Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

Caius, the eldest son of Julia, cannot at this time have been more than nine years old; it would be some years before he could take any effective part in public business. Augustus, always in weak health, had to provide for the contingency of his own death, and it must be borne in mind that, quite apart from the comparatively ignoble ambition of founding a dynasty, a sense of duty would impel Augustus to obviate as far as he could the disturbance of a disputed succession. Augustus prided himself upon his position as a pacificator; his reign was a reign of peace, its wars were frontier wars; to allow the apple of discord to drop into the centre of this realm of peace was to destroy his own work.

But was it necessary that Tiberius should marry the widowed Julia? Was the match capable of being represented to him as a necessity of state, as a duty so imperative as to override all questions of private inclination?

Certainly it was so, though the public grounds were essentially of a private and personal nature.

The two hostile forces in the Imperial House were Livia and Julia, the former the embodiment of the stern virtues of the Roman matron, personified rectitude and humility in her outward demeanour, inwardly unscrupulous and domineering, free from the more amiable but less dignified weaknesses of a woman, incapable of being led away by the love of admiration, icily regular, intemperate only in her pursuit of the greater ambitions, unmoral rather than immoral, she shunned attracting public notice, preferred the enjoyment of power to the demonstration of power, but was none the less keenly jealous of any encroachment on her domain. It is curious how little we hear of her; the poets do not mention her, gossip did not concern itself with her name; it is only from one or two casual references in Josephus, and a few incidents recorded by Tacitus, that we divine the activity of this force behind the throne. Portraits of Livia survive; her high nose is to be seen behind that of Augustus on the coinage; there are busts, and at least one statue. The countenance is that of a very handsome woman and a very dignified woman, but not of a woman who could laugh readily, the mouth looks as if it could smile to order, but not spontaneously. We may surmise that her virtues were of such an obvious type as to constitute a standing provocation to the wicked, that she was one of those women who are more dangerous to sound morality than a bad example, and against whose standards it is impossible not to rebel secretly if not openly; this is especially the case when it is suspected that behind the genuine inclination to correctness in smaller matters lurk the real deadly sins of the soul, hardness, avarice, lust of power. The story that she was blind to the infidelities of Augustus, and even provided the opportunities, may not be true; the infidelities may be, and probably are, as chimerical as the connivance; but even such a myth may be allowed to indicate the type of character.

Pitted against this calm, correct, implacable woman we have the spoiled child Julia, bent upon enjoying herself to the full, adventurous, audacious, both in deed and word. When her father reproved her for riotous living she is said to have replied that, though he might choose to forget that he was Cæsar, she did not propose to forget that she was Cæsar’s daughter, and doubtless the pert sally, accompanied by some laughing gesture, smoothed away the gravity of the outraged Emperor. For a Roman princess at this resplendent time of Rome’s fortunes three lives were open: she might live as Julia’s aunt Octavia lived, or her first cousin the younger Antonia, in comparative retirement, abstaining from intermeddling with affairs of state, the centre of a refined and possibly literary circle, caring for the domestic interests of those whom she loved, or to whom she was bound by duty; or she might live as Livia lived, darkly intriguing behind the scenes, corresponding with “native” princes, plotting and counter-plotting among the Roman families, or again she might fling herself into the riotous amusements of the gilded youth of Rome, the young gentlemen for whom Ovid wrote his treatises on gallantry.

Gambling and betting were as well known diversions in Roman society as in our own; great ladies made their books upon the circus. Cards were not yet invented, but dice were common. Wealthy young provincials, the sons of great but not ennobled capitalists, were as ready then as now to pay for admission to the highest social circles by dealing leniently with fair ladies whose affairs were involved by debts of honour, and some of them lost their heads and hearts over the business. Masquerading in the unlighted Roman streets after respectable people had gone to their early beds was not an infrequent amusement, and even ladies anticipated at Rome the licence of the Mohawk and Tityre Tu of Queen Anne’s reign in London. Antony and Cleopatra amused themselves thus at Alexandria, to the terror and annoyance of respectable middle class men; the joke of thus playing pranks upon inoffensive persons of humble rank under the protection of a slight disguise is not obvious, but it has at all times presented attractions for a certain order of mind. As for Julia, we are told that her revels were conducted even on the sacred Rostra, the public platform of the government of the world. Her cynical defence of her immoralities is said to have been even more outrageous than her conduct. But for all this Julia did not forget that she was Cæsar’s daughter, and was determined not to submit more than was inevitable to the domination of the woman who was not her mother, but was Cæsar’s wife.

