Caligula: A Biography Read online

  CONDITIONS IN ANCIENT ROME

  UNDER TIBERIUS

  The reign of Tiberius (14–37) was of central importance not only to young Caligula personally, but also to the development of the emperor’s position, which had implications for Caligula’s own later rule. Difficult as it is to sum up the character and actions of the second Roman emperor, one conclusion is irrefutable: The legacy left him by his stepfather and adoptive father, Augustus, required the emperor to play a complex role, and Tiberius never grew into it. One could say that while Augustus did play the part like a consummate actor, Tiberius took it all at face value. If the former princeps had exercised his power vis-à-vis the aristocracy by pretending that he did not possess it, then the latter had the power but did not exercise it. And if during the rule of Augustus the senators could pretend that they were exercising power that they did not possess, under Tiberius they possessed power that they could not exercise.

  The new emperor’s first step had been to make sure he controlled the armed forces; the Praetorian Guard and the legions had to swear an oath of allegiance to him. From time to time he summoned the guard to drill in front of the assembled senators as a visible demonstration of his power. He disapproved, however, of the evident result of this situation, already discernible under Augustus—namely that the members of the aristocracy, whose chances for advancement depended to a great extent on the emperor’s favor, attempted to guess what he wanted and then behaved opportunistically to gratify him. Tiberius acted as if the Republic had been restored in actual fact. He frequently had the Senate debate matters related to the real exercise of power without letting the senators know his own position, but was then highly displeased when they reached decisions counter to his wishes—and he let the senators involved feel his wrath. Thus, Tiberius failed to manage the paradoxical situation of sole rule and Republican institutions, as he might have done had he followed Augustus’s model and resorted to ambiguous communication. Instead, he acted in all sincerity, confronting the senators with contradictory demands: They were to accept him as emperor, but also act as if he did not exist, as if the Senate truly remained the real center of power, as it had been in the time of the Republic.

  The difficulties that ensued as the emperor and the Roman aristocracy tried to communicate with one another in the Senate are vividly rendered in Tacitus’s account of the reign of Tiberius in the Annals. To carry out the emperor’s will without knowing what that will was required considerable skill on the part of the senators. In a telling example from the year 15, when the Senate was debating a matter of direct personal concern to him, Tiberius declared that he would vote under oath and called on the other senators to do likewise. Calpurnius Piso responded: “In what order will you register your opinion, Caesar? If first, I shall have something to follow; if last of all, I fear I may inadvertently find myself on the other side” (Tac. Ann. 1.74.5–6). This man known for his courage brought up the problem that usually went unmentioned, in conjunction with a clear indication of his readiness to submit to the emperor’s wishes, but, as Tacitus reports, at the same time he could not avoid embarrassing Tiberius.

  The situation was worsened by a change in the traditional relationships in the Roman aristocracy. These had been governed by a multi-polar system of political friendships: Friends visited one another at home for the salutatio, a formal morning reception, and for banquets in the evenings; they supported one another with the votes of their clients at elections or votes in the Senate; and they left each other bequests in their wills. The existence of an emperor strangely altered this situation in that there was no alternative to friendship with the emperor. All aristocrats were now the emperor’s “friends” or, at the very least, no one could afford to be on bad terms with him publicly. Of course there was a distinction between those men close to the emperor, who enjoyed his particular trust, and all the rest. But the traditional forms of interaction that symbolized friendship were now extended to the entire aristocracy.

  It is reported that under Augustus the entire Senate, all the members of the equestrian order, and many of the common people appeared regularly for the morning receptions at his house, turning them into a time-consuming mass event. The emperor had a decisive influence on the political offices granted to a senator, which counted as a “favor” or “kindness” (beneficium), an act of imperial friendship. In return the number of bequests to the emperor rose enormously, and the emperor remembered all aristocrats of highest rank in his own will. “Friendship” with the emperor thus acquired a new function, as the all-important mechanism for regulating relationships within the aristocracy. The traditional rivalries once expressed in terms of direct amity or hostility were now transformed into a competition for access to the emperor and his favor.

