27. The following instances will illustrate his bloody-mindedness. Having collected wild animals for one of his shows, he found butcher’s meat too expensive and decided to feed them with criminals instead. He paid no attention to the charge-sheets, but simply stood in the middle of a colonnade, glanced at the prisoners lined up before him, and gave the order: ‘Kill every man between that bald head and the other one over there!’ Someone had sworn to fight in the arena if Caligula recovered from his illness; Caligula forced him to fulfil this oath, and watched his swordplay closely, not letting him go until he had won the match and begged abjectedly to be released. Another fellow had pledged himself, on the same occasion, to commit suicide; Caligula, finding that he was still alive, ordered him to be dressed in wreaths and fillets, and driven through Rome by the Imperial slaves—who kept harping on his pledge and finally flung him over the embankment into the river. Many men of decent family were branded at his command, and sent down the mines, or put to work on the roads, or thrown to the wild beasts. Others were confined in narrow cages, where they had to crouch on all fours like animals; or were sawn in half—and not necessarily for major offences, but merely for criticizing his shows, failing to swear by his Genius, and so forth.
Caligula made parents attend their sons’ executions, and when one father excused himself on the ground of ill-health, provided a litter for him. Having invited another father to dinner just after the son’s execution, he overflowed with good-fellowship in an attempt to make him laugh and joke. He watched the manager of his gladiatorial and wild-beast shows being flogged with chains for several days running, and had him killed only when the smell of suppurating brains became insupportable. A writer of Atellan farces was burned alive in the amphitheatre, because of a single line which had an amusing double-entendre. One knight, on the point of being thrown to the wild beasts, shouted that he was innocent; Caligula brought him back, removed his tongue, and then ordered the sentence to be carried out.
28. Once Caligula asked a returned exile how he had been spending his time. To flatter him the man answered: ‘I prayed continuously to the gods for Tiberius’s death, and your accession; and my prayer was granted.’ Caligula therefore concluded that the new batch of exiles must be praying for his own death; so he sent agents from island to island and had them all killed. Being anxious that one particular senator should be torn in pieces he persuaded some of his colleagues to challenge him as a public enemy when he entered the House, stab him with their pens, and then hand him over for lynching to the rest of the Senate; and was not satisfied until the victim’s limbs, organs, and guts had been dragged through the streets and heaped up at his feet.
29. Caligula’s savage crimes were matched by his brutal language. He claimed that no personal trait made him feel prouder than his ‘inflexibility’—by which he must have meant ‘brazen impudence’. As though mere deafness to his grandmother Antonia’s good advice were not enough, he told her: ‘Bear in mind that I can treat anyone exactly as I please!’ Suspecting that young Tiberius had taken drugs as prophylactics to the poison he intended to administer, Caligula scoffed: ‘Can there really be an antidote against Caesar?’ And, on banishing his sisters, he remarked: ‘I have swords as well as islands.’ One ex-praetor, taking a mental cure at Anticyra, made frequent requests for an extension of his sick leave; Caligula had his throat cut, suggesting that if hellebore had been of so little benefit over so long a period, he must need to be bled. When signing the execution list he used to say: ‘I am clearing my accounts.’ And one day, after sentencing a number of Gauls and Greeks to die in the same batch, he boasted of having ‘subdued Gallo-graecia’.
30. The method of execution he preferred was to inflict numerous small wounds, avoiding the prisoner’s vital organs; and his familiar order: ‘Make him feel that he is dying!’ soon became proverbial. Once, when the wrong man had been killed, owing to a confusion of names, he announced that the victim had equally deserved death; and often quoted Accius’s line:
Let them hate me, so long as they fear me.
