Ave Atque Vale -- and Good Riddance! -- to Barrett's Caligula: The Corruption of Power

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After far too long a time -- almost as long as it took me to read David Copperfield, and there I at least had the semi-plausible excuses of buying my first house, moving households, and being thrown into an auditor's role at work -- I'm done. I've finally, finally finished reading Anthony A. Barrett's Caligula: The Corruption of Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 1989 [first published in the UK in 1989 by B.T. Batsford Limited]; 1990; trade paperback; ISBN: 0-300-07429-8; 334 pps.). I'm done, I'm done, I'm done, I am DONE!!

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!

*Ahem*

In the interest of full disclosure, I should qualify that statement, though: I've read the actual text (up to p. 241), skimmed through the endnotes (pps. 255-315) to make sure that I didn't miss anything interesting, attempted to fill in some of the gaps of the laughable index (though I did not do a complete re-indexing of the book), glanced at the first appendix (a two-paged list of Caligula's named victims) and totally skipped the second appendix (titled: "Coins, Inscriptions and Sculpture;" 11 pps., fr p. 244-54). Fahgeddaboutit. I'm done.

This is far and away the most difficult book on Roman history that I've yet read; even Tacitus' Annals (in the Donald R. Dudley translation) wasn't as tough a slog (although it came close). Volume I of the Modern Library edition of Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? Slow, but awesome, and mostly terribly interesting. Sir Ronald Syme's The Roman Revolution? Not a beach read, certainly, but well-written and lucid, even if my head spun with all the Roman names, some of which were duplicated or varied only slightly. This puppy, though....



To quote myself, Barrett's main point -- that the Emperor Gaius (styled "Caligula," or "little boots") isn't nearly as black as he has been painted -- is fine; but he doesn't seem to grasp the concept of arguing his thesis in a narrative format, as opposed to throwing a bunch of countervailing opinions pell-mell throughout his text and endnotes, and chirping in periodically with some variation of "the records don't show..." GAAAAAH!! I'd enjoy Barrett's researches much better if he'd put them into a spreadsheet (with the main column header being "Suetonius," natch...), which would make his "buts," "howevers," and "we must nots" much easier to follow. While I was hoping -- make that "fervently praying" -- for a magisterial summation in the final chapter (Chapter 14: "Fit to Rule?"), even here Barrett flubs it, and doesn't take firm control of his narrative until the last two pages.

Barrett lacks the auctorial gifts of Sir Ronald Syme, or even of Tim Cornell and John Matthews (authors of Atlas of the Roman World); that said, he sometimes manages, despite himself, to rise above the fog of fragmentary and contradictory sources and wildly conflicting modern scholarly opinion, as when he touches upon the roots of modern anti-Semitism among the Alexandrian Greeks.

I read Barrett's book both because I'm interested in the period in general and Caligula in particular, and because I wanted to try to fill in a little bit of the background material presented in Robert Graves' excellent novel I, Claudius before I moved on to the sequel, Claudius the God. Claudius haunts Barrett's book as a shadowy, often ominous presence, which underscores the impression that I got from I, Claudius: that the reader would be a naïve fool to wholly trust Graves' narrator, to see him as merely a cork bobbing wildly along on a turbulent sea. Though Barrett never comes out and says it, I got the distinct impression that he tends to blame Claudius for some of the evils commonly attributed to Caligula.

While Barrett discounts or dismisses outright many of the stories of Caligula's monstrous character (forget about his supposed incest with all three of his sisters, including Agrippina the Younger, Claudius' fourth and final wife and the mother of the emperor Nero), he concedes that Caligula likely had a very dark, cruel sense of humor that was easily misunderstood or misrepresented by contemporaries and by the surviving accounts of his reign. Barrett points out that, the sources (particularly Suetonius, Dio and Josephus) to the contrary, Caligula remained capable of acting rationally throughout his life ("Right to the very end of his reign he seems to have been willing to accept good advice;" p. 240); was quite shrewd in his choice of administrators and in his settlement of the eastern provinces and client kingdoms; and was neither quite as bloodthirsty nor quite as much of a spendthrift as he has been portrayed: Barrett points out that the imperial treasury couldn't have been too depleted, since Caligula's successor, Claudius, "gradually abolished most of the taxes, and refunded some of the money collected, even though he was able to engage in such expensive ventures as the building of the harbour at Ostia" (pps. 228-29). To my disappointment, Barrett never addressed this very interesting judgment in Diana Bowder, et al's Who Was Who in the Roman World (1980; 1984), in the entry for Caligula's father, Germanicus Julius Caesar:

"If the tradition is to be believed, [Germanicus] was an outstandingly handsome, generous, congenial, and talented man, and it is to be regretted that he died so young. Some called him proud, on the other hand; and the character of his children who reached their prime, the Emperor Gaius, Agrippina the Younger, and Drusilla, is not a good advertisement either."

