A stolen urn of ashes, a whispering campaign and two hired traitors: the forgotten crime story of Tiberius’s early reign.
In AD 16 a runaway slave carrying his dead master’s ashes grew a beard, took his master’s name and brought Rome to the edge of civil war. Tiberius answered with two hired traitors, a gag and a locked room on the Palatine.
In the summer of AD 14 the only surviving grandson of Augustus was killed on a small island off the Tuscan coast, quickly and without explanation. Two years later he seemed to come back. Rumours ran through the towns of Italy that Agrippa Postumus had escaped his murderers by the favour of the gods, crowds gathered to greet him at Ostia, and secret meetings were held in Rome itself. The man they were cheering was a slave named Clemens, who had stolen his master’s ashes and his master’s face. Tiberius, the new emperor, never put him on trial. He had him kidnapped at night, interrogated in the palace and killed where nobody could see.
This is the sixth instalment of our True Crime: Ancient Rome series. It began with the murder of Pedanius Secundus and the slaughter of his household, went back to the poison ring of 331 BC, then followed Cicero into the parricide trial of Sextus Roscius and the priests into the case of the Vestal Marcia. Those were all stories about courts. This one is about a crime the state preferred to keep out of court altogether.
The Grandson Nobody Wanted
To understand why a slave could frighten an emperor, you have to start with the man he pretended to be.
Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa Postumus was born in 12 BC, after the death of his father, Marcus Agrippa, the general who had won Augustus his wars. That is what Postumus means: born after the father’s death. His mother was Julia, the only child of Augustus. In AD 4, after the deaths of his elder brothers Gaius and Lucius, Augustus adopted him as a son on the same day he adopted his stepson Tiberius. On paper the young man was now both the emperor’s grandson and the emperor’s son, with Augustus’s blood in his veins, which Tiberius could never claim.
It did not last. Within a few years Postumus was disgraced and sent into exile, and in AD 7 a decree of the Senate made the banishment permanent. He ended up on Planasia, today’s Pianosa, a low, flat island south-west of Elba. The historian Tacitus, writing about a century later, describes him with a cold double edge: a youth without any of the good qualities, stupidly violent in his physical strength, but never convicted of any actual crime. In the Latin, rudem sane bonarum artium et robore corporis stolide ferocem, nullius tamen flagitii conpertum (Annals 1.3). Tacitus places the blame squarely on Augustus’s wife Livia, who, he says, had gained such a hold on her aging husband that he threw his only grandson onto an island to clear the road for her own son.
Then came a rumour that would matter a great deal. A few months before his death, so the story went, Augustus had secretly sailed to Planasia with a single trusted companion, Fabius Maximus, and there had been tears and embraces, and a hope that the young man would be brought home. Tacitus reports this only as something people said (Annals 1.5), and he never confirms it. But it planted an idea in Roman heads: the old emperor had forgiven his grandson, and somebody had made sure the forgiveness came to nothing.
The First Crime of the New Reign
Augustus died at Nola, in Campania, on 19 August AD 14. Postumus did not survive him by long. Tacitus opens his account of the new reign with a sentence that reads like a charge sheet:
Primum facinus novi principatus fuit Postumi Agrippae caedes.
“The first crime of the new reign was the murder of Postumus Agrippa” (Annals 1.6, trans. Church and Brodribb).
A centurion did the work. The young man was surprised and unarmed, and even so, Tacitus notes, the soldier had trouble finishing him. When the centurion came to report, in the military formula, that his orders had been carried out, Tiberius replied that he had given no such orders and that the matter would have to be accounted for before the Senate. It never was. The written order had been sent to the tribune guarding the prisoner by Gaius Sallustius Crispus, a powerful equestrian who stood in the shadows of the court, the great-nephew and adopted son of the historian Sallust. Frightened that he would be made the scapegoat, Crispus went to Livia and warned her that the secrets of the household and the services of the soldiers must not be dragged into public, and that an empire could only be run if accounts were rendered to one man alone (Annals 1.6).
The biographer Suetonius tells the same story with the same doubt. Postumus was killed by the tribune commanding his guard after reading a written order, and nobody could say whether Augustus had left it on his deathbed, or Livia had issued it in his name, with or without Tiberius knowing. Tiberius disowned it and, in Suetonius’s words, “the affair was soon buried in silence” (Tiberius 22, trans. Thomson).
So by the autumn of AD 14 the situation was this. The grandson of Augustus was dead, nobody would admit to having ordered his death, there had been no public inquiry, and the body was ashes on an island. It was the perfect setting for a ghost.
