Tacitus (Donne)/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV.
THE 'ANNALS.'
TIBERIUS.
The title of this work may not be inviting to some English readers. It may suggest to them the idea of a note-book in which rough materials are collected for a complete and polished narrative. They have doubtless observed in the most attractive historical works frequent references to monkish annals—to Camden's and Strype's, for instance, the authorities for much dreary political or ecclesiastical controversy. But no one need anticipate in the 'Annals' of Tacitus any dulness. Far from being the dry bones of some purposed record, they are among the most signal examples of thoughtful, interesting, and brilliant narration. They abound in anecdote; their by-ways are often not less pleasant than the main road; they take the reader into many lands; introduce him to many forms of life and manners. The keystone of the arch is indeed Rome and its Cæsar, but the arch of description itself is wide in its span; the 'Annals' are "the roof and crown" of the mighty master's genius.
The 'Annals' commence with the death of Augustus, A.D. 14, and, when in a perfect state, closed with the death of Nero, in 68. In them were related the events of fifty-four years. They are less mutilated than the 'History,' yet they have in some respects suffered far more severely, inasmuch as we lose in the later of the author's works many more important scenes and events than were treated of in the earlier. Of the fifth book of the 'Annals' the greater part has perished; the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth no longer exist, and of the eleventh a considerable part is missing. By the imperfect condition of the fifth book we are left to learn from other and inferior writers, many of whom lived long after the time of Tiberius, the real character of Sejanus's conspiracy. By the entire absence of four books we are without such a narrative as Tacitus alone could pen, of the whole of Caligula's reign and of the first five years of that of Claudius. By the mutilation of the sixteenth, we are deprived of the necessary materials for understanding the causes and motives of the revolt which hurled from a throne he had so long abused the last of the Julian Cæsars.
It is impossible to attempt giving a mere abstract of the 'Annals' as they have come down to us. Condensation is seldom satisfactory: an epitome can hardly fail to be more or less obscure. We must be content with dwelling on a few only of the more striking scenes or persons delineated by the historian. The first six books may be regarded as a portrait of Tiberius. He, present or absent from the scenes of action, whether they relate to war or peace, is the pivot on which the machine of government revolves. He was neither, like Claudius, the servant of his own freedmen, nor, like Nero, the companion of singers, dancers, gladiators, and charioteers. History presents few characters so difficult to decipher as that of Tiberius. Even Tacitus's summary of his virtues and vices can hardly be reconciled with facts or consistency. Most unpopular with every class at Rome, and in its immediate neighbourhood, he was regarded by the provincials as a wise, a temperate, and even a beneficent sovereign. It almost seems as if there had been one emperor in the capital and another outside its walls.
After relating the death of Tiberius, Tacitus says—"He ruled the Roman state with absolute sway. His manners also varied with the conditions of his fortune. His conduct was exemplary and his reputation high while in a private capacity, or holding dignities under Augustus. While Germanicus and Drusus were yet alive, his manners were reserved and mysterious, artfully assuming the merit of virtues to which he had no claim. While his mother survived, his character exhibited a compound of good and evil. While he loved or feared Sejanus, though detested for his cruelties, he observed a secrecy and caution in the gratification of his evil passions; but at last when all restraints of shame and fear were removed, and he was left to the uncontrolled bent of his genius, he broke out into acts of atrocious villainy and revolting depravity."[1]
The historian who penned this very antithetical character, opens his fourth book with a high testimony to Tiberius during the first nine years of his reign. He ruled indeed with absolute sway, and so, virtually, had Augustus done before him: it was the "hard condition twin-born with their greatness;" but while his predecessor had the art to veil with roses the chains he imposed, if was always the ill-luck of Tiberius to display them, and often inopportunely. For a period of eight years at least he "intrusted to the senate all the public and all private business of importance: to the leading members of it he allowed liberty of debate: he checked flattery of himself; in his preferments he was guided by merit, by ancient nobility, by renown in war, by ability in civil accomplishments, insomuch that his appointments to office were universally approved. Consuls and prætors retained the usual distinctions of their offices; inferior magistrates their proper authority; and the laws, except in cases of treason, were beneficially administered. The tithes, taxes, and public revenues were managed by companies of Roman knights: the Cæsar's own affairs were conducted by men of eminent probity, some of whom were known to him only by their good repute; and when once engaged by him, they were retained without any restriction of term, and most of them grew old in the same employment. Dearth of provisions at times distressed the people, but through no fault of the prince, who spared neither pains nor expense to remedy the deficiency of food, whether it were owing to storms at sea delaying the corn-fleets, or to bad harvests. He took care that the provinces should not be oppressed by new taxes, and that the already existing burdens should not be rendered intolerable by the strictness or rapacity of the farmers of the revenue." "My sheep," it was a favourite maxim of his, "may be shorn, but not flayed by you." Corporal punishments and confiscation of goods were unknown. Many a noble owned far more landed property in Italy than the emperor did: many a rich man possessed more freedmen and slaves: and the behaviour of the imperial slaves was modest, which could not always be said of the senatorial bondmen. If he had any suits with private persons, he referred them as if he had been a simple citizen to the courts and the law.
Tiberius, when the death of Augustus was publicly announced—he had not arrived in time from the Dalmatian coast to be present at the last moments of the dying Cæsar—entered at once upon his important duties as commander of the army, governor-general of the provinces, and tribune of the people; and thus had virtually in his hands all the essentials of imperial power. Secure of these, he awaited, until after the funeral of Augustus, his nomination as Prince of the Senate. And at this point, in the view taken of him by Tacitus, began that system of dissimulation which he followed through a long reign. It might have been more honest to demand, but it was perhaps more politic, as well as decent, to court the suffrages of the senate. The account of the Cæsar's hesitation in accepting, of the senators' eager servility, in imploring him to consent to accept, the only dignity that was not his already, is among the historian's masterpieces of description. Tacitus says that Tiberius never faltered, except in the presence of the conscript-fathers. One motive for his hesitation was a dread that in his nephew Germanicus he might find a formidable rival, and there was not time to assure himself of the loyalty and honorable feelings of that darling of the Roman people. Another but less obvious cause for delay, was his repugnance to be regarded as the nominee of his mother Livia, who not only at the moment had secured her son's quiet accession, but also had obtained for him from the reluctant Augustus every office comprised in the imperium—except that of Prince of the Senate. Moreover, there were members on the senatorial benches whom the late emperor had suggested might contest with the son of Livia the succession to the empire. The suspicions were idle: the senate had been too long trained in subservience to have a voice of its own: but, although idle, they were not ineffectual, as the objects of them found in due time to their cost. Perhaps there was yet another motive for real or affected hesitation in Tiberius on this occasion. He loved to read men's thoughts; to analyse their motives; to balance in his own scale their words and deeds, and to draw his own conclusions as to what was merely lip-service, and what was a real desire that he should ascend the vacant throne. Their votes and voices he could easily have constrained: he preferred to draw out the actual sentiments of his courtiers. His dissimulation will hardly be accounted unwise, if we hear in mind that Tiberius at no one period of his life was a favorite of the Roman people. Their love and hopes had been lavished on his deceased brother Drusus, and now were transferred, in measure heaped and running over, to the son of Drusus, the young, handsome, brave, and gracious Germanicus.
More formidable dangers than political intrigues occupied the attention of Tiberius at the very moment he commenced his reign. The legions in Pannonia broke out into mutiny as soon as they heard of the death of Augustus; and their conduct was the more alarming from the fact that six years before there had been in the same quarter a revolt of the same troops, which Tiberius himself had been sent to put down, and which, as it proved, he had "scotched but not killed." There was the more reason for prompt action, because the mutineers could in a fortnight reach Italy, and in three weeks the capital itself, which was then slenderly supplied with guards, for the most effective divisions of the army were stationed in Upper or Lower Germany. The mutiny was sufficiently grave to render it necessary for the emperor to despatch his son Drusus, and one of the prætorian prefects, Ælius Sejanus, with a formidable force of cavalry and veteran infantry, to the Pannonian camp. A timely eclipse, however, so disheartened the rebels, that, after committing many atrocities, they returned to their standards under the impression that the gods frowned on their revolt.
But if the Pannonian revolt was a spark, a mutiny of the legions in Upper and Lower Germany threatened to be a devouring flame. For there, in both provinces, the disaffected soldiers were in the immediate neighbourhood of the free Germans, proud of their demolition of Varus and his army five years before, and ever watching for an opportunity to cross to the left bank of the Rhine. The most popular general of the day, the Cæsar Germanicus, was in command of eight legions—a force that with auxiliaries consisted of at least 60,000 men. Tiberius might affect to dread some half-dozen of the nobles, but he was sincere in his apprehensions of his adopted son. Him indeed he suspected unjustly. The noble and loyal disposition of Germanicus was a riddle to the moody and timid master of thirty legions, and he probably distrusted him the more for a straightforward dealing of which he was himself incapable. To hear from successive messengers that the legions of the Rhine were in revolt; that they had offered to proclaim their commander Cæsar; that they had demanded and received from him a largesse; that not merely Germanicus, but also his wife, Agrippina, were the darlings of the mutineers; and that even his little grandson Caius, the future Caligula, was their pet,—might alarm a stouter heart than Tiberius possessed. The name of Germanicus alone would have thrown open the city gates, and the servile aristocracy would have joyfully deposed, and probably put to death, a chief whom they disliked, and repeated their oath of allegiance to a Cæsar, beloved equally by senate, soldiers, and people.
The mutineers expiated their crimes by an apparently promiscuous slaughter of their leaders. But both summer and winter camps were become odious to them, and the blood of German foes alone could, in their opinion, wash out the stain of their rebellion and sanguinary remorse. Germanicus, though autumn was already advanced, hurried them over the Rhine, and indulged them with a brief campaign. To trace his steps through two following campaigns in Germany, would demand far more space than we can afford, and also weary the reader with details of events which had no important consequences, and in which the only character of any interest is that of Arminius, the Cheruscan chief. The story of this German hero indeed belongs more to the annals of Augustus than to those of Tiberius, since it was in the earlier reign of the two that he achieved, by a combination of craft and valour, the destruction of Varus and his legions. Against Germanicus his success was far less signal, although by skilfully contrived movements and indomitable energy he baffled the invaders, seriously thinned their ranks, and more than once reduced the Roman general to straits which, but for the discipline of the legions, would a second time have lost Rome a general and an army. In 16 A.D. Germanicus was recalled from the Rhine. He was accorded a magnificent triumph, of which to Roman spectators the most attractive feature was the presence of the hero and his five children riding in the same chariot. Yet this portion of the spectacle excited not merely sentiments of pride and hope, but also gloomy anticipations of the future. The people called to mind, "that popular favour had proved calamitous to his father Drusus; that his uncle Marcellus was snatched in his youth from the ardent affections of the populace; and that ever short-lived and unfortunate were the favorites of the Roman people." The prediction, not uttered with bated breath, doubtless reached the ears of Tiberius, and bore baneful fruit in later years, when his "fears stuck deep" in Agrippina and her sons.
