PLANET NERD

CIRCUS EMPEROR

There was relief and rejoicing in Rome in AD 37 when 25-year-old Gaius Caesar succeeded to the title of Emperor from the elderly tyrant Tiberius. Tiberius, who had spent brooding years of self imposed exile on the island of Capri, had become feared and despised because of the cruel executions of his critics in the Roman army.

But it seemed as if the embittered old emperor might have done some sort of penance by appointing Gaius Caesar as his successor. The young man was a great-grandson of Augustus and son of the soldier Germanicus, one of the unsullied military heroes of the Roman Empire.

As a baby, Gaius had often been taken by his father on Roman army campaigns and the legionnaires who dotted on the child adopted him as lucky mascot. They dressed him in a tiny uniform complete with hand-crafted boots called caligae. And they gave him the fond nickname ‘Caligula’ little boots in four brief years that nickname was to strike terror into the hearts of the citizens of Rome and even the old soldiers who help to rear him.

Caligula had a wild streak of youthful extravagance and an appetite for sexual adventuring. But if his elders thought he would grow out of such excesses youthful excesses masked a deprave insanity which only surfaced when he began to revel in the full power of his new office.

The first six months of Caligula’s reign were a spectacular ‘honeymoon’ period for the citizens of Rome. He quickly won the affections by giving away most of the treasury of Tiberious in generous tax rebates and cash bonuses for the soldiers of the garrison in Rome. And he paid small fortunes to the soldiers he trusted most –the broad-shouldered German mercenaries who made up his personal bodyguard.

With reckless disregard for the worried senators who warned him he would bankrupt himself and the office of Emperor, he began to lavish unheard-of expense on the blood-letting rituals of the circuses in the Roman amphitheatres.

From all parts of the Empire, a sinister menagerie of lions, panthers, elephants and bears were captured in the forests and desserts to be brought to Rome and bloodily butchered in staged ‘hunts’ in the arenas, to the delight of the spectators.

Prize money for the gladiators and charioteers was doubled and trebled to encourage them to fight each other to the death at the circuses. The shows were breathtaking extravaganzas, wildly acclaimed by their audiences –and they made Caligula an Emperor to be admired and applauded.

The popularity of the circuses also helped his subjects to turn a blind eye to the fact that Caligula had made his three sisters leave their husbands and move into his palace to share his bed. And it helped to stifle any misgivings about reports that the fun loving young Emperor spent many nights wandering the city with his guards, indulging orgies with the prostitutes before burning their brothels to the ground.

In AD 38, with his reign only a year old, Caligula was still popular Emperor when he fell ill with a fever. The circuses suddenly stopped.

Sympathetic Romans gathered in their thousands day and night outside his palace. All traffic of chariots and handcarts, and the noise of music and trade in the street were banned within half a mile of the palace, while the citizens prayed for the Caligula’s recovery.

For a month he hovered between life and death. Then the fever broke. The emperor awoke weakened but growing stronger everyday. But he had gone stark, raving mad.

Calling his friends and family around him, he confided: I wasn’t really ill; I was just being reborn as a God!

And with just enough money left at his disposal, Caligula celebrated with program of circuses with surpassed all his previous spectaculars. He was determined that everyone should enjoy themselves as much as he did. Trade and commerce almost ground to a halt as Caligula declared day after day a public holiday so that none of the citizens might have an excuse for not attending the circuses.

The constant bloody carnival soon took its toll. For the Romans, it was too much of a good thing. And for Caligula’s purse, it was an expense he could no longer support. With most of his money gone in spendthrift celebration, even the emperor felt the pinch of the expenses of fresh meat to feed the lions being prepared for their daily battle with gladiators –who were themselves deserting the circus because of the falling prize money.

And when one mediocre circus featured mangy, underfed lions and paunchy, middle aged gladiators lured from retirement, it was unacceptable to the crowds, who demanded more excitement each time. They rose in the 30,000 seat amphitheatre and actually booed the Emperor.

The mad Caligula reacted swiftly. The ringleaders who had led the jeering were seized by his guards and dragged away to the cellars under the arena. There their tongues were cut out and, choking on their own blood, they were forced into the arena to do battle with the wild animals.

