Caligula: A Biography (11 page)

On 10 June 38 Drusilla died unexpectedly—the sister who had always been Caligula’s favorite and whom he had named as sole heir. He found her loss so extraordinarily painful that he could not bring himself to attend the elaborate public funeral with which she was honored. Seneca wrote critically that just as he was unable to show joy or pleasure in a manner suitable for an emperor,
he was unable to mourn appropriately. Caligula shunned human company in Rome and withdrew to his country estate in the Alban Hills, where he tried to distract himself with dice and board games. Then he traveled aimlessly around the region, letting his beard and hair grow in grief.

Caligula granted Drusilla unusual posthumous honors. On top of all the honors Livia had received after her death, the Senate passed a measure deifying Drusilla, an honor previously granted only to Julius Caesar and Augustus. A gold portrait of her was placed in the Curia, and in the Temple of Venus on the Forum a statue of her was erected the same size as the statue to the goddess herself. Drusilla was also to receive her own temple, for which a new college of priests would be established. When women took an oath, they were to use her name, as the emperor did from then on, swearing by the divine Drusilla. Great games would be held on her birthday. In the cities of the Empire she was to be venerated as Panthea, the “All-Goddess,” and we know from inscriptions in the Greek part of the Empire in the East that these instructions were carried out. In Rome, the regulations on mourning were enforced with extreme rigor. Visits to the thermal baths and banquets were prohibited. One man who sold water to mix with wine is supposed to have been executed for the crime of
maiestas
. The senator Livius Geminus declared under oath that he had witnessed how Drusilla rose to heaven and conversed with the gods, vowing that he wished to be struck dead along with his children if he were lying. In contrast to similar attempts when Caligula was ill, the flattery succeeded and the senator was rewarded with a million sesterces.

Seneca writes that people were uncertain whether the emperor would prefer for them to mourn his sister or to worship her, and he describes Caligula’s actions as immoderate in the extreme.
Modern authors have also declared his behavior strange, and even speculated that he may have suffered a nervous breakdown. Without any doubt he was very deeply affected. The claim that his grief was excessive may be unwarrantable, however, since the deification of a male ruler had precedents and Drusilla was Caligula’s designated successor. Her deification was the first time a woman from the imperial family was added to the Roman pantheon, but not the last. The same distinction was granted to Livia under Claudius and to Poppaea Sabina during the reign of Nero.

The unusual honors bestowed on Drusilla after her death were also intended to augment the prestige of the dynasty, and Caligula’s behavior immediately afterwards was entirely rational. The question of the succession was once again completely open, a situation that could lead to dangerous instability if the emperor should fall ill, as the previous year had shown. A few months after the death of his sister Caligula therefore married again. His choice fell on Lollia Paulina, a woman famous for her beauty and, as noted above, her great wealth. She was already married to Publius Memmius Regulus, a man of consular rank who at that time was governor of Moesia, Macedonia, and Achaea. According to Suetonius, Regulus is supposed to have suggested the marriage to Caligula himself and agreed to the divorce, yet even this should not be regarded as abnormal. Marriage within the aristocracy was a tactic in families’ political planning, rarely correlated with personal attraction or love. For sex a Roman senator had ample choice of extramarital partners among both freedwomen and slaves. The connection to the emperor Regulus would gain from Lollia Paulina’s marriage was undoubtedly worth more to him than remaining married to his wife. He was present in Rome himself for the wedding and retained his provincial office into the reign of Claudius.

This marriage did not last long either, however. Caligula ended it, presumably in the summer of the following year. Cassius Dio writes that “allegedly” the wife was infertile, but the real reason was that Caligula was tired of her. Tacitus’s reports on the year 48 show that the reason given out was in fact true: When the emperor Claudius wanted to remarry, the very same Lollia Paulina was recommended to him with the endorsement that because she had borne no children she would create no complications for the imperial family. The high-born lady still possessed all the qualities of an empress ten years later and was actually infertile. Caligula’s separation from her was thus by no means the result of mere whim. But the marriage did have an unintended but probably inevitable secondary consequence: Aemilius Lepidus, who had spent almost a year with the prospect of possibly succeeding to the throne, now knew that Drusilla’s death and Caligula’s remarriage had put an end to this chance once and for all. Events a year later, however, would show that he had not resigned himself to the fact.

