A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (24 page)

When he wasn’t ravaging his sisters, other men’s wives served just as well, including one on her wedding day. “Hands off my wife,” Caligula warned the groom sitting across from him at the reception feast. He then had the bride carried off to his palace and married her himself. Within a week he tired of her and they were divorced. Caligula had his eyes set on another woman, but that relationship didn’t last long, either. After they split, the emperor forbade her from ever sleeping with another man.

It must have been difficult for any of Caligula’s lovers to feel completely comfortable in his arms. “And this beautiful throat will be cut whenever I please,” he would coo whenever he kissed the neck of his mistresses. Still, his love for a woman named Caesonia was almost touching. Though she was neither young nor beautiful, and something of a tramp, Caligula was smitten. So much so that he paraded her naked in front of his friends. Happy as he was, though, he refused to dignify Caesonia with the title of wife until she bore him a child. She obliged him with a baby girl.

Despite the brief period of domestic harmony, the little family was doomed. The people who had once adored “Little Boots” had discovered what a bastard he could be. Fed up, they turned on him. Less than four years after being joyfully hailed as the new emperor, Caligula was assassinated in A.D. 41. Caesonia also was murdered, along with her baby daughter, whose brains were reportedly bashed out against a brick wall. No one was interested in seeing that family line propagated.

 

 

I
f you believe Suetonius, Caligula’s uncle and successor, Claudius, was every bit as stupid as his nephew was nuts—and almost as cruel. An ugly, uncouth clod, he was called “a monster: A man whom Nature had not finished but had merely begun,” by his own mother. Antonia’s maternal pride was such that when she wanted to emphasize someone else’s stupidity she would exclaim, “He is a bigger fool even than my son Claudius!”

Other family members held similar opinions. When his sister Livilla heard someone predict that Claudius would one day inherit the imperial throne, she dropped to her knees and prayed aloud that Rome would be spared such a horrible fate. He was such a buffoon that, even in the midst of the bloodbath of other family members, Caligula kept him alive just for laughs.

Claudius, in fact, had a tough time commanding respect from anyone before he came to the throne. When he fell asleep after dinner, as was his tendency, the gathered guests would pelt him with dates and olive pits. He later tried to explain away his stupidity, saying it was merely an act that served him well during the reign of his vicious nephew. Few were convinced, however, including the author of a contemporary book called
A Fool’s Rise to Power.

Claudius certainly seemed to justify the book’s title when he heard himself proclaimed emperor at the age of fifty. A glorious occasion it was not. He was hiding behind a curtain at the time, cowering in fear, having just heard of the assassination of Caligula. When a guard saw his feet poking out and drew aside the curtain to see who it was, Claudius dropped to the floor and clung to the soldier’s knees pleading for mercy. He was far from reassured by the proclamation that he now ruled, whimpering that he would be destroyed by the same forces that had done in his nephew. It was only when he heard the crowd chanting for monarchy that he began to relax and eventually flex his muscles.

After a brief honeymoon, with Claudius making a great show of benevolence and amiability, things started to get ugly. The new emperor was basically a simpleton with a bad attitude, and his vicious inner-child soon emerged with a vengeance. Like his predecessors, he loved presiding over tortures, executions, and fights to the death. Gladiatorial contests enjoyed the addition of some whimsical new rules introduced by the emperor. He decreed, for example, that any fighter who fell accidentally should have his throat slit—in full view, so Claudius could observe the death throes. At one scheduled mass execution, Claudius became violently annoyed when an executioner could not be found to kill the group of condemned that were tied up to stakes and ready to be dispatched. Determined not to miss an opportunity to satisfy his lust for blood, Claudius summoned an executioner from outside the region and, with nothing better to do, sat around all day waiting for his arrival.

His cruelty was by no means diminished by his stupidity, however. After executing one of his wives, Messalina, for adultery, bigamy, and treason, he apparently forgot what he had done and asked where she was at dinner one night. Another time, he sent for some men to play dice with him. Irate when they failed to appear at his command, he fired off an angry missive calling them lazy—completely oblivious to the fact that he had already ordered them executed.

