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Page 32
Caligula was undoubtedly mad, but his madness would have seemed less
chaotic and incomprehensible, and a thread of sense would have been
discovered even in his excesses and in the ravings of his unsettled
mind, if it had been understood that many of his most famous freaks
were moved and inspired by this Egyptian idea and tendency. In the
madness of Caligula, as in the story of Antony and the tragedy of
Tiberius, there is forever recurring, under a new form, the great
struggle between Italy and the East, between Rome and Alexandria, which
can never be divorced from the history of the last century of the
republic and the first century of the empire. Whoever carefully sifts
out the separate actions in the disordered conduct of the third Roman
emperor will easily rediscover the thread of this idea and the trace of
this latent conflict. For instance, we see the new emperor scarcely
elected before he introduced the worship of Isis among the official
cults of the Roman state and assigned in the calendar a public festival
to Isis. In short, he was favoring those Egyptian cults which
Tiberius, with his "old-Roman" sympathies, had fiercely combatted.
Furthermore, we see Caligula prohibiting the festival in commemoration
of the battle of Actium, which had been celebrated every year for more
than half a century. At first sight the idea seems absurd; but it must
not be considered a caprice; for with this act Caligula was intending
to initiate the historical rehabilitation of Mark Antony, the man who
had tried to shift the center of Roman politics from Rome to
Alexandria. The emperor meant to make plain to Rome that she was no
longer to boast of having humiliated Alexandria with arms, since
Alexandria would henceforth be taken as a model in all things.
[Illustration: Claudius, Messalina, and their two children in what is
known as the "Hague Cameo."]
Just as the dynasty of the Ptolemies had been surrounded by a
semi-religious veneration, Caligula, inspired as he was by Egyptian and
Ptolemaic conceptions, sought to have this same veneration bestowed
upon his entire family--that family which under Tiberius had been
persecuted and defamed by suits and decimated by suicides through the
envy of the aristocracy, which was forever unwilling to forgive its too
great prestige. Caligula not only hastened to set out in person to
gather up the bones of Agrippina, his mother, and of his brother, in
order to bring them to Rome and deposit them piously in the tomb of
Augustus,--that was a natural duty of filial piety,--but he also
prohibited any one to name among his ancestors the great Agrippa, the
builder of the Pantheon, because his very obscure origin seemed a blot
upon the semi-divine purity of his race. He had the title of Augusta
and all the privileges of the vestal virgins bestowed upon his
grandmother Antonia, the daughter of Mark Antony and the faithful
friend of Tiberius; he had these same vestal privileges bestowed upon
his three sisters, Agrippina, Drusilla, and Livilla; he had assigned to
them a privileged position equal to his own at the games in the circus;
he even had it decreed that their names should be included in the vows
which the magistrates and pontiffs offered every year for the
prosperity of the prince and of his people, and that in the prayers for
the conservation of his power there should also be included a prayer
for their felicity. This was a small revolution from the
constitutional point of view; for the Romans, though allowing their
women ample freedom to occupy themselves with politics from the
retirement of their homes, had never recognized for them any official
capacity. Tiberius, faithfully adhering in this also to tradition, had
gone as far as to prevent the senate, at the time of Livia's death,
from voting public honors to her memory, which, he thought, might have
justified the belief that his mother had been, not a matron of the old
Roman stamp, but a public personage. Caligula, however, was quite
indifferent to tradition, and by his expressed will, as if in reaction
against the persecutions and the humiliations which the imperial family
had suffered under Tiberius, even the sisters of the emperor acquired a
sacred character and a privileged position in the state. For the first
time the women of the imperial family acquired the character of
official personages.
It cannot be denied that the transition from atrocious prosecutions to
divine honors was somewhat sudden, but this is merely a further proof
that Caligula was endowed with a violent, impulsive, and irreflective
temperament. In any case, there was neither scandal nor protest at
that time. Caligula during the first months of his rule was popular,
not for his measures in favor of the women of his family, but for
reasons of far greater importance. He had inaugurated a r�gime which
promised to be more indulgent, more prodigal, less harsh than that of
Tiberius. Extravagance had made rapid strides, especially in the ranks
of the aristocracy, during the twenty-two years of Tiberius's rule: and
although the latter, especially toward the end of his life, had ceased
struggling against this tendency, nevertheless his well-known aversion
to sumptuous living, and the example of simplicity which he set before
the eyes of all, had always been a cause of preoccupation to the
aristocracy--to men as well as women. There was no certainty that the
emperor might not again, some day, try to enforce the sumptuary laws.
When Caligula therefore began his career, indicating very clearly his
sympathies with the modernizing party by his eagerness to do away with
the old Roman simplicity, the young aristocracy of both sexes did not
conceal their satisfaction. After a long period of old-fashioned
traditional policy, enforced by the two preceding emperors, they
welcomed with joy the young reformer who set out to introduce in the
imperial government the spirit of the new generations. No one was
sorry that all the purveyors of voluptuousness,--mimes, singers,
actors, dancers of both sexes, cooks, and puppets,--should with noisy
joy break into the imperial palace, which had been official, severe,
and cold under Tiberius, and bring back pleasure, luxury, and
festivals. All hoped that under the rule of this indulgent, youthful
emperor, life, especially at Rome, would become more pleasant and gay;
and no one therefore felt disposed to protest against the official
honors which, contrary to custom, had been bestowed upon the women of
the imperial family.
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