He then discovered a new source of funds in the execution of the wealthier nobles. Brutal and sanguinary from the first, his growing madness and his delight in gladiatorial shows fostered his cruelty. He had an actor burned alive in the Forum for venturing even to hint, in an ambiguous phrase, that the Imperial behaviour was reprehensible. Others he had tortured and executed in his presence, in order that he might enjoy the sensation of seeing them suffer. But it was mainly in quest of money to maintain his terrible expenditure that he stooped to the lowest excesses. No man of wealth in Rome was safe. Informers were eager for the fourth part of a victim’s property, to which they were entitled after a successful impeachment; Caligula hungered for the remaining three-fourths. Every ten days he would “clear his accounts,” as he put it, or doom to death any wealthy Senators whom he had chosen to put on his list of suspects. He would return from the court boasting to Cæsonia of the heavy work he had done while she slept. A great terror brooded over the city, and men talked of the Emperor in whispers. Omens and signs multiplied. The statue of Jupiter Olympus had been brought to Rome, and one day the workmen rushed in alarm from the temple in which it was placed, crying that the marble god had burst into a fit of laughter.
On January 24th, in the year 41, this appalling gloom came to an end, and the third Emperor and fourth Empress of Rome were justly removed. The long hesitation of the Romans must not too readily be ascribed to cowardice. The Prætorian Guards were now encamped at the edge of the city, and were richly paid for personal loyalty to the Emperor; so that there was very faint hope of a successful rising of the citizens. For the greater part these formidable soldiers were mercenaries, caring nothing for the honour of Rome, faithful as dogs to the liberal master. It was not until an officer of this regiment headed a conspiracy that any action could be taken with a prospect of success. This officer was a favourite of Caligula, but the Imperial friendship was expressed in such coarse and stinging epithets that he was driven to rebel. He and his associates determined to assassinate Caligula when he attended the Palatine games in the later part of January. A large wooden theatre had been erected for the occasion, and Caligula presided with delight at the repulsive spectacles. Such was the popular enthusiasm that the conspirators surrounded Caligula day after day without daring to touch him. His German guard, insensible to the grievances of the Romans, would at once and blindly oppose a rising, and the people seemed to have forgotten his tyranny in the blood-reeking show he had provided for them.
They came to the fifth and final day of the games. Caligula was unwell, and wished to remain in the palace, but he was persuaded to make an effort to attend the final performance. Before a vast audience the actors represented the crucifixion of a band of robbers, and the stage was washed with blood. The chief actor of the time had a trick of pouring blood from his mouth, and the other actors clumsily imitated him. When it was over, Caligula, elated with the wild applause of the citizens, entered the narrow passage which led from the theatre to his house on the Palatine. The conspirators seized their last chance, and fell upon the Emperor with their swords. Within a few hours Rome so far changed that it was the turn of the partisans of Caligula to tremble. His body was removed and stealthily buried by Herod Agrippa.
Cæsonia seems to have remained in, or preceded Caligula to, the palace, with her little daughter. There the cries of the guard and the noisy confusion in the palace would soon announce the disaster to her. She had no time to escape, or devise any policy. A centurion rushed to her room and stabbed her to death. Her infant was roughly seized by a soldier, and its brain was shattered on the walls of the palace, where the brief infamies of its father and mother had degraded the civilization of Rome.
CHAPTER IV
VALERIA MESSALINA
The fall of Cæsonia was hardly less romantic than the succession to her position of the woman who is known to every reader of Roman history, and to many others, as Messalina. When Caligula entered the narrow passage leading to the Palatine, after the performance in the theatre, a few members of his suite walked before him. One of these was his uncle Claudius, a slow-witted and despised man, in his fiftieth year, whom Caligula had rescued from humiliation and put in office. He had already entered the palace when the raucous cries of the German guard and the flash of weapons informed him of the assassination of the Emperor. The guards were cutting down such of the conspirators as they could reach. In instinctive terror Claudius hid behind a curtain, nor was he reassured when he saw the soldiers pass with the heads of the nobles they had slain. Presently a soldier of the Prætorian Guard noticed his feet below the curtain, and drew him out. Claudius fell to the ground in terror, and implored them to spare his life. The soldiers had recognized him, however. They put him in a litter, and carried him on their shoulders to the camp. Citizens whom they passed in the street pitied the harmless and, as was generally believed, half-witted prince. At last some one learned, or divined, the purpose of the guards, and Claudius awoke from his terror to hear the strange cry of “Salve, Imperator,” and realized that he was to be made Emperor of Rome.
He had been married three years before to Valeria Messalina, who thus became the fifth Empress. As the youngest son of Drusus, brother of Tiberius, and Antonia, daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia, he was the natural heir to Caligula. The Imperial power was in no sense hereditary, but the attachment of the Prætorian Guards to the ruling family, and their irresistible domination over Rome, for some time ensured a kind of hereditary succession. There had, however, been no deliberate proposal to put Claudius on the throne. While the future of the Empire was being determined by the rough mercenaries in the Prætorian camp, where Claudius promised a substantial largess for his elevation, the Senate was actually discussing the question of restoring the Republic. Somewhat deformed in person, clumsy in gait and corpulent, stuttering in speech, deficient at least in the power of expression, Claudius had always been regarded as a negligible offshoot of the Julian stock. His mother had spoken of him as “a little monster,” Octavian had genially treated him as half-witted, and, when he arrived at early manhood, Tiberius had refused to give him any rank or office. Caligula, however, had given him consular rank, and promoted him in the palace, though he treated his uncle with the brutal jocularity which his mental infirmity was held to justify.
We shall see that this treatment was far from just, for Claudius had some excellent qualities; but the disdain of his family threw him upon the society of his servants, and led him to seek consolation in the pleasures of the table and the dice-board. He had in early youth been betrothed to a daughter of Julia. This contract was dissolved when Julia’s vices were discovered, and he was married to a young lady of distinguished and wealthy family, Livia Medullina Camilla. She died on the wedding-day, and he married Plautia Urgulanilla, a daughter of the Empress Livia’s intimate friend, Urgulania. Suspecting, after a few years, that her friendship with his emancipated-slave friends was warmer than he intended, he divorced her, and married Ælia Pætina, who in turn was shortly divorced.
In the year 38 he married the notorious Valeria Messalina, whose name conveys to every student of history or morals a summary impression of the worst features of the early Empire. The spirit of our time is so resolutely bent on visiting the sins of the children on their fathers—so determined to seek the secret of character in heredity—that the older biographical practice of drawing out genealogies cannot be entirely abandoned; though one may wonder whether the tainted atmosphere of Rome may not have been more deadly than a tainted stock. It is enough to say that both her parents were of the Julian family, and were first cousins of Claudius. Her father, Valerius Messala Barbatus, was a Senator of distinction. He is known to us as the Senator who, in the old Roman spirit, made a futile effort to restrain women from invading public life and the camp. Her mother has a less reputable record. We shall see that she eventually falls under a charge of conspiracy and magic; but we may find that her more serious offence was an intense hatred of the Empress Agrippina, who brought the charge against her.