Chapter XVIII: The Retirement at Capreæ 418 (7)

The habit of scientific veracity is unknown to the Roman historians; any fact is good enough for them, provided it makes good copy, and can be dealt with in a picturesque sentence or neat epigram. They pay little attention to the consecutive order of events, are not always careful to distinguish between persons of the same name, and are rather attracted than otherwise by an opportunity of attributing contradictory qualities to the same person; the time at which a thing was done is of little importance to them, the person by whom it was done of equally little; a good story is to them a good story, and nothing more; if its effect is increased by hanging it on the name of a well known man, they seldom stop to inquire whether he can be justly implicated in the events narrated; consequently it is always agreeable to find their statements corroborated by undesigned coincidences. Paterculus and Suetonius agree in telling us that the last two years of the life of Tiberius at Rhodes were made a burden to him by the sinister influence of Marcus Lollius, but they leave us in some doubt as to who this Marcus Lollius really was, whether he was the same man who was Consul in B.C. 21, and Commander-in-chief in Northern Gaul in B.C. 16, whether the Consul and the General were two different persons, and whether the adviser of Caius Cæsar was not the Consul but his son.

The poet Horace addressed one of his odes and two of his epistles to a Lollius. It has been generally assumed, on the ground of a misunderstood allusion, that the ode was written for the father, and the two letters for the son; comparison of the three shows that they must have been written to the same person, and that that person could not have been Consul in B.C. 21. Letters and ode alike contain advice which Horace could not have addressed even to a man his equal in rank and of his own age without a risk of putting a summary end to any friendship that might have existed between them, still less to a Consular, and possibly a senior. Horace tells us definitely that he was forty-four years of age in the year when Lollius and Lepidus were consuls; the family of Lollius had been hitherto undistinguished; the name appears on no previous occasion in the consular lists, nor had the man himself done anything to suggest him as a fit recipient of premature honours. The legal age for admission to the Consulship was forty-three, and though the law was frequently broken in times of revolution, or in favour of candidates of the Imperial House, Augustus, whose policy was to restore the old as far as it was not incompatible with the new, was not likely to break the law in favour of a man who was not inevitable. It is not likely that Lollius the Consul was one of those young men who were rapidly pushed through the routine of office, because they had claims which could not be disregarded, or because it was necessary to conciliate their families. Horace could not have written, as he did write, to the man who was Consul in B.C. 21.

The second of the two letters included in the collection was certainly written in B.C. 21; the date is fixed by an allusion to the fact that Augustus was at the time away demanding the restoration of the Eagles from the Parthians. The person to whom it was addressed was about to become the companion of some young man of distinction, probably Drusus, for Tiberius was at this time absent with Augustus, and on his return passed under the tutelage of Agrippa, so far as he was not in the hands of Augustus himself. The advice which Horace gives could not be applicable to a man old enough to be Consul, and therefore not in a subordinate position to his charge; but it is strictly applicable to a young man who was to be the companion of another young man, his superior in rank or position. Everything in the letter indicates the youth of Lollius; he was to share in the athletic amusements of his friend; the temptations, which he is to resist, are the temptations of a young man. The advice given is excellent, and might be profitably studied by any young man of the present day, who happens to find himself in a similar situation; some of it is distinctly personal, and tells us what kind of a young man this Lollius was. Horace begins by addressing him as “liberrime Lolli,” “most independent Lollius,” and indicates that one of his dangers is undue sensitiveness to the imputation of servility. He concludes with some general advice not specially applicable to the particular occasion: “In the midst of all you will read the works of learned men, and strictly enquire of them how you may be able to live your life in comfort, whether you are always to be harassed and excited by a sense of poverty, excessive anxiety, and the expectation of but moderate affluence, whether virtue is acquired by learning or given by nature, what dispels care, what puts you on good terms with yourself, what calms and purifies, honour or the pleasures of gain, or the side road, and the path of the unobserved.” We should be at liberty to infer from this that the good qualities of Lollius were balanced by an irritable ambition and a love of money.

The other epistle to Lollius, though he is addressed with mock solemnity in the first line as “most mighty Lollius,” is clearly written to a boy: “while you are spouting Homer at Rome I have read him over again at Præneste.” The recitation of the Homeric poems was an early step in the educational course of the Romans, and preceded the technical course in rhetoric. At the end of the letter Horace says: “Now is the time, boy, to drink in the words of wisdom with a clean heart; present yourself now to the higher influences.” Horace begins with drawing moral lessons from the Homer which he has been reading, and then passes on to general advice: “Don’t wait to enter on the path of virtue, don’t put off your moral discipline, or the time will go by,” “The man who is a slave to cupidity or anxiety cannot enjoy anything,” “Despise sensual pleasures; sensual pleasure is bought with pain and carries a curse,” “The greedy man is always a poor man; fix a limit to your desires,” “The Sicilian tyrants never discovered a worse torture than envy,” “Anger is a short fit of madness; control your temper, it must be slave or despot; bridle it, bind it with chains.”

These might seem to be mere general moralizings, applicable to anybody, but we have already had some of them in the previous letter, and they occur again in the ode addressed to Lollius.