Despite his ruthlessness, or perhaps because of it, Claudius never sat comfortably on his throne. He was convinced that he would be killed and, as a result, showed himself to be a monumental coward as well as savagely paranoid. Anyone perceived as a threat he would have killed, including members of his own family. Claudius’s paranoia became an effective tool for the scores of people who wielded influence over him in getting rid of people they didn’t like.

When his treacherous wife, Messalina, and his secretary, Narcissus, decided to remove one enemy, Appius Silanus, they settled on a plan that had worked for others before. They agreed that Narcissus would alert Claudius to horrible dreams he was having about the emperor’s murder by Appius. With that cue, Messalina would awaken from a fake sleep and pretend to be astonished, saying she had been having the very same dream. The couple had already arranged to have Appius summoned to the emperor, so that when he arrived they could say he was forcing himself in, just as their dreams had foretold. Not surprisingly, the ruse worked, and Appius was dragged away and killed.

Claudius so feared for his life that he bravely tried to abdicate on several occasions. After one man was arrested carrying a knife Claudius believed was meant to kill him, he summoned the Senate in a panic. The emperor broke down in tears and protested loudly that he wasn’t safe anywhere. He then disappeared from the public eye for several days to nurse his fears. After hearing of another plot, this time to kill him and put Messalina’s lover on the throne, Claudius fled in terror to his guards’ camp while repeating over and over, “Am I still Emperor?”

In the end, all his fears were justified. He had executed one dangerous spouse, Messalina, but another soon took her place. Her name was Agrippina the Younger, one of Caligula’s sisters and Claudius’s own niece. She spent years grasping for power, and once having achieved it, completely dominated the emperor. Her influence was such that she was able to persuade Claudius to adopt her son Nero and disinherit his natural son by Messalina, Brittanicus. Then, in A.D. 54, she had Claudius poisoned.

 

 

C
laudius’s porcine successor, Nero, had a series of singularly unpleasant experiences with women. This may have had something to do with the fact that he was a feral, sadistic, sexually depraved lunatic—even if he never actually fiddled while Rome burned. Still, you would think he might have found some respect and affection in his heart for Agrippina the Younger, if not because she gave him life from her loins, then because she arranged the murder of his predecessor to make him Caesar.

But Agrippina crossed the line. She was his mom but she also reportedly became his lover, and, in that dual role, she developed into something of a nag. Nero did not take nagging well. According to Suetonius, Nero deprived his mother-lover of all honors and power before booting her out of the palace. After she moved, he sent people to her house to torment her with lawsuits and scream insults into her windows.

Then he set out to kill her.

Three times he tried poison, but she always seemed to have the antidote. He rigged her bedroom ceiling so it would collapse while she was sleeping, but someone warned her in advance. One time he had a boat sabotaged so it would fall to pieces and sink while Agrippina was sailing on it. Sure this plan would work, Nero happily accompanied his unsuspecting mother down the gangplank—kissing her breasts as she stepped aboard. She swam away from the wreck. Finally, he had her stabbed to death and exulted over her corpse.

Nero’s other relationships fared no better than the one with mom. He tried strangling his first wife, Octavia, on several occasions because she bored him. Finally he simply divorced her and later had her executed. Twelve days after the divorce he married Poppaea Salina, the wealthy wife of a Roman knight whom Nero had to kill to make room for himself. Though he doted on her, Poppaea also proved to be a pest. When she had the temerity to complain when he returned home late from the races, the emperor kicked her to death. She was pregnant. Considering his track record, Claudius’s daughter Antonia refused an invitation to become the next Mrs. Nero. She was charged with attempted rebellion and summarily executed.

Women! Who needed them anyway, especially when young men could fill the void quite nicely. Nero at one point had an adolescent boy castrated so he could take him as his wife. There was a wedding ceremony, complete with dowry and bridal veil. Then the emperor began squiring the unfortunate lad around Rome in the late empress’s clothes. Both men and women were lucky enough to participate in a novel game Nero invented. According to the rules, the frisky emperor would dress up in the skin of a wild animal and pace around in his cage. When the cage door was opened, he would bound out, run up to his play-mates, who were tied up to stakes, and attack their private parts.

