Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

Octavius was at this time little over eighteen years of age; his mother and stepfather were alive, both of them devoted to his interests, but nobody seems as yet to have thought of him as a possible factor in the politics of the future.

By removing him to Apollonia his uncle had to some extent withdrawn him from political life, and the Liberators had forgotten his existence. He was of weakly health, and had shown no particular aptitude for military pursuits. Antonius thought him of such small importance, that he disregarded those portions of Cæsar’s will which referred to him, and actually seized the private treasure which had been bequeathed to him.

Friends and relatives were alike urgent that Octavian should either remain where he was, or delay his journey to Italy till he was assured of the support of an Army. The young man wisely relied on his own judgment; he was Cæsar’s heir and adopted son, but Cæsar could only bequeath to him his private inheritance; it was not in his power to transfer the reins of Government; the nature of the conspiracy against Cæsar and its extent was still unknown; Antonius and other leading Cæsarians had been spared, it was clear that no proscription of the adherents of Cæsar had been contemplated, or, if contemplated, it had been abandoned. If Octavian were marked out for slaughter, he was already doomed; nothing could save him but the affection of Cæsar’s veterans; they were all in Italy, and there was as yet no evidence that they were prepared to transfer their allegiance to so distant a relative of their late commander. To appear with an army would be to invite attack, and Octavian knew his own limitations better than anybody else; he knew that he was no general, and he had not as yet a general in whom he could trust. By appearing in Italy simply as a private person engaged in an ordinary matter of private business, the formal succession to an inheritance, he disarmed prejudice. If Antonius wished to put him out of the way, he could do so in any case. On the other hand, by appearing simply as a defrauded heir, he might attract popular sympathy; Cæsar’s will had already proved to be a political force; and the Constitutional party might be glad of a counterpoise to Antonius.

Such considerations may well have influenced Octavian in the adoption of the important step which he took contrary to advice. It is even possible that he contemplated nothing more than the assertion of his undeniable right; and that the consequences of his daring step took him by surprise. It is certain that he had no sooner landed at Brundisium than he found himself a power; the soldiers flocked to meet him, and his march to Rome was a triumphal progress.

The events of the next three years are difficult to disentangle; to the actors they must have been perplexing in the extreme. The factor which had been omitted from the calculations of all the leaders was the character of the army, which Cæsar had created. As fast as Cæsar made way in Gaul he enlisted the Gauls in his service; his legions were in the end less Italian than Gallic; to the Gauls the abstraction called the Roman Senate had no more significance than the House of Commons to Sikhs and Gurkhas; they had not got beyond, or not fallen behind, the conceptions of personal fidelity to a chieftain which are developed by the clan system. Not only was it natural to them to transfer their fidelity from the person of a father to that of his son and successor, but such personal ties were their strongest political passion. They would obey Antonius and even Lepidus as Cæsar’s friends and trusted subordinates, but their affection for Cæsar’s heir was of a different character; to avenge their dead commander, to put his son in his rights, were to them matters of the first importance; as for the Roman Constitution and theoretical Republics, they neither cared about them nor understood them. At first Octavian did not grasp the situation; his temperament was legal and formal; his first preoccupation was to assert his legal rights against Antonius, and in order to do this effectively, he had no objection to using such help as might be given him by Cicero and the Constitutional party, who for their part proposed to use against him Antonius and then put him out of the way. The first serious operation in the field showed Octavian his mistake; the Senate sent him with the Consuls to relieve Decimus Brutus, brother of Marcus Brutus, who was being besieged by the Cæsarians under Antonius at Mutina; both Consuls, old Cæsarians, were killed, and the soldiers insisted on bringing Octavian back to Rome and making him Consul; it was not long before they also insisted on a reconciliation between the Cæsarian leaders, compelling Antonius, Lepidus, and Octavian to work together and unite in the task of punishing the enemies of Cæsar. The proscription was partly the work of the army; so far as it was a punishment of the enemies of Cæsar, Octavian was an accomplice, though an unwilling accomplice; Antonius and Lepidus both took advantage of it to satisfy old grudges and make large confiscations. Meanwhile the general disorganization invited any man who found himself in command of troops, or was otherwise favourably circumstanced, to fish in troubled waters; Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella, the dissolute little gentleman who was “tied to a sword,” was not the only man who saw an opportunity of doing something to his own advantage. Adventures of this kind disturbed the world for a few months, but after Brutus and Cassius had been beaten near Philippi a fairly definite division declared itself; the world was again divided between Cæsarians and Pompeians, and the chief Pompeian leader was Sextus Pompeius. Antonius had gone off to the East to meet Cleopatra and his fate on the Cydnus. Lepidus, though in command of an army and Governor of Africa, was a negligible quantity, destined to suffer a very remarkable disillusionment as soon as he ventured to assert himself in an independent position.

Few men have ever been so fortunate as Octavian in the mistakes of their adversaries, and few have ever turned them to such good advantage.

