sumed the cognomen of
Germanicus, he called the months of September and October, Germanicus and
Domitian, after his own names, because he commenced his reign in the one,
and was born in the other.

XIV. Becoming by these means universally feared and odious, he was at
last taken off by a conspiracy of his friends and favourite freedmen, in
concert with his wife [829]. He had long entertained a suspicion of the
year and day when he should die, and even of the very hour and manner of
his death; all which he had learned from the Chaldaeans, when he was a
very young man. His father once at supper laughed at him for refusing to
eat some mushrooms, saying, that if he knew his fate, he would rather be
afraid of the sword. Being, therefore, in perpetual apprehension and
anxiety, he was keenly alive to the slightest suspicions, insomuch that
he is thought to have withdrawn the edict ordering the destruction of the
vines, chiefly because the copies of it which were dispersed had the
following lines written upon them:

Kaen me phagaes epi rizanomos epi kartophoraeso,
Osson epispeisai Kaisari thuomeno. [830]

Gnaw thou my root, yet shall my juice suffice
To pour on Caesar's head in sacrifice.

(492) It was from the same principle of fear, that he refused a new
honour, devised and offered him by the senate, though he was greedy of
all such compliments. It was this: "that as often as he held the
consulship, Roman knights, chosen by lot, should walk before him, clad in
the Trabea, with lances in their hands, amongst his lictors and
apparitors." As the time of the danger which he apprehended drew near,
he became daily more and more disturbed in mind; insomuch that he lined
the walls of the porticos in which he used to walk, with the stone called
Phengites [831], by the reflection of which he could see every object
behind him. He seldom gave an audience to persons in custody, unless in
private, being alone, and he himself holding their chains in his hand.
To convince his domestics that the life of a master was not to be
attempted upon any pretext, however plausible, he condemned to death
Epaphroditus his secretary, because it was believed that he had assisted
Nero, in his extremity, to kill himself.

XV. His last victim was Flavius Clemens [832], his cousin-german, a man
below contempt for his want of energy, whose sons, then of very tender
age, he had avowedly destined for his successors, and, discarding