The person, however, who most strongly influenced Tiberius in his fatal decision was possibly Vipsania herself. From both parents she inherited businesslike qualities, cool common sense. Neither of them is credited with having been sentimental at any period of his or her career, and though Tiberius was devoted to her, it is quite possible that she herself regarded her marriage dispassionately as an excellent business arrangement, and that, while she fulfilled all the duties of a wife with scrupulous observance, she was prepared to be equally careful of the interests and honour of any husband with whom she was provided by the higher powers of the family council. She had abundant precedent for taking such a line, and Asinius Gallus, the aspirant proposed to her, was in every way a desirable match. She may have been really indifferent, and have wounded Tiberius by her cool acquiescence in the new arrangement; or again, on this side too there may have been a great renunciation, and the unhappy woman, partly terrified by obscure menaces from Livia, partly persuaded by the kindly urgency of Augustus, may have affected an indifference which she did not feel, and deliberately wounded the man whom she loved for his own good, as she was led to believe. If Vipsania thus hurt the sensitive Tiberius, and shook his faith in his previous happiness, there was Julia ready to heal the wound; was he not the man whom she had always really loved? Her first and second marriages had been no real marriages: she and Marcellus had been mere children, and as for Agrippa, worthy man though he was, he could not feel with a wife so much younger than himself; he had always preferred the society of men who talked of bridges and aqueducts, or planned campaigns against the Sarmatians, to his wife and children; he had been good according to his lights, but it had been a dull life, and she had been driven to find relief in foolish though innocent dissipations by which her good name had suffered, and which she now sincerely regretted. If Tiberius would but take pity on her forlorn condition, and do his best to love his old playfellow, she for her part could conceive no greater happiness than to be the partner of his joys and sorrows; she loved him, she had always loved him, and the careless indifference of years had not weakened her attachment.
Whatever the arguments and allurements by which Tiberius was induced to take the fatal step, he unquestionably did so. At first he lived happily with Julia; they had one son, who died in infancy; and then his official duties took the husband from his home; he was placed in charge of a harassing campaign against a mobile enemy in difficult country along the south of the Danube and in Dalmatia, while his brother Drusus was similarly engaged in frontier wars along the Rhine.
At this time a serious misfortune fell upon Tiberius; he lost his brother.
Drusus had conducted a foray into the Black Forest region, which had not been altogether successful. On his return he either fell from his horse or caught some serious fever—both stories are given—and was seen to be in such danger that Augustus, who was then at Lyons, at once sent for Tiberius from Dalmatia. Tiberius hastened to his brother’s bedside. The elder Pliny tells us that on this occasion he achieved a record speed, travelling 200 Roman miles within twenty-four hours. He was in time to close his brother’s eyes, but that was all. Augustus decided that Drusus should be buried at Rome, and Tiberius marched the whole way on foot at the head of the funeral procession from Lyons to the capital. As soon as the ceremonies were over, he returned to continue his brother’s work on the eastern bank of the Rhine, and after two years’ absence was recalled. Mæcenas had died in B.C. 8, and Augustus felt the need of a confidential adviser. Tiberius on his return was invested with the tribunician power, an elevation which, in the opinion of his contemporaries, finally marked him out as the successor of Augustus.
The history of the tribunate, in spite of the many references to the office, is not particularly clear. It seems that the first tribunes were originally the official mouthpieces of that part of the population of Rome whom we should now call “Outlanders.” After the “Outlanders,” or plebeians, had become for all practical purposes fused into the general body of Roman citizens, the tribunes ranked practically among the other magistrates; they enjoyed the special prerogative of being sacrosanct, their persons were inviolable, and thus during their term of office they were nominally above the laws, a privilege which, however, did not prevent their assassination. They had the power of introducing legislation, and of vetoing legislation, and it is perhaps this power which was constitutionally most important to the early Emperors. Further, they had powers of summary jurisdiction, and constituted a supreme court of appeal in cases in which the life of a Roman citizen was in danger; when St. Paul “appealed unto Cæsar,” it was to the tribune that he appealed. The office was hallowed by sentiment, and though as Consul and Censor and Commander-in-chief the Emperor might seem to hold in his hands all the reasonable means of making his power effective, unless he were also Tribune, his actions could be vetoed; thus Augustus was more than usually wise in absorbing the sanctity and the functions of the Tribune into his own person, and he could show no greater proof of his confidence in Tiberius than by thus giving him the power of constitutional opposition and investing his person with inviolability; but, to the astonishment of the Roman world, Tiberius had hardly received this mark of confidence before he summarily left Rome and retired to Rhodes.
