Roman troops were usually stationed in Jerusalem for Passover, as the crowds present spelled trouble. Soldiers would have watched Jesus’ triumphant entry into the city, mounted on a donkey. But he created far greater concern when he entered the city’s Temple, turning over tables as people convened to pay the temple tax and buy sacrificial pigeons.
The Jewish authorities were understandably aggrieved at the disruption, but the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate had already crushed a Galilean rebellion in the city. Pilate—notorious for his clumsy violence, tactless blunders and brutal repressions—would not tolerate any Jewish threats, particularly one connected to messianic expectations. Pilate encouraged the high priest to ensure Jesus was silenced. The high priest suborned one of Jesus’ disciples, Judas Iscariot, to betray him. After a final meal with his disciples—the Last Supper—at which they shared bread and wine, Jesus led his disciples to the Mount of Olives for prayer. Here, in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was identified by Judas, arrested and taken before Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest, who adjudged him guilty of blasphemy. Brought before Pontius Pilate, Jesus was sentenced to death. He was flogged, forced to drag a cross through the streets of Jerusalem, and crucified outside the city in the company of two thieves. It was clear from his crucifixion that his trial and execution were the acts of the Romans: had it been the act of the Jewish high priests, he would have been stoned.
Three days after Jesus’ death, sightings of him began to be reported. He did not reappear as a ghost, nor as a reanimated corpse, but was transformed in some mysterious way. After visiting a number of his acquaintances and friends, Jesus ascended to heaven, leaving his followers the task of establishing the Christian Church.
After centuries of persecution, the Christian Church eventually became the dominant religious force in the Western world. While Catholics, Protestants and others have at times been responsible for appalling excesses in the name of their particular denomination or viewpoint, Jesus’ philosophy of pacifism, humility, charity and kindness has endured through the ages. Judeo-Christian ideas provide the inspiration for, and foundation of, much of Western political thought, government and law, morals, art, architecture, music and literature.
Yet there is an irony in the story of Christianity: Jesus left no writings; the Gospels were mostly written forty years later, after the destruction of the Jewish Temple by the Romans in AD 70. Until then, the Christians, led by members of Jesus’s family, had prayed as Jews in the Temple. The destruction of Jerusalem and the fall of the Jews led to the final separation of Christianity from the mother-religion. However it is clear that Jesus saw himself as a Jew and not the founder of a new religion, but certainly a prophet, a reformer and the Son of Man, if not the actual Messiah. It was the dynamic visionary Saul of Tarsus, a Jew converted on the road to Damascus, who as Saint Paul forged Christianity as a universal religion based not so much on Jesus’s teachings, but on his sacrificial crucifixion and resurrection and the achievement of grace through faith in Jesus the savior of all mankind. It was Paul—keen to convert Gentiles, not just Jews—who made Christianity a world religion.
CALIGULA
AD 12–41
Make him feel that he is dying.
Caligula’s order when any of his victims was being executed, according to Suetonius
Caligula ascended the imperial throne as the young darling of the Romans—and ended his four-year reign with a reputation as an insanely cruel tyrant. Capricious, politically inept and militarily incompetent, sexually ambiguous and perversely incestuous, he went from beloved prince to butchered psychopath in a reign that quickly slid into humiliation, murder and madness.
Caligula—properly Gaius Caesar—was the great-grandson of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. His nickname Caligula—meaning “little boots”—derives from the miniature army sandals he was dressed in as a boy when he accompanied his father Germanicus on campaign. This made Caligula the favorite mascot of the army. Germanicus died suddenly in AD 19, followed by Caligula’s two elder brothers and his mother Agrippina. Many suspected that Caligula’s great-uncle the emperor Tiberius had poisoned the much-loved Germanicus as a threat to his throne. In AD 31 Caligula went to live with Tiberius at his villa on the island of Capri. It was during this time that the dark side of Caligula’s character began to emerge. As the Roman historian Suetonius (albeit not an objective source) later reported, “He could not control his natural cruelty and viciousness, but he was a most eager witness of the tortures and executions of those who suffered punishment, reveling at night in gluttony and adultery, disguised in a wig and a long robe.” Rumors also began to circulate that Caligula was conducting an incestuous relationship with his sister Drusilla.
When Tiberius died in March AD 37 some said that Caligula had smothered the old man with a pillow. Tiberius had willed that after his death Caligula and his cousin Tiberius Gemellus should rule jointly, but within months of his accession, Caligula had Gemellus murdered. Caligula’s lack of political experience, combined with his spoiled arrogance and lust for absolute power, would prove disastrous.
There are many examples of Caligula’s megalomania. To repudiate a prophecy that he had as much chance of becoming emperor as he did of riding a horse across the Gulf of Naples, he had a bridge of ships built across the water, over which he rode in triumph, wearing the breastplate of Alexander the Great. It was also said that he elevated his favorite horse, Incitatus, to the consulship. On another occasion, while in Gaul, he ordered his troops to defeat Neptune by gathering seashells from the shore, as “spoils of the sea.”