  Here, too, Augustus had succeeded in unifying contraries by using the new hierarchical system of relationships based on the emperor’s favor but behaving as if it were still the old one of close personal friendships between equals. Once again ambiguity in communication between the emperor and the aristocracy was the result. The emperor had to act as if every aristocrat were his friend, and the aristocrats pretended that they were all friends of the emperor, even though it was clear that opportunism was foremost in everyone’s mind and that below the surface, feelings of genuine hostility toward the emperor existed, as became evident now and then when conspiracies were uncovered.

  Tiberius is reported to have tried to withdraw as much as possible from such traditional contacts with the aristocracy and the opportunistic behavior they encouraged. Thus at his morning receptions he received the senators as a group, a step that simplified the procedure but greatly limited the possibilities for private communication with the emperor. He is also said to have systematically avoided contact with senators on other occasions, by hardly granting private interviews. Clearly he was helpless in the face of the usual flattery, which he reportedly detested.

  Two central events from Tiberius’s reign can be explained by his attempt to demand political decisions from the Senate that because of the altered center of power it was no longer able to make and by his withdrawal from personal communication with the aristocracy—that is, by his manner of being emperor without being willing or able to play the part required of him. These events were the treason trials and the rise of Sejanus, prefect of the Praetorian Guard.

  Since under Tiberius rivalries within the aristocracy could not take the form of a competition for imperial favor that was regulated and guided from above, a new and extremely ugly form of behavior arose: intrigues and denunciation. The lex maiestatis had originally been applied to crimes against the “sovereignty” (maiestas) of the Roman polity: mutiny in the army, fomenting rebellion among the people, or gross abuse of office by magistrates. Augustus applied this law to crimes against the emperor as well, in modified form, and in the beginning Tiberius allowed such charges to be raised as a way of prosecuting the authors of vituperative attacks on him. It transpired that an aristocrat unscrupulous enough could use the charge that such a crime had been committed as a way of getting the otherwise inaccessible emperor’s attention. As the aim was to appear solicitous of his safety, the more serious the alleged case, the better. At the same time the tactic provided a relatively safe way of eliminating rivals from the field. Rewards could be earned, too, since there was no public prosecutor in ancient Rome; if a defendant was found guilty, his accuser received a portion of his assets.

  A typical case, reported by Tacitus, shows that allowing such charges endangered the lives of the defendants but could have a grotesque ripple effect as well. The victim in this instance was a high-ranking knight named Titius Sabinus, and his accusers were four senators of Praetorian rank. Their ambition was to become consuls, and they hoped that by pressing charges successfully against Sabinus they would win the support of his enemy Sejanus, the powerful Praetorian prefect. Lucanius Latiaris, the man on best terms with Sabinus among the four, invited him to his house and began complaining about Sejanus; he then went o
n to heap abuse on the emperor, and ultimately Sabinus joined in. Simultaneously the three others hid in the space between the roof and the ceiling so that they could serve as witnesses. The group then filed charges, which resulted in a death sentence and Sabinus’s execution. “In Rome, the anxiety and panic, the reticence of men toward their nearest and dearest, had never been greater,” Tacitus reports. “Meetings and conversations, the ears of friend and stranger were alike avoided; even things mute and inanimate—the very walls and roofs—were eyed with circumspection” (Tac. Ann. 4.69.3).

  At the start it was often men newly raised to the rank of senator who chose this method of advancing their own careers, while their victims tended to be members of old aristocratic families whose ancestry made them potential rivals of the emperor. The crucial factor, however, was that the whole Senate heard the trials and had no choice but to condemn its own members if the emperor did not intervene. The trials thus became a process by which the aristocracy was destroying itself. Tiberius had clearly lost the ability to assess the relative importance of each case. Suetonius reports in his Life of Tiberius that the emperor was dominated by a dread of conspiracies—and the more trials of this nature took place, the better founded that dread seemed to be.

