A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (17 page)

The new métier of
delator
appealed to an increasingly suspicious and sensitive Emperor, especially after his retreat from
Rome to Capri, and his dependence on
men without scruples is epitomized by the rise and fall of the favourite Sejanus, with whom the morale and morality of Rome hit a distressful low.

Caprae (Capri) was and is an enchanting island, opposite Baiae (Naples), where Augustus had built a villa, having exchanged it with the municipality for Ischia. The climate is balmy, the sea
crystal and though tiny the landscape is varied. (Anacapri, where Axel Munthe lived at San Michele, has a feeling quite different from Capri, its inhabitants being still visibly of Greek descent.)
The views are splendid and the dawn touching the cliffs between the twin rocks of the Faraglione – which Tiberius, from one of his twelve houses, must have seen often – is one of
nature’s great polychromatic shows. More to the point, he could see who was approaching from afar and relished the economy of the small number of guards needed for his protection. The Emperor
did not like unexpected callers – as the fisherman, who scaled the cliffs to present him with a mullet, found out; a
langouste
was rubbed in his face and he was thrown back into the sea.

From this natural fortress, where, it was hoped, he had gone to die, Tiberius ruled the Empire for the last eleven years of his life, the first five through Sejanus, who had talked him into this
voluntary exile and had further strengthened his hold on the Emperor by saving his life when a grotto, in which they were dining on the journey south, had collapsed. Sejanus was the first
adventurer to effect a (sort of)
coup d’état
in Rome without an army, for Augustus had succeeded in removing this opportunity from generals by regulating their commands and
paying their troops direct. Power therefore was now centred on the imperial palace and the Praetorian Guard, which Sejanus had regrouped in one barracks under his sole command. People who mistrust
everybody often trust one person too much.

Sejanus’ weapons were slander, intrigue and poison and his strength was his access to Tiberius, who trusted him and called him ‘the partner of my
labours’. He was the son of a knight, who became a prefect of the Praetorian Guard and had made some money in his youth, it was said, out of a rich old queen, before joining the staff of
Gaius, Augustus’ grandson and putative heir. He was strong, tireless and hard-working. A quiet exterior concealed implacable and indeed outrageous ambition, but Tiberius only noticed and
applauded his conscientiousness – to such an extent that Tiberius’ son was once provoked to engage him in fisticuffs. That there were many legitimate heirs between him and the imperial
purple did not daunt Sejanus. He began by seducing Drusus’ wife Livilla, sister of Germanicus, promising her a share in the Empire which one day would surely be his, and the death of
her husband, who was a bad-tempered bully. In
AD
23 Drusus suddenly died and everyone, except the grieving father, Tiberius, suspected poison. He leaned harder on Sejanus,
who had divorced his own wife, but would not let him marry Livilla until some time later. He did listen, however, to his tales of conspiracy against him by his niece Agrippina, whose children now
looked like his heirs. There were too many of them and they were too protected, or so it seemed, until Livia died, aged eighty-six, and Tiberius left Rome. In that year, through the influence of
Sejanus, Agrippina and her son Nero (not the future Emperor) were banished and the other boy, another Drusus, imprisoned.

To Romans, Sejanus with his pride and power seemed to be Emperor, Tiberius a mere island potentate. He was poised to marry into the imperial family now that he had permission – his friends
controlled the crucial provinces, he, the Praetorian Guard. In
AD
31 he became consul with Tiberius and there seemed no limit to his ambition.

At last Tiberius, prompted perhaps by a warning letter from Antonia, widow of his brother Drusus and mother of Germanicus, stirred. He moved carefully, testing and muddying
the waters. He sent for his young great-nephew Gaius (the future Emperor Caligula), whose brother Nero had died and who had been living neglected in Rome. He sent conflicting signals to Sejanus,
that he was on the point of death, that he was well and coming to Rome, that Sejanus could be a priest with Gaius; and then, noticing how well this went down with the soldiery, who loved the memory
of Gaius’ father, Germanicus, hinted that he might make Gaius his successor. The Emperor went on to support an enemy of Sejanus, blocking a prosecution, and referred to Sejanus in an offhand
way in a letter to the Senate; he forbade sacrifices in honour of any human being, including Sejanus, whom he was reported as alternately praising and denouncing. Sejanus was rattled, wishing he
had struck when he had been consul – but he still could, because he still had the Praetorian Guard.

