Part 13

Gambling and betting were as well known diversions in Roman society as in our own; great ladies made their books upon the circus. Cards were not yet invented, but dice were common. Wealthy young provincials, the sons of great but not ennobled capitalists, were as ready then as now to pay for admission to the highest social circles by dealing leniently with fair ladies whose affairs were involved by debts of honour, and some of them lost their heads and hearts over the business. Masquerading in the unlighted Roman streets after respectable people had gone to their early beds was not an infrequent amusement, and even ladies anticipated at Rome the licence of the Mohawk and Tityre Tu of Queen Anne’s reign in London. Antony and Cleopatra amused themselves thus at Alexandria, to the terror and annoyance of respectable middle class men; the joke of thus playing pranks upon inoffensive persons of humble rank under the protection of a slight disguise is not obvious, but it has at all times presented attractions for a certain order of mind. As for Julia, we are told that her revels were conducted even on the sacred Rostra, the public platform of the government of the world. Her cynical defence of her immoralities is said to have been even more outrageous than her conduct. But for all this Julia did not forget that she was Cæsar’s daughter, and was determined not to submit more than was inevitable to the domination of the woman who was not her mother, but was Cæsar’s wife.

At the death of Agrippa, Julia, though already the mother of four children, and shortly to become the mother of a fifth, was only twenty-seven years of age. During the time of her married life she and Tiberius had been much absent from Rome; they had probably met very little since they were brought up together as children in the house of Augustus. Agrippa may have been an indulgent husband, willing to condone the more innocent levities of his young wife; or Tiberius, remembering his agreeable playfellow, now titularly his mother-in-law, may have chosen to disregard the scandalous whispers which reached his ears from time to time.

On her husband’s death Julia found herself in an awkward position; it is true that her father was her friend, but her father’s wife was her enemy, an enemy whose mysterious influence she had good reason to dread, and whose ambition was menaced by the existence of Julia’s own children, already the darlings of their grandfather. Again it is not improbable that she cherished a purely feminine grudge against Vipsania, who had carried off her handsome playfellow, and was additionally piqued by the happiness which Tiberius had found in his marriage. The personal beauty of Tiberius was remarkable; his accomplishments no less so. He was unusually tall, broad shouldered, well shaped, and well proportioned from head to foot, of great physical strength; he belonged to the fair ruddy type of Italian, and carried a profusion of golden hair, which grew low down on the back of his neck, a family peculiarity, his eyes were exceptionally large, and he was credited with the power of seeing in the dark when first awakened; as he habitually carried his head in a bent position, it is possible that he suffered from some visual defect; he was naturally silent, and a slow talker; he had the reputation of being deeply learned, and indeed versed in occult mysteries, such a man as would attract the curiosity of a woman, and challenge her love of conquest by his intellectual, no less than by his physical, qualities. The few existing portraits of Tiberius fully bear out the descriptions given by Paterculus and Suetonius. The so-called bust of Tiberius in the British Museum is not a portrait of him, and was simply so named because it happened to have been found at Capri.

Personal inclination, no less than policy, would have suggested to Julia that here was the natural protector of herself and children, and there was the additional inducement of delivering a checkmate to Livia by falling in with what had been her favourite scheme. With Tiberius as the stepfather and guardian of the children of Agrippa, there was nothing to be feared from the death of Augustus; Livia’s own son would be in a position to defeat any machinations against the heirs of the Julian race, and it was well known that whatever obligations Tiberius took upon himself, Tiberius would honourably fulfil.

The arguments for the divorce and remarriage were, from the Roman point of view, strong; it was not a question of personal convenience or of advancing personal interests, the object was to maintain the peace of the Roman world. Had Tiberius taken the advice of Mæcenas, it would probably have been to the following effect:--“It is true that you are to be trusted, that no pledge is needed from you to ensure the security of the daughter and grandchildren of Augustus, your whole life shows that you have made your stepfather’s interests your own; but you are not the only person concerned. The two boys will be exposed to every temptation as they grow up; their mother is a fascinating lady, but her best friends can hardly claim for her that she is equal to the task of bringing up a family whose responsibilities will be great. If you do not marry her, somebody else will; it would be a serious risk to expose any possible candidate to the temptations of such a position, to introduce a new claimant to the family honours into the family circle. Julia needs a protector, a husband of her own age; she is said to have a strong personal attachment to yourself, and under your guidance it is not likely that she will repeat pardonable indiscretions, to which perhaps she was driven by want of real sympathy with her previous elderly husband. You say that you and your present wife are devoted to one another. Granted; but you are both called upon by a destiny, which you cannot evade, to sacrifice yourselves to the good of the State.” And Horace too would have argued much in the same strain; he would have sympathized more delicately with the feelings of a united couple rudely torn asunder, but with his shrewd common sense he would have shown that there was no alternative but a retirement into private life, a course which would have amounted to abandoning the post of duty.

