numerous unrecorded incidents, which have come to my attention, ought to be known.
[...] Even women were in danger. They could not be charged with aiming at supreme power. So
they were charged with weeping: one old lady was executed for lamenting her son's death. The
senate decided this case. [...] In the same year the high price of corn nearly caused riots. [...]
Frenzied with bloodshed, [Tiberius] now ordered the execution of all those arrested for complicity
with Sejanus. It was a massacre. Without discrimination of sex or age, eminence or obscurity, there
they lay, strewn about-- or in heaps. Relative and friends were forbidden to stand by or lament
them, or even gaze for long. Guards surrounded them, spying on their sorrow, and escorted the
rotting bodies until, dragged to the Tiber, they floated away or groundetouch them. Terror had paralyzed human sympathy. The rising surge of brutality drove compassiond -- with none to cremate or (^)
away. [fn 12]
This is the same Tiberius administration so extravagantly praised by Velleius Paterculus.
The other Latin author who writes about these Julio-Claudian emperors was Gaius Suetonius
Tranquillus, who is far less able than Tacitus to fathom the great issues of imperial policy which
these degenerate emperors influenced. Suetonius is a tabloid version of Tacitus, and he concentrates
on the horrors and perversions of the emperors in their personal sphere, as well as the bloodbaths
they ordered. Since many readers over the centuries have found tSuetonius has always been widely read. hese chronicles highly accessible,
Because of lacunae in the manuscripts of Tacitus's work that have come down to us, much of what
we know of the rule of Caligula (Gaius Caesar, in power from 37 to 41 AD) derives from
Suetonius's book knowCaligula present some striking parallels with the subject of the present book. n as The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. The character and administration of
As a stoic, Caligula was a great admirer of his own "immovable rigor." His motto was "Remember
that I have the right to do anything to anybody." He made no secret of his bloodthirsty
vindictiveness. Caligula was a fan of the green team in the Roman arena, and when the crowdapplauded a charioteer who wore a different color, Caligula cried out, "I wish the Roman people (^)
had but a single neck." At one of his state dinners Caligula burst into a fit of uncontrollable
laughter, and when a consul asked him what was so funny, he replied that it was the thought that as
emperor Caligula had the power to have the throats of the top officials cut at any time he chose.
Caligula carried this same attitude into his personal life: whenever he kissed or caressed the neck ofhis wife or one of his mistresses, he liked to remark: "Off comes this beautiful head whenever I give (^)
the word."
Above all, Caligula was vindictive. After his death, two notebooks were found among his personal
papers, one labelled "The Sword" and the other labelled "The Dagger." These were lists of thepersons he had proscribed and liquidated, and were the forerunners of the enemies' lists and
discrediting committee of today. Suetonius frankly calls Caligula "a monster," and speculates on the
psychological roots of his criminal disposition: "I think I may attribute to mental weakness the
existence of two exactly opposite faults in the same person, extreme assurance and, on the other
hand, excessive timorousness." Caligula was "full of threats" against "the barbarians," but at thesame time prone to precipitous retreats and flights of panic. Caligula worked on his "body
language" by "practicing all kinds of terrible and fearsome expressions before a mirror."
Caligula built an extension of his palace to connect with the Temple of Castor and Pollux, and often
went there to exhibit himself as an object of public worship, delighting in being hailed as "Jupiter