Also by Tom Holland
Nonfiction
RUBICON
The Last Years of the Roman Republic
PERSIAN FIRE
The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
THE FORGE OF CHRISTENDOM
The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West
IN THE SHADOW OF THE SWORD
The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
Fiction
ATTIS
DELIVER US FROM EVIL
THE SLEEPER IN THE SANDS
THE BONEHUNTER
Translations
The Histories by Herodotus
Copyright © 2015 by Tom Holland
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Little, Brown, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, a Hachette UK Company, London, in 2015.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Cover design by Michael J. Windsor
Cover photography (clockwise from upper left) Nero © DEA Picture Library/ Getty Images; Augustus © E+/ Getty Images; Tiberius © Musée Saint-Raymond, Toulouse, France / Bridgeman Images; Claudius and Caligula © DEA Picture Library Getty Images
Author photograph © Charlie Hopkinson
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Holland, Tom, author.
Dynasty : the rise and fall of the House of Caesar / by Tom Holland.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-385-53784-1 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-38553790-2 (eBook)
1. Rome—Politics and government—30 B.C.–476 A.D. 2. Rome—History—Empire, 30 B.C.–476 A.D. 3. Emperors—Rome.
I. Title.
DG270.H65 2015
937’.070922—dc23
2015026911
eBook ISBN 9780385537902
v4.1
a
For Katy
‘at simul heroum laudes et facta parentis iam legere…’
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Tom Holland
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
List of Maps
Family Tree
Preface
Epigraph
I PADRONE
1 CHILDREN OF THE WOLF
2 BACK TO THE FUTURE
3 THE EXHAUSTION OF CRUELTY
II COSA NOSTRA
4 THE LAST ROMAN
5 LET THEM HATE ME
6 IO SATURNALIA!
7 WHAT AN ARTIST
Timeline
Dramatis Personae
Notes
Bibliography
Illustrations
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As ever with my books, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to numerous people for their help. To my various editors, Richard Beswick, Gerry Howard, Frits van der Meij and Christoph Selzer, for their support, assistance and advice. To Iain Hunt, for all the care and patience he has brought to disentangling the knots of my manuscript – maps, timelines, end notes and all. To Susan de Soissons, the finest and kindest publicity director a writer could hope to have. To Patrick Walsh, best of agents, and everyone at Conville and Walsh. To Guy de la Bédoyère, Paul Cartledge, Catharine Edwards, Llewelyn Morgan and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, for generously bringing to bear the full illuminating light of their scholarship on my manuscript, and exposing many an error. To Dan Snow, who more than made up for distracting me from the politics of the first century AD during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum campaign by reading a first draft of Dynasty, to invaluable effect. To Jamie Muir, who (as he has done ever since I wrote Rubicon) read each successive chapter as I printed it off – and then went the extra mile by accompanying me deep into the Teutoburg Forest. To Gareth Blayney, for his beautiful illustrations of ancient Rome, and for agreeing to bring all his talent to bear on the cover of this book. To Sophie Hay, for her kindness, generosity and enthusiasm, her photographs, her companionship on the road trip to Nemi and Spelunca, and her careful tracking of my Twitter avatar’s evolution. To Laura Jeffrey, for her whole-hearted enjoyment of the plumbing on Caligula’s pleasure-boat. To Stephen Key, for selflessly negotiating the roads between Rome, Nemi and Spelunca on behalf of Sophie, Laura and myself. To Mattia Buondonno, for his ebullient hospitality at Pompeii. To Charlie Campbell, for providing me with the opportunity to hit a six, bowl the Crown Prince of Udaipur, and play at Lord’s – and thereby feel for myself what it must have been to rank as Augustus. To my cats, Edith and Tostig, for only periodically sitting on my keyboard. To my beloved wife, Sadie, for living these past years with the Caesars as well as me. To my younger daughter, Eliza, for (oh so perversely) choosing Nerva as her favourite emperor. To my elder daughter, Katy, to whom with all my love I dedicate this book.
MAPS
The Roman World in 44 BC
Central Rome
Italy
Augustan Rome
Germany
The East
The Bay of Naples
Gaul and Britain
Nero’s Rome
Greece
The Roman World in AD 69
Detail left
Detail right
PREFACE
AD 40. It is early in the year. Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus sits on a lofty platform beside the Ocean. As waves break on the shore and spray hangs in the air, he gazes out to sea. Many Roman ships over the years have been lost to its depths. Strange monsters are rumoured to lurk in its grey waters, while beyond the horizon there lies an island teeming with savage and mustachioed head-hunters: Britain. Perils such as these, lurking as they do on the very margins of civilisation, are fit to challenge even the boldest and most iron-willed hero.
The story of the Roman people, though, has always had about it an aura of the epic. They have emerged from dim and provincial obscurity to the command of the world: a feat like no other in history. Repeatedly put to trial, repeatedly surviving it triumphant, Rome has been well steeled for global rule. Now, seven hundred and ninety-two years after her founding, the man who ranks as her emperor wields power worthy of a god. Lined up alongside him on the northern beach are rank upon rank of the most formidable fighting force on the planet: armour-clad legionaries, catapults, battlefield artillery. The Emperor Gaius scans their length. He gives a command. At once, there is a blaring of trumpets. The signal for battle. Then silence. The Emperor raises his voice. ‘Soldiers!’ he cries. ‘I command you to pick up shells. Fill your helmets with the spoils of the Ocean.’1 And the legionaries, obedient to their emperor’s order, do so.
Such, at any rate, is the story. But is it true? Did the soldiers really pick up shells? And if they did – why? The episode is one of the most notorious in the life of a man whose entire career remains to this day a thing of infamy. Caligula, the name by which the Emperor Gaius is better known, is one of the few people from ancient history to be as familiar to pornographers as to classicists. The scandalous details of his reign have always provoked prurient fascination. ‘But enough of the emperor; now to the monster.’2 So wrote Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, a scholar and archivist in the imperial palace who doubled in his spare time as a biographer of the Caesars, and whose life of Caligula is the oldest extant one that we possess. Written almost a century after the Emperor’s death, it catalogues a quite sensational array of depravities and crimes. He slept with his sisters! He dressed up as the goddess Venus! He planned to award his horse the highest magistracy in Rome! Set against the background of such stunts, Caligula’s behaviour on the Channel coast comes to seem a good deal less surprising. Suetonius certainly had no problem in explaining his behaviour. ‘He was ill in both body and mind.’3
But if Caligula was sick, then so too was Rome. The powers of life and death wielded by an emperor would have been abhorrent to an earlier generation. Almost a century before Caligula massed his legions on the shores of the Ocean and gazed out to Britain, his great-great-great-great-uncle had done the same – and then actually crossed the Channel. The exploits of Gaius Julius Caesar had been as spectacular as any in his city’s history: not only two invasions of Britain but the permanent annexation of Gaul, as the Romans called what today is France. He had achieved his feats, though, as a citizen of a republic – one in which it was taken for granted by most that death was the only conceivable alternative to liberty. When Julius Caesar, trampling down this presumption, had laid claim to a primacy over his fellow citizens, it had resulted first in civil war, and then, after he had crushed his domestic foes as he had previously crushed the Gauls, in his assassination. Only after two more murderous bouts of slaughtering one another had the Roman people finally been inured to their servitude. Submission to the rule of a single man had redeemed their city and its empire from self-destruction – but the cure itself had been a kind of sickness.