A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

there were holidays on 117 days of the year. And with so much money in circulation, upper-class
Romans devoted themselves to entertainment, overeating and sex. Augustus tried to remedy the
situation with laws - he even passed a law that regulated how much wine a man could drink with
his meals - but they were unenforceable. When he finally died, in 14 A.D., Augustus had brought
Rome peace and prosperity, but there was nothing he could do about its now incorrigible
criminality.
His successor, Tiberius, Livia’s son by her first husband, was a sour, withdrawn, introverted man
who was fifty-six when he became emperor. In his early manhood he showed himself to be a brave
soldier. He was married to Vipsania, with whom he was deeply in love, when his step-sister Julia
(Augustus’s daughter) fell in love with him; Augustus ordered him to divorce his wife and marry
Julia - such marital rearrangements being common among the Roman aristocracy, where marriage
was made to seal political bonds. Tiberius did as he was told - he had no choice - but he never
reconciled himself to Julia, whose sexual demands exhausted him. In his mid-thirties, he
voluntarily exiled himself to the island of Rhodes - or, more probably, was exiled by Augustus at
Julia’s instigation - and spent seven years there. Restored to favour, he again performed excellently
as a soldier, suppressing a revolt in Illyria; his obsessive strictness made him disliked by his
soldiers, but he is quoted as saying: ‘Let them hate me so long as they obey me.’ Julia had
presented Augustus with three grandsons, who might have been regarded as having greater claims
to the imperial crown than Tiberius; but two of them died under mysterious circumstances -
probably murdered by Livia - and the third was murdered immediately after Augustus’s death. So
in 14 A.D. Tiberius became ‘Princeps’, the first man in Rome.
As emperor he proved to be as strict a disciplinarian as he had been when a general; and made a
determined attempt to improve the morals of Rome by making laws against adultery. Suetonius
offers us a glimpse of the morality of the period when he says: ‘When one Roman knight had sworn
that he would never divorce his wife whatever she did, but found her in bed with his son, Tiberius
absolved him from his oath. Married women of good family were beginning to ply openly as
prostitutes... All such offenders were now exiled...’ He made himself unpopular with the mob by
cutting down on their ‘bread and circuses’. Suetonius is convinced that Tiberius’s strictness was
disguised sadism - as, for example, when he ordered all the witnesses in some obscure law case to
be tortured to try to clarify the evidence.
For the first dozen years of his reign, Tiberius followed conscientiously in the footsteps of
Augustus, and his occasional savageries were excused as military severity. Then his most trusted
adviser, Sejanus - prefect of the guard - persuaded him to move away from Rome to Capri, pointing
out that Tiberius was so much disliked in Rome that his presence there did no good. (In fact,
Sejanus was hoping to succeed Tiberius as emperor.) There, Tiberius seems to have thrown off all
restraint and to have devoted himself to various sexual perversions he had developed in his younger
days. Suetonius describes with relish the rooms furnished with indecent paintings and statues, in
which Tiberius took his pleasure both with boys and girls. He alleges that Tiberius trained little
boys to chase him when he went swimming and to nibble his penis, and that he had bands of young
men and women trained in ‘unnatural practices’. ‘The story goes that once, while sacrificing, he
took an erotic fancy to the acolyte who was carrying the incense casket and could hardly wait for
the ceremony to end before hurrying him and his brother, the sacred trumpeter, out of the temple
and indecently assaulting them both. When they protested at this dastardly crime he had their legs
broken.’