
Tiberius
Published:
1969
Tags:
Non FictionNon Fictionttt
Non Fictionttt
Ernst Mason
Two thousand years ago, a new emperor came to the throne of Rome. His name was Tiberius Claudius Nero, and the riddle of his character has shocked and puzzled the world ever since. He used the public funds to gratify his taste for debauchery and vice, but refused to give gladiatorial contests because he was too mean to pay for them. He delighted in cruel punishments and invented ingenious new forms of torture---yet his reign was one of prosperity and peace.
Calculating and licentious, intelligent and cruel, Tiberius spent the last fourteen years of his life surrounded by hired bodyguards in his pleasure palace on Capri---one of the most hated men the world has ever known. Yet he enriched the Roman treasury by more than two billion sesterces, and the historian Mommsen has called him "the ablest of all the sovereigns the Empire ever had.
TIBERIUS
A Panther Book
First published in the U.S.A. by Ballantine Books, Inc
Ballantine edition published 1960 Panther edition published September 1961 Reprinted June 1963
Copyright © Ernst Mason 1960
For Fletcher Pratt
Conditions of Sale. This book shall nor, without the written consent of the Publishers first given, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.
Printed in England by Hunt, Barnard & Co., Ltd., at the Sign of the Dolphin, Aylesbury, Bucks, and published by Hamilton & Co. (Stafford) Ltd., 108 Brampton Road, London, s.w.3
1
His name was Tiberius Claudius Nero, called Tiberius, the Emperor of one hundred million souls.
Tiberius was born into a household of tragedy. He grew up under the shadow of a greater man; he loved twice and lost twice, and when he died he was hated by nearly every human being alive. He was even hated by himself.
Tiberius spent the beginning of his life in loneliness, and most of the rest of it in running away. He feared people because he despised them. He knew that Rome was a sink, and that the great Roman Senate had become a mob of knaves and libertines; he could not, or would not, change Rome, and so he fled it. He practised foul cruelties on his enemies, and he had no friends.
As a ruler, he sacrificed morality to legality, as one commentator has said; but his "legality" was the law of the shyster. Roman law was not the equal of ours in its guarantees of personal freedom. But there were certain ancient, unbendable laws which gave some protection. A man's slaves might not be made to testify against him. A virgin might not be executed for a crime. Tiberius found legal loopholes through which his desires might be exerted. Usually in preserving the letter of the law he found a path to his ends which plunged his victims into degradation and suffering worse than the thing the law protected them against.
In his personal life he was severe and sometimes unspeakable. He raped small children of both sexes; he pursued the honorable wives of Rome's great men with filthy proposals; he took a pleasure in pain. He also took great interest in literature and in the science of the day, or what passed for it---astrology and the like. He was... peculiar.
If Tiberius was a terror to those about him, it was an exchange that worked both ways. He was the object of a thousand plots. He was the survivor in a remorseless winnowing-out of possible successors to his stepfather, Augustus; and if he arranged the death of some of his competitors, it is also true that some of them tried to arrange his. His own wife was his enemy. Not his first wife, whom he loved and was forced to give up, but his second wife, Julia, Augustus' profligate daughter, who prostituted herself to any passer-by by night and plotted the death of her husband by day. His own mother, whose endless exertions made him Emperor in the first place, became at the last a threat to his throne. When she died he refused to give orders for her funeral until her decaying corpse was an offense to the nostrils. It was a passive, offhand sort of revenge, and thus particularly dear to Tiberius. He had done nothing. It was what he had not done that constituted the revenge.
Yet he governed well---if one applies the touchstone of "the greatest good of the greatest number." It is this that distinguishes him from a Caligula or a Nero. Under Tiberius the Empire was prosperous and at peace.
Tiberius was a pervert, a murderer, and a tyrant, but he was no fool. "He was the ablest of all the sovereigns the Empire had," says the historian Mommsen. He composed Greek verses and recited Greek epigrams. One was "After me, let fire destroy the earth!"
Caligula, Claudius, and Nero kindled the flames.
Tiberius died almost two thousand years ago, and of the ten billion men and women who have lived since then, nearly all have been forgotten. But we do not forget Tiberius. Even today the guides on the Isle of Capri will point out where the stooped, shambling old man hurled his victims to their death.
Tiberius was not the worst of the Roman Emperors. Caligula was mad and murderous, Nero was a terrified pervert. By our standards almost all the Caesars were in some way corrupt and strange---they might live only to kill, like Commodus, or take such queer pleasures as plucking out the body hair of their mistresses, like Domitian. Even Vespasian, one of the best, enriched himself by blackmailing his own corrupt officers.
The Caesars were not even the worst of the ancient rulers. The mist of blood and pain that hung about them was only more of what the ancient world had always known; in Babylon, in Egypt, in all the countries that made up the world's first civilizations there had never been a time when pain and bloodshed came to a halt. But there was something about the Caesars which made them particularly fearful. Partly it was power. Partly it was something more subtle.
What set the Caesars apart was that they governed a civilized state. Rome was a Republic almost up to the time of Tiberius' birth. It is true that democracy reached only a handful---there were no rights for the slaves and very few for the poor plebeians---but that handful had rights as certain and as well established as our own. The Caesars stopped that. "I have the right to do anything at all to anyone," said Caligula to his grandmother. Roman Senators were protected by centuries of law and tradition, but a Caesar could change any law. There was only one weapon that could be used against him---assassination---and though it was many times tried it seldom succeeded. (Still, of the first twelve Emperors seven were murdered---and two more killed themselves for fear of worse.)
What made the Caesars unique among the terrible ancient rulers was that they were a step in the wrong direction. What made Tiberius unique among the Caesars was that he set the pattern for the monsters who followed.
II
Tiberius was born two thousand years ago, but Rome was already old. Five hundred years before his birth the city had more than a quarter of a million people, and the legions had already begun the victories that gave them all the Italian peninsula, all the Mediterranean, ultimately nearly all the known world. Under the centuries of the Republic Rome grew powerful and rich. More than that, the upper classes, at any rate, were free. Freedom was a new invention at that stage in the world's history. The Greeks had had it, but scaled down to midget size; their tiny cities could not compare with Rome's immensity. Rome was big as well as free. The city's rulers were elected by vote. Foreign policy was set by the Senate. Under the Republic a man knew where he stood; his rights were a matter of constitution and law. The higher his rank the more rights he had, of course, but even the poorest freeborn citizen had the assurance that if he was ruled badly or harshly, at least he was ruled by men he had helped to select.
Julius Caesar changed all that.
Caesar was an ambitious, dangerous man. He would do anything for power. The Republic did not suit him. A government should have only one head, and that head, his own. He bribed, cheated, murdered, and stole his way to power. He knew that no man could conquer the centuries-old might of the Roman Republic unless that structure had shaken itself to pieces in internal strife; he stirred up the strife. He cozened the Senate into giving him an army. He cajoled the army into taking their loyalty from Rome and giving it to him. He made conquests in Rome's name and used the treasure won in battle to buy the affections of Romans, who voted him more armies and enabled him to make more conquests. He wanted to be king, but he was wise enough to grasp the power of kingship before reaching for the name. He never did become king of Rome---the daggers of Brutus and a pack of others saw to that---but he was something more. He was an emperor, Rome's first; the tide begins with him. Romans loyal to the Republic were able to kill Julius Caesar, but the Republic itself was already dead.
The murder of Julius Caesar began the most frightful civil war of Rome's history, a war that went on for thirteen bloody years. On one side were Brutus, Casius, and the rest of the Republicans; on the other, the friends and relatives of Caesar. Mark Antony was one; Lepidus was another; a stripling named Octavian, Caesar's heir (later he changed his name to Augustus, and that is the name we will call him now), was the third. These three were the Triumvirate, joined together to fight Caesar's assassins.
But it was not for revenge that they fought. They fought for Rome.
If Brutus and Cassius won, the Republic might be re-established; but if the Triumvirate won they would own all Rome, city and colonies.
This was the world that Tiberius was born into two thousand years ago.
Tiberius' mother was a beautiful girl named Livia. Even for a Roman matron she was young---she was just thirteen when Tiberius was born---but she was the wife of an important man, and herself the descendant of one of Rome's best families. So was her husband. In fact, they were cousins.
Livia was stately. Her nose had an eagle's hook, but that was a sign of beauty in Rome. She had calm, tender eyes; but, more important than beauty, she had all the Roman virtues. She was chaste, she was frugal, she was loyal. A Roman matron was supposed to run her household as efficiently as a factory foreman; indeed, a Roman home was a sort of factory, for clothes were made, cloth was spun, even furnishings were usually constructed there. Livia could do that; even when she had six hundred personal slaves, she still spent hours at the loom and could find a pilfering servant by cataloguing every scrap of cloth. A Roman matron was modest and beyond scandal---or should be; Livia really was. Even the scandal-loving Romans never accused her of adultery. Once she was the center of a real scandal---a band of Roman nudists had exposed themselves to her on the street--- but she would not allow them to be punished. To her men like that were the same as statues, she said.
When she was pregnant with Tiberius she kept a hen's egg warmed between her palms, day and night. When she slept she gave it to a slave to hold. She wanted the egg to hatch, because it would be an omen; and when it did hatch, and the chick was a fine young rooster with the trace of a comb, the household rejoiced. It was a fine omen. It meant that the baby would be a boy, and the comb meant that he would achieve greatness.
While that egg was hatching, the Roman armies were moving toward each other. The Republican forces opposed the legions of the Triumvirate. They met in September of the year 42 B.C., at Philippi, across the Adriatic Sea. It was a great bloody match which the Triumvirs won. Cassius and Brutus died, their legions begged to be allowed to join the armies of the victors, and the last hope of the Republic perished.
Two months later, on the 16th of November, the baby Tiberius was born.
As a baby Tiberius was like any other baby. A new-born infant is only a sort of multiplied egg, and if it does show signs of individual personality at an early age, those signs are mostly of interest to the parents.
But the world the baby Tiberius lived in---that was something special. In the struggle of the giants for control of the world nearly everyone was involved. Whole nations were being sold into slavery, cities were being razed, and every Roman who took a stand (most highborn Romans had to) ran the risk of finding himself executed by the other side. In this world the family of Tiberius led an athletic life.
Tiberius' father was a noble Roman named Tiberius Claudius Nero the Elder. He had been a fleet captain for Julius Caesar, a high priest of the Olympian religion under the Republic, and several times an important magistrate in Rome's city government. After the battle of Philippi he declared his loyalty to one of the members of the Triumvirate, Mark Antony; probably it seemed to him that this would help insure a peaceful life for the future, but it was only a matter of weeks before the Triumvirate began quarreling among itself. Tiberius Claudius Nero was caught in the middle. He took his wife and child and went to the town of Perugia, high in the Apennine Mountains, a siege-proof town where surely he would find peace and quiet. That was his first mistake. In the division of spoils after the battle of Philippi it was Augustus, not Mark Antony, who was given control of the whole Italian peninsula. His first move was to change the habits of such Italians as had sworn personal allegiance to Mark Antony, and Perugia was full of them. In fact Mark Antony's own brother, Lucius Antonius, had taken command of the hill town and imported parties of gladiators, supplies for many months, and all the necessaries of war. No matter. Augustus besieged the town and starved it out. When it fell, young Augustus (he was not much past twenty) did not waste a good chance to teach a lesson for reasons of compassion; he selected three hundred rebellious knights and senators and executed them in front of the altar dedicated to Julius Caesar. Tiberius' father was not among them; he was already on his way to Naples, where he tried to stir up a revolt against Augustus. That didn't work either; the little family barely escaped from Naples, skulking away at night. The baby Tiberius' crying, as they leaped for a ship, nearly cost them their lives. One of the family's intimates, Velleius Paterculus, was with them in their flight. There were too many of them. Paterculus killed himself to give the others a hope of getting away.
From Naples they went to Sicily, where queer old Sextus Pompey had carved out a sort of independent sea-kingdom within the Roman framework; but Augustus made peace with Sextus, and Sicily was no longer safe for Tiberius' father. From Sicily they escaped to Greece. Trouble was not through with them; in Greece they were trapped in a forest fire, and although they escaped, Livia's dress and hair were burned away.
But Augustus offered amnesty then, and Tiberius the Elder seized it gratefully. The family returned to Rome, and settled down---briefly. The baby Tiberius was then three years old, and already a veteran of more battles, sieges, and hairs-breadth escapes than the ordinary man experiences in a lifetime.
That September---the year was 39 B.c---Augustus returned to Rome from a quick survey of his new possessions in Gaul, and for the first time set eyes on Livia.
She was now just seventeen, and pregnant with her second child. Augustus didn't mind. She was, of course, married. Augustus didn't care. Four years of war and power had turned a stripling into an emperor who knew what he wanted the moment he saw it. He wanted Livia. The husband was a nuisance, but Augustus knew how to handle him.
The only real obstacle was Roman law---Augustus was not yet powerful enough to flout it at will. So he sent up a question to the High Pontiffs for decision: Would it be lawful if a pregnant wife should be divorced by her husband and marry another man while still carrying the first man's child? The High Pontiffs knew very well what answer Augustus wanted; they gave it. Oh, yes, perfectly legal. Of course, if the woman wasn't sure she was pregnant it would be illegal---for then there would be doubt, and therefore a cloud on the paternity
of the child. But Livia was sure; in fact, she was six months gone; so the High Pontiffs had no objection at all. Tiberius the Eider had none either; he promptly divorced Livia and even refunded her dowry, paying it over to Augustus.
There was only one other htde obstacle---Augustus was also married. It didn't matter. Her name was Scribonia and he had married her for political reasons (she was related to the Sicilian sailor, Sextus Pompey); but Sextus was under control and besides Scribonia nagged. Augustus divorced her. She was pregnant too; the divorce and the delivery occurred on the same day; the baby was a girl, named Julie.
So Livia went to the home of Augustus to live, leaving Tiberius with his father. Three months later her baby was born---a boy, named Drusus---and promptly sent back to Tiberius the Elder by Livia's new husband. He might be tyrant enough to take a man's wife, but not his son.
III
What was he like, this Augustus whose shadow spread over the whole Roman world?
He was of average height, to begin with---the ordinary Roman stood five feet four, and Augustus was just a trifle taller than that. He was well proportioned and blond, with eyebrows that made a bar across the top of his Roman nose and eyes that were bright and lucid. Augustus was vain of his eyes. It was his conceit that they blazed with a godlike fire. Flatterers blinked and turned their heads when he looked at them, pretending to be dazzled; that pleased him.
Across the chest and diaphragm of Augustus seven birthmarks reproduced the constellation of the Great Bear (what we call the Big Dipper). Time diminished his handsomeness. One eye lost its sight, teeth decayed, a weakness of his left leg made him limp, horny patches blemished his skin. But he was always graceful and always serene. Once that saved his life. A Gaul came to Augustus' camp to murder him, looked on that tranquil face and, defeated, turned away.
When Augustus looked on Livia, six months big with child, and found her fair enough to steal away from her husband, he was twenty-four years old and time had not touched him. By Roman standards he was a remarkably handsome man. He knew it.
He had been married twice before. First he married Claudia, the stepdaughter of his ally Mark Antony. But Claudia was very young even for those times; Augustus quarreled with Claudia's mother and divorced the child without consummating the marriage. Then he wed Scribonia, who had herself been married twice before and came with a child by one of her husbands, but who had the virtue of being related to Sextus Pompey. A queer Roman, Pompey hated the land, almost forgot the Latin tongue, thought himself the child of the sea-god Neptune, and spent his years and his fleets trying to teach landlubbers that naval power was supreme.
At twenty-four Augustus had already had six years of great power.
Lord Acton said: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." It was particularly true in Rome. In those times it was impossible for any Roman to achieve and keep great power except through the exercise of great cruelty.
Augustus was a wise and mighty prince. His name has come down in history as one who was known for his courtesies and for policies that made the world a safer and better place to live in. It is also true that the armies that gave him Rome were paid with the blood of innocents and babes.
Armies needed money. To get that money, the Triumvirate of Augustus, Lepidus, and Mark Antony had to take it from those who had it. The cities in the Roman colonies within Italy were their first targets; the Triumvirs levied brutal taxes and exacted impossible tributes. Some Asian cities were ordered to pay ten years' taxes in advance and the order was enforced by the swords of the legions. Taxes were already high; the tenfold imposition was almost unbearable; what made it even worse was that some of the cities had been occupied by Cassius or Brutus and had already given the other side a ten-year advance. Municipal treasuries were emptied; that wasn't enough, so all municipal properties were auctioned off; that wasn't enough, so the estates and treasures of individual citizens were requisitioned and sold. And as even that was sometimes not enough, freeborn Romans were sold into slavery by their own city fathers to raise the money to pay the impossible taxes.
In Rome, there were many wealthy men who had sided with the Republicans. These came next. It was the law that a traitor to the state should, among other punishments, have all his property seized. Sometimes the heirs of the doomed men might contest such a seizure; so where the traitors had heirs, the Triumvirs slew the heirs too---even when the heirs were small children.
Augustus did not fall behind his co-rulers. He could not afford to, with half a million soldiers on his personal payroll. Indeed, he exceeded even Antony in his single-minded attention to getting the ultimate drop of blood. Augustus put even his own guardian on the proscribed list.
It was not even necessary to be rich to earn the wrath of Augustus. Troops that broke in battle learned to fear him; he had no patience with defeat; he lined the beaten soldiers up and executed every tenth one. Augustus tolerated not even the suspicion of enmity. His suspicion was his proof. He had a knight named Pinarius executed because, while Augustus was making a speech, Pinarius listened all too attentively---worse, made notes on a wax tablet, for heaven knew what purpose. Augustus had him knifed. Even Maecenas, Augustus' lifelong friend, thought him too harsh. There was a day when Augustus sat surrounded by a throng of accusers and witnesses, trying case after case, finding every defendant guilty and sentencing every convict to death. It was too much for Maecenas; he scribbled "Stop it, Butcher!" on a tablet and threw it in the Emperor's lap.
They said of Augustus that he had prostituted himself to Julius Caesar for the sake of becoming his heir, and that he scorched the hair off his legs with hot walnut shells. They said he was the child of a monstrous union between his mother and a snake one night in the Temple of Apollo, and that the strange serpentine discoloration on his mother's skin that kept her from enjoying the baths was the proof of it.
They said that even in his old age he had a passion for deflowering young virgins, and they said that his loving Livia provided the virgins for him to deflower.
They said many things of Augustus which were not true. But a fact of Augustus' life which is true and cannot be forgotten is this: he and those about him built the mightiest and most durable empire the world has ever known.
The other great Roman of Tiberius' babyhood was that graceful blackguard, Mark Antony. Tiberius' father had made the mistake of picking Antony in the grand choosing-up of sides, but he was not alone. Antony had as many followers as Augustus; Antony had more of the habit of power, more of the experience of commanding troops in the field. When Julius Caesar was assassinated Augustus was only a boy of eighteen; Caesar named him his heir in his will (which was a terrible shock to Antony!), but as Augustus was not in Rome and Antony was, it was simple for the older man to step in as the assassinated Caesar's nearest and dearest.
By the time Augustus reached Rome, Mark Antony had solved a great many annoying little problems. He had been broke; but there was plenty of money in Caesar's estate. He had been somewhat worried that the murderers would turn from Caesar to Caesar's friends.
At Caesar's funeral Mark Antony set the stage for such an orgy of grief and hysteria as Rome had seldom seen. He was a great stage manager; he had a wax image made of the murdered man, bleeding blood from twenty-three stab wounds. He set the waxwork corpse and the real one together in a model of the Temple of Venus, and standing by the ivory bier he delivered his funeral oration so well that Rome went mad with sorrow and rage. The crowd set fire to the Temple; soldiers tossed their spears into the blaze, noble ladies contributed their outer garments, the mob ransacked nearby homes and temples for fuel. It was a lovely burning, and it frightened the wits out of the murderers. They fled, abandoning Rome to Mark Antony.
When Caesar was stabbed, Antony was not only penniless but he owed more than a million dollars. By the time Augustus came to Rome to collect his inheritance, Antony was out of debt and solvent. The estate? Antony was all regrets. Somehow or other, it was all gone---at least all that could quickly be converted into cash. More than that, where Antony had been the logical next target for the assassins, now he was the safest, most popular man in Rome. His friends were countless. That was easy to understand, for he had somehow managed to find (gossip said he placed them there himself) in Caesar's effects enough useful papers---appointments, nominations to office, deeds, warrants, and the like---to reward his loyal friends and make a host of new ones.
Undoubtedly young Augustus burned with questions about his estate, but the time was not ripe to ask them. He needed Antony as much as Antony needed him. Brutus and Cassius still lived; and it was not until the battle of Philippi that the last Republican banner came down. By then Augustus no longer needed to ask questions, for he knew all the answers. His fellow Triumvir was a scoundrel.
But such a charming one!
In his life he spent four billion dollars. It can't be said that he stole it, for a man can't steal that much money; the size of the amount changes the nature of the act. His first big acquisition was looting the coffers of Julius Caesar, but that was pennies compared to what he could get by looting the eastern world. For after Philippi, when the Triumvirate divided up the world, Mark Antony exercised the privilege of seniority and chose Rome's eastern possessions, the richest colonies and client kingdoms. He took Egypt, with its century-old stores of treasure; and he took Egypt's queen.
Most of Mark Antony's four billions were spent for essentials: pay for the troops, and the necessaries of war. There was quite a lot, though, that could be used on gracious living. In this Mark Antony was a specialist. He loved food, he loved comfort, and he loved women---yes, and boys were all right, too; Mark Antony took his fun where he found it.
None of these traits were unknown in Rome, or even much frowned on. Julius Caesar himself was called "the husband of every woman, and the wife of every man." The trouble with Mark Antony was that his habits were excessive. He kept a harem of four hundred inmates of mixed sexes and that was altogether too many. He mingled with a select circle of wealthy voluptuaries---they called themselves "the Inimitable Livers," which is not a pun in Latin but is an apt one indeed in English. Antony's cooks prepared eight dinners each day; only one was eaten, but that one had to be exactly right. Antony could be harsh if a meal was spoiled; but he could also be most grateful when a meal was perfection. He gave his chef a villa as a reward for one meal. He was a man with a fastidious palate, and Egypt's queen---Cleopatra---knew how to please him.
The last of the Ptolemies was no more Egyptian than Antony; her blood was pure Greek, and she knew a lot about conquering Romans. (Julius Caesar had passed that way and left her a small proof of his affection in the form of a half-Roman son named Caesarion.) Cleopatra was not very beautiful, but she was blonde and she had personality. And brains. She conquered her conqueror at first sight; instantly she became his mistress; soon thereafter the mother of his twin children; even, a few years later, his wife. However, before that happened Antony had to get rid of the present incumbent, and that was bad politics for she was Octavia, the sister of Augustus. From Rome Augustas wrote Antony a testy letter. Antony replied:
What has come over you? Do you object to my sleeping with Cleopatra? But we are married; and it is not even as though this were anything new. . . . And what about you? Are you faithful to Livia? My congratulations if, when this letter arrives, you have not been in bed with Tertullia, or Terentilla, or Rufilla, or Salvia Titisenia---or all of them.
Augustus was not amused. He was hardly thirty, but he had become rather stuffy. And he had also come to believe that power could not be shared; it was nonsense to have Rome divided. Only one man could rule it. That man should be himself.
At about this time the father of young Tiberius, now nine years old, died. The ex-husband of Livia had got off very well from the civil wars, all things considered, and he knew it He had lost his wife, but he had kept his life and his property; it was the part, of intelligence to keep away from the limelight until things quieted down. He did. But before things were quiet he was dead. His sons, nine-year-old Tiberius and five-year-old Drusus, went to live with their mother in the home of Augustus. Tiberius performed the last duties toward his father; in the Forum, with his father's body on a bier before him, the boy delivered the customary funeral oration. He spoke well, but that was to be expected. Even while still with his father Tiberius had the best of teachers, the finest Greek literary men and the most outstanding Roman rhetoricians.
Afterward there were all those tutors and many more. Tiberius was perhaps the best-educated boy in the Empire. The Emperor had only one child---his daughter Julia, born a few months before Tiberius' brother. The three children played together and took part in the family ceremonials together; when a temple was dedicated, a religious ceremony observed, a victory celebrated, the whole family of Augustus was expected to participate. Even the stepsons. Augustus' home had become the hub of Rome, and those who lived in it were always on display.
But Julia, being female, was not expected to study as hard as the boys. The tutors were for Tiberius and Drusus---and for their cousin Marcellus, the son of Augustus' sister Octavia (by her first husband, not by Mark Antony); Roman family relationships are complicated. The boys studied hard, according to their various personalities: Tiberius seriously, Drusus sweetly, Marcellus under compulsion, for he was a cheerful extrovert. It had already occurred to Augustus that the Empire was a bequeathable piece of property. As these boys were his closest of kin in the next generation, it might very well go to one of them, or to all three; and Augustus was determined that they should be ready for it.
However, in order for him to have an Empire to bequeath it was necessary to make sure it was his.
Augustus waged a few little wars to put his affairs in order. Old Lepidus, the third and least member of the Triumvirate, showed a disposition to become more important; but Augustus put a stop to that in a short skirmish. Then Sextus Pompey, the Sicilian sailor, became a very serious annoyance. All Rome lived off the imports of food from Africa (it was beneath the dignity of Roman landowners to grow grain), and the ships passed perilously near Sicily, where Sextus Pompey's fleets could pounce on them. Sextus Pompey's fleets did.
He was strange even for a highborn Roman---wore sea-green robes instead of white edged with purple, called himself the descendant of Neptune, the Sea God, even pretended to have forgotten how to speak Latin. Augustus taught him how to speak very plainly indeed. Augustus built himself a fleet and turned it over to a man named Marcus Agrippa, a very great Roman who fought batdes, built aqueducts, gave gladiatorial displays, provided free baths for the common citizen---acted, in a word, like a wardheeling politician at election time, but never tried to take power from his master, Augustus. That made him very odd in Rome, but very valuable. Agrippa showed Sextus Pompey that even a descendant of Neptune could be whipped in a sea battie, and opened up the food routes to Africa again.
