Useful Notes / Caligula

"Caligula was no boy scout,
He did things that we can't even talk about.
The Romans knew he'd lost his head,
When he filled a vacant senate seat with Mister Ed.

—Pinky and the Brain, A Meticulous Analysis of History

"Ita feri ut se mori sentiat." ("Strike so that he feels he is dying.")

The infamous Roman emperor, reigned between AD 37 and AD 41. His actual name was Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus; Caligula is a nickname, meaning "Little Boot"^note no, not that one (or less literally "Bootsy"), that he got in his childhood, because, being a Military Brat, his mom liked to dress him up as a soldier. His father was the general Germanicus, whose personal charisma and general ability to win the loyalties of civilians and soldiers (despite a complicated military command record) made him the de facto imperial heir. Caligula's great-uncle was Emperor Tiberius, while his nephew was the equally infamous Nero. After Germanicus died in Roman Syria, it was suspected he had been poisoned, either by a jealous Tiberius, the Governor of Syria Gaius Calpurnius Piso, or both men working in conjunction (it's now generally assumed he died of malaria). Though Tiberius pleaded innocence (and some of Germanicus' final words were "tell Tiberius to avenge my death"), Caligula's mom, Agrippina, believed the Emperor had killed her husband and launched a campaign of PR terror against him. In the ensuing mess, Caligula's mother and two brothers were imprisoned and/or exiled. Caligula himself, wanting to stay out of the mess, spent the remainder of his youth with Tiberius in his island fortress on Capri, where he'd placed himself into self-imposed exile to get away from the machinations of Rome. Depending on who's telling the story, Caligula either grew up watching Tiberius engage in all sorts of debaucheries and horrors that went on to shape him, or just watching his great uncle sink deeper into alcoholism. Whatever the case, Caligula was elevated to emperor once Tiberius died in AD 37.

The first six months of his reign were reportedly an easygoing time for the Romans. Caligula was something of a PR maestro and knew how to put himself over: holding endless games, publicly burning Tiberius' "enemies list", and showering gold coins (actually his inheritance) onto his fans. Later that year he fell seriously ill, the cause of which is still debated. Some suggest herpes or malaria (untreated malarial encephalitis causes extremely high fevers which are noted for causing brain damage in those who survive them) while others suggest lead poisoning.

All of Rome prayed for him to survive...

Upon recovering, Caligula had permanently lost his hair and apparently his mind. Though the popular image of him is as an insane tyrant, he may have just been comically inept at running a government, suffered a nervous breakdown, or some combination of the three. It's hard to find out how much is true, since few contemporary sources survived about him. The outrageous tales about him^note  Specifically: committing incest with his sisters, sending his army against the sea after declaring war on the ocean god Neptune and having them stab the waves and collect shells as booty, marrying a woman who was 9 months pregnant so he wouldn't have to wait for an heir (whether or not it was his is unclear), using a tax hike upon the birth of his daughter to provide gold for him to roll around in, and wanting to make his favorite horse a consul come from Suetonius, a notorious gossip who also published books on the most famous prostitutes in Rome and whose biography about Caligula came out 80 years after the emperor's death at the behest of another dynasty of Emperors who had interest in demonizing their predecessors.^note These particular dynasty being the Nerva-Antonines, initiated by the eponymous emperor Nerva (and whose successors until Marcus Aurelius were adopted instead of blood heirs). For that matter, Nerva himself was closely-associated with the shorter-yet-notable Flavians (consisting of the Parent-Child Team of Vespasian and his sons Titus and Domitian). The fact that nearly all of these Emperors were known to be very upstanding characters (praised by no lesser intellects as Niccolò Machiavelli and Edward Gibbon) helped contrast them with the relative lack of scruples of the Julio-Claudians. A true contemporary chronicler was Seneca, only he was hardly an objective source either given that Caligula hated him and almost executed him at one point.^note Caligula considered Seneca a dangerous upstart due to his growing success and influence in the Senate, and rumors about him being friends with people who had conspired against Caligula didn't help a bit. The good emperor only refrained from having him killed because Seneca had a legendarily fragile health and it was believed he would die of tuberculosis soon anyway. Ironically, it was not the case, as Seneca went to outlive Caligula. Seneca's account is much less bizarre, although he still pictures Caligula as someone terribly unfit for his position who had completely let the power go to his head. A second contemporary, the Jewish writer Philo, also met Caligula personally, in his case to try and negotiate an end to Caligula's attempt to install idols in the temple in Israel, and his depiction falls in line with Seneca's in depicting Caligula not so much insane but an utter Jerkass unfit to rule. Cassius Dio, another later writer, falls in between Suetonius and Seneca/Philo, depicting a Caligula who's a touch tyrannical but generally just too incompetent for a job like his.

