Rome, p.14
Rome, page 14
1 Whose story is as follows. The goddess Athena had invented the flute, but threw it away because playing it distorted her face. Marsyas found it where it lay, and taught himself to play it. He became so good at it that he had to challenge Apollo to a contest: his flute versus the god’s lyre. Inevitably, the impertinent and libidinous satyr lost. Apollo’s dreadful revenge was to string Marsyas up and skin him alive. This was always taken as an allegory of the opposition, in art as in life, between sexy spontaneity (Marsyas) and disciplined invention (merciless Apollo).
2 The Caryatids, bearing the architrave on their heads, were emblems of slavery. The city of Caria, in Asia Minor, had resisted the Athenians, and thenceforth its women were depicted as defeated load-bearers.
3
Later Empire
We are used to thinking of most Roman emperors after Augustus, with the exception (thanks to Robert Graves’s sympathetic novels) of Claudius, as beastly degenerates—the proof that absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is not true, but one can understand why so many have imagined it was.
The most prominent offenders were those two reliable crazies Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, known as Caligula (12–41 C.E.), and Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (37–68 C.E.), or Nero. Caligula got his pet name from the legions—the word roughly translates to “Bootikins”—by wearing tiny versions of the legionaries’ combat boots, caligae, as a child, when he was the mascot of the Rhine armies, shortly after the death of his much-adored father, Germanicus, in 19 C.E. The one thing everyone knows about him is that he was quite mad and excessively fond of his horse Incitatus (a name which meant, roughly, “Go-Go”). Not only did he give this animal a marble stable, an ivory stall, purple blankets, slaves, and a jeweled collar, but he actually appointed it consul. Or so the story goes. There is, however, no evidence that he made any such promotion. Consul Go-Go may just have been palace gossip of a somewhat recherché sort. Suetonius, our only ancient source on this, merely writes, “It is said that he even planned to award Incitatus a consulship”—and planning something is not the same as doing it. The consul-horse story is likely no more than a variation on one of the twisted jokes Caligula was fond of making, as appears from other examples. One can imagine him losing his temper with the unfortunate Senate and calling its members dumber than his horse.
Can anything be said for Caligula? Probably not much, although the Roman gladiators and their owner-managers were doubtless grateful for his obsessional interest in arena fighting. However, he did make distinct contributions to public works. Realizing that the water supplies of Rome’s seven aqueducts were not enough for a growing city, he ordained the construction of two more, the Aqua Claudia and the Anio Novus, though he did not live long enough to see either completed; they were finished by his successor, Claudius. He began a project which (until Claudius finished it) kept thirty thousand men busy for eleven years, leveling and tunneling a mountain to drain the Fucine Lake, in central Italy—a Roman equivalent to the appalling labors to which Stalin’s political slaves would be condemned in digging the White Sea Canal.
The least popular of Caligula’s additions to Rome would have been the Tullianum, or Mamertine Prison, the oldest in the city, at the foot of the Capitoline Hill. Here, notable captives were incarcerated; this was where Saint Peter supposedly languished in chains (the chains themselves are holy relics, preserved along with Michelangelo’s sublime figure of the horned and glaring Moses, gripping the tablets of the Law, in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, not far away); in this sad little round room with its domed ceiling, Jugurtha, once king of Numidia, died of starvation in 104 C.E., and the Gallic warrior Vercingetorix, Caesar’s chief enemy in Gaul, was beheaded in 46 C.E.
Without question, however, Caligula’s most popular contribution to the architecture of Rome was on the Ager Vaticanus, an enormous circus or racecourse known as the Circus of Gaius and Nero. Almost all of it lies underneath the Basilica and Piazza of Saint Peter, for a simple and logical reason: this was the circus where Nero put Christians to death in the spectacular persecution that followed the fires of 64 C.E., for which the members of that sect were blamed. Early Christian tradition also held that it was the site of Saint Peter’s martyrdom. Both Caligula and Nero were obsessive enthusiasts for chariot racing, and they competed with the professionals on this track.
