Yet there was still worse to come. Caligula conjured up an imaginary speech of Tiberius addressed to him: “In all this you have spoken well and truly. Therefore show no affection for any of them and spare none of them. For they all hate you, and they all pray for your death; and they will murder you if they can. Do not stop to consider, then, what acts of yours will please them, nor mind it if they talk, but look solely to your own pleasure and safety, since that has the most just claim. In this way you will suffer no harm and will at the same time enjoy all the greatest pleasures; you will also be honored by them, whether they wish it or not. If, however, you pursue the opposite course, it will profit you naught in reality; for, though in name you may win an empty reputation, you will gain no advantage, but will become the victim of plots and will perish ingloriously. For no man living is ruled of his own free will; on the contrary, only so long as a person is afraid does he pay court to the man who is stronger, but when he gains courage, he avenges himself on the man who is weaker” (Dio 59.16.5–7). Thereupon the emperor announced the resumption of the trials for treason, ordered his directives to be inscribed on a bronze stele, and left the Senate House.
Caligula had not only stripped the mask from the face of the aristocracy; he had also given a name to what lay behind it: their resentment of imperial rule, their hatred of the emperor, and their readiness to attack him whenever a favorable opportunity presented itself. No one could deny any of this, given the conspiracy against him that had just taken place. The truly appalling aspect of the speech, however, did not consist in what Caligula had said. There was no need to inform the senators of their own behavior. Every time they submissively voted some honor to the emperor, the senators knew what they were doing, and their latent willingness to conspire against him came as no surprise. What was unprecedented and shocking was that he had said it at all. By rebuking the Senate for the way it communicated with the emperor, Caligula had rendered it incapable of communication. The senators could not participate in his meta-communication about their ambiguous communication. The inequity of power prevented them from agreeing with him; they could not say, “Yes, we hate you and would gladly rid ourselves of you,” a statement that by this point would probably have reflected reality. Instead they were powerless, helpless, speechless — and personally humiliated at the same time.
There was also a third factor. The mask on the emperors’ part, their attempt to secure the aristocracy’s acceptance by acting as though they were not autocrats at all — this mask too Caligula dropped. Augustus’s art of lifelong playacting, which Caligula himself had copied in the past two years, was thus revealed as a lie, as dissembling and idle talk, that in the end only endangered the emperor’s safety. Now he announced that he would dispense with the aristocracy’s recognition of his position and predicted that aristocrats would remain servile nevertheless. This amounted to a declaration that the Augustan Principate was ended. Caligula had given the political paradox of the age, the contradictory combination of republic and monarchy, its real name, and declared himself for one side only, the monarchy.
How did the senators react? “For the moment,” Dio writes, “their alarm and dejection prevented them from saying a word or transacting any business; but on the next day they associated again and bestowed lavish praise upon Gaius as a most sincere and pious ruler, for they felt very grateful to him that they had not perished like the others. Accordingly, they voted to offer annual sacrifices to his clemency… on the anniversary of the day on which he had read his address” (Dio 59.16.9–10). In other words, they flattered him and so continued to address him in the very language he had exposed as hypocrisy the day before. They continued to show him honor, just as he had cynically predicted. It was their only chance — but it meant that they had taken their self-abasement toward the emperor and his power to the extreme.
With this speech Caligula had taken an irreversible step. To be sure, the consulars involved in the conspiracy had provided evidence of the ambiguity in relations between the aristocracy and the emperor. Their conspiracy had been secret, however, and the fact of the conspirators’ enmity toward the emperor, revealed when the plot was exposed, could have been covered up in public by punishing the participants in the Senate. Now a new situation had arisen. Once the emperor had exposed the doublespeak in communications between aristocrats and himself, every statement addressed to him by the Senate from then on had already been condemned in advance: It was duplicitous, and the emperor knew it. And the senators knew that the emperor knew that they knew that he knew. Conversely, the path was now blocked for every future attempt on the emperor’s part to accommodate them: Everyone would have known that the emperor didn’t mean what he was saying. And the emperor would have known that the senators knew that he also knew that they knew. In other words, Caligula caused the ambiguous form of communication to collapse, which up to that time had been the crucial means for avoiding the paradox of the simultaneous existence of a monarchy and a republic. The truth had been spoken, and that could not be undone.
How were they to go on from here? For the moment the aristocrats in the Senate had no choice but to carry on as before and thereby to abase themselves doubly — as flatterers who had been exposed but continued their flattery nevertheless. As for Caligula, he did not drop the matter after this one speech; rather he used the new situation to humiliate the aristocrats and make them look ridiculous.
By the time of Augustus and Tiberius the continuation of traditional friendships among aristocrats had produced a situation in which all senators and the highest-ranking knights were officially “friends” of the emperor, whatever their actual personal relationships with him. Mornings they visited him at home; in the evening they were his guests or invited him to banquets; they left bequests to him in their wills, to gain his favor. Thus ambiguity prevailed here, too. Although Caligula had now torn down the facade of friendship, he continued to impose the traditional modes of behavior on the aristocracy, and its members were incapable of expressing their enmity to the emperor openly, because all the power was on his side. It is reported, for example, that he addressed many people as “father,” “grandfather,” “mother,” and “grandmother,” that is, by names that conveyed a close and affectionate relationship to them, in order to compel them to make him “voluntary” payments and to bequeath him money. Through a resolution in the Senate, he ordered that all those still alive who had included Tiberius in their wills must now name him instead. Similarly, when his daughter was born a short time later he pointed out the expenses he would incur as a father and demanded “gifts” for her education and dowry. Once again the aristocrats had to pay up or cause their own downfall by demonstrating publicly that they were no friends of the emperor. Philo reports that Caligula made gifts of money to force people to give him far higher amounts in return. Particularly distinguished members of the senatorial order were harmed in other ways “under the guise of friendship.” They were required to pay vast sums for his travels and entertainment when he visited them; some spent their entire fortunes on a single dinner or even went into debt. “And so some came to the point of deprecating the favors bestowed by him” (Phil. Leg. 345).