# Tacitus (Donne)/Chapter 5

CHAPTER V.
THE 'ANNALS.'
CLAUDIUS—NERO.
Claudius, the younger brother of Germanicus, was in his fiftieth year when, after the murder of Caligula, he was unexpectedly raised to the throne. Tacitus cannot conceal his amazement that one hitherto so contemptible in the eyes of every class in Rome should have been reserved for the dignity of emperor. "Some strange caprice of fortune," he thinks, "turns all human wisdom to a jest. There was scarcely a man in Rome who did not seem, by the voice of fame and the wishes of the people, designed for the sovereign power, rather than the very person whom Fate cherished in obscurity in order to make him, at a future period, master of the Roman world."
Yet Claudius, in intention, was not among the bad Cæsars. Had he met with honest friends, and had he not been misguided by his freedmen and his wives, Messalina and the younger Agrippina, his rule might have been happy for his subjects and creditable to himself. During a reign of fourteen years—41 to 54 A.D.,—he made many good and useful regulations. He was ​diligent, nay laborious, in public business—indeed, sometimes too much so, since he would often interfere with matters which it would have been wiser to leave in the hands of the proper and less distinguished officials. By his activity he often incurred blame; and by his awkward manners and want of tact, ridicule also. Naturally a good-humoured man, he was frequently led into cruelty by bad advisers, and these advisers were his freedmen or the empresses.
The reign of Claudius has indeed often, and not improperly, been called "the reign of the Freedmen;" and as their ascendancy pervaded the times both of this Cæsar and his immediate successor, it may be well to give a slight sketch of them here.
That such a worshipper of times past, so stanch an aristocrat as Tacitus, dipped his pen in gall when delineating this order of men, is not to be wondered at. His dislike of these upstarts, as he accounted them, was, however, an echo of an old republican sentiment. Sulla's freedmen were, nearly as much as his proscriptions, the cause of the profound hatred with which the great Dictator was regarded by all except the highest aristocrats of Rome. The freedmen of Pompeius injured, by their pride and ostentation, the popularity of that general favorite of both senate and people. Yet without attempting to palliate the vices of a Polybius, a Pallas, or a Narcissus, it should be borne in mind that in a State which can scarecly be said to have possessed a middle class at the period treated of in the 'Annals'—the balancing influence of the knights as an intermediate power between the senate and the people was a thing of the past—the employment of freedmen in State affairs was almost a necessity of the time. The ​nobles were too proud, when not too profligate, to be willing or wholesome counsellors of Cæsar: and even had they been better or more capable men than they were, he might have feared to draw them too near his person, inasmuch as the great families of Rome were never, at least under the Julian and Claudian emperors, Cæsar's well-wishers. Not until a bourgeois class of senators came in with the Flavian dynasty, was it easy to find, fit for high office, men of decent parentage or ordinary ability. The names of the freedmen show that if not Greeks by birth, they generally sprang from a Grecian stem. Unfortunately for both Cæsar and Rome, it was easy enough to meet with clever Greeks, but not with honest ones.
So long as he kept on good terms with the soldiers, an emperor had little to dread from the ambition of his freedmen, at least as regarded his own position. For neither a servile senate nor a well-fee'd prætorian cohort would have ventured to proclaim the emancipated son of a slave, Cæsar. Claudius gave scarcely more offence to the nobles by conferring on Gauls the full privileges of Roman citizens, than he did by permitting his freedman Polybius to walk in a procession between the two consuls. The odium incurred by royal favorites in modern times—the David Rizzios, the Buckinghams, and others—will enable us to form some idea of the feelings of Rome towards Pallas and Narcissus. The arrogance of these "new men" was on a par with their wealth. An anecdote by Tacitus shows their pride and opulence. A scion of the noble house of the Scipios did not blush to move for a vote of thanks in the senate to the freedman Pallas. "'Public thanks,' said this precious re​presentative of the first and second Africanus, 'should be given to him, for that, being a descendant from the kings of Arcadia, he deigned to forget his ancient nobility, to accept service under the State, and to be numbered among the ministers of the prince.' Claudius gravely assured the conscript fathers that Pallas was satisfied with the honor, and would still live in his former poverty. Thus a decree of the senate was engraven on brass, in which an enfranchised slave, possessing about two millions four hundred thousand pounds, was loaded with commendations for his primitive parsimony!"
