From Tiberius to the Antonines (Routledge Revivals)

A History of the Roman Empire AD 14-192

Albino Garzetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317698432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

The first two centuries of the Christian era were largely a period of consolidation for the Roman Empire. However, the history of the heyday of Roman imperium is far from dull, for Augustus' successors ranged from capable administrators - Tiberius, Claudius and Hadrian - to near-madmen like Caligula and the amateur gladiator Commodus, who might have wrecked the system but for its inherent strength.

Albino Garzetti's classic From Tiberius to the Antonines, first published in 1960, presents a definitive account of this fascinating period, which combines a clear and readable narrative with a thorough discussion of the methodological problems and primary sources. Regarding difficult historical questions, it can be relied upon for careful and reasonable judgments based on a full mastery of an immense amount of material. Nearly three hundred pages of critical notes and a comprehensive bibliography complement the text, ensuring its continuing relevance for all students of Roman history.

PART I

THE
JULIO-CLAUDIAN
DYNASTY

I

TIBERIUS

THE SUCCESSION AFTER AUGUSTUS

The death of Augustus, after forty-five years of personal power and fifty-seven years from the day when he had accepted the legacy of Caesar, was not to pose any problem of succession from a practical point of view. The care he had taken during his lifetime, right from the earliest days of his principate, to put a member of his family constantly in the limelight, with the clear implication that this person was marked out to succeed him, shows how he himself regarded it as natural both that the system he had founded should continue – notwithstanding the provisional character with which he deliberately endowed it by clothing it in legal fictions – and in particular that the principate should remain in his own family. Moreover, it must have appeared natural to the Senate and people of Rome, to Italy and to the provinces. After almost half a century of the new régime, the mere fact that people were now accustomed to it was sufficient to remove it from the realm of discussion, if only because it was a lesser evil than the troubled conditions prevailing previously. If we add to this the advantages of a peaceful life in an order of things in which the prestige and personal tact of Augustus had managed to overcome mistrust and satisfy sensibilities, it is easy to see why a solid base of universal consent henceforth sustained the Augustan principate, even in its evolution towards the revelation of its own true nature, that of an ever more clearly marked despotism. That the régime should revert to a struggle between factions, thus renouncing the very element which had finally reduced the latter to silence, was quite unthinkable and far from anyone’s wish. We must not fall into the error of introducing into this context of facts and judgements the concept of freedom as we understand it today. Cicero (De Rep., II, 43) had said, it is true, that ‘a people which is under a king lacks many things, in primis freedom, which does not consist in being under a just lord, but in being under no lord at all’: but in Cicero’s eyes Augustus would not have ranked as a king. In the political atmosphere officially promoted by Augustus, with its resurrection of republicanism and rehabilitation of Pompey, Cato’s freedom could be commemorated and honoured with impunity by anyone who wished to do so. The great families who now made their influence felt in the state by serving the monarchy, as they had made it felt before – with bigger risks – in the framework of the oligarchy, were not going to exchange the certainty of present dignity for the uncertain return to a situation which would have only been the starting-point of a new struggle for supremacy. As for the population of Rome and the empire as a whole, the problem did not even arise. The principate was henceforth firmly established, both in form and substance, as the product of the long process of development which had led it, under the shrewd and attentive eye of its founder, from the original usurpation of power to a de facto legitimacy founded in the unanimous view of all on the superhuman primacy of the auctoritas, and to the de jure legitimacy of the restoration of the republic. But apart from its constitutional characteristics the structure built up by Augustus was made to last because, realistically, its architect had seen it as an essentially administrative structure. The remote but fundamental cause of the Roman revolution, at any rate from the period of the great Mediterranean conquests onward, had been the inadequacy of the government of the city-state when confronted with the demands of a world empire. Hence the republic’s evolution – governed by the needs that arose on the way, guided by the typically Roman law of empiricism and checked by the powerful rein of tradition – into the principate and the régime of Augustus, who, with his genius for practical organization, utilizing all the preceding experiences and devoting to the business of government a constant personal attention which to us seems wonderful and is in fact the principal aspect of his greatness, completed and concluded the long process after his final victory in the Civil War.