What is certain that Caligula wanted to increase his authority, which made him unpopular with the Senate ^note the Kangaroo Court trials and subsequent executions of several public figures didn't help either, and that he engaged in some rather extravagant and occasionally questionable public and personal construction projects at a time when Rome experienced both an economic downturn and a brief famine^note The degree to which these events were related to said projects, or whether they simply painted his sometimes odd decisions in a poor light for the common Roman, remains unclear.

Said construction projects are a prime example of Caligula's complicated legacy: on the one hand, he enacted public works like improvements to several harbors during the famine (allowing increased food imports), expanding and upgrading the empire's road system, and initiating the construction of two new major aquaducts. On the other hand, he constructed of a pair of massive ships on a sacred lake- the smaller one a floating temple to Diana^note and/or the Egyptian goddess Isis, another apparent point of contention both among his critics at the time and among scholars today, the larger one lavishly equipped as a party barge (for purely ceremonial purposes related to the temple, of course). The fact that these projects sent the fabulously wealthy Caligula from Riches to Rags and he was on the verge of tanking the Roman economy were probably the real final straw in folks deciding there was a need for a regime change.

There were several conspiracies against him, and he was eventually stabbed to death by his own bodyguards, who also killed his wife and infant daughter. He would be succeeded by his uncle Claudius, who ruled Rome from AD 41 to 54 before being succeeded by Nero.

Is the trope namer for The Caligula and Caligula's Horse. His life was the source material for the infamously controversial film Caligula, starring Malcolm McDowell in the title role.

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Tropes as portrayed in fiction:

• Fluffy the Terrible: One of the most infamous rulers in history is almost always called a name that translates as "Bootsy".
• Historical Domain Character: Together with Nero and to a lesser extent, Commodus, the stock evil Roman Emperor to appear in popular culture.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: There has been much scholarly debate on just how many of his evil deeds are real. Although it was common for writers to slander previous rulers, most historians still think that he was, at the very least, utterly incompetent.^note Some historians note that Roman histories were often written by members of the senatorial class, who had the leisure and education for such endeavors—and Caligula certainly treated the Senate with contempt. One modern German scholar has argued that Caligula's behaviour was a deliberate and highly unpopular attempt to expose the duplicity of the Roman aristocracy: e.g., when Caligula was ill, one man vowed that if the emperor recovered, he would give his own life. Caligula duly recovered, and then, to everyone's shock, demanded that the man actually kill himself. This was interpreted by later historians as a sign of Caligula's cruelty, but the modern scholar argues was that nobody, including the man himself, expected that he would have to go through with it; the vow was actually an act of extravagant flattery which was done in the hope of reward, and what Caligula was doing was exposing the ridiculous lengths which hypocrisy had gone to in imperial Rome. The debate goes on.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Rarely will he be called "Emperor Gaius" in fiction or non-fiction.

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Appears in the following works:

Comic Books

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "The Origin" claims that Caligula was a vampire who eventually became Jack the Ripper.
• The 2011 Avatar Press miniseries Caligula begins with Emperor Caligula and his cronies raping the protagonist's family to death as part of their drunken revelry, then follows the protagonist's infiltration of the Emperor's inner circle in a plot to assassinate him. It turns out that Caligula was possessed by a demon during his high fever.
• The Shazam! villain Ibac derives his superpowers from four ruthless historical figures, with Caligula providing his cruelty and the latter "c" in his name.
• Simon Dark: The "familiar" Gaius Publius was once a gladiator who earned Caligula's ire by refusing to kill a defeated opponent. Caligula gave Gaius to a sorcerer who proceeded to transform him into an inhuman monster intended to be an unquestioning slave, but Gaius retained his mind and independence.

Fanfic

• He appears in the third entry of the Barney & Friends Hate Fic Day of the Barney Trilogy, as one of the many children Barney had corrupted throughout history.

Film

• He's the subject of the infamously controversial gorn movie Caligula (1979) by Tinto Brass, where he's played by Malcolm McDowell.
• He's portrayed by Jay Robinson (in Large Ham style) in the 1953 film The Robe and its sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators.