“Lest you should happen to think that the words which I fit to music will perish, I would have you to remember that though Homer stands first, other poets are not unknown. Many heroes have lived and died besides those commemorated by Homer, but their names are lost and their deeds forgotten, because they never found their inspired bard; therefore I will not permit your many virtues, Lollius, to pass unmentioned in my pages. You have an acute intellect, which preserves its balance whether things go well or ill. The man who punishes dishonest avarice, abstaining from money the universal tempter, and is Consul not for one year only, but whenever the good and honest prefer honour to bribes, flings away the gifts of corruption with lofty countenance, and victoriously carries his arms through opposing squadrons. It is not the man with large possessions that you will rightly call happy; he more correctly claims the name who knows how to use the gifts of the gods wisely, and can bear the hardships of poverty and dreads wickedness worse than death; such an one has no fear of dying for the friends he loves or his fatherland.” Even if we admit that the rendering of the tenth and eleventh stanzas of this ode is beset with difficulties, there is no question about the last two with their praise of poverty.

The allusion to the Consulship has tempted commentators to infer that the ode was addressed to Lollius, the father, but it is just as likely, and on other accounts more likely, that the complimentary allusion was made to the son. “Your father is Consul this year; you will be Consul for many years if you abstain from certain temptations.”

In fact, all three poems seem to have been written at about the same time, viz., in the Consulship of the elder Lollius, B.C. 21, whose son was still a boy when he served under Augustus in Spain, his service simply amounting to being present in his father’s company during the campaign.

The situation, in short, seems to have been that Horace was attracted, as other middle-aged men have been attracted, by a spirited, clever, and athletic lad, who seemed to have a great future before him, but whose character was spoiled by three serious defects--a violent temper, restless ambition, cupidity. The attraction was sufficiently mutual to allow Horace to give good advice, which he was careful to present in a complimentary form, but without success, for Paterculus, speaking of the Lollius who was general in Northern Gaul in B.C. 16, and suffered a severe defeat, losing the Eagle of the Fifth Legion, describes him as having been “on all occasions more greedy of money than of acting properly, steeped in vice though a consummate dissembler.” A page or two later he speaks of the misdeeds and death of Marcus Lollius, when acting as adviser of Caius Cæsar in the East.

Lollius may have had an old grudge against Tiberius; he was still a boy when Tiberius, then at the age of seventeen, accompanied Augustus to the Cantabrian War, at which Lollius was also present, and he may already have shown indications of the ungovernable temper which drew forth the monitions of Horace. Then in B.C. 21 he was appointed companion to Drusus, the brother of Tiberius. His abilities rapidly attracted attention; he won the favour of Augustus, and was given a command on the German frontier. He was unsuccessful and was superseded; the war was entrusted to Drusus and Tiberius. After this we do not hear of Lollius in any public capacity till he was made the adviser of Caius Cæsar. It is again not improbable that he attributed his disgrace to the representations of the two Neros, of whom Tiberius was now the sole survivor. The retirement of Tiberius again gave him an opportunity; he again won the favour of Augustus, and went out to the East with Caius, prepared to indulge his grudge against Tiberius. Suetonius definitely tells us that when Caius arrived in the East Tiberius went to visit him at Samos, and found him ill disposed to himself, owing to the representations of his companion and adviser, Marcus Lollius; that this situation lasted for two years; that representations were even made to Augustus to the effect that Tiberius was tampering with the fidelity of the centurions in the army of Caius; that Tiberius, on being informed of this, wrote and begged that a guard might be sent to observe his actions; that he gave up his customary military exercises, and adopted the dress of a Greek civilian; that he became day by day increasingly an object of contempt and hatred, so that the people of Nîmes threw down his statues, and a man ventured to say at a banquet, in the presence of Caius, that he would undertake to start for Rhodes at once and bring back the exile’s head. Tiberius found his position one of actual peril, and again wrote begging to be allowed to return to Rome. He did not obtain this permission till Caius had been consulted on the subject, as Augustus had undertaken to take no step without his consent. Happily Lollius had by this time lost his influence, and Caius raised no objection. Paterculus supplies a link in the chain of events. Lollius, either seeing an opportunity for getting rid of both Caius and Tiberius, and making himself master in the East, or simply in the endeavour to raise suspicions against the latter, had opened a correspondence with the young King of the Parthians, who betrayed it to Caius, with whom he had celebrated a series of entertainments on the river Euphrates, closely resembling those held by Napoleon and the Czar Alexander on the Vistula many centuries later. Lollius died a few days after the disclosure. Paterculus, who was at that time a tribune of soldiers in the army of Caius, did not know whether his death was accidental or self inflicted; he only knew that everybody was delighted, as they were no less grieved by the death of another of the friends of Horace, Censorinus, “a man,” says Paterculus, “born to win the favour of mankind.”

It is characteristic of Suetonius to inform us not that Lollius was dead, but that he had lost favour with Caius, when the latter permitted the return of Tiberius to Rome.

