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Title: Tiberius the Tyrant
Author: Tarver, J. C.
Language: English
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TIBERIUS THE TYRANT
[Illustration:
_Art Repro Co._
_Tiberius._]
TIBERIUS THE
TYRANT
By J. C. TARVER
AUTHOR OF “LIFE AND LETTERS OF GUSTAVE FLAUBERT”
“SOME OBSERVATIONS OF A FOSTER PARENT”
ETC ETC
WESTMINSTER
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND CO LTD
2 WHITEHALL GARDENS
1902
BUTLER & TANNER,
THE SELWOOD PRINTING WORKS,
FROME, AND LONDON.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION:
THE EXPANSION OF ROME AND THE EQUESTRIAN ORDER 1
THE ROMAN PEOPLE 24
THE SENATE 42
SLAVERY 60
CHAPTER
I THE DEATH OF AUGUSTUS 79
II PARENTS AND CHILDHOOD OF TIBERIUS 85
III OCTAVIAN 106
IV AUGUSTUS 129
V THE EDUCATION OF TIBERIUS 143
VI THE FAMILY OF AUGUSTUS 164
VII THE FIRST RETIREMENT OF TIBERIUS 185
VIII THE RETURN OF TIBERIUS 197
IX THE CAMPAIGNS OF TIBERIUS 215
X THE LAST YEARS OF AUGUSTUS 245
XI THE ACCESSION OF TIBERIUS 253
XII THE MUTINIES IN PANNONIA AND ON THE RHINE 270
XIII TACITUS AND TIBERIUS 293
XIV THE CASE OF SCRIBONIUS LIBO 320
XV GERMANICUS AND PISO 331
XVI TIBERIUS AND THE SENATE 353
XVII SEJANUS 385
XVIII THE RETIREMENT AT CAPREÆ 418
Introduction
I
The Expansion of Rome and the Equestrian Order
Used as we are to the terminology and conditions of hereditary monarchy
and territorial sovereignty, we find it hard to appreciate, or even
to express in terms of modern politics the difficulties which beset
the statesmen of Rome at the death of Augustus; and we are further
tempted to read into the story of that critical period ideas, which
were only conceivable after the crisis was over; we can hardly avoid
seeing those days in the light of subsequent events, or speaking
of them in language which involves anachronism. Our information is
principally derived from historians, who wrote a century and a half
after the death of Julius Cæsar, when the Government of the Emperor
and the Senate was established; but the position of the Emperor of
those days was not the position of Augustus, and the Senate of Trajan
was not the Senate of Tiberius. The experienced officials who formed
the majority of the Senate of the Flavian Emperors were no longer the
hereditary oligarchy by whose capacity Rome had been brought to be
first among the city states of the world, but which was unequal to the
task of organizing the Roman empire. The change had, however, escaped
observation, and the warmest admirers of the Senate of the Republic
were men whose position had been won for them by the Emperors. Between
the death of Augustus and the death of Vespasian we have but few
contemporary historians; we have no letters of Cicero to throw light
on the inner life of the statesmen of those days; there were private
records, private letters, and private biographies; we can gather their
tone from the extracts that have been preserved for us, but we have no
opportunity of comparing them or checking them. Velleius Paterculus is
the only contemporary historian of the reign of Tiberius, a portion of
whose work still exists unabridged; and his narrative stops just at the
period when we require most light--at the conspiracy of Sejanus--where
there is also a gap in the annals of Tacitus. From the books of the
New Testament we may infer much as to how the Empire appeared at a
comparatively early period to the inhabitants of Greater Rome, much
also from Josephus, a little from Philo, but we cannot re-people the
Rome of Tiberius, as we can re-people the Rome of Augustus and the Rome
of Cicero. Two facts stand clear to us from the pages of Tacitus, and
in a less degree from those of Suetonius, that the Imperial Family was
divided, that the old Roman princely houses never forgave the Empire,
and that there was a Republican reaction in opinion at the centre of
the Empire. History has repeated itself; just as the Curia of to-day
cannot forgive the monarchy which represents the unity of Italy, so
the Curia of the first century of the Christian era was irreconcilable
to the monarchical constitution which represented the unity of the
Empire. The Roman princes who wrote the memoirs of their houses for
the edification of their children, and the delectation of their
friends never inquired into the authority of a story derogatory to
the Emperors, and the one Emperor, who was never spared was Tiberius;
it is no exaggeration to say that the madness of Caligula, and the
monstrous freaks of Nero are dealt with tenderly by the writers of the
silver age, if we compare the accounts of these with the deliberate
malignity which attends on every word and action of Tiberius; and yet
common sense tells us that only a very able man could have succeeded
Augustus without breaking up his work. At the death of Augustus it was
still possible that there would be no second Emperor; at the death of
Tiberius the Roman Emperor had become an institution, the pivot upon
which the whole machinery of civilized existence turned throughout
the world. Hence the peculiar bitterness against Tiberius; the Curia
felt that in his reign their last chance had gone, and more than this,
that he had been in some sense a traitor to his own caste. Neither the
Julian nor the Octavian families had been among the foremost houses
of Rome, till the genius of the first Cæsar raised them from their
comparative obscurity; but many of the most important events in the
history of Rome, no less than her buildings, her roads, her aqueducts,
and many of her public monuments, were associated with the Claudian
stock, and the Livian, with which it was inter-married, was only less
distinguished. Augustus had been tolerated, for his services to the
State could not be disregarded, but some day Augustus would die; he did
die; his power fell into the hands of the most prominent representative
of the old Roman nobility; the opportunity for a restoration of the
narrow oligarchy of the Republic came, and it passed away for ever. Two
years after the death of Tiberius his lunatic successor was stabbed by
a soldier whom he had insulted; the State was left a few days without a
head, and the Curia was so inanimate that it could neither restore its
own rule, nor provide a new Emperor; it had to accept apparently at the
dictation of the soldiers in the Prætorian barracks a man of letters
who had hitherto been the laughing stock of the Imperial family.
The contemporary history of the years during which the Roman Empire
took organic form is written in terms which tend to disguise the
real significance of the change; our attention is attracted almost
exclusively to the internal politics of the city of Rome; it is
withdrawn from the politics of the Empire; the long struggle which
ended by giving the whole civilized world one system of Government,
which welded together in orderly association Italians, Greeks, Syrians,
Africans, Egyptians, Spaniards, Gauls, Germans, and even Britons,
is represented to us as being little more than a constitutional
revolution inside the city; we see the external pressure, which forced
a revised constitution upon the Roman oligarchy, but we only see it
dimly; no Roman historian has been at the pains to trace out the
process by which the civil administration of the Roman Empire was
developed--surely no less wonderful an achievement than the conquests
of the Roman generals. We have seen other conquerors, and more
brilliant feats of arms than any Roman general achieved, but we have
not seen any other nation impress its language and its law upon the
populations of so wide an area or so permanently. Alexander did much,
but the effects of the conquests of Rome have been more lasting than
those of the conquests of Alexander; except in Asia there is not a
civilized people in the world which does not somewhere or other bear
the impress of Rome, or cannot trace the pedigree of its religion and
its law back to the Italian city. This great destiny was concealed
from the makers of the Empire, but the immediate possibility, the
consolidation of the conquests of Rome, and the permanent establishment
of order over the whole area which drains into the Mediterranean was
present to their minds; unfortunately the makers of the Empire have
been mostly silent, and the only voices which have reached our ears
are those of men who could only grasp the great idea intermittently,
if at all, or who were annoyed by its insistence. Under Augustus for
the first time the Empire became conscious, Virgil and Horace spoke in
terms of the larger conception, but the grip of the Roman oligarchy has
never relaxed its hold upon the imagination of educated men.
Conquest did not involve in ancient times any responsibility towards
the conquered; war was believed to be, and was, a profitable
investment; as Rome pushed her conquests, the organization which she
gave to the conquered peoples was one which suited her own purposes,
she did not consult their convenience, external pressure alone forced
her to modify the conditions of conquest which were universally
accepted by the ancient world; very gradually and very reluctantly she
broke down the barriers which surrounded the city state of antiquity,
and admitted first her immediate neighbours, and lastly the whole of
Italy to some sort of constitutional communion with her. For a long
time war had been forced upon Rome, the invasions of the Gauls, the
domination of Carthage in the Mediterranean, the invasion of Pyrrhus,
the invasion of Hannibal, and lastly the invasion of the Cimbrians
and Teutons involved her in a succession of defensive wars; the city
itself could not find a sufficient supply of soldiers, and the price
which Rome had to pay for being allowed to recruit over Italy was the
partial incorporation of the Italians in the State. Wars of defence
were accompanied and followed by wars of aggression; success encouraged
speculation; after the happy issue of the second war with Carthage the
Roman oligarchy began seriously to turn its attention to the Eastern
Mediterranean, and another century found it entering upon the heritage
of Alexander. This is the turning point of Roman history; from this
time onwards a new conception occupied the minds of ambitious Romans;
alongside of the ideal of the city State there existed the ideal of
an extended Empire, of a world-wide organization, of something more
permanent than conquest; alongside of the men who dreamed of Platonic
republics in which perfect justice would be realized, there grew up
men who formed a yet grander and no less civilized ambition. Pompey
triumphed over Mithridates wearing a robe which had been worn by
Alexander; Augustus used a head of Alexander for his signet ring; it
was by the example of Alexander that Cleopatra seduced Mark Antony.
Alexander was no vulgar adventurer; he solved a problem which had
hitherto baffled the most highly civilized race of the ancient world;
he combined the city state of the Greeks with the Imperial organization
of the Persians; and though, when the Romans came into close contact
with Alexander’s Empire it had fallen into fragments, each fragment
preserved the impress of the great whole, and Roman generals could
converse at Pergamus, at Antioch, or at Alexandria, with men trained
to administer states in terms of the wider conceptions derived from
Alexander and possibly through him from Aristotle; at the same time
many men accustomed to deal with financial problems on a large scale
passed into the service of the Roman conquerors as slaves or honoured
dependants.
While the possibility of a beneficent organization of the conquests
of Rome was thus presented to one order of mind, to another the same
events introduced another set of ideas; while some Romans studied
Alexander in the vestiges of his work, others entered into the full
possession of the Greek historians and philosophers; the ideals of the
Greek city state were replanted in a virgin soil, and the Romans for
the first time began to theorise about their own Constitution. The men
who were taken captive by Plato and Demosthenes did not see that Rome
had long outgrown the conditions under which the theories of these men
were applicable to her political life. The true liberal policy was the
policy of Alexander, the false liberal policy unintentionally gave a
new lease of life to the blind selfishness of the narrow oligarchy
which had governed Rome. The daggers which struck down Cæsar were aimed
by admirers of Verres no less than by students of Plato; and Cicero’s
effusions over the merits of the tyrannicides were effectively stopped
by the unforeseen but necessary emergence of Mark Antony, a tyrant of
the conventional type.
From the moment when a year’s office as Consul or Prætor in the city
of Rome was followed by a term of practically irresponsible government
in a dependency, the Civic Constitution was doomed; the magistracies
of Rome were now of minor importance compared with the career to
which they opened the way; it was impossible any longer to discuss
the politics of Rome in terms of the politics of Athens or Plato’s
Republic with any practical advantage, and indeed without inviting
anarchy; but it was highly convenient to the hereditary aristocracy
of Rome and its adherents that it should pose as representing the
principles of Harmodius and Aristogiton; it found a clever man of
letters and a skilled advocate, who had his own reasons for falling in
with this conception, and who perpetuated it long after the facts had
demonstrated its hollowness even to himself. Cicero as a politician
is alternately a tragic and a comic figure; he is comic because he
lived complacently in a world of his own imagining, which seldom
lost its hold on his imagination, in spite of the rudest shocks, for
it satisfied the promptings of his child-like vanity; he is tragic
because he had his moments of seeing the realities clearly, and because
combined with his vanity there was a genuine admiration for fine
conduct, which led him to face danger manfully in his old age, and in
some sense invite the death of a political martyr; he is yet further
tragic, because he became the father of an equally blind posterity of
politicians, who wasted their energies in spoiling the work of men of
greater enlightenment; it is perhaps due to Cicero, more than to any
other man, that the city of Rome has persistently filled a larger space
than that of the Roman Empire in the works of subsequent historians.
In an expanding community the actual facts of the administration are
seldom in exact correspondence with the forms; apparent rigidity,
real elasticity, enable business to be carried on in accordance with
the claims of new social factors without any sense of insecurity. The
Roman, like the Englishman, preferred making new laws to repealing
old ones; and when he made a fresh departure, he was at pains to
represent it as a development of something by which it had been
preceded; in both cases this profound respect for the historical
aspect of law has been the foundation of national greatness; it has
been extended beyond the races in which it originated, and in the case
of England, as in that of Rome, has resulted in an exceptionally
successful government of alien communities; laws and customs which
are sanctified by immemorial usage appeal to the sympathy of the
Englishman and command his respect; it was the same with the Roman.
England has had her periods of aberration when she has given way
to the proselytizing tendencies of sections of her population, but
the broad lines of her policy in dealing with subject nationalities
have followed the principle of accepting the existing conditions;
in the same way Rome accepted the laws and customs of the Eastern
Mediterranean and of Western Europe; she supplied a common law for
her Empire, which applied where the local law had no application; its
excellence was such that it became predominant, but she did not insist
on remodelling every community over which she held supreme power in
terms of her own constitution. This respect for antiquity and adherence
to established forms has resulted in a misrepresentation of some of
the facts of Roman constitutional development, and especially of those
which concern the development of the Empire, which is in the highest
degree embarrassing to the student of the period in which the change
took place. There was a time when the constitution of Rome and her
political history differed little from that of any other city state of
antiquity, but it would not be easy to state when that period began
or ended; of one thing we may be quite certain, viz., that after the
destruction of Carthage and the completion of the first great period
of conquest in the Eastern Mediterranean in 145 B.C., the political
life of the city of Rome was no longer comparable to that of any
other city state; the forms remained, and the faith in the forms
remained, but the substance was gone. There is for instance no term so
misleading as one which was seldom out of the mouth of Cicero, “the
Roman people”; there unquestionably was a time when the Roman people
was an organized part of the Roman constitution, when it voted in an
orderly fashion according to a property qualification for the election
of certain magistrates, and the ratification of certain laws; when
it voted according to a residential organization for the election of
other magistrates, and to pass other laws; but the forms of popular
government were maintained long after the reality of popular government
had departed. It suited the convenience of noble agitators, such as
the Gracchi, to see in the rabble of the streets the Comitia Tributa,
it was equally convenient to the princely houses to dignify their own
private arrangements with the forms of an election in the Comitia
Centuriata, it was particularly pleasing to the middle class Roman
to share in the spoils of the Empire by exacting direct or indirect
payment for his vote, and so the forms were maintained; an outward
deference to them answered everybody’s purpose, but the real political
power and the real political struggles lay outside and beyond them. The
Roman people, as a body of civilians, could riot, as the raw material
of the Roman army it could strike, it was necessary to keep it in good
humour, and to allow it to regard itself as an organized part of the
constitution, as a body of free and independent electors; but to accept
its own estimate of itself as an important factor in the politics
of the Empire is to misread history; popular Government in any sense
which would commend itself to the intelligence of an Englishman of
to-day, or of an Athenian who listened to Demosthenes, did not and
could not exist in the Rome which had begun to control the destinies of
the Mediterranean; it was a legal fiction which it was convenient to
maintain, the attempt to make it once again a reality resulted in the
revolutionary excesses which preceded the Empire.
The real government of Rome was in the hands of the Senate, an assembly
of nobles and capitalists, who shared between themselves the profits of
the Roman conquests. Like all such assemblies, the senators had their
good times and their bad; between the second and the third wars with
Carthage they so conducted themselves as to impress the imagination
of the civilized world; the successes of their armies, their fidelity
to engagements, their comparative moderation in conquest, were the
wonder of men; admiration for these qualities tempted Judas Maccabæus
to engage their assistance in checking the aggressions of the Greek
rulers of Antioch; their mediation was invited by the chieftains of
Gaul; it was recognized as an honour to them to be called friends of
the Roman people, and the honour was attended by practical advantages.
Success was followed by intoxication, and the time came when the sense
of responsibility was lost in the secure accumulation of riches, and
when the unscrupulous venality of the Senate became a by-word. Then
the power of Rome seemed to be tumbling to decay; Jugurtha defied her
in Africa, Mithridates in Asia, Spain threatened to organize itself
against her under a Roman general, the Cimbrians and Teutons swarmed
over her borders, her Italian allies made war upon her, she could
with difficulty suppress an organized revolt of her rural slaves, at
home she was at the mercy of the savage mob in her streets; out of
this confusion she emerged victorious, and greater than before. The
reason is a simple one; during her period of good behaviour Rome had
become the financial capital of the world; she was indispensable, and
when she could no longer help herself, others were ready to help her.
Left to itself the Roman Senate would have brought ruin on the Roman
Empire in the first half of the century preceding the Christian era;
but it was not left to itself; its incompetence involved the ruin of
too many other interests. We have the story of the Roman generals in
full, but nobody has yet written the story of the Roman bankers; we
are accustomed to think of the Romans as soldiers and lawyers, we
forget that they were also shrewd financiers; with the Romans, as with
ourselves, commerce usually preceded the flag; the soldier completed
the work begun by the capitalist. We are told that the first war
with Mithridates began with a massacre of 80,000 Roman citizens in
Asia Minor; the figures are probably exaggerated, but they are not
questioned by any Roman historians; it did not appear improbable to
them that the Roman residents in Asia should have been so numerous
at that comparatively early date; and though part of the country was
already a Roman province, and we may assume that the popular fury was
largely directed against collectors of taxes, even the rich towns of
Asia Minor can hardly have acquired the services of so large a body of
revenue officials.
The political genius of a nation is shown by nothing so much as the
success with which it supplements the deficiencies of its formal
constitution by informal but recognized agencies. Rome was provided
with a machinery for collecting and distributing her domestic revenue;
she had a treasury and a staff of clerks, but she had no separate civil
service for the Empire; the constitution of a city state did not admit
of such a thing, and the collection of the revenue of a province was
left to semi-private agencies, its taxes being farmed. At fixed periods
the right of collecting the taxes assigned to the public treasury
from the provinces was sold by public auction; the purchaser paid a
lump sum to the treasury, and made the best of his bargain in the
provinces; the speculation was an exceedingly profitable one, but its
profits threatened to disappear owing to excessive competition among
the farmers of taxes; in order to eliminate competition the farmers of
taxes formed themselves into a close corporation, the taxes were bought
in the name of an individual, but in fact by an association.
Alongside of the Senate there thus gradually grew an organized body
which formed the permanent civil executive of the provinces, the body
which was known as the Equestrian Order. As in our own history, so in
Roman history, the value of terms alters from period to period, almost
from year to year; it would therefore be rash to declare that at any
one period every titular Roman knight was an active member of the
Financial Corporation which farmed the taxes, or that the collection
of revenue was the sole business of the corporation as a whole, or
of its individual members. Again, that differentiation of functions
in the case of the individual, or the association, which is to us
almost a law of existence, was unknown to the ancients, or worked on
lines of division not readily comprehensible to ourselves; there was,
for instance, nothing absurd to Roman conceptions in sending out an
advocate like Cicero to govern a frontier province, and placing him on
active service in command of an army, for civil, military, and judicial
functions of the highest responsibility were exercised simultaneously
or successively by the same individual as a matter of course. But
though it is difficult to draw fixed lines, there is quite sufficient
evidence to warrant us in asserting that the Equestrian Order held a
recognized position in the State, that it practically formed the Civil
Service of the provinces, that its interests were repeatedly opposed
to those of the Senate, that it roughly represented Greater Rome, as
opposed to the city of Rome, that through all the disturbances of the
Civil Wars it kept the machinery of Government outside Italy in working
order, that it was the channel through which the leading provincials
gradually passed into the Civil Administration, and that eventually the
Imperial Executive was built up on the foundation, not of the Senate,
but of the Equestrian Order, and the Imperial Household.
The origin of the Equestrian Order is to be found in the Servian
Constitution; we may not altogether believe in the Servian
Constitution, which, as it is presented to us in the pages of Livy,
looks like the clever guess of an antiquarian who was familiar with
the Constitution provided for Athens by Cleisthenes, but we have no
difficulty in believing that there was a time, when every citizen
possessed of a certain amount of property was obliged to keep a horse
for the service of the State, and was expected to take the field as
a cavalry man; or that he was allowed certain distinctions of dress,
and other privileges indicating public consideration; it is also easy
to imagine the process by which the yeomanry force so constituted
was replaced by more efficient cavalry soldiers, and the military
significance of the Equestrian Order disappeared, while the name
remained; of the intermediate steps which followed we have no detailed
account; in theory every Roman citizen possessing more than a definite
amount of property was entitled to be enrolled in the list of the
Equestrian Order by the Censor, and if his property reached a yet
higher value to be similarly called to the Senate, but the practice
must have been different; not every man became a senator or a knight,
who had the necessary property qualification, though demonstrated want
of means might be a disqualification, and entail a loss of position
when the Censor was rigorous, or when an excuse was wanted for reducing
the numbers of the Senate or the Order, or setting aside an undesirable
personality. The time came when two political careers were open to the
ambitious Roman; he could become a candidate for Public Office, and
under the forms of public election eventually gain admission to the
Senate through the Quæstorship, or he could be enrolled on the lists
of the Equestrian Order. In the first case he might eventually become
Prætor, Consul, and then Viceroy of a Province; in the second he became
a member of the great financial corporation which supplied the Civil
Service of the Empire; in the first case he might command armies and
figure prominently before the eyes of men; in the second he might make
a large fortune, but would not enjoy some of the sweets of power which
attract ambitious men.
The relative positions are fairly comparable to those of an English
member of Parliament, and an English clerk in a Public Department in
the days before the Reform Bill; a young Englishman of good position
could be nominated in those days by an influential friend either to a
seat in the House of Commons, or to a subordinate place in one of the
Executive Departments; in the former case he might ultimately become
Prime Minister, in the latter Permanent Head of his department. In the
one case he would be widely known and possibly respected; in the latter
he might do work of the highest public utility, and never be heard of
outside official circles.
To be successful in a senatorial career was an expensive and arduous
process; it was necessary to pay a heavy initiatory fee in the form
of direct and indirect bribery to the electors; it was then necessary
to force a way into the inner circle, which distributed the honours
and emoluments; a new man could only do so by showing that he had a
very strong force of public opinion behind him, and that he could make
himself felt; admission to the Equestrian Order was less costly, and
there was less risk; in consequence the career was deliberately chosen
by large numbers of Romans, whose wealth and family connections might
have tempted them to enter the ranks of the Senate; further, admission
to the Equestrian Order was less jealously guarded; it probably had its
hierarchy, and its inner circle like all similar organizations; and the
summons of the Censor was possibly a mere formality, the nominations
made by him having been previously determined by others; but it was
much easier for an Italian, and eventually for a Provincial to become a
Roman Knight than a Roman Senator. A Provincial, who had once secured
the status of a Roman citizen, could secure the further dignity of a
Roman Knight by processes which we may surmise, but cannot definitely
prescribe; once a Roman Knight, he might look forward to a share in
the financial administration of the provinces during the reign of the
Senate, and to a Governorship under the Emperors.
It would be a mistake to assume that all Roman Knights were members
of the Civil Service, that is to say, that they all belonged to the
hierarchy which farmed the taxes and managed other business necessarily
connected therewith; there were doubtless many Equestrians whose
dignity was chiefly titular; others who as private financiers and
contractors only were connected with the Order, but the continued
allusions to the status of “Eques Romanus,” which multiply as the
Empire takes shape, forbid us to believe that this was in all cases
a purely honorary dignity, which could be assumed by any wealthy man
on application to the Censor. Were there no other evidence, the fact
that we find the Equestrian Order ranged formally against the Senate
at the beginning of the great constitutional struggle which ended in
the Empire, shows that we have to do with no haphazard collection of
wealthy individuals, distinguished from their fellow-citizens by an
honorary precedence.
Cicero made his first triumphant appearance as a public man at Rome,
when he conducted the case against Verres; whatever may have been the
misconduct of Verres, and it was undoubtedly very serious, the action
against him was not promoted by pure philanthropy; the case was a
test case, it was part of a campaign directed against the provincial
administration of the Senate by the Equestrian Order, whose interests
were imperilled by rapacious Viceroys. The only check upon the
proceedings of a Roman Proconsul lay in the possibility of bringing
an action against him for improper exactions; in the purer days of
the Senatorial administration such an action when instituted by the
provincials might be successful, and the possibility of its success
might be a deterrent, because though the offending Senator was in such
a case tried by his peers, those peers, even if influenced by no higher
motive, were interested in preventing the exhaustion of a province;
any one of them might succeed to the wasted estate; the Proconsul who
succeeded a Verres was not likely to make much out of his office, for
he found the estate stripped. As the Senate became reckless, having
found fresh and apparently inexhaustible pastures in the East, scant
attention was paid to the complaints of provincials till their cause
was taken up by the Equestrian Order.
The Roman Proconsul was supreme Judge and supreme executive authority
in his province; he imposed, sanctioned, and sometimes encouraged
public works, such as roads, harbours and buildings; he regulated the
mutual relations of the different independent communities within the
area over which his authority extended; he had ample opportunities
for indirect and direct extortion, but he did not collect the taxes;
the collection of revenue was in the hands of the farmers of the
taxes, that is to say, as time went on, of the Equestrian Order. A
divergency of interests soon declared itself: if the Proconsul harried
the province unmercifully, the tax gatherer found little or no revenue
to collect, and could not reimburse himself. The Proconsul had the
unfair advantage, that cases between the collectors of revenue and the
provincials were tried in his court; thus the farmers of the taxes
found that they had an interest in promoting appeals to Rome, and in
aiding the provincials to bring actions for extortion against the
provincial Governors at the end of their term of office. So long as
the Senate acted equitably no great harm was done, but as soon as the
Senate was found invariably to acquit its own members, the Equestrian
Order became ranged formally against it, and pressed for reforms;
it succeeded for a time in getting these case tried before a court
composed entirely of its own members; Sulla the reactionary gave back
the jurisdiction to the Senate. One consequence of the trial of Verres
was the establishment of a mixed court composed partly of Senators,
partly of Equestrians. The net result was that the Equestrian Order
formed an organized party, commanding enormous financial resources,
in sympathy with the provinces, and more thoroughly conversant with
the details of provincial business than the Senate. Thus eventually
the Equestrian Order came to represent the party of the Empire, as
opposed to the Senate which was the party of the ancient oligarchy of
the city; for with the internal politics of the city the Order was only
concerned so far as they affected or were affected by the standing
quarrel between itself and the Senate. There were men of high moral
standards at Rome both in the Senate and in the Order, who wished to
deal justly with the provinces; but they were few. Either party left to
itself would have plundered the provincials unmercifully; circumstance
ruled that the selfishness of the Equestrians should be enlightened,
that of the Senate unenlightened, while financial relations with men
of business in the provinces, with skilled Greeks and Jews, taught the
Order sounder views of political economy than were open to the average
Senator. However oppressive the methods of the Equestrian Order might
appear when judged by modern standards, they commended themselves to
the favour of antiquity; the Roman Civil Service worked better than
its predecessors, otherwise there would have been no Roman Empire. The
ultimate collector of taxes is never a popular character, and the
Roman Publicans enjoyed to the full the unpopularity which has been
the fate of their brethren at all times, and in all places; but the
revenues of the provinces were collected by the Roman Knights with less
friction, and less capriciously, than by the representatives of Perseus
of Macedon, or Mithridates, or Antiochus; and in their own interests
the Equestrian Order discountenanced other extortioners, whether
high-placed officials or private adventurers. When the Civil Wars came
the Order was interested in finding a counterpoise to the Senate,
and eventually in arresting the progress of anarchy. Cæsar backed by
the Order could confidently face the Senate and Pompeius; similarly
his nephew having once gained its confidence was a match for the
spendthrift Marcus Antonius. The Cæsars and the Order were of one mind
in putting an end to the Senatorial misgovernment of the provinces,
therefore Greater Rome recognized its champions in the Cæsars, and
supported the organization of which they were the head without stopping
to inquire whether the officials whom they employed were Freedmen or of
the purest Roman nobility.
In order not to form a mistaken conception of the process by which the
Roman Empire was built up, it is important to bear in mind that the
term “province” only gradually acquired the territorial significance
with which it is now inseparably associated. Any responsibility outside
the city of Rome and the domain governed directly by the annually
elected magistrates of the city might be called “a province.” The
“province” at one time assigned to Pompeius was the duty of repressing
piracy throughout the Mediterranean. The territorial aspect of a
“province” was in fact accidental. The first territorial provinces,
Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, happened to be islands, and a natural
limitation was thus fixed to the responsibilities of the Roman
Governors, whose duty was to maintain the Roman interests in Sicily
and the other islands against the aggressions of Carthage; the result
was the unification of Sicily, and the realization of a political
condition closely resembling though not absolutely identical with
the modern conception of a province. As the dominions of Alexander
successively passed into the hands of the Senate, it was convenient to
use previously existing boundaries for the delimitation of the several
spheres of influence for which the Roman Proconsuls were responsible,
and thus a territorial significance increasingly attached to the
words province and provincial. Similarly modern usage perverts the
significance of the word “provincial” as applied to the inhabitants of
those cities which passed under the protectorate of Rome. There was not
quite the same quality of disparagement in the ancient use of the words
as in the modern. The units of the Roman Empire were not originally
territories, but individual cities, then, as the conquests of the Roman
Generals extended to peoples not living under the city organization
of the Greeks, Italians and Phœnicians, tribes or nationalities. Rome
was first the universal peacemaker; only at a later time and by a
gradual process did she become the universal ruler, and the centre
of a hierarchy of officials. Such centralization of the details of
Government as we are now familiar with was never realized by the
Roman Empire; the inhabitants of the great cities of the East did not
consider themselves “provincial” in our sense of the word.
II
The Roman People
The official style of the Roman Government was that of the Senate
and the Roman people. It is not easy to form an estimate of what
constituted the Roman people at any particular date. In these days of
individual freedom and independence the term people has a definite
meaning; we know that for political purposes the English people means
every registered voter, and that the process by which any resident
within the limits of His Majesty’s dominions can acquire a vote are
comparatively simple for white men; but citizenship was not so simple
a matter in ancient times, and antiquarian research fails in some
measure to enlighten us, because the Romans had a habit of keeping the
old names and the old forms long after their original significance and
the powers implied had passed to new institutions or suffered complete
change.
The very phrase the Senate _and_ the Roman people is deeply
significant, for it excludes the Senate from the people. Whatever may
have been the original meaning of the word “Populus,” it was clearly
something distinct from the Senate, which was not _representative_ of
the people, but another power. The fusion between the two powers was in
fact never completed till the predominance of the Imperial Hierarchy
practically eliminated the Senate. There was a time in the history of
the Republic when this fusion seemed to be approaching completion, and
when the Senate moved in the direction of becoming a representative
body; but the Roman conquests threw such preponderating influence into
the hands of the Senate, that the constitutional position which had
been slowly won for the “people” became nominal rather than real. The
oligarchy of Rome was never in the Republican period disestablished as
the oligarchies of many Greek cities were disestablished.
The Roman historians have preserved for us a constitution based on
property qualifications, which might tempt us to imagine that there was
a time when a Government with something approaching to a democratic
organization controlled the destinies of Rome. It is possible that
there was a time when the Roman people was divided into classes
according to their assessed property, and when each class voted
separately; but it is exceedingly improbable that even in that golden
age of liberty there was anything approaching to free and independent
elections as we understand them.
The independence of the individual has always been tempered by the
necessity of belonging to some form of organization. In these days
a man belongs to a party, or a trades union or an association, and
sacrifices a portion of his independence to the advantages gained by
sharing in the strength of an organized coherent body; in ancient times
even a modified independence of this kind was not possible, and in
early times at Rome a man was expected to vote for his patron through
thick and thin. To us it would appear that a man lost personal dignity
by following blindly the fortunes of a greater man than himself; to a
Roman it would seem that the individual had no personal dignity, if he
were not recognizably attached to a patron.
Individual independence is only possible in a very highly civilized
society. Men may be technically equal in the eyes of the law long
before they are so practically; even in modern England it has been
found necessary to form associations whose members are bound to
mutual assistance in defending or instituting some actions-at-law.
The difference between ancient and modern society, and indeed between
modern society before and after the French Revolution, lies in this,
that the modern association is most commonly one of equal individuals
for certain definite purposes, while the ancient association was one of
inferiors of various degrees with a superior for all purposes. It would
be rash to attempt to define too closely, but the general statement
that in ancient Roman society there was no such thing as a free and
independent individual, except among the wealthiest or otherwise
most powerful, is near the truth. Numberless conditions unknown to
modern society contributed to produce the same result; among them the
following may be mentioned.
Residence as a means of acquiring political status was not recognized
by the ancients; a man might reside in the same town all his life, and
his children might succeed him, but neither he nor they could buy or
sell, plead in the law courts, intermarry with the citizens, acquire
real property, or in fact enjoy any of the benefits of civilized
society, without making special arrangements; the resident was an alien
until the authorities of the town in which he dwelt had conferred
upon him a political status. Towns such as Rome and Athens, which
admitted resident aliens comparatively readily to a modified form of
citizenship, expanded more quickly than other towns, and the history
of the expansion of Rome is from this point of view the history of
the processes by which she gradually admitted the stranger within her
gates, and then the stranger without her walls to the privileges of
citizenship.
The privileges of a citizen according to ancient ideas were separated
into two classes: they were private and public; to the first class
belonged the rights of buying and selling, intermarrying, making
valid contracts, and acquiring by various tenures real property; to
the second the right of voting in all or some elections, and, as the
climax, of standing for some or all magistracies. The various degrees
of citizenship might be conceded to individuals or to communities; Rome
might admit all full citizens of Arpinum to all or some of the rights
of Roman citizenship, and vice versâ, or similarly favour an individual
citizen of Arpinum. Long before an alien community or individual
received the benefits of citizenship business relations might be
necessary, and in order to get over the difficulty of conducting
business with persons who had no legal status, it was customary for
aliens to form private relations with full citizens through whom their
business was conducted; and here again the alien might be a whole
community or a single individual. At Rome the citizen who thus took
charge of an alien’s business was called his patron, and the alien was
called a client. The principal service rendered by the patron was to
appear on his client’s behalf in those law courts to which the client
had otherwise no access; the case was dealt with as the patron’s case
by a convenient legal fiction. The service rendered by the client was
not definitely prescribed in this case; it could not be, for he was
unknown to the Roman law; but we have no reason to suspect the Roman
patrons of not exacting a satisfactory equivalent for their services.
The same men who were clients at Rome would be patrons in their own
towns, and transact business for their Roman friend at Ephesus or
Alexandria in return for his services at Rome. In the same way aliens
resident at Rome, who for various reasons were unable or unwilling to
acquire rights of citizenship, enrolled themselves among the clients of
a patron. The system added enormously to the wealth and influence of
the powerful men at Rome; for much in the same way that the status of
citizen in its various degrees was personal and transmitted by descent,
only to be revoked by a solemn process, so the relation of patron and
client was personal and heritable on both sides. This combination of
personal with business relationships is one of the peculiarities that
make ancient society so difficult for us to understand.
Even after an alien had acquired the rights of citizenship the tie
between his family and the patron’s family would continue. It would
not be easy to prove that it was strictly obligatory in the eye of
the law, but it was recognized by sentiment, and ingratitude on the
part of the client, or neglect on the part of the patron, were severely
punished by the unwritten law, and in certain cases by the written law.
Thus one form of the relation of patron and client arose out of the
difficulties of intercourse between communities and individuals for
business purposes in a state of society which regarded citizenship as a
special personal qualification, and not as an incident of residence.
A second form was the relation between a Roman noble and his freeborn
dependants in various degrees.
Such a city as Rome was not comparable to a modern city in many
particulars; even after the definite establishment of the Empire when
it had approached the modern conception, there were still survivals
from a previous state of things. It would not, for instance, occur to
a wealthy citizen of London to start from his residence in Park Lane
with a pack of hounds, and all the other paraphernalia of a hunting
expedition, in order to impress his fellow-citizens with a sense of
his importance as a territorial magnate; such a thing was possible
at Rome even in the reign of Domitian, or there would be no point in
one of Martial’s epigrams. The heads of the great Roman families were
not originally rich men who conducted their business in Rome, and
possessed houses in the country to which they went to enjoy sport and
the amenities of Nature; they were originally territorial magnates,
whose importance was due to the fact that they were such; it was a
later development which made them approach to the position of our
great commercial princes in London. The ancient city community was
not a thing enclosed within walls; it extended over a considerable
area. The land outside the city walls might be held under some form of
communal tenure and subdivided into small plots, but it might also be
occupied by large holders in positions analogous to our conceptions
of a tenant-in-chief, whose subtenants were free citizens with full
civic rights in the eye of the law, but who were also in many respects
vassals. Dionysius has a statement of the relations between patron and
client which may be inaccurate in the letter, but which in its spirit
at once suggests the feudal system. It is inevitable in certain stages
of social development that the small man should associate himself in
some way or other with the big man, in order to be able to render
effective the rights which the law gives him. The Roman noble took
charge of his client’s interests in the law courts, the client voted
as his patron directed at the polling booths. The free and independent
electors who swarmed in from the country to give their votes were
pledged to support the candidates and measures recommended to them by
their patrons; had they failed to do so, they would have been thought
deficient in a Roman virtue.
There was a third relationship of patron and client which was fairly
strictly defined by law; when a man emancipated a slave, the relations
between them were changed from those of master and slave to those of
patron and client. The slave did not always receive full citizenship on
emancipation, but all through the various degrees by which he passed
from the servile status to that of full citizen, he and his descendants
continued in the position of client to the original manumittor and his
descendants; the relationship was so close that the property of an
intestate freedman went to his patron or his patron’s representatives.
The legal statements on this subject are somewhat obscure, but enough
remains to show that the connection was recognized by the law as a
close one, and that there were rights on both sides; the relationship
was not purely a matter of personal choice nor readily dissoluble.
All these three ways in which the relation of patron and client might
be created tended even in the purest days of the Roman Republic to
make an election a struggle between big families and groups of big
families rather than a political struggle in which each elector formed
an opinion upon a question of policy and gave his vote independently.
The Senate, that is to say, the assembly of heads of houses, divided
into parties or groups, and each head of a house could bring so many
electors to vote at the polling booths with tolerable certainty. The
ultimate political unit for practical purposes was not the individual
but the group formed by a patron and his clients, who in their
different degrees voted as the patron directed.
A free Government controlled by an electorate, in which each individual
elector votes according to his own judgment, is a dream of political
theorists. It may have existed for a short time in some of the small
city states of antiquity, but in practice the individual elector is
too lazy to exert his own judgment; he votes, if it is made worth his
while to vote, either by the pressure of some extra constitutional
association to which he belongs, or by direct bribery, or by the more
insidious indirect bribery of party leaders who promise pecuniary or
sentimental satisfaction.
In political life the letter of the statute book is always in process
of modification by custom and convenience. No state which is expanding
can hope to keep the letter of its constitution up to date; the changes
are too rapid, too subtle. Constitution makers are thus commonly
disappointed in the results of their labours, partly because they are
not in possession of all the facts, and partly because the conditions
have changed even in the time required to frame a constitution. At Rome
the letter of the constitution was but slightly changed during the
two centuries preceding the Empire; there were the same magistrates,
the same Senate, the same electoral and legislative bodies, very
nearly the same methods of voting, and the same qualifications of an
elector, but the working of the constitution changed; the admission of
large numbers of fresh citizens expanding the mass of voters beyond
manageable numbers, the changed responsibilities of the magistrates,
the widened career open to successful politicians rendered the old
terminology almost meaningless in reference to the actual working of
the constitution.
There was a time when the extra constitutional organization of the
electors was entirely in the hands of the great families; this
arrangement broke down gradually before the influx of new citizens;
direct bribery took its place alongside of personal influence. Up to
the year 180 B.C. Rome had pursued a policy in relation to her allies
which, judged by the standards of antiquity, was liberal; she admitted
her immediate neighbours to a modified form of citizenship, she gave
the citizens of certain towns the right of voting in some of the Roman
elections, and she even gave those citizens of these towns who had held
the highest offices in their own towns, the right of standing for the
magistracies at Rome; she pursued a policy of expansion; at that date
her policy changed; she began to check the admission to citizenship,
which was afterwards only wrung from her by war, till the city
constitution was all but lost in the building of the Empire.
On the one hand, the great families discovered that they had entered
upon the possession of a magnificent property, which they were not
disposed to share with an indefinite number of partners; on the
other hand, they felt that owing to the influx of numbers they had
lost their grip of the electorate, for the men who came to vote from
outlying towns were often sheep without a shepherd. It proved, however,
impossible to keep the electorate restricted. Rome herself could not
supply the armies necessary to carry on the career of conquest upon
which she had embarked; she was forced to depend upon allies to supply
the men whom she organized, and she was forced in various ways to pay
the price. One form of payment was the citizenship, which enabled the
Samnite or other Italian soldier to come to Rome for the elections, and
extort extra payment for his military services; whether he was feasted,
or amused, or actually paid for his vote, he shared with his Roman
fellow-soldier in the spoil of the provinces which he had helped to
conquer. Every fresh concession of citizenship rendered the electorate
more unwieldy, till the Roman people of whose favours Cicero so often
boasts had become little better than a mob.
While the Roman Electorate was thus outgrowing all possible
organization, and the constitution of a city state was breaking down
in every direction under the weight of burdens which it was not
constructed to carry, the minds of liberal statesmen at Rome were
unhappily occupied largely with city constitutions. The enlightened
circle of the Roman nobility, which was represented by such men as
Scipio Æmilianus, studied the Greek political writers rather than the
events which were going on around them, and were tempted to see in
the creation of a really democratic constitution the remedy for the
disorders which were only too obvious. They were liberal in one sense,
but it was in terms of the city state, which no longer existed.
We have had an analogous process in our own history. The expansion of
England for a long time escaped the notice of men, who, frightened by
the French Revolution, were concerned in demonstrating the incomparable
merit of representative government, and of establishing the fact that
the English constitution had always contained in it the democratic
principle. One of these men rewrote for us the history of Greece in
terms of the praise of democracy; another proclaimed the merits of
liberty and representative government; a whole school of historians is
interested in showing the popular share in such events as the extortion
of Magna Charta from an unwilling King, and in the constitution of
the Parliament summoned in the King’s name by Simon de Montfort; as
the result of the labours of these and other men our attention was
drawn for many years exclusively to problems of domestic government;
the far greater problem, the relations of England to her colonies
and dependencies, and the necessary modifications in her internal
constitution, escaped notice.
At Rome the first important act of the new Liberal school was the
attempted agrarian legislation of Tiberius Gracchus; Rome was to deal
with her conquered territory in the terms of a city state; conquered
land was public land; in such states it had always belonged to the
whole people, and had been shared between them; Rome had neglected this
salutary arrangement; her public land had passed into the possession of
the wealthy few; it must be resumed, and redivided. The proposal was
about as practical as an attempt to restore all the common lands to the
English peasantry would be at present; it failed; the originator was
assassinated.
Ten years later his brother proposed further liberal schemes; he
was less of a dreamer; he looked forward rather than back; he saw
that Rome must provide for her time-expired soldiers, and must give
non-Roman Italians who had fought under her standards a larger share
in her conquests; but he was before his time, and was in his turn
assassinated; a similar fate befell a leader from the ranks of the
Conservative nobility, a Livius Drusus, who a few years later advanced
the same political programme. The expansion of Rome to include Italy
had thus become part of the policy of a definite party at Rome; but
this party was not always a popular party, for the men who idled about
the streets of Rome, living on the profits of citizenship, were no more
disposed than the great families to add to the number of the partners.
During the second century before the Christian era, the forms of
popular government were maintained at Rome ready to become more than
forms when an organization was also ready to use them. The most
important effect of the political work of the Gracchi was to breathe
fresh life into the popular assembly; but this was no sooner done
than the constitution proved to be unworkable; then followed a period
of anarchy in Rome itself, which lasted for seventy years; during
this period one party, the party of Greater Rome, steadily grew, and
eventually left the constitution so modified that the local politics
of the capital no longer had a predominant weight in the Empire. The
first great step towards this end was made in the period during which
C. Marius had an overpowering influence in Roman politics. Marius is
represented to us by the historians from an unfriendly point of view;
it is not easy to get at the real man through the mass of legend which
obscures his real story. We see him a capable general who reorganized
the Roman Army; we also see him incapable as a politician; he figures
as the rough brutal demagogue whose violence stands in unpleasing
contrast to the suave manners of Sulla; but whatever he may have been
personally he represented definite political tendencies. The Marian
party survived Marius, and found its most distinguished representative
in the great Cæsar, who was a nephew of Marius.
A significant fact about Marius is that he was not a Roman; he came
from the small town of Arpinum. Technically he was a Roman citizen,
for Arpinum was a community which had enjoyed for nearly a century the
privileges of Roman citizenship; but his connexion with Rome was not
the connexion of a Cornelius or an Æmilius. He was one of the many men
from Italian towns who used their Roman citizenship to push a career
at Rome; Cicero, also from Arpinum, and Pompeius from Picenum are
well-known examples of the same class of men.
Each of these three men failed as a politician at Rome, and in much
the same way each of them transferred to the wide arena of Roman
politics the limitations imposed by the traditions of a small city
state. Marius could not manage the Electorate nor the Senate; Pompeius
could not manage the Senate; Cicero saw in Rome a magnified Arpinum.
Of the three, Marius, in spite of the clumsiness which defeated his
own purposes, had grasped the one political idea which was to conquer
all others in the end; he saw that the men who fought in the armies
of the Empire must have a share in the government of the Empire; he
contributed to this end, perhaps unconsciously, by his reorganization
of the Army. The reforms of Marius in military organization were in
the first place technical, and unfortunately we cannot assign the
several details to their responsible authors. We do not know exactly
what was done by Marius himself, what by his successors; but we do
know that his administration marks the period at which the Roman Army
took the form of a professional standing army as distinct from a
militia. The change had been long in progress, military necessities
had imposed it; occasional service had been practically replaced by
continuous service. Marius substituted in fact, if not in every form,
a military organization in the army for a civil organization; the
change was forced upon the Roman by the dangerous invasions from the
north which had found the Government unprepared. Marius dispersed
the invaders; he stood forth as the saviour not only of Rome, but of
Italy, and he was able to reorganize the army in terms not of the Roman
constitution but of military necessities. The Roman Armies at this
date were not recruited exclusively or even in the greater proportion
from Rome herself; not only was each legion supported by auxiliaries,
such as cavalry and light armed skirmishers, drawn from non-Italian
territories, but the legion itself was recruited from the allies in
Italy as well as from Rome, and the balance of military strength was
against the capital.
The State at once found itself confronted with a difficult problem:
what was to be done with the professional soldiers when their time of
service had expired? Men who had served for a term of years found their
previous employments closed to them. Alongside with the expansion
of the Empire went the depression of Italian agriculture; the food
supplies of the capital were increasingly drawn from Sicily, Africa
and Sardinia; soldiers who had been free agricultural labourers found
their places taken by the captives whom they had themselves reduced
to slavery. The remedy that suggested itself was to assign lands to
the soldiers; they could either be sent to form military colonies in
conquered territory, or be provided with land in Italy confiscated on
various pretexts, or simply taken without further excuse. This remedy
was not in all respects successful. Men who had become used to the
excitements of war and the pleasures of looting, did not settle down
readily to the drudgery of farming; some parted with their farms,
others in cases where the farm had been one appropriated by the State,
allowed the proprietor who had been defrauded to retain possession
on condition of paying a rent; some of these men re-enlisted, others
went to swell the mob of the capital and enjoy its amusements. The
Roman people of Cicero’s days largely consisted of men drawn from
many parts of Italy, who had been, or still were, soldiers, and who
had no objection to being bribed to give their votes; if they had any
political convictions they were Italian rather than Roman; if they
resisted any further extension of the privileges of citizenship it was
from interested motives, and not because they loved the Conservative
party in the Senate. As Rome was the only place in which votes could be
given, the tendency was for all Italians possessing the status of Roman
citizens to drift into Rome, if they had no occupations to detain
them elsewhere. Men who aspired to be political leaders had to win the
favour of this increasing multitude.
The Roman people so constituted had no particular affection for
Rome, and none for the Senate of Rome as a body; its affections were
centred on those who could promote its own interests, on those who
were lavish in providing it with amusements and distributing doles,
on generals who promised large rewards to their soldiers, on orators
who flattered the vanity of the mob; if it had any genuine political
sympathies they were with the Army, and with Italy rather than with the
hierarchy at Rome. The greatness of the Roman statesmen lies in this,
that though nominally the magistrates were elected and laws passed by
this rabble, and the whole administration lay at its mercy, outside
Italy the Roman Government steadily grew in strength; the love of order
and faith in law were so deeply implanted in the Roman character that
the administration was not shattered by years of apparent anarchy,
in which the constitution seemed to have fallen into abeyance, and
the fate of the civilized world to depend upon the caprices of a mob
or the loyalty of soldiers to their leaders. The Roman resembled the
Englishman in being able to make the best of a bad government or no
government; disorder called his reserve of moral strength into action;
the executive was always superior to the constitution; however unruly
the city, the Roman citizen in the provinces preserved the qualities
which had made Rome the ruling power in the Mediterranean.
The character of the Roman people having changed, the mass of citizens
being no longer Romans and nothing else, the ruling classes at Rome
did their best to organize the numbers who filled the streets. All
the methods by which elections may be controlled were resorted to:
political clubs were formed, the great families looked up their
clients, some of them provided themselves with armed bands of
retainers, bribery was systematic and constant; but all efforts to
introduce order into the unwieldy body of the Roman people alike
failed. It is possible that if the popular assembly had had no
further voice in public affairs than to elect magistrates, a way
might have been found out of the difficulty; but the mob was not
only the electorate, it was also the legislative body, or rather a
legislative body. It could not only pass laws, but it could prevent
through its representatives, the tribunes, any laws being passed, or
any business being conducted. The rule of the Roman people under these
conditions was simply authorized anarchy, and the deeply lamented fall
of the Republic with which school histories are apt to close, was
the restoration of order. In fact just at the time when the history
of Rome became the history of the civilized world, there was no
longer any political meaning in the term “the Roman People”; it was
a survival from previous conditions. The attempt to call to life the
forms of popular government resulted, as it was bound to result, not in
government, but in anarchy.
III
The Senate
If the Roman people acquired a political significance in the later
days of the Republic only to show that it was an unmanageable part of
the constitution, the Roman Senate had always been an organized power.
Had it pursued the comparatively liberal policy which prevailed in
its councils immediately after the second Punic War, the Empire would
probably have come, but it might have come without the intervening
period of revolution; this, however, was not to be; the temptations of
wealth and power were too strong. While, however, we are at liberty
to condemn the Senate as it is revealed to us by the transactions
with Jugurtha and other scandalous incidents, we must not forget that
the same body which failed so deplorably at one period of its career
produced the men by whom the Empire was made. It was the embodiment
of all that was politically good in the Roman character, as well as
of much that was evil; its faults were the faults inherent to a close
corporation of nobles enjoying vast responsibilities which it did not
altogether comprehend; its virtues have impressed themselves upon
subsequent history.
A peculiarity of the Roman constitution in the later centuries of
the Republic is that it was practically unworkable even as a city
government, unless everybody was agreed to exercise forbearance,
and not to push constitutional powers to their legitimate extremes.
Two chief magistrates were elected every year, each of whom could
neutralize the work of the other; all public business could be stopped
at a moment’s notice on religious grounds; the magistrates elected by
the popular assembly could impose their veto upon the action of all
other magistrates. As long as the Senatorial families worked together,
and abandoned their mutual differences in the presence of external
pressure, the popular element in the constitution could be disregarded;
but when the Senate became divided against itself, or when individual
Senators chose to ignore the traditional checks by which the whole
body was enabled to work in the interests of the order rather than of
the individuals composing the order, it was possible to paralyze the
Government without departing from the strict letter of the constitution.
The Senate was a strictly aristocratical body, practically a
co-optative body, for every five years the Censor, himself a Senator,
revised the list of the Senate. It was in his power to remove members,
who had in various ways disgraced themselves, or who had fallen below
the property qualification demanded of a Senator; he could summon
new members, and though, after Sulla had passed a decree to that
effect, he was bound to summon all men who had held the elective
office of Quæstor, so long as the Senate was united, it could control
the elections, and take care that no undesirable politician should
in this way effect his admission to the order. This quality of an
Aristocratical Order still hung about the Senate in the early days of
the Empire; it was felt even then to be a public misfortune that a
Senatorial family should be unequal to maintaining its position, and
such families were occasionally subsidised by the Emperors.
The Senate was chiefly composed of men who belonged to an aristocracy
by birth, and it admitted new men very unwillingly; a Marius with the
power of the Army behind him could force his way into the Senate;
a useful advocate like Cicero, or general like Pompeius, could be
summoned to its ranks, but such men were unwelcome; they were accepted
as a disagreeable necessity; all three learned at different times by
bitter experience, that they were, at the best, tolerated.
An indication of the aristocratic nature of the Senate is afforded by
the fact that Senators were forbidden to engage in trade, a prohibition
which however they contrived to evade.
The school of writers which is interested in representing all forms
of government, which have been successful as democratic, has done its
best both in ancient and modern times to minimise the aristocratic
character of the Roman Senate no less than its legislative supremacy;
but the whole tone of Roman history is against them. A Roman Senator
was distinctly a nobleman. Inside the Senate rank went by office;
those Senators who had held the higher offices took precedence of
others according to dignity of office; those families were most highly
honoured who could show the greatest number of dignitaries among
their ancestors, but the qualification of birth co-existed with rank,
derived from office or a long ancestry of office holders. Long after
the distinction between patrician and plebeian had ceased to have
any meaning except in reference to certain priesthoods and religious
ceremonies, the distinction between patrician and plebeian families
was remembered, and occasionally reasserted itself practically; and
it was some time before the official rank of Senator conferred by an
Emperor was respected unless the recipient was entitled to Senatorial
rank by descent. Among the few acts of the early Emperors which win
the respect of contemporary historians, purgations of the Senate are
included. Julius Cæsar tried to make the Senate a council of the Empire
by enrolling in it non-Italians; but he was before his time, and his
astute successor acted in a contrary spirit.
During all the constitutional changes of the last centuries of the
Republic, the position of the Roman Senate remained unchanged in
two particulars: it was the fountain head of Roman religion and of
Roman law, and though the former might be held to be of transitory
importance, the latter was undeniably permanent in its effects.
The Roman Senate did not alone make law, though it alone through the
Prætors interpreted law. As a legislative body it shared its functions
with the popular assemblies; its decrees were rather administrative
than legislative, but it has never been rivalled, except, perhaps,
by the English judges, in its power of expanding the application of
existing laws and creating a legal system. This peculiarity of the
Roman mind, its conservatism combined with a capacity for readjustment,
gave us the Roman Empire; without it the Roman conquests would have
gone for nothing. The Greek, far quicker witted than the Roman, was
ready to change his laws at a moment’s notice. It was to him an open
question whether his state should be democratic or oligarchic; the
question could be settled according to convenience, by voting or by
force; a new constitution could be framed to suit new emergencies. The
Roman mind worked differently; with the Roman the new had, if possible,
to be read into the old. The Roman did not become a constitution
maker till he had passed under Greek influence, and he was remarkably
unsuccessful in the task. He soon abandoned it, but he never failed in
his casuistry; there was no conceivable adjustment of human relations
which the Roman jurisconsult could not refer back to the Twelve Tables;
he never troubled himself as to what was to the advantage of the
greatest number, or as to the precise definition of justice; he simply
took his law, his precedents, his authorised interpretations, and
worked the new circumstances into line with the old forms.
Till the Greek influence modified Roman habits the education of the
young Roman noblemen was largely legal; while the Greek youth was
discussing morality speculatively, the Roman youth was being instructed
in the application of law. He sat at the feet of some Mucius Scævola,
and heard his solutions of knotty entanglements; the oratory in which
he was trained was not the florid rhetoric, which may be addressed
successfully to a mob, but forensic oratory addressed to trained
intelligence.
With the legal temperament, the Roman combined the religious
temperament, the habit of looking to authority rather than to
speculation as a guide for his actions. The Sibylline books continued
to be consulted in form, if not in fact, on occasions of emergency,
long after the cultivated Roman had become familiar with the
rationalistic speculations of the Greeks and the mathematicians.
The Senate might under these influences have easily degenerated into a
futile subservience to stereotyped forms and habits which would have
rendered expansion impossible; it might have opposed a Chinese rigidity
to necessary innovations; but the destinies of Rome had ordained that
from the beginning the principle of modification should exist alongside
with a strong conservative tendency. It may be left to the antiquaries
to decide exactly how much truth survives in the legends which form the
chief part of early Roman history, but even if it were not demonstrable
that the population of Rome was a composite population at a very early
time, the fact would remain that the Romans themselves believed it
to be composed of three elements: they believed that Latins, Sabines
and Etruscans had been welded together under the Kings, and that the
titular distinction between patrician and plebeian families survived
from a further process of incorporation of aliens; thus there was
ancient authority for innovation in such an important matter as the
admission of new citizens. Athens was in this respect more conservative
than Rome; the citizens of the most democratic state of the ancient
world boasted of their pure native descent, while the conservative
Roman found in his history a continuous process of immigration to the
hills by the Tiber, repeated coalition, continued absorption.
While the Roman Senate was in one aspect a body of trained lawyers,
in another it was a body of priests. The evolution of the priesthood
as a separate profession is a comparatively modern process. In the
history of Rome we see the first step in the process, the changes by
which the men appointed to maintain the state religion or to conduct
the ceremonial observances paid to particular gods became elected
officials, after having been the representatives of certain families
upon whom those obligations rested. The duties of religion which had
previously been family duties became state duties; but this change did
not relieve the Senate of its charge of the national religion. Just as
the Senator was an expert in law, so he was an expert in ritual; he did
not discuss questions of faith, but he decided points of ceremonial.
Though the Colleges of Pontiffs and Augurs were not in the later days
of the Republic necessarily drawn from the Senators, and though for a
short period a restricted form of public election was applied to the
former, practically the Senatorial families held these offices in their
own hands, and the power which they thus wielded could only be taken
from them by the expedient of combining in the person of the chief of
the State the functions of chief Pontifex and chief Augur. Any public
business could be suspended by the declaration of a Pontifex or Augur,
that it was contrary to established ritual, or that the gods had
by means of recognized signs and omens signified the occasion to be
unfavourable.
The Senate was also an assembly of heads of families; when a Roman
youth of Senatorial descent came of age, his father presented him to
the Senate. Though inside his family the father was omnipotent, the
Senate decided what actually was the family law; and in this respect
the Senate dealt with the family, not with the individual. If the
head of the family failed to rule his family properly, and thereby
occasioned scandal, he might be marked by the Censor and degraded from
his rank. In the family were included many persons whom we consider
to be outside the family; slaves, freedmen and certain clients had
rights as well as duties; the father of a family who contravened the
regulations of the Senate in his relations with such persons caused
a scandal, no less than in irregular relations with his wife or
children. We are frequently surprised in reading the history of the
early Emperors by the freedom with which they appeal to the Senate for
commiseration in their private misfortunes, by their habit of assuming
that the Senate is interested in their family affairs, but in this they
were only acting as any other Senator would act. The point of view may
be well illustrated from the procedure in divorce; divorce was a purely
family affair with the Romans; a wife guilty of misconduct was divorced
by her husband without any appeal to a law court. With ourselves a man
is at liberty to apply for a divorce; if under certain circumstances
he does not do so, we may admire his forbearance or despise his
laxity, but there is no constituted authority which can force him to
start an action; whereas a Roman Senator who permitted flagrantly
scandalous conduct on the part of his wife could be, and sometimes was,
degraded by the Censor, the good order of the State being imperilled
by the irregularities in his family; cruelty to slaves or neglect of
freedmen and clients were in the same way matters that came under the
observation of the Senate, and of the Emperors as the leaders of the
Senate.
These characteristics of the Roman Senate, that it was broadly speaking
an assembly of lawyers, priests and heads of families, of which any
individual might and often did combine all three functions in his
own person, were most strongly marked in the period during which it
commanded the respect of Polybius and Judas Maccabæus; the policy of
Augustus was to restore these characteristics; they were partly in
abeyance during the period of the greatest prosperity of the Republic,
when the attention of the individual Senator of Rome was irresistibly
drawn to the administration of her conquered territories, and to the
regulation of her relations with potentates on the confines of her
Empire.
At the beginning of the first century before the Christian era, the
Senate was divided into parties evolved by the new responsibilities,
and the changes in opinion caused by the influx of Greek ideals. The
most important problem was the administration of the provinces, but
along with it there had to be considered the organization of the
internal constitution of the city itself. Thus there were two groups
of reformers, those who were chiefly concerned in the adjustment of
the relations between the city and the Empire, and those who were more
actively interested in the reorganization of her local constitution.
The questions which presented themselves to the individual Senator were
three in number: first, were the provinces to be governed rigorously as
conquered territories, or were they to be admitted to a share in their
own government and the government of the Empire? secondly, if they were
to be governed by Rome and for Rome, was the administration to continue
to be exclusively in the hands of the Senate? thirdly, whatever might
be Rome’s relations with her provinces, was it not necessary to give
reality to those germs of popular government which existed in the Roman
constitution, and to make the Senate directly or indirectly an elected
assembly of notable men?
Thus a Senator might be Conservative with reference to the provinces,
but liberal with reference to the city, or he might hold that the
Senate must be the centre of government, and yet be capable of such
internal reforms as to make it the best protector of provincial
interests; or he might say that the rule of the Senate was good for the
city, but unworkable in the provinces.
Outside the Senate there was the Equestrian Order representing both
the Civil Administration of the Empire, and non-Roman as well as
Roman financiers, supporting any man or group in the Senate which
seemed favourable to its interests; there was also the body of Roman
citizens partly composed of men who were still bound by various ties to
individual members of the Senate, and partly of men who had served in
the Roman armies, and supported the policy of distinguished generals by
whom they were organized and in various ways paid for their help.
A peculiar quality of the Roman Senate was the romantic affection with
which it was regarded by its members and adherents; it was no mere
house of representatives; it was a dynasty. Men not only in Rome, but
in the provinces, tolerated its scandalous misgovernment after the
third Punic War, as men have tolerated the government of a bad King
without losing their faith in monarchy and their affection for the
institution. Hard-headed politicians may see in the suicide of Cato at
Utica nothing but contemptible weakness; to them the Roman Senate is
only one of many political organizations; but Cato’s act was otherwise
regarded in antiquity. To find a parallel we have to search among those
adherents of the Stuart Dynasty in England and Scotland, to whom the
cause for which they fought was not merely a political cause, but a
religion. We do not condemn men who committed political suicide after
1715, and abstained from public affairs, or even left their country;
we feel that, for men believing as they did, no other course was open;
it was precisely in this light that the death of Cato appeared to his
contemporaries.
The resistance of the Senate to the various reforms pressed upon it
from 131 B.C. onwards has been represented as simply a resistance of
vested interests; that it was so in some measure even at first, and
increasingly so as time went on, is indisputably true, but Cato did
not kill himself as a martyr to the cause of vested interests. The
Senatorial position was that of a monarch by divine right; the Senate
could not accept reforms in deference to external pressure without in a
measure abdicating; it was in itself both Church and Crown; it could no
more make terms with a Gracchus or a Livius Drusus than could Charles
I. with a Pym or a Cromwell.
This point has been largely concealed from us by the Greek influences
under which the history of Rome has been written; we are tempted to
think of the Roman Senate as of the Athenian Boulé, as of an Upper
House, whose powers and privileges could be curtailed or prescribed
at the will of a popular assembly; but to concede that point was to
concede everything. The bad faith of the Roman Senate, its desperate
expedients to maintain its position alike against the rising power
of the Army, the organization of the Equestrians, the body of Roman
citizens, or the reformers within its ranks, become in a measure
respectable when we reflect that the Senate believed itself to rule by
divine right.
Similarly faith in the detestation of monarchy ascribed to the Senate
is the result, in some measure, of giving undue weight to Greek
prejudices, and to the words of men who were unconsciously enthralled
by them.
The Senate so arranged matters that no member of the oligarchy should
acquire a preponderant position, and disturb the equality which in
theory prevailed between individual Senators; hence various enactments
as to the intervals between holding the Consulate twice over, the
limited period of a provincial appointment and the disbanding of a
Consul’s army outside Rome. In the decadence of the Senate piracy was
not quelled in the Mediterranean, and inadequate provision was made to
repel the Teutonic invasion from the North, because the immense power
wielded by the man to whom either of these enterprises was entrusted
threatened to overbalance the constitution. The Senate felt, and
rightly felt, that its greatness had been achieved by the relatively
unselfish co-operation of its members; when the sentiment, which had
rendered that unselfish co-operation possible, had given way before
the immense opportunities offered by provincial governorships and the
successful command of Roman armies, the Senate endeavoured to restore
the effects of that sentiment by insisting more and more strongly
upon regulations which tended to equality; but this was something
different from the Greek antipathy to the tyrant. Equality between its
members was a fundamental theory of the Senate, but it had so little
antipathy to monarchy as to provide for the rule of one man in the
event of great dangers. The Dictatorship, so long as it lasted, was an
absolute monarchy; to the Greek a Dictator was the negation of civil
order; hence in a Greek town the assumption of the supreme power by
one man, however great the emergency, was a revolutionary proceeding;
at Rome the appointment of a Dictator was a recognized constitutional
expedient.
Thus the divine right of the Senate did not exclude the possibility
of making one of their own number supreme executive magistrate; and
monarchy was abhorrent to the Senator, not because it was a thing
contrary to nature, as some Greek philosophers held, but because it
disturbed the balance of the Senatorial constitution.
By laying undue stress on the Senatorial objection to the rule of one
man, writers of the school of Cicero have concealed the real position
of an orthodox Roman Senator. Cæsar was hated by the old Senatorial
party, less because he was in fact King than because he had changed the
constitution of the Senate, and endeavoured to make it a council of the
Empire by inviting provincials to its ranks.
There is this essential difference between the suicide of Cato and the
subsequent suicide of Brutus: the former was a legitimist, to whom the
defeat of his cause meant the destruction of all that was holy, the
final collapse of law and order and religion; the latter, if an honest
man at all, was a fanatical doctrinaire who had been disappointed in
his expectation of regenerating society; Cato died because he could not
live under the new conditions, Brutus partly because he was disgusted
with his failure, partly because he preferred death by his own hand to
death at the hands of the ruffians of Antonius.
The conservative Senator objected to a King, it is true, but he
objected no less and perhaps even more to such a reconstitution of the
Senate as commended itself to Cicero and other reformers, who wished to
remodel the political arrangements of Rome in terms of the Athenian
Constitution or of some less extravagant ideal republic than that
imagined by Plato.
While the Senate contained a party of irreconcilables whom we may
call the Legitimists, it also contained a party who believed in the
possibility of a genuine reform, and adaptation of the Senatorial
constitution to the needs of the Empire; there was a liberal tradition
as well as a conservative tradition inside the Senate; the men who
had gradually broken down the barriers between Patrician and Plebeian
in the early days of the Republic, and who had gone some distance in
admitting the allies to a place in the constitution, had been succeeded
by the men who had recognized the claims of the Equestrian order, and
saw that some equitable distribution of the rewards of victory among
the rank and file of the army was necessary to the well being of the
State. The names of the men who took the lead in forcing reforms upon
the Senate are Senatorial names, Glaucia, Fimbria, Saturninus, Livius
Drusus, Cinna, no less than the Gracchi were Senators; and though they
were ill advised in mistaking the Roman mob for a constitutional party,
they were not demagogues in the sense that Danton was a demagogue; they
belonged to the body which they wished to reform; their methods were
injudicious, as was proved by the result, but it is not easy to see
what other methods were open to them. After Cicero had pledged himself
to the cause of the Conservative party in the Senate, he spoke of these
men and other men who had proposed and passed measures of reform in
terms of unmeasured reprobation, but we are no more bound to accept
his condemnation as historically accurate than we are at liberty to
accept the current terminology of political abuse in our own day as
indicating anything more than the malignity of the speaker. Even the
moderate reformer is stigmatized as a demagogue by those who object to
his reforms.
Had Marius been as capable a politician as he was a general, it is
possible that the reform party in the Senate might have brought about
a gradual transition from the rule of the Senate to the inevitable
monarchy, but the incapacity of Marius gave the reins to violence, and
brought on the proscription of Cinna to be followed by the reaction and
yet more violent proscription of Sulla.
Constitutional reform failed, but the breed of constitutional
reformers was not extinguished even by the second proscription. Sulla
had recognized this party, and had adopted two of its projects of
reform; he had, in a measure, unified Italy, and he had provided for a
quasi-representative constitution of the Senate by ordaining that men
who had held the elective office of Quæstor should after their term of
office pass into the Senatorial ranks; this did not exclude other means
of admission to the Senate, but it partly broke down the exclusive
system of co-optation through the Censor, and it gave a capable and
pushing man from an Italian municipality, such as Cicero, a better
chance of attaining the highest position at Rome.
The party of moderate reform was divided into two sections, the section
which recognized the Empire, and the section which thought in the
first place of the city; the former became the mainstay of Cæsar, the
latter soon ceased to have any practical weight except in literature.
When the great crisis came, it ranged itself for the most part with
the Pompeians; but the former section was not able to accept Cæsar’s
radical reforms, and became after his death anti-Cæsarian, till after
being frightened by the extravagance of Antonius and the brigandage of
Sextus Pompeius, it was won over by the moderate and cautious policy of
Octavian. These were the men who fought beside Brutus and Cassius, and
joined Lucius Antonius in the Perusine war, but when they saw that the
choice was between anarchy and Octavian, gave their adhesion finally to
his cause; the reign of Augustus bears the impress of their influence
throughout. Among them were two men of note, Livius Drusus, father of
Livia and grandfather of Tiberius, and Tiberius Nero, the father of the
future Emperor.
