Caligula: A Biography (10 page)

A provisional answer has already been given. At first Caligula played the part of an Augustan
princeps
, but then went on to secure his power by eliminating his rivals. He took specific measures to stabilize his position as ruler with different segments of the population, without making too many concessions to the aristocracy. The nobles seemed to find this acceptable. The situation remained fluid, however, because of an aspect of politics omitted in our discussion thus far: Politics in ancient Rome was not limited to specifically political institutions like the Senate, the magistracy and—for a time under Caligula—the popular assemblies. In fact the household, which the Romans called “private” and which they contrasted with the
res publica
, was itself a scene of politics. In Rome the private sphere was in a certain sense also public, and the political sphere operated to a large extent through personal relationships.

During the Republic the houses of the Roman aristocracy had developed into informal centers of communication, where political action took preliminary shape before being introduced in official bodies. Reciprocal visits at morning receptions and evening banquets both constituted and manifested the personal
relationships, linking those who appeared at these events as friends or clients. Patronage structured the relationships. Participants helped each other in the law courts, in money matters, and in elections and political disputes. They left each other legacies. There were clear rules for the support friends and clients owed one another, rules that made the participants’ behavior predictable and reliable. The size of an aristocrat’s household, along with the number and rank of the friends and clients who met there, affected his chances for exercising real power in the institutional sphere, in politics in the narrower sense. The material luxury in such households was politically relevant, too. Carved marble ornamentation, costly paintings and furniture, gold and silver tableware, the lavishness of the food and entertainment offered at banquets—all these attested to the owner’s wealth and potential value as a patron, his social status, and the political influence he possessed or felt entitled to claim. Aristocrats took precise note of the size and opulence of each other’s houses and tried not to fall behind in the competition.

Just like sessions of the Senate, gatherings at aristocrats’ homes were regulated by ceremonial customs illustrating the political and social rank of the participants. In the case of the morning
salutatio
, visitors’ status and their relationship to the host were reflected in the rooms they were permitted to enter and the order in which he greeted them. Banquets were typically attended by nine people ranged around a table on three banqueting couches with different levels of prestige. The importance of these ceremonial customs, which may seem alien from the perspective of today’s largely egalitarian society, is shown in the conflicts that arose when they were not observed.

But how should an emperor organize his household? Who should be received at home, in what luxury and according to
which ceremonial rules? How should the emperor shape his “personal” relationships with aristocrats? As noted above, Augustus and Tiberius had set virtually no precedents. Their desire to keep the emperor’s actual status as far in the background as possible had led to preservation of the old customs to a large extent, even though they were becoming increasingly impracticable. The emperor’s house was small, the furnishings modest, and the crush at the
salutatio
great, since on certain occasions the entire aristocracy appeared. Because banquets remained limited to the usual size, Augustus was obliged to give them “constantly,” often arriving late and leaving early due to other demands on his time. During the last years of Tiberius’s rule when he was living in seclusion on Capri, no imperial “household” had existed in Rome any more at all. So how was the new young emperor to run his house? Should he keep it as it was, below the standards of size and sumptuousness long since adopted by the rest of the aristocracy? Should he regularly admit all senators and the most prominent knights to morning receptions? Should he surround himself with venerable old men at evening banquets and make sure that their respective ranks were reflected at the table?

Tiberius had left more than two billion sesterces at his death. He thus offers a prime demonstration that frugality by itself could not make a Roman emperor popular. It is reported that Caligula went through this sum and more in either one year (Suetonius) or two (Cassius Dio). Most was undoubtedly spent on the immense gifts he made to soldiers and the people of Rome at the start of his rule, but a considerable portion seems to have flowed into running his household as well. His household expenditure reached a level far exceeding the aristocrats’. He began extensive construction on the Palatine Hill, enlarging the complex of freestanding houses belonging to the emperor in the direction
of the Forum, so that most of the hill—the most prestigious residential area in Rome—was now reserved exclusively for his use.

