The Twelve Caesars (18 page)

From tragedy, pragmatism. Gaius was nineteen when he was summoned to Capri. His grandmother Antonia promoted the move, her intention to safeguard him from Sejanus’ evil attentions. There
he schooled himself in emotional costiveness, a stranger to complaint, ‘ignoring the ruin of his kindred as if nothing at all had happened, passing over his own ill-treatment with an
incredible pretence of indifference,’ as Suetonius relates. Afraid to react publicly to the misfortunes of his family, Gaius adopted a policy of stupefying self-control every bit as
calculated as the ageing emperor’s wiles. Following Tiberius’ death, he made a correct assessment of the propaganda value of the memory of Germanicus, Agrippina and their depleted
brood. Reprising the laudable emotionalism of Agrippina’s act of homage as recorded by West, he travelled to Pandateria and Pontia to reclaim the remains of his mother and his brother Nero
(no traces of Drusus’ body could be identified). He purposely chose a period of stormy weather, harnessing nature’s springtime histrionics to his tableaux of elemental grief. In Rome,
claiming that he had transferred the ashes to new urns with his own hands, he interred them with great solemnity in the Mausoleum of Augustus. It was a process of denying Tiberius. Gaius chose not
to position himself within the newly emergent continuum of Rome’s emperors, but in a specifically dynastic context: the heir to the divine blood of Augustus through a family notable for its
greatness. In elevating, and justifying, this dynastic element of the principate – in its explicitness
something new in Rome – he both legitimized his own rule
and sanitized his accession (which had, after all, been willed by Tiberius). He also laid down problems for the future, among them the claim to the throne of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, afterwards
known as Nero, a grandson of Germanicus able like Gaius to invoke a family history of grandeur and tragedy.

In July 37, the mint at Lugdunum (modern Lyons) received instructions about the new reign’s coinage. On the obverse sides of the coins, a portrait of Gaius. Three reverse
types included a head of Germanicus, the relationship of father and son explained in the surrounding inscription; a bust of Agrippina the Elder, ditto; and a radiate head of Augustus bearing the
legend ‘The Divine Augustus, Father of his Country’. At the mint in Caesarea, this tendency was more explicit: one design featured Germanicus on both sides of the coin, another
Germanicus on the obverse, Augustus on the reverse, Gaius in both cases unglimpsed.
¹⁹

The implications were clear. In his coinage as in his official iconography and his public religious observances, Gaius extolled his distinguished ancestry. In celebrating those qualities to
which he laid claim as child and great-grandchild, he appealed directly to that affection for Germanicus, Agrippina and Augustus which persisted across the Empire. He also aligned himself with
Augustus’ divinity. It was a statement of belonging on the part of a man who, save a quaestorship in 33, was a stranger to the
cursus honorum
as well as to military experience and
achievement. The support of the armed forces, associated with Gaius’ family since the time of Julius, was summoned through the memory of Germanicus, cherished as a soldier cut off in his
prime by an associate of the hated Tiberius. Gaius’ numismatic exploitation of his father’s memory is a further refutation of Tiberius and his one-time henchman
Sejanus, alloy-based legerdemain linking the new emperor directly with Augustus by a process of elision. It was the same impulse which, six months into his reign, inspired him to dedicate the new
Temple of Augustus in the Forum. After twenty-three years, Tiberius may or may not have completed construction of the temple which the senate had voted the deified Augustus on his death.
Gaius’ two-day ceremony included a choir of aristocratic children, 800 lions and bears slaughtered, horse-races and a banquet for senators and their wives. In bricks and mortar prominent in
the heart of Rome, it associated the new emperor with his most illustrious forebear. The Roman equivalent of a commemorative tea-towel, coins issued by the mint bore an image of a large-headed
Gaius in front of the temple sacrificing a bull. On the reverse, appropriately, sat a veiled personification of Piety.

As always, the inescapable hand of the past took as much as it gave. Gaius inherited from his father the ungainly combination of a long body and long, thin legs. A programme of vigorous riding
had countered this unwieldiness in Germanicus’ case, spindle-shanks less obvious than the aura of martial heroism. We do not read of the conceited Gaius exercising. So promising at the
outset, his inheritance could have transcended physicalities. The life he led undermined a body already weak and wrought havoc with a mind besieged by demons. If the sources approximate truth, the
ingredients of his downfall would challenge the strongest constitution: excessive alcohol, lack of sleep, an addiction to sex and a seeming determination to steel himself against every
compassionate or feeling impulse. Voyeuristic in his sadism, compulsive in his need to view mental and physical torture
at close quarters (the spectator now, as once in
Tiberius’ palace on Capri his unnatural self-control had provided the spectacle), he was the author of his own demise. At such a remove in time, the extent of his mental weakness cannot be
estimated. The Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo, in a first-hand account of Gaius’ behaviour, indicates caprice and unpredictability but not madness, and attributes these weaknesses to an
illness in October 37 brought about by ‘a life of luxury’: ‘heavy drinking and a taste for delicacies, an appetite insatiable even on a swollen stomach, hot baths at the wrong
time, emetics followed immediately by further drinking and the gluttony which goes with it, indecent behaviour with boys and women.’
²⁰
It hardly matters whether we second Philo – or
prefer Suetonius’ more egregiously lascivious explanation (which fails to take account of the reign’s chronology) that the trouble began with a mind-altering aphrodisiac administered by
Gaius’ promiscuous fourth wife Caesonia.

For a twelve-month period at the beginning of his reign, Gaius issued one of the most famous coins of Roman imperial history. It was a bronze sesterce bearing images on the
reverse of his three sisters, Agrippina, Drusilla and Julia Livilla. The standing female figures personified a trio of those abstract qualities which the Roman mindset – pagan, superstitious,
earnest in its religiosity but robustly practical – invested with significance: Securitas, Concordia and Fortuna. It was the first appearance on Roman coinage of identifiable (and identified)
living female figures, a distinction denied even to Livia, but the coin did not survive Drusilla’s death in 38. In inspiration it celebrated that bounty with which the apparently malleable
Gaius of the first months of
the reign wished to endow Rome: security, harmony and fortune. That aspiration did not survive its year-long currency.

None of these qualities characterizes Gaius’ legacy. From disharmony arose his murder. The loss of any sense of security in Rome created that atmosphere of fear in which conspiracies
flourished. (Gaius also took measures to ensure that senators actively feared him.) His greedy possessiveness about the blessings of fortune expressed his monarchical outlook, token of his belief
in the
princeps
’ special position above that of the loftiest Roman noble. Quickly, a coin which had once extolled the virtues of the emperor’s exemplary family and broadcast his
good intentions in three dimensions acquired a grim irony. Conditions changed in the course of Gaius’ reign, including relationships within the imperial family. By the end of 39, with
Drusilla already dead, Gaius banished Agrippina and Julia Livilla. In their wake, security, harmony and fortune departed too.

The ideological vacuum created by the overthrow of traditional virtues provided fertile soil for the emergence of Gaius’ demonic mythology. Much of what we read may be true. Some of it is
probably imaginative scaremongering on the part of writers determined to blacken his memory beyond redemption. But all of it has on occasion been regarded as the truth. That Gaius’ life
survives in the manner it does in the ancients’ telling – a quasi-veracity dense with caliginous anecdote – is connected to that climate of profound unease which provided the
backdrop for his particular theatre of the macabre.

Was it true that he commended a tortured actor for the euphoniousness of his screams? Did he really lessen the food bill of wild beasts in the circus by feeding them prisoners in place of
butcher’s meat? What prompted Gaius to insist that a father witness the execution of his son, or that Publius Afranius Potitius, the senator who in October 37 had offered to die so long
as Gaius recover from his illness, make good that promise and commit suicide? Was he serious in suggesting the consulship for his favourite horse, Incitatus, or was his
intention another joke at the senate’s expense? Did he laugh or wince after ordering the executioner to chop off the hands of a slave caught stealing and to hang the severed body parts around
the slave’s neck as he remained in attendance at the party? Again, at one level it scarcely matters. These are merely brushstrokes in the broader depiction of Gaius’ reign, an imagery
in which he himself, wittingly or otherwise, was complicit.

It was early in 39 when Gaius made a speech to the senate which, with good reason, unnerved Rome’s upper classes. He did not claim authorship for himself, but attributed
it to Tiberius:

The emperor had lately been reading papers relating to treason trials of the previous reign. These were the same papers which, in 37, abolishing the charge of
maiestas
to
widespread relief, Gaius had promised to destroy unread. Perhaps their destruction would have served both emperor and senate better. For the papers related to Tiberius’ treatment of
Gaius’ mother Agrippina and his brothers Nero and Drusus. Their revelations startled and enraged him. On the evidence they contained he saw that
Tiberius had been
forced to condemn Agrippina and her sons as conspirators. Some of that evidence was contributed by men who continued to frequent the senate. They were the same men who, for the last two years, had
added their voices to the chorus of praise with which a craven senate habitually greeted Gaius’ actions and innovations. For a moment, the world jolted on its axis. For so long Gaius had been
accustomed to consider Tiberius the architect of his family’s downfall. Too late he recognized the distribution of blame. To a stunned senate house, Gaius made plain his discovery and his
deliberations. Then, chillingly, he quoted what he claimed were Tiberius’ own words to him on senatorial duplicity and dislike. He ended with what, in Dio’s account, is a classically
Tiberian statement of nihilistic menace: ‘For no man living is ruled of his own free will; only so long as a person is afraid does he pay court to the man who is stronger.’
²²
The same
day, determined to inspire unease, he restored treason trials to the Roman statute books.