Rome had just enough troops to patrol the border: about three hundred thousand men. The military was the government’s largest expense, typically accounting for more than half the annual budget, according to very rough scholarly estimates. A modern state, even a military power such as the United States, typically devotes less of its budget to the military and more to social welfare programs.
Rome’s economy was relatively poor and inelastic compared with later empires. Its ability to bear a greater military burden was limited. Nor did Germany offer enough riches to make it gleam in a would-be-conqueror’s eye. It presented only a defensible border—the Elbe-Danube line—and the prospect of glory. The levelheaded Tiberius had enough glory. Many in the Roman elite believed that Rome had already conquered the best part of the world, and the rest might not have seemed worth the effort.
More conquest required more soldiers. That would be not only expensive but also dangerous, since their numbers would increase the chance of rebellion. Besides, conscription was unpopular. And who would lead any invasion? The emperors did not want any of their generals to get the credit for major conquests.
People did not realize it at the time, but 16 was a watershed year in the history of the empire. By recalling Germanicus, Tiberius ended Rome’s last serious attempt to win back the territory between the Rhine and the Elbe. The only exception was the Rhineland, a narrow strip of land east of the Rhine, which Rome controlled for centuries.
Years of hard fighting in northern Europe taught Tiberius the bitter truth about wars of conquest. He lacked Augustus’s desire to conquer the world. Always cunning, Tiberius reported to the Senate that Augustus on his deathbed told him not to expand the empire. So major a policy change needed the prestige of Augustus, and Tiberius was wise to invoke him, but it’s doubtful that his predecessor really said it. If he did, and if Tiberius really did see him before the old man died, then it was a deathbed conversion. Everything that Augustus did while emperor shows him to have been a full-blooded imperialist. Tiberius deserves credit for having conceived the new policy and putting it into effect.
Tiberius was a pragmatist, and he was not alone, but deep in the Roman heart, there still beat a desire for military glory. So some emperors continued to fight wars of conquest, especially those few who were able field commanders and, unlike Tiberius, were still young enough to engage in arduous campaigns. Those men waged major wars that added the new provinces of Britain and Dacia to the empire. They also engaged in a long and fruitless generations-long contest with the Parthians and their successors. But they were the exception. Most of Rome’s emperors followed Tiberius’s new imperial policy.
It would be hard to overestimate the consequences of Tiberius’s transformation. True, he built on foundations laid by Augustus and Julius Caesar. But Tiberius took them further to a logical if sometimes harsh conclusion—and he wasted little effort sugarcoating the truth. The result was a fundamental alteration in the character of Rome. Romans continued to debate his policies and some disagreed, but Rome changed as follows:
An empire in search of new lands to conquer needs ambitious generals to lead military campaigns as well as dynamic politicians to guide diplomacy. It needs free and open debate to hammer out strategies, and eloquent orators to persuade the people to follow and serve in the army. A settled empire, by contrast, needs garrison commanders to maintain discipline and suppress revolt, and it needs bureaucrats, managers, and tax collectors. It does not require the Roman people to play any civic role at all, not even as soldiers, since there were plenty of men in Italy and the provinces who were ready to serve.
Nor did Rome need senators as leaders of the political system. The new Rome left senators, at best, as advisors to the emperor and, at worst, as dissidents who needed to be silenced. Augustus had reduced the senatorial elite’s sense of purpose; Tiberius cut it further. Some rebelled and paid with their lives, but most turned docile. They began to look inward, seeking the consolation of philosophy or of pleasure.
RULE BY THE PRAETORIAN GUARD
Tiberius began his reign with warmth toward the Senate and ended it with hostility. Such a turn of events seems almost inevitable, given the new reality of power, the unwillingness of proud Roman nobles to surrender without a fight, and the brusque and no-nonsense personality of the emperor. For much of his reign, and particularly between the years 26 and 31, his chief advisor and partner in his struggle with the nobility was Lucius Aelius Sejanus. Tacitus calls Sejanus daring, wicked, and crafty, and blames him for bringing out the worst in Tiberius. But the truth lies hidden, and it is also possible that Sejanus was doing his master’s bidding.
