Caligula

• 1. Introduction

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  Caligula, the third Roman emperor, came to power in AD 37 at age 24, welcomed by a city delirious with relief. Tiberius, his grim predecessor, had spent his final years in paranoid seclusion on the island of Capri, presiding over a reign of treason trials, informers, and broken families. When the young Caligula rode into Rome, three months of public rejoicing followed. Philo, a Jewish diplomat who would later witness events in Caligula's court firsthand, described the first seven months of his reign as a golden age of happiness and prosperity. Within four years, he was dead, stabbed by his own Praetorian Guard in a conspiracy that also involved senators and courtiers. How does a reign begin in near-universal acclaim and end in assassination? How much of the monster in the ancient sources reflects actual events, and how much reflects the grudges of a senatorial class that he openly despised? And what did this 24-year-old actually build, tax, and reform during his brief time in power?

• 2. A Childhood Under Threat

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  Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was born in Antium on the 31st of August AD 12, the third of six surviving children of the Roman general Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder, Augustus' granddaughter. At the age of two or three, he accompanied his father on military campaigns in the north of Germania. His mother dressed him in a miniature soldier's outfit, complete with army boots known as caligae, and the soldiers called him Caligula, meaning 'little boot'. Historian Winterling believes the child would have enjoyed the attention. He later grew to dislike the nickname.

  Germanicus was a figure of enormous popularity, widely expected to eventually become emperor. At age six, Caligula gave a public speech at Assos during a tour of Rome's allies and provinces. A few months after that tour, Germanicus fell seriously ill and died at Antioch, Syria, aged 33, convinced he had been poisoned by the provincial governor, Gnaius Calpurnius Piso. Many Romans believed Tiberius had ordered his death, fearing a rival. Germanicus was cremated; his ashes were placed in the Mausoleum of Augustus.

  Back in Rome, Caligula's mother Agrippina made no secret of her imperial ambitions for her sons, and her relationship with Tiberius rapidly collapsed. Tiberius forbade her to remarry. Treason trials dominated his later rule. Agrippina and Caligula's older brother Nero were tried and banished in 29 on treason charges. The adolescent Caligula was sent first to live with his great-grandmother Livia, then after her death with his paternal grandmother Antonia Minor. In 30, Tiberius had Caligula's brothers Drusus and Nero declared public enemies. Caligula and his three sisters remained in Italy as hostages under close watch. One by one his family was eliminated; Caligula was the sole male survivor.

• 3. Life on Capri

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  In 31, Caligula's brother Nero died in exile. Caligula was placed in the personal care of Tiberius at Villa Jovis on the island of Capri. His protector there was Naevius Sutorius Macro, the Praetorian prefect, who had helped bring down the dangerously ambitious Sejanus, Macro's predecessor in office. Philo reports that Macro shielded Caligula from Tiberius' suspicions, presenting the young man as friendly and obedient, and devoted to Tiberius' grandson Tiberius Gemellus.

  All the ancient sources describe Caligula during these years as a gifted orator, cultured, intelligent, and a natural actor who understood exactly how much danger he was in. He hid his resentment of Tiberius' treatment of his family behind such elaborate deference that it was said of him that there had never been 'a better slave or a worse master'. Tacitus read this compliance as evidence that his 'monstrous character was masked by a hypocritical modesty'. Winterling offers a simpler explanation: a forthright protest would certainly have cost him his life.

  Tiberius, even in his mid-70s and mistrustful of everyone, reportedly saw through the act. Suetonius quotes him predicting that Caligula would prove 'the ruin of himself and of all men', and that he was 'rearing a viper for the Roman people'. Winterling cautions that this judgment drew on later, unreliable accounts; Suetonius was crediting Tiberius with a penetrating knowledge of human nature that was famously absent in him. In 33, Caligula's mother and his brother Drusus died while still in exile. That same year, Tiberius arranged his marriage to Junia Claudilla, daughter of one of Tiberius' most influential Senate allies. She died in childbirth the following year, along with her baby. By 35, Tiberius named Caligula joint heir alongside Gemellus, Tiberius' own grandson, who was seven years younger than Caligula and still not of adult age.

