Tiberius the Tyrant
J. C. Tarver
9781465664433
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Used as we are to the terminology and conditions of hereditary monarchy and territorial sovereignty, we find it hard to appreciate, or even to express in terms of modern politics the difficulties which beset the statesmen of Rome at the death of Augustus; and we are further tempted to read into the story of that critical period ideas, which were only conceivable after the crisis was over; we can hardly avoid seeing those days in the light of subsequent events, or speaking of them in language which involves anachronism. Our information is principally derived from historians, who wrote a century and a half after the death of Julius Cæsar, when the Government of the Emperor and the Senate was established; but the position of the Emperor of those days was not the position of Augustus, and the Senate of Trajan was not the Senate of Tiberius. The experienced officials who formed the majority of the Senate of the Flavian Emperors were no longer the hereditary oligarchy by whose capacity Rome had been brought to be first among the city states of the world, but which was unequal to the task of organizing the Roman empire. The change had, however, escaped observation, and the warmest admirers of the Senate of the Republic were men whose position had been won for them by the Emperors. Between the death of Augustus and the death of Vespasian we have but few contemporary historians; we have no letters of Cicero to throw light on the inner life of the statesmen of those days; there were private records, private letters, and private biographies; we can gather their tone from the extracts that have been preserved for us, but we have no opportunity of comparing them or checking them. Velleius Paterculus is the only contemporary historian of the reign of Tiberius, a portion of whose work still exists unabridged; and his narrative stops just at the period when we require most light—at the conspiracy of Sejanus—where there is also a gap in the annals of Tacitus. From the books of the New Testament we may infer much as to how the Empire appeared at a comparatively early period to the inhabitants of Greater Rome, much also from Josephus, a little from Philo, but we cannot re-people the Rome of Tiberius, as we can re-people the Rome of Augustus and the Rome of Cicero. Two facts stand clear to us from the pages of Tacitus, and in a less degree from those of Suetonius, that the Imperial Family was divided, that the old Roman princely houses never forgave the Empire, and that there was a Republican reaction in opinion at the centre of the Empire. History has repeated itself; just as the Curia of to-day cannot forgive the monarchy which represents the unity of Italy, so the Curia of the first century of the Christian era was irreconcilable to the monarchical constitution which represented the unity of the Empire. The Roman princes who wrote the memoirs of their houses for the edification of their children, and the delectation of their friends never inquired into the authority of a story derogatory to the Emperors, and the one Emperor, who was never spared was Tiberius; it is no exaggeration to say that the madness of Caligula, and the monstrous freaks of Nero are dealt with tenderly by the writers of the silver age, if we compare the accounts of these with the deliberate malignity which attends on every word and action of Tiberius; and yet common sense tells us that only a very able man could have succeeded Augustus without breaking up his work. At the death of Augustus it was still possible that there would be no second Emperor; at the death of Tiberius the Roman Emperor had become an institution, the pivot upon which the whole machinery of civilized existence turned throughout the world. Hence the peculiar bitterness against Tiberius; the Curia felt that in his reign their last chance had gone, and more than this, that he had been in some sense a traitor to his own caste.
