The Twelve Caesars Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Last Princess: The Devoted Life of Queen Victoria’s Youngest Daughter

  Empress of Rome: The Life of Livia

  First published in hardback and export and airside trade paperback in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Matthew Dennison, 2012

  The moral right of Matthew Dennison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84887-683-5

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-84887-684-2

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-85789-780-0

  Designed by carrdesignstudio.com

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  For my parents, with love

  ‘There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.’

  Lord Acton to Mandell Creighton, 5 April 1887

  ‘It is a man’s pleasures, yes his pleasures, which tell us most about his true worth, his gravitas and his self-control. No one is so dissolute that his work lacks all semblance of seriousness; it is our leisure which betrays us... One of the chief features of good fortune is that it permits us no privacy, no concealment, and in the case of emperors, it flings open the door not only to their homes but to their private bedrooms and deepest retreats; every secret is exposed and revealed to rumour’s listening ear.’

  Pliny the Younger, Panegyricus 82

  ‘That old passion for power, which has ever been innate in man, increased and broke out as the Empire grew in greatness.’

  Tacitus, Histories II.38

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Note on the text

  Family Trees

  Introduction

  I Julius Caesar: ‘Too great for mortal man’

  II Augustus: ‘All clap your hands’

  III Tiberius: ‘Ever dark and mysterious’

  IV Gaius Caligula: ‘Equally furious against men and against the gods’

  V Claudius: ‘Remarkable freak of fortune’

  VI Nero: ‘An angler in the lake of darkness’

  VII Galba: ‘Equal to empire had he never been emperor’

  VIII Otho: ‘If I was worthy to be Roman emperor...’

  IX Vitellius: ‘A series of carousals and revels’

  X Vespasian: ‘The fox changes his fur, but not his nature’

  XI Titus: ‘The delight and darling of the human race’

  XII Domitian: ‘But the third’?

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Glossary

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction: Death of Julius Caesar by Alexander Zick © Bettmann / Corbis

  Julius Caesar: Statue of Caesar © Osa

  Augustus: Bronze statue of emperor Caesar Augustus © Only Fabrizio

  Tiberius: Statue of Tiberius © Toni Sanchez Poy

  Gaius Caligula: Gaius Caligula, Emperor of Rome by Antonius © Stapleton Collection / Corbis

  Claudius: 18th Century Engraving of Claudius © Chris Hellier / Corbis

  Nero: Marble head of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus © Lagui

  Galba: Servius Sulpicius Galba Roman emperor, murdered by Otho, Mary Evans Picture Library

  Otho: Marcus Salvius Otho Roman emperor, Mary Evans Picture Library

  Vitellius: Male bust representing the emperor Vitellius © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikipedia Commons

  Vespasian: Titus Sabinus Vespasianus, Roman emperor, Mary Evans Picture Library

  Titus: 19th century engraving of the Roman Emperor Titus, iStockphoto

  Domitian: Ancient bronze Roman coin Domitian © Paul Picone

  Note on the text

  In the interests of readability and accessibility, I have tried wherever possible to restrict footnotes to a minimum. To this end, I have not provided specific notes on quotations from Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars: the present account simply contains too many. All unattributed quotations therefore are from Suetonius. In each instance, I have made use of the translation by J.C. Rolfe first published in London by William Heinemann in 1914 – still, almost a century later, distinguished by its combination of accuracy, elegance and charm.

  INTRODUCTION

  Introduction: Death of Julius Caesar by Alexander Zick © Bettmann / Corbis

  ‘Exactitude is not truth,’ wrote the painter Henri Matisse in 1947. Readers of the Roman historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus must surely agree. In his De vita Caesarum – usually called in English The Lives of the Caesars or The Twelve Caesars – which was probably published in the decade after the accession of the emperor Hadrian in AD 117, Suetonius sought instances of both: not all overlap. Exactitude is apparently one result of much of his careful fact-finding and evidence-sifting; many of his truths are verifiable by reference to other surviving primary sources. Equally obviously, there are omissions from the twelve Lives; there are also areas where the reader must exercise caution.

