Caligula: A Biography

by Aloys Winterling

  The events at the Gulf of Baiae are revealing in yet another respect, however. They manifested imperial grandeur by means of ceremonies that broke through the conventional Roman semiotic system for assigning social rank. Traditionally the achievement and display of social honor was connected to holding political offices in the Roman polity and functioning as a magistrate of the city: It was office that conferred honor on the man who held it. Accordingly a Roman aristocrat achieved the highest possible distinction if the political institution of the Senate voted him a triumphal procession, which wended its way through the city with great splendor before the assembled citizenry of Rome and reached its ceremonial culmination on the Capitoline Hill. Hence when Caligula demonstrated his imperial superiority to all others in a new manner and with great publicity, it is noteworthy that he did so for the first time outside the city of Rome and independently of the Senate and the Roman polity. This corresponded precisely to his announcement that he would not permit the Senate to vote him any more honors, and to his perceiving the paradoxical situation that arose if honors for an emperor were granted by the Senate and aristocracy. The triumphal ride across the sea thus represented Caligula’s first attempt, through new ceremonial practices, to make real his position as a monarch who stood above the aristocracy. But were these practices in fact new?

  Caligula deployed a semiotic system that comprised Roman elements, first and foremost the triumphal procession, along with elements borrowed from ancient non-Roman monarchies. The Persian kings Xerxes and Darius served as points of reference in that their achievements were being outdone, along with Alexander the Great, with whom Caligula symbolically identified by wearing his breastplate. Thus the ceremonial actions on the bridge at Puteoli drew on the ways in which Persian and Hellenistic rulers displayed their royal status, and, despite the inclusion of some Roman elements, represented an extreme break from Roman traditions. Since the earliest days, since the legendary times when kings had been driven out of Rome, monarchy had been despised there as a degenerate form of government, as tyranny. It is safe to assume that the new inner circle Caligula formed after the great conspiracy, the “tyrant-trainers” as people in Rome were calling them, played a part in designing the new arrangements for presenting the emperor’s status. Those at whose expense this innovation had to be effected will hardly have admitted to themselves that thereby he was seeking a way out of the paradoxical combination of autarchy and republic that had already been bought with a great deal of blood. They will have suspected, though, that Puteoli was only the beginning.

  FOUR

  Five Months of Monarchy

  SUBJUGATING THE ARISTOCRACY

  On his twenty-eighth birthday, 31 August A.D. 40, Caligula reentered Rome after a year’s absence and was greeted with an ovation. We can glean only indirectly what had occurred in the city during the preceding months, after the emperor’s open threats. Those days must have resembled the end of Tiberius’s reign. In his time, denunciations, accusations, trials in the Senate, torture, and executions had been the order of the day. Now the question was: How would the young emperor deal with the senators in Rome, after everything that had happened in the previous year? He had staged a public demonstration of his role as sovereign ruler, independent of Republic and aristocracy, by riding horseback over the sea. How would he now impose his authority in the venerable capital of the Empire, where the Senate and the aristocracy were inescapably present? The fears of the Roman nobility are reflected in the claim (reported by several sources) that after his return Caligula planned to eliminate the entire Senate or the most distinguished men of both the senatorial and the equestrian orders.

  Figure 5. Bust of Caligula. Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek 637 (Inv. 1453).

  The emperor did indeed rely on fear and violence, but he employed them in his own characteristic manner. Whereas Tiberius had stood helplessly by as the aristocracy destroyed itself in the trials for maiestas, Caligula promoted the disintegration of Rome’s noble society and used it to his own advantage. He let the aristocracy do itself in. The events are reflected in the accounts of the sources, which claim several times that baseless executions of senators and high-ranking knights at the emperor’s instigation were becoming the order of the day. Strangely, however, these reports mention only a few victims by name, and investigation of the individual cases exposes the tendentiousness of such a sweeping judgment.

