first time that although it was hard to find an emperor, it might even
be harder to find an empress. During the long reign of Augustus, Livia
had discharged the duties of this difficult position with incomparable
success. Tiberius had succeeded Augustus, and after his divorce from
Julia had never remarried. There had therefore been a long interregnum
in the Roman world of feminine society, during which no one had ever
stopped to think whether it would be easy or difficult to find a woman
who could with dignity take over the position of Livia. The problem
was really presented for the first time with the advent of Caligula;
for, at twenty-seven, he could not solve it as simply as Tiberius had
done. In the first place, it was to be expected that a man of his age
would have a wife; secondly, the _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_ made
marriage a necessity for him, as for all the senators; furthermore, the
head of the state needed to have a woman at his side, if he wished to
discharge all his social duties. The celibacy of Tiberius had
undoubtedly contributed to the social isolation which had been fatal
both to him and to the state.
Therefore in Caligula's time the Roman public became aware that the
problem confronting it was a most difficult one. A most exacting
public opinion, hesitating between the ideals of two epochs, wished to
see united in the empress the best part, both of the ancient and of the
modern customs, and was consequently demanding that the second Livia
should possess virtually every quality. It was necessary that she
should be of noble birth; that is, a descendant of one of those great
Roman families which with every year were becoming less numerous, less
prolific, less virtuous, and more fiercely divided among themselves by
irreconcilable hatreds. This latter was a most serious difficulty; for
by marrying into one of these lines, the emperor ran the risk of
antagonizing all those other families which were its enemies. The
empress, furthermore, must be the model of all the virtues; fruitful,
in order to obey the _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_; religious, chaste,
and virtuous, that she might not violate the _Lex de adulteriis_;
simple and modest, in deference to the _Lex sumptuaria_. She must be
able to rule wisely over the vast household of the emperor, full of his
slaves and freedmen, and she must aid her husband in the fulfilment of
all those social duties--receptions, dinners, entertainments--which,
though serious concerns for every Roman nobleman, were even more
serious for the emperor. That she should be stupid or ignorant was of
course out of the question. In fact, from this time to the downfall of
Nero the difficulties of the imperial family and its authority arise
not so much from the emperors as from their wives; so that it may truly
be said that it was the women who unwittingly dragged down to its ruin
the great Julio-Claudian house.
[Illustration: A bronze sestertius (slightly enlarged), showing the
sisters of Caligula (Agrippina, Drusilla, and Julia Livilla) on one
side and Germanicus on the other side.]
[Illustration: A bronze sestertius with the head of Agrippina the
Elder, daughter of Agrippa and Julia, the daughter of Augustus. She
was the wife of Germanicus, and their daughter, Agrippina the younger,
was the mother of the Emperor Nero.]
But if the difficulty was serious, there never was a man so little
fitted and so ill prepared to face it as this young man of twenty-seven
who had been exalted to the imperial dignity after the death of
Tiberius. Four years before his election as emperor, he had married a
certain Julia Claudilla, a lady who doubtless belonged to one of the
great Roman families, but about whom we have no definite information.
We cannot say, therefore, whether or not at the side of a second
Augustus she might have become a new Livia. In any case, it is certain
that Caligula was not a second Augustus. He was probably not so
frenzied a lunatic as ancient writers have pictured him, but his was
certainly an extravagant, unbalanced mind, given to excesses, and
unhinged by the delirium of greatness, which his coming to the throne
had increased the more because it had been conferred upon him at a time
when he was too young and before he had been sufficiently prepared.
