Tiberius (4 page)

And yet there was much joy to be had in Rome, and much beauty. There was a whole prescribed round of feasts and holidays. In February there was the Lupercalia when naked men ran about b
eating every woman they met with
goatskin whips. (It was to make the women fertile.) April had a ceremony of leaping over bonfires called the Parilia; in May the Vestal Virgins tossed straw scarecrows into the Tiber for the river god; in June came the feast of the goddess Fortune, and all Rome went revelling down the river in boats to her temple. The Saturnalia, celebrated at about our Christmas time, was a wild revel during which masters humorously waited on slaves and almost anything could be said or done. And New Year's was the great day of rejoicing and gifts, when decent Romans ate honey out of snow-white jars and brought presents to Caesar. (Some Caesars balanced their annual budget with the gifts.)

The beauty was all about—provided you didn't mind the reek of the tenements and the narrow streets. There were stately temples and great aqueducts. They were well built as well as beautiful—parts of the aqueducts still stand, so does at least one of the temples (Agrippa's own offering, which we call the Pantheon.)

Agrippa, on the orders of Augustus, constructed great aqueducts to bring water to the city, and helped rebuild the temples.

Augustus was a great builder. At the end of his long reign he observed with pride: "I found Rome brick, and left it marble." What he built was beautiful. Some of it still stands, in fragments. Apart from the marble temples and halls, there were open spaces, statues and columns, great baths and amphitheaters. It was not all dirt and jostle and smells in Rome. Some things about it were god-like.

This is the city in which Tiberius lived. In its teeming warrens there surely would be a place for him.

Emperor-candidate or not, Tiberius was certainly in the very highest ranks of Roman society. Rome was rigidly stratified, almost like an army, with its privates, its non-coms, its commissioned officers, and its generals. Tiberius was at the very least a general.

A Roman belonged to a class. He might hope to rise or fear to fall, but there was never any question in anyone's mind what class he was in. In America today most of us would have to stop and think if asked what our class was; in Russia such a question would be against the law, at least in theory. Rome tolerated no such slipshod social organization. You were senatorial, equestrian, plebeian, freedman, or slave—one of those five or no Roman at all.

Tiberius was of the senatorial class, and that was the top of the heap. Even Augustus, as we have noted, pretended to be just another senator—a particularly important senator maybe but really just one of the boys. In Republican times the Senate actually did rule Rome. F
or convenience
sake, each year the Senate elected two of their number to be "consuls" —that is, to do the actual work of governing; but the term was only a year, and it was not usual for any one senator to hold that office more than two or three times. And in any case, the Senate controlled the consuls.

The senators came from the oldest, most powerful families in Rome. Periodically their numbers were pruned down, to keep only the very best; occasionally, new names were added —the "new men," as they were called; usually, foreigners of particular distinction who had received Roman citizenship. (Even natives of other parts of Italy were foreigners to the Senate of the Roman Republic.)

Just below the senators ranked the knights—the equestrian order, so called because at one time it had been the duty of every knight to provide a horse. Even in the time of Augustus each knight was required to ride a horse in certain processions. Knighthood was more a perquisite of wealth than a matter of breeding. If a man's estate amounted to $20,000 he was a knight (unless he happened already to be a senator). If it didn't, he wasn't. Sometimes a generous rich man would help a needy knight replenish his coffers to keep him on the list; sometimes Augustus and other rulers threw revenues his way for the same purpose. Under the Republic the knights had had a parliament of their own, by no means as powerful as the Senate but by law entitled to some consideration in the government of Rome. Knights were entitled to wear a gold ring and a narrow purple stripe on their tunics. The senatorial stripe of purple (actually it was more red than purple) was broad. Lower classes could wear no purple stripe at all.

Below the knights and the senators were the common people; they dressed as they pleased. Sometimes Roman lawmakers thought of making the slaves, for example, wear some special costume; but always they retreated from the idea. It was good common sense to let the slaves wear what freedmen and plebeians wore"; if slaves wore some distinguishing mark, they would realize how numerous they were, and that would be an invitation to trouble.

