between slaves and their owners, emancipation on a large scale was
not regarded with favour, the statesmen who on different occasions
of emergency released slaves in large numbers in order to fill up
vacancies in the army were spoken of reproachfully; the step was always
felt to be a desperate one.
The reason, however, of the objection to such emancipations was
less fear of the slaves, or dislike, than the interference which
it involved with industrial pursuits; it amounted to a wholesale
confiscation of property; an analogous process at the present day would
be summarily to impress large bodies of operatives; this would bring
many industrial communities to a standstill. Similarly when at a later
period we find restrictions imposed upon the custom of emancipating
slaves by testament, this may well have become a means of throwing
the responsibility of maintaining superfluous slaves upon the public
dole fund, and of exempting the heir from the necessity of supporting
them. Emancipation does not seem to have been regarded as an unmixed
blessing. We have the well known case of Cicero’s secretary Tiro; Tiro
was a slave, but he was his master’s friend; the relations between them
were of a most affectionate nature; Cicero’s letters to him are full
of anxious inquiries after his health, of demands that he shall run
no risk of over fatigue; that he shall take the best medical advice;
and yet it was only late in his life that Cicero bestowed liberty on
Tiro. The letters in which Cicero’s relatives, and especially his
son, congratulate Tiro on his elevation, show that, slave though he
was, he was no less respected than loved. That such relations were
common we may infer from the statement made by Paterculus, that in
the proscription of B.C. 43 the fidelity of sons to their fathers was
least; the merit of wives stood first, of freedmen second, of slaves
third.
The institution of slavery did not demoralize the ancients in the same
way that negro slavery is said to have demoralized the Americans, or
coloured slavery in general to demoralize white men; it was a totally
different institution.
In this, as in all other details of ancient history, the memory of
the bad, the exceptional, the sensational, is preserved; the normal
conditions are forgotten; and as it is much easier to declaim than to
inquire, the essential but unobtrusive features of any particular
institution escape notice. On the whole, the action of slavery in
ancient times was beneficial to civilization, and the eventual
dismemberment of the Empire was not due chiefly to the existence of
slavery. The races who broke up the Empire themselves recognized
slavery, and it was long before agricultural slavery disappeared even
from England.
I
The Death of Augustus
In the hottest weather of the year 14 A.D., a hush fell upon the
streets of old Rome, as the news rapidly circulated that her foremost
citizen was dead, and that the man whose name had spelled peace and
prosperity for the whole civilized world was no longer at the head of
affairs. Few men were still living who could remember any rule but
his; for forty-five years he had controlled without serious opposition
the destinies of an Empire which stretched from the Euphrates to the
English Channel; the men who had taken an active part in the events
before the reins of government dropped into his skilful hands were
now but few, and if they ever spoke of the days which immediately
preceded his reign, it was to contrast fourteen years of anarchy with
nearly half a century of order. Here and there in the palaces of the
few old Roman families that had survived the revolutions of the middle
of the last century the good old times were bewailed, when the spoils
of the world were distributed between the members of a few princely
houses theoretically associated in administering the affairs of only
one Italian town, and bitter epigrams were circulated at the expense
of the monarch who posed as the first man of a free city; but the
vast body of the population had long forgotten the days of a liberty
in whose privileges they had never shared, while they had suffered
from its concomitant licence; the streets were no longer the scene of
furious fights between the retainers of great noblemen, the citizens
regularly received their supplies of corn, holidays were frequent and
the amusements of the public provided for on a liberal scale; the
Prince himself had been the foremost to enjoy all that delighted the
hearts of his fellow citizens.
As the fierceness of the hot Italian sun diminished, and the streets
began to fill, the praises of the dead man passed from mouth to mouth;
one would remember the humility with which he had pressed the claims
of his chosen candidates for public office, and the courtesy with
which he had asked for a vote; another would recall him studiously
fulfilling the sacred duty of a patron, and pleading in the Forum on
behalf of a humble client; yet another would describe him standing at
his own door once a year dressed in white begging for alms to bestow
on the needy; others would speak of the modesty of his household,
the model of an ancient Roman family where Livia his consort herself
superintended the weaving of her maids; nor would the gayer sort forget
his interest in the shows of the circus, or fail to tell stories of his
modest bets, and somewhat liberal jokes; the scholar would speak of his
simple entertainments in which the poet and the historian shared in
the conversation on terms of equality with their host; those of more
serious mind would dwell on his scrupulous attention to the ordinances
of religion, his restoration of temples and shrines and their various
cults; while the tender-hearted would deplore his private sorrows, the
premature deaths that had snatched away his grandsons, the scandals
that had bereft his home of his daughter and granddaughter; nor would
they fail to bewail the fact that the only possible successor to his
heritage and his power was an alien in blood.
