Caligula by Stephen Dando-Collins;

Author:Stephen Dando-Collins;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

XIX

SHOCKS IN GAUL

Shortly after September 19, AD 39, following the five days of chariot racing that culminated the long program of the Great Games, the emperor moved to the suburbs of Rome, leaving the new consuls Afer and Gallus in charge at the capital. It’s highly likely that his party—now in the suburbs with Caligula—included his wife and two sisters, King Agrippa and King Antiochus of Commagene, the emperor’s brothers-in-law Lepidus and Vinicius, and a clutch of senators including Galba. They would have been joined by a Praetorian prefect and the commander of the German Guard, as well as senior Palatium staff.

Josephus tells us that when Agrippa returned to Rome that year to rejoin Caligula’s court, he remembered an old promise and purchased the freedom of Caligula’s slave Thaumustus. This was the same slave who’d given him water when he was being taken away in chains from Tiberius’s villa at Tusculum three years earlier. Agrippa subsequently sent Thaumustus to the Middle East to manage his estates there. Thaumustus would serve Agrippa until the king’s death, after which he faithfully served Agrippa’s son and daughter.169

Soon after leaving the city proper, the emperor, his courtiers, and a massive entourage including actors and gladiators, departed Italy unannounced. Suetonius thought it scandalous that actors, gladiators, women, and horses were in the imperial party, but all had their role to play in what was to follow. The gladiators in question would have been the twenty Thracians of Caligula’s personal troupe, whom he would pit against all comers at games in Gaul, most particularly at Lugdunum, today’s Lyon in central France, where he planned to spend the winter. The actors, too, would appear at the games, in theatrical shows.

By far the largest contingent in the imperial party was made up of troops—cohorts of his German Guard bodyguard and several cohorts of the Praetorian Guard, plus the men and horses from an ala (wing) or two of the Praetorian Horse. Perhaps as much as half the now enlarged Praetorian Guard—six thousand men—was heading north. In all, the emperor’s escort is likely to have involved more than ten thousand troops. The entourage would also have included hundreds, if not thousands, of servants of the emperor and his courtiers—doctors, secretaries, cooks, bakers, stewards, valets, dressers, hairdressers, and handmaids. In the imperial court, there were even slaves whose only job was to maintain the water clocks, while others collected cobwebs as a remedy against the emperor’s shaving cuts.

Caligula’s route and mode of transport for reaching Gaul was not recorded by the ancient authorities, but modern scholars have tended to assume that Caligula and his party traveled overland all the way, through northern Italy to the south of France. However, we know that during his reign Caligula had the habit of using ships of the war fleet based close to Rome at Misenum. Plus, it’s recorded that when the next emperor made this exact same trip to Gaul with a similarly large party not many years later, he traveled by sea from Ostia, port of Rome, to the port of Massalia in Narbonne Gaul, today’s Marseille.

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