  Seneca reports that after a long argument with the Stoic philosopher Julius Canus the emperor ordered his execution, for which the philosopher mockingly offered his thanks. The condemned man spent the ten days until his death perfectly calmly, playing board games and discussing philosophical questions. There is some evidence that that the emperor did not order his execution on a whim, however, for a later source notes that Caligula had accused Canus of being an accessory to a conspiracy against him. Tiberius had attempted to rein in the Senate’s zeal for maiestas trials by introducing a requirement that ten days must elapse between sentencing and execution. The circumstances therefore suggest that Canus was formally accused of conspiracy and sentenced to death by the Senate.

  There is less clarity in the case of Julius Graecinus’s death, which also appears to fall in this period. Seneca claims that Caligula killed him because he was too good a man to be of use to a tyrant. Graecinus was the father of Agricola, Tacitus’s father-in-law. In Tacitus’s biography of Agricola he is depicted as an example of steadfast conduct in the face of the emperor, so lacking in Rome at that time. A noted orator and philosopher himself, Graecinus had refused to prosecute Marcus Silanus and was for that reason eliminated by Caligula, as Tacitus reports. Silanus had died by his own hand near the start of 38, however, while according to Tacitus’s account Agricola was born on 13 June of Caligula’s third consulship, in 40 (and apparently at a time when his father was still alive). Whatever the reason for Graecinus’s death, then, it cannot have been a steadfast refusal to prosecute Silanus.

  The only reported instance of courage and strength of character in the autumn of 40 that stands up to closer examination involves not a senator, but a freedwoman, to whose case Caligula responded with pity rather than cruelty. According to Cassius Dio, a high-ranking senator named Pomponius was accused of conspiracy by a friend named Timidius; in Josephus’s version of the incident, the charge was maiestas and Timidius an enemy of the accused. (At that time, of course, it was difficult to tell one from the other.) Timidius named as his witness Quintilia, an exceptionally beautiful actress with whom Pomponius was having a love affair. Cassius Chaerea, an officer of the Praetorian Guard, tortured Quintilia so badly that afterwards she was permanently disfigured, but she neither denounced her lover (if he was innocent) nor betrayed him (if he was not). When she was brought before the emperor he was touched by her appearance and impressed by her behavior. He released Pomponius and gave Quintilia a present of 800,000 sesterces for her steadfastness.

  Indeed not only were the senators denouncing one another in order to voice their ostensible fear for the emperor’s safety and thereby to procure personal advantage for themselves. Some sought to strike anew, to transform their pent-up hatred for the emperor into action. A third conspiracy of aristocrats against Caligula took shape, although in the end it was no more successful than the first two. According to Seneca, one night in the lamplight of a festive gathering attended by ladies and other senators, Caligula had three men beaten with whips, tortured, and brutally killed for his “amusement.” They were Sextus Papinius, whose father had been consul; Betilienus Bassus, an imperial quaestor and the son of an imperial procurator; and an unnamed senator. Before their execution they were gagged so that they could not utter rebukes. Centurions went to the houses of the victims’ fathers that same night and killed them as well.

  From the parallel account of Cassius Dio it emerges that these executions were not arbitrary sadism on the emperor’s part but rather swift measures to defeat the new conspiracy. Dio mentions that a certain Anicius Cerialis (whom he mistakenly c
onsiders a victim) was involved. This same man is mentioned by Tacitus in a different context, where there is no reason to suspect unreliability; there the author says that during the reign of Nero he attracted attention through his exceptional opportunism: After the Pisonian conspiracy of 65 he brought forward in the Senate the motion that a temple to the divine Nero should be erected at public expense. Not long afterward he was charged with crimes himself and committed suicide; few people pitied him, Tacitus reports, since they remembered that he had once betrayed a conspiracy against Caligula. Seneca’s account, written shortly after Caligula’s death, is thus revealed once again as tendentious and denunciatory, because he leaves out the conspiracy to which the emperor was reacting. Furthermore, in his effort to paint the aristocracy as the emperor’s helpless victims, Seneca suppresses a senator’s role in betraying the conspirators, a betrayal still recalled in Rome a quarter of a century later.

