Livia was one of the richest people in the empire, and, unlike most Roman women, she received complete control of her property. Augustus bequeathed Livia one-third of his estate, while he gave the other two-thirds to Tiberius. She owned property both in Italy and in several provinces East and West. As a woman, Livia couldn’t be a senator, but she received senators in her home, where a huge staff waited on them. All in all, she employed over a thousand people.
Time spent with Livia sometimes paid off down the road. Her household included a man who would end up as commander of the Praetorian Guard under a later emperor. Among her court favorites was someone who would later go on to become Rome’s first emperor from outside the dynastic circle: the first not descended from either Augustus or Livia.
Livia served as a bridge between the reigns of her husband and her son. Tiberius surely both appreciated the continuity and resented it. While he allowed his mother to amass honors and to exercise certain powers, he also imposed limits. For example, early in his reign, the Senate wanted to give her the unprecedented title Mother of Her Country, but Tiberius vetoed it, along with other senatorial suggestions such as officially calling him Son of Julia and renaming the month of October as Livius. Tiberius preferred the title of Son of a God, which he had by virtue of Augustus’s deification.
To understand Tiberius, we have to understand Livia. No Roman woman had ever matched her position of wealth and honor. Not only was she the living link to the founder of the dynasty, but also she was de facto First Lady, since Tiberius was divorced and without a mistress. She was also the most knowledgeable political veteran in Rome. And she was a daily reminder to the proud Tiberius of someone who exceeded what he considered the proper role of a woman. One imagines that if ever someone called him the Son of the Augusta, he surely winced—and yet whenever he faced a knotty political problem, he may well have asked his mother for advice.
From time to time, Livia threw around her weight in Roman public life: advancing a friend here, granting special privileges to an ally there, now dedicating statues in her name and Tiberius’s, now inviting senators to a reception in her home. Tiberius generally accepted these things and even worked behind the scenes to present a united front. That was especially true in the early part of his reign, but as time went by, he grew less patient with his mother.
One person whom Tiberius did not consult was his ex-wife, Julia. Augustus had commuted her exile from an island off the Italian coast to the southern Italian city of Regium, but she still lived under what amounted to house arrest. Within six months of Tiberius’s becoming emperor in the year 14, she was dead of malnutrition. It was said that Julia gave up and starved herself to death, perhaps in grief over the execution of her son Agrippa Postumus or perhaps just in desperation at the thought of her ex-husband in power.
When Tiberius became princeps, he was a mature man and in some ways one of the best-prepared emperors that Rome would ever have. But he was hardly the youngest. At fifty-five, Tiberius was done with leading armies and traveling abroad. Although he followed Augustus’s lead in this—he too had begun to stay put at that age—Tiberius nonetheless came in for unfair criticism for his supposed lack of courage and enterprise.
TIBERIUS AND THE SENATE
Tiberius was fundamentally an oligarch. Unlike Augustus, who enjoyed popularity with Rome’s ordinary people, this emperor was aloof and reserved. He had little time for funding public works and less for attending the games.
Although Tiberius never knew the old republic, his family heritage gave him a stake in the Senate, and in his first years, he showed it respect. He attended senate meetings regularly. He acknowledged the senators’ freedom of speech, listened politely, and tried to be discreet in injecting his own opinion. He rejected titles such as Master or Father of the Fatherland. As he often said, “I am master of the slaves, imperator of the soldiers, and chief of the rest.” He once told the Senate that he considered himself its servant and one who looked on the senators as “kind, just, and indulgent masters.”
But few believed him. To claim to be the First Citizen while really being the king, as in the case of Augustus, you had to be a political magician. Augustus paid attention to the Senate and flattered its members while really manipulating them.
Tiberius was no magician. He gave the senators freedom and expected to get cooperation in return. Instead, the result was a mix of servility and conspiracy. Most senators lacked the courage to speak freely before him. When, at the start of his reign, Tiberius promised the Senate to share power, one senator replied that “the body of the republic is one and must be ruled by one mind”—that is, the First Citizen. Tiberius scorned such sentiments. He supposedly once left a Senate meeting muttering in Greek, “Men fit to be slaves!”
