Chapter XVIII: The Retirement at Capreæ 418 (8)

Maroboduus, the King of the Marcomanni, settled his followers in the neighbourhood of Vienna, having formed the idea of creating a great military power in Germany; it was the first conception of a German Empire, for many tribes were to be united in the confederacy by which the aggressions of Rome were to be stopped, and the tide of invasion possibly turned in the opposite direction. This man, a Suevian by birth, had been a hostage, and was brought up under the care of Augustus at Rome; in this case, as in several others, the policy of educating a native prince, so that he might bring his people under Roman civilization, proved to be of doubtful advantage. Maroboduus applied the lessons which he learned at Rome to resisting the extension of the Empire. He got together a force of 70,000 foot and 4,000 cavalry, drilled them carefully in the Roman fashion, and fixed upon Bohemia as the suitable centre of his Empire. He did not attack the Romans, that was not his first object; he wished to civilize Germany and create a counterpoise to Rome. Tiberius saw that this could not be permitted; the proposed German Empire was too near the turbulent Pannonian region for safety; it was necessary to nip the nascent civilization of Central Europe in the bud. In order finally to break the power of Maroboduus, Tiberius decided to carry out another of those vast combined operations in which he had already twice succeeded. He sent Sentius Saturninus with one army to march from the Rhine through the Hercynian forest to the Danube, while he himself brought up another army from Cis-Alpine Gaul through the Julian Alps. The operation was so admirably planned and its details so well considered, that the two armies found themselves each within five days of their meeting point, when a fresh outbreak of Pannonia and Dalmatia threatened Tiberius in the rear, and compelled him to take his army back to another scene of war. Though this great operation failed in one way, it seems to have succeeded in another; it effectually cowed Maroboduus, who did not intervene, as might have been anticipated, in the Pannonian troubles, while it shook the confidence of the Germans in their self-appointed Emperor; we find him at a later time a fugitive living under the protection of Rome.

The precision with which Tiberius was able to time the arrival of the army of Saturninus indicates a greater knowledge of the geography of the districts north of the Alps, and a less savage condition of those regions, than the statements of Cæsar would lead us to imagine possible. We can hardly take literally the statement of Paterculus that Sentius was told to cut through the Hercynian forest; such work may have been necessary on the watershed of the Neckar and the Danube, or, if, as is most probable, the advance was made by a more northerly route, between the Main and the Danube, but when once in the basin of the Danube, the Roman soldiers must have found their way fairly open, and they must further have found sufficient supplies of food. The central uplands of Germany were then as now covered with forests and more thickly covered, but there must have been known tracks along which an army could be led. In the southern basin of the Upper Danube, after the conquest of the Vindelici, a Roman military colony had been founded at Augsburg, indicating that measures were rapidly taken to sweep the rich country north of the Alps into the net of the Empire. Everywhere the traders, whose chief business was slave hunting, pushed in advance of the Roman armies, and Tiberius was thus able to get sufficiently accurate information to launch an army upon the country north of Vienna from the north-west, timed to meet his own advance from the south-east. The conception was a daring one, and the accuracy with which it was carried out would be admirable even today. To render such elaborate strategy successful a commander must not only be able to plan accurately, but he must be able to depend on the obedience of his subordinates and possess their absolute confidence.

The rising in Pannonia was of a very serious nature. During the interval of seventeen years since Tiberius had last waged war in that direction the country had become so far Romanized as to have adopted to a large extent the language of its conquerors; garrisons of veterans had been established, and the war began with a general slaughter of these, of resident Roman citizens and of travelling merchants. The province of Macedonia was invaded and devastated. At Rome panic prevailed; Augustus publicly declared that the enemy was within ten days’ march of the city; levies were held, veterans were called back to the colours, and men and women alike were compelled to enfranchise a certain proportion of their slaves according to the amount of their assessed property, that they might be enrolled in the armies. Paterculus was put in command of the reinforcements that were sent to Tiberius from Rome.

The war lasted for three years, and was eventually ended partly by diplomacy, partly by the patient strategy of Tiberius. Great pitched battles were impossible in that difficult country, and the strategy of the enemy did not permit them. Tiberius kept dividing the forces of his opponents, cutting off the supplies of the isolated detachments, and conquered them in detail. Paterculus particularly admires his prudence in breaking up his own forces after finding that the numbers, on which others were disposed to rely, were too unwieldy to be effective; he spread his winter quarters over the country, and himself spent the cold season at Siscia, high up in the hills near the sources of the Save.

Paterculus does not give us a consecutive account of the campaigns, but he mentions a few personal details with reference to Tiberius, both on this campaign and on the subsequent one in Germany after the Varian disaster, which are worth quoting.

