Tiberius (13 page)

Then one night there was the customary comet in the sky.

And the next morning Sejanus convened the Senate, in all sure majesty, and as he sat at their head he became aware that one of his own Pretorian officers was reading a queer sort of letter from the Emperor. The officer was a man named Macro —a man very like Sejanus himself, ambitious as Sejanus, unscrupulous as Sejanus. Sejanus was so busy that he had allowed Macro more and more of the actual personal contact with the Pretorian cohorts, feeling he knew him well enough to judge how far he could be trusted. Besides, Macro seemed to get along well with Tiberius. In fact, he got along even better with Tiberius than Sejanus had thought. The letter rambled crazily on, whining and self-pitying. Senators, it said, I am an old man and afraid. Help me! Give me your protection.

Sejanus listened and was amused. This was not the first
^,:
incoherent letter Tiberius had addressed to the Senate. Usually Sejanus himself was allowed to read them, which he relished as it helped prove the point that Tiberius was not fit to rule. There was nothing to fear from letters like these. But suddenly the letter changed its tone. It became sharper, became factual, turned into an accusation. Sejanus is a traitor! the letter cried, and went on to give proofs. Sejanus was transfixed. He could not move, he could not stop Macro. It was a total surprise to the Senate—not a surprise that the plot was under way, of course, but extremely surprising that Tiberius knew and had the strength to act.

For old Tiberius had been warned, and by someone who had no reason to love him.

Antonia, th
e mother of poisoned Germanicus, had learned of die plot. She had not been approached by Sejanus, for she was an upright woman; but neither had he worried about her. Her son had been killed under suspicious circumstances, her daughter-in-law and one grandson had been exiled. Yet she had discovered what was going on and, incredibly, secured written proofs. She had managed to smuggle a letter to Tiber
ius on Capri. Sejanus' Pretorian
s were not quite as trustworthy as he
th
ought. Macro had placed his wager on the old Emperor instead of the young usurper, had helped Tiberius assemble his proo
fs, had undertaken to present th
em in the Senate, had accepted command of the Pretorian Guard—and now called on the Senate to condemn Sejanus to death. The very Pretorians who had been the kernel of his strength were now raised against him. Sejanus was doomed. He sat like a stone, unable to help himself, while the Senate debated for a few moments and then briskly voted his execution.

It
was the beginning of a bloody orgy
of revenge, in making friends, Sejanus had been forced to make enemies as well; the offices he gave out as rewards had to be taken from others; while he was strong in the regard of Tiberius he could ignore the losers, but now they rose against him. He was led out of the Senate with the executioner's halter already around his neck. Great crowds of Romans, hurrying out of their homes to see the excitement, lined the streets between the Forum and the Mamertine Prison. Juvenal wrote a verse account of the scene:

Sejanus with a rope is dragged along,

The sport and laughter of the giddy throng!

Good Lord, they cry, what Ethiop lips he has,

How foul a snout, and what a hanging face!

By heaven, I never could endure his sight!

That morning Sejanus had been the most powerful man in the world, but at sunset his body lay on the steps of the

Mamertine, on the
brink of the river, covered with
spittle.

Sejanus' death was only a beginning. The crowd was maddened with blood; they contested to see who could first denounce friend and relative; to be accused was to be convicted. It went on all night and for many nights. Publius Vitellius was executed for conspiring to turn the treasury over to Sejanus—as though Sejanus didn't have it already! Aelius Gailus was executed, and so was Pomponius Secundus. No one was spared because of ran!? or services to Rome, no one was spared because of sex or age. The small children of Sejanus, even, were condemned—not for any act, surely, since both were under ten years of age, but merely for being his children. The boy went to his death knowing what was happening. The girl was younger. Her name was Junilla. She did not understand. With the rope around her neck she begged to be forgiven for whatever naughtiness she had done, promising to be a good girl from then on. . . The great Roman law halted her execution. The law said that no virgin might be put to death. Tiberian cleverness found the loophole in the law. With the halter
on
her neck her executioner raped the child, then she was strangled.

Tiberius had regained his throne.

The last day of Sejanus' life had been a day of imminent terror for the old tyrant, for there was no telling if things would go well. Sejanus might have become too strong, the Senate might refuse this last call to arms'. As soon as he had sent Macro off to Rome with Ms letter, Tiberius ordered detachments of troops to space themselves along the peninsula, between the island of Capri and Rome, with bonfires ready to be lighted to give him the news. If they burned, Sejanus was dead. If not—

If not, then Tib
erius would flee, to Spain, to Jude
a, to whatever province might have him. He ordered a fleet of galleys to stand by at Capri's harbor, and himself mounted the cliff top to watch the Italian shore.

