Useful Notes / Caligula

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"Caligula was no boy scout,
He did things that we can't even talk about.
The Romans knew he'd lost his head,
When he filled a vacant senate seat with Mister Ed.

—Pinky and the Brain, A Meticulous Analysis of History

Caligula (31 August 12 – 24 January 41) was an infamous Roman emperor who reigned between AD 37 and AD 41. His actual name was Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus;^note born as Gaius Julius Caesar, named after the other one Caligula is a nickname, meaning "Little Boot"^note no, not that one (or less literally "Bootsy" ^note  no, not that one either), that he got in his childhood, because, being a Military Brat, his mom liked to dress him up as a soldier. His father was the general Germanicus, whose personal charisma and general ability to win the loyalties of civilians and soldiers (despite a complicated military command record) made him the de facto imperial heir. Caligula's great-uncle was Emperor Tiberius, while his nephew (by his sister Agrippina the Younger) was the equally infamous Nero. After Germanicus died in Roman Syria, it was suspected he had been poisoned, either by a jealous Tiberius, the Governor of Syria Gaius Calpurnius Piso, or both men working in conjunction (it's now generally assumed he died of malaria). Though Tiberius pleaded innocence (and some of Germanicus's final words were "tell Tiberius to avenge my death"), Caligula's mom, Agrippina the Elder, believed the Emperor had killed her husband and launched a campaign of PR terror against him. In the ensuing mess, Caligula's mother and two brothers were imprisoned and/or exiled. Caligula himself, wanting to stay out of the mess, spent the remainder of his youth with Tiberius in his island fortress on Capri, where he'd placed himself into self-imposed exile to get away from the machinations of Rome. Depending on who's telling the story, Caligula either grew up watching Tiberius engage in all sorts of debaucheries and horrors that went on to shape him, or just watching his great-uncle sink deeper into alcoholism. Whatever the case, Caligula was elevated to emperor once Tiberius died in AD 37.

The first six months of his reign were reportedly an easygoing time for the Romans. Caligula was something of a PR maestro and knew how to put himself over: holding endless games, publicly burning Tiberius's "enemies list", and showering gold coins (actually his inheritance) onto his fans. Later that year, he fell seriously ill, the cause of which is still debated. Some suggest herpes or malaria (untreated malarial encephalitis causes extremely high fevers, which are noted for causing brain damage in those who survive them), while others suggest lead poisoning.

All of Rome prayed for him to survive...

Upon recovering, Caligula had permanently lost his hair and apparently his mind.^note Both of these are debated by historians. Baldness was often attributed as a sign of weakness, regardless of the truth, and his insanity may be a Historical Villain Upgrade by an aristocracy that hated him. Though the popular image of him is as an insane tyrant, he may have just been comically inept at running a government, suffered a nervous breakdown, or some combination of the three. It's hard to find out how much is true, since few contemporary sources survived about him. The outrageous tales about him^note  Specifically: committing incest with his sisters, sending his army against the sea after declaring war on the ocean god Neptune and having them stab the waves and collect shells as booty, marrying a woman who was 9 months pregnant so he wouldn't have to wait for an heir (whether or not it was his is unclear), using a tax hike upon the birth of his daughter to provide gold for him to roll around in, and wanting to make his favorite horse a consul come from Suetonius, a notorious gossip who also published books on the most famous prostitutes in Rome and whose biography about Caligula came out 80 years after the emperor's death at the behest of another dynasty of Emperors who had interest in demonizing their predecessors. ^note  This particular dynasty being the Nerva-Antonines, initiated by the eponymous emperor Nerva (and whose successors until Marcus Aurelius were adopted instead of blood heirs). For that matter, Nerva himself was closely associated with the shorter-yet-notable Flavians (consisting of the Parent-Child Team of Vespasian and his sons Titus and Domitian). The fact that nearly all of these Emperors were known to be very upstanding characters (praised by no lesser intellects as Niccolò Machiavelli and Edward Gibbon) helped contrast them with the relative lack of scruples of the Julio-Claudians. A true contemporary chronicler was Seneca, only he was hardly an objective source either, first of all because Caligula hated him and almost executed him at one point.^note Caligula considered Seneca a dangerous upstart due to his growing success and influence in the Senate, and rumors about him being friends with people who had conspired against Caligula didn't help a bit. The good emperor only refrained from having him killed because Seneca had a legendarily fragile health, and it was believed he would die of tuberculosis soon anyway. Ironically, it was not the case, as Seneca went on to outlive Caligula and only died by his own hand. Seneca's account is much less bizarre, instead picturing Caligula as someone terribly unfit for his position who had completely let the power go to his head. A second contemporary, the Jewish writer Philo, also met Caligula personally, in his case to try and negotiate an end to Caligula's attempt to install idols in the temple in Israel, and his depiction falls in line with Seneca's in depicting Caligula not so much insane but an utter Jerkass with a power trip. Cassius Dio, another later writer, falls in between Suetonius and Seneca/Philo, depicting a Caligula who's a touch tyrannical but generally just too incompetent for a job like his.

What is certain that Caligula wanted to increase his authority, which made him unpopular with the Senate ^note the Kangaroo Court trials and subsequent executions of several public figures didn't help either, and that he engaged in some rather extravagant and occasionally questionable public and personal construction projects at a time when Rome experienced both an economic downturn and a brief famine^note The degree to which these events were related to said projects, or whether they simply painted his sometimes odd decisions in a poor light for the common Roman, remains unclear.