The presence of Germanicus, now consul, was urgently needed in the Eastern provinces, where the death of Augustus had given rise to disturbances on the Armenian and Parthian frontiers, and where, also, the civil government appears to have required the presence of a vice-emperor. The removal of the young and successful general is ascribed by Tacitus to the fear or jealousy of Tiberius, but there is no reason to impute such motives to him. Had Tacitus lived in the reign of Tiberius, we should perhaps have been told by him, that the Claudian Cæsar had seen much service in the Rhenish and Danubian districts, and knew better than Germanicus how to deal with barbarians. So long as the legions were burning their villages, devastating their fields, and chasing them across morass, forest, and river, the Germans were tolerably united in a common cause. Whereas, rid of the invader, they were pretty sure to quarrel with one another; and thus, by their civil wars, they served Rome far more effectually than she could serve herself by the expenditure of blood and treasure. The campaigns of Germanicus had really no important result. The Germans were often defeated, but never conquered; and perhaps a Teutonic Tacitus would have told of more Roman reverses than the Roman one thought meet to chronicle. From the 'Annals' alone it is clear that the invaders suffered severely from the natural difficulties of a land void of roads and bridges, and studded with swamps and pathless woods. Clear, also, it is, that even in pitched battle the Romans' rank and file suffered severely, and were cumbered by their own armour; while their lightly-clad opponents fought with ease and agility, knee-deep in water, or amid the gloom of a primeval forest. And however successful at the opening, Germanicus was with one exception—his first inroad—always unfortunate at the close of his campaigns. He lost his flotilla: he sacrificed many hundreds, at the very least, of valuable soldiers in extricating himself from the sodden and slippery marshes, many, also, in cutting his way through forest and ambush, many by sudden and unexpected assaults, and many by the false reports of his guides.
By appointing Germanicus to the viceroyalty of the Eastern provinces, the emperor might seem to have ceased to fear him, and to have gratified the wishes of all ranks in Rome. The choice, indeed, was, to all appearance, most happy. Had the tribes been polled, he was the person whom they would have voted for unanimously: had the senate been consulted, there would have been no division: had the name of their favorite been referred to the army, there would have been a universal clashing of shields, and loud and ringing huzzas in assent. But Tiberius marred the grace of this appointment by accompanying it with that of one who was notoriously an enemy of the proconsul. Among the proudest of Roman houses, at the time, was that of the Pisones. Calpurnius Piso had his full share of the family pride, and saw in Germanicus, not the hero of the people, but the descendant of the plebeian Drusi. Yet of all the magnates of the time, it was this Piso who was chosen for the post of 'coadjutor' to the young proconsul.
The story of the later days of Germanicus is one of several enigmas we find in the 'Annals.' He insinuates that there was a court-cabal against him and his wife—the one was to be narrowly watched by Piso, the other by Piso's wife Plancina. In the latter suspicion there was, perhaps, the more truth; for Livia, whose influence was still great with Tiberius, did not conceal her hatred of Agrippina. The historian hints that there were ugly stories about the cause of Germanicus's death—idle stories, perhaps; yet it could not be denied that whether to gratify his own malice, or in obedience to secret instructions received by him, Piso thwarted every plan or movement of his chief, and misinterpreted his words and acts. Certainly, if they had such orders, Piso and Plancina most punctiliously obeyed them. Go whither he might, do whatever he might, privately or officially, the conduct of Germanicus, and without question of Agrippina as well, was reported of unfavourably to the Cæsar on the Palatine and his mother. As a token of respect for the fountainhead of Western philosophy and literature, and to display his reverence for the birthplace of so many illustrious statesmen and philosophers, orators, and poets, Germanicus, during a brief visit to Athens, laid aside every outward symbol of his high office, and, attended by a single lictor, walked in the streets, and visited the temples, the schools, the gymnasia, and the theatres of the city of Pallas. This, certainly harmless, and probably sincere, homage to the memory of the mighty dead, appeared to the jaundiced eye of Piso an affront to the dignity of Rome. "Was it seemly in Cæsar's son to be civil to such a pack of hybrid vagabonds as then were the Athenian people? Was it proper for one who represented the majesty of the empire, to curry favour with the offscouring of various nations, with fellows whose great-grandsires had leagued with Mithridates against Sylla, and whose grandsires had fought with Antony against Augustus?" During an interval of business, the proconsul sailed up the Nile and contemplated the great works of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies. This pilgrimage, when reported to Tiberius, gave him much offence. And he severely censured Germanicus for entering the capital of Egypt without permission from the prince. "For Augustus," he wrote, "among other secret rules of power, had appropriated Egypt and restrained the senators and dignified Roman knights from going thither without licence; as he apprehended that Italy might be distressed with famine by every one who seized that province—the key to the empire by sea and land, and defensible by a small garrison of men against large armies." In neglecting to obtain a passport, Germanicus was indiscreet; yet, surely, by refusing the empire, when proffered by his soldiers, he had given a sufficient pledge of loyalty. Even a governor-general, accompanied by a few tribunes and centurions, on a journey of pleasure, need not have reasonably alarmed the lord of thirty legions.
