THE REIGN OF CAIUS.
The poet Gray, in describing the deserted deathbed of our own great
Edward III., says:--
"Low on his funeral couch he lies!
No pitying heart, no eye afford
A tear to grace his obsequies!
* * * * *
"The swarm that in the noontide beam were born?
Gone to salute the rising Morn.
Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the zephyr blows,
While proudly riding o'er the azure realm,
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes;
Youth on the prow and Pleasure at the helm;
Regardless of the sweeping Whirlwind's sway,
That, hushed in grim repose, expects his evening prey."
The last lines of this passage would alone have been applicable to Caius
Caesar. There was nothing fair or gay even about the beginning of his
reign. From first to last it was a reign of fury and madness, and lust
and blood. There was an hereditary taint of insanity in this family,
which was developed by their being placed on the dizzy pinnacle of
imperial despotism, and which usually took the form of monstrous and
abnormal crime. If we would seek a parallel for Caius Caesar, we must
look for it in the history of Christian VII. of Denmark, and Paul of
Russia. In all three we find the same ghastly pallor, the same
sleeplessness which compelled them to rise, and pace their rooms at
night, the same incessant suspicion; the same inordinate thirst for
cruelty and torture. He took a very early opportunity to disembarrass
himself of his benefactors, Macro and Ennia, and of his rival, the young
Tiberius. The rest of his reign was a series of brutal extravagances. We
have lost the portion of those matchless Annals of Tacitus which
contained the reign of Caius, but more than enough to revolt and horrify
is preserved in the scattered notices of Seneca, and in the narratives
of Suetonius in Latin and Dio Cassius in Greek.
His madness showed itself sometimes in gluttonous extravagance, as when
he ordered a supper which cost more than 8,000_l_; sometimes in a
_bizarre_ and disgraceful mode of dress, as when he appeared in public
in women's stockings, embroidered with gold and pearls; sometimes in a
personality and insolence of demeanor towards every rank and class in
Rome, which made him ask a senator to supper, and ply him with drunken
toasts, on the very evening on which he had condemned his son to death;
sometimes in sheer raving blasphemy, as when he expressed his furious
indignation against Jupiter for presuming to thunder while he was
supping, or looking at the pantomimes; but most of all in a ferocity
which makes Seneca apply to him the name of "Bellua," or "wild monster,"
and say that he seems to have been produced "for the disgrace and
destruction of the human race."
We will quote from the pages of Seneca but one single passage to justify
his remark "that he was most greedy for human blood, which he ordered
to stream in his very presence with such eagerness as though he were
going to drink it up with his lips." He says that in one day he scourged
and tortured men of consular and quaestorial parentage, knights and
senators, not by way of examination, but out of pure caprice and rage;
he seriously meditated the butchery of the entire senate; he expressed a
wish that the Roman people had but a single neck, that he might strike
it off at one blow; he silenced the screams or reproaches of his victims
sometimes by thrusting a sponge in their mouths, sometimes by having
their mouths gagged with their own torn robes, sometimes by ordering
their tongues to be cut out before they were thrown to the wild beasts.
On one occasion, rising from a banquet, he called for his slippers,
which were kept by the slaves while the guests reclined on the purple
couches, and so impatient was he for the sight of death, that, walking
up and down his covered portico by lamplight with ladies and senators,
he then and there ordered some of his wretched victims to be beheaded in
his sight.
It is a singular proof of the unutterable dread and detestation inspired
by some of these Caesars, that their mere countenance is said to have
inspired anguish. Tacitus, in the life of his father-in-law Agricola,
mentions the shuddering recollection of the red face of Domitian, as it
looked on at the games. Seneca speaks in one place of wretches doomed to
undergo stones, sword, fire, and _Caius_; in another he says that he had
tortured the noblest Romans with everything which could possibly cause
the intensest agony,--with cords, plates, rack, fire, and, as though it
were the worst torture of all, with his look! What that look was, we
learn from Seneca himself, "His face was ghastly pale, with a look of
insanity; his fierce, dull eyes were 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 mis-shapen." Woe
to the nation that lies under the heel of a brutal despotism; treble woe
to the nation that can tolerate a despot so brutal as this! Yet this was
the nation in the midst of which Seneca lived, and this was the despot
under whom his early manhood was spent.
"But what more oft in nations grown corrupt,
And by their vices brought to servitude,
Than to love bondage more than liberty,
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty?"
It was one of the peculiarities of Caius Caesar that he hated the very
existence of any excellence. He used to bully and insult the gods
themselves, frowning even at the statues of Apollo and Jupiter of the
Capitol. He thought of abolishing Homer, and order the works of Livy and
Virgil to be removed from all libraries, because he could not bear that
they should be praised. He ordered Julius Graecinus to be put to death
for no other reason than this, "That he was a better man than it was
expedient for a tyrant that any one should be;" for, as Pliny tells us,
the Caesars deliberately preferred that their people should be vicious
than that they should be virtuous. It was hardly likely that such a man
should view with equanimity the rising splendour of Seneca's reputation.
Hitherto, the young man, who was thirty-five years old at the accession
of Caius, had not written any of his philosophic works, but in all
probability he had published his early, and no longer extant, treatises
on earthquakes, on superstitions, and the books _On India_, and _On the
Manners of Egypt_, which had been the fruit of his early travels. It is
probable, too, that he had recited in public some of those tragedies
which have come down to us under his name, and in the composition of
which he was certainly concerned. All these works, and especially the
applause won by the public reading of his poems, would have given him
that high literary reputation which we know him to have earned. It was
not, however, this reputation, but the brilliancy and eloquence of his
orations at the bar which excited the jealous hatred of the Emperor.
