Chapter XVIII: The Retirement at Capreæ 418 (13)

The genuineness of this document is certainly open to suspicion. It is notorious that Tiberius particularly disliked any form of address or exaggerated respect which put him on a level with the gods; nor could Sejanus have openly alluded to the extravagances of Agrippina without running the risk of incurring a smart rebuff, unless indeed he were already on such familiar terms with the Emperor that his previous humiliation of himself was unnecessary. The document has probably passed through the crucible of Agrippina’s memoirs. The reply attributed to Tiberius, though not beyond suspicion, has a more genuine note, and resembles other speeches and documents of the same author in its general character. The Emperor began with commending the loyal affection of Sejanus, and, after demanding time for full consideration, added that whereas other men have to think only of what is conducive to their own interests, Princes must think before all things of their reputation; and therefore he did not reply, as it was simple to do, that Livilla could decide for herself whether she would take another husband in succession to Drusus or would continue to live in the same house, that she had her mother and grandmother, her nearer advisers. He would deal more plainly. In the first place, there was the question of the animosity of Agrippina, which would be far more violent if the marriage of Livilla set the house of the Cæsars at variance. Even as things were, the rivalries of the women occasionally broke out, and his grandchildren were the victims of these discords. What if the rivalry were rendered more intense by such a marriage? “For you are mistaken, Sejanus, if you think that you will remain in the same rank, and that Livilla, who has been the wife of Caius Cæsar and then of Drusus, will be content to grow old with a mere Roman knight. Even though I should permit it, do you think that it would be allowed by those who have seen her brother, her father, and our ancestors in the very highest offices? You indeed are willing to stay in your present station; but those magistrates and nobles who break through to me against your will, and consult with me on every question, say without any concealment that you have already long ago passed beyond the highest Equestrian dignity, and gone far in advance of the friendship which my father showed you, and in consequence of their envy of you I too am blamed. But you say Augustus thought about conferring his daughter’s hand on a Roman knight. Surely we have no reason to be surprised that when Augustus was distracted by every kind of anxiety, and foresaw that the man whom he should raise above others by such a match was immeasurably exalted, he did discuss the claims of Gaius Proculeius and some others of noted tranquillity of life, and in no way concerned with the business of the State. And if we are affected by the hesitation of Augustus, how much stronger an argument is the fact that he did place her with Marcus Agrippa and then with myself? In consideration of our friendship, I have not thought it right to conceal these considerations; however, I will not stand in the way of what you and Livilla propose. I will omit for the present to refer to some plans that I have formed, and to tell you the ties by which I propose to associate you with myself. I will only disclose this, that there is no position so lofty that it is not deserved by your virtues and your disposition towards myself; and when the opportunity comes, I will speak openly in the Senate, or in a public address.”

Even in this letter there are suspicious passages. Tiberius could hardly have spoken of the magistrates who broke into him against the will of Sejanus without an admission of weakness, which is almost incredible, unless we are to assume that he wished to snub Sejanus, an assumption, however, which is not supported by the conclusion of the letter. Nor was this letter a public document, preserved in the public records; if preserved at all, it was among the family papers.

One important hint we get from this letter: its writer or editor ranges Livilla and her child in opposition to Agrippina and her children, and saw in the possible marriage with Sejanus a strengthening of the children of Drusus against the children of Germanicus. A similar protection had been given thirty-six years previously to the children of Julia, when Tiberius was made their stepfather. Livilla never married Sejanus, but her attempt to marry him supplies a clue to the labyrinth of plots in the Imperial household. If the principle of heredity was to be recognized, the heirs to the throne were Livilla’s son, the younger Tiberius, and Agrippina’s sons, the former representing the Claudians, the latter the Julians, and the situation was repeated which had existed when Tiberius and his brother had represented the Claudians, Caius and Lucius Cæsar the Julians.

Livilla, anxious for the safety of her son and eager to promote his interests, endeavoured to fasten herself to the strongest man in the State, who would unquestionably on the decease of Tiberius be in possession of the controlling military power.

