Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, nicknamed Caligula (August 31, 12 - January 24, 41 (28 years old)), was the great-nephew of the Roman emperor Tiberius. His grandfather, Drusus, was the younger brother of the emperor, and his father - the famous and extremely beloved by the Romans Germanicus - was adopted by Tiberius by order of Octavian Augustus. As a child, Guy constantly lived with his parents in military camps. He owed his nickname "Caligula" ("Boot") to a joke of legionnaires, because he grew up among soldiers, in the clothes of an ordinary soldier.
The heavy blows that befell the later Germanicus family passed Guy by. Together with his father, he visited Syria in 19. Returning from there after his death, he was raised first by his mother Agrippina, then by Livia, his great-grandmother, and when she died, he moved on to live with his grandmother Antonia. 19 years old, 31 years old, he was summoned by Tiberius to Capri. By this time, his mother and another brother were in captivity.
On Capri, many, by cunning or by force, tried to provoke an expression of displeasure from Guy, but he never succumbed to temptation: it seemed that he completely forgot about the fate of his neighbors, as if nothing had happened to them. And everything that he himself had to endure, he bore with such an amazing pretense that it was rightly said about him: "There was no better slave and worse sovereign in the world."
But already at that time he could not curb his natural ferocity and viciousness. He was present with eager curiosity during the torture and executions of the tortured, at night in false hair and a long dress he staggered through taverns and dens, with great pleasure he danced and sang on stage. Tiberius readily admitted this, hoping to tame his fierce disposition. The shrewd old man saw right through him and more than once prophesied that Guy was living for destruction both for himself and for everyone, and that in him he was feeding the viper for the people of Rome.
A little later he married Junius Claudilla, daughter of Marcus Silanus, one of the most distinguished Romans. Then he was appointed augur to the place of his brother Drusus, but even before the initiation he was introduced to the rank of pontiff. This was an important sign of recognition of his kindred feelings and spiritual inclinations: the house of Tiberius was already deprived of any other support, and Guy was increasingly receiving hope for an inheritance. To establish himself even more firmly in her, after Junia died in childbirth, he entered into a relationship with Annia Nevia, the wife of Macron, who was at the head of the Praetorian cohorts; he promised her that he would marry her when he received power, and he gave an oath and a receipt for this.
Through her, he got into the confidence of Macron and then, it is believed, wore out Tiberius with poison. The dying man had not stopped breathing when Caligula ordered to take off his ring: it seemed that the old man resisted, then Guy ordered to cover him with a pillow and squeezed his throat himself; and the freedman, who had the imprudence to cry out at the sight of this atrocity, immediately sent him to the cross.
So Caligula achieved power in fulfillment of the best hopes of the Roman people. They write that he was the most desired ruler for most of the provinces and troops, where many remembered him as a baby, and for the entire Roman crowd, who loved Germanicus and pitied his almost ruined family. Therefore, when Caligula set out from Misen, despite the fact that he was in mourning and accompanied the body of Tiberius, the people on the way met him with lighted torches, advising him good wishes. And when Gaius entered Rome, he was immediately entrusted with the highest and complete power by the unanimous decision of the Senate and the crowd that burst into the curia.
Caligula himself did everything he could to arouse love for himself in people. With bitter tears he honored Tiberius with a laudatory speech before the assembly and solemnly buried him. Then he went to Pandateria and the Pontic Islands, in a hurry to collect the ashes of his mother and brothers, approached their remains reverently, put them in urns with his own hands, and with great pomp they were delivered to Rome.
Promotional video:
In memory of them, annual memorial rites were established. After, in a Senate resolution, Gaius immediately appointed his grandmother Antonia all the honors that were once given to Livia, the widow of Augustus; he took his uncle Claudius as his consular companion; he adopted his second cousin Tiberius Gemell (the grandson of Tiberius) on the day of his majority and made him the head of youth.
