Part 22

By insisting on an impartial administration of justice, Tiberius made enemies among those who were interested in the contrary practice, and there is no doubt that many a senator relieved his feelings by recording instances of such tyranny in his private diary. It is all a question of point of view; our point of view does not allow us to stigmatize a man as a tyrant who steadily worked for the purity of the law courts.

The next recorded transaction in the Senate was of a different nature; the excessive weight of a road and aqueduct had caused a subsidence of the foundations of a Senator’s house, and he had applied to the Senate for compensation; the officials of the Treasury resisted the claim, but Tiberius ordered the value of the house to be paid to the owner. Then follows the inevitable comment: “For he was fond of distributing money in honourable ways, a virtue which he long retained, when he was abandoning all others.” Even this remark is, however, not sufficiently damaging for Tacitus, and he carefully provides that his next statement should be calculated to appeal to a well-known weakness. Propertius Celer asked to be allowed to retire from the Senatorial Order on account of insufficiency of means. Tiberius, on ascertaining that his poverty was inherited, bestowed on him a million sestertii (about £8,500). So far so good; no senator could object to this, but something follows: “When others attempted to get the same relief he ordered them to prove their case to the Senate, harsh even in those things which he did in due form, through his excessive love of strict procedure. For this reason the rest preferred silence and poverty to confession and gratuities.” We shall have to record later on a particularly impudent attempt on the part of an indigent Senator to extort money for the relief of his necessities, and shall find that Tiberius had good reason for insisting that men who claimed the assistance of the Senate should give a full account of their means and of the causes of their poverty; but it is easy to see that the severity of Tiberius would not be popular with the Senate, and that a prejudice could be created against him by giving an example of his strictness in this matter early in his reign. Paterculus, more just than Tacitus, praises Tiberius for the discrimination with which he assisted impoverished Senators.

In the same year there were heavy floods in the Tiber; the lower regions of the city were inundated, many buildings fell, many lives were lost. Asinius Gallus, the second husband of Vipsania, moved that the Sibylline books should be consulted. We are not surprised to hear that Tiberius rejected the motion “on religious no less than practical grounds.” It is an interesting illustration of the curious development of the Italian intellect that these same men who could seriously propose in their solemn assembly to consult the Roman Mother Shipton in a case of this kind should form a bold engineering scheme for dealing with the difficulty. It was suggested, after a committee had reported, that the tributaries which brought the floods into the Tiber should be diverted. The scheme was abandoned, as deputations from the inhabitants of the valleys through which these rivers flowed pointed out that they would suffer serious loss if it were carried out. There were also religious obstacles; these rivers were worshipped, and Tiber himself might object to the proposed diminution of his glorious stream.

We then have a fragment of administration dismissed by Tacitus in a couple of lines without comment. The provinces of Achaia and Macedonia begged to be relieved of the expense of the Senatorial Government and transferred to the Imperial provinces; both of these provinces had suffered in consequence of the Pannonian war. The Imperial administration was less expensive than that of the Senate, not necessarily because the Senatorial Government was corrupt, but because the honours paid to the Senatorial viceroys and their trains were expensive; there was the difference between maintaining a court and paying an official. Adverse comment was in this case impossible, because when Tacitus was writing, the process of removing the distinction between Senatorial and Imperial provinces was in progress. Trajan would hardly have approved of a reactionary comment, such as Tacitus might have been tempted to make. These provinces were restored to the Senate by Claudius.

This notice is followed by a statement and comment in the best Tacitean style: “Drusus (the son of Tiberius) presided at the gladiatorial shows which he had offered in the names of himself and his brother Germanicus, although too easily pleased with cheap bloodshed, a thing which was full of danger to the commonalty, and which his father is said to have reproved. Different reasons were assigned for the Emperor’s own absence from the shows; some said that he disliked a crowd, others alleged his dismal nature and his fear of comparisons, for Augustus had taken part in these events with affability. I should be unwilling to believe that an opportunity was deliberately given to his son of demonstrating his cruelty and exciting unpopularity, though that was also said.”

The connection of thought is not quite obvious, for if the gladiatorial shows were popular, and they certainly were popular, how could Drusus incur unpopularity by presiding? There is unhappily no evidence that the populace of Rome ever objected to bloodshed in the arena, and the president at these shows would be more likely to make himself disliked by checking than by permitting or encouraging the slaughter. Nor again is it easy to see the force of the phrase, “although too easily pleased with cheap bloodshed,” unless there is a reference implied to the pleasure which Drusus was said to have taken in the executions of the mutineers in Pannonia, an inexpensive pleasure compared with that afforded by the fights of trained gladiators; the word “although” suggests that Drusus could get his bloodshed more cheaply than by giving gladiatorial shows.

