatio/bill becomes a lex (‘law’). A scitum, which is the perfect participle of scisco (‘to vote for’, ‘to approve’), is a resolution of a popular assembly. The word thus places the emphasis on the process of decision-making, and it is usually found with a genitive of the decision-making body, especially the people: plebis scitum (‘plebiscite’), populi scitum (‘the decree of the people’). For this reason, it does not work quite as well as rogatio or lex with an adjective attribute of the person responsible for drafting the bill or law because technically speaking the scitum that turned the rogatio of Piso into the lex Calpurnia was not that of Piso, but that of the people. The slight incongruity is more than made up for by the rhetorical effect of the lexical variety: it seems to imply that the examples could be further multiplied.
nam culpa quam poena prior [sc. est], emendari quam peccare posterius est: The two quam go with the two comparatives prior and posterius and coordinate the four subjects: culpa and poena, emendari and peccare. Thrasea closes his opening gambit with a gnomic saying that is as intricate in rhetorical design as it is banal in content. He makes the same point twice, first with a pair of nouns, then with a pair of infinitives (functioning as nouns), juxtaposed (once again) asyndetically: crime precedes punishment, to be reformed comes after committing a transgression. But the order is for once chiastic: culpa correlates with peccare, poena with emendari, though there is a whiff of parallel design in the alliterative sequence poena prior ~ peccare posterius. The introductory nam has causal force but is perhaps best left untranslated (with a footnote to the examiners that this is a deliberate omission). The repetitious formulation of the argument, the variation of constructions and the expression of the thought from two opposite angles serve to emphasise Thrasea’s point that the senators should make use of Timarchus’ crime to create a good new law. The sentence stands in allusive dialogue with earlier Latin historiography, recalling passages in both Sallust and Livy: ‘significant too is its [sc. Thrasea’s speech] markedly Sallustian language and the fact that in its defence of the established order of things it echoes the conservatism of Cato the Censor [as reported by Livy] when he spoke against the repeal of the sumptuary Oppian law.’79 Here are the two most pertinent passages. First, Sallust, Bellum Iugurthinum 85.12:
Atque ego scio, Quirites, qui postquam consules facti sunt et acta maiorum et Graecorum militaria praecepta legere coeperint: praeposteri homines, nam gerere quam fieri tempore posterius, re atque usu prius est.
[I personally know of men, citizens, who after being elected consuls began for the first time to read the history of our forefathers and the military treatises of the Greeks, preposterous creatures! for though in order of time administration follows election, yet in actual practice it comes first.]
The passage from Livy to consider concerns an episode from 195 BC. Two tribunes of the people proposed the abrogation of the Oppian law that had been passed during the war against Hannibal in 215 BC: it limited public indulgence in luxury items by women. Repeal of the law found much support. But the proposal met with adamant opposition from one of the consuls, Cato the Elder. The speech as given by Livy is too long to be quoted in its entirety. But the following extract towards the end should suffice to highlight affinities between his position and that adopted by Thrasea in Tacitus; it also conveys a good flavour of the period in Roman history and its most iconic representative that Thrasea is keen to evoke in support of his argument (34.4):80
‘Saepe me querentem de feminarum, saepe de virorum nec de privatorum modo sed etiam magistratuum sumptibus audistis, diversisque duobus vitiis, avaritia et luxuria, civitatem laborare, quae pestes omnia magna imperia everterunt. haec ego, quo melior laetiorque in dies fortuna rei publicae est, quo magis imperium crescit – et iam in Graeciam Asiamque transcendimus omnibus libidinum inlecebris repletas et regias etiam adtrectamus gazas –, eo plus horreo, ne illae magis res nos ceperint quam nos illas. infesta, mihi credite, signa ab Syracusis inlata sunt huic urbi. iam nimis multos audio Corinthi et Athenarum ornamenta laudantes mirantesque et antefixa fictilia deorum Romanorum ridentes. ego hos malo propitios deos et ita spero futuros, si in suis manere sedibus patiemur. patrum nostrorum memoria per legatum Cineam Pyrrhus non virorum modo sed etiam mulierum animos donis temptavit. nondum lex Oppia ad coercendam luxuriam muliebrem lata erat; tamen nulla accepit. quam causam fuisse censetis? eadem fuit quae maioribus nostris nihil de hac re lege sanciundi: nulla erat luxuria quae coerceretur. sicut ante morbos necesse est cognitos esse quam remedia eorum, sic cupiditates prius natae sunt quam leges quae iis modum facerent. quid legem Liciniam excitavit de quingentis iugeribus nisi ingens cupido agros continuandi? quid legem Cinciam de donis et muneribus nisi quia vectigalis iam et stipendiaria plebs esse senatui coeperat? itaque minime mirum est nec Oppiam nec aliam ullam tum legem desideratam esse quae modum sumptibus mulierum faceret, cum aurum et purpuram data et oblata ultro non accipiebant. …’
[‘You have often heard me complaining of the extravagance of the women and often of the men, both private citizens and magistrates even, and lamenting that the state is suffering from those two opposing evils, avarice and luxury, which have been the destruction of every great empire. The better and happier becomes the fortune of our commonwealth day by day and the greater the empire grows – and already we have crossed into Greece and Asia, places filled with all the allurements of vice, and we are handling the treasures of kings – the more I fear that these things will capture us rather than we them. Tokens of danger, believe me, were those statues which were brought to this city from Syracuse. Altogether too many people do I hear praising the baubles of Corinth and Athens and laughing at the mouldings worked in clay of our Roman gods. I refer that these gods be propitious to us, and I trust that they will be if we allow them to remain in their own dwellings. In the memory of our forefathers Pyrrhus, through his agent Cineas, tried to corrupt with gifts the minds of our men and women as well. Not yet had the Oppian law been passed to curb female extravagance, yet not one woman took his gifts. What do you think was the reason? The same thing which caused our ancestors to pass no law on the subject: there was no extravagance to be restrained. As it is necessary that diseases be known before their cures, so passions are born before the laws which keep them within bounds. What provoked the Licinian law about the five hundred iugera except the uncontrolled desire of joining field to field? What brought about the Cincian law except that the plebeians had already begun to be vassals and tributaries to the senate? And so it is not strange that no Oppian or any other law was needed to limit female extravagance at the time when they spurned gifts of gold and purple voluntarily offered to them. …’]
Already Cato the Elder, then, posited a causal link between Rome’s triumphal military success abroad and a decline in morality (or at least self-restraint) at home. And like Thrasea, he correlates the passing of sumptuary legislation with the emergence of desires harmful to the fabric of Roman society. Unlike Thrasea, he actively invokes a past period of perfection during which such legislation was not yet required. But even for Cato this period is ancient history; and once corruption has set in, there is no way back. This is the fallen state of the Roman world that Thrasea inhabits as well.
20.4: ergo adversus novam provincialium superbiam dignum fide constantiaque Romana capiamus consilium, quo tutelae sociorum nihil derogetur, nobis opinio decedat, qualis quisque habeatur, alibi quam in civium iudicio esse.
After setting out and illustrating his principles, Thrasea proceeds to outline a course of action. He would like a decision that (a) checks further haughty behaviour on the part of provincials, i.e. is directed adversus novam provincialium superbiam; but also (b) meets Roman standards of excellence in terms of fides and constantia (dignum fide constantiaque Romana capiamus consilium). Both terms find further elaboration in the quo-clause: fide is picked up by quo tutelae sociorum nihil derogetur; and constantia by [quo] nobis opinio decedat, qualis quisque habeatur, alibi quam in civium iudicio esse. The -que after constantia, which links fide and constantia, is the first (!) connective in Thrasea’s speech, but he instantly falls back into asyndetic mode. The two parts of the quo-clause (…derogetur, … decedat) are unlinked, continuing the terse, unremitting, to-the-point accounting and enumeration that is a hallmark of the speech from the outset.
adversus novam provincialium superbiam: The adverb adversus helps to generate a sense of threat, which is magnified further by novam (basically ‘new’, but here with an extra edge – ‘unprecedented’). In general, ‘newness’ carried a negative charge for a Roman audience, implying something never previously encountered, new and dangerous. (The Latin for ‘revolutionary chaos’ is res novae.) The noun superbia, too, is highly damning. It is not something the Romans tolerated in the territories under their control. The most famous articulation of the principle ‘Squash the Proud’ is the ‘imperial mission’ statement towards the end of Aeneid 6, where Anchises, in anticipation of the founding of Rome and her rise to world-empire, exclaims (6.851–53):
‘tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.’
[You, Roman, be mindful of ruling the people with your power of command (be these your arts), to impose custom upon peace, to spare the vanquished, and to squash the proud.]
Thrasea draws a stark, idealised antithesis between the provincials (provincialium) and the Romans (Romana), the former exhibiting arrogance (superbiam), the latter more noble qualities (fide constantiaque).
dignum fide constantiaque Romana … consilium: dignum … consilium forms an impressive hyperbaton. The attribute (in predicative position) and the noun it modifies encase two key Roman values. fides is a key concept in how the Romans thought about social relations, and dictionary entries (‘confidence’, ‘loyalty’, ‘trustworthiness’, ‘credibility’) convey only a limited sense of the full semantic range and force of the qualities at issue: fides underwrites socio-economic exchanges, defines political interactions, and justifies Roman rule. In relationships that were both reciprocal (with party rendering some, but not necessarily the same, kind of service to the other) and asymmetrical (with one party being much more powerful than the other), a commitment to fides on both sides operated as a (partial) counterweight to steep inequalities in power.81 constantia – often paired with gravitas and the opposite of fickleness (‘steadfastness’) – is one of the republican virtues that Cicero likes to bring into play when talking about the moral fibre of his clients or the Roman ancestors.82 But it was not an entirely unproblematic quality, especially in a political system such as republican and imperial Rome that depended much on compromise and consensus. An unwavering (‘obstinate’) attitude of adversaries could paralyse the political process. At pro Sestio 77, for instance, Cicero identifies obstinate persistence (pertinacia aut constantia) on the part of a tribune as a frequent source of riots. And as we have seen in our discussion of Thrasea Paetus’ behaviour in the context of Atilius’ treason trial (see Introduction, section 6), haughty disregard for the social scripts of imperial politics, while perhaps soliciting approval as an admirable display of constantia, might also be regarded as a self-serving pursuit of gloria, with dysfunctional consequences for the terms of interaction between senate and princeps.
capiamus: a hortative subjunctive: Thrasea rallies his colleagues to support his views.
quo tutelae sociorum nihil derogetur, nobis opinio decedat…: The relative pronoun quo (in the ablative of means or instrument, referring back to consilium) introduces a clause that elaborates on fides and constantia in parallel design:
Both derogari and decedere contain the idea of removal or subtraction, yet in antithetical correlation: nothing ought to be removed from Roman fides (with the emphatic nihil stressing the uncompromising disposition of Thrasea); but if the Romans do not get rid of the idea that the actions or opinions of provincials have influence in Rome, their constantia (here in the sense of ‘firmness of purpose’) will be diminished. Both parts of the quo-clause thus reinforce the Roman sense of superiority vis-à-vis the provincial subjects. Fides manifests itself in the proper guardianship of those entrusted to one’s care; constantia in an attitude of indifference towards attempts of provincials to gain any sort of purchase on political decision-making in Rome.
qualis quisque habeatur, alibi quam in civium iudicio esse: An indirect statement dependent on opinio decedat. The phrasing alibi quam (‘anywhere else but’) makes the point powerfully that no other opinion than that of Roman citizens should matter and combines with the earlier nihil to reinforce the impression that Thrasea’s way of thinking is unconditional and categorical: he is not one to budge from principles, not even an inch. qualis refers to the type, quality, or character of a person and stands in predicative position to quisque: ‘of which quality or worth each individual is to be regarded.’ Hence: ‘… let us adopt a policy…, whereby (quo)… we depart from the opinion that what each man is held to be like rests somewhere other than in the judgment of his fellow citizens.’83
in civium iudicio: Thrasea draws a determined line between citizens and non-citizens. The emphasis on citizenship and on Rome as a civic community has a republican ring to it. It sidelines, by passing over in silence, other, more salient distinctions – as the one between the emperor and everyone else. (Especially for members of the ruling élite, the iudicium principis was of course a key factor.) Conversely, the notion that the worth of a person lies in the judgement of some individual or social group goes against the Stoic principle of the self-sufficiency of excellence, which does not require external validation of any kind. Thrasea here adjusts his philosophical affiliations to the realities of Roman politics.
21.1: Olim quidem non modo praetor aut consul sed privati etiam mittebantur qui provincias viserent et quid de cuiusque obsequio videretur referrent; trepidabantque gentes de aestimatione singulorum: at nunc colimus externos et adulamur, et quo modo ad nutum alicuius grates, ita promptius accusatio decernitur.
Thrasea proceeds by drawing a sharp contrast between ‘back then’ (olim) and ‘nowadays’ (nunc). Word order underscores the strength of feeling: the key adverbs olim and nunc are placed in front position and find reinforcement through two strategic particles: quidem, which is usually placed directly after the word it emphasizes and here endows olim with special resonance (‘in the good old days, as you well know’); and the strongly adversative at. The order is chiastic: temporal adverb (olim) + particle (quidem) :: particle (at) + temporal adverb (nunc). Thrasea correlates and contrasts the past and the present by means of lexical and thematic inversions. For the past, he invokes the high magistrates of the republic (praetor, consul) as well as any non-office-holders on top (privati); for the present, he opts for an undifferentiated ‘we’ (colimus, adulamur), as if to underscore the contemporary irrelevance of key political categories from republican times (see further below on privati). The collective self-indictment is reinforced by the contrast between the collective ‘we’ and the preceding de aestimatione singulorum: in the past, entire people (gentes) stood in fear of the assessment of single individuals; now all Romans are beholden to the whim and will of some random provincial. In the course of the sentence, Thrasea sketches out a complete reversal of republican realities in imperial times: we are moving from one random Roman lording it over every provincial to one random provincial lording it over every Roman. At the centre of the design Thrasea places the antithesis de cuiusque obsequio – ad nutum alicuius. obsequium indicates ‘(slavish) obedience’, nutus (‘nod’, but here in the technical sense of ‘a person’s nod as the symbol of absolute power’) refers to someone’s virtually unlimited power to get things done by a mere jerk of the head. By means of two strategic omissions Thrasea manages to suggest that complete nonentities are now in charge at Rome: after alicuius we must mentally supply provincialis (‘by some provincial or other’); and the ablative of agency with decernitur (a provincialibus) is also only implied. In effect, Thrasea argues that the Romans have allowed their provincial subjects to become their overlords – a complete inversion of what things used (and ought) to be.
non modo praetor aut consul sed privati etiam mittebantur: Thrasea claims here that in the olden days not just high-ranking officials but even privati (citizens without office or imperium) were dispatched to run affairs abroad. He is here using privatus in the technical ‘republican’ sense, i.e. ‘non-office holder.’ In the early empire, privatus became (also) an antonym of princeps – i.e. it could be used to refer to any Roman (including high magistrates) as opposed to the emperor. Commentators see in Thrasea’s gesture to republican times a reference to the so-called legatio libera. The term referred to the senatorial privilege of travelling at public expense (like a legate) to look after their personal interests without the requirement of taking on civic duties. Provincials were expected to entertain and support such travellers like a Roman official on public business and bitterly complained about this additional burden. Cicero, for one, tried (unsuccessfully) to outlaw this practice.84 There were, then, good reasons why provincials feared these ‘legates’ – not because they represented Roman law and order (as Thrasea intimates), but because they constituted a particularly insidious form of provincial exploitation. Note also that Thrasea misrepresents the practice: these ‘legates’ were not ‘sent’ by the senate – they received a special privilege to go. The distortions and the hyperbole – both clearly conducive to Thrasea’s argument – raise interesting questions about his character (and Tacitus’ use of characterization). Are we to imagine Thrasea deliberately deviating from the truth to further his case? Or would he and his audience (perhaps even Tacitus?) share a somewhat inaccurate and certainly nostalgic conception of republican times?
qui provincias viserent et quid de cuiusque obsequio videretur referrent: The verbs of the relative clause – viserent and referrent – are in the subjunctive, indicating purpose: these people, Thrasea claims (incorrectly: see previous note), were sent in order to inspect and report. What did they report on? Thrasea supplies the answer in the indirect question (hence the subjunctive) quid … videretur. video in the passive with neuter pronoun as subject means ‘to seem good, right, proper’, so in essence, these Roman visitors issued reports on ‘what seemed proper about the obedience of each individual.’ There is an insidious, subjective touch to videretur: videri, in the sense ‘to seem’, presupposes the eye of a beholder to whom something appears to be the case without it necessarily being the case, and the verb therefore routinely takes a dative of a person whose perspective is at issue. Thrasea could have added eis but leaves it out, generating a wrong impression of objectivity.
cuiusque: The word makes clear that Thrasea imagines the inspection and reporting to have been far-reaching, extending to every single provincial – a hyperbole bordering on the absurd. It evokes association of Hesiod’s droves of immortals who walk the earth in disguise and report on the conduct of humans (Works & Days 252–55) or the prologue of Plautus’ Rudens, where the minor divinity Arcturus develops a ‘Big Jupiter is watching you’ theology – or, indeed, modern totalitarian regimes and their systems of mass-surveillance.
trepidabantque gentes de aestimatione singulorum: The -que, so rare in Thrasea’s speech, links mittebantur (cause) and trepidabant (effect) particularly tightly. The overall design is chiastic – subject (praetor, consul, privati) verb (mittebantur) :: verb (trepidabant) subject (gentes) – which results in the emphatic placement of trepidabant at the beginning of the second main clause and underscores the dynamic of ‘cause and effect.’ The contrast between gentes (entire nations) and singulorum (individuals) brings out the power individual magistrates were able to exercise in the old days. aestimatio here seems to refer to a general ‘assessment’ or ‘appraisal’, but it is also a technical term in law, where it refers specifically to the assessment of damages and their pecuniary value, the insidious implication being that any aestimatio by any Roman will cost Rome’s subject people – dearly.
colimus externos et adulamur: Thrasea pleonastically uses two verbs with almost identical meanings (‘we court and flatter’) to lay on thick the weakness and cravenness of modern officials, which reflects badly on the entire ruling élite (Thrasea implicates himself and everyone else present by switching into the first person plural). There is a note of contempt here, especially in the word externos (‘foreigners’).
quo modo ad nutum alicuius grates, ita promptius accusatio decernitur: A highly condensed mode of expression. Written out in full, the sentence would run: quo modo ad nutum alicuius [provincialis] grates [a provincialibus decernuntur], ita promptius accusatio [a provincialibus] decernitur. Although Timarchus’ ‘crime’ was to claim control over votes of thanks, Thrasea frightens the senators by pointing out that perversely empowered provincials are even quicker (promptius) to press charges against Roman officials than to decree votes of thanks – only to frustrate expectations in the following sentence.
