Tiberius Nero Caesar (Tiberius) - C. Suetonius Tranquillus
XXXVIII. He never set foot outside the gates of Rome, for two years
together, from the time he assumed the supreme power; and after that
period, went no farther from the city than to some of the neighbouring
towns; his farthest excursion being to Antium [338], and that but very
seldom, and for a few days; though he often gave out that he would visit
the provinces and armies, and made preparations for it almost every year,
by taking up carriages, and ordering provisions for his retinue in the
municipia and colonies. At last he suffered vows to be put up for his
good journey and safe return, insomuch that he was called jocosely by the
name of Callipides, who is famous in a Greek proverb, for being in a
great hurry to go forward, but without ever advancing a cubit.
XXXIX. But after the loss of his two sons, of whom Germanicus died in
Syria, and Drusus at Rome, he withdrew into Campania [339]; at which time
opinion and conversation were almost general, that he never would return,
and would die soon. And both nearly turned out to be true. For indeed
he never more came to Rome; and a few days after leaving it, when he was
at a villa of his called the Cave, near Terracina [340], during supper a
great many huge stones fell from above, which killed several of the
guests and attendants; but he almost hopelessly escaped.
XL. After he had gone round Campania, and dedicated the capitol at
Capua, and a temple to Augustus at Nola [341], which he made the pretext
of his journey, he retired to Capri; being (218) greatly delighted with
the island, because it was accessible only by a narrow beach, being on
all sides surrounded with rugged cliffs, of a stupendous height, and by a
deep sea. But immediately, the people of Rome being extremely clamorous
for his return, on account of a disaster at Fidenae [342], where upwards
of twenty thousand persons had been killed by the fall of the
amphitheatre, during a public spectacle of gladiators, he crossed over
again to the continent, and gave all people free access to him; so much
the more, because, at his departure from the city, he had caused it to be
proclaimed that no one should address him, and had declined admitting any
persons to his presence, on the journey.
XLI. Returning to the island, he so far abandoned all care of the
government, that he never filled up the decuriae of the knights, never
changed any military tribunes or prefects, or governors of provinces, and
kept Spain and Syria for several years without any consular lieutenants.
He likewise suffered Armenia to be seized by the Parthians, Moesia by the
Dacians and Sarmatians, and Gaul to be ravaged by the Germans; to the
great disgrace, and no less danger, of the empire.
XLII. But having now the advantage of privacy, and being remote from the
observation of the people of Rome, he abandoned himself to all the
vicious propensities which he had long but imperfectly concealed, and of
which I shall here give a particular account from the beginning. While a
young soldier in the camp, he was so remarkable for his excessive
inclination to wine, that, for Tiberius, they called him Biberius; for
Claudius, Caldius; and for Nero, Mero. And after he succeeded to the
empire, and was invested with the office of reforming the morality of the
people, he spent a whole night and two days together in feasting and
drinking with Pomponius Flaccus and Lucius Piso; to one of whom he
immediately gave the province of Syria, and to the other the prefecture
of the city; declaring them, in his letters-patent, to be "very pleasant
companions, and friends fit for all occasions." He made an appointment
to sup with Sestius Gallus, a lewd and prodigal old fellow, who had been
disgraced by Augustus, and reprimanded by himself but a few days before
in the senate-house; upon condition that he should not recede in the
least from his usual method of entertainment, and that they should be
attended at table by naked girls. He preferred a very obscure candidate
for the quaestorship, before the most noble competitors, only for taking
off, in pledging him at table, an amphora of wine at a draught [343]. He
presented Asellius Sabinus with two hundred thousand sesterces, for
writing a dialogue, in the way of dispute, betwixt the truffle and the
fig-pecker, the oyster and the thrush. He likewise instituted a new
office to administer to his voluptuousness, to which he appointed Titus
Caesonius Priscus, a Roman knight.