A Slave With a Plan
Tacitus places what follows in AD 16, and he introduces it as a near catastrophe:
Eodem anno mancipii unius audacia, ni mature subventum foret, discordiis armisque civilibus rem publicam perculisset.
“That same year the daring of a single slave, had it not been promptly checked, would have ruined the State by discord and civil war” (Annals 2.39, trans. Church and Brodribb).
The word Tacitus chooses is mancipium, a piece of property, the bluntest word Latin had for a slave. The slave’s name was Clemens, and he belonged to Postumus. When he learned that Augustus was dead, he formed what Tacitus calls a plan non servili animo, a plan no slave’s mind should have conceived: to sail to Planasia, carry off his master by trick or by force, and take him to the legions on the Rhine.
The idea was not mad. In the autumn of AD 14 the armies of Germany were in open mutiny, and some of the soldiers were shouting that their commander Germanicus should take the empire for himself. A grandson of Augustus turning up in their camp could have lit a war. Clemens never got there. His plan was ruined by something entirely ordinary: the merchant ship he was travelling on was too slow. By the time he arrived, Postumus was already dead.
Ashes, Hair and a Beard
What Clemens did next is the strangest detail in the whole story. Tacitus says that he turned to “a greater and more hazardous enterprise”, stole the ashes of the dead man (furatur cineres), and sailed to Cosa, a promontory on the coast of Etruria. There he hid in remote places until his hair and beard had grown long.
The reason is given in one short clause: nam aetate et forma haud dissimili in dominum erat, “in age and figure he was not unlike his master”. Clemens had been close enough to Postumus to pass for him at a distance, and the long hair and beard did the rest. A bearded man in mourning, keeping out of sight, could be anybody, and a grandson of Augustus who had just escaped assassination would be expected to look rough.
Why the ashes? Tacitus does not say, and the ancient sources never explain it. Perhaps Clemens wanted to prevent anyone from producing the remains as proof that Postumus was dead. Perhaps it was an act of loyalty to a master he had tried to rescue. What is certain is that the false prince began his career by making sure the real one could not be found.
How to Build a Rumour
Clemens then ran what was, in effect, a carefully managed information campaign. Through trusted agents who shared his secret, word began to spread that Agrippa was alive. Tacitus describes the process with the precision of someone who had watched rumours work in Roman politics all his life: first in hidden conversations, “as is usual with forbidden topics”, then in vague talk that reached the ready ears of the most ignorant, and of the restless who wanted change.
Clemens himself moved from town to town at dusk. He never showed himself openly and never stayed long in one place. Tacitus explains why in one of his most quoted lines:
quia veritas visu et mora, falsa festinatione et incertis valescunt
“truth gains strength by notoriety and time, falsehood by precipitancy and vagueness” (Annals 2.39, trans. Church and Brodribb).
More literally, truth grows strong by being seen and by the passing of time, while lies grow strong through haste and uncertainty. Clemens understood that a close look and a long conversation would expose him. So he arrived just after the story of his coming, or left just before people could examine him, and let the rumour do the talking.
It worked. The story spread through Italy that Agrippa had been saved munere deum, by the gift of the gods, and in Rome it was believed. Note what was being claimed: the people did not think a dead man had risen. They thought the murder had failed, and that the grandson of Augustus had survived the attempt on his life.
Crowds at Ostia
The movement reached its peak at Ostia, the port at the mouth of the Tiber through which Rome received its grain and its ships. (Its ruins are still yielding surprises, such as a monumental 4th-century episcopal church uncovered there this year.) When Clemens arrived there, Tacitus says, multitudo ingens, an enormous crowd, gathered around him, while in Rome itself there were secret meetings, clandestini coetus, in his support. The sources give no figure for his followers. They speak only of a vast concourse and of support across Italy.
The other two ancient accounts add their own versions. Cassius Dio, writing in Greek in the early third century, tells a larger story: Clemens went first to Gaul and won many followers there, then many more in Italy, “and finally he marched upon Rome with the avowed intention of recovering the dominion of his grandfather”. In Dio, “the population of the city became excited at this, and not a few joined his cause” (Roman History 57.16, trans. Cary). Suetonius, more briefly, says that “a slave of Agrippa’s, Clemens by name, had drawn together a considerable force to revenge his master’s death” (Tiberius 25, trans. Thomson). The Latin is non contemnendam manum, a band not to be despised.
The three writers disagree on the route and the size, and Dio’s march on Rome and his Gallic detour appear in no other source. But all three agree on the essential point. For a while, a slave pretending to be a dead prince had a real following, and the government was worried.
