Wolf by the Ears — Tiberius: Capri and Paranoia
To rule the greatest state in the world and not want to look at it? That is exactly what Tiberius does. Since AD 26 he has not returned to Rome. He sits on the island of Capri and writes letters. Rome is run by the man through whose hands those letters pass.
Until one day a letter arrives from the island. By the time the Senate session ends, the most powerful man in the state has lost everything.
How did it come to this? Go back to AD 14, to a man who did not want that power. Or at least so he said.
September AD 14. Augustus is dead after forty-one years of rule. His successor is nearly fifty-five and is Rome’s best general. He subdued Pannonia, defended the Rhine after the Varian disaster, celebrated a triumph. Augustus adopted him ten years earlier. Suetonius knows of a rumor that the old man pitied the Romans, who would be ground by such slow jaws. He does not believe it himself and cites letters in which Augustus calls Tiberius the dearest of men and the sole defense of the nation.
The first session of the Senate is a one-act play. Tiberius convenes the senators as a tribune, not as a ruler. But he has already given the watchword to the Guard, and soldiers escort him to the Senate. So Tacitus writes. The emperor plays at reluctance, surrounded by armed men. He reads out that only Augustus could bear such a burden and that the state should rest on the shoulders of many. The senators weep and fall at his feet. At last Tiberius says he will accept some part of the state.
Then Asinius Gallus asks a question that makes the room go quiet.
The play drags on. One senator cries out in the confusion: let him take it or leave it. Another jeers that Tiberius is slow to promise what he is already doing (Suetonius). Haterius asks how long the state is to be without a head. At last Tiberius yields, as Tacitus writes, without admitting that he accepts power, yet no longer refusing it either. He accepts it until such time as the Senate decides the old man has earned a rest.
Where did this reluctance come from? Suetonius quotes words that became a proverb.
He had reason to be afraid. A slave of Agrippa Postumus gathered a band to avenge his master. The nobleman Libo plotted a coup. And in two places at once, in Pannonia and on the Rhine, the legions mutinied.
On the Rhine, the commander is Germanicus, the emperor’s nephew and adopted son. Young, kind, adored by the soldiers. Veterans show him their scars, complain about pay and service, and some cry out that he should take Augustus’s legacy. Tacitus describes how Germanicus leaps down from the tribunal, draws his sword and says he would sooner die than break faith. The soldiers seize his hand. One of them, Calusidius, offers him his own sword, because it is sharper. It is a literary scene and cannot be verified. But it captures the mood: the legions call for Germanicus, not Tiberius.
The mutiny dies down. But Tiberius remembers whom the soldiers wanted to hand the purple to. And Germanicus is edging ever closer to great fame.