any fact is good enough for them, provided it makes good copy, and
can be dealt with in a picturesque sentence or neat epigram. They pay
little attention to the consecutive order of events, are not always
careful to distinguish between persons of the same name, and are rather
attracted than otherwise by an opportunity of attributing contradictory
qualities to the same person; the time at which a thing was done is of
little importance to them, the person by whom it was done of equally
little; a good story is to them a good story, and nothing more; if
its effect is increased by hanging it on the name of a well known man,
they seldom stop to inquire whether he can be justly implicated in the
events narrated; consequently it is always agreeable to find their
statements corroborated by undesigned coincidences. Paterculus and
Suetonius agree in telling us that the last two years of the life of
Tiberius at Rhodes were made a burden to him by the sinister influence
of Marcus Lollius, but they leave us in some doubt as to who this
Marcus Lollius really was, whether he was the same man who was Consul
in B.C. 21, and Commander-in-chief in Northern Gaul in B.C. 16, whether
the Consul and the General were two different persons, and whether the
adviser of Caius Cæsar was not the Consul but his son.
The poet Horace addressed one of his odes and two of his epistles
to a Lollius. It has been generally assumed, on the ground of a
misunderstood allusion, that the ode was written for the father,
and the two letters for the son; comparison of the three shows that
they must have been written to the same person, and that that person
could not have been Consul in B.C. 21. Letters and ode alike contain
advice which Horace could not have addressed even to a man his equal
in rank and of his own age without a risk of putting a summary end to
any friendship that might have existed between them, still less to a
Consular, and possibly a senior. Horace tells us definitely that he
was forty-four years of age in the year when Lollius and Lepidus were
consuls; the family of Lollius had been hitherto undistinguished;
the name appears on no previous occasion in the consular lists, nor
had the man himself done anything to suggest him as a fit recipient
of premature honours. The legal age for admission to the Consulship
was forty-three, and though the law was frequently broken in times of
revolution, or in favour of candidates of the Imperial House, Augustus,
whose policy was to restore the old as far as it was not incompatible
with the new, was not likely to break the law in favour of a man who
was not inevitable. It is not likely that Lollius the Consul was one of
those young men who were rapidly pushed through the routine of office,
because they had claims which could not be disregarded, or because
it was necessary to conciliate their families. Horace could not have
written, as he did write, to the man who was Consul in B.C. 21.
The second of the two letters included in the collection was certainly
written in B.C. 21; the date is fixed by an allusion to the fact that
Augustus was at the time away demanding the restoration of the Eagles
from the Parthians. The person to whom it was addressed was about
to become the companion of some young man of distinction, probably
Drusus, for Tiberius was at this time absent with Augustus, and on his
return passed under the tutelage of Agrippa, so far as he was not in
the hands of Augustus himself. The advice which Horace gives could not
be applicable to a man old enough to be Consul, and therefore not in
a subordinate position to his charge; but it is strictly applicable
to a young man who was to be the companion of another young man, his
superior in rank or position. Everything in the letter indicates the
youth of Lollius; he was to share in the athletic amusements of his
friend; the temptations, which he is to resist, are the temptations of
a young man. The advice given is excellent, and might be profitably
studied by any young man of the present day, who happens to find
himself in a similar situation; some of it is distinctly personal,
and tells us what kind of a young man this Lollius was. Horace begins
by addressing him as “liberrime Lolli,” “most independent Lollius,”
and indicates that one of his dangers is undue sensitiveness to the
imputation of servility. He concludes with some general advice not
specially applicable to the particular occasion: “In the midst of all
you will read the works of learned men, and strictly enquire of them
how you may be able to live your life in comfort, whether you are
always to be harassed and excited by a sense of poverty, excessive
anxiety, and the expectation of but moderate affluence, whether virtue
is acquired by learning or given by nature, what dispels care, what
puts you on good terms with yourself, what calms and purifies, honour
or the pleasures of gain, or the side road, and the path of the
unobserved.” We should be at liberty to infer from this that the good
qualities of Lollius were balanced by an irritable ambition and a love
of money.
