SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  Nonetheless, the broad framework he set out for being an emperor lasted for more than 200 years – or, to put it another way, for the rest of the period covered by this book. Every later emperor we shall meet was or at least impersonated Augustus. They used the name Augustus among their imperial titles, and they inherited his personal signet ring, which is supposed to have passed down the line from one to the next. This was no longer his original favourite, the sphinx. Over the decades he had changed the design, first to a portrait of Alexander the Great and finally to a portrait of himself. Augustus’ head, in other words, and his distinctive features became the signature of each of his successors. Whatever their idiosyncrasies, virtues, vices or backgrounds, whatever the different names we know them by, they were all better or worse reincarnations of Augustus, operating within the model of autocracy he established and dealing with the problems that he left unresolved.

  It is to some of the problems facing this series of new Augusti that we now turn – starting with another death.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ·

  FOURTEEN EMPERORS

  The men on the throne

  ON 24 JANUARY 41 CE, almost thirty years after the first Augustus had died in his bed and eighty-five years after the death of Julius Caesar, there was another violent assassination in Rome. This time the victim was the emperor Gaius – or, to give him his full name, Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus – who four years earlier had succeeded his great-uncle, the elderly Tiberius, to the throne. He was the second in the series of fourteen emperors, not counting three short-lived claimants in one brief period of civil war through 68 and 69 CE, who ruled Rome in the almost 180 years between the death of Augustus and that of the emperor Commodus, who was assassinated in 192 CE. These include some of the most resonant names in Roman history: Claudius, who replaced Gaius and was given a starring role as a scholarly and shrewd observer of palace politics in the novels of Robert Graves I, Claudius and Claudius the God; Nero, with his reputation for family murder, lyre playing, Christian persecution and pyromania; Marcus Aurelius, the ‘philosopher-emperor’, whose philosophical Thoughts is even now a bestseller; and Commodus, whose exploits in the arena were re-created, not wholly inaccurately, in the movie Gladiator. They also include those who, despite all the ingenuity of modern biographers, survive as little more than names: the elderly Nerva, for example, who held power for just eighteen months at the end of the first century CE.

  67. Three short-term emperors – Galba, Otho and Vitellius – between the death of Nero and the accession of Vespasian.

  Dynasties

  Julio-Claudians (14 – 68 CE)

  Flavians (69 – 96 CE)

  ‘Adoptive dynasty’ (96 – 192 CE)

  The murder of Gaius is one of the best-documented events in this whole period of Roman history, and it certainly gives us the most detailed account to survive of any emperor’s fall. It is told over thirty modern pages, as an elaborate digression within an encyclopaedic history of the Jews, written some fifty years after the event by Titus Flavius Josephus – a leading Jewish rebel against the Romans in the 60s CE (under the name of Joseph ben Matthias) who changed sides, politically if not religiously, and ended up almost a writer-in-residence at the Roman court. For Josephus, Gaius’ murder was divine punishment visited upon an emperor who had scorned the Jews and even erected a statue of himself in the Temple. But to judge from the circumstantial details, in retelling the story, he had on his desk a memoir of what happened in January 41 CE written by someone close to the action.

  Josephus’ account of the assassination is richly revealing about the new world of politics that followed the first Augustus, from the palace intrigues, through the empty slogans of the old senatorial elite and the problems of succession, to the perils of being an emperor on the throne. What is more, the various assessments, both ancient and modern, of Gaius’ faults and failings, of what lay behind his murder and of what followed it point to important questions: about how the reputation of Roman emperors was created, about how their success or failure was, and is, judged and – even more fundamentally – about how far the character and qualities, marriages and murders, of the individual rulers help us understand the broader history of Rome under imperial rule.

  So how was Gaius killed, and why?

  What went wrong with Gaius?