According to the accepted story, there was a guilty connexion between Sejanus and Livilla before the death of her husband, and Sejanus had divorced his wife at the request of his paramour; the two together had poisoned Drusus.

All cases of poisoning are inherently suspect, and it is by no means incredible that Drusus was not really poisoned, and that the guilty intimacy of Livilla with Sejanus previous to the death of her husband was surmised at a later period when her subsequent conduct had given colour to such a story. According to the narrative supplied to us, Sejanus cannot have been under fifty when this intimacy began, and was probably nearer sixty; Livilla cannot have been less than five and thirty. If the story is true, they were certainly a mature couple of lovers.

It is at least as probable that on the death of Drusus Livilla endeavoured to enlist Sejanus in the cause of her son, and was prepared to marry him, he being only too ready to strengthen his position by such a match, as that Livilla had allowed a violent passion for a sexagenarian to tempt her into infidelity to her husband and actual crime. Again, Sejanus himself is never accused of plotting against Tiberius; had his heart been set upon the throne, he would not have waited for the Emperor’s death, whom in the ordinary course of nature he was not likely to survive long. At the period when the Emperor finally retired to Capreæ, and when he was moving from one villa to another in Campania, the roof of a grotto in which the party were dining suddenly fell in. Sejanus protected the Emperor’s person at the risk of his own life. Had he been impatient for the succession, he would have contrived that a happy accident should open the way to the realization of his ambition.

So far as the records go, we are at liberty to believe that Sejanus made friends with the two probable successors and their supporters in the Imperial family, the elder of whom was Drusus the son of Germanicus; the younger, Tiberius the grandson of the Emperor. By so doing he incurred the enmity of Agrippina and her younger son Nero. He was restrained by no scruples of policy, no ties of kindred, from driving the latter to desperation, and doubtless had many private insults to avenge. He possibly considered it his duty to the Emperor to protect him against the consequences of a pardonable weakness, which Agrippina had hitherto abused, and believed himself to be doing a signal service by eliminating from the Imperial circle such a dangerous conspirator; and he was, unfortunately for himself, so unwise as to use other than straightforward means to secure his ends. Meanwhile, as we have seen, he practically held the regency, he promoted and rewarded at will; he held a court at Rome, and it was generally understood that honours and emoluments were to be obtained exclusively by courting Sejanus. Some of the Senate fell in gladly with the new order, the majority secretly opposed it, and many were bitterly hostile, though restrained from showing their hostility by fear of Tiberius or respect for his long services.

In the year 29 A.D., soon after the death of the aged Livia, a letter came to the Senate from Tiberius charging Agrippina and her son with various offences, and demanding that they should be formally accused and the matter then referred to himself. At this point there is a gap in the Annals of Tacitus. We do not know what the steps were in the process, or what evidence was brought against the guilty. We gather from other sources that Agrippina was banished to the island of Pandateria, and her son to another island, in which he killed himself after a considerable interval, possibly at the suggestion of his guards. Agrippina disappears from history ‘semper atrox,’ for on her way into exile she was so abusive that the centurion in charge of the party was obliged to impose restraint by force, and in the struggle which ensued the lady lost an eye. The historians are silent as to the previous damage suffered by the centurion. Nor did she abandon her contumacious attitude on arriving at Pandateria. It was necessary to feed her by force, and, in spite of the well-intentioned efforts of her attendants, she is said to have succeeded two years later in dying of starvation. Agrippina was not a woman of any real strength of character; had she honestly revered her husband’s memory, and followed his example, she would not have continued the Julian feud and handed it down to two more generations. It is impossible not to feel some respect for so stout and so reckless a hater, and nobody has ever disputed her claim to certain domestic virtues which were lamentably absent from other ladies of her family, and were certainly sufficiently advertised by herself and her admirers; but in her maternal solicitude she was more pushing than wise, and the evil of her example influenced her children more than the good. The mother of Caligula, the grandmother of Nero, was certainly not fortunate in the traditions which she transmitted to her posterity, and if Nero really did poison his half-brother Britannicus, with the connivance of his mother, the cup may be said to have been mixed by his grandmother.

