Pod Insights The Rest Is History 535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2) About this episode The Roman historian Suetonius’ biography of the controversial Emperor Tiberius is one of his most shocking and salacious, condemning Tiberius to infamy. But was Tiberius really the perverted monster Suetonius would have us believe? Born of Rome’s most illustrious family and a sacred bloodline - the Claudians - Tiberius’ mother Livia was unceremoniously taken from his father while she carried him, to marry the great Emperor Augustus. So it was that Tiberius grew up in the very heart of imperial power, proving himself intelligent, and a superb military commander. But, following the unforeseen deaths of Augustus’ young heirs, he found himself primed to become the next caesar of Rome. The reign that ensued would prove largely peaceful, prosperous and stable, though Tiberius himself was increasingly plagued by paranoia and fear. While the last of Augustus’ bloodline were wiped out one by one, he retired to Capri, much to the horror of the Roman people. Before long, rumours had begun percolating of the heinous deeds, sick proclivities, and vile abominations Tiberius was practicing on his pleasure island…
Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Tiberius, the impressive though widely lambasted second emperor of Rome. What is the truth behind the sordid myths and mysteries of his reign…?
Pre-order Tom Holland's new translation of 'The Lives of the Caesars' here:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/279727/the-lives-of-the-caesars-by-suetonius/9780241186893
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Transcript 10,559 words · 8 speakers
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0:02 Tom Holland? This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.
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3:05 Dominic Sandbrook? A few days after his arrival on Capri, Tiberius was enjoying his seclusion when a fisherman unexpectedly came up to him and presented him with an enormous mullet, whereupon, alarmed that someone had been able to negotiate the most inaccessible reaches of the island by climbing a pathless cliff, he ordered that the man's face should be scrubbed with the fish. "I only thank my lucky stars," cried out the fisherman as he was enduring this punishment, "that I didn't bring Caesar the huge lobster that I also caught." Whereupon Tiberius gave orders that the lobster should be used to grate the man's face to shreds.
3:50 Dominic Sandbrook? So, what a shameful moment in Roman history this is. It's a notorious incident in the life of the Emperor Tiberius, who of course ruled from AD 14 to AD 37, and it's recorded in Suetonius's Great Biography of the Caesars, now translated by our very own Tom Holland. So, Tom.
4:13 Dominic Sandbrook? This is a very famous story. It's the story that sort of captures the capriciousness and the cruelty of the aged Tiberius as he sits there on his pleasure island in the Bay of Naples. So, so what's going on here? Unpack this story for us.
4:29 Tom Holland? So Capri, as you say, is in the Bay of Naples and it had been appropriated by Augustus to serve him as a kind of a retreat. And actually, he kept his collection of fossils there. So he had a brilliant collection of sea monsters, which were fossils that had been brought to him. And shortly before his death in AD 14, Augustus had gone there to kind of get a bit of rest. And then he'd gone back to the mainland and travelled down the road from Naples. And that, that was where he died. So Tiberius had inherited Capri along with all of Augustus's other properties, all his titles and his ranks, and of course, his status as ruler of the Roman Empire, because Tiberius had been adopted by Augustus. So Tiberius gets the whole lot.
5:13 Dominic Sandbrook? So just to remind everybody, Tiberius is the second Roman emperor. Augustus has been the first, and now Tiberius has succeeded. So he spends time in Rome and then he arrives in Capri and he settles there in the year 27, doesn't he, when he's quite old?
5:27 Tom Holland? Yeah, so he's about, he's about 70 and by Roman standards, I mean, that's very old. And Tiberius essentially is doing what great statesmen who've reached the end of their lives, you know, it's perfectly legitimate. You retire to your, your villa, your country villa, you, you escape the kind of the, the clamour and smoke of Rome and you enjoy what the Roman elites would call "otium cum dignitate", which is basically a kind of leisure with dignity, a dignified retirement.
5:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Sounds nice, sounds lovely.
5:57 Tom Holland? It does, but what Suetonius is doing in his biography is revealing the sordid truth that lies behind these seemingly impeccable motivations.
6:10 Tom Holland? And he lists them and he says that the first reason that Tiberius retires to Capri is out of terror, Suetonius writes. Tiberius lived in the shadow not just of the loathing and hatred that he inspired, but of his own fears and of the bitter insults to which he was subject. So that's obviously why he is so unsettled by finding that a fisherman can climb up this sheer cliff, because he's expecting that he's absolutely secured. And that's why his reaction, Suetonius implies, is so brutal. But there is another reason as well, and we touched on this in the previous episode we did, which is that alongside the Roman assumption that a nobleman has his right to kind of a dignified leisure, is
6:53 Tom Holland? the lurking suspicion that someone who craves privacy for its own sake, who indulges in it too much.
7:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Bad sign.
7:02 Tom Holland? And Tiberius, I mean, he never goes back to Rome following his arrival in Capri. He makes two feints to go back to the city, but he never actually enters it. The assumption in Rome, therefore, is that there are no good reasons for what he's doing. He is indulging the most unspeakable depravity. So again, Suetonius on this, he became notorious for the worst, the most shocking deviances, such as hardly to be talked or heard about, and indeed strain the bounds of credibility. And then Suetonius, having said that, you know, these deviances are too shocking to be talked about, he then talks about them in great.
7:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
7:40 Tom Holland? And salacious detail. And as he does so, he insists that despite having said that, you know, these stories strain the bounds of credibility, in fact, they are true. And he is reporting on gossip that has been obsessing Rome supposedly. Suetonius tells us that the island of Capri has been renamed in Rome, Capro, which is the Latin for a male goat.
8:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
8:08 Tom Holland? So Tiberius is this kind of hideous, goatish figure. And thanks to Suetonius's reports, Tiberius's reputation has never really recovered. And to this day, he has the image, I think, in the the public imagination, of a kind of ghoulish, bloodstained Jeffrey Epstein, a pervert, but an embittered and paranoid and murderous pervert. And it's because of this, Suetonius reports, that when Tiberius dies,
8:40 Tom Holland? The news is greeted with public exaltation. So again, Suetonius writes, "So delighted were the people at the news of his death, that when they first heard it, some ran about all over the place, yelling to the Tiber with Tiberius. In other words, dump his body in the river that flows through Rome. Some prayed to Mother Earth and to the souls of the departed, that the dead man be given no resting place except among the damned, and others yet threatened his corpse with the hook and the Gemonian steps, the flight of steps that lead from the forum up to the capital, and they passed the great prison, and the bodies of those who've been executed are exposed on the Gemonian steps and then dragged with a hook and dumped in the Tiber. In the event, this is not the fate that is visited on Tiberius's body. Instead, it is escorted from the Bay of Naples, much as
9:24 Tom Holland? Augustus's had been when he died, back to Rome with great honour. It's cremated in a great state funeral. But the taint of this reputation has endured for two millennia. And I would say that if you were, say, casting a vampire film about, you know, the living dead in ancient Rome, Tiberius would be the emperor best qualified to star in that.
9:48 Dominic Sandbrook? So there are sort of two things, I would say, that people who know anything about Tiberius know about Tiberius. One is, he's up to terrible, terrible sexual misconduct on this island, which we'll get into. And then the other is that while that is happening, there's a kind of reign of terror in Rome by the head of the Praetorian Guard, this guy called Sigenus, who basically has deluded Tiberius and has secretly kind of taken all his power and is killing everybody in Rome. So Tiberius is simultaneously a sort of depraved old goat, but also a stupid old fool, who's got no idea kind of what's going on and in whose name all these terrible things are happening. And I guess the question is, we know that Tiberius was a serious person.
10:29 Tom Holland? Very serious.
10:30 Dominic Sandbrook? That he was a very, I mean, he was genuinely very serious. Yeah, wasn't he?
10:34 Tom Holland? Yeah.
10:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Quite humorless.
10:35 Tom Holland? Not humorless.
10:36 Dominic Sandbrook? But he has a sort of dual reputation, doesn't he?
10:38 Tom Holland? Yes, he does.
10:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. We know that he's regarded as a very proficient military commander, that he's a serious politician. You know, when he succeeds Augustus as emperor, nobody thinks it bizarre or outlandish that such a man is in command of the Roman world. So the question is, Is all this stuff about attacking people with fish and doing terrible things to people in swimming pools, is all this just spin and mad propaganda? Is it fake news? Or does it get to some truth about Tiberius's character or about the nature of imperial power and power corrupting? And I guess that's the question at the heart of this episode, isn't it?
11:13 Tom Holland? It's a brilliant question, and I think that to answer it, it's probably best to look at Suetonius's biography of Tiberius in the whole, because even though his portrayal of the emperor is this kind of in his grim old age is by far the most memorable. I mean, there is a lot more to his biography than that. And in fact, and I think this is crucial to understanding Tiberius's character and where he is coming from. Suetonius understands that Tiberius's identity is rooted very, very deep in the past with the origins of his family, the dynasty to which he belongs and is born into. And so he begins his life of Tiberius centuries before Tiberius's birth, in fact, in the age of Romulus, who is the founder of Rome itself.
11:55 Tom Holland? And the reason he does that is that even though by adoption, Tiberius is the son of Augustus, who in turn is the adoptive son of Julius Caesar, so the Julian family, who ultimately claimed their descent from the goddess Venus, Tiberius by birth belongs to a family who actually, you know, they are no less patrician than the Julians. They're a lot more celebrated, a lot more distinguished than the Julians historically have been. And this is a family called the Claudians. So Suetonius gives us a kind of potted history of them. He says that the Claudians had migrated to Rome shortly after the city's founding, so in the time of Romulus, and that they established themselves there.
12:36 Tom Holland? And they become probably the most famous of all the nobiles, the Romans call them. So that's the word from which we get both nobleman and nobility. And they dominate the entire history of Rome once the monarchy has been expelled and Rome becomes a republic. And Suetonius writes, "The hold of the Claudians on the people's affections was formidable and self-perpetuating." And they are greatly admired for their achievements. So Suetonius lists some of them. It's a Claudian who steals the Romans to fight against Pyrrhus, the Greek king, whose Carmen has defeated them in three battles and who in the end gives up. His victories have been to Pyrrhic. And also Claudians play a leading role in the defeat of the Carthaginians.
13:19 Tom Holland? But there is also a dark strain to the record of Claudian achievements. Some of them are viewed with great hatred. So again, fighting against the Carthaginians, there's a notorious story of one Claudian who is leading a battle fleet against the Carthaginians. He gets the soothsayer to consult the holy chickens that are on board his flagship. And the soothsayer, no, I'm afraid that the chickens are saying, don't attack. And Tiberius just has the chickens chucked into the sea and promptly loses his entire fleet. And the women of the Claudians also are simultaneously admired and condemned. So there's one of them whose chastity is so prodigious
14:00 Tom Holland? that she's able, single-handedly, it's said, to pull a ship right the way up the Tiber. And there's another one, the sister of the Claudian who had chucked the chickens in the sea, who is driving through Rome in her carriage. There are crowds everywhere. She's furious. She's stuck in a traffic jam. And she says, oh, if only my brother were around to
14:20 Tom Holland? to kill off a few more of these awful crowds in some terrible defeat. And she gets accused of treason for this, the only woman in Roman history to be accused of treason up until that point. So they're very charismatic. So there are lots of people who hate them. And I think that maybe the best way to imagine that their kind of status in the in the Roman Republic is to imagine that in the American Republic, suppose the Kennedys had been on the scene, you know, since the days of the founding fathers, that there'd been successions of Kennedys who'd been presidents.
14:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
14:50 Tom Holland? People hate them, people love them. It's that kind of charisma that the Claudians have.
14:54 Dominic Sandbrook? And what's even worse for Tiberius, or better, depending on your viewpoint, is that both Isma and his father descended from branches of the Claudian family, aren't they? So the Kennedys have been going for 200 years and both of your parents are from different branches of that family. So he is born two years after the Ides of March. Everything has kicked off civil war and actually his father, for all his prestige and all the sort of grandeur of his name, has backed the wrong side, hasn't he? In the civil war after Julius Caesar's assassination.
