The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

If Augustus himself- not to mention his daughter – could set such a bad example, what could he expect of the rest of Rome? Augustus could use the empire’s wealth to rebuild Rome in marble, to clear the roads of robbers, to set up the city’s first police force and a fire-fighting service that would extinguish blazes without preliminary bargaining; he could banish Ovid, who wrote The Art of Love, and shower favours on Virgil, who wrote about the fields and wanted to see a return of the old ways; but the mob wanted their entertainments and free hand-outs, and Augustus had to keep them happy with an increasing number of public holidays and spectacular shows until in the end there were holidays on 117 days of the year. And with so much money in circulation, upper-class Romans devoted themselves to entertainment, overeating and sex. Augustus tried to remedy the situation with laws – he even passed a law that regulated how much wine a man could drink with his meals – but they were unenforceable. When he finally died, in 14 A.D., Augustus had brought Rome peace and prosperity, but there was nothing he could do about its now incorrigible criminality.

His successor, Tiberius, Livia’s son by her first husband, was a sour, withdrawn, introverted man who was fifty-six when he became emperor. In his early manhood he showed himself to be a brave soldier. He was married to Vipsania, with whom he was deeply in love, when his step-sister Julia (Augustus’s daughter) fell in love with him; Augustus ordered him to divorce his wife and marry Julia – such marital rearrangements being common among the Roman aristocracy, where marriage was made to seal political bonds. Tiberius did as he was told – he had no choice – but he never reconciled himself to Julia, whose sexual demands exhausted him. In his mid-thirties, he voluntarily exiled himself to the island of Rhodes – or, more probably, was exiled by Augustus at Julia’s instigation – and spent seven years there. Restored to favour, he again performed excellently as a soldier, suppressing a revolt in Illyria; his obsessive strictness made him disliked by his soldiers, but he is quoted as saying: ‘Let them hate me so long as they obey me.’ Julia had presented Augustus with three grandsons, who might have been regarded as having greater claims to the imperial crown than Tiberius; but two of them died under mysterious circumstances – probably murdered by Livia – and the third was murdered immediately after Augustus’s death. So in 14 A.D. Tiberius became ‘Princeps’, the first man in Rome.

As emperor he proved to be as strict a disciplinarian as he had been when a general; and made a determined attempt to improve the morals of Rome by making laws against adultery. Suetonius offers us a glimpse of the morality of the period when he says: ‘When one Roman knight had sworn that he would never divorce his wife whatever she did, but found her in bed with his son, Tiberius absolved him from his oath. Married women of good family were beginning to ply openly as prostitutes… All such offenders were now exiled…’ He made himself unpopular with the mob by cutting down on their ‘bread and circuses’. Suetonius is convinced that Tiberius’s strictness was disguised sadism – as, for example, when he ordered all the witnesses in some obscure law case to be tortured to try to clarify the evidence.

For the first dozen years of his reign, Tiberius followed conscientiously in the footsteps of Augustus, and his occasional savageries were excused as military severity. Then his most trusted adviser, Sejanus – prefect of the guard – persuaded him to move away from Rome to Capri, pointing out that Tiberius was so much disliked in Rome that his presence there did no good. (In fact, Sejanus was hoping to succeed Tiberius as emperor.) There, Tiberius seems to have thrown off all restraint and to have devoted himself to various sexual perversions he had developed in his younger days. Suetonius describes with relish the rooms furnished with indecent paintings and statues, in which Tiberius took his pleasure both with boys and girls. He alleges that Tiberius trained little boys to chase him when he went swimming and to nibble his penis, and that he had bands of young men and women trained in ‘unnatural practices’. ‘The story goes that once, while sacrificing, he took an erotic fancy to the acolyte who was carrying the incense casket and could hardly wait for the ceremony to end before hurrying him and his brother, the sacred trumpeter, out of the temple and indecently assaulting them both. When they protested at this dastardly crime he had their legs broken.’

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.