A few days later Caligula visited the prison islands off Campania, and vows were uttered for his safe return—at that time no opportunity of demonstrating a general concern for his welfare was ever disregarded. When he fell ill, anxious crowds besieged the Palace all night. Some swore that they would fight as gladiators if the gods allowed him to recover; others even carried placards volunteering to die instead of him. To the great love in which he was held by his own people, foreigners added their own tribute of devotion. Artabanus, King of the Parthians, made unsolicited overtures of friendship to Caligula, attended a conference with the Governor-general of Syria and, before returning across the river Euphrates, paid homage to the Roman Eagles and standards, and to the statues of the Caesars.
15. Caligula strengthened his popularity by every possible means. He delivered a funeral speech in honour of Tiberius to a vast crowd, weeping profusely all the while; and gave him a magnificent burial. But as soon as this was over he sailed for Pandataria and the Pontian Islands to fetch back the remains of his mother and his brother Nero; and during rough weather, too, in proof of devotion. He approached the ashes with the utmost reverence and transferred them to the urns with his own hands. Equally dramatic was his gesture of raising a standard on the poop of the bireme which brought the urns to Ostia, and thence up the Tiber to Rome. He had arranged that the most distinguished knights available should carry them to the Mausoleum, about noon, when the streets were at their busiest; also appointing an annual day of remembrance, marked by Circus games, at which Agrippina’s image would be paraded in a covered carriage. He honoured his father’s memory by renaming the month of September ‘Germanicus’; and sponsored a senatorial decree which awarded his grandmother Antonia, at a blow, all the honours won by Livia Augusta in her entire lifetime. As fellow-Consul he chose his uncle Claudius, who had hitherto been a mere knight; and adopted young Tiberius when he came of age, giving him the official title of ‘Youth Leader’.
The names of Caligula’s sisters were now included in the official oath which everyone had to take, and which ran: ‘…I will not value my life or that of my children less highly than I do the safety of the Emperor Gaius and his sisters!’—and in the Consular motions, as follows: ‘Good fortune attend the Emperor Gaius and his sisters!’
A similar bid for popularity was to recall all exiles, and dismiss all criminal charges whatsoever that had been pending since the time of Tiberius. The batches of written evidence in his mother’s and brothers’ cases were brought to the Forum at his orders, and burned, to set at rest the minds of such witnesses and informers as had testified against them; but first he swore before Heaven that he had neither read nor abstracted a single document. He also refused to examine a report supposedly concerning his own safety, on the ground that nobody could have any reason to hate him, and that he therefore had no time to peruse idle memoranda of this sort.
16. Caligula drove the spintrian perverts from the City, and could with difficulty be restrained from drowning the lot. He gave permission for the works of Titus Labienus, Cremutius Cordus, and Cassius Severus, which had been banned by order of the Senate, to be routed out and republished—making his desire known that posterity should be in full possession of all historical facts; also, he revived Augustus’s practice, discontinued by Tiberius, of publishing an Imperial budget; invested the magistrates with full authority, not requiring them to apply for his confirmation of sentences; and scrupulously scanned the list of knights but, though publicly dismounting any who had behaved in a wicked or scandalous manner, was not unduly severe with those guilty of lesser misbehaviour—he merely omitted their names from the list which he read out. Caligula’s creation of a fifth judicial division aided jurors to keep abreast of their work; his reviving of the electoral system was designed to restore popular control over the magistracy. He honoured every one of the bequests in Tiberius’s will, though this had been set aside by the Senate, and in that of his maternal grandmother Julia, which Tiberius had suppressed56; abolished the Italian half-per-cent auction tax; and paid compensation to a great many people whose houses had been damaged by fire. Any king whom he restored to the throne was awarded the taxes that had accumulated since his deposition—Antiochus of Commagene, for example, got a refund of a million gold pieces from the Public Treasury. To show his interest in public morality he awarded 8,000 gold pieces to a freedwoman who, though put to extreme torture, had not revealed her patron’s guilt. These acts won him many official honours, among them a golden shield, carried once a year to the Capitol by the Colleges of Priests marching in procession, and followed by the Senate, while the children of the aristocracy chanted an anthem in praise of his virtues. By a Senatorial decree the festival of Parilia, which commemorated the birth of Rome and had always taken place at the Spring Equinox, was transferred to the day of his accession, as though Rome had now been born again.
