Not that anyone outside its walls greatly cared. After all, the vast mass of the Roman people, denied by Tiberius their right to a meaningful vote, no longer had a stake in the election of their magistrates. Instead, they had other favourites. They had not forgotten their devotion to the glamorous and tragic family of Julia. The same star quality that had seduced mutinous legionaries on the Rhine now had the crowds swooning in Rome. On Germanicus’s return from the front, the whole city had streamed out to welcome him, Agrippina and their children. Little Gaius, not yet five years old, and whose nickname of ‘Caligula’ appealed to everything that was most sentimental about the Roman people, was their particular darling. During Germanicus’s triumph, he had ridden proudly beside his father. Also present in the chariot had been his two elder brothers, Nero and Drusus, and their baby sisters, Agrippina and Drusilla. Everything about the spectacle might have been calculated to delight the cheering masses – and appal Tiberius. Germanicus, it seemed, could not help but cut a dash.
All of which placed the Princeps in a quandary. Clearly, with the wishes of Augustus still sacrosanct, Tiberius remained committed to grooming his nephew for the succession – and Germanicus’s apprenticeship was far from over. Now that he had completed his term of office north of the Alps, it was time to broaden his horizons and send him east. There, trouble was brewing again. The flashpoint was one that had long been a cause of tension between Rome and Parthia. The kingdom of Armenia, a land of icy mountains, thick forests and notoriously effective poisons, lay sandwiched uncomfortably between the rival empires: too indigestible to be swallowed, too tasty to be left alone. Tiberius himself, almost forty years before, had been sent there by Augustus on his first independent mission – and a great success it had turned out to be. A puppet king had been imposed at the point of a sword; the right of Rome to meddle in Armenian affairs triumphantly affirmed. Where there was opportunity, though, there inevitably lurked peril. It was in Armenia, after all, that Gaius Caesar, Augustus’s precious grandson, had received his fatal wound. Tiberius, whose own rise to greatness would never have happened without Gaius’s untimely death, had good reason to appreciate the disaster that might overtake a headstrong prince. Nor was it only Germanicus’s personal safety at stake. The annihilation of Crassus and his legions at Carrhae still cast a long shadow. Embark on too madcap an adventure, and the entire Roman order in the East might be put in peril. Tiberius knew, as he weighed up his options, that whatever he did would be a risk.
In AD 17, shortly after celebrating his triumph, Germanicus was formally appointed by the Senate to the command of the eastern provinces, with an authority over the region’s various governors equivalent to Tiberius’s own. ‘There can be no prospect of a settlement there,’ the Princeps informed the House with a perfectly straight face, ‘unless his wisdom be brought to bear on it.’38 Shortly afterwards, Germanicus set out on his mission. With him went the seemingly ever-pregnant Agrippina and the young Caligula. First stop was a courtesy call on Drusus’s headquarters in the Balkans; second, the bay of Actium. Almost fifty years had passed since Germanicus’s two grandfathers, the one natural and the other adoptive, had met on its waters to decide the fate of the world; and the young man’s imagination, as well it might have done, ‘conjured up for him vivid scenes of tragedy and triumph’.39 Then, like so many pilgrims before him, he headed on eagerly to the Greek world’s most celebrated tourist attraction. Crowned by the Parthenon, garlanded and perfume-hung with memories of past achievement, Athens had always shimmered in the yearnings of Roman romantics. Horace had studied in its schools; so too Ovid, who on his journey into exile had found himself haunted by memories of his happiness there as a young man. History and philosophy, art and savoir faire: the city had it all. ‘Athens, once mistress over waves and land, has now made Greece a slave to beauty.’40 The highly cultured Germanicus, whose idea of relaxation was to pen a Greek comedy or two, was duly smitten. So too were the Athenians. They may have fallen from their past greatness, but they had no rivals when it came to buttering up dignitaries. To a man such as Germanicus, who liked nothing better than being liked, it was heaven. Sailing on from Athens, his spirits were much buoyed. When Agrippina, just before landing in Asia Minor, paused on the island of Lesbos to give birth to a third daughter, Julia Livilla, it seemed that the gods were smiling on him and his mission.
Trouble was already brewing, though. Not far behind, blunt and unaccommodating where Germanicus himself had been emollient and affable, travelled a legate with a very different take. Piso, who regarded rudeness to foreigners as one of the primordial virtues which distinguished a Roman aristocrat from lesser men, had no time for diplomatic niceties. Arriving in Athens, he delivered a speech that was pointedly rude. The Athenians were unworthy of their heritage; they were scum, the dregs of the earth. Chauvinism such as this, a bristling contempt for the Greeks as a conquered and decadent people, was the reverse of the cultural cringe so recently displayed by Germanicus – a cringe, Piso informed his hosts, that was incompatible with Roman dignity. His point made, he continued on his way – only to be caught in a storm off Rhodes. Saved in the nick of time by a warship doubling as a lifeboat, Piso’s mood was hardly improved by discovering that the man to whom he owed his life was Germanicus. The meeting between him and his rescuer was as stiff as it was brief. Only a day after he had narrowly avoided shipwreck, Piso was on his way again. His destination: the province which more than any other served as the key to Roman security in the East, a land of famous and teeming cities, fabulous wealth, and a frontier directly abutting the Parthians. Piso was heading east as the new governor of Syria.
That Tiberius, like Augustus, thought long and hard before appointing anyone to a military command went without saying. Syria, which had a garrison of four full legions and lay many weeks distant from Rome, was a more sensitive command than most. Delegation did not come easily to the Princeps. As a general in the field, his attention to detail had been remorseless – but as emperor, with the whole world his responsibility, he had reluctantly accepted that he could no longer afford to micromanage. True, he often seemed on the verge of surrendering to temptation, of setting off on a grand tour of the provinces, of attempting to monitor every last aspect of Rome’s dominions; but again and again he would cancel his travel plans. ‘Callippides’, men began to call him, after a famous mime whose party trick had been to imitate the sprinting of an athlete while staying rooted to the spot.
The dispatch of Piso to Syria was Tiberius’s most Callippidean manoeuvre yet. Chopping and changing governors was not his normal style. His preference was for keeping them in place. ‘Even corrupt legates?’ he was once asked. ‘Better blood-glutted flies on a wound than thirsty ones,’ came the mordant reply.41 The circumstances now, though, were exceptional. Despite having brought himself to trust Germanicus with the administration of the East, Tiberius could not bear, in the final reckoning, to leave his nephew unsupervised. He needed someone in Syria he could trust. The loyalties of the incumbent governor, whose daughter was due to marry Nero, Germanicus’s eldest son, were far too split for comfort. Only a man in whom the Princeps had absolute confidence, who shared his values, his instincts and his background, would do. So it was, as Germanicus made his way to Armenia, there to follow in Tiberius’s own footsteps and impose Rome’s choice of a king, that Piso, after landing in Syria and travelling some fifteen miles upriver, arrived in the great metropolis which served the whole of Roman Asia as its cockpit: Antioch.