The reign of Augustus did not finally conclude the reign of the Senate,
but it removed from practical politics the party who could not see
beyond the city State, and it definitely concluded the pretensions of
the rabble of the streets to act in the capacity of the Roman people.
It was only gradually that the Senate became an advisory council to the
Emperors, recruited from the distinguished officials of the Empire, or
from the legal profession; it retained for a long time its hereditary
and domestic character.
It might have been anticipated that there would be a clear division
of functions between the officials of Greater Rome and of the city
itself, that the Emperor with his staff would manage the concerns of
the Empire, and the Senate would govern the city; but it was long
before the Government of the city sank to the position of an ordinary
municipal Government. The division of the provinces into Senatorial
and Imperial ultimately broke down, and was indeed from the beginning
formal rather than real; it was a compromise by which the old nobility
was conciliated, but the honours conceded to the old aristocracy
became more and more titular as time went on; the Roman Senate could
not step down, and it refused to accept the position of the city
Council of Rome, or even of the Council of Italy. It was never formally
disestablished, but it was eventually crowded out, though it was
still sufficiently self-conscious, when Tacitus and the younger Pliny
were writing, to resent the predominance of the Imperial Household,
and to worship the traditions of an omnipotence which it believed to
have been the realization of those dreams of liberty so dear to the
Greek philosophers. So long as Rome continued to be the centre of the
administration of the Empire, the Senate of Rome was always something
more than a municipal council, and the name of the body which had once
governed the Empire was always dignified by associations which could
attach to no other assembly.
IV
Slavery
The politician of to-day is as incapable of imagining a wholesome state
of society in which slavery is a recognized and universal institution,
as he is of believing that any political constitution can be really
good without representative government. The Romans, however, contrived
to civilize the world, so far as it was accessible to them, without
representative government and with slavery. Slavery is, in fact, a
necessary condition in the evolution of civilized society, and was an
important factor in the evolution of the Roman Empire. Teuton and Celt,
no less than Greek or Roman or Phœnician, equally used and doubtless
equally abused the institution; no race can claim to have been at all
periods of its history free from the curse.
In order to arrive at a fair conception of slavery as it existed
in antiquity, it is necessary to clear our minds once for all of
prepossessions created by the conditions of slavery in America or other
countries, where the slave and the slave owner have been distinguished
by such marked racial differences as exist between the white man and
the coloured man, between the highly civilized man and the savage. Even
in the department of negro slavery, as practised in America, there
are two sides to the question, and _Tom Cringle’s Log_ must be set
against _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. Mr. T. Booker Washington, an American
negro who has done perhaps more for the emancipated black men than any
living man, himself born a slave, refuses to join in the wholesale
condemnation of American slave owners; to him the mischief of the
institution lay less in its injurious effects upon the negro than upon
the white man, who despised wholesome industry, and tended to become
useless rather than cruel.
The political student has to approach the subject without prejudice,
and investigate all the consequences and accompaniments of slavery,
not only some of them. It is further necessary in dealing with such
a question to discount the antipathy to pain and discomfort which
is so marked a feature of modern life. Granted that under certain
circumstances slavery resulted in a vast amount of hideous suffering,
still slavery was not the only condition in ancient life, or mediaeval
life, or even modern life, that has resulted in suffering. Wherever a
man finds himself in an irresponsible position towards a number of his
fellow creatures, wherever a society or the rulers of a society live in
terror of any section of that society whether slave or free, there is
always the probability of great cruelty. If all the pain and sorrows
of humanity from the beginning of time until now could be reckoned up
and estimated, and assigned to their various causes, it is questionable
whether slavery would show the blackest record.
Antiquity has left us some notorious instances of cruelty to domestic
slaves, and the stories of a few sensational cases have been preserved;
but even the English domestic servant in Christian London in the
nineteenth century is exposed to cruelty, and if the records of our law
courts survive, posterity on the evidence of a few exceptional cases
will be able to pass a stern sentence upon English men and women of
today. Could we estimate all the pains of all the operatives in modern
England, all the lives that are shortened, or rendered intolerable by
disordered health, could we arrive at a clear understanding of all
that is suffered by puddlers in iron foundries, by stokers on our
great ships, by men and women employed in lead works, in brick works,
in chemical works, in numberless other dangerous industries, we might
well pause before condemning slavery as the one social condition
predominantly productive of human suffering. True, the modern operative
is free, but free to do or to be what? The chain is there; it is only a
different kind of chain.
When St. Paul travelled from Puteoli to Rome, he passed through a
country in which a form of slavery was universal, which is commonly
held to have been the cruellest known to Italy; he passed by the
barracks of the agricultural slaves, and the conditions of travelling
were such as to give him every opportunity of making observations;
he lived certainly for two years after this date, and possibly much
longer, but he nowhere lifts up his voice against slavery in general,
or even this particular form of slavery. Not long before St. Paul made
this journey, it had been necessary to inspect the slave barracks in
the same part of Italy, because free men had acquired the habit of
adopting servitude in order to escape military service.
In fact that picture of antique slavery which represents it as a
scene of whippings and tortures, of rapes and murders, of humiliating
or disgusting services exacted by one man from another, and as the
exclusive condition under which such things occur, is a false picture.
The importance of slavery as a factor in the life of the ancients does
not in fact depend so much upon its moral influence upon individuals as
upon its political consequences, which were many and far-reaching in
their effects.
The condition of slavery in the ancient world did not in itself involve
the same measure of personal degradation with which it is associated in
these days; it was only one of many inequalities recognized by society.
If a slave could not appear in the law courts of Rome, no more could
the resident alien, however rich, however noble in the city from which
he came; if the slave could not hold real property, no more could the
sons of his master; if he could under certain conditions only acquire
personal property, his master’s son was similarly disqualified; the
ceremony by which each acquired freedom was the same; neither could
make a will, nor work entirely for his own profit; both were included
in the family; the domestic disqualifications under which the slave
lived were common to him and the children of the house; the political
disqualifications he shared with the free citizens of any community not
expressly recognized under treaty by the inhabitants of the community
in which he lived. Ancient society never contemplated individual
independence as the fundamental condition of human existence; it
was based on the contrary theory, that individual independence was
the exception, and the privilege of the few; only gradually, and
as the consequence of established law and habitual order rendering
personal security possible for the mean man without the intervention
of a powerful protector, did the modern conception of the rights and
obligations of the individual human being grow up; and in its perfect
development the conception has only very recently been realized.
The slave and his master might be, and commonly were, members of the
same race; if they were of different races, the slave might be a more
highly civilized man than his master, better educated, more capable in
many respects; there were hordes of slaves drawn from less civilized
races, and even from savage races, and the work which fell to their
share tended to be menial or arduous according to their unfitness for
work demanding previous training; but the fact that the slave was by
no means universally of an inferior type of humanity to his owner,
and frequently quite the reverse, put slavery as an institution on a
totally different footing from that which it has held in modern times.
Again, if the slave had to suffer from political disqualifications,
he had corresponding immunities; for one thing, he was exempt from
military service. One very important consequence of this aspect of
slavery was the restriction of the field from which recruits could be
drawn for armies; it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that the
whole of the industrial population of antiquity was not available for
military purposes, but the statement is somewhere near the truth; and
from this followed a further consequence, which eventually helped to
break up the Empire, viz., that the armies were increasingly recruited
from the populations on the confines of the Empire, and ceased to be
Italian. First Gaul, Spain and Illyria, and Thrace, then the Teutons
from Central Europe, sent free recruits to the Roman armies, till
the time came when the less civilized military element threw off
the traditions of the civil government, and society returned to the
conditions which had prevailed before the Roman Empire inaugurated
the reign of peace. Agricultural slavery in Italy is sometimes said
to have been the cause of the depletion of the Roman armies; ancient
authors complain that the hardy breed of peasants from the central
hills of Italy disappeared, and that, because their place had been
taken by slaves, the recruiting grounds were barren of the right
kind of population. The real state of the case was the reverse: the
Roman wars had exhausted the Roman free population, which was then
replaced by slaves. Between the end of the second Punic War and Cæsar’s
campaigns in Gaul, Rome had been continuously draining Italy of her
free population; it was inevitable that the sons of the small farmer
should be replaced by slaves, and that eventually small farms should be
merged in large holdings, and that the slave barrack should stand alone
where the scattered homesteads of the peasant proprietor had adorned
the landscape.
Two forms of slavery in antiquity have almost monopolized the attention
of most writers on the subject--domestic slavery and agricultural
slavery; both lend themselves to sensational treatment; but along with
these there was industrial slavery in all its forms; where we have free
artisans, antiquity had slaves; and it is questionable whether the
slaves employed by a great manufacturing firm in antiquity were less
well off than the mill hands of a Lancashire town of today; in many
industries they were possibly better off than the class of operatives
who are “sweated” in East London; the slave of antiquity was at least
provided with the necessaries of life by his employer. It is true that
the slave operative could be bought and sold and even mortgaged; he
could be bequeathed by will, but these mischances commonly happened to
him collectively, and no more affected him individually than a change
of owners affects the men working in an English manufactory; indeed,
the slave had an advantage over the free artisan; he was part of the
capital, his value was relatively greater, he occupied the place now
taken by the machinery. A body of well trained, well organized slaves
stood in much the same relation to capital in ancient times as the
plant of a manufactory to the modern capitalist; and a new owner would
no more have thought of disbanding or disabling the slaves employed
in a publishing establishment, or brick works, than a modern owner
would break up the machines in a cotton mill which he had acquired.
When we read of the enormous number of slaves owned by some ancient
millionaire, we must not think of butlers and grooms and footmen,
but of clerks and “hands”; where we now say that such and such a
capitalist employs so many thousand men, the ancients said that he
owned so many thousand slaves.
The slave could earn money for himself, and we can see through the
minute regulations of the codes as to the conditions under which he
could earn and hold money, a recognition of the fact that a man’s
free labour is generally more effective than his forced labour; the
slave’s opportunity of earning put him, as we should now say, upon
piece work; he earned so much for his master, so much for himself;
his master gave him the advantages of organization, of capital, of a
commercial reputation, and for these he paid in a proportion fixed from
time to time by legislation, keeping the remainder of his earnings;
that he paid more highly for these advantages than the present value
of money, and the general security of society would render equitable,
is quite true; but then the whole scale of interest on capital was
far higher than it is now. The slave who traded, as he often did,
with his master’s capital, paid less for its use than the interest
which would have been demanded of a stranger. We must not think of the
“peculium,” the slave’s private earnings, as we may think of the purse
accumulated by a modern domestic servant from gratuities and other
sources of private revenue, but as a real wage earned even by a slave.
The regulations which still bound the enfranchized slave to his master
in the new relation of patron seem at first sight harsh, the liberty in
reference to the former master remaining incomplete, but their aspect
changes when we reflect that they rendered manumission more easy, and
that the slave’s opportunities of earning money both before and after
manumission were made for him by his connexion with his master. The
proprietor of a large business might have every feeling of kindliness
and consideration for a trusted slave, who managed some department
of that business, but he might think twice before rewarding him with
his liberty, if that act involved not only the loss of the slave’s
services, but the creation of a commercial competitor.
Much has been written in condemnation of Roman agricultural slavery,
and justly so, if the agricultural slave was dealt with in the spirit
of the elder Cato; but here again we must be careful to distinguish.
The ergastula, the slave barracks, did not account for all the
agricultural slaves, and in the later days of Augustus the ergastula
were preferred by free men to military service; nor can the system of
the ergastula have been as rigorous in practice as in theory; the two
great servile insurrections which proved so serious a danger to Rome
could not have assumed such alarming dimensions, had not the slaves
who organized them been in possession of means of communication. Nor
must it be forgotten that there were many slaves who would now be
convicts, many who had been sold into slavery from a conquered country,
never having known any other condition of life. The ancients did not
often make the mistake of setting a delicately nurtured man to hard
menial labour, for his value in that capacity was small; similarly the
increasing difficulty of finding slaves after Rome ceased to extend her
conquests increased the value even of navvies, and their condition was
improved by the exigencies of sound economy; even a Cato, when slaves
were dear, took care not to wear them out before their time. Though a
slave was not protected except by public opinion against his master,
who might beat and even kill him, he was protected against all other
men, who could not injure him without incurring damages for wanton
destruction of another man’s property. There were cruel savage men
among the ancients as there are among the moderns, but on the whole the
servile condition does not seem to have been abused. Roman masters and
even mistresses occasionally beat their slaves, but vapulation was a
constant feature of human existence till a very few years ago even in
Europe. Shakespeare’s masters frequently strike their servants; that
worthy though foolish citizen, M. Jourdain, after frequent threats and
much aggravation, slapped his maidservant on the face; the use of the
stick is not an exclusive prerogative of the slave owner.
The more domestic of the Latin authors, such as Cicero and Horace, do
not give us a disagreeable picture of slavery; the relations between
slaves and masters in their day seem to have been in every respect as
pleasant as those between employers and servants in these days; and the
taunt of servile origin so frequent in the Classics amounts to little
more than the taunt of connexion with trade so common in some circles
in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact the frequency
of this disparagement tends to prove that it was easy to rise from the
servile condition to positions of great wealth, and even political
influence. The two vulgar rich men in the Satyricon of Petronius,
Trimalchio and Habinna, had both been slaves; and the latter is made
to say that he had become a slave voluntarily, as that was the easiest
method of becoming a Roman citizen; this may be wilful exaggeration on
the part of Petronius for a satirical purpose; but it would have no
point if it did not carry a certain element of truth. Pallas and his
brother Felix, the freedmen of the Emperor Claudius, were, the former
practically Prime Minister, the latter Procurator of Judæa; numerous
similar instances show that a man might have been a slave and yet rise
to high office; the intermediate step seems generally to have been
through the Equestrian Order--in one of its aspects, as we have seen,
the financial department of the Civil Service.
This introduces us to another feature of slavery as practised in
antiquity, viz. its cosmopolitan influence, which was at work in every
class of society, but in the highest class most of all; nothing else
so effectually broke down the barrier between the Greek and the Roman,
between the Eastern and Western half of the Mediterranean, between
North and South.
War in ancient times had many of the aspects of a speculation, and
among the profits of war the sale of captives was reckoned; the
conquered had no rights against the conqueror except under special
terms. When the victim was a civilized State, the free men who were
thus sold into slavery had the opportunity of buying back their own
freedom; they practically paid a ransom; the transaction was a rough
and ready and efficacious method of exacting an indemnity. There
would be a certain proportion who could not pay the indemnity, and
these became slaves, but in their new status they were not wasted
on unprofitable occupations; the philosopher, the physician, the
accountant, the merchant, continued their various occupations in the
service of their master, and if they proved their efficiency rapidly
passed through the stage of slavery to that of freedmen.
Of the twenty famous schoolmasters whom Suetonius honours with short
biographies, three only were certainly not freedmen, Orbilius, the
teacher of Horace, Pomponius Marcellus, and a certain Valerius Probus,
who hailed from Beyrout, and must have been himself free, whatever his
parentage, as he began life with the endeavour to get a centurion’s
commission; fifteen were certainly freedmen, and two probably. Their
nationalities are strangely varied; three were certainly Italians,
three others possibly, two were Syrians, if we so class Probus, three
Gauls, one Spaniard, one Illyrian, six certainly Greek, and one
probably. Of the three Gauls, one, M. Antonius Gnipho, gave lessons
first in the house of Julius Cæsar during the latter’s boyhood; he was
a man of exceptional intellectual brilliance and generous character.
Suetonius does not state that Gnipho actually taught Cæsar, though the
inference suggests itself, and in any case the youthful Cæsar must
have known him, and have received impressions, if not information,
which may have influenced the future conqueror of Gaul. These men
were for the most part highly respected and made large professional
incomes; they taught either in houses of their own, or by special
arrangement in the houses of their patrons; one of them, M. Verrius
Flaccus, taught on these terms the grandchildren of Augustus, who paid
him a handsome annual stipend on condition that he only admitted such
pupils to his classes as were approved of by his employer; he had
previously taught independently; a statue was erected to his memory at
Præneste; this indicates that in spite of his servile origin he was
held in high honour. Horace must have known Verrius Flaccus, even if he
were not actually a relative, and Horace’s allusion to the persuasive
schoolmasters, who coax children to learn the elements by giving them
biscuits, suggests a well known trait of this Verrius Flaccus, who was
the first schoolmaster to offer prizes, “some ancient book handsome
or scarce,” says Suetonius. It is interesting to note that the most
fashionable of these schoolmasters, and the one who made the largest
fortune, was a man who, in the opinion of the Emperors Tiberius and
Claudius, both good judges, was totally unfit to be entrusted with the
charge of youth; while the one of whom it is recorded that in his old
age he sank into extreme poverty is Horace’s old friend, the freeborn
Italian Orbilius. This man also was honoured with a statue.
The proportion of men of servile origin in this one profession was
very large, if we may infer that the short list given by Suetonius
of its leaders indicates conditions which prevailed through the rank
and file; nor was it held in special disrepute. Tacitus mentions a
schoolmaster not included in this list who became a Senator; another,
M. Pomponius Marcellus, was admitted to the inner council of Tiberius,
and anticipated the “supra grammaticam” episode of a much later age; he
reproved the Emperor for a solecism in the wording of a decree, telling
him, “You can give the citizenship to men, Cæsar, but not to a word.”
Men who had been freeborn in their native countries, but had passed
into servitude by fortune of war, found new and wider careers open to
them in the service of their conquerors; they obtained access to the
masters of the world, and were able to direct their thoughts to new
channels, and directly influence their policy; they were further able
to push the fortunes of their relatives and connexions at home; for as
freedmen, and even as slaves, they were not cut off from correspondence
with the countries which they had left.
Their influence, great as it was in breaking down the intellectual
barriers between Rome and her allies and subjects, and in forming
the conception of a world-wide empire, was even greater in the world
of finance. Even the great Cæsar failed to throw open the Roman
Senate to the civilized world, and admission to that body continued
to be jealously guarded, in spite of occasional exceptions, till the
Senate had been practically superseded by the Imperial Household; but
admission to the Equestrian Order was a relatively easy matter; no
sanctity attached to the Order, no historic glamour; and a skilled
financier found his way into its ranks with comparative ease. Roman
bankers such as Cicero’s friend Atticus, needed the assistance of
clever Jews and Greeks, for Roman money was invested privately as well
as publicly in all parts of the Empire; municipal securities, then as
now, were a favourite investment; cities and colonies were in the habit
of borrowing money for local improvements; the knowledge possessed by
men, who had been acquainted with the local and personal conditions was
a valuable commodity; and any Roman, who aspired to play a great part
in the financial world, drew into his service men from all parts of the
Empire; these men were not infrequently rewarded by admission to the
Equestrian Order; some of them were free men, the majority were slaves
to begin with. The process was so common that the term “Libertus” is
used much in the same way as we employ the terms “agent,” or “man of
business.” Not the least important consequence of the system was the
admission of the Jews to a share in the control of administration;
“they of Cæsar’s Household” were not domestic servants, but financial
secretaries of considerable importance.
Slavery has been reproached with being responsible for the horrors
of the arena, and a general indifference to the sanctity of human
life; but this love of spectacular bloodshed, this indifference to
the sufferings and death of human beings and animals, is by no means
an exclusive feature of societies in which slavery is an accepted
institution. Bull fights are being extended at the present day from
Spain to France; bull baiting, bear baiting, badger baiting, prize
fighting, cock fighting, were accepted amusements in England till the
beginning of the present century, some of them are not unknown to our
contemporaries; nor is it easy to distinguish that delight in the
sufferings of condemned criminals, or in the encounters between trained
combatants, which filled the Roman amphitheatres, from the excitement
which drew crowds to look on at the merciless tortures and executions
of the period of the Reformation, and led the fashionable friends
of Madame de Sevignê to watch a woman being burned alive. So far
were gladiatorial combats from being one of the hardships imposed by
slavery, that we have repeated references in the early Imperial period
to the misconduct of Roman knights, and even Senators, who exhibited
themselves in the arena. A skilled gladiator risked his life, as does
a skilled toreador, and he enjoyed the same measure of popular favour;
there were statues of gladiators as well as of schoolmasters.
The tendency of the Empire was to break down the barriers between the
free man and the slave; as political power ceased to be the privilege
of a caste, and became the reward of recognized merit bestowed by
the head of the administration, the importance of free descent was
diminished; the spiteful remarks about freedmen and servile origin,
which we occasionally find in the Latin authors, were suggested by the
improved position of slaves and freedmen; they represent the impotent
malice of a caste, which saw that the sceptre was departing from
between its knees; the distinction was long preserved by literature,
for the boys of the Roman Empire, like the boys of England, were
brought up on the works of the great Athenians, who spoke of the
slave as the slave was spoken of when the free citizens in the most
liberal of Greek States were really an aristocracy of birth entrusted
with the conduct of affairs among a population by which they were far
outnumbered, and which included many men as wealthy as the freeborn
citizens, and no less enlightened.
It was largely through slavery that men of letters, men of science,
architects, engineers, sailors, and even soldiers, found their way from
all parts of the world into the executive services of the Empire. Rome
had become cosmopolitan without being aware of the fact, long before
the genius of Cæsar finally started her on an admittedly cosmopolitan
career.
In spite of the pleasant personal relations which often prevailed
between slaves and their owners, emancipation on a large scale was
not regarded with favour, the statesmen who on different occasions
of emergency released slaves in large numbers in order to fill up
vacancies in the army were spoken of reproachfully; the step was always
felt to be a desperate one.
The reason, however, of the objection to such emancipations was
less fear of the slaves, or dislike, than the interference which
it involved with industrial pursuits; it amounted to a wholesale
confiscation of property; an analogous process at the present day would
be summarily to impress large bodies of operatives; this would bring
many industrial communities to a standstill. Similarly when at a later
period we find restrictions imposed upon the custom of emancipating
slaves by testament, this may well have become a means of throwing
the responsibility of maintaining superfluous slaves upon the public
dole fund, and of exempting the heir from the necessity of supporting
them. Emancipation does not seem to have been regarded as an unmixed
blessing. We have the well known case of Cicero’s secretary Tiro; Tiro
was a slave, but he was his master’s friend; the relations between them
were of a most affectionate nature; Cicero’s letters to him are full
of anxious inquiries after his health, of demands that he shall run
no risk of over fatigue; that he shall take the best medical advice;
and yet it was only late in his life that Cicero bestowed liberty on
Tiro. The letters in which Cicero’s relatives, and especially his
son, congratulate Tiro on his elevation, show that, slave though he
was, he was no less respected than loved. That such relations were
common we may infer from the statement made by Paterculus, that in
the proscription of B.C. 43 the fidelity of sons to their fathers was
least; the merit of wives stood first, of freedmen second, of slaves
third.
The institution of slavery did not demoralize the ancients in the same
way that negro slavery is said to have demoralized the Americans, or
coloured slavery in general to demoralize white men; it was a totally
different institution.
In this, as in all other details of ancient history, the memory of
the bad, the exceptional, the sensational, is preserved; the normal
conditions are forgotten; and as it is much easier to declaim than to
inquire, the essential but unobtrusive features of any particular
institution escape notice. On the whole, the action of slavery in
ancient times was beneficial to civilization, and the eventual
dismemberment of the Empire was not due chiefly to the existence of
slavery. The races who broke up the Empire themselves recognized
slavery, and it was long before agricultural slavery disappeared even
from England.
I
The Death of Augustus
In the hottest weather of the year 14 A.D., a hush fell upon the
streets of old Rome, as the news rapidly circulated that her foremost
citizen was dead, and that the man whose name had spelled peace and
prosperity for the whole civilized world was no longer at the head of
affairs. Few men were still living who could remember any rule but
his; for forty-five years he had controlled without serious opposition
the destinies of an Empire which stretched from the Euphrates to the
English Channel; the men who had taken an active part in the events
before the reins of government dropped into his skilful hands were
now but few, and if they ever spoke of the days which immediately
preceded his reign, it was to contrast fourteen years of anarchy with
nearly half a century of order. Here and there in the palaces of the
few old Roman families that had survived the revolutions of the middle
of the last century the good old times were bewailed, when the spoils
of the world were distributed between the members of a few princely
houses theoretically associated in administering the affairs of only
one Italian town, and bitter epigrams were circulated at the expense
of the monarch who posed as the first man of a free city; but the
vast body of the population had long forgotten the days of a liberty
in whose privileges they had never shared, while they had suffered
from its concomitant licence; the streets were no longer the scene of
furious fights between the retainers of great noblemen, the citizens
regularly received their supplies of corn, holidays were frequent and
the amusements of the public provided for on a liberal scale; the
Prince himself had been the foremost to enjoy all that delighted the
hearts of his fellow citizens.
As the fierceness of the hot Italian sun diminished, and the streets
began to fill, the praises of the dead man passed from mouth to mouth;
one would remember the humility with which he had pressed the claims
of his chosen candidates for public office, and the courtesy with
which he had asked for a vote; another would recall him studiously
fulfilling the sacred duty of a patron, and pleading in the Forum on
behalf of a humble client; yet another would describe him standing at
his own door once a year dressed in white begging for alms to bestow
on the needy; others would speak of the modesty of his household,
the model of an ancient Roman family where Livia his consort herself
superintended the weaving of her maids; nor would the gayer sort forget
his interest in the shows of the circus, or fail to tell stories of his
modest bets, and somewhat liberal jokes; the scholar would speak of his
simple entertainments in which the poet and the historian shared in
the conversation on terms of equality with their host; those of more
serious mind would dwell on his scrupulous attention to the ordinances
of religion, his restoration of temples and shrines and their various
cults; while the tender-hearted would deplore his private sorrows, the
premature deaths that had snatched away his grandsons, the scandals
that had bereft his home of his daughter and granddaughter; nor would
they fail to bewail the fact that the only possible successor to his
heritage and his power was an alien in blood.
As the days wore on the symptoms of the public sorrow increased, and
the authorities began to fear that the order of the funeral might be
marred by some such frantic outburst as had attended the obsequies
of the first great Cæsar, whose body had been seized by an excited
mob and burned in the public market place; regulations were issued to
ensure such order as the Prince himself would have commanded, and to
prevent the licences into which an orgy of sorrow might degenerate.
Day by day was reported the slow progress of the procession from the
small country house in Campania in which he had died to the gates of
the city; here the body had been guarded and carried by soldiers, there
by the knights, the second order in the State, and lastly the Senators
themselves were waiting to receive it, and conduct it on the final
stage of its journey into Rome.
The day came at length when the long train of mourners filed through
the narrow streets, at its head the ivory bier draped in purple,
behind it the effigy of the dead man, and a stately series of similar
effigies leading back through the great Cæsar himself to mythical
Æneas and Anchises and the goddess Venus; there were no deep-voiced
bells, no dull minute guns to express and intensify the public sorrow,
but the silence was broken by the shrieks of dishevelled women and the
monotonous blare of hoarse trumpets. After the images came the chief
mourner, a tall and stately man with bowed head, the Commander-in-chief
of the Roman armies, descended from the noblest blood of ancient Rome;
behind him walked members of the family, high officials, statesmen,
senators, the representatives of kings and cities. Principalities and
powers were all assembled to do honour to the dead. The heat of the
season had rendered it necessary to conduct the ceremony by night, and
the flare of torches fell fitfully on the procession and on the faces
of the spectators. At length the tedious ritual was completed, the
wine, the oil and the spices were thrown on the pyre, thrice was the
dead man called by name, and the silence was broken by no answer; the
chief mourner applied the torch with averted face, the crackling flames
rose to the sky, the soldiers ran round the burning pile, an eagle sped
heavenwards through the smoke; when the fire had at length died down,
and wine had been sprinkled on the ashes, a cry arose of Farewell, and
yet again Farewell; then the mourners departed to their homes, and the
Roman people dispersed to magnify the events of the last few hours, and
to remember portents: stars had fallen from their places in the sky,
the earth had been shaken, rivers had reversed their course, the kindly
rain had been turned into blood, and even small domestic catastrophes
were now known to have had their significance; a Senator had seen the
soul of the deceased rise to heaven from the midst of the flames, and
the credulous were comforted by reflecting that the Genius of Augustus
still watched over the destinies of the Roman people.
Meanwhile in the palaces of the Senators one question of supreme
interest was debated: What was to be the new order of things? and,
indeed, was there to be a new order?
It was fortunate for the destinies of civilized humanity that a
successor was ready at hand to take up the reins of government which
had dropped from the tired hands of Augustus, and that the question
of succession was not left to be settled by debate in the Senate, or
the result of a civil war. Tiberius was on the spot; he had been for
all practical purposes his stepfather’s colleague for ten years; he
was acting Commander-in-chief of the Roman armies; he was of ripe
age and ripe experience; his personal knowledge of the Empire was
almost co-extensive with its limits; he does not seem to have visited
Africa or Egypt, but he had served or commanded armies, and conducted
negotiations over the whole area between the sources of the Euphrates
and the North Sea. There was no living Roman with equal knowledge of
affairs, or of superior rank; his succession was inevitable, if there
was to be a successor to Augustus.
The life of Tiberius is from every point of view profoundly
interesting; it began in the middle of the great revolution which
eventually substituted the rule of one man for the rule of the Senate,
and which left the city of Rome the capital rather than the mistress
of an Empire; it ended after nearly fourscore years, during which
the constitution of that Empire was so firmly established that the
incapacity of individual rulers, and the mutual rivalries of aspirants
to the chief power, though sometimes resulting in civil war, failed
to shake its stability; it coincided with a great step in the forward
march of civilization which has left its impress upon all subsequent
history. If the political events which occurred during the life of
Tiberius are of supreme interest, his personal history is no less
attractive to the student of character, and of the strange vicissitudes
which may occur in the life of a human being; not the least of the
many contradictions in this life is the fact that the man, who is
called by the great German historian, Mommsen, “the ablest of the Roman
Emperors,” should have become the recognized type of all that is most
evil in a ruler, and left a name which is seldom mentioned without an
expression of detestation.
II
Parents and Childhood of Tiberius
The connexion of the Claudian clan with Rome was referred by the Roman
historians to the very beginnings of her history; they had no doubt of
the antiquity of the event; it was only debated whether this Sabine
stock was received into the community on the Tiber at the suggestion
of Titus Tatius, the consort of Romulus, or four years after the
expulsion of the Kings. The headquarters of the Claudians were the
region round Tusculum, in which town its chiefs had a fortress; their
domain gave its name to one of the later electoral divisions of the
Roman territory. From the beginning the Claudian stock was credited
with an unusual measure of aristocratic pride and public spirit; the
legends said that one Claudius caused by his intemperance the secession
of the plebs to the Mons Sacer, and that the unbridled lust of another
brought about the downfall of the Decemvirate; we are on firmer ground
in attributing to the Appius Claudius who was Censor in B.C. 312 the
inception, if not the completion, of two works of great public utility,
the Appian Aqueduct, and the even more famous Appian Way, the great
South Road, the first link in the chain of highways which bound the
Empire together. Appius Claudius the Censor had two sons, who took
the additional names of the Handsome and the Strong; the descendants
of both were to do good service to their country; a Claudius Pulcher
fought the Carthaginians in Sicily, a Claudius Nero defeated Hasdrubal
at the battle of the Metaurus. The Censor is further credited with
having been the earliest Roman writer in prose and verse. Intellectual
and administrative eminence was thus ascribed to the Claudians, also a
touch of arrogance extending to relations in which arrogance was out
of place; for it was Appius Claudius Pulcher the Admiral who, when the
unwonted abstemiousness of the Sacred Chickens portended disaster,
threw them into the sea, and was deservedly rewarded by a defeat.
Both the leading Claudian families were united in the person of the
Emperor; his father was a Nero, his mother was a Pulcher, for though
her father belonged legally to the Livian Gens, he had been adopted
from the Claudian. The family enumerated among its distinctions
thirty-three consulships, five dictatorships, seven censorships, six
triumphs, and two ovations.
In the last century and a half of the Republic the Neronic branch
was less distinguished than that of Pulcher; no records survive of
the immediate ancestors of the Emperor on the father’s side, and no
Claudius Nero appears in the consular list after 204 B.C. When Horace
wished to remind the Romans of their debt to the Neros, he had to go
back to the battle of the Metaurus. The family had become so obscure
that the genuine descent of the Emperor from the conqueror of Hasdrubal
has been questioned; but it was not questioned by his contemporaries,
who would have been only too glad to add the reproach of an obscure
ancestry to the other indignities which they fastened upon him. It
would be in accordance with the pride, and even rectitude of conduct,
ascribed to the Claudians, that this branch of the family preferred
comparative poverty to taking part in the scrambles for office, and
interested intrigues, which marked the decadence of the Senate; and
that its successive chiefs chose the dignified life of a Roman noble of
the old-fashioned type, concentrating their energies rather upon the
management of their ancestral domains than upon pushing themselves into
the inner circle of Senators who sped to exploit the Roman conquests.
Tiberius Claudius Nero, the father of the Emperor, appears first in the
party of Cæsar; he was already a quæstor, and while holding that office
commanded the fleet which besieged Alexandria, and rescued Cæsar from
the insurrection of the Alexandrians; he was rewarded by being made a
Pontifex, and entrusted with the establishment of colonies in Gaul, at
Narbonne and Arles among other places. This was work which required
considerable tact; it was not always easy to satisfy both the veterans
who formed the colony and the population whom they displaced. Cæsar was
not in the habit of employing incompetent agents, and the selection of
Tiberius Nero for this work is an evidence of his capacity. After the
assassination of Cæsar he became a warm partisan of the Liberators;
he is even said to have proposed in the Senate that the Tyrannicides
should be rewarded, when others thought that an amnesty was sufficient
for their deserts. It is not clear whether he was Prætor at this time
or shortly afterwards, but he certainly held that office when Lucius
Antonius and Fulvia making a diversion against Octavian at Præneste;
before the fall of Præneste he had slipped away to Campania, and
endeavoured to form an army from the proprietors in that district who
were threatened with the confiscation of their land for the benefit of
Octavian’s soldiers; in this enterprise he was unsuccessful, and had to
flee for his life to Sicily, where he took refuge for a short time with
Sextus Pompeius.
As we afterwards find Tiberius Nero in the closest association with
Octavian under circumstances which, judged by our standards of conduct,
are discreditable, it is advisable to stop to consider whether a man
could with any measure of consistency serve under Cæsar, and then join
hands with his murderers; on the solution of this question depends
the claim of Tiberius to be considered an honourable man; for in this
relation we can measure him by standards which are applicable to
ancient and modern life alike.
Velleius Paterculus, the historian to whom we owe a conception of the
early days of the Empire different from that suggested by Cicero and
Tacitus, was hereditarily associated with the family of Tiberius Nero;
his grandfather was his most intimate friend; he calls Tiberius Nero
a man of generous spirit, and strongly inclined to learning. A man of
this nature would be attracted to Cæsar by a similarity of character
and tastes. The ambition of Cæsar was a generous ambition; he was one
of those born organizers to whom muddling is a painful and personal
annoyance; he valued power for no vulgar reason, but because it gave
him the opportunity of realizing his conception of a well ordered
world. Endowed with an enormous intellectual ability, inexhaustible
physical vitality, an irresistible personal charm, Cæsar attracted to
himself all the men who really meant work. Cicero himself very nearly
succumbed, and would have done so entirely had his uneasy vanity
allowed him to work in a subordinate position. There is a limit to the
incompetence of constituted authorities; a time comes when all earnest
men in a State, whose public business has gradually been monopolized by
respectable incompetents, look eagerly for a deliverer; such men do not
welcome the noisy reformer, or the narrow doctrinaire, and so long as
these alone present themselves, the earnest men hold back, but as soon
as the really capable hard-working man appears, they give him their
confidence, and pass naturally into his service. Cæsar’s campaigns in
Gaul enabled him to select his men; at first the fashionable young
men of Rome hurried to his standards attracted by the prospect of a
pleasant picnic in charming country with an agreeable climate; no
serious danger was anticipated, and there was a pleasing prospect of
loot. The behaviour of these gentlemen, when it was realized that the
advance of Ariovistus meant serious business, supplies the one comic
interlude in Cæsar’s commentaries. During the nine years which Cæsar
gave to the conquest of Gaul, the earnest workers found their leader;
the intercourse between Cæsar’s camp and the capital was constant; men
learned to contrast the vigorous administration of the Governor of the
two Gauls with the imbecility of the Senate; it was not foreseen that
the contrast would result in the absorption of the powers of government
by this one man. When the time came at which Cæsar had either to
abandon all his work or force the Senate to give him a continuance of
office, his fellow workers were naturally disposed to give him their
continued support. Men who had learned what good work was, and had had
their share in it, were inclined to hope for the best; there were many
self-seekers, doubtless, but it was possible to follow the fortunes of
Cæsar under the influence of the highest motives. The man who had done
such magnificent work in the two Gauls might be trusted to reorganize
the Government. The reaction came, when the continuance of opposition
at Rome forced Cæsar to become an autocrat; his work was only half
done when he had beaten the Senatorial armies in Macedonia, in Egypt,
in Africa, in Spain, in Asia Minor; he had further to clear away all
the obstructions, get rid of all customs and precedents by which the
machinery of the administration was impeded; it was root and branch
work; and Cæsar was impatient; he attacked everything at once; no ties
of affection, no sentimental associations were spared, no prejudices;
he saw everything in the clear light of reason; he knew what was best
for the Empire, and he was determined to have his own way.
To Cæsar the Senate was the embodiment of obstruction and incompetence;
he did not propose to repeat the mistake of Sulla and give it a new
lease of power, for his contempt for the Senators was unbounded; but
the Senate had a name; it could not be disbanded; the better course
seemed to be to swamp the Senate of Rome in the Senate of the Empire,
to make it almost a titular body. He enlarged its numbers, added
to it distinguished provincials, his personal adherents among the
noblemen of Gaul. The figures that are given us may not be absolutely
trustworthy, but there can be no doubt that the Senate was increased
to a number which destroyed its capacity for united action. By this
measure Cæsar alienated the affection and destroyed the confidence of
the liberal members of the old aristocracy; they had been prepared to
pay a heavy price for good government; they were at one with Cæsar in
recognizing the expansion of Rome, but they had not anticipated a time
when a Julius Florus or Cornelius Gallus would not only be dignified
with Roman names, but would have the same social rank as a Claudian or
Sempronian. So determined was Cæsar to convince the Senate that its day
was over, that in transacting business with it he neglected even the
ordinary courtesies, and received its deputations without rising from
his seat. The dagger of Brutus was the result.
In some respects the assassination of Cæsar was fortunate for his
reputation; there was no widespread conspiracy; his government had
been of so short a duration that the disaffected men had no time to
find one another out; their victim had never realized that there was
a formidable opposition, and he fell before his qualities of clemency
and moderation were put to the severest test, which tries the virtue
and capacity of a successful reformer. The men who murdered him were
his chosen friends and servants, many of them were either holding or
were awaiting their turn for holding important provincial appointments.
The conspiracy was not organized; no provision was made for carrying
on the Government after the keystone of the fabric had been removed;
it was enough to kill the tyrant. In one respect the conspirators had
correctly estimated the result; there were men who, bound to Cæsar by
various ties, would not take an active part in any conspiracy against
his person, but who, if once that obstacle to the restoration of the
Senatorial Government were removed, would declare their detestation of
autocracy, and assist in remodelling the State. Tiberius Nero was one
of these; Cicero was another, and there were many others who, during
the last four years, had been ill at ease in the attempt to reconcile
their personal affection for Cæsar and confidence in his ability
with their conception of what constituted political righteousness.
Unfortunately for these men, they were but few in number; within
three months’ time it had become clear that neither the Army, nor
the provincials, nor the subordinate officials had any objection to
an autocrat; the myth of the Senate had been replaced by the myth of
Cæsar; the only question was who would become the centre of the cult.
Two men considered themselves most likely to attract to themselves the
passionate adoration with which the soldiers of Cæsar had regarded
their general; they were his trusted lieutenants, Marcus Lepidus and
Marcus Antonius, the former a Proconsul in command of an army, the
latter Cæsar’s colleague in the Consulship at the time of his death,
and his intimate friend; Cæsar’s widow placed all her husband’s papers
in his hands. Antonius had the advantage of being constitutional head
of the Government, and as soon as it was clear that the popular feeling
at Rome was strongly adverse to the Liberators, he procured a decree
from the frightened Senate sanctioning all Cæsar’s arrangements. Any
other course would in fact have produced intolerable confusion. The
most important consequence of this measure was that the Liberators
were put into positions of great power and influence by the voice of
the man they had killed, and were protected from the consequences of
their own imprudence. Cicero threw aside his literary work and rushed
to Rome, to assist in the restoration of the Republic, and to revive
the party of Pompeius. Antonius, however, had no intention of letting
the reins of Government slip from his grasp; being possessed of the
dead Cæsar’s papers, he was able to produce at his pleasure decrees
which the constitutional party had already sanctioned by anticipation,
and the partisans of the dead man were bound to support. Moderation
was no part of the character of Antonius; he prepared himself to enjoy
thoroughly the wealth which was poured into his hands; with Cæsar’s
soldiers at his back, he felt that he could do what he pleased. An
unexpected event shook his self-confidence, and revived the prospects
of the constitutional party by dividing the Cæsarians.
The young Octavian crossed from Apollonia and landed at Brundisium.
Cæsar had left no direct descendants except an illegitimate son by
Cleopatra, but he had distinguished his great-nephew Octavius by
such indications of his confidence and affection as a Roman would
bestow upon his destined heir. The year before his death he had taken
the young man with him to Spain, on the expedition against the sons
of Pompeius, which ended in their defeat at Munda; he had attached
him closely to his person, shared his tent with him, conducted
all his business in his presence, had in fact begun his political
apprenticeship. Apparently Cæsar came to the conclusion that his
nephew’s education was inadequate, and on the return from Spain he sent
him to Apollonia on the Illyrian coast, a Greek town of considerable
commercial importance, which was the seat of a University largely
frequented by Roman students. So far Cæsar had not taken the final step
of adopting Octavius, but he did so by his will.
Octavius was at this time little over eighteen years of age; his mother
and stepfather were alive, both of them devoted to his interests, but
nobody seems as yet to have thought of him as a possible factor in the
politics of the future.
By removing him to Apollonia his uncle had to some extent withdrawn him
from political life, and the Liberators had forgotten his existence. He
was of weakly health, and had shown no particular aptitude for military
pursuits. Antonius thought him of such small importance, that he
disregarded those portions of Cæsar’s will which referred to him, and
actually seized the private treasure which had been bequeathed to him.
Friends and relatives were alike urgent that Octavian should either
remain where he was, or delay his journey to Italy till he was assured
of the support of an Army. The young man wisely relied on his own
judgment; he was Cæsar’s heir and adopted son, but Cæsar could only
bequeath to him his private inheritance; it was not in his power to
transfer the reins of Government; the nature of the conspiracy against
Cæsar and its extent was still unknown; Antonius and other leading
Cæsarians had been spared, it was clear that no proscription of the
adherents of Cæsar had been contemplated, or, if contemplated, it had
been abandoned. If Octavian were marked out for slaughter, he was
already doomed; nothing could save him but the affection of Cæsar’s
veterans; they were all in Italy, and there was as yet no evidence
that they were prepared to transfer their allegiance to so distant
a relative of their late commander. To appear with an army would be
to invite attack, and Octavian knew his own limitations better than
anybody else; he knew that he was no general, and he had not as yet
a general in whom he could trust. By appearing in Italy simply as a
private person engaged in an ordinary matter of private business, the
formal succession to an inheritance, he disarmed prejudice. If Antonius
wished to put him out of the way, he could do so in any case. On the
other hand, by appearing simply as a defrauded heir, he might attract
popular sympathy; Cæsar’s will had already proved to be a political
force; and the Constitutional party might be glad of a counterpoise to
Antonius.
Such considerations may well have influenced Octavian in the adoption
of the important step which he took contrary to advice. It is even
possible that he contemplated nothing more than the assertion of his
undeniable right; and that the consequences of his daring step took him
by surprise. It is certain that he had no sooner landed at Brundisium
than he found himself a power; the soldiers flocked to meet him, and
his march to Rome was a triumphal progress.
The events of the next three years are difficult to disentangle; to
the actors they must have been perplexing in the extreme. The factor
which had been omitted from the calculations of all the leaders was the
character of the army, which Cæsar had created. As fast as Cæsar made
way in Gaul he enlisted the Gauls in his service; his legions were in
the end less Italian than Gallic; to the Gauls the abstraction called
the Roman Senate had no more significance than the House of Commons to
Sikhs and Gurkhas; they had not got beyond, or not fallen behind, the
conceptions of personal fidelity to a chieftain which are developed
by the clan system. Not only was it natural to them to transfer their
fidelity from the person of a father to that of his son and successor,
but such personal ties were their strongest political passion. They
would obey Antonius and even Lepidus as Cæsar’s friends and trusted
subordinates, but their affection for Cæsar’s heir was of a different
character; to avenge their dead commander, to put his son in his
rights, were to them matters of the first importance; as for the Roman
Constitution and theoretical Republics, they neither cared about them
nor understood them. At first Octavian did not grasp the situation;
his temperament was legal and formal; his first preoccupation was to
assert his legal rights against Antonius, and in order to do this
effectively, he had no objection to using such help as might be given
him by Cicero and the Constitutional party, who for their part proposed
to use against him Antonius and then put him out of the way. The
first serious operation in the field showed Octavian his mistake; the
Senate sent him with the Consuls to relieve Decimus Brutus, brother of
Marcus Brutus, who was being besieged by the Cæsarians under Antonius
at Mutina; both Consuls, old Cæsarians, were killed, and the soldiers
insisted on bringing Octavian back to Rome and making him Consul; it
was not long before they also insisted on a reconciliation between
the Cæsarian leaders, compelling Antonius, Lepidus, and Octavian to
work together and unite in the task of punishing the enemies of Cæsar.
The proscription was partly the work of the army; so far as it was a
punishment of the enemies of Cæsar, Octavian was an accomplice, though
an unwilling accomplice; Antonius and Lepidus both took advantage of
it to satisfy old grudges and make large confiscations. Meanwhile the
general disorganization invited any man who found himself in command of
troops, or was otherwise favourably circumstanced, to fish in troubled
waters; Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella, the dissolute little gentleman
who was “tied to a sword,” was not the only man who saw an opportunity
of doing something to his own advantage. Adventures of this kind
disturbed the world for a few months, but after Brutus and Cassius had
been beaten near Philippi a fairly definite division declared itself;
the world was again divided between Cæsarians and Pompeians, and the
chief Pompeian leader was Sextus Pompeius. Antonius had gone off to the
East to meet Cleopatra and his fate on the Cydnus. Lepidus, though in
command of an army and Governor of Africa, was a negligible quantity,
destined to suffer a very remarkable disillusionment as soon as he
ventured to assert himself in an independent position.
Few men have ever been so fortunate as Octavian in the mistakes of
their adversaries, and few have ever turned them to such good advantage.
East and West alike were taught to adore the memory of the great
Cæsar by the incompetence of the men who proposed to succeed to his
power; under his sway the commercial cities of Asia Minor had thriven;
Cassius plundered them in the name of the Senate, Dolabella on his
own responsibility, Antonius as the successor of Cæsar; Italy had no
sooner begun to look forward to relief from civil war on the departure
of Antonius than the Constitutional party allied itself with Lucius
Antonius and Fulvia, the brother and wife of Marcus Antonius, to impede
the settlement. Tiberius Nero was among those who joined the new
movement. Relieved of the presence of Antonius, who in spite of all
his faults was a general of ability, the Pompeians hoped to be able
to crush Octavian, who was no general; the proscription had left very
bitter feelings; Octavian had so far had no opportunity of indicating
his pacific inclinations; he had had to do what his soldiers required
of him; Antonius was obviously a self-indulgent adventurer, with
whose fortunes no self-respecting man could ally himself; Fulvia
was a virago, and Lucius Antonius no less greedy than his brother,
though less amiable; still it seemed that these latter with their
adherents embodied the Republican principle; and the remnants of the
Constitutional party joined them. Incompetent generalship allowed their
forces to be locked up in Perusia, and after a siege of three months
the soldiers of Octavian glutted their vengeance upon the enemies of
Cæsar; the terror that was inspired served its purpose in two ways:
there were no more conspiracies in Italy, and Octavian made up his mind
never again to be the slave of his own army.
Tiberius Nero either escaped from Perusia before the town was
completely invested, or had started on a special mission to Campania
with the object of creating a diversion in Southern Italy. He still
held the office of Prætor though his legal term had expired, and thus
invested his enterprise with a legal and constitutional aspect. The
territory of Capua had been confiscated by Rome after the second Punic
War, the penalty of the destructive friendship which that city had
conferred on Hannibal; the Senate of those days had appropriated the
land to its own purposes; the redivision of this land had been part
of the programme of the popular party from the days of the Gracchi,
and their heirs the Cæsarians now proposed to assign it to Octavian’s
veterans. Tiberius Nero took up the cause of the proprietors, who
were threatened with expropriation, thus adopting the old Senatorial
standpoint; he doubtless expected to find that the Campanians, to whom
the existing conditions, sanctioned as they were by the precedents of a
century and a half, caused no grievance, would flock to his standards;
but he met with languid support from the beginning, and the fall of
Perusia with the subsequent atrocities destroyed every prospect of
success; the Campanians preferred a peaceful spoliation to the chances
of war. Tiberius Nero was obliged to fly for his life; accompanied
by his wife, his eldest son barely two years of age, and only one
attendant, he made his way to Naples. Here a romantic incident took
place. C. Velleius Paterculus, the grandfather of the historian, had
been associated with Tiberius Nero in all his enterprises; he had been
his friend all his life; he had served under him as Chief Engineer at
Alexandria, and in his subsequent campaigns; it is not clear whether
he had been the sole companion of the flight from Campania, but in any
case he rejoined his friend at Naples; but Naples was no safe refuge;
Octavian was pressing southwards; it was necessary to cross to Sicily;
when it proved to be difficult to provide for the escape of the whole
party, the old man committed suicide rather than be an impediment to
his friend.
Tiberius Nero had suffered two disappointments: he had been
disappointed in Cæsar; he had been disappointed in the attempt to form
a constitutional party in opposition to Cæsar’s heir; a third and
severer disappointment awaited him in Sicily.
Of the two sons of Pompeius, the elder had been killed in Spain
at or after the battle of Munda; the younger, Sextus, had escaped,
and adopted the life of a corsair in the Mediterranean; during the
confusion which reigned in Italy after the death of Cæsar he had
escaped notice, and had been able to get together a formidable fleet of
pirates; he had seized Sicily, and now hoped to be able to secure the
restitution of his father’s property by imposing terms on Rome, for he
controlled the food supply of the capital. The proscription had sent
him many valuable allies, and the anti-Cæsarian party began to look to
him to take his father’s place as their leader. Sextus, however, was no
politician; he was a mere marauder; the corsairs whom his father had
dispersed reassembled from the bays and islands of the Mediterranean,
and joined in an organized system of brigandage; the subordinates
of Sextus were adventurers of the type which has been the perennial
curse of the inland sea, repeatedly stamped out, and ever ready to
reassert itself till the advent of steam power made such operations
too dangerous. It was not the policy of Sextus, but circumstances
beyond his control, which elevated him from being a leader of bandits
to the position of an umpire between parties in the threatened break
up of the Empire. Outlaws and broken men of all kinds gathered to his
headquarters, and the grave Senators of Rome found themselves strangely
out of place in this assemblage of cut-throats and their mistresses.
Tiberius Nero was among the last to arrive; he attempted to assume
the position of a Roman official, and to exact the respect due to
one before whom the prætorian fasces were carried. Sextus, however,
was by no means inclined to put himself under the orders of men of
respectability; still less so the Greek corsairs, who looked forward to
unlimited plunder under his flag.
When Octavian arrived in due course he temporized; his advisers saw
that for the time being nothing could be done; the Cæsarians had no
fleet; on the other hand, Sextus was glad to disembarrass himself
of the Roman notables; and the result was that the victims of the
proscription were pardoned and received into the Cæsarian ranks. This
was the first occasion on which Octavian was able to manifest his
moderation, and to begin his career of conquest by diplomacy. Sextus
was recognized, admitted to a share in the dismembered Empire; there
was no alternative; Rome was relieved from the danger of starvation,
and Octavian was left free to deal with the veterans and the
consolidation of Italy.
Tiberius Nero was not among those who accepted the amnesty; he again
fled, this time to Corinth, which was associated with his family by
ancient ties of patronage. He became a wanderer, a hunted man; romantic
adventures are assigned to the months of danger and hardship which
followed; he even sought the protection of Antonius; at length he
too made terms with Octavian and returned to Rome, where a further
disappointment awaited him; his young wife attracted the notice of
Octavian; she accepted his attentions, and shortly afterwards an
amicable divorce and re-marriage were arranged. Six months later Livia
bore a second son, who was sent to her first husband by Octavian,
and acknowledged by him as his own. The families lived on terms of
intimacy, and when Tiberius Nero died five years later, both his sons
passed under the care of their mother and Octavian, whose family now
consisted of his own daughter Julia by a previous wife, Scribonia, and
his two stepsons. Julia was a little over a year younger than Tiberius
the future Emperor.
So far there had been nothing discreditable in the life of Tiberius
Nero, and it was never attacked even by the bitterest enemies of his
son. He followed the fortunes of Cæsar, so did many men who saw in
Cæsar the only hope of a reformed constitution; he was frightened by
Cæsar’s root and branch reforms, so were many moderate men; he saw in
Cæsar the tyrant, and applauded the men who cut him down, so did Cicero
and many honourable men; in the confusion that ensued he steadily clung
to any power that seemed to make for the restoration of the Republic;
in this he may have been mistaken, but was not dishonourable; he
eventually made terms with the one party which promised a restoration
of order--no other policy was open to a wise and prudent man; he
surrendered his wife to the conqueror; at this point we withdraw our
approval; we think of Cæsar, who refused to put away his wife at the
bidding of Sulla, and our inclination is to see in the action of
Tiberius Nero contemptible weakness.
Apart, however, from the fact that marriages of convenience and
divorces of convenience were of frequent occurrence among the members
of the princely houses of Rome at this period, the personal conditions
in this case may have been such as to render the divorce in question
as little disgraceful to the injured husband as such an event can be.
There is nothing contrary to probability in assuming that Tiberius Nero
at the time of his marriage to Livia was an elderly, if not an old man;
his intimate friend Velleius Paterculus was certainly an old man when
he killed himself at Naples. The father of Livia had been a political
and possibly personal friend of Tiberius Nero; he fought on the
losing side at the battle of Philippi, and was among those who killed
themselves after their cause seemed to be irreparably lost; immediately
afterwards Tiberius Nero married Livia, who, if she was eighty-six
at the time of her death in A.D. 29, can have been little more than
fourteen at the time of her first marriage. According to Paterculus
the historian, the Emperor Tiberius was less than two years old when
his parents fled to Naples after the fall of Perusia in B.C. 40; this
places the marriage somewhere in 43 B.C., or at the latest very early
in 42 B.C. We have no mention of brothers or other relatives of Livia
in her later life; it would seem that her father’s death left her alone
and friendless; it is a possible conjecture that Tiberius Nero married
the daughter of an old friend, partly in order to save her life and
fortune. The disparity of age must have been great in any case, and
Livia must have accepted the marriage as the only way out of a position
of great peril. It is in accordance with all that we know of Livia
that she should have conducted herself with the strictest propriety
as a Roman matron, though the youthful wife of an elderly or aged
husband; and it is more than probable that he became strongly attached
to her, even though her feeling towards him was dutiful rather than
affectionate. When she met Octavian, she met a man but little older
than herself, who fell passionately in love with her; of their mutual
attachment there can be no doubt; it lasted through the whole of their
life together, and on his deathbed Augustus bade her never to forget
their union. Under these circumstances what was the best thing that
Tiberius Nero could do to secure the happiness of the child whom he
had taken to his home, and who now wished to leave him? By the custom
of his time and race no disgrace attached to a divorce in itself; the
Romans had no conception of a holy estate of matrimony indissoluble
except under scandalous circumstances; it was better that Livia should
be transferred peaceably to the man of her choice than that her
good name should suffer. Tiberius Nero accepted the inevitable, not
necessarily because Octavian could have compelled, but because Livia
had given to her young lover the affections which she had never been
able to give to her elderly protector.
Tiberius Nero died in B.C. 33; his eldest son was then only nine
years old, but had already been sufficiently well trained to be able
to recite the customary oration as chief mourner at his father’s
funeral; both he and his brother are said to have been exceptionally
well educated. We may imagine the solitary father with his strong
love of learning, the victim of so many disappointments, finding some
alleviation to his sorrows in bringing up his boys in the strictest
traditions of an old Roman house.
III
Octavian
To the student of even the clearest narrative of the events which
followed the assassination of Cæsar, the impression conveyed is one of
absolute chaos; officials are appointed and removed, decrees passed
and rescinded, provinces assigned and redistributed, leaders combine
and separate only to combine again; it is difficult to distinguish
any guiding principle, any organized force, by which order might be
restored. War and spoliation seem to be universal and continuous, and
the direction of the march of events to be subject to the caprices
of a licentious soldiery, led by rapacious adventurers, who can keep
hold of their troops only by extravagant largess and promises of
plunder. Licensed brigandage rules the world. And yet this turmoil was
immediately succeeded, and in part accompanied by such prosperity as
the civilized world had not yet known; trade flourished in spite of
piracy, great public improvements were designed and completed, young
men went to universities, travellers passed from one end of the Empire
to the other.
The exact date of the journey which Horace took from Rome to Brundisium
in attendance upon Mæcenas is still a subject of dispute among
scholars, but it certainly cannot be placed later than the battle of
Actium, and is generally assigned to a time before Sextus Pompeius had
been driven from Sicily; neither Italy nor the world were at peace,
and Italy had recently been the scene of civil war. There is, however,
nothing in the description of this journey to suggest a ruined or
disordered country; before Horace caught up the suite of his patron he
travelled by the ordinary conveyances along the road or the canal to
the South; the misadventures of his journey are only such as happen to
travellers in a well ordered country in times of the profoundest peace.
The ordinary routine of life can have been but little disturbed by the
marchings and counter-marchings of armies; and the habits of order must
have been too firmly established to be much shaken by the apparent
anarchy at the capital.
In one respect the accounts of these times are necessarily misleading;
as our information comes from Rome and Rome alone, we forget the
enormous area over which the transactions took place. We should not
to-day be surprised to find France prosperous when war was raging in
Italy; we should not expect Spain to be affected by occurrences in the
Balkan Peninsula, or Egypt to be ruined by marauders in Asia Minor;
and we can even imagine a war in Lombardy which would leave Calabria
undisturbed. Roman history gives us all the military operations of all
the countries in Europe South of the Alps and West of the Rhine, and of
all the East that is washed by the Mediterranean, as the history of one
state, and we forget that large though the armies were which disputed
the Empire of the world, they fought over a very large area, and that
the greater part of the Empire was only for short periods or indirectly
affected. Even inside Italy the fighting was carried on at a distance
from the capital; the scenes of actual war were Lombardy or Northern
Tuscany or again the coast opposite Sicily; the marching of the troops
along the great roads did not disturb the country between the scenes of
operations. In all periods of social disturbance the attention is drawn
so exclusively to the sensational events, that the continuance of the
ordinary routine alongside of the confusion escapes notice. A community
which has long been settled parts unwillingly with its fixed habits; it
is only very long periods of war that leave their mark permanently on a
country. Perpetual disorder and perpetual invasions prevent progress,
but even such violent outbreaks of disorder as the early years of the
French Revolution may be followed by a speedy recovery.
Julius Cæsar did not hold absolute power for more than four years;
during those years he had time to remove obstructions, but not to
build; his death did not involve a general collapse of the Government;
the permanent officials continued in their places, the ordinary routine
of public and private business remained much as before. The real danger
which threatened society was the domination of the army under the
command of a licentious adventurer such as Antonius, or the breaking up
of the Empire and its distribution among similar leaders. That this
did not happen is due chiefly to the personal qualities of one man, and
that man a youth, who at the present day would be just leaving school
to begin his career at the University.
It is possible to overrate as well as to underrate Octavian, to ascribe
to him much that he could not possibly have done, as well as to refuse
to him the credit due for what he actually performed.
In contrast with the achievements of his adoptive father, Octavian
stands out in history as the great civilian; he hardly ever fought a
successful battle; even his personal courage was suspected, but he
succeeded where a long line of predecessors had failed and his success
was in part due to the fact that he was not a soldier; he was never
tempted to conquer for the sake of conquest, or to enter on campaigns
in order that he might win glory; he was entirely free from the
weaknesses of a Napoleon.
The precocity of the young Romans of the great families continually
astonishes us, but Octavian would indeed be a marvel if, alone and
unaided, he had placed himself among the four competitors for universal
dominion at the age of twenty. Had he really been the son of Cæsar,
and not a comparatively distant relative, had Cæsar himself been a
constitutional monarch, and the monarchy an institution sanctioned by
long precedent, his succession would not have surprised us; dynasties
are upheld in spite of the youth or feebleness of the successor to the
dynasty; but in this case there was no recognized dynasty, no prejudice
outside the army in favour of the dynast, and the heir could not expect
to inherit anything from his predecessor except his private property.
This was his own view of his own position; he claimed no more.
Octavian was probably no less surprised than the Liberators or Cicero
by his own popularity; the depth of the affection and admiration
inspired by the great Cæsar was not at once comprehended by his
contemporaries; they did not realize that he had become a myth in
his lifetime, and on his death a god; the strength of the sentiments
which he had evoked escaped the notice of the constructors of Utopian
Republics and devotees of the rule of the Sacred Senate. Here was a new
cult, and even a new incarnation of divinity. So little did Octavian
understand the real foundations of his popularity that on his first
arrival in Italy he made overtures to Cicero and the Constitutional
party, to the men who approved of his adoptive father’s murder; so
little did they understand the hold which he had upon the affection
of the soldiers that they prepared to use him for their own purposes
and then throw him over; they wanted a piece to play against Antonius,
Octavian wanted power to force Antonius to disgorge his inheritance.
His first important step was a masterly one. Upon Cæsar’s heir devolved
the duty of paying Cæsar’s bequests to the Roman people, and expending
money upon the great shows in honour of the dead hero. Antonius refused
to surrender the treasures which he had seized. Octavian, whose natural
father had been a very rich man, sold all his private property, sold
all Cæsar’s property that had escaped Antonius, persuaded two of his
relatives to forego their own share of the inheritance, and fulfilled
the obligations imposed by the will. The contrast between him and
Antonius was thus emphasized; Antonius had seized, confiscated,
squandered upon his personal pleasures; Octavian gave, and paid for
the pleasures of the people. It was this characteristic of Octavian,
his indifference to personal display and personal luxury, that was
one source of his strength throughout life; nobody could be more
magnificent or spend more lavishly when such a course was required by
the public interest, but in his personal expenditure he was rigidly
economical. No Roman or provincial ever felt that his property was held
in jeopardy, because Octavian needed money for his private pleasures.
The ruler himself set the example of that moderation in expenditure
which Horace so repeatedly commends to his contemporaries.
The moderation of Octavian recommended him to the financiers, and he at
once found a valuable friend in the person of C. Cilnius Mæcenas. The
Roman historians, in accordance with their invariable custom, ignore
this great permanent official; they have no eyes for any man who has
not held the great magistracies of the Republic, and the share of
Mæcenas in building up the power of Octavian occupies but a small place
in their writings; it is in fact only as a patron of literary men that
Mæcenas is widely known, and the superficial observer might be tempted
to infer that Mæcenas was a private friend of Octavian, whose influence
was due solely to the Emperor’s favour. We know when Mæcenas died,
but we do not know when he was born; his death occurred twenty-two
years before that of Octavian, and as there is no indication that the
event was considered premature, we are justified in assuming that he
was so much older than Octavian as to have had considerable experience
of affairs, and a sufficiently recognized position, when the younger
man was seen to be a possible successor to the great Cæsar. Mæcenas
was a prominent member of the Equestrian Order, of the body which had
been supported in its struggles for recognition against the Senate by
the Marian party, and by Cæsar himself; its interests coincided with
those of the whole body of permanent salaried officials, who owed their
appointments to Cæsar; the collection of the revenue of the Empire was
in its hands; of the candidates for power, the one who secured the
confidence of the Equestrians was the most likely to be successful. We
do not know what had been the previous connexion between Octavian and
Mæcenas, but we do no violence to probability by assuming that Mæcenas
was known to Cæsar, and had enjoyed a measure of his confidence, that
he belonged to the inner circle of financiers whom Cæsar must have
repeatedly consulted, and that he had frequent opportunities for
forming an opinion as to the capacity of the young Octavian.
In any case, and however the connexion was brought about, the man who
formed the alliance between Octavian and Mæcenas acted more wisely
than Octavian had acted when he placed himself at the feet of Cicero.
By himself Octavian might have appeared to be a risky speculation to
the orderly men who were gradually attracted to his party; backed by
the great financier he was safe; the clients of Cæsar in all parts of
the Empire were provided with a guarantee which encouraged them to
transfer to the nephew the allegiance which they had previously given
to the uncle. Octavian’s merit lies in the fact that he was able to
use the wisdom of this cautious adviser and submit to his diplomacy;
his head was not turned by the popular declarations in his favour. He
is frequently reproached with a lack of initiative, with a cynical
indifference to the higher morality, with a cool calculation of his own
interests, and of his own interests to the exclusion of all others;
but to judge thus is to fall into the common error of condemning a
man on his success; there is a natural tendency to ascribe to every
man who eventually succeeds a deliberate intention of success from
the commencement, and the careful working out of a preconceived plan.
Royalists after the Restoration in England could only see in Cromwell
a crafty plotter, who had proposed to himself the usurpation of the
throne. It is assumed that the power of the men who rise to great
positions was at the beginning the same that it was at the end, and
that in the first stages of their career they could have refused to do
things of which they disapproved.
When Octavian made overtures to Cicero and called him his “father,”
he was in earnest, and acted according to his own inclinations, but
he took a false step from which he was forced to recede; he quickly
learned that he commanded sympathy as the avenger of his father’s
murderer, that on those terms he was the darling of the fierce
legionaries; he also learned that the Constitutional Party, to whom
his temperament inclined him, regarded him as a necessary evil, and
that his “father” proposed to use him and then remove him; after the
publication of the Second Philippic, in which Cæsar was denounced no
less savagely than Antonius, Octavian could no longer keep on terms of
friendship with Cicero; he would have been treated as a renegade by his
own soldiers; he had not even the alternative of retiring into private
life; he was too dangerous to both parties alike; had he rejected the
devotion of the legions, the daggers of the Constitutionalists or of
the emissaries of Antonius would have struck him down; nominally a
leader, he was really a hunted beast. The soldiers forced him into
alliance with Antonius, the soldiers forced him to marry the daughter
of the tigress Fulvia, the combination of ferocity drove him to his
share in the proscription. To Antonius the proscription was a means
of filling his ever leaky purse; to Fulvia, the sister of Clodius,
it was a vengeance, she had an old score to settle with Cicero, to
the soldiers it was the merited punishment of the murderers of Cæsar;
Octavian could not hold back; he, however, did the best thing that was
permitted by the circumstances, as soon as Antonius departed for the
East he let the pursuit of the proscribed lapse; he broke with Fulvia
and sent back her daughter; he proved singularly placable to those who
wished to make terms with him.
At this period Octavian can hardly have designed the universal
dominion to which he afterwards succeeded; it was enough to enjoy
comparative security in Italy, and to be recognized as the chief agent
in restoring safety to the peninsula; none of his military operations
were aggressive, and he preferred diplomacy to war; he was content
to let Antonius carry off the richest part of the Empire; he was
content to make terms with Sextus Pompeius, and allow him to take his
share of the provinces, provided the commercial interests of Rome
were respected, and the corn ships allowed to find their way into the
harbour. He required time to deal with the most difficult of tasks, the
reabsorption of Cæsar’s veterans in the civilian population; in order
that Octavian might be personally safe, it was necessary gradually to
break up the army which had dictated to him, and replace it by one of
which he would be master.
This operation must have required consummate skill and coolness; the
financial problem alone must have been serious; it was, however,
rendered much easier by the departure of Antonius to the East; to the
Roman soldiers, as to ourselves for many centuries, the East was the
El Dorado, and service or even settlement in Italy presented small
attractions to the legionary compared with service on the Euphrates;
the gold which had tempted Crassus still glittered in the imagination
of the centurions. Octavian and his advisers were glad to see the more
restless spirits stream after Antonius, it lightened their burden.
Meanwhile Octavian had the good fortune to find a War Minister of rare
genius and unexampled personal devotion; if the career of Octavian is
marvellous, that of his friend Agrippa is no less so; the two men
were of the same age; they were fellow students at Apollonia when the
death of Cæsar summoned Octavian to Rome; they had already laid the
foundations of a friendship which is among the most noteworthy in
history.
Agrippa as a military genius has received scant consideration; but the
man must have been a genius, who at the age of twenty-seven made a
navy for Rome and re-organized an army, and who further contrived to
place that army on a footing, which restored it to its proper position
of subordination to the civil administration. All Agrippa’s projects
bear witness to the mind of a daring planner and a consummate master
of detail. It was necessary to build and train a fleet in the face
of the opposition of Sextus Pompeius, who held the command of the
sea; Agrippa at once bethought himself of an inland lake in which his
ships could be built and then manœuvred; when the work of preparation
was complete he cut a channel into the Mediterranean, and sailed out
to attack and defeat his enemy. In preparation for the subsequent
operations against Antonius at Actium, he was not misled by the example
of the naval experts of the day; he saw that rapidity of manœuvring
was more important in a man-of-war than size and weight, and instead
of competing with the ship builders of Alexandria, constructed a large
number of light galleys, and manned them with skilled crews.
