054 - All in the Family

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 54, All in the Family. Before we get started, I just want to thank everyone for their feedback on the sponsorship issue. Based on the comments, it looks like ads will be a go. I'm not sure exactly when they're going to start, but I promise not to let it get in the way of anything, and the content itself won't change a bit.

When we left off last week, Augustus had set his sights on clearing out the last pockets of resistance to Roman rule within the existent boundaries of the empire, before setting out to push those boundaries northwest to the Danube and Elbe rivers. Tiberius and his younger brother, Drusus, both in their early 20s, had been put in charge of the initial phase, pacifying the independent tribes living in and around the Alps.

As I mentioned at the end of last week, it was important that Augustus elevate his step-sons to prominence as quickly as possible. The princeps' health had always been a concern, and even though he wound up living well into his 70s, the specter of sudden death always loomed large in his mind. Agrippa had thus far served admirably as a backstop in case Augustus were to die, but, let's face it, he was growing old as quickly as Augustus was. A new generation would have to be ready to step forward if and when the princeps died.

It is worth pointing out, though, that as much as selfishness contributed to Augustus' promotion of his step-sons because he wanted power to remain within the family, he also had his eye firmly on the public good. By having a well-established succession plan in place, Augustus could die knowing that when he did, it would not plunge his people back into immediate civil war. But just as Agrippa had been a necessary stand-in when true descendants of Augustus were unavailable, Tiberius and Drusus were now being set up to play much the same role. Though Augustus liked and trusted his step-sons, he was still biased towards passing power to a blood relative. It's almost as if the claim that he was not setting up a monarchy dominated by a royal family was completely bogus.

The temporary status of Tiberius and Drusus as heirs apparent became clear once Agrippa and Julia's new family began to grow. After marrying his best friend to his only daughter in 21 BC, Augustus kept a close eye on the new couple, hoping they would produce a long-term solution to his dynastic problems. It did not take long for Augustus to be greeted with the happy news that Julia had given birth to a son, Gaius, in 20 BC. More good news followed, as the marriage of Agrippa and Julia proved to be a fertile one, and year after year they produced child after child. In 19 BC, Julia the Younger was born. In 17 BC, a second son, Lucius. Three years later, Agrippina the Elder was born, followed in 12 BC by the final son, Agrippa Posthumus, so named because he was born after the unfortunate early death of his father, which we will get to in a moment.

In addition to this week's maps, which highlights the Danube provinces secured during the period, I have also posted a family tree of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. They are a tricky bunch to keep track of, because not only did they share about three total names between the whole lot of them, so which Agrippina are we talking about again? There was also some pretty heavy intermarriage going on. So I hope the family tree will help you sort everyone out. Keep it handy, because it should be good for about 80 more years.

As I was saying though, the births of Gaius and Lucius immediately put a sell-by date on Tiberius and Terusius. In a highly irregular move, Augustus decided to adopt the boys when they were still infants, bring them into his household, and raise them himself. There was simply too much at stake not to involve himself in every aspect of their lives and education. One of them was destined to sit on the throne. Augustus needed to make sure that they would be ready.

But just because there was a planned obsolescence now built into Tiberius and Terusius, that did not mean that Augustus could simply ignore them. It would be twenty years or more before Gaius and Lucius could even begin the process of establishing public lives for themselves. Tiberius and Terusius were ready now, and with all the illnesses that had felled him over the years, Augustus knew that lasting the twenty years before his grandsons would be ready to take over was a dicey prospect at best. Plus, the ancient world being what it was, there was no guarantee that Gaius and Lucius would even survive childhood. It was best to keep as many irons in the fire as possible. So on the off chance that either Tiberius or Terusius was indeed destined to succeed him to the throne, Augustus made sure that everything stayed in the tight family he was building.

So in 19 BC, he had Tiberius marry Vipsania, the daughter of Marcus Agrippa by his first wife, and not long after, Terusius married Antonia, the daughter of Augustus' sister Octavia, and, ironically enough, Mark Antony. Both marriages were happy ones, though in the case of Tiberius, it was this very happiness that would open up a rift with Augustus that would be the hallmark of their future relationship with each other.

In 17 BC, Augustus began to set the stage for his imperial expansion. That year, one of his generals in Gaul lost a minor battle to some Germanic tribes. Rather than letting the incident pass without notice, Augustus saw his opportunity to open up legal war in Germania. Just as is the case with most every civilized country across history, Rome never just declared war. Hostilities were only opened once Rome or one of their allied kingdoms was attacked. It was very important to the Roman sense of themselves that they only entered into just wars of self-defense. In theory, this meant that they were always on strong moral footing when they marched off to war, but in practice, this meant that they simply seized on the flimsiest pretext to launch a campaign.