15:25 Tom Holland? Yeah, so he has to kind of leave Italy in fear of his life and he does so with his wife Livia and his baby son Tiberius. And they go first to Sicily, where Tiberius's father is very arrogant, as all the Claudians are supposedly arrogant. So he has a bust up there with the guy in charge of Sicily and then he goes to Greece and there, they're in Sparta and there's a terrible fire and they have to escape and Livia's hair gets singed. So all kinds of close shaves and it's looking very bad for him. So eventually he goes to Antony, who is ruler of the eastern half of the empire, and makes up with him and there's an amnesty proclaimed and Tiberius's father, Livia, and the baby Tiberius are
16:07 Tom Holland? then able to go back to Rome, where an incredible scandal breaks out because while Antony's in the east, Augustus, as he will come to be known, is the ruler of Rome. And so Tiberius's parents are now in the shadow of Augustus and Suetonius reports the consequence. "It was with Antony that Tiberius's father returned to Rome. And here, pressed by Augustus to surrender him his wife Livia, despite the fact that Livia was pregnant at the time and had already borne him a son, he did so. He died not long afterwards and was survived by two sons, Tiberius and his younger brother Druusus." So, very shocking.
16:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, a quick question. So are we to believe that this is basically that Augustus has genuinely fallen in love with this bloke's wife? It's a genuine love match. I mean, that would, that's the only explanation, isn't it really?
17:00 Tom Holland? Right. Crucially, Livia does not give Augustus any, any children, and particularly any sons. And so this opens up the massive question of who is going to succeed him. It's obviously very useful for Tiberius and his younger brother Druusus to be the stepsons of the most powerful man in the world, the stepsons of Augustus. But equally, it does redound greatly to Augustus's prestige to have a Claudian wife and two Claudian stepsons. Because although Augustus is the grandson of Julius Caesar, his own father had not been a prestigious figure. He'd basically been- A kind of out of town guy.
17:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
17:37 Tom Holland? He's representative of the Italian nobility, not of the kind of high patrician Roman nobility. So it's good for him. It kind of, you know, upgrades his status. And what is also very useful for Augustus is that Tiberius, as he grows up in Augustus's family, proves to be a man of remarkable accomplishment. And Suetonius gives us all the details of this. Suetonius reports that Tiberius is exceedingly clever, exceedingly well read, very, very interested in all kinds of intellectual pursuits, and particularly in mythology, in the study of the gods, and in the literature of Greece and Rome. He's also a very effective administrator.
18:22 Tom Holland? So even as a very young man, he's charged by Augustus, again to quote Suetonius here, making up a shortfall in the supply of grain to Rome. I mean, that's a crucial thing. If Rome is not kept supplied, then Augustus's regime will topple. So it's a real marker of trust. And then Augustus commissions the young Tiberius to launch a thorough investigation into the slave barracks across Italy, the owners of which had a terrible reputation for seizing and imprisoning not just travellers, but men whose fear of military service had driven them to hide out there. And again, that's really important because Augustus does not want his regime to be associated with conditions of internal instability.
19:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, of course.
19:01 Tom Holland? He wants order, really important for his popularity. So this is a real kind of demonstration of his trust in Tiberius. And then on top of that, Tiberius proves to be a brilliant military leader, by far the best of his generation. To the extent that later in his life, whenever there is a major crisis on the frontiers, it is Tiberius to whom Augustus turns. And it's not going too far to say that Tiberius is twice the saviour of his country. So the first of these great feats of repairing Rome and ensuring that her frontiers are not overwhelmed takes place in AD six, when there's a great revolt in Pannonia, so basically what's now Hungary. He crushes that. And the second is
19:45 Tom Holland? In the aftermath of the great disaster of Augustus's reign, which is the defeat of the three legions under the command of Varus by the Germans in AD nine, and is Tiberius who ensures that that disaster does not lead to the complete collapse of the frontier and Germans flooding into Gaul and Italy. So Suetonius quotes a letter that Augustus wrote to Tiberius during these kind of later years, in which he writes to Tiberius and addresses him as dearest and bravest and most dutiful of generals. So, you know, this is a very, very impressive man.
20:22 Dominic Sandbrook? So if you were pointing purely on merit, Tiberius is obviously, obviously the best qualified, the outstanding candidate to succeed Augustus when the time comes as emperor, as master of the Roman world. But we know from Suetonius's account that Augustus basically tries to do everything possible, not everything possible to avoid it, but he's constantly looking at other candidates from his own family. So Tiberius is his stepson, not his son, and what Augustus really wants is his own flesh and blood, so his grandsons to succeed him, because he's had a daughter, hasn't he, Augustus?
20:59 Tom Holland? Yeah.
20:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Called Julia, who is not his daughter by Livia, but by a previous wife.
21:04 Tom Holland? Exactly.
21:05 Dominic Sandbrook? And he wants her children to succeed him, not this guy who's somebody else's son.
21:09 Tom Holland? Right, because that's what every Roman nobleman wants.
21:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
21:13 Tom Holland? They want their bloodline to be perpetuated. So Julia has given him various kind of grandsons and granddaughters, and Augustus has adopted the eldest of his three grandsons, guys called Gaius and Lucius, directly as his sons. So this is marking them out as the heirs. And Tiberius is very, very sensitive to the fact that he's not in the line of succession. And he makes a real point of trying not to tread on the toes of Gaius and Lucius, who of course are much younger than him, much less experienced, much less able, and he... You know, he does his best, but he is a Claudian. I mean, he's a very proud man.
21:54 Tom Holland? And he can't really help but betray his resentment.
21:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
22:00 Tom Holland? So this happens in various ways. So Augustus marries Julia, his daughter, to Tiberius. And Tiberius and Julia don't get on at all. At one point, Tiberius is so aggravated by the situation he finds himself that he chucks everything in and he retires to Rhodes. And he does it in a way that seems very openly to insult Augustus, who has publicly requested him not to go. And relations between the two men break down so badly that in the event when Tiberius says, well, I quite like, I've had enough of Rhodes, I want to come back now. Augustus forbids it. So effectively, Tiberius is in exile. And actually, in a measure of danger from Lucius and Gaius, who, you know, obviously in turn feel menaced by this very able, their kind of elder.