The one great building for which Agrippa was responsible survives to
our time, and still testifies to the originality of his genius; the
dome of the Pantheon is remarkable even now; in its own day it was
unexampled.
Agrippa was even greater in his moral qualities, in the self-restraint,
or perhaps absence of a morbid ambition, which forbade him to become a
rival to the man whose superiority he had elected to recognize. In the
later days of the Republic a man could hardly become a great general
without threatening the balance of the constitution; the death of
Cæsar brought into prominence ambitious soldiers; it seemed that it
was enough to be a successful leader of troops in order to enter upon
the enjoyment of all things that ambitious men most covet; but to this
kind of ambition Agrippa was superior; if he had a conscious ambition
over and above the satisfaction of doing his work well, it was to make
Octavian.
His example was most valuable to the fortunes of the Empire; his
character impressed itself upon the young men at a later time, upon
the youthful Tiberius his son-in-law among others. Henceforth the old
loyalty to the Republic which restored victorious consuls to their
proper place in civil life, when their wars were finished, was replaced
by the loyalty of the army to a possibly civilian Imperator, whose
military work was delegated to subordinate commanders; it was possible
for a man to command an army without feeling that he lost dignity by
submitting to the control of the head of the State.
If Octavian is to be admired for learning in a few years the trade of a
statesman, Agrippa is no less to be admired for the celerity with which
he acquired the detailed knowledge of a naval and military commander;
both young men started with a rare power of submitting themselves
to the guidance of men of experience; the eventual result was a
combination of administrative ability, which was able to use other men
without impairing its own supremacy.
After Sextus Pompeius had disappeared, and Lepidus had found himself in
the unenviable position of a general without an army, and a provincial
governor without a province, the delimitation of authority which
followed may well have seemed to the sharers in power to be final.
Octavian took what was practically in later days the Western Empire,
Antonius the Eastern. The marriage of Octavian’s sister with Antonius
was held to render hostilities between them impossible; and there are
few modern potentates who would not be content with the share which
fell to Octavian; to be supreme ruler of France, Spain, Italy, the
large islands of the Mediterranean, and the Western portion of the
North Coast of Africa, would have satisfied Francis I. or Charles V.
Nor were the Spain and Gaul of those days relatively in such a state of
barbarism that the ruler of Italy could think of them as semi-savage
frontier colonies. Parts of Spain were still imperfectly civilized, but
the relation which they bore to the more settled regions was little
different from that held by the Celtic fringes of our own islands till
comparatively late in our history. Gaul was more united than the France
of Louis XI., and no more subject to internal disturbances. Gaul, in
fact, began almost from the time of Cæsar’s conquests to advance to
a dominant position in the Empire; she supplied soldiers, statesmen,
and rhetoricians to Italy; the balance of power gradually inclined
to the country, which had not been exhausted by successive wars, and
whose population was relatively homogeneous; the time was to come when
the Emperors would be Gallic rather than Italian. The Gauls quickly
assimilated Roman culture and Roman discipline; two of the greatest
writers of the Augustan age, Virgil and Livy, one of an earlier date,
Catullus, were natives of Cis-Alpine Gaul, if not Celtic in their
nationality; Cornelius Gallus, a Transalpine Gaul, was not only
estimated at a high value among the poets of his day, but was the first
Viceroy appointed to Egypt by Octavian. In fact, though it may have
appeared to the men of the day that Antonius had taken to himself the
best share of the Empire, and left Octavian a valueless appanage, the
sequel proved that the latter had the best of the bargain; the central
part of his dominions was the longest organized and the best organized,
while the outlying territories had no time-honoured reputation to set
against the extension of Roman civilization; they had everything to
gain by closer incorporation with the Empire; they even accepted its
language, whereas the Eastern Empire never ceased to be Greek.
The personal qualities of Antonius brought about the union of the
Empire; so long as he served under the direction of the great Cæsar he
passed for a politician and administrator, no less than for a dashing
general; deprived of his great model, he quickly showed himself to be
nothing but a greedy soldier. The East learned by successive bitter
experiences what it lost in Cæsar; first came little Dolabella to harry
Syria, then Cassius and even Brutus extorted all that they could lay
their hands on in the rich cities of the Levant and Asia Minor; then
came Antonius with further fines and confiscations; there was a general
sense of relief when Cleopatra carried him off to Alexandria, only
however to prompt him to fresh extortions.
The alliance of Antony and Cleopatra was the salvation of the Roman
Empire; it frightened the West into union, and its failure brought
about the final submission of the East. This was no mere question of
rivalry between two eminent Roman statesmen; it was a turning point in
civilization; the issue was once again whether the Mediterranean was to
be governed on Oriental or Western lines. The halo of not particularly
edifying romance which shines round the figure of Cleopatra averts the
attention from the statesman-like qualities which she really possessed;
her residence in Rome in the capacity of Cæsar’s mistress was not a
glorious episode in the career of the Egyptian Queen, but it taught
her, as a similar experience had taught Juba, the weakness of Rome from
an Oriental point of view. Cleopatra saw that Rome wanted a despot;
on the death of her admirer she went back to Egypt to wait on events;
when Antonius appeared in the East, she proposed to annex Italy through
Antonius, as Cæsar had through herself annexed Egypt; but, like many
others, she had misjudged the man; Antonius was no Cæsar; and though
Cleopatra could form magnificent schemes of ambition, she lacked the
self-control necessary to carry them out; unfortunately for herself,
in the attempt to annex Antonius she fell violently in love with him,
and statesmanship became a secondary consideration; she could not
deny herself the companionship of her lover; he, too, more than once
forgot all the duties of a soldier in his impatience to return to
her arms. Their plans for extended conquests in the East were foiled
by their maladministration; and even a temporary success proved in
its results worse than a series of defeats; for Antonius celebrated
his victory over the Parthians by parodying at Alexandria the solemn
ritual of a triumph at Rome. This event, more even than a fleeting
descent of Antonius at a previous date upon the coast of Iapygia in
conjunction with Sextus Pompeius, consolidated the power of Octavian;
he became no longer the leader of a party, but the representative
of Latin civilization. Nor is it contrary to probability that the
luxurious excesses of the Court at Alexandria, at Smyrna, at Samos,
frightened the Greek cities, and that frequent emissaries gave Octavian
good reason for supposing that the Greek cities were ready to throw
themselves into his hands; Cæsar had never acted in the spirit of a
Greek tyrant, but the type was abundantly manifested in Antonius.
Octavian waited till he was ready; he then produced a document, the
will of Antonius, which clearly informed the Roman people of the
destiny prepared for them, and when the right moment came, allowed a
dispute about his claims over certain cities to end in a declaration of
war.
The battle of Actium was the result, and the victory was followed
by what was practically a triumphant progress of Octavian round
the Mediterranean; the Roman Empire was one again, the unity of
civilization was complete. Henceforth the wars of the Empire were
conducted on its frontiers, and though they occasionally resulted in
an extension of territory, their primary object was self-defence, the
maintenance of the ring fence of the “civilized world.” The short
war of the Succession, which followed on the death of Nero, hardly
disturbed the peace of Gaul and Italy.
The extraordinary success of the man, who at the age of two and
thirty was recognized as the supreme arbiter of the civilized world,
tempts us, as it tempted his contemporaries, to look for qualities
in him beyond the reach of an ordinary man; some who have looked for
these qualities and failed to discover them have gone in the opposite
direction, and speak of him with scant respect.
Whether Octavian or any other man who has occupied a similar position
was a person whose example could be safely recommended to our children,
is a less interesting question than that relation between his personal
qualities and the needs of the time, which placed him at the head of
affairs. The Senate of Rome had failed to produce a great civilian, and
a great civilian was precisely what was needed by Greater Rome. The men
who, from the time that the problem of the administration of the Empire
had begun to make itself felt, had held the chief power successively,
were soldiers in the first place, and only in the second, if at
all, civil administrators: Marius, Sulla, Pompeius, Cæsar himself
imposed their will upon Rome, because they had the legions behind
them; relying upon the force of organized armies, they were tempted
to overlook all the other forces by which society is held together.
An army is so convincing, so obvious, that men who can organize an
army may well be excused in their blindness to the existence of any
other power. Cæsar was the most enlightened of generals, and had a
clearer appreciation of civilian problems than his predecessors, but
even Cæsar relied ultimately upon the appeal to force; holding, as he
believed, the strongest weapon in his hands, he prepared to change and
reconstruct society as appeared most reasonable to his clear scientific
intelligence; confident in the integrity of his purposes, he believed
that he had only to demonstrate his common sense and benevolence in
order to secure adhesion to all his reforms; he did not weigh public
opinion; he did not study the currents of prepossession and conviction;
wishing well to all men, he never waited to consider whether his
actions might wound the self-esteem of any man; he chose his
subordinates without inquiry into their private opinions; it was enough
for him to have ascertained that they possessed the qualities essential
in his opinion to good administration. In one sense the clemency of
Cæsar was never tested; had he lived another ten years, and been forced
to realize the nature of the opposition which was excited by his
reforms, he, like Cromwell, might have been forced to supersede the
civil organization by a purely military organization; like Napoleon,
he might have been compelled to protect his person and his Government
by an army of spies, and meet plots by counterplots; but the opposition
declared itself only to be final; the first intimation of its existence
to Cæsar was his own death. Had Octavian needed so striking a lesson,
he would have learned from this event that civil power resting on
military predominance is no more secure than civil power conferred by
a popular vote; but he did not need the lesson; his whole temperament
was civilian, and the successive humiliations through which the army
led him strengthened his dislike to the army; for the army forced him
to the alliance with Antonius, in whom he rightly saw his private
enemy; the army forced him to marry the daughter of Fulvia the tigress;
the army forced the proscription upon him; the army compelled him to
deeds of savage cruelty at Perusia; the army forced him to hand over
his sister to the embraces of Antonius; he felt that he could not be a
free agent so long as the army was the dominant factor in politics. His
ideal was not the magnificent stride of the conqueror from continent
to continent. Other young men, finding several thousand veterans ready
to follow them, might have been tempted to a career of conquest; not
so Octavian; circumstances compelled him to temporize with the army,
and to use the army, but he naturally preferred the city to the camp,
and the Forum to the field. Year by year, and even month by month, he
advanced in the favour of the capitalists and constitutionalists, who
dreaded nothing so much as a perpetual cock fight of generals. All
over the Empire a new ideal had been steadily growing, the conception
of war as a permanent condition of society had been replaced by the
conception of peace. In the East for two centuries the internecine wars
between city States had disappeared; the Macedonian Empire, though
broken up and divided, had established permanent umpires; society
was united over larger areas; in the West, after the elimination of
the discordant Phœnician factor, Rome had held the same position of
supreme umpire; great cities had grown up: Smyrna, Ephesus, Antioch,
Alexandria in the East, Rome in the West, for whose populations the
orderly progress of commerce was a necessity of life; war had ceased
to be the only or the most profitable investment; other than military
careers were attractive to the ambitious. Octavian presented the
combination of qualities which the world wanted; he could command
the allegiance of armies without being intoxicated by the possession
of that form of power; he respected the civilian, and had the power
to protect him. But Octavian did not carry his dislike of military
domination to the point of extravagance; he was no intemperate advocate
of peace principles; he did not make the mistake of allowing his army
to become inefficient; he knew that a well ordered army was a necessary
instrument of sound civil Government; he knew that unless the chief
of the State demonstrably enjoyed the support of an efficient army
his reign would be short; but he took care that no successful officer
should be tempted to play the part of an Antonius, or dream that it
was in his power to become a second Cæsar. He had the good fortune to
find first in his friend Agrippa, and subsequently in his two stepsons
Tiberius and Drusus, able generals, who abstained from interfering with
the civil administration. Not the least of the remarkable powers of
Octavian was his power of commanding willing service from equals and
even from superiors, and his recognition of the men who would be useful
to him. As the heir of his father and great-uncle, he inherited not
only money but connexions; his father had been an Equestrian, who was
cut off in the first stages of a more enterprising political career;
he had been Governor of Macedonia; the extent of the connexions of
Cæsar needs no demonstration. The head of a great Roman House was in a
sense the head of a permanent corporation; he could alienate or retain
those individuals, families or cities, both with within and outside of
the technical limits of the Empire, who had been used to conduct their
private or public business through the agency of his House. The use to
which he turned an hereditary advantage of this kind depended on his
personal qualities; Octavian had the qualities which breed confidence;
self-controlled, industrious, courteous, faithful to obligations even
where they were not self-imposed, he quickly showed the adherents of
the House that there was no breach in the continuity of the Cæsarian
succession. Antonius had similar advantages, but he dissipated or
squandered them; men learned that his favour was to be won, or its
continuance to be secured by gross flattery, and subservience to his
caprices; he demanded derogatory services; the Consular Plancus thought
to secure his favour at Alexandria by flopping about at a masquerade
in the unwieldy and farcical dress of a marine deity; such an act would
have disgusted Octavian; it would have shocked him to see a man of rank
doing anything inconsistent with his dignity. A natural instinct for
what is dignified is a valuable attribute in a ruler, and a punctilious
insistence on ceremonial observances is better than an absence of
etiquette; but mere ceremony is apt to degenerate into observances
which injure the self esteem of those concerned, and to substitute
exaggerated forms of respect for the reality. Octavian grasped the true
meaning of dignified behaviour; it was not the person of the ruler but
the business in hand which was respected; frivolity was not an insult
to his person, but to the work in which he was engaged.
Men who were in earnest about anything found that they were in sympathy
with Octavian; he could relax, and be charming in his relaxation, but
with him, as with all great rulers, the line was rigidly drawn between
business and amusement. He could even pardon a refusal to comply with
his request for a personal favour; he invited Horace to leave the
service of Mæcenas and become his private secretary; the poet refused,
but did not in consequence lose the esteem of the Emperor.
Naturally attracted by what was dignified, Octavian was keenly alive
to the prestige of the Senate; Cæsar had found in that body an active
impediment to necessary reforms; he broke down the barriers of sanctity
by which it was surrounded; he treated it with no more respect than
Claudius Pulcher had shown to the sacred chickens; he destroyed its
organization and overrode its decrees; he admitted aliens to its
honours. Antonius was equally reckless in his contempt of Senatorial
prerogatives; but the men of rank and position who successively made
terms with Octavian found that they were treated with respect, that
there was nothing derogatory in working with him; and while a bitter
experience had taught them that there was no other alternative, the
pain of submission was alleviated by the personal consideration shown
to men who had suffered shipwreck. Octavian was the mediator between
the new and the old; his practical sagacity inclined him to make the
best of the new; his personal sympathies equally inclined him to deal
tenderly with the old. Good counsellors, hereditary connexions, the
affection of the veterans, would not have put Octavian permanently
at the head of affairs, had he not possessed those qualities which
enabled him to make the best of these advantages. He had not the dash,
the brilliance, the consummate intellectual ability of his uncle; he
could not have done his uncle’s work; but when that work had once
been done, he was supremely fitted to rebuild on the new foundations;
because he was in many respects inferior to his uncle, he was more
truly representative of his time; he was no prodigy; he did not thunder
and lighten and turn the universe upside down; he made the best of the
world as he found it, and that best was so very good that his work
lasted.
IV
Augustus
In the year 27 B.C., four years after the battle of Actium, the power
of Octavian was so firmly established, his services to the civilized
world were so obviously unique, that there was a general desire to
express by some honourable addition to his title a recognition of those
services. After much discussion the Senate fixed upon the adjective
“Augustus” as the only epithet which would adequately define the
position in which Octavian stood in relation to Rome and the Empire.
This epithet is deeply significant; the modern habit of using it as a
name has destroyed its significance; even in antiquity the necessity of
distinguishing between the different members of the Cæsarian dynasty
led to its occasional use by historians in place of the name of Cæsar,
but the ancients never lost sight of its meaning, as the modern is apt
to do; they were as conscious of using a title for a name when they
spoke of Augustus, as we are when we use the phrases “His Majesty” or
“His Highness,” in speaking of royal personages.
Various alternatives had been suggested, and been rejected either
as deficient in dignity, as having been used before, or as being
applicable to Rome alone and not to the whole Empire; the man who hit
upon the word which satisfied public opinion, both in Rome and the
provinces, was, strangely enough, no other than that Plancus, whose
undignified floppings had amused Cleopatra and the Eunuchs of her
Court. The etymology of the word may be held to be still uncertain, but
the associations which it suggested to the ancients are indisputable;
it was used of things or places, and especially the latter, marked out
by the gods as the abodes of divinity or particularly connected with
their service; the association of ideas was somewhat similar to that
implied in our own use of the word “consecrated”; but a place which
was “augustus” was rather more than “consecrated”; it was not merely
devoted to the service of the deities, but the gods themselves had
signified their will that it should be so; its transference to a man
was a declaration that the gods had selected him as their instrument;
it did not ascribe divinity to the man, but it asserted that the man
was entitled to the respect due to one who was specially under the
protection of the gods; he was not a god, but the divine will was
manifested in him. The distinction, though clear, is too subtle for the
ordinary human intelligence, and the use of the epithet and its Greek
equivalent rapidly led to an actual worship of the man, which, though
discountenanced in Italy, was permitted, and eventually encouraged
in the provinces. Such a thing appears to us impossible; we are even
shocked at its impiety; for us there has been one Incarnation, and one
only; we can more readily transfer ourselves to the mental condition of
those who made their gods in the likeness of men than of those who in
men saw gods. While some of us do not shrink from the irreverence of
attributing to tables and chairs and hats and bits of deal supernatural
powers, and from believing them to be channels of communication between
ourselves and the spiritual world, we shrink from declaring, what
surely should be simpler and more reverent, that certain human beings
have been elected by the Deity to declare His will to men, that to
treat them with insufficient respect is to rebel against the divine
will, and that to worship them is to worship the Deity who is pleased
to permit a portion of His Divine essence to reside in them. So far
have we travelled from the conception of godship prevalent among the
ancients, and even among our subjects in India at the present day, that
it is hardly possible to present the views of the contemporaries of
Augustus without using language suspected of irreverence. That danger,
however, must be faced, if we would understand one of the forces which
helped to bind the Roman Empire together, for though the idea of
assigning Divine honours to a man is repugnant to us, to the ancients
it was natural.
At all times and in all countries it is difficult to define the
current convictions of human beings as to non-human or supra-human
agencies; we always find a minority who reflect and study and discuss,
a majority who tremble; if we pay attention only to the enlightened
men of any particular period, we find a certain resemblance in their
speculations, a similar tendency to distinguish between superstition
and religion, a disinclination to ascribe to the divine agencies
vulgar and petty interference with human concerns; on the other hand,
if we fix our attention upon the voiceless multitude, we find no
distinction between religion and superstition, and a strong inclination
to see even in trivial occurrences an intervention of the divinity. We
cannot gather from Plato or Cicero the religious faith of the majority
of the active men of their day; still less can we infer it from the
mythologies of the poets. Polytheism had no dogmatic faith; it did
not ask a man to state what he believed; it took note of what he did.
Deference to accepted forms of worship was expected; men paid a mutual
respect to one another’s observances; all methods of conciliating the
favour of the gods were good; the dangerous man was the man of no
observances; there was no knowing what wrath he might bring down upon
the community. Many of the ancients developed eclectic tendencies in
the matter of religion; the temper of Herodotus was a common one among
the enlightened, and the inclination to see points of resemblance in
various cults rather than to emphasize differences. Germanicus was
travelling from shrine to shrine in the East when he caught the fever
which killed him; Apuleius at a later date travelled widely with a view
to being initiated into the different mysteries. The conception that
there was One God and One God only who ought to be worshipped, and that
acts of adoration to other divinities, or powers in which divinity was
recognized, constituted an act of treason to Him, was an impossible
conception to the ancients; in spite of the unitarian tendencies,
which we may detect even in Hesiod, and which became increasingly
prevalent among the speculative philosophers, a deity was local rather
than universal; it would have been dangerous to attempt to substitute
the worship of Pallas Athene at Ephesus for that of Artemis, to remove
Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome and put Melkarth in his place; but no
Ephesian thought the Athenian wrong in worshipping Pallas, no Roman saw
a dangerous heresy in the cult of Melkarth at Tyre or Carthage.
The association between religion and morality was only slowly
established; the god was not better than the man; he was stronger than
the man; thus mere power unaccompanied by moral excellence had a divine
character even in a man. To us the Incarnate God is necessarily the
perfection of moral excellence; to the ancients the manifestation of
power was in itself an indication of the divine favour; and similarly
in the case of his worshippers, provided the priest did not infringe
the regulations of the prescribed ritual in preparing for or conducting
an act of worship; his moral character was a matter of indifference;
he might bring down the divine wrath upon the community by paring his
nails at the wrong time, just as much as by the infringement of social
obligations, or by personal debauchery; ritual and not morality was the
province of religion.
In the didactic work of Hesiod, the Farm and the Calendar, which was
used by the Greeks much as we use a catechism, minute and trivial
points of cleanliness and decency rank with perjury and violence;
to neglect the former, to commit the latter, alike involved the
displeasure of the immortals. The Italians were enslaved by minute
ritual even more than the Greeks; they were more superstitious; the
worship of the Lares and of the ancestors, the faith in fortune,
the dread of the unlucky, survived among cultivated Italians to a
late period. Italy is still profoundly superstitious; men who have
shaken off the authority of the Church still dread the evil eye, and
witchcraft of a peculiar kind is still firmly believed in by the
peasants of central Italy; the strega is still a power in the villages
of the Bolognese.
The ancients had nothing to set against the ascription of Divine powers
to a man, though for the enlightened it was possible to distinguish
between ceremonial acts whose purpose was to propitiate the Divinity
behind the man, and the worship of the man himself as a divine being;
nor did death terminate the power of the favoured individual; the
spirit was even more powerful when released from the accidents of
humanity. Among the Italians faith in the power of the dead, and a
considerable dread of their continued interference in the concerns of
the living, was a lively faith, and exemplified in many curious ways;
and thus the worship of Augustus, which was officially recognized only
in the provinces during his lifetime, was extended to Italy after his
death. This worship was not an exclusive worship; it did not destroy
or even impair the cults of other divinities; it was only another god
added to the celestial hierarchy, another saint canonized; but this
particular worship was alone in being universal throughout the Empire
and officially sanctioned; in Gaul it was imposed.
It is particularly worthy of attention that the care of the worship of
Augustus was assigned to freedmen; the Augustales, whose duty it was
in each town to maintain the cult, were to be “libertini”; in Rome the
Prætor Peregrinus, the foreigner’s judge, presided over its feasts, and
it was associated with the worship of the Lares of the Compitalia, that
is to say, with the oratories in the streets at which the slaves paid
their devotions. Men of all nationalities driven together as slaves in
the great cities, far from their native gods, found a common cult and
a common protector in Augustus. It was not long before the worship of
Augustus became indistinguishable from the worship of the Empire, and
each successive Emperor received divine honours, as manifesting that
abstraction; to deny the divinity of the Emperor, to refuse to spill
a little wine, or cast a few grains of incense in his honour, was to
rebel against the civil organization accepted by mankind; it was as
difficult to evade the obligation as for an English soldier to refuse
to drink to the health of his sovereign. The Jews alone protested, and
for a long while their protest was accepted; they did not pray to the
Emperor, but they prayed for him.
Augustus met his worshippers halfway; his own temperament was
profoundly religious, as religion was understood by his contemporaries;
he substituted the divine right of the Emperor for the divine right
of the Senate; he was not a madman like Caligula, jealous of other
divinities; on the contrary, he made every effort to restore cults
which were being abandoned, and to revive both public and private
observances. If he did not believe in his own divinity in the sense
which the words would convey to us, he was equally removed from the
robust scepticism of Vespasian, who remarked in his last moments:
“Bah! I feel I am turning into a god!” His attitude towards his own
divinity was a reverential one; it did not encourage him to set human
laws at defiance, and flagrantly override the rights of other men; on
the contrary he practised a studied humility, and seemed to feel that
if he was himself a god, it was incumbent upon him to see that due
respect was paid to other members of the same fraternity; in dealing
with men he anticipated the Popes in assuming the attitude of the
“Servus Servorum Dei.” There was no deliberate imposture, no conscious
pose. When Cromwell enumerated to an unruly assembly the successive
events in his career which had placed him at the head of affairs, and
claimed that they bore witness to a special Providence, he expressed
in the language of his time and country the same association of ideas
which convinced Octavian that there was something supernatural in the
chain of events, in the unbroken success, which had given him power far
greater than Cromwell’s. There was no arrogance in the claim; there
was humility; he ascribed to powers not his own a series of successes
in which a less reverently minded man would have seen nothing but the
evidence of his own surpassing ability. It was not merely political
astuteness which led him to act in everything as an ordinary citizen,
to vote, to ask for votes, to live without magnificence or ostentatious
expenditure; such conduct was the result partly of personal
inclination, partly of a sense of the infinite smallness of such things
as marble columns and silken raiment, costly banquets and trains of
servants in comparison with the greatness of the destiny imposed upon
him. If at the great shows in the circus he sat on the platform on
which were placed the statues of the gods, he did not thereby assert
equality with them, but claimed their protection and bore witness to
the favour which they bestowed not only on him, but on the people whose
destinies he guided with their approbation and in virtue of the powers
which they had granted. In the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius we may
detect a certain flavour of approbation when these historians tell
us that Tiberius or other Emperors refused divine honours or limited
them, and we might be tempted to infer from this that the assumption
of divinity by the Emperors was contrary to the feeling of the times;
but both Tacitus and Suetonius wrote more than a century after Octavian
had been declared “Augustus,” and in their days the unitarian faith
of the Jews had begun generally to influence the educated classes at
Rome; Horace could jest lightly at the Jewish Sabbath; in the time of
Suetonius, if it was not observed as a day of rest all over the Empire,
as Josephus boasts, it was certainly a well known institution.
It might be urged that whatever the religious attitude of Augustus
in other respects, he cannot have believed in his descent from the
goddess Venus, and that Virgil’s great poem in all that concerns Æneas
and Anchises is conscious imposture. To argue in this way is again
to misinterpret polytheism. The faith in Fauns and Satyrs is not
absolutely extinct in Italy even today; the survival of such a faith
suggested the plot of Hawthorne’s exquisite romance, _Transformation_.
Charles Leland discovered traces of it in Tuscany and Umbria.
The ancients had not arrived at our modern accuracy of definition with
regard to the divine and the human, the natural and the supernatural;
even the most enlightened contemporary of Augustus might hold a faith
as to mixed marriages between gods and men not dissimilar to that
held by many orthodox Protestants as to miracles--they might believe
that such things did not happen in their own day, but that they had
happened. In the curious classification of events affecting the lives
of the Emperors adopted by Suetonius a place is always assigned for
portents. Xiphilinus, the Christian who epitomized Dio Cassius,
apologises for the long lists of portents in his author, and for having
cut out the more trivial of these occurrences, but he leaves a large
number. Faith in portents is in fact always at hand, and even in these
critical days readily springs to life at a favourable opportunity.
With the ancients it was universal; in those days, as in our own,
men preferred sensation to evidence, and the critical faculty, even
when developed, had no very satisfactory apparatus which could be
applied. As a rule, the significance of portents was seen after the
event which they portended. Then, as now, nurses and mothers recalled
remarkable circumstances which had attended the birth and education of
children who afterwards became distinguished; and there are few men
distinguished or obscure who have not at some period of their lives
encountered strange coincidences, or suffered unusual experiences,
which, interpreted by the light of subsequent events, may be held to
have been fraught with mystery. There is no reasonable doubt that the
entrance of Octavian into Rome when he returned to claim his uncle’s
inheritance was attended by some unusual disposition of the sun’s rays,
possibly a solar halo in which only one of the mock suns was clearly
visible, that the event attracted notice at the time, and that it
inclined men to believe that the fortunate youth was reserved for a
remarkable destiny--an anticipation which led to its own fulfilment.
Virgil may well have been in earnest when he hailed the procession of
the star of Cæsar and worked up convenient fragments of legends into
the _Æneid_; even if he had occasional misgivings, his inclination was
to believe, and to hope that his glorious web was woven in threads of
fact.
Faith in his divine ancestry, faith in his divine mission did not
enervate Augustus, nor render him unpractical; he treated his power
as a sacred trust, and used all the resources of a cool intellect and
industrious temperament to further the interests which he believed
to have been committed to his charge. We are told that in his later
years he liked to believe that there was something superhuman in his
glance, and was pleased when men were unable to look him in the face--a
weakness which was encouraged by studious flatterers. If this is true,
we may well believe that, like many other men and women, he was
insensibly influenced by the attitude of those around him, and dropped
into the place assigned for him by the universal opinion.
In any case, Augustus, whether in public or private, did nothing to
jar upon the prejudices of those who were prepared to believe in his
divine mission. He led such a life as has since been led by many of the
better Popes, and at least one English statesman. Gossip, always busy
with the supposed amatory proclivities of great men, has not spared him
in this respect, but even if there were any foundation for the idle
stories which have been handed down, the ancients would not have been
scandalized; the somewhat coarse pleasantries which have also been
attributed to him would have scarcely attracted attention in his own
day.
By his peculiar personality Augustus was able to stamp upon the Roman
Empire a character which has never left it--he made it a religion
as well as a state; and it was due to his work, and to his sense of
the sacredness of his work, that there are still men living even in
England who cannot feel happy in the regulation of what they believe to
be their most important concerns, unless they are assured that their
actions are in accordance with the dictates of the authority from
across the mountains, which is resident in Rome.
It is a curious fact that many of those men and women whose personal
appearance was felt by their own contemporaries to be in the highest
degree awe-inspiring were small: Napoleon was small, Louis XIV was
small, among Queens Elizabeth was small, and Her late Majesty Victoria
unusually small. Augustus was no exception--he was short, slight, and
halted perceptibly in his gait; but these personal disadvantages did
not detract from his dignity. If we compare the portrait of Julius
Cæsar in the British Museum with the bust of the young Augustus, or
the head of the magnificent statue of the Emperor found in Livia’s
villa near the Prima Porta, we are struck by a remarkable difference.
It is possible to bring the face of Cæsar to life again; we can recall
the dark and liquid eyes, and set the strongly marked muscles of the
face in motion; we would hardly be astonished were the lips to open,
and we can anticipate the clear even enunciation of the words to which
they would give utterance. But with the portraits of Augustus it is
otherwise; they are strangely inscrutable. The bust known as the
young Augustus is the portrait of a boy, or at the oldest of a lad of
sixteen. It must have been modelled at a time when the future even of
Julius Cæsar was not assured. The artist may have flattered, but that
particular form of flattery can hardly have been designed; the habit of
thoughtfulness is seldom expressed to the same degree in the features
of boys and young men. Similarly in the older portrait there is an
aloofness; it is the face of a man who would always tempt a careful
observer to wish to know more about him, and who would always elude
curiosity. The next Emperor who was canonized was Claudius. Of him,
too, we have many authentic portraits; even in the most idealized we
can see something of the man whose apotheosis gave Seneca the materials
for a merry jest. It is the face of a man who was perpetually puzzled,
whereas the face of Augustus is the countenance of one who perpetually
puzzled other men.
The great work of establishing the Roman Empire was not the work of
a charlatan or a criminal, in both of which characters Augustus has
been represented. It was the work of a man who shared many of the
crude beliefs of his own time and unconsciously used them for his own
purposes, and those purposes were not self regarding. An Antonius
could squander great gifts in the pursuit of what earthly happiness
is afforded by dissolute excesses--he could allow his soldiers to
perish of hunger and disease while he hastened to the embraces of an
accomplished courtesan; he could shamelessly desert loyal veterans at
the bidding of a licentious woman, and seek salvation in the wake of
her purple sails; such was the hero whom Augustus annihilated, such the
conception of responsibility which he replaced by a devotion to duty
which has rarely been equalled and never surpassed.
The reign of Augustus was monotonous, his policy unadventurous. If
these are defects, we are at least at liberty to prefer them to the
excellences of those more brilliant reigns and more adventurous rulers
who succeeded in dazzling the world, but failed to lay the foundations
for a long era of prosperity. The career of Napoleon is more startling
than that of Augustus, his military record incomparable with the simple
successes of the earlier Emperor, but Napoleon left France with a
diminished frontier, and Augustus left Italy the undoubted mistress of
the civilized world.
V
Education of Tiberius
Though the apparent results of a careful education are often
disappointing, the impressions received in early childhood are
permanent in their effects. The man who has been brought up in a
particular atmosphere retains the influence through life, even though
his acts may seem to be in strong contrast with his training; the son
of a Quaker family may break with all the traditions of the Society
of Friends in his maturity, but he is never quite the same as a man
who has not been under the rigid family discipline of that estimable
sect. A man may throw off all the bonds imposed by the severe domestic
arrangements of a Scotch Elder, he may elect to bring up his own
children on liberal lines, and banish the shorter Catechism from his
household, but he cannot shake off the consciousness of another kind of
life which was forced upon him by his early experiences. In the case
of Tiberius we can trace to the very end of his life the influences to
which his youth and early manhood were subjected. There was no break
with early traditions; the aspect of details changed, the estimate of
their relative mutual importance was modified, but the spirit with
which they were approached was always the same.
The antiquaries have much to tell us of the material arrangements
of a Roman house, but we are not so well informed by them as to its
occupants. There is a disposition to ascribe all that was good in Roman
family life to an indeterminate period anterior to that progressive
decay of good manners and good morals which, according to our
authorities, was the distinguishing feature of the Empire. Exceptional
instances of extravagance are quoted as texts for the supposed rule,
the humorous or declamatory exaggerations of satirists are treated as
if they were the evidence of sober witnesses, and the spirit which
works behind the whole of Roman history is dealt with as of no account
in comparison with the letter of promiscuous citations.
If we wish to revive the ideas which were associated by the Romans with
their princely houses, we must think rather of such Roman palaces as
are described by Mr. Marion Crawford in his Italian Romances; we must
add to this conception something of a mediæval court, something too of
the great mercantile house of the Renascence. So far as the family was
concerned which inhabited such a house as Pompeius built for himself
in the Carinæ, it was often composed of many generations, and of
persons connected by various degrees of affinity; it was a patriarchal
establishment, at whose head stood the eldest man of full age descended
in the line of primogeniture from the founder--it was not merely the
home of a man and his wife and their children. Nor again was the house
only a place of residence: it was a place of business, and the business
was of many kinds--some of it was political, some financial, some
legal, some industrial. In private as in public life at Rome there was
not that strict differentiation of functions, and fine division of
labour and responsibility, which comparatively recent experiences have
caused our contemporaries to regard as a law of existence.
The Roman Empire was not built upon the foundations afforded by the
assembly of the Tribes, or the assembly of the Centuries, or even
by the Senate itself, but upon the surpassing ability of the great
families and the suitability of their organization for the work which
fell into their hands. Collectively as the Senate they exhibited
similar ability during a period which was long enough to fix the
reputation of Rome, but this period was both preceded and followed by
times in which the work of individual houses was supremely effective.
The Imperial household differed in nothing but the greater extent of
its responsibilities from other households. Augustus was not the only
Roman noble who lived upon the Palatine Hill, and his establishment
was ostentatiously modest; many of his contemporaries lived in finer
palaces, and exhibited greater magnificence in private, but the
moderation of Augustus was only relative, and his house was able to
find room at different times for two successive commanders-in-chief,
Agrippa and Tiberius, with their families and dependents. If Roman
history was presented to young Romans in a form which drew their
attention largely to such purely constitutional questions as the
quarrels between the Patricians and Plebeians, it did not omit the
legends of the great houses. The Senatorial dynasty had its heroic
mythology; Horatius who kept the bridge, Cincinnatus who left his
plough to command the army, the Fabians who all died in one day for
their country, Curtius who leapt into the gulf, occupied in the
imagination of Roman boys much the same place as King Alfred and
his cakes occupy in the mind of the English boy. Every funeral of a
member of one of the great families paraded before the eyes of Rome
the effigies of men associated with stirring events in the history of
the city, and filled their ears with the stories of great deeds. So
far as the Romans knew their own history, they knew it in connexion
with the names of the great houses, with whom indeed it was so closely
associated that it was considered somewhat scandalous in the reign of
Tiberius that a man who did not belong to one of these houses should
take upon himself to write and publish a history.
For many years a comparatively small group of families at Rome managed
the affairs of an area which has since found work for the statesmen and
administrators of several kingdoms. Collectively they worked through
the Senate and constitutional officials, individually through the
system of clientele which was expanded from a domestic institution to
a world-embracing system. Communities, as well as private persons, put
themselves in connexion with great families at Rome, who were pledged
to watch their interests; over and above the public official connexion
with the Senate there was the private non-official connexion with
individual senatorial families. Slaves and freedmen gathered from all
parts of the civilized world strengthened and extended the family
connexions. The sons of minor potentates were sent to reside with
Roman noblemen, and receive a Roman education; capable adventurers
such as the Herod family scented out the strong men of Rome and allied
themselves to their fortunes. The minute subdivision of ancient society
even after the creation of the Roman Provinces continued the patronage
system beyond the time at which it might seem to have been naturally
extinguished. Sicily might be a Roman Province, but individual Sicilian
cities might still feel the need of a permanent advocate at Rome. The
Roman Governor changed from year to year, but the dynasty of an Æmilian
or a Claudian was perpetual.
Thus in one of its aspects, and not its least important aspect, a Roman
family was a community in itself, with many and far-reaching interests;
the capacity of its chief personage was a matter of importance to a
very large number of men and women; his failure involved the ruin of a
hierarchy of relatives and dependents. Even in the earlier and simpler
days of Rome the sons of the family were carefully trained to represent
the family in the Forum and the Senate, to manage its estates, to
conduct its financial relations and the extension of the family
connexions, to hold office, to command armies. Greek culture added to
the conception of obligation to the family, obligation to the state;
Greek and Roman ideals alike forbade the young Roman noble to neglect
himself. Even his deportment, his manners, his gestures were serious
matters; he could not afford to be ungainly, or to express himself
awkwardly. If a son proved to be physically or morally incapable of
receiving the required training, Roman sentiment was not shocked by
his supersession or removal. We have a curious illustration of this
in the story of the Emperor Claudius. He was the younger brother of
Germanicus, the son of Drusus, the grandson of Livia. In the ordinary
course of events he would have been introduced to public life like his
brother, but he was awkward, he rolled in his gait, his tongue was
too large for his mouth, he stammered and sputtered, his family, and
even his mother, were ashamed of him, he was kept in the background,
and practically pensioned off. He was, however, a serious student,
a linguist, or at any rate a philologist; as Emperor he planned and
carried out works of great public utility; he was an extensive writer,
an industrious worker. He may have been of feeble character, easily led
by favourites and women, but his reign was by no means a disastrous
one. No ancient writer, however, protests against the prejudice, which
deprived Claudius of all opportunities of advancement, till a supposed
freak of the soldiers made him Emperor; they unanimously accept with
approval the verdict of Augustus, that he was unfitted by his personal
defects for public life. Similarly the youngest son of Agrippa and
Julia, the youngest grandson of Augustus himself, was removed from
Rome, and sequestered in an island “on account of his intractability”;
but though his subsequent fate is one of the many counts in the process
against the reputation of Tiberius, no fault is found with Augustus for
thus eliminating a member of his family who did not prove amenable to
discipline.
Duty to the family, duty to the State, or it might be first duty to
the State, then duty to the family, were impressed upon the young
Roman noble as the conditions of his existence; he lived, like the
heir-apparent to a throne, in a court which forced upon him the
traditions and observances which the maintenance of the court demanded.
If the father neglected his children, and evaded the responsibility
of training them, there were numerous other persons ready and willing
to undertake his work. The presiding genius of a Roman family was not
infrequently an aged lady, or a trusted freedman, deeply imbued with
the importance of the house and the sanctity of its traditions.
For the first nine years of his life Tiberius lived with his father--a
man serious, fond of learning, full of the republican tradition. It is
not impossible that, in spite of the association with Octavian through
Livia, the house was to some extent a meeting place of the remnant of
the Republican party. We at least know that one of these men made the
young Tiberius his heir, and adopted him by his will; he seems to have
been allowed to take the succession, but had to refuse the adoption,
because his benefactor was anti-Cæsarian. The elder Tiberius, not being
engaged in public business, would have plenty of time to give to his
children, and Roman children in a Roman family of the old-fashioned
type were much with their parents. We are told that Tiberius was very
carefully educated; at his father’s death he was already sufficiently
well advanced in recitation to pronounce the customary eulogy at his
funeral. Up to this time everything in his surroundings would tend to
encourage a naturally severe temperament; it can hardly have been a
cheerful home, this house of the lost cause. The affections of the boy
expanded themselves upon his brother Drusus, his junior by more than
two years, to whom his attachment was deep and lasting.
On the death of their father the two boys were transferred to the care
of their mother and stepfather, who was now their guardian. Tiberius
was old enough to resent such an arrangement, but there is no evidence
that he did so; he accepted his stepfather loyally, and Octavian
himself was scrupulously careful of the interests of his stepsons.
Diplomatic divorces and re-marriages were of such common occurrence in
the Roman houses at this period that no slight was felt or intended,
and as a rule the divorced parties maintained friendly relations.
Octavia, the sister of Octavian, was neglected and eventually
repudiated by Antonius, but she nevertheless took good care of his
children by a former marriage, the children of the tigress Fulvia.
Scribonia, the divorced wife of Octavian, continued to be on
sufficiently friendly terms with his family to watch over her daughter
Julia, not altogether to the latter’s advantage, and eventually
accompanied her into exile. Where marriage was treated entirely as
a business arrangement, there was no room for wounded feelings, and
children were not tempted to feel themselves aggrieved by a change
of parents, or to cherish resentment. When a wife was repudiated on
account of infidelity, and therefore disgraced, there was room for
ill-feeling, but not otherwise.
As Octavian at a later date set up a school in his own house for the
benefit of his grandchildren and the children of friends, it is not
improbable that a somewhat similar arrangement was adopted for the
young Neros; the course of grammar, the course of rhetoric, the course
of philosophy would be duly followed out. Except in the far greater
attention paid to elocution, the formal education will have differed
little from that of an Eton boy in the middle of the nineteenth
century. Both Roman and English boy learned Greek, and the Roman boy
had the advantage of learning it as a spoken language; neither had
a systematic instruction in mathematics, though the Roman had the
advantage of being drilled in keeping accounts. But far more valuable
than the formal instruction was the informal education given by the
circumstances of the family. The Romans kept early hours, and it was
customary for the children to dine in the same room with their parents,
though at different tables. Octavian, partly from choice, partly from
necessity imposed upon him by weak health, was not given to large
entertainments. His table was a simple one, old-fashioned observances
were rigorously maintained, but the company was choice. The children
could sit and listen while the conversation was being conducted
by Horace and Virgil; all the latest inventions, all the newest
literature, everything that did not pertain to secret diplomacy, was
discussed at that table. There was Mæcenas with his charming manners
and casual dress; Agrippa, somewhat silent as a rule, but animated
enough when the roof of the Pantheon or the model of a light galley had
to be described to an appreciative audience; there too was Cornelius
Gallus, the brilliant gentleman and poet, betraying by his passionate
vivacity his Gallic origin; Varius too would be there ready to recite
his last heroic poem. After dinner there would be amusements, sometimes
games of chance for small stakes, sometimes recitations; or the last
fashionable preacher, some Greek or Greek-speaking Jew, would discourse
of virtue to the admiration of Livia and the ladies. Chieftains from
Gaul and Spain, Princes from the East or Africa, wealthy citizens from
Antioch or Alexandria or the cities of Asia Minor, were all to be met
at that simple table, wondering at the exiguity of the repast, but none
the less impressed by the personality of their host. The opportunity
was a rare one for a youth who was bent on self-improvement, and it was
not neglected by Tiberius or his brother.
Along with them was brought up Julia, the spoiled child of the family,
and cousin Marcellus with his two sisters, the children of Octavia,
whose other daughter, Antonia, was to be the wife of Drusus, and the
lifelong friend of Tiberius, perhaps the most beautiful of Roman women.
There could be no better preparation for a life devoted to the public
service than this household, in which power only served to increase
the sense of responsibility, in which the routine of every day was a
routine of duty, and the command of the resources of the civilized
world did not add a dish to the table, a garment to the wardrobe, or a
superfluous slave to the servants’ hall.
The atmosphere of the household of Augustus is not to be found in the
scandalous gossip occasionally repeated by Suetonius or Tacitus, but
in the works of Horace and Virgil; both poets repeatedly insist on the
merits of simplicity, not because they were commissioned to do so, but
because their own personal tastes and habits fell into line with those
of the master of the civilized world.
The education of a young Roman was not confined to his home; he
accompanied his father to war when he was old enough, and on peaceful
expeditions at all times, where a great train did not involve
inconvenience. Tiberius was probably still too young to attend Octavian
on his Eastern tour after the battle of Actium, but when he was only
seventeen he accompanied him to Spain, and there took his first lessons
in the field, just as Octavian himself had previously been trained
under Cæsar. A Roman was considered to be of age when he was sixteen,
and he was quickly tested by being called upon to undertake minor
responsibilities. In all departments of public life Tiberius had the
advantage of the example and precept of the best authorities. The staff
of Agrippa, and perhaps Agrippa himself, were ready to instruct him in
the latest developments of the art of war; for finance and diplomacy he
could go to Mæcenas. Octavian was a practised and careful orator; no
one of these men could afford to slumber on his laurels; they were all
hard at work modifying the old, organizing the new. The secrets of the
Empire so frequently alluded to by Tacitus were not so very mysterious;
hard work, discretion, tact, public spirit, formed the bulk of them.
The time for intriguing came after the apprenticeship of Tiberius was
finished, and the intriguers were not the men who had taught him his
business.
Of the personal influences to which Tiberius was submitted in his youth
the one best known to us is that of Horace, who incidentally throws a
light upon his character as a young man. In the year 21 B.C. Augustus
made a progress to the East, visiting notable cities on the way, and
regulating their affairs. The chief object of the tour was, however,
to settle the Eastern frontier of the Empire. Syria was to Rome what
the North-West Provinces of India are to England; Herod and Aretas of
Arabia with the princes of Armenia played the part of the Ameer of
Afghanistan; they were the buffer states between Roman civilization and
the aggressive powers of Central Asia. Their fidelity was by no means
beyond suspicion, and from the mountains of Armenia, all along the west
of the Euphrates down to the borders of Egypt, continuous intriguing
prevailed, every ambitious kinglet making use of one or the other of
the great powers to strengthen his position against his rivals. The
strongest of these chieftains were the rulers of Armenia and Herod
the Idumæan; the former were unquestionably treacherous, and their
proximity to the Parthians rendered them peculiarly liable to wavering;
the latter played skilfully for his own hand. So long as Rome was
strong, Herod was her obedient servant, but if Rome showed signs of
weakness, Herod had no scruples against making friends with a stronger
power in order to further his own ends.
Since Cæsar had conquered Pharnaces, the son of Mithridates, by his
mere apparition, the prestige of Rome in the East had been considerably
damaged. The expeditions of Antonius against the Parthians had been
unsuccessful, and a serious catastrophe had only been averted by the
valour of his lieutenant, Ventidius Bassus, a former mule-driver; by
submitting Herod to the demands of Cleopatra’s cupidity, he had to
some extent alienated the Idumæan, and encouraged him to distrust
Roman politicians. Now that the Spanish war was over and the Western
half of the Empire in good order, Augustus wisely determined to study
his Eastern questions on the spot, and make such a demonstration of
power as would determine the judgment of waverers in favour of Rome.
The plan of operations was to send an army through Asia Minor into
Armenia, and thence if necessary along the Tigris into Parthia, while
the possible allies of the Parthians in Syria were to be overawed
simultaneously by the presence of the Emperor. The command of the army
destined for Armenia was given to Tiberius, now twenty-one years of
age. Both operations were successful; there was not much fighting, but
the Parthians saw that Rome was in earnest, and made terms, sending
back the standards which had been taken from Crassus some thirty years
before; the Roman party in Armenia was strengthened by a change of
rulers, and Tiberius returned in triumph. His first essay in war and
diplomacy was successful.
Tiberius had taken with him a staff of secretaries, or literary
companions, with whom Horace was in correspondence, the chief of whom
seems to have been Julius Florus, a Romanized Gaul. From the tone
of Horace’s letters to these young men we learn much of the future
Emperor. It would seem that Tiberius had formed the idea of surrounding
himself with what Horace on one occasion humorously calls “a gang” of
earnestly minded young men. Their characteristics may be inferred from
the following letter:--
“I am very anxious to know, Julius Florus, the quarter of the world
in which Claudius the stepson of Augustus is campaigning. Are you in
Thrace, or on the Bosphorus, or the rich plains and hills of Asia?
What works is the studious company a-building? I should like to know
this too. Who is undertaking to write the history of Augustus? Who is
going to give immortality to his wars and peaceful exploits? What is
Titius writing, Titius whom all Romans will sing, who has not been
afraid to tap the Pindaric sources, and has ventured to turn away from
commonplace pools and streams? Is he well? Does he think of me? Does
he labour with the aid of the Muse to fit the Theban metres to Latin
strings, or does he rage and bluster in tragedy? Tell me what Celsus
is doing? Warn him against plagiary, tell him to beware of the fate of
the daw in borrowed plumes. And what are your own ventures? What are
the thyme beds about which you lightly hover? You have no mean ability,
you are polished, refined, and will win the first prize as an advocate
in private or public suits, or as a poet of the lighter kind. But if
you could give up the chilling pursuit of business, you would go where
inspired wisdom would lead you. This is the work and interest which
should be sped by us all, whether small or great, if we wish to live
in peace with our country and ourselves. You must also tell me this
when you write, mind you do, how are you getting on with Munatius?
Does the badly patched fellowship join and split again to no purpose?
And are your independent spirits galled either by hot-headedness or
misunderstanding? Wherever you both may happen to be, you who should
not break the bond of brotherhood, I shall be very glad indeed to see
you back again.”
Here is another letter to Celsus, the young gentleman who made somewhat
too free use of the poems in the Palatine Library:--
“I beg you, Muse, to convey my compliments to Celsus Albinovanus, the
companion and secretary of Nero. If he asks what I am doing, tell him
that though I threaten all kinds of fine things, I am neither living
properly nor pleasantly; not because my vines have been smashed by
the hail, or my olives parched with the heat, or my cattle sick on
the outlying lands, but because, more ill at ease in mind than body,
I refuse to hear or learn anything that is good for an invalid, am
annoyed with my faithful physicians, furious with my friends, because
they try to deliver me from my deadly laziness; I am bent on what is
bad for me, I avoid what I know to be good for me; I am fickle enough
to be in love with Tibur at Rome, with Rome at Tibur. After this ask
him how he is, how he manages his business and himself, how he gets
on with his young chief and the company. If he says ‘well,’ first
congratulate him, and then don’t forget to whisper just this little bit
of advice into his ear, ‘Our treatment of you, Celsus, will depend upon
the way you treat your own good fortune.’”
Other letters to Bullatius, to Albius, to Municius, to Secius, to
Lollius are much in the same strain. Though these young men were not
demonstrably included in the inner circle of the friends of Tiberius,
they belonged to the same social rank; in all there is the same
playfulness, in all good advice is conveyed in tactful form. In Lollius
Horace seems to have felt a special interest; he too was a companion
to some notable person, probably Drusus. Horace gives Lollius many
practical directions, somewhat in the style of Polonius, as to his
behaviour to his patron, Lollius being of an independent spirit, and
irascible. Horace is particularly fond of impressing upon his young
friends the duty of “living for themselves,” of considering wealth,
fame, and even public usefulness, as of less importance than a good
conscience. The moral earnestness of Horace is often underrated, as the
moral earnestness of R. L. Stevenson is underrated, and of many other
writers whose teaching has not run in the grooves prescribed by the
professional preachers of their day. Horace had no love for the worthy
gentlemen who improved the occasion after dining with Augustus; the red
eyes of Crispinus affected him as the red nose of Stiggins affected
Dickens; he had equally little patience with those men who labelled
themselves Stoic or Epicurean or Cyrenaic, and professed to live
according to the authorized manuals of the sects; the pretentiousness
of the professors of virtue and the proselytising Jews disgusted him,
as similar manifestations are wont to disgust humorous men at all
ages and in all places, but these men have had their revenge in the
solemnity with which for nearly two thousand years they have deplored
his levity. Few men, however, have lived more consistently with their
professions than Horace, and the world would be none the worse if his
example were less unfrequently followed. The friendship of Mæcenas,
a genuine personal affection, and not a mere literary or convivial
sympathy, gave Horace many opportunities of enriching himself, or at
least of parading his power; it was something to be the friend of the
second or third man in the Roman Empire. But Horace studiously resisted
every temptation to make use of this friendship; he would not even
allow himself to be made the recognised channel of introduction for his
literary friends. The time came when Augustus wished to transfer him to
his own household--the letter is still extant in which the offer was
made, and the greater opportunities hinted at--but Horace would not
hear of such an advancement. It speaks well for Augustus that he was
not offended by the refusal. From Mæcenas Horace accepted a moderate
independence, sufficient for his needs, but a small gift to come from
one of the richest men of his day. He was grateful, but he refused to
sell his soul, and we still have the letter in which he bids Mæcenas
take back his bounty, if it is to involve obligations which the poet
cannot meet without injury to his health, or undue disturbance of his
comfort. He adds with characteristic humour and strict justice, “but
if you take back the Sabine Farm, you must restore to me the youth and
vigour I enjoyed when I first entered your service.”
Men who cannot distinguish an official ode written to order and the
forms imposed by such conditions from the genuine effusions of a
literary artist are fond of accusing Horace of excessive adulation, but
there is no adulation in offering unpalatable advice, or in pointing
out to a patron that he is exceeding his prerogative. Instances may
be found in the Odes, as well as in the Epistles, of not altogether
complimentary exhortation. The truth was that Augustus was surprisingly
the right man in the right place, and the compliments paid to him by
Horace and Virgil and other literary contemporaries, though expressed
in a liberal style, were not in spirit other than the occasion
demanded. Epitaphs and dedications have a language of their own--Italy
is more given to hyperbolical compliment than England--but the men who
declared their admiration of Augustus, however extravagantly to our
ears, had sound reason for admiring and wishing others to admire a
very capable man surrounded by capable advisers and seconded by able
lieutenants.
It is not probable that the first book of the letters of Horace was
published in the lifetime of the poet, for they are often too intimate
for publication. Lollius would not be likely to give the world the
benefit of his castigation, or Mæcenas to allow contemporaries to enjoy
the protest against his thoughtless insistence on the poet’s company.
The collection was most probably made after the death of the writer,
and the dedicatory letter placed at the beginning may equally well
have referred to some other publication. Horace is not the only facile
writer of verse who has occasionally amused himself with writing to his
friends in metre, and the sting of some things which he wished to say
was to some extent dulled by the adoption of a metrical form. We may
take it that in the first book of the Epistles, if nowhere else, we
have the genuine Horace writing without respect of persons, and without
regard to the public. A peculiar interest therefore attaches to the one
short letter in the collection which is written to Tiberius himself; it
is a letter of introduction.
“Septimius I presume has some special information as to the esteem in
which you hold me, Claudius; for in begging and prayerfully compelling
me to try to say a good word for him, and introduce him as worthy of
the intellect and family of that sound reader Nero, in asserting that
I enjoy the privileges of an intimate friend, he sees and knows my
power better than I do myself. I certainly gave a good many reasons
for being let off with an excuse, but I was afraid of being thought to
have falsely pretended incompetence, and to be given to disguising my
real influence, and reserving it for my own sole use. So, in dread of
the disgrace of a greater obloquy, I have entered for the prize awarded
to impudence. If, however, you do not disapprove of my breach of good
manners, committed at the request of a friend, enroll him in your
‘gang,’ and believe him to be staunch and good.”
Knowing as we do from other sources how strongly Horace objected to
turning a private friendship to account, and how specially careful he
was in the matter of introductions, we can see through this letter a
real intimacy with Tiberius; the apology of Horace is addressed rather
to his own conscience than to the recipient of the letter. We need not
infer that Tiberius was particularly difficult of approach.
The qualities which were to render Septimius acceptable to Tiberius
are worth notice; he would be in sympathy with a man whose standard
of reading, or--for the phrase is ambiguous--choice of pursuit
was dignified, he would be staunch, he would be good. Good is the
epithet which Horace applies to Tiberius himself in writing to Julius
Florus--“Florus faithful friend to the brilliant and good Nero”; he
uses the same epithet in the Odes in speaking of a former mistress--“I
am not what I was under the reign of good Cinara.” Without pressing
the sense of the word too closely, it can hardly have been applied to
an ungenial man, such as Tiberius is represented to have been, and may
have afterwards become. The future Emperor had a weary road to travel
before he became, if he ever did become, what the elder Pliny says that
he was, “a most dismal man.”
Thus at the outset of his administrative career we find Tiberius in
excellent company; it is pleasant to think that he may on some occasion
have made an expedition to Tibur or the Sabine Farm, like Torquatus
or Mæcenas, and spent an evening with the genial poet, drinking old
wine laid down in the consulship of Manlius, watching the wood fire
crackling on the hearth, enjoying the jokes of the pert slaves, or
perhaps listening while his host sang to his own accompaniment words
which the world has not yet forgotten. We may be sure that there were
rejoicings when the “company” returned from Asia Minor, that the kid
was duly sacrificed, and that if Tiberius himself was not present,
Florus and Celsus, and let us hope Munatius told the story of their
adventures to the kindly ears of their middle-aged friend.
VI
The Family of Augustus
The principle of the transmission of the chief power by heredity was
never recognized as a fundamental part of the constitution of the
Roman Empire, though the natural tendency is to allow a son to take
his father’s place, and the necessities of ancestor worship made the
succession of a real son or an adopted son agreeable to Roman feeling.
Neither Cæsar nor Augustus ever had legitimate sons; Tiberius had
a son, but he died before his father; Caligula was childless; the
ambition of an unscrupulous woman deprived the son of Claudius of the
succession and his life; Nero was childless, and in him the Cæsarean
strain ended. Circumstances were adverse to the hereditary principle.
Short dynasties, such as those of the Flavians, the Antonines, and the
Constantines, appear from time to time, but the ordinary method of
peaceful succession was the nomination and adoption of a successor or
successors by the reigning Emperor.
For many years Augustus himself avoided the definite establishment of
his own position as even a life tenancy. His office of Imperator was
renewed every ten years; the Tribunician power was granted to him
afresh every year in form, though not in fact; the Censorian office
was taken up every five years; he did not become Pontifex Maximus till
eighteen years after the battle of Actium; the only office which he
held without a break--that of Princeps Senatus--was not considered
to be an office at all, the dignity of the first man in the Senate
being constitutionally purely of respect. Under these circumstances it
would be strange if the historians were correct in assuming that the
chief preoccupation of his life was in providing for a successor of
his own blood. Tacitus, who is full of the dynastic question, informs
us, with his customary inconsistency, that Augustus himself at the end
of his life mentioned three men not connected with the Cæsarean race
as possible candidates for the succession, which he could hardly have
done had he accepted the hereditary principle, seeing that the Cæsarean
stock was by no means extinct.
For a short time the vision of hereditary succession probably attracted
the imagination of Augustus, and certainly always occupied the
attention of members of his family; but the early deaths of two of his
grandsons and the insubordination of a third quickly dispelled the
attractive vision.
The acquiescence of other Roman families in the Cæsarean rule was
bought partly by admission to a share in the administration, partly
by the very fact that the dynastic ideal was not forced in such a
manner as to preclude all possibility of a change in the form of
government, and a reversion to the happy days of the Senatorial
oligarchy. Opposition was further disarmed by intermarriages with the
houses least likely to submit contentedly to the domination of one
family; both stocks of the Claudians, the Antonians, the Domitians, the
Æmilians, the Junians, and others were thus united with the Julians
in the lifetime of Augustus or his successor. The consular lists for
the reign of Augustus recall the names of the noblest Roman families,
and though the old city offices had now become titular rather than
effective, men still liked sitting in Curule chairs, and taking the
lead in the pageantry which survived the reality of power; the process
by which administrative functions gradually passed from the old offices
to the new hierarchy was a slow one, and an ambitious young man might
still think he had embarked on a career when he had been dignified with
the lowest of the old magistracies. The new men were employed less in
Italy than in the imperial provinces, where indeed it was important
that the officials should be attached to the person of the Emperor
rather than to the abstraction called the Senate and the people of
Rome. Neither Augustus nor Tiberius were afraid to entrust the really
effective powers of Prefect of the City of Rome to members of the old
aristocracy.
But if Augustus himself was less interested in the dynastic question
than the historians represent, the ladies of his family were by
no means equally indifferent; their feuds were shared in by their
ladies and freedmen, and the apparently peaceful home of the suave
and unconscious Augustus was a raging battlefield, in which the
weapons of calumny and innuendo were freely hurled, and the external
forms of politeness concealed a state of civil war. Wily Greeks and
Jews or other Orientals used to palace intrigues found a field for
their special talents in the households of Livia or Julia; holding
the confidential positions of physicians, preachers, tutors, and
astrologers, they transferred to the Palatine the atmosphere of the
Courts of the Ptolemies or Herod. Under this subtle influence mere
drawing-room conspiracies sometimes took a serious complexion; young
men were impelled by their female relatives to dangerous courses,
secret information sped from Roman boudoirs to the palaces of Syria and
Armenia.
Livia herself was a skilled intriguer, and though Dio puts into her
mouth a ponderous curtain lecture on the subject of clemency, addressed
to Augustus, her inclinations were more monarchical than those of her
husband. The very substantial compliments which passed between her
and Herod of Judæa are not likely to have been exceptional in their
character, nor is that wily potentate likely to have been the only man
of his class who discovered that her fingers touched the springs of
government. Though by the letters of the law Roman women were in an
almost servile position, though they were liable to be divorced and
remarried to suit the convenience of their families, methods were found
of evading the law, and divorces which tended to further aggrandisement
were not unpopular with their apparent victims. By a variety of legal
fictions women could hold separate estates, and were often immensely
rich independently of their husbands. The wives of provincial
governors were notorious for their rapacity, and took full advantage of
the weakness of uxorious husbands.
Livia spinning the toga of Augustus with her maids or weighing out the
allowances of the slaves, was a pleasing picture for the contemplation
of her husband and the Romans, but the head of the thrifty housekeeper
had room for other than domestic details, and her name was whispered
with awe by many who could not have appreciated her homely virtues, and
had good reason for suspecting her of very different occupations.
Owing to the early marriages of the Romans a family quickly became
patriarchal; some of these marriages, it is true, were mere contracts,
children being sometimes married to secure dowries or successions, or
ratify family alliances, almost before they were out of the nursery.
Owing again to divorces and remarriages the various degrees of affinity
between the members of a group of families are very difficult to trace;
adoption adds complications, which are further increased by the paucity
of Roman names, especially as women generally retained the feminine
form of their father’s names after marriage, and sisters were often
indistinguishable.
Five chief families were united in the household of Augustus: the
Julian--of this the heads were the Emperor himself and his sister
Octavia; the Claudian, represented by Livia and her two sons, Tiberius
and Drusus; the Vipsanian, represented by Agrippa; the Claudian
Marcellan by Octavia’s three elder children; the Antonian by her two
younger children. The heads between whom all matrimonial transactions
were arranged were Augustus, Livia, Octavia, and Agrippa. Of these four
Agrippa was to the two ladies the unwelcome but inevitable intruder;
Livia was disposed to push the Claudians, Octavia the Julians, whom
she represented equally with her brother the Emperor. These four high
contracting parties were about the same age, Octavia being somewhat
the older of the four. If there was to be a dynasty, and if the
succession was to follow the strict line of heredity, Julia, the one
child of Augustus, was obviously the great matrimonial prize. Matters
in her case were somewhat complicated by the existence of her mother,
Scribonia, an affectionate but easy-going lady, who seems to have
abstained from active interference in her daughter’s affairs till she
accompanied her into exile many years later. There was another heiress
in the family of the same age as Julia, namely Vipsania, the daughter
of the despised but necessary Agrippa. She was the granddaughter of
Pomponius Atticus, the very wealthy banker and friend of Cicero.
Agrippa had married her mother when his fortunes were still at a low
ebb, and when it was desirable to conciliate the Equestrian Order to
the advancement of Octavian and his friends. Agrippa owed his position
entirely to his great ability, and his single-hearted unselfish
devotion to the fortunes of Augustus. Nobody had ever heard of the
Vipsanian family till he rose to eminence, and the Claudian and Julian
ladies were contemptuous of its degrading associations. We do not know
whether Pomponia died or was put away, but in the year B.C. 25 Julia,
being of the age of fourteen, was declared marriageable, and a pleasing
atmosphere of matrimonial intrigue filled the house on the Palatine. To
consolidate the fortunes of Agrippa--a really formidable rival, if he
chose to declare himself--with those of Augustus, the right thing to
do was to marry Julia to Agrippa, but Livia wanted her for Tiberius. A
compromise was hit upon; Tiberius was left out in the cold, Julia was
married to young Marcellus, Octavia’s son, her first cousin, now a lad
of eighteen, and in order to associate Agrippa with the Julian blood he
was given the lad’s sister Marcella.
That Augustus can have seriously intended Marcellus at this time to
be heir to anything but his private fortune is impossible; so long as
Agrippa lived there was no other possible successor to the Imperial
power, and the story that Agrippa went off to the East to keep out of
the way of the favours shown to the young Marcellus is absurd. Agrippa
was wanted in the East, and the information that he acquired there led
to the subsequent Eastern progress of Augustus and Tiberius four years
later. When Augustus was so seriously ill in B.C. 23 as to contemplate
the possibility of his death, he sent for Agrippa and gave him his
ring, thus making him his successor so far as it was possible to do so;
on this we are told that Marcellus showed such bitter disappointment
that Agrippa again went to the East, and for the same reason. A few
months later Marcellus died, and Virgil’s touching allusion to the
event in the sixth Æneid is probably the only authority for the
assumption that the wise Augustus proposed to set aside the tried and
faithful Agrippa, the actual second person in the Empire, in favour
of an untried youth. Such an assumption involves a contradiction of
the whole policy of Augustus. Whatever his weaknesses, whatever his
failures in prevision, the one thing he dreaded was the recrudescence
of the wars of adventurers. Steadily through his reign he worked in the
direction of giving permanence to order, and of quietly eliminating all
elements likely to endanger order. He can hardly have been so blind
as not to see that the reign of Marcellus was only possible by the
sufferance of Agrippa, or to ignore the fact that Livia would work for
the elevation of her sons after his own death.
The premature death of Marcellus threw all the matrimonial schemes
again into the melting-pot. His marriage had been a marriage only in
name, and had left no offspring. For two years nothing was done, but
when the whole Imperial party moved to the East in B.C. 21 marriage was
again in the air. There was a sojourn, accompanied with much festivity,
at Samos, where Agrippa met the rest of the family. His marriage with
Marcella had proved childless, his union with the Julian stock had
failed; Julia herself seems to have shown signs of an inclination
for Tiberius, but such a union would have strengthened the Claudians
too much, and Tiberius himself was attracted, if by anybody, by the
daughter of Agrippa. Augustus took matters into his own hands; he
persuaded his sister to allow her daughter to be divorced, and married
his own daughter to his faithful friend Agrippa, a man at least twenty
years older than herself. The line of succession was to be through the
children of Agrippa and grandchildren of Augustus; Livia, and Octavia
were left out in the cold. The former consoled herself by interchanging
amenities with the husband of Mariamne on the Phœnician coast, and both
ladies pleased themselves later on with a double marriage project,
which to some extent restored the balance; Tiberius married Vipsania,
and his brother Drusus the very beautiful younger Antonia. The dates
of these two marriages are not determinable, but as Tiberius was the
father of only one child, in B.C. 12, when Agrippa died, his marriage
at any rate was probably a late one, when he was about thirty years of
age. There is reason for believing that this at least was a love match.
Julia proved to be a fertile mother, she brought five grandchildren to
the founders of the Empire and if the succession was to depend on the
principle of heredity, it was secured, for both the ruling powers were
interested in transmitting the succession in the Julian line, and three
of the children were sons.
Augustus was delighted; the philoprogenitive passion broke out in
him; he insisted that Julia and her husband should live in his house;
he provided instructors for the children; he seldom went out unless
accompanied by them, and they rode round his litter when he went into
the country. The boys he adopted, buying them of their father by the
ancient rude ceremony, and the two elder ones were henceforth known
as Caius and Lucius Cæsar. Livia was more than ever in need of such
consolations as could be won by intriguing with Oriental potentates.
It seemed that the Claudians were definitely relegated to a subordinate
position, and the young Cæsars began to pay increased attention to the
mythology of the Æneid and the story of their mystic descent from the
goddess Venus. A marriage between the son of Drusus Nero, afterwards
known as Germanicus, and Agrippina, the daughter of Julia and Agrippa,
was the sole bright spot in the dynastic fortune of the Claudians.
Destiny, however, had not exhausted her possibilities. In 12 B.C.
Agrippa died. In the following year Octavia died, and Livia was free
to carry out her favourite matrimonial project; the widowed Julia was
married to Tiberius, who divorced his wife, Vipsania, to make room for
her. This was the first tragedy in the life of Tiberius, destined to
bring upon him not only terrible immediate sorrows, but a whole train
of calamity, which pursued him to the end of his days. We are told of
many Roman nobles that they divorced their wives. Tiberius is the only
Roman of whom we are told that he bitterly regretted the wife from whom
he had been separated.