17. Caligula held four consulships: the earliest for two months, from 1 July; the next for the whole month of January; the third for the first thirteen days of January; and the fourth for the first seven. Only the last two were in sequence.57 He assumed his third consulship without a colleague. Some historians describe this as a high-handed breach of precedent; but unfairly, because he was then quartered at Lyons, where the news that his fellow Consul-elect had died in Rome, just before the New Year, had not reached him in time. He twice presented every member of the commons with three gold pieces; and twice invited all the senators and knights, with their wives and children, to an extravagant banquet. At the first of these banquets he gave every man a gown and every woman a red or purple scarf. He also added to the gaiety of Rome by extending the customary four days of the Saturnalia, which begin on 17 December, with a fifth, known as ‘Youth Day’.
18. Caligula held several gladiatorial contests, some in Statilius Taurus’s amphitheatre,58 and others in the Enclosure; diversifying them with prize-fights between the best boxers of Africa and Campania, and occasionally allowing magistrates or friends to preside at these instead of doing so himself. Again, he staged a great number of different theatrical shows in various buildings—sometimes at night, with the whole City illuminated—and would scatter vouchers among the audience entitling them to all sorts of gifts, over and above the basket of food which was everyone’s due. At one banquet, noticing with what extraordinary gusto a knight seated opposite dug into the food, he sent him his own heaped plate as well; and rewarded a senator, who had been similarly enjoying himself, with a praetorship, though it was not yet his turn to hold this office. Many all-day Games were celebrated in the Circus and, between races, Caligula introduced panther-baiting and the Trojan war dance. For certain special Games, when all the charioteers were men of senatorial rank, he had the Circus decorated in red and green. Once, while he was inspecting the Circus equipment, from the Gelotian House which overlooks it, a group of people standing in the near-by balconies called out: ‘What about a day’s racing, Caesar?’ So, on the spur of the moment, he gave immediate orders for games to be held.
19. One of his spectacles was on such a fantastic scale that nothing like it had ever been seen before. He collected all available merchant ships and anchored them in two lines, close together, the whole way from Baiae to the mole at Puteoli, a distance of a little more than three Roman miles. Then he had the ships boarded over, with earth heaped on the planks, and made a kind of Appian Way along which he trotted back and forth for two consecutive days. On the first day he wore oak-leaf crown, sword, buckler, and cloth-of-gold cloak, and rode a gaily caparisoned charger. On the second, he appeared in charioteer’s costume driving a team of two famous horses, with a boy named Dareus, one of his Parthian hostages, triumphantly displayed in the car beside him; behind came the entire Guards Division, and a group of his friends mounted in Gallic curricles. Caligula is, of course, generally supposed to have built the bridge as an improvement on Xerxes’s famous feat of bridging the much narrower Hellespont. Others believe that he planned this huge engineering feat to terrif
y the Germans and Britons, on whom he had his eye. But my grandfather used to tell me as a boy that, according to some courtiers in Caligula’s confidence, the sole reason for the bridge was this: when Tiberius could not decide whom to appoint as his successor, and inclined towards his grandson and namesake, Thrasyllus the astrologer had told him: ‘As for Gaius, he has no more chance of becoming Emperor than of riding a horse dryshod across the Gulf of Baiae.’
20. Caligula gave several shows abroad—Athenian Games at Syracuse, and miscellaneous Games at Lyons, where he also held a competition in Greek and Latin oratory. The loser, it appears, had to present the winners with prizes and make speeches praising them; while those who failed miserably were forced to erase their entries with either sponges or their own tongues—at the threat of being thrashed and flung into the Rhône.
