Two Faces of One Emperor — Caligula: The Horse in the Senate
In the same year, AD 37, Gaius falls gravely ill. The whole city keeps vigil outside the palace. Suetonius writes that some vow to fight as gladiators if he recovers, and others post tablets offering their own lives in exchange for his. The emperor recovers. Dio adds that two of these men paid with their lives, because he made them keep their word.
Let us go back to March for a moment. Tiberius left the state to two grandsons: Gaius and Gemellus, who is still a child. Gaius sends the will to the Senate and the consuls annul it. The reason given: the old emperor was not in his right mind, since he left power to a boy who does not even have the right to enter the Senate (Dio).
Now that boy becomes a problem. Gaius adopted him at the start of his reign and gave him the title Prince of the Youth. After the illness he accuses him of having hoped for his death. Suetonius gives a different reason: Gemellus’s breath smelled of a cough medicine, which the emperor took for an antidote. When the emperor decides to kill him, he exclaims a sentence that Suetonius recorded.
Gemellus perishes. Dio sums it up briefly: Gaius deprived the boy of the throne, and then, despite the adoption, had him killed. The old man from Capri was right.
Dio writes that in every matter Gaius went against the current: what he praised in Tiberius he abandoned, and what he reproached him for he outdid. The first to go are those who raised him up. The praetorian prefect Macro, who helped him win the throne, and his wife Ennia end their lives on the emperor’s orders.
Gaius changes wives too. He carries off Orestilla, a bride, from her own wedding, and divorces her a few days later (Suetonius). He has Lollia Paulina summoned from the provinces, because someone told him of her grandmother’s beauty. He marries her, sends her away after a short time and forbids her to have relations with anyone. Only Caesonia, neither young nor beautiful, stays with him to the end.
The year 38 brings a blow that truly knocks Gaius off balance. Drusilla, one of his three sisters, dies. Suetonius and Dio claim that there was more between them than a family bond, but this accusation comes from hostile authors and cannot be verified. What is certain is what the emperor does after her death.
He proclaims mourning in which laughter, bathing and sharing a meal with one’s family are crimes punishable by death. He himself flees Rome by night, traverses Campania, reaches Syracuse and returns with unshorn hair and beard. He swears henceforth only by the divinity of Drusilla.
The Senate adds fuel to the fire. It introduces the cult of the goddess Panthea, orders a golden image set up in the Curia, appoints twenty priests. The senator Livius Geminius swears by his own life and his children’s lives that he saw Drusilla ascend to heaven and converse with the gods, and receives a million sesterces for it.
A mourning full of traps is just the warm-up. The real trouble lies elsewhere: Tiberius’s treasury is melting before their eyes, and the emperor cannot count.