Caligula became deeply paranoid, and made it an offense for anyone to even look at him, so sensitive was he about his increasing baldness and luxuriant body hair. Those suspected of disloyalty—often on the flimsiest of pretexts—were, prior to their execution, subjected to a variety of ingenious torments devised by the emperor, such as being covered in honey and then exposed to a swarm of angry bees.
Anyone was a potential victim. As Suetonius records, “Many men of honorable rank were first disfigured with the marks of branding irons and then condemned to the mines, to work at building roads, or to be thrown to the wild beasts; or else he shut them up in cages on all fours, like animals, or had them sawed asunder. Not all these punishments were for serious offenses, but merely for criticizing one of his shows, or for never having sworn by his Genius.”
Caligula began to believe himself to be divine. He had the heads of statues of the Olympian gods replaced with likenesses of himself, and almost provoked a Jewish revolt by ordering his godhead to be worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem. Suetonius reports that he regularly talked to the other deities as if they stood beside him. On one occasion he asked an actor who was greater, himself or Jupiter. When the man failed to respond with sufficient alacrity, the emperor had him mercilessly flogged. His cries, Caligula claimed, were music to his ears. On another occasion, when dining with the two consuls, he started laughing manically. When asked why, he retorted, “What do you expect, when with a single nod of my head both of you could have your throats cut on the spot?” Similarly, he used to kiss his wife’s neck while whispering, “Off comes this beautiful head whenever I give the word. If only Rome had one neck.” The most repugnant story of the emperor’s depravity tells how, after he had made his sister Drusilla pregnant, he was so impatient to see his child that he ripped it from her womb. Whether this story is true or not, Drusilla is known to have died in AD 38, probably of a fever, whereupon Caligula declared her to be a goddess.
Caligula’s unbridled narcissism and ever greater appetite for brutality alienated every section of society. The Praetorian Guard resolved that his rule must be brought to an end, and in January AD 41 two of its number killed the emperor by ambushing him as he left the stadium in Rome. They went on to kill his wife and baby daughter, smashing the latter’s head against a wall.
The life of Caligula demonstrated how much the imperial system created by Augustus, while preserving the trappings of the
republic, had actually concentrated absolute power in the hands of one man. Caligula stripped away the veneer of constitutional restraint and flaunted his total authority over his subjects in the most capriciously horrific manner. Caligula personifies the immorality, bloodlust and insanity of absolute power.
NERO
AD 37–68
He showed neither discrimination nor moderation in putting to death whomsoever he pleased.
Suetonius
The emperor who “fiddled while Rome burned,” Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty that took Rome from republic to one-man rule. Raised amidst violence and tyranny, he ruled with ludicrous vanity, demented whimsy and inept despotism. Few mourned his abdication and death amidst the chaos that he himself had created.
Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus was born in AD 37 in the town of Antium, not far from Rome, while the Emperor Caligula—Nero’s uncle—was on the throne. Like so many, he was to suffer at Caligula’s hands—forced with his mother Agrippina into exile when she lost favor with the emperor. Agrippina was Caligula’s sister. Their incestuous relationship supposedly ended when she plotted to overthrow him: Agrippina ranks as one of the most poisonous women in Roman history. Mother and son were allowed to return by Caligula’s successor, Claudius, who had recently executed his nymphomaniacal empress, Messalina. In AD 49 Agrippina became the emperor’s fourth wife. Claudius not only adopted Nero as his son but made him joint heir to the throne with his own son by Messalina, Britannicus.
Agrippina, however, was unwilling to allow nature to take its course and in AD 54 she supposedly poisoned Claudius. Relations between mother and son were also flawed, and when, in the following year, Agrippina realized her hold over Nero was slipping, she conspired in a plot to replace him with Britannicus. On discovering the conspiracy, Nero promptly had his rival poisoned and banished Agrippina from the imperial palace on the pretext of having insulted his young wife, Octavia.
Despite such intrigues, the early years of Nero’s reign were marked by wise governance, largely because much state business was handled by shrewd advisers such as the philosopher Seneca, the Praetorian prefect Burrus and reliable Greek freedmen. This relative calm was not destined to last. Increasingly assured, Nero sought to free himself from the control of others and exercise power in his own right.
The first to feel the consequences of his new assertiveness was his mother, who had continued plotting behind his back. Tired of her machinations, Nero resolved to do away with her in AD 59. When an initial attempt to drown her in the Bay of Naples proved unsuccessful, the emperor sent an assassin to complete the job. Legend has it that, realizing what was about to happen as the killer approached, Agrippina drew back her clothes and cried, in one final act of scorn for her matricidal son, “Here, smite my womb!”
With his mother out of the way, Nero’s reign quickly sank into petty despotism. Burrus and Seneca were both brought to trial on trumped-up charges, and though eventually acquitted lost much of their influence. Yet, even as he gained greater control over the levers of power, so the emperor appeared increasingly to lose touch with reality. He became infatuated with Poppaea Sabina, wife of one of his friends, and resolved to marry her. According to the historian Suetonius, Poppaea’s husband was “persuaded” to grant her a divorce, while Nero’s wife Octavia was first exiled and then murdered on the emperor’s orders—paving the way for the Nero–Poppaea union.