Caligula built extensively outside Rome as well, on a much grander scale than his fellow aristocrats. Villas and palaces in rural settings raised previous efforts to incorporate nature and dominate the landscape to a new level. Caligula tried to realize plans that others considered impossible: “He built moles out into the deep and stormy sea, tunneled rocks of hardest flint, built up plains to the height of mountains, and razed mountains to the level of the plain, all with incredible dispatch” (Suet.
Cal
. 37.3). For sea journeys he had galleys built “with ten banks of oars, with sterns set with gems, particolored sails, huge, spacious baths, colonnades, and banquet halls, and even a great variety of vines and fruit trees; that on board them he might recline at table from an early hour and coast along the shores of Campania amid songs and choruses” (Suet.
Cal
. 37.2).

It is striking that on the subject of the morning
salutatio
at Caligula’s house, only a single account exists—although it reveals that the ceremony took place regularly. Philo notes that King Julius Agrippa came “to pay his wonted respects” during his visit to Rome and that others were present (Phil.
Leg
. 261). The odd dearth of information can probably be attributed to later efforts by senators in particular, who had been obliged to be “friends” of the emperor, to obliterate their contacts with him from the record as far as they could; the aristocratic sources reveal traces of such alteration in other contexts as well. Thus it is not certain whether Caligula performed the expected ceremonial rituals during the first two years of his reign or not. He clearly did not behave in the expected manner at banquets, which were extremely lavish yet at the same time informal.

Early on Macro is supposed to have cautioned the young
princeps
not to show too much enjoyment in the music and dance offered as dinner entertainment, and certainly not to participate; he should not snigger like a boy at coarse jokes or fall asleep during the banqueting, as none of this befitted the emperor’s dignity. Later Caligula ignored the usual protocol for seating guests: His sisters lay on the couches to his right, the places normally given to a wife and children, while his wife was permitted to lie to his left in the place of honor. When his uncle Claudius arrived late he could obtain a place only with effort and after several attempts.

Besides criticizing violations of traditional etiquette at the emperor’s banquets, the sources also find fault with the people he invited. Caligula enjoyed the company of the Greens faction of chariot racers at the Circus Maximus, for example, visiting their building as a guest himself and inviting the well-known charioteer Eutychus to a banquet, at which he gave the racer a gift of two million sesterces. Nonetheless senators continued to covet an invitation to dine with the emperor as a particular honor. Reports mention the presence at banquets of the sitting consuls, of aristocratic ladies with their husbands, and of Vespasian, the later emperor, who was Caligula’s guest during his praetorship and even showed his gratitude with a flattering speech in the Senate.

While the ceremonial rituals for guests of high rank were flouted, the aristocrats invited to imperial banquets were witnesses to enormous outlays of money. Foods were served covered with gold leaf; entirely new dishes might be created for the occasion, and Caligula himself is said to have drunk vinegar in which valuable pearls had been dissolved. All of this is condemned in
ancient sources (and often in modern accounts as well) as more or less pointless luxury and waste. Display of this kind had a definite function, though, in the context of aristocratic competition for status and thus also a latent political dimension. As mentioned earlier, members of the senatorial and equestrian orders engaged in competition over the luxury of their houses and the number and status of people who frequented them. This competition seems even to have increased with the establishment of imperial rule and the aristocracy’s loss of real power—that is to say, it became compensatory. Tacitus reports that in the period from the start of Augustus’s sole rule to the death of Nero huge sums were squandered on luxury: “The more handsome the fortune, the palace, the establishment of a man, the more imposing his reputation and his clientèle” (Tac.
Ann
. 3.55.1–2).

The sources often recount aristocratic extravagance. Caligula’s later wife Lollia Paulina, for instance, is reported to have appeared on a not particularly festive occasion wearing jewelry worth forty million sesterces (forty times the minimum wealth qualification for senatorial rank). She did not even owe these fabulous jewels to her status as empress but had inherited them from her father. The pearls dissolved in vinegar had a special story behind them: Cleopatra was said to have made a wager with her lover Marcus Antonius that she could spend ten million sesterces on a single meal, and won the bet by drinking pearls in vinegar. The luxury and extravagance in Caligula’s household signified his unattainable, quasi-royal superiority in the only area where aristocrats could still vie with the emperor. In fact, Tacitus reports in the passage just cited that families belonging to the old Republican high nobility, the so-called
nobilitas
, wealthy and famous in years past, had ruined themselves with their pursuit of conspicuous luxury.

