the Government of dominions so extensive and so various; and the work
would indeed have been beyond the grasp of any single individual had
not Augustus continued the old Roman policy of letting well alone.
The Roman Empire at this period was largely decentralized; cities,
tribes, nationalities governed themselves according to their previous
laws and customs; no ancient polity was destroyed or remodelled unless
it proved to be out of sympathy with the general order; the details
of local administration were attended to on the spot in accordance
with local usage, by the local officials and magistrates. If the
ancient constitution of a town broke down, the Roman was ready with
his sacred model, the double chief magistrate and the Senate, a model
which was faithfully copied in all the Roman military colonies, but
so long as men could govern themselves, the Romans were content to
allow them to do so; they were not at this time afflicted with a
pedantic passion for uniformity. Thus the Emperor was relieved of
the mass of detail under which he would otherwise have sunk. In his
choice of men Augustus preferred officials who either as non-Romans,
such as Licinus and Cornelius Gallus, or by reason of comparatively
mean extraction felt their dependence upon his favour. When he found
a representative of the ancient nobility who could be trusted, such
as Marcus Lepidus, the son of the former triumvir, he placed power
in his hands; such men served to balance the pretensions of the new
officials, but he was careful not to revive the organization of the
oligarchy. One danger, however, escaped the prevision of the acute
Augustus: he did not see until it was too late the effect of his
pretensions to a divine ancestry upon his own family. As years went on,
and the representatives of the Julian stock were to be found chiefly
in the men and women of the third generation, as the great poem of
Virgil was more and more widely known, the faith in the sanctity of
the posterity of Anchises assumed inconvenient dimensions, and the
tendency to press this faith was largely helped by the presence in the
Imperial Household of representatives of ancient dynasties. East and
West alike sent young men to Rome, in whom the traditions of exalted
lineage were lively and unbroken, who did not need the evidence of
portents and the testimony of poets to assure them that they were set
apart from the rest of mankind. These youths were the playmates of the
grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Augustus; their influence
stimulated the dynastic ambition of such men as Caius Cæsar, and his
nephew and namesake the future Emperor Caligula; the young princes, as
they considered themselves, were impatient of the constitutional forms
of Rome, and the restraints upon the monarchy; they despised families
whose progenitors had not come over with Æneas. Fate had not been kind
to the Julian dynasty, and when Tiberius returned to Rome from the
Rhine in A.D. 12, his adoption and investiture with the Proconsular
Power seemed to extinguish the hopes of its representatives. The direct
descendants of Augustus now living were his daughter Julia, disgraced
and in exile, her daughter Julia similarly disgraced and in exile,
Agrippa Postumus, the intractable, a young man about twenty-four years
of age, who either now, or a little later, enjoyed, like his mother
and sister, the amenities of life on an island; the only descendant in
the third generation who had not been thus disgraced and banished was
Agrippina, the younger daughter of Julia.
Nobody took the Julian legend more seriously than this lady, and her
children enjoyed a double stream of the sacred blood, for she had
married Germanicus, the son of Drusus and Antonia the beautiful,
who was own niece to Augustus. Germanicus was now twenty-seven years
of age; he had been through the Pannonian campaign, and was left by
Tiberius in command of the army on the Lower Rhine. Tiberius seems
to have had more confidence in him than in his own son Drusus, and
Germanicus had so far shown himself worthy of that confidence; he was
blessed with a numerous family, of whom Agrippina was inordinately
proud; she was the mother of the great-grandchildren of Augustus, a
Nero, a Drusus, a Caius, another Agrippina, a Drusilla, and a Julia
Livilla, who eventually married the friend of Paterculus, Marcus
Vinicius. Julia her sister had only borne two daughters before retiring
to her island.
Agrippina was not a mere lady of fashion; she accompanied her husband
on his campaigns, and exhibited all the traditional virtues of a Roman
matron before the enraptured eyes of the legionaries; she dressed up
her youngest boy, Caius, in the full uniform of a Roman soldier, and
got him the nickname of Caligula--Little Gaiters--in the camp.
