The Twelve Caesars Read online

  The senate... Lepidus... Agrippina... Julia Livilla... and now, perhaps, those troops who had always adhered to the family of Germanicus: Gaius’ isolation was growing. That bronze sesterce on which the emperor’s sisters masqueraded as Security, Harmony and Fortune had already been discarded by the mint. But it was not only Rome which was denied their benison. Despite his bluster and bravado, Gaius himself was reaching a position where it was clear that he too had forsaken all.

  In the end, after a flurry of senatorial executions and escalating uncertainty among all classes across the capital, assassination from within palace ranks. Gaius had been foolish to taunt Cassius Chaerea, tribune of the Praetorian Guard, with effeminacy. Had the emperor, in his godly role-play, overlooked the goddess Roma herself? Perhaps then, as much of his behaviour suggests, he had not been sufficiently mindful of virtus, that Roman definition of manliness in the form of man’s ideal behaviour whose cult image exactly matched that of Roma herself. Once, virtus had been Romans’ defining quality. Cicero described it as ‘the badge of the Roman race and breed’:24 a prohibition against male submission, the bar to Roman troops’ surrender even in the face of certain defeat. Granted, the bulkily masculine Chaerea, with a distinguished service record behind him, spoke in high, lisping tones. But he cannot have relished being called ‘Lassie’ by an emperor so conspicuously his inferior in virtus, nor the obscene gestures Gaius made in full view of Chaerea’s men when the latter kissed his hand in obeisance. His disaffection smouldered and finally boiled over into hatred. When Gaius was murdered on 24 January 41, in a covered passage leading from the theatre to the palace, Chaerea swung the first blow. His co-conspirators included his fellow Praetorian tribunes Sextus Papinius and Cornelius Sabinus and Praetorian prefect Marcus Arrecinus Clemens. Gaius’ own principal response, despite the years of suspicion, was surprise. His wife and daughter died at the same time, the blood-smattered Caesonia in one account boldly extending her neck to the assassin’s blade.25 A common soldier dispatched the infant Julia Drusilla. With an utter brutality well matched to Gaius’, he dashed out her brains against a wall.

  No ease could be expected of so violent a death. In the Lamian Gardens, high on the Esquiline Hill close to the Gardens of Maecenas, Gaius’ troubled spirit haunted Rome’s early-spring nights.

  The gardens were imperial property, given to Tiberius by Lucius Aemilius Lamia, legionary commander, imperial legate and city prefect. Former cavalry officers, the Lamiae were among those who had benefited from the principate. Raised to the senate by Augustus, the family earned at least two consulships, one under Augustus himself, a second, suffect appointment under Domitian. In January 41, their name was again synonymous with loyalty.

  Secretly, stealthily, the mangled remnants of Gaius’ body had been transported across the city to this hilltop refuge. A pyre was quickly improvised and the body partly burned. Charred remains were interred in a shallow grave. As in life, Gaius battled restlessness. The gardens’ caretakers, Suetonius tells us, soon became familiar with the sight of his ghost.

  He might never have found peace were it not for his sisters Agrippina and Julia Livilla. Returning from exile in the aftermath of Gaius’ death, they oversaw the body’s removal, cremation and appropriate burial. It was a remarkable act on the part of women once banished by a brother lost to all claims of love and faithfulness. But Agrippina the Younger was indeed a remarkable woman. In 41 she was not finished with Rome’s emperors. As we will see, her own fate would prove no happier than that of her tyrannous, misguided brother.

  CLAUDIUS

  (10 BC–AD 54)

  ‘Remarkable freak of fortune’

