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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Tacitus' "The Annals & The Histories" stands as a monumental chronicle of the Roman Empire's imperial governance and civil strife from the death of Augustus in AD 14 to the year 70. Written in an elegant and concise style, Tacitus employs a meticulous narrative technique, blending historical rigor with a profound psychological insight into the motivations of political actors. The text is distinguished by its moral seriousness and the keen observation of power dynamics, presenting a vivid depiction of the tumultuous period characterized by political intrigue, corruption, and the fluctuations of power, all enriched by Tacitus' distinctive prose that interweaves dramatic narrative with astute analysis, reflecting the complexities of human ambition and ethical dilemmas in governance. Tacitus, a senator and historian of the first century, was profoundly affected by the political landscape of his time, marked by the transition from the Republic to an Empire. His life immersed in political and social spheres of Rome provided him with the insights and perspectives instrumental in crafting a narrative both reflective of his society's moral decay and a cautionary tale regarding absolute power. He grappled with themes of tyranny, the loss of republican values, and the integrity of history itself, making his works both personal and profoundly political. This essential text is recommended for readers interested in the intricate workings of power and governance, historians seeking rich narratives of the past, and anyone desiring to understand the complexities of moral integrity amidst the backdrop of political ambition. Tacitus' reflections and interpretations invite readers to ponder the cyclical nature of history, establishing the significance of his work in any comprehensive study of Roman history. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Annals & The Histories
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection brings together Tacitus’ two major surviving historical narratives, The Annals and The Histories, in a single, coherent volume. Read together, these works represent the core of Tacitus’ mature historiography and preserve his most extensive account of Rome under the early emperors. The purpose of assembling them is not to create a new story, but to present a continuous engagement with imperial power as Tacitus chose to examine it: through a concentrated, literary history that seeks to record events, interpret public life, and render political experience with a moral and rhetorical intensity distinctive to his voice.
The Annals and The Histories are works of history, composed in prose and organized as sequential books. They are not novels, memoirs, or drama; they are narratives that treat public events, the actions of leaders, and the workings of institutions. Tacitus writes as a senator and a trained orator, and his histories are shaped by the expectations of Roman historiography: attention to the conduct of the ruling class, interest in causes and consequences, and a sustained concern for the relationship between personal character and political outcome. In this collection, the “genre” is therefore historical writing at its most literary and analytical.
The Histories opens with the premise of Rome in crisis after the death of Nero, when political authority became violently contested. Tacitus organizes his account around the turbulence of civil conflict and the uncertainties that attend abrupt changes of regime. The work aims to capture how quickly loyalties can shift and how public order can fracture when legitimacy is disputed. Without anticipating the later turns of the narrative, the initial setting establishes the terms of Tacitus’ inquiry: how power is seized, defended, and narrated, and how the institutions and traditions of Rome strain under the pressures of rapid, militarized political change.
The Annals returns to an earlier span of imperial rule, taking as its premise the consolidation and development of the principate after Augustus. Tacitus’ method is to track the unfolding of government year by year, tracing the surface of public events while probing the tensions beneath. The work’s focus is not on a single protagonist but on the complex interplay between emperor, senate, elites, and the broader state. By assembling The Annals alongside The Histories, the collection allows readers to encounter Tacitus’ sustained examination of empire across different moments: relative stability, accumulating pressures, and the eventual exposure of fault lines.
Although The Annals and The Histories are separate works, they belong together in scope and intention. Tacitus is not simply compiling information; he is composing a literary history that aims to make political reality intelligible. His narratives are shaped by selection, emphasis, and interpretation, and they repeatedly return to the question of how a society understands itself under changing forms of rule. The effect of reading the two works together is to see a consistent project: the description of imperial Rome as a system, the depiction of its leading figures within that system, and the evaluation of what is gained and what is lost when authority concentrates.
Tacitus’ style is among the most recognizable in Latin prose: compressed, pointed, and deliberately weighted. He is capable of brisk narrative movement and of arresting pauses that linger over motives, reputations, and the atmosphere of decision. His sentences often carry a sense of controlled tension, as if the language itself were measuring the cost of what it describes. This rhetorical discipline is not ornamental; it serves his historical purpose by sharpening contrasts and making political dynamics visible. In this collection, his stylistic hallmark becomes a unifying thread, linking different episodes through a consistent tone of scrutiny and moral seriousness.
A central theme of both works is the nature of power and the conditions under which it is exercised. Tacitus repeatedly directs attention to the mechanisms by which authority is established, reinforced, and contested, whether through law, military force, patronage, or public performance. He is alert to the ways in which personal relationships become political instruments and to the vulnerability of institutions when fear or ambition governs behavior. Without reducing events to a single cause, he keeps returning to questions of responsibility, complicity, and the pressures that shape public conduct. The collection thus presents a sustained meditation on governance in an imperial setting.
Another unifying concern is the relationship between public speech and political reality. As a historian formed within a culture of rhetoric, Tacitus treats words—formal deliberation, reported persuasion, and public narrative—as part of the historical record’s fabric. He is attentive to how reputation is made, how accusations function, and how official accounts can both reveal and conceal. This interest helps explain why his histories are more than chronologies: they are analyses of how a political community represents itself, how competing versions of events arise, and how the struggle over meaning accompanies the struggle over control.
Tacitus also explores the strains placed on civic life under concentrated authority. Across both works, the senate and the elite appear not merely as background but as an arena in which tradition meets the demands of imperial rule. Questions of autonomy, duty, and survival become sharply defined when the boundaries of permissible action are uncertain. Tacitus’ history registers the psychological as well as the institutional: how fear can alter behavior, how ambition can distort judgment, and how the pursuit of security can erode older expectations of frankness and public responsibility. These themes connect the works into a single ethical and political inquiry.
The scope of this collection also reflects the survival of the texts themselves. Both The Annals and The Histories are transmitted in incomplete form, and what remains is therefore at once substantial and fragmentary. Presenting them together underscores the magnitude of what Tacitus achieved and the limits imposed by historical transmission. It also invites a careful mode of reading in which the reader attends to what is present—structure, method, and recurring preoccupations—without treating gaps as invitations to conjecture. The collection’s purpose is to preserve and foreground the surviving corpus of Tacitus’ principal historical narratives as it is known.
