Ancient Rome and Modern America; A Comparative Study of Morals and Manners

by Guglielmo Ferrero

The son of Drusus, the brother whom Tiberius had so much loved, the adopted son of Tiberius, who had been enjoined by Augustus to adopt him, intelligent, brilliant, generous, well-educated, handsome, affable, inclined to be light-headed and casual like most youths who are fortune’s favourites, Germanicus was the idol of all the enemies of Tiberius. He was, and he was conscious of being, their idol, and, without assuming too openly an attitude of opposition, he willingly let himself be worshipped and extolled by the faction opposed to his adoptive father, which faction was strong enough to exercise an effective pressure on the Senate and throughout the State. In fact, Germanicus, who after the death of Augustus had been sent by Tiberius to take command of the legions of the Rhine, had dared to follow a policy of his own, differing from that of Tiberius, on the Rhine, crossing the great river on his own initiative, and making a long and hazardous incursion into the territories abandoned by Rome after the defeat of Varus.

This incursion—the first step taken by Rome to avenge Varus and his legions, which had been betrayed and butchered in the great forest—had evoked such enthusiasm in Rome and in Italy; Germanicus was so popular; the expansionist party, always strong and now reinforced by all the enemies of Tiberius, had made so much of the daring act of the young general, that Tiberius had not dared to intervene, to repress, or to moderate the dashing initiative of his young nephew and adopted son. So he let Germanicus go on. On no account and at no cost would Tiberius, however, again begin beyond the Rhine a dangerous and expensive policy of provocation and expansion. Therefore, after having allowed Germanicus to cover himself with glory through his expedition, to collect and to bury in the great forests the bones of the butchered legions, and to lay waste the territories of the tribes which had taken part in the war against Rome, he called him back, in order to send him—in the year 17 of the Christian era—to the East, complications and difficulties having arisen in Cappadocia and Armenia. He was not prepared to leave this ambitious, active, bold youth, the tool of his own enemies, too long at grips with the warlike German tribes. He was afraid that the all-powerful craving for glory might lead Germanicus to provoke in the end some great and dangerous war. In Rome, the party which favoured the reconquest of Germany was still powerful. Tiberius did not want to reconquer that region. In the East, amongst unwarlike nations, the danger was less urgent.

So Germanicus was sent to the East—but, by way of compensation for his recall, he was given unusually large powers. When the time came to approve the decree which conferred these powers upon him, the party of his friends in the Senate proposed and carried a motion giving him power overriding that of all the governors of the separate provinces of the whole East; the result being that he was constituted a sort of governor-general or even viceroy. Whether Tiberius was personally in favour of this decree, which placed half the Empire in the absolute power of a young man of little more than thirty years of age, or not, we do not know. The probability is that he was not, and that on this occasion also Tiberius was the victim of the intrigues and cabals of the party which favoured his nephew and adopted son. It was very difficult for him to oppose laws which heaped honours on the public darling, Germanicus, because the public imputed his opposition to base motives, such as jealousy, envy, or the fear of opposition. What is certain, at any rate, is that, after this decree, Tiberius suddenly changed the governor in Syria, the most important province in the East, the choice of whose governors rested with him. He replaced the mediocre person who then occupied the post by a first-rate man, Cneius Piso, a descendant of one of the most noble Roman families, of a family which had distinguished itself in the civil wars by its aversion to the Cæsarian party; of a family, in short, which was aristocratic, traditionalist, and conservative to the core. Cneius Piso himself was a determined, conservative, and energetic man, a firm partisan of the old policy with which Rome had kept in subjection and governed so many nations for hundreds of years.

Tiberius’s idea is quite clear to anyone who examines it impartially. He did not wish to leave the East at the mercy of Germanicus, who was intelligent and good, but still young, inexperienced, and not always deliberate, and who was easily influenced by light-headed, irresponsible, and often vicious and corrupt flatterers. He wished to place, at Germanicus’s elbow in the East, a serious, mature, energetic, and cautious man; a man who could, so to speak, counterbalance him, retrieve his more serious mistakes, keep an eye on everything he did or said, and in every case warn him in time of the more grave eventualities. Can we label such a device a crime? Or the sinister expression of a morbid jealousy, as Tacitus would have us do? Was it not rather the wise precaution of a cautious statesman, who did not wish to rob an intelligent youth of the opportunities of distinguishing himself and of becoming proficient in the government of a world which would, perhaps, one day devolve upon him, though Tiberius was at the same time anxious that the other’s inexperience should not involve too much danger to the Empire and to himself? But the wisest precautions are on occasions the seed of disasters of the first magnitude.

And so they were in this case. In the year 18 A.D., Germanicus and Piso started, one after the other, at a short interval of time, for the East, but they lost no time in coming to loggerheads. The first incident occurred at Athens, which first Germanicus, and then Piso, made a stage in the journey. Germanicus, who was an ardent admirer of Greek culture, had wished to do honour in every possible way to the great city in which the fire of ancient culture had burned with the most dazzling brightness. He had entered Athens almost like a private person, with only one lictor in attendance; and had exchanged the most flowery and amiable speeches with the magistrates of the city. This attitude, however, had seemed too affable to a Roman of the old stamp, like Piso, who considered that the representative of the power of Rome ought never to repose too great authority and confidence in the subject nations and cities, even if they called themselves Greece and Athens, and could pride themselves on having listened to Socrates and on having been the first to applaud the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. So Piso also stopped at Athens, but with the object of cancelling by a brusque and harsh demeanour the impression which might have been made by the imprudent affability of Germanicus. He, in his turn, made a speech, full of stern reproof and almost veiled threats to the Athenians, which seemed to everybody to be a disavowal of the speeches of Germanicus; as if Piso intended to convey to the people of Athens that Germanicus had spoken on his own account and not in the name of the Roman government.

