Part 28

After Tiberius had retired to Capreæ the conspirators Sejanus and Livilla were able, we are told, to control the correspondence which was sent to him from the capital. Imprudent remarks made by Agrippina and her sons were carefully reported to him; the provocation which had occasioned them was not reported. The old man was induced to see in the conduct of his great-nephews a repetition of the excesses which had ruined Caius and Lucius Cæsar at the same age. Sejanus fomented discord between the brothers. Drusus the elder was given the office of Prefect of the city; he was encouraged to fear the jealousy of his brother, who was his mother’s favourite. After the death of the aged Livia, Agrippina and her son Nero acted in such a way as to give an opportunity to their enemies; they courted popular favour, and their friends openly advised them to take refuge with the armies on the Rhine, or to take sanctuary with the Senate and invoke the protection of the Roman people. Meanwhile Sejanus had in A.D. 25 formally begged Tiberius to confer upon him the hand of Livilla, the widow of his son Drusus. Tacitus gives what profess to be extracts from the letter which he addressed to the Emperor on the subject, and from the reply which he received. They are to the following effect. Sejanus is represented to have said that “he had become so habituated to the kindness of Augustus, and then by many proofs to that of Tiberius, as to address his hopes and prayers to the ears of the Princes as soon as to the gods. He had never asked for brilliant office, he preferred to share with the common soldiers the toils of guarding the Emperor. Still he had obtained what he thought most honourable, he was thought worthy of association with Cæsar. On this his hopes were founded. And as he heard that Augustus had once taken into consideration the claims of Roman knights when he was thinking about placing his daughter, so he begged Tiberius, if a husband were sought for Livilla, to remember a friend who would be content with the mere honour of relationship. He did not wish to be relieved of the duties which had been imposed upon him; he thought it sufficient that the family should be strengthened against the malicious persecutions of Agrippina, and that for the sake of the children. For himself the life which he had already lived with such a Prince would be much and more than enough.”

The genuineness of this document is certainly open to suspicion. It is notorious that Tiberius particularly disliked any form of address or exaggerated respect which put him on a level with the gods; nor could Sejanus have openly alluded to the extravagances of Agrippina without running the risk of incurring a smart rebuff, unless indeed he were already on such familiar terms with the Emperor that his previous humiliation of himself was unnecessary. The document has probably passed through the crucible of Agrippina’s memoirs. The reply attributed to Tiberius, though not beyond suspicion, has a more genuine note, and resembles other speeches and documents of the same author in its general character. The Emperor began with commending the loyal affection of Sejanus, and, after demanding time for full consideration, added that whereas other men have to think only of what is conducive to their own interests, Princes must think before all things of their reputation; and therefore he did not reply, as it was simple to do, that Livilla could decide for herself whether she would take another husband in succession to Drusus or would continue to live in the same house, that she had her mother and grandmother, her nearer advisers. He would deal more plainly. In the first place, there was the question of the animosity of Agrippina, which would be far more violent if the marriage of Livilla set the house of the Cæsars at variance. Even as things were, the rivalries of the women occasionally broke out, and his grandchildren were the victims of these discords. What if the rivalry were rendered more intense by such a marriage? “For you are mistaken, Sejanus, if you think that you will remain in the same rank, and that Livilla, who has been the wife of Caius Cæsar and then of Drusus, will be content to grow old with a mere Roman knight. Even though I should permit it, do you think that it would be allowed by those who have seen her brother, her father, and our ancestors in the very highest offices? You indeed are willing to stay in your present station; but those magistrates and nobles who break through to me against your will, and consult with me on every question, say without any concealment that you have already long ago passed beyond the highest Equestrian dignity, and gone far in advance of the friendship which my father showed you, and in consequence of their envy of you I too am blamed. But you say Augustus thought about conferring his daughter’s hand on a Roman knight. Surely we have no reason to be surprised that when Augustus was distracted by every kind of anxiety, and foresaw that the man whom he should raise above others by such a match was immeasurably exalted, he did discuss the claims of Gaius Proculeius and some others of noted tranquillity of life, and in no way concerned with the business of the State. And if we are affected by the hesitation of Augustus, how much stronger an argument is the fact that he did place her with Marcus Agrippa and then with myself? In consideration of our friendship, I have not thought it right to conceal these considerations; however, I will not stand in the way of what you and Livilla propose. I will omit for the present to refer to some plans that I have formed, and to tell you the ties by which I propose to associate you with myself. I will only disclose this, that there is no position so lofty that it is not deserved by your virtues and your disposition towards myself; and when the opportunity comes, I will speak openly in the Senate, or in a public address.”

Even in this letter there are suspicious passages. Tiberius could hardly have spoken of the magistrates who broke into him against the will of Sejanus without an admission of weakness, which is almost incredible, unless we are to assume that he wished to snub Sejanus, an assumption, however, which is not supported by the conclusion of the letter. Nor was this letter a public document, preserved in the public records; if preserved at all, it was among the family papers.

One important hint we get from this letter: its writer or editor ranges Livilla and her child in opposition to Agrippina and her children, and saw in the possible marriage with Sejanus a strengthening of the children of Drusus against the children of Germanicus. A similar protection had been given thirty-six years previously to the children of Julia, when Tiberius was made their stepfather. Livilla never married Sejanus, but her attempt to marry him supplies a clue to the labyrinth of plots in the Imperial household. If the principle of heredity was to be recognized, the heirs to the throne were Livilla’s son, the younger Tiberius, and Agrippina’s sons, the former representing the Claudians, the latter the Julians, and the situation was repeated which had existed when Tiberius and his brother had represented the Claudians, Caius and Lucius Cæsar the Julians.

Livilla, anxious for the safety of her son and eager to promote his interests, endeavoured to fasten herself to the strongest man in the State, who would unquestionably on the decease of Tiberius be in possession of the controlling military power.

According to the accepted story, there was a guilty connexion between Sejanus and Livilla before the death of her husband, and Sejanus had divorced his wife at the request of his paramour; the two together had poisoned Drusus.

All cases of poisoning are inherently suspect, and it is by no means incredible that Drusus was not really poisoned, and that the guilty intimacy of Livilla with Sejanus previous to the death of her husband was surmised at a later period when her subsequent conduct had given colour to such a story. According to the narrative supplied to us, Sejanus cannot have been under fifty when this intimacy began, and was probably nearer sixty; Livilla cannot have been less than five and thirty. If the story is true, they were certainly a mature couple of lovers.

It is at least as probable that on the death of Drusus Livilla endeavoured to enlist Sejanus in the cause of her son, and was prepared to marry him, he being only too ready to strengthen his position by such a match, as that Livilla had allowed a violent passion for a sexagenarian to tempt her into infidelity to her husband and actual crime. Again, Sejanus himself is never accused of plotting against Tiberius; had his heart been set upon the throne, he would not have waited for the Emperor’s death, whom in the ordinary course of nature he was not likely to survive long. At the period when the Emperor finally retired to Capreæ, and when he was moving from one villa to another in Campania, the roof of a grotto in which the party were dining suddenly fell in. Sejanus protected the Emperor’s person at the risk of his own life. Had he been impatient for the succession, he would have contrived that a happy accident should open the way to the realization of his ambition.

So far as the records go, we are at liberty to believe that Sejanus made friends with the two probable successors and their supporters in the Imperial family, the elder of whom was Drusus the son of Germanicus; the younger, Tiberius the grandson of the Emperor. By so doing he incurred the enmity of Agrippina and her younger son Nero. He was restrained by no scruples of policy, no ties of kindred, from driving the latter to desperation, and doubtless had many private insults to avenge. He possibly considered it his duty to the Emperor to protect him against the consequences of a pardonable weakness, which Agrippina had hitherto abused, and believed himself to be doing a signal service by eliminating from the Imperial circle such a dangerous conspirator; and he was, unfortunately for himself, so unwise as to use other than straightforward means to secure his ends. Meanwhile, as we have seen, he practically held the regency, he promoted and rewarded at will; he held a court at Rome, and it was generally understood that honours and emoluments were to be obtained exclusively by courting Sejanus. Some of the Senate fell in gladly with the new order, the majority secretly opposed it, and many were bitterly hostile, though restrained from showing their hostility by fear of Tiberius or respect for his long services.

In the year 29 A.D., soon after the death of the aged Livia, a letter came to the Senate from Tiberius charging Agrippina and her son with various offences, and demanding that they should be formally accused and the matter then referred to himself. At this point there is a gap in the Annals of Tacitus. We do not know what the steps were in the process, or what evidence was brought against the guilty. We gather from other sources that Agrippina was banished to the island of Pandateria, and her son to another island, in which he killed himself after a considerable interval, possibly at the suggestion of his guards. Agrippina disappears from history ‘semper atrox,’ for on her way into exile she was so abusive that the centurion in charge of the party was obliged to impose restraint by force, and in the struggle which ensued the lady lost an eye. The historians are silent as to the previous damage suffered by the centurion. Nor did she abandon her contumacious attitude on arriving at Pandateria. It was necessary to feed her by force, and, in spite of the well-intentioned efforts of her attendants, she is said to have succeeded two years later in dying of starvation. Agrippina was not a woman of any real strength of character; had she honestly revered her husband’s memory, and followed his example, she would not have continued the Julian feud and handed it down to two more generations. It is impossible not to feel some respect for so stout and so reckless a hater, and nobody has ever disputed her claim to certain domestic virtues which were lamentably absent from other ladies of her family, and were certainly sufficiently advertised by herself and her admirers; but in her maternal solicitude she was more pushing than wise, and the evil of her example influenced her children more than the good. The mother of Caligula, the grandmother of Nero, was certainly not fortunate in the traditions which she transmitted to her posterity, and if Nero really did poison his half-brother Britannicus, with the connivance of his mother, the cup may be said to have been mixed by his grandmother.

