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The Life of Nero by Suetonius

Executive summary

Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus in 37 AD. He was the fifth Roman emperor and the final emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, reigning from 54 AD until his suicide in 68, aged just 33.

He was the son of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus and Agrippina the Younger, one of the daughters of Germanicus and sister to the emperor Gaius (Caligula). After Caligula was assassinated in 41 AD, Germanicus’ brother Claudius – who was Agrippina’s uncle – took the throne. Claudius took his niece as his fourth wife in 49 AD.

A year later Claudius was persuaded by Agrippina to adopt her son, Lucius Domitius, and make him his heir. Nero was 13 when he was adopted. When Claudius died (in October 54) it was widely believed that Agrippina poisoned him to ensure her son succeeded to the throne before Claudius’s biological son by his third wife, Britannicus, came of age and presented a more natural successor. A year later, Nero had Britannicus murdered to secure his position.

Nero was 17 when he came to the throne. In the early years of his reign Nero was advised and guided by his mother Agrippina, his tutor Seneca the Younger, and his praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus and ruled moderately and well. But he soon sought to rule independently and to rid himself of restraining influences. His power struggle with his mother was eventually resolved when he had her murdered in 59. Both the murder of Britannicus and Agrippina have elements of farcical ineptitude (see below).

Nero was popular with the members of his Praetorian Guard and lower-class commoners in Rome and its provinces. He organised lavish games, he periodically gave money to the people, he carried out modernising building works. But he was deeply resented by the Roman aristocracy.

The historically closest sources we have – Suetonius in his Lives and Tacitus in his Annals – describe Nero as tyrannical, self-indulgent, and debauched. But then, they were all written under the aegis of the dynasty which succeeded the Julio-Claudians – the Flavians – and so, to some extent, represent propaganda for that dynasty with the aim of rubbishing the emperors which came before.

After his increasingly debauched, spendthrift and reckless rule alienated the aristocracy, Nero was declared a public enemy by the Roman Senate, and forced to flee Rome to a country estate where he committed suicide at the age of 33.

Nero’s death led to chaos as three military commanders vied for supremacy, in what came to be called the Year of Four Emperors, AD 69, the rivals being Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian.

I’ve reviewed Suetonius’s biographies of the four emperors who preceded Nero, namely Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius (Caligula) and Claudius and along the way given several summaries of Suetonius’s approach. This is to give a brisk overview of his subject’s biography before moving on to look at specific areas of the emperor’s person – his appearance, family history and relationships, personality, quotes, the omens which surrounded his birth and death, and much other gossip and scandal.

Suetonius’s life of Nero is 57 (short) chapters long. It can be divided into five sections or parts:

the first five chapters describe Nero’s male forebears among the Ahenobarbi family
chapters 6 to 19 describe ‘Nero’s less atrocious acts’, many actually deserving praise
then, at chapter 20, Suetonius lets rip and commences a lurid account of Nero’s ‘follies and crimes’
chapters 40 to 49 give a long drawn-out description of his moral collapse following the revolt in Gaul, his abandonment by servants and friends, his flight from Rome and suicide
50 to 57 describe his funeral and the aftermath

Suetonius’s life of Nero

The first five chapters describe Nero’s make forebears from the Ahenobarbi family:

Nero’s great-great-great grandfather, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, when tribune of the commons in 104 BC, was enraged at the priests for choosing someone else as pontifex maximus, so he transferred the right of filling vacancies in the priesthoods from the colleges themselves to the people in the Tribal Assembly (the law was subsequently repealed by Sulla). Having defeated the Allobroges and the Arverni in his consulship, he rode through the province on an elephant, attended by a throng of soldiers, in a kind of triumphal procession
His son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (98 to 48 BC), when consul in 54 BC, tried to deprive Caesar of the command of the armies in Gaul. The senate appointed him to succeed Caesar as governor of further Gaul and when Caesar invaded Italy in 49, he was the only one of the aristocratic party who showed any energy or courage, organising the defense of Corfinium. When Corfinium was taken Caesar characteristically granted him clemency but he rejoined the aristocratic party. He was killed at the battle of Pharsalus and is mentioned in one of Cicero’s speeches as a principled example of the old Republic.
He left a son, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (died 31 BC) who was beyond all question better than the rest of the family. He was condemned among those involved in Caesar’s assassination and so went to join Brutus and Cassius. Upon their defeat he surrendered the republican fleet to Mark Antony. This Ahenobarbus successively held all the highest offices including consul in 32 BC. When the civil war between Augustus and Anthony broke out, he was appointed one of Antony’s lieutenants, but defected to Octavian just a few days before the decisive battle of Actium. Although Antony was upset by this betrayal, he still sent him all his gear, his friends and his attendants. (This incident is described in Plutarch’s Life of Anthony, chapter 63.) He died just a few days later.
Gnaeus had a son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (49 BC to 25 AD) who was later well known for being named in Augustus’ will as the purchaser of his goods and chattels. He won the insignia of a triumph in the war in Germany. He gave a gladiatorial games so cruel that Augustus admonished him. He married Antonia the Elder (niece of emperor Augustus) and had a son:
This man, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (2 BC to 41 AD) was widely hated: while on the staff of Gaius Caesar out East he murdered one of his own freedmen for refusing to drink as much as he ordered. In a village on the Appian Way, suddenly whipping up his team, he purposely ran over and killed a boy. In the Roman Forum he gouged out the eye of a Roman knight for being too outspoken in chiding him. When praetor he defrauded the victors in the chariot races of their prizes. Just before the death of Tiberius he was charged with treason, adultery and incest with his sister Lepida, but escaped owing to the change of rulers. Domitius married his first cousin once removed, Agrippina the Younger, Caligula’s sister, after her thirteenth birthday in 28. He was far older than her at the time. Tiberius arranged the marriage. Nine years later his son by Agrippina, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, was born.

6. Nero was born at on 15 December 37, nine months after the death of Tiberius. When shown the baby his father is supposed to have remarked that ‘any child born to him and Agrippina was bound to have a detestable nature and become a public danger’. At the age of three Nero’s father died but his fellow heir Gaius seized all the property.

He had a troubled upbringing in this cursed family. First Gaius banished his mother so that young Domitius was brought up in relative poverty in the house of his aunt Lepida, who assigned him as tutors a dancer and a barber. But when Claudius became emperor, in 41, he restored to Nero his father’s legacy added to it, and recalled his mother from exile.

There is a widely attested legend that Claudius’s third wife, Messalina, came to regard the boy Nero as a rival to her own son, Britannicus, and so sent assassins to murder him, and that they were at the cradle when they were scared away by a snake which suddenly appeared from under his pillow. [A clear copy of the legend of Hercules strangling snakes as a baby.]

[After Claudius had Messalina executed, in 48 AD, for bigamously marrying the senator Gaius Silius and plotting against him, he proceeded to take this same Agrippina as his fourth wife, despite her being his niece, marrying her on New year’s Day 49. At this point Domitius became Claudius’s step-son and Agrippina persuaded Claudius to formally adopted him as his son and heir. This was when the boy was given an entirely new name, Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus.]

7. Domitius/Nero was ten years old when he was adopted by Claudius and assigned the senator and writer Annaeus Seneca as tutor. He almost immediately began a campaign to discredit Britannicus and his surviving relatives.

Nero entered public life aged just 14, reviewing march pasts of the army, pleading the cause of towns with cases before Claudius, appearing as a judge. When he turned 16 (in 53), Nero married Claudius’s daughter (i.e. his own step-sister), Claudia Octavia. He gave games and a beast-baiting in the Circus.

8. Nero was just 17 when the death of Claudius was announced. Most commentators think Claudius was poisoned by Agrippina because she was worried Britannicus would soon come of age and Claudius would change his mind and make his biological son heir. Nero was hailed emperor on the steps of the Palace, carried in a litter to the praetorian camp, made a brief address to the soldiers, and proceeded to the Senate House where he was awarded all manner of honours.

9. He started off with displays of filial duty, giving Claudius a magnificent funeral then paying the highest honours to the memory of his father Domitius. He left to his mother the management of all public and private business. He often rode with her through the streets in her litter. He curried favour with the Praetorian Guard, such a key player in Roman politics since it had been consolidated by Sejanus, by establishing a colony for them at Antium and building a harbour there at great expense.

10. Nero proclaimed he would model his rule on Augustus. He was conspicuously generous. He abolished some taxes and lowered others. popularity. He lowered rewards paid to informers. He distributed a largess of 400 sesterces to the commons and granted the poorest senators a salary. Like Augustus he had a good memory and greeted men of all ranks by name. Wise and popular moves.

11. Nero gave many entertainments of different kinds: the Juvenales, chariot races in the Circus, stage-plays and a gladiatorial show. He organised races for chariots drawn by four camels. At the Great Festival (Ludi Maximi) he organised a series of plays devoted to the eternity of the Empire.

12. At the gladiatorial show Nero had no one put to death, not even criminals. But he did compel 400 senators and 600 Roman knights, some of whom were well to do and of unblemished reputation, to fight in the arena. Some were forced to fight with the wild beasts or perform various services in the arena. He arranged a huge naval battle in salt water with sea monsters swimming about in it. And numerous dances which were a kind of ballet based on legendary themes (the life of the Minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus).

He inaugurated the ‘Neronia’, a festival of competitions in music, gymnastics and horsemanship, modelled on the Greek ones. Nero recited his own poetry and was unanimously awarded the prize for oratory. At the gymnastic contest, which he gave in the Saepta he shaved his chin for the first time, to the accompaniment of a great sacrifice of bullocks, and put the wispy hairs in a golden box adorned with pearls of great price, and dedicated it to the Capitoline Jupiter.

13. Suetonius describes the elaborate ceremonial surrounding the entrance of Tiridates, king of Armenia, into Rome and his obeisance before Nero on a sumptuously decorated platform and then again, in the Theatre. After which Nero to great applause closed the doors of the temple of Janus to signify that the whole empire was at peace.

14. Nero held four consulships.

15. Nero was secretive about deciding law cases, insisting on being given full written explanations of both sides of a case and retiring to consider them in private. He began to tamper with the constitution. He refused to admit the sons of freedmen to the senate. He began to appoint consuls for six months instead of the customary 12. He conferred the triumphal regalia even on men of the rank of quaestor, as well as on some of the knights, and sometimes for other than military services. When he sent speeches to be read to the senate he did so via consuls instead of the quaestors, as had been customary.

16. Nero introduced a new style of architecture to Rome, building porches out in front of houses and apartment blocks whose flat roofs allowed fires to be fought. He considered extending the city walls as far as the port of Ostia and to bring the sea from there to Rome by a canal.

During his reign many abuses were put down. Sumptuary laws limited private expenditures. Expensive public banquets were replaced by a distribution of grain. Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a sect professing a new and mischievous superstition. He ended the licence afforded to chariot drivers, of being able to walk down the street cheating and robbing the people. All pantomime actors and their hangers-on were expelled from the city.

17. Nero made many legal reforms including promulgating protection against forgers, preventing will writers from adding clauses benefiting themselves, and that customers should pay a fixed and reasonable fee for the services of their lawyers.

18. Nero showed no interest in extending the bounds of the empire and considered withdrawing the army from Britain and only changed his mind because it would have diminished the memory of his adoptive father, Claudius. Two minor territorial extensions occurred when the kingdom of Pontus was ceded to Rome by its king, Polemon, and when part of the Alps reverted to Roman control on the death of its king, Cottius.

19. Nero planned two foreign tours but cancelled one to Alexandria after bad omens. He went to Greece where he proposed building a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth, going so far as to breaking ground with a mattock and to carrying off a basketful of earth upon his shoulders before an audience of the Praetorian Guard. He also prepared for an expedition to the Caspian Gates, after enrolling a new legion of raw recruits of Italian birth, each six feet tall, which he grandly called ‘the phalanx of Alexander the Great.’

Chapter 20 marks a dividing point in the biography. Up to this point Suetonius had listed Nero’s respectable and positive achievements, many of which deserved praise. But from this point onwards, Suetonius announces that he will catalogue Nero’s ‘follies and crimes’.

Nero the performer

20. Nero enjoyed music. As soon as he became emperor he sent for Terpnus, the greatest lyre-player of the day, made him perform over successive nights over dinner, and then began to take lessons. And perform the exercises required, namely: lying on his back with a slab of lead on his chest; using enemas and emetics to keep down his weight; refrained from eating apples and other fruits considered damaging to the health (!) Despite all this his voice remained weak and husky.

Nero made his début at Naples, where he did not cease singing until he had finished the number which he had begun, even though the theatre was shaken by a sudden earthquake. He was impressed by the rhythmical clapping of crowds from Alexandria and commissioned some knights and 5,000 commoners to be divided into groups and learn the Alexandrian styles of applause. They were divided into ‘the bees’ (who made a loud humming noise), ‘the roof-tiles’ (who clapped with hollow hands) and ‘the bricks’ (who clapped with flat palms). They were ordered to attend all Nero’s performances and applaud loudly after his performance. You could tell them by their thick hair, splendid dress, and the absence of rings on their left hands. The knights who led them were paid 400 gold pieces for each performance.

21. Nero repeated the Neronian games so he could sing at them. He arranged it so the crowd clamoured to hear him, dropped his name into the urn to take pot luck along with everyone else, but made sure he was called and then came forward, attended by prefects of the Praetorian Guard carrying his lyre, had an ex-consul announce him and then performed the song of Niobe until late in the afternoon.

He toyed with performing opposite professional actors in public shows. He did actually perform in tragedies, taking the parts of mortals and gods, sometimes even goddesses, wearing masks modelled on his own, or women’s masked based on his lover of the moment. He performed in ‘Canace in Childborth’, ‘Orestes the Matricide’, ‘The Blinding of Oedipus’ and the ‘Frenzy of Hercules’. There’s a story that , the last of these plays, a young recruit, seeing the emperor in rags and fetters, dashed forward to his assistance. [Like so many Roman anecdotes, a bit too good to be true.]

22. Nero was obsessed with horse racing from an early age and played with toys of chariots and horses. Once in power, he attended every race day and made no secret of his wish to have the number of races and prizes increased.

He desperately wanted to drive a chariot himself and, after practicing in the privacy of his own grounds, made a public appearance at the Circus Maximus (when one of his freedmen replaced the magistrate who usually took the job of dropping the napkin to start the race).

He went to Greece because all the cities which held musical competitions had swiftly adopted the sycophantic practice of awarding the emperor top prize. He declared that ‘the Greeks were the only ones who had an ear for music and that they alone were worthy of my efforts.’

So he took ship to Greece and immediately on arriving at Cassiope gave his first recital before the altar of Jupiter Cassius, and then went the round of all the contests.

23. During his visit to Greece Nero used his power to make the Greeks hold competitions between the usual intervals and introduced a musical competition into the Olympic Games. When his advisers told him he was needed back at Rome he angrily told them he had to remain performing in Greece until he had proved himself worthy of Nero.

No one was allowed to leave a theatre when Nero was performing. So Suetonius shares comic stories of women giving birth to children there, some secretly dropping down from the back wall, some even feigning death in order to be carried out. He sucked up to his rivals, praising them to their faces but badmouthing them behind their backs. When they were particularly good performers, he bribed them to sing badly. He addressed the judges in deferential terms but was surprisingly nervous before each performance.

24. Nero took the competitions very seriously, scrupulously observing the rules most scrupulously, never daring to clear his throat nor wipe the sweat from his brow with his arm (both actions which lost the competitor points). To obliterate the memory of all other victors in games he had their statues and busts taken down and placed in public lavatories.

Nero drove a chariot in many places. At Olympia he drove a ten-horse team, a novelty. He fell from the chariot, had to be helped back into it and failed to complete the course, but he received the prize just the same. The judges weren’t stupid. On his departure he presented the entire province with freedom and gave the judges Roman citizenship and money. He announced these gifts in in person during the Isthmian Games, standing in the middle of the stadium.

25. Arriving back at Naples, Nero ordered part of the wall to be razed so he could ride white horses through the gap, as was customary with victors in the sacred games. He entered Antium, then Albanum and finally Rome in the same manner. In Rome he rode in the same chariot which Augustus had used in his triumphs and wore a purple robe and a Greek cloak adorned with stars of gold, bearing on his head the Olympic wreath, the Pythian wreath in his right hand. Other wreaths were borne before him with placards describing where he won them, what he sang, who the competition was. He processed through the city to the cheers of the adoring crowd and the accompaniment of lavish sacrifices.

He placed the victor’s wreaths above the couches in his sleeping quarters and set up several statues of himself playing the lyre, and had a coin struck with the same image.

[What an extraordinary travesty and mockery of the military triumphs of the preceding centuries.]

In order to preserve his voice, Nero never addressed the soldiers except by letter or in a speech delivered by others, he never did anything for amusement or in earnest without a voice trainer by his side, to warn him to spare his vocal organs and hold a handkerchief to his mouth. He made friends or enemies according to how enthusiastically they applauded him.

Delinquent behaviour

26. Meanwhile, Nero performed his first acts of wantonness, lust, extravagance, avarice and cruelty in secret. Some might say boys will be boys, but this was the true Nero coming out.

When night fell, he took a cap or wig and went from tavern to tavern, roaming the streets performing pranks, but these weren’t harmless. He used to beat men as they came home from dinner, stabbing any who resisted him and throwing them into the sewers. He broke into shops then sold the loot openly in the market. After he was beaten almost to death by a senator whose wife he had maltreated, he thenceforth had a squad of tribunes follow him at a distance and unobserved.

He attended the theatre in the upper part of the proscenium. When fights broke out on stage (fighting with stones and broken benches) Nero himself threw many missiles at the people and even broke a praetor’s head.

Lavish feasts

27. Slowly Nero’s decadent behaviour became more overt and entrenched. His feasts lasted from noon till midnight with breaks for a swim in a warm bath or, if it was summer, into snow-cooled water. Sometimes he drained the artificial lakes in the Campus Martius or the Circus and held banquets there, including prostitutes and dancing girls as guests.

Whenever he cruised down the Tiber to Ostia, or sailed about the Gulf of Baiae, he had rows of temporary brothels set up along the shore, where married women, pretending to be inn-keepers, solicited him to come ashore. [This is the kind of story which seems superficially colourful but as soon as you think about the practicalities, seems wildly impractical.]

He forced his friends to hold lavish banquets: one friend spent 4 million sesterces on a banquet where everyone wore turbans were distributed, another spent even more on a rose dinner.

Sex

28. Not satisifed with seducing free-born boys and married women, Nero raped the Vestal Virgin, Rubria. Then he tried to marry the freed-woman Acte by bribing some ex-consuls to perjure themselves by swearing that she was of royal birth.

