Augustus

Tiberius, now thirty-one years old, was the better choice, Augustus felt. His wife, Vipsania, was Agrippa’s daughter by his first marriage and dynastically unimportant. Unfortunately, Tiberius loved Vipsania and was most unwilling to divorce her. What was more, he strongly disapproved of Julia, who (according to Suetonius) had made a pass at him during Agrippa’s lifetime.

Such considerations did not trouble the princeps, for whom duty trumped personal preference. In 11 B.C., he required Tiberius to put Vipsania away and marry his daughter. This he did, but continued to miss his first wife. Once accidentally catching sight of her, he stared at her with tears in his eyes and an expression of intense unhappiness. This was noticed and precautions were taken against his ever seeing her again.

At first, Tiberius pulled himself together and made an effort; he and Julia lived affectionately enough as man and wife until a child that was born to them died in infancy. By then he had come to loathe her and renounced marital relations.

Livia is sometimes credited with promoting the match. Perhaps: she would hardly be human if she did not look out for her sons, and she won a reputation among her acquaintances for discreet scheming. A sharp-eyed great-grandson, who knew her in her extreme old age, nicknamed her after the Greek hero most famous for deviousness and sagacity. He called her Ulixes stolatus, Ulysses in a frock. However, no evidence survives of her intervention, and Augustus’ choice of Tiberius was a logical one, which needed no special pleading.

For his father-in-law and (assuming her approval) his mother, Tiberius’ feelings were irrelevant. But he was a private, silent, and introverted man, whose obedience masked obstinate emotion. He had given way on this occasion, but would the time come when he broke free from the heartless and demanding princeps?

Personal loss was not allowed to halt the progress of imperial expansion. Tiberius took over from Agrippa in Illyricum and Pannonia, and Drusus commanded the legions on the Rhine. In the spring or early summer of 12 B.C., the brothers launched simultaneous campaigns. To be in close touch with events as they unfolded, the princeps spent time in Aquileia and other towns in northern Italy.

The older brother fought the Pannonian tribes for four years, but faced few major difficulties because the enemy seemed unable to unite against a common threat. He deployed his usual ruthlessness, deporting most of the men and selling them into slavery. It appeared that the Pannonian problem had been solved once and for all, and that the last gap along the Danube frontier had been plugged.

Drusus had a more difficult time, although he won victory after victory. He also worked hard to encourage Gallic unity under the aegis of Rome. A great altar to Augustus was erected in a temple at Lugdunum at the confluence of the rivers Rhône and Saône. The altar carried an inscription with the names of all Gaul’s sixty tribes, and each tribe contributed a symbolic image of itself.

Propaganda in Gaul was matched by warfare on the far side of the Rhine. Drusus launched a succession of annual incursions. In 12 B.C., he sent a fleet up to the river Weser, and then having won the seacoast marched deep into German lands as far as the mid-Weser. However, he was not such a safe pair of hands as Tiberius and could be foolhardy. He was obsessively ambitious to win the spolia opima—as mentioned earlier, this was Rome’s greatest and rarest military prize, awarded to a commander in chief who personally killed an opposing general—and he used to chase German chieftains across the battlefield at great risk to himself.

The young general twice got into severe difficulties. Evidently failing to understand the vigor of non-Mediterranean tides, he once allowed his fleet to become stranded when the sea ebbed, and just managed to extricate himself from the resulting danger with help from a friendly local tribe. On another occasion Drusus was ambushed in a narrow pass and faced annihilation. Fortunately, his attackers were overconfident and lost formation when they came to close quarters. Only the cool professionalism of the Roman legionary saw off the enemy.

By the fourth year, Drusus reached what was probably his ultimate destination, the river Elbe. After stiff fighting, he defeated the Marcomanni, a tribe strategically placed between the heads of the Elbe and the Danube. These were fine achievements, which earned the popular general triumphal regalia.

The brothers’ successes were impressive, but impermanent. Drusus raided rather than conquered; at the end of each year’s campaigning, he left fortresses, but withdrew his army into Gaul. The relative incompetence of the Pannonians concealed bitter anti-Roman feeling. They did not accept the verdict of the war.