The other epistle to Lollius, though he is addressed with mock
solemnity in the first line as “most mighty Lollius,” is clearly
written to a boy: “while you are spouting Homer at Rome I have read
him over again at Præneste.” The recitation of the Homeric poems was
an early step in the educational course of the Romans, and preceded
the technical course in rhetoric. At the end of the letter Horace says:
“Now is the time, boy, to drink in the words of wisdom with a clean
heart; present yourself now to the higher influences.” Horace begins
with drawing moral lessons from the Homer which he has been reading,
and then passes on to general advice: “Don’t wait to enter on the
path of virtue, don’t put off your moral discipline, or the time will
go by,” “The man who is a slave to cupidity or anxiety cannot enjoy
anything,” “Despise sensual pleasures; sensual pleasure is bought with
pain and carries a curse,” “The greedy man is always a poor man; fix a
limit to your desires,” “The Sicilian tyrants never discovered a worse
torture than envy,” “Anger is a short fit of madness; control your
temper, it must be slave or despot; bridle it, bind it with chains.”
These might seem to be mere general moralizings, applicable to anybody,
but we have already had some of them in the previous letter, and they
occur again in the ode addressed to Lollius.
“Lest you should happen to think that the words which I fit to music
will perish, I would have you to remember that though Homer stands
first, other poets are not unknown. Many heroes have lived and died
besides those commemorated by Homer, but their names are lost and
their deeds forgotten, because they never found their inspired bard;
therefore I will not permit your many virtues, Lollius, to pass
unmentioned in my pages. You have an acute intellect, which preserves
its balance whether things go well or ill. The man who punishes
dishonest avarice, abstaining from money the universal tempter, and
is Consul not for one year only, but whenever the good and honest
prefer honour to bribes, flings away the gifts of corruption with
lofty countenance, and victoriously carries his arms through opposing
squadrons. It is not the man with large possessions that you will
rightly call happy; he more correctly claims the name who knows how to
use the gifts of the gods wisely, and can bear the hardships of poverty
and dreads wickedness worse than death; such an one has no fear of
dying for the friends he loves or his fatherland.” Even if we admit
that the rendering of the tenth and eleventh stanzas of this ode is
beset with difficulties, there is no question about the last two with
their praise of poverty.
The allusion to the Consulship has tempted commentators to infer that
the ode was addressed to Lollius, the father, but it is just as likely,
and on other accounts more likely, that the complimentary allusion was
made to the son. “Your father is Consul this year; you will be Consul
for many years if you abstain from certain temptations.”
In fact, all three poems seem to have been written at about the same
time, viz., in the Consulship of the elder Lollius, B.C. 21, whose son
was still a boy when he served under Augustus in Spain, his service
simply amounting to being present in his father’s company during the
campaign.
The situation, in short, seems to have been that Horace was attracted,
as other middle-aged men have been attracted, by a spirited, clever,
and athletic lad, who seemed to have a great future before him, but
whose character was spoiled by three serious defects--a violent temper,
restless ambition, cupidity. The attraction was sufficiently mutual to
allow Horace to give good advice, which he was careful to present in a
complimentary form, but without success, for Paterculus, speaking of
the Lollius who was general in Northern Gaul in B.C. 16, and suffered
a severe defeat, losing the Eagle of the Fifth Legion, describes him
as having been “on all occasions more greedy of money than of acting
properly, steeped in vice though a consummate dissembler.” A page or
two later he speaks of the misdeeds and death of Marcus Lollius, when
acting as adviser of Caius Cæsar in the East.