The bonfire came; the usurper was dea
d. Tiberius returned to Villa I
o and had a great feast. He had bought back his empire, paid for in the blood of innocent men and children, as well as the blood of the guilty, but it was all his once more and no one would ever again challenge him for it.

XV

Tiberius was seventy now, and aging.

After the death of Sejanus, the Emperor squatted for nine months in Villa Io, hardly showing himself outside his door. His years marked him heavily. He was thin, his complexion was scrofulous. The great statues that frowned on every Roman city in the world were liars; they showed a clean-faced Tiberius with a steady eye, but the Tiberius of the flesh owned a complexion that was a horror. There was a disease that attacked the well-born in Rome about that time, a pustulant, eruptive lesion of the skin. It may have been leprosy. It may even have been syphilis. More likely it was some dietary lack, or some now extinct germ. Tiberius suffered from it badly. His lips, cheeks, and chin rotted and erupted, with a bad smell and a good deal of pain. The medicine of the time treated this condition with harsh and quite futile cauterization—hot irons that burned out the festering but left great taut scars. Tiberius was covered with them.

Apart from that, though, he was not sick—or would not admit it if he was. From the age of thirty on, in fact, he had never consulted a doctor, apart from the wielders of the hot irons. It may have been a wise move, considering the medical science of the time.

But he was past his prime. One day soon he would have to die.

It is difficult to read of Tiberius' last years without pity. Everything he loved was gone, his powers were fading. It is impossible to examine his acts of those years without horror. Wickedly, cruelly, he enforced his old man's caprices on everyone around him. In his seventies he was the greatest man in the world, but

...
he, intent on secret lust alone,

Lives to himself, abandoning the throne;

Cooped in a narrow isle, observing dreams

With flattering wizards and erecting schemes!

as Juvenal says. His "flattering wizards"—Thrasyllus and all the others—lived precariously but had hope, for they had only to perform their duties to his satisfaction and they would live. The rest of Tiberius' court was not so secure. At any moment the old man's lightning might strike them. The Empire Could govern itself—or Macro would govern it for him—while Tiberius examined plots, found victims, and forever indulged his diminishing sexual powers.

In Rome, where Tiberius never again appeared, Capri had become a sort of storybook ogre's den, clouded by distanc
e and secrecy. Romans renamed the beautiful island "Capri
neum"—the place of the goats, named for the old man's goatish ways. In the theater a comedian slipped new lines into his part:

The old goat goes

For the does

With his tongue.

Everyone knew who "the old goat" was. It was daring of the comedian to say it, daring even to listen to it, for it was impossible to know when the Emperor's informers would denounce one. The treason trials mounted endlessly. Gallio went to jail. Sextus Vestilius committed suicide. Vescularius Atticus and Julius Marinus were executed; so was Fufius Geminus; so was Vitia, his mother, who made the mistake of weeping. That was against the law. Tiberius forbade mourning for his victims. Asinius Gallus, that ancient enemy who had dared succeed Tiberius as the husband of Vipsania, now
was in Tiberius' dungeons with
plenty of time to ponder his error. Gallus' friend, Sinacus, went to the dungeons with him and was executed; Gallus received mercy. He was allowed to take his own life.

The delatores grew fat; it was a climate that suited them exactly. If a man dared speak against them to try to check titeir excesses, it was at great risk; Calpurnius Piso dared, and soon enough he was executed himself. R
arely an in
formant's plot misfired. A praetor named Paulus was marked for delation; he had the prudence to wear a cameo ring with Tiberius' head engraved on it, but the unwisdom to use the hand bearing that ring to hold his urinal. Naturally, that was
lese-majeste.
A delator was watching, but Paulus' slave was more watchful still, and had the wit to slip the ring off Paulus' finger before the informer could make his kill.

The dungeons of Capri were full—slaves awaiting torture, nobles awaiting punishment, even princes. Even kings. Herod Agrippa, King of the Jews, had been Tiberius' guest; now on a random fancy of the old man he was Tiberius' prisoner.

