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Page 31
[Illustration: Caligula.]
As they could not consider him, there remained only Caligula, unless
they wished to go outside the family of Augustus, which, if not
impossible, was at least difficult and dangerous. For the provinces,
the German barbarians, and especially the soldiers of the legions, were
accustomed to look upon this family as the mainstay of the empire. The
legions had become specially attached to the memory and to the race of
Drusus and Germanicus, who still lived in the minds of the soldiers as
witnesses to their former exploits and virtues. During the long
watches of the night, as their names were repeated in speech and story,
their shades, idealized by death, returned again to revisit the camps
on the banks of the Rhine and the Danube. The veneration and affection
which the armies had once felt for the Roman nobility were now centered
about the family of Augustus. In this difficulty, therefore, the
senate chose the lesser evil, and, annulling a part of the testament of
Tiberius, elected Caligula, the son of Germanicus, as their emperor.
The death of Tiberius, however, was destined to show the Romans for the
first time that although it was hard to find an emperor, it might even
be harder to find an empress. During the long reign of Augustus, Livia
had discharged the duties of this difficult position with incomparable
success. Tiberius had succeeded Augustus, and after his divorce from
Julia had never remarried. There had therefore been a long interregnum
in the Roman world of feminine society, during which no one had ever
stopped to think whether it would be easy or difficult to find a woman
who could with dignity take over the position of Livia. The problem
was really presented for the first time with the advent of Caligula;
for, at twenty-seven, he could not solve it as simply as Tiberius had
done. In the first place, it was to be expected that a man of his age
would have a wife; secondly, the _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_ made
marriage a necessity for him, as for all the senators; furthermore, the
head of the state needed to have a woman at his side, if he wished to
discharge all his social duties. The celibacy of Tiberius had
undoubtedly contributed to the social isolation which had been fatal
both to him and to the state.
Therefore in Caligula's time the Roman public became aware that the
problem confronting it was a most difficult one. A most exacting
public opinion, hesitating between the ideals of two epochs, wished to
see united in the empress the best part, both of the ancient and of the
modern customs, and was consequently demanding that the second Livia
should possess virtually every quality. It was necessary that she
should be of noble birth; that is, a descendant of one of those great
Roman families which with every year were becoming less numerous, less
prolific, less virtuous, and more fiercely divided among themselves by
irreconcilable hatreds. This latter was a most serious difficulty; for
by marrying into one of these lines, the emperor ran the risk of
antagonizing all those other families which were its enemies. The
empress, furthermore, must be the model of all the virtues; fruitful,
in order to obey the _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_; religious, chaste,
and virtuous, that she might not violate the _Lex de adulteriis_;
simple and modest, in deference to the _Lex sumptuaria_. She must be
able to rule wisely over the vast household of the emperor, full of his
slaves and freedmen, and she must aid her husband in the fulfilment of
all those social duties--receptions, dinners, entertainments--which,
though serious concerns for every Roman nobleman, were even more
serious for the emperor. That she should be stupid or ignorant was of
course out of the question. In fact, from this time to the downfall of
Nero the difficulties of the imperial family and its authority arise
not so much from the emperors as from their wives; so that it may truly
be said that it was the women who unwittingly dragged down to its ruin
the great Julio-Claudian house.
[Illustration: A bronze sestertius (slightly enlarged), showing the
sisters of Caligula (Agrippina, Drusilla, and Julia Livilla) on one
side and Germanicus on the other side.]
[Illustration: A bronze sestertius with the head of Agrippina the
Elder, daughter of Agrippa and Julia, the daughter of Augustus. She
was the wife of Germanicus, and their daughter, Agrippina the younger,
was the mother of the Emperor Nero.]
But if the difficulty was serious, there never was a man so little
fitted and so ill prepared to face it as this young man of twenty-seven
who had been exalted to the imperial dignity after the death of
Tiberius. Four years before his election as emperor, he had married a
certain Julia Claudilla, a lady who doubtless belonged to one of the
great Roman families, but about whom we have no definite information.
We cannot say, therefore, whether or not at the side of a second
Augustus she might have become a new Livia. In any case, it is certain
that Caligula was not a second Augustus. He was probably not so
frenzied a lunatic as ancient writers have pictured him, but his was
certainly an extravagant, unbalanced mind, given to excesses, and
unhinged by the delirium of greatness, which his coming to the throne
had increased the more because it had been conferred upon him at a time
when he was too young and before he had been sufficiently prepared.
For many years Caligula had never even hoped to succeed Tiberius; he
had continually feared that the fate of his mother and his two brothers
was likewise waiting for him. Far from having dreamed that he would be
raised to the imperial purple, he had merely desired that he might not
have to end his days as an exile on some desert island in the
Mediterranean. So much good fortune after the long persecutions of his
family profoundly disturbed his mental faculties, which had not
originally been well balanced, and it fomented in him that delirium of
grandeur which violently directed his desires toward distant Egypt, in
the customs of which, rather than in those of Rome, he, in the
exaltation of power, sought satisfaction for his imperial vanity. From
his earliest youth Caligula had shown a great inclination for the
products and the men of that far country, then greatly admired and
greatly feared by the Romans. For instance, we know that all his
servants were Egyptians, and that Helicon, his most faithful and
influential freedman, was an Alexandrian. But shortly after his
elevation this admiration for the land of the Ptolemies and the
Pharaohs broke forth into a furor of Egyptian exoticism, which impelled
him to an attempt to bring his own reign into connection with the
policies of his great-grandfather Mark Antony. He sought to introduce
into Rome the ideas, the customs, the sumptuousness, and the
institutions of the Pharaoh-Ptolemaic monarchy, to make of his palace a
court similar to that of Alexandria, and of himself a divine king,
adored in flesh and blood, as sovereigns were adored on the banks of
the Nile.
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