Latin stylists for the purpose of acquiring information, or in large
masses; and while they are minutely perpending the significance of
isolated phrases, or enumerating instances of unusual grammatical
constructions, they forget that any other interest attaches to the
works upon which their industry is expended. The stylist and grammarian
alike find so much material for their own special industries in
Tacitus that his claims as a historian are forgotten, and in fact he
is not a historian; he is a bitter pamphleteer of consummate ability;
his affectation of impartiality is a well-considered pose, whose
insincerity becomes manifest as soon as we study the effect produced by
his writing upon the minds of his readers. When we have read the first
six books of the _Annals_, we are left with a very strong impression
of horror; we seem to have waded through seas of misery, and to have
assisted at the ruin of the Roman Empire. In the midst of the gloomy
scene stalks the gaunt figure of Tiberius, equally terrifying in anger
or in silence; his very virtues are more horrible than the vices of
other people, for there is no knowing what hideous wickedness they were
assumed to conceal.
The question may reasonably be asked, why should Tacitus have directed
his bitterness especially against Tiberius? Surely Nero or even
Claudius would have been a better target for his venomed sentences. But
to begin with, there was no object in further damaging the reputation
of an Emperor universally acknowledged to be a villain or a fool. So
far as Caligula, Claudius, and Nero were concerned, judgment had been
passed in the sense in which Tacitus wished it to be passed, but there
were numerous documents in evidence of the fact that Tiberius had been
a good Emperor, and that Greater Rome, if not the City of Rome, had
prospered under his rule.
Tacitus was interested in proving that till the reigns of Nerva and
Trajan there never had been a good Emperor. Augustus was beyond the
reach of attack; that reputation could not be damaged by malignant
epigrams, but the end of the reign of Tiberius had been involved in a
strange catastrophe, whose unquestioned horrors would lend credibility
to misrepresentations of the events by which it had been preceded, and
when Tacitus wrote, the Senate had just emerged from a similar, or
apparently similar, persecution at the hands of Domitian; in fact, the
Tiberius of Tacitus was not Tiberius at all, but Domitian. The curse of
the reign of Domitian had been attacks upon the lives and property of
eminent men, conducted by paid informers. There was some evidence that
the system of rewarding informers had first been extensively used in
the reign of Tiberius, and Tacitus believed that he could find abundant
material for drawing up a strong indictment against the practice of
employing informers in the records of the reign of Tiberius. We shall
see how far he was justified in his confidence.
But it was not enough to damage a system, it was also necessary to
annihilate the man; and here too Tacitus had found the instrument
which he required; he had access to certain memoirs written by the
younger Agrippina, the daughter of Agrippina, the wife of Germanicus.
He tells us of a fact which he mentions:--“This is not recorded by any
of the historians, but I found it in the memoirs of the daughter of
Agrippina, who was the mother of the Emperor Nero, and handed down to
posterity her own life and the misfortunes of her family.” There is not
much in the life of the mother of Nero and sister of Caligula which
would incline us to suspect her memoirs of being a liquid fount of
veracity, but there is a great deal which would tempt us to suspect her
of a bitter animosity against the memory of Tiberius and all members of
the Claudian stock not closely related to herself.
It is not proposed to examine in detail every innuendo made by
Tacitus in the course of his indictment against Tiberius, though from
time to time it will be entertaining to expose glaring instances of
misrepresentation or deliberately malicious inference; but one example
of the methods employed by Tacitus may be profitably given as an
illustration of the way in which he wrote what has passed for sober
history.
In A.D. 25, eleven years after the accession of Tiberius, a deputation
arrived from further Spain with the request that leave might be given
to build a shrine in honour of Tiberius and his mother, as had been
done in Asia. “On this occasion Cæsar, who was at other times also
firm in rejecting honours of this kind, and thought some answer should
be given to those who accused him by public rumour of ambitious
inclinations, made a speech to the following effect:--‘I know,
Conscript Fathers, that many have noted a want of consistency in my
conduct, because on a recent occasion I failed to oppose the cities
of Asia when preferring an identical petition. Therefore I will at
once declare my defence of my former silence, and of the line which
I propose to adopt in the future. Whereas the sainted Augustus did
not forbid a temple to be built to himself and the city of Rome at
Pergamus, I, for whom all his acts and words are like a law, followed
a precedent, already sanctioned, the more readily because veneration
of the Senate was united with the devotion to be paid to myself.