Caligula flouted many expectations of how a Roman aristocrat ought to conduct himself in public. His decision to dispense with elaborate ceremonial greetings was welcomed, certainly, and made it easier and simpler to encounter him in the streets and squares of the city. Yet he behaved more informally than suited the tastes of the upper classes. Macro’s admonitions to the young emperor about not showing too much enthusiasm at Circus games or theatrical performances were in vain. Caligula became an active supporter of one of the four factions at the Circus Maximus. His passion for chariot races was such that he built his own stadium, called the
Gaianum
, in the gardens on the Vatican Hill, where he could drive chariots himself. Aulus Vitellius, son of a man of consular rank, who would later become Roman emperor himself for a few months, shared the same passion, acquiring the special favor of Caligula and also, if Suetonius is to be believed, a limp as the result of an accident. Caligula’s enthusiasm for gladiatorial combat, both between men and against animals, went so far that he trained and fought with gladiators, and is even supposed to have used real weapons. The emperor also had a great love for the theater. He surrounded himself with stars of the stage, including the actor Apelles, who became part of his retinue for a while, and the famed mime Mnester, with whom he spent so much time that it was later claimed the two had a homosexual relationship.

In his passion for chariot races, gladiatorial games, and theatrical performances Caligula shared the interests of contemporary young aristocrats. Since Augustus, the youth of the noblest families in Rome had sometimes participated in chariot races, athletic competitions, and combat with wild animals at the Circus, together with gladiators from the equestrian order. The sons of senators who took part in a gladiatorial game put on by Caligula
must have had some training in this kind of combat. Games in Rome were by no means just entertainment; they had a political dimension. It was significant
that
the emperor presented games, and also
how
he did so. The city’s arenas were the most important spaces for direct communication between the emperor and the urban plebs. Approval or criticism was communicated to the emperor during games through cheers or booing. Quite frequently chanting choruses of sports fans pressed demands that direct confrontation made it hard for the emperor to reject. Attending the contests, he showed solidarity with the people and allowed them to observe him at close quarters. When Augustus attended games at the Circus “he gave his entire attention to the performance, either to avoid the censure to which he realized that his [adoptive] father Caesar had been generally exposed because he spent his time in reading or answering letters and petitions; or from his interest and pleasure in the spectacle, which he never denied but often frankly confessed” (Suet.
Aug
. 45.1).

Throngs of young Romans were devotees of Circus games and the theater, and the people liked it when the emperor attended. Caligula, however, seems to have offended notions about proper public behavior for an emperor. He took sides himself for or against certain actors, and grew angry if the audience didn’t join in or applauded performances of which he did not approve. He was “so carried away by his interest in singing and dancing that even at the public performances he could not refrain from singing with the tragic actor as he delivered his lines, or from openly imitating his gestures by way of praise or correction” (Suet.
Cal
. 54.1). From the perspective of the aristocracy his conduct meant that the young man who had become their ruler behaved “like one of the crowd” (Dio 59.5.4).

Caligula’s organization of his household and his behavior in public were thus inconsistent with the role he played in institutional politics. While the latter showed moderation and skill and was generally praised, in the former he presumed upon his special status to the full. His displays of extravagance relegated the opulence of aristocratic houses to second class, and his unconventional manners at home flouted aristocrats’ preference that distinctions of rank be respected. His enthusiasm for the Circus and personal ties to actors and charioteers further violated aristocratic proprieties. At home he exalted himself above his fellow aristocrats, whereas in public he fell short of the dignity befitting an aristocrat, let alone an emperor. Various reasons can be suggested for this conduct: The years on Capri had removed him from senatorial society and provided too little aristocratic socialization, while the years of oppression and danger led him to savor his imperial possibilities, which must have seemed virtually unlimited. Last but not least, the role his predecessors had bequeathed to him was only imprecisely defined. The question now was, how would the Roman aristocracy react to Caligula’s behavior in the long term? There had never been a young, extravagant emperor with a passion for the arena in Rome before.