An Emperor, A Fisherman and a Crab

There are some days when you wonder why you even bothered to get out of bed. Times when you try to do the right thing only for it to fail, or occasions where a simple attempt at kindness, results in a huge fish being rubbed all over your face.

Bust of Tiberius fromThe British Museum

Tiberius Caesar Divi Augusti Filus Augustus was the second Emperor/Princeps of Rome and the cruelty and capricious nature of the later years of his rule, are what have come to define his time in power. The Step-son of Augustus after his mother Livia married him, Tiberius was a faithful, if not occasionally reluctant lieutenant of the burgeoning Roman Empire and to Augustus. Inheriting power in 14 AD after Augustus' death, his rule was marked with events like the controversial death of the beloved Germanicus, and tiring of the politics of Rome he retired to Capri.

"Yet conceived so intense a loathing for the municipalities, the colonies, and all things situated on the mainland, that he vanished into the Isle of Capreae"

Tacitus Annals Book 4 Chapter 67

It is during his time on the island, in his palace on the cliffs that many of his debauched and depraved activities are recorded. The swimming in pools with small children he named "minnows" nibbling at him, the throwing of guilty men from the cliffs to be beaten with paddles as they fell and finished off if they survived and many more are recorded. 

"When the restraints of shame and fear were gone, and nothing remained but to follow his own bent, he plunged impartially into crime and ignominy"

Tacitus Annals Book 6 Chapter 51

A possible apocryphal tale from Suetonius tells the tales of an unfortunate man who tried to present the gift of a large mullet he had caught to the Princeps. Suetonius was a historian from nearly a hundred years after the time of Tiberius during the reign of the Emperor Domitian, and his Twelve Caesar's is one of the main sources we have for the period, especially wonderful for its particular focus on gossip, hearsay and tall tales. 

"A fisherman appeared unexpectedly and offered him a huge mullet; whereupon in his alarm that the man had clambered up to him from the back of the island over rough and pathless rocks, he had the poor fellow's face scrubbed with the fish"

Suetonius The Life of Tiberius Chapter 60

There are several things remarkable about this tale. Firstly that the old client system of presenting yourself to your patron no longer applied to the Emperor, arguably a patron to the whole empire. The Emperor was no longer an approachable man, He was hidden by guards and gates from the very people he patronised. 

Secondly that the power of the Princeps had grown in under a hundred years to the point where he could command that someone be tortured with a fish and it happened with the fisherman being ex-foliated with a fish being able to do nothing about it.

Tiberius' Villa on Capri

"And because in the midst of his torture the man thanked his stars that he had not given the Emperor an enormous crab that he had caught, Tiberius had his face torn with the Crab also"

Suetonius The Life of Tiberius Chapter 60

The tale of the the fisherman is perhaps a warning to us all then, to not merely present ourselves to an Emperor. However, it shows an Empire in evolution. Clearly the fisherman of the tale still viewed himself in a world where the client/patron system was working, where he could merely arrive at the house of the Princep and give him a gift. But by this time, the subtle consolidating of power through the control of access was already being established. 

At this point in the early empire was the Princeps already seeing himself as a "king", higher and more important than those he ruled, even if his kingdom covered the whole of the Mediterranean? Unfortunately for our brave fisherman, Tiberius, through either superiority or paranoia was not the sort of Emperor you could walk up to with a fish. Let alone a crab. 

Thanks for Reading

James