Rome -- History -- Tiberius, 14-37; Tiberius, Emperor of Rome 42 B.C.-37 A.D.
The result of the orations of Percennius was a general insubordination.
Junius Blæsus, who was commander-in-chief, persuaded the excited
men with some difficulty to send an orderly deputation to Tiberius
to present their grievances, and the soldiers cleverly included his
son in the deputation. For a time there was quiet, but the news of
the mutiny reached Nauportus, where the “flagmen” were employed in
engineering, and they immediately threw off all discipline, plundered
the neighbouring villages, and even Nauportus itself. Laden with
their booty, they marched to the headquarters of the mutinied legions,
but they had not forgotten previously to pay off old scores, they had
derided and beaten their centurions, they had seized the commander
of their camp, a rigorous martinet who had himself risen from the
ranks, piled burdens upon him, and driven him at the head of their
column, asking him how he liked it. Blæsus met them with firmness, and
arrested the ringleaders, but their appeals to their former fellow
soldiers renewed the revolt, the prison was opened, all the prisoners
were released, and a man named Vibulenus mounted the shoulders of his
comrades, and, standing in front of the tribunal of Blæsus, made an
impassioned oration. Addressing the mutineers, he cried: “You have
certainly restored these innocent and miserable men to life and light,
but who will give my brother back his life? Who will give me back
my brother? He was sent to you from the German army on our common
concerns, but last night this man, by the hands of those prize-fighters
whom he keeps and arms to the ruin of the soldiers, cut his throat.
Tell me, Blæsus, where you threw the body. Our enemies even do not
grudge us burial. When I have sated my grief with tears and kisses, bid
me then to be butchered too, so long as my friends here are allowed to
bury those who have been slain for no crime, but because they thought
of the good of the legions.”
This pathetic speech naturally redoubled the excitement, and the
prize-fighters of Blæsus were seized and bound along with the rest of
his slaves, and were likely to have suffered rough treatment, when it
was discovered that Vibulenus never had a brother. The wrath of the
soldiers was then turned upon the centurions; most of them got off and
hid themselves, but one was killed whom the soldiers used to call “Give
us another,” because it had been his habit to break his vinestick over
the shoulders of his men, and then ask for another, and yet another.
The centurions, however, were not all unpopular, and a division of
opinion between the eighth and fifteenth legions about a centurion whom
the former wished to kill, but the latter to protect, would have ended
in a fight, had not the ninth legion intervened.
Though Vibulenus never had a brother, his speech shows that the mutiny
was concerted with the legions on the Rhine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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