Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

Livia herself was a skilled intriguer, and though Dio puts into her mouth a ponderous curtain lecture on the subject of clemency, addressed to Augustus, her inclinations were more monarchical than those of her husband. The very substantial compliments which passed between her and Herod of Judæa are not likely to have been exceptional in their character, nor is that wily potentate likely to have been the only man of his class who discovered that her fingers touched the springs of government. Though by the letters of the law Roman women were in an almost servile position, though they were liable to be divorced and remarried to suit the convenience of their families, methods were found of evading the law, and divorces which tended to further aggrandisement were not unpopular with their apparent victims. By a variety of legal fictions women could hold separate estates, and were often immensely rich independently of their husbands. The wives of provincial governors were notorious for their rapacity, and took full advantage of the weakness of uxorious husbands.

Livia spinning the toga of Augustus with her maids or weighing out the allowances of the slaves, was a pleasing picture for the contemplation of her husband and the Romans, but the head of the thrifty housekeeper had room for other than domestic details, and her name was whispered with awe by many who could not have appreciated her homely virtues, and had good reason for suspecting her of very different occupations.

Owing to the early marriages of the Romans a family quickly became patriarchal; some of these marriages, it is true, were mere contracts, children being sometimes married to secure dowries or successions, or ratify family alliances, almost before they were out of the nursery. Owing again to divorces and remarriages the various degrees of affinity between the members of a group of families are very difficult to trace; adoption adds complications, which are further increased by the paucity of Roman names, especially as women generally retained the feminine form of their father’s names after marriage, and sisters were often indistinguishable.

Five chief families were united in the household of Augustus: the Julian—of this the heads were the Emperor himself and his sister Octavia; the Claudian, represented by Livia and her two sons, Tiberius and Drusus; the Vipsanian, represented by Agrippa; the Claudian Marcellan by Octavia’s three elder children; the Antonian by her two younger children. The heads between whom all matrimonial transactions were arranged were Augustus, Livia, Octavia, and Agrippa. Of these four Agrippa was to the two ladies the unwelcome but inevitable intruder; Livia was disposed to push the Claudians, Octavia the Julians, whom she represented equally with her brother the Emperor. These four high contracting parties were about the same age, Octavia being somewhat the older of the four. If there was to be a dynasty, and if the succession was to follow the strict line of heredity, Julia, the one child of Augustus, was obviously the great matrimonial prize. Matters in her case were somewhat complicated by the existence of her mother, Scribonia, an affectionate but easy-going lady, who seems to have abstained from active interference in her daughter’s affairs till she accompanied her into exile many years later. There was another heiress in the family of the same age as Julia, namely Vipsania, the daughter of the despised but necessary Agrippa. She was the granddaughter of Pomponius Atticus, the very wealthy banker and friend of Cicero. Agrippa had married her mother when his fortunes were still at a low ebb, and when it was desirable to conciliate the Equestrian Order to the advancement of Octavian and his friends. Agrippa owed his position entirely to his great ability, and his single-hearted unselfish devotion to the fortunes of Augustus. Nobody had ever heard of the Vipsanian family till he rose to eminence, and the Claudian and Julian ladies were contemptuous of its degrading associations. We do not know whether Pomponia died or was put away, but in the year B.C. 25 Julia, being of the age of fourteen, was declared marriageable, and a pleasing atmosphere of matrimonial intrigue filled the house on the Palatine. To consolidate the fortunes of Agrippa—a really formidable rival, if he chose to declare himself—with those of Augustus, the right thing to do was to marry Julia to Agrippa, but Livia wanted her for Tiberius. A compromise was hit upon; Tiberius was left out in the cold, Julia was married to young Marcellus, Octavia’s son, her first cousin, now a lad of eighteen, and in order to associate Agrippa with the Julian blood he was given the lad’s sister Marcella.

That Augustus can have seriously intended Marcellus at this time to be heir to anything but his private fortune is impossible; so long as Agrippa lived there was no other possible successor to the Imperial power, and the story that Agrippa went off to the East to keep out of the way of the favours shown to the young Marcellus is absurd. Agrippa was wanted in the East, and the information that he acquired there led to the subsequent Eastern progress of Augustus and Tiberius four years later. When Augustus was so seriously ill in B.C. 23 as to contemplate the possibility of his death, he sent for Agrippa and gave him his ring, thus making him his successor so far as it was possible to do so; on this we are told that Marcellus showed such bitter disappointment that Agrippa again went to the East, and for the same reason. A few months later Marcellus died, and Virgil’s touching allusion to the event in the sixth Æneid is probably the only authority for the assumption that the wise Augustus proposed to set aside the tried and faithful Agrippa, the actual second person in the Empire, in favour of an untried youth. Such an assumption involves a contradiction of the whole policy of Augustus. Whatever his weaknesses, whatever his failures in prevision, the one thing he dreaded was the recrudescence of the wars of adventurers. Steadily through his reign he worked in the direction of giving permanence to order, and of quietly eliminating all elements likely to endanger order. He can hardly have been so blind as not to see that the reign of Marcellus was only possible by the sufferance of Agrippa, or to ignore the fact that Livia would work for the elevation of her sons after his own death.

