Free The Twelve Caesars by Matthew Dennison Page A

seventy-sixth year... he was resolved into the elements from which he sprang and yielded up to
heaven his divine soul.’ 16
    But it is not to be. Into this atmosphere of gentle fading away, a single source interjects a jarring note. Dio claims poisoning, Livia the culprit, her purpose to speed Tiberius’ progress
to the purple before Augustus could change his mind and nominate as his principal heir his grandson Agrippa Postumus – insolent, brutish, possibly mentally deficient. ‘So she smeared
with poison some figs which were still ripening on trees from which Augustus was in the habit of picking the fruit with his own hands. She then ate those which had not been smeared, and offered the
poisoned fruit to him.’ 17
    Poisoning plays its part in our story. A convicted poisoner called Locusta removes obstacles from Nero’s path to the throne. Those crimes were well known to Dio, writing in the second
century. Velleius died too soon to hear the rumours – misdeeds attributed to Augustus’s great-granddaughter Agrippina. HisLivia is not present at Augustus’
death, hers is not the applause the dying actor invites. Instead, Velleius’ Augustus dies ‘with the arms of his beloved Tiberius about him, commending to him the continuation of their
joint work’. 18 He escapes poisoning – even the toxic knowledge of the nature of Tiberius’ continuation.

 
TIBERIUS
(42 BC – AD 37)

‘Ever dark and mysterious’

    Tiberius : Statue of Tiberius © Toni Sanchez Poy

 

    T iberius could see in the dark. His eyes were unusually large and afforded him, albeit for short periods only, vision while
the world slept. For Tiberius was preoccupied with seeing. In a society of informers and conspirators, to see all was to know all. His studied contrariness as emperor, a determined equivocation,
even obfuscation, in his speech and his written communication, denied anyone insights into the real workings of his mind, imposing a sort of blindness, ‘for he thought it bad policy for the
sovereign to reveal his thoughts,’ Dio relates. 1
    He was addicted to astrology, that study of the aspect of celestial bodies in the interests of foresight; and feared the unseen, be it an assassin’s hand, whispering malcontent or
eructations of thunder. Fatalistic, self-contained and stern, for nine years as emperor he lived in isolation on Capri, ‘particularly attracted to that island because it was accessible by
only one small beach, being everywhere else girt with sheer cliffs of great height and by deep water’. Augustus had loved it too: its approach and its moorings afforded neither secrecy nor
hiding-places. Previously Tiberius had chosen temporary exile on Rhodes. Its approaches were similarly exposed. Among the small group of highbrow intimates who formed his companions there was the
Alexandrian astrologer Thrasyllus. Sources record the two men staring out to sea, each in his different way preoccupied by the challengesof the present, the promises of the
future. Thrasyllus’ was the position of greater vulnerability: Tiberius valued him only for his clairvoyance and threatened to kill him for a mistaken prophecy. Gifted or otherwise,
Thrasyllus combined sang-froid with what looks remarkably like charlatanism: his predictions came true and he feathered his own nest by confirming Tiberius’ dependency on second sight.
    Augustus’ heir, in the summer of AD 14 Tiberius ‘almost struggled longer to refuse the principate than others had fought to obtain it’. 2 Formerly his
stepfather’s partner in government, invested in the year before the old man’s death with imperium , powers of censorship and tribunician power matching Augustus’ own,
Tiberius saw too clearly the challenges implicit in Augustus’ bequest. Hostile sources interpret his reluctance as hypocrisy, diffidence an affectation. They take advantage of his
invisibility on his island retreat to weave around his name a tissue of lurid rumours –