Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

The extraordinary indifference of the historians Paterculus and Suetonius to chronology, and their absolutely casual use of such connectives as “hereupon,” “soon afterwards,” and the like, makes it difficult to be certain of the real sequence of events. It is, however, certain that Tiberius was Governor of Transalpine Gaul for a year at some period between B.C. 20 and B.C. 16, that he was harassed during the term of his Governorship by sporadic invasions of German tribes, and was able to measure their importance as affecting the peace of his Province, and form plans for permanently checking them. He came to the conclusion that the whole middle and eastern Alpine region was a centre of disturbance, and that it could not be dealt with alone, seeing that the tribes who lived on the Dalmatian coast and at the sources of the Save were always ready to create a diversion when the Roman armies were occupied in the valleys to the south or north-west of the Alps. Cæsar had more than once been called back from the conquest of Gaul to deal with the Pirustæ in the same quarter.

In B.C. 16 the ill-omened Marcus Lollius sustained a serious defeat at the hands of the German tribes, while Gaul itself had been rendered unquiet by the exactions of Licinus, himself a Gaul employed by Augustus as Governor in the Southern Province. Augustus himself went to Gaul to set straight the civilian administration, Agrippa was sent to the Illyrian regions, Drusus to the passes leading from Lombardy to the Upper Rhine, while Tiberius took charge of an expedition directed upon the same region from Basle by the Lake of Constance. This was the first of the great combined movements originated by Tiberius; their conception, but even more their success, mark him out as a general of genius. Given a mobile enemy able to live on the country, and provided with an interminable area at his rear into which he can retreat, the only hope of dealing with him successfully is to cut off his retreat. This was the strategy of Tiberius.

The army of Agrippa in Illyria protected the rear of Drusus, who was able to drive the Alpine tribes back through the passes to the Northern face of the Alps, where they found the army of Tiberius ready for them. The victory was so complete that the very names of these tribes disappear from history; squeezed between two Roman armies they were doubtless exterminated. Horace wrote an official ode on the occasion, comparing Drusus to a young eagle or lion; and in a complimentary ode to Augustus on another occasion, compared the charge of Tiberius to the impetuous floods of the Aufidus, his native river. The northern slopes of the Western Alps were now secured to Rome; there was no longer any danger of Gallic intrigues stimulated by the restless Helvetii, but the work was by no means done. Augustus seems to have remained for some time in Gaul studying its social conditions, Agrippa remained in the Illyrian district, Drusus was sent to the lower Rhine, and Tiberius, as far as we can gather, remained at Rome.

Profiting by the experience gained in the recent war, Drusus determined to repeat the strategy of Tiberius, and again to hem in an elusive enemy between two Roman armies; he himself marched up the Lippe, making a point on the Weser, somewhere near Paderborn, his objective, and at the same time he sent a flotilla down the Rhine, with instructions to ascend the mouth of the Weser, and thus cut off the flight of the Germans. The first attempt failed, the fleet being dispersed by storms; it was reserved for Tiberius himself to succeed at a later date in this combined movement. In the following year Drusus advanced to the Weser, and on his return established a permanent outpost at Aliso, fifty miles up the Lippe; this was the period of the death of Agrippa, whose command in Pannonia was taken over by Tiberius. We know but little of the operations of Tiberius in Pannonia at this time, except that they were successful, and that the ring of Roman provinces was now completed along the East coast of the Adriatic, uniting Greece and Macedonia with Italy.

In B.C. 10 Augustus returned to Gaul; Drusus consecrated a temple in his honour at Lyons, and the worship of the Roman Empire personified in Augustus was officially substituted for the Druidical religion, in whose priesthood Augustus saw the irreconcilable enemy of Rome. After this ceremony Drusus again crossed the Rhine and penetrated as far as the Elbe; on his return he met with the accident which caused his death, and elicited that touching illustration of affection on the part of Tiberius, to which reference has already been made.

Tiberius took up his brother’s work on the Rhine and remained there for two years; he has disappointed the historians by doing nothing sensational, but when at the end of the two years Augustus called him back to Rome to take the place of Imperial Colleague, he left the Roman frontier extended, and the German terror pushed back from the immediate vicinity of the river. He had created a Roman party among the German chiefs, as Cæsar had created a Roman party among the Gallic chiefs; partly as hostages, partly as friends, the young German nobles were tempted to Rome to learn her civilization and form estimates of her weakness; the Eastern bank of the river was sufficiently Romanized to tempt Varus to treat it fifteen years later as a Roman province. Tiberius did more than this: he began that policy which was eventually to substitute for the magnificent conception of the all-embracing Roman Empire the map of Europe; he transferred 40,000 Germans to the left bank of the Rhine; they accepted the lands assigned to them, coupled with the obligation to service in the armies of their conquerors. It was a perilous policy, but no one could have foreseen its results in the distant future, and even if its tendencies had been suspected at the time, the pressing needs of the Empire would have silenced the voice of a too clear-sighted critic. The Empire was short of soldiers; men evaded military service by all possible means. Even the dreaded slavery of the ergastula seemed to them less terrible than the army; pay could not be found to make the soldier’s career sufficiently attractive, now that the chances of loot and liberal donatives were of the smallest. The finances of the Empire were straitened; Augustus had had difficulty in adding a death duty of five per cent. to his resources. The suggestion of Tiberius must have seemed a stroke of genius: to protect the frontiers by civilizing the enemies of the Empire, to find a cheap supply of soldiers by imposing military service on the hardy Germans, gradually to relieve the manufacturer and the merchant of the burden of finding men and taxes; no words could praise too highly the man who had suggested a means by which these desirable objects could be secured. We ourselves are treading in the same path; we congratulate ourselves on the wisdom which made English soldiers of Highland clansmen and Irish rapparees, which has arrayed against Russia the tribes of the North-West frontier, which fights the barbarians of Central Africa with the trained barbarians of its coasts; but we too shall have to pay the price which the Roman paid, if we neglect the military training of the centre of the Empire, and allow its population to expand unexercised in arms, incapable of fighting. If ever the day comes when the Sikhs and Goorkhas or even our own children beyond the seas learn by experience that preponderant force is in their own hands, and that the breed of fighting men is not ready for action in Great Britain, the Empire of England will be broken up, as the Empire of Rome was broken up; not by any sudden cataclysm, but by the gradual intrusion of the less civilized and less trained components of the Empire upon the central administration.

