Tiberius the Politician

Barbara Levick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134603787
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Tiberius has always been one of the most enigmatic of the Roman emperors. At the same time, his career is uniquely important for the understanding of the Empire's development on the foundations laid by Augustus.
Barbara Levick offers a comprehensive and engaging portrait of the life and times of Tiberius, including an exploration of his ancestry and his education, an analysis of his provincial and foreign policy and an examination of his debauched final years and his posthumous reputation.
This new edition of Tiberius the Politician contains a new preface and a revised bibliography.

CHAPTER 1
ANCESTRY AND EDUCATION

Tiberius Caesar publicly expressed the hope that he would be judged worthy of his ancestors. Like his nephew Claudius, he was versed in the history of the aristocracy, and of his own family in particular, and it would be interesting to know if he had in mind a particular branch, or particular individuals.¹ The models they offered were diverse enough, although by blood he was a Claudian on both sides. Tiberius’ parents were Ti. Claudius Nero and Livia Drusilla, daughter of a Claudius Pulcher who, having been adopted by M.Livius Drusus, the tribune of 91 BC, introduced a third line into Tiberius’ ancestry.²

The stemma of the patrician Claudii sprang from Appius or Attus Claudius (Attius Clausus in Livy), an early immigrant from Regillum in the Sabine country.³ It claimed its first consulship for 493 BC, and by the end of the Republic boasted twenty-eight consulships, five dictatorships, seven censorships, six triumphs, and two ovations (Suetonius’ count). The political outlook of a family prominent for nearly half a millennium has not surprisingly been a matter of controversy since ancient times: ultra-patrician on one view, the Claudii emerge as champions of the people, the urban plebs, on the other.⁴ Annalists and publicists of the late Republic worked up the family traditions and information provided by the Fasti, or lists of magistrates, into accounts that reflect their own preoccupations and prejudices. ⁵ They offered Suetonius a rich harvest of anecdotes illustrating eccentricity, ambition, and self-confidence (the notorious Claudian adrogantia) and Tacitus a facile explanation of some aspects of the conduct and manner of Tiberius. ⁶

The first outstanding figure in the family was Ap. Claudius the Decemvir, who in 450 BC helped to draw up Rome’s first written code of law, the Twelve Tables, and who was alleged to be bent on making his office a permanency. Even more famous than the Decemvir was Ap. Claudius Caecus, the censor of c. 312 BC. It was to the two sons of the censor, Claudius ‘the Fair’ and Claudius ‘the Brave’ (the name is Sabine), that the Pulchri and the Nerones traced their ancestry.

The Pulchri were the senior line, and it continued to produce outstanding individuals until it perished in the principate of Tiberius. By way of example, men from three successive generations of the branch may be shown in the forefront of politics acting in a variety of interests besides their own. Ap. Claudius Pulcher, the consul of 143 BC, cemented a friendship with the Sempronii by marrying his daughter to a member of that family—Ti. Gracchus. Appius himself became a staunch supporter of Gracchus’ policy of settling the landless on the public domains, and until his death he was a member of Gracchus’ land commission. His son, after losing his army to Cinna in 87, was outlawed and returned to hold the consulship in 79 as a pillar of the Sullan restoration. He served the annalists as a model for his arrogant namesake, the consul of 471.⁷ In the next generation P.Clodius showed himself a genuine champion of the plebs, author in 58 BC of a proposal to distribute grain to the people free of charge, and of another to restore the political clubs that had been dissolved. With their help he became the master of crushingly powerful gangs which he used alike against his personal enemy Cicero and the dynast Pompey.⁸