He tried to turn the boy Sporus into a girl by castrating him and then went through a marriage ceremony with him, dowry, bridal veil and all, took him back to the palace attended by a huge crowd and lived with him as man and wife. This gave rise to a joke that the world would have been a better place if Nero’s father had taken that kind of wife.

Nero dressed this Sporus in all the finery of an empress and took him everywhere with him in his litter, kissing him openly in public.

It was no secret that he lusted after his mother. it was said that only her enemies held him back, fearing that she would gain such control over him that her power would be absolute. So Nero added to his concubines a courtesan who was said to look just like Agrippina. Others said that they had incestuous relations whenever he rode in a litter with his mother; you could tell by the stains when he emerged.

29. Nero ran through every type of obscenity and invented new ones. He devised a game in which he dressed in the skin of wild animals, was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women who were bound to stakes. When he had worked himself up to a frenzy he was ‘finished off’ by his freedman Doryphorus.

In fact he got this Doryphorus to marry him, as he had married Sporus, and on their ‘wedding night’ imitated the screams and lamentations of a maiden being deflowered. Like perverts, abusers, wife beaters and misogynists everywhere, he thought all men were secretly just like him, but kept their vices hidden.

Extravagance

30. Nero believed money should be lavished on riotous extravagance. He thought it the mark of a true gentleman to waste and squander. He admired his uncle (his mother Agrippina’s brother, Gaius aka Caligula) because in less than four years he ran through the huge fortune it had taken Tiberius 30 years to amass.

He spent 8,000 gold pieces a day on King Tiridates and on his departure from Rome gave him more than a million. He gave the lyre-player Menecrates and the gladiator Spiculus houses and estates worthy of men who had celebrated triumphs. He was equally generous to the monkey-faced usurer Paneros and later on, had him buried with almost regal splendour.

Nero never wore the same garment twice. He staked 4,000 gold pieces on each throw of the dice. When he went fishing he used a golden net. It was said that he never made a journey with less than a thousand carriages. His mules were shod with silver and their drivers clad in wool from Canusium. He was attended by outriders with jingling bracelets and trappings.

Building works

31. Nero’s wastefulness was most on show in his architectural projects. He built a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which at first he called ‘The Passageway’. After it burned down, he had it rebuilt and named it the Golden House.

The entrance hall was large enough to hold a statue of himself 120 feet high. The triple-pillared colonnade ran for a mile. A huge lake was surrounded with buildings designed to represent entire cities and by a landscaped garden containing ploughed fields, vineyards, pastures and woodland, where every type of domestic animal roamed at large.

Parts of the house were inlaid with gold and studded with precious jewels. All the dining rooms had ceilings of fretted ivory. The panels could be drawn back to rain down dried flowers or perfume. The main banqueting hall was circular and its roof revolved day and night in time with the sky.

When this enormous luxury palace was completed he uttered some immortal words which can go down as the motto for every sybarite and decadent ever since: ‘Good. Now at last I can begin to live like a human being!’

He also began a covered bath, surrounded by colonnades, which stretched from Misenum to Lake Avernus. The plan was to divert all the hot springs in the Baiae region to feed it. Another grand project was to build a ship canal from Avernus all the way to Ostia, 160 miles long and wide enough for two quinqueremes to pass. Prisoners from all over the empire were to be brought in to build it.

He was led on to these wild extravagances by the promises of a Roman knight, who declared that the enormous wealth which queen Dido had taken with her in her flight from Tyre was hidden away in huge caves in Africa and could be easily recovered.

32. When this hope, inevitably, proved false, Nero found himself destitute, discovered that he didn’t even have enough money for the soldiers’ pay or veterans benefits. So he found himself forced to resort to false accusations and robbery. He increased taxes and excises. He seized the estates of anyone rich who died without leaving him enough in their will, and fined lawyers who wrote unsatisfactory wills.

Any man whose words or deeds left him exposed to accusation by an informer was accused of treason. He recalled the lavish gifts he had given to the Greek cities. He decoyed marketeers into buying amethystine or Tyrian dyes (both illegal under the sumptuary laws) then closed them all down and seized their goods. Once he spotted an aristocratic lady wearing this illegal colour at one of his recitals and had her dragged off, stripped off her clothes, but also of her estates.

When he appointed magistrates his instructions were simple: ‘You know my needs; let us leave no-one with any possessions.’ In the end he was forced to strip temples of their gifts and melted down the images of gold and silver, among them the household gods of Rome itself. (Galba, soon afterwards, had them all recast and restored).

Murdering Claudius

33. Claudius himself was the first victim of Nero’s murderous career, for even if Nero wasn’t directly involved in his uncle’s poisoning, he knew all about it, as he later admitted. For he used to mockingly praise mushrooms (the dish by which Claudius was poisoned) as ‘the food of the gods’. After the initial phase of filial duty was over, he took to openly insulting Claudius as stupid and cruel. He joked that he hoped Claudius wasn’t still ‘playing the fool’ in heaven. Nero annulled many of Claudius’s edicts on the ground that he was a doddering old idiot.

Murdering Britannicus

Nero attempted to poison Britannicus for two reasons: a) trivially, he was jealous that Britannicus’s voice was better than his b) he worried that, as he grew up, the people would come to prefer the natural son of Claudius to him, the adoptive one. The Suetonius gives what purports to be a detailed account of how Nero commissioned an arch-poisoner named Locusta to kill his half-brother and, when it didn’t work, flogged her with his own hand. He forced her to devise a stronger and stronger poison, which they tried on a goat – it took 5 hours to work, so he had her reduce it further, and try on a pig, which died on the spot.

That night at dinner Nero administered it to Britannicus who dropped dead at the very first taste. Nero assured the horrified guests that Britannicus was having an epileptic fit but the next day had him hastily buried in a pouring rainstorm, without any ceremony. He rewarded Locusta for her services with a large estates in the country, and actually sent her pupils to study the art of poison.

Murdering Agrippina

34. The over-watchful, over-protective eye that his mother, Agrippina the Younger, shone on Nero eventually proved more than he could bear. At first he tried to intimidate her by threatening to retire to Rhodes (as his grandfather Tiberius had done 60 years earlier). He then deprived her of all honours, even of her Roman and German guard. He forbade her to live with him and drove her from the Palace.

He bribed men to annoy her with lawsuits while she remained in the city, and after she had retired to the country, to pass her house by land and sea and break her rest with abuse and mockery. At last, terrified by her violence and threats, he determined to have her life, and after thrice attempting it by poison and finding that she had made herself immune by antidotes, he tampered with the ceiling of her bedroom, contriving a mechanical device for loosening its panels and dropping them upon her while she slept.

When this leaked out through some of those connected with the plot, he devised a collapsible boat, to destroy her by shipwreck or by the falling in of its cabin. Then he pretended a reconciliation and invited her in a most cordial letter to come to Baiae and celebrate the feast of Minerva with him. He then instructed his captains to wreck the galley in which she had come, by running into it as if by accident. So she had to return to Bauli in the craft he offered her. He saw her off in high spirits, then spent the night anxiously waiting for news.

When he learned that the ship had foundered, alright, but Agrippina had escaped by swimming, he had a dagger thrown down beside her freedman who had brought the news, and ordered that he had made an attempt on his life. The freedman was promptly arrested, tortured, admitted being part of a plot to assassinate the emperor, his mother was part of it, and so she too was executed, giving out that she had tried to assassinate him but then committed suicide when she learned the plan had failed. He is said to have travelled to her house and handled her limp limbs, assessing her looks, between swigs of wine.

However, her memory haunted him and gave him bad dreams. He told confidants that he was hounded by his mother’s ghost and by the whips and blazing torches of the Furies. He even had rites performed by Persian magicians, in an effort to summon her shade and entreat it for forgiveness.

Then he murdered his aunt, Domitia Lepida. He visited her when she was confined to her bed with constipation and ordered her doctors to poison her, seizing her property before she was cold, suppressing her will, that nothing might escape him.

Nero’s wives

35. Besides Octavia Nero later took two wives, Poppaea Sabina, daughter of an ex-quaestor and married to a Roman knight, and then Statilia Messalina. To take Statilia he had to murder her husband Atticus Vestinus while he held the office of consul.

He soon grew tired of living with Octavia. He made several attempts to strangle her, then divorced her on the ground of barrenness. This was unpopular, so then he banished her. And finally he had her put to death on a charge of adultery that was so shameless and unfounded, that even when her slaves were tortured they refused to validate it.

Nero dearly loved Poppaea, whom he married twelve days after his divorce from Octavia, yet he caused her death by kicking her when she was pregnant and ill, because she had scolded him for coming home late from the races.

There is no kind of relationship that he did not violate in his career of crime. He put to death Antonia, daughter of Claudius, for refusing to marry him after Poppaea’s death, charging her with an attempt at revolution. He treated in the same way all others who were in any way connected with him by blood or by marriage.

Among these was the young Aulus Plautius, whom he forcibly defiled before his death, saying ‘Let my mother come now and kiss my successor,’ implying that Agrippina had loved Plautius and that this had roused him to hopes of the throne.

Rufrius Crispinus, a mere boy, his stepson and the child of Poppaea, he ordered to be drowned by the child’s own slaves while he was fishing, because it was said that he used to play at being a general and an emperor.

He banished his nurse’s son Tuscus, because when procurator in Egypt, he had bathed in some baths which were built for a visit of Nero’s.

He drove his tutor Seneca to suicide, although when the old man often pleaded to be allowed to retire and offered to give up his estates, Nero had sworn most solemnly that he was wrong to suspect him and that he would rather die than harm him.

He sent poison to Burrus, prefect of the Guard, in place of a throat medicine which he had promised him. The old and wealthy freedmen who had helped him first to his adoption and later to the throne, and aided him by their advice, he killed by poison, administered partly in their food and partly in their drink.

36. Two conspiracies against Nero’s life were uncovered. The earlier and more dangerous of these was that of Piso at Rome; the other was set on foot by Vinicius at Beneventum. The conspirators made their defence in fetters, some voluntarily admitting their guilt, some saying they were doing a favour to man so steeped in evil as Nero. The children of those who were condemned were banished or put to death by poison or starvation: a number are known to have been murdered all together at a single meal along with their tutors and attendants.

37. After this Nero showed neither discrimination nor moderation in putting to death whoever he pleased on any pretext whatever. Salvidienus Orfitus was charged with having let to certain states as headquarters three shops which formed part of his house near the Forum; Cassius Longinus, a blind jurist, with retaining in the old family tree of his house the mask of Gaius Cassius, the assassin of Julius Caesar; Paetus Thrasea with having a sullen expression.

To those ordered to die he never granted more than an hour’s respite, and to avoid any delay, he brought physicians who were ordered to ‘attend to’ such as lingered – that was the phrase he used for killing them by opening their veins.

Puffed up by success, Nero boasted that no prince had ever known the power he, Nero, now enjoyed. He broadly hinted that he would not spare the senate, but would one day blot out the whole order from the State and hand over the rule of the provinces and command of the armies to the Roman knights and his freedmen.

He even made vows ‘for himself and the people of Rome’, leaving the senate out of the traditional formula.

The great fire of Rome

38. Displeased with the ugliness of the old buildings and the narrow, crooked streets, he set fire to the city. Some granaries near the Golden House, whose location he desired, were demolished and set on fire. For six days and seven nights destruction raged, while the people were driven for shelter to monuments and tombs.

An immense number of common dwellings, houses of great military leaders along with all their treasures and insignia, along with the temples of the gods, and ancient monuments of historical interest, all went up in flames. Nero watched the fire from the tower of Maecenas, exulting in ‘the beauty of the flames’ and sang the entire ‘Sack of Ilium’ in his regular stage costume.

He set out to profit from the disaster so, while promising the removal of the debris and dead bodies free of cost, he allowed no one to approach the ruins of their own property so he could loot them. And he demanded such exorbitant contributions from the provinces for the rebuilding that he nearly bankrupted them.

39. Disaster was added to disaster. A plague killed 30,000. In Britain two important towns were sacked and great numbers of citizens and allies were butchered. (The towns were Camulodunum [Meldon] and Verulamium [St. Albans]. According to the historian Xiphilinus, 80,000 perished).

A Roman army was defeated in Armenia and Syria was all but lost.

The Gaulish revolt

40. After the world had put up with such a ruler for nearly fourteen years, it at last cast him off, and the first steps began in Gaul. Gaul at that time was governed by Julius Vindex as propraetor who now rose against the emperor, sending him a series of increasingly abusive messages. When he heard of the Gaul rebellion, at first Nero was delighted, thinking this would give him the opportunity to fleece the rebellious provinces. When it escalated, he did his best to ignore it.

41. At last a series of insulting edicts of Vindex prompted him to address the senate (but only by letter) to avenge him and the state. When more urgent despatches reached Antium Nero finally repaired to the capital. But here he didn’t address either the senate (in the House) or the people (in the Forum) but invited some of the leading men to his house where, after a hasty consultation about Gaul, he spent the rest of the day exhibiting a new type of water-organ.

42. But when news arrived that the Roman governor Galba was leading a revolt in Spain, Nero fainted. When he regained consciousness, Nero abandoned hope, tearing his robe, declaring that it was all over with him. But instead of taking active steps to quell the rebellions he continued his luxurious habits and whenever good news arrived from the provinces, he gave lavish feasts and composed comic songs about the leaders of the revolt.

43. At the start of the revolt Nero made wild and characteristically brutal plans. He planned to depose all army commanders and all provincial governors and have them all executed, then massacre all exiles everywhere and kill all the Gauls then present in Rome.

[What this clearly demonstrates is Nero’s inability to manage the subtlety and detail of individual men with individual grievances. Augustus and Tiberius knew their officials, knew their strengths and weaknesses and allegiances, knew how to manage them, play them off against each other, keep their ambition under control. In fact they knew that that’s what being Roman emperor consisted of – unending man management, of army leaders, provincial governors, and the jockeying factions in the Senate. Caligula and Nero didn’t understand this and had no interest in it. If anyone stood in their way they just had them killed. Which explains Nero’s blunt, sweeping and ineffective response to the revolts.]

Maybe Suetonius exaggerates when he said Nero also considered poisoning the entire senate and setting Rome on fire again. You feel the heavy hand of Flavian propaganda in such tales. Or maybe they were popular rumours. But they testify to Nero’s inability to manage specific rebel leaders and situations with anything approaching subtlety or intelligence.

Instead, Nero dismissed the two consuls and appointed himself sole consul. He left a feast leaning on the shoulders of his comrades, and declaring that all he need do was confront the rebellious army and fall to his knees weeping for them to realise they loved him and asking forgiveness. Next day he would be dancing and singing hymns of praise, so he was just off to compose a few in preparation.

44. In preparing for his campaign Nero was mainly concerned with finding enough wagons to carry all his musical instruments, and arranging for all his concubines to have male haircuts and be issued with Amazonian axes and shields.

He issued a general conscription which was largely ignored so compelled every household to contribute a certain number of slaves and part of their incomes. All tenants of private houses and apartments had to pay a year’s rent to the Treasury.

45. This aroused bad feeling against Nero which was compounded when he profited from the high cost of grain. A rumour went round that while the people were starving a ship had arrived from Alexandria, bringing sand for the court wrestlers. Graffiti, slogans and angry jokes at his expense proliferated.

46. Nero was frightened by bad dreams, auspices and omens. He dreamed:

that he was steering a ship in his sleep and that the helm was wrenched from his hands
that he was dragged by his wife Octavia into thickest darkness
that he was covered with a swarm of winged ants
that a Spanish horse he was fond of was changed into an ape
that the doors of the Mausoleum (built to house the dead of the royal family) flew open and a voice called him to enter
on the Kalends of January the city gods toppled over and in front of the assembled people the keys of the Capitol could not be found

In his last public appearance as a singer he performed ‘Oedipus in Exile’ which ends with the line:

Wife, father, mother drive me to my death.

Seeing as how he had murdered his (adoptive) father, Claudius, his own mother (Agrippina the Younger), had his first wife Octavia murdered then kicked to death Poppaea.

47. When word came that the other armies had revolted, Nero tore up the dispatches, pushed over his table, smashing his favourite ‘Homeric’ cups, ordered some poison from the arch-poisoner Locusta, to keep with him, and went into the Servilian gardens, where he tried to induce the tribunes and centurions of the Guard to accompany him in his flight. They refused.

He considered other plans: to go as a suppliant to the Parthians; or to Galba; or to appear to the people on the rostra, dressed in black, and beg for pardon for his past offences. Maybe they would allow him the prefecture of Egypt. Afterwards a speech composed for this purpose was found in his writing desk, but it is thought that he didn’t dare deliver it for fear of being torn to pieces before he could reach the Forum.

Next morning Nero awoke to discover his guard of soldiers had abandoned him. He sent for his friends but no-one replied. He roamed round the palace but doors were bolted, no-one answered his calls. Back at his rooms he found even the caretakers had absconded, taking his bed linen and the box of poison.

He called for the gladiator Spiculus or any other trained executioner to put an end to him, but none came and he ran out as if to throw himself into the Tiber.

48. But Nero abandoned that plan and said he needed to go somewhere quiet to gather his thoughts. His freedman Phaon suggested his villa in the suburbs, just four miles away. So Nero pulled on a faded cloak, covered his head, and set off on horseback accompanied by just four attendants, one of whom was Sporus.

The short journey was eventful, with a mild earthquake and a flash of lightning; then shouting from an army camp in favour of Galba. Then his horse took fright at the smell of a corpse which had been thrown out into the road.

They arrived at Phaon’s villa and made their way through brambles to the back door. Nero scooped water from a pool, quipping that this was ‘Nero’s own special brew.’ Once inside the villa he sank down on a couch with a common mattress, over which an old cloak had been thrown. Though suffering from hunger and renewed thirst, he refused some coarse bread which was offered him, but drank a little lukewarm water.

49. At last, as it became clear his enemies were closing in, Nero bad his servants dig a grave and assemble wood for a pyre. As he watched this being done he wept and said again and again: ‘What an artist the world is losing!’

Then a runner brought a letter from Phaon announcing that he had been declared a public enemy by the senate and that, when caught, he would be punished ‘in the ancient style’. When he asked what that meant, his servants told him it meant the criminal was stripped, fastened by the neck in a fork and then beaten to death with rods.

Terrified, Nero seized two daggers but couldn’t bring himself to use them. He ordered one of his slaves to set an example by killing himself, but none of them would. He reproached himself for his cowardice, lamenting that this sordid end didn’t become the great artist Nero at all.

Then they heard a troop of cavalry approaching up the road to arrest him and, with the help of his private secretary, Epaphroditus, he stabbed himself in the throat. He was all but dead when a centurion rushed in. As this centurion placed a cloak to the wound, Nero gasped: ‘Tool ate! But what loyalty!’ Then he died.