  In intent Suetonius’ approach to biography is comprehensive, embracing both the public and private lives of his subjects, and he essays impartiality, quoting conflicting opinions, demonstrating consistently that arguments have at least two sides, abiding by Virginia Woolf’s injunction that the biographer ‘be prepared to admit contradictory versions of the same face’.1 The principal property of his writing is not precision save in the sharpness and bold outline of the many anecdotes he preserves: he adopts (when it suits him) a loose chronology or schematic approach to his material, and his method intermittently suggests a squirrel hoarding nuts, piling and compiling details. He is not writing history as the ancients understood it – an account of the public and political life of the state in war and in peace: chronological, annalistic, thematic, interpretative. His work is life-writing, then as now accorded lowlier status, susceptible to intrusions of the subjective and admitting the possibility of alternative truths: a bravura unmasking of the office-holder behind the office. Given the open-handedness of his approach, his refusal either to endorse or to condemn, the cumulative effect of Suetonius’ research retains an exhilarating, mobile quality reminiscent of Impressionist and Pointillist paintings: an emphasis on looking and seeing; a manipulation of light and shadow; passages of bold colour; a vigorous quest for truth; a certain deliberate liveliness unconstrained by academic convention.

  In a survey of female biography written at the turn of the nineteenth century, Mary Hays wrote: ‘The characteristic of the Roman nation was grandeur: its virtues, its vices, its prosperity, its misfortunes, its glory, its infamy, its rise and fall were alike great.’2 It was a statement of its time, a reiteration of that grandiloquence which history painters of the later eighteenth century had sought to extract from Roman subjects. But successive generations of readers have agreed with Hays’ vision of Rome, and it is possible to enjoy Suetonius’ biographies as the expression of this ‘grandeur’ coloured by a dozen different prisms, a compendium of glory and infamy, virtue and (notably) vice.

  No account of Rome’s twelve rulers from Julius Caes
ar to Domitian can escape the long shadow of Suetonius. To attempt to do so would be contrary: that has not been my intention. The present work revisits Suetonius’ 1,900-year-old survey in acknowledgement of the immense riches both of its subject matter and of the author’s treatment. I have not attempted to imitate my starting point, which would not be possible, nor to offer a commentary on it, an academic appreciation or a riposte. Rather the present work, like Suetonius’, looks at the breadth of its subjects’ lives in an effort to uncover the human face of eminence and snapshots of vanished moments which are utterly remote from our own experience but intermittently familiar. Only implicitly does it address Lord Acton’s famous assessment of the connections between access to power and personal corruption which are all too evident in several Caesars’ spectacular failings.

  Instead, the present Twelve Caesars, informed by additional primary sources and associated secondary material including paintings, revisits aspects of that earlier magnum opus in an effort to create for the generalist reader portraits which recall telling facets of twelve remarkable men: the political seen through the personal, the private impulse exposed to public scrutiny, even the history of their histories, which expresses another kind of truth. None of these portraits is exhaustive; none is encyclopedic. None aims primarily to titillate, none to instruct or offer moral exempla. Material is arranged by turns thematically and chronologically, a loosely knit garment, the intention to cast light on the origins, nature and impact of lives and careers which cannot otherwise be satisfactorily confined within a book of this length. Each of these vignettes, I hope, explores ‘the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders’.3 The present work is an entertainment, and will have succeeded in its aim if a single reader is inspired to return to that earlier, justly celebrated Twelve Caesars.