• 4. The Golden Beginning

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  Tiberius died on the 16th of March AD 37, the day before the Liberalia festival, at the age of 77. On that same day, the Praetorian Guard at Misenum hailed Caligula as emperor. The Senate ratified his leadership two days later. On the 28th or the 29th of March, Caligula entered Rome, and in a single day, with a single piece of legislation, the 25-year-old received all the powers and titles that Augustus had accumulated across a lifetime. He was the first emperor to receive these powers all at once rather than gradually.

  Scholar Anthony A. Barrett put it plainly: Caligula would be 'restrained only by his own sense of discretion'. That discretion, initially, was considerable. He refused the title pater patriae, 'father of the fatherland', citing his youth, until the 21st of September 37. He doubled the payment that Tiberius had promised each Praetorian guardsman, from 500 to 1,000 sesterces, and paid out bonuses to city troops and the army outside Italy. Every citizen in Rome received 150 sesterces; heads of households received twice that. He gave Germanicus' face pride of place on coinage and renamed the month of September after his father.

  He granted his sisters and his grandmother Antonia Minor privileges normally reserved for the Vestal Virgins. He named his favourite sister, Drusilla, as heir to his imperium. He elevated his uncle Claudius, whose limp and stammer his own family found 'something of a public embarrassment', from equestrian to senator and made him consular colleague. Barrett and Yardley describe this as an 'astonishingly enlightened gesture'. He burned Tiberius' secret papers detailing the infamous treason trials, publicly claiming he had not read them first, and used a coin issue to advertise his restoration of legal security. He cleared a backlog of court cases by adding jurors and suspending the requirement for imperial confirmation of sentences. Josephus would later write that in the first two years of his reign, Caligula's even-handed rule earned goodwill throughout the Empire.

• 5. Illness, Purges, and the Break

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  Between approximately mid-October and mid-November 37, Caligula fell gravely ill and for about a month hovered between life and death. Rome's public spaces filled with citizens begging the gods for his recovery, some apparently offering their own lives in exchange. He survived. What followed was a series of deaths that ancient historians and modern scholars still argue over.

  Silanus, once Caligula's father-in-law and an eminent senator, was forced to commit suicide for reasons the sources do not explain. Gemellus, Caligula's adopted son and named joint heir, now 18 and legally adult, was also killed; Suetonius gives several versions, one in which Gemellus was charged with taking an antidote, which was read as an implicit accusation that Caligula had meant to poison him. Several months later in 38, Macro, the very man whose protection had kept Caligula alive on Capri, was forced to suicide as well. Any connection between these deaths is speculative, but one possibility is that Silanus had been planning to install Gemellus as emperor if Caligula died during his illness, and that Caligula simply tired of Macro's considerable influence.

  On the 19th of June 38, Caligula's favourite sister Drusilla died. She had been named his heir. He had her deified and renamed Panthea, meaning 'All Goddesses'; she became the first mortal woman in Roman history to be made a goddess of state. Caligula declared a period of compulsory, universal mourning throughout the Empire. Historian Weidemann argues that purges this early in a reign suggest the 'good period followed by atrocities' model of Caligula's rule is too simplistic, and that he had learned more from Tiberius than the popular narrative admits.

• 6. Building, Taxing, Spending

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  Pliny the Elder considered the two aqueducts Caligula began, the Aqua Claudia and the Anio Novus, to be engineering marvels. Caligula also completed the temple of Augustus and the reconstruction of the theatre of Pompey, began an amphitheatre beside the Saepta Julia, built a large racetrack now known as the Circus of Gaius and Nero, and pushed road maintenance across the empire, forcing past and present highway commissioners to personally repay funds they had embezzled or misused.

  For the Circus of Gaius and Nero, Caligula incorporated an Egyptian obelisk, now known as the Vatican obelisk, which he transported by sea on a purpose-built ship so large that it used 120,000 modi of lentils as ballast. He planned a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth and sent a chief centurion to survey the site; he intended to rebuild the palace of Polycrates at Samos and to found a city high up in the Alps. None of those grander schemes were realised.

