The Twelve Caesars by Matthew Dennison Page B

wife Vipsania Agrippina, daughter of the dead man. The couple had been married for seven years, following an engagement of a
further thirteen years. Engagement, marriage and divorce were all political, all instigated by Augustus whose motive, as we have seen, had been to ensure Agrippa’s loyalty while bypassing him
in the succession in favour of Octavia’s son Marcellus. In the spring of 12 BC , Tiberius was rising thirty, his wife twenty-four. They had a single son, Drusus, and
Vipsania was heavily pregnant. The combined effect of her father’s death and her own enforced divorce from Tiberius cost Vipsaniathe baby she was carrying. For politics
aside, the marriage of Tiberius and Vipsania had proved notably happy.
    But Augustus did not permit happiness to impede the course of political expediency. With Agrippa dead, Tiberius’ marriage to Vipsania lost its raison d’être . At the same
time, the emperor’s daughter Julia, his principal dynastic bargaining tool and milch cow, found herself once again a widow. Augustus knotted loose ends by uniting the Julian and Claudian
elements of his family through the marriage of Julia to Tiberius. Agrippa’s death therefore brought Tiberius ‘closer to Caesar, since his daughter Julia, who had been the wife of
Agrippa, now married [Tiberius],’ Velleius Paterculus records without elaboration, 12 the chief concern of Tiberius’ apologist his hero’s advance towards the throne. If we accept
this explanation, the marriage may well have given pleasure to Tiberius’ ambitious mother Livia. It pleased Augustus too, and the highly sexed Julia, who Suetonius claims had harboured an
adulterous passion for the handsome, well-built Tiberius during her marriage to Agrippa. But it brought lasting pleasure neither to Tiberius nor to Vipsania. The latter married Augustus’
friend Gaius Asinius Gallus Salonius, senator and future consul. She bore him at least six sons, two of whom were accused of conspiracy under Claudius. Tiberius and Julia had a single child, who
died in infancy. The death of that child shattered the fragile comity of what began as a successful, even happy partnership between two people who, temperamentally at odds, had nevertheless known
one another most of their lives and spent much of their childhood in the same house. Afterwards amity swiftly dissipated. This arose possibly as a result of Julia’s infidelities, more
probably over disagreements about women’s place in politics, since Julia, ever mindful of her position as Caesar’s daughter, did not share her new husband’s essentially Republican
interpretation of theunseen role of women. Tiberius and Julia subsequently lived apart. Their separation may have rekindled the former’s affection for Vipsania, which
Suetonius suggests outlived their marriage. ‘Even after the divorce [Tiberius] regretted his separation from [Vipsania], and the only time that he chanced to see her, he followed her with
such an intent and tearful gaze that care was taken that she should never again come before his eyes.’ Four decades later, Tiberius exacted revenge of sorts, instructing the senate to
imprison Vipsania’s second husband Gallus without sentence, without execution or the means of suicide.
    Since the ancient sources do not countenance the possibility of personal development or change, their authors evince no interest in the long-term effects on Tiberius of his unchosen separation
from Vipsania. Nor of the indignities of Julia’s condescension – Tacitus’ assertion that, weary of early amorousness, she disdained him ‘as an unequal match’, 13 Claudian
blood no rival to her own Julian heritage with its associations of divinity. In the aftermath of marital breakdown, when Julia courted disgrace, ‘turning from adultery to prostitution’,
as Seneca has it, ‘seeking gratification of every kind in the arms of casual lovers’, 14 Tiberius turned his back on Rome and departed, like the Divine