The end of the government of Tiberius upon the Rhine was also the beginning of his retirement; his resumption of public work was almost immediately followed by a fresh outbreak in the Pannonian region, and then came a terrible disaster to the Roman arms in the district of the Rhine. Of the campaigns which followed we fortunately have a fairly clear account given us by an eyewitness, Paterculus.

Unfortunately the only work from the pen of Paterculus that has come down to our times, perhaps the only work that he completed, is a short epitome of Roman history from the beginning to A.D. 30, which seems to have been written as an introduction to a work of considerable detail dealing with the campaigns in which the author and the relatives of his friend Marcus Vinicius, to whom the work is dedicated, took part. Paterculus belonged to the class of professional soldiers and administrators whom the Empire called into being, or to whom at least it gave a position which they had not hitherto enjoyed. In his eyes the Empire was good, and its rulers were good; and while he is profuse in his admiration of the heroes of the old Republic, and can pay as high a tribute to Cicero as to any supporter of the Empire, he is no less commendatory of the men who were brought to the front by the new order of things. He does not single out Tiberius as alone worthy of praise; such men as Marcus Lepidus, the son of the triumvir, and others who were in a position to excite the jealousy of a suspicious tyrant, enjoy a full share of his somewhat exuberant laudation. We may admit that Paterculus was uncritical without accusing him of deliberate dishonesty; he was a successful man; he was in the swim; he had no reason for nicely adjusting praise and censure to meet the merits of the men with whom he worked; he was not a frequenter of the Legitimist drawing rooms, but an active capable official, bluff, hearty, with an unfortunate propensity to consider himself a stylist. His grandfather was, as we have seen, an intimate friend and fellow soldier of the father of Tiberius; his father was also a soldier; he himself followed the family profession; he served under Caius Cæsar in Armenia, under Agrippa in Pannonia, under Tiberius both in Germany and Pannonia; he was honoured with civil magistracies at Rome, and eventually became a Senator; his brother was similarly successful. His value to us lies in the fact that he was an eyewitness of the events which he describes, and we may be sure that the few details which he thought worthy of mention in his rapid summary are actual facts. M. Vinicius was Consul in A.D. 30, and the honour enjoyed by his friend prompted Paterculus to write and dedicate this little work. In the following year the events took place which brought about the fall of Sejanus, whom Paterculus praises highly; possibly he was one of those upon whom the wrath of the Senate fell; in any case we hear nothing more of him, and his proposed work was never written, or never published; he died, or at any rate ceased to speak, before the reign of terror which accompanied the fall of Sejanus had cast its shadow upon Tiberius, before the reigns of Caligula and Nero had made it possible to believe every evil of a Roman Emperor, before the novelty of the Empire had worn off; there was no reason for adopting any but an optimistic tone.

Tiberius left Rome for Germany in A.D. 4; war had been going on there for three years, the Roman general being then a Marcus Vinicius, grandfather of the Consul to whom Paterculus dedicated his book. Paterculus accompanied Tiberius, and was generally with him during the nine years of his campaigns; he seems to have been a member of the headquarters staff, succeeding his father as commander of the cavalry. He says: “For nine years in succession, either as cavalry commander or staff officer, I was a spectator of his most heavenly operations, and assisted him in the measure permitted by my own mediocrity.” The epithet strikes us as exuberant, but it is frequently used by Paterculus, and not reserved for Tiberius; he employs it in speaking of the eloquence of Cicero. The historian tells us of the incidents of the journey through the most populous regions of Italy and the provinces of Gaul; he describes the joy with which the inhabitants welcomed their former governor, while the soldiers pressed to seize his hand, and shouted, “Do we really see you, General? Have we got you safe again? I served with you in Armenia, I in Rhætia, I was rewarded by you in Vindelicia, I in Pannonia, I in Germany.”

The first year’s campaign extended to the Weser, and was continued to the month of December; Tiberius then returned to Rome, leaving his soldiers in winter quarters near the sources of the Lippe. He was back again early in the following spring, and in this year successfully completed the operation in which Drusus had failed, on a more extended scale; he made the Elbe, not the Weser, his objective, and sent round a fleet to meet his troops with fresh supplies. Paterculus attributes the success of this enterprise not only to the good fortune and diligence of the Commander-in-Chief, but to his careful study of the seasons. On this occasion the Romans first came across the Lombards, “a race whose courage surpassed even German ferocity”; they seem to have been settled on the East of the Elbe in the region of Magdeburg. Paterculus has a doubtless true story of an elderly German who asked to be allowed to see Tiberius, and on receiving permission paddled across the Elbe; after having stared at him for some time he touched his hand, and declaring that he had now beheld the gods, bewailed the folly of his young men who insisted on fighting with their superiors; he then returned to his boat, and departed across the Elbe, still keeping his eyes on the group of Roman officers. There is nothing improbable in this story; savages are particularly impressed by size, and the stately form of Tiberius, glorious in such a uniform as we see on the Augustus of the Prima Porta, may well have appeared superhuman to the uncultured Lombard.