This is the name that is most prominent on Caligula’s coins and the name that Caligula gave to the month of September when he renamed it after himself. In other words, if Caligula really did have sex with his sisters, then it might not have been an act of depraved insanity, but rather a political maneuver that just didn’t work out the way he planned it to. Now that we know where some of the misconceptions about Caligula come from, let’s talk about what those misconceptions are. It was rumoured that he planned to appoint his horse consul before he died. Suetonius writes in chapter 24, as translated by R. C. Rolfe: “He lived in habitual incest with all his sisters, and at a large banquet he placed each of them in turn below him, while his wife reclined above. Against all odds, Caligula finally wakes up, but, as a result of his illness, he swiftly transforms into a depraved psychopath. Caligula is famously alleged to have had sex with all three of his own sisters and to have treated his sister Drusilla as his wife. Caligula was born on August 31, 12, in Antium, Italy. More recently, the Netflix series Roman Empire has become another major source of misconceptions about Caligula. Afterwards, the assassins murdered his wife Milonia Caesonia and their one-year-old daughter Julia Drusilla. Philon of Alexandria records in his Embassy to Gaius that Caligula overtly tried to portray himself to the public as a god and that he even ordered for a colossal statue of himself to be erected in the Holy of Holies in the Temple of YHWH in Jerusalem. But Gemellus was Caligula’s adopted son, which casts his murder in an especially sinister light. As a child, Gaius was brought up among the soldiers and he wore a smaller version of the outfits they wore. None of the ancient sources claim that he was there and we know that, throughout his reign, he was not perceived as having had anything to do with Caligula’s assassination. Jan Bartek - AncientPages.com - Archaeologists have found the remains of Emperor Caligula’s luxury home and exotic garden. The exact same story is told about both Cleopatra and Caligula and, in all likelihood, never happened with either of them. Excavations on the site began last week. No, Transgender People Are Not a Sign of Cultural Collapse, No, History Doesn’t Need to be “Mathematized”. All of this is completely made up. He blew his predecessor Tiberius’s fortunes in just over a year, which led to a debt crisis in AD 39. Nonetheless, we should take all these descriptions with a grain of salt, since all of these sources are biased and it is common for people to describe political leaders they don’t like as insane, even though those leaders rarely ever meet the clinical definition of insanity. ABOVE: Screenshot from the I, Claudius episode “Hail Who?” of Caligula (played by John Hurt) performing his dance dressed Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Unfortunately, because the series is presented as a docudrama rather than a straight drama, many viewers have been misled to believe that everything depicted in it is historically true. This leaves the question of Caligula’s alleged incest open for debate. Some say that Caligula was insane, but historians have also theorized that Caligula may have suffered from epilepsy and lived with a constant fear of having seizures. Moreover, Caligula’s efforts to portray himself as a deity do not seem to have been the result of delusion, but rather part of a carefully-thought-out political strategy. Caligula Biography, Life, Interesting Facts. This portrayal is based on what Suetonius says in his Life of Caligula, chapter 41. Though his early reign is considered brilliant, Caligula is mostly remembered for his despotic rule, insanity, perversion and acts of extreme cruelty; making him among the iconic ‘bad guys’ in the annals of history. The problem is that the sources can sometimes be unreliable and not everything that is in them is automatically true. This suspicion is never confirmed. In I, Claudius, episode ten (“Hail Who?”), Caligula turns the imperial palace into a brothel, where he pimps the wives of wealthy senators to the highest bidders. The man was arrested near Lake Nemi, South of Rome, where Caligula had a villa as a well as a floating temple and floating palace. No, the Black Death Did Not Cause the Renaissance. If he had been there when Caligula was murdered, it’s hard to see how he could have possibly kept his image so clean. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window). The emperors of Rome could be wise, just and kind. Suetonius describes the entire alleged plot in just one sentence in his Life of Caligula, chapter 24: “The rest of his sisters [i.e. Your email address will not be published. Selecting the top five worst Roman emperors of all time isn't a difficult task, thanks to myriad Roman historians, historical fiction, documentaries, and even movies and television programs, all of which illustrate the moral excesses of many of the rulers of Rome and its colonies. Notice that Suetonius seems to doubt that there was ever a conspiracy among Caligula’s sisters at all and instead seems to believe that Caligula just made the whole thing up as an excuse to send his sisters into exile. In the Greek east, rulers were almost routinely deified, and the divine status of the Egyptian pharaohs had been adopted by their Macedonian successors. Thus, it seems that everything Suetonius says about Caligula’s relationship with his sisters is confirmed by earlier sources—except for his claim that Caligula was having sex with them. In the Netflix series Roman Empire: Caligula: The Mad Emperor, Caligula is portrayed as unwilling to engage in incest until his sister Agrippina actually comes to him in his bedchamber and seduces him, telling him that she will bear him a son who will serve as his heir. All he says is that Caligula was very sick, that the sickness was brought on by an unhealthy hedonistic lifestyle, and that there were fears that Caligula might die. position as Pharaohs had to be validated through their wives’ royal blood according to Egyptian custom. In chapter 37, he famously writes: “In reckless extravagance he outdid the prodigals of all times in ingenuity, inventing a new sort of baths and unnatural varieties of food and feasts; for he would bathe in hot or cold perfumed oils, drink pearls of great price dissolved in vinegar, and set before his guests loaves and meats of gold, declaring that a man ought either to be frugal or Caesar. ABOVE: Proclaiming Claudius Emperor, painted in 1867 by the Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Putting all of these stories aside, the contemporary sources do unambiguously claim that Caligula was insane. Suetonius may have reported real information alongside the slander that was rampant throughout Caligula’s tenure. ABOVE: Screenshot of Caligula waking up from his implausible three-month-long coma in the Netflix series Roman Empire: Caligula: The Mad Emperor. Some sources of popular misconceptions about Caligula. Zeus himself famous had sex with his sister Demeter and married his sister Hera. All three of Caligula’s sisters were direct descendants of the emperor Augustus; none of his official wives shared this quality. My main area of study is ancient Greece, but I also write about other areas of history as well. An equally bizarre take on Caligula’s divinity appears in the 1979 film Caligula, which contains a scene in which Caligula appears before the Senate to make the following declaration: “I have existed from the morning of the world and I shall exist until the last star falls from the night sky! The idea behind it may have been that, because they had made him feel foolish on his campaign, he would make them feel foolish as well. Caligula, born Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus in 31 AD, was the Emperor of Rome between 37 and 41 AD. From Caligula to the lesser known but no less notorious Elagabalus, these emperors have left their mark on history. The reason why Caligula had him killed was not because he couldn’t get the sound of him coughing out of his head, but rather because he suspected that he had been plotting to usurp his power. But unfortunately, most of the Caligula legend has come to us from one historian, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus who lived a century after Caligula. Coma patients generally lack a swallow reflex, meaning they cannot swallow food or drink. Afterwards, he becomes increasingly paranoid, believing that the child developing in her womb will overthrow him and become the new king of the gods. That’s it. I am Spencer Alexander McDaniel. ABOVE: Promotional image for Netflix’s 2019 docudrama series Roman Empire: Caligula: The Mad Emperor. Did Cleopatra Really Dissolve a Pearl in Vinegar. This is the most detailed description of Caligula’s illness we have. There are no earlier sources that explicitly claim Caligula had sex with his sisters, but there is some earlier evidence that scholars have interpreted as possibly supporting Suetonius’s account of Caligula’s incest. The only reason why Caligula murders her and devours her fetus in the show is because the writers of the show wanted to show the sheer extent of Caligula’s alleged insanity. As Peter Gainsford argues in this blog post titled “What did Caligula think of his nickname?” the name that Caligula most likely preferred to be called by was actually Germanicus. The complaint made against the lad was that he had prayed and expected that Gaius would die; and he destroyed many others, too, on this same charge.”. Nonetheless, all the ancient sources written within three centuries after Caligula’s death unanimously refer to him as “Gaius.” This is the name that Philon uses, the name that Seneca uses, the name that the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder (lived c. 23 – 79 AD) uses, the name that Suetonius uses, and so on. It is probably true that Caligula was something of a sadist. Caligula’s notoriety as an unhinged, bloodthirsty Roman emperor may not tell the whole story. Of these he is believed to have violated Drusilla when he was still a minor, and even to have been caught lying with her by his grandmother Antonia, at whose house they were brought up in company. Perhaps most disappointingly, the bikini-clad dance routine from I, Claudius is pure fantasy. He reputedly slept with his sisters and wanted to appoint his horse a consul. Furthermore, even if Caligula really did do these things, this wouldn’t necessarily make him insane, since a person does not have to be insane to be a pimp. ABOVE: Screenshot from the Netflix series Roman Empire: Caligula: The Mad Emperor of Caligula being seduced by his sister Agrippina. The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger (lived c. 4 BC – 65 AD) describes Caligula’s sadism in his treatise On Anger, which he probably wrote in around 45 AD, only a few years after the end of Caligula’s reign. Caligula had been emperor for less than four years. Even with all that, he was popular with the Roman public in his time. He was angry with Herennius Macer for having greeted him as Gaius—nor did the chief centurion of triarii get off scot-free for having saluted him as Caligula; having been born in the camp and brought up as the child of the legions, he had been wont to be called by this name, nor was there any by which he was better known to the troops, but by this time he held ‘Caligula’ to be a reproach and a dishonour.”. Caligula, considered by many to be a mad and unpredictable tyrant, is also known for transferring the last legion under a senatorial proconsul to an imperial legate, completing the emperor ’s monopoly of army command. Notably, there is concrete archaeological evidence that Caligula did exalt his sisters to an unusual extent. When Claudius comes in, Caligula tells him that he has undergone a “metamorphosis” and that he has miraculously transformed into a living god. He had no previous administrative experience. Caligula: Mad, bad, and maybe a little misunderstood. He even scattered large sums of money among the commons from the roof of the basilica Julia for several days in succession.”. He writes, in Rolfe’s translation: “To leave no kind of plunder untried, he opened a brothel in his palace, setting apart a number of rooms and furnishing them to suit the grandeur of the place, where matrons and freeborn youths should stand exposed. Caligula came from that type of family and was born destined for leadership within Rome. Many of his monuments were destroyed in the aftermath of his assassination and his remains were lost. If Caligula really did have incestuous relations with his sisters, he may have done so in conscious imitation of the Olympians. Synopsis. Caligula was many things—including a jerk, a narcissist, a sadist, and a tyrant—but he probably wasn’t really insane. Retelling Obscure Stories from the Distant Past. Police believe that the marble statue came from the emperor’s tomb. Caligula appears as a character in the bestselling novel I, Claudius by Robert Graves, which was published in 1934. In claiming to be a living god, Caligula was really just trying to apply the Hellenistic model of divine kingship to the Roman Empire. The series is neither a drama nor a documentary, but rather a bizarre hybrid of the two in which events are portrayed by actors in costumes, but there are experts (and some non-experts) talking the whole time, adding commentary. ABOVE: Screenshot of Caligula (played by Malcolm McDowell) shouting “Aye!” to his proposition of his own divinity from the 1979 film Caligula. Gaius Caesar (r. AD 37-41), often known as Caligula ('little boots'), was assassinated on January 24th, AD 41. Doing historiography is especially difficult when it comes to Caligula, since he began to be mythologized while he was alive and this mythologization has only proliferated over the course of the past two thousand years since his death. (Image: PLRANG ART Artur Furmanek/Shutterstock) Some historians have posited that Caligula was simply insane, but do not pinpoint any specific condition. Probably the most famous story about Caligula is the one about how he supposedly made his horse Incitatus a senator. Things get even nuttier in episode ten (“Hail Who?”), in which Caligula actually performs a whole dance routine dressed as Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, wearing