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He constantly tongue-lashed the equestrian order as devotees of the stage and the
arena. Angered at the rabble for applauding a faction which he opposed, he cried: "I
wish the Roman people had but a single neck," and when the brigand Tetrinius was
demanded, he said that those who asked for him were Tetriniuses also. Once a band of five retiarii
in tunics, matched against the same number of secutores, yielded without a
struggle; but when their death was ordered, one of them caught up his trident and slew all
the victors. Caligula bewailed this in a public proclamation as a most cruel murder, and
expressed his horror of those who had had the heart to witness it
XXXI. He even used openly to deplore the state of his times, because they had been
marked by no public disasters, saying that the rule of Augustus had been made famous by
the Varus massacre, and that of Tiberius by the collapse of the amphitheatre at Fidenae,
while his own was threatened with oblivion because of its prosperity, and every now and
then he wished for the destruction of his armies, for famine, pestilence, fires, or a
great earthquake.
XXXII. His acts and words were equally cruel, even when he was indulging in relaxation
and given up to amusement and feasting. While he was lunching or revelling capital
examinations by torture were often made in his presence, and a soldier who was an adept at
decapitation cut off the heads of those who were brought from prison. At Puteoli, at the
dedication of the bridge that he contrived, as has been said, after inviting a number to
come to him from the shore, on a sudden he had them all thrown overboard; and when some
caught hold of the rudders of the ships, he pushed them off into the sea with boathooks
and oars. At a public banquet in Rome he immediately handed a slave over to the
executioners for stealing a strip of silver from the couches, with orders that his hands
be cut off and hung from his neck upon his breast, and that he then be led about among the
guests, preceded by a placard giving the reason for his punishment. When a murmillo
from the gladiatorial school fought with him with wooden swords and fell on purpose, he
stabbed him with a real dagger and then ran about with a palm-branch, as victors do. Once
when he stood by the altar dressed as a popa and a victim was brought up, he raised
his mallet on high and slew the cultrarius. At one of his more sumptuous banquets
he suddenly burst into a fit of laughter, and when the consuls, who were reclining next
him, politely inquired at what he was laughing, he replied: "What do you suppose,
except that at a single nod of mine both of you could have your throats cut on the
spot?"
XXXIII. As a sample of his humor, he took his place beside a statue of Jupiter, and
asked the tragic actor Apelles which of the two seemed to him the greater, and when he
hesitated, Caligula had him flayed with whips, extolling his voice from time to time, when
the wretch begged for mercy, as passing sweet even in his groans. Whenever he kissed the
neck of his wife or sweetheart, he would say: "Off comes this beautiful head whenever
I give the word." He even used to threaten now and then that he would resort to
torture if necessary, to find out from his dear Caesonia why he loved her so passionately.
XXXIV. He assailed mankind of almost every epoch with no less envy and malice than
insolence and cruelty. He threw down the statues of famous men, which for lack of room
Augustus had moved from the court of the Capitol to the Campus Martius, and so utterly
demolished them that they could not be set up again with their inscriptions entire; and
thereafter he forbade the erection of the statue of any living man anywhere, without his
knowledge and consent. He even thought of destroying the poems of Homer, asking why he
should not have the same privilege as Plato, who excluded Homer from his ideal
commonwealth. More than that, he all but removed the writings and the busts of Vergil and
of Titus Livius from all the libraries, railing at the former as a man of no talent and
very little learning, and the latter as a verbose and careless historian. With regard to
lawyers too, as if intending to do away with any practice of their profession, he often
threatened that he would see to it, by Heaven, that they could give no advice contrary to
his wish.
XXXV. He took from all the noblest of the city the ancient devices of their families,
from Torquatus his collar, from Cincinnatus his lock of hair, from Gnaeus Pompeius the
surname Magnus belonging to his ancient race. After inviting Ptolemy, whom I have
mentioned before, to come from his kingdom, and receiving him with honor, he suddenly had
him executed for no other reason than that when giving a gladiatorial show, he noticed
that Ptolemy on entering the theatre attracted general attention by the splendor of his
purple cloak. Whenever he ran across handsome men with fine heads of hair [for he himself
was bald], he disfigured them by having the backs of their heads shaved. There was a
certain Aesius Proculus, son of a chief centurion, called Colosseros [ "Giant
Love"] because of his remarkable size and handsome appearance; this man Caligula
ordered to be suddenly dragged from his seat in the amphitheater and led into the arena,
where he matched him first against a Thracian and then against a heavy-armed gladiator;
when Proculus was victor in both contests, Caligula gave orders that he be bound at once,
clad in rags, and then put to death, after first being led about the streets and exhibited
to the women. In short, there was no one of such low condition or such abject fortune that
he did not envy him such advantages as he possessed. Since the king of Nemi [the priest of
Diana at Nemi, who must be a fugitive slave and obtain his office by slaying his
predecessor] had now held his priesthood for many years, he hired a stronger adversary to
attack him. When an essedarius[a gladiator who fought from a chariot] called Porius
was vigorously applauded on the day of one of the games for setting his slave free after a
victory, Caligula rushed from the amphitheater in such haste that he trod on the fringe of
his toga and went headlong down the steps, fuming and shouting: "The people that rule
the world give more honor to a gladiator for a trifling act than to their deified emperors
or to the one still present with them."