It would seem curious that the contempt and dislike in which Tiberius was held for a short time at Rhodes should have been felt so far away as Nîmes, in the South of France. Suetonius, in mentioning the fact, evidently wishes to imply that this contempt of Tiberius was co-extensive with the Empire; but the strangeness of the fact disappears when we remember that Lucius Cæsar was at this time in the South of France on his way to Spain, and supplies a further link in the chain of evidence which goes to prove the animus of the children of Julia against their stepfather; they were only too ready to listen to the suggestions of a Marcus Lollius and others who proposed to build their fortunes upon the insecure foundation of the favour of these spoiled grandchildren of the great Augustus.

Tiberius returned to Rome in A.D. 2, the year in which Lucius Cæsar died suddenly at Marseilles. He did not propose to return to public life; he gave up his palace in the heart of Rome in the Carinæ, and transferred his establishment to the villa and gardens which Mæcenas had laid out on the Esquiline hill outside the walls. He formally introduced his son Drusus to public life by presenting him in the Forum, but himself abstained from any but private business. Meanwhile Caius Cæsar had gone again to Armenia, where he was severely wounded by a native at a conference to which he had entrusted himself with insufficient precaution. The wound was not immediately fatal, but proved disabling both to mind and body. The young man had been captivated by Oriental luxury, and found flatterers to support him in a design of remaining permanently “in the most distant corner of the world.” He was, however, persuaded to return to Rome, and died on his way back in a Lycian town.

Fate had decided that Tiberius should not evade his responsibilities. He had firmly resisted every attempt made by Augustus to seduce him from his retirement after his return to Rome, but the death of Caius left him no option. Both privately and in the Senate publicly Tiberius protested without avail; it was not a case of “nolo episcopari”; he genuinely preferred a private position, and was, in fact, more in sympathy with the old Republican ideals than with the new dynasty. But the public safety demanded the presence of a man of experience at the head of affairs, ready to take over the succession; and it is in language suitable to this demand that Paterculus describes the joy of the population of Rome when it was known that Tiberius had been adopted by Augustus, and again made a colleague in the tribunician power. “Then again there shone for parents confidence in the future of their children; husbands could feel secure in their marriages, masters in their property; all men could look for safety, rest, peace, calm.”

The style of Paterculus, that of a military man, who has done his best to repair deficiencies in his early education by taking lessons in the art of writing in later life, is so artificial as to impair his credit, but on this occasion his choice of language is strictly correct. The young Cæsars had not been a success; of all the possible heirs to Augustus who died young, they alone are not credited with superior virtues. We are not told of them that if they had lived they would have restored the Republic and checked the flood of adulation. They inherited the petulance of Julia, her impatience of restraint, and while the youth of Tiberius and Drusus had been spent in an atmosphere of insecurity at a time when the power of Augustus himself was not firmly established, the children of Julia had come into a world which had forgotten the civil wars, into a court without the traditions of an ancient dynasty, which saw its models in the seraglio of a Herod or Phraates, and laughed at the republican simplicity of the home of Augustus.

The intemperance of Julia was repeated in the next generation; her eldest daughter, married to a L. Æmilius Paulus, followed in her footsteps, and was likewise banished to an island in A.D. 2. The remaining daughter, Agrippina, was married to Germanicus, the son of Drusus and nephew to Tiberius; she was the mother of Caligula and a grandmother of Nero.

The years between the restitution of Tiberius and the death of Augustus were chiefly spent by the former in campaigns in Germany and Dalmatia, the history of which will be treated separately with greater convenience. It is worth while at this juncture, when Augustus and Tiberius were to settle down to work together for ten years, to investigate the relations between them. Was there on either side jealousy or mistrust? Did Augustus foresee the tyranny of Tiberius, as those who believe in the tyranny would have us believe?

One of the many great literary losses which the world has suffered is the loss of the letters of Augustus. Not only have we lost these letters, but we have also lost the private notes of Tiberius kept by him for the benefit of his successor, and burned by Caligula; the only fragments that we possess of the correspondence of Augustus certainly do not favour the view that there was any mistrust or want of sympathy between the two men.

The fragments as they stand in Suetonius are as follows.

The first was written in reply to a letter of Tiberius, complaining of the violence of language used by one Æmilius Ælianus, a native of Cordova, against the Emperor, and probably belongs to the period of the Cantabrian campaign, when Tiberius was still young. “Do not give way, my dear Tiberius, in this matter to the feelings natural to your time of life; do not be too ready to be indignant that there should be any one to speak evil of me; it is enough if we secure this, that nobody shall be able to do us any harm.”

Then we have two purely domestic letters: “I dined, dear Tiberius, with the same party; Vinicius and the elder Silius were added to the company. During dinner we played a family game both yesterday and to-day, for we threw dice, and whoever threw ‘the dog,’ or six, paid a shilling into the pool for every dice thrown, which was taken by the player who threw ‘Venus.’”

“We spent the holidays pleasantly enough, my dear Tiberius, for we played all day and every day, and made the dice market pretty hot. Your brother carried on with plenty of shouting; on the whole, however, he did not lose much, but recovered his losses contrary to all expectation. I lost about £170 on my own account, but because I had been prodigally liberal in my play, as I usually am; for if I had exacted all the winnings that I passed over, or had kept in my own pocket all that I gave anybody, I should have won nearly £420. However, I like it best as it is, for my charity will exalt me to eternal glory.”

