Caligula: A Biography (14 page)

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.

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).