“The foolish sheep,” Pilate jested to Procula. “They don’t know the lion waiting for them in Rome, or the wolf who is now licking his chops in Palestine. How could Antipas play into Agrippa’s hands like that?”
“And to think they used to call him The Fox,” commented Procula, to keep the menagerie intact.
“Deliver us, Jupiter, from scheming and ambitious women!” Pilate prayed with mock solemnity.
“Just so Agrippa doesn’t try to involve you before Caligula in any countermove to stop Antipas.”
“I don’t think he’ll have to. Agrippa has the emperor’s ear like no one else in the Empire.”
Several months passed without any further news of Antipas’s mission. Overcome by curiosity, Pilate went to see his friend Cassius Chaerea, who had just returned from a tour of duty guarding the emperor at Baiae, a luxurious spa on the Bay of Naples where Caligula had been taking the hot baths.
“Have I heard anything about the tetrarch of Galilee paying Caligula a visit?” Chaerea smiled. “Do you mean a Herod and a Herodias?”
“Yes. Herod Antipas.”
“What a shambles! They arrived at Puteoli and caught the princeps while he was still at Baiae. Herod told his story, how he was more fit to be king than Agrippa, and all the time Caligula was reading Agrippa’s long letter of indictment against his brother-in-law, which had just been delivered. It merely accused Herod of disloyalty, ineptitude, conspiracy with Sejanus, and treasonable alliance with the Parthians against Rome. As proof, Agrippa wrote, Herod’s armories bulged with weapons and equipment enough for 70,000 troops.”
“What!”
“Yes. That was Caligula’s reaction. He asked Herod about the contents of his armory, and he was unable to deny the size of his arsenal. Then and there Caligula stripped him of his tetrarchy and all his property—”
“And awarded it all to Agrippa,” supplied Pilate.
“Right. Then he condemned Herod to perpetual exile in Gaul.”
“What about Herodias?”
“When Caligula learned that she was sister to his beloved Agrippa, he offered to let her keep her property and live in freedom apart from Herod.”
“Which she did, of course.”
“No. I thought she would, too. But she told the princeps, ‘Loyalty to my husband prevents my accepting your kind offer. When I have shared his prosperity, it’s not right that I should abandon him in adversity.’ So now they’re both in exile.”
“Imagine, at the end, nobility in Herodias.”
Caligula made another sweeping change in the East when he recalled Vitellius from his post as governor of Syria. Pilate thought it one of the emperor’s few enlightened measures, since he had never forgiven Vitellius for the high-handed manner in which he suspended him from office. Because of his successes in the East, Vitellius had incurred Caligula’s jealousy, and it was only by the most groveling tears and servility before the princeps that he was able to save his own life. Later, when Caligula asked the chastened ex-governor if he could see the Moon in bed with him, Vitellius replied with slavish tact, “No, Master. Only you gods are able to see one another.”
But the lover of the immaterial Moon certainly knew how to spend very material cash. Caligula now grew as prodigal with the sesterce as Tiberius had been frugal. Chaerea disgustedly told Pilate of the worst example. The astrologer Thrasyllus had once predicted that Caligula had no more chance of becoming emperor than of driving a team of horses across the Gulf of Baiae. So, at vast expenditure, Caligula bridged the three and one-half miles of water between Puteoli and Baiae by lashing together a double line of merchant ships and heaping a roadbed of dirt across their decks. Then, mounted on his favorite steed and resplendent in the armor of Alexander the Great, Caligula rode back and forth across the new bridge to the compulsory cheers of throngs on both ends. The next day he repeated the trip in a chariot, followed by the Praetorian Guard. Having rescued the veracity of the dead Thrasyllus in this bizarre fashion, he ordered the bridge dismantled as a hazard to navigation.
“The damnable fool!” Chaerea swore at the end of his story. “What did Rome do to deserve such a maniac?” Pilate started giving some serious thought to the possibility of emigration.
The bridge, and such other necessary projects as a private navy of jeweled pleasure barges, squandered in one year the imperial treasury of 2,700,000,000 sesterces which Tiberius had patiently amassed during his entire administration. In order to replenish his funds, Caligula began pillaging the populace by various means, all illegal. Once he even resorted to auctioning off the furniture of Augustus and Tiberius at enforced astronomical bids. But it was Procula who heard the best story. At another palace sale, Caligula told his auctioneer not to overlook the “bidding” of a tired soul in the third row who kept nodding in his sleep. On awakening, the drowsy fellow learned that thirteen gladiators had been knocked down to him for a mere 9,000,000 sesterces.
Still there was not enough money. A whole cavalcade of new and unheard-of taxes was levied, and this kept the government half solvent. But his personal income suffered, so Caligula condemned to death some of the wealthiest Romans and seized their estates. Finally, he even opened a brothel in the palace itself, where the men of Rome could trade on credit—at high interest rates, of course. Roman statecraft had plunged to a new nadir in this, the 792nd year since the founding of the city.
In lucid moments, Caligula realized that his popularity was slipping. The time-hallowed method for a Roman emperor to regain favor with his subjects was foreign conquest. It was not for nothing that his father was named Germanicus; he, too, would march north and battle the Germans. In September of 39, Caligula crossed the Rhine with his legions and made several forays against Germanic tribes. What he really accomplished was the suppression of a conspiracy against him by the legate of Germany and his own brother-in-law. Both were executed.
Wintering in Gaul, Caligula dreamed of returning to Rome in glorious triumph to celebrate his victory over a foe at the very ends of the earth: he would invade Britain. In the spring of 40, he moved as far as the English Channel, but was too cowardly to cross it. Yet he had to have booty to parade at his forthcoming triumph, so he ordered his legionaries to gather sea shells from the channel shores and fill their helmets with these “spoils from the ocean.” There was also the problem of captives: victories, even mythical victories, required prisoners. Caligula had the tallest Gauls dye their hair red to look like Germans so that they could be “captured” and then paraded in his Roman triumph.
Shortly after the emperor’s return, Cassius Chaerea appeared at Pilate’s door with a face draped in anxiety. “I’m sorry, old friend,” he said, handing him a dreaded summons to the Palatine. “Hope it’s nothing serious.”
Once again Pilate tasted severe apprehension. “Any inkling what it’s about?”
“No.”
Pilate had hoped Caligula would by now have forgotten about his very existence; but, unfortunately, the unhinged brain of the princeps still had its memory intact.
When Pilate arrived at the palace and was ushered into Caligula’s quarters, he found him stalking about the room in a rage, exchanging rapid-fire comments with his chamberlain, an Egyptian named Helicon, and his favorite actor, Apelles, a Greek.