CALIGULA
AD 12–41
Make him feel that he is dying.
Caligula’s order when any of his victims was being executed, according to Suetonius
Caligula ascended the imperial throne as the young darling of the Romans—and ended his four-year reign with a reputation as an insanely cruel tyrant. Capricious, politically inept and militarily incompetent, sexually ambiguous and perversely incestuous, he went from beloved prince to butchered psychopath in a reign that quickly slid into humiliation, murder and madness.
Caligula—properly Gaius Caesar—was the great-grandson of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. His nickname Caligula—meaning “little boots”—derives from the miniature army sandals he was dressed in as a boy when he accompanied his father Germanicus on campaign. This made Caligula the favorite mascot of the army. Germanicus died suddenly in AD 19, followed by Caligula’s two elder brothers and his mother Agrippina. Many suspected that Caligula’s great-uncle the emperor Tiberius had poisoned the much-loved Germanicus as a threat to his throne. In AD 31 Caligula went to live with Tiberius at his villa on the island of Capri. It was during this time that the dark side of Caligula’s character began to emerge. As the Roman historian Suetonius (albeit not an objective source) later reported, “He could not control his natural cruelty and viciousness, but he was a most eager witness of the tortures and executions of those who suffered punishment, reveling at night in gluttony and adultery, disguised in a wig and a long robe.” Rumors also began to circulate that Caligula was conducting an incestuous relationship with his sister Drusilla.
When Tiberius died in March AD 37 some said that Caligula had smothered the old man with a pillow. Tiberius had willed that after his death Caligula and his cousin Tiberius Gemellus should rule jointly, but within months of his accession, Caligula had Gemellus murdered. Caligula’s lack of political experience, combined with his spoiled arrogance and lust for absolute power, would prove disastrous.
There are many examples of Caligula’s megalomania. To repudiate a prophecy that he had as much chance of becoming emperor as he did of riding a horse across the Gulf of Naples, he had a bridge of ships built across the water, over which he rode in triumph, wearing the breastplate of Alexander the Great. It was also said that he elevated his favorite horse, Incitatus, to the consulship. On another occasion, while in Gaul, he ordered his troops to defeat Neptune by gathering seashells from the shore, as “spoils of the sea.”
Caligula became deeply paranoid, and made it an offense for anyone to even look at him, so sensitive was he about his increasing baldness and luxuriant body hair. Those suspected of disloyalty—often on the flimsiest of pretexts—were, prior to their execution, subjected to a variety of ingenious torments devised by the emperor, such as being covered in honey and then exposed to a swarm of angry bees.
Anyone was a potential victim. As Suetonius records, “Many men of honorable rank were first disfigured with the marks of branding irons and then condemned to the mines, to work at building roads, or to be thrown to the wild beasts; or else he shut them up in cages on all fours, like animals, or had them sawed asunder. Not all these punishments were for serious offenses, but merely for criticizing one of his shows, or for never having sworn by his Genius.”
Caligula began to believe himself to be divine. He had the heads of statues of the Olympian gods replaced with likenesses of himself, and almost provoked a Jewish revolt by ordering his godhead to be worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem. Suetonius reports that he regularly talked to the other deities as if they stood beside him. On one occasion he asked an actor who was greater, himself or Jupiter. When the man failed to respond with sufficient alacrity, the emperor had him mercilessly flogged. His cries, Caligula claimed, were music to his ears. On another occasion, when dining with the two consuls, he started laughing manically. When asked why, he retorted, “What do you expect, when with a single nod of my head both of you could have your throats cut on the spot?” Similarly, he used to kiss his wife’s neck while whispering, “Off comes this beautiful head whenever I give the word. If only Rome had one neck.” The most repugnant story of the emperor’s depravity tells how, after he had made his sister Drusilla pregnant, he was so impatient to see his child that he ripped it from her womb. Whether this story is true or not, Drusilla is known to have died in AD 38, probably of a fever, whereupon Caligula declared her to be a goddess.
Caligula’s unbridled narcissism and ever greater appetite for brutality alienated every section of society. The Praetorian Guard resolved that his rule must be brought to an end, and in January AD 41 two of its number killed the emperor by ambushing him as he left the stadium in Rome. They went on to kill his wife and baby daughter, smashing the latter’s head against a wall.
The life of Caligula demonstrated how much the imperial system created by Augustus, while preserving the trappings of the republic, had actually concentrated absolute power in the hands of one man. Caligula stripped away the veneer of constitutional restraint and flaunted his total authority over his subjects in the most capriciously horrific manner. Caligula personifies the immorality, bloodlust and insanity of absolute power.
NERO
AD 37–68
He showed neither discrimination nor moderation in putting to death whomsoever he pleased.
Suetonius
The emperor who “fiddled while Rome burned,” Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty that took Rome from republic to one-man rule. Raised amidst violence and tyranny, he ruled with ludicrous vanity, demented whimsy and inept despotism. Few mourned his abdication and death amidst the chaos that he himself had created.
Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus was born in AD 37 in the town of Antium, not far from Rome, while the Emperor Caligula—Nero’s uncle—was on the throne. Like so many, he was to suffer at Caligula’s hands—forced with his mother Agrippina into exile when she lost favor with the emperor. Agrippina was Caligula’s sister. Their incestuous relationship supposedly ended when she plotted to overthrow him: Agrippina ranks as one of the most poisonous women in Roman history. Mother and son were allowed to return by Caligula’s successor, Claudius, who had recently executed his nymphomaniacal empress, Messalina. In AD 49 Agrippina became the emperor’s fourth wife. Claudius not only adopted Nero as his son but made him joint heir to the throne with his own son by Messalina, Britannicus.
Agrippina, however, was unwilling to allow nature to take its course and in AD 54 she supposedly poisoned Claudius. Relations between mother and son were also flawed, and when, in the following year, Agrippina realized her hold over Nero was slipping, she conspired in a plot to replace him with Britannicus. On discovering the conspiracy, Nero promptly had his rival poisoned and banished Agrippina from the imperial palace on the pretext of having insulted his young wife, Octavia.