The person, however, who most strongly influenced Tiberius in his fatal decision was possibly Vipsania herself. From both parents she inherited businesslike qualities, cool common sense. Neither of them is credited with having been sentimental at any period of his or her career, and though Tiberius was devoted to her, it is quite possible that she herself regarded her marriage dispassionately as an excellent business arrangement, and that, while she fulfilled all the duties of a wife with scrupulous observance, she was prepared to be equally careful of the interests and honour of any husband with whom she was provided by the higher powers of the family council. She had abundant precedent for taking such a line, and Asinius Gallus, the aspirant proposed to her, was in every way a desirable match. She may have been really indifferent, and have wounded Tiberius by her cool acquiescence in the new arrangement; or again, on this side too there may have been a great renunciation, and the unhappy woman, partly terrified by obscure menaces from Livia, partly persuaded by the kindly urgency of Augustus, may have affected an indifference which she did not feel, and deliberately wounded the man whom she loved for his own good, as she was led to believe. If Vipsania thus hurt the sensitive Tiberius, and shook his faith in his previous happiness, there was Julia ready to heal the wound; was he not the man whom she had always really loved? Her first and second marriages had been no real marriages: she and Marcellus had been mere children, and as for Agrippa, worthy man though he was, he could not feel with a wife so much younger than himself; he had always preferred the society of men who talked of bridges and aqueducts, or planned campaigns against the Sarmatians, to his wife and children; he had been good according to his lights, but it had been a dull life, and she had been driven to find relief in foolish though innocent dissipations by which her good name had suffered, and which she now sincerely regretted. If Tiberius would but take pity on her forlorn condition, and do his best to love his old playfellow, she for her part could conceive no greater happiness than to be the partner of his joys and sorrows; she loved him, she had always loved him, and the careless indifference of years had not weakened her attachment.

Whatever the arguments and allurements by which Tiberius was induced to take the fatal step, he unquestionably did so. At first he lived happily with Julia; they had one son, who died in infancy; and then his official duties took the husband from his home; he was placed in charge of a harassing campaign against a mobile enemy in difficult country along the south of the Danube and in Dalmatia, while his brother Drusus was similarly engaged in frontier wars along the Rhine.

At this time a serious misfortune fell upon Tiberius; he lost his brother.

Drusus had conducted a foray into the Black Forest region, which had not been altogether successful. On his return he either fell from his horse or caught some serious fever--both stories are given--and was seen to be in such danger that Augustus, who was then at Lyons, at once sent for Tiberius from Dalmatia. Tiberius hastened to his brother’s bedside. The elder Pliny tells us that on this occasion he achieved a record speed, travelling 200 Roman miles within twenty-four hours. He was in time to close his brother’s eyes, but that was all. Augustus decided that Drusus should be buried at Rome, and Tiberius marched the whole way on foot at the head of the funeral procession from Lyons to the capital. As soon as the ceremonies were over, he returned to continue his brother’s work on the eastern bank of the Rhine, and after two years’ absence was recalled. Mæcenas had died in B.C. 8, and Augustus felt the need of a confidential adviser. Tiberius on his return was invested with the tribunician power, an elevation which, in the opinion of his contemporaries, finally marked him out as the successor of Augustus.

The history of the tribunate, in spite of the many references to the office, is not particularly clear. It seems that the first tribunes were originally the official mouthpieces of that part of the population of Rome whom we should now call “Outlanders.” After the “Outlanders,” or plebeians, had become for all practical purposes fused into the general body of Roman citizens, the tribunes ranked practically among the other magistrates; they enjoyed the special prerogative of being sacrosanct, their persons were inviolable, and thus during their term of office they were nominally above the laws, a privilege which, however, did not prevent their assassination. They had the power of introducing legislation, and of vetoing legislation, and it is perhaps this power which was constitutionally most important to the early Emperors. Further, they had powers of summary jurisdiction, and constituted a supreme court of appeal in cases in which the life of a Roman citizen was in danger; when St. Paul “appealed unto Cæsar,” it was to the tribune that he appealed. The office was hallowed by sentiment, and though as Consul and Censor and Commander-in-chief the Emperor might seem to hold in his hands all the reasonable means of making his power effective, unless he were also Tribune, his actions could be vetoed; thus Augustus was more than usually wise in absorbing the sanctity and the functions of the Tribune into his own person, and he could show no greater proof of his confidence in Tiberius than by thus giving him the power of constitutional opposition and investing his person with inviolability; but, to the astonishment of the Roman world, Tiberius had hardly received this mark of confidence before he summarily left Rome and retired to Rhodes.

