Maybe Tiberius wished for a purely military career, but what faced him now was the most difficult political job in his world and stepping into the shoes of a god. Tiberius might not have wanted it, but the empire was his duty, and Tiberius was devoted to a fault. So he rose and addressed the senators.
Tiberius said that Augustus’s job was too big for anyone else to handle and that it should be divided into three parts: Rome and Italy, the legions, and the provinces. He didn’t mean it, of course, but an overeager senator missed the point. He said it was a good idea, and he asked Tiberius which of the three parts he preferred to have. Tiberius, appearing composed if perhaps really taken aback, replied elegantly. He was good at hiding what he felt when he had to. He said that the same man couldn’t both divide and choose. The senator backed off, but it was too late. (Tiberius remembered the man’s slight and avenged it years later with imprisonment and death by starvation.) Meanwhile, most senators begged Tiberius to take full power.
Finally, and only after hesitation, Tiberius accepted. And he left himself a way out, promising to stay in office, as he said, “Until I reach the point that it seems fair to you to give me a little respite in my old age.” Considering that he was already fifty-five he knew that old age wasn’t far off. Another reason to hesitate was Tiberius’s knowledge of the dangers of the job. At least, he often described it as “holding a wolf by the ears.” Still, however diffident Tiberius was, he took power and continued Rome’s government in more or less the form Augustus had left it. That, in and of itself, was a major achievement.
Tiberius had no easy role to play. Not only did he have to manage expectations after his great predecessor, but also he had to do so in the full knowledge that he wasn’t Augustus’s first choice as successor. Besides, Augustus had bequeathed him a nearly impossible job. Tiberius followed Augustus the way John Adams followed George Washington or the way Tim Cook followed Steve Jobs. In each case, the second man was more effective than he was popular or charismatic.
Conqueror and peacemaker, the emperor was also builder and demolisher; benefactor and judge; head of his family and Father of the Fatherland; tribune of the people and First Man in the Senate; most authoritative of the Romans and champion of the provinces; manager and magnetic leader; showman and symbol of severity; priest and commander; sacrosanct in Rome and king in the East—and even god. Every emperor had to work out an arrangement with the elites that mattered: with the army, the Senate, the imperial court, and the provincial notables. The urban plebeians of Rome mattered too, but their power was much less than it had been under the republic. Augustus managed to pull it off, but only after a civil war and a process of political trial and error and thanks only to a long, long reign. Even a political virtuoso like him did not find the job easy.
His successors had trouble balancing the various and contradictory demands on the emperor. Nor did any of them reign as long as Augustus, who held unrivaled power in the Roman world for forty-five years.
Whereas Augustus adored the mix of force and fraud by which he ruled, Tiberius was a manager and a pragmatist who cut things down to size and made them work—even at the price of repression at home and retrenchment abroad.
As much as Augustus may have identified with the sphinx, Tiberius was the true man of mystery. His guarded personality confounded contemporaries and sometimes baffles today’s historians. Yet Tiberius had a truly consequential reign and proved to be a transformational leader. He cemented Augustus’s monarchy in place but not Augustus’s foreign policy. After centuries of expansion, Tiberius put on the brakes. Nor did any peacetime emperor ever do more damage to the old Roman nobility than Tiberius did. The man who started out as a friend of the Senate ended up as a tyrant in its eyes.
EARLY CAREER
Tiberius was born in Rome on November 16, 42 BC, the son of Tiberius Claudius Nero and Livia Drusilla. They passed on to Tiberius a hereditary attachment to the Roman Republic. But the republic of the Senate and the Roman people was dying, crushed by the invincible armies of Octavian and Antony. In 42 BC no one could guess that Octavian, later Augustus, would play a key role in Tiberius’s life. The two men came from different heritages.
Augustus had only one foot in the Roman nobility. Tiberius, by contrast, came from blue blood. Both of his parents claimed descent from the ancient patrician house of the Claudians, a family that had held Rome’s highest offices for centuries from the start of the republic and had built the Appian Way, Rome’s first great road. The Claudians had a sense of duty but also a feeling of entitlement and a tendency toward arrogance.
