Augustus, page 47
It is obvious that Tiberius gained from the new arrangement, an assumption reinforced by hindsight since we know that he would succeed as princeps and rule for twenty-three years, outliving by a large margin both Germanicus and Drusus. Even without this knowledge, his situation changed from being a man whose career had ended a decade before – and showed no sign of resumption – into a leader of the state, second only to Augustus. Livia’s son was the princeps’ most senior assistant, and would be without doubt the most senior of his successors, who were in turn to include two of her grandchildren. Rumours soon circulated that she had schemed to achieve this, even arranging the deaths of Caius and Lucius so that Tiberius was the only viable choice left to Augustus. Such stories fed on the older tales of her supposed poisonings, and all would grow in time. None of this is probable – and indeed the practicalities of somehow arranging Caius’ wounding during negotiations in Armenia make such claims fanciful in the extreme. We cannot ever truly know, but few, if any, scholars would give the slightest credence to such tales; it is considerably easier to believe that these and the earlier deaths were due to ill fortune – and far more likely. They are more inclined to talk of a power struggle between the Claudian and Julian families – the latter sometimes more specifically Julia’s descendants or even those of her mother Scribonia. This can be almost as incredible.8
Augustus granted Tiberius tribunicia potestas for ten years in AD 4, and may well have done this before he adopted him – Augustus had received a decade-long extension of his provincial command and imperium in the previous year. It was a renewal of Tiberius’ earlier eminence, again raising him to a level only previously occupied by Agrippa, but this time the princeps’ senior agent was his son rather than son-in-law. The distinction is vital, since not all of his new status was to Tiberius’ advantage. In AD 4 he went from being the head of an old aristocratic family with full independence of action to becoming a junior member of another’s family, accepting the supreme authority of his father. Instantly all Tiberius’ property ceased to be his own, and instead became part of Augustus’ fortune, to be disposed of as he wished. The same was true for Postumus, so that the remainder of Agrippa’s great estates now passed to his old friend. Law and tradition gave considerable powers to a Roman father. He could repudiate an adopted son, whereas the son could not recant his adoption. Political independence was lost along with financial independence; it was almost unthinkable and certainly discreditable for a Roman son to oppose his father publicly.9
Tiberius made every show of taking his new status seriously, and for the rest of his life acted towards and spoke of his father Augustus with great reverence. Livia and her son – who was now of course also her husband’s son – were no doubt highly satisfied with the new arrangement and more than likely had lobbied behind the scenes for the decision. Yet Augustus himself gained more than anyone else, and there is no reason to believe that he was manipulated into it. With a middle-aged son, another teenage son and two grandsons, the adoptions gave him close assistants for the immediate and longer-term future, their numbers surely providing protection against further blows of fortune like those that had robbed him of Caius and Lucius. Once again, he adapted to a new situation and created a group of close colleagues from his own family. Tiberius had expressed weariness at his constant employment up to 6 BC, but before the end of AD 4 he went to campaign in Germany and he would then remain on active service for the next decade. His long years of inactivity may have given him a renewed appetite for work, but even so Augustus could now command his son and be confident of his obedience, working him every bit as hard as he had once worked Agrippa.10
The new arrangement cost Tiberius a good deal of toil as well as his independence, and the surprising and unprecedented willingness of a mature and distinguished aristocrat to accept adoption by another – even one so prestigious as the princeps – probably does more than anything else to explain Augustus’ comment that he acted ‘for the sake of the res publica’ in this matter. Such an act genuinely required explanation on both sides. Although the experienced Tiberius was the most convenient choice, his continued exclusion from public life was certainly an option, and one unlikely to pose a serious threat to stability. There may well have been voices urging other courses. Dio and Seneca present a confused and implausible account of an attempted conspiracy led by Cnaeus Cornelius Cinna. The plot was discovered, and Augustus was supposedly talked out of executing the man by Livia – allegedly so convincingly that instead he backed the man’s candidature and ensured that he became one of the consuls for the next year.11
Dio also speaks of demonstrations in Rome calling for the recall of Julia, which leads us to suspect that these were orchestrated, or at least encouraged, by those hoping to do well from her rehabilitation. He dates them to AD 3, but some would place them in the next year or see them as part of wider agitation. In any event the princeps adamantly refused, declaring that fire and water would sooner mix than he would pardon his daughter, and so the crowd carried burning torches to the Tiber and hurled them into the river. Julia was finally permitted to return to the mainland of Italy in AD 3, and for the rest of her life lived near Rhegium, kept under an only slightly looser confinement. None of the sources even hint that she had sufficient freedom to be in touch with those asking for her recall. Similarly, there is no suggestion that the refusal to rehabilitate his daughter dented Augustus’ own popularity in any way. Earlier in AD 3 his residence on the Palatine was badly damaged by fire, which led to a wave of offers of money from communities and individuals. Augustus took only a token sum from each so that they could share in the rebuilding, although it is unclear whether the rest was returned or instead used for public works.12
