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| Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. (Image Credit: Manel/Flickr) |
The documentary Caligula: Paranoia and Brutality in Ancient Rome (2013) sets out on a journey to find clues across the Roman world to discover if many of the myths that overshadow Caligula’s image and characterize his short reign are true. Caligula: Paranoia and Brutality in Ancient Rome (2013) takes on the role of a detective seeking to answer the question that has lingered into modern times: if Caligula deserves to be remembered as a depraved monster.
“Oderint dum metuant.”
“Let them hate, as long as they fear.”
― Caligula
MYTH: CALIGULA INFLICTED UNPARALLELED BRUTALITY IN ROME.
On 31 August AD, 12 Caligula was born as Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus in Antium, Italy, to the revered Roman military commander Germanicus and the esteemed granddaughter of Augustus, Agrippina the Elder. Mary Beard, the documentary’s narrator, an English classicist from Newnham College, University of Cambridge, explains that Caligula was exposed to the brutality of war since he was two years old. He frequently accompanied his father, Germanicus, to war campaigns across northern Germania, traveling “from army camp to army camp.” On these battlegrounds, he became even more acquainted with the horrors of war and the power of glory and triumph. His presence was such a mainstay at these various army camps that he earned the nickname Caligula, or “Little Boots”, from the Roman soldiers stationed across northern Germania.
Soon after Germanicus’ death, Caligula and his family’s home became their tomb. The conflict with the powerful rival, Emperor Tiberius, turned deadly. The family was violently targeted as competitors to the throne. Imagine the anguish of an adolescent Caligula onlooking or overhearing helplessly as his family was eliminated one by one. At the time, he was never allowed to show or express the depth of his grief. Despite the anguish of experiencing such violence, it became his norm. Caligula learned to speak the language of violence. Violence was his destiny, and thus the immovable destiny of Rome.
Caligula and his three sisters survived as hostages of a paranoid Emperor Tiberius. Emperor Tiberius’s systematic slaughter of Caligula’s immediate family concluded after his death. As a hostage at Emperor Tiberius’s court on the island of Capri, Caligula became a diligent student of violence after witnessing the emperor ruthlessly mete out various punishments on perceived enemies. Soon Caligula became an insatiable connoisseur of the violence that eventually engulfed his life. Beard details how the enemies of Emperor Tiberius met their savage ends over the edge of a cliff. Those who were lucky enough to survive the death plunge were subsequently bludgeoned with oars by sailors stationed at the bottom of the cliff.
As a nascent empire, Rome grappled with the complexities of succession. Unrelenting violence was a tool to solve the enigma of succession and impose one’s claim to the throne. Beard explains, “Even though Roman power had now become a family business, since the founder, Caesar Augustus, there was no fixed system of passing the power on.” Professor Greg Woolf of the University of St. Andrews explains how the instability surrounding succession to the throne produced a culture of violence that each emperor embraced and readily reproduced. He goes on to answer the question from Beard about how the uncertainty produced violence and rumors of violence with an example: “First thing that Tiberius does when he succeeds Augustus is he sends a boat to an island on which one of his relatives has been kept in exile for decades, to have the boy killed, because he couldn’t been an alternative, and what does Caligula do when he takes power? One of the first things he does is he has his cousin, a boy named Tiberius Gemellus, murdered because he’s somebody else who could’ve been emperor.”
Anthony Barret recalls in his book Caligula: The Abuse of Power how early into Caligula’s reign he grew ill and then turned against the same Roman officials who seemed desperate for his recovery. His paranoia about the origin of his illness prompted him to even blame family members and soak the palace with their blood or exile them. Then there were the string of forced Senate suicides for no apparent reason and the forced suicide of a key ally, a Praetorian prefect named Quintus Naevius Cordus Sutorius Macro. Caligula was simply embodying the ominous slogan paraded about ancient Rome: “Eat, drink, and be merry because tomorrow you’ll die.”
MYTH: CALIGULA’S SOLE TOOL TO DEMONSTRATE HIS LEGITIMACY TO THE IMPERIAL THRONE WAS BRUTALITY.
