All the accounts of the accession of Tiberius agree in one statement; the evidence is unanimous that he was exceedingly unwilling to occupy the position which Augustus had occupied, and to continue the Empire in the form which it had assumed under his predecessor.

Tiberius was now fifty-six years of age; for ten years he had to all intents and purposes shared the first place in the Empire with Augustus; he had enjoyed his full confidence, none of the things which attract ambitious men had been refused to him. His character was without stain or reproach; the amours which are attributed to Julius Cæsar, and even to the saintly Augustus, are not attributed to him. The idle story that he went to Rhodes to indulge in odious vices was the fabrication of a later age, and was, as we have seen, absurd in itself. He had been a faithful and loving husband to his first wife, Vipsania; the licence of Julia had disgusted him; after his divorce from her he never thought of a fresh marriage, though still a young man. On his campaigns he had shown himself to be simple, and indeed severe, in his personal habits. A story was indeed prevalent that he was given to strong drink, but there is no evidence in its favour except a couple of wildly improbable stories preserved by Suetonius, and a punning nickname given him by the soldiers, who called him Biberius Caldius Mero. The nicknames given by private soldiers and schoolboys to officers and schoolmasters are not evidence, though they sometimes promote, as in this case, the circulation of fictitious stories. The exceptional health which Tiberius is said to have enjoyed to an advanced age does not favour the idea that he was intemperate, and indeed we are told that from the age of thirty onwards he prescribed a regimen for himself without consulting his medical advisers, which was remarkably successful. He was free from the tyranny of the lusts of the flesh, he was equally free from avarice, a point repeatedly insisted on by hostile historians; power in itself and by itself had no attraction for him; he had already on one occasion brusquely rejected it. Thus he was able to consider the question of the succession dispassionately. His personal inclination was rather in the direction of retirement and a private life, and if his judgment was biassed, the disturbing element was a contempt for rather than a love of power.

At the death of Augustus, Tiberius was actually in possession of two forms of authority legally conveyed to him by the Senate in constitutional form, which enabled him to carry on the government: he had the tribunician power, which made him superior to all the civil magistrates; he had the proconsular power, which put him at the head of the executive in all the provinces, and especially at the head of the army. In the first character he was the protector of Roman citizens throughout the world; in the second he was master of the provincials. Thus there was no occasion for any plotting on the part of Livia, no premature assumption of responsibility on the part of Tiberius in setting the guard and giving the password when Augustus had breathed his last; these duties necessarily devolved upon him, and he was in fact at the time on active service.

He was not Princeps, nor Pontifex Maximus, nor had he the censorial power. Of these three the last two were executive offices belonging to the old Republic; the former was an honorary dignity recognised by the forms of the Republic, which had acquired a new meaning during the long tenure of Augustus. It was this dignity, along with all which it now involved, that Tiberius only reluctantly and after resisting considerable pressure eventually accepted. It had become associated with the monarchical principle, and the permanent continuance of the monarchy Tiberius wished to avoid.

The position which he adopted was a reasonable one. Augustus was an exceptional man; he had been called to power under exceptional circumstances; the reign of one man had been inevitable at the end of the civil wars; the right man had been found, a social regeneration had followed; the monarchy, an exceptional expedient, had done its work; there was now the material for creating a stable government on the old lines. The vices of the old Senatorial administration had been purged away; the Senate itself had assumed a different character—it was no longer a narrow oligarchy, it was a council of the Empire; no single man could hope to repeat the success of Augustus. In a multitude of counsellors there is wisdom; the restored Senate working through the new officials would be more likely to carry on the continuity of government than an hereditary or quasi-hereditary monarchy, in which so much depended on the character of an individual, and which was perpetually disturbed by palace plots and conspiracies for the succession.

The life of Tiberius himself had been embittered, his domestic happiness destroyed, by the intrigues of a family which had adopted the habits of an Oriental Court. It might well appear to him, arguing from his own experience, that misgovernment by the Senate was a less probable eventuality than misgovernment by the irresponsible members of a monarchical dynasty listening to the unwholesome suggestions of favourites and parasites, and intriguers of all nations.

