The Book of Ancient Bastards (17 page)

You Call That Nag a Roman Consul?

( A.D. 12–41)

The method of execution [Caligula] preferred was to inflict numerous small wounds; and his familiar order: ‘Make him feel that he is dying!’ soon became proverbial.
—Suetonius, gossipy Roman historian

These days, Roman-emperor-as-lunatic seems nothing short of a cliché. Colorful examples of this archetype include Nero (who fancied himself an athlete and entertainer), Commodus (who walked around dressed up like Hercules), and Elagabalus (a cross-dresser who “married” one of his slave charioteers).

But the granddaddy of them all, the one who originated the whole “mad emperor” meme, was a man who married his second wife by interrupting her marriage to another man and stepping into the bridegroom’s place, who insisted on being worshipped as a god while still alive, who threatened to make his favorite racehorse by turns either a senator or a consul, and who collected seashells along the coast of the English Channel as a symbol of his “great victory” over the sea god Neptune!

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Rome’s third emperor, Gaius, better known these days as Caligula.

While there’s no question that Caligula was one of Rome’s most unforgettable bastards, it’s tough to say for sure whether he was out-and-out crazy, or just a really vindictive bastard with a warped sense of humor, twisted by the difficult years that preceded his taking the throne at age twenty-five.

His father died when he was only seven. His mother (a vicious harpy known as Agrippina) and two of his elder brothers were executed on Tiberius’s orders when Caligula was still in his teens. Following these executions, Caligula began to blatantly suck up to his great-uncle, so impressing the old goat with his apparent indifference to the deaths of those closest to him that Tiberius made Caligula his heir, joking on more than one occasion that he “was rearing a viper for the Roman people.”

His words turned out to be prophetic.

After a promising start on his ascension to the throne in A.D. 41 , Caligula was struck by a strange illness that nearly killed him. He was never the same after that, behaving in an increasingly odd manner, especially with his three younger sisters (with whom he was later alleged to have committed incest). When his favorite sister Drusilla died suddenly, Caligula was beside himself with grief. Tongues began to wag.

The emperor responded to this gossip by becoming ever more bloodthirsty. Sensitive about his premature baldness, he was known on several occasions to order the executions of anyone mentioning his hair, or even of standing anywhere above him, where they might actually be able to see his solar sex panel for themselves.

Coupled with his insistence that he was a god, and ought to be addressed as such, and that he and the moon were siblings, his lavish spending, and the ever-more-bloodthirsty manner in which he suppressed real and imagined plots against his life, it’s small wonder that someone eventually succeeded in killing the bastard in A.D. 41. He was not yet thirty years old.

A Bastard by Any Nickname

The word “Caligula” in Latin means “Little Boots.” Gaius earned this nickname living in a frontier army camp with his father, a popular general named Germanicus. While still a small boy, the future emperor wore miniature versions of the standard-issue hobnailed, open-toed boots (not your ordinary sandals!) worn by Roman infantry. This type of boot was called a caliga; hence the little boy’s nickname.

When Is a Consul Like a Stone?

(10 B.C.– A.D. 54)

No suspicion was too trivial, nor the inspirer of it too insignificant, to drive [Claudius] on to precaution and vengeance, once a slight uneasiness entered his mind. One of two parties to a suit, when he made his morning call, took Claudius aside, and said that he had dreamed that he was murdered by someone; then a little later pretending to recognize the assassin, he pointed out his opponent . . . . The latter was immediately seized, as if caught red-handed, and hurried off to execution.
—Suetonius, The Life of Claudius

Dismissed early on as a stammering boob with the intellect of a potted plant, the Roman emperor Claudius had the last laugh on those who overlooked him while killing off most of his adult male relatives. When his nephew Caligula was murdered in A.D. 41, the same guards who had killed him put Claudius on the throne.

What these praetorians got for their trouble was a straight-up bribe: 15,000 sesterces (small silver pieces) per man. What the Roman people got for theirs was rather more a mixed bag.

Claudius demonstrated surprising ability and shrewdness when it came to administering his empire, and under him Roman troops finally conquered part of the island of Britain (something his ancestor Julius Caesar had attempted, but had never been able to accomplish). This was due in large part to his trusting in imperial freedmen to run his empire for him.

Having witnessed political murder after political murder during his lifetime, Claudius was terrified of being assassinated. And not without reason: within a year of his taking the throne, one of his provincial governors rebelled against him (the rebellion was stamped out within a week). His first wife, Messalina, attempted a palace coup while he was out of Rome on religious business, conducting a sham marriage with a lover. He flew into a rage (he possessed a terrible temper) and had them both seized and executed.

