Part 25

We may take as an example the case of Cappadocia. This country was annexed by Germanicus, its native rulers were deposed, and it passed from the status of an allied kingdom to that of a province. It might be anticipated that we should have a record of discussions in the Senate as to the terms upon which this new Province was to be added to the Empire, as to whether it was to be Imperial or Senatorial, as to its probable cost and revenue; but we have nothing of the kind, we have not even the innuendo of a grievance based on the fact that Tiberius fixed its tribute at half the usual amount, and treated it as an Imperial Province from the outset. Similarly the Government of Achaia passed into the hands of the Emperor at the request of the Province itself, without any debate in the Senate, so far as we are informed by Tacitus. Africa was a Senatorial Province; the moment that trouble between the Roman inhabitants and a native prince declared itself, the Senate practically threw the whole responsibility on Tiberius by asking him to nominate a Governor. With all its pretensions, and in spite of all the encouragement given to it by Tiberius to assume the position of an advisory council to the Emperor, if not of a representative assembly of the Empire, the Senate reverted more and more to its old position of a domestic council representing the best families at Rome and attending to little beyond their interests.

It was fortunate for the Empire that Tiberius failed in his attempt to restore the Senate, for no tyranny can be worse than that of the direct government of dependencies by an irresponsible debating society, divided into parties more or less organized, which intrigue abroad to further their interests at home, and the Senate itself showed a sounder political insight than the Emperor in refusing to assume responsibilities for which it was eminently unfit.

If, however, the greater political questions are passed over by Tacitus, some of the minor subjects with which the Senate dealt are not uninteresting; it retained the position of guardian of the public morals, or at the least of the morals of those families of whom it was composed or whose members were employed in the government of the city and Empire. Adultery under the Julian laws passed by Augustus was not a sin but a crime, and we accordingly have some cases in which Roman ladies of high rank are arraigned before the Senate along with their paramours.

The number of these cases is not great, and in comparison with similar cases in our own divorce courts remarkably small, from which we may conclude either that the Senate was a lenient censor of morals, or that the standard of morality was high; it is further possible that the Senate was only called upon to intervene when the family of the culprit had failed in its duty.

Actors seem to have been a source of trouble to the fathers of the city, but it is not altogether certain in what the “licence” of actors consisted. At first sight it might appear that they were guilty merely of a laxity of morals which is not uncommonly attributed, with or without justice, to the theatrical profession, and that the decrees prohibiting Senators and Equestrians from public and private intercourse with actors were directed against purely private scandals; but there is also evidence that the stage occupied to some extent the position of the modern press, and that the licence of the actors consisted in public and private derision of eminent men, and in the exhibition of caricatures, which if not dangerous to public order, were at least offensive. The fragments of references made on the stage to Tiberius, preserved by Suetonius, are sufficient to indicate a freedom of criticism which in our own day would be considered intolerable. Our own habits allow our public men to be caricatured weekly in the comic papers in a manner which is not found equally acceptable in Germany, but lenient though we are in such matters, even Englishmen have failed to tolerate the caricatures of eminent statesmen on the stage, and “the Happy Land,” in which three Cabinet Ministers appeared under their own names, and in a very successful counterfeit presentment of their persons, was modified by the then Lord Chamberlain.

The laughter which greets a successful cartoon in _Punch_, and the prompt recognition which greets a happy allusion to current events, do little to shake a government or to disturb public order, but when the representatives of law and order are held up to ridicule by the unmistakeable gestures of a skilled actor in a large theatre, not only is the effectiveness of ridicule enormously increased, but the conflicting sympathies of the spectators provoke an immediate riot. We have seen that among the business transacted by Tiberius and the Senate in the first year of his reign was the discussion of a proposal to restore to the Prætors the right of beating actors, which had been withdrawn from them by Augustus. The reason for this proposal was an increase of turbulence in the theatres, which had resulted in the deaths of several of the spectators, the murder of some soldiers and a centurion, and even of the commander of a prætorian cohort, who had endeavoured to check the abuse of magistrates from the stage, and the consequent disturbance in the audience. An Italian audience was quick to catch even an undesigned allusion to current events, and allusion by gesture never failed to meet with its response; thus the actors became in a way the mouthpieces of public opinion, and the despotism of the ruling powers was tempered by epigrams in flesh and blood, if not in actual words; parties were formed, distinguished actors were supported by men of rank, not merely from admiration of their professional skill, but because they were in some sense a political power. In the year 23 A.D. Tiberius found himself obliged to draw the attention of the Senate to the continued insolence of the actors, and a decree was passed by which they were banished from Italy. The particular form of dramatic exhibition which called down this severity was that known as the Atellan farce, which had long been used for the purposes of political satire by educated men. It had been originally a performance in the Oscan dialect; then what we should call “topical songs” had been introduced in Latin. There had been a period during which the Atellan plays had been considered eminently respectable, and men of rank had taken part in them without losing dignity; but either the character of the performance had degenerated, or the sentence of expulsion was less general than the words of Tacitus would imply, and was restricted to men whom we should not consider professional actors, and who had adopted this way of expressing their criticisms of the government.

