The Twelve Caesars (13 page)

‘The first crime of the new reign,’ Tacitus famously asserted, establishing at the outset a chronology of malpractice, ‘was the murder of
Postumus Agrippa.’
¹⁸
Augustus had died at Nola on 19 August
AD
14, Agrippa Postumus shortly after. Tiberius denied involvement in his stepson’s death. Instead,
attended in Rome by the Praetorian Guard, on 4 September he called a meeting of the senate to discuss the nature of his ‘father’s’ funeral honours. He did not, at that stage,
permit debate about the succession. Like Julius before him, Augustus was rewarded with deification and Tiberius, shy of titles, became the son of a god. The death of Agrippa Postumus left Tiberius
sole heir to the Empire: so swift a resolution could only inspire rumour. After a further, protracted debate, in which he protested his own inadequacy in the face of so overwhelming a task –
‘Only the intellect of the Divine Augustus was equal to such a burden’ is Tacitus’ transcript of his hesitancy – Tiberius accepted from the senate the award of all
Augustus’ formal powers. Since Augustus had taken pains to invest Tiberius with these powers anyway, he may have regarded elaborate preliminaries as a necessary procedural nicety, a case of
dotting
i
’s and crossing
t
’s. Such an approach is in keeping with his apparent wish throughout the first years of his reign to involve the senate in imperial
decision-making – ‘consulting them about revenues and monopolies, constructing and restoring public buildings, and even about levying and disbanding the soldiers’, according to
Suetonius – and to assert the desirability of independent thought and action on the senate’s part, as with his nomination of only four of a possible twelve candidates for the first
praetorship elections of the reign. It was an assertion (of which Augustus would have approved) that the powers of the
princeps
existed in the gift of elected representatives of the state.
In time, future emperors would reiterate Tiberius’ reluctance with more hypocrisy and less justification. (In later instances, no one
repeated Quintus Haterius’
question, ‘How long, Caesar, will you suffer the state to be without a head?’ That avowal that choice belonged not to the senate but to the new
princeps
was ultimately
superfluous – and, in time, repeatedly submerged in the role of the military.)

But if the new emperor genuinely fought shy of this greatness thrust upon him, the troops who accompanied him revealed an alternative truth of constitutional developments in Rome. Their loyalty
belonged to him, their concept of the good of the state already embodied in the person of the
princeps
. In Tacitus’ account, evasions and denials in the senate house notwithstanding,
Tiberius had already written to Roman legions across the Empire. This undertaking acknowledges the practical foundation in armed force of Julio-Claudian hegemony. The motive of Tacitus’
Tiberius was ‘fear that Germanicus, who had at his disposal so many legions, such vast auxiliary forces of the allies, and such wonderful popularity, might prefer the possession to the
expectation of empire’.
¹⁹
From the outset the author interprets supreme power not as a benefit to the state but as a personal possession worth fighting for. At the same time he establishes in
the reader’s mind Tiberius’ jealousy of his nephew, who is also his son and his stepson. The unravelling of that relationship – at one level a variant on the convention of the
wicked stepmother, which already existed on the classical stage – will provide the dynamic of the first years of his reign. This dominance of Rome’s public life by family politics
encapsulates Tacitus’ objections to the replacement of a system of elected magistrates by government by a single faction, the heirs of Augustus.

In the short term, both Germanicus and the army occupied Tiberius’ thoughts. Soldiers in Pannonia mutinied on hearing the news of Augustus’ death; messengers carrying reports of
their
revolt arrived in Rome ahead of Tiberius’ first meeting with the senate.
²⁰
Similar unrest broke out among the legions of the Rhine. Under the command of Germanicus,
it was to Germanicus rather than Tiberius that the Rhinish legions declared their loyalty; they also demanded improved pay and conditions. Germanicus quelled their uprising with vain promises. In
theatrical fashion, he threatened to kill himself and publicly sent away from the camp his wife Agrippina, the youngest daughter of Julia and Agrippa (and thus, formerly, Tiberius’
stepdaughter), and the couple’s two-year-old son Gaius, whom the troops called ‘Caligula’, a walking and prattling legionary mascot who would afterwards become the least military
of emperors. Despite Tacitus’ insinuations, it looked like loyalty on the part of Tiberius’ heir. Significantly, it was an interlude which served to heighten the profile of husband and
wife alike. In Pannonia, order was restored by Tiberius’ violent, booze-glugging son Drusus. On this, his first overseas assignment, Drusus received no special award of powers: instead he was
assisted by the joint Praetorian prefect Aelius Sejanus (of whom more later) and a contingent of the Praetorian Guard.

Around 1614, the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens produced a double portrait of Germanicus and Agrippina. The artist was approaching the full maturity of his talents. He had
already completed
The Massacre of the Innocents
, inspired by events in St Matthew’s Gospel, and
The Recognition of Philopoemen
, based on one of Plutarch’s
Lives
.
His thoughts returned to Rome, where he had spent several years of the previous decade. It was there that Rubens had begun his collection of ancient cameos and engraved gems. The double-bust format
of his finished
portrait – the two sitters presented in profile, Agrippina’s image uppermost and central, Germanicus glimpsed behind his wife – recalls
similar cameos. Germanicus’ profile, with its distinctively ‘Roman’ aquiline nose, echoes a drawing of a cameo Rubens made as part of a larger, abandoned project of illustrations
of objects in his own collection.

