The Twelve Caesars (11 page)

Tiberius
: Statue of Tiberius © Toni Sanchez Poy

T
iberius 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 widespread 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.

Above all Tiberius lacked charm. It was part of a larger, conscious detachment from those around him. Dio describes his ‘most peculiar nature’, his anger ‘if anyone gave
evidence of understanding him... he put many to death for no other offence than that of having comprehended him’.
⁹
The contrast with his predecessor is marked. Affable and wily, Augustus had
recast the government of Rome as a public celebration of civic-mindedness displayed in building and restoration programmes, large-scale spectacles and the heightened profile of his own family.
Tiberius,
haughtily patrician, did not trouble to win hearts and minds. He slashed the budget for public games, reducing actors’ pay and capping the number of
gladiators, omitted to complete a single building project and, distancing himself from his troublesome relations, many of whom he executed, eventually concealed himself from sight. (This neglect of
grass-roots popularity was a failing later repeated by the equally aristocratic, equally austere Galba.) High birth and, when it suited him, a superstitious attachment to portents endowed Tiberius
with a sense of entitlement which did not require the endorsement of popular consensus. Although his career prior to the purple encompassed troughs as well as crests, ‘that strong and
unwavering confidence in his destiny, which he had conceived from his early years because of omens and predictions’ never left him. It is one of the many ironies of our story that Augustus,
embracing autocracy, courted popular support, while Tiberius, at heart faithful to the Republican oligarchy his ancestors had served through five centuries, baulked at currying favour,
‘headstrong and stubborn’ in his attitude towards the commons as his family had always been. ‘Let them hate me, provided they respect my conduct,’ Suetonius reports him as
repeating from time to time. It is a statement of remarkable aloofness. The first ‘Julio-Claudian’ thanks to his adoption by Augustus, Tiberius was always the Claudian (arrogant and
cruel) and never the Julian (mercurial, given to flashes of genius).

As Romans would readily have understood, he was a product of his background. A descendant twice over of the family immortalized by Livy as ‘
superbissima
’, ‘excessively
haughty’, he was the son of Tiberius Claudius Nero, whose name he shared, and Livia Drusilla, daughter of a Claudius Pulcher, twin branches of the same Claudian
gens
. His family was
among the grandest in Rome and unique in its Republican achievements:
a record of twenty-eight consulships (the first held in 493
BC
), five
dictatorships, seven censorships, six triumphs and two ovations. Although his father, a shiftless opportunist with an unerring capacity for backing the wrong horse, opposed Octavian and found his
way onto the list of the
proscripti
, his mother married Nero’s tormentor in 39
BC
when Tiberius was only three. Following his father’s death, from the age
of nine Tiberius lived in the household of the most powerful man in Rome. Yet paternity left its imprint. He grew his hair long at the back, a style affected by Claudians, as if eager to assert
loyalties more fundamental than those arising from cohabitation. And despite a philhellenism which increased over time, including an admiration for Greek intellectuals, his nature betrayed
old-fashioned Roman qualities of austerity, continence and self-discipline (in themselves a powerful riposte to Suetonius’ inventory of sexual miscreancy). These were Republican virtues,
paraded by Augustus in the deliberate simplicity of his lifestyle, which Tiberius also followed (he had a taste for radishes and cucumber and, particularly, pears): in Tiberius’ case, they
were part of a larger admiration for the political system they had once upheld. In time, these genetic sympathies – which found expression in funeral games held in honour of his father and
his grandfather – would be balanced by Tiberius’ personal admiration for Augustus, a response compounded of reverence and awe. His resistance early in his principate to using the title
‘Augustus’, save in letters to foreign potentates, arose partly from Republican distaste, partly from a sense that he was unworthy to take on to such an extent the mantle of his
adoptive father. He regarded with wariness those personal, king-like awards stockpiled by Augustus; eschewed the civic crown at his door which, Republican in origin, so nearly symbolized the truth
of the latter’s Roman revolution; resisted the obeisance
of senators and colleagues and refused the appellation ‘Father of his Country’. ‘Of many high
honours,’ we read, ‘he accepted only a few of the more modest.’ His motives were not wholly ideological. Dio recounts a telling incident. A few men began wearing purple clothing,
something which had previously been forbidden. Although Tiberius took measures to stop them, he ‘neither rebuked nor fined any of them’.
¹⁰
His upbraiding took the form of a symbolic
gesture, a dark woollen cloak flung across his own clothes. It was as if it were the loneliness of the principate which disturbed him: at one level the camaraderie of shared purple clothing did not
offend him. In self-imposed exile on Capri, living without many of the trappings of empire, he found escape from that loneliness.