Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

The result of the debate was fresh energy on the part of the Ædiles, but Tacitus says that it was not until the reign of Vespasian that there was any marked improvement, that Emperor being himself averse to luxury. As, however, Tiberius was no less distinguished by plainness of living, it is more probable that the effect was produced by a general equalizing of fortunes among the well-to-do.

While Tiberius thus refused to take upon himself the responsibilities of the Senate in domestic matters, he was equally little inclined to allow them to throw upon him the burden of administering their own Provinces, and carefully referred deputations from the Senatorial Provinces to the Consuls; he punished a private servant of his own who had the management of his estates in Asia, a Senatorial Province, for attempting to exercise powers other than those of the business agent of a private person.

We may remark that the care of feeding the city, which we should have expected to be in the department of the Senate, was really in the hands of the Emperor, who held Egypt in his own exclusive management for that special purpose; nor was Tiberius a sufficiently enlightened economist not to attempt to control the price of corn.

Another subject which from time to time still taxed the energies of the Senate was the prevalence of alien rites, and especially of all forms of magic and divination.

It has been held that the Senate and people of Rome were particularly free from religious intolerance; their behaviour in this matter has been favourably contrasted with that of Christian governments, and there are many who believe that the Romans never interfered with religious observances till they adopted an attitude of exceptional malignity towards the professors of Christianity. Such a view does not, however, correctly represent the facts of the case. Comparatively early in its history the Roman Senate had proceeded with considerable severity against those who were infected with that strange hysterical epidemic which spread over Europe under the guise of the worship of Bacchus, and in the year 19 A.D. we find the Senate passing decrees to repress Egyptian and Jewish religious rites. According to Suetonius the devotees were ordered to burn their vestments and other religious furniture, while he and Tacitus agree in telling us that four thousand freedmen “infected with that superstition” who were of fitting age for military service were sent off to Sardinia to check brigandage there, “and if they should perish in the unwholesome climate, it was not a serious loss.” “The rest,” according to Tacitus, “were to withdraw from Italy unless they abandoned their profane observances before a fixed date.” The language of Tacitus does not distinguish between Jew and Egyptian so far as religion was concerned, for though he mentions both races, he only alludes to one superstition.

The persecution of Jews on religious grounds is thus anterior to Christianity, and the persecutions were not confined to Jews and Egyptians; Chaldæans were included, and as we have already seen, after the case of feather-headed Scribonius Libo Magians and “mathematicians” were also expelled from Italy.

In these persecutions Tiberius is not directly responsible, he left the matter in the hands of the Senate. Sardinia was a Senatorial Province, and he apparently saw no reason for interference. Italy was not, however, swept clear of “mathematicians” and other persons under the ban of the Senate, with whom in fact the head of the executive was probably in private sympathy, for Thrasyllus the “mathematician” had been his constant attendant since the days of the retirement at Rhodes. Decrees for the expulsion of these undesirables recur under subsequent Emperors.

The subject is a complicated one, and the more complicated to us because men so diverse according to our conceptions are included in the same ban. We do not know much of the Chaldæans and Magians, but we know something of the Jews, and we are surprised to find them classed with Egyptians and subjected to the same penalties as Chaldæans, Magians and “mathematicians,” and we further ask ourselves why the Senate, which countenanced the worship of the Great Mother and other alien deities, assumed an attitude of intolerance towards the Jews.

The attitude of the Jews towards other religions was essentially different from that of the priests of Cybele or any other Pagan divinity. Jupiter or Mars or Vesta could tolerate the temples of other Gods, and the respect paid to other Gods—it was of the essence of polytheism to multiply divinities—but the Jew declared that there was only one God; his God was not one of many Gods, but the only God, and the worship of other Gods was wrong and monstrous. Thus to the Roman Senate the observances of the Jews were actually “profane”; they involved hostility to existing religions, and toleration of the Jews was therefore impossible for the orthodox Pagan. Again, it is important to remember that the Jews at this period were not shut up in ghettos, and visibly separated from the rest of the community; whatever differences in dress and customs distinguished them from other inhabitants of the cities in which they dwelt were not peculiar to them; the Syrian, the Egyptian, the Gaul, men of many other nationalities wore their distinctive dress and practised their national religions in every populous city of the Empire. The Jews might for convenience live in the neighbourhood of a synagogue, and thus give portions of the cities which they inhabited the aspect of a Jewish quarter; but such separate residence was not enforced upon them; they moved freely among the people; many of them were in positions of trust, their princes, the Herods, were on intimate terms with the Imperial family, and their young men took part in the diversions of the Roman youth; among them were ardent proselytisers, their peculiar doctrines were well known to the educated, and though Horace might laugh at their credulity, his sneer indicates how well they were known. The unhappy four thousand young men who were sent to Sardinia were either freedmen or the sons of freedmen, a fact which shows that they, or their fathers, had been the trusted servants of Romans. But the Jews were no more homogeneous then than now; if they had their Rothschilds, they had also their Jews of mean streets, their “vagabond Jews, exorcists”; and if the great financier was the trusted friend of an Emperor, the small moneylender of the slums was as much detested in ancient Rome as he is in modern London. There were Jews who were deservedly respected for their great intellectual ability, for the purity of their lives, for the dignity of their religion; but there were also Jews whose disreputable callings and mean habits involved at least a section of their race in such contempt as to lead Tacitus to contemplate with satisfaction their extinction in the fever-haunted swamps of Sardinia. We should, however, be on our guard against attributing to the contemporaries of Tiberius the same degree of animosity against the Jews which was felt by the contemporaries of Trajan; for, in spite of the sweeping decrees of the Senate, the Jews steadily advanced in importance, and the anti-Semitic sentiment of Tacitus was evoked not only by the disreputable section of the chosen people, but also by the men who, as members of the Imperial household, had a large share in the administration of the State.

Again, we should be mistaken if we attributed to the whole Jewish race distributed throughout the civilized world the same sentiments which prevailed among the bigoted Jews of Jerusalem. Even at Jerusalem, where the introduction of the Roman standards invariably produced a riot, the priests of the Temple accepted the offerings made by the different Roman generals who passed by or occupied the Sacred City; and the omission of a Gentile commander to show this form of respect to the one God was somewhat inconsistently resented. At Alexandria especially free intercourse with men who represented the wisdom of the Egyptians and the Greeks modified the conceptions of orthodox but not bigoted Jews, and the spirituality of Judaism steadily tended to prevail over its ceremonial exclusiveness. Learned Jews enjoyed as wide reputations as other learned men, and were in communication with learned Greeks; Tiberius himself is said to have nicknamed Apion the Greek, to whose anti-judaic treatise Josephus replied, “the rattle of the universe.”