We do not know by whom this tragedy was brought about, but we do know
that, so far as dynastic pretensions were concerned, Tiberius was
the last person to be influenced by such a consideration. Whatever
ambitions his mother may have formed for her sons, both of them, now
men in the prime of life, enjoyed the confidence of Augustus because
they had hitherto shown themselves superior to vulgar ambition. Both
were by this time experienced generals, for though the command of
Tiberius in Armenia may have been nominal rather than real, both he
and his brother had conducted a series of campaigns in the difficult
regions to the north of the Balkan Peninsula, in the Alpine valleys,
and on the frontier of the Rhine. Tiberius had further shown himself
a skilled civilian; he had been entrusted not only with the different
Republican magistracies, but he had been made chairman of several of
those commissions by which the real administrative work was done; he
had presided over a very important commission for regulating the corn
supply of Rome, and over another for inquiring into the condition
of the agricultural slave barracks, whose owners were accused of
kidnapping travellers, and offering shelter to freemen who preferred
such a life to military service. After the death of Agrippa he was
unquestionably the second person in the Empire, for Mæcenas had no hold
on the armies, and Tiberius held this position, not as the stepson
of Augustus, but as a representative of the oldest and most highly
honoured family in Rome, and as the reward of distinguished public
services at home and in the field.
Caius, the eldest son of Julia, cannot at this time have been more
than nine years old; it would be some years before he could take any
effective part in public business. Augustus, always in weak health, had
to provide for the contingency of his own death, and it must be borne
in mind that, quite apart from the comparatively ignoble ambition of
founding a dynasty, a sense of duty would impel Augustus to obviate as
far as he could the disturbance of a disputed succession. Augustus
prided himself upon his position as a pacificator; his reign was a
reign of peace, its wars were frontier wars; to allow the apple of
discord to drop into the centre of this realm of peace was to destroy
his own work.
But was it necessary that Tiberius should marry the widowed Julia?
Was the match capable of being represented to him as a necessity of
state, as a duty so imperative as to override all questions of private
inclination?
Certainly it was so, though the public grounds were essentially of a
private and personal nature.
The two hostile forces in the Imperial House were Livia and Julia,
the former the embodiment of the stern virtues of the Roman matron,
personified rectitude and humility in her outward demeanour, inwardly
unscrupulous and domineering, free from the more amiable but less
dignified weaknesses of a woman, incapable of being led away by the
love of admiration, icily regular, intemperate only in her pursuit
of the greater ambitions, unmoral rather than immoral, she shunned
attracting public notice, preferred the enjoyment of power to the
demonstration of power, but was none the less keenly jealous of any
encroachment on her domain. It is curious how little we hear of her;
the poets do not mention her, gossip did not concern itself with her
name; it is only from one or two casual references in Josephus, and
a few incidents recorded by Tacitus, that we divine the activity of
this force behind the throne. Portraits of Livia survive; her high
nose is to be seen behind that of Augustus on the coinage; there are
busts, and at least one statue. The countenance is that of a very
handsome woman and a very dignified woman, but not of a woman who could
laugh readily, the mouth looks as if it could smile to order, but not
spontaneously. We may surmise that her virtues were of such an obvious
type as to constitute a standing provocation to the wicked, that she
was one of those women who are more dangerous to sound morality than
a bad example, and against whose standards it is impossible not to
rebel secretly if not openly; this is especially the case when it is
suspected that behind the genuine inclination to correctness in smaller
matters lurk the real deadly sins of the soul, hardness, avarice, lust
of power. The story that she was blind to the infidelities of Augustus,
and even provided the opportunities, may not be true; the infidelities
may be, and probably are, as chimerical as the connivance; but even
such a myth may be allowed to indicate the type of character.
Pitted against this calm, correct, implacable woman we have the spoiled
child Julia, bent upon enjoying herself to the full, adventurous,
audacious, both in deed and word. When her father reproved her for
riotous living she is said to have replied that, though he might choose
to forget that he was Cæsar, she did not propose to forget that she was
Cæsar’s daughter, and doubtless the pert sally, accompanied by some
laughing gesture, smoothed away the gravity of the outraged Emperor.
For a Roman princess at this resplendent time of Rome’s fortunes
three lives were open: she might live as Julia’s aunt Octavia lived,
or her first cousin the younger Antonia, in comparative retirement,
abstaining from intermeddling with affairs of state, the centre of a
refined and possibly literary circle, caring for the domestic interests
of those whom she loved, or to whom she was bound by duty; or she might
live as Livia lived, darkly intriguing behind the scenes, corresponding
with “native” princes, plotting and counter-plotting among the Roman
families, or again she might fling herself into the riotous amusements
of the gilded youth of Rome, the young gentlemen for whom Ovid wrote
his treatises on gallantry.
Gambling and betting were as well known diversions in Roman society as
in our own; great ladies made their books upon the circus. Cards were
not yet invented, but dice were common. Wealthy young provincials,
the sons of great but not ennobled capitalists, were as ready then
as now to pay for admission to the highest social circles by dealing
leniently with fair ladies whose affairs were involved by debts of
honour, and some of them lost their heads and hearts over the business.
Masquerading in the unlighted Roman streets after respectable people
had gone to their early beds was not an infrequent amusement, and even
ladies anticipated at Rome the licence of the Mohawk and Tityre Tu of
Queen Anne’s reign in London. Antony and Cleopatra amused themselves
thus at Alexandria, to the terror and annoyance of respectable middle
class men; the joke of thus playing pranks upon inoffensive persons of
humble rank under the protection of a slight disguise is not obvious,
but it has at all times presented attractions for a certain order of
mind. As for Julia, we are told that her revels were conducted even on
the sacred Rostra, the public platform of the government of the world.
Her cynical defence of her immoralities is said to have been even more
outrageous than her conduct. But for all this Julia did not forget that
she was Cæsar’s daughter, and was determined not to submit more than
was inevitable to the domination of the woman who was not her mother,
but was Cæsar’s wife.
At the death of Agrippa, Julia, though already the mother of four
children, and shortly to become the mother of a fifth, was only
twenty-seven years of age. During the time of her married life she and
Tiberius had been much absent from Rome; they had probably met very
little since they were brought up together as children in the house
of Augustus. Agrippa may have been an indulgent husband, willing to
condone the more innocent levities of his young wife; or Tiberius,
remembering his agreeable playfellow, now titularly his mother-in-law,
may have chosen to disregard the scandalous whispers which reached his
ears from time to time.
On her husband’s death Julia found herself in an awkward position;
it is true that her father was her friend, but her father’s wife was
her enemy, an enemy whose mysterious influence she had good reason
to dread, and whose ambition was menaced by the existence of Julia’s
own children, already the darlings of their grandfather. Again it is
not improbable that she cherished a purely feminine grudge against
Vipsania, who had carried off her handsome playfellow, and was
additionally piqued by the happiness which Tiberius had found in
his marriage. The personal beauty of Tiberius was remarkable; his
accomplishments no less so. He was unusually tall, broad shouldered,
well shaped, and well proportioned from head to foot, of great physical
strength; he belonged to the fair ruddy type of Italian, and carried a
profusion of golden hair, which grew low down on the back of his neck,
a family peculiarity, his eyes were exceptionally large, and he was
credited with the power of seeing in the dark when first awakened; as
he habitually carried his head in a bent position, it is possible that
he suffered from some visual defect; he was naturally silent, and a
slow talker; he had the reputation of being deeply learned, and indeed
versed in occult mysteries, such a man as would attract the curiosity
of a woman, and challenge her love of conquest by his intellectual,
no less than by his physical, qualities. The few existing portraits
of Tiberius fully bear out the descriptions given by Paterculus and
Suetonius. The so-called bust of Tiberius in the British Museum is not
a portrait of him, and was simply so named because it happened to have
been found at Capri.
Personal inclination, no less than policy, would have suggested to
Julia that here was the natural protector of herself and children, and
there was the additional inducement of delivering a checkmate to Livia
by falling in with what had been her favourite scheme. With Tiberius
as the stepfather and guardian of the children of Agrippa, there was
nothing to be feared from the death of Augustus; Livia’s own son would
be in a position to defeat any machinations against the heirs of the
Julian race, and it was well known that whatever obligations Tiberius
took upon himself, Tiberius would honourably fulfil.
The arguments for the divorce and remarriage were, from the Roman point
of view, strong; it was not a question of personal convenience or of
advancing personal interests, the object was to maintain the peace of
the Roman world. Had Tiberius taken the advice of Mæcenas, it would
probably have been to the following effect:--“It is true that you are
to be trusted, that no pledge is needed from you to ensure the security
of the daughter and grandchildren of Augustus, your whole life shows
that you have made your stepfather’s interests your own; but you are
not the only person concerned. The two boys will be exposed to every
temptation as they grow up; their mother is a fascinating lady, but her
best friends can hardly claim for her that she is equal to the task
of bringing up a family whose responsibilities will be great. If you
do not marry her, somebody else will; it would be a serious risk to
expose any possible candidate to the temptations of such a position, to
introduce a new claimant to the family honours into the family circle.
Julia needs a protector, a husband of her own age; she is said to have
a strong personal attachment to yourself, and under your guidance it
is not likely that she will repeat pardonable indiscretions, to which
perhaps she was driven by want of real sympathy with her previous
elderly husband. You say that you and your present wife are devoted to
one another. Granted; but you are both called upon by a destiny, which
you cannot evade, to sacrifice yourselves to the good of the State.”
And Horace too would have argued much in the same strain; he would have
sympathized more delicately with the feelings of a united couple rudely
torn asunder, but with his shrewd common sense he would have shown that
there was no alternative but a retirement into private life, a course
which would have amounted to abandoning the post of duty.
The person, however, who most strongly influenced Tiberius in his
fatal decision was possibly Vipsania herself. From both parents she
inherited businesslike qualities, cool common sense. Neither of them
is credited with having been sentimental at any period of his or her
career, and though Tiberius was devoted to her, it is quite possible
that she herself regarded her marriage dispassionately as an excellent
business arrangement, and that, while she fulfilled all the duties
of a wife with scrupulous observance, she was prepared to be equally
careful of the interests and honour of any husband with whom she was
provided by the higher powers of the family council. She had abundant
precedent for taking such a line, and Asinius Gallus, the aspirant
proposed to her, was in every way a desirable match. She may have been
really indifferent, and have wounded Tiberius by her cool acquiescence
in the new arrangement; or again, on this side too there may have
been a great renunciation, and the unhappy woman, partly terrified by
obscure menaces from Livia, partly persuaded by the kindly urgency of
Augustus, may have affected an indifference which she did not feel, and
deliberately wounded the man whom she loved for his own good, as she
was led to believe. If Vipsania thus hurt the sensitive Tiberius, and
shook his faith in his previous happiness, there was Julia ready to
heal the wound; was he not the man whom she had always really loved?
Her first and second marriages had been no real marriages: she and
Marcellus had been mere children, and as for Agrippa, worthy man though
he was, he could not feel with a wife so much younger than himself;
he had always preferred the society of men who talked of bridges and
aqueducts, or planned campaigns against the Sarmatians, to his wife and
children; he had been good according to his lights, but it had been a
dull life, and she had been driven to find relief in foolish though
innocent dissipations by which her good name had suffered, and which
she now sincerely regretted. If Tiberius would but take pity on her
forlorn condition, and do his best to love his old playfellow, she for
her part could conceive no greater happiness than to be the partner of
his joys and sorrows; she loved him, she had always loved him, and the
careless indifference of years had not weakened her attachment.
Whatever the arguments and allurements by which Tiberius was induced
to take the fatal step, he unquestionably did so. At first he lived
happily with Julia; they had one son, who died in infancy; and then his
official duties took the husband from his home; he was placed in charge
of a harassing campaign against a mobile enemy in difficult country
along the south of the Danube and in Dalmatia, while his brother
Drusus was similarly engaged in frontier wars along the Rhine.
At this time a serious misfortune fell upon Tiberius; he lost his
brother.
Drusus had conducted a foray into the Black Forest region, which had
not been altogether successful. On his return he either fell from his
horse or caught some serious fever--both stories are given--and was
seen to be in such danger that Augustus, who was then at Lyons, at once
sent for Tiberius from Dalmatia. Tiberius hastened to his brother’s
bedside. The elder Pliny tells us that on this occasion he achieved a
record speed, travelling 200 Roman miles within twenty-four hours. He
was in time to close his brother’s eyes, but that was all. Augustus
decided that Drusus should be buried at Rome, and Tiberius marched the
whole way on foot at the head of the funeral procession from Lyons
to the capital. As soon as the ceremonies were over, he returned to
continue his brother’s work on the eastern bank of the Rhine, and
after two years’ absence was recalled. Mæcenas had died in B.C. 8,
and Augustus felt the need of a confidential adviser. Tiberius on his
return was invested with the tribunician power, an elevation which,
in the opinion of his contemporaries, finally marked him out as the
successor of Augustus.
The history of the tribunate, in spite of the many references to the
office, is not particularly clear. It seems that the first tribunes
were originally the official mouthpieces of that part of the population
of Rome whom we should now call “Outlanders.” After the “Outlanders,”
or plebeians, had become for all practical purposes fused into the
general body of Roman citizens, the tribunes ranked practically among
the other magistrates; they enjoyed the special prerogative of being
sacrosanct, their persons were inviolable, and thus during their term
of office they were nominally above the laws, a privilege which,
however, did not prevent their assassination. They had the power
of introducing legislation, and of vetoing legislation, and it is
perhaps this power which was constitutionally most important to the
early Emperors. Further, they had powers of summary jurisdiction, and
constituted a supreme court of appeal in cases in which the life of
a Roman citizen was in danger; when St. Paul “appealed unto Cæsar,”
it was to the tribune that he appealed. The office was hallowed by
sentiment, and though as Consul and Censor and Commander-in-chief the
Emperor might seem to hold in his hands all the reasonable means of
making his power effective, unless he were also Tribune, his actions
could be vetoed; thus Augustus was more than usually wise in absorbing
the sanctity and the functions of the Tribune into his own person, and
he could show no greater proof of his confidence in Tiberius than by
thus giving him the power of constitutional opposition and investing
his person with inviolability; but, to the astonishment of the Roman
world, Tiberius had hardly received this mark of confidence before he
summarily left Rome and retired to Rhodes.
VII
The First Retirement of Tiberius
The flight of Tiberius to Rhodes, and his determination to abandon his
public career just at the moment when his position as second man in
the State was established on a sure foundation, have naturally excited
the wonder of modern no less than of contemporary writers. An English
historian, equally learned and delightful, speaks of the event as the
freak of a moody and irritable man, and declares that such conduct
summarily disposes of the claim which has been advanced for Tiberius of
having been an astute statesman. His contemporaries, who are followed
by the grave Tacitus and the garrulous Suetonius, found an easier
explanation; to them the motive for retirement was simply the wish to
indulge in licentious excesses too hideous for the starched morality
and glaring daylight of Rome; but the same unfriendly or careless
writers allow that he was probably disgusted by the wanton conduct
of Julia, adding that he was also jealous of the advancement of his
stepsons, the young Cæsars, now respectively fourteen and nine years of
age.
That Julia had forfeited all claims not only to affection, but even
to respect, is an undisputed fact. Soon after his marriage Tiberius
had been obliged to take the field, and his wars had been waged in
localities not likely to be attractive to a lady who lived in the
gallant circles of the poet Ovid. War upon the Illyrian or German
frontier did not involve complete absence from home, and the Roman
generals were in the habit of returning from their campaigns to the
capital when the winter weather made it impossible to take the field.
We do not know whether Tiberius followed this custom, or whether he
took a more rigorous view of his duties and spent the winter season
in winter quarters, but he was certainly much away from home. Some
disillusionment as to the depth of Julia’s affection for him, annoying
domestic difficulties caused by the ill-advised indulgence of her
children by their grandfather, may well have contributed already to
make him feel more at home in the camp than in the splendid house
in the Carinæ. Julia too may have had her own disappointments; the
playfellow of her youth turned out to be another “Colonel Grave Airs,”
no less absorbed in military matters than Agrippa, inclined to spend
his leisure in the society of a learned and serious circle, and averse
to dissipating his time by passing long hours at the great public
pageants in which the Romans delighted. So far there had been nothing
worse than an amicable estrangement between husband and wife. Julia
went her own way, chose her own friends, and lived the life which
pleased her best. Tiberius in the same way pursued the studies which
were agreeable to him, and made the best of a maimed life. Doubtless
he recognized that his private happiness had been wrecked, but there
was still duty, and if he could not meet Vipsania in the street without
emotion, he at least gave the scandalmongers of the city no opportunity.
But when Tiberius returned from Gaul in B.C. 7 to become practically
the colleague of Augustus, he found the state of affairs in his home
such as no self-respecting man could tolerate, and there was this
additional sting in the wound to his honour, that the very office which
had just been bestowed upon him was capable of being represented as
the price paid for unworthy toleration and wilful blindness. Rome was
ringing with the exploits of Julia, with stories of her drunkenness
in the public streets, with the names and number of her gallants. The
two men who were most concerned in her misconduct, as being the two
men upon whom it brought the deepest disgrace, her father and her
husband, were the two men who alone seemed to be ignorant of the state
of affairs. The ignorance of the father might be excused, he had no
motive, except a not unworthy paternal weakness, for closing his eyes
to what was going on, but the husband, so the gossips said, had been
prompted by his ambition to accept an already damaged article, for
Julia’s irregularities were not of recent date, and actuated by the
same unworthy motive he had allowed his house to become a mere brothel:
the proofs were only too obvious. That such a chain of reasoning was
inconsistent with itself in ascribing both ignorance and full knowledge
to Augustus did not concern the gossips. Tiberius had been bribed to
be blind, and all the world could see what a magnificent bribe he had
extorted.
The best men, the kindest men, the justest men, and the most earnest
men make the worst mistakes in dealing with a certain type of woman.
Many a woman who has brought disgrace upon her family and ruin upon
herself has urged with some justice that if her husband or her father
or her brother had been less kind, less blind, less just, but more
understanding, she would not have been betrayed into disastrous
misconduct. Often and often the question has been asked, “You must have
seen what was going on; why did you not stop me?” and as often the
answer has been, “I admit I ought to have seen, perhaps I did see, but
I could not believe you capable of doing what appearances should have
told me that you were doing.”
The higher a man’s ideal of women, the less willing he is to ascribe
to any particular woman the wantonness of lust; the more charitable
his estimate of the strength of some temptation, the less stern his
condemnation, and the greater his readiness to accept excuses for
levity; the higher the range of his own ambitions, and the wider the
area of his own interests, the less capable he is of imagining how
large small slights and imperfect sympathy may appear to a being cast
in a narrower mould. Many a man by acquiescing in a discovered want
of sympathy between himself and his wife has wounded her pride and
provoked her to acts of self-assertion. What was part of his life was
perhaps the whole of hers, and in the end he has been astounded at the
disproportion of the punishment which she has inflicted. Without any
conscious refusal to see things as they really were, any conscious
deference to the susceptibilities of Augustus, Tiberius may well have
been slow to believe in the case against Julia, whose good nature and
frankness might weigh against her want of seriousness.
When, however, Tiberius came to live permanently at Rome, the facts
could no longer be concealed from him, though they were possibly still
concealed from Augustus. He could repudiate Julia, but that would have
caused a public scandal, and have wounded a man in his most sensitive
spot whom he had always known as his truest friend; he could not,
however, continue to live with her, that would justify the charge of
guilty connivance, and expose him to countless humiliations; further,
there was always the sting of the price at which his forbearance up to
the present moment seemed to have been bought.
The course which Tiberius actually took was an heroic one. True he
might have ignored the susceptibilities of Augustus, have repudiated
his daughter, and in the case of resistance have used his now
established power to force the Emperor into private life; he might
have held that he was justified in so doing, that he had been wilfully
deceived, and that his pretended friend had deliberately used him for
his own purposes. But if ever he was tempted to conduct so violent, and
yet under the supposed circumstances so justifiable, he put away the
temptation; he decided that if there was to be a retirement, he was
himself the right man to retire. This course had the further attraction
that it put a summary end to that ugly suspicion of corrupt connivance.
Tiberius matured his plan secretly. Nobody outside his family knew that
he had definitely left Rome till he was already sailing down the coast
of Italy. A fast galley was sent after him, with letters imploring him
to return, and not to desert the Emperor in his old age; it overtook
him before he had passed the Straits of Messina, but the messengers
were abruptly dismissed. No further attempt was made to recall him
till after he had arrived at Rhodes, his ultimate destination, though
he seems to have lingered on his way, and to have spent some time at
Athens, long enough to enable him to be the first Roman who sent a
chariot to compete at the Olympic games.
It was not long before the real cause of his departure became known
to Augustus. Julia’s extravagant conduct was so notorious that it
could no longer be concealed from her father. Livia is credited with
having engineered the ultimate discovery, and even aided and abetted
the grievous misconduct with ulterior motives. Augustus, in the name
of Tiberius, wrote a bill of divorcement, and banished his daughter
to the island of Pandateria off the coast of Campania. The list of
corespondents was a long one. Julius Antonius, the son of Marcus
Antonius, and stepson of Octavia, was among them; he committed suicide
on the discovery of the scandal. After him Paterculus mentions Quintius
Crispinus, Appius Claudius, Sempronius Gracchus, Scipio, a relative of
Julia through her mother, “and other men of less reputation of both
orders.” It was a comprehensive list, and inclines us to suspect that
Tacitus is right in saying that something more alarming than mere
adultery had taken place, and that Julia had allowed herself to be
involved in a plot against her husband and father. It is curious that
Paterculus should confine the list of nameless admirers to members
of the Senatorial and Equestrian Orders. If Julia had been merely
a licentious woman, we should expect to find slaves and gladiators
among the company of her lovers. Amorous intrigues in the atmosphere
of Rome were apt to end in more dangerous conspiracies, and though
the self-esteem of the pious and patriarchal Augustus must have been
deeply wounded by his daughter’s guilt, the punishment of exile awarded
to her, and of death to her gallants, strikes us as disproportionate.
It is most probable that there really was a conspiracy in which Julia
allowed herself to be used, prompted by a desire to settle up accounts
with that veteran intriguer Livia, and that this was the concluding
scene of the first act in the long drama of the feud between the
Julians and Claudians in the Imperial household.
Tiberius behaved on this occasion with dignity and generosity. He wrote
to Augustus deprecating extreme severity to Julia, and begging that she
might be allowed to retain for her own use any gifts that he had made
to her. Such gifts will not have been inconsiderable, for Tiberius must
have been a very rich man; it required a large fortune to inhabit the
famous palace of Pompeius, and on his return to Rome Tiberius lived in
the no less splendid villa of Mæcenas on the Esquiline.
On withdrawing from public affairs Tiberius decided to live as a
private citizen; this he had every right to do. His motive in selecting
Rhodes for his place of residence has to do with features in his
intellectual inclinations upon which we have not as yet touched. The
silly story that Tiberius elected to reside in Rhodes because he could
there enjoy unlimited debauchery may be at once dismissed on the
ground of inherent absurdity. A man who wishes to conceal his vices
does not select a university town, a great commercial town, the house
of call for the mercantile service of the world, the spot visited by
all officials on their way back to and from the capital, an island
where everybody knows everybody else’s business, as the scene of his
loathsome excesses; and Rhodes was all these things. Possibly an
advantage enjoyed by Rhodes in being free from the direct control of
a Roman Proconsul rendered it desirable as a place of residence for
a man in the position of Tiberius, who wished to avoid friction with
the Roman authorities. Most of the famous cities on the Greek mainland
were now in a decayed condition; Corinth alone retained something of
its mercantile importance, Athens had become an agreeable place of
residence as well as a university town; but the cities on the coast of
Asia Minor, Smyrna and Ephesus, and the islands off the coast, Samos
and Rhodes, flourished as they had never flourished before. The corn
ships from Alexandria frequently touched at Rhodes; she lay in the path
between Antioch and Rome, and had become the meeting place between East
and West. This gave a special character to her university. Athens was
purely Greek, but Rhodes was both Oriental and Greek.
Rhodes, though largely despoiled of its trees, is still among the most
agreeable of the Greek islands, and in the days of its luxuriance was
particularly beautiful. Tiberius shared that taste for islands which
inspires the day dreams of many of our own contemporaries. Men only
learn by experience that the secluded charms of a sea-girt residence
are balanced by its inconvenience; but the inconvenience of restricted
and precarious supplies would not be felt at Rhodes, the island being
large enough to be self-dependent, besides being the calling place
of shipping: thus Tiberius could look forward to a life spent in the
pursuit of congenial and serious studies, in delightful scenery, and in
the full stream of the world’s traffic.
The studies which especially attracted Tiberius were then called
mathematical--we should now call them scientific--but neither was
the science of the ancients our science, nor their mathematics our
mathematics. The special branch of science which interested Tiberius
was astronomy; but astronomy in his time was merged in astrology, and
with astrology were associated other supposed means of predicting the
future, that vain preoccupation of mankind. Great skill in judicial
astrology was attributed by the ancients to Tiberius, and it is not
likely that he escaped the intellectual contagions of his age; but
we must be cautious in refusing to concede the possession of a truly
scientific temperament to men of his age, or of much later ages, solely
because they were credited by their contemporaries with sharing in
what we now believe to be frivolous superstitions.
Nearly a century after the death of Tiberius, Apuleius, the compiler
and in part author of the famous _Golden Ass_, was accused before a
Roman Proconsul of magic, and of having bewitched the somewhat elderly
lady who had become his wife; his defence is still extant. There
are many interesting points in it, not the least interesting being
the inclusion of Moses in a list of eminent magicians; but the most
striking features of the apology are the contemptuous way in which
Apuleius deals with the current superstitions as to magic, and the
indications that he was pursuing research on lines which would now
be recognized as scientific--“You say I use mirrors; certainly I do;
so did Archimedes. I am studying their influence on light and heat.
You say that I have collected strange fishes; yes, I am interested
in comparing the structure of their skeletons.” It is strange how
old are modern superstitions. Among the charges against Apuleius was
one of hypnotism, based upon the fact that a boy had been seen to
fall senseless in his presence. Apuleius had no difficulty in proving
that the boy was an epileptic. Hypnotism is still uncanny to the
non-scientific world.
Tiberius could not study astronomy or any other branch of science in
his own day without being suspected of magic and divination; the things
were almost mutually convertible terms, but the ancients had made
considerable advances in the direction of the applied sciences, and had
found out many working hypotheses, which were strictly scientific so
far as the then sources of information allowed, even though further
researches have proved them to be untenable. We should do injustice to
Tiberius if we believed, as his contemporaries were ready to believe,
that he spent his time at Rhodes in casting the horoscopes of himself
and all other persons in whose destiny he had reason to be interested;
but at the same time we must admit that the dividing line between
science and pure charlatanry scarcely existed in those days, and that
men such as Simon Magus and Elymas the Sorcerer frequently mistook the
nature of their own proficiencies. Along with much sound astronomical
knowledge, and with many equally sound results of experimental
research, the East sent through various channels to the West a strange
farrago of religion and so-called magical arts in which the esoteric
learning of the Magicians, the Chaldeans, the Jews, the Greeks, the
Egyptians, and even the Brahmins, was monstrously mixed up with popular
superstitions and wilful imposture. The strong common sense which
Tiberius exhibited in his public actions at a later time forbids us to
believe that he lost his head at this period in hazardous and illusory
speculations. We know that he took his place as an ordinary citizen of
a free Greek town, and joined in the debates of its assembly, that he
attended the lectures of the professors, and that his chosen associate
was Thrasyllus, “a mathematician.” There is a pleasant story to the
effect that Tiberius once went to a schoolmaster at Rhodes who called
himself Diogenes, and was used to lecture on Sabbath days, asking for
the honour of a special audience. Diogenes did not even admit him,
but sent a verbal message by a dirty little slave boy, bidding him
come back on the seventh day. Tiberius took no notice of the rudeness
at the time, but when, after he had become Emperor, he was told that
Diogenes was waiting outside his door at Rome in order to convey his
congratulations, he sent out to tell him to come back in seven years.
For some time Tiberius lived contentedly in his retreat; he was visited
by all men of any distinction, who were passing on their way between
Rome and the East; he maintained a friendly correspondence with
Augustus, and doubtless concluded that he was at liberty to do what
Horace had so repeatedly urged upon his friends, “to live to himself.”
But this life of moral introspection and scientific investigation was
not allowed to last; Tiberius was rudely waked out of his dream, and
learned that men who have once held a great position in the world
cannot abdicate. Sinister influences were at work; not only did his own
life seem to be in danger, but there were signs that the government of
Augustus was itself in peril.
VIII
The Return of Tiberius
During the first five years of his residence at Rhodes, Tiberius,
though he abstained from public business, was still the second person
in the Empire, and still protected by the awe-inspiring atmosphere
which hung round a Roman Tribune. He was, indeed, obliged to reside in
the interior of the island in order to avoid the interruption caused
by throngs of unwelcome visitors, who were anxious to pay their court
to the great personage. Suetonius has two stories of his residence
at Rhodes, which show him in no unamiable light. Tiberius once, in
drawing up his programme for the day, had happened to say that he
proposed to visit all the sick persons in the city. Zealous attendants
immediately went out, and ordered all the invalids of the town to be
taken into a public portico, and arranged according to the nature
of their maladies. Tiberius was taken by surprise and considerably
embarrassed, but recovered himself, spoke to each one, and apologized
for the mistake individually, even to the humblest. On one occasion
only he used his official position; when he was attending a disputation
at the University the wrangling one day became so fierce that a heated
professor made a violent personal attack upon Tiberius, as unfairly
supporting his opponent. Tiberius quietly withdrew, and returned in
official splendour with his train, summoned the intemperate professor
in due legal form, and sent him to prison to meditate upon the enormity
of provoking a breach of the Roman peace.
At the end of the five years Tiberius might well think that he could
return to Rome without being suspected of a wish to exercise political
influence, so plainly had he shown his indifference to public life.
He had left his son at Rome, and there were others to whom he was
attached; there were the three children of his brother Drusus, with
their charming mother Antonia; and in spite of their awkward mutual
relations, he had a genuine affection for Augustus. The family
entanglements had been straightened out; Julia was in exile; the young
Cæsars were beginning to take their part in public affairs. Surely
their stepfather could live in dignified retirement at Rome, ready to
advise and help, when counsel and assistance were demanded of him, but
otherwise unmolested and unobserved.
This, however, was not to be. Augustus himself had acquiesced in the
departure of Tiberius, if not before, certainly after the revelation
of the intemperance of Julia, and was not improbably touched by the
consideration which Tiberius had shown for his personal difficulties
in the matter. But Livia had been bitterly disappointed; all her
schemes had come to nothing just at the moment when the victory seemed
to have been won, and her son had been declared heir-apparent, as far
as the constitutional forms of Rome permitted. Consequently when
Tiberius wrote, expressing an intention of returning to Rome and his
wish to see his relatives, further declaring his determination to
acquiesce in whatever arrangements Augustus might be disposed to make
for the advancement of the young Cæsars, and pointing to his voluntary
retirement as irrefutable evidence of the fact that he wished to stand
out of their way, he received an exceedingly unamiable answer, and was
told that he need not concern himself about the affairs of relatives,
whom he had been so very ready to abandon. We are not told whether this
letter was written by Livia or by Augustus; but it was surely written
at the instance of Livia. No man was more willing to forgive and to
forget than the Emperor; his whole life had been a record of successful
conciliation of declared enemies; both by policy and inclination he was
averse to the maintenance of personal feuds. Livia, too, may have seen
in the stiffness of Tiberius a reason for advancing the young Cæsars,
over whom, as more pliable, she hoped to secure influence.
This letter changed the position of Tiberius. His retirement was no
longer voluntary; he had become an exile, and the difficulties of his
situation were only slightly modified by the concession of “a free
legation,” a nominal office frequently bestowed upon men of wealth
and distinction, who wished to travel with the advantages attached to
an official position. Tiberius, in fact, had to learn that there are
responsibilities and positions which render abdication impossible; that
having once been acting Commander-in-Chief and Prime Minister, he must
always be a political personage, a force to be reckoned with; and if
this fact was not apparent to him, it was very apparent to the advisers
of the young Cæsars, and the worshippers of the rising sun.
During the absence of Tiberius these young men had been carefully put
through the training, which had been successful in the case of the
stepsons of Augustus. Caius, the elder, was now nineteen years of age,
Lucius two or three years younger; there was a third brother, Agrippa,
born after his father’s death, and still a child, showing signs of
intractability. Like Tiberius and Drusus, they were sent to learn the
organization of the Empire and the administration of the Roman Legions.
Lucius went to Gaul, on his way to Spain; Caius was sent to the East,
and like Tiberius was entrusted with the management of the difficult
concerns of the Parthian frontier; he was provided with an adviser in
the person of Marcus Lollius.
The habit of scientific veracity is unknown to the Roman historians;
any fact is good enough for them, provided it makes good copy, and
can be dealt with in a picturesque sentence or neat epigram. They pay
little attention to the consecutive order of events, are not always
careful to distinguish between persons of the same name, and are rather
attracted than otherwise by an opportunity of attributing contradictory
qualities to the same person; the time at which a thing was done is of
little importance to them, the person by whom it was done of equally
little; a good story is to them a good story, and nothing more; if
its effect is increased by hanging it on the name of a well known man,
they seldom stop to inquire whether he can be justly implicated in the
events narrated; consequently it is always agreeable to find their
statements corroborated by undesigned coincidences. Paterculus and
Suetonius agree in telling us that the last two years of the life of
Tiberius at Rhodes were made a burden to him by the sinister influence
of Marcus Lollius, but they leave us in some doubt as to who this
Marcus Lollius really was, whether he was the same man who was Consul
in B.C. 21, and Commander-in-chief in Northern Gaul in B.C. 16, whether
the Consul and the General were two different persons, and whether the
adviser of Caius Cæsar was not the Consul but his son.
The poet Horace addressed one of his odes and two of his epistles
to a Lollius. It has been generally assumed, on the ground of a
misunderstood allusion, that the ode was written for the father,
and the two letters for the son; comparison of the three shows that
they must have been written to the same person, and that that person
could not have been Consul in B.C. 21. Letters and ode alike contain
advice which Horace could not have addressed even to a man his equal
in rank and of his own age without a risk of putting a summary end to
any friendship that might have existed between them, still less to a
Consular, and possibly a senior. Horace tells us definitely that he
was forty-four years of age in the year when Lollius and Lepidus were
consuls; the family of Lollius had been hitherto undistinguished;
the name appears on no previous occasion in the consular lists, nor
had the man himself done anything to suggest him as a fit recipient
of premature honours. The legal age for admission to the Consulship
was forty-three, and though the law was frequently broken in times of
revolution, or in favour of candidates of the Imperial House, Augustus,
whose policy was to restore the old as far as it was not incompatible
with the new, was not likely to break the law in favour of a man who
was not inevitable. It is not likely that Lollius the Consul was one of
those young men who were rapidly pushed through the routine of office,
because they had claims which could not be disregarded, or because
it was necessary to conciliate their families. Horace could not have
written, as he did write, to the man who was Consul in B.C. 21.
The second of the two letters included in the collection was certainly
written in B.C. 21; the date is fixed by an allusion to the fact that
Augustus was at the time away demanding the restoration of the Eagles
from the Parthians. The person to whom it was addressed was about
to become the companion of some young man of distinction, probably
Drusus, for Tiberius was at this time absent with Augustus, and on his
return passed under the tutelage of Agrippa, so far as he was not in
the hands of Augustus himself. The advice which Horace gives could not
be applicable to a man old enough to be Consul, and therefore not in
a subordinate position to his charge; but it is strictly applicable
to a young man who was to be the companion of another young man, his
superior in rank or position. Everything in the letter indicates the
youth of Lollius; he was to share in the athletic amusements of his
friend; the temptations, which he is to resist, are the temptations of
a young man. The advice given is excellent, and might be profitably
studied by any young man of the present day, who happens to find
himself in a similar situation; some of it is distinctly personal,
and tells us what kind of a young man this Lollius was. Horace begins
by addressing him as “liberrime Lolli,” “most independent Lollius,”
and indicates that one of his dangers is undue sensitiveness to the
imputation of servility. He concludes with some general advice not
specially applicable to the particular occasion: “In the midst of all
you will read the works of learned men, and strictly enquire of them
how you may be able to live your life in comfort, whether you are
always to be harassed and excited by a sense of poverty, excessive
anxiety, and the expectation of but moderate affluence, whether virtue
is acquired by learning or given by nature, what dispels care, what
puts you on good terms with yourself, what calms and purifies, honour
or the pleasures of gain, or the side road, and the path of the
unobserved.” We should be at liberty to infer from this that the good
qualities of Lollius were balanced by an irritable ambition and a love
of money.
The other epistle to Lollius, though he is addressed with mock
solemnity in the first line as “most mighty Lollius,” is clearly
written to a boy: “while you are spouting Homer at Rome I have read
him over again at Præneste.” The recitation of the Homeric poems was
an early step in the educational course of the Romans, and preceded
the technical course in rhetoric. At the end of the letter Horace says:
“Now is the time, boy, to drink in the words of wisdom with a clean
heart; present yourself now to the higher influences.” Horace begins
with drawing moral lessons from the Homer which he has been reading,
and then passes on to general advice: “Don’t wait to enter on the
path of virtue, don’t put off your moral discipline, or the time will
go by,” “The man who is a slave to cupidity or anxiety cannot enjoy
anything,” “Despise sensual pleasures; sensual pleasure is bought with
pain and carries a curse,” “The greedy man is always a poor man; fix a
limit to your desires,” “The Sicilian tyrants never discovered a worse
torture than envy,” “Anger is a short fit of madness; control your
temper, it must be slave or despot; bridle it, bind it with chains.”
These might seem to be mere general moralizings, applicable to anybody,
but we have already had some of them in the previous letter, and they
occur again in the ode addressed to Lollius.
“Lest you should happen to think that the words which I fit to music
will perish, I would have you to remember that though Homer stands
first, other poets are not unknown. Many heroes have lived and died
besides those commemorated by Homer, but their names are lost and
their deeds forgotten, because they never found their inspired bard;
therefore I will not permit your many virtues, Lollius, to pass
unmentioned in my pages. You have an acute intellect, which preserves
its balance whether things go well or ill. The man who punishes
dishonest avarice, abstaining from money the universal tempter, and
is Consul not for one year only, but whenever the good and honest
prefer honour to bribes, flings away the gifts of corruption with
lofty countenance, and victoriously carries his arms through opposing
squadrons. It is not the man with large possessions that you will
rightly call happy; he more correctly claims the name who knows how to
use the gifts of the gods wisely, and can bear the hardships of poverty
and dreads wickedness worse than death; such an one has no fear of
dying for the friends he loves or his fatherland.” Even if we admit
that the rendering of the tenth and eleventh stanzas of this ode is
beset with difficulties, there is no question about the last two with
their praise of poverty.
The allusion to the Consulship has tempted commentators to infer that
the ode was addressed to Lollius, the father, but it is just as likely,
and on other accounts more likely, that the complimentary allusion was
made to the son. “Your father is Consul this year; you will be Consul
for many years if you abstain from certain temptations.”
In fact, all three poems seem to have been written at about the same
time, viz., in the Consulship of the elder Lollius, B.C. 21, whose son
was still a boy when he served under Augustus in Spain, his service
simply amounting to being present in his father’s company during the
campaign.
The situation, in short, seems to have been that Horace was attracted,
as other middle-aged men have been attracted, by a spirited, clever,
and athletic lad, who seemed to have a great future before him, but
whose character was spoiled by three serious defects--a violent temper,
restless ambition, cupidity. The attraction was sufficiently mutual to
allow Horace to give good advice, which he was careful to present in a
complimentary form, but without success, for Paterculus, speaking of
the Lollius who was general in Northern Gaul in B.C. 16, and suffered
a severe defeat, losing the Eagle of the Fifth Legion, describes him
as having been “on all occasions more greedy of money than of acting
properly, steeped in vice though a consummate dissembler.” A page or
two later he speaks of the misdeeds and death of Marcus Lollius, when
acting as adviser of Caius Cæsar in the East.
Lollius may have had an old grudge against Tiberius; he was still a
boy when Tiberius, then at the age of seventeen, accompanied Augustus
to the Cantabrian War, at which Lollius was also present, and he
may already have shown indications of the ungovernable temper which
drew forth the monitions of Horace. Then in B.C. 21 he was appointed
companion to Drusus, the brother of Tiberius. His abilities rapidly
attracted attention; he won the favour of Augustus, and was given a
command on the German frontier. He was unsuccessful and was superseded;
the war was entrusted to Drusus and Tiberius. After this we do not hear
of Lollius in any public capacity till he was made the adviser of Caius
Cæsar. It is again not improbable that he attributed his disgrace to
the representations of the two Neros, of whom Tiberius was now the sole
survivor. The retirement of Tiberius again gave him an opportunity;
he again won the favour of Augustus, and went out to the East with
Caius, prepared to indulge his grudge against Tiberius. Suetonius
definitely tells us that when Caius arrived in the East Tiberius went
to visit him at Samos, and found him ill disposed to himself, owing
to the representations of his companion and adviser, Marcus Lollius;
that this situation lasted for two years; that representations were
even made to Augustus to the effect that Tiberius was tampering with
the fidelity of the centurions in the army of Caius; that Tiberius, on
being informed of this, wrote and begged that a guard might be sent to
observe his actions; that he gave up his customary military exercises,
and adopted the dress of a Greek civilian; that he became day by day
increasingly an object of contempt and hatred, so that the people of
Nîmes threw down his statues, and a man ventured to say at a banquet,
in the presence of Caius, that he would undertake to start for Rhodes
at once and bring back the exile’s head. Tiberius found his position
one of actual peril, and again wrote begging to be allowed to return to
Rome. He did not obtain this permission till Caius had been consulted
on the subject, as Augustus had undertaken to take no step without
his consent. Happily Lollius had by this time lost his influence, and
Caius raised no objection. Paterculus supplies a link in the chain of
events. Lollius, either seeing an opportunity for getting rid of both
Caius and Tiberius, and making himself master in the East, or simply
in the endeavour to raise suspicions against the latter, had opened
a correspondence with the young King of the Parthians, who betrayed
it to Caius, with whom he had celebrated a series of entertainments
on the river Euphrates, closely resembling those held by Napoleon and
the Czar Alexander on the Vistula many centuries later. Lollius died
a few days after the disclosure. Paterculus, who was at that time a
tribune of soldiers in the army of Caius, did not know whether his
death was accidental or self inflicted; he only knew that everybody was
delighted, as they were no less grieved by the death of another of the
friends of Horace, Censorinus, “a man,” says Paterculus, “born to win
the favour of mankind.”
It is characteristic of Suetonius to inform us not that Lollius was
dead, but that he had lost favour with Caius, when the latter permitted
the return of Tiberius to Rome.
It would seem curious that the contempt and dislike in which Tiberius
was held for a short time at Rhodes should have been felt so far
away as Nîmes, in the South of France. Suetonius, in mentioning
the fact, evidently wishes to imply that this contempt of Tiberius
was co-extensive with the Empire; but the strangeness of the fact
disappears when we remember that Lucius Cæsar was at this time in the
South of France on his way to Spain, and supplies a further link in the
chain of evidence which goes to prove the animus of the children of
Julia against their stepfather; they were only too ready to listen to
the suggestions of a Marcus Lollius and others who proposed to build
their fortunes upon the insecure foundation of the favour of these
spoiled grandchildren of the great Augustus.
Tiberius returned to Rome in A.D. 2, the year in which Lucius Cæsar
died suddenly at Marseilles. He did not propose to return to public
life; he gave up his palace in the heart of Rome in the Carinæ, and
transferred his establishment to the villa and gardens which Mæcenas
had laid out on the Esquiline hill outside the walls. He formally
introduced his son Drusus to public life by presenting him in the
Forum, but himself abstained from any but private business. Meanwhile
Caius Cæsar had gone again to Armenia, where he was severely wounded
by a native at a conference to which he had entrusted himself with
insufficient precaution. The wound was not immediately fatal, but
proved disabling both to mind and body. The young man had been
captivated by Oriental luxury, and found flatterers to support him in
a design of remaining permanently “in the most distant corner of the
world.” He was, however, persuaded to return to Rome, and died on his
way back in a Lycian town.
Fate had decided that Tiberius should not evade his responsibilities.
He had firmly resisted every attempt made by Augustus to seduce him
from his retirement after his return to Rome, but the death of Caius
left him no option. Both privately and in the Senate publicly Tiberius
protested without avail; it was not a case of “nolo episcopari”; he
genuinely preferred a private position, and was, in fact, more in
sympathy with the old Republican ideals than with the new dynasty.
But the public safety demanded the presence of a man of experience at
the head of affairs, ready to take over the succession; and it is in
language suitable to this demand that Paterculus describes the joy of
the population of Rome when it was known that Tiberius had been adopted
by Augustus, and again made a colleague in the tribunician power.
“Then again there shone for parents confidence in the future of their
children; husbands could feel secure in their marriages, masters in
their property; all men could look for safety, rest, peace, calm.”
The style of Paterculus, that of a military man, who has done his
best to repair deficiencies in his early education by taking lessons
in the art of writing in later life, is so artificial as to impair
his credit, but on this occasion his choice of language is strictly
correct. The young Cæsars had not been a success; of all the possible
heirs to Augustus who died young, they alone are not credited with
superior virtues. We are not told of them that if they had lived they
would have restored the Republic and checked the flood of adulation.
They inherited the petulance of Julia, her impatience of restraint, and
while the youth of Tiberius and Drusus had been spent in an atmosphere
of insecurity at a time when the power of Augustus himself was not
firmly established, the children of Julia had come into a world which
had forgotten the civil wars, into a court without the traditions of
an ancient dynasty, which saw its models in the seraglio of a Herod
or Phraates, and laughed at the republican simplicity of the home of
Augustus.
The intemperance of Julia was repeated in the next generation; her
eldest daughter, married to a L. Æmilius Paulus, followed in her
footsteps, and was likewise banished to an island in A.D. 2. The
remaining daughter, Agrippina, was married to Germanicus, the son of
Drusus and nephew to Tiberius; she was the mother of Caligula and a
grandmother of Nero.
The years between the restitution of Tiberius and the death of
Augustus were chiefly spent by the former in campaigns in Germany
and Dalmatia, the history of which will be treated separately with
greater convenience. It is worth while at this juncture, when Augustus
and Tiberius were to settle down to work together for ten years, to
investigate the relations between them. Was there on either side
jealousy or mistrust? Did Augustus foresee the tyranny of Tiberius, as
those who believe in the tyranny would have us believe?
One of the many great literary losses which the world has suffered
is the loss of the letters of Augustus. Not only have we lost these
letters, but we have also lost the private notes of Tiberius kept by
him for the benefit of his successor, and burned by Caligula; the only
fragments that we possess of the correspondence of Augustus certainly
do not favour the view that there was any mistrust or want of sympathy
between the two men.
The fragments as they stand in Suetonius are as follows.
The first was written in reply to a letter of Tiberius, complaining
of the violence of language used by one Æmilius Ælianus, a native of
Cordova, against the Emperor, and probably belongs to the period of the
Cantabrian campaign, when Tiberius was still young. “Do not give way,
my dear Tiberius, in this matter to the feelings natural to your time
of life; do not be too ready to be indignant that there should be any
one to speak evil of me; it is enough if we secure this, that nobody
shall be able to do us any harm.”
Then we have two purely domestic letters: “I dined, dear Tiberius,
with the same party; Vinicius and the elder Silius were added to the
company. During dinner we played a family game both yesterday and
to-day, for we threw dice, and whoever threw ‘the dog,’ or six, paid a
shilling into the pool for every dice thrown, which was taken by the
player who threw ‘Venus.’”
“We spent the holidays pleasantly enough, my dear Tiberius, for
we played all day and every day, and made the dice market pretty
hot. Your brother carried on with plenty of shouting; on the whole,
however, he did not lose much, but recovered his losses contrary to
all expectation. I lost about £170 on my own account, but because I
had been prodigally liberal in my play, as I usually am; for if I had
exacted all the winnings that I passed over, or had kept in my own
pocket all that I gave anybody, I should have won nearly £420. However,
I like it best as it is, for my charity will exalt me to eternal glory.”
Again a familiar scrap: “Not even a Jew, my dear Tiberius, preserves
his sabbath fast so carefully as I did to-day, for it was not till
after the first hour of the night that I at last chewed a couple of
mouthfuls in the bath, before I began to be perfumed.”
The following letter probably belongs to the period after the return of
Tiberius, and was written on some occasion when he was starting on a
second campaign It is written with occasional quite unnecessary slips
into Greek, which have been mangled in places by the transcribers, so
as to be unintelligible: “Goodbye, most amiable Tiberius, and farewell
to me and mine ... best of generals. Yes, most amiable, and as I hope
for happiness, most brave man, and most illustrious general, farewell.
The scheme of your summer operations! Well, I, my dear Tiberius, in
the midst of many difficulties and considering the slackness of our
military friends, do not think I could have managed matters with
greater foresight than you have done. The men who were with you, in
fact, all admit that the well known line could be applied to you: ‘One
man saved the state for us by his wakefulness.’ Whenever anything
happens which requires my closer thought, if ever I am very much put
out, I swear to you I miss my dear Tiberius, and that verse of Homer’s
occurs to me ‘when he follows....’ When I hear and read that you are
getting thin under the continuance of your labours, may I be confounded
if my body is not all one shudder, and I implore you to spare yourself,
lest, if we hear that you are in bad health, your mother and I may
expire, and the Roman people be in jeopardy of losing its imperial
position. It does not matter a bit whether I myself am ill or well, if
you are not well. I implore the gods to preserve you to us, and to give
you your health now and always, if they do not utterly hate the Roman
people.”
There is nothing insincere in the tone of this letter; it is as natural
as a letter can be, incoherent in places, but always tender.
In fact, whatever misunderstandings arose between Tiberius and
Augustus were due to the misconduct of Julia, or the silly plots and
counterplots of Livia and the other ladies of the family, who by their
domestic jealousies opened the way to the machinations of men of the
type of Marcus Lollius. The friendship of the two men passed through
the severest possible test, and it survived the test. Augustus may
have thought Tiberius too scrupulous in the matter of Julia, and that
the second place in the Empire was worth a little conjugal blindness,
and even if he did not take that line, there were plenty of men and
women ready to suggest it to him. But the sequel proved that Tiberius
had been right, and he contrived in the end to assert his independence
without being involved in a bitter personal quarrel with Augustus. Nor
must too much stress be laid upon such chance utterances as the often
quoted “O my Roman people, in what slow jaws you will be chewed!” We
do not know the context, and this may very well have been no more than
a piece of good-humoured personal banter, suggested by the well-known
slowness of speech which was characteristic of Tiberius.
Though Augustus was on good terms with Tiberius, the children of Julia
were not; they were more Julian than the head of the Julian race; they
noted everything that could be interpreted to his discredit; they
recorded every hasty word, every ill-advised speech, and as the years
went on their malignity increased, till in the person of Agrippina
it amounted to a monomania. But we must pause to study Tiberius as a
general.
IX
The Campaigns of Tiberius
With the battle of Actium the wars of Rome against nations equally
civilized with herself came to an end; henceforth the rulers of the
world were only called upon to round off the ring fence of their
domains, and establish scientific frontiers. The Empire which is so
often spoken of as the establishment of a military despotism was, in
fact, absolutely the reverse; the power wielded by Marius, by Sulla, by
Pompeius, by Cæsar, by Antonius, had this character, for it depended
upon the military capacity of these generals; they were soldiers in
the first place, and owed their predominance in the civil government
to their own sharp swords and the fidelity of the men who had followed
their standards. Till the Roman was sole umpire in the circle of the
Mediterranean, war was in every respect a profitable investment, and
a military career was the readiest path to political supremacy; not
only did a Roman general return laden with spoil, rich beyond the
dreams of avarice, but his conquests appealed to the imagination of
his countrymen; everybody might be proud of generals and armies who
had beaten the successors of Alexander; but when military operations
were transferred to the frontiers, when the enemies to be subdued were
poor and half civilized, when there were no longer gorgeous robes,
graceful statues, piles of treasure to be exhibited in the triumphal
procession of the victorious general, war lost its prestige; and
the steady progress of the civilian administration is, in fact, the
special feature of the reigns of the Cæsars. Augustus was no soldier;
Tiberius never commanded an army after his succession; the expedition
of Caligula to the shore of the English Channel was a madman’s freak;
Claudius had but little share in the conquest of Britain; Nero’s morbid
vanity preferred the triumphs of the stage to those of the camp. A
state in which the military element is predominant does not put up with
rulers such as these.
The Romans in the reign of Augustus were, so far as military matters
are concerned, and indeed, in most other respects, very much in our
own position at the present day. Just as we thoughtlessly and unjustly
estimate the exploits of our soldiers in the Soudan, on the North-West
frontier of India, on the West Coast of Africa, and even in South
Africa, rather cheaply, and disparage their achievements in comparison
with those of Marlborough and Wellington, so the contemporaries of
Augustus looked back with regret to the heroes of the Punic Wars and
the conquerors of Greece; they did not realize that the work which
was to be done in their own time was far more difficult than the work
which had been done. We too forget that to win the Battle of Waterloo
was a trifle compared with the operations which led up to the victory
of Omdurman, and the double march into the Transvaal. The exploits of
Wellington in the Peninsula were splendid, impeded as they were by
opposition from England; but in the conquest of South Africa England
has grappled with far more serious difficulties, and her generals have
shown themselves at least as resourceful as Wellington.
The generals of the Augustan age are hardly known to us. Few class
Agrippa with the leading generals of the world, but the man who for the
first time organized the navy of the Roman Empire, who maintained the
organization of the army on such a footing that the enormous frontier
was never without its defenders, who was himself never beaten in the
field, and who trained a succession of capable officers to follow in
his footsteps, was no mean general. Similarly Tiberius and his brother,
along with many capable subordinates, waged successful campaigns under
conditions of peculiar difficulty for many years; but we never think
of them as great soldiers, because their exploits did not stir the
imagination of their contemporaries.
Vast though the Roman Empire was, its vulnerable frontiers were of
relatively small extent in the reign of Augustus; there was a weak
place at the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates; the Upper Nile had
its Soudanese difficulty then as now, but the whole of the North Coast
of Africa was protected by the desert, and the Mauretanian tribes were
not numerous enough really to imperil the strip of civilization along
the Mediterranean. Spain was all Roman and nearly all civilized, so was
Gaul; but between the mouths of the Rhine and the Bosphorus there was
a vast unsettled region, reaching down in one place to a point within
ten days’ journey of Rome itself, and along an unbroken line of many
hundred miles, threatening the cities of Macedonia and Greece. The
problem before Augustus and his generals was to form a frontier which
should permanently secure Gaul, Italy, and the Balkan Peninsula from
the adventurous races of central and East Central Europe.
The weakest point in the chain of defence was the Northern corner of
the Adriatic, and the increasing prosperity of the great plains of
the Po after they had become a Roman province naturally attracted the
attention of the semi-civilized tribes who lived in the hills along
the Dalmatian coast. Not only was there danger from the East, but the
valley of the Adige formed a gateway through which Central Europe
could pour its restless multitudes upon the Cis-Alpine Province. The
geographical configuration of the regions south of the plains of the
Eastern Danube has always impeded their progress, and to this very day
a patch of backward nationalities remains there in close proximity to
the most elaborately civilized states of Europe.
The other weak spot was the course of the Rhine, and especially the
country below the Drakensberg; that noble river for many miles from the
Lake of Constance formed a natural defence against the Germanic hordes,
but on reaching the flat land below Cologne it spread into marshes
and split into smaller channels, in which flotillas of boats could be
prepared without attracting notice, as was necessarily the case where
the river ran in a single stream. In fact it was practically found that
in places the Rhine was no barrier, and that the tribes on its Eastern
bank must be rolled back from the river, if Gaul was to enjoy her new
prosperity in peace.
It was in the defence of these two weak spots that Tiberius was to
fight his chief campaigns. In both regions security demanded that the
operations should be conducted far beyond the frontier, in country
difficult at the present day, and tenfold more difficult then, when
extensive forests and marshes were added to the impediments offered by
ravines and mountains.
It is not easy to estimate the degree of civilization reached by the
Pannonians and Dalmatians or the Germanic tribes, when they made war
upon the Roman legions. To the ancients all men living under tribal
or national institutions were barbarians; they restricted the honour
of civilization to those whose political constitution was based upon
the city, and though the Græco-Roman city organization practically
covered the two peninsulas, which we call Greece and Italy, it did not
elsewhere extend far inland; the outer fringe of cities was in close
contact with populations living under a clan system, whose chiefs or
kings adopted many of the luxuries and some of the institutions of
their neighbours; behind these again were less advanced nations and
less civilized rulers, gradually merging into real barbarism. The
Gallic chieftains had already been in frequent communication with Rome
for a century before Cæsar conquered Gaul, and the influence of the
Roman traders upon the general standard of civilization was perceptible
in his time even among the German tribes nearest to the Rhine. Arminius
had had a Roman education, Maroboduus was brought up by Augustus,
adopted the Roman military system and welcomed refugees who could train
his troops; Latin was already spoken by the Dalmatian tribes when
they were eventually conquered by Tiberius. Though the greater part
of Central Europe was under forest the valleys were cultivated, as
they were in Britain at the time of Cæsar’s invasions, but the forest
was always near enough to receive fugitives, and to give cover to an
attacking party. There were no large aggregations of human beings in
towns, but there were areas sufficiently thickly populated, and their
population was sufficiently well organized to bring formidable armies
into the field, whose operations were skilfully conducted. The men
were no more savages than the Boers are savages; their civilization
was a different civilization from the Græco-Roman, but it was a
civilization. The occurrences of the Highland Line were anticipated in
the foothills of the Alps; sometimes there was a mere cattle-lifting
raid, when a predecessor of Rob Roy swooped down upon the farms round
Mantua or Cremona, sometimes a combination of clans under a capable
chieftain waged a formidable war, whose object was less plunder than
the preservation of their independence; sometimes the pressure of real
savagery from behind urged the more civilized races forward till the
ultimate wave fell upon the Roman frontier.
Far in the East round the mouths of the Danube the predecessors of the
Cossacks on their little horses kept the Roman outposts in a state of
terror. Ovid tells us how they swooped down upon the labourers in the
fields round the camp at Tomi, how their arrows fell into its very
centre, how they galloped round its walls, picked up some unfortunate
straggler, and were off with him before pursuit could be organized.
Reading such a description as this we realize the true significance
of the two Roman walls in England, and the wall from the Main to the
Danube in Germany. They were not defences against systematic war; they
were too long to be defended against an organized invasion, but they
effectually prevented raiding. Cattle cannot be lifted over a wall
twelve feet high. The difference between our frontier wars and the
Roman frontier wars lies in the proximity of the Roman frontiers to the
heart of the Empire; but in spite of the perpetual imminence of the
danger, the Romans did not pay a sufficient tribute of gratitude to the
generals who secured their safety, and were inclined to underestimate
their services.
Even such a clear-sighted historian as Merivale, in speaking of the
military operations of Tiberius and Drusus in Germany, adopts the
attitude of Tacitus, and disparages the cautious policy of Augustus,
which discouraged schemes of boundless conquest in Central Europe.
Tacitus wrote, when Trajan was engaged in rectifying the frontier
of the Lower Danube, new dangers threatened the Empire and new
measures seemed advisable. The men of his day might be pardoned for
thinking that they were called upon to do what Augustus had unwisely
left undone. Possibly they were right, but they omitted from their
calculations a fact which was of the first importance, and of itself
imposed prudence. The fighting strength of the Empire was not adequate
for a policy of indefinite expansion at the end of the reign of
Augustus, nor even in its middle period. It was difficult to steer
between the two extremes. Augustus had seen the evils of a rampant
military policy in the careers of his uncle and Antonius; he had known
what it was to be the puppet of his own soldiers; he had fought in the
Civil Wars, and he rightly inferred that there could be no settled
government so long as the sword outbalanced the gown. Quite apart
from any personal ambition or mean motive, he shrank from creating
fresh military heroes, who might be tempted to overthrow the carefully
balanced fabric of the State, and renew the Marian and Sullan episodes,
or the hateful reign of the Triumvirate in which he had himself taken
an unwilling part. On the other hand, a certain strength was necessary
to police the Empire and guard its frontiers. In the encouragement
which he gave to civilians in the public service, in the revival of
commerce, and the abundance of employment secured by the internal peace
of the Empire, Augustus cut off his supply of recruits; the army no
longer competed favourably with other employments, and year by year
the number of homeless and ruined men, to whom military service had
opened an opportunity, was reduced. Men were too precious to be lightly
ventured on interminable expeditions in the Hercynian forest, where the
elk, and possibly even the mammoth, still tested the ingenuity of the
hunter.
At the age of seventeen Tiberius accompanied Augustus and Agrippa
to Spain, where a campaign was conducted in the mountainous regions
occupied by the Cantabrians. Augustus soon fell ill and returned home,
but Tiberius remained to take his first lessons in war under the able
and ingenious Agrippa. The Romans wisely flung their young men into
active life at a very early age, and those who had it in them to
learn, had every opportunity of learning. Four years later Tiberius,
barely of age to manage his own affairs according to our ideas, was
put in command of the expedition which penetrated Armenia, and awed
the Parthians into a surrender of the captured standards. We are not
told that there was any serious fighting on this occasion; the triumph
was one of diplomacy rather than of arms, and the expedition itself
took the form of an armed demonstration strong enough to determine
the course of the negotiations rather than of a campaign. Doubtless
Tiberius was attended by capable advisers in addition to those splendid
centurions, the link between the commissioned and non-commissioned
officers, who formed the backbone of the Roman armies; but in any
case the experience was a valuable one. It was necessary that the
army should be conducted through a difficult and mountainous country,
far from its base; any negligence, any want of foresight, might have
brought on a disaster which, even if only temporary, would have spoiled
the effect contemplated, and weakened the Roman Plenipotentiaries. The
expedition was a better training than even a long course of autumn
manœuvres, and Tiberius returned from it with a full knowledge of
military problems.
The extraordinary indifference of the historians Paterculus and
Suetonius to chronology, and their absolutely casual use of such
connectives as “hereupon,” “soon afterwards,” and the like, makes it
difficult to be certain of the real sequence of events. It is, however,
certain that Tiberius was Governor of Transalpine Gaul for a year at
some period between B.C. 20 and B.C. 16, that he was harassed during
the term of his Governorship by sporadic invasions of German tribes,
and was able to measure their importance as affecting the peace of his
Province, and form plans for permanently checking them. He came to the
conclusion that the whole middle and eastern Alpine region was a centre
of disturbance, and that it could not be dealt with alone, seeing that
the tribes who lived on the Dalmatian coast and at the sources of the
Save were always ready to create a diversion when the Roman armies were
occupied in the valleys to the south or north-west of the Alps. Cæsar
had more than once been called back from the conquest of Gaul to deal
with the Pirustæ in the same quarter.
In B.C. 16 the ill-omened Marcus Lollius sustained a serious defeat at
the hands of the German tribes, while Gaul itself had been rendered
unquiet by the exactions of Licinus, himself a Gaul employed by
Augustus as Governor in the Southern Province. Augustus himself went
to Gaul to set straight the civilian administration, Agrippa was sent
to the Illyrian regions, Drusus to the passes leading from Lombardy to
the Upper Rhine, while Tiberius took charge of an expedition directed
upon the same region from Basle by the Lake of Constance. This was the
first of the great combined movements originated by Tiberius; their
conception, but even more their success, mark him out as a general of
genius. Given a mobile enemy able to live on the country, and provided
with an interminable area at his rear into which he can retreat, the
only hope of dealing with him successfully is to cut off his retreat.
This was the strategy of Tiberius.
The army of Agrippa in Illyria protected the rear of Drusus, who was
able to drive the Alpine tribes back through the passes to the Northern
face of the Alps, where they found the army of Tiberius ready for
them. The victory was so complete that the very names of these tribes
disappear from history; squeezed between two Roman armies they were
doubtless exterminated. Horace wrote an official ode on the occasion,
comparing Drusus to a young eagle or lion; and in a complimentary ode
to Augustus on another occasion, compared the charge of Tiberius to the
impetuous floods of the Aufidus, his native river. The northern slopes
of the Western Alps were now secured to Rome; there was no longer any
danger of Gallic intrigues stimulated by the restless Helvetii, but the
work was by no means done. Augustus seems to have remained for some
time in Gaul studying its social conditions, Agrippa remained in the
Illyrian district, Drusus was sent to the lower Rhine, and Tiberius,
as far as we can gather, remained at Rome.
Profiting by the experience gained in the recent war, Drusus determined
to repeat the strategy of Tiberius, and again to hem in an elusive
enemy between two Roman armies; he himself marched up the Lippe, making
a point on the Weser, somewhere near Paderborn, his objective, and at
the same time he sent a flotilla down the Rhine, with instructions
to ascend the mouth of the Weser, and thus cut off the flight of the
Germans. The first attempt failed, the fleet being dispersed by storms;
it was reserved for Tiberius himself to succeed at a later date in this
combined movement. In the following year Drusus advanced to the Weser,
and on his return established a permanent outpost at Aliso, fifty
miles up the Lippe; this was the period of the death of Agrippa, whose
command in Pannonia was taken over by Tiberius. We know but little of
the operations of Tiberius in Pannonia at this time, except that they
were successful, and that the ring of Roman provinces was now completed
along the East coast of the Adriatic, uniting Greece and Macedonia with
Italy.
In B.C. 10 Augustus returned to Gaul; Drusus consecrated a temple in
his honour at Lyons, and the worship of the Roman Empire personified
in Augustus was officially substituted for the Druidical religion, in
whose priesthood Augustus saw the irreconcilable enemy of Rome. After
this ceremony Drusus again crossed the Rhine and penetrated as far as
the Elbe; on his return he met with the accident which caused his
death, and elicited that touching illustration of affection on the part
of Tiberius, to which reference has already been made.
Tiberius took up his brother’s work on the Rhine and remained there
for two years; he has disappointed the historians by doing nothing
sensational, but when at the end of the two years Augustus called him
back to Rome to take the place of Imperial Colleague, he left the
Roman frontier extended, and the German terror pushed back from the
immediate vicinity of the river. He had created a Roman party among
the German chiefs, as Cæsar had created a Roman party among the Gallic
chiefs; partly as hostages, partly as friends, the young German nobles
were tempted to Rome to learn her civilization and form estimates of
her weakness; the Eastern bank of the river was sufficiently Romanized
to tempt Varus to treat it fifteen years later as a Roman province.
Tiberius did more than this: he began that policy which was eventually
to substitute for the magnificent conception of the all-embracing Roman
Empire the map of Europe; he transferred 40,000 Germans to the left
bank of the Rhine; they accepted the lands assigned to them, coupled
with the obligation to service in the armies of their conquerors. It
was a perilous policy, but no one could have foreseen its results in
the distant future, and even if its tendencies had been suspected at
the time, the pressing needs of the Empire would have silenced the
voice of a too clear-sighted critic. The Empire was short of soldiers;
men evaded military service by all possible means. Even the dreaded
slavery of the ergastula seemed to them less terrible than the army;
pay could not be found to make the soldier’s career sufficiently
attractive, now that the chances of loot and liberal donatives were
of the smallest. The finances of the Empire were straitened; Augustus
had had difficulty in adding a death duty of five per cent. to his
resources. The suggestion of Tiberius must have seemed a stroke of
genius: to protect the frontiers by civilizing the enemies of the
Empire, to find a cheap supply of soldiers by imposing military service
on the hardy Germans, gradually to relieve the manufacturer and the
merchant of the burden of finding men and taxes; no words could praise
too highly the man who had suggested a means by which these desirable
objects could be secured. We ourselves are treading in the same path;
we congratulate ourselves on the wisdom which made English soldiers of
Highland clansmen and Irish rapparees, which has arrayed against Russia
the tribes of the North-West frontier, which fights the barbarians of
Central Africa with the trained barbarians of its coasts; but we too
shall have to pay the price which the Roman paid, if we neglect the
military training of the centre of the Empire, and allow its population
to expand unexercised in arms, incapable of fighting. If ever the day
comes when the Sikhs and Goorkhas or even our own children beyond the
seas learn by experience that preponderant force is in their own hands,
and that the breed of fighting men is not ready for action in Great
Britain, the Empire of England will be broken up, as the Empire of
Rome was broken up; not by any sudden cataclysm, but by the gradual
intrusion of the less civilized and less trained components of the
Empire upon the central administration.
The end of the government of Tiberius upon the Rhine was also the
beginning of his retirement; his resumption of public work was almost
immediately followed by a fresh outbreak in the Pannonian region, and
then came a terrible disaster to the Roman arms in the district of the
Rhine. Of the campaigns which followed we fortunately have a fairly
clear account given us by an eyewitness, Paterculus.
Unfortunately the only work from the pen of Paterculus that has come
down to our times, perhaps the only work that he completed, is a short
epitome of Roman history from the beginning to A.D. 30, which seems
to have been written as an introduction to a work of considerable
detail dealing with the campaigns in which the author and the relatives
of his friend Marcus Vinicius, to whom the work is dedicated, took
part. Paterculus belonged to the class of professional soldiers and
administrators whom the Empire called into being, or to whom at least
it gave a position which they had not hitherto enjoyed. In his eyes
the Empire was good, and its rulers were good; and while he is profuse
in his admiration of the heroes of the old Republic, and can pay as
high a tribute to Cicero as to any supporter of the Empire, he is no
less commendatory of the men who were brought to the front by the new
order of things. He does not single out Tiberius as alone worthy of
praise; such men as Marcus Lepidus, the son of the triumvir, and others
who were in a position to excite the jealousy of a suspicious tyrant,
enjoy a full share of his somewhat exuberant laudation. We may admit
that Paterculus was uncritical without accusing him of deliberate
dishonesty; he was a successful man; he was in the swim; he had no
reason for nicely adjusting praise and censure to meet the merits of
the men with whom he worked; he was not a frequenter of the Legitimist
drawing rooms, but an active capable official, bluff, hearty, with an
unfortunate propensity to consider himself a stylist. His grandfather
was, as we have seen, an intimate friend and fellow soldier of the
father of Tiberius; his father was also a soldier; he himself followed
the family profession; he served under Caius Cæsar in Armenia, under
Agrippa in Pannonia, under Tiberius both in Germany and Pannonia; he
was honoured with civil magistracies at Rome, and eventually became a
Senator; his brother was similarly successful. His value to us lies in
the fact that he was an eyewitness of the events which he describes,
and we may be sure that the few details which he thought worthy of
mention in his rapid summary are actual facts. M. Vinicius was Consul
in A.D. 30, and the honour enjoyed by his friend prompted Paterculus to
write and dedicate this little work. In the following year the events
took place which brought about the fall of Sejanus, whom Paterculus
praises highly; possibly he was one of those upon whom the wrath of the
Senate fell; in any case we hear nothing more of him, and his proposed
work was never written, or never published; he died, or at any rate
ceased to speak, before the reign of terror which accompanied the fall
of Sejanus had cast its shadow upon Tiberius, before the reigns of
Caligula and Nero had made it possible to believe every evil of a Roman
Emperor, before the novelty of the Empire had worn off; there was no
reason for adopting any but an optimistic tone.
