Lytron

The only recorded comments in which Tiberius Caesar directly addresses proposals to divest great fortunes for wholesale charity come from hostile senatorial historians—principally Tacitus (Annals 2.48; 6.20), Suetonius (Tiberius 32, 48) and Cassius Dio (57.10–11).  In each passage Tiberius is portrayed as a rigorously frugal custodian of the fiscus who rebuffs well-meaning senators pressing for large remissions of taxation or vast donatives to the urban plebs.  Suetonius preserves the lapidary maxim most often quoted: when a motion was put that he abandon several indirect taxes and empty part of the imperial surplus into public relief, he retorted, “Boni pastoris esse tondere pecus, non deglubere” (“It is a good shepherd’s task to shear his flock, not to flay it”).  Tacitus contextualises the same debate: senators urged that accumulated treasure—nearly three billion sesterces by his own reckoning—be circulated “lest riches lie idle while citizens starved”; Tiberius answered that armies, grain fleets and provincial disasters could not be sustained by sudden beneficence, that abolishing revenue was equivalent to abdicating rule, and that true liberality consisted in timely, targeted aid, not theatrical liquidation of capital.  Dio adds that after a run of earthquakes in Asia Minor Tiberius advanced one hundred million sesterces in interest-free loans for rebuilding, yet even then reminded petitioners that an emperor must be able to “provide for the many by using the few,” never by destroying the storehouse itself.  The convergence of these sources—none sympathetic—suggests that Tiberius consistently framed wealth not as a private hoard to be scattered nor as a moral stain to be purged, but as a strategic reserve whose reckless dispersal would imperil Rome’s military sinews and provincial welfare; his terse shepherd proverb, echoing Cynic commonplaces on moderation, became the canonical summation of that policy for later moralists and imperial biographers. The emperor you have in mind is Tiberius II Constantine, the Cappadocian general whom the dying Justin II adopted and raised to the throne in 578.  Contemporary observers—above all the Monophysite bishop John of Ephesus (Bk V of his Ecclesiastical History, written while Tiberius was alive) and, a century later, the chroniclers Theophanes and the Chronicon Paschale—present him as almost reckless in charity: he cancelled arrears of taxation, paid the arrearages of the army in solid gold, ransomed thousands of war-captives from Avar and Persian markets, and ordered a daily distribution of food to the destitute in Constantinople.  When members of the household complained that the fisc was being drained, John says, his sister (unnamed) begged him to “leave something for the children and for yourself, lest we come to hunger.”  Tiberius answered in a short Greek line that became proverbial: “Οὐ πτωχεύσομεν, ἀδελφή· ἔχομεν λύτρον.”  Literally: “We shall not be reduced to poverty, sister; we possess the lytron.”  The word lytron means both the cash paid to buy a captive’s freedom and, in Christian soteriology, the “ransom” of Christ’s blood; Tiberius was saying that alms placed in the hands of the poor are a down-payment on divine rescue and therefore a safer reserve than any coin in the vault. John adds that the emperor extended the point with a scriptural paraphrase—“Give to the needy, and the treasury of heaven will open” (echoing Prov 19:17 and Matt 6:20)—and that he dismissed further objections by recalling the miracle of the loaves: “He who multiplied bread in the wilderness will not let his servants starve.”  Theophanes, summarising earlier sources under the year 6070 (= AD 578/9), repeats the maxim almost verbatim and notes that within months of his coronation Tiberius had spent Justin’s carefully hoarded reserve of 23,000 lbs of gold yet still met every military payroll.  Even the hostile Excerpta de Legationibus concedes that Persia’s Shah Khosrow I returned Roman prisoners in bulk once the imperial ransom payments arrived. Historiographically, the anecdote functions as a moral counter-portrait to Justin II’s niggardly and mentally distressed final years.  Etymologically, lytron roots the emperor’s policy in the earliest Christian teaching that almsgiving “redeems” the giver (cf. Tob 4:10, Luke 11:41).  Historically, it inaugurated the Byzantine ideal of the φιλόπτωχος βασιλεύς—the “friend-of-the-poor emperor”—which later writers would ascribe to Heraclius and Basil I but which the sixth-century sources squarely attribute to Tiberius II’s brief, lavish reign.