The Twelve Caesars Page 6
Two years before his death, Marcellus had been married to his cousin, Augustus’ daughter Julia. A youthful widow, Julia was shortly remarried by her father to his leading militarist, Marcus Agrippa. The first of the couple’s five children, a son Gaius Caesar, was born in 20 BC, followed three years later by Lucius Caesar. At Lucius’ birth, Dio reports, ‘Augustus immediately adopted him together with his brother Gaius... He did not wait for them to attain manhood, but straightaway appointed them as his successors in authority to discourage plotters from conspiring against them.’11 It is an undertaking clearly at odds with claims of Republicanism; so too the title princeps iuventutis, ‘Prince of Youth’ or ‘Leader of Youth’, with which Augustus endowed Gaius. In the event it scarcely mattered: Lucius died in AD 2, Gaius two years later. In both cases rumour suggested malevolence on the part of Augustus’ wife Livia. No explanations are provided of how Livia poisoned victims scattered across the breadth of the Empire. On 26 June AD 4, Augustus made his final adoption, on this occasion of Livia’s elder son, his stepson Tiberius Claudius Nero. It was not a choice born of affection. Unlike his predecessors in Augustus’ scheme, Tiberius offered a record of achievement which appeared to fit him for the role of princeps. Augustus masterminded awards to Tiberius of maius imperium and tribunician power equal to his own. At a moment of uncertainty, it was the most he could do to ensure the continuance of his own system of government in the hands of a member of his own family.
Augustus was a hypocrite. Mark Antony had known it. He taunted Augustus with the knowledge of those double standards by which he criticized Antony’s affair with Cleopatra at the same time as himself sleeping with a bevy of married women across Rome. Suetonius states, ‘That [Augustus] was given to adultery not even his friends deny.’ Antony chose as an example of Augustus’ feet of clay his ‘taking the wife of an ex-consul from her husband’s dining room before his very eyes into a bedchamber, and bringing her back to the table with her hair in disorder and her ears glowing’. As we will see, it was an act of cavalier fornication worthy of Gaius. So too was the punishment he demanded of his favourite freedman Polus, whom ‘he forced to take his own life because he was convicted of adultery with Roman matrons’.
Yet Antony was dead while Augustus lived. Both shared talent, charisma, riches. Both were capable of decision, strategy, ruthlessness. But it was Augustus who, in the phoney war of the latter period of the Second Triumvirate, made political capital in Rome. Among Augustus’ talents was his ability to satisfy appearances, a guiding principle of his principate, part of that policy which blended emollience with self-serving. ‘There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned,’ Shakespeare’s Antony tells Cleopatra with splendid carelessness: Augustus was never so unguarded. In Suetonius’ account, his domestic policy as princeps included reviving ‘certain obsolescent rites and appointments: the augury of the Goddess Safety, the office of Flamen Dialis, the Lupercalian Festival, the Secular Games and the Cross-Roads Festival’. His policy embraced consciously archaic elements, a billet-doux offered by the first servant of the Republic to the glories of its vanished past. He rebuilt temples. He took measures to revive ancient cults. He sought to restore the prestige of priesthoods and reinvigorate religious observance with reverence and awe. His reinvented Secular Games of 17 BC included his sacrifice of a pregnant sow to Mother Earth, an act attributed by Virgil to Rome’s legendary founder Aeneas,12 and the ‘Centennial Hymn’ specially composed for the occasion by Horace. In bright Roman sunshine on a day of early June, twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls implored the firmament for moral renewal: ‘Goddess, make strong our youth and bless the Senate’s decrees rewarding parenthood and marriage, that from the new laws Rome may reap a lavish harvest of boys and girls.’13 As a prayer it was pretty and pious and pertinent. Propagandist, too. But its hope was vain, and hopelessly impractical, for it sought to regulate private lives by bill, an incursion of the state behind Rome’s closed doors.
