The Twelve Caesars (12 page)

In the spring of 12
BC
, Dio reports, ‘Portents were noted in such numbers... as only normally occur when the greatest calamities threaten the
state.’
¹¹
The calamity in question was the death of Augustus’ leading militarist, Agrippa. In its wake another, more personal calamity. It took the form of divorce and was the desire of
neither husband nor wife. In this case, the husband was Tiberius, his wife Vipsania Agrippina, daughter of the dead man. The couple had been married for seven years, following an engagement of a
further thirteen years. Engagement, marriage and divorce were all political, all instigated by Augustus whose motive, as we have seen, had been to ensure Agrippa’s loyalty while bypassing him
in the succession in favour of Octavia’s son Marcellus. In the spring of 12
BC
, Tiberius was rising thirty, his wife twenty-four. They had a single son, Drusus, and
Vipsania was heavily pregnant. The combined effect of her father’s death and her own enforced divorce from Tiberius cost Vipsania
the baby she was carrying. For politics
aside, the marriage of Tiberius and Vipsania had proved notably happy.

But Augustus did not permit happiness to impede the course of political expediency. With Agrippa dead, Tiberius’ marriage to Vipsania lost its
raison d’être
. At the same
time, the emperor’s daughter Julia, his principal dynastic bargaining tool and milch cow, found herself once again a widow. Augustus knotted loose ends by uniting the Julian and Claudian
elements of his family through the marriage of Julia to Tiberius. Agrippa’s death therefore brought Tiberius ‘closer to Caesar, since his daughter Julia, who had been the wife of
Agrippa, now married [Tiberius],’ Velleius Paterculus records without elaboration,
¹²
the chief concern of Tiberius’ apologist his hero’s advance towards the throne. If we accept
this explanation, the marriage may well have given pleasure to Tiberius’ ambitious mother Livia. It pleased Augustus too, and the highly sexed Julia, who Suetonius claims had harboured an
adulterous passion for the handsome, well-built Tiberius during her marriage to Agrippa. But it brought lasting pleasure neither to Tiberius nor to Vipsania. The latter married Augustus’
friend Gaius Asinius Gallus Salonius, senator and future consul. She bore him at least six sons, two of whom were accused of conspiracy under Claudius. Tiberius and Julia had a single child, who
died in infancy. The death of that child shattered the fragile comity of what began as a successful, even happy partnership between two people who, temperamentally at odds, had nevertheless known
one another most of their lives and spent much of their childhood in the same house. Afterwards amity swiftly dissipated. This arose possibly as a result of Julia’s infidelities, more
probably over disagreements about women’s place in politics, since Julia, ever mindful of her position as Caesar’s daughter, did not share her new husband’s essentially Republican
interpretation of the
unseen role of women. Tiberius and Julia subsequently lived apart. Their separation may have rekindled the former’s affection for Vipsania, which
Suetonius suggests outlived their marriage. ‘Even after the divorce [Tiberius] regretted his separation from [Vipsania], and the only time that he chanced to see her, he followed her with
such an intent and tearful gaze that care was taken that she should never again come before his eyes.’ Four decades later, Tiberius exacted revenge of sorts, instructing the senate to
imprison Vipsania’s second husband Gallus without sentence, without execution or the means of suicide.

Since the ancient sources do not countenance the possibility of personal development or change, their authors evince no interest in the long-term effects on Tiberius of his unchosen separation
from Vipsania. Nor of the indignities of Julia’s condescension – Tacitus’ assertion that, weary of early amorousness, she disdained him ‘as an unequal match’,
¹³
Claudian
blood no rival to her own Julian heritage with its associations of divinity. In the aftermath of marital breakdown, when Julia courted disgrace, ‘turning from adultery to prostitution’,
as Seneca has it, ‘seeking gratification of every kind in the arms of casual lovers’,
¹⁴
Tiberius turned his back on Rome and departed, like the Divine Julius before him, for Rhodes. It
was the first of two self-imposed periods of exile and resulted in estrangement from Augustus, temporary career meltdown and a degree of personal danger. Tiberius explained his move – for
which he received permission only after a four-day hunger strike – as arising from a desire not to overshadow or otherwise stand in the way of the careers of Augustus’ heirs, his
grandsons Gaius and Lucius Caesar (the eldest of Julia’s sons by Agrippa). He also cited ‘weariness of office and a desire to rest’. The effects of divorce and troubled marriage
surely informed that last desire. After Julia, Tiberius did not marry again. He did not
take a mistress and, following the death of his brother Drusus in 9
BC
, forged no new relationship of intimacy. The exception was his elevation of a ruthless philandering equestrian whose heart ‘lusted for supremacy’, Lucius Aelius Sejanus.
¹⁵
Prefect of the Praetorian Guard and, for a time, with Tiberius’ sanction, scourge of Rome’s upper classes, Sejanus cannily exploited Tiberius’ emotional dislocation, that fear of
assassination which bordered on misanthropy. His brief but bloody career (from which no one benefited) was a high price to pay for the isolation Tiberius embraced as the consequence of two broken
marriages.