The Claudian stock was represented by Drusus, the son of Tiberius, a
man slightly younger than Germanicus, whose sister he married, thus
further interweaving the two lines; also by Germanicus himself and his
brother Claudius, the unfortunate sputterer, of whom his own mother was
ashamed, and whose family were united in a desire to keep him out of
sight.
In order further to knit up the dynastic web, Augustus adopted
Tiberius, who in his turn adopted both his own nephew Germanicus and
his stepson Agrippa Postumus. It is not improbable that the dynastic
pretensions of this young man, stimulated by the example of his sister
Agrippina, were the real cause of his enforced retreat, that he did
not acquiesce willingly in his grandfather’s arrangements, and that
the watchful Livia knew how to turn his insubordination to advantage.
Augustus showed disturbing signs of a weakness in his direction in
spite of his intractability.
Tiberius at the time of his adoption was fifty-four years of age; he
was a father and a grandfather; he was the active ruler of the Empire,
but with what appears to us a strange scrupulosity he at once abandoned
his own house, and went to live in his adoptive father’s. He treated
all his property, according to the strict letter of the Roman law, as
his father’s property; he neither manumitted slaves nor performed any
act which could not properly be performed by a man who was still “in
his father’s hand.”
During the last two years of the life of Augustus Tiberius seldom left
him; the old man was in feeble health, but he continued to travel
in Italy, and had just presided at some games held in his honour
at Naples, when his customary weakness assumed an alarming aspect.
Tiberius had been summoned to Illyricum, whence news had arrived of
serious discontent among the troops. He returned in haste to receive
the last words of the dying Emperor, and to give him a final evidence
of that affection which, in spite of the severe strains to which it
had been subjected, had never failed. Augustus died as he had lived,
with dignity and calm; he even retained to the last a dash of humour,
and bade his friends applaud him, as he left the stage of life, if they
were satisfied with his performance. His last words were a request to
Livia never to forget their married life.
The performance had been a good one, and we should be churlish to
withhold our applause.
XI
The Accession of Tiberius
All the accounts of the accession of Tiberius agree in one statement;
the evidence is unanimous that he was exceedingly unwilling to occupy
the position which Augustus had occupied, and to continue the Empire in
the form which it had assumed under his predecessor.
Tiberius was now fifty-six years of age; for ten years he had to
all intents and purposes shared the first place in the Empire with
Augustus; he had enjoyed his full confidence, none of the things which
attract ambitious men had been refused to him. His character was
without stain or reproach; the amours which are attributed to Julius
Cæsar, and even to the saintly Augustus, are not attributed to him. The
idle story that he went to Rhodes to indulge in odious vices was the
fabrication of a later age, and was, as we have seen, absurd in itself.
He had been a faithful and loving husband to his first wife, Vipsania;
the licence of Julia had disgusted him; after his divorce from her
he never thought of a fresh marriage, though still a young man. On
his campaigns he had shown himself to be simple, and indeed severe,
in his personal habits. A story was indeed prevalent that he was
given to strong drink, but there is no evidence in its favour except
a couple of wildly improbable stories preserved by Suetonius, and a
punning nickname given him by the soldiers, who called him Biberius
Caldius Mero. The nicknames given by private soldiers and schoolboys
to officers and schoolmasters are not evidence, though they sometimes
promote, as in this case, the circulation of fictitious stories.
The exceptional health which Tiberius is said to have enjoyed to an
advanced age does not favour the idea that he was intemperate, and
indeed we are told that from the age of thirty onwards he prescribed a
regimen for himself without consulting his medical advisers, which was
remarkably successful. He was free from the tyranny of the lusts of the
flesh, he was equally free from avarice, a point repeatedly insisted on
by hostile historians; power in itself and by itself had no attraction
for him; he had already on one occasion brusquely rejected it. Thus he
was able to consider the question of the succession dispassionately.
