Caligula: A Biography (5 page)

At this point the relationship between the emperor and the aristocracy had reached a nadir. Both sides were extremely fearful after the events surrounding the fall of Sejanus. Those who had nothing left to lose circulated denunciations and scurrilous attacks. The emperor furnished publicity to the universal hatred that befell him, by having such tracts read aloud at their authors’ indictment before the Senate. A letter Tiberius sent to the Senate, whose opening passage is cited by both Tacitus and Suetonius, vividly captures the situation near the end of his reign. It also displays the harrowing and helpless frankness so characteristic of him: “If I know what to write to you, Senators, or how to write it, or what to leave unwritten at present, may all gods and goddesses visit me with more destruction than I feel that I am daily suffering” (Tac.
Ann
. 6.6.1; Suet.
Tib
. 67.1). All communication between the emperor and the aristocracy had broken down. When the seventy-eight-year-old man, who no longer dared set foot in his home city, finally died, the Romans shouted, “Tiberius into the Tiber!” (“Tiberium in Tiberim!” Suet.
Tib
. 75.1).

The social conditions encountered by a young man growing up in aristocratic circles in Rome during the rule of Tiberius could not have been less suited to fostering humanity. The emperor had unlimited powers and his orders had to be carried out without hesitation; at the same time he was hated and lived in constant
fear of conspiracies. Many aristocrats were utterly without scruples; they would denounce each other but bow and scrape to the emperor, all the while waiting for the next opportunity to conspire against him. Murders and executions were everyday occurrences, and ultimately an ambiguity in communication with which the actual circumstances were covered over, lacking all candor and honesty, and thus further intensifying the general anxiety and uncertainty. How did Caligula fare as an adolescent in such a society?

The death of Germanicus in the year 19 rid Tiberius of a potential problem in the succession. His biological son Drusus (II) was by virtue of his age the only eligible aspirant for the throne at the time. The following years would reveal, however, that the acquisition of dynastic prestige by one branch or the other of the imperial family could always become a political problem, either because it aroused the ambitions of other family members or because third parties were able to exploit latent rivalries.

Sejanus’s position as the emperor’s trusted confidant made him a rival of Drusus early on. The sources report that in the year 23 he began an affair with Drusus’s wife, Livilla, who was a sister of Germanicus, and persuaded her to poison her husband. Evidently the charge was clearly proved in a trial eight years later, after the Praetorian prefect’s fall from favor. It is highly improbable that Sejanus had ambitions of seizing the throne himself at that time; more likely he was concerned about securing his own future if Tiberius should die. The emperor was then already over sixty, and his death would have put Sejanus in a most precarious position in the event of Drusus’s succession.

After Drusus II died, the popular family of Germanicus—his widow, Agrippina, and her sons—immediately regained their
central place in speculation about the succession. In a session of the Senate Tiberius particularly recommended Nero and Drusus (III), by then seventeen and sixteen years of age, to the senators, and in so doing offered official confirmation of their importance. Ten-year-old Caligula, by contrast, seemed of less interest because of both his age and his two older brothers. For a time this situation would prove a great advantage. The very next year it emerged that the senators had taken Tiberius’s recommendation too literally; they heaped so many honors on Nero and Drusus that the emperor complained, perhaps because he felt a bit neglected himself. Furthermore his relationship with Agrippina was deteriorating, a development that the sources attribute mainly to intrigues set in motion by Sejanus. After the death of Drusus (II), Tiberius is said to have thought about eliminating Agrippina and her sons as well. According to Tacitus this plan failed for two reasons: The guards in the house of Germanicus’s family were alert and Agrippina was too chaste for Sejanus to use his apparent charms on her. Thereupon he prevailed upon Livia and Livilla to inform Tiberius that the mother of the two possible successors was ambitious for power. Moreover Sejanus denounced her to the emperor himself, saying that Agrippina was gathering a political faction around her that threatened to divide the citizenry.

The next step—denouncing those who still dared to frequent the family’s house—drew on the assistance of compliant senators. The charge was crimes against the
lex maiestatis
, as in the particularly nasty case of Titius Sabinus described above. When things went so far that even one of Agrippina’s cousins was accused, Agrippina went to Tiberius to demand an explanation, and he accused her openly of a lust for power. Sejanus then made use of the atmosphere prevailing at the time, in the truest sense utterly
poisoned, to mount a classic intrigue. Through intermediaries he convinced Agrippina that Tiberius was planning to poison her, and that she should avoid having anything to eat at the house of her adoptive father-in-law. When she was invited soon thereafter to a banquet at which Livia was also present, the emperor noticed that she ate nothing. (He may possibly have been informed of Agrippina’s suspicions.) He praised the fruit that was just then being served, selected a piece, and handed it to her himself. This gesture only heightened her fears, so she passed the fruit to a slave in her retinue without tasting it. Tiberius is said to have turned to Livia and remarked that it would be no wonder if he were to adopt even harsher measures against Agrippina, since she thought he was trying to poison her.

If Tacitus is to be believed, Agrippina was in fact scheming to hasten her sons’—and hence her own—rise to power. If so, she would have represented a real threat to the emperor. The problem cannot be reduced to the individuals involved, however, since it was structural in nature. A very high degree of skill was required—not just of the emperor in his political role, but also of the members of his family—to master the extremely complex relationships among them, which clearly involved mistrust and intrigue. In the end it is hardly surprising that most of them would prove unequal to the task. Caligula himself represented an exception in this respect, as time would show.

The next victim was his eldest brother, Nero, who had become the leading candidate for the throne after the death of Drusus (II). A marriage had been arranged for Nero with his cousin Julia, who was Drusus’s daughter and thus a granddaughter of Tiberius. The household he thus acquired seems to have been instrumental in his downfall. “In spite of the modesty of his youth”—thus Tacitus characterizes the syndrome of inadequacy
described above—Nero “too often forgot what the times demanded” (Tac.
Ann
. 4.59.3). Tacitus reports further that Nero’s freedmen and clients were hoping to gain influence themselves if he became emperor, so they urged him to show vigor and confidence. The people and the army were behind him, they said, and Sejanus, who was now exploiting the trust of the aging emperor, would not dare to make a move against him. The Praetorian prefect had covert informants placed in Nero’s house, however, and they carried any incautious remark elicited from Nero straight to Sejanus and the emperor. Nero was not even safe at night, for whether he was awake, or slept, or sighed, his wife, Julia, supposedly told her mother, Livilla, about it, and she passed the information on to her lover Sejanus. For his part Sejanus now fed the feelings of rivalry and envy in Nero’s brother Drusus (III), whom he won over and encouraged in his hopes for the throne. The time was ripe in the year 27, when Nero was twenty-one and Tiberius already settled on Capri: Agrippina and her eldest son were placed under arrest. Soldiers were assigned to guard them; to watch over all their activities and contacts, including the letters and visitors they received; and to report everything they said.

These events, to which the fourteen-year-old Caligula was an immediate witness, meant that a new home had to be found for him and his two young sisters, Drusilla and Livilla. (Their sister Agrippina married shortly thereafter.) The three children moved into the house of their great-grandmother, Livia, the widow of Augustus who as grande dame kept up associations with many aristocrats and had a corresponding degree of influence.

She is supposed to have intervened to prevent Agrippina and Nero from being placed on trial and condemned. She died two years later, at the age of eighty-six, and Caligula appeared in
public on that occasion and delivered her funeral oration. Once again it was necessary for Germanicus’s children to seek a new home. In the year 29 Caligula and his sisters moved to the house of their grandmother Antonia Minor, the other grande dame in Rome during that era. Antonia was well connected not only in Rome, but also in the East. Through her father, Marcus Antonius, and his relationship with Cleopatra, she had ties to several rulers there, who functioned as “client kings” of Rome, and their families. Several princes were also living in Antonia’s house at the time and got to know Caligula; later on the relationship would stand them in good stead.

Caligula’s stay in Antonia’s house was destined to last only two years. During this period—as Sejanus’s power was approaching its peak—the final downfall of his mother and eldest brother occurred. The emperor himself had written a letter accusing them of various crimes. Because of a gap in Tacitus’s
Annals
and the abbreviated accounts of Suetonius and Cassius Dio, their trial before the Senate cannot be reconstructed in detail. But if we do not know which senators aided Sejanus in instigating it, we do know its outcome: Nero was declared
hostis
, an enemy of the Roman polity, and banished to the island of Pontia; Agrippina was exiled to the island of Pandateria. The circumstances of Nero’s death on Pontia—probably in the year 30—remain unclear; he may have been starved to death or have killed himself, possibly driven to suicide because he believed he was about to be executed: Suetonius reports that an executioner was sent to Nero to show him the noose and hooks.

In that same year Caligula’s brother Drusus (III), who stood next in succession to the throne, came under attack from Sejanus and his minions. Like Nero he was accused of conspiring against the emperor. For years agents had shadowed and eavesdropped
on him as well, activities in which his wife, Aemilia Lepida, is said to have played an important role. Caligula, at that time seventeen or eighteen years old, witnessed how Drusus was thrown into a dungeon on the Palatine Hill, from which he would never emerge. Not much later he too was declared a
hostis;
in his trial the senator Lucius Cassius Longinus served as prosecutor, a role that earned him Sejanus’s goodwill.

There is little reason to doubt what the sources say about how the members of Germanicus’s family were eliminated. In part the authors based their accounts on sessions of the Senate, for which minutes were available to them. The violent deaths of Caligula’s mother and brothers are thus firmly established. It is unclear, however, what was going through Tiberius’s mind in those years. Suetonius asserts in hindsight that Tiberius had planned to kill the members of Germanicus’s family from the start and simply used Sejanus to carry out his will. This claim attempts to explain the brutality of their deaths, but it is not very plausible. According to Cassius Dio, people had concluded Tiberius was mad, because he ultimately brought up the details of their deaths before the Senate, giving himself away completely. It must be assumed that the emperor had lost a sense of reality as he suffered constant fear for his own safety; the fear was actually heightened by his withdrawal from Rome and the influence, on Capri, exerted by his immediate environment, which Sejanus was controlling. In Rome fear must have been the dominant emotion in the Senate as well, for otherwise it is impossible to explain the senators’ reaction to the detailed reports about how Agrippina, Nero, and Drusus were spied upon: Although in fact they were appalled at the emperor’s behavior, as Tacitus reports, they pretended that what horrified them was the supposed enmity within the imperial family.

It took no great skill for Romans to figure out who was next in line, and accounts exist of several attempts to eliminate Caligula, too. Later, after the fall of Sejanus, several senators were prosecuted for attempting crimes of this kind. Sextius Paconianus was alleged to have helped the Praetorian prefect to organize an intrigue against Caligula. Cotta Messalinus and a close confidant of Tiberius named Sextus Vistilius were accused of having spread rumors about his dissolute morals. (Allegations of sexual misconduct had also played a role in the case against Nero.) Everything suggested then that Caligula would soon be placed on trial as well, but things took an unexpected turn.

Toward the end of the year 30, that is to say before the dramatic downfall of Sejanus the following October, described above, Tiberius summoned the eighteen-year-old Caligula to Capri. Only now was he granted the
toga virilis
, the formal sign identifying him as an adult. The man’s toga suggested that the emperor was considering him as a possible successor. But what were the aging emperor’s real intentions for him? Evidence suggests that at first Caligula had a different role to play. The purpose of the young man’s presence on Capri was to make the emperor safer: In effect his status closely resembled that of a hostage.

Several events at this time indicate that in dynastic terms the prestige of Germanicus’s sons remained high or had even risen because people felt pity for them. When the Senate took action against Agrippina and Nero, a rebellious crowd had surrounded the Curia, where the senators were in session, carrying pictures of both and demanding that they be spared. And during the planning for the overthrow of Sejanus, Macro had instructions
that if the action failed, he was to fetch Drusus from his dungeon and present him to the people. The idea was that if the need arose they might be able to exploit Drusus’s popularity in order to shift power back to their side. Finally, it is also reported that the mood in Rome turned against Sejanus and the prefect gave up his plans for a coup the moment that Caligula was summoned to Capri and appeared to be gaining in favor with the emperor. Taking into his household the remaining son of Germanicus, on whom no suspicion had as yet been cast, was a clever tactical move on Tiberius’s part—or on the part of his new strongman, Macro. Caligula’s popularity could help to stabilize the emperor’s own position, and bringing him to Capri would deprive others of the opportunity to make him their instrument.