21.2: decernaturque et maneat provincialibus potentiam suam tali modo ostentandi: sed laus falsa et precibus expressa perinde cohibeatur quam malitia, quam crudelitas.
We have reached the point where Thrasea presents his key paradox. His speech now makes a surprising turn. Up till now his focus has been on whipping up outrage at provincial conceit and the unwholesome inversion of imperial hierarchies. Now Thrasea suggests that he minds neither the provincials bringing charges nor boasting about their power – the real problem lies elsewhere: the corruption in Rome. In what seems at first sight a counterintuitive move, he argues that the provincials ought to retain the right to press charges; but they should be prohibited from issuing (which inevitably means ‘selling’) votes of thanks. The principle has wider applications: there is an implicit analogy here between the insincere or extorted laus that provincials lavish on Roman governors and the insincere or extorted laus that Roman senators lavish on the princeps. As Rudich puts it, perhaps over-assertively: ‘Thrasea Paetus’ message was only thinly masked by rhetorical generalities and must accordingly have been perceived by his audience as an attack on their own practice of adulatio.’85
decernaturque: Thrasea is again elliptical: to complete the first phrase, one needs to supply accusatio from the previous sentence. The mood is subjunctive. The present subjunctive can be used in the third person to give orders (‘jussive subjunctive’), here translating as ‘let it [sc. an accusation] be decreed.’
et maneat provincialibus potentiam suam tali modo ostentandi: The syntax here is rather unusual: the genitive of the gerund (ostentandi), which takes potentiam suam as accusative object, lacks a noun on which it depends and one might have expected an infinitive instead. This is, however, not the only place in the Annals where this construction occurs: Tacitus also uses it at 15.5 (vitandi) and 13.26 (retinendi). As Miller points out, ‘it is extremely unlikely that in all three instances the same odd construction has been caused by the same accident of textual transmission. It is more probably an example of Tacitean experimentation with language’ – in this case the blurring between the use of the gerund and the infinitive.86 The potentia refers specifically to the last thing Thrasea had mentioned, i.e. the power of provincials to charge Roman officials with maladministration. He argues that the provincials should still be able to bring cases against corrupt governors; what must be stopped (as he goes on to argue) are the false or corrupt votes of thanks. The verb ostento (another frequentative) carries the idea of parading or showing off and suggests that Thrasea considers the powers he would like the provincials to retain rather inconsequential. There is a mocking tone to his concession: the ‘potentia’ of the provincials does not amount to much. (For Tacitus on real power vs pomp and show, see 15.31: … inania tramittuntur.)
sed laus falsa et precibus expressa perinde cohibeatur quam malitia, quam crudelitas: Thrasea falls back into asyndetic mode – here reinforced by the anaphora of quam: quam malitia, quam crudelitas – to proclaim his counterintuitive conviction that contrived praise is as much in need of policing as (perinde … quam = as much as) malitia (‘wickedness’) and crudelitas (‘cruelty’). The elegant simplicity of quam malitia, quam crudelitas (which come with the force of punches to the face) contrasts with the slightly contorted expression laus falsa et precibus expressa, in the course of which laus, a positive notion, comes gradually undone. The first attribute (falsa) seems to refer to provincials ‘selling’ their votes of thanksgiving, whereas the second attribute (precibus expressa – from exprimere ‘to squeeze out’) refers to Roman governors extorting votes of thanksgiving from their provincial subjects. Either form of ‘praise’ is morally corrupt and potentially the result of cruel behaviour. The assimilation of laus to malitia and crudelitas conjures a world of rampant immorality in which key ethical and semantic distinctions have broken down.
21.3: plura saepe peccantur, dum demeremur quam dum offendimus: This aphoristic phrase sums up Thrasea’s attitude to provincial government. Paradoxically, he claims that trying to win favour frequently amounts to a greater crime than causing offence. The sequence peccantur – demeremur – offendimus is climactic: we begin with an impersonal passive, move on to the 1st person plural of a deponent (demeremur), and end up with offendimus, which is active in form and meaning. The alliteration of p and d and the neat antithesis in dum demeremur quam dum offendimus, stressed by the anaphora of dum, also help to make this remark shine.
quaedam immo virtutes odio sunt: The word immo (here unusually placed second) puts a novel, corrective spin on the preceding sentence. It explains why causing offence – an apparent negative – ought not to be considered a cause for concern. Even certain positive qualities (virtutes) trigger hatred.
severitas obstinata, invictus adversus gratiam animus: The phrase stands in apposition to virtutes, indicating two examples of just such excellent if unpopular qualities. The overall design is a majestic chiasmus – noun (severitas) + attribute (obstinata) :: attribute (invictus) + noun (animus) – that comes with three special twists: (i) Thrasea again puts on display his aversion to connectives: the two virtutes are listed one after the other, asyndetically. (ii) The overall arrangement is climactic both in quantitative and thematic terms: the second half is significantly longer because invictus, the attribute of animus, is in predicative position and governs the additional phrase adversus gratiam; and there is an increase in intensity from obstinata (‘resolute’) to invictus, which signifies an even higher degree of determination and resolve than obstinatus: the subtle military metaphor makes the evocation of a strong, incorruptible Roman mind especially arresting. (Note that as gloss on Greek amachos (‘unconquerable’) invictus means ‘invinc-ible’, so it only appears to match the past participle obstinata.) Thrasea invokes a mindset so firm of purpose that no attempt to curry favour has any effect. (iii) He twists standard Latin word order out of shape: usually, adjectives in attributive position indicating degree (such as obstinata) come before the noun they modify, whereas adjectives in predicative position (as is the case with invictus here) come after the noun they modify. Overall, the expression evokes the moral discourse of republican Rome and, more specifically, Sallustian idiom: see Bellum Iugurthinum 43.5 (…quod adversum divitias invictum animum gerebat), cited in full above at 20.3.
21.4 inde initia magistratuum nostrorum meliora ferme et finis inclinat, dum in modum candidatorum suffragia conquirimus: quae si arceantur, aequabilius atque constantius provinciae regentur. nam ut metu repetundarum infracta avaritia est, ita vetita gratiarum actione ambitio cohibebitur.’
inde initia magistratuum nostrorum meliora ferme et finis inclinat: The word inde (‘in consequence’) continues Thrasea’s claim that certain excellent qualities (virtutes) such as a strict resolve and a mind steeled against attempts at ingratiation are liable to incur hatred. The line of reasoning here seems to be as follows: the majority (cf. ferme) of Roman magistrates approach their term in office with sound ethics but a feeble disposition; they start out governing with obstinata severitas and rejecting anyone trying to curry favour (hence initia … meliora) – only to encounter resistance or hatred; unable to endure being the source and target of negative emotions, they let themselves be corrupted towards the end. The ellipsis of a verb in the first half (literally, ‘the beginnings of our magistracies [sc. are] generally better’) seems to enact the sense of the early promise quickly slipping away; it also reinforces the antithesis between initia and finis. For someone as reluctant to waste time on connectives as Thrasea, his use of et, which oddly correlates a verb omitted (sunt) with the one main verb in the sentence (inclinat), stands out. The sentence bubbles with sound effects, especially the alliteration and homoioteleuton of i, m and f (see the underlining) all drawing the listeners’ attention to the speaker’s diagnosis of Rome’s political ills. Note also the long, seven-word build up with those resounding polysyllables, and then the simple, self-enacting, anticlimactic finis inclinat.
dum in modum candidatorum suffragia conquirimus: A suffragium is a vote cast in an assembly (for a candidate, resolution, or such like), and the phrase suffragia conquirere refers to the canvassing of votes – a common occurrence before elections. In the context of provincial administration, however, Thrasea presents the practice as demeaning and distinctly undesirable: governors ought not to behave like candidates for political office chasing the popular vote. By using the first person plural (conquirimus) Thrasea suggests that it is not just the reputation of the individual miscreant that is at issue here but that of the entire senate (with one implication being: we, sc. you, have all done it!): governors represent Rome’s ruling élite as a whole, and the behaviour of one reflects on everyone else.
quae si arceantur, aequabilius atque constantius provinciae regentur: quae is a connecting relative (= ea) and refers back to the practice of courting favour with provincials to receive a vote of thanks. Thrasea here switches from moral indictment to asserting the tangible benefits of his proposed measure: if governors refrain from canvassing or buying votes, the provinces will be run better and more consistently. Note the use of moods: we get a potential subjunctive in the protasis (arceantur), and a future indicative in the apodosis (regentur: the provinces will be run…). If the appropriate measures are taken, so Thrasea seems to suggest, then the desired outcome is not in doubt: it will not just kick in potentially, but with certainty. (In other words, it should be a no-brainer.)
aequabilius atque constantius: The phrase is strongly reminiscent of a passage in Sallust. See Bellum Catilinae 2.3–4:
Quodsi regum atque imperatorum animi virtus in pace ita ut in bello valeret, aequabilius atque constantius sese res humanae haberent, neque aliud alio ferri neque mutari ac misceri omnia cerneres. Nam imperium facile eis artibus retinetur quibus initio partum est.
[Now if the mental excellence with which kings and rulers are endowed were as potent in peace as in war, human affairs would run an evener and steadier course, and you would not see power passing from hand to hand and everything in turmoil and confusion; for empire is easily retained by the qualities by which it was first won.]
The two passages share a number of parallels: in each case, the matter at issue is the mental disposition of those in power in a time of peace. The construction – a conditional sequence – is the same (though note that Sallust uses a present counterfactual). And both authors trace a similar trajectory from positive beginnings to eventual decline. Syme suggests that the Sallustian idiom lends support to Thrasea Paetus’ mission to ‘recall ancient dignity in an oration defending the honour of the senatorial order.’87 To reinforce the Sallustian ring of the phrase, Thrasea for once even suspends his dislike of connectives and uses a rare atque.
metu repetundarum infracta avaritia est: Thrasea abbreviates: metu repetundarum stands for metu pecuniarum repetundarum or metu quaestionis repetundarum. pecuniae repetundae was a technical legal term meaning ‘the recovery of extorted money’, but pecuniae is often omitted. The quaestio de repetundis (the Roman extortion court) was the first permanent criminal court or tribunal in Rome, established in 149 BC by the lex Calpurnia (mentioned above) to try cases of extortion by provincial governors. Thrasea’s (blatantly disingenuous) claim that these courts had defeated officials’ greed is stressed by the vivid verb infracta … est and by the position of avaritia inside the components of the verb – a design that seems to enact the crushing of the greed.
vetita gratiarum actione ambitio cohibebitur: In fine style, Thrasea finishes with a succinct summary of his proposal: ban votes of thanks (the ablative absolute vetita … actione replaces a conditional clause) and corruption will end (the future here follows the same confident logic as regentur above).
22.1: Magno adsensu celebrata sententia. non tamen senatus consultum perfici potuit abnuentibus consulibus ea de re relatum. mox auctore principe sanxere, ne quis ad concilium sociorum referret agendas apud senatum pro praetoribus proue consulibus grates, neu quis ea legatione fungeretur.
magno adsensu celebrata [sc. est] sententia: The ellipsis of est gives the impression of a pithy parallelism, with two phrases in which an attribute (magno, celebrata) is followed by a noun (adsensu, sententia). The use of the passive both here and in the following sentence keeps Thrasea in the limelight. The other senators remain an anonymous collective. And the meaningful/meaningless round of applause rings out hollow here to celebrate a stand-out tableau – nailing Tacitus’ equivalent of the ‘Cretan liar’ paradox to imperial Rome.
non tamen senatus consultum perfici potuit abnuentibus consulibus ea de re relatum [sc. esse]: The subject of the sentence is consultum, modified by senatus in the genitive. A ‘resolution of the senate’ was not technically speaking a law, but it had the force of law, especially in foreign and provincial affairs. Here it did not come to pass since the consuls, who presided over the proceedings, intervened. The ablative absolute abnuentibus consulibus has causal force, with abnuentibus introducing an indirect statement, with the infinitive again in the passive: relatum, sc. esse.
The consuls P. Marius and L. Afinius object to an actual resolution on formal grounds: the matter before the senate was whether Timarchus was guilty or not, and Thrasea had used the occasion to scrutinize key principles of provincial government. This part of his argument was extra causam, and while it received the enthusiastic support of the majority of senators, the consuls were wary to add new items, especially those of far-reaching consequences, to the official agenda ad hoc since they had not yet been able to check whether they had the support of the emperor. And this particular proposal came from Thrasea, who had already upset the emperor on previous occasions with his independence. More specifically, the passage here harks back to the incident with which Tacitus begins his account of the year 62: the maiestas-trial of the praetor Antistius at 14.48–49 (cited and discussed in the Introduction, Section 6). Just as the two speeches by Thrasea mirror each other, so does the reaction of the presiding consuls. Their negative intervention here recalls their reaction at 14.49: at consules, perficere decretum senatus non ausi, de consensu scripsere Caesari (‘The consuls, however, not venturing to complete the senatorial decree in form, wrote to the emperor and stated the opinion of the meeting’). The scenario affords us telling insights into the workings of the imperial system, and the interrelation of power and character. Thrasea speaks his mind, without regard for the consequences. The moral majority retains its protective anonymity but can be fired up. The consuls, who are ultimately responsible, don’t want to stick their necks out. Thrasea does not care what the princeps thinks or how he may react; for almost everyone else the mind and disposition of the emperor is the yardstick for their own thoughts and actions. The historian knows that traditional forms of good governance always hand officials tools to block unwelcome reform; in the Caesars’ Rome, at any rate, Tacitus shows, the public pageant of government was pure rigmarole.
mox auctore principe…: In this case there is no hint that Nero felt slighted by Thrasea’s proposal; instead, he himself put forward such a motion soon afterwards. The temporal adverb mox presumably refers to a point in time in the same year (AD 62). Rudich even argues that Thrasea’s proposal played into Nero’s hands and interprets the reluctance of the consuls to have the motion passed differently: ‘It is no accident that the consuls were reluctant to promulgate Thrasea Paetus’ motion to abolish provincial thanksgivings…, while Nero, on the other hand, approved it. Though it was intended to oppose imperial adulatio, the emperor was exploiting Thrasea Paetus’ move for the opposite purpose, that is, of depriving the Senate of another fraction of its political prestige.’88 We have suggested a somewhat different explanation for the consuls’ hesitation. And Rudich’s reading leaves open the question as to why Thrasea’s proposal received the enthusiastic support of the senate. What do you think is going on? And does your Tacitus want us to fathom, to wonder, or to flounder?
sanxere: (= sanxerunt, i.e. the senators). In AD 11, Augustus had passed a law that stipulated an interval of 60 days between the end of a governor’s tenure and the proposal of a vote of thanks. See Cassius Dio 56.25.6: ‘He also issued a proclamation to the subject nations forbidding them to bestow any honours upon a person assigned to govern them either during his term of office or within sixty days after his departure; this was because some governors by arranging beforehand for testimonials and eulogies from their subjects were causing much mischief.’ Now Nero’s proposal aimed to ban the practice altogether. It is not entirely clear whether his measure was effective, ineffectual to begin with, or fell into abeyance after a while.
ne quis … referret agendas apud senatum … grates, neu quis ea legatione fungeretur: After votes of thanks were made in the council, a delegation was sent to Rome to report it to the senate. The law aimed to end both aspects of this practice (i.e. the voting of thanks and the dispatch of a delegation). The sentence has an air of formality and may well be modelled on the language of the decree itself. referret introduces an indirect statement with agendas [sc. esse] as verb and grates as subject accusative.
ne quis … neu quis: quis = aliquis. (‘After si, nisi, num and ne, | ali- goes away.’)89
concilium sociorum: This institution, which had Hellenistic and republican precedents, came into its own under Augustus, as an important site of communication between the centre of imperial power in Rome and the provinces: ‘in each province, the altar to Rome and Augustus provided an official cult centre, and its service provided an occasion for assembly. The concilium met, usually, once a year, and after the rites discussed any business that concerned the province. Any formal expressions of thanks would be voted here, and conveyed by a delegation to the Senate.’90
pro praetoribus prove consulibus: prove = pro + the enclitic ve. pro praetoribus refers to the legati Augusti pro praetore who governed the imperial provinces (‘propraetorian governors of the emperor’); pro consulibus refers to the governors of senatorial provinces, who since the time of Augustus all carried the title of proconsuls: see e.g. Suetonius, Augustus 47. The normal formulation would have been the inverse, i.e. proconsul legatusve.91 The passage is a good example of what Syme has diagnosed as one of the perversities of Tacitean style: ‘The terminology of the Roman administration was awkward or monotonous. Tacitus varies or evades it. … he will go to any lengths or contortions rather than denominate the governor of an imperial province by the exact title.’92 Tacitus means to press, to expose, all official language for its emptiness, inanity, fantasy.
