第33章 A.D.16-19(12)
About the same time he dedicated some temples of the gods, which had perished from age or from fire, and which Augustus had begun to restore.These were temples to Liber, Libera, and Ceres, near the Great Circus, which last Aulus Postumius, when Dictator, had vowed;a temple to Flora in the same place, which had been built by Lucius and Marcus Publicius, aediles, and a temple to Janus, which had been erected in the vegetable market by Caius Duilius, who was the first to make the Roman power successful at sea and to win a naval triumph over the Carthaginians.A temple to Hope was consecrated by Germanicus;this had been vowed by Atilius in that same war.
Meantime the law of treason was gaining strength.Appuleia Varilia, grand-niece of Augustus, was accused of treason by an informer for having ridiculed the Divine Augustus, Tiberius, and Tiberius's mother, in some insulting remarks, and for having been convicted of adultery, allied though she was to Caesar's house.
Adultery, it was thought, was sufficiently guarded against by the Julian law.As to the charge of treason, the emperor insisted that it should be taken separately, and that she should be condemned if she had spoken irreverently of Augustus.Her insinuations against himself he did not wish to be the subject of judicial inquiry.When asked by the consul what he thought of the unfavourable speeches she was accused of having uttered against his mother, he said nothing.
Afterwards, on the next day of the Senate's meeting, he even begged in his mother's name that no words of any kind spoken against her might in any case be treated as criminal.He then acquitted Appuleia of treason.For her adultery, he deprecated the severer penalty, and advised that she should be removed by her kinsfolk, after the example of our forefathers, to more than two hundred miles from Rome.Her paramour, Manlius, was forbidden to live in Italy or Africa.
A contest then arose about the election of a praetor in the room of Vipstanus Gallus, whom death had removed.Germanicus and Drusus (for they were still at Rome) supported Haterius Agrippa, a relative of Germanicus.Many, on the other hand, endeavoured to make the number of children weigh most in favour of the candidates.Tiberius rejoiced to see a strife in the Senate between his sons and the law.
Beyond question the law was beaten, but not at once, and only by a few votes, in the same way as laws were defeated even when they were in force.
In this same year a war broke out in Africa, where the enemy was led by Tacfarinas.A Numidian by birth, he had served as an auxiliary in the Roman camp, then becoming a deserter, he at first gathered round him a roving band familiar with robbery, for plunder and for rapine.
After a while, he marshalled them like regular soldiers, under standards and in troops, till at last he was regarded as the leader, not of an undisciplined rabble, but of the Musulamian people.This powerful tribe, bordering on the deserts of Africa, and even then with none of the civilisation of cities, took up arms and drew their Moorish neighbours into the war.These too had a leader, Mazippa.
The army was so divided that Tacfarinas kept the picked men who were armed in Roman fashion within a camp, and familiarised them with a commander's authority, while Mazippa, with light troops, spread around him fire, slaughter, and consternation.They had forced the Ciniphii, a far from contemptible tribe, into their cause, when Furius Camillus, proconsul of Africa, united in one force a legion and all the regularly enlisted allies, and, with an army insignificant indeed compared with the multitude of the Numidians and Moors, marched against the enemy.There was nothing however which he strove so much to avoid as their eluding an engagement out of fear.It was by the hope of victory that they were lured on only to be defeated.The legion was in the army's centre; the light cohorts and two cavalry squadrons on its wings.Nor did Tacfarinas refuse battle.The Numidians were routed, and after a number of years the name of Furius won military renown.Since the days of the famous deliverer of our city and his son Camillus, fame as a general had fallen to the lot of other branches of the family, and the man of whom I am now speaking was regarded as an inexperienced soldier.All the more willingly did Tiberius commemorate his achievements in the Senate, and the Senators voted him the ornaments of triumph, an honour which Camillus, because of his unambitious life, enjoyed without harm.
In the following year Tiberius held his third, Germanicus his second, consulship.Germanicus, however, entered on the office at Nicopolis, a city of Achaia, whither he had arrived by the coast of Illyricum, after having seen his brother Drusus, who was then in Dalmatia, and endured a stormy voyage through the Adriatic and afterwards the Ionian Sea.He accordingly devoted a few days to the repair of his fleet, and, at the same time, in remembrance of his ancestors, he visited the bay which the victory of Actium had made famous, the spoils consecrated by Augustus, and the camp of Antonius.For, as I have said, Augustus was his great-uncle, Antonius his grandfather, and vivid images of disaster and success rose before him on the spot.Thence he went to Athens, and there, as a concession to our treaty with an allied and ancient city, he was attended only by a single lictor.The Greeks welcomed him with the most elaborate honours, and brought forward all the old deeds and sayings of their countrymen, to give additional dignity to their flattery.