The plebeians were freeborn Romans who didn't have enough money to be knights, or enough connections to be senators. There were very many of them, and they were mostly quite poor. About two hundred thousand of them, in fact, would have gone hungry if it hadn't been for the Emperor's free handouts of wheat (that is the "bread" of the famous prescription "bread and circuses"); even with the dole, they lived badly. Most of the plebeians were unemployed, but not all—artisans and professionals competed with slaves for the available jobs.

Below the plebeians, in theory at least, were the freedmen. Many freedmen were in comfortable conditions, and some were fantastically rich. It was the law that a freed slave could not become a knight or a senator—except, in special cases, with permission—and that was annoying. But there was no law that a freed slave could not make a fortune. Quite a few did. Quite a few, on the other hand, lived more wretchedly than the poorest plebeian or die most lowly slave, because under Roman law a "freedman" might be set free only in part; by manumitting his slave, an owner could be relieved of the need to feed him and house him, and yet if he chose he could so word the release that he retained the right to collect most of what the ex-slave earned. For Roman law was based on property rights. Slaves were property.

And slaves were also the single most numerous class in Rome.

Every war that Rome fought—and she was endlessly fighting—brought long trains of slaves back with the conquerors: the captured enemy soldiers, the inhabitants of sacked villages,
the
slaves once owned by the enemy, now under new masters but slaves still. Perhaps this was the main source for slaves, but by no means was it the only one. A father could sell his children into slavery if he chose, and many plebeian fathers, driven by poverty, did. Convicted felons were often enslaved —when they were not sent to die in the arenas. Slaves begot slaves; every child of a slave woman was born a slave, even if the father was free. Very often the father
was
free, for a major employment for slave women was to solace their masters.

A slave had no rights—none at all. A slave did not have the right to his own life; his master could kill him at will. A slave did not have the right to be fed, to be housed, or to be treated when sick; if the master chose to feed his slaves, that was prudent—slaves cost money, after all—but not obligatory. A slave could be whipped, branded, castrated," raped or, for that matter, eaten alive for dinner. Vedius Polio fed refractory slaves to fish, and ate the fish. Society might bring some pressure to bear on a particularly monstrous master, but the law could not.

The most important right a slave did not have was die right to raise a hand in self-defense. If a slave, driven by whatever desperate cause, so far forgot himself as to kill hi
s master, the penalty was death
—not only for the murderer but for
every
slave the dead man had owned.

Rome was built on slaves—over three hundred thousand of them in Rome itself, more than half the population. Everyone of any importance owned at least one or two. So did many persons of no importance. Eveu slaves could own slaves, if they could somehow scrape up the price. It was slave labor that dug Rome's mines, rowed Rome's ships, worked Rome's factories, served Rome's homes, tilled Rome's farms. All dirty and dangerous work was done by slaves, and there was plenty of work that was dirty and dangerous.

And yet most slaves were not overworked. The keeper of the mistress' scented bath oil, for example, could work at that particular task only when the mistress was at her bath. But as she might want her bath a little ea
rly or a little late th
e slave would be on call all through the day and night.

The slaves were the greatest single form of wealth in Rome. The great fortunes were mostly made out of slaves—a conquering general could sell off his war prisoners for profit. An average slave was worth perhaps two hundred dollars— though on the battlefield, at the source of supply, the price was lower, of course. Sometimes it was as little as fifty cents a head; it is the middlemen who drive up prices! Even in Rome some slaves were cheaper. You could pick up a mangy, vicious farm l
aborer for twenty dollars. Or yo
u could spend upwards of fifty thousand for a skilled Greek professional.

Not only labor, but art and entertainment came largely from slaves. Greek sculptors were often slaves; so were physicians, so were tutors of the young. A deformed slave was nice to have as a sort of conversation piece; it was amusing to see the legless ones scuttle about or the hunchbacked dwarfs dressed in ceremonial tunics. Sometimes the deformities were created.