21. He completed certain projects neglected by Tiberius: namely, the Temple of Augustus and Pompey’s Theatre; and began the construction of an aqueduct in the Tibur district, and of an amphitheatre near the Enclosure. (His successor Claudius finished the aqueduct; but work on the amphitheatre was abandoned.) Caligula rebuilt the ruinous walls and temples of Syracuse, and among his other projects were the restoration of Polycrates’s palace at Samos, the completion of Didymaean Apollo’s temple at Ephesus, and the building of a city high up in the Alps. But he was most deeply interested in cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth, and sent a leading centurion there to survey the site.
22. So much for Caligula the Emperor; the rest of this history must needs deal with Caligula the Monster.
He adopted a variety of titles: such as ‘Pious’, ‘Son of the Camp’, ‘Father of the Army’, ‘Caesar, Greatest and Best of Men’. But when once, at the dinner table, some foreign kings who had come to pay homage were arguing which of them was the most nobly descended, Caligula interrupted their discussion by declaiming Homer’s line:
Nay, let there be one master, and one king!
And he nearly assumed a royal diadem then and there, doing away with the pretence that he was merely the chief executive of a republic. However, after his courtiers reminded him that he already outranked any king or tribal chieftain, he insisted on being treated as a god—sending for the most revered or artistically famous statues of the Greek deities (including that of Juppiter at Olympia), and having their heads replaced by his own.
Next, Caligula extended the Palace as far as the Forum; converted the shrine of Castor and Pollux into a vestibule; and would often stand beside these Divine Brethren to be worshipped by all visitants, some of whom addressed him as ‘Latian Juppiter’. He established a shrine to himself as God, with priests, the costliest possible victims, and a life-sized golden image, which was dressed every day in clothes identical with those that he happened to be wearing. All the richest citizens tried to gain priesthoods here, either by influence or bribery. Flamingoes, peacocks, black grouse, guinea-hens, and pheasants were offered as sacrifices, each on a particular day of the month. When the moon shone full and bright he always invited the Moon-goddess to his bed; and during the day would indulge in whispered conversations with Capitoline Juppiter, pressing his ear to the god’s mouth, and sometimes raising his voice in anger. Once he was overheard threatening the god: ‘If you do not raise me up to Heaven I will cast you down to Hell.’ Finally he announced that Juppiter had persuaded him to share his home; and therefore connected the Palace with the Capitol by throwing a bridge across the Temple of the God Augustus; after which he began building a new house inside the precincts of the Capitol itself, in order to live even nearer.
23. Because of Agrippa’s plebeian origin Caligula loathed being described as his grandson, and would fly into a rage if anyone mentioned him, in speech or song, as an ancestor of the Caesars. He nursed a fantasy that his mother had been born of an incestuous union between Augustus and Julia; and not content with thus discrediting Augustus’s name, cancelled the annual commemorations of Agrippa’s victories at Actium and off Sicily, declaring that they had proved the ruin of the Roman people. He called his great-grandmother Livia Augusta a ‘she-Ulysses’, and in a letter to the Senate dared describe her as of low birth—‘her maternal grandfather Aufidius Lurco having been a mere army sergeant from Fundi’—although the public records showed Lurco to have held high office at Rome. When his paternal grandmother Antonia begged him to grant her a private audience he insisted on taking Macro, the Guards Commander, as his escort. Unkind treatment of this sort hurried her to the grave though, according to some, he accelerated the process with poison and, when she died, showed so little respect that he sat in his dining room and watched the funeral pyre burn. One day he sent a colonel to kill young Tiberius without warning; on the pretext that Tiberius had insulted him by taking an antidote against poison—his breath smelled of it. Then he forced his father-in-law, Marcus Silanus, to cut his own throat with a razor, the charge being that he had not followed the Imperial ship when she put to sea in a storm, but had stayed on shore to seize power at Rome if anything happened to her. The truth was that Silanus, a notoriously bad sailor, could not face the voyage; and young Tiberius’s breath smelled of medicine taken for a persistent cough which was gaining a hold on his lungs. Caligula preserved his uncle Claudius mainly as a butt for practical jokes.
