XIX. AN IMPERIAL SACRIFICE
"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's"
This is the secret of writing: look at the external things until you see pulsating behind them the rhythm and beauty of the Eternal. Only look for it, and persist in your search, and presently the Universal will be revealed shining through the particular, the sweep of everlasting Law through the little object, and happenings of a day.
Come to history with the same intent and method, and at last things appear in their true light. Here, too, as in a landscape, is the rhythm of the Eternal; here are the Basic Forms. I doubt if the evidence of the annalists is ever worth much, unless they had an eye to penetrate to these. When one sees behind the supposed fact narrated and the judgments pronounced the glimmering up of a basic form, one guesses one is dealing with a true historian.
Recently I read a book called The Tragedy of the Caesars, by the novelist Baring-Gould; and in it the life of a certain man presented in a sense flatly contradictory to the views of nineteen centuries anent that man; but it seemed to me at last an account that had the rhythm, the basic form, showing through. So in this lecture what I shall try to give you will be Mr. Baring-Gould's version of this man's life, with efforts of my own to go further and make quite clear the basic form.
What does one mean by 'basic form'? In truth it is hard to define. Only, this world, that seems such a heterogeneous helter-skelter of mournful promiscuities, is in fact the pattern that flows from the loom of an Eternal Weaver: a beautiful pattern, with its rhythms and recurrences; there is no haphazard in it; it is not mechanical,—yet still flawless as the configuarations of a crystal or the petals of a perfect flower.
The name of the man we are to think of tonight has come down as a synonym for infamy: we imagine him a gloomy and bloodthirsty tyrant; a morose tiger enthroned; a gross sensualist;—well, I shall show you portraits of him, to see whether you can accept him for that. The truth is that aristocratic Rome, degenerate and frivolous, parrot-cried out against the supposed deneracy of the imperial, and for the glories of the old republican, regime; for the days when Romans were Romans, and 'virtuous.' One came to them in whom the (real) ancient Roman honor more appeared than in another man in Italy, perhaps before or since;—and they could not understand the honor, and hated the man. They captured his name in a great net of lies; they breathed a huge fog of lies about him, which come down to us as history. Now to see whether a plain tale may not put them down.
Once more take your stand, please, on the Mountain of the Gods: the time, in or about the year 39 B.C.:—and thence try to envisage the world as Those do who guide but are not involved in the heats and dusts of it. The Western World; in which Rome, caput mundi, was the only thing that counted. Caput mundi; but a kind of idiot head at that: inchoate, without co-ordination; maggots scampering through what might have been the brain; the life fled, and that great rebellion of the many lives which we call decay having taken its place. And yet, it was no true season for Rome to be dead; it was no natural death; not so much decent death at all as the death in life we call madness. For the Crest-Wave men were coming in; it was the place where they should be. The cycle of Italy had begun, shall we say, in 94 B.C., and would end in 36 A.D.; —for convenience one must give figures, though one means only approximations by them;—and not until after that latter date would souls of any caliber cease to be incarnate in Roman bodies. Before that time, then, the madness had to be cured and Rome's mission had to be fulfilled.
The mission was, to homogenize the world. That was the task the Law had in mind for Rome; and it had to be done while the Crest-Wave remained in Italy and important egos were gathered in Rome. Some half dozen strong souls, under the Gods' special agent Octavian, had gone in there to do the work; but the Crest-Wave had flowed into Rome when Rome was already vice-rotten; and how could she expect to run her whole thirteen decades a great and ruling people? None of those strong souls could last out the whole time. Octavian himself, should he live to be eighty, would die and not see the cycle finished: twenty years of it would remain—to be filled by one worthy to succeed him, or how should his work escape being undone? The world must be made homogensous, and Rome not its conqueror and cruel mistress, but its well-respected heart and agreed-on center; and all this must be accomplished, and established firmly, before her cyclic greatness had gone elsewhere:—that is, before 37 A.D.
The Republic, as we have seen, had had its method of ruling the provinces: it was to send out young profligates to fleece and exploit them, and make them hate Rome. This must be changed, and a habit formed of ruling for the benefit of the subject peoples. Two or three generations of provincials must have grown up in love with Rome before the end of the cycle, or the Empire would then inevitably break. By 37 A.D., the Crest-Wave would have left Italy, and would be centering in Spain. Spain, hating Rome, would shake off the Roman yoke; she would have the men to do it;—and the rest of the world would follow suit. Even if Spain should set herself to the Gods' work of union-making, what path should she take towards it? Only that of conquest would be open; and how should she hope to conquer, and then wipe out the evil traces of her conquering, and create a homogeneity, all within her possible cycle of thirteen decades? Rome's great opportunity came, simply because Rome had done the conquering before ever the Crest-Wave struck her; in days when the Crest-Wave was hardly in Europe at all. Even so, it would be a wonder if all could be finished in the few years that remained.
By Rome it never could have been done at all: it was the office of a Man, not of a state or nation. The Man who should do it, must do it from Rome: and Rome had first to be put into such condition as to be capable of being used. It devolved upon Augustus to do that first, or his greater work would be impossible. He had to win Rome to acquiescence in himself as Princeps. So his primary need was a personality of infinite tact; and that he possessed. He was the kind of man everybody could like; that put everyone at ease; that was friendly and familiar in all sorts of society; so he could make that treacherous quagmire Rome stable enough to be his pied-a-terre. That done, he could stretch out his arms thence to the provinces, and begin to weld them into unity. For this was the second part and real aim of his work: to rouse up in the Empire a centripetalism, with Rome for center, before centripetalism, in Rome itself, should have given place to the centrifugal forces of national death.
