Deline argues that Tacitus errs when he describes the charges brought by the Emperor Tiberius against his daughter-in-law Agrippina and her eldest son Nero in a.d. 27 and a.d. 29.Footnote ¹ According to Tacitus (Ann. 4.67.4), even though Agrippina and Nero had rejected the advice of those who had advised them to flee to the protection of the armies in Germany or to embrace the statue of the deified Augustus in the forum and call upon the people and Senate for protection, they were nevertheless charged with accepting this advice—that is, planning to do these things—in a.d. 27. However, the result of these first charges, established from other sources but not stated by Tacitus, was that Agrippina and Nero were placed under house arrest, probably in a villa at Herculaneum in the case of Agrippina, and soldiers were assigned to watch them and report on their behaviour.Footnote ² Then, immediately after his mother Livia had died in a.d. 29, Tiberius accused Agrippina of arrogance and defiance and Nero of unchastity and affairs with young men, or so Tacitus claims (Ann. 5.3.2). The result was that, as revealed by Suetonius but not by the surviving text of Tacitus’ work, they were exiled to the islands of Pandateria and Pontias respectively.Footnote ³ As Deline argues, however, the order of charges has almost certainly been reversed, and Agrippina and Nero were subjected to the lesser, moral charges not in a.d. 29 but in a.d. 27, and to the more serious, political charges not in a.d. 27 but in a.d. 29. Deline’s argument rests on common sense, namely the assumption that the more serious offences ought to have incurred the more serious punishments, other minor inconsistencies within Tacitus’ own evidence, and the evidence of a variety of other ancient sources in contradiction of Tacitus’ evidence.Footnote ⁴ The problem lies then in explaining why Tacitus should have erred so badly in this way.

Deline’s attempt to explain why Tacitus should have erred so badly in this matter is less thorough and convincing than her proofs of the ‘error’ itself, if that is what it really was. She claims that the ‘heart of the error’ lies in the letter containing the charges against Agrippina and Nero that Tiberius allegedly sent to the Senate immediately after the death of Livia in a.d. 29.Footnote ⁵ She suggests that Tacitus has misdated this letter to a.d. 29 rather than to a.d. 27. However, she does not explain why he should have done this. After all, this letter ought to have borne a date, and Tacitus ought to have seen this date if he had consulted the original letter in the senatorial archive. If, on the other hand, he did not consult the original letter in the senatorial archive but derived his information concerning it from some earlier historical work, then the question becomes instead why this earlier author should have made so serious an error. One merely transfers the problem a stage back in time.

More importantly, this approach to the problem ignores the complexity of the overall problem. Even if Tacitus had accidentally misdated this letter to a.d. 29, the same source for his knowledge of this letter ought also to have preserved information concerning the real nature of the charges brought against Agrippina and Nero in a.d. 29, presumably a letter that Tiberius really had sent to the Senate in a.d. 29, since his absence on the island of Capri meant that this was his normal method of communicating his wishes to the Senate. Hence, Tacitus ought to have discovered copies of two letters, or reports about two letters, in his source, and this very fact ought to have alerted him to the existence of a problem when, for whatever reason, both had seemed to refer to the same event and date despite their different contents. In other words, his source for the letter which he refers to a.d. 29, whether the senatorial archive or an earlier literary account, ought to have been capable of self-correcting in this case.

Next, one notes that Tacitus ought to have had a large variety of sources available to him concerning so important a topic as the various charges brought against both Agrippina and Nero before their eventual deaths. For example, he cites the memoirs of Agrippina the Younger, daughter of the Agrippina under discussion here, when describing the refusal of Tiberius to let her mother remarry in a.d. 26 (Ann. 4.53), and does so to make the point that earlier historians had not recorded this event. In other words, he had multiple sources for this period of Tiberius’ reign, and they ought to have acted to correct one another on so important an issue. He did not need to rely on the self-correcting ability of a single source, no matter how good this source. Furthermore, if he had noticed some contradiction between these sources, but had not been sure what to do about this, there is a reasonable possibility that he would then have drawn attention to this fact. This is what he did, for example, when discussing the nature of the relations between Agrippina the Younger and her son the Emperor Nero before the latter killed her in a.d. 59, concerning which his two main sources disagreed whether Agrippina had seduced Nero or Nero Agrippina (Ann. 14.2).

