Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

Drusus died after an illness of some duration. Dio tells us that his constitution had been impaired by intemperance and other excesses, and there is other evidence that he had been a man of pleasure as well as a man of business. A speech of his is recorded to the effect that as long as he paid proper attention to his public duties he was at liberty to enjoy his leisure as he pleased. He did not share his father’s taste for literary pursuits or scientific research; but Dio informs us that Tiberius was really attached to his son, and insinuations to the contrary are probably derived from tainted sources, from the private diaries of those to whom it was an axiom that Tiberius hated those whom he was in duty bound to love, and loved those only whom he ought to have hated. Even Tacitus, however unintentionally, supplies evidence that Tiberius was much shaken by his son’s death, for though he tells us that Tiberius did not allow the illness or death of Drusus to interfere with the discharge of his public duties—a piece of stoical conduct quite in accordance with the character of time-honoured Roman models—he also tells us that the Emperor spoke at the time of resigning his office to the Consuls or some other. According to Tacitus, the Emperor also addressed a long speech to the Senate, in which he deplored the extreme old age of Livia, and his own declining years still unprovided with grandchildren. This latter statement was not correct, for Drusus had left a son, a second Tiberius, unless indeed we are to assume that the Emperor did not think he was at liberty to count a descendant who was still too young to be introduced to the Senate. We are further told that Tiberius then begged that the children of Germanicus, “the one consolation of his present misfortune,” might be brought into the Senate house, that the Consuls went out, and after encouraging the lads, placed them in front of the Emperor. He took them by the hand, and said: “Conscript Fathers, I entrusted these orphans to the care of their uncle, and begged him, although he had children of his own, to cherish them as he would cherish his own blood, and own them, and educate them for himself and posterity. Now that Drusus has been taken from us, I address my petition to you, and I implore you, in the presence of our gods and our country, to adopt, to guide the great-grandchildren of Augustus, descendants of such a splendid stock, and to fulfil your duty and my own. These worthy counsellors, Nero and Drusus, will be your parents. You have been born in such a position that your good or bad conduct is a matter of public concern.”

The funeral of Drusus was conducted with unusual pomp; the whole line of the Julians back to Æneas appeared in effigy in the procession, all the Alban kings, Romulus, the Sabine nobility, Attus Clausus, and the rest of the famous Claudians. The magnificence of the Imperial family in both branches was thus emphasized.

The death of Drusus, in fact, left Tiberius in much the same position as Augustus had been left by the death of Caius Cæsar. Neither the Claudian nor the Julian lines were represented by men of an age to lead the State. It is true that the brother of Germanicus, the future Emperor Claudius, was of mature age and in full enjoyment of such faculties as he possessed, but he had long been consigned to a private life, apparently with his own consent. The men who had worked with Tiberius all his life, Marcus Lepidus, Asinius Gallus, Lucius Piso, the Prefect of the city, and others, were now of very advanced age. Sejanus was the only administrator who held a position at all comparable to that which Tiberius had held during the later years of Augustus, but there was this important difference; Tiberius, apart from his personal merits and long experience, had been the representative of the old Roman aristocracy; his succession did no violence to the prejudices of the restored Senate. Sejanus, on the other hand, was a new man; if he represented any particular party, it was the Equestrians, the old enemies of senatorial pretensions; his exaltation was a victory of the officials over the survivors of the hereditary aristocracy.

The services which Sejanus had done to the State were not of that brilliant character which would seem to justify his promotion; he had not distinguished himself by conspicuous military service on the frontiers, though his uncle, Junius Blæsus, had dealt successfully with the mutineers early in the reign of Tiberius, and had more recently earned a triumph by a series of successful campaigns in northern Africa, and Sejanus may have enjoyed a reflected glory from these achievements. It is true that there may be a conspiracy of silence as to his exploits, but even Paterculus, his admirer, has nothing definite to record, and praises him in general terms only as the capable assistant of Tiberius.

It is probable that his merits were those of a good organizer, merits which would be known to those who were working at the centre of affairs, and would be appreciated by Tiberius himself at their true value, but would escape general attention, for the waywardness of human judgement is such that years of patient faithful and laborious devotion to the public service often fail to secure recognition, and a moment of victory weighs more in the public opinion than many hours spent in organizing the forces by which that victory is obtained.

