Caius was brought up chiefly in the royal court and was, as we have seen, in company with Tiberius in much of the luxurious dissipation of that monarch’s later days in the island of Capri. Pampered and flattered, it is not strange that he grew up conceited and arbitrary,—a spoiled child.
It is said that when Caligula was a young boy he was dressed in miniature military accouterments, including the boots, and presented to the soldiers of the prætorian guard. This greatly pleased them, and drew from them the nickname of Caligula, which means “little boot.” A bronze statue, found at Pompeii, represents him at about that time in his life, with his hair in long curls, ornaments of silver upon his cuirass, and his feet shod as indicated. As a youth he seemed to have had a weak constitution. He was very excitable and a poor sleeper.
When he came to the throne he was for a short time diligent and thoughtful. He sailed to the island where his mother Agrippina I had perished and brought back her ashes to Rome for burial in the mausoleum of Augustus. A cippus, or monumental stone, set up among others in the city and erected probably by him, because mention is made on it of his accession to the throne, was hollowed out in the Middle Ages so as to be a standard measure for three hundred pounds of grain and as such was set up to be used by the public in the portico of the City Hall. It is now in the court of the Palace of the Conservatori on the Capitoline. Caligula introduced some measures of wise statesmanship. Then he gained for himself great popularity by his fondness for public sports and his lavish expenditures on great gladiatorial shows, in which Tiberius had taken very little interest. There seems to have been a great deal of enterprise and dash about him.
But Caligula soon abandoned the spirit of discretion and modesty. He showed no true interest for his subjects. Very few of them, however, knew of his unworthy tastes and conduct at Capri. He had been greatly influenced for evil by the companionship at court of Herod Agrippa, a grandson of Herod the Great, who had taken the name of Agrippa in compliment to Vipsanius Agrippa, the prime minister of Augustus. We shall later learn more of this Herod Agrippa I, for under the title of Herod the King it is he who appears in the twelfth chapter of the Acts. Agrippa had filled Caligula’s mind with oriental ideas of what a monarch should be, namely, one who should make the people feel his absolute power and should dazzle them at times with great parades and startling spectacles. Accordingly, Caligula is reported to have said, “Let them hate me, if only they fear me.” It became very soon evident that Caligula’s vanity, arrogance, and cruelty would stop at no limits. He obliged Tiberius Gemellus, his rival for the throne, to commit suicide. He forced a similar fate upon other friends of Tiberius. His morals were execrable. His defiance of public opinion was shameless. He lived with his own sister Drusilla in a disgraceful manner and, when she died, decreed that she should be worshiped as a goddess. He successively took three wives from other men.
He distributed crowns to foreign princes. Among these was his friend Herod Agrippa, whom he allowed to repair to his tetrachy in Palestine, going by the way of Alexandria. In that city Herod Agrippa’s presence was made the occasion of an insult to the Jews by the people of Alexandria. Their governor, Avilius Flaccus, knowing the repugnance of the Jews to all graven images, instigated the Alexandrians to demand that statues of the emperor be set up in the synagogues. This pleased the intolerable arrogance of Caligula. Augustus and Tiberius had allowed themselves to be spoken of as divine in the provinces, but they had forbidden the worship of their pretended divinity at Rome during their lives. A deputation of Jews went to Rome to dissuade the emperor Caligula from sanctioning any such idolatries in regard to himself. They said they had prayed for him and had offered sacrifices for him, but they feared Jehovah as the only God. They were shocked by his blasphemy and returned disheartened when he replied:
“Yes; you have offered sacrifices for me, but not to me.”
He, thereupon, issued his order that a statue of himself should be prepared to be worshiped even in the temple at Jerusalem. He went so far as to arrange for priests and sacrifices in his honor. The governor of Syria told the workmen to proceed slowly upon this statue; so that it was not completed before Caius’s death.
Caligula seems really to have persuaded himself that he was a god, not one of moral purity, but, according to his own depraved idea, a god of outward and sensuous power,—a Bacchus or a Hercules. He caused himself to be adored in the Forum. He showed himself to the people, sitting between the statues of Castor and Pollux in their temple.
“If you do not kill me I will kill you,” he cried out to Jupiter in a thunderstorm, and then he ridiculously invented a machine for imitating thunder. He built some kind of a lofty passageway, which was called a bridge, over the roofs of the houses from the Palatine to the Capitoline, so that he could go over and confer, as he said, with Jupiter in his temple. Merivale says that “to stand on the summit of a high basilica and scatter money to the populace seemed to him an act of divine munificence and to sail along the Campanian coast in enormous galleys equipped with porticos, baths, and banquet halls interspersed with gardens and orchards delighted him as a gorgeous parade and as a defiance to the elements.” He also constructed at great expense a bridge of boats across the bay from Baiæ to Puteoli. This he did as a token of his power to win a victory even over the god Neptune himself. It was about two miles long. We may here quote again from Merivale:
“He ransacked, we are told, the havens far and near to collect every vessel he could lay hands on till commerce was straitened in every quarter and Italy itself threatened with famine. These vessels he yoked together side by side in a double line extending from one shore to the other. On this broad and well-compacted base he placed an enormous platform of timber; this again he covered with earth and paved it after the manner of a military highroad with stones hewn and laid in cement. He determined to enact on it a peculiar pageant, the novelty and brilliancy of which should transcend every recorded phantasy of Kings or Emperors. From Puteoli to Baiæ the semicircle of the bay was crowded with admiring multitudes; the loungers of the baths and porticos sallied forth from their cool retreats; the promenaders of the Lucrine beach checked their palanquins and chariots and hushed the strains of their delicious symphonies; the terraces of the gorgeous villas, which lined the coasts and breasted the fresh and sparkling ripples, glittered with streamers of a thousand colors and with the bright array of senators and matrons drowning the terrors of a popular uprising which day and night beset them, in shrieks of childish joy and acclamation. The clang of martial music echoed from shore to shore. From Bauli the emperor descended upon the bridge, having first sacrificed to the gods, and chiefly to Neptune and Envy, arrayed in a coat of mail adorned with precious gems which had been worn by Alexander the Great, with his sword by his side, his shield on his arm, and crowned with a chaplet of oak leaves. On horseback, followed by a dense column of soldiers, he traversed the solid footway and charged into Puteoli as a conquering foe. There he indulged his victorious army with a day of rest and expectation. On the morrow he placed himself in a triumphal car and drove back exulting in the garb of a charioteer of the Green at the games of the circus. The mock triumph of this entrance was adorned by pretended captives represented by some royal hostages from Parthia who were at the time in the custody of the Roman government. The army followed in long procession. In the center of the bridge the emperor halted and harangued his soldiers on the greatness of their victory from a tribunal erected for the purpose. He contrasted the narrow stream of the Bosphorus and the Hellespont, only seven stades in width, with the broad ocean which he had yoked with chains; and declared that the exploits of Xerxes and Darius were trifles compared with his mightier enterprise. After wearying both himself and his hearers with this prodigious folly he distributed money among them and invited them to a banquet. At nightfall the bridge and the ships were illuminated with torches and at the signal the whole curving line of the coast shone forth, as in a theater, with innumerable lights.”