Julian--of this the heads were the Emperor himself and his sister
Octavia; the Claudian, represented by Livia and her two sons, Tiberius
and Drusus; the Vipsanian, represented by Agrippa; the Claudian
Marcellan by Octavia’s three elder children; the Antonian by her two
younger children. The heads between whom all matrimonial transactions
were arranged were Augustus, Livia, Octavia, and Agrippa. Of these four
Agrippa was to the two ladies the unwelcome but inevitable intruder;
Livia was disposed to push the Claudians, Octavia the Julians, whom
she represented equally with her brother the Emperor. These four high
contracting parties were about the same age, Octavia being somewhat
the older of the four. If there was to be a dynasty, and if the
succession was to follow the strict line of heredity, Julia, the one
child of Augustus, was obviously the great matrimonial prize. Matters
in her case were somewhat complicated by the existence of her mother,
Scribonia, an affectionate but easy-going lady, who seems to have
abstained from active interference in her daughter’s affairs till she
accompanied her into exile many years later. There was another heiress
in the family of the same age as Julia, namely Vipsania, the daughter
of the despised but necessary Agrippa. She was the granddaughter of
Pomponius Atticus, the very wealthy banker and friend of Cicero.
Agrippa had married her mother when his fortunes were still at a low
ebb, and when it was desirable to conciliate the Equestrian Order to
the advancement of Octavian and his friends. Agrippa owed his position
entirely to his great ability, and his single-hearted unselfish
devotion to the fortunes of Augustus. Nobody had ever heard of the
Vipsanian family till he rose to eminence, and the Claudian and Julian
ladies were contemptuous of its degrading associations. We do not know
whether Pomponia died or was put away, but in the year B.C. 25 Julia,
being of the age of fourteen, was declared marriageable, and a pleasing
atmosphere of matrimonial intrigue filled the house on the Palatine. To
consolidate the fortunes of Agrippa--a really formidable rival, if he
chose to declare himself--with those of Augustus, the right thing to
do was to marry Julia to Agrippa, but Livia wanted her for Tiberius. A
compromise was hit upon; Tiberius was left out in the cold, Julia was
married to young Marcellus, Octavia’s son, her first cousin, now a lad
of eighteen, and in order to associate Agrippa with the Julian blood he
was given the lad’s sister Marcella.
That Augustus can have seriously intended Marcellus at this time to
be heir to anything but his private fortune is impossible; so long as
Agrippa lived there was no other possible successor to the Imperial
power, and the story that Agrippa went off to the East to keep out of
the way of the favours shown to the young Marcellus is absurd. Agrippa
was wanted in the East, and the information that he acquired there led
to the subsequent Eastern progress of Augustus and Tiberius four years
later. When Augustus was so seriously ill in B.C. 23 as to contemplate
the possibility of his death, he sent for Agrippa and gave him his
ring, thus making him his successor so far as it was possible to do so;
on this we are told that Marcellus showed such bitter disappointment
that Agrippa again went to the East, and for the same reason. A few
months later Marcellus died, and Virgil’s touching allusion to the
event in the sixth Æneid is probably the only authority for the
assumption that the wise Augustus proposed to set aside the tried and
faithful Agrippa, the actual second person in the Empire, in favour
of an untried youth. Such an assumption involves a contradiction of
the whole policy of Augustus. Whatever his weaknesses, whatever his
failures in prevision, the one thing he dreaded was the recrudescence
of the wars of adventurers. Steadily through his reign he worked in the
direction of giving permanence to order, and of quietly eliminating all
elements likely to endanger order. He can hardly have been so blind
as not to see that the reign of Marcellus was only possible by the
sufferance of Agrippa, or to ignore the fact that Livia would work for
the elevation of her sons after his own death.
