Seducing Autocracy: Tacitus and the Dynasts of the Near East

Seducing Autocracy: Tacitus and the Dynasts of the Near East

Nathanael Andrade

American Journal of Philology, Volume 133, Number 3 (Whole Number531), Fall 2012, pp. 441-475 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/ajp.2012.0028

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American Journal of Philology 133 (2012) 441–475 © 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

1 I use Heubner’s Teubner editions for most cited works of Tacitus, namely his Histories and Annals. For Agricola, I use Delz’s Teubner edition. All translations are mine.

SEDUCING AUTOCRACY: TACITUS AND THE DYNASTS OF THE NEAR EAST

NathaNael aNdrade

uAbstract. This article examines Tacitus’ exploration of the motives of Near-Eastern dynasts in Histories 2 and Annals 2. In these books, Tacitus presents Near-Eastern “enslavement” to the Roman empire as an act of will. Near-Eastern dynasts desired to “seduce” Romans into becoming masters and assuming the same despotic and morally enslaved dispositions that they as dynasts exerted. Their slaving helped frame, forge, and actuate a Roman imperial system that subjected Romans to despotic figures amid the unceasing threat of civil discord. In this sense, Near-Eastern seduction and its products symbolized Rome’s enslavement to autocracy and its circumvention of Republican governance.

per idem tempus Antiocho Commagenorum, Philopatore Cilicum regibus defunctis turbabantur nationes, plerisque Romanum,

aliis regium imperium cupientibus; et provinciae Syria atque Iudaea fessae oneribus deminutionem tributi orabant.

During this same time, because Antiochus and Philopator, respective kings of the Commagenians and the Cilicians, had died, their peoples were in disarray. Most desired Roman imperium, others desired royal

imperium. And the provinces of Syria and Judaea, worn down by burdens, were begging for the lessening of tribute.

—Tacitus, Annals, 2.42.51

thus tacitus commeNted oN the affairs of the “orieNt” that would eventually draw Germanicus Caesar eastward, and to his death. Tacitus may have been referring to a specific instance in Roman impe-rial history, but his statement bore to contemporary Romans a message of more general import. While Tacitus was in strictest terms providing the background for Germanicus’ ill-fated journey to the Near East in 18–19 c.e., he was also asserting a broader disposition shared by Near

442 NATHANAEl ANDRADE

2The “Near East” was not a discrete category recognized in antiquity, but since Tacitus and other Romans often conceived of the ethnicities or provincials of Oriens as having shared characteristics (some examples of which this article will describe), I will use the terms “Near East” and “Near Easterner” in my article.

3While one could object that such a post-modern approach to Tacitus’ narrative would be foreign to the context in which Tacitus wrote and thought, the same could be argued for positivistic or empiricist “modernist” stances that assume singular authorial intent or a stable experience of readership. See Whitmarsh 2001, 30–32, and Batstone 2009, 24–30. In this light, my goal is to produce a plausible reading of Histories 2 and Annals 2 in terms of how they present Near Easterners as, in a sense, “mastering” Romans.

Easterners, who are here represented in metonymic terms by the Cilicians and the Syrian Commagenians.2 Near Easterners desired the ruling authority (imperium) of monarchs or foreign powers. They cultivated a desire (cupido) to be ruled and dominated, whether by Roman emperors or local kings. If such desire was not consummated, then Near-Eastern peoples (nationes) simply persisted in chaos (turbabantur) in ways that fed civil conflict. While Near Easterners always desired imperium, it was often uncertain whose imperium it would be. Competition to determine masters thereby made the Near East an unstable place, one that alternated between civil war and utter subjection.

For such reasons, Near-Eastern desires exerted tremendous desta-bilizing potential in Tacitus’ Histories and Annals. In his works, Near Easterners did not merely suffer enslavement by passively enduring Roman imperial domination. They invited it. Slavery was not something that Syrians, Arabs, and Judaeans suffered at the hands of masters; it was something that they did, and willingly. Although they assumed abject and slavish dispositions as they inhabited imperial margins, they did so in ways that fortified and perpetuated an autocratic regime that unleashed its horror upon Romans at the empire’s center. For this reason, eastern desires for enslavement shaped the characters of Roman imperial agents, staged civil war, and fed a system that enslaved Romans themselves.

With such premises in mind, this article examines Tacitus’ explora-tion of the motives of Near-Eastern dynasts and how his narrative depicts them as contributing to civil conflict and the autocratic aspirations of Roman magistrates. It presents the following interpretation of Tacitus’ narratives in Histories 2 and Annals 2. In these books, Tacitus presents Near-Eastern slavery as constituting a form of agency or an act of will that substituted for liberty within the Roman autocratic system. Whereas Rome sought to dominate, Near Easterners exerted a desire to seduce, and their seduction redirected and manipulated Romans’ will to dominate and exercise imperium.3 In fact, their seduction confounded the epistemo-

443SEDUCING AUTOCRACY

4Accordingly, when I use the terms “freedom” and “slavery,” I am not referring to the literal economic and social relationship of master and slave (the parent domain) but to its use as a meaningful metaphor and structuring principle in how Romans formulated and experienced the power dynamic generated by autocratic conditions (the derived domain). See Roller 2001, 217–19, for this issue.

5The same can be said for Germanicus’ rival Cn. Calpurnius Piso, whom Tacitus frames as a potential alternative to Tiberius as princeps and not as embodying a possible return to Republican governance, despite Piso’s Republican pretensions. See O’Gorman 2006 on this issue.

logical dichotomies of freedom/slavery (libertas/servitus) and master/slave (dominus/servus) that operated as significant metaphors and structuring principles in the “derived domain” of Roman political discourse.4 As they pursued and desired their enslavement, eastern despots attracted their Roman masters to assume the same autocratic characters and morally enslaved dispositions that they exerted. Their slaving even marked all Republican pretensions as mere illusions, appearances, or images (species), and by constantly generating the image (species) of despotism, it helped frame, forge, and actuate a Roman imperial system that subjected Romans to despotic figures amid the unceasing threat of civil discord. In this sense, Near-Eastern seduction and its products symbolized the servitude that both Romans and provincials cultivated elsewhere, a servitude that cre-ated principes in ways that circumvented any possibility of Republican restoration. These themes are most applicable to the imperial ascendency of Vespasian in Histories 2 and the rivalry of Germanicus Caesar and Cnaeus Calpurnius Piso in Annals 2, which this article examines. In fact, whereas previous scholarship has typically treated Germanicus, with all his personal flaws, as a Republican counterpoint to autocratic values, the conduct of Germanicus that Near-Eastern seduction elicited or inspired supports an interpretation of Germanicus as an autocratic figure whose despotic disposition was disguised by Republican pretensions.5


6 For notes on this passage, including the “instantaneous” pluperfect, see Ash 2007, 318–19.

7 See Connolly 2007, 187–89, and 196–97, for Cicero’s views on liberty as obedience to social convention as dictated by “natural law,” not to the whims of tyrants. For Republi-

1. NEAR-EASTERN SlAVES AND VESPASIAN IN TACITUS’ HISTORIES

tantum simul peditum equitumque et aemulantium inter se regum paratus speciem fortunae principalis effecerant.

So much infantry and cavalry together at once and the pageantries of kings competing among themselves now produced the appearance (speciem) of a princeps’ lot. —Tacitus, Histories, 2.81.36

As Tacitus’ statement indicates, Vespasian may have been a principal impe-rial claimant in 69 c.e., but when his faction’s key members assembled in Berytus, the local dynasts of the Near East competed to produce “the appearance of a princeps’ lot” (species fortunae principalis). As we will see below, these same dynasts were, as Tacitus describes, “slaving kings” (inservientes reges). Vespasian’s ambitions, of course, had been encour-aged by the Syrian legate licinius Mucianus, by previous omens, and, as Tacitus states above, by the vast military apparatus at his disposal. Still, Tacitus also significantly emphasizes how the fawning and competitive endeavors of Near-Eastern despots to indulge the vanity of Vespasian helped stage the image, appearance, or illusion (species) that would eventually become the fact of Vespasian’s imperial ascendancy. Certain passages from Histories 2 in fact explore how the slaving desires of Syria triggered or accelerated Vespasian’s latent imperial ambitions, and Tacitus hints that “slaving kings” of the Near East, by soliciting enslavement, replicated both civil war and imperial domination. Within the narrative of Tacitus’ Histories, the physical and epistemic violence exerted by the Roman imperial system was fed by the desires of those who willed their own enslavement.

Such features of Near-Eastern servitude have bearing on Tacitus’ exploration of liberty and the Republic. As scholars have often noted, Tacitus employs the word libertas (liberty) with a sense that being ruled by a princeps had reconstituted what the term signified. Under the princi-pate, it was no longer defined in Republican terms as a willing obedience to social convention and proper authority, the ability to speak and act without fear of the corporal punishment that slaves were powerless to evade, or the sheer absence of a master.7 Instead, it had become under


can libertas as the ability to speak and act without fear of reprisal from an individual with power, see Roller 2001, 214–33, 262–64, and Oakley 2009, 185.

8Tac., Hist. 1.1.1–4 famously criticizes historians whose works are motivated by falsaspecies libertatis and praises the current regime, under which “it is permitted” (licet) for its subjects to say what they feel. In this sense, “liberty” constitutes the “license” extended by masters (including benevolent ones) to slaves, a feature that informs how Tac., Ag. 3.1 praises Nerva’s combining of principatus and libertas. For commentary on the beginning of Tacitus’ Histories specifically, see Damon 2003, 77–79.

9 For such complexities of libertas in Tacitus, see Haynes 2003, 36–37, 40, 52–53, 163–68. For how authors and orators under the principate, including Tacitus, express or define autonomy, outspokenness, or “liberty” within an autocratic system, see Roller 2001, 213–89; Bartsch 2006, 214–15, 232, 243; Connolly 2007, 259–61; Sailor 2008, 134–36, 276–77, 311–13; Oakley 2009.

