Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 1.djvu/1100

Rh 1082 DRUSUS. ing fit, and carried home apparently lifeless. Some said that his illness was a pretence to gain time. It did in fact give him a brief respite, and public prayers for his recovery were put up throughout Italy. Some said, that the fit was occasioned by an overdose of goatVblood, which he had swal- lowed, in order, by his pale countenance, to accre- dit a report that Caepio had attempted to poison him. Feverish anxiety, coupled with great mental and bodily exertion, had probably brought on a return of his old disorder, epilepsy, which was supposed to have been cured by a voyage he once made to Anticyra, for the purpose of taking helle- bore upon the spot where it grew. (De Vir. [U. 66; Plin. H. X. xxviii. 41, XXV. 21 ; Cell. xvii. 15.) Affairs now approached a crisis. The social war was manifestly bursting into flame ; and the consuls, looking upon Drusus as a chief conspirator, resolved to meet his plots by counterplots. He knew his danger, and, whenever he went into the city, kept a strong body-guard of attendants close to his person. The accounts of his death vary in several particulars. Appian says, that the consuls invited a party of Etruscans and Umbrians into the city to waylay him under pretence of urging their claims to citizenship ; that he became afraid to appear abroad, and received his partisans in a dark pas- sage in his house ; and that, one evening at dusk, when dismissing the crowds who attended, he suddenly cried out that he was woitnded, and fell to the ground with a leather-cutter's knife sticking in his groin. The writer de VirLt Il/ustrifjus re- lates that, at a meeting on the Alban mount, the Latins conspired to kill Philippus; that Drusus, though he warned Philippus to Innvare, was ac- cused in the senate of plotting ag;iins>t the consul's life ; and that he was stablied upon entering his house on his return from the Capitol. (Compare also Veil. Paterc. ii. 14.) Assassinated as he was in his own hall, the imacjc of his father was sprinkled with his blood ; and, while he was dying, he turned to those who surrounded him, and asked, with chanicteristic arrogance, based perhaps upon conscious honesty of purpose, " Friends and neighbours, when will the commonwealth have a citizen like me again ?" Though he was cut off in the flower of manhood, no one considered his death premature. It was even rumoured that, to escape from inextricjible embarrassments, he had died bj' his own hand. The assassin w«is never discovered, and no attempts were made to discover him. Caepio and Philippus (Ampelius, 26) were both suspected of having suborned the crime ; and when Cicero (de Nat. Deor. iii. 33) accuses Q. Varius of the murder, he probably does not mean that it was the very hand of Varius which perpetrated the act. Cornelia, the mother of Drusus, a matron worthy of her illustrious name, was present at the death- scene, and bore her calamity — a calamity the more bitter because unsweetened by vengeance — with the same high spirit, says Seneca (Cons, ad Marc. 1 6), with which her son had carried his laws. After the fall of Drusus, his political opponents treated his death as a just retribution for his inju- ries to the state. This sentiment breathes through a fragment of a speech of C. Carbo, the young(r (delivered b. c. 90), which has been celebrated by Cicero (Orator, 63) for the peculiarity of its tro- chaic rythm : " O Murce Druse (patrem appello), iu diccre, soliUis scwraiti esse reiiij.uUicatn : fjuu-uiii- DRUSUS. qm earn violavisscvt., ah omnibus essr. ei poenas pn"- solutas. Patris dictum sapiens femcritas fili cum- prchavU."'' (Niebuhr, History of Rome, vol. iv. Lec- ture xxxii. ; Bayle, Diet. s. v. Drusus ; De Drosses, Vie du Consul Philippe in Memoircs de r Academic, des Inscriptions, xxvii. p. 406.) 7. Livius Drusus Claudianus, the father of Livia, who was the mother of the emperor Tibe- rius. He was one of the gens Claudia, and was adopted by a Livius Drusus. (Suet. 7%. 3 ; Veil. Paterc. ii. 75.) It was through this adoption that the Drusi became connected with the imperial family. Pighius (Annates., iii. p. 21 ), by some over- sight which is repugnant to dates and the ordinary- laws of human mortality, makes him the adopted son of No. 3, and confounds him with No. 5, and, in this error, has been followed by Vaillant. (Num. Ant. Pain. Rom. ii. 51.) There is no such inconsistency in the supposition that he was adopted by No. 7, who is spoken of by Suetonius as if he were an ancestor of Tiberius. (Augustinus, Fam. Rom. (Lirii) p. 77 ; Fabretti, Inscr. c. 6, No. 38.) The father of Livia, after the death of Caesar, espoused the cause of Bnitus and Cassius, and, after the battle of Philippi, being proscribed by the conquerors, he followed the example of others of his own party, and killed himself in his tent. (Dion Cass xlviii. 44 ; Veil. Paterc. ii. 71 ) It is likely that he is the Drusus who, in B. c. 43, encouraged Decimus Brutus in the vain hope that the fourth legion and the legion of Mars, which had fought under Caesar, would go over to the side of his murderers. (Cic. ad Fam. xi. 19. $ 2.) In other j)arts of the correspondence of Cicero, the name Drusus occurs several times, and the person intended may be, as Manutius conjectured, identical with the father of Livia. In b. c. 59, it seems that a lucrative legatign was intended for a Drusus, who is called, perhaps in allusion to some discreditable occurrence, the Pisaurian. (Ad Att. ii. 7. <! 3.) A Drusus, in b. c. 54, was accused by Lucretius of pruevariaitio, or corrupt collusion in betraying a amse which he had undertjiken to prosecute. Cicero defended Drusus, and he was acquitted by a majority of four. The tribuni aerarii saved him, though the greater part of the senators and equites were against him ; for though by the lex Fufia each of the three orders of judices voted separately, it was the majority of single votes, not the majority of majorities, that decided the judgment. (Ad Att. iv. 16. §§ 5, 8, ib. 15. % 9, ad Qu. Fr. ii. 16. § 3. As to the mode of counting votes, see Ascon. in Cic. pro Mil. p. 53, ed. Orelli.) • In b. c. 50, M. Caelius Rufus, who was accused of an offence against the Scantinian law, thinks it ridiculous that Drusus, who was then probably praetor, should be appointed to preside ;it the trial. Upon this ground it has been imagined that there was some stigma of impurity upon tli-; character of Drusus. (Ad Fam. viii. 12. <j 3, 14. § 4.) He possessed gardens, which Cicero was very anxious to purchase. (Ad Att. xii. 2L § 2, 22. § 3, 23. ^ 3, xiii. 26. § 1.) 8. M. Livius Drusus Libo was probably aedile about B. c. 28, shortly befoi-e the completion of the Pantheon, and may be the person who is mentioned by Pliny (//. N. xxxvi. 15. s. 24) as having given games at Rome when the theatre was covered by Valerius, the architect of Ostium. He was consul in b. c. 15. As his name denotes, htt was originally a Scribonius Libo, and was adopted