PREFDCE

ad 40. It is early in the year. Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus

sits on a lofty platform beside the Ocean. As waves break on the shore
and spray hangs in the air, he gazes out to sea. Many Roman ships over
the years have been lost to its depths. Strange monsters are rumoured
to lurk in its grey waters, while beyond the horizon there lies an island
teeming with savage and mustachioed head-hunters: Britain. Perils
such as these, lurking as they do on the very margins of civilisation, are
fit to challenge even the boldest and most iron-willed hero.
The story of the Roman people, though, has always had about it an
aura of the epic. They have emerged from dim and provincial obscurity
to the command of the world: a feat like no other in history. Repeatedly
put to trial, repeatedly surviving it triumphant, Rome has been well
steeled for global rule. Now, seven hundred and ninety-two years after her
founding, the man who ranks as her emperor wields power worthy of a
god. Lined up alongside him on the northern beach are rank upon rank
of the most formidable fighting force on the planet: armour-clad legionaries, catapults, battlefield artillery. The Emperor Gaius scans their length.
He gives a command. At once, there is a blaring of trumpets. The signal
for battle. Then silence. The Emperor raises his voice. Soldiers! he cries.
I command you to pick up shells. Fill your helmets with the spoils of the
Ocean.1 And the legionaries, obedient to their emperors order, do so.
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Such, at any rate, is the story. But is it true? Did the soldiers really pick
up shells? And if they did why? The episode is one of the most notorious in the life of a man whose entire career remains to this day a thing
of infamy. Caligula, the name by which the Emperor Gaius is better
known, is one of the few people from ancient history to be as familiar to
pornographers as to classicists. The scandalous details of his reign have
always provoked prurient fascination. But enough of the emperor; now
to the monster.2 So wrote Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, a scholar and
archivist in the imperial palace who doubled in his spare time as a biographer of the Caesars, and whose life of Caligula is the oldest extant one
that we possess. Written almost a century after the Emperors death, it
catalogues a quite sensational array of depravities and crimes. He slept
with his sisters! He dressed up as the goddess Venus! He planned to award
his horse the highest magistracy in Rome! Set against the background
of such stunts, Caligulas behaviour on the Channel coast comes to seem
a good deal less surprising. Suetonius certainly had no problem in
explaining his behaviour. He was ill in both body and mind.3
But if Caligula was sick, then so too was Rome. The powers of life
and death wielded by an emperor would have been abhorrent to an
earlier generation. Almost a century before Caligula massed his
legions on the shores of the Ocean and gazed out to Britain, his greatgreat-great-great-uncle had done the same and then actually
crossed the Channel. The exploits of Gaius Julius Caesar had been as
spectacular as any in his citys history: not only two invasions of
Britain but the permanent annexation of Gaul, as the Romans called
what today is France. He had achieved his feats, though, as a citizen
of a republic one in which it was taken for granted by most that
death was the only conceivable alternative to liberty. When Julius
Caesar, trampling down this presumption, had laid claim to a primacy over his fellow citizens, it had resulted first in civil war, and
then, after he had crushed his domestic foes as he had previously
crushed the Gauls, in his assassination. Only after two more murderous bouts of slaughtering one another had the Roman people
finally been inured to their servitude. Submission to the rule of a
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single man had redeemed their city and its empire from selfdestruction but the cure itself had been a kind of sickness.
Augustus, their new master had called himself, The Divinely Favoured
One. The great-nephew of Julius Caesar, he had waded through blood
to secure the command of Rome and her empire and then, his rivals
once dispatched, had coolly posed as a prince of peace. As cunning as
he was ruthless, as patient as he was decisive, Augustus had managed
to maintain his supremacy for decades, and then to die in his bed. Key
to this achievement had been his ability to rule with rather than against
the grain of Roman tradition: for by pretending that he was not an
autocrat, he had licensed his fellow citizens to pretend that they were
still free. A veil of shimmering and seductive subtlety had been draped
over the brute contours of his dominance. Time, though, had seen this
veil become increasingly threadbare. On Augustuss death in ad 14, the
powers that he had accumulated over the course of his long and mendacious career stood revealed, not as temporary expediencies, but rather
as a package to be handed down to an heir. His choice of successor had
been a man raised since childhood in his own household, an aristocrat
by the name of Tiberius. The many qualities of the new Caesar, which
ranged from exemplary aristocratic pedigree to a track record as Romes
finest general, had counted for less than his status as Augustuss
adopted son and everyone had known it.
Tiberius, a man who all his life had been wedded to the virtues of the
vanished Republic, had made an unhappy monarch; but Caligula, who
had succeeded him in turn after a reign of twenty-three years, was
unembarrassed. That he ruled the Roman world by virtue neither of
age nor of experience, but as the great-grandson of Augustus, bothered
him not the slightest. Nature produced him, in my opinion, to demonstrate just how far unlimited vice can go when combined with
unlimited power.4 Such was the obituary delivered on him by Seneca,
a philosopher who had known him well. The judgement, though, was
not just on Caligula, but on Senecas own peers, who had cringed and
grovelled before the Emperor while he was still alive, and on the Roman
people as a whole. The age was a rotten one: diseased, debased, degraded.
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Or so many believed. Not everyone agreed. The regime established