(II) 22.2: REVIEW OF STRIKING PRODIGIES THAT OCCURRED IN AD 62
22.2 Isdem consulibus gymnasium ictu fulminis conflagravit effigiesque in eo Neronis ad informe aes liquefacta. et motu terrae celebre Campaniae oppidum Pompei magna ex parte proruit; defunctaque virgo Vestalis Laelia, in cuius locum Cornelia ex familia Cossorum capta est.
We are still in AD 62, but Tacitus now looks back and reviews the omina and prodigia – strange natural occurrences that indicated the displeasure of the gods – that had happened over the course of this year. This is a regular feature of his narrative and serves a variety of purposes. (i) To begin with, it is a key generic marker of annalistic historiography, in terms of both content and form. The Romans themselves traced the beginnings of the practice of writing year-by-year chronicles to the custom of the pontifex maximus recording on a board (tabula) kept on display outside his place of residence (a) the names of the high magistrates and (b) key events of public significance, not least those of a religious nature such as prodigies, on a yearly basis. The recording started from scratch each year, but the priesthood of the pontiffs also archived the information thus collected. Some – but by no means all – historiographers of the Roman republic adopted an approach and style to the writing of history that mimicked the information displayed on the board of the high priest, presumably in part to endow their narratives with the official and/or religious authority of a national chronicle.93 (ii) A key element of annalistic historiography is the repeated reference to consuls – as such, it is an inherently republican form of thinking about history and recalls a period in which the consuls were the highest magistrate in the Roman commonwealth (and the city-state scale of Rome could be governed by yearly flights of officials); annalistic historiography thus stands in latent tension to the existence of a princeps (as well as a worldwide empire). (iii) In addition to the names of magistrates, annals tended to note down anything that concerned the interaction between Rome’s civic community and the gods. Prodigies are divine signs, and their recording situates the narrative within a supernatural context.
[Extra Information: Tacitus and religion
‘Tacitus and religion’ is a complex topic that defies exhaustive discussion in the present context. What follows are some pointers for how Tacitus integrates the sphere of the divine into his narrative universe. Griffin, for instance, identifies four supernatural forces to which Tacitus appeals in his narrative to render events intelligible: (i) divine intervention; (ii) fate, in the Stoic sense of an unalterable chain of natural causes; (iii) destiny, as determined by the time of our birth, i.e. by the stars; (iv) ‘fortune’ or ‘chance.’94 Not all of these factors are mutually reconcilable from a theological point of view.95 More generally speaking, Tacitus’ narrative universe offers a fractured metaphysics: he brings into play mutually incompatible conceptions of the gods, invokes their power and presence in various ways, but only to turn a narrative corner and lament their inefficaciousness. Here is a look at some representative passages that are particularly pertinent for an appreciation of 15.23. To begin with, it is important to stress that Tacitus recognizes the gods as a force in history that strikes emperors and senators alike. See, for instance, Annals 14.22.4:
Isdem diebus nimia luxus cupido infamiam et periculum Neroni tulit, quia fontem aquae Marciae ad urbem deductae nando incesserat; videbaturque potus sacros et caerimoniam loci corpore loto polluisse. secutaque anceps valetudo iram deum adfirmavit.
[About the same date, Nero’s excessive desire for extravagance brought him disrepute and danger: he had entered in the spring of the stream that Quintus Marcius conveyed to Rome to swim; and by bathing his body he seemed to have polluted the sacred waters and the holiness of the site. The grave illness that followed confirmed the wrath of the gods.]
The gods, then, go beyond sending signs of warning. They cause havoc, and not only for the princeps. In the wake of the conspiracy of Piso, the wrath of the gods somehow encompasses all of Roman society. Annals 16.13.1–2 is particularly striking because it conflates divine anger with the savagery of the princeps:
Tot facinoribus foedum annum etiam di tempestatibus et morbis insignivere. vastata Campania turbine ventorum, qui villas arbusta fruges passim disiecit pertulitque violentiam ad vicina urbi; in qua omne mortalium genus vis pestilentiae depopulabatur, nulla caeli intemperie quae occurreret oculis. sed domus corporibus exanimis, itinera funeribus complebantur; non sexus, non aetas periculo vacua; servitia perinde et ingenua plebes raptim extingui, inter coniugum et liberorum lamenta, qui dum adsident, dum deflent, saepe eodem rogo cremabantur. equitum senatorumque interitus, quamvis promisci, minus flebiles erant, tamquam communi mortalitate saevitiam principis praevenirent.
[Upon this year, disgraced by so many shameful deeds, the gods also imposed their mark through violent storms and epidemics. Campania was laid waste by a whirlwind, which wrecked the farms, the fruit trees, and the crops far and wide and carried its violence to the vicinity of the capital, where the force of a deadly disease decimated the human population at all levels of society, even though there was no visible sign of unwholesome weather conditions. But the houses were filled with lifeless bodies, the streets with funerals. Neither sex nor age gave immunity from danger; slaves and the free-born population alike died like flies, amid the laments of their wives and children, who, while tending (to the ill) and mourning (the deceased), (became infected, died, and) often were burnt on the same pyre. The deaths of knights and senators, while likewise indiscriminate, gave less rise to lamentation, since it appeared as if they were cheating the savagery of the emperor by undergoing the common lot.]
And soon afterwards, Tacitus steps back from his account of the bloodshed caused by Nero to reflect on his narrative and the impact it may have on the reader – before invoking the larger supernatural horizon in which imperial history and its recording in Tacitus’ text has unfolded (Annals 16.16.2):
ira illa numinum in res Romanas fuit, quam non, ut in cladibus exercituum aut captivitate urbium, semel edito transire licet.
[It was that wrath of divine forces against the Roman state, which one cannot, as in the case of beaten armies or captured towns, mention once and for all and then move on.]
What these passages illustrate is the uncertainty principle. In some cases, divine retribution for an act of transgression is virtually instantaneous: witness the illness that befell Nero shortly after his inadvisable swim. In other cases, the gap in time between portent and the advent of doom is disconcertingly long: one could have supposed that the melting down of Nero’s statue heralded his imminent demise – but at the point in time his end was still four years in the coming. Too big a gap generates disbelief in the efficacy of prodigies – and the gods. Tacitus himself draws attention to this problem at Annals 14.12.1–2, in the wake of the alleged conspiracy of Agrippina against Nero that ended in her death (the passage also includes an early appearance of Thrasea Paetus):
Miro tamen certamine procerum decernuntur supplicationes apud omnia pulvinaria, utque quinquatrus, quibus apertae insidiae essent, ludis annuis celebrarentur, aureum Minervae simulacrum in curia et iuxta principis imago statuerentur, dies natalis Agrippinae inter nefastos esset. Thrasea Paetus silentio vel brevi adsensu priores adulationes transmittere solitus exiit tum senatu, ac sibi causam periculi fecit, ceteris libertatis initium non praebuit. prodigia quoque crebra et inrita intercessere: anguem enixa mulier, et alia in concubitu mariti fulmine exanimata; iam sol repente obscuratus et tactae de caelo quattuordecim urbis regiones. quae adeo sine cura deum eveniebant, ut multos postea annos Nero imperium et scelera continuaverit.
[However, with a remarkable spirit of emulation among the leading men thanksgivings were decreed at all shrines, further that the festival of Minerva, at which the assassination attempt was discovered, be celebrated by annual games, that a golden statue of Minerva and next to it an effigy of the emperor be put up in the curia, and that Agrippina’s birthday be included among the inauspicious dates. This time, Thrasea Paetus, who was wont to let earlier instances of flattery pass either in silence or with a curt assent, walked out of the senate, creating a source of danger for himself, without opening up a gateway to freedom for the others. Portents, too, appeared, frequent and futile: a woman gave birth to a snake, another was killed by a thunderbolt during intercourse with her husband; the sun, again, was suddenly eclipsed and the fourteen regions of the capital were struck by lightning. These events happened so utterly without any concern of the gods that Nero continued his reign and his crimes for many years to come.]
Tacitus here mercilessly exposes the hypocrisy of the religious adulation that the emperor attracted: in spite of the fact that the son murdered his mother, emperor and senators engage in communal thanksgiving to the gods that the mother did not manage to murder her son. Given this perversion of the truth and the way that the divinities are implicated in the crime (as the agents who supposedly helped to uncover Agrippina’s plot), the numerous signs of divine displeasure do not come as a surprise. Yet Tacitus goes on to dismiss the prodigia as ineffectual because the warning they supposedly constituted resulted neither in a change of behaviour and ritual amendment to avert the apparently imminent danger nor in supernatural punishment of the real criminal, the emperor. The fact that Nero kept on living a life of crime for years to come suggests to Tacitus that the apparent portents lacked divine purpose. Moreover, as the passage from Annals 16 that we just cited illustrates, before Nero gets his comeuppance he visits Roman society like a wrathful divinity himself. Ultimately, divine efficacy in Roman history has become inscrutable and unpredictable. The world that Tacitus records eludes easy understanding. Some aspects of it are both re-prehensible and incom-prehensible. Communication at all levels is seriously distorted. No one’s listening to sage correctives in the senate-house (from our Saint Thrasea), and no one’s listening to alarm-bells set off by that other throwback voice looking out for Rome – heaven-sent scary stuff.]
isdem consulibus: The name of the consuls is one – but no longer the power-indicator – dating system available in imperial Rome.
gymnasium ictu fulminis conflagravit effigiesque in eo Neronis ad informe aes liquefacta: For the Neronia, a quinquennial festival along the model of the Greek Olympic Games first celebrated in AD 60 (Tacitus covers it at Annals 14.20–21, which we cite and discuss below), Nero had built the first public gymnasium in Rome. Tacitus mentions its dedication at the very end of his account of AD 61 (14.47): gymnasium eo anno dedicatum a Nerone praebitumque oleum equiti ac senatui Graeca facilitate (‘In the course of the year, Nero consecrated a gymnasium, oil being supplied to the equestrian and senatorial orders – a Greek form of liberality’).96 The slippage from AD 60 to AD 61 merits some comments. Griffin uses Ann. 14.47 as evidence that ‘in 61 he [sc. Nero] dedicated his new public baths in Rome, a complex that included a gymnasium. He marked the occasion by a free distribution of oil to senators and equites, who were clearly meant to be attracted to athletics by the free offer’ – but acknowledges in an endnote that our other sources have the gymnasium, and in the case of Suetonius, also the baths, dedicated and in use during the Neronia in AD 60.97 To fix the clash, she suggests that ‘it is possible that Tacitus’ date refers to the dedication of the whole complex, the gymnasium alone being finished by the Neronia.’98 But this is hardly compelling given that Tacitus, unlike Suetonius, does not even mention the baths at 14.47: he only speaks of the dedication of the gymnasium. Perhaps something else entirely is going on: could Tacitus have slyly shifted the date of the dedication of the gymnasium back a year so that he could correlate the endings of his accounts of AD 61 (14.47) and AD 62 (15.22)? Has the desire for a suggestive artistic design here overruled the principle of chronological accuracy?
The term gymnasium itself, at any rate, is a loanword from the Greek (γυµνάσιον/gymnasion, a place where one stripped to train ‘naked’, or γυµνός/gymnos in Greek). As the name suggests, it was a quintessentially Greek institution – a place for athletic exercise (in particular wrestling), communal bathing, and other leisure pursuits (such as philosophy). Our sources suggest that Nero himself fancied a career as a wrestler – linked to his sponsorship of gymnasia: ‘his interest in pursuing a somewhat less dangerous career [than fighting as a gladiator] in wrestling is well attested. He certainly built gymnasia at Rome, Baiae, and Naples; wrestlers competed at his Neronia; he enjoyed watching them in Naples; and he actually employed court wrestlers, luctatores auli. Contemporary rumor had it that he intended himself to compete in the next Olympic Games among the athletes, for he wrestled constantly and watched gymnastic contests throughout Greece…’99
Tacitus mentions the occurrence without commentary, but there was little need for one. In part, the structure of his narrative provides an eloquent interpretation: it is hardly coincidental that he should have concluded his account of AD 61 with the dedication of the gymnasium by Nero and his account of AD 62 with instances of divine wrath directed against the building and the statue of the emperor contained therein. The artful design that ensues stands out even more clearly if we recall that the mention of Nero’s dedication of the gymnasium comes right after the obituary for Memmius Regulus (consul of 31) and that the paragraph that follows the meltdown of the statue begins with the consulship of his son (also named Memmius Regulus). Tacitus thus chiastically interrelates the end of 61, the end of 62, and the beginning of 63:
End of 61: obituary of Memmius Regulus pater (14.47: cited below); dedication of Nero’s gymnasium (14.47).
End of 62: conflagration of Nero’s gymnasium (15.22); beginning of 63: reference to the consulship of Memmius Regulus filius (15.23).
