as Augustus had been left by the death of Caius Cæsar. Neither the
Claudian nor the Julian lines were represented by men of an age to
lead the State. It is true that the brother of Germanicus, the future
Emperor Claudius, was of mature age and in full enjoyment of such
faculties as he possessed, but he had long been consigned to a private
life, apparently with his own consent. The men who had worked with
Tiberius all his life, Marcus Lepidus, Asinius Gallus, Lucius Piso, the
Prefect of the city, and others, were now of very advanced age. Sejanus
was the only administrator who held a position at all comparable to
that which Tiberius had held during the later years of Augustus, but
there was this important difference; Tiberius, apart from his personal
merits and long experience, had been the representative of the old
Roman aristocracy; his succession did no violence to the prejudices
of the restored Senate. Sejanus, on the other hand, was a new man; if
he represented any particular party, it was the Equestrians, the old
enemies of senatorial pretensions; his exaltation was a victory of the
officials over the survivors of the hereditary aristocracy.
The services which Sejanus had done to the State were not of that
brilliant character which would seem to justify his promotion; he
had not distinguished himself by conspicuous military service on the
frontiers, though his uncle, Junius Blæsus, had dealt successfully with
the mutineers early in the reign of Tiberius, and had more recently
earned a triumph by a series of successful campaigns in northern
Africa, and Sejanus may have enjoyed a reflected glory from these
achievements. It is true that there may be a conspiracy of silence as
to his exploits, but even Paterculus, his admirer, has nothing definite
to record, and praises him in general terms only as the capable
assistant of Tiberius.
It is probable that his merits were those of a good organizer, merits
which would be known to those who were working at the centre of
affairs, and would be appreciated by Tiberius himself at their true
value, but would escape general attention, for the waywardness of human
judgement is such that years of patient faithful and laborious devotion
to the public service often fail to secure recognition, and a moment
of victory weighs more in the public opinion than many hours spent in
organizing the forces by which that victory is obtained.
The one great work of Sejanus has, quite undeservedly, involved his
name in obloquy. He organized the Prætorian guards, and collected that
portion of them who were on duty at Rome in barracks. The Prætorian
guards constituted the home army of Italy; they were not only the
bodyguard of the Emperor. Indeed, it seems that in the time of Augustus
the Emperor’s bodyguard was a selected troop of Germans, the Swiss
guards of the Pope being thus curiously anticipated by the first
Emperor. The organization of the Prætorians was slightly different from
that of the rest of the army; they were divided not into legions--or,
as we should say, regiments--of about 6,000 men, but into cohorts (the
cohort, or battalion, ordinarily consisted of 600 men, but a Prætorian
cohort numbered 1,000). In other words, the home army was divided into
units available by their size for garrison purposes. These men received
higher pay and better allowances than the legionaries, and were, in
fact, the pick of the service. Everything was done that could be done
to attach them to the person of the Emperor and to distinguish them
from the rest of the army.
The mutinies in Pannonia and on the Rhine had indicated a weak spot
in the organization of the Empire. How if the mutineers had been
successful, if Germanicus had not resisted their wish to make him
Emperor? They would have marched upon Rome. It was clearly necessary
that Italy should be provided with a sufficient force to defend
the seat of government from its own armies and to demonstrate the
inevitable failure of any attempt from the Provinces to overturn the
civil power. It was probably considerations of this nature which
impelled Tiberius to give careful attention to the organization of the
Prætorians, and he doubtless considered himself fortunate in being able
to entrust this important work to a capable officer of whose fidelity
he was well assured.
The absence of barracks had proved a source of disorder; the Prætorians
had been scattered in lodgings throughout the city and other towns. Not
only was their discipline thus rendered a matter of difficulty, but
their sense of corporate unity was impaired, and the language used of
them inclines us to the supposition that so far from being an adequate
police force, they were not infrequently themselves the source of
disturbances in the streets. In order to correct these abuses, Sejanus
built a large camp just outside the walls of Rome; it occupied the site
of the well-known Pincian gardens. The force thus organized numbered
twelve thousand men--three so-called Urban cohorts, nine Prætorian.
The men were carefully chosen from the regions adjacent to the city,
or from the ancient Latin colonies; care was taken to give them a
specially Italian character.
The distinction between Urban and Prætorian cohorts, coupled with
the statement of Suetonius that Tiberius placed garrisons throughout
Italy, while there is no mention in Tacitus of any legion told off to
the Italian service, suggests that the camp of the Prætorians at Rome
only accommodated those cohorts which were on duty at the capital.
