The Twelve Caesars

by Matthew Dennison

  But if the new emperor genuinely fought shy of this greatness thrust upon him, the troops who accompanied him revealed an alternative truth of constitutional developments in Rome. Their loyalty belonged to him, their concept of the good of the state already embodied in the person of the princeps. In Tacitus’ account, evasions and denials in the senate house notwithstanding, Tiberius had already written to Roman legions across the Empire. This undertaking acknowledges the practical foundation in armed force of Julio-Claudian hegemony. The motive of Tacitus’ Tiberius was ‘fear that Germanicus, who had at his disposal so many legions, such vast auxiliary forces of the allies, and such wonderful popularity, might prefer the possession to the expectation of empire’.19 From the outset the author interprets supreme power not as a benefit to the state but as a personal possession worth fighting for. At the same time he establishes in the reader’s mind Tiberius’ jealousy of his nephew, who is also his son and his stepson. The unravelling of that relationship – at one level a variant on the convention of the wicked stepmother, which already existed on the classical stage – will provide the dynamic of the first years of his reign. This dominance of Rome’s public life by family politics encapsulates Tacitus’ objections to the replacement of a system of elected magistrates by government by a single faction, the heirs of Augustus.

  In the short term, both Germanicus and the army occupied Tiberius’ thoughts. Soldiers in Pannonia mutinied on hearing the news of Augustus’ death; messengers carrying reports of their revolt arrived in Rome ahead of Tiberius’ first meeting with the senate.20 Similar unrest broke out among the legions of the Rhine. Under the command of Germanicus, it was to Germanicus rather than Tiberius that the Rhinish legions declared their loyalty; they also demanded improved pay and conditions. Germanicus quelled their uprising with vain promises. In theatrical fashion, he threatened to kill himself and publicly sent away from the camp his wife Agrippina, the youngest daughter of Julia and Agrippa (and thus, formerly, Tiberius’ stepdaughter), and the couple’s two-year-old son Gaius, whom the troops called ‘Caligula’, a walking and prattling legionary mascot who would afterwards become the least military of emperors. Despite Tacitus’ insinuations, it looked like loyalty on the part of Tiberius’ heir. Significantly, it was an interlude which served to heighten the profile of husband and wife alike. In Pannonia, order was restored by Tiberius’ violent, booze-glugging son Drusus. On this, his first overseas assignment, Drusus received no special award of powers: instead he was assisted by the joint Praetorian prefect Aelius Sejanus (of whom more later) and a contingent of the Praetorian Guard.

  Around 1614, the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens produced a double portrait of Germanicus and Agrippina. The artist was approaching the full maturity of his talents. He had already completed The Massacre of the Innocents, inspired by events in St Matthew’s Gospel, and The Recognition of Philopoemen, based on one of Plutarch’s Lives. His thoughts returned to Rome, where he had spent several years of the previous decade. It was there that Rubens had begun his collection of ancient cameos and engraved gems. The double-bust format of his finished portrait – the two sitters presented in profile, Agrippina’s image uppermost and central, Germanicus glimpsed behind his wife – recalls similar cameos. Germanicus’ profile, with its distinctively ‘Roman’ aquiline nose, echoes a drawing of a cameo Rubens made as part of a larger, abandoned project of illustrations of objects in his own collection.

  In this simple-seeming image, the couple appear bold in their resolve and flushed with the beauty of moral rectitude. The pearlescent glow of Agrippina’s pale skin and the enamelled luminosity of Rubens’ paint conjure a gem-like translucency. The portrait’s shimmering surface and pale highlights invest husband and wife with a quality that is more than human. The heroism of Rubens’ vision is entirely in keeping with the portrayal of Germanicus and his wife which survives in written accounts inimical to Tiberius. As we shall discover, events about to unfold – in the main, unresolved and ambiguous – invested the couple with legendary status. In life and in death, they provided a rallying point for Tiberian dissidents. Such was the extent of their popularity and the long-term currency of their magnetism that, in little over two decades, a homicidal maniac wholly unqualified for government became Rome’s fourth Caesar. The principal claim to power of the emperor Gaius lay in his illustrious and charismatic parents.

