Sublime

When Gaius was acclaimed emperor on Tiberius’ death in 37 CE, he must have seemed like a welcome change. Just twenty-four years old, he had as good a claim to the throne as any Julio-Claudian could hope for. His mother, Agrippina, was the daughter of Julia, and so the granddaughter of Augustus in his direct bloodline. His father, Germanicus – once

Pliny the Elder, trying later to arrive at a headcount of Caesar’s victims, seems strikingly modern in accusing him of ‘a crime against humanity’.

‘The first death under the new emperor,’ he starts, implying that there were many more to follow, was that of Marcus Junius Silanus Torquatus, the governor of Asia. He was a man of no ambition whatsoever, so shamelessly apathetic, Tacitus explains, that Gaius had aptly nicknamed him the Golden Sheep. But his death was inevitable, and the reason obv

At the end of 45 BCE he caused a particular stir when the death of one of the sitting consuls was announced on the very last day of the year. Caesar instantly convened an assembly to elect one of his friends, Caius Caninius Rebilus, to the vacant post for just half a day. This prompted a flood of jokes from Cicero: Caninius was such an extraordinar

Clodius’ subsequent reputation for outright villainy has been almost entirely formed by Cicero’s enmity. He has gone down in history as the mad patrician who not only arranged to be adopted into a plebeian family in order to stand for the tribunate but also put two fingers up to the whole process by choosing an adoptive father younger than himself.

Unlike his elder brother, Gaius somehow succeeded in being elected tribune twice. But, in murky circumstances, he failed to be elected again for 121 BCE. In that year he resisted the efforts of the consul Lucius Opimius, a diehard who became something of a hero to the conservatives, to cancel much of his legislation. In the process he was killed, o