by Paul L Maier
“But for the few who achieve greatness,” he told Procula, “every man arrives at that point in life where he must come to terms with the fact that history will pass him by. For those with little ambition, that point comes early, so they can adjust to it with the easy resiliency of youth. Yet I aspired; that point was postponed in my life. But now I’ve reached it. And I’m not young. Accepting that realization now is difficult, terribly difficult.”
“Is it that important, Pilate, having history recognize you?”
“It is, I think. It’s the only thing which ultimately gives life a larger dimension, the one factor which finally affords it some meaning. You will have existed for more generations than merely your own. You will have affected the future, perhaps altered it for the better.”
“Why isn’t this generation enough, Pilate? It certainly is for me.”
“You’re a woman, Procula.”
“Which by definition excludes us from greatness,” she jibed. “But your life is far from over. You’re only fifty, and some of the greatest achievements in Roman politics and culture were fashioned by men older than you.”
Pilate failed to relish such consolation. While he appreciated Procula’s efforts, he resented the new circumstances which occasioned them.
Some weeks passed, and he began struggling more successfully with his problem of adjustment. But just when he was becoming reconciled to leaving the center stage of politics, something would remind him of his now-peripheral status and reopen the wound. At the end of August, for example, the Temple of the Divine Augustus was dedicated at Rome amid much pageantry. The hymn of consecration was sung by a mass choir of boys and girls from the noblest families. There was a public feast and two days of spectacles. There were horse races, gladiatorial combats which saw eight hundred bears and lions slaughtered, and finally a circuit of the hippodrome by Caligula himself, six horses drawing his triumphal chariot arid frenzied cheering by the adoring people of Rome. But even though his equestrian rank permitted him to sit in the lowest fourteen rows as spectator at these events, Pilate’s name had been omitted from the list of official invitations. It symbolized his divorce from Roman public life.
A month later, Rome was shocked to learn that the emperor was almost at the point of death. Never in fully robust health, Caligula had suffered a complete nervous breakdown which, with other complications, made palace physicians despair of his life. All Rome was tormented with apprehension at losing the popular young princeps, who had reigned but six months. Temples were besieged with suppliants. Some threatened the gods. A commoner offered to exchange his own life for the emperor’s if he recovered, while an equestrian swore he would fight in the arena as the lowest gladiator. Such devotion, of course, would not fail to impress the princeps if he survived.
Caligula did recover and was moved indeed. He called for the equestrian with gladiatorial ambitions and packed him off to the arena, where he had to battle and beg for his life. Then he located the poor pleb who had vowed to offer his life for the emperor’s and inquired why the man was still alive. Caligula had him wreathed and garlanded as if for sacrifice, paraded through the city, and finally pitched to his death from the Tarpeian Rock.
Rome thought this conduct somewhat strange, but she would see far stranger antics from Caligula from now on. Apparently, the illness had unhinged his mind. One day, Pilate returned from the Forum where he had gathered the latest word on the princeps, and told Procula: “Rome had an emperor; now she has a monster.”
Perhaps due to some faulty gene in the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the monster had been lurking in Caligula even before his breakdown, though his better qualities had usually kept the beast well chained. Still, there had been earlier symptoms, and Pilate began piecing the stories together. On Capri he had shown definite traces of megalomania and cruelty. His grandmother Antonia had also caught him at incest with one of his sisters, and though later it was Antonia who saved his life by exposing Sejanus’s conspiracy, Caligula had not bothered to attend her funeral in early May, merely viewing her flaming pyre from the comfort of his dining room. His hearing on the Palatine showed Pilate that even the emperor’s better moods were capable of caprice. But after his illness, the benign part of Caligula succumbed to the new role he was creating for himself as Oriental despot.
The man had had no training to rule. Unlike Tiberius, he had never commanded any armies, and had little experience in public office. Now, with the adoring world at his feet, the young princeps’ head was permanently turned, and he became intoxicated with power. He began by lashing out against those closest to him. His potential rival, the teenage Gemellus, was put to death because his breath smelled of an antidote, Caligula claimed. The temerity of the fellow—assuming that the emperor was trying to poison him! The luckless Gemellus had only taken cough medicine for a chronic cold.