“During the whole of the war in Germany and Pannonia, no one of us or of those above or below our rank was ever ill without finding that his health and safety were attended to by the care of Cæsar, in such a way that his mind seemed to be so free from the weight of all its other burdens as to be concentrated on this task alone. For those who desired it there was a composite vehicle ready, his litter assigned to the general benefit, whose advantages I experienced along with others; physicians, food, all the apparatus of a bath, carried for this purpose alone, were ready for every invalid; home and servants alone were wanting, but nothing was missing which they could supply or need. I will add a fact which everybody who was present at that time will recognize at once along with other things which I have related; he alone always rode, always dined sitting along with his guests during the greater part of the summer campaigns; he was indulgent to breaches of discipline, provided there was no bad example; he frequently advised, sometimes reproved, very rarely punished, and took a middle course, being blind to most faults, checking others.”

This is the first mention of a field hospital, reserved, apparently, for the use of the staff and their attendants. Other Roman generals took an elaborate bath establishment with them on their campaigns for their own use: Tiberius utilized it only for the sickness of others. Other generals travelled in carts or on a litter: Tiberius always rode. He took his meals like an active man in a sitting posture, not lying at full length after the customary Roman fashion.

Suetonius declares that in the German wars Tiberius proved to be a martinet, and mentions the case of an officer who was severely punished for sending his freedmen to hunt on the opposite side of the Rhine contrary to orders. Tiberius would indeed have been a bad general if he had neglected to punish a gross violation of discipline, which by revealing the presence of his force might spoil a carefully devised operation. Similarly Suetonius sees excessive severity in the strictness with which Tiberius cut down the transport of officers. Those better versed in the difficulties of warfare will be inclined to take a different view. There were fashionable and luxurious officers then as now, whom it was essential to keep in order. Doubtless some one of these cherished his grievance and left it recorded in his memoirs to be added to the evidence compiled by the historians of a later age.

A mysterious transaction with the Pannonian chief Bato, who was spared after the surrender because he had allowed Tiberius and his troops to slip through an encircling force on one occasion, suggests that diplomacy was employed, as well as arms, in bringing about the surrender of the Pannonians, though it is possible that Tiberius accompanied an act of kindness with an ironical reference to an occasion on which he had outwitted Bato.

The Pannonian war was barely concluded before Tiberius was called off to the Rhine; he left his nephew Germanicus to finish his work east of the Adriatic, and hurried to the scene of his former victories in Germany. Quintilius Varus, the Governor of the Southern German Marches, had been enticed into a trap by the German patriot Arminius, and slain along with two legions, the greater part of a third, and their complement of cavalry and light-armed troops. Arminius, like Maroboduus, had been educated at Rome; he was even a Roman citizen and a member of the Equestrian Order; he too had measured the weakness of Rome, and was only waiting for a favourable opportunity to strike. The rising was organized on a great scale; the Gauls who lived in the country round Vienne were tampered with, the object being to check the advance of a Roman army across the Alps. Fortunately they were only half-hearted in the cause, and were easily suppressed by Tiberius on his way northwards. More serious were the movements on the lower Rhine. The great camp which had been fortified originally by Drusus at Aliso on the Lippe was invested, and a general rising of the tribes who had been settled on the west bank of the Rhine was only prevented by the decision of Lucius Asprenas, who without waiting for the arrival of Tiberius marched two legions down the river. The garrison of Aliso succeeded in cutting its way through the enemy.

In assigning to Varus the command of the Rhine Augustus had been premature. Varus was a civilian rather than a soldier, and his mission was to consolidate the Rhine frontier by the arts of peace, and by bringing the comparatively uncivilized Germans to recognize the blessings of Roman law. It is more than probable that even as a civil administrator he was not particularly upright; he had previously been Governor of Syria, and, according to Paterculus, enjoyed the reputation of having found that province rich and left it poor. He had repressed the military ardour of his subordinates, adopting a policy of conciliation, and deliberately closing his eyes to the necessity of armed interference when events showed that it was advisable. His ruling passion was love of money; in other respects he was inactive both in mind and body, a man of preconceived ideas, such a man as has on other occasions and in other places invited disaster. Arminius fooled him to the top of his bent, the Germans invited him to settle their quarrels according to the honoured forms of Roman law; he was gradually enticed with his force further and further away from the frontier; the summer operations took the form of a judge’s circuit. Meanwhile the German forces gradually closed in behind his rear. Varus was deaf to the remonstrances of his officers and to the information given him by a German rival of Arminius. At last when the pedantic Governor had been successfully lured into a hopeless position Arminius struck. The Roman soldiers, having no confidence in their leader, were completely demoralized; they were slaughtered literally like sheep, sacrificed to the gods of the Germans. The commander of the Roman cavalry basely deserted the infantry and tried to secure his own safety, but was cut down with all his force before he could reach the Rhine. Varus himself committed suicide; his example is said to have been followed by some Roman youths, who, having been taken prisoners, dashed out their brains with their own fetters.

The situation, however, was not so grave as it might have been. Arminius sent the head of Varus to Maroboduus, but that chieftain, either from want of confidence or from jealousy of a rival, took the Roman side, and transmitted the relic with a friendly message to Augustus.