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

  Historian turned history-maker, Claudius struggled with speech but wrote Greek with cumbersome prolixity. With the voice of a sea creature, throaty and raucous, he was virtually unintelligible, Seneca claimed; Pliny the Elder counted him among the hundred most scholarly authors of the day. Disgraced by ‘a horrible habit under the stress of anger of slobbering at the mouth and running at the nose, a stammer, and a persistent nervous tic’, Claudius devoted the wastelands of his youth, when Rome ignored him, to an activity which took no account of his physical shortcomings and which Dio praises as suitable training for the principate: writing history. (He also devoted his time to taverns and tarts.) A scion of the imperial house, his tutors were appropriately eminent: Livy and Sulpicius Flavus. He possessed from birth an exceptional memory, from exceptional circumstances the time and leisure for solitary study. The result was twenty volumes on the history of Etruria, homeland of his first wife Plautia Urgulanilla (granddaughter of a confidante of Livia); an account of the old enemy Carthage written in eight volumes; and forty-three volumes in Latin devoted to the recent history of Rome, with tactful omissions concerning the civil war, the Proscriptions and the roots of Augustus’ settlement. (This last was read by Tacitus.) More remarkably, this limping master of ‘feeble and far-fetched jokes’ spun out his autobiography to eight volumes. Length took no account of paucity of incident. His contemporaries rubbished the undertaking for its poor taste.

  Pedant and thinker, while harvests failed, the emperor Claudius spearheaded the introduction of three new letters to the Roman alphabet (two corresponded to the modern letters W and Y); it was a short-term innovation which did not survive him. Like so many in his high-living family in this period of excess, he was lustful, gluttonous and hard-drinking, ‘impatient of celibacy’, driven to a point of bodily suffering by the need to satisfy urges that were in equal measure libidinous and greedy. (So extreme were the attacks of heartburn which succeeded his overindulgence that he confessed to having considered suicide frequently.) More than sex and alcohol, his passion was the schoolmaster’s weakness for instruction. He bombarded Romans with pithy edicts on subjects from grape harvests to cures for snakebites (the sap of yew trees, apparently): his proposals included a decision to legitimize farting at dinner-parties, after he heard about a man who had endangered his health by attempting to restrain himself. Despite the public readings of his books sponsored during his reign, his only written work to gain wide circulation was a treatise on dicing. It hardly mattered. Despite Gaius’ posturing with wig or caduceus, the ‘Clau-Clau-Claudius’ of Robert Graves’s popular fictions was to become the first of Rome’s Caesars who was openly worshipped in his own lifetime. This ‘monster whom Mother Nature had begun to work upon but then flung aside’ (his mother’s disillusioned assessment) alone among his siblings became a living god.

  His Cinderella story includes, famously, his discovery by soldiers behind a curtain and subsequent acclamation as emperor; in the conquest of Britain in 43, completing what Julius Caesar had begun, shaking head and buckling knees did not prevent his appearance at Camulodunum (Colchester) in the guise of conqueror mounted on an elephant. Indeed, this physical wreck, dismissed by one doctor as ‘a very battleground of diseases’, would allow the troops to salute him in the manner of a victorious general as imperator no fewer than twenty-seven times; in his role of princeps, by contrast, he accepted only the titles ‘Augustus’ and ‘Caesar’ and never became officially imperator of Rome. ‘He possessed majesty and dignity of appearance,’ Suetonius allows, ‘but only when he was standing still or sitting, and especially when he was lying down.’ Among surviving portraits is a statue of a seated Claudius discovered in the theatre of the Etruscan city of Caere, today housed in Rome’s Vatican Museums. The greater part of that image consists of an improbably muscular torso worthy of the Ignudi of Michelangelo. The emperor compelled to immobility was a novel form of heroism.

  ‘When [Claudius’] sister Livilla heard that he would one day be emperor, she openly and loudly prayed that the Roman people might be spared so cruel and undeserved a fortune.’ It is a sibling reaction typical of that dysfunctionalism engendered in Augustus’ heirs by the scramble for power. (Livilla may have coveted the throne for her husband, Marcus Vinicius, or her own sons.
) As it happened, misfortune was not the lot of the sixty million inhabitants of Claudius’ empire. His victims were senators and, in particular, knights. Some thirty-five of the former and as many as three hundred of the latter received death penalties during the thirteen years of his reign. (‘This man, my lords, who looks as though he could not hurt a fly, used to chop off heads as a dog sits down,’ as Augustus laments in Seneca’s satirical Apocolocyntosis, ‘The Pumpkinification of Claudius’.) It was the latest chapter of post-Republican Rome’s tortuous dialogue between senate and Palatine, which only Augustus had arbitrated with consistent success and which Claudius, moving ineluctably towards military-backed absolutism, failed to resolve.

