Tiberius

Suetonius' description of Tiberius

Tiberius, Augustus’s step-son and successor, began his reign with outward restraint and promise. Initially, he maintained the facade of republican propriety – declining grand titles and honorifics in a show of modesty. Suetonius records that Tiberius “declined the forename Imperator, the surname Father of his Country, and the placement of the civic crown at his door,” accepting only the name “Augustus” in official letters to foreign kings. He even rebuked those urging him to take full power, cryptically warning that they did not realize “what a monster the empire was”.

In the early part of his rule, Tiberius also avoided harsh measures. Not until his second year did he prosecute a serious treason case, “fearing to take any severe measures before his power was secure” and contenting himself with milder punishments at first. These initial actions gave hope that Tiberius might govern prudently in the spirit of Augustus’s later years.

Fittingly, Tiberius contributed to stable government for a time – he kept the imperial budget balanced, and in one instance he even refused to burden the provinces except in an emergency (Suetonius notes he provided tax relief after an earthquake in Asia).

He was also, initially, a stickler for discipline and order: when mutinies broke out early in his reign, Tiberius’s envoys handled them with minimal bloodshed, and he refused excessive honors, cultivating an image of a restrained princeps. However, “he quickly unmasked the ruler” and descended into tyranny.

Suetonius paints a grim picture of Tiberius’s later years, dominated by paranoia, debauchery, and cruelty. After retiring from Rome to the secluded island of Capri (27 BC), Tiberius gave free rein to his darkest impulses. “He could not control his natural cruelty and viciousness,” even beforehand, but on Capri it became infamous: Suetonius recounts how Tiberius devised perverse sexual practices, training groups of little boys to service him in his pool by “crawling between his thighs to lick and nibble him” while he swam. He even engaged infants in obscene acts, acting out a twisted fantasy of nursing for his own gratification.

At the same time, Tiberius unleashed terror on the political class. In Rome, he revived the treason trials with a vengeance, executing scores of senators and equestrians on the flimsiest suspicions. “There was no one whom Tiberius spared from torment and death,” Suetonius writes of this period, noting that once Tiberius learned his son Drusus had been murdered, he embarked on a witch-hunt that engulfed innocent and guilty alike. Suetonius' account is underpinned by Tacitus' later description of the senate being thrust into a state of "unprecedented agitation and terror".

On Capri, executions were a grisly spectacle: Tiberius had prisoners tortured and then “cast headlong into the sea before his eyes,” where sailors waited below to club the bodies “with boathooks and oars, to ensure no life remained”. He invented cruel torments – one trick was to force men to drink vast quantities of wine and then bind their genitals, “tormenting them at once by the torture of the cords and the stoppage of their water”. These sadistic punishments earned Tiberius universal hatred and fear. The once-reserved emperor became a capricious tyrant who, according to Suetonius, “lived in extreme fear” himself, issuing secret orders and spying on would-be conspirators.

By the end, Tiberius seemed conscious of his infamy. Suetonius suggests that he had foreseen his own evil legacy – which is why he had initially refused to be titled “Father of the Country” or to have the Senate swear oaths to uphold his acts, lest he “be found unworthy of such honours”. Indeed, when Tiberius died, Rome rejoiced.

Suetonius’ Tiberius is thus a tragic study in the corruption of absolute power: a capable general and administrator whose “barefaced hypocrisy” and cruel nature turned him into one of antiquity’s most despised rulers.