Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

It is characteristic of Suetonius to inform us not that Lollius was dead, but that he had lost favour with Caius, when the latter permitted the return of Tiberius to Rome.

It would seem curious that the contempt and dislike in which Tiberius was held for a short time at Rhodes should have been felt so far away as Nîmes, in the South of France. Suetonius, in mentioning the fact, evidently wishes to imply that this contempt of Tiberius was co-extensive with the Empire; but the strangeness of the fact disappears when we remember that Lucius Cæsar was at this time in the South of France on his way to Spain, and supplies a further link in the chain of evidence which goes to prove the animus of the children of Julia against their stepfather; they were only too ready to listen to the suggestions of a Marcus Lollius and others who proposed to build their fortunes upon the insecure foundation of the favour of these spoiled grandchildren of the great Augustus.

Tiberius returned to Rome in A.D. 2, the year in which Lucius Cæsar died suddenly at Marseilles. He did not propose to return to public life; he gave up his palace in the heart of Rome in the Carinæ, and transferred his establishment to the villa and gardens which Mæcenas had laid out on the Esquiline hill outside the walls. He formally introduced his son Drusus to public life by presenting him in the Forum, but himself abstained from any but private business. Meanwhile Caius Cæsar had gone again to Armenia, where he was severely wounded by a native at a conference to which he had entrusted himself with insufficient precaution. The wound was not immediately fatal, but proved disabling both to mind and body. The young man had been captivated by Oriental luxury, and found flatterers to support him in a design of remaining permanently “in the most distant corner of the world.” He was, however, persuaded to return to Rome, and died on his way back in a Lycian town.

Fate had decided that Tiberius should not evade his responsibilities. He had firmly resisted every attempt made by Augustus to seduce him from his retirement after his return to Rome, but the death of Caius left him no option. Both privately and in the Senate publicly Tiberius protested without avail; it was not a case of “nolo episcopari”; he genuinely preferred a private position, and was, in fact, more in sympathy with the old Republican ideals than with the new dynasty. But the public safety demanded the presence of a man of experience at the head of affairs, ready to take over the succession; and it is in language suitable to this demand that Paterculus describes the joy of the population of Rome when it was known that Tiberius had been adopted by Augustus, and again made a colleague in the tribunician power. “Then again there shone for parents confidence in the future of their children; husbands could feel secure in their marriages, masters in their property; all men could look for safety, rest, peace, calm.”

The style of Paterculus, that of a military man, who has done his best to repair deficiencies in his early education by taking lessons in the art of writing in later life, is so artificial as to impair his credit, but on this occasion his choice of language is strictly correct. The young Cæsars had not been a success; of all the possible heirs to Augustus who died young, they alone are not credited with superior virtues. We are not told of them that if they had lived they would have restored the Republic and checked the flood of adulation. They inherited the petulance of Julia, her impatience of restraint, and while the youth of Tiberius and Drusus had been spent in an atmosphere of insecurity at a time when the power of Augustus himself was not firmly established, the children of Julia had come into a world which had forgotten the civil wars, into a court without the traditions of an ancient dynasty, which saw its models in the seraglio of a Herod or Phraates, and laughed at the republican simplicity of the home of Augustus.

The intemperance of Julia was repeated in the next generation; her eldest daughter, married to a L. Æmilius Paulus, followed in her footsteps, and was likewise banished to an island in A.D. 2. The remaining daughter, Agrippina, was married to Germanicus, the son of Drusus and nephew to Tiberius; she was the mother of Caligula and a grandmother of Nero.

The years between the restitution of Tiberius and the death of Augustus were chiefly spent by the former in campaigns in Germany and Dalmatia, the history of which will be treated separately with greater convenience. It is worth while at this juncture, when Augustus and Tiberius were to settle down to work together for ten years, to investigate the relations between them. Was there on either side jealousy or mistrust? Did Augustus foresee the tyranny of Tiberius, as those who believe in the tyranny would have us believe?

One of the many great literary losses which the world has suffered is the loss of the letters of Augustus. Not only have we lost these letters, but we have also lost the private notes of Tiberius kept by him for the benefit of his successor, and burned by Caligula; the only fragments that we possess of the correspondence of Augustus certainly do not favour the view that there was any mistrust or want of sympathy between the two men.

The fragments as they stand in Suetonius are as follows.

The first was written in reply to a letter of Tiberius, complaining of the violence of language used by one Æmilius Ælianus, a native of Cordova, against the Emperor, and probably belongs to the period of the Cantabrian campaign, when Tiberius was still young. “Do not give way, my dear Tiberius, in this matter to the feelings natural to your time of life; do not be too ready to be indignant that there should be any one to speak evil of me; it is enough if we secure this, that nobody shall be able to do us any harm.”