The one great work of Sejanus has, quite undeservedly, involved his name in obloquy. He organized the Prætorian guards, and collected that portion of them who were on duty at Rome in barracks. The Prætorian guards constituted the home army of Italy; they were not only the bodyguard of the Emperor. Indeed, it seems that in the time of Augustus the Emperor’s bodyguard was a selected troop of Germans, the Swiss guards of the Pope being thus curiously anticipated by the first Emperor. The organization of the Prætorians was slightly different from that of the rest of the army; they were divided not into legions—or, as we should say, regiments—of about 6,000 men, but into cohorts (the cohort, or battalion, ordinarily consisted of 600 men, but a Prætorian cohort numbered 1,000). In other words, the home army was divided into units available by their size for garrison purposes. These men received higher pay and better allowances than the legionaries, and were, in fact, the pick of the service. Everything was done that could be done to attach them to the person of the Emperor and to distinguish them from the rest of the army.

The mutinies in Pannonia and on the Rhine had indicated a weak spot in the organization of the Empire. How if the mutineers had been successful, if Germanicus had not resisted their wish to make him Emperor? They would have marched upon Rome. It was clearly necessary that Italy should be provided with a sufficient force to defend the seat of government from its own armies and to demonstrate the inevitable failure of any attempt from the Provinces to overturn the civil power. It was probably considerations of this nature which impelled Tiberius to give careful attention to the organization of the Prætorians, and he doubtless considered himself fortunate in being able to entrust this important work to a capable officer of whose fidelity he was well assured.

The absence of barracks had proved a source of disorder; the Prætorians had been scattered in lodgings throughout the city and other towns. Not only was their discipline thus rendered a matter of difficulty, but their sense of corporate unity was impaired, and the language used of them inclines us to the supposition that so far from being an adequate police force, they were not infrequently themselves the source of disturbances in the streets. In order to correct these abuses, Sejanus built a large camp just outside the walls of Rome; it occupied the site of the well-known Pincian gardens. The force thus organized numbered twelve thousand men—three so-called Urban cohorts, nine Prætorian. The men were carefully chosen from the regions adjacent to the city, or from the ancient Latin colonies; care was taken to give them a specially Italian character.

The distinction between Urban and Prætorian cohorts, coupled with the statement of Suetonius that Tiberius placed garrisons throughout Italy, while there is no mention in Tacitus of any legion told off to the Italian service, suggests that the camp of the Prætorians at Rome only accommodated those cohorts which were on duty at the capital. It was the headquarters of the whole force, but was not habitually occupied by the whole force. It seems to have been felt that even the Prætorians were not strong enough by themselves to defend Italy in case of emergency, for there was a further provision in the shape of an arrangement with Cotys, the King of Thrace, by which he was bound to keep a force ready, if called upon, to defend northern Italy at the dangerous corner of the Adriatic. Sejanus undoubtedly showed capacity as organizing commander-in-chief in Italy, and Tiberius felt deeply the need for this assistance. He knew that the defence of the Empire was inadequate; he knew that the revenue appropriated to that defence was also inadequate, and it was for this reason that he habitually prided himself upon solving difficulties with the frontier princes by diplomacy rather than by an appeal to arms. He was thus prepared to be grateful to a man who could find a means of increasing the efficiency of the home forces without adding to their numbers. Tiberius had, in fact, serious misgivings as to the quality of the troops. Addressing the Senate early in A.D. 23, he told them that the supply of voluntary soldiers was short, and that where the numbers were adequate the morale of the men was unsatisfactory, because the recruits were generally impoverished and homeless men. Apparently, compulsory service, except in the case of special agreements with recently conquered territories, such as the Thracian kings, had been allowed to fall into abeyance, and Tiberius talked of visiting the Provinces in order to revive the compulsory levies. It is not uninteresting to note that the organizers of the Roman Empire had to meet some of our own difficulties. Men would not enlist who had anything better to do; they had, as we have seen, the further artificial difficulty that they could not draw soldiers from the working classes, who were slaves.

Tacitus and his authorities, keeping their eyes fixed as usual upon Rome, do not tell us what arrangements were made for the rest of Italy, but it is not probable that the use of the barrack system was confined to the capital; the same cause will have everywhere been followed by the same results, and have demanded the same remedy. The innovation was an important one, for though the legions on active service, or in disturbed districts or imperfectly subjugated countries, lived in permanent camps, and though the military colonies in Italy had had something of the same character, a permanent standing army with permanent barracks was a new thing.