And Claudius had even worse companions than Pallas or Narcissus—the women who intrigued with them, and traded on the weak nature of an uxorious prince. In his early days, when he was looked upon as only one degree removed from an idiot, he had always been confined within the palace walls; he had lived only with his wives—he had tried only to please them; and besides them, he had had no social intercourse, except with slaves and freedmen. Of his grandmother Livia, the wife of Augustus, he was always in terror. His ungainly figure, his thick and stammering utterance, his uncouth ways, his absence of mind, made him her abomination. He was successively the husband of the profligate Messalina and the imperious Agrippina, and each of them made him their tool. Such was the training, these were the companions, of the ill-starred brother of Germanicus.
And yet the Cæsar, whom thousands of his subjects ​fancied to be, what his grandmother had called him, a monster (portentum hominis), was the author of a measure that was not merely salutary at the time, but also tended materially to the preservation of the empire for many generations. In 48 A.D., the Ædui (Bourgogne) addressed a petition to Cæsar, praying him to grant to their chief magistrates admission into the senate of Rome, and to such offices as led to senatorial rank. The proposal was received with some murmurs by a proud oligarchy. But Claudius supported it in a speech, still preserved on a brazen table discovered three centuries ago at Lyons. The example then set was followed by similar concessions, and Claudius preceded Vespasian in calling up to the great council of Rome men of probity as well as substance, and in pouring new blood into the veins of a decaying assembly. Nor should we forget the great public works that were executed in this reign, and which would have done honor to a better age. The Claudian aqueduct was constructed in the grand antique style of the Etruscan architects, and supplied Rome with water throughout the middle ages. The emissary or canal which brought the water of the lake Fucinus into the river Liris, a design pronounced impracticable by Augustus, was constructed and completed by Claudius. For these public services he obtained but few thanks from his contemporaries; and the pen of the historian delineates his vices and his weaknesses only, and makes no mention of the better qualities of this unhappy Cæsar. There can be no doubt that his death was effected by poison administered to him by the last and worst of his wives, his own niece, Agrippina. Claudius she had cajoled or compelled to name ​for his successor her son Nero, and to supersede his own son by another wife, Britannicus. Symptoms of repentance for this unnatural act appearing in her husband, she called to her aid a noted artist in poisoning named Locusta, and the administration of her drug "was intrusted to Halotus, one of the emperor's eunuchs, whose office it was to serve up the emperor's repasts, and prove the viands by tasting them."
"In fact," continues Tacitus, "all the particulars of this transaction were soon afterwards so thoroughly known, that the writers of the times are able to account how the poison was poured into a dish of mushrooms of which he was particularly fond; but whether it was that his senses were stupefied, or from the wine he had drunk, the effect of the poison was not immediately perceived. Agrippina was dismayed; and summoned to her assistance Zenophon, a physician, whom she had already involved in her nefarious schemes. It is believed that he, as if purposing to aid Claudius in his efforts to vomit, put down his throat an envenomed feather." Whatever was done was effective; and Claudius, who all his lifetime was scarcely considered to be a man, was in a few days pronounced, by a decree of the senate, to be a god, and honoured with a pompous funeral.
With some precautions, for she was not sure that the Roman people would quietly submit to the disinheriting of Britannicus, Agrippina presented her son at first to the prætorians; and when, by the promise of a donation, their assent had been secured, a decree of the senate pronounced him emperor. There was no op​position on the part of the provinces, long accustomed to accept the choice of the capital. To rule in the name of her son was Agrippina's purpose; to him she left the pleasures, for herself she reserved the toils, of government. Under this arrangement things went on smoothly for a few years, and the "Quinquennium Neronis" became in after-times a common phrase for expressing a happy and well-ordered administration.
