The Twelve Caesars Read online

  In the beginning, he elevated his family, offering decent burial to those who had died and honours to those who remained – the same privileges for his grandmother Antonia as those once enjoyed by the elderly Livia, including the title ‘Augusta’, public prayers for his sisters, a shared consulship for his uncle Claudius; later, he is accused of poisoning Antonia or driving her to suicide; he exiled his sisters on suspicion of conspiracy and killed his widower brother-in-law Lepidus whom Dio claimed was his lover;7 he dunked Claudius in the Rhine simply for being Claudius. Unsurprisingly, his plummet through the opinion polls was rapid. That downward journey revelled in bloodshed, torture and casual carnality. Scholars impose a tentative coherence by discerning a chilling, cruel humour behind Gaius’ atrocities: as an alternative morality it falls flat. Today his hair-raising record provides lurid inspiration for playwrights, film-makers and pornographers. It is a wanton legacy in default of any other. ‘For any great or royal work that he did, which might be for the present and for future ages,’ Josephus sniffs, ‘nobody can name any such.’8

  Dio characterizes Gaius as a compound of contradictions, his only consistency inconsistency.9 So, having at first forbidden Romans to set up images of him, he afterwards offered himself for public consumption to be worshipped as a living god in temples on the Palatine and Capitoline Hills. His ambitions were grandiose: he appeared in the guise of Hercules, Neptune, Bacchus and Apollo; with recourse to wigs he even impersonated Venus, Juno and Diana. The sources preserve a rumour that he went so far as to try to seduce the moon, thirsty for a new sort of thrill as pale, cool light flooded his palace bedroom. One temple contained a life-size golden statue of Gaius. In a practice designed to blur boundaries between the mortal and immortal figures of the emperor, it was dressed on a daily basis in clothing like his own. Only the smoke of sacrifice dimmed its brightness: guinea-hens, peacocks, pheasants, woodcock and even flamingoes burned in appeasement of this charade-loving charlatan.

  Apparently capricious, that attention-seeking volte-face was typical of Gaius’ inability to reconcile irreconcilables: that conjunction of excessive timidness and extreme assurance which Suetonius placed at the root of his mental weakness. In time the man who regarded Rome’s pantheon with contemptuous offhandedness appeared at the seaside playground of Baiae in ‘a crown of oak leaves... and a cloak of cloth of gold’; on other occasions he carried a trident, a caduceus or a thunderbolt, accessories of the gods. Was he testing the perimeters of his newfound power – enjoying an elaborate joke at the expense of Roman credulousness and senatorial sycophancy – or asserting the unassailability of the princeps’ position by ‘borrowing’ heavenly attributes? Was this talent-show approach to public worship in fact a deliberate policy designed to underline Gaius’ own eminence, his fitness to reign by dint of qualities that were more than human, denied to the common herd? If so, events would unveil the hollowness of vainglorious posturing. Perhaps these amateur dramatics should be interpreted as no more than the youthful jeux d’esprit of a man who had schooled himself to rely on his own resources for amusement – ‘a huge bullshitter’, as a brave cobbler once described him to his face;10 alternatively as an exercise in wish-fulfilment perpetrated by one who, even in his youth, was condemned by his appearance to mockery. (To mention the word ‘goat’ in the presence of the bald but hairy-limbed emperor was a capital offence.) Both answers provide grounds for our pity. With their emphasis on mental instability, the sources do not comment. Enough to register that in spirit these were the very gestures which, less than a century earlier, had cost the Divine Julius his life; the same self-aggrandizement which once had marked out Mark Antony as Rome’s ideological enemy, seduced by equations of kingship and divinity associated with the East. Time had moved on since the Ides of March and Mark Antony’s defeat at Actium. Things change, even attitudes. Gaius the madman, with a taste for female footwear and formative years spent among Eastern princelings in the household of Antony’s daughter Antonia, may have been the first in Rome to realize those changes’ full extent.