by Augustus would never have endured had it failed to offer what the
Roman people had come so desperately to crave after decades of civil
war: peace and order. The vast agglomeration of provinces ruled from
Rome, which stretched from the North Sea to the Sahara, and from
the Atlantic to the Fertile Crescent, reaped the benefits as well. Three
centuries on, when the nativity of the most celebrated man to have
been born in Augustuss reign stood in infinitely clearer focus than it
had done at the time, a bishop named Eusebius could see in the
Emperors achievements the very guiding hand of God. It was not
just as a consequence of human action, he declared, that the greater
part of the world should have come under Roman rule at the precise
moment Jesus was born. The coincidence that saw our Saviour begin
his mission against such a backdrop was undeniably arranged by
divine agency. After all had the world still been at war, and not
united under a single form of government, then how much more difficult would it have been for the disciples to undertake their travels.5
Eusebius could see, with the perspective provided by distance, just how
startling was the feat of globalisation brought to fulfilment under
Augustus and his successors. Brutal though the methods deployed to
uphold it were, the sheer immensity of the regions pacified by Roman
arms was unprecedented. To accept a gift, went an ancient saying, is to
sell your liberty. Rome held her conquests in fee; but the peace that she
bestowed upon them in exchange was not necessarily to be sniffed at.
Whether in the suburbs of the capital itself, booming under the Caesars
to become the largest city the world had ever seen, or across the span of
the Mediterranean, united now for the first time under a single power,
or in the furthermost corners of an empire whose global reach was without precedent, the pax Romana brought benefits to millions. Provincials
might well be grateful. He cleared the sea of pirates, and filled it with
merchant shipping. So a Jew from the great Egyptian metropolis of
Alexandria, writing in praise of Augustus, enthused. He gave freedom to
every city, brought order where there had been chaos, and civilised savage
peoples.6 Similar hymns of praise could be and were addressed to
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Tiberius and Caligula. The depravities for which both men would end up
notorious rarely had much impact on the world at large. It mattered little
in the provinces who ruled as emperor just so long as the centre held.
Nevertheless, even in the furthest reaches of the Empire, Caesar was
a constant presence. How could he not be? In the whole wide world,
there is not a single thing that escapes him.7 An exaggeration, of
course and yet due reflection of the mingled fear and awe that an
emperor could hardly help but inspire in his subjects. He alone had
command of Romes monopoly of violence: the legions and the whole
menacing apparatus of provincial government, which existed to ensure
that taxes were paid, rebels slaughtered, and malefactors thrown to
beasts or nailed up on crosses. There was no need for an emperor constantly to be showing his hand for dread of his arbitrary power to be
universal across the world. Small wonder, then, that the face of Caesar
should have become, for millions of his subjects, the face of Rome. Rare
was the town that did not boast some image of him: a statue, a portrait
bust, a frieze. Even in the most provincial backwater, to handle money
was to be familiar with Caesars profile. Within Augustuss own lifetime,
no living citizen had ever appeared on a Roman coin; but no sooner had
he seized control of the world than his face was being minted everywhere, stamped on gold, and silver, and bronze.* Whose likeness and
inscription is this? Even an itinerant street-preacher in the wilds of
Galilee, holding up a coin and demanding to know whose face it portrayed, could be confident of the answer: Caesars.8
No surprise, then, that the character of an emperor, his achievements, his relationships and his foibles, should have been topics of
obsessive fascination to his subjects. Your destiny it is to live as in a theatre where your audience is the entire world.9 Such was the warning
attributed by one Roman historian to Maecenas, a particularly trusted
confidant of Augustuss. Whether he really said it or not, the sentiment
* The earliest portrait of a living Roman on a Roman coin seems to have been

of Julius Caesar. It was minted in 44 bc the year, not coincidentally, of his assassination.

