A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (16 page)

But on parade as Emperor, Augustus was dazzling. No one stood near him so in his imperial toga or imperial armour (and with his lifts) he walked tall, and no one could resist the glare from his
grey eyes, which were set in a sea of white, like kernels of a sun. When he moved from his inner home to the sanctuary surrounding it he became the High Priest (Pontifex Maximus), the Father of his
People (Pater Patriae, an official title in 2
BC
), Commander-in-Chief (Imperator), and on New Year’s Day and at great festivals when he wore the dress and insignia of
a triumphant commander (which his adoptive father had been allowed to wear
every
day) the purple toga, embroidered in gold, a crown of golden laurel and a long ivory sceptre – Augustus
must have looked every inch ruler of the world.

When he died, he had been that for forty-two years and had visited every corner of the Empire, except Sardinia – the Romans did not like Sardinia – and if Romans no longer felt free,
at least there was no outcry in the streets and the arts bloomed in the peace and prosperity of what even then became known as the Augustan Age. The
ara pacis
, a four-sided frieze, can be
seen in its huge glass case by the river Tiber, next to his mausoleum. The pastoral idyll there in relief is as if the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven were
frozen in white
marble and the Imperial family floats serenely through wreaths and garlands.

As
princeps
in Rome, Augustus believed in extending the hegemony of the Senate and People, but his two humiliating defeats, both in Germany, decided him at the end of his life that enough
was enough and that the frontiers should stay as they were. Varus, a stumblebum of a general, had lost three legions, massacred through trickery in a forest in
AD
9, and
this disaster remained the daymare of Augustus’ life towards its end. When nobody (he thought) was watching he would bang his head on the wall of his little house on the Hill and cry,
‘Varus, Varus, give me back my legions.’
²⁹

Augustus’ apotheosis happened in a way designed, by chance, to appeal to his modest, frugal spirit. He was
en route
to his villa in Sorrento when the crew of a ship from Alexandria,
dressed in white, carrying wreaths of flowers and swinging censers, courted him, singing: ‘Through him we live, through him we sail the seas, through him we enjoy freedom and riches’.
This sentiment would have been echoed by the whole of the new middle class and the bureaucracy he had created, at the expense, if it mattered, of the old families of the Republic, which he had
married into but of which he had never been a part. This memory sweetened the last few months of what had become a lonely and unhappy existence. Almost his last words were: ‘Well, I performed
quite well, didn’t I?’

TIBERIUS

In a television film the Empress Livia, announcing to her son Tiberius that the Emperor has just died, is made to say, in an aside, ‘and by the way, don’t touch the
pears’. But she had no reason to want to poison her husband. Their relations had cooled over fifty years of marriage but he was more use to her alive than dead and she didn’t hate him.
Augustus had never liked his stepson, son-in-law and,
faute de mieux
, heir to the imperial throne he had consciously (dissembling heavily the while) created, and Tiberius’ succession
was not in his mind a foregone conclusion. Indeed, towards the end of his life he amused himself with guessing games, out loud, as to the identity of the next emperor – who was able and
willing, who was willing and not able, who was just greedy for power – and the name of Tiberius was not mentioned. Tiberius, of course, heard of this and the names of the other candidates
were lodged in his savagely retentive memory.

Further, at the death of each Emperor of the Julio-Claudian line – Tiberius brought in the
gens Claudia
, prouder and grander than the Julians – patrician Romans persistently
fancied that the Senate might take the opportunity to re-establish consular government with the republican system of checks and balances and its attendant perks and jobs for the boys.

Finally, did Tiberius really want total authority?

He appeared before the Senate, emphasized his own
unpretentiousness, compared to the
gloire
of the instantly deified Augustus, and proposed power-sharing with
others. Tiberius was genuinely modest, hating crowds, fuss, pomp, ‘fearing freedom but hating flattery more’. He was also prone to say the opposite of what he meant. At the end of the
debate, however, stung in a sensitive part of his psyche, perhaps the only one, by Gallus, who had married his beloved former wife, Vipsania, and by another senator, Arruntius, whom Augustus had
admired, who both implied he was evading responsibility, he yielded and accepted the throne. Tiberius was consistent only in being contrary, but was in fact the best candidate, trained for the job,
a successful and economical commander in the field, having served as Augustus’ number two for years and shared his tribunicial and proconsular powers. In the event, he ruled impeccably, if
without charm or panache, until his unchecked misanthropy turned him into the sadistic and paranoid old tyrant on Capri – in which role he is, unfairly, mostly remembered.

Livia had always been determined that her son should succeed, but not to the point of disposing of the grandsons or of her husband. Neither action had been necessary. She lived to a great age
and was rewarded by Tiberius with dislike, his standard response, salted with respect, for he had loved one person only in his life – Vipsania. She was the daughter of Augustus’
favourite man of action, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, and Tiberius’ marriage to her had been in the nature of a political alliance; but he had loved her, and when told to divorce her and marry
Augustus’ only child, Julia, for a closer, dynastic bond, what heart Tiberius had was broken and never mended. Suetonius tells how seeing Vipsania by chance in Rome he ‘followed her
with tears in his eyes and intense unhappiness written on his face; arrangements were made so that he never saw her again’. Tiberius became the
dutiful son-in-law,
trying to like Julia, but when their child died he turned to loathing her, to war and bibulous evenings in the mess.

