WHEN great men stoop to sentiment the world grows fonder of them; but when sentiment governs policy empires totter. Augustus had chosen Tiberius wisely, but too late. When Tiberius was saving the state with patient generalship the Emperor had almost loved him. “Farewell,” one of his letters ended, “most agreeable of men . . . most valiant of men, most conscientious of commanders.”1 Then the pathos of propinquity blinded Augustus, as later Aurelius; he set Tiberius aside for his pretty grandsons; compelled him to renounce a fortunate marriage to become the cuckold of Julia; resented his resentment, and let him grow old with philosophy in Rhodes. When at last Tiberius reached the principate he was already fifty-five, a disillusioned misanthrope who found no happiness in power.
To understand him we must remember that he was a Claudian; with him began the Claudian branch of that Julio-Claudian dynasty which ended with Nero. Through both parents he inherited the proudest blood in Italy, the narrowest prejudices, the strongest will. He was tall, powerful, and well featured; but acne accentuated his shyness, his awkward manners, his moody diffidence, and his love of seclusion.2 The fine head of Tiberius in the Boston Museum shows him as a young priest, with broad forehead, large deep eyes, and pensive countenance; he was so serious in youth that wags called him “the old man.” He received all the education that Rome, Greece, environment, and responsibility could afford; he learned the two classic languages and literatures well, wrote lyrics, dabbled in astrology, and “neglected the gods.”3 He loved his brother Drusus despite the young man’s superior popularity; he was a devoted husband to Vipsania, and so generous to his friends that they could safely give him presents in the expectation of a fourfold return. The severest as well as the ablest general of his time, he gained the admiration and affection of his soldiers because he watched over every detail of their welfare, and won his battles by strategy rather than by blood.
His virtues ruined him. He believed the stories told about the mos maiorum, and wished to see the stern qualities of old Rome reborn in the new Babylon; he approved the moral reforms of Augustus and made clear his intention to enforce them. He had no liking for the ethnic farrago that steamed in the caldron of Rome; he gave it bread but no circuses, and offended it by not attending the games presented by rich men. He was convinced that Rome could be saved from a vulgar degeneration only by an aristocracy stoic in conduct and refined in taste. But the aristocracy could no more than the people bear his “stiff neck” and sober countenance, his long silences and slow speech, his visible awareness of his own excellence, and, worst of all, his grim husbanding of the public funds. He had been misborn a stoic in an epicurean age, and he was too coldly honest to learn Seneca’s art of preaching the one doctrine in beautiful language and practicing the other with graceful constancy.
Four weeks after the death of Augustus, Tiberius appeared before the Senate and asked it to restore the Republic. He was unfit, he told them, to rule so vast a state; “in a city so well provided with men of illustrious character . . . the several departments of public business could be better filled by a coalition of the best and ablest citizens.”4 Not daring to take him at his word, the Senate exchanged bows with him until at last he accepted power “as a wretched and burdensome slavery,” and in the hope that someday the Senate would permit him to retire to privacy and freedom.5 The play was well acted on both sides. Tiberius wanted the principate, or he would have found some way to evade it; the Senate feared and hated him, but shrank from re-establishing a republic based, like the old, upon theoretically sovereign assemblies. It wanted less democracy, not more; and it was pleased when Tiberius (A.D. 14) persuaded it to take over from the comitia centuriata the power of choosing the public officials. The citizens complained for a time, mourning the loss of the sums they had received for their votes. The only political power now left to the common man was the right of electing the emperor by assassination. After Tiberius democracy passed from the assemblies to the army, and voted with the sword.
He seems to have sincerely disliked monarchy and to have considered himself the administrative head and arm of the Senate. He refused all titles that savored of royalty, contented himself with that of princeps senatus, stopped all efforts to deify him or offer worship to his genius, and made evident his distaste for flattery. When the Senate wished to name a month after him, as it had done for Caesar and Augustus, he turned the compliment aside with dry humor: “What will you do if there should be thirteen Caesars?”6 II He rejected a proposal that he should revise the Senatorial list. Nothing could surpass his courtesy to this ancient “assembly of kings”; he attended its meetings, referred “even the smallest matters” to its judgment, sat and spoke as merely a member, was often in the minority, and made no protest when decrees were passed contrary to his expressed opinion.7 “He was self-contained and patient,” according to Suetonius, “in the face of abuse, slander, and lampoons against himself and his family; in a free country, he said, there should be freedom of speech and thought.”8 His nominations, the hostile Tacitus admits,
were made with judgment. The consuls and the praetors enjoyed the ancient honors of their rank. The subordinate officials exercised their functions free from imperial control. The laws, if we except those of violated majesty, flowed in their regular channel. . . . The revenues were administered by men of distinguished probity. . . . In the provinces no new burdens were imposed, and the old duties were collected without cruelty or extortion. . . . Good order prevailed among his slaves. . . . In all questions of right between the emperor and individuals the courts of justice were open, and the law decided.9
This Tiberian honeymoon lasted nine years, during which Rome, Italy, and the provinces enjoyed government as good as any in their history. Without additional taxes, despite many benefactions to stricken families and cities, the careful repair of all public property, the absence of booty-yielding wars, and the rejection of bequests made to the Prince by persons with children or near relatives, Tiberius, who had found 100,000,000 sesterces in the Treasury on his accession, left 2,700,000,000 there at his death. He tried to check extravagance by example rather than by law. He labored carefully on every aspect of domestic and foreign affairs. To provincial governors anxious to collect more revenues he wrote that “it was the part of a good shepherd to shear his flock, not fleece it.”10 Though skilled in the art of war, he denied himself, as Prince, the glories of the battlefield; and after the third year of his long reign he kept the Empire at peace.