To this family belonged by birth the father of Livia. The forwardness of its female members was a theme to the taste of Suetonius, bringing to mind the domineering character of the Princeps’ mother; but Cicero had tried to shame the most famous (or rather notorious) of them all, Clodia, by adducing the distinction of her female forbears,⁹ and this alone is proof of the survival of a favourable tradition about the Claudii and their women. Claudius Pulcher’s adoption made him M. Livius Drusus Claudianus, and through his daughter he was to transmit the cognomen (surname) Drusus to the imperial family. Adoption was an important feature of Roman political life. It gave a man the next best thing to a son of his own body, who would take the name of his father and inherit not only his property but his dependants.¹⁰ Pulcher might have been expected on his adoption to take on a distinctive political colouring. M.Livius Drusus, tribune in 122 BC, had been one of the most effective opponents of C.Gracchus, bearing the title ‘patronus senatus’. Thirty-one years later his son, another M.Livius Drusus, took the tribunate, again in the interests of senatorial government. His object was, by satisfying the wants of each class and pressure group, to recover control of the law courts for the Senate and to re-establish the crumbling position of the nobility, more especially of the Metellan group, of which he was a leading member. Opposition was too strong, and Drusus was assassinated while still a sacrosanct tribune. He died a martyr to his cause, asking characteristically when Rome would see his like again.¹¹ Not, it seemed at first, in the person of his adopted son. Claudianus had his way to make; by 70 BC Metellan ascendancy was a thing of the past, and it was not as clear to everyone else as it was to Cicero that the Republic had died when the First Triumvirate came into being. In 59 BC Claudianus was supporting Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus, and could hope that they would grant him the embassy to Alexandria that they were unwilling to allow P. Clodius. By the spring of the same year, at latest, he was married. The bride, a daughter of M.Alfidius, a councillor of Fundi, was an aristocrat in her home town, but of consequence at Rome only for her dowry. Claudianus was praetor or iudex quaestionis (president of a court) in 50 BC, and we may well believe that his rise was financed partly from his father-in-law’s purse. To Alfidia in return Claudianus gave the entrée to high society. It was a common arrangement, and hostile politicians were fond of reminding men of their municipal mothers.

After the assassination of the Dictator, Julius Caesar, Claudianus re-turned to the principles of his adoptive family. Proscribed at the end of 43 BC, he followed the Liberators to the East and killed himself at Philippi, a fact which Tiberius’ panegyrist, Velleius Paterculus, is at pains to transmit.¹²

Claudianus’ son-in-law, Ti.Claudius Nero, did not share his glory. Nor could he boast any distinction in his immediate ancestry. The Nerones had never equalled their cousins the Pulchri. When the time came for Horace to celebrate the achievements of Tiberius and his kin, all he could cite from the past was C.Nero, great-grandson of the censor, who in 210 BC, after the defeat and death of the Scipios in Spain, took over their armies and who three years later revenged them and dealt a severe blow to Hannibal by destroying Hasdrubal on the Metaurus.¹³ But C.Nero’s success was not enough to keep the family in the front rank. The last consul it produced in the Republic was his cousin, in 202 BC, whom Scipio Africanus blamed for a dilatoriness and greed that delayed the final victory over Hannibal in Africa. Later members of the branch are too obscure to reveal much of their political allegiances; we cannot even trace the stemma with certainty. Towards the end of the Republic it seems that hope of advancement ranged them behind the dynasts. A Ti. Nero was serving in 67 BC as legate of Pompey in the war against the pirates; his speech in the Senate four years later against the summary execution of the associates of Catiline may have been made with an eye on Pompey.¹⁴ His relationship to Ti. Nero, father of the future Princeps, is uncertain; probably they were father and son.

