Caligula: A Biography (20 page)

Finally, both Seneca and Pliny reveal that they themselves were far from innocent of servility in their own dealings with emperors. Shortly after Caligula’s death in 41 Seneca was banned by the new emperor Claudius for an adulterous affair with Caligula’s
sister Livilla; in his work dedicated to the emperor’s freedman Polybius, which was written around this time, he attributes his escape from death to the “divine hand” of Claudius. In the for-word to his
Natural History
(completed in 77) Pliny heaps extravagant praise on Vespasian’s son Titus and says that Romans approach his father at morning receptions “with reverential awe”; he even goes so far as to compare his own work, which he dedicated to the prince, to offerings made to the gods. In the decades following Caligula’s death, Roman aristocrats were far too caught up in the inflationary competition to praise the emperors themselves to consider or depict the cultic veneration of Caligula as a sign of madness—on the side of either the worshiped or the worshipers. But if this is so, how did the claim arise that Caligula believed in his own divinity?

Two other early authors—Philo and Josephus, who were Jewish—are the first to mention this subject. They left an account of Caligula because of a dramatic event in the history of the Jewish people in the last year of his rule. The emperor had given orders to dedicate the Temple in Jerusalem to his own cult and to place a larger-than-life-sized statue of himself there. It was a collision of two diametrically opposed views of religion. For Jews the desecration of their holiest site would have been the worst sacrilege imaginable, and it is Philo above all who pours out hatred for Caligula. From the Roman perspective, however, what was at stake was primarily a political matter. The cult of the emperor in the cities of the provinces was a demonstration of the local ruling class’s political loyalty to Rome, which was welcomed in the capital, and rewarded.

Despite their partisanship the accounts of the two authors reveal that, as in other cases, the veneration of Caligula was not imposed from above but initiated from below. In 38 terrible
pogroms against the Jewish population had occurred in Alexandria, and the non-Jewish residents of the city made a shrewd attempt to win support in high places by placing pictures of the emperor in synagogues and turning them into shrines for his cult. Avilius Flaccus, the prefect at the time, was too involved in Roman affairs to be able to act. His successor, Vitrasius Pollio, seems to have made no decision on the matter either, so both the Jewish and non-Jewish residents of Alexandria sent delegations to Caligula, the first of which was headed by Philo. The problem worsened and spread to Judaea, where similar unrest occurred (presumably around the middle of 40, although there is disagreement about the precise chronology). Jewish worshipers in the town of Jamnia destroyed an altar of the emperor’s cult. From the Roman point of view this qualified as political rebellion, and it was only at this point that Caligula ordered Publius Petronius, the governor of Syria, to establish an imperial cult in the Temple in Jerusalem.

The whole episode had little to do with any ambitions of the emperor to be considered divine. This can be seen in the further course of the conflict. At first, Agrippa, the king of Judaea, who had been a member of Caligula’s inner circle since the days in Lyon, was able to persuade him to rescind the order. When Petronius wrote that the Jews had threatened him with open insurrection, however, Caligula changed his mind again. The issue had now become one of enforcing Roman rule in the province, and he gave orders to proceed accordingly: to use all available military means to break Jewish resistance and to erect the statue of him in the Temple after all.

It is highly significant that both Philo, who discusses Caligula’s mad belief in his own divinity at some length, and Josephus, who mentions it only briefly in three places, thereby become entangled
in a fundamental contradiction. In Philo’s detailed account of his two audiences with the emperor, Caligula is described as friendly, addressing the delegation formally about their business. At the second interview, after news of the Jewish uprising has arrived, he reproaches the delegation for the Jews’ unwillingness to venerate him as a god—that was, of course, the fundamental problem—but his behavior is entirely normal then too. When shown into the emperor’s presence, the Jewish delegates make deep, respectful bows, but Philo reports nothing about
proskynēsis
. Caligula next makes fun of the Jewish custom of eating no pork, and his entourage laughs in agreement. He is mainly concerned with giving instructions for furnishing of his living quarters in the gardens of Maecenas and Lamia on the Esquiline Hill, where the audience is taking place. He walks through the rooms, ordering expensive glass to be installed in the windows and paintings to be hung, with the Jewish and Greek delegations from Alexandria trailing around after him, up and down the stairs. He behaves, that is to say, like a perfectly normal Roman aristocrat occupied with the fittings and decor of his houses. His dilatory treatment of the two delegations is humiliating for them, of course, but in Philo’s account Caligula shows not the slightest trace of a delusion that he is a god or, indeed, any other sign of insanity.