There were executions every day—even holy days, even New Year's Day. Every day and sometimes all day long, ten or twenty bodies at a time were dragged with hooks to the Tiber River and flung in, men and women, even children. The trials were quick and sure. Whomever Tiberius' informers accused was already dead. Tiberius did not allow suicide for those he really hated; his guards would bind up the slashed wrists and drag the victim to trial. Tiberius paced the corridors of the dungeons on an endless tour of inspection, looking over the prisoners as a rancher studies his herds. The rack, the whipping rods, and the hot irons were always in use, for there was always some trial going, and witnesses had to be made to talk. Also there was the matter of punishment. Please, begged one prisoner under torture, kill me to put me out of my misery. Tiberius shook his head. "No. We are not friends yet." Another prisoner managed to commit suicide; his name was Carnalus. Tiberius was furious. "Carnalus has escaped me!"

That was in the Roman spirit, for death was, after all, a rather light punishment. Julius Caesar wanted it reserved for minor offenses. Taking a man's money or banishing him from Rome—those were fit punishments for a serious crime. Since there was no hereafter, death was only obliteration. What was so terrible about that?

Tiberius' inquisitors raked through not only the present but the past, sometimes decades past. Some of the ancient charges they brought to light were fantastic—a woman was charged with a poison plot against her husband; but the husband was long since divorced, and the episode was supposed to have happened twenty years before. Some were not so fantastic. In pawing through the dark filth of conspiracy and plot the inquisitors struck pure gold. Drusus! Tiberius' own son— poisoned!

When evidence came to light that Drusus had been murdered, Tiberius multiplied his arrests and tortures. Sejanus was safely dead, but there must have been others in the plot and he would find them! He was like a madman, throwing one witness after another to the torturers, seeking every possible accomplice, and impossible ones too. For example, there was a man from Rhodes who had welcomed Tiberius as a guest during his Rhodian exile, while his own villa was building; they had kept up some sort of contact ever since and Tiberius himself, in an unusual accession of hospitality, had written him an invitation to visit on Capri. The man accepted; no matter what gossip said about Capri, and invitation from the Emperor was a command. But he arrived at a bad time, on the same ship with a flood of witnesses to the affair of Drusus' poisoning. There was a regrettable confusion. The Rhodian friend went to the torturers. Tiberius heard about it, but rather too late. The man was no longer salvageable, and Tiberius ordered him hurled over the cliff to the waiting squad of marines.

It was well to walk softly on Capri those days, but it did not mean safety. Nothing did.

The Empire staggered along somehow.

Macro filled the place of Sejanus; Tiberius had enough on Capri to keep him busy. Tiberius had been a great general in Augustus' time, but once he became Emperor he fought only a few little wars. He was too preoccupied with other things, and he was also too stingy. In building up the imperial treasury from the meager five million dollars Augustus had left to a handsome hundred million Tiberius could not afford many wars. He also did not choose to afford games; he kept down his veteran's pension bill by denying discharge to old legionaries—it was cheaper to let them die in the service; he knew that gold was the blood of Empire and did not waste it. Tiberius' faults were sometimes virtues. His reasons for keeping provincial governors on for extra terms—sometimes for decades—was partly policy, partly the fact that his mind was elsewhere. But for the first time in Roman history governors had a chance to settle down in their jobs.

But Tiberius was not altogether blind to the fact that he had an Empire—if not to run, at least to bequeath to someone else.

However, he would not be hurried. Some of the possible heirs seemed to be rushing things. There were the three sons of Agrippina, for example. One of them had already been implicated in an undercover affair and had killed himself. Now a second son—still another Drusus!—was imprisoned and exiled because he was too obviously anxious for the job. In exile he was starved to death; when he died, his mouth was full of the stuffing of his mattress. The dead boy was chopped into tiny bits—not even the dead were beyond Tiberius' anger!—and his mother Agrippina killed herself, satisfied at last tha
t revenge was past hoping for.

But one of her sons survived. That was Caligula. Tiberius ordered him to Capri, but let him live.

Tiberius was seventy-six years old when he turned his attention to selecting the man who would succeed him.

The old Emperor had stamped out the rebels. It was no longer necessary to fear his heirs and therefore it was possible to select one. But whom?

The logical candidate was his own grandson, Gemellus. But Gemellus was young—he was only sixteen—and showed no great force of character. Tiberius could dispose of the Empire to anyone he chose, but his successor would have to be strong enough to keep it, and that ruled Gemellus out.

