The Twelve Caesars (16 page)

In Gaius’ nostrils, Tiberius’ cynical adherence to that illusion Augustus had fabricated of government by a continuing system of elected officials, the
princeps
‘first
among equals’ (a leading citizen in a company of leading citizens), smelt as stale as his corpse. Always frank to the point of offensiveness, he despised its untruths. Not content to be
hailed as ‘Greatest and Best of Caesars’ – equally unsusceptible when the mood took him to flattery and to plain speaking – he craved autocracy and made significant strides
towards achieving it. That radical shift formed the dynamic of Gaius’ reign. It shaped his behaviour towards senate and commons. It inspired his creation of a personal mythology. It alienated
the writers of ancient history so
comprehensively that, for modern readers, Gaius – imprecisely but consistently dismissed as insane – lies lost in a fog of fact
and fable which we may never navigate with certainty.

His youth had been one of suffering and circumspection, his prominent and popular family suspected by Tiberius of dangerous designs. With Tiberius dead, a new dawn promised. There would be only
one way from now on, in appearance as well as fact: Gaius’ way. No ‘dominion of the senate and the people of Rome’ as celebrated in Augustus’
Res gestae.
¹
No
senatorial involvement in public finance, public works, military recruitment or correspondence with client kings as fostered by Tiberius.
²
Not even lip-service to good relations between emperor and
senators. ‘Let them hate, provided they fear’ became the broad-brush policy applied to all classes, where fear was the clear blue water that separated governor and governed. Invested
with legal power by the senate on his accession and enjoying the support of the army through family connections – as well as a timely payment of 2,000 sesterces to members of the Praetorian
Guard made on his behalf by the Guard’s prefect, Macro – Gaius nevertheless crucially lacked
auctoritas
: he could not, like his predecessors, claim to rule through personal
authority or as a reward for services to the state. Without experience, he was simply himself. Within himself, he decided, lay the grounds of his distinction. It was an attitude unconducive to
compromise. In March 37, the accession of Tiberius’ successor was managed without opposition. His reign began in happy emollience, a policy of inclusiveness and consensus applied to commons
and senate alike. It would prove short-lived. In Gaius’ reign there were no happy endings – either for Gaius or for his Rome. Like fellow epileptic Julius Caesar before him and Galba,
Otho, Vitellius and Domitian after, in time this miscreant emperor would die a thousand deaths, victim of a frenzy of killing: his jaw split,
his groin ripped by swords, his
body bludgeoned, battered, butchered. Irony destroyed him: a bloody and agonizing end for a sick-minded tyrant who had revelled in the bodily and mental anguish of many who ought never to have been
his victims.

At the outset the beloved son of a beloved father, Gaius was the first of Rome’s emperors to exult in his own eminence. (He was also the first to gain the throne
exclusively through the hereditary principle, his sole qualification for office descent from Augustus via Julia and Agrippina the Elder.) He began by pursuing plaudits, praise and pity (the last
survivor of three sons, both parents killed, his family beloved of Rome’s masses). It was so easy with a carrying wind, ‘for Tiberius’, as Josephus tells us, ‘had brought a
vast number of miseries on the best families of the Romans’,
³
none more so than Gaius’ own. Tiberius’ death was greeted with joy, Gaius’ accession with rapture among the
Roman crowd and, in the senate house, a qualified optimism which its members took pains to disguise as joy. Dio describes the twenty-four-year-old emperor wooing the senate with promises of
power-sharing and a little-boy-lost version of himself as the son and ward of the city fathers;
⁴
he abolished treason trials and unpopular taxes, recalled exiles, destroyed incriminating papers. A
conciliatory gesture: he adopted his co-heir, Tiberius’ grandson Tiberius Gemellus, as his son. (Later he would have him killed, invoking with grim cynicism the legal power of life and death
possessed by a father over his sons:
patria potestas
.) In Suetonius’ account, the fledgling ruler ‘tried to rouse men’s devotion by courting popularity in every way’.
His efforts verged on the theatrical but, emphasizing themes of family piety and the unstinting generosity of the emperor, met
with notable success. Primary and secondary
sources agree – witness Eustache Le Sueur’s painting of 1647,
Caligula Depositing the Ashes of his Mother and his Brother in the Tomb of his Ancestors
, a heroic, understatedly
moving image despite painter and viewer’s knowledge of the emperor’s imminent degeneration into madness and badness.