The disgrace of Agrippina and her son Nero brought on the stormy stage of the family politics Antonia the mother of Germanicus. This aged and refined lady had carefully abstained from meddling in the feuds which disturbed the Imperial household. She was now left in charge of the younger children of Germanicus, of the future Emperor Caligula and his sisters. Alarmed by the increasing power of the adverse faction, she began to study the course of public events; she heard that Sejanus was taking advantage of the Emperor’s retirement to tamper with the fidelity of the Prætorians; dark hints reached her ears as to the means by which Agrippina and her son had been entrapped, she feared some yet more terrible catastrophe, and having collected her information, she succeeded in getting it transmitted to Tiberius. The Emperor’s confidence in his trusted friend and servant was shaken; he followed up the evidence, and came to the conclusion that Antonia was right. Suetonius quotes an extract from a private diary of Tiberius, in which he says that he punished Sejanus because he had persecuted the children of Germanicus. There is no reason to doubt the honesty of this statement, though the events which followed have rendered it suspect.

The blow must have been a severe one. Not only had Tiberius been disappointed in a friend, but it was not even certain that he could resume the reins of power and punish the offender if he wished. It is the behaviour of Tiberius at this period which has justifiably gained him credit for proficiency in dissimulation. He did not at once strike; he first of all tested the temper of the Senate by writing coolly on the subject of Sejanus, and sometimes expressing disapproval of his actions, but yet not in such a way as to declare a breach with him. Careful experiments proved that Sejanus had no real hold on the Senate. In the same way means were found of testing the Prætorian guards, and it was satisfactorily ascertained that they obeyed Sejanus simply as the Emperor’s lieutenant. Tiberius took into his confidence Macro, the Commander of the cohorts on guard at Capreæ and in the neighbourhood, and agreed upon a plan of operations with him. Macro went to Rome with letters to the Senate and Sejanus; the attendance of the latter at a meeting of the Senate was particularly requested, it was hinted that unexampled honours were in store for him. When Sejanus went to the Senate House, Macro went to the camp of the Prætorians. The proceedings in the Senate House were purposely protracted. A very long letter was read from Tiberius, the purport of which was for some time uncertain. Gradually it became evident that it was directed against Sejanus, and it concluded with a demand for his arrest. Meanwhile Macro had presented his credentials to the Prætorian guards; Sejanus was superseded, and Macro appointed Prefect in his place; the soldiers proceeded to renew their oath of fidelity to the Emperor, coupled with that of obedience to their new commander. By the time when the ceremony was over, the Senate had risen, and the body of Sejanus was being dragged about the streets.

No sooner had it become apparent that Sejanus was disgraced and no longer enjoyed the favour of the Emperor than the long smouldering hostility to the upstart broke out into a blaze of fury. Tiberius was given no time for repentance or consideration; the fallen favourite was judged and executed on the spot; his two children were similarly condemned and executed; his friends were sought out and assassinated. For some hours, if not for some days, there was a veritable reign of terror at Rome, whose horrors the Emperor in his distant retirement did not at first surmise, and when informed was powerless to check.

This was the end of the careful restoration of the Senate planned by Augustus and fostered by Tiberius, an outbreak of violence which recalled the days of the Gracchi and the proscriptions. Tiberius did not long remain inactive; order was restored, and judicial prosecutions took the place of unlicensed murders. To the Emperor himself the change to law and order brought but little comfort, rather a deeper depth of despair. The whole story of the plots of Livilla and Sejanus, as it was then believed, was revealed. Apicata, the divorced wife of Sejanus, gave possibly tainted evidence of the machinations by which the death of Drusus, the son of Tiberius, had been brought about. Tiberius found that he had been the accomplice of the murderer of his own son, and that in banishing Agrippina and Nero he had played into the hands of that unnatural son and brother the other Drusus. Many of his old and intimate friends were implicated with Sejanus; there had been a conspiracy of silence, if not an active partisanship, and it was difficult to determine the degrees of guilt. In spite of so many years of public service and of single-hearted devotion to the interests of others, Tiberius found that at the age of seventy-two he stood alone in the world, hated and mistrusted by all.