These performances were given both in public and in private houses. The former might well be restrained as leading to riots; the objection to the latter was undoubtedly the open ridicule of the government; for the Atellan farce, which was originally chiefly spoken, had adopted the procedure of the mimics who acted entirely in dumb show, and it is not difficult to imagine the roars of laughter which would greet the appearance of Tiberius himself and other eminent personages upon the private stages of the Roman nobility.

In penalizing actors Tiberius in fact checked the liberty of the press, and destroyed whatever popularity he had hitherto enjoyed. The Romans were passionately devoted to acting, and never forgave the man who discountenanced their favourite amusement. There was no readier road to popularity at Rome than an exhibition of actors or gladiators. Cæsar and Augustus had both encouraged the taste, and in the later Republican days profusion in giving treats of this kind had been a necessary step in the ladder by which political eminence was reached.

The wisdom of Tiberius in thus checking the expression of popular feeling may be open to question, for we are not in a position to judge how far the passions excited by the actors constituted a real danger to public order, but the line which he took with reference to another kind of legislation is indisputably wise.

Sumptuary laws are a well-known weakness of governments. We are by no means rid of them yet, as is testified by the importance of the temperance party in England. The Pagans of Greece and Italy were no less eager than the Christians of the Middle Ages, or the Puritans of the Reformation, to prescribe for men how they should dress, or how they should eat, and the history of the Roman Senate offers many instances of attempts to enforce moderation of living by stringent laws. The Senate of Tiberius had not forgotten its old traditions; in the year 16 A.D. the subject of increasing luxury had been discussed in the Senate, and the Emperor had evaded action by stating that the matter would be attended to when the period of the Censorship came round. Apparently nothing was done, for in the year 22 A.D. the Ædiles drew the attention of the Senate to the continued and indeed increasing expenditure upon silken robes, household plate, and the pleasures of the table; new laws were demanded, and vigour in administering the old laws. Even on the evidence of Tacitus Tiberius himself was moderate in his household expenditure; Suetonius indeed reproaches him with niggardliness in this matter, saying that he would serve up the remainder of a feast at a second day’s entertainment with the observation “that the part had the same qualities as the whole.” His personal example was entirely in the direction of temperate living, and it was from no want of sympathy with the worthy aspirations of the Senate that he refused to legislate in the matter. Tacitus has preserved for us the letter which he addressed to the Senate on the subject; it is a document sufficiently remarkable to be given in full.

“Although, Conscript Fathers, it is perhaps more expedient that on all other occasions I should be asked in your presence my opinion of what is good for the State, and reply in the same way, still on the present occasion it was better that my eyes should be withdrawn, for if you should openly note the faces of anxiety of those who were involved in the charge of infamous luxury, I should myself see them, and as it were catch them in the act. If indeed our energetic Ædiles had taken counsel with me beforehand, I am inclined to think that I should have advised them to abstain from interfering with vices so firmly rooted, so vigorous, rather than make it publicly manifest that we are too weak to contend with these abuses. Well--they have done their duty as I should wish other magistrates also to do theirs; I could neither be silent with honour, nor was it expedient that I should be the first to speak, seeing that I am neither Ædile, nor Prætor, nor Consul. Something more, something higher is demanded of the Prince, and whereas each individual earns the reward of his own good actions, upon the Prince alone is visited the odium incurred by the bad actions of all.