The same is true in the work of Josephus. In the historian’s extensive narrative of the events leading up to Caligula’s murder, the emperor is shown behaving completely normally. Josephus describes him offering a sacrifice to the deified Augustus, in whose honor games are being held on the Palatine Hill, and attending the theater with several trusted senators who occupy the seats around him and also accompany him when he leaves. Nothing in his dress or appearance differs in the least from that
of his aristocratic companions; there is no mention of any special ceremony and not a word of anything out of the ordinary in the emperor’s behavior. Philo and Josephus claim that Caligula took himself for a god because he was insane, but their own depictions of him do not support the claim. The reason for the hostility in their accounts is not far to seek: It sprang from his order to enforce the imperial cult in Jerusalem, which had plunged Jews into extreme religious and political difficulties.

The first surviving Roman author who presents a similar report is Suetonius, a hundred years after Caligula’s death. In a brief passage in his
Life of Gaius Caligula
he writes that the emperor claimed “divine majesty” (
divina maiestas
) and instituted his own worship. Suetonius also includes anecdotes intended to raise doubts about the emperor’s mental health: “At night whenever the moon began to shine in full light he would regularly invite the moon goddess into his bed and his embrace, while in the daytime he would talk confidentially with Jupiter Capitolinus, now whispering and then turning his ear to the mouth of the god, now in louder and even angry language; for he was heard to make the threat, ‘Lift me up, or I will lift thee’ ” (Suet.
Cal
. 22.4).

By now the reader will not be surprised that Suetonius’s account is also on this occasion stamped with denunciatory intentions. In another text, however, the biographer himself provides information that calls these remarks into question. In the passage quoted above from his
Life of Vitellius
, Suetonius states explicitly that it was the emperor Vitellius’s father, Lucius, and not Caligula himself who initiated the veneration of him as a god. As it happens, we have a parallel passage that reveals how Suetonius adapted the information available to him and reworked the material. In his work
On Anger
, Seneca described a pantomime in which Caligula took part, followed by a feast the emperor hosted
in the open air. When it was interrupted by thunder and lightning and the guests became alarmed, the emperor grew “angry at heaven” and quoted a verse from Homer, “Lift me up, or I will lift thee!” (
Iliad
23.724). In other words he challenged Jupiter to a wrestling match. Seneca considered this sacrilegious and called Caligula demented for that reason. While the episode depicts the emperor as an arrogant man with an explosive temper, it does not in the least suggest that he was communicating with Jupiter in a state of mental confusion. That is exactly how Suetonius reports it, however, taking the incident out of its original context.

The story about the moon goddess can be similarly explained. As shown above, the basis for it was a cynical joke intended to demean the flatterer Vitellius. In Suetonius’s account, though, the emperor is depicted as suffering from a delusion that he is actually in contact with the goddess. Suetonius has turned Caligula’s own weapon against him: Just as the emperor pretended to take his aristocratic flatterers seriously so as to expose how mad their flattery was, now the biographer takes Caligula’s jests seriously, using them to portray him as insane. Nevertheless there is a difference: The point of Caligula’s joke could be grasped by those present—its effect depended on that. In contrast, Suetonius’s technique is not humorous at all. It extracts the emperor’s words from their original context so that their meaning is no longer the same. The result is a misrepresentation of what really occurred, but one that readers cannot immediately recognize as such.