Caius piqued himself on the possession of eloquence; and, strange to
say, there are isolated expressions of his which seem to show that, in
lucid intervals, he was by no means devoid of intellectual acuteness.
For instance, there is real humour and insight in the nicknames of "a
golden sheep" which he gave to the rich and placid Silanus, and of
"Ulysses in petticoats," by which he designated his grandmother, the
august Livia. The two epigrammetic criticisms which he passed upon the
style of Seneca are not wholly devoid of truth; he called his works
_Commissiones meras_, or mere displays.[25] In this expression he hit
off, happily enough, the somewhat theatrical, the slightly pedantic and
pedagogic and professorial character of Seneca's diction, its rhetorical
ornament and antitheses, and its deficiency in stern masculine
simplicity and strength. In another remark he showed himself a still
more felicitous critic. He called Seneca's writings _Arenu sine Calce_,
"sand without lime," or, as we might say, "a rope of sand." This epigram
showed a real critical faculty. It exactly hits off Seneca's short and
disjointed sentences, consisting as they often do of detached
antitheses. It accords with the amusing comparison of Malebranche, that
Seneca's composition, with its perpetual and futile recurrences, calls
up to him the image of a dancer who ends where he begins.
[Footnote 25: Suet. _Calig._ liii.]
But Caius did not confine himself to clever and malignant criticism. On
one occasion, when Seneca was pleading in his presence, he was so
jealous and displeased at the brilliancy and power of the orator that he
marked him out for immediate execution. Had Seneca died at this period
he would probably have been little known, and he might have left few
traces of his existence beyond a few tragedies of uncertain
authenticity, and possibly a passing notice in the page of Dio or
Tacitus. But destiny reserved him for a more splendid and more
questionable career. One of Caius's favourites whispered to the Emperor
that it was useless to extinguish a waning lamp; that the health of the
orator was so feeble that a natural death by the progress of his
consumptive tendencies would, in a very short time, remove him out of
the tyrant's way.
Throughout the remainder of the few years during which the reign of
Caius continued, Seneca, warned in time, withdrew himself into complete
obscurity, employing his enforced leisure in that unbroken industry
which stored his mind with such encyclopaedic wealth. "None of my days,"
he says, in describing at a later period the way in which he spent his
time, "is passed in complete ease. I claim even a part of the night for
my studies. I do not _find leisure_ for sleep, but I _succumb_ to it,
and I keep my eyes at their work even when they are wearied and drooping
with watchfulness. I have retired, not only from men, but from affairs,
and especially from my own. I am doing the work for posterity; I am
writing out things which may prove of advantage to them. I am
intrusting to writing healthful admonitions--compositions, as it were,
of useful medicines."
But the days of Caius drew rapidly to an end. His gross and unheard-of
insults to Valerius Asiaticus and Cassius Chaereas brought on him
condign vengeance. It is an additional proof, if proof were wanting, of
the degradation of Imperial Rome, that the deed of retribution was due,
not to the people whom he taxed; not to the soldiers, whole regiments of
whom he had threatened to decimate; not to the knights, of whom scores
had been put to death by his orders; not to the nobles, multitudes of
whom had been treated by him with conspicuous infamy; not even to the
Senate, which illustrious body he had on all occasions deliberately
treated with contumely and hatred,--but to the private revenge of an
insulted soldier. The weak thin voice of Cassius Chaereas, tribune of
the praetorian cohort, had marked him out for the coarse and calumnious
banter of the imperial buffoon; and he determined to avenge himself, and
at the same time rid the world of a monster. He engaged several
accomplices in the conspiracy, which was nearly frustrated by their want
of resolution. For four whole days they hesitated, while day after day,
Caius presided in person at the bloody games of the amphitheatre. On the
fifth day (Jan. 24, A.D. 41), feeling unwell after one of his gluttonous
suppers, he was indisposed to return to the shows, but at last rose to
do so at the solicitation of his attendants. A vaulted corridor led from
the palace to the circus, and in that corridor Caius met a body of noble
Asiatic boys, who were to dance a Pyrrhic dance and sing a laudatory ode
upon the stage. Caius wished them at once to practice a rehearsal in his
presence, but their leader excused himself on the grounds of
hoarseness. At this moment Chaereas asked him for the watchword of the
night. He gave the watchword, "Jupiter." "Receive him in his wrath!"
exclaimed Chaereas, striking him on the throat, while almost at the same
moment the blow of Sabinus cleft the tyrant's jaw, and brought him to
his knee. He crouched his limbs together to screen himself from further
blows, screaming aloud, "I live! I live!" The bearers of his litter
rushed to his assistance, and fought with their poles, but Caius fell
pierced with thirty wounds; and, leaving the body weltering in its
blood, the conspirators rushed out of the palace, and took measures to
concert with the Senate a restoration of the old Republic. On the very
night after the murder the consuls gave to Chaereas the long-forgotten
watchword of "Liberty." But this little gleam of hope proved delusive to
the last degree. It was believed that the unquiet ghost of the murdered
madman haunted the palace, and long before it had been laid to rest by
the forms of decent sepulchre, a new emperor of the great Julian family
was securely seated upon the throne.