060 - No Better Slave, No Worse Master

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, Episode 60, No Better Slave, No Worse Master. The honeymoon lasted for about six months. The brief window of optimism that opened with the death of Tiberius was slammed shut by Caligula before the year was out. The half year between Tiberius' death and Caligula's nearly fatal illness can be described as the period after which the Romans had jumped from the frying pan, but before they hit the fire. Because as it turns out, that while Tiberius was cruel, paranoid, and calculating, Caligula was simply mad as a hatter.

Now I think most of us, even those who are relatively new to Roman history, know that Caligula was up to some pretty rotten stuff. Even people I know who have no interest in history whatsoever generally know, for example, that a pretty disturbing flick called Caligula came out once upon a time, and that the guy had to be pretty messed up for the movie based on his life to gin up so much controversy. Which is true, incoherent as it is, Caligula the movie does do a pretty good job capturing the essence of the man as portrayed by the ancient historians.

But the question is then, how accurate were those ancient historians? Should we really believe every detail that has been handed down to us as objective truth, or should we take some of it with a grain of salt? Unfortunately, we've lost the relevant chapters from Tacitus, who was generally the most reliable source for information on the early imperial period, and we're left with a combination of Suetonius and Cassius Dio, both of whom are writing well after the fact, and the contemporary passing accounts of Philo of Alexandria and Seneca, both of whom have their own individual bones to pick with the mad emperor.

In his Sex and the Ancient World, John J. Younger points out that Romans would often use tales of sexual deviancy to emphasize how bad a public official was, the way that we might say that some despised ruler regularly kicks puppies or refuses to call his mother on her birthday. So with everyone agreeing that Caligula had psychological issues, and that he was a train wreck of an emperor, it is not surprising that his biography has become packed with deviant sexual activity. The same basic dynamic, by the way, is at play with biographies of Tiberius, and will be at play again when we get to Nero and his alleged Oedipal relationship with his mother Agrippina.

So I'm sure that there is a lot that the ancient historians got right about Caligula, but much of it is undoubtedly exaggeration. When Caligula recovered from his illness in late 37, his personality either changed dramatically, or more likely, who he was simply began to break through the magnificent glow that people had shrouded him in. In the wake of Tiberius, the Romans were quick to project their own needs onto this savior Caligula. So I think it's quite likely that he was the same man throughout, it's just that nobody was really ready to notice what a crazy cretin he was until the initial honeymoon period was over.

I mean, he had been dealt blow after traumatic blow his entire life, and had spent years thoroughly repressed, sucking up to the man who had killed his father, his mother, and his two brothers. So I don't think that Caligula needed anything so dramatic as a near-death experience to go off the deep end. Imperial slaves, who spent more time around the boy than anyone, certainly would have agreed that Caligula needed no illness to become unhinged. Watching him alternate between the pliant and passive servant of Tiberius, and the sadistic teenager who relaxed by witnessing the beatings and executions that occurred regularly at the Imperial Villa on Capri, the slaves reported that concerning Gaius, there was no better slave and no worse master.

Now that he was emperor, he was the slave to no man, and it was all, no worse master from here on out. So let's jump on into the funhouse of horrors, shall we?

We should probably get the most famous rumor about Caligula out of the way early, and that is that he was engaged in incestual relationships with his sisters, Julia Lovilla, Agrippina, and particularly his favorite, Drusilla. The charges, like I say, likely spring from the fact that later unhappiness with Caligula led to some serious character assassination. But it's worth noting that the perception of incest was not made up out of whole cloth. It is understandable that Caligula and his sisters, suffering as orphans together, would be closer than your average set of siblings, but Caligula appears to have taken things to an extreme.

The emperor, for example, seems to have had an atypical married life. He was married four times in his short life, with his first wife dying in childbirth and his second and third wives coming and going within a matter of months. The constant matrons of Caligula's house then in the early part of his reign were not his wives, but rather his sisters, particularly, like I say, Drusilla. His relationship with Drusilla was so close, in fact, that during his bachelor periods between wives, Caligula eschewed the custom of rotating hostesses for his dinner parties, instead sticking exclusively with Drusilla, in effect saying that she is my wife.

