ident provide some pretext for further demonstrations.

When the news of the popular excitement and the centurion's 50
execution reached the ears of Festus, considerably exaggerated and
with the usual admixture of falsehood, he at once sent off a party of
horsemen to murder Piso. Riding at full speed, they reached the
governor's house in the twilight of early dawn and broke in with drawn
swords. As Festus had mainly chosen Carthaginian auxiliaries and Moors
to do the murder, most of them did not know Piso by sight. However,
near his bedroom they happened on a slave and asked him where Piso was
and what he looked like. In answer the slave told them a heroic lie
and said he was Piso, whereupon they immediately cut him down.
However, Piso himself was killed very soon after, for there was one
man among them who knew him, and that was Baebius Massa, one of the
imperial agents in Africa, who was already a danger to all the best
men in Rome. His name will recur again and again in this narrative, as
one of the causes of the troubles which beset us later on.[369]
Festus had been waiting at Adrumetum[370] to see how things went, and
he now hastened to rejoin his legion. He had the camp-prefect,
Caetronius Pisanus, put in irons, alleging that he was one of Piso's
accomplices, though his real motive was personal dislike. He then
punished some of the soldiers and centurions and rewarded others; in
neither case for their deserts, but because he wanted it to be thought
that he had stamped out a war. His next task was to settle the
differences between Oea and Lepcis.[371] These had had a trivial
origin in thefts of fruit and cattle by the peasants, but they were
now trying to settle them in open warfare. Oea, being inferior in
numbers, had called in the aid of the Garamantes,[372] an invincible
tribe, who were always a fruitful source of damage to their
neighbours. Thus the people of Lepcis were in great straits. Their
fields had been wasted far and wide, and they had fled in terror under
shelter of their walls, when the Roman auxiliaries, both horse and
foot, arrived on the scene. They routed the Garamantes and recovered
all the booty, except what the nomads had already sold among the
inaccessible hut-settlements of the far interior.

After the battle of Cremona and the arrival of good news from 51
every quarter, Vespasian now heard of Vitellius' death. A large number
of people of all classes, who were as lucky