The Twelve Caesars Page 11
In keeping with contemporary ideas of the dignity of history painting, West depicted a scene of noble pathos. Dressed in white, her head covered and bowed, Agrippina cradles her husband’s remains. She is surrounded by the survivors of the couple’s nine children – the same children who, two years earlier, had ridden in Germanicus’ chariot in his triumph over the Germans18 – and by a supporting cast of mourning Romans. Centre-stage, the objects of popular adulation, Germanicus’ sons and daughters could not be expected to resist inflated perceptions of either their misfortune or their public significance.5 From Brundisium the party travelled to Rome. The seven-year-old Gaius attended his mother in her triumphal progress, her pilgrimage of reversal and revenge.
As it happened, Agrippina was not so noble that she was not prepared to stage-manage pity to attain that vengeance and, in doing so, to make herself such a thorn in Tiberius’ side that the emperor banished her to Pandateria, site of her mother Julia’s exile. She died there in 33, four years before Tiberius, after an unsuccessful attempt to starve herself to death which resulted in force-feeding and a beating so severe that she lost an eye. It was a dismal, gut-wrenching, inhuman end, which nevertheless assured her the commendation of a historical tradition otherwise opposed to the petticoats aspect of Julio-Claudian government. Taken in conjunction with Germanicus’ murder, and the arrests of Gaius’ elder brothers Nero Caesar and Drusus Caesar, both of whom were also starved to death (Drusus after having been reduced to eating the stuffing of his bed), it amounts to a family inheritance decidedly less enviable than Seneca may lead us to assume. In the atmosphere of rank suspicion which characterized Tiberius’ court, Gaius’ crowd-pleasing paternity was as much curse as blessing.
From tragedy, pragmatism. Gaius was nineteen when he was summoned to Capri. His grandmother Antonia promoted the move, her intention to safeguard him from Sejanus’ evil attentions. There he schooled himself in emotional costiveness, a stranger to complaint, ‘ignoring the ruin of his kindred as if nothing at all had happened, passing over his own ill-treatment with an incredible pretence of indifference,’ as Suetonius relates. Afraid to react publicly to the misfortunes of his family, Gaius adopted a policy of stupefying self-control every bit as calculated as the ageing emperor’s wiles. Following Tiberius’ death, he made a correct assessment of the propaganda value of the memory of Germanicus, Agrippina and their depleted brood. Reprising the laudable emotionalism of Agrippina’s act of homage as recorded by West, he travelled to Pandateria and Pontia to reclaim the remains of his mother and his brother Nero (no traces of Drusus’ body could be identified). He purposely chose a period of stormy weather, harnessing nature’s springtime histrionics to his tableaux of elemental grief. In Rome, claiming that he had transferred the ashes to new urns with his own hands, he interred them with great solemnity in the Mausoleum of Augustus. It was a process of denying Tiberius. Gaius chose not to position himself within the newly emergent continuum of Rome’s emperors, but in a specifically dynastic context: the heir to the divine blood of Augustus through a family notable for its greatness. In elevating, and justifying, this dynastic element of the principate – in its explicitness something new in Rome – he both legitimized his own rule and sanitized his accession (which had, after all, been willed by Tiberius). He also laid down problems for the future, among them the claim to the throne of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, afterwards known as Nero, a grandson of Germanicus able like Gaius to invoke a family history of grandeur and tragedy.
