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Incitatus, as a senator. Because of Caligula’s profligate spending on lavish
entertainments, pleasure palaces, and extravagant public stunts, the surplus
left by Tiberius in the imperial treasury quickly evaporated, and the
emperor soon imposed huge taxes and restored the treason laws to raise
money by forced legacies and confiscations.
In the provinces, Caligula favored client-kings over Roman governors,
whom he feared would raise armies and rebel against his throne. Indeed,
several high-level conspiracies against him were attempted, including one
that ended in the exile of his two surviving sisters, Julia Livilla and Agrippina
the Younger, mother of the future emperor, Nero. Finally, in ad 41, one
such plot succeeded, and Caligula was assassinated in a secret passageway
of the imperial palace, his neck slashed by Cassius Chaerea, a tribune of
the Praetorian Guard. While the relieved members of the Senate debated
their course of action, whether to reinstate the Republic or establish an
elective Principate, their lack of authority was emphasized when the
Praetorians forcibly installed Claudius as their choice for the next emperor.
As the brother of the popularly revered Germanicus, and the only
surviving adult male in the Julio-Claudian family, the scholarly, shrewd
Claudius enjoyed the support of the army and the populace, and he ruled
Rome until his death in ad 54 (Grant, 280–3).
While the Julio-Claudians were building their dynasty, the eastern part
of the Roman Empire was changing as well. The Robe refers to Palestine,
an ancient region in southwestern Asia, covering a strip of land from Syria
in the north to Samaria and Judaea in the south. When King Herod the
Great, who ruled the area as a client-king under Augustus, died in 4 bc, he
left his kingdom to be disputed over by his three sons. Augustus apportioned
the area into three client kingdoms: Herod Antipas ruled Galilee as
a tetrarch until ad 39; Philip became tetrarch of the Golan heights until
ad 34; and Herod Archelaus became ethnarch, or “national leader,” of
Judaea. After several years of bitter feuds and uprisings among various
communities in the area, Augustus removed Archelaus and established
the province of Judaea in ad 6, making it an autonomous part of the
Roman province of Syria (Grant, 334–42). Since Judaea was a third-class
province, of lesser importance in terms of size and revenue, the administrator
of the new province was a prefect, and the office was filled by a
military man from the order of the equites, or “knights,” not a civilian of
the senatorial class.
Judaea quickly gained a reputation as a difficult place to govern, populated
by troublesome groups of locals, and often prone to riot and rebellion.
Although the capital of the new province was the lovely coastal resort
THE ROBE (1953) 43