Literature

• Robert Graves in his novel, I, Claudius (closely following Suetonius) portrays him as evil and completely insane.
• He's mentioned in America (The Book), in the section "The 5 Greatest Moments in Negative Advertising", where it's said that he was nearly undone by a smear campaign that depicted him as a "pretty nice guy". He went into "damage control" by publicly sodomizing a puppy.
• The Trials of Apollo: He's the third emperor and one of the Big Bads of the series. He kills Jason Grace. Apollo had met him once as a mortal, and was apparently so terrified of him he didn't return to the Roman Empire for several decades.

Live-Action TV

• In the TV adaptation I, Claudius he's played by John Hurt. Awesomely.
• In the 1968 mini-series The Caesars (which owes more to Tacitus than Suetonius), he is played by Ralph Bates, who manages to be terrifying without charging into Large Ham territory.
• John Simm played him in a TV miniseries about Nero, and his performance is pretty much a first draft for his portrayal of The Master in Doctor Who.
• A waxdroid of Caligula is one of the leaders of the Villain World waxdroids in the Red Dwarf episode "Meltdown". Much of his onscreen time was of him ordering Rasputin the Mad Monk to give Lister and Cat increasingly bizarre punishments.
• He's played by Justin Timberlake in a Saturday Night Live sketch. A group of Romans come over to his palace and he appears to announce that, "My name is Caligula, and I'm an alcoholic sex addict. But with your help, all of you, I'd like to change that." His guests are not amused to hear that the wild orgy they were anticipating has been replaced with "game night". They try to talk him back into being his usual depraved self.
• The History Bites episode "Caligula is Croaked" focuses on his psychopathy, assassination, and subsequent replacement by Claudius.
• Horrible Histories: Caligula is portrayed by Simon Farnaby, who makes him out to be Laughably Evil.
• Xena: Warrior Princess: In "The God You Know", Caligula is portrayed as an immature, cruel, and murderous tyrant who hears voices and achieves godhood by stealing Aphrodite's divinity. Xena, in disguise, seduces him, then faces him in a chariot race and beats him. She then reveals her true identity and beats him up due to his lack of skill with his powers. Xena bluffs that she still has the power to kill gods, and he decides to kill himself by falling on a sword rather than be killed by her. His ghost has a cameo in "You Are There", where he's waiting to be ferried across the River Styx by Charon, but he's so obnoxious that Charon throws him into the river.
• The third season of Netflix's docu-drama series Roman Empire is devoted to him, with Ido Drent in the title role. The series narrative suggests his late life negative reputation is not only due to his illness, but was also to an extent jumpstarted by being fostered and becoming a house guest/hostage of his predecessor uncle Tiberius, who also fell into his own depravities.

Music

• John Zorn's Moonchild: Songs Without Words has a track called "Caligula".

Theatre

• Albert Camus wrote a play about him entitled Caligula.

Video Games

• In Assassin's Creed II, it's stated that it was a member of the Assassins that finally put down Caligula.
• Is the star of the [adult swim] online game Viva Caligula! and its sequel, Viva Caligula! in Hell. The goal? Kill them all, using various weapons.
• Nasuverse:
  • Referenced by Nero in Fate/EXTRA, who reminisces about him being a delightful uncle who would play with her and tell her stories when she was a child. Hakuno thinks to themself that Nero is probably deliberately choosing to remember Caligula as he was before he went insane.
  • Appears as a summonable Servant in Fate/Grand Order and a member of the Berserker class, and in this universe his insanity was caused by the affections of the moon. He's unbelievably violent and more than a little obsessed with his niece Nero, but in his rare moments of lucidity he shows a surprisingly thoughtful bent and he was a good man before his madness took him.
• Crusader Kings II references one of his exploits with a random event as a ruler with the "Lunatic" trait where you name your horse your chancellor.

Web Animation

• The Unbiased History of Rome had Caligula portrayed in a manner consistent to contemporary history for the first few months, but then after falling ill, the portrayal turned from him claiming to be a god to going through a divination process and actually becoming one. Among other infamous antics that got portrayed as "cladly", the infamous "War Against Neptune" had him go on a god-to-god fight as a result of the sea god standing in the way of invading Britain, then put him on a chokehold while ordering his legions to collect their bounty of seashells. When he got assassinated, he ascended out of disgust.

Web Original

• The AlternateHistory.com timeline Saint Caligula??! is about him converting to Christianity early in his reign and the changes that result from it.

Western Animation

• Appears in "Escape to the House of Mummies Part Two!", an The Venture Brothers episode involving time travel. He appears to be attracted to Hank.
• As mentioned in the quote above, in Pinky and the Brain, he is sung about by the Brain in his song, A Meticulous Analysis of History.

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