Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (Caligula)

31 August, AD 12 - 24 January AD 41

Emperor AD 37-41

Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (b. A.D. 12, d. A.D. 41, emperor A.D. 37-41) represents a turning point in the early history of the Principate. Unfortunately, his is the most poorly documented reign of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The literary sources for these four years are meager, frequently anecdotal, and universally hostile. As a result, not only are many of the events of the reign unclear, but Caligula himself appears more as a caricature than a real person, a crazed megalomaniac given to capricious cruelty and harebrained schemes. Although some headway can be made in disentangling truth from embellishment, the true character of the youthful emperor will forever elude us.

Caligula's Early Life and Reign

Caligula was born on 31 August, A.D. 12, probably at the Julio-Claudian resort of Antium (modern Anzio), the third of six children born to Augustus's adopted grandson, Germanicus, and Augustus's granddaughter, Agrippina. As a baby he accompanied his parents on military campaigns in the north and was shown to the troops wearing a miniature soldier's outfit, including the hob-nailed sandal called caligula, whence the nickname by which posterity remembers him. His childhood was not a happy one, spent amid an atmosphere of paranoia, suspicion, and murder. Instability within the Julio-Claudian house, generated by uncertainty over the succession, led to a series of personal tragedies. When his father died under suspicious circumstances on 10 October A.D. 19, relations between his mother and his grand-uncle, the emperor Tiberius, deteriorated irretrievably, and the adolescent Caligula was sent to live first with his great-grandmother Livia in A.D. 27 and then, following Livia's death two years later, with his grandmother Antonia. Shortly before the fall of Tiberius's Praetorian Prefect, Sejanus, in A.D. 31 he was summoned to join Tiberius at his villa on Capri, where he remained until his accession in A.D. 37. In the interim, his two brothers and his mother suffered demotion and, eventually, violent death. Throughout these years, the only position of administrative responsibility Caligula held was an honorary quaestorship in A.D. 33.

When Tiberius died on 16 March A.D. 37, Caligula was in a perfect position to assume power, despite the obstacle of Tiberius's will, which named him and his cousin Tiberius Gemellus joint heirs. (Gemellus's life was shortened considerably by this bequest, since Caligula ordered him killed within a matter of months.) Backed by the Praetorian Prefect Q. Sutorius Macro, Caligula asserted his dominance. He had Tiberius's will declared null and void on grounds of insanity, accepted the powers of the Principate as conferred by the Senate, and entered Rome on 28 March amid scenes of wild rejoicing. His first acts were generous in spirit: he paid Tiberius's bequests and gave a cash bonus to the Praetorian Guard, the first recorded donativum to troops in imperial history. He honored his father and other dead relatives and publicly destroyed Tiberius's personal papers, which no doubt implicated many of the Roman elite in the destruction of Caligula's immediate family. Finally, he recalled exiles and reimbursed those wronged by the imperial tax system. His popularity was immense. Yet within four years he lay in a bloody heap in a palace corridor, murdered by officers of the very guard entrusted to protect him. What went wrong?

Caligula's "Madness"

The ancient sources are practically unanimous as to the cause of Caligula's downfall: he was insane. The writers differ as to how this condition came about, but all agree that after his good start Caligula began to behave in an openly autocratic manner, even a crazed one. Outlandish stories cluster about the raving emperor, illustrating his excessive cruelty, immoral sexual escapades, or disrespect toward tradition and the Senate. The sources describe his incestuous relations with his sisters, laughable military campaigns in the north, the building of a pontoon bridge across the Bay at Baiae, and the plan to make his horse a consul. Modern scholars have pored over these incidents and come up with a variety of explanations: Caligula suffered from an illness; he was misunderstood; he was corrupted by power; or, accepting the ancient evidence, they conclude that he was mad. However, appreciating the nature of the ancient sources is crucial when approaching this issue. Their unanimous hostility renders their testimony suspect, especially since Caligula's reported behavior fits remarkably well with that of the ancient tyrant, a literary type enshrined in Greco-Roman tradition centuries before his reign. Further, the only eye-witness account of Caligula's behavior, Philo's Embassy to Caligula, offers little evidence of outright insanity, despite the antagonism of the author, whom Caligula treated with the utmost disrespect. Rather, he comes across as aloof, arrogant, egotistical, and cuttingly witty -- but not insane. The best explanation both for Caligula's behavior and the subsequent hostility of the sources is that he was an inexperienced young man thrust into a position of unlimited power, the true nature of which had been carefully disguised by its founder, Augustus. Caligula, however, saw through the disguise and began to act accordingly. This, coupled with his troubled upbringing and almost complete lack of tact led to behavior that struck his contemporaries as extreme, even insane.

