Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

The Romans in the reign of Augustus were, so far as military matters are concerned, and indeed, in most other respects, very much in our own position at the present day. Just as we thoughtlessly and unjustly estimate the exploits of our soldiers in the Soudan, on the North-West frontier of India, on the West Coast of Africa, and even in South Africa, rather cheaply, and disparage their achievements in comparison with those of Marlborough and Wellington, so the contemporaries of Augustus looked back with regret to the heroes of the Punic Wars and the conquerors of Greece; they did not realize that the work which was to be done in their own time was far more difficult than the work which had been done. We too forget that to win the Battle of Waterloo was a trifle compared with the operations which led up to the victory of Omdurman, and the double march into the Transvaal. The exploits of Wellington in the Peninsula were splendid, impeded as they were by opposition from England; but in the conquest of South Africa England has grappled with far more serious difficulties, and her generals have shown themselves at least as resourceful as Wellington.

The generals of the Augustan age are hardly known to us. Few class Agrippa with the leading generals of the world, but the man who for the first time organized the navy of the Roman Empire, who maintained the organization of the army on such a footing that the enormous frontier was never without its defenders, who was himself never beaten in the field, and who trained a succession of capable officers to follow in his footsteps, was no mean general. Similarly Tiberius and his brother, along with many capable subordinates, waged successful campaigns under conditions of peculiar difficulty for many years; but we never think of them as great soldiers, because their exploits did not stir the imagination of their contemporaries.

Vast though the Roman Empire was, its vulnerable frontiers were of relatively small extent in the reign of Augustus; there was a weak place at the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates; the Upper Nile had its Soudanese difficulty then as now, but the whole of the North Coast of Africa was protected by the desert, and the Mauretanian tribes were not numerous enough really to imperil the strip of civilization along the Mediterranean. Spain was all Roman and nearly all civilized, so was Gaul; but between the mouths of the Rhine and the Bosphorus there was a vast unsettled region, reaching down in one place to a point within ten days’ journey of Rome itself, and along an unbroken line of many hundred miles, threatening the cities of Macedonia and Greece. The problem before Augustus and his generals was to form a frontier which should permanently secure Gaul, Italy, and the Balkan Peninsula from the adventurous races of central and East Central Europe.

The weakest point in the chain of defence was the Northern corner of the Adriatic, and the increasing prosperity of the great plains of the Po after they had become a Roman province naturally attracted the attention of the semi-civilized tribes who lived in the hills along the Dalmatian coast. Not only was there danger from the East, but the valley of the Adige formed a gateway through which Central Europe could pour its restless multitudes upon the Cis-Alpine Province. The geographical configuration of the regions south of the plains of the Eastern Danube has always impeded their progress, and to this very day a patch of backward nationalities remains there in close proximity to the most elaborately civilized states of Europe.

The other weak spot was the course of the Rhine, and especially the country below the Drakensberg; that noble river for many miles from the Lake of Constance formed a natural defence against the Germanic hordes, but on reaching the flat land below Cologne it spread into marshes and split into smaller channels, in which flotillas of boats could be prepared without attracting notice, as was necessarily the case where the river ran in a single stream. In fact it was practically found that in places the Rhine was no barrier, and that the tribes on its Eastern bank must be rolled back from the river, if Gaul was to enjoy her new prosperity in peace.

It was in the defence of these two weak spots that Tiberius was to fight his chief campaigns. In both regions security demanded that the operations should be conducted far beyond the frontier, in country difficult at the present day, and tenfold more difficult then, when extensive forests and marshes were added to the impediments offered by ravines and mountains.

It is not easy to estimate the degree of civilization reached by the Pannonians and Dalmatians or the Germanic tribes, when they made war upon the Roman legions. To the ancients all men living under tribal or national institutions were barbarians; they restricted the honour of civilization to those whose political constitution was based upon the city, and though the Græco-Roman city organization practically covered the two peninsulas, which we call Greece and Italy, it did not elsewhere extend far inland; the outer fringe of cities was in close contact with populations living under a clan system, whose chiefs or kings adopted many of the luxuries and some of the institutions of their neighbours; behind these again were less advanced nations and less civilized rulers, gradually merging into real barbarism. The Gallic chieftains had already been in frequent communication with Rome for a century before Cæsar conquered Gaul, and the influence of the Roman traders upon the general standard of civilization was perceptible in his time even among the German tribes nearest to the Rhine. Arminius had had a Roman education, Maroboduus was brought up by Augustus, adopted the Roman military system and welcomed refugees who could train his troops; Latin was already spoken by the Dalmatian tribes when they were eventually conquered by Tiberius. Though the greater part of Central Europe was under forest the valleys were cultivated, as they were in Britain at the time of Cæsar’s invasions, but the forest was always near enough to receive fugitives, and to give cover to an attacking party. There were no large aggregations of human beings in towns, but there were areas sufficiently thickly populated, and their population was sufficiently well organized to bring formidable armies into the field, whose operations were skilfully conducted. The men were no more savages than the Boers are savages; their civilization was a different civilization from the Græco-Roman, but it was a civilization. The occurrences of the Highland Line were anticipated in the foothills of the Alps; sometimes there was a mere cattle-lifting raid, when a predecessor of Rob Roy swooped down upon the farms round Mantua or Cremona, sometimes a combination of clans under a capable chieftain waged a formidable war, whose object was less plunder than the preservation of their independence; sometimes the pressure of real savagery from behind urged the more civilized races forward till the ultimate wave fell upon the Roman frontier.

