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10The following acts of his met with the censure of everybody alike. He caused great numbers of men to fight as gladiators, forcing them to contend both singly and in groups drawn up in a kind of battle array. He had asked permission of the senate to do this, 2so that he was able to do anything he wished even contrary to what was provided by law, and thus put many people to death, among others twenty-six knights, some of whom had devoured their living, while others had merely practised gladiatorial combat. It was not the large number of those who perished that was so serious, though that was serious enough, but his excessive delight in their death and his insatiable desire for the sight of blood. 3The same trait of cruelty led him once, when there was a shortage of condemned criminals to be given to the wild beasts, to order that some of the mob standing near the benches should be seized and thrown to them; and to prevent the possibility of their making an outcry or uttering any reproaches, he first caused their tongues to be cut out. 4Moreover he compelled one of the prominent knights to fight in single combat on the charge of having insulted his mother Agrippina, and when the man proved victorious, handed him over to his accusers and caused him to be slain. And the man’s father, though guilty of no crime, he confined in a cage, as, indeed, he had treated many others, and there put an end to him. 5He held these contests at first in the Saepta, after excavating the whole site and filling it with water, to enable him to bring in a single ship, but later he transferred them to another place, where he had demolished a great many large buildings and erected wooden stands; for he despised the theatre of Taurus. 6For all this he was censured, because of the expense and also of the bloodshed involved. He was blamed likewise for compelling Macro together with Ennia to take their own lives, remembering neither the affection of the latter nor the benefits of the former, who had, among other things, assisted him to win the throne for himself alone; nor did the fact that he had appointed Macro to govern Egypt have the slightest influence. He even involved him in a scandal, in which he himself had the greatest share, by bringing against him among other charges that of playing the pander. 7Thereupon many others were executed, some after being sentenced and some even before being convicted. Nominally they were punished because of the wrongs done to his parents or to his brothers or the others who had perished on their account, but in reality it was because of their property; for the treasury had become exhausted and he never could have enough. 8Such persons were convicted on the evidence not only of the witnesses who appeared against them but also of the papers which he once declared he had burned. Others, again, owed their ruin to the emperor’s illness of the preceding year and to the death of his sister Drusilla, since, among other things, any one who had entertained or had greeted another, or even had bathed during those days, incurred punishment.
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