The previous year the princeps had determined on a course of moral renewal. His focus was not his own ambulatory libido but the sexual habits of Rome’s upper classes, louche, loose-living and lustful. As Augustus himself makes clear in the Res gestae, it was the legislative aspect of that broader policy of old-fashioned conservatism which found physical expression in his spur to a city-wide religious renaissance. ‘By new laws passed on my proposal I brought back into use many exemplary practices of our ancestors which were disappearing in our time, and in many ways I myself transmitted exemplary practices to posterity for their imitation.’14 (He does not stipulate the nature of his own ‘exemplary practices’.) The initiatives of 18 BC targeted women’s fidelity and the birth rate. The lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis addressed the sexual constancy of married women and, for the first time in Roman history, made adultery a criminal act (with stronger penalties inevitably for the errant wife, who potentially faced banishment; and an obligation for the wronged husband to institute immediate divorce proceedings). The lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus, revised in AD 9 as the lex Papia Poppaea, penalized unmarried men and childless couples in an attempt to increase the birth rate. Augustus evidently felt little need to lead by example. There are no indications that he adapted his own sex life along the lines he prescribed for others, while his marriage to Livia, herself a model of old-fashioned rectitude in no need of reform, was childless, despite surviving for more than half a century. In the first instance, Augustus’ token lip-service to his moral crusade made an example of his daughter Julia, whom he promptly married again following the deaths of her first and second husbands, Marcellus and Agrippa.
He could hardly have chosen worse. Handsome, witty, haughty and irreverent, Julia was unsuited to embodying moral precepts. She had inherited a streak of wilful sensuousness to rival her father’s. Her indiscretions were of long vintage: during her marriage to Agrippa, she conceived a passion for Tiberius which would be disappointed in their eventual loveless union. Her misdemeanours embraced full-scale affairs and casual encounters: Seneca records the rumour that at night in the centre of Rome she offered herself as a tart to any passer-by. Augustus responded with incredulousness to the news of her unmasking; fury succeeded disbelief. ‘A calamity broke out in the emperor’s household which is shameful to narrate and dreadful to recall,’ Velleius reports. ‘For his daughter Julia, utterly regardless of her great father... left untried no disgraceful deed untainted with either extravagance or lust of which a woman could be guilty... and was in the habit of measuring the magnitude of her fortune only in the terms of licence to sin, setting up her own caprice as a law unto itself.’15 Incandescent and dizzy with shock, Augustus discussed Julia’s downfall even in the senate. Then he expelled his only child from Rome. Her destination was the volcanic island of Pandateria in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Despite popular demonstrations in her favour, Augustus never relented. He never saw his daughter again and left instructions that her body be barred from his mausoleum. It was a cruel and ironic ending to a policy intended to champion the family; and offers startling confirmation of the importance attached by Augustus to appearances (when it suited him) and to obedience within his own household.
Augustus was sixty-one years old at the time of Julia’s disgrace, a greater age in Rome than today. For nearly four decades he had occupied a place of singular prominence in Roman public life. With vigour he had dedicated himself to restoring Rome’s fortunes after the tardy cataclysms of civil war which reached back into his ‘father’s’ lifetime and beyond. Some of his policies were practical: he fixed soldiers’ pay and organized the Praetorian Guard; he moved to minimize corruption in elections; he created new appointments to enable more men to take part in the administration of the state – supervisors of aqueducts, of public buildings and of the roads. He conjured up romantic visions of the Rome of his forefathers, enforcing toga-wearing in the Forum, teaching his daughter and his granddaughter spinning and weaving, and himself taking the lead in filial devotion to his mother and his sister. He was affable and approachable
in his mien: when a senator he scarcely knew fell blind and resolved to commit suicide as a result, ‘Augustus called on him and by his consoling words induced him to live.’ Most of all, he defined the role of princeps as one of service, an old-fashioned idea in which the greater good of the greater number was seen to count for more than personal gain: ‘May it be my privilege to establish the state in a firm and secure position, and reap from that act the fruit that I desire; but only if I may be called the author of the best possible government.’ His personal contribution included measures for fire and flood protection, restoration of the Via Flaminia and his unparalleled programme of public building. Observers noticed that he was tired, Julia’s downfall a turning point. It was followed by the deaths of Gaius and Lucius Caesar and then, equally dramatically, Augustus’ banishment in AD 8 of Julia’s daughter, Julia the Younger. Augustus’ granddaughter was accused of adultery like her mother; in her case suspicion of conspiracy further muddied the waters. Her brother was involved in the same plan, Agrippa Postumus, the last remaining son of Julia the Elder and Agrippa. Then the following year, in his third year of campaigning in Germania, Quinctilius Varus lost all three Roman legions under his command in a disastrous encounter with Germanic tribes in the Teutoburg Forest. Augustus may have suffered something approaching a nervous breakdown, albeit he appears to have recovered with time: ‘they say that he was so greatly affected that for several months in succession he cut neither his beard nor his hair, and sometimes he would dash his head against a door, crying: “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!”’
So much had changed in Rome; some things not at all. Deep-engrained in the city’s psyche was that mistrust of female power which Octavian had exploited to destroy Cleopatra. At the moment of Augustus’ death, it found expression in a lurid vignette which makes better television than history.
