Part 17

Paterculus does not give us a consecutive account of the campaigns, but he mentions a few personal details with reference to Tiberius, both on this campaign and on the subsequent one in Germany after the Varian disaster, which are worth quoting.

“During the whole of the war in Germany and Pannonia, no one of us or of those above or below our rank was ever ill without finding that his health and safety were attended to by the care of Cæsar, in such a way that his mind seemed to be so free from the weight of all its other burdens as to be concentrated on this task alone. For those who desired it there was a composite vehicle ready, his litter assigned to the general benefit, whose advantages I experienced along with others; physicians, food, all the apparatus of a bath, carried for this purpose alone, were ready for every invalid; home and servants alone were wanting, but nothing was missing which they could supply or need. I will add a fact which everybody who was present at that time will recognize at once along with other things which I have related; he alone always rode, always dined sitting along with his guests during the greater part of the summer campaigns; he was indulgent to breaches of discipline, provided there was no bad example; he frequently advised, sometimes reproved, very rarely punished, and took a middle course, being blind to most faults, checking others.”

This is the first mention of a field hospital, reserved, apparently, for the use of the staff and their attendants. Other Roman generals took an elaborate bath establishment with them on their campaigns for their own use: Tiberius utilized it only for the sickness of others. Other generals travelled in carts or on a litter: Tiberius always rode. He took his meals like an active man in a sitting posture, not lying at full length after the customary Roman fashion.

Suetonius declares that in the German wars Tiberius proved to be a martinet, and mentions the case of an officer who was severely punished for sending his freedmen to hunt on the opposite side of the Rhine contrary to orders. Tiberius would indeed have been a bad general if he had neglected to punish a gross violation of discipline, which by revealing the presence of his force might spoil a carefully devised operation. Similarly Suetonius sees excessive severity in the strictness with which Tiberius cut down the transport of officers. Those better versed in the difficulties of warfare will be inclined to take a different view. There were fashionable and luxurious officers then as now, whom it was essential to keep in order. Doubtless some one of these cherished his grievance and left it recorded in his memoirs to be added to the evidence compiled by the historians of a later age.

A mysterious transaction with the Pannonian chief Bato, who was spared after the surrender because he had allowed Tiberius and his troops to slip through an encircling force on one occasion, suggests that diplomacy was employed, as well as arms, in bringing about the surrender of the Pannonians, though it is possible that Tiberius accompanied an act of kindness with an ironical reference to an occasion on which he had outwitted Bato.

The Pannonian war was barely concluded before Tiberius was called off to the Rhine; he left his nephew Germanicus to finish his work east of the Adriatic, and hurried to the scene of his former victories in Germany. Quintilius Varus, the Governor of the Southern German Marches, had been enticed into a trap by the German patriot Arminius, and slain along with two legions, the greater part of a third, and their complement of cavalry and light-armed troops. Arminius, like Maroboduus, had been educated at Rome; he was even a Roman citizen and a member of the Equestrian Order; he too had measured the weakness of Rome, and was only waiting for a favourable opportunity to strike. The rising was organized on a great scale; the Gauls who lived in the country round Vienne were tampered with, the object being to check the advance of a Roman army across the Alps. Fortunately they were only half-hearted in the cause, and were easily suppressed by Tiberius on his way northwards. More serious were the movements on the lower Rhine. The great camp which had been fortified originally by Drusus at Aliso on the Lippe was invested, and a general rising of the tribes who had been settled on the west bank of the Rhine was only prevented by the decision of Lucius Asprenas, who without waiting for the arrival of Tiberius marched two legions down the river. The garrison of Aliso succeeded in cutting its way through the enemy.

In assigning to Varus the command of the Rhine Augustus had been premature. Varus was a civilian rather than a soldier, and his mission was to consolidate the Rhine frontier by the arts of peace, and by bringing the comparatively uncivilized Germans to recognize the blessings of Roman law. It is more than probable that even as a civil administrator he was not particularly upright; he had previously been Governor of Syria, and, according to Paterculus, enjoyed the reputation of having found that province rich and left it poor. He had repressed the military ardour of his subordinates, adopting a policy of conciliation, and deliberately closing his eyes to the necessity of armed interference when events showed that it was advisable. His ruling passion was love of money; in other respects he was inactive both in mind and body, a man of preconceived ideas, such a man as has on other occasions and in other places invited disaster. Arminius fooled him to the top of his bent, the Germans invited him to settle their quarrels according to the honoured forms of Roman law; he was gradually enticed with his force further and further away from the frontier; the summer operations took the form of a judge’s circuit. Meanwhile the German forces gradually closed in behind his rear. Varus was deaf to the remonstrances of his officers and to the information given him by a German rival of Arminius. At last when the pedantic Governor had been successfully lured into a hopeless position Arminius struck. The Roman soldiers, having no confidence in their leader, were completely demoralized; they were slaughtered literally like sheep, sacrificed to the gods of the Germans. The commander of the Roman cavalry basely deserted the infantry and tried to secure his own safety, but was cut down with all his force before he could reach the Rhine. Varus himself committed suicide; his example is said to have been followed by some Roman youths, who, having been taken prisoners, dashed out their brains with their own fetters.