His personal inclination was rather in the direction of retirement and
a private life, and if his judgment was biassed, the disturbing element
was a contempt for rather than a love of power.
At the death of Augustus, Tiberius was actually in possession of
two forms of authority legally conveyed to him by the Senate in
constitutional form, which enabled him to carry on the government: he
had the tribunician power, which made him superior to all the civil
magistrates; he had the proconsular power, which put him at the head
of the executive in all the provinces, and especially at the head of
the army. In the first character he was the protector of Roman citizens
throughout the world; in the second he was master of the provincials.
Thus there was no occasion for any plotting on the part of Livia, no
premature assumption of responsibility on the part of Tiberius in
setting the guard and giving the password when Augustus had breathed
his last; these duties necessarily devolved upon him, and he was in
fact at the time on active service.
He was not Princeps, nor Pontifex Maximus, nor had he the censorial
power. Of these three the last two were executive offices belonging
to the old Republic; the former was an honorary dignity recognised by
the forms of the Republic, which had acquired a new meaning during the
long tenure of Augustus. It was this dignity, along with all which
it now involved, that Tiberius only reluctantly and after resisting
considerable pressure eventually accepted. It had become associated
with the monarchical principle, and the permanent continuance of the
monarchy Tiberius wished to avoid.
The position which he adopted was a reasonable one. Augustus was
an exceptional man; he had been called to power under exceptional
circumstances; the reign of one man had been inevitable at the end of
the civil wars; the right man had been found, a social regeneration
had followed; the monarchy, an exceptional expedient, had done its
work; there was now the material for creating a stable government on
the old lines. The vices of the old Senatorial administration had been
purged away; the Senate itself had assumed a different character--it
was no longer a narrow oligarchy, it was a council of the Empire; no
single man could hope to repeat the success of Augustus. In a multitude
of counsellors there is wisdom; the restored Senate working through
the new officials would be more likely to carry on the continuity
of government than an hereditary or quasi-hereditary monarchy, in
which so much depended on the character of an individual, and which
was perpetually disturbed by palace plots and conspiracies for the
succession.
The life of Tiberius himself had been embittered, his domestic
happiness destroyed, by the intrigues of a family which had adopted
the habits of an Oriental Court. It might well appear to him, arguing
from his own experience, that misgovernment by the Senate was a less
probable eventuality than misgovernment by the irresponsible members
of a monarchical dynasty listening to the unwholesome suggestions of
favourites and parasites, and intriguers of all nations.
The funeral of Augustus was hardly over when an event occurred
calculated to disgust Tiberius with the dynastic principle, if he had
not already strongly disliked it.
The youngest son of Julia, Agrippa Postumus, had, as we have already
recorded, been banished to the Island of Planasia off the coast of
Campania, and detained in captivity. He was the last of the grandsons
of Augustus. At this time he was about twenty-six years of age, and
would in the ordinary course of events have held appointments and
been pushed forward like his brothers. This had not been done. The
historians agree in ascribing to him a stubborn disinclination to
study, and an evil temper; he was put out of the way as Claudius was
put out of the way; but he continued to be to some extent the centre of
Julian plots, and it was believed that, in spite of his bad manners,
Augustus was personally attached to him. It is possible that his name
had been used in the plots with which his sister, the younger Julia,
and her husband, L. Æmilius Paulus, had been concerned; or that he
had taken up his mother’s quarrel with Tiberius, and had disturbed
the serenity of the Imperial household. Although he had been thus
set aside, Augustus had been sufficiently anxious about his welfare
to request Tiberius to adopt him, when he himself adopted Tiberius.
Whatever may have been the real temper and the real pretensions of
the young man, one thing is certain: immediately after the death of
Augustus he was put to death upon his island, and the centurion on
guard reported to Tiberius that his orders had been obeyed.
Tiberius at once denied that he had given any orders, and added that
he would report the matter to the Senate. No report was ever made, and
Tacitus tells us that Tiberius was over-persuaded by C. Sallustius
Crispus, who had succeeded Mæcenas as confidential and unofficial
adviser to the Cæsarian family. Crispus is said to have urged that any
public inquiry into the matter would have created too much scandal.