10 See Tac., Ann. 2.88.2 for Arminius as liberator hau<d> dubie Germaniae and 2.15.3 for his exhortation to his soldiers to preserve their remaining libertas or to die before servitium. For Civilis and libertas, see Hist. 4.17.

11 Keitel 1993 explores how libertas and servitium cease to be opposed concepts in the speeches of Histories 4.

12 Keitel 1984, 306–9. Recently, Sailor 2008, 190.

the rule of emperors, who could choose to implement arbitrary violence with impunity, the quality that an emperor, as master, allowed his enslaved subjects to have; it was license (licentia). It characterized acts of ostensible and safe outspokenness framed by autocratic conditions, and in this sense, libertas merely constituted the “traces” or “resemblance” of perishing liberty.8 Tacitus therefore often uses the word to describe how orators or historians feigned outspokenness and autonomy before emperors who allowed such posturing in order to conceal their domination of the senato-rial class.9 In other instances, libertas was the quality that Tacitus extended to those who resisted Roman imperial expansion. A virtue associated with Arminius and Julius Civilis of Germany and the Britons, it was also connected to the civil chaos and bloodshed that allegedly characterized such populations.10 Yet, in such regions, the rhetoric of liberty often con-duced to discord and the creation of an autocrat who exercised freedom of action by enslaving others.11 The term was thus characterized either by the bloodlusts, dangers, and chaos of civil conflict or by a form of violence that autocrats could inflict upon a subjugated population. In fact, both of these were merely different manifestations of the same process of civil war. Aristocrats fought to dominate each other in the name of liberty, or a single princeps dominated his slaves beneath the guise of liberty and peace.12 In such conditions, even a capable and moral senator who assumed a provincial command could easily find himself embodying the uneasy tensions between domination (of provincials) and servitude (to


13 Haynes 2006, 165–68, among many other issues, demonstrates how Tacitus’ version of Agricola, as governor of Britain, uncritically accepted his servitude to emperors even as he deprived conquered peoples of liberty, and she also indicates that Tacitus presents Agricola’s noble but modest qualities as morally complicit in the sacrifice of liberty that made his reputation as a good man possible.

14Tac., Ag. 14.1–2; Gowing 1990, 316–22.15 See Tac., Ag. 21.2 for Britons whose acclimation to Roman customs is a “part of

their slavery” (pars servitutis).16This issue is explored by Ash 2006, 355–75. Tacitus generally depicts governors of

Syria, with Corbulo as a potentially significant exception, as amplifying their own imperial ambitions in ways that replicate the enslavement of Romans.

17As stressed by lavan 2011, 301–2.

the princeps) and between a moderation that empowered the autocracy and an autonomy or brilliance that bore the threat of civil war.13

In Tacitus’ works, Syria and its adjacent territories are never even associated with the appearance or illusion of libertas. Instead, Tacitus claims that its polar opposite, slavery (servitus), was the definitive quality of all residents of the Near East, and if Rome maintained client kings as instruments of slavery (instrumenta servitutis), the Near East was where Romans could most expect to find them.14 In the Near East, even kings were mere slaves, and unlike certain peoples who had embraced servitude by adopting Roman customs, easterners were slaves even as they adhered to their own perverse ways.15 Seeking wealth and pleasure, they waged civil war to enslave themselves to masters who would compensate them. Their incessant need to find a master simply amplified the autocratic aspi-rations of imperial magistrates.16 For this reason, it is important to stress that in the same way that Tacitus presents autocratic Rome as detach-ing the word libertas from its Republican referent, he also delineates a similar shift for servitus. Other conquered peoples, like the Britons, could be complicit in their servitude and desire the commodities and luxuries that came with it, but they suffered or endured their enslavement within the specific historical context of conquest.17 For Syrians and easterners of their ilk, “slaving” was virtually a transhistorical “natural” disposition and a constant act of will, one that destabilized the dichotomy of “free” and “enslaved” and could masquerade as liberty (and vice versa). In fact, it is for this reason that this article typically presents the verb servire and its compounds as “to slave” and not “to be a servant” or “to be enslaved.” Such a translation arguably captures how easterners willfully performed their enslavement and exercised active initiative in doing so. To be a slave was to exert a potent desire and agency, and to desire Roman domination was to trigger Rome’s enslavement.


18 Baudrillard 1990, 10, 15, 21–22.19 Baudrillard 1990, 22.20 See Belayche 2000, 12–17, on Roman representations of “orientals.” Also, Isaac

2004, 335–51. Such presentations of Near Easterners date at least as early as Aristotle, Pol.1252b, which states that among barbarians “the feminine and the slave have the same taxis” and then proceeds to assert that Asians characteristically suffer enslavement (1327b). The Hippocratic treatise Air, Waters, Places 16 also depicts Asians as enslaved to despotism.

In fact, in Tacitus’ Histories and Annals, Near-Eastern seduction has similar effects to the seduction of the feminine theorized by Jean Baudrillard. While classifying the masculine as a productive force that defines and stages “the real universe,” Baudrillard claims that feminine seduction constitutes a “mastery over the symbolic universe” that unrav-els the productive and thereby dominating power of the masculine.18

Masculine desire may be oriented toward the categorical framing and possession of an object, but “the law of seduction takes the form of an uninterrupted ritual exchange whereby seducer and seduced constantly raise the stakes in a game that never ends.”19 In fact, since the desires to attract and, in turn, to be desired cannot be isolated from one another, seduction renders the dichotomy of seducer/seduced, as well as all dichotomies staged by masculine desire, unintelligible. To seduce is to be seduced; to be seduced is to seduce. And amid such seduction, one party never prevails to dominate or possess the other. Accordingly, even if Baudrillard’s text will not receive further specific examination in this article, it does provide a hermeneutic lens informing this exploration of how Near-Eastern seduction destabilized the binary of dominus/servus in Tacitus’ accounts.

Indeed, the parallel outlined here is appropriate to Tacitus’ discourse on the Near East not merely because Greeks and Romans conceptual-ized Syrians and surrounding peoples, as we will see below, as servile and even androgynous figures that lacked the autonomy and modera-tion essential for completeness as true Greek or Roman men.20 It is also relevant because in Tacitus’ accounts, Near-Eastern dynasts have no limit in their performances of slavery. Whereas Romans want to be masters of eastern slaves, easterners desire even more to enslave themselves to Roman masters, who are rendered interchangeable amid the escalation of the seductive process. To which specific Roman master easterners are enslaved is never entirely concretized, and who serves whom is increas-ingly in doubt as each stage of seduction and “slaving” prompts Roman commanders to seduce and serve in return. In fact, as Romans compete with each other in their engagement of eastern seduction, they virtually


21 lavan 2011, 295, describes slavery in Tacitus as “a moral condition—a state of mind and spirit.” In this sense, even autocrats, in addition to senators and provincials, can be slaves as they dominate. The notion of slavery as a moral condition, which could afflict rulers, was certainly alive in Roman thought, and Seneca the Younger postulated that any-one, including kings, could be slaves to their anger, cupiditates, or spes, among which were desires or hopes for power. Even if kings could be moderate and in control of passions, they still could be enslaved to the demands of ruling or the desire to rule. For instance, see (in composite) Sen., Ep. 51.8–9 and 77.14–15; De ira 3.15–18 generally; Clem. 1.11.4, 12.1 and 13.2; Tranq. 2.6–12 and 9.3; Constant. 2 and 19; Polyb. 6.4–5; Vit. Beat. 4.4–5. Roller 2001, 272–86, is instructive and contains useful references.

22 Sen., Marc. 17.5.23 Sall., Jug. 63.

become doubles of their eastern counterparts. Since enslavement in Tacitus’ works, just as in those of Seneca the Younger, can be said to be a moral condition and not only a practical or political one, Romans who fall under Near-Eastern seduction could be construed simultaneously to be autocrats (over Romans or provincials) and slaves (to their desires or to what Near Easterners desire for them).21 In much the same way that Seneca claimed that the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius was desirous of domination (dominationis cupidus) and in this sense enslaved to a desire for power, the Romans who nurture a cupido for imperium under Near-Eastern seduction arguably endure the same moral condition in Tacitus’ corpus.22 As they become mirror likenesses of the despots that they encounter and fall prey to their desire to dominate, they gratify the desires of their eastern “slaves” just as much as easterners gratify theirs. Eastern seduction thereby constantly generates potential usurpers, and these usurpers always bear brute despotism, civil war, or both.

Tacitus’ account of Vespasian’s visit to Mount Carmel illustrates the potency of Near-Eastern slaving. According to him, Vespasian had visited this mountain at the border of Syria and Judaea while Rome was engulfed in the civil strife of 69 c.e. There he sacrificed to the mountain’s local divinity. In this episode, which offers parallels with Sallust’s description of how a soothsayer in North Africa had encouraged Marius’ pursuit of the consulship,23 Tacitus describes how the god’s priest, Basilides, predicted Vespasian’s pending ascension to the imperial throne (Hist. 2.78.3–4):

est Iudaeam inter Syriamque Carmelus: ita vocant montem deumque. nec simulacrum deo aut templum—sic tradidere maiores—: ara tantum et reverentia. illic sacrificanti Vespasiano, cum spes occultas versaret animo, Basilides sacerdos inspectis identidem extis “quidquid est” inquit, “Vespa-siane, quod paras, seu domum exstruere seu prolatare agros sive ampliare servitia, datur tibi magna sedes, ingentes termini, multum hominum.”


24 Carmel was at the threshold of Phoenicia and Judaea, but Phoenicia was at this time part of the province of Syria (and hence could be called Syria or Syro-Phoenicia). Millar 1993, 269–70, discusses Carmel.