  An episode that appears credible precisely because it is reported in aristocratic sources documents the disintegration prevailing within the senatorial order after the exposure of a third conspiracy, and how Caligula made use of it. After Papinius and Bassus had been executed, Caligula called the Senate into session and granted the remaining members impunity, adding that there were only a few toward whom he still bore ill will. Naturally this only increased the level of fear and uncertainty among those present. During a later session of the Senate that Caligula did not attend, Protogenes, the emperor’s confidant, who kept the books for him on the conduct of the aristocracy, entered the building. As the senators were greeting him and shaking his hand, he gave the senator Scribonius Proculus a sharp look and asked him, “Do you, too, greet me, when you hate the emperor so?” (Dio 59.26.2).

  During the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius a person accused of hostility toward the emperor had usually met a swift demise, since either he was prosecuted by opportunistic fellow senators and sentenced to death by the Senate as a whole or he committed suicide. In this instance the senators fell to work immediately without waiting for formal procedures; according to Dio they surrounded their colleague in the Senate House itself and tore him to pieces. Suetonius reports that Proculus was stabbed with pens and ripped apart; his limbs and entrails were then dragged through the streets and piled up before the emperor. Suetonius claims that Caligula incited certain individuals to this savagery, without mentioning that they were senators; he does not deny, however, that all the others joined in. In any case, the scene manifests the senators’ fear of reprisals and at the same time their utter lack of scruples, up to and including murder, each man prepared to save his own skin at the others’ expense. Certainly the emperor had a part in the staging of the affair. He exploited aristocrats’ willingness to tear one another to pieces—in this instance literally—for his own purposes, without having to get his hands dirty.

  “Gaius showed pleasure” at the death of Scribonius Proculus, Dio reports, and declared that he had become reconciled with the senators. In response “they voted various festivals and also decreed that the emperor should sit on a high platform even in the very Senate House to prevent any one from approaching him, and should have a military guard even there” (Dio 59.26.3). The fact that the emperor needed a guard in the Senate (a measure to which Augustus had also had recourse in precarious situations, and which the Senate had once offered to Tiberius) shows that the dominant mood after what was now the third conspiracy within a year and a half was in fact anything but conciliatory. At the same time the senators’ decree documented once more the absurdity of the paradoxical communication between the emperor and the aristocracy. In one and the same resolution the Senate revealed both its concern for the emperor’s safety and the fact that the threat to his life stemmed from its own members, from the same people who had voted the resolution.

  The military guard now posted in the Senate was not the sole consequence of the conspiracy. Behind the facade of reconciliation the emperor increased his pressure on the aristocracy, creating even more fear. Josephus reports that Caligula permitted slaves to bring charges against their masters at that time, and to his satisfaction they made copious use of the privilege. If one remembers that a high-ranking aristocrat might have several hundred slaves in his palace in Rome and that some masters were anything but humane in the exercise of their authority (which included the right to kill), it is not hard to imagine how alarmed the nobility must have felt. Now they were not safe from betrayal or denunciation even in their own homes. Any unguarded conversation could be dangerous, and their own servants could turn them in.

  It must be said that this measure was not Caligula’s invention, as Josephus suggests. In Tiberius’s reign Sejanus had ordered slaves and freedmen to be tortured as a way of obtaining evidence against their masters, and two years later Claudius too used the denunciation of slaves and freedmen against their masters as a means of revealing the background of the first conspiracy against him. Now, during Caligula’s reign, Claudius became a victim of the tactic. A slave of his named Polydeuces denounced him, but without success. Josephus writes that Caligula appeared at Claudius’s trial, hoping (in vain) that his uncle would be sentenced to death. It is an open question whether this is true, but the report does indicate that the emperor had no direct influence on the outcome of trials: Once again he left it to the senators to condemn one another.

