The Twelve Caesars Read online

  The Villa Jovis occupies rocky terraces of a steep hill on the northeastern tip of Capri. Despite the proliferation of distinctive white houses which today freckle the island’s wooded heights and downs, its dazzling views of Klein-blue sea, tree-lined shores and sheer cliffs have survived two millennia mostly unscathed. It was here, to this craggy eyrie impossible of invisible assault, one of twelve villas on Capri inherited by Tiberius from Augustus,27 that Tiberius retreated following his departure from Rome in 26 to dedicate temples of Jupiter and Augustus at Capua and Nola.

  He offered no explanation. Granted there had been that year an unsatisfactory altercation with Agrippina, who accosted him with the taunt of her Augustan blood as he sacrificed to Augustus. (The strain of Sejanus’ programmatic attacks on her friends and relations, including, most recently, her kinswoman and close friend Claudia Pulchra, both emboldened and undermined Germanicus’ widow.) Vexations too continued to dominate Tiberius’ relationships with his imperious mother Livia, the senate and Rome’s political classes. For the first two years of Tiberius’ reign, Suetonius claims, the emperor never left Rome. Throughout its slow termination, he would never return there. He surrounded himself with savants and stargazers. It was a quiet coterie, unlikely on the face of it to seek gratification in the pornographic paintings, the young girls dressed as nymphs or the adolescent boys of easy access schooled in the arts of Eastern erotica which Suetonius conjures for the septuagenarian’s twilight years. Dilatory in his acceptance of supreme power in 14, Tiberius had at length succumbed with a suggestion that he might in the future set aside the burdens of office: ‘Until I come to the time when it may seem right to you to grant an old man some repose.’ On Capri, an older, bald and stooping Tiberius, his face a patchwork of plasters covering those sores and inflammations which had plagued him lifelong, found repose of sorts. It did not encompass any cessation in the business of empire nor, the sources aver, any lessening of the emperor’s pernicious cruelty. Tourists in Suetonius’ time could see the spot from which transgressors, ‘after long and exquisite tortures’, were hurled headlong into the sea while Tiberius looked on; sailors waited below, armed with oars and boat-hooks to beat the last vestiges of life from the tumbling bodies. On rainy days Tiberius encouraged unsuspecting dinner-guests to gorge themselves on wine. Then he bound their cocks so tightly it was impossible to piss, a double torture he had devised himself.

  It was government by letter and, given the contortions and convolutions of Tiberius’ prose, an unsatisfactory arrangement. While Tiberius remained the fountainhead, Sejanus wielded malevolent influence as his conduit. Intermittently the senate struggled to interpret the imperial wish dispatched by courier from Capri: inspired by experience rather than hope, it selected severity over moderation on those occasions. Distance did not lessen the force of Tiberius’ anger directed against those he suspected of plotting against him. But he recognized the usefulness of an intermediary prepared to act as fall guy for inevitable opprobrium. Decidedly he was not finished with Sejanus yet. Nor was Sejanus’ own task complete. In Tiberius’ absence he raised the stakes against Agrippina and her family, placing spies among their friends and relations. Sejanus himself played a double role, courting Agrippina and offering tokens of his friendship in the form of incriminating advice. Agrippina kept her head, but she was treading water, safeguarded only by the continuing influence of the aged Livia. When Livia died in 29, ‘the fury of the pair [Tiberius and Sejanus] was unmuzzled’.28 Tacitus claimed that as long as Livia lived there was good in Tiberius as well as evil: without the restraint of Livia’s presence, and with the apparent encouragement to brutality of Sejanus, ‘he expressed only his own personality – by unrestrained crime and infamy’.29 Despite angry popular demonstrations in their favour, Tiberius ordered the banishment of Agrippina and her eldest son Nero; the following year Drusus was imprisoned in Rome. Only two likely candidates for the principate remained to succeed Tiberius: Agrippina’s third son, Gaius, then nearing eighteen, and the eleven-year-old Tiberius Gemellus.