  If only, like Augustus, he could have espoused abstemiousness, restraint in any aspect of his life. Then he might have survived. Instead he was consistently extravagant in his appetites, with an appetite for extravagance. Cassius Dio accuses him of spending more than three billion sesterces in the space of two years,11 Seneca of blowing the annual tribute of three provinces (ten million sesterces) on a single dinner.12 Such extravagance embarrassed the imperial treasury: lust for money was just one ground for his wayward killings. And his appetites ranged widely. According to the sources, he ‘had not the slightest regard for chastity, either his own or anyone else’s’. He opened a brothel in the palace. He married four times in quick succession: only his last wife, Caesonia, lacking beauty but sexually accomplished, leaves any imprint. He indulged incestuous passions for all three of his sisters (a common complaint against unpopular emperors, but one more closely associated with Gaius than others); his favourite sister, Drusilla, became the first woman of the imperial house to be deified. Though he expelled from the city Rome’s most notorious male tarts, he himself was buggered by Valerius Catullus until the latter confessed himself worn out. The simple truth is that, in an amoral age, Gaius fucked with abandonment. Unlike Tiberius, he eschewed even the decency to shelter indecency from prying eyes on an island hideaway like Capri. Unlike Augustus, dissimulation was not among his faults. He cuckolded husbands at dinner-parties to which both husband and wife had been invited. The wife enjoyed in a neighbouring room, Gaius’ post-coital small talk with his guests included a frank assessment of her charms and performance, her husband compelled to silent acquiescence in fear of his life.

  In vain did Macro the Praetorian prefect remind him of the dignity of his office: within a year he had silenced Macro’s carping. Ditto Silanus, the father of his short-lived first wife, Junia Claudilla: Gaius’ father-in-law paid heavily for appearing to aspire to the role of éminence grise. There were token concessions. Like Tiberius before him, Gaius assimilated his portraiture to that of Augustus, as a bust in Copenhagen’s Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek attests. Save a petulant pursing of the lips and a thickening of the nose – the latter possibly the result of heavy drinking – his features closely resemble those of the classicized, idealized imagery of his ageless forebear. Later he would insist that statues of the gods share his own Augustan physiognomy. Gaius evidently needed Augustus’ reflected glory to underpin the legitimacy of his rule and explain the foundation of his divine pretensions: his official iconography merges his features with those of his great-grandfather. But he did not seek to emulate Augustus’ record and translate visual comparisons into the spheres of policy-making or reputation. He resisted comparisons with the ‘young Augustus’ as a slur on his youth and inexperience.13 From a distance, it looks like contrariness; it may have been laziness or lack of interest.

  The full story of this unhappy hell-raiser and his maniacal abuse of power is not confined to Suetonius’ famous assessment of a double career as emperor and monster. Quite as remarkably, it illustrates the durability of the Augustan settlement in the face of mental instability, murder and megalomania. In 37, the Romans took to their hearts a ‘star’, a ‘chick’, a ‘babe’, a ‘nursling’ – a young man whose whole life had been lived under the principate and in the shadow of family politics. Such terms of endearment did not remain long on the lips of the mob. Gaius was a cuckoo in the nest, a wolf in lamb’s clothing: as Tiberius had predicted, a viper in Rome’s bosom and brimful of poison; Phaeton destined to lose control of the sun-chariot and burn the entire Roman world. But his death was not the means of restoring the Republic. Instead, the last remaining adult male of his family inherited that ragbag of powers which Gaius had misused so spectacularly, the office stronger and more durable than the man.

  Revisionist scholars choose to pity him; the ancients, memories still sharp, delve less deeply. Their primary focus is not cause but its spectacular effects. Suetonius buries Gaius beneath a hig
hly flavoured millefeuille of gossip and scandal, layer upon layer of arid lust and senseless viciousness. His Life is punctuated by anecdotes and hearsay. It includes recollections from his own childhood of tidbits dropped by his grandfather, as if his grandfather’s insights and his own memory of stories overheard in his earliest years merit the authority of the written word. Accomplished storytelling, it is questionable history and slapdash biography, even according to the ancients’ nugatory estimation of life-writing as a genre. It did not arise by accident. Deconstructed, Suetonius’ Gaius reveals himself as a composite of would-be didactic literary models and conventions: an ersatz Icarus hell-bent on flying too close to the sun; an unrepentant Prodigal Son; Lucifer glorying in his fall from grace; the degenerate sport of an exemplary father.