VII

The First Retirement of Tiberius

The flight of Tiberius to Rhodes, and his determination to abandon his public career just at the moment when his position as second man in the State was established on a sure foundation, have naturally excited the wonder of modern no less than of contemporary writers. An English historian, equally learned and delightful, speaks of the event as the freak of a moody and irritable man, and declares that such conduct summarily disposes of the claim which has been advanced for Tiberius of having been an astute statesman. His contemporaries, who are followed by the grave Tacitus and the garrulous Suetonius, found an easier explanation; to them the motive for retirement was simply the wish to indulge in licentious excesses too hideous for the starched morality and glaring daylight of Rome; but the same unfriendly or careless writers allow that he was probably disgusted by the wanton conduct of Julia, adding that he was also jealous of the advancement of his stepsons, the young Cæsars, now respectively fourteen and nine years of age.

That Julia had forfeited all claims not only to affection, but even to respect, is an undisputed fact. Soon after his marriage Tiberius had been obliged to take the field, and his wars had been waged in localities not likely to be attractive to a lady who lived in the gallant circles of the poet Ovid. War upon the Illyrian or German frontier did not involve complete absence from home, and the Roman generals were in the habit of returning from their campaigns to the capital when the winter weather made it impossible to take the field. We do not know whether Tiberius followed this custom, or whether he took a more rigorous view of his duties and spent the winter season in winter quarters, but he was certainly much away from home. Some disillusionment as to the depth of Julia’s affection for him, annoying domestic difficulties caused by the ill-advised indulgence of her children by their grandfather, may well have contributed already to make him feel more at home in the camp than in the splendid house in the Carinæ. Julia too may have had her own disappointments; the playfellow of her youth turned out to be another “Colonel Grave Airs,” no less absorbed in military matters than Agrippa, inclined to spend his leisure in the society of a learned and serious circle, and averse to dissipating his time by passing long hours at the great public pageants in which the Romans delighted. So far there had been nothing worse than an amicable estrangement between husband and wife. Julia went her own way, chose her own friends, and lived the life which pleased her best. Tiberius in the same way pursued the studies which were agreeable to him, and made the best of a maimed life. Doubtless he recognized that his private happiness had been wrecked, but there was still duty, and if he could not meet Vipsania in the street without emotion, he at least gave the scandalmongers of the city no opportunity.

But when Tiberius returned from Gaul in B.C. 7 to become practically the colleague of Augustus, he found the state of affairs in his home such as no self-respecting man could tolerate, and there was this additional sting in the wound to his honour, that the very office which had just been bestowed upon him was capable of being represented as the price paid for unworthy toleration and wilful blindness. Rome was ringing with the exploits of Julia, with stories of her drunkenness in the public streets, with the names and number of her gallants. The two men who were most concerned in her misconduct, as being the two men upon whom it brought the deepest disgrace, her father and her husband, were the two men who alone seemed to be ignorant of the state of affairs. The ignorance of the father might be excused, he had no motive, except a not unworthy paternal weakness, for closing his eyes to what was going on, but the husband, so the gossips said, had been prompted by his ambition to accept an already damaged article, for Julia’s irregularities were not of recent date, and actuated by the same unworthy motive he had allowed his house to become a mere brothel: the proofs were only too obvious. That such a chain of reasoning was inconsistent with itself in ascribing both ignorance and full knowledge to Augustus did not concern the gossips. Tiberius had been bribed to be blind, and all the world could see what a magnificent bribe he had extorted.

The best men, the kindest men, the justest men, and the most earnest men make the worst mistakes in dealing with a certain type of woman. Many a woman who has brought disgrace upon her family and ruin upon herself has urged with some justice that if her husband or her father or her brother had been less kind, less blind, less just, but more understanding, she would not have been betrayed into disastrous misconduct. Often and often the question has been asked, “You must have seen what was going on; why did you not stop me?” and as often the answer has been, “I admit I ought to have seen, perhaps I did see, but I could not believe you capable of doing what appearances should have told me that you were doing.”

