Caligula: A Biography (19 page)

After Caligula released Pomponius, Dio relates, the senators praised him “partly out of fear and partly with sincerity,” some calling him a demigod (Greek
hērōs
) and others a god (Dio 59.26.3–5). They didn’t stop there. In accord with a decree of the Senate a temple was built to the emperor; he was to be worshiped there as divine. A college of priests was founded to take charge of the emperor’s worship. “The richest citizens used all their influence to secure the priesthoods of his cult and bid high for the honor” (Suet.
Cal
. 22.3). Dio writes that “these honors paid to him as a god came not only from the multitude, accustomed at all times to flattering somebody, but from those also who stood in high repute” (Dio 59.27.3). What had happened to the senators of Rome? Had fear driven them insane? Not at all. Their behavior was less surprising than it may appear at first glance.

The heaven of the ancients was not nearly as distant as that of Christianity, the religion beginning to spread from the East at that time. In the myths handed down in the ancient world, the gods were not above appearing on earth from time to time, for instance for the purpose of pursuing attractive mortal women. Similarly, from the fourth century
B.C
. on it was possible to designate persons who possessed power or wealth far in excess of human norms as “heroes” or gods and to venerate them accordingly. In Hellenistic times this led to the founding of cults for
individual kings and their dynasties. Roman senators who had conquered the Greek East in the era of the Republic had direct knowledge of this custom, since they had been objects of the same kind of veneration there themselves. Finally, Roman emperors and members of their families were worshiped as gods in the eastern cities of the Empire and not long afterwards in the western provinces as well. Caligula had experienced this himself as a child when he accompanied his parents to the East.

In Rome itself the situation was somewhat more complicated. Julius Caesar had been offered various divine honors by the Senate before he was assassinated. He was designated “Jupiter Julius,” and plans were made for a temple dedicated to him and his clemency; Marcus Antonius was chosen to serve as his priest. In the time of Augustus poets such as Ovid, Horace, and Propertius often addressed the
princeps
as a god, and in Tiberius’s reign various senators attempted to gain recognition by attributing a divine aura to him. Thus it is reported that the emperor’s activities were called “sacred occupations,” that offerings were made to images of the emperor and Sejanus, or that some senators prostrated themselves before him.

The idea of divinity seems to have been not entirely without appeal for recipients of the honor. Alexander the Great and other Hellenistic kings had sometimes appeared attired as various deities, and Roman senators were not unfamiliar with performances of this kind: In a triumph, the highest honor achievable, a victorious Roman general appeared dressed to resemble Jupiter, the supreme god of the Roman polity. Wearing a tunic embroidered with palm trees and red make-up on his face, he carried a scepter; all three features were typical attributes of the god. It is reported of Octavian, the later Augustus, that during the triumvirate he gave a party that became known as the “banquet of the twelve
gods,” at which he appeared costumed as Apollo and the guests also came dressed as divinities. His rival Antonius did not lag behind. He allowed himself to be honored in the eastern parts of the Empire as the “new Dionysus” and appeared with the corresponding costume and paraphernalia.

When he assumed the position of
princeps
in 27
B.C
., however, Augustus altered his behavior in this respect, as he did in many others. When the civil wars ended, he refused divine honors, since they would have run directly counter to his aim of being accepted as sole ruler by reviving Republican forms and honoring the senatorial order as equals. As emperor he seems to have insisted that throughout the Empire he should not be honored in a cult of his own, but only in conjunction with the capital city, so that temples were dedicated to
Roma et Augustus
. Tiberius followed a similar policy. He rejected the idea of such honors for himself and was criticized by the Senate for it. He permitted others in their place, however, granting to the cities in the province of Asia in 23, for instance, the right to erect one temple to him, his mother, Livia, and the Senate. The attempts of some senators to flatter him obsequiously apparently repelled him; every time he left the Senate House, he supposedly exclaimed, “These men! How ready they are for slavery!” (Tac.
Ann
.3.65.3).