However, although there may be an excuse for a solitary acceptance of
such honours, it would be presumptuous and arrogant in me to consent
to being worshipped in divine form all over the provinces; and indeed
the honour paid to Augustus will disappear if it is made cheap by
promiscuous flattery of this kind. I both protest to you, Conscript
Fathers, and I wish posterity to be mindful, that I am a man, and hold
purely human responsibilities, and that I have enough, if I worthily
hold the first position in the State; posterity will give enough, and
more than enough, to my memory if men believe me to have been worthy of
my ancestors, careful of your concerns, firm in danger, and not fearful
of contracting unpopularity in defence of the public welfare. So shall
I have temples in your minds, so the finest and most lasting statues.
For those memorials which are built of stone are despised as mere tombs
if the judgment of posterity proves adverse. Therefore I implore the
allies, the citizens, and the gods themselves, the latter to grant me
to the end of my life a calm intelligence and understanding of human
and divine law; the former, that whenever I may leave the stage, they
may pursue my deeds and the fame of my name with praise and kindly
memories.’ And he persisted afterwards, even in private conversation,
in his contempt of such adoration of himself. This some interpreted
as moderation, many as a sign of mistrust of himself, some as an
indication of a degenerate spirit; for, said they, the best of men aim
at the highest honours; thus among the Greeks Hercules and Liber, among
ourselves Quirinus, had been added to the number of the gods. Augustus
had done better in setting his hopes higher. Princes have everything
else in this life; the one thing they should compass with avidity is
a lasting memory of themselves. For the contempt of fame means the
contempt of virtue.”
It is impossible not to admire the consummate art with which the
effect of a really noble statement of Tiberius is wiped away, and the
picture of a man devoid of sound ambition substituted. The ingenuity
with which Tacitus puts in the mouths of presumed contemporaries his
own perversion of the facts, and concludes his chapter with a concise
damnation, is equally admirable. To us there is, however, something
tragic in the fact that subsequent events and the arts of a supreme
master of style were to rob Tiberius even of the modest fame for which
he prayed.
Tiberius had hardly settled down to business when the threatened mutiny
of the legions in the Illyrian quarter broke out, accompanied by an
even more serious disturbance among the armies of the Rhine. These
events throw much light on the condition of the Roman army at the time,
and upon the characters of Agrippina and Germanicus. The latter, though
a far more formidable rival than Agrippa Postumus, had been invested
with Proconsular power at the request of Tiberius on his accession.
Previously he had only been a legate, a lieutenant-general in command
of the troops on the German frontier; he was now Governor of Gaul as
well. It is not customary, for usurpers who have recently mounted
rickety thrones to add to the powers of those whose rivalry they have
good reason to anticipate. The Proconsulate of Gaul had on a well-known
occasion been the stepping-stone to the Empire. Tiberius clearly had no
mistrust of the loyalty of Germanicus, and at this period could afford
to smile at the restless impetuosity of Agrippina, pattern of matrons.
XII
The Mutinies in Pannonia and on the Rhine
We have seen that when Augustus died Tiberius was on his way to
Illyria, because the temper of the three legions who garrisoned the
recently conquered districts towards the Danube had given cause
for anxiety. The death of one Emperor and the accession of another
occasioned a relaxation of discipline, both events, in accordance with
Roman custom, being observed by a suspension of ordinary business.
The Pannonian army had been reinforced largely from Rome itself; it had
been necessary to revive in a stringent form the obligation to military
service, and even to impress slaves. Among the men thus unwillingly
driven into the ranks were several used to the clubs and street
factions of the capital, quick-witted, ready-tongued, of the class that
are known to our own soldiers and sailors as “lawyers.”