The lasting significance of Tacitus’ work rests on the combination of historical ambition and literary force. His narratives have shaped how later generations imagine early imperial Rome, not because they provide a neutral ledger, but because they offer an incisive model of political analysis expressed through artful prose. He shows how a historian can be simultaneously a narrator of events and an interpreter of power, and his attention to moral complexity keeps the past from hardening into mere exempla. Reading these works together emphasizes his distinctive achievement: a history that scrutinizes both actions and the conditions that make them possible.
As a single-author collection, The Annals & The Histories offers an encounter with Tacitus at full scale, presenting two major works that are unified by genre, method, and theme. The reader moves through imperial Rome as Tacitus depicts it: a world of institutional ritual and sudden violence, of public authority and private calculation, of continuity claimed and continuity broken. The collection is designed to be read as a sustained investigation rather than as isolated episodes, allowing Tacitus’ voice—skeptical, disciplined, and intensely attentive—to emerge across the breadth of his surviving historical project and to demonstrate why his histories remain enduringly influential.
Author Biography
Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a Roman senator and historian active in the late first and early second centuries CE, a period shaped by civil war, the consolidation of imperial rule, and intense debate about liberty and authority. He is valued as one of Latin literature’s greatest historians for a style that is compressed, pointed, and morally charged, and for narratives that probe how power works in practice. His major surviving historical works are The Histories and The Annals, which together offer a sustained account of the early Roman Empire and the political culture that sustained it.
Tacitus’ early life is imperfectly documented, and even his birthplace is uncertain, but his public emergence reflects the elite education typical of a Roman senatorial career. He became known as a gifted orator, trained in the rhetorical culture that prized argument, character portrayal, and the strategic arrangement of facts—skills that later shaped his historical writing. The intellectual environment of his time combined respect for classical models with the pressures of speaking and writing under emperors. In Tacitus, rhetorical technique becomes a tool for analysis: speeches, portraits, and sharp contrasts are used to explore motives and the costs of political conformity.
His career advanced through the standard sequence of high offices open to senators, and he reached the consulship late in the first century. He also served in provincial administration, experience that informed his grasp of the empire’s scale and the mechanisms by which Rome governed distant communities. Tacitus wrote as an insider to imperial politics, familiar with the Senate’s procedures and the complex choreography of imperial court life. That proximity did not translate into complacency. Across his historical narratives, he repeatedly emphasizes the erosion of frank speech, the dependence of reputation on favor, and the uneasy compromises required to survive under autocratic power.
Tacitus’ The Histories begins with the dramatic year 69 CE, when successive claimants fought for the throne after Nero’s death, and it continues into the early Flavian period. Although the surviving text is incomplete, what remains shows his method at full strength: rapid, consequential scenes; scrutiny of military allegiance and imperial legitimacy; and an interest in how rumor, fear, and opportunism propel events. The work is not simply a chronicle of battles and successions. It is also an inquiry into how institutions behave under stress, how leaders manufacture authority, and how violence and uncertainty reshape public life.
In The Annals, Tacitus turns back to an earlier era, narrating the Julio-Claudian emperors from the accession of Tiberius in 14 CE onward; the extant books are also incomplete. Here his attention often centers on the Senate’s changing role, the hazards of proximity to the emperor, and the moral and psychological effects of sustained surveillance and accusation. Without reducing history to a single cause, he treats individual character and systemic incentives as intertwined. Court politics, treason trials, and public spectacle appear alongside episodes of provincial administration and crisis, building a picture of an empire whose stability could rest on intimidation as much as consent.
Tacitus’ outlook is most clearly seen in recurrent themes rather than explicit programs. He writes with a strong sense of moral judgment, yet he is attentive to ambiguity, competing testimonies, and the ways in which fear distorts memory. His histories examine how power can hollow out traditional virtues and how language itself can become compromised when truth is dangerous. At the same time, he shows respect for administrative competence and for the difficult choices faced by those trying to act responsibly within constrained circumstances. The resulting tone—grave, skeptical, and intensely analytical—helped define what later readers recognized as a distinctively “Tacitean” vision of politics.
Tacitus spent his later years writing and revising these large-scale histories; the details of his final decades are limited, and the date of his death is uncertain, but it likely fell in the early second century. Over time, The Histories and The Annals became central texts for understanding imperial Rome and for thinking about the relationship between freedom, security, and authority. Readers across centuries have turned to Tacitus for his portraits of rulers and institutions, his warning about the fragility of civic norms, and his ability to make political experience intelligible without simplification. His work remains influential in historical writing and political thought, where his insights continue to inform debates about governance and accountability.
Historical Context
Publius Cornelius Tacitus wrote at the height of the Roman Empire, when republican institutions survived largely as forms under imperial rule. Born around the mid-50s CE and active into the early 2nd century, he built a senatorial career amid the consolidation of autocracy after the civil wars of the 1st century BCE. His major histories, The Histories and The Annals, narrate the political center of Rome from the crisis year 69 CE backward into the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The collection reflects how elite governance, public speech, and moral authority were reshaped by the principate and by the memory of repeated civil conflict.
Tacitus’s career unfolded under several emperors, and his access to power shaped his historical perspective. He served under the Flavian and early Antonine regimes, holding offices that culminated in the consulship in 97 CE. This trajectory placed him within the senatorial order that The Annals and The Histories repeatedly portray as both participant in and victim of imperial politics. The works look closely at how emperors managed the Senate, armies, and populace through patronage, trials, and public spectacle. Tacitus’s vantage point as a senator-historian also conditioned his attention to debates, decrees, and the fragile boundary between legitimate authority and coercion.
The periods covered in the two works span from the death of Augustus in 14 CE through the civil war of 69 CE and into the early Flavian years. The Annals addresses the Julio-Claudian principate, especially Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, and the political culture that formed around them. The Histories begins with the end of the Julio-Claudian line and the succession struggles that followed Nero’s death in 68 CE. By treating adjacent eras, Tacitus could juxtapose long-term structural pressures—succession, military loyalty, and court politics—with moments of rapid collapse. The collection thus frames Rome’s imperial system as stable in appearance yet repeatedly tested by crises of legitimacy.