Tacitus thus twins the abomination and disaster of the imperial court – Nero is the last scion of the Julio-Claudian dynasty – with an image of continuity in the form of republican lineage.
effigiesque in eo Neronis ad informe aes liquefacta: Statues of emperors (and other members of the imperial family or household) were ubiquitous in imperial Rome. They ensured the visual presence of the princeps in a wide variety of settings, raised the represented figure above the status of ordinary mortals, and more generally constituted an important medium for projecting an image of the reigning princeps to different social groups within the empire: ‘Representations of Roman emperors and empresses crafted in marble or bronze functioned as surrogates for real imperial bodies, artistic evocations of the imperial presence that were replicated and disseminated everywhere in the Empire. Just as the corporeal being of the emperor, as supreme ruler of the Mediterranean, was endowed with his divine essence or genius, and came to be elevated conceptually above the bodies of his subjects, so too imperial images were conceived differently from those of private individuals. Unlike most of their subjects, the emperor or empress could exist as effigies in multiple bodies that took the form of portrait statues populating every kind of Roman environment such as fora, basilicae, temples, baths, military camps and houses.’100 The quotation comes from an article with the title ‘Execution in Effigy: Severed Heads and Decapitated Statues in Imperial Rome’, which focuses on the destruction of statuary after the death of an emperor. New principes, especially if they belonged to a different dynasty, tended systematically to do away with the artistic representations of their predecessors. The melting-down of Nero’s likeness constitutes a divine anticipation of the iconoclasm that lay in store for his images upon his death. Divine displeasure at the Hellenizing shenanigans of the emperor could not have been articulated more clearly. There is no better way to portend Nero’s sticky end than the complete destruction of the statue. One captures a sense of satisfaction in the extreme formulation ad informe aes – Tacitus clearly enjoys the image of golden-boy Nero’s statue being melted down into a shapeless lump as a result of the conflagration. The lightning bolt is the hallmark of Jupiter: so this message comes from the top.
et motu terrae celebre Campaniae oppidum Pompei magna ex parte proruit: Pompe(i)i, ~orum is a second declension masculine plural noun, here standing in apposition to celebre Campaniae oppidum, the subject of the sentence. This earthquake, which Seneca, in his Natural Histories 6.1.2, dates to AD 63, predated the famous eruption of Vesuvius in 79 during the reign of Titus, which totally destroyed Pompeii and the neighbouring city of Herculaneum. Hence there is a proleptic point in magna ex parte: Tacitus and his readers would of course have read this passage with the later catastrophe in mind, turning the earthquake mentioned here into an ominous prefiguration of greater evil to come, though not specifically related to the reign of Nero (but easily relatable to the imminent fall of the first dynasty of Caesars). Seismic activity has natural causes but frequently features the same temporal logic as prodigies, insofar as a minor tremor or eruption – at times many years in advance – is then followed by a cataclysmic outbreak. Likewise, prodigies constituted a preliminary indication of divine displeasure that issued a warning of an imminent disaster (but also afforded a precious window of opportunity to make amends, appease the gods, and thus avert it). The Romans understood extreme natural events as divinely motivated signs, but were unaware of – or refused to believe in – the ineluctability of natural disasters such as earthquakes or volcanic eruptions; they preferred to invest in the conviction that proper communication with the gods constituted some safeguard against crises and chaos. But is that so different from contemporary religious creeds?
magna ex parte proruit: The scale of the destruction was already immense and hints at the violence of the quake.
defunctaque virgo Vestalis Laelia: The Vestal Virgins (six at any one time, who, upon entering the college, took a vow of chastity and stayed in position for thirty years or until they died) were priestesses of Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth. Devoted in the main to the cultivation of the sacred fire, which was not supposed to go out since it symbolized the eternity of the Roman state, they were associated with the well-being of the Roman commonwealth and its continuity in time. Any change in personnel owing to a premature death or other event affecting the smooth functioning of the college therefore amounted to an affair of state. Laelia was perhaps the daughter of D. Laelius Balbus.101
in cuius locum Cornelia ex familia Cossorum capta est: Candidates for the priesthood, girls between 6 and 12 years of age, were offered by their families for the honour. When they were selected by the chief priest (Pontifex Maximus), he said, ‘te, Amata, capio’ (I take you, beloved one): this is the reason for the verb here.102 The Cornelia in question might have been the daughter of Cornelius Cossus, one of the consuls of AD 60.103 Tacitus’ readers would know her gruesome destiny. In AD 91, when she had become Vestalis maxima, the emperor Domitian had her accused of incestum (‘sexual impurity and hence profanation of the religious rites’). She was found guilty and, despite pleading her innocence, executed by being buried alive. See Suetonius, Domitian 8.4 and the harrowing account by Pliny, Letters 4.11.6–13.
The Cornelii Cossi went all the way back to the 5th century BC, i.e. the early years of republican Rome. A member of this branch of the gens Cornelia, Aulus Cornelius Cossus, was the second one of just three Roman generals ever who won the so-called spolia opima (‘rich spoils’) – the armour stripped from an opposing general after he had been killed in single combat (in Cossus’ case the king of the Etruscan town Veii, Lars Tolumnius: see Livy 4.17–20 for the details). Reflect, before reading on, that the sacred institution of the Vestal priesthood (with its impeccable republican pedigree and personnel) provided for the replenishment of its stock of girls in case of loss: you won’t find monarchy coping half so smoothly with the perils menacing its self-perpetuation. Now read on:
(III) 23.1–4: START OF TACITUS’ ACCOUNT OF AD 63: THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF NERO’S DAUGHTER BY SABINA POPPAEA, CLAUDIA AUGUSTA
Tacitus’ account of the year AD 63 comprises Annals 15.23–32. The set text only includes the initial paragraph (23) and then vaults forward to the start of AD 64 at 15.33. The stretch left out primarily covers – in spectacularly telling contrast – military developments in the Near East. In the meantime, we have a royal birth! A daughter! A dead duck.
23.1 Memmio Regulo et Verginio Rufo consulibus natam sibi ex Poppaea filiam Nero ultra mortale gaudium accepit appellavitque Augustam dato et Poppaeae eodem cognomento. locus puerperio colonia Antium fuit, ubi ipse generatus erat.
Memmio Regulo et Verginio Rufo consulibus: This is the standard annalistic formula for opening a year, especially in the latter portions of the Annals: ‘Tacitus introduces a new year with various formulae in Annals 1–6, but in the later books his desire for variatio seems to cease: in fact, all extant year-beginnings, except for two [that for AD 58 at 13.34 and that for AD 65 at 15.48], are introduced by a standard ablative absolute of the type x y consulibus.’104
Memmio Regulo: C. Memmius Regulus, the son of P. Memmius Regulus, one of the consuls of 31, who died in 61. Tacitus records the death at 14.47, as his penultimate entry for that year, adding an overall appreciation of the character:
Eo anno mortem obiit Memmius Regulus, auctoritate constantia fama, in quantum praeumbrante imperatoris fastigio datur, clarus, adeo ut Nero aeger valetudine, et adulantibus circum, qui finem imperio adesse dicebant, si quid fato pateretur, responderit habere subsidium rem publicam. rogantibus dehinc, in quo potissimum, addiderat in Memmio Regulo. vixit tamen post haec Regulus, quiete defensus et quia nova generis claritudine neque invidiosis opibus erat.
[The year saw the end of Memmius Regulus, whose authority, firmness, and character had earned him the maximum of glory possible in the shadows cast by imperial greatness. So true was this that Nero, indisposed and surrounded by sycophants predicting the dissolution of the empire, should he go the way of fate, answered that the nation had a resource. To the further inquiry, where that resource was specially to be found, he added: ‘In Memmius Regulus.’ Yet Regulus survived: he was shielded by his quietude of life; he sprang from a recently ennobled family; and his modest fortune aroused no envy.]
Verginio Rufo: L. Verginius Rufus, a name that points far into the future. He crushed the revolt of Gaius Julius Vindex against Nero in AD 67/68. Twice he declined to be hailed emperor. Pliny records the inscription that Rufus chose for his tombstone (6.10.4; 9.19.1): hic situs est Rufus, pulso qui Vindice quondam | imperium adseruit non sibi, sed patriae (‘Here lies Rufus, who once defeated Vindex and protected the imperial power not for himself, but for his country’). He died in 97, during his third consulship, at the ripe old age of 83. Pliny devotes an entire letter to the event, in which he tells us that it was Tacitus himself who delivered the funeral oration as the suffect consul, who took Rufus’ place (2.1.1–6).
The laconic recording of the two consuls for 63 according to annalistic convention point Tacitus’ readers, in the case of Memmius Regulus, back to the recent past (as commemorated by Tacitus in his Annals) and, in the case of Verginius Rufus, forward into the distant future. The text thus evokes both dynastic succession and annalistic sequence as two complementary grids for imposing patterns on historical time:
‘Imperial history’ has its natural centre of gravity in the reigning princeps. But by opting for an annalistic approach, Tacitus ensures that a pattern of ‘republican history’ remains in place. The very simplicity of associating each year with the name of the consuls in office (whether initially elected or suffect) generates a sense of order and continuity in time more fundamental than the changing dynasties that rule at Rome. Just thinking about the names of the consuls – and in what other years they or their fathers held the consulship (a natural thing to do, from a Roman reader’s point of view) – creates chronological vectors. In this case, the web of associations called into being by the laconic dating device Memmio Regulo et Verginio Rufo consulibus spans all three ‘dynasties’, from the Julio-Claudian through the Flavian and beyond, to Tacitus’ present. There is, then, an ideology built into the annalistic approach to Roman history: emperors come and go; but each year, consuls still enter into their office and maintain (a semblance of) republican continuity. This way of thinking about time existed outside Tacitus’ narrative as well, of course. But through strategic arrangement of his material, our author activates the pattern as a meaningful foil for his imperial history: here it is his obituary of Memmius Regulus pater at 14.47, at the end of his account of 61, which obliquely sets up his son’s entry into the consulship in 63, especially when paired with the references to Nero’s gymnasium (see above). Without this obituary, readers would have had much greater difficulties in associating the son with his father (and his consulship in 31) or in thinking ahead to the death of Verginius Rufus during his third consulship (and the figure who would take his place and deliver the funeral oration). And far less melodrama to savour.
natam sibi ex Poppaea filiam Nero … accepit: The advanced position of natam, right after the annalistic formula, reinforces the sense of a new beginning also for the imperial household – which Tacitus crushes a few lines later (see below, 23.3: quartum intra mensem defuncta infante). The undramatic record of who held the consulship stands in stark contrast to the triumphs and tragedies of the imperial household. The switch from the names of the two highest magistrates of the Roman state, subordinate in power only to the princeps himself, to the birth of a baby girl destined to pass away after a few months creates a tension between the republican frame or matrix of Tacitus’ narrative and its principal subject matter. The names of the imperial couple Poppaea and Nero in the first sentence about AD 63 instantly counterbalance those of Memmius Regulus and Verginius Rufus and refocus attention from republican office to the doings of the imperial family.
Poppaea: Nero was Poppaea Sabina’s third husband, and she his second wife – after Octavia. She enters the Annals at 13.45 (in his account of the year AD 58) as the wife of the knight Rufrius Crispinus. The paragraph opens programmatically with the sentence non minus insignis eo anno impudicitia magnorum rei publicae malorum initium fecit (‘a no less striking instance of immorality proved in the year the beginning of grave public calamities’) and continues as follows:
There was in the capital a certain Poppaea Sabina, daughter of Titus Ollius, though she had taken the name of her maternal grandfather, Poppaeus Sabinus, of distinguished memory, who, with the honours of his consulate and triumphal insignia, outshone her father: for Ollius had fallen a victim to his friendship with Sejanus before holding the major offices. She was a woman possessed of all advantages but good character (huic mulieri cuncta alia fuere praeter honestum animum). For her mother, after eclipsing the beauties of her day, had endowed her alike with her fame and her looks: her wealth was adequate for her standing by birth. Her conversation was engaging, her wit not without point (sermo comis nec absurdum ingenium); she paraded modesty, and practised wantonness (modestiam praeferre et lascivia uti). In public she rarely appeared, and then with her face half-veiled, so as not quite to satiate the beholder, – or, possibly, because that look suited her. She was never sparing of her reputation, and drew no distinctions between husbands and adulterers (famae numquam pepercit, maritos et adulteros non distinguens): vulnerable neither to her own nor to alien passion, where material advantage offered, that’s where she transferred her desires (neque adfectui suo aut alieno obnoxia, unde utilitas ostenderetur, illuc libidinem transferebat). Thus whilst living in the wedded state with Rufrius Crispinus, a Roman knight by whom she had had a son, she was seduced by Otho [sc. the future emperor], with his youth, his voluptousness, and his reputed position as the most favoured of Nero’s friends: nor was it long before adultery was mated to matrimony (nec mora quin adulterio matrimonium iungeretur).
Otho praised the beauty and charms of his wife in the presence of Nero – either, so Tacitus submits in the following paragraph (13.46), because he was so smitten with love that he could not help himself (amore incautus) or because he deliberately wished to inflame the emperor’s desire with a view to a threesome that would have reinforced his own influence at court by the additional bond of joint ownership in one woman (si eadem femina poterentur [sc. he and Nero], id quoque vinculum potentiam ei adiceret). The plan misfired: once brought into the presence of the emperor, Poppaea succeeded in getting Nero infatuated with her, but, after the first adulterous night, played hard to get by insisting that she could not give up her marriage to Otho. To get rid of his rival, Nero broke his ties of friendship with Otho, debarred him from court, and ultimately appointed him as governor of Lusitania (present-day Portugal); there he remained for ten years until the outbreak of civil war in 68. After recording the appointment, Tacitus abruptly discontinues his account of what happened between Nero and Poppaea. One person who is an absent presence during this narrative stretch is Nero’s first wife Octavia, the daughter of his predecessor Claudius. Tacitus has Poppaea mention Acte (Nero’s concubine), but not Octavia. But once she displaced the emperor’s concubine, she also managed to have Octavia banished and, ultimately, killed – a gruesome sequence of events to which Tacitus devotes significant narrative space to end Annals 14 with a bang. Upon the trumped-up charge of having committed adultery with the prefect of the praetorian guard and then procured an abortion, Octavia was executed by Nero’s henchmen at the age of 20: after putting her in binds and opening her veins, they cut off her head and paraded it through the streets of Rome. Much to the delight of Poppaea.
Poppaea herself was accidentally kicked to death by Nero in AD 65, when she was again pregnant, with the emperor acting just like other tyrants in the Greco-Roman tradition, such as Periander of Corinth.105 Tacitus narrates the incident and its aftermath at 16.6, underscoring again how much the emperor loved his wife and would have liked to have children:
Post finem ludicri Poppaea mortem obiit, fortuita mariti iracundia, a quo gravida ictu calcis adflicta est. neque enim venenum crediderim, quamvis quidam scriptores tradant, odio magis quam ex fide: quippe liberorum cupiens et amori uxoris obnoxius erat. corpus non igni abolitum, ut Romanus mos, sed regum externorum consuetudine differtum odoribus conditur tumuloque Iuliorum infertur. ductae tamen publicae exsequiae laudavitque ipse apud rostra formam eius et quod divinae infantis parens fuisset aliaque fortunae munera pro virtutibus.
[After the close of the festival, Poppaea met her end through a chance outburst of anger on the part of her husband, who felled her with a kick during pregnancy. That poison played its part I am unable to believe, though the assertion is made by some writers less from conviction than from hatred; for Nero was desirous of children, and love for his wife was a ruling passion. The body was not cremated in the Roman style, but, in conformity with the practice of foreign courts, was embalmed by stuffing with spices, then laid to rest in the mausoleum of the Julian clan. Still, a public funeral was held; and the emperor at the Rostra eulogized her beauty, the fact that she had been the mother of an infant daughter now divine, and other favours of fortune which did duty for virtues.]
ultra mortale gaudium: While Nero’s delight at becoming a father is a (mock-) sympathetic touch, Tacitus portrays him as emotionally incontinent, unable to restrain himself in either joy (as here) or grief (see below 23.3: atque ipse ut laetitiae ita maeroris immodicus egit). The phrase ultra mortale is also a not particularly subtle reminder of the ever-crazier tyrant’s delusions of divinity (apart from setting up the upcoming apotheosis of his moribund daughter).
appellavitque Augustam dato et Poppaeae eodem cognomento: The daughter’s nomen gentile was Claudia, to which Nero decided to add the honorific title Augusta. Within the Annals, the passage is part of a sequence, stretching back to the very beginning of the work: at Annals 1.8, Tacitus records that Augustus, in his will, posthumously conferred this title on his wife Livia: … cuius testamentum inlatum per virgines Vestae Tiberium et Liviam heredes habuit. Livia in familiam Iuliam nomenque Augustum adsumebatur (‘His will, brought in by the Vestal Virgins, specified Tiberius and Livia as heirs, Livia to be adopted into the Julian family and the Augustan name’). At Annals 12.26, he mentions that Claudius bestowed the honour on his wife Agrippina, in the context of his adoption of her son Nero: rogataque lex, qua in familiam Claudiam et nomen Neronis transiret. augetur et Agrippina cognomento Augustae (‘and the law was carried providing for his adoption into the Claudian family and the name of Nero. Agrippina herself was dignified by the title of Augusta’). Here the honorands are a newborn baby – and a concubine-turned-wife. The absurd devaluation of what in earlier times was a precious honour thus matches the degree of Nero’s emotional excess. Tacitus expresses his disapproval obliquely with a break in syntax after Augustam. Instead of simply stating that Nero conferred the honour to his infant daughter and her mother, he provides the information that Poppaea, ‘too’ (or ‘even’: see the et) received the title Augusta in a lengthy ablative absolute (dato … cognomento). ‘Poppaea’ sounded (gob-smackingly?) incongruous when yoked to the austere yeoman ethnic ‘Sabinus’; tacking on holy ‘Augusta’ completed the effect.
colonia Antium: Antium (modern Anzio) was a coastal town in Latium south of Rome (see Map of Italy). Nero founded a colony of veterans there (hence colonia – though this species of self-perpetuation carried an oddly Greek name, ‘Antion’, ‘Opposite’/ ‘Against’; perhaps not coincidentally, back in 37 CE when he was born, as L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, his uncle Caligula was just succeeding Tiberius as emperor, before soon losing it with everybody). Many Roman nobles had sea-side villas in the region, but it became a particularly significant location for the imperial family. It was where Augustus received a delegation from the Roman people that acclaimed him pater patriae.106 The emperor Gaius (Caligula) was born there (and so according to Suetonius, Caligula 8.5, at one point even considered making it the new capital!) – as was Nero, who also took it upon himself to raze the villa of Augustus to the ground so he could rebuild it on a grander scale. He was in Antium when news of the fire of Rome reached him (Annals 15.39, discussed below).
