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Page 27
This time Sejanus triumphed over the ill success of his rivals, and the
struggle continued in this manner between the two parties, but with an
increasing advantage to Sejanus. Beginning with the year 26, we see
numerous indications that the party of Agrippina and Germanicus was no
longer able to resist the blows and machinations of Sejanus, who
detached from it, one after another, all the men of any importance. He
either won them over to himself through his favors and his promises, or
he frightened them with his threats; and those who resisted most
tenaciously, he destroyed with his suits.
Tiberius was the storm-center of these struggles, and contrary to what
legend has reported, he attempted as far as he was able to prevent the
two parties from going to extremes. But what pain, repugnance, and
fatigue it must have cost him to make the effort necessary for
maintaining a last ray of reason and justice among so many evil
passions, animosities, ambitions, and rivalries! It must have cost him
dearly, for he had grown up in the time when the dream of a great
restoration of the aristocracy was luring the upper classes of Rome
with its fairest and most luminous smile. As a young man he had known
and loved Vergil, Horace, and Livy, the two poets and the historian of
this great dream; like all the elect spirits of those now distant
years, he had seen behind this vision a great senate, a glorious and
terrible army, an austere and revered republic like that which Livy had
pictured with glowing colors in his immortal pages.
Instead of all this, he was now forced to take his place at the head of
this decadent and wretched nobility, which seemed to be interested only
in rending itself asunder with calumnies, denunciations, suits, and
scandalous condemnations, and which repaid him for all that he had done
and was still doing for its safety and the prosperity of the empire by
directing against his name the most atrocious calumnies, the fiercest
railleries, and every sort of ridiculous and infamous legend. He had
dreamed of victories over the enemies of Rome, and he had to resign
himself to struggling day and night against the hysterical extravagance
of Agrippina: he had to be content, even without the sure hope of
success, if he could convince the majority that he was not a poisoner.
Authority without glory or respect, power divorced from the means
sufficient for its exercise--such was the situation in which the
successor of Augustus, the second emperor, after twelve years of a
difficult and trying reign, found himself. He no longer felt himself
safe at Rome, where he feared rightly or wrongly that his life was
being continually threatened, and it is not astonishing that, old,
wearied, and disgusted, between the years 26 and 27 he should have
retired definitely to Capri, seeking to hide his misanthropy, his
weariness, and his disgust with men and things in the wonderful little
isle which a delightful caprice of nature had set down in the lap of
the divine Bay of Naples.
But instead of the peace he sought at Capri, Tiberius found the infamy
of history. How dark and terrible are the memories of him associated
with the charming isle, which, violet-tinted, on beautiful sunny days
emerges from an azure sea against an azure sky! That fragment of
paradise fallen upon the shore of one of the most beautiful seas in the
world is said to have been for about ten years a hell of fierce
cruelties and abominable vices. Tiberius passed sentence upon himself,
in the opinion of posterity, when he secluded himself in Capri. Ought
we, without a further word, to transcribe this sentence? There are, to
be sure, no decisive arguments to prove false the accounts about the
horrors of Capri which the ancients, and especially Suetonius, have
transmitted to us; there are some, however, which make us mistrust and
withhold our judgment. Above all, we have the right to ask ourselves
how, from whom, and by access to what sources did Suetonius and the
other ancients learn so many extraordinary details. It must be
remembered that all the great figures in the history of Rome who had
many enemies, like Sylla, Caesar, Antony, and Augustus himself, were
accused of having scandalous habits. Precisely because the puritan
tradition was strong at Rome, such an accusation did much harm, and for
this reason, whether true or false, enemies were glad to repeat it
whenever they wished to discredit a character. Lastly, all the ancient
writers, even the most hostile, tell us that up to a ripe age Tiberius
preserved his exemplary habits. Is it likely, then, that suddenly,
when already old, he should have soiled himself with all the vices? At
all events, if there is any truth contained in these accounts, we can
at most conclude that as an old man Tiberius became subject to some
mental infirmity and that the man who took refuge at Capri was no
longer entirely sane.
Certain it is, in any case, that after his retirement to Capri,
Tiberius seriously neglected public affairs, and that Sejanus was
finally looked upon at Rome as the _de facto_ emperor. The bulletins
and reports which were sent from the empire and from Rome to the
emperor passed through his hands, as well as the decisions which
Tiberius sent back to the state. At Rome, in all affairs of serious or
slight importance, the senators turned to Sejanus, and about him, whom
all fell into the habit of considering as the true emperor, a court and
party were formed. In fear of his great power, the senators and the
old aristocracy suppressed the envy which the dizzy rise of this
obscure knight had aroused. Rome suffered without protest that a man
of obscure birth should rule the empire in the place of a descendant of
the great Claudian family, and the senators of the most illustrious
houses grew accustomed to paying him court. Worse still, virtually all
of them aided him, either by openly favoring him or by allowing him a
free hand, to complete the decisive destruction of the party and the
family of Germanicus,--of that same Germanicus of whom all had been
fond and whose memory the people still venerated.
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