Lollius may have had an old grudge against Tiberius; he was still a
boy when Tiberius, then at the age of seventeen, accompanied Augustus
to the Cantabrian War, at which Lollius was also present, and he
may already have shown indications of the ungovernable temper which
drew forth the monitions of Horace. Then in B.C. 21 he was appointed
companion to Drusus, the brother of Tiberius. His abilities rapidly
attracted attention; he won the favour of Augustus, and was given a
command on the German frontier. He was unsuccessful and was superseded;
the war was entrusted to Drusus and Tiberius. After this we do not hear
of Lollius in any public capacity till he was made the adviser of Caius
Cæsar. It is again not improbable that he attributed his disgrace to
the representations of the two Neros, of whom Tiberius was now the sole
survivor. The retirement of Tiberius again gave him an opportunity;
he again won the favour of Augustus, and went out to the East with
Caius, prepared to indulge his grudge against Tiberius. Suetonius
definitely tells us that when Caius arrived in the East Tiberius went
to visit him at Samos, and found him ill disposed to himself, owing
to the representations of his companion and adviser, Marcus Lollius;
that this situation lasted for two years; that representations were
even made to Augustus to the effect that Tiberius was tampering with
the fidelity of the centurions in the army of Caius; that Tiberius, on
being informed of this, wrote and begged that a guard might be sent to
observe his actions; that he gave up his customary military exercises,
and adopted the dress of a Greek civilian; that he became day by day
increasingly an object of contempt and hatred, so that the people of
Nîmes threw down his statues, and a man ventured to say at a banquet,
in the presence of Caius, that he would undertake to start for Rhodes
at once and bring back the exile’s head. Tiberius found his position
one of actual peril, and again wrote begging to be allowed to return to
Rome. He did not obtain this permission till Caius had been consulted
on the subject, as Augustus had undertaken to take no step without
his consent. Happily Lollius had by this time lost his influence, and
Caius raised no objection. Paterculus supplies a link in the chain of
events. Lollius, either seeing an opportunity for getting rid of both
Caius and Tiberius, and making himself master in the East, or simply
in the endeavour to raise suspicions against the latter, had opened
a correspondence with the young King of the Parthians, who betrayed
it to Caius, with whom he had celebrated a series of entertainments
on the river Euphrates, closely resembling those held by Napoleon and
the Czar Alexander on the Vistula many centuries later. Lollius died
a few days after the disclosure. Paterculus, who was at that time a
tribune of soldiers in the army of Caius, did not know whether his
death was accidental or self inflicted; he only knew that everybody was
delighted, as they were no less grieved by the death of another of the
friends of Horace, Censorinus, “a man,” says Paterculus, “born to win
the favour of mankind.”
It is characteristic of Suetonius to inform us not that Lollius was
dead, but that he had lost favour with Caius, when the latter permitted
the return of Tiberius to Rome.
It would seem curious that the contempt and dislike in which Tiberius
was held for a short time at Rhodes should have been felt so far
away as Nîmes, in the South of France. Suetonius, in mentioning
the fact, evidently wishes to imply that this contempt of Tiberius
was co-extensive with the Empire; but the strangeness of the fact
disappears when we remember that Lucius Cæsar was at this time in the
South of France on his way to Spain, and supplies a further link in the
chain of evidence which goes to prove the animus of the children of
Julia against their stepfather; they were only too ready to listen to
the suggestions of a Marcus Lollius and others who proposed to build
their fortunes upon the insecure foundation of the favour of these
spoiled grandchildren of the great Augustus.
Tiberius returned to Rome in A.D. 2, the year in which Lucius Cæsar
died suddenly at Marseilles. He did not propose to return to public
life; he gave up his palace in the heart of Rome in the Carinæ, and
transferred his establishment to the villa and gardens which Mæcenas
had laid out on the Esquiline hill outside the walls. He formally
introduced his son Drusus to public life by presenting him in the
Forum, but himself abstained from any but private business. Meanwhile
Caius Cæsar had gone again to Armenia, where he was severely wounded
by a native at a conference to which he had entrusted himself with
insufficient precaution. The wound was not immediately fatal, but
proved disabling both to mind and body. The young man had been
captivated by Oriental luxury, and found flatterers to support him in
a design of remaining permanently “in the most distant corner of the
world.” He was, however, persuaded to return to Rome, and died on his
way back in a Lycian town.
Fate had decided that Tiberius should not evade his responsibilities.
He had firmly resisted every attempt made by Augustus to seduce him
from his retirement after his return to Rome, but the death of Caius
left him no option. Both privately and in the Senate publicly Tiberius
protested without avail; it was not a case of “nolo episcopari”; he
genuinely preferred a private position, and was, in fact, more in
sympathy with the old Republican ideals than with the new dynasty.