22:45 Tom Holland? But then in, first of all, in AD 2, Lucius dies, and then in AD 4, Gaius dies. And this is basically the kind of the plot twist in I. Claudius, that it's Livia, Tiberius' mother, who is poisoning them and kind of elbowing aside anyone who might stand in the path of her son to succeed to the throne.
23:03 Dominic Sandbrook? But in reality, they don't have natural causes. They're not poisoned, are they?
23:07 Tom Holland? No, I mean, almost certainly not. And their death means that effectively Augustus now has no choice but to adopt Tiberius as his heir. And this means that Tiberius ceases to be a Claudian. And he now becomes a Julian. This is what qualifies him to rank as a Caesar. And it's a public proclamation to the world that Tiberius is now Augustus's heir. And sure enough, on the 17th of September, AD 14, when Augustus dies, he has succeeded to the rule of the Roman world by His adoptive son, Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus. And people will note that in that name, there is no hint of his Claudian ancestry.
23:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Okay, so he's had the most fantastic apprenticeship to become emperor. And then we get into the stories in Suetonius's account. We get into the story of how Tiberius actually does. And actually, it's not all attacking people with fish.
24:03 Tom Holland? Perving on islands and stuff.
24:04 Dominic Sandbrook? A lot of it is, he's actually really good at being emperor and he's a very, you know, he's a very proficient and serious and impressive one.
24:10 Tom Holland? So there are whole chunks of Suetonius's account of Tiberius as an emperor that makes him sound an absolutely mortal ruler. So Suetonius says of Tiberius that although he's emperor, he conducted himself much as any citizen in the days of the Republic might have done. And indeed, for a while with fewer heirs. So in other words, Tiberius is reassuring his fellow citizens that just because he has inherited Augustus's powers, that doesn't mean that the civic ideals of the Republic are being kind of thrown in the dust heap.
24:40 Dominic Sandbrook? He's not a monarch. He doesn't conduct himself like a monarch.
24:43 Tom Holland? He does not. Well, this is what Suetonius tells us. And also, he therefore is very quick to scorn flattery. So he gets addressed by someone as dominus, master. And Tiberius is appalled. And Suetonius says, he told the man never to call him by such an insulting title again. And Suetonius specifies that Tiberius shows immense respect towards the Senate, who are the great body of leading men who had guided Rome throughout the centuries of the Republic. He honors the ancient traditions of free speech. People are allowed to insult him if they want to. As he had done as a young man, so as emperor, he secures the public peace against banditry, brigandage and sedition.
25:26 Tom Holland? And he shows concern for the security, stability and wellbeing of the provinces.
25:34 Tom Holland? And to governors who urged him to impose a heavier tribute on the provinces, Suetonius writes, he wrote back that a good shepherd should shear his flock, not skin them. Tiberius is a man who is concerned not just with the peace of the provinces, but with ensuring that they're prosperous. So this all seems to be great. It all sounds brilliant. But then you read this, and then comes a kind of key pivot point in the biography. Suetonius writes, "Only gradually did Tiberius reveal the true character of his rule." And Suetonius's thesis is that the older Tiberius becomes, so the harder he finds it to restrain the monstrous vices that had always secretly
26:18 Tom Holland? been gnawing at him. And there are two vices in particular, one of which we've already discussed, it's his sexual perversities, his appalling deviances, but also the fact that Tiberius secretly is a monster of cruelty.
26:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. And that takes us back obviously to that introduction, the business with the fishermen, which we will come to. Let's take the cruelty first. I recently reminded myself, reading your excellent translation of Suetonius, that he particularly targets his rivals. So the other descendants of Augustus, the rest of the family, people who might be a plausible threat to him. And he does that actually quite late, doesn't he? So he's been emperor for 15 years. He's actually been off on his pleasure island on Capri for two years. And now he decides, okay, I'm going to get rid of all Augustus's other descendants. That seems a bit weird to me.
27:12 Tom Holland? Right. So yeah, so in AD 29, he exiles the woman who is Augustus's last surviving grandchild. And this is a woman called Agrippina. She's much loved and admired by the Roman people, great favorite. But Tiberius doesn't care. He has her exiled to a remote and distant island. And she has given birth to three sons. The eldest of these is called Nero, the middle one is called Druusus, the youngest is called Gaius, and he goes by an affectionate Nickname Caligula.
27:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Little boots or whatever. Yeah.
27:47 Tom Holland? Yes. So he's the youngest. So the two elders Nero and Druusus, Tiberius had adopted them. And that of course is to signal to the world, to the Roman people, these rank as his heirs. He wants them to succeed him. But when their mother falls from favour, so do they. So Nero, like Agrippina, is exiled to a remote island and Druusus is kind of chained up in the bow of the great palace on the Palatine Hill in Rome. And within four years, all three of them are dead. And Suetonius does not spare the reader the hideous details. Agrippina, we're told that she is beaten so badly in prison on her island that she loses an eye. She goes on hunger strike on Tiberius's orders. She's forcibly fed, but she just keeps spitting food up.
28:30 Tom Holland? And ultimately she dies of starvation. Suetonius writes that Nero was driven to commit suicide after an executioner, pretending that he had been sent by order of the senate, showed him a garrote and hooks. And that Druusus was reduced to such torments of hunger that he tried to eat the stuffing of his mattress. So these are the stories that are told.
28:50 Dominic Sandbrook? The only one left is this youngest one, Gaius Caligula.
28:53 Tom Holland? Yeah.
28:53 Dominic Sandbrook? And of course, we will be coming to him next week. And then, so not content with that, according to Suetonius, Tiberius then becomes even more savage and brutal, doesn't he? Because there's been a failed coup against him, hasn't there? His former right hand man, a guy called Ser Janus, who has supposedly been carrying out this reign of terror in Rome, turns against Tiberius, he's accused of leading the coup. Tiberius gets rid of him and then Tiberius just goes mad and starts killing everybody. Is that basically the gist of it?
29:23 Tom Holland? That is the gist of it. I mean, it's very mafia. Ser Janus is kind of Tiberius's conciliary. He's trying to take out the boss. It's failed. And so, you know, the aging godfather launches these terrible reprisals. And again, Suetonius, who loves a shocking atrocity, he doesn't spare us the details. So he says of the people who've been fingered in this conspiracy, all those put to death were flung down the Gemonian steps, dragged away on hooks, since it was strictly forbidden by tradition to strangle virgins. Executioner made sure to rape young girls before throttling them, which I always think is a complete, you know, such a repellent detail. And then anyone who wished to die was forced to live. Again, a kind of, you know, cruel refinement.