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was true to the sheer theatricality of his masters performance. Augustus

himself, lying on his deathbed, was reported by Suetonius to have asked
his friends whether he had played his part well in the comedy of life; and
then, on being assured that he had, to have demanded their applause as
he headed for the exit. A good emperor had no choice but to be a good
actor as too did everyone else in the dramas cast. Caesar, after all, was
never alone on the stage. His potential successors were public figures
simply by virtue of their relationship to him. Even the wife, the niece or
the granddaughter of an emperor might have her role to play. Get it
wrong, and she was liable to pay a terrible price; but get it right, and her
face might end up appearing on coins alongside Caesars own. No household in history had ever before been so squarely in the public eye as that
of Augustus. The fashions and hairstyles of its most prominent members, reproduced in exquisite detail by sculptors across the Empire, set
trends from Syria to Spain. Their achievements were celebrated with
spectacularly showy monuments, their scandals repeated with relish
from seaport to seaport. Propaganda and gossip, each feeding off the
other, gave to the dynasty of Augustus a celebrity that ranked, for the
first time, as continent-spanning.
To what extent, though, did all the vaunting claims chiselled into
showy marble and all the rumours whispered in marketplaces and bars
approximate to what had actually happened in Caesars palace? To be
sure, by the time that Suetonius came to write his biographies of the
emperors, there was no lack of material for him to draw upon: everything from official inscriptions to garbled gossip. Shrewder analysts,
though, when they sought to make sense of Augustus and his heirs,
could recognise at the heart of the dynastys story a darkness that
mocked and defied their efforts. Once, back in the days of the Republic,
affairs of state had been debated in public, and the speeches of Romes
leaders transcribed for historians to study; but with the coming to power
of Augustus, all that had changed. For, from then on, things began to
be done secretly, and in such a way as not to be made public.10 Yes, the
old rhythms of the political year, the annual cycle of elections and
magistracies that once, back in the days of the Republic, had delivered
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to ambitious Romans the genuine opportunity to sway their citys fate,
still endured but as a largely irrelevant sideshow. The cockpit of power
lay elsewhere now. The world had come to be governed, not in assemblies of the great and good, but in private chambers. A womans
whisperings in an emperors ear, a document discreetly passed to him by
a slave: either might have a greater impact than even the most ringing
public oration. The implication, for any biographer of the Caesars, was
grim but inescapable. Even when it comes to notable events, we are in
the dark.11
The historian who delivered this warning, although a close contemporary of Suetonius, was immeasurably his superior as a pathologist
of autocracy indeed, perhaps the greatest there has ever been.
Cornelius Tacitus could draw on an intimate understanding of how
Rome and her empire functioned. Over the course of a glittering career,
he had spoken in the law courts, governed provinces, and held the
highest magistracies to which a citizen could aspire; but he had also
demonstrated a canny, if inglorious, instinct for survival. The dynasty
that ruled Rome as he came of age was no longer that of Augustus,
which had expired amid a welter of blood back in ad 68 but it was
potentially no less murderous for that. Rather than stand up to its exactions, Tacitus had opted to keep his head down, his gaze averted. The
crimes of omission in which he felt himself complicit seem never
entirely to have been cleansed from his conscience. The more he came
to stand at a distance from public life, the more obsessively he sought
to fathom the depths of the regime under which he was obliged to live,
and to track how it had evolved. First he narrated the events of his own
youth and adulthood; and then, in his final and greatest work, a history
that has been known since the sixteenth century as The Annals, he
turned his gaze back upon the dynasty of Augustus. Augustus himself,
and his fateful primacy, Tacitus chose to analyse only in the most
oblique manner: by focusing, not upon the man himself, but rather
upon his heirs. Four Caesars in succession accordingly took centre stage:
first Tiberius; then Caligula; then Caligulas uncle, Claudius; and finally,
the last of the dynasty to rule, Augustuss great-great-grandson, Nero.
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His death it was that marked the end of the line. Again and again, membership of the imperial family had been shown to come at fatal cost. By
ad 68, not a single descendant of Augustus remained alive. Such was the
measure of the story that Tacitus had to tell.
And of something else as well: the challenge of telling the story at all.
Mordantly, in the first paragraph of The Annals, Tacitus spelt out the
problem. The histories of Tiberius and Caligula, of Claudius and Nero,
were falsified while they remained alive out of dread and then, after
their deaths, were composed under the influence of still festering
hatreds.12 Only the most diligent research, the most studied objectivity, would do. Painstaking in his efforts to study the official records of
each emperors reign, Tacitus made equally sure never to take them on
trust.* Words, under the Caesars, had become slippery, treacherous
things. The age was a tainted one, degraded by its sycophancy.13 The
bleakness of this judgement, bred as it was of personal experience,
ensured that Tacituss bitter scepticism ended up corroding all that it
touched. In The Annals, not a Caesar who claimed to be acting in the best
interests of the Roman people but he was a hypocrite; not an attempt
to stay true to the citys traditions but it was a sham; not a fine-sounding
sentiment but it was a lie. Romes history is portrayed as a nightmare,
haunted by terror and shadowed by blood, from which it is impossible
for her citizens to awake. It is a portrait of despotism that many subsequent generations, witnessing the dimming of their own liberties, have
not been slow to recognise. Wherever a tyranny has been planted on the
ruins of a previously free order, and whenever specious slogans have
been used to mask state-sanctioned crimes, it has been remembered. The
dynasty of Augustus still defines the look of autocratic power.
That it should so haunt the public imagination comes, then, as little
* The recent discovery in Spain of a decree issued under Tiberius has shed