Rome ruled the world, and Augustus Rome, by right of conquest; and that is the most precarious right of all, and must always vanish with a change in the cycles. He had to, and did, transmute it into a stable right: first with respect to his own standing in Rome,—which might be done, with tact for weapon,— in a few years; then with respect to Rome's standing in the world,—which could not be done in less than a couple of lifetimes, and with the best of good government as means. If the work should be interrupted too early it would all fall to pieces. So then he must have one successor at least, a soul of standing equal to his own: one that could live and reign until 37 A.D. Let the Empire until that year be ruled continuously from Rome in such a manner as to rouse up Roman—that is, World, —patriotism in all its provinces, and the appearance of the Crest-Wave in a new center would not be the signal for a new break-up of the world. The problem was, then, to find the man able to do this.
The child: for he must not be a man yet. And seeing what was at stake, he must be better equipped than Augustus: he must be trained from childhood by Augustus. Because he was to work in the midst of much more difficult conditions. Augustus had real men to help him: the successor probably would have none. When the Crest-Wave struck it, Rome was already mean and corrupt and degenerate. Augustus, not without good human aid, might hope to knock it into some kind of decency during the apex-time of the thirteen decades. His reign would fall, roughly, in the third quarter of the cycle, which is the best time therein; but his successor would have to hold out through the last quarter, which is the very worst. The Crest-Wave would then be passing from Italy: Rome would be becoming ever a harder place for a Real Man to live and work in. Meaner and meaner egos would be sneaking into incarnation; decent gentlemanly souls would be growing ever more scarce. By 'mean egos' I intend such as are burdened with ingrate personalities: creatures on whom sensuality has done its disintegrating work; whose best pleasure is to exempt themselves from any sense of degradation caused by fawning on the one strong enough to be their master, by tearing down as they may his work and reputation, circulating lies about him, tormenting him in every indirect way they can. Among such as these, and probably quite lonely among the, the successor of Augustus would lave to live, fulfilling Heaven's work in spite of them. Where to find a Soul capable, or who would dare undertake the venture? Well; since it was to be done, and for the Gods,—no doubt the Gods would have sent their qualified man into incarnation.
In B.C. 39 Octavian proclaimed a general amnesty; and among these who profited by it was a certain member of the Claudian gens,—one of that Nero family to which Rome owed so much—
Testis Metaurum flumen et Hasdrubal Devictus
He had been a friend of Caesar's and an enemy of Octavian's; and had been spending his time recently in fleeing from place to place in much peril; as had also his wife, aged eighteen, and their three-year-old son. On one occasion this lady was hurrying by night through a forest, and the forest took fire; she escaped, but not until the heat singed the cloak in which the baby boy in her arms was wrapped. Now they returned, and settled in their house on the Palatine not far from the house of Octavian.
In Rome at that time marriage was not a binding institution. To judge by the lives of those prominent enough to come into history, you simply married and divorced a wife whenever convenient. Octavian some time before had married Scribonia, to patch up an alliance with her kins-man Sextus Pompey, then prominent on the high seas in the role—I think the phrase is Mr. Stobart's—of gentleman-pirate. As she was much older than himself, and they had nothing in common, it occurred to no one that, now the utility of the match had passed, he would not follow the usual custom and divorce her. He met Livia, the wife of this Tiberius Claudius Nero, and duly did divorce Livia. A new wedding followed, in which Claudius Nero acted the part of father to his ex-wife, and gave her away to Octavian. It all sounds very disgraceful; but this must be said: the great Augustus could never have done his great work so greatly had he not had at his side the gracious figure of the empress Livia,— during the fifty-two years that remained to him his serenest counselor and closest friend.
And then—there was the boy: I believe the most important element in the transaction.
His father died soon afterwards, and he came to live in the palace, under the care of his mother,—and of Augustus; who had now within his own family circle the two egos with whom he was most nearly concerned, and without whom his work would have been impossible. So I think we may put aside the idea that the marriage with Livia was an 'affair of the heart,' as they call it:—a matter of personal and passional atraction. He was guided to it, as always, by his Genius, and followed the promptings of the Gods.
But,—Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. The divorced Scribonia never forgave Augustus. She became the center of a faction in society that hated him, hated Livia, loathed and detested the whole Claudian line. There must have been bad blood in Scribonia. Her daughter Julia became profligate. Of Julia's five children, Agrippa Postumus went mad through his vices; Julia inherited her mother's tendencies, and came to a like end. Agrippina, a bitter and violent woman, became the evil genius of the next reign. Of this Agrippina's children, Drusus and Caligula went mad and her daughter was the mother of the madman Nero. To me the record suggest this: that the marriage with, not the divorce of, Scribonia was a grave mistake on the part of Octavian; bringing down four generations of terible karma. He was afloat in dangerous seas at that time, and a mere boy to take arms against them: did he, trusting in material alliances and the aid of Sextus Pirate, forget for once to trust in his Genius within? We have seen how the lines of pain became deeply graven on his face during the years that followed Caesar's death. A high soul, incarnating, must take many risks; and before it has found itself and tamed the new personality, may have sown griefs for itself to be reaped through many lives. The descendants of Augustus and Scribonia were the bane of Augustus and of Rome. But Livia was his good star, and always added to his peace.
But now, back to the household on the Palatine, in the thirties B.C.