A central historical backdrop is the transformation from Augustus’s settlement to an entrenched imperial monarchy. Augustus had balanced traditional republican offices with personal authority, and subsequent emperors inherited both the machinery of governance and the tension between tradition and reality. The Annals, beginning with 14 CE, depicts a Rome where the Senate continued to meet and legislate, yet decisions increasingly flowed from the imperial household and its advisers. Tacitus repeatedly connects this system to questions of freedom of speech, the dangers of flattery, and the use of law as a political instrument. His narrative method highlights the gap between constitutional language and the actual distribution of power.
Tiberius’s reign, a major portion of The Annals, provides historical context for themes of dissimulation, surveillance, and legal repression. The period is known for the prominence of prosecutions for maiestas (treason), a legal category that could be applied broadly and that became entangled with political rivalry. Tacitus presents the Senate as complicit in many of these dynamics, recording debates and votes that reveal how fear and ambition distorted deliberation. The increasing influence of the imperial court, including freedmen and favorites, reflected social shifts within the governing elite. The depiction of this era underscores how personal relationships and the emperor’s moods could reshape public policy.
The rise and fall of Sejanus in the early 30s CE, documented in The Annals, illustrates the capacity of a powerful minister to dominate imperial administration. Historically, Sejanus, as prefect of the Praetorian Guard, expanded the political weight of that institution and became central to succession anxieties. Tacitus uses the episode to show how the Guard’s proximity to the emperor could influence trials, appointments, and elite security. It also demonstrates the vulnerability of senators and equestrians to sudden reversals when imperial favor shifted. More broadly, the narrative reflects how Rome’s capital became a theater where information, rumor, and access determined survival. These patterns recur later in the collection during succession conflicts.
Caligula’s short reign (37–41 CE) and Claudius’s longer one (41–54 CE) offered Tacitus further material on the personalization of power. The period saw the Praetorians’ role in securing emperors become more visible, notably in Claudius’s accession after Caligula’s assassination. The Annals links court intrigue to broader administrative realities, including the growing reliance on imperial freedmen and household bureaucracies. Claudius’s government expanded legal and provincial administration, and Tacitus places emphasis on how such mechanisms could be used for both governance and factional struggle. The recurrent theme is that institutional continuity did not prevent sharp changes in policy when driven by palace politics.
Nero’s reign (54–68 CE) in The Annals sits at the intersection of cultural display, fiscal pressure, and political violence. Tacitus records the growing role of performance culture at court and the ways elite norms were challenged by imperial behavior. The period included major urban and provincial strains, and it ended with revolts that exposed the fragility of succession without clear legitimacy. The narrative context includes high-profile prosecutions and executions among the senatorial class, contributing to the atmosphere of fear that Tacitus portrays. By tracing escalating instability, The Annals prepares the ground for The Histories’ account of open civil war. The combined works thus connect court-centered dynamics to empire-wide consequences.
The Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE and the subsequent rebuilding provide a crucial context for Tacitus’s attention to rumor, blame, and state response. In The Annals, Tacitus reports the disaster and the controversies that followed, including measures of urban reconstruction and public relief. The episode also illustrates how a crisis could be politicized, with public opinion, elite commentary, and imperial authority intersecting. Tacitus’s treatment emphasizes the difficulty of establishing trustworthy accounts amid propaganda and fear. This concern with evidentiary uncertainty is a broader intellectual backdrop for Roman historiography, where authors weighed sources, senatorial records, and oral reports. The fire narrative foreshadows the later turbulence in which competing versions of events multiplied.
Provincial administration and frontier pressures form an essential background across both works. The Annals includes significant material on Germany, Britain, and the eastern frontier, reflecting the empire’s reliance on professional armies stationed far from Rome. Campaigns and governorships created opportunities for commanders to build loyalty among troops, a factor that became decisive in 69 CE. Tacitus’s attention to mutinies and discipline early in the imperial period highlights a persistent challenge: keeping armies obedient to distant civilian authority. The collection repeatedly links military events to political legitimacy, showing how emperors required both senatorial acceptance and military support. This dual dependence shaped the empire’s stability and its recurring succession crises.
Religious practice and the management of cults and omens were deeply embedded in Roman political culture, influencing how events were interpreted. Tacitus reports senatorial decrees about rites, prodigies, and the regulation of foreign cults, reflecting the state’s role in maintaining public religion. These references serve as context for how Romans understood legitimacy and divine favor, even as elite skepticism could coexist with public ritual. The works also demonstrate how emperors used religious honors and ceremonial to reinforce authority. At the same time, Tacitus’s approach often highlights how such language could cloak political motives. This interplay of belief, ceremony, and power forms a recurring cultural framework for episodes of crisis and consolidation.
The year 69 CE, the “Year of the Four Emperors,” is the dramatic hinge of The Histories and a key historical context for the whole collection. After Nero’s death, competing claimants—Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian—were proclaimed by different armies, exposing the empire’s dependence on military allegiance. Tacitus narrates how rapid shifts in support, battles in Italy, and political bargaining in Rome undermined any sense of orderly succession. The crisis demonstrated that the principate could be transferred by force and acclamation as much as by legal forms. It also intensified the Senate’s precarious position, as senators navigated survival under successive regimes. The Histories uses this instability to explore the costs of civil war for civic life and provincial security.
The Flavian rise, especially Vespasian’s accession and consolidation, provides the immediate post-crisis context for Tacitus’s portrayal of reconstruction after civil war. Historically, the Flavians pursued fiscal stabilization, military reorganization, and public building to restore confidence, while also managing the memory of recent conflict. Tacitus’s narrative depicts how new rulers sought legitimacy through victories, public order, and alliances with key institutions. The period also included heightened attention to loyalty and the punishment of perceived opponents, reflecting the lingering insecurity of a new dynasty. For Tacitus, the Flavian settlement was not simply a return to normal but a reconfiguration of power shaped by the trauma of 69. The Histories thereby links the end of civil war to the beginning of a more centralized imperial political culture.
