Because he chose to forgo a hereditary monarchy and thus the concomitant legal clarification of the succession, he found it difficult to control the political prestige derived from blood relationships to the emperor. Rivalries could arise within the imperial family, which in turn offered ideal openings for groups of aristocrats to back possible successors. Sometimes these alliances developed into conspiracies. Augustus’s own daughter, Julia, started the ball rolling. In the year 2 B.C. she was banished because of her contacts with young aristocrats in Rome, including Iullus Antonius, the son of the triumvir Marcus Antonius, who had been Augustus’s last remaining rival in the civil war. Whether adultery was involved, as the official charge claimed, or a political conspiracy, as many suspected, is in the last analysis irrelevant. If the daughter of the emperor, whose three marriages had created presumptive candidates to succeed him, entered into a close relationship with a high-ranking aristocrat, that in itself amounted to an important political development that threatened the emperor, regardless of what her own motives may have been.

Similar events would occur repeatedly over the decades that followed. All these conspiracies, real or imagined, and the punitive reactions to them meant that when the emperor Nero died in the year 68, not a single descendant of Augustus remained alive. This complete disappearance of the imperial family can hardly be judged in moral terms. It resulted from the political relevance of those familial relationships and the potential mortal danger menacing all the emperor’s kin.

A CHILDHOOD AS “LITTLE BOOTS”

Caligula spent his first seven years in Germania, Rome, Greece, and the Orient. As many sources attest, his father, Germanicus, who had risen to the status of prince through Augustus’s adoption arrangements, enjoyed great popularity in all parts of society on account of his good looks and genial personality; he was made commander of the Roman legions on the Rhine in the year 13.