All cause for fear or jealousy was soon at an end. Within a few weeks after his return from Egypt the hope and pride of the empire was stretched on a sick-bed, and passed away from friends and lovers, from foes and spies, in the capital of Syria, Antioch. Often as one of their beloved princes died unexpectedly, the Roman people, with a credulity not uncommon in modern Europe, believed that he had met with foul play. The most absurd stories of magical arts and poisoning sprang up, and were accepted by the populace, and doubtless by many dressed in senatorial attire. At the trial of Piso for the imputed murder of his commander, and contempt of his orders, the disobedience of the coadjutor was proved, but the charge of poisoning quite broke down, and, if we consider the circumstances, very justly. Even for a Piso it was not easy to drug the food of a man at his own table, in the presence of numerous guests and attendants. The illness of which Germanicus died appears to have been some species of fever. He had been suddenly transplanted from a cold and moist to a hot and dry climate—from the banks of the Rhine to those of the Orontes. His vexations were many; the acts and demeanour of Piso, and perhaps of Plancina also, can hardly have failed to have excited suspicions that his coadjutor had some secret warrant for his conduct. When a man is laid low by fever, some extra vexation is not unfavorable—to the disease.
If it be not easy to gather from the records we possess a satisfactory portrait of Tiberius, it is even more difficult to decipher the character of Sejanus. We are assured by Tacitus that the loss of Germanicus caused Tiberius no regret; on the contrary, he accounted that event among the "blessings of his reign." Fortune, he proceeds, now began to change the scene—that is, in the ninth year of his principate—and a train of disasters followed. The emperor began to throw off the mask—either by tyrannising himself, or encouraging and supporting others in tyrannical proceedings.
"The origin and cause of this change," he says, "are attributable to Ælius Sejanus, commander of the Prætorian Guards. He was born at Bolsena [Vulsinii]; his father was Seius Strabo, a Roman knight; in early youth he attached himself to Caius Cæsar, grandson of the deified Augustus. By various acts he subsequently gained such an ascendancy over Tiberius, that though he was close and mysterious in his intercourse with others, he threw off all restraint and reserve with him. His person was hardy and equal to fatigues; his spirit daring; expert in disguising his own iniquities, prompt to spy out the failings of others; at once fawning and imperious"—this is no uncommon combination; "with an exterior of assumed modesty, his heart insatiably lusted for supreme domination." "And with this view he engaged sometimes in profusion, largesses, and luxury; but more frequently gave himself to business and watching, practices no less dangerous, when counterfeited by ambition for the acquisition of power."
That such a person as Sejanus should ever have existed, Tacitus ascribes to the wrath of the gods against the Roman state, to which this minister "was equally fatal in the height of his power and his death." Had he confined the fatality to Tiberius himself, we should have been the more inclined to agree with the historian; he in fact ascribes to the minister the political depravation of the emperor.
The first important measure of Sejanus was to concentrate the prætorians, or imperial body-guard, in one camp. Hitherto this division of the army had been quartered either in the capital or in neighbouring towns. They appear to have been billeted on private householders or lodged in taverns, and were doubtless, in the one case, a nuisance to their hosts, while, in the other, they were put in the way of evil companions. Viewed at the moment it was effected, and not judged of by its results, this collection of the guards into one camp appears to have been a prudent measure—one that even a wise and honest minister might have devised or sanctioned. It assured the Government of ready support when needed; it would protect respectable citizens from the fury of a Roman mob, like those which occasionally disgraced the later years of the commonwealth. It was, in fact, a very similar innovation to that in our own history, when a standing army took the place of a militia; and it was more the fault of the time than of the change which rendered the prætorians the tools of Cæsar, or the arbiters or donors of imperial power. An Augustus, who knew how to win the affections as well as the respect of his subjects, could dispense with a camp near at hand; but for a Tiberius, who possessed no attractive qualities, and who was, perhaps, as much disliked by the citizens as he was feared by the nobles, such a bulwark may have been indispensable.