In AD 4 Augustus was given consular powers to hold a partial census. Poor citizens were not troubled, nor were those resident outside Italy, and instead he reregistered only those boasting of at least 200,000 sesterces’ worth of property. At the same time there was another review of the senatorial roll, but there is no particular reason to believe that this was engineered to remove potential enemies of Tiberius – or indeed of Postumus. Probably it was simply a continuation of the earlier efforts, and examined men whose behaviour or status was in doubt. Some may have struggled to maintain the required property qualification. A decade later we hear of the grandson of the orator Hortensius, who raised four sons but only possessed property worth 1,200,000 sesterces and was thus unable to divide this so as to make all of them eligible for a senatorial career. In AD 4 the princeps gave money to eighty senators so that they could meet the property qualification for membership of the order. It is also sometimes claimed that Tiberius greatly influenced the choice of consuls from now until the end of Augustus’ life. Most likely he played a part in promoting men, as Augustus continued to do, but none of the names are especially surprising and all are the sort of men who would most likely have reached this office anyway.13
The year did see the introduction of a law which reinforced other recent legislation and provided thorough regulation for the treatment of slaves, in particular for the granting of their freedom – notably by restricting the number that could be freed in a will, or by young owners, and also determining the precise obligations owed by a freedman or woman to their former owner. Augustus may well have had some concerns about too many freedmen swamping the numbers of Roman citizens, and certainly feared too many becoming eligible for the corn dole in Rome. Yet other measures protected freedmen, continued to grant them citizenship, if with a few limitations, and rewarded those who raised large families just as they did the rest of the citizen body. The ranks of freed slaves included many industrious and highly successful individuals, important in the vici of Rome itself and sometimes rising to local prominence in towns elsewhere; and Augustus took care to cultivate their loyalty to him and to the state, just as he did with other groups within society. In terms of its laws and activities, AD 4 suggests not a radical shift of power or direction of government, but far more a sense of business as usual.14
THE GREATEST DANGER SINCE HANNIBAL
Before the year was out Tiberius was at the head of an army operating east of the Rhine. He returned to Rome briefly during the winter months – something he would now do every year – before returning to lead another campaign the following spring, taking his legions at least as far as the Elbe. These were operations against leaders and tribes within the area already under Roman influence, reflecting continuing resistance or changed attitudes. Other communities in the region appeared to accept and perhaps even to welcome Roman dominance. Archaeology has provided clear evidence of at least one Roman-style town established around the turn of the first century AD at Waldgirmes, not far from an army base used during the wars of conquest, and there are hints of other similar communities. The urban lifestyle that was so quintessentially Roman still had little appeal for most of the peoples in this area, but that is not to say that the situation would not change in time, just as it had done in other provinces after their conquest.15
For AD 6 the Romans planned a grander operation, seeking to take new territory rather than simply consolidate their hold on existing conquests. The target was King Maroboduus, leader of the Marcomanni, a people belonging to a large sub-group of the Germanic peoples called the Suebi, who were famous for wearing their hair tied in a knot on the top or side of their heads – the Suebian knot. Clever, charismatic and no doubt a skilful war leader, he had carved out an empire for himself consisting of many groups as well as his own people, so that he controlled much of modern Bohemia, the area between the Rhine and the Danube. At least some of his youth had been spent in Rome, probably as a hostage, and in the beginning he may well have gone back to his homeland with Roman support. Velleius dubbed him ‘a barbarian by race, but not intelligence’, and speaks of an exceptionally large royal army, many of the troops permanently maintained at the king’s expense. No doubt he exaggerated when he claimed that they were trained almost to Roman standards, but this was clearly a leader more powerful than any to appear among the tribes for several generations. His lands bordered on the provinces in Germany, Noricum and Pannonia, but although he accepted refugees from those regions, even Velleius makes it clear that he had taken no hostile action against the Romans. The most he could say was that the king’s envoys sometimes behaved with appropriate subservience, but at other times dared to speak ‘as if they represented an equal’.16
Such ‘pride’ in a foreign leader was sufficient to warrant at the very least a display of Roman force. Mutual fear and suspicion fed the situation, Maroboduus building up his strength as protection and at the same time seeming to be more of a threat. A large force was concentrated from the armies in Germany and placed under the command of the legate Caius Sentius Saturninus, an experienced and mature former consul – he had held the office back in 19 BC – who had won the ornamenta triumphalia for his operations in support of Tiberius the previous year. This force would advance against Maroboduus from the north, while Tiberius came from the south, leading another big column, this time drawn from the armies of the Danube. In the spring of AD 6 the attack began, the two Roman armies pushing through the territory of the tribes living between Rome’s provinces and Maroboduus’ kingdom. There was no fighting, and the German king made no aggressive move and held back, until the Roman columns had almost joined together and were just a few days’ march away from his forces. Then, just before he was forced to fight or submit, news came of serious rebellion in the Romans’ Balkan provinces and everything changed. Tiberius offered Maroboduus terms for the restoration of peace. The king did not want to risk fighting the Romans unless he had no other choice, and was happy to accept, so the Roman armies turned around and withdrew to deal with the more pressing matter of the rebellion.17