Like Augustus’s right-hand man Agrippa, Sejanus came from an equestrian family; a prominent one with ties to various senators. Like Agrippa, Sejanus was capable and ambitious and indispensable to his master. Also like Agrippa, Sejanus wanted a share of the emperor’s power. Sejanus did well under Augustus, and he was first cocommander of the Praetorian Guard under Tiberius and then sole commander: a position known as Praetorian prefect.
Sejanus used that position to reach the heights of power. A man in his late thirties at the time of Tiberius’s rise to power, he won the emperor’s trust. One by one, Tiberius’s other advisors disappeared, leaving Sejanus in an unrivaled position. The sudden and unexpected death of his son, Drusus the Younger, in the year 23 was a harsh blow to Tiberius. Once again the emperor’s plans for the succession were in ruins.
The noble ladies of Rome found Sejanus charming. One of his conquests was Tiberius’s daughter-in-law, Livilla, who became his lover. Sejanus’s bitter wife claimed later that Livilla poisoned her husband, Drusus the Younger, at Sejanus’s behest. There was corroborating evidence, but it was obtained by torture. Although the Romans accepted torture-derived evidence, we recognize it as worthless. In any case, by the time the information was produced, Sejanus was no longer alive to defend himself.
Earlier, when Sejanus was still on the rise, he convinced Tiberius to construct a barracks for the Praetorian Guard on the outskirts of Rome. This imposing place covered more than forty acres. It had the standard, rectangular shape of a Roman army camp but with more massive fortifications than usual. A high concrete-and-brick wall, topped by ramparts and punctuated by gates with towers, surrounded the camp. Much of it can still be seen today, not far from Rome’s central train station.
The site was known as the Praetorian Camp. An elite unit, about several thousand men strong, the Guard provided security for the emperor. They were highly paid professionals. Augustus created the Praetorian Guard, but, clever politician that he was, he kept it outside Rome, in nearby towns, so as not to offend the Senate. Tiberius dropped the pretense. First he brought the Guard into the city, housed in various places, and then he began building the permanent camp.
Gathering the Guard together in one strategic place made it easier to instill discipline and impose fear. No doubt it contributed to the Guard’s esprit de corps, and this might have been the moment when the Guard adopted its famous scorpion symbol. The scorpion was Tiberius’s birth sign, and the emperor was addicted to astrology, while the venomous stinger suggested the Guard’s malign power.
The more efficient the Praetorian Guard, the less free the people of Rome. The same could be said for Sejanus’s power, which increased in tandem with a decline in political liberty. In the year 26, chance raised Sejanus’s stock higher. Tiberius owned a villa in and around a cave at a picturesque spot on the coast south of Rome. He was dining there when rocks at the cave entrance suddenly tumbled down and crushed some attendants. Panic followed, but a calm Sejanus used his own body to shield the emperor. After this, Tiberius trusted the Guard commander more than ever and considered him a selfless advisor.
The cave still exists at modern Sperlonga and offers numerous signs of ancient luxury, from fishponds and bedrooms, to exquisite statuary. Considering the executions carried out by Sejanus and Tiberius, a visitor might think of the cave as the place where tyranny was born.
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Shortly afterward, Tiberius left Rome for good. The island of Capreae in the Bay of Naples was Augustus’s favorite getaway. Tiberius went one better and made the island his home. In the year 26, at the age of sixty-eight, he retired there. Although much of his power flowed into Sejanus’s hands, Tiberius continued as emperor. He kept on making decisions and ordering executions, simply ceasing to go to Rome. He spent most of his last ten years in a luxurious island villa, the Villa of Jupiter (Villa Iovis) about 170 miles from the capital.
The relocation was shocking because it showed the truth of the later saying “Rome is where the emperor is.” The statement refers to a ruler 150 years later, but it was already true in Tiberius’s day.