Service in these regions had no mitigations, there was little or no
loot, and since serious operations had ceased, little excitement;
the long holiday and cessation of the ordinary routine gave the camp
agitators their opportunity. Three legions were concerned, the eighth,
the ninth, and the fifteenth. The first open act of mutiny was an
attempt to combine all three in one. This failed, owing to the mutual
jealousies of the legions, neither of the three being willing to be
enrolled under the name of one of the others, and a compromise was
effected by uniting the legions locally, but retaining their separate
organization. The rapid and dramatic account of Tacitus, in which
only the most picturesque incidents are recorded and grouped together
for effect, conceals the fact that this was a very serious step, for
the legions were not quartered together, and must have marched some
distance in order to unite. This event, which Tacitus places at the
beginning of his summary, can only have taken place after the officers
had lost the control of their men, unless we are to credit these
officers, who knew that there was much disaffection, and had already
reported it to Rome, with such blind folly as to have united troops
ready to mutiny.
The speech which Tacitus puts into the mouth of one Percennius, the
arch agitator, a private who had been accustomed to lead a claque in
the Roman theatres, and was well versed in the arts by which factions
are organized, gives a clear summary of the grievances of the Roman
soldier of the period, but will not be intelligible without a little
previous explanation.
First comes the question of discharge. A Roman citizen was
constitutionally liable to be called out for service between the
ages of eighteen and forty-six, but it was held that sixteen years
of service, whether continuous or intermittent, exempted a man from
further duty. The difficulty of finding recruits had caused the claim
to exemption to be ignored, and as the army had become increasingly
professional, losing its character of a militia, the men themselves,
for lack of other occupation, had helped the authorities to expand the
period of service. In order further to swell the numbers of the army,
the Romans had anticipated the “garrison” service recently introduced
into the English army. Time-expired men were enrolled in companies
outside the organization of the legion; they were called flagmen
(vexillarii); they could not be called upon to march in a campaign,
but they formed a kind of permanent garrison in the countries in which
they were employed; they were not a “reserve,” for they could not be
called back to the colours, but they relieved the regular soldiers of
duties, for which there was a dearth of men; they were also employed
as engineers, for we find some of them in the course of this mutiny
detached to build roads and bridges near Nauportus.
There was also a grievance of pay. Cæsar had increased the pay of the
legionary, and fixed it at nine _aurei_ a year; that is to say, ten
asses a day. When this arrangement was made one silver denarius was the
equivalent of ten copper asses, and the pay of the Roman soldier was
assumed to be one denarius, practically a shilling a day; but since
Cæsar’s time the silver denarius had appreciated, and was now worth
sixteen asses: the soldiers, however, were still paid ten asses, and
not sixteen. Another grievance lay in the fact that the household
troops, prætorian guards, who formed the garrison of Italy, received
double pay.
The exactions and cruelty of the centurions formed another grievance.
The position of the centurion in the Roman army is not quite analogous
to anything in our own army, for though there was a distinction
between the commissioned and the non-commissioned officer, and the
centurion belonged in many respects to the latter class, he had
many responsibilities which we, rightly or wrongly, reserve for
commissioned officers. The centurion was selected from the ranks,
but he commanded a company; he was a sergeant with the duties of a
captain, and when he was promoted to the rank of “primipilaris” was so
much of a commissioned officer as to be admitted to councils of war.
Cæsar had paid especial attention to the centurions, he never misses
an opportunity of praising individual centurions in his commentaries,
and distinguished service as a centurion opened the way to the highest
military and even civil positions. Ventidius Bassus, who had commanded
the armies of Antonius in Syria, and had been granted a triumph, began
life as a mule-driver, and passed through the rank of centurion to that
of General. Before the end of the century a former centurion was to
be Emperor. Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judæa, is said to have been a
centurion. One of the arts by which the early Emperors kept their hold
on the army was the recognition of capable centurions. But though the
centurion was in a better position than the English non-commissioned
officer, he still had duties which we should consider beneath the
dignity of a captain.