The emperor’s personality did not help. Tiberius lacked the affability and thoughtfulness that a Roman noble was supposed to show toward his friends. Julius Caesar, for example, could be described as “easy” in his relations with his friends, whereas Tiberius could be described as such only in his fluency in Greek.
He was insincere and often cruel and an unreliable judge of character, sometimes dangerously so. He was austere to the point of bad taste; for instance, he attended Senate meetings rather than visiting his dying son or mourning him afterward. Tiberius had such a strong contempt for honors that he left people nervous and uncertain of how to treat him.
But he had many virtues as well. Tiberius was realistic, prudent, moderate, sober, and thrifty. He was modest enough to turn down a request for a temple to himself and his mother, stating instead that his real temples would be in people’s hearts. He did insist on building a grander residence on the Palatine Hill than Augustus had. Still, Tiberius was frugal enough to die leaving a surplus in the Treasury.
After his divorce from Julia, Tiberius never remarried, nor is he known to have had a long-term mistress. One imagines a lonely man, the Citizen Kane of Roman emperors. Yet Tiberius was not simple. A later historian put it well: “Tiberius possessed a great many virtues and a great many vices, and followed each set in turn as if the other did not exist.”
After a relatively quiet half dozen years of rule, Tiberius allowed his enemies to be put on trial for the crime of maiestas: diminishing the majesty of the Roman people, the emperor, or his family. It was a vague and dangerous charge that almost guaranteed abuse. Senators accused one another of treason. That rarely happened under Augustus, who paid close enough attention to the Senate, but Tiberius let them turn on one another.
Although the trial took place in the Senate, defendants did not relish the venue. Unlike a regular courtroom, the Senate had few rules to protect the accused. In the end, dozens of senators were victims of these trials and lost their lives. The result chilled the freedom of the hundreds of senators who escaped. Most considered Tiberius dishonest and cruel.
If Tiberius behaved tyrannically, he was certainly provoked, not that it justifies his response. Hostility was always bubbling below the surface of the nobility. It came out in little ways again and again. When, for example, an elderly noble widow died at the end of the year 22, she showed what she thought of Tiberius by leaving him out of her will—a gesture that few others of her class dared to follow. Tiberius let it pass with only one act in response. He refused to let her family display the wax masks of her late husband or half brother among the ancestral greats depicted in the funeral procession. She was the widow of Cassius and the half sister of Brutus, two of the leaders of the conspiracy that assassinated Julius Caesar, Tiberius’s adoptive grandfather, in 44 BC. Even after sixty-six years, some wounds still festered.
THE HOUSE OF AUGUSTUS
Tiberius made a good manager, but Augustus had wanted more: he had wanted a hero. He found one in Tiberius’s nephew, the dashing and charismatic general Germanicus (15 BC to the year 19), son of Tiberius’s late brother, Drusus. At the time, Tiberius had his own son, Drusus the Younger, but Germanicus now came before him as heir. Since Germanicus was married to Augustus�
��s granddaughter, the adoption guaranteed that Augustus’s bloodline would eventually return to power. Conveniently for Livia, Germanicus was her grandson, so her bloodline would hold power, starting with her son, Tiberius. The grim emperor and his magnetic nephew did not get along, with disastrous results for the imperial family.
Germanicus was an icon of Tiberius’s early years as emperor. At the age of twenty-eight, he commanded Rome’s armies on the Rhine. Augustus sent him there in the year 13, and placed him in charge of Rome’s eight legions. The Roman people loved Germanicus; his wife, Agrippina the Elder, granddaughter of the divine Augustus; and their six surviving children. (Three others died young.) The sources say that Germanicus was easygoing, accessible, modest, and charming, all of which won him a following among both senators and ordinary folk in Rome and the provinces. Coins and busts show a handsome young man with an aquiline nose, a prominent chin, and curly locks of hair. He was as literate as he was warlike, killing an enemy in hand-to-hand combat and writing poetry in Greek. Portraits show Agrippina the Elder as a serious woman with a classical profile and long, braided hair.