  Despite the misgivings shared by the senate and his family, Claudius governed with conscientiousness and a degree of wisdom for much of his reign. Characteristically, Suetonius accuses him of lack of moderation in his passion for women: he applied the same wholeheartedness to the business of empire, working ‘even on his own anniversaries and those of his family, and sometimes even on festivals of ancient date and days of ill-omen’. He completed the annexation of Britain; he extended and overhauled membership of the senate, in 47 invoking the ancient office of censor to do so and cudgelling Rome’s conservative upper classes into accepting colleagues from the provinces, specifically Gallia Comata; he improved the lot of the ordinary Roman by building a harbour at Ostia to ensure the safe arrival of the imported grain supply and prevent food shortages, as well as by completing two new aqueducts, the Aqua Claudia and the Aqua Anio Novus, at a cost estimated by Pliny the Elder at 350 million sesterces: together they supplied almost half the city’s drinking water. In his coin issues he celebrated a virtue that was both inarguable and uncontentious: Constantia, personifying the steadfastness, persistence and perseverance of the emperor. It was a suitably unshowy claim on the part of a man whose political experience prior to 41 was virtually non-existent and who, despite the notable careers of his father Drusus and his brother Germanicus, lacked military experience entirely. ‘By dulling the blade of tyranny, I reconciled Rome to the monarchy,’ claims Graves’s Claudius in Claudius the God. It was only partly true. (Certainly, in entrusting tasks to imperial freedmen, Claudius spared himself some of the opprobrium of unpopular decision-making.) With greater trust in the legions which had made him princeps than in the senators who had hesitated to confirm their fait accompli, Claudius treated Rome’s political classes with traditional respect. Like all his immediate predecessors, he denied them the means of effective dissent.

  In the absence of the relevant passages of Tacitus’ Annals, and in light of question marks over the surviving version of Dio’s account and the loss of lives of Claudius by Pliny the Elder, Fabius Rusticus and Cluvius Rufus, Suetonius bequeaths us the only full-length account of Claudius’ life to survive from antiquity.1 Its enjoyment ought not to preclude a degree of cautious scepticism on the reader’s part. For in one of his more richly coloured biographies, Suetonius presents that series of apparent contradictions which, taken in aggregate, have contributed to Claudius’ historiographical reputation as a ‘problem’ emperor, his legacy ambiguous, ripe for just the sort of red-top sensationalism which adds piquancy to Graves’s novels and their subsequent televisation. Suetonius’ fifth Caesar combines physical frailty with academic rigour, timidity with barbarous cruelty, clear thinking with overwhelming susceptibility to the self-interest of unofficial close advisers, notably his wives and freedmen. Both his strengths and his weaknesses are strident. He inspires conflicting responses: more than inconsistent, he appears to be compounded of irreconcilables. Early studiousness prior to the throne later gives way to buffoonery; physical infirmities regulated by high office, he apparently jettisons aspects of right thinking.

  His ascent to the purple, a case of the swish of the curtain, is one of the best-known vignettes of the layman’s Rome, more dramatic than convincing. In 1871, it inspired an equally well-known painting, A Roman Emperor, AD 41, by Dutch-born classical painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Alma-Tadema painted pot-boilers. His large-scale snapshots of Roman life and history enjoyed immense popularity and were acclaimed in the artist’s lifetime for the accuracy of their archaeological details. In A Roman Emperor, AD 41, it is the narrative, not the decorative impulse, which predominates. An old and ugly Claudius cowers behind a curtain, where he is discovered by a soldier. We join the scene at the moment the centurion draws back the heavily fringed drapery to expose Gaius’ grim-faced uncle to the obeisance of a motley crowd of soldiers and court beauties. Claudius is revealed half in shadow, right of centre. Occupying the centre of the painting are a mound of richly draped dead bodies and a marble herm, its base suggestively stained with crimson handprints. The painting contains a single image typical of Roman heroism: the dignified profile of the herm.2 It also offers a potent riposte to the legend of ‘innocent’ serendipity surrounding Claudius’ accession. To seize his destiny, the unprepossessing Claudius must step over those ornamental corpses. He must also overcome that fear which contorts his face – surely born of a sense of his own unworthiness which, in Alma-Tadema’s image, the viewer shares.

