By now the reader will not be surprised that Suetonius’s account is also on this occasion stamped with denunciatory intentions. In another text, however, the biographer himself provides information that calls these remarks into question. In the passage quoted above from his Life of Vitellius, Suetonius states explicitly that it was the emperor Vitellius’s father, Lucius, and not Caligula himself who initiated the veneration of him as a god. As it happens, we have a parallel passage that reveals how Suetonius adapted the information available to him and reworked the material. In his work On Anger, Seneca described a pantomime in which Caligula took part, followed by a feast the emperor hosted in the open air. When it was interrupted by thunder and lightning and the guests became alarmed, the emperor grew “angry at heaven” and quoted a verse from Homer, “Lift me up, or I will lift thee!” (Iliad 23.724). In other words he challenged Jupiter to a wrestling match. Seneca considered this sacrilegious and called Caligula demented for that reason. While the episode depicts the emperor as an arrogant man with an explosive temper, it does not in the least suggest that he was communicating with Jupiter in a state of mental confusion. That is exactly how Suetonius reports it, however, taking the incident out of its original context.
The story about the moon goddess can be similarly explained. As shown above, the basis for it was a cynical joke intended to demean the flatterer Vitellius. In Suetonius’s account, though, the emperor is depicted as suffering from a delusion that he is actually in contact with the goddess. Suetonius has turned Caligula’s own weapon against him: Just as the emperor pretended to take his aristocratic flatterers seriously so as to expose how mad their flattery was, now the biographer takes Caligula’s jests seriously, using them to portray him as insane. Nevertheless there is a difference: The point of Caligula’s joke could be grasped by those present — its effect depended on that. In contrast, Suetonius’s technique is not humorous at all. It extracts the emperor’s words from their original context so that their meaning is no longer the same. The result is a misrepresentation of what really occurred, but one that readers cannot immediately recognize as such.
This is evident again a hundred years later in Cassius Dio. On the one hand, he follows the opinion of Suetonius and takes Caligula’s divine adoration as evidence of his madness. On the other hand he reports (from other sources that he, like Suetonius, had available to him) a series of events in which the original context of the emperor’s deification can still be recognized, and assembles information that contradicts the interpretation he adopted from Suetonius. Thus, for example, he reports the seriousness with which even the most prominent Romans venerated the emperor as a god, although it clearly amazes him. This procedure reduces the consistency of his account, but renders it all the more valuable as a source.
Returning now to the situation in Rome in the autumn of 40, we can see that the senators had not reckoned with Caligula’s response to their conspiracies. They experienced a kind of humiliation they probably could not have imagined in their wildest dreams. The young man who was their ruler did not content himself with taking measures specifically designed to terrorize and dishonor them. He accepted the flatteries of individual senators and made the entire Senate venerate him as a god, treatment that alone would have represented extreme degradation for such an exalted group. But he did even worse: Counting on their submissiveness, he staged carnival-like performances at which they were forced to expose themselves to public ridicule by pretending they actually took the emperor in fancy dress for a god. Cassius Dio captured this bizarre way of shaming the highest-ranking members of Roman society in a vivid anecdote, although one suspects he may not have been entirely clear about what was going on. On one occasion when Caligula appeared on a stage costumed as Jupiter, there was a simple shoemaker from Gaul in the audience who burst out laughing. The emperor summoned him forward and asked: “What do I seem to you to be?” The shoemaker answered: “A big humbug.” He suffered no consequences, since according to Dio the emperor would tolerate outspoken comments from the common people but not from men in important positions. But if one recalls the parallel situation with Vitellius, another interpretation of the scene suggests itself: Far from considering himself divine or intending to introduce an official emperor cult in Rome, Caligula was instead appearing as a god at occasional public performances to expose the senators’ fearful and at the same time hypocritical submissiveness toward him in all its absurdity. And he did so before an audience of commoners who could not help laughing at the antics of the nobly born.
The emperor’s authority was uncontested. The soldiers of the Praetorian Guard — who were responsible for arrests, torture, and executions — profited from the prevailing conditions and were loyal to the emperor. Alongside them and sometimes in competition with them his Germanic bodyguards played an important role. As foreigners who did not speak Latin and hence were cut off from most contacts with other groups in Rome, they fixed their attention firmly on the emperor. By their constant presence they ensured his safety, and he paid them generously in return. Among the legions on the frontiers of the Empire, where little news arrived about conditions in Rome, the young emperor’s popularity was unaffected. For them he remained the son of Germanicus, who had grown up in their camp and rewarded them so liberally at the start of his reign.
The people of Rome also continued to stand behind the emperor, who provided a generous supply of bread and circuses. Discord arose occasionally: When the people protested higher taxes Caligula sent out the Praetorian Guard, and he mocked the traditional relationship between the aristocracy and the commoners by sending old gladiators and injured men into the arena to fight against broken-down animals. This did not damage his popularity permanently, however, for he continued to sponsor “serious” games, and regularly distributed large sums of money. Josephus reports that the common people of Rome had an unfavorable opinion of the Senate and saw the emperor as their protection from the greed of the aristocracy.
The emperor’s support among soldiers limited the threat that provincial governors from the senatorial order could pose to him. Moreover, Caligula’s predecessors had already developed a new approach to the fundamental problem of rivalry with the aristocracy. There was an increasing tendency to choose “new men” from the equestrian order to fill positions that conferred extensive military power. Most of these appointees had excellent military and bureaucratic abilities, and they also owed their promotion, and consequent advancement into the highest rank of society, to the emperor. They enjoyed little prestige among aristocrats, commoners, or soldiers. All of this checked any danger of usurpation they might have represented. The recent failure of Lentulus Gaetulicus no doubt functioned as a curb on similar ambitions, and the recall of Lucius Vitellius from Syria proved that the emperor kept an eye on everything.
There were also senators in Rome who cooperated with the emperor and benefited from their ties to him. Various sources confirm that some of them maintained particular “friendships” with Caligula, attending his banquets, inviting him to their own, and accompanying him to public events such as theatrical performances. A few have already been mentioned. Vitellius had counted as a close friend of Caligula’s since his diplomatic comment on the conversation with the moon goddess; he was the son of a man from the equestrian order who had served as a financial administrator under Augustus. His own son Aulus Vitellius, the later emperor, belonged to the emperor’s inner circle as a familiaris. Quintus Pomponius Secundus, Caligula’s co-consul at the start of 41 and the man who kissed the emperor’s feet at a banquet, was the empress Caesonia’s half brother. Gnaeus Sentius Saturninus was the son of a senator who had accompanied Germanicus, Caligula’s father, on his journey to the East.