The Island — Tiberius: Capri and Paranoia
Tiberius travels with a small retinue: one senator, the jurist Cocceius Nerva, one equestrian, Curtius Atticus, Sejanus and a few Greek scholars for conversation. The astrologers, writes Tacitus, said that the arrangement of the stars forbade him to return. They were wrong about his early death, but about this one thing they were right.
First he narrowly escapes death. During a feast in a natural grotto called the Cave, rocks break loose over the entrance. Servants die, guests flee. Sejanus, writes Tacitus, leans over the emperor and with knee, face and hand holds off the falling stones. That is how the soldiers find them. Suetonius describes the same accident, but without Sejanus’s heroism. Only this is certain: rocks fell. According to Tacitus, from that moment the emperor trusts Sejanus even more.
In the end Tiberius chooses Capri. The island lies three miles from the promontory of Sorrento. It has no harbor, the shore is high and steep, and the one small beach is easy to guard. No one can land unnoticed (Tacitus 4.67, Suetonius 40). The emperor builds twelve villas here, each with its own splendid name. Villa Jovis is still known today from its ruins.
Why did he flee here? Tacitus himself is not sure. First answer: Sejanus persuaded him, wanting the emperor in his hands. Second: his mother. Livia wanted to co-rule, and Tiberius could not push her aside, because he had received power by her grace. Third: shame. Tacitus describes the aging emperor: tall, thin and stooped, bald, with a face full of pimples and plasters.
Tacitus adds something more. Tiberius stayed on the island for six years after Sejanus’s fall. So perhaps leaving was his own decision, and he wanted to hide cruelty and debauchery behind it. Tacitus leaves the question open.
In AD 29 Livia, the emperor’s mother, dies at the age of eighty-six. Tiberius did not visit her in her illness. He did not come to the funeral, excusing himself by letter on the grounds of pressing business, and forbade honoring her as a goddess (Dio 58.2, Tacitus 5.2).
Tacitus considers this moment a turning point. As long as Livia lived, Sejanus did not dare set himself above the will of the emperor’s mother. Now the emperor and Sejanus give themselves free rein. From Capri comes a letter against Agrippina and her eldest son Nero. The Senate is silent with terror.
Agrippina is exiled to the island of Pandateria. Nero Caesar is sent to another island, and Drusus Caesar is locked in the cellars of the palace on the Palatine (Fagan; Suetonius 54). All this happens within two years (Fagan: 29 and 30). Before we go on, check that you know who is who.
Meanwhile in Rome people whisper about what the old emperor does on the island. Suetonius devotes several chapters to it. They contain secret gardens, strange games and a debauchery that is hard to read about. We will not summarize it. It is enough to know what scholars think. Suetonius reaches for a set of traits typical of a tyrant. Similar stories travel from emperor to emperor: some of the charges leveled at the young Caligula on Capri fit the later Nero better. All of it comes from a hostile senatorial tradition.
Instead, here is an anecdote that captures his paranoia well. A fisherman climbs up to the lonely emperor from the back of the island and offers him a huge mullet. Terrified that someone has reached him over the sheer rocks, Tiberius has the man’s face scrubbed with the fish. The fisherman says it is a good thing he did not also bring the crab. Then the emperor has him scratched with a crab. One source, Suetonius, and not verifiable. But that is how the emperor of Capri looked in Roman eyes.
In Rome, though, something else counts. Sejanus grows ever stronger. In AD 31 he becomes consul. Together with the emperor himself.