The Twelve Caesars (17 page)

The full story of this unhappy hell-raiser and his maniacal abuse of power is not confined to Suetonius’ famous assessment of a double career as emperor and monster. Quite as remarkably,
it illustrates the durability of the Augustan settlement in the face of mental instability, murder and megalomania. In 37, the Romans took to their hearts a ‘star’, a
‘chick’, a ‘babe’, a ‘nursling’ – a young man whose whole life had been lived under the principate and in the shadow of family politics. Such terms
of endearment did not remain long on the lips of the mob. Gaius was a cuckoo in the nest, a wolf in lamb’s clothing: as Tiberius had predicted, a viper in Rome’s
bosom and brimful of poison; Phaeton destined to lose control of the sun-chariot and burn the entire Roman world. But his death was not the means of restoring the Republic. Instead, the last
remaining adult male of his family inherited that ragbag of powers which Gaius had misused so spectacularly, the office stronger and more durable than the man.

Revisionist scholars choose to pity him; the ancients, memories still sharp, delve less deeply. Their primary focus is not cause but its spectacular effects. Suetonius buries Gaius beneath a
highly flavoured millefeuille of gossip and scandal, layer upon layer of arid lust and senseless viciousness. His
Life
is punctuated by anecdotes and hearsay. It includes recollections from
his own childhood of tidbits dropped by his grandfather, as if his grandfather’s insights and his own memory of stories overheard in his earliest years merit the authority of the written
word. Accomplished storytelling, it is questionable history and slapdash biography, even according to the ancients’ nugatory estimation of life-writing as a genre. It did not arise by
accident. Deconstructed, Suetonius’ Gaius reveals himself as a composite of would-be didactic literary models and conventions: an ersatz Icarus hell-bent on flying too close to the sun; an
unrepentant Prodigal Son; Lucifer glorying in his fall from grace; the degenerate sport of an exemplary father.

Fast forward two millennia, and Suetonius’ victim has yet to escape. He never will. Gaius was a historical travesty: the ‘Caligula’ of the sources is a legend. He will survive
as long as the abuse of power remains a human impulse, continually reinvented, like Cleopatra a convenient and enduring archetype; and as long as prurience revels in stories of excess which, just
possibly, contain grains of truth. In his
Natural History
, Pliny the Elder recorded Gaius’ enjoyment of bathing in perfumed oils; like the Cleopatra of Augustan
propaganda, he dissolved pearls in vinegar and drank them; such was his passion for gold that, anticipating the princes of Renaissance Europe, he sponsored costly, fruitless experiments in the
alchemy of base metals.
¹⁴
Unlike Suetonius’ tone of high censoriousness, Pliny’s list centres Gaius’ predilections within a contemporary culture of sumptuous superfluity: his
prodigality was distinctive but not remarkable, a failing of its time. Nor were its implications necessarily as serious as the sources suggest, since the evidence denies any serious financial
crisis at the beginning of the next reign. Rationality is not enough. More often in the rumours recorded about this cruel and insolent despot, Gaius’ historiography has permitted no excuses.
He is condemned by the facts (such as they can be traced)... condemned alike by fictions.

His reign was brief: three years, ten months and eight days. Suetonius enumerates its duration as if marvelling at its continuance for so long. We too are right to be surprised:
given the catalogue of atrocities attributed to Gaius, his survival in power for almost four years is unexpected. It suggests that much of what we accept as intrinsic to his story may be later
accretions added by a hostile tradition, or events which occurred in private, unknown either to many senators or to the majority of Romans.

The emperor’s death, as so often in the
Lives of the Caesars
, is presaged by portents. Phidias’ statue of Jupiter at Olympia, on the brink of being dismantled and removed to
Rome at Gaius’ particular request, burst into peals of laughter. The
room of Gaius’ palace doorkeeper was struck by lightning, a meteorological outburst
associated with the gods’ displeasure and one of which the emperor himself was terrified, hiding under tables at its onset. Meanwhile Gaius bungled a sacrifice in the temple. Killing a
flamingo, he splashed the bird’s blood onto his clothes, priestly ham-fistedness traditionally a signifier of something adrift. For Suetonius, this otherworldly corroboration of Gaius’
unfitness to govern is the ultimate vindication. It is also, unusually in the context of this account, surplus to the historian’s requirements. Gaius had spared no effort to stockpile his
offences against Rome. The result, by January 41, was an atmosphere of fear and loathing in which desperate men were prepared to embrace desperate measures. As Josephus has Gnaeus Sentius
Saturninus tell an emergency meeting of the senate in the aftermath of regicide:

From the sources (with their senatorial sympathies) emerges a sense of a city worn out by the murderous caprices of its madman ruler, the gods alienated, nature in revolt: a
kettle too close to boiling to require the tinder of the numinous.

But the twenty-eight-year-old Gaius was worn out, too. He slept only three hours a night. Even that rest was fitful and disturbed. Dark, disquieting dreams rent the stillness. He fell prey to
night terrors. Unable – unwilling? – to linger in bed, he
shifted about the palace, sitting or standing, sometimes quite still, his head thumping, prone to
fainting. Along the marble colonnades with their view of the Forum and the slumbering city he trailed – like the figures of Julius Caesar and Calpurnia in Edward Poynter’s 1883 painting
The Ides of March
, his eyes fixed on the sky and the distant horizon where the sun must rise. Sometimes he cried out, desperate for the dawn. All his cries were prayers that night would end.
Little wonder that we read that his eyes and temples were hollow, his face naturally forbidding.

