to sail to Gaul and offer to lead the Vitellian armies.  This made no impression on Piso.  When the centurion whom Mucianus had sent arrived at the gates of Carthage, he kept on shouting all sorts of congratulations to Piso on becoming emperor.  The people he met, who were astounded at this unexpected miracle, were instructed to take up the cry.  With a crowd’s usual credulity, they rushed into the forum calling on Piso to appear, and as they had a passion for flattery and took no interest in the truth, they proceeded to fill the whole place with a confused noise of cheering.  Piso, however, either at a hint from Sagitta, or from his natural good sense, would not show himself in public or give way to the excitement of the crowd.  He examined the centurion, and learnt that his object was to trump up a charge against him and then kill him.[367] He accordingly had the man executed more from indignation against the assassin than in any hope of saving his life; for he found that the man had been one of the murderers of Clodius Macer,[368] and after staining his hand in the blood of a military officer was now proposing to turn it against a civil governor.  Piso then reprimanded the Carthaginians in an edict which clearly showed his anxiety, and refrained from performing even the routine of his office, shutting himself up in his house, for fear that he might by accident 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