The premature death of Marcellus threw all the matrimonial schemes
again into the melting-pot. His marriage had been a marriage only in
name, and had left no offspring. For two years nothing was done, but
when the whole Imperial party moved to the East in B.C. 21 marriage was
again in the air. There was a sojourn, accompanied with much festivity,
at Samos, where Agrippa met the rest of the family. His marriage with
Marcella had proved childless, his union with the Julian stock had
failed; Julia herself seems to have shown signs of an inclination
for Tiberius, but such a union would have strengthened the Claudians
too much, and Tiberius himself was attracted, if by anybody, by the
daughter of Agrippa. Augustus took matters into his own hands; he
persuaded his sister to allow her daughter to be divorced, and married
his own daughter to his faithful friend Agrippa, a man at least twenty
years older than herself. The line of succession was to be through the
children of Agrippa and grandchildren of Augustus; Livia, and Octavia
were left out in the cold. The former consoled herself by interchanging
amenities with the husband of Mariamne on the Phœnician coast, and both
ladies pleased themselves later on with a double marriage project,
which to some extent restored the balance; Tiberius married Vipsania,
and his brother Drusus the very beautiful younger Antonia. The dates
of these two marriages are not determinable, but as Tiberius was the
father of only one child, in B.C. 12, when Agrippa died, his marriage
at any rate was probably a late one, when he was about thirty years of
age. There is reason for believing that this at least was a love match.
Julia proved to be a fertile mother, she brought five grandchildren to
the founders of the Empire and if the succession was to depend on the
principle of heredity, it was secured, for both the ruling powers were
interested in transmitting the succession in the Julian line, and three
of the children were sons.
Augustus was delighted; the philoprogenitive passion broke out in
him; he insisted that Julia and her husband should live in his house;
he provided instructors for the children; he seldom went out unless
accompanied by them, and they rode round his litter when he went into
the country. The boys he adopted, buying them of their father by the
ancient rude ceremony, and the two elder ones were henceforth known
as Caius and Lucius Cæsar. Livia was more than ever in need of such
consolations as could be won by intriguing with Oriental potentates.
It seemed that the Claudians were definitely relegated to a subordinate
position, and the young Cæsars began to pay increased attention to the
mythology of the Æneid and the story of their mystic descent from the
goddess Venus. A marriage between the son of Drusus Nero, afterwards
known as Germanicus, and Agrippina, the daughter of Julia and Agrippa,
was the sole bright spot in the dynastic fortune of the Claudians.
Destiny, however, had not exhausted her possibilities. In 12 B.C.
Agrippa died. In the following year Octavia died, and Livia was free
to carry out her favourite matrimonial project; the widowed Julia was
married to Tiberius, who divorced his wife, Vipsania, to make room for
her. This was the first tragedy in the life of Tiberius, destined to
bring upon him not only terrible immediate sorrows, but a whole train
of calamity, which pursued him to the end of his days. We are told of
many Roman nobles that they divorced their wives. Tiberius is the only
Roman of whom we are told that he bitterly regretted the wife from whom
he had been separated.
We do not know by whom this tragedy was brought about, but we do know
that, so far as dynastic pretensions were concerned, Tiberius was
the last person to be influenced by such a consideration. Whatever
ambitions his mother may have formed for her sons, both of them, now
men in the prime of life, enjoyed the confidence of Augustus because
they had hitherto shown themselves superior to vulgar ambition. Both
were by this time experienced generals, for though the command of
Tiberius in Armenia may have been nominal rather than real, both he
and his brother had conducted a series of campaigns in the difficult
regions to the north of the Balkan Peninsula, in the Alpine valleys,
and on the frontier of the Rhine. Tiberius had further shown himself
a skilled civilian; he had been entrusted not only with the different
Republican magistracies, but he had been made chairman of several of
those commissions by which the real administrative work was done; he
had presided over a very important commission for regulating the corn
supply of Rome, and over another for inquiring into the condition
of the agricultural slave barracks, whose owners were accused of
kidnapping travellers, and offering shelter to freemen who preferred
such a life to military service. After the death of Agrippa he was
unquestionably the second person in the Empire, for Mæcenas had no hold
on the armies, and Tiberius held this position, not as the stepson
of Augustus, but as a representative of the oldest and most highly
honoured family in Rome, and as the reward of distinguished public
services at home and in the field.
Caius, the eldest son of Julia, cannot at this time have been more
than nine years old; it would be some years before he could take any
effective part in public business. Augustus, always in weak health, had
to provide for the contingency of his own death, and it must be borne
in mind that, quite apart from the comparatively ignoble ambition of
founding a dynasty, a sense of duty would impel Augustus to obviate as
far as he could the disturbance of a disputed succession. Augustus
prided himself upon his position as a pacificator; his reign was a
reign of peace, its wars were frontier wars; to allow the apple of
discord to drop into the centre of this realm of peace was to destroy
his own work.
