Titans of History (11 page)

Caligula became deeply paranoid, and made it an offense for anyone to even look at him, so sensitive was he about his increasing baldness and luxuriant body hair. Those suspected of disloyalty—often on the flimsiest of pretexts—were, prior to their execution, subjected to a variety of ingenious torments devised by the emperor, such as being covered in honey and then exposed to a swarm of angry bees.

Anyone was a potential victim. As Suetonius records, “Many men of honorable rank were first disfigured with the marks of branding irons and then condemned to the mines, to work at building roads, or to be thrown to the wild beasts; or else he shut them up in cages on all fours, like animals, or had them sawed asunder. Not all these punishments were for serious offenses, but merely for criticizing one of his shows, or for never having sworn by his Genius.”

Caligula began to believe himself to be divine. He had the heads of statues of the Olympian gods replaced with likenesses of himself, and almost provoked a Jewish revolt by ordering his godhead to be worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem. Suetonius reports that he regularly talked to the other deities as if they stood beside him. On one occasion he asked an actor who was greater, himself or Jupiter. When the man failed to respond with sufficient alacrity, the emperor had him mercilessly flogged. His cries, Caligula claimed, were music to his ears. On another occasion, when dining with the two consuls, he started laughing manically. When asked why, he retorted, “What do you expect, when with a single nod of my head both of you could have your throats cut on the spot?” Similarly, he used to kiss his wife's neck while whispering, “Off comes this beautiful head whenever I give the word. If only Rome had one neck.” The most repugnant story of the emperor's depravity tells
how, after he had made his sister Drusilla pregnant, he was so impatient to see his child that he ripped it from her womb. Whether this story is true or not, Drusilla is known to have died in
AD
38, probably of a fever, whereupon Caligula declared her to be a goddess.

Caligula's unbridled narcissism and ever greater appetite for brutality alienated every section of society. The Praetorian Guard resolved that his rule must be brought to an end, and in January
AD
41 two of its number killed the emperor by ambushing him as he left the stadium in Rome. They went on to kill his wife and baby daughter, smashing the latter's head against a wall.

The life of Caligula demonstrated how much the imperial system created by Augustus, while preserving the trappings of the republic, had actually concentrated absolute power in the hands of one man. Caligula stripped away the veneer of constitutional restraint and flaunted his total authority over his subjects in the most capriciously horrific manner. Caligula personifies the immorality, bloodlust and insanity of absolute power.

AD
37–68

He showed neither discrimination nor moderation in putting to death whomsoever he pleased
.

Suetonius

The emperor who “fiddled while Rome burned,” Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty that took Rome from republic to one-man rule. Raised amidst violence and tyranny, he ruled with
ludicrous vanity, demented whimsy and inept despotism. Few mourned his abdication and death amidst the chaos that he himself had created.

Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus was born in
AD
37 in the town of Antium, not far from Rome, while the Emperor Caligula—Nero's uncle—was on the throne. Like so many, he was to suffer at Caligula's hands—forced with his mother Agrippina into exile when she lost favor with the emperor. Agrippina was Caligula's sister. Their incestuous relationship supposedly ended when she plotted to overthrow him: Agrippina ranks as one of the most poisonous women in Roman history. Mother and son were allowed to return by Caligula's successor, Claudius, who had recently executed his nymphomaniacal empress, Messalina. In
AD
49 Agrippina became the emperor's fourth wife. Claudius not only adopted Nero as his son but made him joint heir to the throne with his own son by Messalina, Britannicus.

Agrippina, however, was unwilling to allow nature to take its course and in
AD
54 she supposedly poisoned Claudius. Relations between mother and son were also flawed, and when, in the following year, Agrippina realized her hold over Nero was slipping, she conspired in a plot to replace him with Britannicus. On discovering the conspiracy, Nero promptly had his rival poisoned and banished Agrippina from the imperial palace on the pretext of having insulted his young wife, Octavia.

Despite such intrigues, the early years of Nero's reign were marked by wise governance, largely because much state business was handled by shrewd advisers such as the philosopher Seneca, the Praetorian prefect Burrus and reliable Greek freedmen. This relative calm was not destined to last. Increasingly assured, Nero sought to free himself from the control of others and exercise power in his own right.

The first to feel the consequences of his new assertiveness was his mother, who had continued plotting behind his back. Tired of
her machinations, Nero resolved to do away with her in
AD
59. When an initial attempt to drown her in the Bay of Naples proved unsuccessful, the emperor sent an assassin to complete the job. Legend has it that, realizing what was about to happen as the killer approached, Agrippina drew back her clothes and cried, in one final act of scorn for her matricidal son, “Here, smite my womb!”

With his mother out of the way, Nero's reign quickly sank into petty despotism. Burrus and Seneca were both brought to trial on trumped-up charges, and though eventually acquitted lost much of their influence. Yet, even as he gained greater control over the levers of power, so the emperor appeared increasingly to lose touch with reality. He became infatuated with Poppaea Sabina, wife of one of his friends, and resolved to marry her. According to the historian Suetonius, Poppaea's husband was “persuaded” to grant her a divorce, while Nero's wife Octavia was first exiled and then murdered on the emperor's orders—paving the way for the Nero–Poppaea union.