XLIII. In his retreat at Capri [344], he also contrived an apartment
containing couches, and adapted to the secret practice of abominable
lewdness, where he entertained companies of girls and catamites, and
assembled from all quarters inventors of unnatural copulations, whom he
called Spintriae, who defiled one another in his presence, to inflame by
the exhibition the languid appetite. He had several chambers set round
with pictures and statues in the most lascivious attitudes, and furnished
with the books of Elephantis, that none might want a pattern for the
execution of any lewd project that was prescribed him. He likewise
contrived recesses in woods and groves for the gratification of lust,
where young persons of both sexes prostituted themselves in caves and
hollow rocks, in the disguise of little Pans and Nymphs [345]. So that
he was publicly and commonly called, by an abuse of the name of the
island, Caprineus. [346]
XLIV. But he was still more infamous, if possible, for an (220)
abomination not fit to be mentioned or heard, much less credited. [347]
------------------When a picture, painted by Parrhasius, in which the
artist had represented Atalanta in the act of submitting to Meleager's
lust in a most unnatural way, was bequeathed to him, with this proviso,
that if the subject was offensive to him, he might receive in lieu of it
a million of sesterces, he not only chose the picture, but hung it up in
his bed-chamber. It is also reported that, during a sacrifice, he was so
captivated with the form of a youth who held a censer, that, before the
religious rites were well over, he took him aside and abused him; as also
a brother of his who had been playing the flute; and soon afterwards
broke the legs of both of them, for upbraiding one another with their
shame.
XLV. How much he was guilty of a most foul intercourse with women even
of the first quality [348], appeared very plainly by the death of one
Mallonia, who, being brought to his bed, but resolutely refusing to
comply with his lust, he gave her up to the common informers. Even when
she was upon her trial, he frequently called out to her, and asked her,
"Do you repent?" until she, quitting the court, went home, and stabbed
herself; openly upbraiding the vile old lecher for his gross obscenity
[349]. Hence there was an allusion to him in a farce, which was acted at
the next public sports, and was received with great applause, and became
a common topic of ridicule [350]: that the old goat--------
XLVI. He was so niggardly and covetous, that he never allowed to his
attendants, in his travels and expeditions, any salary, but their diet
only. Once, indeed, he treated them liberally, at the instigation of his
step-father, when, dividing them into three classes, according to their
rank, he gave the (221) first six, the second four, and the third two,
hundred thousand sesterces, which last class he called not friends, but
Greeks.
XLVII. During the whole time of his government, he never erected any
noble edifice; for the only things he did undertake, namely, building the
temple of Augustus, and restoring Pompey's Theatre, he left at last,
after many years, unfinished. Nor did he ever entertain the people with
public spectacles; and he was seldom present at those which were given by
others, lest any thing of that kind should be requested of him;
especially after he was obliged to give freedom to the comedian Actius.
Having relieved the poverty of a few senators, to avoid further demands,
he declared that he should for the future assist none, but those who gave
the senate full satisfaction as to the cause of their necessity. Upon
this, most of the needy senators, from modesty and shame, declined
troubling him. Amongst these was Hortalus, grandson to the celebrated
orator Quintus Hortensius, who [marrying], by the persuasion of Augustus,
had brought up four children upon a very small estate.
XLVIII. He displayed only two instances of public munificence. One was
an offer to lend gratis, for three years, a hundred millions of sesterces
to those who wanted to borrow; and the other, when, some large houses
being burnt down upon Mount Caelius, he indemnified the owners. To the
former of these he was compelled by the clamours of the people, in a
great scarcity of money, when he had ratified a decree of the senate
obliging all money-lenders to advance two-thirds of their capital on
land, and the debtors to pay off at once the same proportion of their
debts, and it was found insufficient to remedy the grievance. The other
he did to alleviate in some degree the pressure of the times. But his
benefaction to the sufferers by fire, he estimated at so high a rate,
that he ordered the Caelian Hill to be called, in future, the Augustan.
To the soldiery, after doubling the legacy left them by Augustus, he
never gave any thing, except a thousand denarii a man to the pretorian
guards, for not joining the party of Sejanus; and some presents to the
legions in Syria, because they alone had not paid reverence to the
effigies of Sejanus among their standards. He seldom gave discharges to
the veteran soldiers, calculating (222) on their deaths from advanced
age, and on what would be saved by thus getting rid of them, in the way
of rewards or pensions. Nor did he ever relieve the provinces by any act
of generosity, excepting Asia, where some cities had been destroyed by an
earthquake.
