Tiberius (3 page)

Augustus was not amused. He was hardly thirty, but he had become rather stuffy. And he had also come to believe that power could not be shared; it was nonsense to have Rome divided. Only one man could rule it. That man should be himself.

At about this time the father of young Tiberius, now nine years old, died. The ex-husband of Livia had got off very well from the civil wars, all things considered, and he knew it He had lost his wife, but he had kept his life and his property; it was the part, of intelligence to keep away from the limelight until things quieted down. He did. But before things were quiet he was dead. His sons, nine-year-old
Tiberius and five-year-old Drusus, went to live with their mother in the home of Augustus. Tiberius performed the last duties toward his father; in the Forum, with his father's body on a bier before him, the boy delivered the customary funeral oration. He spoke well, but that was to be expected. Even while still with his father Tiberius had the best of teachers, the finest Greek literary men and the most outstanding Roman rhetoricians.

Afterward there were all those tutors and many more. Tiberius was perhaps the best-educated boy in the Empire. The Emperor had only one child—his daughter Julia, born a few months before Tiberius' brother. The three children played together and took part in the family ceremoni
als togeth
er; when a temple was dedicated, a religious ceremony observed, a victory celebrated, the whole family of Augustus was expected to participate. Even the stepsons. Augustus' home had become the hub of Rome, and those who lived in it were always on display.

But Julia, being female, was not expected to study as hard as the boys. The tutors were for Tiberius and Drusus—and for their cousin Marcellus, the son of Augustus' sister Octavia (by her first husband, not by Mark Antony); Roman family relationships are complicated. The boys studied hard, according to their various personalities: Tiberius seriously, Drusus sweetly, Marcellus under compulsion, for he was a cheerful extrovert. It had already occurred to Augustus that the Empire was a bequeathable piece of property. As these boys were his closest of kin in the next generation, it might very well go to one of them, or to all three; and Augustus was determined that they should be ready for it.

However, in order for him to have an Empire to bequeath it was necessary to make sure it was his.

Augustus waged a few little wars to put his affairs in order. Old Lepidus, the third and least member of the Triumvirate, showed a disposition to become more important; but Augustus put a stop to that in a short skirmish. Then Sextus Pompey, the Sicilian sailor, became a very serious annoyance. All Rome lived off the imports of food from Africa (it was beneath the dignity of Roman landowners to grow grain), and the ships passed perilously near Sicily, where Sextus Po
m
pey's fleets could pounce on them. Sextus Pompey's fleets did.

He was strange even for a highborn Roman—wore sea-green robes instead of white edged with purple, called himself the descendant of Neptune, the Sea God, even pretended to have forgotten how to speak Latin. Augustus taught him how to speak very plainly indeed. Augustus built himself a fleet and turned it over to a man named Marcus Agrippa, a very great Roman who fought batdes, built aqueducts, gave gladiatorial displays, provided free baths for the common citizen—acted, in a word, like a wardheeling politician at election time, but never tried to take power from his master, Augustus. That made him very odd in Rome, but very valuable. Agrippa showed Sextus Pompey that even a descendant of Neptune could be whipped in a sea battie, and opened up the food routes to Africa again.

With those two thorns out of his side, Augustus turned his attention to Antony.

The trouble Was, Rome was weary of civil wars. So many thousands had died, so much treasure had been squandered, that it was plainly dangerous to risk starting another war between Roman and Roman. Augustus wanted to fight Mark Antony because he thought he would win. But he did not dare begin it, and Mark Antony, infuriatingly, would nor begin it for him, no matter how many ugly letters Augustus sent to Egypt.

Augustus turned to Livia for advice.

Throughout his life he turned to her with the problems of state, and she never failed him. She came up with a scheme: Don't declare war on Mark Antony. Declare war on Cleopatra;
she
is no Roman; then let Antony do as he likes.

Augustus did, and what Antony liked, of course, was to fight on the side of his wife; and once again great masses of Roman legions came to battle each other for control of die known world.

They met at a place called Actium.

Actium is a little cape of land in the Ambracian Gulf. Mark Antony's army came up to one side of the gulf, Augustus' camped on the other. They couldn't get at each other, but they could shout across at each other—the gulf is only a few miles wide—and presently the war fleets of both sides appeared.

