Part 15
Lollius may have had an old grudge against Tiberius; he was still a boy when Tiberius, then at the age of seventeen, accompanied Augustus to the Cantabrian War, at which Lollius was also present, and he may already have shown indications of the ungovernable temper which drew forth the monitions of Horace. Then in B.C. 21 he was appointed companion to Drusus, the brother of Tiberius. His abilities rapidly attracted attention; he won the favour of Augustus, and was given a command on the German frontier. He was unsuccessful and was superseded; the war was entrusted to Drusus and Tiberius. After this we do not hear of Lollius in any public capacity till he was made the adviser of Caius Cæsar. It is again not improbable that he attributed his disgrace to the representations of the two Neros, of whom Tiberius was now the sole survivor. The retirement of Tiberius again gave him an opportunity; he again won the favour of Augustus, and went out to the East with Caius, prepared to indulge his grudge against Tiberius. Suetonius definitely tells us that when Caius arrived in the East Tiberius went to visit him at Samos, and found him ill disposed to himself, owing to the representations of his companion and adviser, Marcus Lollius; that this situation lasted for two years; that representations were even made to Augustus to the effect that Tiberius was tampering with the fidelity of the centurions in the army of Caius; that Tiberius, on being informed of this, wrote and begged that a guard might be sent to observe his actions; that he gave up his customary military exercises, and adopted the dress of a Greek civilian; that he became day by day increasingly an object of contempt and hatred, so that the people of Nîmes threw down his statues, and a man ventured to say at a banquet, in the presence of Caius, that he would undertake to start for Rhodes at once and bring back the exile’s head. Tiberius found his position one of actual peril, and again wrote begging to be allowed to return to Rome. He did not obtain this permission till Caius had been consulted on the subject, as Augustus had undertaken to take no step without his consent. Happily Lollius had by this time lost his influence, and Caius raised no objection. Paterculus supplies a link in the chain of events. Lollius, either seeing an opportunity for getting rid of both Caius and Tiberius, and making himself master in the East, or simply in the endeavour to raise suspicions against the latter, had opened a correspondence with the young King of the Parthians, who betrayed it to Caius, with whom he had celebrated a series of entertainments on the river Euphrates, closely resembling those held by Napoleon and the Czar Alexander on the Vistula many centuries later. Lollius died a few days after the disclosure. Paterculus, who was at that time a tribune of soldiers in the army of Caius, did not know whether his death was accidental or self inflicted; he only knew that everybody was delighted, as they were no less grieved by the death of another of the friends of Horace, Censorinus, “a man,” says Paterculus, “born to win the favour of mankind.”
It is characteristic of Suetonius to inform us not that Lollius was dead, but that he had lost favour with Caius, when the latter permitted the return of Tiberius to Rome.
It would seem curious that the contempt and dislike in which Tiberius was held for a short time at Rhodes should have been felt so far away as Nîmes, in the South of France. Suetonius, in mentioning the fact, evidently wishes to imply that this contempt of Tiberius was co-extensive with the Empire; but the strangeness of the fact disappears when we remember that Lucius Cæsar was at this time in the South of France on his way to Spain, and supplies a further link in the chain of evidence which goes to prove the animus of the children of Julia against their stepfather; they were only too ready to listen to the suggestions of a Marcus Lollius and others who proposed to build their fortunes upon the insecure foundation of the favour of these spoiled grandchildren of the great Augustus.
Tiberius returned to Rome in A.D. 2, the year in which Lucius Cæsar died suddenly at Marseilles. He did not propose to return to public life; he gave up his palace in the heart of Rome in the Carinæ, and transferred his establishment to the villa and gardens which Mæcenas had laid out on the Esquiline hill outside the walls. He formally introduced his son Drusus to public life by presenting him in the Forum, but himself abstained from any but private business. Meanwhile Caius Cæsar had gone again to Armenia, where he was severely wounded by a native at a conference to which he had entrusted himself with insufficient precaution. The wound was not immediately fatal, but proved disabling both to mind and body. The young man had been captivated by Oriental luxury, and found flatterers to support him in a design of remaining permanently “in the most distant corner of the world.” He was, however, persuaded to return to Rome, and died on his way back in a Lycian town.
Fate had decided that Tiberius should not evade his responsibilities. He had firmly resisted every attempt made by Augustus to seduce him from his retirement after his return to Rome, but the death of Caius left him no option. Both privately and in the Senate publicly Tiberius protested without avail; it was not a case of “nolo episcopari”; he genuinely preferred a private position, and was, in fact, more in sympathy with the old Republican ideals than with the new dynasty. But the public safety demanded the presence of a man of experience at the head of affairs, ready to take over the succession; and it is in language suitable to this demand that Paterculus describes the joy of the population of Rome when it was known that Tiberius had been adopted by Augustus, and again made a colleague in the tribunician power. “Then again there shone for parents confidence in the future of their children; husbands could feel secure in their marriages, masters in their property; all men could look for safety, rest, peace, calm.”