Tiberius was not the man to be deterred from doing what he considered
a public duty by any consideration of what he might himself suffer,
but there was another person whose good name was likely to be damaged,
and whose responsibility for what had occurred it would be awkward to
demonstrate; that person was his mother, Livia. Tiberius himself had
no motive for committing such a crime; only the perverse inconsistency
of a Roman historian could be capable of attributing to the same man
reluctance to accept power, and complicity in a crime whose object
was to secure the undisturbed enjoyment of that power. Whoever was
responsible for the death of Agrippa Postumus, Tiberius certainly was
not; but Livia, the friend of Herod, whose life had been spent in
pushing the fortunes of the Claudians, was not a woman to be frightened
by the murder of an inconvenient aspirant.
If anything had been wanting to convince Tiberius of the evils likely
to attend the perpetuation of the dynasty, this event was in itself
enough to determine him in his dislike to an institution capable of
producing such horrors, and under circumstances so wounding to his
personal pride. A crime had been foisted on him in such a way that he
could not prove his innocence without making himself the accuser of his
mother.
The Senate, however, insisted that Tiberius should take the whole
burden of the government upon himself. His suggestion that the
responsibility should be divided was met with derision; there was no
way out of the difficulty but to accept the trust, and to work it in
the spirit most likely to lead to the development of his own views.
The Senate was, in fact, wiser than Tiberius; those of its members
who took an active share in the government knew that whatever might
be the views of the few remaining Legitimist families, the monarchy
was essential to the Empire, and that the Imperial House could not
break with the traditions of half a century. Cæsar’s heir did not
merely inherit property, he inherited the conduct of an organization
whose branches extended all over the world, and this even as a
private person; nor again was it easy to define his relation to those
provinces, and especially Egypt, which had been administered by the
late Emperor as private estates. Countless officials had learned to
look to the Emperor as the source of patronage. A slow change was
possible, but an abrupt change would have been a revolution, and would
have disturbed the sense of security in all quarters of the Empire. The
succession of Tiberius had been tacitly accepted as an accomplished
fact in every part of the world for the last ten years. The intrigues
in the Imperial family were distressing, and doubtless painful to
those immediately concerned, but they had not affected the general
prosperity, nor stirred the imagination of such men as hope to fish in
troubled waters. Germanicus, the only practical candidate for the chief
place, was notoriously loyal to the existing state of affairs, and had
never shown any disposition to disturb arrangements made by Augustus.
In the end Tiberius gave way, and accepted what the Senate offered him
“until,” as he said, “I come to the time of life at which it may seem
just to you to grant some rest to my old age.”
These words are in themselves a protest against dynastic assumptions;
the power which Tiberius was to receive he would hold as associated
with an office separable from his person; he was not to be once a king,
always a king, ruling in virtue of mythology and portents.
Tiberius was equally careful to distinguish between complimentary
tributes which had been paid to Augustus and official designations. He
would not be called “Father of his country,” he would not even use the
title “Augustus” as a name, though he was legally entitled to do so; he
only used it in corresponding with foreign kings and potentates. Still
less would he allow himself to be worshipped, and strictly forbade his
statue to be erected in a temple except as an ornament. Nor again would
he place the title of Imperator before his name, as Augustus had done,
thereby making it personal and inseparable; he used it simply as a
statement that he held a particular office. From the first he objected
to the exaggerated language of obsequious persons, and demanded to be
addressed as Dominus by his slaves, Imperator by soldiers, Princeps
by the rest of the world. A Senator who flung himself at his feet
and endeavoured to grasp his knees with an oriental exuberance of
subservience suffered a rude fall, as Tiberius instinctively jumped
back out of his reach. In a like spirit he checked the adulation which
the Senate were prepared to heap upon Livia, and discouraged every
attempt to invest her with the dangerous attributes of an Empress
Dowager.