There had been, then, no shortage of attempts to venerate emperors as divine even before Caligula’s time. These did not entail belief that the emperors were superhuman; rather they formed part of the ambiguous communication that had become requisite in imperial Rome. The first two emperors had tried to block this development because they feared correctly—as could be seen in Caesar’s case—that the more honors the aristocracy awarded them, the lower their acceptance sank among those very aristocrats. The Senate itself was venerated as “sacred” or as a
“divine assembly,” in some cities in the eastern part of the Empire, after all, so that worship of the emperor as a god would clearly detract from the “divinity” of its members. This did not prevent some senators from pushing for veneration of the emperor all the same, and their colleagues could hardly voice any objection.

Now the question was how Caligula would react to the veneration of his person. Clearly he was in a different position from his predecessors in that he did not need to weigh acceptance by the aristocracy in his decision. That was a thing of the past, since open enmity now reigned. The offer of worship belonged to the mode of ambiguous communication the senators still practiced, both out of fear and because they lacked an alternative; it had nothing to do with whether they actually accepted his position as emperor. Caligula was clearly aware of all this: He himself was the one who had pulled back the curtain a year and a half earlier, after the consulars’ conspiracy, and exposed their manner of communicating with him for what it was: obsequiousness and insincere flattery. So how did he now respond to veneration of himself as a god by the “divine assembly”?

Caligula was the first emperor who
permitted
the aristocracy in Rome to venerate him as divine. Suetonius provides a description of the temple that was erected “to his own godhead” (
numen
). “In this temple was a life-sized statue of the emperor in gold, which was dressed each day in clothing such as he wore himself,” and the animals sacrificed to him were “were flamingoes, peacocks, black grouse, guinea hens, and pheasants, offered day by day each after its own kind” (Suet.
Cal
. 22.3). But Caligula not only allowed the senators to pray to the golden statue of him; he allowed himself to be worshipped as a god by them. He “built out a part of the palace as far as the Forum, and making the Temple of Castor and Pollux its vestibule, he often took his place between
the divine brethren, and exhibited himself there to be worshiped by those who presented themselves; and some hailed him as Jupiter Latiaris” (Suet.
Cal
. 22.2). The terms Suetonius uses suggest that Caligula turned the customary morning
salutatio
, when the senators and others greeted the emperor at home, into veneration of himself as a god. In addition it is reported that he appeared not only as Jupiter, but also costumed as a great variety of other ancient gods, both male and female: as Hercules, as one of the Dioscuri, as Dionysus, Hermes, Apollo, Ares, Neptune, Mercury, or Venus. At times he appeared shaved, at other times with a golden beard; he would appear with or without a wig, depending on which god he was portraying. And the senators of Rome worshiped him. What did that mean? Had
the emperor
now gone mad? In this case, too—as in the case of the senators—the answer is clearly no.

The German scholar Hugo Willrich has conjectured that by allowing himself to be worshiped as a god Caligula intended to abolish the established form of empire and replace it with a new kind of monarchy, one modeled on the Hellenistic kingdoms where the ruler was divine. This would mean that a new “state cult” had been founded in what Willrich calls an act of “religious policy.” In fact after his sojourn in Lyon Caligula did experiment with new forms of monarchy, which would have broken the paradoxical link between the emperor and the aristocratic hierarchy preserved from the time of the Republic. He borrowed elements from Hellenistic kingdoms, among which his identification with Alexander the Great was of particular significance, as can be seen from his horseback ride across the bay at Puteoli. Nevertheless there is important evidence against such an interpretation of his veneration as a god.

For one thing, he limited his appearances as a “god” to certain occasions. In a discussion of the emperor’s clothing Dio writes that the special attire “was what he would assume whenever he pretended to be a god . . . At other times he usually appeared in public in silk or in triumphal dress” (Dio 59.26.10). And Suetonius too mentions in addition to divine raiment the clothing of a
triumphator
, cloaks set with jewels or silken garments, in which the emperor allowed himself to be ordinarily seen. This fits with the specific reports on Caligula’s behavior after the autumn of 40 (and before), since they make no mention at all of unusual dress, let alone symbols of divinity. Hence it was a case of individual appearances or public presentations rather than a permanent ceremonial practice, as one would expect if the aim had been to establish a “divinely ruled kingdom.” Finally, evidence against the formal institution of a cult for a divine ruler is provided by the complete silence of the non-literary sources on the subject. Not a single inscription or coin mentions the emperor as a god in the context of the city of Rome or depicts him with emblems of divinity. In the evidence that survives, all honors awarded to Caligula or representations of him follow the patterns customary under his predecessors, Augustus and Tiberius.

Another explanation lies closer to hand. After his account of Vitellius’s innovation in approaching the emperor, Dio relates the following incident: On a later occasion the emperor told Vitellius that he was in conversation with the moon goddess and asked whether he did not see the goddess near him. The singer Apelles had a similar experience when Caligula, who was standing next to a larger-than-life-sized statue of Jupiter, asked which of the two seemed greater to him, the emperor or the god. The meaning of the emperor’s behavior can easily be interpreted if
one recalls how he had dealt with insincere statements and flattery before, including the vows made when he fell ill in the year 37 and above all thereafter with regard to the “friendship” of the aristocracy since the year 39. Caligula exposed them all as lies by taking them at face value, and he humiliated the flatterer by cynically forcing him to do what he had announced. The pattern continues here. Neither Vitellius, who is notorious in the ancient sources for his servile flattery, nor Apelles actually believed Caligula was a god, and both of them knew that the emperor was aware of this. He reacted to being addressed as a god, which was intended as a gesture of submission, by compelling them to behave as if they really did take him for a god, that is, as if they were not in their right minds. Vitellius deftly managed to extricate himself from the awkward situation—an indication that he possessed the communicative skills required by the times. Trembling as if in awe, he dropped his gaze to the ground and replied softly, “Only you gods, Master, may behold one another” (Dio 59.27.6). Apelles, by contrast, who had fallen out of favor for unknown reasons after a period in Caligula’s special grace, was at a loss for words. Caligula had him whipped, noting that even when the singer was screaming his voice retained its sweet sound.

As a group the senators seem to have fared much as Vitellius and Apelles did. Caligula did not reject the new form of their flattery as such, but cynically demanded that they then act as if he really were a god. We happen to know from a biographical account of Claudius that Caligula used membership in the priesthood of his cult to demand ruinous sums from leading senators. Thus the emperor’s uncle “was forced to pay eight million sesterces to enter a new priesthood, which reduced him to such straitened circumstances that he was unable to meet the obligation incurred to the treasury; whereupon by edict of the prefects his property was
advertised for sale to meet the deficiency, in accordance with the law regulating confiscations” (Suet.
Claud
. 9.2).

Some of the ancient sources themselves offer a different interpretation. They claim that the emperor, having lost his mind, took himself for a god and then forced the aristocracy to venerate his person accordingly. Modern biographers, too, have accepted this view, so that Caligula’s “divinity” has played a decisive role in establishing his reputation as a mad emperor. How should this be judged?

First of all, it is telling that the earliest Roman sources, Seneca and Pliny the Elder, make no mention whatsoever that the emperor in his mental derangement considered himself a god, even though such assertions would have conformed perfectly with their no-holds-barred depiction of him as a misbegotten monster. The reason is evident: The claim would not have seemed very plausible to contemporaries. For one thing, they had lived through that time themselves, and doubtless wanted not to be reminded of their own disreputable role in his veneration as a god. Further, attributing divinity to the emperor as a way of flattering him had continued under Caligula’s successors. Although Claudius forbade Romans to prostrate themselves before him or offer sacrifices to him, the author Scribonius Largus refers to him three times as “our god the emperor” (
deus noster Caesar
). After the Pisonian conspiracy under Nero in 65, the senator Cerialis, who had betrayed the conspirators, introduced a motion that a temple be built to the (living) emperor and a cult be established to venerate him.