With those two thorns out of his side, Augustus turned his attention to Antony.
The trouble Was, Rome was weary of civil wars. So many thousands had died, so much treasure had been squandered, that it was plainly dangerous to risk starting another war between Roman and Roman. Augustus wanted to fight Mark Antony because he thought he would win. But he did not dare begin it, and Mark Antony, infuriatingly, would nor begin it for him, no matter how many ugly letters Augustus sent to Egypt.
Augustus turned to Livia for advice.
Throughout his life he turned to her with the problems of state, and she never failed him. She came up with a scheme: Don't declare war on Mark Antony. Declare war on Cleopatra; she is no Roman; then let Antony do as he likes.
Augustus did, and what Antony liked, of course, was to fight on the side of his wife; and once again great masses of Roman legions came to battle each other for control of die known world.
They met at a place called Actium.
Actium is a little cape of land in the Ambracian Gulf. Mark Antony's army came up to one side of the gulf, Augustus' camped on the other. They couldn't get at each other, but they could shout across at each other---the gulf is only a few miles wide---and presently the war fleets of both sides appeared.
The warship of the Romans was the galley---great wooden vessels with patchy sails, relying mostly on the muscle-power of rowers to move them lumberingly through the water. In Egypt the fashion was to make things colossal and stately: Mark Antony's galleys had as many as ten banks of oars, great hulks with four or five hundred men rowing and another couple of hundred carrying arms on deck. Augustus' fleet (commanded again by Marcus Agrippa) had smaller vessels, but faster ones and more of them. Augustus needed to have more of them. Ram-and-board was the favorite naval tactic of the time, but that would not work against Mark Antony's monsters. They were armored against the sharp beaks of the enemy ships with huge timbers and plates of brass. Brass spikes protruded from their sides. Two or three of Augustus' smaller ships attacked each of the giants, but dared not come close enough to board; it was hounds harrying a boar. The little ships could be destroyed in a moment if they came too close.
So the little ships laid back and fought with missile weapons. Antony had those too---big ones---catapults large enough to batter the walls of a city. But they were as slow as his ships; it took time to wind them, time to set them; before one of the blunderbusses could be aimed, its target was already somewhere else. Meanwhile the little ships struck; fired arrows, fired lighter catapults, hurled balls of flaming pitch to set the giants afire. The fight went on for hours---even after dark, although Roman battles almost always stopped with the setting of the sun. Thousands died, while their friends or foes on the shores screamed imprecations or shouted encouragement. Most of them died very badly; killed by the smoke, roasted to death in their armor, drowned, savaged by the schools of sharks that came hurrying in to the feast. It was a long hard fight, but Augustus won it. Cleopatra's own galley blundered out of position and began to retreat, Antony followed, the line of battle was destroyed, and wholesale surrenders began at once. Antony and Cleopatra escaped---for the moment---but they had lost everything and they knew it.
Augustus had won the world.
IV
Tiberius was then thirteen years old. He was too young to fight, but not too young to participate in the triumph of his mother's husband, Augustus.
A Roman triumph was a gorgeous spectacle. Our ticker-tape parade up Broadway is only a pale shadow. The Roman who won a great victory, and thereby received the honor of a triumph, had not only the parade and the adoring mob but feasts and entertainments, titles to add to his name, privileges such as the right to award decorations to others. The triumphing Roman was expected to preside at games, where some of the prisoners he brought home with him would be permitted to kill each other off as gladiators, where wild animals and athletes would entertain the mobs. The games were an expensive honor, because someone had to pay for them, usually the one who owned the triumph; but any victory worth a triumph was sure to produce a great deal of loot, most of which stuck to the fingers of the general.
Augustus had not one victory to celebrate but three--- Illyricum, Acnum, Egypt---a triple triumph, and he was careful not to dampen the pleasure of the viewers by allowing any hint to appear that all of those victories had been over armies which were in the main Roman. Lacking the living Cleopatra, Augustus had a wax image of her made, complete with a wax snake to show how she died, and paraded it in a cart, while his agents went through the crowd to remind them that if Cleopatra had won, the gods forfend, they would all be Egyptians now.
Augustus himself rode in a stately chariot, horse-drawn. His nephew, young Marcellus, rode on the left-hand trace horse of the team; thirteen-year-old Tiberius rode the right.
Already the young Tiberius was beginning to show signs of character. He was no longer a baby; if he was still partly a child, he was also partly a man, and some of the traits that marked him all his life were beginning to take form.
The picture that comes down to us of the teen-age Tiberius is that of a shy youth----sometimes they called him a sullen one. Certainly he could be obstinate and difficult when he chose; his rhetoric teacher, Theodoras the Gadarene, called him "mud, kneaded with blood." He was not a great speaker, and that must have disappointed Theodorus---particularly after his promising start at the age of nine, when he preached his father's funeral oration. Tiberius kept to himself, and probably he felt unloved. Probably he was. Certainly his mother's husband offered him no affection.
His mother Livia, on the other hand, surely loved him. Livia was the very model of a Roman matron. After the scandal of her marriage to Augustus, she lived an exemplary life. It was too bad that she never gave Augustus a son of his own---the two she bore Tiberius Claudius Nero were the last she produced---but Augustus did already have one child, after all. Unfortunately it was a girl, Julia, but even girls could carry on a blood line.
Livia was the co-ruler of a mighty empire, but she lived more modestly than the wife of many a senator. The matrons of old Rome took a Quakerish pride in producing the essentials of their housekeeping themselves, even the cloth they wore on their backs; and until the day he died, the Emperor Augustus never wore a garment that had not been loomed in his own home, sometimes by the hands of Livia herself. Livia had six hundred personal servants; it must not be thought that she struggled in penury. She had slaves who did nothing but fold her clothes, and others who did nothing but put them away. Her favorite dog had a slave governess. Livia had a slave cosmetician whose specialty was ears, and several to work on her hair; she had jewelers and perfumers, to say nothing of slaves to help her dress and undress, to write down her letters for her and to read to her the letters that came from outside.
Six hundred slaves? She lived modestly? But it is true. She ate frugally. She worked hard. She raised her children---once her ex-husband had abandoned them to her by dying---with care and thought. She lived in imperial palaces, but the greatest of them was almost shabby in comparison with the glories of the homes of later Caesars and even of rich men of Augustus' own time. There was no marble in it, not even mosaics; the furnishings were meager. Indeed, a century after Augustus died a later Caesar opened Augustus' home as a public spectacle, so that Romans could marvel at the dowdiness of it. And this home, built on the Palatine hill of Rome, was the prototype of a palace---indeed, it is from the name of the hill that the word "palace" comes!
Tiberius must have respected his mother. No Roman could help it. But the very virtues that made Rome esteem her must have kept her away from him. She was busy. Perhaps it is pleasant to have six hundred personal slaves (not to mention five thousand other household servants of one sort or another), but slaves steal, slaves need to be told what to do, slaves get into squabbles and misunderstandings. Butlers, major-domos and overseers help, but who is to oversee the overseers? It was Livia's duty, as she saw it, to measure every scrap of wool, check every expenditure, take the direct responsibility for everything that went on in her household. Then she had a husband to care for---not only in common domestic ways, but in helping him exercise direct personal control of a huge empire. Civil service had not been invented. The separation of the various functions of government was not dreamed of. Augustus was not only the ruler of Rome but its chief magistrate; he heard cases, and sometimes even pleaded them. Roman citizens in all the colonies could appeal directly to him when something went badly wrong; and although he could not handle all these matters himself, he had to try. The Roman gods, even, were organs of the Roman state; Augustus was a high priest of the Roman religion, with duties of sacrifice and consecration, and with religious questions to settle. The loose and irregular construction of the Empire made it constantly necessary to intervene in the affairs of client kingdoms of many sorts. And in all of these matters, Augustus leaned on the advice and help of Livia. Busy? It is a wonder that Livia knew she had sons.
Certainly Tiberius must have harbored some dim wonder if not resentment, over the way his mother had left his father to wed someone else. Perhaps it is not surprising that he was shy---or even sullen, if you like. But he studied. And he learned---very many things, and not all of them from Theodoras the Gadarene.
For what there was to learn in the house of Augustus was the business of empire.
To that plain structure on the Palatine came the greatest men in the world. After Antony's death, there was no rival for power, and every ambitious kingling or greedy ambassador knew that to further his designs, whatever they might be, he needed at least the tacit approval of the Emperor. From Palestine and Germany, from Egypt and what is now Romania, from Spain and Greece and the farthest frontiers came envoys, proconsuls, princes and priests. For in order for a colonial administrator or a subject king to stay in the good graces of the Emperor he had to send ambassadors of great skill---or still better, attend Augustus in person.
The journey from the far ends of the Empire to Rome was no light matter. The pipsqueak Roman rowboats were at the mercy of every wind and storm. They seldom dared sail far from the sight of land, partly because a storm might catch them unprotected, partly because they knew little about the art of celestial navigation. Hugging the shores made a long voyage longer. Even so, it was better to take ship when possible than to cross the land. The great network of Roman roads was only beginning.
Yet the kings and ambassadors came, the young Tiberius saw them all. As he grew to fourteen and older he began to meet them, to dine at table with subject kings who picked wonderingly at the coarse meals the Emperor served. He met the petty kings of the Jews---indeed, when he was old enough to make his first appearance in civil life, it was as defense counsel (or what passed for defense counsel in Roman courts) for the Jewish king Archelaus, in trouble for a host of faults. But before that he had seen others. Herod, the cruel tyrant, had been assiduous in courting Augustus. Well, he needed to be; he had made the tactical error of siding with Mark Antony. He had not, he was grateful to remember, actually taken arms against Augustus; but that was because trouble between Egyptians and Jews is not a modern invention, and Cleopatra had refused to let Herod have a major fighting command. Instead she had ordered him to fight the king of the Arabs---and over a mere tax-gathering matter at that.
Herod's troops had won their war; but Antony had lost his, and Herod had fences to mend. Augustus was willing. Augustus was always willing to let a former enemy come over to his side---as long as there was more profit in a truce than in a revenge. Tiberius learned from that too.
In this palace of intrigue and high policy, Tiberius grew up.
Obstinately old Augustus still failed to adopt him, but some of the patina of power rubbed off on him. It was not only a matter of riding the trace horse in a triumph, or of being cultivated by those who were desperate for any avenue to the Emperor, even one as unlikely as young Tiberius. Tiberius began to see his own form in marble; when statues and friezes were made to honor Augustus, often the whole family was included. The life of the imperial family was full of ritual. They all took part in the dedication of temples---and there were hundreds to dedicate, for Augustus built or rebuilt eighty-two of them in one year alone. They all participated in the celebration of holidays and in the giving of public entertainments and games.
There was, for instance, a custom of presenting a mock fight between two groups of boys. It was called the Troy game, and tradition said that it dated back to the time of Aeneas. Tiberius was the leader of the older boys' squad. That was an honor but not altogether a comfortable one; for although it was a game played by boys it was hardly boyish. It was easy to get hurt. After a couple of senatorial sons had been badly injured in successive games the whole thing was called off.
Tiberius would not have been human if he had not enjoyed the attention of the mob. He would not have been Roman if he had not speculated that, some day, he might be Emperor.
But it was not necessary to be Emperor to be an important man in Rome. Tiberius had every hope of a great career. He wanted to be a soldier first; that was the traditional first step. But after that, certainly some high office in the government of the city of Rome, at least, would be within his grasp.
Apart from the Empire, the Eternal City itself was a monster that needed many leaders. Rome was always a giant among cities. By the time Tiberius was a young man the population totalled 500,000. It was, as they say, "a city built on seven hills." Or nine; or twelve---it depended on when you stopped counting. The city did not stop growing.
Like a modern American metropolis it was a city laid out in concentric rings. There was the downtown urban area--- the temples and palaces, the government offices and ceremonial buildings. Next to them, the tenements of the poor. In a larger ring were the homes of the middle class--- crowded close together; away from the stink, the noise, and the crowds of central Rome, but not too far for their inhabitants to be carried in litters to the Senate, the Forum, and the baths.
Farther still were the estates of the wealthy and noble families; and past them the great stock farms.
No modern tenement is more crowded, dirty, or dangerous than the homes of the Roman poor. Land was precious--- comparatively it was more valuable than it is now, because the city could not spread nearly as far as any modern municipality. Rapid transit did not exist. Even if the Roman plebeians could afford wheeled transportation, which they could not, Roman law forbade the use of chariots within the city itself during the day. Every possible inch of land was used.
Shabby shacks staggered five, six, and seven stories into the air; rickety bridges of sleeping rooms spanned the narrow alleys between buildings; projecting excrescences of bedrooms hung shakily out over the River Tiber itself. The people who lived in them were crammed into tiny dark rooms, with scant halls and few windows. In the summer they stank and sweated. In the winter they stank and froze.
There was no hour in one of those tenements when its inhabitants could be sure of living to see the next. Fire was a constant danger. If a drunken plebeian on the ground floor kicked over a brazier in his sleep, the inhabitants of the upper stories were quite certain to roast. The buildings were tinder and there were no fire escapes. There were no fire departments, either---or anyway, none whose motives were above suspicion. One man paid for and equipped a rather large fire department to answer the alarms of all comers, but it was not a philanthropy. Did a fire threaten your building, he would come and offer to buy it from you---at distress-goods prices. If you came to terms quickly enough, and he secured tide, then his firemen would proceed to put out the flames.
Fire killed countless thousands, but fire was hardly necessary to murder Rome's tenement dwellers. The buildings themselves were always agreeable to collapse. Roman architecture gave its marvelous arch and stone dome to the ages; but such refinements were not wasted on the tenements of the poor.
The streets of Rome were crowded by day and frightful at night. Most of Rome's commerce was carried on in the open air, and all of it, according to Juvenal, seemed to involve poking someone in the ribs or screaming in his ear., Jews in yellow turbans conducted banking operations on street corners; porters carried food and goods to the imperial palaces; black Nubian litter-bearers, most valued of slaves, raced from law-court to bath with their wealthy owners. Pigs wandered freely through the streets. So did dogs---some of them rabid. Wine merchants ladled drinks out of counter vats, like a New York candy store dispensing egg creams. Prostitutes, dieir hair dyed the obligatory blonde or wearing yellow wigs, solicited trade outside their tiny individual places of business---single rooms, cot wide and man long; there was no waste space in a Roman brothel. At night the jostling crowd diminished, but there was no hour when the Roman streets were empty. At night the ban against carts and wagons was lifted so that heavy shipments of food and goods could come into the city, and wheels clattered on the rough pavement until daybreak. And at night, too, there were the ruffians and the thieves. It was dangerous to walk about Rome after dark, even with a bodyguard. Not all noble Romans minded that, A later Caesar thought it was rather interesting; in fact, he liked to masquerade as one of the ruffians, beating and stabbing late wayfarers as he roamed the streets---with a detachment of soldiers close by in case there was resistance.
And yet there was much joy to be had in Rome, and much beauty. There was a whole prescribed round of feasts and holidays. In February there was the Lupercalia when naked men ran about beating every woman they met with goatskin whips. (It was to make the women fertile.) April had a ceremony of leaping over bonfires called the Parilia; in May the Vestal Virgins tossed straw scarecrows into the Tiber for the river god; in June came the feast of the goddess Fortune, and all Rome went revelling down the river in boats to her temple. The Saturnalia, celebrated at about our Christmas time, was a wild revel during which masters humorously waited on slaves and almost anything could be said or done. And New Year's was the great day of rejoicing and gifts, when decent Romans ate honey out of snow-white jars and brought presents to Caesar. (Some Caesars balanced their annual budget with the gifts.)
The beauty was all about---provided you didn't mind the reek of the tenements and the narrow streets. There were stately temples and great aqueducts. They were well built as well as beautiful---parts of the aqueducts still stand, so does at least one of the temples (Agrippa's own offering, which we call the Pantheon.)
Agrippa, on the orders of Augustus, constructed great aqueducts to bring water to the city, and helped rebuild the temples.
Augustus was a great builder. At the end of his long reign he observed with pride: "I found Rome brick, and left it marble." What he built was beautiful. Some of it still stands, in fragments. Apart from the marble temples and halls, there were open spaces, statues and columns, great baths and amphitheaters. It was not all dirt and jostle and smells in Rome. Some things about it were godlike.
This is the city in which Tiberius lived. In its teeming warrens there surely would be a place for him.
Emperor-candidate or not, Tiberius was certainly in the very highest ranks of Roman society. Rome was rigidly stratified, almost like an army, with its privates, its non-coms, its commissioned officers, and its generals. Tiberius was at the very least a general.
A Roman belonged to a class. He might hope to rise or fear to fall, but there was never any question in anyone's mind what class he was in. In America today most of us would have to stop and think if asked what our class was; in Russia such a question would be against the law, at least in theory. Rome tolerated no such slipshod social organization. You were senatorial, equestrian, plebeian, freedman, or slave---one of those five or no Roman at all.
Tiberius was of the senatorial class, and that was the top of the heap. Even Augustus, as we have noted, pretended to be just another senator---a particularly important senator maybe but really just one of the boys. In Republican times the Senate actually did rule Rome. For convenience sake, each year the Senate elected two of their number to be "consuls" ---that is, to do the actual work of governing; but the term was only a year, and it was not usual for any one senator to hold that office more than two or three times. And in any case, the Senate controlled the consuls.
The senators came from the oldest, most powerful families in Rome. Periodically their numbers were pruned down, to keep only the very best; occasionally, new names were added ---the "new men," as they were called; usually, foreigners of particular distinction who had received Roman citizenship. (Even natives of other parts of Italy were foreigners to the Senate of the Roman Republic.)
Just below the senators ranked the knights---the equestrian order, so called because at one time it had been the duty of every knight to provide a horse. Even in the time of Augustus each knight was required to ride a horse in certain processions. Knighthood was more a perquisite of wealth than a matter of breeding. If a man's estate amounted to $20,000 he was a knight (unless he happened already to be a senator). If it didn't, he wasn't. Sometimes a generous rich man would help a needy knight replenish his coffers to keep him on the list; sometimes Augustus and other rulers threw revenues his way for the same purpose. Under the Republic the knights had had a parliament of their own, by no means as powerful as the Senate but by law entitled to some consideration in the government of Rome. Knights were entitled to wear a gold ring and a narrow purple stripe on their tunics. The senatorial stripe of purple (actually it was more red than purple) was broad. Lower classes could wear no purple stripe at all.
Below the knights and the senators were the common people; they dressed as they pleased. Sometimes Roman lawmakers thought of making the slaves, for example, wear some special costume; but always they retreated from the idea. It was good common sense to let the slaves wear what freedmen and plebeians wore"; if slaves wore some distinguishing mark, they would realize how numerous they were, and that would be an invitation to trouble.
The plebeians were freeborn Romans who didn't have enough money to be knights, or enough connections to be senators. There were very many of them, and they were mostly quite poor. About two hundred thousand of them, in fact, would have gone hungry if it hadn't been for the Emperor's free handouts of wheat (that is the "bread" of the famous prescription "bread and circuses"); even with the dole, they lived badly. Most of the plebeians were unemployed, but not all---artisans and professionals competed with slaves for the available jobs.
Below the plebeians, in theory at least, were the freedmen. Many freedmen were in comfortable conditions, and some were fantastically rich. It was the law that a freed slave could not become a knight or a senator---except, in special cases, with permission---and that was annoying. But there was no law that a freed slave could not make a fortune. Quite a few did. Quite a few, on the other hand, lived more wretchedly than the poorest plebeian or die most lowly slave, because under Roman law a "freedman" might be set free only in part; by manumitting his slave, an owner could be relieved of the need to feed him and house him, and yet if he chose he could so word the release that he retained the right to collect most of what the ex-slave earned. For Roman law was based on property rights. Slaves were property.
And slaves were also the single most numerous class in Rome.
Every war that Rome fought---and she was endlessly fighting---brought long trains of slaves back with the conquerors: the captured enemy soldiers, the inhabitants of sacked villages, the slaves once owned by the enemy, now under new masters but slaves still. Perhaps this was the main source for slaves, but by no means was it the only one. A father could sell his children into slavery if he chose, and many plebeian fathers, driven by poverty, did. Convicted felons were often enslaved ---when they were not sent to die in the arenas. Slaves begot slaves; every child of a slave woman was born a slave, even if the father was free. Very often the father was free, for a major employment for slave women was to solace their masters.
A slave had no rights---none at all. A slave did not have the right to his own life; his master could kill him at will. A slave did not have the right to be fed, to be housed, or to be treated when sick; if the master chose to feed his slaves, that was prudent---slaves cost money, after all---but not obligatory. A slave could be whipped, branded, castrated," raped or, for that matter, eaten alive for dinner. Vedius Polio fed refractory slaves to fish, and ate the fish. Society might bring some pressure to bear on a particularly monstrous master, but the law could not.
The most important right a slave did not have was die right to raise a hand in self-defense. If a slave, driven by whatever desperate cause, so far forgot himself as to kill his master, the penalty was death---not only for the murderer but for every slave the dead man had owned.
Rome was built on slaves---over three hundred thousand of them in Rome itself, more than half the population. Everyone of any importance owned at least one or two. So did many persons of no importance. Eveu slaves could own slaves, if they could somehow scrape up the price. It was slave labor that dug Rome's mines, rowed Rome's ships, worked Rome's factories, served Rome's homes, tilled Rome's farms. All dirty and dangerous work was done by slaves, and there was plenty of work that was dirty and dangerous.
And yet most slaves were not overworked. The keeper of the mistress' scented bath oil, for example, could work at that particular task only when the mistress was at her bath. But as she might want her bath a little early or a little late the slave would be on call all through the day and night.
The slaves were the greatest single form of wealth in Rome. The great fortunes were mostly made out of slaves---a conquering general could sell off his war prisoners for profit. An average slave was worth perhaps two hundred dollars--- though on the battlefield, at the source of supply, the price was lower, of course. Sometimes it was as little as fifty cents a head; it is the middlemen who drive up prices! Even in Rome some slaves were cheaper. You could pick up a mangy, vicious farm laborer for twenty dollars. Or you could spend upwards of fifty thousand for a skilled Greek professional.
Not only labor, but art and entertainment came largely from slaves. Greek sculptors were often slaves; so were physicians, so were tutors of the young. A deformed slave was nice to have as a sort of conversation piece; it was amusing to see the legless ones scuttle about or the hunchbacked dwarfs dressed in ceremonial tunics. Sometimes the deformities were created.
For the sexual sport of the masters the slaves were always readily at hand---all ages and both sexes. There were laws requiring chastity for Roman women, but there were no such laws for Roman men---unless, of course, they made the mistake of seducing a Roman matron. That was a mistake which many made, but there was no real need for it. The slaves were much more convenient and there was no danger of unhappy consequences. Indeed, there might be consequences that were quite happy, in the form of a new baby slave. This was the morality of the worser parts of our own antebellum South; it was also the morality of Rome; it is the morality of slaveowners always and everywhere.
Slaves could be made to work outside their masters' homes or enterprises. Why not? Sometimes they were allowed to keep part of their earnings, sometimes not. Some of the yellow-haired prostitutes that lined the Roman streets were slaves--- bought by a special class of slaveowner called a leno, trained in the necessary arts and provided with a place of business--- but they were a minority. Not that the law hampered this operation; but the profits were very low.
Slaves had not ordinarily even such privileges as marriage or the right to serve with the legions. There was little future for them. Their finest hope was somehow to earn or to be given their freedom, and that hope depended entirely on the whim of the master. More than that, if, once freed, they offended him, they could be returned to slavery without further ado.
More direct methods of easing their lot were extremely dangerous. Murdering masters was most unpopular---not only with masters but with slaves, for the reasons aforementioned.
It was every slave's prayer that his master would die a perfectly straightforward natural death; because if there was any suspicion of a servile murder, the first step in investigating the facts would be to put all likely slaves to the torture. A slave could, of course, run away. But a runaway slave was hunted with great persistence by the state. Augustus alone caught thirty thousand of them. If a runaway slave could be returned to his master, he was; if he couldn't, he was crucified; while he was being held pending the results of a search for his owner, he was ordinarily worked half to death, sometimes entirely to death, in a special establishment for criminal slaves and fugitives called an ergastulum. Quite often slaves preferred crucifixion to return, or to the ergasiulum.
Yet the life of the slave was not always miserable. Quite often masters were decent, gentle, and humane. Quite often the masters loved their slaves, tended them when ill, and moumed them when they died; there are many cases where masters protected their slaves and where slaves voluntarily died for their masters. It is a touching and beautiful thing, the love that sprang up in some places between master and slave; but on what a foul manure it was nourished!
V
In 27 B.C. Tiberius was fifteen years old. He was a strong youth, tall and broad-shouldered. He had a pimply complexion, but teen-agers often do. Like his mother, his nose had the Roman hook, very pronounced.
Highborn Romans learned early to fight and to womanize. Tiberius already had his own personal slaves, including female ones, to experiment on, He was a little young to get married, at fifteen, but not very; and certainly he was not too young to think about it. His first marriage would be arranged for him, but there would be no harm in indicating a preference. There was, for instance, that pretty child Julia. Although she was his stepsister there was no blood relationship; her father
happened to be married to his mother. Of course, she was only eleven---but Livia had not been much older when she married for the first time---and Julia was very attractive and very gay.
Also she was the daughter of the Emperor.
Tiberius himself was not very gay, even as a youth. He had no skill at showing joy. "Mad, kneaded with blood." But he was as well educated as any youth of his time could be; he had learned his quota of Greek verse, had studied such technical scientific subjects as divination, astrology, and the interpretation of dreams, had schooled himself to write poetry and construct literary letters. What he needed now was a little practical experience---soldiering experience---and in the fall of the year 27 B.C. Augustus provided it. It was time for the Emperor to inspect outposts in Gaul, and he took Tiberius and his step cousin, Marcellus, along.
