The Twelve Caesars (19 page)

The senate’s response – to vote annual sacrifices to Gaius and formalize veneration of the emperor’s cult – failed to impress. As the senators had deceived Tiberius, so
they would deceive Gaius too. He was aware already of rumoured conspiracy. Before the year was out, he would act on just such a hunch, adding to the death toll among Rome’s aristocracy.

It was not a case of groundless paranoia. Nor is this its significance. The revelations of those ‘burnt’ papers drove a wedge between Gaius and the senate. They convinced him of the
rightness of a policy which discounted senatorial consultation in favour of monarchical government by himself and a chosen coterie of personal advisers, including an influential freedman called
Kallistos. And so an irony is revealed. Regret for the political influence it had enjoyed under the Republic encouraged the senate to flatter the
princeps
in order to maintain those
vestiges of power it retained (and perhaps build on that platform in an attempt to regroup). In doing so, it succeeded only in further undermining its position by revealing a
querulous cowardice which proved to Gaius his good sense in mistrusting so debased a body of men and discounting their counsels in favour of friends and former slaves.

For his part, Gaius emerges from the sources as determined to stamp out opposition wherever it raised its head. From now on, the focus of his principate was absolutism: an urgent need to retain
his throne, enforce submission and further elevate his own position by an unrelenting emphasis on his divinity. It was a high-risk strategy both at home and abroad. In Judaea, for example, his
insistence that a cult statue of himself be erected in the temple in Jerusalem brought the Jewish world close to conflagration. Although Gaius’ advisers included anti-Semitic Alexandrian
freedmen, his policy was only partly mischievous: the Empire must accept his godliness. (Eventually Gaius softened his line towards the Jews, concluding that they were ‘sadly misguided rather
than wicked; and foolish in refusing to believe that I have got the nature of a god’.
²³
)

His actions had acquired a symbolic dimension. He devised what Suetonius describes as ‘a novel and unheard-of kind of pageant’. Across the three-mile span of the bay at Baiae he
created a floating temporary ‘bridge’, a costly and impressive feat of engineering. It was in fact a pontoon of boats and ships in two lines, closely anchored and supporting a dirt
track ‘fashioned in the manner of the Appian Way’. Gaius rode across it, dressed in the breastplate of that legendary absolutist, Alexander the Great. On the following day, for the
diversion of spectators who included delegates from Parthia, he raced a chariot across his sea-borne bridge. He was followed by friendly attendants and the entire Praetorian Guard.

Unsurprisingly, this puzzling and unique set piece of Roman public theatre – in which, with that easygoing brutality which is such a part of Gaius’ principate,
spectators lost their lives after drunkenly falling into the sea from their vantage-points on surrounding hills and cliffs – did little to diminish the emperor’s
folie de
grandeur.
Instead, it may have steeled his hand to undertake the only military campaign of his reign, a ‘joke’ in Tacitus’ assessment, played out along the banks of the
Rhine.

In the autumn of 39, Gaius left Italy to cross the Alps. Although he travelled in an enormous and luxurious convoy, carried in a litter with eight bearers and followed by Praetorians, his
progress was rapid. For his purpose was not principally, as Suetonius tells us, the recruitment of additional Batavian warriors for his German guard, nor, as Dio suggests, the need to shore up a
bankrupt treasury with plunder from Spain and Gaul, but the quashing of a conspiracy which Gaius could not ignore.

Travelling with the emperor were his sisters, Agrippina and Julia Livilla, and Drusilla’s widower Lepidus. Their first destination was Upper Germany, where, by the end of October, Gaius
had executed the imperial legate, Lentulus Gaetulicus, on suspicion of treason. Although the facts are confused, Gaetulicus was probably suspected of plotting to assassinate Gaius and replace him
with Lepidus, at that point Gaius’ most likely heir. Inevitably, Lepidus too paid for this disloyalty with his life (in his case, he was charged with adultery with his sisters-in-law rather
than direct involvement in scheming to become Rome’s fifth Caesar). Agrippina and Julia Livilla were commanded to accompany Lepidus’ remains back to Rome – presumably an
intentional parody of the elder Agrippina’s triumphal progress from Brundisium – before being sent into exile, their possessions auctioned by Gaius to the highest bidders. Meanwhile
Gaius, largely idle with the quarter-of-a-million
troops he had assembled around him, staged a sequence of imaginary ‘raids’ across the Rhine, posting his own men
as ‘enemies’, then chasing and capturing them. He accepted the senate’s congratulations on these warlike antics and seven acclamations by the troops as
imperator
. The
timely defection to the Romans that autumn of a British prince called Amminus enabled Gaius to claim that he had conquered the inhospitable island during this northern progress, an achievement for
which he was rewarded with the name ‘Britannicus’. In an act of future significance, he appointed as Gaetulicus’ replacement in Upper Germany a hatchet-faced grandee called
Servius Sulpicius Galba.

Gaius spent the autumn in Lugdunum, gambling and money-grubbing. Restored, bored or perhaps simply reluctant to return to Rome, he then embarked on an escapade which sealed beyond recall his
reputation for madness and folly. The ‘invasion’ of Britain did not progress further than the southern shores of the English Channel. Instead, with his soldiers lined up on the beach,
Gaius ordered them to fire their catapults into the ocean and gather seashells as the spoils of their victory. It is a much-debated incident, which appears to embody Suetonius’ taunt of
extreme assurance and excessive timidness. Whether the soldiers in fact refused to embark for Britain, and Gaius instructed them to fill their helmets with shells as a reprimand for cowardice, we
cannot know. Suffice to say that his reputation no longer permitted any benefit of the doubt.

The senate... Lepidus... Agrippina... Julia Livilla... and now, perhaps, those troops who had always adhered to the family of Germanicus: Gaius’ isolation was growing. That bronze sesterce
on which the emperor’s sisters masqueraded as Security, Harmony and Fortune had already been discarded by the mint. But it was not only Rome which was denied their benison.
Despite his bluster and bravado, Gaius himself was reaching a position where it was clear that he too had forsaken all.

In the end, after a flurry of senatorial executions and escalating uncertainty among all classes across the capital, assassination from within palace ranks. Gaius had been
foolish to taunt Cassius Chaerea, tribune of the Praetorian Guard, with effeminacy. Had the emperor, in his godly role-play, overlooked the goddess Roma herself? Perhaps then, as much of his
behaviour suggests, he had not been sufficiently mindful of
virtus
, that Roman definition of manliness in the form of man’s ideal behaviour whose cult image exactly matched that of
Roma herself. Once,
virtus
had been Romans’ defining quality. Cicero described it as ‘the badge of the Roman race and breed’:
²⁴
a prohibition against male submission, the bar
to Roman troops’ surrender even in the face of certain defeat. Granted, the bulkily masculine Chaerea, with a distinguished service record behind him, spoke in high, lisping tones. But he
cannot have relished being called ‘Lassie’ by an emperor so conspicuously his inferior in
virtus
, nor the obscene gestures Gaius made in full view of Chaerea’s men when the
latter kissed his hand in obeisance. His disaffection smouldered and finally boiled over into hatred. When Gaius was murdered on 24 January 41, in a covered passage leading from the theatre to the
palace, Chaerea swung the first blow. His co-conspirators included his fellow Praetorian tribunes Sextus Papinius and Cornelius Sabinus and Praetorian prefect Marcus Arrecinus Clemens. Gaius’
own principal response, despite the years of suspicion, was surprise. His wife and daughter died at the same time, the blood-smattered Caesonia in one account boldly extending her neck to the
assassin’s blade.
²⁵
A common soldier
dispatched the infant Julia Drusilla. With an utter brutality well matched to Gaius’, he dashed out her brains against a
wall.

No ease could be expected of so violent a death. In the Lamian Gardens, high on the Esquiline Hill close to the Gardens of Maecenas, Gaius’ troubled spirit haunted
Rome’s early-spring nights.

The gardens were imperial property, given to Tiberius by Lucius Aemilius Lamia, legionary commander, imperial legate and city prefect. Former cavalry officers, the Lamiae were among those who
had benefited from the principate. Raised to the senate by Augustus, the family earned at least two consulships, one under Augustus himself, a second, suffect appointment under Domitian. In January
41, their name was again synonymous with loyalty.

Secretly, stealthily, the mangled remnants of Gaius’ body had been transported across the city to this hilltop refuge. A pyre was quickly improvised and the body partly burned. Charred
remains were interred in a shallow grave. As in life, Gaius battled restlessness. The gardens’ caretakers, Suetonius tells us, soon became familiar with the sight of his ghost.

He might never have found peace were it not for his sisters Agrippina and Julia Livilla. Returning from exile in the aftermath of Gaius’ death, they oversaw the body’s removal,
cremation and appropriate burial. It was a remarkable act on the part of women once banished by a brother lost to all claims of love and faithfulness. But Agrippina the Younger was indeed a
remarkable woman. In 41 she was not finished with Rome’s emperors. As we will see, her own fate would prove no happier than that of her tyrannous, misguided brother.