He would indiscriminately abuse the Senate as having been friends of Sejanus, or informers against his mother and brothers (at this point producing the papers which he was supposed to have burned!); and exclaim that Tiberius’s cruelty had been quite justified since, with so many accusers about, he was bound to believe their charges. The Knights earned his constant displeasure for spending their time, or so he complained, at the play or the Games. On one occasion the people cheered the wrong team; he cried angrily: ‘I wish all you Romans had only one neck!’ When a shout arose in the amphitheatre for Tetrinius the Bandit to come out and fight, he said that all those who called for him were Tetriniuses too. A group of net-and-trident gladiators, dressed in tunics, put up a very poor show against the five men-at-arms with whom they were matched; but when he sentenced them to death for cowardice, one of them seized a trident and killed each of his opponents in turn. Caligula then publicly expressed his horror at what he called ‘this most bloody murder’, and his disgust with those who had been able to stomach the sight.
31. He went about complaining how bad the times were, and particularly that there had been no public disasters like the Varus massacre under Augustus,60 or the collapse of the amphitheatre at Fidenae under Tiberius.61 The prosperity of his own reign, he said, would lead to its being wholly forgotten, and he often prayed for a great military catastrophe, or for famine, plague, fire, or at least an earthquake.
32. Everything that Caligula said and did was marked with equal cruelty, even during his hours of rest and amusement and banquetry. He frequently had trials by torture held in his presence while he was eating or otherwise enjoying himself; and kept an expert headsman in readiness to decapitate the prisoners brought in from gaol. When the bridge across the sea at Puteoli was being blessed, he invited a number of spectators from the shore to inspect it; then abruptly tipped them into the water. Some clung to the ships’ rudders, but he had them dislodged with boat-hooks and oars, and left to drown. At a public dinner in the City he sent to his executioners a slave who had stolen a strip of silver from a couch; they were to lop off the man’s hands, tie them around his neck so that they hung on his breast, and take him for a tour of the tables, displaying a placard in explanation of his punishment. On another occasion a gladiator against whom he was fencing with a wooden sword fell down deliberately; whereupon Caligula drew a real dagger, stabbed him to death, and ran about waving the palm-branch of victory. Once, while presiding appropriately robed at the sacrificial altar, he swung his mallet, as if at the victim, but instead felled the assistant-priest, whose duty it was to slit its throat. At one particularly extravagant banquet he burst into sudden peals of laughter. The Consuls, who were reclining next to him, politely asked whether they might share the joke. ‘What do you think?’ he answered. ‘It occurred to me that I have only to give one nod and both your throats will be cut on the spot!’
33. He played a prank on Apelles, the tragic actor, by striking a pose beside a statue of Juppiter and asking: ‘Which of us two is the greater?’ When Apelles hesitated momentarily, Caligula had him flogged, commenting on the musical quality of his groans for mercy. He never kissed the neck of his wife or mistress without saying: ‘And this beautiful throat will be cut whenever I please.’ Sometimes he even threatened to torture Caesonia as a means of discovering why she was so devoted to him.
34. In his insolent pride and destructiveness he made malicious attacks on men of almost every epoch. Needing more room in the Capitol courtyard, Augustus had once shifted the statues of certain celebrities to the Campus Martius; these Caligula dashed to the ground and shattered so completely, inscriptions and all, that they could not possibly be restored. After this no statue or bust of any living person could be set up without his permission. He toyed with the idea of suppressing Homer’s poems—for he might surely claim Plato’s privilege of banishing Homer from his republic? As for Virgil and Livy, Caligula came very near to having their works and
busts removed from the libraries, claiming that Virgil had little knowledge and less skill; and that Livy was a wordy and inaccurate historian. It seems, also, that he proposed to abolish the legal profession; at any rate, he often swore by Hercules that no lawyer’s advice would ever thwart his will.
35. Caligula deprived the noblest men at Rome of their ancient family emblems—Torquatus lost his golden collar, Cincinnatus his lock of hair, and Gnaeus Pompey the famous surname ‘Great’. He invited King Ptolemy to visit Rome, welcomed him with appropriate honours, and then suddenly ordered his execution—as mentioned above—because at Ptolemy’s entrance into the amphitheatre during a gladiatorial show the fine purple cloak which he wore had attracted universal admiration. Any good-looking man with a fine head of hair whom Caligula ran across—he himself was bald—had the back of his scalp brutally shaved. One Aesius Proculus, a leading-centurion’s son, was so well-built and handsome that people nicknamed him ‘Giant Cupid’. Without warning, Caligula ordered Aesius to be dragged from his seat in the amphitheatre into the arena, and matched first with a Thracian net-fighter, then with a man-at-arms. Though Aesius won both combats, he was thereupon dressed in rags, led fettered through the streets to be jeered at by women, and finally executed; the truth being that however low anyone’s fortune or condition might be, Caligula always found some cause for envy. Thus he sent a stronger man than the then Sacred King of Nemi to challenge him, after many years of office—because this king, or priest of Diana, was by tradition a fugitive slave who had killed his predecessor with a sword. A chariot-fighter called Parius drew such tremendous applause for freeing his slave in celebration of a victory at the Games that Caligula indignantly rushed from the amphitheatre. In so doing he tripped over the fringe of his robe and pitched down the steps, at the bottom of which he complained that the most powerful race in the world seemed to take greater notice of a gladiator’s trifling gesture than of all their deified emperors, or even the one still among them.
36. He had not the slightest regard for chastity, either his own or others’, and was accused of homosexual relations, both active and passive, with Marcus Lepidus, also with Mnester the actor, and various foreign hostages; moreover, a young man of consular family, Valerius Catullus, revealed publicly that he had enjoyed the Emperor, and that they quite wore one another out in the process. Besides incest with his sisters, and a notorious passion for the prostitute Pyrallis, he made advances to almost every well-known married woman in Rome; after inviting a selection of them to dinner with their husbands he would slowly and carefully examine each in turn while they passed his couch, as a purchaser might assess the value of a slave, and even stretch out his hand and lift up the chin of any woman who kept her eyes modestly cast down. Then, whenever he felt so inclined, he would send for whoever pleased him best, and leave the banquet in her company. A little later he would return, showing obvious signs of what he had been about, and openly discuss his bed-fellow in detail, dwelling on her good and bad physical points and criticizing her sexual performance. To some of these unfortunates he issued, and publicly registered, divorces in the name of their absent husbands.
37. No parallel can be found for Caligula’s far-fetched extravagances. He invented new kinds of baths, and the most unnatural dishes and drinks—bathing in hot and cold perfumes, drinking valuable pearls dissolved in vinegar, and providing his guests with golden bread and golden meat; and would remark that Caesar alone could not afford to be frugal. For several days in succession he scattered largesse from the roof of the Julian Basilica; and built Liburnian galleys, with ten banks of oars, jewelled poops, multi-coloured sails, and with huge baths, colonnades and banqueting halls aboard—not to mention growing vines and apple-trees of different varieties. In these vessels he used to take early-morning cruises along the Campanian coast, reclining on his couch and listening to songs and choruses. Villas and country-houses were run up for him regardless of expense—in fact, Caligula seemed interested only in doing the apparently impossible—which led him to construct moles in deep, rough water far out to sea, drive tunnels through exceptionally hard rocks, raise flat ground to the height of mountains, and reduce mountains to the level of plains; and all at immense speed, because he punished delay with death. But why give details? Suffice it to record that, in less than a year he squandered Tiberius’s entire fortune of 27 million gold pieces, and an enormous amount of other treasure besides.
38. When bankrupt and in need of funds, Caligula concentrated on wickedly ingenious methods of raising funds by false accusations, auctions, and taxes. He ruled that no man could inherit the Roman citizenship acquired by any ancestor more remote than his father; and when confronted with certificates of citizenship issued by Julius Caesar or Augustus, rejected them as obsolete. He also disallowed all property returns to which, for whatever reason, later additions had been appended. If a leading-centurion had bequeathed nothing either to Tiberius or himself since the beginning of the former’s reign, he would rescind the will on the ground of ingratitude; and voided those of all other persons who were said to have intended making him their heir when they died, but had not yet done so. This caused widespread alarm, and even people who did not know him personally would tell their friends or children that they had left him everything; but if they continued to live after the declaration he considered himself tricked, and sent several of them presents of poisoned sweetmeats. Caligula conducted these cases in person, first announcing the sum he meant to raise, and not stopping until he had raised it. The slightest delay nettled him, and he once passed a single sentence on a batch of more than forty men charged with various offences, and then boasted to Caesonia, when she woke from her nap, that he had done very good business since she dozed off.
He would auction whatever properties were left over from a theatrical show; driving up the bidding to such heights that many of those present, forced to buy at fantastic prices, found themselves ruined and committed suicide by opening their veins. A famous occasion was when Aponius Saturninus fell asleep on a bench, and Caligula warned the auctioneer to keep an eye on the senator of praetorian rank who kept nodding his head. Before the bidding ended Aponius had unwittingly bought thirteen gladiators for a total of 90,000 gold pieces.
39. While in Gaul Caligula did so well by selling the furniture, jewellery, slaves, and even the freedmen of his condemned sisters at a ridiculous over-valuation that he decided to do the same with the furnishings of the Old Palace. So he sent to Rome, where his agents commandeered public conveyances, and even draught animals from the bakeries, to fetch the stuff north; which led to a bread shortage in the City, and to the loss of many law-suits, because litigants who lived at a distance were unable to appear in court and meet their bail. He then used all kinds of tricks for disposing of the furniture: scolding the bidders for their avarice, or for their shamelessness in being richer than he was, and pretending grief at this surrender of family property to commoners. Discovering that one wealthy provincial had paid the Imperial secretariat 2,000 gold pieces to be smuggled into a banquet, Caligula was delighted that the privilege of dining with him should be valued so highly and, when next day the same man turned up at the auction, made him pay 2,000 gold pieces for some trifling object—but also sent him a personal invitation to dinner.
40. The publicans were ordered to raise new and unprecedented taxes, and found this so profitable that he detailed his Guards colonels and centurions to collect the money instead. No goods or services now avoided duty of some kind. He imposed a fixed tax on all foodstuffs sold in any quarter of the City, and a charge of 2½ per cent on the money involved in every lawsuit and legal transaction whatsoever; and devised special penalties for anyone who compounded or abandoned a case. Porters had to hand over an eighth part of their day’s earnings and prostitutes their standard fee for a single act of intimacy—even if they had quitted their profession and were respectably married; pimps and ex-pimps also became liable to this public tax.
41. These new regulations having been
announced by word of mouth only, many people failed to observe them, through ignorance. At last he acceded to the urgent popular demand, by posting the regulations up, but in an awkwardly cramped spot and written so small that no one could take a copy. He never missed a chance of making profits: setting aside a suite of Palace rooms, he decorated them worthily, opened a brothel, stocked it with married women and boys, and then sent his pages around the squares and public places, inviting all men, of whatever age, to come and enjoy them selves. Those who appeared were lent money at interest, and clerks wrote down their names under the heading ‘Contributors to the Imperial Revenue’.
When Caligula played at dice he would always cheat and lie. Once he interrupted a game by giving up his seat to the man behind him and going out into the courtyard. A couple of rich knights passed; Caligula immediately had them arrested and confiscated their property; then resumed the game in high spirits, boasting that his luck had never been better.
42. His daughter’s birth gave him an excuse for further complaints of poverty. ‘In addition to the burden of sovereignty,’ he said, ‘I must now shoulder that of fatherhood’—and promptly took up a collection for her education and dowry. He also announced that New Year gifts would be welcomed on 1 January; and then sat in the Palace porch, grabbing the handfuls and capfuls of coin which a mixed crowd of all classes pressed on him. At last he developed a passion for the feel of money and, spilling heaps of gold pieces on an open space, would walk over them barefoot, or else he down and wallow.