CALIGULA, THE MADCAP
[Illustration: CALIGULA]
The third Roman emperor was Caligula. His real name was Caius. He was
a son of Germanicus and Agrippina first, and a grandson of Drusus, who
was a brother of the Emperor Tiberius. On his mother’s side he was a
great-grandson of Augustus. Tiberius seems to have preferred him for
his successor to Tiberius Gemellus, his own grandson.
Caius was brought up chiefly in the royal court and was, as we have
seen, in company with Tiberius in much of the luxurious dissipation
of that monarch’s later days in the island of Capri. Pampered
and flattered, it is not strange that he grew up conceited and
arbitrary,--a spoiled child.
It is said that when Caligula was a young boy he was dressed in
miniature military accouterments, including the boots, and presented
to the soldiers of the prætorian guard. This greatly pleased them, and
drew from them the nickname of Caligula, which means “little boot.” A
bronze statue, found at Pompeii, represents him at about that time in
his life, with his hair in long curls, ornaments of silver upon his
cuirass, and his feet shod as indicated. As a youth he seemed to have
had a weak constitution. He was very excitable and a poor sleeper.
When he came to the throne he was for a short time diligent and
thoughtful. He sailed to the island where his mother Agrippina I had
perished and brought back her ashes to Rome for burial in the mausoleum
of Augustus. A cippus, or monumental stone, set up among others in the
city and erected probably by him, because mention is made on it of his
accession to the throne, was hollowed out in the Middle Ages so as to
be a standard measure for three hundred pounds of grain and as such was
set up to be used by the public in the portico of the City Hall. It is
now in the court of the Palace of the Conservatori on the Capitoline.
Caligula introduced some measures of wise statesmanship. Then he gained
for himself great popularity by his fondness for public sports and his
lavish expenditures on great gladiatorial shows, in which Tiberius had
taken very little interest. There seems to have been a great deal of
enterprise and dash about him.
But Caligula soon abandoned the spirit of discretion and modesty. He
showed no true interest for his subjects. Very few of them, however,
knew of his unworthy tastes and conduct at Capri. He had been greatly
influenced for evil by the companionship at court of Herod Agrippa,
a grandson of Herod the Great, who had taken the name of Agrippa in
compliment to Vipsanius Agrippa, the prime minister of Augustus. We
shall later learn more of this Herod Agrippa I, for under the title
of Herod the King it is he who appears in the twelfth chapter of the
Acts. Agrippa had filled Caligula’s mind with oriental ideas of what
a monarch should be, namely, one who should make the people feel his
absolute power and should dazzle them at times with great parades and
startling spectacles. Accordingly, Caligula is reported to have said,
“Let them hate me, if only they fear me.” It became very soon evident
that Caligula’s vanity, arrogance, and cruelty would stop at no limits.
He obliged Tiberius Gemellus, his rival for the throne, to commit
suicide. He forced a similar fate upon other friends of Tiberius. His
morals were execrable. His defiance of public opinion was shameless.
He lived with his own sister Drusilla in a disgraceful manner and,
when she died, decreed that she should be worshiped as a goddess. He
successively took three wives from other men.
He distributed crowns to foreign princes. Among these was his friend
Herod Agrippa, whom he allowed to repair to his tetrachy in Palestine,
going by the way of Alexandria. In that city Herod Agrippa’s presence
was made the occasion of an insult to the Jews by the people of
Alexandria. Their governor, Avilius Flaccus, knowing the repugnance of
the Jews to all graven images, instigated the Alexandrians to demand
that statues of the emperor be set up in the synagogues. This pleased
the intolerable arrogance of Caligula. Augustus and Tiberius had
allowed themselves to be spoken of as divine in the provinces, but they
had forbidden the worship of their pretended divinity at Rome during
their lives. A deputation of Jews went to Rome to dissuade the emperor
Caligula from sanctioning any such idolatries in regard to himself.
They said they had prayed for him and had offered sacrifices for him,
but they feared Jehovah as the only God. They were shocked by his
blasphemy and returned disheartened when he replied:
“Yes; you have offered sacrifices _for_ me, but not _to_ me.”
He, thereupon, issued his order that a statue of himself should be
prepared to be worshiped even in the temple at Jerusalem. He went so
far as to arrange for priests and sacrifices in his honor. The governor
of Syria told the workmen to proceed slowly upon this statue; so that
it was not completed before Caius’s death.
Caligula seems really to have persuaded himself that he was a god, not
one of moral purity, but, according to his own depraved idea, a god of
outward and sensuous power,--a Bacchus or a Hercules. He caused himself
to be adored in the Forum. He showed himself to the people, sitting
between the statues of Castor and Pollux in their temple.
“If you do not kill me I will kill you,” he cried out to Jupiter
in a thunderstorm, and then he ridiculously invented a machine for
imitating thunder. He built some kind of a lofty passageway, which was
called a bridge, over the roofs of the houses from the Palatine to
the Capitoline, so that he could go over and confer, as he said, with
Jupiter in his temple. Merivale says that “to stand on the summit of a
high basilica and scatter money to the populace seemed to him an act of
divine munificence and to sail along the Campanian coast in enormous
galleys equipped with porticos, baths, and banquet halls interspersed
with gardens and orchards delighted him as a gorgeous parade and as
a defiance to the elements.” He also constructed at great expense a
bridge of boats across the bay from Baiæ to Puteoli. This he did as a
token of his power to win a victory even over the god Neptune himself.
