Caligula — A Personal View

It is 37AD, and in an imperial villa in Misenum, southwestern Italy, there lays the lifeless body of the aged and diseased emperor Tiberius. Standing over the corpse of Rome’s second emperor is the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Macro, as well as Tiberius’s great-nephew and joint-heir apparent, Gaius Germanicus. This Gaius is known to history as Caligula. In some manner of complicated and entirely unclear last-minute and makeshift conspiracy, they have contrived to end Tiberius’s already guttering life. Whether it was Macro or Gaius who administered the poison, or whether it was an entirely prosaic stabbing, or, as most accounts indicate, a smothering, is not conclusively clear. The ruthless Macro and the degenerate Gaius, regardless of the exact details, now stand on the threshold of a new world, one which held the promise of better times, of a departure from the malevolence and informer-culture of the old man’s regime. The hopes of the world, and history, however, would not only be disappointed, but horrified.

Caligula’s name—a nickname from childhood—is synonymous with cruel and unusual behaviour. His whole four-year reign can be characterised as an ever-increasing litany of vice, corruption, violence, and outright brutality. The story of Caligula’s crimes and follies is so extreme, that many modern historians have suggested that the ancient accounts have been exaggerated. TV historian, globalist feminist shill and cherry-picker extraordinaire Mary Beard is one of those. For some reason I can never fathom, Beard thinks she knows better than Suetonius and Cassius Dio and Pliny; all the ancient sources are agreed upon Caligula’s madness and debauch, but Beard and her perverse revisionists think it is largely just post Julio-Claudian propaganda and politically motivated name smearing by the ancient historians. Stupid nonsense, of course.

What then of the sources? Unfortunately, we have very little indeed on the life of Caligula from my favourite Roman historian, Tacitus. The Annals, by Tacitus, are very far from complete. Whole swathes of it are missing. If a complete original copy of Tacitus turned up in a forgotten Italian monastery, I, and all other ancient history enthusiasts, would be absolutely over-the-moon; it would be the single greatest discovery for the understanding of ancient Rome. As it is, though, we have to suffer the fact that large chunks of the early imperial period being lost to us. Also, nearly the entire reign of Caligula is missing in The Annals. We get the odd line here and there in other places referring to Caligula, but we do not have pages and pages of description and analysis from Tacitus on Caligula. A crying shame.

So we must turn to the second tier of Roman historians to inform us of what occurred. Though we have fragments here and there, as well as extensive commentaries from people like Josephus and Seneca, the main source, the best one, is the ever scandalous Suetonius. Suetonius’s Life of Caligula is a truly remarkable read, by turns fascinating and grotesque, savage and bizarre.

Firstly then a quick word about Gaius’ early life and childhood. He earned the name Caligula—which means little boots, or little soldiers boots—because throughout his childhood, Gauis often followed his father Germanicus on campaign, and was frequently dressed up in the garb of a miniature legionary. The army were supposed to have adored him. Yet the young Caligula’s childhood would be completely ruined before too long. His father’s uncle was Tiberius, the unpredictable and mendacious sex-criminal emperor; Caligula’s grandfather had been Tiberius’s younger brother, closest confidant and only real mediating force. Unfortunately, Caligula’s grandfather, Drusus, had fallen from a horse and died from his injuries twenty years before Caligula was even born.

With no great restraining force to mellow Tiberius’s venal passions, and certainly after his mother Livia died, Tiberius descended lower and lower into the depths of degeneracy and crime. He took the family of Germanicus under his wing, which was not the type of protection anyone in their right mind would want. Firstly Germanicus—Caligula’s father—died when Caligula was only 7 years old. A terrible age to lose one’s father. Not helping are suspicions that Germanicus may have been poisoned by members of his own family, though we do not know this for sure. Later, Caligula’s mother—Agrippina the Elder—as well as his two older brothers—a Nero and another Drusus—were denounced by Sejanus, Tiberius’s lackey, tried by the Senate, found guilty of treason, and exiled to tiny and remote islands. They all died there. Some say that his mother Agrippina was also blinded in one eye by a particularly callous beating from a centurion.

So, little Caligula had basically seen most of his family murdered by his great uncle Tiberius. Yet Tiberius seemed to like the boy, and kept him close at hand, and kept him often on Capri, his pleasure isle. There, it seems, Caligula learnt and became accustomed to the art of being cruel and sadistic to everyone around him who was of a lower station. We can only imagine that it was even encouraged. What is striking about this period of Caligula’s early life is the fact that he apparently never spoke of his family and their disturbing fates. Apparently Caligula not only never mentioned them, but if they ever did come up, or were mentioned, he would remain silent, and he would betray no emotion what-so-ever. It seems as though this was exactly what Tiberius required in order to avoid his wrath. For when Tiberius finally died and Caligula ascended to the purple, among the first things he did was to personally visit the islands where his mother and brothers had been exiled/killed, exhume their bodies, bringing them to Rome, giving them ornate funerary rites, and having their remains interred in the mausoleum of Augustus.

