Little Boot from the Camp — Caligula: The Horse in the Senate
Let us start with the boots. The boy is named Gaius, but Rome knows him as Caligula, that is, Little Boot. The nickname was coined by the soldiers, as Suetonius explains, because the child grew up among them in a little soldier’s outfit, and the Latin caliga is a heavy soldier’s boot. His father, Germanicus, commands the legions on the Rhine, and his mother, Agrippina the Elder, lives with him in the camps.
Germanicus is what Rome lacks: a commander who is loved. Suetonius collected opinions about him: the handsomest, the bravest, educated in Greek and Latin, warm to everyone. When Augustus dies, the legions want to hand him power, and he refuses and calms them. In the same turmoil the soldiers stop the carriage taking the nearly two-year-old Gaius out of the camp, and out of shame beg that such a disgrace be spared them.
In AD 19 Germanicus dies in Antioch, at thirty-three. On the day of his death, writes Suetonius, the Romans overturned altars and threw stones at the temples. Then Tiberius comes to the fore. The Senate declares Gaius’s two older brothers public enemies, and his mother ends up on an island. None of them will live to see the end of Tiberius’s reign.
The boy is left alone. He lives with his great-grandmother Livia, and when she dies, he delivers her eulogy from the Rostra while still a youth. Then he goes to his grandmother Antonia. In AD 31, in his nineteenth year, he receives a summons from Tiberius: he is to come to Capri.
On the island, whoever can pretend survives. People hover around him, trying to coax the young man into complaining about his family’s fate. They get nothing. Gaius watches the destruction of his kin as if it did not concern him, and is all humility toward Tiberius. Rome will remember a saying about him that Suetonius cites.
Tiberius is not blind. Suetonius records that the old man used to say he was raising a viper for the Roman people and a Phaethon for the whole world. Tacitus describes a scene from the last years: Tiberius embraces his younger grandson, Gemellus, and looking at Gaius’s gloomy face, tells Gaius that he will kill this boy and himself die by another’s hand. Whether it really happened we do not know. Predictions are easy to add when you know the ending.
March AD 37. Tiberius dies in a villa near Misenum. Exactly how, no one knows: Suetonius collects versions from ordinary illness to a pillow over the face, and adds that some suspected Gaius himself. More important is what happens next.
Gaius is twenty-four. From Misenum he sets out for Rome in mourning dress, with the body of his predecessor, and along the way altars, sacrifices and torches greet him. The crowd cries to him: our star, our chick, our baby, our nursling. The Romans remember Germanicus and pity the family that has nearly died out. The Senate and the people give him full power unanimously.
The joy is great, and Rome thanks the gods with sacrifices. Guess how many animals were sacrificed in the first three months.
The first decisions look like the program of a good ruler. Gaius pays out the bequests in Tiberius’s will, and gives the soldiers as much again. He releases prisoners and brings the condemned back from exile. He ends the treason trials, allows banned books to be read and again publishes the state’s accounts, which Tiberius had neglected. Dio notes that he did this partly out of fear of the people and the army, but mostly out of conviction.
He himself sails to the islands where his mother and brother died, and with his own hands gathers their ashes. He brings them into Rome in broad daylight, through busy streets, so that everyone can see, and places them in the tomb of Augustus. In honor of his father, he renames September the month of Germanicus.
It looks like a golden age. One year is enough for it to end. But first, Gaius falls ill.