XVIII. (146) I have related these events at some length, not for the sake of keeping old injuries in remembrance, but because I admire that power who presides over all freemen’s affairs, namely, justice, seeing that those men who were so generally hostile to Flaccus, those by whom of all men he was most hated, were the men who now brought their accusations against him, to fill up the measure of his grief, for it is not so bitter merely to be accused as to be accused by one’s confessed enemies; (147) but this man was not merely accused, though a governor, by his subjects, and that by men who had always been his enemies, when he had only a short time before been the lord of the life of every individual among them, but he was also apprehended by force, being thus subjected to a twofold evil, namely, to be defeated and ridiculed by exulting enemies, which is worse than death to all right-minded and sensible people. (148) And then see what an abundance of disasters came upon him, for he was immediately stripped of all his possessions, both of those which he inherited from his parents and of all that he had acquired himself, having been a man who took especial delight in luxury and ornament; for he was not like some rich men, to whom wealth is an inactive material, but he was continually acquiring things of every useful kind in all imaginable abundance; cups, garments, couches, miniatures, and everything else which was any ornament to a house; (149) and besides that, he collected a vast number of servants, carefully selected for their excellencies and accomplishments, and with reference to their beauty, and health, and vigour of body, and to their unerring skill in all kinds of necessary and useful service; for every one of them was excellent in that employment to which he was appointed, so that he was looked upon as either the most excellent of all servants in that place, or, at all events, as inferior to no one. (150) And there is a very clear proof of this in the fact that, though there were a vast number of properties confiscated and sold for the public benefit, which belonged to persons who had been condemned, that of Flaccus alone was assigned to the emperor, with perhaps one or two more, in order that the law which had been established with respect to persons convicted of such crimes as his might not be violated. (151) And after he had been deprived of all his property, he was condemned to banishment, and was exiled from the whole continent, and that is the greatest and most excellent portion of the inhabited world, and from every island that has any character for fertility or richness; for he was commanded to be sent into that most miserable of all the islands in the Aegaean Sea, {2}{this was a common place of banishment for criminals, Juvenal 1.72.} called Gyara, and he would have been left there if he had not availed himself of the intercession of Lepidus, by whose means he obtained leave to exchange Gyara for Andros, which was very near it. (152) Then he was sent back again on the road from Rome to Brundusium, a journey which he had taken a few years before, at the time when he was appointed governor of Egypt and the adjacent country of Libya, in order that the cities which had then seen him exulting and behaving with great insolence in the hour of his prosperity, might now again behold him full of dishonour. (153) And thus he being now become a conspicuous mark by reason of this total change of fortune, was overwhelmed with more bitter grief, his calamities being constantly rekindled and inflamed by the addition of fresh miseries, which, like relapses in sickness, compel the recollection of all former disasters to return, which up to that time appeared to be buried in obscurity.
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