The boys saw no fighting to speak of. Probably they were disappointed; probably Augustus planned it that way. They needed to learn that expanding the Roman frontier was a process that was not completed when a battle was won. After a military victory came the hard job of consolidation, absorption, exploitation. Julius Caesar had conquered the hairy, godless Gallic savages on the field, but there was much to be done before the colonies began to carry their fair share of the load for Rome. Augustus took the boys from outpost to outpost, setting up schools to teach Latin and sending out parties of census takers to prepare the Gauls for the necessary burden of taxation.
They spent months in Gaul, rebuilding its wretched little cities and attending to the endless niggling details of trans-muting wilderness into Rome. When the boys came back they were men.
It was time for them to begin to take part in governing the city. There were jobs for youths like them---minor magistracies, where there was enough responsibility to give them good practice, but where a mistake would do no permanent harm. Marcellus was eighteen years old now, a bright, quick young man with a complicated personality. He was easy to love, warm and outgoing, but he was also beginning to have a certain high sense of his own importance. Tiberius was a year younger, with a slow, methodical way of speaking that was rather disturbing. He seemed to pick his words as though he wanted to conceal his meaning rather than to make it plain. He would stop in the middle of a sentence and wait, silent, looking at the man he was talking to, until he found the exact word he wanted. It was a mannerism he might have learned from the Emperor---they said that Augustus liked to carry on important conversation in writing. Even with his wife, Augustus wrote out the more complicated parts of what he wanted to say, and then read them to her. But in Tiberius such silences were disturbing. He made people nervous.
It was time the boys had jobs, and Augustus gave them both jobs; but he gave Marcellus something else. He gave him the hand of his pretty fourteen-year-old daughter, Julia.
The wedding was a great social event. Augustus turned the arrangements over to the second greatest man in the kingdom, Marcus Agrippa, the hero of Actium and of the battle against Sextus Pompey. Agrippa did his best for the young couple, and the wedding was a great success, but in the process the great admiral discovered that the cheerful bridegroom had a sharp edge to his tongue. The two collided. In such a conflict Agrippa could not lose---he was the Emperor's most valued friend; but neither could the Emperor's son-in-law, especially as he happened also to be the Emperor's nephew.
Agrippa chose not to take offense.
Young Marcellus was impudent, but he was also a bridegroom; it was his wedding, after all. Agrippa let him have his way. Youth must be served. Agrippa went even farther, and kept himself out of sight as much as possible.
On the other hand, Agrippa got along very well indeed with Tiberius. He understood Tiberius' character better even than Augustus. Tiberius had been a good student, and Agrippa appreciated his culture; Tiberius was methodical and sure, and Agrippa had fought enough battles to value a man who could be relied on. Such a man could do great things in Rome. Perhaps he would not be Emperor, but he would make a fine magistrate, a useful general ... he would especially, thought Agrippa, make a very satisfactory son-in-law. For Agrippa had a daughter of marriageable age--- around fifteen---named Vipsania Agrippina.
Agrippa discussed the subject with Augustus and with Tiberius. Augustus was agreeable. Tiberius was overjoyed. It was what he had wanted all along, for Tiberius was in love.
The Romans maintained in their minds an orderly separation between love and marriage on one hand, between love and sexual performance on the other. Marriage was a business arrangement, sex was harmless fun; love was something entirely different. It was disturbing. It was a sort of madness. Catullus and Ovid might write poetry about love but it had nothing to do with marriage. Marriage meant cementing an alliance between two families, or acquiring a suitable mother for one's children, or even collecting a big enough dowry to clear up some worrisome debts. To marry for love was not unheard of entirely, for there was the example of Augustus himself and Livia. But. it was not common. A man who loved his wife was looked on somewhat as we look on a man who drinks too much; the poor fellow can't help it but it is a serious handicap all the same. Tiberius didn't care. Tiberius was happy.
The young couples set up housekeeping in Augustus' great palace. There was plenty of room, which was fortunate. Agrippa's own palatial home burned to the ground, and the Emperor invited his valued friend to move in. That was not so fortunate. Living in the same house with Marcellus made it hard to avoid an occasional conflict. Marcellus didn't try. He was nearly twenty now. Everything he touched turned to gold. Augustus loved him, noble Romans fawned on him, his future was assured, and he didn't see any reason why he should pretend to be impressed by old Agrippa. Agrippa did again what he had done before. He got out of the way. He cooked up a job that needed to be done off in the eastern provinces, and left. No one was deceived, of course. It was only old Agrippa's extremely proper way of avoiding trouble that could embarrass the Emperor.
At the time of Agrippa's departure Rome was struck by a plague. The plague was typhoid fever.
Typhoid fever is the product of filth and pollution. The Romans were impeccably clean in their own persons---think of the countless huge public batiis---and Agrippa's own aqueducts brought fine, clear water from the mountains. But the stink of sewage was everywhere in Rome. The inhabitants of the rickety upper stories of the tenements dumped slops in the street---it was an occupational risk for Roman pedestrians. When typhoid came to the city it was bound to spread. A thousand Romans fell sick---ten thousand---finally fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, no one really knew how many thousand. Slaves got it and so did senators. They fell sick, suffered what treatment the Greek physicans prescribed (baths in cold water and cold compresses were popular), and, much of the time, they died.
The Emperor was stricken. Agrippa was summoned--- hurriedly, for it had come to Augustus for the first time that the remote day when he would pass on his Empire might arrive much sooner than he had planned. But who should be the imperial heir? Augustus went methodically over the candidates with his wife; no, not Tiberius; not Tiberius' brother, Drusus; not even Marcellus, in spite of his being married to Julia. The boys were coming along nicely, but---they were boys. Marcellus was only twenty. Augustus remembered inheriting an Empire when he himself was young, and the struggle that followed had crippled Rome for more than a decade. A young man had not the circle of loyal associates or the machinery of power that would permit him to hold on to a throne. Regretfully Augustus discarded them all, and only one man was left.
Sick and feverish, Augustus called for Agrippa. It had to be Agrippa. Augustus made out his will, but that was not enough; he beckoned Agrippa to his side and handed over his signet ring, the symbol of his principate.
And then, anticlimatically, Augustus began to recover.
The cold water treatment of Antonius Musa, his Greek physician, must have had some merit to it---anyway, it wasn't in itself fatal---because Augustus made a complete recovery. Agrippa gave him back his ring and started off again, out of the way of the annoying young Marcellus. He didn't have to go far. The plague was not yet over. Marcellus caught it and, though Antonius Musa did his best, Marcellus died. He was only twenty, and he was mourned by Augustus, Octavia, his mother, and Julia, his widow; but not by Agrippa. Not then. A little later on, even Agrippa came to wish the boy had lived.
Because the Emperor's widowed daughter could not be left long without a husband, Augustus looked high and low for a suitable match; but one young man was too stupid and another had the wrong sort of family. Besides, coming so close to dying himself had made Augustus think very hard about a successor. He wanted things to go smoothly when he died. So he married Julia off to Agrippa himself.
Julia was not yet eighteen and Agrippa was in his forties. Agrippa was sober, settled, hard working; Julia was flighty, pretty, and gay. The late Marcellus had been a headstrong boy but an exciting one, and as Agrippa was not the sort of husband to provide much excitement, it became necessary to Julia to stir it up for herself.
This concerned Tiberius somewhat---after all, Agrippa was his father-in-law and Julia, besides being his stepmother-in-law, was also his step-half-sister, by virtue of Livia's marriage to Augustus. But it didn't concern hirh much. He was too happy.
Tiberius lived to be seventy-eight years old, and in all those years there were less than a dozen when he was happy. Golden years! He had a wife he loved; the beloved wife gave him a fine son, whom he named Drusus Junior, after his brother. He had the companionship of his brother, too; Drusus the Elder was now also a man, and the brothers had always been close; now they worked together in their careers as they had played together in the nursery. And as important as all these things to a slow, sober man, Tiberius had his work. He was given troops and a mission.
Tiberius was twenty-two years old when he got his first military command, and in a way of speaking it was the most important job in the Empire. It wasn't a fighting job, exactly; it was a job for diplomacy backed by armed force, and because of the particular Roman scale of values it could make or break the man who did it.
The assignment was to recover the lost standards of a legion.
In Parthia---we would call it Persia, though the borders of this combative outpost shifted with every battle---a Roman column had been surprised and defeated a generation before. Every man was lost, killed, or captured, but that was not the worst of the affair. What was worse was that the legion's standards had been lost to the Parthians.
The standards of the legions---bronze eagles on a long staff ---were to the Romans what the flag was to a cavalry regiment in the mannerly wars of the 19th century. They were the heart of the legion. Their importance was only symbolic, but that symbol meant everything to Romans. The eagles must never be captured or lost.
Any common Roman legionary would gladly die to keep his standard safe. There was no question about it. If a standard bearer fell, the nearest man must seize the eagle and carry on. That meant he could no longer fight well enough to protect himself, in the hand-to-hand combat that was common in that sort of war. That meant death. But no one faltered.
If troops ever allowed their standards to be taken, or retreated leaving their standards on the ground, they were hopeless outcasts forever. There were very few such troops. In fact, so deep was the devotion of the soldiers to the bronze images that a favorite tactic of some officers, when things looked worst, was to fling the standard into the heart of the enemy. They knew that their tired and wavering troops would get the standards back or die.
What made Tiberius' mission .important was that those Roman standards in Parthia had been lost for thirty years. He carried the mission off successfully, but it was a little disappointing. The Parthians didn't resist. They offered a bargain; there was a Parthian named Tiridates who had tried to organize a revolt against the Parthian king," failed, and fled to Rome. The standards for the traitor. Tiberius glumly made the deal (he was probably not as glum as Tiridates, at that). He sent the long-lost standards back to Rome and was applauded, but he was cheated of a triumph.
For his triumph he had to look elsewhere, and he turned to the barbarian frontiers to the north.
North of Rome lay the trackless European forests of the Gauls, the Germans, the Pannonians and the other hairy illiterates who fought for pleasure, built no cities to be taken, lived chaste lives with a single wife, and countered the superb disciplined and sophisticated tactics of the Roman legions with a fierce talent for ambushes. Rome had bitten many a piece out of Europe already. Yet reputations could still be made, fighting against the savages; it was the right place for Tiberius.
In 12 B.C. Tiberius asked for and got the job of pacifying Pannonia.
This is country close to Italy, lying along the eastern Adriatic sea. Modern Jugoslavia is part of it. The fact that it was still wild while far Spain and the countries along the southern rim of the Mediterranean were long since conquered is a good indication of the fighting abilities of the Pannonians. A war against those barbarians was like a war against smoke. There was nothing to strike against; but out of the smoke came arrows and yelling warriors when you least expected them.
To beat the Pannonians a general had to be cautious and bold, flexible and sure. Tiberius was all these things. He was careful of ambushes; he was daring in pursuit of a fleeing foe; he held back his men until the time was right, and then he struck hard. He was a very good general. He was even liked, for once in his life. His fellow officers joked with him; they called him Biberius Caldius Mero (instead of Tiberius Claudius Nero), which in Latin means something like: "Drinker of wine with no water added." It seems to have been a friendly joke, die kind of man-to-man joke one might hear in an officers' mess. Tiberius was one Roman general who took some thought for the soldiers who were wounded. Heaven knows what poisonous messes the physicans prescribed, but at least Tiberius tried to have physicians present, and Utters and carriages for the casualties, too.
For himself, Tiberius in the field was almost Spartan. He would not use a litter but traveled on horseback; he would not carry couches and divans with him, and ate sitting up. Romans hated to eat sitting up. It was crude and it wasn't comfortable.
Tiberius was a model general, and he fought like a Robert E. Lee. He found the enemy and destroyed them. He ended the revolt. He brought captives home to Rome, and he was awarded that dearest of wishes, a triumph.
No more riding the trace-horses for another's glory! Now the triumph was all for Tiberius, the cheering crowds and the processions, the games and the festivals! He had earned them all fairly.
Tiberius had nearly everything he could want, including happiness; but now he began to lose his dearest possessions, one by one.
First there was his brother, Drusus the Elder.
Drusus was four years younger than Tiberius, but the boys had been very close; as men, they shared a strong brotherly love. Drusus was also well married and also a general. Both young men were doing great things on the frontiers.
The arena for Drusus was Germany. What Tiberius had faced in Pannonia, his brother faced in Germany. If anything, Drusus had the harder job, for there was more of it. To the Romans, "German" included nearly all of Europe north of the Alps. It was not possible for armies to occupy all that vast area, not even Roman armies. The problem was to know where to stop. There weren't any cities to take. There were not even villages of any size worth mentioning. The barbarians built their homes where they chose; it was rare for one house to be within eyeshot of another. Egypt had fallen when Alexandria was taken; there was nothing to take m Germany. The Germans would be defeated only when the bulk of their fighting men were dead.
As a starter, Drusus looked for a river to serve as a frontier, found it in the Elbe, and pushed his troops toward it, killing as many Germans as possible in the process.
He succeeded, but he paid with his own life.
No barbarian killed Drusus. He fell from his horse.
It was a minor accident, but Drusus hurt himself internally and he died of it. The Romans knew nothing of stopping internal bleeding and had only the dimmest appreciation of what the various organs were for. Drusus had what care was available in those times, but it did not good. He lingered on for a while and died.
The news reached Tiberius in the field. He dropped his campaign and rode day and night through the forests to Germany. It was four hundred miles, and he rode it in four days, reaching Drusus just in time to see him die.
All that Tiberius could do for his younger brother was to bring his body home to Rome.
Tiberius walked in front of the coffin all the long way. If he had always seemed dour, now he was tragic. What love Tiberius was capable of he had given to two people, his brother and his wife. Now he had lost one of them.
And when he returned to Rome he lost the other.
The history of the Roman emperors is full of repetitions, events that echo other events decades past.
Tiberius had seen his own mother, pregnant with Drusus, snatched away from her husband because Augustus willed it.
Now Augustus willed that Tiberius lose Vipsania Agrippina. Vipsania was also pregnant again.
But the will of Augustus was the law of Rome. Agrippa was dead. Julia was widowed. The year of mourning had passed, and now Julia needed a husband to quiet her passionate nature.
Tiberius was elected.
It was essential to the plans of Augustus for his succession that Julia find a suitable husband. Tiberius was not the kind of man Augustus would choose as a successor, but he would do to raise one. Agrippa had been decent enough to leave half-a-dozen children when he died, three of them boys. They were young. But time would correct that. And if Augustus died before they were of ripe age, Tiberius could care for them and preserve them for the throne.
So Augustus hoped. It was not a very good hope, but it was the best he had. Agrippa had been his first choice to succeed, and he died; Drusus had been his second choice, and he died; there was no third choice except the baby grandsons. Augustus had to work with what he had.
Then, Julia may have had something to do with the choice of Tiberius.
Roman gossip said that even while she was Tiberius' stepmother-in-law, she nursed an incestuous passion for Tiberius. It sounds reasonable. Roman gossip, largely borne' out by history, said that she nursed some sort of passion for almost everyone else. Why should Tiberius be an exception?
Julia was a child of light, but in the first year or two of marriage she tried to be a good wife to Tiberius. He was a stick. But he was a young stick, and therefore a considerable improvement over the previous incumbent. She even went with him to subdue the Dalmatians, who were acting up again. She lived with him in the field, in the great scarlet tents proper to a Roman general's wife. She bore him a child, a little boy who died.
Even in scarlet tents, with slaves and entertainers, the Dalmatian coast was nothing like Rome. Julia liked to laugh, she liked to be free. She was twenty-seven years old when her father married her to Tiberius. She was twice a widow and she had borne five children, but she wasn't ready to settle down. Not a bit.
Julia was a pretty and cultured woman, and in the very high Roman circles into which she was born a woman could assert her independence, within reason. Julia had a great deal of independence. She liked to wear fine immodest silks instead of proper homespun---shocking stuff, the silk, it clung to the figure. Julia was not ashamed of her figure. She liked to mingle with bright young people, even bright older people like the poet Ovid. She dined with companies of men, which was a scandal; a Roman dinner party was for men only; women were present, but only as servants, dancers, and the like. Julia didn't care.
Perhaps Marcellus could have handled her, for they were very much alike. But Marcellus was dead. Agrippa handled her well enough too, in a way; with that enviable talent of his for staying out of die way, he managed to close his eyes to what his wife was doing. The five children she bore him all resembled him, and that was a subject for racy jest at Julia's cheerful parties. She joked back at her guests: "I never take passengers on board until the cargo is in my hold." In her circle of lightheads and gay blades her jest was widely quoted. Perhaps even Agrippa appreciated it. At any rate, he didn't divorce her, as he easily could have; and married to him, Julia was more or less happy. But Agrippa died too.
When Julia married Tiberius she must have thought that her happiness was assured. He was young and good-looking; maybe she would have another playmate like Marcellus. At worst, as Tiberius was somewhat solemn and somewhat slow, she could turn him into an indulgent wedded father like Agrippa. A year on the Dalmatian coast showed her the error of her ways; and then they returned to Rome and she discovered her motherin-law.
Livia was the leading woman in Rome. As Julia's stepmother she had been no particular problem, but as a motherin-law she suddenly became a partisan in the enemy camp. Tiberius and his new bride did not get along. Livia took her son's part.
Empires tremble when women quarrel, especially when the women are the Emperor's loved wife and the Emperor's loved daughter. As with Marcellus and Agrippa, the conflict was between two persons neither of whom could lose. They were too powerful. They were utterly secure. Livia was Augustus' co-regent---the Senate had even voted to change her name to "Augusta" to mark the fact that she shared his rule. Augustus leaned on her for advice, needed her to run his palace, loved her for her beauty and her wisdom. She surely was wise--- not only in the business of running an Empire, but in handling a husband. She explained to a friend how she kept Augustus' love: "By being scrupulously chaste, cheerfully doing what my husband wishes, never meddling with his affairs, and pretending to know nothing about his women." And Julia was quite as secure. She was loved deeply by Augustus, as she was loved by half the men in Rome---because she was meant to be loved.
Around the women conflicting parties formed. Livia, with Tiberius and the Romans of good old family and position, took the side of decency, order, tradition. Julia's circle was the young, hard-living set. The Emperor was somewhere in between. When Livia was with him he could thunder against immorality, pass laws against adultery, forbid the waste of money on foolish frills. When Julia was with him he could see nothing but Julia.
Tiberius seethed, suffered, and went out to fight wars. He was a good general, though a plodder, and he usually won, but even more important, this kept him from tangling with Julia. That suited Julia very well. -
It was all fun to Julia. She would have got along very well with Mark Antony. Too bad that the Inimitable Liver died before her time. A change in husbands made no change-in Julia's ways. She flirted and flighted on a grander scale than before. Tiberius mourned.
Once, in Rome between battles, he happened to meet Vipsania at the home of a friend.
She was lost to him forever---Augustus could not have her left available, so he arranged her remarriage immediately to Asinius Gallus, a fine Senator---but Tiberius fell dumb when he saw her. His awkward, hesitant speech dried up entirely. It was embarrassing to everyone; Vipsania left, as gracefully as she could, but Tiberius followed her through die streets, weeping.
The Emperor heard about it, and frowned. He disliked the scandal. No one had dared tell him, quite, about the scandals of his own daughter. He knew she was light-hearted, but he didn't know that she was seen carousing drunkenly through the streets late at night. The Emperor called in Tiberius and laid down the law: As he couldn't control himself, he was never to see Vipsania again.
Of course, Tiberius could have ended his troubles at any time, if he chose. There was a remedy in law close at hand.
With Livia behind him, Augustus himself had put forth a law to control adultery. It was not his only attempt to reform Roman morals---he had legislated against extravagant dress and other wastes---but this law had more teeth in it than the others.
The law was called "the Julian Law on adultery"---named after Julia herself, joked the scurrilous gossips. But it wasn't. It was named after the family of Augustus, the Julian family. It provided severe penalties for unchaste wives, and even for their lovers. It proclaimed the responsibility of the husband to denounce his erring wife to the courts; and if the husband failed to do so within sixty days, it became the duty of the adulteress's father. If the father likewise failed, any Roman could bring the miscreant to justice.
How Tiberius must have hoped that some Roman would!
The law was there. Why didn't someone use it? But no one did, for the same reasons that bound Tiberius. Julia was the daughter of one Emperor, and it was all but certain that she would be the mother of the next. The law could be used to crush her, but the man who wielded it would earn the sure hatred of the mightiest men in Rome.
Tiberius' best escape was war. He went to Germany, and in a long, bloody campaign finished the work his brother had started. But victory brought him only glory. He was still young enough.---and he was still human enough---to want happiness. But that was gone. Tiberius reached majesty before he died, but the golden years of simple, human pleasures were already behind him.
If war gave Tiberius a job to take his mind off his troubles, it gave Julia something too. It gave her more freedom than before.
Not privacy; she could never have that, for it did not exist in Rome. All of Rome's intrigues and adulteries were carried on in a noonday brightness of publicity, always. Every Roman home of the upper class was crammed with people. One cannot own a thousand slaves and ever get very far from slave eyes and ears. Besides the slaves, there were the "clients"--- the hangers-on, the moochers and leeches; the legacy-hunters and the frank beggars for bread. The more high-ranking the household, the greater its size. Every slave and client had a mourh. Fear made slaves careful, but nothing could keep them quiet.
So Julia frolicked, and Rome buzzed with talk.
It was a galling life for a proud, sullen man. Tiberius resented it. Even more he resented the fact that he was helpless to end it.
And he seemed to be losing what favor he had in the eyes of Augustus. Julia did that to him too; once Tiberius had showed her that he would not be as blind as Agrippa, would not pretend to a happy home, Julia began to make it her policy to ruin die man she had married. It wasn't hard. Augustus had always found Tiberius hard to leave. The old Emperor admitted that Tiberius was a great general, but he didn't like him. He acknowledged that Tiberius gave good advice and counsel, but found him a crashing bore. "Mud, kneaded with blood." The man had no presence and no popularity with the crowds.
Tiberius was not shunned entirely; in fact, he received many honors. He earned them. He was made a tribune, one of the highest offices in Rome, and given die office not for the customary one year but for an almost unheard-of five. More glory; it was not what Tiberius wanted. And, as it was all at the pleasure of Augustus, Tiberius knew that it could all be taken away.
With a thoroughly unfaithful wife, a cooling stepfather, and stepsons who might soon have power of life and death over him, Tiberius became more moody and more queer. He kept to himself when in Rome; he stayed out of Rome as much as he could; he was trying to find a way out.
It occurred to Tiberius that there was one move he might make.
Suppose he left Rome. Suppose he took himself far enough from Julia that she would have no fear at all of what he might say or do. Suppose he gave up his armies and stayed away from the Emperor's councils. Wouldn't that have a good effect? Surely Julia would go too far, so far that Augustus would have to act and punish her. And surely the Emperor would miss him.
It was a perfectly reasonable plan, but what was wrong with it was Augustus. In the year 6 B.C. Tiberius abruptly pulled up stakes and sailed for die island of Rhodes. He left all his problems behind him. He left Julia to do as she liked---knowing perfectly well what that would be. He left his mother Livia, who was aware of his problems but powerless to help; and he left the Emperor---who was unaware, and furious.
What was the lout trying to do? Steal out of Rome like a fugitive, turn his back on Rome's problems, take away Rome's best military leader? Augustus fumed, raged, cooled off, and made his decision. Very well, let him go; but he could never come back.
The Tiberius who went to the island of Rhodes was a grim, angry, powerful man. Tiberius was now thirty-six years old. He was at the very height of his powers. He was fit to rule an Empire, conduct a great war, or govern a continent of barbarians; but all his ability and strength began to turn inwards.
Rhodes was Greek, not Roman. The inhabitants were part of the Empire---practically all the world was part of the Empire---but on the island they spoke Doric Greek, they followed Greek customs, the homes were of Greek design, and the natives wore Grecian dress. That suited Tiberius perfectly. He held a sullen, slow-burning anger against Rome, which had made him a cuckold and an outcast. On Rhodes Tiberius was in a small puddle, but in it he was a large frog.
When Tiberius was elected tribune for a five-year term, shortly before his voluntary exile, he was given one of the most important posts in the Empire. A tribune was exempt from punishment. He could not be held to account under the law. His person was inviolate. He was entitled to respect wherever he went. (Of course, a mischievous tribune might have to face an accounting when his term was over and his immunities ended.) Tiberius would have been quite within his rights to insist on the privileges of his office even on Rhodes: ceremonial dress, a herald to clear the way for him when he walked out, the traditional courtesies that went with the tribune's power. Tiberius did not. He wore the dress of a simple Greek. He mingled with the natives in the marketplace and allowed them to speak to him as equals. He even accepted insults---sometimes. There was a Greek literary teacher named Diogenes (not the famed one who sought an honest man.) On Saturdays this Diogenes lectured to anyone who cared to hear. Tiberius came to his villa one day and the proud Greek sent a slave out to turn him away. "Come back on the seventh day," the slave ordered the tribune, and the tribune meekly turned away. Sometimes Tiberius was less forgiving. What a learned Greek could do, a mere plebeian could not. On one such occasion Tiberius went back to the villa where he was staying for his official robes, and came back in his role of rank and privilege; he had the impudent fellow jailed.
Rhodes turned itself inside out to welcome him. Tiberius built himself a great, fine villa, and while it was under construction he was welcomed in the homes of the best families--- not only himself, but all his train of servants and followers. Tiberius might not be on the best of terms with Augustus, but he was very close to the purple. Once he went to visit die sick in hospitals, but made the mistake of telling the authorities he was coming. Eager to impress him, they dragged every patient out into die open for his inspection, even the moribund and wretched. Tiberius was horrified. He went from man to man, apologizing, and increased his popularity with the Rhodians.
In his new home Tiberius was hardly lonesome. As he no longer had any cares of war or state, he could devote his thoughts to art and to science. Greek literary men and philosophers were plentiful in Rhodes, and Tiberius' villa always had a few in the guest rooms, ready to debate a literary point with him at dinner or compose an ode in his honor in the morning. Other guest rooms were given to scientists--- we would call them astrologers; but astrology is, after all, the embryo form of astronomy. Tiberius was always fascinated by the study of the stars. He wanted to know what was in store for him, and the astrologers were willing to tell.