Now, Augustus had his flimsy pretext. He traveled himself to Gaul and began reorganizing the legions there to prepare them for what would no doubt be a difficult push across the Rhine River to the banks of the Elbe. The princeps would remain in the province for a good three years, keeping himself within easy reach of all the campaigns he had initiated.

The first major push, as I said at the end of last week, was Tiberius and Drusus' invasion of what would become the province of Rhaetia, which covered modern day Switzerland and part of Austria. In the single summer of 15 BC, the two brothers ruthlessly prosecuted a war of pacification against the tribes living there. The causus belli for the invasion, I should note, was some reported ill treatment of Roman citizens passing through the territory. Flimsy pretexts. I has them.

Rather than being satisfied with simply beating the tribes on the battlefield and turning them into taxpayers, the two brothers decided that the best way to ensure the mountainous region remained safe for Roman travelers was to initiate a mass deportation of the men. Those who weren't sold into slavery were marched at spear point off their land. Women, children, and old men were left behind to keep the region nominally populated but completely defenseless.

Neighboring Rhaetia, incorporating the rest of modern Austria, was the recently consolidated, if still unofficial, province of Noricum. The tribes there had been friends of Rome since at least 170 BC and had actually been important allies of Julius Caesar during his civil wars against the Senate. In 16 BC, all Augustus had to do was order a proconsul in to occupy the land. The formal annexation of all the land south of the Danube was well underway.

With Roman intentions obvious, the recently passive tribes inhabiting Pannonia rose up against encroachment. They had been beaten soundly by Augustus during his Illyrian campaigns 20 years earlier, but their territory had not been officially incorporated into the empire. The fiercely independent Pannonian tribes could barely stand unofficial servitude, so there was no way they were going to be able to stand official servitude. And with the legions on the march, that sure looked like what they were headed for.

But that fierce independence would ironically sow the seeds for their loss of it, because not only were they predisposed to standing apart from Rome, they were also predisposed to standing apart from each other. Unable to establish a united front, the tribes were easily picked off one by one. That is not to say that the conquest of Pannonia took place overnight, as the conquest of Rhaetia basically had, but just to say that the outcome was never really in doubt.

In 13 BC, the 29-year-old Tiberius served his consul for the first time. Obviously, long before he should have qualified for that office. Lifting age restrictions for his possible heirs was one of Augustus' favorite tricks to give them a leg up on the competition. When his year on the consulship was done, Tiberius would qualify for any number of pro-consul ships in the provinces, where he could continue to grow his power and prestige. All the while, his peers would be hoping against hope to nail down that first quaestor ship.

13 BC also marked, finally, the passing of Marcus Lepidus. The old triumvirate had managed to last another 25 years, living in comfortable obscurity after being booted from the triumvirate in 36 BC. The one concession Augustus had allowed Lepidus when the latter left the public stage was allowing him to remain as Pontifex Maximus, an office he had held since the death of Julius Caesar. When Lepidus died, Augustus naturally assumed the high priesthood. Now the princeps was the official head of all three branches of Roman public life, the church, the state, and the military.

At the end of the year, with operations in Pannonia going well but not perfectly, Augustus sent in Marcus Agrippa to bring the annexation to a speedy conclusion. Eager to get started, Agrippa immediately set sail for the Balkans and spent the winter there, planning the next summer's campaign. But it was a campaign that he would not live to see. Suffering from a number of nagging ailments, Agrippa caught sick and was forced to return home in March of 12 BC. But landing in Brundisium, he took a turn for the worse. Messengers raced to Rome to deliver the news to Augustus, who dropped what he was doing and rushed to Brundisium. But by the time he got there, it was too late. Marcus Agrippa was dead.

It would be difficult to overstate what a blow this was. Agrippa was basically the reason Augustus had gotten anywhere in life. The inherited name of Julius Caesar was obviously the catalyst for his rise, and the savvy advice of Macinus helped him pick his way through the treacherous world of Roman politics. But it would all have been for naught without victories on the battlefield. And all of Augustus's most important victories, against first Sextus Pompey and then Mark Antony, had been won by Agrippa. The death of the great general at age 51 was a harsh reminder that while he was now all-powerful, Augustus never really had been able to do it alone.

The question of what would happen the next time a key military victory was required must have weighed heavy on Augustus's mind. Because not only had he been able to trust Agrippa to win the battle, but he could also trust Agrippa not to betray him afterwards. The next great battle, if such a thing occurred, would be fraught with danger for the regime. It would mean a loss of legitimacy, while victory would mean a new rival for power. The death of Agrippa was bad news for Augustus, no matter which way he sliced it.

