By now Caligula’s litter-bearers, who initially, and with great courage, had sought to stave off the assassins with their poles, had also fled. Even when the Emperor’s German bodyguard, alerted to their master’s murder, came hurrying to the scene and drove off the remaining Praetorians, they left his trunk and severed head alone. As they spilled out through the streets of the Palatine, hunting the assassins, the corpse of Caligula lay where his murderers had left it. There it was found by Caesonia and her young daughter: a child that Caligula, witnessing her viciousness, and the relish she brought to scratching the faces of her playmates, had laughingly acknowledged his own. And there in turn they were found, mother and daughter together, prostrated by misery and covered in Caligula’s blood, by a Praetorian sent to hunt them down. Caesonia, looking up at the soldier, urged him through her tears to ‘finish the last act of the drama’58 – which he duly did. First he slit her throat; then he dashed out her daughter’s brains against a wall.59
So perished the line of Caligula: dead of a joke taken too far.
*
*1 The earliest datable allusion to Caligula committing incest with his sisters is in The Antiquities of the Jews, written by Josephus more than half a century after his death (19.204). Josephus, though, was well informed about Caligula’s reign, and drew on sources written much closer in time to it. As ever in a city as addicted to scurrilous gossip as Rome, the existence of a rumour did not mean that it was actually true. No contemporaries of Caligula mention it; and it was only with Suetonius that the rumours really took wing. ‘Have you committed incest with your sister?’ he described Caligula as asking his friend, the noted wit Passienus Crispus. ‘Not yet,’ Passienus is said to have replied, quick as a flash (quoted by the Scholiast on Juvenaclass="underline" 4.81).
*2 It is Dio, even as he claims that Caligula ‘had won no battle and slain no enemy’, who lets slip this detail (59.22.2). Two contradictory traditions are to be found intertwined in the reports of historians such as Suetonius and Dio: in one, Caligula’s military record is a laughable thing of whim and folly; but in the other, he is portrayed as a stern and effective disciplinarian in the best tradition of his father and Tiberius. Even though the fog that envelops this period of his reign is unusually dense, there are enough scattered details to make it probable that Caligula did make a tour of the Rhine in the autumn of 39, did stamp his authority upon the legions stationed there, and did win a few scattered engagements. Equally, it has to be acknowledged that Caligula may not have advanced to the Rhine until shortly after the New Year.
*3 Dio, writing in the early third century AD, implies that Caligula travelled to the Bay of Naples in the spring of 39, in the wake of his devastating speech to the Senate; but Seneca, in his essay On the Shortness of Life (18.5), makes it clear that the journey took place the following year. If absolute certainty is impossible, the context weights the balance of probability massively towards 40 rather than 39.
*4 Suetonius does not specify the chariots’ place of origin, but the word he uses to describe them, esseda, refers to war-chariots of the kind used in earlier centuries by the Gauls, and in Caligula’s time exclusively by the Britons. Maecenas, ever at the forefront of innovation, was supposed to have owned ‘a British essedum’. (Propertius: 2.1.76)
*5 So, at any rate, reports Josephus, whose account is the most detailed and contemporary that we have. According to Suetonius (Caligula: 57.4), the blood was that of a flamingo – and it was Caligula himself who was splashed by it.
6
IO SATURNALIA!
Master of the House
Chaos spelt opportunity. None knew this better than the House of Caesar itself. This was why, ever since Augustus had emerged to supremacy from the horrors of civil war, it had jealously denied to anyone outside its own exclusive circles the chance to capitalise upon its often murderous rivalries. Now, though, with the assassination of Caligula, the dice had been thrown up in the air. The Palatine, from where Augustus had upheld the peace of the world, was given over to riot and confusion. German swordsmen, combing its tangle of alleyways and corridors, searched for the killers in a blood lust of their own. When they ran into Asprenas, the unfortunate senator whose toga had been dirtied during the sacrifices, they cut off his head. Two other senators were dispatched with equal brutality.
Meanwhile, in the theatre, confused rumours were sweeping the stands. No one could be certain that Caligula was truly dead. Some reported that he had escaped his assassins and made it to the Forum, where he was whipping up the plebs – ‘who in their folly had loved and honoured the emperor’.1 Senators sat paralysed, torn between their longing to believe the reports of their tormentor’s death and their dread that it was all a trick. Their nerves were hardly settled by the sudden arrival of a posse of Germans, who, after brandishing the heads of Asprenas and the two other murdered senators in their faces, dumped them on the altar. Only the timely arrival of an auctioneer famed for his booming voice, who confirmed for the benefit of everyone in the theatre the death of the Emperor, and successfully urged the Germans to put up their swords, prevented a massacre. Caligula would no doubt have been disappointed.
Meanwhile, down in the Forum, some of the more ambitious among the Senate were already calculating what his elimination might mean for them. When indignant crowds surrounded Valerius Asiaticus and demanded to know who had murdered their beloved emperor, he replied with cheery insouciance, ‘I only wish that I had.’2 Clearly, the insult to his wife had not been forgotten. More was at stake, though, than the satisfaction of personal pique. Without an obvious heir to Caligula on hand, a dizzying prospect had abruptly opened up before the nobility. That afternoon, as the Forum seethed with protestors, it was no emperor who appointed guards to keep order, but the two consuls. When senators convened to debate the future, they did so not in the Senate House rebuilt by the Caesars, but high up on the Capitol, in the great temple of Jupiter, on a site redolent of Rome’s venerable past. ‘For those schooled in virtue, it is enough to live even a single hour in a free country, answerable only to ourselves, governed by the laws that made us great.’3 So declared one of the consuls in a tone of soaring self-satisfaction. When Cassius Chaerea, reporting to the Senate that evening, solemnly asked the consuls for the watchword, the answer proclaimed to the Roman people that their ancient constitution was restored: ‘liberty’.
Except, of course, that it would take more than fine words to resuscitate the Republic. The regime founded by Augustus had put down roots so deep that only those at its heart could glimpse how far they reached. Senators, whose rank was fixed for them by law, and whose stage was a debating chamber in which everyone sat on open display, were ill-placed to trace them. Few now lived on the Palatine, that great labyrinth of alleyways, corridors and courtyards, into which even the murderers of an emperor had been able to vanish with impunity. One who still did was Caecina Largus, an Etrurian like Maecenas, and of the same family as Germanicus’s deputy on the Rhine. In the garden of his mansion there stood some beautiful lotus trees, of which Caecina was inordinately proud – as well he might have been, for from beneath their shade he was better placed than any number of his colleagues to monitor the arcana imperii, ‘the secrets of power’. Currents were flowing of which the senators on the Capitol were only dimly aware. However proudly Chaerea might strut, Caecina knew that most Praetorians had no stake in any return to the Republic. Roaming the Palatine in the wake of Caligula’s murder, they had been hunting his killers, not siding with them. Unsurprisingly, then, rather than join his colleagues in their grandstanding on the Capitol, Caecina opted to play a different game. Other, more certain routes to influence lay open. Caecina was not alone in suspecting that Rome’s future had already been decided for her.