Even if we accept the sensational stories which have accumulated round the retirement at Capreæ, we have still to recognize a life of sixty-eight years unstained by vice or crime, and chiefly spent in the laborious execution of the highest public duties. As a general, as a statesman, Tiberius stands, if not in the first rank, then at the very top of the second, and he deserves this additional credit, that public life was distasteful to him, power had no attraction for him, and had he been at liberty to choose for himself he would have lived in seclusion, a student of literature and natural science. We see in him, in fact, the best type of Roman, the best example of that peculiar character by which Rome rose to be mistress of the world. It was not the cleverness of the Romans, nor their military skill, that gave them the mastery, the Greeks were far cleverer, and Hannibal was greater than any Roman general, it was their strong sense of public duty, their passion for legality, their love of order, their tenacity in prosecuting large schemes, their self-restraint, their honour, which enabled them to succeed where Greek and Phœnician had failed before them, and where Gaul and Teuton were to fail after them. All these qualities are strongly represented in Tiberius; he is the ideal Roman Senator, the realization of those legendary types which formed the imagination of Roman children. It is not Cicero, the fluent orator, the versatile man of letters and agreeable gentleman, who represents the true Roman, nor Cato the bigot, nor Cæsar the man of genius: it is the dogged, dutiful, and just Tiberius, not over enthusiastic, not brilliant, devoid of personal fascination, awful rather than amiable, but wise enough and temperate enough and strong enough to do the work which was set before him.
Why then this perpetual stream of calumny, which has filtered down practically unchecked for nearly two thousand years? The immediate causes have been demonstrated in the foregoing pages; the subsequent causes Tiberius shares with the Roman Empire, of which he was in some sense an incarnation. It has been the custom of some Christian writers since the period of the Reformation to oppose Christianity to the Roman Empire; there is no trace of any such opposition in the earliest Christian writings. Neither the Gospels nor the Acts of the Apostles, nor the letters of St. Paul, nor those ascribed to the friends and contemporaries of Jesus of Nazareth, nor even the writings of the early Fathers, show the faintest indication of dissatisfaction with the Empire as such. The evidence, in fact, is in the contrary direction. But the later expounders of Christianity required a contrast, and it was an easy feat of rhetoric to collect all that is discreditable from the mass of Roman records and to compare it disadvantageously with the pure teaching of the Gospel. Tiberius himself had in this aspect the misfortune to be the contemporary of the founder of Christianity, and in the idle tales of Suetonius and the studied malignity of Tacitus an opportunity was found for starting the contrast from the very commencement. This particular antithesis is so convenient that the wickedness of Tiberius has almost assumed the dignity of an “articulus fidei,” and to dispute it is to tread the perilous path of the heresiarch.
Let us hope that the prescience of Tiberius as he watched the sun setting over the Mediterranean from the cliffs of Capreæ did not enable him to contemplate the long roll of centuries during which his name would be held in execration by the posterity of those for whom he had laboured, and on continents far beyond his ken, or to anticipate that savage howl of “Tiberius to the Tiber” with which the graceless populace of Rome greeted his funeral, or the still more cruel repetition of its echo from one generation to another.
The Imperial Family.
There are five chief lines of descent—
From Caius Julius Cæsar through his great-nephew and adopted son Octavianus, known after B.C. 27 as Augustus.
From Caius Julius Cæsar through his great-niece Octavia, sister to Augustus.
From Marcus Antonius through his children by his second wife, Octavia.
From Tiberius Claudius Nero through his two sons by Livia, the second wife of Augustus.