CHAPTER IV
ASSASSINATIONS OF TIBERIUS, CALIGULA, CLAUDIUS, NERO
(A. D. 37-68.)
AT the time of the assassination of Julius Cæsar, the Roman people, and especially the higher classes, had reached a degree of perversity and degeneracy which appears to the modern reader almost incredible. They had become utterly unfit for self-government. The most atrocious public and private vices in both sexes had taken the place of the civic virtues and the private honor for which the ancient Roman had been famous the world over. In public life, corruption, venality, and bribery were general; a public office-holder was synonymous with a robber of the public treasury. Nepotism prevailed to an alarming degree, and the ablest men were unceremoniously pushed aside for the incapable descendants of the nobility. In times like those, only the very strongest hand and the sternest character and mind can restrain the masses from falling into anarchy and civil war, and impose on society moderation and the rule of law.
The assassination of Cæsar had a most demoralizing effect on the Roman people. The hand of the master who might have controlled the unruly masses and restrained the degenerate nobility lay palsied in death; the giant intellect, which had embraced the civilized world in its dream of establishing a universal monarchy, thought no more; and the results were chaos, anarchy, and civil war. The absence of the master mind was lamentably felt; his heirs were unable to control the wild elements which the assassins had set free; and for many years, rapine, bloodshed, murder, and spoliation ruled supreme throughout the vast extent of the Roman Republic, until finally, in the year 30 B.C., Octavianus Augustus, Cæsar’s nephew, succeeded in establishing that imperium of which Cæsar had dreamed, and for which his genius and his victories had paved the way.
The imperial era, beginning with a display of magnificence and splendor, both in military achievements and literary production, soon degenerated into an era of crime, which, at least in the highest classes of society, has never been equalled in history. Its worst feature was, perhaps, the utter degradation and depravity of the women even of the highest classes, and their readiness to sacrifice everything—chastity, shame, name, and reputation—to the gratification of their passions. Soon the women excelled the men in assassinating, by poison or dagger, their victims or rivals. Augustus, the first Emperor, showed on the throne much less cruelty than he had manifested as a triumvir; but Livia Drusilla, his third wife, was the first of those female monsters on the throne of the Cæsars—Livia, Agrippina, Messalina, Domitia—who never shrank from murder, if by blood or poison they could rid themselves of a rival or of an obstacle to their criminal ambition. Livia, who wished Tiberius, her son by a former marriage, to be the successor of Augustus on the imperial throne, caused Marcellus (the
