A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (19 page)

This ultimate in outrage has been held as a sign, nay proof, of Caligula’s insanity but we may consider, granted his previous performance in this area, that it was par for the course, for
Caligula had the devilish cunning to hit not just a nerve, but
the
nerve of his Jewish subjects. Petronius did as he was told up to a point, moving his legions south to the border of
Galilee, but wrote to his Emperor that the Jews were so upset that they were neglecting the harvest; i.e., a revolt was imminent with consequent loss of revenue. His only friend, Herod Agrippa, who
had returned to Rome, was appalled, hearbroken, and possibly had a stroke, when he heard the
news. He sent Caligula a long letter rehearsing imperial policy towards the Jews,
and out of friendship Caligula countermanded the instructions to Petronius, on the understanding that the Jews would not interfere with his new cult outside Jerusalem; but, according to Philo, he
had secretly decided to renege on the deal and planned to bring the statue with him on his forthcoming trip to the East. Fortunately, he died.

Caligula was a (conscious) artist in making enemies, especially out of friends. He lost Agrippa and now his freedman, Callistus, a responsible figure, turned against him, appalled at his
master’s political folly. But it was not this, or a high-minded conspiracy, of which there had been many, which caused his death. When a man possessed of absolute power insists publicly on
immediate sexual congress with the wife of another, he offends. When after the adultery he returns and comments to the husband that his wife’s performance was inadequate, he offends
absolutely.’
⁴¹

Cornelius Sabinus, a tribune in the Praetorian Guard, was one of the young husbands humiliated in this way by Caligula. Another conspirator was Cassius Chaerea, a soldier of a certain age,
distinguished in the Rhine mutiny of
AD
14, where Caligula had been present as a little boy. Like General Patton, the American tank general in the Second World War, he had a
high squeaky voice, which Caligula imitated remorselessly. He taunted him for effeminacy, and embarrassed him by inventing the daily passwords for the palace, which were in his charge, like
‘Venus’ and ‘Priapus’; not too much provocation for an assassination, one might think, but enough.

On the last day of the Palatine Games, 24 January
AD
41, the Emperor, while sacrificing a flamingo, spilled some blood on his toga. He had a
hangover that morning and perhaps his hand was unsteady. Persuaded to adjourn for lunch, around one o’clock, by the Senator Asprenas, he was being carried up to the palace via an underground
tunnel in his litter, when he stopped to talk to a group of young aristocrats from Asia who were practising a Trojan war dance they were to perform for him later that night. (They had been
‘planted’.) In the confines of the tunnel and unprotected by his German guards the Emperor was temporarily vulnerable . . .

Chaerea struck the first blow, Sabinus the second, in the chest, then again and again – thirty times – he was stabbed by the patrician assassins, finally in the genitals, surely by
Sabinus? His litter-bearers tried to defend him with their poles – he was not the only bad man to be loved by his servants – but they were no match for his determined killers. The
Germans arrived too late to save him but killed a few of his assassins, Asprenas and another senator among the bystanders for good measure. They also killed one conspirator who could not resist
looking at his dead body, ‘for the sheer pleasure of it’. A praetorian tribune killed his wife Caesonia
⁴²
and then their little daughter, Julia
Drusilla, was
picked up by her feet and had her brains dashed out against a wall.

‘On this day,’ wrote the historian Dio Cassius, ‘Caligula learned by experience that he was not a god.’

Caesonia had been found weeping over the dead body of her husband. She was the only person in Rome who wept. Caligula was the first Roman Emperor not to receive a state funeral. His legacy was
nil, though dramatists and film-makers have been attracted to his extravagant life. A movie has been made about Caligula, so salacious that the egregious Gore Vidal, not known for his sensitivity
in this regard, had his name removed from the credits. Malcolm McDowell, the actor, is better-looking than Caligula, but the manic laugh, the exaggerated grief for his sister, the violent changes
of mood and costume are authentic and likely. The erotic scenes are juicy. The sets glitter with convincing replicas of marble, gilt and porphyry, the floors are spattered with stage blood and the
entrails of the tortured. In the palaces of Caligula the blood and the spunk and the shrieks of pain were real.

CLAUDIUS

Claudius had more than one reason for keeping out of the way when he heard that his nephew, the Emperor Caligula, had been assassinated, just after one o’clock on 24
January
AD
41.

He had left the Games to go to lunch, before Caligula, with two senators who may or may not have been in the plot, and would have heard the rumpus below. If he had been complicit – and
historians still disagree – Claudius might have been in danger from the Emperor’s enraged German bodyguard, if not, from the assassins, young nobs with no clear plan, save that the
death of an Emperor was always, in the patrician mind, an opportunity to restore the Republic. So Claudius, who never pretended to be a hero, hid himself, but not very successfully. Maybe the
Praetorian who spotted an expensive pair of sandals peeping from behind a curtain and discovered him – crying, ‘I have found a Germanicus!’ – did not have to search too
hard. This officer, one Gratus, was a member of an élite, whose high pay and perquisites would be at risk were there not an Emperor in Rome, so he held on to this gibbering middle-aged man,
comforted him, saluted him
imperator
and ordered a litter to convey him to the safety of the Praetorian barracks about three kilometres away.

There Claudius stayed, a ‘captive’ he said, but willing to be drafted, using a technique described by his most recent
biographer as ‘disreputable,
essentially infantile, but useful and adopted by others – by Henry II [of England for the murder of Beckett] and Elizabeth I [for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots] against internal
threats (1170 and 1587) and by Reagan in the USA against Iran and Nicaragua – which consisted of allowing others to act or engineering them into it, while the principle remains
“ignorant” of what is going on. Thus servants or subordinates have to take responsibility, eschewing the defence of superior orders.’ This process, which sounds so complicated,
was invoked by Claudius, considered so simple-minded, in a matter of hours to make himself Emperor. However it happened, and the main authorities have different versions – to Suetonius he
remains an idiot, to Josephus, inept and manipulated by that great family friend, Herod Agrippa (who had buried Caligula in a shallow grave) – it
did
happen, and forty-eight hours
after he had been taken off to the barracks, the same Praetorians escorted him to the Palatine Hill, where he was invested with all the powers accorded to his predecessors.

The night of the assassination, chatting in the mess over a jar or two – if Claudius remained sober, it was the only night of his life, including his last, that he had – Claudius had
promised a donative of 15,000 to 20,000
sesterces
per guardsman and pro-rata for the officers. This enormous and unpredecented sum riveted the Praetorian Guard to his side. Each needed the
other, the Praetorians had to have an Emperor and though Claudius was not the natural heir of Caligula, if anyone cared, he was the nephew of Germanicus and so linked to the founder, Augustus, for
which connection many Romans did care. This gave him a lineal edge on his rivals: M. Vinicius, Caligula’s brother-in-law; V. Asiaticus, a rich man from Vienne near Lyons, of whom more will be
heard; and Galba, in command of the legions in the Upper Rhine,
who heard too late about the death of Caligula to make a move. From the barracks, therefore, Claudius had been
able to send a message to the Senate, ‘that he had not sought power but he would not renege on an offer he had accepted, that he of all people understood the dangers of tyranny, that his rule
would be just and allow room for all in his administration if he were accepted, vengeful if he were not’. The Senate had collapsed. Claudius knew his history – had he not written forty
books about Rome? – he knew that force, sharply applied, was the best weapon in politics.

So, in his fifties, Claudius entered on what few could have thought ever would be his inheritance. He had always been the runt of the family; historians used to attribute his feebleness to polio
but now cerebral palsy, coupled with slight spasticity, is thought to be the cause of his symptoms, which were a dragging right leg, a cracked raucous voice and, when excited, a running nose and an
uncontrollable laugh. His hands shook slightly and he occasionally stuttered, the result perhaps, as with the late George VI, of a stupid nurse having bound his left hand, the one he preferred to
use, behind his back. He performed better when seated, and since he stopped suffering from stomach cramps after his accession, part of his trouble must have been psychosomatic.

Awareness of his condition came to Rome with his coming of age, the assumption of the
toga virilis
at fourteen, before which a young Roman did not really count. In the case of a prince of
the imperial house this ceremony was an occasion for a public party, as if, as it were, a prince of the House of Windsor were to be
bar-mitzvahed
in Trafalgar Square.
⁴³
(The
wretched young Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus was given his
toga virilis
in the dead of night, muffled in a blanket, so apprehensive
were the family of his public appearance.)

Concern or compassion for the disabled is a modern phenomenon. The Romans, sensitive to physical beauty and outward perfection, showed only distaste for the ‘ill-met knight’, which
was all at first Claudius ever became. His mother referred to him as a ‘monstrosity of a human being, one that Nature began and never finished’. Seneca, particularly, sneered. His
grandmother Livia could not bear to look him in the face. His great-uncle Augustus was more circumspect and Suetonius quotes three letters between them about how to deal with Claudius and his
problem. In the first, Augustus worries whether he is in full possession of his faculties and if he might make a fool of himself (and the family) if allowed into the imperial box at the Games; in
the second he says he will ask young Tiberius Claudius to dine every afternoon rather than leave him to his tutors all the time, and in the third he is amazed that he can speak so well in public.
Nevertheless Augustus gave him no serious position and no serious money, naming him in his will ‘an heir of the third degree’. During his years in the shadows Claudius endured social
and political frustration, aggravated by poverty and illness. Though hailed cheerfully by the crowd at the Games, as a Germanicus, he was mocked and snubbed by his equals, who amused themselves by
throwing date and olive stones at him at Caligula’s dinner parties, even when he shared a consulship with their host, and when he fell asleep they put slippers on his hands, so that he rubbed
his eyes with them when he woke up. He was made a member of two
down-market priesthoods and once picked up a perquisite of forty gold coins, which the family considered quite
enough. Twice Tiberius refused his request for a minor magistracy but did leave him a small interest in his will.

Claudius spent his time scribbling at his histories; for recreation he pursued women and indulged in a lot of food, wine and gambling, convinced he could beat the system. (He wrote a book about
that too.) Like Caesar and Caligula, Claudius was married four times; first to one Plautia Urgulanilla, by whom he had two children. He divorced her in
AD
24 for adultery
and, unbelievably, suspicion of murder. Then there was a non-starter who died on her wedding day but whose brother emerged later as a minor conspirator against him. Next was Aelia Paetina, relation
of Sejanus, the favourite of Tiberius, and obviously selected by him. He was not important enough to have played any part in the downfall of his wife’s relative and simply kept his head down,
pretending to be, as he explained to the Senate, during the reign of Caligula, a fool. Once Emperor, he became successively the sexual target of the two most notorious women in Roman history,
Messalina and Agrippina. Alone of the five rulers in this book, not the faintest whiff of homosexuality attaches to his name.
⁴⁴