The Senate Claims Its Liberty

While matters stood like this, Claudius was suddenly carried off from his house. The soldiers had held a meeting, and when they had talked over among themselves what was to be done, they saw that a democracy could never manage such a vast weight of public affairs, and that if it were set up, it would not be to their advantage. And if any one man from among those already in the government gained the supreme power, it would be a grievance to them in every way unless they had helped him to it. It would therefore be right, while affairs were still unsettled, to choose Claudius as emperor. He was the uncle of the dead Gaius, and in the worth of his ancestors and in the learning he had gained by his education he stood above every one of those who were assembled in the senate. Once established as emperor, he would honor them as they deserved and reward them with gifts. Such were their thoughts, and they acted on them at once. So Claudius was suddenly seized by the soldiers. Gnaeus Sentius Saturninus, however, although he had heard that Claudius had been seized, and that he was claiming the government—unwillingly in appearance, but in truth by his own free choice—stood up in the senate. Not dismayed in the least, he gave them an exhortation such as befitted free and noble-minded men, and spoke as follows: [a]

“Romans, it is hard to believe, because it has come to us unhoped for after so long a time, but we now possess the dignity of liberty. How long it will last is uncertain; that rests with the gods who granted it. Yet it is enough to make us rejoice, and enough to make us happy even if we should be robbed of it. For a single hour is enough for those who have a sense of virtue, if it is lived with a mind answerable to itself alone, in a country now independent and governed by the laws under which it once flourished. As for me, I cannot remember our former liberty, since I was born after it was gone. But I am filled beyond measure with joy at our present freedom. I count those who were born and bred in that former liberty happy men, and I count these men here worthy of no less honor than the gods, for they have given us a taste of it, late as it is, in our own lifetime. I wish that the quiet enjoyment of it we have now might continue through all the ages to come. Yet even this single day may suffice, both for the younger among us and for those of us who are old. To our old men it will seem a whole lifetime, if they may die while its blessings last; and to the younger it will be a lesson in the virtue of the men from whom we are descended. As for ourselves, at this present hour nothing can matter more than to live with virtue, for virtue alone preserves liberty for mankind. I know the old days only by hearsay; but what I have lived with and seen with my own eyes has taught me what evils tyrannies fill a commonwealth with. They discourage all virtue and rob the high-minded of their freedom; they become teachers of flattery and fear, because they leave affairs to be governed not by the wisdom of the laws but by the temper of those in charge. Ever since Julius Caesar set his mind on dissolving our democracy, and threw our government into confusion by doing violence to the order of our laws—making himself master of justice but a slave to his own private pleasure—there has been no kind of evil that has not worn this city down. All who succeeded him in the government have vied with one another to abolish the ways of our fathers and to leave the city as bare as they could of noble-minded citizens. They thought it served their own safety to keep company with worthless men, and not only to humble those who were trusted for their virtue, but to resolve on their utter destruction. Of all these emperors—and they have been many, and each showed an unbearable harshness while he ruled—this Gaius who has been killed today did more terrible things than all the rest. He let loose his untamed rage not only on his fellow citizens but on his own relatives and friends as well, and he heaped still greater evils on everyone alike, exacting punishments they had not deserved, raging equally against men and against the gods. For tyranny is not content to take its sweet pleasure, or to commit outrage by injuring men’s property and their wives; it counts its whole profit in overthrowing the entire households of its enemies. And every lover of liberty is an enemy of tyranny. Not even those who bear lightly what they have suffered can win its goodwill. For tyrants know full well the evils they have heaped on such men, and how nobly those men have scorned their misfortunes; and since they cannot hide from themselves what they have done, they trust that they can be free of the suspicion only if they are able to take those men out of the world altogether. Now that we are rid of such evils and answerable only to one another—the form of government that best assures our present concord, gives the best security against plots hereafter, and does the most for our own glory in setting the city in good order—each of you ought to look out for it, for his own sake and for the public good, since its benefits come to all in common. And anyone who dislikes what has been proposed may declare his own contrary opinion. This now carries no danger at all, because there is no lord set over us who could harm the city without having to answer for it, and who had absolute power to remove those who spoke their minds. Nothing has nourished tyranny of late so much as sloth, and the habit of never contradicting anything it wanted. We were overcome by the sweetness of peace and had learned to live like slaves; and as many of us as heard of incurable disasters far away, or saw the miseries of those near us, endured, out of fear of dying with virtue, a death joined to the utmost disgrace. First of all, then, we ought to decree the greatest honors we can to those who have removed the tyrant, and above all to Chaerea Cassius. For with the help of the gods this one man has proved to be the provider of our liberty, by his counsel and by his hands. It is right not to forget him. Under the tyranny he planned ahead for our liberty and took the risk ahead of us; now that we are free, we ought to vote him honors, and make this the first decision we declare as men under no one’s orders. It is a most noble deed, and one that befits free men, to repay their benefactors, and this man has been a benefactor to us all. He is not at all like Cassius and Brutus, who killed Gaius Julius Caesar. They fanned into flame the beginnings of sedition and civil war in our city; but this man, by killing the tyrant, has also set the city free from all the miseries that came from tyranny.” [d]