In this simple-seeming image, the couple appear bold in their resolve and flushed with the beauty of moral rectitude. The pearlescent glow of Agrippina’s pale skin and the enamelled
luminosity of Rubens’ paint conjure a gem-like translucency. The portrait’s shimmering surface and pale highlights invest husband and wife with a quality that is more than human. The
heroism of Rubens’ vision is entirely in keeping with the portrayal of Germanicus and his wife which survives in written accounts inimical to Tiberius. As we shall discover, events about to
unfold – in the main, unresolved and ambiguous – invested the couple with legendary status. In life and in death, they provided a rallying point for Tiberian dissidents. Such was the
extent of their popularity and the long-term currency of their magnetism that, in little over two decades, a homicidal maniac wholly unqualified for government became Rome’s fourth Caesar.
The principal claim to power of the emperor Gaius lay in his illustrious and charismatic parents.

Cruelty and tyranny dominate the presentation of Tiberius within hostile sources: twin impulses, the former is enlisted in the service of the latter. Ditto those martyrs on whom
the ancient authors insist, material proof of Tiberius’s viciousness. From within the imperial family first Agrippa Postumus, imbecilic and sluggardly, then Germanicus, Tacitus’ hero,
handsome if spindly legged, histrionic, with a weakness for the trappings of rank, a man in whom charm probably held the upper hand over capability. At Augustus’
instigation, Tiberius had adopted his nephew Germanicus as his son. He became at a stroke the brother of Tiberius’ surviving child from his marriage to Vipsania, Drusus the Younger. The
brothers-cousins were further united by Drusus’ marriage to Germanicus’ sister Livilla. Germanicus ascended the ladder of magistracies with bravura, comfortably in advance of the
minimum age qualifications; Drusus’ record was more dogged – a case of history repeating itself, Germanicus in Marcellus’ place, Drusus in Tiberius’s (like father, like
son). And so it proved. For in
AD
19, to widespread consternation, Germanicus suddenly died. Poison and witchcraft were the rumour, blame attributed to Tiberius himself.

The emperor had grown jealous of his dashing but apparently loyal nephew. Germanicus’ response to the mutiny of the four Rhine legions in
AD
14 had been a series of
campaigns within Germany. Victorious, nonetheless all exacted a heavy Roman death toll; none resulted in significant gains of territory. Veteran of no fewer than nine periods of military service in
Germany, Tiberius recalled Germanicus to Rome. He may have doubted the long-term success of his nephew’s policy: certainly he was more interested in stabilizing than extending the German
frontier. He rewarded Germanicus with a triumph and partnership in his consulship of the following year. He then dispatched him to Syria, foremost among Rome’s eastern provinces, his
capabilities enhanced by a grant of
maius imperium
which matched that once bestowed on Tiberius by Augustus.

At the same time, Tiberius appointed a new governor to the province. Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, a man of high estate and Republican sympathies, had previously served as proconsul of
Africa. There his chief distinction consisted in unwarranted brutality towards his own men.
²¹
Arrogant and old-fashioned in outlook and behaviour, he was connected to Tiberius through a
shared consulship in 7
BC
, and to the emperor’s mother Livia, who was a close friend of his wealthy, independent-minded wife, Munatia Plancina. Tacitus suggests that
husband and wife received separately from Tiberius and Livia unofficial commissions concerning the younger couple. Their role amounted to surveillance: the historian does not provide evidence.

Germanicus and Piso did not meet until late in
AD
18, when a disagreement over relative status within the province, understandable given Piso’s role as governor and
Germanicus’
maius imperium
, caused open conflict. Both men appear to have reached their own conclusion. Germanicus departed for Egypt; in his absence, Piso countermanded his recent
orders. That inflammatory course of action was discovered by Germanicus on his return to the province the following spring. Overt hostility at that point soured the men’s relationship to such
an extent that, when Germanicus fell ill, he suspected Piso of poisoning him and ordered his immediate departure from Syria. While Piso frittered away his days on Kos, on 10 October at Antioch the
affronted Germanicus died.

In Rome news of his death had an electric effect. Agrippina had ordered her husband’s living quarters to be searched: inevitably the haul revealed evidence of witchcraft and magic spells
– bones, charms, crude human likenesses, tablets engraved with Germanicus’ name. Germanicus’ last wish was for justice for Piso and Plancina. Rumour, taking wing, strengthened the
bonds between the governor and his wife and Tiberius and Livia. Few doubted Piso’s guilt. Agrippina landed at Brundisium (Brindisi) in company with her children, bearing the urn of
Gaius’ ashes, and embarked on what became a triumphal
progress to Rome. Attended by grief-stricken crowds, her mourning odyssey inspired widespread support and set the
seal on Germanicus’ martyrdom and her own role as faithful and suffering widow. Tiberius and Livia were conspicuously absent from the torch-lit service of interment of Germanicus’ ashes
in the Mausoleum of Augustus. That absence further augmented unfavourable rumour. When the trial began, Livia intervened in Plancina’s cause and successfully secured her acquittal. Tiberius
made no efforts on Piso’s behalf bar ordering the repair of those public statues of the erstwhile governor destroyed by an angry mob. ‘Let no notice be taken of my own sorrow, or the
tears of Drusus,’ he addressed magistrates. ‘This case should be tried in the same manner as any other.’ The accused man committed suicide after correctly assessing the popular
mood: at one point a lynch mob gathered outside the hearings.