Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  The only structural remains of the Palazzo a Mare are a brick wall abutting the cliff, twenty feet high, with a series of vaulted recesses, the remnants of private chambers. True to Suetonius’s description, the living quarters were modest in size. The villa was sited bang on the sea’s edge, so its terraces must have been washed by waves when the sea was rough. In the shallows directly in front of it, a modern stone breakwater creates a calm, shallow tidal pool where children can splash in safety on fine days and small boats are moored during a storm. Near the fragmentary ruins of the villa, there is a row of private changing rooms and a trattoria called Bagni Tiberio, which is owned by Don Vincenzo’s nephew Peppino.

  At the conclusion of our tour, Don Vincenzo brings me to his house, a trim white frame cottage midway along the Roman road to San Costanzo. The house is surrounded by a small vineyard, where he raises grapes from vines that he discovered when he was digging his garden. He believes they are relics of Augustus’s own vineyard. Proudly, he says, “I make wine from the vines of the imperatore.”

  * * *

  WE FEEL THAT we know Augustus, but Tiberius, his successor, presents a dark, shape-shifting enigma as elusive as the Sirens. If the phrase fits anyone, Augustus was a Great Man of History, possessed by unbounded ambition, which wrought the empire that dominated Europe and the Mediterranean for a millennium. He ruled with ruthless resolve, yet his triumph owed as much to his personal charm as to military genius and statecraft. In his personal habits, he was a man of simple tastes with a passion for gardening who preached and practiced the homely virtues of family life. Augustus was adored by the soldiers who marched to his orders and revered by the Roman people, who made a god of him long before his posthumous deification by a decree of the Senate. Tiberius was his bipolar opposite, a gloomy, secretive monarch who ascended to the throne with obvious reluctance. He was a brilliant general with a distaste for political intrigue, at least in the beginning of his career, who was propelled to power by his mother, the formidable Livia. As emperor, Tiberius was as irresolute as his predecessor was decisive, incapable of taking any action until he had sought the advice of everyone around him. Pliny the Elder called him tristissimus hominum, saddest of men.

  It is impossible to make an objective assessment of the personality and reign of Tiberius, because the surviving sources of information are biased and unreliable and conflict with one another about everything except the bare facts. Among those, none was more influential to the course of history than Tiberius’s decision in A.D. 26 to move from Rome to Capri. It was unprecedented. Norman Douglas wrote, “For the first time, the center of the world was displaced, the spell of the Eternal City broken.” It was a wobble in imperial history that set the precedent for future dislocations of the seat of power, to Milan, Ravenna, Nicomedia, and finally Byzantium. Augustus was enchanted by the Siren Island and visited it often throughout his long life, but Tiberius’s move to Capri was permanent: the Gulf of Naples was his Rubicon in reverse. He ruled the world from Villa Jovis, his palace overlooking the gulf, until his death more than ten years later. This final phase of his life dominated his reputation for posterity, and the reports of Tiberius’s residency in Capri also had a potent influence on the island’s own reputation.

  The principal historians of the early empire, Tacitus and Suetonius, paint a lurid portrait of a depraved monster governed by irrational cruelty and perverted sexual appetites. Tacitus, much the more esteemed of the two by his contemporaries and modern historians, wrote his Annals eighty years after Tiberius’s death. Like most intellectuals of his era, he deplored the monarchy and nurtured a hopeless dream of restoring the republic that had ruled Rome for centuries until the dictatorship of Julius Caesar. The god Augustus was untouchable, commanding respect even after his death, so Tacitus poured his republican convictions into his chronicle of the second emperor’s reign. He wrote that Tiberius’s professed reason for moving to Capri was a desire to escape the rancorous intrigues of the capital, in particular the relentless scheming of his domineering mother, but “for the most part I am moved to ascribe the motive of his removal more truly to his cruelty and lust, which his actions proclaimed even as he concealed them in a distant place.”

