059 - To the Tiber with Tiberius

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 59, to the Tiber with Tiberius. Tiberius had never been particularly happy with his role as emperor. From the beginning of his reign, he had attempted to dump as much of the drudgery of supreme authority as he could off on other people, first trying to enlist a thoroughly disinterested a willing, but dead-too-soon son, before he finally settled on a supposedly hyper-loyal praetorian prefect named Lucius Sejanus, who proved to have only his own interests at heart. After the fall of Sejanus, though, Tiberius simply stopped looking for a partner to bear his burdens for him. That is not to say that he actually began to embrace the dull responsibilities of office. Quite the contrary, after Sejanus was executed, Tiberius attended to the empire even less than before. Had it not been for the inertia of the imperial bureaucracy, the empire likely would have devolved into another round of chaotic civil wars the minute ambitious men realized that there was no one manning the helm anymore. But the apparatus Augustus had set up turned out to be self-perpetuating enough to survive six years of utter neglect by his successor.

In his last years, Tiberius was famously obsessed with two things, one, purging Rome of anything resembling a threat to his power, and two, indulging in his own increasingly inappropriate fetishes. We'll deal with the latter in a moment, but as to the former, in the early 30s BC, Tiberius unleashed a terror on Rome that dwarfed anything perpetuated by Sejanus. I've been thinking a lot about these cycles of violence that have been plaguing Rome for the last century. I mean, I searched for the word purge in the manuscript, and other than a passing reference to Hannibal being a virus that needed to be purged from the Roman body, the word literally does not show up until episode 34, Marius and Sulla. But since then, it is a vocabulary word that I have been turning to with frightening regularity. Marius purges Sulla's supporters, Sulla purges Marius' supporters, the second triumvirate purges the republicans, the second triumvirate purges each other, Lucius Sejanus purges his political enemies, and now Tiberius is about to purge anyone connected to Sejanus. Julius Caesar was the only one of them who refused to join in the fun, and guess what happened to him? That's right, murdered on the steps of Pompey's theater.

There is definitely something to be said for the Romans emerging as the dominant power in the Mediterranean in the mid-100s BC. Annihilating the Carthaginians and conquering the Greeks left the Romans with nothing to keep their politics from turning into life and death struggles. No threat from a foreign other remained to bind the competing political factions to one another. The number of men and women killed in intra-Roman feuds prior to 150 BC is practically nil, the number killed after, too many to count. And here we are again, another round of bloody violent purges. And believe me, this won't be going away anytime soon.

With the state apparatus firmly now in the hands of a single man, if that man turned out to be cruel or paranoid, well, the state simply followed his lead. Tiberius turned out to be cruel and paranoid, and his vehicle for inflicting his wrath on the population of Rome was an escalation of his treason trials. Prescriptions may have been fine for the wild days of yore, but since the beginning of his reign, Tiberius had slowly codified something far more horrific. There is something terrible about being consumed by violent chaos, but I think there is something far more terrifying about being consumed by violent order. After the rise and fall of Sejanus, Tiberius let his perfectly insane, Kafka-esque legal system off its leash and allowed it to consume everyone. Evidence didn't matter, rationality didn't matter, all that mattered was that you had been fingered, or knew someone who had been fingered. I shudder when I think about living under such circumstances. And unfortunately for the people of Rome, there was little they could do about it. As long as the leadership of the Praetorian Guard and the frontier armies were staffed with men loyal to the Emperor, there was no fighting back.

There was a comment in the thread to last week's episode from listener Mike wondering where the rest of the legions stood on all of this, and why they didn't push back against the growing power of the Praetorian Guard. The answer is that at the top, the generals appointed to lead the army were men chosen carefully by the Emperor, and their loyalty to the regime was their most important qualification for office. Beneath the loyal generals, most of the professional officers in the armies were actually angling themselves for a spot in the Praetorian Guard. They didn't want to push back against the Praetorian Guard's new influence, they wanted to join in the fun. So the civilian population was left at the mercy of the regime.