It was the headquarters of the whole force, but was not habitually
occupied by the whole force. It seems to have been felt that even the
Prætorians were not strong enough by themselves to defend Italy in
case of emergency, for there was a further provision in the shape of
an arrangement with Cotys, the King of Thrace, by which he was bound
to keep a force ready, if called upon, to defend northern Italy at the
dangerous corner of the Adriatic. Sejanus undoubtedly showed capacity
as organizing commander-in-chief in Italy, and Tiberius felt deeply
the need for this assistance. He knew that the defence of the Empire
was inadequate; he knew that the revenue appropriated to that defence
was also inadequate, and it was for this reason that he habitually
prided himself upon solving difficulties with the frontier princes by
diplomacy rather than by an appeal to arms. He was thus prepared to be
grateful to a man who could find a means of increasing the efficiency
of the home forces without adding to their numbers. Tiberius had, in
fact, serious misgivings as to the quality of the troops. Addressing
the Senate early in A.D. 23, he told them that the supply of voluntary
soldiers was short, and that where the numbers were adequate the morale
of the men was unsatisfactory, because the recruits were generally
impoverished and homeless men. Apparently, compulsory service, except
in the case of special agreements with recently conquered territories,
such as the Thracian kings, had been allowed to fall into abeyance,
and Tiberius talked of visiting the Provinces in order to revive the
compulsory levies. It is not uninteresting to note that the organizers
of the Roman Empire had to meet some of our own difficulties. Men would
not enlist who had anything better to do; they had, as we have seen,
the further artificial difficulty that they could not draw soldiers
from the working classes, who were slaves.
Tacitus and his authorities, keeping their eyes fixed as usual upon
Rome, do not tell us what arrangements were made for the rest of Italy,
but it is not probable that the use of the barrack system was confined
to the capital; the same cause will have everywhere been followed by
the same results, and have demanded the same remedy. The innovation
was an important one, for though the legions on active service, or
in disturbed districts or imperfectly subjugated countries, lived
in permanent camps, and though the military colonies in Italy had
had something of the same character, a permanent standing army with
permanent barracks was a new thing.
The arrangement at first met with universal approval. The towns were
relieved of the presence of disorderly soldiers in the streets, and
on the occasion of a riot the soldiers could be depended on to act
together and preserve order; they were not united by various ties of
familiarity with the rioters.
The fact that a new force had been created which could be used to
coerce the Government escaped notice at first, and Sejanus was held to
be a public benefactor.
He further achieved some measure of popularity by his energy and skill
in stopping the spread of a conflagration which originated in the
theatre of Pompeius, and the grateful Senate voted that his statue,
magnificently gilded, should be set up in the place where he had saved
the lives of the citizens.
When Drusus died Tiberius was sixty-five years of age. Nothing had
occurred to shake his confidence in Sejanus. At home and abroad the
Government seemed to be strong and settled, and the Emperor felt that
he was at liberty to withdraw himself from any but the most urgent
public business. Tacitus and the authorities whom he followed accused
Tiberius, with their customary animosity, of mere hypocrisy when he
talked of abdicating; they forgot that he had once before retired from
public life, and only been brought back to it with difficulty, and
that, in accepting the cares of the Empire, he had expressed a hope
that the Senate would one day allow him a period of rest in his old
age. From this time he, in fact, began tentatively to absent himself
from Rome and to avoid public functions. Eventually, in A.D. 26, he
finally withdrew to the island of Capreæ, and though he sometimes
approached the city, never entered it again. Meanwhile Sejanus acted as
his Regent at Rome.
We are now approaching the great tragedy of the reign of Tiberius,
a tragedy whose details will never be made clear unless some happy
investigator in the libraries of a monastery or the sands of Egypt
should recover for us the missing books and chapters of Tacitus, and
other authors whose works we have lost.
Though after the death of Drusus Tiberius appeared less frequently
in public, he still conducted business in the Senate, and even after
he had definitely withdrawn from Rome occasionally appeared in the
vicinity of the city. In the year 27 A.D. a temporary wooden theatre,
constructed by a speculator at Fidenæ, not far outside the walls of
Rome, collapsed, involving in its ruins no less than twenty-five
thousand persons. This disaster was almost immediately followed by a
fire on the Cælian Hill, a crowded quarter of Rome. On both occasions
the Emperor gave lavish assistance from his private purse, and promoted
measures likely to prevent the recurrence of such catastrophes. He
continued to transact the business which appertained to what we should
call the Foreign Office of the Empire, and on all important occasions
communicated with the Senate by letter, showing in such communications,
at least up to the year 31 A.D., no abatement of his former ability;
but he did, in fact, withdraw his attention from the details of
government, and allowed the conduct of the legal processes in the
Senate to pass into the hands of Sejanus.
Sejanus, so far as we can learn from our authorities, took advantage
of the increasing aversion of the Emperor from public affairs to take
his place, to promote his own favourites, and gradually to occupy even
in the eyes of the Prætorians that position which really belonged to
Tiberius. It is possible that his procedure in the Senate was more
autocratic than that of the Emperor.
The situation was complicated by the continuance of the domestic
rivalries of the Imperial household, which, on the death of the aged
Livia in 29 A.D., broke out into a series of horrors whose exact nature
cannot from want of evidence be determined, though it may be surmised.
The opposition to Sejanus was twofold: there was what may be called the
constitutional and personal opposition of a large party in the Senate,
who refused to submit to the domination of a new man, and there was
the private opposition of members of the Imperial family, Tiberius
being almost alone in his appreciation of the good qualities of his
subordinate. Thus the sources of our information are discredited from
the outset. The memoirs of Agrippina are coloured by her mother’s
long-standing feud with the Emperor and all whom he trusted, and the
memoirs of Senators are equally likely to be coloured by detestation of
the upstart. It is perhaps for this reason that the annals of the seven
years succeeding the death of Drusus are more than usually filled with
senatorial prosecutions and suggestions of unfairness. It is indeed
possible that Sejanus took some pains to remove political adversaries
by encouraging prosecutions against them, but, except in one instance,
there is no sufficient evidence of perversion of the forms of justice,
and as a rule the hostile comment amounts to little more than an
affirmation of the maxims that a Senator could do no wrong, that he
was always innocent if he committed suicide, and that somehow Tiberius
or Sejanus, or both, were responsible for the act of cowardice which
terminated his dishonoured existence.
In comparison with the greater interests of the Empire, the squalid
scandals which ended in the fall of Sejanus may seem undignified; but
they have their interest also, not only in the obloquy with which they
have covered the name of the “ablest of Roman Emperors,” but in the
disparagement which through them has attached to the Empire itself. The
fall of Sejanus was, in fact, the fall of Tiberius, and the sinister
events with which it was accompanied have cast their shadow upon the
whole subsequent history of the Emperors. A fashion was then set, and
a tone was adopted, which has influenced historians for all time. The
lives of the Cæsars in the pages of Suetonius are little better than a
Newgate calendar; the various works of Tacitus are little better than a
continued jeremiad, in which nobody is good except men unconnected with
the administration, the Germans, and the historian’s father-in-law. For
this peculiar attitude there was certainly no sufficient reason up to
23 A.D., and in the subsequent events till the accession of Caligula
even the bitterly hostile evidence indicates that the Emperor was more
sinned against than sinning.
The story as it has been handed down to us, so far as it can be
collected from fragmentary documents, is to the following effect.
Sejanus formed designs upon the succession at a comparatively early
period; after the death of Germanicus one man alone, Drusus, stood
between him and the object of his ambition. In order to compass the
destruction of Drusus, Sejanus, a man certainly past fifty years of
age, if not close upon sixty, laid siege to Livilla, the wife of
Drusus, the sister of Germanicus. Successful in his assaults upon her
not impenetrable chastity, he divorced his wife Apicata, and joined
with Livilla and a favourite freedman of Drusus in a conspiracy.
Drusus, according to the story, did not die a natural death; he was
poisoned by Sejanus through the instrumentality of his favourite
Lygdus. The way to the succession now lay clear, for the son of Drusus
was still a child, and the eldest sons of Germanicus were little
older; moreover, it was supposed that Tiberius disliked the family
of Germanicus. To the disappointment of Sejanus, Tiberius showed an
inclination to favour this family, and though he sharply reproved
the Senate for attempting to confer premature honours upon them, he
introduced them to the Senate, and as they advanced in years treated
them as his probable successors along with his own grandson.
Sejanus then, we are told, by means of secret emissaries worked upon
the excitable temperament of Agrippina in the hope that she would
involve herself and her family in ruin by committing some unpardonable
offence against Tiberius. In this he was eventually successful, though
so long as Tiberius continued to live at Rome the violence of Agrippina
was met by somewhat amused contempt. Thus it is recorded that on one
occasion Agrippina, goaded by the agents of Sejanus, burst in upon
Tiberius when he was sacrificing in presence of the statue of Augustus.