He pardoned those convicted and exiled on all charges left over from the past. Officials Caligula gave permission to freely rule the court and even tried to restore popular assemblies. He eased taxes and reimbursed many of the victims of the fire. Twice he distributed 300 sesterces to each Roman. He arranged many times and various spectacles for the amusement of the Roman people.
In the very first year, Guy completed the construction of the temple of Augustus, which Tiberius began to build, but did not manage to finish, despite the fact that he ruled for more than 20 years. Under Gai, they began to build a water supply from the Tibur region. However, the good done by Caligula could in no way outweigh the heavy burden of terrible atrocities and extravagances, which he began to indulge in almost immediately after gaining supreme power.
He suddenly took a dislike to his grandmother Anthony, who raised him, began to bully him, and with many insults and humiliations (and, according to some, poison) he brought him to the grave. After her death, Guy did not pay her any honors and from the dining room watched with interest her funeral pyre. He suddenly executed his second cousin and adopted son in '38, accusing him of smelling like medicine and taking an antidote before coming to his feast.
The praetorian prefect Macron, who had given him power, was forced to commit suicide, and he ordered his wife and his mistress Ennieu to be executed. In the same way, he brought Silan's father-in-law to suicide because he did not want to sail with him in stormy weather to Pandateria for the remains of his mother.
With all his sisters, Caligula lived in a criminal relationship, and at all dinner parties they took turns reclining on the bed below him, and his legal wife above him. They say that one of them, Drusilla, he took her virginity as a teenager, and Antonia's grandmother, with whom they grew up, once caught them together. Then she was married off to Lucius Cassius Longinus, a senator of the consular rank, but Guy took her from her husband, openly kept her as a legal wife, and even appointed her during his illness as the heir to his property and power.
When she passed away in 38, he established such a mourning that it was considered a mortal crime to laugh, swim, dine with parents, wife or children. Since that time, all his oaths on the most important subjects, even in the assembly before the people and before the troops, he pronounced only in the name of the divine Drusilla. He did not love the other two sisters so passionately and did not respect so much: more than once he even gave them for the amusement of his pets, and then hypocritically judged them for debauchery and, accusing them of intending to kill the sisters, sent them to the Pontine Islands.
It is difficult to say about his marriages what was more obscene in them: imprisonment, dissolution or being married. Livia Orestilla, who was marrying Guy Piso, Caligula himself came to congratulate, immediately ordered to take it away from her husband and released a few days later, and two years later sent into exile, suspecting that during this time she again got along with her husband. Lollya Pavlina, the wife of Gaius Memmius, consular and military leader, he summoned from the provinces, having learned that her grandmother was once a beauty, immediately divorced her husband and married him, and after a short time he let her go, forbidding her to come closer to anyone else. …
Caligula met his last wife Caesonia in 39. Although she was neither beautiful nor youthful and had already given birth to three daughters from another husband, Guy loved her the hottest and longest. In the name of his wife, he honored her no earlier than she gave birth to him, and on the same day declared himself the husband and father of her child.
His government was a mixture of ludicrous eccentricities and evil farce. He seemed to set out to mix with dirt everything that the Romans were used to being proud of, to ridicule the traditions and customs, exaggerating them to an incredible degree. To begin with, he appropriated many nicknames: he was called both "pious" and "son of the camp" and "father of the army" and "Caesar the good and the greatest."
Not content with this, he announced that he decided to deify himself during his lifetime, without waiting for the court of posterity, and gave orders to bring from Greece images of gods glorified by both worship and art, including even Olympian Zeus, in order to remove their heads and replace them. on their own.
He continued the Palatine Palace until the forum itself, and turned the temple of Castor and Pollux into his hallway and often stood there between the statues of twins, receiving divine honors from visitors. He dedicated a special temple to his deity, where there was his full-length statue. He appointed priests, and made the richest citizens take turns in the post of chief priest.