The style of Paterculus, that of a military man, who has done his best to repair deficiencies in his early education by taking lessons in the art of writing in later life, is so artificial as to impair his credit, but on this occasion his choice of language is strictly correct. The young Cæsars had not been a success; of all the possible heirs to Augustus who died young, they alone are not credited with superior virtues. We are not told of them that if they had lived they would have restored the Republic and checked the flood of adulation. They inherited the petulance of Julia, her impatience of restraint, and while the youth of Tiberius and Drusus had been spent in an atmosphere of insecurity at a time when the power of Augustus himself was not firmly established, the children of Julia had come into a world which had forgotten the civil wars, into a court without the traditions of an ancient dynasty, which saw its models in the seraglio of a Herod or Phraates, and laughed at the republican simplicity of the home of Augustus.
The intemperance of Julia was repeated in the next generation; her eldest daughter, married to a L. Æmilius Paulus, followed in her footsteps, and was likewise banished to an island in A.D. 2. The remaining daughter, Agrippina, was married to Germanicus, the son of Drusus and nephew to Tiberius; she was the mother of Caligula and a grandmother of Nero.
The years between the restitution of Tiberius and the death of Augustus were chiefly spent by the former in campaigns in Germany and Dalmatia, the history of which will be treated separately with greater convenience. It is worth while at this juncture, when Augustus and Tiberius were to settle down to work together for ten years, to investigate the relations between them. Was there on either side jealousy or mistrust? Did Augustus foresee the tyranny of Tiberius, as those who believe in the tyranny would have us believe?
One of the many great literary losses which the world has suffered is the loss of the letters of Augustus. Not only have we lost these letters, but we have also lost the private notes of Tiberius kept by him for the benefit of his successor, and burned by Caligula; the only fragments that we possess of the correspondence of Augustus certainly do not favour the view that there was any mistrust or want of sympathy between the two men.
The fragments as they stand in Suetonius are as follows.
The first was written in reply to a letter of Tiberius, complaining of the violence of language used by one Æmilius Ælianus, a native of Cordova, against the Emperor, and probably belongs to the period of the Cantabrian campaign, when Tiberius was still young. “Do not give way, my dear Tiberius, in this matter to the feelings natural to your time of life; do not be too ready to be indignant that there should be any one to speak evil of me; it is enough if we secure this, that nobody shall be able to do us any harm.”
Then we have two purely domestic letters: “I dined, dear Tiberius, with the same party; Vinicius and the elder Silius were added to the company. During dinner we played a family game both yesterday and to-day, for we threw dice, and whoever threw ‘the dog,’ or six, paid a shilling into the pool for every dice thrown, which was taken by the player who threw ‘Venus.’”
“We spent the holidays pleasantly enough, my dear Tiberius, for we played all day and every day, and made the dice market pretty hot. Your brother carried on with plenty of shouting; on the whole, however, he did not lose much, but recovered his losses contrary to all expectation. I lost about £170 on my own account, but because I had been prodigally liberal in my play, as I usually am; for if I had exacted all the winnings that I passed over, or had kept in my own pocket all that I gave anybody, I should have won nearly £420. However, I like it best as it is, for my charity will exalt me to eternal glory.”
Again a familiar scrap: “Not even a Jew, my dear Tiberius, preserves his sabbath fast so carefully as I did to-day, for it was not till after the first hour of the night that I at last chewed a couple of mouthfuls in the bath, before I began to be perfumed.”
The following letter probably belongs to the period after the return of Tiberius, and was written on some occasion when he was starting on a second campaign It is written with occasional quite unnecessary slips into Greek, which have been mangled in places by the transcribers, so as to be unintelligible: “Goodbye, most amiable Tiberius, and farewell to me and mine ... best of generals. Yes, most amiable, and as I hope for happiness, most brave man, and most illustrious general, farewell. The scheme of your summer operations! Well, I, my dear Tiberius, in the midst of many difficulties and considering the slackness of our military friends, do not think I could have managed matters with greater foresight than you have done. The men who were with you, in fact, all admit that the well known line could be applied to you: ‘One man saved the state for us by his wakefulness.’ Whenever anything happens which requires my closer thought, if ever I am very much put out, I swear to you I miss my dear Tiberius, and that verse of Homer’s occurs to me ‘when he follows....’ When I hear and read that you are getting thin under the continuance of your labours, may I be confounded if my body is not all one shudder, and I implore you to spare yourself, lest, if we hear that you are in bad health, your mother and I may expire, and the Roman people be in jeopardy of losing its imperial position. It does not matter a bit whether I myself am ill or well, if you are not well. I implore the gods to preserve you to us, and to give you your health now and always, if they do not utterly hate the Roman people.”