It is not incumbent upon us to believe that after this disaster the aged Emperor acquired a habit of dashing his head against the wall, and crying, “Varus, Varus, give me back my legions!” but that the calamity was a sufficient one to disturb his equanimity seriously is self-evident. Soldiers had been found only with great difficulty for the Pannonian war, as we have seen; the recall of veterans to the standards was always considered a desperate measure, and still more desperate was the employment of slaves as soldiers; the absolute destruction of two whole legions and six cohorts along with their cavalry meant a loss of 17,300 men, as large a force as the permanent garrison of Italy. It imposed upon Tiberius the necessity of husbanding his men, even if he had not been naturally disposed to circumspection, for nearly a tenth part of the whole Roman army had been wiped out.

Tiberius quickly avenged the army of Varus; he swept through the country, leaving devastation behind him, but he failed to capture the ringleaders of the revolt. During this campaign, in which he was soon joined by Germanicus, he abandoned his ordinary policy of acting entirely on his own initiative and without consultation with his staff; he carefully explained to them the reason of all his movements. In fact, he now set to work to educate his successors, for he saw that other duties would shortly prevent his personal activity in the field.

Both Augustus and Tiberius have been reproached with an unadventurous policy on the German frontier. Augustus discouraged the distant expeditions of Drusus into the heart of Germany, and Tiberius was to be accused of jealousy in the near future in similarly restraining the ardour of Germanicus, but those who lightly make these charges overlook the difficulties of the problem. The conquest of the basin of the Mediterranean had been a conquest of civilized peoples, who knew when they were beaten, and who once having accepted the arbitrament of the Roman arms found acquiescence in the Roman domination the best security for civilization. But the conquest of Central Europe was another matter; in one sense there was nothing to be gained by it. When Tiberius met his fleet upon the Elbe, he had traversed many miles of that desolate flat of Northern Europe which has only been gradually reclaimed from the wilderness and rendered fertile by the patient labour of many centuries. There was no trade. There were, so far as he knew, no minerals, there was nothing to invite settlers in the endless marshes, and to an Italian the climate was detestable. If, on the other hand, he turned his attention to the hill country, there was the same absence of attractions; even if the valleys were cultivated they were too far off, and the climate was too severe to enable them to compete with the more accessible territory of Gaul; the mineral treasures of the hills were as yet undiscovered, and even if they had been discovered, they were practically inaccessible. It seemed wiser, and more immediately practicable, to limit the expansion of the Empire to the lines suggested by the Danube and the Rhine, and to spread such a terror of the Roman name beyond those limits as would secure the settlers on the outlying lands from attack. This policy was partly realized; it was not fully realized, and the German frontier remained the running sore of the Roman Empire till the Empire itself became German, and even then fresh hordes were to push on from Central Asia. Nor was the Empire absolutely at peace within itself; there were still sporadic outbreaks to be dealt with even in Gaul and Spain, still African tribes threatening Mauretania and Egypt, still the ever-watchful Parthian in the East. Augustus rightly considered that the expansion of the Empire was ended, and that the time for purposeless conquests had gone by.

With the German campaign Tiberius ended his career as a general. Twenty years of his life had been spent in the field, and though his name is associated with no dazzling victories, it is equally free from any suspicion of failure. Had he suffered even minor reverses, his critics would not have failed to make the most of them; but there is not a suggestion of anything of the kind, and the silence of less friendly historians supports the opinion which Paterculus held of his leader’s merits. Of the two brothers Drusus was the more dashing soldier, as he was the more generally attractive man, but Tiberius was the greater general; and his services to the Empire were none the less solid because in comparison with the brilliant feats of Cæsar they were inconspicuous. Perhaps we should have formed a higher opinion of the value of Tiberius in the field had he too been able to leave his commentaries; but, alas! his exploits are concealed in an almost impenetrable night along with those of the brave men who lived before Agamemnon. His three great combined movements, that by which the Vindelici were conquered behind the Alps, the ferocious Longobardi frightened on the Elbe, and Maroboduus cowed in Bohemia, anticipated similar great operations of Napoleon.

X

The Last Years of Augustus

Twenty-nine years after the battle of Actium the Senate, by the voice of one of the noblest of their order, Marcus Valerius Messala, hailed Augustus as the “Father of his Country.” The now aged Emperor burst into tears, and declaring that he had reached the summit of his ambition, prayed to the gods that they would allow him, so long as life lasted, to continue to be worthy of the confidence thus expressed by his countrymen. The title had perhaps been somewhat soiled by use; Cicero had arrogated it to himself after that exhibition of consummate statesmanship which quelled the conspiracy of Catiline, but it was none the less a tribute to the singleness of purpose with which Augustus had devoted himself to the welfare of the vast Empire committed to his care. In the press of daily business and vexatious details Augustus may often have failed to perceive how general was the recognition of his services to the State, and we can pardon the display of uncontrolled emotion which interrupted his customary calm on receiving this solemn assurance that his labours had not been in vain.