East and West alike were taught to adore the memory of the great Cæsar by the incompetence of the men who proposed to succeed to his power; under his sway the commercial cities of Asia Minor had thriven; Cassius plundered them in the name of the Senate, Dolabella on his own responsibility, Antonius as the successor of Cæsar; Italy had no sooner begun to look forward to relief from civil war on the departure of Antonius than the Constitutional party allied itself with Lucius Antonius and Fulvia, the brother and wife of Marcus Antonius, to impede the settlement. Tiberius Nero was among those who joined the new movement. Relieved of the presence of Antonius, who in spite of all his faults was a general of ability, the Pompeians hoped to be able to crush Octavian, who was no general; the proscription had left very bitter feelings; Octavian had so far had no opportunity of indicating his pacific inclinations; he had had to do what his soldiers required of him; Antonius was obviously a self-indulgent adventurer, with whose fortunes no self-respecting man could ally himself; Fulvia was a virago, and Lucius Antonius no less greedy than his brother, though less amiable; still it seemed that these latter with their adherents embodied the Republican principle; and the remnants of the Constitutional party joined them. Incompetent generalship allowed their forces to be locked up in Perusia, and after a siege of three months the soldiers of Octavian glutted their vengeance upon the enemies of Cæsar; the terror that was inspired served its purpose in two ways: there were no more conspiracies in Italy, and Octavian made up his mind never again to be the slave of his own army.

Tiberius Nero either escaped from Perusia before the town was completely invested, or had started on a special mission to Campania with the object of creating a diversion in Southern Italy. He still held the office of Prætor though his legal term had expired, and thus invested his enterprise with a legal and constitutional aspect. The territory of Capua had been confiscated by Rome after the second Punic War, the penalty of the destructive friendship which that city had conferred on Hannibal; the Senate of those days had appropriated the land to its own purposes; the redivision of this land had been part of the programme of the popular party from the days of the Gracchi, and their heirs the Cæsarians now proposed to assign it to Octavian’s veterans. Tiberius Nero took up the cause of the proprietors, who were threatened with expropriation, thus adopting the old Senatorial standpoint; he doubtless expected to find that the Campanians, to whom the existing conditions, sanctioned as they were by the precedents of a century and a half, caused no grievance, would flock to his standards; but he met with languid support from the beginning, and the fall of Perusia with the subsequent atrocities destroyed every prospect of success; the Campanians preferred a peaceful spoliation to the chances of war. Tiberius Nero was obliged to fly for his life; accompanied by his wife, his eldest son barely two years of age, and only one attendant, he made his way to Naples. Here a romantic incident took place. C. Velleius Paterculus, the grandfather of the historian, had been associated with Tiberius Nero in all his enterprises; he had been his friend all his life; he had served under him as Chief Engineer at Alexandria, and in his subsequent campaigns; it is not clear whether he had been the sole companion of the flight from Campania, but in any case he rejoined his friend at Naples; but Naples was no safe refuge; Octavian was pressing southwards; it was necessary to cross to Sicily; when it proved to be difficult to provide for the escape of the whole party, the old man committed suicide rather than be an impediment to his friend.

Tiberius Nero had suffered two disappointments: he had been disappointed in Cæsar; he had been disappointed in the attempt to form a constitutional party in opposition to Cæsar’s heir; a third and severer disappointment awaited him in Sicily.

Of the two sons of Pompeius, the elder had been killed in Spain at or after the battle of Munda; the younger, Sextus, had escaped, and adopted the life of a corsair in the Mediterranean; during the confusion which reigned in Italy after the death of Cæsar he had escaped notice, and had been able to get together a formidable fleet of pirates; he had seized Sicily, and now hoped to be able to secure the restitution of his father’s property by imposing terms on Rome, for he controlled the food supply of the capital. The proscription had sent him many valuable allies, and the anti-Cæsarian party began to look to him to take his father’s place as their leader. Sextus, however, was no politician; he was a mere marauder; the corsairs whom his father had dispersed reassembled from the bays and islands of the Mediterranean, and joined in an organized system of brigandage; the subordinates of Sextus were adventurers of the type which has been the perennial curse of the inland sea, repeatedly stamped out, and ever ready to reassert itself till the advent of steam power made such operations too dangerous. It was not the policy of Sextus, but circumstances beyond his control, which elevated him from being a leader of bandits to the position of an umpire between parties in the threatened break up of the Empire. Outlaws and broken men of all kinds gathered to his headquarters, and the grave Senators of Rome found themselves strangely out of place in this assemblage of cut-throats and their mistresses. Tiberius Nero was among the last to arrive; he attempted to assume the position of a Roman official, and to exact the respect due to one before whom the prætorian fasces were carried. Sextus, however, was by no means inclined to put himself under the orders of men of respectability; still less so the Greek corsairs, who looked forward to unlimited plunder under his flag.