24. It was his habit to commit incest with each of his three sisters in turn and, at large banquets, when his wife reclined above him, placed them all in turn below him. They say that he ravished his sister Drusilla before he came of age: their grandmother Antonia, at whose house they were both staying, caught them in bed together. Later, he took Drusilla from her husband, the ex-Consul Lucius Cassius Longinus, quite unashamedly treating her as his wife; and when he fell dangerously ill left Drusilla all his property, and the Empire too. At her death he made it a capital offence to laugh, to bathe, or to dine with one’s parents, wives, or children while the period of public mourning lasted; and was so crazed with grief that he suddenly rushed from Rome by night, drove through Campania, took ship to Sicily, and returned just as impetuously without having shaved or cut his hair in the meantime. Afterwards, whenever he had to take an important oath, he swore by Drusilla’s holiness, even at a public assembly or an army parade. He showed no such extreme love or respect for the two surviving sisters, and often, indeed, let his favourites sleep with them; and at Aemilius Lepidus’s trial, felt no compunction about denouncing them as adulteresses who were party to plots against him—openly producing letters in their handwriting (acquired by trickery and seduction) and dedicating to Mars the Avenger the three swords with which, the accompanying placard alleged, they had meant to kill him.
25. It would be hard to say whether the way he got married, the way he dissolved his marriages, or the way he behaved as a husband was the most disgraceful. He attended the wedding ceremony of Gaius Piso and Livia Orestilla, but had the bride carried off to his own home. After a few days, however, he sent her away, and two years later banished her, suspecting that she had returned to Piso in the interval. According to one account he told Piso, who was reclining opposite him at the wedding feast: ‘Hands off my wife!’ and took her home with him at once; and announced the next day that he had taken a wife in the style of Romulus and Augustus.59 Then he suddenly sent to Greece for Lollia Paulina, wife of Gaius Memmius, the consular Governor, because somebody had remarked that her grandmother was once a famous beauty; but soon discarded Lollia, forbidding her ever again to sleep with another man. Caesonia was neither young nor beautiful, and had three daughters by a former husband, besides being recklessly extravagant and utterly promiscuous; yet he loved her with a passionate faithfulness and often, when reviewing the troops, used to take her out riding in helmet, cloak and shield. For his friends he even paraded her naked; but would not allow her the dignified title of ‘wife’ until she had borne him a child, whereupon he announced the marriage and the birth simultaneously. He named the child Julia Drusilla; and carried her around the temples of all the goddesses in turn before finally entru
sting her to the lap of Minerva, whom he called upon to supervise his daughter’s growth and education. What finally convinced him of his own paternity was her violent temper; while still an infant she would try to scratch out her little playmates’ eyes.
26. It seems hardly worth while to record how Caligula treated such relatives and friends as his cousin King Ptolemy of Mauretania (son of King Juba II and Mark Antony’s daughter Selene), or Macro the Guards Commander, with his wife Ennia, by whose help he had become Emperor. Their very loyalty and nearness to him earned them cruel deaths.
Nor was he any more respectful or considerate in his dealings with the Senate, but made some of the highest officials run for miles beside his chariot, dressed in their gowns; or wait in short linen tunics at the head or foot of his dining couch. Often he would send for men whom he had secretly killed, as though they were still alive, and remark off handedly a few days later that they must have committed suicide. When two Consuls forgot to announce his birthday, he dismissed them and left the country for three days without officers of state. One of his quaestors was charged with conspiracy; Caligula had his clothes stripped off and spread on the ground, to give the soldiers who flogged him a firmer foothold.
He behaved just as arrogantly and violently towards people of less exalted rank. A crowd bursting into the Theatre about midnight to secure free seats angered him so much that he had them driven away with clubs; more than a score of knights, as many married women, and numerous others were crushed to death in the ensuing panic. Caligula liked to stir up trouble in the Theatre by scattering gift vouchers before the seats were occupied, thus tempting commoners to invade the rows reserved for knights. During gladiatorial shows he would have the canopies removed at the hottest time of the day and forbid anyone to leave; or cancel the regular programme, and pit feeble old fighters against decrepit criminals; or stage comic duels between respectable householders who happened to be physically disabled in some way or other. More than once he closed down the granaries and let the people go hungry.
The Twelve Caesars Page 19