XXXVI. He respected neither his own chastity nor that of anyone else. He is said to
have had unnatural relations with Marcus Lepidus, the pantomimic actor Mnester, and
certain hostages. Valerius Catullus, a young man of a consular family, publicly proclaimed
that he had violated the emperor and worn himself out in commerce with him. To say nothing
of his incest with his sisters and his notorious passion for the concubine Pyrallis, there
was scarcely any woman of rank whom he did not approach. These as a rule he invited to
dinner with their husbands, and as they passed by the foot of his couch, he would inspect
them critically and deliberately, as if buying slaves, even putting out his hand and
lifting up the face of anyone who looked down in modesty; then as often as the fancy took
him he would leave the room, sending for the one who pleased him best, and returning soon
afterward with evident signs of what had occurred, he would openly commend or criticize
his partner, recounting her charms or defects and commenting on her conduct. To some he
personally sent a bill of divorce in the name of their absent husbands, and had it entered
in the public records.
XXXVII. In reckless extravagance he outdid the prodigals of all times in ingenuity,
inventing a new sort of baths and unnatural varieties of food and feasts; for he would
bathe in hot or cold perfumed oils, drink pearls of great price dissolved in vinegar, and
set before his guests loaves and meats of gold, declaring that a man ought either to be
frugal or Caesar. He even scattered large sums of money among the people from the roof of
the Basilica Julia for several days in succession. He also built Liburnian galleys with
ten banks of oars, with sterns set with gems, parti-colored sails, huge spacious baths,
colonnades, and banquet-halls, and even a great variety of vines and fiuit trees; that on
board of them he might recline at table from an early hour, and coast along the shores of
Campania amid songs and choruses. He built villas and country houses with utter disregard
of expense, caring for nothing so much as to do what men said was impossible. So he built
moles out into the deep and stormy sea, tunnelled rocks of hardest flint, built up plains
to the height of mountains and razed mountains to the level of the plain; all with
incredible dispatch, since the penalty for delay was death. To make a long story short,
vast sums of money, including the 2,700,000,000 sesterces which Tibelius Caesar had
amassed, were squandered by him in less than the revolution of a year.
XXXVIII. Having thus impoverished himself, from very need he turned his attention to
pillage through a complicated and cunningly devised system of false accusations, auction
sales, and imposts. He ruled that Roman citizenship could not lawfully be enjoyed by those
whose forefathers had obtained it for themselves and their descendants, except in the case
of sons, since "descendants" ought not to be understood as going beyond that
degree; and when certificates of the deified Julius and Augustus were presented to him, he
waved them aside as old and out of date. He also charged that those estates had been
falsely returned, to which any addition had later been made from any cause whatever. If
any chief centurions since the beginning of Tiberius' reign had not named that emperor or
himself among their heirs, he set aside their wills on the ground of ingratitude; also the
testaments of all others, as null and void, if anyone said that they had intended to make
Caesar their heir when they died. When he had roused such fear in this way that he came to
be named openly as heir by strangers among their intimates and by parents among their
children, he accused them of making game of him by continuing to live after such a
declaration, and to many of them he sent poisoned dainties. He used further to conduct the
trial of such cases in person, naming in advance the sum which he proposed to raise at
each sitting, and not rising until it was made up. Impatient of the slightest delay, he
once condemned in a single sentence more than forty who were accused on different counts,
boasting to Caesonia, when she woke after a nap, of the great amount of business he had
done while she was taking her afternoon sleep. Appointing an auction, he put up and sold
what was left from all the shows, personally soliciting bids and running them up so high,
that some who were forced to buy articles at an enormous price and were thus stripped of
their possessions, opened their veins. A well-known incident is that of Aponius
Saturninus; he fell asleep on one of the benches, and as the auctioneer was warned by
Gaius not to overlook the praetorian gentleman who kept nodding to him, the bidding was
not stopped until thirteen gladiators were knocked down to the unconscious sleeper at nine
million sesterces.