Domitian’s reign (81–96 CE), though not the main narrative focus of the surviving parts of either work, strongly shaped Tacitus’s authorial environment. Ancient sources describe increased tension between emperor and senatorial elite, including political trials and executions, contributing to an atmosphere of caution. Tacitus, like other senators, lived through a period when public speech and historical writing could carry risks. This experience helps explain the moral urgency and attention to coercion in his accounts of earlier emperors, without requiring claims about his private motives. The post-Domitian transition, culminating in Nerva’s accession in 96 CE, created a context in which senators could more openly reflect on imperial abuses. Tacitus’s major historical projects belong to this era of reassessment and recovery of public discourse.
The broader intellectual context includes the traditions of Roman historiography and rhetoric, which emphasized moral evaluation and the political uses of memory. Tacitus drew on earlier historians and on official records such as senatorial proceedings, while also participating in a culture where oratory shaped elite identity. The works’ close attention to speeches and debates reflects this rhetorical education, even when the exact words are understood as crafted representations rather than transcripts. In Tacitus’s Rome, literature also served as a venue for coded political reflection, especially after periods of censorship or fear. This helps explain why The Annals and The Histories often connect character, language, and power. The collection thus belongs to a wider movement in which elite writers assessed the imperial system’s effects on virtue, truth-telling, and civic participation.
Cultural and technological shifts relevant to these themes include the expansion of imperial bureaucracy and communications networks that bound the Mediterranean together. Roads, sea routes, and the cursus publicus (state courier system) enabled faster transmission of news and orders, but also accelerated rumor and reaction during crises like 69 CE. The centralization of archives, legal procedures, and provincial reporting strengthened the state while increasing opportunities for surveillance and manipulation. Tacitus’s narratives repeatedly show how information—letters, denunciations, and dispatches—became a political weapon. The growth of the imperial household as an administrative center also changed social mobility patterns, elevating freedmen and equestrians in ways that unsettled older senatorial expectations. These developments provide concrete background for his recurring focus on administration, secrecy, and the contested ownership of “truth.”
The Jewish Revolt (66–73 CE) and the Flavian victory, including the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, form part of the wider imperial landscape surrounding The Histories. Although Tacitus’s surviving text is incomplete, the conflict is historically central to Flavian legitimacy, celebrated in Roman triumph and monumental building such as the Flavian Amphitheater begun under Vespasian. The war illustrates how provincial unrest, religious identity, and harsh military reprisals intersected with dynastic propaganda. In Tacitus’s approach, imperial rule is tested not only in Rome but also at the peripheries where governors and generals exercised immense power. The inclusion of provincial revolts and ethnographic observations aligns with Roman interest in defining “Rome” against its subjects. Such material provides context for how empire-wide violence fed back into politics at the center, especially in years of contested succession.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Annals
A tightly argued chronicle of Rome under the early emperors, tracing how personal ambition, court politics, and institutional decay shape public life. Tacitus emphasizes the mechanisms of power—informers, patronage, fear, and spectacle—showing how decisions made in private reverberate across the state. The tone is incisive and morally alert, with sustained attention to the tension between traditional ideals of liberty and the realities of autocracy.
The Histories
An account of imperial crisis and rapid political turnover, focused on how civil conflict and competing claims to legitimacy fracture the Roman world. Tacitus follows shifting alliances and battlefield outcomes while probing the motives of leaders and the volatility of crowds and armies. The writing is urgent and skeptical, foregrounding contingency, propaganda, and the costs of violence as Rome’s governing order is tested.
The Annals & The Histories
The Annals
Table of Contents
BOOK I. A.D. 14, 15
Rome at the beginning was ruled by kings. Freedom and the consulship were established by Lucius Brutus. Dictatorships were held for a temporary crisis. The power of the decemvirs did not last beyond two years, nor was the consular jurisdiction of the military tribunes of long duration. The despotisms of Cinna and Sulla were brief; the rule of Pompeius and of Crassus soon yielded before Caesar; the arms of Lepidus and Antonius before Augustus; who, when the world was wearied by civil strife, subjected it to empire under the title of “Prince.” But the successes and reverses of the old Roman people have been recorded by famous historians; and fine intellects were not wanting to describe the times of Augustus, till growing sycophancy scared them away. The histories of Tiberius, Caius, Claudius, and Nero, while they were in power, were falsified through terror, and after their death were written under the irritation of a recent hatred. Hence my purpose is to relate a few facts about Augustus — more particularly his last acts, then the reign of Tiberius, and all which follows, without either bitterness or partiality, from any motives to which I am far removed.
When after the destruction of Brutus and Cassius there was no longer any army of the Commonwealth, when Pompeius was crushed in Sicily, and when, with Lepidus pushed aside and Antonius slain, even the Julian faction had only Caesar left to lead it, then, dropping the title of triumvir, and giving out that he was a Consul, and was satisfied with a tribune’s authority for the protection of the people, Augustus won over the soldiers with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and all men with the sweets of repose, and so grew greater by degrees, while he concentrated in himself the functions of the Senate, the magistrates, and the laws. He was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle, or in the proscription, while the remaining nobles, the readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion, so that, aggrandised by revolution, they preferred the safety of the present to the dangerous past. Nor did the provinces dislike that condition of affairs, for they distrusted the government of the Senate and the people, because of the rivalries between the leading men and the rapacity of the officials, while the protection of the laws was unavailing, as they were continually deranged by violence, intrigue, and finally by corruption.