For many years Caligula had never even hoped to succeed Tiberius; he
had continually feared that the fate of his mother and his two brothers
was likewise waiting for him. Far from having dreamed that he would be
raised to the imperial purple, he had merely desired that he might not
have to end his days as an exile on some desert island in the
Mediterranean. So much good fortune after the long persecutions of his
family profoundly disturbed his mental faculties, which had not
originally been well balanced, and it fomented in him that delirium of
grandeur which violently directed his desires toward distant Egypt, in
the customs of which, rather than in those of Rome, he, in the
exaltation of power, sought satisfaction for his imperial vanity. From
his earliest youth Caligula had shown a great inclination for the
products and the men of that far country, then greatly admired and
greatly feared by the Romans. For instance, we know that all his
servants were Egyptians, and that Helicon, his most faithful and
influential freedman, was an Alexandrian. But shortly after his
elevation this admiration for the land of the Ptolemies and the
Pharaohs broke forth into a furor of Egyptian exoticism, which impelled
him to an attempt to bring his own reign into connection with the
policies of his great-grandfather Mark Antony. He sought to introduce
into Rome the ideas, the customs, the sumptuousness, and the
institutions of the Pharaoh-Ptolemaic monarchy, to make of his palace a
court similar to that of Alexandria, and of himself a divine king,
adored in flesh and blood, as sovereigns were adored on the banks of
the Nile.
Caligula was undoubtedly mad, but his madness would have seemed less
chaotic and incomprehensible, and a thread of sense would have been
discovered even in his excesses and in the ravings of his unsettled
mind, if it had been understood that many of his most famous freaks
were moved and inspired by this Egyptian idea and tendency. In the
madness of Caligula, as in the story of Antony and the tragedy of
Tiberius, there is forever recurring, under a new form, the great
struggle between Italy and the East, between Rome and Alexandria, which
can never be divorced from the history of the last century of the
republic and the first century of the empire. Whoever carefully sifts
out the separate actions in the disordered conduct of the third Roman
emperor will easily rediscover the thread of this idea and the trace of
this latent conflict. For instance, we see the new emperor scarcely
elected before he introduced the worship of Isis among the official
cults of the Roman state and assigned in the calendar a public festival
to Isis. In short, he was favoring those Egyptian cults which
Tiberius, with his "old-Roman" sympathies, had fiercely combatted.
Furthermore, we see Caligula prohibiting the festival in commemoration
of the battle of Actium, which had been celebrated every year for more
than half a century. At first sight the idea seems absurd; but it must
not be considered a caprice; for with this act Caligula was intending
to initiate the historical rehabilitation of Mark Antony, the man who
had tried to shift the center of Roman politics from Rome to
Alexandria. The emperor meant to make plain to Rome that she was no
longer to boast of having humiliated Alexandria with arms, since
Alexandria would henceforth be taken as a model in all things.
[Illustration: Claudius, Messalina, and their two children in what is
known as the "Hague Cameo."]
Just as the dynasty of the Ptolemies had been surrounded by a
semi-religious veneration, Caligula, inspired as he was by Egyptian and
Ptolemaic conceptions, sought to have this same veneration bestowed
upon his entire family--that family which under Tiberius had been
persecuted and defamed by suits and decimated by suicides through the
envy of the aristocracy, which was forever unwilling to forgive its too
great prestige. Caligula not only hastened to set out in person to
gather up the bones of Agrippina, his mother, and of his brother, in
order to bring them to Rome and deposit them piously in the tomb of
Augustus,--that was a natural duty of filial piety,--but he also
prohibited any one to name among his ancestors the great Agrippa, the
builder of the Pantheon, because his very obscure origin seemed a blot
upon the semi-divine purity of his race. He had the title of Augusta
and all the privileges of the vestal virgins bestowed upon his
grandmother Antonia, the daughter of Mark Antony and the faithful
friend of Tiberius; he had these same vestal privileges bestowed upon
his three sisters, Agrippina, Drusilla, and Livilla; he had assigned to
them a privileged position equal to his own at the games in the circus;
he even had it decreed that their names should be included in the vows
which the magistrates and pontiffs offered every year for the
prosperity of the prince and of his people, and that in the prayers for
the conservation of his power there should also be included a prayer
for their felicity. This was a small revolution from the
constitutional point of view; for the Romans, though allowing their
women ample freedom to occupy themselves with politics from the
retirement of their homes, had never recognized for them any official
capacity. Tiberius, faithfully adhering in this also to tradition, had
gone as far as to prevent the senate, at the time of Livia's death,
from voting public honors to her memory, which, he thought, might have
justified the belief that his mother had been, not a matron of the old
Roman stamp, but a public personage. Caligula, however, was quite
indifferent to tradition, and by his expressed will, as if in reaction
against the persecutions and the humiliations which the imperial family
had suffered under Tiberius, even the sisters of the emperor acquired a
sacred character and a privileged position in the state. For the first
time the women of the imperial family acquired the character of
official personages.