30:08 Tom Holland? The poor fisherman who brought Tiberius the mullet with which we began this episode, he's not the only guy who gets flung from a cliff. So on Caprice, Suetonius writes, the place where Tiberius used to watch executions is still pointed out. So there's a bit of field research. The very spot from where those found guilty after protracted and excruciating tortures would be flung on his command into the sea, down to where a band of marines would be waiting to smash the corpses with poles and oars, just on the off chance that any might still have the breath of life. And then Suetonius gives us a particularly hideous torture that Tiberius has devised himself. No sooner had his victims been tricked into filling themselves to bursting with a large quantity of wine than their urethras would be bound tight so that they would be put
30:52 Tom Holland? into agony, both by the tightening of the cord and by the distending of their bladders.
30:57 Dominic Sandbrook? I'm actually struggling to work out how physically that would work, but it's fair to say that either Tiberius or Suetonius has a very strange imagination. Do you think that's fair, Tom?
31:08 Tom Holland? I think it's entirely fair. And it's not surprising that the Marquis de Sade kept a copy of Suetonius in his library. Because as well as the cruelty, there are these sex crimes that he's supposedly indulging in. And the passages where Suetonius describes them, I think, definitely the most revolting section in the Lives of the Caesar's, quite possibly in the whole of Roman literature, which is, you know, I mean, is saying something. And Suetonius himself, I mean, he says that these deviances, that they shouldn't be discussed. And then, of course, he does. And I suppose the most notorious example, probably the one that people who are familiar
31:48 Tom Holland? with this story will have heard of, is Suetonius claims that Tiberius trained little boys, whom he called his minnows, to slip between his thighs as he was swimming and to tease him with the swirling of their tongues and the playfulness of their nibbling. And that is by no means the worst.
32:07 Dominic Sandbrook? No, it gets worse, doesn't it?
32:08 Tom Holland? It does get worse. And all these sections where Suetonius is describing not just what is being done to Tiberius himself, but he's kind of staging erotic pageants, floor shows. It's quite hard to work out exactly what is going on, what positions are being adopted. Because it's almost as though the Latin itself is breaking down, as though Suetonius is struggling to articulate the complexity of all these kind of weird sex acts that Tiberius is commissioning. And, you know, as we said, this account of what Tiberius is getting up to on Capri is so shocking, so celebrated, so notorious. It has damaged Tiberius's reputation for two millennia.
32:52 Tom Holland? To return to the question that you asked, beginning of this half, you know, is it biographical fact or is it muckraking? I think it is really telling that actually all the stuff that we've also been talking about in this episode, all the stuff about him investigating slave barracks and, you know, leading armies and sorting out the grain supply. I mean, nobody remembers that. That's all kind of boring. It's the lurid quality of what's being described. And I think that these seem to exist in a completely different dimension. So it's as though in the biography, we have, Tiberius is a Roman politician like any other, the kind of figure who might appear in, you know, Livy or something like that.
33:33 Tom Holland? And then on Capri, he seems like some monster from some hideous tragedy or monstrous epic poem. And I think that the clue to what is going on with Suetonius and indeed with Tiberius lies in that. It's the fact that Tiberius is being portrayed both as an emperor like any other, but also as a figure of myth. That's the key to understanding him.
34:00 Dominic Sandbrook? All right. Well, let's explore this a little bit more after the break.
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35:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Tiberius held the rule of earth and sea for 23 years without once permitting so much as the merest spark of war to smolder in the lands of either the Greeks or the barbarians. And he bestowed upon the world both peace and the blessings of peace right the way up to his dying day. And he did so, what is more, with an ungrudging generosity of spirit. He was a man of deep common sense, the most skilled in penetrating to the heart of a person's secret intentions of all his contemporaries, whom he surpassed in wisdom as in rank. No one on both sides of his family had a nobler ancestry. No one was more sagacious or better read.
36:33 Dominic Sandbrook? So that's not Suetonius, that's Philo of Alexandria, who was a Judean philosopher. And that's an obvious corrective to all the stuff about minnows and assaulting people with lobsters and killing all these people and whatnot. Now, Philo obviously is not as close to the circles of power as Suetonius would later be. So Philo is from Alexandria, but he'd been to Rome, hadn't he? He'd been there a year after Tiberius's death. So he might well have spoken to people who knew Tiberius and, you know, he's not to be discounted. So Tom, what's going on here? Why does that account differ so much from the lurid kind of, I mean, I was going to say Hello Magazine, but of course it's not Hello Magazine. It's
37:14 Dominic Sandbrook? far, far more scandalous than anything in Hello Magazine than that version of Tiberius.
37:19 Tom Holland? Yeah. So I mean, maybe one answer to that puzzle, you might think, well, Philo is a Greek. As you said, he's not, you know, familiar with Rome because he's from Alexandria. Perhaps he, you know, he just doesn't really have a handle on what's going on. Perhaps you have to be in Rome to get the full sense of the horrors that are being reported of Tiberius. And backup for that is the fact that we do have another very detailed source for Tiberius's reign. And that is not a biography, but a history. And it's a history written by Rome's greatest historian Tacitus, who hates Tiberius and corroborates many of Suetonius's darkest accusations. And Tacitus, like Suetonius, agrees that Tiberius was hated by the Roman
38:04 Tom Holland? people when he died. And according to both men, the great biographer and the great historian, the Senate hated Tiberius because he had been tyrannical, vengeful, murderous. And the people had hated him because they had sensed that he despised them. He took no pleasure in the things that gave them delight. He refused to lay on public entertainments. Gladiators in his reign were complaining that they had nothing to do. You know, not only is he a kind of bloodstained pervert who goes around killing senators, he's also a massive killjoy.
38:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, yeah.