Besides the chosen guests, there were the "clients." The ordinary were entitled by custom to their sportula, or daily basket of food, or to its equivalent in money. The legacy-hunters were men whose principal occupation was making friends with the rich in the hope of a bequest. They were quite a problem in Rome. Augustus worried about them, because they had a bad effect; it was pleasant to be cultivated by legacy-hunters, and therefore many rich men deliberately stayed free of marriage and its consequent presumptive heirs in order to enjoy the flattery and attentions of the legacy-hunters. That was bad for the Roman birth rate, always a concern to Augustus. Still, there were many thousands of them. Augustus himself was sometimes called one, by his enemies---at least, it was certain when a friend of Augustus died, the Emperor was visibly mortified if there was no sizable bequest for him in the will. He didn't always accept the money, but he liked to have it offered.
Tiberius, even in exile, had hordes of these sycophants always about him. When he tired of art, science, and flattery, he still did not need to be lonesome. The fact that his wife was far away did not, of course, mean that his sexual life was in any way curtailed. Far from it. It almost seemed that Tiberius set out to show Julia that anything she could do, he could do better---and more variously.
We can almost see Tiberius, living his idler's life on Rhodes. A pleasant hour in the morning, while the clients came to pay their respects and earn their sportula. A brief interlude in his library, among the cedar presses that held his thousands of rolls of books, parchment, and papyrus, while one slave stood with a wax tablet and stylus to write down any thoughts he might have, and another read to him from a favorite work---from, perhaps, one of the Egyptian how-to-do-it manuals of sexual intercourse which he imported from the city of Elephantis. A pleasant light lunch, and a stroll in the marketplace. A lingering hour in the baths, where he could have his choice of conversational partners if his mood was for literature or astrology, or where the surroundings would add a pleasant variety to sex, if that was his mood. Then dinner with whatever guests he liked, reclining on die triclinium, casting dice, talking, or watching dancers and musicians ---or all at once. Then bed and a good night's sleep . . . with his selected woman. Or girl. Or boy. Or several at once.
It sounds like a relaxing existence. We might think that Tiberius would have enjoyed it very much. We know, though, that he was miserable. He was thirty-six years old, at the peak of his powers, and he had nothing to do.
Time did not stand still in Rome, however slowly it might pass for Tiberius on Rhodes.
Augustus was becoming quite an old man. When Tiberius raged away to Rhodes, Augustus was not yet sixty; but time passed, he was beginning to limp, he was in serious pain from stones in his bladder; summers were too hot and winters were too cold. He was at an age where a man begins to feel that if he wants to see his life's work done he'd better get on with it. And he was constantly being interfered with by an annoying women's war that raged around him.
On one side were the light ladies---Julia and her sporting companions, now embarked on a project which they did not regard lightly at all, the destruction of Tiberius. On the other were Livia, the Emperor's wife but also Tiberius' mother. With Livia was Antonia, the widow of the beloved brother Drusus, always as loyal a friend (and astonishingly untouched by scandal) as-Tiberius could have. Both sides attracted followers until most of Rome was entered for or against "the Exile." Julia's sons, Lucius and Gaius, were automatically enrolled against him, for the suspicion was always there that Tiberius might seek to inherit the principate, and Lucius and Gaius were comfortably aware that they had first call. They were still young but old enough to be elected to high civic office, by stretching the law, and they would soon be old enough to become a consul, either of them or both together as partners. Not all of Tiberius' clients and legacy-hunters were idle parasites. Some were spies. The Exile hardly made a move that was not reported to Julia, Gaius, and Lucius. And not all their hangers-on were quite idle, either; one of Gaius' clients offered to go to Rhodes and murder Tiberius if that was his master's pleasure.
The struggle was disturbing, and Augustus tried to stay outside it. He did not want to see Tiberius murdered, but neither did he want to see him back in Rome. He wanted things to stay as they were. He had given Tiberius permission to go to Rhodes, when Tiberius spleenfully demanded it; let him stay there; Augustus would not allow him to return. Augustus wanted no one about him that he could not rely on, and besides his feelings were hurt and there were more important things to do.
All the outposts of Empire needed to be governed, and Augustus had to appoint governors, watch them, replace them ---and, often enough, punish them. There were constant little border squabbles and minor tribal insurrections, and Augustus had to see that they never got big enough to matter. There were religious duties to fulfill. Augustus' old ally and later enemy, Lepidus, had died; Augustus would not take away from him his office as Chief Pontiff of the Roman state religion while he lived, but after he died Augustus immediately assumed the job; he could not afford to give it to another--- it was too important.
And Rome itself needed a constant clucking attendance. Romans would do things that threatened the stability of the state. Augustus had already passed laws against their wicked extravagant spending and their adulterous folly. Now he had the problem of slavery to consider.
It was not the institution of slavery that worried Augustus--- that was perfectly right and proper---it was what was happening to Rome. Slaves were sometimes freed, in spite of everything. As freedmen, they had certain civil rights, even Parthians and Gauls and Greeks, even Jews and Egyptians, even the black litter-bearers and the brown Arabians. They were mongreiizing the pure Roman blood! It was not so long ago that even Italians from less than fifty miles away were "new men" and distinctly honored to be allowed to call themselves Roman; now any rag-bag provincial or barbarian might spend a few decades in slavery and thus---on being freed---become the equal of a true-born son of Rome.
It was a disgrace, and Augustus devised a law---the Lex fufina canina, it was called. Let this helter-skelter freeing of slaves he stopped, or at least kept within bounds. A master who owned two slaves was forbidden to free more than one of them. A master with a hundred slaves might free twenty-five. No master, no matter how many slaves he owned (and Augustus owned six thousand, remember; some rich farm owners possessed two or three times that), could free more than a hundred.
It was a satisfying law to Augustus and, unlike the sumptuary laws against extravagance, it could be enforced. He was well pleased. But he hardly had turned from solving one problem before he was faced with another.
The Tiberian party---Livia, Antonia and the others---had their backs to the wall. The libertine Julians made the very Forum ring with their revels. The poet Ovid published his Arts of Love---a manual of seduction and adultery---disgraceful! (Why, it was almost the equal in obscenity to Tiberius' favorite Elephantine Books.) Rome was a stench of shameful behavior.
For Julia had gone from bad to unspeakable.
Adultery was nothing new to her; she had cuckolded Tiberius a hundred times, and cuckolded Agrippa before him. Her affair with Sempronius Gracchus had already lasted through ten years and two husbands. Mark Antony's son, Antonius, was her lover; so was Appius Claudius and so was Scipio; so were half the handsome and wellborn males of Rome. She went farther. She slept with men whose names she did not know, and then with men who had no names. She rioted through the streets with her Inimitable Livers, and the women of the party hailed passers-by as though they were prostitutes, and it was a great lark when the passers-by took them off into an archway for a quick transaction. It was a lark; it became a habit. Every night, finally, Julia, daughter of the godlike Augustus, went to the assigned post of Rome's whoredom by the statue of Marsyas in the Forum, and practiced "every shamelessness"---says Seneca---"in the arms of the first passer-by." A stench indeed. Yet the old Emperor obstinately refused to sniff.
They brought the smell directly under his nose. Livia found a way to secure proofs of Julia's misbehavior, and she displayed them to the Emperor.
He had to see it. He could not believe, but then he had to believe.
Worse, he had to act. It was his own Lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis, the Julian Law of Adultery; an adulteress must be prosecuted---'by her husband (but Tiberius was far away in Rhodes!), and if not by her husband, then by her father. He had to obey his own law, particularly as he was informed that if he did not another Roman would.
Augustus had borne much, but he could not bear to have Julia's disgrace come at the hands of others; he called her before him and, in a tirade of reproaches and invective, he tried her, condemned her, and sentenced her. It should have been to death; that was Lex Iulia. Old Augustus did not have the heart for that. He banished her to an island---a tiny rock, really, hardly fit for life; its name was Pandateria.
Julia exiled!
It was what Tiberius had prayed for. But queerly it did not do for him what he had hoped. When his tribune's power ran out, Augustus refused to renew it; he begged to return to Rome, but Augustus said no. What could it mean? Was Augustus forever his enemy now? Had the Lady Livia lost all influence with her husband?
Tiberius brooded and could find no answer. With Julia gone, Rome was once again heaven, but he was excluded.
Heartsick, more sullen and secretive than ever, Tiberius talked with his astrologers, played with his little harem, and saw time vanish away from him. As he talked witii his parasites his speech was slower than ever, the silences longer and more embarrassing. Livia was moving heaven and earth for him, but Augustus stood obstinately firm. One litde concession he did make. To end Livia's nagging, he appointed Tiberius ambassador to Rhodes, but it was a mere cloak to hide the real fact of exile.
The stories that came to Rhodes from outside were most unpleasant. Once Tiberius had been a triumphing general, and statues had gone up to him all over Rome. Now citizens, moved by heaven knew what lies of Julia's raging supporters, were toppling those statues and screaming for the death of the Exile. Probably it was Julia's sons who were behind it. There were three sons, and not all were equally favored---one was Postumus, a shaggy bear of a man, a vulgar lout though brave. Augustus turned against him, too, sending him to exile after his mother. But the other two were riding high. Augustus was falling asleep after his meals now, dropping off in his litter, drowsing with his shoes off and his hand shading his eyes; he wore four or five layers of tunics and woolen gowns in winter, and he had a slave always fanning him in summer. He was failing. Gaius and Lucius, eidier or both, would not have to wait too long to inherit.
And of course once Augustus was dead some sycophant of the brothers would surely remember to come and lop off the head of the Exile.
Tiberius had to get to Rome. But he could not, though the years passed and became a decade.
Tiberius retreated from the world entirely.
He took refuge in the stars. He had always been an enthusiastic believer in astrology. Most Romans were, Julius Caesar had been; Augustus too. Perhaps astrology held them so firmly because they had so little to believe in otherwise.
The ancients were not as ignorant of the facts of science as we sometimes suppose. The world did not need to wait for Galileo to discover that the earth was not flat; Strabo was twenty years older than Tiberius, and he had already told the world that it was round. "We may show summarily that the earth is spheroidal," he wrote in his Physical Geography, "from the consideration that all things, however distant, tend to its center, and that everybody is attracted toward its center of gravity." Galileo? Why, it is almost Newton! Strabo told the Romans this, but perhaps they did not believe. Perhaps they did not want to. It was rather more reassuring to think of Earth as something rather special and rather solid, not like the fleeing stars.
And it was also reassuring to believe that somehow the stars could tell a man what to expect. A man needed to have some glimpse of tomorrow. Stars, spells, trances, the study of the intestines of animals, the interpretation of dreams--- somewhere the gods must be kind enough to let wise men see their plans!
Augustus looked everywhere for omens. It was good luck to begin a journey in a light rain; it was bad luck to put a shoe on the wrong foot. He studied his dreams endlessly. You couldn't put much trust in springtime dreams, though; he always had bad dreams in the spring, and they never meant anything. But he had been moved to leave his tent at the battle of Philippi because of a dream; and his tent was captured shortly after. Dreams were important, if you knew how to read their lessons. Even more important than the stars.
With Tiberius it was the other way---stars first, dreams and other omens second. Of course, one couldn't afford to neglect any sort of omen. Tiberius knew that an ancestor of his, Claudius the Fair, had made that mistake; Claudius was about to start a naval battle when he was told the sacred chickens were off their feed. "If they will not eat, let them drink!" he cried brashly, threw the chickens into the sea, went out to fight his naval battle, and lost it. His whole fleet was destroyed, in fact, all because Claudius the Fair had ignored the warning of the chickens.
Astrology, however, was the most important and reliable of the sciences, in Tiberius' considered opinion, and he had tried them all. Of course, you had to have a good astrologer. Since it was so arcane and cryptic an art, the field was full of mischievous quacks, and it was hard to tell the good from the bad without a test.
Tiberius arranged testing facilities. They were not elaborate. All that was required was an astrologer, a cliff, and a husky slave.
It was the custom of Tiberius to take a new recruit to his stable of astrologers out for a walk, on a path that led by some cliffs. The husky slave would walk a few paces ahead while Tiberius plied the astrologer with questions. Tiberius usually had a good idea of what the answers should be. If the answers were right, the slave was merely a sort of guard of honor. If the answers were wrong, disappointed Tiberius gave a signal, and the slave hurled the astrologer off the cliff. It was hard on the astrologers, but there were always plenty more.
On one occasion an astrologer named Thrasyllus was put to this test. Tiberius was very anxious for a reliable man, for there had been some indication that something big was about to happen. An eagle had perched on the roof of his villa---strange! Because there had never been any kind of eagle on Rhodes before. And when he put his tunic on that day, it had seemed to glow with a fiery radiance.
So, up on the cliff path, Tiberius suggested to Thrasyllus that he consult the stars. Was there, he asked, anything of very great interest coming up soon?
Thrasyllus made his studies. There were many stars in the sky, and comprehending their messages took time. They were not even Roman stars, really, or not all of them---bright Canopus, the giant of the south, was never visible from Rome, but was from Rhodes; so with other stars and constellations; in fact, it may be that one reason why Tiberius picked a southern place of exile was to change his constellations. So Thrasyllus computed all the variables, and presently began to shake with fear. "What's the matter?" demanded Tiberius.
"The stars," said Thrasyllus, trembling; "why, I'm in great danger myself, the stars say---something threatens my life at this very moment!"
Tiberius laughed and signaled the slave to go away. The danger had been real enough for Thrasyllus, but he had the right answer, and now he had earned himself a position--- a long-term one, as it turned out. Go ahead, Tiberius ordered him, see what else you can find in the stars.
And Thrasyllus studied on and---"Lo!" he said, "there is a ship! It brings great news for you, Tiberius!"
Almost at once the ship appeared.
It was a great triumph of scientific study over guesswork. Thrasyllus' prediction was borne out very soon. For when the ship arrived the news was very great. It carried a letter for Tiberius; the iron will of the Emperor had softened, just a little; Tiberius was ordered to return to Rome.
Tiberius was back in Rome, but the Emperor still looked at him with a dour face. No matter. Tiberius was at the hub of the universe. He was a Roman, and it meant more to him to be a private citizen in Rome than to be a tribune and all but king in Rhodes ... as long as Julia was on her naked rock.
Tiberius came back to Rome in August of the year 2 A.D. Almost at once there was news from Marseilles, where young Lucius had gone on state affairs. The princeling was ill---very ill, said a later dispatch---no, said one later still; he was dead.
Tiberius had moved up a notch.
It had happened at an awkward time, so soon after Tiberius' return. Public opinion was bound to whisper that Tiberius' agents had poisoned him. However, for Tiberius the effect was good. The Emperor softened a trifle more. Tiberius was admitted to a few minor jobs of state---because the Emperor had softened, but also because there were signs of trouble in the provinces. Augustus might need a general soon.
Augustus tried his luck with Julia's remaining favored son, Gaius---sent him to Lycia, where there was a little war. But no war is a "little war" to the man who dies in it. Gaius died in this one; and lo! the Exile was the second man in Rome!
Augustus had gambled away many an afternoon at the dice and he knew when he had lost. Very well, Tiberius, the goddess Venus from whom you claim to be descended, and all the other gods in the Roman pantheon for that matter, have determined that you shall rule Rome. I surrender, said Augustus in effect; rule, then!
And now the world opened up to Tiberius.
Augustus gave him armies and a mission: Finish Drusus' job in Germany. Tiberius went, and fought bravely, and the Germans surrendered. Pannonia and Dalmatia were restive again. Tiberius took armies across the Adriatic and crushed them. Once again the Roman streets resounded with cheers for the great general. The toppled statues were set up again, new statues were carved in haste. Rule, Tiberius!
Nothing had changed inside the man, nothing at all. He was still secretive, he still spoke slowly and sat silent for long periods. "Poor Rome, doomed to be masticated by those slow-moving jaws," Augustus whimpered to a servant; but it was Augustus who fed Rome to them.
In the year 4 A.D. Augustus adopted Tiberius as his son. It meant that Tiberius would be the next Emperor of Rome.
Rome itself was buzzing with new scandals about the old Emperor's family. Not poor, pretty, careless Julia this time; it was too late for that sort of thing for her. She still lived out her life in exile on her rock, with her father's guards studying every male who came near her. If they were at all young or handsome they were sent away; she could not have handsome men around her any more, nor could she have wine or good food. That was part of her punishment.
But Julia had left behind her a daughter, the Younger Julia, who was very much her mother's child.
The daughter's crowd of Inimitable Livers caroused every bit as bravely as the mother's had. The daughter too had poets in her circle---Ovid, now aging, was one of them, and he was a figure of scandal himself. He had published his Arts of Love a few years earlier. Some said that young Julia set herself the task of practicing them all. "Take your fill of amusement," Ovid gravely advised men. All right, that was Roman custom; but Ovid shocked Rome by advocating equal rights for women. To Roman girls he counseled: "Withhold not your favors from your ardent lovers. If they deceive you, wherein is your loss? All your charms remain; and even if a thousand should partake of them, those charms would still be unimpaired."
The Emperor struck like lightning and annihilated them all.
Augustus would tolerate no more from a granddaughter than from her mother, not when he was made to see. Tiberius helped him to see; it was the party of Tiberius and Livia, the Old Roman party, that held the power now. Augustus thundered at the girl as he had at Julia herself, and gave her the same punishment. Off to an island! The girl was pregnant. She was not married to the father but, for a wonder, she knew who he was. The man wished to admit paternity, even to marry the girl, but it was too late for that. Augustus was stern. The bastard could not live. The guilty man went into one exile, Julia the Younger into another; when the baby was born, Augustus ordered it exposed---that is, ordered it to be put out in an unsheltered place until it died.
Ovid followed them into exile, protesting that he hadn't done a thing, really. But he had. Not the thing he was exiled for, of course---the ostensible reason was punishment for daring to write that filthy work, the Arts of Love. That was nonsense; the book had been published ten years before.
What Ovid was exiled for was something to do with the Younger Julia. She might have been his mistress. Probably not. More likely, she was the mistress of another man and Ovid knew about it---perhaps helped their rendezvous; there was talk of a tryst in the Temple of Isis, with Ovid conspiring to 'help it along. He need have done nothing more, under Lex Iulia; it was not only a crime to commit adultery, but a crime to refrain from denouncing it if one had proof.
But most of all, whether he slept with the Younger Julia or not, whether or not he had guilty knowledge of her affairs, he was part of the circle of free-living, free-loving youth that she had built around her; and his presence in Rome was an embarrassment to Augustus. Augustus did not need to suffer embarrassment from a mere poet.
When Julia went to her island, Ovid went to Tomi, a tiny and backward community at the mouth of the Danube, on the Black Sea. Wine froze in winter, it was so cold; there was a constant threat of barbarian raids. So said Ovid; yet perhaps the man was making things sound worse than they were---at least, we know that old Agrippa had visited that part of the world once and liked it well enough to stay six months, the only vacation he took in his life. But for so highly cultivated an Inimitable Liver as Ovid, Tomi might have been very hell. The natives didn't even speak Latin!
Ovid half-heartedly learned their language and even wrote a few verses in it, which delighted the natives. But the plaudits of the citizens of Tomi were no recompense for the loss of Rome. Ovid spent the rest of his life writing wheedling letters and self-pitying verse, begging for a pardon which never came.
Old Augustus doddered about his plain palace, working at Empire and brooding over the vileness of his kin. The good ones were dead; the survivors were foul. When he spoke of his daughter, his granddaughter, the Younger Julia, or Postumus, his one surviving grandson, he called them "my three running sores." He was past seventy. He was not up to many more disappointments.
But a very great one was in the making.
Germany flared up again. Tiberius was busy, and besides he had conquered the Germans once. Let another general try. He sent Varus, with three fine legions, eighteen thousand men. It was a great force for those times, for these were not barbarians or auxiliaries, they were native-born legionaries, the deadliest fighting men in the world. Surely they would teach the Germans a lesson once and for all!
It was a frightful disaster.
Varus blundered, allowed himself to be surprised. Under a German named Hermann---the Romans called him Arminius ---the barbarians surrounded the legions in the Teutoburg Forest and cut them down.
Every man died. Most were killed in die fury of the fight; others died under torture, a victory amusement for the celebrating Germans. Varus took his own life, despairing, when he saw there was no way out.
It was wise of Varus to commit suicide. No doubt die Germans would have given him a more painful death. Still worse, he might have escaped and fallen into the hands of Augustus.
The old man went almost mad with rage. "Varus, Varus," he bellowed in the halls of his palace, "give me back my legions!" They said he even beat his head against the wall in his frenzy. Three legions were a great chunk out of Rome's armies---there only were twenty-eight legions in all. With three of the finest destroyed, the others would be spread dangerously thin; so great a disaster would surely encourage revolt in other lightly-held lands.
And worst of all, it had been not only men that were lost in Teutoburg Wald, but standards. It was a national disgrace.
It was a time to call for Tiberius, and the old man did.
It took Tiberius a busy year, but he shored up the defenses, recruited new troops (it meant enrolling freedmen and slaves, so great was the danger!), sent out expeditions, punished the daring barbarians. Rome itself was shaking with sedition; Tiberius was equal to that threat too, and very stern. It was his golden hour, and he met it bravely, while the old man paced the halls and vilified the dead Varus.
Augustus could not have saved the Empire that year without Tiberius and he knew it. Those "slow-moving jaws" could grind up Rome's enemies better than the Emperor's.
There was one job left that could be done only by Augustus, and the old man proceeded to do it.
He called his slave-secretary and dictated his autobiography. As soon as it was done, copies were made and rushed to all the municipalities of the Empire, there to be carved or embossed or inscribed on temples and columns. Of all those copies, only two have come down to us---one in Latin and one in Greek, both badly mutilated but, fortunately, not in the same places.
We can imagine the old man droning his reminiscences to the slave, listening critically as passages were read back. "At nineteen years of age I equipped an army, on my private judgment and at my private expense, by which I restored to liberty the public oppressed by the domination of faction." That was the beginning. Nineteen! That was a lifetime ago; now he had all but lost the sight of one of those godlike eyes; now his few remaining teeth were rotted stumps. "Those who had slain my father I drove into exile, avenging their crime." It was his stepfather he meant, Julius Caesar. "I have captured six hundred ships, besides those smaller than triremes. Twice I have triumphed with an ovation." And one of those triumphs was the triple triumph after Actium, when the young Tiberius was only a child riding the trace-horse of his chariot. "Four times I aided the treasury with my money, so that I transferred 150,000,000 sesterces to those who had charge of the treasury." His had not been a saving reign; there would be little in the fiscus for Tiberius to inherit. But he had never allowed Rome to go without money. "I built a Senate-house, and near it a temple of Minerva ... a sacred couch at the Circus Maximus, temples of Jupiter the Vanquisher and of Jupiter the Thundering on the Capitol, a temple of Quirinus, temples of Minerva and Juno the Queen and Jupiter of Liberty on the Aventine, a temple of the Lares on the summit of the Sacred Way, a temple of the gods' Penates on the Velian, a temple of Youth, a temple of the Mighty Mother on the Palatine." He had always been a religious man---at least outwardly.
Nor had he neglected his people's comforts. "Three times I have given gladiatorial exhibitions in my name, and five times in the name of my sons or nephews; at which exhibitions there fought about 10,000 men. Twice I have furnished the people in my own name a spectacle of athletes, summoned from all quarters, and a third time in the name of my grandson. ... I gave the people in my name, or those of my sons and grandsons, twenty-six hunts of African beasts, either in the circus or in the forum or in the amphitheaters, in which about 3,500 beasts were brought together. I gave the people the spectacle of a naval battle across the Tiber, in the place where now is Caesar's Grove, a place having been excavated 1,800 feet long, 220 wide; in which thirty beaked ships of two and three banks of oars, and a larger number of smaller ones, fought with each other. On these fleets there fought, besides the rowers, about 3,000 men."
On and on . . . "I have freed the ocean from pirates . . ." "I have enlarged the bounds of all the provinces..." "I added Egypt to the empire of the Roman people . . ." "I have recovered many military standards lost by other commanders . . ." "I was by Senate decree styled 'The August,' and the pillars of my temples were publicly bound with laurel. . ."
And: "When I wrote this, I had attained my seventy-seventh year."
That was finished; that was the last big job.
In the summer of the year 14 A.D. there were signs and portents. Lightning struck one of his statues, burning off the letter "C," leaving the word "AESAR." The meaning was clear---especially to Augustus, who understood omens very well and who feared lightning all his life. It had nearly killed him once, on the march; even now he carried a sealskin amulet as protection against it, and hid in the cellar during thunderstorms. Lightning had something to tell him. What? Well, "C" was the Roman 100. "Aesar" was the Etruscan word for "God." Put them together, and the meaning is: In 100 days Caesar will become a god.
Did anyone need confirmation? Very well. An eagle circled around old Augustus on the Field of Mars. The bird flew away to Agrippa's Pantheon and perched on the stone carving just over the letter "A" in Agrippa's name. "A" also stood for "Augustus." And there was a comet. Comets were carefully studied by Roman stargazers. There were fiery comets and bearded comets, comets like torches and comets like cypress trees. Each one held its own meaning, and, when this one was analyzed, the astrologers saw at once that it could mean only the death of a great man. The stars agreed. All the signs conjoined. It was time. There was only one task left for the old man to do, and that was to die.
Once, years before, Augustus had chanced to visit the island of Capri.
Many thousands of Americans know Capri well. It was a rest camp for American soldiers during the Italian fighting of World War II. It lies in the Bay of Naples, or just outside it, under Vesuvius' feathery plume of smoke. All of the Bay is beautiful, with the horseshoe-shaped sweep of the shore, blue water, green hills, blue sky. Perhaps Capri is most beautiful of all. It was a fine place for a serviceman tired of dirt and danger. It was a wonderful playground for Emperors a couple of thousand years earlier.
When Augustus first saw it, Capri knew nothing of Emperors or GI's. It belonged to the City of Naples; but it caught his eye, just as Livia once had, and he appropriated it---just as he had Livia. It was not only the beauty of the island that attracted him. There was a dying oak on the island; but while he was near it suddenly began to turn green, the limp branches lifted, the tree regained its strength. Of course it was an omen. Augustus had to have this island, and he traded Ischia to the Neapolitans for it.
