The Twelve Caesars by Robert Graves

Author:Robert Graves [Graves, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7953-3764-2
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2014-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

And he nearly assumed a royal diadem then and there, doing away with the pretence that he was merely the chief executive of a republic. However, after his courtiers reminded him that he already outranked any king or tribal chieftain, he insisted on being treated as a god—sending for the most revered or artistically famous statues of the Greek deities (including that of Juppiter at Olympia), and having their heads replaced by his own.

Next, Caligula extended the Palace as far as the Forum; converted the shrine of Castor and Pollux into a vestibule; and would often stand beside these Divine Brethren to be worshipped by all visitants, some of whom addressed him as ‘Latian Juppiter’. He established a shrine to himself as God, with priests, the costliest possible victims, and a life-sized golden image, which was dressed every day in clothes identical with those that he happened to be wearing. All the richest citizens tried to gain priesthoods here, either by influence or bribery. Flamingoes, peacocks, black grouse, guinea-hens, and pheasants were offered as sacrifices, each on a particular day of the month. When the moon shone full and bright he always invited the Moon-goddess to his bed; and during the day would indulge in whispered conversations with Capitoline Juppiter, pressing his ear to the god’s mouth, and sometimes raising his voice in anger. Once he was overheard threatening the god: ‘If you do not raise me up to Heaven I will cast you down to Hell.’ Finally he announced that Juppiter had persuaded him to share his home; and therefore connected the Palace with the Capitol by throwing a bridge across the Temple of the God Augustus; after which he began building a new house inside the precincts of the Capitol itself, in order to live even nearer.

23. Because of Agrippa’s plebeian origin Caligula loathed being described as his grandson, and would fly into a rage if anyone mentioned him, in speech or song, as an ancestor of the Caesars. He nursed a fantasy that his mother had been born of an incestuous union between Augustus and Julia; and not content with thus discrediting Augustus’s name, cancelled the annual commemorations of Agrippa’s victories at Actium and off Sicily, declaring that they had proved the ruin of the Roman people. He called his great-grandmother Livia Augusta a ‘she-Ulysses’, and in a letter to the Senate dared describe her as of low birth—‘her maternal grandfather Aufidius Lurco having been a mere army sergeant from Fundi’—although the public records showed Lurco to have held high office at Rome. When his paternal grandmother Antonia begged him to grant her a private audience he insisted on taking Macro, the Guards Commander, as his escort. Unkind treatment of this sort hurried her to the grave though, according to some, he accelerated the process with poison and, when she died, showed so little respect that he sat in his dining room and watched the funeral pyre burn. One day he sent a colonel to kill young

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