Burial

50. Nero was buried at a cost of 200,000 sesterces and laid out in white robes embroidered with gold, which he had worn on the Kalends of January. His ashes were deposited by his nurses, Egloge and Alexandria, accompanied by his mistress Acte, in the family tomb of the Domitii on the summit of the Hill of Gardens.

51. Nero was about average height, his body was marked with pimples and smelt bad. His hair was light blond, his features regular rather than attractive, his eyes blue and somewhat weak. His neck was thick and squat, his belly prominent and his legs very slender.

His health was good. For all his riotous excess he was only ill three times during the fourteen years of his reign, and even then not enough to give up wine or any of his usual habits.

He was utterly shameless in the care of his person and in his dress, always having his hair arranged in tiers of curls, and during the trip to Greece let it grow long and hang down behind.

He often gave audiences in an unbelted silk dressing gown and slippers.

52. When a boy he studied the usual liberal arts except philosophy which his mother Agrippina told him was no subject for a future ruler.

His tutor Seneca kept him from reading the early orators in order to make himself appear better to the boy, so Nero turned to poetry. He wrote poetry easily, with great facility. Some people claimed that he passed off other writer’s work as his own but “notebooks and papers have come into my possession which contain some of Nero’s best-known poems in his own handwriting. Many erasures and cancellations as well as words substituted above the lines, prove that he was neither copying nor dictating but are written just as people write when they are thinking and composing.”

[a) what an extraordinary thought, that Suetonius had before him on the table the actual notebooks of Nero; b) Have any of Nero’s poems survived?]

Nero also took more than an amateur’s interest in painting and sculpture.

53. But Nero’s dominant characteristic was his thirst for popularity and his jealousy of anyone who caught the public eye for any achievement whatsoever. Not content with singing, playing the lyre and chariot racing, he studied and practised wrestling constantly, watching contests from right next to the ring.

It is said that he planned to emulate the exploits of Hercules and had had a lion specially trained so he could safely face it naked in the amphitheatre and, in front of the whole population of Rome, kill it with a club or even strangle it with his bare hands.

54. Towards the end of his reign Nero publicly vowed that if he retained his power, he would celebrate his victory by giving a performance on the water-organ, the flute, and the bagpipes, and that on the last day he would appear as an actor and dance ‘Vergil’s Turnus’. Some claim he had the actor Paris put to death because he saw him as a dangerous rival.

55. Nero’s obsession with immortality and undying fame made him name many places and things after himself: he renamed the month of April Neroneus and was tempted to rename Rome Neropolis.

56. Nero despised all cults except that of the Syrian goddess Atagarsis but he eventually changed his mind even about her and urinated on her image. He came instead to have a superstitious belief which he kept to the end: for an unknown commoner sent him the gift of a little image of a girl as a protection against plots. As it happened a plot was revealed immediately afterwards so Nero took to worshipping this little image as if she were a powerful goddess and sacrificed to her three times a day.

57. Nero died at the age of 31, on the anniversary of the murder of Octavia. Such was the public rejoicing that the public ran through the streets wearing liberty caps and cheering. Yet for a long time afterwards, some secret admirers garlanded his tomb with spring and summer flowers and had statues made of him which they placed on the rostra wearing his characteristic fringed toga.

Vologaesus, king of the Parthians, when he sent envoys to the senate to renew his alliance, asked that honour be paid to the memory of Nero. In fact, Suetonius tells us that 20 years later, when he was a young man, a person of obscure origin appeared in Parthia claiming to be Nero and such was the power of his name to Parthian ears that they supported him vigorously and surrendered him to the Romans only with great reluctance.

Credit

Robert Graves’s translation of The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius was published by Penguin in 1957. A revised translation by Classicist Michael Grant, more faithful to the Latin original, was published in 1979. A further revised edition was published in 1989 with an updated bibliography.

Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars

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by Simon on December 12, 2022 • Permalink

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The Life of Claudius by Suetonius

Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was the fourth Roman emperor. Born in 10 BC, Claudius ruled from the assassination of his predecessor Caligula, in 41, until his own death in 54, a total of 13 years.

Claudius was the son of Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus (38 to 9 BC) and Antonia the Younger, the younger of two surviving daughters of Mark Antony and Octavia the Elder. He was born at Lugdunum (modern-day Lyons) in Roman Gaul, where his father was stationed as a military legate.

In his boyhood Claudius suffered an illness which left him with a limp and slight deafness. This led to him being ostracised by his family and excluded from public office (unlike most of his male relatives he didn’t hold any public office until he was allotted a consulship when his nephew became emperor in 37).

It was probably these infirmities which saved his life. Under the reigns of terror instituted by Tiberius (14 to 37) and Caligula (37 to 41) most of his extended family was executed. Claudius, by contrast, was not seen as a serious threat. In his Life of Caligula, Suetonius states that Caligula kept Claudius around as a laughing-stock (Caligula, chapter 23). When, to his own amazement, he was selected by the Praetorian Guard to replace Caligula, Claudius was the last surviving adult male of his family.

Claudius ruled effectively, though under continual threat from restive nobles. It was under Claudius that Britain was first invaded, conquered and settled by the Romans. (Julius Caesar had made a couple of brief incursions in 55 and 54 BC, fought a few battles then departed, leaving no lasting impact.)

When Claudius died at the age of 63, it was widely rumoured that he’d been poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina the Younger. Agrippina wanted to secure the succession for her son, Lucius Domitius, whom Claudius had, at her bidding, adopted, before Claudius’s biological son (Britannicus) by his third wife (Messalina) could come of age. So Nero ascended the throne and the next year, 55, Britannicus died aged just 13, and all sources agree he was poisoned on Nero’s orders.

Suetonius’s life of Claudius

Roman texts were divided into short sections, sometimes called ‘chapters’ though most are less than a page long. Suetonius’s biography of the emperor Claudius is 46 sections long.

1. Claudius’s father, Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus (38 to 9 BC), also called Drusus the Elder, was the son of Livia Drusilla. He was born just three months after her marriage to Augustus (i.e. Augustus married her when she was 6 months pregnant by her first husband, who he forced her to divorce – unless the child was Augustus’s all along, and he had been sleeping with Livia while she was married).

Drusus was a successful general, in charge of the war in Raetia and later in Germany, the first Roman general to sail the northern Ocean, and responsible for building the huge canals which bear his name to this day. He was awarded an ovation with the triumphal regalia and was named consul, but after he returned to his summer camp in northern Gaul, he died, aged just 29. His body was brought back to Rome amid widespread mourning, he was given a marble arch on the Appian Way, and the surname Germanicus for himself and his descendants.

He made no secret of wanting to restore the old republican form of government whenever possible.

Some think that this prompted the enmity of Augustus and even accuse Augustus of having him poisoned. But Suetonius thinks this unlikely because there is plenty of evidence that Augustus loved him dearly, named him joint-heir along with his (adopted) sons, and eulogised him warmly after his death.

Drusus had several children by the younger Antonia, but was survived by only three, Germanicus, Livilla and Claudius.

2. At birth, Claudius’s name was Tiberius Claudius Drusus. Later, on the adoption of his elder brother Germanicus into the Julian family, he took over the surname Germanicus.

Claudius lost his father when he was a baby and throughout his childhood and youth he suffered so severely from various obstinate disorders that the vigour of both his mind and his body was dulled, so that he was not thought capable of any public or private business.

For a long time, even after he reached the age of manhood, he remained in the charge of a guardian. Later Claudius complained that this man was a barbarian and a former chief of muleteers, whose sole purpose was punishing severely for any cause of all.

It was because of poor health that Claudius wore a cloak when he presided at the gladiatorial games which he and his brother gave in honour of their father. Such was the family’s embarrassment of him that on the day when he assumed the gown of manhood, instead of processing to the Capitol in a public procession, he was taken there in a litter in the middle of the night, with no escort.

3. Claudius early was interested in the liberal arts and published works in many genres. But he could not attain any public position.

His mother Antonia often called him ‘a monster of a man, a man Nature had begun but not finished’ and if she ever accused anyone of dullness, she used to say that they were ‘an even bigger fool than my son Claudius.’

Claudius’s grandmother, Augusta, always treated him with the utmost contempt, very rarely speaking to him, and reproving him in short, bitter letters.

When his sister Livilla heard that he would one day be emperor, she openly and loudly prayed that the Roman people would be spared such a cruel and undeserved fate.

4. Suetonius then quotes extensively from letters by Augustus to Livia saying something must be done about ‘the Claudius problem’, namely that his lack of soundness of mind and body risked making the entire imperial family a laughing stock. However, his letters also suggest that, when he had a quit chat with Claudius, he was surprised how sensible and dignified he was.

‘How in the world anyone who is so unclear in his conversation can speak with such clearness and propriety when he declaims, is more than I can understand.’

In the event, Augustus left him invested with no office other than the augural priesthood and didn’t even name him as one of his heirs, save in the third degree, and to a sixth part of his estate – among relatives so distant as to be virtual strangers.

5. When Claudius’s paternal uncle, Tiberius, assumed the throne, he gave him the consular regalia but refused to give him any other office.

So Claudius abandoned all hope of advancement and gave himself up to idleness, living sometimes in his house and gardens in the suburbs, sometimes at a villa in Campania. He hung out with the lowest of men and incurred criticism for drunkenness and gambling.

Yet somehow he retained the respect of the nobility and the public.

6. The equestrian order twice chose Claudius as their patron, to head a deputation on their behalf. They used to rise when he appeared at the public shows and put off their cloaks. The senate voted that he be made a special member of the priests of Augustus, who were usually chosen by lot. When he later lost his house by fire, the senate voted that it should be rebuilt at the public expense.

When Tiberius died (in 37) he named Claudius only among his heirs in the third degree, to a third part of his estate, although he did give him a legacy of about two million sesterces, and expressly commended him besides to the armies and to the senate and people of Rome.

7. It was only when his nephew, Caligula, came to power, that his uncle Claudius was awarded any significant office. Caligula made him consul, though admittedly only for two months.

It chanced that as he entered the Forum for the first time with the fasces, an eagle that was flying by alighted on his shoulder.

He was allotted a second consulship, to be held four years later, and several times he presided at the shows in place of Caligula, and was greeted by the people with cries of ‘Success to the emperor’s uncle!’ and with ‘All hail to the brother of Germanicus!’

8. None of which saved Claudius from constant insults. He’d arrive at dinner to find no place for him and have to wander round the dining-room. Whenever he went to sleep after dinner, which was a habit of his, he was pelted with the stones of olives and dates.

9. But Claudius also faced real dangers. He was almost deposed from his first consulship when he was slow in setting up statues of the emperor’s brothers, of Nero and Drusus.

After the conspiracy of Lepidus and Gaetulicus was discovered he was sent to Germany as one of the envoys to congratulate the emperor, but Caligula was furious that his uncle of all men had been sent to him, as if he were a child in need of a guardian. Some say Caligula had Claudius thrown into the river, clothes and all.

In the Senate he was humiliated by being ranked last to have his opinion asked.

10. Having spent most of his life putting up with humiliations like this, Claudius became emperor in his fiftieth year by a freak of fortune. When Caligula’s assassins shut out the crowd under pretence that the emperor wished to be alone, Claudius was ousted with the rest and withdrew to an apartment called the Hermaeum. When rumour of the assassination spread Claudius hid behind the curtains on a nearby balcony.

As he cowered there, a common soldier, who was prowling about at random, saw his feet and, intending to ask who he was, pulled him out. But when Claudius fell at his feet in terror, he was astonished when the soldier hailed him as emperor.

Then he took him to the rest of his comrades who were angry, confused and didn’t know what to do. These placed him in a litter and carried him to the army camp in a state of despair and terror. Here he spent the night among the sentries, full of doubt because the consuls, the senate and the city cohorts had taken possession of the Forum and the Capitol, and were determined to restore the republic.

When he was summoned to the Senate by the tribunes to give his advice on the situation, he sent word that he was being detained by force. But the Senate lost its chance by prevarication and argument among factions while the people, standing outside, called for one ruler and expressly named Claudius.

Learning of this, Claudius allowed the assembly of the soldiers to swear allegiance to him, and promised each man fifteen thousand sesterces. In doing so he was the first of the Caesars who resorted to bribery to secure the loyalty of the troops.

11. The first thing Claudius did was pass an act of oblivion for everything done and said in the confusion after the assassination, except for executing a few of the tribunes and centurions who he learned had called for his own death.

He then set about venerating the memories of his grandmother Livia and Augustus. He inaugurated annual games on his father’s birthday and for his (dead) mother a carriage to bear her image through the Circus and the surname of Augusta, which she had declined during her lifetime.

He took every opportunity of honouring his (dead) brother, Germanicus. He completed the marble arch to Tiberius near Pompey’s theatre, which had been voted some time before by the senate, but left unfinished.

He annulled all the acts of Caligula.

12. Claudius was modest and unassuming, refraining from taking the forename Imperator, refusing excessive honours, and passing over the betrothal of his daughter and the birthday of a grandson in with merely private ceremonies.

He recalled no one from exile except with the approval of the senate. He asked the consuls for permission to hold fairs on his private estates. He often appeared as one of the advisers at cases tried before the magistrates. When games were held he rose with the rest of the audience and showed his respect by acclamations and applause.

When the tribunes of the commons appeared before him as he sat upon the tribunal, he apologised to them because for lack of room he could not hear them unless they stood up.

By such conduct he won love and devotion in a short time. When it was erroneously reported that he had been ambushed and killed on a journey to Ostia, it triggered a riot and outpouring of anger against the senate and soldiers, until witnesses were brought to the rostra to assure the people that Claudius was safe.

13. Yet Claudius’s rule saw many threats: he was attacked by individuals, by a conspiracy, and finally by a civil war.

A commoner was caught near his bed-chamber in the middle of the night, dagger in hand. Two members of the equestrian order were found lying in wait for him in public places, one ready to attack him with a sword-cane as he came out of the theatre, the other with a hunting knife as he was sacrificing in the temple of Mars.

Asinius Gallus and Statilius Corvinus, grandsons of the orators Pollio and Messala, conspired to overthrow him, aided by a number of his own freedmen and slaves. [When you consider how wise and just Augustus was, and yet the final years of his rule were clouded by conspiracies, you realise there will always be men who want to overthrow the existing regime, for whatever purpose.]

The civil war was set on foot by Furius Camillus Scribonianus, governor of Dalmatia but his rebellion was put down within five days, since the legions which had changed their allegiance were turned from their purpose by superstitious fear for when the order was given to march, by some chance the eagles could not be adorned nor the standards pulled up and moved.

14. Claudius held four consulships in addition to his original one under Caligula. He administered justice most conscientiously both as consul and when out of office, even on his own anniversaries and those of his family, and sometimes even on festivals of ancient date and days of ill-omen.

He did not always follow the letter of the laws, but modified their severity or lenity in many cases according to his own notions of equity and justice; for he allowed a new trial to those who had lost their cases before private judges by demanding more than the law prescribed, while, overstepping the lawful penalty, he condemned to the wild beasts those who were convicted of especially heinous crimes.

15. In hearing and deciding cases Claudius showed a strange inconsistency of temper, for he was now careful and shrewd, sometimes hasty and inconsiderate, occasionally silly.

When a woman refused to recognise her son, the evidence on both sides was conflicting, he forced her to admit the truth by ordering her to marry the young man.

Whenever one party to a suit was absent, he was prone to decide in favour of the one who was present, without considering whether his opponent had failed to appear through his own fault or from a necessary cause.

On a man’s being convicted of forgery, someone cried out that his hands ought to be cut off, whereupon Claudius insisted that an executioner be summoned at once with knife and block.

In a case involving citizenship a fruitless dispute arose among the advocates as to whether the defendant ought to make his appearance in the toga or in a Greek mantle, and the emperor, with the idea of showing absolute impartiality, made him change his garb several times, according as he was accused or defended.

By such acts as these he so discredited himself that he was held in general and open contempt.

Suetonius drops in another personal anecdote, saying that he himself used to hear older men say that the pleaders took such advantage of Claudius’s good-nature, that they would not only call him back when he left the tribunal, but would catch hold of the fringe of his robe, and sometimes of his foot, and thus detain him.

Suetonius says it is a widely known story that a Roman knight who was tried on charge of improper conduct towards women cooked up by his enemies, upon seeing common prostitutes brought as witnesses against him, hurled his stylus and tablets in the emperor’s face with such force as to cut his cheek badly. [Suetonius doesn’t say whether he was punished for this outburst.]

16. Claudius also assumed the censorship which had long been discontinued, but in this office too he was variable and both his theory and his practice were inconsistent.

In his review of the knights he left off a young man of evil character on his own judgement. Another who was notorious for corruption and adultery he merely admonished to be more restrained. He removed the mark of censure affixed to one man’s name, at the request of his friends, but insisted that the mark of erasure remain visible. He struck from the list of jurors a man of high birth, a leading citizen of the province of Greece, because he did not know Latin, and even deprived him of the rights of citizenship. And he degraded many, some contrary to their expectation and on the novel charge that they had left Italy without consulting him and obtaining leave of absence.

When he attempted to degrade more he discovered that the snooping of his spies was often careless, because those he accused of celibacy, childlessness or lack of means were able to prove that they were married, or fathers or well-to‑do.

17. Claudius waged only one military campaign and that of little importance. When the senate voted him the triumphal regalia, thinking the honour beneath the imperial dignity and desiring the glory of a legitimate triumph, he chose Britain as the best place for gaining it, a land that had been attempted by no one since the Deified Julius and was just at that time in a state of rebellion because of the refusal to return certain deserters.

He led a force across the Channel and, without any battle or bloodshed, received the submission of a part of the island, returned to Rome within six months after leaving the city, and celebrated a triumph of great splendour.

18. Claudius always gave scrupulous attention to the care of the city and the supply of grain. On the occasion of a serious fire he paid the common people to work to put it out with his own money. When there was a bread shortage, he was caught by the mob and pelted with bread and abuse so that, from that moment on, he used every possible means to bring grain to Rome.

20. The public works which Claudius completed were great and essential rather than numerous. He completed an aqueduct begun by Caligula. He built an outlet of Lake Fucinus which was three miles in length, partly by levelling and partly by tunnelling a mountain, a work of great difficulty and requiring eleven years, although he had 30,000 men at work all the time without interruption.

He brought to the city on stone arches the cool and abundant founts of the Claudian aqueduct, one of which is called Caeruleus and the other Curtius and Albudignus, and at the same time the spring of the new Anio, distributing them into many beautifully ornamented pools.

