Chapter XVIII: The Retirement at Capreæ 418 (12)

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.”

But while on the one hand a reformed and spiritualized Judaism was tending to become the effective religion of the Empire, the debased Judaism was joining hands with the other demoralizing superstitions of the East. No one who has read the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of St. Paul attentively can deny that if there were spiritually-minded Jews like the great Apostle, there were also Jews who practised exorcisms and divination, and who studied “curious books.” We know little of the peculiar tenets of the Chaldæans and the Magians, equally little of the Egyptians, except as worshippers of Isis, but we know that fortune-telling and witchcraft were practised by them, no less than dignified inquiries into the laws of nature, so far as their imperfect means of observation permitted. The dividing line between Thrasyllus the “mathematician,” the friend of Tiberius, and those men whom foolish Libo consulted, would have been difficult to draw, science was not to be clear of superstition for many ages, but there were respectable astrologers, genuine, though perhaps mistaken, searchers after truth, alongside of the disreputable charlatans who interpreted dreams and told fortunes and held sway over the dissolute imaginations of needy profligates by means of conjuring tricks and skilfully organized conspiracies with numerous confederates. Even the purest of Jewish sects--if indeed they can be called a sect--the Essenians, laid stress upon their powers of predicting events by means of the stars.

Polytheism was in fact tolerant so long as an enemy had not declared himself; it was no sooner conscious of an enemy than it persecuted, and the persecution was no less a persecution because it was prompted by mixed motives. There may have been good reason for mistrusting the influence of the diviners upon persons of weak mind, for suspecting them of helping to bring about the accomplishment of their predictions by the use of poisons, and of prompting plots in whose success they had a personal interest; but it was also inevitable that the emergence of a new religious attitude should alarm, and that its professors should be subject to attack. In times of popular excitement the monotheists were persecuted by the enlightened rationalists no less than by the orthodox polytheists, and many motives over and above religious intolerance contributed to sharpen the laws against the Jew and the diviner. Not the least of these was the dread of poison, a very lively terror even in modern times, till the accumulations of chemical and medical knowledge restricted the sphere of operations of mysterious drugs; and there may well have been some foundation for the superstitious dread of secret poisoning by which many of the ancients were affected. Not only was the charlatan ready to magnify his own powers, and to ascribe to his spells and incantations deaths from purely natural causes, but the older civilizations of the East had doubtless preserved many secrets of pharmacy which were skilfully used by adepts to impress the imagination of the vulgar.

At this very day the medicine men and women, the Papaloi and Mamaloi of the Black Republic of Hayti, exert a power above the laws by their knowledge and use of poisons, from which even the educated white man cannot escape. Before we condemn the Roman Senate for its intolerance of magicians and its superstitious dread of their powers, we must place ourselves in their position, limit ourselves to their knowledge; and again we must be modest enough to remember that we still consider it necessary to protect the ignorant dupe from the fortune-teller, that the law is not unfrequently called into action in such cases, and that the clients of the spiritualist and diviner of to-day are to be found in all classes, and not exclusively among the poor and ignorant.

While the Senate thus endeavoured to repress alien worships, it continued to protect the sanctity of its own ritual; vestal virgins were appointed in due form, though with increasing difficulty, as the solemn form of marriage necessary for the proper parentage of a vestal had fallen into disfavour. Considerable interest attached to the case of a Senator named Servius Maluginensis, who had a claim to the Proconsulship of Asia, and wished to evade the restrictions which were imposed on him by the fact that he was Flamen Dialis, sublimest priest of Jupiter. The ancient ritual forbade the Flamen Dialis to leave the city for more than a day and a night in succession, and Servius therefore attempted to prove that the ritual was obsolete, and that exceptions had been allowed. The Senate discussed the case with due solemnity, and then referred it to Tiberius, who in his turn remitted it to the College of Pontiffs. Their decision was against Servius, and the Province of Asia fell to the Senator next on the roll.

