THREE
THE CONSULARS’ CONSPIRACY
“As for Gaius, he administered the Empire quite high-mindedly during the first and second years of his reign. By exercising moderation he made great advances in popularity both with the Romans themselves and with their subjects.” With these words Josephus characterizes the period of Caligula’s reign described up to this point (Jos. Ant. 18.256). The emperor stressed his respect for the Senate at the very beginning of 39 by some symbolic acts. When he assumed his second consulship on 1 January and resigned from it after only thirty days, he made a point of taking the oaths on the Rostra in the Forum as consuls normally did, behaving as one senator among others. His fellow consul, L. Apronius Caesianus, remained in office for six months, and Caligula was replaced as consul by Sanquinius Maximus, the city prefect. “During these and the following days,” writes Cassius Dio in an abrupt end to his account of the start of the year 39, “many of the foremost men perished in fulfillment of sentences of condemnation (for not a few of those who had been released from prison were punished for the very reasons that had led to their imprisonment by Tiberius), and many others of less prominence in gladiatorial combats. In fact, there was nothing but slaughter” (Dio 59.13.2–3).
Figure 4. Bust of Caligula. Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek 637a (Inv. 2687). Photo: Jo Selsing.
What had happened? What had led suddenly to these events, which come as a complete surprise after the first two years of Caligula’s rule? Why were so many men condemned, including numerous “leaders” (prōtoi), a term by which Dio usually means the highest category of senators, the consulares or former consuls? That some of them had been prosecuted for similar crimes under Tiberius and then released by Caligula suggests that they were convicted of the crime of maiestas. And since there are no indications at all of defamatory writings or verbal insults to the young emperor, the crime may have taken the most serious form of all, namely a conspiracy. Dio’s reference to verdicts handed down by a court shows that the conspirators were found guilty in orderly trials in accordance with the law, presumably conducted by the Senate. But Dio, our sole source, who usually makes an effort to maintain chronological order, offers no information on the precise course of events and says not a word about whether there was actually a conspiracy or whether the condemned were just snared by denunciations. There are other passages in Book 59 of his Roman History in which Dio sometimes fails to discuss the motives behind actions, but here, at the decisive turning point of Caligula’s reign, one has the impression that the author—or possibly the sources on which he based his account—intentionally passes over the background to these events in silence.
Other sources provide no further help. Suetonius just speaks in general terms about various conspiracies and provides a date only for the last one, which succeeded. Nor do Caligula’s contemporaries Seneca and Philo show any interest in conspiracies against the emperor that might explain his later actions. Given the limited information provided by the sources, most modern biographies of Caligula shed no light on the early months of the year 39, the phase in which the relationship between emperor and aristocracy underwent a fundamental transformation.
A remark attributed to the later emperor Domitian runs: “Emperors’ claims to have uncovered a conspiracy are not believed until they have been killed.” If we assemble all the details in the various accounts, then this insight appears to apply to the present case. Dio goes on to mention that disagreements had arisen, clouding the relationship between Caligula and the people. At plays the crowd had chanted loud protests against informers, refusing to stop and demanding that they be handed over. This reveals that—for the first time under Caligula’s rule—charges had been filed against a number of high-ranking aristocrats, including some who had their own supporters among the people, and that they were facing trial.
Soon afterward Caligula delivered a speech in the Senate (about which more will be said later), in response to which the Senators expressed their gratitude “that they had not perished like the others.” We can infer from this that many more of them were considered guilty of the same crime. They voted to offer sacrifices to his philanthropy in the future. (“Philanthropy” [philanthrōpia in Greek, clementia in Latin] was the technical term for the mercy or benevolence that a ruler showed to someone who had opposed him.) And last they approved honors for the emperor including an “ovation,” the “small” triumphal procession usually granted after military victories, “as if he had defeated some enemies” (Dio 59.16.9 and 11).
The evidence thus suggests a course of events as follows: In the period after Caligula resigned his consulate on 30 January, a conspiracy was uncovered in which many senatorial aristocrats had participated. The noteworthy feature of this conspiracy was that its leaders were neither old enemies of Germanicus’s family nor former adherents of Gemellus, whom Caligula had prosecuted after his illness. We know this because it is expressly reported that some of them had been charged with similar crimes in the reign of Tiberius, that is, at a time when opposition to the family of Germanicus or support for Gemellus was more likely to lead to political advantage than to trouble. There is no indication that old scores were being settled, then. Furthermore it was the “leading men” of the aristocracy, that is to say consulars, who had initiated the conspiracy. In other words the leaders were men who, while they may have disliked the emperor’s enthusiasm for Circus games and displays of extravagance and felt threatened by his plans for conquest, had received generally supportive and accommodating treatment at his hands.
The conspirators were charged and condemned in court proceedings. Was this Caligula’s only reaction? In his account of the first half of 39 Dio mentions that some former senatorial officeholders stood trial for corruption. Several times, he reports, the senator Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo had drawn attention to deficiencies in the Roman road network that had arisen in Tiberius’s time. Now with his help Caligula proceeded against all the men who had served as curatores viarum in the last few decades and received funds for road repairs but had not used them for the intended purpose. They—or the contractors whom they had hired—were required to pay the money back in full. Dio further mentions by name five senators who are supposed to have been victims of Caligula’s persecution at that time. Investigation of these cases, however, provides no foundation for the claim that he had senators liquidated in great numbers.
Gaius Calvisius Sabinus, just returned from serving as governor of Pannonia, and his wife were accused of crimes and took their own lives, according to Dio. We learn nothing about the charges against the husband, but the wife was said to have inspected troops acting as camp guards in the province and to have watched soldiers as they drilled. As it happens, Tacitus in a different context records that the prosecution of the lady, at least, was entirely justified. She was accused of going about the camp dressed as a man and of committing adultery with an officer in the staff headquarters. The next man named is Titius Rufus, who committed suicide because he had said that the Senate thought differently than it spoke. This statement was undoubtedly correct, but for precisely that reason it is more likely that he was denounced by opportunistic colleagues rather than persecuted by the emperor. The praetor Junius Priscus was accused of various transgressions but the real reason for his trial, according to Dio, was his wealth. When it transpired after his death that he had not been particularly rich, Caligula is supposed to have remarked that Priscus had deceived him and could have remained alive. It is not possible to assess his case, since the charges against him are not named.
The case of Gnaeus Domitius Afer, a well-known orator of the time, is a different matter. He proposed an inscription to honor Caligula, but the emperor took offense instead. Reportedly Afer was able to save his own life only by resorting to servile flattery. He cannot have been in danger of death, however, since Dio writes that Afer had good connections to Caligula’s freedman Callistus and was made a consul by the emperor soon afterwards—in the extremely volatile political atmosphere of the next conspiracy. Finally, Seneca is mentioned as someone who just barely escaped becoming a victim, because an outstanding speech he had delivered in the Senate aroused Caligula’s anger. He was allegedly saved by the intervention of a woman close to the emperor, who told Caligula that he was suffering from an advanced case of consumption. This account does not seem very convincing either. Suetonius reports that Caligula made fun of Seneca’s style and characterized it as “sand without lime”—an assessment that could have been made by a modern philologist as well. Seneca’s oratory can thus hardly have been the grounds for his jeopardy.
On the whole then, beyond sentences for conspirators and the punishment of corrupt magistrates, there is no conclusive evidence that members of the aristocracy were prosecuted at that time. Caligula’s reaction to the conspiracy of the consulars took an altogether different form. Although he did not resort to physical force, the effectiveness of his response left nothing to be desired.