  Tacitus has nothing but praise for Capri itself. In the Annals, the historian is absorbed by the foibles and follies of his imperial subjects and takes but little interest in writing descriptions of places that his readers would have known for themselves. Capri elicited the only description of a landscape that survives in his long book:

  The solitude of the place was, I believe, what pleased [Tiberius] most. It is surrounded by a harborless sea with few places of refuge for even the meanest vessels, and no one can land there and escape the notice of a practiced lookout. The air in winter is soft, for the island is protected from the fury of the winds by a mountain. In the summertime, the West Wind wafts it, and the open sea all around it makes it a pleasant place. Moreover, it commands the most beautiful view of the bay, at least before flaming Mount Vesuvius altered the appearance of the coast.

  Tacitus’s description is still a concise, accurate geographic survey of Capri. After Tiberius moved there, Tacitus says, he built a dozen villas, each dedicated to a sign of the zodiac, implying that he moved from one palace to the next following the astrological calendar. This aspect of Tacitus’s history is probably apocryphal, or heavily embroidered: the remains of his residence in Damecuta, at the island’s western end, suggest that it was a large, lavish palace, and tradition supports the previous existence of a villa above Augustus’s Palazzo a Mare, on a site now occupied by a rich man’s house, but no trace of the other palaces survives either in stone or in legend, as one would expect of “huge villas.” Virtually every event in the historical record of Tiberius’s reign takes place at Villa Jovis.

  From a diplomatic and military perspective, Tiberius was a successful monarch, who strengthened Rome’s control of distant provinces and extended its reach. For most citizens of the empire, it was a prosperous time, and even his sternest critics begrudgingly credit him with being just and generous in his dealings with plebeians. The historians’ most interesting material was the ceaseless cycle of murderous intrigues in the capital. One after another Tiberius discovered (or was persuaded to find) traitors in the Senate, the army, and his own family who were subjected to show trials and sentenced to banishment or execution by enforced suicide. Many of these inquisitions were instigated by his chief adviser, Sejanus, the commander of the Praetorian Guard, whom Tiberius called his socius laborum, the partner in his toils. Tiberius eventually turned over most of the day-to-day tasks of running the imperial city to him. Sejanus consolidated his control over the suspicious, vacillating monarch by turning him against anyone who stood in the way of his own ambition, which aimed at nothing less than the throne. After the death of Drusus, Tiberius’s son and heir (probably as the result of poisoning by his wife, whom Sejanus had seduced), the emperor wearied of Rome and made his move to Capri, leaving his treacherous helpmate to rule in his place.

  It was not the first time Tiberius had run away from Rome. Early in his career, after Augustus made him supreme commander of the Eastern Empire, in 6 B.C., he announced an abrupt retirement from public life, at the age of thirty-six, and moved to Rhodes. The decision was probably motivated at least in part by a desire to escape his miserable marriage to Julia, Augustus’s daughter. Tiberius adored his first wife, Vipsania, but Augustus forced him to divorce her and marry his only natural child while she was still in mourning for her husband, Agrippa. Julia was spoiled and headstrong and by every account unrestrained in her quest of sexual adventure. Everyone in Rome except her father knew that she was sleeping with many of the empire’s most powerful men. After Augustus found out about her wanton sex life, he ordered a divorce in Tiberius’s name and exiled her to the tiny islet of Pandateria, where she was deprived of wine and the company of any men except eunuchs until her death. Tacitus suggests that Tiberius’s early, short-lived retirement from public l
ife might have been a sort of trial run of the Orgy in Capri: “In the years that he went into exile in Rhodes under the guise of retirement, he had no other thoughts than meditating wrath, hypocrisy, and secret sensuality.”

  Once Tiberius had installed himself in Villa Jovis, after he finally learned the full extent of Sejanus’s treachery, he ordered him to be arrested by the very Praetorian Guards that were supposed to be under Sejanus’s direct control, a deft stroke that rooted out every vestige of Sejanus’s shadow regime. Everyone related to him was executed. A notorious detail of this bloody purge is the execution of the traitor’s young children. To satisfy the demands of the convention that children be exempted from execution, the boy was dressed in the toga virilis, the emblem of manhood, before his throat was cut, and the little girl was raped by a guard before she was murdered, to avoid the damnable sin of killing a virgin.