The Roman Empire, conquered during the centuries of the Republic, formed the basis of the Roman emperors’ power. Their untold wealth flowed from taxes collected in the provinces, and their political power was supported by the military forces stationed there (along with the elite troops and the paramilitary groups who kept order in Rome). At the same time, however, the resources of the Empire constituted a potential danger for the emperor. High-ranking members of the senatorial order governed nearly all the various provinces. These men were responsible for law and order in their regions and carried out administrative and
jurisdictional tasks. They were in charge of the legions stationed there, whose commanding officers were Roman senators as well. A long tradition decreed that only members of the senatorial order, men of high social standing and political experience, could be considered for leadership positions in the Empire. The emperor, whose rule always drew latent rivalry from his fellow aristocrats, thus had to depend on precisely those fellow aristocrats to administer his rule. The military forces in the Empire, the base of his dominant position since the civil wars of the late Republic, could be used to threaten his grip on power in a crisis. In addition to choosing the “right” men for crucial posts, meaning primarily ones who were not of too noble birth, there were two main strategies an emperor could use to preempt crises and, in a countermove, use the Empire to stabilize his own position: He could strengthen his personal relationship with soldiers, and he could heighten his activities as a patron toward the populations of the provinces—meaning above all toward the municipal aristocracies of the Empire. Both strategies required him to spend money, but ideally they also demanded his presence in person.

The last time an emperor had traveled to one of the provinces lay almost half a century in the past, when Augustus had visited Gaul. Tiberius had not left Italy once during his entire reign. Caligula, who had already greatly favored the upper classes in the provinces when he expanded the equestrian order, spent a lot of time abroad, particularly in view of the brevity of his rule. A few weeks after Drusilla’s death, in about the middle of the year 38, he departed on a journey to Sicily. He began construction on a large port terminal with granaries near the city of Rhegium, so that ships arriving from Egypt could unload their cargoes of grain there. Presumably this helped to supply southern Italy, and in Josephus’s view it represents the most useful act of Caligula’s
reign. On his visit to the city of Syracuse, the emperor sponsored games, presumably in honor of Drusilla, and had repairs made to its dilapidated walls and temples.

Seneca, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio do not mention the harbor construction at all, and note the journey to Sicily only in passing. For the city of Syracuse, however, the event was probably the most significant in its recent history. As we know from other instances, an emperor’s visit was an occasion for great festivities with elaborate greeting ceremonies and many honors conferred on the ruler by city leaders and the entire population. By sponsoring games and construction projects and making extensive gifts in return, the emperor raised his profile as a benefactor, a role to which the Syracusans would refer on later occasions. It appears that other Sicilian towns also received the honor of a visit. Caligula is reported to have left Messina ahead of schedule because Mount Etna was threatening to erupt.

On his return he began by concentrating on further benefits for Rome. In October he joined his Praetorian guards in putting out a fire; the emperor’s personal participation attracted general attention. In the year 38 he also began construction of two new aqueducts, the Aqua Claudia and the Anio Novus, to bring water to Rome from Tibur (modern Tivoli). Both ambitious projects were completed by his successor, Claudius.