He constructed the harbour at Ostia by building curving breakwaters on the right and left, while before the entrance he placed a mole in deep water. To give this mole a firmer foundation, he first sank the ship in which the great obelisk had been brought from Egypt, and then securing it by piles, built upon it a very lofty tower after the model of the Pharos at Alexandria, to be lighted at night and guide the course of ships.

21. Claudius very often distributed largess to the people. He also gave several splendid shows, some of a new kind and some revived from ancient times.

He opened the games at the dedication of Pompey’s theatre, which he had restored when it was damaged by a fire.

He also celebrated secular games, alleging that they had been given too early by Augustus and not reserved for the regular time.

He often gave games in the Vatican Circus, with a beast-baiting between every five races. The Great Circus he adorned with barriers of marble and gilded goals, whereas before they had been of tufa and wood, and assigned special seats to the senators, who had been in the habit of viewing the games with the rest of the people.

In addition to the chariot races he exhibited the game called Troy and also panthers, which were hunted down by a squadron of the praetorian cavalry under the lead of the tribunes and the prefect himself. And Thessalian horsemen who drive wild bulls all over the arena, leaping upon them when they are tired out and throwing them to the ground by the horns.

He gave many gladiatorial shows: one in yearly celebration of his accession, and one in the Saepta of the usual kind; another not in the regular list, short and lasting but a few days, to which he was the first to apply the name of sportula, because he proclaimed that he invited the people ‘as it were to an extempore meal, hastily prepared.’

He was familiar with the people, regularly addressing the audience and urging them to merriment, interspersing feeble jokes.

When he had granted the wooden sword to an essedarius for whose discharge four sons begged, and the act was received with loud and general applause, he at once circulated a note, pointing out to the people how greatly they ought to desire children, since they saw that they brought favour and protection even to a gladiator [an interesting commentary on the ongoing need to keep Rome’s population up which had so bothered Augustus 50 years earlier].

He staged a sea battle on the Fucine lake between a Sicilian and a Rhodian fleet, each numbering twelve triremes. The signal to commence was sounded on a horn by a silver Triton, which was raised from the middle of the lake by a mechanical device.

22. Claudius corrected various abuses, revived some old customs or even established new ones. He scrupulously observed the custom of having the praetor call an assembly and proclaim a holiday whenever there was an earthquake within the city, as well as that of offering up a supplication whenever a bird of ill-omen was seen on the Capitol.

23. The courts previously sat in a winter and a summer season; Claudius made them sit continuously.

He made a law that those who were banished from a province by its magistrates should also be debarred from Rome and from Italy. He created a new punishment whereby some were forbidden to go more than three miles outside of the city.

24. Claudius obliged the college of quaestors to give a gladiatorial show in place of paving the roads, then, depriving them of their official duties at Ostia and in Gaul, he restored to them the charge of the treasury of Saturn, which had in the meantime been administered by praetors, or by ex-praetors, as in our time.

He gave the triumphal regalia to Silanus, his daughter’s affianced husband, who was still a boy, and conferred them on older men so often and so readily, that a joint petition was circulated in the name of the legions, praying that those emblems be given the consular governors at the same time with their armies, to prevent their seeking pretexts for war.

25. Claudius rearranged the military career of the knights, assigning a division of cavalry after a cohort, and next the tribunate of a legion. He also instituted a series of military positions and a kind of fictitious service, which is called ‘supernumerary’ and could be performed in absentia and in name only.

When certain men were exposing their sick and worn out slaves on the Island of Aesculapius because of the trouble of treating them, Claudius decreed that all such slaves were free, and that if they recovered, they should not return to the control of their master; but if anyone preferred to kill such a slave rather than to abandon him, he was liable to the charge of murder.

Those who usurped the privileges of Roman citizenship he executed in the Esquiline field. He restored to the senate the provinces of Achaia and Macedonia, which Tiberius had taken into his own charge. He deprived the Lycians of their independence because of deadly intestine feuds, and restored theirs to the Rhodians, since they had given up their former faults.

He allowed the people of Ilium perpetual exemption from tribute, on the ground that they were the founders of the Roman race.

Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome.

He allowed the envoys of the Germans to sit in the orchestra, led by their naïve self-confidence; for when they had been taken to the seats occupied by the common people and saw the Parthian and Armenian envoys sitting with the senate, they moved of their own accord to the same part of the theatre, protesting that their merits and rank were no whit inferior.

He abolished the cruel and inhuman religion of the Druids among the Gauls, which under Augustus had merely been prohibited to Roman citizens. He tried to transfer the Eleusinian rites from Attica to Rome.

In this and many other acts he acquired the reputation of being dictated to by his wives and freedmen, since he nearly always acted in accordance with their interests and desires.

26. Claudius had four wives. He was betrothed several times before marrying Plautia Urgulanilla, whose father had been honoured with a triumph. Then Aelia Paetina, daughter of an ex-consul. He divorced both these, Paetina for trivial offences, Urgulanilla because of her scandalous lewdness and the suspicion of murder.

Then he married Valeria Messalina, daughter of his cousin Messala Barbatus. But when he learned that, besides other shameful and wicked deeds, she had bigamously married Gaius Silius, he put her to death and declared before the praetorian guard that, because his marriages did not turn out well, he would remain a widower.

Nonetheless, he toyed with marrying Paetina, whom he had formerly discarded, or Lollia Paulina, who had been the wife of Caligula.

But his affections were finally captured by Agrippina, daughter of his brother Germanicus and so, at the next meeting of the senate, he sponsored some senators to propose that he be compelled to marry Agrippina ‘for the interest of the State’, and he married her with hardly a single day’s delay.

27. He had children by three of his wives: by Urgulanilla, Drusus and Claudia; by Paetina, Antonia; by Messalina, Octavia and a son, at first called Germanicus and later Britannicus.

He lost Drusus just before he came to manhood, for he was strangled by a pear which he had thrown into the air in play and caught in his open mouth. A few days before this he had betrothed him to the daughter of Sejanus. Claudia was the offspring of his freedman Boter, and although she was born within five months after the divorce and he had begun to rear her, yet he ordered her to be cast out naked at her mother’s door and disowned.

He gave Antonia in marriage to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, and later to Faustus Sulla, both young men of high birth, and gave Octavia to his stepson Nero, after she had previously been betrothed to Silanus.

Britannicus was born on the twenty-second day of his reign and in his second consulship. When he was still very small, Claudius would often take him in his arms and commend him to the assembled soldiers, and to the people at the games, holding him in his outstretched hands to the applauding crowd.

Of his sons-in‑law he adopted Nero; Pompeius and Silanus he not only declined to adopt, but put to death.

28. Suetonius lists some of Claudius’s favourite freedmen. Most of all he was devoted to his secretary Narcissus and his treasurer Pallas, and he gladly allowed them to be honoured in addition by a decree of the senate, not only with immense gifts, but even with the insignia of quaestors and praetors. He permitted them to amass such wealth by plunder, that when he once complained of the low state of his funds, the witty answer was made that he would have enough and to spare, if he were taken into partnership by his two freedmen.

29. Suetonius repeats the claim that Claudius was wholly under the control of these freedmen and his wives, playing the part, not of a prince, but of a servant lavishing honours, the command of armies, pardons or punishments, as they wishes.

It was at their wishes that he put to death his father-in‑law Appius Silanus and the two Julias, daughters of Drusus and Germanicus, on an unsupported charge and giving them no opportunity for defence. Also Gnaeus Pompeius, the husband of his elder daughter, and Lucius Silanus who was betrothed to his younger one.

He inflicted the death penalty on 35 senators and more than 300 Roman knights with such indifference, that when a centurion in reporting the death of an ex-consul said that his order had been carried out, he replied that he had given no order; but he nevertheless approved the act, since his freedmen declared that the soldiers had done their duty in hastening to avenge their emperor without instructions.

30. Claudius possessed majesty and dignity of appearance, but only when he was standing still or sitting, and especially when he was lying down; for he was tall but not slender, with an attractive face, becoming white hair, and a full neck.

But when he walked, his weak knees gave way under him (in 21 Suetonius describes it as ‘his ridiculous tottering gait’).

He had many disagreeable traits: his laughter was unseemly and his anger still more disgusting for he would foam at the mouth and trickle at the nose. He stammered and his head was very shaky at all times, but especially when he made the least exertion.

31. Though before ascending the throne Claudius’s health had been bad, it was excellent while he was emperor, except for attacks of heartburn, which he said all but drove him to suicide.

32. Claudius gave frequent and grand dinner parties, as a rule in spacious places, where 600 guests were often entertained at one time.

He gave a banquet close to the outlet of the Fucine Lake and was well-nigh drowned, when the water was let out with a rush and deluged the place.

He always invited his own children to dinner along with the sons and daughters of distinguished men, having them sit at the arms of the couches as they ate, after the old time custom.

He is even said to have considered an edict allowing the privilege of breaking wind quietly or noisily at table, having learned of a man who ran some risk by restraining himself through modesty.

33. Claudius was eager for food and drink at all times and in all places. Once when he was holding court in the forum of Augustus and had caught the savour of a meal which was preparing for the Salii in the temple of Mars hard by, he left the tribunal, went up where the priests were, and took his place at their table.

He hardly ever left the dining-room until he was stuffed and soaked. Then he went to sleep at once, lying on his back with his mouth open, and a feather was put down his throat to relieve his stomach.

He slept but little at a time, for he was usually awake before midnight; but he would sometimes drop off in the daytime while holding court and could hardly be roused when the advocates raised their voices for the purpose.

He was immoderate in his passion for women, but wholly free from unnatural vice.

He was greatly devoted to gaming, even publishing a book on the art, and he actually used to play while driving, having the board so fitted to his carriage as to prevent his game from being disturbed.

34. That Claudius was of a cruel and bloodthirsty disposition was shown in matters great and small:

He always exacted examination by torture and the punishment of parricides at once and in his presence.

When he was at Tibur and wished to see an execution in the ancient fashion, no executioner could be found after the criminals were bound to the stake, whereupon he sent to fetch one from the city and continued to wait for him until nightfall.

At any gladiatorial show, either his own or another’s, he gave orders that even those who fell accidentally should be slain, in particular the net-fighters, so that he could watch their faces as they died.

He took such pleasure in the combats with wild beasts and of those who fought at noonday that he would go down to the arena at daybreak and after dismissing the people for luncheon at midday, he would keep his seat and in addition to the appointed combatants, he would for trivial and hasty reasons match others, even of the carpenters, the assistants, and men of that class, if any automatic device, or pageant, or anything else of the kind, had not worked well. He even forced one of his pages to enter the arena just as he was, in his toga.

35. Claudius was most famous, though, for timidity and suspicion.

He never ventured to go to a banquet without being surrounded by guards with lances and having his soldiers wait upon him in place of the servants.

He never visited a man who was ill without having the patient’s room examined beforehand and his pillows and bed-clothing felt over and shaken out.

When Camillus began his coup he wrote Claudius a threatening letter telling him to retire to private life if he wanted to live and Claudius was so timorous that he called together the leading men and asked their advice about complying.

36. After the man with a dagger was caught near his person, Claudius summoned the senate in haste and bewailed his lot in tears. Coward.

When he thought Messalina’s lover Silius was planning a coup, he ran off to the army base, doing nothing all the way but ask whether his throne was secure.

[When you compare this behaviour with that of Sulla and Marius or Caesar and Pompey, it is laughable, pathetic.]

37. No suspicion was too trivial to drive him on to precaution and vengeance.

When Messalina and Narcissus had put their heads together to destroy him, they agreed on their parts and the latter rushed into his patron’s bed-chamber before daybreak in pretended consternation, declaring that he had dreamed that Appius Silanus had made an attack on the emperor. Then Messalina, with assumed surprise, declared that she had had the same dream for several successive nights. A little later, as the conspirators had arranged, Appius, who had received orders the day before to come at that time, was reported to be forcing his way in, as proving the conspirators’ dreams. And so Claudius ordered his immediate accusation and death. Then recounted the whole story to the senate next day and thanked the freedman for watching over his emperor’s safety even in his sleep.

38. Claudius knew he was quick to anger and resentment and excused both in an edict. Suetonius gives a list of his rash acts, generally punishing people for minor offences.

In some speeches Claudius declared that he had purposely feigned stupidity under Caligula in order to survive. This convinced no one and an anonymous book was published called ‘The Elevation of Fools’ arguing that that no-one feigned folly.

39. People were astonished by Claudius’s forgetfulness. Shortly after having his third wife, Messalina, put to death, he took his place at the table and asked where the empress was.

He caused many of those he had condemned to death to be summoned the very next day to consult with him or game with him, and sent a messenger to upbraid them for being sleepy-heads when they didn’t appear.

Just before his adoption of Nero, as if it were not bad enough to adopt a stepson when he had a grown-up son of his own, he publicly declared more than once that no-one had ever been taken into the Claudian family by adoption.

40. He often showed such heedlessness in word and act that one would suppose that he did not know or care to whom, with whom, when, or where he was speaking. Every hour he made unwise or tactless remarks.

41. He began to write a history in his youth with the encouragement of Livy and the help of Sulpicius Flavius. But when he gave his first reading to a large audience, he had difficulty in finishing, since he more than once threw cold water on his own performance. For at the beginning of the reading the breaking down of several benches by a fat man raised a laugh, and even after the disturbance was quieted, Claudius could not keep from recalling the incident and renewing his guffaws.

Even while emperor he wrote a good deal and gave constant recitals through a professional reader.

He began his history with the death of the dictator Caesar, but passed to a later period and took a fresh start at the end of the civil war, realising that he was not allowed to give a frank or true account of the earlier times, since he was often taken to task both by his mother and his grandmother.

He left two books of the earlier history, but forty-one of the later one.

He also composed an autobiography in eight books, lacking rather in good taste than in style, as well as a ‘Defence of Cicero against the Writings of Asinius Gallus’, a work of no little learning.

He invented three new letters and added them to the alphabet, maintaining that they were greatly needed. He published a book on their theory when he was still in private life, and when he became emperor had no difficulty in bringing about their general use. These characters may still be seen in numerous books and in inscriptions on public buildings.

42. Claudius studied Greek which he publicly declared superior to Latin. He often replied to Greek envoys in the senate in a set speech. He quoted many Homeric lines from the tribunal.

He wrote historical works in Greek, 20 books of Etruscan History and eight of Carthaginian. Because of these works there was added to the old Museum at Alexandria a new one called after his name where it was required that his Etruscan History should be read each year from beginning to end, and in the other his Carthaginian, by various readers in turn, in the manner of public recitations.

43. Towards the end of his life Claudius repented his marriage with Agrippina and his adoption of Nero. For example when he was praised for his judgement in the trial of a woman for adultery, he declared that it had been his destiny, also, to have wives who were all adulterous but who went unpunished.

Meeting Britannicus, he hugged him close and urged him to grow up and receive from his father an account of all that he had done, adding in Greek, ‘He who dealt the wound will heal it.’

He expressed his intention of giving Britannicus the gown of manhood, since his stature justified it though he was still young, adding that: ‘The Roman people may at last have a genuine Caesar’.

44. Not long afterwards Claudius made his will and sealed it with the seals of all the magistrates but before he could go any farther he was cut short by Agrippina, who was being accused by increasing numbers of informers.

It is the general belief that Claudius was poisoned, but by whom is disputed. Some say that it was his taster, the eunuch Halotus, as he was banqueting on the Citadel with the priests. Others say that at a family dinner Agrippina served the poison to him with her own hand in mushrooms, a dish which he was extravagantly fond of.

Reports also differ as to what followed. Many say that as soon as he swallowed the poison he became speechless and then suffered excruciating pain all night, dying just before dawn. Some say that he first fell into a stupor, then vomited up the whole contents of his overloaded stomach, and was given a second dose, perhaps in a gruel, under pretence that he must be refreshed with food after his exhaustion, or administered in a syringe, as if he were suffering from a surfeit and required relief by that form of evacuation as well.

45. Claudius’s death was kept quiet until all the arrangements were made about the succession. Accordingly, vows were offered for his safety as if he were still ill, and the farce was kept up by bringing in comic actors, under pretence that he had asked to be entertained in that way.

He died on the third day before the Ides of October in the sixty-fourth year of his age and the fourteenth of his reign (in 54 AD). He was buried with regal pomp and enrolled among the gods, an honour neglected and finally annulled by Nero, but later restored to him by Vespasian.

46. There were, of course, omens foretelling Claudius’s death:

the rise of a long-haired star, commonly called a comet
the striking of his father Drusus’s tomb by lightning
the fact that many magistrates of all ranks had died that same year

There are indications that he suspected his approaching end: when he was appointing the consuls, he made no appointment beyond the month when, it turned out, he died. On his last appearance in the senate, after earnestly exhorting his children to harmony, he begged the members to watch over the tender years of both. And in his last sitting on the tribunal he declared more than once that he had reached the end of a mortal career, although all who heard him prayed that the omen might be averted.

Summary

One has the vague idea that Claudius was a huge relief after the madness of Caligula, but Suetonius goes out of his way to emphasise that Claudius, just as much as his predecessor, enjoyed watching people being tortured or forced to fight to the death in the arena and ordered the execution of senators and knights – while at the same time being a cowardly pawn of his scheming wife and freedmen.

In other words, he was still a pitiful falling-off after the ability and honour and sheer competence of Julius Caesar or Augustus: only the fact that he was bookended by Caligula and Nero makes Claudius look good.

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by Simon on December 9, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Biography, History, Translation

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Posted by Simon on December 9, 2022

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The Life of Caligula by Suetonius

‘I am rearing a viper for the Roman people.’
(Tiberius talking about young Caligula, in Suetonius’s Life of Caligula, section 11)

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known by his nickname Caligula (meaning ‘little boots’), was the third Roman emperor.

Born in 12 AD, Caligula ruled from 37 until his assassination in 41, four brief, chaotic years. He was the son of the popular Roman general Germanicus Julius Caesar and Augustus’s grand-daughter, Agrippina the Elder.

Family tree of the Julio-Claudian emperors

Coming from a small nuclear family I find extended family trees confusing at the best of times. The family tree of the early Roman emperors is especially confusing because:

the emperors and everyone else in their families married multiple times
many of the emperors, and people in their families, had the same names or combinations of the same names, such as Drusus, Germanicus, Nero and Tiberius
they regularly changed their names, exemplified by Octavian who went through half a dozen name changes – but most of all because:
all the key men adopted nephews or grandchildren as sons, thus radically confusing the traditional notion of ‘sons’ being the blood relative of at least one of their ‘parents’ – not in Imperial Rome, they weren’t

Which goes to explain why none of the Julio-Claudian emperors was a blood descendant of his immediate predecessor.

