Caligula: A Biography (3 page)

Augustus implemented wise policies on particular issues, such as increasing the security of the Empire and its infrastructure, adding architectural adornments to Rome, or keeping its citizens supplied with grain. But fundamentally his grip on success came not from policy, but from his personal ability to master paradoxical demands in communicating with the aristocracy: ruling without giving orders, wielding power without appearing to do so. At the end of his life, it is reported, he sent for the members of his inner circle, delivered a cynical commentary on the times, and asked for a round of applause, like a star retiring from the stage. His immediate successor would demonstrate that such acting skills were rare among the Roman aristocracy.

Because Augustus had not introduced a monarchy in a constitutional sense, arranging instead for the institutions of the Republic to grant him special powers tailored to his own needs, it was an open question who would legally succeed him. The characteristic motto of hereditary monarchies—“The king is dead; long live the king!”—did not apply to the Roman Empire. In Theodor Mommsen’s classic phrase, “by law the Principate died with the
princeps
.” Every time an emperor died, someone had to emerge as the next wielder of supreme power, to be proclaimed emperor by the army, and to be confirmed by the Senate. In the worst-case scenario—as it played out after Nero’s death in the
year 68 or that of Commodus in 192—that meant the outbreak of a new civil war, until one of the claimants emerged as victor. Normally an emperor would make arrangements for the succession during his lifetime. It was crucial, however, that in principle he had a free hand to choose a successor. To start with, the identity of the next emperor was an open question.

Usually it was not only the family fortune that was passed on from father to son in aristocratic families in ancient Rome; sons also inherited the close relationships within the aristocratic society, alliances known as “friendships,” as well as any political prestige that the father had enjoyed with the people of Rome and the soldiers of the Empire. If the emperor had a son or had adopted one, that son was thus automatically destined to be the successor. Women, especially wives or daughters of an emperor, could also play a crucial role in the question of succession if they had a son from a previous marriage or had given birth to a grandson of the emperor. As a result family relationships acquired great political significance, which could destabilize the position of a reigning emperor as well as support it.

Although Augustus had no son of his own, he did have a daughter, Julia, from a former marriage. His second wife, Livia, for her part had brought two sons with her into the marriage: Tiberius, the later emperor, and Drusus (known as Drusus I, or Drusus the Elder). Augustus chose to signal and secure his choice by arranging for the presumptive successor to marry Julia: first his nephew Marcellus and then, after Marcellus’s early demise, his chief general and associate, Marcus Agrippa. When Agrippa also died in 12
B.C
. Augustus adopted his two grandsons from Julia and Agrippa’s marriage, Gaius and Lucius, who thus became candidates for the throne. Both of them also predeceased Augustus,
however, so that the choice finally fell on his stepson Tiberius. He, too, had to marry Julia, and of all the candidates was the one who actually lived to become her father’s successor.

The politics of the imperial family had, however, produced other aspirants for the throne. Augustus had married off his second stepson, Drusus, to his niece, Antonia II (Antonia Minor, Antonia the Younger). At the time of Drusus’s death in 9
B.C
. they had two sons—Claudius, the later emperor, and Germanicus—who were thus great-nephews of the emperor. Claudius received little notice initially because of a physical handicap, but for Germanicus a marriage was arranged with Agrippina the Elder, Augustus’s granddaughter from the marriage of Julia and Agrippa. Germanicus and Agrippina’s children included three sons: Nero (not the later emperor), another Drusus (III), and Caligula. At the time of Augustus’s death they were all still children, but unlike Tiberius they acquired the prestige of the imperial family by virtue of being the first emperor’s biological great-grandchildren and great-great-nephews. Augustus “solved” this problem by requiring Tiberius to adopt Germanicus, thereby opening the way to the succession for his great-grandchildren. The fate of Tiberius’s own son, Drusus II (Drusus the Younger) remained undecided. An attempt was made to resolve it by arranging further marriages between the different branches of the imperial family. Thus Drusus the Younger married Livilla, Augustus’s great-niece, while Livilla’s daughter in her turn married one of Germanicus’s sons, Nero. One last grandson of Augustus, named Agrippa Postumus, from the marriage of Julia and Agrippa, had fallen into disfavor for reasons that remain unclear. He was murdered in the year 14, possibly on Augustus’s own initiative or that of Livia or Tiberius.

