Tacitus, Annals, 15.20­-23, 33­-45. Latin Text, Study Aids with Vocabulary, and Commentary, 2013a

Take this as a benchmark and you could argue that the senators who
proposed divine honours for Nero’s baby-girl showed remarkable...
restraint. 114
A sacred couch on which the images of the gods were placed
at a special celebration (the lectisternium) – the suggestion here is that the
young baby’s image be placed among them as a new goddess (diva Claudia,
Neronis filia).
The singular surprises in its conspicuous modesty: in contrast
to the twenty priests and priestesses that Caligula appointed for the shrine
of his sister, the temple of diva Claudia looks decidedly under-staffed.
Another very short
and therefore emphatic sentence, in which Tacitus makes explicit how
highly strung Nero was. The advanced position and parallelism of ut
laetitiae, ita maeroris (both genitives are dependent on immodicus) highlight
that Nero is prone to excess at either end of the emotional spectrum. The
adjective immodicus (‘excessive’) carries strong negative connotations in
traditional Roman morality, which regarded control of one’s emotions as
a sign of excellence; it correlates with the ultra mortale at 23.1, effecting a
further bracketing of birth and death. Tacitus perhaps also invites us to
evaluate Nero’s emotional reaction to the arrival and departure of his baby
daughter against the high infant mortality rate in antiquity. Valerie French
provides some numbers: 115
If we retroject the worst mortality rates of the modern world back into the
Greco- Roman one, we would estimate that about 5% of all babies born alive
would die before they reached the age of one month, and that among every
20,000 women giving birth, five would die. If we include late fetal and in -
childbirth deaths, the probability of infant mortality climbs from 5% to 8%.
114 As a further point of comparison one could cite Cassius Dio’s account of the honours
Augustus awarded to his nephew and son-in-law Marcellus after his death in 23 BC.
It is indicative of an early stage of imperial honours, where the crossing of the divide
between human and divine was still a taboo: ‘Augustus gave him a public burial after the
customary eulogies, placing him in the tomb he was building, and as a memorial to him
finished the theatre whose foundations had already been laid by the former Caesar and
which was now called the theatre of Marcellus. And he ordered also that a golden image
of the deceased, a golden crown, and a curule chair should be carried into the theatre at
the Ludi Romani and should be placed in the midst of the officials having charge of the
games’ (53.30).
115 French (1986) 69.