Julia (Scribonia's daughter), pert, witty, bold, and daring, was the darling of her father, whom she knew well how to amuse. Drusus, the younger son of Livia and Claudius Nero, was a bold handsome boy of winning manners and fine promise, generally noticed and loved. To these two you may say Augustus stood in only human relations: the loving, careful, and jolly father, sharing in all their games and merriment. He always liked playing with children: as emperor, would often stop in his walks through the streets to join in a game with the street-boys. But with Livia's elder son, Tiberius, he was different. Tiberius had no charm of manner: Drusus his brother quite put him in the shade. He carried with him the scars of his babyhood's perilous adventures, and the terror of that unremembered night of fire. He was desperately shy and sensitive; awkward in company; reserved, timid, retiring, silent. Within the nature so pent up were tense feelings; you would say ungovernable, only that he always did govern them. He went unnoticed; Drusus was the pet of all; under such conditions how much harmony as a rule exists between two brothers? But Tiberius loved Drusus with his whole heart; his thoughts knew no color of jealousy; unusual harmony was between them until Drusus died.—The world said Augustus disliked the boy: we shall see on what appearances that opinion was based. But Tiberius, then and ever afterwards, held for Augustus a feeling deeper and stronger than human or filial affection: it was that, with the added reverence of a disciple for his Teacher.—You shall find these intense feelings sometimes in children of his stamp; though truly children of the stamp of Tiberius are rare enough; for with all his tenderness, his over-sensitiveness and timidity, put him to some task, whisper to him Duty!—and the little Tiberius is another child altogether: unflinching, silent, determined, pertinacious, ready to die rather than give in before the thing is most whole-souledly done.
Augustus, merriest and most genial of men, never treated him as he did Julia and Drusus: there were no games and rompings with Tiberius. Let this grave child come into the room, and all ended; as if the Princeps were a school-boy caught at it by some stern prowling schoolmaster. Indeed, it was common talk that Augustus, until the last years of his life, never smiled in Tiberius' presence; that his smile died always on his stepson's entry; the joke begun went unfinished; he became suddenly grave and restrained;—as, I say, in the presence of a soul not to be treated with levity, but always upon a considered plan.
The children grew up, and people began to talk of a successorship to Augustus in the Principate. It would be, of course, through Julia, his daughter. He married her to Marcellus, aged seventeen, his sister Octavia's son, who he adopted. Marcellus and Julia, then, would succeed him; no one thought of retiring Tiberius. Marcellus, however, died in a couple of years; and folk wondered who would step into his place. Augustus gave Julia to Vipsanius Agrippa, the man who had won so many campaigns for him. Agrippa was as old as the Princeps, but of much stronger constitution; and so, likely to outlive him perhaps a long while. Very appropriate, said Rome: Agrippa will reign next: an excellent fellow. No one thought of shy Tiberius.—Agrippa, by the way, was a strong man and a strict disciplinarian,—with soldiers, at any rate: it might be hoped also with wives. It was just as well for lady Julia to be under a firm hand.
Ten years later Agrippa died, and the heirship presumptive passed to his two eldest children by Julia: the princes Caius and Lucius. Augustus adopted them in due course. Heirship presumptive means here, that they were the ones Rome presumed would be the heirs: a presumption which Augustus, without being too definite, encouraged. The Initiate Leaders and Teachers of the world do not, as a rule, as far as one can judge, advertise well beforehand the identity of their successors.—As for Tiberius;—why, said Rome, his stepfather does not even like him. Drusus, now, and his children,—ah, that might be a possibility.
For the marriages of the two brothers told a tale. Drusus had married into the sacred Julian line: a daughter of Octavia and Mark Anthony; his son Germanicaus was thus a grand-nephew of Augustus, and a very great pet. But Tiberius had made a love-match, with a mere daughter of Agrippa by some former wife: an alliance that could not advance him in any way. Her name was Vipsania; the whole intensity of his pent-up nature went into his feeling for her; he was remarkably happily married;—that is, for the human, the tender, sensitive, and affectionate side of him.
Meanwhile both brothers had proved their worth. At twenty-two, Tiberius set up a kind in Armenia, and managed for Augustus the Parthian affair, whereby the standards of Crassus were returned. There were Swiss and German campaigns: in which Drusus was rather put where he might shine,—and he did shine;—and Tiberius a little in the shade. But Drusus in Germany fell from his horse, and died of his injuries; and then Tiberius was without question the first general of his age, and ablest man under the Princeps. As a soldier he was exceedingly careful of the welfare of his men; cautious in his strategy, yet bold; reserved; he made his own plans, and saw personally to their carrying out;— above all, he never made mistakes and never lost a battle. His natural shyness and timidity and awkwardness vanished as soon as there was work to be done: in camp, or on the battlefield, he was a very different man from the shy Tiberius of Roman society.
Gossip left his name untouched. It took advantage of Augustus; natural bonhomie, and whispered tales agains him galore: even said that Livia retained her hold on him by taking his indiscretions discreetly;—which is as much as to say that an utterly corrupt society judged that great man by its own corrupt standards. But Tiberius was too austere; his life chilled even Roman gossip into silence. There was also his patent devotion to Vipsania….. You could only sneer at him, if at all, for lack of spirit.
He had, then, great and magnificent qualities; but the scars of his babyhood peril remained. There was that timid and clinging disposition; that over-sensitiveness that came out when he was away from camp, or without immediate business to transact, or in any society but that of philosophers and occultists:—for we do know that he was a student of Occult Philosophy. He had grand qualities; but felt, beneath his reserve, much too strongly; had a heart too full of pent-up human affections. But it is written:
"Before the Soul can stand in the prescence of the Masters, its feet must be washed in the blood of the heart."
It devolved upon his Teacher to break that heart for him; so that he might stand in the presence of the Masters.