  Suetonius records that the emperor received the news of the executions at Villa Jovis, where he kept “a constant watch from the highest cliffs for the signals he had ordered to be raised on the mainland.” Sixteen centuries before the first telescopes, such signals could only have been transmitted by beacons or perhaps smoke signals. This passage has excited scholarly speculation about how Tiberius was able to rule the empire from such an isolated place. The most obvious explanation would be fires lit at nighttime, which could be used to send messages, perhaps employing a prototype of Morse code. One modern military historian has mooted the possibility that the Romans developed an early heliograph, creating a bright flash on a large reflective surface that was visible in daytime.

  Even after the massacre of Sejanus and his ilk, which left the capital in turmoil, Tiberius did not budge from his island retreat. He made occasional forays to the mainland of Campania, but never again entered the city of Rome. What kept him in Capri, which for all its natural beauty is a small island, is one of the murkiest of the Tiberian enigmas. Tacitus’s sensational explanation is that the monarch, now in his seventies, was so much given over to cruelty and sexual lust that he had lost touch with the realities of empire: “The more intent he had formerly been upon public cares, he became now so much the more buried in dark debauches.” Maliciously, he adds that Tiberius might also have been prompted to live in solitude because he was embarrassed by his appearance; although he had a handsome figure, he was bald and his face was disfigured by erupting cankers, which he covered with plasters.

  Tacitus was a serious writer, a master rhetorician famed for the symmetry and high polish of his prose. He evoked a sense of terror in his narrative not with graphic shocks but rather with dark insinuations that left the details to his reader’s imagination. He leaves his indictment of Tiberius’s cruelty deliberately vague. Suetonius, on the other hand, is explicit, and glories in the gory details. His recital of horrors is extensive. One famous passage describes the Salto di Tiberio, Tiberius’s Leap: “In Capri, they point out the scene of his executions, from which he used to command those condemned to die, after long and exquisite tortures, to leap into the sea before his eyes. Below, his marines battered the bodies of the victims with pikes to ensure that no breath of life remained, and then shoved the bodies back into the sea.” The Salto di Tiberio is the steepest cliff on the island, a principal feature of boat excursions for modern tourists, whose guides recite Suetonius’s tale, just as he predicted they would. One of Tiberius’s favorite tortures, according to Suetonius, was to profess friendship with the victim and encourage him to drink enormous quantities of wine; then, before the man had a chance to urinate, guards would seize him and tie up his penis with a cord, preventing him from purging his bladder.

  Tacitus also enforces a decorous vagueness in his descriptions of the emperor’s sexual perversions. This passage is the closest he comes to a pornographic description of Tiberius’s orgy:

  Like a royal despot, he defiled and committed outrages on freeborn youths. His lust was excited not only by a beautiful face and a graceful body but also in some cases by their youthful innocence and in others by noble ancestry. At this time words came into use that were previously unknown, the Sellarii and Spintriae, one expressing the filthiness of the place and the other the manifold postures and methods of buggery.1 Slaves were charged with procuring and bringing youths to service him, with gifts for the willing and threats against the recalcitrant; and if their parents or guardians put up resistance, the young people were taken forcibly, and the procurers satisfied their own desires with them, as if they were prisoners of war.

  In his treatment of sex, too, Suetonius is compendious with anecdotes and graphic in detail. Here, he describes the spintriae: “On retiring to Capri, [Tiberius] devised a rural pavilion for his secret orgies, where bands of girls and male favorites who had distinguished themselves as experts in unnatural intercourse, called spintriae, copulated in triple unions in his presence, to excite his flagging lust.” Some passages approach buffoonery, such as his description of groves in the garden of Villa Jovis that were fitted out as mock temples of prostitution, where the youthful talent were costumed as little Pans and nymphs. Suetonius has the irritating habit of feigning disgust at what he clearly relishes and pretending reluctance to come out and say what he is eager to tell:

  [Tiberius’s] infamy proclaimed itself with even grosser depravities, so flagrant one can scarcely bear to report or hear them, or even to believe them, such as the children of the tenderest age, whom he called his little fishes, trained to swim between his thighs, licking and nibbling him as they swirled about in the water; and the babies, robust yet still unweaned, whom he brought to his penis as if it were a mother’s teat, for they were surely more apt to enjoy this sort of pleasure by nature at their age.

