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Monday, August 02, 2010 - 2:04 PM
Soon afterwards Cocceius Nerva, a man always at the emperor's side,
a master of law both divine and human, whose position was secure and health
sound, resolved to die. Tiberius, as soon as he knew it, sat by him and
asked his reasons, adding intreaties, and finally protesting that it would
be a burden on his conscience and a blot on his reputation, if the most
intimate of his friends were to fly from life without any cause for death.
Nerva turned away from his expostulations and persisted in his abstinence
from all food. Those who knew his thoughts said that as he saw more closely
into the miseries of the State, he chose, in anger and alarm, an honourable
death, while he was yet safe and unassailed on.
Meanwhile Agrippina's ruin, strange to say, dragged Plancina with
it. Formerly the wife of Cneius Piso, and one who had openly exulted at
the death of Germanicus, she had been saved, when Piso fell, by the intreaties
of Augusta, and not less by the enmity of Agrippina. When hatred and favour
had alike passed away, justice asserted itself. Pursued by charges universally
notorious, she suffered by her own hand a penalty tardy rather than
undeserved.
Amid the many sorrows which saddened Rome, one cause of grief was
the marriage of Julia, Drusus's daughter and Nero's late wife, into the
humbler family of Rubellius Blandus, whose grandfather many remembered
as a Roman knight from Tibur. At the end of the year the death of Aelius
Lamia, who, after being at last released from the farce of governing Syria,
had become city-prefect, was celebrated with the honours of a censor's
funeral. He was a man of illustrious descent, and in a hale old age; and
the fact of the province having been withheld gained him additional esteem.
Subsequently, on the death of Flaccus Pomponius, propraetor of Syria, a
letter from the emperor was read, in which he complained that all the best
men who were fit to command armies declined the service, and that he was
thus necessarily driven to intreaties, by which some of the ex-consuls
might be prevailed on to take provinces. He forgot that Arruntius had been
kept at home now for ten years, that he might not go to
Spain.
That same year Marcus Lepidus also died. I have dwelt at sufficient
length on his moderation and wisdom in my earlier books, and I need not
further enlarge on his noble descent. Assuredly the family of the Aemilii
has been rich in good citizens, and even the members of that house whose
morals were corrupt, still lived with a certain splendour.
During the consulship of Paulus Fabius and Lucius Vitellius, the
bird called the phoenix, after a long succession of ages, appeared in Egypt
and furnished the most learned men of that country and of Greece with abundant
matter for the discussion of the marvellous phenomenon. It is my wish to
make known all on which they agree with several things, questionable enough
indeed, but not too absurd to be noticed.
That it is a creature sacred to the sun, differing from all other
birds in its beak and in the tints of its plumage, is held unanimously
by those who have described its nature. As to the number of years it lives,
there are various accounts. The general tradition says five hundred years.
Some maintain that it is seen at intervals of fourteen hundred and sixty-one
years, and that the former birds flew into the city called Heliopolis successively
in the reigns of enlarge 662.enl.002 , Amasis, and Ptolemy, the third king of the
Macedonian dynasty, with a multitude of companion birds marvelling at the
novelty of the appearance. But all antiquity is of course obscure. From
Ptolemy to Tiberius was a period of less than five hundred years. Consequently
some have supposed that this was a spurious phoenix, not from the regions
of Arabia, and with none of the instincts which ancient tradition has attributed
to the bird. For when the number of years is completed and death is near,
the phoenix, it is said, builds a nest in the land of its birth and infuses
into it a germ of life from which an offspring arises, whose first care,
when fledged, is to bury its father. This is not rashly done, but taking
up a load of myrrh and having tried its strength by a long flight, as soon
as it is equal to the burden and to the journey, it carries its father's
body, bears it to the altar of the Sun, and leaves it to the flames. All
this is full of doubt and legendary exaggeration. Still, there is no question
that the bird is occasionally seen in Egypt.
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