The Twelve Caesars

by Robert Graves

  56. He acted no less cruelly towards his Greek favourites. One day he asked a man named Zeno, who had been discoursing in a rather affected style: ‘What damned dialect may that be?’ ‘It is Doric,’ replied Zeno. Tiberius mistook this for a taunting reference to his exile at Rhodes, where Doric is spoken; and banished Zeno to the Aegean island of Cinaria, home of the artichoke. At the dinner table he used to pose questions arising from his daily study. Seleucus, a professor of literature, had been finding out from the Imperial servants what books he was reading, and came prepared with all the right answers; hearing of this, Tiberius dismissed him from the company, and later forced him to commit suicide.

  57. Some signs of Tiberius’s savage and dour character could be distinguished even in his boyhood. Theodorus the Gadarene, who taught him rhetoric, seems to have been the first to do so, since, on having occasion to reprove Tiberius, he would call him ‘mud, kneaded with blood!’ But after he became Emperor, while he was still gaining popular favour by a pretence of moderation, there could be no doubt that Theodorus had been right. Once, as a funeral procession was passing, a humorist hailed the corpse and asked him to tell Augustus’s ghost that his bequests to the commons had not yet been duly paid. Tiberius ordered the man to be arrested and brought before him. ‘I will give you your due at once,’ he said, and ordered his execution with: ‘Why not go to my father yourself and tell him the truth about those legacies?’ Soon afterwards a Roman knight named Pompey appeared in the Senate to lodge a strong protest against some action of Tiberius’s. Tiberius threatened imprisonment, shouting: ‘You’re Pompey, aren’t you? I’ll make a Pompeian of you unless you hold your tongue!’—a reference to the dismal fate of Pompey the Great’s supporters at the hands of the victorious Caesareans.

  58. About this time a praetor asked Tiberius whether, in his opinion, courts should be convened to try cases of lèse majesté. Tiberius replied that the law must be enforced; and enforce it he did, most savagely, too. One man was accused of decapitating an image of Augustus with a view to substituting another head; his case was tried before the Senate and, finding a conflict of evidence, Tiberius had the witnesses examined under torture. The offender was sentenced to death, which provided a precedent for far-fetched accusations: people could now be executed for beating a slave, or changing their own clothes, close to an image of Augustus, or for carrying a ring or coin, bearing Augustus’s head, into a privy or a brothel; or for criticizing anything Augustus had ever said or done. The climax came when a man died merely for letting an honour be voted him by his native town council on the same day that honours had once been voted to Augustus.

  59. Tiberius did so many other wicked deeds under the pretext of reforming public morals—but in reality to gratify his lust for seeing people suffer—that many satires were written against the evils of the day, incidentally expressing gloomy fears about the future; such as the following:

  You cruel monster! I’ll be damned, I will,

  If even your own mother loves you still.

  ***

  You are no knight—Caesar’s adopted son

  May own no cash to qualify as one;

  And banishment in Rhodes cancelled your right

  To be a citizen—far less a knight.

  ***

  Saturn’s golden age has passed,

  Saturn’s age could never last;

  Now while Caesar holds the stage

  This must be an iron age.

  ***

  He is not thirsty for neat wine

  As he was thirsty then,

  But warms him up a tastier cup—

  The blood of murdered men.

  ***

  Here is a Sulla, men of Rome, surnamed

  Sulla the Fortunate—to your misfortune;

  Here is a Marius come back at last

  To capture Rome; here is an Antony

  Uncivilly provoking civil strife,

  His hands thrice dyed in costly Roman blood.

  Confess: ‘Rome is no more!’ All who return

  To reign, from banishment, reign bloodily.

  At first Tiberius dismissed these verses as the work of bilious malcontents who were impatient with his reforms and did not really mean what they said. He would remark: ‘Let them hate me, so long as they fear me!’ But, as time went on, his conduct justified every line they had written.