In the end, Claudius’s fear of assassination proved prophetic. The emperor who once drunkenly remarked that “it was his destiny first to suffer and finally to punish the infamy of his wives” was undone by his own terrible taste in women. He replaced the slutty and manipulative Messalina with his own niece, the equally slutty and manipulative Agrippina, who, in order to see her own son Nero made emperor, poisoned Claudius in A.D. 54.

Shaky, Drooling Dullard and Snot-Nosed Bastard

Claudius’s own mother referred to him as “a monster of a man, not finished but merely begun by Dame Nature.” According to the Roman biographer Suetonius, if she wanted to insult anyone’s intelligence, she would call the object of her contempt “a bigger fool than her son Claudius.” The future emperor suffered from an unknown childhood illness that left him with a pronounced limp. As if this weren’t enough, Suetonius tells us that Claudius “had many disagreeable traits . . . he would foam at the mouth and trickle at the nose; he stammered besides and his head was very shaky at times.”

Actor, Singer, Poet, Athlete, Matricidal
Mamma’s Boy

( A.D. 37–68)

Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. . . . And derision accompanied their end: they were covered with wild beasts’ skins and torn to death by dogs; or they were fastened on crosses, and when daylight failed were burned to serve as lamps by night.
—Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome

Humanist, patron of the arts, actor, singer, poet, playwright, and athlete. That is how the Roman emperor Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus wished to be remembered. But he’s mostly remembered for fiddling while Rome burned.

He was first a political pawn of others (especially his monstrous mother), then an upstart who had said domineering mother murdered, and later an emperor who initiated the persecution of Christians (supposedly to cover up his own guilt in starting the enormous fire that gutted Rome in A.D. 64).

Nero was related to the line of emperors descended from Julius Caesar through his mother, Agrippina. One of the most ambitious and notorious stage mothers in history, Agrippina connived to marry her uncle, the reigning emperor Claudius (that dynastic inbreeding stuff again) in order to get Nero, her child by a previous marriage, in line for the throne.

Guided by such heavyweights as the Roman philosopher and playwright Seneca, Nero began his reign on a mostly positive note, in spite of his mother Agrippina’s seemingly insatiable lust for power. When he’d had enough of her trying to rule through him, Nero concocted a scheme wherein the boat in which she was travelling literally fell apart around her. When Agrippina proved more formidable than the sea, managing to reach the shore and from there her villa, Nero sent trusted soldiers to murder her in her bed. Her reported last words were “Strike here! This bore Nero!” while pointing at her womb.

Fiddling Bastard

Everyone knows the story of how Nero fiddled while Rome burned. The germ of that story (and the notion that the emperor used Christians as scapegoats for the great fire that engulfed Rome in A.D. 64) comes from the Roman historian Tacitus: “For a rumor had spread that, while the city was burning, Nero had gone on his private stage and, comparing modern calamities with ancient, had sung the destruction of Troy.” To make matters worse, Nero seized a large chunk of the burned-out center of the city, where he erected a huge statute of himself as well as a sprawling, lavish new imperial residence dubbed the Domus Aureum (“Golden House”). When it was completed, Nero is said to have toured it, remarking, “At last a house fit for a human being to live in!” What he thought of those whom he’d dispossessed in order to build his golden house is not recorded.

From that point onward, there was no stopping the guy. As noted, Nero fancied himself quite the artist (reportedly saying, “What an artist dies with me!” on his deathbed). He acted on the stage, wrote and performed his own plays (a move that scandalized an ever-more-disenchanted Roman populace), and gave concerts wherein he played the lyre and sang. And heaven help you if you tried to leave one of these concerts early: several men who did were cut down by the Praetorian Guard for leaving the emperor’s presence without permission. Pregnant women were reported to have gone into labor and given birth during Nero’s performances!

Nero even competed in the Olympic Games, where (surprise, surprise) he won every single event in which he participated.

By A.D. 68, the most important of the emperor’s supporters, the army, had had enough. Several legions rose in revolt, with one of them proclaiming their general (Galba) emperor. Historians maintain that had Nero actually gone out and conquered some new province or fought an invading enemy with his legions, his eccentricities might have been overlooked. As it was, he cut his own throat in order to avoid capture by Galba’s soldiers.

Bastard.