These complicated family relationships—difficult not only for modern prosopographers, but probably also for contemporaries to keep straight—signal a central problem that resulted directly from Augustus’s construction of the Principate. Because he chose to forgo a hereditary monarchy and thus the concomitant legal clarification of the succession, he found it difficult to control the political prestige derived from blood relationships to the emperor. Rivalries could arise within the imperial family, which in turn offered ideal openings for groups of aristocrats to back possible successors. Sometimes these alliances developed into conspiracies. Augustus’s own daughter, Julia, started the ball rolling. In the year 2
B.C
. she was banished because of her contacts with young aristocrats in Rome, including Iullus Antonius, the son of the triumvir Marcus Antonius, who had been Augustus’s last remaining rival in the civil war. Whether adultery was involved, as the official charge claimed, or a political conspiracy, as many suspected, is in the last analysis irrelevant. If the daughter of the emperor, whose three marriages had created presumptive candidates to succeed him, entered into a close relationship with a high-ranking aristocrat, that in itself amounted to an important political development that threatened the emperor, regardless of what her own motives may have been.

Similar events would occur repeatedly over the decades that followed. All these conspiracies, real or imagined, and the punitive reactions to them meant that when the emperor Nero died in the year 68, not a single descendant of Augustus remained alive. This complete disappearance of the imperial family can hardly be judged in moral terms. It resulted from the political relevance of those familial relationships and the potential mortal danger menacing all the emperor’s kin.

Caligula spent his first seven years in Germania, Rome, Greece, and the Orient. As many sources attest, his father, Germanicus, who had risen to the status of prince through Augustus’s adoption arrangements, enjoyed great popularity in all parts of society on account of his good looks and genial personality; he was made commander of the Roman legions on the Rhine in the year 13. His task there was to lead a campaign against the Germanic tribes east of the river, who had inflicted a major defeat on the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest a few years earlier. Germanicus’s wife, Agrippina, followed him, and soon afterwards their small son was sent north to join them, too. He thus spent his early years in a military camp. Supposedly it was Agrippina, known to take an active interest in military affairs, who hit on the idea of dressing little Gaius in a kind of miniature legionary’s uniform, as a form of flattery to the soldiers and designed to win their affection. He acquired his nickname, “Caligula,” from the little soldier’s boots he wore, and it stuck to him for his entire life.

Agrippina had anticipated the soldiers’ reaction correctly. The little boy became the favorite of the legions’ camp. After the death of Augustus, when the armies of the Rhine mounted a dangerous mutiny and tried to proclaim Germanicus emperor even against his will, the child is thought to have played a decisive role. When the precarious situation prompted the commander to send his wife and child to safety in Trier with their retinue, the solders are supposed to have become ashamed and called off the uprising. According to another source they took Caligula hostage to prevent his removal from the camp.

In early summer of the year 17 the family returned to Rome, where Germanicus was honored with a triumph for his campaigns against the Germanic tribes. Such a procession to celebrate a commander’s victories was the traditional apex of an aristocrat’s career, and a huge enhancement to his family’s prestige, but a goal achieved by very few. Germanicus’s triumph is said to have been staged with exceptional pomp. Trophies, prisoners, and depictions of the mountains, rivers, and battlefields were included, so that the Roman public could get a vivid picture of the popular general’s feats. Caligula, not quite five years old, and his four siblings stood at the center of the grand display with which the city celebrated Rome’s military success in the North and honored Germanicus: “To the spectators the effect was heightened by the noble figure of the commander himself,” writes Tacitus in his
Annals
, “and by the five children who loaded his chariot” (2.41.3).

The stay in Rome lasted only a few months. Already in the fall of the same year Germanicus was given the task of reorganizing governmental affairs in the eastern part of the Empire. Again his wife, Agrippina, accompanied him, and so did Caligula, while the other children remained behind in Rome. The trip turned out to be a combination of educational journey and ruler’s progress. In addition to his military skills Germanicus is reported to have been very knowledgeable about Greek and Roman traditions and well versed in literature; he is thought to have written comic plays in Greek himself. The group visited the site of the naval battle at Actium, where Augustus (then still known as Octavian) had defeated Marcus Antonius, Germanicus’s grandfather. The next stop was Athens, followed by the islands of Euboea and then Lesbos, where Agrippina gave birth to another child, Livilla. They then traveled through northwestern
Asia Minor to Byzantium and the Black Sea before returning to the Aegean coast. After making an excursion to Troy the family headed for Syria next, making intermediate stops that included Rhodes. Everywhere the potential successor to the throne, his wife, and their small son were received with great honor. As we know from surviving inscriptions and coins, several cities used the opportunity to commemorate Germanicus and Agrippina as deities, a form of honoring rulers that had a long tradition in the Greek East. Twenty years later the town of Assos on the coast of Asia Minor reminded Caligula, then emperor, that he had first set foot on the soil of the province of Asia there in the company of his father.

From Syria the group proceeded to a further country under Roman influence: Armenia, where a new king was crowned. After seeing to the reorganization of some parts of the Roman administration, particularly in Cappadocia and Commagene, Germanicus proceeded with his family to the famous ancient city of Alexandria. It was here that the Ptolemaic kings had resided in their magnificent palaces, but also where Caesar and Antonius had lived with Queen Cleopatra. The inhabitants of the city, which had served as an opposite pole to Rome during the civil war, staged great festivities to celebrate Germanicus’s arrival. After an excursion up the Nile to see Memphis and the Pyramids, the family returned to Syria.

There the journey came to a sudden and tragic end. Germanicus fell ill and died on 10 October of the year 19, at the age of thirty-three. An open quarrel had broken out with Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, the governor of Syria, and as he lay dying Germanicus accused the governor of poisoning him. A rumor to this effect quickly spread and soon acquired the added detail that the actual instigator had been the emperor Tiberius himself. It was
said he had plotted the murder of his adopted son because Germanicus’s great popularity with the common people and soldiers had turned him into a rival.

On his father’s death Caligula, then a boy of seven, was thrust into the spotlight for the last time during his childhood. He was once again at the center of extraordinary events, but now of a sad kind. When Agrippina, accompanied by Caligula and Livilla, arrived in Brindisi with the urn containing her husband’s ashes, she was met by a huge crowd of mourners. Two cohorts of the Praetorian Guard provided an escort for the family’s onward journey. Drusus, the son of Tiberius, and Claudius, Germanicus’s brother, came as far as the town of Tarracina to meet them, accompanied by the four other children, the consuls, the Senate, and citizens from the city. They escorted the procession back to Rome, where Germanicus’s remains were interred in the Mausoleum of Augustus. Vast crowds of Romans lined the streets for his funeral.

For Caligula, his father’s death was a major turning point in his life in more respects than one, for it affected not only his family. He had spent his first seven years in an elevated position in a milieu dominated entirely by monarchic institutions. The role played by a Roman general in war was monarchical, and the position of a Roman governor in the provinces resembled that of a monarch. At the legionaries’ camp on the Rhine, in the triumph at Rome, and on the journey through the eastern parts of the Empire, Caligula had always been presented to a public that transferred some of its veneration for the outstanding prince Germanicus to his small son. The general popularity that “Little Boots” thus enjoyed became visible again eighteen years later in the enthusiasm with which the population greeted his accession to the throne. In the intervening years, however, Caligula would
have very different experiences. The admiration showered on him when he stood beside a future emperor gave way to a long phase marked by peril and mortal enmities. Along with the rest of his family Caligula was exposed to such threats, which cost his mother and brothers their lives.