Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  The state terror reached a new intensity. Tiberius, old, paranoid and isolated, was easily persuaded of the guilt of suspects. Macro and his protégé – Tiberius’s nephew and prospective successor, the young Gaius Caligula – were determined to maintain their dominance through the short period of life remaining to the emperor. Their mechanism of power was the treason trial. Informers (delatores) were encouraged to come forward and denounce suspects for ‘diminishing the majesty of the Roman People’ (maiestas minuta). This vague, catch-all, essentially meaningless charge was used to destroy a succession of prominent figures, the example serving to intimidate other potential opponents. Great state trials continued through the remaining six years of the reign, a grinding machine of terror to shore up Tiberius’s principate, Macro’s ascendancy, and Caligula’s succession. At the end, even the tyrant himself may have fallen victim to his agent’s bloody rule. He died at Misenum on the Bay of Naples during an occasional visit to the mainland. Tacitus reports foul play. The story goes that after the emperor’s apparent death Caligula’s succession had been announced, but that Tiberius had promptly rallied and ordered a meal. ‘There was a general panic-stricken dispersal. Every face was composed to show grief – or lack of awareness. Only Gaius stood in stupefied silence, his soaring hopes dashed, expecting the worst. Macro, unperturbed, ordered the old man to be smothered with a heap of bed-clothes and left alone.’(5)

  Caligula was an inexperienced and mentally unstable young man. He owed his elevation – and early popularity – to his Julio-Claudian ancestry, being great-nephew of Tiberius, and great step-grandson of Augustus. His father Germanicus and grandfather Drusus had both been famous generals. Tiberius had been hated at the end, the terror casting a pall over official Rome, and the beginning of the new reign was celebrated with general enthusiasm. Yet Caligula’s madness soon revealed itself. The contradiction between supreme power and personal insecurity quickly unhinged the ruler. Seriously ill in 37 BC, Caligula was disconcerted to discover that the business of government had continued perfectly well without him. Macro, his leading minister, fell under suspicion and was struck down. Other high-ranking courtiers were also purged. The court was filled with a coterie of aristocratic youth and celebrities of stage and stadium – nonentities whose presence would not expose the young emperor’s inexperience and inadequacies. A series of flamboyant public events was organized – such as a military parade, led by Caligula dressed as Alexander the Great, which passed along a 5 km bridge of boats specially constructed for the purpose on the Bay of Naples. The ruling class – largely excluded from this travesty of government – was quickly alienated. Matters came to crisis-point in AD 39. Though details are obscure, it seems that Caligula faced a major plot, since we hear that both consuls were sacked and replaced by stooges, and that there were changes in military commands and several forced suicides. Among the victims of the purge were Caligula’s brother-in-law and remaining sisters, and the Governors of Pannonia and Upper Germany, both big military provinces.

  It must have dawned on Caligula that gestures were not enough to secure the allegiance of the governing class; the emperor had to prove himself fit to rule by real achievement. So Caligula planned a great campaign in the north, first to cow the German tribes and stabilize the Rhine frontier, then to conquer Britain. Though he came from a family of great soldiers, Caligula yet lacked military accomplishments of his own. Great victories in the North would restore his battered public image.

  The campaign was a disaster. Though Caligula’s generals won limited gains in Germany, the emperor was disgraced by personal cowardice, having to be passed to the rear over the heads of his soldiers at news of the enemy’s imminent approach. Later, on the Channel coast, either the emperor lost his nerve entirely, or the soldiers, having no confidence in their leader, mutinied and refused to embark. Whatever the cause, instead of invading Britain, Caligula’s soldiers were ordered to collect seashells on the shore, and these were sent back to Rome as spoils of a victory over Neptune.

