Reconstruction Of The Villa Jovis On Capri, viewed from the north-east. According to Tacitus, Tiki owned twelve villas on the island; the so-called Villa Jovis, perched on the cliffs
of the eastern promontory, over 1000 feet (334 m) above sea-level, is the best preserved. The remote situation suited Tiberius's need for security and privacy and led to the growth of
scurrilous reports of his activities there.
Tiberius had had an outstandingly successful military and administrative career from his early twenties, in the East, Germany, and the Balkans, interrupted only during the years of
his retirement. He thus came to the task of government in his mid-fifties with excellent and unrivalled credentials. But his character was dour and introspective, poisoned by unhappy
private experience, with more than a touch of melancholia and insecurity. Above all, he lacked the consummate political adroitness of Augustus, his self-confidence and prestige as
the restorer of peace and security to a world shattered by civil war, his genial tact which had moved him to ask on his death-bed 'if everybody had enjoyed the play'. Men could never
be quite sure what was going on in Tiberius' mind. This led to the view, particularly prevalent in Tacitus' Annals (below, p. 648), that he was a hypocrite, a master of dissimulation, a
view sometimes ludicrous in its strained invention or innuendo. In fact, the true dissimulation stemmed not from the man, but from the system which he inherited, the product of the
great illusionist Augustus; it was only underlined by his successor's maladroitness. Criticism, flinching from finding fatal flaws in the system itself, or seeing no practical alternative
to it, turned instead on the failings of individual emperors once they were safely dead and adulation must be transferred to the new from the old master.
Tacitus gave grudgingly good marks to the early years of Tiberius' rule; but the curse of premature mortality fell heavy on him as it had on Augustus, and by A.D. 23 first his adopted
son Germanicus and then his true son Drusus were in their graves, leaving him with no younger shoulders to lean on as he approached old age. He came to rely heavily on his
praetorian prefect L. Aelius Sejanus, especially after his withdrawal from Rome in 26. Sejanus used his chance and the vague, but deadly, charge of treason (maiestas) to pick off
enemies and rivals, mostly adherents of Germanicus' strong-minded and ambitious widow Agrippina, sister of the dead Gaius and Lucius Caesar and grand-daughter of Augustus
himself: she and the sons whom she fought to protect and advance were deported or imprisoned. Sejanus himself aspired to the hand of Claudia Livilla, Germanicus' sister and widow
of Tiberius' son Drusus, in the hope no doubt of ruling as regent and guardian of Drusus' son Tiberius Gemellus (born A.D. 19) once the boy's grandfather was gone. Tiberius was too
wary to allow that; but by A.D. 31 Sejanus had reached the consulship and had thoughts of the tribunician power, which Drusus had held for the year before his death. With the
princeps now in his seventies and no 'heir apparent' in sight, more and more men must have looked to his great minister as the star to steer by. Then came swift and utter ruin:
Antonia, the widow of Tiberius' brother Drusus, penetrated the fence which Sejanus had woven around the Emperor on his remote island retreat and alerted him to much of which he
had been ignorant; Sejanus was out-guiled, arrested, and executed, and there folio-wed a blood-bath of his supporters and associates, including his children.
The final years were years of gloom, intrigue, and uncertainty, over which loomed the cynical and suspicious shadow of a lonely old man encompassed by astrologers (and, so
scabrous gossip would have it, the instruments of nameless sexual perversions) on the island of Capri. If we shift our sights from Rome, it is true, the Empire seems to have been well
governed, prosperous, and (apart from a quickly suppressed revolt in Gaul occasioned by the greed of Roman financiers) secure; the Treasury was healthy, and Italy flourishing. But
that something went wrong under Tiberius there is no doubt. The Augustan pattern was marred, above all, by Tiberius' neglect or refusal to imitate his predecessor in persisting in the
search for a tried and trusted successor who could be trained for empire and give a secure sense of continuity and direction to men with longer horizons than the failing princeps. To
have died leaving it virtually certain that Gaius must succeed is the blackest of all indictments, whether we seek an explanation in embittered cynicism, suspicious insecurity, or a
lingering and misjudged 'constitutionalism' which saw it as the Senate's part to decide what must follow.
Gaius (Caligula)
Gaius was the son of Germanicus, and the great-grandson of both Augustus and Mark Antony: his nickname 'Caligula' he owed to the little soldiers' boots he wore as a child with his
parents in the cantonments of the Rhine, 'Bootikins', an ironically innocent name. Just under twenty-five on his accession in A.D. 37, he lost little time in making away with the
young Tiberius Gemellus, voiding the will in which Tiberius had named Gemellus as his coheir, and executing Macro, Sejanus' supplanter as praetorian prefect, who had been
prompt in supporting Gaius' own accession. His brief reign has an air of melodramatic unreality: mental and emotional instability, vicious cruelty, incest, ridiculous indecision and
waywardness as exemplified in the farce of his projected invasion of Britain, fantasies of divinity which inter alia bred unrest among the Jews. Within less than four years it was all
over, and he and his fourth wife and his young daughter all lay dead in his palace. The murder was not part of a plan to seize power for a successor, and the Senate seemed to have a
fleeting chance to reassert its authority. 'But while they deliberated, the praetorian guards had resolved.' In January 41 Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus, Gaius' uncle and the
brother of Germanicus, became the penultimate Julio-Claudian Emperor.
Claudius