  But that was not all. Suetonius reports, without giving a date, that the emperor sought to increase his revenues not only by establishing certain new taxes, but also by opening a brothel on the Palatine Hill and making Roman matrons, that is, married women, and freeborn boys available in rooms whose elegant furnishings betokened the dignity of the place. Then he sent his nomenclators to all the markets and public halls to invite young and old to come and satisfy their desires. Allegedly customers could borrow money at interest, and the emperor’s clerks wrote their names down openly, because they were contributing to his revenues. Once again we have a bizarre story intended to demonstrate Caligula’s “madness” but self-contradictory. If someone is short of money, he doesn’t furnish spaces lavishly and then lend money at interest. More likely the story reveals the harshest measure the emperor used to demoralize the aristocracy.

  What actually happened can be inferred from Cassius Dio’s account of the end of A.D. 40 (where he says nothing about a brothel). He mentions that the occupants of the newly furnished rooms near the imperial palace were “the wives of the foremost men as well as the children of the most aristocratic families,” and he might have added that this location meant they could easily be seized by the Praetorian soldiers guarding the emperor. Dio writes that Caligula forced them to live there at exorbitant cost, but notes at the same time: “Some of those who thus contributed to his need did so willingly, but others very much against their will, lest they should be thought to be vexed” (Dio 59.28.9). Supposedly the plebeians were pleased by the aristocrats’ discomfiture and about the “gold and silver” that the emperor collected from his tenants.

  Suetonius, then, suppresses the fact that the occupants of these quarters were the wives and children of the prōtoi (the word Dio uses), meaning the consulars; he reverses the direction of the payments and turns the apartments into a brothel. If we leave aside this last and set both reports in the context of the now frequently reported manner and habit in which the emperor exploited the aristocracy’s code of behavior, then it becomes clear what was going on. Remember that relationships between the emperor and the aristocracy continued to be expressed in the old ceremonies of friendship, morning receptions, evening banquets, reciprocal support in financial matters, and testamentary bequests. In this process it had become necessary for imperial nomenclators to keep records of the emperor’s “friends,” because there were so many he could no longer keep track of them himself. After the consulars conspired against him in early 39, Caligula had cynically exposed the ambiguity of these forms of communication by reproaching them for their enmity and hatred for him, but then demanding payments of money fro
m individuals on the basis of their friendship with him, which no one could disavow. The highest form of imperial favor was the privilege to live as familiares on the Palatine in the palace buildings, a dispensation known from reports about other emperors, such as Agrippa in the reign of Augustus, or later Titus Vinius, Cornelius Laco, and Marcianus Icelus under Galba.

  So once again Caligula took aristocrats’ protestations of friendship at face value and showed extraordinary favor to the leading consulars. After their conspiracy was exposed they had shown concern for his safety by murdering Scribonius Proculus and voting him a military bodyguard in the Senate. Now he responded by allowing their wives and children to live on the Palatine Hill, where they could enjoy the greatest possible proximity to the emperor, a distinction in which all of them took so much satisfaction. Simultaneously his nomenclators, who kept the lists of the emperor’s friends and the favors they did for one another, visited the former consuls and asked them for a gift in return.

  In actual fact, of course, this meant that the emperor was holding the family members of the Senate leadership hostage on the Palatine under the eye of his Praetorian Guard, while at the same time extorting payments of gold and silver from the senators, forcing them to pay “voluntarily,” as Dio notes expressly, since one can describe paradoxical circumstances only in paradoxical language. This was Caligula’s response to the third attempt to murder him. He had put aristocrats in their place again and continued to humiliate them with jokes. At a solemn banquet he suddenly burst out laughing; the two consuls, who were reclining on the couches next to him, politely inquired what had amused him so. “What do you suppose,” he replied, “except that at a single nod of mine both of you could have your throats cut on the spot?” (Suet. Cal. 32.3). We have already observed in Suetonius’s style a kind of montage technique (and will encounter it again in further examples), in which he takes Caligula’s cynical jokes literally, thereby distorting their meaning and presenting his behavior as aberrant. Caligula in these days may have had even a further joke, particularly about the new building on the Palatine, the wives and children living there, and the profits resulting from them that he had provided for himself: “I now have a brothel on the Palatine.”