Romans began to cut Sejanus. The crowd seeking favours at his doors thinned, and when this was reported back to Tiberius he decided to set his plan in motion. No conspirator moved more cunningly
and, now, more swiftly than the Emperor in the destruction of his former favourite. First, to quieten him, he let it be known that he intended for Sejanus the tribunician power, that authority
which guaranteed immunity from arrest. Then he wrote a long letter of denunciation to be read out to the Senate, which he entrusted to Naevius Sertorius Macro, the new confidant he had made
commander of the bodyguard. (We now know from an inscription that he had once been a prefect of the Vigiles, so he was a good choice.) Macro entered the city at night, briefed one of the consuls
– the other being on Sejanus’ side – and confided in the commander of the Night Watch. At dawn he
climbed up the Palatine Hill to the Temple of Apollo, where
the Senate was to meet.

Macro saw Sejanus pacing up and down outside, worried that he had no message from Tiberius. Macro told him (in the strictest confidence) that the Emperor had decided to give him the tribunician
power, at which news Sejanus bounded happily into the Senate. Macro was then able to order the Praetorians (Sejanus’ men) to return to their barracks, having sweetened them with
Tiberius’ promises of donatives. They were replaced by men from the Night Watch. At times of crisis, control of the guards outside the Senate was more important than the majority inside the
chamber. Then the admirably efficient Macro hurried off to the camp to prevent any uprising, having handed over Tiberius’ letter to the consuls.

Tacitus tells how, as this tortuous and finally damning document was read out, the senators at first cheered Sejanus, believing, as
he
did, that more authority was to be given him, but as
the tone changed and the intention of Tiberius to unmask him became clear, the senators seated near him moved away and
praetors
and tribunes moved in to prevent his leaving the chamber and
creating trouble. But Sejanus stayed in his seat, unable to believe his ears. Once, twice, thrice the consul Regulus, pointing to him, summoned him. ‘Who, me?’ answered Sejanus,
unaccustomed to being addressed in this way. Finally he stood up and was joined by the commander of the Night Watch, Laco. At the conclusion of what Juvenal described seventy years later (for the
downfall of the tyrant became legendary) as ‘the long and wordy letter from Capri’, Regulus asked one senator if he thought there was any reason why Sejanus should not be imprisoned.
When the answer was no, Laco led him off.

Each movement in this affair had been choreographed by the fearful old man on Capri; in one day, a figure who had
been honoured as second only to the Emperor saw his images
overturned and was reduced to having his face beaten as if he were a runaway slave, as he was led to his execution. His body was abused by the mob then thrown into the river and his children were
put to death, his daughter being first betrothed then violated, for a virgin could not be executed – a convention still honoured, if that is the word, in some parts of the world to this day.
The episode did
not
honour the Senate and People of Rome, even if the Emperor’s chief appetite, revenge, had been temporarily satisfied. The evil that Sejanus did lived long after his
humiliating death. His first wife wrote to Tiberius how Sejanus had poisoned Drusus, slowly, over the years. Tiberius spared the second wife, Livilla, out of consideration for her mother, Antonia,
who then starved her daughter to death.

Rome, thinking the Sejanus chapter was closed, breathed a sigh of relief, hoping for a balmier breeze from the sweet isle of Capri; it was not to be. For Tiberius the ‘conspiracy’
– there had not been one, as we have seen – was an opportunity for private revenge. He was quite selective,
³²
executing another twenty of
Sejanus’ followers in
AD
33 before amnestying the rest. That year is better known for the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth under Pontius Pilate, Procurator or Prefect
of Judaea.

Tiberius, with no need to justify himself militarily as Emperor, followed the injunction of Augustus about freezing the frontiers of Rome. He had only three small local difficulties in Thrace,
Gaul and Africa (Libya and Tunisia) to deal with. His handling of the provinces was so sensible –
‘You should shear my sheep, not flay them’, was his rebuke
to a greedy governor – that under him the Empire was peaceful. He chose intelligent governors like L. Vitellius, legate for Syria, into which province Palestine was subsumed. By the standards
of the day, modern historians have judged Pilate to be ‘below average’
(vide
H.H. Scullard quoted above) and even discounting the complaints against him from the Jews (who, alone
of his clan, Tiberius had not favoured), the fact that his superior Vitellius sent him to Rome to stand trial for, amongst other offences, the unnecessary massacre of some Samaritans, suggests that
the reputation of Pilate as a just man is more biblical than historical. The story that he reported the punishment of Jesus to Tiberius is equally untrue.

