Caligula: A Biography (18 page)

What actually happened can be inferred from Cassius Dio’s account of the end of
A.D
. 40 (where he says nothing about a brothel). He mentions that the occupants of the newly furnished rooms near the imperial palace were “the wives of the foremost men as well as the children of the most aristocratic families,” and he might have added that this location meant they could easily be seized by the Praetorian soldiers guarding the emperor. Dio writes that Caligula forced them to live there at exorbitant cost, but notes at the same time: “Some of those who thus contributed to his need did so willingly, but others very much against their will, lest they should be thought to be vexed” (Dio 59.28.9). Supposedly the plebeians were pleased by the aristocrats’ discomfiture and about the “gold and silver” that the emperor collected from his tenants.

Suetonius, then, suppresses the fact that the occupants of these quarters were the wives and children of the
prōtoi
(the word Dio uses), meaning the consulars; he reverses the direction of the payments and turns the apartments into a brothel. If we leave aside this last and set both reports in the context of the now frequently reported manner and habit in which the emperor exploited the aristocracy’s code of behavior, then it becomes clear what was going on. Remember that relationships between the emperor and the aristocracy continued to be expressed in the old ceremonies of friendship, morning receptions, evening banquets, reciprocal support in financial matters, and testamentary bequests. In this process it had become necessary for imperial nomenclators to
keep records of the emperor’s “friends,” because there were so many he could no longer keep track of them himself. After the consulars conspired against him in early 39, Caligula had cynically exposed the ambiguity of these forms of communication by reproaching them for their enmity and hatred for him, but then demanding payments of money from individuals on the basis of their friendship with him, which no one could disavow. The highest form of imperial favor was the privilege to live as
familiares
on the Palatine in the palace buildings, a dispensation known from reports about other emperors, such as Agrippa in the reign of Augustus, or later Titus Vinius, Cornelius Laco, and Marcianus Icelus under Galba.

So once again Caligula took aristocrats’ protestations of friendship at face value and showed extraordinary favor to the leading consulars. After their conspiracy was exposed they had shown concern for his safety by murdering Scribonius Proculus and voting him a military bodyguard in the Senate. Now he responded by allowing their wives and children to live on the Palatine Hill, where they could enjoy the greatest possible proximity to the emperor, a distinction in which all of them took so much satisfaction. Simultaneously his nomenclators, who kept the lists of the emperor’s friends and the favors they did for one another, visited the former consuls and asked them for a gift in return.

In actual fact, of course, this meant that the emperor was holding the family members of the Senate leadership hostage on the Palatine under the eye of his Praetorian Guard, while at the same time extorting payments of gold and silver from the senators, forcing them to pay “voluntarily,” as Dio notes expressly, since one can describe paradoxical circumstances only in paradoxical language. This was Caligula’s response to the third attempt to murder him. He had put aristocrats in their place again and
continued to humiliate them with jokes. At a solemn banquet he suddenly burst out laughing; the two consuls, who were reclining on the couches next to him, politely inquired what had amused him so. “What do you suppose,” he replied, “except that at a single nod of mine both of you could have your throats cut on the spot?” (Suet.
Cal
. 32.3). We have already observed in Suetonius’s style a kind of montage technique (and will encounter it again in further examples), in which he takes Caligula’s cynical jokes literally, thereby distorting their meaning and presenting his behavior as aberrant. Caligula in these days may have had even a further joke, particularly about the new building on the Palatine, the wives and children living there, and the profits resulting from them that he had provided for himself: “I now have a brothel on the Palatine.”

If we adopt Seneca’s moral standards (and if we bear in mind that the aristocracy itself—and Seneca in the opinion of the aristocracy—was utterly depraved according to these standards), then we can agree with his drastic conclusion: Caligula was the emperor who showed how “far supreme vice could go, when combined with supreme power” (Sen.
Ad Helv
. 10.4). The Roman aristocracy was finished, its resistance broken.

