Tiberius (21 page)

Chapter One

Old Age is
a shipwreck. I saw that in Augustus and indeed heard the phrase on his lips, though, if I remember, he did not apply it to himself. Now I recognise its truth for me.
I
am breaking on the sharp rocks, buffeted by cruel winds. Peace of mind and ease of body both
desert me. The Greek poet Calli
machus complained of being assailed by the Telchines — a cannibal tribe ready to tear your liver out. I had thought to erect a barricade by study, collecting the wisdom of ages as found in books. It offers no defence. Philosophy, I conclude, offers comfort only to minds that are not disturbed, which have, therefore, no need of it. Philosophy cannot quiet the maledictory and maleficent demons who torment me. I am, men say, the emperor of the world. Some fools in Asia are even ready to worship me as a god. When I was told this, I remarked to myself that the only resemblance I could see between the gods and myself lay in our indifference to humanity, and contempt for men.

Augustus died in his seventy-seventh year. I had grown fonder of him in his old age, as he became aware of the depth of his failure. There were moments, I even thought, when he realised how he had corrupted Rome, breeding a generation of slaves, therefore of liars, since no slave can be trusted to tell the truth, but must always say what he believes his master wishes to hear. He fell ill when I was about to return to the army. Naturally I changed my plans and hastened back. He was still conscious and lucid. He entrusted Rome, and Livia, to my care. I knew that it was not what he would have wished to do, but I knew also that he had come to value me in his last years. In a letter he once wrote "If you were to fall ill, the news would kill your mother and me, and the whole country would be in danger." The first part of the apodosis was characteristically hyperbolic, but he knew the second part to be true, and I welcomed his recognition of my worth.

We buried his ashes in the mausoleum he had constructed for the family. I pronounced the funeral eulogy, avoiding the direct lie, not eschewing polite fictions. A couple of days later, the former praetor Numerius Atticus obligingly informed the Senate that during the cremation ceremony he had seen my stepfather's spirit soaring up to Heaven through the flames. Nobody chose to express doubt.

Augustus was declared to be a god.

What would they have said if they had known that almost his last act had been to despatch orders that his only surviving grandson Agrippa Postumus should . . . cease to survive?

Nothing, I suppose. They would not have dared.

I owed Augustus some gratitude for taking that decision on himself. Unfortunately the timing was such that the boy was not killed till a few days after his grandfather's death, and then there were naturally many ready to believe that I had ordered his execution. I would in fact have had no authority to do so.

The question of authority had to be settled immediately. Augustus claimed in his political testament, the
res gestae,
which I published at his request, that after the expiry of the peculiar powers granted him by the law which established the Triumvirate with Mark Antony and Manius Aemilius Lepidus, he had possessed "no more power than the others who were my colleagues in each magistracy, though I excelled all in authority".

This was disingenuous. He had ensured that a superior overriding
imperium
was granted to him, which, in effect, meant that his legal power was unquestioned in all affairs, even within those provinces of the empire which are nominally within the charge of the Senate. He had devised a constitution which obscured his power, but did not prevent him from exercising it wherever he chose. It was his wish that I should inherit his position.

I had no doubt of that. He had revealed it in numerous conversations in his last years. Livia was certain that was his intention. When she returned from watching over her husband's ashes, she embraced me, and said: "At last, my son, you have everything which I have striven for years to obtain for you."

"Mother," I said, "if I have anything, it is as a result of my own labours, and anyway I am not certain what I wish to have."

"What you wish . . ." she repeated my words, and shook her head. "Don't you understand, my dear, that your wishes have never entered into the matter? You have what is yours, what the gods have awarded you, what I have for forty years worked to bring about."

"We shall see."

"Oh no, you will see sense. You will see that you have no choice. Go down to the Senate by all means, and offer to restore the Republic in its old form. You won't find anyone to understand what you mean."

Gnaeus Piso gave me the same advice.

"Of course you're a Republican," he said. "So am I. Of course you detest the tyranny which has been imposed on Rome. So do I. But that's all there is to it. It's not a choice between the empire and the Republic. It's a choice between Tiberius and some other emperor. You must grab the empire by the balls, my friend, or someone else will take a tight and painful grip of yours."

I did not sleep the night before I attended the Senate. It was a calm night in September. The moon was up and the city silent. A cat brushed against my legs as I stood on the terrace of my house gazing beyond the city to the invisible sea. I bent down, picked up the cat and held it in my arms, stroking its back and listening to its contented purr. Everything Livia and Piso said was true; yet I rebelled against the despotism of fact.

I sought to be dull, yet to impress the Senate with the magnitude of empire. I read to them the account of the empire which Augustus had prepared. I deluged them with statistics concerning the number of regular and auxiliary troops serving in the armies, the strength of the navy; details concerning the provinces and dependent kingdoms; the tax receipts, both direct and indirect; the annual expenditure. It was an audit of empire, impressive and daunting in scale. The last sentence repeated the judgment at which Augustus and I myself had independently arrived following the disaster in Germany: that the empire should not be extended beyond its present frontiers.

Then I laid the document aside, and spoke as follows.