Agrippa had died; and for Julia's sake it was wise and better to provide her with a husband. Augustus hesitated long before he dared take the tremendous step he did: as one doubtful whether it would accomplish what he hoped, or simply kill at once the delicate psychic organism to be affected by it. Then he struck, —hurled the bolt. Let Tiberius put away Vipsania and marry Julia.
Put away that adored Vipsania:—marry that Julia,—whom every single instinct in his nature abhorred! Incompatible:—that is the very least and mildest thing you can say about it;—but he must say nothing, for he is speaking to her father. He resists a long time, in deep anguish; but there is one word that for Tiberius was ever a clarion call to his soul.
What, cries he, is this terrible thing you demand of me?—and his Teacher answers: Duty. Duty to Rome, that the Julian and Claudian factions may be united; duty to the empire, that my successors, Caius and Lucius, may have, after I am gone, a strong man for their guardian.—You will note that, if you please. Augustus had just adopted these two sons of Julias; they were, ostensibly, to be his successors; there was no bait for ambition in this sacrifice Tiberius was called on to make; he would not succeed to the Principate; the marriage would not help him; there was to be nothing in it for him but pure pain. In the name of duty he was called on to make a holocaust of himself.
He did it; and the feet of his soul were indeed washed in the blood of his heart. He said no word; he divorced Vipsania and explained nothing. But for months afterwards, if he should chance to meet her, or see her in the street far off, he could not hide the fact that his eyes filled with tears.—Then Rome in its own kindly way took upon itself the duty or pleasure of helping him out a little: gossip got to work to soothe the ache of his wound. "Vipasania," said gossip;—"you are well rid of her; she was far from being all that you thought her." Probably he believed nothing of it; but the bitterness lay in its being said. A shy man is never popular. His shyness passes for pride, and people hate him for it. Tiberius was very shy. So society was always anxious to take down his pride a little. The truth was, he was humble to the verge of self-distrust.
He did his best for Julia: lived under the same roof with her for a few agonized months, and discovered what everyone knew or suspected about her. The cup of his grief was now quite full; and indeed, worse things a man could hardly suffer. Austere, reserved, and self-controlled as he was, at sight of Vipsania he could not hide his tears. But it is written:
"Before the eyes can see, they must become incapable of tears."
—He was the butt of Roman gossip: in all rancorous mouths because of the loved Vipsania; in all tattling mouths because of the loathed Julia; laughed at on both accounts; sympathized with by nobody; hearing all whispers, and fearfully sensitive to them. But
"Before the ear can hear, it must have lost its sensitiveness."
The storm was upon him; the silence was ahead; he was rocked and shaken and stunned by the earthquakes and thunders of Initiation: when a man has to be hopeless, and battered, and stripped of all things: a naked soul afflicted with fiery rains and torments; and to have no pride to back him; and no ambition to back him; and no prospect before him at all, save such as can be seen with the it may be unopened eyes of faith. This is the way Tiberius endured his trials:—
All Rome knew what Julia was, except Augustus. So it is said; and perhaps truly; for here comes in the mystery of human duality: a thing hard enough to understand in ourselves, that are common humanity; how much harder the variety that appears in one such as Augustus! You may say, He must have known. Well, there was the Adept Soul; that, I doubt not, would have known. But perhaps it is that those who have all knowledge at their beck and call, have the power to know or not know what they will?—to know what shall help, not to know what shall hinder their work? Julia was not to be saved: was, probably, tainted with madness like so many of her descendants:—then what the Adept Soul could not forfend, why would the human personality, the warn-hearted father, be aware of? Had that last known, how should he escape being bowed down with grief: then in those years when all his powers and energies were needed? Octavian had gone through storm and silence long since: in the days of the Triumvirate, and his enforced partnership in its nefarious deeds;—now his personal mind and his hands were needed to guide the Empire: and needed clear and untrammeled with grief… Until Tiberius should be ready; at least until Tiberius…. So I imagine it possible that the soul of Augustus kept from its personality that wounding knowledge about Julia.
Tiberius was not the one to interfere with its purposes. Why did he not get a divorce? The remedy was clear and easy; and he would have ceased to be the laughing stock of Rome. He did not get a divorce; or try to; he said no word; he would not lighten his own load by sharing it with the Teacher he loved. He would not wound that Teacher to save himself pain or shame. Augustus had made severe laws for punishing such offenses as Julia's; and—well, Tiberius would bear his griefs alone. No sound escaped him.
But, as no effort of his could help or save her, live with Julia, or in Rome, he could not. His health broke down; he threw up all offices, and begged leave to retire to Rhodes. Augustus was (apparently) quite unsympathetic; withheld the permission until (they say) Tiberius had starved himself for four days to show it was go or die with him. And no, he would not take Julia; and he would give no reason for not taking her. Well; what was Augustus to do, having to keep up human appearances, and suit his action to the probabilities? What, but appear put out, insulted, angry? Estrangement followed; and Tiberius went in (apparent) disgrace. I find the explanation once more in Light on the Path; thus—
"In the early state in which a man is entering upon the silence he loses knowledge of his friends, of his lovers, of all who have been near and dear to him: and also loses sight of his teachers."
So in this case. "Scarce one passes through," we read, "without bitter complaint." But I think Tiberius did.