  The emperor Tiberius, who took over from his adoptive father Augustus, apparently seamlessly, in 14 CE, grew increasingly reclusive over the last decade of his rule, spending most of his time on the island of Capri, only remotely in touch with the capital. When Gaius was acclaimed emperor on Tiberius’ death in 37 CE, he must have seemed like a welcome change. Just twenty-four years old, he had as good a claim to the throne as any Julio-Claudian could hope for. His mother, Agrippina, was the daughter of Julia, and so the granddaughter of Augustus in his direct bloodline. His father, Germanicus – once tipped as a future emperor before his early, and predictably suspicious, death – was both a grandson of Livia and a great-nephew of Augustus. It was thanks to his parents that Gaius ended up with the embarrassing nickname Caligula (‘Bootikins’), by which he is now better known. They had taken him as a young child on military campaigns and dressed him up in a miniature soldier’s uniform, including some trademark miniature army boots (caligae in Latin).

  68. This bust presents Gaius in military guise, wearing an elaborate breastplate. Around his head is a wreath of oak-leaves, the corona civica (or civic crown), traditionally awarded to Romans who saved the lives of their fellow citizens in battle.

  His assassination, after just four years on the throne, by three soldiers from the Praetorian Guard, was as bloody and messy as Caesar’s. In the ancient world, murder was rarely possible from a safe distance. Killing usually meant getting up close and often spilling a lot of blood. As both Caesar and Gaius found, anyone in power was most at risk from those who were allowed to come closest to them: from wives and children, bodyguards, colleagues, friends and slaves. Yet the contrast between the two assassinations is striking too, and a sign of changed times between the Republic and the rule of the emperors. It was fellow senators who stabbed Caesar, at a public meeting, in full view, as they were presenting a petition. Gaius was hacked to pieces at home, all alone in a deserted corridor, by some of the crack troops who were supposed to ensure the regime’s home security. And when his wife came with her baby daughter to find the body, they too were eliminated.

  The emperor, Josephus explains, had been watching some performances on the Palatine Hill at the annual festival held there in memory of the first Augustus, timed to coincide with the wedding anniversary of the first imperial couple. At the end of the morning’s show, he decided to skip lunch – another version claims that he was feeling slightly nauseous after overindulging the night before – and to go on his own from the theatre to his private baths. As he walked down a passage between two of the properties that were part of the growing ‘palace complex’ (already far more extensive than Augustus’ relatively modest accommodation), the three praetorians, NCOs in our terms, attacked him. A personal grudge reputedly drove the leader, Cassius Chaerea. He had often acted as the emperor’s agent, torturer and enforcer, but Gaius in return is supposed to have repeatedly and publicly mocked his effeminacy (‘girlie’ was one of the favourite taunts). This was Chaerea’s revenge.

  There may also have been some higher principles driving the plot and more widespread support for it among soldiers and senators. Or so the many stories told of Gaius’ villainies suggest. His incest with his sisters and his mad plans to make his horse a consul have become notorious. His vanity building projects have been placed somewhere on the spectrum between an affront to the laws of nature and ludicrous display. (Imagine him, as more than one ancient writer pictures the scene, prancing on horseback along a roadway constructed on top of a bridge of boats across the Bay of Naples, wearing the breastplate of Alexander the Great …) His valiant soldiers were disgracefully humiliated by being made to hunt for seas
hells on a French beach. And his gleeful menace directed at the long-suffering Roman aristocracy became legendary. On one famous occasion he was caught bursting into laughter at a palace dinner party when he was reclining next to the two consuls. ‘What’s the joke?’ one asked politely. ‘Just the thought that I would only have to nod and your throats would be cut on the spot,’ came the reply. Someone else would have wielded the knife if Chaerea had not.

  Whatever the exact motives for the assassination, however, this was a new politics: a hit squad operating behind closed doors and a dynastic murder that demanded that the victim’s immediate family should share his fate. No one had gone after Julius Caesar’s wife. It also revealed that, despite Augustus’ largely successful attempts to remove the Roman legions from politics, the few soldiers stationed in the city could wield an enormous amount of power if they chose. In 41 CE it was not just that a group of disaffected praetorians killed one emperor; the Praetorian Guard immediately installed his successor. The emperor’s most intimate personal bodyguard, a small private militia of Germans, chosen because their barbarity was thought to be a guarantee against corruption, also played a bloody part in what happened next.