The Tiberius who set sail for Rhodes in 6
BC
was conspicuously endowed with honours – as Suetonius described him, ‘at the flood-tide of
success... in the prime of life and health’. In addition to tribunician power and
maius imperium
, which exceeded the
imperium
awarded to provincial governors, he had twice held
the consulship, following quaestorship and praetorship, and won triumphal insignia (in 12
BC
), an ovation (10
BC
) and a triumph (7
BC
). He was thirty-six years old. Despite Augustus’ choice as his heirs of offspring of his own blood, it was his stepson Tiberius who could claim the position of imperial
second-in-command. It was not enough. Jealousy of Gaius and Lucius Caesar may have played its part; so too a Republican revulsion against the dizzy honours accorded to these ‘Princes of
Youth’. But none of the sources records any aspiration on Tiberius’ part to usurp Augustus’ place. His manner of life on Rhodes was unassuming, ‘a modest house and a villa
in the suburbs not much more spacious’, a virtual abandonment of those tribunician powers which Augustus pointedly neglected to renew on the grant’s expiry in 1
BC
; a rejection even of Rome
itself manifest in his espousal of Greek costume in place of the toga. Granted, Tiberius ultimately chafed to return: that wish arose
as much from fear that his life was in danger as from eagerness again to exercise power in the capital. Tiberius’ exile on Rhodes offers our strongest indication that the protests of
AD
14 – his hesitancy in the face of supreme power – were not the ‘barefaced hypocrisy’ of the ancients’ assessment, but a genuine reservation
concerned either with the principate’s monopoly of power or with his own reluctance to assume so wide-ranging and overwhelming a battery of responsibilities.

Once Tiberius’ portraits resembled those of his mother Livia. Eyes, nose, mouth, even facial shape were all assimilated to that careful iconography developed for
Augustus’ wife following the grant of sacrosanctity in 35
BC
. Later portraits of Livia’s son vary: in place of the rounded cheeks and button chin, the long,
straight nose and rosebud lips that distinguish Livia’s imagery, emerged a less defined appearance, closer to the idealization of Augustus’ portraiture. It was not an accident. On 26
June
AD
4, Tiberius was adopted by Augustus alongside the youngest son of Julia and Agrippa, Agrippa Postumus. At a stroke, the Claudian became a Julian, reinvented and
re-envisioned. What remains is the discernible downturn of those unsmiling lips, token of that excessive sadness noted by Pliny.

The dynamics of power on the Palatine had changed. With Gaius and Lucius Caesar both dead, Lucius succumbing inexplicably at Massilia in
AD
2, Gaius dying on 21 February
AD
4 of a wound received the previous autumn at the siege of Artagira in Armenia, Augustus adopted his stepson. Father and ‘son’ were sixty-six and rising
forty-six respectively. Their tie
was not, on Augustus’ side, one of affection but need. ‘Alas for the Roman people, to be ground by jaws that crunch so
slowly!’ was the verdict of the ageing
princeps
on the tight-lipped, often silent Tiberius. ‘I am also aware,’ Suetonius mischievously reports, ‘that some have
written that Augustus so openly and unreservedly disapproved of his austere manners, that he sometimes broke off his freer and lighter conversation when Tiberius appeared.’ With an ill grace,
Augustus justified his action ‘for reasons of state’. Six years previously, belatedly aware of her flaunting promiscuity (and perhaps suspecting conspiracy), he had banished his
daughter Julia, having first dissolved her marriage to the exiled Tiberius without consulting the latter. This high-handed jettisoning represented a nadir in Tiberius’ fortunes. Reversal
would be accompanied by a ten-year grant of tribunician power (double the usual allotment), which made Tiberius Augustus’ co-ruler as well as his heir.
¹⁶
In keeping with Augustus’ dynastic preoccupations, future portraits of Tiberius asserted that relationship in three dimensions, incorporating elements of his own
official physiognomy. This physical ‘kinship’ underlined the older man’s adoption of the younger: it was a strategy for assuring the succession of which Tiberius himself would be
the ultimate beneficiary (Augustus was not concerned with the possibility of Tiberius’ future reluctance in the face of that glittering prize). On the surface, Tiberius’ life had
reverted to the first phase of Tacitus’ epitaph: ‘It was a bright time in his life and reputation, while under Augustus he was a private citizen or held high offices.’
¹⁷
His initial
services to Augustus were military. Rebellion in Pannonia kept him on the Danube for three years; thereafter troubles in Germany claimed his attention.