How else to explain the incident I cannot guess. Or indeed, his whole life. Tacitus' account does not hang together at all; the contraditions trip each other up, and any mud is good enough to fling. Mr. Baring-Gould's version goes far towards truth; but the well is deep for his tackle, and only esotericism, I think, can bring up the clear water. Whether Augustus knew all personally, or was acting simply on the promptings of his inner nature, or of Those who stoood behind him,—he took the course, it seems to me, which as an Occult Teacher he was bound to take. His conduct was framed in any case to meet the needs of his disciple's initiation. He, for the Law, had to break that disciple's outer life; and then send him lonely into the silence to find the greater life within. Truly these waters are deep; and one may be guessing with the utmost presumption. But hear Light on the Path again; and judge whether the picture that emerges is or is not consistent. It says:
"Your teacher or your predecessor, may hold your hand in his, and give you the utmost sympathy the human heart is capable of. But when the silence and the darkness come, you lose all knowledge of him: you are alone, and he cannot help you; not because his power is gone, but because you have invoked your great enemy."
—Tiberius was alone, and Augustus could not help him; and he went off, apparently quite out of favor, to seven years of voluntary exile in Rhodes, there to don the robe of a philosopher, and study philosophy and "astrology," as they say. Let us put it, the Esoteric Wisdom; I think we may.
The truth about Julia could not be kept from Augustus forever. It came to his ears at last; when his work was by so much nearer completion, and when Tiberius was by so much nearer his illumination. The Princeps did his duty, thought it made an old man of him: he banished Julia according to his own law. Then it was the wronged husband who stepped in and interceded; who wrote pleading letters to his stepfatehr, imploring him to have mercy on the erring woman: to lighten her punishment; to let her mother, at least, be with her in her exile. He knew well what tales Julia had been telling her father about him; and how Augustus had seemed to believe them; but "a courageous endurance of personal injustice" is demanded of the disciple; and very surely it was found in him. Rome heard of his intercession, and sneered at him for his weak-spiritedness; as kindly letter-writers failed not to let him know.
"Look for the flower to bloom in the silence that follows the storm, not till then."
The flower bloomed in this case during those seven years at Rhodes; then Tiberius was fit to return. Outer events shaped themseves to fit inner needs and qualifications: here now at last was the Man who was to succeed Augustus, duly and truly prepared, worthy and well-qualified: initiated, and ready to be named before the world Heir to the Principate. Within a few months of each other Caius and Lucius, the hitherto supposed successors designate, died; their brother Agrippa Postumus was already showing signs of incipient madness. True, there were many of the Julian line still alive and available, were Augustus (as had been thought) bent on making Julian blood the qualification necessary: there was Germanicus, married to Agrippina; he the son of Drusus and Antonia, Octavia's daughter; she the daughter of Julia, and so grand-daughter of Augustus himself: there were these two with their several children. But all else might wait upon the fact that Tiberius, the real man, was now ready. The Princeps adopted him, and no one was left to doubt who was to be the successor. The happiest years in Tiberius's life began: he had at last the full, unreserved, and undisguised friendship of his Teacher. His portarait-busts taken at this period show for the fist and only time a faint smile on his gravely beautiful face.
Also he was given plenty of work. His great German campaigns followed quickly; and the quelling of the Pannanian insurrection that called him back from the Rhine; and Varus' defeat while Tiberius was in Pannonia; and Tiberius's triumphant saving of the situation. It was then, when the frontier was broken and all the world aquake with alarm, that he consulted his generals; the only time he ever did so. Says Velleius Paterculus, who served uner him:—"There was no ostentation in his conduct; it was marked by solid worth, practicality, humaneness. He took as much care of any one of us who happened to be sick, as if that one's health were the main object of his concern." Ambulances, he continues, were always in attendance, with a medical staff, warm baths, suitable food, etc., for the sick. "The general often admonished, rarely punished; taking a middle part, dissembling his knowledge of most faults, and preventing the commission of others…. He preferred the approval of his own conscience to the acquisition of renown."
He returned to Rome in triumph in the autumn of A.D. 12; and dismissed his chief captives with present, instead of butchering them in the fine old Roman way. He was at the height of his fame; undeniably Rome's savior, and surely to be Princeps on his Teacher's death. Augustus, in letters that remain, calls him "the only strength and stay of the Empire." "All who were with you," says he, "admit that this verse suits you:"
'One man by vigilance has restored the state.'
Whenever anything happens that requires more than ordinary consideration, or when I am out of humor, then, by Hercules, I long for the presence of my dear Tiberius; and Homer's lines rise in my mind:
'Bold from his prudence, I could e'en aspire
To dare with him the burning rage of fire.'
"When I hear that you are worn out with incessant fatigue, the Gods confound me if I am not all in a quake. So I entreat you to spare yourself, lest, should we hear of your being ill, the news prove fatal to your mother and myself, and the Roman people be alarmed for the safety of the Empire. I pray heaven to preserve you for us, and bless you with health now and ever,—if the Gods care a rush for the Roman people. ….Farewell, my dearest Tiberius; may good success attend you, you best of all generals, in all that you undertake for me and for the Muses."
Two years later Augustus died, and Tiberius became emperor; and the persecution broke out that was not to end till his death. Let us get the whole situation firmly in mind. There was that clique in high society of men who hated the Principate because it had robbed them of the spoils of power. It gathered first round Scribonia, because she hated Augustus for divorcing her; then round Julia, because she was living in open contempt of the principles her father stood for. Its chief bugbear of all was Tiberius, because he was the living embodiment of those principles; and because Julia, the witty and brilliant, hated him above all things and made him in the salons the butt for her shafts. Its darling poet was Ovid; whose poetic mission was, in Mr. Stobart's phrase, "to gild uncleannes with charm." Presently Augustus sent him into exile: whiner over his own hard lot. But enough of unsavory him: the clique remained and treasured his doctrine. When Caius and Lucius died, it failed not to whisper that of course Tiberius had poisoned them; and during the next twenty-five years you could hardly die, in Rome, without the clique's buzzing a like tale over your corpse.—A faction that lasted on, handing down its legends, until Suetonius and Tacitus took them up and immortalized them; thus creating the Tiberius of popular belief and "history," deceiving the world for twenty centuries.