The funeral of Augustus was hardly over when an event occurred calculated to disgust Tiberius with the dynastic principle, if he had not already strongly disliked it.

The youngest son of Julia, Agrippa Postumus, had, as we have already recorded, been banished to the Island of Planasia off the coast of Campania, and detained in captivity. He was the last of the grandsons of Augustus. At this time he was about twenty-six years of age, and would in the ordinary course of events have held appointments and been pushed forward like his brothers. This had not been done. The historians agree in ascribing to him a stubborn disinclination to study, and an evil temper; he was put out of the way as Claudius was put out of the way; but he continued to be to some extent the centre of Julian plots, and it was believed that, in spite of his bad manners, Augustus was personally attached to him. It is possible that his name had been used in the plots with which his sister, the younger Julia, and her husband, L. Æmilius Paulus, had been concerned; or that he had taken up his mother’s quarrel with Tiberius, and had disturbed the serenity of the Imperial household. Although he had been thus set aside, Augustus had been sufficiently anxious about his welfare to request Tiberius to adopt him, when he himself adopted Tiberius. Whatever may have been the real temper and the real pretensions of the young man, one thing is certain: immediately after the death of Augustus he was put to death upon his island, and the centurion on guard reported to Tiberius that his orders had been obeyed.

Tiberius at once denied that he had given any orders, and added that he would report the matter to the Senate. No report was ever made, and Tacitus tells us that Tiberius was over-persuaded by C. Sallustius Crispus, who had succeeded Mæcenas as confidential and unofficial adviser to the Cæsarian family. Crispus is said to have urged that any public inquiry into the matter would have created too much scandal. Tiberius was not the man to be deterred from doing what he considered a public duty by any consideration of what he might himself suffer, but there was another person whose good name was likely to be damaged, and whose responsibility for what had occurred it would be awkward to demonstrate; that person was his mother, Livia. Tiberius himself had no motive for committing such a crime; only the perverse inconsistency of a Roman historian could be capable of attributing to the same man reluctance to accept power, and complicity in a crime whose object was to secure the undisturbed enjoyment of that power. Whoever was responsible for the death of Agrippa Postumus, Tiberius certainly was not; but Livia, the friend of Herod, whose life had been spent in pushing the fortunes of the Claudians, was not a woman to be frightened by the murder of an inconvenient aspirant.

If anything had been wanting to convince Tiberius of the evils likely to attend the perpetuation of the dynasty, this event was in itself enough to determine him in his dislike to an institution capable of producing such horrors, and under circumstances so wounding to his personal pride. A crime had been foisted on him in such a way that he could not prove his innocence without making himself the accuser of his mother.

The Senate, however, insisted that Tiberius should take the whole burden of the government upon himself. His suggestion that the responsibility should be divided was met with derision; there was no way out of the difficulty but to accept the trust, and to work it in the spirit most likely to lead to the development of his own views. The Senate was, in fact, wiser than Tiberius; those of its members who took an active share in the government knew that whatever might be the views of the few remaining Legitimist families, the monarchy was essential to the Empire, and that the Imperial House could not break with the traditions of half a century. Cæsar’s heir did not merely inherit property, he inherited the conduct of an organization whose branches extended all over the world, and this even as a private person; nor again was it easy to define his relation to those provinces, and especially Egypt, which had been administered by the late Emperor as private estates. Countless officials had learned to look to the Emperor as the source of patronage. A slow change was possible, but an abrupt change would have been a revolution, and would have disturbed the sense of security in all quarters of the Empire. The succession of Tiberius had been tacitly accepted as an accomplished fact in every part of the world for the last ten years. The intrigues in the Imperial family were distressing, and doubtless painful to those immediately concerned, but they had not affected the general prosperity, nor stirred the imagination of such men as hope to fish in troubled waters. Germanicus, the only practical candidate for the chief place, was notoriously loyal to the existing state of affairs, and had never shown any disposition to disturb arrangements made by Augustus. In the end Tiberius gave way, and accepted what the Senate offered him “until,” as he said, “I come to the time of life at which it may seem just to you to grant some rest to my old age.”