However, there is no solid evidence of sexual activity between the two, and coupled with his more general embrace of living godhood, it looks like he may have just been playing out the kind of sister-brother, husband-wife dynamic seen in many eastern religions. But the very public role Drusilla took on as Caligula's primary female companion makes it a knot particularly hard to believe that maybe something was going on behind closed doors. Not long before her death, which we'll get to in a moment, Caligula further demanded that she be included in the oaths taken by legionary soldiers when swearing to protect the emperor, again in effect saying that she was to be considered his wife. So while the incest rap may be a bad one, Caligula basically did everything in his power to make it hard for people to believe otherwise.

That all being said, the incest charges only dominated the gossip of the early part of Caligula's reign, because in mid-38, Drusilla came down with a fever and died. The grief-stricken Caligula, who did not leave Drusilla's side during the illness, ordered that the entire empire go into mourning upon her death, and thereafter would often swear oaths to the divine Drusilla, whom he inducted into the growing imperial pantheon. Unfortunately for Rome, though, once she was gone, the gloves really came off.

For the three years left on his reign, Roman historians describe at length a man who personifies everything that is awful about absolute power resting in the hands of a single man. Unlike Augustus and Tiberius, who tried to downplay their power and defer to the senate as much as possible, Caligula had no interest in such things, and actually went out of his way to do everything he could to demean the senate and exalt himself above them. For example, he would force them to run alongside his carriage while it made its way through Rome, and any senator who failed to show up or display the proper amount of enthusiasm were noted by the emperor and then targeted for future humiliations.

One of his reported favorite pastimes was to bring senators and their wives to dinner, and over the course of the meal, pick out one of the married women and disappear with her to the bedroom while her shamed husband was forced to remain at the table. Caligula would then return with the wife in question, and proceed to describe in detail everything that had gone on in the bedroom. There was no recourse for the distressed couple. Any challenge to Caligula's whims was fast becoming a capital offense.

Both Caligula's second and third marriages were actually the result of stealing women from their husbands, and in the case of his second wife, Livia Orestella, it was actually on the occasion of her marriage that the theft went down. Invited to the wedding, Caligula took a shine to the bride and told the new husband, Gaius Calpurnius Piso, who will feature prominently in the episode on Nero, to quote, get away from my wife, and then immediately absconded with the poor woman. Caligula would abandon her just days later, but not before twisting the knife further and forbidding her to remarry Piso.

Why did he do it? Who knows? Men and women now lived in perpetual fear that they would say the wrong thing, or do the wrong thing, or do the right thing, but at the wrong time. One young aristocrat was forced to fight as a gladiator simply because he was good looking and made Caligula jealous. After the man won both of his matches, Caligula had him hauled off in chains and executed. Good times.

But the biggest fear was that Caligula would simply covet your estate and confiscate it all after arresting and killing you for no reason. In this, he was indiscriminate. He didn't even bother working up any kind of paranoid fantasy to explain who he was targeting. He would just send agents to your doors one day, and you would be hauled off to court, tried, and exiled or killed.

The executions themselves became a hallmark of Caligula's sadism, as he would force parents to come witness the executions of their children. When one man said that he was too sick to attend, Caligula sent around one of his imperial carriages to pick the man up and make sure that he could be there. And when the condemned were killed, they were not simply strangled or hurled from the Tarpian Rock. No, Caligula was famous for promoting the maxim of death by a thousand cuts. Major organs were left alone as the victims were nicked and bled and stabbed over the course of sometimes days. His usual order to the executioners was to make him feel that he is dying.

When one man continued to proclaim his innocence as the execution began, Caligula halted the proceedings. Then, he ordered the soldiers to cut out the man's tongue so Caligula would be able to enjoy the execution in peace. Charming stuff.

The only practical foundation for all of this random cruelty was that Caligula needed money. Lots and lots of money. Tiberius had been, famously, a spendthrift, who in his later life basically vetoed every spending bill he ever saw. He probably took it too far, leaving many worthy projects unfunded, but there is no denying that when he died, the empire was in excellent financial shape. The treasury was well stocked and revenue was outpacing expenditures. Caligula managed to blow up this financial cushion within two years of taking office, leaving the empire and the imperial family massively in debt.

Some things he did were decent enough. He finished the Temple of Augustus and built improved ports at Regium and on Sicily to facilitate more grain shipments. He also expanded the aqueduct system that was essential for bringing clean water into the city. But mostly, he just blew through the treasury, building huge personal yachts, lavish villas, and a personal chariot racetrack. Caligula's basic motto was why pay retail when you can pay ten times retail.