38:39 Tom Holland? This is not a good image, but the fact is that actually, we do know, even though it hasn't survived, that there was at least one account of Tiberius's life that was very, very laudatory. And the reason we know that is that Suetonius is clearly drawing on it, because although he doesn't name his sources, it's evident when you read his life that what he's done is basically lifted stuff from one source, which is very positive.
39:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
39:08 Tom Holland? And he's listed other stuff from a second source, which is vituperative. And he's basically just stitched them together, and he hasn't tried really to reconcile them.
39:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, in your introduction to the Twelve Caesars, which I was talking about in the last episode we did about how interesting it is, you make the point that the biography of Tiberius is the most unstable and the most unsatisfying in some ways of all the biographies in Suetonius's book, because he never strikes a balance between, I mean, he just, you know, first we have all the stuff that says Tiberius is brilliant, he's doing all this stuff with grain. And then we have all the stuff that says he's absolutely terrible, he's throwing people off cliffs. But there's no attempt by Suetonius really to make any psychological sense of the fact that you've got these two different versions of the same man's character.
39:53 Tom Holland? Right, exactly. And so that's why it's so hard to get a handle on who the real Tiberius might have been. And is it possible to get any sense of the real man, the real politician, the real emperor behind the myth? And I think it's difficult. But I think it is possible to make a case for Tiberius as having been an emperor who probably was more sinned against than sinning when it comes to Suetonius and Tacitus. And I think it's worth remembering that Suetonius is writing in an age, you know, so he's, you know, he's secretary to Hadrian, this is a century on from Tiberius, a time when everyone in the Roman world takes the existence of an autocracy in Rome for granted. But that's not the world
40:38 Tom Holland? that Tiberius is born into and grows up in. Tiberius, I think. To a degree that Suetonius is unqualified to recognise, is a man who is torn between two different worlds, two different periods, the period of the Republic and the period of the Empire. So it's really important, and this is something clearly that Suetonius inherently does recognise, that Tiberius was a Claudian, that he's a scion of the greatest of all the patrician dynasties that had flourished under the Republic. But he is simultaneously being raised as the stepson and then the adopted son of an autocrat, the first great autocrat in Roman history. So there's an enormous tension there. So
41:22 Tom Holland? as a Claudian, you know, he's inherited this assumption that it's his role to serve the Republic, to win glory for himself, for his family, for his, his city, in the traditional manner by, you know, organising grain and conquering barbarians and all that kind of thing. But simultaneously, as Augustus is dependent, he is expected to show, you know, gratitude and submission to the very man who has put the Republic in his shadow, who has established basically a monarchy. And I think it's not surprising that this seems to have generated a degree of stress. And all the more so because in Augustus's
42:05 Tom Holland? household, he is obliged to play second fiddle to people who are much younger and less accomplished than him, but who are being elevated simply because they have the blood of Augustus in their veins. And it's incredibly humiliating for him. But more than that, I think there is a kind of ideological stress because he's torn between the sense of loyalty he feels towards his city and his class, which is, these are republican dynasties, they're hostile by nature to monarchy. It is the Roman sense that a son should be dutiful towards his father, so he should show respect to Augustus. And I think it's not surprising that Suetonius reports that Tiberius really hated his mother, Livia, as well he might have done, because it's basically Livia who's put him in this bind.
42:49 Dominic Sandbrook? So that idea that you get from Suetonius, that Tiberius is a man with two faces, that there's the good Tiberius and the bad Tiberius, that's not then psychologically implausible, is it? If he's a man torn between two very different roles that he feels from birth he has been appointed to play. One of them is the Claudian, the heir to the Republic, and the other is the heir to Augustus, who's basically going to inherit this autocracy. So it would make sense then that he's somebody who is a very complicated, torn, possibly quite unhappy man.
43:21 Tom Holland? I would go so far as to say, I am sure that that's what's going on with him. And what makes it worse is that, in a sense, under Augustus, the better things get for him, the worse they become. So in AD 4, when he, after Gaius Nusius are both dead, and Augustus adopts him as his son, he's now the heir to the rule of the world. He's going to succeed Augustus as Caesar. But this is a kind of real nightmare of your principled opponent of monarchy. I mean, it's a real problem. But also, there's a kind of deep element of humiliation, even in being appointed as heir to the rule of the world, because he is no longer a Claudian. That side of him has now been erased. He's a Julian.
44:04 Tom Holland? And historians call the dynasty of Augustus the Julio- Claudians. There are no Julio- Claudians. You're either a Julian or a Claudian. And Tiberius, by becoming a Julian, has ceased to be a Claudian. And what's even worse is that, as Augustus's adopted son, his status is effectively reduced to that of a child. And Suetonius spells out exactly what this means for Tiberius, who by this point, he's a very seasoned general administrator, he's been the head of his own family. And Suetonius writes, from that point on, so after his adoption by Augustus, "He no longer acted as the head of a family, nor held on to any of the rights that he had forfeited as a result of his adoption.
44:47 Tom Holland? For he neither gave out donatives nor granted slaves their freedom, nor could he receive inheritances or legacies, except by adding them to his personal allowance, which technically belonged to his father." So that's Augustus.
44:58 Dominic Sandbrook? So to give a modern analogy, which will appeal to our American listeners, it's a little bit like very, very senior American politicians who accept the vice presidency. And are therefore reduced to just sort of hanging around in the president's shadow. But it's that, but magnified to an extraordinary degree, that the Romans take that very seriously, don't they, the idea of father and son? And if he's been reduced to the level of Augustus's son and heir, he's not nothing, but he's a pale shadow of what he once was.
45:24 Tom Holland? I mean, I suppose I would say the contrast with the vice president is that, what is it? It's worth a bucket of spit, you don't do anything. Tiberius is doing, I mean, he's going off and he's, this is the period when he's going off and stabilising the frontiers and defeating the Germans and the Pannonians and things like that. So he's doing things. It's just that his legal status is very, very humiliating to a proud man.
45:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
45:43 Tom Holland? Who has always cherished his, you know, his status as a Claudian.
45:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
45:48 Tom Holland? Then in AD 14, he becomes emperor in succession to Augustus. And formally, you know, there is no title of emperor. It's still a work in progress. Officially, you know, he is hailed as princeps, which means first man. And traditionally, under the Republic, this hadn't been a formal title, not one held as an office, but it was a title that was kind of awarded by the man who is acknowledged by his peers in the Senate, best to have served the Republic.
46:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
46:16 Tom Holland? So Pompey had been called princeps, for instance. I think for Tiberius, he must have been nagged by the sense that had it not been for his succession to Augustus, you know, he might have inherited this title of princeps, not by virtue of succession, but by virtue of acclamation.
46:34 Dominic Sandbrook? He might have earned it rather than just been given it.
46:36 Tom Holland? Exactly. And again, you can see that that would make him feel kind of very conflicted, very ambivalent about his, you know, the status that he now has as princeps, as ruler of the world. And I think that the key to understanding the tragedy of his rule and why he seems such an unhappy figure is that essentially he's trying to square ruling as a monarch with his ancestral respect for the traditions of the Republic.
47:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
47:04 Tom Holland? And he demonstrates that this simply can't be done. I suspect that part of what is going on with the narratives of his bad behaviour is that it's a reflection of the fact that Tiberius does. Come to feel contempt for his fellow citizens, that in a sense, the frustration he feels at his own role comes to be vented on his own family, on the senate, on the people. So just to look at them in turn. Agrippina, Nero, Druusus, so that's the granddaughter of Augustus, the great grandsons of Augustus. You know, these are not Tiberius's blood relatives. They are the descendants of Augustus and they have their status by virtue of that.
47:45 Tom Holland? And, you know, that I imagine would not have encouraged Tiberius to feel any great fondness for them. And although they're arrested before Sir Janus's attempted coup, they are eliminated after it. And it's understandable that Tiberius would have felt jittery in the wake of the attempt to overthrow him. And he would have known that if people are going to try and overthrow him, then it's the bloodline of the Caesars, of Augustus, who are the obvious threat to him. And I suspect that that is why he has them eliminated. And then the senate, Suetonius says, Tiberius has shown the senate immense respect. He's behaved incredibly well to it. And it's only really kind of towards the end of his rule
48:28 Tom Holland? that things start to get a bit bad. But two things to say about that. The first is that actually, when you, when you kind of tot up the stats, there are only fifty-two people who are accused of treason, maestas, the Romans called it, an offence against the majesty of the emperor. Half of these get off. So it's basically twenty-five, twenty-six people.
48:51 Dominic Sandbrook? By the standards of most rulers in history, not tyrants, but most rulers of any kind, that's a pretty meagre death toll. I mean, that's hardly the work of a sort of blood crazed maniac, is it?
49:03 Tom Holland? Yeah, I mean, it's not Stalin, it's not Hitler.
49:05 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, Stalin would go through more than that in a day.
49:07 Tom Holland? And I think that, less so with Tacitus, but definitely with Suetonius, there's a sense he doesn't really understand the power politics of what's been going on. He doesn't understand perhaps the challenges that Tiberius faced on Capri with maintaining his, his position in Rome. You know, no one has ever tried to do it. And Suetonius gives this ludicrous story that treason. I'll start when a man is denounced for having removed the head of Augustus from a statue and replaced it with the head of someone else. And Seutonius writes that thereafter it became a capital crime to be to slave or even to change one's clothes near a statue of Augustus to carry a ring or coin with his image on it into a latrine or a brothel, which is, I mean, clearly mad.
49:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
49:47 Tom Holland? And Tacitus, actually, in his account explicitly says that this is not the case. You know, it didn't happen like that.
49:52 Dominic Sandbrook? You could put your coat on near a statue of Augustus, no one would cut your head off.
49:56 Tom Holland? Exactly. You could go and have a pee with one of his coins in your purse and you're not going to be arrested.
50:01 Dominic Sandbrook? And as for the people, so he does despise the people, doesn't he? But that's the norm for a Roman patrician, right?
50:06 Tom Holland? That's yes.
50:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Goes to the territory. Of course, you're going to look down on the people. That's completely natural and normal.
50:10 Tom Holland? We've talked about this before many times on the on the podcast, but essentially, politics in the Republic is about vibe rather than policy. It's about whether you are a conservative, a traditionalist, or whether you are a populist, a populist, if you like, but they're all kind of, you know, they're all members of the aristocracy. The Tiberius is not a populist, and in that he's a contrast to Augustus. Augustus is a great one, you know, he's endlessly putting on gladiator shows and slapping people on the back and
50:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
50:40 Tom Holland? letting everyone know that he enjoys the pleasures of the people.
50:43 Dominic Sandbrook? He's Nigel Farage.
50:44 Tom Holland? Yeah, Tiberius is not that. He's above all that. He kind of despises those kind of things. He's not having anything to do with it.
50:51 Dominic Sandbrook? He's Rory Stewart. He's Rory Stewart, Tom.
50:54 Tom Holland? I think he's a sterner, more implacable figure than Rory.
50:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
51:00 Tom Holland? But Tiberius is not, you know, he kind of despises people who flock to gladiator shows. He's not interested in that. And instead, he sees it as his duty to conserve the resources of the state, build the coffers of the treasury. And this in turn, of course, means that he doesn't need to impose swingeing taxes on the provinces. And that, of course, helps to explain why he's so popular in places like Alexandria. So I think that he eliminates members of his own adoptive family in a very brutal manner. He does have senators put to death on charges of treason. But I don't think that by the standards of many other Roman emperors, let alone kind of modern dictators, he is in any way a tyrant.
51:43 Tom Holland? He is an old school Roman aristocrat. He is flinty, he's stern, he's imperious. So that's what gives him this kind of severe public reputation. He's been raised with the traditional values and aspirations of his class.
51:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
51:59 Tom Holland? And although that had caused him great agony to also simultaneously be part of the family of an autocrat, he had sought to do his duty to the best of his abilities and those abilities are considerable.
52:11 Dominic Sandbrook? And to be fair, Tom, his reign is 23 years long and it is a reign of great stability, prosperity and above all, peace. Think about all the civil wars, you know, the chaos on the frontiers that is to come in Roman history. Yeah, Tiberius's reign is a kind of oasis of stability compared with what before and after.