  In the winter of AD 40–41 a great plot formed to destroy the regime. Though most senators remained cravenly inert, a minority feared the damage to the empire and was prepared to act to restore good government. Many more probably knew of the plot but kept their silence. It was the army, though, that was decisive, especially men of the imperial bodyguard, whose adherence would maximize the chances of successful assassination. Caligula’s arrogance, bullying and unpredictability had eroded the support of even his own police-chiefs – the prefects and tribunes of the Praetorian Guard – who were left fearful for their own safety. Other leading courtiers were also among the active conspirators. The rot had, in fact, eaten into the narrow coterie of family and friends around the ruler. Caligula sensed the danger. For three months after his return from the North he refused to enter the capital, instead issuing a string of alarming statements, threatening violent retribution on his enemies, offering himself as emperor of equestrians and people in opposition to the senators, and, perhaps most worrying of all, announcing that he had become a god. Late in AD 40 he launched a minor purge, but the regime’s security apparatus was degrading, and only marginal figures were destroyed; the core of the conspiracy remained undetected. In late January AD 41, when Caligula retired from his seat at the Palatine Games to lunch and bathe, he was attacked in the tunnels beneath his palace by a group of army officers led by two tribunes of the Guard and hacked to death. Thus Caligula, as the historian Dio Cassius dryly observed, discovered by actual experience that he was not a god after all.

  At first there was pandemonium. Someone dispatched a death-squad to kill the empress and her daughter. On the other hand, the emperor’s German bodyguard went berserk, killed several senators in the games stadium, and seemed poised for a general massacre; only with difficulty were they restrained as city officials began to assert control. Fearful of general disorder, the consuls summoned the Senate to emergency session on the Capitoline, moved the city treasures there, and mobilized the Urban Cohorts to provide a defensive cordon. As debate began, some urged the restoration of libertas (liberty: the collective rule of the senatorial elite). The terror of Tiberius and the madness of Caligula had breached the central Augustan principle of polite deceit that was supposed to govern relations between princeps and Senate. The ten years preceding the coup of AD 41 had revealed tyranny behind the façade of Republicanism. The fear engendered made libertas an attractive option. Others, however, rallied around the rival candidatures of different senators, pursuing the self-interested factionalism now inherent in the Roman political system. The session became rancorous and inconclusive as it ground on into the night. It also became increasingly irrelevant, for the embryonic senatorial state on the Capitoline Hill was confronted by an alternative embryonic court on the other side of the city.

  The Praetorian Guard had found Claudius – uncle of Caligula, nephew of Tiberius, step-grandson of Augustus – hiding in the palace, recognized him, and carried him off to their barracks. His presence was the occasion for another great debate on the future government of Rome, this time a debate not of politicians but of soldiers, indeed of guardsmen, the most pampered of the emperor’s soldiers, enjoying easy conditions of service, high pay, generous donatives, and all the amenities and comforts of the capital city. These privileges were inextricably bound up with Julio-Claudian power: the Praetorians were creatures of Caesarian patronage. Claudius, the senior surviving male member of the imperial house, being the best candidate for emperor available, the Praetorian Guard ended their assembly by acclaiming a new princeps.

  For a while, the farce continued. On one side of the city, an assembly of millionaires and career politicians, protected by a thin cordon of riot police, bickered over which of their self-interested cliques should form a government. On the other, several thousand hired thugs guarded an obscure middle-aged aristocrat as a growing trickle of supporters and sycophants arrived to pay homage. But it did not last long. Power flowed through the night from Senate to court. A
s news spread, the Caesarian mob rallied to the Julio-Claudian, the place-seekers headed for the barracks, and the cordon of outnumbered police around the Capitoline broke up, fearing a clash with the Guard. In the light of morning, their semblance of power dissolved, a gloomy little party of politicians and officers made its way across the city to concede defeat. Claudius was carried in triumph to the imperial palace on the Palatine. The coup of AD 41 had ended in Julio-Claudian victory. After Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, it had taken eight years to crush Republicanism. After Caligula’s, it took just 24 hours.