But the public safety demanded the presence of a man of experience at
the head of affairs, ready to take over the succession; and it is in
language suitable to this demand that Paterculus describes the joy of
the population of Rome when it was known that Tiberius had been adopted
by Augustus, and again made a colleague in the tribunician power.
“Then again there shone for parents confidence in the future of their
children; husbands could feel secure in their marriages, masters in
their property; all men could look for safety, rest, peace, calm.”
The style of Paterculus, that of a military man, who has done his
best to repair deficiencies in his early education by taking lessons
in the art of writing in later life, is so artificial as to impair
his credit, but on this occasion his choice of language is strictly
correct. The young Cæsars had not been a success; of all the possible
heirs to Augustus who died young, they alone are not credited with
superior virtues. We are not told of them that if they had lived they
would have restored the Republic and checked the flood of adulation.
They inherited the petulance of Julia, her impatience of restraint, and
while the youth of Tiberius and Drusus had been spent in an atmosphere
of insecurity at a time when the power of Augustus himself was not
firmly established, the children of Julia had come into a world which
had forgotten the civil wars, into a court without the traditions of
an ancient dynasty, which saw its models in the seraglio of a Herod
or Phraates, and laughed at the republican simplicity of the home of
Augustus.
The intemperance of Julia was repeated in the next generation; her
eldest daughter, married to a L. Æmilius Paulus, followed in her
footsteps, and was likewise banished to an island in A.D. 2. The
remaining daughter, Agrippina, was married to Germanicus, the son of
Drusus and nephew to Tiberius; she was the mother of Caligula and a
grandmother of Nero.
The years between the restitution of Tiberius and the death of
Augustus were chiefly spent by the former in campaigns in Germany
and Dalmatia, the history of which will be treated separately with
greater convenience. It is worth while at this juncture, when Augustus
and Tiberius were to settle down to work together for ten years, to
investigate the relations between them. Was there on either side
jealousy or mistrust? Did Augustus foresee the tyranny of Tiberius, as
those who believe in the tyranny would have us believe?
One of the many great literary losses which the world has suffered
is the loss of the letters of Augustus. Not only have we lost these
letters, but we have also lost the private notes of Tiberius kept by
him for the benefit of his successor, and burned by Caligula; the only
fragments that we possess of the correspondence of Augustus certainly
do not favour the view that there was any mistrust or want of sympathy
between the two men.
The fragments as they stand in Suetonius are as follows.
The first was written in reply to a letter of Tiberius, complaining
of the violence of language used by one Æmilius Ælianus, a native of
Cordova, against the Emperor, and probably belongs to the period of the
Cantabrian campaign, when Tiberius was still young. “Do not give way,
my dear Tiberius, in this matter to the feelings natural to your time
of life; do not be too ready to be indignant that there should be any
one to speak evil of me; it is enough if we secure this, that nobody
shall be able to do us any harm.”
Then we have two purely domestic letters: “I dined, dear Tiberius,
with the same party; Vinicius and the elder Silius were added to the
company. During dinner we played a family game both yesterday and
to-day, for we threw dice, and whoever threw ‘the dog,’ or six, paid a
shilling into the pool for every dice thrown, which was taken by the
player who threw ‘Venus.’”
“We spent the holidays pleasantly enough, my dear Tiberius, for
we played all day and every day, and made the dice market pretty
hot. Your brother carried on with plenty of shouting; on the whole,
however, he did not lose much, but recovered his losses contrary to
all expectation. I lost about £170 on my own account, but because I
had been prodigally liberal in my play, as I usually am; for if I had
exacted all the winnings that I passed over, or had kept in my own
pocket all that I gave anybody, I should have won nearly £420. However,
I like it best as it is, for my charity will exalt me to eternal glory.”
Again a familiar scrap: “Not even a Jew, my dear Tiberius, preserves
his sabbath fast so carefully as I did to-day, for it was not till
after the first hour of the night that I at last chewed a couple of
mouthfuls in the bath, before I began to be perfumed.”
The following letter probably belongs to the period after the return of
Tiberius, and was written on some occasion when he was starting on a
second campaign It is written with occasional quite unnecessary slips
into Greek, which have been mangled in places by the transcribers, so
as to be unintelligible: “Goodbye, most amiable Tiberius, and farewell
to me and mine ... best of generals. Yes, most amiable, and as I hope
for happiness, most brave man, and most illustrious general, farewell.