Plots, or the suspicion of them, thickened very soon after the reins of government were placed in the hands of Sejanus. The upper classes, who looked on the Claudian prince as a supplanter of the Julian line, yet more deeply resented the intrusion of one whom they regarded as an upstart—the obscure offspring of a borough town (municipalis), having no ancestral claims on their respect, and whose family name had never been inscribed on the calendar of consuls (Fasti). Like the favorite counsellor of Augustus, Sejanus came of an old Etruscan house; but Mæcenas had never risen above the rank of a knight, and was modest in his demeanour and habits of life. On the contrary, the man whom Tiberius delighted to honor was notorious for his arrogance, and the higher he rose in public rank or imperial favor, the more he was fawned upon and hated. When Cæsar indeed proclaimed the virtues of this lucky adventurer, who would dare to call them in question? In everything the emperor, now advanced in years, weary of public business, and conscious that he was detested by a majority of the Roman citizens, gave way to Sejanus. The weak bent to the strong will—the man who could rise no higher to the man who was still climbing up ambition's ladder. So ostentatious was his favor, perhaps, for a while, so sincere his friendship, that, in his speeches and letters to the senate, Tiberius frequently made honorable mention of Sejanus. He was his guide, his other self, in the government of the empire. Careless of public honors himself, shunning rather than courting applause from his subjects, Tiberius was gratified when such distinctions were conferred on his minister. He permitted statues and busts of the Etruscan to be placed beside his own in the forum and the law courts, in the prætorian barracks and the camps of the legions; nor did he evince any jealousy when the senate decreed one altar to Clemency, another altar to Friendship, and set up around them portraits of himself and Sejanus.
The most terrible weapon in the hands of Sejanus was that furnished by the public informer (delatores). It did not originate with him, but he worked the machine with an energy unknown before. He had many reasons for rendering the function of informer more effective. The Cæsar was timid and suspicious, and easily persuaded, after awhile, that his life or his authority was assailed by the persons who counted his days, arraigned his policy, or spoke of his private conduct. The nobles regarded the minister with envy and contempt—with the one for his nearness to the Cæsar, with the other for his obscure origin. Again, Sejanus could not entertain a hope of succeeding Tiberius, unless he could isolate him from his own family and his immediate friends. "The imperial house full of Cæsars," writes Tactius, "the emperor's son in the vigour of manhood, and his grandsons grown up, were obstacles to his ambition; and because to cut them off all at once was dangerous, the success of his treacherous plot required that the horrid deeds should be perpetrated by slow degrees." From the army and the populace he expected and experienced no opposition. The former, although they were Roman soldiers, were rarely Roman by birth, and, even if they knew the names of old and noble families, they were ignorant of the deeds by which the Fabii, the Scipios, the Cornelii, or the Gracchi had raised themselves to the consulate and the senatorial bench. The latter, with the mean spirit of a mob in all times, rejoiced in the humiliation of men of rank, and saw in every illustrious victim a kind of sacrifice to their own envy. A Roman mob was always ready to cry, "A bas les aristocrats!" and a London or Parisian one is always ready to do the like. Among the earliest and certainly the most conspicuous victims struck down by Sejanus, was Drusus, the emperor's only son. But the direct heir to the purple was beyond the informer's shaft: and the prince-imperial was murdered by the aid of his young wife Livia, whom an adulterous connection had previously brought into the snares of the ambitious minister. It was against the widow of Germanicus, her sons, and their adherents, that he first let slip his bloodhounds. With Agrippina it was less difficult to deal. She was indeed far from friendless among the great: she was the darling of the Roman people: and the soldiers reverenced in her the relict of their deceased and beloved commander. But the great could gradually be mown down, by the aid of informers. The unarmed populace were helpless; and the victims of information were despatched with a secrecy that eluded the notice of the soldiers. Agrippina herself afforded opportunities to her foes. With all his admiration of her, as a sample of the woman of a bygone age, Tacitus does not conceal the infirmities of her temper. Her haughty demeanour, her unguarded tongue, her bursts of passion, were the source of many sorrows to herself, of her ultimate ruin, and of that of many of her friends and partisans. The last injunctions of the dying Germanicus were addressed to her. "Then turning to his wife," writes the annalist, "he adjured her by her remembrance of him, by their common children, to divest herself of her unbending spirit and bow to fortune in the storm of her anger; and, on her return to the city, not to irritate those who were more than a match for her, by a competition for the mastery. So much was said by him openly, and more in secret." The injunction was in vain: year by year the number of her supporters diminished: the brave and loyal were driven to suicide, or into exile, or handed over to the executioner: the timid forsook her or became spies on her actions and words; and she herself, by occasional indiscretions, nursed the jealousy or incurred the anger of Tiberius. Of her three sons one only survived her; and she herself, after undergoing countless indignities, died, it is said, of starvation in the island of Ponza (Pontia).
In his designs against the family of Germanicus, Sejanus, if not aided, was not crossed by the aged widow of Augustus. To Agrippina and her children Livia felt, and did not conceal it, all the hatred of a step-mother. The favor which she extended to her eldest son Tiberius, seems not to have included his brother Drusus—assuredly not Drusus' sons. The despotic and dangerous old woman, whom, for her crafty and intriguing spirit, Caligula called "a Ulysses in petticoats"—was more likely to cherish the jealousy of the Cæsar, and applaud the plans of his minister, than to shelter from their cruelty Agrippina and her orphaned children.
The function of Public Informer (delator) is one of the most perplexing features in Cæsarian history. It is hard to imagine life endurable under such a system of police. It affected every order of society except the lowest,—senators, knights, magistrates, and military officers—the busy, the idle—the very young, the very old—men conspicuous for their virtues, and sometimes also for their honourable poverty, and men notorious for their vices, and sometimes for their wealth. A harmless country-gentleman was not more secure in his park than was the occupier of a stately mansion on the Palatine. The informer's bolt was not "the arrow which flies in darkness." There was nothing in the system like the privacy of the Inquisition, of the Vehmgericht, or the Venetian Council of Ten. The emissaries of a Delator did not stick a citation on the pillow of his victim, nor drop it into a lion's mouth—the government post-office. Whatever was done by the Roman informer was done openly. He was not ashamed of his calling: it brought him money and distinction: and he gloried in the means that raised him from obscurity. And yet when no one was secure, men revelled as well as lived under this reign of terror, drank old Falernian and feasted on Lucrine oysters and Umbrian boars as cheerfully as if they were as sure of the morrow as of its sunrise and sunset.
Political eloquence, at least on any grand scale, expired with the commonwealth, for where there are no parties in a State there can be but few occasions for debate. In the law courts, at the city-prætor's tribunal, and when there was an impeachment argued before the senate, there was still a field for wordy war; and if we may trust to the reminiscences of the elder Seneca, to the reports of Tacitus, to Pliny's Letters, to Quintilian, and other writers of the time, many of the Delators were persons of great ability, and by no means contemptible as public speakers. Some of them were of ignoble birth, others were scions of ancient families, whom, whether high-born or low-born, ambition, poverty, or fashion—for there are endemics in public life as well as in certain states of the air—impelled to take up the profession of public prosecutor. Knights and senators did not blush to make a traffic of their eloquence and accomplishments; while a "new man"—that is, one who had no "blue blood" in his veins or waxen images in his hall—might, in dragging a culprit, or quite as likely an innocent person, before the senate, complaisantly compare himself to a tribune of the people in bygone days. In case of conviction, a portion of the fine fell regularly to their share, and it was often augmented by a special remuneration also. But money was not their sole reward. At a later time there was coined the proverb that Galen—a good medical practice—brought wealth; and Justinian—briefs at the bar—led to honors.[2] The informer, however, besides filling his pocket, reaped an ample harvest of political eminence and notoriety akin to fame. Hardly any one of this class of them, according to Tacitus or Pliny, possessed any private virtues. They were as covetous as they were unprincipled; but their greed of gain was limited to getting it, for the most part: they squandered their enormous fees, bribes, or gratuities as rapidly as they pocketed them. Frequently they suffered the miscry they had inflicted: a rich informer was an irresistible temptation to a brother of the craft; or a Cæsar whose profusion had drained the treasury, made little scruple in banishing or strangling a prosperous Delator, and seizing, for his own use, his goods, chattels, and investments. When a Cæsar like Vespasian or Trajan wore the purple robe, it was an evil day for informers; for then, if not handed over to the executioner, they were sent to some island prison, and it sometimes happened that the ship which carried them never reached any port.
Many more pages than we can afford might be occupied by an account of the rise and fall of these pernicious allies of despotism. We can only narrate a few of their exploits. It was accounted a crime against majesty—that is the concrete State—to perform before an emperor's effigy, even on a coin or ring, any act which would be deemed indecent in the presence of the emperor himself, such as to strip a slave for chastisement, or even to strip one's self for the bath. No public charge against an officer of the State or an illustrious citizen came to be thought complete, unless one of disrespect towards the Cæsar was annexed to it as a codicil. Silanus, proconsul of Asia, a friend of the deceased Germanicus, a partisan of the widowed Agrippina, was accused of extortion in his province. But no sooner was the impeachment published than a consular, an ædile, and a prætor brought other irrelevant charges against him,—among others, that he had profaned the divinity of Augustus and disparaged the majesty of Tiberius. Two profligate women of high birth, Apuleia and Lepida, were impeached for adultery and generally scandalous lives. But the accuser thought to strengthen his case by imputing to the former of them expressions of disrespect towards Augustus and Tiberius, and even the empress-mother Livia Augusta; and to the latter the crime of consulting soothsayers about the destinies of the imperial family—of course including in her inquiry the important question, "How long is his majesty likely to live?" For a while it was necessary that the defendant should be proved guilty of some act or deed. Afterwards words spoken or written were admitted in evidence of disaffection, and many a scroll was burnt by the hangman in the Forum; and several authors died suddenly, because a volume in which Brutus and Cassins were extolled, or an unlucky epigram or pasquinade was found, was traced to their pen.
Impeachment of conspicuous citizens and party-leaders was no novelty in Rome: the commonwealth had bequeathed it to the empire, and the empire did little more than place it on a new platform. Laws on the subject of treason to the State (majestas) had existed from the days of the kings. Indictments of political or personal opponents were among the privileges and the barriers of public freedom, and the brightest laurels in the orator's crown were the convictions of a Scipio Asiaticus, a Verres, or a Catiline. But when the emperor united in his own person the various functions, civil and military, of the republic—when he was consul, prince of the senate, censor, proconsul-general, commander of the army, and tribune of the people—when he could legally as well as logically say, L'état, c'est moi—the law of majestas applied to his person alone, since he was the only representative of the nobles, the knights, the people, the legions, and the subjects of Rome. Consequently he was the target at which all satirical arrows were aimed, the object of every conspiracy, the aim of every rebel. The Julian law, borrowed by the first Cæsar from Sulla's legislation, but considerably modified, was confirmed and extended by his successor: but neither the popular Julius nor the prudent Augustus availed themselves of it, except under extreme provocation. It was not so with Tiberius. He was, out of a camp, a timid man; and after he had reigned several years, and his age was in the sere and yellow leaf, the consciousness of his own unpopularity, and the knowledge of machinations against him, exaggerated his fears into cruelty. The history of the public informers accordingly opens with this portion of the 'Annals,' and does not close until Domitian fell under the blows of a few conspirators whose own lives depended on their taking his.
