Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

The practical results of the campaign were to convince Tiberius that an eastward extension of the Roman frontier was alike impracticable and undesirable; the problem was to find a defensible line of outposts near the Rhine and overawe the tribes who lived beyond it; but before Tiberius had time to rectify the frontier he was called off to deal with a far more serious war nearer Italy.

Maroboduus, the King of the Marcomanni, settled his followers in the neighbourhood of Vienna, having formed the idea of creating a great military power in Germany; it was the first conception of a German Empire, for many tribes were to be united in the confederacy by which the aggressions of Rome were to be stopped, and the tide of invasion possibly turned in the opposite direction. This man, a Suevian by birth, had been a hostage, and was brought up under the care of Augustus at Rome; in this case, as in several others, the policy of educating a native prince, so that he might bring his people under Roman civilization, proved to be of doubtful advantage. Maroboduus applied the lessons which he learned at Rome to resisting the extension of the Empire. He got together a force of 70,000 foot and 4,000 cavalry, drilled them carefully in the Roman fashion, and fixed upon Bohemia as the suitable centre of his Empire. He did not attack the Romans, that was not his first object; he wished to civilize Germany and create a counterpoise to Rome. Tiberius saw that this could not be permitted; the proposed German Empire was too near the turbulent Pannonian region for safety; it was necessary to nip the nascent civilization of Central Europe in the bud. In order finally to break the power of Maroboduus, Tiberius decided to carry out another of those vast combined operations in which he had already twice succeeded. He sent Sentius Saturninus with one army to march from the Rhine through the Hercynian forest to the Danube, while he himself brought up another army from Cis-Alpine Gaul through the Julian Alps. The operation was so admirably planned and its details so well considered, that the two armies found themselves each within five days of their meeting point, when a fresh outbreak of Pannonia and Dalmatia threatened Tiberius in the rear, and compelled him to take his army back to another scene of war. Though this great operation failed in one way, it seems to have succeeded in another; it effectually cowed Maroboduus, who did not intervene, as might have been anticipated, in the Pannonian troubles, while it shook the confidence of the Germans in their self-appointed Emperor; we find him at a later time a fugitive living under the protection of Rome.

The precision with which Tiberius was able to time the arrival of the army of Saturninus indicates a greater knowledge of the geography of the districts north of the Alps, and a less savage condition of those regions, than the statements of Cæsar would lead us to imagine possible. We can hardly take literally the statement of Paterculus that Sentius was told to cut through the Hercynian forest; such work may have been necessary on the watershed of the Neckar and the Danube, or, if, as is most probable, the advance was made by a more northerly route, between the Main and the Danube, but when once in the basin of the Danube, the Roman soldiers must have found their way fairly open, and they must further have found sufficient supplies of food. The central uplands of Germany were then as now covered with forests and more thickly covered, but there must have been known tracks along which an army could be led. In the southern basin of the Upper Danube, after the conquest of the Vindelici, a Roman military colony had been founded at Augsburg, indicating that measures were rapidly taken to sweep the rich country north of the Alps into the net of the Empire. Everywhere the traders, whose chief business was slave hunting, pushed in advance of the Roman armies, and Tiberius was thus able to get sufficiently accurate information to launch an army upon the country north of Vienna from the north-west, timed to meet his own advance from the south-east. The conception was a daring one, and the accuracy with which it was carried out would be admirable even today. To render such elaborate strategy successful a commander must not only be able to plan accurately, but he must be able to depend on the obedience of his subordinates and possess their absolute confidence.

The rising in Pannonia was of a very serious nature. During the interval of seventeen years since Tiberius had last waged war in that direction the country had become so far Romanized as to have adopted to a large extent the language of its conquerors; garrisons of veterans had been established, and the war began with a general slaughter of these, of resident Roman citizens and of travelling merchants. The province of Macedonia was invaded and devastated. At Rome panic prevailed; Augustus publicly declared that the enemy was within ten days’ march of the city; levies were held, veterans were called back to the colours, and men and women alike were compelled to enfranchise a certain proportion of their slaves according to the amount of their assessed property, that they might be enrolled in the armies. Paterculus was put in command of the reinforcements that were sent to Tiberius from Rome.

The war lasted for three years, and was eventually ended partly by diplomacy, partly by the patient strategy of Tiberius. Great pitched battles were impossible in that difficult country, and the strategy of the enemy did not permit them. Tiberius kept dividing the forces of his opponents, cutting off the supplies of the isolated detachments, and conquered them in detail. Paterculus particularly admires his prudence in breaking up his own forces after finding that the numbers, on which others were disposed to rely, were too unwieldy to be effective; he spread his winter quarters over the country, and himself spent the cold season at Siscia, high up in the hills near the sources of the Save.

Paterculus does not give us a consecutive account of the campaigns, but he mentions a few personal details with reference to Tiberius, both on this campaign and on the subsequent one in Germany after the Varian disaster, which are worth quoting.

“During the whole of the war in Germany and Pannonia, no one of us or of those above or below our rank was ever ill without finding that his health and safety were attended to by the care of Cæsar, in such a way that his mind seemed to be so free from the weight of all its other burdens as to be concentrated on this task alone. For those who desired it there was a composite vehicle ready, his litter assigned to the general benefit, whose advantages I experienced along with others; physicians, food, all the apparatus of a bath, carried for this purpose alone, were ready for every invalid; home and servants alone were wanting, but nothing was missing which they could supply or need. I will add a fact which everybody who was present at that time will recognize at once along with other things which I have related; he alone always rode, always dined sitting along with his guests during the greater part of the summer campaigns; he was indulgent to breaches of discipline, provided there was no bad example; he frequently advised, sometimes reproved, very rarely punished, and took a middle course, being blind to most faults, checking others.”

This is the first mention of a field hospital, reserved, apparently, for the use of the staff and their attendants. Other Roman generals took an elaborate bath establishment with them on their campaigns for their own use: Tiberius utilized it only for the sickness of others. Other generals travelled in carts or on a litter: Tiberius always rode. He took his meals like an active man in a sitting posture, not lying at full length after the customary Roman fashion.

Suetonius declares that in the German wars Tiberius proved to be a martinet, and mentions the case of an officer who was severely punished for sending his freedmen to hunt on the opposite side of the Rhine contrary to orders. Tiberius would indeed have been a bad general if he had neglected to punish a gross violation of discipline, which by revealing the presence of his force might spoil a carefully devised operation. Similarly Suetonius sees excessive severity in the strictness with which Tiberius cut down the transport of officers. Those better versed in the difficulties of warfare will be inclined to take a different view. There were fashionable and luxurious officers then as now, whom it was essential to keep in order. Doubtless some one of these cherished his grievance and left it recorded in his memoirs to be added to the evidence compiled by the historians of a later age.

A mysterious transaction with the Pannonian chief Bato, who was spared after the surrender because he had allowed Tiberius and his troops to slip through an encircling force on one occasion, suggests that diplomacy was employed, as well as arms, in bringing about the surrender of the Pannonians, though it is possible that Tiberius accompanied an act of kindness with an ironical reference to an occasion on which he had outwitted Bato.