In July 37, the mint at Lugdunum (modern Lyons) received instructions about the new reign’s coinage. On the obverse sides of the coins, a portrait of Gaius. Three reverse types included a head of Germanicus, the relationship of father and son explained in the surrounding inscription; a bust of Agrippina the Elder, ditto; and a radiate head of Augustus bearing the legend ‘The Divine Augustus, Father of his Country’. At the mint in Caesarea, this tendency was more explicit: one design featured Germanicus on both sides of the coin, another Germanicus on the obverse, Augustus on the reverse, Gaius in both cases unglimpsed.19
The implications were clear. In his coinage as in his official iconography and his public religious observances, Gaius extolled his distinguished ancestry. In celebrating those qualities to which he laid claim as child and great-grandchild, he appealed directly to that affection for Germanicus, Agrippina and Augustus which persisted across the Empire. He also aligned himself with Augustus’ divinity. It was a statement of belonging on the part of a man who, save a quaestorship in 33, was a stranger to the cursus honorum as well as to military experience and achievement. The support of the armed forces, associated with Gaius’ family since the time of Julius, was summoned through the memory of Germanicus, cherished as a soldier cut off in his prime by an associate of the hated Tiberius. Gaius’ numismatic exploitation of his father’s memory is a further refutation of Tiberius and his one-time henchman Sejanus, alloy-based legerdemain linking the new emperor directly with Augustus by a process of elision. It was the same impulse which, six months into his reign, inspired him to dedicate the new Temple of Augustus in the Forum. After twenty-three years, Tiberius may or may not have completed construction of the temple which the senate had voted the deified Augustus on his death. Gaius’ two-day ceremony included a choir of aristocratic children, 800 lions and bears slaughtered, horse-races and a banquet for senators and their wives. In bricks and mortar prominent in the heart of Rome, it associated the new emperor with his most illustrious forebear. The Roman equivalent of a commemorative tea-towel, coins issued by the mint bore an image of a large-headed Gaius in front of the temple sacrificing a bull. On the reverse, appropriately, sat a veiled personification of Piety.
As always, the inescapable hand of the past took as much as it gave. Gaius inherited from his father the ungainly combination of a long body and long, thin legs. A programme of vigorous riding had countered this unwieldiness in Germanicus’ case, spindle-shanks less obvious than the aura of martial heroism. We do not read of the conceited Gaius exercising. So promising at the outset, his inheritance could have transcended physicalities. The life he led undermined a body already weak and wrought havoc with a mind besieged by demons. If the sources approximate truth, the ingredients of his downfall would challenge the strongest constitution: excessive alcohol, lack of sleep, an addiction to sex and a seeming determination to steel himself against every compassionate or feeling impulse. Voyeuristic in his sadism, compulsive in his need to view mental and physical torture at close quarters (the spectator now, as once in Tiberius’ palace on Capri his unnatural self-control had provided the spectacle), he was the author of his own demise. At such a remove in time, the extent of his mental weakness cannot be estimated. The Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo, in a first-hand account of Gaius’ behaviour, indicates caprice and unpredictability but not madness, and attributes these weaknesses to an illness in October 37 brought about by ‘a life of luxury’: ‘heavy drinking and a taste for delicacies, an appetite insatiable even on a swollen stomach, hot baths at the wrong time, emetics followed immediately by further drinking and the gluttony which goes with it, indecent behaviour with boys and women.’20 It hardly matters whether we second Philo – or prefer Suetonius’ more egregiously lascivious explanation (which fails to take account of the reign’s chronology) that the trouble began with a mind-altering aphrodisiac administered by Gaius’ promiscuous fourth wife Caesonia.
For a twelve-month period at the beginning of his reign, Gaius issued one of the most famous coins of Roman imperial history. It was a bronze sesterce bearing images on the reverse of his three sisters, Agrippina, Drusilla and Julia Livilla. The standing female figures personified a trio of those abstract qualities which the Roman mindset – pagan, superstitious, earnest in its religiosity but robustly practical – invested with significance: Securitas, Concordia and Fortuna. It was the first appearance on Roman coinage of identifiable (and identified) living female figures, a distinction denied even to Livia, but the coin did not s
urvive Drusilla’s death in 38. In inspiration it celebrated that bounty with which the apparently malleable Gaius of the first months of the reign wished to endow Rome: security, harmony and fortune. That aspiration did not survive its year-long currency.
None of these qualities characterizes Gaius’ legacy. From disharmony arose his murder. The loss of any sense of security in Rome created that atmosphere of fear in which conspiracies flourished. (Gaius also took measures to ensure that senators actively feared him.) His greedy possessiveness about the blessings of fortune expressed his monarchical outlook, token of his belief in the princeps’ special position above that of the loftiest Roman noble. Quickly, a coin which had once extolled the virtues of the emperor’s exemplary family and broadcast his good intentions in three dimensions acquired a grim irony. Conditions changed in the course of Gaius’ reign, including relationships within the imperial family. By the end of 39, with Drusilla already dead, Gaius banished Agrippina and Julia Livilla. In their wake, security, harmony and fortune departed too.
