Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

“Why do we obey like slaves a handful of centurions, and still fewer tribunes? When are we to venture to demand our rights if we do not now approach the new and still tottering Emperor with either entreaties or force? It is through our own fault, through our own want of spirit, that we have gone on for so many years putting up with thirty or forty years’ service, old men as we are, and most of us crippled with wounds. Even after our discharge there is no end to our service; we camp under the flags and suffer the same burdens under another name. And if any man does happen to get out of all these dangers and difficulties with his life, he is dragged off to distant lands, where he is given under the name of a farm a morass or a precipice. The service itself is severe, and poorly paid; body and soul are valued at ten asses a day! Out of this we have to find clothes, arms, tents, buy off the centurions, yes, and pay for our own discharge.[1] The stick, the wounds, the bitter winter, the summer marches, the cruelties of war, or the barrenness of peace are everlasting. We shall never get any comfort till the service is entered on fixed conditions, a denarius a day for pay, sixteen years for a discharge; and we are not to be kept on under the flags, but stay in our camps and get our pension in cash. Do the prætorians face greater dangers than we do? But they get two denarii a day, and return to their homes after sixteen years. We don’t have to patrol the city at night, but we do have to live among savages and look at the enemy out of our very quarters.”

[1] “Vacationes munerum.” The translation in the text is the accepted one, but the phrase may simply mean “leave.” The custom of feeing the sergeant for this purpose has not been unknown in the English army.

This statement of the grievances of the private soldier may not represent the actual words of Percennius, but it is strangely familiar. Protracted service is not at present included among the grievances of the English soldier, but we have already taken one step in a direction which may lead to its inclusion. The Roman Empire shirked the recruiting difficulty, and in the end brought down upon itself countless disasters. If the English Empire follows the same path, it will find itself some day at the same destination. The conditions are strangely similar. By the institution of slavery the whole body of operatives throughout the Roman Empire was exempted from military service, the recruiting ground was artificially restricted. We have no artificial restriction in the English Empire, but the operatives have been allowed gradually to withdraw themselves from even the limited obligation to military service imposed by the ancient regulations of the militia, and they have further been allowed to assume that whatever may happen to other people they are not to be conscious of the burden of taxation; they are practically as free from military service and taxation as the slaves of antiquity.

When these mutinies were eventually suppressed Tiberius found himself unable to confirm the grant of a discharge after sixteen years’ service, and was obliged to fix it at twenty years; he said that the Empire could not stand the change, and deplored, in strangely modern language, the breakdown of the “voluntary system.” The statesmen of his time could not touch the institution of slavery; the demand for a conscription of slaves would have been resisted on every ground of public expediency; there would have been an outcry against interference with private property. We have no institution which forbids us to make soldiers of our intelligent working-men; they can be invited and encouraged to take their share in bearing the burden of defence. The statesman who discovers the best means of bringing them into the recruiting field will have solved the most pressing difficulty of the English Empire.

The result of the orations of Percennius was a general insubordination. Junius Blæsus, who was commander-in-chief, persuaded the excited men with some difficulty to send an orderly deputation to Tiberius to present their grievances, and the soldiers cleverly included his son in the deputation. For a time there was quiet, but the news of the mutiny reached Nauportus, where the “flagmen” were employed in engineering, and they immediately threw off all discipline, plundered the neighbouring villages, and even Nauportus itself. Laden with their booty, they marched to the headquarters of the mutinied legions, but they had not forgotten previously to pay off old scores, they had derided and beaten their centurions, they had seized the commander of their camp, a rigorous martinet who had himself risen from the ranks, piled burdens upon him, and driven him at the head of their column, asking him how he liked it. Blæsus met them with firmness, and arrested the ringleaders, but their appeals to their former fellow soldiers renewed the revolt, the prison was opened, all the prisoners were released, and a man named Vibulenus mounted the shoulders of his comrades, and, standing in front of the tribunal of Blæsus, made an impassioned oration. Addressing the mutineers, he cried: “You have certainly restored these innocent and miserable men to life and light, but who will give my brother back his life? Who will give me back my brother? He was sent to you from the German army on our common concerns, but last night this man, by the hands of those prize-fighters whom he keeps and arms to the ruin of the soldiers, cut his throat. Tell me, Blæsus, where you threw the body. Our enemies even do not grudge us burial. When I have sated my grief with tears and kisses, bid me then to be butchered too, so long as my friends here are allowed to bury those who have been slain for no crime, but because they thought of the good of the legions.”

This pathetic speech naturally redoubled the excitement, and the prize-fighters of Blæsus were seized and bound along with the rest of his slaves, and were likely to have suffered rough treatment, when it was discovered that Vibulenus never had a brother. The wrath of the soldiers was then turned upon the centurions; most of them got off and hid themselves, but one was killed whom the soldiers used to call “Give us another,” because it had been his habit to break his vinestick over the shoulders of his men, and then ask for another, and yet another. The centurions, however, were not all unpopular, and a division of opinion between the eighth and fifteenth legions about a centurion whom the former wished to kill, but the latter to protect, would have ended in a fight, had not the ninth legion intervened.

Though Vibulenus never had a brother, his speech shows that the mutiny was concerted with the legions on the Rhine.

In due time Drusus, the son of Tiberius, arrived from Rome with picked guards, including a detachment of the Germans, who then formed the bodyguard of the Emperor. Ælius Sejanus accompanied him as adviser, though Drusus, being of the age of seven and twenty, could hardly have been considered a youth. He read a letter from Tiberius empowering him to remedy such grievances as could be remedied on the spot, but referring the solution of permanent difficulties to the Senate. Tiberius as Imperator had practically unlimited powers over the army, but either he had not by this time formally accepted the office of Imperator, or he held that such questions as increase of pay and reduction of the years of service were not purely military questions, and must be referred to the civil authority.

The soldiers had listened quietly to Drusus till the reference to the Senate was mentioned; they then again burst into uproar, protesting, with a semblance of reason, that the Senate was only dragged in when it was a question of favours or rewards, the generals imposed punishments and ordered severe labours on their own responsibility. The aged Gnæus Lentulus, an experienced public servant, who had accompanied Drusus, and who was held to influence him in the direction of severity, was nearly killed; stones were thrown at Drusus himself, who with his escort and attendants escaped with difficulty into the permanent camp.

Fortunately that night there was an eclipse, and at the same time stormy weather set in. The excitable superstitious soldiers were frightened by the portent; Drusus skilfully took advantage of their wavering resolution, and by means of clever agents set the individual soldiers against one another, and inspired mutual distrust between the three legions. There was a sudden and violent revulsion of feeling, the ringleaders Percennius and Vibulenus were killed, order was restored, and Drusus returned to Rome. It was left to Tiberius and the Senate to redress the grievances.