Voices in Time

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Because of the general Agrippa’s humble origin, Gaius Caligula loathed being described as his grandson and would fly into a rage if anyone mentioned him, in speech or song, as an ancestor of the Caesars. He nursed a fantasy that his mother had been born of an incestuous union between Augustus and Julia. He called his great-grandmother Livia Augusta a “Ulysses in petticoats,” and in a letter to the senate he dared describe her as of low birth—“her maternal grandfather Aufidius Lurco having been a mere town councilor from Fundi”—although the public records showed Lurco to have held high office at Rome. When his paternal grandmother Antonia begged him to grant her a private audience, he insisted on taking Macro, the praetorian prefect, as his escort. Unkind treatment of this sort hurried her to the grave, though according to some he accelerated the process with poison; and when she died, he showed so little respect that he sat in his dining room and watched the funeral pyre burn. He sent a military tribune to kill his cousin, young Tiberius, without warning, on the pretext that Tiberius had insulted him by taking an antidote against poison—his breath smelled of it—and he forced his father-in-law, Marcus Silanus, to cut his own throat with a razor, the charge being that he had not followed him when he put to sea in a storm but had stayed on shore to seize power at Rome if anything happened to him. The truth was that Silanus, a notoriously bad sailor, could not face the voyage—and young Tiberius’ breath smelled of medicine taken for a persistent cough which was gaining a hold on his lungs. Gaius preserved his uncle Claudius mainly as a butt for practical jokes.

It was his habit to commit incest with each of his three sisters in turn, and at large banquets, when his wife reclined above him, placed them all in turn below him. They say that he ravished his sister Drusilla before he came of age: their grandmother Antonia, at whose house they were both staying, caught them in bed together. Later, he took Drusilla from her husband, the former consul Lucius Cassius Longinus, quite unashamedly treating her as his wife; when he fell dangerously ill, he left her all his property, and the empire too. At her death he made it a capital offense to laugh, to bathe, or to dine with one’s parents, wives, or children while the period of public mourning lasted, and he was so crazed with grief that he suddenly rushed from Rome by night, drove through Campania, took ship to Sicily, and returned just as impetuously, without having shaved or cut his hair in the meantime. Afterward, whenever he had to take an important oath, he swore by Drusilla’s godhead, even at a public assembly or an army parade. He showed no such extreme love or respect for the two surviving sisters and often, indeed, let his toy boys sleep with them; and at Aemilius Lepidus’ trial he felt no compunction about denouncing them as adulteresses who were party to plots against him—openly producing letters in their handwriting (acquired by trickery and seduction) and dedicating to Mars Ultor the three swords with which, the accompanying placard alleged, they had meant to kill him.

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