Augustus meanwhile, as supports to his despotism, raised to the pontificate and curule aedileship Claudius Marcellus, his sister’s son, while a mere stripling, and Marcus Agrippa, of humble birth, a good soldier, and one who had shared his victory, to two consecutive consulships, and as Marcellus soon afterwards died, he also accepted him as his son-in-law. Tiberius Nero and Claudius Drusus, his stepsons, he honoured with imperial tides, although his own family was as yet undiminished. For he had admitted the children of Agrippa, Caius and Lucius, into the house of the Caesars; and before they had yet laid aside the dress of boyhood he had most fervently desired, with an outward show of reluctance, that they should be entitled “princes of the youth,” and be consuls-elect. When Agrippa died, and Lucius Caesar as he was on his way to our armies in Spain, and Caius while returning from Armenia, still suffering from a wound, were prematurely cut off by destiny, or by their step-mother Livia’s treachery, Drusus too having long been dead, Nero remained alone of the stepsons, and in him everything tended to centre. He was adopted as a son, as a colleague in empire and a partner in the tribunitian power, and paraded through all the armies, no longer through his mother’s secret intrigues, but at her open suggestion. For she had gained such a hold on the aged Augustus that he drove out as an exile into the island of Planasia, his only grandson, Agrippa Postumus, who, though devoid of worthy qualities, and having only the brute courage of physical strength, had not been convicted of any gross offence. And yet Augustus had appointed Germanicus, Drusus’s offspring, to the command of eight legions on the Rhine, and required Tiberius to adopt him, although Tiberius had a son, now a young man, in his house; but he did it that he might have several safeguards to rest on. He had no war at the time on his hands except against the Germans, which was rather to wipe out the disgrace of the loss of Quintilius Varus and his army than out of an ambition to extend the empire, or for any adequate recompense. At home all was tranquil, and there were magistrates with the same titles; there was a younger generation, sprung up since the victory of Actium, and even many of the older men had been born during the civil wars. How few were left who had seen the republic!
Thus the State had been revolutionised, and there was not a vestige left of the old sound morality[1q]. Stript of equality, all looked up to the commands of a sovereign without the least apprehension for the present, while Augustus in the vigour of life, could maintain his own position, that of his house, and the general tranquillity. When in advanced old age, he was worn out by a sickly frame, and the end was near and new prospects opened, a few spoke in vain of the blessings of freedom, but most people dreaded and some longed for war. The popular gossip of the large majority fastened itself variously on their future masters. “Agrippa was savage, and had been exasperated by insult, and neither from age nor experience in affairs was equal to so great a burden. Tiberius Nero was of mature years, and had established his fame in war, but he had the old arrogance inbred in the Claudian family, and many symptoms of a cruel temper, though they were repressed, now and then broke out. He had also from earliest infancy been reared in an imperial house; consulships and triumphs had been heaped on him in his younger days; even in the years which, on the pretext of seclusion he spent in exile at Rhodes, he had had no thoughts but of wrath, hypocrisy, and secret sensuality. There was his mother too with a woman caprice. They must, it seemed, be subject to a female and to two striplings besides, who for a while would burden, and some day rend asunder the State.”
While these and like topics were discussed, the infirmities of Augustus increased, and some suspected guilt on his wife’s part. For a rumour had gone abroad that a few months before he had sailed to Planasia on a visit to Agrippa, with the knowledge of some chosen friends, and with one companion, Fabius Maximus; that many tears were shed on both sides, with expressions of affection, and that thus there was a hope of the young man being restored to the home of his grandfather. This, it was said, Maximus had divulged to his wife Marcia, she again to Livia. All was known to Caesar, and when Maximus soon afterwards died, by a death some thought to be self-inflicted, there were heard at his funeral wailings from Marcia, in which she reproached herself for having been the cause of her husband’s destruction. Whatever the fact was, Tiberius as he was just entering Illyria was summoned home by an urgent letter from his mother, and it has not been thoroughly ascertained whether at the city of Nola he found Augustus still breathing or quite lifeless. For Livia had surrounded the house and its approaches with a strict watch, and favourable bulletins were published from time to time, till, provision having been made for the demands of the crisis, one and the same report told men that Augustus was dead and that Tiberius Nero was master of the State.
The first crime of the new reign was the murder of Postumus Agrippa[2q]. Though he was surprised and unarmed, a centurion of the firmest resolution despatched him with difficulty. Tiberius gave no explanation of the matter to the Senate; he pretended that there were directions from his father ordering the tribune in charge of the prisoner not to delay the slaughter of Agrippa, whenever he should himself have breathed his last. Beyond a doubt, Augustus had often complained of the young man’s character, and had thus succeeded in obtaining the sanction of a decree of the Senate for his banishment. But he never was hard-hearted enough to destroy any of his kinsfolk, nor was it credible that death was to be the sentence of the grandson in order that the stepson might feel secure. It was more probable that Tiberius and Livia, the one from fear, the other from a stepmother’s enmity, hurried on the destruction of a youth whom they suspected and hated. When the centurion reported, according to military custom, that he had executed the command, Tiberius replied that he had not given the command, and that the act must be justified to the Senate.
As soon as Sallustius Crispus who shared the secret (he had, in fact, sent the written order to the tribune) knew this, fearing that the charge would be shifted on himself, and that his peril would be the same whether he uttered fiction or truth, he advised Livia not to divulge the secrets of her house or the counsels of friends, or any services performed by the soldiers, nor to let Tiberius weaken the strength of imperial power by referring everything to the Senate, for “the condition,” he said, “of holding empire is that an account cannot be balanced unless it be rendered to one person.”
Meanwhile at Rome people plunged into slavery — consuls, senators, knights. The higher a man’s rank, the more eager his hypocrisy, and his looks the more carefully studied, so as neither to betray joy at the decease of one emperor nor sorrow at the rise of another, while he mingled delight and lamentations with his flattery. Sextus Pompeius and Sextus Apuleius, the consuls, were the first to swear allegiance to Tiberius Caesar, and in their presence the oath was taken by Seius Strabo and Caius Turranius, respectively the commander of the praetorian cohorts and the superintendent of the corn supplies. Then the Senate, the soldiers and the people did the same. For Tiberius would inaugurate everything with the consuls, as though the ancient constitution remained, and he hesitated about being emperor. Even the proclamation by which he summoned the senators to their chamber, he issued merely with the title of Tribune, which he had received under Augustus. The wording of the proclamation was brief, and in a very modest tone. “He would,” it said, “provide for the honours due to his father, and not leave the lifeless body, and this was the only public duty he now claimed.”
