Tiberius Caesar

42 BC – 37 · Generation III · Roman emperor (r. AD 14–37) · Julio-Claudian

Tiberius Claudius Nero was born in Rome on 16 November 42 BC to Tiberius Claudius Nero and Livia Drusilla, both of the ancient patrician Claudian family. His father had sided against Octavian in the civil wars, and the infant spent his first years as a fugitive in Sicily and Greece until an amnesty allowed the family home. In 39 BC Livia was divorced from her husband and married Octavian, the future Augustus, which made Tiberius the stepson of the man who would rule the Roman world. At nine he gave the eulogy at his father’s funeral, and from then on he and his younger brother, Drusus, were brought up in Augustus’s household.

His rise was swift. He was quaestor before he was twenty, and in 20 BC, sent east by Augustus, he presided as the Parthians handed back the legionary standards lost by Crassus and Antony. He fought Alpine tribes alongside his brother, was consul in 13 BC, and between 12 and 6 BC led successful campaigns in Pannonia and Germany, where his care for his soldiers made him popular with them. His private life was happy too. In about 19 BC he had married Vipsania Agrippina, daughter of Augustus’s right-hand man Agrippa, and she bore him a son, Drusus.

Agrippa’s death in 12 BC ended that happiness. Augustus made Tiberius divorce Vipsania and marry Agrippa’s widow, his own daughter Julia. The marriage soon turned sour and left no surviving child. When Tiberius later caught sight of Vipsania by chance, he trailed after her weeping, and Augustus saw to it that they did not meet again. In 9 BC his brother Drusus died on campaign in Germany, and Tiberius accompanied the body back to Rome on foot. Then, in 6 BC, newly granted the powers of a tribune and plainly marked out as heir, he abruptly withdrew to Rhodes, for reasons the ancient writers could only guess at. Augustus, offended, refused for years to let him return. Julia was banished by her father for adultery, and the marriage was dissolved in 2 BC.

Deaths in the imperial family brought him back. Augustus’s grandsons and adopted heirs, Lucius and Gaius Caesar, died in AD 2 and AD 4, and in AD 4 Augustus adopted Tiberius, requiring him in turn to adopt his nephew Germanicus. Tiberius spent the following decade as Augustus’s partner in power and chief general, commanding against the Germans after three legions were destroyed in the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9. When Augustus died on 19 August AD 14, Tiberius’s position was secure. At the Senate’s meeting that September he played the reluctant ruler so awkwardly that the senators found him obstructive rather than modest, and his relations with them stayed poor.

As emperor he was cautious and thrifty. He added no new territory, generally chose provincial governors well and treated the provinces fairly, and at his death the treasury was far richer than he had found it. He refused worship as a living god, allowing only a single temple at Smyrna to honour his genius together with the Senate’s. At Rome, though, the treason law was turned more and more often against his enemies. The death of Germanicus in Syria in AD 19, which the dying man himself blamed on the governor Piso, embittered relations with Germanicus’s family, and Tiberius’s own son Drusus died in AD 23. He came to depend on the praetorian prefect Sejanus, under whom the guard had been moved into the city, and in AD 26 or 27 he left Rome and settled on Capri. He never lived in the capital again.

From Capri he governed by letter while Sejanus moved against Germanicus’s widow, Agrippina, and her sons. In AD 31, with Sejanus as his fellow consul, Tiberius sent the Senate a letter that began with praise of the prefect and ended by denouncing him as a traitor. Sejanus was arrested and executed, and a wave of prosecutions followed. Tacitus reports that Sejanus had poisoned Drusus with the help of Drusus’s wife, Livilla, though the accusation surfaced only eight years after the death and may be false. Tiberius died at Misenum on 16 March AD 37. Tacitus and Cassius Dio say he was smothered, while Suetonius records several rumours and Seneca the Elder a natural death. The Senate refused him divine honours and crowds shouted “To the Tiber with Tiberius!”, but he was cremated and his ashes were placed in the Mausoleum of Augustus. Pliny the Elder called him “the gloomiest of men”.

Place in the family

• Tiberius Caesar married Julia the Elder, a daughter of Augustus Caesar.
• Tiberius Caesar was the elder of 2 children of Tiberius Claudius Nero and Livia Drusilla recorded in this archive.

Images

• Gold aureus of Tiberius, about AD 27–30, styling him son of the deified Augustus (cgb, CC BY-SA 3.0)
• Tiberius and his mother Livia, sculpture from Paestum, AD 14–19 (National Archaeological Museum, Madrid) (Miguel Hermoso Cuesta, CC BY-SA 4.0)
• Ruins of the Villa Jovis on Capri, where Tiberius spent his last years (Thomas Möllmann (Buckeye), CC BY-SA 3.0)

One of 17 people of Julio-Claudian (85 BC–68) in this archive. Rome’s first imperial family: the Julii and the Claudii joined by marriage and adoption, Augustus to Nero.

Line of descent: Gaius Octavius of Velitrae → Augustus Caesar → Tiberius Caesar.

Read more on Wikipedia

Parents

• Tiberius Claudius Nero (85 BC – 33 BC)
• Livia Drusilla (59 BC – 29)
• Augustus Caesar (63 BC – 14)

Siblings

• Julia the Elder (39 BC – 14) (adopted)
• Drusus the Elder (38 BC – 9 BC)

Partners

• Married Julia the Elder (39 BC – 14) in 11 BC; they separated in 2 BC

Children

• Germanicus Caesar (15 BC – 19)

Life

• 42 BC — Born
• 11 BC — Married Julia
• 2 BC — Parted from Julia
• 37 — Died

Sources

1. Tiberius (A.D. 14–37) · De Imperatoribus Romanis (Loyola University Chicago)
2. Tiberius · Encyclopaedia Britannica
3. Tiberius · Wikipedia