Sure enough, a few months before his death, Augustus had given his guards a massive pay rise; and in due course, when the oath of loyalty to Tiberius came to be sworn, only the consuls had taken precedence over their commander. Seius Strabo, the Praetorian prefect, was an Etrurian from the determinedly provincial town of Volsinii, famous for the invention of the hand-mill and not a great deal else; but he was competent, cultured and, crucially, an equestrian. He also had a son, Aelius Sejanus, who, despite an early posting on Gaius’s ill-fated expedition to the East, had since become a much-valued partisan of Tiberius. The new Princeps did not take long to demonstrate his appreciation. One of his first appointments was to promote Sejanus to the joint command of the Praetorians alongside his father. Those alert to the substance of power, rather than to its show, had no doubt as to the implications. Tiberius’s agonising in the Senate House was, to all intents and purposes, an irrelevance. ‘In the military sphere, there had been no prevarication; instead, he had immediately adopted and begun exercising the powers of a Princeps.’13
Except that the military, of course, were not confined to Rome. Out on the frontiers, the perks and donatives lavished on the Praetorians had not gone unnoticed. In Pannonia and Germany, where the desperate efforts of the previous decade had required conscripts to be force-marched to the front and reservists chivvied out of their retirement, resentments ran particularly deep. ‘Floggings and injuries, harsh winters and summers on manoeuvre, grim war and peace without profit – all relentless!’14 No sooner had tidings of Augustus’s death reached the northern front than mutterings like these were flaring up into direct insubordination. With startling speed, the flames of mutiny began to spread along the Danube and the Rhine.
Brought the news, Tiberius was appalled. He knew, none better, the vital importance of keeping the frontiers secure. It was the measure of his dismay that he sent as his emissary to Pannonia both his only natural son, Drusus, and his most trusted lieutenant, Sejanus. The mission was to prove perilous. Riding into the very heart of the camp, Drusus found his attempts at negotiation confronting a firestorm of rage. When his withdrawal was blocked, it seemed, as dusk fell, that he and his whole escort might be lynched. Drusus, though, was not his father’s son for nothing: obdurate and untiring in equal measure, he spent the night working on the mutineers, summoning them, by the pale light of a full moon, to a sense of their duty. Gradually he worked them round. When, by lucky chance, a lunar eclipse cast the camp into sudden darkness, the soldiers took it for an omen, wailing that the gods were sickened by their crimes. By daybreak, the mutiny was effectively over. Two of the ringleaders were put to death that same morning, and others hunted down. Steady rain then extinguished the final embers of revolt. Drusus, who had never before been inside a legionary camp, let alone been given responsibility for three legions, had risen to a mortal challenge with courage and skill. He could be well satisfied with his efforts. So too, back in Rome, could Tiberius.
Nevertheless, the jolt given to his confidence was a jarring one. As a general, he had always set a premium on obligation and commitment. The oath of duty spoken by a legionary, the sacramentum, was of a peculiarly fearsome order, and to break it a terrible thing. The men who swore it, although granted by its terms a licence denied civilians to fight and kill, were simultaneously deprived of rights that were the essence of citizenship. There was nothing of Rome’s chaotic snarl of streets in the measured grid of a legionary base. No matter where it might be planted, whether beneath the grey clouds of the North or the broiling African sun, its plan would be identical to that of every other camp across the empire. Within its ditches and palisades, discipline was absolute. Everyone, from general to lowest recruit, knew his place. The self-description of one particular centurion might well have applied to all. ‘For I am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me: and I say to one, “Go,” and he goes; and to another, “Come,” and he comes.’15 It was the pledge of the citizen who swore the sacramentum that he would readily commit himself to obedience. The sanctions against insubordination were correspondingly ferocious. Not for nothing was the emblem of the centurion a vine-stick. So notorious was one particular martinet for breaking his on the backs of his men that he was nicknamed ‘Bring Me Another’.16 Cornered by the mutineers in Pannonia, he had been torn to pieces. In Germany too, it was the centurions who bore the brunt of the soldiers’ hatred. In Vetera, a huge legionary base standing guard over the confluence of the Rhine with the Lippe, many of the officers were pinned to the ground and given sixty strokes with their own rods, before being flung into the river. Then, drunk on their own violence, the mutineers began to contemplate savageries better suited to the barbarians they were supposed to be standing guard against: the abandonment of their positions, the sacking of the Altar of the Ubians, a bare sixty miles to the south, the despoliation of Gaul. Such, it seemed, was the menace of a wolf that had tossed off its rider.
In the event, although the mutiny in Germany was on a much graver scale than that in Pannonia, it too was suppressed – and by a son of Tiberius to boot. Germanicus, adopted by his uncle a decade earlier, had followed his first consulship in AD 12 by travelling north of the Alps, there to serve as governor of Gaul and commander-in-chief of the German front. News of the mutiny reached him hot on the heels of the announcement of Augustus’s death; and so naturally he headed directly to the Rhine. There, lacking the helpful intervention of an eclipse, and desperate not to risk the frontier firmed up with such effort by Tiberius, he adopted a number of expedients. Concessions were combined with executions, histrionic appeals with threats. Sure enough, by mid-autumn, order had been restored. The legionaries of Vetera, in a violent spasm of repentance, first massacred the more mutinous among their own comrades, then demanded of Germanicus – who with his customary showiness had affected to be appalled by the slaughter he found in their camp – that he lead them against the barbarians. A quick strike across the Rhine, the incineration of fifty square miles’ worth of villages, and the soldiers were left much cheered up. ‘Returning to camp for winter, it was with their confidence boosted, and recent events quite forgotten.’17
But Tiberius did not forget them. There had been a sinister dimension to the mutiny in Germany lacking in Pannonia. The concentration of troops along the Rhine, as Tiberius himself knew better than anyone, was easily the most formidable in the entire empire – and Germanicus, on his first arrival in Vetera, had been pressed by the mutineers to ride at their head on Rome. That Germanicus himself had reacted with horror to the suggestion, displaying throughout an unimpeachable loyalty to his uncle, had not set Tiberius at rest. Reports of the events in Vetera provided an uncomfortable parody of his own coming to power. The stilted expressions of support that he had received from the Senate seemed mocked by the violent enthusiasm of the legionaries for his nephew; his own agonised prevarications, when set against the flamboyant shock displayed by Germanicus at the soldiers’ urgings, could not help but seem the more insincere. Most unsettling of all, to a man appalled by any hint of mob rule, were the reports of the mutineers’ ultimate ambitions. ‘They wished to have a new leader, a new order, a new system of government; they presumed to threaten the Senate, even the Princeps, with new laws – laws which were to be dictated by themselves.’18 Nothing, to the man who had just terminated centuries of voting on the Campus, could possibly have appeared more monstrous.