Again, if Drusus was wrong in patronizing these shows, how could Tiberius also be wrong in refusing to be present? As a matter of fact, one of the many points in the character of Tiberius which commands our respect is his aversion to the disgusting spectacles of all kinds in which the Roman people delighted. But considerations of this kind did not weigh with Tacitus; he was not interested in being consistent; he found in the memoirs adverse interpretations of the conduct of Tiberius, and he impartially repeated them, though they were in contradiction with his previous condemnation of Drusus.

A riot in the theatre was the next event of importance. We shall have on a later occasion to discuss the position of the theatres at some length. It is enough to record that on the present occasion opinions were given in the Senate to the effect that the Prætors should be allowed to flog actors. A tribune interposed his veto according to an old constitutional practice, and was roundly abused by Asinius Gallus for doing so. “Tiberius preserved silence, for he conceded to the Senate such phantoms of liberty.” However, the veto of the tribune was allowed, “because the sainted Augustus had once declared that actors were exempt from the rods, and it was a matter of conscience with Tiberius not to infringe his utterances.” The further proceedings in the Senate on this occasion throw a curious light on the manners of the time. It was decreed that Senators should not enter the houses of the pantomimists, that the Equestrians should not attend them when they went out, that they should not give performances except in the theatre, and that the Prætors should have power to punish the extravagance of the spectators with banishment.

Then the Spaniards were allowed to build a temple to Augustus at Tarragona, thus setting an example to all the provinces. The people of Tarragona had not hitherto been fortunate in their worship of Augustus; they had set up an altar to him in his lifetime, and soon afterwards announced to him radiantly that a palm had grown from it. “It is easy to see that you do not often sacrifice,” the old man had remarked.

Petitions were presented against the tax of one per cent. on auctions. Tiberius declared in an edict that the military chest depended on that source of income, and added that the burden of the army was too great for the State unless the soldiers served for twenty years; thus the reduction to sixteen years demanded by the mutineers was set aside.

The two concluding chapters of the first book of the _Annals_ are also remarkable in their unfairness or want of perspicacity; and yet the grievances suggested by them have been alluded to again and again by historians of repute without criticism and as real grievances, for it is the melancholy fate of most students of Tacitus to lose all sense of consistency.

“Poppæus Sabinus was continued in the governorship of Moesia, Achaia and Macedonia being added to the province. This too was one of the ways of Tiberius, to prolong the periods of office and to keep most of the officials in command of the same armies or at the head of the same jurisdictions to the ends of their lives. Various reasons are given. Some said that through mere distaste for fresh exertion he treated appointments once made as eternal, others that he was envious and wanted few to enjoy power; some think that selections were a matter of serious anxiety to him because he was cunning; he had little regard for eminent virtues, and again he disliked vices; he feared danger to himself from worthy men, public disgrace from bad men. At length he went so far in this kind of dilatoriness that he assigned provinces to some men, whom he did not intend to leave the city.”

The frequent change of Governors, Generals, and other officials had been the curse of the Republican Government. Again and again it had been necessary, when serious work was to be done, to lengthen the limited terms of office allowed by the old senatorial constitution; the old arrangements had not been made in the interests of the provincials or the administration of public business, but so that the members of the oligarchy at Rome might share and share alike in the plunder of the conquered countries, and that no single one of them should acquire sufficient money or power to set himself above the laws. When the old arrangements were rigorously carried out, no Roman Governor had more than a transitory glance of the province which he occupied; he himself and the train by which he was attended devoted their energies to making as much as they could in the short time at their disposal; the evil had been pointed out again and again; and as Tacitus has himself told us, the burden even of the reformed senatorial government was such that two impoverished provinces begged to be relieved of it. The policy of Tiberius was the only sound one for the provinces, and the sole objection to it was an objection which he, if he had been a suspicious ruler, might have felt to be a strong one. There was a danger that the men who stayed in their provinces long enough to feel their strength might be tempted to set up an independent government. This danger Tiberius preferred to risk, and that he did so acquits him of the charge conveyed in the insinuation that he was jealous of the enjoyment of power by a number of persons. Eventually, as we shall see later on, he made the Governors of provinces Secretaries of State for the countries which they governed; they did not leave Rome, but were the channels through which the business of the provinces was conducted at Rome. The language which Tacitus here uses is not the language of an experienced official working under Trajan with the records of a century of the Empire behind him, but the language of a reactionary of the reign of Tiberius. The breed of Romans who could see nothing in greater Rome but a field for plundering in the name of governing never quite died out; even in Trajan’s reign there were probably more aspirants than offices, and many discontented men, who thought that there were not sufficient opportunities of promotion. Tiberius certainly was careful in his selection of the great officials, but his caution was in the interests of the unhappy provincials. There were doubtless many noble Romans in his day who believed themselves to be possessed of the eminent virtues necessary to a provincial governor, but who somehow failed to secure promotion.

