Caligula

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was born on 31 August AD 12 at Antium, the third surviving son of Germanicus — Rome's most popular general — and Agrippina the Elder, granddaughter of Augustus. He thus carried Augustan blood through both parents, an unusually pure imperial pedigree. From the age of two or three he accompanied his father on campaigns against the German tribes; the legionaries delighted in his miniature uniform and especially his small boots, and gave him the nickname "Caligula" (Little Boot), which he later disliked. After Germanicus' death in Syria in AD 19 — officially malaria, although Tacitus and Suetonius hint at poisoning ordered by Tiberius — his mother and elder brothers were caught up in the treason trials of Tiberius' reign and starved to death in exile. The young Caligula was placed under house arrest, then in AD 31 brought to Tiberius on Capri. There, for six years, he displayed what contemporaries called a genius for survival: he so perfectly concealed his hatred of the emperor who had destroyed his family that an observer remarked there had never been a better slave nor a worse master.

Tiberius died in March AD 37, and the twenty-four-year-old Caligula succeeded amid wild popular enthusiasm — Rome had loathed the reclusive old emperor. For seven months the new reign was almost a textbook of good government. Caligula paid bonuses to the Praetorian Guard and the legions, burned Tiberius' treason files, recalled exiles, cut taxes, restored gladiatorial games, and reverently brought home the bones of his mother and brothers for entombment in the Mausoleum of Augustus. Philo of Alexandria, no apologist, wrote that these first months were "complete happiness." The accession was celebrated for three months, during which more than 160,000 sacrificial animals were slaughtered.

In October AD 37 Caligula fell gravely ill. Philo identifies this near-death experience as the turning point of the reign. On recovery he began executing courtiers who had vowed to die in his place — and demanded they keep their promise. He banished his wife, forced his father-in-law Marcus Junius Silanus and his cousin Tiberius Gemellus to suicide on dubious treason charges, and then, in AD 38, executed Macro, the prefect of the Praetorian Guard who had engineered his accession. Some reforms were genuinely enlightened — he published the imperial accounts (which Tiberius had hidden), restored magistrate elections to the popular assemblies, and helped fire victims. But these were intermixed with executions without trial.

A financial crisis followed in AD 39-40, exacerbated by Caligula's vast building programme: the Aqua Claudia and Anio Novus aqueducts, the Circus of Gaius and Nero on the Vatican hill (where the Vatican obelisk originally stood), and two enormous floating palaces on Lake Nemi which were not recovered from the lake bed until 1929-32. To find revenue he resorted to confiscation, taxation of prostitution and lawsuits, and even auctioning gladiators' lives in the arena. He had a two-mile pontoon bridge built across the Bay of Baiae, donned the breastplate of Alexander the Great, and rode his beloved horse Incitatus across — a piece of pure theatre, in defiance of an old astrological prophecy that he was as likely to become emperor as to ride a horse across the bay. Suetonius and Cassius Dio also report that he tried to make Incitatus a consul, although the historicity of this is disputed.

In AD 39 his relations with the Senate finally collapsed. He reopened Tiberius' treason files, executed several senators, dismissed consuls, and humiliated senators by making them run beside his chariot. A plot involving his brother-in-law Marcus Aemilius Lepidus was discovered the same year. In AD 40 he annexed Mauretania after summarily executing its client king Ptolemy in Rome, an action that would trigger a major revolt under Claudius. He launched a campaign towards Britain but, after deploying troops on the Channel coast, reportedly ordered them to collect seashells as "spoils from the sea" — an episode whose true meaning (training exercise, Latin double-entendre, Suetonius' satire, or genuine derangement) still divides scholars.

Also in AD 40 he began appearing in public dressed as Hercules, Mercury, Venus or Apollo, and demanded divine worship. A temple to him stood at Miletus; he ordered his statue installed in the Temple in Jerusalem, a command the Syrian governor Petronius successfully delayed at the urging of Agrippa I. On 24 January AD 41, leaving theatrical games in honour of Augustus, Caligula was stabbed thirty times in a corridor by tribune Cassius Chaerea and other Praetorian officers — Suetonius noted the parallel with Julius Caesar's assassination. He was twenty-eight. His wife Caesonia and infant daughter Julia Drusilla were also killed; his uncle Claudius, hiding behind a curtain, was found by the Praetorians and proclaimed emperor. The contemporary sources Philo and the elder Seneca, together with the later Suetonius and Cassius Dio (writing 80-180 years after the event), are uniformly hostile, so modern historians cautiously offer medical explanations — epilepsy, hyperthyroidism, lead poisoning — without consensus. What is certain is that Caligula provided the template for every tyrant story written afterwards: the early reign of promise, the snap into autocracy, the demand for worship, the dagger in the corridor.