XXXIX. When he was in Gaul and had sold at immense figures the jewels, furniture,
slaves, and even the freedmen of his sisters who had been condemned to death, finding the
business so profitable, he sent to the city for all the paraphernalia of the old palace,
seizing for its transportation even public carriages and animals from the bakeries; with
the result that bread was often scarce at Rome and many who had cases in court lost them
from inability to appear and meet their bail. To get rid of this furniture, he resorted to
every kind of trickery and wheedling, now railing at the bidders for avarice and because
they were not ashamed to be richer than he, and now feigning regret for allowing common
men to acquire the property of princes. Having learned that a rich provincial had paid
those who issued the emperor's invitations two hundred thousand sesterces, to be smuggled
in among the guests at one of his dinner-parties, he was not in the least displeased that
the honor of dining with him was rated so high; but when next day the man appeared at his
auction, he sent a messenger to hand him some trifle or other at the price of two hundred
thousand sesterces and say that he should dine with Caesar on his personal invitation.
XL. He levied new and unheard of taxes, at first through the publicans and then,
because their profit was so great, through the centurions and tribunes of the praetorian
guard; and there was no class of commodities or men on which he did not impose some form
of tariff. On all eatables sold in any part of the city he levied a fixed and definite
charge; on lawsuits and legal processes begun anywhere, a fortieth part of the sum
involved, providing a penalty in case anyone was found guilty of compromising or
abandoning a suit; on the daily wages of porters, an eighth; on the earnings of
prostitutes, as much as each received for one embrace; and a clause was added to this
chapter of the law, providing that those who had ever been prostitutes or acted as panders
should be liable to this public tax, and that even matrimony should not be exempt.
XLI. When taxes of this kind had been proclaimed, but not published in writing,
inasmuch as many offences were committed through ignorance of the letter of the law, he at
last, on the urgent demand of the people, had the law posted up, but in a very narrow
place and in excessively small letters, to prevent the making of a copy. To leave no kind
of plunder untried, he opened a brothel in his palace, setting apart a number of rooms and
furnishing them to suit the grandeur of the place, where matrons and freeborn youths
should stand exposed. Then he sent his pages about the fora and basilicas, to invite young
men and old to enjoy themselves, lending money on interest to those who came and having
clerks openly take down their names, as contributors to Caesar's revenues. He did not even
disdain to make money from play, and to increase his gains by falsehood and even by
perjury. Having on one occasion given up his place to the player next him and gone into
the courtyard, he spied two wealthy Roman knights passing by; he ordered them to be seized
at once and their property confiscated and came back exultant, boasting that he had never
played in better luck.
XLII. But when his daughter was born, complaining of his narrow means, and no longer
merely of the burdens of a ruler but of those of a father as well, he took up
contributions for the girl's maintenance and dowry. He also made proclamation that he
would receive New Year's gifts, and on the Kalends of January took his place in the
entrance to the Palace, to clutch the coins which a throng of people of all classes
showered on him by handfuls and lapfuls. Finally, seized with a mania for feeling the
touch of money, he would often pour out huge piles of gold pieces in some open place, walk
over them barefooted, and wallow in them for a long time with his whole body.
XLIII. He had but one experience with military affairs or war, and then on a sudden
impulse; for having gone to Mevania to visit the river Clitumnus and its grove, he was
reminded of the necessity of recruiting his body-guard of Batavians and was seized with
the idea of an expedition to Germania. So without delay he assembled legions and
auxiliaries from all quarters, holding levies everywhere with the utmost strictness, and
collecting provisions of every kind on an unheard of scale. Then he began his march and
made it now so hurriedly and rapidly, that the praetorian cohorts were forced, contrary to
all precedent, to lay their standards on the pack-animals and thus to follow him; again he
was so lazy and luxurious that he was carried in a litter by eight bearers, requiring the
inhabitants of the towns through which he passed to sweep the roads for him and sprinkle
them to lay the dust.
XLIV. On reaching his camp, to show his vigilance and strietness as a commander, he
dismissed in disgrace the generals who were late in bringing in the auxiliaries from
various places, and in reviewing his troops he deprived many of the chief centurions who
were well on in years of their rank, in some cases only a few days before they would have
served their time, giving as a reason their age and infirmity; then railing at the rest
for their avarice, he reduced the rewards given on completion of full military service to
six thousand sesterces. All that he accomplished was to receive the surrender of Adminius,
son of Cynobellinus king of the Britons, who had been banished by his father and had
deserted to the Romans with a small force; yet as if the entire island had submitted to
him, he sent a grandiloquent letter to Rome, commanding the couriers who carried it to
ride in their post-chaise all the way to the Forum and the Senate, and not to deliver it
to anyone except the consuls, in the temple of Mars the Avenger, before a full meeting of
the senate.
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