It cannot be denied that the transition from atrocious prosecutions to
divine honors was somewhat sudden, but this is merely a further proof
that Caligula was endowed with a violent, impulsive, and irreflective
temperament. In any case, there was neither scandal nor protest at
that time. Caligula during the first months of his rule was popular,
not for his measures in favor of the women of his family, but for
reasons of far greater importance. He had inaugurated a régime which
promised to be more indulgent, more prodigal, less harsh than that of
Tiberius. Extravagance had made rapid strides, especially in the ranks
of the aristocracy, during the twenty-two years of Tiberius's rule: and
although the latter, especially toward the end of his life, had ceased
struggling against this tendency, nevertheless his well-known aversion
to sumptuous living, and the example of simplicity which he set before
the eyes of all, had always been a cause of preoccupation to the
aristocracy--to men as well as women. There was no certainty that the
emperor might not again, some day, try to enforce the sumptuary laws.
When Caligula therefore began his career, indicating very clearly his
sympathies with the modernizing party by his eagerness to do away with
the old Roman simplicity, the young aristocracy of both sexes did not
conceal their satisfaction. After a long period of old-fashioned
traditional policy, enforced by the two preceding emperors, they
welcomed with joy the young reformer who set out to introduce in the
imperial government the spirit of the new generations. No one was
sorry that all the purveyors of voluptuousness,--mimes, singers,
actors, dancers of both sexes, cooks, and puppets,--should with noisy
joy break into the imperial palace, which had been official, severe,
and cold under Tiberius, and bring back pleasure, luxury, and
festivals. All hoped that under the rule of this indulgent, youthful
emperor, life, especially at Rome, would become more pleasant and gay;
and no one therefore felt disposed to protest against the official
honors which, contrary to custom, had been bestowed upon the women of
the imperial family.
In truth, if he, still harking back to Egyptian ideas and customs, had
been content with surrounding his family, especially its women, with a
respect which would have protected them against the infamous
accusations and iniquitous persecutions to which many had fallen
victims, he might have had credit for an action which was good, just,
and useful to the state. That strange condition of affairs which had
been growing up under Tiberius was both absurd and dangerous to the
country: the emperor was honored with extraordinary powers and made the
object of a semi-religious veneration; but his family, and especially
its women, were, as a sort of retribution, set outside the laws and
fiercely assailed in a thousand insidious ways. But the lunatic
Caligula was not the man to keep even a wise proposal within reasonable
limits. Power, popularity, and praise quickly aroused all that was
warped and excessive in his nature, and very soon, as he showed at the
end of the year 37, he entertained an idea which must have seemed to
the Romans a horrible impiety. His wife died soon after he became
emperor. Another marriage seemed obligatory, and he decided that he
would marry his sister Drusilla.