intriguing light on Tacituss methods. There can be no doubt that he had

detailed knowledge of its wording; nor that he fully appreciated the degree to
which it expressed, not the truth, but rather what those who had composed it
wished to be taken for the truth.

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surprise. When people think of imperial Rome, it is the city of the first
Caesars that is most likely to come into their minds. There is no other
period of ancient history that can compare for sheer unsettling fascination with its gallery of leading characters. Their lurid glamour has
resulted in them becoming the very archetypes of feuding and murderous dynasts. Monsters such as we find in the pages of Tacitus and
Suetonius seem sprung from some fantasy novel or TV box-set: Tiberius,
grim, paranoid, and with a taste for having his testicles licked by young
boys in swimming pools; Caligula, lamenting that the Roman people did
not have a single neck, so that he might cut it through; Agrippina, the
mother of Nero, scheming to bring to power the son who would end up
having her murdered; Nero himself, kicking his pregnant wife to death,
marrying a eunuch, and raising a pleasure palace over the fire-gutted
centre of Rome. For those who like their tales of dynastic back-stabbing
spiced up with poison and exotic extremes of perversion, the story might
well seem to have everything. Murderous matriarchs, incestuous powercouples, downtrodden beta males who nevertheless end up wielding
powers of life and death: all these staples of recent dramas are to be found
in the sources for the period. The first Caesars, more than any comparable dynasty, remain to this day household names. Their celebrity holds.
All of which, it is as well to admit, can be a cause of some embarrassment to historians of the period. Tales of poison and depravity,
precisely because so melodramatic, have a tendency to make them
feel uncomfortable. The more sensational a story, after all, the less
plausible it is liable to seem. The truth of the allegations laid against
the Julio-Claudians as the dynasty of Augustus is conventionally
known by scholars has for this reason long provoked disagreement.
Could Caligula, for instance, really have been as mad as Suetonius and
other ancient authors claimed? Perhaps, rather than insane, his more
flamboyant stunts had simply been garbled in the transmission? Was
it possible, for instance, that behind the seeming lunacy of his order
to pick up seashells there was in fact a perfectly rational explanation?
Many scholars have suggested as much. Over the years, numerous
theories have been proposed. Perhaps although no source mentions
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it there had been a mutiny, and Caligula was looking to punish his
soldiers by giving them some demeaning task? Or maybe he wanted
them to look for pearls, or else for shells that he could then use to
ornament water features? Or perhaps concha, the Latin word for shell,
was in fact being used by Caligula to signify something quite different: a kind of boat, or even the genitals of a whore? Any of these
suggestions are possible; none of them is definitive. Like a vivid dream,
the episode seems haunted by the sense of some unfathomable logic,
some meaning that all our efforts to understand it are doomed never
quite to grasp. Such is often the frustration of ancient history: that
there are things we will never know for certain.
None of which need necessarily be cause for despair. Known
unknowns are not without their value to the historian of the first
Caesars. The question of what precisely Caligula might have been getting up to on that Gallic beach will never be settled decisively; but what
we do know for certain is that Roman historians did not feel that it particularly needed an explanation. They took for granted that ordering
soldiers to pick up shells was the kind of thing that a bad, mad emperor
did. The stories told of Caligula that he insulted the gods, that he took
pleasure in cruelty, that he revelled in every kind of sexual deviancy
were not unique to him. Rather, they were a part of the common stock
of rumour that swirled whenever a Caesar offended the proprieties of
the age. Leave ugly shadows alone where they lurk in their abyss of
shame:14 this po-faced admonition, delivered by an anthologist of
improving stories during the reign of Tiberius, was one that few of his
fellow citizens were inclined to follow. They adored gossip far too much.
The anecdotes told of the imperial dynasty, holding up as they do a
mirror to the deepest prejudices and terrors of those who swapped
them, transport us to the heart of the Roman psyche. It is why any
study of Augustuss dynasty can never simply be that, but must also
serve as something more: a portrait of the Roman people themselves.
It is also why a narrative history, one that covers the entire span of
