CHAP. LIV.

CNÆUS PISO.

445

not be moved to exhibit anger or suspicion. He protested that, much as he lamented the death of one so near to him, yet princes as well as private citizens must acquiesce in the common lot of hu manity. But Piso, on the death of his superior, had audaciously seized on the position thereby vacated, and had made himself fair ly amenable to legal process. He was required to return to Rome and justify himself before the Senate; and when, after the charges had been made against him, he was called upon for his defence, he retired to his closet, and was there found with his throat

U.C. 773.

cut, and his bloody sword beside him. The rumor easily A.D. 20. arose that Tiberius had caused him to be assassinated, to silence any testimony against himself. There seems, however, no reason to doubt that he fell by his own hand.

The death of Piso opens to us a new page in Roman history on which it will be well to make some general remarks. From this time forth we shall meet with a long succession of nobles whose deaths must be ascribed more or less directly to the antagonism in which their order stood to the imperial authority accepted by the Roman people. Cnæus Piso was a member of the Calpurnian gens, which claimed as ancient a descent as any of the noblest families of Rome, and, at least in the last century of the republic, had repeatedly filled the highest magistracies. The surname of Piso was common to more than one branch of this noble house, and the prænomen Cnæus had descended to the personage now before us from a father who had fought through the wars of Cæsar and Pompeius, had shared the disasters of Cassius and Brutus, who, though pardoned by Octavius, had disdained to solicit employment under the new institutions. Only when spontaneously offered him had he deigned to accept the consulship. Cnæus Piso, the son, was reputed a proud man among the proudest of circles-the magnates of the expiring free state and the rising empire; a class whose intense self-assertion was inflamed by family names, family rites and images. The decline of their number after the civil wars had imparted still greater concentration to this feeling; and, claiming complete equality among themselves, they hesitated to acknowledge a superior even in the emperor. To an Æmilius, a Calpurnius, a Lepidus, or a Piso the son of an Octavius was still no more than a plebeian imperator, raised to power by the breath of the commonalty. His pretensions to legitimate right they despised and repudiated. They had marked perhaps with peculiar jealousy the alliance of a plebeian Octavius with one of their own houses, the Claudian, the nobility of which it was impossible to gainsay; but this served only to convert their disdain into antagonism and hatred. Each of them conceived that he had as good or better right to rule than the upstart whom fortune had placed in the ascendant.

Piso deemed himself at least the natural equal of Tiberius; and his consort Plancina, herself of similar birth and pretensions to his own, fortified his pride and stimulated his ambition. Piso believed himself appointed to be a check upon Germanicus, and Plancina may have been instructed by Livia, with whom she was intimate, to play the rival to his consort Agrippina. No doubt the political jealousies of the men were aggravated by the domestic jealousies which reigned among the women in the palace.

B.C. 100.

Against the murmurs and intrigues of the class of discontented nobles the emperors found it necessary to defend themselves by special means of repression. Under their administration the law of Majesty was the legal protection thrown around the person of the chief of the state. The first enactment, indeed, which received this title, half a century before the foundation of the empire, was actually devised as a special security for the tribunate. The crime of Majesty was first specified by the demagogue Saturninus, in the year 654, to guard or exalt the dignity of the champion of the plebs. An attempt against the prerogatives of this popular officer was declared to be an assault on the dignity of the commonwealth itself; to detract from the majesty of the tribune was regarded as constructive treason against the state. It became the object of the oligarch Sulla to baffle this movement, and to restrict the crime of Majesty more closely to hostile efforts against the commonwealth itself; and Cæsar, though generally opposed to the principles of the Sullan legislation, took no step, apparently, to reverse this magnanimous policy. Augustus, indeed, extended the law of his predecessor, and included in his definition of the crime the publication of pasquinades against the emperor, as a mode of bringing the person of the ruler into contempt. But Augustus was anxious for the most part to put off the moment when the people should regard the law of treason merely as a device for the ruler's security. Tiberius felt no such confidence in himself, and he was justified, as we have seen, in having still less confidence in his subjects. Under this ruler accordingly the person of the emperor begins to be the great subject of the law of treason. Circumstances had changed; popular opinion had become fatally modified. The emperor is now in the world what the gods are in Olympus-a being to be reverenced and feared simply for himself, without regard to his attributes or the qualities he may be supposed to embody. Attempts on his life become heinous crimes, only to be compared with sacrilege against the blessed divinities. Not only such overt acts, however, but any conduct or language which could be construed into the compassing of his death, became involved in the crime and penalties of treason. Rome was full of soothsayers or magicians, who

CHAP. LIV.

THE LAW OF TREASON.

447

To

pretended to communicate a knowledge of future events. "inquire into the years" of the emperor was now reputed treasonable: the man who sought to ascertain beforehand the day of the emperor's death must have some illicit interest in the event; he must cherish the hopes of a traitor in his heart. Not pasquinades and injurious publications only, but abusive language fell under the same definition. Even from the early days of the Tiberian principate cases continually occurred in which the Roman nobles, both men and women, were made amenable to this comprehensive law, which was gradually extended to embrace any sort of act which could be construed to imply disregard for the sacred majesty of Cæsar and of those most closely connected with him.