As soon, however, as Augustus was dead, he had given the watchword to the praetorian cohorts, as commander-in-chief. He had the guard under arms, with all the other adjuncts of a court; soldiers attended him to the forum; soldiers went with him to the Senate House. He sent letters to the different armies, as though supreme power was now his, and showed hesitation only when he spoke in the Senate. His chief motive was fear that Germanicus, who had at his disposal so many legions, such vast auxiliary forces of the allies, and such wonderful popularity, might prefer the possession to the expectation of empire. He looked also at public opinion, wishing to have the credit of having been called and elected by the State rather than of having crept into power through the intrigues of a wife and a dotard’s adoption. It was subsequently understood that he assumed a wavering attitude, to test likewise the temper of the nobles. For he would twist a word or a look into a crime and treasure it up in his memory.
On the first day of the Senate he allowed nothing to be discussed but the funeral of Augustus, whose will, which was brought in by the Vestal Virgins, named as his heirs Tiberius and Livia. The latter was to be admitted into the Julian family with the name of Augusta; next in expectation were the grand and great-grandchildren. In the third place, he had named the chief men of the State, most of whom he hated, simply out of ostentation and to win credit with posterity. His legacies were not beyond the scale of a private citizen, except a bequest of forty-three million five hundred thousand sesterces “to the people and populace of Rome,” of one thousand to every praetorian soldier, and of three hundred to every man in the legionary cohorts composed of Roman citizens.
Next followed a deliberation about funeral honours. Of these the most imposing were thought fitting. The procession was to be conducted through “the gate of triumph,” on the motion of Gallus Asinius; the titles of the laws passed, the names of the nations conquered by Augustus were to be borne in front, on that of Lucius Arruntius. Messala Valerius further proposed that the oath of allegiance to Tiberius should be yearly renewed, and when Tiberius asked him whether it was at his bidding that he had brought forward this motion, he replied that he had proposed it spontaneously, and that in whatever concerned the State he would use only his own discretion, even at the risk of offending. This was the only style of adulation which yet remained. The Senators unanimously exclaimed that the body ought to be borne on their shoulders to the funeral pile. The emperor left the point to them with disdainful moderation, he then admonished the people by a proclamation not to indulge in that tumultuous enthusiasm which had distracted the funeral of the Divine Julius, or express a wish that Augustus should be burnt in the Forum instead of in his appointed resting-place in the Campus Martius.
On the day of the funeral soldiers stood round as a guard, amid much ridicule from those who had either themselves witnessed or who had heard from their parents of the famous day when slavery was still something fresh, and freedom had been resought in vain, when the slaying of Caesar, the Dictator, seemed to some the vilest, to others, the most glorious of deeds. “Now,” they said, “an aged sovereign, whose power had lasted long, who had provided his heirs with abundant means to coerce the State, requires forsooth the defence of soldiers that his burial may be undisturbed.”
Then followed much talk about Augustus himself, and many expressed an idle wonder that the same day marked the beginning of his assumption of empire and the close of his life, and, again, that he had ended his days at Nola in the same house and room as his father Octavius. People extolled too the number of his consulships, in which he had equalled Valerius Corvus and Caius Marius combined, the continuance for thirty-seven years of the tribunitian power, the title of Imperator twenty-one times earned, and his other honours which had either frequently repeated or were wholly new. Sensible men, however, spoke variously of his life with praise and censure. Some said “that dutiful feeling towards a father, and the necessities of the State in which laws had then no place, drove him into civil war, which can neither be planned nor conducted on any right principles. He had often yielded to Antonius, while he was taking vengeance on his father’s murderers, often also to Lepidus. When the latter sank into feeble dotage and the former had been ruined by his profligacy, the only remedy for his distracted country was the rule of a single man. Yet the State had been organized under the name neither of a kingdom nor a dictatorship, but under that of a prince. The ocean and remote rivers were the boundaries of the empire; the legions, provinces, fleets, all things were linked together; there was law for the citizens; there was respect shown to the allies. The capital had been embellished on a grand scale; only in a few instances had he resorted to force, simply to secure general tranquillity.”
It was said, on the other hand, “that filial duty and State necessity were merely assumed as a mask. It was really from a lust of sovereignty that he had excited the veterans by bribery, had, when a young man and a subject, raised an army, tampered with the Consul’s legions, and feigned an attachment to the faction of Pompeius. Then, when by a decree of the Senate he had usurped the high functions and authority of Praetor when Hirtius and Pansa were slain — whether they were destroyed by the enemy, or Pansa by poison infused into a wound, Hirtius by his own soldiers and Caesar’s treacherous machinations — he at once possessed himself of both their armies, wrested the consulate from a reluctant Senate, and turned against the State the arms with which he had been intrusted against Antonius. Citizens were proscribed, lands divided, without so much as the approval of those who executed these deeds. Even granting that the deaths of Cassius and of the Bruti were sacrifices to a hereditary enmity (though duty requires us to waive private feuds for the sake of the public welfare), still Pompeius had been deluded by the phantom of peace, and Lepidus by the mask of friendship. Subsequently, Antonius had been lured on by the treaties of Tarentum and Brundisium, and by his marriage with the sister, and paid by his death the penalty of a treacherous alliance. No doubt, there was peace after all this, but it was a peace stained with blood; there were the disasters of Lollius and Varus, the murders at Rome of the Varros, Egnatii, and Juli.”
The domestic life too of Augustus was not spared. “Nero’s wife had been taken from him, and there had been the farce of consulting the pontiffs, whether, with a child conceived and not yet born, she could properly marry. There were the excesses of Quintus Tedius and Vedius Pollio; last of all, there was Livia, terrible to the State as a mother, terrible to the house of the Caesars as a stepmother. No honour was left for the gods, when Augustus chose to be himself worshipped with temples and statues, like those of the deities, and with flamens and priests. He had not even adopted Tiberius as his successor out of affection or any regard to the State, but, having thoroughly seen his arrogant and savage temper, he had sought glory for himself by a contrast of extreme wickedness.” For, in fact, Augustus, a few years before, when he was a second time asking from the Senate the tribunitian power for Tiberius, though his speech was complimentary, had thrown out certain hints as to his manners, style, and habits of life, which he meant as reproaches, while he seemed to excuse. However, when his obsequies had been duly performed, a temple with a religious ritual was decreed him.