25The diverse and complex forms with which inhabitants of the Roman Near East endowed their divinities cannot be treated here, but see Gaifman 2008. Tacitus’ character-ization of eastern religion is notably prone to overgeneralization, and his representation coheres with those of Greek and Roman authors who often treated the worship of betyls, rock altars, stones, or imageless divinities as “oriental” and thereby not Greek or Roman practices. But Stewart 2008, 300–301, stresses the existence of aniconic representations of divinities in the Roman empire generally, and Gaifman 2008, 67–72, shows how Romans and Greeks inaccurately stereotyped Syrians as worshippers of aniconic objects or image-less gods alone.

26 Pl., Crit. 116c.

Carmel is between Judaea and Syria. They use this name for the mountain and the god. The god has neither a likeness nor a sacred enclosure (their ancestors have handed down this tradition). There is an altar and worship; that’s all. When he had checked the entrails again and again, the priest Basilides said to Vespasian, who was engaged in sacrifice there while turning secret hopes over in his mind, “Vespasian, whatever it is you are preparing, whether to build a house, expand your fields, or increase your slave holdings, a great foundation, vast frontiers, a host of men are being granted you.”

Tacitus begins the scene by stressing the utter foreignness with which Syrians (or Syro-Phoenicians) worshipped the divinity.24 Without a cult statue or a sacred precinct, the Syrians worshipped at an altar on the mountain and perhaps even worshipped the altar itself.25 Tacitus then emphasizes that while Vespasian nursed his secret ambitions, the priest Basilides claimed that whatever Vespasian was planning, whether to build a house, expand his fields, or garner an even greater host of slaves (servitia), he would meet with success.

Tacitus generally endows Syrian dynasts with the dispositions of slaves, and the name Basilides coheres with this general theme. Basilides is also a Greek word for a petty king or king’s son,26 and Tacitus’ juxtapo-sition of the name Basilides with the word sacerdos could be translated as “petty king priest,” instead of “Basilides, the priest.” In this sense, Tacitus’ image of the basilides sacerdos classifies Basilides as a typical Syrian dynast and highlights the monarchical powers that Vespasian would soon assume. The priest of a prominent cult, he owed his authority, as Tacitus hints, to his ability to exploit bizarre eastern cultic practices and to ingratiate himself to Roman governors. In fact, this “petty king priest” did not hesitate to offer Vespasian a vastly amplified host of slaves. While Basilides’ reference to servitia was strictly linked to the expansion of


27As observed by Ash 1999, 132–33, who notes the ease with which Vespasian’s subordinates use cult to manipulate him.

28 On this issue, see Mellor 2002, 75–76, and Curran 2007, 85–90.29 For the servitus that the senate suffers under Domitian, see Tac., Ag. 2.3 and 3.3.30Ash 2007, 315, provides commentary on this passage, including the use of the abla-

tive of quality to describe Sohaemus’ resources.

Vespasian’s personal estate, it also referred to Vespasian’s control over his future imperial subjects.27 Without the slightest resistance, Basilides had offered himself and his Syrians to Vespasian even while Vespasian’s hopes for power (spes) were still secret, thereby prompting him to pro-long the bloody civil conflict currently occurring in Italy. Basilides’ act, of course, only constituted one of many opportunities that Vespasian utilized to anchor his imperial legitimacy in the favor that he had earned from Syrian, Judaean, and Egyptian divinities and eastern cult authorities.28

But in a more sinister light, it laid the foundation for the servitus of the Roman senate that Tacitus’ Agricola describes Vespasian’s son Domitian as later inflicting.29 Basilides had in effect prompted Vespasian and by extension his children to assume the position of basileus at a precise moment when Romans had allowed factors other than descent to inform imperial succession.

Tacitus develops this theme further as he narrates how other Syrian, Arab, and Judaean dynasts rushed to Vespasian’s assistance as he embarked on his imperial bid (Hist. 2.81.1–2):

Syria omnis in eodem sacramento fuit. accessere cum regno Sohaemus haud spernendis viribus, Antiochus vetustis opibus ingens et inservientium regum ditissimus, mox per occultos suorum nuntios excitus ab urbe Agrippa: ignaro adhuc Vitellio celeri navigatione properaverat. nec minore animo regina Berenice partes iuvabat, florens aetate formaque et seni quoque Vespasiano magnificentia munerum grata.

All Syria was in the same allegiance. Sohaemus, a man of by no means contemptible power,30 Antiochus, great in his ancient resources and the richest of the slaving kings (inservientium regum), joined along with their realms. Soon Agrippa was aroused from the city through the secret mes-sengers of his clients. He hastened with swift sailing while Vitellius still knew nothing about it. And the queen Berenice was helping his faction with no less excitement. She was blooming in youth and beauty, and she was also pleasing to Vespasian, who was aged, in the splendor of her generosity.

According to Tacitus, numerous Near-Eastern dynasts committed their massive wealth to Vespasian’s imperial effort. They were, as Tacitus states,


31 In her commentary, Ash 2007, 317, translates inservientes reges as “kings offering their services” and downplays the pejorative and slavery-connoting aspects of the compound verb in-servio. By contrast, I would maintain that Tacitus is offering a barbed critique of the paradoxical status of “slaving kings” who “ruled” the Near East. For Tacitus’ characteriza-tion of Vitellius as passive and inert, see Ash 1999, 95–125.

32 See Ash 2007, 317, for how the chiasmus of, florens aetate formaque . . . magnificen-tia munerum grata, “postpones and sharpens” Tacitus’ joke that Vespasian found Berenice charming because of her money. Also observe Ash’s emphasis that quoque sets up the more amorous Titus as a point of comparison.

33Tacitus’ own career had of course benefited from Vespasian’s rule. Tac., Hist. 1.1.3.

exemplary “slaving kings” (inservientes reges), but his account emphasizes their activity, movement, and initiative.31 Sohaemus of Emesa and Antio-chus IV of Commagene readily acceded to the most eligible master in the vicinity. likewise, while Vitellius was still characteristically unaware (ignarus) and inert, Herod Agrippa II of Judaea fled Rome to shape the context of civil war, and Agrippa’s sister Berenice seduced (literally and metaphorically) the elderly Vespasian with her vitality, beauty, and above all, her money.32 Through their desire to support Vespasian, these dynasts helped inspire species fortunae principalis.

It is important to emphasize that while Near Easterners triggered or accelerated Vespasian’s imperial ambitions, Tacitus implies that they also made him a slave to his imperial desires and hopes (spes). This does not mean that Vespasian had become an outlandish despot like Caligula, Nero, or his own son Domitian. Tacitus generally depicts Vespasian as a moderate governor and emperor, and he describes Vespasian as “the only of all principes before himself who changed for the better” (solusque omnium ante se principum in melius mu<ta>tus est, Hist. 1.50.4).33 But the Near-Eastern seduction that the Syrian priest Basilides had embod-ied had incited Vespasian to desire autocratic power, even if couched in moderation, and as we will see, the Germanicus of Tacitus’ Annals con-stitutes a similar “restrained” autocrat. But for present purposes, it must be stressed that Tacitus revisits the Near-Eastern seduction of Vespasian at the end of Histories 4, and when he does so, he significantly depicts Vespasian as cupidus imperii, embedded in eastern cult, and under the spell of another Basilides.

Vespasian’s second encounter with a Basilides, like his first, prompted him to nurture a desire for imperium and assume the autocratic disposition of a Basilides, which, again, is a Greek word meaning “petty king” or “king’s son.” According to Tacitus, Vespasian had been wintering at Alexandria when numerous Egyptians began to treat him as endowed


34Tac., Hist. 4.81 generally.

with supernatural healing powers, and Tacitus in this vein transmits an account in which Vespasian allegedly healed a man’s disfigured hand.34

Regarding such occurrences as signs of heavenly favor for his elevation to the throne, “Vespasian thereupon had a deeper desire to enter the sacred temple (of Serapis) to seek counsel for matters of imperium” (altior inde Vespasiano cupido adeundi sacram sedem, ut super rebus imperii consul-eret, Hist. 4.82.1). When Vespasian entered the temple, from which he had prohibited all worshippers, he encountered an Egyptian notable named Basilides. This was a surprise, for Vespasian had known Basilides to be lying ill many days’ travel distance away. Vespasian subsequently verified that Basilides had been far outside Alexandria that day and that what he had seen was Basilides’ apparition or image. He “then interpreted that the image (species) was divine and that the point of the response was found in the name ‘Basilides’ ” (tunc divinam speciem et vim responsi ex nomine Basilidis interpretatus est, Hist. 4.82.2). In other words Vespasian, who now possessed cupido imperii, regarded the apparition of a man whose name was Greek for “petty king” to mark Serapis’ favor for his imperial ambition. In such ways, both a Syro-Phoenician Basilides and an Egyptian Basilides had prompted Vespasian to become enamored of their royal name.

2. NEAR-EASTERN SlAVING AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE IN TACITUS’ HISTORIES

As described above, the Vespasian of Tacitus’ Histories suffered enslave-ment to royal pretensions because of eastern seduction, but he was not the only Roman commander of Syria or Judaea to do so in this work. Certain passages of Tacitus’ Histories in fact suggest that other governors of eastern provinces had developed or nurtured autocratic dispositions. For instance, Tacitus depicts Mucianus, the legate of Syria, as deferring the principate to Vespasian in name but coveting autocratic power in deed. He, too, had thereby fallen beneath the spell of Near-Eastern seduction, even if Tacitus does not describe in detail how this occurred. As Tacitus claims early in his Histories, Mucianus’ charm carried much influence among sub-ordinates, neighbors, and colleagues, and he was “the sort for whom it was more convenient to hand over imperium than maintain it” (cui expeditius fuerit tradere imperium quam obtinere, Hist. 1.10.2–3). But since Mucianus was such an active player in waging civil war, Tacitus (Hist. 2.83.1) also describes him as conducting himself more as Vespasian’s colleague (socius)


35Tac., Hist. 4.4.1–2: id vero erga rem publicam superbum, erga principem contume-liosum, quod in manu sua fuisse imperium donatumque Vespasiano iactabat.