Tiberius left Rome for Germany in A.D. 4; war had been going on there
for three years, the Roman general being then a Marcus Vinicius,
grandfather of the Consul to whom Paterculus dedicated his book.
Paterculus accompanied Tiberius, and was generally with him during the
nine years of his campaigns; he seems to have been a member of the
headquarters staff, succeeding his father as commander of the cavalry.
He says: “For nine years in succession, either as cavalry commander
or staff officer, I was a spectator of his most heavenly operations,
and assisted him in the measure permitted by my own mediocrity.”
The epithet strikes us as exuberant, but it is frequently used by
Paterculus, and not reserved for Tiberius; he employs it in speaking of
the eloquence of Cicero. The historian tells us of the incidents of the
journey through the most populous regions of Italy and the provinces of
Gaul; he describes the joy with which the inhabitants welcomed their
former governor, while the soldiers pressed to seize his hand, and
shouted, “Do we really see you, General? Have we got you safe again?
I served with you in Armenia, I in Rhætia, I was rewarded by you in
Vindelicia, I in Pannonia, I in Germany.”
The first year’s campaign extended to the Weser, and was continued to
the month of December; Tiberius then returned to Rome, leaving his
soldiers in winter quarters near the sources of the Lippe. He was back
again early in the following spring, and in this year successfully
completed the operation in which Drusus had failed, on a more extended
scale; he made the Elbe, not the Weser, his objective, and sent round
a fleet to meet his troops with fresh supplies. Paterculus attributes
the success of this enterprise not only to the good fortune and
diligence of the Commander-in-Chief, but to his careful study of the
seasons. On this occasion the Romans first came across the Lombards,
“a race whose courage surpassed even German ferocity”; they seem to
have been settled on the East of the Elbe in the region of Magdeburg.
Paterculus has a doubtless true story of an elderly German who asked to
be allowed to see Tiberius, and on receiving permission paddled across
the Elbe; after having stared at him for some time he touched his hand,
and declaring that he had now beheld the gods, bewailed the folly of
his young men who insisted on fighting with their superiors; he then
returned to his boat, and departed across the Elbe, still keeping his
eyes on the group of Roman officers. There is nothing improbable in
this story; savages are particularly impressed by size, and the stately
form of Tiberius, glorious in such a uniform as we see on the Augustus
of the Prima Porta, may well have appeared superhuman to the uncultured
Lombard.
The practical results of the campaign were to convince Tiberius that an
eastward extension of the Roman frontier was alike impracticable and
undesirable; the problem was to find a defensible line of outposts
near the Rhine and overawe the tribes who lived beyond it; but before
Tiberius had time to rectify the frontier he was called off to deal
with a far more serious war nearer Italy.
Maroboduus, the King of the Marcomanni, settled his followers in the
neighbourhood of Vienna, having formed the idea of creating a great
military power in Germany; it was the first conception of a German
Empire, for many tribes were to be united in the confederacy by which
the aggressions of Rome were to be stopped, and the tide of invasion
possibly turned in the opposite direction. This man, a Suevian by
birth, had been a hostage, and was brought up under the care of
Augustus at Rome; in this case, as in several others, the policy of
educating a native prince, so that he might bring his people under
Roman civilization, proved to be of doubtful advantage. Maroboduus
applied the lessons which he learned at Rome to resisting the extension
of the Empire. He got together a force of 70,000 foot and 4,000
cavalry, drilled them carefully in the Roman fashion, and fixed upon
Bohemia as the suitable centre of his Empire. He did not attack the
Romans, that was not his first object; he wished to civilize Germany
and create a counterpoise to Rome. Tiberius saw that this could not
be permitted; the proposed German Empire was too near the turbulent
Pannonian region for safety; it was necessary to nip the nascent
civilization of Central Europe in the bud. In order finally to break
the power of Maroboduus, Tiberius decided to carry out another of those
vast combined operations in which he had already twice succeeded. He
sent Sentius Saturninus with one army to march from the Rhine through
the Hercynian forest to the Danube, while he himself brought up another
army from Cis-Alpine Gaul through the Julian Alps. The operation was
so admirably planned and its details so well considered, that the two
armies found themselves each within five days of their meeting point,
when a fresh outbreak of Pannonia and Dalmatia threatened Tiberius in
the rear, and compelled him to take his army back to another scene of
war. Though this great operation failed in one way, it seems to have
succeeded in another; it effectually cowed Maroboduus, who did not
intervene, as might have been anticipated, in the Pannonian troubles,
while it shook the confidence of the Germans in their self-appointed
Emperor; we find him at a later time a fugitive living under the
protection of Rome.
The precision with which Tiberius was able to time the arrival of the
army of Saturninus indicates a greater knowledge of the geography
of the districts north of the Alps, and a less savage condition of
those regions, than the statements of Cæsar would lead us to imagine
possible. We can hardly take literally the statement of Paterculus
that Sentius was told to cut through the Hercynian forest; such work
may have been necessary on the watershed of the Neckar and the Danube,
or, if, as is most probable, the advance was made by a more northerly
route, between the Main and the Danube, but when once in the basin
of the Danube, the Roman soldiers must have found their way fairly
open, and they must further have found sufficient supplies of food.
The central uplands of Germany were then as now covered with forests
and more thickly covered, but there must have been known tracks along
which an army could be led. In the southern basin of the Upper Danube,
after the conquest of the Vindelici, a Roman military colony had been
founded at Augsburg, indicating that measures were rapidly taken to
sweep the rich country north of the Alps into the net of the Empire.
Everywhere the traders, whose chief business was slave hunting, pushed
in advance of the Roman armies, and Tiberius was thus able to get
sufficiently accurate information to launch an army upon the country
north of Vienna from the north-west, timed to meet his own advance from
the south-east. The conception was a daring one, and the accuracy with
which it was carried out would be admirable even today. To render such
elaborate strategy successful a commander must not only be able to
plan accurately, but he must be able to depend on the obedience of his
subordinates and possess their absolute confidence.
The rising in Pannonia was of a very serious nature. During the
interval of seventeen years since Tiberius had last waged war in that
direction the country had become so far Romanized as to have adopted to
a large extent the language of its conquerors; garrisons of veterans
had been established, and the war began with a general slaughter
of these, of resident Roman citizens and of travelling merchants.
The province of Macedonia was invaded and devastated. At Rome panic
prevailed; Augustus publicly declared that the enemy was within ten
days’ march of the city; levies were held, veterans were called back
to the colours, and men and women alike were compelled to enfranchise
a certain proportion of their slaves according to the amount of
their assessed property, that they might be enrolled in the armies.
Paterculus was put in command of the reinforcements that were sent to
Tiberius from Rome.
The war lasted for three years, and was eventually ended partly by
diplomacy, partly by the patient strategy of Tiberius. Great pitched
battles were impossible in that difficult country, and the strategy of
the enemy did not permit them. Tiberius kept dividing the forces of his
opponents, cutting off the supplies of the isolated detachments, and
conquered them in detail. Paterculus particularly admires his prudence
in breaking up his own forces after finding that the numbers, on which
others were disposed to rely, were too unwieldy to be effective; he
spread his winter quarters over the country, and himself spent the cold
season at Siscia, high up in the hills near the sources of the Save.
Paterculus does not give us a consecutive account of the campaigns, but
he mentions a few personal details with reference to Tiberius, both on
this campaign and on the subsequent one in Germany after the Varian
disaster, which are worth quoting.
“During the whole of the war in Germany and Pannonia, no one of us or
of those above or below our rank was ever ill without finding that
his health and safety were attended to by the care of Cæsar, in such
a way that his mind seemed to be so free from the weight of all its
other burdens as to be concentrated on this task alone. For those who
desired it there was a composite vehicle ready, his litter assigned
to the general benefit, whose advantages I experienced along with
others; physicians, food, all the apparatus of a bath, carried for this
purpose alone, were ready for every invalid; home and servants alone
were wanting, but nothing was missing which they could supply or need.
I will add a fact which everybody who was present at that time will
recognize at once along with other things which I have related; he
alone always rode, always dined sitting along with his guests during
the greater part of the summer campaigns; he was indulgent to breaches
of discipline, provided there was no bad example; he frequently
advised, sometimes reproved, very rarely punished, and took a middle
course, being blind to most faults, checking others.”
This is the first mention of a field hospital, reserved, apparently,
for the use of the staff and their attendants. Other Roman generals
took an elaborate bath establishment with them on their campaigns for
their own use: Tiberius utilized it only for the sickness of others.
Other generals travelled in carts or on a litter: Tiberius always rode.
He took his meals like an active man in a sitting posture, not lying at
full length after the customary Roman fashion.
Suetonius declares that in the German wars Tiberius proved to be
a martinet, and mentions the case of an officer who was severely
punished for sending his freedmen to hunt on the opposite side of
the Rhine contrary to orders. Tiberius would indeed have been a bad
general if he had neglected to punish a gross violation of discipline,
which by revealing the presence of his force might spoil a carefully
devised operation. Similarly Suetonius sees excessive severity in the
strictness with which Tiberius cut down the transport of officers.
Those better versed in the difficulties of warfare will be inclined to
take a different view. There were fashionable and luxurious officers
then as now, whom it was essential to keep in order. Doubtless some one
of these cherished his grievance and left it recorded in his memoirs to
be added to the evidence compiled by the historians of a later age.
A mysterious transaction with the Pannonian chief Bato, who was
spared after the surrender because he had allowed Tiberius and his
troops to slip through an encircling force on one occasion, suggests
that diplomacy was employed, as well as arms, in bringing about the
surrender of the Pannonians, though it is possible that Tiberius
accompanied an act of kindness with an ironical reference to an
occasion on which he had outwitted Bato.
The Pannonian war was barely concluded before Tiberius was called off
to the Rhine; he left his nephew Germanicus to finish his work east
of the Adriatic, and hurried to the scene of his former victories
in Germany. Quintilius Varus, the Governor of the Southern German
Marches, had been enticed into a trap by the German patriot Arminius,
and slain along with two legions, the greater part of a third, and
their complement of cavalry and light-armed troops. Arminius, like
Maroboduus, had been educated at Rome; he was even a Roman citizen
and a member of the Equestrian Order; he too had measured the weakness
of Rome, and was only waiting for a favourable opportunity to strike.
The rising was organized on a great scale; the Gauls who lived in the
country round Vienne were tampered with, the object being to check the
advance of a Roman army across the Alps. Fortunately they were only
half-hearted in the cause, and were easily suppressed by Tiberius on
his way northwards. More serious were the movements on the lower Rhine.
The great camp which had been fortified originally by Drusus at Aliso
on the Lippe was invested, and a general rising of the tribes who had
been settled on the west bank of the Rhine was only prevented by the
decision of Lucius Asprenas, who without waiting for the arrival of
Tiberius marched two legions down the river. The garrison of Aliso
succeeded in cutting its way through the enemy.
In assigning to Varus the command of the Rhine Augustus had been
premature. Varus was a civilian rather than a soldier, and his
mission was to consolidate the Rhine frontier by the arts of peace,
and by bringing the comparatively uncivilized Germans to recognize
the blessings of Roman law. It is more than probable that even as a
civil administrator he was not particularly upright; he had previously
been Governor of Syria, and, according to Paterculus, enjoyed the
reputation of having found that province rich and left it poor. He had
repressed the military ardour of his subordinates, adopting a policy of
conciliation, and deliberately closing his eyes to the necessity of
armed interference when events showed that it was advisable. His ruling
passion was love of money; in other respects he was inactive both
in mind and body, a man of preconceived ideas, such a man as has on
other occasions and in other places invited disaster. Arminius fooled
him to the top of his bent, the Germans invited him to settle their
quarrels according to the honoured forms of Roman law; he was gradually
enticed with his force further and further away from the frontier;
the summer operations took the form of a judge’s circuit. Meanwhile
the German forces gradually closed in behind his rear. Varus was deaf
to the remonstrances of his officers and to the information given him
by a German rival of Arminius. At last when the pedantic Governor had
been successfully lured into a hopeless position Arminius struck. The
Roman soldiers, having no confidence in their leader, were completely
demoralized; they were slaughtered literally like sheep, sacrificed
to the gods of the Germans. The commander of the Roman cavalry basely
deserted the infantry and tried to secure his own safety, but was cut
down with all his force before he could reach the Rhine. Varus himself
committed suicide; his example is said to have been followed by some
Roman youths, who, having been taken prisoners, dashed out their brains
with their own fetters.
The situation, however, was not so grave as it might have been.
Arminius sent the head of Varus to Maroboduus, but that chieftain,
either from want of confidence or from jealousy of a rival, took the
Roman side, and transmitted the relic with a friendly message to
Augustus.
It is not incumbent upon us to believe that after this disaster the
aged Emperor acquired a habit of dashing his head against the wall,
and crying, “Varus, Varus, give me back my legions!” but that the
calamity was a sufficient one to disturb his equanimity seriously
is self-evident. Soldiers had been found only with great difficulty
for the Pannonian war, as we have seen; the recall of veterans to
the standards was always considered a desperate measure, and still
more desperate was the employment of slaves as soldiers; the absolute
destruction of two whole legions and six cohorts along with their
cavalry meant a loss of 17,300 men, as large a force as the permanent
garrison of Italy. It imposed upon Tiberius the necessity of husbanding
his men, even if he had not been naturally disposed to circumspection,
for nearly a tenth part of the whole Roman army had been wiped out.
Tiberius quickly avenged the army of Varus; he swept through the
country, leaving devastation behind him, but he failed to capture
the ringleaders of the revolt. During this campaign, in which he was
soon joined by Germanicus, he abandoned his ordinary policy of acting
entirely on his own initiative and without consultation with his staff;
he carefully explained to them the reason of all his movements. In
fact, he now set to work to educate his successors, for he saw that
other duties would shortly prevent his personal activity in the field.
Both Augustus and Tiberius have been reproached with an unadventurous
policy on the German frontier. Augustus discouraged the distant
expeditions of Drusus into the heart of Germany, and Tiberius was to
be accused of jealousy in the near future in similarly restraining
the ardour of Germanicus, but those who lightly make these charges
overlook the difficulties of the problem. The conquest of the basin of
the Mediterranean had been a conquest of civilized peoples, who knew
when they were beaten, and who once having accepted the arbitrament
of the Roman arms found acquiescence in the Roman domination the
best security for civilization. But the conquest of Central Europe
was another matter; in one sense there was nothing to be gained by
it. When Tiberius met his fleet upon the Elbe, he had traversed many
miles of that desolate flat of Northern Europe which has only been
gradually reclaimed from the wilderness and rendered fertile by the
patient labour of many centuries. There was no trade. There were, so
far as he knew, no minerals, there was nothing to invite settlers in
the endless marshes, and to an Italian the climate was detestable.
If, on the other hand, he turned his attention to the hill country,
there was the same absence of attractions; even if the valleys were
cultivated they were too far off, and the climate was too severe to
enable them to compete with the more accessible territory of Gaul;
the mineral treasures of the hills were as yet undiscovered, and even
if they had been discovered, they were practically inaccessible. It
seemed wiser, and more immediately practicable, to limit the expansion
of the Empire to the lines suggested by the Danube and the Rhine,
and to spread such a terror of the Roman name beyond those limits
as would secure the settlers on the outlying lands from attack. This
policy was partly realized; it was not fully realized, and the German
frontier remained the running sore of the Roman Empire till the Empire
itself became German, and even then fresh hordes were to push on from
Central Asia. Nor was the Empire absolutely at peace within itself;
there were still sporadic outbreaks to be dealt with even in Gaul and
Spain, still African tribes threatening Mauretania and Egypt, still
the ever-watchful Parthian in the East. Augustus rightly considered
that the expansion of the Empire was ended, and that the time for
purposeless conquests had gone by.
With the German campaign Tiberius ended his career as a general.
Twenty years of his life had been spent in the field, and though his
name is associated with no dazzling victories, it is equally free
from any suspicion of failure. Had he suffered even minor reverses,
his critics would not have failed to make the most of them; but there
is not a suggestion of anything of the kind, and the silence of less
friendly historians supports the opinion which Paterculus held of
his leader’s merits. Of the two brothers Drusus was the more dashing
soldier, as he was the more generally attractive man, but Tiberius
was the greater general; and his services to the Empire were none
the less solid because in comparison with the brilliant feats of
Cæsar they were inconspicuous. Perhaps we should have formed a higher
opinion of the value of Tiberius in the field had he too been able to
leave his commentaries; but, alas! his exploits are concealed in an
almost impenetrable night along with those of the brave men who lived
before Agamemnon. His three great combined movements, that by which
the Vindelici were conquered behind the Alps, the ferocious Longobardi
frightened on the Elbe, and Maroboduus cowed in Bohemia, anticipated
similar great operations of Napoleon.
X
The Last Years of Augustus
Twenty-nine years after the battle of Actium the Senate, by the
voice of one of the noblest of their order, Marcus Valerius Messala,
hailed Augustus as the “Father of his Country.” The now aged Emperor
burst into tears, and declaring that he had reached the summit of his
ambition, prayed to the gods that they would allow him, so long as
life lasted, to continue to be worthy of the confidence thus expressed
by his countrymen. The title had perhaps been somewhat soiled by use;
Cicero had arrogated it to himself after that exhibition of consummate
statesmanship which quelled the conspiracy of Catiline, but it was none
the less a tribute to the singleness of purpose with which Augustus
had devoted himself to the welfare of the vast Empire committed to his
care. In the press of daily business and vexatious details Augustus may
often have failed to perceive how general was the recognition of his
services to the State, and we can pardon the display of uncontrolled
emotion which interrupted his customary calm on receiving this solemn
assurance that his labours had not been in vain.
As a matter of fact at this time, and for the rest of his life,
Augustus had no enemies save those of his own household. There was no
political opposition to the Emperor; small conspiracies such as those
of Murena and Cæpio there had been, the work of hot-headed youths who
wished to emulate the example of Brutus, and there were, as we have
seen, intrigues in the Emperor’s own family. As Suetonius mentions
among the plots directed against Augustus one in which Lucius Æmilius
Paullus, the husband of the younger Julia was concerned, we are at
liberty to suspect that in her case, as in her mother’s, it was thought
better to punish a graver offence as a case of domestic misconduct.
It was on this occasion that the poet Ovid learned that there is a
limit to the liberties which a man of fashion can allow himself, and
was forced to withdraw from his butterfly existence at Rome to the
mosquito-haunted swamps at the mouth of the Danube, where he wrote
poems more worthy of his dignity than any he had previously composed.
The power of the Emperor was based largely on his patronage. The Empire
had been divided between the Emperor and the Senate; those provinces
in which it was necessary to maintain a standing and mobilized army,
in which swift action, continuous authority, and unity of purpose were
imperatively necessary, were governed by Augustus as a private estate;
their highest official was a “Procurator,” “a manager”; they comprised
two districts in the west and north of Spain, the whole of Gaul, the
Germanic frontier, the Balkan, Cilicia, Cœlesyria Phenicia, Cyprus and
Egypt; the Senate retained the old settled provinces, Eastern Spain,
Sardinia, Sicily, Northern Africa, the district round Cyrene, the west
of Asia Minor, and Achaia. Thus the Emperor’s direct patronage was
large, but even in the Senatorial Provinces he could intervene with
superior powers, and the liberty which the Senate enjoyed of appointing
their Governors, was nominal rather than real, for the Senate itself
was increasingly composed of men who had owed their advancement to the
Emperor, or expected further promotion from his hands.
Senatorial Governorships tended to become merely honorary, and the
wealthy or noble men, who held courts for limited periods in Sicily or
Asia had little more actual responsibility or power than an English
Viceroy in Ireland. Further, those parts of the Empire in which active
work was to be done, or in which the administration really tested
capacity, and was rewarded with further promotions, were precisely
those parts in which the Emperor was exclusive patron.
We naturally wonder at the business capacity of a man who carried on
the Government of dominions so extensive and so various; and the work
would indeed have been beyond the grasp of any single individual had
not Augustus continued the old Roman policy of letting well alone.
The Roman Empire at this period was largely decentralized; cities,
tribes, nationalities governed themselves according to their previous
laws and customs; no ancient polity was destroyed or remodelled unless
it proved to be out of sympathy with the general order; the details
of local administration were attended to on the spot in accordance
with local usage, by the local officials and magistrates. If the
ancient constitution of a town broke down, the Roman was ready with
his sacred model, the double chief magistrate and the Senate, a model
which was faithfully copied in all the Roman military colonies, but
so long as men could govern themselves, the Romans were content to
allow them to do so; they were not at this time afflicted with a
pedantic passion for uniformity. Thus the Emperor was relieved of
the mass of detail under which he would otherwise have sunk. In his
choice of men Augustus preferred officials who either as non-Romans,
such as Licinus and Cornelius Gallus, or by reason of comparatively
mean extraction felt their dependence upon his favour. When he found
a representative of the ancient nobility who could be trusted, such
as Marcus Lepidus, the son of the former triumvir, he placed power
in his hands; such men served to balance the pretensions of the new
officials, but he was careful not to revive the organization of the
oligarchy. One danger, however, escaped the prevision of the acute
Augustus: he did not see until it was too late the effect of his
pretensions to a divine ancestry upon his own family. As years went on,
and the representatives of the Julian stock were to be found chiefly
in the men and women of the third generation, as the great poem of
Virgil was more and more widely known, the faith in the sanctity of
the posterity of Anchises assumed inconvenient dimensions, and the
tendency to press this faith was largely helped by the presence in the
Imperial Household of representatives of ancient dynasties. East and
West alike sent young men to Rome, in whom the traditions of exalted
lineage were lively and unbroken, who did not need the evidence of
portents and the testimony of poets to assure them that they were set
apart from the rest of mankind. These youths were the playmates of the
grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Augustus; their influence
stimulated the dynastic ambition of such men as Caius Cæsar, and his
nephew and namesake the future Emperor Caligula; the young princes, as
they considered themselves, were impatient of the constitutional forms
of Rome, and the restraints upon the monarchy; they despised families
whose progenitors had not come over with Æneas. Fate had not been kind
to the Julian dynasty, and when Tiberius returned to Rome from the
Rhine in A.D. 12, his adoption and investiture with the Proconsular
Power seemed to extinguish the hopes of its representatives. The direct
descendants of Augustus now living were his daughter Julia, disgraced
and in exile, her daughter Julia similarly disgraced and in exile,
Agrippa Postumus, the intractable, a young man about twenty-four years
of age, who either now, or a little later, enjoyed, like his mother
and sister, the amenities of life on an island; the only descendant in
the third generation who had not been thus disgraced and banished was
Agrippina, the younger daughter of Julia.
Nobody took the Julian legend more seriously than this lady, and her
children enjoyed a double stream of the sacred blood, for she had
married Germanicus, the son of Drusus and Antonia the beautiful,
who was own niece to Augustus. Germanicus was now twenty-seven years
of age; he had been through the Pannonian campaign, and was left by
Tiberius in command of the army on the Lower Rhine. Tiberius seems
to have had more confidence in him than in his own son Drusus, and
Germanicus had so far shown himself worthy of that confidence; he was
blessed with a numerous family, of whom Agrippina was inordinately
proud; she was the mother of the great-grandchildren of Augustus, a
Nero, a Drusus, a Caius, another Agrippina, a Drusilla, and a Julia
Livilla, who eventually married the friend of Paterculus, Marcus
Vinicius. Julia her sister had only borne two daughters before retiring
to her island.
Agrippina was not a mere lady of fashion; she accompanied her husband
on his campaigns, and exhibited all the traditional virtues of a Roman
matron before the enraptured eyes of the legionaries; she dressed up
her youngest boy, Caius, in the full uniform of a Roman soldier, and
got him the nickname of Caligula--Little Gaiters--in the camp.
The Claudian stock was represented by Drusus, the son of Tiberius, a
man slightly younger than Germanicus, whose sister he married, thus
further interweaving the two lines; also by Germanicus himself and his
brother Claudius, the unfortunate sputterer, of whom his own mother was
ashamed, and whose family were united in a desire to keep him out of
sight.
In order further to knit up the dynastic web, Augustus adopted
Tiberius, who in his turn adopted both his own nephew Germanicus and
his stepson Agrippa Postumus. It is not improbable that the dynastic
pretensions of this young man, stimulated by the example of his sister
Agrippina, were the real cause of his enforced retreat, that he did
not acquiesce willingly in his grandfather’s arrangements, and that
the watchful Livia knew how to turn his insubordination to advantage.
Augustus showed disturbing signs of a weakness in his direction in
spite of his intractability.
Tiberius at the time of his adoption was fifty-four years of age; he
was a father and a grandfather; he was the active ruler of the Empire,
but with what appears to us a strange scrupulosity he at once abandoned
his own house, and went to live in his adoptive father’s. He treated
all his property, according to the strict letter of the Roman law, as
his father’s property; he neither manumitted slaves nor performed any
act which could not properly be performed by a man who was still “in
his father’s hand.”
During the last two years of the life of Augustus Tiberius seldom left
him; the old man was in feeble health, but he continued to travel
in Italy, and had just presided at some games held in his honour
at Naples, when his customary weakness assumed an alarming aspect.
Tiberius had been summoned to Illyricum, whence news had arrived of
serious discontent among the troops. He returned in haste to receive
the last words of the dying Emperor, and to give him a final evidence
of that affection which, in spite of the severe strains to which it
had been subjected, had never failed. Augustus died as he had lived,
with dignity and calm; he even retained to the last a dash of humour,
and bade his friends applaud him, as he left the stage of life, if they
were satisfied with his performance. His last words were a request to
Livia never to forget their married life.
The performance had been a good one, and we should be churlish to
withhold our applause.
XI
The Accession of Tiberius
All the accounts of the accession of Tiberius agree in one statement;
the evidence is unanimous that he was exceedingly unwilling to occupy
the position which Augustus had occupied, and to continue the Empire in
the form which it had assumed under his predecessor.
Tiberius was now fifty-six years of age; for ten years he had to
all intents and purposes shared the first place in the Empire with
Augustus; he had enjoyed his full confidence, none of the things which
attract ambitious men had been refused to him. His character was
without stain or reproach; the amours which are attributed to Julius
Cæsar, and even to the saintly Augustus, are not attributed to him. The
idle story that he went to Rhodes to indulge in odious vices was the
fabrication of a later age, and was, as we have seen, absurd in itself.
He had been a faithful and loving husband to his first wife, Vipsania;
the licence of Julia had disgusted him; after his divorce from her
he never thought of a fresh marriage, though still a young man. On
his campaigns he had shown himself to be simple, and indeed severe,
in his personal habits. A story was indeed prevalent that he was
given to strong drink, but there is no evidence in its favour except
a couple of wildly improbable stories preserved by Suetonius, and a
punning nickname given him by the soldiers, who called him Biberius
Caldius Mero. The nicknames given by private soldiers and schoolboys
to officers and schoolmasters are not evidence, though they sometimes
promote, as in this case, the circulation of fictitious stories.
The exceptional health which Tiberius is said to have enjoyed to an
advanced age does not favour the idea that he was intemperate, and
indeed we are told that from the age of thirty onwards he prescribed a
regimen for himself without consulting his medical advisers, which was
remarkably successful. He was free from the tyranny of the lusts of the
flesh, he was equally free from avarice, a point repeatedly insisted on
by hostile historians; power in itself and by itself had no attraction
for him; he had already on one occasion brusquely rejected it. Thus he
was able to consider the question of the succession dispassionately.
His personal inclination was rather in the direction of retirement and
a private life, and if his judgment was biassed, the disturbing element
was a contempt for rather than a love of power.
At the death of Augustus, Tiberius was actually in possession of
two forms of authority legally conveyed to him by the Senate in
constitutional form, which enabled him to carry on the government: he
had the tribunician power, which made him superior to all the civil
magistrates; he had the proconsular power, which put him at the head
of the executive in all the provinces, and especially at the head of
the army. In the first character he was the protector of Roman citizens
throughout the world; in the second he was master of the provincials.
Thus there was no occasion for any plotting on the part of Livia, no
premature assumption of responsibility on the part of Tiberius in
setting the guard and giving the password when Augustus had breathed
his last; these duties necessarily devolved upon him, and he was in
fact at the time on active service.
He was not Princeps, nor Pontifex Maximus, nor had he the censorial
power. Of these three the last two were executive offices belonging
to the old Republic; the former was an honorary dignity recognised by
the forms of the Republic, which had acquired a new meaning during the
long tenure of Augustus. It was this dignity, along with all which
it now involved, that Tiberius only reluctantly and after resisting
considerable pressure eventually accepted. It had become associated
with the monarchical principle, and the permanent continuance of the
monarchy Tiberius wished to avoid.
The position which he adopted was a reasonable one. Augustus was
an exceptional man; he had been called to power under exceptional
circumstances; the reign of one man had been inevitable at the end of
the civil wars; the right man had been found, a social regeneration
had followed; the monarchy, an exceptional expedient, had done its
work; there was now the material for creating a stable government on
the old lines. The vices of the old Senatorial administration had been
purged away; the Senate itself had assumed a different character--it
was no longer a narrow oligarchy, it was a council of the Empire; no
single man could hope to repeat the success of Augustus. In a multitude
of counsellors there is wisdom; the restored Senate working through
the new officials would be more likely to carry on the continuity
of government than an hereditary or quasi-hereditary monarchy, in
which so much depended on the character of an individual, and which
was perpetually disturbed by palace plots and conspiracies for the
succession.
The life of Tiberius himself had been embittered, his domestic
happiness destroyed, by the intrigues of a family which had adopted
the habits of an Oriental Court. It might well appear to him, arguing
from his own experience, that misgovernment by the Senate was a less
probable eventuality than misgovernment by the irresponsible members
of a monarchical dynasty listening to the unwholesome suggestions of
favourites and parasites, and intriguers of all nations.
The funeral of Augustus was hardly over when an event occurred
calculated to disgust Tiberius with the dynastic principle, if he had
not already strongly disliked it.
The youngest son of Julia, Agrippa Postumus, had, as we have already
recorded, been banished to the Island of Planasia off the coast of
Campania, and detained in captivity. He was the last of the grandsons
of Augustus. At this time he was about twenty-six years of age, and
would in the ordinary course of events have held appointments and
been pushed forward like his brothers. This had not been done. The
historians agree in ascribing to him a stubborn disinclination to
study, and an evil temper; he was put out of the way as Claudius was
put out of the way; but he continued to be to some extent the centre of
Julian plots, and it was believed that, in spite of his bad manners,
Augustus was personally attached to him. It is possible that his name
had been used in the plots with which his sister, the younger Julia,
and her husband, L. Æmilius Paulus, had been concerned; or that he
had taken up his mother’s quarrel with Tiberius, and had disturbed
the serenity of the Imperial household. Although he had been thus
set aside, Augustus had been sufficiently anxious about his welfare
to request Tiberius to adopt him, when he himself adopted Tiberius.
Whatever may have been the real temper and the real pretensions of
the young man, one thing is certain: immediately after the death of
Augustus he was put to death upon his island, and the centurion on
guard reported to Tiberius that his orders had been obeyed.
Tiberius at once denied that he had given any orders, and added that
he would report the matter to the Senate. No report was ever made, and
Tacitus tells us that Tiberius was over-persuaded by C. Sallustius
Crispus, who had succeeded Mæcenas as confidential and unofficial
adviser to the Cæsarian family. Crispus is said to have urged that any
public inquiry into the matter would have created too much scandal.
Tiberius was not the man to be deterred from doing what he considered
a public duty by any consideration of what he might himself suffer,
but there was another person whose good name was likely to be damaged,
and whose responsibility for what had occurred it would be awkward to
demonstrate; that person was his mother, Livia. Tiberius himself had
no motive for committing such a crime; only the perverse inconsistency
of a Roman historian could be capable of attributing to the same man
reluctance to accept power, and complicity in a crime whose object
was to secure the undisturbed enjoyment of that power. Whoever was
responsible for the death of Agrippa Postumus, Tiberius certainly was
not; but Livia, the friend of Herod, whose life had been spent in
pushing the fortunes of the Claudians, was not a woman to be frightened
by the murder of an inconvenient aspirant.
If anything had been wanting to convince Tiberius of the evils likely
to attend the perpetuation of the dynasty, this event was in itself
enough to determine him in his dislike to an institution capable of
producing such horrors, and under circumstances so wounding to his
personal pride. A crime had been foisted on him in such a way that he
could not prove his innocence without making himself the accuser of his
mother.
The Senate, however, insisted that Tiberius should take the whole
burden of the government upon himself. His suggestion that the
responsibility should be divided was met with derision; there was no
way out of the difficulty but to accept the trust, and to work it in
the spirit most likely to lead to the development of his own views.
The Senate was, in fact, wiser than Tiberius; those of its members
who took an active share in the government knew that whatever might
be the views of the few remaining Legitimist families, the monarchy
was essential to the Empire, and that the Imperial House could not
break with the traditions of half a century. Cæsar’s heir did not
merely inherit property, he inherited the conduct of an organization
whose branches extended all over the world, and this even as a
private person; nor again was it easy to define his relation to those
provinces, and especially Egypt, which had been administered by the
late Emperor as private estates. Countless officials had learned to
look to the Emperor as the source of patronage. A slow change was
possible, but an abrupt change would have been a revolution, and would
have disturbed the sense of security in all quarters of the Empire. The
succession of Tiberius had been tacitly accepted as an accomplished
fact in every part of the world for the last ten years. The intrigues
in the Imperial family were distressing, and doubtless painful to
those immediately concerned, but they had not affected the general
prosperity, nor stirred the imagination of such men as hope to fish in
troubled waters. Germanicus, the only practical candidate for the chief
place, was notoriously loyal to the existing state of affairs, and had
never shown any disposition to disturb arrangements made by Augustus.
In the end Tiberius gave way, and accepted what the Senate offered him
“until,” as he said, “I come to the time of life at which it may seem
just to you to grant some rest to my old age.”
These words are in themselves a protest against dynastic assumptions;
the power which Tiberius was to receive he would hold as associated
with an office separable from his person; he was not to be once a king,
always a king, ruling in virtue of mythology and portents.
Tiberius was equally careful to distinguish between complimentary
tributes which had been paid to Augustus and official designations. He
would not be called “Father of his country,” he would not even use the
title “Augustus” as a name, though he was legally entitled to do so; he
only used it in corresponding with foreign kings and potentates. Still
less would he allow himself to be worshipped, and strictly forbade his
statue to be erected in a temple except as an ornament. Nor again would
he place the title of Imperator before his name, as Augustus had done,
thereby making it personal and inseparable; he used it simply as a
statement that he held a particular office. From the first he objected
to the exaggerated language of obsequious persons, and demanded to be
addressed as Dominus by his slaves, Imperator by soldiers, Princeps
by the rest of the world. A Senator who flung himself at his feet
and endeavoured to grasp his knees with an oriental exuberance of
subservience suffered a rude fall, as Tiberius instinctively jumped
back out of his reach. In a like spirit he checked the adulation which
the Senate were prepared to heap upon Livia, and discouraged every
attempt to invest her with the dangerous attributes of an Empress
Dowager.
Similarly he distinguished between occasions on which he acted in a
public or private capacity. Unless officially presiding, he attended
the law courts like any other Senator, listening to the evidence, and
offering his opinion like the rest; he, in fact, lost no opportunity
of showing that he held his position to be a purely official one, and
while he encouraged the worship of Augustus, he refused to be included
in the cult.
At a later period Tiberius, in speaking to the Senators, declared
that he regarded himself as their servant; his constitutional theory
was that the Senate was the fountain of authority, the Emperor its
first executive officer and adviser, but certainly not its master.
This theory of the mutual relations of Emperor and Senate broke down,
because one man, if he is capable at all, is always more capable than
a number of equally capable men working together as a council: he
can act more quickly, and his relations with suitors and suppliants
are simpler. If a capable man is assisted by a council, the general
lines of policy are his, and not those of the council, whose advice
practically amounts to little more than valuable suggestions on points
of detail. The dream of professors and political pedants that a country
is best governed by a debating society of selected wiseacres has a
never-ending fascination, but it is a mere dream, and as soon as the
ostensible government degenerates into a debating society the real work
of governing is done by other agencies; the alternative is anarchy.
The Senate for its part was studiously averse at first to accepting
any greater measure of responsibility than had fallen to its share
under Augustus; its leading members were used to a certain routine
of business. Augustus had introduced a kind of Cabinet system, the
ordinary business of the Senate being conducted by a small committee
on which the Senators served in some kind of rotation; full meetings
of the whole body were rare; the committee were in constant attendance
upon the Emperor. Nobody had any wish to abandon this system, and to
impose the necessity of frequent attendance upon all members of the
Senate; at the same time, it was well to be sufficiently in evidence
to secure a share in promotions and appointments. Hostility to the
existing arrangements existed, but it was confined to some old families
who were nearly powerless, and who found a safety valve for their
discontent in pasquinades, and the compilation of bitter memoirs,
in which every rumour, every scandal unfavourable to the existing
government was carefully recorded.
Tiberius had so little of the dynast about him, so little of the
jealousy of the usurper, that he employed in positions of trust the
men who were generally believed to have been designated as possible
aspirants to the Imperial power by Augustus. Marcus Lepidus held one
office after another under Tiberius, not merely ornamental offices,
but those which involved active work; C. Asinius Gallus, the second
husband of Vipsania, similarly took a leading part in the counsels of
the Senate, and was entrusted with various dignities; his mysterious
fate three years before the death of Tiberius will occupy us later on;
L. Arruntius similarly lived in dignity and affluence till he committed
suicide shortly before Tiberius died, having become involved in highly
discreditable, but not political, transactions; another, Gnæus Piso,
was the centre of a strange conspiracy six years later than this. Of
him too we shall speak in greater detail; it is enough for our present
purpose to record that he was holding an important Governorship six
years after the accession of Tiberius.
The same historian who tells us nearly all that is known of the lives
of these men, and who fixes the dates of their deaths, also informs
us that they were the objects of the suspicion of Tiberius, that
their lives were rendered miserable by him, and that they all, with
the exception of Lepidus, “soon” came to a bad end. Allowing that six
years is a term to which the word “soon” can be applied, we may admit
that Gnæus Piso soon came to a bad end; we shall see later on who was
responsible for his afflictions. Lepidus lived to a good old age, and
died a natural death not long before Tiberius himself; and though the
ends both of Asinius Gallus and Arruntius were miserable, they did not
occur “soon,” periods of twenty years and upwards not being usually so
described.
The facts relating to these men are an excellent illustration of the
reckless inconsistency of statement which is indulged in by Tacitus.
Fortunately, the historian prided himself upon his impartiality, and
does not suppress facts which happen to be in contradiction with his
main contention. Stripped of its comments and insinuations, as also of
its rhetoric, his narrative gives a favourable picture of Tiberius and
his reign, but Tacitus possessed such a mastery of innuendo that his
statements of facts are forgotten, while his comments are remembered.
It is, unfortunately, not the custom of modern scholars to read the
Latin stylists for the purpose of acquiring information, or in large
masses; and while they are minutely perpending the significance of
isolated phrases, or enumerating instances of unusual grammatical
constructions, they forget that any other interest attaches to the
works upon which their industry is expended. The stylist and grammarian
alike find so much material for their own special industries in
Tacitus that his claims as a historian are forgotten, and in fact he
is not a historian; he is a bitter pamphleteer of consummate ability;
his affectation of impartiality is a well-considered pose, whose
insincerity becomes manifest as soon as we study the effect produced by
his writing upon the minds of his readers. When we have read the first
six books of the _Annals_, we are left with a very strong impression
of horror; we seem to have waded through seas of misery, and to have
assisted at the ruin of the Roman Empire. In the midst of the gloomy
scene stalks the gaunt figure of Tiberius, equally terrifying in anger
or in silence; his very virtues are more horrible than the vices of
other people, for there is no knowing what hideous wickedness they were
assumed to conceal.
The question may reasonably be asked, why should Tacitus have directed
his bitterness especially against Tiberius? Surely Nero or even
Claudius would have been a better target for his venomed sentences. But
to begin with, there was no object in further damaging the reputation
of an Emperor universally acknowledged to be a villain or a fool. So
far as Caligula, Claudius, and Nero were concerned, judgment had been
passed in the sense in which Tacitus wished it to be passed, but there
were numerous documents in evidence of the fact that Tiberius had been
a good Emperor, and that Greater Rome, if not the City of Rome, had
prospered under his rule.
Tacitus was interested in proving that till the reigns of Nerva and
Trajan there never had been a good Emperor. Augustus was beyond the
reach of attack; that reputation could not be damaged by malignant
epigrams, but the end of the reign of Tiberius had been involved in a
strange catastrophe, whose unquestioned horrors would lend credibility
to misrepresentations of the events by which it had been preceded, and
when Tacitus wrote, the Senate had just emerged from a similar, or
apparently similar, persecution at the hands of Domitian; in fact, the
Tiberius of Tacitus was not Tiberius at all, but Domitian. The curse of
the reign of Domitian had been attacks upon the lives and property of
eminent men, conducted by paid informers. There was some evidence that
the system of rewarding informers had first been extensively used in
the reign of Tiberius, and Tacitus believed that he could find abundant
material for drawing up a strong indictment against the practice of
employing informers in the records of the reign of Tiberius. We shall
see how far he was justified in his confidence.
But it was not enough to damage a system, it was also necessary to
annihilate the man; and here too Tacitus had found the instrument
which he required; he had access to certain memoirs written by the
younger Agrippina, the daughter of Agrippina, the wife of Germanicus.
He tells us of a fact which he mentions:--“This is not recorded by any
of the historians, but I found it in the memoirs of the daughter of
Agrippina, who was the mother of the Emperor Nero, and handed down to
posterity her own life and the misfortunes of her family.” There is not
much in the life of the mother of Nero and sister of Caligula which
would incline us to suspect her memoirs of being a liquid fount of
veracity, but there is a great deal which would tempt us to suspect her
of a bitter animosity against the memory of Tiberius and all members of
the Claudian stock not closely related to herself.
It is not proposed to examine in detail every innuendo made by
Tacitus in the course of his indictment against Tiberius, though from
time to time it will be entertaining to expose glaring instances of
misrepresentation or deliberately malicious inference; but one example
of the methods employed by Tacitus may be profitably given as an
illustration of the way in which he wrote what has passed for sober
history.
In A.D. 25, eleven years after the accession of Tiberius, a deputation
arrived from further Spain with the request that leave might be given
to build a shrine in honour of Tiberius and his mother, as had been
done in Asia. “On this occasion Cæsar, who was at other times also
firm in rejecting honours of this kind, and thought some answer should
be given to those who accused him by public rumour of ambitious
inclinations, made a speech to the following effect:--‘I know,
Conscript Fathers, that many have noted a want of consistency in my
conduct, because on a recent occasion I failed to oppose the cities
of Asia when preferring an identical petition. Therefore I will at
once declare my defence of my former silence, and of the line which
I propose to adopt in the future. Whereas the sainted Augustus did
not forbid a temple to be built to himself and the city of Rome at
Pergamus, I, for whom all his acts and words are like a law, followed
a precedent, already sanctioned, the more readily because veneration
of the Senate was united with the devotion to be paid to myself.
However, although there may be an excuse for a solitary acceptance of
such honours, it would be presumptuous and arrogant in me to consent
to being worshipped in divine form all over the provinces; and indeed
the honour paid to Augustus will disappear if it is made cheap by
promiscuous flattery of this kind. I both protest to you, Conscript
Fathers, and I wish posterity to be mindful, that I am a man, and hold
purely human responsibilities, and that I have enough, if I worthily
hold the first position in the State; posterity will give enough, and
more than enough, to my memory if men believe me to have been worthy of
my ancestors, careful of your concerns, firm in danger, and not fearful
of contracting unpopularity in defence of the public welfare. So shall
I have temples in your minds, so the finest and most lasting statues.
For those memorials which are built of stone are despised as mere tombs
if the judgment of posterity proves adverse. Therefore I implore the
allies, the citizens, and the gods themselves, the latter to grant me
to the end of my life a calm intelligence and understanding of human
and divine law; the former, that whenever I may leave the stage, they
may pursue my deeds and the fame of my name with praise and kindly
memories.’ And he persisted afterwards, even in private conversation,
in his contempt of such adoration of himself. This some interpreted
as moderation, many as a sign of mistrust of himself, some as an
indication of a degenerate spirit; for, said they, the best of men aim
at the highest honours; thus among the Greeks Hercules and Liber, among
ourselves Quirinus, had been added to the number of the gods. Augustus
had done better in setting his hopes higher. Princes have everything
else in this life; the one thing they should compass with avidity is
a lasting memory of themselves. For the contempt of fame means the
contempt of virtue.”
It is impossible not to admire the consummate art with which the
effect of a really noble statement of Tiberius is wiped away, and the
picture of a man devoid of sound ambition substituted. The ingenuity
with which Tacitus puts in the mouths of presumed contemporaries his
own perversion of the facts, and concludes his chapter with a concise
damnation, is equally admirable. To us there is, however, something
tragic in the fact that subsequent events and the arts of a supreme
master of style were to rob Tiberius even of the modest fame for which
he prayed.
Tiberius had hardly settled down to business when the threatened mutiny
of the legions in the Illyrian quarter broke out, accompanied by an
even more serious disturbance among the armies of the Rhine. These
events throw much light on the condition of the Roman army at the time,
and upon the characters of Agrippina and Germanicus. The latter, though
a far more formidable rival than Agrippa Postumus, had been invested
with Proconsular power at the request of Tiberius on his accession.
Previously he had only been a legate, a lieutenant-general in command
of the troops on the German frontier; he was now Governor of Gaul as
well. It is not customary, for usurpers who have recently mounted
rickety thrones to add to the powers of those whose rivalry they have
good reason to anticipate. The Proconsulate of Gaul had on a well-known
occasion been the stepping-stone to the Empire. Tiberius clearly had no
mistrust of the loyalty of Germanicus, and at this period could afford
to smile at the restless impetuosity of Agrippina, pattern of matrons.
XII
The Mutinies in Pannonia and on the Rhine
We have seen that when Augustus died Tiberius was on his way to
Illyria, because the temper of the three legions who garrisoned the
recently conquered districts towards the Danube had given cause
for anxiety. The death of one Emperor and the accession of another
occasioned a relaxation of discipline, both events, in accordance with
Roman custom, being observed by a suspension of ordinary business.
The Pannonian army had been reinforced largely from Rome itself; it had
been necessary to revive in a stringent form the obligation to military
service, and even to impress slaves. Among the men thus unwillingly
driven into the ranks were several used to the clubs and street
factions of the capital, quick-witted, ready-tongued, of the class that
are known to our own soldiers and sailors as “lawyers.”
Service in these regions had no mitigations, there was little or no
loot, and since serious operations had ceased, little excitement;
the long holiday and cessation of the ordinary routine gave the camp
agitators their opportunity. Three legions were concerned, the eighth,
the ninth, and the fifteenth. The first open act of mutiny was an
attempt to combine all three in one. This failed, owing to the mutual
jealousies of the legions, neither of the three being willing to be
enrolled under the name of one of the others, and a compromise was
effected by uniting the legions locally, but retaining their separate
organization. The rapid and dramatic account of Tacitus, in which
only the most picturesque incidents are recorded and grouped together
for effect, conceals the fact that this was a very serious step, for
the legions were not quartered together, and must have marched some
distance in order to unite. This event, which Tacitus places at the
beginning of his summary, can only have taken place after the officers
had lost the control of their men, unless we are to credit these
officers, who knew that there was much disaffection, and had already
reported it to Rome, with such blind folly as to have united troops
ready to mutiny.
The speech which Tacitus puts into the mouth of one Percennius, the
arch agitator, a private who had been accustomed to lead a claque in
the Roman theatres, and was well versed in the arts by which factions
are organized, gives a clear summary of the grievances of the Roman
soldier of the period, but will not be intelligible without a little
previous explanation.
First comes the question of discharge. A Roman citizen was
constitutionally liable to be called out for service between the
ages of eighteen and forty-six, but it was held that sixteen years
of service, whether continuous or intermittent, exempted a man from
further duty. The difficulty of finding recruits had caused the claim
to exemption to be ignored, and as the army had become increasingly
professional, losing its character of a militia, the men themselves,
for lack of other occupation, had helped the authorities to expand the
period of service. In order further to swell the numbers of the army,
the Romans had anticipated the “garrison” service recently introduced
into the English army. Time-expired men were enrolled in companies
outside the organization of the legion; they were called flagmen
(vexillarii); they could not be called upon to march in a campaign,
but they formed a kind of permanent garrison in the countries in which
they were employed; they were not a “reserve,” for they could not be
called back to the colours, but they relieved the regular soldiers of
duties, for which there was a dearth of men; they were also employed
as engineers, for we find some of them in the course of this mutiny
detached to build roads and bridges near Nauportus.
There was also a grievance of pay. Cæsar had increased the pay of the
legionary, and fixed it at nine _aurei_ a year; that is to say, ten
asses a day. When this arrangement was made one silver denarius was the
equivalent of ten copper asses, and the pay of the Roman soldier was
assumed to be one denarius, practically a shilling a day; but since
Cæsar’s time the silver denarius had appreciated, and was now worth
sixteen asses: the soldiers, however, were still paid ten asses, and
not sixteen. Another grievance lay in the fact that the household
troops, prætorian guards, who formed the garrison of Italy, received
double pay.
The exactions and cruelty of the centurions formed another grievance.
The position of the centurion in the Roman army is not quite analogous
to anything in our own army, for though there was a distinction
between the commissioned and the non-commissioned officer, and the
centurion belonged in many respects to the latter class, he had
many responsibilities which we, rightly or wrongly, reserve for
commissioned officers. The centurion was selected from the ranks,
but he commanded a company; he was a sergeant with the duties of a
captain, and when he was promoted to the rank of “primipilaris” was so
much of a commissioned officer as to be admitted to councils of war.
Cæsar had paid especial attention to the centurions, he never misses
an opportunity of praising individual centurions in his commentaries,
and distinguished service as a centurion opened the way to the highest
military and even civil positions. Ventidius Bassus, who had commanded
the armies of Antonius in Syria, and had been granted a triumph, began
life as a mule-driver, and passed through the rank of centurion to that
of General. Before the end of the century a former centurion was to
be Emperor. Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judæa, is said to have been a
centurion. One of the arts by which the early Emperors kept their hold
on the army was the recognition of capable centurions. But though the
centurion was in a better position than the English non-commissioned
officer, he still had duties which we should consider beneath the
dignity of a captain.
With the aid of this short introduction the speech of Percennius should
be intelligible without further explanation; it is not probable that we
have the genuine speech, but a summary of the soldiers’ grievances put
into the mouth of their spokesman.
“Why do we obey like slaves a handful of centurions, and still fewer
tribunes? When are we to venture to demand our rights if we do not now
approach the new and still tottering Emperor with either entreaties or
force? It is through our own fault, through our own want of spirit,
that we have gone on for so many years putting up with thirty or forty
years’ service, old men as we are, and most of us crippled with wounds.
Even after our discharge there is no end to our service; we camp under
the flags and suffer the same burdens under another name. And if any
man does happen to get out of all these dangers and difficulties
with his life, he is dragged off to distant lands, where he is given
under the name of a farm a morass or a precipice. The service itself
is severe, and poorly paid; body and soul are valued at ten asses a
day! Out of this we have to find clothes, arms, tents, buy off the
centurions, yes, and pay for our own discharge.[1] The stick, the
wounds, the bitter winter, the summer marches, the cruelties of war,
or the barrenness of peace are everlasting. We shall never get any
comfort till the service is entered on fixed conditions, a denarius a
day for pay, sixteen years for a discharge; and we are not to be kept
on under the flags, but stay in our camps and get our pension in cash.
Do the prætorians face greater dangers than we do? But they get two
denarii a day, and return to their homes after sixteen years. We don’t
have to patrol the city at night, but we do have to live among savages
and look at the enemy out of our very quarters.”
[1] “Vacationes munerum.” The translation in the text
is the accepted one, but the phrase may simply mean
“leave.” The custom of feeing the sergeant for this
purpose has not been unknown in the English army.
This statement of the grievances of the private soldier may not
represent the actual words of Percennius, but it is strangely familiar.
Protracted service is not at present included among the grievances
of the English soldier, but we have already taken one step in a
direction which may lead to its inclusion. The Roman Empire shirked
the recruiting difficulty, and in the end brought down upon itself
countless disasters. If the English Empire follows the same path, it
will find itself some day at the same destination. The conditions
are strangely similar. By the institution of slavery the whole body
of operatives throughout the Roman Empire was exempted from military
service, the recruiting ground was artificially restricted. We have no
artificial restriction in the English Empire, but the operatives have
been allowed gradually to withdraw themselves from even the limited
obligation to military service imposed by the ancient regulations of
the militia, and they have further been allowed to assume that whatever
may happen to other people they are not to be conscious of the burden
of taxation; they are practically as free from military service and
taxation as the slaves of antiquity.
When these mutinies were eventually suppressed Tiberius found himself
unable to confirm the grant of a discharge after sixteen years’
service, and was obliged to fix it at twenty years; he said that the
Empire could not stand the change, and deplored, in strangely modern
language, the breakdown of the “voluntary system.” The statesmen of
his time could not touch the institution of slavery; the demand for
a conscription of slaves would have been resisted on every ground of
public expediency; there would have been an outcry against interference
with private property. We have no institution which forbids us to
make soldiers of our intelligent working-men; they can be invited
and encouraged to take their share in bearing the burden of defence.
The statesman who discovers the best means of bringing them into the
recruiting field will have solved the most pressing difficulty of the
English Empire.
The result of the orations of Percennius was a general insubordination.
Junius Blæsus, who was commander-in-chief, persuaded the excited
men with some difficulty to send an orderly deputation to Tiberius
to present their grievances, and the soldiers cleverly included his
son in the deputation. For a time there was quiet, but the news of
the mutiny reached Nauportus, where the “flagmen” were employed in
engineering, and they immediately threw off all discipline, plundered
the neighbouring villages, and even Nauportus itself. Laden with
their booty, they marched to the headquarters of the mutinied legions,
but they had not forgotten previously to pay off old scores, they had
derided and beaten their centurions, they had seized the commander
of their camp, a rigorous martinet who had himself risen from the
ranks, piled burdens upon him, and driven him at the head of their
column, asking him how he liked it. Blæsus met them with firmness, and
arrested the ringleaders, but their appeals to their former fellow
soldiers renewed the revolt, the prison was opened, all the prisoners
were released, and a man named Vibulenus mounted the shoulders of his
comrades, and, standing in front of the tribunal of Blæsus, made an
impassioned oration. Addressing the mutineers, he cried: “You have
certainly restored these innocent and miserable men to life and light,
but who will give my brother back his life? Who will give me back
my brother? He was sent to you from the German army on our common
concerns, but last night this man, by the hands of those prize-fighters
whom he keeps and arms to the ruin of the soldiers, cut his throat.
Tell me, Blæsus, where you threw the body. Our enemies even do not
grudge us burial. When I have sated my grief with tears and kisses, bid
me then to be butchered too, so long as my friends here are allowed to
bury those who have been slain for no crime, but because they thought
of the good of the legions.”
This pathetic speech naturally redoubled the excitement, and the
prize-fighters of Blæsus were seized and bound along with the rest of
his slaves, and were likely to have suffered rough treatment, when it
was discovered that Vibulenus never had a brother. The wrath of the
soldiers was then turned upon the centurions; most of them got off and
hid themselves, but one was killed whom the soldiers used to call “Give
us another,” because it had been his habit to break his vinestick over
the shoulders of his men, and then ask for another, and yet another.
The centurions, however, were not all unpopular, and a division of
opinion between the eighth and fifteenth legions about a centurion whom
the former wished to kill, but the latter to protect, would have ended
in a fight, had not the ninth legion intervened.
Though Vibulenus never had a brother, his speech shows that the mutiny
was concerted with the legions on the Rhine.
In due time Drusus, the son of Tiberius, arrived from Rome with picked
guards, including a detachment of the Germans, who then formed the
bodyguard of the Emperor. Ælius Sejanus accompanied him as adviser,
though Drusus, being of the age of seven and twenty, could hardly have
been considered a youth. He read a letter from Tiberius empowering
him to remedy such grievances as could be remedied on the spot, but
referring the solution of permanent difficulties to the Senate.
Tiberius as Imperator had practically unlimited powers over the army,
but either he had not by this time formally accepted the office of
Imperator, or he held that such questions as increase of pay and
reduction of the years of service were not purely military questions,
and must be referred to the civil authority.
The soldiers had listened quietly to Drusus till the reference to the
Senate was mentioned; they then again burst into uproar, protesting,
with a semblance of reason, that the Senate was only dragged in when it
was a question of favours or rewards, the generals imposed punishments
and ordered severe labours on their own responsibility. The aged Gnæus
Lentulus, an experienced public servant, who had accompanied Drusus,
and who was held to influence him in the direction of severity, was
nearly killed; stones were thrown at Drusus himself, who with his
escort and attendants escaped with difficulty into the permanent camp.
Fortunately that night there was an eclipse, and at the same time
stormy weather set in. The excitable superstitious soldiers were
frightened by the portent; Drusus skilfully took advantage of their
wavering resolution, and by means of clever agents set the individual
soldiers against one another, and inspired mutual distrust between the
three legions. There was a sudden and violent revulsion of feeling, the
ringleaders Percennius and Vibulenus were killed, order was restored,
and Drusus returned to Rome. It was left to Tiberius and the Senate to
redress the grievances.
The mutiny was a serious one, not so well organized as the simultaneous
mutiny on the Rhine, and not so ambitious in its aims; but the facts
as given us ascribe a strange childishness to the Roman legionary. The
story of the eclipse is hard to swallow, but there is other evidence
to the superstitious character of the legionary; his commanders owed
their authority largely to a certain religious awe with which they
were surrounded; the standards were worshipped, and the Roman soldier,
afraid of little else, was supremely afraid of breaking his military
oath.
The mutiny on the Rhine was of a more serious character; not only was
the number of legions implicated far larger, more than double that
of the Pannonian legions, but the ambition of the mutineers was not
confined to obtaining a redress of grievances; they proposed to annex
the Empire. “The State is in our hands,” they said; “it is increased by
our victories; the Emperor takes his title from his armies.” A vision
of plundering Gaul, marching upon Rome, and setting up an Emperor of
their own, floated before the eyes of the ringleaders. On the Rhine,
as in Pannonia, the agitation was engineered by the recruits, chiefly
enfranchized slaves recently drawn from the capital. The men who
had fought under Drusus and Tiberius were hardly conscious of their
own grievances; military discipline had numbed their intelligence;
they knew of nothing else, and they were well content to exchange
the peaceful but laborious routine of the camp for the hardships of
campaigns among the forests and morasses of Germany, where the enemy
was less terrible than the gloom of primeval trees and the treachery
of bogs and estuaries. They were, however, only too willing to listen
when cleverer men than themselves told them they had grievances. The
fidelity of the most loyal troops and of the most trusted servants can
seldom long resist the voice of the tempter, who deplores the injustice
with which they are treated. The idlers of Rome, swept into the ranks
from the street corners and the open air amusements of the great city,
awoke from dreams of plunder and licence to the stern realities of the
centurion’s stick and the heavy fatigue of a Roman camp. They had no
fighting, but they had drill, and digging and building in plenty; few
of them had ever before done an honest stroke of work. To the veterans,
life on the frontier had become somewhat dull, and though they would
quickly have discovered the worthlessness of their new associates on
active service, they could not resist the fascinations of jokes and
stories and songs picked up from the professional buffoons of the Roman
theatres.
There were two armies on the Rhine frontier: the Lower Army, under
Aulus Cæcina, quartered between the region of the Lippe and the
neighbourhood of Cologne, the Upper Army, under Silius, about the gorge
of the Rhine. The mutiny broke out in the Lower Army; the Upper Army
waited to see the result before moving on its own account. Germanicus,
as proconsul, was at the time conducting the census of Gaul in the
regions of the Meuse and Moselle. Fortunately, the lower army was
divided; it was composed of four legions, the twenty-first, the fifth,
the first, and the twentieth; the two former began the mutiny. Cæcina
was with them when it broke out.
The scenes of the Pannonian mutiny were repeated. Centurions were
beaten and killed, Cæcina was powerless to interpose, and in fact
seems at first to have lost his head. He surrendered to the soldiers
a centurion who had taken refuge at his tribunal. Another centurion
at the same time fought his way through the mob; he was Cassius
Chærea, destined some twenty years later to rid Rome of Caligula.
Rejecting the authority of their officers, the mutineers took the whole
organization of the camp into their own hands; there was no suspension
of discipline, but perfect order, a fact which increased the gravity of
the situation as indicating a settled purpose and skilled ringleaders.
Germanicus left his civil duties to repress the mutineers if possible.
He was received sullenly in the camp. Some of the men, seizing his hand
under the pretext of kissing it, pressed his fingers into their mouths
that he might feel the absence of their teeth; others pointed at their
limbs bent with old age.
Germanicus on this occasion, as at the few other times when we get a
fair view of him, showed himself a man of courage, resource, and strict
uprightness. Before addressing the mutineers, he insisted that they
should group themselves in the customary divisions, company by company,
battalion by battalion, hoping thus to restore the habit of obedience,
but he was disappointed. His first question as to the causes of the
mutiny raised a storm. Men stripped to show the scars of wounds, the
weals raised by the centurions’ sticks; eager protests were shouted
against the prices paid for discharges, the smallness of the pay; the
different labours of the camp were mentioned in detail, the digging of
fortifications, the collection of fodder, timber, firewood. The most
serious outcry was that of the veterans demanding immediate discharge;
the immediate payment of the legacy of Augustus was also demanded, and
then voices were heard offering to follow Germanicus if he would claim
the Empire.
Germanicus at once jumped from his seat and left the tribunal. The
soldiers endeavoured to force him back, whereupon he drew his sword and
threatened to drive it into his own heart; a wag of the camp offered
him his own sword with the observation that it was sharper. Germanicus
was hurried off by his friends into his tent, and a consultation was
held. Seeing that the fidelity of the Upper Army was insecure, the
danger was such that Germanicus decided to yield; a letter was drawn
up in the name of the Emperor granting a full discharge to men who had
served for twenty years; men who had served for sixteen years were to
be put on the reserve of “flagmen” for another four years; the legacy
of Augustus was to be paid and doubled.
The soldiers demanded an immediate fulfilment of the terms of the
letter, and the tribunes at once set to work to draw up the discharges
in authorized form; the payment of the legacies was to be deferred till
the winter. This, however, did not satisfy the soldiers of the fifth
and twenty-first legions, who insisted on immediate payment, which was
met by the private resources of Germanicus and his friends. The first
and twentieth then asserted their own claims, and were marched back
to their quarters near Cologne, under Cæcina, carrying the treasure
chests of their commander-in-chief between the standards. Germanicus
then went to the upper army and renewed the military oath of the
second, thirteenth, and seventeenth legions without any opposition; the
fourteenth legion showed signs of wavering, and was at once offered the
discharges and the money.
The beginnings of a mutiny among the “flagmen” who were settled on
the Lippe were summarily repressed by the prefect of the camp, who
illegally but wisely executed two of the ringleaders.
Germanicus returned from the Upper Army to Cologne, where the recently
mutinous legions were quartered, and there received the deputation who
had arrived from Rome with the answer to his report. The soldiers,
without waiting to hear the message of the deputation, assumed that it
was unfavourable, and again broke out into mutiny; they attacked and
insulted Plancus, who had come from Rome at the head of the deputation,
and he was with difficulty rescued by Germanicus, and sent away under
an escort of Gallic cavalry.
The advisers of Germanicus, possibly members of the deputation, then
accused him of too great leniency and of imprudence. It would have been
much better for him to have secured his personal safety and that of his
wife and child by remaining with the Upper Army, which was faithful;
and they urged him to send Agrippina and the boy to the Gauls at Trêves.
Agrippina protested that she would not retire, the granddaughter of
Augustus was not going to run away from legionaries, she said. The
affectionate remonstrances of her husband, however, prevailed, and she
started; but when she was seen leaving the camp with an insignificant
escort, taking with her “Little Gaiters,” the pet of the soldiers, and
when it was understood that she was seeking shelter with foreigners,
the temper of the men suddenly changed; they stopped her flight,
they implored Germanicus to let her stay. He skilfully seized the
opportunity, and addressed them in words which were so successful in
reanimating their lost loyalty that he ventured in conclusion to bid
them, as a pledge of their renewed fidelity, to set apart the innocent
from the guilty, and vindicate their military honour. The revulsion
of feeling was so complete that a rough form of trial was at once
instituted. The commander of the first legion presided; each soldier
was placed before him on a platform in turn, and acquitted or condemned
to instant death by the shouts of his companions.
Germanicus then wrote to Cæcina, who was further down the Rhine with
the other two mutinous legions, and said that he was coming to punish
them, unless they previously punished themselves. Cæcina communicated
the tenour of the letter privately to soldiers whom he trusted, and the
camp was purged of its delinquents before the arrival of Germanicus.
The method was rough, a somewhat indiscriminate massacre, but it was
effective.
The troops, now anxious to clear themselves and to appease the spirits
of their slaughtered brethren by sending the enemy to join them in the
world of ghosts, were led across the Rhine, and a series of campaigns
kept them too fully occupied to mutiny for several years.
Tiberius confirmed the concessions made by Germanicus, and granted
them to all the mutinous armies alike, both in Pannonia and on the
Rhine, but he adopted twenty years as the fixed period for service in
the future. Excessive length of service had probably been confined to
or felt as a grievance only in the armies in these comparatively wild
regions. There was no lack of recruits for service in Syria or parts of
the world where life was agreeable, and there was not the same wastage
in the settled parts of the Empire; but central Europe possessed no
attractions for the Roman soldier, and desperate expedients had been
necessary to keep up the strength of the legions. A mutiny was also
threatened in Spain, but it was nipped in the bud by the firmness and
tact of Marcus Lepidus, whom we know as one of the possible aspirants
to the Empire.
The campaigns which followed extended over five years; they were in
every respect a repetition of previous campaigns in the same regions.
The Roman soldiers occasionally got into difficulties through ignorance
of the country, and especially of the tides; but, in spite of some
severe reverses, they more than held their own against the Germans;
these latter indeed began to quarrel among themselves. The differences
between Arminius and members of his family were taken advantage of by
Germanicus; further differences seemed likely to declare themselves
between Arminius and Maroboduus. Tiberius returned to his previous
policy. Germany had been sufficiently exhausted; the Rhine with a line
of outposts must be the frontier. Germanicus was recalled and given the
more coveted position of proconsul of the Eastern frontier. Drusus, the
son of Tiberius, took his place in Germany.
The authorities consulted by Tacitus, among which are included the
memoirs of the younger Agrippina, who was born soon after the mutiny
somewhere near Cologne, ascribed the recall of Germanicus to the
jealousy of Tiberius. The inconsistency which is involved in giving
larger powers and greater responsibility to a dangerous rival does
not strike them. There was every precedent for dreading the influence
of high official position in the East upon the mind of an ambitious
proconsul. Sulla had marched upon Rome from the East; the power of
Pompeius was founded upon his victories over Mithridates and the
pirates; Antonius had been tempted by his power in the East to grasp
at universal dominion; even the young Caius Cæsar had succumbed to
Oriental fascinations. Had Tiberius really been in dread of Germanicus,
he would have kept him in comparative insignificance at Rome; he
certainly would not have put the wealth, the resources, and the armies
of the East at his disposal.
It was, however, exceedingly desirable to get Agrippina away from the
armies on the Rhine, and Germanicus himself at the time of the mutiny
seems already to have had misgivings as to her influence, for when the
soldiers demanded that she and Caligula should return to the camp, he
granted their demand so far as the boy was concerned, but found an
excuse of an interesting and domestic nature for removing his wife to
a distance. She did not return to the army till the mutiny was finally
suppressed, but before the expected event had happened. Even Tacitus
admits on more than one occasion that Agrippina was a lady of somewhat
excitable temperament, and the virtues to which she laid ostentatious
claim, and which were universally ascribed to her, are not incompatible
with a restless ambition. She was a devoted wife, and even as a widow
maintained a reputation for “impenetrable” chastity. She was the very
pink and pattern of Roman matrons, but there was nothing in this to
prevent her from attempting to push the fortunes of her husband and
children in ways of which the former disapproved. In the last year of
the Rhine campaigns of Germanicus she temporarily took command during
her husband’s absence. Owing to a reverse which had just been sustained
the authorities at headquarters proposed to destroy the bridge across
the Rhine, a measure which would have cut off the retreat of the
Roman legions as effectively as it would have prevented an invasion
of Germans. Agrippina resisted this pusillanimous counsel; she did
more, she took up her position at the end of the bridge and praised
and thanked the legions as they returned. Nobody can fail to admire
the womanly kindness which impelled her to clothe the ragged soldiers
and poultice the wounded, but we may pardon Tiberius for complaining
that she had forgotten her position when she inspected the companies
and stood by the standards, and for seeing something more than an
exaggerated maternal pride in the dress of Caligula and the wish that
he should be called Cæsar, a something more than mere kindness in her
freehanded gifts to the private soldiers.
