50 pages • 1 hour read
SuetoniusThe Twelve Caesars
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 121A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
TiberiusChapter Summaries & Analyses
Sections 1-7 Summary
Tiberius was born into one of the most distinguished aristocratic clans in Rome, the Claudii, a family known for producing either exceptional matrons, politicians, and generals, or arrogant and petty people. His father Nero sided against Julius Caesar in the civil war, and as a result, Tiberius, Livia, and the infant Tiberius lived on the run. His first wife was Vipsania Agrippina, with whom he had a son named Drusus. Augustus and Livia forced him to divorce Vipsania Agrippina and instead marry Augustus’s daughter Julia, whom he grew to hate.
Sections 8-14 Summary
After beginning a promising military and political career, Tiberius abruptly retired and left Rome for Rhodes, which infuriated Augustus. Suetonius is unsure of the motive and speculates that Tiberius was either trying to improve his popularity by removing himself from the public gaze, was trying not to seem to compete with Augustus’s grandsons Lucius and Gaius, or was simply trying to get away from Julia. Either way, after two years Tiberius was allowed to return to Rome.
Sections 15-20 Summary
Tiberius resumed his military career by campaigning in Germany, where he gained a reputation for being harsh toward his own soldiers.
Sections 21-22 Summary
Augustus reluctantly named Tiberius his successor due to pressure from Livia and, according to one rumor cited by Suetonius, so that “he himself would one day be the more regretted” (Section 21). As soon as Augustus died, his one surviving grandson, Agrippa, was killed in his prison. Suetonius does not know if Livia or Augustus himself made the order.
Sections 23-38 Summary
With apparent reluctance, Tiberius accepted the imperial office. He spent his early years as emperor cultivating the image of an average citizen, discouraging flattery and honors, and refusing to act against critics of himself and his family. Tiberius ruled conservatively, cutting back state expenditures on public entertainment and passing laws restricting foreign religious practices.
Sections 39-64 Summary
Later in Tiberius’s reign, after the deaths of his nephew and adopted son Germanicus and his son Drusus, Suetonius alleges that Tiberius revealed his true “savage and tenacious nature” (Section 57). He left Rome and secluded himself at Capri. Rumors spread that Tiberius indulged in sexual deviance while there. Apparently encouraged by the praetorian prefect Sejanus, Tiberius became paranoid and cruel, persecuting and killing Augustus’s descendants, his granddaughter Agrippina the Elder, and her and Germanicus’s sons, Nero and Drusus the Younger.
Sections 65-67 Summary
Tiberius turned on Sejanus after receiving word that Sejanus was plotting to usurp the imperial title and had him arrested through trickery. Sejanus’s downfall did not end Tiberius’s persecution of Agrippina the Elder and her family.
Sections 68-73 Summary
Suetonius describes Tiberius as a strong and healthy man interested in literature as well as astrology, but not traditional religion.
Sections 74-76 Summary
Tiberius accurately predicted his own death in a dream. News of his demise was greeted with celebration by the people of Rome. In his will, Tiberius named his grandson Gemellus and Gaius “Caligula,” the only surviving son of Agrippina the Elder and Germanicus, as joint heirs to the empire.
“Tiberius” Analysis
With Tiberius (42 BCE-37 CE), we have Suetonius’s first biography of a “bad” Caesar. Suetonius traces Tiberius’s serious flaws to his ancestry as a member of the occasionally benevolent and occasionally imperious Claudii family as well as to Tiberius’s innate nature. Like Tiberius himself, whom Suetonius describes as a devout believer in astronomy, most educated Romans would have understood the implication that Tiberius’s vices were fixed from birth. Although astronomy in ancient Rome had its skeptics, including the philosopher and statesman Cicero, it was generally regarded as a science that, like geometry and mathematics, investigated the intricate and connected workings of the cosmos. In short, Suetonius asserts that Tiberius was simply born wicked. Whatever virtues Tiberius exhibited were simply an affectation.
Still, the Tiberius that Suetonius presents is hardly one-dimensional or incapable of change. Beginning with his forced divorce to Vipsania Agrippina, Tiberius resisted his own path to the imperial office. Also, there is a clear change in how Tiberius managed the empire in his early and later years, as he changed from a ruler tolerant of free speech to a paranoid, murderous tyrant. This suggests that Suetonius’s portrait of Tiberius may be historically accurate, despite his expectations and biases.
The problems of family and succession continued to mount during Tiberius’s reign. Essentially, the imperial dynasty was split between Tiberius’s own immediate family and the direct descendants of Augustus. This conflict was worsened by the fact that Augustus more or less made Tiberius a placeholder until Augustus’s nephew, Germanicus, could succeed him. Dynastic conflict, which resulted in the deaths of Agrippa and Agrippina the Elder, among others, becomes an overriding theme in The Twelve Caesars.
When it comes to depicting Tiberius as a tyrant, there are some essential characteristics Suetonius includes in his analysis. Suetonius is clear that, despite Sejanus’s influence over him, Tiberius acted on his own instincts. Also, he depicts Tiberius as becoming intolerant of criticism and hints that his penchant to exercise torture and murder for political ends was strongly tied to his sexual deviance. The targets of Tiberius’s tyranny were primarily members of the senatorial class, who likely left most of the records and stories that Suetonius would have accessed. For Suetonius and in traditional Roman thought, tyrants had an innate inability to exercise self-control. This failure to regulate their own emotions and actions had dire political and personal consequences, as Suetonius believes Tiberius’s later career as emperor and his behavior at Capri illustrate.
