Part 19

In A.D. 25, eleven years after the accession of Tiberius, a deputation arrived from further Spain with the request that leave might be given to build a shrine in honour of Tiberius and his mother, as had been done in Asia. “On this occasion Cæsar, who was at other times also firm in rejecting honours of this kind, and thought some answer should be given to those who accused him by public rumour of ambitious inclinations, made a speech to the following effect:--‘I know, Conscript Fathers, that many have noted a want of consistency in my conduct, because on a recent occasion I failed to oppose the cities of Asia when preferring an identical petition. Therefore I will at once declare my defence of my former silence, and of the line which I propose to adopt in the future. Whereas the sainted Augustus did not forbid a temple to be built to himself and the city of Rome at Pergamus, I, for whom all his acts and words are like a law, followed a precedent, already sanctioned, the more readily because veneration of the Senate was united with the devotion to be paid to myself. However, although there may be an excuse for a solitary acceptance of such honours, it would be presumptuous and arrogant in me to consent to being worshipped in divine form all over the provinces; and indeed the honour paid to Augustus will disappear if it is made cheap by promiscuous flattery of this kind. I both protest to you, Conscript Fathers, and I wish posterity to be mindful, that I am a man, and hold purely human responsibilities, and that I have enough, if I worthily hold the first position in the State; posterity will give enough, and more than enough, to my memory if men believe me to have been worthy of my ancestors, careful of your concerns, firm in danger, and not fearful of contracting unpopularity in defence of the public welfare. So shall I have temples in your minds, so the finest and most lasting statues. For those memorials which are built of stone are despised as mere tombs if the judgment of posterity proves adverse. Therefore I implore the allies, the citizens, and the gods themselves, the latter to grant me to the end of my life a calm intelligence and understanding of human and divine law; the former, that whenever I may leave the stage, they may pursue my deeds and the fame of my name with praise and kindly memories.’ And he persisted afterwards, even in private conversation, in his contempt of such adoration of himself. This some interpreted as moderation, many as a sign of mistrust of himself, some as an indication of a degenerate spirit; for, said they, the best of men aim at the highest honours; thus among the Greeks Hercules and Liber, among ourselves Quirinus, had been added to the number of the gods. Augustus had done better in setting his hopes higher. Princes have everything else in this life; the one thing they should compass with avidity is a lasting memory of themselves. For the contempt of fame means the contempt of virtue.”

It is impossible not to admire the consummate art with which the effect of a really noble statement of Tiberius is wiped away, and the picture of a man devoid of sound ambition substituted. The ingenuity with which Tacitus puts in the mouths of presumed contemporaries his own perversion of the facts, and concludes his chapter with a concise damnation, is equally admirable. To us there is, however, something tragic in the fact that subsequent events and the arts of a supreme master of style were to rob Tiberius even of the modest fame for which he prayed.

Tiberius had hardly settled down to business when the threatened mutiny of the legions in the Illyrian quarter broke out, accompanied by an even more serious disturbance among the armies of the Rhine. These events throw much light on the condition of the Roman army at the time, and upon the characters of Agrippina and Germanicus. The latter, though a far more formidable rival than Agrippa Postumus, had been invested with Proconsular power at the request of Tiberius on his accession. Previously he had only been a legate, a lieutenant-general in command of the troops on the German frontier; he was now Governor of Gaul as well. It is not customary, for usurpers who have recently mounted rickety thrones to add to the powers of those whose rivalry they have good reason to anticipate. The Proconsulate of Gaul had on a well-known occasion been the stepping-stone to the Empire. Tiberius clearly had no mistrust of the loyalty of Germanicus, and at this period could afford to smile at the restless impetuosity of Agrippina, pattern of matrons.

XII

The Mutinies in Pannonia and on the Rhine

We have seen that when Augustus died Tiberius was on his way to Illyria, because the temper of the three legions who garrisoned the recently conquered districts towards the Danube had given cause for anxiety. The death of one Emperor and the accession of another occasioned a relaxation of discipline, both events, in accordance with Roman custom, being observed by a suspension of ordinary business.

The Pannonian army had been reinforced largely from Rome itself; it had been necessary to revive in a stringent form the obligation to military service, and even to impress slaves. Among the men thus unwillingly driven into the ranks were several used to the clubs and street factions of the capital, quick-witted, ready-tongued, of the class that are known to our own soldiers and sailors as “lawyers.”

