Emperor in Military Tunic
(From Trajan’s Column)
The practice of delation, so rapidly developed under the rule of Tiberius, introduced a new principle into the government of his day, and marked it with features of its own. It is hardly possible to overrate the effects of this practice upon the general complexion of the Roman polity, nor is it easy to exaggerate the horror with which it came to be regarded. It was an attempt to reconcile the despotism of the monarch with the forms of a republic; to strengthen the sovereign power by weakening its subjects; to govern the people by dividing them, by destroying their means of combination among themselves, by generating among them habits of mutual distrust and fear, and finally plunging them into a state of political imbecility. It has been asserted that this system was in fact the product of peculiar circumstances rather than the creation of a deliberate will; nevertheless the chief of the state was made, not unnaturally, to bear the whole responsibility of it, and the disgust of the nobler spirits of Rome at the tyranny of spies and informers was turned against the prince himself, in whose interest at least, if not at whose instigation, their enormities were for the most part perpetrated.
If we examine the authorities for the history of the reign we have been reviewing, we shall find that those who were nearest to the times themselves have generally treated Tiberius with the greatest indulgence. Velleius Paterculus indeed, and Valerius Maximus, his contemporaries and subjects, must be regarded as mere courtly panegyrists; but the adulation of the one, though it jars on ears accustomed to the dignified self-respect of the earlier Romans, is not more high-flown in language and sentiment than what our own writers have addressed to the Georges, and even the Charleses and Jameses, of the English monarchy; while that of the other is chiefly offensive from the connection in which it stands with the lessons of virtue and patriotism which his book was specially designed to illustrate. The elder Seneca, the master of a school of rhetoric, to which science his writings are devoted, makes no mention of the emperor under whom he wrote; but his son, better known as the statesman and philosopher, though he was under the temptation of contrasting the austere and aged tyrant with the gay young prince to whom he was himself attached, speaks of him with considerable moderation, and ascribes the worst of his deeds to Sejanus and the delators rather than to his own evil disposition.
In the pages of Philo[i] and Josephus,[h] the government of Tiberius is represented as mild and equitable; it is not till we come to Suetonius and Tacitus, in the third generation, that his enormities are blazoned in the colours so painfully familiar to us.[16] It will suffice here to remark that both these later writers belong to a period of strong reaction against the Cæsarian despotism, when the senate was permitted to raise its venerable head and assume a show, at least, of its old imperial prerogatives; when the secret police of Rome was abolished, delation firmly repressed, freedom of speech proclaimed by the voice of the emperor himself, and the birthright of the Roman citizen respectfully restored to him. There ensued a strong revulsion of feeling, not against monarchy, which had then become an accepted institution, but against the corruptions which had turned it into tyranny; and Tiberius, as the reputed founder of the system of delation, bore the odium of all the crimes of all the tyrants who had succeeded him. Tacitus admits that the affairs of Tiberius were misrepresented during his power by fear, and after his death by spite; yet we cannot doubt that Tacitus himself often yields to the bias of his detractors, while Suetonius is at best indifferent to the truth. After all, a sober discretion must suspend its belief regarding many of the circumstances above recorded, and acknowledge that it is only through a treacherous and distorting haze that we have scanned the features of this ill-omened principate.
THE CHARACTER OF THE TIMES
[25-37 A.D.]
Nevertheless, the terror which prevailed in the last years of Tiberius, to whomsoever it is chiefly to be ascribed, exercised a baleful influence over society at Rome, and shows by effects which are still discoverable that it has been but little exaggerated. It has left permanent traces of itself in the manifest decline and almost total extinction of literature under its pressure. The Roman writers addressed only a small class in the capital; to be popularly known in the provinces, to be read generally throughout the Roman world, was a privilege reserved for few, and anticipated perhaps rarely by any. Even in the capital the poet and historian composed their works for a circle of a few thousand knights and senators, for the friends and families of their own few hundreds of acquaintances, whom they invited to encourage their efforts by attending their recitations. The paralysis which benumbed the energies of the Roman nobility at this crisis of terror and despair, extended naturally to the organs of their sentiments and opinions. Not history and philosophy only suffered an eclipse, but poetry also, which under Augustus had been the true expression of the national feelings, became mute when the feelings themselves could no longer be trusted with utterance. Cremutius was subjected to persecution for pronouncing that Brutus and Cassius were the last of the Romans. A tragedian was accused, and if accused, we may presume, perhaps, that he was condemned for speaking evil of the king of men, Agamemnon; and various authors were assailed, and their writings sentenced to proscription, to whose recitations the last princeps had himself listened with indulgence.
The poems which were tolerated were generally the most trifling, and perhaps licentious in character. The sly irony of the fable, a style of composition adopted by slaves, and imitated from the servile Orientals, seems not unsuitable to these perilous times. The name of Phædrus belongs in all probability to the Tiberian period, but it is curious that no later writer for four centuries should have cared to notice him. Similar or worse has been the fate of a more serious writer, Manilius, the author of an elaborate poem on astronomy and its spurious sister astrology, a theme of some danger under the circumstances of the times, but which he has treated with irreproachable discretion; it is owing, perhaps, to the disgrace under which the forbidden science fell that this innocent work lapsed into entire oblivion, and has escaped the mention of any writer of antiquity.