  As soon as news of the murder leaked out, the Germans proved their brutal, thuggish loyalty. They ran through the Palatine, killing anyone they suspected of involvement in the plot. One senator was slaughtered because his toga was splattered with animal blood from a religious sacrifice earlier in the day, which gave the impression that he might have been involved in the emperor’s killing. And they terrorised the people who were still mingling in the theatre after the emperor had left. These remnants of the audience were barricaded in, until a kindly doctor intervened. He had come there to treat those who had been wounded in the aftermath of the assassination, and he engineered the evacuation of the innocent bystanders by sending them off on the pretext of picking up medical supplies.

  Meanwhile, the senate met in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, the great symbolic monument of the Republic, and exchanged fine words about the end of political slavery and the return of liberty. It was a hundred years, they calculated, since freedom had been lost – presumably thinking that the deal arranged in 60 BCE by Pompey, Caesar and Crassus, as the Gang of Three, was the turning point – and so it was a particularly auspicious moment to reclaim it. The consul Gnaeus Sentius Saturninus delivered the most stirring speech. He was too young, he admitted, to remember the Republic, but he had seen with his own eyes ‘the evils with which tyrannies fill the state’. A new dawn had come with the murder of Gaius: ‘No despot is set over you now who can get away with ruining the city … what recently nurtured the tyranny was nothing other than our inaction … Weakened by the pleasure of peace we learned to live like slaves … Our first duty now is to give the highest possible honours to those who have killed the tyrant.’ This sounded impressive but proved hollow. All the time Saturninus spoke, he was wearing his usual signet ring, which loyally featured the head of Gaius. One observer, spotting the inconsistency between the words and the jewellery, went up and tore it off his finger.

  The whole performance was in any case too late. The Praetorian Guard, who had a low view of the capabilities of the senate and no desire to return to the Republic, had already picked a new emperor. The story was that, terrified by the violence and commotion, Gaius’ uncle the fifty-year-old Claudius had hidden himself down another dark alley. But he was quickly discovered by the praetorians and, though fearing he too was about to be killed, was hailed as emperor instead. His blood relationship with Livia and Augustus made him as plausible a candidate as anyone, and he was conveniently on the spot.

  Edgy negotiations, careful publicity and awkward decisions followed. Claudius gave each of the praetorians a vast handout: ‘the first emperor to use bribery to secure the loyalty of the soldiers’, carped the biographer Suetonius, as if Augustus had not done much the same thing. The senators gave up any idea of Republican liberty and were soon demanding no more than that Claudius should formally accept the throne from them, while most of them quickly scuttled off to the safety of their country estates. Instead of receiving ‘the highest possible honours’, Chaerea and one of his fellow assassins were executed, the new emperor’s advisors sternly arguing that, while the deed had been a glorious one, disloyalty should nevertheless be punished to discourage any repetition. Claudius continued to claim that he was a reluctant ruler, thrust into power against his will. Maybe that was true, but a parade of reluctance has often provided a useful cover for ruthless ambition. It was not long before sculptors across the Roman world were going with the times and were busy recarving redundant portraits of Gaius to give them passable versions of the features of his old uncle, the new emperor.

  These events are a vivid snapshot of the politics of Roman autocracy almost thirty years after the death of Augustus. The senate’s ineffective posturing over the restoration of the Republic serves only to prove that the old system of government was gone for good, little more than a nostalgic fantasy conjured up by those who had never experienced it. As Josephus hints, anyone who could loudly advocate a return to Republican rule while sporting the emperor’s portrait on his ring did not understand what Republican rule was about. The confusion and violence that followed the assassination not only shows how easy it was for a peaceful morning of theatrical performance to turn into a bloodbath but also points to all kinds of different political views between senate, soldiers and ordinary people. The majority of the rich and privileged were celebrating the death of a tyrant. The poor were instead lamenting the murder of their hero. Josephus singles out for scorn the folly of the women, children and slaves who ‘were reluctant to accept the truth’ and joyfully believed the false rumours that Gaius had been patched up and was walking around the Forum. It is clear enough that those who were pleased to see him out of the way did not agree on what should happen next. Many more did not want to see their emperor assassinated at all.