In fact, the Augustan structure, through the very solidity of its administrative framework, did last, and delayed by some centuries the end of the Roman state. And the backbone of the Augustan administration really consisted of the republican nobility, against whose authority the struggle for innovation had developed; it now became the hierarchical corps, proud and revered, of the empire’s highest officials: magistrates, generals, governors of provinces. From this point of view, too, it would have been difficult, after decades of happy experience, to suppress the instrument created specially for the demands of empire and to go back to the beginning again. Material interest – which for the richer classes counselled loyalty to the principate as the restorer of tranquillity in economic life and of security of credit and landed property, and for the poorer classes signified the advantages and distractions of munificence – formed another powerful reason for the continuation of the régime. Other factors certainly leading in the same direction, less visibly but no less efficaciously, were the innumerable tiny relationships between persons, families and parties – the relationships through which the real and sovereign power of the Princeps was effectively exercised behind the fagade of legal fictions. These relationships were furthered by the strengthening of his own party – the party which had given him victory in the Civil War – by the subtle manoeuvres, to which Augustus was always most attentive, of political marriages, by his position as patron of individuals and communities both in Italy and abroad, and by the favour he showed his friends in the exercise of the two fundamental elements of everyday Roman public life, the clientela and political amicitia.

If one can envisage the self-annihilation at one stroke of the power of a man to whom, at the end of the still uncertain and confused period of the Civil War, Rome, Italy and the western provinces had sworn a personal oath of loyalty outside any constitutional framework and who, on the consensus revealed by this act, whether it had been voluntary or extorted, based the real and practical legality of his position when, potentiae securus, he established the system through which succeeding generations enjoyed peace and a Princeps¹; a man who was also ‘father of his country’, son of a god, a god himself in the eastern provinces, and confidently expecting to become one, like his ‘father’, throughout the empire (though this presupposed the continuation of the principate); who controlled the elections, the armies and the treasury; who was still in a word head of the party, and hence the wielder of a power all the more fearful because it was hidden; only if the abolition of all this can be imagined is it also thinkable that the principate as an effective reality could begin and end with Augustus.

Consequently it was beyond dispute that there had to be a successor to Augustus. Theoretically this successor could be chosen from outside the family of Augustus, for according to the legal fiction which from the start placed all questions relating to the principate on two different planes, those of formal authority and real power, it was a matter for the Senate and people to choose their protector and prince. The nobility, however, which accepted the confirmed supremacy of the Julio-Claudian family because it was based on the immense personal prestige of Augustus and also because this nobility felt itself incorporated in the system without any damage to its pride, would have hardly accepted the supremacy of any other family chosen from its own ranks – quite apart from the wishes of the army and the feelings of the provinces. Augustus himself had brought this out in the quiet speech addressed to L. Cinna, who wanted to kill him: ‘Do you think that, if you become prince in place of me, Paulus and Fabius Maximus, the Cossi and the Servilii will remain peaceful and content?’¹

The successor could only be Tiberius, for two reasons. First, in the final stages of Augustus’s physical decline Tiberius happened to be governing the empire already; in other words, he was deeply involved in an administrative system which he more than anyone else was bound to endorse because of his own character, and he was also equipped from the formal point of view with the powers to govern, having been placed in this very position by Augustus himself through the implicit procedure of veiled but effective designation, a distinction so often conferred on various people and just as often frustrated by fate. Second, on any objective estimate, no better candidate for the succession could be found. And even if the position of indispensability that he had by now achieved was still only a makeshift² solution to the dynastic design constantly pursued by Augustus, it certainly also represented the results of Livia’s secret efforts in favour of her son and of those of his friends or of people more friendly disposed to the Claudii, with their lofty and ancient patrician nobility, than to any others.

Tiberius had not had an easy life. His father, Tiberius Claudius Nero, was an honourable man whom Cicero would have liked to have had as a son-in-law instead of the dissolute Dolabella. Although a supporter of Caesar, after the Ides of March he had nevertheless proposed honours for the tyrannicides; then he had become involved in the Perugian War against Octavian and when the latter’s side was victorious, at the end of the winter of 41–40, had fled first to Sextus Pompeius in Sicily and later to Mark Antony in Achaea. He had taken with him his wife Livia Drusilla, who was herself a Claudius by blood, since she was the daughter of the Pompeian Appius Claudius Pulcher, who fell at Philippi. Appius Claudius had become M. Livius Drusus Claudianus, having been adopted in infancy by M. Livius Drusus, the famous tribune of 91 B.C. With his parents, in the romantic circumstances described by Suetonius, was the little Tiberius, who had been born less than two years before, on 16 November 42, in the house on the Palatine. When the triumvirs vi’ere reconciled at Brundisium, it became possible for the couple, before the end of the year 40 B.C., to return to Rome, where their erstwhile persecutor fell in love with the young and attractive Livia. Although she was about to give birth to her second son, Drusus, he married her on 17 January 38, with the more or less forced concurrence of her husband and after repudiating his own wife Scribonia, who had borne him Julia, his only daughter. The marriage was naturally also a political match (as can be seen from the family and party connections sketched above) as well as a romantically happy union.