52:31 Tom Holland? I would say it's unprecedented because even under Augustus, Augustus had spent much of his reign conquering vast swathes of territory, you know, the great disasters of the Pannonian revolt, the massacre of Varus's legions. There's nothing like that under Tiberius. And I would say that never before in history had there been such a period of freedom from war across such a vast expanse of territory. And that in that sense, Tiberius's rule absolutely is an extraordinary achievement. And it's not surprising, again, that people in Alexandria like Philo, who can recognise this, say, you know, this guy was amazing.
53:07 Dominic Sandbrook? How then do we reconcile that with the attacking people with fish, throwing them off the cliffs, interfering with children, all of this stuff that is so shocking and horrible?
53:18 Tom Holland? So the fisherman, this is clearly a kind of folkloric tale. The idea of, you know, someone who cries out, oh, thank goodness, I didn't tell them about the lobster or about the, you know, the prickly pear or whatever. It's a story that gets recycled and recycled across the globe throughout time. And there's a brilliant new book by Edward Champigny, who wrote a wonderful book about Nero that I've often praised. This book's just come out, Tiberius and His Age: Myth, Sex, Luxury and Power. And I've been waiting for it to come out for years because I read some of Champigny's chapters on Tiberius years ago and they're absolutely brilliant. And in this book, he points out that this story of the fisherman, it's not the only time.
54:03 Tom Holland? That Tiberius features in a kind of folkloric story in a way that makes him seem like a figure of myth, rather than a kind of real life historical emperor. And Champin lists many of the strange stories that are told about Tiberius. So there's kind of very eerie story that Plutarch, the great Greek biographer, reports that a ship is sailing past an island in Greece, and here's this eerie, mysterious voice crying out, "The great god Pan is dead." Likewise, there are reports of a merman being discovered in a cave of the coast of Spain. And both of these wonders are reported to Tiberius, and he sets up panels to investigate what's going on. He is cast in stories where he explains his policies by means of fables.
54:49 Tom Holland? So that kind of, "I want my governor to shear my sheep, not kill them." Tiberius is the archetype of a good ruler. And again and again, he is the star of what might almost be called parables, kind of stories that are told to illustrate timeless truths. And again, this is idea that Tiberius is being extracted from his own age and serving almost as the model of a good emperor, a wise king.
55:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
55:17 Tom Holland? And in fact, Champin calls him Tiberius the Wise, and describes him as a figure unique in ancient folklore, a man who is repeatedly appearing in these kind of stories, but who had actually existed.
55:30 Dominic Sandbrook? But hold on, how do you reconcile that then with the terrible behaviour on? Because that seems to run completely counter to the tradition that he's an absolute depraved monster.
55:39 Tom Holland? It kind of does, but in both cases, whether Tiberius is being cast as a monster or as the model of a sage, in fact, often a prospero, a magician on an island. Because this is another theme, you know, Philei mentions it, there is no one wiser than Tiberius, but also that he can penetrate to the mysteries that other people can't see.
56:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
56:02 Tom Holland? And in all of those, you know, both the negative reports and the much more positive reports, Tiberius is cast as a man of absolutely exceptional learning. With an ability to fathom dimensions of the supernatural in a way that no one else can. So just as you have, Tiberius is the guy to work out whether Pan is dead, or what this merman is, or you know, all this kind of stuff. So likewise, in Suetonius's account of all his orgies and depravities, there's a sense that Tiberius is making play with mythology. So Suetonius writes, "Tiberius set up shrines to Venus in woods and groves across Capri,
56:42 Tom Holland? where young boys dressed as pan and girls dressed as nymphs would solicit sex outside caves and grottos." And of course, rapes, fantastical copulations, bestiality, these are rife in the tales that are told of the gods in Greek mythology. And Suetonius is implying that this is what Tiberius is doing, that he's restaging them for his own kind of intellectual titillation, as well as his erotic titillation.
57:08 Dominic Sandbrook? So actually, what these stories are therefore, they're almost, maybe this is too simplistic, but they're part of a literary formula that is establishing Tiberius as somebody who is, I was about to say, he's not exactly more than human, but he is maybe a tiny, a degree more than human. He is just, he is exceptional. He has that very kind of unsettling sense of the divine about him, because of course, he's part of the imperial family.
57:31 Tom Holland? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so Champint says that, you know, it's a bit like reading a life of an American president, and then suddenly this American president is revealing that Elvis had actually lived, or that the aliens at Roswell, you know, he kind of puts them on public television. It's the intersection between, you know, the day to day life of a politician who sorts out grain supplies and so on, with all kinds of mad stuff about pan, or erotic floor shows or whatever. And whether it's positive or negative, it's casting Tiberius as the interface between the day to day and the weird, between the mortal and the divine, between the affairs of politics, and
58:14 Tom Holland? Kind of dimensions of literature and mythology. I mean, the extent to which this reflects the historical Tiberius, I think, is now impossible to know. But clearly, there were qualities within Tiberius's rule and his character that made people feel he was an exceptional person, whether for bad or for good. And that's why, I think, Suetonius struggles with him. So, you know, it's a failure as a biography, but as a work of mythologisation, it's incredible and very, very influential. And it's Tiberius's misfortune that Suetonius should have emphasised the negative spin rather than the positive one, because I think there is clearly a very positive tradition
58:54 Tom Holland? as well, in which Tiberius is viewed as having been the wisest of all rulers, not just in Rome, but across all of history.
59:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Correctly, that's a big claim. So, Tiberius died on the 16th of March, 37, and he was 77 years old. And he was succeeded by that little boy that we talked about earlier, who he had spared, the brother of Nero and Druusus, who was Gaius, who was better known by the nickname Little Boots, Caligula. And Caligula, I mean, if you think Tiberius is a good character, my word, we're going to have some fun with Caligula. And the good news for members of the Rest is History Club, Tom, our very own Praetorian Guard, is that they can listen to that episode on Caligula right away. If you want to join the Rest is History Club, it is of course at thereistishistory.com. But if you don't, we will be back on Monday with, well, was he the most blood-crazed, depraved
59:47 Dominic Sandbrook? maniac in ancient history? Or is the reality more complicated? I have a terrible feeling that Tom is going to say it's a little bit more complicated, but we will find out on Monday.
59:57 Tom Holland? Time will tell.
59:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, time will tell. See you then. Bye bye.
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