第97章 A.D.65, 66(4)

Ostorius was living at the time on a remote estate on the Ligurian frontier.Thither a centurion was despatched to hurry on his destruction.There was a motive for promptitude arising out of the fact that Ostorius, with his great military fame and the civic crown he had won in Britain, possessed, too, as he was of huge bodily strength and skill in arms, had made Nero, who was always timid and now more frightened than ever by the lately discovered conspiracy, fearful of a sudden attack.So the centurion, having barred every exit from the house, disclosed the emperor's orders to Ostorius.That fortitude which he had often shown in fighting the enemy Ostorius now turned against himself.And as his veins, though severed, allowed but a scanty flow of blood, he used the help of a slave, simply to hold up a dagger firmly, and then pressing the man's hand towards him, he met the point with his throat.

Even if I had to relate foreign wars and deaths encountered in the service of the State with such a monotony of disaster, I should myself have been overcome by disgust, while I should look for weariness in my readers, sickened as they would be by the melancholy and continuous destruction of our citizens, however glorious to themselves.But now a servile submissiveness and so much wanton bloodshed at home fatigue the mind and paralyze it with grief.The only indulgence I would ask from those who will acquaint themselves with these horrors is that Ibe not thought to hate men who perished so tamely.Such was the wrath of heaven against the Roman State that one may not pass over it with a single mention, as one might the defeat of armies and the capture of cities.Let us grant this privilege to the posterity of illustrious men, that just as in their funeral obsequies such men are not confounded in a common burial, so in the record of their end they may receive and retain a special memorial.

Within a few days, in quick succession, Annaeus Mela, Cerialis Anicius, Rufius Crispinus, and Petronius fell, Mela and Crispinus being Roman knights with senatorian rank.The latter had once commanded the praetorians and had been rewarded with the decorations of the consulate.He had lately been banished to Sardinia on a charge of conspiracy, and on receiving a message that he was doomed to die had destroyed himself.Mela, son of the same parents as Gallio and Seneca, had refrained from seeking promotion out of a perverse vanity which wished to raise a Roman knight to an equality with ex-consuls.He also thought that there was a shorter road to the acquisition of wealth through offices connected with the administration of the emperor's private business.He had too in his son Annaeus Lucanus a powerful aid in rising to distinction.After the death of Lucanus, he rigorously called in the debts due to his estate, and thereby provoked an accuser in the person of Fabius Romanus, one of the intimate friends of Lucanus.A story was invented that the father and son shared between them a knowledge of the conspiracy, and a letter was forged in Lucanus's name.This Nero examined, and ordered it to be conveyed to Mela, whose wealth he ravenously desired.

Mela meanwhile, adopting the easiest mode of death then in fashion, opened his veins, after adding a codicil to his will bequeathing an immense amount to Tigellinus and his son-in-law, Cossutianus Capito, in order to save the remainder.In this codicil he is also said to have written, by way of remonstrance against the injustice of his death, that he died without any cause for punishment, while Rufius Crispinus and Anicius Cerialis still enjoyed life, though bitter foes to the prince.It was thought that he had invented this about Crispinus, because the man had been already murdered; about Cerialis, with the object of procuring his murder.Soon afterwards Cerialis laid violent hands on himself, and received less pity than the others, because men remembered that he had betrayed a conspiracy to Caius Caesar.

With regard to Caius Petronius, I ought to dwell a little on his antecedents.His days he passed in sleep, his nights in the business and pleasures of life.Indolence had raised him to fame, as energy raises others, and he was reckoned not a debauchee and spendthrift, like most of those who squander their substance, but a man of refined luxury.And indeed his talk and his doings, the freer they were and the more show of carelessness they exhibited, were the better liked, for their look of natural simplicity.Yet as proconsul of Bithynia and soon afterwards as consul, he showed himself a man of vigour and equal to business.Then falling back into vice or affecting vice, he was chosen by Nero to be one of his few intimate associates, as a critic in matters of taste, while the emperor thought nothing charming or elegant in luxury unless Petronius had expressed to him his approval of it.Hence jealousy on the part of Tigellinus, who looked on him as a rival and even his superior in the science of pleasure.And so he worked on the prince's cruelty, which dominated every other passion, charging Petronius with having been the friend of Scaevinus, bribing a slave to become informer, robbing him of the means of defence, and hurrying into prison the greater part of his domestics.