The populace celebrated the old Emperor’s passing with cries of “Tiberius to the Tiber!” and hailed the Senate’s ratification of Gaius Caesar Germanicus as his successor. Born to Agrippina as she was accompanying Germanicus on his northern campaigns, Gaius had been brought up among soldiers, had imitated their dress, and had been affectionately named Caligula, or Little Boot, from the half boot (caliga) worn in the army. He now announced that he would follow the principles of Augustus in his policy and would co-operate respectfully with the Senate in everything. He distributed among the citizens the 90,000,000 sesterces that Livia and Tiberius had bequeathed them, and added a gift of 300 sesterces to each of the 200,000 recipients of state corn. He restored to the comitia the power to choose the magistrates, promised low taxes and rich games, recalled the banished victims of Tiberius, and brought his mother’s ashes piously to Rome. He seemed to be in all ways the opposite of his predecessor—prodigal, cheerful, humane. Within three months of his accession the people had sacrificed 160,000 victims to the gods in gratitude for so charming and beneficent a prince.23
They had forgotten his lineage. His father’s mother was the daughter of Antony, his mother’s mother was the daughter of Augustus; in his blood the war between Antony and Octavian was renewed, and Antony won. Caligula was proud of his skill as a dueler, a gladiator, and a charioteer; but he was “troubled with the falling sickness,” and at times was “hardly able to walk or collect his thoughts.”24 He hid under the bed when it thundered, and fled in terror from the sight of Aetna’s flames. He found it hard to sleep and would wander through his enormous palace at night crying for the dawn. He was tall, huge, hairy, except for a bald crown; his hollow eyes and temples made him look forbidding, to his delight; he “practiced all kinds of fearsome expressions before a mirror.”25 He had received a good schooling, was an eloquent orator, had a keen wit, and a sense of humor that knew no scruple and no law. Infatuated with the theater, he subsidized many performers and himself privately acted and danced; desiring an audience, he summoned the leaders of the Senate as if to some vital conference, and then displayed his steps before them.26 A quiet life of responsible labor might have steadied him, but the poison of power made him mad. Sanity, like government, needs checks and balances; no mortal can be omnipotent and sane. When Caligula’s grandmother Antonia gave him some advice he rebuked her with the remark, “Remember that I have the right to do anything to anybody.” In the midst of a banquet he reminded his guests that he could have them all killed where they reclined; and while embracing his wife or mistress he would say pleasantly, “Off comes this beautiful head whenever I give the word.”27
Soon therefore the young Prince who had been so respectful of the Senate began to give it orders and exact an Oriental subservience. He let senators kiss his feet in homage, and senators thanked him for the honor.28 He admired Egypt and its ways, introduced many of these to Rome, and longed to be worshiped, Pharaoh-like, as a god. He made the religion of Isis one of the official cults of the Roman state. He did not forget that his great-grandfather had planned to unite the Mediterranean region under an Oriental monarchy; he too thought of making his capital at Alexandria, but distrusted the wit of its people. Suetonius describes him as living in “habitual incest with all his sisters”;29 it seemed to him an excellent Egyptian custom. Ill, he made his sister Drusilla heir to his throne; when she married he made her divorce her husband, and “treated her as his lawful wife.”30 To other desired women he sent letters of divorce in their husbands’ names, and invited them to his embraces; there was scarcely one woman of rank whom he did not approach. Amid these and some homosexual amours he found time for four marriages. Attending the wedding of Livia Orestilla and Gaius Piso, he took the bride to his own house, married her, and in a few days divorced her. Hearing that Lollia Paulina was very beautiful, he sent for her, divorced her from her husband, married her, divorced her, and forbade her to have relations with any man thereafter. His fourth wife, Caesonia, was pregnant by her husband when he married her. She was neither young nor fair, but he loved her faithfully.
In this imperial frolic government was an aside, and could usually be left to inferior minds. Caligula ably revised the roster of the business class and promoted its best members to the Senate. But his extravagance soon exhausted the full treasuries left him by Tiberius. He took his baths not in water but in perfumes; on one banquet he spent 10,000,000 sesterces.31 He built great pleasure barges with colonnades, banquet halls, baths, gardens, fruit trees, and gem-set sterns. He had his engineers span Baiae’s bay with a bridge resting on so many boats that Rome suffered famine for lack of ships to import corn. When the bridge was completed a great celebration took place, illuminated by flood lights in the modern manner; the people drank merrily, boats overturned, and many were drowned. From the roof of the Basilica Julia he would scatter gold and silver coins among the people below and watch with glee their fatal scrambling. He was so devoted to the green faction at the races that he gave a charioteer 2,000,000 sesterces. He built a marble stall and an ivory manger for the race horse Incitatus, invited it to dinner, and proposed to make it consul.
To raise funds for his lifelong Saturnalia, Caligula restored the custom of presenting gifts to the emperor; he accepted these in person, on his palace terrace, from all who came to give. He encouraged citizens to name him heir in their wills. He levied taxes upon everything: a sales tax on all food, a tax on all legal processes, a twelve and a half per cent tax on the wages of porters. “On the earnings of prostitutes,” Suetonius avers, he laid a tax of “as much as each received for one embrace; and the law provided that those who had ever been prostitutes should remain subject to this tax even after they married.”32 He had rich men accused of treason and condemned to death as an aid to the Treasury. He personally auctioned off gladiators and slaves, and forced aristocrats to attend and bid; when one of these slept, Caligula interpreted his nods as bids, so that the sleeper, waking, found himself richer by thirteen gladiators and poorer by 9,000,000 sesterces.33 He compelled senators and knights to fight as gladiators in the arena.
After three years a conspiracy was formed to end this humiliating buffoonery. Caligula detected it and revenged himself by a reign of terror enhanced by his maniac joy in inflicting pain. The executioners were instructed to kill his victims “by numerous slight wounds, so that they may feel that they are dying.”34 If we may believe Dio Cassius, he forced his saintly grandmother Antonia to kill herself.35 Suetonius recounts that when meat ran short for feeding the beasts kept for gladiatorial games, Caligula ordered “all bald-headed” prisoners to be fed to the animals for the public good; that he had men of high rank branded with irons, condemned to mines, thrown to beasts, or shut up in cages and then sawn in two.36 These are stories that we have no means of disproving and must record as the tradition; but Suetonius loved gossip, the senator Tacitus hated the emperors, and Dio Cassius wrote two centuries after the event.37 More credible is the report that Caligula began the war between the principate and philosophy by exiling Carrinas Secundus and sentencing two other teachers to death. The young Seneca was marked for execution, but was spared because he was sickly and might be relied upon to die without prodding. Claudius, uncle of Caligula, escaped because he was, or pretended to be, an insignificant book-ridden dolt.
Caligula’s final pleasantry was to announce himself as a god, equal to Jupiter himself. Famous statues of Jove and other deities were decapitated and crowned with heads of the Emperor. He enjoyed sitting on a throne in the Temple of Castor and Pollux and receiving divine worship. At times he would converse with an image of Jupiter, often in terms of reproof; and he had a contrivance made by which he could reply to Jove’s thunder and lightning peal for peal and stroke for stroke.39 He set up a temple to his godhead, with a corps of priests and a supply of select victims, and he appointed his favorite horse as one of the priests. He pretended that the moon-goddess had come down to embrace him, and asked Vitellius could he not see her. “No,” answered that wise courtier, “only you gods can see one another.”40 The people were not deceived. When a Gallic cobbler saw Caligula masquerading as Jupiter, and was asked what he thought of the Emperor, he said, simply, “A big humbug.” Caligula heard, but did not punish such refreshing courage.41
At twenty-nine this god was an old man, worn out by excesses, probably venereally diseased, with a small and half-bald head upon a fat body, with a livid complexion, hollow eyes, and a sinister glance. His fate came suddenly, and from that Praetorian Guard whose support he had long purchased with gifts. A tribune of the Guard, Cassius Chaerea, insulted by the obscenities that Caligula gave him as passwords day after day, killed him in a secret passage of the palace (41). When the news went out, the city hesitated to believe it; men feared that this was a trick of the imperial prankster to find out who would rejoice at his death. To clarify the issue the assassins killed Caligula’s final wife and dashed out his daughter’s brains against a wall. On that day, says Dio, Caligula learned that he was not a god.42