The Twelve Caesars

by Matthew Dennison

  Above all Tiberius lacked charm. It was part of a larger, conscious detachment from those around him. Dio describes his ‘most peculiar nature’, his anger ‘if anyone gave evidence of understanding him... he put many to death for no other offence than that of having comprehended him’.9 The contrast with his predecessor is marked. Affable and wily, Augustus had recast the government of Rome as a public celebration of civic-mindedness displayed in building and restoration programmes, large-scale spectacles and the heightened profile of his own family. Tiberius, haughtily patrician, did not trouble to win hearts and minds. He slashed the budget for public games, reducing actors’ pay and capping the number of gladiators, omitted to complete a single building project and, distancing himself from his troublesome relations, many of whom he executed, eventually concealed himself from sight. (This neglect of grass-roots popularity was a failing later repeated by the equally aristocratic, equally austere Galba.) High birth and, when it suited him, a superstitious attachment to portents endowed Tiberius with a sense of entitlement which did not require the endorsement of popular consensus. Although his career prior to the purple encompassed troughs as well as crests, ‘that strong and unwavering confidence in his destiny, which he had conceived from his early years because of omens and predictions’ never left him. It is one of the many ironies of our story that Augustus, embracing autocracy, courted popular support, while Tiberius, at heart faithful to the Republican oligarchy his ancestors had served through five centuries, baulked at currying favour, ‘headstrong and stubborn’ in his attitude towards the commons as his family had always been. ‘Let them hate me, provided they respect my conduct,’ Suetonius reports him as repeating from time to time. It is a statement of remarkable aloofness. The first ‘Julio-Claudian’ thanks to his adoption by Augustus, Tiberius was always the Claudian (arrogant and cruel) and never the Julian (mercurial, given to flashes of genius).

  As Romans would readily have understood, he was a product of his background. A descendant twice over of the family immortalized by Livy as ‘superbissima’, ‘excessively haughty’, he was the son of Tiberius Claudius Nero, whose name he shared, and Livia Drusilla, daughter of a Claudius Pulcher, twin branches of the same Claudian gens. His family was among the grandest in Rome and unique in its Republican achievements: a record of twenty-eight consulships (the first held in 493 BC), five dictatorships, seven censorships, six triumphs and two ovations. Although his father, a shiftless opportunist with an unerring capacity for backing the wrong horse, opposed Octavian and found his way onto the list of the proscripti, his mother married Nero’s tormentor in 39 BC when Tiberius was only three. Following his father’s death, from the age of nine Tiberius lived in the household of the most powerful man in Rome. Yet paternity left its imprint. He grew his hair long at the back, a style affected by Claudians, as if eager to assert loyalties more fundamental than those arising from cohabitation. And despite a philhellenism which increased over time, including an admiration for Greek intellectuals, his nature betrayed old-fashioned Roman qualities of austerity, continence and self-discipline (in themselves a powerful riposte to Suetonius’ inventory of sexual miscreancy). These were Republican virtues, paraded by Augustus in the deliberate simplicity of his lifestyle, which Tiberius also followed (he had a taste for radishes and cucumber and, particularly, pears): in Tiberius’ case, they were part of a larger admiration for the political system they had once upheld. In time, these genetic sympathies – which found expression in funeral games held in honour of his father and his grandfather – would be balanced by Tiberius’ personal admiration for Augustus, a response compounded of reverence and awe. His resistance early in his principate to using the title ‘Augustus’, save in letters to foreign potentates, arose partly from Republican distaste, partly from a sense that he was unworthy to take on to such an extent the mantle of his adoptive father. He regarded with wariness those personal, king-like awards stockpiled by Augustus; eschewed the civic crown at his door which, Republican in origin, so nearly symbolized the truth of the latter’s Roman revolution; resisted the obeisance of senators and colleagues and refused the appellation ‘Father of his Country’. ‘Of many high honours,’ we read, ‘he accepted only a few of the more modest.’ His motives were not wholly ideological. Dio recounts a telling incident. A few men began wearing purple clothing, something which had previously been forbidden. Although Tiberius took measures to stop them, he ‘neither rebuked nor fined any of them’.10 His upbraiding took the form of a symbolic gesture, a dark woollen cloak flung across his own clothes. It was as if it were the loneliness of the principate which disturbed him: at one level the camaraderie of shared purple clothing did not offend him. In self-imposed exile on Capri, living without many of the trappings of empire, he found escape from that loneliness.

  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.

  ‘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.)