The primary targets of this round of purges were first and foremost families who had connections to Sejanus. The fallen Prefect had earned himself many enemies during his rise to power, but he also gained many friends as well. With the fall of Sejanus, those friends joined their patron and were themselves accused, tried, and convicted of treason. Some were exiled, others committed suicide, but most, being unable or unwilling to escape the shame of it, were executed. Their property as usual was seized and folded into the Imperial Treasury. But not content to focus all of his attention on Sejanus' partisans, Tiberius also welcomed the opportunity to persecute senatorial and equestrian families with ties to the Julian clan, who he saw as having opposed his regime from the very beginning. Praetorian spies spread themselves throughout the city, and the slightest slip of the tongue, say, complaining at a party that it sure did stink that your old friend had just committed suicide after being caught up in crazy Tiberius' treason trials, meant that you yourself were about to be caught up in crazy Tiberius' treason trials. Tacitus describes that the trials paid no heed to gender or age. Senior citizens, children, men, and women were all hauled before the courts, tried, and executed. Heaps of bodies began to pile up, and it became a crime to even linger where the corpses lay and mourn a dead friend or relative for too long. It also became a crime to attempt to bury or cremate the condemned dead, whose bodies were treated as those of common criminals, left to rot in the streets, or dragged with hooks into the Tiber River. It was a dark time for Rome, and the veil would not be lifted until Tiberius was dead, though we know now that the lifted veil would crash right back down after Caligula arrived and revealed his true colors.

While all this was going on, Tiberius remained on capri, approving lists of victims, but otherwise leaving the empire to its own devices. So what exactly filled the hours of his day? Well, the stories that have come down to us were mostly written after Tiberius' reputation had taken a nosedive, so it's tough to say where fact ends and slander begins. But let's just say that his inhibitions were no longer a factor in his actions. This is a family podcast, and I once upon a time marked the show as clean within the iTunes library, so I would hate to betray that trust by describing in detail what Tiberius was allegedly up to in the last years of his reign, but I will say that just like the treason trials, gender and age did not matter. And also like the treason trials, his victims wound up murdered, supposedly thrown from the cliffs at his villa on Capri, when he grew bored with them, or was simply not satisfied any longer. The specifics of his alleged depravities can be found in both Suetonius or Tacitus if you would like a full accounting, but just keep in mind that I think a lot of it is probably exaggeration.

The final takeaway from the tales of Tiberius' perversions should be that by the time the second emperor of Rome was dead, the people hated and despised him and were eager to utterly trash his reputation. The only silver lining Romans could see in the horror of Tiberius' final years was that the old man would soon be dead and they would get a chance to start over with a new emperor. It's not like the next man could possibly be as bad as the old bloodthirsty pervert Tiberius. Enter to the stage, please, Gaius Julius Caesar Caligula, the man who would prove that you should never put your trust in the notion that at least it can't get any worse. Because guess what? It can always get worse.

Gaius Julius Caesar, the third and youngest son of Germanicus and Agrippina, was born in 12 AD and raised in the legionary camps. It was common practice at the time for a general to take his family with him on assignment, so when Germanicus was put in charge of the legions on the Rhine following the death of Augustus, his wife Agrippina and children, which at this point included eight-year-old Nero, seven-year-old Drusus, and two-year-old Gaius, went with him. Young Gaius became something of a mascot for the soldiers under Germanicus' command, and the toddler was outfitted with a little army man outfit that he would wear around camp, prompting the soldiers to nickname him Caligula, or Little Boots, after the adorable versions of the sandal boots that the boy would march around in. I should note at this point that while history calls him Caligula, in his time as emperor he was known simply as Gaius. The nickname only came back into use after his death, frequently with ironic derision.

When Germanicus was reposted to Syria in 17 AD, the family, now joined by the girls, Agrippina the Younger and Drusilla, dutifully followed along and when Germanicus died two years later, the children, including now the infant Julia Lovilla, returned to Rome with Agrippina. The next decade would be difficult for Agrippina and her children. Deathly afraid that any man who married Germanicus' widow would immediately become a powerful rival, Tiberius forbade Agrippina to remarry. This left the family adrift with no other paterfamilias than Tiberius himself, who hated and feared the whole lot of them. Caligula managed to stay below Tiberius' radar when the paranoid old man decided he couldn't stand the family any longer and prosecuted for treason Agrippina and the two elder boys Nero and Drusus. With their mother and elder brothers dead, the remaining children were shunted off to live with their grandmother Antonia, who looked after them for the next few years. The girls were one by one married off at Tiberius' orders, while Caligula remained in a sort of limbo.

