public career just at the moment when his position as second man in
the State was established on a sure foundation, have naturally excited
the wonder of modern no less than of contemporary writers. An English
historian, equally learned and delightful, speaks of the event as the
freak of a moody and irritable man, and declares that such conduct
summarily disposes of the claim which has been advanced for Tiberius of
having been an astute statesman. His contemporaries, who are followed
by the grave Tacitus and the garrulous Suetonius, found an easier
explanation; to them the motive for retirement was simply the wish to
indulge in licentious excesses too hideous for the starched morality
and glaring daylight of Rome; but the same unfriendly or careless
writers allow that he was probably disgusted by the wanton conduct
of Julia, adding that he was also jealous of the advancement of his
stepsons, the young Cæsars, now respectively fourteen and nine years of
age.
That Julia had forfeited all claims not only to affection, but even
to respect, is an undisputed fact. Soon after his marriage Tiberius
had been obliged to take the field, and his wars had been waged in
localities not likely to be attractive to a lady who lived in the
gallant circles of the poet Ovid. War upon the Illyrian or German
frontier did not involve complete absence from home, and the Roman
generals were in the habit of returning from their campaigns to the
capital when the winter weather made it impossible to take the field.
We do not know whether Tiberius followed this custom, or whether he
took a more rigorous view of his duties and spent the winter season
in winter quarters, but he was certainly much away from home. Some
disillusionment as to the depth of Julia’s affection for him, annoying
domestic difficulties caused by the ill-advised indulgence of her
children by their grandfather, may well have contributed already to
make him feel more at home in the camp than in the splendid house
in the Carinæ. Julia too may have had her own disappointments; the
playfellow of her youth turned out to be another “Colonel Grave Airs,”
no less absorbed in military matters than Agrippa, inclined to spend
his leisure in the society of a learned and serious circle, and averse
to dissipating his time by passing long hours at the great public
pageants in which the Romans delighted. So far there had been nothing
worse than an amicable estrangement between husband and wife. Julia
went her own way, chose her own friends, and lived the life which
pleased her best. Tiberius in the same way pursued the studies which
were agreeable to him, and made the best of a maimed life. Doubtless
he recognized that his private happiness had been wrecked, but there
was still duty, and if he could not meet Vipsania in the street without
emotion, he at least gave the scandalmongers of the city no opportunity.
But when Tiberius returned from Gaul in B.C. 7 to become practically
the colleague of Augustus, he found the state of affairs in his home
such as no self-respecting man could tolerate, and there was this
additional sting in the wound to his honour, that the very office which
had just been bestowed upon him was capable of being represented as
the price paid for unworthy toleration and wilful blindness. Rome was
ringing with the exploits of Julia, with stories of her drunkenness
in the public streets, with the names and number of her gallants. The
two men who were most concerned in her misconduct, as being the two
men upon whom it brought the deepest disgrace, her father and her
husband, were the two men who alone seemed to be ignorant of the state
of affairs. The ignorance of the father might be excused, he had no
motive, except a not unworthy paternal weakness, for closing his eyes
to what was going on, but the husband, so the gossips said, had been
prompted by his ambition to accept an already damaged article, for
Julia’s irregularities were not of recent date, and actuated by the
same unworthy motive he had allowed his house to become a mere brothel:
the proofs were only too obvious. That such a chain of reasoning was
inconsistent with itself in ascribing both ignorance and full knowledge
to Augustus did not concern the gossips. Tiberius had been bribed to
be blind, and all the world could see what a magnificent bribe he had
extorted.
The best men, the kindest men, the justest men, and the most earnest
men make the worst mistakes in dealing with a certain type of woman.
Many a woman who has brought disgrace upon her family and ruin upon
herself has urged with some justice that if her husband or her father
or her brother had been less kind, less blind, less just, but more
understanding, she would not have been betrayed into disastrous
misconduct. Often and often the question has been asked, “You must have
seen what was going on; why did you not stop me?” and as often the
answer has been, “I admit I ought to have seen, perhaps I did see, but
I could not believe you capable of doing what appearances should have
told me that you were doing.”
The higher a man’s ideal of women, the less willing he is to ascribe
to any particular woman the wantonness of lust; the more charitable
his estimate of the strength of some temptation, the less stern his
condemnation, and the greater his readiness to accept excuses for
levity; the higher the range of his own ambitions, and the wider the
area of his own interests, the less capable he is of imagining how
large small slights and imperfect sympathy may appear to a being cast
in a narrower mould. Many a man by acquiescing in a discovered want
of sympathy between himself and his wife has wounded her pride and
provoked her to acts of self-assertion. What was part of his life was
perhaps the whole of hers, and in the end he has been astounded at the
disproportion of the punishment which she has inflicted. Without any
conscious refusal to see things as they really were, any conscious
deference to the susceptibilities of Augustus, Tiberius may well have
been slow to believe in the case against Julia, whose good nature and
frankness might weigh against her want of seriousness.
