Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

by Tom Holland

So highly did the Roman people prize this ideal of the common good that their name for it – res publica – served as shorthand for their entire system of government.

Meanwhile, in Rome, in legionary camps and in cities across the empire, hard men spoke fine words and methodically planned for war. And wolves, in lofty cities, made the nights echo with their howls.

Amid the blackened fields and bandit-haunted woods of Etruria, phantoms could easily seem a more vivid presence than the living.

What mattered to the Roman people was no longer who won, but simply that there be a definitive winner. Bloodied and exhausted, they had grown too war-weary to care very much who ruled them – just so long as they were granted peace.

Augustus, who in almost everything save his ambition was deeply conservative, had far too much respect for tradition ever to think of having such a venerable memorial removed from the Forum.

‘When Augustus was absent from Rome, the people were fractious – and when he was present, they behaved themselves.’

No man could be reckoned truly a man who was the slave of his own desires.

When Ovid strolled up to Apollo’s temple on the Palatine, or haunted the shady colonnades raised on the site of Vedius’s palace, or visited the arches of Pompey’s theatre, it was not to admire the architecture. He was scoping out girls.

A citizen was made, not born. A male, after all, was not necessarily a man.

A brothel was not so different from a latrine: dirty and disreputable, yes, but serving an essential purpose as a receptacle of human waste.

Wolf-bred though a Roman was, his proficiency at inflicting slaughter was not that of a wild beast. Training, rigid and relentless, had forged him into a single link in a mighty chain. A soldier was not permitted to marry: his comrades were all he had.

cunning. A murder that left no traces was, notoriously, muliebris fraus,112 ‘a woman’s machination’.

All the same, the price paid by Tiberius was crippling. Rigid of principle, awkward of manner, hypocrisy did not come nearly as naturally to him as it had done to Augustus.

History and philosophy, art and savoir faire: the city had it all. ‘Athens, once mistress over waves and land, has now made Greece a slave to beauty.’40

‘The best cure for a civil war is to forget that it ever happened.’58 Silence, though, could sometimes be deafening.

Since it would naturally have been an offence against the most sacred traditions of the Roman people to put a virgin to death, the executioner made sure to rape her first.

Back in 12 BC, Augustus had confiscated and burned more than two thousand books which claimed to reveal the future; two years into Tiberius’s reign, the Senate had ordered all astrologers out of Italy. Particularly prominent ones risked being thrown off a cliff. Knowledge of where the world was heading had become far too sensitive to be permitted the average citizen.

To the Roman people, privacy was something inherently unnatural. It permitted aberrant and sinister instincts free rein.

citizens. No rumour of his perversities was so hideous that it could not be believed in Rome. That he had trained little boys to slip between his thighs as he went swimming and tease him with their licking; that he had put unweaned babies to the head of his penis, as though to a mother’s breast; even, most repellently of all, that he enjoyed cunnilingus.

Bloodstained pervert and philosopher-king: it took a man of rare paradox to end up being seen as both.

The Senate itself, like a battered wife frantic to forestall a beating, had made sure, in the first days of Caligula’s reign, to deny him nothing.

Truth be told, the fondness of Claudians for their siblings had long been a cause of suspicion. Back in the dying days of the Republic, Clodius’s intimacy with his three sisters had provoked dark and delighted accusations of incest.

What Capri had been to Tiberius, the whole of Rome was now to his heir: a theatre of cruelty and excess.

Yet it was Claudius who had enjoyed the last laugh. Though the odds had always been stacked against him, he had demonstrated an unexpected ability to play them. In the supreme crisis of his life, he had placed a bet that had won him the world. Not since Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon had there been quite so blatant a military coup.

the complete lack of interest he had always shown in forcing himself on male partners marked Claudius out as a true eccentric. Not that people particularly disapproved – for it was the way of the world that different men had different foibles, and just as some might prefer blondes and others brunettes, so were there a few who only ever fucked females, and a few who only ever fucked males.

Weighing up whether to have his friend put to death or merely banished to the limits of the world, he opted for the course of mercy, dispatching Otho to Lusitania, out on the Atlantic margins of Iberia, there to serve as its governor.

‘In a similar manner, nothing is better able to brainwash and enslave us than the dazzle of spectacle.’34

Claudius, with the perspective that came from his deep reading in history, had made this argument with typical subtlety and erudition. ‘Everything we now believe to be the essence of tradition,’ he had reminded his fellow senators, ‘was a novelty once.’44

A sobering reflection, to be sure: that to serve as the capital of the world might render Rome less Roman.

‘No matter how many people you put to death,’ Seneca had told him in the wake of Agrippina’s murder, ‘you can never kill your successor.’