The Roman crowd, used to seeing trained professional ‘huntsmen’ kill the lions, were stunned into silence by the sight of their fellow citizens being made to face the beasts. But Caligula enjoyed the scene immensely, whopping and clapping until the last of the insolent hecklers had been killed and dragged back to the cages by the emaciated lions.

As he left the arena with a mad glint in his eye, he told the Captain of the Guard wistfully: ‘I only wish all of the Rome had just one neck so I could cut off all their heads with one blow.’

Caligula had cowed even the bloodthirsty Romans into shocked submission. Still he needed more money to stage even more circuses and to keep paying his army for their shaken loyalty. And mad though he was, he knew that nothing would bring the wrath of his disenchanted subjects down on him quicker than a hefty increase in their taxes.

At least he had solved the problem of the food bill for the lions. From then on, the common criminals of Rome’s jails were transported to the amphitheatres at night and fed to the lions. He began to ease his other financial problems with a series of trumped-up treason charges against some of the capital’s wealthiest citizens. Their vast estates and fortunes were sized as fines and punishment, and the paid informers who gave perjured evidence against them were rewarded with a few gold coins.

With all of Rome turning against him, the Emperor seemed to see some sense a last and turned to the time-honored way of raising cash –plundering the captive peoples of France and Spain.

He reserved the last of his imperial revenues for one bizarre display in the Bay of Naples, where he moored 4,000 boats in a floating causeway to give the lie to a prediction by a soothsayer who had told him as a boy that he had as much chance of becoming Emperor as crossing the bay and keeping his feet dry.

Caligula galloped across a wooden road of ships laid with turf, flanked with artificial gardens and mock taverns, to loot the city of Puteoli. Caligula then returned to Rome happy that he had proved the soothsayer wrong.

That night a storm wrecked almost half the ships still riding at anchor, and Caligula swore he would take his revenge on Neptune, the God of the sea. The loss of the ships hasn’t dampened his spirits enough to prevent him throwing a party for his favorite horse Incitatus, was ‘promoted’ from Senator to Consul of Roman Empire.

Broke and desperate to recoup the cost of his Bay of Naples escapade, Caligula threw all caution to the wind. His guards rounded up ordinary citizens in the street and forced them to contribute every coin in their purses to the Emperor’s treasury. Holding back a single coin could mean instant death.

When his loyal guards explained that they had even managed to rob the city’s prostitutes of their meager earnings, Caligula hit on his most obscene idea for raising even more revenue. At a family meeting in his palace, he raged at his sisters Agrippinilla and Lesbia: Everyone else in Rome has to work to support me, but I never see any money from you. Now it’s your turn to work.’

By imperial decree, Caligula announced that his palace was to be opened as a brothel, with his sisters as prostitutes. Eminent senators were ordered to turn up at the enforced sex orgies and pay an entrance fee of 1,000 gold pieces. To the shame of the noblest men of the Senate, they were then summoned to return into another series of orgies and bring their wives and daughters as prostitutes to join Caligula’s sisters.

When Rome had been bled almost dry, Caligula decided to look further afield and, to the relief of his own countrymen, set out to plunder his way through the captured provinces of France and Germany. He sent word ahead to the military garrison commanders and provincial governors in France that he wanted all the richest men in their areas to be assembled in Lyons to meet him. Nervously the Roman administrators complied, fearing that Caligula might rob and kill the French noblemen and provoke another Gallic uprising. But the tortured mind of the Emperor had produced an outrageous compromise. The rich merchants were being offered the bargain of a life time, a chance to buy some of the ‘treasures’ of Caligula’s palace at knock-down prices.

So began the weirdest ‘auction’ any of them had ever witnessed. Caligula himself did the bidding on behalf of his captives buyers, bidding merchant against merchant until he was satisfied he had taken every pieces of gold from dice to the battlefield bidders, the French merchants found they had unwittingly paid thousands of pieces of gold for packages of cloth which contained only old sandals and mouldy pieces of cheese.

