The World

In AD 36, Tiberius invited Caligula to live with him in Capri, ‘rearing a viper for the Roman people’. Yet he appointed joint heirs, Caligula and his own grandson, the eighteen-year-old Tiberius Gemellus, but the boy was suspected of being Sejanus’ son. When Tiberius died, Caligula, a twenty-five-year-old epileptic, gangly, pointy-faced and balding, was hailed by the people as ‘our chick’ in an orgy of celebration as he promised to end treason trials and restore elections. The Senate appointed Caligula as sole heir, but while his predecessors were experienced commanders, he himself had no laurels. After a short illness, he ordered the execution of his cousin Gemellus, an act that so horrified their joint grandmother Antonia that she starved herself to death. Attracted by the Egyptian tradition of sister-marriage, he gathered around him his sisters Agrippina (the Younger), Julia Livilla and Drusilla and may have slept with them, or just claimed that he did. Agrippina, married to the aristocrat Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, had just had a son, Lucius – the future Nero. When Drusilla died, Caligula deified her, the first Caesar woman to be so elevated. It implied that Caligula too was a god.

Starting with public gifts of cash and public construction projects, he also orchestrated spectacular shows, and rode his horse Incitatus across a bridge of boats on the Gulf of Naples, wearing the breastplate of Alexander the Great. Caligula could not resist boasting of his power; as he told his grandmother Antonia, ‘Remember that I have the right to do anything to anyone.’ He had a hangman’s wit. When killing his victims, he ordered the executioner to ‘strike so he feels he is dying’. As he began to sense his unpopularity, he quoted a Greek play, ‘Let them hate so long as they fear,’ adding, ‘If only Rome had one neck.’ At dinners, he demanded the right to seduce the wives of his guests and then rated them afterwards. He must have heard that Augustus had done something similar, but somehow Augustus befriended his victims while Caligula repelled them. At one of his dinner parties, he burst out laughing: ‘At a single nod from me,’ he told the consuls, ‘both of you would have your throats cut on the spot.’ And whenever his kissed his wives, he would sigh, ‘Off comes this beautiful head whenever I give the word.’ To torment the Senate, he threatened to make his horse a senator. Jealous of the brilliant speeches of Seneca, a forty-four-year-old senator, son of a historian from Hispania, he ordered his execution for conspiracy – but, hearing that he was mortally ill, he laughed that he would die soon anyway and just exiled him. Seneca understood that ‘all cruelty springs from weakness.’

Caligula had affairs with the beautiful actor Mnester and Drusilla’s husband Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, a great-great-grandson of Augustus, a taste totally acceptable in the Roman male provided he was married, feared the gods and took the active position in sex. But later, fearing Lepidus’ pedigree, he had him executed. His trusted praetorian prefect Cassius Chaerea tortured women for sport, often joined by Caligula. The emperor exiled his two surviving sisters. Rightly suspicious of all members of his family, he was indulgent towards his lame uncle Claudius, who had spent his life writing a history of the Etruscans. Caligula promoted him to consul as a joke and, in a clear sign that he did not regard him as a threat, he married him to their teenage cousin Valeria Messalina, also descended from Octavia and Antony. Meanwhile, anxious for a successor, he tried to father a son, finally marrying for the fourth time his mistress Milonia Caesonia, with whom he had a daughter.

In pursuit of military success, he travelled up to Gaul where he supposedly ordered his troops to collect seashells to dedicate to Neptune, the sea god. More likely they built military huts (mistranslated as seashells) while Caligula received the allegiance of that tempting target – Britannia.

Such was the competence of the administration – overseen by Caligula’s secretary, the Greek freedman Callistus – that the empire continued to run even under the rule of a demented freak. Keen to secure the east, the emperor sent his friend the Jewish prince Herod Agrippa to remove the untrustworthy prefect of Egypt, then promoted him to king like his grandfather Herod the Great. He next ordered the Jews to worship a statue of himself in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews seethed. Herod Agrippa persuaded him to cancel the order.^*