"Conscript Fathers, we are all of us heirs of the great history of Rome, children of the great Republic. My own family, as you all know, has played a major part in the development of Rome's greatness. My late father Augustus has overseen the security of the empire, and guided its destiny, for more than forty years, longer than some of you have been alive. You have known no other father of the country. He restored peace within the territories of the Republic. After the civil wars he restored the institutions of the Republic. He extended the frontiers of the empire into lands where the arms of Rome had been unknown. In the words of the poet whom he delighted to honour, he made the world cry: 'Behold them, conquerors, all clad in Roman togas.' He followed the Roman custom: to spare the subject and subdue the proud.

"But now, fellow citizens, we must ask, not only where shall we find his like but, more urgently, whether it is proper that any one man, lacking his supreme qualities, should wield the same degree of power. For my part, I think it is a task beyond any of us. It is certainly beyond me. I was honoured in his last years to be permitted to share his burdens, and, believe me, I know their weight. I know what hard, demanding, hazardous work it is to rule such an empire as Rome's.

"Besides, I would urge you to consider whether it is proper that a state like ours, which can rely on so many distinguished personages, should commit such power to one man, and concentrate the management of the empire in the hands of a single person. Would it not be better, Conscript Fathers, to share it among a number of us?"

The previous night Livia had asked me to rehearse my speech. I had declined to do so, saying that twice-cooked meat never tastes good, but I had given her the gist.

"They won't know what you mean," she said, "and they will be afraid you are trying to trick them. Besides, though you don't know it, they stand rather in awe of you. You've been away so much, you're practically a stranger in Rome, and consequently you have become an enigma. They will be seeking to uncover the secret meaning of your discourse."

"There is no secret meaning," I said, "I am giving them their chance. Over the years I have heard, or come to know of, so many mutterings, so many protests at his concentration of power, so many complaints that the path of honour and glory in which our ancestors delighted is now closed, blocked off, that I wish to give them the opportunity to explore it. That's all." "All?" she said. "They will be scared stiff."

Now, when I finished speaking, there was a prolonged silence in the Curia. It was broken only by a shifting of bodies and a few coughs. I resumed my seat, and waited. Nothing happened. When I looked at a senator, his gaze slipped away.

I sighed. Suddenly I was beset by abject appeals to take Augustus' place . . . "There was no alternative" it was cried. I rose again and, making an effort to speak courteously, and not to reveal the disgust I felt, I explained that while I did not feel myself capable of assuming the whole burden of government, I was naturally ready to take on any branch of it that they might choose to entrust to me.

C. Asinius Gallus then rose to speak. I knew him for an ambitious man, but an imprudent one. His father had been one of Augustus' generals, but Augustus had never entrusted an army to the son. Moreover, I had cause to dislike, as well as distrust him: he had married my dear Vipsania after our divorce, and treated her badly, partly because his taste ran to very young virgins, and he often proclaimed that the body of a mature woman disgusted him. So, when he got to his feet, I prepared for something disagreeable.

"Tell us, Caesar," he said, "which branch you desire to have handed to you."

"That is not for me to say," I replied. "Frankly, I would be happy to retire altogether from affairs of state. Yet I am ready to accept any duty which the Senate cares to impose upon me."

"That's not good enough," Gallus said, "and we all know it. For if we nominate a branch which does not please you, then we shall offend you and since you already have the power, by reason of your tribune's status, to annul any decision we take, and since you have already shown your willingness to employ the power entrusted to you by the fact that you have accepted a bodyguard of the Praetorians, none of us is likely to make the sort of specific proposal you call for. Besides, you have misunderstood the nature of my question. It was never my intention that we should parcel out functions which, frankly, are indivisible. I only put forward my question in order to make it quite clear that the state is a single organic whole which requires that it be directed by a single mind. And who, Conscript Fathers, better than Tiberius, who has won such great honours, denied the rest of us, in war, and who has done the state, and Augustus, such service in peace?"

After this speech there was a general confused babble, as one senator after another (and sometimes more than one at the same time) protested that they had no wish but to surrender the power that belonged to them into my hands. Quintus Haterius even went so far as to cry out: "How long, Caesar, will you allow the state to have no head?" — as if Augustus had been dead for years rather than a few days.

Finally, Mamercus Aemilius Scaurus, a man never without a sneer on his lips, remarked that since I had not used my tribune's power to veto the motion which suggested I should replace Augustus, he hoped that the Senate's prayers would not go unrewarded. His comment was greeted with acclamation. He smiled, pleased to be the object of general attention and to have forced me towards the unwelcome chalice. For Scaurus was one of the few senators intelligent enough to understand that I was sincere and it pleased him to destroy my hope that someone would consent to take up part of the burden, and so make it possible to attempt to restore the Republic.

I was beaten. Driven to power by a generation fit for slavery, there was bitterness in my heart as I indicated my acceptance. What was I accepting? Misery and back-breaking labour. What was I setting aside? The hope of happiness. "I shall do as you ask,"
1
growled, "until I grow so old that you may be good enough to grant me a respite."

That evening I was prostrated by a migraine. I dismissed the slaves whose remedies were vain. Sejanus stroked my head with a napkin soaked in vinegar.