THE MOMENT OF TRUTH
The emperor began by giving a speech in the Senate from which Cassius Dio provides extensive excerpts. In it he said things that the venerable assembly had never before heard, starting with a critical summary of how the members of the senatorial order had behaved over the past few decades. Caligula reproached the senators and people for the criticism they had heaped on his predecessor, Tiberius—in which he himself had previously taken part. “Thereupon,” writes Cassius Dio, “he took up separately the case of each man who had lost his life, and tried to show, as people thought at least, that the senators had been responsible for the death of most of them, some by accusing them, others by testifying against them, and all by their votes of condemnation. The evidence of this, purporting to be derived from those very documents that he once declared he had burned, he caused to be read to them by the imperial freedmen.” And he added, “If Tiberius really did do wrong, you ought not, by Jupiter, to have honored him while he lived, and then, after repeatedly saying and voting what you did, turn about now. But it was not Tiberius alone that you treated in a fickle manner; Sejanus also you first puffed up with conceit and spoiled, then put him to death. Therefore I, too, ought not to expect any decent treatment from you” (Dio 59.16.2–4).
This was a personal and direct attack on the assembled senators. Caligula presented a historical analysis of the behavior of the aristocracy under Tiberius, evidently supported by the advance work and documentary research of his freedmen. He confronted the senators with the fact that members of their own body, motivated by opportunistic desires to win the emperor’s favor, had denounced other members. Furthermore, they themselves had pronounced the sentences of death against their colleagues. One can vividly imagine how the members of that august body felt as the freedmen on the imperial staff quoted from the records the statements they themselves had made during the trials for treason and then read the verdicts that the whole Senate had handed down. It must have been even worse, however, that in their presence—to their consternation, being senators—Caligula broached the subject of the opportunism and flattery that had characterized the Senate’s communication with the emperor since the time of Augustus. By confronting the aristocrats in the Senate first with the honors they had bestowed on Tiberius and Sejanus and then with their completely contrary behavior after the two men’s deaths—actions no one could deny—he exposed their behavior toward the emperor as consisting of hypocrisy, deception, and lies.
Yet there was still worse to come. Caligula conjured up an imaginary speech of Tiberius addressed to him: “In all this you have spoken well and truly. Therefore show no affection for any of them and spare none of them. For they all hate you, and they all pray for your death; and they will murder you if they can. Do not stop to consider, then, what acts of yours will please them, nor mind it if they talk, but look solely to your own pleasure and safety, since that has the most just claim. In this way you will suffer no harm and will at the same time enjoy all the greatest pleasures; you will also be honored by them, whether they wish it or not. If, however, you pursue the opposite course, it will profit you naught in reality; for, though in name you may win an empty reputation, you will gain no advantage, but will become the victim of plots and will perish ingloriously. For no man living is ruled of his own free will; on the contrary, only so long as a person is afraid does he pay court to the man who is stronger, but when he gains courage, he avenges himself on the man who is weaker” (Dio 59.16.5–7). Thereupon the emperor announced the resumption of the trials for treason, ordered his directives to be inscribed on a bronze stele, and left the Senate House.
Caligula had not only stripped the mask from the face of the aristocracy; he had also given a name to what lay behind it: their resentment of imperial rule, their hatred of the emperor, and their readiness to attack him whenever a favorable opportunity presented itself. No one could deny any of this, given the conspiracy against him that had just taken place. The truly appalling aspect of the speech, however, did not consist in what Caligula had said. There was no need to inform the senators of their own behavior. Every time they submissively voted some honor to the emperor, the senators knew what they were doing, and their latent willingness to conspire against him came as no surprise. What was unprecedented and shocking was that he had said it at all. By rebuking the Senate for the way it communicated with the emperor, Caligula had rendered it incapable of communication. The senators could not participate in his meta-communication about their ambiguous communication. The inequity of power prevented them from agreeing with him; they could not say, “Yes, we hate you and would gladly rid ourselves of you,” a statement that by this point would probably have reflected reality. Instead they were powerless, helpless, speechless—and personally humiliated at the same time.
There was also a third factor. The mask on the emperors’ part, their attempt to secure the aristocracy’s acceptance by acting as though they were not autocrats at all—this mask too Caligula dropped. Augustus’s art of lifelong playacting, which Caligula himself had copied in the past two years, was thus revealed as a lie, as dissembling and idle talk, that in the end only endangered the emperor’s safety. Now he announced that he would dispense with the aristocracy’s recognition of his position and predicted that aristocrats would remain servile nevertheless. This amounted to a declaration that the Augustan Principate was ended. Caligula had given the political paradox of the age, the contradictory combination of republic and monarchy, its real name, and declared himself for one side only, the monarchy.
How did the senators react? “For the moment,” Dio writes, “their alarm and dejection prevented them from saying a word or transacting any business; but on the next day they associated again and bestowed lavish praise upon Gaius as a most sincere and pious ruler, for they felt very grateful to him that they had not perished like the others. Accordingly, they voted to offer annual sacrifices to his clemency, . . . on the anniversary of the day on which he had read his address” (Dio 59.16.9–10). In other words, they flattered him and so continued to address him in the very language he had exposed as hypocrisy the day before. They continued to show him honor, just as he had cynically predicted. It was their only chance—but it meant that they had taken their self-abasement toward the emperor and his power to the extreme.
With this speech Caligula had taken an irreversible step. To be sure, the consulars involved in the conspiracy had provided evidence of the ambiguity in relations between the aristocracy and the emperor. Their conspiracy had been secret, however, and the fact of the conspirators’ enmity toward the emperor, revealed when the plot was exposed, could have been covered up in public by punishing the participants in the Senate. Now a new situation had arisen. Once the emperor had exposed the doublespeak in communications between aristocrats and himself, every statement addressed to him by the Senate from then on had already been condemned in advance: It was duplicitous, and the emperor knew it. And the senators knew that the emperor knew that they knew that he knew. Conversely, the path was now blocked for every future attempt on the emperor’s part to accommodate them: Everyone would have known that the emperor didn’t mean what he was saying. And the emperor would have known that the senators knew that he also knew that they knew. In other words, Caligula caused the ambiguous form of communication to collapse, which up to that time had been the crucial means for avoiding the paradox of the simultaneous existence of a monarchy and a republic. The truth had been spoken, and that could not be undone.
How were they to go on from here? For the moment the aristocrats in the Senate had no choice but to carry on as before and thereby to abase themselves doubly—as flatterers who had been exposed but continued their flattery nevertheless. As for Caligula, he did not drop the matter after this one speech; rather he used the new situation to humiliate the aristocrats and make them look ridiculous.
