The performance had been a good one, and we should be churlish to withhold our applause.
XI
The Accession of Tiberius
All the accounts of the accession of Tiberius agree in one statement; the evidence is unanimous that he was exceedingly unwilling to occupy the position which Augustus had occupied, and to continue the Empire in the form which it had assumed under his predecessor.
Tiberius was now fifty-six years of age; for ten years he had to all intents and purposes shared the first place in the Empire with Augustus; he had enjoyed his full confidence, none of the things which attract ambitious men had been refused to him. His character was without stain or reproach; the amours which are attributed to Julius Cæsar, and even to the saintly Augustus, are not attributed to him. The idle story that he went to Rhodes to indulge in odious vices was the fabrication of a later age, and was, as we have seen, absurd in itself. He had been a faithful and loving husband to his first wife, Vipsania; the licence of Julia had disgusted him; after his divorce from her he never thought of a fresh marriage, though still a young man. On his campaigns he had shown himself to be simple, and indeed severe, in his personal habits. A story was indeed prevalent that he was given to strong drink, but there is no evidence in its favour except a couple of wildly improbable stories preserved by Suetonius, and a punning nickname given him by the soldiers, who called him Biberius Caldius Mero. The nicknames given by private soldiers and schoolboys to officers and schoolmasters are not evidence, though they sometimes promote, as in this case, the circulation of fictitious stories. The exceptional health which Tiberius is said to have enjoyed to an advanced age does not favour the idea that he was intemperate, and indeed we are told that from the age of thirty onwards he prescribed a regimen for himself without consulting his medical advisers, which was remarkably successful. He was free from the tyranny of the lusts of the flesh, he was equally free from avarice, a point repeatedly insisted on by hostile historians; power in itself and by itself had no attraction for him; he had already on one occasion brusquely rejected it. Thus he was able to consider the question of the succession dispassionately. His personal inclination was rather in the direction of retirement and a private life, and if his judgment was biassed, the disturbing element was a contempt for rather than a love of power.
At the death of Augustus, Tiberius was actually in possession of two forms of authority legally conveyed to him by the Senate in constitutional form, which enabled him to carry on the government: he had the tribunician power, which made him superior to all the civil magistrates; he had the proconsular power, which put him at the head of the executive in all the provinces, and especially at the head of the army. In the first character he was the protector of Roman citizens throughout the world; in the second he was master of the provincials. Thus there was no occasion for any plotting on the part of Livia, no premature assumption of responsibility on the part of Tiberius in setting the guard and giving the password when Augustus had breathed his last; these duties necessarily devolved upon him, and he was in fact at the time on active service.
He was not Princeps, nor Pontifex Maximus, nor had he the censorial power. Of these three the last two were executive offices belonging to the old Republic; the former was an honorary dignity recognised by the forms of the Republic, which had acquired a new meaning during the long tenure of Augustus. It was this dignity, along with all which it now involved, that Tiberius only reluctantly and after resisting considerable pressure eventually accepted. It had become associated with the monarchical principle, and the permanent continuance of the monarchy Tiberius wished to avoid.
The position which he adopted was a reasonable one. Augustus was an exceptional man; he had been called to power under exceptional circumstances; the reign of one man had been inevitable at the end of the civil wars; the right man had been found, a social regeneration had followed; the monarchy, an exceptional expedient, had done its work; there was now the material for creating a stable government on the old lines. The vices of the old Senatorial administration had been purged away; the Senate itself had assumed a different character—it was no longer a narrow oligarchy, it was a council of the Empire; no single man could hope to repeat the success of Augustus. In a multitude of counsellors there is wisdom; the restored Senate working through the new officials would be more likely to carry on the continuity of government than an hereditary or quasi-hereditary monarchy, in which so much depended on the character of an individual, and which was perpetually disturbed by palace plots and conspiracies for the succession.
The life of Tiberius himself had been embittered, his domestic happiness destroyed, by the intrigues of a family which had adopted the habits of an Oriental Court. It might well appear to him, arguing from his own experience, that misgovernment by the Senate was a less probable eventuality than misgovernment by the irresponsible members of a monarchical dynasty listening to the unwholesome suggestions of favourites and parasites, and intriguers of all nations.
The funeral of Augustus was hardly over when an event occurred calculated to disgust Tiberius with the dynastic principle, if he had not already strongly disliked it.