There is nothing insincere in the tone of this letter; it is as natural as a letter can be, incoherent in places, but always tender.
In fact, whatever misunderstandings arose between Tiberius and Augustus were due to the misconduct of Julia, or the silly plots and counterplots of Livia and the other ladies of the family, who by their domestic jealousies opened the way to the machinations of men of the type of Marcus Lollius. The friendship of the two men passed through the severest possible test, and it survived the test. Augustus may have thought Tiberius too scrupulous in the matter of Julia, and that the second place in the Empire was worth a little conjugal blindness, and even if he did not take that line, there were plenty of men and women ready to suggest it to him. But the sequel proved that Tiberius had been right, and he contrived in the end to assert his independence without being involved in a bitter personal quarrel with Augustus. Nor must too much stress be laid upon such chance utterances as the often quoted “O my Roman people, in what slow jaws you will be chewed!” We do not know the context, and this may very well have been no more than a piece of good-humoured personal banter, suggested by the well-known slowness of speech which was characteristic of Tiberius.
Though Augustus was on good terms with Tiberius, the children of Julia were not; they were more Julian than the head of the Julian race; they noted everything that could be interpreted to his discredit; they recorded every hasty word, every ill-advised speech, and as the years went on their malignity increased, till in the person of Agrippina it amounted to a monomania. But we must pause to study Tiberius as a general.
IX
The Campaigns of Tiberius
With the battle of Actium the wars of Rome against nations equally civilized with herself came to an end; henceforth the rulers of the world were only called upon to round off the ring fence of their domains, and establish scientific frontiers. The Empire which is so often spoken of as the establishment of a military despotism was, in fact, absolutely the reverse; the power wielded by Marius, by Sulla, by Pompeius, by Cæsar, by Antonius, had this character, for it depended upon the military capacity of these generals; they were soldiers in the first place, and owed their predominance in the civil government to their own sharp swords and the fidelity of the men who had followed their standards. Till the Roman was sole umpire in the circle of the Mediterranean, war was in every respect a profitable investment, and a military career was the readiest path to political supremacy; not only did a Roman general return laden with spoil, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, but his conquests appealed to the imagination of his countrymen; everybody might be proud of generals and armies who had beaten the successors of Alexander; but when military operations were transferred to the frontiers, when the enemies to be subdued were poor and half civilized, when there were no longer gorgeous robes, graceful statues, piles of treasure to be exhibited in the triumphal procession of the victorious general, war lost its prestige; and the steady progress of the civilian administration is, in fact, the special feature of the reigns of the Cæsars. Augustus was no soldier; Tiberius never commanded an army after his succession; the expedition of Caligula to the shore of the English Channel was a madman’s freak; Claudius had but little share in the conquest of Britain; Nero’s morbid vanity preferred the triumphs of the stage to those of the camp. A state in which the military element is predominant does not put up with rulers such as these.
The Romans in the reign of Augustus were, so far as military matters are concerned, and indeed, in most other respects, very much in our own position at the present day. Just as we thoughtlessly and unjustly estimate the exploits of our soldiers in the Soudan, on the North-West frontier of India, on the West Coast of Africa, and even in South Africa, rather cheaply, and disparage their achievements in comparison with those of Marlborough and Wellington, so the contemporaries of Augustus looked back with regret to the heroes of the Punic Wars and the conquerors of Greece; they did not realize that the work which was to be done in their own time was far more difficult than the work which had been done. We too forget that to win the Battle of Waterloo was a trifle compared with the operations which led up to the victory of Omdurman, and the double march into the Transvaal. The exploits of Wellington in the Peninsula were splendid, impeded as they were by opposition from England; but in the conquest of South Africa England has grappled with far more serious difficulties, and her generals have shown themselves at least as resourceful as Wellington.
The generals of the Augustan age are hardly known to us. Few class Agrippa with the leading generals of the world, but the man who for the first time organized the navy of the Roman Empire, who maintained the organization of the army on such a footing that the enormous frontier was never without its defenders, who was himself never beaten in the field, and who trained a succession of capable officers to follow in his footsteps, was no mean general. Similarly Tiberius and his brother, along with many capable subordinates, waged successful campaigns under conditions of peculiar difficulty for many years; but we never think of them as great soldiers, because their exploits did not stir the imagination of their contemporaries.