A question of even greater importance, partly religious in its character, required the decision of the Senate. Numerous Greek towns, chiefly situated in the islands of the Ægean and along the coasts of Asia Minor, had abused the rights of Sanctuary attached to some of their temples. Not only were the rights of property imperilled by the ready shelter given to runaway slaves, but the concourse of unruly ruffians assembled in these insular Alsatias threatened to disturb the public peace. A sanctuary, if conveniently situated, might easily assume the character of a nest of pirates; the Greek genius for brigandage has always been as remarkable as the Greek gift for preaching morality. An attempt to suppress the sanctuaries led to protests, and deputations from the towns concerned pleaded their cause before the Senate. The arguments used in defence of the sanctuaries are interesting, because they show a sense of continuity of government from the times of Alexander to those of Tiberius. The claims were partly based on mythological grounds, but more effectively on recognitions granted by Alexander, and afterwards by Roman Proconsuls. The maintenance of the sanctuaries was regarded as an honourable distinction, and this aspect of the claims was pressed rather than the material advantages.

The abuse, however, was too alarming to be tolerated. One temple alone, that of Æsculapius at Pergamus, which from other evidence seems to have assumed the character of a school of medicine, retained its privileges; the others were dismissed with honourable compliments, and it was ordered that a copy of the Senatorial decree should be inscribed on brass, and placed in a conspicuous position in the temples concerned. Subsequently other sanctuaries were similarly dealt with. The credit of thus dealing with a serious abuse is ascribed by Suetonius to Tiberius, and it is possible that, though the actual decision was made in the Senate, because the towns involved were in a Senatorial Province, the initiative came from the Emperor himself. If Tiberius was thus severe in correcting a time-honoured abuse, he had been no less liberal in remitting taxation and furnishing relief to numerous cities in the same part of the world, which had suffered severely from an earthquake. In fact, though he was careful to observe the constitutional forms, he kept a watchful eye upon the Senatorial administration, and supplied the necessary stimulation for its corporate conscience.

Reference has already been made to the practice of supplementing the resources of impoverished Senators, and to the severity with which Tiberius treated such cases. The Senate was only too willing to vote public money to provide pensions for its members. Tiberius recognized the obligation, but he insisted that the beneficiary should make out a good case, and be able to demonstrate that his distress was due to misfortune, not to thriftlessness. The case of Hortalus, grandson of Cicero’s rival, Hortensius, affords an illustration both of the severity of Tiberius and of the curiously domestic character of the Senate.

In the year 16 A.D. Hortalus rose in his place in the Senate, having posted his four sons at the door, where they could be seen by all; he then spoke as follows, fixing his eyes alternately on the statue of Hortensius standing among the orators, and that of Augustus:--“It was not by my own will, but at the suggestion of the Prince, that I begot and acknowledged these children, whose number and tender years you behold; and indeed my ancestors had deserved that I should have successors. For I, who owing to the revolutionary times could neither inherit the ancestral property of my house, nor earn money, nor win the affections of the people, nor train myself in eloquence, should have had enough if my poverty had neither shamed nor burdened others. At the command of the Emperor I married a wife. Behold the stock and progeny of all those consuls and dictators. I do not say this to disparage anybody else, but to win your compassion. The offices that you confer, Cæsar, will be at your service while you reign; meanwhile defend the great-grandchildren of Quintus Hortensius, the children fostered by the sainted Augustus, from want.” In spite of the mendacity of this statement--for on the father’s side, at any rate, the family of Hortensius could only claim the credit of two consulships and no dictatorships--the appeal was heard with favour by the Senate, till Tiberius intervened with these words:--“If all the poverty-stricken begin to come here and demand money for their children, the applicants will never be satiated, and the public purse will run dry. And indeed it was certainly never contemplated by our ancestors when they allowed Senators to leave the matter in hand, and move amendments for the public benefit, that we should endeavour to increase our private fortunes in this place in such a manner as to render the Senate and the Princes unpopular, whether they granted or refused the largess. This is not a humble request; it is an impudent demand, unseasonable, and unprecedented, to rise when the Senate are assembled for the discussion of other matters, and do violence to the kindness of the Senate by urging the number and age of one’s children, and to pass on the same violence to me, and as it were break open the treasury, which we shall have to supplement by injustice, if we exhaust it in courting popularity. Money was given to you, Hortalus, by the sainted Augustus, but without previous application, and certainly not on the terms that once given it should be always given. Industry will slacken, indolence will gain strength, if men’s hopes and fears are not to depend on themselves, if all are confidently to look for resources from outside, useless to themselves and a burden to us.” Tiberius was clearly in the right, but the authorities whom Tacitus consulted evidently thought that Hortalus had been hardly used, for the narrative is continued:--“Although these and similar words were listened to with favour by those whose custom it is to praise all that falls from the lips of Princes, honourable and dishonourable alike, the majority received them in silence or with subdued murmurs. And Tiberius perceived this, and after a short silence said that he had given Hortalus his answer. However, if the Senate thought well, he would give each of his children of the male sex two hundred thousand sesterces (about £3,000). The rest expressed their thanks. Hortalus was silent, either from consternation or because he retained something of his ancestral nobility even in his indigence. Nor did Tiberius show him any further compassion, although the family of Hortensius fell into disgraceful poverty.”

