Part 27

If Senators of ancient descent were disgusted at the position held by Sejanus, the family of the Emperor were even more so. Drusus, a hot-tempered man, is said on one occasion to have struck him, an incident which may well have occurred when Drusus was a little boy or petulant youth, and been turned to good account by sensation-loving writers of memoirs. Agrippina could not contain herself in the presence of this new oppressor of the children of Germanicus, the great-grandchildren of the sainted Augustus, and so forth. These poor innocents were, in her excited imagination, the victims of the ambitions of Sejanus; that they were not from the moment of their birth of an age to be entrusted with the conduct of affairs did not enter into her considerations.

Drusus died after an illness of some duration. Dio tells us that his constitution had been impaired by intemperance and other excesses, and there is other evidence that he had been a man of pleasure as well as a man of business. A speech of his is recorded to the effect that as long as he paid proper attention to his public duties he was at liberty to enjoy his leisure as he pleased. He did not share his father’s taste for literary pursuits or scientific research; but Dio informs us that Tiberius was really attached to his son, and insinuations to the contrary are probably derived from tainted sources, from the private diaries of those to whom it was an axiom that Tiberius hated those whom he was in duty bound to love, and loved those only whom he ought to have hated. Even Tacitus, however unintentionally, supplies evidence that Tiberius was much shaken by his son’s death, for though he tells us that Tiberius did not allow the illness or death of Drusus to interfere with the discharge of his public duties--a piece of stoical conduct quite in accordance with the character of time-honoured Roman models--he also tells us that the Emperor spoke at the time of resigning his office to the Consuls or some other. According to Tacitus, the Emperor also addressed a long speech to the Senate, in which he deplored the extreme old age of Livia, and his own declining years still unprovided with grandchildren. This latter statement was not correct, for Drusus had left a son, a second Tiberius, unless indeed we are to assume that the Emperor did not think he was at liberty to count a descendant who was still too young to be introduced to the Senate. We are further told that Tiberius then begged that the children of Germanicus, “the one consolation of his present misfortune,” might be brought into the Senate house, that the Consuls went out, and after encouraging the lads, placed them in front of the Emperor. He took them by the hand, and said: “Conscript Fathers, I entrusted these orphans to the care of their uncle, and begged him, although he had children of his own, to cherish them as he would cherish his own blood, and own them, and educate them for himself and posterity. Now that Drusus has been taken from us, I address my petition to you, and I implore you, in the presence of our gods and our country, to adopt, to guide the great-grandchildren of Augustus, descendants of such a splendid stock, and to fulfil your duty and my own. These worthy counsellors, Nero and Drusus, will be your parents. You have been born in such a position that your good or bad conduct is a matter of public concern.”

The funeral of Drusus was conducted with unusual pomp; the whole line of the Julians back to Æneas appeared in effigy in the procession, all the Alban kings, Romulus, the Sabine nobility, Attus Clausus, and the rest of the famous Claudians. The magnificence of the Imperial family in both branches was thus emphasized.

The death of Drusus, in fact, left Tiberius in much the same position as Augustus had been left by the death of Caius Cæsar. Neither the Claudian nor the Julian lines were represented by men of an age to lead the State. It is true that the brother of Germanicus, the future Emperor Claudius, was of mature age and in full enjoyment of such faculties as he possessed, but he had long been consigned to a private life, apparently with his own consent. The men who had worked with Tiberius all his life, Marcus Lepidus, Asinius Gallus, Lucius Piso, the Prefect of the city, and others, were now of very advanced age. Sejanus was the only administrator who held a position at all comparable to that which Tiberius had held during the later years of Augustus, but there was this important difference; Tiberius, apart from his personal merits and long experience, had been the representative of the old Roman aristocracy; his succession did no violence to the prejudices of the restored Senate. Sejanus, on the other hand, was a new man; if he represented any particular party, it was the Equestrians, the old enemies of senatorial pretensions; his exaltation was a victory of the officials over the survivors of the hereditary aristocracy.

The services which Sejanus had done to the State were not of that brilliant character which would seem to justify his promotion; he had not distinguished himself by conspicuous military service on the frontiers, though his uncle, Junius Blæsus, had dealt successfully with the mutineers early in the reign of Tiberius, and had more recently earned a triumph by a series of successful campaigns in northern Africa, and Sejanus may have enjoyed a reflected glory from these achievements. It is true that there may be a conspiracy of silence as to his exploits, but even Paterculus, his admirer, has nothing definite to record, and praises him in general terms only as the capable assistant of Tiberius.

It is probable that his merits were those of a good organizer, merits which would be known to those who were working at the centre of affairs, and would be appreciated by Tiberius himself at their true value, but would escape general attention, for the waywardness of human judgement is such that years of patient faithful and laborious devotion to the public service often fail to secure recognition, and a moment of victory weighs more in the public opinion than many hours spent in organizing the forces by which that victory is obtained.

The one great work of Sejanus has, quite undeservedly, involved his name in obloquy. He organized the Prætorian guards, and collected that portion of them who were on duty at Rome in barracks. The Prætorian guards constituted the home army of Italy; they were not only the bodyguard of the Emperor. Indeed, it seems that in the time of Augustus the Emperor’s bodyguard was a selected troop of Germans, the Swiss guards of the Pope being thus curiously anticipated by the first Emperor. The organization of the Prætorians was slightly different from that of the rest of the army; they were divided not into legions--or, as we should say, regiments--of about 6,000 men, but into cohorts (the cohort, or battalion, ordinarily consisted of 600 men, but a Prætorian cohort numbered 1,000). In other words, the home army was divided into units available by their size for garrison purposes. These men received higher pay and better allowances than the legionaries, and were, in fact, the pick of the service. Everything was done that could be done to attach them to the person of the Emperor and to distinguish them from the rest of the army.

The mutinies in Pannonia and on the Rhine had indicated a weak spot in the organization of the Empire. How if the mutineers had been successful, if Germanicus had not resisted their wish to make him Emperor? They would have marched upon Rome. It was clearly necessary that Italy should be provided with a sufficient force to defend the seat of government from its own armies and to demonstrate the inevitable failure of any attempt from the Provinces to overturn the civil power. It was probably considerations of this nature which impelled Tiberius to give careful attention to the organization of the Prætorians, and he doubtless considered himself fortunate in being able to entrust this important work to a capable officer of whose fidelity he was well assured.

The absence of barracks had proved a source of disorder; the Prætorians had been scattered in lodgings throughout the city and other towns. Not only was their discipline thus rendered a matter of difficulty, but their sense of corporate unity was impaired, and the language used of them inclines us to the supposition that so far from being an adequate police force, they were not infrequently themselves the source of disturbances in the streets. In order to correct these abuses, Sejanus built a large camp just outside the walls of Rome; it occupied the site of the well-known Pincian gardens. The force thus organized numbered twelve thousand men--three so-called Urban cohorts, nine Prætorian. The men were carefully chosen from the regions adjacent to the city, or from the ancient Latin colonies; care was taken to give them a specially Italian character.

The distinction between Urban and Prætorian cohorts, coupled with the statement of Suetonius that Tiberius placed garrisons throughout Italy, while there is no mention in Tacitus of any legion told off to the Italian service, suggests that the camp of the Prætorians at Rome only accommodated those cohorts which were on duty at the capital. It was the headquarters of the whole force, but was not habitually occupied by the whole force. It seems to have been felt that even the Prætorians were not strong enough by themselves to defend Italy in case of emergency, for there was a further provision in the shape of an arrangement with Cotys, the King of Thrace, by which he was bound to keep a force ready, if called upon, to defend northern Italy at the dangerous corner of the Adriatic. Sejanus undoubtedly showed capacity as organizing commander-in-chief in Italy, and Tiberius felt deeply the need for this assistance. He knew that the defence of the Empire was inadequate; he knew that the revenue appropriated to that defence was also inadequate, and it was for this reason that he habitually prided himself upon solving difficulties with the frontier princes by diplomacy rather than by an appeal to arms. He was thus prepared to be grateful to a man who could find a means of increasing the efficiency of the home forces without adding to their numbers. Tiberius had, in fact, serious misgivings as to the quality of the troops. Addressing the Senate early in A.D. 23, he told them that the supply of voluntary soldiers was short, and that where the numbers were adequate the morale of the men was unsatisfactory, because the recruits were generally impoverished and homeless men. Apparently, compulsory service, except in the case of special agreements with recently conquered territories, such as the Thracian kings, had been allowed to fall into abeyance, and Tiberius talked of visiting the Provinces in order to revive the compulsory levies. It is not uninteresting to note that the organizers of the Roman Empire had to meet some of our own difficulties. Men would not enlist who had anything better to do; they had, as we have seen, the further artificial difficulty that they could not draw soldiers from the working classes, who were slaves.