  Fast forward two millennia, and Suetonius’ victim has yet to escape. He never will. Gaius was a historical travesty: the ‘Caligula’ of the sources is a legend. He will survive as long as the abuse of power remains a human impulse, continually reinvented, like Cleopatra a convenient and enduring archetype; and as long as prurience revels in stories of excess which, just possibly, contain grains of truth. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder recorded Gaius’ enjoyment of bathing in perfumed oils; like the Cleopatra of Augustan propaganda, he dissolved pearls in vinegar and drank them; such was his passion for gold that, anticipating the princes of Renaissance Europe, he sponsored costly, fruitless experiments in the alchemy of base metals.14 Unlike Suetonius’ tone of high censoriousness, Pliny’s list centres Gaius’ predilections within a contemporary culture of sumptuous superfluity: his prodigality was distinctive but not remarkable, a failing of its time. Nor were its implications necessarily as serious as the sources suggest, since the evidence denies any serious financial crisis at the beginning of the next reign. Rationality is not enough. More often in the rumours recorded about this cruel and insolent despot, Gaius’ historiography has permitted no excuses. He is condemned by the facts (such as they can be traced)... condemned alike by fictions.

  His reign was brief: three years, ten months and eight days. Suetonius enumerates its duration as if marvelling at its continuance for so long. We too are right to be surprised: given the catalogue of atrocities attributed to Gaius, his survival in power for almost four years is unexpected. It suggests that much of what we accept as intrinsic to his story may be later accretions added by a hostile tradition, or events which occurred in private, unknown either to many senators or to the majority of Romans.

  The emperor’s death, as so often in the Lives of the Caesars, is presaged by portents. Phidias’ statue of Jupiter at Olympia, on the brink of being dismantled and removed to Rome at Gaius’ particular request, burst into peals of laughter. The room of Gaius’ palace doorkeeper was struck by lightning, a meteorological outburst associated with the gods’ displeasure and one of which the emperor himself was terrified, hiding under tables at its onset. Meanwhile Gaius bungled a sacrifice in the temple. Killing a flamingo, he splashed the bird’s blood onto his clothes, priestly ham-fistedness traditionally a signifier of something adrift. For Suetonius, this otherworldly corroboration of Gaius’ unfitness to govern is the ultimate vindication. It is also, unusually in the context of this account, surplus to the historian’s requirements. Gaius had spared no effort to stockpile his offences against Rome. The result, by January 41, was an atmosphere of fear and loathing in which desperate men were prepared to embrace desperate measures. As Josephus has Gnaeus Sentius Saturninus tell an emergency meeting of the senate in the aftermath of regicide:

  this Gaius... hath brought more terrible calamities upon us than did all the rest [of the emperors], not only by exercising his ungoverned rage upon his fellow citizens, but also upon his kindred and friends, and alike upon all others, and by inflicting still greater miseries upon them, as punishments, which they never deserved, he being equally furious against men and against the gods.15

  From the sources (with their senatorial sympathies) emerges a sense of a city worn out by the murderous caprices of its madman ruler, the gods alienated, nature in revolt: a kettle too close to boiling to require the tinder of the numinous.

  But the twenty-eight-year-old Gaius was worn out, too. He slept only three hours a night. Even that rest was fitful and disturbed. Dark, disquieting dreams rent the stillness. He fell prey to night terrors. Unable – unwilling? – to linger in bed, he shifted about the palace, sitting or standing, sometimes quite still, his head thumping, prone to fainting. Along the marble colonnades with their view of the Forum and the slumbering city he trailed – like the figures of Julius Caesar and Calpurnia in Edward Poynter’s 1883 painting The Ides of March, his eyes fixed on the sky and the distant horizon where the sun must rise. Sometimes he cried out, desperate for the dawn. All his cries were prayers that night would end. Little wonder that we read that his eyes and temples were hollow, his face naturally forbidding.

