[p. 285]
Book 13
BOOK XIII
A.D. 5458
Ch. 1 The first death under the new emperor, that of Junius Silanus,
proconsul of Asia, was, without Nero's knowledge,
planned by the treachery of Agrippina. Not that Silanus had provoked
destruction by any violence of temper, apathetic as he was, and so utterly
despised under former despotisms, that Caius Csar used to call him
the golden sheep. The truth was that Agrippina, having contrived the murder
of his brother Lucius Silanus, dreaded his vengeance; for it was the
incessant popular talk that preference ought to be given over Nero, who was
scarcely out of his boyhood and had gained the empire by crime, to a man of
mature age, of blameless life, of noble birth, and, as a point then much
regarded, of the line of the Csars. Silanus in fact was the son of a
great-grandson of Augustus. This was the cause of his destruction. The
agents of the deed were Publius Celer, a Roman knight, and Helius, a
freedman, men who had the charge of the emperor's domains in Asia. They gave the proconsul poison at a banquet, too
openly to escape discovery.
With no less precipitation, Narcissus,
Claudius's freedman, whose quarrels with Agrippina I have mentioned, was
driven to suicide by his cruel imprisonment and hopeless plight, even
against the wishes of Nero, with whose yet concealed vices he was
wonderfully in sympathy from his rapacity and extravagance.