Tiberius’ father made his first appearance in 54 BC, seeking a conventional début on the political stage. He competed against C.Memmius and the brother of Mark Antony for the right to impeach A. Gabinius for extortion, with Cicero’s approval.¹⁵ Four years later Nero was competing for something else: the hand of Cicero’s daughter; but he and his suit, though well received by Cicero, then absent from Rome in his Eastern governorship, came too late. Tullia had been disposed of elsewhere by her mother. Would Cicero have been more chagrined if he had thought that he was losing the chance of becoming the grandfather of Rome’s second Princeps?¹⁶ But Nero did not remain on the straight course that Cicero might have prophesied for him. In 48 BC we find him, on the same side as many to whom the dominant oligarchy held out small hope of advancement, acting as quaestor to the successful rebel Julius Caesar and in command of his fleet at Alexandria. He was rewarded for his services by admission to a priesthood, the pontificate, in 46, and by a chance of further work: the foundation of Caesarian colonies in Narbonese Gaul. Yet only two years later, after the assassination of Caesar, he was proposing that the killers should be rewarded.¹⁷ Like many of his followers, Nero may have been disillusioned by the Dictator’s failure to ‘restore the Republic’. But Republicanism in 43–42 showed itself a losing cause. Nero attached himself to Mark Antony, who seemed to some to be less of a menace than the young Octavian. He was elected to the praetorship in 43, and at the end of his year refused to lay down the rods of office. Octavian was confiscating land in Italy for Caesarian veterans, the victors of Philippi, and Nero committed himself to the attempt made by Antony’s brother Lucius, his wife Fulvia, dissident Republicans, and landowners to raise Italy against him. Perusia, the insurgent stronghold, fell to Octavian and Nero made his way to Praeneste and Campania, where he tried to provoke another rising. When that failed he took his wife and infant son Tiberius to join Pompey’s son Sextus in Sicily. There the cause of the Republic was still being maintained. But the dynastic combinations of these years were not stable; Octavian, who had to confront the returning Antony, moved closer to Sex. Pompeius; and Nero and his family were sent on their travels again, to Antony in the East. It was only in the spring of 39 BC, when the treaty struck at Puteoli by the Triumvirs and Sex. Pompey guaranteed their impunity, that they could return to Italy.¹⁸

The marriage of Nero and Livia had taken place between 46 or 45 BC, when the bride reached marriageable age, and the first months of 42 (Tiberius was born on 16 November 42¹⁹). The engagement may have been of long standing but the political thinking of the two Claudians had most in common in the years between 49 and 44; they may have come to differ in their attitude to Antony. If political considerations cemented the marriage, it was Octavian’s passion for Livia alone that brought it to an end. Some months after their return to Italy Nero divorced his wife, so that she might marry the Triumvir. He even presided over the wedding feast on 17 January 38 BC, when she was six months pregnant with his second son Drusus. Wags quoted a verse on the luck of a couple whose children were brought to birth after only three months’ gestation; to end the scandal Octavian sent both children back to their father. Nero’s complaisance would be incredible, if it had not had a political motive. To marry Livia, Octavian too had to be divorced—from the formidable Scribonia, whose brother was the father-in-law of Sex. Pompey. It had been a political match, made in 40 after the break with L.Antonius and Fulvia. By destroying it Octavian’s passion for Livia would help to loosen his alliance with Pompey. Nero, as an old ally of Antony, would not be loth to make a sacrifice in that cause; he himself, after all, had been repudiated by Pompey when an alliance with Octavian had been on the cards.²⁰

The surrender of his wife brought Nero no advancement that we know of. The consulship eluded him, generous though the Triumvirs were to their partisans; nor did he follow Antony to the East. When he died he consigned his sons to the tutorship of Octavian, and the elder, now nine years old, delivered the funeral oration. The composition of that speech can have been no easy task for Tiberius’ mentors, in 33 or 32 BC, when war between Octavian and Antony was imminent; the naval achievements of Nero and his forbears and his foundation of colonies were safer topics than his political career.²¹ Indeed, this was one field in which the Nerones outshone the notoriously un-military Pulchri, whose creation of the Roman navy had not been followed by much success in its use. Tiberius, his brother, and his nephew all sought and won distinction as soldiers; and all made free use of their fleets to achieve it. Here the heritage of the young Tiberius was ancient and unambiguous. In politics he would take in divergent traditions: on his mother’s side, the brilliant Pulchri and their ruthless exploitation of patronage for the benefit of the house; from his father’s career, flexibility and ambition, tempered by principle; and, by adoption of his maternal grandfather, the unyielding conservatism of the Livii Drusi, priggish, ostentatious, and magnificent, that had finally claimed the allegiance of Claudianus at Philippi.

