Tiberius to the Tiber — Tiberius: Capri and Paranoia

Rome thinks things will be better now. It thinks so until it learns that Tiberius does not intend to call off the hunt. The trials of Sejanus’s supporters begin. They are still going on in AD 33, when, according to Fagan, all the prisoners awaiting sentence were put to death.

Suetonius claims that no day passed without an execution. That is the rhetoric of a hostile tradition, but he quotes a remark that rings true. To a condemned man who begged for a quick death, the emperor is supposed to have said: I am not yet reconciled with you.

In AD 33 Agrippina the Elder dies on Pandateria. Tacitus writes that she refused food of her own accord, though it is possible she was denied food and her death was staged to look voluntary. The emperor accuses her in the Senate of immorality and boasts that he did not have her strangled. The Senate thanks him for his clemency. In the same year her son Drusus Caesar dies in the palace prison. Nero Caesar had died earlier on his island. Of Germanicus’s sons only Gaius remains.

The emperor too is broken. In one of his letters to the Senate he admits: may the gods and goddesses destroy me more terribly than I feel myself perishing every day, if I know what to write to you. So Tacitus and Suetonius record it. Tacitus adds that if the souls of tyrants could be laid bare, we would see wounds in them.

Or perhaps he wants to return? Suetonius records that he tried twice. Once he sailed in a trireme up to the gardens by the artificial lake near Rome. Another time he got as far as the seventh milestone on the Via Appia. Each time he turned back, for no known reason or frightened by an omen. He saw the city walls only from a distance.

The picture is not black and white. The governors propose higher taxes on the provinces. What is his reply?

Fagan writes that Tiberius chose governors well, waged no wars of conquest and treated the provinces fairly. The state ran thanks to Augustus’s apparatus even while the emperor stayed on an island. His greatest failure lay in Roman affairs: the law of treason, which turned words into crimes, and trials in which informers divided the property of the condemned (Fagan; Dio 57.19).

Tacitus divides his life into stages. A bright time when he was a private man or held office under Augustus. A time of secrecy and cunning virtue, while Germanicus and Drusus lived. A mixture of good and bad while his mother lived. Cruelty with concealed debauchery when he loved or feared Sejanus. Finally, when he cast off fear and shame, he threw himself into every evil, for he now followed only his own inclinations (Annals 6.51).

At the start of AD 37, weakened, he reaches the villa of Lucullus at Misenum. He hides his illness. As he takes his leave, the physician Charicles grasps his hand as if to kiss it, but in fact feels his pulse. Tiberius sees this. He has the banquet resumed and sits at table longer than usual, so that no one will see his weakness (Tacitus 6.50, Suetonius 72). On March 16, AD 37, he dies. He is seventy-seven. The cause of death is disputed; the sources give several versions. Only the date and place are certain.

The news spreads through Rome. People run about crying: Tiberius to the Tiber! That was the fate of condemned criminals: their bodies were dragged to the river. The Senate refuses him the honor of deification. Soldiers take the body to Rome, where it will burn at a public funeral (Suetonius 75, Fagan).

And the successor? To the end Tiberius cannot decide. His grandson, Drusus’s son, is still a child. Germanicus’s son is in his prime and has the people behind him, and the emperor does not like him. Tacitus recorded that when Gaius mocked Sulla in his presence, Tiberius foretold that he would have all of Sulla’s vices and none of his virtues. Suetonius adds that the emperor is said to have remarked that he was raising a viper for the Roman people and a Phaethon for the world.

In the next episode: the favorite of the legions, Germanicus’s son. Rome greets him as a savior. He is twenty-four, with a father whom the whole army loved and a nickname from the camps: Little Boot. Is Rome in for a disappointment?