As the days wore on the symptoms of the public sorrow increased, and
the authorities began to fear that the order of the funeral might be
marred by some such frantic outburst as had attended the obsequies
of the first great Cæsar, whose body had been seized by an excited
mob and burned in the public market place; regulations were issued to
ensure such order as the Prince himself would have commanded, and to
prevent the licences into which an orgy of sorrow might degenerate.
Day by day was reported the slow progress of the procession from the
small country house in Campania in which he had died to the gates of
the city; here the body had been guarded and carried by soldiers, there
by the knights, the second order in the State, and lastly the Senators
themselves were waiting to receive it, and conduct it on the final
stage of its journey into Rome.
The day came at length when the long train of mourners filed through
the narrow streets, at its head the ivory bier draped in purple,
behind it the effigy of the dead man, and a stately series of similar
effigies leading back through the great Cæsar himself to mythical
Æneas and Anchises and the goddess Venus; there were no deep-voiced
bells, no dull minute guns to express and intensify the public sorrow,
but the silence was broken by the shrieks of dishevelled women and the
monotonous blare of hoarse trumpets. After the images came the chief
mourner, a tall and stately man with bowed head, the Commander-in-chief
of the Roman armies, descended from the noblest blood of ancient Rome;
behind him walked members of the family, high officials, statesmen,
senators, the representatives of kings and cities. Principalities and
powers were all assembled to do honour to the dead. The heat of the
season had rendered it necessary to conduct the ceremony by night, and
the flare of torches fell fitfully on the procession and on the faces
of the spectators. At length the tedious ritual was completed, the
wine, the oil and the spices were thrown on the pyre, thrice was the
dead man called by name, and the silence was broken by no answer; the
chief mourner applied the torch with averted face, the crackling flames
rose to the sky, the soldiers ran round the burning pile, an eagle sped
heavenwards through the smoke; when the fire had at length died down,
and wine had been sprinkled on the ashes, a cry arose of Farewell, and
yet again Farewell; then the mourners departed to their homes, and the
Roman people dispersed to magnify the events of the last few hours, and
to remember portents: stars had fallen from their places in the sky,
the earth had been shaken, rivers had reversed their course, the kindly
rain had been turned into blood, and even small domestic catastrophes
were now known to have had their significance; a Senator had seen the
soul of the deceased rise to heaven from the midst of the flames, and
the credulous were comforted by reflecting that the Genius of Augustus
still watched over the destinies of the Roman people.
Meanwhile in the palaces of the Senators one question of supreme
interest was debated: What was to be the new order of things? and,
indeed, was there to be a new order?
It was fortunate for the destinies of civilized humanity that a
successor was ready at hand to take up the reins of government which
had dropped from the tired hands of Augustus, and that the question
of succession was not left to be settled by debate in the Senate, or
the result of a civil war. Tiberius was on the spot; he had been for
all practical purposes his stepfather’s colleague for ten years; he
was acting Commander-in-chief of the Roman armies; he was of ripe
age and ripe experience; his personal knowledge of the Empire was
almost co-extensive with its limits; he does not seem to have visited
Africa or Egypt, but he had served or commanded armies, and conducted
negotiations over the whole area between the sources of the Euphrates
and the North Sea. There was no living Roman with equal knowledge of
affairs, or of superior rank; his succession was inevitable, if there
was to be a successor to Augustus.
The life of Tiberius is from every point of view profoundly
interesting; it began in the middle of the great revolution which
eventually substituted the rule of one man for the rule of the Senate,
and which left the city of Rome the capital rather than the mistress
of an Empire; it ended after nearly fourscore years, during which
the constitution of that Empire was so firmly established that the
incapacity of individual rulers, and the mutual rivalries of aspirants
to the chief power, though sometimes resulting in civil war, failed
to shake its stability; it coincided with a great step in the forward
march of civilization which has left its impress upon all subsequent
history. If the political events which occurred during the life of
Tiberius are of supreme interest, his personal history is no less
attractive to the student of character, and of the strange vicissitudes
which may occur in the life of a human being; not the least of the
many contradictions in this life is the fact that the man, who is
called by the great German historian, Mommsen, “the ablest of the Roman
Emperors,” should have become the recognized type of all that is most
evil in a ruler, and left a name which is seldom mentioned without an
expression of detestation.