For the sexual sport of the masters the slaves were always readily at hand—all ages and both sexes. There were laws requiring chastity for Roman women, but there were no such laws for Roman men—unless, of course, they made the mistake of seducing a Roman matron. That was a mistake which many made, but there was no real need
for it. The slaves were much mor
e convenient and there was no danger of unhappy consequences. Indeed, there might be consequences that were quite happy, in the form of a new baby slave. This was the morality of the worser parts of our own antebellum South; it was also the morality of Rome; it is the morality of
slave-owners
always and everywhere.

Slaves could be made to work outside their masters' homes or enterprises. Why not? Sometimes they were allowed to keep part of their earnings, sometimes not. Some of the yellow-haired prostitutes that lined the Roman streets were slaves— bought by a special class of slaveowner called a
leno,
trained in the necessary arts and provided with a place of business— but they were a minority. Not that the law hampered this operation; but the profits were very low.

Slaves had not ordinarily even such privileges as marriage or the right to serve with the legions. There was little future for them. Their finest hope was somehow to earn or to be given their freedom, and that hope depended entirely on the whim of the master. More than that, if, once freed, they offended him, they could be returned to slavery without further ado.

More direct methods of easing their lot were extremely dangerous. Murdering masters was most unpopular—not only with masters but with slaves, for the reasons aforementioned.

It was every slave's prayer that his master would die a perfectly straightforward natural death; because if there was any suspicion of a servile murder, the first step in investigating the facts would be to put all likely slaves to the torture. A slave could, of course, run away. But a runaway slave was hunted with great persistence by the state. Augustus alone caught thirty thousand of them. If a runaway slave could be returned to his master, he was; if he couldn't, he was crucified; while he was being held pending the results of a search for his owner, he was ordinarily worked half to death, sometimes entirely to death, in a special establishment for criminal slaves and fugitives called an
ergastulum.
Quite often slaves preferred crucifixion to return, or to the
ergasiulum.

Yet the life of the slave was not always miserable. Quite often masters were decent, gentle, and humane. Quite often the masters loved their slaves, tended them when ill, and moumed them when they died; there are many cases where masters protected their slaves and where slaves voluntarily died for their masters. It is a touching and beautiful thing, the love that sprang up in some places between master and slave; but on what a foul manure it was nourished!

V

In 27
B.C.
Tiberius was fifteen years old. He was a strong youth, tall and broad-shouldered. He had a pimply complexion, but teen-agers often do. Like his mother, his nose had the Roman hook, very pronounced.

Highborn Romans learned early to fight and to womanize. Tiberius already had his own personal slaves, including female ones, to experiment on, He was a little young to get married, at fifteen, but not very; and certainly he was not too young to think about it. His first marriage would be arranged for him, but there would be no harm in indicating a preference. There was, for instance, that pretty child Julia. Although she was his stepsister there was no blood relationship; her father

happened to be married to his mother. Of course, she was only eleven—but Livia had not been much older when she married for the first time—and Julia was very attractive and very gay.

Also she was the daughter of the Emperor.

Tiberius himself was not very gay, even as
a
youth. He had no skill at showing joy. "Mad, kneaded with blood." But he was as well educated as any youth of his time could be; he had learned his quota of Greek verse, had studied such technical scientific subjects as divination, astrology, and the interpretation of dreams, had schooled himself to write poetry and construct literary letters. What he needed now was a little practical experience—soldiering experience—and in the fall of the year 27
B.C.
Augustus provided it. It was time for the Emperor to inspect outposts in Gaul, and he took Tiberius and his
step cousin
, Marcellus, along.

The boys saw no fighting to speak of. Probably they were disappointed; probably Augustus planned it that way. They needed to learn that expanding the Roman frontier was a process that was not completed when a battle was won. After a military victory came the hard job of consolidation, absorption, exploitation. Julius Caesar had conquered the hairy, godless Gallic savages on the field, but there was much to be done before the colonies began to carry their fair share of the load for Rome. Augustus took the boys from outpost to outpost, setting up schools to teach Latin and sending out parties of census takers to prepare the Gauls for the necessary burden of taxation.

They spent months in Gaul, rebuilding its wretched little cities and attending to the endless niggling details of trans-muting wilderness into Rome. When the boys came back they were men.