The situation, however, was not so grave as it might have been. Arminius sent the head of Varus to Maroboduus, but that chieftain, either from want of confidence or from jealousy of a rival, took the Roman side, and transmitted the relic with a friendly message to Augustus.

It is not incumbent upon us to believe that after this disaster the aged Emperor acquired a habit of dashing his head against the wall, and crying, “Varus, Varus, give me back my legions!” but that the calamity was a sufficient one to disturb his equanimity seriously is self-evident. Soldiers had been found only with great difficulty for the Pannonian war, as we have seen; the recall of veterans to the standards was always considered a desperate measure, and still more desperate was the employment of slaves as soldiers; the absolute destruction of two whole legions and six cohorts along with their cavalry meant a loss of 17,300 men, as large a force as the permanent garrison of Italy. It imposed upon Tiberius the necessity of husbanding his men, even if he had not been naturally disposed to circumspection, for nearly a tenth part of the whole Roman army had been wiped out.

Tiberius quickly avenged the army of Varus; he swept through the country, leaving devastation behind him, but he failed to capture the ringleaders of the revolt. During this campaign, in which he was soon joined by Germanicus, he abandoned his ordinary policy of acting entirely on his own initiative and without consultation with his staff; he carefully explained to them the reason of all his movements. In fact, he now set to work to educate his successors, for he saw that other duties would shortly prevent his personal activity in the field.

Both Augustus and Tiberius have been reproached with an unadventurous policy on the German frontier. Augustus discouraged the distant expeditions of Drusus into the heart of Germany, and Tiberius was to be accused of jealousy in the near future in similarly restraining the ardour of Germanicus, but those who lightly make these charges overlook the difficulties of the problem. The conquest of the basin of the Mediterranean had been a conquest of civilized peoples, who knew when they were beaten, and who once having accepted the arbitrament of the Roman arms found acquiescence in the Roman domination the best security for civilization. But the conquest of Central Europe was another matter; in one sense there was nothing to be gained by it. When Tiberius met his fleet upon the Elbe, he had traversed many miles of that desolate flat of Northern Europe which has only been gradually reclaimed from the wilderness and rendered fertile by the patient labour of many centuries. There was no trade. There were, so far as he knew, no minerals, there was nothing to invite settlers in the endless marshes, and to an Italian the climate was detestable. If, on the other hand, he turned his attention to the hill country, there was the same absence of attractions; even if the valleys were cultivated they were too far off, and the climate was too severe to enable them to compete with the more accessible territory of Gaul; the mineral treasures of the hills were as yet undiscovered, and even if they had been discovered, they were practically inaccessible. It seemed wiser, and more immediately practicable, to limit the expansion of the Empire to the lines suggested by the Danube and the Rhine, and to spread such a terror of the Roman name beyond those limits as would secure the settlers on the outlying lands from attack. This policy was partly realized; it was not fully realized, and the German frontier remained the running sore of the Roman Empire till the Empire itself became German, and even then fresh hordes were to push on from Central Asia. Nor was the Empire absolutely at peace within itself; there were still sporadic outbreaks to be dealt with even in Gaul and Spain, still African tribes threatening Mauretania and Egypt, still the ever-watchful Parthian in the East. Augustus rightly considered that the expansion of the Empire was ended, and that the time for purposeless conquests had gone by.

With the German campaign Tiberius ended his career as a general. Twenty years of his life had been spent in the field, and though his name is associated with no dazzling victories, it is equally free from any suspicion of failure. Had he suffered even minor reverses, his critics would not have failed to make the most of them; but there is not a suggestion of anything of the kind, and the silence of less friendly historians supports the opinion which Paterculus held of his leader’s merits. Of the two brothers Drusus was the more dashing soldier, as he was the more generally attractive man, but Tiberius was the greater general; and his services to the Empire were none the less solid because in comparison with the brilliant feats of Cæsar they were inconspicuous. Perhaps we should have formed a higher opinion of the value of Tiberius in the field had he too been able to leave his commentaries; but, alas! his exploits are concealed in an almost impenetrable night along with those of the brave men who lived before Agamemnon. His three great combined movements, that by which the Vindelici were conquered behind the Alps, the ferocious Longobardi frightened on the Elbe, and Maroboduus cowed in Bohemia, anticipated similar great operations of Napoleon.