This is evident again a hundred years later in Cassius Dio. On the one hand, he follows the opinion of Suetonius and takes Caligula’s divine adoration as evidence of his madness. On the other hand he reports (from other sources that he, like Suetonius,
had available to him) a series of events in which the original context of the emperor’s deification can still be recognized, and assembles information that contradicts the interpretation he adopted from Suetonius. Thus, for example, he reports the seriousness with which even the most prominent Romans venerated the emperor as a god, although it clearly amazes him. This procedure reduces the consistency of his account, but renders it all the more valuable as a source.

Returning now to the situation in Rome in the autumn of 40, we can see that the senators had not reckoned with Caligula’s response to their conspiracies. They experienced a kind of humiliation they probably could not have imagined in their wildest dreams. The young man who was their ruler did not content himself with taking measures specifically designed to terrorize and dishonor them. He accepted the flatteries of individual senators and made the entire Senate venerate him as a god, treatment that alone would have represented extreme degradation for such an exalted group. But he did even worse: Counting on their submissiveness, he staged carnival-like performances at which they were forced to expose themselves to public ridicule by pretending they actually took the emperor in fancy dress for a god. Cassius Dio captured this bizarre way of shaming the highest-ranking members of Roman society in a vivid anecdote, although one suspects he may not have been entirely clear about what was going on. On one occasion when Caligula appeared on a stage costumed as Jupiter, there was a simple shoemaker from Gaul in the audience who burst out laughing. The emperor summoned him forward and asked: “What do I seem to you to be?” The shoemaker answered: “A big humbug.” He suffered no consequences, since according to Dio the emperor would tolerate outspoken comments from the common people but not from men in
important positions. But if one recalls the parallel situation with Vitellius, another interpretation of the scene suggests itself: Far from considering himself divine or intending to introduce an official emperor cult in Rome, Caligula was instead appearing as a god at occasional public performances to expose the senators’ fearful and at the same time hypocritical submissiveness toward him in all its absurdity. And he did so before an audience of commoners who could not help laughing at the antics of the nobly born.

The emperor’s authority was uncontested. The soldiers of the Praetorian Guard—who were responsible for arrests, torture, and executions—profited from the prevailing conditions and were loyal to the emperor. Alongside them and sometimes in competition with them his Germanic bodyguards played an important role. As foreigners who did not speak Latin and hence were cut off from most contacts with other groups in Rome, they fixed their attention firmly on the emperor. By their constant presence they ensured his safety, and he paid them generously in return. Among the legions on the frontiers of the Empire, where little news arrived about conditions in Rome, the young emperor’s popularity was unaffected. For them he remained the son of Germanicus, who had grown up in their camp and rewarded them so liberally at the start of his reign.

The people of Rome also continued to stand behind the emperor, who provided a generous supply of bread and circuses. Discord arose occasionally: When the people protested higher taxes Caligula sent out the Praetorian Guard, and he mocked the traditional relationship between the aristocracy and the commoners
by sending old gladiators and injured men into the arena to fight against broken-down animals. This did not damage his popularity permanently, however, for he continued to sponsor “serious” games, and regularly distributed large sums of money. Josephus reports that the common people of Rome had an unfavorable opinion of the Senate and saw the emperor as their protection from the greed of the aristocracy.

The emperor’s support among soldiers limited the threat that provincial governors from the senatorial order could pose to him. Moreover, Caligula’s predecessors had already developed a new approach to the fundamental problem of rivalry with the aristocracy. There was an increasing tendency to choose “new men” from the equestrian order to fill positions that conferred extensive military power. Most of these appointees had excellent military and bureaucratic abilities, and they also owed their promotion, and consequent advancement into the highest rank of society, to the emperor. They enjoyed little prestige among aristocrats, commoners, or soldiers. All of this checked any danger of usurpation they might have represented. The recent failure of Lentulus Gaetulicus no doubt functioned as a curb on similar ambitions, and the recall of Lucius Vitellius from Syria proved that the emperor kept an eye on everything.