It is clear that Caligula’s apparent indifference to the disgrace and deaths of his mother and brothers was only a mask worn for Tiberius’s benefit, and quite possibly saved him from a very similar end. Yet even this speaks of a particular type of psychological process going on; the trauma of seeing nearly everyone you love taken from you, only to wind up dead, and that any expression of loss or mourning would be fatal, and that you must appear to love and be loyal to their killer. Despite any possible chemical imbalance in Caligula’s brain, this trauma alone would be enough to severely damage the mind and worldview of any adolescent.

Caligula clearly had a reason to finish off the old man, when the time came. That he may well have personally smothered him is not a shock and not out of character. Here is the passage in Suetonius which deals with that episode.

He assailed Tiberius with poison, as some people think; he issued orders for his ring to be removed while he was still breathing, and when he would not let it go he had him smothered with a pillow. According to one account, he throttled Tiberius with his own hands, and when a freedman cried out in protest at this wicked deed he crucified him at once. All this may be true; some writers report that Gaius later confessed to intended if not actual parricide.

Beginning in that violent and ruthless manner, Caligula’s reign only got worse. For example, we are told that he wanted to do away with all the last vestiges of the Republic and Augustus’s so-called principate, and have himself officially declared a king of Rome.

However, after his courtiers reminded him that he already outranked any king or local ruler, he insisted on being treated as a god—arranging for the most revered or artistically famous statues of the gods, including those of Jupiter at Olympia, to be brought from Greece and have their heads replaced by his own.

Here we can see that, among other things, Caligula had delusions of grandeur. He had an utterly unbounded ego. Even in the thirties and forties AD, to Roman sensibilities, declaring yourself a god while still alive was not the done thing. It was inviting the vicissitudes of fortune to serve you up a big fat slice of hubris pie. It was a type of madness, even then. At some point, much later in life, Caligula suffered from a life-threatening illness which looked set to carry him off; yet when he did in fact recover, he gave out that Caligula had indeed died, and what everyone now observed before them, was a god.

We come then to the question of whether Caligula was clinically insane. While historians are very cagey about attempting medical diagnosis long after it is possible to examine a patient, and they are even more reluctant when it comes to mental health disorders, in the case of Gaius Germanicus Caesar, it is easier than most to come to some kind of conclusion. It is my opinion that Caligula did suffer from a psychological and physical malady. I think this because Suetonius tells us it is the case. Cherry-picker extraordinaire Mary Beard chooses to ignore that. I guess she just closes her eyes and puts her fingers in her ears at the various points where Suetonius speaks of Caligula’s wild mood swings, his not infrequent seizures, the remarks of many who lived through his reign saying that he was definitely insane, and the fact that Caligula himself thought he was mad. Suetonius tells us that Caligula would have moments of more or less lucidity; in the moments of clearer thinking, he apparently admitted that he knew he was ill, beyond doubt, and that his illness scared even him. If there is anyone in the ancient world I would be most comfortable describing as clinically insane, it would be Caligula.

Not only do the ancient sources make the situation quite clear, but the arguments to the contrary don’t seem to hold up under any real scrutiny. For example, it is claimed that Suetonius had a vested interest in lying about Caligula and exaggerating his crimes. Yet by the time Suetonius was writing, no such motivation would have existed. It seems to me that moderns that try to paint Caligula as unfairly maligned or the victim of an uncalled for character assassination are being willfully obtuse. I suspect they just have a new book they wish to sell. They are exhibiting no real historical rigour.

The sordid details of Caligula’s monstrous delinquency have been much documented; least of all by John Hurt’s superb portrayal in Robert Graves’ I, Claudius. A quick rundown of just the most egregious examples are as follows:

It was his habit to commit incest with each of his three sisters in turn, and at large banquets… They say that he ravaged his sister Drusilla before he came of age: their grandmother Antonia, at whose house they were both staying, caught them in bed together. Later he took Drusilla from her husband, and former consul Lucius Cassius Longinus, quite unashamedly treating her as his wife.

It seems hardly worthwhile to record how Gaius treated such relatives and friends as his cousin King Ptolemy, and even Macro… Their very loyalty and nearness to him earned them cruel deaths… Often he would send for men whom he had secretly killed, as though they were still alive, and remark offhandedly a few days later that they must have committed suicide.