Such was Sentius’s speech, and the senators received it with pleasure, as did as many of the knights as were present. Then a certain Trebellius Maximus jumped up and pulled a ring off Sentius’s finger. It had a stone set in it engraved with the image of Gaius, which Sentius had forgotten, so it was supposed, in his eagerness over what he was saying and what he meant to do. The engraving was smashed at once. By now the night was far advanced, and Chaerea asked the consuls for the watchword. They gave him “Liberty.” They themselves wondered at what was happening and could hardly believe it; for it was in the hundredth year since they had first been deprived of their democracy that the giving of the watchword returned to the consuls. Before the city came under tyrants, it was the consuls who had commanded the soldiers. When Chaerea had received the watchword, he passed it to those of the soldiers who had sided with the senate. There were four cohorts of them, men who held a government without an emperor to be more precious than tyranny. These went off with their tribunes. The people, too, now went away overjoyed, full of hope and confidence, because they had won back the government for themselves and were no longer under a ruler set over them; and Chaerea was everything to them. [f]

Chaerea, however, was very uneasy that Gaius’s wife and daughter were still alive, and that his whole family had not perished with him, since whatever was left of them would be left for the ruin of the city and of its laws. Besides, he was eager to carry his purpose through to the end and fully to satisfy his hatred of Gaius. So he sent Julius Lupus, one of the tribunes, to kill Gaius’s wife and daughter. They gave this task to Lupus because he was a relative of Clemens, so that by having a share, even in this way, in killing the tyrant, he might be honored for his virtue by his fellow citizens, and might seem to have shared in the whole plot with those who had first formed it. Some of the conspirators, though, thought it too cruel to use such violence against a woman, because Gaius had done everything by following his own nature rather than her advice—the nature that had brought the city to despair under the evils that had seized it and had destroyed the flower of its citizens. Others blamed her for consenting to these things; indeed, they laid on her the blame for all the evil Gaius had done. They said she had given Gaius a drug that enslaved his mind and drew his desire to her, so that once he had been driven mad, she was the one who had steered everything against the fortunes of the Romans and of the inhabited world that was subject to them. In the end it was decided that she must die, since those who argued against it could do nothing to save her, and Lupus was sent. He made no delay on his part, for he wanted to serve those who had sent him at the right moment, and to be in no way to blame for anything done for the good of the people. When he came into the palace, he found Caesonia, Gaius’s wife, lying beside her husband’s body. It lay on the ground, deprived of everything the law grants to the dead. She was smeared all over with the blood from his wounds and overwhelmed by her misery, and her daughter was flung down beside her. Nothing was heard from her in this state but her reproach of Gaius, that he had not believed her though she had often warned him beforehand. Those words were taken two ways even then, and they are still laid before those who hear them with the same doubt, each person giving them whatever weight he pleases. Some said they meant that she had advised him to give up his madness and his cruelty toward the citizens, and to govern with moderation and virtue, so that he would not perish at their hands in the same way he had treated them. Others said that when word of the conspirators had reached Gaius, she had urged him to make no delay but to deal with them all at once, even if they had done nothing wrong, and so put himself out of danger; and that this was her reproach—that she had told him so beforehand, and he had been too soft. That is what Caesonia said, and what people thought about it. When she saw Lupus coming, she pointed to Gaius’s body and begged him, with lamentation and tears, to come nearer. And when she saw that Lupus was resolved, and was coming toward her not at all like a man going to a task he disliked, she understood what he had come for. She bared her throat, quite readily, crying out in pity for herself as people do who plainly despair of living, and told him not to hesitate to finish the tragedy they had planned for her and her daughter. So she died bravely at the hands of Lupus, and her little daughter after her. Lupus then hurried to report it to Chaerea and his men. [h]

So Gaius died, having ruled the Romans four years less four months. Even before he came to power he was perverse, a man who had reached the very height of wickedness. He was a slave to pleasure and fond of slander; terrified by anything frightening, and for that very reason murderous in the extreme wherever he felt bold enough. He used his power for one purpose only, to insult others, showing an unreasonable haughtiness toward those who least deserved it, and he got his wealth by killing and by breaking the law. He strove to be, and to seem, above both what was divine and what was lawful, and yet he was a slave to the praise of the crowd; everything the law judges shameful and punishes, he counted as virtue. He forgot his friends, however close the friendship and however great their services, and if he grew angry with them he would punish them over the smallest things. He regarded every man who pursued virtue as his enemy, and whatever he commanded, he would allow no one to oppose his desire. That is how he came to have sexual relations with his own full sister. It was this above all that first made a fierce hatred spring up against him among the citizens, since such a thing had not been heard of for a long time; it moved them to distrust and hatred of the man who had done it. Nobody could name any great or royal work that he ever did for the benefit of his own generation or of those to come, except the harbor he planned near Rhegium and Sicily to receive the grain ships from Egypt. That was admittedly a very great work and of the greatest use to seafarers. Yet it was never finished; it was left half done because he worked at it too sluggishly. The reason was that he gave his attention to useless things, and by spending on pleasures that would benefit himself alone, he left himself nothing for the ambition to do things everyone agreed were better. In other respects he was an excellent orator, thoroughly trained both in Greek and in the Romans’ own language. He grasped a thing at once, and when he answered on the spot speeches that others had composed and prepared long in advance, he proved more persuasive than anyone, even in matters of the greatest weight. This came from a natural readiness for it, strengthened by diligent practice. For as the grandson of Tiberius’s brother, and Tiberius’s successor, he was under strong pressure to hold fast to learning, since Tiberius himself excelled in it and stood among the first; and Gaius pursued the same distinction, yielding to the letters of his relative and emperor, and he came to stand first among the citizens of his day. Yet the good things he had gathered from his learning could not hold out against the ruin that his power brought on him. So hard is it for those who can do whatever they please without answering for it to acquire the virtue of self-control. At first he had friends who were in every way worthy, and he was eagerly courted by them because of his learning and his reputation for zeal for better things. But at last, through his excess of insolence, they stripped off the goodwill they had for him; hatred grew up among them, and he died by their plot. [j]