  60. A few days after he came to Capri a fisherman suddenly intruded on his solitude by presenting him with an enormous mullet, which he had lugged up the trackless cliffs at the rear of the island. Tiberius was so scared that he ordered his guards to rub the fisherman’s face with the mullet. The scales skinned it raw, and the poor fellow shouted in his agony: ‘Thank Heaven, I did not bring Caesar that huge crab I also caught!’ Tiberius sent for the crab and had it used in the same way.

  A guardsman once stole a peacock from the Imperial aviary and was sentenced to death. On another occasion, during a country jaunt, the bearers of Tiberius’s litter were held up by a bramble thicket; he had the Guards’ centurion, whose task it was to choose the right path, stretched on the ground and flogged until he nearly died.

  61. Soon Tiberius broke out in every sort of cruelty and never lacked for victims: these were, first, his mother’s friends and less intimate acquaintances; then those of Agrippina, Nero and Drusus; finally, those of Sejanus. With Sejanus out of the way his savageries increased; which proved that Sejanus had not, as some thought, been inciting him to commit them, but merely providing the opportunities that he demanded. Nevertheless, in Tiberius’s dry, brief autobiography we find him daring to assert that Sejanus had been killed for persecuting Nero and Drusus; the fact being that he had himself put Nero to death when Sejanus was already an object of suspicion, and Drusus after he had fallen from power. A detailed list of Tiberius’s barbarities would take a long time to compile; I shall content myself with a few samples. Not a day, however holy, passed without an execution; he even desecrated New Year’s Day. Many of his men victims were accused and punished with their children—some actually by their children—and the relatives forbidden to go into mourning. Special awards were voted to the informers who had denounced them and, in certain circumstances, to the witnesses too. An informer’s word was always believed. Every crime became a capital one, even the utterance of a few careless words. A poet found himself accused of slander—he had written a tragedy which presented King Agamemnon in a bad light—and a historian had made the mistake of describing Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and Cassius, as ‘the last of the Romans’. Both these authors were executed without delay, and their works—though once publicly read before Augustus, and accorded general praise—were called in and destroyed. Tiberius denied those who escaped with a prison sentence not only the solace of reading books, but the privilege of talking to their fellow-prisoners. Some of the accused, on being warned to appear in court, felt sure that the verdict would be ‘guilty’ and, to avoid the humiliation of a trial, stayed at home and severed an artery; yet Tiberius’s men bandaged their wounds and hurried them, half-dead, to prison. Others obeyed their summons and then drank poison in full view of the Senate. The bodies of all executed persons were flung on the Stairs of Mourning, and dragged to the Tiber with hooks—as many as twenty a day, including women and children. Tradition forbade the strangling of virgins; so, when little girls had been condemned to die in this way, the executioner began by violating them. Tiberius used to punish with life those who wished to die. He regarded death as a comparatively light affliction, and on hearing that a man named Carnalus had forestalled his execution by suicide, exclaimed: ‘Carnalus has got away!’ Once, during a gaol inspection, a prisoner begged to be put out of his misery; Tiberius replied: ‘No; we are not yet friends again.’ An ex-consul has recorded in his memoirs that he attended a banquet at which Tiberius was suddenly asked by a loud-voiced dwarf, standing among a group of jesters near the table: ‘What of Paconius? Why is he still alive after being charged with lèse majesté?’ Tiberius told him to hold his
saucy tongue; but a few days later requested the Senate to make a quick decision about Paconius’s execution.

  62. On eventually discovering that Drusus had after all died, not as a result of his debauched habits, but from poison administered by his wife Livilla in partnership with Sejanus, Tiberius grew enraged and redoubled his cruelties until nobody was safe from torture and death. He spent whole days investigating the Drusus affair, which obsessed him to such a degree that when a man whose guest he had been at Rhodes arrived in response to his own friendly invitation, he mistook him for an important witness in the case and had him put to the torture at once. When the truth came out he actually executed the man to avoid publicizing the scandal.

