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

urial and the validity of the accused’s will.’ 131 For special effect, Tacitus
again delays subject (Torquatus) and verb (interscidit) till the very end,
though readers would have known what was coming after the accusative
object (placed up front) brachiorum venas.
secuta [sc. est] : oratio implies that Nero spoke in an official
setting, perhaps in front of the senate. The inversion of normal word
order, which gives special prominence to the verb secuta, makes clear the
immediacy of Nero’s statement, adding pathos and the irony that, straight
after he all but forced Torquatus to suicide, the emperor claims that he
would have spared his life if only he had waited.
This phrase is loaded with Tacitus’ dark cynicism and despair:
this, he says, was common practice under the emperors. In Annals 2.31, the
emperor Tiberius did and said the same thing after forcing a senator called
Libo to commit suicide: it seems this was a method the emperor could use
to achieve what he desired and still maintain a pretence of clemency.
Tacitus summarizes Nero’s oration
in indirect speech: the subject accusative of the apodosis, sc. Torquatum
(modified by sontem and diffisum in predicative position), is implied; the
verb is victurum fuisse. Of course Nero does not concede that Torquatus was
innocent; rather, he goes out of his way to stress that he was guilty. First,
we have the emphatically placed sontem; then comes the comment that he
was right to lose confidence in his defence (defensioni merito diffisum). Put
differently, Nero here twists Torquatus’ suicide into a confession of guilt.
This serves him as foil to promote his mercy: he would have pardoned a
man whom he knew to be plotting against him. After what has just been
said, Tacitus is leading his reader to say, ‘Yeah right!’
Emperors liked to be able to boast mercy as one of their
virtues (remember Nero’s rapprochement with Thrasea at 15.23), and Nero’s
tutor Seneca had written a treatise entitled de Clementia, ‘On Mercy’, as a
guide for Nero in his boyhood. The iudex Nero mentions is he himself, either
because some trials of this type were held intra cubiculum (i.e. behind closed
doors in the imperial palace): see Annals 11.2 for an example; or because he
131 Miller (1975) 84.