The Augustan system implied no tyranny; not even absolutism:—it was through no fault of its founder, or of his successor, that the constitutional side of it broke down. Remember the divine aim behind it all: to weld the world into one. So you must have the provinces, the new ones that retaineed their national identity, under Adept rule; there must be no monkeying by incompetents there. Those provinces were, absolutely all in the hands of Caesar. But in Rome, and Italy, and all quiet and long-settled parts, the senate was to rule; and Augustus' effort, and especially Tiberius' effort, was to make it do so. But by this time, you may say, there was nothing resembling a human ego left among the senators: when the Manasaputra incarnated, these fellows had been elsewhere. They simply could not rule. Augustus had had constantly to be intervening to pull them out of scrapes; to audit their accounts for them, because they could not do the sums themselves; to send down men into their provinces to put things right whenever they went wrong. Tiberius was much more loath to do this. At times one almost suspects him of being at heart a republican, anxious to restore the Republic the first moment it might be practicable. That would be, when the whole empire was one nation and some few souls to guide things should have appeared. At any rate (in his latter years) it must have seemed still possible that the Principate should continue: there was absolutely no one to follow him in it. So the best thing was to leave as much as possible the senate's duty to the senate, that responsibility might be aroused in them. For himself, he gave his whole heart and mind to governing the provinces of Caesar. He went minutely into finances; and would have his sheep sheared, not flayed. His eyes and hands were everywhere, to bring about the Brotherhood of Man. There is, perhaps, evidence in the Christian Evangels: where we see the Jewish commonalty on excellent good terms with the Roman soldier, and Jesus consorting freindily with Tiberius' centurions and tax-gatherers; but the Jewish national leaders as the enemies of both—of the Romans, and of the democratic Nazarene. If this emperor's life had come down through provincial, and not metropolitan, channels, we should have heard of him as the most beneficent of men. Indeed, Mr. Baring-Gould argues that among the Christians a tradition came down of him as of one "very near the Kingdom of God." It may be so; and such a view may even be the reflexion of the Nazarene Master's own opinion as to Tiberius. At any rate, we must suppose that at that time the Christian Movement was still fairly pure: its seat was in the provinces, far from Rome; and its strength among humble people seeking to live the higher life. But those who were interested to lie against Tiberius, and whose lies come down to us for history, were all metropolitans, and aristocrats, and apostles of degeneracy. I do not mean to include Tacitus under the last head; but he belonged to the party, and inherited the tradition.
It was on the provinces that Tiberius had his hand, not on the metropolis. He hoped the senators would do their duty, gave them every chance to; he rather turned his eyes away from their sphere, and kept them fixed on his own. We must understand this well: the histories give but accounts of Roman and home affairs; with which, as they were outside his duty, Tiberius concerned himself as little as he might.
But the senate's conception of duty-doing was this: flatter the Caesar in public with all the ingenuity and rhetoric God or the devil has given you; but for the sake of decency slander him in private, and so keep your self-respect.—I abased my soul to Caesar, I? Yes, I know I licked his shoes in the senate house; but that was merely camouflage. At Agrippina's at home I made up for it; was it not high-souled I who told that filthy story about him?—which, (congratulate me!) I invented myself. How dare you then accuse me of being small-spirited, or one to reverence any man soever?—So these maggots crawled and tumbled; untill they brought down their own karma on their heads like the Assyrian in the poem, or a thousand of bricks. Constitutuionalism broke down, and tyranny came on awfully in its place; and those who had not upheld the constitution suffered from the tyranny. But it was not heroic Tiberius who was the tyrant.
He was unpopular with the crowd, because austere and taciturn; he would not wear the pomps and tinsels, or swagger it in public to their taste. He was too reserved; he was not a good mixer: if you fell on your knees to him, he simply recoiled in disgust. He would not witness the gladiatorial games, with their sickening senseless bloodshed; nor the plays at the theatre, with their improprieties. In these things he was an anomaly in his age, and felt about them as would any humane gentleman today. So it was easy for his enemies to work up popular feeling aginst him.
At the funeral of Augustus he had to read the oration. A lump in his throat prevented him getting through with it, and he handed the paper to his son Drusus to finish. "Oh!" cried his enemies then and Tacitus after them, "what dissimulation! what rank hypocrisy! when in reality he must be overjoyed to be in the dead man's shoes." When that same Drusus (his dear son and sole hope) died some years later, he so far controlled his feelings that none saw a muscle of his face moved by emotion while he read the oration. "Oh!" cried his enemies then and Tacitus after them, "what a cold unfeeling monster!" Tiberius, with an absolute eye for reading men's thoughts, knew well what was being said on either occasion.