His first campaign was against the Cantabrii, a resourceful and dangerous tribe (the Basques?) which Julius Caesar thought he had subdued by sending their men of military age into slavery; but
six years later they had simultaneously murdered their masters and reconvened for another rebellion, and they had to be attended to. Then Tiberius crowned a king in Armenia, recovered the standards
lost by poor, or rather rich, old Crassus in Parthia, commanded armies in Pannonia (Dalmatia) and in Germany, where he marched to the Elbe and back, taking 40,000 prisoners-of-war to colonize
Alsace.
³⁰

Although a young man Tiberius became a workhorse of a general and was appropriately honoured, being elected quaestor, praetor and consul before he was really eligible, due to his lack of years.
At this point, on the crest of a spectacular career, Tiberius announced his intention to retire to the island of Rhodes, as a private citizen. This cold, gaunt, bitter man, never loved and never
understood, with a strong sense of justice and responsibility, was also impulsive, and, as has been said, contrary. He longed to be accepted by men of learning and this was his reason for choosing
Rhodes, a beautiful place favoured by Greek scholars, which was for Romans what Florence became for the English, somewhere to imbibe an older and superior culture. The Romans, to whom he had not
bothered to say goodbye, said that his self-exile was to avoid his appalling wife and to remove himself from the
competition of his stepsons, Gaius and Lucius, then considered
by their grandfather, the Emperor, and the Empire most likely to succeed. In Rhodes Tiberius played the modest scholar, wandering round the forum chatting, dressed like an ordinary citizen; but his
astrologer, Thrasyllus, was also there, reminding him he could not avoid his destiny. (This all-knowing fellow knew his employer’s mind so well that when asked once why he looked so gloomy,
admitted apprehensions that Tiberius wanted him out of the way. He was forgiven.)

Tiberius’ stock in Rome was falling. Like Louis XIV (their only similarity), Augustus did not like absentees. It was assumed that ‘the exile’, as he became known, must be into
some kind of conspiracy. He wasn’t, and when Gaius visited nearby Samos, Tiberius attended his court to throw himself at the feet of his stepson and protest he wasn’t. Suspicion still
increased and Tiberius, realizing he had been out in the cold long enough, wrote to his mother asking her to plead with the Emperor that he be welcomed home. Augustus never liked Tiberius and after
the death of the grandsons, when Tiberius had become his heir, forced himself, for reasons of state, to be civil, even intimate, but his letters to Tiberius glow with insincerity. Augustus was
exceedingly vain, as his
Res Gestae
, the account of his achievements, dictated by himself and engraved on an enormous tablet for all to applaud, clearly and precisely shows. Not an aqueduct
or temple built or restored, not a benefaction, not a province conquered or a law initiated is omitted from this self-satisfied recital. But he was anxious to be loved as well as revered by
posterity. Like many cruel men he was sentimental. Suetonius suggests that one reason for Augustus’ choice of Tiberius was that his stepson was so unpleasant that his own reign would be
remembered with even greater affection.

In his early days as Emperor, Tiberius was circumspect. He consulted the Senate on every matter, encouraging debate. Not he but Augustus or Livia had arranged for his
possible rival, Agrippa Postumus, Julia’s remaining son who was regarded by all as a bad hat, to be put to death. He obeyed Augustus’ instructions – he left a lot – in
naming Germanicus (the nephew of whom he was jealous, popular son of a popular father) his heir, and while this young man and his mother were alive Tiberius behaved well. Indeed during these years,
described by Tacitus as
mitia tempora
, Italy and the Empire prospered, conscientiously monitored by an Emperor who respected the laws and the constitution, rose in the presence of consuls,
gave way to them in the streets, kept a modest household with few slaves, spent no money on himself (or anybody else), refused grandiose titles and deferred to the Senate, whose judicial powers
were increased at the expense of the popular assembly. These good years, which were a blessing, did not last. Tiberius despised senators for their deference towards him. ‘Oh you lot, fit only
for servitude’, he was heard to mutter, in Greek, after one session.
³¹

The first bleak sign of tyranny – of the kind of tyranny Caligula was later to enjoy with such zest and caprice – was the re-establishment, in dangerously undefined terms, of the law
of treason; originally designed to protect the Republic from subversion, by making
maiestas (lèse majesté)
a crime against the state, it became an excuse for the
princeps
, or anybody who wished to ingratiate themselves with him, to punish those who had offended him, however trivially. There was no public prosecutor in Rome and any citizen could bring
a charge, so a whole new profession was born, the
delatores
,
denouncers or informers. (Romans had a nomenclature for everybody; legacy hunters were
captatores.)
At first Tiberius resisted their uncongenial activities. The first accused was a knight, for allowing an actor (a synonym, as we have observed, for a male tart) to join the worshippers of a cult of
Augustus and for selling, along with a garden property, a statue of the god, his predecessor. Tiberius reacted with scratchy propriety, writing to the consuls that Augustus had not been made divine
in order to ruin Roman citizens, that the actor in question had been taken to Games given in honour of Augustus by his mother Augusta (Livia had been belatedly elevated to this honorific) and that
selling a statue was not a sacrilege. So that was that.

Next, a governor of Bithynia was accused by his assistant and colleague, a man who ‘created a career which was to be made notorious by the villainous products of subsequent gloomy
years’. ‘Needy, obscure and restless he wormed his way by secret reports into the grim Emperor’s confidence. ‘Then anyone of any eminence was in danger from him,’
wrote Tacitus of this early McCarthy. The charge was that the governor had bad-mouthed the Emperor, telling stories about his meanness, his fondness for wine, his dislike of his mother –
stories serious (and accurate) enough to warrant a conviction. Tacitus continues that ‘the Emperor “lost his temper” and, voluble for once, exclaimed that he personally would
vote, openly and on oath . . . Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso asked: “Caesar, will you vote first or last? If first, I shall have your lead to follow; if last, I am afraid of inadvertently voting
against you.” This struck home . . . Tiberius voted for acquittal.’ (Tacitus,
The Annals of Ancient Rome,
tr. Michael Grant, Penguin.)