These words are in themselves a protest against dynastic assumptions; the power which Tiberius was to receive he would hold as associated with an office separable from his person; he was not to be once a king, always a king, ruling in virtue of mythology and portents.

Tiberius was equally careful to distinguish between complimentary tributes which had been paid to Augustus and official designations. He would not be called “Father of his country,” he would not even use the title “Augustus” as a name, though he was legally entitled to do so; he only used it in corresponding with foreign kings and potentates. Still less would he allow himself to be worshipped, and strictly forbade his statue to be erected in a temple except as an ornament. Nor again would he place the title of Imperator before his name, as Augustus had done, thereby making it personal and inseparable; he used it simply as a statement that he held a particular office. From the first he objected to the exaggerated language of obsequious persons, and demanded to be addressed as Dominus by his slaves, Imperator by soldiers, Princeps by the rest of the world. A Senator who flung himself at his feet and endeavoured to grasp his knees with an oriental exuberance of subservience suffered a rude fall, as Tiberius instinctively jumped back out of his reach. In a like spirit he checked the adulation which the Senate were prepared to heap upon Livia, and discouraged every attempt to invest her with the dangerous attributes of an Empress Dowager.

Similarly he distinguished between occasions on which he acted in a public or private capacity. Unless officially presiding, he attended the law courts like any other Senator, listening to the evidence, and offering his opinion like the rest; he, in fact, lost no opportunity of showing that he held his position to be a purely official one, and while he encouraged the worship of Augustus, he refused to be included in the cult.

At a later period Tiberius, in speaking to the Senators, declared that he regarded himself as their servant; his constitutional theory was that the Senate was the fountain of authority, the Emperor its first executive officer and adviser, but certainly not its master. This theory of the mutual relations of Emperor and Senate broke down, because one man, if he is capable at all, is always more capable than a number of equally capable men working together as a council: he can act more quickly, and his relations with suitors and suppliants are simpler. If a capable man is assisted by a council, the general lines of policy are his, and not those of the council, whose advice practically amounts to little more than valuable suggestions on points of detail. The dream of professors and political pedants that a country is best governed by a debating society of selected wiseacres has a never-ending fascination, but it is a mere dream, and as soon as the ostensible government degenerates into a debating society the real work of governing is done by other agencies; the alternative is anarchy.

The Senate for its part was studiously averse at first to accepting any greater measure of responsibility than had fallen to its share under Augustus; its leading members were used to a certain routine of business. Augustus had introduced a kind of Cabinet system, the ordinary business of the Senate being conducted by a small committee on which the Senators served in some kind of rotation; full meetings of the whole body were rare; the committee were in constant attendance upon the Emperor. Nobody had any wish to abandon this system, and to impose the necessity of frequent attendance upon all members of the Senate; at the same time, it was well to be sufficiently in evidence to secure a share in promotions and appointments. Hostility to the existing arrangements existed, but it was confined to some old families who were nearly powerless, and who found a safety valve for their discontent in pasquinades, and the compilation of bitter memoirs, in which every rumour, every scandal unfavourable to the existing government was carefully recorded.

Tiberius had so little of the dynast about him, so little of the jealousy of the usurper, that he employed in positions of trust the men who were generally believed to have been designated as possible aspirants to the Imperial power by Augustus. Marcus Lepidus held one office after another under Tiberius, not merely ornamental offices, but those which involved active work; C. Asinius Gallus, the second husband of Vipsania, similarly took a leading part in the counsels of the Senate, and was entrusted with various dignities; his mysterious fate three years before the death of Tiberius will occupy us later on; L. Arruntius similarly lived in dignity and affluence till he committed suicide shortly before Tiberius died, having become involved in highly discreditable, but not political, transactions; another, Gnæus Piso, was the centre of a strange conspiracy six years later than this. Of him too we shall speak in greater detail; it is enough for our present purpose to record that he was holding an important Governorship six years after the accession of Tiberius.