By the time of Augustus and Tiberius the continuation of traditional friendships among aristocrats had produced a situation in which all senators and the highest-ranking knights were officially “friends” of the emperor, whatever their actual personal relationships with him. Mornings they visited him at home; in the evening they were his guests or invited him to banquets; they left bequests to him in their wills, to gain his favor. Thus ambiguity prevailed here, too. Although Caligula had now torn down the facade of friendship, he continued to impose the traditional modes of behavior on the aristocracy, and its members were incapable of expressing their enmity to the emperor openly, because all the power was on his side. It is reported, for example, that he addressed many people as “father,” “grandfather,” “mother,” and “grandmother,” that is, by names that conveyed a close and affectionate relationship to them, in order to compel them to make him “voluntary” payments and to bequeath him money. Through a resolution in the Senate, he ordered that all those still alive who had included Tiberius in their wills must now name him instead. Similarly, when his daughter was born a short time later he pointed out the expenses he would incur as a father and demanded “gifts” for her education and dowry. Once again the aristocrats had to pay up or cause their own downfall by demonstrating publicly that they were no friends of the emperor. Philo reports that Caligula made gifts of money to force people to give him far higher amounts in return. Particularly distinguished members of the senatorial order were harmed in other ways “under the guise of friendship.” They were required to pay vast sums for his travels and entertainment when he visited them; some spent their entire fortunes on a single dinner or even went into debt. “And so some came to the point of deprecating the favors bestowed by him” (Phil. Leg. 345).
That was Caligula’s second response to the conspiracy by his consular “friends.” After having himself unmasked the pretense of friendship between emperor and aristocracy, for a cynical humiliation he made use of the fact that nonetheless no other alternative possibility for their conduct was available. He treated his aristocratic “friends”—that is, the aristocracy as a whole—as if their friendship toward him were actually sincere. Since no one could deny it, given their behavior, he was able to damage them financially as well. They were helpless, and Caligula is said to have made no secret of how much enjoyment that gave him.
Similarly, he compelled senators to pay large amounts of money to sponsor games in Rome. Presumably after the reintroduction of popular elections, he reinstated the old custom of choosing two praetors by lot to present gladiatorial games. Further, he put up his own gladiators for sale and attended the auction in person; his presence had the effect of driving up the prices, since bidders felt obligated to do him a favor in this way. Suetonius provides an account of how Caligula could indulge his sense of humor at senators’ expense during such auctions: “A well-known incident is that of Aponius Saturninus; he fell asleep on one of the benches, and as the auctioneer was warned by Gaius not to overlook the Praetorian gentleman who kept nodding to him, the bidding was not stopped until thirteen gladiators were knocked down to the unconscious sleeper at nine million sesterces” (Suet. Cal. 38.4).
He did not stop there. Dio reports how Caligula invited Incitatus (“Hotspur”), his favorite race horse, to dinner, fed him barley corn made of gold, toasted him with golden goblets, and planned to make him a consul. The meaning of this last gesture, perhaps the emperor’s most notorious, which seems to make no sense, can be inferred from the parallel account by Suetonius, who reports that in addition to a marble stall, a manger made of ivory, and purple blankets, Caligula gave his horse a palace, a staff of servants, and a dinner service so that the guests received in his name could be entertained as grandly as possible. Lastly Suetonius also mentions that the emperor planned to appoint the horse to the consulship.
There is no way now to know whether everyone in Rome got this joke. Nor can we tell whether Suetonius understood it later or—as seems more likely—failed to understand it on purpose, since he makes use of it to present the emperor as insane. There can be no doubt, however, about who in Rome would have gotten the point at the start of 39. The households of the senators—their houses, servants, and dinner services—represented a central manifestation of their social status and were in part an item of ruinous competition that was served up at wasteful banquets, and laws were passed from time to time to restrict extravagance. Achieving the consulship remained the most important goal of an aristocrat’s career. To equip the emperor’s horse with a sumptuous household and to destine it for the consulship satirized the main aim of aristocrats’ lives and laid it open to ridicule. Caligula placed his horse on the same level as the highest-ranking members of society—and by implication equated them with a horse.
Besides symbolically devaluing the Roman consulars, Caligula’s designation of Incitatus as a consul sent a further message: The emperor can appoint anyone he likes to the consulship; consulars are consulars by the grace of the emperor. In fact there was no alternative to the system that awarded status to members of the upper class in Rome according to their standing in the Senate, a form of ranking that had been in place for centuries. But if an individual possessed the minimum requirements—being in the third freeborn generation and of unblemished character—his position within this hierarchy was now decided by the emperor. In fact the emperor could even grant the rights of free birth, ingenuitas, and so make knights even of men born as slaves. Caligula’s joke about his horse not only made the consulars look ridiculous, but also expressed a truth about Roman society that members of the highest rank found extremely disagreeable: The position of every one of them depended on the emperor’s goodwill.
All this, then, was Caligula’s response to the unexpected attempt on his life by the consulars: Instead of issuing orders for heads to roll indiscriminately, he took aim at their positions in the Senate, in relationships of patronage, and in the hierarchy of their society—confronting them with the unpleasant reality of the Empire and with their own duplicitous behavior in dealing with their lack of real power. He forced them to humiliate themselves. He dishonored them by cynicism and symbolic acts. He left them to their impotence and absurdity.
Was this radical shift of behavior on the emperor’s part “appropriate”? The extent to which it was or was not cannot be determined with certainty, since the sources are silent on the motive for the conspiracy that preceded the shift and on its scope and object. That Caligula was still following a policy of demonstrative cooperation with the Senate at the start of the year, however, suggests that something extreme had occurred. In any case one feature of Caligula’s response is clear. Striking at the core of the senatorial aristocracy’s position in society had the desired effect. Conflict between emperor and aristocracy had suddenly erupted, and now the groundwork had been laid for its escalation. The only question was what would be the next opportunity for venting the stored-up hatred. The wait was not long, and the occasion came with two measures intended to stabilize the emperor’s position.
In the summer of the year 39 Caligula remarried. He was again attempting to clarify the dynastic situation by having an heir. The bride, Milonia Caesonia, is said to have been neither young nor particularly beautiful, but she had already proved her fertility by having borne three children—and she was well along in a pregnancy. After the baby was born, Caligula referred to Caesonia as his wife and acknowledged the daughter, who was named Julia Drusilla, as his own. The order of events indicates that this time the emperor waited to marry until a child had actually been born, a child who represented the purpose of the union.
There was a not inconsiderable side effect to Caligula’s now having legitimate offspring, however. His sisters, Agrippina and Livilla, and their descendants were apparently to be permanently removed from possible succession to the throne. Yet Agrippina in particular had demonstrated her ambitions for the succession a year and a half earlier (and would do so again in later years). When her marriage to Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, a very aristocratic but ailing older man, had produced a son, the later emperor Nero, she had asked Caligula to name the child. Her hopes that the emperor would choose “Gaius” and thereby grant him a special place in the dynasty were in vain, however. Caligula instead suggested the name of their uncle, Claudius, a member of the imperial family whom no one took seriously at that time. Now, with the birth of Caligula’s daughter, Agrippina’s chance to be the mother of an emperor was tending toward zero. She now shared the situation of Aemilius Lepidus, who had lost a once promising position after the death of Drusilla.
The build-up for a military campaign against hostile tribes in Germania led to a further and lasting consequence. As later events would show, Caligula, given the state of his relations with the aristocracy, was preparing this expedition with great urgency in the months following the conspiracy. Since 29, the Roman commander on the upper Rhine had been the senator Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Gaetulicus. He had survived Sejanus’s fall despite their having had a close connection, though there were rumors that Tiberius had issued a barely veiled threat to him at that time. Gaetulicus had written to the emperor, according to Tacitus’s account, that he would remain loyal, but if the emperor named a successor the commander would regard it as a certain death sentence. Gaetulicus proposed a kind of bargain, whereby the emperor would remain in charge of the rest of the Empire, but he would keep his province. At the time he got away with it. He had achieved great popularity with his soldiers, though clearly at the expense of discipline. The attacks by tribes in the region, Caligula’s official reason for his campaign, were probably a consequence of Gaetulicus’s long command; at the very least he had to accept responsibility for them. The way Caligula had proceeded against corrupt magistrates in Rome and the prospect that the emperor would soon arrive in the Rhineland in person must have prompted in the senator well-founded fears about his future fate.