The warship of the Romans was the galley—great wooden vessels with patchy sails, relying mostly on the muscle-power of rowers to move them lumberingly through the water. In Egypt the fashion was to make things colossal and stately: Mark Antony's galleys had as many as ten banks of oars, great hulks with four or five hundred men rowing and another couple of hundred carrying arms on deck. Augustus' fleet (commanded again by Marcus Agrippa) had smaller vessels, but faster ones and more of them. Augustus needed to have more of them. Ram-and-board was the favorite naval tactic of the time, but that would not work against Mark Antony's monsters.
They
were armored against the sharp beaks of the enemy ships with huge timbers and plates of brass. Brass spikes protruded from their sides. Two or three of Augustus' smaller ships attacked each of the giants, but dared not come close enough to board; it was hounds harrying a boar. The little ships could be destroyed in a moment if they came too close.

So the littl
e ships laid back and fought with missile weapons. Antony had those too—
big
ones—catapults large enough to batter the walls of a city. But they were as slow as his ships; it took time to wind them, time to set them; before one of the blunderbusses could be aimed, its target was already somewhere else. Meanwhile the little ships struck; fired arrows, fired lighter catapults, hurled balls of flaming pitch to set the giants afire. The fight went on for hours—even after dark, although Roman battles almost always stopped with the setting of the sun. Thousands died, while their friends or foes on the shores screamed imprecations or shouted encouragement. Most of them died very badly; killed by the smoke, roasted to death in their armor, drowned, savaged by the schools of sharks that came hurrying in to the feast. It was a long hard fight, but Augustus won it. Cleopatra's own galley blundered out of position and began to retreat, Antony followed, the line of battle was destroyed, and wholesale surrenders began at once. Antony and Cleopatra escaped—for the moment—but they had lost everything and they knew it.

Augustus had won the world.

IV

Tiberius was then thirteen years old. He was too young to fight, but not too young to participate in the triumph of his mother's husband, Augustus.

A Roman triumph was a gorgeous spectacle. Our ticker-tape parade up Broadway is only a pale shadow. The Roman who won a great victory, and thereby received the honor of a triumph, had not only the parade and the adoring mob but feasts and entertainments, titles to add to his name, privileges such as the right to award decorations to others. The triumphing Roman was expected to preside at games, where some of the prisoners he brought home with him would be permitted to kill each other off as gladiators, where wild animals and athletes would entertain the mobs. The games were an expensive honor, because someone had to pay for them, usually the one who owned the triumph; but any victory worth a triumph was sure to produce a great deal of loot, most of which stuck to the fingers of the general.

Augustus had not one victory to celebrate but three— Illyricum, Acnum, Egypt—a triple triumph, and he was careful not to dampen the pleasure of the viewers by allowing any hint to appear that all of those victories had been over armies which were
in the main Roman. Lacking th
e living Cleopatra, Augustus had a wax image of her made, complete with a wax snake to show how she died, and paraded it in a cart, while his agents went through the crowd to remind them that if Cleopatra had won, the gods forfend, they would all be Egyptians now.

Augustus himself rode in a stately chariot, horse-drawn. His nephew, young Marcellus, rode on the left-hand trace horse of the team; thirteen-year-old Tiberius rode the right.

Already the young Tiberius was beginning to show signs of character. He was no longer a baby; if he was still partly
a child, he was also partly a man, and some of the traits that marked him all his life were beginning to take form.

The picture that comes down to us of the teen-age Tiberius is that of a shy youth—-sometimes they called him a sullen one. Certainly he could be obstinate and difficult when he chose; his rhetoric teacher, Theodoras the Gadarene, called him "mud, kneaded with blood." He was not a great speaker, and that must have disappointed Theodorus—particularly after his promising start at the age of nine, when he preached his father's funeral oration. Tiberius kept to himself, and probably he felt unloved. Probably he was. Certainly his mother's husband offered him no affection.

His mother Livia, on the other hand, surely loved him. Livia was the very model of a Roman matron. After the scandal of her marriage to Augustus, she lived an exemplary life. It was too bad that she never gave Augustus a son of his own—the two she bore Tiberius Claudius Nero were the last she produced—but Augustus did already have one child, after all. Unfortunately it was a girl, Julia, but even girls could carry on a blood line.

Livia was the co-ruler of a mighty empire, but she lived more modestly than the wife of many a senator. The matrons of old Rome took a Quakerish pride in producing the essentials of their housekeeping themselves, even the cloth they wore on their backs; and until the day he died, the Emperor Augustus never wore a garment that had not been loomed in his own home, sometimes by the hands of Livia herself. Livia had six hundred personal servants; it must not be thought that she struggled in penury. She had slaves who did nothing but fold her clothes, and others who did nothing but put them away. Her favorite dog had a slave governess. Livia had a slave cosmetician whose specialty was ears, and several to work on her hair; she had jewelers and perfumers, to say nothing of slaves to help her dress and undress, to write down her letters for her and to read to her the letters that came from outside.