After this all prayers were addressed to Tiberius. He, on his part, urged various considerations, the greatness of the empire, his distrust of himself. “Only,” he said, “the intellect of the Divine Augustus was equal to such a burden. Called as he had been by him to share his anxieties, he had learnt by experience how exposed to fortune’s caprices was the task of universal rule. Consequently, in a state which had the support of so many great men, they should not put everything on one man, as many, by uniting their efforts would more easily discharge public functions.” There was more grand sentiment than good faith in such words. Tiberius’s language even in matters which he did not care to conceal, either from nature or habit, was always hesitating and obscure, and now that he was struggling to hide his feelings completely, it was all the more involved in uncertainty and doubt. The Senators, however, whose only fear was lest they might seem to understand him, burst into complaints, tears, and prayers. They raised their hands to the gods, to the statue of Augustus, and to the knees of Tiberius, when he ordered a document to be produced and read. This contained a description of the resources of the State, of the number of citizens and allies under arms, of the fleets, subject kingdoms, provinces, taxes, direct and indirect, necessary expenses and customary bounties. All these details Augustus had written with his own hand, and had added a counsel, that the empire should be confined to its present limits, either from fear or out of jealousy.
Meantime, while the Senate stooped to the most abject supplication, Tiberius happened to say that although he was not equal to the whole burden of the State, yet he would undertake the charge of whatever part of it might be intrusted to him. Thereupon Asinius Gallus said, “I ask you, Caesar, what part of the State you wish to have intrusted to you?” Confounded by the sudden inquiry he was silent for a few moments; then, recovering his presence of mind, he replied that it would by no means become his modesty to choose or to avoid in a case where he would prefer to be wholly excused. Then Gallus again, who had inferred anger from his looks, said that the question had not been asked with the intention of dividing what could not be separated, but to convince him by his own admission that the body of the State was one, and must be directed by a single mind. He further spoke in praise of Augustus, and reminded Tiberius himself of his victories, and of his admirable deeds for many years as a civilian. Still, he did not thereby soften the emperor’s resentment, for he had long been detested from an impression that, as he had married Vipsania, daughter of Marcus Agrippa, who had once been the wife of Tiberius, he aspired to be more than a citizen, and kept up the arrogant tone of his father, Asinius Pollio.
Next, Lucius Arruntius, who differed but little from the speech of Gallus, gave like offence, though Tiberius had no old grudge against him, but simply mistrusted him, because he was rich and daring, had brilliant accomplishments, and corresponding popularity. For Augustus, when in his last conversations he was discussing who would refuse the highest place, though sufficiently capable, who would aspire to it without being equal to it, and who would unite both the ability and ambition, had described Marcus Lepidus as able but contemptuously indifferent, Gallus Asinius as ambitious and incapable, Lucius Arruntius as not unworthy of it, and, should the chance be given him, sure to make the venture. About the two first there is a general agreement, but instead of Arruntius some have mentioned Cneius Piso, and all these men, except Lepidus, were soon afterwards destroyed by various charges through the contrivance of Tiberius. Quintus Haterius too and Mamercus Scaurus ruffled his suspicious temper, Haterius by having said —“How long, Caesar, will you suffer the State to be without a head?” Scaurus by the remark that there was a hope that the Senate’s prayers would not be fruitless, seeing that he had not used his right as Tribune to negative the motion of the Consuls. Tiberius instantly broke out into invective against Haterius; Scaurus, with whom he was far more deeply displeased, he passed over in silence. Wearied at last by the assembly’s clamorous importunity and the urgent demands of individual Senators, he gave way by degrees, not admitting that he undertook empire, but yet ceasing to refuse it and to be entreated. It is known that Haterius having entered the palace to ask pardon, and thrown himself at the knees of Tiberius as he was walking, was almost killed by the soldiers, because Tiberius fell forward, accidentally or from being entangled by the suppliant’s hands. Yet the peril of so great a man did not make him relent, till Haterius went with entreaties to Augusta, and was saved by her very earnest intercessions.
Great too was the Senate’s sycophancy to Augusta. Some would have her styled “parent”; others “mother of the country,” and a majority proposed that to the name of Caesar should be added “son of Julia.” The emperor repeatedly asserted that there must be a limit to the honours paid to women, and that he would observe similar moderation in those bestowed on himself, but annoyed at the invidious proposal, and indeed regarding a woman’s elevation as a slight to himself, he would not allow so much as a lictor to be assigned her, and forbade the erection of an altar in memory of her adoption, and any like distinction. But for Germanicus Caesar he asked pro-consular powers, and envoys were despatched to confer them on him, and also to express sympathy with his grief at the death of Augustus. The same request was not made for Drusus, because he was consul elect and present at Rome. Twelve candidates were named for the praetorship, the number which Augustus had handed down, and when the Senate urged Tiberius to increase it, he bound himself by an oath not to exceed it.
It was then for the first time that the elections were transferred from the Campus Martius to the Senate. For up to that day, though the most important rested with the emperor’s choice, some were settled by the partialities of the tribes. Nor did the people complain of having the right taken from them, except in mere idle talk, and the Senate, being now released from the necessity of bribery and of degrading solicitations, gladly upheld the change, Tiberius confining himself to the recommendation of only four candidates who were to be nominated without rejection or canvass. Meanwhile the tribunes of the people asked leave to exhibit at their own expense games to be named after Augustus and added to the Calendar as the Augustales. Money was, however, voted from the exchequer, and though the use of the triumphal robe in the circus was prescribed, it was not allowed them to ride in a chariot. Soon the annual celebration was transferred to the praetor, to whose lot fell the administration of justice between citizens and foreigners.