He took up war and military affairs only once in 39, absolutely unexpectedly for everyone. Caligula went to Mevania to see the spring and the grove of Klitumnus. Then he was reminded that it was time to replenish the detachment of Batavian bodyguards that surrounded him. Then he decided to undertake a campaign in Germany; and without delay, having summoned legions and auxiliary troops from everywhere, having produced with great severity a new ubiquitous set, having prepared as many supplies as had never been seen, he set out on his journey.
He moved swiftly and quickly, so that the Praetorian cohorts sometimes had to, contrary to custom, load banners on mules in order to catch up with him, then suddenly slowly and lazily, when his stretcher was carried by 8 people, and the people from the surrounding cities had to sweep the road in front of him and spray dust.
Upon arrival at the camps, he wanted to show himself as an active and strict commander: he dismissed the legates who belatedly led the auxiliary troops with dishonor, senior centurions, of whom many had only a few days before retirement, he stripped the rank under the pretext of their decrepitude and powerlessness, and he scolded the rest for being greedy and cut their salary by half.
But during this entire campaign they did nothing: only when Aminius, the son of the British king Kinobellin, exiled by his father, fled under his protection with a small detachment, he sent a magnificent report to Rome, as if the whole island had submitted to him, and ordered the messengers not to dismount from the chariot until they arrive directly at the forum, at the doors of the curia, so that only in the temple of Mars, in the face of the entire Senate, they can transfer it to the consuls. And then, since there was no one to fight with, he ordered several Germans from his guards to cross the Rhine, hide there and, after an afternoon breakfast, with a desperate noise to announce the approaching enemy.
Everything was done; then he, with his closest companions and a detachment of praetorian horsemen, rushed into the neighboring forest, chopped off branches from the trees and, decorating the trunks like trophies, returned by the light of torches. Those who did not follow him, he scolded for cowardice and cowardice, and the companions and participants in the victory were awarded wreaths. The next time he gave orders to take several boys hostages from the school and secretly send them ahead, and suddenly, leaving the banquet, he rushed after them with the cavalry and led them back in chains. He invited the participants in this chase to take a place at the table without taking off their armor, and even said, encouraging them, the famous verse of Virgil: Be firm and keep yourself for future successes.
At the same time, by an angry edict in absentia, he reprimanded the Senate and the people for the fact that, while Caesar was fighting amid so many dangers, they were enjoying untimely feasts, a circus, theater and relaxation in beautiful villas. In the end, as if about to end the war, he lined up an army on the seashore, and suddenly ordered everyone to collect shells in helmets and folds of clothes - this, he said, is the booty of the Ocean, which he sends to the Capitol and Palatine. In memory of the victory, he erected a high tower. He promised the soldiers a hundred denarii each as a gift, and, as if it was boundless generosity, he exclaimed: "Go now happy, go rich!"
After that, he turned to worries about triumph. Not content with barbaric captives and deserters, he chose from among the inhabitants of Gaul the tallest and, as he said, fit for triumph. The triremes, on which he went out into the ocean, were ordered to deliver almost everything to Rome by dry road. But before leaving the province, he decided to execute every tenth of those legions that rebelled after the death of Augustus, because they once held a siege of himself, as a baby, and his father Germanicus. But seeing that the soldiers were preparing to fight back, he fled to Rome.
Returning, he showered the Senate with threats, allegedly because he was denied triumph, and the Senate envoys who had come out to meet him, answered with a thunderous voice: "I will come, yes, I will come, and with me - that's who" - and patted on the hilt of a sword hanging from a belt. Thus, canceling or postponing his triumph, he entered Rome with an ovation on his very birthday.
The same gloomy buffoonery can be seen in many of his actions. He ordered a bridge to be built across the bay between Bayi and Puteolansky mole, 3,600 paces wide. For this, he collected cargo ships from everywhere (which caused the famine, since there were no ships left for the delivery of bread), lined them up at anchors in two rows, poured an earthen rampart on them and aligned them according to the model of the Appian Way. Over this bridge he rode up and down for two days with a retinue of praetorians. According to many, Caligula invented this bridge in imitation of Xerxes, who caused such delight by blocking the narrower Hellespont.