Beard notes that Caligula strategically highlighted how his bloodline shaped and destined him for the Roman imperial throne. He boldly proclaimed his connection to the celebrated Germanicus, a descendant of the Roman Empire’s founders. Caligula generated spectacle by giving the ashes of his mother a victorious return to Rome and burying her with his own hands in the sacred ancestral tomb. On her tombstone, he inscribed honor to his mother’s legacy by pronouncing her relation to Augustus, the first Roman emperor, that Caligula now deemed a god. In doing so, he bolstered his image and boasted of his legitimacy.
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| Front: C CAESAR DIVI AVG PRON AVG P M TR P III P P. Head of Caligula with laurel wreath. Back: ADLOCVT
// COH. Caligula stands in a toga on a pedestal in front of a chair. His hand is raised before five soldiers in full gear accompanied by four legionary eagles. (Image Credit: Reinhard Saczewski/Wikimedia Commons) |
Caligula: Paranoia and Brutality in Ancient Rome (2013) details how he “stamped with his portrait” on the Roman currency to spread news far and wide of his imperial reign. Due to his generosity, the coins proliferated throughout Rome and beyond, spreading messages in his favor. The image of Caligula on the collection of coins, coupled with images celebrating his bloodline, reinforced his claim to the throne daily. The coins depicted magnificent images of “Caligula on one side, his father, the great Germanicus on the other. Another shows a carriage parading a statue of his mother in celebrations founded in her honor, and even more important, this one shows Caligula sacrificing a bull at the temple of his great grandfather, the god Augustus.”
Caligula then embedded his imperial brand into the very structures of Rome with “iconic, ancient monuments.” Caligula spearheaded the construction of two aqueducts in Rome, the Aqua Claudia and Anio Novus. These structures improved water accessibility by “bringing water from over 40 miles away to the center of Rome.” The obelisk “that now stands in front of St. Peters, is also Caligulan, shipped from over Egypt on an enormous, specially built boat” was placed in Circus Caligula. He invested tremendously in imperial building projects on Palatine Hill. Caligula vigorously embarked on more building projects that drained the palace coffers, such as completing the temple of Augustus and the theater of Pompey in the city of Rome. Other endless projects included initiating the construction of an amphitheater beside the Saepta Julia, only for it to be cleared and filled with water. He then turned his attention to repairing the city walls and temples in Syracuse and maintaining the roads throughout the empire and extended territories. More ambitious construction projects were in the works before his assassination, such as rebuilding palaces and temples, all extolling the glory of Rome and his adjacent power.
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| Print of Caligula by Etienne Charpentier, 1750-1760, France. (Image Credit: Smithsonian Design Museum) |
MYTH: CALIGULA BESTOWED HIS FAVORITE IMPERIAL HORSE, INCITATUS, WITH HIS OWN PALACE AND GRANTED THE HORSE A TITLE AS A CONSUL OF ROME.
Questions regarding Caligula’s supposed order to appoint an imperial racehorse as a Roman consul taunt historians to this day. Was Caligula’s humor ahead of his time? Was he sarcastically making a sly observation about the deteriorating state of Roman political affairs that was misinterpreted by his more somber aristocratic peers? Was Caligula truly mad? Or was the joke on him? Perhaps the rumor was spread about Caligula in jest? Or in a vicious response to his insulting jest? Beard clarifies that there is no evidence from ancient historians from his time period who confirmed that a horse actually rose to power as a consul of Rome. In fact, it is not definitive whether he planned to appoint his imperial racehorse or if these mad plans were simply false rumors.
More likely, the Senators were not in the mood for jokes after the last spate of forced Senator suicides. Since Caligula was also a consul, the court probably refused to consider that the brutal and paranoid ruler would reference his position in a joking manner, thus undermining his own power just for the sake of a laugh. Emperors were to be taken at their word by their subjects no matter how outrageous the command. Disobedient subjects who mocked the orders of their emperors faced the threat of death. Therefore, the recollection in the ancient text, Roman History by Cassius Dio, a Roman historian and senator, says of the matter, “One of the horses, which he named Incitatus, he used to invite to dinner, where he would offer him golden barley and drink his health in wine from golden goblets; he swore by the animal's life and fortune and even promised to appoint him consul, a promise that he would certainly have carried out if he had lived longer.”
MYTH: CALIGULA DISHONORED THE ROYAL PALACE WITH HIS UNBRIDLED PERVERSIONS.