As a matter of fact at this time, and for the rest of his life, Augustus had no enemies save those of his own household. There was no political opposition to the Emperor; small conspiracies such as those of Murena and Cæpio there had been, the work of hot-headed youths who wished to emulate the example of Brutus, and there were, as we have seen, intrigues in the Emperor’s own family. As Suetonius mentions among the plots directed against Augustus one in which Lucius Æmilius Paullus, the husband of the younger Julia was concerned, we are at liberty to suspect that in her case, as in her mother’s, it was thought better to punish a graver offence as a case of domestic misconduct. It was on this occasion that the poet Ovid learned that there is a limit to the liberties which a man of fashion can allow himself, and was forced to withdraw from his butterfly existence at Rome to the mosquito-haunted swamps at the mouth of the Danube, where he wrote poems more worthy of his dignity than any he had previously composed.

The power of the Emperor was based largely on his patronage. The Empire had been divided between the Emperor and the Senate; those provinces in which it was necessary to maintain a standing and mobilized army, in which swift action, continuous authority, and unity of purpose were imperatively necessary, were governed by Augustus as a private estate; their highest official was a “Procurator,” “a manager”; they comprised two districts in the west and north of Spain, the whole of Gaul, the Germanic frontier, the Balkan, Cilicia, Cœlesyria Phenicia, Cyprus and Egypt; the Senate retained the old settled provinces, Eastern Spain, Sardinia, Sicily, Northern Africa, the district round Cyrene, the west of Asia Minor, and Achaia. Thus the Emperor’s direct patronage was large, but even in the Senatorial Provinces he could intervene with superior powers, and the liberty which the Senate enjoyed of appointing their Governors, was nominal rather than real, for the Senate itself was increasingly composed of men who had owed their advancement to the Emperor, or expected further promotion from his hands.

Senatorial Governorships tended to become merely honorary, and the wealthy or noble men, who held courts for limited periods in Sicily or Asia had little more actual responsibility or power than an English Viceroy in Ireland. Further, those parts of the Empire in which active work was to be done, or in which the administration really tested capacity, and was rewarded with further promotions, were precisely those parts in which the Emperor was exclusive patron.

We naturally wonder at the business capacity of a man who carried on the Government of dominions so extensive and so various; and the work would indeed have been beyond the grasp of any single individual had not Augustus continued the old Roman policy of letting well alone. The Roman Empire at this period was largely decentralized; cities, tribes, nationalities governed themselves according to their previous laws and customs; no ancient polity was destroyed or remodelled unless it proved to be out of sympathy with the general order; the details of local administration were attended to on the spot in accordance with local usage, by the local officials and magistrates. If the ancient constitution of a town broke down, the Roman was ready with his sacred model, the double chief magistrate and the Senate, a model which was faithfully copied in all the Roman military colonies, but so long as men could govern themselves, the Romans were content to allow them to do so; they were not at this time afflicted with a pedantic passion for uniformity. Thus the Emperor was relieved of the mass of detail under which he would otherwise have sunk. In his choice of men Augustus preferred officials who either as non-Romans, such as Licinus and Cornelius Gallus, or by reason of comparatively mean extraction felt their dependence upon his favour. When he found a representative of the ancient nobility who could be trusted, such as Marcus Lepidus, the son of the former triumvir, he placed power in his hands; such men served to balance the pretensions of the new officials, but he was careful not to revive the organization of the oligarchy. One danger, however, escaped the prevision of the acute Augustus: he did not see until it was too late the effect of his pretensions to a divine ancestry upon his own family. As years went on, and the representatives of the Julian stock were to be found chiefly in the men and women of the third generation, as the great poem of Virgil was more and more widely known, the faith in the sanctity of the posterity of Anchises assumed inconvenient dimensions, and the tendency to press this faith was largely helped by the presence in the Imperial Household of representatives of ancient dynasties. East and West alike sent young men to Rome, in whom the traditions of exalted lineage were lively and unbroken, who did not need the evidence of portents and the testimony of poets to assure them that they were set apart from the rest of mankind. These youths were the playmates of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Augustus; their influence stimulated the dynastic ambition of such men as Caius Cæsar, and his nephew and namesake the future Emperor Caligula; the young princes, as they considered themselves, were impatient of the constitutional forms of Rome, and the restraints upon the monarchy; they despised families whose progenitors had not come over with Æneas. Fate had not been kind to the Julian dynasty, and when Tiberius returned to Rome from the Rhine in A.D. 12, his adoption and investiture with the Proconsular Power seemed to extinguish the hopes of its representatives. The direct descendants of Augustus now living were his daughter Julia, disgraced and in exile, her daughter Julia similarly disgraced and in exile, Agrippa Postumus, the intractable, a young man about twenty-four years of age, who either now, or a little later, enjoyed, like his mother and sister, the amenities of life on an island; the only descendant in the third generation who had not been thus disgraced and banished was Agrippina, the younger daughter of Julia.