Maybe the family tree below helps. It is very much simplified. What I like about it, compared to the many similar trees on the internet, is the use of dotted lines to indicate adoption, which makes it clear how Julius Caesar adopted Octavian, Octavian – renamed Augustus – adopted Tiberius, Tiberius adopted Germanicus (who predeceased him) and then Gaius (Caligula) and Claudius adopted Nero.

Family tree of the Julio-Claudian emperors.

From it you can see that Caius Julius Caesar adopted his great-nephew Octavianus as son and heir. Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC. Thirteen years later (31 BC), after two further civil wars, Octavianus had become the sole power in Rome. Awarded the honorific ‘Augustus’ in 27 BC, he adopted a number of male members of his extended family but these died before him, so he ended up adopting his step-son, Tiberius Claudius Nero, as his son and heir.

Augustus had forced Tiberius to a) marry his daughter, Julia and b) to adopt Julia’s son, Germanicus, as his own son, sitting alongside his actual biological son, Drusus. According to Suetonius, Tiberius hated both these ‘sons’. He was happy when his adopted son, the popular charismatic Germanicus, died in 19 AD, and when his biological son, Drusus, died in 23 AD (possibly had him poisoned).

Suetonius’s life of Caligula

Roman texts were divided into short sections, sometimes called ‘chapters’ though most are less than a page long. Suetonius’s biography of the emperor Caligula is 60 sections long.

Suetonius himself divides his Life of Caligula into two halves: sections 1 to 21 deal with The Emperor; then the last 40 sections deal with The Monster.

Part One: The Emperor

1. Germanicus Julius Caesar was son of Drusus and the younger Antonia. A charming, immensely popular figure, successful general, popular with the crowd, stylish and elegant, he was adopted as ‘son’ by his paternal uncle Tiberius. He processed through the posts of quaestorship and consul before the legal age.

When Augustus died Germanicus was sent to the army in Germany. The legions there didn’t want to accept Tiberius as emperor but Germanicus made them. He defeated the Germans in various battles and was a warded a triumph back in Rome.

Chosen consul for a second time, he was sent to restore order in the Orient, and after vanquishing the king of Armenia and reducing Cappadocia to a province, died of a lingering illness at Antioch, aged just 33.

It was widely believed that Tiberius had him poisoned by the governor of Syria, Gnaeus Piso, governor of Syria. In consequence Piso narrowly escaped being torn to pieces by the people on his return to Rome, and was condemned to death by the senate.

3. Suetonius delivers a paean to Germanicus: he was a paragon of a man: handsome, brave: in battle he fought the enemy hand to hand; a great orator; adept at the best learning of Greece and Rome, among other fruits of his studies he left some Greek comedies. He was kind, with a remarkable capacity for winning men’s affection.

In Germany Germanicus planned to bury all the dead of Varus’s three lost legions (massacred in the Teutoburger Forest in 9 AD) and took the lead in collecting and assembling them by hand.

4. Germanicus was so popular with the masses that he was greeted by cheering crowds wherever he went. When he returned from Germany after quelling the rebellion, the entire population poured out of Rome as far as the twentieth milestone.

5. Popular sadness at Germanicus’s death was immense. The temples were stoned and the altars of the gods thrown down, some flung their household gods into the street. Even barbarian peoples unanimously consented to a truce as if all the world shared in the tragedy. It is said that some princes cut off their beards and had their wives’ heads shaved.

6. False rumours that he had recovered led to widespread rejoicing, only to be cast down when the final confirmation of his death came through. Public grief knew no limits and continued even during the festal days of the month of December.

Germanicus’s fame and regret for his loss were increased by the horror of the times which followed since it was widely believed that Tiberius’s cruelty had been held in check through his respect for Germanicus and was now given free rein.

7. Germanicus had married Agrippina, daughter of Marcus Agrippa and Julia, who bore him nine children. Two died in infancy, one in boyhood. Of the surviving six, three girls – Agrippina, Julia Drusilla and Livilla, born in successive years – and three boys – Nero, Drusus and Gaius Caesar, the future emperor. Nero and Drusus were accused of being public enemies by the senate on the accusation of Tiberius.

8. Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was born in 12 AD when his father was 27. Suetonius spends several sections weighing the evidence about where Gaius was born.

9. Gaius’s surname, ‘Caligula’, was a jokey nickname awarded by the soldiers he grew up among. [Caliga was the name of a type of military boot. His father liked dressing his little son in a child’s version of a soldier’s outfit, including miniature versions of these boots. Latin formed diminutives of words by adding ‘-ula’ to the end of them. So ‘caligula’ literally meant ‘little boots’ and the nickname stuck.]

10. As a boy Caligula accompanied his father on his expedition to Syria. After Germanicus’s death, his widow, Caligula’s mother, Agrippina, returned with her six children to Rome, where she became entangled in a bitter feud with Tiberius, which led to her banishment. Caligula went to live with his great-grandmother Livia and when Livia died (in 29 AD), he lived with his grand-mother Antonia. The emperor Tiberius had retreated to Capri in 26. In 31, as he reached the age of manhood (18), Caligula was summoned to join him.

In Capri Caligula proved resilient to the ill-will of the emperor and his flatterers. He ignored the bad treatment of his mother and brothers, and was so obsequious to his grandfather that it was said of him that no one had ever been a better slave or a worse master.

11. Here in Capri his natural cruelty and viciousness were allowed to flourish. He developed a taste for witnessing torture and execution and by night revelled in gluttony and adultery. He liked wearing a wig and practicing the arts of dancing and singing. It was observing his cruelty and immorality blossoming which led Tiberius to (allegedly) say that Caligula’s advent marked the ruin of him (Tiberius) and the world; that he was rearing a viper for the Roman people and a Phaethon for the world. [In the Greek myth Phaethon tricked his father, Apollo, into letting him drive the chariot of the son which, not being strong enough, he let plunge down towards the earth, drying up rivers, causing earthquakes and destroying entire cities.]

12. Gaius took to wife Junia Claudilla, daughter of Marcus Silanus, a man of noble rank. He was appointed augur then advanced to the role of pontifex maximus. After the fall of Sejanus, Tiberius’s henchman, in 31, Tiberius encouraged Caligula to think of himself as the heir to the throne.

After Junia died in childbirth, Caligula seduced Ennia Naevia, wife of Macro, who at that time commanded the praetorian guard, promising to marry her when he became emperor. Difficult for us to understand that, according to Suetonius, he did this in order to worm himself into Macro’s favour.

Suetonius then, with astonishing casualness, claims that Caligula poisoned Tiberius. He ordered his signet ring of power to be taken from him and when it was discovered that Tiberius was still breathing, himself placed a pillow over his face. Others claim he strangled the old man (Tiberius was 78 when he died) with his own hand, immediately ordering the crucifixion of a freedman who cried out at the awful deed.

Later, Caligula put it about that he was avenging Tiberius’s execution of his mother and two brothers.

13. Caligula was popular with the general population because of his youth, his popularity with the soldiers, who he’d grown up among, and the aura from his legendary father, Germanicus. And Tiberius had led a reign of terror for over a decade. So his accession was greeted with rejoicing. His journey from Capri to Rome accompanying the body of Tiberius was greeted by cheering crowds at each town.

14. When he entered Rome, full and absolute power was at once put into his hands by the unanimous consent of the senate and of the mob, contrary to Tiberius’s will which had named his other grandson as joint heir with Caligula.

Foreign rulers sent messages of congratulation, including king Artabanus of Parthia who had been outspoken in his contempt for Tiberius.

15. At the beginning of his reign Caligula carefully courted popularity. He delivered a tearful eulogy at Tiberius’s funeral, then send to the islands where his mother and brothers had been banished, to fetch back their ashes to give a decent burial as well as games in the Circus in honour of his mother, providing a carriage to carry her image in the procession.

In memory of his father he renamed the month of September Germanicus. He lavished on his grandmother Antonia all the honours Livia Augusta had ever enjoyed. He took his uncle Claudius as his colleague in the consulship (37 AD). He adopted his brother Tiberius on the day that he assumed the gown of manhood and gave him the title of Chief of the Youth. He caused the names of his sisters to be included in all oaths.

He recalled those who had been condemned to banishment, had all documents relating to the cases of his mother and brothers carried to the Forum and burned, declared the era of anonymous informers over.

In other words, he dazzled everyone by displays of filial duty and respect.

16. Caligula banished from Rome the sexual perverts called spintriae who Tiberius had patronised.

He published the accounts of the empire, which had regularly been made public by Augustus, a practice discontinued by Tiberius. He allowed the magistrates unrestricted jurisdiction, without appeal to himself. He revised the lists of the Roman knights strictly and scrupulously. He tried also to restore the suffrage to the people by reviving the custom of elections. He paid faithfully and without dispute the legacies named in the will of Tiberius as well as in that of Julia Augusta, which Tiberius had suppressed.

He remitted the tax of a two-hundredth on auction sales in Italy, made good to many their losses from fires, and whenever he restored kings to their thrones, he allowed them all the arrears of their taxes and their revenue for the meantime.

This was all wildly popular and a golden shield was voted him, which was to be borne every year to the Capitol on an appointed day by the colleges of priests, escorted by the senate, while boys and girls of noble birth sang the praises of his virtues in a choral ode. It was decreed that the day on which he began to reign should be called the Parilia (the festival celebrating the founding of Rome) indicating that, after the long cruel years of Tiberius, Rome had been founded a second time.

17. Caligula twice gave the people a gift of 300 sesterces each, and twice a lavish banquet to the senate and the equestrian order, together with their wives and children. To make a permanent addition to public gaiety he added a day to the Saturnalia and called it Juvenalis.

18. Caligula gave several gladiatorial shows. He exhibited stage-plays continually, of various kinds and in many different places, sometimes even by night, lighting up the whole city. He also gave many games in the Circus, lasting from early morning until evening, introducing the manoeuvres of the game called Troy.

19. Caligula bridged the gap between Baiae and the mole at Puteoli, a distance of about 3,600 paces, by bringing together merchant ships from all sides and anchoring them in a double line, afterwards a mound of earth was heaped upon them and fashioned in the manner of the Appian Way. Over this bridge he rode back and forth for two successive days, the first day on a caparisoned horse, resplendent in a crown of oak leaves, a buckler, a sword, and a cloak of cloth of gold.

[Interestingly, Suetonius makes mention, here, of his own family, telling us that his grandfather told him the reason for the work was that Thrasyllus the astrologer had declared to Tiberius, when he was worried about his successor and inclined towards his natural grandson, that Gaius had no more chance of becoming emperor than of riding about over the gulf of Baiae with horses.]

20. Caligula gave shows in foreign lands, Athenian games at Syracuse in Sicily, and miscellaneous games at Lugdunum in Gaul.

21. Caligula completed the public works which had been half finished under Tiberius, namely the temple of Augustus and the theatre of Pompey. He likewise began an aqueduct in the region near Tibur and an amphitheatre beside the Saepta (the former finished by his successor Claudius, while the latter was abandoned). He planned to have a canal run through the Isthmus of Corinth in Greece and sent a chief centurion to survey the work.

Part Two: The Monster

22. So much for Caligula as emperor; Suetonius tells us that the rest of his biography will now tell of the monster.

Caligula claimed to be a god. He ordered all the best statues in Greece brought to Rome, decapitated and topped with copies of his own head.

Caligula converted the temple of Castor and Pollux into the vestibule of a hugely expanded Imperial palace and often took his place between the divine brethren to be worshipped by citizens.

He set up a temple to his own godhead, with priests and with victims of the choicest kind. He placed in it a life-sized statue of himself made from gold, which was dressed each day in the same clothes he was wearing.

During the day he would talk confidentially with Jupiter Capitolinus, now whispering in his ear, then turning his ear to the god’s mouth. Sometimes they had angry arguments if Jupiter disobeyed Caligula’s orders.

23. Caligula hated to be thought of as the grandson of Agrippa, a mere commoner, so spread the rumour that his mother was the product of an incestuous passion between Augustus and his daughter, Julia. He insulted the memory of Livia, and drove his grandmother Antonia to an early death with insults (although some think that he also gave her poison)

He had his brother, Tiberius, put to death without warning, suddenly sending a tribune of the soldiers to do the deed. He drove his father-in‑law Silanus to end his life by cutting his throat with a razor.

He spared his uncle, Claudius, as a laughing-stock.

24. Caligula lived in habitual incest with all his sisters. He is believed to have violated Drusilla when he was still a minor, and even to have been caught lying with her by his grandmother, Antonia. Afterwards, she married Lucius Cassius Longinus, an ex-consul, but Caligula took her from him and openly treated her as his lawful wife

After Drusilla died Caligula was beside himself with grief, not cutting his hair or shaving his beard. He never afterwards took an oath about matters of the highest moment except by the godhead of Drusilla. The rest of his sisters he slept with sometimes, or prostituted them to his favourites.

25. Suetonius says it is hard to decide whether he behave more appallingly in contracting his marriages, annulling them, or as a ‘husband’.

At the marriage of Livia Orestilla to Gaius Piso he gave orders that the bride be taken to his own house, where he ravished her for two days before ‘divorcing’ her. Two years later he banished her on the suspicion that she’d gone back to her former husband.

When he heard the rumour that the grandmother of Lollia Paulina, who was married to Gaius Memmius, had once been a remarkably beautiful woman, he recalled her from the province where he husband was serving suddenly called Lollia from the province, separated her from her husband, and married her; then in a short time had her put away, with the command never to have intercourse with anyone.

Though Caesonia was neither beautiful nor young, and was already mother of three daughters by another, Caligula loved her passionately, often exhibiting her to the soldiers riding by his side, decked with cloak, helmet and shield, and to his friends even in a state of nudity. Only when she bore him a daughter did he formally declare her his wife (in 39 AD). He named the child Julia Drusilla.

Ptolemy, son of king Juba, his cousin, Macro and Ennia, who helped him to the throne, he had put to death.

He forced senators to run alongside his chariot and to wait on him at table. Some he had put to death. When the consuls forgot to proclaim his birthday, he deposed them and left the state for three days without its highest magistrates.

His sleep was disturbed by the noise made by people who’d come in the middle of the night to get the free seats in the Circus, so he had them driven out with cudgels and in the melee more than twenty Roman knights were crushed to death, with as many matrons and a countless number of others.

He liked to scatter free tickets at the theatre in order to sow confusion.

At gladiatorial shows he ordered the awnings pulled back when the sun was hottest and give orders that no one be allowed to leave, leaving the audience to burn.

27. When cattle to feed the wild beasts which he had provided for a gladiatorial show were expensive, Caligula ordered them to be fed with criminals. He had prisoners lined up and selected on a whim those to be executed and fed to the animals.

He had many men of noble rank branded with hot irons then condemned to the mines, to work at building roads, or to be thrown to the wild beasts, or he had them up in cages on all fours, or sawn in half.

These punishments were not for serious offences, but having maybe having criticised one of his shows or not having sworn by his Genius.

He forced parents to attend the executions of their sons, sending a litter for one man who pleaded ill health, and inviting another to dinner immediately after witnessing the death of his son and baiting him trying to with jokes and gaiety.

He had the manager of his gladiatorial shows and beast-baitings beaten with chains in his presence for several successive days until the stench of his putrefied brain prompted him to finish him off in disgust.

He burned a writer of Atellan farces alive in the middle of the arena of the amphitheatre, because of a humorous line of double meaning.

When a Roman knight on being thrown to the wild beasts loudly protested his innocence, he took him out, cut off his tongue, and threw him back again.

28. Caligula conceived the notion that exiles were conspiring against him and so sent emissaries from island to island to butcher them all.

He had one of the senators stabbed with quills then turned over to the mob. He wasn’t satisfied till he saw the man’s limbs, members and bowels dragged through the streets and piled up before him.

29. Caligula’s speech was full of threats. When his grandmother Antonia gave him some advice he replied: ‘Remember that I have the right to do anything to anybody.’

After banishing his sisters, he made the threat that he not only had islands, but swords as well.

An ex-praetor who had retired to Anticyra for his health, sent frequent requests for an extension of his leave, so Caligula had him put to death, joking that anyone who had not been helped by a long course of hellebore needed to be bled.

When he signed the list of prisoners who were to be put to death, he said that he was ‘clearing his accounts’.

30. Caligula seldom had anyone put to death except by numerous slight wounds, his constant order, which soon became well-known, being: ‘Strike so that he may feel that he is dying.’ He often uttered the familiar line of the tragic poet Accius:

‘Let them hate me, so they but fear me.’

He regularly castigated the senators for having informed against his mother (who Tiberius had exiled then killed on trumped-up charges).

He constantly tongue-lashed the equestrian order as devotees of the stage and the arena.

Angered at the rabble for applauding a faction which he opposed, he cried: ‘I wish the Roman people had but a single neck.’

31. Caligula lamented that there had been no great disaster during his rule, saying the reign of Augustus had been made famous by the Varus massacre, and that of Tiberius by the collapse of the amphitheatre at Fidenae, while his own was threatened with oblivion because of its prosperity. So he was heard wishing for famine, pestilence, fires or a great earthquake.

32. Even while feasting or at amusements, he was cruel, having people tortured in front of him as he ate, and employing a soldier who was adept at decapitation to cut off the heads of people brought from prison.

At the dedication of a bridge he’d had constructed at Puteoli, he invited members of the crowd to join him on the bridge, then ordered them all to be thrown into the water.

At a public banquet a slave was caught stealing a strip of silver from a couch so he ordered his hands to be cut off and hung round his neck and that he then be led about among the guests, preceded by a placard giving the reason for his punishment.

When he was training with a murmillo from the gladiatorial school who was using a wooden sword and fell out of deference to the emperor, Caligula stabbed him with a real dagger.

At a particularly sumptuous banquet he suddenly burst into a fit of laughter and when the consuls politely inquired why, he replied: ‘I was just thinking that at a single nod of mine both of you could have your throats cut on the spot.’

33. Caligula stood next to a statue of Jupiter and asked the tragic actor Apelles which of the two seemed to him the greater and, when he hesitated, had him flayed with whips.

Whenever he kissed the neck of his wife or sweetheart he would say: ‘And this beautiful throat can be cut whenever I please.’

He loved Caesonia but he sometimes playfully threatened to torture her to find out why he loved her so passionately.

34. Caligula made malicious attacks on men from every era. Augustus had moved some statues of famous men from the court of the Capitol to the Campus Martius. Caligula had them all destroyed, and thereafter forbade the erection of the statue of any living man anywhere, without his knowledge and consent.

He even considered destroying the poems of Homer, asking why he should not have the same privilege as Plato, who excluded Homer from his ideal commonwealth.

He came close to More than that, removing the writings and the busts of Vergil and Livy from all the libraries, calling Virgil talentless and Livy wordy and inaccurate.

He considered abolishing the legal profession altogether in order to prevent any opinions being given which contradicted his wish.