Six hundred slaves? She lived modestly? But it is true. She ate frugally. She worked hard. She raised her children—once her ex-husband had abandoned them to her by dying—with care and thought. She lived in imperial palaces, but the greatest of them was almost shabby in comparison with the glories of the homes of later Caesars and even of rich men of Augustus' own time. There was no marble in it, not even mosaics; the furnishings were meager. Indeed, a century after Augustus died a later Caesar opened Augustus' home as a public spectacle, so that R
omans could marvel at the dowdi
ness of it. And this home, built on the Palatine hill of Rome, was the prototype of a palace—indeed, it is from the name of the hill that the word "palace" comes!

Tiberius must have respected his mother. No Roman could help it. But the very virtues that made Rome esteem her must have kept her away from him. She was busy. Perhaps it is pleasant to have six hundred personal slaves (not to mention five thousand other household servants of one sort or another), but slaves steal, slaves need to be told what to do, slaves get into squabbles and misunderstandings. Butlers, major-domos and overseers help, but who is to oversee the overseers? It was Livia's duty, as she saw it, to measure every scrap of wool, check every expenditure, take the direct responsibility for everything that went on in her household. Then she had a husband to care for—not only in common domestic ways, but in helping him exercise direct personal control of a huge empire. Civil service had not been invented. The separation of the various functions of government was not dreamed of. Augustus was not only the ruler of Rome but its chief magistrate; he heard cases, and sometimes even pleaded them. Roman citizens in all the colonies could appeal directly to him when something went badly wrong; and although he could not handle all these matters himself, he had to try. The Roman gods, even, were organs of the Roman state; Augustus was a high priest of the Roman religion, with duties of sacrifice and consecration, and with religious questions to settle. The loose and irregular construction of the Empire made it constantly necessary to intervene in the affairs of client kingdoms of many sorts. And in all of these matters, Augustus leaned on the advice and help of Livia. Busy? It is a wonder that Livia knew she had sons.

Certainly Tiberius must have harbored some dim wonder if not resentment, over the way his mother had left his father to wed someone else. Perhaps it is not surprising that he was shy—or even sullen, if you like. But he studied. And he learned—very many things, and not all of them from Theodoras the Gadarene.

For what there was to learn in the house of Augustus was the business of empire.

To that plain structure on the Palatine came the greatest men in the world. After Antony's death, there was no rival for power, and every ambitious kingling or greedy ambassador knew that to further his designs, whatever they might be, he needed at least the tacit approval of the Emperor. From Palestine and Germany, from Egypt and what is now Romania, from Spain and Greece and the farthest frontiers came envoys, proconsuls, princes and priests. For in order for a colonial administrator or a subject king to stay in the good graces of the Emperor he had to send ambassadors of great skill—or still better, attend Augustus in person.

The journey from the far ends of the Empire to Rome was no light matter. The pipsqueak Roman rowboats were at the mercy of every wind and storm. They seldom dared sail far from the sight of land, partly because a storm might catch them unprotected, partly because they knew little about the art of celestial navigation. Hugging the shores made a long voyage longer. Even so, it was better to take ship when possible than to cross the land. The great network of Roman roads was only beginning.

Yet the kings and ambassadors came, the young Tiberius saw them all. As he grew to fourteen and older he began to meet them, to dine at table with subject kings who picked wonderingly at the coarse meals the Emperor served. He met the petty kings of the Jews—indeed, when he was old enough to make his first appearance in civil life, it was as defense counsel (or what passed for defense counsel in Roman courts) for the Jewish king Archelaus, in trouble for a host of faults. But before that he had seen others. Herod, the cruel tyrant, had been assiduous in courting Augustus. Well, he needed to be; he had made the tactical error of siding with Mark Antony. He had not, he was grateful to remember, actually taken arms against Augustus; but that was because trouble between Egyptians and Jews is not a modern invention, and Cleopatra had refused to let Herod have a major fighting command. Instead she had ordered him to fight the king of
the Arabs—and over a mere tax-gathering matter at that.

Herod's troops had won their war; but Antony had lost his, and Herod had fences to mend. Augustus was willing. Augustus was always willing to let a former enemy come over to his side—as long as there was more profit in a truce than in a revenge. Tiberius learned from that too.

In t
his palace of intrigue and high
policy, Tiberius grew up.

Obstinately old Augustus still failed to adopt him, but some of the patina of power rubbed off on him. It was not only a matter of riding the trace horse in a triumph, or of being cultivated by those who were desperate for any avenue to the Emperor, even one as unlikely as young Tiberius. Tiberius began to see his own form in marble; when statues and friezes were made to honor Augustus, often the whole family was included. The life of the imperial family was full of ritual. They all took part in the dedication of temples—and there were hundreds to dedicate, for Augustus built or rebuilt eighty-two of them in one year alone. They all participated in the celebration of holidays and in the giving of public entertainments and games.