It was this pacific policy that marred the progress of his rule. His handsome and popular nephew, Germanicus, whom he had adopted as his son at Drusus’ death, had won some victories in Germany and wished to go on to its conquest. Tiberius advised against it, to the disgust of the imperialistic populace. Because Germanicus was a grandson of Mark Antony, those who still dreamed of restoring the Republic used him as a symbol for their cause. When Tiberius transferred him to the East, half of Rome called the young commander a martyr to the Prince’s jealousy; and when Germanicus suddenly took sick and died (19), nearly all Rome suspected that Tiberius had had him poisoned. Cnaeus Piso, an appointee of Tiberius in Asia Minor, was accused of the crime and was tried by the Senate; foreseeing condemnation, he killed himself to save his property for his family. No facts appeared to indicate Tiberius’ innocence or guilt; we know only that he asked the Senate to give Piso a fair trial, and that Germanicus’ mother, Antonia, remained to the end of her life the most faithful friend of Tiberius.11
The excited participation of the public in the celebrated case, the scurrilous tales circulated about the Emperor, and the agitation now aroused against him by Germanicus’ widow, Agrippina, induced Tiberius to avail himself of that lex lulia de maiestate, or law of treason, which Caesar had passed to define crimes against the state. Since Rome had no public prosecutor or attorney general, and (before Augustus) no police, every citizen was empowered and requested to accuse before the courts any person whom he knew to have violated a law. If the accused was condemned, the delator or informer was awarded a fourth of the convicted man’s goods, while the state confiscated the rest. Augustus had used this dangerous procedure to enforce his marriage laws. Now, as plots multiplied against Tiberius, delatores sprang up to profit from denouncing them; and the supporters of the Prince in the Senate were ready to prosecute such accusations vigorously. The Emperor sought to restrain them. He interpreted the law strictly in the case of persons charged with defaming the memory or statues of Augustus; but “personalities leveled against himself,” says Tacitus, “were to be let pass unpunished.” He assured the Senate that his mother Livia wished a similar leniency shown to assailants of her good name.12
Livia herself was now a major problem of state. Tiberius’ failure to remarry left him with no protection against a strong-minded woman accustomed to exercise authority over him. She felt that her maneuvers had cleared his way to the throne, and she gave him to understand that he held it only as her representative.13 During the earlier years of Tiberius’ reign, though he was approaching sixty, his official letters were signed by her as well as by himself. “But not satisfied to rule on equal terms with him,” says Dio, “she wished to assert a superiority over him . . . and undertook to manage everything like a sole ruler.”14 Tiberius long bore this situation patiently; but as Livia survived Augustus fifteen years, he at last built himself a separate palace and left his mother in undisputed possession of that which Augustus had raised. Gossip accused him of cruelty to her, and of having starved his exiled wife. Meanwhile Agrippina was pushing her son Nero to succeed—if possible, to replace—Tiberius.15 This, too, he bore with hot patience, merely chiding her with a Greek quotation: “Do you think a wrong is done you, dear daughter, if you are not empress?”III Hardest of all for him to bear was the realization that his only son, Drusus, borne to him by his first wife, was a worthless rake, cruel, ill-mannered, and lecherous.