Nobody took the Julian legend more seriously than this lady, and her children enjoyed a double stream of the sacred blood, for she had married Germanicus, the son of Drusus and Antonia the beautiful, who was own niece to Augustus. Germanicus was now twenty-seven years of age; he had been through the Pannonian campaign, and was left by Tiberius in command of the army on the Lower Rhine. Tiberius seems to have had more confidence in him than in his own son Drusus, and Germanicus had so far shown himself worthy of that confidence; he was blessed with a numerous family, of whom Agrippina was inordinately proud; she was the mother of the great-grandchildren of Augustus, a Nero, a Drusus, a Caius, another Agrippina, a Drusilla, and a Julia Livilla, who eventually married the friend of Paterculus, Marcus Vinicius. Julia her sister had only borne two daughters before retiring to her island.

Agrippina was not a mere lady of fashion; she accompanied her husband on his campaigns, and exhibited all the traditional virtues of a Roman matron before the enraptured eyes of the legionaries; she dressed up her youngest boy, Caius, in the full uniform of a Roman soldier, and got him the nickname of Caligula--Little Gaiters--in the camp.

The Claudian stock was represented by Drusus, the son of Tiberius, a man slightly younger than Germanicus, whose sister he married, thus further interweaving the two lines; also by Germanicus himself and his brother Claudius, the unfortunate sputterer, of whom his own mother was ashamed, and whose family were united in a desire to keep him out of sight.

In order further to knit up the dynastic web, Augustus adopted Tiberius, who in his turn adopted both his own nephew Germanicus and his stepson Agrippa Postumus. It is not improbable that the dynastic pretensions of this young man, stimulated by the example of his sister Agrippina, were the real cause of his enforced retreat, that he did not acquiesce willingly in his grandfather’s arrangements, and that the watchful Livia knew how to turn his insubordination to advantage. Augustus showed disturbing signs of a weakness in his direction in spite of his intractability.

Tiberius at the time of his adoption was fifty-four years of age; he was a father and a grandfather; he was the active ruler of the Empire, but with what appears to us a strange scrupulosity he at once abandoned his own house, and went to live in his adoptive father’s. He treated all his property, according to the strict letter of the Roman law, as his father’s property; he neither manumitted slaves nor performed any act which could not properly be performed by a man who was still “in his father’s hand.”

During the last two years of the life of Augustus Tiberius seldom left him; the old man was in feeble health, but he continued to travel in Italy, and had just presided at some games held in his honour at Naples, when his customary weakness assumed an alarming aspect. Tiberius had been summoned to Illyricum, whence news had arrived of serious discontent among the troops. He returned in haste to receive the last words of the dying Emperor, and to give him a final evidence of that affection which, in spite of the severe strains to which it had been subjected, had never failed. Augustus died as he had lived, with dignity and calm; he even retained to the last a dash of humour, and bade his friends applaud him, as he left the stage of life, if they were satisfied with his performance. His last words were a request to Livia never to forget their married life.

The performance had been a good one, and we should be churlish to withhold our applause.

XI

The Accession of Tiberius

All the accounts of the accession of Tiberius agree in one statement; the evidence is unanimous that he was exceedingly unwilling to occupy the position which Augustus had occupied, and to continue the Empire in the form which it had assumed under his predecessor.

Tiberius was now fifty-six years of age; for ten years he had to all intents and purposes shared the first place in the Empire with Augustus; he had enjoyed his full confidence, none of the things which attract ambitious men had been refused to him. His character was without stain or reproach; the amours which are attributed to Julius Cæsar, and even to the saintly Augustus, are not attributed to him. The idle story that he went to Rhodes to indulge in odious vices was the fabrication of a later age, and was, as we have seen, absurd in itself. He had been a faithful and loving husband to his first wife, Vipsania; the licence of Julia had disgusted him; after his divorce from her he never thought of a fresh marriage, though still a young man. On his campaigns he had shown himself to be simple, and indeed severe, in his personal habits. A story was indeed prevalent that he was given to strong drink, but there is no evidence in its favour except a couple of wildly improbable stories preserved by Suetonius, and a punning nickname given him by the soldiers, who called him Biberius Caldius Mero. The nicknames given by private soldiers and schoolboys to officers and schoolmasters are not evidence, though they sometimes promote, as in this case, the circulation of fictitious stories. The exceptional health which Tiberius is said to have enjoyed to an advanced age does not favour the idea that he was intemperate, and indeed we are told that from the age of thirty onwards he prescribed a regimen for himself without consulting his medical advisers, which was remarkably successful. He was free from the tyranny of the lusts of the flesh, he was equally free from avarice, a point repeatedly insisted on by hostile historians; power in itself and by itself had no attraction for him; he had already on one occasion brusquely rejected it. Thus he was able to consider the question of the succession dispassionately. His personal inclination was rather in the direction of retirement and a private life, and if his judgment was biassed, the disturbing element was a contempt for rather than a love of power.