tons of makeup, a wig, and a gold bikini. ABOVE: Screenshot of Caligula (played by John Hurt) with his horse Incitatus from the 1976 television series I, Claudius. It is only in around the late fourth century AD that the sources start referring to Caligula by the name Caligula. Still, if I must produce my authority, apply to the man who saw Drusilla going heavenward; he will say he saw Claudius limping along in the same direction. One the most influential ancient sources about Caligula is a biography of him written by the Roman author Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (lived c. 69 – after c. 122 AD), who worked as a secretary to the emperors Trajan and Hadrian. The ancient sources do record that Caligula did fall seriously ill early in his reign and that there were fears that he might die, but none of them say anything at all about him falling into a coma (let alone one lasting for three months), nor do any of them say anything about the illness causing him to go insane. The account is far from flattering. It’s possible he may have really done it, but it’s also possible that it is simply a rumor invented by some senator who was annoyed that Caligula was showering extraordinary honors on his sisters while holding the Senate in the uttermost contempt. They even draw explicit comparisons to the murder of Julius Caesar. In sharp contrast to I, Claudius, this film quickly won a reputation as one of the worst films ever made. Ancient Roman writers often focus on profligate spending as an indication that a ruler is foolish and morally degenerate. Deifying female members of the imperial family was extremely unusual in Caligula’s time. But was Caligula really insane? He describes how this was seen as shocking and sacrilegious. Well you have to study more. quite lately Gaius Caesar flogged and tortured Sextus Papinius, whose father was a consular, Betilienas Bassus, his own quaestor, and several others, both senators and knights, on the same day, not to carry out any judicial inquiry, but merely to amuse himself.”, “Indeed, so impatient was he of any delay in receiving the pleasure which his monstrous cruelty never delayed in asking, that when walking with some ladies and senators in his mother’s gardens, along the walk between the colonnade and the river, he struck off some of their heads by lamplight.”. He came to power when he was just 24 and was given unlimited power. Ancient authors most likely started doing this to belittle him by calling him a childish nickname that they knew he hated. It is also easy to see how senators might have gotten annoyed by Caligula paying so much attention to his horse while treating the Senate with disdain and therefore started joking about how Caligula loved his horse so much that he was probably planning to make him a consul. Upon waking from his coma, his personality completely changed and he became an unhinged lunatic. ABOVE: Title screen from the 1976 BBC drama series I, Claudius. Was The Roman Emperor Caligula Insane? In the video devoted to Caligula from his ‘Emperors of Rome’ series, Adrian Murdoch suggests that the young emperor was corrupted by this absolute power which he had never been taught to manage. There is very little evidence to support the idea that Claudius had anything to do with Caligula’s assassination. For instance, a dedication from the site of Caere dated to Caligula’s reign that is now on display in the Vatican Museums bears a Latin inscription that would have originally read “DIVAE DRVSILLAE SORORI CAII CAESARIS AVGVSTI GERMANICI,” which means “To the Divine Drusilla, sister of Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.”, ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an inscription from the site of Caere on display in the Vatican Museums bearing the dedication, “To the Divine Drusilla, sister of Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus”. I am obsessed with the ancient world and I write about it constantly. Then soldiers come out and start whipping all the senators, just as the black curtains of mourning come falling down from the ceiling on everybody’s heads. Agrippina and Julia Livilla] he did not love with so great affection, nor honour so highly, but often prostituted them to his favourites; so that he was the readier at the trial of Aemilius Lepidus to condemn them, as adulteresses and privy to the conspiracies against him; and he not only made public letters in the handwriting of all of them, procured by fraud and seduction, but also dedicated to Mars the Avenger, with an explanatory inscription, three swords designed to take his life.”