For an empire that never rested, an emperor unable to sleep. But while the empire’s 6,000 miles of frontier were patrolled by legions and its provinces administered by an imperial
bureaucracy which had evolved over time into a sequence of highly efficient government satellites, no one fully shared with Gaius the burdens of the purple. He would not have wished it. Yet it was
an unrealistic weight to place on the shoulders of a man whose infirmities were not only mental but physical, and whose undignified enthusiasm for tragedians and circus performers outweighed his
interest in the day-to-day business of imperial rule.

‘The empire was not given to himself, but to his father Germanicus,’ Seneca tartly observed of Gaius.
¹⁶
In March 37, it was a truth universally acknowledged. Gaius
himself took no pains to disguise or deny the hereditary nature of his elevation. On the contrary, his consciousness of a distinction grounded in descent – indissoluble, impossible to gainsay
– explains that conviction of unanswerability which characterizes much of his interpretation of the principate. He even sought to ‘improve’
his bloodline,
preferring to erase the humbly born Agrippa, husband of his grandmother Julia the Elder, and instead to imagine his mother Agrippina as the daughter of an incestuous father–daughter
relationship between Augustus and Julia.

Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, born on 31 August
AD
12, was the youngest surviving son of Germanicus Caesar and Agrippina the Elder. He was thus a great-grandson through
the paternal line of Mark Antony, Livia and the latter’s first husband Tiberius Claudius Nero and, through his mother, of Augustus himself. This heavyweight inheritance would prove a highly
charged genetic amalgam. It conferred on Gaius Julio-Claudian ancestry and proximity to divinity. Embracing both victor and victim of Actium, it facilitated scattershot loyalties on the part of a
young man determined to cherry-pick only those aspects of Augustus’ Roman revolution which suited him.

But Gaius’ heredity was more than a tracery of bloodlines, a painted stemma on the walls of the family atrium. His inheritance encompassed heroism and villainy, Empire-wide acclaim, the
loyalty of Rome’s armed forces, and deep wellsprings of popular sentiment which his mother had taken pains to manipulate in her children’s favour. In Roman minds, the melding of
aristocratic clans predisposed Gaius to a sequence of inherited traits: Julian swagger and even genius; the cruelty, hauteur and distinction of the Claudians; Mark Antony’s feckless
prodigality; the amiability of Germanicus. So richly scented a brew ought to have stimulated reflection. Seneca, we have seen, placed the emphasis on Germanicus. That and, we can add, the absence
of any alternative candidate from within the imperial family.

We know Germanicus’ story. Consul at twenty-six, he had been a distinguished military commander whose popularity surpassed that of his uncle Tiberius. A probable candidate for
princeps
, he campaigned successfully in Pannonia and Dalmatia and on the Rhine, earning comparisons from Tacitus with Alexander the Great. In Germany, the infant Gaius shared
in his father’s renown. Dressed by his mother in a tiny soldier’s uniform, he became an unofficial legionary mascot and on one occasion helped prevent revolt in the ranks. It was the
troops who called him ‘Caligula’, ‘Little Boots’, in reference to his miniature soldier’s boots. The incident of the mutiny in 14, like the soldier’s pet name
(which he himself hated), has entered the emperor’s mythology, though he himself can hardly have remembered it. What adhered was the affection of the military. In 19, it was not enough to
save Germanicus. As we have seen, he was probably poisoned by Piso in Syria on the instructions of Tiberius, who afterwards stayed away from his funeral. His grieving widow certainly thought so.
Agrippina understood enough of the world to exploit family tragedy for subsequent advancement. The principal beneficiary of her plotting, which brought about her own death and that of her two elder
sons, was her smallest chick, Gaius.

In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, at the request of the archbishop of York, a Pennsylvania-born history painter trained his sights on Agrippina.
The Landing of Agrippina at
Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus
occupied Benjamin West for several years. At the cleric’s request it was inspired by a passage from Tacitus’
Annals
:

In keeping with contemporary ideas of the dignity of history painting, West depicted a scene of noble pathos. Dressed in white, her head covered and
bowed, Agrippina cradles her husband’s remains. She is surrounded by the survivors of the couple’s nine children – the same children who, two years earlier, had ridden in
Germanicus’ chariot in his triumph over the Germans
¹⁸
– and by a supporting cast of mourning Romans. Centre-stage, the objects of popular adulation, Germanicus’ sons and daughters
could not be expected to resist inflated perceptions of either their misfortune or their public significance.
⁵
From Brundisium the party
travelled to Rome. The seven-year-old Gaius attended his mother in her triumphal progress, her pilgrimage of reversal and revenge.

As it happened, Agrippina was not so noble that she was not prepared to stage-manage pity to attain that vengeance and, in doing so, to make herself such a thorn in Tiberius’ side that the
emperor banished her to Pandateria, site of her mother Julia’s exile. She died there in 33, four years before Tiberius, after an unsuccessful attempt to starve herself to death which resulted
in force-feeding and a beating so severe that she lost an eye. It was a dismal, gut-wrenching, inhuman end, which nevertheless assured her the commendation of a historical tradition otherwise
opposed to the petticoats aspect of Julio-Claudian government. Taken in conjunction with Germanicus’ murder, and the arrests of Gaius’ elder brothers Nero Caesar
and Drusus Caesar, both of whom were also starved to death (Drusus after having been reduced to eating the stuffing of his bed), it amounts to a family inheritance decidedly less
enviable than Seneca may lead us to assume. In the atmosphere of rank suspicion which characterized Tiberius’ court, Gaius’ crowd-pleasing paternity was as much curse as blessing.