36Tac., Hist. 4.49 and 4.80. Mucianus, for instance, ordered that l. Calpurnius Piso and the son of Vitellius be killed.

37Tac., Hist. 5.9.3.38 Steel 2001, 47–52, provides an examination of the ethno-cultural implications of

Cicero’s attacks.39 Cic., Pis. 1: nemo queritur Syrum nescio quem de grege noviciorum factum esse

consulem. I use Nisbet’s 1961 edition. Nisbet’s commentary seems to posit that this state-ment, which follows a massive lacuna that once contained the text’s beginning, refers to the speech’s main target l. Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, but it fits his consular colleague Gabinius better.

40 Cic., Pis. 22: cum conlegae tui domus cantu et cymbalis personaret, cumque ipse nudus in convivio saltaret—in quo, cum illum suum saltatorium versaret orbem, ne tum quidem Fortunae rotam pertimescebat.

of imperium than as a subordinate (minister). In this sense, Mucianus was also elevating himself to the level of a princeps while disguising this very fact, and by the beginning of Histories 4, many senators believed that “it was in truth insolent to the Republic, insulting toward the princeps, that he was boasting that he had held imperium in his hand and had gifted it to Vespasian.”35 Amid his displays of power and violence in Rome, he in fact “embraced the power of princeps, but disavowed the name” (vim principis amplecti, nomen remittere, Hist. 4.11.1–2).36 likewise, the procu-rator Antonius Felix, a freedman of the emperor Claudius’ family, had previously “exerted a king’s command by means of his servile character” (ius regium servili ingenio exercuit) as he unleashed his savagery (saevitia) and lust (libido) upon Judaea. Tacitus’ endowment of Felix with a “servile character” constitutes a double reference to Felix’s status as a freedman and his captivity to a desire for regal domination that imperium in an eastern province nourishes.37

Tacitus’ presentation of the potency of Near-Eastern slavery in lur-ing governors to assume both regal and servile dispositions is in many ways consistent with that of his Republican senatorial predecessor Cicero, whose rhetoric routinely endowed Syrians with a slavish image. Cicero even conferred upon Syrians an androgynous character, and in this vein, his invectives against Aulus Gabinius, a rival senator, relied on his use of Syrian stereotypes.38 After Gabinius had become governor of Syria, Cicero indicated that Gabinius’ moral degeneracy was both the product of his origin from Syrian slaves and his governance of the Syrian province.39

As Syria’s governor, Gabinius had merely returned to his ancestral land, where he could continue unabated in his wantonness. like androgynous Syrians, Gabinius, as Cicero claimed, had danced nude at banquets amid exotic song and cymbals.40 By constructing such a disposition for Gabinius,


41 Cic., De pro. con. 9–10: an vero in Syria diutius est Semiramis illa retinenda? . . . iam vero publicanos . . . tradidit in servitutem Iudaeis et Syris, nationibus natis servituti.

Cicero developed a notion of the Syrian slave-king in ways that to some extent anticipated Tacitus’ application. In fact, Cicero had argued that Gabinius, instead of being a legitimate Roman governor, had become a Syrian dynast who acted like an immoderate and despotic woman. He was a new “Semiramis,” an ancient queen of Assyria. Cicero upbraided Gabinius further for allegedly indulging Syrian and Judaean debtors, not their Roman creditors. His immoderate tyrannical impulses and ungov-ernable desires, in Cicero’s estimation, had enslaved Romans and by implication Gabinius himself to “nations born for slavery.”41 According to Cicero’s rhetoric, Gabinius was not an autonomous Roman male; he was a lusting and unrestrained Syrian slave-queen who had returned to the land from which his depraved ancestors had hailed. As governor, he had fulfilled the desires of Syrian and Judaean subjects, who had further amplified his degenerate and autocratic qualities. Cicero thereby presented himself, by contrast, as a legitimate and autonomous Roman man, and he also indicated that Syrian slaving and despotism could engender or bolster degenerate desires within governors. Gabinius, who was both a slaving Syrian and a “Roman” governor morally enslaved by Near Easterners, was a farcically exaggerated example of this phenomenon.

Similar views permeate the writings of Tacitus, but with a critical difference. While Cicero used the image of the Near-Eastern slave to frame the liberty of a true Roman man, Tacitus explored how Near East-erners’ innate desire to seek a master paralleled and even impelled the general condition of Romans in the imperial period. Tacitus’ easterners had never known anything but slavery, but his Romans, despite conceiv-ing of themselves as having been free under the Republic, now suffered their same abasement under autocratic rule. Yet, Cicero and Tacitus agreed about one important aspect of Near Easterners. They were nei-ther Greeks nor Romans, and despite their posturing, they had failed to be properly acculturated. According to Tacitus, the slaving “East” was a land of bizarre religious practice (superstitio) emblematized foremost by its aniconic tendencies. The Jews, who refused to model images of gods (deum imagines) on human forms (species hominum) (Hist. 5.5.4), both conformed to and exemplified this inclination. For this reason, Tacitus’ Histories presents Jews as foremost being an eastern people that Greek kings had failed to make Greek (Hist. 5.8.2):


42 Haynes 2003, 118–26 (120 quoted), and 140–47, explores Tacitus’ presentation of the Flavian dynasty as producing definitions of religio by sanctioning and normalizing eastern superstitio (or in other words, treating it as religio), which itself underpins the dynasty’s claims to absolute authority, and by pegging the concept of superstitio to Jewish practice.

dum Assyrios penes Medosque et Persas Oriens fuit, despectissima pars servientium; postquam Macedones praepolluere, rex Antiochus demere superstitionem et mores Graecorum dare adnisus, quo minus taeterrimam gentem in melius mutaret, Parthorum bello prohibitus est; nam ea tempes-tate Arsaces desciverat.

So long as the East belonged to Assyrians, Medes, and Persians, it [Judaea] was the most despicable lot of those who were slaving. After the Mace-donians flourished, king Antiochus, endeavoring to suppress their [the Jews’] bizarre cult practices (superstitionem) and to give them the customs of the Greeks, was prohibited by war with the Parthians from transforming the foulest people for the better. For Arsaces had revolted at that time.

Tacitus’ statement stresses how the Jews engaged in uniquely irregular non-Greek (or non-Roman) religious practices, even by Near-Eastern aniconic standards. As described previously in this article, Tacitus (Hist. 2.78) emphatically claims that Syrians at Carmel likewise engaged in the bizarre practice of worshipping gods with merely an altar and without cult statues or sacred enclosures, and Vespasian was inclined to harness such gods’ support for his imperial bid. However, in this passage Tacitus treats the practices of the Jews as surpassing the Near East’s general perversity even while cohering with its broader trends. In this sense, the Jews’ practices, representing an excess of Near-Eastern error, were both uniquely perverse and emblematic of a flawed East.

Tacitus’ presentation of Jewish cult as an “excess” of general Near-Eastern perversion coheres with his exploration of Near-Eastern slaving, but it bears additional nuances. As observed by previous scholarship, Tacitus’ description of the Jews is more broadly relevant to his complex treatment of how Romans formulated religio and superstitio. While religioconstituted rituals and encounters with the divine that the Roman rul-ing class had sanctioned, superstitio could by contrast be defined as any “mystical practice or belief that does not conform to religio.” Superstitio was therefore what had to be repressed or delegitimized if religio was to acquire definitive sanction by Roman power holders, but the boundaries of religio and superstitio, being arbitrarily drawn, could shift.42 In fact, the Flavian dynasty of Tacitus’ Histories arguably disguised the fact that Near-Eastern superstitio constituted a basis of its legitimacy by arbitrarily


43Tac., Hist. 5.13.1–2. In BJ 3.399–408, Josephus claims to have prophesied Vespasian’s imperial ascendency on behalf of the Jewish divinity.

44Tac., Ag. 21.2.45Tac., Hist. 5.4.1–2: profana illic omnia quae apud nos sacra, rursum concessa apud

illos quae nobis incesta (“all that is sacred among us is profane over there; all that is abomi-nable to us is, by contrast, allowed among them”).

46Tacitus’ account cuts off before describing the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 c.e., but Hist. 5.9–13 describes Titus’ siege and preceding events. Some of the content of Histories 5 can be plausibly reconstructed from the late antique authors Sulpicius Severus and Orosius. See Barnes 2005, 133–35.

reframing it as religio, as validated by the regime. Vespasian therefore yoked the prophecies of an aniconic cult site at Syrian Carmel, and Taci-tus reports that omens from the Jewish temple expressed divine support for Vespasian and Titus, even if Jews refused to recognize it.43 In other words, Tacitus depicts the Flavians as sanctioning the validity of other Near-Eastern cult practices and prophecies that authorized their political legitimacy, thereby reframing such Near-Eastern superstitio as religio. But because the Jews refused to recognize their divine order’s support of the Flavian dynasty, they challenged the ability of the Flavians to acquire political and religious authority by mastering Near-Eastern superstitio.

Accordingly, even while stressing Jewish particularity and the Fla-vians’ validation of Near-Eastern cult practices, Tacitus still frames the Near East in general as the home of peculiar cults, of superstitio. A bizarre land whose inhabitants refused to worship gods with human likenesses, it had persisted in its errors despite Alexander’s conquests and Roman governance. Unlike the Britons, whose slavery Tacitus links to the adop-tion of Roman customs, Near Easterners engaged in a form of slavery while retaining exotic superstitio.44 By actively desiring enslavement and embracing the sacred and political stature of principes, the Near East was able to preserve its “foul” customs, legitimize its religious deviances, and otherwise refrain from assimilating to Roman norms.45 It was only when Near Easterners uncharacteristically resisted enslavement, as the Jews of Judaea initiated in 66 c.e., that the Romans imposed a culturally destructive form of slavery.46 Put another way, the superstitio and slaving of most easterners were such that they could embrace a Roman master, treat him as sacred, and, in turn, have their cultic perversions receive the validation of the imperial regime. By contrast, the particularity of Jew-ish superstitio underpinned by priestly dynasts could not accommodate another god and be regulated by Roman religio (however Romans defined it), even if the Jewish cult and priesthood constituted a mirror reflection


47 Haynes 2003, 140–44, on this; Tac., Hist. 5.13.1 for religio/superstitio.48Tac., Hist. 5.5.4–5: igitur nulla simulacra urbibus suis, nedum templis s<ist>unt; non

regibus haec adulatio, non Caesaribus honor.49 Sailor 2008, 231–49, develops Tacitus’ discussion of the destruction of the Jewish

temple as a “social drama” (236–37) through which the Flavians restored significations of Roman centrality to Rome’s topography.