-- Bowder, et al, p. 226)

The Senate comes in for quite a drubbing due to the collusion of the majority of that body in Caligula's worst excesses, and their savage repression -- including their dismemberment of Proculus (the senators added "insult to injury by voting special festivals in honour of Caligula afterwards;" p. 235) -- of those few senators who were "principled enough to stand up to autocracy" (ibid). If many senators took pains after Caligula's assassination to "pretend that they had lived under autocratic repression," the fact remains that "[t]he autocracy that caused such resentment was an autocracy that they themselves had helped to create, and continued to foster" (p. 237; p. 239). Caligula remained loved by the common people and the equestrian order; Barrett brushes aside Suetonius' explanation of the crowd's fury at Caligula's murder as stemming from their disbelief of the reports of his death and their assumption that this was a cruel prank of the emperor's to test their loyalty (p. 229). Far from being an apologist for Caligula, however, Barrett's verdict on one of history's most reviled rulers draws a parallel with one of 20th century's most looming and monstrous figures:

"If Caligula was mad, he was not the potty eccentric typified by a Ludwig of Bavaria, but a much more frightening Stalinesque figure, capable of rational decisions, capable of statesmanlike acts (when it suited him), but morally neutral, determined to sweep all before him in the pursuit of his own personal ends, and ultimately indifferent to the consequences of his actions on others."

-- Barrett, p. 241

In the final analysis, Barrett somewhat softens the portrait of Caligula painted by Robert Graves in I, Claudius, if only in that Barrett, unlike Graves, dismisses most if not all of the stories of his madness and irrationality, preferring to believe that any such seeming spells stemmed from Caligula's singularly perverse (even for the time) sense of humor and the spin of subsequent chroniclers and senators who did quite well under him, thank you very much, but who found it politically expedient to obscure that fact.

Some final bits of trivia that I found interesting:

• Caligula had a residence and a racetrack on the Vatican hill; the thought of Caligula and his toadying touts racing pell-mell around the Vatican, then retiring to his manse to disport themselves in gambling, gluttony and licentiousness, is amusing to me. It also might explain the activities of some of the medieval and Renaissance popes: they had a tradition to uphold...
  
  
• Barrett notes that the senators "would rightly have resented deeply [Caligula's] refusal to show them the basic deference to which they were entitled, a deference that had been shown by Augustus and even by Tiberius" (p. 238); this dovetails into Caligula's touchiness to any perceived slight from the senate ("'Who dares teach me?' is one of the most revealing phrases attributed to him by Philo;" ibid), and Barrett speculates that Caligula's disdain for the intellectual and cultural elites of the day "might explain his success with the ordinary people, and the equestrians" (ibid). It seems to me that this part of Caligula's character and appeal to the common man parallels, in a way, that of George W. Bush. (I'll forbear from commenting on the conspiracy theory concerning "Dubya's" gay lover.)
  
  
• Speaking of gay lovers, one of Caligula's male lovers was one Valerius Catullus, "with whom he is supposed to have had a particularly vigorous session" (p. 44). Wouldn't it be ironic if this was a descendant of Gaius Valerius Catullus, the "naughty" poet (whom Capt. Sir Richard Francis Burton was said to have translated), floruit 60-55 B.C.?
  
  
• I didn't realize that the Androcles and the lion bit "supposedly took place while Caligula was presiding" (ibid). Huh.
  
  
• Just what were the Roman beliefs concerning marriage within the bounds of cousinage? The fourth stemma ("The family connections of Herod Agrippa;" p. 35) shows that Salome's daughter Berenice married her first cousin, Aristobulus, and their son was "Herod" Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great. Okay, technically these guys weren't Romans, but they were heavily involved with them -- Antonia, daughter of Antony (yes, yes: Mark Antony, or, more properly speaking, Marcus Antonius) and Augustus' sister Octavia, mother of Germanicus and Claudius, grandmother of Gaius or Caligula, "inherited much goodwill and many connections (as well as huge amounts of property) in the East from her father," and "several client princes from the East, including 'Herod' Agrippa," were frequently her houseguests (Bowder, et al, p. 21) -- so I'm assuming that their mores were more or less the same as those of the Roman elites. Marriage between first cousins isn't technically incest, but it's still a bit too creepy for my taste.
  