Senators, who occupied the highest positions, dressed in togas, he forced to run after his chariot for several miles, and at dinner they stand at his bed, girded with linen, like slaves. At theatrical performances, he handed out gratuitous passes ahead of time, so that the rabble would take the places of the riders, and afterwards he made fun of watching their quarrels. At the gladiatorial games, instead of the usual pomp, he suddenly brought out exhausted animals and wretched decrepit gladiators.
He often complained that his reign would soon be erased from memory, since it was not marked by anything majestic - neither the defeat of the troops, nor hunger, nor plague, nor fire, nor even an earthquake. However, as it turned out, he was grieving about this in vain. His clothes and footwear often struck him with their absurdity. Every now and then he went out to the people in colored, pearl-embroidered capes, with sleeves and wrists, sometimes in silks and women's bedspreads, now in sandals or koturna, now in soldiers' boots, and sometimes in women's shoes. Repeatedly he appeared with a gilded beard, and in his hands he held a lightning or a trident. He wore a triumphal robe all the time, even before his campaign.
In luxury, he surpassed the most unbridled prodigals in his expenditure. He invented unheard of ablutions, outlandish dishes and feasts - he bathed in fragrant oils, heated and cooled, drank precious pearls dissolved in vinegar. At the same time, he said: "You need to live either as a modest, or as a Caesar!"
He ordered the Liburnian galleys to be lined up in ten rows of oars, with pearl sterns, with multi-colored sails, with huge baths, porticoes, banquet rooms, even with vineyards and orchards of all kinds: feasting in them in broad daylight, he sailed along to music and singing along the coast of Campania.
Erecting villas and country houses, he forgot about all common sense, thinking only about building what seemed inconceivable to build. As a result, in less than a year he squandered the colossal inheritance of Tiberius - 2 billion 700 million sesterces (and according to some reports even more).
Then he turned to the most criminal methods, not disdaining absolutely no atrocities, to embezzle other people's money. He declared wills unlawful, forced to buy for fabulous prices all the utensils left over after great shows, sitting in court, sentenced everyone's property to confiscation, regardless of their guilt (they said that once he had condemned 40 people with one sentence on the most diverse accusations, and then boasted to Caesonia, who woke up from a nap, how much he had done while she was resting).
He collected new and unprecedented taxes: for example, he imposed a duty on all edible goods that were sold in the city, porters paid one-eighth of their daily wages, prostitutes - the price of one intercourse. Nor did he hesitate to face outright robbery. One day he played dice with friends and lost. Then he left the palace, saw two horsemen, ordered to seize them and deprive them of their property, and then returned and continued the game.
Of the arts, Caligula was most involved in rhetoric, and in fact achieved great success. He easily found words, and thoughts, and the necessary expressiveness, and his voice reached the very back rows.
But with special passion he was engaged in arts of a different kind, very different. Gladiator and driver, singer and dancer, he fought with military weapons, performed in circuses built by him, and enjoyed singing and dancing so much that even at national shows he could not resist singing along with the tragic actor and not echoing the dancer's movements in front of everyone.
He loved his horse Swift-footed so much that he built him a stable of marble and an ivory manger, they say that if Caligula had not been killed, he would certainly have made the horse consul.
Among these follies and robberies, many were ready to put an end to the emperor Caligula, but success fell to the lot of Cassius Herea, the tribune of the Praetorian cohort. It was known that Caligula constantly made fun and mockery. The conspirators attacked Guy on January 24, 41, while he, accompanied by several senators, was walking down a narrow passage towards the theater.
The first blow was made by Kherey, piercing the back of his head, then the rest inflicted more than 30 wounds on him. His wife Caesonia was also hacked to death, and his daughters smashed their heads against the wall. The corpse of the emperor Caligula was somehow burned in half and buried in the garden (later it was buried by the more worthy sisters who returned from exile). Power was transferred to Caligula's uncle Claudius.
K. Ryzhov