It was shocking, too, because it showed that Tiberius’s policy of respecting the Senate had ended. If he was no longer in Rome, then he could no longer attend Senate meetings. After trying to revive the Senate’s power, the emperor in effect declared the experiment a failure.
But Tiberius’s withdrawal from Rome was also not shocking, because it followed in the footsteps of his predecessors. Julius Caesar spent only brief periods in Rome—less than a year, all told—during the eventful final fifteen years of his life. And Augustus spent much of his time as emperor outside Rome. True, they were away on essential business, either waging war, conducting diplomacy, or inspecting the provinces. Yet Caesar and Augustus each enjoyed reliable channels of information. Not so Tiberius. Sejanus controlled the flow of information to the island and decided what Tiberius did and didn’t need to know. The gatekeeper took over the role of decision-maker.
It seems unlikely that Tiberius left Rome to escape his mother, Livia, as some said, although he may have had his fill of that very strong personality. They quarreled once over her repeated insistence that he appoint an unqualified person to a prestigious position on a panel of judges. Tiberius finally agreed but criticized her in public. Livia then drove Tiberius over the edge by pulling out old letters from Augustus that she had kept for safekeeping in a shrine, letters that called Tiberius grim and stubborn. Tiberius was too disciplined to respond emotionally to such a low blow. Besides, he enjoyed his revenge cold.
Three years after Tiberius withdrew to Capreae, in the year 29, Livia died. Tiberius did not return to Rome for her funeral and burial in the mausoleum of Augustus. It was a contrast to his dash across northern Europe years earlier to reach the side of his mortally injured brother and his quick return to Rome in the year 22 at the news that his mother was ill. Nor did Tiberius make Livia a goddess after her death as she had wished and as the Senate decreed. She got what she wanted eventually but not until a later reign. The Senate also voted to honor Livia with a triumphal arch, which would have been the first ever for a woman, but Tiberius made sure it was never built.
Yet no one could deny the importance of Livia’s role. As her ashes were laid to rest, the monumental nature of her achievement lived on. When she was born eighty-seven years earlier, the proud nobles of the Senate still felt entitled to guide the fate of empire. When she died, she guided that nobility on behalf of the empire. She could honestly consider herself the bringer of a new order; a woman who had served both as wife and mother of the First Citizen; someone who was a member in good standing of the Claudian clan but who was also Julia Augusta; and a woman who had both renovated the republic and buried it. Rome had known powerful women before but never one to match Livia.
Tiberius, now in his seventies, continued to carry out some public business, particularly provincial administration. When some governors wrote and asked to increase provincial taxation, the emperor replied, “A good shepherd shears his flock; he does not flay them.” But when it came to the politics of the capital and especially the imperial family, he was far too trusting of Sejanus.
Tiberius’s astrologer accompanied him to Capreae. The historian Suetonius is full of juicy stories about Tiberius’s sexual misdeeds on the island. The “old goat,” as people are said to have called him, supposedly went after women as well as children of both sexes. His debaucheries are said to have included orgies, threesomes, pedophilia, and the murder of someone who refused him. He supposedly trained little boys to chase him when he was swimming and to get between his legs and lick and nibble him—he called them his “minnows.” Reports like this may have contributed to Tiberius’s low public standing in Rome, but Roman history is full of salacious rumors, and we should be skeptical. In reality, stargazing and fortune-telling are probably as risqué as Tiberius got on the island. Meanwhile, things heated up in the capital.
The pace of treason trials against Tiberius’s enemies now picked up. How much of what followed was the emperor’s doing and how much was Sejanus’s is hard to say. For example, a historian was indicted for saying that Brutus and Cassius were “the last of the Romans.” A bitter enemy of Sejanus, he was forced to commit suicide.
Sejanus convinced Tiberius that Germanicus’s widow, the proud and assertive Agrippina the Elder, was plotting against him. The charge might even have been true, because Augustus’s granddaughter, and the fourth member of his family to shape Tiberius’s life, truly hated the emperor. She was, wrote Tacitus, “so eager to rule that she cast aside women’s flaws for the masculine world of public business.” Proud and popular, she considered Tiberius an interloper to the true heirs. Bad relations between the two escalated.