Again a familiar scrap: “Not even a Jew, my dear Tiberius, preserves his sabbath fast so carefully as I did to-day, for it was not till after the first hour of the night that I at last chewed a couple of mouthfuls in the bath, before I began to be perfumed.”

The following letter probably belongs to the period after the return of Tiberius, and was written on some occasion when he was starting on a second campaign It is written with occasional quite unnecessary slips into Greek, which have been mangled in places by the transcribers, so as to be unintelligible: “Goodbye, most amiable Tiberius, and farewell to me and mine ... best of generals. Yes, most amiable, and as I hope for happiness, most brave man, and most illustrious general, farewell. The scheme of your summer operations! Well, I, my dear Tiberius, in the midst of many difficulties and considering the slackness of our military friends, do not think I could have managed matters with greater foresight than you have done. The men who were with you, in fact, all admit that the well known line could be applied to you: ‘One man saved the state for us by his wakefulness.’ Whenever anything happens which requires my closer thought, if ever I am very much put out, I swear to you I miss my dear Tiberius, and that verse of Homer’s occurs to me ‘when he follows....’ When I hear and read that you are getting thin under the continuance of your labours, may I be confounded if my body is not all one shudder, and I implore you to spare yourself, lest, if we hear that you are in bad health, your mother and I may expire, and the Roman people be in jeopardy of losing its imperial position. It does not matter a bit whether I myself am ill or well, if you are not well. I implore the gods to preserve you to us, and to give you your health now and always, if they do not utterly hate the Roman people.”

There is nothing insincere in the tone of this letter; it is as natural as a letter can be, incoherent in places, but always tender.

In fact, whatever misunderstandings arose between Tiberius and Augustus were due to the misconduct of Julia, or the silly plots and counterplots of Livia and the other ladies of the family, who by their domestic jealousies opened the way to the machinations of men of the type of Marcus Lollius. The friendship of the two men passed through the severest possible test, and it survived the test. Augustus may have thought Tiberius too scrupulous in the matter of Julia, and that the second place in the Empire was worth a little conjugal blindness, and even if he did not take that line, there were plenty of men and women ready to suggest it to him. But the sequel proved that Tiberius had been right, and he contrived in the end to assert his independence without being involved in a bitter personal quarrel with Augustus. Nor must too much stress be laid upon such chance utterances as the often quoted “O my Roman people, in what slow jaws you will be chewed!” We do not know the context, and this may very well have been no more than a piece of good-humoured personal banter, suggested by the well-known slowness of speech which was characteristic of Tiberius.

Though Augustus was on good terms with Tiberius, the children of Julia were not; they were more Julian than the head of the Julian race; they noted everything that could be interpreted to his discredit; they recorded every hasty word, every ill-advised speech, and as the years went on their malignity increased, till in the person of Agrippina it amounted to a monomania. But we must pause to study Tiberius as a general.

IX

The Campaigns of Tiberius

With the battle of Actium the wars of Rome against nations equally civilized with herself came to an end; henceforth the rulers of the world were only called upon to round off the ring fence of their domains, and establish scientific frontiers. The Empire which is so often spoken of as the establishment of a military despotism was, in fact, absolutely the reverse; the power wielded by Marius, by Sulla, by Pompeius, by Cæsar, by Antonius, had this character, for it depended upon the military capacity of these generals; they were soldiers in the first place, and owed their predominance in the civil government to their own sharp swords and the fidelity of the men who had followed their standards. Till the Roman was sole umpire in the circle of the Mediterranean, war was in every respect a profitable investment, and a military career was the readiest path to political supremacy; not only did a Roman general return laden with spoil, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, but his conquests appealed to the imagination of his countrymen; everybody might be proud of generals and armies who had beaten the successors of Alexander; but when military operations were transferred to the frontiers, when the enemies to be subdued were poor and half civilized, when there were no longer gorgeous robes, graceful statues, piles of treasure to be exhibited in the triumphal procession of the victorious general, war lost its prestige; and the steady progress of the civilian administration is, in fact, the special feature of the reigns of the Cæsars. Augustus was no soldier; Tiberius never commanded an army after his succession; the expedition of Caligula to the shore of the English Channel was a madman’s freak; Claudius had but little share in the conquest of Britain; Nero’s morbid vanity preferred the triumphs of the stage to those of the camp. A state in which the military element is predominant does not put up with rulers such as these.

The Romans in the reign of Augustus were, so far as military matters are concerned, and indeed, in most other respects, very much in our own position at the present day. Just as we thoughtlessly and unjustly estimate the exploits of our soldiers in the Soudan, on the North-West frontier of India, on the West Coast of Africa, and even in South Africa, rather cheaply, and disparage their achievements in comparison with those of Marlborough and Wellington, so the contemporaries of Augustus looked back with regret to the heroes of the Punic Wars and the conquerors of Greece; they did not realize that the work which was to be done in their own time was far more difficult than the work which had been done. We too forget that to win the Battle of Waterloo was a trifle compared with the operations which led up to the victory of Omdurman, and the double march into the Transvaal. The exploits of Wellington in the Peninsula were splendid, impeded as they were by opposition from England; but in the conquest of South Africa England has grappled with far more serious difficulties, and her generals have shown themselves at least as resourceful as Wellington.