It was August AD 14 and the emperor, travelling in Campania, fell prey to a recurrence of an intestinal complaint which had plagued him for some time; in its wake, attacks of chronic diarrhoea, difficult to manage on the road or at sea. Augustus altered his plans. He headed for Nola. His house there, by chance, was the same one in which his father, Gaius Octavius, had died. He asked that his bed be placed in the very room in which Gaius breathed his last. The instinct was one of peacefulness more than mawkishness: this then was the end. ‘Since no care could withstand the fates,’ writes Velleius Paterculus, ‘in his seventy-sixth year... he was resolved into the elements from which he sprang and yielded up to heaven his divine soul.’16
But it is not to be. Into this atmosphere of gentle fading away, a single source interjects a jarring note. Dio claims poisoning, Livia the culprit, her purpose to speed Tiberius’ progress to the purple before Augustus could change his mind and nominate as his principal heir his grandson Agrippa Postumus – insolent, brutish, possibly mentally deficient. ‘So she smeared with poison some figs which were still ripening on trees from which Augustus was in the habit of picking the fruit with his own hands. She then ate those which had not been smeared, and offered the poisoned fruit to him.’17
Poisoning plays its part in our story. A convicted poisoner called Locusta removes obstacles from Nero’s path to the throne. Those crimes were well known to Dio, writing in the second century. Velleius died too soon to hear the rumours – misdeeds attributed to Augustus’s great-granddaughter Agrippina. His Livia is not present at Augustus’ death, hers is not the applause the dying actor invites. Instead, Velleius’ Augustus dies ‘with the arms of his beloved Tiberius about him, commending to him the continuation of their joint work’.18 He escapes poisoning – even the toxic knowledge of the nature of Tiberius’ continuation.
TIBERIUS
(42 BC–AD 37)
‘Ever dark and mysterious’
Tiberius: Statue of Tiberius © Toni Sanchez Poy
Tiberius could see in the dark. His eyes were unusually large and afforded him, albeit for short periods only, vision while the world slept. For Tiberius was preoccupied with seeing. In a society of informers and conspirators, to see all was to know all. His studied contrariness as emperor, a determined equivocation, even obfuscation, in his speech and his written communication, denied anyone insights into the real workings of his mind, imposing a sort of blindness, ‘for he thought it bad policy for the sovereign to reveal his thoughts,’ Dio relates.1
He was addicted to astrology, that study of the aspect of celestial bodies in the interests of foresight; and feared the unseen, be it an assassin’s hand, whispering malcontent or eructations of thunder. Fatalistic, self-contained and stern, for nine years as emperor he lived in isolation on Capri, ‘particularly attracted to that island because it was accessible by only one small beach, being everywhere else girt with sheer cliffs of great height and by deep water’. Augustus had loved it too: its approach and its moorings afforded neither secrecy nor hiding-places. Previously Tiberius had chosen temporary exile on Rhodes. Its approaches were similarly exposed. Among the small group of highbrow intimates who formed his companions there was the Alexandrian astrologer Thrasyllus. Sources record the two men staring out to sea, each in his different way preoccupied by the challenges of the present, the promises of the future. Thrasyllus’ was the position of greater vulnerability: Tiberius valued him only for his clairvoyance and threatened to kill him for a mistaken prophecy. Gifted or otherwise, Thrasyllus combined sang-froid with what looks remarkably like charlatanism: his predictions came true and he feathered his own nest by confirming Tiberius’ dependency on second sight.
Augustus’ heir, in the summer of AD 14 Tiberius ‘almost struggled longer to refuse the principate than others had fought to obtain it’.2 Formerly his stepfather’s partner in government, invested in the year before the old man’s death with imperium, powers of censorship and tribunician power matching Augustus’ own, Tiberius saw too clearly the challenges implicit in Augustus’ bequest. Hostile sources interpret his reluctance as hypocrisy, diffidence an affectation. They take advantage of his invisibility on his island retreat to weave around his name a tissue of lurid rumours – ‘criminal obscenities... almost too vile to be believed’, according to Suetonius, foremost among them that little boys called ‘minnows’ were trained to follow him when he swam and, darting between his legs, nibble and lick and suck his genitals. Similar tittle-tattle plagued Tiberius in life. During the trial of Votienus Montanus, he was forced to listen to a witness recount just such calumnies. It was the price he paid for his compulsive secrecy. The Tiberius of the ancient sources is more lecherous hypocrite than seer, paranoid and cruel, irresponsible in government, without visionary qualities.