23.2 iam senatus uterum Poppaeae commendaverat dis votaque publice susceperat, quae multiplicata exsolutaque. et additae supplicationes templumque fecunditatis et certamen ad exemplar Actiacae religionis decretum, utque Fortunarum effigies aureae in solio Capitolini Iovis locarentur, ludicrum circense, ut Iuliae genti apud Bovillas, ita Claudiae Domitiaeque apud Antium ederetur.
Here we reach our first example of what Stephen Oakley has aptly called ‘corporate servility’ in the set text:107 The senate tries to match the anxious expectation of the emperor before and his joy after the birth of his daughter by intensifying communication with the gods on behalf of the imperial family. This was an excellent way to show loyalty and devotion to the princeps;108 on occasion, however, it backfired. In his biography of Caligula, Suetonius mentions instances in which the emperor demanded that those who had made vows for his health when he was sick kept them after his return to health (27):
Votum exegit ab eo, qui pro salute sua gladiatoriam operam promiserat, spectavitque ferro dimicantem nec dimisit nisi victorem et post multas preces. alterum, qui se periturum ea de causa voverat, cunctantem pueris tradidit, verbenatum infulatumque votum reposcentes per vicos agerent, quoad praecipitaretur ex aggere.
[A man who had made a vow to fight in the arena, if the emperor recovered, he compelled to keep his word, watched him as he fought sword in hand, and would not let him go until he was victorious, and then only after many entreaties. Another who had offered his life for the same reason, but delayed to kill himself, he turned over to his slaves, with orders to drive him decked with sacred boughs and fillets through the streets, calling for the fulfilment of his vow, and finally hurl him from the embankment.]
Nevertheless, the practice remained a standard element in the peculiar social dynamic that unfolded between the emperor and other members of Rome’s ruling élite in imperial times. We (and Tacitus) tend to see the proposed honours as manifestations of corporate servility. It is therefore useful to recall that there is another cultural logic in play. Thus Ittai Gradel argues that this was a technique for the senators to get some purchase on the behaviour of the princeps: ‘Honours were a way to define the status or social position of the person or god honoured, but it was also a way to tie him down. The bestowal of honours to someone socially superior, whether man or god, obliged him to return them with benefactions. Or, we might say, to rule well. It could indeed be honourable to reject excessive honours, and for example, the elder Scipio had excelled in this gloria recusandi. On the other hand, refusing honours also entailed rejecting the moral obligations that went with them, even to the point of recognizing no bonds whatsoever. So it would be socially irresponsible to reject all such proposals.’109
iam senatus uterum Poppaeae commendaverat dis votaque publice susceperat, quae multiplicata exsolutaque [sc. sunt]: As with his account of Nero’s reaction, Tacitus manages to convey his distaste in how he represents the senate. The front position of the adverb iam helps to generate the impression of escalation: already during Poppaea’s pregnancy, the senate had decided to turn the wellbeing of her unborn child into an affair of state. The priesthood of the Arval Brothers, which consisted of senators, vowed sacrifices in case of a successful delivery. After the birth, the manifestations of joy, so Tacitus implies, knew no bounds: collectively, the senate joined in with the emperor’s excessive reaction to the birth by multiplying and fulfilling their – proliferating – vows. The Arval Brothers too fulfilled their vows, as recorded in their Acta under 21 January 63: in Capitolio uota soluta quae susceperant pro partu et incolumitate Poppaeae.110 When the couple returned from Antium with their newborn, the Arval Brotherhood celebrated their arrival with sacrifices to Spes, Felicitas (or Fecunditas), and Salus Publica. (Tacitus’ publice possibly alludes to the occasion, though he refrains from providing details.)
et additae supplicationes templumque fecunditatis et certamen ad exemplar Actiacae religionis decretum, utque Fortunarum effigies aureae in solio Capitolini Iovis locarentur, ludicrum circense, ut Iuliae genti apud Bovillas, ita Claudiae Domitiaeque apud Antium ederetur: Tacitus now gives more specific details of what the vows consisted in, in his usual elliptical style:
– et additae [sc. sunt] supplicationes
– templumque fecunditatis et certamen ad exemplar Actiacae religionis decretum [sc. est]
Tacitus now switches construction, using decretum [est] as an elegant pivot: the verb governs both the nouns templum and certamen (as subjects) and the following ut-clause (analysed in more detail below):
– utque Fortunarum effigies aureae in solio Capitolini Iovis locarentur, ludicrum circense, ut Iuliae genti apud Bovillas, ita Claudiae Domitiaeque apud Antium ederetur
In other words, we have (i) public thanksgivings (supplicationes); (ii) a temple to Fertility (templum); (iii) highly prestigious public games (certamen); (iv) the dedication of two golden statues to the two Fortunes (effigies); and (v) circus races (ludicrum circense). Polysyndeton (the alternating et … -que … et … -que) underscores the impression of excess – just as Tacitus’ persistent use of the passive voice from multiplicata exsolutaque onwards (additae, decretum, locarentur, ederetur) suggests a loss of purposeful agency on the part of the senate.
supplicationes: ‘In times of crisis, the senate sometimes decreed public days of prayer, on which the whole citizenry, men, women, and children, went from temple to temple throughout the city praying for divine aid (supplicationes). In turn, a favorable outcome of such prayers led to public days of thanksgiving, on which the citizen body gave thanks for their deliverance.’111
et certamen ad exemplar Actiacae religionis: After his victory over Mark Antony at Actium (on the coast of Western Greece) in 31 BC, Octavian founded the city of Nicopolis (‘Victory City’) nearby. Every five years, it was to hold Greek games in memory of the victory, modelled on the Games at Olympia: see Suetonius, Augustus 18. A Roman colony may have been set up in the vicinity. But, as R. A. Gurval points out, ‘Nicopolis was, above all, a Greek city with Greek institutions. Its local government, coinage, and public inscriptions were Greek.’112 In establishing Greek forms of entertainment in Italy and Rome, the senate, then, seems to have tried to pander to the philhellenic passions of the emperor – much to the ire of Tacitus, who despised the Greeks. We have already had occasion to discuss Nero’s ill-fated gymnasium (see above on 15.22.2). The topic will resurface forcefully later on in the set text. Here it is important to note that the senators clearly knew how to please their princeps. But in Tacitus’ narrative, the contrast between the foundational victory of Octavian at Actium, which brought to an end a century of intermittent civil bloodshed, and the successful birth of Nero’s doomed baby daughter remains: it strikingly underscores the utter lack of proportion in the farcical measures proposed.
Fortunarum effigies: Two sister goddesses of Fortune were worshipped in Antium, and their images are taken to the Capitol in Rome in a lunatic’s idea of honouring Antium, the birthplace of Nero’s un-fortunate daughter.
Capitolini Iovis: Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus was Rome’s supreme divinity; he had his main temple in Rome on the Capitoline Hill.
ludicrum circense ut Iuliae genti apud Bovillas ita Claudiae Domitiaeque apud Antium ederetur: ludicrum circense … ederetur is the second part of the ut-clause, in asyndetic continuation of Fortunarum effigies … locarentur. At issue are races in the circus, which already were established at Bovillae in honour of the gens Julia (see Map of Italy). (The town of Bovillae, about ten miles from Rome, was a colony of Alba Longa, which in turn was founded by Aeneas’ son Iulus.) Now Antium was to receive games as well, in honour of the gens Claudia and the gens Domitia (the dative singular genti is to be supplied with both Claudiae and Domitiae). Nero shared ancestors with all three gentes. His mother Agrippina was the daughter of Agrippina maior (who in turn was the daughter of Augustus’ daughter Julia and his general Agrippa) and Germanicus (the son of Nero Claudius Drusus); Nero’s father was Cn. Domitius. But the extraordinary honour he now accorded to Antium – in implicit rivalry with Bovillae – suggests a deliberate attempt to step outside the shadow of Augustus. John Humphrey’s analysis of the stone circus at Bovillae is suggestive here:113
Fully-built stone circuses will be seen to be very rare outside Rome at such an early date. Undoubtedly it was the special connection of the Julian gens with Bovillae that prompted the construction of this circus, for the reputed origin of Julus was at nearby Alba Longa whence the ancient cults had been transferred to Bovillae prior to the Augustan period. Under Tiberius at the end of AD 16 a shrine to the Julian gens and a statue of the divine Augustus were dedicated at Bovillae. Augustus may have established a college of youths (collegia iuvenum) at Bovillae, while in AD 14 Tiberius established the sodales Augustales which administered the cult of the gens Iulia. Both organizations may have been involved with the games at Bovillae. Circus games are specifically alluded to in AD 35 … and in AD 63 (circus games given in honour of the Julian cult) [with reference to our passage]; by implication these circus games had also been held in previous years. Thus the circus was probably used chiefly for games held under the close auspices of the emperor or the cult of the emperor, and it may have been located in close proximity to the shrine (sacrarium) of the Julian gens. … It is hard to resist the conclusion that the monumental entertainment buildings of Bovillae, like some of its other public buildings, were a special project of Augustus and Tiberius.
The passage also should put into perspective the sacral investment on the part of both Nero and the senate. Nero’s predecessors and in particular Augustus had set high benchmarks in terms of honours received and self-promotion, and if he wanted to stand out against them – a virtual requirement of someone who took on the role of ‘princeps’: the elevated position of ‘the first or most outstanding member of society’ required permanent justification, not least vis-à-vis those who had held that role before. Nero could clearly not hold his own in terms of military achievement, so he decided to excel in a field of social practice on which no princeps had hitherto left a conspicuous mark: cultural activities cultivated in Greece. Meanwhile, as John Henderson reminds us, what he forgot was the meaning of the dual Fortunes’ rule over Antium – ‘Fortune’ and (her opposite number) ‘Mis-Fortune’ (Or as Horace puts it at Odes 1.35.1–4: O diva, gratum quae regis Antium, | praesens vel imo tollere de gradu | mortale corpus vel superbos | vertere funeribus triumphos; ‘Divine Fortune, who rules over pleasing Antium, ready to raise a mortal body from the lowest rung or change proud triumphs into funeral processions’). He might have reflected both on what befell the gens Iulia when Bovillan Augustus’ daughter Julia was born (he divorced her mother Scribonia and took the baby ‘on the same day’: Dio 48.34.4) and that these games were most likely one feature of Tiberius’ celebration of Augustus’ death and deification (or ‘deathification’). And as for the Claudian clan, it was more lunacy to insist simultaneously on both Nero’s adoptive and birth lineage; and it was less than fortunate a reminder to recall the end of the last Claudian princess Octavia, whose gruesome death Tacitus had just recounted at the end of the previous book.
23.3 quae fluxa fuere, quartum intra mensem defuncta infante. rursusque exortae adulationes censentium honorem divae et pulvinar aedemque et sacerdotem. atque ipse ut laetitiae, ita maeroris immodicus egit.
quae fluxa fuere quartum intra mensem defuncta infante: quae is a connecting relative (= ea). fuere = fuerunt. All the efforts were as written on water. Tacitus announces this anticlimax with laconic brevity and a mocking f-alliteration. quartum intra mensem defuncta infante is a good example of another hallmark of Tacitean style, that is, the surprising distribution of information across main and subordinate clauses. Here the ‘vital’ element is packed into a (causal) ablative absolute, with the participle (defuncta) and noun (infante) further delayed for special effect. The language is very matter-of-fact and unelaborated, again contrasting the simple reality of the death with the extravagant honours previously listed. In terms of syntax (and placement in the sentence) the phrase mirrors dato et Poppaeae eodem cognomento at 23.1 and the two ablative absolutes thus bracket the birth and the death of Nero’s daughter, adding to the overall sense of futility and finality.
rursusque exortae [sc. sunt] adulationes censentium honorem divae et pulvinar aedemque et sacerdotem: The rursusque (‘and again’) at the beginning of the sentence gives a sense of despair to Tacitus’ words: for him, the new outpouring of sycophantic adulation is depressingly predictable. The verb exorior hints at novelty, and the proposed honours were indeed unprecedented: (i) deification (honorem divae); (ii) a sacred couch (pulvinar); (iii) a temple (aedem); and (iv) a priest (sacerdotem). All four items are accusative objects of censentium (the genitive plural present active participle of censeo, dependent on adulationes: ‘of those, who…’). Tacitus again employs polysyndeton to stress the profusion of honours showered on the dead baby by the supine senators and (as with the ablative absolute) to set up a correlation (this time on the level of style) between the events at her birth and upon her death. (See above 23.2 ‘et additae…’)
honorem divae: The senators proposed to deify the baby-girl. Accordingly, Tacitus calls Poppaea ‘mother of the divine infant’ (divinae infantis parens) at Annals 16.6.2. The move may seem preposterous (and Tacitus’ dry laconic account presents it as such). But we are supposed to recall what other emperors had dreamed up in this respect. Here is Cassius Dio’s account of how Caligula reacted to the death of his sister Drusilla:
Drusilla was married to Marcus Lepidus, at once the favorite and lover of the emperor, but Gaius [sc. Caligula] also treated her as a concubine. When her death occurred at this time, her husband delivered the eulogy and her brother accorded her a public funeral. 2 The Pretorians with their commander and the equestrian order by itself ran about the pyre and the boys of noble birth performed the equestrian exercise called ‘Troy’ about her tomb. All the honours that had been bestowed upon Livia were voted to her, and it was further decreed that she should be deified, that a golden effigy of her should be set up in the senate-house, and that in the temple of Venus in the Forum a statue of her should be built for her, 3 that she should have twenty priests, women as well as men; women, whenever they offered testimony, should swear by her name, and on her birthday a festival equal of the Ludi Megalenses should be celebrated, and the senate and the knights should be given a banquet. She accordingly now received the name Panthea, and was declared worthy of divine honours in all the cities. 4 Indeed, a certain Livius Geminius, a senator, declared on oath, invoking destruction upon himself and his children if he spoke falsely, that he had seen her ascending to heaven and holding converse with the gods; and he called all the other gods and Panthea herself to witness. For this declaration he received a million sesterces.
Take this as a benchmark and you could argue that the senators who proposed divine honours for Nero’s baby-girl showed remarkable… restraint.114
pulvinar: A sacred couch on which the images of the gods were placed at a special celebration (the lectisternium) – the suggestion here is that the young baby’s image be placed among them as a new goddess (diva Claudia, Neronis filia).
sacerdotem: The singular surprises in its conspicuous modesty: in contrast to the twenty priests and priestesses that Caligula appointed for the shrine of his sister, the temple of diva Claudia looks decidedly under-staffed.
atque ipse ut laetitiae, ita maeroris immodicus egit: Another very short and therefore emphatic sentence, in which Tacitus makes explicit how highly strung Nero was. The advanced position and parallelism of ut laetitiae, ita maeroris (both genitives are dependent on immodicus) highlight that Nero is prone to excess at either end of the emotional spectrum. The adjective immodicus (‘excessive’) carries strong negative connotations in traditional Roman morality, which regarded control of one’s emotions as a sign of excellence; it correlates with the ultra mortale at 23.1, effecting a further bracketing of birth and death. Tacitus perhaps also invites us to evaluate Nero’s emotional reaction to the arrival and departure of his baby daughter against the high infant mortality rate in antiquity. Valerie French provides some numbers:115
If we retroject the worst mortality rates of the modern world back into the Greco-Roman one, we would estimate that about 5% of all babies born alive would die before they reached the age of one month, and that among every 20,000 women giving birth, five would die. If we include late fetal and in-childbirth deaths, the probability of infant mortality climbs from 5% to 8%.
These figures help to explain the high level of anxiety (and the investment in religious supplications) as the date of birth was approaching – as well as the tangible sense of relief thereafter; but they also help to underscore the emotional excess of the emperor: in light of the rather high likelihood that the child would not survive, the degree to which Nero was buoyed with joy and struck down by grief generates the impression of an emotionally unbalanced individual.
