Tiberius – A Personal View

It is 14 AD, and in a modest villa near the picturesque seaside town of Nola in southern Italy lies the freshly deceased body of Augustus Caesar, People’s Tribune and first citizen of Rome. He had ruled as an autocratic despot in all but name for forty years, dispensing with most functions of the Republic, and many wondered if his fledgling monarchy would live on much after his own death. At his bedside is his wife-consort, Livia. She mourns but does not weep. She is more pensive than distraught. She is awaiting the arrival of Tiberius, her first born son from her first marriage, a tried and tested general in the Roman army, and Augustus’s heir apparent. Presently the man himself confidently strides into the room, tall, dark faced, serious. Tiberius glances down at his lifeless step-father, the man in whose shadow he had laboured and suffered for so long. The Augustan age was over; there would be a new dawn, and it would be Tiberius and his mother who would be the new bright burning stars in the firmament of power. Rome and the world was now theirs. At least, it was theirs for the taking, if they dare grasp it.

The story of Rome’s second Emperor, Tiberius, is inextricably bound up with that of his mother, Livia. Livia Drusilla—later to be styled Julia Augusta, and finally the Divine Augusta—is one the most fascinating and enigmatic women in all of Roman history. Her likenesses in marble depict a delicate, demure, innocent-looking paragon of a virtuous aristocratic Roman matron. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Yet this impression must surely be misleading. She must have been, at least to some degree, ruthless and Machiavellian in her political and dynastic dealings. She must have been involved in all manner of schemes and plots and back-room dirty dealings; this can be fairly firmly inferred. The exact nature and extent of Livia’s machinations are not known though, as the sources do not make themselves entirely clear.

Once again, my personal view of Livia was first informed and heavily influenced by Robert Graves’ I, Claudius. In his two novels I, Claudius and Claudius The God—as well as the 1970s TV adaptation—Livia is depicted as a truly malevolent, duplicitous, murderous, evil creature, entirely devoid of compassion or pity. She is shown to be a political operator of the most cut-throat kind; that her overarching ambition to have Tiberius succeed Augustus as the Princeps of Rome would not be diverted or thwarted by anything. Graves has Livia orchestrating unwanted marriages, insisting upon unwanted divorces, and even murdering multiple members of the imperial family, all so a path could be cleared for Tiberius’ ascent to the purple.

The problem with that narrative is that the original ancient sources do not properly support it. For example, the ancient historian who is best known for his love of salacious gossip and who seems happiest repeating scandalous rumor, Suetonius, says nothing at all about Livia’s decades long campaign of manouvering and assassination. This is very odd, as if there was something sordid and scurrilous to report; usually we can be confident that Suetonius would mention, if not revel in it.

Funny, then, that we have to rely on the far more serious, far more measured account of Tacitus for a window into the character and actions of Livia. But even then, Tacitus is annoyingly vague. We do not get pages and pages of exposition and description about the crimes of Livia. In fact, we get little more than innuendo. Even innuendo, when coming from Cornelius Tacitus, is still extremely telling and powerful.

“He (Augustus) had admitted the children of Agrippa, Gaius and Lucius into the house of the Caesars, and before they had yet laid aside the dress of boyhood, he had most fervently desired, with an outward show of reluctance, that they should be entitled Princes of the Youth, and be Consuls elect. When Agrippa died and Lucius Caesar, as he was on his way to our armies in Spain, and Gaius while returning from Armenia, still suffering from a wound, were prematurely cut off by destiny; or by their step-mother Livia’s treachery. Drusus too having long been dead, Tiberius remained alone among the step-sons, and in him everything tended to centre. He was adopted as a son, as a colleague in empire and a partner in the tribunician power, and paraded through all the armies, no longer through his mother’s secret intrigues, but at her open suggestion. For she had gained such a hold on the aged Augustus that he drove out as an exile into the island of Planasia his only grandson, Agrippa Postumus.”

In the above passage Tacitus is as explicit as he would ever be about the role of Livia in the deaths and displacements of nearly half a dozen members of the imperial household. He mentions her ‘treachery’ but gives us no concrete details or evidence. Very frustrating. Later, again almost in passing, he mentions that he views her as “a real catastrophe to the nation as a mother, and to the house of the Caesars as a step-mother.” We, as modern readers, are left with scant extra detail. We are left with only our imaginations to fill in the gaps.