XLIX. In the course of a very short time, he turned his mind to sheer
robbery. It is certain that Cneius Lentulus, the augur, a man of vast
estate, was so terrified and worried by his threats and importunities,
that he was obliged to make him his heir; and that Lepida, a lady of a
very noble family, was condemned by him, in order to gratify Quirinus, a
man of consular rank, extremely rich, and childless, who had divorced her
twenty years before, and now charged her with an old design to poison
him. Several persons, likewise, of the first distinction in Gaul, Spain,
Syria, and Greece, had their estates confiscated upon such despicably
trifling and shameless pretences, that against some of them no other
charge was preferred, than that they held large sums of ready money as
part of their property. Old immunities, the rights of mining, and of
levying tolls, were taken from several cities and private persons. And
Vonones, king of the Parthians, who had been driven out of his dominions
by his own subjects, and fled to Antioch with a vast treasure, claiming
the protection of the Roman people, his allies, was treacherously robbed
of all his money, and afterwards murdered.
L. He first manifested hatred towards his own relations in the case of
his brother Drusus, betraying him by the production of a letter to
himself, in which Drusus proposed that Augustus should be forced to
restore the public liberty. In course of time, he shewed the same
disposition with regard to the rest of his family. So far was he from
performing any office of kindness or humanity to his wife, when she was
banished, and, by her father's order, confined to one town, that he
forbad her to stir out of the house, or converse with any men. He even
wronged her of the dowry given her by her father, and of her yearly
allowance, by a quibble of law, because Augustus had made no provision
for them on her behalf in his will. Being harassed by his mother, Livia,
who claimed an equal share in the government with him, he frequently
avoided (223) seeing her, and all long and private conferences with her,
lest it should be thought that he was governed by her counsels, which,
notwithstanding, he sometimes sought, and was in the habit of adopting.
He was much offended at the senate, when they proposed to add to his
other titles that of the Son of Livia, as well as Augustus. He,
therefore, would not suffer her to be called "the Mother of her Country,"
nor to receive any extraordinary public distinction. Nay, he frequently
admonished her "not to meddle with weighty affairs, and such as did not
suit her sex;" especially when he found her present at a fire which broke
out near the Temple of Vesta [351], and encouraging the people and
soldiers to use their utmost exertions, as she had been used to do in the
time of her husband.
LI. He afterwards proceeded to an open rupture with her, and, as is
said, upon this occasion. She having frequently urged him to place among
the judges a person who had been made free of the city, he refused her
request, unless she would allow it to be inscribed on the roll, "That the
appointment had been extorted from him by his mother." Enraged at this,
Livia brought forth from her chapel some letters from Augustus to her,
complaining of the sourness and insolence of Tiberius's temper, and these
she read. So much was he offended at these letters having been kept so
long, and now produced with so much bitterness against him, that some
considered this incident as one of the causes of his going into
seclusion, if not the principal reason for his so doing. In the (224)
whole years she lived during his retirement, he saw her but once, and
that for a few hours only. When she fell sick shortly afterwards, he was
quite unconcerned about visiting her in her illness; and when she died,
after promising to attend her funeral, he deferred his coming for several
days, so that the corpse was in a state of decay and putrefaction before
the interment; and he then forbad divine honours being paid to her,
pretending that he acted according to her own directions. He likewise
annulled her will, and in a short time ruined all her friends and
acquaintance; not even sparing those to whom, on her death-bed, she had
recommended the care of her funeral, but condemning one of them, a man of
equestrian rank, to the treadmill. [352]
LII. He entertained no paternal affection either for his own son Drusus,
or his adopted son Germanicus. Offended at the vices of the former, who
was of a loose disposition and led a dissolute life, he was not much
affected at his death; but, almost immediately after the funeral, resumed
his attention to business, and prevented the courts from being longer
closed. The ambassadors from the people of Ilium coming rather late to
offer their condolence, he said to them by way of banter, as if the
affair had already faded from his memory, "And I heartily condole with
you on the loss of your renowned countryman, Hector." He so much
affected to depreciate Germanicus, that he spoke of his achievements as
utterly insignificant, and railed at his most glorious victories as
ruinous to the state; complaining of him also to the senate for going to
Alexandria without his knowledge, upon occasion of a great and sudden
famine at Rome. It was believed that he took care to have him dispatched
by Cneius Piso, his lieutenant in Syria. This person was afterwards
tried for the murder, and would, as was supposed, have produced his
orders, had they not been contained in a private and confidential
dispatch. The following words therefore were posted up in many places,
and frequently shouted in the night: "Give us back our Germanicus." This
suspicion was afterwards confirmed by the barbarous treatment of his wife
and children.