Augustus slept nearly every night for forty years on the same plain bed in his plain Palatine home; but he did allow himself a few vacations, and often it was to Capri that he went. He had a collection of fossils there---they called them "Giants' Bones," but he knew that they were really the skeletons of animals. He thought Capri was a lazy place---he called it "Lubberland"---and a lazy place was just what he wanted, once the autobiography was out of the way and Tiberius seemed to have everything else in hand.
After the warnings of the lightning and the eagle, Augustus went to Capri to wait for the end. Tiberius was there, with Thrasyllus, his pet astrologer. The Emperor was not much in the mood for astrology. He already knew what he had to know, so he used Thrasyllus mostly as a target for his wit. "Name me this poet," he said to Thrasyllus, and recited a couple of lines in Greek. The astrologer was baffled. It was very good poetry, he mumbled, but what master had written it he could not say.
It was the right answer, because the lines had been composed extempore by Augustus himself, who laughed and felt cheered.
They lingered on Capri for a while. But Tiberius had work to do, even if the old man didn't; he couldn't stay. There were some matters that had to be settled in the province of Dalmatia---the home of the spotted fire-dog, next to Pannonia which Tiberius himself had subdued.
Tiberius started the trip to Dalmatia, and old Augustus joined him, at least part way, as a mark of respect. (Formal courtesies were very important now. There must be no doubt in Roman minds that Tiberius was the favorite of the old man.) They tarried for a celebration at Naples, went on to Benevento, parted there; and Augustus started back.
He got as far as the town of Nola. (It happened that his own father---not Julius Caesar, but his real father---had died at Nola.) There he fell ill and went to his father's house to rest. (His father had died in the house.) He was put to bed in the room his father had died in.
And there Augustus died.
As soon as it was clear that the old man was going, Livia sent swift messengers to Tiberius. Come back, come back!
There was still no law of succession. Indeed, the fiction still existed that there was no throne to succeed to. Augustus had done everything he could, and there was no Roman alive who didn't know that Tiberius was Augustus' choice. Certainly no one else had half so good a claim.
Yet something might go wrong. If Livia's son was to rule Rome, the only safe thing was for him to be on the spot at the moment when the rule passed to him. You could not be sure of the legions, not even of the Pretorian Guard, if he was away. Someone might bribe them or win their hearts; some accident might happen; even, though it was a fantastic thought, the Senate might remember its manhood and refuse to take another Caesar to lead them by the nose.
Livia took what steps her conscience ordered.
While the messengers were speeding after Tiberius, Livia had armed guards surround the house in which the old man lay. It was sealed off; no one was allowed in or out. Hourly bulletins were given to the world on Augustus' condition, like the television coverage of the illness of an American president. But no one was allowed to see him.
Tiberius hurried back.
As soon as he arrived, he went at once to the room of Augustus. He stayed there for a long time.
When he came out he told the world that Augustus was dead. He had had a long talk with the old man, who had expressed himself as content to die now that Tiberius was there, and who had given all of Rome into Tiberius' hands.
And Tiberius displayed the corpse. It was three o'clock in the afternoon of the 19th day of August---August, the month that Augustus had named after himself when he reformed the calendar.
There was no doubt that Augustus was dead. Everyone could see it.
What was less easy to see was that all the rest of the story was a pack of lies; Augustus had been dead for some time; the whole protracted wait was a hoax; the bulletins were fictions, contrived by Livia to give Tiberius the time he needed in order to return and claim his throne.
A senator named Numericus Atticus came forward to swear that he had seen the divine spirit of the dead Emperor ascending to heaven. Perhaps he did see something, or perhaps that was a lie too. If it was, it was a convenient one; it gave the Senate the excuse they needed to vote Augustus a god. The smoke of his funeral pyre had hardly blown away when a temple was being erected to his worship.
IX
In the crushing pyramid of the Roman world, built on tens of millions of writhing slaves, there was room for only one man at the top. Tiberius stood there now. He was supreme. He had no master. He was past fifty, still with the abundant physical health he kept all his life, still strong. He walked stiffly, with his head poked forward, and he still spoke like the tolling of a slow bell. But it was only his way. Age had not touched him. He had never been healthier.
He had everything a Roman could dream of, but it had all come too late. Wine turns sour. Dreams grow stale. At thirty, with Vipsania for a wife, Tiberius might have made a greater Emperor than Augustus, but at fifty-six the master of the world was an unhappy man. Work was still good, but it had been so much easier when Augustus was on the throne! Now that Tiberius had the' name as well as the power there were endless interruptions; his time was not his own; everything conspired to keep him from doing what he wished with the Empire. Tiberius became bored. He became annoyed and resentful, and rather quickly he became afraid.
Now that he had the throne, it was certain that someone would want to take it from him.
A day in the life of an Emperor!
Tiberius wakes in the morning and spends an hour or so lounging in bed, while hordes of "clients" pay their respects. For the Emperor, his clients are senators, ambassadors and kings. Then, perhaps at about eight o'clock, there is breakfast---not alone, of course. Nothing the Emperor does is ever alone. After breakfast there are more social duties. Between nine and noon the visitors are of a more advanced rank--- relatives, men of great wealth, important officials of the Empire, great generals.
Then it is noon, and time to be up and about.
An Emperor was considered to be the first and greatest of the senators, but only a senator all the same. That was the fiction. It did not prevent an Emperor from having the power of life and death over any senator on any whim, but in order to preserve the fiction even a Tiberius found it necessary to attend the ceremonial events in the lives of his chief associates. (An Emperor had thousands of close associates.) Velleius Paterculus has completed a new chapter in his history of Rome and invites a few friends to hear it read. A funeral oration is to be spoken for Patuleius. An aedile's son is to try his first case at law, a tribune's daughter announces her engagement. At such rites even an Emperor must appear.
In the afternoon the Senate will be in session. That is part of the Emperor's duties. He will preside, or perhaps he will take an actual part in the deliberations. The Senate has become only a rubber stamp for the imperial will, but it must go through the form of considering the welfare of the colonies, alleviating a famine, authorizing a punitive force of soldiers to put down a rebellion. The Emperor's views are necessary. (One Senator dares to chide Tiberius for being slow to give them. "Why do you wait until last to speak? Give us your opinions at the beginning of the debate, so we can know what we are supposed to say.") The Senate is also a court. Criminal cases are heard there; so are civil suits, if they are important enough. Sometimes Tiberius is judge, sometimes he prosecutes. Sometimes he is attorney for the defense, if the defendant has a claim to his favor.
With his rank also goes a religious obligation. The obligation is not to believe---what Roman except the commons believes this nonsense of Olympian gods and deified dead Emperors? Belief has nothing to do with it. But as the Olympian religion is thought to help keep the commons in check, Ramans of high rank are required to give it hp service. The lip service can make heavy demands on an Emperor's time. He nominates the priests, he dedicates the temples. When an important sacrifice is to be made, he slits die goat's throat or disembowels the hen.
Later on in the day the Emperor's time is given over to pleasures. But as they are compulsory pleasures they are indistinguishable from work. Perhaps there are games, and the Emperor must be in the ornate box as the gladiators murder each other on the sand. (Tiberius permitted very few games in Rome, partly because he didn't think them as necessary as other rulers did, partly because he was too penurious to foot the bill.) Lacking any such formal occasion, each day, perhaps several times a day, there is time for a sojourn at the baths. (The Roman toleration for bad smells did not extend to their persons.) And in the evening, dinner is a very important event. It lasts for hours, the Emperor reclining on his belly until it is full, then rolling over on his side to signify that the eating aspect of the occasion is at an end. There are guests for dinner, of course, but Tiberius has a little more freedom here. Sometimes the guests are Greek poets or astrologers, for Tiberius always finds their talk rewarding.
But if the dinner is the bright spot, the rest of the day is dull. It is all very wearing, and all very boring.
Tiberius had been withdrawn and cold as a private citizen; as an Emperor he did not change. Fighting a war was worth doing. Laws had to be prepared. But how he must have hated the endless, polite probing with ambassadors, the priestly rites, the bickering in the Senate!
Tiberius began to cast around for Romans who might be wellborn enough, and adventurous enough, to threaten him on the throne. The two most likely candidates had been good enough to die---his own former stepsons, Gaius and Lucius, the children of Julia and the admiral Agrippa. But Agrippa had left Julia pregnant at his death---when the baby was born it was a boy, and for apparent reasons he had been named Agrippa Postumus. Postumus was an unpleasant boy. He was good at killing things, but nothing much else seemed to interest him. Probably he was a little feeble-minded. Tiberius sent an army officer after him and, although the centurion caught Postumus unarmed and by surprise, the muscular young lout put up a good fight. The assassin finished him off, but retained scars for the rest of his life.
So much for one threat.
A second threat, though an indirect one, obliged Tiberius by removing itself. That was his ex-wife, Julia. When Augustus died she begged Tiberius for forgiveness. Tiberius refused. Perhaps it broke her heart; at any rate she grew ill and faded. She had lived more than ten years on one of the bleakest islands in the Roman world, eadng coarse food and permitted only the company of her keepers or such few incompetents as her keepers would admit to her. There was not much for her to live for, with her youth and beauty gone, and she died.
A third threat was the Senate itself. i
It was preposterous to think that they could defy Tiberius, but Tiberius had become very cautious. The Senate would not move against him, but they might grow bold enough to assist some daring man. It was necessary to keep them harmless.
For a first step, Tiberius took the Pretorian Guard and gave it to a man named Sejanus. The Guard was a late invention of Augustus, the only real force of soldiers on the Italian peninsula. It was, not popular with the Romans, who correctly saw in it a sword pointed at their own throats. To keep the peace, Augustus had scattered its cohorts all over the map, a few in Rome, a few around Naples, a handful in the north. Tiberius gave Sejanus orders to bring them all to Rome. They set up a camp at Rome's gate, where senators could see it as their litter-bearers carried them into the city. Pretorian detachments stamped through the city, armed and stern.
Tiberius did not need to threaten the Senate; the constant presence of the Pretorian Guard was threat enough.
However, Tiberius was wise enough to sugar-coat the pill. The world was his; but in order to keep it, he chose to appear to thrust it away. He called the Senate into session, four weeks after the death of Augustus. Sirs, he said, I beg you, relieve me of this terrible burden. Restore the Republic. No mere man can wield the power of the Divine Augustus. Let me give up the throne and be merely a senator among you.
The senators were wise enough to swallow the pill. They refused". They knew enough to do what Tiberius wanted, not what he asked.
But there was still one threat on the horizon serious enough to keep a nervous Emperor alert.
Tiberius had two sons---one his own by virtue of blood, Vipsania's boy, Drusus Junior. Unfortunately he was a negligible lout somewhat like his distant relative, Agrippa Postumus. The other was Germanicus, whom Tiberius had adopted under the orders of Augustus.
Germanicus was young, but he was a soldier. He was off in Germany, where he had been earning great honors for himself, expanding the Roman frontier. As a field commander, he had die loyalty of his legions. As the son of Tiberius' beloved brother, Drusus, and the great nephew of the late Emperor, Germanicus might be thought by some to have a pretty good claim to die Empire.
Tiberius gave a great deal of thought to Germanicus. Probably the boy was loyal enough, but suppose something happened to stir up trouble? Germanicus would be in an excellent position to profit, if he chose. And trouble was in the air, for die legions were in a turmoil.
The trouble in the legions reached its peak when Augustus died. It made no difference to them whether Tiberius or Augustus was on the throne, except that perhaps there might be some profit in the change. But the legions had grievances. They were starved, poor, and worn out. They had been presenting demands to Rome for years, and no one had cared to listen; now, with a new, weak Emperor on the throne, perhaps they could get justice.
A former actor, now a private in one of the legions in Pannonia, was a man named Percennius. He made a speech:
"When will you dare to demand relief, if you do not go with your prayers or arms to a new and yet tottering throne? We have blundered enough by our tameness for so many years, in having to endure thirty or forty campaigns till we grow old, most of us with bodies maimed by wounds. Even dismissal is not the end of our service, but, quartered under a legion's standard, we toil through the same hardships under another title. If a soldier survives so many risks, he is still dragged into remote regions where, under the name of lands, he receives soaking swamps or mountainous wastes. Assuredly, military service itself is burdensome and unprofitable; ten asses a day is the value set on life and limb; out of this, clothing, arms, tents, as well as the mercy of centurions and exemptions from duty have to be purchased. But indeed of floggings and wounds, of hard winters, wearisome summers, of terrible war, or barren peace, there is no end."
The legions went mad with agreement. Gray-haired ancients, tottering toward the discharge bonus that ever receded before their eyes, wept and applauded. The flogged showed their scars, the bankrupt wrapped their rags around them. Why, sure, the man was right: now was the hour to press their demands, before Tiberius became fat and safe on his throne.
The troops were mutinous. Some of them tom-catted out of the camps and terrified the surrounding peaceful countrymen with beatings and thefts; they staggered back to camp carrying their loot, and the general ordered them arrested. Arrest them? Arrest the heroes of the common soldier? It was a shame, cried one of them---a man named Vibulenus; he was lifted on the shoulders of his fellows in front of the general and sobbed out his charges:
"Who restores to my brother his life? Who gives my brother back to me? The gladiators you keep in your slave-pen, General, they butchered him! Where have you hidden his body, General?"
The mob rocked with sympathy. "Kill me," cried Vibulenus, "let me cry out my grief and then kill me---but when you have had me murdered, let my good comrades here bury me, for I give my life for the good of the legions." He wept, he slapped his face in uncontrollable grief, he threw himself to the ground, squalling like a child. Oh, the poor man was daft with his troubles; and the sympathies of his comrades were excited beyond control. It was true, the general did have gladiators among his slaves; well, catch them and chain them! The soldiers did. And the poor murdered brother---let his corpse be found and given the honor of a soldier's burial! Troops hurried to find it.
But the body couldn't be found. In fact, there hadn't been any murder. In fact, as was discovered later, Vibulenus never had a brother and the whole story was a pack of lies; but a mere factual correction has never been known to stop a good riot, and before they were through, the rioting troops had called a centurion, robbed the baggage of the officers of the legion and very nearly declared war between two of the legions.
It was time for Tiberius to act.
He sent his son, the thick-witted Drusus Junior. It was a smart move, because the legions would appreciate the respect paid them by sending an emperor's son, yet the boy was young enough (and stupid enough) so that there would be no need for him to make decisions on the spot. He could always say that he needed to ask his father's permission. Just to make sure Junior didn't get into trouble, Tiberius sent along his commander of the Pretorian Guard, Sejanus. It was a fortunate decision. The legions were a lot less respectful and appreciative than the Emperor had hoped; first thing, they locked the gates behind Drusus and his company; a second thing, they posted armed troops where they could mow down the Emperor's ambassadors to enforce their demands. Then they made the demands, and took no interest in the suggestion that Rome would have to ratify the grants; they wanted action on the spot. Then they began to throw rocks.
But Tiberius had the moon on his side. There was an eclipse. It scared them. Their resolution shook. They spent a worried and unrestful night, and in the morning when Drusus held out an olive branch they took it. It wasn't that they feared the moon had been devoured by a monster, like the barbarians; or that they considered Drusus a magician. But the Romans believed in omens---believed in them even when they didn't understand them, believed in them as warnings. If the gods sent word by way of a lunar eclipse that trouble was brewing, the troops would try to avert it.
So Drusus murdered a few of the rebels---Vibulenus of the mythical brother and Percennius, who had played his last part---made his small concessions to the soldiers' great wrongs, and returned to Rome.
But what of Germanicus?
In Germany the legions were waiting. They knew about the rebellions in Pannonia; what would Tiberius do about them? Time gave the answer. Tiberius sent his son---he didn't send troops to crush and kill the rebels, he only sent a few men, and he made promises. Well. That was interesting. It was time to start a little something in Germany, then, where the legions had quite the same scars and gray hairs, and had something else, too. They had the person of Germanicus Caesar.
And there were more of them.
Germanicus was no fool, and he knew who his parents were.
The man in Rome, Tiberius, was there by the favor of an aging Emperor, pressed by a determined wife; even so, Tiberius was at best the third or fourth choice of Augustus as a successor. Certainly there was no clear mandate that he should inherit the throne.
Germanicus himself, in cold blood, realized that he had a pretty good claim---maybe a better one than Tiberius. It was a fact. The legions knew it as well as he. But Germanicus was also a man of honor and one whose ambitions were always well controlled. He would not move to claim the throne.
The legions, however, diought that perhaps they could make him. Disorders began; to quell them, the generals ordered punishments; to resist the punishments, the disorders turned into riots. Soldiers seized their centurions and clubbed them to bloody rags. It was a remarkable phenomenon to see, for the rebelling soldiers maintairfed perfect discipline---against their officers. They set up patrols and guards, they policed their quarters, and they managed their housekeeping chores--- without officers.
Germanicus was away---in Gaul, collecting taxes; he hurried back. It took courage to enter his own catnp. He was instantly surrounded---not with anger but with love; soldiers seized his hands and kissed them---and thrust his fingers into their mouths to feel their toothless gums; we are old, they said, we are poor and mistreated; help us, Caesar! They wrangled on for hours, recessed, and then wrangled more. Other legions were drawn in, in other camps. Across the Rhine, the German tribes were listening with sharp ears. The native auxiliary troops, always doubtful, were murmuring with wonder about the confusion in the Roman camps. It was a situation full of danger---no, not merely danger, full of the certainty of trouble. Germanicus smelled death in the air. He would face it himself, he decided, but he would send his family away.
His family included a small boy named Gaius, better known to the troops and to history as Caligula.
A couple of decades later young Caligula would himself become Emperor of Rome, and leave a stain on the principate that few could match; but he was a tiny child in the German camp; he was two years old. The soldiers loved him. The Roman soldiers were not afraid of the enemy, the Emperor of the gods, but when they found the baby Caligula being hurried away from their wrath they were ashamed; it is hard to believe, but it is true; they-broke down and wept, and pleaded with the boy's father. Germanicus let the boy stay. The mutiny flickered and died; and to wipe out its bad taste forever, Germanicus bridged the Rhine and sent the legions across against the Germans.
The light advance troops ran into heavy resistance; but Germanicus rode up crying, "Advance and turn your guilt into glory!" The mutineers roared and charged; and the stain of the mutiny was washed away with cascades of German blood.
Back in Rome Tiberius watched and was relieved, but not pleased. It was presumptuous of Germanicus to succeed so well.
With Tiberius begins the Pax Romana, the long-lasting, worldwide Roman peace. The Republic had thrown legions at every barbarian frontier. Julius Caesar and Augustus had continued the wars of conquest, and waged the great civil struggles that pitted Roman against Roman. Rome had a tradition of centuries of war; Tiberius put a stop to it.
His motives were not humanitarian; he was too good a general to fear war in itself. It was a budgetary matter. Rome had plenty of colonies already. New conquests would invoke the law of diminishing returns---already the Germans had shown themselves an expensive race. The farther the legions marched from Rome, the more expensive their battles would become, the less surely the tax-gatherers would be able to return the necessary spoils. No more conquests. The Pax Romana.
There was plenty of work to be done on the existing colonies. Tax collecting was always a running sore. The system was grossly inefficient. It almost had to be. The Emperor in Rome could impose a tax on, say, the Judaeans, but as he could not himself collect it, he had to delegate that authority to someone on the scene. That person was perhaps the local governor or procurator, or the general of the occupying armies; who, in turn, would break down his territory into smaller areas and himself delegate authority to collect taxes in each of them. The collectors for the localities would themselves employ tax farmers to go out and bring in the actual revenue, in money or in kind.
Double-entry bookkeeping had not yet been invented, and empty pockets yawned at every step of the way. For ten pounds of gold to arrive in the imperial treasury, a hundred had to be wrung out of the dry fields of Judaea. It didn't matter if the Jews could not pay. A delinquent taxpayer was never entirely without assets; he himself could be seized and sold. Our modern system of the graduated income tax, the "soak the rich" spirit of campaign oratory, would have astonished the Romans. The rich were more accustomed to collecting taxes than to paying them. Often enough that was how they had become rich.
Tiberius could not do much to reform the system, but he could do a little to blunt its edge. The custom had been to shake up the administration of the colonies regularly, appoint new governors, and keep the colonial chain of command in a state of flux. Tiberius stopped that. His governors stayed in their jobs. When they were good it was a blessing to the colonies, and even when they were bad at least they grew fat and lazy.
Tiberius did not raise taxes, but he made sure that more of them reached Rome. Tiberius found only five million dollars in Rome's treasury when Augustus died, but gold silted up all through Tiberius' reign. He lived like an emperor but not a madman. He spent carefully and got bargains. At the end of Tiberius' life the treasury bulged with more than a hundred million dollars, and the budget was balanced.
It was not only taxes that came from the colonies, but food. Egypt's wheat fields fed Rome for four months of the year. Spices came from the East, queer new vegetables tempted epicures, like the German radish and the carrot that was beginning to come down from Gaul. All of this was expensive, and therefore annoying to Tiberius.
Italy could have fed its people well enough. Its soil was deep and rich, its climate was fine. What prevented it was pride. "The best thing to do with land is to use it for pasturing herds at a fine profit. The second best thing is to use it for pasturing herds, at little or no profit. The third best thing is to use it for pasturing herds at a loss. The fourth best thing is to plow and grow food." Hardly any other problem of Roman administration vexed Tiberius quite as much as this, but he was never able to solve it, though he tried for years. He tried speeches, and Rome turned a deaf ear. He tried laws like Augustus', and Rome found ways to avoid them. He tried that ultimate weapon of the legislator, a money regulation: Every banker in Rome, he ordered, was immediately to invest two-thirds of his cash in Italian properties. It was a toothed law that Romans could not flout, so they did the next best thing. They began very rapidly to go bankrupt. Investments from the colonies were hurriedly liquidated, Italian land began to soar in price. Investments became worthless, banks closed. A money panic struck Rome. Tiberius, with what horror and anger we can only guess, had to dig into his imperial purse for a free gift of a million dollars to bolster up the staggering economy; and he never tried that again.
In his first few years on the throne Tiberius worked hard and intelligently. He had to labor to avoid the appearance of monarchy---reproving a senator who fawned on him as "Lord and Master," refusing to let the Senate name a month after him, as they had for Julius and Augustus. ("And what will you dp if there should happen to be thirteen Caesars?") He had to labor even harder to secure the fact of rule. There were always threats. The throne was hard work and constant irritation, but there was always someone who wanted to take it from him.
In the Italian cities and in the colonies the stone-cutters were working day and night, chipping out statues, reliefs, and busts of Tiberius, but that was custom, not love. Tiberius could not rely on the love of his subjects. He was doing his best to be a wise and just Emperor, but he could never be a beloved one. He hadn't the manners for it. Stiff, sulky, forbidding; a Roman never knew just where he stood with Tiberius, and it was always easy to fear that one stood badly. His queer habits were worrying---what decent Roman served yesterday's half-eaten roast to today's guests? Tiberius did. He could be mild and forbearing, as when he refused to let the Senate open a new list of citizens who spoke badly of him. Or he could flash into killing temper. One man made a joke where Tiberius could hear it; Augustus had directed that out of his estate some gratuities should be given to the common citizens of Rome, and Tiberius had not yet nerved himself up to parting with the money. A funeral procession was passing through the streets and the humorist called to the corpse: "Hi, there! Tell Augustus that his bequests haven't been paid yet." Tiberius ordered him dragged off to jail, tried him, convicted him, sentenced him. "Go to my father yourself and tell him the truth about those legacies," he said, ordering the man strangled. "Mud, kneaded with blood."
Tiberius knew what he was. He had not the talent to inspire love, and he did not even have the time. There was hardly time for all the necessary things. The provinces cried for a visit from the Emperor---it would help keep the legions quiet, it would combat the rising popularity of Germanicus---but how could he get away? He made plans again and again--- arranged for ships, ordered the colonial towns to prepare for his arrival---and again and again called off the trip. The Romans began to call him "Callipedes" in a snickering whisper---Callipedes was a comedian whose funniest act was an imitation of a long-distance runner. What made it funny was that Callipedes never moved from the spot. But there were laws to write and trials to judge. Fire struck some of the Roman hills, and only the Emperor could arrange for rebuilding the demolished quarters of the city. The Tiber continued to silt up---causing floods, causing tragedies---and dredging had to be ordered. And overseen. Tiberius' helpers could take some of the burden off his shoulders. Particularly Sejanus, the commander of the Pretorian Guard, became the Emperor's all-seeing eye and omnipresent voice. But Tiberius hadn't the personality to win the loyalty of a corps of aides, any more than he could win die love of an Empire; he could appoint assistants, but except for Sejanus he could not trust them.
He dared not create an Agrippa, who might become a challenge to his rule. There were enough challenges already. Apart from Germanicus, whose intentions Tiberius could not read and whose personality he feared, there were encroachments visible close to hand. One was his own mother, Livia. She had put Tiberius on the throne, she felt, through a lifetime of cajoling old Augustus. She intended to keep him there. She saw no better way of insuring his reign than to have him share it with her. His first decrees bore two signatures, his mother's and his own. Favor-seekers fawned on Tiberius, but the wiser among them made sure they fawned on Livia as well. When the Senate offered to change the name of September to Tiberius, they proposed to change the name of October to Livius as well; perhaps they thought Tiberius would be flattered; they were wrong.
But Livia was only an annoyance. She was not a physical danger; she might nag Tiberius, but she was hardly likely to assassinate him.
Plenty of persons were available who would, if they had the chance. Some proposed to do so by force majeure. There was a slave named Clemens; he had been the property of the murdered Agrippa Postumus, and had enough loyalty to his dead master to recruit a large slave army whose aim was to murder Tiberius for revenge; it took troops and guile to put down this rebellion. Other assassins were closer to home.