  As Suetonius concedes, difficult to believe. Yet throughout most of the nearly two thousand years since the histories of Tacitus and Suetonius were published, the scandals were widely accepted and repeated. “Tiberius in Capri” was universal shorthand for excessive, perverted sexual license and brutal cruelty.

  Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century serial killer who confessed to sodomizing, torturing, and murdering a large number of youths, perhaps hundreds of them, ranging in age from six to eighteen, said at his trial that he was inspired to commit the crimes after reading Suetonius’s biography of Tiberius. A marshal of France who fought beside Joan of Arc, Gilles also had an element of Nero, the megalomaniac artist, in his character. He wrote a mystery play about Joan’s triumph at the Siege of Orléans that was twenty thousand verses long, with 120 speaking parts and an army of extras. Gilles’s homicidal rampage originated in an obsession with the occult. On one occasion, when he performed a Black Mass, the demon he was trying to summon demanded the body parts of children as the price for making an appearance. The accounts of torture and mayhem that came out at Gilles’s trial make gruesome reading; the most horrible aspect of his crimes was their psychological cruelty. Like Tiberius, he delighted in feigning friendship with his victims in the beginning, treating them to gifts at a lavish banquet in order to intensify their shock when he revealed his true purpose. In his confession, he said that he would sit on the stomach of the child after he had cut his throat, for the thrill of watching him die.

  Tiberius’s orgy in Capri, even more than the madness of Caligula and Nero, created the paradigm of imperial wickedness. In the Renaissance, the histories of Tacitus and Suetonius were the primary sources of information about the early empire and an integral part of the curriculum at schools and colleges. In his tragedy Sejanus, His Fall, Ben Jonson, most learned of the Elizabethan poets, closely paraphrases Tacitus in his description of Tiberius’s life in Capri:

  He hath his boys, and beauteous girls ta’en up,

  Out of the noblest houses, the best formed,

  Best nurtured, and most modest: What’s their good,

  Serves to provoke his bad …

  [and] dealt away

  unto his spintries, sellaries, and slaves,

  Masters of strange and new-commented lusts,

&nb
sp; For which wise nature hath not left a name.

  Milton’s readers required only a brief allusion to bring the Roman histories to mind. In Paradise Regained, Satan tempts Christ with earthly powers, chief among them the opportunity to expel Tiberius from his throne and restore Rome to greatness:

  This Emperor hath no son, and now is old;

  Old and lascivious: and from Rome retir’d

  To Capreae, an island small, but strong,

  On the Campanian shore, with purpose there,

  His horrid lusts in private to enjoy.

  Charles Dunster, the editor of an edition of Paradise Regained published in 1795, footnoted this passage, “The accuracy and historical correctness, with which the character of Tiberius is here drawn, is well worth noticing,” and adduced long quotations from Tacitus and Suetonius to support the assertion. Yet Dunster was already old-fashioned: skepticism about the canonical historians had taken hold in France before the Revolution.

  One of the earliest works of fiction inspired by the Orgy in Capri was written by a writer who campaigned against belief in anything at all except the flesh, the Marquis de Sade, “the only writer who will never lose the power to shock us,” as Francine du Plessix Gray wrote. None of his works is more shocking than his novel Juliette, which was published anonymously at the end of the eighteenth century, as the sequel to Justine. In Justine, subtitled The Misfortunes of Virtue, the heroine undergoes unspeakable torments and humiliations as a result of her virtuous behavior; in Juliette, Justine’s wicked sister abandons every conceivable norm of human decency with joyous abandon. She and her demonic companion Clairwil go on a rampage that decants buckets of sperm and oceans of blood across Europe, and Tiberius is frequently invoked as an inspiration for their adventures. Rape, torture, infanticide, mass murder, and cannibalism are elaborated in phantasmagoric and ultimately monotonous variations. Juliette is not pornographic in the conventional sense; only a monster like Gilles de Rais could find the book sexually arousing. For most readers of any era, the book is a violent assault on the imagination and the gut, punctuated by philosophical digressions that anticipate the intellectual revolutions that would have respectable triumphs by the end of the nineteenth century.