Eventually, even Rome’s notoriously licentious citizenry had enough of Nero’s nonsense. He was hounded into suicide. Savage and nutty as he was, though, this emperor deserves a little credit. He did banish all mimes from Rome.

 

 

T
he death of Nero in A.D. 68 was followed by civil wars and the brief and insignificant reigns of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius. All three came and went within about a year.

Galba’s biggest claim to fame during his seven months in power was his grossly undignified demise. After being murdered, as was the established pattern among Roman emperors, Galba was decapitated by a private soldier. Being completely bald, the dead emperor’s severed head was difficult to grasp, so the soldier improvised and carried it to Otho, the new emperor, with his thumb stuffed into its mouth.

Otho then handed off the head to the gathered crowd, who carried it away on a spike. They made wicked fun of the gruesome trophy, chanting insults. Galba had once made a bit of an ass out of himself by quoting Homer in response to a passing compliment on his robust appearance. “So far my vigor undiminished is,” he said at the time. The mob now gleefully responded: “Galba, Galba, Cupid Galba, Please enjoy your vigor still!”

Otho, who with his own supplanter, Vitellius, led the assassination of Galba, earns distinction for instigating what was perhaps the most pathetic scene in all of antiquity before he came to power. He had been one of Emperor Nero’s chief cohorts during that reign, arranging, for example, the murder of Nero’s mother. Because of his close connection to the throne, Otho must have considered himself immune from Nero’s wrath. How else to explain what happened next?

He was put in charge of protecting Poppaea Sabina, whom Nero had stolen from her husband to have for himself. Otho, however, fell madly in love with her and decided to steal her from the boss. Ordinarily this would have been a fatal mistake, but for some reason he got away with it. As Suetonius reports, instead of ordering the rival suitor killed, Nero stood outside the locked door of the room where Otho and Poppaea were staying and pleaded for his girl. He was ignored. Like Galba, Otho didn’t last long as emperor; defeated in the civil war by his rival to the throne, Vitellius, he stabbed himself to death.

Rounding out this triumverate of flash-in-the-pan emperors, all of whom were deposed in the year A.D. 69, Vitellius came from a family of professional bootlickers. He distinguished himself by kissing the behinds of four emperors in a row, in one case quite literally, before coming to power himself. According to Suetonius, Vitellius spent his boyhood and adolescence as a member of Emperor Tiberius’s stable of male prostitutes, earning in the process public promotions for his equally obsequious father. A debauchee himself, Vitellius naturally was a hit with Caligula, who admired his chariot-racing skills, and Claudius, who loved tossing dice with him. Nero in particular was a big fan, for Vitellius rendered a service near and dear to this emperor.

Fancying himself quite a musician, Nero was always eager to compete in musical contests, but had to feign modesty. That’s where good old Vitellius came in. While Nero would leave the theater and pretend to disappear, Vitellius would rev up the audience with the idea of convincing their emperor to play for them. Then Vitellius would chase down the apparently reluctant Nero and, on behalf of the people, beg him to play.

After he won the throne from Otho, Vitellius became decadent in his gluttony. Surviving coins from his era faithfully reproduce the fat rings overwhelming the back of his head. One of his favorite dishes, with ingredients shipped in from all over the Roman empire, consisted of pike livers, pheasant and peacock brains, flamingo tongues, and lamprey milt, which are the male reproductive organs of the fish. But Vitellius would eat just about anything, snatching sacrificial foods off altars or devouring half-eaten food scraps left over from the day before.

Like those of his two predecessors, Vitellius’s reign was very brief. He was captured trying to escape the forces of future Emperor Vespasian, trapped like a dog in his hiding place—a janitor’s closet with a bed and mattress jammed against the door. Yanked out by rebels looting the palace, Vitellius at first tried to deny he was the emperor but was quickly recognized. His hands were tied behind his back and a noose was flung around his neck. Then, amid a jeering crowd, he was dragged away half-naked to the Forum, his remaining clothes in tatters. Excrement was thrown at him, while people screeched “glutton” and similar insults. Finally, he was tortured by the soldiers with little sword cuts,
à la
Caligula, before he was at last dispatched and tossed into the Tiber River.