Then we have two purely domestic letters: “I dined, dear Tiberius, with the same party; Vinicius and the elder Silius were added to the company. During dinner we played a family game both yesterday and to-day, for we threw dice, and whoever threw ‘the dog,’ or six, paid a shilling into the pool for every dice thrown, which was taken by the player who threw ‘Venus.’”
“We spent the holidays pleasantly enough, my dear Tiberius, for we played all day and every day, and made the dice market pretty hot. Your brother carried on with plenty of shouting; on the whole, however, he did not lose much, but recovered his losses contrary to all expectation. I lost about £170 on my own account, but because I had been prodigally liberal in my play, as I usually am; for if I had exacted all the winnings that I passed over, or had kept in my own pocket all that I gave anybody, I should have won nearly £420. However, I like it best as it is, for my charity will exalt me to eternal glory.”
Again a familiar scrap: “Not even a Jew, my dear Tiberius, preserves his sabbath fast so carefully as I did to-day, for it was not till after the first hour of the night that I at last chewed a couple of mouthfuls in the bath, before I began to be perfumed.”
The following letter probably belongs to the period after the return of Tiberius, and was written on some occasion when he was starting on a second campaign It is written with occasional quite unnecessary slips into Greek, which have been mangled in places by the transcribers, so as to be unintelligible: “Goodbye, most amiable Tiberius, and farewell to me and mine ... best of generals. Yes, most amiable, and as I hope for happiness, most brave man, and most illustrious general, farewell. The scheme of your summer operations! Well, I, my dear Tiberius, in the midst of many difficulties and considering the slackness of our military friends, do not think I could have managed matters with greater foresight than you have done. The men who were with you, in fact, all admit that the well known line could be applied to you: ‘One man saved the state for us by his wakefulness.’ Whenever anything happens which requires my closer thought, if ever I am very much put out, I swear to you I miss my dear Tiberius, and that verse of Homer’s occurs to me ‘when he follows....’ When I hear and read that you are getting thin under the continuance of your labours, may I be confounded if my body is not all one shudder, and I implore you to spare yourself, lest, if we hear that you are in bad health, your mother and I may expire, and the Roman people be in jeopardy of losing its imperial position. It does not matter a bit whether I myself am ill or well, if you are not well. I implore the gods to preserve you to us, and to give you your health now and always, if they do not utterly hate the Roman people.”
There is nothing insincere in the tone of this letter; it is as natural as a letter can be, incoherent in places, but always tender.
In fact, whatever misunderstandings arose between Tiberius and Augustus were due to the misconduct of Julia, or the silly plots and counterplots of Livia and the other ladies of the family, who by their domestic jealousies opened the way to the machinations of men of the type of Marcus Lollius. The friendship of the two men passed through the severest possible test, and it survived the test. Augustus may have thought Tiberius too scrupulous in the matter of Julia, and that the second place in the Empire was worth a little conjugal blindness, and even if he did not take that line, there were plenty of men and women ready to suggest it to him. But the sequel proved that Tiberius had been right, and he contrived in the end to assert his independence without being involved in a bitter personal quarrel with Augustus. Nor must too much stress be laid upon such chance utterances as the often quoted “O my Roman people, in what slow jaws you will be chewed!” We do not know the context, and this may very well have been no more than a piece of good-humoured personal banter, suggested by the well-known slowness of speech which was characteristic of Tiberius.
Though Augustus was on good terms with Tiberius, the children of Julia were not; they were more Julian than the head of the Julian race; they noted everything that could be interpreted to his discredit; they recorded every hasty word, every ill-advised speech, and as the years went on their malignity increased, till in the person of Agrippina it amounted to a monomania. But we must pause to study Tiberius as a general.
IX
The Campaigns of Tiberius
With the battle of Actium the wars of Rome against nations equally civilized with herself came to an end; henceforth the rulers of the world were only called upon to round off the ring fence of their domains, and establish scientific frontiers. The Empire which is so often spoken of as the establishment of a military despotism was, in fact, absolutely the reverse; the power wielded by Marius, by Sulla, by Pompeius, by Cæsar, by Antonius, had this character, for it depended upon the military capacity of these generals; they were soldiers in the first place, and owed their predominance in the civil government to their own sharp swords and the fidelity of the men who had followed their standards. Till the Roman was sole umpire in the circle of the Mediterranean, war was in every respect a profitable investment, and a military career was the readiest path to political supremacy; not only did a Roman general return laden with spoil, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, but his conquests appealed to the imagination of his countrymen; everybody might be proud of generals and armies who had beaten the successors of Alexander; but when military operations were transferred to the frontiers, when the enemies to be subdued were poor and half civilized, when there were no longer gorgeous robes, graceful statues, piles of treasure to be exhibited in the triumphal procession of the victorious general, war lost its prestige; and the steady progress of the civilian administration is, in fact, the special feature of the reigns of the Cæsars. Augustus was no soldier; Tiberius never commanded an army after his succession; the expedition of Caligula to the shore of the English Channel was a madman’s freak; Claudius had but little share in the conquest of Britain; Nero’s morbid vanity preferred the triumphs of the stage to those of the camp. A state in which the military element is predominant does not put up with rulers such as these.