. Ancient authors record that, after he became emperor, Gaius absolutely detested it whenever anyone called him by the nickname Caligula or by his personal name Gaius. Philon asserts in his Embassy to Gaius, chapter thirteen, that Caligula gave in to “madness and frenzy” and that he was “utterly insane.” Seneca exclaims with regard to Caligula in his On Anger 1.20, “How great was his madness!” Suetonius claims in his Life of Caligula, chapter fifty, “He was sound neither of body nor mind.”. Unfortunately, over the centuries, a tremendous mythology has grown up around him and many of the things that are popularly believed about him are simply not true. Furthermore, not only is the whole thing about the three-month-long coma not in the ancient sources, but I genuinely don’t think it would be possible for a person in the ancient world to survive in a complete coma for three months. This drama, however, exaggerates the extent of Caligula’s alleged insanity even further than Graves’s original novel. For the emperor, a man of the highest possible office, to literally act as a pimp would have been the utmost scandal. It is possible that Caligula may have simply been trying to do the same thing that the Ptolemies had done before him. Even if the story is true, there are still a couple different ways we can interpret it that don’t entail Caligula being completely bonkers. The claim that Caligula drank “pearls of great price dissolved in vinegar” is especially suspect because it is a standard canard that the Romans often told about anyone they didn’t like. Despite all this, most of what we see in I, Claudius and Caligula is made up. He was tyrannical, possibly insane, and had tendencies towards debauchery and even the merciless taking of life. Willy-nilly, he has to see everything that happens in heaven; for he is the superintendent of the Appian road, by which you know both the divine Augustus and Tiberius Caesar went to join the gods.”, “If you ask this man he will tell you privately; in presence of more than one he’ll never speak a word. It is unclear why the Praetorian Guard declared Claudius emperor, but it is possible that they may have believed that he was feeble-minded and that he would be easy to control. For them, a conspiracy and an assassination isn’t enough; Claudius has to be in on it all too. In the 1976 television series I, Claudius, episode nine (“Zeus, by Jove!”), when Caligula awakens from his coma, he immediately demands to see his uncle Claudius, threatening to kill him if he doesn’t come. However, Caligula made the news just last week (see Tom Kington’s article in the Guardian): Italian police announced that they believed to have discovered the emperor’s tomb when they arrested a man trying to smuggle abroad a statue of the emperor. Agrippina was given Lepidus’ bones in an urn and bidden to carry it back to Rome, keeping it in her bosom during the whole journey. There is no evidence that this ever happened. The problem here is that Suetonius is a relatively late, generally unreliable source. The Roman emperor Caligula, who ruled from 16 March 37 AD until his assassination on 24 January 41 AD, is undoubtedly one of the most notorious Roman emperors. The way this is presented makes it seem like something that we know really happened and that is recorded in the ancient sources. He writes, as translated by Allan Perley Ball: “Who ever demanded affidavits from an historian? In the 1976 BBC television series I, Claudius, episode nine (“Zeus, by Jove!”), Caligula is portrayed as suffering from frequent headaches and hearing a strange galloping in his ears. In fairness, though, most of the most famous stories I’ve investigated in this article actually are in the sources. Caligula awarding himself the same status in Rome was only insane in the sense that it was a political gambit certain to fail. However, people are still questionable whether it is true or not. This merely proves that Caligula was not very attuned to the political climate in which he lived—not that he was insane. This theory was supported by the fact that Caligula was known to speak to the moon (it was once believed that epilepsy was caused by the effects of the moon). The story about Caligula allegedly planning to make Incitatus a consul also appears in Kassios Dion’s Roman History 59.14.7. Caligula was murdered, aged 28, just four years into his reign, in an underground corridor in the imperial palace in a conspiracy that is believed to have involved the army, the court and the senate. The later historian Kassios Dion gives us a little bit more information about the alleged plot, writing in his Roman History 59.22.6–7, as translated by Earnest Cary: “Another of his victims was Lepidus, that lover and favourite of his, the husband of Drusilla, the man who had together with Gaius maintained improper relations with the emperor’s other sisters, Agrippina and Julia, the man whom he had allowed to stand for office five years earlier than was