But was it necessary that Tiberius should marry the widowed Julia?
Was the match capable of being represented to him as a necessity of
state, as a duty so imperative as to override all questions of private
inclination?
Certainly it was so, though the public grounds were essentially of a
private and personal nature.
The two hostile forces in the Imperial House were Livia and Julia,
the former the embodiment of the stern virtues of the Roman matron,
personified rectitude and humility in her outward demeanour, inwardly
unscrupulous and domineering, free from the more amiable but less
dignified weaknesses of a woman, incapable of being led away by the
love of admiration, icily regular, intemperate only in her pursuit
of the greater ambitions, unmoral rather than immoral, she shunned
attracting public notice, preferred the enjoyment of power to the
demonstration of power, but was none the less keenly jealous of any
encroachment on her domain. It is curious how little we hear of her;
the poets do not mention her, gossip did not concern itself with her
name; it is only from one or two casual references in Josephus, and
a few incidents recorded by Tacitus, that we divine the activity of
this force behind the throne. Portraits of Livia survive; her high
nose is to be seen behind that of Augustus on the coinage; there are
busts, and at least one statue. The countenance is that of a very
handsome woman and a very dignified woman, but not of a woman who could
laugh readily, the mouth looks as if it could smile to order, but not
spontaneously. We may surmise that her virtues were of such an obvious
type as to constitute a standing provocation to the wicked, that she
was one of those women who are more dangerous to sound morality than
a bad example, and against whose standards it is impossible not to
rebel secretly if not openly; this is especially the case when it is
suspected that behind the genuine inclination to correctness in smaller
matters lurk the real deadly sins of the soul, hardness, avarice, lust
of power. The story that she was blind to the infidelities of Augustus,
and even provided the opportunities, may not be true; the infidelities
may be, and probably are, as chimerical as the connivance; but even
such a myth may be allowed to indicate the type of character.
Pitted against this calm, correct, implacable woman we have the spoiled
child Julia, bent upon enjoying herself to the full, adventurous,
audacious, both in deed and word. When her father reproved her for
riotous living she is said to have replied that, though he might choose
to forget that he was Cæsar, she did not propose to forget that she was
Cæsar’s daughter, and doubtless the pert sally, accompanied by some
laughing gesture, smoothed away the gravity of the outraged Emperor.
For a Roman princess at this resplendent time of Rome’s fortunes
three lives were open: she might live as Julia’s aunt Octavia lived,
or her first cousin the younger Antonia, in comparative retirement,
abstaining from intermeddling with affairs of state, the centre of a
refined and possibly literary circle, caring for the domestic interests
of those whom she loved, or to whom she was bound by duty; or she might
live as Livia lived, darkly intriguing behind the scenes, corresponding
with “native” princes, plotting and counter-plotting among the Roman
families, or again she might fling herself into the riotous amusements
of the gilded youth of Rome, the young gentlemen for whom Ovid wrote
his treatises on gallantry.
Gambling and betting were as well known diversions in Roman society as
in our own; great ladies made their books upon the circus. Cards were
not yet invented, but dice were common. Wealthy young provincials,
the sons of great but not ennobled capitalists, were as ready then
as now to pay for admission to the highest social circles by dealing
leniently with fair ladies whose affairs were involved by debts of
honour, and some of them lost their heads and hearts over the business.
Masquerading in the unlighted Roman streets after respectable people
had gone to their early beds was not an infrequent amusement, and even
ladies anticipated at Rome the licence of the Mohawk and Tityre Tu of
Queen Anne’s reign in London. Antony and Cleopatra amused themselves
thus at Alexandria, to the terror and annoyance of respectable middle
class men; the joke of thus playing pranks upon inoffensive persons of
humble rank under the protection of a slight disguise is not obvious,
but it has at all times presented attractions for a certain order of
mind. As for Julia, we are told that her revels were conducted even on
the sacred Rostra, the public platform of the government of the world.
Her cynical defence of her immoralities is said to have been even more
outrageous than her conduct. But for all this Julia did not forget that
she was Cæsar’s daughter, and was determined not to submit more than
was inevitable to the domination of the woman who was not her mother,
but was Cæsar’s wife.