Too soon, seduced by visions, Gaius outgrew initial joy. Without compunction he shattered every good opinion. Indifferent to any estimation bar his own, he cultivated contentment in his very
callousness, the actions by which he lost Rome’s love more theatrical than those by which once he had sought to keep it. ‘Would that you had but a single neck,’ he told a hostile
crowd repelled by his orgiastic delight in slaughter and his apparently insatiable desire for the sight and scent of blood and money;
⁵
by then Romans knew better than to doubt his desire to kill
them one and all. It was as if he had decided to turn the world on its head: an iconoclasm of misery and mistrust. In the beginning, he made payments to the people of those generous legacies left
by Livia (suppressed by Tiberius) and Tiberius (suppressed by the senate), as well as his own early donatives made on two occasions; later he imposed swingeing taxes and cut off supplies of free
grain. In the beginning, championing the people’s pleasure, he sponsored public games and festivities, even appearing as a gladiator himself; later, on a day of broiling heat, he locked the
crowd in the theatre and withdrew the awnings that sheltered them from the sun. (Mistreatment of spectators at the games always bodes ill. Dio later accuses Domitian of confining the crowd in the
circus during a storm so violent that, drenched and freezing, several caught colds and died.
⁶
)

In the beginning, he elevated his family, offering decent burial to those who had died and honours to those who remained – the same privileges for his grandmother Antonia
as those once enjoyed by the elderly Livia, including the title ‘Augusta’, public prayers for his sisters, a shared consulship for his uncle Claudius; later, he is accused
of poisoning Antonia or driving her to suicide; he exiled his sisters on suspicion of conspiracy and killed his widower brother-in-law Lepidus whom Dio claimed was his lover;
⁷
he dunked Claudius in
the Rhine simply for being Claudius. Unsurprisingly, his plummet through the opinion polls was rapid. That downward journey revelled in bloodshed, torture and casual carnality. Scholars impose a
tentative coherence by discerning a chilling, cruel humour behind Gaius’ atrocities: as an alternative morality it falls flat. Today his hair-raising record provides lurid inspiration for
playwrights, film-makers and pornographers. It is a wanton legacy in default of any other. ‘For any great or royal work that he did, which might be for the present and for future ages,’
Josephus sniffs, ‘nobody can name any such.’
⁸

Dio characterizes Gaius as a compound of contradictions, his only consistency inconsistency.
⁹
So, having at first forbidden Romans to set up images of him, he afterwards offered himself for
public consumption to be worshipped as a living god in temples on the Palatine and Capitoline Hills. His ambitions were grandiose: he appeared in the guise of Hercules, Neptune, Bacchus and Apollo;
with recourse to wigs he even impersonated Venus, Juno and Diana. The sources preserve a rumour that he went so far as to try to seduce the moon, thirsty for a new sort of thrill as pale, cool
light flooded his palace bedroom. One temple contained a life-size golden statue of Gaius. In a practice designed to blur boundaries between the mortal and immortal figures of the emperor, it was
dressed on a daily basis in clothing like his own. Only the smoke of sacrifice dimmed its brightness: guinea-hens, peacocks, pheasants, woodcock and even flamingoes burned in appeasement of this
charade-loving charlatan.