The premature death of Marcellus threw all the matrimonial schemes again into the melting-pot. His marriage had been a marriage only in name, and had left no offspring. For two years nothing was done, but when the whole Imperial party moved to the East in B.C. 21 marriage was again in the air. There was a sojourn, accompanied with much festivity, at Samos, where Agrippa met the rest of the family. His marriage with Marcella had proved childless, his union with the Julian stock had failed; Julia herself seems to have shown signs of an inclination for Tiberius, but such a union would have strengthened the Claudians too much, and Tiberius himself was attracted, if by anybody, by the daughter of Agrippa. Augustus took matters into his own hands; he persuaded his sister to allow her daughter to be divorced, and married his own daughter to his faithful friend Agrippa, a man at least twenty years older than herself. The line of succession was to be through the children of Agrippa and grandchildren of Augustus; Livia, and Octavia were left out in the cold. The former consoled herself by interchanging amenities with the husband of Mariamne on the Phœnician coast, and both ladies pleased themselves later on with a double marriage project, which to some extent restored the balance; Tiberius married Vipsania, and his brother Drusus the very beautiful younger Antonia. The dates of these two marriages are not determinable, but as Tiberius was the father of only one child, in B.C. 12, when Agrippa died, his marriage at any rate was probably a late one, when he was about thirty years of age. There is reason for believing that this at least was a love match.

Julia proved to be a fertile mother, she brought five grandchildren to the founders of the Empire and if the succession was to depend on the principle of heredity, it was secured, for both the ruling powers were interested in transmitting the succession in the Julian line, and three of the children were sons.

Augustus was delighted; the philoprogenitive passion broke out in him; he insisted that Julia and her husband should live in his house; he provided instructors for the children; he seldom went out unless accompanied by them, and they rode round his litter when he went into the country. The boys he adopted, buying them of their father by the ancient rude ceremony, and the two elder ones were henceforth known as Caius and Lucius Cæsar. Livia was more than ever in need of such consolations as could be won by intriguing with Oriental potentates. It seemed that the Claudians were definitely relegated to a subordinate position, and the young Cæsars began to pay increased attention to the mythology of the Æneid and the story of their mystic descent from the goddess Venus. A marriage between the son of Drusus Nero, afterwards known as Germanicus, and Agrippina, the daughter of Julia and Agrippa, was the sole bright spot in the dynastic fortune of the Claudians.

Destiny, however, had not exhausted her possibilities. In 12 B.C. Agrippa died. In the following year Octavia died, and Livia was free to carry out her favourite matrimonial project; the widowed Julia was married to Tiberius, who divorced his wife, Vipsania, to make room for her. This was the first tragedy in the life of Tiberius, destined to bring upon him not only terrible immediate sorrows, but a whole train of calamity, which pursued him to the end of his days. We are told of many Roman nobles that they divorced their wives. Tiberius is the only Roman of whom we are told that he bitterly regretted the wife from whom he had been separated.

We do not know by whom this tragedy was brought about, but we do know that, so far as dynastic pretensions were concerned, Tiberius was the last person to be influenced by such a consideration. Whatever ambitions his mother may have formed for her sons, both of them, now men in the prime of life, enjoyed the confidence of Augustus because they had hitherto shown themselves superior to vulgar ambition. Both were by this time experienced generals, for though the command of Tiberius in Armenia may have been nominal rather than real, both he and his brother had conducted a series of campaigns in the difficult regions to the north of the Balkan Peninsula, in the Alpine valleys, and on the frontier of the Rhine. Tiberius had further shown himself a skilled civilian; he had been entrusted not only with the different Republican magistracies, but he had been made chairman of several of those commissions by which the real administrative work was done; he had presided over a very important commission for regulating the corn supply of Rome, and over another for inquiring into the condition of the agricultural slave barracks, whose owners were accused of kidnapping travellers, and offering shelter to freemen who preferred such a life to military service. After the death of Agrippa he was unquestionably the second person in the Empire, for Mæcenas had no hold on the armies, and Tiberius held this position, not as the stepson of Augustus, but as a representative of the oldest and most highly honoured family in Rome, and as the reward of distinguished public services at home and in the field.