Her most aggressive detractors, such as Robert Graves, have accused her of the following heinous crimes; that she poisoned Marcellus, Augustus’s favourite; that she poisoned Germanicus, the next favourite; that she engineered the death of her own second son, Drusus, because he heavily favoured a return to the republic; that she was somehow nefariously involved with the deaths of Gaius and Lucius, Augustus’s last great shining hope for the future of the empire; that she ordered the killing of Postumus immediately upon the death of Augustus to remove the only legitimate claimant who might possibly stand above Tiberius in the succession. Personally, I suspect she was involved in some of these crimes, and not others. To my mind, the deaths of Marcellus and Germanicus and Postumus are highly suspicious and perfectly further Livia’s aims. The deaths of Gaius and Lucius—particularly Gaius—seem difficult to pin on Livia in any tangible way. We can never know for sure one way or the other, of course.

So then, by hook or by crook, the path had been largely cleared for Tiberius to assume the position of chief magistrate immediately upon the death of Augustus. A look at, or even a glance at, Tiberius’ career as emperor shows a cruel and perverted chronicle of vice and wickedness. Though he certainly can be counted among the bad emperors, his excesses did not quite reach the insane, absurd levels of, say, Caligula or Nero, and so his memory is not quite as stained as it really should be.

Tiberius was, however, a cruel and vindictive sex criminal. He was the type of tyrant who would take offense at the tiniest of slights, the most fleeting of criticisms—often finding disrespect where none was intended—before brooding on it for a long time and eventually taking his revenge. He was mean and calculating and spiteful. He was humourless and vengeful.

In the later years of his relatively long reign, Tiberius essentially abandoned the business of government. He allowed the machinery of state to be controlled and guided by his trusted favourites, while he himself ‘retired’ to his pleasure isle of Capri, where he would indulge himself with all manner of sensual depravity.

Suetonius tells us:

“On his return to Capri he let all affairs of state slide, neither filling vacancies that occurred in the equestrian order, nor appointing new military tribunes and cavalry officers, nor sending out new provincial governors; Spain and Syria were left without legates of consular rank for several years. He allowed the Parthians to overrun Armenia, the Dacians and Sarmatians to ravage Moesia, and the Germans to invade Gaul—a negligence as dangerous to the empire as it was dishonourable… But having found seclusion at last, and no longer feeling himself under public scrutiny, he rapidly succumbed to all the vicious passions which he had for a long time tried, not very successfully, to disguise.”

The details of Tiberius’s carnal transgressions are so depraved, that many historians shy away from their litany. The podcaster Mike Duncan, for example, in his landmark series on the history of Rome, was too prudish to mention any of these details whatsoever. For the fact of the matter is, Tiberius was a paedophile; a prolific paedophile.

The tittle-tattle loving Suetonius has fewer reservations than Mike Duncan:

“On retiring to Capri he made himself a private playhouse, where sexual extravagances were practised for his secret pleasure. Bevies of girls and toy boys, whom he had collected from all over as adepts in unnatural practices and who were known as spintriae, would perform before him in groups of three to excite his waning passions. A number of small rooms were furnished with the most indecent pictures and statuary obtainable, as well as the erotic manuals of Elephantis… He furthermore devised little nooks of lechery in the woods and glades of the island, and had boys and girls dressed up as Pans and nymphs posted in front of caverns or grottoes… Some aspects of his criminal obscenity are almost too vile to discuss, much less believe. Imagine training little boys, whom he called his ‘minnows’, to chase him while he went swimming and get between his legs to lick and nibble him. Or letting babies not yet weaned from their mother’s breast suck at his groin instead—such a filthy old man he had become!”

Tiberius’s crimes were not restricted to those of the flesh. He also seemed to enjoy torture and murder. He particularly liked having people thrown off of the cliffs of Capri while he watched. This could be the punishment for the tiniest of infractions. Tiberius was, in short, a sadist and a psychopath.

To sum up, then, Rome’s second emperor might not have been the very worst of men ever to have achieved that highest of positions, but he wasn’t far off. Only the truly insane and monstrous of the emperors could be said to have outdone him. He seems to have been a rotten egg to his very core. There seems to have been little to no redeeming features in his character. If nothing else, he set the tone for those who were to succeed him, as Rome’s ruling elite were, with blips, to descend further and further down the rabbit hole of tyranny and debauchery.