As a result, shortly before the emperor’s twenty-seventh birthday, a crisis began to brew that would eclipse everything that had gone before. Events in the following weeks show that around the middle of the year a new conspiracy formed, which would take on dramatic dimensions.
THE GREAT CONSPIRACY
AND THE EXPEDITION TO THE NORTH
At the core of the conspiracy were Lepidus, the emperor’s most important senatorial confidant, and Gaetulicus, the commander in upper Germania. Other participants included members of Caligula’s immediate family: his two sisters, Agrippina and Livilla, to whom in the previous two years the emperor had awarded the highest honors. Agrippina had entered into an affair with Lepidus “out of her lust after power,” as Tacitus puts it (Ann. 14.2.2). A large number of senators were also privy to the plot, among them both consuls—the highest magistrates of the Roman polity—who had taken office on 1 July. The conspirators could thus count on military backing in the Empire, on broad support among the aristocracy, on the most important officeholders in Rome, and on some of the emperor’s closest relatives—meaning that they also had a presumptive future emperor and empress handy. Caligula himself had confirmed the man’s suitability for rule by including him in his own plans for the succession, and the woman provided the prestige of the current emperor as a “dowry,” so to speak. Agrippina’s son Nero even offered a prospective successor in the next generation. These were probably the best conditions for a conspiracy in the whole history of the Roman Empire. All that remained to do was to assassinate Caligula.
But things did not go as planned. The sources do not reveal who betrayed the plot to the emperor, and its full scope does not appear to have been clear immediately. Evidently only Gaetulicus and senatorial circles in Rome fell under suspicion at first. Caligula’s response was swift and effective. In the early days of September he removed the two consuls from office and ordered his minions to break their fasces, the bundle of rods that symbolized their office and the power connected with it. One of the consuls committed suicide. Caligula replaced them with Domitius Afer, mentioned above, who was close to the emperor’s freedman Callistus, and Aulus Didius Gallus, a senator from an obscure family who was known to be ambitious. Presumably at the same time, the emperor withdrew from the Senate’s hold the last military unit that had remained formally under its control, the legion in the province of Africa, and replaced its commander. Next Caligula traveled to the town of Mevania in Umbria. He had given no sign that he planned a longer journey, but in a surprise move he pushed on from there as swiftly as possible toward Germania. The pace of the march is said to have been so fast that the Praetorian Guard had to use pack animals to carry its standards, and orders were given to cities and towns along their route to wet the roads, to keep the dust down. Traveling in Caligula’s retinue were Lepidus, Agrippina, and Livilla, who had not yet come under suspicion.
An attempt to reconstruct in detail what happened in the following weeks and months runs into a number of difficulties. For one thing, what is true of ancient reports about Caligula in general applies in even greater measure to the great conspiracy of mid-39 and his march north to Germania: The central facts of the case are reported explicitly and in a reliable way, since they appear in contexts only indirectly related to Caligula himself. Where Caligula’s own actions are concerned, however, ancient historians try to present them as incoherent and senseless, occasionally entangling themselves in blatant contradictions in the process. Cassius Dio, for example, reports that Caligula ordered the consuls’ fasces to be taken from them and broken because they had failed to celebrate his birthday properly—a remark that at least establishes the date securely. Suetonius claims that Caligula’s sudden expedition to Germania grew out of a plan to add to the Germanic bodyguard that served him as it had his predecessors on the throne. Yet in the same breath he writes that for this purpose legions and auxiliary troops had been gathered from all over the Empire, new recruits had been raised, and provisions collected “on an unheard-of scale.” Dio writes that the threat posed by Germanic peoples was merely a pretext; in reality the emperor was in financial difficulties and organized the military campaign in order to plunder wealthy Gaul. Yet he mentions only a few sentences later that the troops assembled for the purpose numbered between 200,000 and 250,000, and that the money raised in Gaul was used mainly to pay for this army. In addition both authors’ accounts of how the conspiracy was put down and how the campaign proceeded in Germania portray Caligula’s behavior as absurd and grotesque—thereby demonstrating above all, once again, that this was not what happened.
Modern scholars have debated the subject at length. While the state of the sources means that some questions cannot be answered with certainty, nevertheless it is possible to trace in outline a course of events that appears plausible. As in other distorted accounts of the emperor, we can deduce a basic framework from the overall pattern of events, the mention of details in parallel sources that have no reason to seem suspect, and, last but not least, information that Suetonius and Dio included even though it contradicted the impression they wished to create, probably because the facts were too well known to be suppressed.
To begin with, Caligula’s abrupt departure for the North clearly accomplished his primary purpose. Gaetulicus was taken by surprise and had no time to prepare his legions for an open uprising against the emperor. He was executed, presumably in Mainz, and replaced by Servius Sulpicius Galba, a capable general who was to become emperor himself briefly a few decades later. The full scope of the conspiracy apparently came to light only at this point, perhaps because Gaetulicus betrayed the others in an attempt to save his own skin. Lepidus, Agrippina, and Livilla were found guilty as accessories to the plot to assassinate the emperor; Lepidus was executed, and the two sisters were banished to the Pontine Islands. Caligula forced Agrippina to take an urn with the ashes of her lover Lepidus back to Rome, carrying it against her body for the whole journey. The emperor divulged documents in their own hands revealing their share in planning the conspiracy. He also distributed money to the soldiers as a reward for their continued loyalty to him, and sent the three swords with which the plotters meant to murder him to Rome, where they were placed in the Temple of Mars Ultor (“Mars the Avenger”) as dedicatory offerings. Last, he informed the Senate in a letter about the assassination he had narrowly escaped and forbade the senators to vote honors for any of his relatives in the future. The dating of these events can be reconstructed from a fragmentary inscription of the priestly college known as the Arval Brethren. On 27 October 39 they performed a sacrifice to offer thanks that “the nefarious plans of Gnaeus Lentulus Gaetulicus against Gaius Germanicus were detected.” It can thus be inferred that reports of the general’s disloyalty had reached Rome by then, but the guilt of Lepidus and the emperor’s sisters had not yet been made public.
What went on in the young emperor’s mind in these days is not reported, but it is not difficult to imagine. This time it was not high-ranking senators in Rome who had plotted to take his life, as at the beginning of the year—but members of his innermost circle. Even his own sisters, the people who were undoubtedly closest to him personally, had joined in a conspiracy to assassinate him. The comparatively mild treatment they received probably points to the close relationship that once existed among the siblings. In view of what had occurred, Romans would certainly not have considered it an overreaction if both of them had been put to death—a step, incidentally, that would have prevented Nero from ever becoming emperor. In whom could the emperor place any trust from then on? That was the overriding question of the moment. Relatives—his uncle Claudius, for example—were out of the question, as his prohibition of new forms of honor for any members of the imperial family made abundantly clear. Could he trust senators? That was unthinkable after what had taken place earlier in the year.