Macro, the praetorian prefect, made the mistake of continually reminding Caligula how much he owed to him, so Macro and his wife and children were all forced to commit suicide. The news staggered Pilate, since only a few months earlier he had seen him basking in the princeps’ favor.
Anything was permitted in the private life of the “Greatest and Best of Caesars,” as he now liked to be styled. He lived in habitual incest with his sisters, but was capable of love beyond the family. At the wedding banquet of a friend, he carried the bride away from the table to his own palace, “divorcing” her a few days later. He recognized Caesonia as his third wife only after she had borne him a baby girl. Caligula said he was sure of the parentage, because the baby had a savage temper and regularly tried to scratch out the eyes of children who played with her.
Pilate learned many of the grotesque stories firsthand, since his old friend Cassius Chaerea was a praetorian tribune assigned to the Palatine. It was with Chaerea that Pilate had guzzled wine the night of his dismissal from government service. Lately, the tribune was spending many an evening at Pilate’s home, reporting on Caligula with obvious loathing and congratulating Pilate on his lucky escape from immediate contact with “Crazy Boots,” as he had slightly adjusted the emperor’s name.
Predictably, Caligula soon showed contempt for the Senate. Interviews with senators were usually conducted with them trotting alongside his chariot, their togas flapping in the breeze until the business was concluded. Others played sycophant and waited on him hand and foot.
“Remember that I have the right to do anything to anybody,” he once told Antonia, and his reign became a studied effort to demonstrate that claim. He now launched a program of private executions of senators and equestrians, which were carried out by graduated woundings “so that the victim may feel he is dying.” Final decapitations often took place before Caligula while he was lunching. Procula was so horrified at such reports that Pilate now sent her out of the room whenever Cassius Chaerea arrived with his latest brace of stories.
The only way commoners escaped the imperial vengeance was by their sheer numbers. Once at the races, the rabble deliberately cheered the red faction rather than Caligula’s beloved greens. “I wish the people had but a single neck,” he growled. Then he ordered the awnings over the top edges of the hippodrome drawn back so that the plebes would bake in the sun for their perversity.
Caligula had now reached an ultimate stage of megalomania by laying serious claim to his own divinity. Julius Caesar and Augustus had been deified after their deaths, but this was taken seriously only in the East, where the idea of a ruler cult originated. Most practical Romans regarded their “deified” emperors only as quasi-saints. But Caligula insisted on a more literal interpretation, and he wanted his deity in this life where he could enjoy it. He now deigned to be worshiped personally in the Temple of Castor and Pollux at appointed hours, taking his place between the divine brothers. Later he erected a separate temple to his own godhead, which housed a life-sized statue of himself in gold. Each day, his priesthood dressed the statue in clothing identical to Caligula’s own costume for the day. His favorite horse he appointed a
s high priest of his cult and enrolled it in the Senate. And since he was having so many god-to-god conversations with Jupiter, he had a special bridge constructed from his palace to the deity’s temple on the Capitoline to facilitate their communication.
Pilate watched the moral deterioration of the emperor with a strange mixture of horror and consolation. Like any normal citizen, he was aghast at the enormities of the man who was supposed to symbolize Rome. But he no longer felt sorry for himself at being dismissed from government service. In the unfathomable irony of the times, that dismissal had been his salvation. The powerful Macro had gone the way of Sejanus, as had others in positions to which Pilate at one time aspired. Under the new Caligula, security could be found only in anonymity. Pilate thanked Fate for having permitted his hearing to take place before the princeps’ breakdown. His one continuing prayer now was simply that Caligula should forget him. He and Procula made it a rule never to attend public or social functions at which the emperor might see them from any proximity.
