To his splendid public liberality the emperor added bounties no less
popular. The property of Aemilia Musa, a rich woman who died intestate,
on which the imperial treasury had a claim, he handed over to Aemilius
Lepidus, to whose family she appeared to belong; and the estate of
Patuleius, a wealthy Roman knight, though he was himself left in part
his heir, he gave to Marcus Servilius, whose name he discovered in
an earlier and unquestioned will. In both these cases he said that
noble rank ought to have the support of wealth. Nor did he accept
a legacy from any one unless he had earned it by friendship. Those
who were strangers to him, and who, because they were at enmity with
others, made the emperor their heir, he kept at a distance. While,
however, he relieved the honourable poverty of the virtuous, he expelled
from the Senate or suffered voluntarily to retire spendthrifts whose
vices had brought them to penury, like Vibidius Varro, Marius Nepos,
Appius Appianus, Cornelius Sulla, and Quintus Vitellius.

About the same time he dedicated some temples of the gods, which had
perished from age or from fire, and which Augustus had begun to restore.
These were temples to Liber, Libera, and Ceres, near the Great Circus,
which last Aulus Postumius, when Dictator, had vowed; a temple to
Flora in the same place, which had been built by Lucius and Marcus
Publicius, aediles, and a temple to Janus, which had been erected
in the vegetable market by Caius Duilius, who was the first to make
the Roman power successful at sea and to win a naval triumph over
the Carthaginians. A temple to Hope was consecrated by Germanicus;
this had been vowed by Atilius in that same war.

Meantime the law of treason was gaining strength. Appuleia Varilia,
grand-niece of Augustus, was accused of treason by an informer for
having ridiculed the Divine Augustus, Tiberius, and Tiberius’s mother,
in some insulting remarks, and for having been convicted of adultery,
allied though she was to Caesar’s house. Adultery, it was thought,
was sufficiently guarded against by the Julian law. As to the charge
of treason, the emperor insisted that it should be taken separately,
and that she should be condemned if she had spoken irreverently of
Augustus. Her insinuations against himself he did not wish to be the
subject of judicial inquiry. When asked by the consul what he thought
of the unfavourable speeches she was accused of having uttered against
his mother, he said nothing. Afterwards, on the next day of the Senate’s
meeting, he even begged in his mother’s name that no words of any
kind spoken against her might in any case be treated as criminal.
He then acquitted Appuleia of treason. For her adultery, he deprecated
the severer penalty, and advised that she should be removed by her
kinsfolk, after the example of our forefathers, to more than two hundred
miles from Rome. Her paramour, Manlius, was forbidden to live in Italy
or Africa.

A contest then arose about the election of a praetor in the room of
Vipstanus Gallus, whom death had removed. Germanicus and Drusus (for
they were still at Rome) supported Haterius Agrippa, a relative of
Germanicus. Many, on the other hand, endeavoured to make the number
of children weigh most in favour of the candidates. Tiberius rejoiced
to see a strife in the Senate between his sons and the law. Beyond
question the law was beaten, but not at once, and only by a few votes,
in the same way as laws were defeated even when they were in force.

In this same year a war broke out in Africa, where the enemy was led
by Tacfarinas. A Numidian by birth, he had served as an auxiliary
in the Roman camp, then becoming a deserter, he at first gathered
round him a roving band familiar with robbery, for plunder and for
rapine. After a while, he marshalled them like regular soldiers, under
standards and in troops, till at last he was regarded as the leader,
not of an undisciplined rabble, but of the Musulamian people. This
powerful tribe, bordering on the deserts of Africa, and even then
with none of the civilisation of cities, took up arms and drew their
Moorish neighbours into the war. These too had a leader, Mazippa.
The army was so divided that Tacfarinas kept the picked men who were
armed in Roman fashion within a camp, and familiarised them with a
commander’s authority, while Mazippa, with light troops, spread around
him fire, slaughter, and consternation. They had forced the Ciniphii,
a far from contemptible tribe, into their cause, when Furius Camillus,
proconsul of Africa, united in one force a legion and all the regularly
enlisted allies, and, with an army insignificant indeed compared with
the multitude of the Numidians and Moors, marched against the enemy.
There was nothing however which he strove so much to avoid as their
eluding an engagement out of fear. It was by the hope of victory that
they were lured on only to be defeated. The legion was in the army’s
centre; the light cohorts and two cavalry squadrons on its wings.
Nor did Tacfarinas refuse battle. The Numidians were routed, and after
a number of years the name of Furius won military renown. Since the
days of the famous deliverer of our city and his son Camillus, fame
as a general had fallen to the lot of other branches of the family,
and the man of whom I am now speaking was regarded as an inexperienced
soldier. All the more willingly did Tiberius commemorate his achievements
in the Senate, and the Senators voted him the ornaments of triumph,
an honour which Camillus, because of his unambitious life, enjoyed
without harm.
The Annals by Tacitus