The ideological vacuum created by the overthrow of traditional virtues provided fertile soil for the emergence of Gaius’ demonic mythology. Much of what we read may be true. Some of it is probably imaginative scaremongering on the part of writers determined to blacken his memory beyond redemption. But all of it has on occasion been regarded as the truth. That Gaius’ life survives in the manner it does in the ancients’ telling – a quasi-veracity dense with caliginous anecdote – is connected to that climate of profound unease which provided the backdrop for his particular theatre of the macabre.
Was it true that he commended a tortured actor for the euphoniousness of his screams? Did he really lessen the food bill of wild beasts in the circus by feeding them prisoners in place of butcher’s meat? What prompted Gaius to insist that a father witness the execution of his son, or that Publius Afranius Potitius, the senator who in October 37 had offered to die so long as Gaius recover from his illness, make good that promise and commit suicide? Was he serious in suggesting the consulship for his favourite horse, Incitatus, or was his intention another joke at the senate’s expense? Did he laugh or wince after ordering the executioner to chop off the hands of a slave caught stealing and to hang the severed body parts around the slave’s neck as he remained in attendance at the party? Again, at one level it scarcely matters. These are merely brushstrokes in the broader depiction of Gaius’ reign, an imagery in which he himself, wittingly or otherwise, was complicit.
It was early in 39 when Gaius made a speech to the senate which, with good reason, unnerved Rome’s upper classes. He did not claim authorship for himself, but attributed it to Tiberius:
Show no affection for any of them and spare none of them. For they all hate you and they all pray for your death; and they will murder you if they can. Do not stop to consider, then, what acts of yours will please them nor mind it if they talk, but look solely to your own pleasure and safety, since that has the most just claim.21
The emperor had lately been reading papers relating to treason trials of the previous reign. These were the same papers which, in 37, abolishing the charge of maiestas to widespread relief, Gaius had promised to destroy unread. Perhaps their destruction would have served both emperor and senate better. For the papers related to Tiberius’ treatment of Gaius’ mother Agrippina and his brothers Nero and Drusus. Their revelations startled and enraged him. On the evidence they contained he saw that Tiberius had been forced to condemn Agrippina and her sons as conspirators. Some of that evidence was contributed by men who continued to frequent the senate. They were the same men who, for the last two years, had added their voices to the chorus of praise with which a craven senate habitually greeted Gaius’ actions and innovations. For a moment, the world jolted on its axis. For so long Gaius had been accustomed to consider Tiberius the architect of his family’s downfall. Too late he recognized the distribution of blame. To a stunned senate house, Gaius made plain his discovery and his deliberations. Then, chillingly, he quoted what he claimed were Tiberius’ own words to him on senatorial duplicity and dislike. He ended with what, in Dio’s account, is a classically Tiberian statement of nihilistic menace: ‘For no man living is ruled of his own free will; only so long as a person is afraid does he pay court to the man who is stronger.’22 The same day, determined to inspire unease, he restored treason trials to the Roman statute books.
The senate’s response – to vote annual sacrifices to Gaius and formalize veneration of the emperor’s cult – failed to impress. As the senators had deceived Tiberius, so they would deceive Gaius too. He was aware already of rumoured conspiracy. Before the year was out, he would act on just such a hunch, adding to the death toll among Rome’s aristocracy.
It was not a case of groundless paranoia. Nor is this its significance. The revelations of those ‘burnt’ papers drove a wedge between Gaius and the senate. They convinced him of the rightness of a policy which discounted senatorial consultation in favour of monarchical government by himself and a chosen coterie of personal advisers, including an influential freedman called Kallistos. And so an irony is revealed. Regret for the political influence it had enjoyed under the Republic encouraged the senate to flatter the princeps in order to maintain those vestiges of power it retained (and perhaps build on that platform in an attempt to regroup). In doing so, it succeeded only in further undermining its position by revealing a querulous cowardice which proved to Gaius his good sense in mistrusting so debased a body of men and discounting their counsels in favour of friends and former slaves.