But that did not mean Augustus was going to simply cash in his chips or linger too long over the death of his friend. After escorting Agrippa's body back to Rome, Augustus placed the remains in his own recently constructed mausoleum, so at least in death the two friends would be reunited. So when he closed the doors on the tomb, it was time to move on.

The key question was what to do with his now twice-widowed daughter, Julia. He mulled over, but then dismissed the idea of marrying her to an ally outside the family. No, Augustus wanted to keep everything in a nice tight little bundle, so he settled on marrying her to Tiberius. The only problem was that Tiberius was happily married to Vipsania, and he had no desire to marry the woman who had so recently been his stepmother-in-law. He and Vipsania had already produced a healthy son named Nero Claudius Drusus, named unusually after his uncle rather than Tiberius himself, as was the custom. But when Augustus made up his mind, he made up everybody's mind. Tiberius was forced to divorce Vipsania and marry Julia.

The bitterness over the incident grew slowly in Tiberius, sparked at first simply by his longing for Vipsania, but then nursed into a full-blown fiery rage when he really got to know his new wife. The problem was that the two were simply not compatible. Tiberius was conservative, thoughtful, and at times an admittedly humorless man. He was smart, talented, and ambitious, but embraced none of the flamboyance that had come to mark Julia's personality. As the only daughter of Augustus, Julia had been raised in a pampered world of wealth and privilege. But now that she was grown up, she was not daddy's little girl anymore. She was now simply a pawn in her father's dynastic games.

Never one to consider his daughter's feelings, Augustus married her off as was politically expedient and then took her sons Gaius and Lucius away at the first opportunity. In response, Julia began to act out against her father's obsession with traditional morality and proceeded to carry on affairs with Rome's leading men, essentially making a fool out of Augustus behind his moralizing back. Tiberius stepped into this situation and soon found himself playing the cuckold. But as much as Tiberius disdained his new wife, it seems that Julia was no great fan of Tiberius's either. She even sent a letter to her father through an intermediary denouncing Tiberius as unworthy of her hand in marriage and beneath her. After their only child died in infancy, Tiberius seems to have renounced marital relations with Julia, not that she cared.

After Agrippa died, Tiberius inherited not just the general's widow, but also his commanded Pannonia. Droesus, meanwhile, was placed in charge of the armies of the Rhine, and in contrast to Tiberius's unhappy private life, found his own family a source of great joy. His marriage to Antonia was a happy one and produced three children, each destined for a life in the public eye. Droesus returned the compliment Tiberius had paid him by naming his own eldest son, born in either 16 or 15 BC, Nero Claudius Tiberius. Of course, we know the boy today by the agnomen he inherited from his father, Germanicus. Filling out the family was Julia Lovilla, born in 13 BC, and the reversely named Tiberius Claudius Nero, born in 10 BC. Obviously the Romans were not much for unique naming, so from here on out, I'll be referring to them as Germanicus, Lovilla, and Claudius, respectively. And in case you didn't already know, yes, that Claudius.

The young family was the toast of the Roman world. Droesus, unlike his sad sack and socially awkward older brother, was outgoing and universally popular. Antonia herself soon joined the auspicious ranks of Cornelia Africana, mother of the Gracchi brothers, and her own mother, Octavia, as a near-deified paragon of womanly virtue. When Droesus died, she refused to remarry, eventually living another five decades without ever taking a new husband, a highly unusual state of affairs.

From 11 BC to 9 BC, the two stepsons of Augustus battled their way into hostile territory. Tiberius had the easier time of it because, as I said, the tribes of Pannonia remained too disconnected to really prove a match for the legions. But Germania was a different story. The tribes there were larger, tougher, and more strategically advanced than the natives in Pannonia. Droesus was able to eventually push his armies all the way to the Elbe, but every winter he was forced to withdraw back to the safety of Gaul. When they faced Droesus in battle, the Germans usually lost, but that in no way led to anything resembling an atmosphere of conquest. Like the Romans themselves, the Germans could lose all the battles in the world and still never admit defeat.

In 9 AD, a Roman general named Publius Varus would make the mistake of thinking the Germans had conquered people, and lead three legions into a disaster that would see the Romans more or less withdraw from Germania forever, the dream of a border on the Elbe River abandoned.

Disaster struck the royal family, and really, that's what they were, a royal family. In the late summer of 9 BC, when Droesus fell off of his horse, he had been winding down a successful year in the consulship and was preparing to take on pro-consular authority and follow his brother up the chain of command, but just like that, his career and his life were cut short. The injuries he sustained from the fall likely became infected, and he was simply unable to recover.

