There, signal honours awaited him: a second consulship, a triumph. Tiberius, determined to banish any whisperings of a breach between him and his prospective heir, lavished gold on the cheering crowds. His nephew’s youth and magnetism were actively trumpeted. An arch built in the Forum hailed the recapture of the eagles lost by Varus. No matter the Emperor’s private conviction that the campaigning had in reality been a waste of effort and expense, he made sure to welcome home Germanicus as ‘the conqueror of Germany’.23
Not everyone was convinced by this display of family affection. Some, puzzled as to why the General of the North should have been recalled just as victory seemed within his grasp, freely attributed it to his uncle’s jealousy. The charge was venomously unfair – and yet, for all that, not lacking an element of truth. Though Tiberius had been obediently following the wishes of Augustus in grooming Germanicus for greatness, it would have been hard for him to track his nephew’s progress and not feel a stirring of envy. He remained what he had been since his first awkward speeches to the Senate as Princeps: a man profoundly uncomfortable in his own skin. The task of taking on the semblance of Augustus had not grown any easier with time. Oppressed by its demands, Tiberius had begun to live in shadow. The comet-blaze of his nephew’s celebrity increasingly gave to his own reticent and withdrawn nature the quality of enigma. ‘What a contrast there was between the young man’s easy manner, and his exceptional good humour, and the haughty and opaque reserve which characterised how Tiberius spoke and appeared.’24 While Germanicus roamed the wilds of Germany and sailed the northern Ocean, Tiberius skulked in Rome, never once in two years setting foot outside the city. The austere aristocrat who had been testing himself since the age of sixteen in combat against Rome’s foes, who had once turned his back on Augustus rather than compromise his dignity, who had always scorned the smooth and practised hypocrisies of the fashionable elite, now found himself obliged to negotiate a swamp more treacherous than any he had faced beyond the Rhine. Such a world was better suited to the talents of his mother than to his own; and when his enemies, sneering at him behind his back, jeered that it was the Augusta who had secured him his rule of the world, rather than his own record of virtus, the mockery stung. Not surprisingly, then, when senators proposed with practised malice that the title ‘Son of Livia’ be included on his inscriptions, Tiberius responded with fury. Rather than risk substantiating the charge that he had profited from her influence, let alone that he remained under her thumb, he made a point of avoiding his mother’s company whenever he could. Repeatedly he warned the Augusta: ‘do not meddle with affairs of importance inappropriate to a woman.’25
He still needed her, though. Reports from the Rhine of Agrippina’s performance in the mutiny had served as a salutary reminder to Tiberius that the bloodline of Augustus, charged as it was with a mystique that he could never hope to share, retained its hold upon the affections of the Roman people. Agrippina herself, though a rogue and unwelcome presence in the house of which he was now the head, was married to the hero of the hour, and therefore in effect beyond his control. Not so her mother. Julia’s final ruin had been sealed by her father’s death. By the terms of Augustus’s will, everything permitted her in her exile – her allowance, her household, her possessions – had become Livia’s. The Augusta, although by now formally a Julian, had shown the woman who was simultaneously her stepdaughter and adoptive sister not a shred of family feeling. Instead, chill and implacable, she had ordered all supplies to the wretched exile cut off. Julia, deprived of all hope, had starved herself to death. No one doubted that Livia, in the exercise of this cruelty, had been serving her son’s interests. Clearly, people presumed, ‘he had calculated that the sheer length of her exile would prevent her death from being noted.’26
In the clandestine and increasingly murderous battle between the bloodline of Augustus and that of his wife, it was Livia who had triumphed. Her son ruled as emperor; her grandson had no conceivable rival as his heir. In the great mausoleum of Augustus, whose priest and daughter Livia had become after the reading of his will, no space was given to the ashes of the disinherited Julia. Claudians had become Julians, and Julians, purged amid conditions of squalor and secrecy, had vanished altogether from the roster of the August Family. The blaze of the deified Augustus’s glory illumined only the single daughter: Julia Augusta, the woman who had previously been his wife. It shed its lustre upon only the single son: Tiberius Caesar Augustus. To those who gazed full upon the brilliance and did not think to shade their eyes, there seemed no shadows, no hint of darkness, only gold. Tiberius, as Augustus had been, was ‘the very best a Princeps can be’. The son of a god, he served as a model fit to be copied by all mankind. ‘Great though he is as the ruler of the Roman world, he is greater still as an example to it.’27
Praise that would have brought a bitter smile, perhaps, to Julia’s pinched lips as she lay starving, or to Agrippa Postumus, as he rotted on Planasia, dreaming of freedom, fated never to leave. Except that the obscurity of their deaths, veiled as they were from the gaze of the world, encouraged people to wonder. Two years after Agrippa’s supposed execution, a remarkable rumour began to sweep Rome. ‘The news was only whispered at first – as forbidden stories always are.’28 Augustus’s grandson, so it was reported, had cheated death. ‘Preserved by the heavens’,29 he had slipped his guards, procured a boat, reached the mainland. The Roman people, their love for Julia’s children undimmed, began to speak of it in ever more breathless tones. Senators and equestrians, too, so it was said, were rallying to Agrippa’s cause – even members of the imperial household itself. They were sending the young man funds; they were sending him inside information. The whole of Italy seemed to be yearning for the story to be true.
Few, though, ever saw the man who claimed to be Agrippa. He was constantly on the move, avoiding public spaces, keeping to the night. When at last he was captured, it was by subterfuge. Tiberius’s agents themselves had been operating in murk and shadow; and when they tricked their elusive quarry into believing them to be his supporters, and met him in conditions of strictest secrecy, there was no one to witness his abduction to the Palatine. There, in the house of Caesar, the truth soon came out. The man whose claims had set all Italy seething was an imposter, a former slave of Agrippa’s by the name of Clemens. Obdurate in the face of torture, he refused to betray his associates; and so Tiberius, who had no wish to give the affair any further publicity, decided to let sleeping dogs lie. He instructed that no further inquiries were to be held. The whole business was to be covered up. As for Clemens himself, he was naturally to be executed, and his body covertly dispatched.
First, though, so it was reported, Tiberius himself made sure to study the imposter; and then, marking the slave’s close resemblance to his dead master, even down to the styling of his hair and beard, addressed him directly. ‘How did you manage it? How did you make yourself into Agrippa?’