When I hear of these and like occurrences, I suspend my judgment on the question whether it is fate and unchangeable necessity or chance which governs the revolutions of human affairs.Indeed, among the wisest of the ancients and among their disciples you will find conflicting theories, many holding the conviction that heaven does not concern itself with the beginning or the end of our life, or, in short, with mankind at all; and that therefore sorrows are continually the lot of the good, happiness of the wicked; while others, on the contrary, believe that though there is a harmony between fate and events, yet it is not dependent on wandering stars, but on primary elements, and on a combination of natural causes.Still, they leave us the capacity of choosing our life, maintaining that, the choice once made, there is a fixed sequence of events.Good and evil, again, are not what vulgar opinion accounts them; many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable, if only the first bear their hard lot with patience, and the latter make a foolish use of their prosperity.
Most men, however, cannot part with the belief that each person's future is fixed from his very birth, but that some things happen differently from what has been foretold through the impostures of those who describe what they do not know, and that this destroys the credit of a science, clear testimonies to which have been given both by past ages and by our own.In fact, how the son of this same Thrasyllus predicted Nero's reign I shall relate when the time comes, not to digress too far from my subject.
That same year the death of Asinius Gallus became known.That he died of starvation, there was not a doubt; whether of his own choice or by compulsion, was a question.The emperor was asked whether he would allow him to be buried, and he blushed not to grant the favour, and actually blamed the accident which had proved fatal to the accused before he could be convicted in his presence.Just as if in a three years' interval an opportunity was wanting for the trial of an old ex-consul and the father of a number of ex-consuls.
Next Drusus perished, after having prolonged life for eight days on the most wretched of food, even chewing the stuffing, his bed.
According to some writers, Macro had been instructed that, in case of Sejanus attempting an armed revolt, he was to hurry the young prince out of the confinement in which he was detained in the Palace and put him at the head of the people.Subsequently the emperor, as a rumour was gaining ground that he was on the point of a reconciliation with his daughter-in-law and his grandson, chose to be merciless rather than to relent.
He even bitterly reviled him after his death, taunting him with nameless abominations and with a spirit bent on his family's ruin and hostile to the State.And, what seemed most horrible of all, he ordered a daily journal of all that he said and did to be read in public.That there had been spies by his side for so many years, to note his looks, his sighs, and even his whispered thoughts, and that his grandfather could have heard read, and published all, was scarce credible.But letters of Attius, a centurion, and Didymus, a freedman, openly exhibited the names of slave after slave who had respectively struck or scared Drusus as he was quitting his chamber.The centurion had actually added, as something highly meritorious, his own language in all its brutality, and some utterances of the dying man in which, at first feigning loss of reason, he imprecated in seeming madness fearful things on Tiberius, and then, when hope of life was gone, denounced him with a studied and elaborate curse."As he had slain a daughter-in-law, a brother's son, and son's sons, and filled his whole house with bloodshed, so might he pay the full penalty due to the name and race of his ancestors as well as to future generations."The Senate clamorously interrupted, with an affectation of horror, but they were penetrated by alarm and amazement at seeing that a hitherto cunning prince, who had shrouded his wickedness in mystery, had waxed so bold as to remove, so to speak, the walls of his house and display his grandson under a centurion's lash, amid the buffetings of slaves, craving in vain the last sustenance of life.
Men's grief at all this had not died away when news was heard of Agrippina.She had lived on, sustained by hope, I suppose, after the destruction of Sejanus, and, when she found no abatement of horrors, had voluntarily perished, though possibly nourishment was refused her and a fiction concocted of a death that might seem self-chosen.
Tiberius, it is certain, vented his wrath in the foulest charges.He reproached her with unchastity, with having had Asinius Gallus as a paramour and being driven by his death to loathe existence.But Agrippina, who could not endure equality and loved to domineer, was with her masculine aspirations far removed from the frailties of women.The emperor further observed that she died on the same day on which Sejanus had paid the penalty of his crime two years before, a fact, he said, to be recorded; and he made it a boast that she had not been strangled by the halter and flung down the Gemonian steps.He received a vote of thanks, and it was decreed that on the seventeenth of October, the day on which both perished, through all future years, an offering should be consecrated to Jupiter.