The Twelve Caesars by Matthew Dennison Page A

them hate me, provided they respect my conduct,’ Suetonius reports him as
repeating from time to time. It is a statement of remarkable aloofness. The first ‘Julio-Claudian’ thanks to his adoption by Augustus, Tiberius was always the Claudian (arrogant and
cruel) and never the Julian (mercurial, given to flashes of genius).
    As Romans would readily have understood, he was a product of his background. A descendant twice over of the family immortalized by Livy as ‘ superbissima ’, ‘excessively
haughty’, he was the son of Tiberius Claudius Nero, whose name he shared, and Livia Drusilla, daughter of a Claudius Pulcher, twin branches of the same Claudian gens . His family was
among the grandest in Rome and unique in its Republican achievements:a record of twenty-eight consulships (the first held in 493 BC ), five
dictatorships, seven censorships, six triumphs and two ovations. Although his father, a shiftless opportunist with an unerring capacity for backing the wrong horse, opposed Octavian and found his
way onto the list of the proscripti , his mother married Nero’s tormentor in 39 BC when Tiberius was only three. Following his father’s death, from the age
of nine Tiberius lived in the household of the most powerful man in Rome. Yet paternity left its imprint. He grew his hair long at the back, a style affected by Claudians, as if eager to assert
loyalties more fundamental than those arising from cohabitation. And despite a philhellenism which increased over time, including an admiration for Greek intellectuals, his nature betrayed
old-fashioned Roman qualities of austerity, continence and self-discipline (in themselves a powerful riposte to Suetonius’ inventory of sexual miscreancy). These were Republican virtues,
paraded by Augustus in the deliberate simplicity of his lifestyle, which Tiberius also followed (he had a taste for radishes and cucumber and, particularly, pears): in Tiberius’ case, they
were part of a larger admiration for the political system they had once upheld. In time, these genetic sympathies – which found expression in funeral games held in honour of his father and
his grandfather – would be balanced by Tiberius’ personal admiration for Augustus, a response compounded of reverence and awe. His resistance early in his principate to using the title
‘Augustus’, save in letters to foreign potentates, arose partly from Republican distaste, partly from a sense that he was unworthy to take on to such an extent the mantle of his
adoptive father. He regarded with wariness those personal, king-like awards stockpiled by Augustus; eschewed the civic crown at his door which, Republican in origin, so nearly symbolized the truth
of the latter’s Roman revolution; resisted the obeisanceof senators and colleagues and refused the appellation ‘Father of his Country’. ‘Of many high
honours,’ we read, ‘he accepted only a few of the more modest.’ His motives were not wholly ideological. Dio recounts a telling incident. A few men began wearing purple clothing,
something which had previously been forbidden. Although Tiberius took measures to stop them, he ‘neither rebuked nor fined any of them’. 10 His upbraiding took the form of a symbolic
gesture, a dark woollen cloak flung across his own clothes. It was as if it were the loneliness of the principate which disturbed him: at one level the camaraderie of shared purple clothing did not
offend him. In self-imposed exile on Capri, living without many of the trappings of empire, he found escape from that loneliness.

    In the spring of 12 BC , Dio reports, ‘Portents were noted in such numbers... as only normally occur when the greatest calamities threaten the
state.’ 11 The calamity in question was the death of Augustus’ leading militarist, Agrippa. In its wake another, more personal calamity. It took the form of divorce and was the desire of
neither husband nor wife. In this case, the husband was Tiberius, his