23.4 adnotatum est, omni senatu Antium sub recentem partum effuso, Thraseam prohibitum immoto animo praenuntiam imminentis caedis contumeliam excepisse. secutam dehinc vocem Caesaris ferunt qua reconciliatum se Thraseae apud Senecam iactaverit ac Senecam Caesari gratulatum: unde gloria egregiis viris et pericula gliscebant.
The passage functions as a node that brings together various narrative threads. Tacitus here connects the last major event he recounted in his coverage of 62 (the speech of Thrasea on provincial government) with the first major event in his account of 63, i.e. the birth and death of Nero’s baby daughter. At the same time, he takes the opportunity to recall via the figure of Seneca the early years of Nero’s reign and to drop a hint about Seneca’s and Thrasea’s dire future. More precisely, the phrasing here stands in intratextual dialogue with the very end of the surviving portion of the Annals: at 16.21–35, Tacitus recounts the death of Thrasea Paetus and Barea Soranus (a respected elderly statesman), as the climax of Nero’s killing spree – murdering them was to kill virtus personified: trucidatis tot insignibus viris ad postremum Nero virtutem ipsam exscindere concupivit interfecto Thrasea Paeto et Barea Sorano (21; ‘After the slaughter of so many of the noble, Nero in the end conceived the ambition to shred Virtue herself by killing Thrasea Paetus and Barea Soranus’). The last image where the text breaks off is of Thrasea dying slowly in excruciating pain after opening his veins by order of the princeps (16.35). Thrasea’s death was preceded by the death of Seneca in the wake of the Pisonian conspiracy, narrated as the climactic bookend sequence at 15.60–64, which followed a similarly gruesome pattern.
adnotatum est … Thraseam prohibitum immoto animo praenuntiam imminentis caedis contumeliam excepisse: adnotatum est introduces an indirect statement with Thraseam as subject accusative and excepisse as infinitive. contumeliam – which is modified by the attribute praenuntiam (in predicative position and governing the genitive phrase imminentis caedis) – is the direct object of excepisse. prohibitum modifies Thraseam – it is Tacitus’ condensed way of saying that Nero forbade Thrasea to attend his reception of the senate. Nero’s decision to uninvite just him from the birth celebrations amounted to a renuntiatio amicitiae (renunciation of friendship) from the emperor, often a precursor to banishment or worse: this is what Tacitus refers to with praenuntiam imminentis caedis contumeliam (an affront which foreshadowed his impending murder). At 16.24, Tacitus notes that the emperor had prohibited Thrasea to join in the celebrations that greeted the arrival of Tiridates (the Parthian king) in Rome: Igitur omni civitate ad excipiendum principem spectandumque regem effusa, Thrasea occursu prohibitus non demisit animum, sed codicillos ad Neronem composuit, requirens obiecta et expurgaturum adseuerans, si notitiam criminum et copiam diluendi habuisset (‘The whole city, then, streamed out to welcome the emperor and inspect the king, but Thrasea was ordered to avoid the reception. [Aptly named for ‘Boldness’] He didn’t lower his spirits, but drew up a note to Nero, asking for the allegations against him and stating that he would rebut them, if he was allowed cognizance of the charges and facilities for dissipating them’).
omni senatu Antium … effuso: Embedded within coverage of Thrasea occurs an ablative absolute in which Tacitus dispatches the rest of the senate. The whole (cf. the totalising omni) of the senate troop out to Antium to pay their homage to the newborn. The strong verb effundo (literally ‘to pour out’; this picks up on the image of flux in the previous sentence: quae fluxa fuere) helps to convey how the senators were falling over themselves to be seen congratulating the emperor and his wife.
sub recentem partum: Immediately after the birth.
immoto animo: The contrast between Nero’s wild emotions and Thrasea’s unshaken spirit is pointed.
secutam [sc. esse] dehinc vocem Caesaris ferunt qua reconciliatum [sc. esse] se Thraseae apud Senecam iactaverit ac Senecam Caesari gratulatum [sc. esse]: The sentence introduces a surprising turn: after the reference to Thrasea’s impending doom (and its Stoic acceptance), we now hear [the story] that Nero reconciled himself with his adversary and boasted about it to his old tutor Seneca. ferunt introduces an indirect statement with vocem and Senecam as subject accusatives and secutam (esse) and gratulatum (esse) as verbs. Within the relative clause iactaverit introduces an indirect statement with se as subject accusative and reconciliatum (esse) as verb. There is an interesting shift in grammatical position from the relative clause to the second part of the indirect statement dependent on ferunt: in the relative clause Nero is the subject of the main verb and the subjective accusative of the indirect statement (se), whereas Thrasea is in the dative; afterwards Nero is mentioned in the dative (Caesari), whereas Seneca becomes the subject accusative. It is another instance in which Tacitus uses evaluative syntax: he elevates Seneca to a more prominent syntactic position than the emperor and uses style to reinforce theme: as Furneaux puts it, ‘the answer of Seneca implies that the friendship of Thrasea was worth more to Nero than Nero’s to him.’116
apud Senecam: What we get here is a throw-back to the times when Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65) was Nero’s tutor and tried to guide him in thought and practice, not least through his treatise de Clementia (‘On Mercy’), which he addressed to his charge. At Annals 14.53–6, we were treated to an excruciating interview exchange when Seneca tried to let go his graduate and retire, only to run into a sample of the fancy rhetoric he had taught his prince pupil, and be refused.
ferunt: Tacitus often reports a story in this manner, neither mentioning his sources nor vouching for the story himself. Here, he tells the little tale to illustrate aspects of the intertwined characters of three major figures.
unde gloria egregiis viris et pericula gliscebant: egregiis viris refers to Seneca and Thrasea. Seneca won glory because of the fearless reaction to the emperor’s vaunting, thus speaking an unwelcome truth to power (always a dangerous thing to do), whilst Thrasea won glory through the recognition of his status as a benchmark of political excellence and integrity – again a worrisome position to be in if the ruler is a tyrant who falls short of the standards set by some of his subjects. The position of gloria at the beginning suggests that the outcome of the event was as it should be, then the delayed and threatening pericula reminds us that the world of Neronian Rome was not so fair and just, and that something more sinister was awaiting them. Ultimately, both had to commit suicide. That the same action simultaneously brings glory as well as danger reveals the perverse nature of Nero’s regime: qualities that ought to bring renown entail peril.
et pericula: This is another instance of Tacitean style, what Oakley calls ‘the pointed use of et.’ He cites Annals 12.52.3 as an example: de mathematicis Italia pellendis factum senatus consultum atrox et irritum and translates: ‘with regard to the expulsion of the astrologers from Italy, a decree of the senate was passed that was fearful – and ineffectual.’117 The same effect is in play here: ‘from this incident (unde) glory grew for these eminent men – and danger.’
gliscebant: This powerful metaphor gives the ominous sense of their futures: glisco is literally ‘to swell up, blaze up.’ Tacitus is fond of it: he uses it at the very beginning of the Annals to describe flattery and obsequiousness ‘swelling’ under Tiberius: gliscente adulatione (1.1). It belongs into the category of recherché or archaic words that Tacitus and other historiographers prefer over more common possibilities: ‘The similarity exhibited by Sallust, Livy, Quintus Curtius Rufus (in his History of Alexander the Great) and Tacitus in their choice of vocabulary allows the generalisation that Latin historical style was marked by frequent employment of archaisms: e.g. the use of cunctus for the more mundane omnis (‘all’), glisco for cresco (‘grow’) and metuo for timeo (‘fear’).’118 Moreover, ‘grow’ is just what Nero’s baby didn’t manage to do. And with her went – the whole shooting-match. Soon. Poppaea and Nero, Seneca and Thrasea. The dynasty of Augustus, the Annals of Tacitus.
15.33–45 can be divided as follows:
- 33.1–34.1: Nero’s coming-out party as stage performer
- 34.2–35.3: A look at the kind of creatures that populate Nero’s court – and the killing of an alleged rival
- 36: Nero considers, but then reconsiders, going on tour to Egypt
- 37: To show his love for Rome, Nero celebrates a huge public orgy that segues into a (publicly consummated) mock-wedding with his freedman Pythagoras
- 38–41: The fire of Rome
- 42–43: Reconstructing the Capital: Nero’s New Palace
- 44: Appeasing the gods and Christians as scapegoats
- 45: Raising funds for buildings
(I) 33.1–34.1: NERO’S COMING-OUT PARTY AS STAGE PERFORMER
33.1 C. Laecanio M. Licinio consulibus acriore in dies cupidine adigebatur Nero promiscas scaenas frequentandi. nam adhuc per domum aut hortos cecinerat Iuvenalibus ludis, quos ut parum celebres et tantae voci angustos spernebat.
As John Henderson points out to us, this paragraph initiates a narrative stretch in which a rhythmic pattern of ‘ins-and-outs’ (or ‘es and ads’) bursts out all over through the to-and-fro of the storytelling, dancing attendance round Nero: [33] adigebatur - adeptus - eliceret - e proximis coloniis - acciverat - [34] - evenit - egresso - adfuerat - edebatur - adsumptus…[36] edicto - adiit - aditurus - egressus - adversum - evenerat - acquireret - e terris - adstabant - …
C. Laecanio M. Licinio consulibus: As we have seen, this is the annalistic formula that indicates the beginning of the consular year (our AD 64). Gaius Laecanius Bassus outlived Nero and died during the reign of Vespasian (Pliny, Natural Histories 26.5). Marcus Licinius Crassus Frugi, however, was indicted for treason by the delator M. Aquilius Regulus and executed by Nero.119 He thus followed in the footsteps of his parents, who died under Claudius.
acriore in dies cupidine adigebatur Nero promiscas scaenas frequentandi: The sentence is beautifully balanced: acriore in-dies cupidine [= 3 words] + adigebatur Nero [main verb and subject] + promiscas scaenas frequentandi [3 words]. At the same time, further syntactical aspects and relations generate the impression that Nero is carried away by disgraceful desire:
- the minor hyperbaton acriore … cupidine, with the intervening phrase in dies generates the impression of an unstoppable escalation.
- the major hyperbaton cupidine … promiscas scaenas frequentandi (the genitive of the gerund depends on cupidine and takes promiscas scaenas as accusative object) enmeshes and overpowers the emperor, who is caught in the middle.
- the passive verb adigebatur and the inversion of normal word order (verb – subject, rather than subject – verb) again suggests that Nero’s rational agency is compromised: he is pushed along by his desires.
- the placement of verb and subject in the middle produces a powerful climax: we first get the ever-increasing desire, then the disconcerting intelligence that it has been overpowering the emperor, and, finally, the clarification of what the desire consists in: repeated (cf. frequentandi) appearances on stage in performances open to the public (cf. promiscas).
promiscas scaenas: promiscas refers to the fact that Nero’s stage performances were now open to the public. He needed now to have indiscriminate access to the stage, no-holds-barred (cf. immodicus above).
nam adhuc per domum aut hortos cecinerat Iuvenalibus ludis, quos ut parum celebres et tantae voci angustos spernebat: Tacitus frequently supplies background information in a main clause in the pluperfect, set up by an adverb such as adhuc or iam, and followed by a subordinate clause situated in the narrative present. In terms of syntax, the sentence here recalls 23.2: iam senatus uterum Poppaeae commendaverat dis votaque publice susceperat, quae multiplicata exolutaque: (i) adverb (iam; adhuc); (ii) a main clause in the pluperfect (commendaverat, susceperat; cecinerat) providing background information; (iii) a relative clause that details actions in the narrative present (quae … exsolutaque; quos … spernebat). Both sentences are perfect illustrations of Tacitus’ habit of distributing information in surprising ways across main and subordinate clauses.
Iuvenalibus ludis: The reference is to the Juvenile Games that Nero celebrated in AD 59, at the occasion of his first shave as a 21-year-old. These games took place in Nero’s palace and his gardens, i.e. were not open to the general public. Special festivities at this rite of passage were unremarkable. See Cassius Dio 48.34.3 on how Caesar Octavianus celebrated the occasion: ‘For example, when Caesar now for the first time shaved off his beard, he held a magnificent entertainment himself besides granting all the other citizens a festival at public expense. He also kept his chin smooth afterwards, like the rest; for he was already beginning to be enamoured of Livia also, and for this reason divorced Scribonia the very day she bore him a daughter.’ The future emperor Augustus, of course, did not contribute to the entertainment himself.
quos ut parum celebres et tantae voci angustos spernebat: The antecedent of quos is hortos, i.e. the gardens of the imperial estate. There is irony in Tacitus’ voice as he says Nero felt these private performances did not attract the attendance figures (cf. ut parum celebres) he desired. Nero’s talents as a singer and lyre-player are often derided in our sources, and the advanced position of tantae (such a great [voice]) has a sarcastic ring to it, especially since the appraisal of his vox as tanta is focalized for us through Nero himself. The vivid adjective angustos (literally, ‘narrow’, a ludicrous descriptor of the imperial gardens) suggests Nero feels restricted by his current opportunities to perform and wants ‘more space.’ Compare the account in Suetonius, Nero 20:
Inter ceteras disciplinas pueritiae tempore imbutus et musica, statim ut imperium adeptus est, Terpnum citharoedum vigentem tunc praeter alios arcessiit diebusque continuis post cenam canenti in multam noctem assidens paulatim et ipse meditari exercerique coepit neque eorum quicquam omittere, quae generis eius artifices vel conservandae vocis causa vel augendae factitarent; sed et plumbeam chartam supinus pectore sustinere et clystere vomituque purgari et abstinere pomis cibisque officientibus; donec blandiente profectu, quamquam exiguae vocis et fuscae, prodire in scaenam concupiit, subinde inter familiares Graecum proverbium iactans occultae musicae nullum esse respectum.
[Having gained some knowledge of music in addition to the rest of his early education, as soon as he became emperor he sent for Terpnus, the greatest master of the lyre in those days, and after listening to him sing after dinner for many successive days until late at night, he little by little began to practise himself, neglecting none of the exercises which artists of that kind are in the habit of following, to preserve or strengthen their voices. For he used to lie upon his back and hold a leaden plate on his chest, purge himself by the syringe and by vomiting, and deny himself fruits and all foods injurious to the voice. Finally encouraged by his progress, although his voice was weak and husky, he began to long to appear on the stage, and every now and then in the presence of his intimate friends he would quote a Greek proverb meaning ‘Hidden music counts for nothing.’]
33.2 non tamen Romae incipere ausus Neapolim quasi Graecam urbem delegit: inde initium fore, ut transgressus in Achaiam insignesque et antiquitus sacras coronas adeptus maiore fama studia civium eliceret.
Tacitus here takes a step back. Nero’s desire to appear on stage may have been driving him on, but even he has not entirely lost a sense of decorum. He does not dare to inaugurate his career as a public performer in Rome but chooses a Greek city famous for its Greek entertainment culture instead. Tacitus presents this choice both as an avoidance of Rome and as an anticipation of Nero’s trip to Greece, which would happen several years later (AD 66–67).
Romae: A locative: ‘in Rome’.
Neapolim quasi Graecam urbem: Neapolis, modern Naples, was, as its Greek name (nea = new; polis = city, hence: ‘New City’) implies, originally a Greek foundation. The quasi here thus has causal force. Although it had long been part of Roman Italy, Neapolis seems to have retained much of its Greek character. Aristocratic norms were more flexible there, making it a more suitable place for Nero to inaugurate his career as a public performer. The antithesis between Greek and Roman is significant. Traditional Roman thinkers saw themselves as the guardians of great civilised Roman values (mores maiorum). They may have enjoyed and respected Greek art and literature, but Greek behaviour, morals and practices came with a stigma: Greekness was often tied up in Roman thought with luxury and immorality. Nero’s desires are such that he has to leave Rome and find the nearest ‘Greek city’ to allow an outlet for his foreign, un-Roman, or, indeed, ‘novel/weird/revolutionary’, urges.
inde initium fore, ut transgressus in Achaiam insignesque et antiquitus sacras coronas adeptus maiore fama studia civium eliceret: inde initium fore is an indirect statement dependent on an implied verb of thinking. Tacitus slyly lets us partake of what he assumes were Nero’s thoughts/motivations at the time. According to him, the emperor already in AD 63 harboured grandiose plans of ‘conquering’ the Greek world with his showbiz talents, anticipating a triumphant return to Rome and an enthusiastic welcome from his fellow-citizens, not unlike those accorded to the military conquerors of old.
inde initium: The alliteration stresses that Nero envisages this performance as just a debut: an ominous sign! Both initium and antiquitus chime with/against the ‘newness’ of Naples.
transgressus in Achaiam insignesque et antiquitus sacras coronas adeptus: The -que after insignes links transgressus and adeptus. The two participles (transgressus; adeptus) and the phrases they govern (in Achaiam; insignesque et antiquitus sacras coronas) are arranged chiastically.
transgressus in Achaiam: The Roman province of Achaea essentially covered mainland Greece. The participle transgressus carries an aggressive note, in a double sense: Nero is transgressing against Roman cultural norms; and he is invading Greece, reversing the cultural conquest of Italy famously noted by Horace at Epistle 2.1.156–57: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis | intulit agresti Latio (‘Conquered Greece conquered/captivated her wild vanquisher and brought her arts to rustic Latium’).
insignesque et antiquitus sacras coronas adeptus: Winners in prestigious Greek competitions received wreaths (coronae) as prizes. Nero’s thoughts here are designed to put across his devotion to and love of all things Greek: these wreaths are longingly described with the very positive adjectives insignes and antiquitus sacras (lit. ‘anciently sacred’). Moreover, there is the arrogance and mindset of a tyrant here in the participle adeptus (‘having won’): Nero does not doubt for one moment that he will be victorious – and why would he as emperor of the known world! This is Tacitus subtly showing us Nero’s perversion of these competitions.
maiore fama: The word fama (fame) is an ambiguous word in Latin: it can mean ‘fame’ in the positive sense or, in a negative sense, ‘disgrace’, ‘notoriety.’ We are of course in Nero’s thoughts, so ‘he’ means that he will win glory among the citizens; at the same time, we can hear Tacitus’ cynicism and wonder whether the actual result will be Nero achieving disgrace and notoriety.120
studia civium eliceret: Nero imagines that his feats on stage will hit the spot, coax enthusiasm from the citizens.