The young Cæsar enjoyed many advantages that had been denied to his predecessor. Claudius, who had a sincere relish for research, was permitted to pursue his own studies, and to write books, which have all perished, and which probably no one except himself ever read. But Nero had been carefully trained in his childhood, and there is reason to believe that his talents were naturally good, although his taste in poetry was, by unanimous consent of his contemporaries, abominable. He was an only, but not a spoilt child. His mother provided him with the best tutors she could find; and his studies were superintended by the foremost man of the age in literature, the philosopher Seneca. In one branch of learning he appears to have made little progress; and his incompetence was the more marked at the time, because ability to address an audience was an almost universal accomplishment in young Romans of rank. "Old men," says Tacitus, "who make it their recreation to compare the present and the past, took notice that Nero was the first Roman emperor who required the aid of another's eloquence." It may have been that Agrippina hoped the studies her son most delighted in—music and poetry—would always divert his attention from affairs of State, and leave herself and her favorites free to ​deal with politics. In the forms and ceremonies of his high office, he was doubtless properly instructed; since, had he displayed ignorance of them, the Roman wits and scandal-mongers would not have failed to note it, and to make Rome merry at the mistakes of its Cæsar. In his "five good years" Nero indeed seems to have taken some part in business, and even to have exhibited generous instincts in his care for his people. Any dream, however, of an amiable character in Nero soon vanished; and his father's prophecy at his birth—that "his and Agrippina's offspring could be nothing but a monster"—was amply fulfilled.
We can afford space for only a very brief summary of the events in a reign of fifteen years. Peaceful years they were not, like those in general of Claudius. There were disturbances in Britain: the Parthians were again in the field, though they were humbled in the end, and their king Tiridates was compelled to acknowledge himself a vassal of the empire. He came to Rome: he had a magnificent reception there; and took his diadem from Nero's hand. But Corbulo, a faithful and conscientious as well as brave and succesful general, was ill repaid for his victories. He anticipated by self-destruction the death Nero had prepared for him.
The fire which destroyed two-thirds of the city is scarcely less familiar to English readers than the great fire of London. The Golden Palace which Nero built on the ruins of Rome is also too famous for mention; and the so-called first persecution of the Christians adds to the interest of the period.
Nero's follies seem to have caused more indigna​tion than his vices, and his vices to have been more resented than his crimes. The murder of his young brother (by adoption) Britannicus; of his miserable wife Octavia; of his mother Agrippina,—did not seriously incense a profligate nobility or a venal people, although the latter once rose in favour of the wife, but were frightened into apathy by brutal soldiers. In point of fact, the vices of the Cæsars were those of the upper classes of Rome generally, but, being exhibited on a larger stage, were the more observed, because, from his high and solitary station, the criminal was more conspicuous.
Once, indeed, in the year 65 A.D., it seemed as if the tyrant had at length exhausted the patience of his subjects, and that a spark still survived of the ancient spirit of Rome. The conspiracy of which Piso was the head, was formed; and had the members of it not wasted time in long delays, and had its nominal chief not been weak and vacillating, there was a fair prospect of success. The plot comprised some of the noblest and some of the most intelligent men of the time; among them the philosopher Seneca, and his nephew, the poet Lucan. The consummate art of the narration, in this case, adds to the perception of our loss in the absence of Tacitus's account of the far more complex and more widely ramified conspiracy of Sejanus.
In the combination of Piso and his associates against Nero we come for the first time on the appearance of philosophers in connection with public affairs; and as Stoics especially were destined to take some prominent share in the administration of the empire, or in the imperial Council of State, nay, in the person of Marcus Au​relius to occupy the throne itself, if may be pertinent to the subject to show what view Tacitus took of men who mingled speculative with active pursuits. Two sects of philosophers of any moment prevailed at Rome either in the time of Nero or the historian—the Stoic and Epicurean. But the latter of these so rarely appear in the 'Annals' that they may be passed over. It was otherwise with the members of the Stoic school. If not really formidable, they were the cause of great anxiety to the Cæsars. Tacitus informs us of the interest taken by the capital, and in many of the provinces also, as to all that the Stoic Thrasea—with whose last words this portion of his works closes—was saying or doing. The journals of the day were read in all parts of the empire in order to learn what Thrasea approved or condemned. It was found that he avoided the ceremony of renewing the oath of allegiance to the Cæsar—in this case Nero—at the beginning of each year. Although one of the quindecemviral priesthood, he was never known to offer vows to the gods for the preservation of the prince. He declined to pray for his heavenly voice, as others did; and as the imperial voice was husky, it was the more disloyal in him not to petition the deities to vouchsafe it clearness. The Stoics were much given to suicide, and in their lectures and writings commended the practice of it. And so it was difficult to deal with people who, holding their own lives cheap, might be supposed to have little respect for the lives of others.