It was time for them to begin to take part in governing the city. There were jobs for youths like them—minor magistracies, where there was enough responsibility to give them good practice, but where a mistake would do no permanent harm. Marcellus was eighteen years old now,
a
bright, quick young man with a complicated pe
rsonality. He was easy to love,
warm and outgoing, but he was also beginning to have
a
certain high sense of his own importance. Tiberius was
a
year younger, with
a
slow, methodical way of speaking that was rather disturbing. He seemed to pick his words as though he wanted to conceal his meaning rather than to make it plain. He would stop in the middle of a sentence and wait, silent, looking at the man he was talking to, until he found the exact word he wanted. It was a mannerism he might have learned from the Emperor—they said that Augustus liked to carry on important conversation in writing. Even with his wife, Augustus wrote out the more complicated parts of what he wanted to say, and then read them to her. But in Tiberius such silences were disturbing. He made people nervous.

It was time the boys had jobs, and Augustus gave them both jobs; but he gave Marcellus something else. He gave him the hand of his pretty fourteen-year-old daughter, Julia.

The wedding was a great social event. Augustus turned the arrangements over to the second greatest man in the kingdom, Marcus Agrippa, the hero of Actium and of the battle against Sextus Pompey. Agrippa did his best for the young couple, and the wedding was a great success, but in the process the great admiral discovered that the cheerful bridegroom had a sharp edge to his tongue. The two collided. In such a conflict Agrippa could not lose—he was the Emperor's most valued friend; but neither could the Emperor's son-in-law, especially as he happened also to be the Emperor's nephew.

Agrippa chose not to take offense.

Young Marcellus was impudent, but he was also a bridegroom; it was his wedding, after all. Agrippa let him have his way. Youth must be served. Agrippa went even farther, and kept himself out of sight as much as possible.

On the other hand, Agrippa got along very well indeed with Tiberius. He understood Tiberius' character better even than Augustus. Tiberius had been a good student, and Agrippa appreciated his culture; Tiberius was methodical and sure, and Agrippa had fought enough battles to value a man who could be relied on. Such a man could do great things in Rome. Perhaps he would not be Emperor, but he would make a fine magistrate, a useful general
...
he would especially, thought Agrippa, make a very satisfactory son-in-law. For Agrippa had a daughter of marriageable age— around fifteen—named Vipsania Agrippina.

Agrippa discussed the subject with Augustus and with Tiberius. Augustus was agreeable. Tiberius was overjoyed. It was what he had wanted all along, for Tiberius was in love.

The Romans maintained in their minds an orderly separation between love and marriage on one hand, between love and sexual performance on the other. Marriage was a business arrangement, sex was harmless fun; love was something entirely different. It was disturbing. It was a sort of madness. Catullus and Ovid might write poetry about love but it had nothing to do with marriage. Marriage meant cementing an alliance between two families, or acquiring a suitable mother for one's children, or even collecting a big enough dowry to clear up some worrisome debts. To marry for love was not unheard of entirely, for there was the example of Augustus himself and Livia. But. it was not common. A man who loved his wife was looked on somewhat as we look on a man who drinks too much; the poor fellow can't help it but it is a serious handicap all the same. Tiberius didn't care. Tiberius was happy.

The young couples set up housekeeping in Augustus' great palace. There was plenty of room, which was fortunate. Agrippa's own palatial home burned to the ground, and the Emperor invited his valued friend to move in. That was not so fortunate. Living in the same house with Marcellus made it hard to avoid an occasional conflict. Marcellus didn't try. He was nearly twenty now. Everything he touched turned to gold. Augustus loved him, noble Romans fawned on him, his future was assured, and he didn't see any reason why he should pretend to be impressed by old Agrippa. Agrippa did again what he had done before. He got out of the way. He cooked up a job that needed to be done off in the eastern provinces, and left. No one was deceived, of course. It was only old Agrippa's extremely proper way of avoiding trouble that could embarrass the Emperor.

At the time of Agrippa's departure Rome was struck by a plague. The plague was typhoid fever.