This was the state of affairs at Rome when a mutiny broke out in the legions of Pannonia, which could be traced to no fresh cause except the change of emperors and the prospect it held out of license in tumult and of profit from a civil war. In the summer camp three legions were quartered, under the command of Junius Blaesus, who on hearing of the death of Augustus and the accession of Tiberius, had allowed his men a rest from military duties, either for mourning or rejoicing. This was the beginning of demoralization among the troops, of quarreling, of listening to the talk of every pestilent fellow, in short, of craving for luxury and idleness and loathing discipline and toil. In the camp was one Percennius, who had once been a leader of one of the theatrical factions, then became a common soldier, had a saucy tongue, and had learnt from his applause of actors how to stir up a crowd. By working on ignorant minds, which doubted as to what would be the terms of military service after Augustus, this man gradually influenced them in conversations at night or at nightfall, and when the better men had dispersed, he gathered round him all the worst spirits.
At last, when there were others ready to be abettors of a mutiny, he asked, in the tone of a demagogue, why, like slaves, they submitted to a few centurions and still fewer tribunes. “When,” he said, “will you dare to demand relief, if you do not go with your prayers or arms to a new and yet tottering throne? We have blundered enough by our tameness for so many years, in having to endure thirty or forty campaigns till we grow old, most of us with bodies maimed by wounds. Even dismissal is not the end of our service, but, quartered under a legion’s standard we toil through the same hardships under another title. If a soldier survives so many risks, he is still dragged into remote regions where, under the name of lands, he receives soaking swamps or mountainous wastes. Assuredly, military service itself is burdensome and unprofitable; ten as a day is the value set on life and limb; out of this, clothing, arms, tents, as well as the mercy of centurions and exemptions from duty have to be purchased. But indeed of floggings and wounds, of hard winters, wearisome summers, of terrible war, or barren peace, there is no end. Our only relief can come from military life being entered on under fixed conditions, from receiving each the pay of a denarius, and from the sixteenth year terminating our service. We must be retained no longer under a standard, but in the same camp a compensation in money must be paid us. Do the praetorian cohorts, which have just got their two denarii per man, and which after sixteen years are restored to their homes, encounter more perils? We do not disparage the guards of the capital; still, here amid barbarous tribes we have to face the enemy from our tents.”
The throng applauded from various motives, some pointing with indignation to the marks of the lash, others to their grey locks, and most of them to their threadbare garments and naked limbs. At, last, in their fury they went so far as to propose to combine the three legions into one. Driven from their purpose by the jealousy with which every one sought the chief honour for his own legion, they turned to other thoughts, and set up in one spot the three eagles, with the ensigns of the cohorts. At the same time they piled up turf and raised a mound, that they might have a more conspicuous meeting-place. Amid the bustle Blaesus came up. He upbraided them and held back man after man with the exclamation, “Better imbrue your hands in my blood: it will be less guilt to slay your commander than it is to be in revolt from the emperor. Either living I will uphold the loyalty of the legions, or Pierced to the heart I will hasten on your repentance.”
None the less however was the mound piled up, and it was quite breast high when, at last overcome by his persistency, they gave up their purpose. Blaesus, with the consummate tact of an orator, said, “It is not through mutiny and tumult that the desires of the army ought to be communicated to Caesar, nor did our soldiers of old ever ask so novel a boon of ancient commanders, nor have you yourselves asked it of the Divine Augustus. It is far from opportune that the emperor’s cares, now in their first beginning, should be aggravated. If, however, you are bent upon attempting in peace what even after your victory in the civil wars you did not demand, why, contrary to the habit of obedience, contrary to the law of discipline, do you meditate violence? Decide on sending envoys, and give them instructions in your presence.”
It was carried by acclamation that the son of Blaesus, one of the tribunes, should undertake the mission, and demand for the soldiers release from service after sixteen years. He was to have the rest of their message when the first part had been successful. After the young man departure there was comparative quiet, but there was an arrogant tone among the soldiers, to whom the fact that their commander’s son was pleading their common cause clearly showed that they had wrested by compulsion what they had failed to obtain by good behaviour.
Meanwhile the companies which previous to the mutiny had been sent to Nauportus to make roads and bridges and for other purposes, when they heard of the tumult in the camp, tore up the standards, and having plundered the neighbouring villages and Nauportus itself, which was like a town, assailed the centurions who restrained them with jeers and insults, last of all, with blows. Their chief rage was against Aufidienus Rufus, the camp-prefect, whom they dragged from a waggon, loaded with baggage, and drove on at the head of the column, asking him in ridicule whether he liked to bear such huge burdens and such long marches. Rufus, who had long been a common soldier, then a centurion, and subsequently camp-prefect, tried to revive the old severe discipline, inured as he was to work and toil, and all the sterner because he had endured.
On the arrival of these troops the mutiny broke out afresh, and straggling from the camp they plundered the neighbourhood. Blaesus ordered a few who had conspicuously loaded themselves with spoil to be scourged and imprisoned as a terror to the rest; for, even as it then was, the commander was still obeyed by the centurions and by all the best men among the soldiers. As the men were dragged off, they struggled violently, clasped the knees of the bystanders, called to their comrades by name, or to the company, cohort, or legion to which they respectively belonged, exclaiming that all were threatened with the same fate. At the same time they heaped abuse on the commander; they appealed to heaven and to the gods, and left nothing undone by which they might excite resentment and pity, alarm and rage. They all rushed to the spot, broke open the guardhouse, unbound the prisoners, and were in a moment fraternising with deserters and men convicted on capital charges.
Thence arose a more furious outbreak, with more leaders of the mutiny. Vibulenus, a common soldier, was hoisted in front of the general’s tribunal on the shoulders of the bystanders and addressed the excited throng, who eagerly awaited his intentions. “You have indeed,” he said, “restored light and air to these innocent and most unhappy men, but who restores to my brother his life, or my brother to myself? Sent to you by the German army in our common cause, he was last night butchered by the gladiators whom the general keeps and arms for the destruction of his soldiers. Answer, Blaesus, where you have flung aside the corpse? Even an enemy grudges not burial. When, with embraces and tears, I have sated my grief, order me also to be slain, provided only that when we have been destroyed for no crime, but only because we consulted the good of the legions, we may be buried by these men around me.”