When Augustus died, his one surviving grandson, Agrippa Postumus, was mad and under restraint in the island of Planasia, near Elba. A plot was hatched to spirit him away to the Rhine, and have him there proclaimed as against Tiberius by the legions. One Clemens was deputed to do this; but when Clemens reached Planasia, he found Agrippa murdered. Says Suetonius:
"It remained doubtful whether Augustus left the order (for the murder) in his last moments, to prevent any public disturbance after his death; or whether Livia issued it in the name of Augustus, or whether it was issued with or without the knowledge of Tiberius."—Tacitus in the right,—though truly this Agrippa Postumus was a peculiarly violent offensive idiot, and Augustus knew well what the anti-Claudian faction was capable of. Nor can one credit that gracious lady Livia with it; though it was she who persuaded Tiberius to hush the thing up, and rescind his order for a public senatorial investigation. For an order to that effect he issued; and Tacitus, more suo, puts it down to his hypocrisy. Tacitus' method with Tiberius is this: all his acts of mercy are to be attributed to weak-spiritedness; all his acts of justice, to blood-tyranny; everything else to hypocrisy and dissimulation.
Neither Augustus, nor yet Livia, then, had Agrippa killed; must we credit it to Tiberius? Less probably, I think, it was he than either of the others: I can just imagine Augustus taking the responsibility for the sake of Rome, but not Tiberius criminal for his own sake. Here is an explanation which incriminates neither: it may seem far-fetched; but then many true things do. We know how the children of darkness hate the Messengers of Light. Tiberius stood for private and public morality; the Julian-republican clique for the opposite. He stood for the nations welded into one, the centuries to be, and the high purposes of the Law. They stood for anarchy, civil war, and the old spoils system.—Down him then! said they. And how?—Fish up mad Postumus, and let's have a row with the Legions of the Rhine.—Yes; that sounds pretty—for you who are not in the deep know of the thing. But how far do you think the Legions of the Rhine are going to support this young revolting-habited madman against the first general of the age? You are green; you are crude, my friends;—but go to it; your plot shall do well. But we, the cream and innermost of the party,—we have another. Let the madman be murdered,—and who shall be called the murderer?
I believe they argued that way;—and very wisely; for Tiberius still carries the odium of the murder of Agrippa Postumus.
Why did he allow himself to be dissuaded from the public investigation? Was it weakness? His perturbation when he heard of the murder, and his orders for the investigation, were natural enough. One can perhaps understand Livia, shaken with the grief of her great bereavement, fearing the unknown, fearing scandal, fearing to take issue with the faction whose strength and bitterness she knew, pleading with her son to let the matter be. Was it weakness on his part, that he concurred? This much must be allowed: Tiberius was always weak at self-defense. Had he taken prompt steps against his personal enemies, it might have been much better for him, in a way. But then and always his eyes were upon the performance of his duty; which he understood to be the care of the empire, not the defense of himself. We called Augustus the bridge; Tiberius was the shield. He understood the business of a shield to be, to take shafts, and make no noise about it. Proud he was; with that sublime pride that argues itself capable of standing all things, so that the thing it cares for—which is not its own reputation—is unhurt. You shall see. We might call it unwisdom, if his work had suffered by it; but it was only his peace, his own name—and eventually his enemies— that suffered. He brought the world through.
Detail by detail, Mr. Baring-Gould takes the incidents of his reign, and show how the plot was worked up against him, and every happening, all his deeds and motives, colorless or finely colored, given a coat of pitch. We can only glance at one or two points here: his relations with Germanicus, and with Agrippina; the rise and fall of Sejanus.
Germanicus, his nephew, was fighting on the Rhine when Tiberius came to the throne. There was a mutiny; which Germanicus quelled with much loss of dignity and then with much bloodshed. To cover the loss of dignity, he embarked on gay adventures against the Germans; and played the fool a little, losing some few battles. Tiberius, who understood German affairs better than any man living, wanted peace in that quarter; and recalled Germanicus; then, lest there should be any flavor of disgrace in the recall, sent him on a mission to the East. Your textbooks will tell you he recalled him through jealousy of his brilliant exploits. Germanicus being something flighty of disposition, the emperor sent with him on his new mission a rough old fellow by the name of Calpurnius Piso to keep a weather eye open on him, and neutralize, as far as might be, extravagant actions. The choice, it must be said, was a bad one; for the two fought like cat and dog the better part of the time. Then Germanicus died, supposing that Piso had poisoned him; and Agrippina his wife came home, an Ate shrieking for revenge. She had exposed her husband's naked body in the marketplace at Antioch, that all might see he had been poisoned; which shows the kind of woman she was. Germanicus was given a huge funeral at Rome; he was the darling of the mob, and the funeral was really a demonstration against Tiberius. then Piso was to be tried for the murder: a crabbed but honest old plebeian of good and ancient family, who Tiberius knew well enough was innocent. There were threats of mob violence if he should be acquitted; and the suggestion studiously sown that Piso, guilty, had been set on to the murder by the Princeps. Tiberius, knowing the popular feeling, did not attend the funeral of his nephew. It was a mistake in policy, perhaps; but his experience had been unpleasant enought at the funeral of Augustus. Tacitus says he stayed away fearing lest the public, peering into his face thus from close to, might see the marks of dissimulation in it, and realize that his grief was hypocrisy. How the devil did Tacitus know? Yet what he says comes down as gospel.
This sort of thing went on continually, and provided him a poor atmosphere in which to do his great and important work. As he grew older, he retired more and more. He trusted in his minister Sejanus who had once heroically save his life: an exceedingly able, but unfortunately also an exceedingly wicked man. Sejanus became his link with Rome and the senate; and used that position, and the senate's incompetence, to gather into his own hands a power practically absolute in home affairs. Home affairs, be it always remembered, were what the Princeps expected the senate to attend to: their duty, under the constitution. Instead, however, they fawned on Sejanus ad lib. Sejanus murdered Tiberius' son Drusus, and aspired to the hand of Livilla, his widow: she was the daughter of Germanicus and Agrippina; and she certainly, and Agrippina probably, were accessories to the murder of Drusus. For Agrippina was obsessed with hatred for Tiberius: with the idea that he had murdered her husband, and with thirst for revenge. Sejanus was thus in a fair way to the ends of his ambition: to be named the successor to the Principate.