  Those differences of opinion challenge orthodoxies and raise some bigger historical questions. Was Gaius really as monstrous as he has been consistently painted? Had the ordinary people, as Josephus suggests, been taken in by an emperor reputed to make extravagantly generous gestures to the crowds – on one occasion, it was said, standing on top of a building in the Forum and literally throwing money down at the bystanders? Maybe they had. But there are some strong reasons to be suspicious about many of the standard tales of Gaius’ wickedness that have we have inherited.

  69. The slightly awkward appearance of this portrait of Claudius, especially in the hair, is due to an identity change. A head of Gaius has been recut into a head of his successor. It is a nice symbol of the erasure of the previous regime, while also hinting that there was less difference between individuals than we like to think.

  Some of these tales are simply implausible. Leaving aside his histrionics in the Bay of Naples, could he really have built a huge bridge in Rome from the Palatine Hill to the Capitoline Hill of which no sure trace remains? Almost all our stories were written years after the emperor’s death, and the most extravagant look weaker the more they are examined. The one about the seashells may well go back to a confusion around the Latin word musculi, which can mean both ‘shells’ and ‘military huts’. Were the soldiers actually dismantling a temporary camp and not on a shell hunt? And the first surviving reference to incest is found only at the end of the first century CE, while the clearest evidence for it seems to be his deep distress at the death of his sister Drusilla, which is hardly clinching proof of sexual relations. The idea of some modern writers that his dinner parties came close to orgies, with his sisters ‘underneath’ him and his wife ‘on top’, rests simply on a mistranslation of the words of Suetonius, who is referring to the place settings – ‘above’ and ‘below’ – at a Roman dining table.

  It would be naive to imagine that Gaius was an innocent and benevolent ruler, horribly misunderstood or consistently misrepresented. But it is hard to resist the conclusion th
at, whatever kernel of truth they might have, the stories told about him are an inextricable mixture of fact, exaggeration, wilful misinterpretation and outright invention – largely constructed after his death, and largely for the benefit of the new emperor, Claudius, whose legitimacy on the throne depended partly on the idea that his predecessor had been rightly eliminated. As it was in the interests of Augustus to vilify Antony so it was in the interests of the Claudian regime, and of those under the new emperor who wanted to distance themselves from the old, to pile abuse on Gaius, whatever the truth. To put it another way, Gaius may have been assassinated because he was a monster, but it is equally possible that he was made into a monster because he was assassinated.

  But suppose – ignoring all suspicions – that the stories are entirely accurate, that the ordinary people had been merely gullible and that Rome had been under the rule of a mad sadist somewhere between a clinical psychopath and a Stalin. The truth is that, beyond making it absolutely clear that emperors had become a permanent fixture, the killing of Gaius had no significant impact on the long history of imperial rule at all. That was one thing the assassins of 41 CE had in common with the assassins of 44 BCE, who killed one autocrat (Julius Caesar) only to end up with another (Augustus). For all the excitement generated by the murder of Gaius, the suspense, the uncertainty of the moment and the flirtation with Republicanism, as brief as it was unrealistic, the end result was another emperor on the throne who was not all that unlike the one he had replaced. Claudius may have had a better and far more bookish posthumous reputation than Gaius; for it was not so obviously in the interests of his adopted son and successor, Nero, to damn his memory. But scratch the surface, and he too has a grim record of cruelty and criminality (35 senators, out of a total of about 600, and 300 equestrians put to death during his rule, according to one ancient tally), and he filled the same slot in the Roman power structure.