It was about two miles long. We may here quote again from Merivale:
“He ransacked, we are told, the havens far and near to collect
every vessel he could lay hands on till commerce was straitened
in every quarter and Italy itself threatened with famine. These
vessels he yoked together side by side in a double line extending
from one shore to the other. On this broad and well-compacted base
he placed an enormous platform of timber; this again he covered
with earth and paved it after the manner of a military highroad
with stones hewn and laid in cement. He determined to enact on it
a peculiar pageant, the novelty and brilliancy of which should
transcend every recorded phantasy of Kings or Emperors. From
Puteoli to Baiæ the semicircle of the bay was crowded with admiring
multitudes; the loungers of the baths and porticos sallied forth
from their cool retreats; the promenaders of the Lucrine beach
checked their palanquins and chariots and hushed the strains of
their delicious symphonies; the terraces of the gorgeous villas,
which lined the coasts and breasted the fresh and sparkling
ripples, glittered with streamers of a thousand colors and with
the bright array of senators and matrons drowning the terrors of
a popular uprising which day and night beset them, in shrieks of
childish joy and acclamation. The clang of martial music echoed
from shore to shore. From Bauli the emperor descended upon the
bridge, having first sacrificed to the gods, and chiefly to Neptune
and Envy, arrayed in a coat of mail adorned with precious gems
which had been worn by Alexander the Great, with his sword by his
side, his shield on his arm, and crowned with a chaplet of oak
leaves. On horseback, followed by a dense column of soldiers,
he traversed the solid footway and charged into Puteoli as a
conquering foe. There he indulged his victorious army with a day
of rest and expectation. On the morrow he placed himself in a
triumphal car and drove back exulting in the garb of a charioteer
of the Green at the games of the circus. The mock triumph of this
entrance was adorned by pretended captives represented by some
royal hostages from Parthia who were at the time in the custody of
the Roman government. The army followed in long procession. In the
center of the bridge the emperor halted and harangued his soldiers
on the greatness of their victory from a tribunal erected for the
purpose. He contrasted the narrow stream of the Bosphorus and the
Hellespont, only seven stades in width, with the broad ocean which
he had yoked with chains; and declared that the exploits of Xerxes
and Darius were trifles compared with his mightier enterprise.
After wearying both himself and his hearers with this prodigious
folly he distributed money among them and invited them to a
banquet. At nightfall the bridge and the ships were illuminated
with torches and at the signal the whole curving line of the coast
shone forth, as in a theater, with innumerable lights.”
All this was simply useless extravagance, the wild freak of a madman,
the whim of a childish tyrant who confounded arbitrary power and
splendor with divinity. He did not know of any better way of proving
himself to be godlike.
It is possible that some thought of all this blasphemous arrogance
may have been in the Apostle Paul’s mind when, in 2 Thess. ii, 4, he
pictures “the man of sin” to be revealed, as one “who opposeth and
exalteth himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped; so
that he as God sitteth in the temple of God showing himself that he is
God.”
In order to keep up his assumed character of a god, Caligula had to
accomplish, of course, many mighty things. He completed the temple of
Augustus at Rome. He enlarged the imperial residence on the Palatine
with oriental extravagance, connecting by descending porticos the
palace of Tiberius with the temple of Castor and Pollux. He projected,
and perhaps commenced, the great Claudian aqueduct. He brought from
Egypt and erected in the Vatican circus the immense granite obelisk,
one hundred and thirty-two feet high, which now stands in front of St.
Peter’s, not very far, indeed, from the locality where he placed it.
But Caligula was so jealous of other men that he caused many statues
and monuments that had been erected by Augustus to be thrown down and
so broken that the names could not be restored to the figures. He
was so consumed with envy that he had a passion for destroying every
well-earned reputation. He forbade the circulation of the writings
of Virgil, of Livy, and of other famous authors whom Augustus had
fostered, and of whom the people were proud. He even threatened to
abolish the laws and make his own word and will the rule for mankind.
No personal excellence could escape his erratic hostility.
It was inevitable that he should look with hatred upon the popularity
of the distinguished Seneca. This writer and philosopher we have
referred to as winning public approval in the days of Tiberius. He
had become a great advocate and was beginning to express exalted
opinions. Caius prided himself on his brilliant wit, of which, indeed,
a few illustrations have come down to us; but he could not tolerate
such a noble and talented man as Seneca. He was so displeased with
him that he singled him out for immediate execution; but one of the
emperor’s favorites whispered to him that he need not take the trouble
to extinguish an expiring lamp, Seneca was in such poor health at the
time. So Seneca escaped, but withdrew into obscurity for the rest of
the reign of Caius and devoted himself to his studies and meditations.