The much later Emperor Elagabalus, who reigned from 218 to 222 C.E., drove in Vaticano, too, except that his chariot was drawn not by horses but by a team of four elephants, which does not suggest lightning speed, especially since his ponderous équipe kept knocking over tombs on the way. Elagabalus lives in legend as the demented homosexual transvestite who once arranged for his guests to be smothered in rose petals, dropped through trapdoors in the ceiling of his palace. His sexuality made Caligula’s seem almost routine, although the two were not dissimilar; Elagabalus surrounded himself with actors, dancers, and charioteers, all seeking to outdo one another in perversity. He was at least bisexual enough to have three wives: Julia Paula (who lasted one year), Aquilia Severa (a vestal virgin, whom he married, divorced, and married again, each time for a year), and Annia Faustina, a relative of the late, great Marcus Aurelius, whom he seems to have espoused for the sake of prestige. She, too, lasted a year.
To make quite sure that he had something for everyone, Elagabalus also caused annoyance to religious conservatives by bringing his own god with him from the East, the black stone of Emesa, itself an object of reverence, representing Baal. Having been proclaimed emperor in 218 by rebellious legions of Eastern troops, he was persuaded by his grandmother—a fearsome old harpy who dominated him completely and, in effect, ran the palace with his mother—to adopt his cousin Severus Alexander as his son and Caesar in 221. Perhaps inevitably, this lad’s presence sent Elagabalus into shrieking fits of jealousy: the Western imperial troops liked Severus better than the emperor. Elagabalus planned to have him killed, but the soldiers killed him instead, with his mother. Thus perished the only emperor who gave Caligula some competition as the most dissolute in Roman history.
The personal behavior of both Caligula and Nero fluctuated, according to the rather meager reports it left—mainly in the writings of Suetonius—between the eccentrically aesthetic and the utterly mad, the indulgent and the insanely cruel. Caligula is said to have raped his sister Drusilla, and to have made a habit of public incest with her and two other sisters at banquets, while (one imagines) the less-than-enthusiastic guests stared in glum silence at their roast peacock. He could also be more public in his entertainments. It was Caligula who habitually condemned criminals ad bestias (to be devoured by wild beasts in the arena), or had them forced into narrow cages where they were sawn in half—“merely for criticizing his shows [or] failing to swear by his Genius.” What made life under Caligula especially difficult was that he expected to be applauded, not just by his courtiers but by the whole Roman public, as a great tragic-comic and sporting personality. Gladiator, singer, dancer, chariot racer, actor: there was nothing he did not excel at. Perhaps there is a touch of Caligula in every showbiz star, but Caligula himself was all Caligula, and nobody who outdid him in performance was likely to live long. Besides, he was no fool in literary matters. He might rave and shout, but he knew all his references. The emperor had a captive audience, and he knew it. To imagine a more modern, though hardly more threatening equivalent, one should perhaps think of Adolf Hitler singing at Bayreuth, with a member of the Gestapo posted behind each seat in the theater.
But some of his efforts at self-dramatization (and they were many) defy any attempt at rational explanation. Suetonius relates how, while on campaign in Gaul, facing the English Channel, Caligula had had his men drawn up in battle array, backed by various engines of war—ballistae and the like—pointing at the distant coast of England. He then boarded a trireme and put to sea, for a short distance. Then his warship turned round and brought him back to shore, where he clambered up on its high poop and shouted the order, “Gather sea-shells!” Nonplussed but obedient to their commander-in-chief, his troops did so, filling their helmets and tunics with what Caligula termed “plunder from the sea, owed to the Capitol and the Palace.” He then promised every man in his army a bonus of four solidi or gold pieces, though there is no record that this was actually given out. The seashells were dispatched back to Rome as “booty.” As Caligula’s most recent biographer has written with some understatement, “This episode has provided much grist for the scholarly mill.”