  In Capri they still show the place at the cliff top where Tiberius used to watch his victims being thrown into the sea after prolonged and exquisite tortures. A party of marines were stationed below, and when the bodies came hurtling down they whacked at them with oars and boot-hooks, to make sure that they were completely dead. An ingenious torture of Tiberius’s devising was to trick men into drinking huge draughts of wine, and then suddenly to knot a cord tightly around their genitals, which not only cut into the flesh but prevented them from urinating. Even more people would have died, it is thought, had Thrasyllus the astrologer not cleverly persuaded him to postpone his designs by an assurance that he still had many years of life in hand. These victims would have included Germanicus’s sole surviving son, Gaius Caligula, and his own grandson Tiberius, whom he hated as having been born from adultery. The story is credible, because he sometimes used to envy Priam for having outlived his entire family.

  63. Much evidence is extant, not only of the hatred that Tiberius earned but of the state of terror in which he himself lived, and the insults heaped upon him. He forbade anyone to consult soothsayers, except openly and with witnesses present; and even attempted to suppress all oracles in the neighbourhood of Rome—but desisted for fear of the miraculous power shown by the sacred Lots, which he brought to Rome in a sealed chest from the Temple of Fortune at Palestrina. They vanished and did not become visible again until returned to the same temple.

  Tiberius had assigned provinces to certain ex-consuls whom he distrusted; but, not daring to relax his surveillance, detained them in Rome for several years until their successors had been appointed. Meanwhile, they relayed his frequent instructions to their lieutenants and agents in the provinces which they officially governed, yet were unable to visit.

  64. After exiling Agrippina and her two sons he always moved them from one place of confinement to another in closed Utters, with their wrists and ankles fettered and a military escort to prevent all persons met on the road from even stopping to watch the litter go by, let alone glance inside.

  65. Becoming aware that Sejanus’s birthday was being publicly celebrated, and that golden statues had been raised to him everywhere, as a preliminary step to his usurpation of the throne, Tiberius found some difficulty in getting rid of his tool and did so at last by subterfuge rather than by the exercise of imperial authority. First of all, to detach Sejanus from his own immediate entourage, while pretending to honour him, Tiberius appointed him his colleague in a fifth consulship,53 which he assumed solely for this purpose ten years after the fourth; but did not visit Rome for his inauguration. Next, he made Sejanus believe that he would soon marry into the imperial family and be awarded tribunicial power; and then, taking him off his guard, sent a shamefully abject message to the Senate begging, among other things, to be fetched into their presence under military escort by one of the two subsidiary Consuls—he complained that he was a poor, lonely old man whom Sejanus was plotting to assassinate. But he had taken precautions against the revolt which he feared might yet break out, by ordering that his grandson Drusus, who was still alive, should be released if necessary from his prison at Rome and appointed commander-in-chief. He thought, indeed, of taking refuge at the headquarters of some provincial army and had a naval flotilla standing by to carry him off the island; where he waited on a cliff top for the distant bonfire signals (announcing all possible eventualities), which he had ordered to be sent in case his couriers might be delayed. Even when Sejanus’s conspiracy had been suffocated Tiberius did not show the least sign of increased confidence, but remained in the so-called Villa Io for the next nine months.

  66. His uneasiness of mind was aggravated by a perpetual stream of reproaches from all sides; and every one of his condemned victims either cursed him to his face or arranged for a defamatory notice to be posted in the theatre seats occupied by senators. His attitude to these reproaches varied markedly: sometimes shame made him want nobody to hear about the incident, sometimes he laughed and deliberately publicized it. He even had a scathing letter from Artabanus, King of Parthia, in which he was accused of murdering his immediate family, with other innocent persons, and of disgustingly obscene practices; and recommended to satisfy the intense and pardonable longings of his people, who loathed him, by commiting suicide as soon as convenient.