At the death of Agrippa, Julia, though already the mother of four
children, and shortly to become the mother of a fifth, was only
twenty-seven years of age. During the time of her married life she and
Tiberius had been much absent from Rome; they had probably met very
little since they were brought up together as children in the house
of Augustus. Agrippa may have been an indulgent husband, willing to
condone the more innocent levities of his young wife; or Tiberius,
remembering his agreeable playfellow, now titularly his mother-in-law,
may have chosen to disregard the scandalous whispers which reached his
ears from time to time.
On her husband’s death Julia found herself in an awkward position;
it is true that her father was her friend, but her father’s wife was
her enemy, an enemy whose mysterious influence she had good reason
to dread, and whose ambition was menaced by the existence of Julia’s
own children, already the darlings of their grandfather. Again it is
not improbable that she cherished a purely feminine grudge against
Vipsania, who had carried off her handsome playfellow, and was
additionally piqued by the happiness which Tiberius had found in
his marriage. The personal beauty of Tiberius was remarkable; his
accomplishments no less so. He was unusually tall, broad shouldered,
well shaped, and well proportioned from head to foot, of great physical
strength; he belonged to the fair ruddy type of Italian, and carried a
profusion of golden hair, which grew low down on the back of his neck,
a family peculiarity, his eyes were exceptionally large, and he was
credited with the power of seeing in the dark when first awakened; as
he habitually carried his head in a bent position, it is possible that
he suffered from some visual defect; he was naturally silent, and a
slow talker; he had the reputation of being deeply learned, and indeed
versed in occult mysteries, such a man as would attract the curiosity
of a woman, and challenge her love of conquest by his intellectual,
no less than by his physical, qualities. The few existing portraits
of Tiberius fully bear out the descriptions given by Paterculus and
Suetonius. The so-called bust of Tiberius in the British Museum is not
a portrait of him, and was simply so named because it happened to have
been found at Capri.
Personal inclination, no less than policy, would have suggested to
Julia that here was the natural protector of herself and children, and
there was the additional inducement of delivering a checkmate to Livia
by falling in with what had been her favourite scheme. With Tiberius
as the stepfather and guardian of the children of Agrippa, there was
nothing to be feared from the death of Augustus; Livia’s own son would
be in a position to defeat any machinations against the heirs of the
Julian race, and it was well known that whatever obligations Tiberius
took upon himself, Tiberius would honourably fulfil.
The arguments for the divorce and remarriage were, from the Roman point
of view, strong; it was not a question of personal convenience or of
advancing personal interests, the object was to maintain the peace of
the Roman world. Had Tiberius taken the advice of Mæcenas, it would
probably have been to the following effect:--“It is true that you are
to be trusted, that no pledge is needed from you to ensure the security
of the daughter and grandchildren of Augustus, your whole life shows
that you have made your stepfather’s interests your own; but you are
not the only person concerned. The two boys will be exposed to every
temptation as they grow up; their mother is a fascinating lady, but her
best friends can hardly claim for her that she is equal to the task
of bringing up a family whose responsibilities will be great. If you
do not marry her, somebody else will; it would be a serious risk to
expose any possible candidate to the temptations of such a position, to
introduce a new claimant to the family honours into the family circle.
Julia needs a protector, a husband of her own age; she is said to have
a strong personal attachment to yourself, and under your guidance it
is not likely that she will repeat pardonable indiscretions, to which
perhaps she was driven by want of real sympathy with her previous
elderly husband. You say that you and your present wife are devoted to
one another. Granted; but you are both called upon by a destiny, which
you cannot evade, to sacrifice yourselves to the good of the State.”
And Horace too would have argued much in the same strain; he would have
sympathized more delicately with the feelings of a united couple rudely
torn asunder, but with his shrewd common sense he would have shown that
there was no alternative but a retirement into private life, a course
which would have amounted to abandoning the post of duty.