  Cruelty and tyranny dominate the presentation of Tiberius within hostile sources: twin impulses, the former is enlisted in the service of the latter. Ditto those martyrs on whom the ancient authors insist, material proof of Tiberius’s viciousness. From within the imperial family first Agrippa Postumus, imbecilic and sluggardly, then Germanicus, Tacitus’ hero, handsome if spindly legged, histrionic, with a weakness for the trappings of rank, a man in whom charm probably held the upper hand over capability. At Augustus’ instigation, Tiberius had adopted his nephew Germanicus as his son. He became at a stroke the brother of Tiberius’ surviving child from his marriage to Vipsania, Drusus the Younger. The brothers-cousins were further united by Drusus’ marriage to Germanicus’ sister Livilla. Germanicus ascended the ladder of magistracies with bravura, comfortably in advance of the minimum age qualifications; Drusus’ record was more dogged – a case of history repeating itself, Germanicus in Marcellus’ place, Drusus in Tiberius’s (like father, like son). And so it proved. For in AD 19, to widespread consternation, Germanicus suddenly died. Poison and witchcraft were the rumour, blame attributed to Tiberius himself.

  The emperor had grown jealous of his dashing but apparently loyal nephew. Germanicus’ response to the mutiny of the four Rhine legions in AD 14 had been a series of campaigns within Germany. Victorious, nonetheless all exacted a heavy Roman death toll; none resulted in significant gains of territory. Veteran of no fewer than nine periods of military service in Germany, Tiberius recalled Germanicus to Rome. He may have doubted the long-term success of his nephew’s policy: certainly he was more interested in stabilizing than extending the German frontier. He rewarded Germanicus with a triumph and partnership in his consulship of the following year. He then dispatched him to Syria, foremost among Rome’s eastern provinces, his capabilities enhanced by a grant of maius imperium which matched that once bestowed on Tiberius by Augustus.

  At the same time, Tiberius appointed a new governor to the province. Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, a man of high estate and Republican sympathies, had previously served as proconsul of Africa. There his chief distinction consisted in unwarranted brutality towards his own men.21 Arrogant and old-fashioned in outlook and behaviour, he was connected to Tiberius through a shared consulship in 7 BC, and to the emperor’s mother Livia, who was a close friend of his wealthy, independent-minded wife, Munatia Plancina. Tacitus suggests that husband and wife received separately from Tiberius and Livia unofficial commissions concerning the younger couple. Their role amounted to surveillance: the historian does not provide evidence.

  Germanicus and Piso did not meet until late in AD 18, when a disagreement over relative status within the province, understandable given Piso’s role as governor and Germanicus’ maius imperium, caused open conflict. Both men appear to have reached their own conclusion. Germanicus departed for Egypt; in his absence, Piso countermanded his recent orders. That inflammatory course of action was discovered by Germanicus on his return to the province the following spring. Overt hostility at that point soured the men’s relationship to such an extent that, when Germanicus fell ill, he suspected Piso of poisoning him and ordered his immediate departure from Syria. While Piso frittered away his days on Kos, on 10 October at Antioch the affronted Germanicus died.

  In Rome news of his death had an electric effect. Agrippina had ordered her husband’s living quarters to be searched: inevitably the haul revealed evidence of witchcraft and magic spells – bones, charms, crude human likenesses, tablets engraved with Germanicus’ name. Germanicus’ last wish was for justice for Piso and Plancina. Rumour, taking wing, strengthened the bonds between the governor
and his wife and Tiberius and Livia. Few doubted Piso’s guilt. Agrippina landed at Brundisium (Brindisi) in company with her children, bearing the urn of Gaius’ ashes, and embarked on what became a triumphal progress to Rome. Attended by grief-stricken crowds, her mourning odyssey inspired widespread support and set the seal on Germanicus’ martyrdom and her own role as faithful and suffering widow. Tiberius and Livia were conspicuously absent from the torch-lit service of interment of Germanicus’ ashes in the Mausoleum of Augustus. That absence further augmented unfavourable rumour. When the trial began, Livia intervened in Plancina’s cause and successfully secured her acquittal. Tiberius made no efforts on Piso’s behalf bar ordering the repair of those public statues of the erstwhile governor destroyed by an angry mob. ‘Let no notice be taken of my own sorrow, or the tears of Drusus,’ he addressed magistrates. ‘This case should be tried in the same manner as any other.’ The accused man committed suicide after correctly assessing the popular mood: at one point a lynch mob gathered outside the hearings.