Caligula and the Empire

Caligula's reign is too short, and the surviving ancient accounts too sensationalized, for any serious policies of his to be discerned. During his reign, Mauretania was annexed and reorganized into two provinces, Herod Agrippa was appointed to a kingdom in Palestine, and severe riots took place in Alexandria between Jews and Greeks. These events are largely overlooked in the sources, since they offer slim pickings for sensational stories of madness. Two other episodes, however, garner greater attention: Caligula's military activities on the northern frontier, and his vehement demand for divine honors. His military activities are portrayed as ludicrous, with Gauls dressed up as Germans at his triumph and Roman troops ordered to collect sea-shells as "spoils of the sea." Modern scholars have attempted to make sense of these events in various ways. The most reasonable suggestion is that Caligula went north to earn military glory and discovered there a nascent conspiracy under the commander of the Upper German legions, Cn. Lentulus Gaetulicus. The subsequent events are shrouded in uncertainty, but it is known that Gaetulicus and Caligula's brother-in-law, M. Aemilius Lepidus, were executed and Caligula's two surviving sisters, implicated in the plot, suffered exile. Caligula's enthusiasm for divine honors for himself and his favorite sister, Drusilla (who died suddenly in A.D. 38 and was deified), is presented in the sources as another clear sign of his madness, but it may be no more than the young autocrat tactlessly pushing the limits of the imperial cult, already established under Augustus. Caligula's excess in this regard is best illustrated by his order that a statue of him be erected in the Temple at Jerusalem. Only the delaying tactics of the Syrian governor, P. Petronius, and the intervention of Herod Agrippa prevented riots and a potential uprising in Palestine.

Conspiracy and Assassination

The conspiracy that ended Caligula's life was hatched among the officers of the Praetorian Guard, apparently for purely personal reasons. It appears also to have had the support of some senators and an imperial freedman. As with conspiracies in general, there are suspicions that the plot was more broad-based than the sources intimate, and it may even have enjoyed the support of the next emperor Claudius, but these propositions are not provable on available evidence. On 24 January A.D. 41 the praetorian tribune Cassius Chaerea and other guardsmen caught Caligula alone in a secluded palace corridor and cut him down. He was 28 years old and had ruled three years and ten months.

Conclusion

Whatever damage Tiberius's later years had done to the carefully crafted political edifice created by Augustus, Caligula multiplied it a hundredfold. When he came to power in A.D. 37 Caligula had no administrative experience beyond his honorary quaestorship, and had spent an unhappy early life far from the public eye. He appears, once in power, to have realized the boundless scope of his authority and acted accordingly. For the elite, this situation proved intolerable and ensured the blackening of Caligula's name in the historical record they would dictate. The sensational and hostile nature of that record, however, should in no way trivialize Caligula's importance. His reign highlighted an inherent weakness in the Augustan Principate, now openly revealed for what it was -- a raw monarchy in which only the self-discipline of the incumbent acted as a restraint on his behavior. That the only means of retiring the wayward princeps was murder marked another important revelation: Roman emperors could not relinquish their powers without simultaneously relinquishing their lives.

MORE DETAIL:

March, 37 CE: At about 25 years old, Caligula was named Rome's third emperor, the first direct descendant of Augustus to take the throne (click here for a coin on which Caligula emphasizes this relationship). The reign began with good feelings all around, since Caligula declared an amnesty for all Romans imprisoned or exiled under Tiberius, posthumously restored honor to his mother and brothers, and stopped the treason trials, getting rid of the informers in the process. One month after his accession, his grandmother, Antonia, died.

