Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

The best men, the kindest men, the justest men, and the most earnest men make the worst mistakes in dealing with a certain type of woman. Many a woman who has brought disgrace upon her family and ruin upon herself has urged with some justice that if her husband or her father or her brother had been less kind, less blind, less just, but more understanding, she would not have been betrayed into disastrous misconduct. Often and often the question has been asked, “You must have seen what was going on; why did you not stop me?” and as often the answer has been, “I admit I ought to have seen, perhaps I did see, but I could not believe you capable of doing what appearances should have told me that you were doing.”

The higher a man’s ideal of women, the less willing he is to ascribe to any particular woman the wantonness of lust; the more charitable his estimate of the strength of some temptation, the less stern his condemnation, and the greater his readiness to accept excuses for levity; the higher the range of his own ambitions, and the wider the area of his own interests, the less capable he is of imagining how large small slights and imperfect sympathy may appear to a being cast in a narrower mould. Many a man by acquiescing in a discovered want of sympathy between himself and his wife has wounded her pride and provoked her to acts of self-assertion. What was part of his life was perhaps the whole of hers, and in the end he has been astounded at the disproportion of the punishment which she has inflicted. Without any conscious refusal to see things as they really were, any conscious deference to the susceptibilities of Augustus, Tiberius may well have been slow to believe in the case against Julia, whose good nature and frankness might weigh against her want of seriousness.

When, however, Tiberius came to live permanently at Rome, the facts could no longer be concealed from him, though they were possibly still concealed from Augustus. He could repudiate Julia, but that would have caused a public scandal, and have wounded a man in his most sensitive spot whom he had always known as his truest friend; he could not, however, continue to live with her, that would justify the charge of guilty connivance, and expose him to countless humiliations; further, there was always the sting of the price at which his forbearance up to the present moment seemed to have been bought.

The course which Tiberius actually took was an heroic one. True he might have ignored the susceptibilities of Augustus, have repudiated his daughter, and in the case of resistance have used his now established power to force the Emperor into private life; he might have held that he was justified in so doing, that he had been wilfully deceived, and that his pretended friend had deliberately used him for his own purposes. But if ever he was tempted to conduct so violent, and yet under the supposed circumstances so justifiable, he put away the temptation; he decided that if there was to be a retirement, he was himself the right man to retire. This course had the further attraction that it put a summary end to that ugly suspicion of corrupt connivance.

Tiberius matured his plan secretly. Nobody outside his family knew that he had definitely left Rome till he was already sailing down the coast of Italy. A fast galley was sent after him, with letters imploring him to return, and not to desert the Emperor in his old age; it overtook him before he had passed the Straits of Messina, but the messengers were abruptly dismissed. No further attempt was made to recall him till after he had arrived at Rhodes, his ultimate destination, though he seems to have lingered on his way, and to have spent some time at Athens, long enough to enable him to be the first Roman who sent a chariot to compete at the Olympic games.

It was not long before the real cause of his departure became known to Augustus. Julia’s extravagant conduct was so notorious that it could no longer be concealed from her father. Livia is credited with having engineered the ultimate discovery, and even aided and abetted the grievous misconduct with ulterior motives. Augustus, in the name of Tiberius, wrote a bill of divorcement, and banished his daughter to the island of Pandateria off the coast of Campania. The list of corespondents was a long one. Julius Antonius, the son of Marcus Antonius, and stepson of Octavia, was among them; he committed suicide on the discovery of the scandal. After him Paterculus mentions Quintius Crispinus, Appius Claudius, Sempronius Gracchus, Scipio, a relative of Julia through her mother, “and other men of less reputation of both orders.” It was a comprehensive list, and inclines us to suspect that Tacitus is right in saying that something more alarming than mere adultery had taken place, and that Julia had allowed herself to be involved in a plot against her husband and father. It is curious that Paterculus should confine the list of nameless admirers to members of the Senatorial and Equestrian Orders. If Julia had been merely a licentious woman, we should expect to find slaves and gladiators among the company of her lovers. Amorous intrigues in the atmosphere of Rome were apt to end in more dangerous conspiracies, and though the self-esteem of the pious and patriarchal Augustus must have been deeply wounded by his daughter’s guilt, the punishment of exile awarded to her, and of death to her gallants, strikes us as disproportionate. It is most probable that there really was a conspiracy in which Julia allowed herself to be used, prompted by a desire to settle up accounts with that veteran intriguer Livia, and that this was the concluding scene of the first act in the long drama of the feud between the Julians and Claudians in the Imperial household.

Tiberius behaved on this occasion with dignity and generosity. He wrote to Augustus deprecating extreme severity to Julia, and begging that she might be allowed to retain for her own use any gifts that he had made to her. Such gifts will not have been inconsiderable, for Tiberius must have been a very rich man; it required a large fortune to inhabit the famous palace of Pompeius, and on his return to Rome Tiberius lived in the no less splendid villa of Mæcenas on the Esquiline.

On withdrawing from public affairs Tiberius decided to live as a private citizen; this he had every right to do. His motive in selecting Rhodes for his place of residence has to do with features in his intellectual inclinations upon which we have not as yet touched. The silly story that Tiberius elected to reside in Rhodes because he could there enjoy unlimited debauchery may be at once dismissed on the ground of inherent absurdity. A man who wishes to conceal his vices does not select a university town, a great commercial town, the house of call for the mercantile service of the world, the spot visited by all officials on their way back to and from the capital, an island where everybody knows everybody else’s business, as the scene of his loathsome excesses; and Rhodes was all these things. Possibly an advantage enjoyed by Rhodes in being free from the direct control of a Roman Proconsul rendered it desirable as a place of residence for a man in the position of Tiberius, who wished to avoid friction with the Roman authorities. Most of the famous cities on the Greek mainland were now in a decayed condition; Corinth alone retained something of its mercantile importance, Athens had become an agreeable place of residence as well as a university town; but the cities on the coast of Asia Minor, Smyrna and Ephesus, and the islands off the coast, Samos and Rhodes, flourished as they had never flourished before. The corn ships from Alexandria frequently touched at Rhodes; she lay in the path between Antioch and Rome, and had become the meeting place between East and West. This gave a special character to her university. Athens was purely Greek, but Rhodes was both Oriental and Greek.

Rhodes, though largely despoiled of its trees, is still among the most agreeable of the Greek islands, and in the days of its luxuriance was particularly beautiful. Tiberius shared that taste for islands which inspires the day dreams of many of our own contemporaries. Men only learn by experience that the secluded charms of a sea-girt residence are balanced by its inconvenience; but the inconvenience of restricted and precarious supplies would not be felt at Rhodes, the island being large enough to be self-dependent, besides being the calling place of shipping: thus Tiberius could look forward to a life spent in the pursuit of congenial and serious studies, in delightful scenery, and in the full stream of the world’s traffic.

The studies which especially attracted Tiberius were then called mathematical—we should now call them scientific—but neither was the science of the ancients our science, nor their mathematics our mathematics. The special branch of science which interested Tiberius was astronomy; but astronomy in his time was merged in astrology, and with astrology were associated other supposed means of predicting the future, that vain preoccupation of mankind. Great skill in judicial astrology was attributed by the ancients to Tiberius, and it is not likely that he escaped the intellectual contagions of his age; but we must be cautious in refusing to concede the possession of a truly scientific temperament to men of his age, or of much later ages, solely because they were credited by their contemporaries with sharing in what we now believe to be frivolous superstitions.