Pilate’s cousin, the ex-consul Pontius Nigrinus, could not find such refuge under the welcome blanket of privacy. He told Pilate that each banquet with Caligula was a personal crisis. Recently the princeps suddenly broke out laughing uproariously at a dinner party, and the new consuls who were reclining at his sides asked him what was so funny. “I just happened to think,” Caligula explained, “just a nod of my head and both your throats would be cut on the spot. Aha! Ahahaha!”
In the summer of 38, the princeps finally let his close friend and adviser Agrippa return to Palestine in order to assume his kingdom. Agrippa had become rather odious in Rome as Caligula’s “trainer-in-tyranny,” though he was hardly responsible for his insanity. But Pilate was greatly relieved to have Agrippa out of Italy, for he represented Palestine to Caligula, and Palestine might remind him of a recent ex-prefect.
Letters from Cornelius in Caesarea kept Pilate and Procula well-informed on events in Judea. He was recently promoted to tribune, the ex-centurion reported happily, but something far more significant had happened to him, something too difficult to put into writing just now. Meanwhile, Pilate’s good friends Herod Antipas and Herodias were en route to Rome, Cornelius added. Herodias, it seems, was so furiously jealous that her brother Agrippa should have left Palestine a homeless debtor and returned as a king that she had hounded her husband to seek a similar fortune in Rome. At first Antipas would have none of it, since he was mellowing in his old age, Cornelius wrote. But finally he succumbed to his wife’s ambitious urgings and they were now going to appeal to Caligula to confer the title of king also on Antipas and extend his territories.
“The foolish sheep,” Pilate jested to Procula. “They don’t know the lion waiting for them in Rome, or the wolf who is now licking his chops in Palestine. How could Antipas play into Agrippa’s hands like that?”
“And to think they used to call him The Fox,” commented Procula, to keep the menagerie intact.
“Deliver us, Jupiter, from scheming and ambitious women!” Pilate prayed with mock solemnity.
“Just so Agrippa doesn’t try to involve you before Caligula in any countermove to stop Antipas.”
“I don’t think he’ll have to. Agrippa has the emperor’s ear like no one else in the Empire.”
Several months passed without any further news of Antipas’s mission. Overcome by curiosity, Pilate went to see his friend Cassius Chaerea, who had just returned from a tour of duty guarding the emperor at Baiae, a luxurious spa on the Bay of Naples where Caligula had been taking the hot baths.
“Have I heard anything about the tetrarch of Galilee paying Caligula a visit?” Chaerea smiled. “Do you mean a Herod and a Herodias?”
“Yes. Herod Antipas.”
“What a shambles! They arrived at Puteoli and caught the princeps while he was still at Baiae. Herod told his story, how he was more fit to be king than Agrippa, and all the time Caligula was reading Agrippa’s long letter of indictment against his brother-in-law, which had just been delivered. It merely accused Herod of disloyalty, ineptitude, conspiracy with Sejanus, and treasonable alliance with the Parthians against Rome. As proof, Agrippa wrote, Herod’s armories bulged with weapons and equipment enough for 70,000 troops.”
“What!”
“Yes. That was Caligula’s reaction. He asked Herod about the contents of his armory, and he was unable to deny the size of his arsenal. Then and there Caligula stripped him of his tetrarchy and all his property—”
“And awarded it all to Agrippa,” supplied Pilate.
“Right. Then he condemned Herod to perpetual exile in Gaul.”
“What about Herodias?”
“When Caligula learned that she was sister to his beloved Agrippa, he offered to let her keep her property and live in freedom apart from Herod.”
“Which she did, of course.”
“No. I thought she would, too. But she told the princeps, ‘Loyalty to my husband prevents my accepting your kind offer. When I have shared his prosperity, it’s not right that I should abandon him in adversity.’ So now they’re both in exile.”
“Imagine, at the end, nobility in Herodias.”
Caligula made another sweeping change in the East when he recalled Vitellius from his post as governor of Syria. Pilate thought it one of the emperor’s few enlightened measures, since he had never forgiven Vitellius for the high-handed manner in which he suspended him from office. Because of his successes in the East, Vitellius had incurred Caligula’s jealousy, and it was only by the most groveling tears and servility before the princeps that he was able to save his own life. Later, when Caligula asked the chastened ex-governor if he could see the Moon in bed with him, Vitellius replied with slavish tact, “No, Master. Only you gods are able to see one another.”