It is creditable to Tiberius that he at first struggled against the informers. He rebuked their officious zeal: he would not permit a charge of high treason (majestas) to be mixed up with one of misgovernment of a province or scandal in private life. He met such accusations in a spirit worthy of a great monarch: he was, in these respects, less timid than our James I., less vindictive than either Philip II. of Spain or Louis XIV. In his better moods he commended liberty of speech. "In a free State," he was wont to say, "both mind and tongue should be free." But he was borne down by the current of the time. He was wearied by the servility of the senate: he was irritated by his own unpopularity, by pasquinades, by the rumour, if not by the reality, of plots against himself. He became, as he grew older, more and more distrustful of all about him, and when he discovered that even his own familiar friend, the man whom he had taken to his bosom and treated as almost his partner in the empire, was false, mercy and justice alike departed from him, and the moody self-exile in Capri "let slip the dogs" of information against all who had followed and flattered, or were imagined to have done so, the arch-traitor Ælius Sejanus.
As regards his fame, no step Tiberius ever took was more fatal to it than his retiring to Capri. It was a mystery which no one of his subjects could fathom; but it was also a mystery that invited the worst interpretations. In the days of the commonwealth, a tribune of the people had increased his popularity by instructing an architect so to build him a house on the Capitoline Hill, that all his fellow-citizens might at any moment be able to see what he was doing. It was a similar seclusion in his Alban villa that rendered Domitian more obnoxious than ever to all classes in Rome. "No one," says Tacitus, "could have imagined that a Roman would voluntarily abandon his country for a period of eleven years." To modern ears the historian's words sound strangely. Capri was not so far from Rome as Edinburgh is from London, yet we should think the phrase extravagant, if a man, by going to the capital of Scotland, were accused of "abandoning" Britain. Far other import had the words in Roman ears.
Tiberius was in his sixty-seventh year when, on a pretext of dedicating a temple to Jupiter at Capua and to Augustus at Nola, he turned his back on Rome for ever. He was attended to the beautiful island of Capri, where he lived in seclusion for eleven years, by a very slender retinue;—by his minister Sejanus, now the ostensible if not the sole governor of the empire; by one of the most eminent lawyers of the day, Cocceius Nerva; by one other senator, by one knight; by an astrologer or two—Chaldæans, as they were then usually called; and by a few learned Greeks. Busy and curious Rome very likely asked what occasion the Cæsar had for the presence of an eminent jurist? The Greek companions they could easily account for, since Tiberius had always dabbled in literature; and the Chaldæans excited no surprise, for, ever since his long exile in Rhodes, he had been an anxious inquirer into his own future, as well as that of men whom he feared or hated. Tiberius had often expressed an intention of visiting the provinces: galleys had been kept in readiness to convey him to Gaul or to the east: but he never carried out his purpose, and his indecision had become a by-word in Rome. His lingering in Campania, accordingly, and his seclusion in Capri, perplexed the senate and the people with wonder and fear.
For the fear there was good cause. Although he withdrew from the publicity of Rome and its tedious ceremonies, at all times repugnant to him, Tiberius did not retire from the business of the State. Far from doing so, the decrees and letters issued by him from the island, so far as we are acquainted with them, appear to have been among the worst samples of his jealousy and hatred of the senate. Tacitus and other historians lead us to impute to Sejanus the suggestions which excited the Cæsar to a long and uniform series of cruelties. And now it is plain why he took an expert lawyer with him. Tiberius was in matters of form a pedant; and therefore to advise him in criminal prosecutions, and to draw up death-warrants or sentences of exile with legal precision, the presence of Cocceius Nerva was necessary. He, in fact, was a kind of "Secretary of the Hanging and Heading Department."
