The Senate at Capri

In the twelfth year of his rule Tiberius left Rome and did not return. He went to Capri, an island of twelve miles’ circuit with no harbour worth the name, and from there he governed the world by letter. The letters were read in the senate by a quaestor. The senators listened, and voted, and sent their decrees back across the water, and in this way the commonwealth was conducted for eleven years between a man who would not be seen and an assembly that could not see him. Tacitus, who wrote the account, did not think it a convenience. He thought it the form that tyranny takes when it has grown tired of faces.

I set this down because the arrangement has been revived, with one alteration. The emperor has not gone to Capri. The citizens have.

Consider what a Roman meant by the business of the commonwealth. It was done standing up, in the open, within smell of other men. The senate met in a room that held some hundreds, close enough that a man’s colour could be seen to change, and it voted by a method that has no equivalent in any later age: the senators rose and walked, each to the side of the house whose opinion he shared. To vote was to cross a floor in front of one’s enemies. The Latin for it is to go on foot into an opinion, and the phrase preserved, long after the thing was lost, the knowledge that a judgment is a bodily act, that it costs something to be counted, and that the cost is paid in public. The people, for their part, met in the forum, where they shouted. The emperor who wished to know what Rome thought of him went to the theatre, and the theatre told him, in a roar he could not switch off, and more than one emperor left by a side door.

None of this was pleasant. The forum stank. The senate was full of cowards; Tacitus says so on nearly every page. But the cowardice had to be performed. A man who meant to betray the republic had to do it under the eyes of the men he was betraying, and had afterward to walk home past them, and the walk was the last residue of liberty when every other residue was gone. When the letter arrived from Capri that destroyed Sejanus, the senators who had fawned on him the day before were obliged to turn on him in his presence, and the historian records their faces. He records them because they could be recorded. There was a room, and they were in it.

Now consider the new arrangement. The business of the commonwealth, so far as any of it is still done by citizens, is done from private rooms behind drawn blinds, through a sheet of glass that shows each man a grid of other men who are also in private rooms. No one crosses a floor. The vote, where there is a vote, is a button, and the button records the opinion without the body that held it. No one is seen to change colour. No one need walk home past anyone. The room that the Caesars spent a century learning to intimidate, and finally to empty, has been dissolved without an edict, and the citizens who left it did not feel themselves driven out. They felt themselves spared the commute.

It is here that Tacitus has his one sentence to say, and it is the sentence for which he is remembered. When the Britons under Calgacus looked at what Rome had made of the north, he gave them the words: they make a solitude, and they call it peace. The new power has improved on the Romans in this as in much else. It did not have to make the solitude. The citizens made it for themselves, one by one, each for his own excellent reason, and they call it flexibility.

What follows for power is plain, and the Roman case shows it exactly. The prince who ruled from Capri did not lose authority by his absence; he gained it. A face can be read, and a man who can be read can be opposed, because his fear shows, and the knowledge that the tyrant is afraid is the beginning of every resistance that has ever succeeded. A letter has no face. It arrives finished. Tiberius, who in the senate house had been hesitant, obscure, and twice nearly voted down, became from the island a voice without hesitation, because hesitation does not survive the crossing. The senators, for their part, lost the one instrument they had retained, which was to look at him. They could no longer see whether the request was a request. So they treated every letter as a command, which is what a frightened assembly does with any communication it cannot interrogate, and the historian’s verdict on them is the verdict on every body that has consented to be governed through glass: they rushed into servitude, and the more distinguished the man, the more false and the more hurried.

What follows for courage is worse, because courage is the one virtue that cannot exist in private. Thrasea Paetus, when Nero’s letter was read excusing the murder of his mother, rose and walked out of the senate. Tacitus says that he brought danger upon himself without bringing liberty to the rest, and the judgment is severe, but observe what made the act possible. There was a floor to walk across and a door to go out of and a hundred men to watch him do it and report it by nightfall across the city. The act was the walking. Remove the room and the act is not forbidden; it is abolished, because there is nothing left for it to consist of. A man who leaves a meeting conducted through glass does not walk out. He is simply no longer among the small pictures, and no one is sure whether he left in protest or because his connection failed, and the question is not asked, and the meeting proceeds. Courage requires a witness as fire requires air. The new arrangement has not made men cowards. It has removed the element in which the distinction between courage and cowardice could be observed, and a virtue that cannot be observed is soon not practised, and then not remembered, and the Romans had a word for the years in which men lost the use of their voices and would have lost their memory too if forgetting had been as much in their power as silence.

And what follows for tyranny is the bitterest thing of all, and it is the thing that most needs naming. The praetorian guard was concentrated in a single camp in the reign of Tiberius so that the soldiers might see their own numbers and the city might see them too. This was understood as the instrument of the new order. It was expensive. The cohorts had to be paid and flattered and occasionally purged, and in the end they made and unmade emperors as they pleased, so that the instrument of tyranny became its master. The new order has no such difficulty. It has discovered that a man who has placed himself under house arrest does not need to be guarded. He needs to be supplied. The grain that Augustus used to buy the people is brought to the door now by a courier whom no one sees, and the spectacles that Augustus used to distract them are delivered through the same glass sheet by which the commonwealth is conducted, so that a citizen may pass from his work to his bread to his games without once encountering another body, and may call this, as the Romans called it, the sweetness of leisure. Tacitus has the phrase. The first prince, he says, won over the soldiers with gifts, the people with grain, and all men with the sweetness of leisure. He did not need to add that the leisure was the price.

I do not say that there is a tyrant. The Roman evidence does not require one. Tacitus is careful to show that the republic had been dead for a generation before anyone noticed, that the names of the magistracies were all preserved, that the consuls were still elected and the senate still met and the laws were still passed, and that under these same forms the whole substance of self-government had drained away into one house on the Palatine, because the citizens, exhausted by the civil wars, preferred the safety of the present to the dangers of the past. There was no night on which liberty was taken. There was a long afternoon on which it was not used, and then a morning on which no one could remember how. Whoever eventually sat in the house on the Palatine found the work already done.

That is the pattern, and it is the whole of my argument. The republic did not fall to an army at the gates. There was no army and there were no gates. It dissolved in the silence of comfortable rooms, where men who still called themselves senators waited for the next letter from the island, and found that the waiting suited them, and told each other that the arrangement was in any case more efficient than the old one, in which a man had to put on his toga and walk to the curia in the heat and look his colleagues in the face. They were right. It was more efficient. Tacitus wrote the history of what it was efficient at.

Agricola, the historian says of his father-in-law, was fortunate in the hour of his death, because he did not live to see the senate house surrounded by soldiers. The sentence has been admired for eighteen centuries as the summit of grief under restraint. I find I cannot read it now without the adjustment the age requires. Agricola did not live to see the senate house surrounded. We shall not live to see it surrounded either. There will be no need. It will be found one morning to be empty, with the blinds drawn in every house in the city, and the citizens within, each at his own glass, each receiving his bread and his spectacles and his instructions, each perfectly free, each perfectly safe, and not one of them able to say, when the question is at last put, in what year the republic ended, or who was in the room.