  It must have seemed to Sejanus that he had reached the point of no return. He was declared Tiberius’ fellow consul for 31, an unprecedented award for an equestrian who had held none of the magistracies of state, and invested with proconsular power. On two previous occasions during his reign Tiberius had held the consulship: with Germanicus in 18 and Drusus in 21. Both men at the time were his heirs.

  For so long Sejanus had held his nerve. Higher and higher his dizzying ascent had carried him. If he stooped now to make sacrifice to the gods, he surely misread the message coiled in bleeding entrails. For into this tale of ambition, corruption and death stepped a fairy godmother. She was a Roman matron of exemplary virtue. Tiberius’ widowed sister-in-law and Livilla’s mother, her name was Antonia. Josephus claims that Antonia wrote to Tiberius. Among the claims she made was that Sejanus had turned his attention to Gaius as the final significant obstacle in his way.

  It was at last a chink of light shone through that curtain which Sejanus had hung before Tiberius’ eyes. The ageing emperor, embattled and embittered, saw so many things now. Perhaps even that he himself was in danger of becoming Sejanus’ pawn, a stepping-stone in an ambitious upstart’s bid for power. ‘Sejanus was growing greater and more formidable all the time,’ Dio reports, ‘so that the senators and the rest looked up to him as if he were actually emperor and held Tiberius in slight esteem. When Tiberius learned this, he did not treat the matter lightly or disregard it, since he feared they might declare his rival emperor outright.’30 With circumspection and the utmost secrecy he made plans to topple his former ally. For the boy’s safety, he summoned Gaius to Capri. He appointed a replacement Praetorian prefect, Quintus Naevius Cordus Sutorious Macro. To prevent Sejanus’ suspicions, he awarded the favourite further honours: a priesthood shared with his son. At the same time, Tiberius invested Gaius with the same priesthood. He sent Macro to Rome. There, encountering Sejanus, Macro informed him of the imminence of the award of tribunician power; he also secured his own position with the Praetorians and delivered to the senate that letter in which, to universal astonishment, Tiberius denounced Sejanus. He was condemned and strangled on the same day. Then his body was taken from the Mammertine prison and displayed on the Gemonian Steps. For three days a people steeped in hatred vented fury and disgust at the remains of this man whom the principate had encouraged to aim too high. Tiberius made excuses, as we have seen. But Sejanus’ death did not save Agrippina or Drusus. With Nero already dead, mother and brother followed him to the grave.

  Instead more killing. It was a sort of madness, an espousal on the senate’s part of an alternative reality for which neither rules nor guidebook existed. First to die: Sejanus’ family – unsavoury details, an infant daughter Junilla, who, because no precedent existed for the execution of a virgin, was raped by the executioner with the noose around her neck. Afterwards further attacks by the princeps on senatorial ranks, more than half the major judicial proceedings of Tiberius’ reign compressed into his final six years.31 Vengeance against Sejanus’ supporters and accomplices was a dastardly, elemental force. Bruttedius Niger, Publius Vitellius, Sextius Paconianus, Gaius Annius Pollio, Gaius Appius Silanus, Gaius Calvisius Sabinus, Annius Vinicianus, Geminius the knight: on the list stretches, no connection with Sejanus too slight to merit the death sentence. ‘Every single one of those who were condemned to death heaped all kinds of abuse upon [Tiberius],’ Suetonius tells us: ‘his anxiety of mind became torture.’ Sleepless nights became the price of tyranny: it is an historical convention.

  Eventually the clouds lifted. On Capri in the villa gardens there were cucumber frames. Tiberius acquired a small pet snake and fed it himself. He retained his grip on the Empire, loathed in Rome but still a competent and conscientious administrator, his auctoritas (as great as once Augustus’ had been) a binding force across wide-flung provinces. In 33, he resolved the greatest financial crisis of his reign by distributing 100 million sesterces in three-year, inte
rest-free loans. New currency minted to meet the demand proclaimed the roll-call of Tiberius’ titles. But the pictorial element of these last Tiberian coins was all concerned with Divus Augustus,32 the numismatic iconography of Augustus’ ascent heavenwards. It expressed in miniature a truth of Tiberius’ principate, the earnestness of his fidelity to that settlement Augustus had carved out for himself more than half a century earlier. But Tiberius deceived himself. His abandonment of Rome for Capri amounted to a dereliction of Augustus’ most careful charade: that the princeps was the servant of the state, first among equals, a Republican in purple clothing. For all his lip-service to Augustus’ settlement, in ruling by edict – letters of instruction to the senate from the Villa Jovis – Tiberius dispensed with the illusion of service and consensus. His power, as Sejanus had realized, was absolute.