  The victor was a portly, twitching, stammering, somewhat debauched intellectual, who had been denied a conventional political and military career by his snobbish family because they were embarrassed by his ‘physical and mental deficiency’ (in fact, though we cannot be sure, Claudius probably suffered from cerebral palsy). Wrongly assumed to be stupid, relatively inexperienced and unknown, Claudius was easily caricatured by his enemies as a fool. Furthermore, he had now become the willing tool of insurgent soldiers, a figurehead ruler whose power rested on the naked coercion of an intimidated Senate. He was both Claudius the Fool and Claudius the Usurper. The new regime’s spin-doctors had work to do. The danger became apparent the following year, when dissident senators and generals hatched a plot to bring one of the huge legionary armies stationed in the Balkans to Rome. The soldiers refused to march, and the coup collapsed after five days. Snatch-squads rounded up suspects. There were show-trials in the Senate. Bodies were dumped in the Tiber. All told, during Claudius’s 13-year reign, 35 senators and 321 equestrians were executed for treason. His court was filled with equestrians, freedmen, provincials and others of secondary status whose loyalty could be trusted. Claudius rested uneasy on his throne, hated by many of his peers as a mediocrity and tyrant presiding over a regime of upstarts. It is for this reason that Claudius was both ‘the last of the populares’ and also conqueror of Britain.

  Claudius bought popularity in the old-fashioned way. He paid the Praetorian Guard a donative of up to 5,000 denarii per man (Caligula had paid just 500). The rest of the army received a donative totalling almost 200 million denarii – virtually an entire year’s tax revenue. The mob was bribed with cash handouts, grain doles, public-works programmes, and gladiatorial games. All this largesse drained the treasuries. The cost of Caesarian populism had traditionally been met by war booty, however, and war was precisely what Claudius’s advisors proposed; and not only for the booty – also to legitimize the new principate, inspire party loyalists, and marginalize the malcontents and would-be plotters.

  Britain was the obvious target. The expansion of the Catuvellaunian kingdom in the south east – at the expense of a Roman client-king – provided a handy casus belli. Caligula’s officers had already done the staff-work – for the abortive invasion of AD 40. Britain was mysterious, dangerous, ‘beyond Ocean’, and in some sense unfinished business ever since the expeditions of Julius Caesar a century before. While an invasion of Britain was probably less risky than war in the East or in Germany, it could none the less be presented to the public otherwise: as one of the greatest of Roman military achievements. Also, the island was rich enough to subsidize Claudius’s largesse.

  The invasion was, as predicted, a spectacular success. Aulus Plautius and 40,000 men were landed in the early summer of AD 43. Shortly afterwards they won a two-day pitched battle against Caratacus and the main field army of the Catuvellaunian kingdom. Claudius then arrived in person to head the triumphal entry into the enemy capital at Camulodunum (Colchester) and receive the surrender of 11 British kings. It was, says Barbara Levick, Claudius’s modern biographer, ‘the greatest event of his reign’ and ‘one of his prime claims to rule, as his systematic exploitation of it shows’.(6) There were celebrations in Rome in AD 43 when news of the victory first reached the capital; more when Claudius arrived home in AD 44, having toured the western provinces on the way; and yet more when Aulus Plautius returned in AD 47, when the city boundary was extended in commemoration in AD 49, and finally when the captured British leader Caratacus was paraded through the streets of the city in AD 51.