50As shown by Haynes 2004, 47–49. For the “otherness” of Germany in late Repub-lican and imperial Roman literature, see Krebs 2011.

51 likewise, lavan 2011 argues for a connection between the slavishness of Britons and that of Roman senators, as depicted in Agricola. One can also observe the formal parallels between the rule of Rome under the vocabulum (invented name) of Augustus and the appointment of an Armenian king under the vocabulum of Artaxias. Haynes 2004, 54, who examines these episodes, therefore highlights how Roman imperial processes had enslaved both Romans and foreigners by detaching words from their proper referents and creating new ideological categories.

52Tac., Hist. 4.17.4: servirent Syria Asiaque et suetus regibus Oriens.

of how Romans were now creating autocrats with religious authority.47

Of all Near-Eastern peoples who were inclined to worship aniconic gods and engage in superstitio, Jews alone could not tolerate images of kings or Caesars, could not allow their cult practices to become religio beneath the aegis of Flavian patronage.48 In Tacitus’ Histories, Jewish slaving alone had its limits, and by suppressing its unique challenge to Roman authority and destroying the Jews’ temple, the Flavians reinforced the centrality of Rome’s sacred topography, one by then marred and destabilized by civil war.49

Although Tacitus stresses the Near East’s perpetual enslavement by kings, his portrayals also reflect how Roman imperial processes imposed new categories, vocabulary, and fantasies upon the Near East’s conquered landscape, but through the desire and complicity of easterners themselves. Tacitus’ presentation of Germany in his Germany and his Annals follows a similar pattern, but with some critical differences. The Germans of Tacitus’ works constituted Rome’s alienated self because of their inability to be conquered and enslaved; they were what the Romans desired to be but could not be.50 By contrast, easterners, the Germans’ polarized opposites, were what the Romans had become: a culture ideologically framed and defined by autocratic domination.51 When Tacitus presents the German rebel Julius Civilis as claiming that the inhabitants of Syria, Asia, and the East were characteristically slaves for kings, whereas Germany and Gaul at least had historical experiences of freedom, it coheres with this general theme.52 It is arguably for this reason that Romans nurtured fantasies of the Near East’s “superstitious” and exotic culture tyrannized by men who


53 likewise, Tacitus’ examination of Jewish institutions and cult practice pinpoints key similarities between Romans and Jews, not just difference, and it thereby subjects Rome’s historiographic tradition of Jewish despicability to scrutiny. See Feldherr 2009, 312–16.

54 Some obvious examples occur in Histories 1 and Annals 1.16–49, which, I would suggest, thematically anticipate Tacitus’ exploration of Near-Eastern seduction in Histories2 and Annals 2.

55Tac., Hist. 1.16.4: neque enim hic, ut gentibus quae regnantur, certa dominorum domus et ceteri servi, sed imperaturus es hominibus, qui nec totam servitutem pati possunt nec totam libertatem.

were altogether kings, slaves, and (according to Cicero) not quite men. If unconquered Germany was alien, unknown, masculine, and imagined to be free, the Near East’s servitude was all too familiar, all too Roman.53

In this sense, Near-Eastern seductions and the autocratic hope that they inspired symbolized how the “slaving” dispositions of Romans, provincials, senators, and soldiers fed the autocratic regime, even if they empowered alternative principes to the current one. Indeed, while Roman senators in Tacitus’ corpus assumed imperial ambitions through Near-Eastern seduction, many of them also intriguingly cultivated a desire for servitus that paralleled that of the Near East. Such desire nourished the increasingly violent autocratic domination of principes and endangered dissenting or otherwise moral senators who were targeted by their flat-terers. Even the emperor Tiberius, whose disdain of libertas publica (Ann. 3.65.3) would in Tacitus’ Annals eliminate dissenters or critics, could criticize fawning and flattering Roman senators for being servientes, “men ready for slavery” (homines ad servitutem paratos, 3.65.3). The reemerg-ing tendency of Roman soldiers and the urban plebs of Rome to bolster imperial claims or threaten civil war through mutiny, which cannot be examined in detail in this article, could be added to this phenomenon.54

In a strictly causal sense, Near-Eastern slaving did not make Rome autocratic, but in Tacitus’ narratives, its potency represents the prevailing dispositions of Romans, provincials, and soldiers that elsewhere did. For as the emperor Galba told his adopted heir lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi licinianus before their deaths, “Here, in fact, the house of the masters and the rest who are slaves are not stable in the same manner as peoples who are ruled by kings (gentibus quae regnantur); you are soon to govern men who cannot suffer total slavery (servitus) or total liberty (libertas).”55

In other words, while incapable both of restoring the old Republic and of being enslaved to one royal succession, slaving Romans constantly made new principes to whom they could be slaves, and destroyed them.

Because Roman senators, subjects, and soldiers had in so many ways assumed Near-Eastern moral dispositions, Romans of Tacitus’ account


56Virg., Aen. 8.678–88; Plut., Ant. 58–60; Dio Cass., 50.3–6; Hor., Carm. 1.37, for example.

therefore had to alienate easterners as “superstitious” worshippers of aniconic deities and classify them as slaves of slaving kings. In such ways, Romans, at least being slaves who in theory dominated slaves, could still frame Roman self-hood even as they resembled easterners more than their Republican forbears, and even as the Flavians transformed eastern superstitio into religio. But this illusion of domination was part and parcel of the species fortunae principalis that Near Easterners had wrought. Rome had conquered regions of the Near East, but these regions’ inhabitants helped ensure Rome’s violent enslavement under autocracy by staging principes through their slavish and seductive arts and thereby helping stabilize the autocracy’s ideological position, even as individual emperors rose and fell, even as civil wars occurred. During his reign, the emperor Augustus could boast to have defeated an errant Antonius who had been seduced by an eastern dynast, but his “Republic” would nonetheless succumb to eastern seductions thereafter.56 As the next section posits, Tacitus’ depiction of the rivalry of Germanicus and Piso suggests that their antagonism bore autocratic dispositions, the seeds of civil discord, and the possibility that either man could displace Tiberius as princeps. Near-Eastern seductions had set all of this in motion.

3. VONONES, PISO, AND GERMANICUS IN TACITUS’ ANNALS

incerti solutique et magis sine domino quam in libertate profugum Vononen in regnum accipiunt.

Unstable and unrestrained, and more without a master than in liberty, they [the Armenians] received the exile Vonones onto the royal throne.

—Tacitus, Annals, 2.4.2

In the quotation above, Tacitus describes the latest in a series of failed attempts made by Armenians to find a dominus. He indicates that when Near Easterners were without a king, they had more an interregnum than libertas. Not entertaining autonomous governance, they desired and solicited an autocrat. Tacitus’ statement thereby highlights the consistency with which Near Easterners sought their enslavement and the chaos that ensued when the Romans failed to produce masters for them. The Parthian exile Vonones, both a slave searching for a kingdom and a king


57 See Tac., Ann. 2.1.1 (mota Orientis regna), 2.5.1 (turbari res Orientis), 2.42.5 (turba-bantur nationes), and 2.43.1 (motum Orientem).

in pursuit of a master, embodied this failure. His quest would stimulate the destabilizing strife between Germanicus Caesar and Cnaeus Cal-purnius Piso, which constitutes one of the primary narrative threads of Annals 2. As the next two sections suggest, the context of Near-Eastern seduction outlined in Annals 2 foregrounds the autocratic dispositions of Germanicus and Piso, whom Tacitus’ Romans otherwise associated with Republican pretensions. Tacitus, of course, gives no indication that Germanicus and Piso had plotted against Tiberius or were actively conspiring against him, and these sections do not surmise that any such effort occurred, within or outside Tacitus’ account. But Annals 2 does indicate that Germanicus and Piso, if positioned to acquire total power during Tiberius’ lifetime or after his death, would have displaced him as principes instead of restoring the Republic and its libertas. Near-Eastern seductions in this sense symbolized how the slaving of both Romans and provincials stimulated civil war and created principes in ways that made Republican restoration virtually impossible.

The narrative of Annals 2, in which Vonones’ biography is cir-cumscribed, conventionally describes the “East” as a place of motion or flux, as though Oriens was by definition motus or turbatus.57 In fact, the “motion” of the East, as Tacitus relates, was driven by its desire for a master, a desire which Germanicus would eventually be sent by Tiberius to mollify. At the beginning of Annals 2, Tacitus situates Vonones at the center of this process as the “East” continually searched for a king and Vonones for a throne (Ann. 2.1.1–2):

Sisenna Statilio [Tauro] l. libone consulibus mota Orientis regna provinci-aeque Romanae, initio apud Parthos orto, qui petitum Roma acceptumque regem, quamvis gentis Arsacidarum, ut externum aspernabantur. is fuit Vonones, obses Augusto datus a Phraate.

When Sisenna Statilius [Taurus] and lucius libo were consuls, the kingdoms of the East, and its Roman provinces, were disturbed. The beginning arose among the Parthians, who were rejecting a king sought and received from Rome, albeit of the Arsacid line, as though he were a foreigner. This was Vonones, a hostage given to Augustus by Phraates.