The steps Caligula took against the aristocracy after returning from the North were not limited to furthering their self-destructive tendencies, encouraging slaves to denounce their masters, and interning consulars’ wives and children on the Palatine. He also set about destroying the foundation of every aristocracy: its honor. Following the earlier consulars’ conspiracy he had mocked how hollow the old aristocratic conceptions of
honor were under a changed form of government by granting awards to his horse Incitatus. Now, after two further conspiracies, he shifted from symbolic actions to concrete ones. Josephus and Suetonius report that the emperor abolished reserved seating for senators and knights at the theater. As a result there were pushing and shoving, and even fights, before performances began, and the highest-ranking members of society were forced to compete with commoners for a place. The seating order was left to chance. The emperor is said to have been amused by it all. His primary motive was certainly to annoy the aristocracy, but at the same time the resulting thoroughly mixed order of seating demonstrated that differences in rank were observed only when the emperor stood behind them; if he failed to support them, they were obsolete.

As the emperor allowed traditional social distinctions to be abolished by society itself, he also set about strategically dishonoring individuals among the leading members of the aristocracy. His uncle Claudius, who enjoyed particular distinction because of their close relationship, received much the same treatment as Silanus had earlier. Caligula decreed that of all the former consuls Claudius should always be the last to vote in the Senate. Because rank coincided with the order of voting, he was thus permanently demoted to the lowest place among them. But the emperor’s main targets were now the remaining members of the higher ranks of old Republican aristocracy, the
nobilitas
, who played a leading role in the group of
consulares
. He ordered that the statues of famous men from the Republican era, which Augustus had moved to the Campus Martius, be taken down, and announced that in the future he alone would decide in whose honor statues and portraits could be displayed. Living members of distinguished old families were prohibited from using certain emblems of an
ancestor’s fame to which they had traditionally been entitled. A Torquatus was forbidden to wear his torque, a Cincinnatus could not wear his lock of hair, and a descendant of Pompey lost the right to add “the Great” to his name.

In the last case Caligula’s proceeding can be traced in some detail. Suetonius describes these insults without naming a year, making them seem arbitrary, but they can in fact be dated with relative precision. Pompey’s descendant, a great-grandson on his mother’s side of the famous Pompeius Magnus, is still listed with the unshortened form of his name in an inscription from the start of 40. Thus the prohibition of the cognomen belongs among the measures ordered by the emperor after his return to Rome. Secondly, Dio reports the reason Caligula gave for withdrawing the honor: He remarked that “it would be dangerous for anyone to be called Magnus [‘the Great’]” (Dio 60.5.9).

This statement could also have come from a modern social historian. “Noble birth still . . . was perilous,” writes Ronald Syme in his famous study of the early Empire. Every emperor had a “rational distrust” of the old
nobilitas
, whose very existence challenged his claim to exercise rule alone, for “even if the
nobilis
forgot his ancestors and his name, the emperor could not.” This Pompey’s later fate took a predictable course. The emperor Claudius restored his cognomen and even chose him as a son-in-law. But then the combination of distinguished ancestry and membership in the emperor’s inner circle proved to be too much of a good thing. Falling victim to an intrigue of the empress Messalina in 47, he lost his life “because of his family and his relationship to the emperor” (Dio 61[60].29.6a). Caligula turned out to be right in the end. But he was not a social historian, and Pompey cannot have had any interest in abstract insights. Caligula’s remark represents a cynical insult added to the injury. Not
only did he devalue Pompey as a potential rival; he openly alluded to the dangerous rivalry between him and members of highly distinguished families. He thus justified the dishonor inflicted on Pompey with the need to protect him from the ruler—from himself.

As Pompey’s case shows, the most painful humiliations for the aristocracy undoubtedly occurred in personal contact with the emperor. Philo reports that even though everyone suffered from Caligula’s actions, people still continued to flatter him. Among the guests at the emperor’s last banquet in early 41 was Quintus Pomponius Secundus, one of the sitting consuls and a half brother of the empress Caesonia. According to Cassius Dio, Secundus sat at the emperor’s feet—like a slave—during the meal and “kept bending over continually to shower kisses upon them” (Dio 59.29.5). Suetonius recounts that when the emperor dined in the evening sometimes a few senators who had occupied the highest offices would stand at the head or foot of his couch dressed in short linen tunics: that is, comporting themselves in the manner of his personal slaves.

Thus the forms of debasement suffered in personal contact with the emperor began with voluntary, submissive, individual acts; when Caligula did not discourage these, everyone else was obliged to imitate them. This was not a new phenomenon. Tacitus used strong language to characterize aristocrats’ opportunistic behavior under Augustus and Tiberius and, as we have seen, they acted no differently under Caligula even before the autumn of 40. Now, however, the emperor began to demand self-abasing behavior from them. Dio writes that to most senators he offered his hand or foot to kiss but did not kiss them in return—an act that would have symbolized equality in rank. In one hate-filled passage, Seneca describes an incident in which a consular wished
to thank Caligula for saving his life; clearly he had been denounced, and he may have been the lover of Quintilia. The emperor held out his left foot to be kissed, and this man, who had held the highest offices in Rome, prostrated himself and kissed the emperor’s foot in the presence of the leaders of the Senate. Caligula further subverted the traditions of the social hierarchy by offering the honor of his kiss in public to favorites whose official rank was far below the senators’, such as the well-known actor Mnester.

The reaction of aristocrats to their ceremonial degradation is illustrated by Dio’s report that those senators who were granted the exceptional honor of a kiss from the emperor thanked him in speeches in the Senate. The submissiveness continued, in other words. But Caligula went further in using his contacts with the aristocracy to humiliate specific individuals. All the sources mention his rhetorical talent and his quick wit, and we have noted his fondness for cynical jokes.

A sense of the horror aroused by Caligula’s presence among senators forced into submissive behavior has been preserved in various accounts: “Amid the multitude of his other vices,” writes Seneca, Gaius Caesar “had a bent for insult” and “was moved by the strange desire to brand every one with some stigma.” Seneca immediately gave him a taste of his own medicine by describing his appearance: “Such was the ugliness of his pale face bespeaking his madness, such the wildness of his eyes lurking beneath the brow of an old hag, such the hideousness of his bald head with its sprinkling of beggarly hairs. And he had, besides, a neck overgrown with bristles, spindle shanks, and enormous feet” (Sen.
De Const. Sap
. 18.1). According to Suetonius, Caligula’s face “was naturally forbidding and ugly,” but “he purposely made it
even more savage, practicing all kinds of terrible and fearsome expressions before a mirror” (Suet.
Cal
. 50.1).

It cannot be verified whether Caligula’s feet were in fact enormous or whether he used a mirror to practice making horrible faces. Here again, remember that the behavior described as illustrating the emperor’s character can belong only to the time after he returned to Rome in the autumn of 40. Josephus and Dio’s accounts show that up to the time of the consulars’ conspiracy he had treated the aristocracy courteously, and after the great conspiracy he had spent a year away from Rome. The fears that he inspired in senators from then on, and his consistent efforts to humiliate them, thus formed part of a conscious new strategy. Much of it, especially the insults directed at individuals, should probably be ascribed to the emperor’s desire to take personal revenge and should be taken as his response both to the events of the previous year and to the most recent conspiracy. But Caligula’s remarks on the emperor’s paradoxical position of honor within the senatorial class show that his goal went even further: His aim was to destroy the aristocratic hierarchy as such and expose it to ridicule.

Lucius Vitellius, Suetonius reports, “was the first to begin to worship Gaius Caesar as a god; for on his return from Syria he did not presume to approach the emperor except with veiled head, turning himself about and then prostrating himself” (Suet.
Vit
. 2.5). The father of the later emperor had presumably been replaced as governor of Syria at the beginning of the year and then must have feared for his life. Dio provides more details. In
order to save his life, Vitellius dressed as a man of lower rank than he actually was, threw himself at the emperor’s feet, addressed him with many divine names, prayed to him, and finally vowed that he would offer sacrifices to him. In other words, in Caligula’s presence Vitellius performed a ritual combining an element of Roman cultic practice (veiling the head) with the custom known in the Hellenic world and the East of prostrating oneself before a divine ruler (
proskynēsis
). He started a trend.