The same historian who tells us nearly all that is known of the lives of these men, and who fixes the dates of their deaths, also informs us that they were the objects of the suspicion of Tiberius, that their lives were rendered miserable by him, and that they all, with the exception of Lepidus, “soon” came to a bad end. Allowing that six years is a term to which the word “soon” can be applied, we may admit that Gnæus Piso soon came to a bad end; we shall see later on who was responsible for his afflictions. Lepidus lived to a good old age, and died a natural death not long before Tiberius himself; and though the ends both of Asinius Gallus and Arruntius were miserable, they did not occur “soon,” periods of twenty years and upwards not being usually so described.

The facts relating to these men are an excellent illustration of the reckless inconsistency of statement which is indulged in by Tacitus. Fortunately, the historian prided himself upon his impartiality, and does not suppress facts which happen to be in contradiction with his main contention. Stripped of its comments and insinuations, as also of its rhetoric, his narrative gives a favourable picture of Tiberius and his reign, but Tacitus possessed such a mastery of innuendo that his statements of facts are forgotten, while his comments are remembered.

It is, unfortunately, not the custom of modern scholars to read the Latin stylists for the purpose of acquiring information, or in large masses; and while they are minutely perpending the significance of isolated phrases, or enumerating instances of unusual grammatical constructions, they forget that any other interest attaches to the works upon which their industry is expended. The stylist and grammarian alike find so much material for their own special industries in Tacitus that his claims as a historian are forgotten, and in fact he is not a historian; he is a bitter pamphleteer of consummate ability; his affectation of impartiality is a well-considered pose, whose insincerity becomes manifest as soon as we study the effect produced by his writing upon the minds of his readers. When we have read the first six books of the Annals, we are left with a very strong impression of horror; we seem to have waded through seas of misery, and to have assisted at the ruin of the Roman Empire. In the midst of the gloomy scene stalks the gaunt figure of Tiberius, equally terrifying in anger or in silence; his very virtues are more horrible than the vices of other people, for there is no knowing what hideous wickedness they were assumed to conceal.

The question may reasonably be asked, why should Tacitus have directed his bitterness especially against Tiberius? Surely Nero or even Claudius would have been a better target for his venomed sentences. But to begin with, there was no object in further damaging the reputation of an Emperor universally acknowledged to be a villain or a fool. So far as Caligula, Claudius, and Nero were concerned, judgment had been passed in the sense in which Tacitus wished it to be passed, but there were numerous documents in evidence of the fact that Tiberius had been a good Emperor, and that Greater Rome, if not the City of Rome, had prospered under his rule.

Tacitus was interested in proving that till the reigns of Nerva and Trajan there never had been a good Emperor. Augustus was beyond the reach of attack; that reputation could not be damaged by malignant epigrams, but the end of the reign of Tiberius had been involved in a strange catastrophe, whose unquestioned horrors would lend credibility to misrepresentations of the events by which it had been preceded, and when Tacitus wrote, the Senate had just emerged from a similar, or apparently similar, persecution at the hands of Domitian; in fact, the Tiberius of Tacitus was not Tiberius at all, but Domitian. The curse of the reign of Domitian had been attacks upon the lives and property of eminent men, conducted by paid informers. There was some evidence that the system of rewarding informers had first been extensively used in the reign of Tiberius, and Tacitus believed that he could find abundant material for drawing up a strong indictment against the practice of employing informers in the records of the reign of Tiberius. We shall see how far he was justified in his confidence.

But it was not enough to damage a system, it was also necessary to annihilate the man; and here too Tacitus had found the instrument which he required; he had access to certain memoirs written by the younger Agrippina, the daughter of Agrippina, the wife of Germanicus. He tells us of a fact which he mentions:—“This is not recorded by any of the historians, but I found it in the memoirs of the daughter of Agrippina, who was the mother of the Emperor Nero, and handed down to posterity her own life and the misfortunes of her family.” There is not much in the life of the mother of Nero and sister of Caligula which would incline us to suspect her memoirs of being a liquid fount of veracity, but there is a great deal which would tempt us to suspect her of a bitter animosity against the memory of Tiberius and all members of the Claudian stock not closely related to herself.