When Augustus died in the year 14, the legions of Germany mutinied and wanted Germanicus instead of Tiberius to be emperor. With the help of his capable wife, Germanicus put down the mutiny and restored loyalty to Tiberius. Then in the year 16 Tiberius recalled Germanicus from the Rhine, where, in spite of his name (“conqueror of Germany”), the general had won battles but did not extend the empire. His standout success was recapturing legionary standards lost by Varus and burying the still-exposed dead men’s bones.
Back in Rome, Germanicus celebrated a triumph that exaggerated his achievements and magnified the adulation of the crowd. All eyes were on him as he rode in a chariot with five of his children. His friends and supporters were ever ready to polish his image. Even Germanicus’s previous, failed expedition to the North Sea received an epic poem trumpeting his boldness.
Next, Tiberius sent Germanicus to the East with a broad portfolio, but the young man pushed for even more power. He and Agrippina clashed with the governor of Syria, Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, and his wife, Plancina, who had joined them on his mission. Both were nobles and not easily intimidated.
Soon Germanicus left for Egypt, which he visited without Tiberius’s permission, even though no senator was allowed to enter the province without it. In Alexandria, Germanicus received a hero’s welcome. He owed his popularity in part to his ancestry: through his mother, Antonia the Younger, Germanicus was the grandson of Mark Antony (and Octavia). His generosity also won him acclaim, because Germanicus helped people by putting state-owned grain on sale during a food shortage. The cheering was so great that Germanicus had to ask the Alexandrians to tone it down. He said that only Tiberius and Livia were worthy of such acclamation.
When he fell sick in Syria, Germanicus blamed poison and he allegedly suspected Piso and Plancina. He died on October 10, 19, aged thirty-three. In the uproar afterward, Piso was recalled to Rome and forced to stand trial before the Senate. He was convicted of lesser crimes than murder, but he committed suicide before the sentencing. Plancina was also forced back to Rome, but she was saved by the powerful protection of Livia, who had Tiberius intercede on her behalf and arrange her acquittal. Many in Rome pointed a finger at a jealous Tiberius, with Livia supposedly behind him as the real cause of Germanicus’s death. Distant and elitist as they were, they could not match Germanicus’s popularity. That they resented it seems likely—they were only human, but murder is another matter. Incidentally, Plancina outlived Livia only to find her protection gone, so Plancina, like her husband, committed suicide.
Even in death, Germanicus was the public’s darling. The sources speak of a universal outpouring of grief, as if everyone felt he or she had lost one of his own. A poet wrote at the time: “I, Hades, declare, ‘Germanicus is not mine; he’s of the stars.’ ”
His ashes were laid to rest in the mausoleum of Augustus on a day when torches blazed around the monument and the raucous city for once knew only silence broken by cries of grief.
Germanicus’s death robbed Rome of a hero and Tiberius of a successor. At the age of sixty, he surely felt pressure to find the next emperor. Germanicus had three sons, but they were too young. Tiberius’s thirty-two-year-old son, Drusus, was an experienced soldier and statesman but also a playboy. Besides, Augustus had clearly meant for Germanicus and his descendants to rule. So Tiberius named Drusus the Younger as the emperor-in-waiting, with the understanding that he would pass the throne to one of Germanicus’s sons. Unfortunately, a family feud got in the way; that, and the craftiness of an ambitious outsider who took advantage of an old man.
But before turning to the blood and thunder that ended Tiberius’s reign, consider for a moment the way he took charge of Rome’s foreign policy and changed it forever. That was the legacy of Tiberius’s best years.
THE IMPERIAL ARMY
Like General George Washington or General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Tiberius was a soldier to the core who preferred to keep his sword in its sheath once he became chief executive. He wrenched the military system out of the pattern that Augustus had established, and he gave the army what would be its new and lasting main task: to defend the Roman peace.