Far in the East round the mouths of the Danube the predecessors of the Cossacks on their little horses kept the Roman outposts in a state of terror. Ovid tells us how they swooped down upon the labourers in the fields round the camp at Tomi, how their arrows fell into its very centre, how they galloped round its walls, picked up some unfortunate straggler, and were off with him before pursuit could be organized. Reading such a description as this we realize the true significance of the two Roman walls in England, and the wall from the Main to the Danube in Germany. They were not defences against systematic war; they were too long to be defended against an organized invasion, but they effectually prevented raiding. Cattle cannot be lifted over a wall twelve feet high. The difference between our frontier wars and the Roman frontier wars lies in the proximity of the Roman frontiers to the heart of the Empire; but in spite of the perpetual imminence of the danger, the Romans did not pay a sufficient tribute of gratitude to the generals who secured their safety, and were inclined to underestimate their services.

Even such a clear-sighted historian as Merivale, in speaking of the military operations of Tiberius and Drusus in Germany, adopts the attitude of Tacitus, and disparages the cautious policy of Augustus, which discouraged schemes of boundless conquest in Central Europe. Tacitus wrote, when Trajan was engaged in rectifying the frontier of the Lower Danube, new dangers threatened the Empire and new measures seemed advisable. The men of his day might be pardoned for thinking that they were called upon to do what Augustus had unwisely left undone. Possibly they were right, but they omitted from their calculations a fact which was of the first importance, and of itself imposed prudence. The fighting strength of the Empire was not adequate for a policy of indefinite expansion at the end of the reign of Augustus, nor even in its middle period. It was difficult to steer between the two extremes. Augustus had seen the evils of a rampant military policy in the careers of his uncle and Antonius; he had known what it was to be the puppet of his own soldiers; he had fought in the Civil Wars, and he rightly inferred that there could be no settled government so long as the sword outbalanced the gown. Quite apart from any personal ambition or mean motive, he shrank from creating fresh military heroes, who might be tempted to overthrow the carefully balanced fabric of the State, and renew the Marian and Sullan episodes, or the hateful reign of the Triumvirate in which he had himself taken an unwilling part. On the other hand, a certain strength was necessary to police the Empire and guard its frontiers. In the encouragement which he gave to civilians in the public service, in the revival of commerce, and the abundance of employment secured by the internal peace of the Empire, Augustus cut off his supply of recruits; the army no longer competed favourably with other employments, and year by year the number of homeless and ruined men, to whom military service had opened an opportunity, was reduced. Men were too precious to be lightly ventured on interminable expeditions in the Hercynian forest, where the elk, and possibly even the mammoth, still tested the ingenuity of the hunter.

At the age of seventeen Tiberius accompanied Augustus and Agrippa to Spain, where a campaign was conducted in the mountainous regions occupied by the Cantabrians. Augustus soon fell ill and returned home, but Tiberius remained to take his first lessons in war under the able and ingenious Agrippa. The Romans wisely flung their young men into active life at a very early age, and those who had it in them to learn, had every opportunity of learning. Four years later Tiberius, barely of age to manage his own affairs according to our ideas, was put in command of the expedition which penetrated Armenia, and awed the Parthians into a surrender of the captured standards. We are not told that there was any serious fighting on this occasion; the triumph was one of diplomacy rather than of arms, and the expedition itself took the form of an armed demonstration strong enough to determine the course of the negotiations rather than of a campaign. Doubtless Tiberius was attended by capable advisers in addition to those splendid centurions, the link between the commissioned and non-commissioned officers, who formed the backbone of the Roman armies; but in any case the experience was a valuable one. It was necessary that the army should be conducted through a difficult and mountainous country, far from its base; any negligence, any want of foresight, might have brought on a disaster which, even if only temporary, would have spoiled the effect contemplated, and weakened the Roman Plenipotentiaries. The expedition was a better training than even a long course of autumn manœuvres, and Tiberius returned from it with a full knowledge of military problems.