  Suetonius claims Caligula spent 2.7 billion sesterces in his first year and addressed the resulting deficit through confiscations and new taxes. Those taxes were extensive: taverns, artisans, slaves, food sold in the city, litigation, weddings, porters' wages, and most famously, a tax on prostitutes equivalent to a single transaction, applied to active, retired, or married practitioners. Citizens of provincial Italy lost previous exemptions. Overall taxes roughly doubled across his reign. Barrett notes that Caligula's immediate successor Claudius abolished taxes and donated 15,000 sesterces to each Praetorian guardsman at the start of his own reign, which suggests Caligula had left him a solvent treasury, not a bankrupt one. The tax on prostitution outlasted Caligula; it continued up to the reign of Severus Alexander.

• 7. The Senate, Incitatus, and the Baiae Bridge

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  By 39, Caligula's relationship with his Senate had moved from tension into open confrontation. He accused senators of servility, treachery, and hypocrisy, pointing out that they had voted honours to Tiberius and to the disgraced Sejanus while both lived, then revoked those honours once they were safely dead. He declared it folly to seek their love or approval, since they hated him and wanted him dead; better that they should fear him instead. The Senate responded by voting him a special armed guard and proposing that his chair be raised on a high platform 'even in the very Senate house'. They offered him a thanksgiving as to a monarch.

  Suetonius and Dio both describe Caligula's supposed plan to promote his favourite racehorse, Incitatus, whose name meant 'Swift', to the position of consul, and later to priest of his own cult. Winterling reads this as a deliberate insult aimed at the consulars themselves: the highest ambition of the Roman aristocracy would be thrown open to ruinous competition and simultaneously made ridiculous. David Woods considers it unlikely Caligula truly intended to demean the consulship, having held it himself. Whatever Caligula meant, Suetonius took it as additional proof of insanity, embellishing the story with palaces, golden goblets, and dinner invitations for the horse.

  In 39 or 40, Caligula ordered a temporary floating bridge stretching more than two miles from the resort of Baiae, near Naples, to the neighbouring port of Puteoli. Grain ships were requisitioned as pontoons, earth-paved and fitted with resting places. For the opening ceremony, Caligula donned what was said to be Alexander the Great's breastplate and rode Incitatus across the full length of the bridge, perhaps enacting a defiant response to a prophecy attributed to Tiberius' soothsayer Thrasyllus of Mendes that Caligula had 'no more chance of becoming emperor than of riding a horse across the Bay of Baiae'. Seneca and Dio blamed the project for dangerously depleting Rome's grain supply; Barrett dismisses this as 'a genuine grain crisis simply blamed on the most outlandish episode at hand.'

• 8. The End and What Followed

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  In early 41, Caligula was assassinated in a conspiracy involving officers of the Praetorian Guard, senators, and courtiers. At least some of the plotters may have intended to restore the Roman Republic and aristocratic privileges. If so, they were outmaneuvered: the Praetorians appear to have spontaneously chosen Claudius, Caligula's uncle, as the next emperor. Caligula's death ended the Julii Caesares in the male line, though the Julio-Claudian dynasty continued to rule until the death of Caligula's nephew, the Emperor Nero.

  The sources that survive were nearly all written by members of the senatorial nobility, long after the events they describe, and most modern historians treat them with considerable caution. Some dismiss many of the worst allegations as misunderstandings, exaggeration, or malicious fantasy directed at a man who had openly shown he despised their class. Caligula's coinage, his aqueducts, his road network, his tax reforms and his legal reforms outlasted him. His ruling that bequests made to any reigning emperor became property of the office rather than the man was made constitutional law under Antoninus Pius. The military's responsibility for tax collection, which Caligula introduced, remained in force well beyond his reign. The coin he minted to mark the abolition of the half-percent sales tax, the ducentesima, was itself a small bronze quadrans: an everyday object given to ordinary Romans to announce they had paid less.