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Bridge to Baia Destroyed by Storm!
© by
David Taylor
Gaius Caligula
(image, above), in fact, donned the Emperor's purple
soon after in A.D. 37, (after convincing Tiberius to
sleep with his head underneath the pillow) and two
years later the twenty-seven-year-old autocrat ordered
that all merchant vessels over a certain tonnage be
escorted to the Bay of Naples and anchored and lashed
together with planks laid across them to form a
continuous bridge from Pozzuoli to Baia. Some
descriptions say that the bridge carried shops and
gardens and that extra boats were used to form islands
at intervals along the bridge.
Robert Graves in I, Claudius
gives the following dramatic description of Caligula
setting out to have Thrasyllus eat his words: "He mounted on Incitatus and began trotting across the bridge from the Bauli end. The whole of the Guards cavalry was at his back, and behind that a great force of cavalry brought from France, followed by 20,000 infantry. When he reached the last island, close to Puteoli, he made his trumpeters blow the charge and dashed into the city as fiercely as if he were pursuing a beaten enemy!" We are also told that his return across the bridge was in the form of a triumphal procession and included spoils "captured" from merchants in Pozzuoli, and was followed by a night of festivities and celebrations which included naval attacks on the bridge and those unfortunate carousers who happened to be there. The cost to the Empire of withdrawing from service the enormous number of boats needed for the project must have been exceedingly heavy, especially for a Rome that was heavily dependent on grain imports from Egypt. Caligula, despotic and convinced of his divinity, appears to have been unconcerned at this and even ordered that the pontoon remain in place —he was deeply offended when Neptune saw fit to launch a storm which destroyed many ships and grounded the rest. Caligula's brief reign ended two years later
with his assassination in A.D. 41, and historians and
writers have since painted him as a deranged
megalomaniac. Certainly, his reign was troubled and
disruptive and trouble broke out as a result of his
treatment of the Jews, but, nevertheless, it would
have been interesting to have sat on a hill above
Pozzuoli all those centuries ago and watch the
spectacle of this "living God" wearing Alexander's
breastplate and flourishing Julius Caesar's sword,
blowing an elaborate raspberry at the Fates.
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Jesus'
eloquent description of impossibility, "It is easier
for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of
God", was not much quoted on Capri in the 1st
century A.D.; therefore, Thrasyllus, soothsayer by
Imperial appointment, chose his own words when trying
to convince emperor Tiberius that