Vast though the Roman Empire was, its vulnerable frontiers were of relatively small extent in the reign of Augustus; there was a weak place at the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates; the Upper Nile had its Soudanese difficulty then as now, but the whole of the North Coast of Africa was protected by the desert, and the Mauretanian tribes were not numerous enough really to imperil the strip of civilization along the Mediterranean. Spain was all Roman and nearly all civilized, so was Gaul; but between the mouths of the Rhine and the Bosphorus there was a vast unsettled region, reaching down in one place to a point within ten days’ journey of Rome itself, and along an unbroken line of many hundred miles, threatening the cities of Macedonia and Greece. The problem before Augustus and his generals was to form a frontier which should permanently secure Gaul, Italy, and the Balkan Peninsula from the adventurous races of central and East Central Europe.
The weakest point in the chain of defence was the Northern corner of the Adriatic, and the increasing prosperity of the great plains of the Po after they had become a Roman province naturally attracted the attention of the semi-civilized tribes who lived in the hills along the Dalmatian coast. Not only was there danger from the East, but the valley of the Adige formed a gateway through which Central Europe could pour its restless multitudes upon the Cis-Alpine Province. The geographical configuration of the regions south of the plains of the Eastern Danube has always impeded their progress, and to this very day a patch of backward nationalities remains there in close proximity to the most elaborately civilized states of Europe.
The other weak spot was the course of the Rhine, and especially the country below the Drakensberg; that noble river for many miles from the Lake of Constance formed a natural defence against the Germanic hordes, but on reaching the flat land below Cologne it spread into marshes and split into smaller channels, in which flotillas of boats could be prepared without attracting notice, as was necessarily the case where the river ran in a single stream. In fact it was practically found that in places the Rhine was no barrier, and that the tribes on its Eastern bank must be rolled back from the river, if Gaul was to enjoy her new prosperity in peace.
It was in the defence of these two weak spots that Tiberius was to fight his chief campaigns. In both regions security demanded that the operations should be conducted far beyond the frontier, in country difficult at the present day, and tenfold more difficult then, when extensive forests and marshes were added to the impediments offered by ravines and mountains.
It is not easy to estimate the degree of civilization reached by the Pannonians and Dalmatians or the Germanic tribes, when they made war upon the Roman legions. To the ancients all men living under tribal or national institutions were barbarians; they restricted the honour of civilization to those whose political constitution was based upon the city, and though the Græco-Roman city organization practically covered the two peninsulas, which we call Greece and Italy, it did not elsewhere extend far inland; the outer fringe of cities was in close contact with populations living under a clan system, whose chiefs or kings adopted many of the luxuries and some of the institutions of their neighbours; behind these again were less advanced nations and less civilized rulers, gradually merging into real barbarism. The Gallic chieftains had already been in frequent communication with Rome for a century before Cæsar conquered Gaul, and the influence of the Roman traders upon the general standard of civilization was perceptible in his time even among the German tribes nearest to the Rhine. Arminius had had a Roman education, Maroboduus was brought up by Augustus, adopted the Roman military system and welcomed refugees who could train his troops; Latin was already spoken by the Dalmatian tribes when they were eventually conquered by Tiberius. Though the greater part of Central Europe was under forest the valleys were cultivated, as they were in Britain at the time of Cæsar’s invasions, but the forest was always near enough to receive fugitives, and to give cover to an attacking party. There were no large aggregations of human beings in towns, but there were areas sufficiently thickly populated, and their population was sufficiently well organized to bring formidable armies into the field, whose operations were skilfully conducted. The men were no more savages than the Boers are savages; their civilization was a different civilization from the Græco-Roman, but it was a civilization. The occurrences of the Highland Line were anticipated in the foothills of the Alps; sometimes there was a mere cattle-lifting raid, when a predecessor of Rob Roy swooped down upon the farms round Mantua or Cremona, sometimes a combination of clans under a capable chieftain waged a formidable war, whose object was less plunder than the preservation of their independence; sometimes the pressure of real savagery from behind urged the more civilized races forward till the ultimate wave fell upon the Roman frontier.
Far in the East round the mouths of the Danube the predecessors of the Cossacks on their little horses kept the Roman outposts in a state of terror. Ovid tells us how they swooped down upon the labourers in the fields round the camp at Tomi, how their arrows fell into its very centre, how they galloped round its walls, picked up some unfortunate straggler, and were off with him before pursuit could be organized. Reading such a description as this we realize the true significance of the two Roman walls in England, and the wall from the Main to the Danube in Germany. They were not defences against systematic war; they were too long to be defended against an organized invasion, but they effectually prevented raiding. Cattle cannot be lifted over a wall twelve feet high. The difference between our frontier wars and the Roman frontier wars lies in the proximity of the Roman frontiers to the heart of the Empire; but in spite of the perpetual imminence of the danger, the Romans did not pay a sufficient tribute of gratitude to the generals who secured their safety, and were inclined to underestimate their services.