At the death of Agrippa, Julia, though already the mother of four children, and shortly to become the mother of a fifth, was only twenty-seven years of age. During the time of her married life she and Tiberius had been much absent from Rome; they had probably met very little since they were brought up together as children in the house of Augustus. Agrippa may have been an indulgent husband, willing to condone the more innocent levities of his young wife; or Tiberius, remembering his agreeable playfellow, now titularly his mother-in-law, may have chosen to disregard the scandalous whispers which reached his ears from time to time.

On her husband’s death Julia found herself in an awkward position; it is true that her father was her friend, but her father’s wife was her enemy, an enemy whose mysterious influence she had good reason to dread, and whose ambition was menaced by the existence of Julia’s own children, already the darlings of their grandfather. Again it is not improbable that she cherished a purely feminine grudge against Vipsania, who had carried off her handsome playfellow, and was additionally piqued by the happiness which Tiberius had found in his marriage. The personal beauty of Tiberius was remarkable; his accomplishments no less so. He was unusually tall, broad shouldered, well shaped, and well proportioned from head to foot, of great physical strength; he belonged to the fair ruddy type of Italian, and carried a profusion of golden hair, which grew low down on the back of his neck, a family peculiarity, his eyes were exceptionally large, and he was credited with the power of seeing in the dark when first awakened; as he habitually carried his head in a bent position, it is possible that he suffered from some visual defect; he was naturally silent, and a slow talker; he had the reputation of being deeply learned, and indeed versed in occult mysteries, such a man as would attract the curiosity of a woman, and challenge her love of conquest by his intellectual, no less than by his physical, qualities. The few existing portraits of Tiberius fully bear out the descriptions given by Paterculus and Suetonius. The so-called bust of Tiberius in the British Museum is not a portrait of him, and was simply so named because it happened to have been found at Capri.

Personal inclination, no less than policy, would have suggested to Julia that here was the natural protector of herself and children, and there was the additional inducement of delivering a checkmate to Livia by falling in with what had been her favourite scheme. With Tiberius as the stepfather and guardian of the children of Agrippa, there was nothing to be feared from the death of Augustus; Livia’s own son would be in a position to defeat any machinations against the heirs of the Julian race, and it was well known that whatever obligations Tiberius took upon himself, Tiberius would honourably fulfil.

The arguments for the divorce and remarriage were, from the Roman point of view, strong; it was not a question of personal convenience or of advancing personal interests, the object was to maintain the peace of the Roman world. Had Tiberius taken the advice of Mæcenas, it would probably have been to the following effect:—“It is true that you are to be trusted, that no pledge is needed from you to ensure the security of the daughter and grandchildren of Augustus, your whole life shows that you have made your stepfather’s interests your own; but you are not the only person concerned. The two boys will be exposed to every temptation as they grow up; their mother is a fascinating lady, but her best friends can hardly claim for her that she is equal to the task of bringing up a family whose responsibilities will be great. If you do not marry her, somebody else will; it would be a serious risk to expose any possible candidate to the temptations of such a position, to introduce a new claimant to the family honours into the family circle. Julia needs a protector, a husband of her own age; she is said to have a strong personal attachment to yourself, and under your guidance it is not likely that she will repeat pardonable indiscretions, to which perhaps she was driven by want of real sympathy with her previous elderly husband. You say that you and your present wife are devoted to one another. Granted; but you are both called upon by a destiny, which you cannot evade, to sacrifice yourselves to the good of the State.” And Horace too would have argued much in the same strain; he would have sympathized more delicately with the feelings of a united couple rudely torn asunder, but with his shrewd common sense he would have shown that there was no alternative but a retirement into private life, a course which would have amounted to abandoning the post of duty.