A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Sejanus was now in almost sole control in Rome and seems to have spent his time making
accusations against knights and ensuring that they were executed or committed suicide. In 23 A.D.
he poisoned Tiberius’s son Drusus, making it look like a disease. But with a master as
pathologically suspicious as Tiberius, Sejanus was bound to make a mistake. He was arrested and
accused of conspiracy; after execution, his body was thrown to the rabble, who abused it for three
days. Sejanus’s three children were also executed; the girl of fourteen was a virgin, and protected
by Roman law, so the executioner raped her before killing her. On hearing rumours that his son
Drusus had been murdered, Tiberius instituted another reign of terror that continued more or less
unchecked until his death six years later. Citizens were tried and executed on the slightest of
pretexts. When he finally died, at the age of seventy-eight - probably smothered by his chief
henchman - the people of Rome went wild with joy.
It is only fair to add that some historians regard the accusations of sexual perversion contained in
Suetonius and Tacitus as mere gossip, and believe that Tiberius withdrew to Capri because he could
not tolerate the corruption and vice of his capital. This could be true; but the record of men tried
and executed on absurd pretexts could hardly be faked. In fact, what happened to Tiberius begins to
seem monotonously inevitable when we study the history of Rome. Faced with adversity or
interesting challenges, he was admirable; when allowed to do whatever he liked, he became the
victim of his emotions and of boredom. It was a lack of what we have called the stabilising force,
‘force C’, that turned him into a criminal. Lacking imagination, lacking any deeper religious or
philosophical interest, the Romans needed practical problems to bring out the best in them; success
left them at the mercy of their own worst qualities.
This is even more appallingly obvious in the case of the man Tiberius appointed as his successor,
Gaius Caligula. He was twenty-five when he took over, and he immediately increased his already
considerable popularity by showering gifts of money on the people and holding magnificent
gladiatorial contests. His pleasure in spending money amounted to a mania. He had ships anchored
in a double line three miles long and covered with earth and planks so that he could ride back and
forth; for a soothsayer had once remarked that Caligula had no more chance of becoming emperor
than he had of riding dry shod over the Bay of Baiae.
It soon became clear that absolute power had driven him insane. He announced that he was a god
and that Jupiter had asked him to share his home. He committed incest with his three sisters, on the
grounds that it was the correct thing for a god to do - Jupiter having slept with his sister Juno. And
he began to kill with total abandon, without any of Tiberius’s pretence of legality. One day, when
he was fencing with a gladiator with a wooden sword, the man fell down deliberately; Caligula
pulled out a dagger, stabbed him to death, then ran around flourishing the bloodstained weapon as
evidence that he had won. One day when he was presiding at a sacrifice in the temple - at which he
was supposed to stun a beast with a mallet - he swung the mallet at the priest who was supposed to
cut its throat and knocked him unconscious; it was his idea of a joke. At one of his banquets he
began to laugh, and when politely asked the cause of his mirth, answered: ‘It just occurred to me
that I only have to give one nod and your throats will be cut.’ When he was told the price of raw
meat for the wild animals in the circus, he decided that it would be cheaper to feed them on
criminals; he had a row of malefactors lined up and told the soldiers: ‘Kill every man between that
bald head and the one over there.’ He called Rome: ‘The city of necks waiting for me to chop
them.’ And when he ran out of money, he adopted the now time-honoured system of accusing rich
men of various crimes and seizing their property. His favourite method of execution was what
might be called ‘the death of a thousand cuts’, in which hundreds of small wounds were inflicted.