The self-control with which Tiberius supported these tribulations left his nerves on edge. He retired more and more into himself, and developed a gloom of countenance and severity of speech that scattered all but his most hopeful friends. One man seemed unfailingly loyal to him—Lucius Aelius Sejanus. As prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Sejanus professed it his duty to protect the Prince; soon no one was admitted to the Emperor’s presence except through the hands and under the watch of the crafty vizier. Gradually Tiberius entrusted to him more and more of the government. Sejanus persuaded him that the imperial safety required the closer presence of the Praetorian Guard. Augustus had stationed six of its nine cohorts outside the city limits; Tiberius now allowed all nine to pitch their camp at the Viminal Gate, only a few miles from the Palatine and the Capitol; there they became first the protectors, then the masters, of the emperors. So supported, Sejanus exercised his powers with increasing boldness and venality. He began by recommending men for office, he advanced his fortune by selling offices to the highest bidders, he ended by aspiring to the principate. A senate of real Romans would soon have overthrown him; but the Senate had, with many exceptions, become an epicure’s club too listless to wield competently even the authority that Tiberius had urged it to retain. Instead of unseating Sejanus, it crowded Rome with statues voted by it in his image and honor, and at his suggestion it banished one after another of Agrippina’s followers. When Tiberius’ son Drusus died, Rome whispered that Sejanus had poisoned him.
Overcome with disappointment and bitterness, Tiberius, now a lonely and melancholy man of sixty-seven, left the hectic capital and removed to the inaccessible privacy of Capri. But gossip followed him without impediment. People said that he wished to conceal his emaciated figure and scrofulous face, and to indulge himself in drink and unnatural vice.16 Tiberius drank considerably, but was no drunkard; the story of his vices was probably calumny;17 most of his companions on Capri, says Tacitus, “were Greeks distinguished in nothing but literature.”18 He continued to administer carefully the affairs of the Empire, except that he communicated his views and desires to officials and the Senate through Sejanus. Since the Senate increasingly feared him, or Sejanus, or the hovering Guard, it accepted the wishes of the Emperor as commands; and without any change in the constitution, and with no clear insincerity on Tiberius’ part, the principate became a monarchy under the man who had proposed to restore the Republic.
Sejanus took advantage of his position to exile more of his enemies by having them accused under the “law of majesty,” and the weary Emperor no longer interfered. If we may believe Suetonius, Tiberius was now often guilty of cruelty;19 and we have the word of the unreliable Tacitus that he asked and obtained the death penalty for Poppaeus Sabinus on the ground that spies had overheard him plot against the government.20 A year later (27) Livia died, sad and lonely in the home of her former husband; Tiberius, who had seen her but once since leaving Rome, did not attend her funeral. Freed from the restraint that the “Mother of her Country” might have exercised, Sejanus now persuaded Tiberius that Agrippina and her son Nero had been involved in the conspiracy of Sabinus. The mother was banished to Pandateria, and the son to the island of Pontia, where shortly afterward he killed himself.
Having won everything else, Sejanus now reached for the throne. Irked by a letter which Tiberius had written to the Senate recommending Gaius, son of Agrippina, as successor to the principate, Sejanus formed a plot to kill the Emperor (31). Tiberius was saved by Germanicus’ mother, Antonia, who risked her life to send him a warning. The old Prince, not yet destitute of resolution, secretly placed a new prefect over the Praetorians, had Sejanus arrested, and accused him to the Senate. Never had that body so gladly complied with the imperial wishes. It condemned Sejanus with expedition and had him strangled that very night. A reign of terror followed, led partly by senators whose interests, relatives, or friends had been injured by Sejanus, and partly by Tiberius, whom fear and anger, topping an accumulation of disillusionments, had plunged into a fury of revenge. Every important agent or supporter of Sejanus was put to death; even his young daughter was condemned; and since the law forbade the execution of a virgin, she was first deflowered and then strangled. Apicata, his divorced wife, committed suicide, but only after she had sent Tiberius a letter assuring him that Antonia’s daughter Livilla had joined with Sejanus in poisoning her husband Drusus, the Emperor’s son. Tiberius ordered Livilla tried, but she refused food until she died. Two years later (33) Agrippina killed herself in exile; and another of her sons, having been imprisoned, starved himself to death.
Tiberius lingered for six years after the fall of Sejanus. Probably his mind was now disordered; only on this supposition can we explain the incredible cruelties attributed to him. We are told that he now supported, instead of checked, accusations for maiestas; all in all sixty-three persons were indicted on this charge during his reign. He begged the Senate to provide protection for “an old and lonely man.” In 37 he left Capri after nine years of self-imprisonment, and visited some cities in Campania. While stopping at Lucullus’ villa in Misenum he fell in a fainting fit, and seemed dead. The courtiers at once flocked about Gaius, soon to be Emperor, and then were shocked to learn that Tiberius was recovering. A friend of all concerned ended the embarrassment by smothering Tiberius with a pillow (37).21
He was, said Mommsen, “the ablest ruler the Empire ever had.”22 Almost every misfortune had come to him during his life; and after his death he fell upon the pen of Tacitus.