Tiberius’s father and grandfather each fought against Octavian at various times. A firm supporter of the republic, Tiberius’s grandfather committed suicide after going into battle on the losing side at Philippi. Tiberius’s father had more flexible principles. First he served Caesar in the Civil War, but then he found Caesar’s monarchical ways unbearable. After Caesar’s assassination, he voted for the Senate to honor the killers. (The Senate declined to do so.) Then after fighting Octavian, he fled Italy and Sicily in turn to take refuge in Greece. Tiberius was just a toddler then, but he and his mother Livia joined in the flight. Later, they returned to Italy, where Livia married Octavian.
Octavian was one of the most powerful men in the world. If Tiberius’s father objected to Octavian stealing his wife, he was in no position to stop him. So when Octavian and Livia were married in January 38 BC, Tiberius’s father was present at the wedding and gave away Livia “just as a father would.” She was pregnant at the time and soon gave birth to Tiberius’s younger brother, Drusus. Their father raised Tiberius and Drusus for the next five years. No doubt he introduced them to the proud traditions of the Claudian family. The Claudians, champions of the nobility, considered the Roman people a distant second. When he died in 33 BC, Tiberius’s father left Octavian as guardian to the two boys, who were now raised by Octavian and Livia. Although he was only nine, Tiberius delivered the eulogy at his father’s funeral—presumably someone else wrote it.
Tiberius and Drusus grew up in their stepfather’s house under the same roof as their stepsister, Augustus’s daughter, Julia. Augustus raised all three children to play a part in his regime, but he gave pride of place to Julia and her progeny, his blood relations. Livia, meanwhile, always the powerbroker, had great expectations for her own two sons.
A Roman woman who sought political power had no choice but to act through a man. Husbands could be influenced, as could lovers, fathers, and brothers, but the strongest male-female emotional tie in Rome was that of mother and son. Livia behaved accordingly. She advanced her boys both assiduously and patiently. Tough and unyielding herself, Livia raised Tiberius and Drusus to be hard men, which served them well in adversity but won few popularity contests.
The brothers developed a lifelong closeness. Julia and Tiberius, however, had a more complicated bond. He was dutiful, while she was wild; and he had an awkward relationship with Augustus, while she was daddy’s girl (at first). Raised as stepbrother and stepsister, they suddenly found themselves having to start all over as adults.
Julia and Livia each had a great impact on Tiberius’s life. So, ironically, would three other women related to Augustus by blood or marriage. A man’s man and the scion of his own proud noble house, Tiberius found that much of his career revolved around the women of his stepfather’s family. As a man who thought that women should not be allowed to rise too high, he could not have liked it. He “considered an exalted rank for a woman to be a diminution of his own,” wrote the Roman historian Tacitus.
Raised to be a soldier and statesman, Tiberius was also trained in the Greek and Latin classics. He was a skilled orator, poet, and wine connoisseur. He was knowledgeable in Roman law. He had an interest in philosophy and a passion for astrology. In short, Tiberius was military but educated and literate.
He is said to have been tall and strong. Both his coins and the literary sources depict a handsome man, but he was supposedly so stiff and stern th
at he came off as unpleasant or arrogant. Augustus allegedly quipped on his deathbed that Tiberius would crunch Rome in his tough and obstinate jaws.
Beneath the toughness, perhaps there lay mental scars. An early life as a refugee, a broken home, a change of households, the loss of a father, a stepfather who considered other young men more promising than him, and an overbearing mother—Tiberius suffered through quite a lot in his boyhood. Throughout his life, he had a reputation for insincerity, yet perhaps he found that he needed to hide his true feelings in order to survive.
THE RISE TO POWER
Tiberius traveled a long, glorious, but bitter road to power. Practically from the time he took on the toga of manhood at the age of fifteen in 27 BC, he was active in public affairs. After holding his first military and political offices, he married Vipsania, the daughter of Agrippa, Augustus’s right-hand man and son-in-law. Vipsania was the third important woman in Tiberius’s life with a close connection to the ruler. She did not come from an old noble family, but Tiberius loved her, and they enjoyed a happy home life with their son, Drusus the Younger. That is, when Tiberius was home.
After serving as a judicial official known as a praetor in 16 BC, Tiberius spent the next decade continually campaigning north of Italy in an attempt to bring Rome’s borders to the Danube and Elbe Rivers. He fought in the dark, cold, poor, and unglamorous parts of the empire, the ancient equivalents of today’s Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Serbia, and Hungary. Between 12 and 9 BC, Tiberius led the hard fighting that conquered Pannonia, an area lying south and west of the Danube. Tiberius proved to be a popular commander, hard drinking and risk averse but also someone who little by little expanded Rome’s borders. Meanwhile, Drusus led Rome’s armies in Germany all the way eastward to the Elbe.
Then Tiberius’s personal life turned upside down. When Agrippa died in 12 BC, Augustus needed someone new to serve as administrator and to guard the interests of the young princes Gaius and Lucius Caesar, Augustus’s two adopted sons. He turned to a mature and responsible man: Tiberius. Livia, not one to let sentiment get in the way of a good career move, probably encouraged Augustus’s decision, and she certainly smiled on it. Augustus now forced Tiberius to end his happy marriage, divorce Vipsania, and marry Julia, his stepsister.
Tiberius got along with Julia at first. Although he loved his first wife, marriage to Julia represented a promotion within the imperial family. Julia was attractive, witty, and helpful, and she was certainly a known quantity. She traveled to northern Italy to be nearer Tiberius fighting across the Alps. She bore him a son.
But their infant son died, and their interests diverged. Julia wanted to promote the careers of her sons by Agrippa, while Tiberius had his own career and his own son, Drusus the Younger. Tiberius considered himself a champion of the nobles, while Julia arguably had populist tendencies. More important, Tiberius thought little of women in politics, and Julia had no intention of staying home. Tiberius also missed Vipsania. The story goes that Tiberius was so upset when he once happened to see his ex-wife on the streets of Rome that it was arranged for them never to cross paths again.
When his brother suffered a severe injury in Germany in 9 BC after a riding accident, Tiberius made the long and difficult trip from Pannonia to see him. He reached Drusus just before he died. Tiberius followed his brother’s body to Rome—all the way on foot. If it was a nod to Augustus’s promotion of family values, it might also have expressed sincere grief at the loss of the last link to Tiberius’s father. Drusus earned the posthumous name Germanicus—conqueror of Germany—and passed it on to his descendants.
In 6 BC Augustus decided to send Tiberius on a new mission to the East. But Tiberius shocked him by announcing his plan to retire to Rhodes instead, a beautiful Greek island far from the center of power. He said that he was exhausted and in need of rest and that he didn’t want to stand in the way of Augustus’s grandsons—and Julia’s sons—Gaius and Lucius, who were about to come of age and who were being groomed as Augustus’s successors. Others said that Tiberius wanted to get away from Julia, but his dislike for her was more than just personal. Tiberius might well have feared that Gaius and Lucius would eventually have him executed. Sure enough, Gaius soon displayed his hostility to Tiberius, and perhaps Tiberius had seen it coming. Gossip added an additional reason for Tiberius’s retreat to Rhodes: supposedly he wanted to indulge his sex life there in a way he couldn’t at Rome, as if Rhodes were some ancient Las Vegas.
Tiberius enjoyed Rhodes, from its exquisite landscape to the company of a Greek scholar and astrologer whom he met there, and perhaps because of its illicit pleasures. Eventually Tiberius wanted to return to Rome, but Augustus forced him to wait until the year 2, when Tiberius took up a quiet residence in town. He brought the scholar-astrologer back with him and made him a Roman citizen.
RETURN TO ROME
Tiberius’s future looked dim in 6 BC, when he left for Rhodes. Ten years later, he was named Augustus’s successor. What happened? Julia had gotten tired of waiting for power. She committed serial adultery and plotted against her father but was caught. In 2 BC she faced disgrace and exile, and Augustus required Tiberius to divorce her. Her sons continued in favor, but they were both dead by the year 4. Gossip, as usual, blamed Livia, saying she had arranged for Gaius and Lucius to be poisoned so that Tiberius could come back to power. Yet each died on a mission abroad, far from Livia’s power base in Rome: Lucius succumbed to an illness; Gaius, to the lingering effects of a battle wound. Ancient conditions were often fragile and risky, and we can only wonder at Augustus’s willingness to risk their lives overseas. And Livia was probably not unhappy to see the obstacles to her sons’ elevation die.