Tacitus on this occasion, as on many others, skilfully substitutes contemporary comment for contemporary evidence. All that he really tells us is that some of the contemporaries of Tiberius disliked his policy; what he wishes to tell us is that the government of Tiberius was radically bad, and that his contemporaries were right in saying so.

The last chapter deals with the elections of the Consuls, a subject which Tacitus professes to find obscure. The reality of election by the Comitia Centuriata had already been abolished; it had become a mere form, and nobody noticed its abolition; Augustus practically appointed the Consuls; Tiberius seems to have wished the Senate to elect them, but found that there were practical difficulties. After mentioning various ways in which Tiberius secured the election of his own candidates, Tacitus says: “Generally he discoursed to the effect that those men only were candidates whose names he had given to the Consuls, but that others were at liberty to stand if they had confidence in their own influence or deserts. This was plausible enough in words, but meaningless or insidious in fact, and the more it was involved in the appearance of liberty, likely to break out into the more deadly slavery.”

This imposing malediction ends the book. As a matter of fact the Consular Office was by this time purely ornamental.

XIV

The Case of Scribonius Libo

Enough has been said in the previous chapter to show the bias under which Tacitus wrote, and the dexterity with which he substituted inferences and insinuations for evidence. It must, however, be conceded to Tacitus that the operation of the “Lex Majestatis” was attended by many and serious evils; for those evils Tiberius and the men of his time were not responsible. The period was one of transition in most departments of social organization, and especially in all matters connected with the administration of justice. Under the Republic every head of a great family was in theory, and even in practice, a skilled lawyer; there was no legal profession. The Prætors who presided in the law courts were not specially trained judges; any Senator might become a Prætor, and preside in one of the law courts for his year of office; similarly any Senator might be called upon to take his place as a juryman, and give his verdict after listening to the evidence and the speeches of counsel. In course of time the Equestrian Order shared this duty with Senators.

Similarly there was no such thing as a professional advocate; every Senator was bound to plead on behalf of his own clients, and no Senator could recover fees as an advocate; indeed, advocates were strictly forbidden to ask for fees. The relation between the advocate and his client was held to be a personal one, not professional. The word client still in use reminds us of this relation; we have lost the corresponding word “patron,” which Tacitus and Suetonius employ precisely in the technical sense of advocate. Such a system could not be maintained under the increased complexity of life caused by the expansion of Rome, and the professional advocate was inevitably evolved; “patrons” who were noticeably successful in winning their cases naturally attracted “clients”; and hence we have even in the Republican period men occupying positions not easily distinguishable from those of our own barristers, and in virtue of various legal fictions actually making large fortunes by the exercise of their profession. Cicero and Hortensius were eminent examples of the non-professional and yet professional advocate.

The fact that there was no organized and officially recognized body of men to plead in the law courts caused little inconvenience in private cases. A man who defended the interests of a friend, or brought an action in his name, was not in an invidious position, even though by well known evasions of the law he received a consideration for his friendly services. Again so long as the senatorial constitution existed, the prosecution of offenders against the State was an honourable public duty, and young men took their first step in a political career by conducting a State prosecution or defending the delinquent. Such prosecutions were political rather than legal; they were episodes in a never-ending party struggle; they resembled the impeachments and attainders of our own parliamentary history. The introduction of the monarch into the Roman Constitution created a state of affairs for which the Constitution had not provided; the position of the head of the Government was not defined; it was only gradually and by a slow process of development that his person and his good name were protected from attack. We do not possess the text of the Julian laws passed in the reign of Augustus, whose object was in part to protect the first person in the State, and to make offences against his person and reputation offences against the majesty of the State; but we know enough of their nature to be certain that Augustus with all his wisdom found an unhappy solution of a real difficulty. The Roman Republic was not provided with a Public Prosecutor, nor with law officers of the Crown, nor could Augustus be provided with such protectors; he could neither through his agents nor in person bring actions against offenders under the “Lex Majestatis,” for in such a case the verdict was a foregone conclusion. In order, therefore, that such cases should be spontaneously brought before the courts, it was enacted that the prosecutor, if successful, should receive all or part of the fine. Men were thus tempted not only to get up cases, but to provide that the evidence should lead to a confiscation of the goods of the defendant; the greater the penalty, the greater the reward of the prosecutor. Speculations in promoting conspiracy and then informing were the natural result. It is easy at this distance of time to condemn the system, and easier still to forget the long growth of habits and prescriptions which have rendered trials for treason and constructive treason and for libelling the Sovereign almost obsolete in our own country. In our happy ignorance of the conditions which made such processes possible and necessary we may be tempted to ask with surprise why Tiberius, if he were really a wise and moderate man, did not abolish or amend the “Lex Majestatis.” The hostile writers Tacitus and Suetonius tell us repeatedly that Tiberius never made use of this law, or of any law, as a means of filling his treasury. The examples of prosecutions under this law given by Tacitus almost without exception, and invariably up to A.D. 30, show Tiberius moderating the zeal of the prosecutors, and lightening the sentences pronounced by the Senate; in fact, the abuses of the law are perpetrated by the prosecutors and the Senate, not by Tiberius; and the Emperor may reasonably have held that as it was always in his power to check the abuses of the law, its amendment, a matter of great difficulty, might be left to time, and that in accordance with Roman custom the desired result would be achieved better by an accumulation of precedents than by a formal enactment.