At one point, he called for hundreds of ships to line up beside one another in the Gulf of Baie. Then, he packed them with earth and mortar, turning the whole line into a bridge between the resort at Baie and the port of Puteoli on the other side of the Gulf. He then rode his horse across the two-mile expanse. Legend has it that the entire operation was undertaken because Tiberius' astrologer had once remarked that Caligula had no more hope of becoming empire than he did crossing the Gulf of Baie on horseback. It would make for an almost light-hearted tale, except for the massive expenditures involved and the fact that by pressing all the ships into becoming a bridge, Rome suffered from a grain shortage due to the lack of available freighters.

By 39, Caligula's relationship with the Senate and people was shot. The man they had once hailed as their savior had proved himself to be nothing more than an erratic sadist who was bankrupting the empire. Caligula had showed the Senate nothing but disrespect, going so far as to promise to have his favorite horse named Consul because it possessed more intelligence than the whole lot of them put together. Eventually, the Senators began to mumble under their breath that we really need to do something to rein this psychopath in.

Catching wind that some kind of resistance movement was being organized, Caligula called the Senate to meet and revealed to them a big surprise. He had made copies of all the treason trial notes that he had allegedly destroyed upon taking office. Suddenly, the treason trials were back up and running. The Senate was forced to accept the Emperor's decision, but unlike with the 70-year-old Tiberius, they could not reasonably hope to outlast the Emperor. Caligula was still in his late 20s, so the madness could go on for 50 years or more. So it is probably at this point that Caligula's death warrant was really signed. He left them no choice but to eventually assassinate him. The simple logic of survival demanded it.

It was right around this time, too, that Caligula began to let it be known that he was actually more than just a man. Unlike Augustus and Tiberius, who made no claims of divinity while they were alive—Augustus, in fact, went to great lengths to stop people from worshipping him as a god—Caligula decided that everyone was free to worship him as divine if they wished. In fact, he insisted. He began appearing in public dressed as Hercules and Apollo and Mercury, sometimes even Venus. More and more, he began to talk as if he were in fact a god, trapped down here on earth with all these scummy mortals who forever got in his way.

The people more or less humored these claims because, hey, what else are you going to do? So when Caligula ordered that his statue be placed in every temple in the empire for worship, most everyone obliged. But his extreme megalomania ran into a brick wall in the far eastern province of Judea. When imperial agents brought word that a statue of the emperor was to be erected in the Holy Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, there were nearly riots. The fiercely monotheistic Jews, who were already pretty angry that they were forced to live under the Roman yoke to begin with, had no intention of allowing some egotistical punk to share the stage with Yahweh.

It was only the timely intervention of Herod Agrippa that prevented a massive uprising against the Romans. Herod was the grandson of Herod the Great, and as a child he had been sent to live in Rome and was befriended by the imperial family. When Caligula became emperor, Herod had been sent home to govern the eastern territories, and it was only because of his personal influence that he had with Caligula that he was able to first delay the idea of erecting the statue and then get the idea killed altogether. Had Herod not been there to talk some sense into Caligula, the revolt in Judea almost certainly would have erupted 30 years earlier than it eventually did.

Having become a god, though, there was still something conspicuously absent from Caligula's resume—military conquest. Being an imperator, without any military triumphs to point to, is like being a surgeon who has never performed surgery—it just doesn't make sense on the face of it. So to rectify the situation, he got it in his head that he should return to the sight of his father's glory and finally bring Germania to heel. Clearly lacking in skill, experience, and training, though, the campaign was probably never going to end well, so it was probably a good thing that it wound up ending early.

He did lead the legions across the Rhine, but was nervous about penetrating too far into the forests. Not really craving an actual battle, he sent some allied Gauls into the woods dressed as Germans so that he could pretend to charge heroically into their midst when they emerged from the woods at the appointed hour. After this staged episode, he strutted about camp, bragging about his own bravery in contrast to the rest of the men who had milled around when word of the attack came. Then reports arrived that there were really real Germans in the area, at which point Caligula's entourage ran everyone over, getting the emperor back to the Roman side of the Rhine. The whole thing is just cartoonishly pathetic.

