TACITUS'S CHARACTER OF THE

EMPEROR TIBERIUS.

NIEBUHR in his lectures on the History of Rome quotes a remark said to have been made by Napoleon I., that Tacitus had not done justice to Tiberius. There is at present a growing disposition to incline to this view. Dean Merivale in his 'History of the Romans under the Empire" points out that he had great merits, and that he has been in all probability much misrepresented by ancient writers. Professor Beesly goes further, and has argued at considerable length in two articles in the Fortnightly Review that Tacitus's account of him is nothing more nor less than an elaborate libel.

There can, we think, be hardly a doubt that the old traditional notions about this emperor require to be modified. It was usual to conceive of him as a wily hypocritical despot who solaced his declining years with ruthless cruelty and the foulest sensuality. Certainly, in the pages of Tacitus, he stands before us as a man who dissembled with consummate skill and with infinite delight. Something like a hardened cynicism, which cared not for contemporary opinion or for that of posterity, seems to have been the basis of his character, if we judge him solely from Tacitus. Niebuhr, though he allows he had some virtues as well as great abilities, and quotes with approval the remark above referred to, has not ventured to dispute the generally accepted view, and believes him to have been both a tyrant and debauchee. There was always, he thinks, a hateful side to his character, and this during his reign was more and more developed. Is this a true estimate of him? Dean Merivale is sceptical; Professor Beesly denies it in toto, and is confident that the emperor has been shamefully maligned.

Our knowledge about Tiberius is drawn mainly from four writers, Tacitus, Suetonius, Dion Cassius, and Velleius Paterculus. Among the first three there is a general agree

1 Lecture CXII.

2 Fortnightly Review, December, 1867, January, 1868.

ment. All take the unfavourable view. Suetonius, however, is a writer not to be highly valued. He was fond of gossip and scandal, and he had not much discrimination in choosing his materials. He goes out of his way to fill his pages with disgusting details of the emperor's alleged profligacy. Very possibly, too, being a contemporary of Tacitus, he may have been brought almost entirely under his historical influence, and not have ventured to exercise an independent judgment. Dion Cassius wrote his history nearly two centuries after the death of Tiberius, and so had to depend wholly on previous writers1. He seems not to have been a remarkably acute man, and a character like that of Tiberius was one with which he was hardly competent to deal. He describes it as a compound of many virtues and many vices, both of which were carried to extreme lengths. Substantially, he does not differ from Tacitus, who indeed, we may fairly assume, formed the views of subsequent authors in all their main outlines. Next comes Velleius Paterculus. He was a soldier, and had served under Tiberius in Germany and in Pannonia in the years A.D. 5 and 6. Of these campaigns he wrote a narrative during Tiberius's reign. Niebuhr appears to have had a high opinion of him2, though he admits that he had bad features in his character. He is," he says, "trustworthy, and an excellent historical source, where he had no temptation to distort the truth." Such a temptation, however, must have been tolerably strong at the time when he was writing. Dean Merivale speaks of him as a courtly panegyrist, and this, we believe, is the commonly accepted view. Very possibly he was a good soldier, and he is certainly a clever writer, but the fact that he persistently praises Sejanus is hardly in his favour. Whatever we may think of Tiberius, there cannot be much doubt that Sejanus's influence over him was for evil, unless, indeed, there was a deliberate conspiracy among all the chief later authors to deceive posterity. We have no right indeed to disregard the testimony of Velleius, or to question that he felt a sincere admiration of Tiberius, but still we cannot help thinking that much of his language is close akin to flattery. This, indeed, was not unnatural, as Tiberius was his patron. Flattery, too, of a very gross kind was unfortunately becoming more and more characteristic of the age, and this may be fairly taken as an excuse for Velleius when he speaks of the emperor's" divine deeds;" of his "superhuman munificence;" of his "incredible and unspeakable filial piety," &c., &c. We can believe that such rhetorical phrases as these may have been used without conscious insincerity. Still, they ought to be noted, when an attempt is made to represent

1 His account of Tiberius has not come down to us entire.

2 Lectures on History of Rome, Lecture CXI.

8 History of Romans under the Empire, chap. 46.

Velleius as simply an honest and straightforward soldier, to whom flattery would be distasteful. It is quite possible that he may have described without exaggeration Tiberius's achievements in Germany, and the affection and confidence with which he inspired the troops. That Tiberius was a general of the highest ability, that he showed a strong sense of duty in his care for his men, and was regarded by them with positive enthusiasm, is, we think, likely to be true. At any rate, we do not see why we should not take Velleius's word for all this. But are we not on unsafe ground when we argue from it that there could not have been latent in Tiberius a bad and hateful side of his character, which subsequent circumstances developed and ultimately brought into frightful prominence? Is it not quite possible that a man may have had all the great and good qualities, which Velleius attributes to Tiberius, up to a mature age, and yet in his declining years have become, under special temptations, a tyrant and a sensualist? Nor, again, have we any certainty that Tiberius, though a good soldier, an accomplished and cultivated man with some real virtues, may not have had a secret inclination to vice, and indulged it when opportunity offered. It seems to us that we have not the evidence which can justify us in pronouncing confidently on such a matter. If Tacitus is to be assumed to have had a strong bias which made him take the worst view of Tiberius, it must also be remembered that Velleius had powerful motives to speak well of him. It is going too far, we think, to impute to Tacitus deliberate and continuous misrepresentation solely on the strength of the excessive eulogies of Velleius. It is, however, perfectly fair to scrutinize closely Tacitus's own narrative and see whether there are grounds for suspecting that he has dealt particularly hard measure to Tiberius. It may be so, without our having to suppose that he was an utterly unscrupulous historian. Had he been this, he would not have hesitated in plain terms to have pronounced Nero the author of the great fire at Rome in A.D. 64, as, it seems, most writers did. But he had, unquestionably, a very bitter dislike of the Cæsars and of Cæsarism. He hated the Cæsars as the destroyers of the old Roman freedom, and, though he may have recognised the necessity of a political revolution and even of the concentration of power in the hands of one man, he heartily disliked the authors of the change. It was under Tiberius that this change may be said to have been fully consummated, and this fact would be enough to present him in an odious light to the Roman nobility, and to the class to which Tacitus belonged. He would be held up to infamy as the subverter of free institutions. If it could also be said with any truth that he was a proud, ungenial, and reserved man, it would be almost a moral certainty that he would be the subject of gross misrepresentation, and that