Finally, Deline’s attempt to explain Tacitus’ reversal of the sequence of the charges against Agrippina and Nero between a.d. 27 and a.d. 29 does not pay proper attention to the fact that Tacitus makes two ‘errors’ in his treatment of these charges. Not only does he reverse the sequence of these charges, he also misdates the charges against Agrippina and Nero in a.d. 29 in relation to the death of Livia in the same year, as Deline herself argues.Footnote ⁶ For while he emphasizes that Tiberius had waited until after the death of Livia to lay the charges against Agrippina and Nero in that year, the cumulative evidence of Velleius Paterculus, Pliny and Suetonius place it beyond doubt that Tiberius had really brought the final charges against them before the death of Livia.Footnote ⁷ Hence, there are two problems to be resolved here, not one.

While it is not impossible that an author may make two independent ‘errors’ in this fashion, it is natural to enquire whether these ‘errors’ may be more closely related in origin than appears at first sight. The key question here is what effect each ‘error’ has on the overall understanding of the material by the reader. In this case, the effect of dating the charges against Agrippina and Nero in a.d. 29 to after the death of Livia allows Tacitus to argue that Livia had prevented Tiberius from bringing these charges against them before her death. In this way, he attacks both the reputation of Tiberius by depicting him as a man who was too weak-willed to prevent his mother from interfering in political affairs and the reputation of Livia by depicting her as a woman who had acted in an improper way for a woman by interfering in political affairs and had continued to do so even to the point of her death. As for the effect of re-dating the most serious charges to a.d. 27 and the less serious charges to a.d. 29, this acts to reinforce the idea that Tiberius had been dominated by his mother in this way before her death. After all, someone or something must have exercised extraordinary control over the emperor who had punished his daughter-in-law and grandson so severely on such insubstantial grounds in a.d. 29 that he had only subjected them to a relatively minor punishment on much more serious charges in a.d. 27, or so the reader is meant to think. The contrast in the treatment of Agrippina and Nero on these two occasions forces the reader to ask what had happened in the meantime to cause this change in behaviour, and the answer, as supplied by Tacitus, is that Livia had died. Hence, the effects of the two ‘errors’ reinforce each other in the depiction of Tiberius as a man who had been greatly controlled by his mother Livia.Footnote ⁸

It is necessary next to enquire what Tacitus’ attitude was both to the involvement of women in political affairs more generally and to the behaviour of Livia in particular. The answer is that he was strongly critical of attempts by any woman either to participate in military and political affairs or to exercise any influence over the emperor, whatever her precise relationship with him, whether wife, mother, sister or daughter.Footnote ⁹ As for his attitude towards Livia, it is overwhelmingly negative, as demonstrated by his frequent description of aspects of her behaviour that could only have harmed her general reputation. For example, he did not hide her initial concealment of the death of Augustus in order to secure the undisputed succession of her son, even if this inevitably encouraged the reader to compare her to the villainous Tanaquil of early Roman mythology, unlike Velleius Paterculus who chose to pass discretely over her role in the succession.Footnote ¹⁰ The fact that some of his accusations against her were probably true does not lessen their negative impact, or his malicious intent in recording these.Footnote ¹¹ He also displays an eagerness to malign her reputation, as in his repeated characterization of her as a nouerca (‘stepmother’) to invoke a comparison of her to the stock evil stepmother of Roman literature.Footnote ¹²

The facts that the two ‘errors’ under discussion reinforce each other’s effect on the mind of the reader and that this effect, the depiction of the behaviour and character of Livia in a negative light, is consistent with the prejudice against her that Tacitus has already displayed throughout his text until this point, suggest that these ‘errors’ are not ‘errors’ at all. Instead, they are literary devices that have been used to further damage the reputation of Livia. This is not to deny that Tacitus can sometimes make honest mistakes in minor matters or mislead his reader in some minor aspect of a matter that he is passing over quickly.Footnote ¹³ For example, it does not matter much that he appears to date an earthquake in Campania to a.d. 62 (Ann. 15.22), although Seneca confirms that it actually occurred on 5 February a.d. 63 (QNat. 6.1), in a context where he is interested only in the ominous significance of this event rather than in its precise date and mentions it in passing as just one among several ominous events at about this time. However, the complexity of the ‘error’ involving the reversal of the sequence of charges against leading members of the imperial family in a.d. 27 and a.d. 29, where the events surrounding these charges are described at length, renders it a very different phenomenon. Furthermore, the consistency of this ‘error’ with Tacitus’ strong bias against Livia suggests that he is personally responsible for it rather than that he has merely taken it over from an earlier source.Footnote ¹⁴ Hence, the two ‘errors’ discussed here are not genuine mistakes by Tacitus, but represent one last twist of the knife in his campaign of vilification against Livia, while also flattering his judgement by confirming the accuracy of his prior observation during his formal obituary for her (Ann. 5.1.3) that she had been a mater impotens ‘overbearing mother’.Footnote ¹⁵