35. Caligula deprived the noblest families in Rome of their traditional emblems.

He invited King Ptolemy to Rome, entertained him lavishly and then had him put to death merely because, when giving a gladiatorial show, he noticed that Ptolemy on entering the theatre attracted general attention by the splendour of his purple cloak.

Whenever he ran across handsome men with fine heads of hair he ordered the backs of their heads shaved.

There was no one of such low condition or such abject fortune that he did not envy him whatever advantages he possessed.

36. Caligula had no respect for his own chastity or anyone else’s.

He is said to have had unnatural relations with Marcus Lepidus, the pantomime actor Mnester, and certain hostages.

Valerius Catullus, a young man of a consular family, publicly proclaimed that he had buggered the emperor and worn himself out in the process.

Beside incest with his three sisters and his passion for the concubine Pyrallis, there was scarcely any woman of rank whom he did not proposition.

He invited them to dinner with their husbands and, as they passed by the foot of his couch, inspected them critically as if buying slaves. Then he would leave the room, sending for the one who pleased him best, returning soon afterwards with evident signs of what had occurred, after which he would openly commend or criticise the woman, commenting on her body and performance.

37. Caligula’s extravagance was unparalleled. He invented new sort of baths and unnatural varieties of food. He bathed in hot or cold perfumed oils, drank pearls of great price dissolved in vinegar, and set before his guests loaves and meats of gold, declaring that a man ought either to be frugal or Caesar.

He scattered large sums of money among the commons from the roof of the basilica Julia for several days in succession.

He built galleys with ten banks of oars, with sterns set with gems, multi-coloured sails, spacious baths, colonnades and banquet-halls, and even a variety of vines and fruit trees. Then he would recline at table as they cruised up and down along the coast of Campania amid songs and choruses.

He built villas and country houses with utter disregard of expense.

He deliberately set out to achieve the impossible: he built moles out into the deep and stormy sea, tunnelled rocks of hardest flint, built up plains to the height of mountains and razed mountains to the level of the plain.

In sum, he squandered vast sums of money, including the 2.7 billion sesterces which Tiberius had amassed, in less than a year.

38. When he ran low on funds he devised a complicated system of false accusations, auction sales, and taxes. For example he demanded proof of Roman citizenship or payment.

He disallowed all returns of property from emperor to owner, if the owner had subsequently made any additions or improvements.

If any chief centurions since the beginning of Tiberius’ reign had not named that emperor or himself among their heirs, he set aside their wills on the ground of ingratitude.

With the result that hosts of people included Caligula as beneficiaries of their wills. But if he learned of this and the will-maker hadn’t died, he accused them of toying with him and sent them poisoned food.

He conducted trials of people like this himself, assigning fines at random, naming in advance the amount he intended to fleece them by.

At one sitting he condemned in a single sentence more than forty prisoners who were accused on different counts, boasting to Caesonia, when she woke after a nap, of the great amount of business he had done while she was taking her siesta.

He attended auctions and deliberately drove the bids as high as possible, forcing people to pay ridiculous sums, bankrupting bidders, forcing some of them to commit suicide.

39. When Caligula was in Gaul he had arranged to be sold for huge amounts the jewels, furniture, slaves, and even the freedmen of his sisters who had been condemned to death. He found this so profitable that he sent to Rome for all the paraphernalia of the old palace, seizing for its transportation public carriages and animals from the bakeries with the result that bread became scarce at Rome.

40. He levied new and unheard of taxes. There was no class of commodities or men on which he did not impose some form of tariff. On all eatables sold in any part of Rome he levied a fixed charge. On lawsuits and legal processes he demanded a fortieth part of the sum involved, on the daily wages of porters, an eighth, on the earnings of prostitutes, as much as each received for one trick.

41. He opened a brothel in his palace, setting aside a number of rooms where matrons and freeborn youths should stand exposed. Then he sent his pages about the fora and basilicas to invite young men and old to come and enjoy themselves, lending money on interest to those who attended and having clerks openly take down their names, as contributors to Caesar’s revenues.

42. When Caligula’s daughter was born he complained that, in addition to the burden of a ruler he now had to bear that of a father and asked for contributions for the girl’s maintenance and dowry.

He declared he would accept New Year gifts and on 1 January took his place in the entrance to the Palace, to receive the coins which a throng of people of all classes showered on him.

Finally, seized by with a mania for money, he would pour out huge piles of gold pieces, walk over them barefooted or wallow in them for a long time.

43. On a whim Caligula announced an expedition to Germany. It was a farce. He assembled legions and auxiliaries from all quarters, collecting provisions of every kind on an unheard of scale. Then he made a forced march for the border, while he himself was carried in a litter by eight bearers. He required the inhabitants of the towns through which he passed to sweep the roads for him and sprinkle them to lay the dust.

44. On reaching his camp, to overawe everyone, Caligula dismissed in disgrace the generals who were late in bringing in the auxiliaries. In reviewing his troops he deprived many of the chief centurions who were well on in years of their rank, in some cases only a few days before they would have served their time.

All that he accomplished was to receive the surrender of Adminius, son of Cunobelinus king of the Britons, who had been banished by his father and had deserted to the Romans with a small force. But he sent a letter back to Rome boasting as if he’d conquered the whole island.

45. Finding no one to fight with, he had a few Germans of his body-guard taken across the river and hidden and then word brought to him after lunch that the enemy were close at hand. This allowed him to rush out with his friends and flatterers, where they ‘captured’ these Germans and brought them back to the camp where he berated everyone else for their cowardice.

Another time he had hostages sent ahead and, again, suddenly left a banquet with some of the cavalry, galloped off and overtook these entirely quiescent friends, leading them back to the camp in fetters like a great hero.

Meanwhile, he rebuked the senate and people back in Rome for living the life of luxury while he exposed himself to untold dangers.

[If we compare this behaviour to the eight hard years fighting of Julius Caesar in Gaul, it really feels like history repeats itself, first as genuine struggle, then as pantomime.]

46. Caligula drew up his army on the coast (presumably the Channel coast) and then ordered them to…gather seashells and fill their helmets and the folds of their gowns with them.

As a monument of his victory he erected a lofty tower, from which lights were to shine at night to guide the course of ships, as from the Pharos.

47. Caligula then stage managed a triumph back in Rome in which he ordered various friendly Gauls to dye their hair red and pose as captured German chieftains.

He had the triremes in which he had sailed on the Channel carried overland to Rome. Imagine the effort of just this one act!

48. Before leaving Gaul Caligula conceived the insane idea of massacring all the legions there because, 20 years earlier they had, upon hearing of the death of Augustus, besieged the headquarters of his father Germanicus.

He was only just restrained from this order but insisted on decimating them i.e. killing every tenth one, so had them assembled without their weapons, but when he saw some sneaking off to get their swords, he panicked, and fled, travelling back to Rome and taking his fury out on the Senate.

49. Caligula entered Rome to an ovation (one step down from a formal triumph), meditating further crimes and atrocities, but four months later he was dead.

It is said that he intended to massacre all the best men of both orders (presumably senate and knights) and then move the capital of the empire to Antium or maybe to Alexandria. Two lists were found of the men to be executed.

50. Caligula’s physique He was very tall and extremely pale, with an unshapely body, but very thin neck and legs. His eyes and temples were hollow, his forehead broad and grim, his hair thin and entirely gone on the top of his head, though his body was hairy. Because of this to look upon him from a higher place as he passed by, or for any reason whatever to mention a goat, was treated as a capital offence.

While his face was naturally forbidding and ugly, he purposely made it even more savage, practising all kinds of terrible and fearsome expressions before a mirror.

He was sound neither of body nor mind. As a boy he was troubled with epilepsy and it recurred in manhood. During attacks he was hardly able to walk, to stand up, to collect his thoughts, or to hold up his head.

Some say his wife Caesonia gave him an aphrodisiac which had the effect of driving him mad.

He suffered from insomnia, never getting more than three hours sleep a night. He had bad nightmares and premonitions.

51. Caligula combined two mental faults: extreme assurance and excessive timorousness. He claimed to despise the gods but was terrified of lightning and thunder.

Panicked by rumour of a German attack, he deserted his troops, rode quickly back to the bridges, which were packed with troops, and so had himself passed from hand to hand over the men’s heads.

Hearing of an uprising in Germany he made preparations to flee Rome. His assassins played on this well-known fear when they claimed to the soldiery, after they’d murdered him, that he committed suicide after hearing of a defeat.

52. Caligula wore outlandish clothes. Instead of a plain toga, he often appeared in public in embroidered cloaks covered with precious stones, with a long-sleeved tunic and bracelets, sometimes in silk and in a woman’s robe, now in slippers or buskins, again in boots, such as the emperor’s bodyguard wear, and at times in the low shoes which are worn by women.

He frequently wore the uniform of a triumphing general, even before his campaign, and sometimes the breastplate of Alexander the Great, which he had had taken from Alexander’s tomb at Alexandria.

53. Caligula wasn’t very interested in literature but paid attention to oratory and very eloquent. When he was angry he let forth an abundant flow of words and thoughts, he paced up and down, and his delivery was such that he was clearly heard at a distance.

The Stoic philosopher, statesman and dramatist Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (4 BC to 65 AD) was popular during his reign but Caligula accused him of writing ‘mere school exercises’ and of being ‘sand without lime’.

He liked to compose speeches for and against those he had brought to trial and often forced the senate and knights to listen to both addresses, before making a decision on a whim.

54. Caligula was very active. He appeared in the Circus as a Thracian gladiator, fighting with the weapons of actual warfare; as a charioteer; and even as a singer and dancer.

He fancied his talents so much that even at public performances he couldn’t refrain from singing with the tragic actor as he delivered his lines, or from openly imitating his gestures by way of praise or correction.

On the day he was assassinated he seems to have ordered an all-night vigil for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the licence of the occasion to make his first appearance on the stage.

On one occasion he summoned three senators of consular rank to the palace and when they arrived in fear of their lives, he seated them on a stage and then suddenly burst onto it amid a great din of flutes and clogs, dressed in a cloak and a tunic reaching to his heels, performed a song and dance and disappeared again.

Yet he could not swim.

55. Those Caligula loved he loved with a mad intensity. He used to kiss Mnester, the pantomime actor, even in the theatre, and if anyone made the slightest sound while his favourite was dancing, he had him dragged from his seat and scourged him with his own hand.

On the day before the games, in order to prevent his horse, Incitatus, from being disturbed, he sent his soldiers to enforce silence in the whole neighbourhood.

Besides a stall of marble, a manger of ivory, purple blankets and a collar of precious stones, he gave this horse a house, a troop of slaves and furniture, for the elegant entertainment of the guests invited in his name. It said that he planned to make his horse consul.

56. There were many conspiracies, until two men succeeded in killing Caligula with the co-operation of his most influential freedmen and the officers of the praetorian guard.

They decided to kill him at noon as he left the Palatine games. The principal part was claimed by Cassius Chaerea, tribune of a cohort of the praetorian guard. Caligula used to taunt him, a man already well on in years, with voluptuousness and effeminacy and every form of insult. Whenever he asked for the watchword Gaius would give him ‘Priapus’ or ‘Venus’ and when Chaerea had occasion to thank him for anything, Caligula would hold out his hand to kiss, forming and moving it in an obscene fashion.

57. Caligula’s approaching murder was foretold by many prodigies:

the statue of Jupiter at Olympia, which he had ordered to be taken to pieces and moved to Rome, suddenly uttered such a peal of laughter that the scaffoldings collapsed and the workmen took to their heels
a man called Cassius turned up, who declared that he had been bidden in a dream to sacrifice a bull to Jupiter
the Capitol at Capua was struck by lightning on the Ides of March, and also the room of the doorkeeper of the Palace at Rome
he soothsayer Sulla, when Gaius consulted him about his horoscope, declared that inevitable death was close at hand
the lots of Fortune at Antium warned him to beware of Cassius, and he accordingly ordered the death of Cassius Longinus, who was at the time proconsul of Asia, forgetting that the family name of Chaerea was Cassius
the day before he was killed he dreamt that he stood in heaven beside the throne of Jupiter and that the god struck him with the toe of his right foot and hurled him to earth
the day before his death, as he was sacrificing, he was sprinkled with the blood of a flamingo,
the pantomimic actor Mnester danced a tragedy which the tragedian Neoptolemus had acted years before during the games at which Philip king of the Macedonians was assassinated
in a farce called ‘Laureolus’, in which the chief actor falls as he is making his escape and vomits blood, several understudies so vied with one another in giving evidence of their proficiency that the stage swam in blood

58. On the ninth day before the Kalends of February, at about the seventh hour, he hesitated whether or not to get up for luncheon, since his stomach was still disordered from excess of food on the day before, but at length he came out at the persuasion of his friends.

In the covered passage through which he had to pass, some boys of good birth, who had been summoned from Asia to appear on the stage, were rehearsing their parts, and he stopped to watch and to encourage them and had not the leader of the troop complained that he had a chill, he would have returned and had the performance given at once.

From this point there are two versions of the story: some say that as he was talking with the boys, Chaerea came up behind, cried ‘Take this!’ and gave him a deep sword wound in the neck, and that then the tribune Cornelius Sabinus, who was the other conspirator and faced Caligula, stabbed him in the breast.

Others say that Sabinus, after getting rid of the crowd through centurions who were in the plot, asked for the watchword, as soldiers do, and that when Caligula gave him ‘Jupiter’, he cried ‘So be it’ and, as Caligula looked around, he split his jawbone with a blow of his sword.

As he lay writhing on the ground crying ‘I am still alive’ the other conspirators dispatched him with 30 wounds as the cry went around, ‘Strike again.’ Some even thrust their swords through his privates. At the beginning of the disturbance his bearers ran to his aid with their poles and then some of the Germans of his body-guard, who killed several of his assassins, as well as some innocent senators who happened to be nearby.

59. Caligula lived 29 years and ruled 3 years, 10 months and 8 days. His body was conveyed secretly to the gardens of the Lamian family, where it was partly consumed on a hastily erected pyre and buried beneath a light covering of turf. Later his sisters on their return from exile dug it up, cremated it, and consigned it to the family tomb.

Before this was done, it is well known that the caretakers of the gardens were disturbed by ghosts, and that, in the house where he was murdered, not a night passed without some fearsome apparition until at last the house itself was destroyed by fire.

With Caligula died his wife Caesonia, stabbed with a sword by a centurion, while his daughter’s brains were dashed out against a wall.

60. The atmosphere of fear and paranoia continued after his death. Not even after the murder was made known was it believed that Caligula was dead. People suspected that Caligula himself had staged his own death and would return to punish anyone who was celebrating.

The confusion was exacerbated because the conspirators had not agreed on a successor. The senate was unanimously in favour of re-establishing the republic and so called the first meeting, not in the senate house, because it bore the by-now hated name Julian Building, but in the Capitol.

Some wanted all memory of the Caesars obliterated and all their temples destroyed. Men commented that all the Caesars whose forename was Gaius had perished by the sword, beginning with the one who was slain in the times of Cinna. [Although Michael Grant tells us in a footnote that this is not factually correct, it indicates the terrible reputation the family had acquired.]

[Once Claudius was securely in power he had Caligula’s assassins, including Cassius Chaerea and Julius Lupus, the murderer of Caligula’s wife and daughter, put to death – to ensure Claudius’s own safety and to act as a deterrent against conspirators during his reign.]

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by Simon on December 7, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Biography, History, Translation

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The Life of Tiberius by Suetonius

‘Poor Rome, doomed to be masticated by those slow-moving jaws.’
(Augustus’s dying comment on his adoptive son and successor, Tiberius, quoted in Suetonius’s Life of Tiberius, section 21)

Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus was the second Roman emperor. He succeeded his stepfather and adopted father, the first Roman emperor, Augustus, in 14 AD. Born in 42 BC, Tiberius reigned from 14 (i.e. aged 56) until 37 AD, 23 years in total, dying at the age of 78.

Roman texts were divided into short sections, sometimes called ‘chapters’ though most are less than a page long. Suetonius’s biography of the emperor Tiberius is 76 chapters long. Like all the emperors, you can divide his biography into two parts, before he was emperor, and his reign as emperor.

The central fact about Tiberius is that he was a grumpy, unsociable and reluctant emperor who began his reign with exaggerated respect for the institutions of Rome but slowly declined until he was overseeing a reign of terror, especially as a result of encouraging unaccountable spies and informers to bring charges against eminent men.

Already, in 6 BC, while he was being groomed as first among equals in Augustus’s extended family to succeed the great man and had established himself as an effective general after leading the army in Germany, he abruptly quit public life and retired to Rhodes, where he remained for seven years.

The historian Tacitus thinks the biggest reason among many possible ones for Tiberius’s retirement was that Augustus had forced him to divorce his wife, Vipsania, who he really loved, and marry Augustus’s own daughter, Julia who a) despised Tiberius’s relatively lowly origins and b) was extremely promiscuous, taking numerous lovers and publicly humiliating Tiberius.

Suetonius covers the important political and military events of Tiberius’s life, but really comes into his own when discussing the personal quirks and gossip surrounding the second emperor. Key learnings of the opening chapters are:

The Claudian clan, which Tiberius descended from, was famous for its arrogance.

Nero became a common surname in the Claudian clan, from the Sabine tongue meaning ‘strong and valiant’.

His father was the politician Tiberius Claudius Nero and his mother was Livia Drusilla. This Nero opposed the party of Octavian and so as a boy Tiberius was always on the move as his parents moved from place to place dictated by the tribulations of the civil wars.

But once the assassins of Julius Caesar had been defeated, Nero (Tiberius’s father) returned to Rome and was reconciled with Octavian. At which point Octavian, triumphant after winning the civil wars and establishing the Second Triumvirate with Mark Antony and Lepidus, forced Livia to divorce Nero and marry him, even though she was heavily pregnant by Nero at the time. This was in 38 BC. So Augustus married Livia knowing she was pregnant with another man’s child (unless, of course, it was he who had gotten her pregnant, not the husband).

The life of Tiberius: before he was emperor

Tiberius had a younger brother, Drusus Nero.

At the age of nine Tiberius delivered a eulogy of his dead father from the rostra. Just as he was reaching puberty, he accompanied the chariot of Augustus in his triumph after Actium (31 BC), riding the left trace-horse, while Marcellus, son of Octavia, rode the one on the right.

Tiberius presided, too, at the city festival, and took part in the game of Troy during the performances in the circus, leading the band of older boys.

Chapter 7. Between attaining manhood and ascending the throne:

Tiberius gave a gladiatorial show in memory of his father, and a second in honour of his grandfather Drusus, the former in the Forum and the latter in the amphitheatre
he also gave stage-plays, but without being present in person

Around 19 BC Tiberius married Vipsania Agrippina, daughter of Marcus Agrippa, and granddaughter of Caecilius Atticus, the Roman knight to whom Cicero’s letters are addressed.