With the aid of this short introduction the speech of Percennius should
be intelligible without further explanation; it is not probable that we
have the genuine speech, but a summary of the soldiers’ grievances put
into the mouth of their spokesman.
“Why do we obey like slaves a handful of centurions, and still fewer
tribunes? When are we to venture to demand our rights if we do not now
approach the new and still tottering Emperor with either entreaties or
force? It is through our own fault, through our own want of spirit,
that we have gone on for so many years putting up with thirty or forty
years’ service, old men as we are, and most of us crippled with wounds.
Even after our discharge there is no end to our service; we camp under
the flags and suffer the same burdens under another name. And if any
man does happen to get out of all these dangers and difficulties
with his life, he is dragged off to distant lands, where he is given
under the name of a farm a morass or a precipice. The service itself
is severe, and poorly paid; body and soul are valued at ten asses a
day! Out of this we have to find clothes, arms, tents, buy off the
centurions, yes, and pay for our own discharge.[1] The stick, the
wounds, the bitter winter, the summer marches, the cruelties of war,
or the barrenness of peace are everlasting. We shall never get any
comfort till the service is entered on fixed conditions, a denarius a
day for pay, sixteen years for a discharge; and we are not to be kept
on under the flags, but stay in our camps and get our pension in cash.
Do the prætorians face greater dangers than we do? But they get two
denarii a day, and return to their homes after sixteen years. We don’t
have to patrol the city at night, but we do have to live among savages
and look at the enemy out of our very quarters.”
[1] “Vacationes munerum.” The translation in the text
is the accepted one, but the phrase may simply mean
“leave.” The custom of feeing the sergeant for this
purpose has not been unknown in the English army.
This statement of the grievances of the private soldier may not
represent the actual words of Percennius, but it is strangely familiar.
Protracted service is not at present included among the grievances
of the English soldier, but we have already taken one step in a
direction which may lead to its inclusion. The Roman Empire shirked
the recruiting difficulty, and in the end brought down upon itself
countless disasters. If the English Empire follows the same path, it
will find itself some day at the same destination. The conditions
are strangely similar. By the institution of slavery the whole body
of operatives throughout the Roman Empire was exempted from military
service, the recruiting ground was artificially restricted. We have no
artificial restriction in the English Empire, but the operatives have
been allowed gradually to withdraw themselves from even the limited
obligation to military service imposed by the ancient regulations of
the militia, and they have further been allowed to assume that whatever
may happen to other people they are not to be conscious of the burden
of taxation; they are practically as free from military service and
taxation as the slaves of antiquity.
When these mutinies were eventually suppressed Tiberius found himself
unable to confirm the grant of a discharge after sixteen years’
service, and was obliged to fix it at twenty years; he said that the
Empire could not stand the change, and deplored, in strangely modern
language, the breakdown of the “voluntary system.” The statesmen of
his time could not touch the institution of slavery; the demand for
a conscription of slaves would have been resisted on every ground of
public expediency; there would have been an outcry against interference
with private property. We have no institution which forbids us to
make soldiers of our intelligent working-men; they can be invited
and encouraged to take their share in bearing the burden of defence.
The statesman who discovers the best means of bringing them into the
recruiting field will have solved the most pressing difficulty of the
English Empire.
The result of the orations of Percennius was a general insubordination.