  But A Roman Emperor, AD 41 was not Alma-Tadema’s only depiction of Claudius’ transition to pre-eminence. Four years earlier he had painted Proclaiming Claudius Emperor. In this earlier, quite different image, the composition is inspired by paintings of the Annunciation by Fra Angelico, Filippino Lippi and Botticelli. A youthful Claudius kneels in supplication before a bowing soldier, begging for his life. Other soldiers look on, their faces rapt with joy. The painting depicts the prequel to an unambiguously happy ending, the moment Claudius emerges from his curtained hiding-place to a brighter destiny. In both compositional and symbolic terms, Claudius occupies the Virgin Mary’s place. Inscribed on the frame of Botticelli’s Annunciation were words from St Luke’s Gospel: ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.’ In this first image of Claudius, Alma-Tadema draws on the visual language of good and evil, blessings (in the form of benefactions promised by the youthful figure of Claudius) following the curse of Gaius’ short reign. It was an historical inaccuracy, of course, and not without melodrama and a heavy dollop of sentiment. More than this, Proclaiming Claudius Emperor cannot be reconciled with the painter’s later revisiting of the same scene. Unable to negotiate the contradictions of Suetonius’ Claudius, a Victorian crowd-pleaser offered the gallery-visiting public both sides of the story, verdicts wholly at variance.

  Claudius ought to have been born for distinction. In the first instance, that role fell to his brother Germanicus, in time soldier and popular hero. His father Drusus, Livia’s younger son, was a favourite of Augustus and also of the senate for the reason that ‘he made no secret of his intention of restoring the old-time form of government, whenever he should have the power’; Augustus asked the gods to make Gaius and Lucius Caesar resemble Drusus. But Drusus died in 9 BC, the year after the birth of his youngest child, Tiberius Claudius Nero, known as Claudius. In place of power, he had to make do with posthumous glory, while the fortunes of his immediate family, lacking any trace of Julian blood, were overshadowed for the next decade and a half by the careers of Tiberius and the sons of Julia and Agrippa. Claudius’ mother was Antonia, daughter of Mark Antony and Augustus’ sister Octavia, a woman of irreproachable reputation whom we have witnessed intervene with Tiberius on behalf of Claudius’ nephew Gaius and, in doing so, play her part in the inception of that troubled psychopath’s premiership, not to mention Sejanus’ downfall; Antonia successfully resisted Augustus’ pressure to remarry after Drusus’ death. Claudius inherited from his family a share in the popularity of Drusus and Germanicus, which extended to a predisposition in his favour on the part of Rome’s legions independent of his own lack of military prowess. By contrast, his record as emperor demonstrates little of Drusus’ overt Republicanism, while his private life falls short of Antonia’s faithful vigil.

  Almost from birth, Claudius ‘su
ffered so severely from various obstinate disorders that the vigour of both his mind and his body was dulled’. Suetonius’ description has troubled successive generations of readers, who have diagnosed Claudius’ complaint variously as congenital cerebral paralysis, prenatal encephalitis, multiple sclerosis, meningitis and poliomyelitis;3 his most recent biographer suggests a nervous disorder called dystonia.4 Crucially, despite Claudius’ tottering walk, the single foot he may have dragged behind him, and his difficulties in off-the-cuff speech with its attendant spluttering and drooling, the sources do not indicate physical deformities: it is a mistake to envisage an unnuanced portrait which conflates this skilful administrator and enthusiastic fornicator with images of Quasimodo or the Richard III of Shakespearean amateur dramatics. The ancients may have accorded significance to the circumstances of his birth: as Drusus dedicated an altar to Divus Augustus in Lugdunum, the first of its kind in Gaul, a Sicilian slave disguised as a waiter produced a dagger and flourished it behind his neck. Terror jolted Antonia into premature labour. She appears never to have warmed to this child born of a moment of fear. First fears may also have impacted on Claudius: as emperor his terror of assassination and conspiracy was sufficiently acute to turn his thoughts on occasion to abdication.