permitted by law and whom he kept declaring he would leave as his successor to the throne. He is now famous for being one of the most insane emperors of all time. Seneca is probably exaggerating a bit here, but he’s probably not lying through his teeth; Caligula probably was a very brutal ruler. Afterwards, when she was the wife of Lucius Cassius Longinus, an ex-consul, he took her from him and openly treated her as his lawful wife; and when ill, he made her heir to his property and the throne.”, “When she died, he appointed a season of public mourning, during which it was a capital offence to laugh, bathe, or dine in company with one’s parents, wife, or children. Besides a stall of marble, a manger of ivory, purple blankets and a collar of precious stones, he even gave this horse a house, a troop of slaves and furniture, for the more elegant entertainment of the guests invited in his name; and it is also said that he planned to make him consul.”. Unfortunately, virtually all our surviving ancient sources about Caligula were written by elite Roman men, who despised him and saw him as the prototype of a “bad emperor.” We don’t know very much about what the common people thought of him. The ancient Roman historical sources record that Caligula was assassinated by members of a conspiracy led by a man named Cassius Chaerea on 24 January 41 AD while he was passing through a narrow covered passage. Philo, author of Legatio ad Caium ("embassy to Caius") and leader of a delegation sent to Caligula to seek relief from persecution by Alexandrian Greeks, claimed that the emperor was no more than a vicious jokester. The Roman historian Kassios Dion (lived c. 155 – c. 235 AD) records in his Roman History 59.8, as translated by Earnest Cary for the Loeb Classical Library: “After this he [i.e. Honestly, a name like “Little Boots” is probably better suited for a housecat than a sadistic tyrant. Notice that, in Suetonius’s version, making his horse consul is only something that Caligula talked about doing, not something he ever actually did. The surviving contemporary accounts of his reign unanimously portray him as a cruel tyrant. Remembered as a cruel and erratic tyrant, his deranged tendencies threw Rome into chaos—and eventually caused his violent end. Emperor Caligula was one of the most insane men in history, and if he were around today, he would be greatly feared. After only four years, he was assassinated by members of his bodyguard and the Roman Senate.During his reign, many innocent people were killed without fair trials. What I have heard from him, then, I state positively and plainly, so help him!”. Required fields are marked *. He was so beside himself with grief that suddenly fleeing the city by night and traversing Campania, he went to Syracuse and hurriedly returned from there without cutting his hair or shaving his beard. Perhaps the the most insane thing about Caligula was that he was simply doing all this to get people angry. So, how much truth is there behind these portrayals? Did Medieval Christians Really Crucify Heretics? What made Caligula one of the most infamous emperors in the history of ancient Rome? As we shall soon see, many of the events portrayed in the series are completely made up. Suetonius’s claim that Caligula turned a portion of the palace into a brothel, however, is not supported by any earlier sources and it represents exactly the sort of story some senator might have made up just to show how depraved the emperor was. The doctor who is caring for him tells Macro, the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, that he is probably going to die. Mr.McDaniel, Suetonius writes in his Life of Caligula 55, as translated by Rolfe: “He used to send his soldiers on the day before the games and order silence in the neighbourhood, to prevent the horse Incitatus from being disturbed. Yeah, they probably should. Even though it wasn’t his actual name, I do think the name Caligula is useful for historical purposes because it is unique and can only refer to one specific individual. Many historians have doubted the validity of the wildest claims about his life, and believe he may have done many of these acts just to anger the senate. In other words, his nickname literally means “Little Boots.”, ABOVE: Photograph of an actual ancient Roman caliga dated to the first century BC or first century AD that was discovered at the site of Qasr Ibrim in Egypt, ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a man wearing a modern reproduction of an ancient Roman caliga. As I’ve noted a few times already, one of the best-attested facts about Caligula’s reign is that he held the Senate in total disdain. Thus, in the series, Claudius is not only portrayed as the real mastermind behind Caligula’s murder, but as being present at the scene of the crime itself. Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, better known by his nickname Caligula, was the third Roman Emperor who reigned for a short period of 4 years from 37 AD to 41 AD. Another famous story holds that Caligula was so crazy that he once declared war on Neptune and made his soldiers attack the sea and then gather seashells as “loot.” This story originates from what Suetonius writes in his Life of Caligula 46: “Finally, as if he intended to bring the war to an end, he drew up a line of battle on the shore of the Ocean, arranging his ballistas and other artillery; and when no one knew or could imagine what he was going to do, he suddenly bade them gather shells and fill their helmets and the folds of their gowns, calling them ‘spoils from the Ocean, due to the Capitol and Palatine.’”. Philon came to the emperor as a member of a group of Jewish ambassadors; he claims that the emperor persistently belittled and insulted them and refused to listen to their concerns. In the very first section of the work, Seneca sarcastically remarks that the events he is about to describe may sound incredible, but you have to believe him because he heard it all from the same man who testified to the Senate that he had seen Drusilla ascending into heaven as a goddess. Of course, the fact that Caligula honored his sisters on coins doesn’t prove he was having sex with them. Caligula’s full name before he became emperor was Gaius Julius Caesar (which is, incidentally, the exact same full name as the more famous Gaius Julius Caesar who conquered Gaul and was assassinated on 15 March 44 BC). (As I discuss in this article from January 2020, Cleopatra VII Philopator, the last ruler of this dynasty, was the product of literally centuries of incest.) I’ve already mentioned that Caligula and his three sisters were all direct descendants of Augustus. Even Livia was not deified until the reign of Caligula’s successor Claudius. Indeed, Suetonius does give a rational explanation for why Caligula supposedly openly his brothel; according to Suetonius he did it because he was desperate for money to fund his outlandish lifestyle. Caligula had other family members killed as well: his father-in-law Silanus ostensibly for refusing to go to sea with him but really on suspicion of conspiracy, and his brother-in-law (and cousin and, some say, lover) Lepidus for conspiracy. You claim to be a history guru. Julius Caesar had been declared a god shortly after his death, leading his grandnephew and heir Augustus to claim the title of divi filius, meaning “son of a god.” After his death, Augustus was likewise declared a god. These are all stories that have accumulated over the years. He succeeded Tiberius as Roman emperor in 37 A.D., and adopted the name Gaius Caesar Germanicus. Drusilla’s posthumous deification is also referenced by Seneca in his Apocolocyntosis Claudii or The Gourdification of Claudius, a satirical work making fun of the emperor Claudius and the Roman tradition of posthumously deifying emperors. After the death of Augustus in 14 AD, his adopted son Tiberius became emperor of Rome. The Jewish Middle Platonist philosopher Philon of Alexandria (lived c. 20 BC – c. 50 AD) gives a first-hand account of his experience with Caligula in his Embassy to Gaius. In I, Claudius, episode nine (“Zeus, by Jove!”), Gemellus is portrayed as a young child with a cough and Caligula is portrayed as having him murdered because he can’t get the sound of him coughing out of his head. Exaggerated and colorful stories have piled on top of exaggerated and colorful stories and, as a result, Caligula seems to have grown even more insane with each passing generation. ), ABOVE: Screenshot from the 1979 film Caligula of Caligula (played by Malcolm McDowell) with his sister Drusilla (played by Teresa Ann Savoy). And in that same Wikimedia page the legend describes him as : Although I have taken the form of Caius Caligula, I am all men as I am no man and, therefore, I am… a god.”. (As we shall see in a moment, Caligula did deify Drusilla, but only after her death.) In I, Claudius, episode nine (“Zeus, by Jove!”), Caligula is portrayed as impregnating Drusilla. This is why, for the rest of this article, I will be calling the emperor in question “Caligula,” even though he was certainly not known by this name while he was emperor. Caligula (Gaius Julius Augustus Germanicus) was Roman emperor from 37 AD to 41 AD. The question of whether or not Caligula was insane remains unanswered. Caligula’s uncle Claudius supposedly hid from the assassins behind a curtain in the imperial palace until he was discovered by loyal members of the Praetorian Guard, who escorted him to their camp, where they proclaimed him emperor. In the Netflix series Roman Empire: Caligula: The Mad