The army was the greatest institution in the empire, but it was no mere military machine. For most people, it was the only ladder of social mobility. It was also a tool of assimilation. The army made provincial subjects into citizens, and it mixed together people from one end of the Mediterranean to the other and from Britain to Iraq. The word people, and not men, is used advisedly, because in military camps and in communities that grew up around them, there were women and children who, along with soldiers and civilian men, were shaped and influenced by the Roman military. This was the case even though Roman soldiers were not allowed by law to marry, which was a big source of discontent. Many of them formed common-law marriages anyhow.
The Roman Imperial Army had about three hundred thousand men in Tiberius’s day and later rose to roughly five hundred thousand at its peak in the second century. Professional and well paid, it was also very well outfitted, highly disciplined, and large.
The military consisted of three main groups: the legions, auxiliaries, and others (rowers and sailors; tribal units on the edges of the empire; and the city of Rome’s guards, paramilitary police, and firemen).
Legionaries were heavy infantrymen and the pride of the Roman military. They served for twenty-five years. In addition to their annual salary, the men received a cash bonus upon retirement. Emperors were also expected to give additional cash bonuses from time to time—if they knew what was good for them. After all, the army put the Caesars in power, and the army could unseat them.
Legionaries were generally Roman citizens, but they rarely came from Rome or even Italy. Increasingly, Italians lost interest in military service, since they were now successful farmers enjoying peace and prosperity. Recruits came from other areas such as southern Gaul and Hispania and the provinces along the Danube.
There were twenty-five legions under Tiberius, three fewer than before Varus’s defeat in Germany in the year 9. Not long after Tiberius, the number of legions would go back to twenty-eight, and then, over the next century and a half, it reached thirty and finally a high of thirty-three. The total number of legionaries varied between about 130,000 and 170,000 men.
Auxilliaries, which fought alongside the legions, were composed of noncitizens. They were paid at a lower rate than legionaries, tended to be poorer and less literate, and, frankly, were more likely to have to fight and die in the thick of battle. They served in locally recruited units that were equipped and trained according to local customs. Starting around the year 50, auxiliaries received citizenship after twenty-five years of service. As proof, they received a folding bronze tablet called a diploma.
Special forces were kept in Rome. The Praetorian Guard, about several thousand strong, served as an elite unit to support and protect the emperor. Anoth
er 1,500 or so soldiers were deployed as the city’s police force. Approximately another 3,000 soldiers made up Rome’s fire fighters. Unlike the rest of the army, soldiers in Rome were, in the main, Italians.
The navy had two bases in Italy, one on the Bay of Naples and the other on the Adriatic. Rome also had warships on the Rhine and Danube.
One last part of the Roman military consisted of tribesmen who lived on both sides of the frontier on the empire’s edges. They served in semi-irregular units.
As impressive as the Roman army was, it included few men who’d ever set foot in Rome. That did not rob the military of a sense of purpose, but it did tend to make pay and conditions of service loom ever larger in the men’s minds. After all, if they weren’t fighting for hearth and home, they might as well be fighting for money.
Another problem was the army’s combat edge. It is easier to inspire troops who are marching off to war than those who are sitting on garrison duty. Maintaining discipline became ever more important for the imperial army—and more difficult.
One day, far in the future, Rome’s soft and comfortable peacetime army would offer a tempting target to hard men on the other side of the frontier. But not in Tiberius’s era.
“A PRINCE UNINTERESTED IN EXTENDING THE EMPIRE”
Germanicus wanted to win back Germany east of the Rhine, but Tiberius, a realist, disagreed. For all the talk of “empire without end” under Augustus, he knew better. Tiberius was, as Tacitus described him in the quotation above, uninterested in expansion, or at least in armed expansion. The new policy marked a dramatic change. For nearly three hundred years, men who conquered new territory had dominated Roman politics. Not anymore; not if Tiberius had his way. And there were sound and sensible reasons for the emperor to prevail.
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