Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

The youngest son of Julia, Agrippa Postumus, had, as we have already recorded, been banished to the Island of Planasia off the coast of Campania, and detained in captivity. He was the last of the grandsons of Augustus. At this time he was about twenty-six years of age, and would in the ordinary course of events have held appointments and been pushed forward like his brothers. This had not been done. The historians agree in ascribing to him a stubborn disinclination to study, and an evil temper; he was put out of the way as Claudius was put out of the way; but he continued to be to some extent the centre of Julian plots, and it was believed that, in spite of his bad manners, Augustus was personally attached to him. It is possible that his name had been used in the plots with which his sister, the younger Julia, and her husband, L. Æmilius Paulus, had been concerned; or that he had taken up his mother’s quarrel with Tiberius, and had disturbed the serenity of the Imperial household. Although he had been thus set aside, Augustus had been sufficiently anxious about his welfare to request Tiberius to adopt him, when he himself adopted Tiberius. Whatever may have been the real temper and the real pretensions of the young man, one thing is certain: immediately after the death of Augustus he was put to death upon his island, and the centurion on guard reported to Tiberius that his orders had been obeyed.

Tiberius at once denied that he had given any orders, and added that he would report the matter to the Senate. No report was ever made, and Tacitus tells us that Tiberius was over-persuaded by C. Sallustius Crispus, who had succeeded Mæcenas as confidential and unofficial adviser to the Cæsarian family. Crispus is said to have urged that any public inquiry into the matter would have created too much scandal. Tiberius was not the man to be deterred from doing what he considered a public duty by any consideration of what he might himself suffer, but there was another person whose good name was likely to be damaged, and whose responsibility for what had occurred it would be awkward to demonstrate; that person was his mother, Livia. Tiberius himself had no motive for committing such a crime; only the perverse inconsistency of a Roman historian could be capable of attributing to the same man reluctance to accept power, and complicity in a crime whose object was to secure the undisturbed enjoyment of that power. Whoever was responsible for the death of Agrippa Postumus, Tiberius certainly was not; but Livia, the friend of Herod, whose life had been spent in pushing the fortunes of the Claudians, was not a woman to be frightened by the murder of an inconvenient aspirant.

If anything had been wanting to convince Tiberius of the evils likely to attend the perpetuation of the dynasty, this event was in itself enough to determine him in his dislike to an institution capable of producing such horrors, and under circumstances so wounding to his personal pride. A crime had been foisted on him in such a way that he could not prove his innocence without making himself the accuser of his mother.

The Senate, however, insisted that Tiberius should take the whole burden of the government upon himself. His suggestion that the responsibility should be divided was met with derision; there was no way out of the difficulty but to accept the trust, and to work it in the spirit most likely to lead to the development of his own views. The Senate was, in fact, wiser than Tiberius; those of its members who took an active share in the government knew that whatever might be the views of the few remaining Legitimist families, the monarchy was essential to the Empire, and that the Imperial House could not break with the traditions of half a century. Cæsar’s heir did not merely inherit property, he inherited the conduct of an organization whose branches extended all over the world, and this even as a private person; nor again was it easy to define his relation to those provinces, and especially Egypt, which had been administered by the late Emperor as private estates. Countless officials had learned to look to the Emperor as the source of patronage. A slow change was possible, but an abrupt change would have been a revolution, and would have disturbed the sense of security in all quarters of the Empire. The succession of Tiberius had been tacitly accepted as an accomplished fact in every part of the world for the last ten years. The intrigues in the Imperial family were distressing, and doubtless painful to those immediately concerned, but they had not affected the general prosperity, nor stirred the imagination of such men as hope to fish in troubled waters. Germanicus, the only practical candidate for the chief place, was notoriously loyal to the existing state of affairs, and had never shown any disposition to disturb arrangements made by Augustus. In the end Tiberius gave way, and accepted what the Senate offered him “until,” as he said, “I come to the time of life at which it may seem just to you to grant some rest to my old age.”