The disgrace of Agrippina and her son Nero brought on the stormy stage of the family politics Antonia the mother of Germanicus. This aged and refined lady had carefully abstained from meddling in the feuds which disturbed the Imperial household. She was now left in charge of the younger children of Germanicus, of the future Emperor Caligula and his sisters. Alarmed by the increasing power of the adverse faction, she began to study the course of public events; she heard that Sejanus was taking advantage of the Emperor’s retirement to tamper with the fidelity of the Prætorians; dark hints reached her ears as to the means by which Agrippina and her son had been entrapped, she feared some yet more terrible catastrophe, and having collected her information, she succeeded in getting it transmitted to Tiberius. The Emperor’s confidence in his trusted friend and servant was shaken; he followed up the evidence, and came to the conclusion that Antonia was right. Suetonius quotes an extract from a private diary of Tiberius, in which he says that he punished Sejanus because he had persecuted the children of Germanicus. There is no reason to doubt the honesty of this statement, though the events which followed have rendered it suspect.

The blow must have been a severe one. Not only had Tiberius been disappointed in a friend, but it was not even certain that he could resume the reins of power and punish the offender if he wished. It is the behaviour of Tiberius at this period which has justifiably gained him credit for proficiency in dissimulation. He did not at once strike; he first of all tested the temper of the Senate by writing coolly on the subject of Sejanus, and sometimes expressing disapproval of his actions, but yet not in such a way as to declare a breach with him. Careful experiments proved that Sejanus had no real hold on the Senate. In the same way means were found of testing the Prætorian guards, and it was satisfactorily ascertained that they obeyed Sejanus simply as the Emperor’s lieutenant. Tiberius took into his confidence Macro, the Commander of the cohorts on guard at Capreæ and in the neighbourhood, and agreed upon a plan of operations with him. Macro went to Rome with letters to the Senate and Sejanus; the attendance of the latter at a meeting of the Senate was particularly requested, it was hinted that unexampled honours were in store for him. When Sejanus went to the Senate House, Macro went to the camp of the Prætorians. The proceedings in the Senate House were purposely protracted. A very long letter was read from Tiberius, the purport of which was for some time uncertain. Gradually it became evident that it was directed against Sejanus, and it concluded with a demand for his arrest. Meanwhile Macro had presented his credentials to the Prætorian guards; Sejanus was superseded, and Macro appointed Prefect in his place; the soldiers proceeded to renew their oath of fidelity to the Emperor, coupled with that of obedience to their new commander. By the time when the ceremony was over, the Senate had risen, and the body of Sejanus was being dragged about the streets.

No sooner had it become apparent that Sejanus was disgraced and no longer enjoyed the favour of the Emperor than the long smouldering hostility to the upstart broke out into a blaze of fury. Tiberius was given no time for repentance or consideration; the fallen favourite was judged and executed on the spot; his two children were similarly condemned and executed; his friends were sought out and assassinated. For some hours, if not for some days, there was a veritable reign of terror at Rome, whose horrors the Emperor in his distant retirement did not at first surmise, and when informed was powerless to check.

This was the end of the careful restoration of the Senate planned by Augustus and fostered by Tiberius, an outbreak of violence which recalled the days of the Gracchi and the proscriptions. Tiberius did not long remain inactive; order was restored, and judicial prosecutions took the place of unlicensed murders. To the Emperor himself the change to law and order brought but little comfort, rather a deeper depth of despair. The whole story of the plots of Livilla and Sejanus, as it was then believed, was revealed. Apicata, the divorced wife of Sejanus, gave possibly tainted evidence of the machinations by which the death of Drusus, the son of Tiberius, had been brought about. Tiberius found that he had been the accomplice of the murderer of his own son, and that in banishing Agrippina and Nero he had played into the hands of that unnatural son and brother the other Drusus. Many of his old and intimate friends were implicated with Sejanus; there had been a conspiracy of silence, if not an active partisanship, and it was difficult to determine the degrees of guilt. In spite of so many years of public service and of single-hearted devotion to the interests of others, Tiberius found that at the age of seventy-two he stood alone in the world, hated and mistrusted by all.