The revolt of the Pannonians and Dalmatians spread rapidly through regions the Romans had complacently regarded as secure. Like many rebellions, this broke out just as a generation of younger men grew up who had never experienced defeat at the hands of the Romans. When auxiliaries were levied in Illyricum to support the war against Maroboduus, the local tribesmen are supposed to have looked at their own numbers and begun to realise their strength. Levies on the provincial population – whether of manpower, livestock and crops to support the Roman military or straightforwardly in money – often fell heavily on the people, especially when those overseeing them were clumsy or corrupt or both. One of the leaders of the rebellion later claimed: ‘You Romans are to blame for this; for you send as guardians to your flocks, not dogs or shepherds, but wolves.’18
Simmering discontent was fed by the sense of their own numbers, especially when they saw the pick of the Roman forces in the region drawn off for the planned conquest of Bohemia. The outbreak began with attacks on Roman merchants and other civilians in the provinces. Roman military doctrine was to confront any signs of rebellion as quickly as possible, attacking it with whatever troops could be quickly gathered. Inaction would be seen as weakness, and so encourage more and more people to rally to the rebel cause. Yet the risk of such rapid counter-attacks was that the forces involved were too weak to deal with any serious resistance. A Roman defeat, however small, was an even greater recruiter for the rebellion. Details are obscure, but at best there was a failure to crush the rebellion and probably there were a number of small reverses. At least one was more serious, and Velleius mentions the massacre of a force of legionary veterans.19
There were problems in other provinces as well. Around this time we hear of campaigning on the frontier in Africa – the last province with a legionary garrison entrusted to a senatorial proconsul – and of problems in Isauria in Asia. It was also in this year that Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, the imperial legate in charge of Syria, intervened with the bulk of his field army in Judaea. Herod’s son Archelaus had proved so woefully unpopular with his subjects that he was stripped of his throne and sent to live out his life in comfortable retirement in Gaul. Instead a large part of Herod the Great’s former kingdom was taken under direct rule and turned into a Roman province. Unusually, it would be governed by an equestrian prefect rather than a man of senatorial rank – the first such province after Egypt, but an innovation that would later be repeated. As part of the process Quirinius began to hold a census. It was the first time that the population had been subject to registration and tax paid directly to the Romans rather than to a local king, and it soon prompted outbreaks of serious violence. The Roman response was characteristically brutal and quickly effective, just as it had been to the trouble following the death of Herod the Great in 4 BC.20
In his sixty-ninth year, Imperator Caesar Augustus was faced with serious problems on several fronts simultaneously and for a short time seems to have lost his nerve. Pliny claims that he fell into despair, refusing to eat for four days and declaring that he wished to die. The rebellion in Illyricum affected one of the closest provinces to Italy and from the beginning was clearly on a very large scale. Augustus had personal experience of the region, and so knew how tough its warriors were and how difficult the terrain made campaigning. At first he cannot have known what would happen in Bohemia, and if Maroboduus had chosen to fight rather than accept peace it would have been very difficult to draw troops away in the numbers needed to deal with the rebellion. His legions in the rest of the empire were either too far away to be quickly brought to the theatre of operations or already committed to dealing with other problems. In Italy, he had only the nine cohorts of praetorians, his small force of German bodyguards, the urban cohorts and the imperial fleets, and all of these combined could scarcely be seen as a viable field force.21
Ironically enough, the year had begun with a major reorganisation of military funding, aimed at setting it on a permanent and sustainable footing. To this end, Augustus created the Military Treasury (aerarium militare), priming it with 170,000,000 sesterses of his own money and setting three former praetors to serve as its supervisors for three-year terms of office. This would pay soldiers’ salaries, and the bonus now normally given on discharge in lieu of a grant of land. By this time there were twenty-eight legions, and as a means of reducing costs by delaying the payment of the discharge bonus, the terms of service were now extended from sixteen to twenty years, with a further five years as a veteran – the type of soldier massacred during the early stages of the rebellion in Illyricum. Even so, this would in the longer run require a constant flow of funding, and to provide it Augustus introduced a levy of five per cent on inheritances going to anyone outside the immediate family. This was the first direct taxation of citizens living in Italy for more than a century and a half and was deeply resented from the start.22
Now, faced by a rapidly spreading rebellion, the priority suddenly became less long-term stability than the immediate raising of fresh troops to deal with the problem. Augustus announced in the Senate that unless something was done quickly the enemy could reach Rome within ten days, while others compared the danger to the great struggle with Carthage. A levy was held in Rome itself for the first time in decades, and when not enough volunteers appeared, resort was made to limited conscription as well as the acceptance of men normally considered unsuitable physically or because of their occupation. New cohorts were formed, although it is less clear whether these were intended ultimately to be absorbed by the legions or to remain as independent formations. At the same time slaves were demanded from the wealthy, and once handed over these men were given their freedom and citizenship, and then enrolled in special cohorts – the cohortes voluntariorum civium romanorum (volunteer cohorts of Roman citizens). The title, as well as different patterns of uniform and equipment, distinguished them from the freeborn citizens in the legions.23
