This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Tiberius was 55 years old when he became the second Roman emperor. He ruled from AD 14 to 37, spending most of the second half of his reign on the island of Capri, where he never lost his grip on power despite being over 130 miles from Rome. 

Like most bureaucratic administrators, he was far from popular. Tacitus (AD 56–120), the greatest of all Roman historians, presents Tiberius as paranoid, ruthlessly cruel, and pathologically unable to say what he meant. The imperial biographer Suetonius (69–122) completes the Tacitean picture of a dour, charmless pervert, miserable even in his increasingly sordid pleasures. 

Not all writers are quite so hostile to Tiberius: since the Enlightenment he has won qualified praise from thinkers including Montesquieu and Voltaire, who have often been willing to overlook at least some of his vices. The great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote in 1825: “The more I read Tacitus, the more I come to like Tiberius. He was one of the greatest administrative minds of antiquity.” 

Of course, Pushkin could take revisionism to contrarian extremes, as when he said of a notorious assassination: “If murder can be guiltless in an autocratic state when it is for reasons of political necessity, then Tiberius was justified.”

Iskander Rehman doesn’t go quite so far as Pushkin; yet he does want us to look past all the gossip and scandals, and see what we can learn in practical terms from this controversial emperor. Tiberius was not a conqueror; his main task was to consolidate his predecessor’s achievements and establish stability throughout the empire. 

He was faced with the question of how you govern a massive, unwieldy state as an absolute monarch without the benefit of personal charisma, reliable subordinates or the momentum of conquest. Rehman focuses on foreign policy, military affairs and imperial management in general, and concludes that, whatever else might have been wrong with Tiberius, at least he understood grand strategy, international relations, and how to handle the Roman economy.

rehman’s new book iron imperator: roman Grand Strategy Under Tiberius is so stylishly produced that it could be mistaken for a coffee-table book or exhibition catalogue; the text itself is exceptionally well written. It is a shock to learn that the author has a doctorate from the Institute of Political Studies (“Sciences Po”) in Paris. He seems far too cultured for that sort of thing. Indeed, he prefers not to think of himself as a mere “political scientist”; instead, he includes himself among the company of “applied historians”, who 

certainly do not subscribe to the notion, so prevalent among contemporary American political scientists, that our combined historical experience forms a sterile vat from which neatly self-contained case studies can be surgically extracted and then grafted onto some grand architectonic theory of human behaviour.

Rehman claims not to study history for its own sake; rather, he seeks to extract useful lessons from the past without indulging in pseudo-scientific play-acting. He is refreshingly modest and cautious in both his claims and his conclusions.

Iron Imperator functions in many ways like a thought experiment based around the question of how far Ancient Roman history can be seen to reflect or illuminate certain urgent aspects of American foreign policy. Much of the reader’s pleasure arises from seeing how cunningly Rehman develops a coherent point of view without reducing his ideas to a set of bullet points.

the work is a model of lucid, accessible historical writing; indeed, it could easily serve as an introductory textbook on Roman imperial history. 

Rehman takes no knowledge for granted on the part of his readers. His grasp of all the relevant material is especially impressive once one remembers that Rehman’s real scholarly expertise involves not Roman palace intrigues, but European military and diplomatic history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

Professional historians might be inclined to dismiss Iron Imperator: after all, Tiberius’s administrative prowess is not exactly a startling revelation. Even so, this is the most stimulating book on Tiberius since Gregorio Marañón’s classic 1939 study (translated into English in 1956 as Tiberius: A Study in Resentment). 

In fact, it might be the most impressive single publication on an ancient Roman subject by a non-specialist since Edward Luttwak’s Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (first published in 1976, and most recently revised in 2016).

All told, Iron Imperator is a brilliant start to Rehman’s literary career. His next book, on French statesmen of the Grand Siècle, will surely prove a masterpiece. For now, we can enjoy this elegant, convincing provocation.