In Rome, too, at the center of the Empire, the dramatic events led to a general sense of uncertainty. Legal proceedings were taken against individuals who could be shown to have had conspiratorial contacts with Caligula’s sisters or the men who had been executed. In addition to the consuls, who had already been removed from office, several aediles and praetors had to resign from office and stand trial. Many who had not taken part in the plot must have felt uneasy as well. The disclosure of the conspiracy appears to have launched a wave of denunciations, not unlike what had occurred under Tiberius. Thus, for example, we know from the biography of the later emperor Vespasian, who was a praetor at the time, that ambitious men of modest origins took advantage of the situation to display their loyalty to the emperor. This group included Vespasian himself, who made a motion in the Senate to leave the corpses of the conspirators executed in Rome unburied—a proposal not in the best of taste, but indicative of the atmosphere in that period.
The Senate voted an ovation for the emperor, just as it had done after the first conspiracy at the start of the year, and sent a legation to inform him of their action and to demonstrate their support. To lead the group, they chose none other than Claudius, the man who possessed the greatest dynastic prestige after the emperor himself since the banishment of Agrippina and Livilla, and who would in fact later succeed Caligula on the throne. The emperor was outraged. The Senate had violated his express prohibition against honoring members of his family when they put Claudius in charge of the mission. Caligula also seems to have feared further plots. He sent most of the legation back to Rome before it even reached him, because he believed their real purpose was to spy on him and wished to prevent them from having any contact with members of his personal or military retinue. Only a few chosen delegates were permitted to continue on and meet with him, including Claudius, whom Caligula allegedly humiliated and threatened after the mission arrived.
Given this volatile situation of fear and mutual distrust, Caligula must have decided first and foremost to stabilize the military, since in the end his position of power rested on the army. His sudden departure for Germania had upset the original plans for war. It was now the beginning of November, and the season alone made a military campaign on the right bank of the Rhine unfeasible. In addition, the Rhine legions were in such a miserable state that they would not have been capable of carrying out a rapid strike.
Caligula’s first measures were thus aimed at reorganizing the troops there. A large number of centurions—key officers in the Roman military forces—were discharged on the grounds of age and poor physical condition, and the customary payments on retirement were reduced. Several commanders of forces redeployed to Germany from other provinces of the Empire received dishonorable discharges because they had arrived on the scene too late. Evidently they were suspected of having held back intentionally, waiting to see if Gaetulicus’s uprising would succeed. Galba, on the other hand, who had not stinted with his active support, received a special commendation. As the new supreme commander he was charged with making the army of the upper Rhine fit for action again. He refused soldiers’ requests for leave, and re-accustomed them to military discipline by constant maneuvers and forced marches in which he took part himself. Suetonius cites a saying that circulated among the troops and reflected the new conditions: “Soldier, learn to play the soldier; ’tis Galba, not Gaetulicus” (Galba 6.2). On the lower Rhine near Cologne and Xanten, where four further legions were stationed, another military reorganization appears to have taken place about the same time. There Lucius Apronius was relieved of his command and replaced with Publius Gabinius Secundus. The families of Apronius and Gaetulicus were connected, and Apronius had been responsible for several catastrophic defeats in battles against Frisian tribes.
In his Life of Galba, Suetonius reports that during that autumn the new governor repelled “barbarians” who had advanced even into Gaul, and in the Life of Vespasian he writes that the later emperor, then a praetor, proposed in the Senate among other things that special games be held to mark the emperor’s victory over the tribes in Germania. Dio’s account states that the emperor had himself acclaimed imperator a number of times. Thus it is apparent that several military engagements occurred in the fall of the year 39 and ended successfully for the Romans. In his Life of Gaius Caligula, however, the same Suetonius relates some bizarre stories depicting the military actions carried out under the emperor’s command as pure farce. He reports, for example, that Caligula gave orders to some men from his Germanic bodyguard to cross the Rhine and hide there. Then he arranged for a report to be brought to him after breakfast with a great to-do that the enemy had arrived, and he rushed off with some friends and cavalrymen from the Praetorian Guard to a nearby wood, where they chopped down trees and dressed them up to look like trophies. In the evening the emperor returned by torchlight and rebuked the men who had stayed behind, calling them cowards; to the participants in his “victory,” however, he awarded a new kind of military decoration. Since Suetonius himself included passages in his biographies of other emperors about very serious military engagements on the upper Rhine, which were at least partly successful despite the condition of the troops, the story about the game of hide-and-seek can easily be recognized as a military exercise in which the emperor personally took part. Suetonius has taken the event out of context and distorted it.
Tacitus elsewhere briefly reports the vast scale of the preparations, but no extensive military action could be carried out before winter began. Caligula therefore left the front along the Rhine and spent the winter in Lyon, capital of the province of Gallia Lugdunensis, which at that time was also the site of the sole imperial mint for coining precious metals. Clearly tax assessments were calculated here in order to finance the huge war effort, as is reflected in Dio’s claim that the emperor had the tax rolls of Gaul brought to him and gave instructions for the richest inhabitants to be executed. It is doubtful, however, that he actually selected this particular way to raise revenue, for at the same time the emperor put his sisters’ entire sumptuous household effects up for auction, including their slaves and even freedmen. Since the auction was a great success, Caligula afterwards ordered much of the valuable inventory accumulated in other households of the imperial family during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius to be sent from Rome and auctioned off as well. The shipments were reportedly so large that the government had to seize private vehicles; the transportation of grain to Rome was affected and there was a shortage of bread. Dio states that Caligula conducted the auctions personally, and that “the finest and most precious heirlooms of the monarchy” came under the hammer (Dio 59.21.5).
Dio writes that people attending the auction were forced to buy, but this, again, seems quite unlikely. The wealthy residents of the cities in Gaul probably sought to furnish their houses with luxurious objects like the aristocracy in Rome, and “the objects of the old court” (Suet. Cal. 39.1) would no doubt have seemed extremely attractive to them. Dio says that in auctioning off the objects the emperor was simultaneously selling “the reputation” attached to them (Dio 59.21.6). Both the interest of the Gallic nobility in acquiring prestige through some connection with the emperor and the group’s economic power are documented in an anecdote from Suetonius: A rich man in the province wanted to attend one of Caligula’s banquets and had paid the servants a bribe of 200,000 sesterces to smuggle him in—a sum, it should be recalled, equal to half the minimum amount required for a Roman to qualify for membership in the equestrian order. When the emperor heard of it, he arranged for the man to purchase some small object for the price of 200,000 sesterces at auction the next day and sent a message that he might now attend the emperor’s banquet at his personal invitation. Yet Caligula did not just take in money at Lyon; he also spent it on a grand scale. He sponsored splendid festivities befitting an emperor visiting a provincial city, including theatrical performances, games, and a contest for orators in both Greek and Latin. In addition he granted Roman citizenship to the inhabitants of the town of Vienna (modern Vienne).
Meanwhile the atmosphere in Rome was less festive. The aristocracy feared that the emperor would take further measures, as became evident on 1 January 40, when the absent Caligula began his third consulate. His co-consul had died shortly before. The praetors and tribunes of the people, whose task it would have been to call the Senate into session in the consuls’ absence, did not dare to proceed, fearing to give the impression that they were acting in the place of the emperor, without instructions from him. All political business of the Senate thus halted until 12 January, when a message arrived from Caligula that he was resigning from the consulate. Thereupon the senators in a body climbed the steps to the Capitol, offered sacrifices in the temple there, and performed the act ofproskynēsis, prostrating themselves before an empty throne. Following that, they assembled in the Curia without any official summons and spent the day giving speeches praising Caligula and offering prayers on his behalf, “for since they had no love for him nor any wish that he should survive, they went to greater lengths in simulating both these feelings, as if hoping in this way to disguise their real sentiments” (Dio 59.24.6). When the two new consuls had assumed office, it was decided inter aliahenceforth to celebrate the birthdays of Tiberius and of Drusilla with the same ceremonies as that of Augustus, and in consequence of a letter from Caligula statues of Drusilla and himself were erected and dedicated.