the Julio-Claudian period, offers perhaps the surest way of steering a
path between the Scylla of flaccid gullibility and the Charybdis of an
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overly muscle-bound scepticism. Clearly, not all stories told about the
early Caesars are to be trusted; but equally, many of them do provide
us with a handle on what most probably inspired them. Anecdotes
that can seem utterly fantastical when read in isolation often appear
much less so with the perspective that a narrative provides. The evolution of autocracy in Rome was a protracted and contingent business.
Augustus, although ranked by historians as the citys first emperor, was
never officially instituted as a monarch. Instead, he ruled by virtue of
rights and honours voted him in piecemeal fashion. No formal procedure ever existed to govern the succession; and this ensured that
each emperor in turn, on coming to power, was left with little option
but to test the boundaries of what he could and could not do. As a
result, the Julio-Claudians presided over one long continuous process
of experimentation. That is why I have chosen in this book to trace the
entire course of the dynasty, from its foundation to its final bloody
expiration. The reign of each emperor is best understood, not on its
own terms, but in the context of what preceded and followed it.
And all the more so because the study of the period, as is invariably
the case with ancient history, can sometimes resemble the frustration
of listening to an old-fashioned car radio, with various stations forever
fading in and out of audibility. If only, for instance, we had the account
by Tacitus of Caligulas actions on that beach by the Channel but
alas, we do not. Everything that The Annals had to report about the
years between the death of Tiberius and the halfway stage of Claudiuss
reign has been lost. That Caligula, the most notorious member of his
dynasty, should also be the Julio-Claudian for whose reign the sources
are the patchiest is almost certainly not a coincidence. Although two
thousand years of repetition might give us the impression that the narrative of the period has long since been settled, in many cases it has not.
It remains as important, when studying ancient history, to recognise
what we do not know as to tease out what we do. Readers should be
aware that much of the narrative of this book, like the pontoon bridge
that Caligula once built between two promontories in the Bay of
Naples, spans turbulent depths. Controversy and disagreement are
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endemic to the study of the period. Yet this, of course, is precisely its
fascination. Over the past few decades, the range and vitality of scholarly research into the Julio-Claudians have revolutionised our
understanding of their age. If this book manages to give readers even
a flavour of how exciting it is to study Romes first imperial dynasty,
then it will not have failed in its aim. Two millennia on, the Wests
primal examples of tyranny continue to instruct and appal.
Nothing could be fainter than those torches which allow us, not to
pierce the darkness, but to glimpse it.15 So wrote Seneca, shortly before
his death in ad 65. The context of his observation was a shortcut that
he had recently taken while travelling along the Bay of Naples, down
a gloomy and dust-choked tunnel. What a prison it was, and how
long. Nothing could compare with it. As a man who had spent many
years observing the imperial court, Seneca knew all about darkness.
Caligula, resentful of his brilliance, had only narrowly been dissuaded
from having him put to death; Claudius, offended by his adulterous
affair with one of Caligulas sisters, had banished him to Corsica;
Agrippina, looking for someone to rein in the vicious instincts of her
son, had appointed him Neros tutor. Seneca, who would ultimately
be compelled by his erstwhile student to slit his own veins, had no illusions as to the nature of the regime he served. Even the peace that it
had brought the world, he declared, had ultimately been founded
upon nothing more noble than the exhaustion of cruelty.16
Despotism had been implicit in the new order from its very beginning.
Yet what he detested Seneca also adored. Contempt for power did
not inhibit him from revelling in it. The darkness of Rome was lit by
gold. Two thousand years on, we too, looking back to Augustus and
his heirs, can recognise in their mingling of tyranny and achievement,
sadism and glamour, power-lust and celebrity, an aureate quality such
as no dynasty since has ever quite managed to match.
Caesar and the state are one and the same.17
How this came to be so is a story no less compelling, no less
remarkable and no less salutary than it has ever been these past two
thousand years.
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