Tacitus did not hold in much esteem the doctrines of the Porch, and doubted the fitness of speculative dreamers for statesmen. Had Seneca shown himself a good adviser for his imperial pupil? Had not the ​pupil compelled the tutor to consent to or justify deeds which disgraced them both? Had he lifted up his voice when Britannicus was foully murdered? Had he not composed the speech by which the son extenuated the still more atrocious murder of his mother? Some of these followers of Zeno he knew to be arrant knaves—hired witnesses, unscrupulous informers, hypocrites who preached virtue and practised vice under the shelter of an unkempt beard and a ragged gown. Even such as he respected he often blames for their want of common-sense. Their protests and struggles against Cæsarianism served for little else than to make it more oppressive. The rumour of a conspiracy increased a Cæsar's fears: its failure, his cruelty. The tendency of philosophers to suicide—and in readiness to poison or stab himself the Epicurean was not behind the Stoic—Tacitus thought a symptom of impatience or moral cowardice, rather than of true manliness or patriotism. When so few people were good and so many evil, why should the former hang themselves and the latter flourish like green bay-trees?
Many of the numerous anecdotes with which Tacitus enlivens his 'Annals' are, taken in connection with the more important events of the time, key-notes to Cæsarian history. The following words, addressed to Nero by a rough honest soldier, who had been engaged in Piso's conspiracy, may suffice for one among the many examples that might be given. "Asked by the emperor, what could induce him to forget the solemn obligation of his military oath, Subrius Flavius replied, 'There was a time when no soldier in your army was more devoted than I was to your service, ​and that as long as you deserved the esteem of mankind. I began to hate you when you were guilty of parricide: when you murdered your mother, and destroyed your wife: when you became a charioteer, and an incendiary.'" It is evident from this strange juxtaposition of folly with crime that Nero's degradation of his high office weighed in public opinion fully as much as any of the darker deeds which have rendered his name infamous for ever.
The reader's attention is now called to passages in the 'Annals' which may fairly be denominated Episodical, and in which their author displays his masterly skill as a painter in words. He avails himself of every opportunity for such digressions. Weary, apparently, of the crimes, the follies, the caprices, and prodigality of the Cæsars and the capital, he gladly leaves Rome and Italy for a while behind him, and welcomes a change of scene, even as the traveller in a thirsty land welcomes the green spots and the water-springs which relieve the tediousness of his way.
"Whenever Tacitus indulges himself in those beautiful episodes, in which he relates some domestic transactions of the Germans or the Parthians, his principal object is to relieve the attention of the reader from a uniform scene of vice and misery." So wrote one who had deeply studied the works of the historian, and who followed the example he commends in many of his own most interesting chapters.
The reign of Tiberius, for example, although it lasted for twenty-three years, is far from rich in events, and, ​without episodical digressions, is little more than a narrative of the contest between the emperor, the Julian family, and the senate. Tiberius, after Germanicus was recalled from the Rhine, succeeded in reducing the Roman world to a state of general acquiescence in his rule. The provinces, to all appearance, and indeed according to the account given of them by other writers, enjoyed the benefits of a general peace; and had every reason to be content with a Cæsar who did not oppress them by capricious or over-burdensome taxation, and who, by allowing both imperial and senatorial governors to remain long, and sometimes even for life, in office, delivered them from the harpies sent out at least triennially by the commonwealth. One great offence, in Tacitus's opinion, committed by Tiberius, was his politic neglect of minor disturbances abroad. He would not expend the forces of the empire upon petty wars in Africa or Gaul. He forbore to interfere with them in person: he let them either die out by exhaustion of the rebels themselves, or left them to be extinguished by his ordinary representatives, prætorian or proconsular. Tacitus, who wrote the 'History' and 'Annals' under the warlike Trajan—who not only put down revolt with his own hand, but considerably extended the boundaries of the empire—condemned the policy of Tiberius as either a culpable neglect or an inglorious timidity. But in his Dacian war, Trajan humbled an enemy who, in a few years more, might have imperilled Rome itself; and in his eastern campaigns taught the Parthians a lesson which they remembered until again invited to active measures by the decrepitude and decline of the empire itself.