Tacitus and his authorities, keeping their eyes fixed as usual upon Rome, do not tell us what arrangements were made for the rest of Italy, but it is not probable that the use of the barrack system was confined to the capital; the same cause will have everywhere been followed by the same results, and have demanded the same remedy. The innovation was an important one, for though the legions on active service, or in disturbed districts or imperfectly subjugated countries, lived in permanent camps, and though the military colonies in Italy had had something of the same character, a permanent standing army with permanent barracks was a new thing.

The arrangement at first met with universal approval. The towns were relieved of the presence of disorderly soldiers in the streets, and on the occasion of a riot the soldiers could be depended on to act together and preserve order; they were not united by various ties of familiarity with the rioters.

The fact that a new force had been created which could be used to coerce the Government escaped notice at first, and Sejanus was held to be a public benefactor.

He further achieved some measure of popularity by his energy and skill in stopping the spread of a conflagration which originated in the theatre of Pompeius, and the grateful Senate voted that his statue, magnificently gilded, should be set up in the place where he had saved the lives of the citizens.

When Drusus died Tiberius was sixty-five years of age. Nothing had occurred to shake his confidence in Sejanus. At home and abroad the Government seemed to be strong and settled, and the Emperor felt that he was at liberty to withdraw himself from any but the most urgent public business. Tacitus and the authorities whom he followed accused Tiberius, with their customary animosity, of mere hypocrisy when he talked of abdicating; they forgot that he had once before retired from public life, and only been brought back to it with difficulty, and that, in accepting the cares of the Empire, he had expressed a hope that the Senate would one day allow him a period of rest in his old age. From this time he, in fact, began tentatively to absent himself from Rome and to avoid public functions. Eventually, in A.D. 26, he finally withdrew to the island of Capreæ, and though he sometimes approached the city, never entered it again. Meanwhile Sejanus acted as his Regent at Rome.

We are now approaching the great tragedy of the reign of Tiberius, a tragedy whose details will never be made clear unless some happy investigator in the libraries of a monastery or the sands of Egypt should recover for us the missing books and chapters of Tacitus, and other authors whose works we have lost.

Though after the death of Drusus Tiberius appeared less frequently in public, he still conducted business in the Senate, and even after he had definitely withdrawn from Rome occasionally appeared in the vicinity of the city. In the year 27 A.D. a temporary wooden theatre, constructed by a speculator at Fidenæ, not far outside the walls of Rome, collapsed, involving in its ruins no less than twenty-five thousand persons. This disaster was almost immediately followed by a fire on the Cælian Hill, a crowded quarter of Rome. On both occasions the Emperor gave lavish assistance from his private purse, and promoted measures likely to prevent the recurrence of such catastrophes. He continued to transact the business which appertained to what we should call the Foreign Office of the Empire, and on all important occasions communicated with the Senate by letter, showing in such communications, at least up to the year 31 A.D., no abatement of his former ability; but he did, in fact, withdraw his attention from the details of government, and allowed the conduct of the legal processes in the Senate to pass into the hands of Sejanus.

Sejanus, so far as we can learn from our authorities, took advantage of the increasing aversion of the Emperor from public affairs to take his place, to promote his own favourites, and gradually to occupy even in the eyes of the Prætorians that position which really belonged to Tiberius. It is possible that his procedure in the Senate was more autocratic than that of the Emperor.

The situation was complicated by the continuance of the domestic rivalries of the Imperial household, which, on the death of the aged Livia in 29 A.D., broke out into a series of horrors whose exact nature cannot from want of evidence be determined, though it may be surmised.

The opposition to Sejanus was twofold: there was what may be called the constitutional and personal opposition of a large party in the Senate, who refused to submit to the domination of a new man, and there was the private opposition of members of the Imperial family, Tiberius being almost alone in his appreciation of the good qualities of his subordinate. Thus the sources of our information are discredited from the outset. The memoirs of Agrippina are coloured by her mother’s long-standing feud with the Emperor and all whom he trusted, and the memoirs of Senators are equally likely to be coloured by detestation of the upstart. It is perhaps for this reason that the annals of the seven years succeeding the death of Drusus are more than usually filled with senatorial prosecutions and suggestions of unfairness. It is indeed possible that Sejanus took some pains to remove political adversaries by encouraging prosecutions against them, but, except in one instance, there is no sufficient evidence of perversion of the forms of justice, and as a rule the hostile comment amounts to little more than an affirmation of the maxims that a Senator could do no wrong, that he was always innocent if he committed suicide, and that somehow Tiberius or Sejanus, or both, were responsible for the act of cowardice which terminated his dishonoured existence.

