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

(servitium) emerges as pragmatism and common sense, and what he
calls the independence (libertas) of Thrasea Paetus as a rather irritating
act of self-promotion that leaves everybody else worse off.
Let’s look at the fall-out: by arguing for a more lenient sentencing by
the senate Thrasea Paetus pre-empts the role that Nero expected to play
himself. (Reading his speech intertextually with Caesar’s position in the
senatorial debate over the fate of the Catilinarian conspirators as reported
by Cicero (in his fourth speech against Catiline) and Sallust (in his Bellum
Catilinae) heightens the affront: it implies that Paetus is here play-acting as
emperor by imitating the founding figure of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.) 62
The senate (including the consuls who had proposed the death penalty) are
forced to change tack. The princeps is deprived of his opportunity to show
mercy and grudgingly concedes what he would have gladly imposed.
Aulus Vitellius aggravates the divisions within the senate for personal gain
(just like Thrasea). Everyone is insecure and anxious once the princeps has
been upset. The episode thus illustrates Tacitus’ earlier critical comment
on Thrasea’s adversarial stance towards the princeps, when he notes that
Thrasea’s ostentatious departure from a senate-meeting as protest against
excessive adulation of the emperor ‘caused danger for himself without
initiating freedom for the rest’ (Annals 14.12.1: sibi causam periculi fecit,
ceteris libertatis initium non praebuit).
Within the senate, then, Thrasea’s refusal to play along in what was
ultimately a carefully orchestrated social drama that enabled senators
and emperor to negotiate their positions vis-à-vis one another, was
bound to prove divisive: it forced all other senators to adopt a much more
exposed stance on the matter. From the point of view of the retrospective
historiographer, of course, Thrasea’s intervention was a godsend: it
provided Tacitus with the opportunity to assess the character of the
senate as a whole and of specific individuals on a spectrum of possibilities,
ranging from ‘unscrupulous opportunist’ to ‘servile’ to ‘principled and
independent.’ At the same time, it is important to note that Tacitus enables
his readers to appreciate how disruptive a figure Thrasea Paetus was. He
could, for instance, easily have enhanced Thrasea’s apparent heroism by
suppressing the information that Nero planned to pardon the accused
in any case: this would have made it much more difficult for his readers
to recognize the social script that was playing itself out before Thrasea
62 The phrase multo cum honore Caesaris (49) is studiously ambiguous: Caesar could be Nero
– or Julius Caesar.