Jupiter of the Palatine — Caligula: The Horse in the Senate
After returning from the north, the emperor appears less and less as a man. Dio writes that he dresses up as gods: Hercules, Dionysus, Apollo, and also goddesses, Juno, Diana and Venus. Suetonius sees him with a golden beard and a thunderbolt in his hand. As Jupiter Latiaris he has himself worshipped. He turns the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Forum into the vestibule of his palace, so that, as he puts it, he has two gods as doorkeepers, and he sits between their statues.
On top of that, his own cult: a temple, a golden statue that is dressed every day just like the emperor, and priesthoods that the richest buy. According to Dio each pays ten million sesterces. Flamingos and peacocks are sacrificed. The emperor talks with Jupiter Capitolinus as an equal, and when it thunders, he answers with his own thunder. When the god hurls a thunderbolt, he hurls a spear at a rock and quotes Homer.
A god needs temples, and temples need money. The emperor devises taxes on everything: on food sold in the city, on lawsuits (a fortieth of the sum in dispute), on the earnings of porters (an eighth of a day’s wage). He posts the law so high and in such small print that no one can read it, so it is broken out of ignorance. When the people protest loudly in the circus, Dio writes, the emperor has soldiers deal with those assembled. After that, everyone is silent.
It is AD 40. Before you judge the rumors about the palace, put yourself in a senator’s place.
And what about the rumor of a brothel in the palace? Suetonius and Dio describe rooms in the palace in which wives and children of the best families were supposedly put on display, and the emperor made money from the fees charged to the willing and the unwilling. Winterling takes this story apart and shows how a fact was distorted: Caligula had the wives and children of prominent senators moved into the palace, where they were at once guests and hostages. Fagan allows a grain of truth, heavily embellished.
Is the man who does all this insane? The ancients had no doubts. Suetonius records the symptoms: epilepsy in childhood, sudden spells of weakness that made it hard for the emperor to walk, stand and gather his thoughts, and above all insomnia. He slept no more than three hours, and even then specters tormented him. At night he wandered the porticoes of the palace and called for dawn. He himself is said to have suspected that something was wrong with his mind, and thought of withdrawing to rest. It was also said that his wife Caesonia gave him a love potion that addled him.
Historians are more cautious. Fagan considers medical diagnoses from two thousand years ago doomed from the start, because the sources cannot be trusted. His explanation is simpler: a young, inexperienced man with unlimited power. Van Nispen describes it as ad hoc, personal rule in which decisions are made on the spot, with no principle at all. And the only eyewitness, Philo of Alexandria, does not describe a madman. He describes a man who is haughty, egocentric and maliciously witty.
The emperor himself liked to repeat a line by some tragic poet. Suetonius puts it in his mouth.
It is a single source, and the image of the “typical tyrant” has a long tradition in ancient literature, as Reeves points out. One sentence that is easy to repeat years later may be proof of character or an invention. The same goes for another story from Suetonius: the emperor thought of destroying the poems of Homer, and nearly removed the writings and busts of Virgil and Livy from all libraries, calling the first a poet without talent and the second a wordy and careless historian.
Before we enter the corridor, let us sort out which of these stories are certain and which are not.
There is a man serving in the palace whose watchwords from the emperor have for years been insults. And he remembers every one of them.