Then Tiberius found him out; and sent a message to a senate engaged in Sejanus-worship, demanding the punishment of the murderers of Drusus.
Sejanus had built up his power by fostering the system of delation. There was no public prosecutor in the Roman system: when any wrong had been done, it was anyone's business to prosecute. The end of education was rhetoric, that you might get on in life. The first step was to bring an accusation against some public man, and support it with a mighty telling speech. If you succeeded, and killed your man,—why, then your name was made. On this system, with developments of his own, Sejanus had built; had employed one half of Rome informing against the other. It took time to bring about; but he had worked up by degrees a state of things in which all went in terror of him; and the senate was eager perpetually to condemn any one he might recommend for condemnation. When Tiberius found him out, they lost their heads entirely, and simply tumbled over themselves in their anxiety to accuse, condemn, and execute each other. Everyone was being informed against as having been a friend of Sejanus, and therefore an enemy of their dear Princeps; who was away at Capri attending to his duty; and whose ears, now Sejanus was gone, they might hope to reach with flatteries. You supped with your friend overnight; did your best to diddle him into saying something over the wine-cups;—then rose betimes in the morning to accuse him of saying it: only too often to find that he, (traitorly wretch!) had risen half an hour earlier and accused you; so you missed your breakfast for nothing; and dined (we may hope) in a better world. Thus during the last years of the reign there was a Terror in Rome: in the senate's sphere of influence; the senatorial class the sufferers and inflictors of the suffering. Meanwhile Tiberius in his retirement was still at his duty; his hold on his provinces never relaxed. When the condemned appealed to him, the records show that in nearly every case their sentences were commuted. Tiberius' enemies were punishing themselves; but the odium of it has been fastened on Tiberius. He might have interfered, you say?—What! with Karma? I doubt.
His sane, balanced, moderate character comes out in his own words again and again: he was a wonderful anomaly in that age. Rome was filled with slanders against him; and the fulsome senate implored him to punish the slanderers. "We have not much time to spare," Tiberius answered; "we need not involve ourselves in this additional business." "If any man speaks ill of me, I shall take care so to behave as to be able to give a good accound of my words and acts, and so confound him. If he speaks ill of me after that, it will be time enough for me to think about hating him." Permission was asked to raise a temple to him in Spain; he refused to grant it, saying that if every emperor was to be worshiped, the worship of Augustus would lose its meaning. "For myself, a mere mortal, it is enough for me if I do my duties as a mortal; I am content if posterity recognises that… This is the only temple I desire to have raised in my honor,—and this only in men's hearts."—the senate, in a spasm of flattery, offered to swear in advance to all his acts. He forbade it, saying in effect that he was doing and proposed to do his best; but all things human were liable to change, and he would not have them endorsing the future acts of one who by the mere failure of his faculties might do wrong.
In those sayings, I think, you get the man: perhaps a disciple only, and never actually a Master; perhaps never absolutely sure of himself, but only of his capacity and determination to do his duty day by day: his own duty, and not other men's:—never setting himself on a level with his Teacher; or thinking himself able, of his own abilities, to run the world, as Augustus had had the power and the mission to do,—but as probably no man might have had the power to do in Tiberius' time;—and by virtue of that faith, that high concentration on duty, carrying the world (but not Rome) through in spite of Rome, which had become then a thing incurable, nothing more than an infection and lamentable scab.
He left it altogether in his last years; its atmosphere and bitterness were too much for him. Form the quiet at Capri he continued to rule his provinces until the end; ever hoping that if he did his duty, someone or some spirit might arise in the senate to do theirs. Tacitus explains his retirement—as Roman society had explained it when it happened,—thus: Being then seventy-two years old, Tiberius, whose life up to that time had been irreproachable and untouched by gossip, went to Capri to have freedom and privacy for orgies of personal vice. But why did he not stay at Rome for his orgies: doing at Rome as the Romans did, and thereby perhaps earning a measure of popularity?
Over the bridge Augustus, western humanity had made the crossing; but on the further shore, there had to be a sacrifice to the Fates. Tiberius was the sacrifice. And that sacrifice was not in vain. We get one glimpse through provincial (and therefore undiseased) eyes of the empire he built up in the provinces. It is from Philo Judaeus, a Jewish Theosophist of Alexandria, who came to Rome in the reign of Caligula, Tiberius' successor. (Tiberius, it must be said, appointed no successor; there was none for him to appoint.) Caligula, says Philo,
"….succeeded to an empire that was well organized, tending everywhere to conceed—north, south, east, and west brought into friendship; Greeks and barbarians routed, soldiers and civilians linked together in the bonds of a happy peace."
That was the work of Tiberius.
In the Gospel narrative, Jesus is once made to allude to him; in the words quoted at the head of this paper: "Render unto Caesar"—who was Tiberius—"the things which are Caesar's" I think it is about time it should be done: that the wreath of honor should at last be laid on the memory of this brave, just, sane, and merciful man; this silent duty-doer, who would speak no word in his own defense; this Agent of the Gods, who endured all those years of crucifixion, that he might build up the Unity of Mankind.
Says Mr. Baring-Gould:
"In the galleries of Rome, of Naples, Florence, Paris, one sees the beautiful face of Tiberius, with that intellectual brow and sensitive mouth, looking pleadingly at the passer-by, as though seeking for someone who would unlock the secret of his story and vindicate his much aspersed memory."