  JULIUS CAESAR

  (100–44 BC)

  ‘Too great for mortal man’

  Julius Caesar: Statue of Caesar © Osa

  Isolated by eminence, ‘the bald whoremonger’ Gaius Julius Caesar conceals from us the innermost workings of heart and mind. ’Twas ever thus. Repeatedly he came, saw, conquered; he wrote too, and with impassioned gestures and in a high-pitched voice he importuned his contemporaries if not for love, then for acquiescence, assistance, acknowledgement, awe, acclaim, an approximation of ardour and, above all, admiration and action. He did not stoop to explanations, but asserted unblushingly that dearer to him than life itself was that public renown the Romans called dignitas (a quality he rated higher than moral decency, according to Cicero).1

  The scale of his achievements dazzled and repelled his contemporaries. (So too a habit of playing fast and loose with the strict legalities of those offices of state he won by bribery, force of will and sheer charisma.) Ancient sources, including Cicero’s letters, betray this ambivalence: they omit to unravel any motive bar vaunting self-belief. Openly Caesar regarded himself as the leading man of the state. He could tolerate no superior and once announced that he preferred the prospect of pre-eminence in a mountain backwater to second place in Rome. Suetonius claims that he ‘allowed honours to be bestowed on him which were too great for mortal man... There were no honours which he did not receive with pleasure.’ We know too well the outcome.

  Intermittently his character was cold, the white heat of ambition his defence against the loneliness of epic hubris. We learn as much of the man himself from the handful of portraits which survive from his own lifetime: long-nosed and broad-browed, with strong cheekbones, a resolute, direct gaze and the receding hairline which caused him such anguish. Their style has yet to evolve that bland idealization which will transform the public face of his successor Augustus from autocratic wunderkind to ageless marble dreamboat. As the written sources confirm, Caesar’s was not the appearance of a hero (nor was blandness among his characteristics). He dressed with eccentric flamboyance, customizing the purple-striped tunic that was the senator’s alternative to the toga with full-length fringed sleeves and a belt slung loosely about his waist; later he affected scarlet leather boots. Fastidiousness bordering on vanity reputedly extended to depilation of his pubic hair. It is the sort of detail by which the Romans habitually found out their heroes’ feet of clay and we may choose to disregard it if we will.

  Of the twenty-three dagger wounds inflicted on Caesar on the Ides of March 44 BC by that conspiracy of friends, Romans and countrymen – not to mention cuckolded husbands and former colleagues – only one was fatal, poetically a wound to the heart (or near enough). It was not a poet’s death, although Caesar had written poetry – one composition, appropriately called ‘The Journey’, undertaken on the twenty-four-day march from Rome to Further Spain. Rather it was the death of a man who had sown and reaped mightily. As he announced at Marcus Lepidus’ dinner party while dissent fomented, his choice had always been for a speedy death. Conspiracy did not thwart that final ambition. Given his apparent disregard for the good opinion of Rome’s governing class, his destiny, as Plutarch concluded, was ‘not so much unexpected as... unavoidable’.2

  Compulsively adulterous, subject to the aphrodisiac of power as he resisted submission in every other aspect of his life, he cultivated a legend of personal distinction and vaulting audacity in which none believed more fully than he. At a time when unbridled self-esteem was inculcated in the majority of senators’ sons, Caesar succumbed in splendid fashion.3 He dreamed, a soothsayer explained to him, that he was destined to rule the world: a restless spirit, unchecked energy and an irrational need for paramountcy drove him towards that preposterous goal. ‘Caesar’s many successes,’ Plutarch wrote, ‘did not divert his natural spirit of enterprise and ambition to the enjoyment of what he had laboriously achieved, but served as fuel and incentive for future achievements, and begat in him plans for future deeds, and a passion for fresh glory, as though he had used up what he already had.’4 Those achievements were to change the political map of Europe and divert the course of Western history, connecting the untamed lands of the north with the culture and, in time, belief systems of the south; against that, reorganization of the calendar and a month named in his honour appear small beer. What Suetonius describes as ‘incredible powers of endurance’ facilitated feats of comic-book daring and derring-do, and doggedness in the face of opposition which, in different forms, proved unrelenting.