Very early in the 'Annals' we are introduced to the ​rivals of Rome on its eastern frontier. Armenia was a constant bone of contention between the Roman and the Parthian monarch. It had been so when consuls ruled the State; it was so under Augustus; and it was the ambition and the pride of both the eastern and the western emperor to place on the Armenian throne a sovereign willing to be guided by them respectively. In A.D. 16, and before the Rhenish campaigns of Germanicus were finished, the oriental kingdoms, and consequently the Roman provinces adjacent to them, were thrown into commotion. The flame of discord was lighted up by the Parthians. Weary of civil broils and a disputed succession to the throne, that restless people had sued for a king at the hands of Rome, and not long after accepting, grew tired of him. Vonones, whom the Cæsar had sent them, was at first received with all demonstrations of joy. But his subjects soon began to despise him as a prince, whose education at Rome had rendered him unfit for an eastern crown. In his tastes and pursuits he was essentially a foreigner. He took no delight in horsemanship—and to be a fearless rider was, among the Parthians, one of the most indispensable of royal virtues. Not being an expert and fearless horseman, Vonones naturally disliked the sports of the chase—and this was another cause of grave offence to his people. When he made a progress in his kingdom, he did not witch the world with noble horsemanship, but lolled lazily in a litter, like some effeminate western despot. Next, the rude fare of the Parthians was not to his taste: he introduced new-fangled Italian dishes, and thus vexed the souls of his caterers and cooks. The Romans were particular in sealing up their wine-casks: and Vonones looked ​sharp after his cellar. This conduct was thought abominable in a crowned head, and excited the ridicule and contempt of his butlers and his people. Again, since the days of the great Cyrus, it had ever been the practice of oriental potentates to show themselves sparingly to their subjects, and even to their courtiers and ministers to be difficult of access; whereas Vonones was affable to all comers, and practised at Seleucia the courtesy which he had seen Augustus display at Rome. "Virtues," says Tacitus, "new to the Parthians were new vices. Between his good and evil qualities no distinction was made: they were foreign manners, and for that reason detested." The unlucky Vonones was in a very similar position to that of our George I. and George II., whose preference for Hanoverian ways and dishes, whose undisguised yearning for their palace at Herrenhausen and its stiff and punctilious ceremonies, and whose equally manifest distaste for English cookery, rendered them very unpopular with the nation that had not very willingly invited them to the throne.
Not, however, until Nero's reign, and shortly after his accession, do the Parthian wars occupy a prominent spaces in the 'Annals.' Cn. Domitius Corbulo was a soldier of the ancient stamp—one "fit to stand by Cæsar and give direction." He had highly distinguished himself under Claudius in a war against a German tribe, the Chauci, and by the excellent discipline he maintained in his army—not a universal merit at the time in Roman generals, as appears in several chapters of the 'History.' In the year 54 A.D., the Parthian king, Vologeses, invaded Armenia and expelled its king, Rhadamistus, who was under the pro​tection of the Roman Cæsar. The war, with sundry intervals of truce, lasted for nine years, but, in despite of much thwarting by Nero or his advisers, Corbulo was uniformly successful, and secured and strengthened the eastern frontier for several years to come. "Corbulo," says Tacitus, "was in high favour with the princes of the east." He possessed many qualities attractive to oriental minds. His stature was manly, his personal dignity remarkable: his discourse magnificent—that is, having something of Asiatic pomp: his movements in the field were rapid: his combinations excited the wonder and applause of his opponents—even in their eyes he was a hero: "he united," says the historian, "with experience and consummate wisdom, those exterior accomplishments, which, though in themselves of no real value, give an air of elegance even to trifles."