Service in these regions had no mitigations, there was little or no loot, and since serious operations had ceased, little excitement; the long holiday and cessation of the ordinary routine gave the camp agitators their opportunity. Three legions were concerned, the eighth, the ninth, and the fifteenth. The first open act of mutiny was an attempt to combine all three in one. This failed, owing to the mutual jealousies of the legions, neither of the three being willing to be enrolled under the name of one of the others, and a compromise was effected by uniting the legions locally, but retaining their separate organization. The rapid and dramatic account of Tacitus, in which only the most picturesque incidents are recorded and grouped together for effect, conceals the fact that this was a very serious step, for the legions were not quartered together, and must have marched some distance in order to unite. This event, which Tacitus places at the beginning of his summary, can only have taken place after the officers had lost the control of their men, unless we are to credit these officers, who knew that there was much disaffection, and had already reported it to Rome, with such blind folly as to have united troops ready to mutiny.

The speech which Tacitus puts into the mouth of one Percennius, the arch agitator, a private who had been accustomed to lead a claque in the Roman theatres, and was well versed in the arts by which factions are organized, gives a clear summary of the grievances of the Roman soldier of the period, but will not be intelligible without a little previous explanation.

First comes the question of discharge. A Roman citizen was constitutionally liable to be called out for service between the ages of eighteen and forty-six, but it was held that sixteen years of service, whether continuous or intermittent, exempted a man from further duty. The difficulty of finding recruits had caused the claim to exemption to be ignored, and as the army had become increasingly professional, losing its character of a militia, the men themselves, for lack of other occupation, had helped the authorities to expand the period of service. In order further to swell the numbers of the army, the Romans had anticipated the “garrison” service recently introduced into the English army. Time-expired men were enrolled in companies outside the organization of the legion; they were called flagmen (vexillarii); they could not be called upon to march in a campaign, but they formed a kind of permanent garrison in the countries in which they were employed; they were not a “reserve,” for they could not be called back to the colours, but they relieved the regular soldiers of duties, for which there was a dearth of men; they were also employed as engineers, for we find some of them in the course of this mutiny detached to build roads and bridges near Nauportus.

There was also a grievance of pay. Cæsar had increased the pay of the legionary, and fixed it at nine _aurei_ a year; that is to say, ten asses a day. When this arrangement was made one silver denarius was the equivalent of ten copper asses, and the pay of the Roman soldier was assumed to be one denarius, practically a shilling a day; but since Cæsar’s time the silver denarius had appreciated, and was now worth sixteen asses: the soldiers, however, were still paid ten asses, and not sixteen. Another grievance lay in the fact that the household troops, prætorian guards, who formed the garrison of Italy, received double pay.

The exactions and cruelty of the centurions formed another grievance. The position of the centurion in the Roman army is not quite analogous to anything in our own army, for though there was a distinction between the commissioned and the non-commissioned officer, and the centurion belonged in many respects to the latter class, he had many responsibilities which we, rightly or wrongly, reserve for commissioned officers. The centurion was selected from the ranks, but he commanded a company; he was a sergeant with the duties of a captain, and when he was promoted to the rank of “primipilaris” was so much of a commissioned officer as to be admitted to councils of war. Cæsar had paid especial attention to the centurions, he never misses an opportunity of praising individual centurions in his commentaries, and distinguished service as a centurion opened the way to the highest military and even civil positions. Ventidius Bassus, who had commanded the armies of Antonius in Syria, and had been granted a triumph, began life as a mule-driver, and passed through the rank of centurion to that of General. Before the end of the century a former centurion was to be Emperor. Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judæa, is said to have been a centurion. One of the arts by which the early Emperors kept their hold on the army was the recognition of capable centurions. But though the centurion was in a better position than the English non-commissioned officer, he still had duties which we should consider beneath the dignity of a captain.

With the aid of this short introduction the speech of Percennius should be intelligible without further explanation; it is not probable that we have the genuine speech, but a summary of the soldiers’ grievances put into the mouth of their spokesman.

“Why do we obey like slaves a handful of centurions, and still fewer tribunes? When are we to venture to demand our rights if we do not now approach the new and still tottering Emperor with either entreaties or force? It is through our own fault, through our own want of spirit, that we have gone on for so many years putting up with thirty or forty years’ service, old men as we are, and most of us crippled with wounds. Even after our discharge there is no end to our service; we camp under the flags and suffer the same burdens under another name. And if any man does happen to get out of all these dangers and difficulties with his life, he is dragged off to distant lands, where he is given under the name of a farm a morass or a precipice. The service itself is severe, and poorly paid; body and soul are valued at ten asses a day! Out of this we have to find clothes, arms, tents, buy off the centurions, yes, and pay for our own discharge.[1] The stick, the wounds, the bitter winter, the summer marches, the cruelties of war, or the barrenness of peace are everlasting. We shall never get any comfort till the service is entered on fixed conditions, a denarius a day for pay, sixteen years for a discharge; and we are not to be kept on under the flags, but stay in our camps and get our pension in cash. Do the prætorians face greater dangers than we do? But they get two denarii a day, and return to their homes after sixteen years. We don’t have to patrol the city at night, but we do have to live among savages and look at the enemy out of our very quarters.”