There was a young popinjay named Libo, rich, wellborn, a daily visitor at Tiberius' court. Libo was quick but not intelligent. Still, he would do to kill a tyrant, and some of Tiberius' enemies cultivated him. He was coached in extravagance and in hate. Senators helped him, with parties and follies, to dissipate his fortune, and then loaned him more. They bribed fortune-tellers to discover a great future for him ---he could be rich again---he could be powerful---why, he could even be Caesar! All that was necessary was to murder the present incumbent.
The case of Libo is interesting, not because it is unique but because it set a precedent in Roman law. Tiberius discovered early that Libo had designs against his life. It would have been reasonably easy to get rid of Libo, but it would not have been convenient to do so without a trial and conviction. First, Tiberius wanted Libo to serve as an example---having him murdered on a pretext would not accomplish that. Second, the fellow might have accomplices.
Tiberius held his blow for a year. He took precautions. At religious observances, where Libo (who was a priest) was to make die sacrifice, Tiberius had the sharp sacrificial knife replaced with a blade of lead. When Libo came to visit, Tiberius made sure never to receive him alone---even when guards were dismissed, Tiberius' son, Drusus, stayed in the room. The lout was strong and loyal, and alert. To make doubly sure, Tiberius complained of feeling faint and leaned on Libo's arm---the knife-wielding arm. Meanwhile, Tiberius'. informants and personal spies sought for evidence and names. They got nothing. There was no evidence to be found, though all Rome buzzed now with the story of what Libo was about, and only Libo himself was unconscious that Tiberius also knew.
The problem was that the only reliable witnesses would be Libo's own slaves. And they could not be used.
In Roman courts verdicts went to the best actors, and if witnesses did not perjure themselves it was because the crime of perjury had not been invented. A favorable verdict was really a sort of good review. Testimony under oath was in no way more reliable than an unadorned statement. A Roman might swear an oath to the gods to perform an act, and then do his best to accomplish it; but he would not feel obliged to be truthful because of an oath. Why should the gods care whether he told the truth or not?
The common Roman beliefs about his Olympian gods can be summed up in four brief statements:
First, they are no better than I am, only stronger;
Second, they can be bribed with sacrifices but they cannot be won over by good works;
Third, they are not much interested in mortals; and
Fourth, there probably aren't any gods anyway.
In order to give validity to trial proceedings, though, some sort of evidence was necessary. Physical evidence was best--- a letter, a vial of poison. Lacking that, Roman justice needed a guarantee that the spoken word was true; and as they could not rely on an oath, they found that guarantee in torture.
Torture was a terribly ordinary event in Roman life. As in all Roman affairs, a man's prospects of being tortured were closely related to his class standing. The highborn might hope to avoid it entirely---not because they were exempt, but because only a superior could apply it, and they had relatively few superiors. But the lower one went, the better the odds; a slave could pretty much count on it if anything went wrong.
Slaves were always being questioned in times of trouble, and "questioned" always meant "tortured." There simply was no other way to do it. it didn't do a slave any particular good to blurt out whatever he thought his questioners wanted to hear before the hot iron touched him, either. Very well, the questioners said, nodding, yes, that's interesting, but now let's see if you're sure. Then the hot iron. Or the screws, or the whip, or the rack, or---the devices were endless.
Torture was so common that it was not even particularly feared---not enjoyed or looked forward to, of course; but its probable approach evoked no crawling dread. The whole Roman attitude toward any sort of pain was unlike ours. Their world contained much more of it. The 20th century has resolutely fled pain, through anaesthetics, nerve blocs, painless dentistry, hypnosis for childbirth, the abolition of the flogging post, the end of the teacher's ruler. We spend fortunes to execute murderers gendy. Our diplomats haggle endlessly, between wars, over conventions to soften the next war's sting. A few years ago we fought what was almost a holy war against the Germans, and the things that inflamed us against them were things like ripped-out thumbnails, the hot pokers of the Gestapo, the bestiality of the concentration camps.
No Roman would have dreamed of fighting for such a principle. The Golden Rule had not yet been invented. A Roman might have said in its place something like: "Do unto your inferiors whatever may serve your convenience." It is property rights again. And also a Roman didn't need to be tortured to experience pain; a decayed tooth was agony, sickness was pain, dying almost always hurt terribly. Even an emperor might admit that, of all boons, that which he would like most was a quick and painless death. Augustus did.
So that if Romans turned to torture to get the truth, it should not be surprising. It was economical to use pain to secure truth. Pain was a commodity of which they had more than enough; why should they not get something out of it?
In the trial of Libo it would have been very simple, then, and not at all immoral, to torture his slaves for evidence.
However, the Romans were not blind and it had become a custom, then a law, that a man's slaves could not be tortured to compel testimony against him. They could be tortured for any other purpose, certainly. Why not? But the law was clear. Libo's slaves would be the best witnesses against him, slaves being everywhere and seeing everything, but the law had to be upheld.
Very well. Tiberius would not flout the law.
It did occur to him, though, that there was a way out the state buy Libo's slaves from him. Once Libo had passed title they were no longer his, and affairs could proceed. It was done.
As soon as the state owned them, Libo's ex-slaves were stretched on the rack. Or burned, or cut, or whipped; but the rack was a favorite method of torture in such cases because of its efficient provision against suicide. A man disjointed on the rack had not the strength to kill himself. Thus he could be interrogated indefinitely with a minimum expense for guards.
It was all too much for Libo; and he killed himself. Too bad, said Tiberius solemnly, and swore that his intention had been to pardon the youth for his folly; but all the same he continued the trial. After all, it was not merely the life of Libo that was at stake. If he were convicted, his estates would be forfeit to the state; it would not be thrifty to stop the trial just when the prospects for helping out the budget looked so good.
In the year 17 A.D. Tiberius recalled Germanicus to Rome. The legions were quieter now, he told his adopted son in a letter, and Rome wanted to give him the triumph he deserved. Besides, leave some laurels for Drusus to win!
Germanicus obeyed, returned to Rome, received his honors. There was no mistaking the love the cheering throng gave him. The dour Tiberius studied the crowd and was not pleased; perhaps it had been a mistake to bring Germanicus back to Rome, where adulation might inspire ambition in him. If he was not already ambitious. Tiberius cast around for a new post for Germanicus, found it in the Near East. The young Caesar was ordered cut to settle the troubles of uneasy tribes and, to make sure that whatever honors he won would be diluted, Tiberius sent along a helper with nearly equal rank.
His name was Cneius Piso, and perhaps he was more than helper. Perhaps he was also Germanicus' murderer.
For Germanicus died. There was a comet in the sky and the wise men knew it portended a death. It was Germanicus' comet.
The body of the dead young man was borne somberly back to Rome, and everywhere it was met with lamentations and ceremonies. Germanicus had a hundred funerals. In every town the people came out in black, burning offerings, weeping and wailing. Long before his ashes reached Rome, Piso was accused of his murder.
Probably he was guilty---more than that, he was certainly guilty under Roman law. The only doubt lies in a sort of technicality. Piso plotted to poison Germanicus, and Germanicus died. The evidence was sure, not tortured slaves but physical proof, absolutely unquestionable to Romans.
Yet in us it might raise strong questions. The evidence was such things as moldering corpses, stolen from their graves and used in magical rites; the name of Germanicus, written in a magical way on tablets of lead; records of incantations; blood-smeared cinders, the proof of secret sacrifices---everything, that is to say, except what might really kill a man.
Poisoning to the Romans was not the simple science the Borgias later brought to perfection. The Egyptians were wiser; before Cleopatra settled on the asp, she had conducted weeks of careful experiments on slaves, one chemical poison after another, one venomous bite after another; the slaves that died most easily and quickly were those bitten by snakes, she observed; thus the asp. Romans were more prone to spells and incantations. A grain of salt might kill a man if the grain were magical. That was what Piso tried, magical poisons, sorcerer's tricks in no way different from voodoo or hex. (But we know that voodoo victims also die.) When the murdered man was cremated his heart would not burn. It was found un-scorched in his ashes; and it was a scientific fact, which everyone knew, that the heart of a poison victim did not burn.
It was evidence enough to convict Piso.
Piso knew it. Like Libo, he waited to make sure the trial was going against him, and then he retired, worried and hopeless, to his room. He closed the door, wrote a note; the next morning he was found dead. The sword that cut his throat was lying beside him.
Roman scandal instantly conjectured that Piso was not a suicide, that the sword had been wielded by someone anxious to shut his mouth forever.
Tiberius paid no attention to that sort of gossip. (Perhaps because one of the two most frequently mentioned suspects was his chief assistant, Sejanus. The other was himself.) As with Libo, Tiberius soberly continued the trial, and soberly confiscated the dead man's estates; but the questions about Piso's death and the reasons for Germanicus' murder were never answered at that trial. They have not been answered to date.
XI
Vipsania died. In Africa a rebellious chief, Tacfarinas, was giving the Empire fits. In Rome the commons muttered over the death of Germanicus and then, paradoxically, over the death of his murderer. Tiberius had his hands full.
It was too bad about Vipsania but, really, she had been out of Tiberius' life for thirty years; it was only that with her death the last thing he had ever loved was irretrievably gone. Tacfarinas was a nearer problem. In the African mountains he defied the Roman legions, hid from them when he chose, fought them when he thought he could win. He ambushed a Roman cohort near the river Pagyda, and it was not bad enough that they were defeated---the African made them flee in panic. Tiberius scowled. His officers took a leaf from the imperial book and had the beaten troops lined up. Every tenth man was flogged to death, pour encourager les autres. Reinforced and angered, the Romans marched against Tacfarinas again, but he got away.
A Jewish problem arose in Rome. Four outcast Jews, driven out of Judea and living by their wits in Rome, found themselves a fat young partridge in the person of a Roman matron, Fulvia. She had a great deal of money and she was religiously unfulfilled; she thought she would like to become a Jew and worship one God; the four scoundrels were glad to accommodate her. Once converted, Fulvia was quite agreeable to their suggestion of sending gold, precious fabrics and other treasures to the Temple in Jerusalem, especially as they agreed to transport the gifts for her.
They were thieves, and foolish enough to make a show of their booty. The woman's husband complained to Tiberius.
Tiberius did not like foreign religions in the first place. The Greek and Egyptian gods were bad enough. Jehovah was worse. The Jews dared declare Him the God, the sole deity in the universe. Clearly this was to say that the Roman gods were frauds and their worshippers dupes; and whatever Tiberius' private views, he was Chief Pontiff of the Olympian religion in his public self.
Thousands of Jews lived in Rome. There had been a large Jewish colony for centuries. Though Jews had not the rights of citizens, they were not slaves; they were clever in commerce and unambitious for power and, as they had always supported the Caesars, they were allowed to manage as best they could.
Tiberius took the advice of his Pretorian commander, Sejanus, who saw nothing wrong in punishing ten thousand Jews for the crime committed by four. Fulvia's husband had had no such intention when he made his complaint, but the matter was out of his hands now. Four thousand Jews were drafted into the army and sent on a useless mission to Sardinia. The climate was bad, mosquitoes were everywhere, malaria was sure to strike them down. Within a year they died, as Sejanus had planned. The others in Rome's Jewish colony were banished out of the city entirely; and the commons had something to talk about besides the death of Germanicus and Piso.
Tiberius was nearly sixty now, an old rock of a man, proud, cantankerous, and powerful.
Perhaps the expulsion of the Jews was the first really cruel, wrong thing he did as Emperor. He did it on the advice of Sejanus, that supple courtier, and later he tried to blame Sejanus for it entirely. That was false. The blame was all Tiberius'. He was the Emperor, and if he listened to bad advice, or gave power to as bad a man as Sejanus, it was his decision and his power all the same.
Tiberius was not failing in his bodily strength, but he was lonely and he began to seek new pleasures. Work was not the joy it might have been. So much of it had to be devoted to fiddling little enterprises hardly worthy of his time. There were abuses of the right of temple sanctuary in the provinces, criminals and impudent slaves claiming immunity because they had managed to touch a sacred statue, and laughing at the law; Tiberius undertook a study of the old decrees of five centuries to learn how to withdraw the privilege of sanctuary when it was abused. A law of Augustus, Lex Pappia, had become a nuisance. The law insisted that Roman nobles marry and have children. Augustus' intention was to keep the old Roman families alive; but Roman childbearing would not be legislated. Hundreds of the greatest Romans lived in the shadow of this law, their civic rights restricted, their fortunes ripe for confiscation under its penalties.
The United States has countless laws on the books as foolish and dangerous as Lex Pappia, but as they are not enforced they do little harm. Rome could not have a law that was a dead letter. Roman prosecutors were not paid servants of the state, able to ignore an act that forbade kissing one's wife on Sunday. In Rome any citizen could act as prosecutor. A law that provided for money fines and confiscation would never lapse from disuse. The citizen who saw his duty to prosecute and did so was entitled to a reward---one-fourth of everything confiscated. The Roman hit-or-miss legal system relied entirely on such volunteers; they were called "delatores" and the act of delation---of bringing a charge against a wealthy man---became a lucrative profession.
The accuser had everything to gain by hanging any wretch he could find. The richer the victim, the fatter the prize. Lex Pappia produced scores of victims. Almost any wealthy senator who had fewer than three children could be hauled up on charges under it!
Tiberiue could not allow this but could not prevent it as long as the law stood, so he changed it. All he changed, however, was Lex Pappia. The delatores remained. They cast about for a new'law under which to bring their charges, and discovered the law of treason.
The treason law was called Lex maiestatis and, as it conveniently defined treason to include the crimes of holding the state and the Emperor up to ridicule or slander, it gave employment to many.
Money drove many of the delatores, ambition inspired others. For a Roman citizen to prosecute successfully a great man was to win huge prestige. The scalp of even a minor magistrate was a fine trophy for an ambitious youngster. It gave him community standing that only decades of hard work might equal, and in a fraction of the time.
Tiberius saw the danger of delation and tried to prevent it. He made the penalty for an unsuccessful prosecution as severe for the prosecutor as a successful one was for the defendant. Then he stopped. The acid in his heart began to burn away such considerations. The delatores took courage and flourished, knowing the Emperor would not oppose them.
It was a sickness of the will that began to strike Tiberius now. All his life he had been turning inward---away from the mother who left him, away from the wife he had to give up, away from the brother who died. As he could not have happiness, he began to seek pleasure. Pleasure was the conversation of wise astrologers like Thrasyllus; pleasure was also more athletic and more personal. Tiberius had never been a monk. Why should he be? Sex with women was the inalienable privilege of every Roman male, as long as the women were concubines, courtesans, or slaves. Sex with men and boys had such mighty precedents as Julius Caesar and Augustus. Tiberius' appreciation of money did not hamper him in providing comforts for his palace, however much it might discourage his waging wars. He began to live more for the evenings and less for the days of work.
His only blood relative, the son named Drusus Junior, was partial to pleasures too. He inherited no talent for work from his father, nor any love for learning. He liked gladiatorial shows, and hated his father's penurious refusal to give them. He loved the sight of death. If he could not see gladiators dying by the sword, he would watch an execution; if no execution was handy, he would hunt to kill wild animals, or fish. His morals were terrible by our standards, but what really kept Tiberius from loving his son was that he was a lout.
Young Drusus as a mere stripling had managed to quell the rebellious legions in Pannonia, with the moon's help. It was probably the most successful act of his life; he was good for nothing much after that. He married a beautiful girl named Livilla---that is, Little Livia---and she gave him twin sons. She was of excellent family; in fact, she was the sister of the Germanicus whom Piso had poisoned. She was a warm-hearted, loving woman, but not to Drusus Junior. She had a lover.
Adultery was a terrible crime---for women----under the Roman law; a matron who went that far would go even farther. Livilla's lover was the commander of Tiberius' Pretorian Guard, Sejanus, rapidly becoming the second most powerful man in the Empire. He knew Livilla, and knew that if she admitted him to her bed she would help him in a still more serious enterprise he had in mind.
Tiberius did not have too much love for his son, but the boy was the logical successor to the Empire. It was disturbing to Tiberius when young Drusus fell sick. It was a terrible shock when he died. Tiberius retreated farther still; more and more of his Empire he handed over to the only man he trusted, Sejanus.
This was what Sejanus had intended. Although he had managed to conceal the evidence well enough, the death of Drusus was no accident; Sejanus had murdered him. He could not have done it alone. His accomplice was Drusus' wife.
XII
Sejanus was a calculator, a maneuverer. He set his sights high early in life and never swerved from the path of ambition. He had no family. He had no friends. It was necessary to make them.
Tacitus describes him for us: "He had a body which could endure hardships, and a daring spirit. He was one who screened himself, while attacking others; he was as cringing as he was imperious; before the world he affected humility; in his heart he lusted after supremacy." He could spend gold like water to impress one man; he could be thrifty and thoughtful to impress another. His whole life was a sequence of calculated acts. Even his seduction of Livilla.
Sejanus created useful allies by attaching lrimself to powerful men. He could find ways to make himself indispensable to them. Nothing was too small for him to do, nothing too low. There was Apicius, very rich, very fond of pleasure. (The dish he invented for his own table has come down to us as pate de foie gras.) Apicius liked young men he could help on their way; he also liked young men who let him make love to them; this was the sort of price Sejanus easily paid. Apicius ran through all his fortune and committed suicide, but Sejanus was already on his way. Apicius had introduced him to Gaius, Augustus' favourite. Unfortunately, Gaius died. Sejanus wasted no time; he attached himself to" Tiberius.
What Tiberius wanted more than anything was a delegate to whom he could entrust power, to whom he could assign any job that needed doing. Sejanus made himself that man. He commanded the Pretorian Guard. He scouted likely prospects for office and presented them to Tiberius. He always gave advice, knowing what advice Tiberius wanted. He never failed to keep Tiberius informed of plots and rumors. He made Tiberius trust him, and even like him---that broody, dour man could relax with Sejanus; when they dined together, which was often, there was laughter. Tiberius was ripe for a friendship. Sejanus became his friend.
Having won the confidence of the Emperor, Sejanus now had to create a family. This was not difficult. His relatives were nobodies, but with Tiberius' ear Sejanus could find them important posts, so that his whole family suddenly blossomed into a show of consulships and prefectures and other high offices. It was a new family, but it had suddenly become almost the mightiest in Rome.
It was not enough.
Sejanus and Drusus Junior did not get along at all. The son of Tiberius was no intellectual but he was intelligent enough to dislike his father's favorite---and brainless enough to -show Ills dislike in the way his intellect suggested, by hitting Sejanus in the face. Tactitus thinks that that blow turned Sejanus' mind to murder. Probably not. Surely Seianus could see that Drusus Junior was in his way, with or without a fist-fight.
As it was necessary to remove the obstacle, Sejanus sought new allies, and found what he needed in the person of Livilla.
We know that Livilla was one of the most beautiful women in Rome. But she had been an ugly little girl, slow to mature.Her brother was Germanicus, who might have been Emperor with a little more ambition and a little more time. Her marriage to Drusus Junior was arranged, and perhaps she did not want it; at any rate, she was ripe prey for Sejanus. The deep-rooted certainty, from her unattractive childhood, that she could not be loved; the suspicion of Tiberius that sprang from the murder of her brother---these were emotions upon which a skillful man might play, and Sejanus had an unfailingly persuasive tongue. She could not resist Sejanus. No one else ever had.
Once seduced, she belonged to him entirely. Step by step he presented her with his proposition. You are the mother of Drusus' twins; they are Tiberius' own grandchildren, and surely they will in time climb the throne. As Drusus is bloodthirsty and not overly bright he should not be Emperor; but in order to insure the thrones for your sons he must be put out of the way. Poison him. Then marry me. And when old Tiberius dies, why, I will be Emperor Regent and you will be the Emperor Regent's wife!
It is not a suggestion that would appeal to a loyal wife, but it appealed to Livia. What made it appeal was the personality of Sejanus, who knew when to threaten and when to flatter. Sejanus' power grew and grew. Tiberius suspected nothing. When no one else could see the Emperor, Sejanus was with him. It became evident that Sejanus was the only way to Tiberius; soon it went beyond tiiat. No one needed to see Tiberius at all any more. Sejanus had the authority to act for him. Tiberius merely ratified the decisions of his friend---when the friend bothered to trouble the Emperor with them at all.
As commander of the Pretorian Guard, Sejanus was the man in charge of the only real force of soldiers within hundreds of miles of Rome. They were picked men, paid three times the wages of the Legions, chosen for loyalty as well as for strength and skill.
Soon the whole machinery of the Empire was in Sejanus' hands. His men worked the palace and staffed the administrative machine. His delegates controlled provinces from Gaul to Asia Minor. Often he chose his own Pretorian officers to govern colonies. There was an opening, for example, as procurator of Judea, and to fill it Sejanus made an appointment better remembered in history than most. He sent a Pretorian much like himself in character, humorous, guileful, ambitious; the man's name was Pontius Pilate.
While Tiberius occupied himself with public ceremonies, Sejanus strengthened his power and made his plans.
Then, in 23 A.D., Drusus Junior was poisoned. To kill an Emperor's son was not easy, even when his wife was the mistress of the murderer. It took planning and it required accomplices. How busy Sejanus must have been in those months! He had to make his contacts---very carefully; he had to make an ally of Livilla's doctor, Eudemus; he had to subvert Lygdus, Drusus' eunuch, who was to feed the poison to Drusus Junior. He had to find a poison that would work slowly enough, and obscurely enough, so that the death would be taken for sickness (and he succeeded, because it took eight years, and a leak from witiiin the conspiracy, to prove the fact of murder). And most of all he had to keep his mistress happy. With the help of the doctor, Sejanus and Livilla were able to see much of each other---she could always pretend she was ill and needed the doctor's ministrations, and then Sejanus would do the ministering. But she was, for some reason or other, jealous. Sejanus was married and Livilla didn't like that. To satisfy her, Sejanus divorced his wife Apicata. The entente of the conspirators was now complete. Drusus Junior died on schedule; no one suspected---at least out loud; and the last obstacle was out of Sejanus' path. Only Tiberius remained, and he was not a problem. For with the death of Drusus Junior, Tiberius went to pieces.
Was it grief? It is hard to believe---though surely Tiberius had loved the boy once. But there is no doubt that from the time of the death of Drusus Junior, Tiberius was not the man he had been. He had been sour of disposition and mysterious of speech; but he had been a worker and an Emperor who gave serious thought to the needs of Rome. After the death of Junior, Sejanus ruled unhindered.
With Drusus Junior dead and Apicata divorced (though not dead, and not resigned) the next step for Sejanus was clear. Marry Livilla. Attach himself clearly to the imperial house.
For this he needed the permission of Tiberius and, as was the fashion, he set down on paper a long letter of self-deprecation and humble devotion. Clearly Livilla needed a husband, and that husband should be the loyalest of the Emperor's subjects. The inference was clear.
But Tiberius was not yet so far gone that he was willing to comply. Why? History does not tell us. It was not suspicion of Sejanus surely, for Sejanus was having everything else his own way, then and for years to come. It was not lack of precedent, for already Augustus had furnished the example of a ruling Emperor betrothing his daughter to someone no greater by birth than Sejanus himself. And surely it was not dislike for Sejanus, unless Tiberius was a greater dissembler than the master-dissembler himself. I cannot do it, gravely wrote Tiberius in return, much though I love thee, Sejanus; I will in my own way at my time show how great that love is; but for now, no, you can't marry Livilla.
It was a soft answer that turned away no wrath. It worried Sejanus. Was the old man going to develop a mind of his own now? So he thought the matter over and came to a conclusion. Long ago Tiberius had visited the Isle of Rhodes and been happy there. Let him be happy again. Away from Rome. On an island---not Rhodes, no; Tiberius would never go for that.
But there happened to be a perfectly fine island available and one which belonged, moreover, to the Emperor.
The island of Capri, visited by Augustus in the previous reign, was beautiful. It was a place fit for an Emperor to live. Sejanus knew that Tiberius thought highly of Capri. The island was not only beautiful but comfortably cool in summer, not only comfortable but safe. There is only one point on the shores of Capri where a vessel can land. Tiberius was always very careful to locate himself where he had a strong defensive position, not out of any particular fear but from a general instinct for caution.
It remained only for Sejanus to get Tiberius to go there.
The first step was to set him on a tour outside Rome. There were temples to be dedicated in Campania; let the Emperor go to dedicate them. So Tiberius left Rome with his retinue; and astrologers cast their reckonings and said, marveling, look, with such planet here and such sign there, it is perfectly clear, Tiberius will never return to Rome! Even a broken clock is right twice a day. He never did.
Two terrible things happened. First was an accident to Tiberius himself. He and Sejanus and a court of others were dining in a country house called "The Cave," located in a natural grotto. The cave collapsed; rocks fell in on the illustrious company; Sejanus, brave or merely farseeing, leaped to defend his Emperor and, with his own body, shielded him from the falling boulders. A good days work for Sejanus. The Emperor no longer had any doubt that his friend was his loyal slave.
The second thing was a remarkable catastrophe.
There was a town called Fidena, not far from Rome. A freed slave named Atilius, the P. T. Barnum of his day, observed that the Romans loved gladiatorial displays and that Tiberius was too cheap to give them what they wanted--- more, discouraged anyone else from giving them, so as not to make the throne look penurious by contrast. But outside of Rome the restrictions were less severe, and there was money to be made out of the shows, especially if one did not waste too much money on construction. So Atilius built an arena--- a large one even for Rome, as it seated fifty thousand persons---and built it on a ramshackle foundation with slim and unreliable pillars. This arena was very popular with Romans, being handy; and when it collapsed, as it was bound to, it killed or maimed all fifty thousand spectators. It was a gory spectacle---for days the wounded were screaming, sobbing, and dying in the ruins, while the rubble was being excavated for bodies and survivors---and a few years later it attracted the envy of a Caligula. Curse my fate, he was heard to cry, Tiberius had all the luck; why can't something exciting like that happen to me?
So Tiberius dedicated his temples, rubbed the bruises from the collapse of The Cave, organized relief measures for the victims of Fidena, and embarked for Capri. Sejanus went with him, very pleased.
The portrait of Tiberius begins to change now. The colors are darker, hot reds and smoky blacks.