In comparison with the greater interests of the Empire, the squalid scandals which ended in the fall of Sejanus may seem undignified; but they have their interest also, not only in the obloquy with which they have covered the name of the “ablest of Roman Emperors,” but in the disparagement which through them has attached to the Empire itself. The fall of Sejanus was, in fact, the fall of Tiberius, and the sinister events with which it was accompanied have cast their shadow upon the whole subsequent history of the Emperors. A fashion was then set, and a tone was adopted, which has influenced historians for all time. The lives of the Cæsars in the pages of Suetonius are little better than a Newgate calendar; the various works of Tacitus are little better than a continued jeremiad, in which nobody is good except men unconnected with the administration, the Germans, and the historian’s father-in-law. For this peculiar attitude there was certainly no sufficient reason up to 23 A.D., and in the subsequent events till the accession of Caligula even the bitterly hostile evidence indicates that the Emperor was more sinned against than sinning.

The story as it has been handed down to us, so far as it can be collected from fragmentary documents, is to the following effect. Sejanus formed designs upon the succession at a comparatively early period; after the death of Germanicus one man alone, Drusus, stood between him and the object of his ambition. In order to compass the destruction of Drusus, Sejanus, a man certainly past fifty years of age, if not close upon sixty, laid siege to Livilla, the wife of Drusus, the sister of Germanicus. Successful in his assaults upon her not impenetrable chastity, he divorced his wife Apicata, and joined with Livilla and a favourite freedman of Drusus in a conspiracy. Drusus, according to the story, did not die a natural death; he was poisoned by Sejanus through the instrumentality of his favourite Lygdus. The way to the succession now lay clear, for the son of Drusus was still a child, and the eldest sons of Germanicus were little older; moreover, it was supposed that Tiberius disliked the family of Germanicus. To the disappointment of Sejanus, Tiberius showed an inclination to favour this family, and though he sharply reproved the Senate for attempting to confer premature honours upon them, he introduced them to the Senate, and as they advanced in years treated them as his probable successors along with his own grandson.

Sejanus then, we are told, by means of secret emissaries worked upon the excitable temperament of Agrippina in the hope that she would involve herself and her family in ruin by committing some unpardonable offence against Tiberius. In this he was eventually successful, though so long as Tiberius continued to live at Rome the violence of Agrippina was met by somewhat amused contempt. Thus it is recorded that on one occasion Agrippina, goaded by the agents of Sejanus, burst in upon Tiberius when he was sacrificing in presence of the statue of Augustus. The scene is brought home to us if we imagine that the famous statue of the Prima Porta found on the site of Livia’s villa was the statue in question. A friend, and indeed cousin, of Agrippina’s, one Claudia Pulchra, had been accused of unchastity and of magical performances directed against the Emperor himself. It was suggested to Agrippina that she was the person really attacked, and being “always violent,” as Tacitus says, she went straight to the Emperor, and, in allusion to the solemn occupation in which she found him engaged, declared that “a man had no right to offer victims to the sainted Augustus and at the same time persecute his posterity. The divine spirit had not passed into dumb images, but his real presentment, born of his divine blood, understood the inconsistency, and mourned.” She went on to describe the attack upon Claudia as an attack upon herself. Tiberius for once was provoked to a retort, and, quoting a Greek poet, said, “Your only injury, daughter, is that you are not Queen.” This scene in the calm presence of the statue of Augustus was followed by another. Cousin Claudia was found guilty of the offence with which she was charged; but Agrippina persisted in her grievances. She fell into ill-health; Tiberius visited her; she received him at first in silence, then burst into floods of tears. She bewailed her loneliness, and begged him to find her a husband; she was still young, she said; marriage alone would relieve her from the contumelious position in which she found herself; there were plenty of men in the State who would not disdain to welcome the wife and children of Germanicus.

Tiberius left her on this occasion without uttering a word. Then it was suggested to the aggrieved lady by the emissaries of Sejanus that her life was in danger, that poison was being prepared for her, that she should refuse to dine with the Emperor. In consequence, on the next occasion on which she partook of a meal with the head of the family she passed all the dishes, till Tiberius, noting her want of appetite, picked up a particularly fine apple and handed it to her with much praise of its merits; the unhappy lady at once passed the fruit to the slave who stood behind her. Tiberius merely turned to his mother and remarked that it would not be strange if he dealt severely with a woman who accused him of poisoning. This speech led to diverse horrid surmises, but was obviously without any serious purpose, as Agrippina lived unmolested for another five years.

Tacitus tells us that he quoted these details directly from the memoirs of the younger Agrippina, who was possibly present on the last of the three occasions.