TIBERIUS WAS 55 YEARS OLD WHEN HE became the second Roman emperor. He ruled from AD 14 to 37, spending most of the second half of his reign on the island of Capri, where he never lost his grip on power despite being over 130 miles from Rome.
Like most bureaucratic administrators, he was far from popular. Tacitus (AD 56–120), the greatest of all Roman historians, presents Tiberius as paranoid, ruthlessly cruel, and pathologically unable to say what he meant. The imperial biographer Suetonius (69–122) completes the Tacitean picture of a dour, charmless pervert, miserable even in his increasingly sordid pleasures.
Not all writers are quite so hostile to Tiberius: since the Enlightenment he has won qualified praise from thinkers including Montesquieu and Voltaire, who have often been willing to overlook…
You're reading a preview of
The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, July 2024