With another small fortune in running expenses, Caligula set off for the Rhine, vowing to exterminate his German enemies. In one small skirmish, his legions captured about 1,000 prisoners. Caligula picked out only 300 men from the disheveled ranks and ordered the remainder to be lined up against a cliff, with a bald man at each end. Satisfied he had enough prisoners for a swaggering triumphal entry to Rome, he ordered his Legions: ‘Kill every man from bald head to bald head.’

Then he set off his last great battle’. Camping outside the port of Boulogne, he ordered his dispirited and nervous army to line up on the beaches. Roman archers formed ranks at the water’s edge. Huge catapults and slings were dragged on to the sand dunes to support the infantrymen; massed troops of cavalry waited on the flanks. All eyes were set on the horizon, watching disbelievingly for the appearance of some distant enemy.

Then Caligula rode with imperial majesty into the shallow water. With blood-curdling oaths, he unsheathed his sword. Then he ordered the catapults to be fired into the sea. The infantry charged, trampling the waves. The archers shot their arrows at the breakers. The shallow waters were pierced with spears and the cavalry rode in out of the surf, stabling the seawater with their swords.

Now for the plunder’, shouted an overjoyed Caligula. And each man had to begin looting the sea –gathering piles of the sea shells in their helmets. It was too much. The mighty Roman army had been reduced to clowning their insane emperor.

As Caligula began the long march home, the long-overdue conspiracy to rid the empire of the bestial lunatic quickly gathered strength. When Caligula entered Rome, bringing the straggling German prisoners and a handful of Britons he had captured from a trading boat in Bologna, together with tons of seashells, the Senate was seething and the army close to revolt.

For the next month they plotted. They let the mad emperor rant and rave and award himself great honors for his victories’. Caligula drew up plans for all statues of the Gods in Rome to be beheaded and replaced with an image of his own head. He danced through his palace in silken women’s clothes and carried on blatant love affairs with young men he selected to be his bed partners.

But his days were numbered. There was no mass uprising to overthrow him, just the sudden anger of one old soldier who had reached the end of his tether.

To Cassius Chaerea, colonel of the Imperial Guard was given the most menial task of tax collecting. As an honorable soldier he was sworn to give total obedience to his Emperor, no matter what the provocation. But when Cassius was ordered to tortured a young girl falsely accused of treachery, he broke down and wept at the girl’s pain and innocent anguish. Word of the veteran soldier’s tears reached Caligula and the Emperor began to taunt him with shouts of ‘cry baby’.

To make sure all of the Guard knew of his insults, he teased Cassius mercilessly each day when he issued the new password for the Guard. Cassius was given the password personally by Caligula and had to repeat it in turn to each of his junior officers. The passwords had always been stern military slogans like ‘victory’ and ‘no surrender’. Cassius had to repeat the new series given to him by the mocking Emperor, slogans like ‘perfume and powder’ and kiss me soldier’.

Cassius’s sense of honor finally outweighed loyalty to a madman. In January AD 41, he waited in covered walkway which separated Caligula’s palace rehearsals for a new play a troupe of young Greek dancing boys had arrived to perform for him. The perverted Emperor couldn’t wait to meet the youngsters. He abandoned the audience and, as he hurried along the passageway, the old soldier Cassius stepped forward.

I need the password for today, Emperor,’ he told Caligula. ‘Oh yes, said the leering Emperor. ‘Let me see now. I think the password for today should be “old man’s petticoat”.’

It was to be his last insult. Cassius drew his sword and smashed Caligula to the ground. With ten thrust of the sword, from the skull to the groin, he ended the rule of the Divine Emperor Caligula. Seconds later he strode into the theatre and told the audience: ‘The show is over, the Emperor is dead.’

There was a stunned silence. Then a roar of applause louder and more joyous than any heard during four years of depraved circuses and orgies of the wicked reign of Emperor Caligula.                            

He had a wild streak of youthful extravagance and an appetite for sexual adventuring. His elders thought he would grow out of such excesses youthful excesses masked a deprave insanity which only surfaced when he began to revel in the full power of his new office.