  Tiberius died on 16 March 37 on the mainland at Misenum, the ancient port of Campania. Death occurred in a villa which had previously belonged to Lucius Lucullus, that leviathan figure of the late Republic known as ‘Xerxes in a toga’. He was seventy-eight. His pet snake had already died, devoured almost before his eyes by an angry swarm of ants. Given the fervour with which his death was anticipated in the senate house and on the streets of Rome, it is no surprise that varying reports proliferate. The immediate cause of death was fever; exhaustion and old age can safely be added to the mix. Faithful to a lifetime of concealment and dissimulation, Tiberius struggled to disguise his true condition and carry on as normal. (A more popular ruler could have laid claim to indomitability.) In the presence of the leading physician of his generation, Charicles, Tiberius’ shamming was recognized for what it was. The end came peacefully, whether we believe Suetonius’ report that he fell dead beside his couch, strength suddenly failing him, or Tacitus’ version. After a false alarm, when delighted sycophants rushed to congratulate Gaius, Tiberius regained consciousness. Amid the toadies, a panic-stricken dispersal; stupefied silence Gaius’ only response. In that moment of dashed hopes, Macro seized the initiative and ordered that the old man be suffocated with his bedclothes. No fight ensued: Tiberius was old and tired, the blankets were simply heaped upon him. No one protested. Not even, in the event, Tiberius himself. He left behind him a treasury replete with almost three billion sesterces, the result of his long and careful husbandry of imperial resources. As we shall see, it was not enough to fund that four-year act of repudiation in which his successor sought to deny his memory. The tyranny and cruelty had only just begun.

  GAIUS CALIGULA

  (AD 12–41)

  ‘Equally furious against men and against the gods’

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

  No more pretence. No more crocodile tears for a Republic broken and discarded than for the death of an absentee emperor hated and feared (although appearances were satisfied in the splendid funeral Gaius granted Tiberius and, in time, himself threatened by conspiracies, he would reassess his opinion of the behaviour of a predecessor similarly threatened. Indeed, for episodes of his reign, a deliberate historical amnesia on the part of Rome’s fourth Caesar, posterity’s ‘Caligula’: a refusal to kowtow to precedent or to humour senatorial memories of a vanished Golden Age of oligarchic rectitude and influence.

  In Gaius’ nostrils, Tiberius’ cynical adherence to that illusion Augustus had fabricated of government by a continuing system of elected officials, the princeps ‘first among equals’ (a leading citizen in a company of leading citizens), smelt as stale as his corpse. Always frank to the point of offensiveness, he despised its untruths. Not content to be hailed as ‘Greatest and Best of Caesars’ – equally unsusceptible when the mood took him to flattery and to plain speaking – he craved autocracy and made significant strides towards achieving it. That radical shift formed the dynamic of Gaius’ reign. It shaped his behaviour towards senate and commons. It inspired his creation of a personal mythology. It alienated the writers of ancient history so comprehensively that, for modern readers, Gaius – imprecisely but consistently dismissed as insane – lies lost in a fog of fact and fable which we may never navigate with certainty.