After the first shock, the vigour of the old man returned; he checked the indiscriminate persecution of the friends of Sejanus, and he did his best to secure for them a fair trial. The Empire itself was not shaken by the blow, the effects of which did not extend beyond the city of Rome and Italy; but it must have been a grievous wound to his sensitive nature to discover that his oldest friends did not trust him, and that even such a tried associate as Asinius Gallus followed the example of the many weak-minded men who preferred suicide to facing an inquiry into their conduct. Prosecutions in connection with the Sejanus conspiracy seem to have continued for four years, but the order of events is not quite certain. It is not probable that Tiberius gave orders three years after the event to execute all the prisoners together without further hearing.

As Tiberius himself has generally been credited with responsibility for the disasters which accompanied the fall of Sejanus, it is as well to insist upon the evidence of Dio, who expressly says that Sejanus and his children were condemned by the Senate, and that Tiberius had only demanded his arrest. It had been found necessary on a previous occasion to check the tendency of the Senate to order immediate executions of persons whom they had condemned, and Tiberius had passed a decree that an interval of ten days was always to elapse between condemnation in capital offences and execution, in order that he might be communicated with, and have an opportunity of revising the sentence. The violence with which the adherents of Sejanus were persecuted was really a piece of political vengeance; it was a revival of the old quarrel between the Senatorial and Equestrian parties. In spite of the favour of Tiberius the Senatorial party had not gained upon the Equestrians; in fact, as the business of the Empire increased, the power of the Equestrians had increased with it. Sejanus was only one of many capable administrators whose activity and efficiency was in disagreeable contrast with Senatorial incapacity; the outbreak in which he lost his life was neither concerted nor foreseen. An opportunity occurred for indulging an animosity which had hitherto found its expression in private diaries and drawing-room conspiracies. The way of violence once opened, self-preservation enforced a continuance in that evil path. After the first blow had been struck, root and branch work was inevitable. Sejanus was to leave no avengers behind him.

Contrasted with this furious punishment of a political enemy and his adherents is the curious patience of the Senate at a later date in submitting to the excesses of a Caligula or a Nero. Only seven years later Caligula succeeded his great-uncle. He apparently lost his reason soon after he ascended the throne; he persecuted the Senate in every possible way, he confiscated money, he dishonoured nobly born women, he fined and executed, he even poured contempt, for he made his horse Consul, and having sent for the trembling Senators in the middle of the night, had them conducted to a dark room, where they were relieved to find that nothing worse awaited them than the performance of a _pas seul_ by the Emperor. Caligula was eventually assassinated, but not by the Senate, who punished his murderer; they had submitted to his caprices for more than two years. Nero, though sane, was scarcely less extravagant in his treatment of the leading men at Rome, but, as has been before observed, both Caligula and Nero are spoken of with less abhorrence than Tiberius.