The case of Scribonius Libo is interesting, less as affecting the character of Tiberius than as throwing a light upon the manners of the time. Tacitus does not provide us with the formal indictment, nor with the evidence; he is pleased to think that the case affords a remarkable illustration of the horrors of the “Lex Majestatis,” and omits or insinuates at discretion. The case as represented by him seems to have been rather trivial, and more trivial to us than to the Romans of that time, because we no longer believe, or believe that we no longer believe in magic.

Drusus Scribonius Libo was a relative, though not a very near relative, to members of the Julian house. Scribonia, his great-great-aunt, was the first real wife of Augustus and the mother of Julia; he was therefore a distant cousin to Agrippina and her brothers. His grandmother, the niece of this Scribonia, was wife to Sextus Pompeius, and thus the young man was a descendant of the great Pompeius. Tacitus speaks of him as a young man at the time of the prosecution, but this epithet is used by the Roman writers technically of men between the ages of seventeen and forty-six, and is therefore applied to men past their callow youth, such as Germanicus and Drusus; and as Libo had been Prætor, he was certainly old enough to manage his own affairs. Libo, according to Tacitus, fell into the hands of a Senator named Firmius Catus, who encouraged him in vicious courses and lent him money, in order to become fully possessed of his secrets. This same treacherous adviser stimulated his ambition, and reminded him of the splendour of his ancestry; he urged him to listen to the promises of Chaldæans, to consult the mysterious rites of magians and interpreters of dreams. When Firmius had sufficiently implicated his victim in doubtful proceedings, he asked for an interview with Tiberius, using an Equestrian, Flaccus Vescularius, a very intimate friend of the Emperor’s, as intermediary. Tiberius refused the interview, saying, according to Tacitus, that he could get any further information through Flaccus. “Meanwhile” he made Libo prætor, frequently invited him to dinner, discovered no irritation either by look or word, and “preferred to know all his deeds and words, although he could have stopped them.”

In other words, the folly of Libo having been brought to the notice of Tiberius, he paid no very serious attention, and endeavoured to demonstrate the error of his ways by admitting him to familiar intercourse, for vague though the historian’s “meanwhile” may be taken to be, there is no improbability in assuming that the first experiment of Catus was foiled by the Emperor’s common sense.

The next stage in the proceedings was more exciting. Libo endeavoured to bribe one Junius to call up the spirits of the dead by means of incantations. This person, probably a professional necromancer, gave information to Fulcinius Trio, a professional prosecutor so far as such a thing existed at the time. “The ability of Trio was well known among the accusers of those days, and his eager love of notoriety.” Trio did not allow the grass to grow under his feet; he held a “plump juicy offender” in his hands, and was determined to make the best of him; he went to the consuls and demanded a hearing before the Senate. Libo, for his part, was not idle; on hearing of his peril he put on mourning and, accompanied by ladies of rank, visited the palaces of the great, implored his family connexions, demanded the aid of their voices to encounter his danger; but all refused; their excuses were different, but fear was the real reason for all. Fear of what? Tacitus leaves us to infer that Tiberius was the object of dread, but even if we allow that the historian was correct in assigning fear as the motive of abstention from assisting Libo, there was another possible cause of fear. The black art was no laughing matter to the men and women of those days, and a fashionable gentleman, who was suddenly discovered to have been engaged in an attempt to raise the dead, was an awe-inspiring object in spite of his train of aristocratic ladies.