Agrippina was not an intriguer, she was too boisterous, too
self-confident for intrigue; but she was none the less dangerous: a
woman of rights, conjugal rights, maternal rights, ancestral rights; an
injured woman, the daughter of an injured mother, a woman whose virtues
it is pleasantest to contemplate when exhibited in the bosom of another
man’s family. Tiberius did not take her sufficiently seriously; on the
whole he seems to have been amused by her, only taking action when
action was imperatively necessary. He did not take sufficiently into
account the power for mischief which a good-hearted wrong-headed woman
of this description may become when her grievances have been taken up
by others, and when more subtle intriguers have seen in her a useful
tool.
It was soon after this exhibition of amazonian propensities that
Germanicus was recalled, and doubtless with his own consent. The
sequel indicates that his health had suffered in the arduous campaigns
on the frontier, and he probably welcomed the exchange to a warmer
climate. Tiberius, in recalling him, said that some opportunity of
conquest must be left for Drusus, a remark which has been interpreted
as an indication of jealousy on Drusus’ behalf; but it can also be
interpreted as a humorous compliment to Germanicus himself. There was
no occasion to remind him of the claims of Drusus, for the two cousins
were united by a strong friendship, as we are informed by the same
authorities who envelop us in an atmosphere of hatred, jealousy, envy,
and malice.
The political importance of the mutiny on the Rhine was very great;
it showed that fifty years of settled government had not done away
with the military danger, and that the civil government was still
at the mercy of the armies. Tiberius was less than ever inclined to
reverse the policy of Augustus, and extend the State at the expense of
exaggerating the importance of the soldiers, more than ever disposed to
employ diplomacy rather than force. We shall find him as time goes on
almost as averse to war as the great Elizabeth, and equally in danger
of pursuing peaceful methods too long. He also found it necessary to
revise his conception of the possible Imperial constitution, and to
accept the hereditary principle as inevitable. The Emperor was not to
be above and outside the State; he was to be hereditary stadtholder;
but to this extent the dynastic tendency must be accepted, and not the
least of the responsibilities of the reigning Emperor was to be the
provision for an orderly succession and a capable successor. Hence
we shall find Tiberius following the example of Augustus in training
members of his family for the burden of public duty, and in ensuring
the order of precedence by successive adoptions. It was solely owing
to the loyalty and fine ambition of Germanicus that the mutiny had not
resulted in a civil war.
In theory hereditary succession to official responsibilities is
demonstrably absurd, but in practice there is nothing so satisfactory
as a dynasty. The mutual jealousies and intrigues of aspirants are far
more dangerous to a State than the incompetence of the temporary ruler,
and the qualification of birth, though theoretically ridiculous, has
the merit of being a qualification that everybody can understand. In
the states imagined by philosophers and radical politicians the eminent
virtues of eminent men are always so conspicuous that meritorious
“Amurath to Amurath succeeds” by the will of the people without break
or intermission and in obedience to a law of nature, for, given fair
play, the capable and trustworthy men must always find themselves
at the top of the society which is blessed with their presence; but
in the states which unlearned men know of there is no agreement of
opinion as to what constitutes capacity or trustworthiness or political
virtue, and in a general scramble for power the least scrupulous has
at least an equal chance with the most virtuous. The dynast is in fact
a social necessity, and the larger the area of the State which is
governed in his name, the more necessary his existence. Society is most
secure when the highest position is reserved for those who possess an
indisputable qualification. Men may argue about the particular compound
of meritorious characteristics which they wish to see exemplified in
their ruler, and in the search for the perfect man find anarchy, but
the qualification of birth is not a thing exposed to many varieties of
opinion. Better on the whole the incapable or the overcapable dynast
than an uncertain successor.
Tiberius, by modifying his prejudices on the dynastic question, averted
a catastrophe, which fell upon the Roman Empire as soon as the line
of the Cæsars was extinguished in the person of Nero. Then the armies
of Spain set up one Emperor, and the armies of Gaul another, and the
armies of Syria a third; for two years a reversion to anarchy seemed
inevitable. The perpetual intrigues of jealous ladies ambitious
for their sons or husbands did not contribute to the pleasures of
existence in the Imperial households, but they were less evil than the
disruption of the Empire or the emergence of military adventurers.
Tiberius sacrificed his domestic comfort to the interests of the
State; he did not know that he was at the same time sacrificing his
posthumous reputation; he did not divine the existence of the memoirs
of Agrippina.
XIII
Tacitus and Tiberius
To tell the story of the reign of Tiberius by minutely tracking
Tacitus through his manifold inconsistencies and clever insinuations,
though entertaining to the investigator, would prove wearisome to the
reader; but a somewhat careful examination of the Emperor’s methods of
Government during the first year of his administration will spare us
lengthy explanations in dealing with subsequent events.
Tacitus and Suetonius alike seem to have collected their information
from three chief sources, private memoirs, popular rumours, in which
are to be included pasquinades and the topical songs of actors,
and the official record of the transactions of the Senate. The
first two sources of information are obviously not of a trustworthy
character; memoirs are not to be relied on even in these days of rapid
transmission of news and wide publicity. An historian who should essay
to compile the biography of a public man of today, even from the daily
and weekly journals which are filled with personal gossip about those
upon whom the attention of the public is fixed, would find such a
mass of contradictions to deal with that he would abandon his task in
despair; and yet the matter thus afforded to his inspection is day by
day subject to correction. Memoirs written by an irresponsible person
in his private study are even more likely to contain perversions of
fact, to omit, to exaggerate, to represent exclusively the personal
bias of the writer.
It is hardly necessary to add that loose anecdotes and the buffooneries
of actors do not constitute evidence; it is, indeed, difficult to
understand how Suetonius, a presumably grave schoolmaster, could quote
snatches of popular songs as serious history, and repeat the filthy
gossip of the Roman streets.
But the evidence of public documents such as the record of the
transactions of the Senate is unimpeachable; and this evidence,
whenever Tacitus gives it us, is invariably such as to compel us to
believe that Tiberius was a wise and moderate ruler.
So overwhelming is this evidence, that the very creators of the
monstrous figure, which passes for that of Tiberius, had serious
misgivings; whenever they examined the public records, they found
the lustful, rapacious, bloodthirsty tyrant of their imaginations
acting on the strictest lines of constitutional government. How
were they to reconcile their creation with acknowledged and indeed
indisputable facts? It seemed to them that there was a simple way out
of the difficulty, namely, to ascribe to the monster the yet further
monstrosity of deep dissimulation. The fascination of the style of
Tacitus is such that this astounding solution of the difficulty has
been all but universally accepted; but even if we accept it, we have
to ask ourselves whether profound dissimulation of this kind is not a
quality to be desired in a ruler rather than the reverse; whether in
fact the general sum of wickedness in the world would not be diminished
almost to vanishing point, were we to accept as a rule of life the duty
of acting virtuously from motives of profound dissimulation up to the
age of seventy, in order that we may enjoy unbridled licentiousness and
cruelty for the remainder of our lives. This is the practical result
of believing that Tiberius never did a good action except from motives
of profound dissimulation. We shall find ourselves, when we come to
the events of the year A.D. 30, faced with an insoluble problem, which
even the discovery of the missing book of Tacitus might fail to clear
for us; but the only solution of that problem which has as yet been
offered to us is contrary to the known laws of human nature. Men do not
of forethought and design practise virtue for seventy years in order
that they may indulge in vice at a time of life when they are oftenest
incapable of taking exercise except in a bath-chair.
The fable of the dissimulation of Tiberius grew out of two facts, his
naturally reserved nature, and the mysterious tragedy which clouded the
last seven years of his life. Of the nature of that tragedy, and of the
question whether he was not more sinned against than sinning, it will
be more convenient to speak when we reach it in the order of events;
but of the personal characteristics which tempted men to ascribe to
him numerous unamiable qualities, and which gave credence to the cruel
insinuations of his private enemies, it is not inconvenient to speak at
the present moment.
The silent man is always terrible, and Tiberius was a silent man; even
when he spoke, he spoke slowly; his prepared speeches were uttered
with deliberation, and it was not always easy to follow their meaning;
he was in fact apt to speak above the heads of his audience, and to
ascribe to them knowledge and trains of thought which they did not
share with himself. His obscurity was the more alarming because it
seemed to be premeditated, for when he was unexpectedly stirred by
some strong emotion, his words were rapid enough and clear enough and
incisive enough to make such of his hearers as had reason to dread
his displeasure feel very uncomfortable. Given time for preparation,
he studied the statesman’s art of non-committal oratory; he felt his
responsibilities, and was so anxious to avoid injudicious expressions
as to be sometimes unintelligible. The contrast between this
studied reticence and his occasional vigorous invective, or biting
sarcasm, was so marked as to suggest perpetually smouldering fires.
Sometimes his sense of humour tempted him to an unseemly display,
as when the citizens of Troy sent a belated deputation to condole
with him on the death of his son, and he returned the compliment by
expressing his sympathy with their grief at the loss of an eminent
fellow-citizen--Hector. He was contemptuous of the arts by which
popularity is gained; conscious of rectitude of purpose, and of a
generally benevolent temper towards his immediate attendants and the
people of Rome, he never pretended to take pleasure in things for
which he had no taste in order to win favour. Simple in his tastes,
inexpensive in his pleasures, he reserved his money for great
emergencies, and forbore to squander it upon those sumptuous shows in
which the Roman crowds delighted. It was this severity of temperament
in Tiberius which Augustus endeavoured unsuccessfully to modify,
himself a man naturally disposed to bask in the popular favour and
genuinely enjoying the lighter side of life. We shall have to record
pleasing instances of the benevolent and wise liberality of Tiberius
on occasions of great distress, but the common herd is more ready to
bestow its affections upon those who share its everyday amusements
than upon those who provide relief for its exceptional tribulations;
indeed, the man who abstains from the pleasures of others, inevitably,
though unwillingly and unconsciously, assumes the position of a censor
of morals, for the man who cannot enjoy with others is often unjustly
credited, even in private life, with a veiled contempt for the lovers
of innocent diversions. Again, seeing events from a point of view which
commanded a large horizon, Tiberius did not feel the sting of words or
actions which appeared to less large natures necessarily unendurable,
and when he forbore to express resentment his silence was construed
as an indication not of indifference, but of politic self-restraint.
Men do not readily inflict humiliation on themselves by imputing to an
enemy unconsciousness of their malice or contempt for its smallness;
it is more satisfactory to believe that the wound has been felt, and
that the victim is brooding over his revenge. The reserve of Tiberius
was the more imposing because his personal appearance was in itself
awe-inspiring; the tall, gaunt old man, with his large eyes, his
thin lips, his bush of hair, his stooping shoulders, and, as his age
increased, his fiery complexion, was a figure calculated to inspire
terror, when the revelation of some unexpected meanness, some more than
ordinarily unjust interpretation of his actions called forth one of
those rare bursts of passion and scorching vituperation. But a man may
thus terrify without possessing any propensity to cruelty; mere native
superiority is terrifying, and the more so when its possessor is one
whose powers are vague and believed to be unlimited.
Tiberius is not the only statesman who has underestimated the
damaging effects of unpopularity; within certain limits a statesman
cannot afford to be unpopular, and impairs his own usefulness if he
raises an irrational prejudice against himself. There are times and
occasions when it is the duty of a statesman to face public opinion,
and to persist in an unpopular policy, but it is never the duty of
a statesman to excite personal animosity; in so far as a public man
stirs unnecessary animosities he is a failure, for it is only a rare
combination of circumstances that reveals to a community the real worth
of a man who has the unfortunate knack of making himself disliked. On
the other hand, the worthlessness of many a man who has achieved great
popularity by the unconscious flattery of the weaknesses of his fellow
citizens, has often escaped notice, because the events by which alone
he could be tested never happened to occur in his lifetime, or during
his tenure of power.
Conscious of the strictest rectitude of purpose, contemptuous of the
judgment of the crowd, equally contemptuous of the small aims and
narrow outlook of even the more cultivated Roman Senators, shrewd,
practical and intellectual, but not emotional or sentimental, impatient
of weakness, intolerant of smallness, Tiberius was not a man to attract
sympathy, or to be appreciated beyond the narrow circle of a few
intimates, who understood his real aspirations. Augustus was a less
noble man and a less intellectual man, but he was able to do work that
Tiberius could never have done, because he was more in touch with the
men through whom he had to work; where Augustus was guided by a subtle
and unconscious sympathy, Tiberius practised the lessons drawn from
observation and reason. The result was in most cases the same, but with
this difference, that Tiberius ignored those things which are incapable
of rational analysis and mathematical expression, Augustus understood
them; while Tiberius refused to allow altars to be built in his honour,
his sturdy common sense not permitting him to see anything supernatural
in his position, Augustus, with a truer instinct, allowed himself to be
canonized in his lifetime. Tiberius offended a popular sentiment by his
rejection of divine honours; Augustus by his acceptance added not only
to his own security, but to the strength of the Empire.
An examination of the political transactions of Tiberius for the year
15 A.D., and of the account which Tacitus gives of them, forms at once
a good introduction to the study of subsequent events, and sets in a
clear light the policy of the Emperor, the tendencies of the Senate,
and the character of the impartiality claimed for himself by the
historian.
Augustus had been dead for four months when the Senate met on the first
of January to exchange compliments with the Emperor, and to inaugurate
the policy of the coming year; the formal business of installing the
officials in their chairs was gone through on this occasion, and all
the ceremonies handed down from the Republican times were scrupulously
observed.
In addition to the routine business, the Senate offered a compliment
to Tiberius; they wished him to accept and adopt permanently the title
of “Father of his Country,” which they had given to Augustus. Tiberius
refused it. Suetonius has preserved a few lines of the speech in which
he intimated his refusal: “If, however, you shall at any time find
reason to mistrust my character, or my devotion to yourselves--and I
pray heaven that death may save me from such a change in your opinion
of me before it comes to pass--this title will add nothing to my fame,
while it will convict you either of precipitation in conferring it
upon me now, or of levity in forming a contrary opinion hereafter.”
The concluding sentence suggests a possible touch of irony, but it
does not give any ground for the assumption that Tiberius foresaw his
own unpopularity, or was conscious of being unworthy of the honour,
as is suggested by Suetonius. Tiberius despised the empty compliment;
possibly he was irritated by the offer, but the tyrant who would think
it worth his while to deprecate a compliment of this kind, because he
was conscious of his unworthiness, or deliberately proposed to make
himself unworthy, is rare in the annals of tyranny.
The Senate then wished to proceed to a ceremony which was not merely
ceremonial, but of deep political significance. Cæsar during his
short reign had prevailed on the Senate to take an oath individually
that they would ratify all his transactions. It was by virtue of
this proceeding that Antonius made his snatch at supreme power.
After the murder of the Dictator the Senate was still pledged to the
ratification of his acts, and Antonius being in possession of the
papers of Cæsar was able to produce Cæsar’s authority for whatever
measures he wished to carry and whatever appointments he wished to
make. Augustus had reintroduced the same system, and it had been the
custom during his reign to renew the oath on the first day of each
official year. The Senate’s position was thus reduced from that of a
legislative and executive body to that of a purely consultative body;
the forms of voting, the forms of the appointment of magistrates might
be maintained, senators might be free to express their opinions on
questions of policy, or to raise questions and direct the attention of
the Emperor to matters requiring his attention, but they were pledged
in advance to accept his decision. It is a work of supererogation to
enumerate the different magistracies which were combined in the one
person of the Emperor, for so long as the Senators took this oath, he
was above all magistracies; no power was left to the Senate except
that of formally ratifying his decrees. Much the same effect has
been secured in English politics by the stringent rules of party
Government: members of Parliament do not take an oath to register the
decrees of the leaders or leader of their party, but the practical
result is the same; whatever may be said in the House of Commons,
however violent the debates, the conclusion is foregone, so soon as the
Government of the day has declared its intentions; practically no Bill
can be introduced without its consent, no discussion held except with
its connivance; the majority is pledged to vote as its leaders direct,
and the march into the division lobbies is a tedious and superfluous
ceremony, an antiquated and exasperating formality. Political purists
may deplore such a state of things, but as a practical expedient it is
supremely useful. No country was ever yet governed by an undisciplined
debating society; the form of discipline may vary, but the discipline
must be there.
Tiberius, however, wished to be a constitutional ruler, and to restore
to the Senate its independence; he refused to allow it to swear in
advance to ratify his transactions. Here again we have a few lines
of his speech: “I shall always be like myself, and I shall never
change my character so long as I am of sound mind; but for the sake of
the precedent the Senate must be cautious not to bind itself to the
transactions of any being who might be changed by some misadventure.”
The comment of Tacitus is simply: “He did not, however, gain credit
for a constitutional policy in this way. For he had revived the ‘Lex
Majestatis,’ etc., etc.”
Deferring for a moment the consideration of the “Lex Majestatis,” which
was the special bugbear of Tacitus, we may remark that either he did
not realize the significance of the act by which Tiberius formally
emancipated the Senate from his own control, in which case we attach
little value to his opinions as a constitutional historian, or that
he did see, but preferred to ignore, in which case we may dismiss his
claim for impartiality. It is quite possible that he states correctly
the opinion of some contemporaries of Tiberius, who frequently
misunderstood a moderation for which they were not prepared, and who
had so long acquiesced in the policy of Augustus that any other was
beyond their comprehension; but Tacitus was not bound to a similar
dullness, and still less are we bound to share his blindness. The act
was one of the first political importance, and no modern historian
would dismiss a similar action of a prominent statesman with a comment
of seven words. We shall see that in this as in other similar measures,
Tiberius was unsuccessful in his attempt to restore the Senatorial
Government, but we cannot without gross injustice refuse him credit for
making the attempt.
The next statement, “For he had revived the ‘Lex Majestatis,’ etc.,”
is simply a lie, for the words would naturally be held to imply that
the law in question had fallen into abeyance, and was now recalled
to activity. Tacitus himself tells us in the very next sentence,
that Augustus had extended the application of this law from deeds to
libellous writings; nor was the “revival” of this application anything
that we should understand as a revival. The Prætors, on entering
office each year, made an official announcement of the sense in which
they proposed to interpret the laws during their term of office, and
of any modifications which were to be introduced in their procedure.
Pompeius Macro, who was one of the Prætors for the year A.D. 15, asked
Tiberius whether cases under the “Lex Majestatis” were to be heard.
Tiberius replied that the laws must be enforced; he neither made a new
law nor revived an old one, nor announced a fresh interpretation of a
previous law; he simply announced that the previous practice should be
continued, and this in the customary routine of business; it was the
duty of Macro the Prætor, not of Tiberius the Princeps, to announce
any proposed change in procedure. Tacitus may be right in assuming
that it was in the power of Tiberius at this moment to take the sting
out of the actions under the “Lex Majestatis,” and that he would have
been wise in doing so, but he has totally misrepresented the facts in
stating that Tiberius revived the operation of this law.
The history of the “Lex Majestatis” is not absolutely clear, but it
is certain that comparatively early in the Republican period the
laws provided for the punishment of a Roman citizen who by his acts
diminished the majesty of the Republic: cowardice in the field,
premature surrender, dishonourable breaches of faith by which the
dignity of the State was impaired, were deeds punishable under this
law. Its operation was extended under Augustus to words and actions
tending to lower the dignity of private citizens and of the head of the
State in whom the majesty of the Republic was centred and personified;
to publish disrespectful or libellous statements about the Emperor,
to plot against his life, to acquiesce in depreciatory criticism of
his actions, were all things which could be brought under the “Lex
Majestatis”; it dealt with treason, constructive treason, and ordinary
libel. The penalties were severe, but the peculiar aggravation lay in
the fact that the informer was rewarded. Similar laws are not unknown
to modern States, and are not held to be necessarily detrimental to the
body politic; at the same time, they are capable of being abused, and
under the rule of Caligula, Nero and Domitian, the “Lex Majestatis”
proved to be an engine of tyranny; informers drove a profitable trade,
and the confiscations made under the law proved a source of revenue
to these spendthrift princes. There is, however, no evidence that the
grievance had been felt in the reign of Augustus, and Tiberius is
hardly to be blamed for not annulling ancient legislation within six
months of his accession, which had as yet caused little inconvenience.
If there had been abuses, the remedy lay in the administration rather
than in the repeal of the law.
Tacitus had at his disposal the whole body of the transactions of the
Senate; if a good case was to be made out against the manner in which
the “Lex Majestatis” was worked under Tiberius, all the material was
before him; had there been serious abuses, the evidence was accessible.
He, however, produces only three cases in the year 15 A.D., which he
introduces with the following flourish: “It will be worth while to
relate the charges which it was endeavoured to bring against Falanius
and Rubrius, equestrians of no particular distinction, so that it may
be seen from what beginnings this deadly bane started, with what artful
management on the part of Tiberius it crept on, was then repressed,
lastly blazed up, and carried everything before it.” Falanius was
accused on two charges: he had enrolled a notoriously disreputable
actor among the worshippers of Augustus; he had sold a statue of
Augustus along with the garden in which it stood. Rubrius was accused
of perjury after swearing by the name of Augustus. The charges were
dismissed. Tiberius said that Cassius the actor had been included by
Livia herself among the actors appointed to give a performance in
honour of Augustus; that there was no reason for distinguishing between
a statue of Augustus and statues of other gods, which were habitually
included in the sale of houses and gardens; that Augustus had not
been deified in order that his worship should lead to the ruin of the
citizens; and as to oaths taken in his name, they must be treated
like oaths taken in the name of Jupiter. He added with characteristic
irony: “The gods can protect their own dignity.” These remarks
contained in a letter addressed to the Consuls, as soon as the facts
came to the Emperor’s ears, stopped the prosecution. The accusers were
foolish enough, but it is not easy to see where Tiberius is guilty of
encouraging informers in these cases.
The third case was more complicated. Granius Marcellus, the Governor
of Bithynia, was accused by two different men at once of two different
crimes: his subordinate, Cæpio Crispinus, charged him with extortion
in the government of his province; Hispo, a professional informer,
according to Tacitus, accused him of defamation of the character of
Tiberius, of placing his own statue higher than that of the Cæsars,
of cutting the head off a statue of Augustus and replacing it by one
of Tiberius. Marcellus was acquitted of the charges brought by Hispo,
which came under the “Lex Majestatis”; the charge of extortion was
referred to the court appointed to hear such causes. Here again there
is absolutely no evidence that Tiberius was inclined to press charges
under the “Lex Majestatis”; the evidence is all in the contrary
direction, but Tacitus, with an absolutely diabolical ingenuity,
contrives to give his story the necessary twist. “Hispo pretended that
Marcellus had made libellous speeches about Tiberius, a charge which
it was impossible to escape, since the accuser picked out all the most
abominable things in the character of the Emperor, and imputed the
statement of them to the defendant. For because they were true charges
they were believed to have been uttered.” And yet it was precisely on
these charges that the man was acquitted. Tacitus, however, succeeded
in stating that Tiberius was a man of abominable moral character, that
everybody knew it, and in further suggesting that the statements were
made in a court of justice with the acquiescence of the audience. It
is not likely that the speech of Hispo was preserved, even if the
case went so far as to allow him to make one, but the influence of
the senatorial record in favour of Tiberius had to be dispelled, and
is cleverly dispelled by the suggestion that the calumnies against
Tiberius received a quasi-official sanction in the law court; if they
were listened to, their truth was so obvious that nobody protested.
After recounting the points in Hispo’s indictment, Tacitus continues:
“Thereupon he (Tiberius) lost his temper to such an extent, that
breaking his usual silence he declared that he would give his opinion
on that case openly and on his oath, in order that the other senators
might be obliged to do the same.” Tacitus would like us to think that
the display of indignation was caused by the charge of defamation, but
there were two other and better reasons for wrath. In the first place,
extortionate proceedings in the provinces always stirred the wrath of
Tiberius; Bithynia was a Senatorial Province; the Senate were still
apt to deal leniently with one of their own order, and Tiberius may
have detected indications that they were likely to take this line; in
the second place, to couple a charge of extortion with a charge of
defamation of the Emperor was a bit of sharp practice; the informer
hoped to get his reward under the “Lex Majestatis,” because he believed
that the man would be condemned on the charge of extortion, and that
the prejudice thus created against him would secure his condemnation on
both charges. It was an abominable trick, and Tiberius saw through it.
The conclusion of the narrative of Tacitus is no less ingenious; he
says: “There even then remained some traces of expiring liberty.
Therefore Gnæus Piso said, ‘In what place will you give your opinion,
Cæsar? If first, I shall have something to follow; if last, I am
afraid I may inadvertently differ from you.’ Thoroughly alarmed by
these words, and penitent because of the imprudence of his outburst, he
allowed the accused to be acquitted of the charges of ‘Majestas.’ The
case of extortion was referred to the assessors.”
As these are the only three cases tried under the law of “Majestas”
in the first twelve months of the reign of Tiberius, we must admit
that he marched very slowly to that tragic wickedness to which Tacitus
refers, and by means of an art which is so artful, as to be to our eyes
absolutely invisible.
It is further to be remembered that there was formal documentary
evidence of the charges, and of their subsequent dismissal, but no
evidence can have been forthcoming as to the Emperor’s burst of temper,
or the acquiescence of the audience in the supposed revelation of his
wickedness except tradition and private memoirs. The remark of Gnæus
Piso was to the point, but it is evidence of the weakness of the
Senate, not of the tyranny of Tiberius.
Tiberius having thus summarily quashed three cases under the “Lex
Majestatis,” and sent a senatorial oppressor of a province to be dealt
with by the constitutional court, may have offended those surviving
heirs of the old senatorial tradition to whom the restoration of
the Senate implied the restoration of the abuses of the senatorial
administration, but he had done nothing tyrannical. The narrative
of Tacitus proceeds, however, as if Tiberius had waded knee deep in
blood, and triumphed in the perversion of justice: “Not satiated with
the processes in the Senate he used to attend the courts, sitting
at the end of the tribunal, in order not to remove the Prætor from
his official seat.” There is no question about the fact; Augustus
used in the same unofficial fashion to attend the courts and watch
the administration of justice, acting in this respect like any other
Senator, but the skilful use of the words “not satiated” gives a
sinister significance to an innocent statement.
The administration of justice was not above suspicion in the Roman
Law Courts, and the presence of Tiberius among the jury secured a
fair hearing. As Tacitus himself says, “Many decisions were given in
his presence contrary to the bribes and solicitations of influential
men,” and then follows the customary Tacitean comment, “But while the
interests of truth were being looked after liberty was corrupted.”
If liberty means the sacred right of senatorial juries and powerful
men to secure maladministration of justice by means of bribes and
private influence, we can hardly blame Tiberius for “corrupting” such
liberty, and may be excused for not seeing any excessive adulation in
the remarks which Paterculus makes in reference to the same procedure,
“Confidence in the Courts of Law was restored.” “With what dignity does
he (Tiberius) attentively listen to cases as a senator and juryman, not
as Princeps and Cæsar!”
By insisting on an impartial administration of justice, Tiberius made
enemies among those who were interested in the contrary practice,
and there is no doubt that many a senator relieved his feelings by
recording instances of such tyranny in his private diary. It is all
a question of point of view; our point of view does not allow us to
stigmatize a man as a tyrant who steadily worked for the purity of the
law courts.
The next recorded transaction in the Senate was of a different nature;
the excessive weight of a road and aqueduct had caused a subsidence of
the foundations of a Senator’s house, and he had applied to the Senate
for compensation; the officials of the Treasury resisted the claim,
but Tiberius ordered the value of the house to be paid to the owner.
Then follows the inevitable comment: “For he was fond of distributing
money in honourable ways, a virtue which he long retained, when he was
abandoning all others.” Even this remark is, however, not sufficiently
damaging for Tacitus, and he carefully provides that his next statement
should be calculated to appeal to a well-known weakness. Propertius
Celer asked to be allowed to retire from the Senatorial Order on
account of insufficiency of means. Tiberius, on ascertaining that his
poverty was inherited, bestowed on him a million sestertii (about
£8,500). So far so good; no senator could object to this, but something
follows: “When others attempted to get the same relief he ordered them
to prove their case to the Senate, harsh even in those things which he
did in due form, through his excessive love of strict procedure. For
this reason the rest preferred silence and poverty to confession and
gratuities.” We shall have to record later on a particularly impudent
attempt on the part of an indigent Senator to extort money for the
relief of his necessities, and shall find that Tiberius had good
reason for insisting that men who claimed the assistance of the Senate
should give a full account of their means and of the causes of their
poverty; but it is easy to see that the severity of Tiberius would
not be popular with the Senate, and that a prejudice could be created
against him by giving an example of his strictness in this matter early
in his reign. Paterculus, more just than Tacitus, praises Tiberius for
the discrimination with which he assisted impoverished Senators.
In the same year there were heavy floods in the Tiber; the lower
regions of the city were inundated, many buildings fell, many lives
were lost. Asinius Gallus, the second husband of Vipsania, moved that
the Sibylline books should be consulted. We are not surprised to hear
that Tiberius rejected the motion “on religious no less than practical
grounds.” It is an interesting illustration of the curious development
of the Italian intellect that these same men who could seriously
propose in their solemn assembly to consult the Roman Mother Shipton in
a case of this kind should form a bold engineering scheme for dealing
with the difficulty. It was suggested, after a committee had reported,
that the tributaries which brought the floods into the Tiber should be
diverted. The scheme was abandoned, as deputations from the inhabitants
of the valleys through which these rivers flowed pointed out that they
would suffer serious loss if it were carried out. There were also
religious obstacles; these rivers were worshipped, and Tiber himself
might object to the proposed diminution of his glorious stream.
We then have a fragment of administration dismissed by Tacitus in
a couple of lines without comment. The provinces of Achaia and
Macedonia begged to be relieved of the expense of the Senatorial
Government and transferred to the Imperial provinces; both of these
provinces had suffered in consequence of the Pannonian war. The
Imperial administration was less expensive than that of the Senate,
not necessarily because the Senatorial Government was corrupt, but
because the honours paid to the Senatorial viceroys and their trains
were expensive; there was the difference between maintaining a court
and paying an official. Adverse comment was in this case impossible,
because when Tacitus was writing, the process of removing the
distinction between Senatorial and Imperial provinces was in progress.
Trajan would hardly have approved of a reactionary comment, such as
Tacitus might have been tempted to make. These provinces were restored
to the Senate by Claudius.
This notice is followed by a statement and comment in the best Tacitean
style: “Drusus (the son of Tiberius) presided at the gladiatorial
shows which he had offered in the names of himself and his brother
Germanicus, although too easily pleased with cheap bloodshed, a thing
which was full of danger to the commonalty, and which his father
is said to have reproved. Different reasons were assigned for the
Emperor’s own absence from the shows; some said that he disliked a
crowd, others alleged his dismal nature and his fear of comparisons,
for Augustus had taken part in these events with affability. I should
be unwilling to believe that an opportunity was deliberately given to
his son of demonstrating his cruelty and exciting unpopularity, though
that was also said.”
The connection of thought is not quite obvious, for if the gladiatorial
shows were popular, and they certainly were popular, how could Drusus
incur unpopularity by presiding? There is unhappily no evidence that
the populace of Rome ever objected to bloodshed in the arena, and the
president at these shows would be more likely to make himself disliked
by checking than by permitting or encouraging the slaughter. Nor
again is it easy to see the force of the phrase, “although too easily
pleased with cheap bloodshed,” unless there is a reference implied to
the pleasure which Drusus was said to have taken in the executions
of the mutineers in Pannonia, an inexpensive pleasure compared with
that afforded by the fights of trained gladiators; the word “although”
suggests that Drusus could get his bloodshed more cheaply than by
giving gladiatorial shows.
Again, if Drusus was wrong in patronizing these shows, how could
Tiberius also be wrong in refusing to be present? As a matter of fact,
one of the many points in the character of Tiberius which commands our
respect is his aversion to the disgusting spectacles of all kinds in
which the Roman people delighted. But considerations of this kind did
not weigh with Tacitus; he was not interested in being consistent;
he found in the memoirs adverse interpretations of the conduct of
Tiberius, and he impartially repeated them, though they were in
contradiction with his previous condemnation of Drusus.
A riot in the theatre was the next event of importance. We shall have
on a later occasion to discuss the position of the theatres at some
length. It is enough to record that on the present occasion opinions
were given in the Senate to the effect that the Prætors should be
allowed to flog actors. A tribune interposed his veto according to an
old constitutional practice, and was roundly abused by Asinius Gallus
for doing so. “Tiberius preserved silence, for he conceded to the
Senate such phantoms of liberty.” However, the veto of the tribune was
allowed, “because the sainted Augustus had once declared that actors
were exempt from the rods, and it was a matter of conscience with
Tiberius not to infringe his utterances.” The further proceedings in
the Senate on this occasion throw a curious light on the manners of the
time. It was decreed that Senators should not enter the houses of the
pantomimists, that the Equestrians should not attend them when they
went out, that they should not give performances except in the theatre,
and that the Prætors should have power to punish the extravagance of
the spectators with banishment.
Then the Spaniards were allowed to build a temple to Augustus at
Tarragona, thus setting an example to all the provinces. The people of
Tarragona had not hitherto been fortunate in their worship of Augustus;
they had set up an altar to him in his lifetime, and soon afterwards
announced to him radiantly that a palm had grown from it. “It is easy
to see that you do not often sacrifice,” the old man had remarked.
Petitions were presented against the tax of one per cent. on auctions.
Tiberius declared in an edict that the military chest depended on that
source of income, and added that the burden of the army was too great
for the State unless the soldiers served for twenty years; thus the
reduction to sixteen years demanded by the mutineers was set aside.
The two concluding chapters of the first book of the _Annals_ are also
remarkable in their unfairness or want of perspicacity; and yet the
grievances suggested by them have been alluded to again and again by
historians of repute without criticism and as real grievances, for it
is the melancholy fate of most students of Tacitus to lose all sense of
consistency.
“Poppæus Sabinus was continued in the governorship of Moesia, Achaia
and Macedonia being added to the province. This too was one of the
ways of Tiberius, to prolong the periods of office and to keep most of
the officials in command of the same armies or at the head of the same
jurisdictions to the ends of their lives. Various reasons are given.
Some said that through mere distaste for fresh exertion he treated
appointments once made as eternal, others that he was envious and
wanted few to enjoy power; some think that selections were a matter of
serious anxiety to him because he was cunning; he had little regard
for eminent virtues, and again he disliked vices; he feared danger to
himself from worthy men, public disgrace from bad men. At length he
went so far in this kind of dilatoriness that he assigned provinces to
some men, whom he did not intend to leave the city.”
The frequent change of Governors, Generals, and other officials had
been the curse of the Republican Government. Again and again it had
been necessary, when serious work was to be done, to lengthen the
limited terms of office allowed by the old senatorial constitution; the
old arrangements had not been made in the interests of the provincials
or the administration of public business, but so that the members of
the oligarchy at Rome might share and share alike in the plunder of
the conquered countries, and that no single one of them should acquire
sufficient money or power to set himself above the laws. When the
old arrangements were rigorously carried out, no Roman Governor had
more than a transitory glance of the province which he occupied; he
himself and the train by which he was attended devoted their energies
to making as much as they could in the short time at their disposal;
the evil had been pointed out again and again; and as Tacitus has
himself told us, the burden even of the reformed senatorial government
was such that two impoverished provinces begged to be relieved of it.
The policy of Tiberius was the only sound one for the provinces, and
the sole objection to it was an objection which he, if he had been
a suspicious ruler, might have felt to be a strong one. There was a
danger that the men who stayed in their provinces long enough to feel
their strength might be tempted to set up an independent government.
This danger Tiberius preferred to risk, and that he did so acquits him
of the charge conveyed in the insinuation that he was jealous of the
enjoyment of power by a number of persons. Eventually, as we shall see
later on, he made the Governors of provinces Secretaries of State for
the countries which they governed; they did not leave Rome, but were
the channels through which the business of the provinces was conducted
at Rome. The language which Tacitus here uses is not the language of an
experienced official working under Trajan with the records of a century
of the Empire behind him, but the language of a reactionary of the
reign of Tiberius. The breed of Romans who could see nothing in greater
Rome but a field for plundering in the name of governing never quite
died out; even in Trajan’s reign there were probably more aspirants
than offices, and many discontented men, who thought that there were
not sufficient opportunities of promotion. Tiberius certainly was
careful in his selection of the great officials, but his caution was
in the interests of the unhappy provincials. There were doubtless many
noble Romans in his day who believed themselves to be possessed of the
eminent virtues necessary to a provincial governor, but who somehow
failed to secure promotion.
Tacitus on this occasion, as on many others, skilfully substitutes
contemporary comment for contemporary evidence. All that he really
tells us is that some of the contemporaries of Tiberius disliked his
policy; what he wishes to tell us is that the government of Tiberius
was radically bad, and that his contemporaries were right in saying so.
The last chapter deals with the elections of the Consuls, a subject
which Tacitus professes to find obscure. The reality of election by the
Comitia Centuriata had already been abolished; it had become a mere
form, and nobody noticed its abolition; Augustus practically appointed
the Consuls; Tiberius seems to have wished the Senate to elect them,
but found that there were practical difficulties. After mentioning
various ways in which Tiberius secured the election of his own
candidates, Tacitus says: “Generally he discoursed to the effect that
those men only were candidates whose names he had given to the Consuls,
but that others were at liberty to stand if they had confidence in
their own influence or deserts. This was plausible enough in words,
but meaningless or insidious in fact, and the more it was involved in
the appearance of liberty, likely to break out into the more deadly
slavery.”
This imposing malediction ends the book. As a matter of fact the
Consular Office was by this time purely ornamental.
XIV
The Case of Scribonius Libo
Enough has been said in the previous chapter to show the bias under
which Tacitus wrote, and the dexterity with which he substituted
inferences and insinuations for evidence. It must, however, be conceded
to Tacitus that the operation of the “Lex Majestatis” was attended by
many and serious evils; for those evils Tiberius and the men of his
time were not responsible. The period was one of transition in most
departments of social organization, and especially in all matters
connected with the administration of justice. Under the Republic every
head of a great family was in theory, and even in practice, a skilled
lawyer; there was no legal profession. The Prætors who presided in the
law courts were not specially trained judges; any Senator might become
a Prætor, and preside in one of the law courts for his year of office;
similarly any Senator might be called upon to take his place as a
juryman, and give his verdict after listening to the evidence and the
speeches of counsel. In course of time the Equestrian Order shared this
duty with Senators.
Similarly there was no such thing as a professional advocate; every
Senator was bound to plead on behalf of his own clients, and no
Senator could recover fees as an advocate; indeed, advocates were
strictly forbidden to ask for fees. The relation between the advocate
and his client was held to be a personal one, not professional. The
word client still in use reminds us of this relation; we have lost
the corresponding word “patron,” which Tacitus and Suetonius employ
precisely in the technical sense of advocate. Such a system could
not be maintained under the increased complexity of life caused by
the expansion of Rome, and the professional advocate was inevitably
evolved; “patrons” who were noticeably successful in winning their
cases naturally attracted “clients”; and hence we have even in the
Republican period men occupying positions not easily distinguishable
from those of our own barristers, and in virtue of various legal
fictions actually making large fortunes by the exercise of their
profession. Cicero and Hortensius were eminent examples of the
non-professional and yet professional advocate.
The fact that there was no organized and officially recognized body of
men to plead in the law courts caused little inconvenience in private
cases. A man who defended the interests of a friend, or brought an
action in his name, was not in an invidious position, even though
by well known evasions of the law he received a consideration for
his friendly services. Again so long as the senatorial constitution
existed, the prosecution of offenders against the State was an
honourable public duty, and young men took their first step in a
political career by conducting a State prosecution or defending the
delinquent. Such prosecutions were political rather than legal;
they were episodes in a never-ending party struggle; they resembled
the impeachments and attainders of our own parliamentary history.
The introduction of the monarch into the Roman Constitution created
a state of affairs for which the Constitution had not provided; the
position of the head of the Government was not defined; it was only
gradually and by a slow process of development that his person and his
good name were protected from attack. We do not possess the text of
the Julian laws passed in the reign of Augustus, whose object was in
part to protect the first person in the State, and to make offences
against his person and reputation offences against the majesty of the
State; but we know enough of their nature to be certain that Augustus
with all his wisdom found an unhappy solution of a real difficulty.
The Roman Republic was not provided with a Public Prosecutor, nor with
law officers of the Crown, nor could Augustus be provided with such
protectors; he could neither through his agents nor in person bring
actions against offenders under the “Lex Majestatis,” for in such a
case the verdict was a foregone conclusion. In order, therefore, that
such cases should be spontaneously brought before the courts, it was
enacted that the prosecutor, if successful, should receive all or part
of the fine. Men were thus tempted not only to get up cases, but to
provide that the evidence should lead to a confiscation of the goods
of the defendant; the greater the penalty, the greater the reward
of the prosecutor. Speculations in promoting conspiracy and then
informing were the natural result. It is easy at this distance of time
to condemn the system, and easier still to forget the long growth of
habits and prescriptions which have rendered trials for treason and
constructive treason and for libelling the Sovereign almost obsolete in
our own country. In our happy ignorance of the conditions which made
such processes possible and necessary we may be tempted to ask with
surprise why Tiberius, if he were really a wise and moderate man, did
not abolish or amend the “Lex Majestatis.” The hostile writers Tacitus
and Suetonius tell us repeatedly that Tiberius never made use of this
law, or of any law, as a means of filling his treasury. The examples of
prosecutions under this law given by Tacitus almost without exception,
and invariably up to A.D. 30, show Tiberius moderating the zeal of the
prosecutors, and lightening the sentences pronounced by the Senate;
in fact, the abuses of the law are perpetrated by the prosecutors and
the Senate, not by Tiberius; and the Emperor may reasonably have held
that as it was always in his power to check the abuses of the law,
its amendment, a matter of great difficulty, might be left to time,
and that in accordance with Roman custom the desired result would be
achieved better by an accumulation of precedents than by a formal
enactment.
The case of Scribonius Libo is interesting, less as affecting the
character of Tiberius than as throwing a light upon the manners of the
time. Tacitus does not provide us with the formal indictment, nor with
the evidence; he is pleased to think that the case affords a remarkable
illustration of the horrors of the “Lex Majestatis,” and omits or
insinuates at discretion. The case as represented by him seems to have
been rather trivial, and more trivial to us than to the Romans of
that time, because we no longer believe, or believe that we no longer
believe in magic.
Drusus Scribonius Libo was a relative, though not a very near relative,
to members of the Julian house. Scribonia, his great-great-aunt,
was the first real wife of Augustus and the mother of Julia; he
was therefore a distant cousin to Agrippina and her brothers. His
grandmother, the niece of this Scribonia, was wife to Sextus Pompeius,
and thus the young man was a descendant of the great Pompeius. Tacitus
speaks of him as a young man at the time of the prosecution, but this
epithet is used by the Roman writers technically of men between the
ages of seventeen and forty-six, and is therefore applied to men past
their callow youth, such as Germanicus and Drusus; and as Libo had
been Prætor, he was certainly old enough to manage his own affairs.
Libo, according to Tacitus, fell into the hands of a Senator named
Firmius Catus, who encouraged him in vicious courses and lent him
money, in order to become fully possessed of his secrets. This same
treacherous adviser stimulated his ambition, and reminded him of the
splendour of his ancestry; he urged him to listen to the promises of
Chaldæans, to consult the mysterious rites of magians and interpreters
of dreams. When Firmius had sufficiently implicated his victim in
doubtful proceedings, he asked for an interview with Tiberius, using
an Equestrian, Flaccus Vescularius, a very intimate friend of the
Emperor’s, as intermediary. Tiberius refused the interview, saying,
according to Tacitus, that he could get any further information through
Flaccus. “Meanwhile” he made Libo prætor, frequently invited him to
dinner, discovered no irritation either by look or word, and “preferred
to know all his deeds and words, although he could have stopped them.”
In other words, the folly of Libo having been brought to the notice
of Tiberius, he paid no very serious attention, and endeavoured
to demonstrate the error of his ways by admitting him to familiar
intercourse, for vague though the historian’s “meanwhile” may be taken
to be, there is no improbability in assuming that the first experiment
of Catus was foiled by the Emperor’s common sense.
The next stage in the proceedings was more exciting. Libo endeavoured
to bribe one Junius to call up the spirits of the dead by means of
incantations. This person, probably a professional necromancer, gave
information to Fulcinius Trio, a professional prosecutor so far as
such a thing existed at the time. “The ability of Trio was well known
among the accusers of those days, and his eager love of notoriety.”
Trio did not allow the grass to grow under his feet; he held a “plump
juicy offender” in his hands, and was determined to make the best of
him; he went to the consuls and demanded a hearing before the Senate.
Libo, for his part, was not idle; on hearing of his peril he put on
mourning and, accompanied by ladies of rank, visited the palaces of
the great, implored his family connexions, demanded the aid of their
voices to encounter his danger; but all refused; their excuses were
different, but fear was the real reason for all. Fear of what? Tacitus
leaves us to infer that Tiberius was the object of dread, but even if
we allow that the historian was correct in assigning fear as the motive
of abstention from assisting Libo, there was another possible cause
of fear. The black art was no laughing matter to the men and women of
those days, and a fashionable gentleman, who was suddenly discovered to
have been engaged in an attempt to raise the dead, was an awe-inspiring
object in spite of his train of aristocratic ladies.
On the day of the meeting of the Senate Libo was carried in a litter
to the doors, either pretending illness or worn out with anxiety and
vexation; he leaned on his brother, and appealed to Tiberius by word
and gesture, who for his part preserved the immobility proper to his
position. In due time the Emperor read the declarations aloud and
the names of their authors, in such a way as not to indicate his own
opinion. By this time Trio was not the only accuser; Catus was there,
Fonteius Agrippa and Vibius Serenus, Senators of repute, all anxiously
offering information, and wrangling between themselves as to which of
them was to have the honour of making the speech for the prosecution.
Libo had no defender. At last Vibius was allowed to state the charges;
there seemed to be little reason for alarm in them. Among other things
Libo had asked his diviners whether he should have enough money to
cover the Appian Way with coin from Rome to Brindisi.
But in spite of such abundant evidence of folly, the audience were
horror stricken when a book was produced, written in Libo’s own hand,
in which the names of the Emperor and leading Senators were found
with strange and occult marks appended. This gentleman, who wanted
to converse with the dead, was, if a fool, a dangerous fool. It was
decided to question his slaves; but as they could not legally bear
evidence against their master, it was necessary to transfer them to
another owner, and a remand was granted in order that this might
be done. This skilful evasion of the law of evidence is attributed
by Tacitus to the cunning inventiveness of Tiberius; but it is not
probable that the Romans had waited so long to discover a solution of
a frequently recurring difficulty. Libo went home, entrusting his last
entreaties to the Emperor to the care of a relative. A guard was set
round his house; the soldiers were even heard and seen in the outer
hall. Libo ordered himself a magnificent dinner, but even in the midst
of the sumptuous repast his craven spirit gave way; he handed a sword
to his slaves and implored them to kill him. In the confusion that
ensued the lights were overturned, and the miserable man succeeded in
taking his own life in the funereal darkness. As soon as his death was
made known the soldiers departed.
In spite of the suicide of the delinquent the case was continued on the
following day; but Tiberius took an oath that he would have asked for
the culprit’s life, even though proved guilty, had he not anticipated
the sentence. Libo’s goods were divided between his accusers, and
extraordinary prætorships were given to such of them as were of
senatorial rank. Various Senators then proposed measures indicating
their opinion that the case had been a very grave one. Libo’s image was
no longer to be included among the family busts; no Scribonius was ever
again to be called Drusus; a public thanksgiving was to be held; gifts
were to be offered to Jupiter, Mars and Concord; the day on which Libo
killed himself was to be a holiday for ever. Decrees of the Senate were
also passed, expelling “mathematicians” and magians from Italy; two of
their number were summarily executed.
Tacitus stigmatizes all these proposals, so strangely disproportionate
to the event as it appears to us, as acts of adulation to Tiberius;
but after all Tiberius was not the only person concerned, nor indeed
chiefly concerned. There is no evidence of a plot against Tiberius
more than against the other Senators, whose names were included in the
mysterious notebook.
As a matter of fact, on this occasion as on many subsequent occasions,
the Senators lost their heads; they, and not Tiberius, were responsible
for the excesses of the sentence and the subsequent transactions. The
fear of magic was strong upon them, as their subsequent action in
driving the practisers of magic arts from Italy demonstrates. They did
not succeed in doing so, and similar equally futile senatorial decrees
recur again and again. These solemn rulers of the world behaved like
little children in their terror of the black art; they believed in
incantations, divinations, signs and wonders, spells and imprecations
far more strongly than they did in the precepts of the Stoic and the
Epicurean. Here and there we find one of the ancients superior to the
prevailing superstitions, but only here and there; and in the Roman
palaces, no less than at the court of Louis XIV., the plotter and the
poisoner were hand in hand with the crafty charlatans, or self-deceived
miracle workers, who haunted the private apartments of men and women of
rank.
Tiberius could not have resisted the panic of the Senate on this
occasion, even if he had had the opportunity; we shall find magic a
couple of years later playing an important part in a more notable
prosecution.
Libo was evidently a profligate fool, and not likely to have been
implicated in a serious plot; but it is not impertinent to ask where
Tacitus got his detailed information; the case is hardly mentioned by
other authors. The scene of the suicide is graphic, the authority whom
Tacitus uses is clearly in sympathy with Libo. Now Libo was, as we
have seen, related to the Julians, and it is at least probable that a
version of the story was supplied by a correspondent to Agrippina, who
was at the time in Germany, and so became incorporated in the memoirs
which she handed down to her daughter, who again used it in the memoirs
which Tacitus tells us that he saw.
The two “mathematicians” who were summarily punished suffered different
penalties: Pituarius was thrown from the Tarpeian rock, Marcius was
proceeded against “in the manner of our forefathers”; the trumpet was
sounded, calling the centuries to the Campus Martius, the unhappy man
was then bound to a stake, and beaten with rods till he was dead,
after which his head was cut off; these privileges he enjoyed as being
a Roman citizen infected with a foreign superstition. It is to be hoped
that he really was a charlatan, and not a genuine man of science, who
paid the common penalty for being in advance of his age.
XV
Germanicus and Piso
The death of Germanicus occupies a larger space in the annals of
Tacitus than the actual importance of the event would seem to require.
The space given to the transactions in the East by which it was
preceded, and the trial of Piso by which it was followed, amounts to
nearly a sixth part of the books dealing with the reign of Tiberius;
or perhaps it would be more correct to say that the aspects of the
premature death of Germanicus, which were really important, receive
small attention in comparison with those which were less important.
The death of Germanicus opened the way to the long series of plots
which rendered the life of Tiberius intolerable, and eventually
overwhelmed him in the disastrous events of the year 30 A.D. When
Germanicus started for the East in the year 18 A.D., he was the
destined successor of Tiberius, with a possible coadjutor in the person
of his first cousin Drusus, the two men being legally brothers by
the process of adoption. If Tiberius had any personal preference, he
unquestionably inclined to Germanicus, to whom he showed every mark of
favour, and whose political training he was now completing by sending
him to study the Oriental difficulties of the Empire. Drusus at the
same time was promoted to his brother’s former position in the West,
the still disturbed provinces on the frontiers of the Rhine and Danube
being entrusted to his care. Had both these men lived, there would
have been no Sejanus, and probably no Caligula. Tiberius himself would
have permanently enjoyed for ever the excellent reputation which he
won during the first sixteen years of his reign, but an unkind destiny
willed it otherwise.
There was no reason why Tiberius should dislike Germanicus, to whose
father, as we have seen, he was attached by an affection remarkable
even between brothers, and Germanicus himself had on an occasion, which
strongly tested his loyalty, shown that it could stand the test. All
the authorities, Paterculus included, speak highly of Germanicus; he
was an able general and a lovable man. Drusus was a less attractive
character, somewhat rough, severe and passionate, but whatever his
weaknesses, he had the merit of being attached to his cousin and
nominal elder brother; there is no trace of any jealousy between the
two men, and their unity was further cemented by the fact that the
sister of Germanicus was the wife of Drusus.
While the three representative men of the Imperial family were thus
in harmony, and lived on terms of mutual trust and helpfulness, the
case was different with the women. Livia, the widow of Augustus, and
Agrippina, the daughter of Julia, were separated by ancient hatreds and
fresh causes of offence. If the whole private diary and correspondence
of Agrippina had been preserved to us, we should probably be in a
position to compare Livia with Madame de Maintenon, as she is exhibited
to us in the lively letters of that sturdy little hater, Charlotte
Elizabeth, Duchess of Orleans, for the memoirs of Agrippina, filtered
through her daughter’s editing, and the mind of a man of letters
indicate no want of a proper animosity, no desire to bury old grudges.
Livia did not acquiesce willingly in her diminished glories as dowager;
if she had proposed to herself--and there is every reason to suppose
that she did so propose--to continue to be the power behind the
throne in her son’s reign, as in her husband’s, she was disappointed.
While studiously paying every sign of respect to his mother as his
mother, and even stretching points in her favour, Tiberius refused to
acknowledge her as a politician; such honours as might decorously be
paid to the widow of Augustus, such consolations of her affliction as
expressions of public sympathy could afford, he readily sanctioned, but
he no less resolutely drew the line at the point at which complimentary
and consolatory decrees seemed to involve the recognition of a
governing Empress Dowager. Few things can have been more distasteful
to Livia than the reversion to the Senatorial Constitution attempted
by Tiberius. She could no longer inspire “transactions of Cæsar,” to
which the Senate was pledged in anticipation, nor was Tiberius inclined
to let the foreign policy of Rome slip out of his own hands into
that of the Jews and Greeks who enjoyed the confidence of the august
lady. A king of Cappadocia, of whom Tiberius disapproved, accepted an
invitation from Livia to come to Rome and depend on her influence to
win the favour of her son. The result was so disappointing that the
aged monarch died of distress of mind; his kingdom was turned into a
province. Tiberius would stand no tampering with “native” princes. Nor
was Livia allowed to put herself above the laws at Rome. A lady named
Urgulania, who was a friend of hers, incurred debts, and was proceeded
against in the court of the Prætor Urbanus. She took refuge with Livia,
who urged her son to defend the lady’s cause. Tiberius undertook to do
so, but by very deliberate walking, and exceptional graciousness to
the friends whom he encountered on the way, contrived to arrive too
late. Urgulania lost her case, and Livia had to pay her friend’s debt.
The Prætor in this case was Lucius Piso. Shortly afterwards this same
Urgulania refused to give her evidence in a court of law, and required
the officials to take it in her own house, a privilege which belonged
to the Vestal virgins. Urgulania was not a Vestal virgin “emerita,”
determined to retain the advantages of her previous position with
the help of Livia, for we find her later on sending a dagger as a
significant hint to a scandalous grandson.
Tiberius was certainly in a very difficult position with regard to
his mother. His natural sense of decorum, and possibly his natural
affection, made him shrink from the very appearance of treating her
with disrespect; but her domineering tendency, encouraged by years
of unquestioned sway during her husband’s lifetime, tempted her to
exaggerate the real claims which she had upon his dutiful affection;
nor were the ladies of her household backward in regretting the change
of circumstances, and in pointing out how different things had been
in the lifetime of the sainted Augustus. Delicate as they were in
any case, the relations between mother and son were rendered still
more susceptible to disagreeable incidents by the presence of the
aggrieved Agrippina, to whom mother and son alike were detestable
usurpers, enjoying as the result of their nefarious intrigues the
inalienable rights of the true Julians. Thus both the belligerent
parties were opposed to Tiberius; his mother because he prevented her
from continuing to enjoy a power which she had long exercised, his
daughter-in-law, stepdaughter and niece, because in her opinion he
usurped a power which she ought to have enjoyed, and because she had
learned to regard her mother as a saint martyred by the agency of her
stepfather in the cause of the Julian dynasty. There was no reason why
Livia should like Drusus better than Germanicus; both her grandsons
were alike leagued with her undutiful son to keep the shadow of
petticoats off the Senate House.
Tiberius made his arrangements without taking the ladies into
consideration. There was one member of the family whom he may have
been glad to please, the beautiful Antonia, the widow of his brother
Drusus and the mother of Germanicus. It is to the credit of this lady
that her name is never mentioned in the list of intriguers; she escapes
both praise and censure, though her persistent determination to live in
retirement as a widow might have attracted the attention of those who
found so much to admire in the “impenetrable chastity” of Agrippina.
Perhaps the fortress of her virtue was less frequently assailed by
those storms, assaults, blockades, and circumvallations which, we
may presume, rendered the epithet no hyperbole in the case of her
daughter-in-law.
The affairs of the East needed a comprehensive survey. Achaia and
Macedonia had recently passed into the Emperor’s hands; the Senatorial
Government had been defective in Bithynia; several of the Greek
cities on the Ægæan had suffered severely in a disastrous earthquake;
Cappadocia was being organized as a province; there were dynastic
troubles in Armenia; the Parthians were showing signs of restlessness;
the native princes on the Syrian frontier were also unsettled by
questions of succession; Judæa was more than usually unquiet.
Germanicus was therefore despatched to the East with proconsular
powers, which gave him an authority higher than that of all proconsuls
or governors in their own provinces, and with a commission to settle
all differences on the spot according to his own judgment. So large a
share of power had never been entrusted to any one except Augustus and
Pompeius. On a previous occasion when the same services were required,
Augustus had himself visited the East and conducted the business in
person, but he was then a younger man than Tiberius was now, and he was
able to leave behind him in the person of Mæcenas a more experienced,
or at least more trustworthy, statesman than any who were within
reach of Tiberius. Drusus, though a good soldier, had not shown
statesmanlike qualities.
At the same time a new Governor was required for Syria, the richest of
the Imperial Provinces, for its capital, Antioch, was the second city
of the Empire, the emporium where East met West. To this post Tiberius
appointed Gnæus Piso. Gnæus Piso belonged to a family which had long
maintained its opposition to the Cæsars, although the last wife of
Julius Cæsar, Calpurnia, had been a daughter of the house. Republican
ideals were still cherished in this, one of the most ancient and noble
of Roman families. The efforts of Tiberius to restore the Senate
had not had a happy influence upon the two leading members of this
house; one brother, Lucius, threatened to retire from public business
altogether, disgusted with the obsequiousness of the Senate; the other,
Gnæus, had distinguished himself by an aggressive outspokenness which
threatened to breed unnecessary difficulties. Lucius was the Prætor who
had refused to allow Urgulania to avoid paying her just debts, and for
this reason it is improbable that Gnæus was in the confidence of Livia.
He had rendered himself undesirable at Rome, but Tiberius had no doubt
of his integrity, and thought that if he were honourably withdrawn
for a time from the centre of affairs, public business would march
more smoothly. Tiberius in fact was beginning to learn that it was not
altogether wise to revive the pretensions of the old families.
Unfortunately Tiberius did not foresee the possibility of friction
between Germanicus and Piso; still less did he take into account
the results of the juxtaposition of two such explosive fireships as
Agrippina and Plancina the wife of Piso; and he forgot that Plancina
was among the devoted friends of Livia, who had a long-standing
personal interest in the affairs of Syria and its adjacent
principalities. It was the scene of her first diplomatic triumphs,
the place where she had cemented by the interchange of presents a
friendship with that worthy pater-familias Herod the Great, whose
posterity shared with Jerusalem the honour of being a meeting point of
the intrigues of the Jews of all nations.
The story of the events which followed is so obviously coloured by the
partisanship of the chief actors that much of it must be far from the
truth. It is not, for instance, easy to believe that Piso, having no
authority outside his own province, would follow Germanicus to Athens,
where Germanicus had authority, and take a pleasure in reversing his
compliments to the Athenians. There is no inherent improbability in the
action ascribed to Piso inside his own province, where he practically
refused to recognize the proconsular power of Germanicus, but he could
hardly with safety have followed the footsteps of Germanicus eastwards,
loudly proclaiming his insubordination in places where he had no more
right to express an opinion than a private citizen; had he done so, a
swift Liburnian galley would have brought his letters of recall. Idle
stories of this kind probably took their origin at a later period, and
were communicated with mistaken zeal to Agrippina by her sympathizing
friends.
At first all went well with Germanicus, and his commission bore
the appearance of a holiday progress. He met his brother Drusus at
Nicopolis, the city which had been built to commemorate the victory
off the promontory of Actium, and they celebrated the glorious event
in company; he then went to Athens, and up the Ægæan into the Euxine,
redressing grievances and visiting holy places. In the course of the
tour Agrippina’s youngest daughter Julia was born at Lesbos, destined
afterwards to marry M. Vinicius, the friend of Paterculus. On the
return journey southwards Germanicus met the convoy of Piso at Rhodes
on its way to Syria, where, the historian tells us, that Germanicus,
though well aware of the persecution of Piso, saved his ship from
destruction in a storm. Germanicus made his way from thence to Armenia
and the frontiers of the Empire, where he conducted his negotiations
with success. Meanwhile Piso hurried on his way to Syria, and at once
began to make favour with the army and the residents. His indulgences
to the troops were such that the soldiers called him “father of the
legions”; while Plancina, to the horror of Agrippina, forgetting the
limitations of her sex, took part in drills and parades.
The first overt act of insubordination on the part of Piso was a
neglect to forward some cohorts to Germanicus in Armenia. On the return
of Germanicus he met Piso, and an attempt to adjust their mutual
differences was rendered ineffective by the mischievous offices of
friends. Germanicus himself was inclined to take a lenient view, but he
was influenced by the suggestions of those who told him exaggerated
stories about Piso and his sons and Plancina. A private conference was
held, but the two men left it open enemies. After this Piso publicly
resented all honours paid to Germanicus, and Plancina was particularly
annoyed because her somewhat lucrative protégé Vonones, a former
aspirant to the Parthian crown, was removed by Germanicus at the
request of the Parthians to a safer distance from the frontier.
Germanicus finding that the best part of his work was accomplished,
and that life in Syria was not pleasant, made a tour in Egypt, going
up the Nile as far as Elephantine and Syene, then the limit of Roman
rule. It is pleasing to find him visiting the same sights that attract
the modern traveller, over whom he had an advantage in that the priests
were able to read the inscriptions for him.
In visiting Egypt, Germanicus inadvertently broke a decree of Augustus,
which forbade any Roman Senator or Equestrian to enter that private
domain of the Emperor without special permission. Tiberius had written
to bring this to his notice, but the letter arrived too late.
On returning from his holiday tour in Egypt, Germanicus found that all
his arrangements in Syria had been reversed by Piso, his disposition
of the legions had been changed, and his formal alliances with the
cities modified. Stormy scenes followed, and Piso decided to leave
Syria, so says our narrative; but the more probable order of events is
that Piso was ordered by Germanicus to withdraw, and was at Seleucia
on his way home when news reached him of the illness of Germanicus.
We are not told the nature of this illness. Agrippina and possibly
Germanicus himself jumped to the conclusion that poison and spells were
the cause of the sickness. Horrible things were found in the house;
fragments of human remains embedded in the floors and walls; bits of
parchment covered with spells; leaden tablets inscribed with the name
of Germanicus, and other mystic apparatus with which it was customary
to consign the spirit of an enemy to the shades. The illness seems to
have been a lingering one. Piso hovered off the coast, approaching
or withdrawing as the symptoms were declared to be better or worse.
In the end Germanicus died. Agrippina and her friends were so fully
persuaded that he had been the victim of poison or witchcraft, that
they exposed his body naked in the market place at Antioch, confident
that the flames of the funeral pyre would fail to devour his heart, for
it was well known that the heart of a man who had been poisoned was
incombustible. When the ceremony was over, Agrippina gathered up the
ashes and started with her youngest children for Rome.
Meanwhile the Senators and other officials who had been in the train
of Germanicus treated the Province of Syria as though it were vacant,
and appointed Gnæus Sentius, one of their number, Governor in the place
of Piso. There was no time to send to Rome for orders. Germanicus had
cashiered Piso, but had died before appointing his successor, and it
was necessary that there should be some one in authority, in case Piso
returned and attempted to resume the government of Syria.
Piso had travelled on his homeward journey as far as Cos, when the news
of the death of Germanicus reached him. He made thanksgiving offerings
to the gods, and Plancina, who had recently lost a sister, threw off
her mourning. Consultations were held as to the best course to pursue.
Marcus Piso, the younger of his two sons, urged his father to return
to Rome. So far he had done nothing unpardonable, but an attempt to
resume the government of the province meant nothing less than civil
war. Other and less prudent friends advised Piso not to recognize the
appointment of Sentius, and to rely on his popularity with the legions.
Tacitus puts into the mouth of these advisers the following astounding
statement, which he probably found in those memoirs of Agrippina which
are not evidence: “You have the complicity of Livia, the favour of
Cæsar though hidden, and none mourn more loudly for Germanicus than
those who are best pleased at his death.”
Piso and Plancina proved to have miscalculated the affection of the
legions, and an attempt to recover Syria by force was defeated by
Sentius, who gave the unhappy candidate for power ships and a safe
conduct to Rome.
Agrippina meanwhile had traversed the seas and arrived at Brundisium
with the vase containing her husband’s ashes early in the year 20
A.D. The illness and death of Germanicus had excited much feeling
in the city and Italy, though we are not bound to believe in the
dark suggestions of the historian that the populace had assumed the
complicity of Tiberius in his nephew’s death. The widow made the
best of her affliction, and contrived to give the procession to the
Mausoleum of Augustus, in which her husband’s ashes were deposited,
the aspect of a public demonstration in favour of the Julian race.
Neither Tiberius himself, nor Livia, nor even the mother of Germanicus,
were present at this ceremony. Doubtless they had sufficient reasons,
but their absence unfortunately favoured the credulity of those who
at a later time listened to the lamentations of Agrippina, and her
passionate assertions that her husband had been done to death with the
connivance of his own kith and kin.
Piso returned slowly to Rome. He sent his son ahead with letters to
Tiberius, in which he represented himself as the aggrieved party, and
accused Germanicus of debauchery and arrogance; he sought on his way an
interview with Drusus, who had returned to Illyria after his brother’s
funeral. Drusus received him coldly, and dismissed him with words so
politic that they were thought to have been suggested by a cooler head.
The day after he arrived in Rome, Fulcinius Trio, the prosecutor of
Scribonius Libo, took the first formal steps in a process against him.
The story of this famous trial is so narrated by Tacitus as to convey
the impression that there was a serious miscarriage of justice, and
that the oppressors of Germanicus were protected by the influence of
Livia and Tiberius; but, as usual, the narrative, wherever it depends
upon accessible documentary evidence, does not support such a view of
the case.
Accusers and accused alike pressed Tiberius to hear the case himself,
knowing “that he was impervious to the influence of rumour,” and
fearing the excitability of a large court. Tiberius, after hearing
the evidence, referred the whole case to the Senate. Five of the most
respected men in Rome refused to act as counsel for the defence.
Among the three who did eventually defend Piso was Marcus Lepidus,
whom we have already seen in possession of the full confidence of the
Emperor. On the day of the trial Tiberius opened the proceedings in
the Senate; he said that Piso had been a trusted officer and friend
of Augustus, that he had himself assigned him as an assistant to
Germanicus in the administration of the East with the authority of
the Senate. It was the duty of the court to decide without prejudice
whether he had exasperated the young man by insubordination and
opposition and rejoiced over his death, or had killed him with malice
and aforethought, “for if the subordinate officer exceeded the limits
of his office, if he refused to pay proper respect to his superior, and
rejoiced over his death, and my sorrow, I shall hate him, and shall
exclude him from my house, and punish his enmity as a private matter,
not with the power I hold as Princeps. But if it is discovered that a
crime in bringing about the death of any man requires punishment, then
do you confer upon the children of Germanicus and us his relatives our
proper consolation. And at the same time you must carefully consider
this point, whether Piso handled the armies in an insubordinate and
seditious fashion, whether he tampered disloyally with the affections
of the soldiers, whether he attempted to recover the province by force
of arms, or have the accusers exaggerated these charges? I may say that
I have good reason to be annoyed with their exercise of partisanship.
For was it proper to strip the body, to expose it to the eager scrutiny
of the eyes of the vulgar, and even to allow statements to spread among
foreigners that he had been poisoned, if this was still uncertain and
a subject of inquiry? I mourn for the loss of my son, and always shall
mourn, but I do not prevent the accused from advancing every fact by
which his innocence may be supported, or his guilt extenuated if there
was any provocation on the part of Germanicus; and I implore you not to
take accusations for proved facts, because the case touches me nearly
personally. I beg those who have been led by the ties of kindred or
faithful friendship to act as counsel for the defendant, to help him in
his danger as far as their eloquence and diligence allows; and I invite
the prosecution to similar efforts and similar firmness. In one point
only we raise Germanicus above the law, viz., in trying the case in the
Senate House rather than in the forum, before the Senate and not before
a jury. Let everything else be handled with a like moderation. I would
have no one pay regard to the tears of Drusus and my own sorrow, nor to
any fictitious charges made against us.”
Such a speech was doubtless disappointing to Agrippina, who had
already in her own mind condemned Piso and the amazonian Plancina
without benefit of clergy; she knew Germanicus had been poisoned, and
bewitched; she knew how it had all been done by means of a celebrated
poisoner named Martina, who had been fetched from the East to give
evidence, and had died mysteriously at Brundisium on the way. Had not
the poison been found after her death tied up in her hair? What further
evidence was wanting? And why did the woman die so conveniently for the
purposes of those who wished to shield the enemies of Germanicus? The
poor lady had troubles enough, left a widow with a family of six young
children, marked out for the enmity of a malignant and all powerful
grandmother-in-law, but her inclination to regard herself as the victim
of persistent ill-usage is not evidence; and though her contemporaries
would have had no difficulty in believing in the effects of witchcraft,
the case against Piso is rendered weak to us by the introduction of
this element; and the more so that the prosecution was not able to
prove the use of poison, or even to suggest a favourable opportunity
for its administration.