An Emperor Who Could Not Decide
Tiberius had only been in power for two years, and his position was not as solid as it would later look. Suetonius places Clemens in a list of the dangers that made the new emperor hesitate to accept power at all: the slave gathering men to avenge his master, a young nobleman named Libo secretly plotting, and the mutinies of the legions in Illyricum and Germany. It was at this time, Suetonius says, that Tiberius often remarked that he was “holding a wolf by the ears” (Tiberius 25).
Tacitus shows him paralysed. Should he crush “this slave of his” with soldiers, or wait for a foolish credulity to fade away on its own? modo nihil spernendum, modo non omnia metuenda: at one moment he thought nothing should be ignored, at the next that not everything was worth fearing, torn, in Tacitus’s words, “between shame and terror”.
Both halves of the dilemma were real. Sending troops against a crowd that believed it was greeting the grandson of Augustus would look like a second murder of the same young man, and it would make the pretender far more important than he was. Doing nothing risked letting the movement grow. In the end Tiberius chose a third way, and he gave the job to the one man who already knew exactly what had happened on Planasia.
The Sting
He handed the affair to Sallustius Crispus, the same courtier who had sent the written order for the death of the real Postumus.
Crispus picked two of his own clients (Tacitus adds that some said they were soldiers) and instructed them to approach Clemens as fellow conspirators, offering money and promising loyalty and a share in the danger. They did as they were told. Then, having watched for a night when the pretender was unguarded, they brought a sufficient force, seized him, tied him up, gagged him and dragged him to the Palatine:
dein speculati noctem incustoditam, accepta idonea manu, vinctum clauso ore in Palatium traxere.
“Then, waiting for an unguarded hour of night, they took with them a sufficient force, and having bound and gagged him, dragged him to the palace” (Annals 2.40, trans. Church and Brodribb).
Suetonius compresses all this into three words, fraude deceptum redegit: Tiberius “got Clemens into his hands by stratagem”. Dio says much the same, that Tiberius caught him “by a ruse with the aid of some persons who pretended to sympathize with the upstart”.
No court, no accusation, no witnesses. The whole operation took place outside the law, conducted by private agents of a private adviser, and it ended inside the emperor’s house.
“As You Became Caesar”
What happened in the palace produced one of the most famous lines in Roman history. Tiberius questioned the prisoner himself. Dio says he had him tortured first, to find out who his accomplices were. Then he asked how he had become Agrippa. The answer, as Tacitus reports it, was four words of Latin:
percontanti Tiberio quo modo Agrippa factus esset respondisse fertur “quo modo tu Caesar.”
“When Tiberius asked him how he had become Agrippa, he is said to have replied, ‘As you became Caesar'” (Annals 2.40, trans. Church and Brodribb).
Dio gives the same exchange in Greek: “How did you come to be Agrippa?” “In the same way as you came to be Caesar” (Roman History 57.16, trans. Cary).
The insult works on more than one level. Tiberius was not a Caesar by birth. He was a Claudius who had become a Julius Caesar by adoption, a legal transformation of name and identity, just as Clemens had become Agrippa by changing his appearance and his name. And the road that had made Tiberius emperor ran directly through the corpse of the man Clemens was impersonating. A slave was telling the emperor, in his own palace, that they were both impostors, and that the difference between them was only that one of them had won.
Tacitus is careful to write fertur, “he is said to have replied”. Nobody outside that room could have heard it, and the line may have been improved in the retelling. But it survived in two independent historians, which means Romans found it worth repeating, and probably found it true in the sense that mattered.
Killed in Secret
Clemens could not be made to name his accomplices. Tiberius, Tacitus writes, “did not venture on a public execution” (nec Tiberius poenam eius palam ausus), and ordered him to be killed in a hidden part of the Palatine and his body carried away in secret.
The verb is revealing: ausus, he did not dare. An emperor who could order the death of any Roman did not dare to let the city watch this one die. A public execution would have meant a public charge, and a public charge would have meant saying aloud who Clemens claimed to be and why so many people had believed him.
Then comes the last sentence of the episode, perhaps the most disturbing of all:
et quamquam multi e domo principis equitesque ac senatores sustentasse opibus, iuvisse consiliis dicerentur, haud quaesitum.
“And although many of the emperor’s household and knights and senators were said to have supported him with their wealth and helped him with their counsels, no inquiry was made” (Annals 2.40, trans. Church and Brodribb).
A slave who had nearly started a civil war had backers inside the imperial household, among the equestrians and in the Senate. And nobody looked for them. The investigation that should have followed the arrest simply never happened.