Tacitus’ placement and choice of ending for mota locates the Near East’s disturbance foremost within its kingdoms (Orientis regna), which had rejected Vonones. The provinciae Romanae, appended to the end of


58Tac., Ann. 2.4.3.

the clause and possessing a different gender, were affected as a result. Tacitus thereby introduces Vonones as a hostage at Augustus’ court who had been put on the Parthian throne by the Romans, but who had been subsequently ejected from it by his own subjects.

Afterwards, Tacitus unfolds Vonones’ biography as a rogue king continually seeking a new regnum. While his eventual rival and usurper Artabanus had avoided the taint of servitude, Vonones, according to Tacitus, was vilified by his Parthian subjects for having adopted foreign customs and for having endured slavery at the Roman imperial court. A virtual slave of Caesar, he, too, was a slaving king (Ann. 2.2.1–2):

accepere barbari laetantes, ut ferme ad nova imperia. mox subiit pudor: degeneravisse Parthos; petitum alio ex orbe regem, hostium artibus infec-tum; iam inter provincias Romanas solium Arsacidarum haberi darique. ubi illam gloriam trucidantium Crassum, exturbantium Antonium, si mancipium Caesaris, tot per annos servitutem perpessum, Parthis imperitet?

The barbarians received him happily, as they usually do for new ruling regimes. Soon shame set in that the Parthians had become degenerate. A king had been sought from another world, one tainted by the practices of the enemy. The throne of the Arsacids was now being held and given together with the Roman provinces. Where was that glory of those who butchered Crassus, who drove out Antonius, if a slave of Caesar who had suffered slavery for so many years was to rule the Parthians?

The Parthians’ burgeoning hostility to Vonones ultimately facilitated Artabanus’ rise to power and the dislodging of Vonones from the Par-thian throne. Expelled from Parthia, he migrated to Armenia, where he became monarch. As stated at the beginning of this section, the Arme-nians accepted Vonones because they were more without a master than free. Vonones, “Caesar’s slave,” now governed Armenia, but not for long.

According to Annals 2, Vonones’ dubious double status as a slave (of Romans) and a former despot (over Near-Eastern lands) attracted similar manifestations of slavish despotism among the Romans who entered his orbit. His desire for a Roman master and a Near-Eastern regnum motivated relationships of destabilizing reciprocity that inspired the autocratic dispositions of both Germanicus and Piso and eventual civil war. All this fittingly occurred while Vonones was making ill-starred efforts to escape the “mockery” (ludibrium) of both possessing a royal title and living in Roman captivity, as described in section 4 below.58


59Tac., Ann. 1.2.1.60 For Tacitus’ complex perceptions on the outspoken critics of the regime, including

“martyrs,” see Sailor 2008, 11–33, and Haynes 2003, 24–31.61 See Oakley 2009, 187–88, on this and similar passages.

It is also worth noting that by emphasizing Vonones’ slaving, Annals 2 endows him with the same character that Roman senators had displayed in Annals 1, in which senators who encouraged the princeps’ autocratic ambitions were known to have the most successful careers. As stated early in Annals 1, for instance, the victory of Octavian at Actium had ushered in an era in which “the rest of the nobles were being elevated in riches and honors to the same extent that each was readier for slav-ery” (ceteri nobilium, quanto quis servitio promptior, opibus et honoribus extollerentur).59 Rome’s empire had become one in which those who were actively willing to be slaves held the most influence over the emperor, even if Tiberius disdained their slaving. “Men ready for slavery” (homines ad servitutem paratos, Ann. 3.65.3) had the power; they had seduced the princeps and could destroy dissenting or moderate rivals.

Yet, what distinguished eastern slaving kings from slaving senators is that while easterners celebrated their servitude, many senators pretended to be free. In fact, as Rome’s senators delved deeper into servitude, many endeavored even more to cultivate the “image” (imago) or “appearance” (species) of Republican libertas that Tacitus associates with previous historians’ open hostility to the imperial regime in Histories 1.1.2 (falsa species libertatis), but their display of slavery amounted to the mere license that an autocrat permitted them to exercise. In Tacitus’ Annals, Piso had in such ways notably cultivated vestigia morientis libertatis (1.74.5) and species libertatis (2.35.2) in his outspoken critiques of Tiberius. For even if senators openly criticized Tiberius’ accumulation of power, their ability to do so disguised the autocracy’s despotic nature.60 In fact, by the end of Annals 1, Tacitus describes Tiberius’ decision to allow candidates not nominated by him to run for elections as an act of autocracy glossed by a rhetoric of liberty (Ann. 1.81.1):

speciosa verbis, re inania aut subdola, quantoque maiore libertatis imagine tegebantur, tanto eruptura ad infensius servitium.

[His statements] were handsome in word (speciosa verbis), empty or decep-tive in substance, and they were being veiled by a grander image of liberty (maiore libertatis imagine) to the same extent that they were going to erupt into an enslavement (servitium) all the more oppressive.61


62 It is beyond the scope of this article to explore the implications of Domitius Corbulo’s military operations in Armenia, but Ash 2006, 364–75, examines the relevance of Corbulo’s encounter with the Near East, of Tacitus’ allusions to the campaigns of lucul-lus that highlight the excesses of Nero and the cruelty of Corbulo, and of the dangers of behaving like a Republican general under the principate.

Such acts of leniency, as Tacitus claims, disguised the autocratic nature of the principate. But, as we will see, they concealed more than just that. They masked the autocratic dispositions of Roman senators whose “Republican” qualities bolstered their popularity. Those who emulated Republican libertas and outspokenness could also assume the position of the princeps’ greatest rival for the throne. They could exploit their spe-cies libertatis to acquire power and popularity and position themselves as alternatives to the emperor.

In Tacitus’ account, the most notable victims of Vonones’ seduc-tions were quite visibly the most “Republican” figures of Annals 2: Piso and Germanicus. Despite their Republican associations, both men, amid Vonones’ seductive game, fashioned despotic dispositions that spelled the possibility (and outcome) of civil war and marked them as rivals to the emperor Tiberius for autocratic power. Their stimulation of civil war and despotic pretensions cohere with Tacitus’ broader tendency, one described above, to treat both factional strife and utter oppression beneath a single household as constituting civil conflict. As early as the reign of Augustus, the imperial family had notably claimed credit for ending the period of civil war, but the Julio-Claudian principate of Tacitus’ corpus merely disguised and underpinned a ceaseless state of civil war. Accord-ingly, as Germanicus and Piso competed to govern subject easterners, they were perpetuating the same ongoing civil strife that plagued Rome itself, whether in the form of warring factions or of domination wrought by an imperial family.62 When Near Easterners such as Vonones desired to be slaves of Germanicus or Piso, they stimulated these competitive pretensions among Roman authority figures all the more, and they thereby intensified the divisive violence of civil war and autocracy.

4. AUTOCRATIC GERMANICUS

Vonones’ close association with despotism and slaving is applicable to the conduct of Germanicus and Piso in Annals 2. Tacitus indicates that Piso and Germanicus, before their itinerary eastward, had been famously endowed with Republican values by Roman subjects. As previously described, Tacitus associates Piso, a descendent of an old Republican


63 See O’Gorman 2006, 288–92, on how Cn. Calpurnius Piso represents the “virtual” potential for a Pisonian principate. For an emphasis on the Republican personae of Ger-manicus and Piso, which are incongruent with imperial realities, see Pelling 1993, 82–85.

64 Kelly 2010, 232–37, has recently emphasized that Germanicus and his association with libertas pits him against the tyranny of the principate, especially as he sojourns among the monuments of Egyptian kings whose projects resemble those of the Julio-Claudians. While this is a valid reading, I also want to stress how Germanicus’ association with Republican values also has a deceptive quality in light of the traits that he exhibits as a gentle despot. For Germanicus as a performer, see Fulkerson 2006.

65 In 49 b.c.e., as the civil war between Caesar and Pompey gained momentum, Cicero had written to Atticus (Att. 8.16.2) concerning the effectiveness of the insidiosa clementiaof Caesar, or “Peisistratus.” Cicero, and apparently like-minded senators, also endowed Caesar with the virtue of clementia during his dictatorship. Cic., Deiot. 43, Marcell. 1 and 18, Ligar. 6. and 30; Plut., Caes. 57.4–5. While Konstan 2005 makes a powerful argument that many Romans of Caesar’s era classified clementia unambiguously as a virtue, he also notes that subsequent generations could have understood it to be the trait of a merciful tyrant.

66Tac., Ann. 13.11.2. Sen., Clem., of course, treats this topic in detail.

senatorial family that had resisted Julius Caesar and his faction during the civil wars, with the illusion or the traces of dying liberty (vestigia morientis libertatis, Ann. 1.74.5; species libertatis, Ann. 2.35.2) and an inability to obey the imperial family (obsequii ignarus, Ann. 2.43.2). Yet, Tacitus also notes that the emperor Augustus may have accredited Piso with having the ability and daring to become emperor (Ann. 1.13.3), and as imperial governor, Piso posed the threat of fostering his own dynastic ambitions beneath the guise of Republican aristocratic performance.63 likewise, Germanicus was the nephew and adopted son of the current emperor Tiberius and a descendent of both Augustus and Marcus Antonius (Tac., Ann. 2.53.2), but despite his very “Caesarean” lineage and descent from an eastern queen’s allegedly captivated lover, he was perceived by many imperial subjects to embody still-lingering hopes of a return to Repub-lican liberty. It was believed that his father Drusus would have restored Republican liberty if he had lived (libertatem redditurus, Ann. 1.33.2), and when Germanicus died, many Romans associated his premature death with that of his father, as they believed that he would have restored freedom (libertate reddita, Ann. 2.82.2). Despite this quality, his conduct in Syria also reflected a despotic temperament that compromised his reputation for valuing liberty.64 Although more merciful and moderate than Piso, his was the mercy (clementia) that a tyrant extended to an abject slave amid his role-play as freedom’s protector.65 Germanicus’ clementia therefore had a sinister air. It was this same clementia that his grandson Nero, par-roting Seneca, would praise before terrorizing his senate.66 Moreover, Tacitus endows Germanicus with the same inherent pothos/cupido that Alexander possessed before him and that his Histories claims Vespasian,


67 Germanicus’ cupido to travel the East (Ann. 2.54) resembles Alexander’s cupidoto see Egypt. For Alexander and pothos/cupido, see Curt. 4.8.3. Syme 1958, vol. 2, 770–71, and Kelly 2010, 223, n. 9, dissociate the pothos of Alexander from the cupido of Germanicus on the grounds that Tacitus also links cupido to the oracle consultations of Vespasian and Titus (Hist. 2.2.2 and 4.82.1) and the naval forays of Civilis (Hist. 5.23.1). But one could just as easily argue that Tacitus associates all five men with autocratic ambition and its characteristic pothos/cupido.

