CHAPTER TEN

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FOURTEEN EMPERORS

The men on the throne

ON 24 JANUARY 41 CE, almost thirty years after the first Augustus had died in his bed and eighty-five years after the death of Julius Caesar, there was another violent assassination in Rome. This time the victim was the emperor Gaius – or, to give him his full name, Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus – who four years earlier had succeeded his great-uncle, the elderly Tiberius, to the throne. He was the second in the series of fourteen emperors, not counting three short-lived claimants in one brief period of civil war through 68 and 69 CE, who ruled Rome in the almost 180 years between the death of Augustus and that of the emperor Commodus, who was assassinated in 192 CE. These include some of the most resonant names in Roman history: Claudius, who replaced Gaius and was given a starring role as a scholarly and shrewd observer of palace politics in the novels of Robert Graves I, Claudius and Claudius the God; Nero, with his reputation for family murder, lyre playing, Christian persecution and pyromania; Marcus Aurelius, the ‘philosopher-emperor’, whose philosophical Thoughts is even now a bestseller; and Commodus, whose exploits in the arena were re-created, not wholly inaccurately, in the movie Gladiator. They also include those who, despite all the ingenuity of modern biographers, survive as little more than names: the elderly Nerva, for example, who held power for just eighteen months at the end of the first century CE.

67. Three short-term emperors – Galba, Otho and Vitellius – between the death of Nero and the accession of Vespasian.

Dynasties

Julio-Claudians (14 – 68 CE)

Flavians (69 – 96 CE)

‘Adoptive dynasty’ (96 – 192 CE)

The murder of Gaius is one of the best-documented events in this whole period of Roman history, and it certainly gives us the most detailed account to survive of any emperor’s fall. It is told over thirty modern pages, as an elaborate digression within an encyclopaedic history of the Jews, written some fifty years after the event by Titus Flavius Josephus – a leading Jewish rebel against the Romans in the 60s CE (under the name of Joseph ben Matthias) who changed sides, politically if not religiously, and ended up almost a writer-in-residence at the Roman court. For Josephus, Gaius’ murder was divine punishment visited upon an emperor who had scorned the Jews and even erected a statue of himself in the Temple. But to judge from the circumstantial details, in retelling the story, he had on his desk a memoir of what happened in January 41 CE written by someone close to the action.

Josephus’ account of the assassination is richly revealing about the new world of politics that followed the first Augustus, from the palace intrigues, through the empty slogans of the old senatorial elite and the problems of succession, to the perils of being an emperor on the throne. What is more, the various assessments, both ancient and modern, of Gaius’ faults and failings, of what lay behind his murder and of what followed it point to important questions: about how the reputation of Roman emperors was created, about how their success or failure was, and is, judged and – even more fundamentally – about how far the character and qualities, marriages and murders, of the individual rulers help us understand the broader history of Rome under imperial rule.

So how was Gaius killed, and why?