When, however, Tiberius came to live permanently at Rome, the facts
could no longer be concealed from him, though they were possibly still
concealed from Augustus. He could repudiate Julia, but that would have
caused a public scandal, and have wounded a man in his most sensitive
spot whom he had always known as his truest friend; he could not,
however, continue to live with her, that would justify the charge of
guilty connivance, and expose him to countless humiliations; further,
there was always the sting of the price at which his forbearance up to
the present moment seemed to have been bought.
The course which Tiberius actually took was an heroic one. True he
might have ignored the susceptibilities of Augustus, have repudiated
his daughter, and in the case of resistance have used his now
established power to force the Emperor into private life; he might
have held that he was justified in so doing, that he had been wilfully
deceived, and that his pretended friend had deliberately used him for
his own purposes. But if ever he was tempted to conduct so violent, and
yet under the supposed circumstances so justifiable, he put away the
temptation; he decided that if there was to be a retirement, he was
himself the right man to retire. This course had the further attraction
that it put a summary end to that ugly suspicion of corrupt connivance.
Tiberius matured his plan secretly. Nobody outside his family knew that
he had definitely left Rome till he was already sailing down the coast
of Italy. A fast galley was sent after him, with letters imploring him
to return, and not to desert the Emperor in his old age; it overtook
him before he had passed the Straits of Messina, but the messengers
were abruptly dismissed. No further attempt was made to recall him
till after he had arrived at Rhodes, his ultimate destination, though
he seems to have lingered on his way, and to have spent some time at
Athens, long enough to enable him to be the first Roman who sent a
chariot to compete at the Olympic games.
It was not long before the real cause of his departure became known
to Augustus. Julia’s extravagant conduct was so notorious that it
could no longer be concealed from her father. Livia is credited with
having engineered the ultimate discovery, and even aided and abetted
the grievous misconduct with ulterior motives. Augustus, in the name
of Tiberius, wrote a bill of divorcement, and banished his daughter
to the island of Pandateria off the coast of Campania. The list of
corespondents was a long one. Julius Antonius, the son of Marcus
Antonius, and stepson of Octavia, was among them; he committed suicide
on the discovery of the scandal. After him Paterculus mentions Quintius
Crispinus, Appius Claudius, Sempronius Gracchus, Scipio, a relative of
Julia through her mother, “and other men of less reputation of both
orders.” It was a comprehensive list, and inclines us to suspect that
Tacitus is right in saying that something more alarming than mere
adultery had taken place, and that Julia had allowed herself to be
involved in a plot against her husband and father. It is curious that
Paterculus should confine the list of nameless admirers to members
of the Senatorial and Equestrian Orders. If Julia had been merely
a licentious woman, we should expect to find slaves and gladiators
among the company of her lovers. Amorous intrigues in the atmosphere
of Rome were apt to end in more dangerous conspiracies, and though
the self-esteem of the pious and patriarchal Augustus must have been
deeply wounded by his daughter’s guilt, the punishment of exile awarded
to her, and of death to her gallants, strikes us as disproportionate.
It is most probable that there really was a conspiracy in which Julia
allowed herself to be used, prompted by a desire to settle up accounts
with that veteran intriguer Livia, and that this was the concluding
scene of the first act in the long drama of the feud between the
Julians and Claudians in the Imperial household.
Tiberius behaved on this occasion with dignity and generosity. He wrote
to Augustus deprecating extreme severity to Julia, and begging that she
might be allowed to retain for her own use any gifts that he had made
to her. Such gifts will not have been inconsiderable, for Tiberius must
have been a very rich man; it required a large fortune to inhabit the
famous palace of Pompeius, and on his return to Rome Tiberius lived in
the no less splendid villa of Mæcenas on the Esquiline.
On withdrawing from public affairs Tiberius decided to live as a
private citizen; this he had every right to do. His motive in selecting
Rhodes for his place of residence has to do with features in his
intellectual inclinations upon which we have not as yet touched. The
silly story that Tiberius elected to reside in Rhodes because he could
there enjoy unlimited debauchery may be at once dismissed on the
ground of inherent absurdity. A man who wishes to conceal his vices
does not select a university town, a great commercial town, the house
of call for the mercantile service of the world, the spot visited by
all officials on their way back to and from the capital, an island
where everybody knows everybody else’s business, as the scene of his
loathsome excesses; and Rhodes was all these things. Possibly an
advantage enjoyed by Rhodes in being free from the direct control of
a Roman Proconsul rendered it desirable as a place of residence for
a man in the position of Tiberius, who wished to avoid friction with
the Roman authorities. Most of the famous cities on the Greek mainland
were now in a decayed condition; Corinth alone retained something of
its mercantile importance, Athens had become an agreeable place of
residence as well as a university town; but the cities on the coast of
Asia Minor, Smyrna and Ephesus, and the islands off the coast, Samos
and Rhodes, flourished as they had never flourished before. The corn
ships from Alexandria frequently touched at Rhodes; she lay in the path
between Antioch and Rome, and had become the meeting place between East
and West. This gave a special character to her university. Athens was
purely Greek, but Rhodes was both Oriental and Greek.