68 O’Gorman 2000, 46–77 (66, specifically for Germanicus as imago).69 For instance, Pelling 1993, esp. 82–85, and Kelly 2010, 131–35.70 For Germanicus as being clementior in his dealings with Piso, see Ann. 2.57.2.71As Tacitus stresses in Ann. 4.1. For Tacitus’ treatment and framing of Tiberius’ dis-

simulation and tyrannical qualities, see Syme 1958, vol. 1, 420–34; Griffin 1995; O’Gorman 2000, 78–105.

Titus, and Civilis to have displayed as they challenged (or coveted) impe-rial authority in 69 or thereafter.67

In short, Germanicus and Piso departed for Syria while bearing, in the eyes of many Roman subjects, putative aspirations of a return to Republican liberty. But for the reasons just described, subjects could also endow them with autocratic features. It is therefore worth observing, as one scholar has, that Tacitus frames Germanicus as an imago onto which readers could inscribe a spectrum of Republican and autocratic connotations depending on how they situated him in relation to his past and future.68 Such an observation is important because, although recent scholarship has recognized that Tacitus’ treatment of Germanicus is not always favorable, it is still common to conceive of Germanicus’ conduct in Annals 1 and 2 as that of an imperial family member who, for all his flaws, embodied values antagonistic to the principate.69 When they arrived in Syria, however, Germanicus and Piso assumed the disposi-tions of autocratic imperial figures who dominated a host of ostensibly powerless eastern slaves, upon whom they could unleash the full brunt of unrestrained arrogance or show a more merciful (clementior) disposi-tion.70 In this sense, what the Near East had been through the course of human history was a startling vision of what Roman senators had become under imperial rule, even if they maintained the imago or species libertatis. Indeed, this species libertatis was disrupted as Piso and Germanicus fell under the Near East’s sway, and both men emerged as despotic figures and imperial alternatives to Tiberius, not senatorial practitioners of traditional Republican competition. As they competed to govern the Near East on Rome’s behalf and to harness Near Easterners’ desire for enslavement, they fashioned virtually the same characters as Near-Eastern despots and constituted ruling alternatives to the emperor Tiberius, who was known to be envious of Germanicus’ popularity and whose restrained disposition, as Tacitus claims, erupted into utter violence over time.71


Tacitus significantly links the figures of Vonones and Germanicus by associating both of them with “the name ‘king’ ” (nomen regium). He does so in the context of Vonones’ removal from Armenia to Syria and Germanicus’ funeral at Antioch. As he states in the passages below (Ann. 2.4.3 and 2.73.3–4, respectively):

sed ubi minitari Artabanus et parum subsidii in Armeniis, vel, si nos<tr>a vi defenderetur, bellum adversus Parthos sumendum erat, rector Syriae Creticus Silanus excitum custodia circumdat, manente luxu et regio nomine.

But when Artabanus threatened and there was little support in Armenia, or if he [Vonones] was to be defended by our power, we had to wage war against the Parthians, Creticus Silanus, the governor of Syria, sent for [Vonones] and put him under guard. But his extravagance (luxu) and the name “king” (regio nomine) remained.

quod si solus arbiter rerum, si iure et nomine regio fuisset, tanto promptius adsecuturum gloriam militiae quantum clementia, temperantia, ceteris bonis artibus praestitisset.

Because if he [Germanicus] had been the sole governor of affairs, if he had possessed the power and name of “king” (iure et nomine regio), he would have achieved military glory more readily [than Alexander] to the same extent that he had surpassed [him] in mercy, moderation, and other noble qualities.

Even if Germanicus and Vonones exhibited vastly different personal qualities, Tacitus, as these two above passages show, knits them intimately together by associating them both with a nomen regium. While under guard in Syria, Vonones, now deprived of a kingdom, retained a king’s name and extravagance. likewise, when the Antiochenes in attendance at Germanicus’ funeral compared him to Alexander the Great, they fan-tasized about how easily Germanicus would have surpassed Alexander in military success if he had a nomen regium. Indeed, although Syrians and other easterners were unable to seduce Germanicus into assuming a nomen regium before his untimely death, they, as we will see, appar-ently still prompted him to wear a gold crown and to adopt the type of luxus, or extravagance, that Vonones retained. In fact, before his fatal attempt to escape Roman captivity, Vonones had set in motion the conflict between Piso and Germanicus that would attract both men to covet the same slaving regal disposition that he had fashioned. Romans may have hoped that Germanicus would restore the old Republic, but during his tenure in the Near East, he assumed the despotic likeness of a Vonones.


72Tacitus, Ann. 2.56 and 58.73 For an exploration of Tacitus’ descriptions of the luxury and decadence of eastern

lands, see Schmal 2006, 759–60, 765–67.

In Tacitus’ account, Vonones is thereby one of the focal points for the efforts of Germanicus and Piso to cultivate slaves in search of a mas-ter. When Germanicus and Piso arrived in Syria, his need for a patron to support him in his bid to reclaim the Armenian throne prompted him to earn Piso’s affection with gifts. Germanicus, by contrast, supported a certain Zeno, a Pontic noble, as a candidate for the Armenian throne, and he transferred Vonones from Syria to Cilicia in ways that his rival Piso found insulting.72 Accordingly, in Tacitus’ account, Vonones’ need for a Roman master to allot him territory specifically exacerbated the rivalry between Germanicus and Piso and prompted the chain of events that led to civil war among their followers after Germanicus died.

This rivalry reached an apex during a banquet that Nabataean royals hosted for Germanicus and Piso. During this banquet, the royal family offered large gold crowns to Germanicus and his wife and smaller ones to Piso and his spouse. Tacitus describes the scene in the following way (Ann. 2.57.4):

vox quoque eius audita est in convivio, cum apud regem Nabataeorum coronae aureae magno pondere Caesari et Agrippinae, leves Pisoni et ceteris offerrentur, principis Romani, non Parthi regis filio eas epulas dari; abiecitque simul coronam et multa in luxum addidit: quae Germanico quamquam acerba tolerabantur tamen.

Also, at a banquet, when heavy gold crowns were being offered to Caesar and Agrippina in the presence of the Nabataean king, and light ones to Piso and the rest, his [Piso’s] remark was heard that these feasts were being given for the son of a Roman princeps, not of a Parthian king. And he at once threw his crown aside and added many statements against extrava-gance (luxum). These, although fierce, Germanicus tolerated nonetheless. 73

Although Tacitus is silent regarding what Germanicus did with his crown, his narrative, which explicitly documents Piso’s refusal, encourages readers to accept that he wore it. By receiving and wearing the crown that the Nabataean king offered him, Tacitus’ Germanicus increasingly assumed the troubling likeness of a Vonones, whose luxus Germanicus had now adopted. Indeed, as a hostage in Syria, Vonones apparently still maintained royal extravagance (luxus, Ann. 2.4.3) along with “the name ‘king’,” and Germanicus was now wearing a crown and assuming royal


74 Plut., Caes. 61 and Ant. 12; App., B. Civ. 2.109; Dio Cass. 44.11; Suet., Iul. 79, for example.

75Tac., Ann. 2.78.1: Piso, promptus ferocibus, in sententiam trahitur missisque ad Tiberium epistulis incusat Germanicum luxus et superbiae; seque pulsum, ut locus rebus novis patefieret.

luxus as though he were Parthian royalty. Accordingly, Piso’s aspersions against Germanicus were framed by his self-positioning as the protec-tor of Republican tradition, and he therefore criticized a member of the imperial family who was acting like a Parthian despot. Yet, Tacitus’ timely description of Piso’s and the others’ crowns as being lighter (leves) than that of Germanicus (magno pondere) also hints that Piso’s anger was foremost stimulated by Germanicus’ preferential treatment.

Adding to the complexity of this passage is the obvious parallel with Julius Caesar’s notable conduct at the lupercalia of 44 b.c.e., at which Marcus Antonius had offered him a diadem.74 Although Caesar had refused it, his eventual assassins nonetheless construed his refusal as evidence of his tyrannical aspirations. Accordingly, it should be emphasized that when Tacitus describes Germanicus’ treatment by the Nabataean king, he emphatically notes that a gold crown was offered to “Caesar.” While Germanicus’ acceptance of his crown was the blatant act of a rex and earned him accusations of cultivating the same regal luxus that had characterized Vonones (Ann. 2.4.3), it also paralleled Caesar’s refusal of a diadem, but with one critical difference. Julius Caesar had refused to wear a diadem; Germanicus apparently had not refused to wear a crown. Similar arguments could be made regarding Piso’s conduct. Piso’s refusal, despite his pretensions of following Republican tradition, arguably con-stituted the act of an autocratic disposition. Tacitus’ description raises the interpretative possibility that Piso’s anger merely reflected a vain effort to associate himself with Republican virtue while disguising his displeasure that Germanicus received a better gold crown than he had. After all, Piso was known for cultivating species libertatis, but refusing a crown could be just as despotic an act as wearing one.

