第14章 A.D.14, 15(14)

The legions followed at a moderate interval.They were helped by a night of bright starlight, reached the villages of the Marsi, and threw their pickets round the enemy, who even then were stretched on beds or at their tables, without the least fear, or any sentries before their camp, so complete was their carelessness and disorder;and of war indeed there was no apprehension.Peace it certainly was not- merely the languid and heedless ease of half-intoxicated people.

Caesar, to spread devastation widely, divided his eager legions into four columns, and ravaged a space of fifty miles with fire and sword.Neither sex nor age moved his compassion.Everything, sacred or profane, the temple too of Tamfana, as they called it, the special resort of all those tribes, was levelled to the ground.There was not a wound among our soldiers, who cut down a half-asleep, an unarmed, or a straggling foe.The Bructeri, Tubantes, and Usipetes, were roused by this slaughter, and they beset the forest passes through which the army had to return.The general knew this, and he marched, prepared both to advance and to fight.Part of the cavalry, and some of the auxiliary cohorts led the van; then came the first legion, and, with the baggage in the centre, the men of the twenty-first closed up the left, those of the fifth, the right flank.The twentieth legion secured the rear, and, next, were the rest of the allies.

Meanwhile the enemy moved not till the army began to defile in column through the woods, then made slight skirmishing attacks on its flanks and van, and with his whole force charged the rear.The light cohorts were thrown into confusion by the dense masses of the Germans, when Caesar rode up to the men of the twentieth legion, and in a loud voice exclaimed that this was the time for wiping out the mutiny."Advance," he said, "and hasten to turn your guilt into glory." This fired their courage, and at a single dash they broke through the enemy, and drove him back with great slaughter into the open country.At the same moment the troops of the van emerged from the woods and intrenched a camp.After this their march was uninterrupted, and the soldiery, with the confidence of recent success, and forgetful of the past, were placed in winter-quarters.

The news was a source of joy and also of anxiety to Tiberius.He rejoiced that the mutiny was crushed, but the fact that Germanicus had won the soldiers' favour by lavishing money, and promptly granting the discharge, as well as his fame as a soldier, annoyed him.Still, he brought his achievements under the notice of the Senate, and spoke much of his greatness in language elaborated for effect, more so than could be believed to come from his inmost heart.He bestowed a briefer praise on Drusus, and on the termination of the disturbance in Illyricum, but he was more earnest, and his speech more hearty.And he confirmed, too, in the armies of Pannonia all the concessions of Germanicus.

That same year Julia ended her days.For her profligacy she had formerly been confined by her father Augustus in the island of Pandateria, and then in the town of the Regini on the shores of the straits of Sicily.She had been the wife of Tiberius while Caius and Lucius Caesar were in their glory, and had disdained him as an unequal match.This was Tiberius's special reason for retiring to Rhodes.When he obtained the empire, he left her in banishment and disgrace, deprived of all hope after the murder of Postumus Agrippa, and let her perish by a lingering death of destitution, with the idea that an obscurity would hang over her end from the length of her exile.He had a like motive for cruel vengeance on Sempronius Gracchus, a man of noble family, of shrewd understanding, and a perverse eloquence, who had seduced this same Julia when she was the wife of Marcus Agrippa.

And this was not the end of the intrigue.When she had been handed over to Tiberius, her persistent paramour inflamed her with disobedience and hatred towards her husband; and a letter which Julia wrote to her father, Augustus, inveighing against Tiberius, was supposed to be the composition of Gracchus.He was accordingly banished to Cercina, where he endured an exile of fourteen years.Then the soldiers who were sent to slay him, found him on a promontory, expecting no good.On their arrival, he begged a brief interval in which to give by letter his last instructions to his wife Alliaria, and then offered his neck to the executioners, dying with a courage not unworthy of the Sempronian name, which his degenerate life had dishonoured.Some have related that these soldiers were not sent from Rome, but by Lucius Asprenas, proconsul of Africa, on the authority of Tiberius, who had vainly hoped that the infamy of the murder might be shifted on Asprenas.

The same year witnessed the establishment of religious ceremonies in a new priesthood of the brotherhood of the Augustales, just as in former days Titus Tatius, to retain the rites of the Sabines, had instituted the Titian brotherhood.Twenty-one were chosen by lot from the chief men of the State; Tiberius, Drusus, Claudius, and Germanicus, were added to the number.The Augustal game's which were then inaugurated, were disturbed by quarrels arising out of rivalry between the actors.Augustus had shown indulgence to the entertainment by way of humouring Maecenas's extravagant passion for Bathyllus, nor did he himself dislike such amusements, and he thought it citizenlike to mingle in the pleasures of the populace.Very different was the tendency of Tiberius's character.But a people so many years indulgently treated, he did not yet venture to put under harsher control.