Historians have represented this intention as the perverse delirium of
an unbridled sensuality. It was certainly the gross act of a madman,
but there was perhaps more politics in his madness than perversity; for
it was an attempt to introduce into Rome the dynastic marriages between
brothers and sisters which had been the constant tradition of the
Ptolemies and the Pharaohs of Egypt. This oriental custom certainly
seems a horrible aberration to us, who have been educated according to
the strict and austere doctrines of Christianity, which, inheriting in
these matters the fine flower of Greco-Latin ideas, has purified and
rendered them more rigorous. But for centuries in Egypt,--that is, in
the most ancient of the Mediterranean civilizations,--this horrible
aberration was looked upon as a sovereign privilege which brought the
royal dynasty into relationship with the gods. By means of it, this
family preserved the semi-divine purity of its blood; and perchance
this custom, which had survived up to the fall of the Ptolemies, was
only the projection of ideas and customs which in most ancient times
had had a much wider diffusion along the Mediterranean world, for
traces of it can be found even in Greek mythology. For were not
Jupiter and Juno, who constituted the august Olympian couple, at the
same time also brother and sister? Gradually restricted through the
spreading of Greek civilization, this custom was finally eradicated at
the shores of the Mediterranean by Rome after the destruction of the
kingdom of the Ptolemies.
The lunatic Caligula now suddenly took it into his head to transplant
this custom to Rome--to transplant it with all the religious pomp of
the Egyptian monarchy, and thus transform the family of Augustus, which
up to the present had been merely the most eminent family of the Roman
aristocracy, into a dynasty of gods and demigods, whose members were to
be united by marriage among themselves in order not to pollute the
celestial purity of their blood. A fraternal and divine pair were to
rule at Rome, like another Arsinoë and Ptolemy, whom the Alexandrian
throngs had worshiped on the banks of the Nile. The idea had already
matured in his mind at the end of the year 37, and among his three
sisters he had already chosen Drusilla to be his wife. This is proved
by a will made at the time of an illness which he contracted in the
autumn of the first year of his rule. In this will he appointed
Drusilla heir not only of his goods, but also of his empire, a wild
folly from the point of view of Roman ideas, which did not admit women
to the government; but it proves that Caligula had already thought and
acted like an Egyptian king.
[Illustration: Remains of the Bridge of Caligula in the Palace of the
Caesars.]
It is easy to understand why the peace and harmony which had been
reestablished for a moment in the troubled imperial family by the
advent of Caligula should have been of brief duration. His grandmother
and his sisters were Romans, educated in Roman ideals, and this exotic
madness of his could inspire in them only an irresistible horror. This
brought confusion into the imperial family, and after having suffered
the persecutions of Sejanus and his party, the unhappy daughters of
Germanicus found themselves in the toils of the exacting caprices of
their brother. In fact, in 38, Caligula had already broken with his
grandmother, whom the year before he had had proclaimed Augusta; and
between the years 38 and 39, catastrophes followed one another in the
family with frightful rapidity. His sister Drusilla, whom, as
Suetonius tells us, he already treated as a lawful wife, died suddenly
of some unknown malady while still very young. It is not improbable
that her health may have been ruined by the horror of the wild
adventure, which was neither human nor Roman, into which her brother
sought to drag her by marriage. Caligula suddenly declared her a
goddess, to whom all the cities must pay honors. He had a temple built
for her, and appointed a body of twenty priests, ten men and ten women,
to celebrate her worship; he decreed that her birthday should be a
holiday, and he wished the statue of Venus in the Forum to be carved in
her likeness.
But in proportion as Caligula became more and more fervid in this
adoration of his dead sister, the disagreement between himself and his
other two sisters became more embittered. Julia Livilla was exiled in
38; Agrippina, the wife of Domitius Enobarbus, in 39, and about this
same time the venerable Antonia died. It was noised about that
Caligula had forced her to commit suicide, and that Agrippina and
Livilla had taken part in a conspiracy against the life of the emperor.
How much truth there may be in these reports it is difficult to say,
but the reason for all these catastrophes may be affirmed with
certainty. Life in the imperial palace was no longer possible,
especially for women, with this madman who was transforming Rome into
Alexandria and who wished to marry a sister. Even Tiberius, the son of
Drusus and co-heir to the empire with Caligula, was at about this time
defeated in some obscure suit and disappeared.
