by David Potter
Five years later, Augustus left Rome to travel to Naples. He fell desperately ill, and died on August 19, AD 14. Tiberius, who the year before had been accorded equal authority to Augustus everywhere throughout the empire but Rome, now succeeded him.
Eccentric Stability: Emperors from Tiberius to Nero
(AD 14–68)
Augustus put the imperial system on such a firm footing that even the dysfunctional behaviour of his four successors could not overturn his achievement. The pillars of the new regime were the army’s loyalty to the princeps, concern for the welfare of the population of Rome and the emperor’s patronage of loyal members of the ruling class. The overarching ideological principle that informed all the regime’s policies was domestic propriety. Romans recalled that the years before Actium were haunted by violence and uncertainty, and the ideals of the Republic became inextricably linked with civil war.
Augustus’ very success in promoting his mode of governance as the only effective antidote to anarchy resulted in widespread fear that civil war would erupt as soon as he died. This fear was not even allayed by the fact that Tiberius already held a firm grip on power, and persistent rumours of impending turmoil continued to circulate. Some people wondered if Agrippa Postumus might break free from his island prison to challenge the new regime (the rumours were not even scotched when Postumus was executed by his guards, an act of gratuitous brutality for which Tiberius denied all responsibility). Others speculated whether Tiberius’ popular nephew Germanicus (15 BC–AD 19), now commanding the powerful army on the Rhine, might choose not to bide his time and wait to succeed Tiberius but instead make an immediate bid for power.
Tiberius and Germanicus
In the event, matters came to a head when four Roman legions stationed on the Rhine and three on the Danube (the province of Pannonia) staged mutinies at the news of Augustus’ death. The immediate catalyst of the mutinies was anger over harsh conditions of service: men were being forced to serve beyond their due retirement date, while also suffering brutality at the hands of their centurion officers and receiving derisory pay. Yet the underlying cause that made the troops’ simmering grievances boil over into open insurrection was their uncertainty about the future. The Danubian mutiny was swiftly and decisively put down by Tiberius’ son Drusus (13 BC–AD 23) and Aelius Sejanus (20 BC–AD 31), the newly promoted commander of the praetorian guard, who were dispatched to deal with the crisis in the Balkans, around the time of Augustus’ funeral in September. However, the mutiny in Germany was a far more serious affair; Germanicus’ men murdered several brutal centurions and there were mutterings in the ranks that he should seize the throne. Yet although Germanicus refused to accede to their demands, the histrionics he displayed in quelling the unrest in his ranks called his judgement and leadership into question. At one point, the general drew his sword and threatened to commit suicide unless the men returned to their proper loyalty; one soldier was so unimpressed by this display that he offered his own sword, saying that it was sharper. Eventually, through some persuasive lastditch rhetoric, and concessions to the troops on pay and conditions, Germanicus calmed the situation.
Despite some shortcomings as a commander, Germanicus ultimately turned out to play a key role in the dynastic succession of the Julio-Claudian family. His wife, Julia Agrippina, was exceptionally fecund and gave birth to nine children, no fewer than six of whom survived infancy. Two of these offspring of their union ensured the continuation of the imperial house – one as the emperor Caligula, the other as the mother of Nero. Germanicus himself disappeared from the historical stage in October, AD 19, when he suddenly fell ill and died in Antioch, Syria.
Meanwhile, Romans were becoming ever more alarmed at the tyrannical turn Tiberius’ rule was taking. In particular, he increasingly resorted to invoking the lex maiestatis, the law governing actions that might ‘diminish the majesty of the Roman people’ (that is, high treason), to silence his enemies, real or perceived. There was widespread abuse in the application of this capital offence, since anyone who accused a person subsequently found guilty stood to gain a share of the convicted man’s estate. Tiberius’ overuse of this extreme sanction was just another manifestation of his aloofness and disdain for the finer arts of political persuasion. In public relations terms, Tiberius completely lacked his predecessor Augustus’ personal touch in the exercise of authority and his flair for winning friends and influencing people. As a result, he maintained extremely poor relations with the senate, whom, according to the testimony of the later Roman historian Tacitus, he derided as ‘men fit to be slaves’.
The news that the people’s champion and heir apparent was dead sent ripples of shock through the empire. Tiberius was reviled, and his likely successor Drusus was far less popular than Germanicus. The finger of suspicion for Germanicus’ death pointed at the governor of Syria, Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso (c. 44 BC–AD 20). There was a long-running enmity between the two men, and just before the onset of Germanicus’ fatal illness, he had forced Piso to resign his post. Worse still, there was some circumstantial evidence to suggest that Piso had poisoned his rival on the secret instruction of Tiberius. No one dared say this openly, but suspicions mounted when the former governor returned to Rome to defend himself on a charge of maiestas arising both from the assassination rumours and his subsequent efforts to retake the province from Germanicus’ officers by force of arms. Piso’s defence was that he was Tiberius’ man on the spot and his fulsome protestations of unswerving loyalty may only have served to convince the emperor that his placeman was actually about to make incriminating revelations. Conveniently, following a visit by Sejanus, Piso was discovered to have committed ‘suicide’ by slitting his own throat.
The rise and fall of Sejanus
Drusus did not long survive Germanicus, dying in AD 23. A plot almost certainly lay behind his sudden demise, though unlike Germanicus’ death, no rumours circulated at the time. However, after Sejanus fell from favour and was killed eight years later, clear evidence of a conspiracy emerged. From as early as AD 19, Sejanus had been conducting an affair with Drusus’ wife Livilla. His political ambitions were also on the rise and he began to entertain hopes that, if he made himself indispensable to Tiberius, the emperor might begin to regard him in the same light as Augustus had viewed Agrippa and appoint him as his successor. Sejanus realized that it would immeasurably strengthen his hand if Drusus were to die and he marry his widow. Drusus duly fell victim to a mystery illness, but the second part of Sejanus’ plan was thwarted when Tiberius refused him permission to marry Livilla. Even so, from this point Tiberius seems to have placed ever greater trust in the leadership powers of his lieutenant, and had statues of Sejanus erected throughout Rome. At this stage, the obvious heirs to the throne were the two teenage sons of Germanicus, Nero and Drusus, but they and their mother Agrippina antagonized Tiberius by continuing to hold him responsible for Germanicus’ death. Thoroughly sick of the business of governing, Tiberius retired to his villa on Capri in AD 28, leaving the day-to-day running of the state in Sejanus’ hands. The following year, his patience with Agrippina and her sons finally ran out and he had all three banished to the same island where Augustus had once exiled his daughter Julia.
The succession now looked as if it must fall to Agrippina’s third son Gaius Caligula or the young son of Drusus, Tiberius Gemellus (AD 19–38), who were both favoured by Tiberius and who lived with him on Capri. Faced with these new obstacles, in AD 31 Sejanus appears to have decided to seize power for himself and hatched a plot to kill Tiberius and the surviving male members of the imperial house. The conspiracy was unmasked by Germanicus’ mother, who sent a slave girl named Caenis along with one of her trusted freed male slaves to warn the emperor. Tiberius’ response was swift and brutal: Sejanus was condemned by the senate, strangled, and his body thrown to the Roman mob who had always hated and feared him in equal measure and who now delighted in tearing his corpse to pieces.
Tiberius spent the final years of his reign as a
n embittered recluse. His tendency to brooding introspection – a contemporary once characterized him as tristissimus hominum (‘the gloomiest of men’) – now assumed paranoid proportions. Members of the senate lived in fear they might be suddenly charged with treason, and some long-serving provincial governors lapsed into incompetence. One of these men was Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea, who was finally dismissed in AD 36, a few months after he had executed a teacher from Galilee at the behest of the religious authorities in Jerusalem. It was one of the few times that he seems to have been willing to go along with what they wanted, but Jesus of Nazareth was the sort of independent religious leader who had caused him trouble at various points during his years in office. His brutal response to the actions of another holy man in the course of the year would finally convince the governor of Syria that he had to go.
As for the emperor, surrounding himself on Capri with a coterie of academics and astrologers, he disengaged himself from all practical concerns, including the crucial question of his succession, as he began to have serious doubts about the fitness of his nephew Gaius Caligula to assume the mantle of emperor. These doubts gave way to study of the stars, which only confirmed his tendency towards helpless inertia, since it indicated to him that Caligula’s accession was inevitable. In March of AD 37, aged 79, Tiberius fell ill and died of natural causes, though stories spread suggesting that he was actually smothered by Sejanus’ successor as praetorian prefect, a man named Macro (21 BC–AD 38).
Caligula the monster
Tiberius’ death provoked unbridled celebration among both the senate and the people of Rome. Yet the fact remained that when he came to power, he had been eminently well qualified to succeed Augustus; no one had commanded more armies and provinces than Tiberius, nor been consul so many times. Moreover, despite his deep unpopularity, his reign had left the empire in a far stronger position. He had not embarked on damaging military adventures but had consolidated existing boundaries, and as a result the treasury was in a very healthy state on his death. He had therefore been, for all his growing eccentricity, a symbol of stability from the outset. The same could not be said for his successor. Caligula had held just one junior office, and had no official position when Tiberius died. So, whereas Tiberius had simply inherited the role of princeps from Augustus, to formalize this new accession the senate and people now took it upon themselves to define the legal position of the emperor by passing a bill to confer that position on Caligula. To those who did not know him, the young Caligula, the son of a popular father, seemed the perfect antidote to his great-uncle. Caligula instantly won great acclaim by abolishing treason trials. However, it soon became apparent that Rome’s euphoric celebration of her new emperor was badly misplaced. Caligula had never had to demonstrate virtus in a collective environment.
The formative period of his life had been spent at Tiberius’ villa on Capri, and there his chief companions were the sons of eastern client-kings whose attitudes towards power were very different from those of the average Roman. Caligula had fully imbibed their imperious attitude. His closest friends were his sisters, and it was rumoured that he had incestuous relations with at least one of them, possibly all three. In response, Caligula’s propagandists now sought to deflect public attention by disseminating lurid stories about how Tiberius had spent his waning years. He was alleged to have developed a taste for watching young people have sex; in the public mind, the image of the dour, academic ex-general was supplanted by that of the septuagenarian paedophile. This salacious smear campaign could not, however, mask the essential truth. The intelligence offered to Tiberius by his stargazing had been accurate: Caligula lacked experience of collective decision making and was wholly unsuited to wielding absolute power.
Rome now witnessed a series of unsettling events. Macro was executed on a charge of treason within a year of Caligula taking power. Those who were tired of the overbearing influence of the praetorian guard’s commander may have been glad to see him go, but there was now no voice to control the emperor. Caligula began to suggest that he was a god, and began to indulge his whims (including sexual assaults upon female guests at his parties). It took less than a year before the first conspiracy against him came to light, and its aftermath revealed another unsavoury characteristic of the new ruler: he liked to watch people be tortured. Shortly thereafter, Caligula left Rome to campaign in the north. This escapade was meant to prove that the emperor really was a man of substance, but instead turned into a fiasco; a planned invasion of Britain was aborted and Caligula’s troops were ordered to collect seashells to carry back to Rome as tokens of the emperor’s glorious victory over the sea-god Neptune. Caligula announced his intention of making his favourite pampered horse, Incitatus, a member of the senate. Anger mounted, and a number of senators and military men plotted to assassinate the emperor.
On January 24, AD 41, while Caligula was watching a theatrical show, a tribune of the imperial bodyguard stabbed him to death. Never before had this loyal body of men shown itself willing to betray the emperor, but Caligula had made the mistake of alienating their officers, especially an experienced man named Cassius Chaerea, who masterminded the assassination in the cryptoporticus, or underground tunnel, that linked the palaces on the Palatine hill. The plot against Caligula taught future conspirators an important lesson: first ensure the complicity of the praetorian guard, and secondly, restrict the plot to a very small circle of people with direct access to the emperor’s person.
An unlikely successor
Shortly after the assassination, the senate convened a meeting at which several of its members proposed a return to Republican government. This was clearly not going to be acceptable to the praetorian guard, who owed their privileges to the imperial system. Interestingly, despite the recent dashing of their hopes in Caligula and their long, painful experience of Tiberius’ rule, the Roman people apparently had no wish to see the Republic restored either, assembling in the Forum and loudly proclaiming that they would not stand for a return to senatorial rule.
Popular myth recounts that the praetorian guard discovered Caligula’s uncle Claudius hiding behind a curtain and, on a whim, declared him the new emperor. The truth may be more prosaic: the officers of the guard knew that they were going to need an alternative to Caligula, and the obvious choice was Caligula’s uncle, Claudius. In fact, he may well have willingly joined the praetorians in their camp as soon as he learned that Caligula was dead, suggesting that he had foreknowledge of the plot and colluded in his nephew’s demise. After a day of intense negotiation between the various parties, the senate welcomed the appointment of the new emperor.
Claudius is an intriguing figure. He is most familiar to contemporary readers through the historical novels I Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935) by the British writer Robert Graves, which cover the reign of the first four emperors; drawing on Tacitus, Plutarch and Suetonius, Graves presents a man who learns to play up his disabilities, especially his supposed simple-mindedness, so as to avoid appearing a threat to his peers, and so survive. This portrait is probably well grounded in historical fact. Born with a club foot, and possibly also suffering from cerebral palsy, Claudius had been kept in the background throughout the reign of Tiberius. Caligula had deigned to share the consulship with him in AD 37, but thereafter had rarely missed an opportunity to humiliate him. The two men were fundamentally different characters. Claudius had spent his formative years in the palace reading widely, and writing. History was his particular love, and he seems to have developed a genuine affection for Roman antiquity. But, like Caligula, he had no real experience of political life, and reportedly found the company of senators difficult. Having no power base among the senatorial classes, he naturally turned for advice to the freed slaves who administered the increasingly complex affairs of the imperial household, which controlled vast territories throughout the empire. In modern terms, Claudius can be seen as a technocrat, valuing the company of other people who knew how to get things done. Conversely, hi
s abiding weakness was his lack of political guile in not recognizing that many of those who served him did so not in order to further the public good but for their own ends.
Achievements and setbacks
Claudius was also keen to demonstrate to a sceptical Roman senate and people that he was a strong and decisive leader. So it was that in AD 43, two years after coming to power, he organized a highly efficient invasion of Britain, winning kudos for capturing a prize that had even eluded Julius Caesar, in whom Claudius seems to have been particularly interested. The operation itself was meticulously planned and executed by Claudius’ skilled commander, Aulus Plautius. Four legions and several auxiliary units amounting to some 40,000 men took part in the assault. Plautius quickly succeeded in establishing a bridgehead on the island. The decisive battle took place at the River Medway in southeast England, where the Batavian auxiliaries, recruited from the area at the mouth of the Rhine, outflanked the Britons under King Caractacus after fording the river in full battle gear. After two days, the Britons were defeated and the Romans gained a firm foothold from which they began the long process of pacifying the island. That process would take nearly half a century because, despite Claudius’ success in achieving his initial military and strategic objectives, the occupation – as always happens with military operations motivated by short-term political ambitions – turned out to be a costly and protracted affair with no thought-out endgame.