Rhodes, though largely despoiled of its trees, is still among the most
agreeable of the Greek islands, and in the days of its luxuriance was
particularly beautiful. Tiberius shared that taste for islands which
inspires the day dreams of many of our own contemporaries. Men only
learn by experience that the secluded charms of a sea-girt residence
are balanced by its inconvenience; but the inconvenience of restricted
and precarious supplies would not be felt at Rhodes, the island being
large enough to be self-dependent, besides being the calling place
of shipping: thus Tiberius could look forward to a life spent in the
pursuit of congenial and serious studies, in delightful scenery, and in
the full stream of the world’s traffic.
The studies which especially attracted Tiberius were then called
mathematical--we should now call them scientific--but neither was
the science of the ancients our science, nor their mathematics our
mathematics. The special branch of science which interested Tiberius
was astronomy; but astronomy in his time was merged in astrology, and
with astrology were associated other supposed means of predicting the
future, that vain preoccupation of mankind. Great skill in judicial
astrology was attributed by the ancients to Tiberius, and it is not
likely that he escaped the intellectual contagions of his age; but
we must be cautious in refusing to concede the possession of a truly
scientific temperament to men of his age, or of much later ages, solely
because they were credited by their contemporaries with sharing in
what we now believe to be frivolous superstitions.
Nearly a century after the death of Tiberius, Apuleius, the compiler
and in part author of the famous _Golden Ass_, was accused before a
Roman Proconsul of magic, and of having bewitched the somewhat elderly
lady who had become his wife; his defence is still extant. There
are many interesting points in it, not the least interesting being
the inclusion of Moses in a list of eminent magicians; but the most
striking features of the apology are the contemptuous way in which
Apuleius deals with the current superstitions as to magic, and the
indications that he was pursuing research on lines which would now
be recognized as scientific--“You say I use mirrors; certainly I do;
so did Archimedes. I am studying their influence on light and heat.
You say that I have collected strange fishes; yes, I am interested
in comparing the structure of their skeletons.” It is strange how
old are modern superstitions. Among the charges against Apuleius was
one of hypnotism, based upon the fact that a boy had been seen to
fall senseless in his presence. Apuleius had no difficulty in proving
that the boy was an epileptic. Hypnotism is still uncanny to the
non-scientific world.
Tiberius could not study astronomy or any other branch of science in
his own day without being suspected of magic and divination; the things
were almost mutually convertible terms, but the ancients had made
considerable advances in the direction of the applied sciences, and had
found out many working hypotheses, which were strictly scientific so
far as the then sources of information allowed, even though further
researches have proved them to be untenable. We should do injustice to
Tiberius if we believed, as his contemporaries were ready to believe,
that he spent his time at Rhodes in casting the horoscopes of himself
and all other persons in whose destiny he had reason to be interested;
but at the same time we must admit that the dividing line between
science and pure charlatanry scarcely existed in those days, and that
men such as Simon Magus and Elymas the Sorcerer frequently mistook the
nature of their own proficiencies. Along with much sound astronomical
knowledge, and with many equally sound results of experimental
research, the East sent through various channels to the West a strange
farrago of religion and so-called magical arts in which the esoteric
learning of the Magicians, the Chaldeans, the Jews, the Greeks, the
Egyptians, and even the Brahmins, was monstrously mixed up with popular
superstitions and wilful imposture. The strong common sense which
Tiberius exhibited in his public actions at a later time forbids us to
believe that he lost his head at this period in hazardous and illusory
speculations. We know that he took his place as an ordinary citizen of
a free Greek town, and joined in the debates of its assembly, that he
attended the lectures of the professors, and that his chosen associate
was Thrasyllus, “a mathematician.” There is a pleasant story to the
effect that Tiberius once went to a schoolmaster at Rhodes who called
himself Diogenes, and was used to lecture on Sabbath days, asking for
the honour of a special audience. Diogenes did not even admit him,
but sent a verbal message by a dirty little slave boy, bidding him
come back on the seventh day. Tiberius took no notice of the rudeness
at the time, but when, after he had become Emperor, he was told that
Diogenes was waiting outside his door at Rome in order to convey his
congratulations, he sent out to tell him to come back in seven years.
For some time Tiberius lived contentedly in his retreat; he was visited
by all men of any distinction, who were passing on their way between
Rome and the East; he maintained a friendly correspondence with
Augustus, and doubtless concluded that he was at liberty to do what
Horace had so repeatedly urged upon his friends, “to live to himself.”