But the lover of the immaterial Moon certainly knew how to spend very material cash. Caligula now grew as prodigal with the sesterce as Tiberius had been frugal. Chaerea disgustedly told Pilate of the worst example. The astrologer Thrasyllus had once predicted that Caligula had no more chance of becoming emperor than of driving a team of horses across the Gulf of Baiae. So, at vast expenditure, Caligula bridged the three and one-half miles of water between Puteoli and Baiae by lashing together a double line of merchant ships and heaping a roadbed of dirt across their decks. Then, mounted on his favorite steed and resplendent in the armor of Alexander the Great, Caligula rode back and forth across the new bridge to the compulsory cheers of throngs on both ends. The next day he repeated the trip in a chariot, followed by the Praetorian Guard. Having rescued the veracity of the dead Thrasyllus in this bizarre fashion, he ordered the bridge dismantled as a hazard to navigation.
“The damnable fool!” Chaerea swore at the end of his story. “What did Rome do to deserve such a maniac?” Pilate started giving some serious thought to the possibility of emigration.
The bridge, and such other necessary projects as a private navy of jeweled pleasure barges, squandered in one year the imperial treasury of 2,700,000,000 sesterces which Tiberius had patiently amassed during his entire administration. In order to replenish his funds, Caligula began pillaging the populace by various means, all illegal. Once he even resorted to auctioning off the furniture of Augustus and Tiberius at enforced astronomical bids. But it was Procula who heard the best story. At another palace sale, Caligula told his auctioneer not to overlook the “bidding” of a tired soul in the third row who kept nodding in his sleep. On awakening, the drowsy fellow learned that thirteen gladiators had been knocked down to him for a mere 9,000,000 sesterces.
Still there was not enough money. A whole cavalcade of new and unheard-of taxes was levied, and this kept the government half solvent. But his personal income suffered, so Caligula condemned to death some of the wealthiest Romans and seized their estates. Finally, he even opened a brothel in the palace itself, where the men of Rome could trade on credit—at high interest rates, of course. Roman statecraft had plunged to a new nadir in this, the 792nd year since the founding of
the city.
In lucid moments, Caligula realized that his popularity was slipping. The time-hallowed method for a Roman emperor to regain favor with his subjects was foreign conquest. It was not for nothing that his father was named Germanicus; he, too, would march north and battle the Germans. In September of 39, Caligula crossed the Rhine with his legions and made several forays against Germanic tribes. What he really accomplished was the suppression of a conspiracy against him by the legate of Germany and his own brother-in-law. Both were executed.
Wintering in Gaul, Caligula dreamed of returning to Rome in glorious triumph to celebrate his victory over a foe at the very ends of the earth: he would invade Britain. In the spring of 40, he moved as far as the English Channel, but was too cowardly to cross it. Yet he had to have booty to parade at his forthcoming triumph, so he ordered his legionaries to gather sea shells from the channel shores and fill their helmets with these “spoils from the ocean.” There was also the problem of captives: victories, even mythical victories, required prisoners. Caligula had the tallest Gauls dye their hair red to look like Germans so that they could be “captured” and then paraded in his Roman triumph.
Shortly after the emperor’s return, Cassius Chaerea appeared at Pilate’s door with a face draped in anxiety. “I’m sorry, old friend,” he said, handing him a dreaded summons to the Palatine. “Hope it’s nothing serious.”
Once again Pilate tasted severe apprehension. “Any inkling what it’s about?”
“No.”
Pilate had hoped Caligula would by now have forgotten about his very existence; but, unfortunately, the unhinged brain of the princeps still had its memory intact.
When Pilate arrived at the palace and was ushered into Caligula’s quarters, he found him stalking about the room in a rage, exchanging rapid-fire comments with his chamberlain, an Egyptian named Helicon, and his favorite actor, Apelles, a Greek.