Similarly he distinguished between occasions on which he acted in a
public or private capacity. Unless officially presiding, he attended
the law courts like any other Senator, listening to the evidence, and
offering his opinion like the rest; he, in fact, lost no opportunity
of showing that he held his position to be a purely official one, and
while he encouraged the worship of Augustus, he refused to be included
in the cult.
At a later period Tiberius, in speaking to the Senators, declared
that he regarded himself as their servant; his constitutional theory
was that the Senate was the fountain of authority, the Emperor its
first executive officer and adviser, but certainly not its master.
This theory of the mutual relations of Emperor and Senate broke down,
because one man, if he is capable at all, is always more capable than
a number of equally capable men working together as a council: he
can act more quickly, and his relations with suitors and suppliants
are simpler. If a capable man is assisted by a council, the general
lines of policy are his, and not those of the council, whose advice
practically amounts to little more than valuable suggestions on points
of detail. The dream of professors and political pedants that a country
is best governed by a debating society of selected wiseacres has a
never-ending fascination, but it is a mere dream, and as soon as the
ostensible government degenerates into a debating society the real work
of governing is done by other agencies; the alternative is anarchy.
The Senate for its part was studiously averse at first to accepting
any greater measure of responsibility than had fallen to its share
under Augustus; its leading members were used to a certain routine
of business. Augustus had introduced a kind of Cabinet system, the
ordinary business of the Senate being conducted by a small committee
on which the Senators served in some kind of rotation; full meetings
of the whole body were rare; the committee were in constant attendance
upon the Emperor. Nobody had any wish to abandon this system, and to
impose the necessity of frequent attendance upon all members of the
Senate; at the same time, it was well to be sufficiently in evidence
to secure a share in promotions and appointments. Hostility to the
existing arrangements existed, but it was confined to some old families
who were nearly powerless, and who found a safety valve for their
discontent in pasquinades, and the compilation of bitter memoirs,
in which every rumour, every scandal unfavourable to the existing
government was carefully recorded.
Tiberius had so little of the dynast about him, so little of the
jealousy of the usurper, that he employed in positions of trust the
men who were generally believed to have been designated as possible
aspirants to the Imperial power by Augustus. Marcus Lepidus held one
office after another under Tiberius, not merely ornamental offices,
but those which involved active work; C. Asinius Gallus, the second
husband of Vipsania, similarly took a leading part in the counsels of
the Senate, and was entrusted with various dignities; his mysterious
fate three years before the death of Tiberius will occupy us later on;
L. Arruntius similarly lived in dignity and affluence till he committed
suicide shortly before Tiberius died, having become involved in highly
discreditable, but not political, transactions; another, Gnæus Piso,
was the centre of a strange conspiracy six years later than this. Of
him too we shall speak in greater detail; it is enough for our present
purpose to record that he was holding an important Governorship six
years after the accession of Tiberius.
The same historian who tells us nearly all that is known of the lives
of these men, and who fixes the dates of their deaths, also informs
us that they were the objects of the suspicion of Tiberius, that
their lives were rendered miserable by him, and that they all, with
the exception of Lepidus, “soon” came to a bad end. Allowing that six
years is a term to which the word “soon” can be applied, we may admit
that Gnæus Piso soon came to a bad end; we shall see later on who was
responsible for his afflictions. Lepidus lived to a good old age, and
died a natural death not long before Tiberius himself; and though the
ends both of Asinius Gallus and Arruntius were miserable, they did not
occur “soon,” periods of twenty years and upwards not being usually so
described.
The facts relating to these men are an excellent illustration of the
reckless inconsistency of statement which is indulged in by Tacitus.
Fortunately, the historian prided himself upon his impartiality, and
does not suppress facts which happen to be in contradiction with his
main contention. Stripped of its comments and insinuations, as also of
its rhetoric, his narrative gives a favourable picture of Tiberius and
his reign, but Tacitus possessed such a mastery of innuendo that his
statements of facts are forgotten, while his comments are remembered.