  For seven days following Caesar’s murder, the sun was dark as if eclipsed; skies above Rome thrilled to the nightly appearance of a comet of surpassing splendour universally acknowledged by the credulous as the dead man’s soul. In death he was deified; his legend had begun in life. If some of the evil that he did lives after him, as Shakespeare has Mark Antony assert in his funeral oration for Caesar, not all of the good lies interred with his bones.5 Revisionism began with the last of those dagger wounds. Even Cicero, whose relationship with Caesar was notoriously troubled, admitted that ‘his character was an amalgamation of genius, method, memory, culture, thoroughness, intellect and industry’.6

  On every level Caesar was himself the architect of his own mythology: we shall discover that it is a trait of those who aspire to pre-eminence. His seven books of Commentaries on the Gallic War, covering the period of his proconsulship of Gaul from 58 to 52 BC, present his self-appointed task of subduing Gaul for the empire (and himself) in the light of military manoeuvres necessitated in the interests of national security. The truth is both different and less clean-cut. Those who contributed to his successes, notably his second-in-command Quintus Atius Labienus, scarcely check the progress of this narrative of military apotheosis; nor are rare setbacks acknowledged as failure or wrong calls on Caesar’s part.7 (Not surprisingly, Labienus later transferred allegiance away from Caesar.) It would be easy to dismiss him as a fraudster or a confidence trickster, but none was convinced more fully than he. In Suetonius’ account, belief in his own superhuman destiny shapes Caesar’s thoughts throughout his mature career, attested in the unusually large number of direct quotations the biographer preserves.
This for Suetonius was central to any understanding of Caesar, as well as his interest as a biographical subject. It probably explains why Suetonius felt able to dismiss the conquest of Gaul in a single paragraph, focusing instead on those qualities which permitted Caesar to pull off such a grandiose scam by inspiring and sustaining a relationship of lover-like devotion between himself and the soldiers who followed him year after eventful year, and who even offered to fight for him without pay.8 For Suetonius’ Caesar, dogged by debt, the attraction of proconsulship of Gaul was that, of all provinces, Gaul was ‘the most likely to enrich him and furnish suitable material for triumphs’. By dint of iron will, and relentless exploitation of blood and iron, his guess came good. This was not heroism in the cause of the senate and the people of Rome. In placing self before service, Caesar acted in the spirit of the times. An ailing republic failed to enforce – or to generate – those mechanisms needed to contain the ambitions of dangerous men. In his Parallel Lives, written in the century after his death, Plutarch twinned Caesar with Alexander the Great. No shrinking violet, Caesar made the same comparison himself, regretting his own tardiness in the face of Alexander’s prodigiously well-spent youth. Like his all-conquering predecessor, in time he bestrode the earth like a Colossus. In the final call, such might could not be reconciled with a republic dedicated through five centuries to curbing individual eminence.

  Gaius Julius Caesar was an aristocrat when noble birth was still at a premium in Rome. The family into which he was born on 13 July 100 BC was ancient, obscure and of slender means: patricians, members of the city’s oldest aristocratic class. In his veins, he claimed, flowed the blood of kings, heroes and a goddess: invincibility was coded into the physical chemistry of his being like lesser men’s predisposition to freckles or thick ankles. Among descendants of the Julii were Venus, her son Aeneas (Trojan hero and progenitor of the Roman race) and those kings of Alba Longa who counted among their offspring Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus. It was as hard to disprove as to prove, although Velleius Paterculus, that enthusiastic chronicler of the Julio-Claudians, described it as ‘a claim acknowledged by all those who study the ancient past’.9 Perhaps. Such lofty assertions overrode the curiously unelevated etymology of the ‘Caesar’ cognomen, which may have referred to Punic elephants or blue-grey eyes or the family trait of a luxuriant thatch of hair (the last singularly inappropriate in Caesar’s case) or, more graphically, to birth by caesarean section. Years later, triumphant in Spain, Caesar would commend his troops for storming the heavens; from the outset he claimed for himself by dint of birth something approaching direct heavenly access. ‘Our stock... has at once the sanctity of kings, whose power is supreme among mortal men, and the claim to reverence which attaches to the Gods, who hold sway over kings themselves,’ Caesar told mourners in a funeral oration for his father’s sister in 69 BC. Of such is the discourse of omnipotence. It was a language with which he kept faith lifelong.