It is not proposed to examine in detail every innuendo made by Tacitus in the course of his indictment against Tiberius, though from time to time it will be entertaining to expose glaring instances of misrepresentation or deliberately malicious inference; but one example of the methods employed by Tacitus may be profitably given as an illustration of the way in which he wrote what has passed for sober history.

In A.D. 25, eleven years after the accession of Tiberius, a deputation arrived from further Spain with the request that leave might be given to build a shrine in honour of Tiberius and his mother, as had been done in Asia. “On this occasion Cæsar, who was at other times also firm in rejecting honours of this kind, and thought some answer should be given to those who accused him by public rumour of ambitious inclinations, made a speech to the following effect:—‘I know, Conscript Fathers, that many have noted a want of consistency in my conduct, because on a recent occasion I failed to oppose the cities of Asia when preferring an identical petition. Therefore I will at once declare my defence of my former silence, and of the line which I propose to adopt in the future. Whereas the sainted Augustus did not forbid a temple to be built to himself and the city of Rome at Pergamus, I, for whom all his acts and words are like a law, followed a precedent, already sanctioned, the more readily because veneration of the Senate was united with the devotion to be paid to myself. However, although there may be an excuse for a solitary acceptance of such honours, it would be presumptuous and arrogant in me to consent to being worshipped in divine form all over the provinces; and indeed the honour paid to Augustus will disappear if it is made cheap by promiscuous flattery of this kind. I both protest to you, Conscript Fathers, and I wish posterity to be mindful, that I am a man, and hold purely human responsibilities, and that I have enough, if I worthily hold the first position in the State; posterity will give enough, and more than enough, to my memory if men believe me to have been worthy of my ancestors, careful of your concerns, firm in danger, and not fearful of contracting unpopularity in defence of the public welfare. So shall I have temples in your minds, so the finest and most lasting statues. For those memorials which are built of stone are despised as mere tombs if the judgment of posterity proves adverse. Therefore I implore the allies, the citizens, and the gods themselves, the latter to grant me to the end of my life a calm intelligence and understanding of human and divine law; the former, that whenever I may leave the stage, they may pursue my deeds and the fame of my name with praise and kindly memories.’ And he persisted afterwards, even in private conversation, in his contempt of such adoration of himself. This some interpreted as moderation, many as a sign of mistrust of himself, some as an indication of a degenerate spirit; for, said they, the best of men aim at the highest honours; thus among the Greeks Hercules and Liber, among ourselves Quirinus, had been added to the number of the gods. Augustus had done better in setting his hopes higher. Princes have everything else in this life; the one thing they should compass with avidity is a lasting memory of themselves. For the contempt of fame means the contempt of virtue.”

It is impossible not to admire the consummate art with which the effect of a really noble statement of Tiberius is wiped away, and the picture of a man devoid of sound ambition substituted. The ingenuity with which Tacitus puts in the mouths of presumed contemporaries his own perversion of the facts, and concludes his chapter with a concise damnation, is equally admirable. To us there is, however, something tragic in the fact that subsequent events and the arts of a supreme master of style were to rob Tiberius even of the modest fame for which he prayed.

Tiberius had hardly settled down to business when the threatened mutiny of the legions in the Illyrian quarter broke out, accompanied by an even more serious disturbance among the armies of the Rhine. These events throw much light on the condition of the Roman army at the time, and upon the characters of Agrippina and Germanicus. The latter, though a far more formidable rival than Agrippa Postumus, had been invested with Proconsular power at the request of Tiberius on his accession. Previously he had only been a legate, a lieutenant-general in command of the troops on the German frontier; he was now Governor of Gaul as well. It is not customary, for usurpers who have recently mounted rickety thrones to add to the powers of those whose rivalry they have good reason to anticipate. The Proconsulate of Gaul had on a well-known occasion been the stepping-stone to the Empire. Tiberius clearly had no mistrust of the loyalty of Germanicus, and at this period could afford to smile at the restless impetuosity of Agrippina, pattern of matrons.