[1] “Vacationes munerum.” The translation in the text is the accepted one, but the phrase may simply mean “leave.” The custom of feeing the sergeant for this purpose has not been unknown in the English army.

This statement of the grievances of the private soldier may not represent the actual words of Percennius, but it is strangely familiar. Protracted service is not at present included among the grievances of the English soldier, but we have already taken one step in a direction which may lead to its inclusion. The Roman Empire shirked the recruiting difficulty, and in the end brought down upon itself countless disasters. If the English Empire follows the same path, it will find itself some day at the same destination. The conditions are strangely similar. By the institution of slavery the whole body of operatives throughout the Roman Empire was exempted from military service, the recruiting ground was artificially restricted. We have no artificial restriction in the English Empire, but the operatives have been allowed gradually to withdraw themselves from even the limited obligation to military service imposed by the ancient regulations of the militia, and they have further been allowed to assume that whatever may happen to other people they are not to be conscious of the burden of taxation; they are practically as free from military service and taxation as the slaves of antiquity.

When these mutinies were eventually suppressed Tiberius found himself unable to confirm the grant of a discharge after sixteen years’ service, and was obliged to fix it at twenty years; he said that the Empire could not stand the change, and deplored, in strangely modern language, the breakdown of the “voluntary system.” The statesmen of his time could not touch the institution of slavery; the demand for a conscription of slaves would have been resisted on every ground of public expediency; there would have been an outcry against interference with private property. We have no institution which forbids us to make soldiers of our intelligent working-men; they can be invited and encouraged to take their share in bearing the burden of defence. The statesman who discovers the best means of bringing them into the recruiting field will have solved the most pressing difficulty of the English Empire.

The result of the orations of Percennius was a general insubordination. Junius Blæsus, who was commander-in-chief, persuaded the excited men with some difficulty to send an orderly deputation to Tiberius to present their grievances, and the soldiers cleverly included his son in the deputation. For a time there was quiet, but the news of the mutiny reached Nauportus, where the “flagmen” were employed in engineering, and they immediately threw off all discipline, plundered the neighbouring villages, and even Nauportus itself. Laden with their booty, they marched to the headquarters of the mutinied legions, but they had not forgotten previously to pay off old scores, they had derided and beaten their centurions, they had seized the commander of their camp, a rigorous martinet who had himself risen from the ranks, piled burdens upon him, and driven him at the head of their column, asking him how he liked it. Blæsus met them with firmness, and arrested the ringleaders, but their appeals to their former fellow soldiers renewed the revolt, the prison was opened, all the prisoners were released, and a man named Vibulenus mounted the shoulders of his comrades, and, standing in front of the tribunal of Blæsus, made an impassioned oration. Addressing the mutineers, he cried: “You have certainly restored these innocent and miserable men to life and light, but who will give my brother back his life? Who will give me back my brother? He was sent to you from the German army on our common concerns, but last night this man, by the hands of those prize-fighters whom he keeps and arms to the ruin of the soldiers, cut his throat. Tell me, Blæsus, where you threw the body. Our enemies even do not grudge us burial. When I have sated my grief with tears and kisses, bid me then to be butchered too, so long as my friends here are allowed to bury those who have been slain for no crime, but because they thought of the good of the legions.”

This pathetic speech naturally redoubled the excitement, and the prize-fighters of Blæsus were seized and bound along with the rest of his slaves, and were likely to have suffered rough treatment, when it was discovered that Vibulenus never had a brother. The wrath of the soldiers was then turned upon the centurions; most of them got off and hid themselves, but one was killed whom the soldiers used to call “Give us another,” because it had been his habit to break his vinestick over the shoulders of his men, and then ask for another, and yet another. The centurions, however, were not all unpopular, and a division of opinion between the eighth and fifteenth legions about a centurion whom the former wished to kill, but the latter to protect, would have ended in a fight, had not the ninth legion intervened.

Though Vibulenus never had a brother, his speech shows that the mutiny was concerted with the legions on the Rhine.

In due time Drusus, the son of Tiberius, arrived from Rome with picked guards, including a detachment of the Germans, who then formed the bodyguard of the Emperor. Ælius Sejanus accompanied him as adviser, though Drusus, being of the age of seven and twenty, could hardly have been considered a youth. He read a letter from Tiberius empowering him to remedy such grievances as could be remedied on the spot, but referring the solution of permanent difficulties to the Senate. Tiberius as Imperator had practically unlimited powers over the army, but either he had not by this time formally accepted the office of Imperator, or he held that such questions as increase of pay and reduction of the years of service were not purely military questions, and must be referred to the civil authority.