At the death of Augustus, Tiberius was actually in possession of two forms of authority legally conveyed to him by the Senate in constitutional form, which enabled him to carry on the government: he had the tribunician power, which made him superior to all the civil magistrates; he had the proconsular power, which put him at the head of the executive in all the provinces, and especially at the head of the army. In the first character he was the protector of Roman citizens throughout the world; in the second he was master of the provincials. Thus there was no occasion for any plotting on the part of Livia, no premature assumption of responsibility on the part of Tiberius in setting the guard and giving the password when Augustus had breathed his last; these duties necessarily devolved upon him, and he was in fact at the time on active service.

He was not Princeps, nor Pontifex Maximus, nor had he the censorial power. Of these three the last two were executive offices belonging to the old Republic; the former was an honorary dignity recognised by the forms of the Republic, which had acquired a new meaning during the long tenure of Augustus. It was this dignity, along with all which it now involved, that Tiberius only reluctantly and after resisting considerable pressure eventually accepted. It had become associated with the monarchical principle, and the permanent continuance of the monarchy Tiberius wished to avoid.

The position which he adopted was a reasonable one. Augustus was an exceptional man; he had been called to power under exceptional circumstances; the reign of one man had been inevitable at the end of the civil wars; the right man had been found, a social regeneration had followed; the monarchy, an exceptional expedient, had done its work; there was now the material for creating a stable government on the old lines. The vices of the old Senatorial administration had been purged away; the Senate itself had assumed a different character--it was no longer a narrow oligarchy, it was a council of the Empire; no single man could hope to repeat the success of Augustus. In a multitude of counsellors there is wisdom; the restored Senate working through the new officials would be more likely to carry on the continuity of government than an hereditary or quasi-hereditary monarchy, in which so much depended on the character of an individual, and which was perpetually disturbed by palace plots and conspiracies for the succession.

The life of Tiberius himself had been embittered, his domestic happiness destroyed, by the intrigues of a family which had adopted the habits of an Oriental Court. It might well appear to him, arguing from his own experience, that misgovernment by the Senate was a less probable eventuality than misgovernment by the irresponsible members of a monarchical dynasty listening to the unwholesome suggestions of favourites and parasites, and intriguers of all nations.

The funeral of Augustus was hardly over when an event occurred calculated to disgust Tiberius with the dynastic principle, if he had not already strongly disliked it.

The youngest son of Julia, Agrippa Postumus, had, as we have already recorded, been banished to the Island of Planasia off the coast of Campania, and detained in captivity. He was the last of the grandsons of Augustus. At this time he was about twenty-six years of age, and would in the ordinary course of events have held appointments and been pushed forward like his brothers. This had not been done. The historians agree in ascribing to him a stubborn disinclination to study, and an evil temper; he was put out of the way as Claudius was put out of the way; but he continued to be to some extent the centre of Julian plots, and it was believed that, in spite of his bad manners, Augustus was personally attached to him. It is possible that his name had been used in the plots with which his sister, the younger Julia, and her husband, L. Æmilius Paulus, had been concerned; or that he had taken up his mother’s quarrel with Tiberius, and had disturbed the serenity of the Imperial household. Although he had been thus set aside, Augustus had been sufficiently anxious about his welfare to request Tiberius to adopt him, when he himself adopted Tiberius. Whatever may have been the real temper and the real pretensions of the young man, one thing is certain: immediately after the death of Augustus he was put to death upon his island, and the centurion on guard reported to Tiberius that his orders had been obeyed.

Tiberius at once denied that he had given any orders, and added that he would report the matter to the Senate. No report was ever made, and Tacitus tells us that Tiberius was over-persuaded by C. Sallustius Crispus, who had succeeded Mæcenas as confidential and unofficial adviser to the Cæsarian family. Crispus is said to have urged that any public inquiry into the matter would have created too much scandal. Tiberius was not the man to be deterred from doing what he considered a public duty by any consideration of what he might himself suffer, but there was another person whose good name was likely to be damaged, and whose responsibility for what had occurred it would be awkward to demonstrate; that person was his mother, Livia. Tiberius himself had no motive for committing such a crime; only the perverse inconsistency of a Roman historian could be capable of attributing to the same man reluctance to accept power, and complicity in a crime whose object was to secure the undisturbed enjoyment of that power. Whoever was responsible for the death of Agrippa Postumus, Tiberius certainly was not; but Livia, the friend of Herod, whose life had been spent in pushing the fortunes of the Claudians, was not a woman to be frightened by the murder of an inconvenient aspirant.

If anything had been wanting to convince Tiberius of the evils likely to attend the perpetuation of the dynasty, this event was in itself enough to determine him in his dislike to an institution capable of producing such horrors, and under circumstances so wounding to his personal pride. A crime had been foisted on him in such a way that he could not prove his innocence without making himself the accuser of his mother.