The higher a man’s ideal of women, the less willing he is to ascribe to any particular woman the wantonness of lust; the more charitable his estimate of the strength of some temptation, the less stern his condemnation, and the greater his readiness to accept excuses for levity; the higher the range of his own ambitions, and the wider the area of his own interests, the less capable he is of imagining how large small slights and imperfect sympathy may appear to a being cast in a narrower mould. Many a man by acquiescing in a discovered want of sympathy between himself and his wife has wounded her pride and provoked her to acts of self-assertion. What was part of his life was perhaps the whole of hers, and in the end he has been astounded at the disproportion of the punishment which she has inflicted. Without any conscious refusal to see things as they really were, any conscious deference to the susceptibilities of Augustus, Tiberius may well have been slow to believe in the case against Julia, whose good nature and frankness might weigh against her want of seriousness.

When, however, Tiberius came to live permanently at Rome, the facts could no longer be concealed from him, though they were possibly still concealed from Augustus. He could repudiate Julia, but that would have caused a public scandal, and have wounded a man in his most sensitive spot whom he had always known as his truest friend; he could not, however, continue to live with her, that would justify the charge of guilty connivance, and expose him to countless humiliations; further, there was always the sting of the price at which his forbearance up to the present moment seemed to have been bought.

The course which Tiberius actually took was an heroic one. True he might have ignored the susceptibilities of Augustus, have repudiated his daughter, and in the case of resistance have used his now established power to force the Emperor into private life; he might have held that he was justified in so doing, that he had been wilfully deceived, and that his pretended friend had deliberately used him for his own purposes. But if ever he was tempted to conduct so violent, and yet under the supposed circumstances so justifiable, he put away the temptation; he decided that if there was to be a retirement, he was himself the right man to retire. This course had the further attraction that it put a summary end to that ugly suspicion of corrupt connivance.

Tiberius matured his plan secretly. Nobody outside his family knew that he had definitely left Rome till he was already sailing down the coast of Italy. A fast galley was sent after him, with letters imploring him to return, and not to desert the Emperor in his old age; it overtook him before he had passed the Straits of Messina, but the messengers were abruptly dismissed. No further attempt was made to recall him till after he had arrived at Rhodes, his ultimate destination, though he seems to have lingered on his way, and to have spent some time at Athens, long enough to enable him to be the first Roman who sent a chariot to compete at the Olympic games.

It was not long before the real cause of his departure became known to Augustus. Julia’s extravagant conduct was so notorious that it could no longer be concealed from her father. Livia is credited with having engineered the ultimate discovery, and even aided and abetted the grievous misconduct with ulterior motives. Augustus, in the name of Tiberius, wrote a bill of divorcement, and banished his daughter to the island of Pandateria off the coast of Campania. The list of corespondents was a long one. Julius Antonius, the son of Marcus Antonius, and stepson of Octavia, was among them; he committed suicide on the discovery of the scandal. After him Paterculus mentions Quintius Crispinus, Appius Claudius, Sempronius Gracchus, Scipio, a relative of Julia through her mother, “and other men of less reputation of both orders.” It was a comprehensive list, and inclines us to suspect that Tacitus is right in saying that something more alarming than mere adultery had taken place, and that Julia had allowed herself to be involved in a plot against her husband and father. It is curious that Paterculus should confine the list of nameless admirers to members of the Senatorial and Equestrian Orders. If Julia had been merely a licentious woman, we should expect to find slaves and gladiators among the company of her lovers. Amorous intrigues in the atmosphere of Rome were apt to end in more dangerous conspiracies, and though the self-esteem of the pious and patriarchal Augustus must have been deeply wounded by his daughter’s guilt, the punishment of exile awarded to her, and of death to her gallants, strikes us as disproportionate. It is most probable that there really was a conspiracy in which Julia allowed herself to be used, prompted by a desire to settle up accounts with that veteran intriguer Livia, and that this was the concluding scene of the first act in the long drama of the feud between the Julians and Claudians in the Imperial household.

Tiberius behaved on this occasion with dignity and generosity. He wrote to Augustus deprecating extreme severity to Julia, and begging that she might be allowed to retain for her own use any gifts that he had made to her. Such gifts will not have been inconsiderable, for Tiberius must have been a very rich man; it required a large fortune to inhabit the famous palace of Pompeius, and on his return to Rome Tiberius lived in the no less splendid villa of Mæcenas on the Esquiline.