In the imperfect fifth and in the sixth book of the 'Annals' the history of Tiberius is completed. It is little more than the chronicle of suspicions and fears, and consequently increasing cruelty. An emperor, designed by nature for great and salutary ends—some of which in the first nine years of his reign he carried out—gradually sank into a tyrant, who was at once miserable himself, and terrible to at least the higher order of his subjects. Not until after the death of Sejanus did he learn the real story of his son's death. Apicata, the widow of the fallen minister, drew up a written narrative of the poisoning of Drusus, and then, rendered desperate by the loss of her children, destroyed herself. This new revelation of the perfidy of Sejanus—the only man whom Tiberius had ever, to all appearance, really trusted—brought out all the worst qualities in his nature, perhaps maddened him, for there was insanity in the Claudian family, and more than one of his ancestors had displayed the symptoms of a disturbed, as well as a depraved mind. But the mystery which shrouds the character of this emperor will probably never be completely solved; and it would far exceed the limits, as well as be foreign to the purpose of this volume, to discuss the inconsistencies patent in the portrait drawn of him by Tacitus. The difficulty of severing truth from falsehood, rumour from record, trustworthy statements from scandalous memorials of the time, is forcibly expressed in the following words of Niebuhr:—
"The difficulties which embarrass an historical narrative of times preceding that of the writer, were for those of Tacitus really insurmountable. Tiberius had succeeded, after Germanicus had quitted Germany, in reducing the world"—we suggest that Rome and Italy would be more correct—"to a state of torpid stillness, and in overspreading it with the silence of the grave. Its history is now confined to himself and his unfortunate house, to the destruction of the victims of his tyranny and the servitude of the senate. In this dreary silence we shudder, and speak in a whisper: all is dark and wrapt in mystery, doubtful and perplexing. Was Germanicus poisoned? Was Piso guilty? What urged him to his mad violence? Did the son of Tiberius die by poison,—Agrippina by the stroke of an assassin? All this was just as uncertain to Tacitus as to us."
And the doubts which hang over this reign increase when we turn from the pages of Tacitus to those of other writers, whether contemporaries of Tiberius or of a somewhat later period. In them we shall find that the admissions in his favor which the historian makes, reluctantly fall short of rather than exceed the truth. Those who were nearest to the time have generally treated the emperor with respect or indulgence.
Nor should it be forgotten, while admitting the darkness of the narrative, and trying in vain to reconcile the inconsistencies it presents, that among the materials employed by Tacitus in the composition of the 'Annals' were, by his own confession, the 'Memoirs' of the younger Agrippina, the unworthy daughter of Germanicus, the wife of the unfortunate Claudius, and the mother of the execrable Nero. The authoress of these 'Memoirs' was not likely to be just, much less lenient, to the memory of Tiberius. Her mother, the virtuous and high-minded Agrippina—"a matron of the ancient stamp"—her two brothers, Drusus and Nero, had been sacrificed to the fears and jealousies of the Claudian Cæsar, who listened to the evil promptings of his minister Sejanus, and who was further incensed against the family of Drusus by the haughty bearing of the widow of Germanicus. The younger Agrippina had indeed wrongs to avenge; but the destruction of her near kindred was not her only motive for hostility to the name of Tiberius. Rumour had bruited abroad that her father Drusus was in heart a republican, and regarded even Augustus as a usurper. There was division in Cæsar's household. The loyal Germanicus, indeed, seems to have taken no part in it; but his wife, and the Drusi generally, viewed Tiberius as an interloper, and themselves, or at least the head of their family, as the only legitimate successors of Augustus. The hatred which the Plantagenets felt for the Tudors, the hatred which the Jacobites cherished against the house of Hanover, will afford us some measure of the feelings of the children of Drusus for the son of Livia. We no longer accept such writers as Heath and Sandford for our authorities in the case of Cromwell, nor trust Reginald Pole in forming our judgment of Henry VIII. A similar caution may fairly be exercised in the case of Tiberius, as he is exhibited by Tacitus; and, besides Agrippina's 'Memoirs,' Dean Merivale has been the first to turn attention to a very probable cause for the ill fame of Tiberius. He was, in some things, an official pedant. The reports of criminal trials, even though they contain serious charges against himself, were carefully preserved in the public Record Office, "which thus became an official repository for every calumny against the emperor which floated on the impure surface of common conversation." There they probably remained unread until there came a time of zealous reaction against the Julian and Claudian Cæsars—the time, that is to say, of Trajan. "We cannot but suspect," continues the same great authority for 'Rome under the Cæsars,' "that this was the storehouse to which Tacitus and Suetonius, or the obscurer writers from whom they drew, resorted for the reputed details of a prince's habits whom it was the pleasure and interest of many parties to blacken to the utmost. The foulest stories current against Tiberius were probably the very charges advanced against him by libellers which he openly contradicted and denounced at the time, and which would have sunk into oblivion with the mass of contemporary slander, but for the restless and suicidal jealousy with which he himself registered and labelled them in the archives of indignant justice."[3]
"Velleius Paterculus, indeed, and Valerius Maximus," writes Dean Merivale, whose delineation of Tiberius is a corrective of that of Tacitus on many points—contemporaries and subjects of that emperor, must be regarded as merely courtly panegyrists: but the adulation of the one, though it jars on ears accustomed to the dignified self-respect of the earlier Romans, is not more high-flown in language and sentiment than what our own writers have addressed to the Georges, and even the Charleses and Jameses, of the English monarchy; while that of the other is chiefly offensive from the connection in which it stands with the lessons of virtue and patriotism which his book was specially designed to illustrate. The elder Seneca, the master of a school of rhetoric, to which art his writings are devoted, makes no mention of the emperor under whom he wrote; but his son, better known as the statesman and philosopher, speaks of him with considerable moderation, and ascribes the worst of his deeds to Sejanus and the public informers (delatores) rather than to his own evil disposition. In the pages of Philo and Josephus the government of Tiberius is represented as mild and equitable: it is not until we come to Suetonius and Tacitus, in the third generation, that they are blazoned in the colours so painfully familiar to us."[4]