Then there was Claudius. Claudius should have been a first-rate choice. He was a man full grown, and he was the son of Tiberius' beloved brother, Drusus. But he seemed to be a clown, a weakling, and feeble-minded. His own slaves laughed at him. He wandered foolishly around Tiberius' palaces on silly errands. Tiberius' Greek thinkers liked to talk with him because he knew a great deal about history, archeology, and literature; he devoted his whole life,to them. But he was also pot-bellied, thin-legged, and palsied; he had had infantile paralysis as a child, and it left him with a permanent shambling walk and drooling mouth. His own mother called him "a monster: a man whom Mother Nature had begun to work upon but then flung aside." Even when Claudius was
fully grown he was treated like a ch
ild, with a tutor following him
about, not so much to teach him, as Claudius himself said, but for "the task of punishing me savagely whatever I might do."

Claudius really was a little touched—something was missing. Those who knew him best despised him, and he was utterly unable to command any sort of respect from his wife, his family, or his servants. But he would not have been a bad choice for Tiberius. Claudius ultimately did become Emperor and conquered Britain for the Empire, among other great deeds—great enough so that when Claudius died die Romans made him a god—as they had done for Julius Caesar and for Augustus, and as they absolutely refused to do for Tiberius. Maybe all those years on Capri, under the shadow of Tiberius' inquisitions, Cla
udius was on
ly pretending to be a fool as protective coloration.

In any case, Tiberius passed him by. When Claudius became Emperor it was not Tiberius he succeeded but the man whom Tiberius finally chose: Caligula.

Caligula was nineteen years old when Tiberius summoned him to protective custody on Capri.

He was a bright, sweet boy. We have already seen how the rioting soldiers in Germany had given up their revolt for his sake when he was only two years old. It was not his physical appearance that made him likeable; he was pale and rather hairy on his body, though his head began to go bald while he was quite young. (He did not live to be old.) He had a clumsily shaped body and thin legs; but he also had personality.

And he had good sense. In the vicious tides that swept around Tiberius it was an important occupation of hangers-on to try to entrap one another. The parasite who tricked another into a rude joke or a harsh word could report it to the old man, and gain favor. Caligula would not be tricked. He would not admit to anger on any pretext, not for harm done his family nor his friends. The courtiers thought surely he would say something catastrophic about the deaths of his mother and brotiiers, and when he gave them bland answers they went away, shaking their heads. "There never was a better slave—or a worse master," they said. It was good prophecy.

Tiberius made Caligula his
heir. As an afterthought he
named his grandson. Gemellus, to share the estate and the Empire with Caligula, but Caligula was the senior partner. Tiberius married him to a girl named Julia Claudilla and kept a watchful eye on him.

What he saw was not altogether attractive. Young Caligula had a taste for violence. He liked watching men on the rack or being executed almost as much as Tiberius did; he enjoyed all sorts of brutal and scandalous pleasures that fascinated Tiberius, and he possessed the one quality necessary for such enjoyment that Tiberius had lost: youth. Tiberius must have been jealous. But he was also understanding.

Some of Caligula's pleasures might have offended even
a
Tiberius. His grandmother found Caligula sleeping with one of his sisters—and incest was a terrible offense to
Roman ways. In fact, he slept w
ith all three of his sisters, for in matters of morality Caligula was hardly Roman. He had come to admire the East, particularly Egypt; if incest was a custom of Egyptian rulers, it was good enough for Caligula.

But Caligula did not confine his attentions to his sisters. He learned a trick from the career of Sejanus, and made it a point to seduce the wife of Macro, Sejanus' successor. She could help to insure his becoming Emperor, and he wanted that very much.

This was Tiberius' chosen successor. "I am nursing a viper in Rome's bosom," Tiberius observed cheerfully. It didn't matter. The troops liked Caligula and would support him. Probably he would be an unpleasant sort of Emperor, but he would rule.

Tiberius was now in his seventy-eighth year, and a fantastic story whirled around the Empire.

The phoenix had been seen in Egypt!

That legendary bird, which showed itself to men only once in centuries, was surely an omen. There were other terrible signs. The Emperor's pet snake died; when he went to feed it with his own hands, as he liked to do, he found it not only dead but already half devoured by a swarm of ants. A dead fire in the Emperor's dining room suddenly blazed up again. An earthquake shook Capri. The Emperor had imported
a
great statue of Apollo for a temple, but he dreamed that the statue came to him and said: "Tiberius will never dedicate me."

Tiberius' "flattering wizards" studied the portents and could draw only one conclusion: the Emperor was ready to die.

Perhaps this was a boon, but it was a dangerous one. If Tiberius were told that death was close, might he not do some terribly rash, unwelcome new thing? Herod, King of the Jews, had left orders for mass executions on the day of his death, to make sure that Jerusalem would resound to wails of mourning. Tiberius might do the same, he might do something even worse.