Caligula therefore remained alone at Rome to represent in the imperial
palace the family which only ironically can be considered as the most
fortunate in Rome. Of three generations, upon whom fate seemed to have
showered all the gifts of life, there remained at his side only
Claudius, the clownish old man, the plaything of slaves and freedmen,
whom no one molested because all could make game of him. A madman and
an imbecile,--or at least one who was reputed such by everybody,--this
was all that remained of the family of Augustus seventy years after the
battle of Actium.
Alone, with no sisters now to elevate to the divine honors of the Roman
Olympus, Caligula was reduced to hunting for wives in the families of
the aristocracy. But it seems that even there could be found no great
abundance of women who had all the necessary qualities to make them the
Olympian consorts of so capricious a god. In three years he married
and repudiated three--and in a very strange manner, if we are to trust
the ancient accounts of Caligula's loves. The first was Livia
Orestilla, the wife of Caius Piso. The emperor, who had seen the woman
at the marriage celebration, became, we are told, so infatuated with
her that he obliged the husband to divorce her; he then married her,
and a few days later repudiated her. Caligula is said to have compared
himself on this occasion to Romulus who ravished the Sabine woman, and
to Augustus who raped Livia. The second was Lollia Paulina, wife of
Caius Memmius, proconsul of a distant province. Caligula heard of the
prodigious beauty of Lollia's grandmother. The portrayal of her charms
made him fall in love with her granddaughter, though absent and
distant. He gave orders for her immediate recall to Rome, and as soon
as she could be divorced from her husband he married her. This union,
like the former one, lasted only a brief time. The third wife was
Milonia Caesonia, and to her Caligula was more faithful, though from
the accounts of ancient writers she appears to have been much older
than he, rather homely, and already a mother of three daughters when he
first loved her. It is difficult to determine how much truth there is
in these reports: Caligula was, it is true, a raving maniac, and his
frenzy became more accentuated when under the sway of love--a passion
which deranges somewhat even wise men. It is not strange, therefore,
that in regard to women he may have been guilty of even greater
excesses than he was capable of in his dealings with men. Yet some of
these accounts seem a little incredible even when ascribed to a madman.
However that may be, Livia Orestilla, Lollia Paulina, Milonia Caesonia
are figures without relief, shades and ghosts of empresses, no one of
whom had time enough even to occupy the highest post. In vain the
people expected that there would appear in the imperial palace a worthy
successor to Livia. Caligula, like all madmen, was by nature solitary,
and could not live with other human beings: he was to remain alone, a
prey to his ravings, which became even stranger and more violent. He
now wished to impose upon the empire the worship of his own person,
without considering any opposition or local traditions and
superstitions. In doing this he did violence not only to the civic and
republican sentiment of Italy, which detested this worship of a living
man as an ignoble oriental adulation, but also to the religious feeling
of the Hebrews, to whom this cult appeared most horrible and idolatrous.
[Illustration: The Emperor Caligula.]
In this way difficulties, dissatisfaction, and sedition arose in all
parts of the empire. The extravagances, the wild expenditures, the
riotous pleasures, and the cruelties of Caligula increased the
discontent and disgust on every hand. We need not take literally all
the accounts of his cruelty and violence which ancient writers have
transmitted to us,--even Caligula has been blackened,--but it is
certain that his government in the last two years of his reign
degenerated into a reckless, extravagant, violent, and cruel tyranny.
One day the empire awoke in terror to the fact that the imperial
family--that family in which the legions, the provinces, and the
barbarians saw the keystone of the state--no longer existed; that in
the vast imperial palace, empty of women, empty of children, empty of
hope, there wandered a raging madman of thirty-one, who divorced a wife
every six months, who foolishly wasted the treasure and the blood of
his subjects, and who was concerned with no other thought than that of
having himself worshiped like a god in flesh and blood by all the
empire. A conspiracy was formed in the palace itself, and Caligula was
killed.