  For an empire that never rested, an emperor unable to sleep. But while the empire’s 6,000 miles of frontier were patrolled by legions and its provinces administered by an imperial bureaucracy which had evolved over time into a sequence of highly efficient government satellites, no one fully shared with Gaius the burdens of the purple. He would not have wished it. Yet it was an unrealistic weight to place on the shoulders of a man whose infirmities were not only mental but physical, and whose undignified enthusiasm for tragedians and circus performers outweighed his interest in the day-to-day business of imperial rule.

  ‘The empire was not given to himself, but to his father Germanicus,’ Seneca tartly observed of Gaius.16 In March 37, it was a truth universally acknowledged. Gaius himself took no pains to disguise or deny the hereditary nature of his elevation. On the contrary, his consciousness of a distinction grounded in descent – indissoluble, impossible to gainsay – explains that conviction of unanswerability which characterizes much of his interpretation of the principate. He even sought to ‘improve’ his bloodline, preferring to erase the humbly born Agrippa, husband of his grandmother Julia the Elder, and instead to imagine his mother Agrippina as the daughter of an incestuous father–daughter relationship between Augustus and Julia.

  Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, born on 31 August AD 12, was the youngest surviving son of Germanicus Caesar and Agrippina the Elder. He was thus a great-grandson through the paternal line of Mark Antony, Livia and the latter’s first husband Tiberius Claudius Nero and, through his mother, of Augustus himself. This heavyweight inheritance would prove a highly charged genetic amalgam. It conferred on Gaius Julio-Claudian ancestry and proximity to divinity. Embracing both victor and victim of Actium, it facilitated scattershot loyalties on the part of a young man determined to cherry-pick only those aspects of Augustus’ Roman revolution which suited him.

  But Gaius’ heredity was more than a tracery of bloodlines, a painted stemma on the walls of the family atrium. His inheritance encompassed heroism and villainy, Empire-wide acclaim, the loyalty of Rome’s armed forces, and deep wellsprings of popular sentiment which his mother had taken pains to manipulate in her children’s favour. In Roman minds, the melding of aristocratic clans predisposed Gaius to a sequence of inherited traits: Julian swagger and even genius; the cruelty, hauteur and distinction of the Claudians; Mark Antony’s feckless prodigality; the amiability of Germanicus. So richly scented a brew ought to have stimulated reflection. Seneca, we have seen, placed the emphasis on Germanicus. That and, we can add, the absence of any alternative candidate from within the imperial family.

  We know Germanicus’ story. Consul at twenty-six, he had been a distinguished military commander whose popularity surpassed that of his uncle Tiberius. A probable candidate for princeps, he campaigned successfully in Pannonia and Dalmatia and on the Rhine, earning comparisons from Tacitus with Alexander the Great. In Germany, the infant Gaius shared in his father’s renown. Dressed by his mother in a tiny soldier’s uniform, he became an unofficial legionary mascot and on one occasion helped prevent revolt in the ranks. It was the
troops who called him ‘Caligula’, ‘Little Boots’, in reference to his miniature soldier’s boots. The incident of the mutiny in 14, like the soldier’s pet name (which he himself hated), has entered the emperor’s mythology, though he himself can hardly have remembered it. What adhered was the affection of the military. In 19, it was not enough to save Germanicus. As we have seen, he was probably poisoned by Piso in Syria on the instructions of Tiberius, who afterwards stayed away from his funeral. His grieving widow certainly thought so. Agrippina understood enough of the world to exploit family tragedy for subsequent advancement. The principal beneficiary of her plotting, which brought about her own death and that of her two elder sons, was her smallest chick, Gaius.

  In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, at the request of the archbishop of York, a Pennsylvania-born history painter trained his sights on Agrippina. The Landing of Agrippina at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus occupied Benjamin West for several years. At the cleric’s request it was inspired by a passage from Tacitus’ Annals:

  Agrippina... worn out though she was with sorrow and bodily weakness, yet still impatient of everything which might delay her vengeance, embarked with the ashes of Germanicus and her children, pitied by all. Here indeed was a woman of the highest nobility.17