  The aftermath of Germanicus’ unexpected death represents a watershed in Tiberius’ reign. Agrippina conceived a violent hatred for the man who had once been her stepfather: over time that feeling increased and hardened; it gathered in its wake others who nurtured grievances against the emperor. Her loathing included fear, so that she dare not eat at Tiberius’ table without first entrusting her food to a taster; and shaped the relationship of Tiberius and Agrippina’s children, with almost universally unhappy results. The suspicion felt by Agrippina, a member of Tiberius’ extended family and a palace insider, found an echo in a wider unease among Romans concerning the emperor’s benevolence. Given Tiberius’ refusal to indulge in acts of crowd-pleasing, the mysterious death of his handsome and popular heir – the only member of his family capable of challenging him for the throne – became a focus for wide-ranging apprehensions. In Tiberian historiography, the events surrounding Germanicus’ death provided justification for that overwhelmingly negative characterization of Augustus’ successor which has become the stuff of legend. Tiberius’ contemporary, Philo, an Alexandrian Jew, commended his gift of peace ‘and the blessing of peace to the end of his life with ungrudging bounty of hand and heart’ with which he endowed the empire.22 Suetonius, Tacitus and Dio, concerned more exclusively with life within Rome and, in particular, senatorial Rome, present instead a man whose every action is open to negative construction.

  In Suetonius’ case, this second Tiberius, visible for the most part only during his sixties and seventies, poses problems for the writer. For Suetonius subscribes to the ancient belief in the immutability of character (despite the repeated volte-faces and circumambulations of several of his twelve subjects). Thinking on his feet, he pinpoints evidence of cruelty in Tiberius’ childhood. As Tacitus states more explicitly, that cruel impulse which defines the ‘real’ Tiberius only ever slips from view as a result of conscious dissimulation. Suetonius offers us instances of enlightenment and benignity on Tiberius’ part – his patience ‘in the face of abuse and slander, and of lampoons on himself and his family’; his belief in freedom of speech and thought in a free country – trusting that we will formulate our own conclusions. Occasionally he guides our hand: ‘Little by little he unmasked the ruler, and although for some time his conduct was variable, yet he more often showed himself kindly and devoted to the public weal.’ Insinuation aside, this is the layman’s ‘lost’ Tiberius, a diligent and conscientious public servant. He has been overshadowed by that geriatric pervert who enjoys underwater the tickle of small boys’ tongues against his cock, a monster created by scandal mongers and partly of Suetonius’ own invention. In this instance, Suetonius cannot have it both ways. Two factors come to his assistance: the ascendancy of Sejanus and Tiberius’ retirement to Capri. The latter suggests the ending of one chapter and the beginning of another and facilitates a shift in tone and change of narrative gear. Before that, the former, like a playwright’s deus ex machina, intervenes to unknot the apparent contradictions between Suetonius’ two Tiberiuses: this Sejanus is a catalyst. Henceforth, the villain in Tiberius will prevail.

  In September AD 23, Tiberius disguised his grief at Drusus’ death. He curtailed the period of formal mourning, while his behaviour soon after towards a visiting deputation suggested that he had already forgotten his bereavement. We have learned to mistrust Tiberius’ public emotions. Two years previously he had made his son consul for the second time; the following year he awarded him tribunician power. He also entrusted Drusus with guardianship of the elder sons of Germanicus and Agrippina, his heirs in the next generation, a move which went some way towards sidelining Agrippina and minimizing what Tiberius undoubtedly regarded as her malign influence. He acted in accord with a pattern established by Augustus. With Germanicus dead, Drusus became his father’s heir: office-holding and grants of power paved the way for the succession; the whimsicality of fate demanded an heir in the second generation. Inspiration for these developments lay in pragmatism rather than affection. As so often in Augustus’ quest to ensure the succession, it was not to be.

  In the event, Tiberius appeared to have chosen an alternative helpmeet in government. A speech given by the emperor in the senate in 20, while Drusus was still alive, suggested that Tiberius had chosen to place his trust in the man who had recently succeeded his father as prefect of the Praetorian Guard: Lucius Aelius Sejanus. For the next decade of Tiberius’ reign, it was Sejanus rather than any member of the imperial family who came closest to exercising power. For a period he did so with the princeps’ full consent. In time, of course, his fall matched his rise.

