It soon became apparent that the cause behind the removal of the man who would have initially been destined to guide the affairs of the state was not a clash of two personalities, shall we say, but Caligula’s very nature. We hear nothing of high-ranking men who had any real influence under him. The emperor could not tolerate any independent power alongside himself; he wanted to be his own minister, and that was not all: he also wanted to intervene independently in every sphere. But his fundamentally limited nature, even before it degenerated further, lacked the knowledge and talent, the composure and self-discipline for him to do that.
Soon, something much more terrible came to the fore.
His ruthless willfulness (21), the startling ideas of reform, the sudden and cruel measures taken against men who had risen high may still have unleashed cheers from the masses, who saw in this the expression of the personality of a strong ruler, but more insightful observers already saw the terrible specter lurking behind it: madness.
* * *
We have grown accustomed to speaking of Ceasarean madness as a special form of mental illness, and the reader may remember the thrilling scene in Gustav Freytag’s The Lost Manuscript, in which the unworldly professor, all unawares, spells out to the insane prince the image of his illness on the basis of Tacitus. The traits of the illness: megalomania heightened to the point of self-deification, disregard for all legal boundaries and for all the rights of other individuals, brutal cruelty without goal or meaning – all this is also found in other mentally ill persons. The difference lies merely in the fact that the position of ruler offers an especially fertile ground for the seeds of such predispositions and allows them an unhindered growth that is otherwise hardly possible, and which, at the same time, can translate into cruel deeds on a scale that is otherwise completely unimaginable.
This specific Ceasarean madness is the product of circumstances that can flourish only in the moral degeneration of monarchically-minded nations, or of the more elevated classes who constitute the ruler’s immediate environment. The impression of seemingly unlimited power causes the monarch to forget all the boundaries of the legal order; the theoretical justification of this power as derived from divine law fatefully distorts the ideas of the poor man who truly believes this; the forms of courtly etiquette – and even more so what goes beyond this etiquette, namely the submissive adoration of all those who crowd up to the emperor – completely instill in him the notion that he is a being elevated above all humans by nature itself; at the same time, what he can observe in his environment gives rise to the view that those who surround him are a despicable, common lot. If we add to this that not only is the courtly environment corrupted, but the mass of the people as well, that the ruler, whatever he undertakes, encounters no manful, open resistance, that the opposition, if it ever ventures to stand up, at the very least fearfully upholds the appearance that it does not wish to fight the person of the ruler and his views, and if even the corrupted spirit that has invented the crime of lese-majésté and sees in the refusal to show reverence a punishable insult to the ruler has entered into the laws and administration of justice – it would be truly astonishing if a king who is absolute in this way were to remain of sound mind.
(21) According to Suetonius 29, Caligula boasted of his [ . . . ].
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