The well-trained legions which Corbulo commanded in Germany did not accompany him to Armenia. There he had to construct an army before he could venture on active operations in the field:—
"He had to struggle with the slothful disposition of his legionaries more than with the perfidy of his enemies; for the legions brought out of Syria, enervated by a long peace, bore with much impatience the duties of Roman soldiers. It fully appeared that in that army there were veterans who never mounted guard, never stood sentry—men who gazed at a palisade and foss as things strange and wonderful—without helmets or breastplates—coxcombs, and only looking after gain, having served their whole time in different towns. Having, therefore, discharged such as were unfit from sickness or age, he sought to recruit his ​forces; and levies were made through Cappadocia and Galatia, and a legion from Germany was added. The whole army, too, was kept in tents; though such was the rigour of the winter, that the earth, which was covered with ice, would not, without digging, afford a place for their tents. Many had their limbs shrivelled up by the intense cold; and some, as they stood sentry, were frozen to death. One soldier was particularly remarked, whose hands, as he carried a bundle of wood, mortified so suddenly that, still clasping the burden, they dropped from his mutilated arms. The general himself, thinly clad, his head bare, when the troops were assembled, when employed in their works, was incessantly among them, commending the stout-hearted, comforting the feeble, and exhibiting an example to all. Shrinking from the hardship of the climate and the service, many at first deserted; but desertion was in all cases punished with death. Nor did Corbulo, as in other armies, treat with indulgence a first or second offence. That course experience proved to be salutary and preferable to mercy, inasmuch as there were fewer desertions from that camp than from those in which lenity was employed."
The result of such extreme severity shows not merely the ability of the commander, but also the sterling worth of the Roman soldier, who submitted to the conversion of a slothful into an active force, and while he suffered under it recognised the wisdom of such discipline. In reforming troops whom other generals had spoiled by indulgence, Corbulo followed the wholesome example of the conqueror of Carthage, the younger Scipio Africanus, who reorganised at ​Numantia a lax and disorderly army; and that of Caius Marius, who, like our Wellington in Portugal, prohibited his men from fighting until he was satisfied that they were soldiers indeed.
The pride of the Roman people had rarely been more deeply gratified than when the news arrived that the Armenian king, Tiridates, had surrendered to Corbulo, and had laid down his diadem at the foot of Nero's statue, in the camp of his conqueror and in the presence of his own nobles. The homage was the more signal and complete because Tiridates was a brother of the Parthian monarch, and had been placed by him on the Armenian throne. A few days before, Corbulo and Tiridates had an interview in the tent of the latter, and the ceremony then observed was not unlike that which now takes place when a governor-general of India receives a native prince. The Parthian and the Roman general, each attended by twenty mounted officers, met on ground now occupied by the legions, but recently the scene of a defeat on their part. As soon as they drew near to each other, Tiridates leapt from his horse, and Corbulo returned the compliment. They then advanced on foot, and took each other by the hand. The pride of the Barbarians was flattered by the recollection of their late victory on the spot; while the triumph of Corbulo was rendered complete by the proposal of the Armenian king to accept his crown from the Cæsar's hand in Rome itself. The conference ended with an embrace.
"Then," proceeds the historian, "after an interval of a few days, the two armies met with much pomp and circumstance on both sides: there stood the Parthian horse, ranged in troops with the standards of ​their several nations: here were posted the battalions of the legions, their eagles glittering, their ensigns displayed, with the images of their gods, and forming a kind of temple. A tribunal placed in the centre supported a chair of state, on which the statue of Nero rested. Tiridates approached, and having immolated the victims in due form, he lifted the diadem from his head and laid it at the foot of the statue. Every heart throbbed with intense emotion."
Tiridates seems to have been more struck by the manners of the Romans than by their military array. Perhaps to a monarch accustomed to see myriads of horsemen in their bright chain-mail, the compact camp and the scanty cavalry of his opponents might appear comparatively poor and mean. We are told that—
"To the splendour of renown—for he was held in high esteem by the easterns—Corbulo added the graces of courtesy and the pleasures of the banquet: during which the king, as often as he observed any usage which was new to him, was frequent in his inquiries what it might mean—as that a centurion advertised the general when the watch was first set, and the company at the banquet broke up at the sound of a trumpet. Why was the fuel on the augural altar kindled by a torch? All which, Corbulo explaining in a strain of exaggeration, inspired Tiridates with admiration of the ancient institutions of the Romans."
Occasionally Tacitus indulges in what we may fairly term a romantic story. Rhadamistus, an Iberian prince, had usurped the Armenian throne, but was expelled from it by the Tiridates just mentioned, and compelled to fly for his life. "He escaped with his wife, and both owed their lives to the speed of their ​horses. She was far advanced in pregnancy, yet from dread of the enemy, and tenderness for her husband, she bore up at first as well as she could under the fatigue of the flight. Compelled, however, to yield to her condition, she implored him to save her by an honorable death from the reproach and misery of captivity. At first he embraced, he comforted and cheered her; now admiring her heroic spirit, now faint with dread that, if left behind, she might fall into the hands of another. At last, from excess of love, and his own familiarity with deeds of horror, he bared his scimitar, and wounding her, drew her to the banks of the Araxes, where he committed her to the stream. He himself fled with headlong speed till he reached Iberia. Zenobia, meanwhile (for such was her name), was descried by shepherds floating on the water, still breathing, and with manifest signs of life; and as they gathered from the dignity of her aspect that she was of no mean rank, they bound up her wound and applied their rustic medicines to it; and when they had learnt her name and adventures, they conveyed her to Artaxata, whence, at the public charge, she was conducted to Tiridates, who received her courteously, and treated her with the respect due to royalty."
This story of Zenobia in no way affects the fortunes of the empire. It throws no light on the policy or character of the Cæsars, but it affords the writer an opportunity for displaying the deep interest he took in the sorrows and sufferings of humankind.
He does not disdain to interrupt his narrative when ​that "miraculous bird the phœnix, after disappearing for a series of ages, revisited Egypt in the year 34 A.D." He thinks "the fact worthy of notice, and that it will not be unwelcome to the reader."
"That the phœnix is sacred to the sun, and differs from the rest of the feathered species in the form of its head, and the tincture of its plumage, are points settled by naturalists. Of its longevity the accounts are various. The common persuasion is, that it lives five hundred years, though by some writers the period is extended to fourteen hundred and sixty-one. . . . It is the disposition of the phœnix, when its course of years is finished, and the approach of death is felt, to build a nest in its native clime, and there deposit the principles of life, from which a new progeny arises. The first care of the young bird, as soon as fledged and able to trust to its wings, is to perform the obsequies of its father. But this duty is not undertaken rashly. He collects a quantity of myrrh, and, to try its strength, makes frequent excursions with a load on its back. When he has made this experiment through a long tract of air and gained confidence in his own vigour, he takes up the body of his father, and flies with it to the altar of the sun, where he leaves it to be consumed in flames of fragrance. Such is the account of this extraordinary bird. It has, no doubt, a mixture of fable; but that the phœnix, from time to time, appears in Egypt, seems to be a fact sufficiently ascertained."
We pass on to the 'History.' Inferior to them in some respects, and far more imperfect than the 'Annals,' ​the earlier-written work rests on better authority than the later. The 'History,' indeed, is a narrative akin to that of Livy and Roman historians in general; whereas the 'Annals' are conceived in a modern spirit, and are the model on which many subsequent writers have constructed their works.
* ↑ Annals, iii. ch. 18.
* ↑ Annals, xii. ch. 53.
* ↑ Annals, xii. ch. 67.
* ↑ Annals, xv. ch. 67.
* ↑ Gibbon—Decline and Fall, ch. viii.
* ↑ Annals, xii. ch. 51.
* ↑ Annals, vi. ch. 28.