The Historians' History of the World 06

A man in this condition—sane enough to realise that as long as the material basis of his power, the loyalty of the soldiery and the masses, is unshaken, he will meet with no opposition in the gratification of his maddest whims—may at any moment conceive the idea of testing the validity of his omnipotence in any direction. It is a mere chance whether this display of power is directed towards great or even reasonable ends, or whether it issues in deeds of crime and horror. This is more particularly the case when the monarch in question is the victim of shattered nerves, the child of caprice, and the toy of every passing impulse.

The premonitory signs of the evil to come manifested themselves soon after the beginning of the year 38. Caligula, who chiefly delighted in the company of charioteers, stage-players, and buffoons, began to make a wanton exhibition of his despotic power, thus abruptly breaking with the astute policy of his predecessors. And it was a despotism which ignored the precepts of ancient Roman decorum, which, in sexual relations, overstepped all bounds of law and modesty, nay, even of common decency. To the wearisome admonitions of Macro, who exhorted him to act with some degree of discretion, he replied by forcing both the general and his wife to commit suicide.

Presently, however, the monarch having spent the vast riches of Tiberius in the space of nine or ten months, and being possessed with a mania for building as well as with a passion for games, became aware of a very perceptible limit to his omnipotence. To relieve himself of his financial embarrassments, he had recourse to the most sanguinary as well as to the pettiest and most infamous measures. Capital charges, most of which were decided before the emperor’s own tribunal, became more and more numerous, partly to satisfy Caligula’s growing lust of blood, partly to fill his coffers with the proceeds of confiscation. Trials for offences of majestas

were revived as a matter of course (39 A.D.).

The money thus acquired was squandered again and again on objects that could only be called colossal whims. Of these the most notorious was the construction of the ephemeral bridge of boats between Puteoli and Baiæ, across which he caused a substantial highway to be made, with aqueducts and posting stations, after the model of the Appian way, for the sole purpose of crossing it, surrounded by his guards, in the character of triumphator, and celebrating this chaining of the ocean by a gorgeous banquet.

His administration of imperial affairs was characterised by the same whimsical caprice. Having restored for no good purpose the kingdom of Commagene, he bestowed upon his friend and contemporary, M. Julius Agrippa (or Herod Agrippa, born 11 B.C.), grandson of Herod the Great, the greater part of his grandfather’s dominions, most of which had been annexed to Syria under Augustus and Tiberius. On the other hand, he summoned Ptolemy, king of Mauretania (from 23 B.C. onwards), to Rome in the year 40, and there put him out of the way for the sake of his wealth.

Tradition represents all the scenes of Caligula’s visit to Gaul in a light absolutely grotesque. [Some details from Suetonius will be introduced presently.] The shout of triumph after a sortie across the Rhine in which some of his Germanic guards were brought back as sham prisoners, strikes the reader as wholly comic, but we note with indignation that at Lyons Caligula continued the disgraceful system of making money by capital sentences and criminal charges against persons of rank, and recruited his finances by putting interesting and ancient articles from the palace of the Cæsars at Rome up to public auction.

The collection of an army, estimated at some 250,000 men, in the ports of the Morini on the Channel with a view to the conquest of Britain remained nothing but an empty demonstration. It may have induced the British chiefs to avert the danger by a formal act of homage and valuable presents; but tradition represents Caligula as concluding this bloodless expedition with a piece of buffoonery, and after bestowing costly gifts on the soldiers, commanding them to pick up shells on the shore as “spoils won from the ocean.”

When he returned to Rome, late in the summer of the year 40, his humour assumed a more and more sinister character. He regarded his own person as divine, though he loved to appear with the attributes of the various gods and goddesses of the Græco-Roman Pantheon; and he now instituted a college of priests in his own honour, and while heaping ignominy on the most revered of ancient images of the gods, commanded that he himself should be worshipped in temples set apart for the purpose throughout the provinces.