33.3 ergo contractum oppidanorum vulgus, et quos e proximis coloniis et municipiis eius rei fama acciverat, quique Caesarem per honorem aut varios usus sectantur, etiam militum manipuli, theatrum Neapolitanorum complent.
The sentence features a series of subjects: (i) vulgus, which governs the perfect participle contractum; (ii) the implied antecedent of quos, i.e. ei; (iii) the implied antecedent of qui, i.e. ei; (iv) manipuli. They all go with the main verb at the end: complent. The et links vulgus and the first implied ei; the -que after qui links the two implied ei; Tacitus then continues, climactically, with etiam (‘even’). The pronounced polysyndeton magnifies the list of those co-opted to swell the emperor’s enormous retinue. Tacitus revels in the idea of so many men from so many different groups flooding into the theatre of Neapolis.
oppidanorum vulgus: The oppidani are the townsfolk of Neapolis, in contrast to the Roman citizens (cives) mentioned in the previous sentence. The word vulgus (‘crowd’, ‘mob’) suggests that Nero’s local audience is made up of the lowest elements of society.
coloniis et municipiis: Although originally distinct forms of settlement (a colonia being a settlement of Roman citizens, a municipium an independent Italian town), by this period the distinction had lost some of its significance. Tacitus uses both to exaggerate Nero’s recruitment to his fan-club, drawing from anywhere he could all over the country.121
eius fama: Here we meet that wonderfully ambiguous word fama again. Once again Tacitus uses it to imply (without explicitly saying) that these men were attracted by the infamy of what Nero was up to: in other words, he not only blackens Nero’s character, but also suggests that the men who flocked to him were lowlifes, attracted to Nero’s outrageous designs like flies round the proverbial canine ordure.
quique Caesarem per honorem aut varios usus sectantur: In the midst of this unseemly rabble the words Caesarem and honorem seem incongruous. They help to give a sense of noble, devoted servants of the emperor caught up in this group. The impression is undone by the vague and promiscuous aut varios usus that follows it. Tacitus may have had in mind the so-called Augustiani – a special group of young men formed by Nero some years previously, to follow him, flatter him and applaud his performances: ‘All great performers had their own claques (fautores histrionum) to cheer them on and to whip up the audience with elaborate rhythmic chants and hand-clapping. It was at his private Juvenile Games, celebrated in 59, that Nero first introduced his Augustiani, Roman knights in their prime who made both day and night ring with applause and praise of Nero’s godlike beauty and voice. … By the time Nero first appeared in public in Naples, in 64, these Roman knights were backed by some 5,000 hardy plebeian youths. They were divided into groups, factiones, to learn the different elaborate forms of clapping (imported from Alexandria) – “the buzzings,” “the tiles,” “the bricks” – by which Nero had been captivated and which they performed vigorously when he sang.’122 (What, do you think, did ‘the buzzings’, ‘the tiles’, and ‘the bricks’ sound like?) They would have been amongst this group, and the frequentative verb sectantur (‘keep following around’, ‘follow in the train of’) suggests their fawning attendance on the emperor.
per honorem aut varios usus: The preposition per has a causal sense here. honestum (‘the honourable’) and utile (‘the advantageous’) are two key concepts in (philosophical) ethics, extensively discussed in (for instance) Cicero’s de Officiis.
etiam militum manipuli: etiam (‘even’) and the delay of this group to the end of the long list, makes clear that the soldiers’ presence was the most shocking: Nero has enlisted soldiers (most likely members of the Praetorian guard) to join his fan-club in the theatre and to cheer him on. The maniple was a company in the Roman army, numbering two centuries (i.e. about 120 men in total). Here it is plural (manipuli), indicating that Nero took a very sizeable number of soldiers with him. Their presence, stressed by the alliteration, the etiam and their final position in the list, seems highly incongruous: these fighting men of Rome are there, not to invade, but to watch their emperor disgrace himself like a Greek on the stage.
theatrum Neapolitanorum complent: The object and verb come along at last after a long list of subjects, piling into the theatre. The verb complent makes abundantly clear the number of Nero’s assembled supporters – they pack the house out.
34.1 Illic, plerique ut arbitrabantur, triste, ut ipse, providum potius et secundis numinibus evenit: nam egresso qui adfuerat populo vacuum et sine ullius noxa theatrum collapsum est. ergo per compositos cantus grates dis atque ipsam recentis casus fortunam celebrans petiturusque maris Hadriae traiectus apud Beneventum interim consedit, ubi gladiatorium munus a Vatinio celebre edebatur.
illic, plerique ut arbitrabantur, triste, ut ipse, providum potius et secundis numinibus evenit: One could rephrase the sentence as follows, to bring out Tacitus’ syntactic contortions: illic res evenit tristis, ut plerique arbitrabantur, sed provida et secundis numinibus, ut ipse arbitrabatur. In other words, we have:
- a hysteron proteron: Tacitus first gives us the evaluation, then the fact that is being evaluated (indeed, we have to wait until the next sentence to find out what actually happened – but the effect is already noticeable here with arbitrabantur preceding evenit);
- the use of adjectives (triste, providum) in the place of nouns; triste stands in antithetical contrast to providum potius et secundis numinibus;
- a parallelisms with twists: plerique ut arbitrabantur corresponds to ut ipse, but the subject plerique is pulled out of the first ut-clause for emphasis and in the second ut-clause the verb is elided.
The parallel structure and anaphora of ut renders the disparity between most people’s judgment and Nero’s apparent. A majority of right-thinking observers saw this event as triste, in contrast to the one man, Nero himself, who thought otherwise. Nero’s opinion is not just different but the exact opposite. In addition the pleonastic providum … et secundis numinibus, a prolix phrase designed to drown out the word triste with great, yet hollow triumphalist fanfare, suggests the bizarre amount of positive meaning Nero tried to read into the destruction of a theatre. The alliteration providum potius helps to stress the contrast.
illic: in Neapolis.
et secundis numinibus: An ablative absolute (with the verb – the non-existent present participle of esse – missing), awkwardly linked to providum with et.
nam egresso qui adfuerat populo vacuum et sine ullius noxa theatrum collapsum est: Tacitus now explains why Nero viewed the event as favourable – because the theatre was not destroyed while in use. Nevertheless, a theatre collapsing is not generally viewed as providential, and one can appreciate the challenge Nero faced in endowing it with positive meaning. Or, as John Henderson puts it: ‘A failed building was a literal ruina – and everywhere outside Nero’s nutcase spelled “ruination” (of social fabric, the universe, etc).’
egresso qui adfuerat populo: An ablative absolute that contains a relative clause within. The antecedent of qui is populo.
vacuum et sine ullius noxa: As in providum potius et secundis numinibus, Tacitus uses et very creatively here: ‘the theatre collapsed [when it was] empty and [hence] without harm to anyone.’
theatrum collapsum est: After much delay Tacitus finally tells us what all the fuss is about. Suetontius, Nero 20.2, identifies an earthquake as the reason for the collapse, which, he claims, set in during one of Nero’s performances: Et prodit Neapoli primum ac ne concusso quidem repente motu terrae theatro ante cantare destitit, quam incohatum absolveret nomon (‘And he made his début at Naples, where he did not cease singing until he had finished the number which he had begun, even though the theatre was shaken by a sudden earthquake shock’).
To understand Nero’s reaction better, it is worth recalling Tacitus’ account of a similar disaster at Annals 4.62, where he details the collapse of a full amphitheatre in the year AD 27 (i.e. in the reign of Tiberius):
[62] M. Licinio L. Calpurnio consulibus ingentium bellorum cladem aequavit malum improvisum: eius initium simul et finis exstitit. nam coepto apud Fidenam amphitheatro Atilius quidam libertini generis, quo spectaculum gladiatorum celebraret, neque fundamenta per solidum subdidit neque firmis nexibus ligneam compagem superstruxit, ut qui non abundantia pecuniae nec municipali ambitione, sed in sordidam mercedem id negotium quaesivisset. adfluxere avidi talium, imperitante Tiberio procul voluptatibus habiti, virile ac muliebre secus, omnis aetas, ob propinquitatem loci effusius; unde gravior pestis fuit, conferta mole, dein convulsa, dum ruit intus aut in exteriora effunditur immensamque vim mortalium, spectaculo intentos aut qui circum adstabant, praeceps trahit atque operit. et illi quidem, quos principium stragis in mortem adflixerat, ut tali sorte, cruciatum effugere: miserandi magis quos abrupta parte corporis nondum vita deseruerat; qui per diem visu, per noctem ululatibus et gemitu coniuges aut liberos noscebant. iam ceteri fama exciti, hic fratrem, propinquum ille, alius parentes lamentari. etiam quorum diversa de causa amici aut necessarii aberant, pavere tamen; nequedum comperto, quos illa vis perculisset, latior ex incerto metus.
[In the consulate of Marcus Licinius and Lucius Calpurnius, the casualties of some great wars were equalled by an unexpected disaster. It began and ended in a moment. A certain Atilius, of the freedman class, who had begun an amphitheatre at Fidena, in order to give a gladiatorial show, failed both to lay the foundation in solid ground and to secure the fastenings of the wooden structure above; the reason being that he had embarked on the enterprise, not from a superabundance of wealth nor to court the favours of his townsmen, but with an eye to sordid gain. Greedy for such amusements, since they had been debarred from their pleasures under the reign of Tiberius, people poured to the place, men and women, old and young, the stream swollen because the town lay near. This increased the gravity of the catastrophe, as the unwieldy fabric was packed when it collapsed, breaking inward or sagging outward, and precipitating and burying a vast crowd of human beings, intent on the spectacle or standing around. Those, indeed, whom the first moment of havoc had dashed to death, escaped torture, so far as was possible in such a fate: more to be pitied were those whose mutilated bodies life had not yet abandoned, who by day recognized their wives or their children by sight, and at night by their shrieks and moans. The news brought the absent to the scene – one lamenting a brother, one a kinsman, another his parents. Even those whose friends or relatives had left home for a different reason still felt the alarm, and, as it was not yet known whom the catastrophe had destroyed, the uncertainty gave wider range for fear.]
In the wake of the disaster, Tacitus goes on to report, the senate passed a decree that no one with a fortune of less than 400,000 sesterces should organize gladiatorial games and that amphitheatres had to be built on ground of tried solidity.
34.2 ergo per compositos cantus grates dis atque ipsam recentis casus fortunam celebrans petiturusque maris Hadriae traiectus apud Beneventum interim consedit, ubi gladiatorium munus a Vatinio celebre edebatur.
per compositos cantus: compositos implies that Nero wrote the songs himself.
grates dis atque ipsam recentis casus fortunam celebrans: One can either supply agens with grates dis or take both grates and ipsam fortunam as accusative objects of celebrans in what would be a zeugma. The zeugma gives the sentence a slightly strained feel, helping to convey the oddity of Nero’s actions. ipsam recentis casus (= mis-fortune) fortunam (= luck, good fortune) celebrans amounts to a paradox.
grates: See above on 20.1.
celebrans petiturusque: The -que links celebrans and petiturus. Note the variatio here, this time in terms of word order: the present participle celebrans comes at the end of its phrase, whereas the future petiturus… comes at the beginning. The juxtaposition of a present participle and future participle is striking: Nero has hardly finished dealing with one calamity before his mind is already set on the next outrage.
petiturusque maris Hadriae traiectus: Tacitus uses the poetic phrase maris Hadriae (lit. ‘of the Sea of Hadria’, i.e. the town of Adria, rather than plain adjectival ‘of the Adriatic Sea’). traiectus is accusative plural. One wonders what evidence Tacitus can have had for the claim that already in AD 64 Nero had plans to go straight from his first public appearance on stage at Neapolis on a tour through Greece – two years before he actually did. At 36.1, at any rate, Tacitus reports that Nero had dropped the plan for unknown reasons and returned from Beneventum to Rome: nec multo post omissa in praesens Achaia (causae in incerto fuere) urbem revisit (see below). Now it is true that Beneventum, though situated to the north of Neapolis, would be a good stop on the way to Brundisium, especially if Nero wanted to honour Vatinius with his presence at the games: it was situated at the Via Appia (see Map of Italy); but for the same reasons, Nero might have gone there on his way back to Rome. Given that a tour of Greece by the emperor was a logistical challenge of the first order, it is rather unlikely that Nero opted for and against going at the spur of the moment. Possibly, Tacitus simply made this up, thereby anticipating Nero’s actual trip to Greece two years later and illustrating the fickleness of the emperor on top. Support for this assumption comes from the etymology of Beneventum, which makes it an ideal place to ponder a sea voyage. As John Henderson points out, the story is that the auspicious Latin name ‘Bene-ventum’, ‘Fair wind’ (mildly in tension with consedit: see below), replaced the Latin rendering of the original nice Greek name, Maloeis, ‘Appley’ – ‘Male-ventum’, for portending a bad outcome for heedless voyagers.123
apud Beneventum interim consedit: Beneventum, a city located on the Via Appia, was the hometown of Vatinius, whom Tacitus introduces in the following clause. See previous note for its etymology. There is a mild pun in consedit as Nero, rather than setting sail, ‘settled’ – ‘into his seat’ to watch the gladiator show.
ubi gladiatorium munus a Vatinio celebre edebatur: For Vatinius, see Miller’s colourful note: ‘he was a native of Beneventum (Juvenal 5.46 [and therefore unrelated to the powerful foe of Cicero, whose family came from Sabine Reate]) and a new type of court character – the licensed buffoon. But such men, in Roman as in medieval times, could be powerful and dangerous. Tacitus recognises his importance, and his colour-value in the narrative.’124 Gladiatorial games were a very Roman form of entertainment, unlike stage-plays, lyre-playing or athletics.
celebre: Tacitus delays the attribute that indicates the popularity of this form of entertainment – perhaps implying a contrast with the ‘hired enthusiasts’ that crowded Nero’s performances? (Recall that at 33.1 Nero is presented as deeming his gardens parum celebres for his talents.)
(II) 34.2–35.3: A LOOK AT THE KIND OF CREATURES THAT POPULATE NERO’S COURT – AND THE KILLING OF AN ALLEGED RIVAL
In this stretch, Tacitus advances his narrative by loose associations: we move from Nero’s own appearance at Neapolis (33) to the gladiatorial games organized by one of his courtiers, i.e. Vatinius (34.1). The mentioning of Vatinius offers the occasion for a character-portrayal (or rather assassination) of malicious brilliance (34.2), before Tacitus claims that Nero conceived of the murder of his distant relative (and hence potential rival) Silanus Torquatus during the gladiatorial games put on by Vatinius (35.1). We then get an account of the events that led to Silanus’ death: charge, pending trial, pre-emptive suicide, speech of regret by the emperor, announcing that he would have exercised mercy even though the defendant was guilty as charged (35.2). The entire sequence is held together by a ‘factoid’ for which Tacitus could not conceivably have had any evidence: that the munus of Vatinius was the moment at which Nero began to plot the murder of Silanus. The suspicion that Tacitus here exercises creative license thickens in light of the fact that Cassius Dio (62.27.2, cited below) dates Silanus’ suicide to the following year. Again, one may wonder how best to explain this discrepancy in our sources. If Cassius Dio got it right, did Tacitus ride roughshod over chronological accuracy since he wished to plant a premeditated murder in Nero’s mind during Vatinius’ gladiatorial games, not least to blur the distinction between voluptas and scelus?