Typhoid fever is the product of filth and pollution. The Romans were impeccably clean in their own persons—think of the countless huge public batiis—and Agrippa's own aqueducts brought fine, clear water from the mountains. But the stink of sewage was everywhere in Rome. The inhabitants of the rickety upper stories of the tenements dumped slops in the street—it was an occupational risk for Roman pedestrians. When typhoid came to the city it was bound to spread. A thousand Romans fell sick—ten thousand—finally fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, no one really knew how many thousand. Slaves got it and so did senators. They fell sick, suffered what treatment the Greek physicans prescribed (baths in cold water and cold compresses were popular), and, much of the time, they died.

The Emperor was stricken. Agrippa was summoned— hurriedly, for it had come to Augustus for the first time that the remote day when he would pass on his Empire might arrive much sooner than he had planned. But who should be the imperial heir? Augustus went methodically over the candidates with his wife; no, not Tiberius; not Tiberius' brother, Drusus; not even Marcellus, in spite of his being married to Julia. The boys were coming along nicely, but—they were boys. Marcellus was only twenty. Augustus remembered inheriting an Empire when he himself was young, and the struggle that followed had crippled Rome for more than a decade. A young man had not the circle of loyal associates or the machinery of power that would permit him to hold on to a throne. Regretfully Augustus discarded them all, and only one man was left.

Sick and feverish, Augustus called for Agrippa. It had to be Agrippa. Augustus made out his will, but that was not enough; he beckoned Agrippa to his side and handed over his signet ring, the symbol of his principate.

And then, anticlimatically, Augustus began to recover.

The cold water treatment of Antonius Musa, his Greek physician, must have had some merit to it—anyway, it wasn't in itself fatal—because Augustus made a complete recovery. Agrippa gave him back his ring and started off again, out of the way of the annoying young Marcellus. He didn't have to go far. The plague was not yet over. Marcellus caught it and, though Antonius Musa did his best, Marcellus died. He was only twenty, and he was mourned by Augustus, Octavia, his mother, and Julia, his widow; but not by Agrippa. Not then. A little later on, even Agrippa came to wish the boy had lived.

Because the Emperor's widowed daughter could not be left long without a husband, Augustus looked high and low for a suitable match; but one young man was too stupid and another had the wrong sort of family. Besides, coming so close to dying himself had made Augustus think very hard about a successor. He wanted things to go smoothly when he died. So he married Julia off to Agrippa himself.

Julia was not yet eighteen and Agrippa was in his forties. Agrippa was sober, settled, hard working; Julia was flighty, pretty, and gay. The late Marcellus had been a headstrong boy but an exciting one, and as Agrippa was not the sort of husband to provide much excitement, it became necessary to Julia to stir it up for herself.

This concerned Tiberius somewhat—after all, Agrippa was his father-in-law and Julia, besides
being his step-moth
er-in-law, was also his step-half-sister, by virtue of Livia's marriage to Augustus. But it didn't concern hirh much. He was too happy.

Tiberius lived to be seventy-eight years old, and in all those years there were less than a dozen when he was
happy.
Golden years! He had a wife he loved; the beloved wife gave him a fine son, whom he named Drusus Junior, after his brother. He had the compan
ionship of his brother, too; Dru
sus the Elder was now also a man, and the brothers had always been close; now they worked together in their careers as they had played together in the nursery. And as important as all these things to a slow, sober man, Tiberius had his work. He was given troops and a mission.

Tiberius was twenty-two years old when he got his first military command, and in a way of speaking it was the most important job in the Empire. It wasn't a fighting job, exactly; it was a job for diplomacy backed by armed force, and because of the particular Roman scale of values it could make or break the man who did it.

The assignment was to recover the lost standards of a legion.

In Parthia—we would call it Persia, though the borders of this combative outpost shifted with every battle—a Roman column had been surprised and defeated a generation before. Every man was lost, killed, or captured, but that was not the worst of the affair. What was worse was that the legion's standards had been lost to the Parthians.

The standards of the legions—bronze eagles on a long staff —were to the Romans what the flag was to a cavalry regiment in the mannerly wars of the 19th century. They were the heart of the legion. Their importance was only symbolic, but that symbol meant everything to Romans. The eagles must never be captured or lost.