“Now what shall I first try to check and to cut down to the ancient measures? The boundless extent of country estates? The numbers of native and alien slaves? The weight of gold and silver plate? The marvellous bronzes and pictures? The rich materials common to male and female dress? Or again those peculiarly feminine forms of luxury owing to which our money is transferred to foreign and even hostile races for the sake of mere stones? I am perfectly well aware that these are things with which fault is found at dinner parties and social entertainments, and that there is a cry for interference; but when a law is passed, penalties are assigned, and those same guardians of the public virtue will not then fail to clamour that the State is being turned upside down, that any magnificent man is threatened with ruin, that every one is liable to prosecution. And yet it is only by severe remedies that long-standing diseases of the body can be checked, and the fever of the mind at once corrupt and corrupting can only be quenched by remedies no less violent than the lusts with which it burns. All the laws which were discovered by our ancestors, all those that were passed by the sainted Augustus, have added confidence to luxury, the former because they have been forgotten, the latter, which is much worse, because they have been abrogated by contempt. For should a man wish to do a thing which has not yet been forbidden, he would be in fear of a prohibition, but if he transgresses a known prohibition, there is no longer any fear, or any sense of shame. Now why did frugal living at one time prevail? Because every man imposed restraint on himself, because we were then the citizens of a single city; there was not even temptation for us when our dominion was confined to Italy. It was through our foreign victories that we learned to waste the property of others, by our civil wars to waste our own. And what a small thing it is to which our attention is called by the Ædiles! What a trifle if it is compared with our other responsibilities! Yes, nobody bethinks himself that Italy is dependent upon external resources, that the sustenance of the Roman people is exposed every day to the uncertainties of the winds and waves!

“And should the resources of the Provinces fail to come to the rescue of our landowners, and slaves, and farms, our own forests, forsooth, our own estates will protect us! This is the anxiety, Conscript Fathers, which falls upon the shoulders of the Prince, and if he refuses to attend to this, the State will be dragged down to perdition. For those other difficulties a remedy can be found in our own conduct; may a sense of honour improve ourselves, necessity restrain the poor, satiety the rich. Or if any one of the magistrates holds out a prospect of so much industry, such rigour as to be able to contend with these abuses, I both commend him, and admit that I am thereby relieved of part of my burden. But if they are willing enough to demonstrate abuses, and then, when they have obtained the credit of this action, stir animosities, and hand them over to me, believe me, Conscript Fathers, that I too have no taste for unpopularity; tasks involving serious, and generally unjust, unpopularity I will undertake for the good of the State. I rightly protest against being required to incur trivial and useless causes of offence likely to be profitable neither to myself nor to you.”

The language of Tacitus leaves it uncertain as to whether these words are the actual letter of Tiberius, or only an epitome of the real letter; but the sense, if not the form, is clearly the Emperor’s own. In his view of the inefficiency of sumptuary legislation Tiberius was far in advance of his time; no law can in these matters do for the individual what he refuses to do for himself. Indirectly Tiberius reproaches the Senate for their individual complicity in the offences against which legislation was demanded; he also reproaches those zealous magistrates, the Ædiles, whose business it was to look after the markets and repress extravagant expenditure, for their previous neglect of duty; he also points out that there was an abundance of laws to meet the offence, and an equally abundant neglect of those laws. The constitutional position which Tiberius takes up is also noteworthy; it was not for him to anticipate the action of the ordinary magistrates; on the other hand, the greater cares of the Empire are his, and these domestic concerns can be left to those officials whom the constitution provided for the purpose.

Throughout the letter we detect a profound contempt for the Senate, as being a body ever ready to talk, but never ready to act, and we are therefore prepared to believe that there is some truth in the story which tells us that Tiberius seldom left the Senate House without exclaiming, “Men made for slavery!” We also see that Tiberius was sensitive to public opinion, and was not prepared to face unpopularity except with good reason. The implied warning against the folly of passing laws which it is impossible to enforce shows sound statesmanship; the vice of clamouring for fresh laws in order to check offences which have been already provided for by old ones, and of invoking the aid of legislation in matters where good example and sound conduct on the part of individuals are more effective, is a vice which has survived the Roman Senate.

The result of the debate was fresh energy on the part of the Ædiles, but Tacitus says that it was not until the reign of Vespasian that there was any marked improvement, that Emperor being himself averse to luxury. As, however, Tiberius was no less distinguished by plainness of living, it is more probable that the effect was produced by a general equalizing of fortunes among the well-to-do.

While Tiberius thus refused to take upon himself the responsibilities of the Senate in domestic matters, he was equally little inclined to allow them to throw upon him the burden of administering their own Provinces, and carefully referred deputations from the Senatorial Provinces to the Consuls; he punished a private servant of his own who had the management of his estates in Asia, a Senatorial Province, for attempting to exercise powers other than those of the business agent of a private person.

We may remark that the care of feeding the city, which we should have expected to be in the department of the Senate, was really in the hands of the Emperor, who held Egypt in his own exclusive management for that special purpose; nor was Tiberius a sufficiently enlightened economist not to attempt to control the price of corn.

Another subject which from time to time still taxed the energies of the Senate was the prevalence of alien rites, and especially of all forms of magic and divination.