After the fall of Sejanus, though, Tiberius gave enough passing thought to a successor that he called for Caligula to come live with him on Capri. The young future emperor seems to have managed to avoid crossing Tiberius during the six years he spent as a virtual prisoner on the island by repressing all the fear and resentment he likely felt towards the old man and pretended to be nothing less than the pliant servant of the aging emperor. In 33 AD, Caligula was given an honorary quaestorship, the only official office he would hold by becoming the supreme ruler of the empire, and also in that year, he married Junia Claudilla, though the union would only survive until Junia's death and childbirth a year later. In 35 AD, Tiberius changed his will to take some account for succession, ordering that his estate, and thus the throne, jointly fall to Caligula and Tiberius' grandson, Tiberius Gemellus, the only surviving son of the ill-fated marriage between Drusus and Levilla. Unlike Augustus, who had obsessed over succession and spent a great deal of his energy readying his potential successors, first Marcellus, then Tiberius and Drusus, then Gaius and Lucius, Tiberius seems to have done nothing to prepare Caligula or Gemellus for imperial responsibility. Gemellus at this point was barely even a teenager.

In 37 AD, death finally came knocking for Tiberius, though the details of his final moments are the source of some debate. Some sources claim that the now 77-year-old emperor who had ruled Rome for 23 years simply passed away in his sleep. Another more colorful account is that the emperor was reported to have finally succumbed to a fatal illness, which prompted the people of Rome to begin celebrating his death, but then another report followed right on the heels of the first, stating that the emperor had actually recovered. Then a third and final report came, stating that the emperor's recovery was a fiction and that he had, in fact, died. This last report was issued by the Praetorian prefect, Navius Sutorius Macro, who had gone in to confirm for himself the death of the emperor. And by confirm the death of the emperor himself, I of course mean smother with a pillow the weak but fully recovered Tiberius. A third version of the story points to Caligula as the murderer, but since this version was recounted by Caligula himself, in an attempt to be seen as the man who finally delivered Rome from his wicked grandfather, I think we can safely dismiss this version. Caligula was also fond of telling people that he used to creep into Tiberius' room at night and stand over the sleeping emperor with a brandish knife, and would refrain from doing what he felt was right, namely, murdering the evil Tiberius, only at the behest of the divine Augustus, whose voice commanded him to be patient and let nature take its course. Yeah, Caligula was nuts.

However it happened, Tiberius was dead and the people rejoiced. Such was the depth of their hatred for him, that rather than calling for elaborate funeral arrangements, they simply cried out, to the Tiber with Tiberius. They wanted to do to him what he had done to them, and treat his body as nothing more than a corpse of a criminal, drag it through the streets of Rome on hooks, and then deposit it unceremoniously into the river. The people did not get their way though, and a formal funeral and cremation were arranged, but Tiberius was conspicuously not granted the same divine honors the senate had tripped over itself bestowing upon Augustus.

Though Tiberius as well specified that Caligula and Gamellus should jointly rule the empire, Caligula had no interest in sharing power. The shrinking violet mask he had worn for years to avoid Tiberius' wrath was now cast aside. Having likely arranged in advance with Macro that when the day came the Praetorian prefect would figure prominently in the new regime if the guard declared for Caligula and Caligula alone, Gamellus was immediately locked out of his inheritance when Tiberius died. The young man turned out to be one of the first victims of Caligula's reign, and did not survive the year. First he was denied his inheritance, then he was put under something resembling house arrest, then he was executed for allegedly conspiring against the new regime. The boy's unhappy destiny, it seems, was to live as a prisoner of two emperors, before finally being murdered at the tender age of eighteen, guilty of nothing more than being born into the wrong family at the wrong time.

After freezing out Gamellus, Caligula made preparations to give the people of Rome something they had not seen in more than a decade, a personal appearance by their emperor. The imperial house, he announced, was returning from exile. The people were ecstatic at the news, and when Caligula arrived, they lined the roads out to the twentieth mile post to greet him. When they saw the new emperor, they shouted at him every pet name they could think of, calling him Our Prince, and Our Star, and of course, Little Boots. With the handsome twenty-four year old son of Germanicus ascending to the throne, it seemed like things were about to change for the better, that it might go back to the way that it had been under Augustus. It was reported that over a hundred and fifty thousand animal sacrifices were made across the empire to celebrate the good news. And at first, Caligula's ascension really was good news. He immediately cancelled the treason trials, and made a very public show of gathering all the records and evidence that had been gathered by Tiberius's spies, and burning it all in a great public bonfire. Those who had managed to survive by going into exile, were recalled to Rome, and pardoned of whatever crime they had been charged with, or convicted of. Suetonius even recounts an episode where Caligula went so far as to refuse to even read a report supposedly outlining a plot against him. To explain his decision, the emperor simply said that since no one had any reason to hate him, he didn't have time to read such idle memoranda. And at this point, he was probably more right about that than wrong. The people of Rome no longer feared daily for their lives and property thanks to Caligula. It's hard to hate a guy for making you feel safe in your own home again.