  The increase of flattery, intrigue, denunciation, and fear among the aristocrats—to which Tiberius’s own behavior unwittingly made a decisive contribution—now led the emperor to withdraw entirely from aristocratic society, and even from Rome itself. In the year 26 he moved to Campania, and the following year to the Isle of Capri. Until his death in 37 he never set foot in Rome again. It was an astonishing step: The ruler of the Roman Empire retired from Rome, the center of his realm, and from then on ran the government by correspondence. His retreat, which documented Tiberius’s failure in the role of emperor, went hand in hand with the rise of Sejanus. As Praetorian prefect he was head of the emperor’s bodyguard, and thus carried out an important military function. In addition, however, Sejanus possessed to a high degree the very skills so notably lacking in the emperor: He managed to his own benefit the sometimes unscrupulous opportunism that dominated aristocrats’ behavior; he used the web of intrigue for his own purposes; and finally he came to monopolize the favor that Tiberius was withholding from the aristocracy.

  Through clever maneuvers Sejanus had succeeded in winning Tiberius’s complete trust. He achieved a position of preeminent power by the time of the emperor’s withdrawal to Capri, at the very latest. He monitored the entire imperial correspondence, which was transported back and forth by the Praetorian Guard. In addition Sejanus had placed his own people in positions close to the emperor, so that he was able to oversee all access to and communication with Tiberius, and thereby controlled all avenues to gaining influence with him. As a result, the aristocrats’ efforts to win the emperor’s favor now became efforts to win the favor of his favorite. According to Cassius Dio’s Roman History there was a great crush in front of Sejanus’s house in Rome every morning during the salutatio, not only because men were afraid of being overlooked, but also because they didn’t want to be seen bringing up the rear of the procession. This was true of the leaders of the Senate in particular, whose behavior was observed closely. Tacitus writes that it was possible to reach the consulship, and thereby the highest social rank, only with Sejanus’s support, and the consuls themselves discussed all public and personal matters with him. At the same time, Tacitus continues, everyone who was on bad terms with Sejanus for any reason, or who stood in his way, was exposed to the gravest danger. The fate of Titius Sabinus was described above, and we will soon learn what happened to the family of Germanicus. Tiberius permitted extraordinary honors to be awarded to the commander of his bodyguard: Sejanus’s birthday was celebrated publicly, and golden images of him were venerated. He reached the zenith of his power in the year 31, when he shared the consulship with the emperor, had the best prospects for marrying into the imperial family, and was promised tribunician potestas, which would have made him a kind of co-regent.

  To trust no man but one, and trust him too much—this captures Tiberius’s behavior in a nutshell. Clearly he overextended Sejanus’s loyalty. Given that the question of the succession remained open, Sejanus seems to have found the temptation too great to resist: Not content with being the emperor’s virtual equal, he strove to become emperor himself. The report of the conspiracy is said to have been delivered to Tiberius by a trusted slave of Antonia Minor, who as his sister-in-law had privileged access to the emperor. The old man rallied to bring off one bravura performance. He secretly appointed a new Praetorian prefect, Quintus Naevius Macro, simultaneously ordering that ships be made ready to carry him away to safety in case of emergency, to a garrison of loyal troops. Then in a dramatic denouement in the Senate, a letter was read aloud in Sejanus’s presence; it began with noncommittal phrases, but finally accused him directly of plotting against the emperor. The once all-powerful favorite was executed the same day, along with his children. Their bodies were dragged through Rome for several days after that.

  A new spate of trials for treason ensued, as people settled old scores and used new openings to try to make a name for themselves. In the year 33 Tiberius gave orders that everyone in prison for participating in the conspiracy was to be killed. “On the ground lay the huge hecatomb of victims: either sex, every age; the famous, the obscure,” writes Tacitus, “scattered or piled in mounds. Nor was it permitted to relatives or friends to stand near, to weep over them, or even to view them too long; but a cordon of sentries, with eyes for each beholder’s sorrow, escorted the rotting carcasses as they were dragged to the Tiber, there to float with the current or drift to the bank, with none to commit them to the flames or touch them. The ties of our common humanity had been dissolved by the force of terror; and before each advance of cruelty compassion receded” (Tac. Ann. 6.19.2–3).

  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).

  A PERILOUS YOUTH

  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.