It cannot be verified whether Caligula’s feet were in fact enormous or whether he used a mirror to practice making horrible faces. Here again, remember that the behavior described as illustrating the emperor’s character can belong only to the time after he returned to Rome in the autumn of 40. Josephus and Dio’s accounts show that up to the time of the consulars’ conspiracy he had treated the aristocracy courteously, and after the great conspiracy he had spent a year away from Rome. The fears that he inspired in senators from then on, and his consistent efforts to humiliate them, thus formed part of a conscious new strategy. Much of it, especially the insults directed at individuals, should probably be ascribed to the emperor’s desire to take personal revenge and should be taken as his response both to the events of the previous year and to the most recent conspiracy. But Caligula’s remarks on the emperor’s paradoxical position of honor within the senatorial class show that his goal went even further: His aim was to destroy the aristocratic hierarchy as such and expose it to ridicule.
Lucius Vitellius, Suetonius reports, “was the first to begin to worship Gaius Caesar as a god; for on his return from Syria he did not presume to approach the emperor except with veiled head, turning himself about and then prostrating himself” (Suet. Vit. 2.5). The father of the later emperor had presumably been replaced as governor of Syria at the beginning of the year and then must have feared for his life. Dio provides more details. In order to save his life, Vitellius dressed as a man of lower rank than he actually was, threw himself at the emperor’s feet, addressed him with many divine names, prayed to him, and finally vowed that he would offer sacrifices to him. In other words, in Caligula’s presence Vitellius performed a ritual combining an element of Roman cultic practice (veiling the head) with the custom known in the Hellenic world and the East of prostrating oneself before a divine ruler (proskynēsis). He started a trend.
After Caligula released Pomponius, Dio relates, the senators praised him “partly out of fear and partly with sincerity,” some calling him a demigod (Greek hērōs) and others a god (Dio 59.26.3–5). They didn’t stop there. In accord with a decree of the Senate a temple was built to the emperor; he was to be worshiped there as divine. A college of priests was founded to take charge of the emperor’s worship. “The richest citizens used all their influence to secure the priesthoods of his cult and bid high for the honor” (Suet. Cal. 22.3). Dio writes that “these honors paid to him as a god came not only from the multitude, accustomed at all times to flattering somebody, but from those also who stood in high repute” (Dio 59.27.3). What had happened to the senators of Rome? Had fear driven them insane? Not at all. Their behavior was less surprising than it may appear at first glance.
The heaven of the ancients was not nearly as distant as that of Christianity, the religion beginning to spread from the East at that time. In the myths handed down in the ancient world, the gods were not above appearing on earth from time to time, for instance for the purpose of pursuing attractive mortal women. Similarly, from the fourth century B.C. on it was possible to designate persons who possessed power or wealth far in excess of human norms as “heroes” or gods and to venerate them accordingly. In Hellenistic times this led to the founding of cults for individual kings and their dynasties. Roman senators who had conquered the Greek East in the era of the Republic had direct knowledge of this custom, since they had been objects of the same kind of veneration there themselves. Finally, Roman emperors and members of their families were worshiped as gods in the eastern cities of the Empire and not long afterwards in the western provinces as well. Caligula had experienced this himself as a child when he accompanied his parents to the East.
In Rome itself the situation was somewhat more complicated. Julius Caesar had been offered various divine honors by the Senate before he was assassinated. He was designated “Jupiter Julius,” and plans were made for a temple dedicated to him and his clemency; Marcus Antonius was chosen to serve as his priest. In the time of Augustus poets such as Ovid, Horace, and Propertius often addressed the princeps as a god, and in Tiberius’s reign various senators attempted to gain recognition by attributing a divine aura to him. Thus it is reported that the emperor’s activities were called “sacred occupations,” that offerings were made to images of the emperor and Sejanus, or that some senators prostrated themselves before him.
The idea of divinity seems to have been not entirely without appeal for recipients of the honor. Alexander the Great and other Hellenistic kings had sometimes appeared attired as various deities, and Roman senators were not unfamiliar with performances of this kind: In a triumph, the highest honor achievable, a victorious Roman general appeared dressed to resemble Jupiter, the supreme god of the Roman polity. Wearing a tunic embroidered with palm trees and red make-up on his face, he carried a scepter; all three features were typical attributes of the god. It is reported of Octavian, the later Augustus, that during the triumvirate he gave a party that became known as the “banquet of the twelve gods,” at which he appeared costumed as Apollo and the guests also came dressed as divinities. His rival Antonius did not lag behind. He allowed himself to be honored in the eastern parts of the Empire as the “new Dionysus” and appeared with the corresponding costume and paraphernalia.
When he assumed the position of princeps in 27 B.C., however, Augustus altered his behavior in this respect, as he did in many others. When the civil wars ended, he refused divine honors, since they would have run directly counter to his aim of being accepted as sole ruler by reviving Republican forms and honoring the senatorial order as equals. As emperor he seems to have insisted that throughout the Empire he should not be honored in a cult of his own, but only in conjunction with the capital city, so that temples were dedicated to Roma et Augustus. Tiberius followed a similar policy. He rejected the idea of such honors for himself and was criticized by the Senate for it. He permitted others in their place, however, granting to the cities in the province of Asia in 23, for instance, the right to erect one temple to him, his mother, Livia, and the Senate. The attempts of some senators to flatter him obsequiously apparently repelled him; every time he left the Senate House, he supposedly exclaimed, “These men! How ready they are for slavery!” (Tac. Ann.3.65.3).
There had been, then, no shortage of attempts to venerate emperors as divine even before Caligula’s time. These did not entail belief that the emperors were superhuman; rather they formed part of the ambiguous communication that had become requisite in imperial Rome. The first two emperors had tried to block this development because they feared correctly — as could be seen in Caesar’s case — that the more honors the aristocracy awarded them, the lower their acceptance sank among those very aristocrats. The Senate itself was venerated as “sacred” or as a “divine assembly,” in some cities in the eastern part of the Empire, after all, so that worship of the emperor as a god would clearly detract from the “divinity” of its members. This did not prevent some senators from pushing for veneration of the emperor all the same, and their colleagues could hardly voice any objection.