Finally, preparations must have begun in this year for a large-scale campaign in Germania. In 39, legions and supplementary troops were assembled from all over the Empire; extensive recruiting efforts took place everywhere, and huge amounts of food and other supplies were stockpiled. Between 200,000 and 250,000 soldiers are said to have been involved. These preparations may also have included plans to build the new town in the Alps mentioned by Suetonius. The campaign was a response to
incursions into Gaul by Germanic tribes from east of the Rhine; the decisive impulse, however, was probably the young emperor’s wish to recommence the conquest of Germania his father had pursued and win military glory for himself. Success in war remained the most important source of prestige in Roman society; it could both increase the emperor’s support among soldiers and widen the gap in status between him and the aristocracy. Through his wars in Spain between 27 and 24
B.C
. Augustus had demonstrated that campaigns could enable an emperor to sidestep conflicts at home and benefit from a victory abroad to solidify his position in Rome. The emperors appreciated the significance of military fame for enhancing their position. In imperial Rome, celebration of a triumph, a distinction traditionally granted to victorious generals in the field, became reserved with few exceptions exclusively for the ruler, who officially exercised supreme command. Thus the preparations for war indicate that Caligula was making a concerted attempt to use the resources of the Empire to consolidate his own position.

The plans for the campaign in Germania were drawn up in conjunction with other measures in the Greek and eastern parts of the Empire. There was a string of Roman-dominated client kingdoms extending from the Bosporus through Thrace and Syria to Palestine, some of which Tiberius had brought under Roman administration as a result of domestic political upheavals and the spread of Parthian influence. In the year 37 Caligula had already placed two kings on the throne, Julius Agrippa in Judaea and Antiochus IV Epiphanes in Commagene, and had supplied both with substantial gifts of funds. Both of them had spent part of their youth in Rome and continued to reside there after their coronations. Agrippa, who had been in close contact with Caligula since his time on Capri at the latest (but possibly
as early as his stay in the house of Antonia), was even granted the insignia of Praetorian rank by the Senate after Caligula became emperor.

At the end of the year 38 Caligula granted further territories in Asia Minor and the Near East. Three sons of Cotys, the king of Thrace—Rhoemetalces, Polemon II, and Cotys, who as great-grandsons of Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra had family ties to the emperor—were granted kingdoms, as were Sohaemus, the scion of an indigenous princely family, and Mithridates, a great-grandson of the famous Mithridates VI. Taken together their kingdoms stretched from the region of the Black Sea to Lesser Armenia. Caligula had these grants confirmed by the Senate, and formally installed the kings himself in solemn ceremonies on the Rostra in the Forum. It is possible that Caligula envisioned these new client kingdoms as part of more extensive plans for the eastern regions of the Empire. Thus it is reported that he intended to rebuild the palace of Polycrates on Samos and also to dig a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth. Both projects would have aligned him vividly with the traditions of Hellenistic kings, and also with the great dictator Julius Caesar, who had made the most recent attempt to create a canal there (following the Corinthian tyrant Periander and King Demetrius Poliorcetes of Macedonia). More will be said below about Caligula’s plans for a journey to Alexandria and the East, which took on more definite shape two years later and owed much to the example of his father, Germanicus.

What sort of picture would the Roman senatorial aristocracy have had of Caligula, then twenty-six years old, toward the end of the year 38? How did all his varied activities fit together? Within a short time he had acted directly and without scruple to rid himself of both rivals for the throne and of Tiberius’s
powerful favorites. Within Roman political institutions he had skillfully played the role of an emperor willing to accommodate the Senate. In his own household he had established himself on a plane above his fellow nobles with lavish displays of great extravagance. At the Circus and the theater he had shared the enthusiasm of the common people and won their hearts. He had acquired a political profile with a broad spectrum of sensible and necessary measures, ranging from expanding the equestrian order to improving Rome’s water supply, projects to which virtually no objections could be raised. He had visited cities in Sicily, reorganized the regions on the eastern borders of the Empire, maintained friendly relations with rulers in the East, and planned extensive military actions against the Germanic tribes, which if successful would significantly strengthen his position as emperor. And he accomplished all this within twenty months, despite having been confined to his bed by illness perhaps for two of them.

It is safe to assume that some of the venerable old aristocrats of consular rank who set the tone in the Senate had begun to feel uneasy. Disquieting stories circulated: When Caligula was entertaining some royal guests—perhaps the kings named above—at a banquet in Rome, they began quarreling about the respective nobility of their ancestry. In response Caligula is said to have quoted Homer: “Let there be one king, one ruler!” (
Iliad
2.204–5).