It has been held that the Senate and people of Rome were particularly free from religious intolerance; their behaviour in this matter has been favourably contrasted with that of Christian governments, and there are many who believe that the Romans never interfered with religious observances till they adopted an attitude of exceptional malignity towards the professors of Christianity. Such a view does not, however, correctly represent the facts of the case. Comparatively early in its history the Roman Senate had proceeded with considerable severity against those who were infected with that strange hysterical epidemic which spread over Europe under the guise of the worship of Bacchus, and in the year 19 A.D. we find the Senate passing decrees to repress Egyptian and Jewish religious rites. According to Suetonius the devotees were ordered to burn their vestments and other religious furniture, while he and Tacitus agree in telling us that four thousand freedmen “infected with that superstition” who were of fitting age for military service were sent off to Sardinia to check brigandage there, “and if they should perish in the unwholesome climate, it was not a serious loss.” “The rest,” according to Tacitus, “were to withdraw from Italy unless they abandoned their profane observances before a fixed date.” The language of Tacitus does not distinguish between Jew and Egyptian so far as religion was concerned, for though he mentions both races, he only alludes to one superstition.

The persecution of Jews on religious grounds is thus anterior to Christianity, and the persecutions were not confined to Jews and Egyptians; Chaldæans were included, and as we have already seen, after the case of feather-headed Scribonius Libo Magians and “mathematicians” were also expelled from Italy.

In these persecutions Tiberius is not directly responsible, he left the matter in the hands of the Senate. Sardinia was a Senatorial Province, and he apparently saw no reason for interference. Italy was not, however, swept clear of “mathematicians” and other persons under the ban of the Senate, with whom in fact the head of the executive was probably in private sympathy, for Thrasyllus the “mathematician” had been his constant attendant since the days of the retirement at Rhodes. Decrees for the expulsion of these undesirables recur under subsequent Emperors.

The subject is a complicated one, and the more complicated to us because men so diverse according to our conceptions are included in the same ban. We do not know much of the Chaldæans and Magians, but we know something of the Jews, and we are surprised to find them classed with Egyptians and subjected to the same penalties as Chaldæans, Magians and “mathematicians,” and we further ask ourselves why the Senate, which countenanced the worship of the Great Mother and other alien deities, assumed an attitude of intolerance towards the Jews.

The attitude of the Jews towards other religions was essentially different from that of the priests of Cybele or any other Pagan divinity. Jupiter or Mars or Vesta could tolerate the temples of other Gods, and the respect paid to other Gods--it was of the essence of polytheism to multiply divinities--but the Jew declared that there was only one God; his God was not one of many Gods, but the only God, and the worship of other Gods was wrong and monstrous. Thus to the Roman Senate the observances of the Jews were actually “profane”; they involved hostility to existing religions, and toleration of the Jews was therefore impossible for the orthodox Pagan. Again, it is important to remember that the Jews at this period were not shut up in ghettos, and visibly separated from the rest of the community; whatever differences in dress and customs distinguished them from other inhabitants of the cities in which they dwelt were not peculiar to them; the Syrian, the Egyptian, the Gaul, men of many other nationalities wore their distinctive dress and practised their national religions in every populous city of the Empire. The Jews might for convenience live in the neighbourhood of a synagogue, and thus give portions of the cities which they inhabited the aspect of a Jewish quarter; but such separate residence was not enforced upon them; they moved freely among the people; many of them were in positions of trust, their princes, the Herods, were on intimate terms with the Imperial family, and their young men took part in the diversions of the Roman youth; among them were ardent proselytisers, their peculiar doctrines were well known to the educated, and though Horace might laugh at their credulity, his sneer indicates how well they were known. The unhappy four thousand young men who were sent to Sardinia were either freedmen or the sons of freedmen, a fact which shows that they, or their fathers, had been the trusted servants of Romans. But the Jews were no more homogeneous then than now; if they had their Rothschilds, they had also their Jews of mean streets, their “vagabond Jews, exorcists”; and if the great financier was the trusted friend of an Emperor, the small moneylender of the slums was as much detested in ancient Rome as he is in modern London. There were Jews who were deservedly respected for their great intellectual ability, for the purity of their lives, for the dignity of their religion; but there were also Jews whose disreputable callings and mean habits involved at least a section of their race in such contempt as to lead Tacitus to contemplate with satisfaction their extinction in the fever-haunted swamps of Sardinia. We should, however, be on our guard against attributing to the contemporaries of Tiberius the same degree of animosity against the Jews which was felt by the contemporaries of Trajan; for, in spite of the sweeping decrees of the Senate, the Jews steadily advanced in importance, and the anti-Semitic sentiment of Tacitus was evoked not only by the disreputable section of the chosen people, but also by the men who, as members of the Imperial household, had a large share in the administration of the State.