How did the senators react? “For the moment,” Dio writes, “their alarm and dejection prevented them from saying a word or transacting any business; but on the next day they associated again and bestowed lavish praise upon Gaius as a most sincere and pious ruler, for they felt very grateful to him that they had not perished like the others. Accordingly, they voted to offer annual sacrifices to his clemency… on the anniversary of the day on which he had read his address” (Dio 59.16.9–10). In other words, they flattered him and so continued to address him in the very language he had exposed as hypocrisy the day before. They continued to show him honor, just as he had cynically predicted. It was their only chance — but it meant that they had taken their self-abasement toward the emperor and his power to the extreme.
With this speech Caligula had taken an irreversible step. To be sure, the consulars involved in the conspiracy had provided evidence of the ambiguity in relations between the aristocracy and the emperor. Their conspiracy had been secret, however, and the fact of the conspirators’ enmity toward the emperor, revealed when the plot was exposed, could have been covered up in public by punishing the participants in the Senate. Now a new situation had arisen. Once the emperor had exposed the doublespeak in communications between aristocrats and himself, every statement addressed to him by the Senate from then on had already been condemned in advance: It was duplicitous, and the emperor knew it. And the senators knew that the emperor knew that they knew that he knew. Conversely, the path was now blocked for every future attempt on the emperor’s part to accommodate them: Everyone would have known that the emperor didn’t mean what he was saying. And the emperor would have known that the senators knew that he also knew that they knew. In other words, Caligula caused the ambiguous form of communication to collapse, which up to that time had been the crucial means for avoiding the paradox of the simultaneous existence of a monarchy and a republic. The truth had been spoken, and that could not be undone.
How were they to go on from here? For the moment the aristocrats in the Senate had no choice but to carry on as before and thereby to abase themselves doubly — as flatterers who had been exposed but continued their flattery nevertheless. As for Caligula, he did not drop the matter after this one speech; rather he used the new situation to humiliate the aristocrats and make them look ridiculous.
By the time of Augustus and Tiberius the continuation of traditional friendships among aristocrats had produced a situation in which all senators and the highest-ranking knights were officially “friends” of the emperor, whatever their actual personal relationships with him. Mornings they visited him at home; in the evening they were his guests or invited him to banquets; they left bequests to him in their wills, to gain his favor. Thus ambiguity prevailed here, too. Although Caligula had now torn down the facade of friendship, he continued to impose the traditional modes of behavior on the aristocracy, and its members were incapable of expressing their enmity to the emperor openly, because all the power was on his side. It is reported, for example, that he addressed many people as “father,” “grandfather,” “mother,” and “grandmother,” that is, by names that conveyed a close and affectionate relationship to them, in order to compel them to make him “voluntary” payments and to bequeath him money. Through a resolution in the Senate, he ordered that all those still alive who had included Tiberius in their wills must now name him instead. Similarly, when his daughter was born a short time later he pointed out the expenses he would incur as a father and demanded “gifts” for her education and dowry. Once again the aristocrats had to pay up or cause their own downfall by demonstrating publicly that they were no friends of the emperor. Philo reports that Caligula made gifts of money to force people to give him far higher amounts in return. Particularly distinguished members of the senatorial order were harmed in other ways “under the guise of friendship.” They were required to pay vast sums for his travels and entertainment when he visited them; some spent their entire fortunes on a single dinner or even went into debt. “And so some came to the point of deprecating the favors bestowed by him” (Phil. Leg. 345).
That was Caligula’s second response to the conspiracy by his consular “friends.” After having himself unmasked the pretense of friendship between emperor and aristocracy, for a cynical humiliation he made use of the fact that nonetheless no other alternative possibility for their conduct was available. He treated his aristocratic “friends”—that is, the aristocracy as a whole — as if their friendship toward him were actually sincere. Since no one could deny it, given their behavior, he was able to damage them financially as well. They were helpless, and Caligula is said to have made no secret of how much enjoyment that gave him.
Similarly, he compelled senators to pay large amounts of money to sponsor games in Rome. Presumably after the reintroduction of popular elections, he reinstated the old custom of choosing two praetors by lot to present gladiatorial games. Further, he put up his own gladiators for sale and attended the auction in person; his presence had the effect of driving up the prices, since bidders felt obligated to do him a favor in this way. Suetonius provides an account of how Caligula could indulge his sense of humor at senators’ expense during such auctions: “A well-known incident is that of Aponius Saturninus; he fell asleep on one of the benches, and as the auctioneer was warned by Gaius not to overlook the Praetorian gentleman who kept nodding to him, the bidding was not stopped until thirteen gladiators were knocked down to the unconscious sleeper at nine million sesterces” (Suet. Cal. 38.4).
He did not stop there. Dio reports how Caligula invited Incitatus (“Hotspur”), his favorite race horse, to dinner, fed him barley corn made of gold, toasted him with golden goblets, and planned to make him a consul. The meaning of this last gesture, perhaps the emperor’s most notorious, which seems to make no sense, can be inferred from the parallel account by Suetonius, who reports that in addition to a marble stall, a manger made of ivory, and purple blankets, Caligula gave his horse a palace, a staff of servants, and a dinner service so that the guests received in his name could be entertained as grandly as possible. Lastly Suetonius also mentions that the emperor planned to appoint the horse to the consulship.
There is no way now to know whether everyone in Rome got this joke. Nor can we tell whether Suetonius understood it later or — as seems more likely — failed to understand it on purpose, since he makes use of it to present the emperor as insane. There can be no doubt, however, about who in Rome would have gotten the point at the start of 39. The households of the senators — their houses, servants, and dinner services — represented a central manifestation of their social status and were in part an item of ruinous competition that was served up at wasteful banquets, and laws were passed from time to time to restrict extravagance. Achieving the consulship remained the most important goal of an aristocrat’s career. To equip the emperor’s horse with a sumptuous household and to destine it for the consulship satirized the main aim of aristocrats’ lives and laid it open to ridicule. Caligula placed his horse on the same level as the highest-ranking members of society — and by implication equated them with a horse.
Besides symbolically devaluing the Roman consulars, Caligula’s designation of Incitatus as a consul sent a further message: The emperor can appoint anyone he likes to the consulship; consulars are consulars by the grace of the emperor. In fact there was no alternative to the system that awarded status to members of the upper class in Rome according to their standing in the Senate, a form of ranking that had been in place for centuries. But if an individual possessed the minimum requirements — being in the third freeborn generation and of unblemished character — his position within this hierarchy was now decided by the emperor. In fact the emperor could even grant the rights of free birth, ingenuitas, and so make knights even of men born as slaves. Caligula’s joke about his horse not only made the consulars look ridiculous, but also expressed a truth about Roman society that members of the highest rank found extremely disagreeable: The position of every
one of them depended on the emperor’s goodwill.
All this, then, was Caligula’s response to the unexpected attempt on his life by the consulars: Instead of issuing orders for heads to roll indiscriminately, he took aim at their positions in the Senate, in relationships of patronage, and in the hierarchy of their society — confronting them with the unpleasant reality of the Empire and with their own duplicitous behavior in dealing with their lack of real power. He forced them to humiliate themselves. He dishonored them by cynicism and symbolic acts. He left them to their impotence and absurdity.
Was this radical shift of behavior on the emperor’s part “appropriate”? The extent to which it was or was not cannot be determined with certainty, since the sources are silent on the motive for the conspiracy that preceded the shift and on its scope and object. That Caligula was still following a policy of demonstrative cooperation with the Senate at the start of the year, however, suggests that something extreme had occurred. In any case one feature of Caligula’s response is clear. Striking at the core of the senatorial aristocracy’s position in society had the desired effect. Conflict between emperor and aristocracy had suddenly erupted, and now the groundwork had been laid for its escalation. The only question was what would be the next opportunity for venting the stored-up hatred. The wait was not long, and the occasion came with two measures intended to stabilize the emperor’s position.
In the summer of the year 39 Caligula remarried. He was again attempting to clarify the dynastic situation by having an heir. The bride, Milonia Caesonia, is said to have been neither young nor particularly beautiful, but she had already proved her fertility by having borne three children — and she was well along in a pregnancy. After the baby was born, Caligula referred to Caesonia as his wife and acknowledged the daughter, who was named Julia Drusilla, as his own. The order of events indicates that this time the emperor waited to marry until a child had actually been born, a child who represented the purpose of the union.
There was a not inconsiderable side effect to Caligula’s now having legitimate offspring, however. His sisters, Agrippina and Livilla, and their descendants were apparently to be permanently removed from possible succession to the throne. Yet Agrippina in particular had demonstrated her ambitions for the succession a year and a half earlier (and would do so again in later years). When her marriage to Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, a very aristocratic but ailing older man, had produced a son, the later emperor Nero, she had asked Caligula to name the child. Her hopes that the emperor would choose “Gaius” and thereby grant him a special place in the dynasty were in vain, however. Caligula instead suggested the name of their uncle, Claudius, a member of the imperial family whom no one took seriously at that time. Now, with the birth of Caligula’s daughter, Agrippina’s chance to be the mother of an emperor was tending toward zero. She now shared the situation of Aemilius Lepidus, who had lost a once promising position after the death of Drusilla.
The build-up for a military campaign against hostile tribes in Germania led to a further and lasting consequence. As later events would show, Caligula, given the state of his relations with the aristocracy, was preparing this expedition with great urgency in the months following the conspiracy. Since 29, the Roman commander on the upper Rhine had been the senator Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Gaetulicus. He had survived Sejanus’s fall despite their having had a close connection, though there were rumors that Tiberius had issued a barely veiled threat to him at that time. Gaetulicus had written to the emperor, according to Tacitus’s account, that he would remain loyal, but if the emperor named a successor the commander would regard it as a certain death sentence. Gaetulicus proposed a kind of bargain, whereby the emperor would remain in charge of the rest of the Empire, but he would keep his province. At the time he got away with it. He had achieved great popularity with his soldiers, though clearly at the expense of discipline. The attacks by tribes in the region, Caligula’s official reason for his campaign, were probably a consequence of Gaetulicus’s long command; at the very least he had to accept responsibility for them. The way Caligula had proceeded against corrupt magistrates in Rome and the prospect that the emperor would soon arrive in the Rhineland in person must have prompted in the senator well-founded fears about his future fate.
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.
THE GREAT CONSPIRACY AND THE EXPEDITION TO THE NORTH
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.
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