Tiberius

As the first steps of his civil duties, he defended King Archelaus, the Trallians, and the Thessalians, each for different causes, while Augustus heard the cases; on behalf of the Laodiceans, Thyatirens, and Chians, who were afflicted by an earthquake and imploring aid, he petitioned the senate; Fannius Caepio, who had conspired with Varro Murena against Augustus, he prosecuted for high treason before the judges and secured his condemnation. And during these activities, he administered a double charge: that of the grain supply, which had fallen into scarcity, and that of inspecting the slave-prisons throughout Italy, whose owners had fallen into ill repute on the ground that they were detaining under confinement not only travelers but also those whom the fear of military service had driven into such hiding places.

He performed his first military service as a military tribune in the Cantabrian expedition, then, having led an army to the East, he restored the kingdom of Armenia to Tigranes and placed the diadem upon him before the tribunal. He also recovered the standards which the Parthians had taken from Marcus Crassus. After this, he governed for about a year long-haired Gaul, which was unsettled by the incursions of barbarians and the discord of its chiefs. Thereafter he conducted the Raetian and Vindelician war, then the Pannonian, then the German. In the Raetian and Vindelician war he subdued the Alpine nations, in the Pannonian the Breuci and the Dalmatians, and in the German he transported forty thousand surrendered people into Gaul and settled them in homes assigned near the bank of the Rhine. For these exploits he entered the city both on foot in ovation and in a chariot, having previously, as some think, been honored with triumphal ornaments, a new kind of honor never before granted to anyone. He also entered upon offices earlier than usual and ran through them almost in immediate succession: the quaestorship, the praetorship, the consulship; and after an interval, when consul for the second time, he also received the tribunican power for five years.

With so many successes flowing together, while he was in his prime of age and health, he suddenly resolved to withdraw and to remove himself as far as possible from public life; it is doubtful whether from weariness of his wife, whom he neither dared to accuse or divorce, nor could endure any longer, or to preserve and even increase his authority by absence, avoiding the satiety of his constant presence, in case the state should ever stand in need of him. Some think that, Augustus’ children being now grown up, he voluntarily withdrew from the place and virtual possession of the second rank which he had long usurped, following the example of Marcus Agrippa, who, when Marcus Marcellus was admitted to public duties, went away to Mytilene, so that he might not seem by his presence either to oppose or disparage him. Which reason he himself also gave, but later. At that time, however, pretending satiety of honors and rest from labors, he asked for leave; and he did not grant indulgence either to his mother who suppliantly entreated him, or to his stepfather who complained, even in the senate, that he was being deserted. Nay, when they held him back even more pertinaciously, he abstained from food for four days. Having at last obtained permission to depart, leaving his wife and son at Rome, he immediately went down to Ostia, without returning a single word to any of those who accompanied him, and having kissed only a very few at his departure.

Coasting along Campania from Ostia, on receiving news of Augustus’ illness, he stopped for a short time. But when the rumor grew that he was lingering in expectation of a greater hope, he sailed for Rhodes almost against contrary winds, having been captivated by the pleasantness and healthfulness of the island ever since he had landed there when returning from Armenia. Here, content with a modest house and a suburban villa not much more spacious, he established an extremely civil way of life, walking about sometimes in the gymnasium without a lictor or viator, and exchanging mutual courtesies with the Greeks almost on an equal footing. Once by chance, in arranging his day in the morning, he had foretold that he wished to visit whatever sick people there were in the city; this was understood otherwise by those next to him, and all the sick were ordered to be carried into a public portico and arranged according to the nature of their illnesses. Shocked therefore by the unexpected thing and for a long time uncertain what to do, he at last went around to each one, apologizing for the occurrence even to the poorest and most unknown. Only this one thing, and nothing else besides, was noted in which he seemed to have exerted the right of his tribunican power: when he was constant around the schools and auditoriums of the professors, a rather serious quarrel having arisen among the rival sophists, there was not wanting one who attacked him as he intervened and seemed rather partial to one side, with abuse. And so, returning gradually home, he suddenly came out with his apparitors, and ordered the abuser, summoned before the tribunal by the voice of a herald, to be dragged to prison. He found out afterwards that his wife Julia had been condemned for her lusts and adulteries, and that a divorce had been sent to her in his name by the authority of Augustus; and although he was glad of the news, yet he thought it his duty, as far as was in his power, to deprecate the father of his daughter in frequent letters, and to allow her to keep whatever he had ever given her as a gift, however she might have deserved. But when the time of his tribunican power had expired, having at last confessed that he had avoided nothing else by his retirement than the suspicion of rivalry with Gaius and Lucius, he requested that he, being now secure on this side, since these had grown strong and easily maintained the second place, might be permitted to revisit his relatives, for whom he felt a longing. But he did not obtain it, and was even gratuitously admonished to lay aside all care of his family, whom he had so eagerly left.