The following instances will illustrate his cruelty. Having collected wild animals for one of his shows, he found butcher’s meat too expensive and decided to feed them with criminals instead. He paid no attention to the charge sheets, but simply stood in the middle of a colonnade, glanced at the prisoners lined up before him, and gave the order ‘Kill every man between that bald head and that other one over there.

Someone had sworn to fight in the arena if he (Caligula) recovered from his illness; Gaius forced him to fulfil this oath and watched his swordplay closely, not letting him go until he had won the match and begged abjectly to be released. Another fellow had pledged himself on the same occasion to commit suicide; Gaius, finding that he was still alive, ordered him to be dressed in wreaths and fillets and driven through Rome by imperial slaves, who kept harping on his pledge and finally flung him over the rampart.

Many men of decent family were branded at his command and sent down the mines, or put to work on the roads, or thrown to the wild beasts. Others were confined in narrow cages, where they had to crouch on all fours like animals, or were sawn in half—and not necessarily for major offences, but merely for criticising his shows, failing to swear by his genius, and so forth.

Gaius made parents attend their sons’ executions, and when one father excused himself on the grounds of ill health he provided a litter for him. Having invited another father to dinner just hours after the sons’ execution, he overflowed with good fellowship in an attempt to make him laugh and joke.

He watched the manager of his gladiatorial and wild-beast shows being flogged with chains for several days running, and had him killed only when the smell of suppurating brains became insupportable.

One eques, on the point of being thrown to the wild beasts, shouted that he was innocent; Gaius brought him back, removed his tongue, and then ordered the sentence to be carried out.

When signing the execution list after the ten-day waiting period he used to say, ‘I am clearing my accounts’.

The method of execution he preferred was to inflict numerous small wounds, avoiding the prisoner’s vital organs, and his familiar order ‘Make him feel that he is dying!’ soon became proverbial. Once, when the wrong man had been killed, owing to a confusion of names, he announced that the victim had equally deserved death, and he often quoted the tragic line ‘Let them hate me, so long as they fear me.

Everything that Gaius said and did was marked with equal cruelty, even during his hours of rest and amusement and banquetry. He frequently had trials by torture held in his presence while he was eating or otherwise enjoying himself, and kept an expert headsman in readiness to decapitate the prisoners brought in from jail.

At one particularly extravagant banquet he burst into sudden peels of laughter. The consuls, who were reclining next to him, politely asked whether they might share the joke. ‘What do you think?’ he answered. ‘It occurred to me that I have only to give one nod and both your throats will be cut on the spot!

He had not the slightest regard for chastity, either his own or others… Besides incest with his sisters, and a notorious passion for the prostitute Pyrallis, Gaius made advances to almost every well-known married woman in Rome… and openly discuss his bedfellow in detail, dwelling on her good and bad physical points and criticising he sexual performance.

These examples are just a few of the stories told about Caligula and his cruelty. There are, of course, many, many more. The random killings and rapes were unending. The foreign policy disasters kept piling up. The insults and assaults to Rome’s body-politic only ever increased in ferocity. Eventually he had made just too many powerful enemies. When the people who are charged with protecting your person, keeping you physically safe, when those people begin to fear for their lives, then the end will be coming soon.

Eventually, even the leadership of the emperor’s Praetorian Guard feared that they would be next. Thus they took matters into their own hands.

Two different versions of what followed are current. Some say that Chaerea came up behind Gaius as he stood talking to the boys and, with a cry of ‘Take this!’, gave him a deep wound in the neck, whereupon Gaius Sabinus, the other conspirator, stabbed him in the breast. The other version makes Sabinus tell certain centurions implicated in the plot to clear away the crowd and then ask Gaius for the day’s watchword. He is said to have replied ‘Jupiter’, whereupon Chaerea, from his rear, yelled ‘So be it!’ and split his jawbone as he turned his head. Gaius lay twitching on the ground: ‘I am still alive!’ he shouted, but word went round, ‘Strike again!’, and he succumbed to further wounds, including sword thrusts through his genitals.

That was the violent and horrid end of Gaius Germanicus Caesar. And, much like the assassination of his great ancestor Julius, his murderers had no clear plan for what would replace the regime they just terminated. There was no individual earmarked to become the head of government. A period of civil war or even anarchy loomed. The conspirators were, however, quick to make sure that Caligula’s immediate family were also eliminated.

His wife Caesonia died at the same time as he, stabbed with a sword by a centurion, and his little daughter’s brains were dashed out against a wall.