Said construction projects are a prime example of Caligula's complicated legacy: on the one hand, he enacted public works like improvements to several harbors during the famine (allowing increased food imports), expanding and upgrading the empire's road system, and initiating the construction of two new major aqueducts. On the other hand, he constructed of a pair of massive ships on a sacred lake- the smaller one a floating temple to Diana^note and/or the Egyptian goddess Isis, another apparent point of contention both among his critics at the time and among scholars today, the larger one lavishly equipped as a party barge (for purely ceremonial purposes related to the temple, of course). The fact that these projects sent the fabulously wealthy Caligula from Riches to Rags and that he was on the verge of tanking the Roman economy was probably the real final straw in folks deciding there was a need for a regime change.

There were several conspiracies against him, and he was eventually stabbed to death by his own bodyguards, who also killed his wife and infant daughter. He would be succeeded by his uncle Claudius, who ruled Rome from AD 41 to 54 before being succeeded by Nero.

An alternative interpretation is that Caligula, thanks to the multiple conspiracies against him, was neither insane nor a drunken pervert. Instead, he quickly became disillusioned with the Augustinian style of politics, which involved the Princeps pretending to merely receive honors from a Senate still firmly in charge, yes sir, and still the very real power. Of note, his predecessor and mentor, Tiberius, was also painted in a negative light by historians (drawn primarily from the Senatorial aristocracy, FYI) because he also refused to participate in this style of politics. However, Tiberius merely retired to a palace on an island and ruled without pretending to consult the Senate, which drew the ire of the aristocracy, but didn't outright deny them the polite fiction of rule (hence they also paint him as a decadent pervert, but not nearly as bad as Caligula).

Caligula, after the first conspiracy (which may have been nothing more than "What do we do if he dies?" and misunderstood by Caligula as an attempt on his life) decided to humiliate the Senate. He publicly pointed out all the ways he had all the power and they had none. Offering to make his horse a consul was, in this framing, not insanity, but another humiliation by pointing out how powerless the consuls were. An analogy would be that the Princeps was a stage magician, and the Senate his audience, maintaining an illusion. Whereas Tiberius merely walked off-stage and never returned, Caligula turned the lights on, pointed out all the ways the tricks worked, then continued the show and forced the Senate to sit and applaud anyway^note Shout out to the podcast Our Fake History for this analogy and these two paragraphs. This led to a vicious cycle where people conspired against him, and he retaliated ever more fiercely, which inspired another plot... In the end, regardless, Caligula presaged the end of Nero, and the victors wrote the histories.

Is the trope namer for The Caligula and Caligula's Horse.

Tropes as portrayed in fiction:

• The Caligula: Well of course.
• Enmity with an Object: One of his most famous delusions was that the sea (to be precise, the English Channel) was his mortal enemy, based on a potential typographical error of his legions returning from an aborted invasion of Britain^note his uncle and successor Claudius took credit when the Roman armies finally got round to it with seashells instead of siege engines as booty.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Always depicted as in passionate incestuous love with Drusilla. Whatever the truth, he certainly loved his sister and had the Senate deify her, which had only previously been done for the Princeps.
• Freudian Excuse: Most depictions point the finger at his terrible upbringing with Tiberius as the reason that Caligula is so awful.
• Fluffy the Terrible: One of the most infamous rulers in history is almost always called a name that translates as "Bootsy". It's noted that he really disliked the nickname as an adult.
• Historical Domain Character: Together with Nero and to a lesser extent, Commodus, the stock evil Roman Emperor to appear in popular culture.
• Historical Villain Upgrade:
  • There has been much scholarly debate on just how many of his evil deeds are real. Although it was common for writers to slander previous rulers, most historians still think that he was, at the very least, utterly incompetent.^note Some historians note that Roman histories were often written by members of the senatorial class, who had the leisure and education for such endeavors—and Caligula certainly treated the Senate with contempt. One modern German scholar has argued that Caligula's behaviour was a deliberate and highly unpopular attempt to expose the duplicity of the Roman aristocracy: e.g., when Caligula was ill, one man vowed that if the emperor recovered, he would give his own life. Caligula duly recovered, and then, to everyone's shock, demanded that the man actually kill himself. This was interpreted by later historians as a sign of Caligula's cruelty, but the modern scholar argues was that nobody, including the man himself, expected that he would have to go through with it; the vow was actually an act of extravagant flattery which was done in the hope of reward, and what Caligula was doing was exposing the ridiculous lengths which hypocrisy had gone to in imperial Rome. The debate goes on.
  • Multiple early-Christianity dramas try to associate him with Christian persecution, especially given that he was friends with the first major Christian Persecutor Herod Agrippa, and Caligula making godhood proclamations are sure to be the ultimate blasphemy to Christian audiences. In reality, he likely never even heard of Christianity, as it was in its nascency throughout his reign. The closest thing to such villainy that he's actually known to have done was an attempt to install a statue of himself in Herod's Temple, which might be obliquely referred to in Jesus's predictions of the destruction of the Jewish homeland seeing as the next time that many Romans were there it was the first of the Jewish Revolts.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: He's typically presented as a bad kid who, upon becoming Emperor, becomes even worse.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Rarely will he be called "Emperor Gaius" in fiction or non-fiction.
• Too Dumb to Live: He does everything in his power to guarantee that people will eventually try to kill him.

Appears in the following works: