Tiberius the Capricious

In Memoriam Ed. Champlin In this article, I argue that fictional stories about the Roman emperor are a fruitful avenue for excavating a multifaceted discourse about the sole ruler of the Roman world, who, in this case, is Tiberius. Edward Champlin, who worked on anecdotes about Tiberius in the last decade or so, attributes these negative impressions of the emperors to the pen of a single author (i.e. M. Servilius Nonianus). This argument, I argue, sells the wider meaning of these stories short. The anecdotes themselves are windows into a wider discourse about how the emperor seemed to his subjects. Fictitious or true, such stories inform imaginations about who Tiberius was seen to be, which make these the stories historically relevant. We must both embrace these stories as relevant historical evidence for how Roman emperors were scrutinized and criticized and recognize them as a crucial part of Roman understandings of who the emperor was.