Augustus solved his succession crisis by adopting Tiberius as his son. He was not the emperor’s first or second or even third choice, but Augustus was a realist. Besides, as will become clear, he added a sting to his gift.
In spite of their past disagreements, Tiberius was Rome’s most experienced general. Augustus also gave Tiberius tribunician power along with a grant of overriding authority (imperium maius). He said that he was adopting Tiberius for the good of the republic, a comment that was surely meant to strengthen Tiberius’s position rather than insult him. Although Augustus also adopted his youngest grandson, Agrippa Postumus, the boy was only sixteen and no threat at the time to Tiberius, a senior statesman aged forty-six. Augustus had no other grandchildren.
Soon afterward, Augustus sent Tiberius back to the northern front. A pro-Tiberius source praises Tiberius as a wise, prudent, authoritative, and moderate general who was considerate of his men’s lives. Certainly, Tiberius was successful. First he campaigned in Germany, where he matched his brother’s achievement of reaching the Elbe River with Roman arms. Then, in the year 6, he hurried back to Pannonia, where a major revolt was under way, this time including the neighboring region of Dalmatia (roughly, the coastal region of Croatia).
In three years of hard fighting, Tiberius put down one of the more serious revolts Rome had faced. He showed himself to be a cool practitioner of what would now be called counterinsurgency. It was a pacification campaign that the Romans won as much by cutting off the enemy from food and supplies as by engaging in battle.
Then, in the year 9, came the General Varus disaster in Germany and the loss of three Roman legions. Augustus sent Tiberius back to Germany over the next two years, where he engaged in the slow, patient, inglorious work of reorganizing the surviving legions and punishing Rome’s enemies across the Rhine River.
Back in Rome in the year 12, Tiberius celebrated a long-delayed triumph for the reconquest of Pannonia. His powers were extended and made equal to those of Augustus. A coin from the year 13 shows Augustus on one side and Tiberius on the other, as if the Roman world were preparing for the inevitable transfer of power.
THE SUCCESSION
In some ways, Augustus arranged for the smoothest and most peaceful transition imaginable. When he died, Tiberius had the good fortune to be at his beds
ide or at least to show up soon enough afterward that people could say he was there. It is likely that Augustus himself gave the cold-blooded order to have Agrippa Postumus executed upon his own death, in order to remove a potential rival to the new ruler. After all, Augustus had earlier established the principle that “too many Caesars is not a good thing.”
But in other ways, Augustus tied Tiberius’s hands. Livia was now seventy years old but still vigorous, and Augustus left her strong tools. He assured Livia’s position by adopting her in his will—as his daughter!—which made her a member of the Julian family. After his death, the Senate approved the adoption. As far as we know, no one asked whether Livia was now also the adoptive sister of her son Tiberius, who had already been adopted by Augustus.
No less important, Augustus’s will renamed Livia as Julia Augusta. This was an unprecedented distinction, and no one knew precisely what it meant. Livia, Tiberius, and the Senate would have to work that out. Yet clearly Augustus intended his wife to maintain considerable authority. The prestigious title of Julia Augusta placed her in Rome’s first family and left her only two letters away (a versus us) from the supreme position in the state. It was a way, in effect, of continuing Augustus’s power beyond the grave and of tempering Tiberius.
Nor was that the end of Livia’s authority. She was also the first priestess of the deified Augustus’s cult. This was no small thing because no woman held a major priesthood in Rome, aside from the Vestal Virgins. With Livia’s new office also came the right to have a bodyguard whenever she carried out her new religious duties, another sign of her importance. Many other honors followed, from a seat in the theater with the Vestal Virgins, to the several cities named after her. A province in the East erected a temple in honor of Tiberius, Livia, and the Senate. Sculpture and inscriptions began to connect Livia with Ceres, goddess of fertility and abundance, something only hinted at under Augustus.
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