As the case proceeded it became quite clear that the charge of
poisoning could not be sustained, but that Piso had been guilty of
serious political offences. Meanwhile there was considerable agitation
among the people, to whom the sensational side of the trial alone
appealed, and who threatened violence if the murderer of Germanicus
escaped by the votes of the Senate. This at least we are told by
Tacitus, though here again it is more than probable that the public
excitement existed chiefly in the imagination of Agrippina, who always
saw herself playing the part of injured heroine to a sympathetic
audience of the Roman people. Riots were not dreaded at Rome since the
police of the city had been organized and the Prætorian guards placed
in barracks.
As the case became exclusively political, Plancina naturally dropped
out of it; “machinations of Livia,” shrieked Agrippina, and Tacitus has
repeated the shriek.
The case had an abrupt and tragic termination. Piso, seeing that the
hostile evidence steadily accumulated, and that Tiberius preserved an
absolutely impartial and judicial attitude, killed himself, leaving
a letter to Tiberius, from which the following extract has been
preserved: “Crushed by a conspiracy of my private enemies, and the
hatefulness of a false accusation, inasmuch as no opportunity is left
for the truth and the establishment of my innocence, I call heaven to
witness, Cæsar, that I have lived loyally to you, and dutifully to your
mother; and I implore you to take charge of my children, of whom Gnæus
Piso was certainly not concerned in my fortunes whatever may have been
their character, for he spent the whole time at Rome, and Marcus Piso
dissuaded me from returning to Syria. And I wish that I had rather
given way to the counsels of my young son than he to those of his aged
father. I beg the more earnestly that his innocence may not pay the
penalty of my perversity. I beg for the safety of my unhappy son in the
name of forty-five years of loyal duty, of a consulship shared with
yourself, of the confidence placed in me by Augustus, of the friendship
with yourself, and as a last request.” He made no mention of his
wife in this dying petition. Tiberius exempted Marcus Piso from any
complicity in the charges brought against his father, and also spoke
on behalf of Plancina. A two days’ inquiry was held into her conduct,
but to the disgust of Agrippina she was acquitted. Her escape was
attributed to the influence of Livia.
The Senate passed severe sentences upon the sons of Piso, which
Tiberius, as usual, considerably modified. Honours and rewards were
bestowed on the accusers, but Tiberius, in promising Fulcinius Trio
office later on, significantly hinted that he was in danger of spoiling
his eloquence by excessive violence. It had been in the power of
Tiberius to confiscate the property of Piso, but he bestowed it upon
his son Marcus. Tacitus comments in characteristic fashion--“Superior
to the temptation of money, as I have often recorded, and the more
readily appeased at that time through an uneasy conscience about the
acquittal of Plancina.”
There certainly does not seem to have been any miscarriage of justice,
for even if Piso was sincere in his protestations of innocence, and
really was innocent of the technical offence of waging civil war,
his case was never concluded, and he was never condemned. It pleased
Agrippina and her friends, and it pleased the sensation mongers of the
capital, to see in the case not a political trial, but a demand for
vengeance on the murderers of Germanicus. In this demand they were
disappointed, for Plancina, the supposed culprit, escaped altogether,
Piso died uncondemned by his own hand, and whatsoever punishment fell
upon his two sons was inflicted on them as the sons of a man who
had been disloyal to the State, not as the sons of the murderer of
Germanicus. It was therefore superfluous on the part of two Senators to
propose that altars should be erected to Vengeance, and of another that
thanks should be returned to certain members of the Imperial family
because Germanicus had been avenged.
There is, in fact, absolutely no evidence that Germanicus was murdered,
while there is abundant evidence that the relations between him and
Piso, both personal and political, were exceedingly unsatisfactory,
and that Piso was so injudicious as to endeavour to set aside his
authority. Piso was by many years the older man of the two, he had
had long experience of public affairs, had enjoyed the confidence of
Augustus, and acquiesced very unwillingly in the arrangements which put
Germanicus, a much younger man, over his head. It is quite possible
that he had private instructions from Tiberius to give Germanicus the
benefit of his experience in friendly fashion, and that he interpreted
these instructions wrongly, believing them to amount to a declaration
of his own independence of Germanicus, and he would be the more ready
to believe this because he was touchy on the subject of his own
dignity; but that he actually carried authority to thwart and annoy
Germanicus is as improbable as that he had instructions to poison him.
Tiberius was guilty of a mistake in not anticipating the friction that
would necessarily arise between an older man and a younger man when
the former was placed in subordination to somewhat indefinite powers
wielded by the latter. If the two men had been left to settle their
differences alone, there would probably have been little trouble,
for Germanicus began with courtesy and forbearance, but the ladies
insisted on taking an active part in the quarrel. Agrippina saw Livia
written large all over Plancina, with whom she had doubtless enjoyed
several preliminary skirmishes at Rome; and Plancina met her on her own
field and fought her with her own weapons, for, reprehensible though
Plancina’s military performances appeared in the eyes of a pattern
Roman matron, Agrippina had herself set the fashion in Germany. The
atmosphere of the East was a particularly unwholesome one for two
ladies thus mutually breathing out threatenings and slaughters, and
listening to tales depreciatory of one another. The East swarmed with
sorcerers and necromancers, and supple intriguers of all kinds used to
the internecine feuds of the ladies who lived in the palaces of their
princes.
The most unfortunate result of the death of Germanicus was that it left
Agrippina an embittered and vindictive woman. Even her husband had
occasionally deprecated the violence of her temper. Time did nothing to
cure her grievances, indeed the legend of her many sorrows seemed to
grow steadily as the events receded into the distance, and she handed
her quarrel on to her children with its vitality undiminished.
One possible solution of the part played by Piso, and of the difficulty
of reconciling it with his last protestation of innocence, is that
Plancina was actually in the confidence of Livia, from whom she held
such a commission as Livia could give her to make arrangements
desired by her patroness. The Oriental princes had learned to rely
on secret influence rather than on open negotiations with Tiberius
and the Senate; the stern impartiality of the Emperor drove them to
subterranean manœuvres, and Livia was by no means disinclined to let
it be understood that her influence was paramount. Thus while Piso
as Governor of Syria was the properly constituted representative of
Tiberius, his wife was the accredited plenipotentiary of the power
behind the throne. The charges against Plancina were really charges
against Livia, and the case which was hushed up was the case which
would have exposed the unauthorized political intrigues of the Empress
Dowager. Tiberius could either allow his mother’s interference with
State affairs to be a subject of public inquiry, or he could allow
Plancina to be tried on the frivolous charge of poisoning with the
certainty that she would escape conviction. He preferred the less
heroic course, with the result that both he and his mother were
credited with having been concerned in a criminal conspiracy against a
near relative.
The tradition repeated by Tacitus, that Piso was in possession of
documents which would have established his innocence by demonstrating
the complicity of Tiberius and Livia, and that he refrained from
producing them on being assured of his safety by Sejanus, is not
incompatible with this view of the case. Tiberius would certainly not
have been involved, but instructions given by Livia to Plancina may
very well have existed, and have led to those reversals of the policy
of Germanicus which produced the ultimate quarrel. On this assumption
the suicide of Piso becomes intelligible, he could not defend his grave
political misconduct without exposing the still graver misconduct of
the Empress Dowager, and when he saw that no other means of escape was
open to him, he took a course which, to the Romans, did not seem to be
devoid of heroism. Tiberius may have been weak in not dismissing his
mother to an island, but he was certainly not responsible for the death
of Piso, or concerned in a plot to poison Germanicus.
XVI
Tiberius and the Senate
Drusus, the son of Tiberius, died in A.D. 23, under circumstances which
it will be more convenient to consider at a later period. From this
event Tacitus dates the perversion of Tiberius, forgetting that he has
already ascribed to him every unamiable quality except avarice. After
enumerating the various legions, and recording their distribution,
Tacitus says: “I hope I am not wrong in believing that it is relevant
to review the other departments of State as well, to say how they were
managed up to that time, since this year marked the beginning of a
change for the worse in the Emperor’s administration. Now first, public
business and the most important concerns of private men were dealt with
before the Senate, and the chief men were allowed to make speeches,
and he checked them himself, where they slipped into flattery; and he
used to confer office by taking into consideration nobility of descent,
brilliance in the field, distinguished service at home, so that it was
agreed that there were no men with higher claims. Consuls and Prætors
enjoyed their proper dignity, the lesser magistrates also were in
the full exercise of their powers, and the laws, with the exception
of the “Lex Majestatis,” were well administered. Moreover, the corn
supply and tribute, and the rest of the public revenues, were managed
by associations of Roman knights. Cæsar entrusted the management of his
own affairs to the most distinguished men, to some who were unknown,
on hearing of their reputation; and when once he had adopted a man he
retained him indefinitely, for most of his officers grew old in the
same departments. The commonalty certainly suffered from a dear market,
but the Prince was not responsible for that; indeed, he met the failure
of crops, or the difficulties of navigation, as far as expense and care
could help him. And he took measures that the Provinces should not be
disturbed by fresh burdens, and that they should be able to endure
the old ones exempt from the avarice or cruelty of officials. There
was no such thing as personal outrages or confiscations of property.
The estates of Cæsar were few in Italy, his establishments of slaves
were modest, his household confined to a few freedmen; and if ever he
was at variance with a private person, he resorted to the ordinary
processes of law, the ordinary courts. All this he kept up until things
were changed by the death of Drusus, not indeed graciously, but with a
repellent manner, so that he was generally an object of terror.”
These words, except for the last sentence, differ but little from those
employed by Paterculus in enumerating the blessings enjoyed by the
Roman people under the sway of Tiberius, though Paterculus does not
limit the good administration of the Emperor to the period which ended
with the death of Drusus.
It is indeed difficult, when we read the record of the actual
transactions of the Senate, to form any other opinion than that
advanced by Tacitus in the foregoing summary; even in the case of the
“Lex Majestatis” it is the Senate, not Tiberius, who show a tendency to
abuse the powers which it conferred, and the rare occasions on which
the Emperor himself allows an accusation under this law to be pressed
are those on which the strictest republican virtue would have demanded
its application, viz., when the misconduct of a provincial governor
had impaired the dignity of the State. It is true that this extension
of the operation of the “Lex Majestatis” had not been familiar to
the Republic, and that the provincials had been held to be protected
sufficiently by the laws against extortion, but it might reasonably
be held that a Roman magistrate disgraced his country no less by
maladministration in the Provinces than by cowardice in the field, or a
disgraceful treaty. In fact, this probably was the real grievance which
caused the Senatorial Annalists, whose diaries were read by Tacitus,
to fill their memoirs with bitter animadversions on the abuse of the
“Lex Majestatis,” and the professional advocates who were a terror to
delinquent Senators. Incapable or corrupt governors, who might have
escaped punishment on some technical plea, if they had been accused
formally of extortion, were now confronted with a fuller examination
into their conduct under the vaguer charge of having impaired the
dignity of the State. Tiberius constituted himself the guardian of the
dignity of the State; it was his duty to do so. In upholding the purity
of the administration, he was upholding the Empire, but he was also
declaring an emphatic negative to the theory that the Roman Senate was
at liberty to deal as it pleased with its Provinces. The restoration of
the Senate, begun in some degree by Augustus and continued by Tiberius,
was attended by this inconvenience, that it revived the pretensions of
the survivors of the Oligarchy, and though the majority of the Senate
were distinguished rather by an inclination to hand over all their
responsibilities to the Emperor than by an uncompromising attitude
towards his government, there were a minority who were disgusted
because fuller advantage was not taken of the opportunities afforded,
and because the liberal policy of the Emperor brought them little
nearer to the cherished abuses of the old oligarchical government.
When we reflect that the first six books of the _Annals of Tacitus_
cover a period of twenty-three years, and that he had access to the
Senatorial archives no less than to private memoirs, we are astonished
at the meagreness of his information. If we remove from these books
all that refers to the campaigns in Germany, Thrace, and Africa, all
that is concerned with the death of Germanicus, all that has to do with
the personal history of the Imperial family, singularly little remains
to tell us how the Senate administered the Provinces which had been
left to its care, and the two great questions in which statesmen are
profoundly interested, the questions of Revenue and Defence, are hardly
touched upon.
For this there are two reasons, apart from the fact that Tacitus was an
incompetent historian; one is that Tacitus avowedly interested himself
only in recording events which seemed to him striking illustrations of
good or bad behaviour, history to him being merely a primer of morals
and a collection of examples; the other is that very little business
actually was transacted before the Senate.
We may take as an example the case of Cappadocia. This country was
annexed by Germanicus, its native rulers were deposed, and it passed
from the status of an allied kingdom to that of a province. It might be
anticipated that we should have a record of discussions in the Senate
as to the terms upon which this new Province was to be added to the
Empire, as to whether it was to be Imperial or Senatorial, as to its
probable cost and revenue; but we have nothing of the kind, we have not
even the innuendo of a grievance based on the fact that Tiberius fixed
its tribute at half the usual amount, and treated it as an Imperial
Province from the outset. Similarly the Government of Achaia passed
into the hands of the Emperor at the request of the Province itself,
without any debate in the Senate, so far as we are informed by Tacitus.
Africa was a Senatorial Province; the moment that trouble between the
Roman inhabitants and a native prince declared itself, the Senate
practically threw the whole responsibility on Tiberius by asking him
to nominate a Governor. With all its pretensions, and in spite of all
the encouragement given to it by Tiberius to assume the position of an
advisory council to the Emperor, if not of a representative assembly of
the Empire, the Senate reverted more and more to its old position of a
domestic council representing the best families at Rome and attending
to little beyond their interests.
It was fortunate for the Empire that Tiberius failed in his attempt
to restore the Senate, for no tyranny can be worse than that of the
direct government of dependencies by an irresponsible debating society,
divided into parties more or less organized, which intrigue abroad
to further their interests at home, and the Senate itself showed a
sounder political insight than the Emperor in refusing to assume
responsibilities for which it was eminently unfit.
If, however, the greater political questions are passed over by
Tacitus, some of the minor subjects with which the Senate dealt are
not uninteresting; it retained the position of guardian of the public
morals, or at the least of the morals of those families of whom it was
composed or whose members were employed in the government of the city
and Empire. Adultery under the Julian laws passed by Augustus was not
a sin but a crime, and we accordingly have some cases in which Roman
ladies of high rank are arraigned before the Senate along with their
paramours.
The number of these cases is not great, and in comparison with similar
cases in our own divorce courts remarkably small, from which we may
conclude either that the Senate was a lenient censor of morals, or
that the standard of morality was high; it is further possible that the
Senate was only called upon to intervene when the family of the culprit
had failed in its duty.
Actors seem to have been a source of trouble to the fathers of the
city, but it is not altogether certain in what the “licence” of actors
consisted. At first sight it might appear that they were guilty
merely of a laxity of morals which is not uncommonly attributed,
with or without justice, to the theatrical profession, and that the
decrees prohibiting Senators and Equestrians from public and private
intercourse with actors were directed against purely private scandals;
but there is also evidence that the stage occupied to some extent
the position of the modern press, and that the licence of the actors
consisted in public and private derision of eminent men, and in the
exhibition of caricatures, which if not dangerous to public order, were
at least offensive. The fragments of references made on the stage to
Tiberius, preserved by Suetonius, are sufficient to indicate a freedom
of criticism which in our own day would be considered intolerable. Our
own habits allow our public men to be caricatured weekly in the comic
papers in a manner which is not found equally acceptable in Germany,
but lenient though we are in such matters, even Englishmen have failed
to tolerate the caricatures of eminent statesmen on the stage, and “the
Happy Land,” in which three Cabinet Ministers appeared under their
own names, and in a very successful counterfeit presentment of their
persons, was modified by the then Lord Chamberlain.
The laughter which greets a successful cartoon in _Punch_, and the
prompt recognition which greets a happy allusion to current events,
do little to shake a government or to disturb public order, but when
the representatives of law and order are held up to ridicule by the
unmistakeable gestures of a skilled actor in a large theatre, not
only is the effectiveness of ridicule enormously increased, but the
conflicting sympathies of the spectators provoke an immediate riot.
We have seen that among the business transacted by Tiberius and the
Senate in the first year of his reign was the discussion of a proposal
to restore to the Prætors the right of beating actors, which had been
withdrawn from them by Augustus. The reason for this proposal was an
increase of turbulence in the theatres, which had resulted in the
deaths of several of the spectators, the murder of some soldiers and
a centurion, and even of the commander of a prætorian cohort, who had
endeavoured to check the abuse of magistrates from the stage, and the
consequent disturbance in the audience. An Italian audience was quick
to catch even an undesigned allusion to current events, and allusion by
gesture never failed to meet with its response; thus the actors became
in a way the mouthpieces of public opinion, and the despotism of the
ruling powers was tempered by epigrams in flesh and blood, if not in
actual words; parties were formed, distinguished actors were supported
by men of rank, not merely from admiration of their professional
skill, but because they were in some sense a political power. In the
year 23 A.D. Tiberius found himself obliged to draw the attention of
the Senate to the continued insolence of the actors, and a decree was
passed by which they were banished from Italy. The particular form of
dramatic exhibition which called down this severity was that known
as the Atellan farce, which had long been used for the purposes of
political satire by educated men. It had been originally a performance
in the Oscan dialect; then what we should call “topical songs” had been
introduced in Latin. There had been a period during which the Atellan
plays had been considered eminently respectable, and men of rank had
taken part in them without losing dignity; but either the character
of the performance had degenerated, or the sentence of expulsion was
less general than the words of Tacitus would imply, and was restricted
to men whom we should not consider professional actors, and who had
adopted this way of expressing their criticisms of the government.
These performances were given both in public and in private houses.
The former might well be restrained as leading to riots; the objection
to the latter was undoubtedly the open ridicule of the government; for
the Atellan farce, which was originally chiefly spoken, had adopted
the procedure of the mimics who acted entirely in dumb show, and it is
not difficult to imagine the roars of laughter which would greet the
appearance of Tiberius himself and other eminent personages upon the
private stages of the Roman nobility.
In penalizing actors Tiberius in fact checked the liberty of the press,
and destroyed whatever popularity he had hitherto enjoyed. The Romans
were passionately devoted to acting, and never forgave the man who
discountenanced their favourite amusement. There was no readier road to
popularity at Rome than an exhibition of actors or gladiators. Cæsar
and Augustus had both encouraged the taste, and in the later Republican
days profusion in giving treats of this kind had been a necessary step
in the ladder by which political eminence was reached.
The wisdom of Tiberius in thus checking the expression of popular
feeling may be open to question, for we are not in a position to judge
how far the passions excited by the actors constituted a real danger to
public order, but the line which he took with reference to another kind
of legislation is indisputably wise.
Sumptuary laws are a well-known weakness of governments. We are by
no means rid of them yet, as is testified by the importance of the
temperance party in England. The Pagans of Greece and Italy were no
less eager than the Christians of the Middle Ages, or the Puritans
of the Reformation, to prescribe for men how they should dress, or
how they should eat, and the history of the Roman Senate offers many
instances of attempts to enforce moderation of living by stringent
laws. The Senate of Tiberius had not forgotten its old traditions; in
the year 16 A.D. the subject of increasing luxury had been discussed
in the Senate, and the Emperor had evaded action by stating that
the matter would be attended to when the period of the Censorship
came round. Apparently nothing was done, for in the year 22 A.D.
the Ædiles drew the attention of the Senate to the continued and
indeed increasing expenditure upon silken robes, household plate, and
the pleasures of the table; new laws were demanded, and vigour in
administering the old laws. Even on the evidence of Tacitus Tiberius
himself was moderate in his household expenditure; Suetonius indeed
reproaches him with niggardliness in this matter, saying that he would
serve up the remainder of a feast at a second day’s entertainment with
the observation “that the part had the same qualities as the whole.”
His personal example was entirely in the direction of temperate living,
and it was from no want of sympathy with the worthy aspirations of
the Senate that he refused to legislate in the matter. Tacitus has
preserved for us the letter which he addressed to the Senate on the
subject; it is a document sufficiently remarkable to be given in full.
“Although, Conscript Fathers, it is perhaps more expedient that on all
other occasions I should be asked in your presence my opinion of what
is good for the State, and reply in the same way, still on the present
occasion it was better that my eyes should be withdrawn, for if you
should openly note the faces of anxiety of those who were involved in
the charge of infamous luxury, I should myself see them, and as it were
catch them in the act. If indeed our energetic Ædiles had taken counsel
with me beforehand, I am inclined to think that I should have advised
them to abstain from interfering with vices so firmly rooted, so
vigorous, rather than make it publicly manifest that we are too weak to
contend with these abuses. Well--they have done their duty as I should
wish other magistrates also to do theirs; I could neither be silent
with honour, nor was it expedient that I should be the first to speak,
seeing that I am neither Ædile, nor Prætor, nor Consul. Something more,
something higher is demanded of the Prince, and whereas each individual
earns the reward of his own good actions, upon the Prince alone is
visited the odium incurred by the bad actions of all.
“Now what shall I first try to check and to cut down to the ancient
measures? The boundless extent of country estates? The numbers of
native and alien slaves? The weight of gold and silver plate? The
marvellous bronzes and pictures? The rich materials common to male
and female dress? Or again those peculiarly feminine forms of luxury
owing to which our money is transferred to foreign and even hostile
races for the sake of mere stones? I am perfectly well aware that
these are things with which fault is found at dinner parties and
social entertainments, and that there is a cry for interference; but
when a law is passed, penalties are assigned, and those same guardians
of the public virtue will not then fail to clamour that the State is
being turned upside down, that any magnificent man is threatened with
ruin, that every one is liable to prosecution. And yet it is only by
severe remedies that long-standing diseases of the body can be checked,
and the fever of the mind at once corrupt and corrupting can only be
quenched by remedies no less violent than the lusts with which it
burns. All the laws which were discovered by our ancestors, all those
that were passed by the sainted Augustus, have added confidence to
luxury, the former because they have been forgotten, the latter, which
is much worse, because they have been abrogated by contempt. For should
a man wish to do a thing which has not yet been forbidden, he would be
in fear of a prohibition, but if he transgresses a known prohibition,
there is no longer any fear, or any sense of shame. Now why did frugal
living at one time prevail? Because every man imposed restraint on
himself, because we were then the citizens of a single city; there was
not even temptation for us when our dominion was confined to Italy.
It was through our foreign victories that we learned to waste the
property of others, by our civil wars to waste our own. And what a
small thing it is to which our attention is called by the Ædiles! What
a trifle if it is compared with our other responsibilities! Yes, nobody
bethinks himself that Italy is dependent upon external resources,
that the sustenance of the Roman people is exposed every day to the
uncertainties of the winds and waves!
“And should the resources of the Provinces fail to come to the rescue
of our landowners, and slaves, and farms, our own forests, forsooth,
our own estates will protect us! This is the anxiety, Conscript
Fathers, which falls upon the shoulders of the Prince, and if he
refuses to attend to this, the State will be dragged down to perdition.
For those other difficulties a remedy can be found in our own conduct;
may a sense of honour improve ourselves, necessity restrain the poor,
satiety the rich. Or if any one of the magistrates holds out a prospect
of so much industry, such rigour as to be able to contend with these
abuses, I both commend him, and admit that I am thereby relieved of
part of my burden. But if they are willing enough to demonstrate
abuses, and then, when they have obtained the credit of this action,
stir animosities, and hand them over to me, believe me, Conscript
Fathers, that I too have no taste for unpopularity; tasks involving
serious, and generally unjust, unpopularity I will undertake for the
good of the State. I rightly protest against being required to incur
trivial and useless causes of offence likely to be profitable neither
to myself nor to you.”
The language of Tacitus leaves it uncertain as to whether these words
are the actual letter of Tiberius, or only an epitome of the real
letter; but the sense, if not the form, is clearly the Emperor’s own.
In his view of the inefficiency of sumptuary legislation Tiberius was
far in advance of his time; no law can in these matters do for the
individual what he refuses to do for himself. Indirectly Tiberius
reproaches the Senate for their individual complicity in the offences
against which legislation was demanded; he also reproaches those
zealous magistrates, the Ædiles, whose business it was to look after
the markets and repress extravagant expenditure, for their previous
neglect of duty; he also points out that there was an abundance of laws
to meet the offence, and an equally abundant neglect of those laws. The
constitutional position which Tiberius takes up is also noteworthy; it
was not for him to anticipate the action of the ordinary magistrates;
on the other hand, the greater cares of the Empire are his, and these
domestic concerns can be left to those officials whom the constitution
provided for the purpose.
Throughout the letter we detect a profound contempt for the Senate,
as being a body ever ready to talk, but never ready to act, and we
are therefore prepared to believe that there is some truth in the
story which tells us that Tiberius seldom left the Senate House
without exclaiming, “Men made for slavery!” We also see that Tiberius
was sensitive to public opinion, and was not prepared to face
unpopularity except with good reason. The implied warning against the
folly of passing laws which it is impossible to enforce shows sound
statesmanship; the vice of clamouring for fresh laws in order to check
offences which have been already provided for by old ones, and of
invoking the aid of legislation in matters where good example and sound
conduct on the part of individuals are more effective, is a vice which
has survived the Roman Senate.
The result of the debate was fresh energy on the part of the Ædiles,
but Tacitus says that it was not until the reign of Vespasian that
there was any marked improvement, that Emperor being himself averse to
luxury. As, however, Tiberius was no less distinguished by plainness of
living, it is more probable that the effect was produced by a general
equalizing of fortunes among the well-to-do.
While Tiberius thus refused to take upon himself the responsibilities
of the Senate in domestic matters, he was equally little inclined to
allow them to throw upon him the burden of administering their own
Provinces, and carefully referred deputations from the Senatorial
Provinces to the Consuls; he punished a private servant of his own who
had the management of his estates in Asia, a Senatorial Province, for
attempting to exercise powers other than those of the business agent of
a private person.
We may remark that the care of feeding the city, which we should have
expected to be in the department of the Senate, was really in the hands
of the Emperor, who held Egypt in his own exclusive management for that
special purpose; nor was Tiberius a sufficiently enlightened economist
not to attempt to control the price of corn.
Another subject which from time to time still taxed the energies of the
Senate was the prevalence of alien rites, and especially of all forms
of magic and divination.
It has been held that the Senate and people of Rome were particularly
free from religious intolerance; their behaviour in this matter has
been favourably contrasted with that of Christian governments, and
there are many who believe that the Romans never interfered with
religious observances till they adopted an attitude of exceptional
malignity towards the professors of Christianity. Such a view does
not, however, correctly represent the facts of the case. Comparatively
early in its history the Roman Senate had proceeded with considerable
severity against those who were infected with that strange hysterical
epidemic which spread over Europe under the guise of the worship of
Bacchus, and in the year 19 A.D. we find the Senate passing decrees to
repress Egyptian and Jewish religious rites. According to Suetonius
the devotees were ordered to burn their vestments and other religious
furniture, while he and Tacitus agree in telling us that four thousand
freedmen “infected with that superstition” who were of fitting age for
military service were sent off to Sardinia to check brigandage there,
“and if they should perish in the unwholesome climate, it was not a
serious loss.” “The rest,” according to Tacitus, “were to withdraw from
Italy unless they abandoned their profane observances before a fixed
date.” The language of Tacitus does not distinguish between Jew and
Egyptian so far as religion was concerned, for though he mentions both
races, he only alludes to one superstition.
The persecution of Jews on religious grounds is thus anterior to
Christianity, and the persecutions were not confined to Jews and
Egyptians; Chaldæans were included, and as we have already seen, after
the case of feather-headed Scribonius Libo Magians and “mathematicians”
were also expelled from Italy.
In these persecutions Tiberius is not directly responsible, he left
the matter in the hands of the Senate. Sardinia was a Senatorial
Province, and he apparently saw no reason for interference. Italy was
not, however, swept clear of “mathematicians” and other persons under
the ban of the Senate, with whom in fact the head of the executive was
probably in private sympathy, for Thrasyllus the “mathematician” had
been his constant attendant since the days of the retirement at Rhodes.
Decrees for the expulsion of these undesirables recur under subsequent
Emperors.
The subject is a complicated one, and the more complicated to us
because men so diverse according to our conceptions are included in the
same ban. We do not know much of the Chaldæans and Magians, but we know
something of the Jews, and we are surprised to find them classed with
Egyptians and subjected to the same penalties as Chaldæans, Magians and
“mathematicians,” and we further ask ourselves why the Senate, which
countenanced the worship of the Great Mother and other alien deities,
assumed an attitude of intolerance towards the Jews.
The attitude of the Jews towards other religions was essentially
different from that of the priests of Cybele or any other Pagan
divinity. Jupiter or Mars or Vesta could tolerate the temples of other
Gods, and the respect paid to other Gods--it was of the essence of
polytheism to multiply divinities--but the Jew declared that there
was only one God; his God was not one of many Gods, but the only God,
and the worship of other Gods was wrong and monstrous. Thus to the
Roman Senate the observances of the Jews were actually “profane”;
they involved hostility to existing religions, and toleration of the
Jews was therefore impossible for the orthodox Pagan. Again, it is
important to remember that the Jews at this period were not shut up
in ghettos, and visibly separated from the rest of the community;
whatever differences in dress and customs distinguished them from
other inhabitants of the cities in which they dwelt were not peculiar
to them; the Syrian, the Egyptian, the Gaul, men of many other
nationalities wore their distinctive dress and practised their national
religions in every populous city of the Empire. The Jews might for
convenience live in the neighbourhood of a synagogue, and thus give
portions of the cities which they inhabited the aspect of a Jewish
quarter; but such separate residence was not enforced upon them; they
moved freely among the people; many of them were in positions of trust,
their princes, the Herods, were on intimate terms with the Imperial
family, and their young men took part in the diversions of the Roman
youth; among them were ardent proselytisers, their peculiar doctrines
were well known to the educated, and though Horace might laugh at their
credulity, his sneer indicates how well they were known. The unhappy
four thousand young men who were sent to Sardinia were either freedmen
or the sons of freedmen, a fact which shows that they, or their
fathers, had been the trusted servants of Romans. But the Jews were no
more homogeneous then than now; if they had their Rothschilds, they
had also their Jews of mean streets, their “vagabond Jews, exorcists”;
and if the great financier was the trusted friend of an Emperor, the
small moneylender of the slums was as much detested in ancient Rome as
he is in modern London. There were Jews who were deservedly respected
for their great intellectual ability, for the purity of their lives,
for the dignity of their religion; but there were also Jews whose
disreputable callings and mean habits involved at least a section
of their race in such contempt as to lead Tacitus to contemplate
with satisfaction their extinction in the fever-haunted swamps of
Sardinia. We should, however, be on our guard against attributing to
the contemporaries of Tiberius the same degree of animosity against
the Jews which was felt by the contemporaries of Trajan; for, in spite
of the sweeping decrees of the Senate, the Jews steadily advanced in
importance, and the anti-Semitic sentiment of Tacitus was evoked not
only by the disreputable section of the chosen people, but also by the
men who, as members of the Imperial household, had a large share in the
administration of the State.
Again, we should be mistaken if we attributed to the whole Jewish race
distributed throughout the civilized world the same sentiments which
prevailed among the bigoted Jews of Jerusalem. Even at Jerusalem, where
the introduction of the Roman standards invariably produced a riot,
the priests of the Temple accepted the offerings made by the different
Roman generals who passed by or occupied the Sacred City; and the
omission of a Gentile commander to show this form of respect to the
one God was somewhat inconsistently resented. At Alexandria especially
free intercourse with men who represented the wisdom of the Egyptians
and the Greeks modified the conceptions of orthodox but not bigoted
Jews, and the spirituality of Judaism steadily tended to prevail over
its ceremonial exclusiveness. Learned Jews enjoyed as wide reputations
as other learned men, and were in communication with learned Greeks;
Tiberius himself is said to have nicknamed Apion the Greek, to whose
anti-judaic treatise Josephus replied, “the rattle of the universe.”
But while on the one hand a reformed and spiritualized Judaism was
tending to become the effective religion of the Empire, the debased
Judaism was joining hands with the other demoralizing superstitions of
the East. No one who has read the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles
of St. Paul attentively can deny that if there were spiritually-minded
Jews like the great Apostle, there were also Jews who practised
exorcisms and divination, and who studied “curious books.” We know
little of the peculiar tenets of the Chaldæans and the Magians, equally
little of the Egyptians, except as worshippers of Isis, but we know
that fortune-telling and witchcraft were practised by them, no less
than dignified inquiries into the laws of nature, so far as their
imperfect means of observation permitted. The dividing line between
Thrasyllus the “mathematician,” the friend of Tiberius, and those men
whom foolish Libo consulted, would have been difficult to draw, science
was not to be clear of superstition for many ages, but there were
respectable astrologers, genuine, though perhaps mistaken, searchers
after truth, alongside of the disreputable charlatans who interpreted
dreams and told fortunes and held sway over the dissolute imaginations
of needy profligates by means of conjuring tricks and skilfully
organized conspiracies with numerous confederates. Even the purest of
Jewish sects--if indeed they can be called a sect--the Essenians, laid
stress upon their powers of predicting events by means of the stars.
Polytheism was in fact tolerant so long as an enemy had not declared
himself; it was no sooner conscious of an enemy than it persecuted,
and the persecution was no less a persecution because it was prompted
by mixed motives. There may have been good reason for mistrusting the
influence of the diviners upon persons of weak mind, for suspecting
them of helping to bring about the accomplishment of their predictions
by the use of poisons, and of prompting plots in whose success they had
a personal interest; but it was also inevitable that the emergence of a
new religious attitude should alarm, and that its professors should be
subject to attack. In times of popular excitement the monotheists were
persecuted by the enlightened rationalists no less than by the orthodox
polytheists, and many motives over and above religious intolerance
contributed to sharpen the laws against the Jew and the diviner. Not
the least of these was the dread of poison, a very lively terror
even in modern times, till the accumulations of chemical and medical
knowledge restricted the sphere of operations of mysterious drugs; and
there may well have been some foundation for the superstitious dread of
secret poisoning by which many of the ancients were affected. Not only
was the charlatan ready to magnify his own powers, and to ascribe to
his spells and incantations deaths from purely natural causes, but the
older civilizations of the East had doubtless preserved many secrets of
pharmacy which were skilfully used by adepts to impress the imagination
of the vulgar.
At this very day the medicine men and women, the Papaloi and Mamaloi
of the Black Republic of Hayti, exert a power above the laws by their
knowledge and use of poisons, from which even the educated white man
cannot escape. Before we condemn the Roman Senate for its intolerance
of magicians and its superstitious dread of their powers, we must place
ourselves in their position, limit ourselves to their knowledge; and
again we must be modest enough to remember that we still consider it
necessary to protect the ignorant dupe from the fortune-teller, that
the law is not unfrequently called into action in such cases, and that
the clients of the spiritualist and diviner of to-day are to be found
in all classes, and not exclusively among the poor and ignorant.
While the Senate thus endeavoured to repress alien worships, it
continued to protect the sanctity of its own ritual; vestal virgins
were appointed in due form, though with increasing difficulty, as
the solemn form of marriage necessary for the proper parentage of a
vestal had fallen into disfavour. Considerable interest attached to the
case of a Senator named Servius Maluginensis, who had a claim to the
Proconsulship of Asia, and wished to evade the restrictions which were
imposed on him by the fact that he was Flamen Dialis, sublimest priest
of Jupiter. The ancient ritual forbade the Flamen Dialis to leave
the city for more than a day and a night in succession, and Servius
therefore attempted to prove that the ritual was obsolete, and that
exceptions had been allowed. The Senate discussed the case with due
solemnity, and then referred it to Tiberius, who in his turn remitted
it to the College of Pontiffs. Their decision was against Servius, and
the Province of Asia fell to the Senator next on the roll.
A question of even greater importance, partly religious in its
character, required the decision of the Senate. Numerous Greek towns,
chiefly situated in the islands of the Ægean and along the coasts
of Asia Minor, had abused the rights of Sanctuary attached to some
of their temples. Not only were the rights of property imperilled
by the ready shelter given to runaway slaves, but the concourse of
unruly ruffians assembled in these insular Alsatias threatened to
disturb the public peace. A sanctuary, if conveniently situated,
might easily assume the character of a nest of pirates; the Greek
genius for brigandage has always been as remarkable as the Greek
gift for preaching morality. An attempt to suppress the sanctuaries
led to protests, and deputations from the towns concerned pleaded
their cause before the Senate. The arguments used in defence of the
sanctuaries are interesting, because they show a sense of continuity of
government from the times of Alexander to those of Tiberius. The claims
were partly based on mythological grounds, but more effectively on
recognitions granted by Alexander, and afterwards by Roman Proconsuls.
The maintenance of the sanctuaries was regarded as an honourable
distinction, and this aspect of the claims was pressed rather than the
material advantages.
The abuse, however, was too alarming to be tolerated. One temple
alone, that of Æsculapius at Pergamus, which from other evidence seems
to have assumed the character of a school of medicine, retained its
privileges; the others were dismissed with honourable compliments,
and it was ordered that a copy of the Senatorial decree should be
inscribed on brass, and placed in a conspicuous position in the
temples concerned. Subsequently other sanctuaries were similarly dealt
with. The credit of thus dealing with a serious abuse is ascribed by
Suetonius to Tiberius, and it is possible that, though the actual
decision was made in the Senate, because the towns involved were in
a Senatorial Province, the initiative came from the Emperor himself.
If Tiberius was thus severe in correcting a time-honoured abuse, he
had been no less liberal in remitting taxation and furnishing relief
to numerous cities in the same part of the world, which had suffered
severely from an earthquake. In fact, though he was careful to observe
the constitutional forms, he kept a watchful eye upon the Senatorial
administration, and supplied the necessary stimulation for its
corporate conscience.
Reference has already been made to the practice of supplementing the
resources of impoverished Senators, and to the severity with which
Tiberius treated such cases. The Senate was only too willing to vote
public money to provide pensions for its members. Tiberius recognized
the obligation, but he insisted that the beneficiary should make out
a good case, and be able to demonstrate that his distress was due to
misfortune, not to thriftlessness. The case of Hortalus, grandson
of Cicero’s rival, Hortensius, affords an illustration both of the
severity of Tiberius and of the curiously domestic character of the
Senate.
In the year 16 A.D. Hortalus rose in his place in the Senate, having
posted his four sons at the door, where they could be seen by all;
he then spoke as follows, fixing his eyes alternately on the statue
of Hortensius standing among the orators, and that of Augustus:--“It
was not by my own will, but at the suggestion of the Prince, that I
begot and acknowledged these children, whose number and tender years
you behold; and indeed my ancestors had deserved that I should have
successors. For I, who owing to the revolutionary times could neither
inherit the ancestral property of my house, nor earn money, nor win
the affections of the people, nor train myself in eloquence, should
have had enough if my poverty had neither shamed nor burdened others.
At the command of the Emperor I married a wife. Behold the stock
and progeny of all those consuls and dictators. I do not say this
to disparage anybody else, but to win your compassion. The offices
that you confer, Cæsar, will be at your service while you reign;
meanwhile defend the great-grandchildren of Quintus Hortensius, the
children fostered by the sainted Augustus, from want.” In spite of
the mendacity of this statement--for on the father’s side, at any
rate, the family of Hortensius could only claim the credit of two
consulships and no dictatorships--the appeal was heard with favour
by the Senate, till Tiberius intervened with these words:--“If all
the poverty-stricken begin to come here and demand money for their
children, the applicants will never be satiated, and the public purse
will run dry. And indeed it was certainly never contemplated by our
ancestors when they allowed Senators to leave the matter in hand, and
move amendments for the public benefit, that we should endeavour to
increase our private fortunes in this place in such a manner as to
render the Senate and the Princes unpopular, whether they granted or
refused the largess. This is not a humble request; it is an impudent
demand, unseasonable, and unprecedented, to rise when the Senate are
assembled for the discussion of other matters, and do violence to the
kindness of the Senate by urging the number and age of one’s children,
and to pass on the same violence to me, and as it were break open the
treasury, which we shall have to supplement by injustice, if we exhaust
it in courting popularity. Money was given to you, Hortalus, by the
sainted Augustus, but without previous application, and certainly
not on the terms that once given it should be always given. Industry
will slacken, indolence will gain strength, if men’s hopes and fears
are not to depend on themselves, if all are confidently to look for
resources from outside, useless to themselves and a burden to us.”
Tiberius was clearly in the right, but the authorities whom Tacitus
consulted evidently thought that Hortalus had been hardly used, for
the narrative is continued:--“Although these and similar words were
listened to with favour by those whose custom it is to praise all that
falls from the lips of Princes, honourable and dishonourable alike,
the majority received them in silence or with subdued murmurs. And
Tiberius perceived this, and after a short silence said that he had
given Hortalus his answer. However, if the Senate thought well, he
would give each of his children of the male sex two hundred thousand
sesterces (about £3,000). The rest expressed their thanks. Hortalus
was silent, either from consternation or because he retained something
of his ancestral nobility even in his indigence. Nor did Tiberius show
him any further compassion, although the family of Hortensius fell into
disgraceful poverty.”
The gift made by Tiberius was private and personal; he did not make
use of the public money for a purpose of which he had expressed strong
disapproval. The incident is chiefly interesting as indicating that,
in spite of the rude shocks given to the Senatorial system by Julius
Cæsar, the body had recovered its evil tradition of assuming that it
was at liberty to use the public purse to meet the private necessities
of its members. Hortalus was clearly a well-known spendthrift.
The Senate, in fact, tended to become more and more a high court of
justice, in which its members and high officials were tried by their
peers, the cases being either political or such private cases as
had by long tradition fallen to the Senate as the guardian of the
morality of the privileged orders. It was tenacious of its privileges,
careless of its wider responsibilities. Tiberius treated it with formal
respect, and did his best to make it worthy of its opportunities; if
he could have avoided interfering with its administration of its own
provinces, he would have done so, but he was not prepared to submit
the provincials to misgovernment in order to maintain the prestige
of the Senate, and the misgovernment of Proconsuls was by no means a
thing of the past. Tiberius, like Augustus, supplied himself with an
inner Council of the Senate, and it is possible that on most occasions
this inner Council represented the whole body; but he did not restrict
himself to Senatorial Counsellors, and we are told that, in dealing
with provincial questions, he was always careful to provide himself
with the expert evidence of men who knew the localities concerned.
Though the Senate could not shake itself free from the traditions
of its existence, and always represented the great families of the
City of Rome rather than Italy or the Empire, except in so far as it
provided the personnel of the Supreme Court of Appeal, it was curiously
indifferent to municipal matters. The city was policed by the Prefect
of the city, an official appointed by the Emperor, who held office for
long periods, and it was guarded by troops commanded by the Emperor.
The rank of Senator eventually became little more than an honourable
distinction, though from time to time the body possessed sufficient
coherence to bid for the power which it had lost, and even for short
periods to wield it. The distinction between Senatorial and Imperial
Provinces did not last long, the Imperial administration proving better
suited to the needs of the Empire.
Many writers infected with the spirit of the nineteenth century have
advanced the opinion that the Roman Empire collapsed because the Romans
never hit upon representative government. It is curious that Augustus
very nearly effected this supreme achievement. He at one time proposed
to hold simultaneous elections of the Roman magistrates in all the
cities of Italy; the names of the candidates were to be posted up, the
votes were to be collected in ballot boxes, which were to be sent to
Rome sealed up, and afterwards counted in the city itself. This scheme
happily came to nothing, for the strength of the Roman Empire lay in
its respect for local government. The Provincial Governors were the
supreme umpires in their Provinces, but they did not concern themselves
with the details of local administration; the constitutions of Athens,
and even Sparta, continued to work even after these towns were included
in the Province of Achaia, and similarly throughout the Empire original
institutions were left to do their previous work. As we have seen,
the Governors of Provinces did not even control the organization by
which the Imperial taxes were collected. The local life of the Empire
was strong; Antioch and Alexandria, even the new cities of Gaul,
bowed reluctantly to Rome, and in course of time the position of the
Patriarch of Rome was not to be that of Primate of Christianity till
many a battle had been fought, and in fact the Popes never succeeded to
the full heritage of the Emperors. The Empire was the bond of union and
the peacemaker between an infinite number of self-governing units, it
provided a supreme arbitrator, a Supreme Court of Appeal. The Empire,
in fact, was peace; it was not a system of local as well as universal
administration. The introduction of representative government, the
substitution of an Elective Parliament at Rome for the Senate, would
have killed the vigorous local governments, and would not have improved
the administration of the Empire. Under such rulers as Augustus and
Tiberius, the Flavians and the Antonines, the organization of the Roman
Empire probably reached the limits of perfectibility; it would not
have been improved by collecting deputies from all parts of the world,
and expecting them to be responsible for the executive. Representative
institutions have not prevented official corruption or no less deadly
incompetence, nor has the absence of really free parliaments impeded
the advance of some modern nations; those diseases of the body politic
from which the Roman Empire is held to have suffered in a special
degree, corruption and official formalism, have not been unknown in
communities blessed with Houses of Representatives duly elected and
accredited. A multitude of counsellors neither protects an Empire from
corruption nor ensures wisdom in the conduct of its affairs, while
the conscience of any corporate body is notoriously duller than that
of each individual of which it is composed. The Roman Emperors were
wise in respecting local institutions, and in not imposing a strict
system of centralization, for it is unfortunately impossible to retrace
our steps, and when once the local life has been killed, it cannot
be revived. Decentralization as a matter of mechanical convenience
is possible after the central authority has drawn to itself all
the prestige of political life, but this is purely administrative
decentralization; when once the central government has absorbed the
vitality of local political life, it cannot give back that which it
has taken away. It was good for the Empire that the Senate should not
exclusively attract the ambition of capable men from the Provinces,
and on the other hand that the energies of the Emperors should be
distributed over a wide area. The Emperors had no time for universal
tyranny, and the extravagancies of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian were
scarcely felt outside Rome itself; they certainly did nothing to shake
the foundations of that fabric which had been so wisely laid by the
first two Emperors.
XVII
Sejanus
One of the most trusted public servants of Augustus was a Roman
Equestrian named Seius Strabo; he hailed from an Italian, or rather
a Tuscan, city, his family having been long settled at Vulsinii, and
was thus exposed at Rome to the reproach of being a “new man.” Seius
Strabo was content with administrative work, and did not aspire to high
senatorial rank. Augustus made him commander of the Prætorian cohorts
which formed the garrison of Italy, and afterwards entrusted him with
the most important office in his gift, for he made him Governor of
Egypt, that valuable appanage of the Roman Emperors upon which the corn
supply of the capital depended. Seius married into the Junian gens, the
gens of Brutus the Liberator, and his son could in consequence claim
affinity through his mother with the most honourable Roman houses. This
son was adopted by a member of the Ælian gens, and thus became known
as Ælius Sejanus. He married a daughter of Apicius the Epicure, a very
wealthy man, but notorious rather than distinguished.
The young Sejanus enjoyed the confidence of Augustus as his father
had done. He succeeded him in command of the Prætorians, and was made
adviser to Caius Cæsar when he went to the East. In this capacity he
did his best to counteract the mischievous counsels of Marcus Lollius,
and won the gratitude of Tiberius, which he soon improved into a
personal friendship. As Sejanus was made his father’s colleague in
B.C. 14, soon afterwards succeeding him in the sole command of the
Prætorian guards, he cannot have been much younger than Tiberius, for
he would hardly have been associated with his father before he was
twenty years of age, and in that case Tiberius would have been his
senior by only eight years. Even if we assume that Sejanus became
his father’s colleague at the age of sixteen, an age at which young
Romans commonly first entered on active service, he would still be
only twelve years younger than Tiberius; but it is very improbable
that so young a man would have been entrusted with the command of the
Prætorians. The question is of some importance, for the language of
the historians, perhaps unintentionally, conveys the impression that
Sejanus was a comparatively youthful favourite of the Emperor’s, who
owed his advancement to a blind partiality, whereas his acquaintance
with Tiberius had been almost lifelong, even if we assume that he was
little more than a boy when he first commanded the Prætorian guards. It
is far more probable that there were only three or four years between
the two men, and that the relations between Sejanus and Tiberius were
comparable to those between Augustus and Agrippa.
Paterculus, who admired Sejanus, is curiously apologetic about the
obscurity of his family. He suggests that it was not so obscure as was
generally supposed, and again that obscurity of descent is no bar to
admission to the public service; he quotes very ancient examples, and
the more modern ones of Marius, Cicero, and Asinius Pollio.
In fact the Revolution, which had broken the political power of the
old Roman aristocracy, had been succeeded by a reaction in favour of
great names and exalted lineages, which would have given the Senate a
new lease of power had that body been capable of effective work. The
History of Livy, the Fasti of Ovid, the later books of the Æneid, had
all combined to throw a glamour over the great Roman families, and the
new world of capable officials recruited from Italy and other parts of
the Empire found itself despised at Rome by the futile descendants of
legendary ancestors. We are told that the Emperor Caligula was ashamed
of his grandfather, Marcus Agrippa, and was offended if reminded
of his descent from the ignoble Vipsanian stock. Tiberius himself
was evidently inclined to be a formalist in matters affecting the
aristocracy, and though he drew his trusted servants from all classes
and races, the deference which he paid to the Senate and the old
constitutional magistrates, along with his careful observance of the
old legal ritual, tended to foster aristocratic pretensions.
To the memoir-writing Senators Sejanus was an upstart, and in spite
of the recent precedents of Agrippa and Mæcenas and other capable
colleagues of Augustus, the strict aristocracy could see nothing but
evil in the “new man.” On the other hand, a large party in the Senate,
representatives of the new hierarchy of officials, accepted Sejanus,
as Agrippa had been accepted; they followed the lead of Tiberius, and
after the death of Drusus in A.D. 23 were prepared to treat Sejanus as
the second person in the Empire.
If Senators of ancient descent were disgusted at the position held
by Sejanus, the family of the Emperor were even more so. Drusus, a
hot-tempered man, is said on one occasion to have struck him, an
incident which may well have occurred when Drusus was a little boy or
petulant youth, and been turned to good account by sensation-loving
writers of memoirs. Agrippina could not contain herself in the
presence of this new oppressor of the children of Germanicus, the
great-grandchildren of the sainted Augustus, and so forth. These
poor innocents were, in her excited imagination, the victims of the
ambitions of Sejanus; that they were not from the moment of their birth
of an age to be entrusted with the conduct of affairs did not enter
into her considerations.
Drusus died after an illness of some duration. Dio tells us that his
constitution had been impaired by intemperance and other excesses,
and there is other evidence that he had been a man of pleasure as
well as a man of business. A speech of his is recorded to the effect
that as long as he paid proper attention to his public duties he
was at liberty to enjoy his leisure as he pleased. He did not share
his father’s taste for literary pursuits or scientific research;
but Dio informs us that Tiberius was really attached to his son,
and insinuations to the contrary are probably derived from tainted
sources, from the private diaries of those to whom it was an axiom
that Tiberius hated those whom he was in duty bound to love, and
loved those only whom he ought to have hated. Even Tacitus, however
unintentionally, supplies evidence that Tiberius was much shaken by
his son’s death, for though he tells us that Tiberius did not allow
the illness or death of Drusus to interfere with the discharge of his
public duties--a piece of stoical conduct quite in accordance with the
character of time-honoured Roman models--he also tells us that the
Emperor spoke at the time of resigning his office to the Consuls or
some other. According to Tacitus, the Emperor also addressed a long
speech to the Senate, in which he deplored the extreme old age of
Livia, and his own declining years still unprovided with grandchildren.
This latter statement was not correct, for Drusus had left a son, a
second Tiberius, unless indeed we are to assume that the Emperor did
not think he was at liberty to count a descendant who was still too
young to be introduced to the Senate. We are further told that Tiberius
then begged that the children of Germanicus, “the one consolation of
his present misfortune,” might be brought into the Senate house, that
the Consuls went out, and after encouraging the lads, placed them in
front of the Emperor. He took them by the hand, and said: “Conscript
Fathers, I entrusted these orphans to the care of their uncle, and
begged him, although he had children of his own, to cherish them as he
would cherish his own blood, and own them, and educate them for himself
and posterity. Now that Drusus has been taken from us, I address my
petition to you, and I implore you, in the presence of our gods and
our country, to adopt, to guide the great-grandchildren of Augustus,
descendants of such a splendid stock, and to fulfil your duty and my
own. These worthy counsellors, Nero and Drusus, will be your parents.
You have been born in such a position that your good or bad conduct is
a matter of public concern.”
The funeral of Drusus was conducted with unusual pomp; the whole line
of the Julians back to Æneas appeared in effigy in the procession, all
the Alban kings, Romulus, the Sabine nobility, Attus Clausus, and the
rest of the famous Claudians. The magnificence of the Imperial family
in both branches was thus emphasized.
The death of Drusus, in fact, left Tiberius in much the same position
as Augustus had been left by the death of Caius Cæsar. Neither the
Claudian nor the Julian lines were represented by men of an age to
lead the State. It is true that the brother of Germanicus, the future
Emperor Claudius, was of mature age and in full enjoyment of such
faculties as he possessed, but he had long been consigned to a private
life, apparently with his own consent. The men who had worked with
Tiberius all his life, Marcus Lepidus, Asinius Gallus, Lucius Piso, the
Prefect of the city, and others, were now of very advanced age. Sejanus
was the only administrator who held a position at all comparable to
that which Tiberius had held during the later years of Augustus, but
there was this important difference; Tiberius, apart from his personal
merits and long experience, had been the representative of the old
Roman aristocracy; his succession did no violence to the prejudices
of the restored Senate. Sejanus, on the other hand, was a new man; if
he represented any particular party, it was the Equestrians, the old
enemies of senatorial pretensions; his exaltation was a victory of the
officials over the survivors of the hereditary aristocracy.
The services which Sejanus had done to the State were not of that
brilliant character which would seem to justify his promotion; he
had not distinguished himself by conspicuous military service on the
frontiers, though his uncle, Junius Blæsus, had dealt successfully with
the mutineers early in the reign of Tiberius, and had more recently
earned a triumph by a series of successful campaigns in northern
Africa, and Sejanus may have enjoyed a reflected glory from these
achievements. It is true that there may be a conspiracy of silence as
to his exploits, but even Paterculus, his admirer, has nothing definite
to record, and praises him in general terms only as the capable
assistant of Tiberius.
It is probable that his merits were those of a good organizer, merits
which would be known to those who were working at the centre of
affairs, and would be appreciated by Tiberius himself at their true
value, but would escape general attention, for the waywardness of human
judgement is such that years of patient faithful and laborious devotion
to the public service often fail to secure recognition, and a moment
of victory weighs more in the public opinion than many hours spent in
organizing the forces by which that victory is obtained.
The one great work of Sejanus has, quite undeservedly, involved his
name in obloquy. He organized the Prætorian guards, and collected that
portion of them who were on duty at Rome in barracks. The Prætorian
guards constituted the home army of Italy; they were not only the
bodyguard of the Emperor. Indeed, it seems that in the time of Augustus
the Emperor’s bodyguard was a selected troop of Germans, the Swiss
guards of the Pope being thus curiously anticipated by the first
Emperor. The organization of the Prætorians was slightly different from
that of the rest of the army; they were divided not into legions--or,
as we should say, regiments--of about 6,000 men, but into cohorts (the
cohort, or battalion, ordinarily consisted of 600 men, but a Prætorian
cohort numbered 1,000). In other words, the home army was divided into
units available by their size for garrison purposes. These men received
higher pay and better allowances than the legionaries, and were, in
fact, the pick of the service. Everything was done that could be done
to attach them to the person of the Emperor and to distinguish them
from the rest of the army.
The mutinies in Pannonia and on the Rhine had indicated a weak spot
in the organization of the Empire. How if the mutineers had been
successful, if Germanicus had not resisted their wish to make him
Emperor? They would have marched upon Rome. It was clearly necessary
that Italy should be provided with a sufficient force to defend
the seat of government from its own armies and to demonstrate the
inevitable failure of any attempt from the Provinces to overturn the
civil power. It was probably considerations of this nature which
impelled Tiberius to give careful attention to the organization of the
Prætorians, and he doubtless considered himself fortunate in being able
to entrust this important work to a capable officer of whose fidelity
he was well assured.
The absence of barracks had proved a source of disorder; the Prætorians
had been scattered in lodgings throughout the city and other towns. Not
only was their discipline thus rendered a matter of difficulty, but
their sense of corporate unity was impaired, and the language used of
them inclines us to the supposition that so far from being an adequate
police force, they were not infrequently themselves the source of
disturbances in the streets. In order to correct these abuses, Sejanus
built a large camp just outside the walls of Rome; it occupied the site
of the well-known Pincian gardens. The force thus organized numbered
twelve thousand men--three so-called Urban cohorts, nine Prætorian.
The men were carefully chosen from the regions adjacent to the city,
or from the ancient Latin colonies; care was taken to give them a
specially Italian character.
The distinction between Urban and Prætorian cohorts, coupled with
the statement of Suetonius that Tiberius placed garrisons throughout
Italy, while there is no mention in Tacitus of any legion told off to
the Italian service, suggests that the camp of the Prætorians at Rome
only accommodated those cohorts which were on duty at the capital.
It was the headquarters of the whole force, but was not habitually
occupied by the whole force. It seems to have been felt that even the
Prætorians were not strong enough by themselves to defend Italy in
case of emergency, for there was a further provision in the shape of
an arrangement with Cotys, the King of Thrace, by which he was bound
to keep a force ready, if called upon, to defend northern Italy at the
dangerous corner of the Adriatic. Sejanus undoubtedly showed capacity
as organizing commander-in-chief in Italy, and Tiberius felt deeply
the need for this assistance. He knew that the defence of the Empire
was inadequate; he knew that the revenue appropriated to that defence
was also inadequate, and it was for this reason that he habitually
prided himself upon solving difficulties with the frontier princes by
diplomacy rather than by an appeal to arms. He was thus prepared to be
grateful to a man who could find a means of increasing the efficiency
of the home forces without adding to their numbers. Tiberius had, in
fact, serious misgivings as to the quality of the troops. Addressing
the Senate early in A.D. 23, he told them that the supply of voluntary
soldiers was short, and that where the numbers were adequate the morale
of the men was unsatisfactory, because the recruits were generally
impoverished and homeless men. Apparently, compulsory service, except
in the case of special agreements with recently conquered territories,
such as the Thracian kings, had been allowed to fall into abeyance,
and Tiberius talked of visiting the Provinces in order to revive the
compulsory levies. It is not uninteresting to note that the organizers
of the Roman Empire had to meet some of our own difficulties. Men would
not enlist who had anything better to do; they had, as we have seen,
the further artificial difficulty that they could not draw soldiers
from the working classes, who were slaves.
Tacitus and his authorities, keeping their eyes fixed as usual upon
Rome, do not tell us what arrangements were made for the rest of Italy,
but it is not probable that the use of the barrack system was confined
to the capital; the same cause will have everywhere been followed by
the same results, and have demanded the same remedy. The innovation
was an important one, for though the legions on active service, or
in disturbed districts or imperfectly subjugated countries, lived
in permanent camps, and though the military colonies in Italy had
had something of the same character, a permanent standing army with
permanent barracks was a new thing.
The arrangement at first met with universal approval. The towns were
relieved of the presence of disorderly soldiers in the streets, and
on the occasion of a riot the soldiers could be depended on to act
together and preserve order; they were not united by various ties of
familiarity with the rioters.
The fact that a new force had been created which could be used to
coerce the Government escaped notice at first, and Sejanus was held to
be a public benefactor.
He further achieved some measure of popularity by his energy and skill
in stopping the spread of a conflagration which originated in the
theatre of Pompeius, and the grateful Senate voted that his statue,
magnificently gilded, should be set up in the place where he had saved
the lives of the citizens.
When Drusus died Tiberius was sixty-five years of age. Nothing had
occurred to shake his confidence in Sejanus. At home and abroad the
Government seemed to be strong and settled, and the Emperor felt that
he was at liberty to withdraw himself from any but the most urgent
public business. Tacitus and the authorities whom he followed accused
Tiberius, with their customary animosity, of mere hypocrisy when he
talked of abdicating; they forgot that he had once before retired from
public life, and only been brought back to it with difficulty, and
that, in accepting the cares of the Empire, he had expressed a hope
that the Senate would one day allow him a period of rest in his old
age. From this time he, in fact, began tentatively to absent himself
from Rome and to avoid public functions. Eventually, in A.D. 26, he
finally withdrew to the island of Capreæ, and though he sometimes
approached the city, never entered it again. Meanwhile Sejanus acted as
his Regent at Rome.
We are now approaching the great tragedy of the reign of Tiberius,
a tragedy whose details will never be made clear unless some happy
investigator in the libraries of a monastery or the sands of Egypt
should recover for us the missing books and chapters of Tacitus, and
other authors whose works we have lost.
Though after the death of Drusus Tiberius appeared less frequently
in public, he still conducted business in the Senate, and even after
he had definitely withdrawn from Rome occasionally appeared in the
vicinity of the city. In the year 27 A.D. a temporary wooden theatre,
constructed by a speculator at Fidenæ, not far outside the walls of
Rome, collapsed, involving in its ruins no less than twenty-five
thousand persons. This disaster was almost immediately followed by a
fire on the Cælian Hill, a crowded quarter of Rome. On both occasions
the Emperor gave lavish assistance from his private purse, and promoted
measures likely to prevent the recurrence of such catastrophes. He
continued to transact the business which appertained to what we should
call the Foreign Office of the Empire, and on all important occasions
communicated with the Senate by letter, showing in such communications,
at least up to the year 31 A.D., no abatement of his former ability;
but he did, in fact, withdraw his attention from the details of
government, and allowed the conduct of the legal processes in the
Senate to pass into the hands of Sejanus.
Sejanus, so far as we can learn from our authorities, took advantage
of the increasing aversion of the Emperor from public affairs to take
his place, to promote his own favourites, and gradually to occupy even
in the eyes of the Prætorians that position which really belonged to
Tiberius. It is possible that his procedure in the Senate was more
autocratic than that of the Emperor.
The situation was complicated by the continuance of the domestic
rivalries of the Imperial household, which, on the death of the aged
Livia in 29 A.D., broke out into a series of horrors whose exact nature
cannot from want of evidence be determined, though it may be surmised.
The opposition to Sejanus was twofold: there was what may be called the
constitutional and personal opposition of a large party in the Senate,
who refused to submit to the domination of a new man, and there was
the private opposition of members of the Imperial family, Tiberius
being almost alone in his appreciation of the good qualities of his
subordinate. Thus the sources of our information are discredited from
the outset. The memoirs of Agrippina are coloured by her mother’s
long-standing feud with the Emperor and all whom he trusted, and the
memoirs of Senators are equally likely to be coloured by detestation of
the upstart. It is perhaps for this reason that the annals of the seven
years succeeding the death of Drusus are more than usually filled with
senatorial prosecutions and suggestions of unfairness. It is indeed
possible that Sejanus took some pains to remove political adversaries
by encouraging prosecutions against them, but, except in one instance,
there is no sufficient evidence of perversion of the forms of justice,
and as a rule the hostile comment amounts to little more than an
affirmation of the maxims that a Senator could do no wrong, that he
was always innocent if he committed suicide, and that somehow Tiberius
or Sejanus, or both, were responsible for the act of cowardice which
terminated his dishonoured existence.
In comparison with the greater interests of the Empire, the squalid
scandals which ended in the fall of Sejanus may seem undignified; but
they have their interest also, not only in the obloquy with which they
have covered the name of the “ablest of Roman Emperors,” but in the
disparagement which through them has attached to the Empire itself. The
fall of Sejanus was, in fact, the fall of Tiberius, and the sinister
events with which it was accompanied have cast their shadow upon the
whole subsequent history of the Emperors. A fashion was then set, and
a tone was adopted, which has influenced historians for all time. The
lives of the Cæsars in the pages of Suetonius are little better than a
Newgate calendar; the various works of Tacitus are little better than a
continued jeremiad, in which nobody is good except men unconnected with
the administration, the Germans, and the historian’s father-in-law. For
this peculiar attitude there was certainly no sufficient reason up to
23 A.D., and in the subsequent events till the accession of Caligula
even the bitterly hostile evidence indicates that the Emperor was more
sinned against than sinning.
The story as it has been handed down to us, so far as it can be
collected from fragmentary documents, is to the following effect.
Sejanus formed designs upon the succession at a comparatively early
period; after the death of Germanicus one man alone, Drusus, stood
between him and the object of his ambition. In order to compass the
destruction of Drusus, Sejanus, a man certainly past fifty years of
age, if not close upon sixty, laid siege to Livilla, the wife of
Drusus, the sister of Germanicus. Successful in his assaults upon her
not impenetrable chastity, he divorced his wife Apicata, and joined
with Livilla and a favourite freedman of Drusus in a conspiracy.
Drusus, according to the story, did not die a natural death; he was
poisoned by Sejanus through the instrumentality of his favourite
Lygdus. The way to the succession now lay clear, for the son of Drusus
was still a child, and the eldest sons of Germanicus were little
older; moreover, it was supposed that Tiberius disliked the family
of Germanicus. To the disappointment of Sejanus, Tiberius showed an
inclination to favour this family, and though he sharply reproved
the Senate for attempting to confer premature honours upon them, he
introduced them to the Senate, and as they advanced in years treated
them as his probable successors along with his own grandson.
Sejanus then, we are told, by means of secret emissaries worked upon
the excitable temperament of Agrippina in the hope that she would
involve herself and her family in ruin by committing some unpardonable
offence against Tiberius. In this he was eventually successful, though
so long as Tiberius continued to live at Rome the violence of Agrippina
was met by somewhat amused contempt. Thus it is recorded that on one
occasion Agrippina, goaded by the agents of Sejanus, burst in upon
Tiberius when he was sacrificing in presence of the statue of Augustus.
The scene is brought home to us if we imagine that the famous statue
of the Prima Porta found on the site of Livia’s villa was the statue
in question. A friend, and indeed cousin, of Agrippina’s, one Claudia
Pulchra, had been accused of unchastity and of magical performances
directed against the Emperor himself. It was suggested to Agrippina
that she was the person really attacked, and being “always violent,”
as Tacitus says, she went straight to the Emperor, and, in allusion to
the solemn occupation in which she found him engaged, declared that “a
man had no right to offer victims to the sainted Augustus and at the
same time persecute his posterity. The divine spirit had not passed
into dumb images, but his real presentment, born of his divine blood,
understood the inconsistency, and mourned.” She went on to describe
the attack upon Claudia as an attack upon herself. Tiberius for once
was provoked to a retort, and, quoting a Greek poet, said, “Your only
injury, daughter, is that you are not Queen.” This scene in the calm
presence of the statue of Augustus was followed by another. Cousin
Claudia was found guilty of the offence with which she was charged;
but Agrippina persisted in her grievances. She fell into ill-health;
Tiberius visited her; she received him at first in silence, then burst
into floods of tears. She bewailed her loneliness, and begged him to
find her a husband; she was still young, she said; marriage alone would
relieve her from the contumelious position in which she found herself;
there were plenty of men in the State who would not disdain to welcome
the wife and children of Germanicus.
Tiberius left her on this occasion without uttering a word. Then it was
suggested to the aggrieved lady by the emissaries of Sejanus that her
life was in danger, that poison was being prepared for her, that she
should refuse to dine with the Emperor. In consequence, on the next
occasion on which she partook of a meal with the head of the family
she passed all the dishes, till Tiberius, noting her want of appetite,
picked up a particularly fine apple and handed it to her with much
praise of its merits; the unhappy lady at once passed the fruit to
the slave who stood behind her. Tiberius merely turned to his mother
and remarked that it would not be strange if he dealt severely with a
woman who accused him of poisoning. This speech led to diverse horrid
surmises, but was obviously without any serious purpose, as Agrippina
lived unmolested for another five years.
Tacitus tells us that he quoted these details directly from the memoirs
of the younger Agrippina, who was possibly present on the last of the
three occasions.
After Tiberius had retired to Capreæ the conspirators Sejanus and
Livilla were able, we are told, to control the correspondence which
was sent to him from the capital. Imprudent remarks made by Agrippina
and her sons were carefully reported to him; the provocation which had
occasioned them was not reported. The old man was induced to see in
the conduct of his great-nephews a repetition of the excesses which
had ruined Caius and Lucius Cæsar at the same age. Sejanus fomented
discord between the brothers. Drusus the elder was given the office
of Prefect of the city; he was encouraged to fear the jealousy of his
brother, who was his mother’s favourite. After the death of the aged
Livia, Agrippina and her son Nero acted in such a way as to give an
opportunity to their enemies; they courted popular favour, and their
friends openly advised them to take refuge with the armies on the
Rhine, or to take sanctuary with the Senate and invoke the protection
of the Roman people. Meanwhile Sejanus had in A.D. 25 formally begged
Tiberius to confer upon him the hand of Livilla, the widow of his son
Drusus. Tacitus gives what profess to be extracts from the letter which
he addressed to the Emperor on the subject, and from the reply which
he received. They are to the following effect. Sejanus is represented
to have said that “he had become so habituated to the kindness of
Augustus, and then by many proofs to that of Tiberius, as to address
his hopes and prayers to the ears of the Princes as soon as to the
gods. He had never asked for brilliant office, he preferred to share
with the common soldiers the toils of guarding the Emperor. Still he
had obtained what he thought most honourable, he was thought worthy of
association with Cæsar. On this his hopes were founded. And as he heard
that Augustus had once taken into consideration the claims of Roman
knights when he was thinking about placing his daughter, so he begged
Tiberius, if a husband were sought for Livilla, to remember a friend
who would be content with the mere honour of relationship. He did not
wish to be relieved of the duties which had been imposed upon him; he
thought it sufficient that the family should be strengthened against
the malicious persecutions of Agrippina, and that for the sake of the
children. For himself the life which he had already lived with such a
Prince would be much and more than enough.”