As time would show, his concerns were well placed. The burdens of Augustus’ ‘restored Republic’ were too great for this first hereditary princeps, Rome’s third Caesar. We will never know the truth of his sex life but understand already that, in cataloguing sexual misdemeanours, the ancients exacted recompense from their great men. In the accounts of both Suetonius and Tacitus, Tiberius emerges as tyrannous and cold-hearted. He delights in torture and the arbitrary exercise of power. In order to enjoy firm, young flesh without protest, he breaks the legs of those who resist his fetid advances. It is a metaphor for his treatment of dissent at the highest levels of Roman society. His punishment is to be castigated with depravity: paedophilia, incontinent lusts, joyless rape, urges too terrible for satisfaction anywhere but in exile – the stuff of film-makers and warped voyeurs, the shadow side of the sun, nightmarish and, with a degree of detachment on the reader’s part, impossible to countenance given what else we can deduce of his character. Such smears would become a repeating pattern in the historiography of the twelve Caesars. In this instance, Suetonius is the prime offender.
This man who loved trees and hard liquor (hot wine without water, the origin of his nickname among his troops: Biberius Caldius Mero) was nevertheless diligent and assiduous in the discharge of his duty. He was commonsensical and practical. When the Tiber burst its banks, he did not echo the wides
pread response that here was an omen, but ‘thinking that it was due to the great over-abundance of surface water, appointed five senators, chosen by lot, to constitute a permanent board to look after the river, so that it should neither overflow in winter nor fail in summer, but should maintain as even a flow as possible all the time’.3 He required provincial governors to act with moderation, avoiding greedy plunder, instructing them ‘that it was the part of a good shepherd to shear his flock, not skin it’. He understood power not as his right or privilege but as a responsibility, himself ‘the servant of the senate, often of the citizens as a whole, and sometimes even of individuals’. Even before his accession he enjoyed rare distinction – dignitas and the foundations of personal auctoritas (which could increase only with Augustus’ death). Successful campaigns in Illyricum, Pannonia and Germany made Tiberius the foremost general of his generation. His hard-won victories erased the shame of those Roman standards lost in Germany by Varus; earlier, his diplomatic efforts had secured the return of standards lost by Crassus in Parthia in 53 BC. ‘Most charming and valiant of men and most conscientious of generals,’ Augustus acclaimed him in a letter preserved by Suetonius. ‘I have only praise for the conduct of your summer campaigns, dear Tiberius, and I am sure that no one could have acted with better judgement than you did amid so many difficulties and such apathy of your army.’ Tiberius’ reply does not survive.
‘I treat all his actions and words as if they had the force of law,’ he claimed after Augustus’ death. We ought not to overlook the possibility of irony, an element of dissembling. Faithful in public to Augustus’ formula for power, Tiberius privately discounted that genius humbug’s explanation that, first among equals, he had done no more than restore an earlier status quo. He regarded the principate as Augustus’ creation, a construct already fully developed, his own role one of custodianship for his lifetime. This explains Tiberius’ numismatic programme, his policy (particularly at the Lugdunum mint) of reissuing Augustan coin types in order to assert the continuity at the regime’s heart; a commemorative issue celebrating Augustus’ divinity is a lone innovation.4 For this ‘greatest of generals, attended alike by fame and fortune’, spent his life in thrall to his domineering stepfather who became his father by adoption, ‘veritably the second luminary and the second head of the state’, ‘the most eminent of all Roman citizens save one (and that because he wished it so)’, in the syrupy account of Velleius Paterculus.5 Denied any choice in the matter, Tiberius expended long years in Augustus’ service and, afterwards, in safeguarding Augustus’ settlement. At his stepfather’s request he divorced a wife he loved to marry a sneering and snobbish harlot who cuckolded him with strangers in full view of Rome’s night-time revellers; he adopted as his heir his nephew Germanicus in place of his own son.4 He was a big man, strong, taller than average, well proportioned, with a handsome face in his youth, broad shoulders and hands capable of crushing a boy’s skull. But he regarded the gift of empire, forced upon him by Augustus, who had the direction of so much of his life, as ‘a wretched and burdensome slavery’. While the primary sources admit cynicism, nothing in his record suggests that Tiberius ever changed this view of the principate. Pliny the Elder described him as ‘tristissimus hominum’, the saddest or gloomiest of men;7 in Tacitus’ portrait he is ‘stern’, reserved, adept at concealment: ‘he had his words and looks under strict control, and occasionally would try to hide his weakness... by a forced politeness.’8 To his contemporaries he appeared taciturn; even ascetic in the matter of self-fulfilment. His death inspired joy in place of lamentation, perhaps in his own heart most of all.