In AD 64, a huge fire swept through Rome which the emperor observed with indifference, supposedly playing his lyre. Indeed, according to the Roman chronicler Tacitus, Nero himself was behind the inferno, which was started to make room for his new palace. In fact he probably helped extinguish the fire and gave shelter to the homeless in his gardens. But his reputation for being frivolous, feckless and inept was established. In an effort to divert attention, Nero sought a scapegoat, thus beginning his persecution of the Christians. Tacitus recounts the atrocities committed: “Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burned, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”
Increasingly convinced that rivals were plotting against him, Nero had any potential critics executed, including, in AD 62–3, Marcus Antonius Pallas, Rubellius Plautus and Faustus Sulla. Then, in AD 65, a conspiracy led by Gaius Calpurnius Piso to oust the emperor and restore the republic was uncovered. Nearly half of the forty-one accused were either executed or forced to commit suicide, Seneca among them. Taking himself increasingly seriously as an actor and neglecting his duties as the Roman economy faltered and disorder spread, Nero began to sing and act on the public stage, spending more time in the theater than running the empire. He also fancied himself as a sportsman, even taking part in the Olympic Games of AD 67—ostensibly to improve relations with Greece, but more likely to milk the obsequious praise that invariably greeted his efforts. He won various awards—mostly secured in advance by hefty bribes from the imperial exchequer.
By AD 68, elements within the army—which the dilettante emperor had largely ignored—decided that things could not continue. The governor of one of the provinces in Gaul rebelled and persuaded a fellow governor, Galba, to join him. Galba emerged as a popular focus for opposition to Nero and, crucially, the Praetorian Guard now declared their support for him. Faced with the desertion of the army, Nero was forced to flee Rome and went into hiding; a short time later, he committed suicide with the words “What an artist the world is losing in me.” His legacy was one of unrest across the empire, as Rome suffered the Year of the Four Emperors, during which civil war broke out between competing claimants to the throne. Hostilities ended only with the emergence of Vespasian and the founding of the Flavian dynasty.
MARCUS AURELIUS
121–180
Every instant of time is a pinprick of eternity. All things are petty, easily changed, vanishing away.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.36
Marcus Aurelius was the philosopher-king of the Roman empire, who exemplified the qualities he praised in his philosophical writings in a reign marked by principled and reforming rule over a vast and turbulent domain. He had an unselfish and pragmatic approach to governing his empire and did not shirk from sharing supreme power for the greater political good. His major written work, the Meditations, is an urbane and civilized commentary on life, expressing in a tender and personal voice a Stoic view of life, death and the vicissitudes of fortune.
Marcus Aurelius, born Marcus Annius Verus in AD 121, came from a family well acquainted with high office. His paternal grandfather was a consul and the prefect of Rome. An aunt was married to Titus Aurelius Antoninus, who would later become the emperor Antoninus Pius. And his maternal grandmother stood to inherit one of the largest fortunes in the Roman empire. He also came from liberal stock: the emperors of the 1st and 2nd centuries were more sober, munificent and inclined toward good deeds than the flamboyant urban emperors of the previous, Julio-Claudian dynasty founded by Augustus.
Marcus was handpicked for great things. In AD 138 the emperor Hadrian had arranged for Marcus to be adopted by his appointed heir, Antoninus, which marked out the seventeen-year-old as a future joint emperor, along with another young man, who would become the emperor Lucius Verus.
Marcus received his education in Greek and Latin from the best tutors, including Herodes Atticus and Fronto, one of the principal popular literary figures of the day. But practice in rhetoric and linguistic exercises did not fully satisfy such a bright young man, and he keenly embraced the Discourses of Epictetus. Epictetus was a former slave who had become an important moral philosopher of the Stoic school, which taught that it was through fortitude and self-control that one could attain spiritual well-being and a clear and unbiased outlook on life. Philosophy in general, and Stoicism in particular, would be the intellectual touchstones of Marcus’ life.
When his adoptive father died in AD 161, Marcus was already pr
epared to take over the imperial duties. But in accordance with his sense of honor and political intelligence, he insisted that Lucius Verus be made joint emperor with him. Although Marcus could easily have eliminated his rival, he realized that with such a diverse empire to govern it made sense to have a partner with the political authority to rule when required but without the seniority to be a threat to stable government. It was Marcus who carried out the serious work of government.
As emperor, Marcus continued the benign policies of his predecessors. He made various legal reforms and provided relief to the less favored in society—slaves, widows and minors all felt the benefits of his rule. Although there was some concern over the gap between the legal rights and privileges enjoyed by honestiores and those enjoyed by humiliores (the better-off and worse-off in society), Marcus was generally committed to building a fairer, more prosperous empire for his subjects.
One thing that Marcus could not control was the caprice of fate in sending disease and war. While fighting the Parthians between 162 and 166, many soldiers contracted the plague, which spread throughout the empire. From 168 until around 172, Marcus (with Verus until his death in 169) was preoccupied with subduing the German tribes along the Danube, who were intent on marauding into the Roman Empire.
Titans of History Page 8