Two Secret Killings, One Fixer
Read as a crime story, the case of Clemens has an unusual shape. It contains two homicides, two years apart, and they mirror each other.
In AD 14 a prisoner on an island was killed by a soldier on a written order that nobody would own, and the emperor announced an inquiry that never took place. In AD 16 a prisoner in the palace was killed by unnamed hands on the emperor’s direct order, and an inquiry that should have taken place was never opened. Both times the man in the background was Sallustius Crispus. Both times the body disappeared. And both times the victim, real or false, was a grandson of Augustus.
Seen this way, the false Agrippa was not just a fraud. He was a living accusation. Every time a crowd shouted that Postumus had been saved by the gods, it was also saying that someone had tried to kill him, and asking who. Clemens’s real offence was to keep that question in the streets. Tiberius’s answer was to make the question disappear along with the man.
Why no inquiry into the supporters? Tacitus does not say, and modern readers can only guess. Investigating knights and senators would have meant a trial, and a trial would have meant testimony about Planasia, about written orders and about who had wanted Postumus dead. It was safer for the regime to let the accomplices go than to let them talk.
What Was the Crime?
A modern court would have plenty to charge Clemens with: theft of human remains, impersonation, conspiracy, sedition. Rome would have added the gravest offence of all for a slave, a rebellion against the order of society by someone who was legally property. Yet he was never charged with anything, because he was never tried.
That is what makes this a true crime story with an inverted shape. The most clearly criminal acts in it, the killing of a defenceless prisoner on Planasia and the extrajudicial execution of another in the palace, were carried out by the state. The impostor’s own crimes were, in the end, the ones nobody was allowed to describe in public.
The case also shows how the early Principate actually worked. Augustus had built a system that pretended to be the old Republic, with consuls, a Senate and courts. Behind it there was a household, and inside the household were men like Sallustius Crispus, who held no senatorial office at all and yet, Tacitus says in his obituary of him, surpassed in power many who had won triumphs and consulships (Annals 3.30). His advice to Livia in AD 14, that accounts could only be balanced if they were rendered to one man, could serve as the motto of the whole affair.
Who Was Clemens?
Of the impostor himself we know almost nothing beyond what Tacitus tells us. He belonged to Postumus, he was close to him in age and looks, he was loyal enough to try a rescue and bold enough to try something much bigger, and he would not betray his friends under interrogation.
Modern scholars have tried to find a trace of him elsewhere. The historian Meyer Reinhold pointed to a local magistrate recorded at Verona of 1 BC called Sextus Vipsanius Clemens, son of a Marcus Vipsanius, which raised the possibility of a link with the household of Agrippa. Others have urged caution. Anthony Barrett argues the two men should not be assumed to be connected, and Ralf Scharf points out that Clemens was simply too common a name to prove anything.
The story did have one remarkable afterlife. In his novel I, Claudius (1934), Robert Graves suggested that the man captured in AD 16 was not an impostor at all, but the real Postumus, who had escaped the assassins. No ancient source supports this, and Tacitus is clear that Postumus died in AD 14. But it is a measure of how well Clemens played his part that, nineteen centuries later, a novelist could still wonder whether the slave had been telling the truth.
Epilogue
The case of Clemens shares something with the other episodes in this series. In the Pedanius Secundus affair, the state answered one slave’s crime by killing four hundred. In the trial of the Vestals, Rome widened the circle of punishment to quiet public fear. Here the reaction went the other way. The circle of guilt was deliberately kept as small as possible: one slave, one locked room, one body taken out by night. Everyone else who had funded and advised him, inside the palace and in the Senate, walked away.
A slave told the emperor that he had become Agrippa the same way Tiberius had become Caesar. The emperor’s reply was to make sure nobody else would ever hear him say it. Tacitus heard it anyway, and wrote it down.
Sources: Tacitus, Annals 1.3, 1.5-6, 2.39-40 and 3.30 (Latin text ed. C. D. Fisher, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1906; English translation by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, 1876, both via the Perseus Digital Library); Suetonius, Life of Tiberius 22 and 25 (translation by Alexander Thomson, ed. J. Eugene Reed, via the Perseus Digital Library); Cassius Dio, Roman History 57.16 (translation by Earnest Cary, Loeb Classical Library, 1924, via Lexundria); Meyer Reinhold, Marcus Agrippa (1933); Anthony A. Barrett, Livia: First Lady of Imperial Rome (Yale University Press, 2002); Ralf Scharf, Agrippa Postumus: Splitter einer historischen Figur (2001); Wikipedia, “Clemens (impostor)” and “Agrippa Postumus”.
Featured image: Ancientrome.ru
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