Apparently capricious, that attention-seeking volte-face was typical of Gaius’ inability to reconcile irreconcilables: that conjunction of excessive timidness and
extreme assurance which Suetonius placed at the root of his mental weakness. In time the man who regarded Rome’s pantheon with contemptuous offhandedness appeared at the seaside playground of
Baiae in ‘a crown of oak leaves... and a cloak of cloth of gold’; on other occasions he carried a trident, a caduceus or a thunderbolt, accessories of the gods. Was he testing the
perimeters of his newfound power – enjoying an elaborate joke at the expense of Roman credulousness and senatorial sycophancy – or asserting the unassailability of the
princeps
’ position by ‘borrowing’ heavenly attributes? Was this talent-show approach to public worship in fact a deliberate policy designed to underline Gaius’ own
eminence, his fitness to reign by dint of qualities that were more than human, denied to the common herd? If so, events would unveil the hollowness of vainglorious posturing. Perhaps these amateur
dramatics should be interpreted as no more than the youthful
jeux d’esprit
of a man who had schooled himself to rely on his own resources for amusement – ‘a huge
bullshitter’, as a brave cobbler once described him to his face;
¹⁰
alternatively as an exercise in wish-fulfilment perpetrated by one who, even in his youth, was condemned by his appearance to
mockery. (To mention the word ‘goat’ in the presence of the bald but hairy-limbed emperor was a capital offence.) Both answers provide grounds for our pity. With their emphasis on
mental instability, the sources do not comment. Enough to register that in spirit these were the very gestures which, less than a century earlier, had cost the Divine Julius his life; the same
self-aggrandizement which once had marked out Mark Antony as Rome’s ideological enemy, seduced by equations of kingship and divinity associated with the East. Time had moved
on since the Ides of March and Mark Antony’s defeat at Actium. Things change, even attitudes. Gaius the madman, with a taste for female footwear and formative years spent among
Eastern princelings in the household of Antony’s daughter Antonia, may have been the first in Rome to realize those changes’ full extent.

If only, like Augustus, he could have espoused abstemiousness, restraint in any aspect of his life. Then he might have survived. Instead he was consistently extravagant in his appetites, with an
appetite for extravagance. Cassius Dio accuses him of spending more than three billion sesterces in the space of two years,
¹¹
Seneca of blowing the annual tribute of three provinces (ten million
sesterces) on a single dinner.
¹²
Such extravagance embarrassed the imperial treasury: lust for money was just one ground for his wayward killings. And his appetites ranged widely. According to the
sources, he ‘had not the slightest regard for chastity, either his own or anyone else’s’. He opened a brothel in the palace. He married four times in quick succession: only his
last wife, Caesonia, lacking beauty but sexually accomplished, leaves any imprint. He indulged incestuous passions for all three of his sisters (a common complaint against unpopular emperors, but
one more closely associated with Gaius than others); his favourite sister, Drusilla, became the first woman of the imperial house to be deified. Though he expelled from the city Rome’s most
notorious male tarts, he himself was buggered by Valerius Catullus until the latter confessed himself worn out. The simple truth is that, in an amoral age, Gaius fucked with abandonment. Unlike
Tiberius, he eschewed even the decency to shelter indecency from prying eyes on an island hideaway like Capri. Unlike Augustus, dissimulation was not among his faults. He cuckolded husbands at
dinner-parties to which both husband and wife had been invited. The wife enjoyed in a neighbouring room, Gaius’ post-coital small talk
with his guests included a frank
assessment of her charms and performance, her husband compelled to silent acquiescence in fear of his life.

In vain did Macro the Praetorian prefect remind him of the dignity of his office: within a year he had silenced Macro’s carping. Ditto Silanus, the father of his short-lived first wife,
Junia Claudilla: Gaius’ father-in-law paid heavily for appearing to aspire to the role of
éminence grise.
There were token concessions. Like Tiberius before him, Gaius
assimilated his portraiture to that of Augustus, as a bust in Copenhagen’s Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek attests. Save a petulant pursing of the lips and a thickening of the nose – the latter
possibly the result of heavy drinking – his features closely resemble those of the classicized, idealized imagery of his ageless forebear. Later he would insist that statues of the gods share
his own Augustan physiognomy. Gaius evidently needed Augustus’ reflected glory to underpin the legitimacy of his rule and explain the foundation of his divine pretensions: his official
iconography merges his features with those of his great-grandfather. But he did not seek to emulate Augustus’ record and translate visual comparisons into the spheres of policy-making or
reputation. He resisted comparisons with the ‘young Augustus’ as a slur on his youth and inexperience.
¹³
From a distance, it looks like contrariness; it may have been laziness or lack of
interest.