X

The Last Years of Augustus

Twenty-nine years after the battle of Actium the Senate, by the voice of one of the noblest of their order, Marcus Valerius Messala, hailed Augustus as the “Father of his Country.” The now aged Emperor burst into tears, and declaring that he had reached the summit of his ambition, prayed to the gods that they would allow him, so long as life lasted, to continue to be worthy of the confidence thus expressed by his countrymen. The title had perhaps been somewhat soiled by use; Cicero had arrogated it to himself after that exhibition of consummate statesmanship which quelled the conspiracy of Catiline, but it was none the less a tribute to the singleness of purpose with which Augustus had devoted himself to the welfare of the vast Empire committed to his care. In the press of daily business and vexatious details Augustus may often have failed to perceive how general was the recognition of his services to the State, and we can pardon the display of uncontrolled emotion which interrupted his customary calm on receiving this solemn assurance that his labours had not been in vain.

As a matter of fact at this time, and for the rest of his life, Augustus had no enemies save those of his own household. There was no political opposition to the Emperor; small conspiracies such as those of Murena and Cæpio there had been, the work of hot-headed youths who wished to emulate the example of Brutus, and there were, as we have seen, intrigues in the Emperor’s own family. As Suetonius mentions among the plots directed against Augustus one in which Lucius Æmilius Paullus, the husband of the younger Julia was concerned, we are at liberty to suspect that in her case, as in her mother’s, it was thought better to punish a graver offence as a case of domestic misconduct. It was on this occasion that the poet Ovid learned that there is a limit to the liberties which a man of fashion can allow himself, and was forced to withdraw from his butterfly existence at Rome to the mosquito-haunted swamps at the mouth of the Danube, where he wrote poems more worthy of his dignity than any he had previously composed.

The power of the Emperor was based largely on his patronage. The Empire had been divided between the Emperor and the Senate; those provinces in which it was necessary to maintain a standing and mobilized army, in which swift action, continuous authority, and unity of purpose were imperatively necessary, were governed by Augustus as a private estate; their highest official was a “Procurator,” “a manager”; they comprised two districts in the west and north of Spain, the whole of Gaul, the Germanic frontier, the Balkan, Cilicia, Cœlesyria Phenicia, Cyprus and Egypt; the Senate retained the old settled provinces, Eastern Spain, Sardinia, Sicily, Northern Africa, the district round Cyrene, the west of Asia Minor, and Achaia. Thus the Emperor’s direct patronage was large, but even in the Senatorial Provinces he could intervene with superior powers, and the liberty which the Senate enjoyed of appointing their Governors, was nominal rather than real, for the Senate itself was increasingly composed of men who had owed their advancement to the Emperor, or expected further promotion from his hands.

Senatorial Governorships tended to become merely honorary, and the wealthy or noble men, who held courts for limited periods in Sicily or Asia had little more actual responsibility or power than an English Viceroy in Ireland. Further, those parts of the Empire in which active work was to be done, or in which the administration really tested capacity, and was rewarded with further promotions, were precisely those parts in which the Emperor was exclusive patron.

We naturally wonder at the business capacity of a man who carried on the Government of dominions so extensive and so various; and the work would indeed have been beyond the grasp of any single individual had not Augustus continued the old Roman policy of letting well alone. The Roman Empire at this period was largely decentralized; cities, tribes, nationalities governed themselves according to their previous laws and customs; no ancient polity was destroyed or remodelled unless it proved to be out of sympathy with the general order; the details of local administration were attended to on the spot in accordance with local usage, by the local officials and magistrates. If the ancient constitution of a town broke down, the Roman was ready with his sacred model, the double chief magistrate and the Senate, a model which was faithfully copied in all the Roman military colonies, but so long as men could govern themselves, the Romans were content to allow them to do so; they were not at this time afflicted with a pedantic passion for uniformity. Thus the Emperor was relieved of the mass of detail under which he would otherwise have sunk. In his choice of men Augustus preferred officials who either as non-Romans, such as Licinus and Cornelius Gallus, or by reason of comparatively mean extraction felt their dependence upon his favour. When he found a representative of the ancient nobility who could be trusted, such as Marcus Lepidus, the son of the former triumvir, he placed power in his hands; such men served to balance the pretensions of the new officials, but he was careful not to revive the organization of the oligarchy. One danger, however, escaped the prevision of the acute Augustus: he did not see until it was too late the effect of his pretensions to a divine ancestry upon his own family. As years went on, and the representatives of the Julian stock were to be found chiefly in the men and women of the third generation, as the great poem of Virgil was more and more widely known, the faith in the sanctity of the posterity of Anchises assumed inconvenient dimensions, and the tendency to press this faith was largely helped by the presence in the Imperial Household of representatives of ancient dynasties. East and West alike sent young men to Rome, in whom the traditions of exalted lineage were lively and unbroken, who did not need the evidence of portents and the testimony of poets to assure them that they were set apart from the rest of mankind. These youths were the playmates of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Augustus; their influence stimulated the dynastic ambition of such men as Caius Cæsar, and his nephew and namesake the future Emperor Caligula; the young princes, as they considered themselves, were impatient of the constitutional forms of Rome, and the restraints upon the monarchy; they despised families whose progenitors had not come over with Æneas. Fate had not been kind to the Julian dynasty, and when Tiberius returned to Rome from the Rhine in A.D. 12, his adoption and investiture with the Proconsular Power seemed to extinguish the hopes of its representatives. The direct descendants of Augustus now living were his daughter Julia, disgraced and in exile, her daughter Julia similarly disgraced and in exile, Agrippa Postumus, the intractable, a young man about twenty-four years of age, who either now, or a little later, enjoyed, like his mother and sister, the amenities of life on an island; the only descendant in the third generation who had not been thus disgraced and banished was Agrippina, the younger daughter of Julia.

Nobody took the Julian legend more seriously than this lady, and her children enjoyed a double stream of the sacred blood, for she had married Germanicus, the son of Drusus and Antonia the beautiful, who was own niece to Augustus. Germanicus was now twenty-seven years of age; he had been through the Pannonian campaign, and was left by Tiberius in command of the army on the Lower Rhine. Tiberius seems to have had more confidence in him than in his own son Drusus, and Germanicus had so far shown himself worthy of that confidence; he was blessed with a numerous family, of whom Agrippina was inordinately proud; she was the mother of the great-grandchildren of Augustus, a Nero, a Drusus, a Caius, another Agrippina, a Drusilla, and a Julia Livilla, who eventually married the friend of Paterculus, Marcus Vinicius. Julia her sister had only borne two daughters before retiring to her island.

Agrippina was not a mere lady of fashion; she accompanied her husband on his campaigns, and exhibited all the traditional virtues of a Roman matron before the enraptured eyes of the legionaries; she dressed up her youngest boy, Caius, in the full uniform of a Roman soldier, and got him the nickname of Caligula--Little Gaiters--in the camp.

The Claudian stock was represented by Drusus, the son of Tiberius, a man slightly younger than Germanicus, whose sister he married, thus further interweaving the two lines; also by Germanicus himself and his brother Claudius, the unfortunate sputterer, of whom his own mother was ashamed, and whose family were united in a desire to keep him out of sight.

In order further to knit up the dynastic web, Augustus adopted Tiberius, who in his turn adopted both his own nephew Germanicus and his stepson Agrippa Postumus. It is not improbable that the dynastic pretensions of this young man, stimulated by the example of his sister Agrippina, were the real cause of his enforced retreat, that he did not acquiesce willingly in his grandfather’s arrangements, and that the watchful Livia knew how to turn his insubordination to advantage. Augustus showed disturbing signs of a weakness in his direction in spite of his intractability.

Tiberius at the time of his adoption was fifty-four years of age; he was a father and a grandfather; he was the active ruler of the Empire, but with what appears to us a strange scrupulosity he at once abandoned his own house, and went to live in his adoptive father’s. He treated all his property, according to the strict letter of the Roman law, as his father’s property; he neither manumitted slaves nor performed any act which could not properly be performed by a man who was still “in his father’s hand.”

During the last two years of the life of Augustus Tiberius seldom left him; the old man was in feeble health, but he continued to travel in Italy, and had just presided at some games held in his honour at Naples, when his customary weakness assumed an alarming aspect. Tiberius had been summoned to Illyricum, whence news had arrived of serious discontent among the troops. He returned in haste to receive the last words of the dying Emperor, and to give him a final evidence of that affection which, in spite of the severe strains to which it had been subjected, had never failed. Augustus died as he had lived, with dignity and calm; he even retained to the last a dash of humour, and bade his friends applaud him, as he left the stage of life, if they were satisfied with his performance. His last words were a request to Livia never to forget their married life.

The performance had been a good one, and we should be churlish to withhold our applause.

XI

The Accession of Tiberius

All the accounts of the accession of Tiberius agree in one statement; the evidence is unanimous that he was exceedingly unwilling to occupy the position which Augustus had occupied, and to continue the Empire in the form which it had assumed under his predecessor.