For his part, Gaius emerges from the sources as determined to stamp out opposition wherever it raised its head. From now on, the focus of his principate was absolutism: an urgent need to retain his throne, enforce submission and further elevate his own position by an unrelenting emphasis on his divinity. It was a high-risk strategy both at home and abroad. In Judaea, for example, his insistence that a cult statue of himself be erected in the temple in Jerusalem brought the Jewish world close to conflagration. Although Gaius’ advisers included anti-Semitic Alexandrian freedmen, his policy was only partly mischievous: the Empire must accept his godliness. (Eventually Gaius softened his line towards the Jews, concluding that they were ‘sadly misguided rather than wicked; and foolish in refusing to believe that I have got the nature of a god’.23)
His actions had acquired a symbolic dimension. He devised what Suetonius describes as ‘a novel and unheard-of kind of pageant’. Across the three-mile span of the bay at Baiae he created a floating temporary ‘bridge’, a costly and impressive feat of engineering. It was in fact a pontoon of boats and ships in two lines, closely anchored and supporting a dirt track ‘fashioned in the manner of the Appian Way’. Gaius rode across it, dressed in the breastplate of that legendary absolutist, Alexander the Great. On the following day, for the diversion of spectators who included delegates from Parthia, he raced a chariot across his sea-borne bridge. He was followed by friendly attendants and the entire Praetorian Guard.
Unsurprisingly, this puzzling and unique set piece of Roman public theatre – in which, with that easygoing brutality which is such a part of Gaius’ principate, spectators lost their lives after drunkenly falling into the sea from their vantage-points on surrounding hills and cliffs – did little to diminish the emperor’s folie de grandeur. Instead, it may have steeled his hand to undertake the only military campaign of his reign, a ‘joke’ in Tacitus’ assessment, played out along the banks of the Rhine.
In the autumn of 39, Gaius left Italy to cross the Alps. Although he travelled in an enormous and luxurious convoy, carried in a litter with eight bearers and followed by Praetorians, his progress was rapid. For his purpose was not principally, as Suetonius tells us, the recruitment of additional Batavian warriors for his German guard, nor, as Dio suggests, the need to shore up a bankrupt treasury with plunder from Spain and Gaul, but the quashing of a conspiracy which Gaius could not ignore.
Travelling with the emperor were his sisters, Agrippi
na and Julia Livilla, and Drusilla’s widower Lepidus. Their first destination was Upper Germany, where, by the end of October, Gaius had executed the imperial legate, Lentulus Gaetulicus, on suspicion of treason. Although the facts are confused, Gaetulicus was probably suspected of plotting to assassinate Gaius and replace him with Lepidus, at that point Gaius’ most likely heir. Inevitably, Lepidus too paid for this disloyalty with his life (in his case, he was charged with adultery with his sisters-in-law rather than direct involvement in scheming to become Rome’s fifth Caesar). Agrippina and Julia Livilla were commanded to accompany Lepidus’ remains back to Rome – presumably an intentional parody of the elder Agrippina’s triumphal progress from Brundisium – before being sent into exile, their possessions auctioned by Gaius to the highest bidders. Meanwhile Gaius, largely idle with the quarter-of-a-million troops he had assembled around him, staged a sequence of imaginary ‘raids’ across the Rhine, posting his own men as ‘enemies’, then chasing and capturing them. He accepted the senate’s congratulations on these warlike antics and seven acclamations by the troops as imperator. The timely defection to the Romans that autumn of a British prince called Amminus enabled Gaius to claim that he had conquered the inhospitable island during this northern progress, an achievement for which he was rewarded with the name ‘Britannicus’. In an act of future significance, he appointed as Gaetulicus’ replacement in Upper Germany a hatchet-faced grandee called Servius Sulpicius Galba.
Gaius spent the autumn in Lugdunum, gambling and money-grubbing. Restored, bored or perhaps simply reluctant to return to Rome, he then embarked on an escapade which sealed beyond recall his reputation for madness and folly. The ‘invasion’ of Britain did not progress further than the southern shores of the English Channel. Instead, with his soldiers lined up on the beach, Gaius ordered them to fire their catapults into the ocean and gather seashells as the spoils of their victory. It is a much-debated incident, which appears to embody Suetonius’ taunt of extreme assurance and excessive timidness. Whether the soldiers in fact refused to embark for Britain, and Gaius instructed them to fill their helmets with shells as a reprimand for cowardice, we cannot know. Suffice to say that his reputation no longer permitted any benefit of the doubt.