After the first shock, the vigour of the old man returned; he checked the indiscriminate persecution of the friends of Sejanus, and he did his best to secure for them a fair trial. The Empire itself was not shaken by the blow, the effects of which did not extend beyond the city of Rome and Italy; but it must have been a grievous wound to his sensitive nature to discover that his oldest friends did not trust him, and that even such a tried associate as Asinius Gallus followed the example of the many weak-minded men who preferred suicide to facing an inquiry into their conduct. Prosecutions in connection with the Sejanus conspiracy seem to have continued for four years, but the order of events is not quite certain. It is not probable that Tiberius gave orders three years after the event to execute all the prisoners together without further hearing.

As Tiberius himself has generally been credited with responsibility for the disasters which accompanied the fall of Sejanus, it is as well to insist upon the evidence of Dio, who expressly says that Sejanus and his children were condemned by the Senate, and that Tiberius had only demanded his arrest. It had been found necessary on a previous occasion to check the tendency of the Senate to order immediate executions of persons whom they had condemned, and Tiberius had passed a decree that an interval of ten days was always to elapse between condemnation in capital offences and execution, in order that he might be communicated with, and have an opportunity of revising the sentence. The violence with which the adherents of Sejanus were persecuted was really a piece of political vengeance; it was a revival of the old quarrel between the Senatorial and Equestrian parties. In spite of the favour of Tiberius the Senatorial party had not gained upon the Equestrians; in fact, as the business of the Empire increased, the power of the Equestrians had increased with it. Sejanus was only one of many capable administrators whose activity and efficiency was in disagreeable contrast with Senatorial incapacity; the outbreak in which he lost his life was neither concerted nor foreseen. An opportunity occurred for indulging an animosity which had hitherto found its expression in private diaries and drawing-room conspiracies. The way of violence once opened, self-preservation enforced a continuance in that evil path. After the first blow had been struck, root and branch work was inevitable. Sejanus was to leave no avengers behind him.

Contrasted with this furious punishment of a political enemy and his adherents is the curious patience of the Senate at a later date in submitting to the excesses of a Caligula or a Nero. Only seven years later Caligula succeeded his great-uncle. He apparently lost his reason soon after he ascended the throne; he persecuted the Senate in every possible way, he confiscated money, he dishonoured nobly born women, he fined and executed, he even poured contempt, for he made his horse Consul, and having sent for the trembling Senators in the middle of the night, had them conducted to a dark room, where they were relieved to find that nothing worse awaited them than the performance of a _pas seul_ by the Emperor. Caligula was eventually assassinated, but not by the Senate, who punished his murderer; they had submitted to his caprices for more than two years. Nero, though sane, was scarcely less extravagant in his treatment of the leading men at Rome, but, as has been before observed, both Caligula and Nero are spoken of with less abhorrence than Tiberius.

It would seem that the Senators paid rather a heavy price for their outbreak, and that a reign of spies and informers actually did set in after the first disturbances, which followed the fall of Sejanus, had been quelled. If Tiberius became suspicious, if he became apprehensive for his personal safety, if he no longer interfered to stop trivial charges and prevent unjust confiscations, if the liberty of allusive libel was cut short, the Senate had given him very good reason for mistrusting them individually and collectively. At the same time the aristocratic party were smarting under a defeat; they had murdered Sejanus and his posterity, and cut off the greater number of his friends, but they had not succeeded in changing the constitution of the Empire, nor had they shaken the power of the Emperor, who mounted guard over them with his cohorts of Prætorians at the gates of Rome. The city itself was more or less under martial law, for the part which the populace had taken in hunting down the adherents of Sejanus had been a vivid reminder of previous disastrous events in the history of the capital. The very insecurity of the succession--for Caligula was barely of age, and not in good health, while the young Tiberius was little more than a child--impelled the aged Emperor to keep a tight hand upon the public order, lest his death, an event probably near at hand, should involve the State in civil war. Of those members of the Imperial family who had known Augustus, Antonia and her son Claudius alone survived; the former had always abstained from interference in politics, and the latter was considered to be disqualified from appearance in any public capacity. Nor had any of the numerous marriages of the daughters and granddaughters of the immediate successors of Augustus brought into the world any man of such striking ability that he seemed worthy to govern.

A strange destiny pursued Tiberius; he could not retire, he could not shake off that servitude which was imposed upon him by the needs of the Roman people. As he had been compelled to return from Rhodes and share the burden of Augustus, so now he was compelled, if not to return from Capreæ, yet to feel that upon him, and upon him alone, still rested the responsibility for preserving the peace of the civilized world.