It would seem that the Senators paid rather a heavy price for their outbreak, and that a reign of spies and informers actually did set in after the first disturbances, which followed the fall of Sejanus, had been quelled. If Tiberius became suspicious, if he became apprehensive for his personal safety, if he no longer interfered to stop trivial charges and prevent unjust confiscations, if the liberty of allusive libel was cut short, the Senate had given him very good reason for mistrusting them individually and collectively. At the same time the aristocratic party were smarting under a defeat; they had murdered Sejanus and his posterity, and cut off the greater number of his friends, but they had not succeeded in changing the constitution of the Empire, nor had they shaken the power of the Emperor, who mounted guard over them with his cohorts of Prætorians at the gates of Rome. The city itself was more or less under martial law, for the part which the populace had taken in hunting down the adherents of Sejanus had been a vivid reminder of previous disastrous events in the history of the capital. The very insecurity of the succession--for Caligula was barely of age, and not in good health, while the young Tiberius was little more than a child--impelled the aged Emperor to keep a tight hand upon the public order, lest his death, an event probably near at hand, should involve the State in civil war. Of those members of the Imperial family who had known Augustus, Antonia and her son Claudius alone survived; the former had always abstained from interference in politics, and the latter was considered to be disqualified from appearance in any public capacity. Nor had any of the numerous marriages of the daughters and granddaughters of the immediate successors of Augustus brought into the world any man of such striking ability that he seemed worthy to govern.

A strange destiny pursued Tiberius; he could not retire, he could not shake off that servitude which was imposed upon him by the needs of the Roman people. As he had been compelled to return from Rhodes and share the burden of Augustus, so now he was compelled, if not to return from Capreæ, yet to feel that upon him, and upon him alone, still rested the responsibility for preserving the peace of the civilized world.

Meanwhile the diaries were steadily written up; every case of apparent persecution was faithfully recorded. Nor were the obscenities scribbled on the walls or slily hinted at by the popular actors omitted from the record, and of such there was a plentiful supply, for though Tiberius had never been popular, and though his appearance in the streets of Rome had terrified rather than pleased, the commonalty was insulted by his absence. Undisguised contempt for the applause of the multitude stirs a bitterer hatred than active oppression, for so strange are the freaks of vanity that there are a large number of human beings who are happier in being harried and driven than in not attracting notice.

XVIII

The Retirement at Capreæ

The life of a public man at Rome was conducted on lines which must have rendered the transaction even of private business a matter of difficulty, and must have caused serious inconvenience to one upon whom the burden fell of conducting the correspondence of the whole Empire. The Emperor, equally with other men of eminence, was expected to live largely in public; his day began with the dawn, when the crowd of private clients and public courtiers assembled to greet him in the hall of his house; the procession to the Senate House or the Forum followed, when the great man was expected to recognize acquaintances whom he met, and even to submit to being kissed by them, a practice which Tiberius had the courage to forbid in his own case. After the business of the Curia or the Courts was finished, the same solemn procession restored the Emperor to his house. A respite was allowed in the noonday heat; then followed the visits of friends, and the great meal of the day, which might be in itself of the nature of a public function, and an occasion for the informal transaction of business; after a short period of relaxation the secretaries came, and letters were written till late into the night. On the numerous occasions on which there was a public holiday the Emperor was expected to take part in the shows and processions, and a holiday for others was a hard day’s work for the chief of the State. To escape unnecessary inroads upon his time, and to secure for himself a fair portion of leisure, Tiberius decided to live away from Rome, where it seemed to him that his presence was no longer indispensable. The state of his health also suggested retirement. In spite of a somewhat strict self-imposed regimen, Tiberius seems to have suffered from a form of eczema, which disfigured his countenance, and practically made it impossible for him to appear in public. The Romans were particularly sensitive on the subject of their personal appearance, and the Roman mob was by no means considerate of the feelings of those who were afflicted with any deformity. The tall figure of the Emperor was now bowed with age, his once handsome face disfigured with blotches and sores and the unguents used as palliatives of a malady probably aggravated by the pestilential and dusty air of the crowded city. Under these untoward circumstances Tiberius did what any other man would have done who was suffering as he suffered: he looked for some spot healthily situated not far from Rome, close enough to the great lines of communication to enable him to correspond freely with all parts of the world, but sufficiently removed from the beaten track to relieve him of the throng of unwelcome and importunate visitors. After trying various country houses in Campania he fixed upon the island of Capreæ as the ideal residence. Those who have seen the island have no hesitation in commending the Emperor’s taste.

