Teaching and the Decline of Liberty at Credulity and Curiosity in A ...

Tacitus'
Teaching and the Decline of Liberty
at Rome 199
der they were compelled to accept. It was the effect of Tiberius'
peculiar policy
and character to complete the transformation of these proud men from defeated
republicans to mere apolitical subjects. The character of these men and their po
tential danger to the despotism has nowhere been better described than by Gib
bon. From him we gain a hint of Tacitus'
intention.
The minds of the Romans were very differently prepared for slavery [than the Per
sians]. Oppressed beneath the weight of their own corruption and of military violence,
they for a long while preserved the sentiments, or at least the ideas, of their freeborn
ancestors. The education of Helvidius and Thrasea, of Tacitus and Pliny, was the same
as that of Cato and Cicero. From Grecian philosophy they had imbibed the justest and
of human nature and the origin of civil society. The
most liberal notions of the dignity
history of their own country had taught them to revere a free, a virtuous, and a victori
ous commonwealth; to abhor the successful crimes of Caesar and Augustus; and in
wardly to despise those tyrants whom they
adored with the most abject flattery. As
magistrates and senators, they were admitted into the great council which had once
dictated laws to the earth, whose name gave still a sanction to the acts of the monarch,
and whose authority was so often prostituted to the vilest purposes of tyranny.7
This tradition and education of the leading Romans was potentially the major
obstacle to the smooth working of the Principate. We believe that this is the
problem to which Tacitus addresses himself in his study of the reign of Tiberius.
That reign is a crucial turning-point in the history of the Romans. For during this
reign tyranny consolidated itself by a terrible treason law and whatever remained
of the proud self-reliance of the old Romans was assailed and all but destroyed in
everyone save the very few most outstanding men.
It is for this reason that we have chosen to devote an entire chapter to the char
acter of Tiberius, to understand the necessities at work in transforming the am
biguous accomplishment of Caesar and Augustus into such a monstrosity. After
Tiberius there remained almost no more politics at Rome;
all opposition extir
pated, the subsequent history of the Empire remains one of palace intrigues and
occasional seditions of mercenary armies, but the Senate and people of Rome are
eliminated from the enumeration of political factors that count. Henceforth men
were to accept the decisions taken by their master in Rome without
the force to resist them, or the will to govern themselves. Already in the reign
of Tiberius we see evidence of this acquiescent temperament in the embassies
from cities relief asking in misfortune or begging leave to establish temples and
shrines dedicated to the reigning emperor or his ancestor. In the increasing re
quests for temples and the spread of eastern religion we see the beginning of a
new era when men turned to other-worldly hopes rather than to their own efforts
in common for the solution of their problems. Tacitus indicates the beginnings of
this development in the reign of Tiberius; it was to increase in importance with
the passing years. The Roman Republic brought to an end the independent cities
and tribes. Rome nearly alone remained political in the first century B.C. Caesar
and Augustus conquered Rome, but it remained for Tiberius to extirpate the last
7. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 1:63.