Caligula did recover and was moved indeed. He called for the equestrian with gladiatorial ambitions and packed him off to the arena, where he had to battle and beg for his life. Then he located the poor pleb who had vowed to offer his life for the emperor’s and inquired why the man was still alive. Caligula had him wreathed and garlanded as if for sacrifice, paraded through the city, and finally pitched to his death from the Tarpeian Rock.
Rome thought this conduct somewhat strange, but she would see far stranger antics from Caligula from now on. Apparently, the illness had unhinged his mind. One day, Pilate returned from the Forum where he had gathered the latest word on the princeps, and told Procula: “Rome had an emperor; now she has a monster.”
Perhaps due to some faulty gene in the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the monster had been lurking in Caligula even before his breakdown, though his better qualities had usually kept the beast well chained. Still, there had been earlier symptoms, and Pilate began piecing the stories together. On Capri he had shown definite traces of megalomania and cruelty. His grandmother Antonia had also caught him at incest with one of his sisters, and though later it was Antonia who saved his life by exposing Sejanus’s conspiracy, Caligula had not bothered to attend her funeral in early May, merely viewing her flaming pyre from the comfort of his dining room. His hearing on the Palatine showed Pilate that even the emperor’s better moods were capable of caprice. But after his illness, the benign part of Caligula succumbed to the new role he was creating for himself as Oriental despot.
The man had had no training to rule. Unlike Tiberius, he had never commanded any armies, and had little experience in public office. Now, with the adoring world at his feet, the young princeps’ head was permanently turned, and he became intoxicated with power. He began by lashing out against those closest to him. His potential rival, the teenage Gemellus, was put to death because his breath smelled of an antidote, Caligula claimed. The temerity of the fellow—assuming that the emperor was trying to poison him! The luckless Gemellus had only taken cough medicine for a chronic cold.
Macro, the praetorian prefect, made the mistake of continually reminding Caligula how much he owed to him, so Macro and his wife and children were all forced to commit suicide. The news staggered Pilate, since only a few months earlier he had seen him basking in the princeps’ favor.
Anything was permitted in the private life of the “Greatest and Best of Caesars,” as he now liked to be styled. He lived in habitual incest with his sisters, but was capable of love beyond the family. At the wedding banquet of a friend, he carried the bride away from the table to his own palace, “divorcing” her a few days later. He recognized Caesonia as his third wife only after she had borne him a baby girl. Caligula said he was sure of the parentage, because the baby had a savage temper and regularly tried to scratch out the eyes of children who played with her.
Pilate learned many of the grotesque stories firsthand, since his old friend Cassius Chaerea was a praetorian tribune assigned to the Palatine. It was with Chaerea that Pilate had guzzled wine the night of his dismissal from government service. Lately, the tribune was spending many an evening at Pilate’s home, reporting on Caligula with obvious loathing and congratulating Pilate on his lucky escape from immediate contact with “Crazy Boots,” as he had slightly adjusted the emperor’s name.
Predictably, Caligula soon showed contempt for the Senate. Interviews with senators were usually conducted with them trotting alongside his chariot, their togas flapping in the breeze until the business was concluded. Others played sycophant and waited on him hand and foot.
“Remember that I have the right to do anything to anybody,” he once told Antonia, and his reign became a studied effort to demonstrate that claim. He now launched a program of private executions of senators and equestrians, which were carried out by graduated woundings “so that the victim may feel he is dying.” Final decapitations often took place before Caligula while he was lunching. Procula was so horrified at such reports that Pilate now sent her out of the room whenever Cassius Chaerea arrived with his latest brace of stories.
The only way commoners escaped the imperial vengeance was by their sheer numbers. Once at the races, the rabble deliberately cheered the red faction rather than Caligula’s beloved greens. “I wish the people had but a single neck,” he growled. Then he ordered the awnings over the top edges of the hippodrome drawn back so that the plebes would bake in the sun for their perversity.
Caligula had now reached an ultimate stage of megalomania by laying serious claim to his own divinity. Julius Caesar and Augustus had been deified after their deaths, but this was taken seriously only in the East, where the idea of a ruler cult originated. Most practical Romans regarded their “deified” emperors only as quasi-saints. But Caligula insisted on a more literal interpretation, and he wanted his deity in this life where he could enjoy it. He now deigned to be worshiped personally in the Temple of Castor and Pollux at appointed hours, taking his place between the divine brothers. Later he erected a separate temple to his own godhead, which housed a life-sized statue of himself in gold. Each day, his priesthood dressed the statue in clothing identical to Caligula’s own costume for the day. His favorite horse he appointed as high priest of his cult and enrolled it in the Senate. And since he was having so many god-to-god conversations with Jupiter, he had a special bridge constructed from his palace to the deity’s temple on the Capitoline to facilitate their communication.
Pilate watched the moral deterioration of the emperor with a strange mixture of horror and consolation. Like any normal citizen, he was aghast at the enormities of the man who was supposed to symbolize Rome. But he no longer felt sorry for himself at being dismissed from government service. In the unfathomable irony of the times, that dismissal had been his salvation. The powerful Macro had gone the way of Sejanus, as had others in positions to which Pilate at one time aspired. Under the new Caligula, security could be found only in anonymity. Pilate thanked Fate for having permitted his hearing to take place before the princeps’ breakdown. His one continuing prayer now was simply that Caligula should forget him. He and Procula made it a rule never to attend public or social functions at which the emperor might see them from any proximity.
Pilate’s cousin, the ex-consul Pontius Nigrinus, could not find such refuge under the welcome blanket of privacy. He told Pilate that each banquet with Caligula was a personal crisis. Recently the princeps suddenly broke out laughing uproariously at a dinner party, and the new consuls who were reclining at his sides asked him what was so funny. “I just happened to think,” Caligula explained, “just a nod of my head and both your throats would be cut on the spot. Aha! Ahahaha!”
In the summer of 38, the princeps finally let his close friend and adviser Agrippa return to Palestine in order to assume his kingdom. Agrippa had become rather odious in Rome as Caligula’s “trainer-in-tyranny,” though he was hardly responsible for his insanity. But Pilate was greatly relieved to have Agrippa out of Italy, for he represented Palestine to Caligula, and Palestine might remind him of a recent ex-prefect.
Letters from Cornelius in Caesarea kept Pilate and Procula well-informed on events in Judea. He was recently promoted to tribune, the ex-centurion reported happily, but something far more significant had happened to him, something too difficult to put into writing just now. Meanwhile, Pilate’s good friends Herod Antipas and Herodias were en route to Rome, Cornelius added. Herodias, it seems, was so furiously jealous that her brother Agrippa should have left Palestine a homeless debtor and returned as a king that she had hounded her husband to seek a similar fortune in Rome. At first Antipas would have none of it, since he was mellowing in his old age, Cornelius wrote. But finally he succumbed to his wife’s ambitious urgings and they were now going to appeal to Caligula to confer the title of king also on Antipas and extend his territories.