The soldiers had listened quietly to Drusus till the reference to the Senate was mentioned; they then again burst into uproar, protesting, with a semblance of reason, that the Senate was only dragged in when it was a question of favours or rewards, the generals imposed punishments and ordered severe labours on their own responsibility. The aged Gnæus Lentulus, an experienced public servant, who had accompanied Drusus, and who was held to influence him in the direction of severity, was nearly killed; stones were thrown at Drusus himself, who with his escort and attendants escaped with difficulty into the permanent camp.

Fortunately that night there was an eclipse, and at the same time stormy weather set in. The excitable superstitious soldiers were frightened by the portent; Drusus skilfully took advantage of their wavering resolution, and by means of clever agents set the individual soldiers against one another, and inspired mutual distrust between the three legions. There was a sudden and violent revulsion of feeling, the ringleaders Percennius and Vibulenus were killed, order was restored, and Drusus returned to Rome. It was left to Tiberius and the Senate to redress the grievances.

The mutiny was a serious one, not so well organized as the simultaneous mutiny on the Rhine, and not so ambitious in its aims; but the facts as given us ascribe a strange childishness to the Roman legionary. The story of the eclipse is hard to swallow, but there is other evidence to the superstitious character of the legionary; his commanders owed their authority largely to a certain religious awe with which they were surrounded; the standards were worshipped, and the Roman soldier, afraid of little else, was supremely afraid of breaking his military oath.

The mutiny on the Rhine was of a more serious character; not only was the number of legions implicated far larger, more than double that of the Pannonian legions, but the ambition of the mutineers was not confined to obtaining a redress of grievances; they proposed to annex the Empire. “The State is in our hands,” they said; “it is increased by our victories; the Emperor takes his title from his armies.” A vision of plundering Gaul, marching upon Rome, and setting up an Emperor of their own, floated before the eyes of the ringleaders. On the Rhine, as in Pannonia, the agitation was engineered by the recruits, chiefly enfranchized slaves recently drawn from the capital. The men who had fought under Drusus and Tiberius were hardly conscious of their own grievances; military discipline had numbed their intelligence; they knew of nothing else, and they were well content to exchange the peaceful but laborious routine of the camp for the hardships of campaigns among the forests and morasses of Germany, where the enemy was less terrible than the gloom of primeval trees and the treachery of bogs and estuaries. They were, however, only too willing to listen when cleverer men than themselves told them they had grievances. The fidelity of the most loyal troops and of the most trusted servants can seldom long resist the voice of the tempter, who deplores the injustice with which they are treated. The idlers of Rome, swept into the ranks from the street corners and the open air amusements of the great city, awoke from dreams of plunder and licence to the stern realities of the centurion’s stick and the heavy fatigue of a Roman camp. They had no fighting, but they had drill, and digging and building in plenty; few of them had ever before done an honest stroke of work. To the veterans, life on the frontier had become somewhat dull, and though they would quickly have discovered the worthlessness of their new associates on active service, they could not resist the fascinations of jokes and stories and songs picked up from the professional buffoons of the Roman theatres.

There were two armies on the Rhine frontier: the Lower Army, under Aulus Cæcina, quartered between the region of the Lippe and the neighbourhood of Cologne, the Upper Army, under Silius, about the gorge of the Rhine. The mutiny broke out in the Lower Army; the Upper Army waited to see the result before moving on its own account. Germanicus, as proconsul, was at the time conducting the census of Gaul in the regions of the Meuse and Moselle. Fortunately, the lower army was divided; it was composed of four legions, the twenty-first, the fifth, the first, and the twentieth; the two former began the mutiny. Cæcina was with them when it broke out.

The scenes of the Pannonian mutiny were repeated. Centurions were beaten and killed, Cæcina was powerless to interpose, and in fact seems at first to have lost his head. He surrendered to the soldiers a centurion who had taken refuge at his tribunal. Another centurion at the same time fought his way through the mob; he was Cassius Chærea, destined some twenty years later to rid Rome of Caligula. Rejecting the authority of their officers, the mutineers took the whole organization of the camp into their own hands; there was no suspension of discipline, but perfect order, a fact which increased the gravity of the situation as indicating a settled purpose and skilled ringleaders.

Germanicus left his civil duties to repress the mutineers if possible. He was received sullenly in the camp. Some of the men, seizing his hand under the pretext of kissing it, pressed his fingers into their mouths that he might feel the absence of their teeth; others pointed at their limbs bent with old age.