Junius Blæsus, who was commander-in-chief, persuaded the excited
men with some difficulty to send an orderly deputation to Tiberius
to present their grievances, and the soldiers cleverly included his
son in the deputation. For a time there was quiet, but the news of
the mutiny reached Nauportus, where the “flagmen” were employed in
engineering, and they immediately threw off all discipline, plundered
the neighbouring villages, and even Nauportus itself. Laden with
their booty, they marched to the headquarters of the mutinied legions,
but they had not forgotten previously to pay off old scores, they had
derided and beaten their centurions, they had seized the commander
of their camp, a rigorous martinet who had himself risen from the
ranks, piled burdens upon him, and driven him at the head of their
column, asking him how he liked it. Blæsus met them with firmness, and
arrested the ringleaders, but their appeals to their former fellow
soldiers renewed the revolt, the prison was opened, all the prisoners
were released, and a man named Vibulenus mounted the shoulders of his
comrades, and, standing in front of the tribunal of Blæsus, made an
impassioned oration. Addressing the mutineers, he cried: “You have
certainly restored these innocent and miserable men to life and light,
but who will give my brother back his life? Who will give me back
my brother? He was sent to you from the German army on our common
concerns, but last night this man, by the hands of those prize-fighters
whom he keeps and arms to the ruin of the soldiers, cut his throat.
Tell me, Blæsus, where you threw the body. Our enemies even do not
grudge us burial. When I have sated my grief with tears and kisses, bid
me then to be butchered too, so long as my friends here are allowed to
bury those who have been slain for no crime, but because they thought
of the good of the legions.”
This pathetic speech naturally redoubled the excitement, and the
prize-fighters of Blæsus were seized and bound along with the rest of
his slaves, and were likely to have suffered rough treatment, when it
was discovered that Vibulenus never had a brother. The wrath of the
soldiers was then turned upon the centurions; most of them got off and
hid themselves, but one was killed whom the soldiers used to call “Give
us another,” because it had been his habit to break his vinestick over
the shoulders of his men, and then ask for another, and yet another.
The centurions, however, were not all unpopular, and a division of
opinion between the eighth and fifteenth legions about a centurion whom
the former wished to kill, but the latter to protect, would have ended
in a fight, had not the ninth legion intervened.
Though Vibulenus never had a brother, his speech shows that the mutiny
was concerted with the legions on the Rhine.
In due time Drusus, the son of Tiberius, arrived from Rome with picked
guards, including a detachment of the Germans, who then formed the
bodyguard of the Emperor. Ælius Sejanus accompanied him as adviser,
though Drusus, being of the age of seven and twenty, could hardly have
been considered a youth. He read a letter from Tiberius empowering
him to remedy such grievances as could be remedied on the spot, but
referring the solution of permanent difficulties to the Senate.
Tiberius as Imperator had practically unlimited powers over the army,
but either he had not by this time formally accepted the office of
Imperator, or he held that such questions as increase of pay and
reduction of the years of service were not purely military questions,
and must be referred to the civil authority.
The soldiers had listened quietly to Drusus till the reference to the
Senate was mentioned; they then again burst into uproar, protesting,
with a semblance of reason, that the Senate was only dragged in when it
was a question of favours or rewards, the generals imposed punishments
and ordered severe labours on their own responsibility. The aged Gnæus
Lentulus, an experienced public servant, who had accompanied Drusus,
and who was held to influence him in the direction of severity, was
nearly killed; stones were thrown at Drusus himself, who with his
escort and attendants escaped with difficulty into the permanent camp.
Fortunately that night there was an eclipse, and at the same time
stormy weather set in. The excitable superstitious soldiers were
frightened by the portent; Drusus skilfully took advantage of their
wavering resolution, and by means of clever agents set the individual
soldiers against one another, and inspired mutual distrust between the
three legions. There was a sudden and violent revulsion of feeling, the
ringleaders Percennius and Vibulenus were killed, order was restored,
and Drusus returned to Rome. It was left to Tiberius and the Senate to
redress the grievances.
The mutiny was a serious one, not so well organized as the simultaneous
mutiny on the Rhine, and not so ambitious in its aims; but the facts
as given us ascribe a strange childishness to the Roman legionary. The
story of the eclipse is hard to swallow, but there is other evidence
to the superstitious character of the legionary; his commanders owed
their authority largely to a certain religious awe with which they
were surrounded; the standards were worshipped, and the Roman soldier,
afraid of little else, was supremely afraid of breaking his military
oath.