In Gaul an important military decision was made at about this time, to abandon the campaign in Germania in favor of an attempt to conquer Britain. Given the state of the sources we can only speculate about what was behind this move, as about other military events of that time. In all likelihood there were protracted discussions; considering the more or less complete failure of Roman policy in Germania since Varus’s catastrophic defeat in the Teutoburg Forest in A.D. 9, disagreement would hardly have been surprising. The emperor was probably looking for a quick military victory as well, since the situation in Rome was extremely tense after exposure of the conspiracy. The spur for the change of plans seems to have been a dispute over the succession to the throne of Cynobellinus (Cymbeline), king of the Britons. Furthermore, the Romans would have regarded a successful conquest of the distant island as a highly prestigious achievement. Since Julius Caesar’s expeditions in 55 and 54 B.C., no other Roman general had set foot in the country; and two years after the death of Caligula, Claudius would demonstrate that a conquest of Britain was entirely possible and a suitable enterprise for stabilizing the emperor’s position.
Once again the sources are scarce and unclear. On the one hand, the British king’s son Adminius is said to have left the island with a small force and surrendered to Caligula, whereupon the emperor wrote a boastful letter to the Senate implying that the prince had handed over the whole island to him. On the other hand, it is also reported that when Caligula reached the ocean, presumably the English Channel, he drew up his soldiers in battle formation and set to sea himself in a warship, but only briefly. Then he returned and gave the legions an order to collect shells on the beach. As a symbol of victory they constructed a tall light; the soldiers received the amount of 400 sesterces each, and Caligula concluded the maneuver by announcing, “Go your way happy; go your way rich” (Suet.Cal. 46).
Perhaps the most plausible explanation of the events was suggested by the English scholar Dacre Balsdon. He bases it on the reports about Claudius’s expedition to Britain in 43. At that time the Roman legions mutinied, declaring that the island lay outside the bounds of the oikoumenē, the civilized world, and refusing to cross the Channel to Britain. Only after several weeks could they be persuaded to embark for a campaign. Something similar could have happened at the start of 40. In that case the order to collect seashells and the bonus payment should be interpreted as the emperor ridiculing the cowardice of mutinous troops, who had assembled at the edge of the sea but refused to fight.
There is no knowing what actually happened in any detail, but Suetonius, after describing the scene at the water’s edge, adds an odd incident further suggestive of a mutiny: Before leaving the province Caligula was said to have intended to order a massacre of two legions. After he had been dissuaded from this extremely dangerous plan, he wanted at least to decimate them, that is, to use the traditional method to punish cowardice in the Roman army, in which every tenth man in a legion that had been cowardly in the face of the enemy was killed, regardless of how he had behaved himself. The plan failed, Suetonius says, because the legionaries realized what was afoot and rushed to get their weapons. Thereupon the emperor hastily fled from the assembly.
Suetonius accounts for Caligula’s inclination to punish the men by mentioning that the legions involved were the same ones that had mutinied after the death of Augustus in A.D. 14. At that time his father, Germanicus, had been their commander and Caligula, then a small child, had been present in the camp himself. It is obvious how little credence should be given to this account: The usual period of military service for an ordinary legionary was twenty years; centurions could serve longer. After twenty-six years, in other words, hardly any of the participants in the original mutiny would have been left in the legions. In any case, carrying out a punishment at that critical juncture would have been a completely senseless act on the emperor’s part. It corresponds precisely, however, to the portrait of Caligula that Suetonius consistently seeks to draw.
It seems, then, that the campaign against the Britons may have failed because of a mutiny in which legions I and XX took part; both had refused to fight in A.D. 14 and had now joined Caligula’s forces from their original station on the Rhine. This conclusion is supported by Anthony Barrett’s analysis of circumstances within Britain. In his view, the general conditions would definitely have favored an aspiring conqueror at that time, if Caligula and his troops had only mounted an attack.
Looking at the enormous expense and effort Caligula’s military campaigns required, Tacitus characterizes them as ludicrous and attributes their failure to the emperor’s capricious nature. In fact Caligula achieved no conquests worth mentioning. An impartial assessment must record, however, that he quelled a revolt by the governor of one of the militarily most important provinces in the Empire and corrected deficiencies in the troops along the Rhine that had gone unaddressed for years. Much evidence suggests that Caligula created the conditions in which Claudius was able to conquer Britain three years later. It should also be kept in mind that all long-term planning for military campaigns had to be tossed overboard once the great conspiracy was uncovered, and that the expeditions all were attempted while the situation in Rome was highly uncertain.
Last, there are various indications that the abrupt end of the mission and Caligula’s swift return were prompted by new threats against him from aristocratic circles. In connection with events at the English Channel, Dio mentions that Caligula showed “no little vexation at his commanders who won some slight success” (Dio 59.21.3). This remark points to conflicts between the emperor and the commanding officers of the military, who all came from the senatorial order. Such tensions can hardly have arisen if the officers’ successes were in carrying out the emperor’s orders. Furthermore, the close of military actions coincided with a great intensification of the emperor’s hostility toward the aristocracy as a whole, for which the sources provide no other convincing explanation. On his way back to Rome Caligula encountered another delegation from the Senate asking him to hurry, which suggests there was an urgent need for him to take action in the capital. Thereupon, the account runs, Caligula shouted at the top of his voice, “I will come; I will come, and this will be with me,” tapping the hilt of the sword at his side. At the same time he proclaimed in an edict that “he was returning, but only to those who desired his presence, the equestrian order and the people, for to the Senate he would never more be fellow citizen nor princeps” (Suet. Cal. 49.1). He also gave up plans to celebrate a triumph, and forbade any senators to come out to meet him en route; in other words, he announced that he would have no further social contact with his fellow aristocrats.
RESHAPING THE EMPEROR’S ROLE
The conspiracy of Agrippina, Livilla, and Lepidus had presented Caligula with the same threat in extreme form that had always been present under the rule of his imperial predecessors and that his successors on the throne would face a number of times: The very people who made up the emperor’s closest circle could endanger his safety. Precisely because they were close to the ruler, because they could influence his decisions and allow or deny others access to him, they had power that could also be turned against the emperor himself. This gave rise to a paradoxical situation in which the emperor had to be most mistrustful of the people he trusted most. The problem was exacerbated in the case of a close family relationship or high social standing. Already under the first two emperors this danger had had consequences for the selection of their staff, which had been called into service for precarious power-political tasks. This is seen not only in the equestrian rank of the Praetorian prefects and the governor of Egypt but also on occasion by the employing of freedmen (former slaves) of the emperor’s household in highly confidential posts. These last were particularly well suited for their positions, since in contrast to individuals of high rank or members of the imperial family, freedmen owed everything to the emperor. Without him they were nothing. While they might become a threat to him in court intrigues, they could never aspire to replace him. Caligula was the first Roman emperor systematically to exploit the advantage this group offered.
After Lepidus was executed and the emperor’s sisters banished, we hear nothing more of Roman aristocrats who acquired influence and wealth as members of Caligula’s inner circle or through close personal ties to him. When he appeared in public in the city he was of course still accompanied by a retinue of high-ranking “friends” from the aristocracy, including Claudius, but after the expedition to Gaul the circle of Caligula’s closest confidants and aides consisted of quite different people.
One of the central figures in this group was the freedman Gaius Julius Callistus. Nothing is known about his background. His daughter Nymphidia, mother of the later Praetorian prefect Nymphidius Sabinus under Nero, is said to have been Caligula’s mistress as a young woman; that may be how the two men encountered one another. Callistus appears to have played a role in the detection of the great conspiracy. In this extremely perilous situation it was he who persuaded the emperor to give the consulate to Domitius Afer. In the aftermath, according to Josephus, the fear he inspired in people and his great wealth enabled him to achieve enormous influence and power “no less than a tyrant’s” (Jos. Ant. 19.64). Another close confidant, probably also descended from slaves, was Protogenes. He “assisted the emperor in all his harshest measures” (Dio 59.26.1) and is supposed to have carried around two catalogues labeled “Sword” and “Dagger.” They apparently recorded the behavior of the six hundred members of the Senate (too large a number to keep track of in one’s head) and the intended punishment for each, should the necessity arise—something that caused the secretary to become a terrifying figure for the aristocracy. Another important role was played by the Egyptian slave Helicon, originally a gift for Tiberius, who worked his way up to become Caligula’s valet. Philo reports that Helicon was always at Caligula’s side, doing gymnastic exercises with him, and accompanying him to the baths. Since he remained near the emperor when he ate or slept, Helicon seems to have served some of the functions of a bodyguard as well. He advised Caligula on decisions, controlled access to him, and used his position to his own advantage by taking bribes—or at least that is what Philo claims, who had bad experiences with him.
Another member of the new inner circle around Caligula was the empress Caesonia, who had borne him a daughter and with whom he was passionately in love, according to the sources. She, too, was considered to be an influential adviser and apparently remained in Rome during Caligula’s expedition to the North, acting as his stand-in. Finally, by virtue of their positions a significant role fell to the two Praetorian prefects. Cassius Dio names both, in addition to Callistus and Caesonia, as the emperor’s most important confidants.
All the above-named people acquired political prominence only after the great conspiracy and Caligula’s sojourn in Gaul. After his experiences in 39 the emperor consciously embarked on a new path in exercising rule. He removed all the aristocrats from his inner circle and thereby also from the political nerve center of the Roman Empire. The background for this measure was the emperor’s need for personal security, and it was directed against Rome’s traditional political institutions, the Senate and magistrates. At the same time, some people outside the center gained importance in political operations although they had no connection at all with the old institutions. Thus, for example, after the events on the shore of the English Channel Caligula authorized his procurators—financial agents—to confiscate funds as they saw fit to pay for his triumph in Rome (the one that was later called off). Officers of the Praetorian Guard were authorized to collect taxes and unpaid tribute as well. In other words, the emperor used the structures available in his household and in the military to administer political tasks for which they had previously had no responsibility.
The fundamental changes were not limited to the ways in which central rule was organized, for Caligula also dealt with a problem no emperor before him had addressed: the social rank of the emperor himself. Up to that point he had followed his predecessors’ example in allowing the Senate to confer extraordinary honors on him that, although they had raised the emperors far above the other members of the aristocracy, had at the same time remained permanently linked to the traditional aristocratic ranking. In its turn this system of rank was based on the various classes of senatorial office (consular, Praetorian, etc.) and thus ultimately on the structures of the old Republican magistracy, that is, on a political order that had not merely not foreseen the possibility of a monarchy, but had excluded it on principle. Thus at the heart of the matter was a paradoxical process: Precisely by undermining the traditional ranking system in order to place himself at the top of it, the emperor provided proof both of its continuing validity and of his having no independent claim to monarchical rank. When he allowed the Senate to award him distinctions, he confirmed that he needed the old Republican institution in order to manifest his social standing. By accepting honors he emphasized that he lacked them on his own.
Caligula is the only Roman emperor of whom it is reported that he grasped this very paradox and made an issue of it himself. Cassius Dio, writing about the first delegation from the Senate after the great conspiracy had been uncovered, reports that Caligula’s response was to prohibit the Senate from passing any furthers honors to him: “For he did not for a moment wish it to appear that anything that brought him honor was in the power of the senators, since that would imply that they were his superiors and could grant him favors as if he were their inferior. For this reason he frequently found fault with various honors conferred upon him, on the ground that they did not increase his splendor but rather destroyed his power” (Dio 59.23.3–4).
But what would a monarchical position of honor look like once it surpassed the limits of the old Republican order of ranking, which was the only such order existing in Rome, and had been in place for centuries? The coming weeks and months would reveal Caligula’s plans on the subject. His first priority was display of material splendor, since after the old political ranking this was the second way Romans showed off their social status. Caligula had begun to exceed conventional limits of luxury some time before, but in this respect, too, he altered his behavior after the sojourn in Gaul. The auction of the household goods of his predecessors can be interpreted not only as a source of income but also as a conscious break with elements that had previously served to represent the emperor’s social position. Thus fundamental changes in the way the emperor’s role was shaped were taking place here as well. Yet the decisive question remained: What, for the emperor, would replace traditional manifestations of rank? It was true not just of ancient Rome but of all pre-modern aristocratic societies that each individual’s social status became a reality only when it achieved visibility in public.
The circle of people closest to Caligula during his stay in Gaul was not entirely free of aristocrats; it was free only of Roman aristocrats. According to Cassius Dio, among the emperor’s entourage were the rulers of two client kingdoms in the Hellenic East whom he had placed on their thrones in 37, Julius Agrippa of Judaea and Antiochus IV of Commagene. Another such ruler, Ptolemy of Mauretania, seems to have gone to Lyon as well, but was then condemned to death by Caligula under circumstances that are unclear but may have had something to do with political changes in the province of Africa. These kings embodied another tradition, of sole rule established over the course of centuries in the Hellenic empires of the East. Such kings were independent of urban political structures and urban aristocrats; they headed political administrations that had grown out of their own household staffs and answered to the monarch alone. The rank of the aristocrats and nobles around such kings was linked to a court hierarchy at whose apex the king stood unchallenged. And, last but not least: Since the third century B.C. it had become customary in the East for the kings, who occupied a position so far above everyone else, to be worshiped as godlike beings, with cultic rites. In describing the turn of the year 39/40 during Caligula’s reign, Cassius Dio mentions particular concern in Rome when the news arrived “that King Agrippa and King Antiochus were with him, like two tyrant-trainers” (Dio 59.24.1). What looked liked tyranny from the perspective of Roman senators can be described in other words: Caligula was starting to alter the paradoxical and dangerous role he had played up to that point as an emperor in a republic, and to create an openly monarchical system.
TRIUMPHANTLY CROSSING THE SEA
Caligula’s swift return journey to Italy ended before the gates of Rome. He was at the shrine of the Arval Brethren outside the city walls near the end of May in 40, and possibly about the same time he received on the first occasion the embassy of Alexandrian Jews, led by Philo, in the gardens of his mother, Agrippina, which likewise lay outside Rome. Two circumstances above all probably kept Caligula from entering the capital immediately. Events over the previous few months must have made the situation in Rome extremely volatile; for that reason alone, concern for the emperor’s safety would have ruled out an official entry amid large crowds of people. Then again, a return from Germania without any ceremony at all would have looked like an admission of defeat. On the other hand, the emperor had expressly forbidden the Senate to provide any formal welcome and other honors, so that a triumphal procession of the usual kind was out of the question. In its place Caligula chose a new way to stage his return, one without precedent in Rome. It alluded to the events of the northern campaigns, surpassed all previous triumphs, and was so imposing that even Suetonius includes it among the few deeds of the “good” ruler Caligula. To achieve this, the emperor proceeded to his luxurious villas near Puteoli in Campania and prepared to demonstrate his power as he had been prevented from doing at the English Channel: by triumphantly crossing the sea.
A bridge of ships a little more than three miles long was constructed in the Gulf of Baiae between Puteoli and Bauli (near Misenum). It consisted of a double row of cargo ships assembled from many places, with earth piled on top of them to make a road as solid as the Via Appia. At various intervals the road was widened to make space for resting places and shelters with running fresh water. When the entire structure was finished, Caligula put on the breastplate of the most famous ruler of the Greek world, Alexander the Great, which had been taken from his grave; over it he wore a purple cloak of the kind used by Greek military commanders, with gold decorations and jewels from India. Wearing a sword at his side, carrying a shield, and with a crown of oak leaves on his head, he sacrificed to the gods, first of all to Poseidon, the god of the sea, and Invidia, the goddess of envy, so that he himself would not be a target for envy. Then he rode onto the bridge from Bauli, accompanied by troops of cavalry and infantry. On reaching the other side he stormed into the town of Puteoli like a general bent on conquering it.
The following day the troops rested, as if after a victory, and then the return march began. This time Caligula wore a tunic embroidered with gold and drove a chariot pulled by the most famous race horses of the day. Behind him followed a long column with articles of plunder that had obviously been brought back from the North, as well as a Parthian prince who was being kept in Rome at that time as a hostage. Next came a procession of chariots carrying his cohors amicorum, the “friends” who made up the aristocratic retinue of a Roman general, wearing cloaks of blossoms, followed by the Praetorian Guard, the army, and further supporters who had decorated their clothing however they saw fit. The entire train proceeded to the center of the bridge, where a stage had been erected on top of the ships. There the emperor gave a speech: “First he extolled himself as an undertaker of great enterprises, and then he praised the soldiers as men who had undergone great hardships and perils, mentioning in particular this achievement of theirs in crossing the sea on foot. For this he gave them money” (Dio 59.17.7). After this speech a festive banquet was held on the bridge and on ships anchored nearby for the rest of the day and the following night, during which bonfires illuminated the bridge, the bay, and the surrounding mountains like a stage set.
At the end of the celebration “he hurled many of his companions off the bridge into the sea and sank many of the others by sailing about and attacking them in boats equipped with beaks. Some perished, but the majority, though drunk, managed to save themselves” (Dio 59.17.9–10). The emperor boasted that he had turned the sea into dry land and the night into day, mocking the Persian rulers Darius and Xerxes (who had crossed the Bosporus and the Hellespont on bridges of ships in the years 513 and 480B.C.) because he himself had crossed a much wider expanse of water.
Caligula’s horseback ride over the sea made a deep impression, as the ancient sources attest. According to Seneca, while the emperor was amusing himself with the resources of the Empire, the dearth of available ships was endangering grain supplies to Rome. Both Seneca and Josephus use the event to illustrate the emperor’s insanity. Suetonius mentions contemporary interpretations that come closer to the heart of the matter. These averred that Caligula wanted to outdo Xerxes (as Dio also reports) and at the same time to inspire fear in the Germanic tribes and Britons, whose borders he was threatening. The reason given by Suetonius himself reflects the web of anecdotes that was spun around the event in the next hundred years. When Suetonius was a child he had heard court gossip from his own grandfather that Tiberius, concerned about his grandson Gemellus’s prospects for rule, had consulted the astrologer Thrasyllus. Thrasyllus told him that Caligula had about as much chance of becoming emperor as of crossing the Gulf of Baiae on horseback. The story does not quite add up, since Caligula was already emperor by then and had been for some time, but it does exemplify how incredible the deed was. According to Dio, the crossing should be seen as Caligula’s disdain for a triumph: The emperor would have regarded being pulled by horses across dry land as too ordinary, and hence had wanted to cross the sea.
In fact, in addition to its demonstration of unlimited power, the staging of the crossing contains several symbolic references. The connection with events on the coast of the Channel is obvious: The emperor showed that in Italy, unlike the distant North, he was not dependent on the goodwill of his troops and the cooperation of his senatorial generals; at home he had the power to lead his soldiers on foot even across the sea. The ride from Bauli to Puteoli was thus a symbolic demonstration of the emperor’s potential power to conquer Britain. The return journey, with the emperor driving a chariot followed by trophies and spoils, was modeled on a triumphal procession, and the ensuing feast on the bridge was in a sense designed to outshine the triumph he did not have in Rome (which he himself had rejected). The ironic praise for the bravery of his “friends” and soldiers and the dunking that followed also point clearly to the events of the spring. They designated who was really responsible for the fiasco at the Channel and simultaneously expressed Caligula’s bent for mocking and humiliating those who resisted his assertions of power.
The events at the Gulf of Baiae are revealing in yet another respect, however. They manifested imperial grandeur by means of ceremonies that broke through the conventional Roman semiotic system for assigning social rank. Traditionally the achievement and display of social honor was connected to holding political offices in the Roman polity and functioning as a magistrate of the city: It was office that conferred honor on the man who held it. Accordingly a Roman aristocrat achieved the highest possible distinction if the political institution of the Senate voted him a triumphal procession, which wended its way through the city with great splendor before the assembled citizenry of Rome and reached its ceremonial culmination on the Capitoline Hill. Hence when Caligula demonstrated his imperial superiority to all others in a new manner and with great publicity, it is noteworthy that he did so for the first time outside the city of Rome and independently of the Senate and the Roman polity. This corresponded precisely to his announcement that he would not permit the Senate to vote him any more honors, and to his perceiving the paradoxical situation that arose if honors for an emperor were granted by the Senate and aristocracy. The triumphal ride across the sea thus represented Caligula’s first attempt, through new ceremonial practices, to make real his position as a monarch who stood above the aristocracy. But were these practices in fact new?
Caligula deployed a semiotic system that comprised Roman elements, first and foremost the triumphal procession, along with elements borrowed from ancient non-Roman monarchies. The Persian kings Xerxes and Darius served as points of reference in that their achievements were being outdone, along with Alexander the Great, with whom Caligula symbolically identified by wearing his breastplate. Thus the ceremonial actions on the bridge at Puteoli drew on the ways in which Persian and Hellenistic rulers displayed their royal status, and, despite the inclusion of some Roman elements, represented an extreme break from Roman traditions. Since the earliest days, since the legendary times when kings had been driven out of Rome, monarchy had been despised there as a degenerate form of government, as tyranny. It is safe to assume that the new inner circle Caligula formed after the great conspiracy, the “tyrant-trainers” as people in Rome were calling them, played a part in designing the new arrangements for presenting the emperor’s status. Those at whose expense this innovation had to be effected will hardly have admitted to themselves that thereby he was seeking a way out of the paradoxical combination of autarchy and republic that had already been bought with a great deal of blood. They will have suspected, though, that Puteoli was only the beginning.