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

Vatinius offers the occasion for a character-portrayal (or rather assassination)
of malicious brilliance (34.2), before Tacitus claims that Nero conceived
of the murder of his distant relative (and hence potential rival) Silanus
Torquatus during the gladiatorial games put on by Vatinius (35.1). We then
get an account of the events that led to Silanus’ death: charge, pending
trial, pre-emptive suicide, speech of regret by the emperor, announcing
that he would have exercised mercy even though the defendant was guilty
as charged (35.2). The entire sequence is held together by a ‘factoid’ for
which Tacitus could not conceivably have had any evidence: that the munus
of Vatinius was the moment at which Nero began to plot the murder of
Silanus. The suspicion that Tacitus here exercises creative license thickens
in light of the fact that Cassius Dio (62.27.2, cited below) dates Silanus’
suicide to the following year. Again, one may wonder how best to explain
this discrepancy in our sources. If Cassius Dio got it right, did Tacitus
ride roughshod over chronological accuracy since he wished to plant a
premeditated murder in Nero’s mind during Vatinius’ gladiatorial games,
not least to blur the distinction between voluptas and scelus?
adsumptus, dehinc optimi cuiusque criminatione eo usque valuit ut
gratia pecunia vi nocendi etiam malos praemineret.
Here we get a little portrait of one of Nero’s creatures – the parvenu
Vatinius from Beneventum, who reputedly had a long nose (Juvenal, Satire
5.46–7, Martial, Epigrams 14.96) and made a fortune under the emperor as
informer and ‘sinister court-buffoon.’ 125 In his Dialogus de Oratoribus, Tacitus
mentions that Maternus eventually crushed the creature by means of some
acid poetry (11.2). 126 The vocabulary of wickedness – foedissima, sutrinae,
detorto, scurrilibus, contumelias, criminatione, malos – is densely packed here
to give a very strong flavour of the corruption of Vatinius and of Nero’s
court.
After first establishing that
Nero’s entire court teemed with disgusting misfits – the implication of inter
125 Syme (1958) I 356.
126 For the (uncertain) text, translation, and discussion see Bartsch (1994) 103–4.