In a touching tribute to the bond shared by the brothers, Tiberius raced across 200 miles of hostile territory accompanied by a single Gallic guide when he heard the news. Unlike Augustus racing to meet Agrippa, Tiberius was able to make it in time, but just barely. Soon after his brother's arrival, Droesus died. Tiberius led the body back to Rome and was soon joined by Augustus and Livia, who was beside herself with grief at the loss of her son.

As I said, Antonia never remarried. She moved in with Augustus and Livia, and her children were raised alongside their older cousins, Gaius and Lucius.

The next year brought only more bad news for Augustus. Macinus, his longtime friend and key political advisor during the rise to power, died in October, leaving Augustus alone at the top. There is something indispensable about advisors who are around before power is won, who can speak plainly and directly without succumbing to awe. Augustus was fast running out of such men, and the two most important were now dead. Augustus, for so long the young man fighting his elders for power, was now himself the elder, surrounded by younger men whose relationship to him was inalterably colored by his supreme power.

Augustus was never lonely or lacking for company, but at this point, the only person left who resembled both a friend and an equal was Livia. There was much speculation about why he remained with her after it became apparent that their marriage would never produce children, but perhaps she gave him access to an easy familiarity that he would be unable to find anywhere else. File that under pure speculation, though.

With Agrippa and Drusus dead, the only man ready to step into power now, should Augustus die, was Tiberius. Probably out of consideration for this fact, Tiberius was promoted to a status not unlike that attained by Agrippa after Augustus' brush with death in 23 BC. After taking over his brother's command in Germania, he served his consul in 7 BC, and was then granted the same power at the tribunate that Augustus enjoyed.

Once his year in the consulship was over, Augustus had slated Tiberius to head east and oversee another intervention into Armenia, where a pro-Parthian monarch had recently ascended the throne. But Tiberius shocked everyone when he suddenly announced that he would be doing no such thing, that in fact he was retiring from public life for good.

Historians, both ancient and modern, have puzzled over Tiberius' inexplicable retirement. Some posit that he could see plainly that he was simply a temporary placeholder, that he would be forced to step aside for Gaius and Lucius eventually, so why waste his life clearing the way for his younger stepbrothers? Others say that he actually had the teenager's best interests at heart, and was removing himself from the stage so there would be no competition for the public's attention. And of course, on a more personal level, everyone likes to point out how unhappy the marriage between Tiberius and Julia was, and that when he retired, he was retiring as much from her as he was from politics. Whatever the real reason, in 6 BC, the one man Augustus would feel comfortable turning over the empire to, walked away from him.

Augustus was enraged by his stepson's betrayal, and when the princeps announced Tiberius' decision to the Senate, his remarks made it very clear that he was taking the whole thing personally. But despite the heavy pressure exerted on him to reconsider, Tiberius packed his bags and sailed for Rhodes, the island he had chosen for his self-imposed exile.

It's hard to tell what to make of the episode. Did Tiberius really think he was leaving public life behind, or was it all some elaborate charade designed to prove how indispensable he was? To partially answer the question, I think we can look to the fact that while Tiberius gave up formal office when he left for Rhodes, he conspicuously did not give back the at-large powers the Senate had bestowed upon him. One suspects that Tiberius was not done with politics just yet.

Tiberius' announcement left Augustus in a bind. Gaius and Lucius, at this point, were only 14 and 11. If the princeps died, who would take over? Because they certainly weren't ready. Tiberius could always be returned from retirement, but this whole self-imposed exile thing would make it very difficult to arrange for a peaceful transfer of power. If Tiberius was still retired when Augustus died, other ambitious men would seize on the opportunity to lay their own claim on the throne. Since that certainly wouldn't do, Augustus was left with no other choice. He simply had to keep living. One way or the other, he would have to stay alive long enough to see Gaius and Lucius come of age and establish a place in Roman public life for themselves.

Next week, fate will continue to mock Augustus' plan for a permanent dynasty. While the princeps focused on outliving the childhoods of his two grandsons, he was not prepared to outlive them completely. But when death came calling, first for Lucius and then for Gaius, the princeps could only stand by helplessly as his young heirs were stolen away from him. To make matters worse, by the time the two boys died, Augustus had already banished Julia from Rome when somebody finally told him what she had been up to all these years.

With his only daughter wasting away in exile and his two prized grandsons dead, the family Augustus had worked so hard to build and protect was now in shambles. The Julian line could no longer stand on its own two feet. It would need a transfusion of blood from the Claudians to survive.

Before we go, I would like to take a personal moment here, as today is Mother's Day in the United States. Mom, I know you're like three episodes behind the pace, so this won't get to you for another week or two. But wherever you are, probably trucking around the neighborhood, happy Mother's Day. I love you.