  Otherwise, on the frontiers, Claudian policy was conservative. It was the policy of the late Augustus and of Tiberius: to eschew further conquests, consolidate the frontiers, assimilate new subjects. Caligula and Claudius had broken with this policy in relation to Britain, but in both cases they were motivated not by strategy but by the political insecurity of their respective regimes. Once Claudius the Fool-Usurper had transformed himself into Claudius the Conqueror, he reverted to the policy of imperial retrenchment. The power of the empire was in part mirage. It appeared invulnerable and all-conquering. This appearance – what imperial statesmen sometimes call ‘prestige’ – was vital to its security. But in truth it had reached the limits of its capacity for expansion. Campaigns were sometimes undertaken to straighten, shorten and otherwise strengthen existing frontiers, but even these were capable of provoking intractable resistance. Tacfarinas, a Numidian who had deserted from Roman auxiliary service, led a long guerrilla war in North Africa between AD 17 and 24. The reasons are obscure, but the disruption of traditional nomadic migration routes by Roman frontier operations may have been one of them. Heavy Roman taxation could also provoke revolt, as in Gaul under Florus and Sacrovir in AD 21, where again leadership was provided by elements in the Romanized elite who had been alienated by their erstwhile masters. Tiberius urged moderation upon imperial governors, aspiring to have his ‘sheep shorn, not flayed’; but on the ground, where tax-collectors, recruiting officers, loan-sharks and slave-dealers battened on to the provinces under the protection of the Roman army, the reality was often very different. Rome ruled through fear. Fear was instilled by ‘prestige’: the conviction of the victims that the imperial state had the power to crush them if they fought back. And prestige depended upon victory. Military adventures beyond the frontier risked defeat, a haemorrhaging of men, a denting of prestige. Super-exploitation risked revolt, a diverting of men to internal security, an overextended army. The Claudian invasion of Britain was an anomaly, therefore, one driven by political necessity, not a wholesale return to the glory days of Pompey and Caesar.

  Claudius ruled Britain, but not his own court. The dominant factions there were headed by two successive wives. The first, Messallina, was about 16 when she married the middle-aged Claudius shortly before his accession. She produced a son in AD 41, later named Britannicus, an obvious potential heir to the throne. But Messallina was a naïve, ambitious and reckless schemer, who eventually overreached herself. Though the events of her downfall are hard to decipher, she appears to have taken part in some sort of ‘marriage’ to her lover, and whether this was a prank or an attempted coup, it was certainly used by her enemies at court to destroy her. The couple were arrested and summarily executed by leading freedman Narcissus and a detachment of the Guard. Claudius’s second wife, Agrippina, more mature and subtle but no less scheming than the first, manoeuvred to displace Britannicus in favour of her own son by a previous marriage, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. Claudius was persuaded to adopt Ahenobarbus – who thus became Nero Claudius Caesar – and to marry him to Messallina’s daughter Octavia. Having consolidated her faction’s power by forming an alliance with Burrus, Prefect of the Praetorian Guard, and fearing that Nero’s hedonistic character might cause her husband second thoughts, Agrippina had no further use for Claudius. It is rumoured she murdered him by serving up a plate of poisoned mushrooms.

  Nero was 16 when he became emperor, and for the first eight years of his reign the government was controlled by his former tutor Seneca, a Romano-Hispanic senator and intellectual, and Burrus, the Romano-Gallic equestrian who commanded the Guard. Both men were competent. Relations with the governing class were good. Appointments were not restricted to a narrow clique. There were no state trials of senators or equestrians between AD 54 and 62. But in the latter year Burrus died, Seneca retired, and Nero assumed personal responsibility for governm
ent. Few men elevated to such high office have been less suited. Nero was a vain, hedonistic, upper-class playboy with a distinctly psychotic personality. His relationship with his mother was probably incestuous and certainly highly charged. When she spitefully transferred her affections to Britannicus, Nero had his rival murdered at the dinner table. When she continued to scheme – or because he imagined she did – mother and son became increasingly estranged, until finally, in AD 59, Nero dispatched a death-squad to bludgeon her to death in the family villa on the Bay of Naples. When he assumed power in AD 62, he divorced his wife Octavia (who was later exiled and then executed) and married his mistress Poppaea Sabina (whom he would also later kill). At the same time he promoted Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus to command of the Praetorian Guard in place of Burrus. These three – Nero, Poppaea and Tigellinus – headed an all-powerful court faction devoted to private indulgence and public spectacles. The degradation of government was symbolized by Nero’s personal addiction to the games and his ambition to win acclaim as an artist. His appearances culminated in AD 67, when, during a tour of Greece, all four major games festivals were celebrated in the same year, and the emperor was awarded all 800 prizes. The tactfulness of the Greeks was amply rewarded: imperial taxation was abolished in their province.