Caligula then went further. He cancelled an unpopular tax the Italians had been chafing under, while simultaneously upping the pay for soldiers on the frontier and in the Praetorian Guard. He also reinstated a few of the provisional client monarchs who had been deposed by Tiberius for spurious reasons, and not only gave them their power back, but promised them the tax receipts they would have received had they not been removed from power. To top off his generous arrival to the throne, Caligula initiated lavish gladiatorial games to celebrate the dawning of this new day. At all levels of the empire, from the common citizens, to the middle-class merchants, to the rich aristocracy, to the soldiers in the field and the provincials they defended, Emperor Caligula was a godsend. The pious young emperor then gathered up the bones of his dead mother and brothers and brought them back to Rome for burial in the imperial mausoleum. And finally, he renamed the month of September for his dear departed father Germanicus. Yep, everything was going A-OK.

So the question is, what happened? Well, apparently behind the happy facade, all was not well in the House of Caesar. Caligula had never been given the training he needed to really be an effective ruler. He had no experience in administration, had not served in the legions, and had been given no real responsibilities of his own until the moment he became emperor. His early political success seems to have been built largely by his doing nothing more than give the people whatever they wanted. Lower taxes? Sure. More benefits? Sure. Higher pay for the army? Of course. Lavish games and free grain for the mobs? I wouldn't think of doing anything less. It was a completely unsustainable combination of policies, of course. But it seems that the only thing Caligula learned at Tiberius' need during their six years together was that being emperor meant doing what you wanted, when you wanted, with whomever you wanted. Nothing about maintaining steady revenue streams, or limiting expenditures to justifiable ends, or striking a balance between needs and wants. Caligula basically just said yes to anything and everything, no matter how contradictory all those things turned out to be.

With this public policy time bomb ticking in the background, Caligula followed in Tiberius' footsteps and began indulging excessively in wine, women, food, and games. The hard living may have caught up with him because in October of 37, just six months after rising to power, Caligula was struck down by a serious illness and nearly died. The people were distraught at the news, and prayers and promises of every shape and form were sent up to the gods to beg them for the safe return of their new emperor. Famously, a few senators promised to trade their own lives for Caligula's if only the emperor recovered. Basically, these were the same empty promises that are often made on deathbeds, oh Jupiter, take me instead, that sort of thing. But then Caligula recovered. Now a few of the ancient sources don't draw a one-to-one causal link between the illness and the subsequent madness of Caligula's reign, but a few do point to the event as the decisive turning point. And certainly, if you were to ask the senators who had pledged their lives in a moment of melodramatic piety, they would tell you that the Caligula who went in was not the same as the Caligula who came out. Because when the emperor recovered and learned of their generous offers, he supposedly took them at their word. How nice that you pledged your life so that I may live. I'm just wondering then, what are you still doing here? Shouldn't you be at home committing suicide? After all, what will the gods do if you break your oath? Pale-faced and in shock, the unfortunate senators in question had little recourse but to follow through on their once-empty promise.

In I Claudius, Caligula's recovery from his illness is portrayed as the catalyst for his delusions of godhood, but the scattered accounts we have of his reign don't show him moving decisively toward self-deification until a few years later. So though the illness is a convenient place to point to and say, before this line, good, after this line, bad, it is probably more complicated than that. I, however, will take it as a convenient place to stop this week's episode. Next week, we'll get into the guts of Caligula's short and brutal reign. Though he was emperor for just four years, that proved time enough to mark him as one of, if not the, most infamous ruler in Roman history. Incest, murder, rape, and theft are all the calling cards of Caligula, and next week we'll do our best to separate myth from fact. I mean, did this psycho really try to have his horse named Consul?

Before we go this week, though, I'm going to take another personal moment, as today is Father's Day here in the United States. Dad, wherever and whenever you get this episode, happy Father's Day. I love you too. Though I plan to show you zero mercy in this week's Grandpa D. Herms epic battle for second place in the Western Amateur T-Ball League. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.