The genuineness of this document is certainly open to suspicion. It
is notorious that Tiberius particularly disliked any form of address
or exaggerated respect which put him on a level with the gods; nor
could Sejanus have openly alluded to the extravagances of Agrippina
without running the risk of incurring a smart rebuff, unless indeed
he were already on such familiar terms with the Emperor that his
previous humiliation of himself was unnecessary. The document has
probably passed through the crucible of Agrippina’s memoirs. The
reply attributed to Tiberius, though not beyond suspicion, has a more
genuine note, and resembles other speeches and documents of the same
author in its general character. The Emperor began with commending
the loyal affection of Sejanus, and, after demanding time for full
consideration, added that whereas other men have to think only of
what is conducive to their own interests, Princes must think before
all things of their reputation; and therefore he did not reply, as it
was simple to do, that Livilla could decide for herself whether she
would take another husband in succession to Drusus or would continue
to live in the same house, that she had her mother and grandmother,
her nearer advisers. He would deal more plainly. In the first place,
there was the question of the animosity of Agrippina, which would
be far more violent if the marriage of Livilla set the house of the
Cæsars at variance. Even as things were, the rivalries of the women
occasionally broke out, and his grandchildren were the victims of these
discords. What if the rivalry were rendered more intense by such a
marriage? “For you are mistaken, Sejanus, if you think that you will
remain in the same rank, and that Livilla, who has been the wife of
Caius Cæsar and then of Drusus, will be content to grow old with a
mere Roman knight. Even though I should permit it, do you think that
it would be allowed by those who have seen her brother, her father,
and our ancestors in the very highest offices? You indeed are willing
to stay in your present station; but those magistrates and nobles who
break through to me against your will, and consult with me on every
question, say without any concealment that you have already long ago
passed beyond the highest Equestrian dignity, and gone far in advance
of the friendship which my father showed you, and in consequence of
their envy of you I too am blamed. But you say Augustus thought about
conferring his daughter’s hand on a Roman knight. Surely we have no
reason to be surprised that when Augustus was distracted by every kind
of anxiety, and foresaw that the man whom he should raise above others
by such a match was immeasurably exalted, he did discuss the claims of
Gaius Proculeius and some others of noted tranquillity of life, and in
no way concerned with the business of the State. And if we are affected
by the hesitation of Augustus, how much stronger an argument is the
fact that he did place her with Marcus Agrippa and then with myself?
In consideration of our friendship, I have not thought it right to
conceal these considerations; however, I will not stand in the way of
what you and Livilla propose. I will omit for the present to refer to
some plans that I have formed, and to tell you the ties by which I
propose to associate you with myself. I will only disclose this, that
there is no position so lofty that it is not deserved by your virtues
and your disposition towards myself; and when the opportunity comes, I
will speak openly in the Senate, or in a public address.”
Even in this letter there are suspicious passages. Tiberius could
hardly have spoken of the magistrates who broke into him against the
will of Sejanus without an admission of weakness, which is almost
incredible, unless we are to assume that he wished to snub Sejanus, an
assumption, however, which is not supported by the conclusion of the
letter. Nor was this letter a public document, preserved in the public
records; if preserved at all, it was among the family papers.
One important hint we get from this letter: its writer or editor ranges
Livilla and her child in opposition to Agrippina and her children,
and saw in the possible marriage with Sejanus a strengthening of the
children of Drusus against the children of Germanicus. A similar
protection had been given thirty-six years previously to the children
of Julia, when Tiberius was made their stepfather. Livilla never
married Sejanus, but her attempt to marry him supplies a clue to
the labyrinth of plots in the Imperial household. If the principle
of heredity was to be recognized, the heirs to the throne were
Livilla’s son, the younger Tiberius, and Agrippina’s sons, the former
representing the Claudians, the latter the Julians, and the situation
was repeated which had existed when Tiberius and his brother had
represented the Claudians, Caius and Lucius Cæsar the Julians.
Livilla, anxious for the safety of her son and eager to promote his
interests, endeavoured to fasten herself to the strongest man in the
State, who would unquestionably on the decease of Tiberius be in
possession of the controlling military power.
According to the accepted story, there was a guilty connexion between
Sejanus and Livilla before the death of her husband, and Sejanus had
divorced his wife at the request of his paramour; the two together had
poisoned Drusus.
All cases of poisoning are inherently suspect, and it is by no means
incredible that Drusus was not really poisoned, and that the guilty
intimacy of Livilla with Sejanus previous to the death of her husband
was surmised at a later period when her subsequent conduct had given
colour to such a story. According to the narrative supplied to us,
Sejanus cannot have been under fifty when this intimacy began, and was
probably nearer sixty; Livilla cannot have been less than five and
thirty. If the story is true, they were certainly a mature couple of
lovers.
It is at least as probable that on the death of Drusus Livilla
endeavoured to enlist Sejanus in the cause of her son, and was prepared
to marry him, he being only too ready to strengthen his position by
such a match, as that Livilla had allowed a violent passion for a
sexagenarian to tempt her into infidelity to her husband and actual
crime. Again, Sejanus himself is never accused of plotting against
Tiberius; had his heart been set upon the throne, he would not have
waited for the Emperor’s death, whom in the ordinary course of nature
he was not likely to survive long. At the period when the Emperor
finally retired to Capreæ, and when he was moving from one villa to
another in Campania, the roof of a grotto in which the party were
dining suddenly fell in. Sejanus protected the Emperor’s person at the
risk of his own life. Had he been impatient for the succession, he
would have contrived that a happy accident should open the way to the
realization of his ambition.
So far as the records go, we are at liberty to believe that Sejanus
made friends with the two probable successors and their supporters
in the Imperial family, the elder of whom was Drusus the son of
Germanicus; the younger, Tiberius the grandson of the Emperor. By so
doing he incurred the enmity of Agrippina and her younger son Nero.
He was restrained by no scruples of policy, no ties of kindred, from
driving the latter to desperation, and doubtless had many private
insults to avenge. He possibly considered it his duty to the Emperor to
protect him against the consequences of a pardonable weakness, which
Agrippina had hitherto abused, and believed himself to be doing a
signal service by eliminating from the Imperial circle such a dangerous
conspirator; and he was, unfortunately for himself, so unwise as to use
other than straightforward means to secure his ends. Meanwhile, as we
have seen, he practically held the regency, he promoted and rewarded
at will; he held a court at Rome, and it was generally understood that
honours and emoluments were to be obtained exclusively by courting
Sejanus. Some of the Senate fell in gladly with the new order, the
majority secretly opposed it, and many were bitterly hostile, though
restrained from showing their hostility by fear of Tiberius or respect
for his long services.
In the year 29 A.D., soon after the death of the aged Livia, a letter
came to the Senate from Tiberius charging Agrippina and her son with
various offences, and demanding that they should be formally accused
and the matter then referred to himself. At this point there is a gap
in the Annals of Tacitus. We do not know what the steps were in the
process, or what evidence was brought against the guilty. We gather
from other sources that Agrippina was banished to the island of
Pandateria, and her son to another island, in which he killed himself
after a considerable interval, possibly at the suggestion of his
guards. Agrippina disappears from history ‘semper atrox,’ for on her
way into exile she was so abusive that the centurion in charge of the
party was obliged to impose restraint by force, and in the struggle
which ensued the lady lost an eye. The historians are silent as to
the previous damage suffered by the centurion. Nor did she abandon
her contumacious attitude on arriving at Pandateria. It was necessary
to feed her by force, and, in spite of the well-intentioned efforts
of her attendants, she is said to have succeeded two years later in
dying of starvation. Agrippina was not a woman of any real strength of
character; had she honestly revered her husband’s memory, and followed
his example, she would not have continued the Julian feud and handed it
down to two more generations. It is impossible not to feel some respect
for so stout and so reckless a hater, and nobody has ever disputed her
claim to certain domestic virtues which were lamentably absent from
other ladies of her family, and were certainly sufficiently advertised
by herself and her admirers; but in her maternal solicitude she was
more pushing than wise, and the evil of her example influenced her
children more than the good. The mother of Caligula, the grandmother
of Nero, was certainly not fortunate in the traditions which she
transmitted to her posterity, and if Nero really did poison his
half-brother Britannicus, with the connivance of his mother, the cup
may be said to have been mixed by his grandmother.
The disgrace of Agrippina and her son Nero brought on the stormy stage
of the family politics Antonia the mother of Germanicus. This aged and
refined lady had carefully abstained from meddling in the feuds which
disturbed the Imperial household. She was now left in charge of the
younger children of Germanicus, of the future Emperor Caligula and his
sisters. Alarmed by the increasing power of the adverse faction, she
began to study the course of public events; she heard that Sejanus
was taking advantage of the Emperor’s retirement to tamper with the
fidelity of the Prætorians; dark hints reached her ears as to the means
by which Agrippina and her son had been entrapped, she feared some
yet more terrible catastrophe, and having collected her information,
she succeeded in getting it transmitted to Tiberius. The Emperor’s
confidence in his trusted friend and servant was shaken; he followed
up the evidence, and came to the conclusion that Antonia was right.
Suetonius quotes an extract from a private diary of Tiberius, in
which he says that he punished Sejanus because he had persecuted the
children of Germanicus. There is no reason to doubt the honesty of this
statement, though the events which followed have rendered it suspect.
The blow must have been a severe one. Not only had Tiberius been
disappointed in a friend, but it was not even certain that he could
resume the reins of power and punish the offender if he wished. It is
the behaviour of Tiberius at this period which has justifiably gained
him credit for proficiency in dissimulation. He did not at once strike;
he first of all tested the temper of the Senate by writing coolly on
the subject of Sejanus, and sometimes expressing disapproval of his
actions, but yet not in such a way as to declare a breach with him.
Careful experiments proved that Sejanus had no real hold on the Senate.
In the same way means were found of testing the Prætorian guards, and
it was satisfactorily ascertained that they obeyed Sejanus simply as
the Emperor’s lieutenant. Tiberius took into his confidence Macro, the
Commander of the cohorts on guard at Capreæ and in the neighbourhood,
and agreed upon a plan of operations with him. Macro went to Rome
with letters to the Senate and Sejanus; the attendance of the latter
at a meeting of the Senate was particularly requested, it was hinted
that unexampled honours were in store for him. When Sejanus went
to the Senate House, Macro went to the camp of the Prætorians. The
proceedings in the Senate House were purposely protracted. A very long
letter was read from Tiberius, the purport of which was for some time
uncertain. Gradually it became evident that it was directed against
Sejanus, and it concluded with a demand for his arrest. Meanwhile
Macro had presented his credentials to the Prætorian guards; Sejanus
was superseded, and Macro appointed Prefect in his place; the soldiers
proceeded to renew their oath of fidelity to the Emperor, coupled with
that of obedience to their new commander. By the time when the ceremony
was over, the Senate had risen, and the body of Sejanus was being
dragged about the streets.
No sooner had it become apparent that Sejanus was disgraced and no
longer enjoyed the favour of the Emperor than the long smouldering
hostility to the upstart broke out into a blaze of fury. Tiberius was
given no time for repentance or consideration; the fallen favourite
was judged and executed on the spot; his two children were similarly
condemned and executed; his friends were sought out and assassinated.
For some hours, if not for some days, there was a veritable reign of
terror at Rome, whose horrors the Emperor in his distant retirement did
not at first surmise, and when informed was powerless to check.
This was the end of the careful restoration of the Senate planned
by Augustus and fostered by Tiberius, an outbreak of violence which
recalled the days of the Gracchi and the proscriptions. Tiberius did
not long remain inactive; order was restored, and judicial prosecutions
took the place of unlicensed murders. To the Emperor himself the
change to law and order brought but little comfort, rather a deeper
depth of despair. The whole story of the plots of Livilla and Sejanus,
as it was then believed, was revealed. Apicata, the divorced wife of
Sejanus, gave possibly tainted evidence of the machinations by which
the death of Drusus, the son of Tiberius, had been brought about.
Tiberius found that he had been the accomplice of the murderer of his
own son, and that in banishing Agrippina and Nero he had played into
the hands of that unnatural son and brother the other Drusus. Many of
his old and intimate friends were implicated with Sejanus; there had
been a conspiracy of silence, if not an active partisanship, and it was
difficult to determine the degrees of guilt. In spite of so many years
of public service and of single-hearted devotion to the interests of
others, Tiberius found that at the age of seventy-two he stood alone in
the world, hated and mistrusted by all.
After the first shock, the vigour of the old man returned; he checked
the indiscriminate persecution of the friends of Sejanus, and he did
his best to secure for them a fair trial. The Empire itself was not
shaken by the blow, the effects of which did not extend beyond the
city of Rome and Italy; but it must have been a grievous wound to his
sensitive nature to discover that his oldest friends did not trust
him, and that even such a tried associate as Asinius Gallus followed
the example of the many weak-minded men who preferred suicide to
facing an inquiry into their conduct. Prosecutions in connection with
the Sejanus conspiracy seem to have continued for four years, but the
order of events is not quite certain. It is not probable that Tiberius
gave orders three years after the event to execute all the prisoners
together without further hearing.
As Tiberius himself has generally been credited with responsibility for
the disasters which accompanied the fall of Sejanus, it is as well to
insist upon the evidence of Dio, who expressly says that Sejanus and
his children were condemned by the Senate, and that Tiberius had only
demanded his arrest. It had been found necessary on a previous occasion
to check the tendency of the Senate to order immediate executions of
persons whom they had condemned, and Tiberius had passed a decree that
an interval of ten days was always to elapse between condemnation in
capital offences and execution, in order that he might be communicated
with, and have an opportunity of revising the sentence. The violence
with which the adherents of Sejanus were persecuted was really a piece
of political vengeance; it was a revival of the old quarrel between the
Senatorial and Equestrian parties. In spite of the favour of Tiberius
the Senatorial party had not gained upon the Equestrians; in fact, as
the business of the Empire increased, the power of the Equestrians had
increased with it. Sejanus was only one of many capable administrators
whose activity and efficiency was in disagreeable contrast with
Senatorial incapacity; the outbreak in which he lost his life was
neither concerted nor foreseen. An opportunity occurred for indulging
an animosity which had hitherto found its expression in private diaries
and drawing-room conspiracies. The way of violence once opened,
self-preservation enforced a continuance in that evil path. After
the first blow had been struck, root and branch work was inevitable.
Sejanus was to leave no avengers behind him.
Contrasted with this furious punishment of a political enemy and his
adherents is the curious patience of the Senate at a later date in
submitting to the excesses of a Caligula or a Nero. Only seven years
later Caligula succeeded his great-uncle. He apparently lost his reason
soon after he ascended the throne; he persecuted the Senate in every
possible way, he confiscated money, he dishonoured nobly born women,
he fined and executed, he even poured contempt, for he made his horse
Consul, and having sent for the trembling Senators in the middle of
the night, had them conducted to a dark room, where they were relieved
to find that nothing worse awaited them than the performance of a _pas
seul_ by the Emperor. Caligula was eventually assassinated, but not
by the Senate, who punished his murderer; they had submitted to his
caprices for more than two years. Nero, though sane, was scarcely less
extravagant in his treatment of the leading men at Rome, but, as has
been before observed, both Caligula and Nero are spoken of with less
abhorrence than Tiberius.
It would seem that the Senators paid rather a heavy price for their
outbreak, and that a reign of spies and informers actually did set in
after the first disturbances, which followed the fall of Sejanus, had
been quelled. If Tiberius became suspicious, if he became apprehensive
for his personal safety, if he no longer interfered to stop trivial
charges and prevent unjust confiscations, if the liberty of allusive
libel was cut short, the Senate had given him very good reason for
mistrusting them individually and collectively. At the same time the
aristocratic party were smarting under a defeat; they had murdered
Sejanus and his posterity, and cut off the greater number of his
friends, but they had not succeeded in changing the constitution of
the Empire, nor had they shaken the power of the Emperor, who mounted
guard over them with his cohorts of Prætorians at the gates of Rome.
The city itself was more or less under martial law, for the part which
the populace had taken in hunting down the adherents of Sejanus had
been a vivid reminder of previous disastrous events in the history of
the capital. The very insecurity of the succession--for Caligula was
barely of age, and not in good health, while the young Tiberius was
little more than a child--impelled the aged Emperor to keep a tight
hand upon the public order, lest his death, an event probably near at
hand, should involve the State in civil war. Of those members of the
Imperial family who had known Augustus, Antonia and her son Claudius
alone survived; the former had always abstained from interference
in politics, and the latter was considered to be disqualified from
appearance in any public capacity. Nor had any of the numerous
marriages of the daughters and granddaughters of the immediate
successors of Augustus brought into the world any man of such striking
ability that he seemed worthy to govern.
A strange destiny pursued Tiberius; he could not retire, he could not
shake off that servitude which was imposed upon him by the needs of the
Roman people. As he had been compelled to return from Rhodes and share
the burden of Augustus, so now he was compelled, if not to return from
Capreæ, yet to feel that upon him, and upon him alone, still rested the
responsibility for preserving the peace of the civilized world.
Meanwhile the diaries were steadily written up; every case of apparent
persecution was faithfully recorded. Nor were the obscenities scribbled
on the walls or slily hinted at by the popular actors omitted from the
record, and of such there was a plentiful supply, for though Tiberius
had never been popular, and though his appearance in the streets of
Rome had terrified rather than pleased, the commonalty was insulted by
his absence. Undisguised contempt for the applause of the multitude
stirs a bitterer hatred than active oppression, for so strange are the
freaks of vanity that there are a large number of human beings who are
happier in being harried and driven than in not attracting notice.
XVIII
The Retirement at Capreæ
The life of a public man at Rome was conducted on lines which must
have rendered the transaction even of private business a matter of
difficulty, and must have caused serious inconvenience to one upon whom
the burden fell of conducting the correspondence of the whole Empire.
The Emperor, equally with other men of eminence, was expected to live
largely in public; his day began with the dawn, when the crowd of
private clients and public courtiers assembled to greet him in the hall
of his house; the procession to the Senate House or the Forum followed,
when the great man was expected to recognize acquaintances whom he met,
and even to submit to being kissed by them, a practice which Tiberius
had the courage to forbid in his own case. After the business of the
Curia or the Courts was finished, the same solemn procession restored
the Emperor to his house. A respite was allowed in the noonday heat;
then followed the visits of friends, and the great meal of the day,
which might be in itself of the nature of a public function, and an
occasion for the informal transaction of business; after a short period
of relaxation the secretaries came, and letters were written till
late into the night. On the numerous occasions on which there was a
public holiday the Emperor was expected to take part in the shows and
processions, and a holiday for others was a hard day’s work for the
chief of the State. To escape unnecessary inroads upon his time, and to
secure for himself a fair portion of leisure, Tiberius decided to live
away from Rome, where it seemed to him that his presence was no longer
indispensable. The state of his health also suggested retirement. In
spite of a somewhat strict self-imposed regimen, Tiberius seems to
have suffered from a form of eczema, which disfigured his countenance,
and practically made it impossible for him to appear in public. The
Romans were particularly sensitive on the subject of their personal
appearance, and the Roman mob was by no means considerate of the
feelings of those who were afflicted with any deformity. The tall
figure of the Emperor was now bowed with age, his once handsome face
disfigured with blotches and sores and the unguents used as palliatives
of a malady probably aggravated by the pestilential and dusty air of
the crowded city. Under these untoward circumstances Tiberius did
what any other man would have done who was suffering as he suffered:
he looked for some spot healthily situated not far from Rome, close
enough to the great lines of communication to enable him to correspond
freely with all parts of the world, but sufficiently removed from the
beaten track to relieve him of the throng of unwelcome and importunate
visitors. After trying various country houses in Campania he fixed
upon the island of Capreæ as the ideal residence. Those who have seen
the island have no hesitation in commending the Emperor’s taste.
Apart from its inaccessibility and the beauty of its surroundings,
Capreæ had this further attraction for Tiberius, that its elevated
rocks afforded ideal opportunities for the prosecution of his favourite
pursuit, for the Emperor was, as we have seen, an astronomer. It
would be rash to affirm that Tiberius in his astronomical research
was free from the taint of superstition with which that branch of
natural science was at that time infected, and indeed the fact that
he is said to have built twelve villas on the island, which he named
after the twelve planets, and inhabited at different periods, suggests
that he was a believer in the influences of the stars, or possibly
had a superstitious faith that places thus dedicated would be more
favourable to his observations at different seasons of the year. It
is, however, significant of the character of the intellect of Tiberius
that he fastened upon the one branch of science which even in those
days was tolerably exact, for though the real nature of the movements
of the heavenly bodies was unknown to the ancients, their observations
were accurate so far as they went; eclipses and occultations could be
predicted with a near approach to accuracy, and though the vulgar were
still terrified by the temporary disappearances of the sun or moon, to
the educated such events were, though mysterious, part of the orderly
laws by which the universe seemed to be governed.
Tiberius himself was believed to be an adept in astrology, and stories
of his prescience have been handed down, based not improbably upon
really successful calculations, by which the future movements of the
planets were foretold. One of these stories is palpably absurd. It is
said that Tiberius predicted the future reign of Galba by quoting a
Greek verse to the effect that he too would have a share of the Empire,
but the story is also told of Augustus, and under circumstances which
involve no power of prediction, but simply a promise made by a kindly
potentate to an attractive child in the presence of his parents.
The companions whom Tiberius took to share his retirement were such men
as a man with literary and scientific tastes would naturally select;
his old friend and companion Thrasyllus the “mathematician” was one;
there were also professors of literature; for the purposes of public
business a small staff of Equestrians and freedmen. The few Senators
who were invited to attend were private friends, a fact which caused
displeasure in high circles at Rome, where it was not understood, or if
understood was resented, that one object of the Emperor’s retirement
was to avoid the distractions of an official court and the trammels of
etiquette.
We may dismiss once and for all as unfounded, and indeed absurd, the
stories of unmentionable obscenities and hideous cruelties practised
by the Emperor upon his lonely island. No man after reaching the age
of sixty-eight could suddenly fling himself into such an orgy of lust
as is described by Suetonius, and then live for nine years, the thing
is a physical impossibility. Again, Tiberius, though always stern, had
never been cruel. Instances of his humanity are not wanting during his
residence at Capreæ; he again gave lavish assistance to the sufferers
from a fire on the Aventine, and was at considerable pains to relieve
the distress of poor debtors, though the measures which he adopted were
not such as would commend themselves to rigid political economists.
Again, as has been observed in an earlier portion of this narrative,
up to the time of the retirement to Capreæ Tiberius is known to us
only as an absolutely chaste man, as chaste as Agrippina herself.
There is no record, no insinuation even, of the presence of sensual
favourites in his camp or at his Court; he is not even accused of that
politic amorousness which is ascribed to the sainted Augustus, or of
the warmer amours which invest the life of the great Julius Cæsar
with an atmosphere of romance. That a man close on seventy should
suddenly change his habits is incredible, unless we are to assume the
existence of a hideous form of senile dementia, whose victim is to be
pitied rather than condemned. There are such cases, but the patients
are most commonly those who have continuously led impure lives, not
those who have been distinguished by self-restraint. We may be asked,
how then did such stories originate? It is impossible to track these
falsehoods back to their source; a reason for one of them may, however,
be suggested. Among the scandals of Capreæ was said to be the presence
of a large number of young people of both sexes who were sacrificed
to the Emperor’s lusts; they were of the noblest blood of Rome, a fact
which was supposed to have constituted their chief attraction. Now the
two grandchildren of Tiberius were quite young when the Emperor went
to Capreæ. Owing to his position he was guardian to many other such
children, and it would have been entirely in accordance with Roman
practice to educate all these young children together. We know that the
suite which accompanied the Emperor contained professional teachers.
For the sinister interpretation put upon the arrangement we have only
to recall the ineffable prurience of the Italian imagination in ancient
times. There are works of art, there are fragments of literature, there
are household ornaments dating from this period, and earlier periods
and later periods, which are simply indescribable in modern language.
The mystery of the Emperor’s seclusion was in itself enough to set
the foul tongues wagging and to stimulate the impure inventiveness of
the brothel-keepers in the capital; and there were men of rank, and
possibly women, only too glad to note down in their diaries evidence
collected from the mouths of slaves and other dependents. Similarly
with the stories of cruelty. The disturbed condition of political life
after the fall of Sejanus created an atmosphere of terror. Tiberius
had always been dreaded, and the sensation-mongers could find ready
credence for tales of atrocities, for which there was no such obvious
contradiction as would have existed had Tiberius been spending his days
in the full sight of his countrymen. These tales were believed because
everybody wished to believe them, and because there was no evidence to
the contrary. Because nothing was seen, anything was imagined.
Similarly in the sensational narrative of judicial murders and
vexatious prosecutions with which Tacitus adorns his account of the
last seven years of Tiberius, the record is so imperfect, the animus
is so clear, that we may excusably suspend our judgment. In none of
these cases are we given the full evidence against the prisoner; in
all everything is told us that can be urged against the judge. It
was further the practice of the historians of the time to attribute
to Tiberius himself acts which were done by his agents even when
he had certainly not ordered the act in question. Suetonius, for
instance, states that Tiberius knocked out the eye of the obstreperous
Agrippina--he has the grace to add “by the agency of a centurion,” but
the story is told in such a way that the odium rests upon the Emperor,
and not upon the participants in an undignified scuffle. Similarly
there is a ghastly tale of the death of Drusus, the son of Agrippina,
by starvation, a process which is said to have lasted for two or three
years, during which every word uttered by the prisoner, every groan,
was faithfully reported to Tiberius; it is even represented that the
miserable man in the extremity of his anguish devoured his cushions.
That an official report was forwarded to Tiberius at regular intervals
of the conduct of this prisoner of State is what we should naturally
expect, nor is it impossible that an overzealous gaoler abounded in
details, nor again is it impossible that Agrippina the younger,
the sister of the prisoner, left an exceedingly harrowing, though
improbable, story in her memoirs.
It is worthy of note that the elder Agrippina and her son Nero were
not recalled from their respective islands after the fall of Sejanus.
Seclusion in an island did not of itself involve any serious degree of
suffering, and we have mention of occasions on which Tiberius selected
for his exiles islands which were healthy or otherwise attractive.
The exiles were, in fact, simply removed to places from which they
could no longer disturb the public peace. Though it had transpired
that Agrippina and Nero were to some extent the victims of Drusus and
Sejanus, they had shown themselves inclined to be dangerous, and the
situation with regard to the succession was now such as to demand
exceptional precautions. In his dealings with Agrippina, Tiberius
surprises us by his forbearance rather than by his severity.
As we do not know the exact nature of the conspiracy of Sejanus, so
we do not know the exact degree of guilt of the younger Drusus. Since
he was treated with exceptional rigour we may surmise that he was
implicated in a plot to depose the Emperor and enter at once upon the
coveted succession. After his death Tiberius wrote a letter to the
Senate giving a full account of his misdemeanours, an act which is
represented to have been scandalous, but was probably necessary. It
must be remembered that Sejanus was disgraced because of his practices
against Agrippina and Nero; he was immediately killed by the Senate.
After his death a deeper plot, and indeed a series of plots, was
revealed.
An attempt was made to implicate Caligula in the guilt of these dark
transactions, but unsuccessfully. It was on this occasion that Tiberius
wrote that despairing cry to the Senate in which Tacitus savagely
triumphs--“If I know what I am to write to you, Conscript Fathers, or
how I am to write to you, or what indeed I should not write to you
at such a time, may the gods and goddesses drag me even into greater
depths than those into which I feel that I am sinking day by day.”
In spite of the perplexities that assailed him, Tiberius did not relax
his hold upon Greater Rome. Encouraged by rumours of the Emperor’s
failure, the Parthians began to intrigue to reverse the order
established on the Eastern frontier of the Empire, but they quickly
learned that Tiberius, though aged and beaten upon, had not forgotten
his diplomacy and still knew where to find, and how to choose, an able
officer who could effectually quell any attempt to trifle with the
dignity of the Roman name. The general appointed to settle affairs in
the East was Lucius Vitellius, whose son was one day to enjoy a short
and very inglorious career as Roman Emperor.
During the last three years of the Emperor’s life Caligula rapidly
advanced in his favour. He was formally adopted, and was continually
named as the Emperor’s heir along with the young Tiberius. The adviser
and friend of Caligula at this time was the Jewish prince Agrippa, the
half-brother of Herodias, the incestuous wife of Herod Antipas, and
grandson of Herod the Great. The election of Caligula as successor to
Tiberius is a somewhat puzzling circumstance. Tacitus says that he
always showed signs of insanity, but at the same time credits him with
great astuteness in winning the old man’s favour. It is more probable,
from other accounts, that the madness of Caligula was the result of
an illness to which he fell a victim almost immediately after his
succession, for that he was technically mad is undeniable. We have
a curious picture of him from the pen of Philo the Jew, who arrived
from Alexandria with a deputation of Jews to protest against being
required to worship Caligula exclusively as a god. The envoys found
Caligula superintending the building of one of his palaces at Baiæ.
They were introduced to the half-finished edifice, where the Emperor
was hurrying from one room to another, feverishly running up and down
stairs. He suddenly observed his visitors, and remarking, “So you are
those atheists,” vanished; presently he reappeared, and after saying
“Why don’t you eat pork?” finally disappeared. It is not likely that
Tiberius would have entrusted the fate of the civilized world to a man
whose intellect was so obviously disturbed. If, however, we ask who
had an interest in the succession of Caligula, the answer is, Agrippa,
who, according to Josephus, had found men to finance him in order
that he might push his fortunes at Rome. In this he had been somewhat
imprudent, and an impatient remark he made to Caligula was reported to
Tiberius, who put him under guard for the rest of his reign; on the
death of Tiberius he exchanged captivity for the throne of Herod the
Great. There is a story that Tiberius, being in doubt as to whether he
should nominate his own grandson, the younger Tiberius, or his adopted
son Caligula, consulted his diviners, who told him to appoint the one
of the two children who should first enter the room after both had been
summoned; the Emperor fell in with the suggestion, and the parties
interested then contrived that Caligula should be the first to arrive.
The historians do not allow Tiberius even to die in peace. We are told
that when he became aware that his health was failing, he was nervously
anxious to conceal the fact; he left Capreæ and took up his quarters
in the villa of Lucullus on the mainland opposite the island. Having
discovered that his physician had surreptitiously felt his pulse, he
ordered a better dinner than usual, and ostentatiously enjoyed himself,
but the effort was too much for him; he fainted, and a report was
immediately spread through the household that he was dead. Caligula
was receiving the congratulations of all, and was proceeding to act as
Emperor, when there was a rumour that the old man had recovered. At the
suggestion of Macro, orders were at once given to smother him beneath
a pile of mattresses. The story is finely sensational, but it is to be
hoped that it is not true.
Whatever was the exact nature of his end, Tiberius died in the
seventy-eighth year of his life, and the twenty-third of his reign,
having lived through such vicissitudes of fortune, and such a
continuity of hard work, as have rarely fallen to the lot of any human
being; but far stranger than the events of his life is the horrible
reputation that has attached to the memory of the man who held that in
all things princes were bound to consider their good name.
Even if we accept the sensational stories which have accumulated
round the retirement at Capreæ, we have still to recognize a life of
sixty-eight years unstained by vice or crime, and chiefly spent in
the laborious execution of the highest public duties. As a general,
as a statesman, Tiberius stands, if not in the first rank, then at
the very top of the second, and he deserves this additional credit,
that public life was distasteful to him, power had no attraction for
him, and had he been at liberty to choose for himself he would have
lived in seclusion, a student of literature and natural science. We
see in him, in fact, the best type of Roman, the best example of that
peculiar character by which Rome rose to be mistress of the world. It
was not the cleverness of the Romans, nor their military skill, that
gave them the mastery, the Greeks were far cleverer, and Hannibal was
greater than any Roman general, it was their strong sense of public
duty, their passion for legality, their love of order, their tenacity
in prosecuting large schemes, their self-restraint, their honour, which
enabled them to succeed where Greek and Phœnician had failed before
them, and where Gaul and Teuton were to fail after them. All these
qualities are strongly represented in Tiberius; he is the ideal Roman
Senator, the realization of those legendary types which formed the
imagination of Roman children. It is not Cicero, the fluent orator,
the versatile man of letters and agreeable gentleman, who represents
the true Roman, nor Cato the bigot, nor Cæsar the man of genius: it
is the dogged, dutiful, and just Tiberius, not over enthusiastic, not
brilliant, devoid of personal fascination, awful rather than amiable,
but wise enough and temperate enough and strong enough to do the work
which was set before him.
Why then this perpetual stream of calumny, which has filtered down
practically unchecked for nearly two thousand years? The immediate
causes have been demonstrated in the foregoing pages; the subsequent
causes Tiberius shares with the Roman Empire, of which he was in some
sense an incarnation. It has been the custom of some Christian writers
since the period of the Reformation to oppose Christianity to the
Roman Empire; there is no trace of any such opposition in the earliest
Christian writings. Neither the Gospels nor the Acts of the Apostles,
nor the letters of St. Paul, nor those ascribed to the friends and
contemporaries of Jesus of Nazareth, nor even the writings of the early
Fathers, show the faintest indication of dissatisfaction with the
Empire as such. The evidence, in fact, is in the contrary direction.
But the later expounders of Christianity required a contrast, and it
was an easy feat of rhetoric to collect all that is discreditable from
the mass of Roman records and to compare it disadvantageously with the
pure teaching of the Gospel. Tiberius himself had in this aspect the
misfortune to be the contemporary of the founder of Christianity, and
in the idle tales of Suetonius and the studied malignity of Tacitus
an opportunity was found for starting the contrast from the very
commencement. This particular antithesis is so convenient that the
wickedness of Tiberius has almost assumed the dignity of an “articulus
fidei,” and to dispute it is to tread the perilous path of the
heresiarch.
Let us hope that the prescience of Tiberius as he watched the sun
setting over the Mediterranean from the cliffs of Capreæ did not
enable him to contemplate the long roll of centuries during which
his name would be held in execration by the posterity of those for
whom he had laboured, and on continents far beyond his ken, or to
anticipate that savage howl of “Tiberius to the Tiber” with which the
graceless populace of Rome greeted his funeral, or the still more cruel
repetition of its echo from one generation to another.
The Imperial Family.
There are five chief lines of descent--
From CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR through his great-nephew and adopted son
Octavianus, known after B.C. 27 as Augustus.
From CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR through his great-niece Octavia, sister to
Augustus.
From MARCUS ANTONIUS through his children by his second wife, Octavia.
From TIBERIUS CLAUDIUS NERO through his two sons by Livia, the second
wife of Augustus.
From MARCUS VIPSANIUS AGRIPPA through his children by Julia I, the
daughter of Augustus.
CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR OCTAVIANUS AUGUSTUS
married
I. A daughter of Marcus Antonius and Fulvia, whom he almost
immediately repudiated.
II. Scribonia, related by marriage to the family of Pompeius, issue
one daughter, Julia I.
III. Livia, no issue; but by her previous husband, Tiberius
Claudius Nero, Livia had two sons, Tiberius and Drusus I.
OCTAVIA
married
I. MARCUS MARCELLUS I, issue Marcus Marcellus II, and two
daughters, Marcella I, Marcella II.
Marcus Marcellus II married Julia I, and died without
issue, “tu Marcellus eris.”
Marcella I married first Agrippa, no issue, and then
Julius Antonius, son of Marcus Antonius, by his first
wife, Fulvia.
Marcella II, her marriage is not mentioned.
II. MARCUS ANTONIUS, issue two daughters, Antonia I, Antonia II.
Antonia I married L. Domitius Abenobarbus, and thus became
one of the grandmothers of the Emperor Nero.
Antonia II married Drusus I, issue Germanicus, Claudius,
who succeeded Caligula as Emperor, Livilla. Germanicus
married Agrippina I, Claudius eventually married
Agrippina II. Livilla married Drusus II, the son of
Tiberius.
MARCUS ANTONIUS
His blood ran in the family through his two daughters, Antonia I and
Antonia II; his sons by his first wife, Fulvia, did not marry into the
Julian or Claudian families; one of them was put to death as a paramour
of Julia I.
TIBERIUS CLAUDIUS NERO
married Livia, issue two sons, Tiberius the Emperor and Drusus I.
Tiberius married first Vipsania, daughter of Agrippa by his first
wife, Pomponia, who was daughter of Pomponius Atticus, the
banker, and friend of Cicero, issue one son, Drusus II, married
Livilla, issue one son, Tiberius, murdered by Caligula.
Secondly, Julia I, daughter of Augustus, no issue.
Drusus I married Antonia II, issue Germanicus, Claudius, Livilla.
Germanicus married Agrippina I, daughter of Julia I,
granddaughter of Augustus and M. Vipsanius Agrippa; issue Nero
I, Drusus III, Caius (Caligula) Agrippina II, Drusilla, Julia
Livilla who married M. Vinicius, the friend of Paterculus.
These are the six children whose claims to represent the true
Julian stock were so vehemently asserted by their mother,
Agrippina I. They derived their Julian blood from Octavia,
through their grandmother Antonia II, on the father’s side,
and from Augustus through their grandmother, Julia I, on the
mother’s side.
MARCUS VIPSANIUS AGRIPPA
married
I. Pomponia, issue Vipsania the first wife of Tiberius, she was
thus the mother of Drusus II; after her divorce from Tiberius
she married Caius Asinius Gallus.
II. Marcella I, sister to “tu Marcellus eris,” daughter of Octavia
by her first husband, no issue; after her divorce she married
Julius Antonius.
III. Julia I, daughter of Augustus, and his only child; issue Caius
Cæsar, Lucius Cæsar, Julia II, Agrippina I, Agrippa Postumus;
on the death of Agrippa, Julia I married Tiberius, she was
afterwards divorced and banished on account of misconduct,
which appears to have been political, at least as much as it
was adulterous.
Caius Cæsar died without issue.
Lucius Cæsar died without issue.
(After being regarded as the probable heirs of
Augustus.)
Julia II married an Æmilius Paullus, but was banished like
her mother for similar reasons.
Agrippina I married Germanicus.
Agrippa Postumus, the intractable, was banished by
Augustus, and put out of the way at the accession of
Tiberius; by whose orders is not definitely certain.
Through Agrippina the obscure Agrippa was the grandfather of one
Emperor, Caligula, and the great grandfather of another, Nero.
INDEX
A
Achaia demands to be transferred to Imperial provinces, 313, 336, 357
Actium, battle of, 107, 122
Actors in Rome, 359
Banished, 361
Ædiles and sumptuary laws, 362, 366, 367
Africa a Senatorial province, 357
Agrippa:
As general, 217
Campaign in Illyria, 225
Death, 173
In Octavian’s household, 145, 168, 169, 172
Minister for war, 153
Sketch of career, 116
Agrippa, Fonteius, 326
Agrippa, grandson of Herod, friend of Caligula, 426
Agrippa Postumus, 249
Banished, 249, 256
Put to death, 257
Agrippina the younger, Memoirs, 266, 292, 329, 333, 398, 402, 425
Agrippina, wife of Germanicus, 211, 249, 269, 332, 338
Conduct after her husband’s death, 341, 343, 345, 350, 400
Banished, 409
Character, 288
Recalled, 425
Starts for Trêves, 284
Alexander:
Combines city state with Imperial organization, 7
Effects of his conquests, 5
Fragments of empire, 7
Policy, 8
Alexandria:
Antonius’ triumph at, 121
Insurrection in, 87
Jews in, 372
Aliso, Drusus fortifies camp at, 226, 239
Alpine tribes defeated, 225
Antonia, wife of Drusus, 152, 172, 176, 198, 335
In charge of Caligula and his sisters, 410
Antonian family, 168
Antonius, Julius, commits suicide, 190
Antonius, Lucius:
At Præneste, 88
Character, 99
Joins Constitutional party, 98
Perusine war, 58
Antonius, Marcus:
Alliance with Cleopatra, 120
At Mutina, 97
Character, 119, 126
Conduct after Cæsar’s death, 93, 111, 142
Expeditions against Parthians, 155
Extravagance, 58
Goes to East, 98, 115, 120
Power wielded by, 215
Share of empire, 118,119
Snatch at supreme power, 301
Tyrant of conventional type, 8
Antony (_see_ Antonius Marcus)
Apicata, wife of Sejanus, 400, 413
Apicius the Epicure, 385
Apion the Greek, nickname, 373
Apollonia, Octavian at, 94
Appian Aqueduct, 85
Appian Way, 85
Apuleius:
Accused of magic, 194
Object of travels, 132
Aretas of Arabia, 154
Ariovistus, advance of, 89
Aristogiton, principles of, 8
Armenia:
Dynastic troubles in, 336
Rulers of, 154
Arminius adopts Roman military system, 220
Rising of, 239
Arpinum, privileges of Roman citizenship, 37
Arruntius, L., suicide, 262
Asia Minor:
Commercial cities of, 98
Roman citizens massacred in, 13
Asprenas, Lucius, decision of, 239
Astronomy and astrology, 193
Atellan farce, 361
Athenian Constitution and Rome, 56
Athens:
As place of residence, 192
Constitution provided by Cleisthenes, 16
Politics of, 8
Atticus, Pomponius, 169
Augsburg, Roman military colony at, 235
Augur, functions of, 48
Augustus (_see_ Octavian)
Augustales, 135
B
Bacchus, worship of, 368
Bassus, Ventidius, 155
Career, 273
Bato, Pannonian chief, 238
Bithynia, a Senatorial province, 308, 336
Blæsus, Junius, 391
Arrests ringleaders of mutiny, 277
Brundisium, Octavian lands at, 94, 96
Brutus, Decimus, besieged at Mutina, 97
Brutus’ suicide, difference between Cato’s and, 55
Bull fights, 74
C
Cæcina, Aulus, commander of Lower Army on Rhine, 281, 285
Cæpio, conspiracy of, 246
Cæsar, Agrippa, 200
Cæsar, Caius, 172, 174, 198
Attitude towards Tiberius, 207
Death, 209
Training, 200
Cæsar, Julius:
Adopts Octavian, 94
Assassination, 91
Attitude towards Senate, 45, 55, 90, 127
Duration of absolute power, 108
Party supporting, 58
Portrait in British Museum, 141
Power wielded by, 215
Reliance on army, 123
Sketch of career, 88 _seqq._
State of empire after his death, 106
Cæsar, Lucius, 172, 198, 208
Death, 209
Training, 200
Cæsars and Equestrian Order, 22
Caligula (Caius), 249
Adopted by Tiberius, 426
Ashamed of his descent, 387
Burns private notes of Tiberius, 211
Extravagancies only felt in Rome, 384, 415
Jealous of other divinities, 135
Meaning of nickname, 250
Pet of soldiers, 285, 287
Calpurnia, wife of Julius Cæsar, 337
Cappadocia, an Imperial province, 336, 357
Capreæ, Tiberius in, 396, 420 _seqq._
Capua, territory confiscated by Rome, 99
Carthage:
Destruction of, 10
Her dominion in Mediterranean, 6
Cassius plunders cities of Asia Minor, 98
Cato’s suicide:
Attitude of contemporaries towards, 52
Difference between suicide of Brutus and, 55
Catullus, native of Cis-Alpine Gaul, 119
Catus, Firmius, 324, 326
Celer, Propertius, desires to retire from Senatorial Order, 311
Celsus, Horace’s letter to, 157
Censor:
Enrolled members of Equestrian Order, 16, 18
Power of, 50, 255
Revised list of Senate, 43
Censorinus, death of, 208
Chærea, Cassius, centurion, 282
Chaldæans expelled from Italy, 369
Cicero:
As governor of frontier province, 15
As politician, 9
Conception of early empire, 88
Conducts case against Verres, 19
Example of advocate, 321
In Rome after Cæsar’s death, 93
Judgment of reformers, 56
Native of Arpinum, 37
On “the Roman people,” 11, 34
Picture of slavery, 69
Second Philippic, 114
Treatment of Tiro, 77
Wishes to remodel Rome on Athenian Constitution, 55
Cimbrians, invasion of, 6, 13
Cinna:
Forces reforms on Senate, 56
Proscribed, 57
Claudia Pulchra, accusation against, 401
Claudian family, 168, 250, 407
Associations with, 3
Connexion with Rome, 85
Claudian Marcellan family, 168
Claudius, Appius, Censor, B.C. 312, 85, 86, 190
Claudius, Emperor:
Portrait, 141
Sketch of, 148
Claudius Nero defeats Hasdrubal, 86
Claudius Pulcher, 86, 127
Cleisthenes provides constitution for Athens, 16
Cleopatra, alliance with Antony, 120
Cleopatra and Antony: amusements at Alexandria, 177
Cologne, mutineers at, 284
Comitia Centuriata, 11
Comitia Tributa and rabble, 11
Consuls, election of, 319
Corinth, mercantile importance, 192
Corsica, territorial province, 23
Cotys, King of Thrace, 394
Crispinus, Cæpio, charge against G. Marcellus, 307
Crispinus, Quintius, 190
Crispus, C. Sallustius, advice to Tiberius, 257
Cromwell, Oliver:
Claims special providence, 136
Forced to rely on military organization, 123
Curia, attitude towards monarchy, 3
D
Dalmatians, 219
Speak Latin, 220
Dangerous tracks, injuries to workers in, 62
Dictatorship an absolute monarchy, 54
Dio on Drusus’ death, 388
Dionysius on relations of patron and client, 30
Dolabella, son-in-law of Cicero, 97
Plunders cities of Asia Minor, 98, 120
Domitian, extravagancies only felt in Rome, 384
Drusus Livius, father of Livia and grandfather of Tiberius, 53, 58
Forces reforms on Senate, 56
Political programme, 36
Drusus, Nero Claudius, brother of Tiberius, 150
Death, 183, 227
Marries Antonia, 172
Prefect of city, 402
Victory in Alps, 225
Drusus, son of Agrippina, 424, 425
Drusus, son of Tiberius:
Character, 332
Death, 353, 388, 400, 407
Funeral, 390
Introduced to public life, 209
Marries sister of Germanicus, 250
Presides at gladiatorial shows, 313
Reception of Piso, 343
Remedies grievances of mutineers, 278
Succeeds Germanicus, 287, 332
E
Eastern Mediterranean, first period of conquest in, 10
Egypt as granary for Rome, 368
Electors and free government, 31
Elymas the sorcerer, 195
Emperor an institution at death of Tiberius, 3
England:
Caricatures in papers, 359
Expansion of, 34
Rules of party government, 302
Significance of Roman walls in, 221
English army, policy of recruiting for, 228, 275, 276
Englishman, attitude towards law, 9
Englishmen, political careers open to, 17
Ephesus, flourishing state of, 192
Equestrian Order:
Admission to, 18, 73
Growth of, 14 _seqq._
Origin of, 16
Ranged against Senate, 19, 20
Represents civil administration and financiers, 51
Represents party of empire, 21
Slaves rising through, 70
Essenians, 373
F
Falanius, accusations against, 306
Felix, Procurator of Judæa, a freed man, 70
Fimbria forces reforms on Senate, 56
Flaccus, M. Verrius, taught Augustus’ grandchildren, 72
Flamen Dialis, 375
Florus, Julius:
Accompanies Tiberius to Armenia, 156
Horace’s letter to, 156
Social rank, 91
Fulvia, wife of Marcus Antonius, 98, 114
At Præneste, 88
Character, 99
G
Gallic chieftains in communication with Rome, 219
Gallus, C. Asinius, husband of Vipsania, 181, 262, 390, 414
Gallus, Cornelius, Transalpine Gaul, 91, 119, 152, 248
Gallus, Licinus, 248
Gaul:
Cæsar’s conquest of, 89, 96
Position in empire, 119
Gauls, invasions of, 6
Generals of Augustan age, 217
Germanic tribes:
Civilization of, 219
Defeat M. Lollius, 224
Germanicus:
Character, 332
Conducts census of Gaul, 281
Death, 331, 341, 342
Destined successor to Tiberius, 331
Endeavours to quell mutiny, 282, 284
Finishes Pannonian war, 238, 250
Loyalty of, 259, 290
Marries Agrippina, 173
Proconsul of eastern frontier, 287, 336
Proconsul of Gaul, 269
Recalled, 289
Relations with Piso, 339, 349
Tour in Egypt, 340
Travels in East, 132
Gladiators, 75
Glaucia forces reforms on Senate, 56
Gnipho, M. Antonius, gave lessons in Cæsar’s house, 71
Gracchus, Caius, liberal schemes, 35
Gracchus, Tiberius, attempts agrarian legislation, 35
Greek ideals of city state, 7
Greek influence on Romans, 46, 53
H
Hannibal, invasion of, 6
Harmodius, principles of, 8
Hasdrubal defeated by Claudius Nero, 86
Hawthorne, plot of _Transformation_, 138
Hercynian forest, 222, 234
Herod Antipas, 426
Herod family, 147
Herod the Great, 338
Policy, 154
Herodotus, temper of, 132
Hesiod, _Farm and the Calendar_, 133
Hesiod, unitarian tendencies, 132
Hispo, charges against G. Marcellus, 307
Historians between deaths of Augustus and Vespasian, 2
Horace:
Allusion to M. Verrius Flaccus, 72
Compliments to Augustus, 160
Epistles, Book I, 160
Jests at Jewish Sabbath, 137
Journey from Rome to Brundisium, 106
Letter to Celsus quoted, 157
Letter to Julius Florus quoted, 156
Letter to Tiberius quoted, 161
Letters to Lollius, 158, 201, 202
Moral earnestness, 158
Ode to Lollius, 204
On character of Tiberius, 154
On merits of simplicity, 153
On Roman empire, 5
Picture of slavery, 69
Reminds Romans of their debt to Neros, 86
Hortalus, case of, 377
Hortensius, example of advocate, 321
Hypnotism, 194
I
Iapygia, Antonius descends on coast of, 121
Italian agriculture depressed, 39
Italian superstition, 134
Italy drained of free population, 65
J
Jerusalem, Roman generals at, 372
Jews:
Attitude towards other religions, 370
Influence of their faith on educated classes at Rome, 137
Persecution of, 369
Protest against worship of Augustus, 135
Sketch of their customs, 370
Josephus:
Boast about Sabbath, 137
On Agrippa, 427
References to Livia, 175
Judæa unquiet, 336
Judas Maccabæus:
Asks help from Senate, 12
Respect for Senate, 50
Jugurtha defies Senate, 12, 42
Julia, Augustus’ daughter, 169, 175
Banished, 190
Her character, 176, 178, 186
Wife of Agrippa, 171
Wife of Marcellus, 170
Wife of Tiberius, 173, 182
Julian family, 3, 168, 407
Attitude towards Tiberius, 214
L
Leland, Charles, on traces of faith in Fauns and Satyrs, 138
Lentulus, Gnæus, 279
Lepidus, Marcus, 229, 248, 390
Defends Piso, 344
Holds office under Tiberius, 262
Proconsul, 93, 97, 98, 118
Stops mutiny in Spain, 286
Lex Majestatis, 303, 320, 355
History of, 304
Liberators:
Attitude towards Octavian, 94, 110
Position after Cæsar’s death, 93
Libo, Drusus Scribonius, case of, 323 _seqq._
Suicide, 327
Licinus, governor of S. Gaul, 224
Livia, wife of Tiberius Nero and of Octavian, 80, 102, 104
Agrippa Postumus and, 258
Attitude towards Tiberius, 198
Character, 175
Death, 398
Friend of Plancina, 338, 350
Hatred of Agrippina, 332
Portraits, 175
Skilled in intrigue, 167, 177
Livian family, 4
Livilla, wife of Drusus, 399, 402, 406
Livy, _History_ of, 387
Native of Cis-Alpine Gaul, 119
On Servian Constitution, 16
Lollius, Marcus, 158, 201 _seqq._
Adviser to Caius Cæsar, 200
Death, 208
Defeated by German tribes, 224
Lombards, 232
M
Macedonia:
Demands to be transferred to Imperial provinces, 313, 336
Devastated, 235
Macedonian empire, 125
Macro, commander at Capreæ, 411, 428
Macro, Pompeius, Prætor, 304
Mæcenas, C. Cilnius:
Death, 183
Friend of Horace, 159
Friend of Octavian, 111
His manners, 151
Journey from Rome to Brundisium, 107
Master of finance and diplomacy, 153
Magians, 370, 373
Magic, 328
Maluginensis, Servius, Flamen Dialis, 375
Mamaloi of Hayti, knowledge of poisons, 375
Marcellus, death of, 170
Marcellus, Granius, Governor of Bithynia, accusations against, 306
Marcellus, M. Pomponius, 71
Reproves Tiberius for solecism, 73
Marcius killed, 329
Marion Crawford, description of Roman palaces, 144
Marius, C.:
Incapacity of, 57
Influence in Roman politics, 36
Native of Arpinum, 37
Power wielded by, 215
Reliance on army, 123
Reorganization of army, 37
Maroboduus, King of Marcomanni:
Adopts Roman military system, 220
Conception of German Empire, 233
Martina, poisoner, 346
Mediterranean, piracy not quelled in, 54
Merivale on policy of Augustus, 221
Messala, Marcus Valerius, hails Augustus as “Father of his country,”
245
Metaurus, battle of the, 86
Mithridates defies Senate, 13
Mommsen on “ablest of Roman Emperors,” 84
Munda, Pompeius’ sons defeated at, 94, 101
Murena, conspiracy of, 246
Mutina, Decimus Brutus besieged at, 97
Mutinies in Pannonia and on Rhine, 270 _seqq._
N
Napoleon, army of spies, 124
Nauportus, news of mutiny reaches, 276
Negro slavery in America, 60, 77
Nero:
Courts popular favour, 403
Extravagancies only felt in Rome, 384, 415
Line of Cæsars ended in, 292
Recalled from banishment, 425
Nicopolis, Germanicus and Drusus meet at, 339
O
Octavia, wife of Antonius, 124, 150, 169
Octavian:
A great civilian, 109, 122, 124
Adopts Tiberius, 210, 251
Amnesty to S. Pompeius, 102, 115
Asserts legal rights, 97
“Augustus,” significance of, 129
Character, 113, 127, 128, 135, 139
Conduct after Cæsar’s death, 94, 110
Connexions, 126, 128
Conspiracies against, 246
Death, 1, 4, 79 _seqq._, 252
Dislike to army, 124, 125, 222
Empire of, 118
Exceptional man, 255
Funeral ceremonies, 81
Household, 103, 150, 152, 168, 172, 249
Hostile forces in, 175, 191
In Gaul, 224, 226
Invites Horace to be his private secretary, 127, 159
Julian laws of, 358
Lands at Brundisium, 94, 96
Last years, 245
Letters, fragments of, 211
Marriage, 102, 104, 114
Orator, 153
Overtures to Cicero, 112, 113, 114
Palace, 145
Panegyrics on, 80
Patronage, 246
Personal appearance, 141
Policy, 58, 142, 171, 221, 242, 290
Policy towards Senate, 50, 262
Popularity, 110
Princeps Senatus, 165
Progress to East, 154
Relations with Tiberius, 211, 214
Remodels army, 115
Scheme of representative government, 382
Successor, 83
Tiberius Nero associated with, 88
Vision of hereditary succession, 165
Worship of, 134, 226, 299, 306
Octavian family, 3
Orbilius, teacher of Horace, 71, 72
Ovid:
_Fasti_, 387
On barbarians at Tomi, 221
Withdraws from Rome, 246
P
Pallas, a freedman of Claudius, 70
Pandateria Isle:
Agrippina banished to, 409
Julia banished to, 190
Pannonia:
Army, how reinforced, 270
Mutiny in, 270 _seqq._, 392
Tiberius’ campaigns in, 226
Pannonians, 219
Pantheon, dome of, 116
Papaloi of Hayti, knowledge of poisons, 375
Parthians:
Antonius’ victory over, 121
Expeditions against, 155
Show signs of restlessness, 336
Paterculus, C. Velleius:
Associated with Tiberius Nero, 88, 100
Commits suicide, 100, 104
Paterculus, Velleius:
Accompanies Tiberius in campaigns, 231, 236
Epitome of Roman history, 229
Indifferent to chronology, 224
Narrative, 2
On age of Tiberius, 104
Fidelity, 77
Germanicus, 332
M. Lollius and Tiberius, 201
Rule of Tiberius, 354
Sejanus, 387, 391
Young Cæsars, 210
Praises Tiberius for discrimination, 312
Patricians and plebeians, distinction between, 45
Paulus, L. Æmilius, marries Julia’s daughter, 210, 246, 257
Percennius:
Killed, 279
On grievances of soldiers, 271
Speech to soldiers quoted, 274
Pergamus, rights of sanctuary in temple of Æsculapius, 376
Perusia, siege of, 99, 100
Petronius, slaves in _Satyricon_, 70
Philippi, battle at, 98, 104
Philo the Jew, picture of Caligula, 427
Piso, Gnæus, Governor of Syria, 263, 308, 337
Conduct to Germanicus, 338 _seqq._, 349
Suicide, 347, 352
Trial of, 343
Piso, Lucius, 390
Prætor, 334, 337
Piso, Marcus:
Advice to his father, 342
Tiberius bestows his father’s property on, 348
Pituarius thrown from Tarpeian rock, 329
Planasia Isle, Agrippa Postumus in, 256
Plancina, wife of Gnæus Piso, 338, 339, 340, 342, 350
Charges against, 348, 351
Plancus:
At Alexandria, 126
Suggests use of “Augustus,” 130
Plato, politics of _Republic_, 8, 56
Pliny (elder):
Account of journey of Tiberius, 183
On Tiberius, 162
Polybius, respect for Senate, 50
Polytheism, 132, 138, 374
Pompeius, Sextus, 98
Brigandage of, 58
Descent on coast of Iapygia, 121
Native of Picenum, 37
Power wielded by, 215
“Province” assigned to, 23
Reliance on army, 123
Seizes Sicily, 101, 107
Pontifex Maximus, 255
Functions, 48
Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judæa, 273
Portents, faith in, 138
Præneste, fall of, 88
Prætorian guards organized, 392
Prætors, 320
Right to beat actors, 360
Princeps, 255
Probus, Valerius, 71
_Punch_, cartoons in, 360
Pyrrhus, invasion of, 6
R
Republic and empire, 2, 4
Rhine:
Mutiny on, 280 _seqq._, 392
Importance of, 290
Romanized, 227
Rhodes, flourishing state of, 192
Rome:
As universal peacemaker and ruler, 23
Disturbances after death of Sejanus, 412, 416
Fires in, 396, 397
Food supplies from Sicily, Africa and Sardinia, 39
Government of city, 59
Indifferent to municipal matters, 381
Prefect of city, 166
Resident aliens in, 27
Riot in theatre, 315
Umpire of world, 125
Roman armies:
Barrack system, 395
Centurion, position of, 273
Concessions to soldiers, 283, 286
“Garrison” service, 272
Grievances of soldiers, 271, 272, 273
On Rhine frontier, 281
Pay of soldier, 272
Prætorian guard, 392
Recruiting for, 6, 38, 65, 76, 227, 241, 270, 275
Superstition of soldiers, 279
Roman Civil Service (_see_ Equestrian Order)
Roman electorate, 31, 33, 34
Roman Empire:
A religion as well as a state, 140
Area of wars, 107, 122
Change of officials, 317
Christianity and, 430
Conquests:
Conditions of, 6
Effects of, 5
Organization, 7
Constitution:
Hereditary succession, 164
People an organized part of, 11
Theories on, 8, 31
Working changed, 32, 34
Decentralized, 247
Expansion of, 1 _seqq._
Finances, 228
Frontiers vulnerable, 217
How broken up, 228
Imperial Executive founded on Equestrian Order, 15
Information from authors on, 2
Local life of, 382
Policy to allies, 33
Politics of, 4
Popular government a legal fiction, 12
“Province”:
Division of, 59, 313, 357
Signification of, 22
Slavery in, 60
State prosecutions, 321
Supreme Court of Appeal, 382
Taxes farmed, 14
Tendency of, 75
Wars forced on, 6
Wars of aggression, 6
(_See_ also Equestrian Order, etc.)
Roman family a community, 147
Roman generals, 216
Roman history:
Connexion of great houses with, 146
Greek influence on, 53
Turning point of, 6
Roman law courts, 310
Roman palaces, 144
Roman people:
As financiers, 13
Character, 40, 41
Citizen privileges, 27
Composed of three elements, 47
Diversions, 177
Early marriages, 168
Estimate of generals, 216
Faith in portents, 138
Gods of, 130, 133, 134, 226
Individual independence, 25, 26
Legal temperament, 9, 40, 46
Legends of early history, 47
Love of spectacular bloodshed, 74, 314, 362
Meaning of phrase, 24, 41
Morality and religion, 133
No affection for Rome or Senate, 40
Patrons and clients, 28, 29, 30, 321
Religion and superstition, 131
Religious temperament, 47
Roman nobles, territorial magnates, 29
Roman residents in Asia Minor, 13
Rule of, 41
Senatorial career, 17
Sympathy with army, 40
Training of young, 147, 149
Two political careers open to, 16
(_See_ also Equestrian Order)
Roman Proconsul:
Only check upon, 19
Power in province, 20
Roman Senate:
Admission jealously guarded to, 73
Advisory council to Emperors, 58, 256
Affection of its members and adherents, 52
Aristocratic nature of, 44
As court of justice, 380
Attitude of Senators:
Towards Cæsar, 55
Towards Sejanus, 388, 391, 398
Towards Tiberius, 258, 261
Cabinet system in, 262
Cæsar and, 90
Decision on rights of sanctuary, 377
Divided into groups, 31
Duties of Senators, 320
Equality of members, 54
Equestrian Order and, 19, 20
Functions of, 45, 48, 49, 50, 358
Governorships, 247
Never formally disestablished, 59
Not _representative_ of people, 24
Oath to Emperor, 301
Of different Emperors, 1
Offers Tiberius title of “Father of his Country,” 300
Parties in, 50, 56
Sections of, 57
Prosecutions after conspiracy of Sejanus, 412, 414, 416
Provincial Governors, power of, 382
Questions for Senators to settle, 51
Religious intolerance, 368, 375
Represents party of ancient oligarchy, 21
Resistance to reforms, 52
Senators’ fear of magic, 328
Sketch of, 12, 42 _seqq._
Sumptuary laws, 362
Tiberius and, 253 _seqq._
Roman women, position of, 167
Rubrius, accusation against, 306
S
Sabinus, Poppæus, 316
St. Paul:
“Appeal to Cæsar,” 184
Journeys from Puteoli to Rome, 62
Samos, flourishing state of, 192
Sanctuary, rights of, 376
Sardinia, territorial province, 23, 369
Saturninus, Sentius:
Acts in combination with Tiberius, 234
Forces reforms on Senate, 56
Scipio Æmilianus studies Greek political writers, 34
Scipio, relative of Julia, 190
Scribonia, wife of Octavian, 103, 150, 169
Sejanus, Ælius:
Account of, 385 _seqq._
Adviser to Drusus, 278
As Commander-in-Chief in Italy, 394
Conspiracy, 2
Fall of, 230, 399, 412
Opposition to, 398
Organized Prætorian guards, 392
Regent, 396
Seneca, jest on apotheosis of Claudius, 141
Sentius, Gnæus, Governor of Syria, 341
Serenus, Vibius, states charges against Libo, 326
Servian Constitution and Equestrian Order, 16
Sibylline books consulted, 47
Sicily, territorial province, 23
Silius, commander of Upper Army on Rhine, 281
Simon Magus, 195
Slavery, 60 _seqq._
Agricultural slaves, 62, 65, 68, 78
Captives in war in, 70, 73
Condition of slaves in ancient world, 63
Cosmopolitan influence of, 70, 76
Domestic slavery, 66
Earnings of slaves, 67
Emancipation, 76
Immunities, 64
“Libertus,” 74
Not demoralizing to ancients, 77
Political disqualifications, 64
Slave barracks, 65, 68
Slave’s relation to his patron, 30
“They of Cæsar’s household,” 74
Smyrna, flourishing state of, 192
Society, difference between ancient and modern, 26
Stevenson, R. L., moral earnestness, 158
Strabo, Seius, 385
Stuart dynasty, attitude of adherents towards, 52
Suetonius:
Biographies of schoolmaster freedmen, 71
Fragments of Octavian’s letters, 211
Idle tales of, 430
Indifferent to chronology, 224
On banishment of devotees of Bacchus, 369
M. Lollius and Tiberius, 201
M. Verrius Flaccus, 72
Tiberius and Caius Cæsar, 207
Tiberius’ expenditure, 363
Tiberius in Capreæ, 421
Tiberius in German wars, 237
Tiberius’ refusal of divine honours, 137
Tiberius’ refusal of title of “Father of his Country,” 300
Sources of information, 293
Stories of Tiberius in Rhodes, 197
Sulla:
Decree on Senators, 43
Gives back jurisdiction to Senate, 21
Grants new lease of power to Senate, 90
Power wielded by, 215
Proscribed, 57
Reliance on army, 123
Sumptuary laws, 362
Tiberius’ attitude on, 366
Syria, an Imperial Province, 337
T
Tacitus:
_Annals_, gap in, 2
Period covered by, 356, 409
Quoted, 316
As historian, 357
Attitude towards Tiberius, 430
Conception of early empire, 88
Mentions schoolmaster freedman, a Senator, 73
Narrative of Tiberius and his reign, 263, 265
Instance of misrepresentation, 266
On Caligula, 427
Crispus’ advice to Tiberius, 257
Election of Consuls, 319
Lex Majestatis, 302, 303, 305, 307
Perversion of Tiberius, 353
Policy of Augustus, 221
Secrets of Empire, 154
Tiberius, 293 _seqq._
Tiberius refusing divine honours, 137
Trial of Piso, 351
References to Livia, 175
Sources of information, 293
Tarragona, temple to Augustus at, 315
Tatius, Titius, consort of Romulus, 85
Teutons:
Invasion of, 6, 13
Inadequate provision to repel, 54
Thrasyllus, the “Mathematician,” 195, 369, 373
Accompanies Tiberius to Capreæ, 421
Tiber, floods in, 312
Tiberius, Claudius Nero, father of Emperor:
Attitude towards Cæsar, 58, 92
Death, 105
Flees to Corinth, 102
His character, 103
In Sicily, 101
Joins Constitutional party, 98
Marries Livia, 102, 104
Mission to Campania, 99
Returns to Rome, 102
Sketch of career, 87
Tiberius, Emperor:
Accession, 253 _seqq._
Accompanies Octavian to Spain, 153
Action after death of Sejanus, 413
Address on army, 394
Address on sumptuary laws quoted, 363
Adopted by Augustus, 210, 251
Adopts Caligula, 426
Adopts Germanicus and Agrippa Postumus, 251
As General, 243
As Imperator, 278
Attached to Drusus, 150
Attitude towards Senate, 353 _seqq._
Bitterness of writers against, 3
Campaigns, 174, 186, 211, 215 _seqq._
Against Maroboduus, 233
Combined movements, 244
Defence of vulnerable frontiers, 219, 227
Gallic, 225
Germanic, 231, 243
Avenges Varus, 241
In Pannonia, 226, 235
Spanish, 223
Character, 253, 296, 299, 314, 411, 422, 429
Evidence on, 294
Colleague and successor of Augustus, 83, 187
Commands army against Parthians, 155
Concessions to mutinous armies, 286
Conduct to Livia, 333, 334
Constitutional theory, 261, 302
Day in Rome, how spent, 418
Death, 428
Descent, 86
Destroys popularity, 361
Education, 149 _seqq._
Fall of, 399
Flight to Rhodes, 184
Cause of, 189
Funeral, 431
Governor of Transalpine Gaul, 224
Grant to Propertius Celer, 311
His life interesting, 83
Holds Egypt as granary, 368
Household, rivalries in, 397, 404, 406
In law courts, 310
Letter to Senate, 426
Makes Emperor an institution, 3
Marriages, 172, 173, 182
Nickname, 254
Palace, 191, 209
Personal appearance, 179, 298, 419
Plots against, 331
Policy, 227, 317, 377
On German frontier, 242, 290
Proconsular power, 254
Refuses title of “Father of his Country,” 300
Relations with Augustus, 211, 214
With Sejanus, 386, 396, 411
Reply to Sejanus, 404
Responsible for peace, 417
Retires to Capreæ, 396, 402, 420 _seqq._
Returns to Rome, 209
Skilled civilian, 174
Speech at trial of Piso, 344
On case of Hortalus, 378
Strategy, 225
Studies, 193, 420
Tribune, 184, 197
Wishes to return to Rome, 199, 207
Tiberius the younger, 407, 408, 416, 426
Tiro, Cicero’s secretary, 77
Tomi, barbarians at Roman camp at, 221
Trajan rectifies frontier of Lower Danube, 221
Tribunate, history of, 183
Trio, Fulcinius, professional prosecutor, 325, 343, 348
Tusculum, headquarters of Claudians, 85
U
Urgulania, friend of Livia’s, 334
V
Varius, heroic poems, 152
Varus, Quintilius, Governor of Southern German Marches:
Sketch of career, 239
Slain, 238
Treats Rhine as Roman Province, 227
Verres, trial of, 19, 21
Vescularius, Flaccus, 324
Vespasian:
Averse to luxury, 367
Scepticism of, 136
Vibulenus:
Killed, 279
Oration to soldiers, 277
Vinicius, Marcus, Consul, 229, 230
Marries Julia Livilla, 250, 339
Vinicius, Marcus, General, 231
Vipsania, daughter of Agrippa, 169
Wife of Tiberius, 172, 181
Vipsanian family, 168
Virgil:
Allusion to death of Marcellus, 170
Compliments to Augustus, 160
Legends in _Æneid_, 139
Native of Cis-Alpine Gaul, 119
On merits of simplicity, 153
Roman Empire, 5
Vitellius, Lucius, 426
Vonones removed by Germanicus, 340
W
War, captives reckoned as profits of, 70
Washington, T. Booker, attitude towards slave owners, 60
X
Xiphilinus, epitome of Dio Cassius, 138
Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references.
Page 75: “de Sevignê” currently is spelled “de Sévigné”.
Page 392: The two sentences beginning with “How if the mutineers” were
printed that way.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Tiberius the Tyrant" ***
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