Tiberius the Tyrant

Tiberius the Tyrant

Used as we are to the terminology and conditions of hereditary monarchy and territorial sovereignty, we find it hard to appreciate, or even to express in terms of modern politics the difficulties which beset the statesmen of Rome at the death of Augustus; and we are further tempted to read into the story of that critical period ideas, which were only conceivable after the crisis was over; we can hardly avoid seeing those days in the light of subsequent events, or speaking of them in language which involves anachronism. Our information is principally derived from historians, who wrote a century and a half after the death of Julius Csar, when the Government of the Emperor and the Senate was established; but the position of the Emperor of those days was not the position of Augustus, and the Senate of Trajan was not the Senate of Tiberius. The experienced officials who formed the majority of the Senate of the Flavian Emperors were no longer the hereditary oligarchy by whose capacity Rome had been2 brought to be first among the city states of the world, but which was unequal to the task of organizing the Roman empire. The change had, however, escaped observation, and the warmest admirers of the Senate of the Republic were men whose position had been won for them by the Emperors. Between the death of Augustus and the death of Vespasian we have but few contemporary historians; we have no letters of Cicero to throw light on the inner life of the statesmen of those days; there were private records, private letters, and private biographies; we can gather their tone from the extracts that have been preserved for us, but we have no opportunity of comparing them or checking them. Velleius Paterculus is the only contemporary historian of the reign of Tiberius, a portion of whose work still exists unabridged; and his narrative stops just at the period when we require most lightat the conspiracy of Sejanuswhere there is also a gap in the annals of Tacitus. From the books of the New Testament we may infer much as to how the Empire appeared at a comparatively early period to the inhabitants of Greater Rome, much also from Josephus, a little from Philo, but we cannot re-people the Rome of Tiberius, as we can re-people the Rome of Augustus and the Rome of Cicero. Two facts stand clear to us from the pages of Tacitus, and in a less degree from those of Suetonius, that the Imperial Family was divided, that the old Roman princely houses never forgave the Empire, and that there was a Republican reaction in opinion at the centre of the Empire. History has repeated itself; just as the3 Curia of to-day cannot forgive the monarchy which represents the unity of Italy, so the Curia of the first century of the Christian era was irreconcilable to the monarchical constitution which represented the unity of the Empire. The Roman princes who wrote the memoirs of their houses for the edification of their children, and the delectation of their friends never inquired into the authority of a story derogatory to the Emperors, and the one Emperor, who was never spared was Tiberius; it is no exaggeration to say that the madness of Caligula, and the monstrous freaks of Nero are dealt with tenderly by the writers of the silver age, if we compare the accounts of these with the deliberate malignity which attends on every word and action of Tiberius; and yet common sense tells us that only a very able man could have succeeded Augustus without breaking up his work. At the death of Augustus it was still possible that there would be no second Emperor; at the death of Tiberius the Roman Emperor had become an institution, the pivot upon which the whole machinery of civilized existence turned throughout the world. Hence the peculiar bitterness against Tiberius; the Curia felt that in his reign their last chance had gone, and more than this, that he had been in some sense a traitor to his own caste. Neither the Julian nor the Octavian families had been among the foremost houses of Rome, till the genius of the first Csar raised them from their comparative obscurity; but many of the most important events in the history of Rome, no less than her buildings, her roads, her aqueducts, and many of her public monuments, were associated with the4 Claudian stock, and the Livian, with which it was inter-married, was only less distinguished. Augustus had been tolerated, for his services to the State could not be disregarded, but some day Augustus would die; he did die; his power fell into the hands of the most prominent representative of the old Roman nobility; the opportunity for a restoration of the narrow oligarchy of the Republic came, and it passed away for ever. Two years after the death of Tiberius his lunatic successor was stabbed by a soldier whom he had insulted; the State was left a few days without a head, and the Curia was so inanimate that it could neither restore its own rule, nor provide a new Emperor; it had to accept apparently at the dictation of the soldiers in the Prtorian barracks a man of letters who had hitherto been the laughing stock of the Imperial family. The contemporary history of the years during which the Roman Empire took organic form is written in terms which tend to disguise the real significance of the change; our attention is attracted almost exclusively to the internal politics of the city of Rome; it is withdrawn from the politics of the Empire; the long struggle which ended by giving the whole civilized world one system of Government, which welded together in orderly association Italians, Greeks, Syrians, Africans, Egyptians, Spaniards, Gauls, Germans, and even Britons, is represented to us as being little more than a constitutional revolution inside the city; we see the external pressure, which forced a revised constitution upon the Roman oligarchy, but we only see it dimly; no Roman5 historian has been at the pains to trace out the process by which the civil administration of the Roman Empire was developedsurely no less wonderful an achievement than the conquests of the Roman generals. We have seen other conquerors, and more brilliant feats of arms than any Roman general achieved, but we have not seen any other nation impress its language and its law upon the populations of so wide an area or so permanently. Alexander did much, but the effects of the conquests of Rome have been more lasting than those of the conquests of Alexander; except in Asia there is not a civilized people in the world which does not somewhere or other bear the impress of Rome, or cannot trace the pedigree of its religion and its law back to the Italian city. This great destiny was concealed from the makers of the Empire, but the immediate possibility, the consolidation of the conquests of Rome, and the permanent establishment of order over the whole area which drains into the Mediterranean was present to their minds; unfortunately the makers of the Empire have been mostly silent, and the only voices which have reached our ears are those of men who could only grasp the great idea intermittently, if at all, or who were annoyed by its insistence. Under Augustus for the first time the Empire became conscious, Virgil and Horace spoke in terms of the larger conception, but the grip of the Roman oligarchy has never relaxed its hold upon the imagination of educated men. Conquest did not involve in ancient times any responsibility towards the conquered; war was6 believed to be, and was, a profitable investment; as Rome pushed her conquests, the organization which she gave to the conquered peoples was one which suited her own purposes, she did not consult their convenience, external pressure alone forced her to modify the conditions of conquest which were universally accepted by the ancient world; very gradually and very reluctantly she broke down the barriers which surrounded the city state of antiquity, and admitted first her immediate neighbours, and lastly the whole of Italy to some sort of constitutional communion with her. For a long time war had been forced upon Rome, the invasions of the Gauls, the domination of Carthage in the Mediterranean, the invasion of Pyrrhus, the invasion of Hannibal, and lastly the invasion of the Cimbrians and Teutons involved her in a succession of defensive wars; the city itself could not find a sufficient supply of soldiers, and the price which Rome had to pay for being allowed to recruit over Italy was the partial incorporation of the Italians in the State. Wars of defence were accompanied and followed by wars of aggression; success encouraged speculation; after the happy issue of the second war with Carthage the Roman oligarchy began seriously to turn its attention to the Eastern Mediterranean, and another century found it entering upon the heritage of Alexander. This is the turning point of Roman history; from this time onwards a new conception occupied the minds of ambitious Romans; alongside of the ideal of the city State there existed the ideal of an extended Empire, of a world-wide organization, of something7 more permanent than conquest; alongside of the men who dreamed of Platonic republics in which perfect justice would be realized, there grew up men who formed a yet grander and no less civilized ambition. Pompey triumphed over Mithridates wearing a robe which had been worn by Alexander; Augustus used a head of Alexander for his signet ring; it was by the example of Alexander that Cleopatra seduced Mark Antony. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 66690
Author: Tarver, John Charles
Release Date: Nov 8, 2021
Format: eBook
Language: English
Publication Date: 1902
Publisher Country: United Kingdom