(225) LIII. His daughter-in-law Agrippina, after the death of her
husband, complaining upon some occasion with more than ordinary freedom,
he took her by the hand, and addressed her in a Greek verse to this
effect: "My dear child, do you think yourself injured, because you are
not empress?" Nor did he ever vouchsafe to speak to her again. Upon her
refusing once at supper to taste some fruit which he presented to her, he
declined inviting her to his table, pretending that she in effect charged
him with a design to poison her; whereas the whole was a contrivance of
his own. He was to offer the fruit, and she to be privately cautioned
against eating what would infallibly cause her death. At last, having
her accused of intending to flee for refuge to the statue of Augustus, or
to the army, he banished her to the island of Pandataria [353]. Upon her
reviling him for it, he caused a centurion to beat out one of her eyes;
and when she resolved to starve herself to death, he ordered her mouth to
be forced open, and meat to be crammed down her throat. But she
persisting in her resolution, and dying soon afterwards, he persecuted
her memory with the basest aspersions, and persuaded the senate to put
her birth-day amongst the number of unlucky days in the calendar. He
likewise took credit for not having caused her to be strangled and her
body cast upon the Gemonian Steps, and suffered a decree of the senate to
pass, thanking him for his clemency, and an offering of gold to be made
to Jupiter Capitolinus on the occasion.
LIV. He had by Germanicus three grandsons, Nero, Drusus, and Caius; and
by his son Drusus one, named Tiberius. Of these, after the loss of his
sons, he commended Nero and Drusus, the two eldest sons of Germanicus, to
the senate; and at their being solemnly introduced into the forum,
distributed money among the people. But when he found that on entering
upon the new year they were included in the public vows for his own
welfare, he told the senate, "that such honours ought not to be conferred
but upon those who had been proved, and were of more advanced years." By
thus betraying his private feelings towards them, he exposed them to all
sorts of accusations; and after practising many artifices to provoke
(226) them to rail at and abuse him, that he might be furnished with a
pretence to destroy them, he charged them with it in a letter to the
senate; at the same time accusing them, in the bitterest terms, of the
most scandalous vices. Upon their being declared enemies by the senate,
he starved them to death; Nero in the island of Ponza, and Drusus in the
vaults of the Palatium. It is thought by some, that Nero was driven to a
voluntary death by the executioner's shewing him some halters and hooks,
as if he had been sent to him by order of the senate. Drusus, it is
said, was so rabid with hunger, that he attempted to eat the chaff with
which his mattress was stuffed. The relics of both were so scattered,
that it was with difficulty they were collected.
LV. Besides his old friends and intimate acquaintance, he required the
assistance of twenty of the most eminent persons in the city, as
counsellors in the administration of public affairs. Out of all this
number, scarcely two or three escaped the fury of his savage disposition.
All the rest he destroyed upon one pretence or another; and among them
Aelius Sejanus, whose fall was attended with the ruin of many others. He
had advanced this minister to the highest pitch of grandeur, not so much
from any real regard for him, as that by his base and sinister
contrivances he might ruin the children of Germanicus, and thereby secure
the succession to his own grandson by Drusus.
LVI. He treated with no greater leniency the Greeks in his family, even
those with whom he was most pleased. Having asked one Zeno, upon his
using some far-fetched phrases, "What uncouth dialect is that?" he
replied, "The Doric." For this answer he banished him to Cinara [354],
suspecting that he taunted him with his former residence at Rhodes, where
the Doric dialect is spoken. It being his custom to start questions at
supper, arising out of what he had been reading in the day, and finding
that Seleucus, the grammarian, used to inquire of his attendants what
authors he was then studying, and so came prepared for his enquiries--he
first turned him out of his family, and then drove him to the extremity
of laying violent hands upon himself.
(227) LVII. His cruel and sullen temper appeared when he was still a
boy; which Theodorus of Gadara [355], his master in rhetoric, first
discovered, and expressed by a very apposite simile, calling him
sometimes, when he chid him, "Mud mixed with blood." But his disposition
shewed itself still more clearly on his attaining the imperial power, and
even in the beginning of his administration, when he was endeavouring to
gain the popular favour, by affecting moderation. Upon a funeral passing
by, a wag called out to the dead man, "Tell Augustus, that the legacies
he bequeathed to the people are not yet paid." The man being brought
before him, he ordered that he should receive what was due to him, and
then be led to execution, that he might deliver the message to his father
himself. Not long afterwards, when one Pompey, a Roman knight, persisted
in his opposition to something he proposed in the senate, he threatened
to put him in prison, and told him, "Of a Pompey I shall make a Pompeian
of you;" by a bitter kind of pun playing upon the man's name, and the
ill-fortune of his party.
LVIII. About the same time, when the praetor consulted him, whether it
was his pleasure that the tribunals should take cognizance of accusations
of treason, he replied, "The laws ought to be put in execution;" and he
did put them in execution most severely. Some person had taken off the
head of Augustus from one of his statues, and replaced it by another
[356]. The matter was brought before the senate, and because the case
was not clear, the witnesses were put to the torture. The party accused
being found guilty, and condemned, this kind of proceeding was carried so
far, that it became capital for a man to beat his slave, or change his
clothes, near the statue of Augustus; to carry his head stamped upon the
coin, or cut in the stone of a ring, into a necessary house, or the
stews; or to reflect upon anything that had been either said or done by
him. In fine, a person was condemned to death, for suffering some
honours to be decreed to him in the colony where he lived, upon the same
day on which they had formerly been decreed to Augustus.
(228) LIX. He was besides guilty of many barbarous actions, under the
pretence of strictness and reformation of manners, but more to gratify
his own savage disposition. Some verses were published, which displayed
the present calamities of his reign, and anticipated the future. [357]
Asper et immitis, breviter vis omnia dicam?
Dispeream si te mater amare potest.
Non es eques, quare? non sunt tibi millia centum?
Omnia si quaeras, et Rhodos exsilium est.
Aurea mutasti Saturni saecula, Caesar:
Incolumi nam te, ferrea semper erunt.
Fastidit vinum, quia jam sit it iste cruorem:
Tam bibit hunc avide, quam bibit ante merum.
Adspice felicem sibi, non tibi, Romule, Sullam:
Et Marium, si vis, adspice, sed reducem.
Nec non Antoni civilia bella moventis
Nec semel infectas adspice caeda manus.
Et dic, Roma perit: regnabit sanguine multo,
Ad regnum quisquis venit ab exsilio.
Obdurate wretch! too fierce, too fell to move
The least kind yearnings of a mother's love!
No knight thou art, as having no estate;
Long suffered'st thou in Rhodes an exile's fate,
No more the happy Golden Age we see;
The Iron's come, and sure to last with thee.
Instead of wine he thirsted for before,
He wallows now in floods of human gore.
Reflect, ye Romans, on the dreadful times,
Made such by Marius, and by Sylla's crimes.
Reflect how Antony's ambitious rage
Twice scar'd with horror a distracted age,
And say, Alas! Rome's blood in streams will flow,
When banish'd miscreants rule this world below.
At first he would have it understood, that these satirical verses were
drawn forth by the resentment of those who were impatient under the
discipline of reformation, rather than that they spoke their real
sentiments; and he would frequently say, "Let them hate me, so long as
they do but approve my conduct." [358] At length, however, his behaviour
showed that he was sensible they were too well founded.
(229) LX. A few days after his arrival at Capri, a fisherman coming up
to him unexpectedly, when he was desirous of privacy, and presenting him
with a large mullet, he ordered the man's face to be scrubbed with the
fish; being terrified at the thought of his having been able to creep
upon him from the back of the island, over such rugged and steep rocks.
The man, while undergoing the punishment, expressing his joy that he had
not likewise offered him a large crab which he had also taken, he ordered
his face to be farther lacerated with its claws. He put to death one of
the pretorian guards, for having stolen a peacock out of his orchard. In
one of his journeys, his litter being obstructed by some bushes, he
ordered the officer whose duty it was to ride on and examine the road, a
centurion of the first cohorts, to be laid on his face upon the ground,
and scourged almost to death.