But after she had given Tiberius a son, Drusus, Augustus forced Tiberius to divorce Vipsania and marry his (Augustus’s) daughter, Julia, in 11 BC. This greatly upset Tiberius who continued to be in love with Vipsania. His new wife, Julia, bore him a child but it died in infancy, at which point it is thought the couple ceased to have relations.

Tiberius’s brother, Drusus, died in Germany and he conveyed his body to Rome, walking before the coffin the entire way.

Chapter 8. Tiberius began his civil career by defending client kings and states. He prosecuted a noble who had conspired against Augustus.

He undertook two public commissions: to improve the grain supply to Rome and to investigate the slave-prisons throughout Italy, the owners of which had gained a bad reputation for kidnapping and enslaving travellers, and as havens for men seeking to evade military service.

9. Tiberius’s first military service was as tribune of the soldiers in the campaign against the Cantabrians. Then he led an army to the Orient and restored the throne of Armenia to Tigranes. For about a year he was governor of Gallia Comata which was in a state of unrest through the inroads of the barbarians and the dissensions of its chiefs. Then he conducted war with the Raeti and Vindelici, then in Pannonia, and finally in Germany. He brought 40,000 prisoners of war over into Gaul and assigned them homes near the bank of the Rhine.

For these achievements he was given an ovation in Rome, riding in a chariot and having been honoured with the triumphal regalia, a new kind of distinction never before conferred on anyone.

Tiberius proceeded quickly through the offices of quaestor, praetor, and consul, five years before the usual age limit (he was consul in 13 BC). He was made consul again in 7 BC and the following year received the tribunicial power for five years.

10. In 6 BC, while on the verge of accepting command in the East and becoming the second-most powerful man in Rome, Tiberius announced his withdrawal from politics and retired to the island of Rhodes.

Some say it was due to disgust with his wife, her mockery of him and her indiscriminate promiscuousness, which he daren’t confront, seeing as she was Augustus’s daughter. Others think that, since the children of Augustus were now of age, Tiberius voluntarily gave up the position of number two in the empire, in order to clear the way for them. At the time he simply gave the reason that he was exhausted after years of campaigning in Germany and holding public office and needed a rest.

Augustus was furious and openly criticised him in the Senate. When Augustus and Livia tried to stop him leaving Tiberius went on hunger strike for four days (!). When he was permitted to leave, he did so hugger-mugger, hardly saying goodbye to anyone. He was an odd, secretive, unhappy man.

Tiberius chose Rhodes because he’d liked it when he stopped off there on the way back from campaigning in Armenia. Once there, he settled into a modest house and adopted an unassuming manner of life, at times walking in the gymnasium without a lictor or a messenger, exchanging courtesies with the common people.

He was a constant attendant at the schools and lecture-rooms of the professors of philosophy.

In 2 BC Tiberius’s wife, Julia, was disgraced and sent into exile by Augustus. Despite disliking her, Tiberius performed the husbandly duty of sending letters to intercede with Augustus.

Then, when his tribunician period of office came to an end, and now that Augustus’s grandsons Gaius and Lucius had come of age and were clearly nominated for the succession, Tiberius wrote asking to be allowed to visit his relatives, whom he sorely missed. But Augustus rejected his appeal and told him to forget about ever seeing his family again, who he had so eagerly abandoned.

12. So Tiberius remained in Rhodes against his will. Through his mother he secured the title of envoy of Augustus, so as to conceal his disgrace. He wasn’t left in peace because every Roman official who sailed past the island felt duty bound to stop off and pay their respects

In his absence from Rome negative rumours accumulated around him. When he crossed to Samos to visit his stepson Gaius, who had been made governor of the Orient, he found him alienated due to slanders spread by Gaius’s staff. It was also claimed that Tiberius had sent messages to some centurions which possibly hinted at overthrowing Augustus. Tiberius swore it wasn’t so and asked Augustus for the appointment of someone, of any rank whatsoever, to keep watch over his actions and words to prove it.

13. Tiberius gave up his usual exercises with horses and arms and dropped the traditional costume of his people i.e. the toga, taking to the cloak and slippers of Greece – prompting criticism. There’s a story that, when his name came up at a dinner party hosted by Gaius, a man got up and assured Gaius that if he would say the word, he would at once take ship for Rhodes and bring back the head of “the exile,” as he was commonly called.

At this point Tiberius realised his life was actually at risk, so he renewed his pleas to his mother, and, as it happens, Augustus’s eldest son was at odds with Marcus Lollius, Gaius’s adviser, and so ready to oppose him on this issue (of recalling Tiberius). So, as a result of palace intrigue, Tiberius was grudgingly allowed to return to Rome, but on condition that he took no part or active interest in public affairs. So in the eighth year of his retirement Tiberius returned to Rome.

14. Since his early days Tiberius’s life had been marked by omens and predictions:

when Livia was pregnant with him, and was trying to divine by various omens whether she would bring forth a male, she took an egg from under a setting-hen, and when she had warmed it in her own hand and those of her attendants in turn, a cock with a fine crest was hatched
in his infancy the astrologer Scribonius promised him an illustrious career and even that he would one day be king, but without the crown of royalty
on his first campaign, when he was leading an army through Macedonia into Syria, it chanced that at Philippi the altars consecrated in bygone days by the victorious legions gleamed of their own accord with sudden fires
on his way to Illyricum he visited the oracle of Geryon near Patavium and drew a lot which advised him to seek an answer to his inquiries by throwing golden dice into the fount of Aponus – and then the dice which he threw showed the highest possible number (and those dice may be seen to this day, under the water)
a few days before his recall an eagle, a bird never before seen in Rhodes, perched on the roof of his house
the day before he was notified that he might return, his tunic seemed to blaze as he was changing his clothes

On the day the ship bearing Augustus’s permission came into sight, Tiberius was walking along the cliffs with his astrologer Thrasyllus, who saw it and declared that it brought good news. This was lucky for him because Tiberius had made up his mind to push the man off the cliff, believing him a false prophet because things up to that moment had all turned out contrary to his predictions. [How could anyone know the truth of this story? Only if Tiberius himself told someone, who told someone else etc.]

15. Tiberius returned to Rome in 2 AD. Here he introduced his son, Drusus Julius Caesar (born in 14 BC and so aged 16) to public life. Forbidden to take part in public life, Tiberius moved to the gardens of Maecenas on the Esquiline Hill, where he led a very retired life, merely attending to his personal affairs and exercising no public functions.

The situation was transformed when the two young heirs to the throne died in quick succession, Lucius in 2 AD, Gaius in 4. This prompted Augustus to rearrange the pieces on the chess board: he now formally adopted Tiberius as his own son and heir, compelling him, in turn, to adopt his nephew Germanicus.

From this time onwards (4 AD) nothing was left undone which could add to his prestige, especially after the disowning and banishment of Agrippa made it clear that the hope of the succession lay in him alone.

16. Augustus gave Tiberius the tribunician power for a second term of three years. He was assigned responsibility for subjugating Germany. But then a revolt broke out in the province of Illyricum, in the western Balkans, and Tiberius was transferred to take charge of quelling it.

This war lasted four years, from 6 to 9 AD. It came to be called the Bellum Batonianum and Suetonius describes it as the most serious of all foreign wars since those with Carthage (the three Punic Wars between 264 and 146 BC). Tiberius commanded fifteen legions and a corresponding force of auxiliaries, surmounting difficulties of terrain, the scattered nature of the tribal enemy and scarcity of supplies. His perseverance paid off and Tiberius completely subdued and reduced to submission the whole of Illyricum, which became a Roman province.

17. Tiberius’s exploits in Illyricum won him all the more glory because it was during this period, in 9 AD, that Quintilius Varus lost his three legions in an ambush in Germany, and no one doubted that the victorious Germans would have united with the Pannonians to foment rebellion on two fronts, had not Illyricum been subdued first.

Consequently a triumph was voted to Tiberius and many high honours. Some recommended that he be given the surname of Pannonicus, others of Invictus, others of Pius. Characteristically, Augustus vetoed these suggestions. Tiberius himself put off the triumph, because the country was in mourning for the disaster to Varus.

18. The next year Tiberius returned to Germany and, realising that the disaster to Varus was due to that general’s rashness and lack of care, he took no step without the approval of a council, having previously been a man of independent judgment and self-reliance. He ordered baggage to be kept to a minimum. Once across the Rhine he took his meals sitting on the bare turf, often passed the night without a tent, and gave all his orders for the following day in writing, for the avoidance of doubt or ambiguity. He ordered that if any officers were in doubt, they were to consult him personally, at any hour whatsoever, even in the night.

19. In Germany Tiberius insisted on the strictest discipline, reviving bygone methods of punishment. For example, he demoted the commander of a legion for sending a few soldiers across the river to accompany one of his freedmen on a hunting expedition.

Despite all these rational procedures, he remained deeply superstitious, embarking on battle with greater confidence when, the night before, his lamp suddenly and without human agency died down and went out, claiming this had always been a good omen, for himself and his ancestors.

One assassination attempt was made, by a member of the Bructeri tribe who got access to Tiberius among his attendants, but was detected through his nervousness and was then tortured till he confessed.

20. After two years Tiberius returned to Rome from Germany and celebrated the triumph which he had postponed, accompanied by his generals, for whom he had obtained the triumphal regalia. Before turning to enter the Capitol, he dismounted from his chariot and fell at the knees of Augustus, who was presiding over the ceremonies.

Tiberius sent Bato, the leader of the Pannonians, to Ravenna, after presenting him with rich gifts, thus showing his gratitude to him for allowing him to escape when he was trapped with his army in a dangerous place. Then he gave a banquet to the common people at a thousand tables, and distributed a largess of 300 hundred sesterces to every man. With the proceeds of his spoils from the war Tiberius restored and dedicated the temple of Concord, as well as that of Pollux and Castor, in his own name and that of his brother.

21. Tiberius was scheduled to return to Illyricum to govern it, but he was at once recalled for Augustus was entering his last illness. Tiberius spent an entire day with him in private. it is said that when Tiberius left the room after this confidential talk, Augustus was overheard by his chamberlains to say: ‘Alas for the Roman people, to be ground by jaws that crunch so slowly!’

It is said that Augustus so disapproved of Tiberius’s austere manners that he sometimes broke off his lighter conversation when Tiberius entered the room. Here comes Old Gloomy Guts.

But Augustus gave in to Livia’s pleading for her son to be made heir. It may also be that Augustus concluded that, with such a successor he himself would come to be all the more venerated and respected – although Suetonius himself can’t believe such a responsible ruler as Augustus would behave so irresponsibly.

Suetonius thinks Augustus had to make a difficult decision – all the heirs he had lined up had died and Tiberius, despite his dour manner and the black mark of his retirement to Rhodes, had proved himself an assiduous and victorious general in Illyricum, so…on balance…his merits outweighed his faults.

[Such is the weakness of an imperial or royal system of government, that it can only choose successors from a very limited pool of candidates and so, by the law of averages, is as likely to produce bad or terrible rulers as good or excellent ones, more likely in fact, since the demands of ruling an empire require more than normal abilities.]

Suetonius’s interpretation is backed up by the record, for he cites the fact that Augustus took an oath before the people that he was adopting Tiberius for the good of the country, and alludes to him in several letters as a most able general and the sole defence of the Roman people. Suetonius goes on to quote from Augustus’s correspondence where, among other epithets, Augustus calls Tiberius ‘most charming of men’ and ‘most charming and valiant of men and most conscientious of generals’.

The life of Tiberius: his rule as emperor

22. Tiberius didn’t make the death of Augustus public until the young Agrippa had been disposed of. The latter was slain by a tribune of the soldiers appointed to guard him, who received a letter with the order. It is not known whether Augustus left this letter when he died, to remove a future source of discord, or whether Livia wrote it herself in the name of her husband, or whether it was with or without the connivance of Tiberius.

Anyway, when the tribune reported that he had done his bidding, Tiberius replied that he had given no such order, and that the man must render an account to the senate, apparently trying to avoid odium at the time, for later his silence consigned the matter to oblivion.

23. When Tiberius first addressed the senate after Augustus’s death he broke off his speech with a groan, saying he was overcome with grief, wished he also was dead, handed the speech to his son Drusus to finish.

Then he had Augustus’s will read out. It began: ‘Since a cruel fate has bereft me of my sons Gaius and Lucius, be Tiberius Caesar heir to two-thirds of my estate’ – hardly a ringing endorsement, and confirming the suspicion that Augustus had named Tiberius his successor from necessity rather than from choice.

24. Though Tiberius did not hesitate at once to assume and to exercise the imperial authority, surrounding himself with a guard of soldiers, with the actual power and the outward sign of sovereignty, nonetheless he refused the title for a long time. When his friends urged him to adopt it, he upbraided them for not realising what a monster the empire was.

At last, reluctantly and complaining that a wretched and burdensome slavery was being forced upon him, Tiberius accepted the empire, but in such a way as to suggest the hope that he would one day lay it down. His own words were: ‘Until I come to the time when it may seem right to you to grant an old man some repose’ [anticipating his later retirement to Capri].

25. Tiberius described being emperor as like ‘holding a wolf by the ears’. There were plots against his life:

a slave of Agrippa, Clemens, had collected a band to avenge his master
Lucius Scribonius Libo, one of the nobles, was secretly plotting a revolution
a mutiny of the soldiers broke out in two places, Illyricum and Germany

Both armies demanded numerous special privileges – above all, that they should receive the same pay as the praetorians. The army in Germany was reluctant to accept an emperor who was not its own choice and vociferously preferred their general, the nephew whom Augustus had forced Tiberius to adopt, Germanicus – although the latter, with characteristic grace and propriety, refused.

Tiberius asked the Senate to appoint colleagues to share the burden of rule. He also feigned ill-health, to induce Germanicus to wait with more patience for a speedy succession, or at least for a share in the sovereignty. The mutinies were put down, and he also got Clemens into his power, outwitting him by stratagem.

Not until his second year did he finally arraign Libo in the senate, fearing to take any severe measures before his power was secure, and satisfied in the meantime merely to be on his guard. In the meantime Tiberius took precautions: thus when Libo was offering sacrifice with him among the pontiffs, he had a leaden knife substituted for the usual one; when Libo asked for a private interview, Tiberius would not grant it except with his son Drusus present, and as long as the conference lasted he held fast to Libo’s right arm, under pretence of leaning on it as they walked together [in order to stop him grabbing a knife or other weapon].

26. Tiberius at first played an unassuming part, almost humbler than that of a private citizen. Of many high honours he accepted only a few of the more modest. He barely consented to allow his birthday to be recognized by the addition of a single two-horse chariot to the scheduled games. He forbade the voting of temples, flamens, and priests in his honour, and even the setting up of statues and busts without his permission.

He refused to allow an oath to be taken ratifying his acts, nor the name Tiberius to be given to the month of September, or that of Livia to October.

He declined the forename Imperator, the surname of ‘Father of his Country’ and the placing of the civic crown at his door (as Augustus had had done). He did not even use the title of ‘Augustus’ in any letters except those to kings and potentates, although it was his by inheritance.

Tiberius held only three consulships after becoming emperor – one for a few days, a second for three months, and a third, during his absence from the city, until the Ides of May.

27. Tiberius so loathed flattery that he would not allow any senator to approach his litter, either to pay his respects or on business, and when an ex-consul in apologizing to him attempted to embrace his knees, he drew back in such haste that he fell over backward.

If anyone in conversation or in a set speech spoke of him in too flattering terms, Tiberius interrupted him and corrected his language on the spot. Being once called ‘Lord’, he warned the speaker not to address him again in an insulting fashion.

28. Tiberius rose above abuse, slander and lampoons of himself and his family. He said that in a free country there should be free speech and free thought.

29. Tiberius treated the Senate with exaggerated respect, openly stating that a princeps ought to be the servant of the senate, of the citizenry as a whole, and sometimes even of individuals.

30. There was no matter of public or private business so small or so great that he did not lay it before the senators, consulting them about revenues, restoring public buildings, levying and disbanding soldiers, the disposal of the legionaries and auxiliaries, about the extension of military commands and appointments to the conduct of wars, his replies to the letters of kings.

31. Tiberius was content for the Senate to vote against his expressed wishes and on one famous occasion opposed a motion so popular that he was the only man to go into the minority lobby, and not a single colleague followed him.

Tiberius revived the importance of the consuls. He had foreign delegations address themselves to the consuls, rose when they entered a room, and made way for them on the street.

32. Tiberius rebuked some ex-consuls in command of armies for addressing their reports to him and not to the Senate. To the governors who recommended burdensome taxes for his provinces, he wrote in answer that it was the part of a good shepherd to shear his flock, not skin it.

33. Tiberius intervened to prevent abuses. Sometimes he offered the magistrates his services as adviser, taking his place beside them at the tribunal. If word got around the bribery was being deployed in a court case, he would appear remind the jurors of the laws and of their oath to uphold justice.

34. Tiberius reduced the cost of the games and shows by cutting down the pay of the actors and limiting the pairs of gladiators to a fixed number. He recommended that prices in the market should be regulated each year at the discretion of the senate.

He was personally frugal. As part of his campaign against waste, he often served at formal dinners half-eaten dishes from the night before – on one occasion serving the remaining half of a boar eaten the night before, declaring that it contained all that the other half did.

He issued an edict forbidding general kissing as well as the exchange of New Year’s gifts after the Kalends of January.

35. Tiberius revived the custom whereby married women guilty of improprieties could be punished by a family council. Married women of good family had begun to practice as prostitutes and to escape punishment for adultery by renouncing the privileges of their class. Profligate young men voluntarily incurred degradation from their rank so as to appear on the stage and in the arena without incurring punishment. Tiberius punished all such men and women with exile.

36. Tiberius abolished foreign cults, especially the Egyptian and the Jewish rites. He compelled adherents to these religions to burn their religious vestments and all their paraphernalia. He assigned Jews of military age to provinces with unhealthy climates, ostensibly to serve in the army. Jews over the age of military service he banished from the city on pain of slavery for life.

He banished the astrologers from Rome, unless they promised to abandon their practices.

37. Tiberius safeguarded the country against banditry and lawlessness. He stationed garrisons of soldiers nearer together than before throughout Italy, while in Rome he established a camp for the barracks of the praetorian cohorts, which before that time had been quartered in isolated groups in divers lodging houses.

He took great pains to prevent city riots. When a quarrel in the theatre ended in bloodshed, he banished the leaders of the factions as well as the actors who were the cause of the dissension.

He abolished the traditional right of sanctuary throughout the empire.