Ancient rumors spread that Caligula tainted the palace by misusing the majestic abode as his personal brothel. Scandalous stories floated throughout ancient Roman consciousness and now even the modern imagination about the excessive amounts of intimate partners he collected, his penchant for wearing women’s clothing, and the intensity at which he pursued his nonstop perversions. The rumor that tarnished his image more than a rusty imperial coin was the possibility that he engaged in improper intimate relations with his own twin sisters and with his favorite sister, Julia Drusilla. Cassius Dio speculates in “Book 59” of Roman History how his deified self image inspired the relentless debauchery. “Indeed, even before this he had been demanding that he be regarded as more than a human being, and was wont to claim that he had intercourse with the Moon, that Victory put a crown upon him, and to pretend that he was Jupiter, and he made this a pretext for seducing numerous women, particularly his sisters; again, he would pose as Neptune because he had bridged so great an expanse of sea; he also impersonated Hercules, Bacchus, Apollo, and all the other divinities, not merely males but also females, often taking the role of Juno, Diana, or Venus.”
Even the grand images on Caligula’s coins could not protect the legacy of a young emperor besieged by such astonishing and damaging rumors. Caligula: Paranoia and Brutality in Ancient Rome (2013) challenges the validity of these rumors. Beard hints that the rumors were deliberately spread years after his assassination in a campaign to desecrate his reign. The sources for these wild rumors did not appear in written texts until years after his death, “by the second century biography, Centonius.” According to Beard, no historians during Caligula’s time corroborated the rumors. Perhaps nostalgia for his reign reignited in Rome, and the rumors were unleashed to undermine the nostalgia. According to Peter Wiseman, Caligula remained popular with the ordinary citizens who were enamored by his relation to heroes such as Julius Caesar, Germanicus, and Augustus.
As Beard noted in the beginning of Caligula: Paranoia and Brutality in Ancient Rome (2013), those in the imperial court were encouraged to remain desensitized and unemotional to violent and unfortunate circumstances. The documentary recounted the ghastly tale of a Roman princess who stoically continued to dine at an imperial feast after her brother was fatally poisoned next to her. Professor Catherine Edwards of Birkbeck, University of London, describes to Beard how Caligula’s excessive grief over Drusilla’s death was viewed with suspicion. By now, it had become the standard response to perceive all of Caligula’s excess as a connection to depravity, even excessive grief. His departure from the stoic composure usually demanded from imperial rulers and even the royal court seemed to imply that the rumors were true. Especially since Caligula managed to be stoic for the other deaths in his family. Edwards further dissected how the same anxieties about succession that instigated violence also compelled aristocrats to blanket elite Roman society with damaging rumors about rivals. Due to Rome’s recent changes to succession, there was growing resentment over how one family could monopolize the throne through the increased utilization of women.
“Vivo!”
“I live!”
― Caligula
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| Caligula poses triumphantly in a winged helmet and holds double-headed arrows before a military scene in the background, despite the emperor’s lack of military experience. From ‘Roman Emperors on Horseback’. (Image Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art) |
Whether true or not, the buildup of the myths and rumors in Rome about Caligula killed his image and contributed significantly to Caligula’s eventual assassination at the age of 28 in January 41 AD by Praetorian tribunes Cassius Chaerea and Cornelius Sabinus, and a sizable amount of centurions. I noticed a pattern that his deepest favorites—the people, things, and animals he trusted—often became targets of scandals and rumors. This realization only beckons more questions. Did the elite not trust Caligula to have wholesome favorites? Did Caligula’s favorites undermine their power? Or was Caligula so damaged that his cherished favorites only derived from perversion?
Since Caligula did not have experience as a great military leader to define his personal legacy, these secondhand myths and rumors easily weighed down his reign. Caligula was deprived of being the hero of well-circulating stories of military valor that could contend with the wild ancient rumors and safeguard his reputation. Due to his lack of political experience, Caligula was unable to develop his political prowess to better deal with envious Senators and quell these rumors. To overcome these deficiencies, Caligula turned to declarations of divinity to bolster his power, even dressing up as various deities. These declarations only invited more vicious rumors of madness. His death occurred less than four years into his reign as the victim of a tragic attempt to end imperial rule and return Rome to a republic. Despite the assassins’ brutal maneuvering, the Roman Empire prevailed. Claudius was installed as the new Roman Emperor shortly afterwards. Imperial rule was too entrenched in the inner workings of Rome for the assassination of one young emperor to topple the Roman Empire.
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