Apart from its inaccessibility and the beauty of its surroundings, Capreæ had this further attraction for Tiberius, that its elevated rocks afforded ideal opportunities for the prosecution of his favourite pursuit, for the Emperor was, as we have seen, an astronomer. It would be rash to affirm that Tiberius in his astronomical research was free from the taint of superstition with which that branch of natural science was at that time infected, and indeed the fact that he is said to have built twelve villas on the island, which he named after the twelve planets, and inhabited at different periods, suggests that he was a believer in the influences of the stars, or possibly had a superstitious faith that places thus dedicated would be more favourable to his observations at different seasons of the year. It is, however, significant of the character of the intellect of Tiberius that he fastened upon the one branch of science which even in those days was tolerably exact, for though the real nature of the movements of the heavenly bodies was unknown to the ancients, their observations were accurate so far as they went; eclipses and occultations could be predicted with a near approach to accuracy, and though the vulgar were still terrified by the temporary disappearances of the sun or moon, to the educated such events were, though mysterious, part of the orderly laws by which the universe seemed to be governed.

Tiberius himself was believed to be an adept in astrology, and stories of his prescience have been handed down, based not improbably upon really successful calculations, by which the future movements of the planets were foretold. One of these stories is palpably absurd. It is said that Tiberius predicted the future reign of Galba by quoting a Greek verse to the effect that he too would have a share of the Empire, but the story is also told of Augustus, and under circumstances which involve no power of prediction, but simply a promise made by a kindly potentate to an attractive child in the presence of his parents.

The companions whom Tiberius took to share his retirement were such men as a man with literary and scientific tastes would naturally select; his old friend and companion Thrasyllus the “mathematician” was one; there were also professors of literature; for the purposes of public business a small staff of Equestrians and freedmen. The few Senators who were invited to attend were private friends, a fact which caused displeasure in high circles at Rome, where it was not understood, or if understood was resented, that one object of the Emperor’s retirement was to avoid the distractions of an official court and the trammels of etiquette.

We may dismiss once and for all as unfounded, and indeed absurd, the stories of unmentionable obscenities and hideous cruelties practised by the Emperor upon his lonely island. No man after reaching the age of sixty-eight could suddenly fling himself into such an orgy of lust as is described by Suetonius, and then live for nine years, the thing is a physical impossibility. Again, Tiberius, though always stern, had never been cruel. Instances of his humanity are not wanting during his residence at Capreæ; he again gave lavish assistance to the sufferers from a fire on the Aventine, and was at considerable pains to relieve the distress of poor debtors, though the measures which he adopted were not such as would commend themselves to rigid political economists.

Again, as has been observed in an earlier portion of this narrative, up to the time of the retirement to Capreæ Tiberius is known to us only as an absolutely chaste man, as chaste as Agrippina herself. There is no record, no insinuation even, of the presence of sensual favourites in his camp or at his Court; he is not even accused of that politic amorousness which is ascribed to the sainted Augustus, or of the warmer amours which invest the life of the great Julius Cæsar with an atmosphere of romance. That a man close on seventy should suddenly change his habits is incredible, unless we are to assume the existence of a hideous form of senile dementia, whose victim is to be pitied rather than condemned. There are such cases, but the patients are most commonly those who have continuously led impure lives, not those who have been distinguished by self-restraint. We may be asked, how then did such stories originate? It is impossible to track these falsehoods back to their source; a reason for one of them may, however, be suggested. Among the scandals of Capreæ was said to be the presence of a large number of young people of both sexes who were sacrificed to the Emperor’s lusts; they were of the noblest blood of Rome, a fact which was supposed to have constituted their chief attraction. Now the two grandchildren of Tiberius were quite young when the Emperor went to Capreæ. Owing to his position he was guardian to many other such children, and it would have been entirely in accordance with Roman practice to educate all these young children together. We know that the suite which accompanied the Emperor contained professional teachers. For the sinister interpretation put upon the arrangement we have only to recall the ineffable prurience of the Italian imagination in ancient times. There are works of art, there are fragments of literature, there are household ornaments dating from this period, and earlier periods and later periods, which are simply indescribable in modern language. The mystery of the Emperor’s seclusion was in itself enough to set the foul tongues wagging and to stimulate the impure inventiveness of the brothel-keepers in the capital; and there were men of rank, and possibly women, only too glad to note down in their diaries evidence collected from the mouths of slaves and other dependents. Similarly with the stories of cruelty. The disturbed condition of political life after the fall of Sejanus created an atmosphere of terror. Tiberius had always been dreaded, and the sensation-mongers could find ready credence for tales of atrocities, for which there was no such obvious contradiction as would have existed had Tiberius been spending his days in the full sight of his countrymen. These tales were believed because everybody wished to believe them, and because there was no evidence to the contrary. Because nothing was seen, anything was imagined.