Tiberius’ education may have begun, as that of all Roman children should, at his mother’s knee.²² But in his case this stage must have ended earlier than usual, at the age of three, soon after the divorce of his parents. His primary education (reading and writing in Greek and Latin, and numbers) had not lasted much more than two years when he delivered his father’s funeral oration. Henceforward he probably studied alongside M.Claudius Marcellus, Octavian’s nephew, who was only six months older than himself, at home in private rather than in a school.²³ When he reached the age of eleven or twelve, Tiberius passed into the care of the grammatici (grammarians) to study the classics of literature—just too early to benefit from the reforms of Q.Caecilius Epirota, who introduced Virgil and other contemporary Roman poets into the curriculum.²⁴ His diet in Latin would have been highly moral in tone and mainly poetic in form: Livius Andronicus, Ennius, the comic poets, the moral distichs of Cato, and, even at this stage, probably Cicero. From this part of his education Tiberius acquired a distinctive taste in Latin literature that may be illustrated from his vocabulary and choice of quotations²⁵—and a liking for literary quizzes. Late in life he would invite grammatici to dinner and (turning the tables on the schoolmasters) tease them with questions culled from his daily reading.²⁶ Tiberius’ interest in literature was not simply that of a reader and critic. Even in verse he could compose (Latin and Greek): he wrote an elegy on the death of L.Caesar, presumably in AD 2 or 3; and his Greek models reveal a preference for the learned and elaborate; that is, for the Alexandrian.²⁷

The distinction between the provender offered by grammaticus and rhetor (teacher of oratory) was not sharp, but it was usually after taking the toga of manhood at fourteen that a boy embarked on the last stage of his education, that mastery of the art of oratory that was essential equipment for the lawyer or politician. In Tiberius’ case that would have been in 27 BC: he took the toga on 24 April.²⁸ Besides rhetoric, Tiberius studied philosophy, alongside his cousin Marcellus, with the Academic Nestor, and perhaps with the Peripatetic Athenaeus as well. To judge by his later expertise, law and history were also included in his diet.²⁹ That he should get the best was only to be expected. He was a precocious boy; and Augustus had high hopes of Marcellus and a respect for education that reminds us of the incompleteness of his own.³⁰ But Tiberius’ civil education was interrupted by public duties; there was no time for leisurely study at Athens or any of the other centres of learning favoured by Romans. But when he went East in 20 BC he took with him a ‘studious company’ of literary men: historians and poets. This literary retinue was the precursor of others, of which the last, assembled on the island of Capri, consisted not of ambitious young amateurs, Ita...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• PREFACE TO THE 1999 EDITION
• SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
• CHAPTER 1: ANCESTRY AND EDUCATION
• CHAPTER II: FIRST YEARS IN POLITICS: TIBERIUS IN THE SERVICE OF THE PRINCEPS
• CHAPTER III: EMINENCE AND ECLIPSE
• CHAPTER IV: REHABILITATION: THE FINAL STRUGGLE FOR THE SUCCESSION
• CHAPTER V: THE ‘ACCESSION’ OF TIBERIUS
• CHAPTER VI: THE POLICY OF THE PRINCEPS
• CHAPTER VII: POLICY IN PRACTICE: THE SENATE AND ITS MEMBERS
• CHAPTER VIII: EQUITES AND PLEBS
• CHAPTER IX: PROVINCIAL AND FOREIGN POLICY
• CHAPTER X: THE DYNASTIC CATASTROPHE
• CHAPTER XI: TIBERIUS AND THE LAW: THE DEVELOPMENT OF MAIESTAS
• CHAPTER XII: LAST YEARS AND POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY