Birthday Greetings #30

Happy birthday to Tiberius, Roman emperor.  Tiberius was the second Roman emperor and was hand picked for the job by his predecessor Augustus after all the more promising candidates had inconveniently died.  This may go someway towards explaining the less cheery aspects of his reign.  "Oh well, I suppose it's got to be Tiberius" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.

Tiberius was a gloomy, depressive character utterly incapable of effectively voxing the populi or making close friends.  There is a famous story of one occasion when he attempted to do the usual royal crowd pleaser of visiting the sick in a hospital.  Unfortunately somebody got their wires crossed and when Tiberius turned up he found that all the sick had been dragged out of their hospital beds and lined up for his inspection.  All that Tiberius could do was wander amongst the ill making desperate apologies.  His disposition wasn't improved when Augustus finally realising that he was going to have to name Tiberius as heir brought him into the family.  His method of doing so was to force Tiberius to divorce his much loved wife and marry Augustus's daughter Julia.  The feelings between Tiberius and Julia were mutual; they hated each other.

None of the above means Tiberius was actually unqualified to rule.  Augustus had had his eye on him for a long time.  He had served with distinction in some of the most demanding military and civil posts in the empire and in a number of ways he proved to be perfectly capable.  As his depression (or whatever it was) settled more fully on him he withdrew more and more from the senate and communicated with his government by writing.  Eventually he handed day to day control over to a subordinate and settled himself with keeping an eye on things from a distance.

So what sort of subordinate does a morbidly suspicious, friendless and deeply depressed person choose to be their number one guy?  Probably a ruthless, cynical, morally bankrupt son of bitch.  Step forward Sejanus.  Sejanus was praetorian prefect and became the emperor's go to guy.  He also kept the emperor busy by discovering plots which needed to be punished with of course the appropriate number of executions and sequestrations.  Eventually Sejanus pushed his luck too far and Tiberius had him executed before replacing him with somebody worse.

Contemporary (or near contemporary) historians are pretty down on Tiberius.  They note the execution of senators, the general reign of terror form of government, the reliance on dubious freedmen and they hinted at sexually depraved behaviour at Tiberius's villa at Capri.  By hinted I mean "stated explicitly".  There is a story about young boys being forced to bathe in the sea while the emperor swam amongst them nipping at their ankles which indicates pretty impressive lung capacity in what was by now a rather old man.  Since almost nobody was ever invited to Capri the number of reliable eyewitnesses for stories such as this can be counted on the fingers of one foot.

The truth of the matter seems to be that Tiberius really was a bit of a terror to the ruling class.  A miserable, paranoid emperor tends find ways of making the political elite miserable and paranoid as well.  There were certainly a fair few treason executions for reasons ranging from the silly to the downright ridiculous and certainly a lot of senators lived in fear of the knock on the door.  However lets put this into context.  The political elite probably accounted for less than one percent of the population.  The rest Tiberius left pretty much alone and since he never lost his talents for organisation and administration it seems that if anything the bulk of the population benefited from his rule rather than the reverse.

For the senatorial class though Tiberius probably was a worry.  Eventually he died and the senators with relief and gratitude welcomed their new emperor; Caligula.