Tiberius by Ernst Mason Read Free Book Online

on what a foul manure it was nourished!
    V
    In 27 B.C. Tiberius was fifteen years old. He was a strong youth, tall and broad-shouldered. He had a pimply complexion, but teen-agers often do. Like his mother, his nose had the Roman hook, very pronounced.
    Highborn Romans learned early to fight and to womanize. Tiberius already had his own personal slaves, including female ones, to experiment on, He was a little young to get married, at fifteen, but not very; and certainly he was not too young to think about it. His first marriage would be arranged for him, but there would be no harm in indicating a preference. There was, for instance, that pretty child Julia. Although she was his stepsister there was no blood relationship; her father
    happened to be married to his mother. Of course, she was only eleven—but Livia had not been much older when she married for the first time—and Julia was very attractive and very gay.
    Also she was the daughter of the Emperor.
    Tiberius himself was not very gay, even as a youth. He had no skill at showing joy. "Mad, kneaded with blood." But he was as well educated as any youth of his time could be; he had learned his quota of Greek verse, had studied such technical scientific subjects as divination, astrology, and the interpretation of dreams, had schooled himself to write poetry and construct literary letters. What he needed now was a little practical experience—soldiering experience—and in the fall of the year 27 B.C. Augustus provided it. It was time for the Emperor to inspect outposts in Gaul, and he took Tiberius and his step cousin , Marcellus, along.
    The boys saw no fighting to speak of. Probably they were disappointed; probably Augustus planned it that way. They needed to learn that expanding the Roman frontier was a process that was not completed when a battle was won. After a military victory came the hard job of consolidation, absorption, exploitation. Julius Caesar had conquered the hairy, godless Gallic savages on the field, but there was much to be done before the colonies began to carry their fair share of the load for Rome. Augustus took the boys from outpost to outpost, setting up schools to teach Latin and sending out parties of census takers to prepare the Gauls for the necessary burden of taxation.
    They spent months in Gaul, rebuilding its wretched little cities and attending to the endless niggling details of trans-muting wilderness into Rome. When the boys came back they were men.
    It was time for them to begin to take part in governing the city. There were jobs for youths like them—minor magistracies, where there was enough responsibility to give them good practice, but where a mistake would do no permanent harm. Marcellus was eighteen years old now, a bright, quick young man with a complicated pe rsonality. He was easy to love, warm and outgoing, but he was also beginning to have a certain high sense of his own importance. Tiberius was a year younger, with a slow, methodical way of speaking that was rather disturbing. He seemed to pick his words as though he wanted to conceal his meaning rather than to make it plain. He would stop in the middle of a sentence and wait, silent, looking at the man he was talking to, until he found the exact word he wanted. It was a mannerism he might have learned from the Emperor—they said that Augustus liked to carry on important conversation in writing. Even with his wife, Augustus wrote out the more complicated parts of what he wanted to say, and then read them to her. But in Tiberius such silences were disturbing. He made people nervous.
    It was time the boys had jobs, and Augustus gave them both jobs; but he gave Marcellus something else. He gave him the hand of his pretty fourteen-year-old daughter, Julia.
    The wedding was a great social event. Augustus turned the arrangements over to the second greatest man in the kingdom, Marcus Agrippa, the hero of Actium and of the battle against Sextus Pompey. Agrippa did his best for