Ancient Rome: How Caligula went from being a beloved ruler to one of the most cruel emperors

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01-05-2025

Caligula proved a popular choice as emperor, both in Rome and in the provinces. He was not only the son of Germanicus but also the grandson, on his mother's side, of Marcus Agrippa, and the great-grandson of both Augustus and Mark Antony. Although without meaningful military experience, he was popular with the Roman troops: many fondly remembered the pint-sized, uniformed child who, from the age of two, had served as a mascot on his father's campaigns against the Germans.
Caligula was adored by the people of Rome, too, in part because of their love for Germanicus but also out of sympathy for the terrible persecutions suffered by his family: Tiberius had murdered Caligula's mother, his father, his two brothers and his aunt, Livilla. As he made his way north from Capreae to Rome, escorting the corpse of the dead emperor, he was accompanied by a 'dense and joyful throng' who hailed him affectionately as their 'star' (sidus) and their 'chick' (pullum). In March 37, he was quickly proclaimed the new princeps (the title that Tiberius, following Augustus, had also used). Such was the joy at his accession that in the space of a few weeks 160,000 birds and animals were sacrificed in thanks to the gods for granting them such a fine leader.
Caligula quickly began repaying the love of the people and the faith of the Senate. He showed great deference to the senators, pledging to share power with them. He allowed them to sit on cushions rather than, as before, on bare benches, and to wear broad-brimmed straw hats in the hot weather. He lowered taxes on sales at auction, allowed the circulation of books banned by Tiberius, recalled those whom Tiberius had exiled, and banished the sexual contortionists whose antics had catered to the old emperor's depraved fancies. (He was narrowly dissuaded from throwing them into the sea.) Whereas Tiberius gave no public shows at all, Caligula staged plays and gladiatorial combats as well as chariot races in the intermissions – for which he introduced such exciting new attractions as panther-baiting. He added an extra day to the Saturnalia, the popular festival during which gifts were exchanged and days on end were spent eating and drinking. He renamed the month of September as Germanicus, in honour of his beloved father. He completed large public works, such as rebuilding the port at Rhegium, refurbishing the Theatre of Pompey (badly damaged in a recent fire) and bringing a 25-metre-high obelisk (the one now pointing heavenward in St Peter's Square) from Egypt. Construction also started on a new aqueduct and another amphitheatre.
Some of Caligula's antics, however, caused some concern. Dressing in women's clothes, donning the armour and weapons of a gladiator, carrying around a thunderbolt or trident as a prop, or insisting that he held conversations with the moon: such caprices may have seemed harmless or amusing eccentricities. So too, perhaps, his habit of urgently convening the Senate in the middle of the night only to – once the great men had assembled, expecting to discuss weighty matters – treat them to a performance of his latest dance moves. But other behaviour was more disquieting, such as removing from office two consuls who forgot to send him birthday wishes, or forcing his grandmother (the daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia) to commit suicide 'because she had rebuked him for something'.
These were the first indications that the new princeps was – if we accept the lurid testimony of the sources – severely and hopelessly deranged. Most of what we know of Caligula's life and reign comes from six ancient writers: Seneca the Younger and Philo of Alexandria, both of whom knew him personally; Tacitus and Josephus, who knew people who had known Caligula; and finally, Suetonius and Cassius Dio, whose works were not written until, respectively, some eighty and 190 years following Caligula's reign. Almost all the material on Caligula from the best historian on the Julio-Claudian period, Tacitus, has been lost, and it's unclear if the sources available to Suetonius and Cassius were entirely reliable. At the start of his Annals, which appeared in 116 CE, Tacitus observed (quite accurately) that the histories of emperors like Tiberius and Caligula were 'falsified through cowardice while they flourished, and composed, when they fell, under the influence of still rankling hatreds'. We do not have, in other words, unbiased accounts of their lives and reigns. We must therefore be wary of accepting much of the evidence – especially the more shocking and sensationalised stories – at face value. This same problem, we shall see, likewise complicates our understanding of many later emperors.
Caligula certainly seemed to give plenty of cause for hatred to rankle. It's unclear what exactly might have led to his monstrous exploits. Medical sleuths have diagnosed him with everything from alcoholism and a thyroid disorder to encephalitis, temporal lobe epilepsy, lead poisoning, schizophrenia and neurosyphilis. Suetonius reported that he was driven mad by an aphrodisiac administered by his wife (though his libido, if we trust the sources, was scarcely in need of encouragement). Yet it's difficult to imagine how any of these agents or ailments could have been responsible for his gratuitous and sadistic violence – for what Cassius Dio called his 'insatiable desire for the sight of blood'. He seems to have earnestly believed what he once told his grandmother: 'Remember that I have the right to do anything to anybody.' And so he did: no one, it appears, was safe from his psychopathic whims. 'Off comes this beautiful head whenever I give the word,' he would tenderly whisper to his wives and mistresses. When the two consuls sitting beside him at a sumptuous feast asked why he was chuckling, he explained the cause of his mirth was that at a single nod he could have their throats slit.
At least his wives and the consuls were spared. Hundreds or even thousands of others were not. Cassius Dio recorded the disturbing story that when there was a shortage of condemned criminals to be fed to the lions, Caligula ordered a random group of spectators – 'some of the mob standing near the benches' – to be seized and thrown to them. 'To prevent the possibility of their making an outcry or any reproaches,' Cassius claimed, 'he first caused their tongues to be cut out.' Other of his bloody acts were aimed at eliminating rivals, such as his 18-year-old cousin Tiberius Gemellus, the son of Drusus and Livilla: he was forced to commit suicide. Another victim was a distinguished visiting guest, important ally and distant relative, King Ptolemy of Mauretania. Legend had it that King Ptolemy was murdered because Caligula grew jealous of the ardent admiration sparked by his magnificent purple robe. More probably, Caligula disposed of him because Ptolemy, as the grandson of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, represented a threat to his power.
Caligula's murders had an economic as well as a political motive. In the first two years of his reign, his wild extravagances virtually exhausted the treasury. Desperately in need of funds, he took to confiscating the assets of his victims, who were denounced on trumped-up charges and then executed merely so he could get his hands on their money. 'No one who possessed anything', reported Cassius Dio, 'got off unscathed.'
Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar had raised vast sums through their wars of conquest, and so Caligula, hoping to emulate their example, embarked on several military expeditions. He first went to Gaul, but his invasion force of actors, gladiators and women, all equipped with the 'trappings of luxury', failed to inflict any damage. He soon returned to Rome. A campaign in Britain fared no better: he reached the English Channel but instead of crossing the waves, like Julius Caesar, and engaging the inhabitants, he perched on a lofty platform on a French beach and, after much tooting of trumpets and other warlike preparations, simply ordered the soldiers to gather seashells. The bizarre episode no doubt puzzled his soldiers as much as it does modern historians.