Similarly in the sensational narrative of judicial murders and vexatious prosecutions with which Tacitus adorns his account of the last seven years of Tiberius, the record is so imperfect, the animus is so clear, that we may excusably suspend our judgment. In none of these cases are we given the full evidence against the prisoner; in all everything is told us that can be urged against the judge. It was further the practice of the historians of the time to attribute to Tiberius himself acts which were done by his agents even when he had certainly not ordered the act in question. Suetonius, for instance, states that Tiberius knocked out the eye of the obstreperous Agrippina--he has the grace to add “by the agency of a centurion,” but the story is told in such a way that the odium rests upon the Emperor, and not upon the participants in an undignified scuffle. Similarly there is a ghastly tale of the death of Drusus, the son of Agrippina, by starvation, a process which is said to have lasted for two or three years, during which every word uttered by the prisoner, every groan, was faithfully reported to Tiberius; it is even represented that the miserable man in the extremity of his anguish devoured his cushions. That an official report was forwarded to Tiberius at regular intervals of the conduct of this prisoner of State is what we should naturally expect, nor is it impossible that an overzealous gaoler abounded in details, nor again is it impossible that Agrippina the younger, the sister of the prisoner, left an exceedingly harrowing, though improbable, story in her memoirs.

It is worthy of note that the elder Agrippina and her son Nero were not recalled from their respective islands after the fall of Sejanus. Seclusion in an island did not of itself involve any serious degree of suffering, and we have mention of occasions on which Tiberius selected for his exiles islands which were healthy or otherwise attractive. The exiles were, in fact, simply removed to places from which they could no longer disturb the public peace. Though it had transpired that Agrippina and Nero were to some extent the victims of Drusus and Sejanus, they had shown themselves inclined to be dangerous, and the situation with regard to the succession was now such as to demand exceptional precautions. In his dealings with Agrippina, Tiberius surprises us by his forbearance rather than by his severity.

As we do not know the exact nature of the conspiracy of Sejanus, so we do not know the exact degree of guilt of the younger Drusus. Since he was treated with exceptional rigour we may surmise that he was implicated in a plot to depose the Emperor and enter at once upon the coveted succession. After his death Tiberius wrote a letter to the Senate giving a full account of his misdemeanours, an act which is represented to have been scandalous, but was probably necessary. It must be remembered that Sejanus was disgraced because of his practices against Agrippina and Nero; he was immediately killed by the Senate. After his death a deeper plot, and indeed a series of plots, was revealed.

An attempt was made to implicate Caligula in the guilt of these dark transactions, but unsuccessfully. It was on this occasion that Tiberius wrote that despairing cry to the Senate in which Tacitus savagely triumphs--“If I know what I am to write to you, Conscript Fathers, or how I am to write to you, or what indeed I should not write to you at such a time, may the gods and goddesses drag me even into greater depths than those into which I feel that I am sinking day by day.”