A law so sweeping and indefinite, and commonly enforced with excessive severity, threw a cloud of insecurity over all life in the higher classes. It created and encouraged the system of delation, which became a marked feature of the imperial polity. Spies and informers swarmed throughout the Forum, the Curia, and the houses of the nobility. The law awarded them a large share in the confiscated fortunes of the victims they brought to justice. Not only did men of the best families degrade themselves by adopting the trade of the "delator," they indemnified themselves for the silence which the empire imposed upon political debate by thrusting themselves into the law courts and denouncing with all the artifices of rhetoric the men they selected for their accusations. The prosecution of such charges became the readiest road to fame, to emoluments, and to honors. Tiberius appreciated the service these parasites rendered him, and did not fail to favor and encourage even while he sometimes affected to repress them. It was the great secret of his statecraft, as long as he deigned to keep terms with law and justice, to set the nobles against one another as spies and prosecutors. Thus, and only thus, he was enabled, at least for some years, to throw a decent veil of probity and moderation over the studied cruelty with which he broke down the independence of the class he feared and hated.

CHAPTER LV.

Tiberius brings forward his son Drusus.-Sejanus rises in his favor, removes Drusus by poison, and aspires to the hand of his widow, Livilla.-Induces Tiberius to withdraw to Capreæ, and intrigues against Agrippina.—Death of Livia, A.D. 29.-Banishment of Agrippina.-Confinement of her son Drusus.-Sejanus appointed consul for five years. He begins to lose favor with Tiberius, and is craftily overthrown.-His death, and proscription of his family and friends.—Tiberius approaches Rome, but returns.-His cruelty and revolting licentiousness.--Insanity imputed to the blood of the Claudii.-Despair of the noble Romans.-Suicide of Cocceius Nerva and Arruntius.-Death of the younger Drusus.-Remaining princes of the imperial family, Tiberius Claudius, Caius, and Tiberius Gemellus. -Last days and death of the emperor Tiberius.-His personal and political character. --General prosperity of the empire under his government. (A.D. 20-37.)

THE death of Germanicus constituted a crisis in the career of Tiberius. The emperor had done good service to the state, both in his military and his civil capacity, while he served under the command of Augustus; but neither as a captain nor as a statesman had he exhibited ability for supreme rule. He suffered under serious defects of temper; he was reserved, morose, shy, distrustful of himself and others, and jealous of the qualities which he was conscious that he most wanted himself. He was jealous, no doubt, of the gallant Germanicus, and of the high favor in which he was held by the Roman people. After that prince's decease he was hardly less jealous of the favor in which they held his widow Agrippina, who brought his ashes to Rome and deposited them in the mausoleum of Augustus, surrounded by the numerous offspring of a happy marriage. At the same time the process of Piso revealed to him the smothered discontent of his nobles, while the ardor of the informers and the accusers discovered the means by which it might be systematically baffled. His own son Drusus still remained to him as a support and a consolation; but he does not seem to have regarded the youth in either of these lights. Drusus had been employed in military affairs without intermission, and his conduct, if in no respect brilliant, had not been destitute of promise. The Romans, indeed, did not lavish upon him the love they had vainly devoted to Germanicus. They were rather inclined to detract from such merits as he had, and to ascribe to him vices which possibly he had not; but, with the view we must take of the character of Tiberius, the indisposition of the people

CHAP. LV.

ELEVATION OF SEJANUS.

449

towards him could hardly have injured him in his father's favor. Tiberius had now recalled him to Rome, and brought him forward in civil employments, bestowing upon him the consulship, and finally the tribunician power, by which he virtually associated him in the empire with himself. But it was not on Drusus that he really leaned for support. On the contrary, his jealous temper impelled him to thwart and check his natural supporter by the intervention of a more intimate though less avowed favorite. The man on whom the emperor relied was now Ælius Sejanus, a courtier of no high distinction in birth, accomplishments, or abilities, but who was rather recommended to him by this very want of distinction. Sejanus was, however, in command of the prætorian bands, the garrison of the city and the body-guard of the prince, and was thereby constituted not only the protector of his person, but the instrument of his most violent actions.

Sejanus conceived the daring ambition of securing to himself the reversion of the imperial power. It was evident that henceforth the government would descend in the family of the reigning Cæsar, and he determined to destroy the family, and leave it open to the Cæsar to make an independent appointment. The nearest in the order of succession was the young Drusus. Sejanus found means of removing him by poison; for of all the reported poisonings which successively occurred in the imperial house, this was one of which the least question seems to have been entertained. Sejanus, we are assured, had debauched Livilla, a sister of Germanicus, the wife of Drusus; he had divorced his own consort, Apicata, and had promised marriage to his paramour on the death of her husband. He seems to have hoped to rise in this way into the line of the succession, and there is reason to surmise that Tiberius had given some countenance to his aspirations; but the emperor shrank from finally consenting to the union, and the career of Sejanus received a check which he might in prudence have profited by. But though baffled in this direction he promptly set to work in another. He exerted all his influence to induce his master to withdraw from the vexations of public life at Rome and settle himself in the voluptuous retreat of Capreæ, while he committed to his minister the general management of affairs. At the same time he inspired him with constant dread of Agrippina, the widow of Germanicus, and of the intrigues he imputed to her and her rising family. Agrippina, on her part, lived in constant icar of Tiberius; nor did her vehement spirit suffer her to conceal it. On one occasion she besought his permission to a second marriage, in order, as she avowed, to secure herself a protector; on another she refused some viands offered her at his own table by his own hand, as if apprehensive of poison.