There was, for instance, a custom of presenting a mock fight between two groups of boys. It was called the Troy game, and tradition said that it dated back to the time of Aeneas. Tiberius was the leader of the older boys' squad. That was an honor but not altogether a comfortable one; for although it was a game played by boys it was hardly boyish. It was easy to get hurt. After a couple of senatorial sons had been badly injured in successive games the whole thing was called off.

Tiberius would not have been human if he had not enjoyed the attention of the mob. He would not have been Roman if he had not speculated that, some day, he might be Emperor.

But it was not necessary to be Emperor to be an important man in Rome. Tiberius had every hope of a great career. He wanted to be a soldier first; that was the traditional first step. But after that, certainly some high office in the government of the city of Rome, at least, would be within his grasp.

Apart from the Empire, the Eternal City itself was a monster that needed many leaders. Rome was always
a
giant among cities. By the time Tiberius was a young man the population totalled 500,000. It was, as they say,
"a
city built on seven hills." Or nine; or twelve—it depended on when you stopped counting. The city did not stop growing.

Like a modern American metropolis it was
a
city laid out in concentric rings. There was the downtown urban area— the temples and palaces, the government offices and ceremonial buildings. Next to them, the tenements of the poor. In a larger ring were the homes of the middle class— crowded close together; away from the stink, the noise, and the crowds of central Rome, but not too far for their inhabitants to be carried in litters to the Senate, the Forum, and the baths.

Farther still were the estates of the wealthy and noble families; and past them the great stock farms.

No modern tenement is more crowded, dirty, or dangerous than the homes of the Roman poor. Land was precious— comparatively it was more valuable than it is now, because the city could not spread nearly as far as any modern municipality. Rapid transit did not exist. Even if the Roman plebeians could afford wheeled transportation, which they could not, Roman law forbade the use of chariots within the city itself during the day. Every possible inch of land was used.

Shabby shacks staggered five, six, and seven stories into the air; rickety bridges of sleeping rooms spanned the narrow alleys between buildings; projecting excrescences of bedrooms hung shakily out over the River Tiber itself. The people who lived in them were crammed into tiny dark rooms,
with scant halls and few window
s. In the summer they stank and sweated. In the winter they stank and froze.

There was no hour in one of those tenements when its inhabitants could be sure of living to see the next. Fire was a constant danger. If a drunken plebeian on the ground floor kicked over a brazier in his sleep, the inhabitants of the upper stories were quite certain to roast. The buildings were tinder and there were no fire escapes. There were no fire departments, either—or anyway, none whose motives were above suspicion. One man paid for and equipped a rather large fire department to answer the alarms of all comers, but it was not a philanthropy. Did a fire threaten your building, he would come and offer to buy it from you—at distress-goods prices. If you came to terms quickly enough, and he secured tide, then his firemen would proceed to put out the flames.

Fire killed countl
ess thousands, but fire was hardly necessary to murder Rome's tenement dwellers. The buildings themselves were always agreeable to collapse. Roman architecture gave its marvelous arch and stone dome to the ages; but such refinements were not wasted on the tenements of the poor.

The streets of Rome were crowded by day and frightful at night. Most of Rome's commerce was carried on in the open air, and all of it, according to Juvenal, seemed to involve poking someone in the ribs or screaming in his ear., Jews in yellow turbans conducted banking operations on street corners; porters carried food and goods to the imperial palaces; black Nubian litter-bearers, most valued of slaves, raced from law-court to bath with their wealthy owners. Pigs wandered freely through the streets. So did dogs—some of them rabid. Wine merchants ladled drinks out of counter vats, like a New York candy store dispensing egg creams. Prostitutes, dieir hair dyed the obligatory blonde or wearing yellow wigs, solicited trade outside their tiny individual places of business—single rooms, cot wide and man long; ther
e was no
waste space in a Roman brothel. At night the jostling crowd diminished, but there was no hour when the Roman streets were empty. At night the ban against carts and wagons was lifted so that heavy shipments of food and goods could come into the city, and wheels clattered on the rough pavement until daybreak. And at night, too, the
re were the ruffians and the th
ieves. It was dangerous to walk about Rome after dark, even with a bodyguard. Not all noble Romans minded that, A later Caesar thought it wa
s rath
er interesting; in fact, he liked to masquerade as one of the ruffians, beating and stabbing late wayfarers as he roamed the streets—with a detachment
of soldiers close by in case th
ere was resistance.