The scene is brought home to us if we imagine that the famous statue
of the Prima Porta found on the site of Livia’s villa was the statue
in question. A friend, and indeed cousin, of Agrippina’s, one Claudia
Pulchra, had been accused of unchastity and of magical performances
directed against the Emperor himself. It was suggested to Agrippina
that she was the person really attacked, and being “always violent,”
as Tacitus says, she went straight to the Emperor, and, in allusion to
the solemn occupation in which she found him engaged, declared that “a
man had no right to offer victims to the sainted Augustus and at the
same time persecute his posterity. The divine spirit had not passed
into dumb images, but his real presentment, born of his divine blood,
understood the inconsistency, and mourned.” She went on to describe
the attack upon Claudia as an attack upon herself. Tiberius for once
was provoked to a retort, and, quoting a Greek poet, said, “Your only
injury, daughter, is that you are not Queen.” This scene in the calm
presence of the statue of Augustus was followed by another. Cousin
Claudia was found guilty of the offence with which she was charged;
but Agrippina persisted in her grievances. She fell into ill-health;
Tiberius visited her; she received him at first in silence, then burst
into floods of tears. She bewailed her loneliness, and begged him to
find her a husband; she was still young, she said; marriage alone would
relieve her from the contumelious position in which she found herself;
there were plenty of men in the State who would not disdain to welcome
the wife and children of Germanicus.
Tiberius left her on this occasion without uttering a word. Then it was
suggested to the aggrieved lady by the emissaries of Sejanus that her
life was in danger, that poison was being prepared for her, that she
should refuse to dine with the Emperor. In consequence, on the next
occasion on which she partook of a meal with the head of the family
she passed all the dishes, till Tiberius, noting her want of appetite,
picked up a particularly fine apple and handed it to her with much
praise of its merits; the unhappy lady at once passed the fruit to
the slave who stood behind her. Tiberius merely turned to his mother
and remarked that it would not be strange if he dealt severely with a
woman who accused him of poisoning. This speech led to diverse horrid
surmises, but was obviously without any serious purpose, as Agrippina
lived unmolested for another five years.
Tacitus tells us that he quoted these details directly from the memoirs
of the younger Agrippina, who was possibly present on the last of the
three occasions.
After Tiberius had retired to Capreæ the conspirators Sejanus and
Livilla were able, we are told, to control the correspondence which
was sent to him from the capital. Imprudent remarks made by Agrippina
and her sons were carefully reported to him; the provocation which had
occasioned them was not reported. The old man was induced to see in
the conduct of his great-nephews a repetition of the excesses which
had ruined Caius and Lucius Cæsar at the same age. Sejanus fomented
discord between the brothers. Drusus the elder was given the office
of Prefect of the city; he was encouraged to fear the jealousy of his
brother, who was his mother’s favourite. After the death of the aged
Livia, Agrippina and her son Nero acted in such a way as to give an
opportunity to their enemies; they courted popular favour, and their
friends openly advised them to take refuge with the armies on the
Rhine, or to take sanctuary with the Senate and invoke the protection
of the Roman people. Meanwhile Sejanus had in A.D. 25 formally begged
Tiberius to confer upon him the hand of Livilla, the widow of his son
Drusus. Tacitus gives what profess to be extracts from the letter which
he addressed to the Emperor on the subject, and from the reply which
he received. They are to the following effect. Sejanus is represented
to have said that “he had become so habituated to the kindness of
Augustus, and then by many proofs to that of Tiberius, as to address
his hopes and prayers to the ears of the Princes as soon as to the
gods. He had never asked for brilliant office, he preferred to share
with the common soldiers the toils of guarding the Emperor. Still he
had obtained what he thought most honourable, he was thought worthy of
association with Cæsar. On this his hopes were founded. And as he heard
that Augustus had once taken into consideration the claims of Roman
knights when he was thinking about placing his daughter, so he begged
Tiberius, if a husband were sought for Livilla, to remember a friend
who would be content with the mere honour of relationship. He did not
wish to be relieved of the duties which had been imposed upon him; he
thought it sufficient that the family should be strengthened against
the malicious persecutions of Agrippina, and that for the sake of the
children. For himself the life which he had already lived with such a
Prince would be much and more than enough.”