In spite of the perplexities that assailed him, Tiberius did not relax his hold upon Greater Rome. Encouraged by rumours of the Emperor’s failure, the Parthians began to intrigue to reverse the order established on the Eastern frontier of the Empire, but they quickly learned that Tiberius, though aged and beaten upon, had not forgotten his diplomacy and still knew where to find, and how to choose, an able officer who could effectually quell any attempt to trifle with the dignity of the Roman name. The general appointed to settle affairs in the East was Lucius Vitellius, whose son was one day to enjoy a short and very inglorious career as Roman Emperor.

During the last three years of the Emperor’s life Caligula rapidly advanced in his favour. He was formally adopted, and was continually named as the Emperor’s heir along with the young Tiberius. The adviser and friend of Caligula at this time was the Jewish prince Agrippa, the half-brother of Herodias, the incestuous wife of Herod Antipas, and grandson of Herod the Great. The election of Caligula as successor to Tiberius is a somewhat puzzling circumstance. Tacitus says that he always showed signs of insanity, but at the same time credits him with great astuteness in winning the old man’s favour. It is more probable, from other accounts, that the madness of Caligula was the result of an illness to which he fell a victim almost immediately after his succession, for that he was technically mad is undeniable. We have a curious picture of him from the pen of Philo the Jew, who arrived from Alexandria with a deputation of Jews to protest against being required to worship Caligula exclusively as a god. The envoys found Caligula superintending the building of one of his palaces at Baiæ. They were introduced to the half-finished edifice, where the Emperor was hurrying from one room to another, feverishly running up and down stairs. He suddenly observed his visitors, and remarking, “So you are those atheists,” vanished; presently he reappeared, and after saying “Why don’t you eat pork?” finally disappeared. It is not likely that Tiberius would have entrusted the fate of the civilized world to a man whose intellect was so obviously disturbed. If, however, we ask who had an interest in the succession of Caligula, the answer is, Agrippa, who, according to Josephus, had found men to finance him in order that he might push his fortunes at Rome. In this he had been somewhat imprudent, and an impatient remark he made to Caligula was reported to Tiberius, who put him under guard for the rest of his reign; on the death of Tiberius he exchanged captivity for the throne of Herod the Great. There is a story that Tiberius, being in doubt as to whether he should nominate his own grandson, the younger Tiberius, or his adopted son Caligula, consulted his diviners, who told him to appoint the one of the two children who should first enter the room after both had been summoned; the Emperor fell in with the suggestion, and the parties interested then contrived that Caligula should be the first to arrive.

The historians do not allow Tiberius even to die in peace. We are told that when he became aware that his health was failing, he was nervously anxious to conceal the fact; he left Capreæ and took up his quarters in the villa of Lucullus on the mainland opposite the island. Having discovered that his physician had surreptitiously felt his pulse, he ordered a better dinner than usual, and ostentatiously enjoyed himself, but the effort was too much for him; he fainted, and a report was immediately spread through the household that he was dead. Caligula was receiving the congratulations of all, and was proceeding to act as Emperor, when there was a rumour that the old man had recovered. At the suggestion of Macro, orders were at once given to smother him beneath a pile of mattresses. The story is finely sensational, but it is to be hoped that it is not true.

Whatever was the exact nature of his end, Tiberius died in the seventy-eighth year of his life, and the twenty-third of his reign, having lived through such vicissitudes of fortune, and such a continuity of hard work, as have rarely fallen to the lot of any human being; but far stranger than the events of his life is the horrible reputation that has attached to the memory of the man who held that in all things princes were bound to consider their good name.

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.

From MARCUS VIPSANIUS AGRIPPA through his children by Julia I, the
daughter of Augustus.

CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR OCTAVIANUS AUGUSTUS

married

I. A daughter of Marcus Antonius and Fulvia, whom he almost
immediately repudiated.

II. Scribonia, related by marriage to the family of Pompeius, issue
one daughter, Julia I.

III. Livia, no issue; but by her previous husband, Tiberius
Claudius Nero, Livia had two sons, Tiberius and Drusus I.

OCTAVIA

married