The Bridge of Ships — Caligula: The Horse in the Senate
Tiberius was frugal, so he left behind a full treasury. Gaius empties it faster than anyone could have imagined. The money goes to games, actors, charioteers, gladiators and horses, writes Dio. Here is the tally.
And yet it is just then that the emperor devises a spectacle that Rome will not forget.
Why did he do it? Suetonius knows three answers. One: he wanted to match Xerxes, who built a bridge across the much narrower Hellespont. Two: he wanted to frighten Germania and Britain with news of something superhuman. The third he heard as a boy from his own grandfather, who knew it from courtiers. The astrologer Thrasyllus once told Tiberius that Gaius had as little chance of ruling as of riding a horse across the Gulf of Baiae. The bridge, then, was meant to answer the prophecy.
The price of the show is high. There are not enough ships, so some were built on the spot and the rest brought from many ports. Dio links this to a severe famine in Italy and Rome. At night, in the glow of bonfires, the drunken emperor throws some of the guests into the water. Most, drunk as they are, save themselves, because the sea is exceptionally calm.
When the money runs out, the inventing begins. Soon the emperor sets out from Rome to the north, officially against the Germans, but according to Dio really for the riches of Gaul and Hispania. He takes actors, gladiators, horses and women.
At Lugdunum, today’s Lyon, he stages games and an oratory contest in Greek and Latin. The losers, writes Suetonius, must hand prizes to the winners and compose speeches in their praise, and the weakest must erase their compositions with a sponge or their tongue, unless they prefer a flogging or a dip in the river.
He also sells off palace furniture and family relics, and Dio records how he praises them: this belonged to my father, this to my mother, this to my grandfather and this Egyptian object was Antony’s and became Augustus’s spoils. So fame is bought along with the object. Suetonius describes an auction at which the emperor himself bids up the prices. At it, a man of praetorian rank, Aponius Saturninus, dozes on a bench and nods in his sleep.
Money is one thing, fear another. The emperor crushes a conspiracy: Lentulus Gaetulicus, commander in Germania for ten years and popular with the soldiers, is killed, and so is Lepidus, once the emperor’s favorite. Caligula exiles his sisters, Agrippina the Younger and Julia, to islands and dedicates three daggers to Mars the Avenger. Agrippina must carry the urn with Lepidus’s ashes to Rome. That same Agrippina will return from exile, and you will hear of her again in later episodes.
An embassy of the Senate also comes to the emperor, and among the envoys is his uncle Claudius. According to Dio, Caligula would have killed him, had it not been for contempt: Claudius, partly by nature, partly by design, gave the impression of being a great fool. Remember this sentence.
On the shore of the Ocean, opposite Britain, the legions stand in battle formation. The emperor boards a trireme, sails out a short way and returns. He sits on a platform and gives the signal for battle. No one knows what will happen. Then he orders them to gather shells into their helmets and the folds of their togas. “Spoils from the Ocean, owed to the Capitol and the Palatine,” he says. He also orders a tall tower built, on which lights are to burn at night like those of the Pharos. The soldiers receive a hundred denarii each, and he cries: go happy, go rich. Suetonius and Dio both describe the shells, with small differences; only Suetonius mentions the tower and the hundred denarii.
What lies behind it? Winterling sees in it the humiliation of the soldiers, who in his view had shown cowardice. Fagan links the expedition with the discovery of the conspiracy of Gaetulicus, commander of the legions in Germania. Whether the shells were a joke or a humiliation of the army, the sources do not say, and historians disagree.
In August AD 40, on his own birthday, he enters Rome in an ovation, that is, a lesser triumph. He has a few months left.