But this life of moral introspection and scientific investigation was
not allowed to last; Tiberius was rudely waked out of his dream, and
learned that men who have once held a great position in the world
cannot abdicate. Sinister influences were at work; not only did his own
life seem to be in danger, but there were signs that the government of
Augustus was itself in peril.
VIII
The Return of Tiberius
During the first five years of his residence at Rhodes, Tiberius,
though he abstained from public business, was still the second person
in the Empire, and still protected by the awe-inspiring atmosphere
which hung round a Roman Tribune. He was, indeed, obliged to reside in
the interior of the island in order to avoid the interruption caused
by throngs of unwelcome visitors, who were anxious to pay their court
to the great personage. Suetonius has two stories of his residence
at Rhodes, which show him in no unamiable light. Tiberius once, in
drawing up his programme for the day, had happened to say that he
proposed to visit all the sick persons in the city. Zealous attendants
immediately went out, and ordered all the invalids of the town to be
taken into a public portico, and arranged according to the nature
of their maladies. Tiberius was taken by surprise and considerably
embarrassed, but recovered himself, spoke to each one, and apologized
for the mistake individually, even to the humblest. On one occasion
only he used his official position; when he was attending a disputation
at the University the wrangling one day became so fierce that a heated
professor made a violent personal attack upon Tiberius, as unfairly
supporting his opponent. Tiberius quietly withdrew, and returned in
official splendour with his train, summoned the intemperate professor
in due legal form, and sent him to prison to meditate upon the enormity
of provoking a breach of the Roman peace.
At the end of the five years Tiberius might well think that he could
return to Rome without being suspected of a wish to exercise political
influence, so plainly had he shown his indifference to public life.
He had left his son at Rome, and there were others to whom he was
attached; there were the three children of his brother Drusus, with
their charming mother Antonia; and in spite of their awkward mutual
relations, he had a genuine affection for Augustus. The family
entanglements had been straightened out; Julia was in exile; the young
Cæsars were beginning to take their part in public affairs. Surely
their stepfather could live in dignified retirement at Rome, ready to
advise and help, when counsel and assistance were demanded of him, but
otherwise unmolested and unobserved.
This, however, was not to be. Augustus himself had acquiesced in the
departure of Tiberius, if not before, certainly after the revelation
of the intemperance of Julia, and was not improbably touched by the
consideration which Tiberius had shown for his personal difficulties
in the matter. But Livia had been bitterly disappointed; all her
schemes had come to nothing just at the moment when the victory seemed
to have been won, and her son had been declared heir-apparent, as far
as the constitutional forms of Rome permitted. Consequently when
Tiberius wrote, expressing an intention of returning to Rome and his
wish to see his relatives, further declaring his determination to
acquiesce in whatever arrangements Augustus might be disposed to make
for the advancement of the young Cæsars, and pointing to his voluntary
retirement as irrefutable evidence of the fact that he wished to stand
out of their way, he received an exceedingly unamiable answer, and was
told that he need not concern himself about the affairs of relatives,
whom he had been so very ready to abandon. We are not told whether this
letter was written by Livia or by Augustus; but it was surely written
at the instance of Livia. No man was more willing to forgive and to
forget than the Emperor; his whole life had been a record of successful
conciliation of declared enemies; both by policy and inclination he was
averse to the maintenance of personal feuds. Livia, too, may have seen
in the stiffness of Tiberius a reason for advancing the young Cæsars,
over whom, as more pliable, she hoped to secure influence.
This letter changed the position of Tiberius. His retirement was no
longer voluntary; he had become an exile, and the difficulties of his
situation were only slightly modified by the concession of “a free
legation,” a nominal office frequently bestowed upon men of wealth
and distinction, who wished to travel with the advantages attached to
an official position. Tiberius, in fact, had to learn that there are
responsibilities and positions which render abdication impossible; that
having once been acting Commander-in-Chief and Prime Minister, he must
always be a political personage, a force to be reckoned with; and if
this fact was not apparent to him, it was very apparent to the advisers
of the young Cæsars, and the worshippers of the rising sun.
During the absence of Tiberius these young men had been carefully put
through the training, which had been successful in the case of the
stepsons of Augustus. Caius, the elder, was now nineteen years of age,
Lucius two or three years younger; there was a third brother, Agrippa,
born after his father’s death, and still a child, showing signs of
intractability. Like Tiberius and Drusus, they were sent to learn the
organization of the Empire and the administration of the Roman Legions.
Lucius went to Gaul, on his way to Spain; Caius was sent to the East,
and like Tiberius was entrusted with the management of the difficult
concerns of the Parthian frontier; he was provided with an adviser in
the person of Marcus Lollius.