The gift made by Tiberius was private and personal; he did not make use of the public money for a purpose of which he had expressed strong disapproval. The incident is chiefly interesting as indicating that, in spite of the rude shocks given to the Senatorial system by Julius Cæsar, the body had recovered its evil tradition of assuming that it was at liberty to use the public purse to meet the private necessities of its members. Hortalus was clearly a well-known spendthrift.

The Senate, in fact, tended to become more and more a high court of justice, in which its members and high officials were tried by their peers, the cases being either political or such private cases as had by long tradition fallen to the Senate as the guardian of the morality of the privileged orders. It was tenacious of its privileges, careless of its wider responsibilities. Tiberius treated it with formal respect, and did his best to make it worthy of its opportunities; if he could have avoided interfering with its administration of its own provinces, he would have done so, but he was not prepared to submit the provincials to misgovernment in order to maintain the prestige of the Senate, and the misgovernment of Proconsuls was by no means a thing of the past. Tiberius, like Augustus, supplied himself with an inner Council of the Senate, and it is possible that on most occasions this inner Council represented the whole body; but he did not restrict himself to Senatorial Counsellors, and we are told that, in dealing with provincial questions, he was always careful to provide himself with the expert evidence of men who knew the localities concerned.

Though the Senate could not shake itself free from the traditions of its existence, and always represented the great families of the City of Rome rather than Italy or the Empire, except in so far as it provided the personnel of the Supreme Court of Appeal, it was curiously indifferent to municipal matters. The city was policed by the Prefect of the city, an official appointed by the Emperor, who held office for long periods, and it was guarded by troops commanded by the Emperor. The rank of Senator eventually became little more than an honourable distinction, though from time to time the body possessed sufficient coherence to bid for the power which it had lost, and even for short periods to wield it. The distinction between Senatorial and Imperial Provinces did not last long, the Imperial administration proving better suited to the needs of the Empire.