The scheme of your summer operations! Well, I, my dear Tiberius, in
the midst of many difficulties and considering the slackness of our
military friends, do not think I could have managed matters with
greater foresight than you have done. The men who were with you, in
fact, all admit that the well known line could be applied to you: ‘One
man saved the state for us by his wakefulness.’ Whenever anything
happens which requires my closer thought, if ever I am very much put
out, I swear to you I miss my dear Tiberius, and that verse of Homer’s
occurs to me ‘when he follows....’ When I hear and read that you are
getting thin under the continuance of your labours, may I be confounded
if my body is not all one shudder, and I implore you to spare yourself,
lest, if we hear that you are in bad health, your mother and I may
expire, and the Roman people be in jeopardy of losing its imperial
position. It does not matter a bit whether I myself am ill or well, if
you are not well. I implore the gods to preserve you to us, and to give
you your health now and always, if they do not utterly hate the Roman
people.”
There is nothing insincere in the tone of this letter; it is as natural
as a letter can be, incoherent in places, but always tender.
In fact, whatever misunderstandings arose between Tiberius and
Augustus were due to the misconduct of Julia, or the silly plots and
counterplots of Livia and the other ladies of the family, who by their
domestic jealousies opened the way to the machinations of men of the
type of Marcus Lollius. The friendship of the two men passed through
the severest possible test, and it survived the test. Augustus may
have thought Tiberius too scrupulous in the matter of Julia, and that
the second place in the Empire was worth a little conjugal blindness,
and even if he did not take that line, there were plenty of men and
women ready to suggest it to him. But the sequel proved that Tiberius
had been right, and he contrived in the end to assert his independence
without being involved in a bitter personal quarrel with Augustus. Nor
must too much stress be laid upon such chance utterances as the often
quoted “O my Roman people, in what slow jaws you will be chewed!” We
do not know the context, and this may very well have been no more than
a piece of good-humoured personal banter, suggested by the well-known
slowness of speech which was characteristic of Tiberius.
Though Augustus was on good terms with Tiberius, the children of Julia
were not; they were more Julian than the head of the Julian race; they
noted everything that could be interpreted to his discredit; they
recorded every hasty word, every ill-advised speech, and as the years
went on their malignity increased, till in the person of Agrippina
it amounted to a monomania. But we must pause to study Tiberius as a
general.
IX
The Campaigns of Tiberius
With the battle of Actium the wars of Rome against nations equally
civilized with herself came to an end; henceforth the rulers of the
world were only called upon to round off the ring fence of their
domains, and establish scientific frontiers. The Empire which is so
often spoken of as the establishment of a military despotism was, in
fact, absolutely the reverse; the power wielded by Marius, by Sulla, by
Pompeius, by Cæsar, by Antonius, had this character, for it depended
upon the military capacity of these generals; they were soldiers in
the first place, and owed their predominance in the civil government
to their own sharp swords and the fidelity of the men who had followed
their standards. Till the Roman was sole umpire in the circle of the
Mediterranean, war was in every respect a profitable investment, and
a military career was the readiest path to political supremacy; not
only did a Roman general return laden with spoil, rich beyond the
dreams of avarice, but his conquests appealed to the imagination of
his countrymen; everybody might be proud of generals and armies who
had beaten the successors of Alexander; but when military operations
were transferred to the frontiers, when the enemies to be subdued were
poor and half civilized, when there were no longer gorgeous robes,
graceful statues, piles of treasure to be exhibited in the triumphal
procession of the victorious general, war lost its prestige; and
the steady progress of the civilian administration is, in fact, the
special feature of the reigns of the Cæsars. Augustus was no soldier;
Tiberius never commanded an army after his succession; the expedition
of Caligula to the shore of the English Channel was a madman’s freak;
Claudius had but little share in the conquest of Britain; Nero’s morbid
vanity preferred the triumphs of the stage to those of the camp. A
state in which the military element is predominant does not put up with
rulers such as these.