The Senate, however, insisted that Tiberius should take the whole burden of the government upon himself. His suggestion that the responsibility should be divided was met with derision; there was no way out of the difficulty but to accept the trust, and to work it in the spirit most likely to lead to the development of his own views. The Senate was, in fact, wiser than Tiberius; those of its members who took an active share in the government knew that whatever might be the views of the few remaining Legitimist families, the monarchy was essential to the Empire, and that the Imperial House could not break with the traditions of half a century. Cæsar’s heir did not merely inherit property, he inherited the conduct of an organization whose branches extended all over the world, and this even as a private person; nor again was it easy to define his relation to those provinces, and especially Egypt, which had been administered by the late Emperor as private estates. Countless officials had learned to look to the Emperor as the source of patronage. A slow change was possible, but an abrupt change would have been a revolution, and would have disturbed the sense of security in all quarters of the Empire. The succession of Tiberius had been tacitly accepted as an accomplished fact in every part of the world for the last ten years. The intrigues in the Imperial family were distressing, and doubtless painful to those immediately concerned, but they had not affected the general prosperity, nor stirred the imagination of such men as hope to fish in troubled waters. Germanicus, the only practical candidate for the chief place, was notoriously loyal to the existing state of affairs, and had never shown any disposition to disturb arrangements made by Augustus. In the end Tiberius gave way, and accepted what the Senate offered him “until,” as he said, “I come to the time of life at which it may seem just to you to grant some rest to my old age.”

These words are in themselves a protest against dynastic assumptions; the power which Tiberius was to receive he would hold as associated with an office separable from his person; he was not to be once a king, always a king, ruling in virtue of mythology and portents.

Tiberius was equally careful to distinguish between complimentary tributes which had been paid to Augustus and official designations. He would not be called “Father of his country,” he would not even use the title “Augustus” as a name, though he was legally entitled to do so; he only used it in corresponding with foreign kings and potentates. Still less would he allow himself to be worshipped, and strictly forbade his statue to be erected in a temple except as an ornament. Nor again would he place the title of Imperator before his name, as Augustus had done, thereby making it personal and inseparable; he used it simply as a statement that he held a particular office. From the first he objected to the exaggerated language of obsequious persons, and demanded to be addressed as Dominus by his slaves, Imperator by soldiers, Princeps by the rest of the world. A Senator who flung himself at his feet and endeavoured to grasp his knees with an oriental exuberance of subservience suffered a rude fall, as Tiberius instinctively jumped back out of his reach. In a like spirit he checked the adulation which the Senate were prepared to heap upon Livia, and discouraged every attempt to invest her with the dangerous attributes of an Empress Dowager.

Similarly he distinguished between occasions on which he acted in a public or private capacity. Unless officially presiding, he attended the law courts like any other Senator, listening to the evidence, and offering his opinion like the rest; he, in fact, lost no opportunity of showing that he held his position to be a purely official one, and while he encouraged the worship of Augustus, he refused to be included in the cult.

At a later period Tiberius, in speaking to the Senators, declared that he regarded himself as their servant; his constitutional theory was that the Senate was the fountain of authority, the Emperor its first executive officer and adviser, but certainly not its master. This theory of the mutual relations of Emperor and Senate broke down, because one man, if he is capable at all, is always more capable than a number of equally capable men working together as a council: he can act more quickly, and his relations with suitors and suppliants are simpler. If a capable man is assisted by a council, the general lines of policy are his, and not those of the council, whose advice practically amounts to little more than valuable suggestions on points of detail. The dream of professors and political pedants that a country is best governed by a debating society of selected wiseacres has a never-ending fascination, but it is a mere dream, and as soon as the ostensible government degenerates into a debating society the real work of governing is done by other agencies; the alternative is anarchy.

The Senate for its part was studiously averse at first to accepting any greater measure of responsibility than had fallen to its share under Augustus; its leading members were used to a certain routine of business. Augustus had introduced a kind of Cabinet system, the ordinary business of the Senate being conducted by a small committee on which the Senators served in some kind of rotation; full meetings of the whole body were rare; the committee were in constant attendance upon the Emperor. Nobody had any wish to abandon this system, and to impose the necessity of frequent attendance upon all members of the Senate; at the same time, it was well to be sufficiently in evidence to secure a share in promotions and appointments. Hostility to the existing arrangements existed, but it was confined to some old families who were nearly powerless, and who found a safety valve for their discontent in pasquinades, and the compilation of bitter memoirs, in which every rumour, every scandal unfavourable to the existing government was carefully recorded.

Tiberius had so little of the dynast about him, so little of the jealousy of the usurper, that he employed in positions of trust the men who were generally believed to have been designated as possible aspirants to the Imperial power by Augustus. Marcus Lepidus held one office after another under Tiberius, not merely ornamental offices, but those which involved active work; C. Asinius Gallus, the second husband of Vipsania, similarly took a leading part in the counsels of the Senate, and was entrusted with various dignities; his mysterious fate three years before the death of Tiberius will occupy us later on; L. Arruntius similarly lived in dignity and affluence till he committed suicide shortly before Tiberius died, having become involved in highly discreditable, but not political, transactions; another, Gnæus Piso, was the centre of a strange conspiracy six years later than this. Of him too we shall speak in greater detail; it is enough for our present purpose to record that he was holding an important Governorship six years after the accession of Tiberius.

The same historian who tells us nearly all that is known of the lives of these men, and who fixes the dates of their deaths, also informs us that they were the objects of the suspicion of Tiberius, that their lives were rendered miserable by him, and that they all, with the exception of Lepidus, “soon” came to a bad end. Allowing that six years is a term to which the word “soon” can be applied, we may admit that Gnæus Piso soon came to a bad end; we shall see later on who was responsible for his afflictions. Lepidus lived to a good old age, and died a natural death not long before Tiberius himself; and though the ends both of Asinius Gallus and Arruntius were miserable, they did not occur “soon,” periods of twenty years and upwards not being usually so described.

The facts relating to these men are an excellent illustration of the reckless inconsistency of statement which is indulged in by Tacitus. Fortunately, the historian prided himself upon his impartiality, and does not suppress facts which happen to be in contradiction with his main contention. Stripped of its comments and insinuations, as also of its rhetoric, his narrative gives a favourable picture of Tiberius and his reign, but Tacitus possessed such a mastery of innuendo that his statements of facts are forgotten, while his comments are remembered.

It is, unfortunately, not the custom of modern scholars to read the Latin stylists for the purpose of acquiring information, or in large masses; and while they are minutely perpending the significance of isolated phrases, or enumerating instances of unusual grammatical constructions, they forget that any other interest attaches to the works upon which their industry is expended. The stylist and grammarian alike find so much material for their own special industries in Tacitus that his claims as a historian are forgotten, and in fact he is not a historian; he is a bitter pamphleteer of consummate ability; his affectation of impartiality is a well-considered pose, whose insincerity becomes manifest as soon as we study the effect produced by his writing upon the minds of his readers. When we have read the first six books of the _Annals_, we are left with a very strong impression of horror; we seem to have waded through seas of misery, and to have assisted at the ruin of the Roman Empire. In the midst of the gloomy scene stalks the gaunt figure of Tiberius, equally terrifying in anger or in silence; his very virtues are more horrible than the vices of other people, for there is no knowing what hideous wickedness they were assumed to conceal.

The question may reasonably be asked, why should Tacitus have directed his bitterness especially against Tiberius? Surely Nero or even Claudius would have been a better target for his venomed sentences. But to begin with, there was no object in further damaging the reputation of an Emperor universally acknowledged to be a villain or a fool. So far as Caligula, Claudius, and Nero were concerned, judgment had been passed in the sense in which Tacitus wished it to be passed, but there were numerous documents in evidence of the fact that Tiberius had been a good Emperor, and that Greater Rome, if not the City of Rome, had prospered under his rule.

Tacitus was interested in proving that till the reigns of Nerva and Trajan there never had been a good Emperor. Augustus was beyond the reach of attack; that reputation could not be damaged by malignant epigrams, but the end of the reign of Tiberius had been involved in a strange catastrophe, whose unquestioned horrors would lend credibility to misrepresentations of the events by which it had been preceded, and when Tacitus wrote, the Senate had just emerged from a similar, or apparently similar, persecution at the hands of Domitian; in fact, the Tiberius of Tacitus was not Tiberius at all, but Domitian. The curse of the reign of Domitian had been attacks upon the lives and property of eminent men, conducted by paid informers. There was some evidence that the system of rewarding informers had first been extensively used in the reign of Tiberius, and Tacitus believed that he could find abundant material for drawing up a strong indictment against the practice of employing informers in the records of the reign of Tiberius. We shall see how far he was justified in his confidence.

But it was not enough to damage a system, it was also necessary to annihilate the man; and here too Tacitus had found the instrument which he required; he had access to certain memoirs written by the younger Agrippina, the daughter of Agrippina, the wife of Germanicus. He tells us of a fact which he mentions:--“This is not recorded by any of the historians, but I found it in the memoirs of the daughter of Agrippina, who was the mother of the Emperor Nero, and handed down to posterity her own life and the misfortunes of her family.” There is not much in the life of the mother of Nero and sister of Caligula which would incline us to suspect her memoirs of being a liquid fount of veracity, but there is a great deal which would tempt us to suspect her of a bitter animosity against the memory of Tiberius and all members of the Claudian stock not closely related to herself.

It is not proposed to examine in detail every innuendo made by Tacitus in the course of his indictment against Tiberius, though from time to time it will be entertaining to expose glaring instances of misrepresentation or deliberately malicious inference; but one example of the methods employed by Tacitus may be profitably given as an illustration of the way in which he wrote what has passed for sober history.