Many writers infected with the spirit of the nineteenth century have advanced the opinion that the Roman Empire collapsed because the Romans never hit upon representative government. It is curious that Augustus very nearly effected this supreme achievement. He at one time proposed to hold simultaneous elections of the Roman magistrates in all the cities of Italy; the names of the candidates were to be posted up, the votes were to be collected in ballot boxes, which were to be sent to Rome sealed up, and afterwards counted in the city itself. This scheme happily came to nothing, for the strength of the Roman Empire lay in its respect for local government. The Provincial Governors were the supreme umpires in their Provinces, but they did not concern themselves with the details of local administration; the constitutions of Athens, and even Sparta, continued to work even after these towns were included in the Province of Achaia, and similarly throughout the Empire original institutions were left to do their previous work. As we have seen, the Governors of Provinces did not even control the organization by which the Imperial taxes were collected. The local life of the Empire was strong; Antioch and Alexandria, even the new cities of Gaul, bowed reluctantly to Rome, and in course of time the position of the Patriarch of Rome was not to be that of Primate of Christianity till many a battle had been fought, and in fact the Popes never succeeded to the full heritage of the Emperors. The Empire was the bond of union and the peacemaker between an infinite number of self-governing units, it provided a supreme arbitrator, a Supreme Court of Appeal. The Empire, in fact, was peace; it was not a system of local as well as universal administration. The introduction of representative government, the substitution of an Elective Parliament at Rome for the Senate, would have killed the vigorous local governments, and would not have improved the administration of the Empire. Under such rulers as Augustus and Tiberius, the Flavians and the Antonines, the organization of the Roman Empire probably reached the limits of perfectibility; it would not have been improved by collecting deputies from all parts of the world, and expecting them to be responsible for the executive. Representative institutions have not prevented official corruption or no less deadly incompetence, nor has the absence of really free parliaments impeded the advance of some modern nations; those diseases of the body politic from which the Roman Empire is held to have suffered in a special degree, corruption and official formalism, have not been unknown in communities blessed with Houses of Representatives duly elected and accredited. A multitude of counsellors neither protects an Empire from corruption nor ensures wisdom in the conduct of its affairs, while the conscience of any corporate body is notoriously duller than that of each individual of which it is composed. The Roman Emperors were wise in respecting local institutions, and in not imposing a strict system of centralization, for it is unfortunately impossible to retrace our steps, and when once the local life has been killed, it cannot be revived. Decentralization as a matter of mechanical convenience is possible after the central authority has drawn to itself all the prestige of political life, but this is purely administrative decentralization; when once the central government has absorbed the vitality of local political life, it cannot give back that which it has taken away. It was good for the Empire that the Senate should not exclusively attract the ambition of capable men from the Provinces, and on the other hand that the energies of the Emperors should be distributed over a wide area. The Emperors had no time for universal tyranny, and the extravagancies of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian were scarcely felt outside Rome itself; they certainly did nothing to shake the foundations of that fabric which had been so wisely laid by the first two Emperors.

XVII

Sejanus

One of the most trusted public servants of Augustus was a Roman Equestrian named Seius Strabo; he hailed from an Italian, or rather a Tuscan, city, his family having been long settled at Vulsinii, and was thus exposed at Rome to the reproach of being a “new man.” Seius Strabo was content with administrative work, and did not aspire to high senatorial rank. Augustus made him commander of the Prætorian cohorts which formed the garrison of Italy, and afterwards entrusted him with the most important office in his gift, for he made him Governor of Egypt, that valuable appanage of the Roman Emperors upon which the corn supply of the capital depended. Seius married into the Junian gens, the gens of Brutus the Liberator, and his son could in consequence claim affinity through his mother with the most honourable Roman houses. This son was adopted by a member of the Ælian gens, and thus became known as Ælius Sejanus. He married a daughter of Apicius the Epicure, a very wealthy man, but notorious rather than distinguished.

The young Sejanus enjoyed the confidence of Augustus as his father had done. He succeeded him in command of the Prætorians, and was made adviser to Caius Cæsar when he went to the East. In this capacity he did his best to counteract the mischievous counsels of Marcus Lollius, and won the gratitude of Tiberius, which he soon improved into a personal friendship. As Sejanus was made his father’s colleague in B.C. 14, soon afterwards succeeding him in the sole command of the Prætorian guards, he cannot have been much younger than Tiberius, for he would hardly have been associated with his father before he was twenty years of age, and in that case Tiberius would have been his senior by only eight years. Even if we assume that Sejanus became his father’s colleague at the age of sixteen, an age at which young Romans commonly first entered on active service, he would still be only twelve years younger than Tiberius; but it is very improbable that so young a man would have been entrusted with the command of the Prætorians. The question is of some importance, for the language of the historians, perhaps unintentionally, conveys the impression that Sejanus was a comparatively youthful favourite of the Emperor’s, who owed his advancement to a blind partiality, whereas his acquaintance with Tiberius had been almost lifelong, even if we assume that he was little more than a boy when he first commanded the Prætorian guards. It is far more probable that there were only three or four years between the two men, and that the relations between Sejanus and Tiberius were comparable to those between Augustus and Agrippa.