Emperor, episode two (“A New Hope”), Caligula is portrayed as initially a good emperor. In reality, it’s an entirely fictional scenario based on nothing but Suetonius’s claim that Caligula had sex with his sisters and the writers of the show’s awareness of Agrippina’s extraordinary cunning and domineering personality. The invasion of AD 43 never happened, or not in the way that Claudius suggested; Caligula had already attempted an invasion in AD 37. Most of them are definitely or probably false; others are based on historical facts but have been greatly misrepresented. In the midst of all the baaing, Caligula leaps into the air and shouts that the period of mourning is now over. Many ancient Romans were happy when he was gone, and he was considered a tyrant who ultimately became a monster. For since the day when he took oath in the Senate that he had seen Drusilla going up to heaven and in return for such good news nobody believed him, he has declared in so many words that he’ll not testify about anything, not even if he should see a man murdered in the middle of the Forum. Dion was writing around a hundred years after Suetonius, however, and most likely used Suetonius’s Life of Caligula as a source, so he probably can’t be considered an independent witness. ABOVE: Photograph of a Roman marble sculpture in the British Museum depicting a nude young man riding on horseback, widely suspected to represent the notorious emperor Caligula on his horse Incitatus. In historical reality, Gemellus was not a small child, but rather a young man who was around nineteen years old at the time of his death. In 1979 the film “Caligula,” directed by Tinto Brass and starring Malcolm McDowell, shocked the world with its explicit portrayal of the emperor’s cruel and salacious escapades. The fact that Caligula had Drusilla deified does not prove that he had sex with her, but it does demonstrate the extent of his attachment to her. Antium is now known as Anzio. This certainly never happened and there are no surviving ancient sources that say he actually did this. In 1976, Graves’s novel was adapted into an award-winning BBC drama, also titled I, Claudius, which is generally regarded as one of the best television shows ever made and is considered the direct precursor to modern shows like Rome and Game of Thrones. The kings of the Greek Ptolemaic Dynasty, which ruled Egypt from 305 BC until 30 BC, had been known for marrying their own sisters to keep their bloodlines pure. His parents were Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder. Also, since many honours had been voted earlier to his sisters manifestly on his act, he forbade the awarding of other distinctions to any of his relatives.”. Caligula. When a soldier presents the emperor with Gemellus’s severed head, he declares, “I’ve cured his cough.”. They left stories about him that are so ridiculous that some people now insist that … In order for him to survive longer than that, he would have to either wake up every week or so before falling back into the coma or somehow still be able to swallow food and water while in the coma. It’s a fitting name. I named my tuxedo cat with white socks Caligula. Essentially, Suetonius is recycling an age-old folktale about profligacy and turning it into a story about Caligula. ABOVE: The Banquet of Cleopatra, painted in 1653 by the Flemish painter Jacob Jordaens. It is entirely possible that the real reason why Caligula honored his sisters so highly is simply because he wanted to emphasize the importance of the Augustan bloodline. Then Caligula starts baaing like a sheep, leading all the senators to start baaing like sheep as well. For instance, Suetonius really does claim that Caligula had sex with his sisters, that he talked about making his horse a consul, and that he made war on the sea and collected seashells as loot. In each iteration of the story, all that changes is the person who is doing the pearl-dissolving. Philon describes at length how Caligula made public appearances dressed as demigods, including Herakles, the Dioskouroi, and Dionysos and how he eventually began dressing himself as full deities such as Hermes, Apollon, and Ares. When Does United States History Really Begin? Unfortunately, virtually everything the show says about the so-called “Plot of the Three Daggers” is completely made up. “traditionnally thought to be a Seleucid prince, maybe Attalus II of Pergamon”. This is a story that is actually found in some ancient sources. Philon does not record Caligula as having regularly called himself “Zeus” and his sister Drusilla “Juno,” nor does he record him as having dressed up as Zeus, nor does he record him as having renovated the imperial palace to make it look more like Mount Olympos.
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