  His name has become a byword for ambition. Sejanus was born of Etruscan equestrian stock but adopted into the senatorial family of Quintus Aelius Tubero in Rome. Hard-working and opportunistic – Tacitus reports him as selling his sexual favours to ‘a rich debauchee, Apicius’, presumably in the interests of advancement – he preferred following his father’s career to embarking as a new man on the cursus honorum. He became a friend of Gaius Caesar’s. Afterwards ‘he won the heart of Tiberius so effectually by various artifices that the emperor, ever dark and mysterious towards others, was with Sejanus alone careless and freespoken’.23 Sejanus had joined his father as co-prefect of the Praetorian Guard, a position which facilitated privileged access to the emperor. That access increased after Tiberius transferred all nine units of Praetorians, six of which had previously been stationed outside Rome, to a single barracks near the Viminal Hill.24 This development also augmented the political influence of the Praetorian prefecture, as Sejanus quickly grasped following his father’s promotion to the prefecture of Egypt. He embarked on a policy of making himself indispensable to Tiberius. Chief among his malign practices was his orchestration of a network of paid informers, delatores, who provided the evidence required to institute criminal proceedings for treason (maiestas). Partly through Sejanus’ influence, these trials became a feature of Tiberius’ reign and, targeting the senatorial class above others, grounds for that schism between emperor and senate which survives in the intense dislike of Tiberius in all the major sources bar Velleius Paterculus. Sentences were characterized by their severity and cruelty (an impulse Suetonius attributes to Tiberius on the grounds that his cruelty did not diminish following Sejanus’ downfall). Nothing less than terror afflicted Rome’s senators; within that loosely enclosed fraternity terror bred mistrust. For the shady underground network of delatores operated outside senatorial convention. Their scaremongering encouraged a degree of paranoia on Tiberius’ part too, which in turn increased his reliance on his Praetorian bodyguard. Openly Tiberius began to acknowledge this cynical upstart as ‘the partner of his toils’. He endorsed the erection of statues of Sejanus not only in the public spaces of the capital but at legionary headquarters across the Empire (only the legions in Syria resisted this piece of misplaced flattery, abstinence which later earned them rewards).

  All this happened following Germanicus’ death but during Drusus’ lifet
ime. The predictable result was resentment on the part of Drusus, ‘who did not conceal his hatred and incessantly complained “that a stranger was invited to assist in the government while the emperor’s son was alive. How near the step of declaring the stranger a colleague!”’25 Sejanus avenged himself for Drusus’ dislike by seducing the latter’s wife Livilla. If we believe Tacitus, he also took the opportunity of killing Drusus, administering a slow-working poison through the agency of a eunuch called Lygdus. (Dio attributes this information to Sejanus’ ex-wife Apicata, who distributed blame equally between Sejanus and Livilla, partners in crime; hitherto dissipation had been regarded as the most likely cause of Drusus’ sudden and mysterious demise.) With Drusus dead, Sejanus came clean about the extent of his ambition: in AD 25, he asked Tiberius’ permission to marry his mistress Livilla. Tiberius declined. Drusus’ death had made Germanicus’ elder sons, Nero and Drusus, Tiberius’ heirs. The emperor withheld permission for remarriage from Agrippina as well as Livilla, denying both the opportunity of producing alternative heirs or strengthening the focus of opposition. In 23, Nero and Drusus were still young: Sejanus understood that in time their influence would rival his own. Tiberius’ refusal of 25 demonstrated that that influence was not boundless. He responded with a campaign of calumny and aggression directed against Agrippina and her sons, his purpose to isolate Agrippina from power to his own advantage. Agrippina’s life, and those of Nero and Drusus Caesar, all fell forfeit to Sejanus’ ambition and Tiberius’ brooding mistrust. By the two men’s joint agency, the pool of Tiberius’ potential heirs shrank to two: Gaius Caesar, youngest son of Germanicus and Agrippina, and Tiberius Gemellus, Tiberius’ grandson via Drusus. Suetonius claims this outcome as Tiberius’ intention all along: ‘He had advanced [Sejanus] to the highest power, not so much from regard to him, as that he might through his services and wiles destroy the children of Germanicus and secure the succession for his own grandson, the child of his son Drusus.’ It is an oversimplification apparently refuted in Tiberius’ fragmentary lost autobiography, in which he claimed Sejanus’ plots against the children of Germanicus as the grounds of the former’s downfall,26 and ultimately discarded even by Gaius, who possessed the greatest grounds for enmity.