Paterculus, who admired Sejanus, is curiously apologetic about the obscurity of his family. He suggests that it was not so obscure as was generally supposed, and again that obscurity of descent is no bar to admission to the public service; he quotes very ancient examples, and the more modern ones of Marius, Cicero, and Asinius Pollio.

In fact the Revolution, which had broken the political power of the old Roman aristocracy, had been succeeded by a reaction in favour of great names and exalted lineages, which would have given the Senate a new lease of power had that body been capable of effective work. The History of Livy, the Fasti of Ovid, the later books of the Æneid, had all combined to throw a glamour over the great Roman families, and the new world of capable officials recruited from Italy and other parts of the Empire found itself despised at Rome by the futile descendants of legendary ancestors. We are told that the Emperor Caligula was ashamed of his grandfather, Marcus Agrippa, and was offended if reminded of his descent from the ignoble Vipsanian stock. Tiberius himself was evidently inclined to be a formalist in matters affecting the aristocracy, and though he drew his trusted servants from all classes and races, the deference which he paid to the Senate and the old constitutional magistrates, along with his careful observance of the old legal ritual, tended to foster aristocratic pretensions.

To the memoir-writing Senators Sejanus was an upstart, and in spite of the recent precedents of Agrippa and Mæcenas and other capable colleagues of Augustus, the strict aristocracy could see nothing but evil in the “new man.” On the other hand, a large party in the Senate, representatives of the new hierarchy of officials, accepted Sejanus, as Agrippa had been accepted; they followed the lead of Tiberius, and after the death of Drusus in A.D. 23 were prepared to treat Sejanus as the second person in the Empire.

If Senators of ancient descent were disgusted at the position held by Sejanus, the family of the Emperor were even more so. Drusus, a hot-tempered man, is said on one occasion to have struck him, an incident which may well have occurred when Drusus was a little boy or petulant youth, and been turned to good account by sensation-loving writers of memoirs. Agrippina could not contain herself in the presence of this new oppressor of the children of Germanicus, the great-grandchildren of the sainted Augustus, and so forth. These poor innocents were, in her excited imagination, the victims of the ambitions of Sejanus; that they were not from the moment of their birth of an age to be entrusted with the conduct of affairs did not enter into her considerations.

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.

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.

The story as it has been handed down to us, so far as it can be collected from fragmentary documents, is to the following effect. Sejanus formed designs upon the succession at a comparatively early period; after the death of Germanicus one man alone, Drusus, stood between him and the object of his ambition. In order to compass the destruction of Drusus, Sejanus, a man certainly past fifty years of age, if not close upon sixty, laid siege to Livilla, the wife of Drusus, the sister of Germanicus. Successful in his assaults upon her not impenetrable chastity, he divorced his wife Apicata, and joined with Livilla and a favourite freedman of Drusus in a conspiracy. Drusus, according to the story, did not die a natural death; he was poisoned by Sejanus through the instrumentality of his favourite Lygdus. The way to the succession now lay clear, for the son of Drusus was still a child, and the eldest sons of Germanicus were little older; moreover, it was supposed that Tiberius disliked the family of Germanicus. To the disappointment of Sejanus, Tiberius showed an inclination to favour this family, and though he sharply reproved the Senate for attempting to confer premature honours upon them, he introduced them to the Senate, and as they advanced in years treated them as his probable successors along with his own grandson.

Sejanus then, we are told, by means of secret emissaries worked upon the excitable temperament of Agrippina in the hope that she would involve herself and her family in ruin by committing some unpardonable offence against Tiberius. In this he was eventually successful, though so long as Tiberius continued to live at Rome the violence of Agrippina was met by somewhat amused contempt. Thus it is recorded that on one occasion Agrippina, goaded by the agents of Sejanus, burst in upon Tiberius when he was sacrificing in presence of the statue of Augustus. The scene is brought home to us if we imagine that the famous statue of the Prima Porta found on the site of Livia’s villa was the statue in question. A friend, and indeed cousin, of Agrippina’s, one Claudia Pulchra, had been accused of unchastity and of magical performances directed against the Emperor himself. It was suggested to Agrippina that she was the person really attacked, and being “always violent,” as Tacitus says, she went straight to the Emperor, and, in allusion to the solemn occupation in which she found him engaged, declared that “a man had no right to offer victims to the sainted Augustus and at the same time persecute his posterity. The divine spirit had not passed into dumb images, but his real presentment, born of his divine blood, understood the inconsistency, and mourned.” She went on to describe the attack upon Claudia as an attack upon herself. Tiberius for once was provoked to a retort, and, quoting a Greek poet, said, “Your only injury, daughter, is that you are not Queen.” This scene in the calm presence of the statue of Augustus was followed by another. Cousin Claudia was found guilty of the offence with which she was charged; but Agrippina persisted in her grievances. She fell into ill-health; Tiberius visited her; she received him at first in silence, then burst into floods of tears. She bewailed her loneliness, and begged him to find her a husband; she was still young, she said; marriage alone would relieve her from the contumelious position in which she found herself; there were plenty of men in the State who would not disdain to welcome the wife and children of Germanicus.

Tiberius left her on this occasion without uttering a word. Then it was suggested to the aggrieved lady by the emissaries of Sejanus that her life was in danger, that poison was being prepared for her, that she should refuse to dine with the Emperor. In consequence, on the next occasion on which she partook of a meal with the head of the family she passed all the dishes, till Tiberius, noting her want of appetite, picked up a particularly fine apple and handed it to her with much praise of its merits; the unhappy lady at once passed the fruit to the slave who stood behind her. Tiberius merely turned to his mother and remarked that it would not be strange if he dealt severely with a woman who accused him of poisoning. This speech led to diverse horrid surmises, but was obviously without any serious purpose, as Agrippina lived unmolested for another five years.

Tacitus tells us that he quoted these details directly from the memoirs of the younger Agrippina, who was possibly present on the last of the three occasions.

After Tiberius had retired to Capreæ the conspirators Sejanus and Livilla were able, we are told, to control the correspondence which was sent to him from the capital. Imprudent remarks made by Agrippina and her sons were carefully reported to him; the provocation which had occasioned them was not reported. The old man was induced to see in the conduct of his great-nephews a repetition of the excesses which had ruined Caius and Lucius Cæsar at the same age. Sejanus fomented discord between the brothers. Drusus the elder was given the office of Prefect of the city; he was encouraged to fear the jealousy of his brother, who was his mother’s favourite. After the death of the aged Livia, Agrippina and her son Nero acted in such a way as to give an opportunity to their enemies; they courted popular favour, and their friends openly advised them to take refuge with the armies on the Rhine, or to take sanctuary with the Senate and invoke the protection of the Roman people. Meanwhile Sejanus had in A.D. 25 formally begged Tiberius to confer upon him the hand of Livilla, the widow of his son Drusus. Tacitus gives what profess to be extracts from the letter which he addressed to the Emperor on the subject, and from the reply which he received. They are to the following effect. Sejanus is represented to have said that “he had become so habituated to the kindness of Augustus, and then by many proofs to that of Tiberius, as to address his hopes and prayers to the ears of the Princes as soon as to the gods. He had never asked for brilliant office, he preferred to share with the common soldiers the toils of guarding the Emperor. Still he had obtained what he thought most honourable, he was thought worthy of association with Cæsar. On this his hopes were founded. And as he heard that Augustus had once taken into consideration the claims of Roman knights when he was thinking about placing his daughter, so he begged Tiberius, if a husband were sought for Livilla, to remember a friend who would be content with the mere honour of relationship. He did not wish to be relieved of the duties which had been imposed upon him; he thought it sufficient that the family should be strengthened against the malicious persecutions of Agrippina, and that for the sake of the children. For himself the life which he had already lived with such a Prince would be much and more than enough.”