Germanicus was an impressionable young man, but really kind-hearted and conciliatory. He did not take, in bad part, the kind of disavowal which Piso had inflicted on him, all the more because he knew that Piso was the mouthpiece of a perhaps harsh version of the admonitions of Tiberius’s experienced wisdom. Round Germanicus, however, there stood a large party of flatterers and intriguers who had fixed on him as the future emperor—Tiberius was already an old man—; also, Germanicus had to wife Agrippina, a virtuous and highly educated woman, who loved and admired him intensely, but was at the same time very ambitious, passionate, and uncritical, prone to mistake for just and wise everything which appeased her ardent and not ungenerous passions. Piso was accompanied to the East by his wife, Plancina, a great friend of Livia, Tiberius’s mother, and a great enemy of Agrippina. The interested flatteries of friends, the fiery temperament of Agrippina, her blind love for her husband, and her hatred for Plancina, in a short time transformed into a violent personal conflict what Tiberius had intended to be a discreet collaboration between a man of ripe age and experience, and a young man full of good intentions but at times lacking in ballast.

For the rest, the matters which Germanicus and Piso had been sent to the East to settle were complicated and difficult, and therefore afforded countless opportunities and pretexts for quarrels. Rome found herself involved in a grave difficulty in the East. Some years before, the Parthians, left without a king, had sent to Italy for Vonones, a son of their old King Phraates, who had been educated in Rome at the house of Augustus. To have at the head of the Parthian Empire a king who had been educated on the banks of the Tiber was a stroke of luck for Rome. The Parthians, however, very soon discovered that Vonones had become too much Latinised at Rome, and had forgotten too completely the ideas and customs of his nation. Consequently, they had turned him out and elected in his stead Artabanus. Vonones had fled to Armenia, and had succeeded in getting elected King of the Armenians. But Artabanus, not wishing his predecessor to become king of a vast empire marching with his own, from which he might retrieve in due course the crown of the Parthians, had succeeded also by means of various intrigues and threats in getting Vonones expelled from Armenia.

The difficulty which Tiberius had charged Germanicus and Piso to study and resolve on the spot was actually this: whether Rome should or should not give ear to Vonones’s clamour and replace him on the throne of Armenia. The difficulty was a serious one, as each of the two opposing courses promised grave dangers. By replacing Vonones on the throne of Armenia, Rome might implicate herself in serious quarrels, and perhaps in a war, with the King of the Parthians, who was opposed to Vonones’s restoration. By not replacing him, Rome appeared to sacrifice to the hatred of the Parthian King this faithful client of hers, whose only fault was that he had been educated in Rome; to be inclined to recognise that a prince who had been too thoroughly Romanised could not govern an Oriental state,—a confession which certainly would not encourage the protected sovereigns of Asia, great and small, to bring themselves too closely into touch with the affairs, ideas, and customs of the protecting state. In point of fact, Germanicus and Piso, who were already embittered against each other by the incidents at Athens, came into open conflict on this point. Germanicus and his supporters were in favour of sacrificing Vonones to the resentment of the King of the Parthians and to the national susceptibilities of the East; while Piso, more loyal to the authoritative traditions of the old Roman policy, which were faithfully reflected in his own more cautious judgment, decided to defend Vonones. Rome must not abandon the cause of this her faithful servant in the East!

Germanicus had, by virtue of a decree of the Senate, supreme powers in the East; as a result his opinion carried the day, notwithstanding all the efforts that Piso made to prevent his sacrificing Vonones, whom Piso by way of compensation entertained, treated with honour, and openly took under his protection. Towards the middle of the year 18, Germanicus crowned Zenon King of the Armenians in Artaxata, a son of Polemon, King of Pontus. When, however, Germanicus asked Piso to send into Armenia a section of the legions placed under his command, to make an armed demonstration in favour of the new sovereign, Piso refused. Theoretically and by virtue of the decrees of the Senate, Germanicus had the right to give orders to Piso, and Piso ought to have obeyed them. On the other hand, Piso represented Tiberius; and with Germanicus, as with every other human authority, it was not enough to possess the power, there was needed also the hardihood to use it. In the face of Piso’s energy and the authority of Tiberius, who stood behind Piso, Germanicus did not dare to insist.

It is easy, however, to picture the fury and rage of Germanicus’s friends and flatterers, to whom this kind of surveillance to which Germanicus was subjected became more intolerable, the more it limited indirectly their own authority. In their fury, they determined to have their revenge, and they were not long in finding an opportunity, though it cost them dear. Artabanus, the King of the Parthians, encouraged by the pliability of Germanicus, sent to ask him to forbid Vonones to live in Syria, on the ground that, as that province bordered on his Empire, Vonones could easily use it as a base from which to intrigue against him. In view of the fact that Vonones was in Syria as the guest of Piso, the Parthian King was asking Germanicus in so many words to forbid Piso to protect him. The demand was, in truth, excessive and somewhat humiliating for Rome; but Germanicus’s entourage saw in this demand a means of humiliating Piso, and worked and talked to such effect that Germanicus conceded to it and shut Vonones up in a city in Cilicia. A checkmate had been inflicted on Piso, but the price of it was a humiliation for Rome. Piso and his party had good reason for accusing Germanicus and his entourage of compromising with singular levity the prestige of Rome in the East.