He abhorred the conduct of the emperor. He speaks of “wretches doomed
to undergo stones, sword, fire, and Caius”; and described Caius as one
whose “face was ghastly pale with a look of insanity, his eyes half
hidden under a wrinkled brow; his ill-shaped head was partly bald,
partly covered with dyed hair, his neck covered with bristles, his legs
thin and his feet misshapen.” On the other hand Caius called Seneca’s
writings “mere displays” and “sand without lime.”
This emperor spent fabulous sums on extraordinary entertainments. It
was the custom of the times for the vulgar rich to lay out enormous
amounts of money upon the decorations and luxurious provisions of
their tables, and Caligula was not to be surpassed in this regard by
any of them. Viands were set before his guests with fantastic display,
chiefly on account of their rarity and costliness. The brains of
peacocks and the tongues of nightingales and flamingoes, besides rare
birds from distant regions, were only specimens of the extravagant
dishes, while pearls dissolved by powerful acids placed in the wine
seemed to give an additional relish to the foolish prodigality. He had
the most richly furnished banquet-halls, the most elaborate furniture,
and the most exquisite music that the empire could furnish.
He was fond of imposing military demonstrations. He celebrated with
great pomp a barren victory over the Germans. He made ridiculous boasts
over an invasion of Great Britain, an invasion that was abandoned not
far from that country’s shores.
The people soon became very tired and disgusted with Caligula’s revels
and dissipations. His extravagance, of course, required increased
taxation, and his capricious cruelty put every man’s life in jeopardy.
He seemed to delight in causing suffering. It is declared that he
told his executioners to strike in such a manner that their victims
might feel themselves dying, and that once, when a sufficient number
of animals was wanting, he commanded some of the spectators in the
amphitheater to be thrown to the wild beasts. His imagination seems
to have had a tendency to dwell on cruel and grewsome thoughts, as the
following quotation will show:
“One day at a public banquet, when the consuls were reclining by
his side, he burst suddenly into a fit of laughter and, when they
courteously inquired the cause of his mirth, astounded them by
coolly replying that he was thinking how by one word he could cause
the heads of both of them to roll on the floor. He amused himself
with similar banter even with his wife Cæsonia, for whom he seems
to have had a stronger feeling than for any of his former consorts.
While fondling her neck, he is reported to have said, ‘Fair as it
is, how easily I could sever it!’ He did not content himself with
such fancies. Too often they were followed by actual cruelty and
bloodshed, so that few could laugh at his joking. There was no
telling how he would shock the public next.”
“This prince,” said Seneca, “only lived to show what the greatest vices
could do in the circumstances of the highest fortune.”
It may be asked: Where was the Roman Senate? Had it no power in the
time of such public distress? The senators had more power than they had
courage to exercise. They were weak and vacillating, each man fearing
for his own life. They were often struck dumb by his imperious and
remorseless demands, but the next day they would meet and pay servile
court to him.
It was fortunate that Caligula’s reign was not long. It lasted less
than four years. The suppressed and muttering storm of popular
indignation was long reaching its climax. But at last the outburst
came, and the merciless lightning fell. He had presided on a certain
occasion at the games at the foot of the Palatine. At the hour of
intermission and rest he allowed most of his guard to go up into the
palace by the open way, while he entered through the cryptoporticus,--a
long tunnel-like passageway under the building, the same one through
the shadows of which the modern visitor to the Palatine Hill now
generally passes. Hither Cassius Chærea, a tribune of the Guard,
whom Caligula had insulted by mockingly imitating his squeaky voice,
followed him, with others, and arresting his steps, suddenly struck
him upon the head with a sword. Blow followed blow till life was
extinct. The bearers of his litter had run to his assistance with their
poles, while his small body-guard of Germans had struck wildly at
the assassins. But these assassins made their escape from the narrow
passage, and left the body where it fell. It was borne in secret by
friendly hands to a place of cremation, where it was only partially
consumed. Later his sisters, Livia and Agrippina II, reduced it
completely to ashes, which they consigned to a decent sepulcher.
The people must have breathed more freely when his death was announced,
for they felt that nothing worse could follow and something better
might. Caligula is not mentioned in the New Testament, but he was
carrying out his wild career while the Gospel was spreading from
Jerusalem through Judea and Samaria and as far perhaps as to Antioch.
The preaching of Peter and Philip and John, in Samaria, and the
conversion of Saul of Tarsus at about that time would have had no
interest for him if he had been told about it.
There is a bronze bust of him in the Hall of the Emperors in the
Capitoline Museum at Rome, from which we would suppose him to be
somewhat good-looking. He had regular features and an intellectual
head, but wore a sort of frown upon his brow. He did not part his hair.
None of the first emperors seem to have done that; so it was probably
the fashion for other men not to do it. The bust represents him as
wearing a corselet over the woven garment that falls in folds from his
shoulders. There is some alertness and vigor in the face. Perhaps in
his youth he was a possible statesman. If so, he was badly spoilt by
his early training in a hot-bed of corruption and sensuality. His name
is a black spot upon the history of a period dark enough at best, and
is never mentioned but to be despised.