October, 37 CE: Caligula fell seriously ill, with what was described at the time as a “brain fever”; there was great mourning in Rome, and much joy at his recovery. There were a number of freedmen in his close circle who attained considerable influence: Helicon, his chamberlain; Apelles, a tragic actor; and most wealthy and powerful of all, Callistus, a kind of imperial secretary.

38 CE: Early in the year, Caligula forced his father-in-law, Gaius Silanus, to commit suicide by accusing him of treasonable activities. Although the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Macro, had been influential in helping Caligula secure the throne, the emperor apparently felt that Macro was becoming too powerful. Caligula tricked Macro into believing that he was being made prefect of Egypt and then had him arrested and executed. Later in the year Caligula killed his favorite sister, Drusilla. In the manner of the eastern monarchs, Caligula had Drusilla deified; she was the first Roman woman ever officially declared a deity, but her divinity did not survive his reign because he had so egregiously flouted Roman precedent (in contrast, when Claudius had Livia deified, he emphasized her role as “diva Augusta,” wife and mother of emperors). Caligula also minted coins in Drusilla's honor.

39 CE: Since the beginning of his reign Caligula had spent lavishly on public shows, games, and displays (sometimes even participating in them himself); in the most extravagant of these, he had hundreds of ships tied together to make a temporary floating bridge so that he could ride across the Bay of Naples on horseback. By 39, the public treasury was near bankruptcy. Therefore, at the beginning of the year Caligula revived the treason trials that had become so unpopular under Tiberius; he also began other methods of raising public money, including the auctioning off of public properties left over from shows. Many of these revealed his strange sense of humor (e.g., at one of these auctions a senator fell asleep and Caligula took each of his nods as bids, selling him 13 gladiators for a huge sum). In the words of historian Michael Grant, “Caligula had an irrepressible, bizarre sense of the ridiculous, deliberately designed to shock, but frequently taken by his alarmed subjects too seriously. Notoriously absurd traditions . . . such as the story that he intended to give a consulship to his favorite horse Incitatus no doubt originated from his continual stream of jokes. Probably he remarked that Incitatus would do the job as well as most of the recent incumbents; and meanwhile he ordered silence in the entire neighborhood, to prevent the horse from being disturbed” (The Twelve Caesars, [New York: Scribner, 1975], 113). Some of his jokes were more sadistic, as when he arranged an oratory competition in which all the losers had to erase their wax tablets with their tongues. All these activities, as Grant points out, “meant that he had far less time available for governing the empire. Caligula, that is to say, became the first emperor to attempt this enormous task as a part-time job” (116).

September, 39 CE: When Caligula was going to Germany to join the legions for a military campaign, he discovered a serious conspiracy against his life, engineered by the army commander Gaetulicus, who apparently intended to replace Caligula with the former husband of Drusilla, M. Aemilius Lepidus (called “Ganymede” in I, Claudius), who was at the time the lover of one of Caligula's other sisters, Agrippina the Younger (called “Agrippinilla” in I, Claudius). Caligula had the two men executed and banished his two sisters, Agrippina and Julia Livilla (called “Lesbia” in I, Claudius). He wintered in Germany, but the campaign there and the proposed invasion of Britain were never carried out; instead the troops engaged in drills and maneuvers, including the collection of sea shells to be displayed in a triumphal parade as the spoils of battle. Caligula became increasingly suspicious, almost paranoid, and his relations with the Senate deteriorated.

40 CE: Caligula announced his self-deification, building temples and erecting statues, even in Rome, to his glorified self. He even ordered that a statue of himself should be placed in the Temple of Jerusalem and the Jews be forced to worship him (the procurator wisely postponed executing this order, and it had not yet been carried out when Caligula was assassinated). This deification was part of Caligula's apparently systematic concept of imperial power, of what he liked to term his “inflexibility” (called by Robert Graves his “immovable rigor”). Was Caligula clinically insane? Was he the evil monster portrayed by Robert Graves? The ancient sources are uniformly hostile, and modern historians differ in their interpretations of his behavior. It is impossible to answer these questions with any certainty. What we can conclude is that he was carried away by the absolute nature of the power that he had inherited from more hard-working and stable emperors. He seemed to be determined to flaunt that power and to strip away all the pretense and euphemisms in which Augustus (and Tiberius, to a lesser extent) had cloaked it. Caligula's bizarre behavior demonstrates what can happen when absolute power is combined with a total lack of responsibility and respect for others (see Garrett Fagan's biography for a balanced assessment of Caligula).

