The Twelve Caesars (14 page)

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’ lifetime. 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.

The Villa Jovis occupies rocky terraces of a steep hill on the northeastern tip of Capri. Despite the proliferation of distinctive white houses which today freckle the
island’s wooded heights and downs, its dazzling views of Klein-blue sea, tree-lined shores and sheer cliffs have survived two millennia mostly unscathed. It
was here, to
this craggy eyrie impossible of invisible assault, one of twelve villas on Capri inherited by Tiberius from Augustus,
²⁷
that Tiberius retreated following his departure from Rome in 26 to dedicate
temples of Jupiter and Augustus at Capua and Nola.

He offered no explanation. Granted there had been that year an unsatisfactory altercation with Agrippina, who accosted him with the taunt of her Augustan blood as he sacrificed to Augustus. (The
strain of Sejanus’ programmatic attacks on her friends and relations, including, most recently, her kinswoman and close friend Claudia Pulchra, both emboldened and undermined
Germanicus’ widow.) Vexations too continued to dominate Tiberius’ relationships with his imperious mother Livia, the senate and Rome’s political classes. For the first two years
of Tiberius’ reign, Suetonius claims, the emperor never left Rome. Throughout its slow termination, he would never return there. He surrounded himself with savants and stargazers. It was a
quiet coterie, unlikely on the face of it to seek gratification in the pornographic paintings, the young girls dressed as nymphs or the adolescent boys of easy access schooled in the arts of
Eastern erotica which Suetonius conjures for the septuagenarian’s twilight years. Dilatory in his acceptance of supreme power in 14, Tiberius had at length succumbed with a suggestion that he
might in the future set aside the burdens of office: ‘Until I come to the time when it may seem right to you to grant an old man some repose.’ On Capri, an older, bald and stooping
Tiberius, his face a patchwork of plasters covering those sores and inflammations which had plagued him lifelong, found repose of sorts. It did not encompass any cessation in the business of empire
nor, the sources aver, any lessening of the emperor’s pernicious cruelty. Tourists in Suetonius’ time could see the spot from which transgressors, ‘after long and exquisite
tortures’, were hurled headlong into the sea while Tiberius
looked on; sailors waited below, armed with oars and boat-hooks to beat the last vestiges of life from the
tumbling bodies. On rainy days Tiberius encouraged unsuspecting dinner-guests to gorge themselves on wine. Then he bound their cocks so tightly it was impossible to piss, a double torture he had
devised himself.