The Historians' History of the World 06

Cæsar, the high-handed usurper, met an usurper’s death, by open violence in the light of day. Augustus, after fifty years of the mildest and most equitable rule the times admitted, sank at last by a slow and painless decay into the arms of those dearest to him, amidst the respectful sympathies of an admiring people. The end of Tiberius, whether consummated by treachery or not, was shrouded in gloom and obscurity; the chamber of mortality was agitated to the last by the intrigues and fears of the dying man and his survivors. The fellow-countrymen of the detested tyrant seem to have deemed it fitting that one whose life was to them an enigma should perish by a mysterious death. It seems preferable to represent him as a man whose character was sufficiently transparent, the apparent inconsistencies in whose conduct, often exaggerated and misrepresented, may generally be explained by the nature of his position, and the political illusions with which he was required to encircle himself. It is the character of the age in which he was placed, an age of rapid though silent transition, rather than of the man himself, which invests him with an historical interest. This is the point to which it will be well to direct our attention, before letting the curtain drop upon the personage with whom the forms of the republic perished, and the despotism of the Cæsars finally dropped its mask.

Emperor in Military Tunic

(From Trajan’s Column)

The practice of delation, so rapidly developed under the rule of Tiberius, introduced a new principle into the government of his day, and marked it with features of its own. It is hardly possible to overrate the effects of this practice upon the general complexion of the Roman polity, nor is it easy to exaggerate the horror with which it came to be regarded. It was an attempt to reconcile the despotism of the monarch with the forms of a republic; to strengthen the sovereign power by weakening its subjects; to govern the people by dividing them, by destroying their means of combination among themselves, by generating among them habits of mutual distrust and fear, and finally plunging them into a state of political imbecility. It has been asserted that this system was in fact the product of peculiar circumstances rather than the creation of a deliberate will; nevertheless the chief of the state was made, not unnaturally, to bear the whole responsibility of it, and the disgust of the nobler spirits of Rome at the tyranny of spies and informers was turned against the prince himself, in whose interest at least, if not at whose instigation, their enormities were for the most part perpetrated.

If we examine the authorities for the history of the reign we have been reviewing, we shall find that those who were nearest to the times themselves have generally treated Tiberius with the greatest indulgence. Velleius Paterculus indeed, and Valerius Maximus, his contemporaries and subjects, must be regarded as mere courtly panegyrists; but the adulation of the one, though it jars on ears accustomed to the dignified self-respect of the earlier Romans, is not more high-flown in language and sentiment than what our own writers have addressed to the Georges, and even the Charleses and Jameses, of the English monarchy; while that of the other is chiefly offensive from the connection in which it stands with the lessons of virtue and patriotism which his book was specially designed to illustrate. The elder Seneca, the master of a school of rhetoric, to which science his writings are devoted, makes no mention of the emperor under whom he wrote; but his son, better known as the statesman and philosopher, though he was under the temptation of contrasting the austere and aged tyrant with the gay young prince to whom he was himself attached, speaks of him with considerable moderation, and ascribes the worst of his deeds to Sejanus and the delators rather than to his own evil disposition.