Germanicus and Piso thereby both embodied the tension between their species libertatis and the species fortunae principalis that the Near East stimulated in its Roman governors. Although the rivalry of Piso and Germanicus may have resembled traditional Republican competition, under the influence of Near-Eastern slaving, the species fortunae princi-palis predictably prevailed. According to Tacitus, after Germanicus had died, Piso wrote letters to Tiberius reproaching Germanicus for arrogance (superbia) and royal extravagance (luxus) and claiming that Germanicus’ followers had expelled him from Syria to sow revolution (res novae).75 In


76Tac., Ann. 2.55.5–6 and 80–81, and 3.12–13. 77 O’Gorman 2006 follows Tacitus’ development of an alternative principate of Pisones

throughout Tacitus’ Histories and Annals.78Tac., Ann. 1.13.3 relates the rumor that Augustus had described Piso as having the

ability and daring to be his successor. For depictions of Germanicus as a superior royal figure to Tiberius, see 1.33.2 and 2.73.3–4.

this instance, Germanicus’ regal disposition disproportionately distanced him from the senatorial class, connoted undisguised autocratic authority, and symbolically elevated him above Tiberius, who did not wear Near-Eastern royal headgear. Germanicus, with his regium nomen and luxus, was in this sense a fitting father of Caligula and grandfather of Nero (Ann. 6.46, 11.12, and 12.2). likewise, Piso’s species libertatis also intersected with the suspicion that he maintained an autocratic disposition. Having, as Tacitus claims, given donatives in his own name and not Tiberius’ to the legions in Syria, he waged a civil war after Germanicus’ death to main-tain his position in Syria amid the challenges of Germanicus’ friends.76

Tacitus’ treatment of Piso in Annals 2 thereby plays a role in his broader “alternative history” of the “Pisonian principate,” by which he maps the dominance of another senatorial family to be the only viable alternative to Julio-Claudian rule, not the governance of a “Republican” senate.77

In such ways, Tacitus’ account implicitly convicts Germanicus and Piso of cultivating autocratic dispositions at every turn. Germanicus’ clementia and amiability may have distinguished him from Tiberius in the popular imagination, and Piso’s species libertatis, recalcitrant outspoken-ness, and disobedience toward Germanicus may have held Republican connotations. But in Tacitus’ Oriens, these qualities are the delusory traits of tyrants whom Near Easterners’ desire for enslavement had lured into a predictable contest for domination. In Tacitus’ account, Germanicus and Piso, despite their guise of Republican libertas, constituted potential rivals for the imperial throne and stimulated throes of civil discord, as evidenced by the struggle between Piso and Germanicus’ followers after Germani-cus’ death.78 Their rivalry did not merely pit them against each other but also implicitly against the emperor Tiberius, who in Tacitus’ account had contributed to the destruction of both men as he eliminated potential rivals. Germanicus and Piso did not embody Republican alternatives to Tiberius’ or the principate’s autocratic character. They all were autocratic rivals, and Near-Eastern seduction, by having species principalis fortunae unravel species libertatis, illustrated that the “Republican” pretensions of senators disguised their own autocratic dispositions and that even if sena-tors were able to accumulate wealth, power, and popularity, they merely constituted alternatives to the current autocrat, but not to autocracy.


79 Syme 1958, vol. 1, 186–88, 278–85, and 295–96, elaborates upon Tacitus’ use of archived acta senatus. Devillers 2003, 54–64, presents evidence of the acta senatus as one of Tacitus’ main sources. See Gowing 2009 for Tacitus’ reading of previous historiography and Schmal 2005, 106–15, for sources generally.

80 Published by Eck, Caballos, and Fernández 1996. Easily accessible in Potter and Damon 1999.

81 For Tacitus’ complex engagement with the document, see Woodman and Martin 1996, 114–18, and, amid his telling of “mirror story” of Germanicus and Piso in Annals 2 and 3, Damon 1999. More recently, Griffin 2009, 177–80.

82 Edition from Crawford 1996, no. 37, fr. a, lines 15–18: missus in transmarinas pro≥[vincias atque] in conformandis iis regnisque . . . ob rem p(ublicam) mortem obisset.

83 It is important to emphasize that while Tacitus could highlight discontinuities between the “old” Republic and the principate, many members of the early principate, including Velleius Paterculus, indexed continuities between the acts of the current princepsand those of leading Romans in the Republican period. See esp. Eder 2005; Gowing 2005, 34–48, and 2007; lobur 2008, 94–127.

5. EPIlOGUE: NEAR-EASTERN SEDUCTION BEFORE AND AFTER TACITUS

Tacitus’ discourse on Near-Eastern seduction was very much at home in the context of late Republican and early imperial Rome. Cicero’s criticism of Gabinius anticipated it, and apparently so did the written documents of the imperial Roman senate, many of which Tacitus consulted to formu-late his own historical work.79 Nearly a century before Tacitus wrote his Annals, a senatorial document provided a narrative of the “Germanicus affair” that emphasized the seduction of Near-Eastern slavery. This was the Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone patre, the inscribed senatorial decree that condemned Piso for slighting and even violating imperial majesty and inciting civil war after Germanicus’ death in Antioch.80 Although Tacitus consulted this document in order to fashion his own presentation of the quarrel between Germanicus and Piso, his version differs from that of the senatorial document in a significant way.81 While Tacitus presents both Germanicus and Piso as vulnerable to tyrannical ambition in the face of eastern servitude, the senatorial decree sanitizes Germanicus of such an inclination. In this sense, it mirrors the Tabula Siarensis, which depicts Germanicus as stabilizing “overseas provinces” and “kingdoms” and as “encountering death on behalf of the Republic.”82

In the senatorial decree against Piso, Piso alone is depicted as over-whelmed by the corrupting influence of Near-Eastern culture. Accord-ing to this senatorial document, which, unlike Tacitus, treats the Julio- Claudian principate as having legitimately restored the Republic,83 Piso had been corrupted (corruptus) by the great gifts of Vonones in ways that


84 S.C. de Cn. Pisone patre 45–46: eaq(ue) magnis muneribus Vononis corruptus fecerit.85 S.C. de Cn. Pisone patre 46–47: numine divi Aug(usti) virtutibusq(ue) Ti. Caesaris

Aug(usti) omnibus civilis belli sepultis malis. For the numerous charges against Piso, see generally 26–70. For the prevention of civil war as a point of emphasis in Julio-Claudian ideology and historiography of this era, see Potter 1999, 78–82.

86 Millar 1964, 38–39, and 167–70, discusses relevant dates.87 From Boissevain’s edition.

had prompted him to oppose Germanicus’ settlement in Armenia and to incite civil war.84 He had therefore threatened to disturb “the tranquility of the Republic’s present state” (tranquillitatem praesentis status r[ei] p[ublicae], 13–14). In such an environment, Piso’s unrestrained savagery and cruelty, as the document claimed, had prompted him, among other transgressions, to distribute money to his legions under his own name and not Caesar’s, to be insubordinate to the impeccably moderate Germanicus, and to incite civil war after his death. He had done so despite the fact that “all the evils of civil war had been buried by the power (numen) of the divine Augustus and the virtues of Tiberius Caesar Augustus.”85 Piso had therefore endangered “the Republic” that the imperial family sought to stabilize by exerting an unlawful usurpation of provincial power. The senatorial decree presents Piso alone as planting the seeds of civil war because of his vulnerability to Near-Eastern seduction and his auto-cratic disposition. Tacitus, by contrast, shapes a narrative that implicates Germanicus as well.

Such themes of Near-Eastern seduction persisted in the generations after Tacitus’ career. In the early third century, the Greek-speaking senator Cassius Dio composed his Roman history, a task which undoubtedly made Dio ponder the reign of Caligula and the inspiration for his tyrannical disposition.86 Dio’s narrative emphasizes the impact that Near-Eastern influences had exerted on Caligula’s depraved character, and his exami-nation of such influences virtually constitutes a concise summary of the perspective developed more broadly in Tacitus’ corpus (Dio Cass., 59.24.1):

οὐ µέντοι ταῦθ’ οὕτως αὐτοὺς ἐλύπει ὡς τὸ προσδοκᾶν ἐπὶ πλεῖον τήν τε ὠµότητα τὴν τοῦ Γαΐου καὶ τὴν ἀσέλγειαν αὐξήσειν, καὶ µάλισθ’ ὅτι ἐπυνθάνοντο τόν τε Ἀγρίππαν αὐτῶ καὶ τὸν Ἀντίοχον τοὺς βασιλέας ὥσπερ τινὰς τυραννοδιδασκάλους συνεῖναι.87

Nonetheless, these acts did not distress them [the people of Rome] so much as the expectation that the cruelty and wantonness of Gaius would increase even more, and especially because they were aware that the kings Agrippa (of Judaea) and Antiochus (of Commagene) were keeping company with him like a couple of tyrant teachers.


88 My contemplation of Tacitus’ works has benefited over time from the insights of David S. Potter. Its written form was vastly improved by the suggestions and critique of AJP’s anonymous readers. I thank Derick N. Alexandre for his very helpful comments. Much gratitude is also owed to the Department of the Classics at Harvard University and the Department of History at West Virginia University for making possible various stages of research and composition.

As Dio’s quotation suggests, this particular depraved emperor had not gone morally astray merely on his own accord or through his natural inclinations. He had fashioned his deranged disposition beneath the influ-ence of “tyrant teachers” (tyrannodidaskaloi), who were significantly of Near-Eastern origin. Tyrants over their local populations, Agrippa I and Antiochus IV were, as Dio hints, slaves to their passions and to Caligula himself, but it was through their slaving to him that they exerted their destabilizing potential. Their seduction fed the autocratic and despotic aspirations of Caligula, who became an undisguised tyrant and a slave to his own lusts. It would be intriguing to know what Tacitus had to say about these dynasts and their relationship to Caligula, but the vagaries of transmission have silenced Tacitus’ narrative of Caligula’s reign.88

uNiversity of oregoN

e-mail: [email protected]

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Seducing Autocracy: Tacitus and the Dynasts of the Near East

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