The generals of the Augustan age are hardly known to us. Few class Agrippa with the leading generals of the world, but the man who for the first time organized the navy of the Roman Empire, who maintained the organization of the army on such a footing that the enormous frontier was never without its defenders, who was himself never beaten in the field, and who trained a succession of capable officers to follow in his footsteps, was no mean general. Similarly Tiberius and his brother, along with many capable subordinates, waged successful campaigns under conditions of peculiar difficulty for many years; but we never think of them as great soldiers, because their exploits did not stir the imagination of their contemporaries.

Vast though the Roman Empire was, its vulnerable frontiers were of relatively small extent in the reign of Augustus; there was a weak place at the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates; the Upper Nile had its Soudanese difficulty then as now, but the whole of the North Coast of Africa was protected by the desert, and the Mauretanian tribes were not numerous enough really to imperil the strip of civilization along the Mediterranean. Spain was all Roman and nearly all civilized, so was Gaul; but between the mouths of the Rhine and the Bosphorus there was a vast unsettled region, reaching down in one place to a point within ten days’ journey of Rome itself, and along an unbroken line of many hundred miles, threatening the cities of Macedonia and Greece. The problem before Augustus and his generals was to form a frontier which should permanently secure Gaul, Italy, and the Balkan Peninsula from the adventurous races of central and East Central Europe.

The weakest point in the chain of defence was the Northern corner of the Adriatic, and the increasing prosperity of the great plains of the Po after they had become a Roman province naturally attracted the attention of the semi-civilized tribes who lived in the hills along the Dalmatian coast. Not only was there danger from the East, but the valley of the Adige formed a gateway through which Central Europe could pour its restless multitudes upon the Cis-Alpine Province. The geographical configuration of the regions south of the plains of the Eastern Danube has always impeded their progress, and to this very day a patch of backward nationalities remains there in close proximity to the most elaborately civilized states of Europe.

The other weak spot was the course of the Rhine, and especially the country below the Drakensberg; that noble river for many miles from the Lake of Constance formed a natural defence against the Germanic hordes, but on reaching the flat land below Cologne it spread into marshes and split into smaller channels, in which flotillas of boats could be prepared without attracting notice, as was necessarily the case where the river ran in a single stream. In fact it was practically found that in places the Rhine was no barrier, and that the tribes on its Eastern bank must be rolled back from the river, if Gaul was to enjoy her new prosperity in peace.

It was in the defence of these two weak spots that Tiberius was to fight his chief campaigns. In both regions security demanded that the operations should be conducted far beyond the frontier, in country difficult at the present day, and tenfold more difficult then, when extensive forests and marshes were added to the impediments offered by ravines and mountains.

It is not easy to estimate the degree of civilization reached by the Pannonians and Dalmatians or the Germanic tribes, when they made war upon the Roman legions. To the ancients all men living under tribal or national institutions were barbarians; they restricted the honour of civilization to those whose political constitution was based upon the city, and though the Græco-Roman city organization practically covered the two peninsulas, which we call Greece and Italy, it did not elsewhere extend far inland; the outer fringe of cities was in close contact with populations living under a clan system, whose chiefs or kings adopted many of the luxuries and some of the institutions of their neighbours; behind these again were less advanced nations and less civilized rulers, gradually merging into real barbarism. The Gallic chieftains had already been in frequent communication with Rome for a century before Cæsar conquered Gaul, and the influence of the Roman traders upon the general standard of civilization was perceptible in his time even among the German tribes nearest to the Rhine. Arminius had had a Roman education, Maroboduus was brought up by Augustus, adopted the Roman military system and welcomed refugees who could train his troops; Latin was already spoken by the Dalmatian tribes when they were eventually conquered by Tiberius. Though the greater part of Central Europe was under forest the valleys were cultivated, as they were in Britain at the time of Cæsar’s invasions, but the forest was always near enough to receive fugitives, and to give cover to an attacking party. There were no large aggregations of human beings in towns, but there were areas sufficiently thickly populated, and their population was sufficiently well organized to bring formidable armies into the field, whose operations were skilfully conducted. The men were no more savages than the Boers are savages; their civilization was a different civilization from the Græco-Roman, but it was a civilization. The occurrences of the Highland Line were anticipated in the foothills of the Alps; sometimes there was a mere cattle-lifting raid, when a predecessor of Rob Roy swooped down upon the farms round Mantua or Cremona, sometimes a combination of clans under a capable chieftain waged a formidable war, whose object was less plunder than the preservation of their independence; sometimes the pressure of real savagery from behind urged the more civilized races forward till the ultimate wave fell upon the Roman frontier.

