the, deepest dye, and having nobler game in view, BOOK he disdained to stoop to an inferior quarry. The three last were saved by their want of importance.

IX. Cassius and Silanus were banished by a decree of the senate. The case of Lepida was referred to the prince. Cassius, in a short time after, was transported to the island of Sardinia, where Nero was content to leave him to old age and the decay of nature. Silanus was conveyed to Ostia, there, as was pretended, to embark for the isle of Naxos. He never reached that place. Barium (a) a municipal city of Apulia, was the last stage of his journey. He there supported life with a temper that gave dignity to undeserved misfortune, till a centurion, employed to commit the murder, rushed upon him abruptly. That officer advised him to open his veins. "Death," said Silanus, "has been familiar to my 'thoughts, but the honour of prescribing to me I "shall not allow to a ruffian and a murderer." The centurion, seeing that he had to do with a man, unarmed, indeed, but robust and vigorous, not a symptom of fear in his countenance, but, on the contrary, an eye that sparkled with indignation, gave orders to his soldiers to seize their prisoner. Silanus stood on the defensive: what man could do without a weapon he bravely dared, struggling, and dealing his blows about him, till he fell by the sword of the centurion, like a gallant officer, receiving honourable wounds, and facing his enemy to the last.

XVI. A. U. C.

818. A. D.

65.

BOOK
XVI.

A. U. C.

818. A. D.

65.

X. Lucius Vetus, and Sextia his mother-in-law, with Pollutia his daughter, died with equal fortitude. Nero thought them a living reproach to himself for the murder of Rubellius Plautus (a), the son-in-law of Lucius Vetus. The root of bitterness rankled in Nero's heart, till Fortunatus, one of the manumitted slaves of Vetus, gave him an opportunity to wreak his vengeance on the whole family. The freedman had been employed by Vetus in the management of his affairs, and having defrauded his master, he thought it time to add treachery to peculation, and give evidence against his patron. In this black design he associated with himself one Claudius Demianus, a fellow of an abandoned character, who had been charged in Asia, while Vetus was proconsul of the province, with various crimes, and sent to Rome in fetters. To forward the prosecution, Nero set him at liberty.

Vetus heard, with indignation, that the evidence of a freedman was received against the life of his patron, and retired to his country-seat in the neighbourhood of Formiæ. A band of soldiers followed him, and beset his house. His daughter was then with him. A sense of former injuries was still fresh in her mind. She had seen her husband, Rubellius Plautus, massacred by a band of ruffians. Upon that occasion she opposed her person to the assassin's stroke: she clung to her husband's bleeding neck, and preserved the garment stained with his blood. From that time nothing could assuage her sorrows: she remained a widow, a prey to grief, inconsolable, loathing all food, except what was ne

XVI.

A. U. C.
818.
A. D.

65.

cessary for the support of nature. In the present BOOK distress, by her father's advice, she set off for Naples, where Nero then resided. Not being admitted to his presence, she watched the palace-gates, and, as soon as he came forth, she cried aloud, "Hear my father, hear an innocent man; he was your colleague (b) in the consulship; extend your mercy, nor let him fall a sacrifice to the perni"cious arts of a vile abandoned slave." She persisted, as often as Nero passed, to renew her application, sometimes in tears and misery of heart; often in a tone of vehemence, roused by her sufferings above the weakness of her sex. But neither tears nor reproaches had any effect on the cruelty of Nero: insensible to both, and heedless of the popular hatred, he remained obdurate and implacable.

XI. Pollutia returned to her father, and, since not a ray of hope was left, exhorted him to meet his fate with a becoming spirit. Intelligence arrived at the same time, that preparations for the trial were going on with rapidity, and that the senate shewed a disposition to pronounce the severest sentence. Among the friends of Cassius some were of opinion, that the surest way to secure part of his fortune for his grand-children, would be by making the emperor heir in chief. He rejected that advice as unworthy of his character. Having lived his days with a spirit of independence, he resolved to die with honour. He distributed the money then in his possession among his slaves, and ordered them to remove for their own use all the effects that

BOOK could be carried off, with an exception of three XVI. couches, to serve as funeral beds for himself and his family.

A, U. C.

818. A. D. 65.

They retired to die together. In the same chamber, and with the same instrument, the father, the mother-in-law, and the daughter opened their veins, and without any other covering, than such as decency required, were conducted to a warm bath; the father with his eyes fixed upon his daughter; the grandmother gazing on the same object; and she, in return, looking with tender affection on both her parents; each of them wishing to avoid the pain of seeing the others in the pangs of death, and praying to be released. Nature pursued her own course. They died in the order of their respective ages, the oldest first. After their decease, a prosecution was carried on in due form of law, and all three were adjudged to capital punishment. Nero so far opposed the sentence, as to give them the liberty of choosing their mode of dying. When the tragedy was already performed, such was the farce that followed.

XII. Publius Gallus, a Roman knight, for no other crime than his intimacy with Fenius Rufus (a), and some connection with Vetus, was interdicted from fire and water. The freedman of Vetus, who betrayed his master, and the accuser, who undertook the conduct of the prosecution, obtained, to reward their villany, a seat in the theatre among the officers who follow in the train of the tribunes. The month of April was already styled by the name

XVI.

A. U. C.
818.
A. D.

of Nero (6), and, in like manner, May was changed BOOK to that of Claudius, and June to Germanicus. Cornelius Orfitus was the author of this innovation. His reason for the last was, because the two Torquati (c) suffered in the month of June, and that inauspicious name ought, therefore, to be abolished from the calendar.

XIII. To the blood and horror, that made this year for ever memorable, we may add the vengeance of Heaven, declared in storms and tempests, and epidemic disorders. A violent hurricane made the country of Campania a scene of desolation; whole villages were overthrown; plantations were torn up by the roots, and the hopes of the year destroyed. The fury of the storm was felt in the neighbourhood of Rome, where, without any apparent cause in the atmosphere, a contagious distemper broke out, and swept away a vast number of the inhabitants. The houses were filled with dead bodies, and the streets with funeral processions. Neither sex nor age escaped. Slaves and men of ingenuous birth were carried off, without distinction, amidst the shrieks and lamentations of their wives and children. Numbers, while they assisted their expiring friends, or bewailed their loss, were suddenly seized, and burnt on the same funeral pile. The Roman knights and senators suffered the common lot of mortality; but death delivered them from the power of the tyrant, and, for that reason, they were not regretted.

In the course of the year new levies were made in Narbon Gaul, and likewise in Asia and Africa,

65.