Tiberius’ resignation to a vicious old age on Capri was compounded by the death of his mother, his nephew Germanicus and his son Drusus, but when it was revealed to him that Sejanus, whom
he had so trusted, had conspired with his daughter-in-law to poison his son, Tiberius collapsed and for nine months did not leave his villa. However, he never abandoned his duties – although
these were less amply recorded than his debaucheries, because all Roman historians were nearer in spirit to
Confidential
and the
News of the World
than to the
Wall Street
Journal
or the
Economist.
Details of public administration or private industry bored them. Tacitus, says Professor Reid (Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge), used as a (poisoned)
source for his accounts of Tiberius’ sexual depravity and his ingenious, sadistic and, presumably usually unsuccessful, attempts to achieve orgasm the memoirs of the younger Agrippina. One
can tell from the epigrams of Martial and the satires of Juvenal and even the letters of Cicero that Romans gossiped, lied and exaggerated a lot about each other’s private lives and
especially about their Emperors. Tiberius, they said, used to
boast about his ‘minnows’ who fellated him under water. One wonders how.
³³
He is also supposed to have obliged the noble youths of Rome to become his catamites. None of them, however, came to any serious harm, and one, Galba, became Emperor. It amused
him to have people flogged – a constant Roman pastime but in his case often just for crossing his path and once a newborn babe, removed from its mother’s breast, for crying. This
behaviour was rooted in hate, unleashed in the form of sadism, when there was no one left alive to restrain him. Professor Reid wrote of Tiberius: ‘It is a question whether he ever liked or
was liked by a single being.’ The answer must be no, save for his first wife, Vipsania of course, whom he was forced to exchange for Augustus’ daughter Julia. Apart from the sexual, his
consistent pleasure was in the company of what he would have called his fellow intellectuals, lawyers and men of letters whom he put up in his villas on Capri and who put up with him. Their
continued, voluntary, presence suggests that Tiberius cannot have been totally, as he was often described, uncongenial, all the time and to everybody. He was the most unkindly represented of all
our Emperors but his real crime was to have been depressed and depressing. Conscientious in the matter of bread for the people, mean over circuses, secretive, devious, calculating and lonely
– and finally, like Hitler in his bunker, loathing his own people – he was, like Hitler, dangerous and powerful till his dying day.

His problem,
solus et senex
, alone and old, was the succession. His grandson Gemellus, the son of Drusus, was too young and his nephew Claudius was generally, but as we
shall see, wrongly, thought to be feeble-minded, so the next Emperor had to be Gaius, nicknamed ‘Caligula’, from the soldiers’ leggings he had worn when displayed as
an infant to the mutinous Roman army on the Rhine by his mother Agrippina. This young man, untrained, except in the art of dissimulation – and was there not a saying, ‘Who cannot
dissemble will never be king’? – was recognized by Tiberius, with satisfaction, as a ‘serpent’ (his phrase) and as such the appropriate legacy to bequeath to an ungrateful
Rome. He therefore made Caligula co-heir with Gemellus – at one moment taking that little boy in his arms and, with tears in his eyes, indicating Caligula and saying, ‘He will kill
you.’

Tiberius’ later actions were worthy of the administrator who had always done the right thing. He solved a financial crisis with an interest-free loan to debtors, he paid for the
restoration of buildings damaged by fire on the Aventine out of his own pocket, he reduced the sales tax and when he died there was a surplus of 2,700 million sesterces in the public treasury.

The manner of Tiberius’ death was characteristically tricky. Since the age of thirty he had disdained doctors and so issued his own bulletins as to his state of health. His ability to
dissimulate was the last of his senses to go. On 16 March
AD
37 he ceased to breathe, and Gaius began to breathe freely. Then suddenly he called out for something to eat.
There was a general panic. Gaius was stunned. Nobody answered his call and Macro, the man he had trusted since the death of Sejanus, ordered him to be smothered with his own bedclothes and left
alone. When the news reached Rome the people went wild with joy. ‘Tiberius to the Tiber!’ was the cry. But Tiberius had his revenge. He had left them Caligula.