Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

The arrangement at first met with universal approval. The towns were relieved of the presence of disorderly soldiers in the streets, and on the occasion of a riot the soldiers could be depended on to act together and preserve order; they were not united by various ties of familiarity with the rioters.

The fact that a new force had been created which could be used to coerce the Government escaped notice at first, and Sejanus was held to be a public benefactor.

He further achieved some measure of popularity by his energy and skill in stopping the spread of a conflagration which originated in the theatre of Pompeius, and the grateful Senate voted that his statue, magnificently gilded, should be set up in the place where he had saved the lives of the citizens.

When Drusus died Tiberius was sixty-five years of age. Nothing had occurred to shake his confidence in Sejanus. At home and abroad the Government seemed to be strong and settled, and the Emperor felt that he was at liberty to withdraw himself from any but the most urgent public business. Tacitus and the authorities whom he followed accused Tiberius, with their customary animosity, of mere hypocrisy when he talked of abdicating; they forgot that he had once before retired from public life, and only been brought back to it with difficulty, and that, in accepting the cares of the Empire, he had expressed a hope that the Senate would one day allow him a period of rest in his old age. From this time he, in fact, began tentatively to absent himself from Rome and to avoid public functions. Eventually, in A.D. 26, he finally withdrew to the island of Capreæ, and though he sometimes approached the city, never entered it again. Meanwhile Sejanus acted as his Regent at Rome.

We are now approaching the great tragedy of the reign of Tiberius, a tragedy whose details will never be made clear unless some happy investigator in the libraries of a monastery or the sands of Egypt should recover for us the missing books and chapters of Tacitus, and other authors whose works we have lost.

Though after the death of Drusus Tiberius appeared less frequently in public, he still conducted business in the Senate, and even after he had definitely withdrawn from Rome occasionally appeared in the vicinity of the city. In the year 27 A.D. a temporary wooden theatre, constructed by a speculator at Fidenæ, not far outside the walls of Rome, collapsed, involving in its ruins no less than twenty-five thousand persons. This disaster was almost immediately followed by a fire on the Cælian Hill, a crowded quarter of Rome. On both occasions the Emperor gave lavish assistance from his private purse, and promoted measures likely to prevent the recurrence of such catastrophes. He continued to transact the business which appertained to what we should call the Foreign Office of the Empire, and on all important occasions communicated with the Senate by letter, showing in such communications, at least up to the year 31 A.D., no abatement of his former ability; but he did, in fact, withdraw his attention from the details of government, and allowed the conduct of the legal processes in the Senate to pass into the hands of Sejanus.

Sejanus, so far as we can learn from our authorities, took advantage of the increasing aversion of the Emperor from public affairs to take his place, to promote his own favourites, and gradually to occupy even in the eyes of the Prætorians that position which really belonged to Tiberius. It is possible that his procedure in the Senate was more autocratic than that of the Emperor.

The situation was complicated by the continuance of the domestic rivalries of the Imperial household, which, on the death of the aged Livia in 29 A.D., broke out into a series of horrors whose exact nature cannot from want of evidence be determined, though it may be surmised.

The opposition to Sejanus was twofold: there was what may be called the constitutional and personal opposition of a large party in the Senate, who refused to submit to the domination of a new man, and there was the private opposition of members of the Imperial family, Tiberius being almost alone in his appreciation of the good qualities of his subordinate. Thus the sources of our information are discredited from the outset. The memoirs of Agrippina are coloured by her mother’s long-standing feud with the Emperor and all whom he trusted, and the memoirs of Senators are equally likely to be coloured by detestation of the upstart. It is perhaps for this reason that the annals of the seven years succeeding the death of Drusus are more than usually filled with senatorial prosecutions and suggestions of unfairness. It is indeed possible that Sejanus took some pains to remove political adversaries by encouraging prosecutions against them, but, except in one instance, there is no sufficient evidence of perversion of the forms of justice, and as a rule the hostile comment amounts to little more than an affirmation of the maxims that a Senator could do no wrong, that he was always innocent if he committed suicide, and that somehow Tiberius or Sejanus, or both, were responsible for the act of cowardice which terminated his dishonoured existence.

In comparison with the greater interests of the Empire, the squalid scandals which ended in the fall of Sejanus may seem undignified; but they have their interest also, not only in the obloquy with which they have covered the name of the “ablest of Roman Emperors,” but in the disparagement which through them has attached to the Empire itself. The fall of Sejanus was, in fact, the fall of Tiberius, and the sinister events with which it was accompanied have cast their shadow upon the whole subsequent history of the Emperors. A fashion was then set, and a tone was adopted, which has influenced historians for all time. The lives of the Cæsars in the pages of Suetonius are little better than a Newgate calendar; the various works of Tacitus are little better than a continued jeremiad, in which nobody is good except men unconnected with the administration, the Germans, and the historian’s father-in-law. For this peculiar attitude there was certainly no sufficient reason up to 23 A.D., and in the subsequent events till the accession of Caligula even the bitterly hostile evidence indicates that the Emperor was more sinned against than sinning.