If we adopt Seneca’s moral standards (and if we bear in mind that the aristocracy itself — and Seneca in the opinion of the aristocracy — was utterly depraved according to these standards), then we can agree with his drastic conclusion: Caligula was the emperor who showed how “far supreme vice could go, when combined with supreme power” (Sen. Ad Helv. 10.4). The Roman aristocracy was finished, its resistance broken.
The steps Caligula took against the aristocracy after returning from the North were not limited to furthering their self-destructive tendencies, encouraging slaves to denounce their masters, and interning consulars’ wives and children on the Palatine. He also set about destroying the foundation of every aristocracy: its honor. Following the earlier consulars’ conspiracy he had mocked how hollow the old aristocratic conceptions of honor were under a changed form of government by granting awards to his horse Incitatus. Now, after two further conspiracies, he shifted from symbolic actions to concrete ones. Josephus and Suetonius report that the emperor abolished reserved seating for senators and knights at the theater. As a result there were pushing and shoving, and even fights, before performances began, and the highest-ranking members of society were forced to compete with commoners for a place. The seating order was left to chance. The emperor is said to have been amused by it all. His primary motive was certainly to annoy the aristocracy, but at the same time the resulting thoroughly mixed order of seating demonstrated that differences in rank were observed only when the emperor stood behind them; if he failed to support them, they were obsolete.
As the emperor allowed traditional social distinctions to be abolished by society itself, he also set about strategically dishonoring individuals among the leading members of the aristocracy. His uncle Claudius, who enjoyed particular distinction because of their close relationship, received much the same treatment as Silanus had earlier. Caligula decreed that of all the former consuls Claudius should always be the last to vote in the Senate. Because rank coincided with the order of voting, he was thus permanently demoted to the lowest place among them. But the emperor’s main targets were now the remaining members of the higher ranks of old Republican aristocracy, the nobilitas, who played a leading role in the group of consulares. He ordered that the statues of famous men from the Republican era, which Augustus had moved to the Campus Martius, be taken down, and announced that in the future he alone would decide in whose honor statues and portraits could be displayed. Living members of distinguished old families were prohibited from using certain emblems of an ancestor’s fame to which they had traditionally been entitled. A Torquatus was forbidden to wear his torque, a Cincinnatus could not wear his lock of hair, and a descendant of Pompey lost the right to add “the Great” to his name.
In the last case Caligula’s proceeding can be traced in some detail. Suetonius describes these insults without naming a year, making them seem arbitrary, but they can in fact be dated with relative precision. Pompey’s descendant, a great-grandson on his mother’s side of the famous Pompeius Magnus, is still listed with the unshortened form of his name in an inscription from the start of 40. Thus the prohibition of the cognomen belongs among the measures ordered by the emperor after his return to Rome. Secondly, Dio reports the reason Caligula gave for withdrawing the honor: He remarked that “it would be dangerous for anyone to be called Magnus [‘the Great’]” (Dio 60.5.9).
This statement could also have come from a modern social historian. “Noble birth still… was perilous,” writes Ronald Syme in his famous study of the early Empire. Every emperor had a “rational distrust” of the old nobilitas, whose very existence challenged his claim to exercise rule alone, for “even if the nobilis forgot his ancestors and his name, the emperor could not.” This Pompey’s later fate took a predictable course. The emperor Claudius restored his cognomen and even chose him as a son-in-law. But then the combination of distinguished ancestry and membership in the emperor’s inner circle proved to be too much of a good thing. Falling victim to an intrigue of the empress Messalina in 47, he lost his life “because of his family and his relationship to the emperor” (Dio 61[60].29.6a). Caligula turned out to be right in the end. But he was not a social historian, and Pompey cannot have had any interest in abstract insights. Caligula’s remark represents a cynical insult added to the injury. Not only did he devalue Pompey as a potential rival; he openly alluded to the dangerous rivalry between him and members of highly distinguished families. He thus justified the dishonor inflicted on Pompey with the need to protect him from the ruler — from himself.
As Pompey’s case shows, the most painful humiliations for the aristocracy undoubtedly occurred in personal contact with the emperor. Philo reports that even though everyone suffered from Caligula’s actions, people still continued to flatter him. Among the guests at the emperor’s last banquet in early 41 was Quintus Pomponius Secundus, one of the sitting consuls and a half brother of the empress Caesonia. According to Cassius Dio, Secundus sat at the emperor’s feet — like a slave — during the meal and “kept bending over continually to shower kisses upon them” (Dio 59.29.5). Suetonius recounts that when the emperor dined in the evening sometimes a few senators who had occupied the highest offices would stand at the head or foot of his couch dressed in short linen tunics: that is, comporting themselves in the manner of his personal slaves.
Thus the forms of debasement suffered in personal contact with the emperor began with voluntary, submissive, individual acts; when Caligula did not discourage these, everyone else was obliged to imitate them. This was not a new phenomenon. Tacitus used strong language to characterize aristocrats’ opportunistic behavior under Augustus and Tiberius and, as we have seen, they acted no differently under Caligula even before the autumn of 40. Now, however, the emperor began to demand self-abasing behavior from them. Dio writes that to most senators he offered his hand or foot to kiss but did not kiss them in return — an act that would have symbolized equality in rank. In one hate-filled passage, Seneca describes an incident in which a consular wished to thank Caligula for saving his life; clearly he had been denounced, and he may have been the lover of Quintilia. The emperor held out his left foot to be kissed, and this man, who had held the highest offices in Rome, prostrated himself and kissed the emperor’s foot in the presence of the leaders of the Senate. Caligula further subverted the traditions of the social hierarchy by offering the honor of his kiss in public to favorites whose official rank was far below the senators’, such as the well-known actor Mnester.
The reaction of aristocrats to their ceremonial degradation is illustrated by Dio’s report that those senators who were granted the exceptional honor of a kiss from the emperor thanked him in speeches in the Senate. The submissiveness continued, in other words. But Caligula went further in using his contacts with the aristocracy to humiliate specific individuals. All the sources mention his rhetorical talent and his quick wit, and we have noted his fondness for cynical jokes.
A sense of the horror aroused by Caligula’s presence among senators forced into submissive behavior has been preserved in various accounts: “Amid the multitude of his other vices,” writes Seneca, Gaius Caesar “had a bent for insult” and “was moved by the strange desire to brand every one with some stigma.” Seneca immediately gave him a taste of his own medicine by describing his appearance: “Such was the ugliness of his pale face bespeaking his madness, such the wildness of his eyes lurking beneath the brow of an old hag, such the hideousness of his bald head with its sprinkling of beggarly hairs. And he had, besides, a neck overgrown with bristles, spindle shanks, and enormous feet” (Sen. De Const. Sap. 18.1). According to Suetonius, Caligula’s face “was naturally forbidding and ugly,” but “he purposely made it even more savage, practicing all kinds of terrible and fearsome expressions before a mirror” (Suet. Cal. 50.1).