  
• Speaking of Salome -- yes, yes, that Salome -- she and Livia Drusilla (a.k.a. Julia Augusta: Augustus' wife and Caligula's great-grandmother; Caligula famously called her "an Odysseus in petticoats") were great friends. I simply cannot believe that Graves didn't work that bit into I, Claudius. (And if I'm uneasy at marriage between first cousins, you can imagine what I think of Salome's marriage to her uncle, Herod Antipas -- he's the Herod who refused to try Jesus -- after he brought her the head of John the Baptist. Eeeewww. Yeah, Claudius married his niece, Agrippina the Younger, at the end, but he more than paid for it. Bad idea, Claude! Bad!)
  
  
• Caligula is portrayed as something of a literary iconoclast, if not an out-and-out anti-intellectual: "He is supposed to have considered destroying the works of Homer...[and] threatened to remove Vergil and Livy from the public libraries, on the grounds that the former had no talent, and the latter was a wordy and shoddy historian" (p. 48). Graves' Claudius administers a verbal smack-down to Livy for the latter's prolixity in I, Claudius; but I had no idea that "Vergil was criticised, especially for plagiarism, in his own day, and obliged to answer the criticisms personally" (ibid). Barrett cautions: "It must..be recognized that it was something of a convention to ascribe perverse literary views to emperors" (ibid).
  
  
• "The so-called Lex de Imperio Vespasiani [which is "a senatorial decree granting imperial powers in AD 69 to Vespasian;" p. 56]" has provisions that "almost certainly..go back to Caligula's accession in 37. Part of the original document..is missing, but among those measures surviving is Clause VI which gives the princeps the right and power (ius and potestas) to do what he thinks to be to the advantage of the state, thus technically giving him the discretion to violate even existing laws" (p. 57). I find this to be another, more serious parallel with Bush "43;" when combined with the arrogance and sense of entitlement ("'Who dares teach me?'") that both men share, this trait moves from "ominous" to "dangerous."
  
  
• One of the most depressing aspects of Roman history for me is the regular massive, indiscriminate slaughter of animals in the name of entertainment. (Yes, I have more sentimental and romanticised feelings towards most animals than I do for most people, doubtless due to the fact that humans have a lot more power in the aggregate than animals, and that I've suffered far more at the hands of my fellow man than I have at the fang, claw, hoof, beak, wing or tentacle of animals. Sue me.) For example, when Caligula dedicated the Temple of Divus Augustus in either 37 or 38 AD, "some 400 bears" were killed (p. 69). Gee, and so many species are endangered or have become extinct because why..?
  
  
• In the interest of offering another vague "kinda/sorta" historical parallel, I present the following: Barrett suggests that the contradictory accounts of Caligula's assassination "can be reconciled if we think in terms of a conspiracy that attracted a wide range of diverse interests whose inner group retained their secrecy, even though Caligula managed to catch a number of people on the fringe. Josephus does indeed comment that many of the conspirators were operating allelon agnoia ('in ignorance of one-another')" (p. 156); this is similar to the conspiracy theory about John F. Kennedy's assassination that seems most reasonable to me: that JFK was done in by a confluence of murder plots, not necessarily working in knowledge of, much less in conjunction with, each other (think "grassy knoll").
  
  
• Another big reason why the general public liked the emperors in general and Caligula in particular is because the "liberty" of the republic was not extended to them, and they were fed up with being lorded over by a motley collection of oligarchs who half facetiously traced their lineage back to various imaginary deities but seldom exemplified the salutary qualities of said beings. Barrett notes that "there was considerable distress over the death of Caligula and a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the idea of a return to the republican system and to the privileges of the old nobility" (p. 172).
  
  
• Barrett makes some excellent observations about the problematic role of Claudius in Caligula's assassination, dryly remarking that Claudius' accession "within twenty-four hours of his nephew's death [is] an operation that was so remarkably smooth that it provokes questions about the possible role of Claudius himself, or at least of those around him" (p. 176). Barrett concludes his remarks as follows:
  
  "The Praetorian guard and the imperial freedmen would not have served their self-interest by abolishing the principate. They might, however, have seen the merit of removing a specific princeps whose behaviour threatened to discredit the whole institution, and of replacing him with a more suitable incumbent. Claudius may or may not himself have been a party to such a plot from the outset, but he would in any case have been anxious to prevent any general knowledge about it afterwards, and to foster the notion that the principate came to him by only an accidental twist of fate."
  
  -- p. 177
  
  None of this would necessarily obviate the intelligent affability of Robert Graves' Claudius in I, Claudius. Far from it...
  
  
• The final word on Caligula's character seems to have occurred early on in Barrett's book, which just might be one reason why it was such an off-putting read: "If absolute power had corrupted Tiberius with his [italics in the original] vast experience, what chance was there for the inexperienced Caligula under the tutelage of [Praetorian prefect Quintus Naevius Cordus Sutorius] Macro?" (p. 40)