Tiberius was sixty-seven years old, a Caesar with endless opportunities for wickedness. He would seize them all. Time was slipping away, and Tiberius began to grasp at strong pleasures. Happiness was gone, and Tiberius looked for new stimulation. His face was becoming the face of an old man--- still healthy, still strong, but old. He lost weight. His face broke out in discolored blotches. The Romans whispered that he had fled to Capri to hide his appearance from the world. It was not that which he wished to hide.
The Emperor of Rome was now the ruler of only one island---everything else had been abandoned to Sejanus---and he began to remake that island to suit his fancy. Capri had no homes suitable for majesty. Tiberius built one---and another, and another, until he had twelve great villas circling the island. He and his court roamed from one to another. They were exquisite and lavish. A fortune went into their marble doorways, twelve feet wide. The floors were mosaic tiles; the walls were red, yellow, blue, sometimes decorated with landscapes, sometimes with architectural designs. Greek sculptors carved statues and fountains, gardens were planted with the richest shrubs and flowers. In man-made caves queer shrines and grottos held treasures of beauty. Divine fish swam in labyrinthine waterways, where priests could fortell the future from the way one fish wandered through this passage and another through that. In other grottos were some of Tiberius' lavish baths, where he liked to swim with his favorites. (The Blue Grotto tourists see now was probably one of his retreats.) Not all the buildings were for pleasure or sport; an Emperor needed halls of judgment, and an Emperor needed dungeons. But, of course, those were pleasure and sport of a kind, too.
Turning from his labors of construction, Tiberius began to assemble a new court. His favorite Greek philosophers and astrologers were summoned to Capri and housed like princes. Sejanus' Pretorians were everywhere, watchful against assassins, ready to carry out their master's will. Senators and princelings were "invited"---"compelled" is a better word--- to wait on Tiberius, ostensibly so that they might have his friendship, actually so that he could keep them under his eye.
To the ends of the Empire Tiberius' agents went, searching for entertainers to bring to Capri. There were plenty of dancers and lute-players: what Tiberius wanted now was entertainment of another sort. The performers he purchased or hired were called "spintriae"---sexual perverts---trained from childhood to perform every conceivable sexual act before an audience. The audience was Tiberius. His sunny villas became temples of indecency, a company of the spintriae in each, a fresh and always changing supply of partners for Tiberius himself. The statues the Greek sculptors created for him were indecent; his library held copies of rare manuals of sexual practice from all over the world. The very gods were subjects for obscene paintings, as though the aging Emperor at last were to say: See, this Olympus is all a filthy farce after all. He began to drink, heavily, as he had not since he was a young officer; the name "Biberius Caldius Mero," drinker of straight wine, was revived. The powerful undiluted wine dissolved inhibitions, the queer, salacious play of the spintriae flagged the aging flesh to new lusts. Tiberius drank, and talked of poetry with his Greeks; revelled, and chose fresh partners for his bed. He had always been dour, and now he became unpredictably cruel. Each villa had its dungeons, and Tiberius kept them filled. Even a friend might find himself jailed, facing torture. The simplest friendly gesture might bring disaster. A humble fisherman found the Emperor sunning himself on a cliff and, dazzled by majesty, anxious to make a good impression, presented Tiberius with a huge fish he had caught. But he had had the bad luck to startle Tiberius, who had the man cast to the ground and his face rubbed with the fish until it bled.
And nothing was enough! The courtesans and slaves were not enough; Tiberius wanted what he should not have, fine Roman matrons, freeborn Roman boys. He wanted Mallonia, wife of a great man, and drove her to suicide with his peculiar lusts. He trained little boys to swim with him in the bath and taught them erotic arts.
And yet he was Caesar, when he spoke, the earth shook. Even Sejanus could not quite oppose his will.
Sejanus' experiment with murder had been a success. Drusus was dead. No one had suspected. Yet Tiberius, who gave in to Sejanus in everything, had proved strangely obstinate about the one thing Sejanus wanted most of all. Sejanus had killed Livia's husband in order to be free to marry her; now Tiberius refused his consent. Sejanus doubtfully accepted what he could not, for the present, change.
It was queer that Tiberius should block him in this, but Sejanus was not to be stopped by one rebuff. As the emperor could not be reasoned with, Sejanus gave up trying; he had another tactic which would work; he could make himself so clearly and uniquely the inevitable successor to Tiberius that the logic of events would force Tiberius to allow him to marry Livilla. It was not even difficult. It only meant killing off every other possible heir.
Meanwhile there was Rome to govern. Tacfarinas set Africa aflame again, and a large force had to be despatched to put him out of the way once and for all. A slave revolt began in southern Italy---begun by one of Sejanus' own Pretorians, disgracefully enough! The ex-soldier found some disgruntled war prisoners, recently enslaved. In secret he promised them freedom and glory, and also revenge on Rome; all they had to do was rise and fight. The town of Brundisium was attacked one night, and a band of armed slaves fought, freed themselves, released others, and escaped to the deep, untouched forests of Italy's heel. There were farms, whose laborers were fettered slaves, condemned criminals; the marauders struck off their irons and armed them. Other towns were infiltrated or invaded, first by stealth, then by armed bands---finally, the former slaves marched openly in great strength, entering the towns and posting placards that promised freedom and wealth. Sejanus was furious and energetic; but before he could mount an attack on the revolutionists, chance ended the threat for him. A few naval galleys put in for water and supplies; their marines were hastily drafted and caught the slaves by surprise, wiping them out.
In the Senate thanksgivings were addressed to the Emperor. But it was Sejanus who stood to receive them.
On Capri Tiberius, between bouts of pleasure, attended to what affairs of state Sejanus had left him. He was still concerned with public morality, for example. A wealthy old epicure named Gallus had the habit of giving dinners nearly as scandalous as Tiberius' own; what an Emperor might do was too rich for senatorial blood. Tiberius, called Gallus before him, tongue-whipped him, took away his senatorial standing, and prohibited any further entertainments. (Then he reconsidered. Gallus might give one more such dinner---provided he invited Tiberius.) Also there was the one major problem remaining which Sejanus could not handle for him.
The name of that problem was Livia.
Tiberius had hardly seen her in several years. Probably one of his reasons for escaping to Capri was to get away from her; she had become a nuisance, a scold; she disapproved of her son and disliked being ignored by him. Before Augustus died he had written her several notes about Tiberius and some of them were hardly flattering. Livia dug up the old letters now and threatened to make them public. But they already were public, or at least enough of them to occupy Roman gossips. Tiberius was seriously annoyed, and in Rome verses were recited about him and Livia in the marketplace:
You cruel monster! I'll be damned, I will, If even your own mother loves you still!
Livia was now very old, past eighty. She could not travel, but she could ask her son to come to her. He would not. She fell ill and asked again; he would not. She died. It was a release for Tiberius, but he bore a grudge. He would not attend her funeral---worse, would not give the orders for the funeral to be held. Tiberius sat obstinately silent on Capri for days while his mother's body lay in the Augustan palace until it became an offense as well as a disgrace, then grudgingly he permitted her to be buried. But he would not attend.
She was given a funeral oration by her great-grandson, Caligula. He was only a boy, but he was the only one who dared.
Caligula was the little boy whose presence had calmed the rebels in Germanicus' camp, fifteen years before. He was still in his teens. His father was Germanicus. His mother was Agrippina, Julia's daughter, once Tiberius' own stepchild when he and Julia were married.
Caligula was one of those who seemed in the way of Sejanus. He was still popular with the troops, he was wellborn. He was not yet a serious threat, but Sejanus marked him for the future; now he was only a boy; some day he would be a man. His brothers, Nero and Drusus---still another Drusus!---were also in the direct line of succession. So was their uncle, Germanicus' brother Claudius.
Indeed, by any proper reckoning Claudius was very close to the throne indeed. He was a mature man, in his early thirties, whereas the others were only boys. But Claudius seemed a fool, with a great vacuous grin and an illimitable capacity for absorbing insults. It was very useful, for it kept him alive through three Emperors, when nearly every male related to him by blood was being assassinated. It saved him to a ripe old age; and it saved him from Sejanus now.
The three sons of Gcrmanicus were marked for elimination. Sejanus whispered in the ear of the Emperor: Their mother, Agrippina, hates you; the sons are plotting to seize your throne. Tiberius was always ready to believe that sort of story, and he watched Agrippina with a jaundiced eye. A delator named Domitius Afer brought charges against a Roman matron named Pulchra; Afer was a friend of Sejanus, Pulchra the cousin and close friend of Agrippina; the charges were adultery, sorcery, and a plot to poison Tiberius. They were trumped up, of course. Agrippina took fire and went angrily to Tiberius to complain. It did not help her cousin. Tiberius could be obstinate and was already mistrustful; the word went out that Pulchra was to be convicted, and when the trial was over Tiberius went out of his way to reward Afer for his virtue and eloquence.
Agrippina saw the handwriting on the wall. The conviction of Pulchra was a blow aimed at her. Next it would be her own life. She cast about for powerful help and, frantic, seized the one stong friend who would doom her utterly. That was Asinius Gallus---now a widower. Vipsania was dead, but Tiberius had not forgotten her; and he had not forgiven the man who married her. If Agrippina had ever had a hope of Tiberius' forgiveness, it was gone now.
Agrippina resolutely faced her destruction. Tiberius sent her a flowery invitation to dine and she came to his dinner, but sat like a rock, touching nothing. Sejanus whispered: Insults, Tiberius! She fears you will poison her! Tiberius nodded and put her to the test; he selected an apple with his own hand and urged her to eat it, and when he saw her furtively pass it to a slave he was furious. The woman presumed too much. He drew up a letter cataloguing her misdeeds and sent it to the Senate. Yet even those spineless men would not go so far as to condemn the widow of Germanicus; there was a terrible tumult in the Senate and outside it, where the commons flocked to parade with pictures of Agrippina and her sons, shouting loyalty to them. It took a second letter from Tiberius to whip the Senate into line. That was enough. Agrippina was condemned. Caligula and the other Drusus were too young to be punished, so Tiberius contented himself with ordering them to Capri, where he could watch them; but Nero, the oldest brother, was also condemned.
Soldiers were sent to arrest Nero and his mother. Nero surrendered without a fight. His mother was made of sterner stuff; she resisted; she---a Roman matron!---fought the soldiers with her bare hands; it took a struggle, in the course of which one of her eyes was put out, to subdue her. Agrippina went to Pandateria, where Julia had been exiled to die before her. The son went to another island, Pontia; then was shipped to Rome again; and there committed suicide. Another victory for Sejanus. He renewed his suit for Livilla's hand.
Tiberius stalked about his villas on Capri, a fragmented man, sometimes exhausting himself in a frenzy of lust, sometimes in cruelty, sometimes dabbling at the affairs of Empire, sometimes keeping his poets and astrologers awake all night with talk. He saw ghosts. In the middle of an execution he would break into fits of remorse. He drank, but wine no longer helped him.
Like Rhodes, Capri has steep cliffs. Tiberius always found a use for steep cliffs. He stationed a party of marines at the base of Capri's cliffs. Their duty was not to guard him. There was no threat there. But for reasons of state, for vengeance--- sometimes for pure amusement---the victims of Tiberius were hurled over those cliffs, and if they chanced to survive the fall the marines were detailed to flog them to death. In Rome the anonymous versifiers sang:
He is not thirsty for neat wine.
As he was thirsty then,
But warms him up a tastier cup:
The blood of murdered men!
In his bath he had his little boys---"Tiberius' minnows," they were called. The spintriae performed their erode tableaux, the courtesans and the chaste matrons waited their turn for Tiberius' bed. Surely his mind was going; yet sometimes it would be crystal clear. He was at his best in conversations with his learned friends. At dinner Tiberius could still seem cool, intelligent, wise. Reclining before the marble dining table on one elbow, while dancing girls and musicians diverted the guests, Tiberius loved to talk with his Greeks of literature and science. He would debate with Thrasyllus such great questions as: Were comets real stars or mere optical illusions, caused by the rays of other stars converging at a point? He would keep his literary Greeks on their toes with the sort of questions that might have delighted a television quizmaster: "What was the name of Hecuba's mother?" "What name did Achilles assume when he disguised himself as a girl at the court of King Lycomedes?" He enjoyed hearing his scholars give the right answers; he enjoyed it even more when they did not. Yet even in conversation with his pedants the lightning would sometimes blaze forth. It could be provoked by anything. Zeno once commented that a certain word had a Doric sound to him; Doric was the sort of Greek spoken on the island of Rhodes, where Tiberius had spent ten long years of exile; it smelled suspiciously like a slur to Tiberius, and Zeno found himself arrested, condemned, and banished to the remote wastelands.
Meanwhile Sejanus ran the Empire. No one could approach Tiberius without the approval of Sejanus. No one could even come to Capri. On the Italian shore, three miles away, senators, knights, wealthy men, ambassadors, and client kings stood waiting for a word, a nod, from Sejanus. They dared not leave. Sejanus might appear at any moment. They waited there in all weathers, and their own slaves felt contempt for patricians who so demeaned themselves. But they had no choice.
Statues of Sejanus were beginning to appear at the ends of the Empire. Such statues went to Judaea, where they stirred the Jews to frenzy. "Thou shalt make no graven image," commanded the One God of the Jews, and the statues were an insult, the Roman law that they should be worshipped was a blasphemy.
Sejanus' man Pontius Pilate was procurator there.
It was a mistake for him to force the Jews to worship these images, for it brought riots and bloodshed; he sought to rectify it. That was a graver error still. It seemed to Pilate a little, politic thing to yield to the demand of the Sanhedrin for the death of one man. It would placate the restless Jews, he thought, and therefore it would be a service to Pilate's master, Sejanus. Besides---he was a wryly humerous person, this Pontius Pilate---it was a son of joke on the Jews to execute the person who claimed to be their king. So he gave the order for the Crucifixion.
It was that simple for even the second-hand power of the remote, uncaring Caesar to stretch a finger halfway around the world and snuff out a life.
There is no reason to believe that Tiberius ever heard the name of the Man who was crucified that day. But the successors of Tiberius learned it very well.
XIV
On New Year's Day, 31 A.D., Tiberius allowed himself to be elected again as one of the two consuls of Rome. It was his fifth term as consul. Traditions form quickly in high places, and it was already traditional for an Emperor to choose for his co-consul someone he specially wished to mark as his closest friend, perhaps even his successor.
Tiberius chose Sejanus.
It was a signal honor for Sejanus, not because it increased his power in any way---nothing could do that!---but because it was official, formal recognition of his standing. Tiberius went even farther. Sejanus had never stopped pleading for the hand of Livilla. Now Tiberius gave in. The marriage might take place.
Sejanus rode very high. His birthday was made a national day of celebration and in a thousand towns from Africa to the Rhine goats and chickens were slaughtered in his honor. Golden statues were erected to him all over the Empire. No Roman had ever had so much in honor and in power without being an Emperor---not even Agrippa, who had given Rome to Augustus. Tiberius' own fame was a shadow compared to that of Sejanus.
But the shadow had substance. Sejanus discovered that the old man yielded in one place only to throw a block in his way in another. Livilla was given to him, but suddenly the Emperor wrote a letter to the Senate discussing die likely candidates to succeed himself and, lo! Agrippina's family was back in contention. Sejanus was not mentioned at all. Tiberius gave his endorsement to young Caligula.
Sejanus felt the time had come to throw off the mask. Old Tiberius could not be trusted. Perhaps he was senile, perhaps he was suspicious, but one way or another he might take some crazy, unpredictable step that would seriously hurt Sejanus. It would be better to get him out of the way. He had nothing left to give except his life. Sejanus already had everything else. By now Sejanus had his friends everywhere, he knew whom he could count on, he knew what triggers to pull to bring the waverers to his side. He met secretly with close friends and useful allies---Aelius Gallus, and Publius Vitellius, the prefect of the imperial treasury; generals and governors; senators and quaestors. One man's price was a province in Africa, another wanted only revenge for some hurt Tiberius had done his family. Sejanus contracted to pay all prices, to reward all friends. Half a dozen were in the plot, then a score, then more. All Rome whispered and bubbled. It was fortunate for Sejanus that Tiberius revelled fretfully in his self-imposed exile; had he been in Rome he would surely have heard whispers. But on Capri his ears were stopped up. No word could reach him except by letter, and the postmen were members of Sejanus' own Pretorian Guard.
Everything went wonderfully well. The real problem was not Tiberius himself any longer. The Emperor was as good as dead; on Capri, his life was to be had for the taking, any time Sejanus raised a hand. What was necessary was to make sure of the loyalty of the legions outside Italy. It would do no good to seize the throne and claim the city of Rome if fifty thousand legionaires came marching down from Gaul, or across from Spain or Africa. Until Sejanus knew that the provincial commanders would keep their hands off he could only wait. It took time. Meanwhile, Sejanus was already like a king. When he walked into the Senate he was saluted as a god, almost. Toadies and sycophants flocked about. They didn't ask for favors, only for a word of greeting; it was enough of a victory merely to be allowed in his presence.
Then one night there was the customary comet in the sky.
And the next morning Sejanus convened the Senate, in all sure majesty, and as he sat at their head he became aware that one of his own Pretorian officers was reading a queer sort of letter from the Emperor. The officer was a man named Macro ---a man very like Sejanus himself, ambitious as Sejanus, unscrupulous as Sejanus. Sejanus was so busy that he had allowed Macro more and more of the actual personal contact with the Pretorian cohorts, feeling he knew him well enough to judge how far he could be trusted. Besides, Macro seemed to get along well with Tiberius. In fact, he got along even better with Tiberius than Sejanus had thought. The letter rambled crazily on, whining and self-pitying. Senators, it said, I am an old man and afraid. Help me! Give me your protection.
Sejanus listened and was amused. This was not the first,: incoherent letter Tiberius had addressed to the Senate. Usually Sejanus himself was allowed to read them, which he relished as it helped prove the point that Tiberius was not fit to rule. There was nothing to fear from letters like these. But suddenly the letter changed its tone. It became sharper, became factual, turned into an accusation. Sejanus is a traitor! the letter cried, and went on to give proofs. Sejanus was transfixed. He could not move, he could not stop Macro. It was a total surprise to the Senate---not a surprise that the plot was under way, of course, but extremely surprising that Tiberius knew and had the strength to act.
For old Tiberius had been warned, and by someone who had no reason to love him.
Antonia, the mother of poisoned Germanicus, had learned of die plot. She had not been approached by Sejanus, for she was an upright woman; but neither had he worried about her. Her son had been killed under suspicious circumstances, her daughter-in-law and one grandson had been exiled. Yet she had discovered what was going on and, incredibly, secured written proofs. She had managed to smuggle a letter to Tiberius on Capri. Sejanus' Pretorians were not quite as trustworthy as he thought. Macro had placed his wager on the old Emperor instead of the young usurper, had helped Tiberius assemble his proofs, had undertaken to present them in the Senate, had accepted command of the Pretorian Guard---and now called on the Senate to condemn Sejanus to death. The very Pretorians who had been the kernel of his strength were now raised against him. Sejanus was doomed. He sat like a stone, unable to help himself, while the Senate debated for a few moments and then briskly voted his execution.
It was the beginning of a bloody orgy of revenge, in making friends, Sejanus had been forced to make enemies as well; the offices he gave out as rewards had to be taken from others; while he was strong in the regard of Tiberius he could ignore the losers, but now they rose against him. He was led out of the Senate with the executioner's halter already around his neck. Great crowds of Romans, hurrying out of their homes to see the excitement, lined the streets between the Forum and the Mamertine Prison. Juvenal wrote a verse account of the scene:
Sejanus with a rope is dragged along,
The sport and laughter of the giddy throng!
Good Lord, they cry, what Ethiop lips he has,
How foul a snout, and what a hanging face!
By heaven, I never could endure his sight!
That morning Sejanus had been the most powerful man in the world, but at sunset his body lay on the steps of the
Mamertine, on the brink of the river, covered with spittle.
Sejanus' death was only a beginning. The crowd was maddened with blood; they contested to see who could first denounce friend and relative; to be accused was to be convicted. It went on all night and for many nights. Publius Vitellius was executed for conspiring to turn the treasury over to Sejanus---as though Sejanus didn't have it already! Aelius Gailus was executed, and so was Pomponius Secundus. No one was spared because of ran!? or services to Rome, no one was spared because of sex or age. The small children of Sejanus, even, were condemned---not for any act, surely, since both were under ten years of age, but merely for being his children. The boy went to his death knowing what was happening. The girl was younger. Her name was Junilla. She did not understand. With the rope around her neck she begged to be forgiven for whatever naughtiness she had done, promising to be a good girl from then on. . . The great Roman law halted her execution. The law said that no virgin might be put to death. Tiberian cleverness found the loophole in the law. With the halter on her neck her executioner raped the child, then she was strangled.
Tiberius had regained his throne.
The last day of Sejanus' life had been a day of imminent terror for the old tyrant, for there was no telling if things would go well. Sejanus might have become too strong, the Senate might refuse this last call to arms'. As soon as he had sent Macro off to Rome with Ms letter, Tiberius ordered detachments of troops to space themselves along the peninsula, between the island of Capri and Rome, with bonfires ready to be lighted to give him the news. If they burned, Sejanus was dead. If not---
If not, then Tiberius would flee, to Spain, to Judea, to whatever province might have him. He ordered a fleet of galleys to stand by at Capri's harbor, and himself mounted the cliff top to watch the Italian shore.
The bonfire came; the usurper was dead. Tiberius returned to Villa Io and had a great feast. He had bought back his empire, paid for in the blood of innocent men and children, as well as the blood of the guilty, but it was all his once more and no one would ever again challenge him for it.
Tiberius was seventy now, and aging.
After the death of Sejanus, the Emperor squatted for nine months in Villa Io, hardly showing himself outside his door. His years marked him heavily. He was thin, his complexion was scrofulous. The great statues that frowned on every Roman city in the world were liars; they showed a clean-faced Tiberius with a steady eye, but the Tiberius of the flesh owned a complexion that was a horror. There was a disease that attacked the wellborn in Rome about that time, a pustulant, eruptive lesion of the skin. It may have been leprosy. It may even have been syphilis. More likely it was some dietary lack, or some now extinct germ. Tiberius suffered from it badly. His lips, cheeks, and chin rotted and erupted, with a bad smell and a good deal of pain. The medicine of the time treated this condition with harsh and quite futile cauterization---hot irons that burned out the festering but left great taut scars. Tiberius was covered with them.
Apart from that, though, he was not sick---or would not admit it if he was. From the age of thirty on, in fact, he had never consulted a doctor, apart from the wielders of the hot irons. It may have been a wise move, considering the medical science of the time.
But he was past his prime. One day soon he would have to die.
It is difficult to read of Tiberius' last years without pity. Everything he loved was gone, his powers were fading. It is impossible to examine his acts of those years without horror. Wickedly, cruelly, he enforced his old man's caprices on everyone around him. In his seventies he was the greatest man in the world, but
... he, intent on secret lust alone,
Lives to himself, abandoning the throne;
Cooped in a narrow isle, observing dreams
With flattering wizards and erecting schemes!
as Juvenal says. His "flattering wizards"---Thrasyllus and all the others---lived precariously but had hope, for they had only to perform their duties to his satisfaction and they would live. The rest of Tiberius' court was not so secure. At any moment the old man's lightning might strike them. The Empire Could govern itself---or Macro would govern it for him---while Tiberius examined plots, found victims, and forever indulged his diminishing sexual powers.
In Rome, where Tiberius never again appeared, Capri had become a sort of storybook ogre's den, clouded by distance and secrecy. Romans renamed the beautiful island "Caprineum"---the place of the goats, named for the old man's goatish ways. In the theater a comedian slipped new lines into his part:
The old goat goes
For the does
With his tongue.
Everyone knew who "the old goat" was. It was daring of the comedian to say it, daring even to listen to it, for it was impossible to know when the Emperor's informers would denounce one. The treason trials mounted endlessly. Gallio went to jail. Sextus Vestilius committed suicide. Vescularius Atticus and Julius Marinus were executed; so was Fufius Geminus; so was Vitia, his mother, who made the mistake of weeping. That was against the law. Tiberius forbade mourning for his victims. Asinius Gallus, that ancient enemy who had dared succeed Tiberius as the husband of Vipsania, now was in Tiberius' dungeons with plenty of time to ponder his error. Gallus' friend, Sinacus, went to the dungeons with him and was executed; Gallus received mercy. He was allowed to take his own life.
The delatores grew fat; it was a climate that suited them exactly. If a man dared speak against them to try to check titeir excesses, it was at great risk; Calpurnius Piso dared, and soon enough he was executed himself. Rarely an informant's plot misfired. A praetor named Paulus was marked for delation; he had the prudence to wear a cameo ring with Tiberius' head engraved on it, but the unwisdom to use the hand bearing that ring to hold his urinal. Naturally, that was lese-majeste. A delator was watching, but Paulus' slave was more watchful still, and had the wit to slip the ring off Paulus' finger before the informer could make his kill.
The dungeons of Capri were full---slaves awaiting torture, nobles awaiting punishment, even princes. Even kings. Herod Agrippa, King of the Jews, had been Tiberius' guest; now on a random fancy of the old man he was Tiberius' prisoner.
There were executions every day---even holy days, even New Year's Day. Every day and sometimes all day long, ten or twenty bodies at a time were dragged with hooks to the Tiber River and flung in, men and women, even children. The trials were quick and sure. Whomever Tiberius' informers accused was already dead. Tiberius did not allow suicide for those he really hated; his guards would bind up the slashed wrists and drag the victim to trial. Tiberius paced the corridors of the dungeons on an endless tour of inspection, looking over the prisoners as a rancher studies his herds. The rack, the whipping rods, and the hot irons were always in use, for there was always some trial going, and witnesses had to be made to talk. Also there was the matter of punishment. Please, begged one prisoner under torture, kill me to put me out of my misery. Tiberius shook his head. "No. We are not friends yet." Another prisoner managed to commit suicide; his name was Carnalus. Tiberius was furious. "Carnalus has escaped me!"