It may be that this bizarre incident was nothing more than training maneuvers; but this was winter, the weather and the seas were adverse, and even if Caligula (who was terrified of the sea and could not swim) had not realized it, any of his captains could have enlightened him about the impossibility of launching an invasion of Britain at that time of the year. No matter: he planned an ovation for himself for having invaded Britain, and he even chose some sturdy Gauls to grow their hair long, dye it red, and act like conquered soldiers, which in a general way they were. But it was not enough for Caligula to be fêted and admired as a hero, the conqueror of Germany and Britain. He was determined to be worshipped as a living god. Now, it was true that previous emperors had been seen, and within limits revered, as divine. Virgil included Octavian/Augustus as one of the “gods among us,” and it was common in the Greek East of the Empire to pay divine honors to members of the imperial family. But divine homage to living emperors was far less usual in Rome itself than in the external empire, the definition of divinity itself could be rather fuzzy, and in any case some emperors found it excessive, even embarrassing: Tiberius, for instance, refused to allow a temple to be dedicated to himself and Livia in 25 C.E. Dead emperors could be worshipped as gods and have temples dedicated to their cult, but Caligula was the first (though not the last) to take this a step or two further. According to Suetonius, he decided to live as Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline. It was said that he planned to have Phidias’ renowned sculpture of Olympian Zeus transferred there as his cult image, presumably given a new head, but was somehow dissuaded; he then had a full-length statue of himself, life-sized, made in gold. Every day the slaves dressed it in a different outfit of clothes from Caligula’s extensive wardrobe.
All in all, perhaps the most surprising thing about Caligula’s short and demented reign—he died in 41 C.E. at twenty-eight, assassinated by the officers of his own guard, having ruled Rome for not quite four years—was that he managed to last as long as he did. What happened to the seashells is unrecorded.
His successor was a man widely regarded as the family idiot, humiliated and condescended to by his nephew Caligula: Tiberius Claudius Drusus (10 B.C.E.–54 C.E.), known to history simply as Claudius, the last male member of the Julio-Claudian line. But he was popular with the Roman public, and with the army as well; certainly he was much better respected and liked than the repulsive Caligula. Nothing, one might have supposed, prepared him for the imperium. He was lame; he drooled and twitched when excited; and some chroniclers, notably Suetonius and Tacitus, treated him as a ridiculous figure, inept and stammering. Some of his traits were consistent with Tourette’s syndrome, but this is not easily judged. Moreover, his sexual tastes, compared with those of most Roman emperors, seemed downright eccentric, almost perverse: according to Suetonius, he had no interest in men, only in women. Unfortunately, he had a way of marrying the wrong ones: first a lumpish horse of a creature named Urgulanilla, then a termagant called Aelia Paetina, then his cousin Valeria Messalina, a money-crazed nymphomaniac who, according to the often unreliable testimony of Tacitus, once competed with a prostitute to see which of them could take on the most sexual partners in a night; and finally Agrippina, a descendant of Augustus and the mother of Nero. From childhood on, Claudius was mercilessly bullied and deprecated as a fool by his mother, Antonia, and his grandmother Livia, and this seems to have set a pattern of domination by scheming women which infected his entire married career.
Claudius was fifty years old when Caligula was murdered. In the general confusion that followed the assassination, he ran into hiding behind a door curtain in the palace. One of the Praetorian Guardsmen, Gratus by name, spotted his feet beneath the curtain and pulled him out. Claudius, thinking his last moment had come, clasped the soldier’s knees and started begging for mercy—but, to his mingled terror and relief, the soldier bore him off to the palace guards’ quarters, where he was acclaimed as the new emperor. He was the first emperor to be proclaimed by the Praetorian Guard rather than the Senate; obviously, the Senate had little choice in the matter.