In
AD
64, a huge fire swept through Rome which the emperor observed with indifference, supposedly playing his lyre. Indeed, according to the Roman chronicler Tacitus, Nero himself was behind the inferno, which was started to make room for his new palace. In fact he probably helped extinguish the fire and gave shelter to the homeless in his gardens. But his reputation for being frivolous, feckless and inept was established. In an effort to divert attention, Nero sought a scapegoat, thus beginning his persecution of the Christians. Tacitus recounts the atrocities committed: “Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burned, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”

Increasingly convinced that rivals were plotting against him, Nero had any potential critics executed, including, in
AD
62–3,
Marcus Antonius Pallas, Rubellius Plautus and Faustus Sulla. Then, in
AD
65, a conspiracy led by Gaius Calpurnius Piso to oust the emperor and restore the republic was uncovered. Nearly half of the forty-one accused were either executed or forced to commit suicide, Seneca among them. Taking himself increasingly seriously as an actor and neglecting his duties as the Roman economy faltered and disorder spread, Nero began to sing and act on the public stage, spending more time in the theater than running the empire. He also fancied himself as a sportsman, even taking part in the Olympic Games of
AD
67—ostensibly to improve relations with Greece, but more likely to milk the obsequious praise that invariably greeted his efforts. He won various awards—mostly secured in advance by hefty bribes from the imperial exchequer.

By
AD
68, elements within the army—which the dilettante emperor had largely ignored—decided that things could not continue. The governor of one of the provinces in Gaul rebelled and persuaded a fellow governor, Galba, to join him. Galba emerged as a popular focus for opposition to Nero and, crucially, the Praetorian Guard now declared their support for him. Faced with the desertion of the army, Nero was forced to flee Rome and went into hiding; a short time later, he committed suicide with the words “What an artist the world is losing in me.” His legacy was one of unrest across the empire, as Rome suffered the Year of the Four Emperors, during which civil war broke out between competing claimants to the throne. Hostilities ended only with the emergence of Vespasian and the founding of the Flavian dynasty.

121–180

Every instant of time is a pinprick of eternity. All things are petty, easily changed, vanishing away
.

Marcus Aurelius,
Meditations
6.36

Marcus Aurelius was the philosopher-king of the Roman empire, who exemplified the qualities he praised in his philosophical writings in a reign marked by principled and reforming rule over a vast and turbulent domain. He had an unselfish and pragmatic approach to governing his empire and did not shirk from sharing supreme power for the greater political good. His major written work, the
Meditations
, is an urbane and civilized commentary on life, expressing in a tender and personal voice a Stoic view of life, death and the vicissitudes of fortune.

Marcus Aurelius, born Marcus Annius Verus in
AD
121, came from a family well acquainted with high office. His paternal grandfather was a consul and the prefect of Rome. An aunt was married to Titus Aurelius Antoninus, who would later become the emperor Antoninus Pius. And his maternal grandmother stood to inherit one of the largest fortunes in the Roman empire. He also came from liberal stock: the emperors of the 1st and 2nd centuries were more sober, munificent and inclined toward good deeds than the flamboyant urban emperors of the previous, Julio-Claudian dynasty founded by Augustus.

Marcus was handpicked for great things. In
AD
138 the emperor Hadrian had arranged for Marcus to be adopted by his appointed
heir, Antoninus, which marked out the seventeen-year-old as a future joint emperor, along with another young man, who would become the emperor Lucius Verus.

Marcus received his education in Greek and Latin from the best tutors, including Herodes Atticus and Fronto, one of the principal popular literary figures of the day. But practice in rhetoric and linguistic exercises did not fully satisfy such a bright young man, and he keenly embraced the
Discourses
of Epictetus. Epictetus was a former slave who had become an important moral philosopher of the Stoic school, which taught that it was through fortitude and self-control that one could attain spiritual well-being and a clear and unbiased outlook on life. Philosophy in general, and Stoicism in particular, would be the intellectual touchstones of Marcus' life.

When his adoptive father died in
AD
161, Marcus was already prepared to take over the imperial duties. But in accordance with his sense of honor and political intelligence, he insisted that Lucius Verus be made joint emperor with him. Although Marcus could easily have eliminated his rival, he realized that with such a diverse empire to govern it made sense to have a partner with the political authority to rule when required but without the seniority to be a threat to stable government. It was Marcus who carried out the serious work of government.

As emperor, Marcus continued the benign policies of his predecessors. He made various legal reforms and provided relief to the less favored in society—slaves, widows and minors all felt the benefits of his rule. Although there was some concern over the gap between the legal rights and privileges enjoyed by
honestiores
and those enjoyed by
humiliores
(the better-off and worse-off in society), Marcus was generally committed to building a fairer, more prosperous empire for his subjects.

One thing that Marcus could not control was the caprice of fate in sending disease and war. While fighting the Parthians
between 162 and 166, many soldiers contracted the plague, which spread throughout the empire. From 168 until around 172, Marcus (with Verus until his death in 169) was preoccupied with subduing the German tribes along the Danube, who were intent on marauding into the Roman Empire.

In spite of such engrossing problems, Marcus Aurelius remained a keen scholar of Stoicism, and in the last ten years of his life, in breaks between his campaigning and administrative duties, he wrote his
Meditations
. Written in Greek and randomly arranged just as they came to him, these are an eclectic selection of diary entries, fragments and epigrams in which he addresses the challenges of life at war, the fear of death, and the cares and injustices of everyday life.

The general sentiment of the
Meditations
is that overreaction and lingering bitterness are the most damaging responses to life's iniquities. “If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs you, but your own judgment of it,” he writes. “And it is in your power to wipe out this judgment now.” Another typical injunction reads: “A cucumber is bitter; throw it away. There are briars in the road; turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add ‘And why were such things made in the world?'”

As the
Meditations
were written against the backdrop of war, mortality naturally features prominently in them. Marcus' position is clear: “Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.”

It is advice that Marcus followed throughout his life but he did not succeed as a father. Before he died on campaign in 180, he appointed as his successor his son Commodus, whose diabolical and demented tyranny ended in assassination. But in spite of all, Marcus Aurelius managed to articulate with greater compassion than any of his contemporaries a timeless vision of fortitude in the face of human injustice and mortality.