Far in the East round the mouths of the Danube the predecessors of the Cossacks on their little horses kept the Roman outposts in a state of terror. Ovid tells us how they swooped down upon the labourers in the fields round the camp at Tomi, how their arrows fell into its very centre, how they galloped round its walls, picked up some unfortunate straggler, and were off with him before pursuit could be organized. Reading such a description as this we realize the true significance of the two Roman walls in England, and the wall from the Main to the Danube in Germany. They were not defences against systematic war; they were too long to be defended against an organized invasion, but they effectually prevented raiding. Cattle cannot be lifted over a wall twelve feet high. The difference between our frontier wars and the Roman frontier wars lies in the proximity of the Roman frontiers to the heart of the Empire; but in spite of the perpetual imminence of the danger, the Romans did not pay a sufficient tribute of gratitude to the generals who secured their safety, and were inclined to underestimate their services.

Even such a clear-sighted historian as Merivale, in speaking of the military operations of Tiberius and Drusus in Germany, adopts the attitude of Tacitus, and disparages the cautious policy of Augustus, which discouraged schemes of boundless conquest in Central Europe. Tacitus wrote, when Trajan was engaged in rectifying the frontier of the Lower Danube, new dangers threatened the Empire and new measures seemed advisable. The men of his day might be pardoned for thinking that they were called upon to do what Augustus had unwisely left undone. Possibly they were right, but they omitted from their calculations a fact which was of the first importance, and of itself imposed prudence. The fighting strength of the Empire was not adequate for a policy of indefinite expansion at the end of the reign of Augustus, nor even in its middle period. It was difficult to steer between the two extremes. Augustus had seen the evils of a rampant military policy in the careers of his uncle and Antonius; he had known what it was to be the puppet of his own soldiers; he had fought in the Civil Wars, and he rightly inferred that there could be no settled government so long as the sword outbalanced the gown. Quite apart from any personal ambition or mean motive, he shrank from creating fresh military heroes, who might be tempted to overthrow the carefully balanced fabric of the State, and renew the Marian and Sullan episodes, or the hateful reign of the Triumvirate in which he had himself taken an unwilling part. On the other hand, a certain strength was necessary to police the Empire and guard its frontiers. In the encouragement which he gave to civilians in the public service, in the revival of commerce, and the abundance of employment secured by the internal peace of the Empire, Augustus cut off his supply of recruits; the army no longer competed favourably with other employments, and year by year the number of homeless and ruined men, to whom military service had opened an opportunity, was reduced. Men were too precious to be lightly ventured on interminable expeditions in the Hercynian forest, where the elk, and possibly even the mammoth, still tested the ingenuity of the hunter.

At the age of seventeen Tiberius accompanied Augustus and Agrippa to Spain, where a campaign was conducted in the mountainous regions occupied by the Cantabrians. Augustus soon fell ill and returned home, but Tiberius remained to take his first lessons in war under the able and ingenious Agrippa. The Romans wisely flung their young men into active life at a very early age, and those who had it in them to learn, had every opportunity of learning. Four years later Tiberius, barely of age to manage his own affairs according to our ideas, was put in command of the expedition which penetrated Armenia, and awed the Parthians into a surrender of the captured standards. We are not told that there was any serious fighting on this occasion; the triumph was one of diplomacy rather than of arms, and the expedition itself took the form of an armed demonstration strong enough to determine the course of the negotiations rather than of a campaign. Doubtless Tiberius was attended by capable advisers in addition to those splendid centurions, the link between the commissioned and non-commissioned officers, who formed the backbone of the Roman armies; but in any case the experience was a valuable one. It was necessary that the army should be conducted through a difficult and mountainous country, far from its base; any negligence, any want of foresight, might have brought on a disaster which, even if only temporary, would have spoiled the effect contemplated, and weakened the Roman Plenipotentiaries. The expedition was a better training than even a long course of autumn manœuvres, and Tiberius returned from it with a full knowledge of military problems.

The extraordinary indifference of the historians Paterculus and Suetonius to chronology, and their absolutely casual use of such connectives as “hereupon,” “soon afterwards,” and the like, makes it difficult to be certain of the real sequence of events. It is, however, certain that Tiberius was Governor of Transalpine Gaul for a year at some period between B.C. 20 and B.C. 16, that he was harassed during the term of his Governorship by sporadic invasions of German tribes, and was able to measure their importance as affecting the peace of his Province, and form plans for permanently checking them. He came to the conclusion that the whole middle and eastern Alpine region was a centre of disturbance, and that it could not be dealt with alone, seeing that the tribes who lived on the Dalmatian coast and at the sources of the Save were always ready to create a diversion when the Roman armies were occupied in the valleys to the south or north-west of the Alps. Cæsar had more than once been called back from the conquest of Gaul to deal with the Pirustæ in the same quarter.

In B.C. 16 the ill-omened Marcus Lollius sustained a serious defeat at the hands of the German tribes, while Gaul itself had been rendered unquiet by the exactions of Licinus, himself a Gaul employed by Augustus as Governor in the Southern Province. Augustus himself went to Gaul to set straight the civilian administration, Agrippa was sent to the Illyrian regions, Drusus to the passes leading from Lombardy to the Upper Rhine, while Tiberius took charge of an expedition directed upon the same region from Basle by the Lake of Constance. This was the first of the great combined movements originated by Tiberius; their conception, but even more their success, mark him out as a general of genius. Given a mobile enemy able to live on the country, and provided with an interminable area at his rear into which he can retreat, the only hope of dealing with him successfully is to cut off his retreat. This was the strategy of Tiberius.

The army of Agrippa in Illyria protected the rear of Drusus, who was able to drive the Alpine tribes back through the passes to the Northern face of the Alps, where they found the army of Tiberius ready for them. The victory was so complete that the very names of these tribes disappear from history; squeezed between two Roman armies they were doubtless exterminated. Horace wrote an official ode on the occasion, comparing Drusus to a young eagle or lion; and in a complimentary ode to Augustus on another occasion, compared the charge of Tiberius to the impetuous floods of the Aufidus, his native river. The northern slopes of the Western Alps were now secured to Rome; there was no longer any danger of Gallic intrigues stimulated by the restless Helvetii, but the work was by no means done. Augustus seems to have remained for some time in Gaul studying its social conditions, Agrippa remained in the Illyrian district, Drusus was sent to the lower Rhine, and Tiberius, as far as we can gather, remained at Rome.

Profiting by the experience gained in the recent war, Drusus determined to repeat the strategy of Tiberius, and again to hem in an elusive enemy between two Roman armies; he himself marched up the Lippe, making a point on the Weser, somewhere near Paderborn, his objective, and at the same time he sent a flotilla down the Rhine, with instructions to ascend the mouth of the Weser, and thus cut off the flight of the Germans. The first attempt failed, the fleet being dispersed by storms; it was reserved for Tiberius himself to succeed at a later date in this combined movement. In the following year Drusus advanced to the Weser, and on his return established a permanent outpost at Aliso, fifty miles up the Lippe; this was the period of the death of Agrippa, whose command in Pannonia was taken over by Tiberius. We know but little of the operations of Tiberius in Pannonia at this time, except that they were successful, and that the ring of Roman provinces was now completed along the East coast of the Adriatic, uniting Greece and Macedonia with Italy.

In B.C. 10 Augustus returned to Gaul; Drusus consecrated a temple in his honour at Lyons, and the worship of the Roman Empire personified in Augustus was officially substituted for the Druidical religion, in whose priesthood Augustus saw the irreconcilable enemy of Rome. After this ceremony Drusus again crossed the Rhine and penetrated as far as the Elbe; on his return he met with the accident which caused his death, and elicited that touching illustration of affection on the part of Tiberius, to which reference has already been made.

Tiberius took up his brother’s work on the Rhine and remained there for two years; he has disappointed the historians by doing nothing sensational, but when at the end of the two years Augustus called him back to Rome to take the place of Imperial Colleague, he left the Roman frontier extended, and the German terror pushed back from the immediate vicinity of the river. He had created a Roman party among the German chiefs, as Cæsar had created a Roman party among the Gallic chiefs; partly as hostages, partly as friends, the young German nobles were tempted to Rome to learn her civilization and form estimates of her weakness; the Eastern bank of the river was sufficiently Romanized to tempt Varus to treat it fifteen years later as a Roman province. Tiberius did more than this: he began that policy which was eventually to substitute for the magnificent conception of the all-embracing Roman Empire the map of Europe; he transferred 40,000 Germans to the left bank of the Rhine; they accepted the lands assigned to them, coupled with the obligation to service in the armies of their conquerors. It was a perilous policy, but no one could have foreseen its results in the distant future, and even if its tendencies had been suspected at the time, the pressing needs of the Empire would have silenced the voice of a too clear-sighted critic. The Empire was short of soldiers; men evaded military service by all possible means. Even the dreaded slavery of the ergastula seemed to them less terrible than the army; pay could not be found to make the soldier’s career sufficiently attractive, now that the chances of loot and liberal donatives were of the smallest. The finances of the Empire were straitened; Augustus had had difficulty in adding a death duty of five per cent. to his resources. The suggestion of Tiberius must have seemed a stroke of genius: to protect the frontiers by civilizing the enemies of the Empire, to find a cheap supply of soldiers by imposing military service on the hardy Germans, gradually to relieve the manufacturer and the merchant of the burden of finding men and taxes; no words could praise too highly the man who had suggested a means by which these desirable objects could be secured. We ourselves are treading in the same path; we congratulate ourselves on the wisdom which made English soldiers of Highland clansmen and Irish rapparees, which has arrayed against Russia the tribes of the North-West frontier, which fights the barbarians of Central Africa with the trained barbarians of its coasts; but we too shall have to pay the price which the Roman paid, if we neglect the military training of the centre of the Empire, and allow its population to expand unexercised in arms, incapable of fighting. If ever the day comes when the Sikhs and Goorkhas or even our own children beyond the seas learn by experience that preponderant force is in their own hands, and that the breed of fighting men is not ready for action in Great Britain, the Empire of England will be broken up, as the Empire of Rome was broken up; not by any sudden cataclysm, but by the gradual intrusion of the less civilized and less trained components of the Empire upon the central administration.

The end of the government of Tiberius upon the Rhine was also the beginning of his retirement; his resumption of public work was almost immediately followed by a fresh outbreak in the Pannonian region, and then came a terrible disaster to the Roman arms in the district of the Rhine. Of the campaigns which followed we fortunately have a fairly clear account given us by an eyewitness, Paterculus.

Unfortunately the only work from the pen of Paterculus that has come down to our times, perhaps the only work that he completed, is a short epitome of Roman history from the beginning to A.D. 30, which seems to have been written as an introduction to a work of considerable detail dealing with the campaigns in which the author and the relatives of his friend Marcus Vinicius, to whom the work is dedicated, took part. Paterculus belonged to the class of professional soldiers and administrators whom the Empire called into being, or to whom at least it gave a position which they had not hitherto enjoyed. In his eyes the Empire was good, and its rulers were good; and while he is profuse in his admiration of the heroes of the old Republic, and can pay as high a tribute to Cicero as to any supporter of the Empire, he is no less commendatory of the men who were brought to the front by the new order of things. He does not single out Tiberius as alone worthy of praise; such men as Marcus Lepidus, the son of the triumvir, and others who were in a position to excite the jealousy of a suspicious tyrant, enjoy a full share of his somewhat exuberant laudation. We may admit that Paterculus was uncritical without accusing him of deliberate dishonesty; he was a successful man; he was in the swim; he had no reason for nicely adjusting praise and censure to meet the merits of the men with whom he worked; he was not a frequenter of the Legitimist drawing rooms, but an active capable official, bluff, hearty, with an unfortunate propensity to consider himself a stylist. His grandfather was, as we have seen, an intimate friend and fellow soldier of the father of Tiberius; his father was also a soldier; he himself followed the family profession; he served under Caius Cæsar in Armenia, under Agrippa in Pannonia, under Tiberius both in Germany and Pannonia; he was honoured with civil magistracies at Rome, and eventually became a Senator; his brother was similarly successful. His value to us lies in the fact that he was an eyewitness of the events which he describes, and we may be sure that the few details which he thought worthy of mention in his rapid summary are actual facts. M. Vinicius was Consul in A.D. 30, and the honour enjoyed by his friend prompted Paterculus to write and dedicate this little work. In the following year the events took place which brought about the fall of Sejanus, whom Paterculus praises highly; possibly he was one of those upon whom the wrath of the Senate fell; in any case we hear nothing more of him, and his proposed work was never written, or never published; he died, or at any rate ceased to speak, before the reign of terror which accompanied the fall of Sejanus had cast its shadow upon Tiberius, before the reigns of Caligula and Nero had made it possible to believe every evil of a Roman Emperor, before the novelty of the Empire had worn off; there was no reason for adopting any but an optimistic tone.

Tiberius left Rome for Germany in A.D. 4; war had been going on there for three years, the Roman general being then a Marcus Vinicius, grandfather of the Consul to whom Paterculus dedicated his book. Paterculus accompanied Tiberius, and was generally with him during the nine years of his campaigns; he seems to have been a member of the headquarters staff, succeeding his father as commander of the cavalry. He says: “For nine years in succession, either as cavalry commander or staff officer, I was a spectator of his most heavenly operations, and assisted him in the measure permitted by my own mediocrity.” The epithet strikes us as exuberant, but it is frequently used by Paterculus, and not reserved for Tiberius; he employs it in speaking of the eloquence of Cicero. The historian tells us of the incidents of the journey through the most populous regions of Italy and the provinces of Gaul; he describes the joy with which the inhabitants welcomed their former governor, while the soldiers pressed to seize his hand, and shouted, “Do we really see you, General? Have we got you safe again? I served with you in Armenia, I in Rhætia, I was rewarded by you in Vindelicia, I in Pannonia, I in Germany.”

The first year’s campaign extended to the Weser, and was continued to the month of December; Tiberius then returned to Rome, leaving his soldiers in winter quarters near the sources of the Lippe. He was back again early in the following spring, and in this year successfully completed the operation in which Drusus had failed, on a more extended scale; he made the Elbe, not the Weser, his objective, and sent round a fleet to meet his troops with fresh supplies. Paterculus attributes the success of this enterprise not only to the good fortune and diligence of the Commander-in-Chief, but to his careful study of the seasons. On this occasion the Romans first came across the Lombards, “a race whose courage surpassed even German ferocity”; they seem to have been settled on the East of the Elbe in the region of Magdeburg. Paterculus has a doubtless true story of an elderly German who asked to be allowed to see Tiberius, and on receiving permission paddled across the Elbe; after having stared at him for some time he touched his hand, and declaring that he had now beheld the gods, bewailed the folly of his young men who insisted on fighting with their superiors; he then returned to his boat, and departed across the Elbe, still keeping his eyes on the group of Roman officers. There is nothing improbable in this story; savages are particularly impressed by size, and the stately form of Tiberius, glorious in such a uniform as we see on the Augustus of the Prima Porta, may well have appeared superhuman to the uncultured Lombard.

The practical results of the campaign were to convince Tiberius that an eastward extension of the Roman frontier was alike impracticable and undesirable; the problem was to find a defensible line of outposts near the Rhine and overawe the tribes who lived beyond it; but before Tiberius had time to rectify the frontier he was called off to deal with a far more serious war nearer Italy.