even an historian such as Tacitus, who could not fail to appreciate real greatness and capacity, and would never stoop to the level of a Suetonius, might incline in this direction.

That Tacitus has done this, we think there is evidence in his own pages. We are not prepared to say that his view of Tiberius is an utterly inconsistent and impossible one, but it certainly often seems needlessly harsh, and not quite reconcilable with passages in which he recognises the presence of good qualities and praiseworthy motives, though he does this rather grudgingly and reluctantly. He admits himself that the history of Tiberius, like the histories of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, "was falsified, while he reigned, through terror, and written after his death with the irritation of a recent hatred." This is confessing that he drew his accounts from poisoned sources. He says, indeed, that he has no motives to bitterness or partiality, but his history, at all events its general tone, produces the impression that, though he could heartily admire a great man, he was apt to be both bitter and contemptuous in his judgments. Towards Tiberius he is almost always bitter. It was, he gives us to understand, the merest affectation of humility when he professed himself unequal to the burden of empire. The Senate were made to go through a degrading farce, that they might sink to a lower depth of adulation. He is represented1 as taking offence at leading senators from the most unworthy motives. If he checks2 flattery to his mother, it is because he considers it a slight to himself; if he checks it when offered to himself, he is acting insincerely, or is giving way to a sullen and ungenial temper. It is assumed that several distinguished men, Piso among them, 66 were destroyed by various charges through his contrivance." It is hinted, not indeed asserted, that he was responsible for the death of Germanicus, and that he possibly got rid of Piso, his instrument in accomplishing that death, by foul means. Yet Niebuhr, who takes an unfavourable view of him, acquits him of the first crime, and Dean Merivale confidently maintains that he was guilty of neither. It is rather insinuated that he allowed the provinces to be under the same governors for an unusually long time from bad, or at least improper motives, though there is reason for believing that the arrangement was favourable to the interests of the provincials. In the account of the prosecution of Libo Drusus, when, according to the historian, the system of delation first began to develope itself, the emperor 5 is represented as resorting to an ingenious legal device in order to procure his condemnation. When Hortalus applies to him for help in his poverty, the answer he received was, it is hinted, gratuitously ungracious, although it is obvious that there may have been good reasons for the emperor's sternness,

1 Annals, 1. 13,
4 Ibid. 11. 14.

2 Ibid. L. 13.
5 Ibid. 1. 80.

8 Ibid. II. 30.
6 Ibid. II. 38.

and equally certain, as Tacitus takes care to tell us, that he could be and often was extremely munificent. Sejanus was probably a bad man, clever and able, but of a low and vulgar type, and his elevation is perhaps a serious blot on Tiberius, but the emperor was, it must be remembered, aged and lonely. The result, no doubt, was frightfully disastrous to Rome, and it would be useless to deny that the thickest gloom hung over his last years. They were, in fact, a reign of terror. Was Tiberius to be pitied or simply detested? His famous letter to the Senate in which he says that "he does not know what to write, or how to write, or what not to write," is susceptible of two meanings. Tacitus chooses the worst, and assumes it to have been the expression of remorse. When he finally sums up his character, it is in a bitter sentence in which he plainly hints that his temper had always been radically vicious.

On the whole, we think that there cannot be much doubt that Tacitus inclines to an unfairly severe view of this emperor. He had merits, as he admits, judicious munificence, administrative ability, thoughtfulness for the rights and welfare of the provincials. He was a good and careful financier, and would not let public money be squandered in the vulgar show of gladiatorial exhibitions. He was frugal and economical in his personal habits, and the imperial establishment was not so great or splendid as some of those of the nobles. He would receive1 legacies only from friends, though it was the fashion of the time for rich men to remember the emperor in their wills. It is clear from Tacitus's own account that he had many of the qualities which go to make a wise and just ruler. Equally clear is it from the same account that the malignant gossip of the day often charged him with the foulest crimes without the least real ground, as in the case of the death of Drusus. The historian's marked bitterness is no doubt to be explained by the fact that he regarded Tiberius as the deliberate organiser of the hateful practice of "delation," and as thus the murderer of his country's liberties. This is the view which is ever present to his mind, and it leads him to be continually attributing bad motives and suspecting apparently good ones. The hideous horrors connected with "delation," which were still fresh in his memory, hardly allowed him to do justice to the emperor in whose reign they began to show themselves. Tiberius indeed, he is careful to tell us, often inclined to mercy, mitigated a harsh sentence of the Senate, or even stopped a prosecution altogether, and the actual number of persons who perished on charges of treason previous to the ascendency of Sejanus was, as Professor Beesly has pointed out, comparatively small. Yet even in these cases, we often meet with an ill-natured remark or insinuation, which betrays the animus of the writer. It is possible that we might have had a different picture of the emperor, had his reign closed 1 Annals, VL. 6. 4 Ibid. II. 48.

2 Ibid. VL 51.

8 Ibid. IV. 7.