But while he was out playing soldier, a conspiracy involving a local Roman governor was uncovered that seems to have put the kibosh on the rest of the campaign. The details are unknown, but it was a serious enough plot that his brother-in-law was executed and his two remaining sisters, Agrippina and Julia Lovilla, wound up exiled, suggesting Caligula had been hit fairly close to home. Having accomplished nothing in Germania, Caligula did what any sensible politician would do to save face. He declared victory and left.

In 40 AD, the emperor turned his attention to Britannia, that foggy island on the edge of the world. But again, he managed to do little more there than add another bizarre chapter to his already bizarre biography. According to legend, he lined up the legions in battle formation along the banks of the English Channel, even though there was no enemy there to fight. The men waited around expectantly until Caligula's orders finally came down. Go forth and collect all the seashells on the beach and bring them back to Italy as spoils of this great victory over Neptune and the sea. Uh-huh.

Having won another, um, battle, Caligula returned to Rome and celebrated a dual triumph in honor of his successful campaigns in Germania and Britain. The collected seashells were dutifully displayed as prized treasure. Can someone, anyone, do us all a favor and just knife this guy?

Back home, Caligula settled into happy domesticity with his new wife and child. In either 39 or 40, he had begun an affair with a woman named Caesonia that resulted in the birth of a daughter, Julia Drusilla, named for Caligula's late lamented sister. In Caesonia, Caligula finally found a kindred spirit, who he was not related to. Though she was much older than he was, she relished in extravagance, opulence, and had no empathy for anyone whatsoever. She was, in short, a perfect match for the mad emperor.

They seemed to be perfectly happy with one another, though Caligula would often remind her in a doting sort of way that he could slit her throat whenever he wanted. But the good times were not to last. Caligula may have thought that he was a god and that he could do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted to whomever he wanted, but that did not mean that people were going to like it. It was only a matter of time before what went around came around, and in early 41 AD, it came back around.

There was a member of the Praetorian Guard by the name of Cassius Caria who had had enough. Caligula would often single the man out and mock him for his effeminacy and allude to a genitalia-related injury Caria had suffered while on campaign. After being humiliated time and time again, the angry Praetorian Guardsmen began to whisper with members of the Senate who were looking for any opportunity to off this psychotic brat of an emperor. Caria agreed to be the man on the inside and brought two others in as formal accomplices.

The plot was hatched with the tacit approval of the Praetorian Prefect, who was himself under investigation for treason and thus needed to get rid of Caligula before Caligula got rid of him. In January of 41 AD, after Caligula was done addressing a troop of actors for an upcoming theatrical performance, Caria and the two accomplices cornered the emperor and stabbed him to death. Caligula was 28 years old and had ruled Rome for just shy of four years. The assassins then quickly made their way to the imperial family's chambers and killed Caesonia and the infant Drusilla. There could be no blood heir to Caligula left alive.

With the emperor dead, the big question was what came next. Caria himself seems to have been under the impression that by killing the emperor, it might give the Senate a chance to step into the power vacuum and return Rome to its republican roots. But that was of course a pipe dream. The Praetorian Guard as a whole did not share their comrade's idealism. As it turned out, Caria and the other assassins were unable to get to Uncle Claudius before the rest of the Guard hustled the stammering fool into the safety of their camp. According to legend, Claudius was hiding behind a curtain when they found him, but that is most likely a later dramatic flourish.

That very night, the Guard declared Claudius to be the new emperor, which, when word got out, seemed like some kind of sick joke. Everyone knew that Claudius was a mushy-headed dunce who had managed to stay alive through the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula because he made such a great butt for jokes. There was no way that he was capable of ruling the empire. And this was, of course, precisely the point. The Praetorian leadership figured Claudius would be easy to control.

As we'll see next week, though, Claudius seems to have had everyone fooled pretty well. He was no fool at all, and would prove to be a thoroughly competent emperor even if his domestic life left something to be desired.

The short and brutal reign of Caligula is an object lesson for why you don't put absolute power in the hands of one man, especially without vetting him first. Though he was the first really terrible emperor, he will certainly not be the last, as every generation or so, another Caligula will emerge to remind everyone why they tried to get away from all of this in the first place, why they had shared consulships, why they had thrown the kings out, why they had set up the Senate, why they had set up the people's assemblies, why it was just dumb to give absolute power to just one guy. But it was too late to go back to the days of a shared consulship or the diffusion of power. All the Romans could do now was try to survive the bad years and hope that the next guy would be better. Because like it or not, the emperors had all the power now.