  His youth had been one of suffering and circumspection, his prominent and popular family suspected by Tiberius of dangerous designs. With Tiberius dead, a new dawn promised. There would be only one way from now on, in appearance as well as fact: Gaius’ way. No ‘dominion of the senate and the people of Rome’ as celebrated in Augustus’ Res gestae.1 No senatorial involvement in public finance, public works, military recruitment or correspondence with client kings as fostered by Tiberius.2 Not even lip-service to good relations between emperor and senators. ‘Let them hate, provided they fear’ became the broad-brush policy applied to all classes, where fear was the clear blue water that separated governor and governed. Invested with legal power by the senate on his accession and enjoying the support of the army through family connections – as well as a timely payment of 2,000 sesterces to members of the Praetorian Guard made on his behalf by the Guard’s prefect, Macro – Gaius nevertheless crucially lacked auctoritas: he could not, like his predecessors, claim to rule through personal authority or as a reward for services to the state. Without experience, he was simply himself. Within himself, he decided, lay the grounds of his distinction. It was an attitude unconducive to compromise. In March 37, the accession of Tiberius’ successor was managed without opposition. His reign began in happy emollience, a policy of inclusiveness and consensus applied to commons and senate alike. It would prove short-lived. In Gaius’ reign there were no happy endings – either for Gaius or for his Rome. Like fellow epileptic Julius Caesar before him and Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Domitian after, in time this miscreant emperor would die a thousand deaths, victim of a frenzy of killing: his jaw split, his groin ripped by swords, his body bludgeoned, battered, butchered. Irony destroyed him: a bloody and agonizing end for a sick-minded tyrant who had revelled in the bodily and mental anguish of many who ought never to have been his victims.

  At the outset the beloved son of a beloved father, Gaius was the first of Rome’s emperors to exult in his own eminence. (He was also the first to gain the throne exclusively through the hereditary principle, his sole qualification for office descent from Augustus via Julia and Agrippina the Elder.) He began by pursuing plaudits, praise and pity (the last survivor of three sons, both parents killed, his family beloved of Rome’s masses). It was so easy with a carrying wind, ‘for Tiberius’, as Josephus tells us, ‘had brought a vast number of miseries on the best families of the Romans’,3 none more so than Gaius’ own. Tiberius’ death was greeted with joy, Gaius’ accession with rapture among the Roman crowd and, in the senate house, a qualified optimism which its members took pains to disguise as joy. Dio describes the twenty-four-year-old emperor wooing the senate with promises of power-sharing and a little-boy-lost version of himself as the son and ward of the city fathers;4 he abolished treason trials and unpopular taxes, recalled exiles, destroyed incriminating papers. A conciliatory gesture: he adopted his co-heir, Tiberius’ grandson Tiberius Gemellus, as his son. (Later he would have him killed, invoking with grim cynicism the legal power of life and death possessed by a father over his sons: patria potestas.) In Suetonius’ account, the fledgling ruler ‘tried to rouse men’s devotion by courting popularity in every way’. His efforts verged on the theatrical but, emphasizing themes of family piety and the unstinting generosity of the emperor, met with notable success. Primary and secondary sources agree – witness Eustache Le Sueur’s painting of 1647, Caligula Depositing the Ashes of his Mother and his Brother in the Tomb of his Ancestors, a heroic, understatedly moving image despite painter and viewer’s knowledge of the emperor’s imminent degeneration into madness and badness.

  Too soon, seduced by visions, Gaius outgrew initial joy. Without compunction he shattered every good opinion. Indifferent to any estimation bar his own, he cultivated contentment in his very callousness, the actions by which he lost Rome’s love more thea
trical than those by which once he had sought to keep it. ‘Would that you had but a single neck,’ he told a hostile crowd repelled by his orgiastic delight in slaughter and his apparently insatiable desire for the sight and scent of blood and money;5 by then Romans knew better than to doubt his desire to kill them one and all. It was as if he had decided to turn the world on its head: an iconoclasm of misery and mistrust. In the beginning, he made payments to the people of those generous legacies left by Livia (suppressed by Tiberius) and Tiberius (suppressed by the senate), as well as his own early donatives made on two occasions; later he imposed swingeing taxes and cut off supplies of free grain. In the beginning, championing the people’s pleasure, he sponsored public games and festivities, even appearing as a gladiator himself; later, on a day of broiling heat, he locked the crowd in the theatre and withdrew the awnings that sheltered them from the sun. (Mistreatment of spectators at the games always bodes ill. Dio later accuses Domitian of confining the crowd in the circus during a storm so violent that, drenched and freezing, several caught colds and died.6)