VII
The First Retirement of Tiberius
The flight of Tiberius to Rhodes, and his determination to abandon his public career just at the moment when his position as second man in the State was established on a sure foundation, have naturally excited the wonder of modern no less than of contemporary writers. An English historian, equally learned and delightful, speaks of the event as the freak of a moody and irritable man, and declares that such conduct summarily disposes of the claim which has been advanced for Tiberius of having been an astute statesman. His contemporaries, who are followed by the grave Tacitus and the garrulous Suetonius, found an easier explanation; to them the motive for retirement was simply the wish to indulge in licentious excesses too hideous for the starched morality and glaring daylight of Rome; but the same unfriendly or careless writers allow that he was probably disgusted by the wanton conduct of Julia, adding that he was also jealous of the advancement of his stepsons, the young Cæsars, now respectively fourteen and nine years of age.
That Julia had forfeited all claims not only to affection, but even to respect, is an undisputed fact. Soon after his marriage Tiberius had been obliged to take the field, and his wars had been waged in localities not likely to be attractive to a lady who lived in the gallant circles of the poet Ovid. War upon the Illyrian or German frontier did not involve complete absence from home, and the Roman generals were in the habit of returning from their campaigns to the capital when the winter weather made it impossible to take the field. We do not know whether Tiberius followed this custom, or whether he took a more rigorous view of his duties and spent the winter season in winter quarters, but he was certainly much away from home. Some disillusionment as to the depth of Julia’s affection for him, annoying domestic difficulties caused by the ill-advised indulgence of her children by their grandfather, may well have contributed already to make him feel more at home in the camp than in the splendid house in the Carinæ. Julia too may have had her own disappointments; the playfellow of her youth turned out to be another “Colonel Grave Airs,” no less absorbed in military matters than Agrippa, inclined to spend his leisure in the society of a learned and serious circle, and averse to dissipating his time by passing long hours at the great public pageants in which the Romans delighted. So far there had been nothing worse than an amicable estrangement between husband and wife. Julia went her own way, chose her own friends, and lived the life which pleased her best. Tiberius in the same way pursued the studies which were agreeable to him, and made the best of a maimed life. Doubtless he recognized that his private happiness had been wrecked, but there was still duty, and if he could not meet Vipsania in the street without emotion, he at least gave the scandalmongers of the city no opportunity.
But when Tiberius returned from Gaul in B.C. 7 to become practically the colleague of Augustus, he found the state of affairs in his home such as no self-respecting man could tolerate, and there was this additional sting in the wound to his honour, that the very office which had just been bestowed upon him was capable of being represented as the price paid for unworthy toleration and wilful blindness. Rome was ringing with the exploits of Julia, with stories of her drunkenness in the public streets, with the names and number of her gallants. The two men who were most concerned in her misconduct, as being the two men upon whom it brought the deepest disgrace, her father and her husband, were the two men who alone seemed to be ignorant of the state of affairs. The ignorance of the father might be excused, he had no motive, except a not unworthy paternal weakness, for closing his eyes to what was going on, but the husband, so the gossips said, had been prompted by his ambition to accept an already damaged article, for Julia’s irregularities were not of recent date, and actuated by the same unworthy motive he had allowed his house to become a mere brothel: the proofs were only too obvious. That such a chain of reasoning was inconsistent with itself in ascribing both ignorance and full knowledge to Augustus did not concern the gossips. Tiberius had been bribed to be blind, and all the world could see what a magnificent bribe he had extorted.