After his accession to the throne, Tiberius undertook no further military campaigns. If regional kings were disaffected, he used threats and cajolery rather than military campaigns. Or he lured them to Rome with flattering promises and then kept them there.

38. For two whole years after becoming emperor he did not set foot outside the gates. After that he made promises to tour the provinces and even hired transports and food, but never managed to actually leave, leading to many jokes.

39. Both Tiberius’s sons died before him: his nephew and heir, Germanicus, who he adopted in 4 AD, died in 19, aged 33. His natural son, Drusus the younger (named after Tiberius’s brother), Tiberius’s son by his first wife, Vipsania, died in 23, aged 26.

After their deaths, Tiberius retired to Campania and it became widely believed that he would die there. In fact he nearly died in a freak accident when he was attending a luxury dinner in a grotto and some of the ceiling gave way, killing guests near him.

40. The official reason for the journey through Campania was to dedicate a temple to Capitoline Jupiter at Capua and a temple to Augustus at Nola, but when he’d done this he didn’t return to Rome but crossed to the island of Capri. Shortly afterwards he was recalled to the mainland after a disaster at an amphitheatre which had given way during a gladiatorial show, killing thousands. So he crossed to the mainland and made himself accessible to all, for a spell.

41. But then he returned to Capri and from this point onwards began to neglect all his responsibilities, for example not filling the vacancies in the decuries of the knights, nor changing the tribunes of the soldiers and prefects or the governors of any of his provinces. He left Spain and Syria without consular governors for several years, allowed Armenia to be overrun by the Parthians, Moesia to be laid waste by the Dacians and Sarmatians, and the Gallic provinces by the Germans, to the great dishonour and danger of the empire.

Tiberius retreated to Capri in 26 AD and never afterwards visited Rome. From this point onwards Suetonius’s account turns into a lurid account of Tiberius’s decline into moral degeneracy.

42. Tiberius had from the start of his military career been known as a heavy drinker. He had acquired the nickname of ‘Biberius Caldus Mero’, meaning ‘Drinker of hot wine with no water added’. He spent two days and a night feasting and drinking with Pomponius Flaccus and Lucius Piso, immediately afterwards making the one governor of the province of Syria and the other prefect of Rome.

Tiberius attended had a dinner given him by Cestius Gallus, a lustful and prodigal old man, who had once been degraded by Augustus, but ensured he kept his usual custom of having the serving girls naked.

43. On Capri Tiberius indulged his sexual fantasies. He built a sexual sporting house as the setting for orgies. He selected men and women from across the empire to engage in acts of deviant sex for his stimulation. The bedrooms were decorated with erotic paintings and sculptures. He had an erotic library, in case a performer needed an illustration of what was required. In Capri’s woods and groves he arranged a number of nooks where boys and girls, dressed as Pans and nymphs, prostituted themselves outside bowers and grottoes.

44. Suetonius goes on to list grosser allegations made against him, for example:

that he trained little boys, who he called his ‘minnows’, that when he went swimming they swam between his thighs to lick and nibble his genitals
that he put unweaned babies to his penis for them to suckle
that he owned a painting by Parrhasius depicting Atalanta fellating Meleager

45. Tiberius terrorised women of high birth. When a certain Mallonia refused to submit to his lust he had her informed on and taken to trial, with the result that she went home, delivered a tirade against ‘that filthy-mouthed, hairy, stinky old man’ and stabbed herself to death.

46. He was tight-fisted to the extent of miserliness.

47. In striking contrast to Augustus, Tiberius constructed no magnificent public works. He undertook only two, the temple of Augustus and the restoration of Pompey’s theatre, but both were left unfinished at the end of his reign. He gave no public shows at all and very seldom attended those given by others.

48. Tiberius showed generosity to the public only twice: once when he offered to lend a hundred million sesterces without interest for a period of three years in response to a widespread financial crisis; and then when he made good the losses of some owners of blocks of houses on the Caelian mount, which had burned down.

He acted generously to the army once, doubling the legacies provided for in the will of Augustus, but thereafter never gave gifts to the soldiers, with the exception of a thousand denarii to each of the praetorians for not taking sides with Sejanus during the latter’s attempted coup.

He did not relieve the provinces by any act of liberality, except Asia, when some cities were destroyed by an earthquake.

49. As the years went by Tiberius’s stinginess turned to rapacity. He drove Gnaeus Lentulus Augur to make Tiberius his heir, then kill himself. He confiscated the property of leading men of the Spanish and Gallic provinces, as well as of Syria and Greece. He deprived many states and individuals of immunities of long standing meaning that he collected their revenues.

Tiberius persuaded Vonones, king of the Parthians, after he’d been dethroned by his subjects and taken refuge at Antioch with a vast treasure, to put himself under the protection of the Roman people, then had him treacherously put to death.

50. One by one Tiberius turned against his own family. When his brother Drusus wrote a letter suggesting they band together to force Augustus to restore the Republic, Tiberius snitched on his brother to Augustus in order to blacken his name.

Tiberius so hated his banished second wife, Julia, that, when he came to power he intensified her exile not just to one town, but to one house, and deprived her of her allowance.

Tiberius was very touchy about accusations that his mother Livia influenced him or shared his rule. He refused to let her be awarded the title ‘Parent of her Country’ or any other public honour.

[Livia died in 29, aged 87 i.e. Tiberius had to put up with her overbearing presence for the first 15 years of his rule.]

51. During an argument Livia is said to have produced letters from Augustus complaining about Tiberius’s sour character. This suggested such a deep and long-held enmity towards him that some say this was the reason for his retreat to Capri.

In the last three years of Livia’s life, Tiberius is said to have visited her only once, for a few hours, and didn’t visit her at all when she was ill.

After Livia’s death, Tiberius forbade her deification. He ignored the provisions of her will, and within a short time caused the downfall of all her friends and intimates, even those she had commended to his care. He had one of them, a man of equestrian rank, condemned to the treadmill.

52. Tiberius had a father’s affection neither for his own son Drusus (d. 19 AD) nor his adopted son Germanicus (d. 23 AD). After Drusus died he barely waited for the traditional period of mourning to end before resuming his usual routine.

Germanicus was handsome, successful, charming (remember how Ovid placed all his hopes for clemency in him, in his Black Sea Letters). According to Tacitus, many Romans considered Germanicus to be their equivalent to Alexander the Great, and believed that he would have easily surpassed the achievements of Alexander had he become emperor. But Tiberius mocked his achievements and openly complained to the Senate about him.

It was widely believed that Tiberius arranged to have Germanicus poisoned while on active service in Syria at the hands of Gnaeus Piso, governor of Syria. When Piso was tried on that charge, it was rumoured that he was about to produce Tiberius’s written instructions to him, so Tiberius had him quickly poisoned. As a result the slogan ‘Give us back Germanicus,’ was posted around Rome.

Tiberius then confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions by cruelly abusing Germanicus’s widow, Agrippina, and their children.

53. Tiberius embarked on a campaign to blacken the name of Germanicus’s wife, Agrippina. He stage-managed a dinner where he offered her an apple which she refused to take, assuming it was poisoned. He accused her of not trusting him. He falsely accused her of trying to flee, seeking sanctuary with the statue of Augustus or fleeing to the army. So he exiled her to Pandataria and, when she complained, had her beaten by a centurion until one of her eyes was destroyed.

Agrippina decided to starve herself to death in which, although he had her mouth forced open and food crammed into it, she succeeded. After Agrippina’s death Tiberius slandered her, persuading the senate to add her birthday to the days of ill omen and claiming credit for not having her publicly executed and thrown onto the Stairs of Mourning.

54. By Germanicus Tiberius had three grandsons, Nero, Drusus and Gaius (the future emperor Caligula), and by Drusus one, called Tiberius. Tiberius recommended Nero and Drusus to the senate and celebrated the day when each of them came to his majority. But almost immediately he began criticising and undermining them. When they complained about him he had witnesses stationed nearby and accumulated enough instances to have them pronounced public enemies and starved to death, Nero on the island of Pontia and Drusus in a lower room of the Imperial Palace. Drusus was said to be so tortured by hunger that he tried to eat the stuffing of his mattress.

55. Tiberius asked the Senate to select 20 leading men to form a council of state. Only 2 or 3 of them died natural deaths. He promoted Aelius Sejanus in order to use his cunning and services to destroy the children of Germanicus and secure the succession for his own grandson, the child of his son Drusus.

56. Tiberius was cruel to his Greek companions, banishing one, forcing another to commit suicide.

57. Even at the start of his reign, when he was still courting popularity by a show of moderation, Tiberius occasionally burst out with vengeful acts, executing people who offended him or questioned him.

58. Tiberius began to enforce laws for lèse-majesty regarding Augustus, which slowly escalated in triviality and severity. Eventually people could be tried beating a slave near a statue of Augustus carrying a ring or coin stamped with Augustus’s image into a privy or a brothel. Finally, a man was put to death merely for allowing an honour to be voted him in his native town on the same day that honours had previously been voted to Augustus.

59. Slowly, more and more cruel and savage deeds were carried out under the guise of the improvement of the public morals but in reality to gratify Tiberius’s pleasure in seeing suffering.

60. Cruelty: A few days after he reached Capri a fisherman appeared unexpectedly and offered him a huge mullet. Tiberius was so freaked out by the man’s appearance out of nowhere that he had his face rubbed raw with the fish’s scales.

When the litter he was being carried in was blocked by brambles, he had the centurion responsible for scouting the path stretched out on the ground and flogged half to death.

61. The 20s AD saw the creation of an atmosphere of fear in Roman noble and administrative circles with the expansion of treason trials and the widespread use of delatores or informers. Informers were always believed and could betray people for a few mildly critical words. All sentences became death sentences. Not a day passed without an execution.

Eventually, this degenerated into carnage. On some days 20 people were killed. Entire families, women and children too. Since it was illegal to execute virgins, the public executioners raped them first, then executed them. Corpses were dragged to the Tiber with hooks.

Many thought that Sejanus, as his henchman, egged him on, but after Sejanus’s fall the cruelty only got more ferocious.

62. Upon discovering that his own son, Drusus, had not died from his dissipated lifestyle but been poisoned by his wife Livilla and Sejanus, Tiberius went mad and spared none from torment and death, devoting all his time to unmasking what he saw as endless conspiracy, submitting random strangers to torture and execution.

On Capri people still point out the cliff Tiberius had his victims thrown off into the sea. If the tide was out a crew of marines waited below and broke their bones with boathooks and oars.

He devised a form of torture whereby he tricked men into drinking copious draughts of wine, and then had their genitals tightly bound so they couldn’t pee.

The soothsayer Thrasyllus is said to have saved many lives by telling Tiberius he would live a long life and so had plenty of time to torture and execute as many as he wanted. Tiberius even hated his own grandsons, Gaius and Tiberius the Younger.

63. He prevented ex-consuls taking up governorships in their provinces, because he didn’t trust them.

64. After the exile of his daughter-in‑law and grandchildren, Tiberius never moved them anywhere except in fetters and in a tightly closed litter, while a guard of soldiers kept any who met them on the road from looking at them or even from stopping as they went by.

65. Tiberius realised that his henchman Sejanus was plotting revolution, that he was being celebrated back in Rome and statues erected to him, so he embarked on a complicated strategy to discredit and overthrow him. This began by having Sejanus appointed consul with Tiberius, in 31 AD.

66. Public disgust at Tiberius broke out in a hundred ways, in lampoons and graffiti and slogans and jokes about his grotesque cruelty. Artabanus, king of the Parthians, sent a long letter detailing his crimes against the state and his own family, and telling him to commit suicide.

67. Suetonius makes the interesting point that Tiberius appears to have anticipated that his own wretched character would come to the fore. Soon after his accession the Senate had grovellingly offered him the title of ‘Father of his Country’ and an even more sycophantic gesture that anything he had said or done or would say or do would be honoured. Suetonius quotes Tiberius’s letters of reply to these offers in which he turns them down on the basis that, despite themselves, men change their character – almost as if he knew that, once granted supreme power, his worst nature would come to the fore.

68. Tiberius’s physique. He was above average height and strong (unlike short, weedy Augustus). He could crack someone’s skull with a single punch. He had blonde hair which he wore long at the back, concealing his neck. He was handsome but liable to pimples. He had large eyes. He enjoyed excellent health till the end of his life.

69. He didn’t venerate the gods as Augustus had done, but he was addicted to astrology. He was immoderately afraid of thunder. Whenever the sky darkened he wore a laurel wreath because it was said that that kind of leaf was not blasted by lightning.

70. Tiberius was greatly devoted to Greek and Roman literature. He wrote poetry in Greek. His specialist interest was Greek mythology and he cultivated the company of historians and grammarians who he asked teasingly obscure questions (Who was Hecuba’s mother? What was the name of Achilles when he hid among the girls of King Lycomedes’ court?)

71. Tiberius spoke Greek fluently yet he insisted on Latin being used on formal, political and legal occasions.

72. After his retirement to Capri, Tiberius made two attempts to return to Rome, once up the river Tiber, once by road, but both times turned back, afraid, it is said, of the mob. It was on the second attempt that he fell ill and, on the journey back to Capri, tried to conceal it by staying up late feasting at all the waystations, thus exacerbating the condition.

73. Reading that people named by informers were now being released without trial, Tiberius exclaimed this was treason and vowed to return to his safe place, Capri. But he became increasingly unwell and died in the villa of Lucullus, aged 78, in the 23rd year of his reign.

Some believe he was poisoned by Gaius (Caligula). Others that during convalescence from a fever, food was refused him when he asked for it. Some say that a pillow was put over his face to smother him. Seneca writes that, conscious of his approaching end, Tiberius took off his signet ring as if to give it to someone but couldn’t bring himself to part with it and, eventually, slipped it back on his finger. Having been unconscious with illness, he woke, called for attendants and, when no-one came, got up but his strength failed him and he fell dead near his couch.

74. The Romans really loved stories about omens. No biography is complete without them. Thus:

on his last birthday he dreamt that the huge statue of Apollo he had brought to adorn the library of the Temple of Augustus, came to him and announced he would not be dedicated by Tiberius
a few days before his death the lighthouse at Capri was wrecked by an earthquake

75. Tiberius’s death prompted celebrations around Rome. He was survived by one last atrocity. Hearing he was ill, the Senate declared all executions should be delayed by 10 days. Tiberius died on that tenth day but, since there was no-one in authority to extend the period or sign remittances, the executioners went ahead and strangled all the condemned, so that it was said his cruelty lived on after his death. Thus many called for there to be no funeral or his body to be only half cremated as an insult.

In the end his body was taken to Rome by the soldiers and cremated in the approved way.

76. Tiberius’s will named his grandsons, Gaius, son of Germanicus, and Gemellus, son of Drusus, heirs to equal shares of his estate. He gave legacies to several to the Vestal Virgins, with a bounty for every serving soldier and every member of the commons of Rome.

[Tiberius was succeeded by Gaius, more generally known as Caligula, son of Germanicus, and Tiberius’s great-nephew. Caligula was the only one of Germanicus’s children to survive Tiberius’s persecution. He adopted Caligula and took him to live with him in his debauched retirement on Capri. In Suetonius’s Life of Caligula, Tiberius is quoted as saying that he was ‘nursing a viper in Rome’s bosom.’ It was widely believed that Gaius had his very old great-uncle murdered, possibly himself smothering him with a pillow. After a promising beginning, Caligula’s reign swiftly descended into four years of chaotic misrule.]

Thoughts

Tiberius’s life divides very much into two halves, the dutiful imperial servant and the disgraceful debauchee. Tiberius’s military service in Germany and particularly Illyricum inspire respect. Compared to the military ‘service’ of his successors (Caligula, Claudius, Nero), he is a truly impressive figure.

But once he had settled into power, and begun to indulge his personal tastes for torture and debauchery, what a sickening contrast to his adoptive father, Augustus, who worked tirelessly for the improvement of Rome and the fair administration of justice right to the end of his long life.

Suetonius reports that some people wondered if Augustus chose Tiberius as his heir because he knew what a monster he’d turn out to be and that Tiberius’s rule would probably make his (Augustus’s) reputation all the more glorious.

Tiberius’s life shows what absolute power does to dissolute or depraved characters.

During the republican era Roman propagandists prided themselves that the rule of law and their complex constitutional procedures set them apart from the oriental despotisms of the East. By the turn of the first century BC Rome had imported a number of Eastern religions and rites, notably the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis. You could say that the reign of Tiberius marked the full arrival in Rome of the political traditions of oriental despotism – namely, palace intrigue and public terror.

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by Simon on December 5, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Biography, History, Sex, Translation

Tagged Achilles, Aelius Sejanus, Agrippa, Agrippina Vipsania, Alexander the Great, ancient Egyptian, Ancient history, ancient Rome, ancient world, Apollo, Aponus, Armenia, Artabanus, astrology, Atalanta, Augustus, Bato, Battle of Actium, Bellum Batonianum, Biberius Caldus Mero, Black sea Letters, Bructeri, Caecilius Atticus, Caligula, Campania, Capitoline Jupiter, Capri, Capua, Carthage, Castor and Pollux, Cestius Gallus, Claudian clan, consul, consuls, Dacians, decuries, delatores, Drusus Julius Caesar, Drusus Nero, Emperor Augustus, emperor Tiberius, Esquiline Hill, Father of His Country, Gaius, Gallia Comata, gardens of Maecenas, Gaul, Germanicus, Germany, Geryon, Gnaeus Lentulus Augur, Gnaeus Piso, Greek literature, Greek mythology, Hecuba, history, Illyricum, Imperator, informers, ISIS, Jews, Julia the Elder, King Lycomedes, Lepidus, Livia, Livia Drusilla, Lucius, Lucius Piso, Lucius Scribonius Libo, Macedonia, Mallonia, Marcellus, Marcus Agrippa, Marcus Lollius, Mark Antony, Meleager, Michael Grant, minnows, Moesia, morality laws, Nero, Octavia, Octavian, ovation, Ovid, Pandataria, Pannonia, Pannonians, Parrhasius, Parthians, Patavium, Philippi, Pompey's theatre, Pomponius Flaccus, Pontia, praetor, princeps, Punic Wars, quaestor, Quintilius Varus, Raeti, Ravenna, Rhodes, Robert Graves, Roman Empire, Roman literature, Roman Republic, Rome, Samos, Sarmatians, Scribonius, Second Triumvirate, Sejanus, Senate, Spain, Suetonius, Syria, Tacitus, temple of Concord, The Twelve Caesars, Thrasyllus, Tiberius, Tiberius Claudius Nero, Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus, Tigranes, toga, triumph, Vestal Virgins, Vindelici, Vipsania, Vonones

Posted by Simon on December 5, 2022

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