This may not have been a very auspicious start to his reign, but Claudius proved to be a surprisingly good ruler—much better, certainly, than either his crazed predecessor, Caligula, or his predecessor, the mediocre Tiberius, who, after a promising start, with wide military experience on the German frontier, ended his reign as an elderly, cruel debauchee on the island of Capri while leaving the effective control of Rome to his Praetorian captain Sejanus. Claudius, of whom less had been expected, did much more. He considerably enlarged and strengthened the Empire by planting coloniae, fortified settlements, in remote zones; such places as Colchester in Britain and Cologne in Germany were originally Claudian settlements. To Claudius belongs the distinction of leading the successful conquest of Britain, which began in 43 C.E. Having captured the British general Caractacus, he spared his life and treated him with unusual clemency. Caractacus was allowed to live out his natural life on land given to him by the Roman state, instead of being garrotted in prison, the usual fate of those who dared lead a resistance against Rome. This, one need not doubt, did wonders for the colonial relationship between the British and their conquerors.
Claudius was a gifted administrator with (as it must have seemed to citizens who had grown used to the arbitrary habits of Caligula) an intense regard for the minutiae of the law. He presided at public trials, viewing his presence there as both a duty and a pleasure, although some of his edicts make strange reading today; one of them, according to Suetonius, promoted unrestrained farting at table as a health measure. In particular, he was committed to programs of public works—the building of aqueducts, the draining of the Fucine Lake. (The latter almost proved a disaster; because of miscalculation by the engineers, the lake waters came rushing out too soon and backed up in a too-narrow sluice, nearly drowning Claudius and his party, for whom a great banquet had been prepared on the bank of the channel.) The Fucine drainage scheme, underwritten by a syndicate of businessmen in return for ownership of the reclaimed land, kept thirty thousand men at work for eleven years, but is said to have eventually returned a profit. Probably the most important of these works was Claudius’ creation of a deep-water harbor at Ostia, complete with a tall lighthouse; this transformed Rome’s access to Mediterranean trade, especially during the winter storm season.
His main contribution to popular entertainment was his unbridled enthusiasm for arena fights. Claudius—according to Suetonius, our only source on this—was unusually bloodthirsty, even by Roman standards. If an accused man was to be tortured to extract testimony, Claudius liked to watch. Sometimes, when he had spent the whole morning watching gladiator fights and wild-beast shows, “he would dismiss the audience, keep his seat, and not only watch the regular combats but extemporize others between the stage carpenters … as a punishment for the failure of any mechanical device.” Nothing survives of Claudius’ work as a historian—which is a considerable loss, since he wrote many books about Roman, Etruscan, and even Carthaginian history from sources which were extant two thousand years ago but have now disappeared.
He was gluttonous, and this led to his death. His favorite dish was mushrooms, and at a family banquet his last wife, Agrippina, served him a dish of funghi porcini laced with poison. This killed him, conveniently preparing for the succession of Agrippina’s son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, better known as Nero.
Nobody could say that Nero lacked the advantages of education as well as birth.
Coming from Spain, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (d. 65 C.E.) was Nero’s tutor, and a stupendously voluble writer; his surviving prose works alone run to over a thousand closely printed pages. He took great pride in his Stoicism, but no Stoic was ever longer-winded or more self-infatuated. He could argue both sides of a case—when Claudius died, it was Seneca who composed the eulogy delivered on him by Nero, his successor, but also Seneca who wrote a satire on the departed emperor, the Apocolocyntosis or Pumpkinification of Claudius, who was imagined as turning into a dim-witted, sententious vegetable god. Seneca was a hypocrite almost without equal in the ancient world. He sang praises of moderation: “To be a slave to self is the most grievous kind of slavery; yet its fetters may easily be struck off.… Man needs but little, and that not for long.” Fine words, which, unhappily, bear little relation to the real facts of Seneca’s life: he was a mercilessly greedy usurer. Few can have mourned him when, on direct orders from Nero, he committed suicide by opening his veins in a hot bath.
Nero’s most notorious act of vandalism was (supposedly) burning much of the city of Rome.
It is not sure that, as legend durably insists, he fiddled while doing so. Though he was a keen amateur musician, his preference was for giving long vocal recitatives, generally of a tragic kind, some of whose titles—though, perhaps mercifully, not their libretti—have been preserved: among these were Canace in Childbirth, Hercules Distraught, and Orestes the Matricide. In these he would wear the masks of heroes, gods, or goddesses modeled either on his own face or on the features of a current mistress.