  67. At last, growing thoroughly disgusted with himself, he as good as confessed his misery. A letter to the Senate began in this strain. ‘My lords, if I know what to tell you, or how to tell it, or what to leave altogether untold for the present, may all the gods and goddesses in Heaven bring me to an even worse damnation than I now daily suffer!’ According to one body of opinion he had foreseen that he would, in time, yield to his vices and earn universal hatred or dislike; which made him refuse, point-blank, the title ‘Father of His Country’ offered by the Senate, and also forbid them to swear an oath approving in advance and retrospect of whatever he said or did—for fear that his shame would be intensified when he turned out to be unworthy of such honours. This conclusion may, in fact, be deduced from his formal reply to the two proposals:

  So long as my wits do not fail me, you can count on the consistency of my behaviour; but I should not like you to set the precedent of binding yourselves to approve a man’s every action; for what if something happened to alter that man’s character?

  And again:

  If you ever feel any doubts about my character or my sincere regard for you—but may I die before that happens!—the title ‘Father of His Country’ will not recompense me for the loss of your regard, and you will be ashamed either of having given me the title without sufficient deliberation, or of having shown disloyalty by changing your opinion of me.

  68. Tiberius was strongly and heavily built, and above average height. His shoulders and chest were broad, and his body perfectly proportioned from top to toe. His left hand was more agile than the right, and so strong that he could poke a finger through a sound, newly-plucked apple or into the skull of a boy or young man. He had a handsome, fresh-complexioned face, though subject to occasional rashes of pimples. The letting his back hair grow down over the nape seems to have been a family habit of the Claudians. Tiberius’s eyes were remarkably large and possessed the unusual power of seeing in the dark, when he first opened them after sleep; but this phenomenon disappeared after a minute or two. His gait was a stiff stride, with the neck poked forward, and if ever he broke his usual stern silence to address those walking with him, he spoke with great deliberation and eloquent movements of the fingers. Augustus disliked these mannerisms and put them down to pride, but frequently assured both the Senate and the commons that they were physical, not moral, defects. Tiberius enjoyed excellent health almost to the end of his reign, although after the age of thirty he never called in a doctor or asked one to send him medicine.

  69. He lacked any deep regard for the gods or other religious feelings, his belief in astrology having persuaded him that the world was wholly ruled by fate. Yet thunder had a most frightening effect on Tiberius: whenever the sky wore an ugly look he would put on a laurel wreath which, he supposed, would make him lightning-proof.

  70. Tiberius was deeply devoted to Greek and Latin literature and, while still a young man, modelled his Latin oratorical style on that of old Messala Corvinus; but ruined i
t with so many affectations and pedantries that his extempore speeches were considered far better than the prepared ones. He also wrote an Elegy on the Death of Julius Caesar and Greek verses in the manner of his favourites Euphorion, Rhianus, and Parthenius, whose busts he placed in the public libraries among those of the classics—thus prompting several scholars to publish rival commentaries on these poets and dedicate them to him. However, he had a particular bent for mythology and carried his researches in it to such a ridiculous point that he would test professors of Greek literature—whose society, as I have already mentioned, he cultivated above all others—by asking them questions like: Who was Hecuba’s mother?—‘What name did Achilles assume when he disguised himself as a girl at the court of King Lycomedes?’—‘What song did the Sirens sing?’ Furthermore, on his first entrance into the Senate after the death of Augustus he showed equal respect for the gods and for his adoptive father’s memory by reviving the example set long ago by King Minos of Crete when informed of his son Androgeus’s murder: he used wine and incense in his sacrifice, but dispensed with the customary flautists.

  71. Tiberius spoke Greek fluently, but there were occasions when he stuck to Latin, especially official ones: indeed, he once apologized to the House for the foreign word ‘monopoly’, explaining that he could find no native equivalent. And he objected to the Greek word ‘emblems’—meaning metal ornaments rivetted on wine cups—when it appeared in a decree: if a one-word Latin equivalent could not be found, he said, a periphrasis of several words must serve. At another time he gave orders that a soldier who had been asked, in Greek, to give evidence on oath, must answer either in Latin or not at all.