34.2 Vatinius inter foedissima eius aulae ostenta fuit, sutrinae tabernae alumnus, corpore detorto, facetiis scurrilibus; primo in contumelias adsumptus, dehinc optimi cuiusque criminatione eo usque valuit ut gratia pecunia vi nocendi etiam malos praemineret.
Here we get a little portrait of one of Nero’s creatures – the parvenu Vatinius from Beneventum, who reputedly had a long nose (Juvenal, Satire 5.46–7, Martial, Epigrams 14.96) and made a fortune under the emperor as informer and ‘sinister court-buffoon.’125 In his Dialogus de Oratoribus, Tacitus mentions that Maternus eventually crushed the creature by means of some acid poetry (11.2).126 The vocabulary of wickedness – foedissima, sutrinae, detorto, scurrilibus, contumelias, criminatione, malos – is densely packed here to give a very strong flavour of the corruption of Vatinius and of Nero’s court.
Vatinius inter foedissima eius aulae ostenta fuit, sutrinae tabernae alumnus, corpore detorto, facetiis scurrilibus: After first establishing that Nero’s entire court teemed with disgusting misfits – the implication of inter foedissima eius aulae ostenta is that there were many others who reached the same superlative degree of repulsiveness – Tacitus proceeds to specifics. They are presented in a punchy, asyndetic tricolon, with typical variation in construction and style: (i) sutrinae tabernae alumnus, (ii) corpore detorto, (iii) facetiis scurrilibus.
inter foedissima eius aulae ostenta: The superlative foedissima, a very powerful and negative word implying both moral and physical ugliness, gives an immediate sense of Vatinius’ character. Tacitus further casts him as one of the ostenta (marvels, monstrosities) of the court, describing him like a freakish and horrifying object. ostentum is synonymous with monstrum and prodigium and refers to a spectacularly unnatural occurrence: Nero’s entire court emerges as an abomination of what is normal and natural.
sutrinae tabernae alumnus: Tacitus reports scornfully his humble background, a sign for Roman readers of how unfitting it was for him to be in the emperor’s court. Note the emphatic position of sutrinae, to stress the lowliness of his family.
corpore detorto: An ablative of quality. The adjective detortus (‘twisted out of shape’) gives a vivid evocation of his deformity. Tacitus, as many other classical authors, operates on the assumption that physical appearance offers insights into character. ‘Physiognomy’, as the procedure of deducing psychological traits from physical characteristics, was a pseudo-science with considerable traction in antiquity (and beyond).127 We should therefore understand detortus both literally and metaphorically. In fact, Vatinius could be seen as the ‘face’ of Nero’s regime – a twisted and ugly perversion of anything pleasing and natural. Under the Julio-Claudian emperors the ‘body politic’ is as deformed as Vatinius’ appearance. Not coincidentally, Tacitus uses the verb at the very beginning of the Annals in his characterization of Tiberius (1.7.7): postea cognitum est ad introspiciendas etiam procerum voluntates inductam dubitationem: nam verba vultus in crimen detorquens recondebat (‘It was realized later that his coyness had been assumed with the further object of gaining an insight into the feelings of the aristocracy: for all the while he was distorting words and looks into crimes and storing them in his memory’).
facetiis scurrilibus: Vatinius’ sense of humour was as deformed as his body. Again, the adjective scurrilibus is significant: it is a rare word and comes from the noun scurra, a buffoon or jester. ‘Tacitus is giving him a basinfull of his own medicine: comically, the name Vatinius itself originated as one of those peasanty Roman nicknames for physical debility, “Knock-Knees”. What for Nero’s pet is presumably a ‘trade-name’ apes (and trashes) an inherited aristocratic badge of honour. Nero’s next victim will go down for his pedigree name – and bona fide descent.’128
primo in contumelias adsumptus, dehinc optimi cuiusque criminatione eo usque valuit, ut gratia pecunia vi nocendi etiam malos praemineret: Vatinius was initially recruited to serve as an object of mockery, but managed to turn the victimization he suffered on account of his physical disabilities around by virtue of his sharp and evil wit. This structure primo … dehinc (‘first… then…’) suggests the unexpected transformation of Vatinius from jester to power-figure.
primo in contumelias adsumptus: In other words, Vatinius was taken in as a member of the court as a jester (not exactly a sign of his nobility of character or eminence). Jesters were, as in mediaeval times, a feature of the Roman imperial court.
dehinc optimi cuiusque criminatione … valuit: Tacitus was aware of the potential power and danger of the lowlier figures in the court. optimi cuiusque stands in implicit contrast to Vatinius himself, and there is evident disgust as Tacitus reports how a shoeshop-born, crippled jester from Beneventum brought about the downfall of noble Romans. The mention of criminatione (by accusing) tells us that Vatinius became a delator (‘informer’): under the one-man rule of imperial Rome, many men found riches and favour by informing on their fellow citizens and having them condemned.129 Informers populate Tacitus’ Annals from 1.74 onwards.
eo usque valuit, ut…: The strongly-phrased result clause (to the point that…) makes clear how dramatically his power grew by his ignoble informing.
ut gratia pecunia vi nocendi etiam malos praemineret: The asyndetic tricolon, which consists of three ablatives of means, enumerates what Vatinius had gained under Nero: (i) gratia, by seeming to be particularly loyal to the emperor and by inspiring fear in the other courtiers; (ii) pecunia, because the confiscated property of the accused was often given in part to the informer; and (iii) vi nocendi, since influence at court and financial resources under Nero’s regime yield great power to cause even further damage and harm. The punch-line comes at the end: Vatinius’ influence at court is such that he stands out even among the mali – in Tacitus’ imperial Rome that took some doing. The word (‘bad men/crooks’), which refers to Nero’s other courtiers, casts them as a thoroughly reprehensible lot, while the fact that Vatinius outdid ‘even’ (etiam) them makes clear how abysmal a character he was. Tacitus uses the verb praeminere (‘to become pre-eminent over’, ‘to excel’) with cutting sarcasm: like the English ‘pre-eminent’, it is usually a very positive word, implying superiority and nobility; but in the twisted world of Nero’s court, Vatinius became ‘pre-eminent’ by being even more appalling and immoral than the rest. Turning physical impairment into a double plus, the jester turned informer rose to be a powerful – towering – strongman (valuit, vi, praemineret).
35.1 Eius munus frequentanti Neroni ne inter voluptates quidem a sceleribus cessabatur. isdem quippe illis diebus Torquatus Silanus mori adigitur, quia super Iuniae familiae claritudinem divum Augustum abavum ferebat.
Nero, so Tacitus implies, was such an inveterate criminal that he planned his misdeed even during hours devoted to public entertainment. That he did not even cease from plotting murder while indulging in pleasure suggests that far from being mutually exclusive voluptas and scelus coincide in Nero’s case, highlighting the emperor’s savage and sadistic cruelty. The effect is enhanced by the use of the plural for both pleasures (voluptates) and crimes (a sceleribus): Nero is a perverse and criminal polymorph. Here the victim is Decimus Junius Silanus Torquatus, one of the consuls of AD 53 (at the end of the emperor Claudius’ reign: see Annals 12.58). Like Nero, he was a great-great-grandson of Augustus – a lineage that turned him into a potential rival to the throne (see Family Tree). The murder harks back to the very beginning of Tacitus’ Nero-narrative, which poignantly starts with the death of Silanus’ brother (Annals 13.1.1–2, cited in the Introduction, Section 5). Like mother, like son, who, now fully grown-up, no longer needs parental guidance to commit murder (having honed his skills by doing away with his own mother).
eius munus frequentanti Neroni … cessabatur: eius refers back to Vatinius. munus is the gladiatorial games that Vatinius put on; it is the accusative object of the present participle frequentanti, which modifies Neroni (a dative of agency with the passive cessabatur).
isdem quippe illis diebus Torquatus Silanus mori adigitur: Cassius Dio has the following account (62.27.2): ‘Junius Torquatus, a descendant of Augustus, was handed over for punishment on a remarkable charge. He had squandered his property rather prodigally, whether following his native bent or with the deliberate intention of not being very rich. Nero therefore declared that, as he lacked many things, he must be covetous of the goods of others, and consequently caused a fictitious charge to be brought against him of aspiring to the imperial power.’ As discussed above, he places the enforced suicide in the following year. Notice the sardonic pseudo-parallelism between Nero ‘driven by desire’ and Silanus ‘driven to death’ (adigebatur, 33.1 ~ adigit, 35.1).
quia super Iuniae familiae claritudinem divum Augustum abavum ferebat: The Junian family was one of Rome’s oldest and grandest patrician families (i.e. descended from Rome’s original senate). Its most famous scions were the two Bruti, one of whom expelled the kings from Rome in 509 BC, the other who led the assassins of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. The immense nobility and antiquity of his lineage make him an especially dangerous threat to Nero.
[Extra information:
As John Henderson reminds us, ‘the Junii Silani chapter in Syme’s Augustan Aristocracy is maybe the most powerful performance of prosopography – and of death by prosopography, or sentencing-by stemma-under-tyranny.’ And he elaborates: ‘Rhetorically mixing Junius Silanus in with the sordid jester’s fun and gladiatorial games gives Tacitus another chance to pump up the disgust: as if the bluest of blue nobles was not just liquidated but given the imperial thumbsdown – humiliated as star victim out in the arena among the condemned criminals and slaves. But this pathetically stark notice of elimination – earning no more coverage than that solo concert and those small beer games – also keeps the continuing story of the Silani (begun way back even before “great-great-grandfather” Augustus, and folding in the weight of the entire roll-call of Roman history since the republic began) as Nero’s prime alternatives-and-targets stoked: where the reign (and Annals’ Neronian hexad) began (prima novo principatu mors Iunii Silanus …, 13.1.1), all but ceased (in the Pisonian Conspiracy, where Piso feared the next Silanus in line as his likely rival for the throne, 15.52), and plunged into non-stop purge (16.7–9, that next-in-line goes down valiantly fighting the emperor’s hitmen): the nadir comes when a senator gets the three months April to June re-branded for Nero, Claudius and Germanicus, the last because the crimes of the Junii Torquati had made the name ‘June-ius’ unholy! (16.12) Finally, for the finale in our MSS, Thrasea Paetus provokes his martyrdom inter alia by public display of outrage for the Silani (16.22).’]
35.2 iussi accusatores obicere prodigum largitionibus, neque aliam spem quam in rebus novis esse: quin inter libertos habere, quos ab epistulis et libellis et rationibus appellet, nomina summae curae et meditamenta.
iussi accusatores: The emphatic first position of iussi enacts Nero’s decisive, unhesitating actions, ordering men to bring trumped-up charges against Torquatus.
obicere prodigum largitionibus: obicere introduces an indirect statement, with both the subject accusative (eum, sc. Torquatum) and the verb (esse) elided. prodigum stands in predicative position to the implied subject accusative: ‘…that he was excessively generous in his munificence.’ As Miller points out, these two well-chosen words ‘accuse him of being (a) poor, and so dangerous, as seeing in revolution his only hope of recouping his fortunes [cf. neque aliam spem quam in rebus novis esse], (b) responsible for his poverty, because of extravagance, and (c) over-generous, with overtones of bribery.’130 Excessive munificence is one of the hallmarks of the tyrant since it secures willing followers who hope for more, so Torquatus’ profligacy is turned into an implicit threat to Nero. Cassius Dio (cited above) suggests that Torquatus gave away his wealth as a safety measure, to pre-empt being murdered to fill the imperial purse. Under Nero, plain to see, it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
quin inter libertos: We are still hearing the charges made against him. The use of quin (‘moreover’) here helps the accusers to magnify his treason. All large Roman households had freedmen in senior positions who managed the business and administrative responsibilities of their masters.
ab epistulis et libellis et rationibus appellet: Under the Republic, these titles would have been common in noble households. However, with the imperial household becoming the centre of power, these titles became essentially offices of state, which in turn meant that their use by anyone else but the emperor could be interpreted as a sign that this person harboured hopes of usurping the throne. The polysyndeton again exaggerates the number of Torquatus’ crimes.
nomina summae curae et meditamenta: The genitive of quality summae curae (‘of the highest, i.e. imperial, administration’) goes with both nomina and meditamenta (a Tacitean neologism for meditatio). Nero’s henchmen charge Torquatus with putting on a dress-rehearsal for his ascent to the throne, which implies that he is plotting Nero’s overthrow.
35.3 tum intimus quisque libertorum vincti abreptique; et cum damnatio instaret, brachiorum venas Torquatus interscidit. secutaque Neronis oratio ex more, quamvis sontem et defensioni merito diffisum victurum tamen fuisse, si clementiam iudicis exspectasset.
intimus quisque libertorum vincti abreptique [sc. sunt]: Nero’s henchmen go for Torquatus’ key servants: intimus quisque (singular in form, but plural in sense – hence the verbs are in the plural) refers to those whom he held in closest confidence.
cum damnatio instaret, brachiorum venas Torquatus interscidit: Torquatus knew which way the wind was blowing and took the usual way out while the final verdict was still outstanding: ‘Suicide was employed (A. 6,29) to anticipate condemnation, and to ensure an easier death, proper burial and the validity of the accused’s will.’131 For special effect, Tacitus again delays subject (Torquatus) and verb (interscidit) till the very end, though readers would have known what was coming after the accusative object (placed up front) brachiorum venas.
secuta [sc. est] Neronis oratio: oratio implies that Nero spoke in an official setting, perhaps in front of the senate. The inversion of normal word order, which gives special prominence to the verb secuta, makes clear the immediacy of Nero’s statement, adding pathos and the irony that, straight after he all but forced Torquatus to suicide, the emperor claims that he would have spared his life if only he had waited.
ex more: This phrase is loaded with Tacitus’ dark cynicism and despair: this, he says, was common practice under the emperors. In Annals 2.31, the emperor Tiberius did and said the same thing after forcing a senator called Libo to commit suicide: it seems this was a method the emperor could use to achieve what he desired and still maintain a pretence of clemency.
quamvis sontem et defensioni merito diffisum victurum tamen fuisse, si clementiam iudicis exspectasset: Tacitus summarizes Nero’s oration in indirect speech: the subject accusative of the apodosis, sc. Torquatum (modified by sontem and diffisum in predicative position), is implied; the verb is victurum fuisse. Of course Nero does not concede that Torquatus was innocent; rather, he goes out of his way to stress that he was guilty. First, we have the emphatically placed sontem; then comes the comment that he was right to lose confidence in his defence (defensioni merito diffisum). Put differently, Nero here twists Torquatus’ suicide into a confession of guilt. This serves him as foil to promote his mercy: he would have pardoned a man whom he knew to be plotting against him. After what has just been said, Tacitus is leading his reader to say, ‘Yeah right!’
clementiam iudicis: Emperors liked to be able to boast mercy as one of their virtues (remember Nero’s rapprochement with Thrasea at 15.23), and Nero’s tutor Seneca had written a treatise entitled de Clementia, ‘On Mercy’, as a guide for Nero in his boyhood. The iudex Nero mentions is he himself, either because some trials of this type were held intra cubiculum (i.e. behind closed doors in the imperial palace): see Annals 11.2 for an example; or because he could have vetoed the capital punishment handed out by a senatorial jury (as he wished to do – but was pre-empted by Thrasea – in the case of Antistius: see Annals 14.49, cited in the Introduction, Section 6). That Tacitus presents Nero as referring to himself in the third person generates more of that ironic tone with which Tacitus has imbued this little story. ‘Nero said that he would have been saved, if only he’d waited for a fair, merciful judge… like Nero!’ At the same time, as John Henderson points out to us, Nero might well have acted on the principle nomen est omen (‘the name is a portent’) in driving Iunius Silanus Torquatus into suicide: ‘Besides the hallowed/dangerous name of Iunius, our Silanus sports the legendary badge of honour “Torquatus” originally acquired by T. Manlius in solo victory over a champion Gaul (followed by decapitation and removal of his golden “torque”, or “necklace” > hence “Torquatus”); besides the degradation of this pre-sentencing suicide, there is the force of the legend’s sequel to reckon with, as marked by the Roman proverb “imperia Manliana”, where Torquatus now in command did not celebrate his son’s copycat solo combat victory but instead had him executed for leaving the ranks without first asking permission (see Livy 8.7.8–22 for the gruesome details). Like everyone else, Nero knew perfectly well that “clemency” was not supposed to run in, or apply to, this family!’