[...] 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 grounded -- with none to cremate or touch them. Terror had
paralyzed human sympathy. The rising surge of brutality drove compassion 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 these chronicles highly accessible, Suetonius has always been
widely read.
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 known as The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. The
character and administration of Caligula present some striking parallels with the subject
of the present book.
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 crowd applauded 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 of his 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 the persons 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