II
Parents and Childhood of Tiberius
The connexion of the Claudian clan with Rome was referred by the Roman
historians to the very beginnings of her history; they had no doubt of
the antiquity of the event; it was only debated whether this Sabine
stock was received into the community on the Tiber at the suggestion
of Titus Tatius, the consort of Romulus, or four years after the
expulsion of the Kings. The headquarters of the Claudians were the
region round Tusculum, in which town its chiefs had a fortress; their
domain gave its name to one of the later electoral divisions of the
Roman territory. From the beginning the Claudian stock was credited
with an unusual measure of aristocratic pride and public spirit; the
legends said that one Claudius caused by his intemperance the secession
of the plebs to the Mons Sacer, and that the unbridled lust of another
brought about the downfall of the Decemvirate; we are on firmer ground
in attributing to the Appius Claudius who was Censor in B.C. 312 the
inception, if not the completion, of two works of great public utility,
the Appian Aqueduct, and the even more famous Appian Way, the great
South Road, the first link in the chain of highways which bound the
Empire together. Appius Claudius the Censor had two sons, who took
the additional names of the Handsome and the Strong; the descendants
of both were to do good service to their country; a Claudius Pulcher
fought the Carthaginians in Sicily, a Claudius Nero defeated Hasdrubal
at the battle of the Metaurus. The Censor is further credited with
having been the earliest Roman writer in prose and verse. Intellectual
and administrative eminence was thus ascribed to the Claudians, also a
touch of arrogance extending to relations in which arrogance was out
of place; for it was Appius Claudius Pulcher the Admiral who, when the
unwonted abstemiousness of the Sacred Chickens portended disaster,
threw them into the sea, and was deservedly rewarded by a defeat.
Both the leading Claudian families were united in the person of the
Emperor; his father was a Nero, his mother was a Pulcher, for though
her father belonged legally to the Livian Gens, he had been adopted
from the Claudian. The family enumerated among its distinctions
thirty-three consulships, five dictatorships, seven censorships, six
triumphs, and two ovations.
In the last century and a half of the Republic the Neronic branch
was less distinguished than that of Pulcher; no records survive of
the immediate ancestors of the Emperor on the father’s side, and no
Claudius Nero appears in the consular list after 204 B.C. When Horace
wished to remind the Romans of their debt to the Neros, he had to go
back to the battle of the Metaurus. The family had become so obscure
that the genuine descent of the Emperor from the conqueror of Hasdrubal
has been questioned; but it was not questioned by his contemporaries,
who would have been only too glad to add the reproach of an obscure
ancestry to the other indignities which they fastened upon him. It
would be in accordance with the pride, and even rectitude of conduct,
ascribed to the Claudians, that this branch of the family preferred
comparative poverty to taking part in the scrambles for office, and
interested intrigues, which marked the decadence of the Senate; and
that its successive chiefs chose the dignified life of a Roman noble of
the old-fashioned type, concentrating their energies rather upon the
management of their ancestral domains than upon pushing themselves into
the inner circle of Senators who sped to exploit the Roman conquests.
Tiberius Claudius Nero, the father of the Emperor, appears first in the
party of Cæsar; he was already a quæstor, and while holding that office
commanded the fleet which besieged Alexandria, and rescued Cæsar from
the insurrection of the Alexandrians; he was rewarded by being made a
Pontifex, and entrusted with the establishment of colonies in Gaul, at
Narbonne and Arles among other places. This was work which required
considerable tact; it was not always easy to satisfy both the veterans
who formed the colony and the population whom they displaced. Cæsar was
not in the habit of employing incompetent agents, and the selection of
Tiberius Nero for this work is an evidence of his capacity. After the
assassination of Cæsar he became a warm partisan of the Liberators;
he is even said to have proposed in the Senate that the Tyrannicides
should be rewarded, when others thought that an amnesty was sufficient
for their deserts. It is not clear whether he was Prætor at this time
or shortly afterwards, but he certainly held that office when Lucius
Antonius and Fulvia making a diversion against Octavian at Præneste;
before the fall of Præneste he had slipped away to Campania, and
endeavoured to form an army from the proprietors in that district who
were threatened with the confiscation of their land for the benefit of
Octavian’s soldiers; in this enterprise he was unsuccessful, and had to
flee for his life to Sicily, where he took refuge for a short time with
Sextus Pompeius.
As we afterwards find Tiberius Nero in the closest association with
Octavian under circumstances which, judged by our standards of conduct,
are discreditable, it is advisable to stop to consider whether a man
could with any measure of consistency serve under Cæsar, and then join
hands with his murderers; on the solution of this question depends
the claim of Tiberius to be considered an honourable man; for in this
relation we can measure him by standards which are applicable to
ancient and modern life alike.