That was in the Roman spirit, for death was, after all, a rather light punishment. Julius Caesar wanted it reserved for minor offenses. Taking a man's money or banishing him from Rome---those were fit punishments for a serious crime. Since there was no hereafter, death was only obliteration. What was so terrible about that?
Tiberius' inquisitors raked through not only the present but the past, sometimes decades past. Some of the ancient charges they brought to light were fantastic---a woman was charged with a poison plot against her husband; but the husband was long since divorced, and the episode was supposed to have happened twenty years before. Some were not so fantastic. In pawing through the dark filth of conspiracy and plot the inquisitors struck pure gold. Drusus! Tiberius' own son--- poisoned!
When evidence came to light that Drusus had been murdered, Tiberius multiplied his arrests and tortures. Sejanus was safely dead, but there must have been others in the plot and he would find them! He was like a madman, throwing one witness after another to the torturers, seeking every possible accomplice, and impossible ones too. For example, there was a man from Rhodes who had welcomed Tiberius as a guest during his Rhodian exile, while his own villa was building; they had kept up some sort of contact ever since and Tiberius himself, in an unusual accession of hospitality, had written him an invitation to visit on Capri. The man accepted; no matter what gossip said about Capri, and invitation from the Emperor was a command. But he arrived at a bad time, on the same ship with a flood of witnesses to the affair of Drusus' poisoning. There was a regrettable confusion. The Rhodian friend went to the torturers. Tiberius heard about it, but rather too late. The man was no longer salvageable, and Tiberius ordered him hurled over the cliff to the waiting squad of marines.
It was well to walk softly on Capri those days, but it did not mean safety. Nothing did.
The Empire staggered along somehow.
Macro filled the place of Sejanus; Tiberius had enough on Capri to keep him busy. Tiberius had been a great general in Augustus' time, but once he became Emperor he fought only a few little wars. He was too preoccupied with other things, and he was also too stingy. In building up the imperial treasury from the meager five million dollars Augustus had left to a handsome hundred million Tiberius could not afford many wars. He also did not choose to afford games; he kept down his veteran's pension bill by denying discharge to old legionaries---it was cheaper to let them die in the service; he knew that gold was the blood of Empire and did not waste it. Tiberius' faults were sometimes virtues. His reasons for keeping provincial governors on for extra terms---sometimes for decades---was partly policy, partly the fact that his mind was elsewhere. But for the first time in Roman history governors had a chance to settle down in their jobs.
But Tiberius was not altogether blind to the fact that he had an Empire---if not to run, at least to bequeath to someone else.
However, he would not be hurried. Some of the possible heirs seemed to be rushing things. There were the three sons of Agrippina, for example. One of them had already been implicated in an undercover affair and had killed himself. Now a second son---still another Drusus!---was imprisoned and exiled because he was too obviously anxious for the job. In exile he was starved to death; when he died, his mouth was full of the stuffing of his mattress. The dead boy was chopped into tiny bits---not even the dead were beyond Tiberius' anger!---and his mother Agrippina killed herself, satisfied at last that revenge was past hoping for.
But one of her sons survived. That was Caligula. Tiberius ordered him to Capri, but let him live.
Tiberius was seventy-six years old when he turned his attention to selecting the man who would succeed him.
The old Emperor had stamped out the rebels. It was no longer necessary to fear his heirs and therefore it was possible to select one. But whom?
The logical candidate was his own grandson, Gemellus. But Gemellus was young---he was only sixteen---and showed no great force of character. Tiberius could dispose of the Empire to anyone he chose, but his successor would have to be strong enough to keep it, and that ruled Gemellus out.
Then there was Claudius. Claudius should have been a first-rate choice. He was a man full grown, and he was the son of Tiberius' beloved brother, Drusus. But he seemed to be a clown, a weakling, and feeble-minded. His own slaves laughed at him. He wandered foolishly around Tiberius' palaces on silly errands. Tiberius' Greek thinkers liked to talk with him because he knew a great deal about history, archeology, and literature; he devoted his whole life,to them. But he was also pot-bellied, thin-legged, and palsied; he had had infantile paralysis as a child, and it left him with a permanent shambling walk and drooling mouth. His own mother called him "a monster: a man whom Mother Nature had begun to work upon but then flung aside." Even when Claudius was fully grown he was treated like a child, with a tutor following him about, not so much to teach him, as Claudius himself said, but for "the task of punishing me savagely whatever I might do."
Claudius really was a little touched---something was missing. Those who knew him best despised him, and he was utterly unable to command any sort of respect from his wife, his family, or his servants. But he would not have been a bad choice for Tiberius. Claudius ultimately did become Emperor and conquered Britain for the Empire, among other great deeds---great enough so that when Claudius died die Romans made him a god---as they had done for Julius Caesar and for Augustus, and as they absolutely refused to do for Tiberius. Maybe all those years on Capri, under the shadow of Tiberius' inquisitions, Claudius was only pretending to be a fool as protective coloration.
In any case, Tiberius passed him by. When Claudius became Emperor it was not Tiberius he succeeded but the man whom Tiberius finally chose: Caligula.
Caligula was nineteen years old when Tiberius summoned him to protective custody on Capri.
He was a bright, sweet boy. We have already seen how the rioting soldiers in Germany had given up their revolt for his sake when he was only two years old. It was not his physical appearance that made him likeable; he was pale and rather hairy on his body, though his head began to go bald while he was quite young. (He did not live to be old.) He had a clumsily shaped body and thin legs; but he also had personality.
And he had good sense. In the vicious tides that swept around Tiberius it was an important occupation of hangers-on to try to entrap one another. The parasite who tricked another into a rude joke or a harsh word could report it to the old man, and gain favor. Caligula would not be tricked. He would not admit to anger on any pretext, not for harm done his family nor his friends. The courtiers thought surely he would say something catastrophic about the deaths of his mother and brotiiers, and when he gave them bland answers they went away, shaking their heads. "There never was a better slave---or a worse master," they said. It was good prophecy.
Tiberius made Caligula his heir. As an afterthought he named his grandson. Gemellus, to share the estate and the Empire with Caligula, but Caligula was the senior partner. Tiberius married him to a girl named Julia Claudilla and kept a watchful eye on him.
What he saw was not altogether attractive. Young Caligula had a taste for violence. He liked watching men on the rack or being executed almost as much as Tiberius did; he enjoyed all sorts of brutal and scandalous pleasures that fascinated Tiberius, and he possessed the one quality necessary for such enjoyment that Tiberius had lost: youth. Tiberius must have been jealous. But he was also understanding.
Some of Caligula's pleasures might have offended even a Tiberius. His grandmother found Caligula sleeping with one of his sisters---and incest was a terrible offense to Roman ways. In fact, he slept with all three of his sisters, for in matters of morality Caligula was hardly Roman. He had come to admire the East, particularly Egypt; if incest was a custom of Egyptian rulers, it was good enough for Caligula.
But Caligula did not confine his attentions to his sisters. He learned a trick from the career of Sejanus, and made it a point to seduce the wife of Macro, Sejanus' successor. She could help to insure his becoming Emperor, and he wanted that very much.
This was Tiberius' chosen successor. "I am nursing a viper in Rome's bosom," Tiberius observed cheerfully. It didn't matter. The troops liked Caligula and would support him. Probably he would be an unpleasant sort of Emperor, but he would rule.
Tiberius was now in his seventy-eighth year, and a fantastic story whirled around the Empire.
The phoenix had been seen in Egypt!
That legendary bird, which showed itself to men only once in centuries, was surely an omen. There were other terrible signs. The Emperor's pet snake died; when he went to feed it with his own hands, as he liked to do, he found it not only dead but already half devoured by a swarm of ants. A dead fire in the Emperor's dining room suddenly blazed up again. An earthquake shook Capri. The Emperor had imported a great statue of Apollo for a temple, but he dreamed that the statue came to him and said: "Tiberius will never dedicate me."
Tiberius' "flattering wizards" studied the portents and could draw only one conclusion: the Emperor was ready to die.
Perhaps this was a boon, but it was a dangerous one. If Tiberius were told that death was close, might he not do some terribly rash, unwelcome new thing? Herod, King of the Jews, had left orders for mass executions on the day of his death, to make sure that Jerusalem would resound to wails of mourning. Tiberius might do the same, he might do something even worse.
Tiberius' chief astrologer was still Thrasyllus. A man who had been deft enough to save his life on Rhodes and agile enough to remain the Emperor's advisor in all the tricky years since was a man who possessed a definite ability to land on his feet. Thrasyllus knew that Tiberius would demand his interpretation of the ominous events. He also knew that it was dangerous to tell the truth.
When Tiberius asked for die latest bulletin from the stars, Thrasyllus was all joy. Look, he said, casting the horoscope, the signs are all favorable, the constellations are all working for you. You will live a long time yet! There is no threat to you at all!
It was a lie but the Emperor was willing to believe it. So, unwarned, Tiberius went to perform a few ceremonial duties on the mainland. There were games to attend. As Emperor he was expected to take a certain part in the fun, so he took a few javelins and threw them at a wild boar. He wrenched his shoulder. That was a small thing, but he went to bed to recover, didn't recover, grew worse, became very sick, and went into a coma.
His physicians examined him, as they had not been allowed to do for nearly half a century. They clucked over his terribly emaciated body and the ravaged, scrofulous skin. It was astounding to them that the imperial lecher had survived so many decades of abandoned life without their ministrations; but they took sober comfort in the thought that he was now paying the price. He was hopeless. He was dying. His breathing was terribly faint and uneven; death could be no more than a few hours away.
The physicians sent out the word.
At once there was pandemonium. Caligula hurried forward to claim the throne. The Pretorian Guard hurrahed the new Emperor; a letter was sped to the Senate to announce the death of the old man and the accession of the balding young favorite of the armies. In the dungeons the word flashed to the doomed; there was hope; the tyrant was gone! In widening waves the news reached every ear on Capri, on the Italian shore, up and down the peninsula. Tiberius' favorites blanched and began to try to make their peace with the new order; his enemies rejoiced and swarmed toward Capri and Rome and their triumph.
And suddenly old Tiberius stirred.
His eyes opened. He sat up and looked around. He asked for something to eat.
He had decided not to die just yet, after all. It was a terribly inconvenient thing for him to do.
The people were swarming around Caligula, delirious with joy. "My star, my baby!" they cried. "My chicken! My pet!" He was twenty-five years old, spindle-legged and pale; but he had been the darling of the legions as a toddler and he looked very good after Tiberius. The mob screamed its affection and pelted him with flowers; and tiien, in the middle of great joy, the word came from the death watch. Tiberius was alive.
Caligula flew into a panic. The world had been bis for a moment, but a revived Tiberius would surely snatch it away. Even though he had chosen Caligula as his heir, he would not like the young man's being in such a hurry. The mobs whispered, moaned, and fled. The celebration turned into a rout. The cohorts of Pretorians halted in their tracks, muttering.
Only Macro, the new Pretorian commander, kept his wits about him.
The succession had passed, and those few skulking targets of Tiberius' anger who had survived could begin to draw breath. Macro had pinned his future to Caligula. The old man could not be allowed to spoil things now! Macro hurried back to the sickroom. Tiberius sat glowering and sullen. Where had everyone gone? Where was his seal ring, that should have been on his finger? The old man was weak but he was certainly mending, and his mood was furious.
Macro did not pause. He stepped to the bed of Tiberius and caught up a heap of blankets. Tiberius had no chance to stop him. Macro was on him, thrusting him down with the smothering blankets, leaning on him with all his weight; the lean, sick old man struggled like a giant, but he was helpless. The struggle stopped.
And so Tiberius did die that day, after all. He was murdered by the man to whom he had given control of Rome during his lifetime, for the sake of the man to whom he had bequeathed it after death. The day was March 15th---the Ides of March---and the year was 37 A.D.
The life of Tiberius Caesar spans Rome's transition from tottering Republic to firmly based Empire. He was born into a world where parties of giants contended for power. When he died the world had grown smaller by this much: It had room in it for only one giant.
Was he a good Emperor? A bad one?
On the basis of statistics he must be called good. Whatever his perverse cruelties and wild extravagances at home, he was, after all, the Emperor of a hundred million souls. His Empire was almost all the known world---the boundaries were the Rhine, the Danube, and the Euphrates. Except for barbarians and the semi-legendary Far East, all the world paid tribute to Tiberius. A map of his Empire shows the Mediterranean Sea surrounded, like a great mouth. Greece is an uvula, the Italian peninsula a fang, the hps are the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar. Ail the Mediterranean world is engorged, and the mouth reaches out for more. In this great teeming heartland only a few thousand suffered directly under Tiberius, and the others had cause to bless him. He fought no great wars, he imposed no new taxes, he exterminated no subject races. He was vicious and perverted, but the fury that turned Rome into a stew and made Capri a shambles left tens of millions of human beings untouched.
But this was no altruism of Tiberius. It was only another form of his stinginess. He would not waste gold except on his personal pleasure. And he would not waste suffering, except where he could enjoy it.
When Rome heard that Tiberius had died there was an eruption of joy. "To the Tiber with Tiberius!" cried the mob, and some of them went for hooks to drag his body away, as so many victims of Tiberius' torturers and trials had been dragged. Caligula would not allow this. He wore robes of deep mourning, though there was joy in his heart, and he treated the dead Emperor's corpse with great respect. It was his way of setting an example to Rome; he wanted to be quite sure that no Roman got the notion that an Emperor who happened to be a monster was any less entitled to respect.
Rome breathed freely. It was only one gasp, and then Caligula was upon them; but it tasted good that March day. Whatever young Caligula might turn out to be, he could be no worse, they thought, than that wooden-tongued, icily-staring golem of a man, Tiberius.
In the middle of the rejoicing the crowds learned of one last horror. A group of convicted plotters had been sentenced to death for some crime or other against the dead man. Then, for technical reasons, their executions had been postponed for a period of ten days. Tiberius had died on the ninth day. Astonishing good fortune. Now their lives were saved! Or so they thought. But the jailers were hard professionals. They knew that Caesar's orders had to be carried out. The new Caesar could free the condemned men if he wished, of course. But the new Caesar had not yet formally assumed his office, and thus could not or would not act.
On this technicality the last victims of Tiberius were strangled and thrown upon the Stairs of Mourning. The crowd howled imprecations on the dead Tiberius. "His cruelty lives after him!" they cried; but then in a little while Caligula began to teach them what cruelty really meant.
Dramatis Personae
Roman marriage habits were complex, and so were Roman names. Nearly every major figure in Roman history of Tiberian times has more than one marriage; many have more than one name; the situation becomes confusing when one attempts to keep the various relationships in mind.
What particularly complicates recalling the names of many Romans is that they change before one's eyes. A new name might be awarded to celebrate a great victory---Germanicus in our period, Britannicus a little later---or to denote special virtue, as Augustus. A Roman name may have a number of spellings: Caius may be Gaius, Cnaeus may be Cneius. The Roman custom of adoption may change a name---Octavius becoming Octavian---or it may not---Tiberius remaining Tiberius. In Augustus, for example, we have all these factors operating at once. He was born Gaius (or Caius) Octavius; when he became Julius Caesar's heir he took the name Gaius (or Caius) Julius Caesar Octavianus; when he became clearly the ruler of Rome, the Senate voted him the title, quickly becoming the name, Augustus.
To help sort out the family relationships of the Julio-Claudians and their in-laws, these notes are appended concerning a few of the more important ones in our story.
AGRIPPA. (Marcus Agrippa.) He was the husband of Augustus' only child, Julia. She bore him a number of children of whom five survived to maturity: Agrippina (who married Germanicus), Gaius and Lucius (Tiberius' favored rivals for the succession at the time of his exile in Rhodes), Julia the Younger, and Agrippa Postumus (born to Julia just after Agrippa's death, and murdered by a Roman centurion shortly after Tiberius succeeded to the principate). Agrippa in his own right was a great admiral, statesman, and builder.
AUGUSTUS. (Gaius Octavius; Gaius Julius Caesar
Octavianus.) He was the second Emperor of Rome, the nephew of Julius Caesar and, after the round of civil wars that followed Julius' assassination, his successor. Augustus married Scribonia, who bore him his only child, Julia, born the day Augustus divorced Scribonia in order to marry Livia (the mother of Tiberius). Augustus is the architect of the Roman Empire. Julius Caesar cleared the way for it, Tiberius gave it a necessary breathing space, but Augustus set its limits, defined its policies, and organized its government.
CALIGULA. (Gaius Caesar; by the legions nicknamed affectionately "Caligula" or "Little Boots.") As a small child Caligula was brought up by the legions and retained their affections even for the first year or so of his reign, when he retained no one else's. Caligula's father was Germanicus, poisoned by Piso; his mother was Agrippina, once Tiberius' stepdaughter and later starved to death in his prisons. Caligula succeeded Tiberius as Emperor and, though he ruled only four years, almost made the Romans want Tiberius alive again,
DRUSUS. Of Drususes we have a goodly, supply. The principal ones in our story are:
(1) Drusus Senior, Tiberius' loved younger brother, who was born to Livia three months after her marriage toAugustus. This Drusus died of a fall from horseback during a frontier campaign, his death being one of the two great losses which drove Tiberius to exile in Rhodes.


Drusus Junior was Tiberius' son (his mother was Vipsania). He was bom in 15 B.C. and was poisoned by his wife, Livilla, at the urging of her lover, Sejanus, in 23 A.D.


The third Drusus was the son of Germanicus and Agrippina; like his mother, he died of starvation in Tiberius' dungeons; his brother was Caligula, who became Emperor on Tiberius' death.


GERMANICUS. He was the great-nephew of Augustus and the husband of Agrippina. He was the father of Caligula (who became Rome's third Emperor when Tiberius died), and also the brother of Claudius (who became Rome's fourth Emperor, on the death of Caligula). Germanicus was a first-rate general who had the loyalty of the legions. In spite of this he did not challenge Tiberius for the throne. As a reward, he was poisoned by Piso---an act which Tiberius may not have incited, but which he certainly enjoyed. Germanicus' sister Livilla, in turn, poisoned Tiberius' son, Drusus Junior.
JULIA. Julia was the daughter of Augustus, his only child. She married Marcellus, her cousin, who died young; then Agrippa (by whom she had five children who lived to maturity); then Tiberius, by whom she had one child who died in infancy; Tiberius fled to Rhodes before they could have more. One of her daughters was Julia the Younger (Julilla), who, like her mother, was ultimately exiled by Augustus for immorality.
LIVIA. (Livia Drusilla; later Augusta.) As the wife of Tiberius Claudius Nero, she bore one son---Tiberius---and conceived another---Drusus---who was not born until after she had divorced her first husband and married Augustus. Her marriage with Augustus lasted half a century, ending only with his death. She was Augustus' equal partner in most of the affairs of Empire, though operating behind the scenes; and the Senate, recognizing her importance, voted her the title Augusta by which she is sometimes known.
TIBERIUS. (Tiberius Claudius Nero Minor; later Tiberius Caesar.) Born November 26, 42 B.C.; died March 15, 37 A.D. He was the third Roman to hold supreme imperial power and the first to show to what depths such power could descend.
About This Book
It would be possible to write a quite different story of Tiberius by a change in the selection of sources. The one important source written by a contemporary of Tiberius, for example, is the history by Velleius Paterculus. It shows nothing of Tiberius the Monster. It calls even Sejanus "a most excellent coadjutor in all the toils of government ... a man of pleasing gravity, and of unaffected cheerfulness . . . assuming nothing to himself."
This is preposterous. To understand Velleius Paterculus it must be remembered that he lived and wrote at the very pinnacle of Sejanus' power; every word he dictated was spoken with the knowledge that the slave who wrote it down was quite capable of betraying him to the tyrant. What Velleius Paterculus wrote was untrue and he knew it.
For the present work the author has relied most heavily on two ancient writers, Tacitus and Suetonius. It may be that they are not altogether reliable. Some of their data have been shown to be errors; some, it is said, may be malicious lies. We know that Tacitus wrote a full century after Tiberius came to the throne and Suetonius even later; both have been called slanderers and gossips; it has even been said that both Tacitus and Suetonius wrote as they did for political purposes, to curry favor, or stir up opinion. Will Durant, for example, thinks Tiberius a wronged emperor; as Durant puts it, "Almost every misfortune had come to him during his life; and after his death he fell upon the pen of Tacitus."
Yet what these men have to say cannot be dismissed. They had access to sources which have long been lost to other historians; Suetonius particularly, as private secretary to a later emperor, had the use of all manner of secret state documents; they had the private diaries of Livia (now lost), the correspondence of both Augustus and Tiberius (only a few scraps now remain), and most of all they had the host of inscriptions, the records of punishments and lawsuits, the family memories of how one grandfather had died or another been rewarded. Nothing of this remains. What few fragments survive do support the picture given us by these two writers. Tiberius certainly was a monster. Durant, defending him, concedes the rape and execution of Sejanus' little daughter, the banishment of Agrippina, the persecutions on the charge of lese-majeste. "Probably his mind was disordered," Durant says charitably; but this is an excuse, not a denial.
For Tacitus, the translation employed in the present work is that by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, published by The Modern Library in New York. For Suetonius, several translations have been consulted, but by all odds the most literate, and the one which serves as a source for all the quotations from Suetonius employed in the present work, is that by Robert Graves, published by Penguin Books, Inc., under the title The Twelve Caesars. Those whose interest in the period of the early Empire has been quickened by the present book can do no better than to secure The Twelve Caesars. (The prolific Robert Graves has also produced three fascinating novels of the same period, King Jesus, Claudius the God and I, Claudius.)
Other ancient sources on which the author has drawn are Plutarch, Juvenal, Seneca, both the Elder and the Younger Pliny, Macrobius, Flavius Josephus, Dio Cassius, Strabo, Petronius Arbiter, the aforementioned Velleius Paterculus and the autobiography of Augustus himself. Augustus' autobiography is based on a Latin reconstruction of the fragmentary inscriptions made by Professor T. Mommsen, translated for the Grolier Society and published in The Book of Literature, Volume 6. The other authors are available in many translations. The Juvenal used was John Dryden's classic verse translation. A particularly useful Younger Pliny is Volume 9 of The Harvard Classics, Letters and Treatises of Cicero and Pliny, where the footnotes provide a wealth of background material. Much the same can be said of the translations of Ovid and Catullus used by the author of the present work; here the source is Three Roman Poets: Plautus, Catullus, Ovid, by F. A. Wright. Wright's supplementary studies are worth more than the translations themselves---particularly his clear description of Roman marriage and related customs. But the translations are excellent in their own right.
Of the modern writers whose books have been examined in preparing this one, Will Durant is the one who can most surely be recommended to the lay reader. His Caesar and Christ is so persuasive in its conjectures and so imposing in its marshalling of facts that the present writer, at least, found it hard to resist some of his conclusions. Those who read for enjoyment need not try. What is most astonishing about Will Durant is that the seventy-odd years covered in the present volume form but a tiny fraction of the centuries he writes of in Caesar and Christ; and that, brilliant and informed as that book is, it is only one of several volumes in what is, in fact, a history of all civilization everywhere.
Almost as commendable as Durant is E. T. Salmon's A History of the Roman World (published by Methuen in London), of which Volume 6, covering the period 30 B.C. to 138 A.D., includes most o f the lives of Tiberius and Augustus. The present writer's understanding of the nature of Roman offices and the relationship of Roman classes, as well as much miscellaneous information, derives from this book.
A more specialized work, but indispensable, is Gugliermo Ferrero's The Women of the Caesars. This life of Tiberius would be a radically different and lesser book without Ferrero's informative material and persuasive suggestions---not all of which, however, have been followed.
John Buchan's Augustus is an exact and rewarding biography of Tiberius' predecessor. Agnes Repplier's essay on Horace (found in her book, Eight Decades), Homer W. Smith's Man and His Gods, Crawford's Ave Roma Immortalis, Lady Magnus' Outlines of Jewish History, Margolis and Marx's A History of the Jewish People, Theodor H. Gaster's New Year, Mark Graubard's Astrology and Alchemy: Two Fossil Sciences, and a number of encyclopedia entries in the Americana, the Britannica, and the Funk & Wagnalls volumes have contributed specialized sidelights. The descriptions of Roman scenes, when not from the above sources, were mainly from periodical accounts of archeological excavations, supplemented by the author's own notes made in Rome, Pompeii, and elsewhere.
Finally there in one volume which is devoted entirely to Tiberius himself. That is Gregorio Maranon's Tiberio: Historia de un resentimiento, which since the present author completed his first draft of this work has become available in
English through the translation of Warren Bradley Wells. As Dr Marafon is both a psychologist and a medical doctor he has concentrated his attention on the mind and health of Tiberius, writing, as he puts it, "a study of his resentment" rather than a biography of the emperor himself, and in these areas his informed deductions are of great value.
At the last it should be said, as was said at the beginning, that much of what we know of Roman times two thousand years ago rests on a choice between two authorities, as to which of them is better informed. We cannot even be certain, for example, of the historicity of such a famous incident as Mark Antony's funeral oration for Julius Caesar; some authorities record it, some who should, in all reason, have mentioned it conspicuously do not. Tacitus, Suetonius, and the other ancients whose works have survived at all have come down to us as copies of copies of copies---sometimes as copies restored from palimpsests, from manuscripts which have been erased and overwritten---usually copied by slaves, monks, or hired scribes whose interest in the subject wa3 often slight and whose education was sometimes negligible. Even what we have is incomplete. There is a great gap in Tacitus at one of the most interesting periods in Tiberius' life, which can only in part be restored by reference to other sources.
Yet it is not only Tiberius' life of which this can be said. We know about as much concerning his appearance, habits, and acts as we can know of anyone who has been dead for nearly two thousand years. Probably we know a little more about Julius Caesar. But probably we know somewhat less of Jesus.
The author does not wish to excuse gross errors of fact by this disclaimer, only to assure the reader that he has tried to avoid them. Unfortunately, all precedent suggests that some may be found. But it has been the author's intention, which he hopes to have fulfilled to the satisfaction of the reader, that in this book more than in any other the living figure of Tiberius may be seen.
Ernst Mason
THE END