When his father died, the nine-year-old Tiberius pronounced the funeral oration. From this moment onward he and his little brother became more closely attached to the house of Octavian, who had been named by the dying father as the guardian of his sons. Continuing his practice of arranging marriages of convenience, Octavian at that point promised Tiberius to little Vipsania, the daughter, then hardly a year old, of M. Agrippa, his faithful collaborator and future son-in-law, and of Caecilia Attica, the daughter of T. Pomponius Atticus, Cicero’s rich equestrian correspondent, a friend of Octavian and no less of Antony. Atticus died a little later (in 32 B.C.), after a life notable chiefly for its perfect equilibrium. On 7 August 29, at Octavian’s triumph, Tiberius, now a boy of thirteen, rode on the outer left-hand horse of the quadriga, the second position of honour, since the first – on the right-hand horse – was occupied by M. Claudius Marcellus, who was his coeval but also, as the son of Octavia, the nephew of the man celebrating the triumph. He enjoyed a position of distinction at the games held on the same occasion, and considerable prominence was also given to his assumption of the toga virilis, on 24 April 27. The young man’s own public displays were likewise encouraged by Augustus and Livia, who provided the means for the funeral games in honour of his father Ti. Claudius Nero and his grandfather M. Livius Drusus.

Thus the position of Tiberius, both in the household of the Princeps and in the public eye, was from the start a leading one, and it subsequently became even more prominent when he was also dispensed from the age qualifications. For example, in 24 he was allowed to anticipate by five years the entry to the magistracy and as a result in 23 became a quaestor at the age of nineteen. Moreover, among all the relations and kinsmen whom Augustus was accustomed to appoint from preference to the highest posts in the government, Tiberius swiftly distinguished himself by the talents, especially the military ones, with which he was endowed. But from the practical point of view of the dynastic programme there were still other people ahead of him. First of all there was Marcellus, who had Augustus’s blood in his veins and whose designation had been made crystal clear if not official (and these designations could never be made official without destroying the fiction of the restoration of the republic) by his marriage to Julia, the Princeps’s only daughter (25 B.C.). Next, when Marcellus died in 23, came Agrippa, to whom it fell in his turn to marry Julia; but when Agrippa also died in 12 B.C. Tiberius’s hour struck at last. In 11 B.C. he was constrained to give up his beloved Vipsania, by whom he had had one son, Drusus, and from whom he awaited another, and to marry Julia, now the mother of five children fathered by Agrippa. Augustus’s flights of imagination in pursuing his own matrimonial combinations were equalled only by the tyranny with which he insisted on their execution. They were nothing new or marvellous to the high society of the age, but Tiberius was embittered by them.

The son whom Julia bore him at Aquileia soon died. In the year 9 his brother Drusus died in Germany. The dissolute conduct of Julia and the excessive satisfaction with which Augustus regarded Agrippa’s young sons Gaius and Lucius Caesar, born in 20 and 17 respectively and both already adopted by Augustus in this same year, provided Tiberius with new motives for resentment. Whether it was these motives alone or others as well that caused his disguised exile in Rhodes from 5 B.C. to A.D. 2, it is impossible to say for certain. He returned to Rome in A.D. 2; three years earlier Julia had been banished, and just at that time Lucius Caesar died. In A.D. 4, on the death of Gaius Caesar (as well), adoption by Augustus came at last, and Tiberius Claudius Nero became Tiberius Julius Caesar, or more simply and more frequently, Tiberius Caesar. However, on the same occasion Augustus also adopted Agrippa Postumus, Agrippa’s youngest son (whom he caused to be banished, however, in A.D. 7), and in addition made Tiberius adopt, that is, put on an equal footing with his own son Drusus, his nephew Germanicus, son of the elder Drusus. But Germanicus was also the son of Antonia, the second of the daughters of Mark Antony and Octavia, and was thus of the blood of Augustus; he was bound even more closely to the family of the Princeps by his marriage (probably in A.D. 5) to Agrippina, one of Agrippa’s and Julia’s daughters. Nevertheless, it was Tiberius alone whom Augustus at this point made his partner in the tribunicia potestas, for ten years; and from this time onwards he collaborated in the government of the empire, involved almost continually, by virtue of his proconsular authority, in the hard military campaigns which marked the last period of Augustus’s principate. His tribunicia potestas was renewed in A.D. 13. In the same year a law conferring on him powers equal to those of Augustus over the provinces and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Translator's Preface
• Part I The Julio-Claudian Dynasty
• Part II Crisis and Renewal: from Galba to Trajan
• Part III Hadrian and the Antonines
• Appendices
• Indexes