Velleius Paterculus, the historian to whom we owe a conception of the
early days of the Empire different from that suggested by Cicero and
Tacitus, was hereditarily associated with the family of Tiberius Nero;
his grandfather was his most intimate friend; he calls Tiberius Nero
a man of generous spirit, and strongly inclined to learning. A man of
this nature would be attracted to Cæsar by a similarity of character
and tastes. The ambition of Cæsar was a generous ambition; he was one
of those born organizers to whom muddling is a painful and personal
annoyance; he valued power for no vulgar reason, but because it gave
him the opportunity of realizing his conception of a well ordered
world. Endowed with an enormous intellectual ability, inexhaustible
physical vitality, an irresistible personal charm, Cæsar attracted to
himself all the men who really meant work. Cicero himself very nearly
succumbed, and would have done so entirely had his uneasy vanity
allowed him to work in a subordinate position. There is a limit to the
incompetence of constituted authorities; a time comes when all earnest
men in a State, whose public business has gradually been monopolized by
respectable incompetents, look eagerly for a deliverer; such men do not
welcome the noisy reformer, or the narrow doctrinaire, and so long as
these alone present themselves, the earnest men hold back, but as soon
as the really capable hard-working man appears, they give him their
confidence, and pass naturally into his service. Cæsar’s campaigns in
Gaul enabled him to select his men; at first the fashionable young
men of Rome hurried to his standards attracted by the prospect of a
pleasant picnic in charming country with an agreeable climate; no
serious danger was anticipated, and there was a pleasing prospect of
loot. The behaviour of these gentlemen, when it was realized that the
advance of Ariovistus meant serious business, supplies the one comic
interlude in Cæsar’s commentaries. During the nine years which Cæsar
gave to the conquest of Gaul, the earnest workers found their leader;
the intercourse between Cæsar’s camp and the capital was constant; men
learned to contrast the vigorous administration of the Governor of the
two Gauls with the imbecility of the Senate; it was not foreseen that
the contrast would result in the absorption of the powers of government
by this one man. When the time came at which Cæsar had either to
abandon all his work or force the Senate to give him a continuance of
office, his fellow workers were naturally disposed to give him their
continued support. Men who had learned what good work was, and had had
their share in it, were inclined to hope for the best; there were many
self-seekers, doubtless, but it was possible to follow the fortunes of
Cæsar under the influence of the highest motives. The man who had done
such magnificent work in the two Gauls might be trusted to reorganize
the Government. The reaction came, when the continuance of opposition
at Rome forced Cæsar to become an autocrat; his work was only half
done when he had beaten the Senatorial armies in Macedonia, in Egypt,
in Africa, in Spain, in Asia Minor; he had further to clear away all
the obstructions, get rid of all customs and precedents by which the
machinery of the administration was impeded; it was root and branch
work; and Cæsar was impatient; he attacked everything at once; no ties
of affection, no sentimental associations were spared, no prejudices;
he saw everything in the clear light of reason; he knew what was best
for the Empire, and he was determined to have his own way.
To Cæsar the Senate was the embodiment of obstruction and incompetence;
he did not propose to repeat the mistake of Sulla and give it a new
lease of power, for his contempt for the Senators was unbounded; but
the Senate had a name; it could not be disbanded; the better course
seemed to be to swamp the Senate of Rome in the Senate of the Empire,
to make it almost a titular body. He enlarged its numbers, added
to it distinguished provincials, his personal adherents among the
noblemen of Gaul. The figures that are given us may not be absolutely
trustworthy, but there can be no doubt that the Senate was increased
to a number which destroyed its capacity for united action. By this
measure Cæsar alienated the affection and destroyed the confidence of
the liberal members of the old aristocracy; they had been prepared to
pay a heavy price for good government; they were at one with Cæsar in
recognizing the expansion of Rome, but they had not anticipated a time
when a Julius Florus or Cornelius Gallus would not only be dignified
with Roman names, but would have the same social rank as a Claudian or
Sempronian. So determined was Cæsar to convince the Senate that its day
was over, that in transacting business with it he neglected even the
ordinary courtesies, and received its deputations without rising from
his seat. The dagger of Brutus was the result.
In some respects the assassination of Cæsar was fortunate for his
reputation; there was no widespread conspiracy; his government had
been of so short a duration that the disaffected men had no time to
find one another out; their victim had never realized that there was
a formidable opposition, and he fell before his qualities of clemency
and moderation were put to the severest test, which tries the virtue
and capacity of a successful reformer. The men who murdered him were
his chosen friends and servants, many of them were either holding or
were awaiting their turn for holding important provincial appointments.
The conspiracy was not organized; no provision was made for carrying
on the Government after the keystone of the fabric had been removed;
it was enough to kill the tyrant. In one respect the conspirators had
correctly estimated the result; there were men who, bound to Cæsar by
various ties, would not take an active part in any conspiracy against
his person, but who, if once that obstacle to the restoration of the
Senatorial Government were removed, would declare their detestation of
autocracy, and assist in remodelling the State. Tiberius Nero was one
of these; Cicero was another, and there were many others who, during
the last four years, had been ill at ease in the attempt to reconcile
their personal affection for Cæsar and confidence in his ability
with their conception of what constituted political righteousness.
Unfortunately for these men, they were but few in number; within
three months’ time it had become clear that neither the Army, nor
the provincials, nor the subordinate officials had any objection to
an autocrat; the myth of the Senate had been replaced by the myth of
Cæsar; the only question was who would become the centre of the cult.