Augustus

Augustus, of course, resisted any pressure to change his dynastic strategy, but he was too aware of the uncertainties of life to remove Tiberius from the board entirely. Circumstances could possibly arise in the future, unwelcome though they were to contemplate, that would call for his return to power.

Augustus did his best to persuade Tiberius to change his mind. So did Livia, but to no avail. Family quarrels often descend into childishness, and Tiberius went on hunger strike for four days to prove that he was serious. The princeps admitted defeat and announced the retirement to the Senate. He characterized it bitterly as an act of betrayal. It was a very long time since someone had said no to him.

Tiberius left Rome at once, hurrying down to the port of Ostia without saying a word to the troop of friends who had come to offer their farewells, and kissing only very few of them before he boarded his ship and sailed off. He traveled as a private citizen, accompanied by one little-known senator and a few equites. As he was coasting past Campania on his journey south, he received news that Augustus was ill. He cast anchor for a time, but soon guessed that the princeps was applying moral blackmail. He did not want to appear to be awaiting an opportunity to seize power. So he resumed his journey.

He decided he would live on Rhodes in the eastern Mediterranean, where he had had an enjoyable holiday many years before on his return from Armenia. The diamond-shaped island is nearly fifty miles long and in those days had between sixty thousand and eighty thousand inhabitants. Until the arrival of Rome, it had been a leading sea power; it was still a center of Greek culture. The land was fertile and figs, pears, pistachios, and olives were grown, as they are today.

Tiberius settled in a modest town house and acquired a villa not far away in the countryside. He behaved unassumingly, keeping his lictors (the guards who symbolized his authority) and his runners out of sight. He often strolled around the Gymnasium, where, Suetonius reports, “he greeted and chatted with simple Greeks as if they were his equals.”

Tiberius wanted Augustus, and perhaps especially supporters of Gaius and Lucius, the “Julian faction,” to believe that he was politically inactive, as indeed he was. It was awkward that distinguished Romans, traveling to eastern provinces on one commission or another, made a point of stopping off at Rhodes to pay their respects, but he could hardly refuse to receive them. Many governors had friendly connections with the self-made exile and, according to Velleius Paterculus, a military officer who served under Tiberius, lowered their fasces to him in acknowledgment that “his retirement was more worthy of respect than their official positions.”

Nobody quite believed that the career of Tiberius was over.

Little is known of public affairs during the next few years. A regular system of suffect or replacement consuls, who took over from the original officeholders in mid-term, was reintroduced. The princeps reformed the procedures by which a provincial governor could be arraigned for extortion, and in 4 and 3 B.C. further settlements of military veterans were founded.

On the domestic front, a new generation was beginning to emerge. The dead Drusus had had several children by his much-loved wife, Antonia, three of whom survived. The eldest, Germanicus, was born in 15 B.C. and grew up into a courageous and good-natured boy. He was handsome, although his legs were somewhat spindly, a fault he tried to remedy by constant horseback riding after meals. He learned to become an excellent public speaker in Latin and Greek, enjoyed literature, and in adulthood wrote a number of comedies in Greek. Augustus became extremely fond of Germanicus.

Drusus’ other son, Claudius, born in 10 B.C., was a problem. His childhood was marred by frequent illnesses. He was physically weak and he limped (perhaps the result of a polio attack); he developed a stutter and a nervous twitching of the head. His mother, Antonia, loathed him. She called him “a monster, not finished but merely begun by nature.” Accusing anyone of stupidity, she would say: “He’s as big a fool as my son Claudius.” Livia also treated him with contempt and rarely spoke to him.

In fact, Claudius matured into an intelligent and studious youth. As a child, he set his sights on becoming a historian. Encouraged by the greatest historian of the age, Livy, he started work on a history of Rome. It opened with the murder of Julius Caesar, but skipped the civil wars that followed when Livia and Antonia warned him that he would not be allowed to publish an uncensored account of those years.

The third child was a girl, Livilla, whom Augustus regarded, as he did all his female relatives, as little more than dynastic marriage fodder. That no record of her early years survives is a reminder of the low value Romans placed on girls.