Tiberius Read Online Free Page B

they knew it.
    Augustus had won the world.
    IV
    Tiberius was then thirteen years old. He was too young to fight, but not too young to participate in the triumph of his mother's husband, Augustus.
    A Roman triumph was a gorgeous spectacle. Our ticker-tape parade up Broadway is only a pale shadow. The Roman who won a great victory, and thereby received the honor of a triumph, had not only the parade and the adoring mob but feasts and entertainments, titles to add to his name, privileges such as the right to award decorations to others. The triumphing Roman was expected to preside at games, where some of the prisoners he brought home with him would be permitted to kill each other off as gladiators, where wild animals and athletes would entertain the mobs. The games were an expensive honor, because someone had to pay for them, usually the one who owned the triumph; but any victory worth a triumph was sure to produce a great deal of loot, most of which stuck to the fingers of the general.
    Augustus had not one victory to celebrate but three— Illyricum, Acnum, Egypt—a triple triumph, and he was careful not to dampen the pleasure of the viewers by allowing any hint to appear that all of those victories had been over armies which were in the main Roman. Lacking th e living Cleopatra, Augustus had a wax image of her made, complete with a wax snake to show how she died, and paraded it in a cart, while his agents went through the crowd to remind them that if Cleopatra had won, the gods forfend, they would all be Egyptians now.
    Augustus himself rode in a stately chariot, horse-drawn. His nephew, young Marcellus, rode on the left-hand trace horse of the team; thirteen-year-old Tiberius rode the right.
    Already the young Tiberius was beginning to show signs of character. He was no longer a baby; if he was still partly a child, he was also partly a man, and some of the traits that marked him all his life were beginning to take form.
    The picture that comes down to us of the teen-age Tiberius is that of a shy youth—-sometimes they called him a sullen one. Certainly he could be obstinate and difficult when he chose; his rhetoric teacher, Theodoras the Gadarene, called him "mud, kneaded with blood." He was not a great speaker, and that must have disappointed Theodorus—particularly after his promising start at the age of nine, when he preached his father's funeral oration. Tiberius kept to himself, and probably he felt unloved. Probably he was. Certainly his mother's husband offered him no affection.
    His mother Livia, on the other hand, surely loved him. Livia was the very model of a Roman matron. After the scandal of her marriage to Augustus, she lived an exemplary life. It was too bad that she never gave Augustus a son of his own—the two she bore Tiberius Claudius Nero were the last she produced—but Augustus did already have one child, after all. Unfortunately it was a girl, Julia, but even girls could carry on a blood line.
    Livia was the co-ruler of a mighty empire, but she lived more modestly than the wife of many a senator. The matrons of old Rome took a Quakerish pride in producing the essentials of their housekeeping themselves, even the cloth they wore on their backs; and until the day he died, the Emperor Augustus never wore a garment that had not been loomed in his own home, sometimes by the hands of Livia herself. Livia had six hundred personal servants; it must not be thought that she struggled in penury. She had slaves who did nothing but fold her clothes, and others who did nothing but put them away. Her favorite dog had a slave governess. Livia had a slave cosmetician whose specialty was ears, and several to work on her hair; she had jewelers and perfumers, to say nothing of slaves to help her dress and undress, to write down her letters for her and to read to her the letters that came from outside.
    Six hundred slaves? She lived modestly? But it is true. She ate frugally. She worked hard. She raised her