The person, however, who most strongly influenced Tiberius in his
fatal decision was possibly Vipsania herself. From both parents she
inherited businesslike qualities, cool common sense. Neither of them
is credited with having been sentimental at any period of his or her
career, and though Tiberius was devoted to her, it is quite possible
that she herself regarded her marriage dispassionately as an excellent
business arrangement, and that, while she fulfilled all the duties
of a wife with scrupulous observance, she was prepared to be equally
careful of the interests and honour of any husband with whom she was
provided by the higher powers of the family council. She had abundant
precedent for taking such a line, and Asinius Gallus, the aspirant
proposed to her, was in every way a desirable match. She may have been
really indifferent, and have wounded Tiberius by her cool acquiescence
in the new arrangement; or again, on this side too there may have
been a great renunciation, and the unhappy woman, partly terrified by
obscure menaces from Livia, partly persuaded by the kindly urgency of
Augustus, may have affected an indifference which she did not feel, and
deliberately wounded the man whom she loved for his own good, as she
was led to believe. If Vipsania thus hurt the sensitive Tiberius, and
shook his faith in his previous happiness, there was Julia ready to
heal the wound; was he not the man whom she had always really loved?
Her first and second marriages had been no real marriages: she and
Marcellus had been mere children, and as for Agrippa, worthy man though
he was, he could not feel with a wife so much younger than himself;
he had always preferred the society of men who talked of bridges and
aqueducts, or planned campaigns against the Sarmatians, to his wife and
children; he had been good according to his lights, but it had been a
dull life, and she had been driven to find relief in foolish though
innocent dissipations by which her good name had suffered, and which
she now sincerely regretted. If Tiberius would but take pity on her
forlorn condition, and do his best to love his old playfellow, she for
her part could conceive no greater happiness than to be the partner of
his joys and sorrows; she loved him, she had always loved him, and the
careless indifference of years had not weakened her attachment.
Whatever the arguments and allurements by which Tiberius was induced
to take the fatal step, he unquestionably did so. At first he lived
happily with Julia; they had one son, who died in infancy; and then his
official duties took the husband from his home; he was placed in charge
of a harassing campaign against a mobile enemy in difficult country
along the south of the Danube and in Dalmatia, while his brother
Drusus was similarly engaged in frontier wars along the Rhine.
At this time a serious misfortune fell upon Tiberius; he lost his
brother.
Drusus had conducted a foray into the Black Forest region, which had
not been altogether successful. On his return he either fell from his
horse or caught some serious fever--both stories are given--and was
seen to be in such danger that Augustus, who was then at Lyons, at once
sent for Tiberius from Dalmatia. Tiberius hastened to his brother’s
bedside. The elder Pliny tells us that on this occasion he achieved a
record speed, travelling 200 Roman miles within twenty-four hours. He
was in time to close his brother’s eyes, but that was all. Augustus
decided that Drusus should be buried at Rome, and Tiberius marched the
whole way on foot at the head of the funeral procession from Lyons
to the capital. As soon as the ceremonies were over, he returned to
continue his brother’s work on the eastern bank of the Rhine, and
after two years’ absence was recalled. Mæcenas had died in B.C. 8,
and Augustus felt the need of a confidential adviser. Tiberius on his
return was invested with the tribunician power, an elevation which,
in the opinion of his contemporaries, finally marked him out as the
successor of Augustus.
The history of the tribunate, in spite of the many references to the
office, is not particularly clear. It seems that the first tribunes
were originally the official mouthpieces of that part of the population
of Rome whom we should now call “Outlanders.” After the “Outlanders,”
or plebeians, had become for all practical purposes fused into the
general body of Roman citizens, the tribunes ranked practically among
the other magistrates; they enjoyed the special prerogative of being
sacrosanct, their persons were inviolable, and thus during their term
of office they were nominally above the laws, a privilege which,
however, did not prevent their assassination. They had the power
of introducing legislation, and of vetoing legislation, and it is
perhaps this power which was constitutionally most important to the
early Emperors. Further, they had powers of summary jurisdiction, and
constituted a supreme court of appeal in cases in which the life of
a Roman citizen was in danger; when St. Paul “appealed unto Cæsar,”
it was to the tribune that he appealed. The office was hallowed by
sentiment, and though as Consul and Censor and Commander-in-chief the
Emperor might seem to hold in his hands all the reasonable means of
making his power effective, unless he were also Tribune, his actions
could be vetoed; thus Augustus was more than usually wise in absorbing
the sanctity and the functions of the Tribune into his own person, and
he could show no greater proof of his confidence in Tiberius than by
thus giving him the power of constitutional opposition and investing
his person with inviolability; but, to the astonishment of the Roman
world, Tiberius had hardly received this mark of confidence before he
summarily left Rome and retired to Rhodes.
VII
The First Retirement of Tiberius