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It's neither condescending nor facile to treat ancient historians with as much caution as modern ones. Apart from the fact that Suetonius (like Tacitus) was writing almost a hundred years after the lifetime of Tiberius, and the question of exactly how either of them could be expected to know what the reclusive emperor got up to on his island retreat, Suetonius' portrait of Tiberius on Capri accords too neatly with the literary conventions of the 'bad emperor,' whose lack of control over his own desires is symptomatic of his inability to control the state. There is undoubtedly a polemic at work (in different ways) in the writings of both historians, connected with their social class and the ongoing tension between the princeps and the senatorial elite. I think it is 'facile' to take either Suetonius or Tacitus at face-value, and I'm pretty sure that their Roman readers would not have done so. In the Tacitus passage you quote, for instance, what strikes me as significant is that the Emperor feels himself at liberty to treat free-born children - the children of the Roman senatorial class - in a manner appropriate to the treatment of slaves. This is part of a polemic about the enslavement and oppression of Rome's hereditary elite, not really about Tiberius' sex-life at all. Of course, some of these stories might be true. It's not impossible that they all are. We have no way of knowing, though in a world where fanciful rumours about our leaders' sex-lives circulate wildly despite technologies that allow us to be much better-informed than the Romans were, I think it pays to be cautious. And I also think we are not imposing modern preconceptions on the past if we treat Roman history as a literary genre rather than an attempt to provide an objective account of past events in the style of the nineteenth-century positivists. At any rate, the only thing we can be certain about is that both Suetonius and Tacitus disapproved of the sexual antics they attributed to Tacitus, and thought that this was conduct gravely unbecoming of an emperor. Why they thought this is, in my view, a much more interesting and productive question than trying to figure out whether Tiberius really was a randy old goat after all. |