They quarreled over the prosecution of Agrippina’s friend and cousin. When a furious Agrippina accused Tiberius of a veiled attack on her, he replied with a Greek quotation asking her if she felt entitled to reign. Not long afterward, Agrippina asked for Tiberius’s approval to remarry. He kept silent, which was in effect to say no. In later years, he accused her of adultery. Finally, when she was seated next to Tiberius at a dinner party, Agrippina refused to touch some apples that he passed to her—as if to imply that he wanted to poison her. Tiberius complained about this to Livia, who was also there. He never invited Agrippina to dinner again.
Finally, in the year 29, shortly after Livia’s death, Tiberius accused Agrippina of planning to take refuge at the statue of Augustus and with the army. He had her arrested and got the Senate to exile her from Italy to an offshore island, the same place where Augustus once banished the wretched Julia. Four years later, Agrippina died. The official story is that she went on a hunger strike, but there was also a rumor that she was starved to death. Like Julia, she shared Augustus’s blood but came to a terrible end after turning on his heir.
Nor did her sons thrive under Tiberius. Instead of passing the throne to one of them, as originally planned, the emperor imprisoned the two older boys. Neither survived. Only their younger brother, Gaius, who was only seventeen, was left alone.
Sejanus became ever more powerful, and by the year 31, he had convinced Tiberius to make him nearly his equal in legal authority. The septuagenarian emperor, meanwhile, paid less and less attention to matters in Rome. He is supposed to have said, in reference to his unpopularity in the Senate, “Let them hate me, as long as they respect me.”
The emperor withdrew his long opposition to a marriage between Sejanus and Livilla, the widow of Tiberius’s son. Everything seemed ready for Sejanus to be named heir to the throne. Having gotten rid of Agrippina and her grown sons, he was ready to step out from the shadows and seize power. Enter doom.
If the sources can be trusted, it was now that one final woman in Augustus’s family who saved Tiberius: his sister-in-law, Antonia the Younger. Antonia was the complete imperial woman. She was the daughter of Octavia and Mark Antony, niece of Augustus, widow of Tiberius’s brother, Drusus, mother of Germanicus, and grandmother of his and Agrippina’s surviving children. She was said to be as beautiful as Venus and so gentle that she wouldn’t so much as spit. She was also the model of wifely loyalty. After the death of her husband in 9 BC, she remained a widow and decided to keep living in the house of her mother-in-law, Livia. There she raised her own three children and, after Livia’s death, her grandchildren. In addition, she supervised a ci
rcle of young foreign princes who were hostages in Rome. She also helped manage her extensive estates. All the while, she kept a finger in politics.
In the year 31 Antonia made her boldest political move. She took the risk of writing to Tiberius and informing him that Sejanus was planning a conspiracy against him. The letter succeeded in convincing the emperor that Sejanus intended to murder Agrippina and Germanicus’s surviving son. Then he would put Tiberius’s young grandson on the throne and wield the real power in Rome.
That was enough for Tiberius. He already had his suspicions of his all-powerful minister, and the letter sealed them. On October 18, 31, the emperor had another letter read in the Senate, with Sejanus present. This was a scathing denunciation of Sejanus, written by Tiberius himself. As cunning as he was, Sejanus didn’t see it coming. Shocked and unprepared, he was guilty of a fatal error: underestimating Tiberius. The senators, meanwhile, jumped to their master’s voice. They had Sejanus immediately taken out and executed, as were his young children. He did not receive a trial or even a formal charge, depriving him of the rights of a Roman citizen. Then his corpse was mutilated and thrown into the Tiber. His supporters were hauled into court. And it was all because a woman of the imperial household had set the wheels in motion.
Sejanus’s name was erased from official records, and all images of him were destroyed—so effectively that no securely identified figure of this once-famous man has survived. Someone declared an enemy of the state by the Senate usually had his or her memory erased. Details differed from case to case. Although sometimes called damnatio memoriae—“condemnation of memory”—that is not an ancient term but one invented later.
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