These words are in themselves a protest against dynastic assumptions; the power which Tiberius was to receive he would hold as associated with an office separable from his person; he was not to be once a king, always a king, ruling in virtue of mythology and portents.

Tiberius was equally careful to distinguish between complimentary tributes which had been paid to Augustus and official designations. He would not be called “Father of his country,” he would not even use the title “Augustus” as a name, though he was legally entitled to do so; he only used it in corresponding with foreign kings and potentates. Still less would he allow himself to be worshipped, and strictly forbade his statue to be erected in a temple except as an ornament. Nor again would he place the title of Imperator before his name, as Augustus had done, thereby making it personal and inseparable; he used it simply as a statement that he held a particular office. From the first he objected to the exaggerated language of obsequious persons, and demanded to be addressed as Dominus by his slaves, Imperator by soldiers, Princeps by the rest of the world. A Senator who flung himself at his feet and endeavoured to grasp his knees with an oriental exuberance of subservience suffered a rude fall, as Tiberius instinctively jumped back out of his reach. In a like spirit he checked the adulation which the Senate were prepared to heap upon Livia, and discouraged every attempt to invest her with the dangerous attributes of an Empress Dowager.

Similarly he distinguished between occasions on which he acted in a public or private capacity. Unless officially presiding, he attended the law courts like any other Senator, listening to the evidence, and offering his opinion like the rest; he, in fact, lost no opportunity of showing that he held his position to be a purely official one, and while he encouraged the worship of Augustus, he refused to be included in the cult.

At a later period Tiberius, in speaking to the Senators, declared that he regarded himself as their servant; his constitutional theory was that the Senate was the fountain of authority, the Emperor its first executive officer and adviser, but certainly not its master. This theory of the mutual relations of Emperor and Senate broke down, because one man, if he is capable at all, is always more capable than a number of equally capable men working together as a council: he can act more quickly, and his relations with suitors and suppliants are simpler. If a capable man is assisted by a council, the general lines of policy are his, and not those of the council, whose advice practically amounts to little more than valuable suggestions on points of detail. The dream of professors and political pedants that a country is best governed by a debating society of selected wiseacres has a never-ending fascination, but it is a mere dream, and as soon as the ostensible government degenerates into a debating society the real work of governing is done by other agencies; the alternative is anarchy.

The Senate for its part was studiously averse at first to accepting any greater measure of responsibility than had fallen to its share under Augustus; its leading members were used to a certain routine of business. Augustus had introduced a kind of Cabinet system, the ordinary business of the Senate being conducted by a small committee on which the Senators served in some kind of rotation; full meetings of the whole body were rare; the committee were in constant attendance upon the Emperor. Nobody had any wish to abandon this system, and to impose the necessity of frequent attendance upon all members of the Senate; at the same time, it was well to be sufficiently in evidence to secure a share in promotions and appointments. Hostility to the existing arrangements existed, but it was confined to some old families who were nearly powerless, and who found a safety valve for their discontent in pasquinades, and the compilation of bitter memoirs, in which every rumour, every scandal unfavourable to the existing government was carefully recorded.

Tiberius had so little of the dynast about him, so little of the jealousy of the usurper, that he employed in positions of trust the men who were generally believed to have been designated as possible aspirants to the Imperial power by Augustus. Marcus Lepidus held one office after another under Tiberius, not merely ornamental offices, but those which involved active work; C. Asinius Gallus, the second husband of Vipsania, similarly took a leading part in the counsels of the Senate, and was entrusted with various dignities; his mysterious fate three years before the death of Tiberius will occupy us later on; L. Arruntius similarly lived in dignity and affluence till he committed suicide shortly before Tiberius died, having become involved in highly discreditable, but not political, transactions; another, Gnæus Piso, was the centre of a strange conspiracy six years later than this. Of him too we shall speak in greater detail; it is enough for our present purpose to record that he was holding an important Governorship six years after the accession of Tiberius.