January 21, 41 CE: Caligula was assassinated by members of his own Praetorian Guard, including M. Arrecinus Clemens, co-prefect of the Guard, and Cassius Chaerea, a military tribune of the Guard, in conspiracy with several high-ranking senators, notably Marcus Vinicius, husband of Caligula's exiled sister Julia Livilla. You can visit the underground passageway (cryptoporticus) where he was assassinated by virtually travelling to the Palatine in Region X of VRoma via the web gateway or the anonymous browser. Caligula's wife, Caesonia, and their young daughter were also killed. The Praetorian Guard proclaimed his uncle Claudius the new emperor, and the Senate subsequently ratified this action. Caligula's brief reign also demonstrates the significant role the Praetorian Guard was beginning to play in the Empire. Under Tiberius, the prefect Sejanus had come dangerously close to achieving his goal of succeeding Tiberius as emperor. The subsequent prefect, Macro, had helped Caligula secure his power. Caligula himself was assassinated because he had made a mockery of the military and alienated the leaders of the Guard; it is likely that the senatorial conspiracy would not have succeeded if the Guard had remained loyal to Caligula. Finally, it was the Praetorian Guard that quite openly chose Claudius to succeed Caligula.

Did Caligula have a God complex?
Stanford, Oxford archaeologists find evidence that depraved tyrant annexed sacred temple

BY JOHN SANFORD

Archaeologists from Stanford, Oxford and the American Institute for Roman Culture have unearthed evidence that Caligula, in an act of astonishing hubris, extended his palace to the podium of a sacrosanct temple.

The discovery, made during the final weeks of a month-and-a-half-long dig this summer in the Roman Forum, appears to support accounts by some ancient historians that the profligate but short-lived emperor was a megalomaniac.

"It's the equivalent of Queen Elizabeth taking over St. Paul's Cathedral as an anteroom," said Jennifer Trimble, an assistant professor of classics. "It's outrageous."

In late June, Trimble led a team of three graduate and nine undergraduate students to Rome. They were joined by Darius Arya, executive director of the American Institute for Roman Culture (AIRC), and a team of British students headed by Andrew Wilson, the project's field director and a senior lecturer in Roman archaeology at Oxford.

The goal of the dig was to explore the interaction of ancient commercial, religious and monumental space around the edge of the Forum. While excavating an area immediately to the south of the Temple of Castor and Pollux (a shrine dedicated to the mythological twin sons of Jupiter), the archaeologists say they discovered the remains of walls and a floor foundation that almost certainly belonged to Caligula's palace. What's more, the walls appear to have at one time connected with the temple, they say.

Caligula was the nickname (it means "little boots") of Gaius Caesar, who ruled from 37 to 41. According to Suetonius, a Roman biographer and antiquarian born in 69, the emperor transformed the temple into his vestibule. Dio Cassius, a historian born about 150, wrote that Caligula made the temple the entrance to his palace.

But modern historians have been hard-pressed to believe this and other accounts of the tyrant's despotic excesses, sexual perversity and sadism.

"It's very hard to evaluate all these scurrilous stories," Trimble said. "He's been condemned in memory as a lunatic and a really bad emperor."

Scholars also point to more tangible evidence for their incredulity: Remains dating to the last centuries B.C. and early second century indicate that a street once divided the palace from the temple. Excavations of the street have turned up no evidence of Caligulan walls or foundations. Hence, most historians have assumed that the street remained intact throughout the first two centuries.

The Stanford, Oxford and AIRC archaeologists found compelling evidence that Suetonius and Dio Cassius were right.

Telltale drains

Trimble gives Wilson, an authority on Roman hydraulics, much of the credit for having understood the significance of a drain that runs northward from the site of Caligula's palace and cuts across the street just south of the Temple of Castor. Because the street already had a drain that ran to the west, Trimble and her colleagues wondered why it would have been necessary to construct another one along a different alignment. Their theory: Caligula destroyed the street to connect his palace with the temple and, as a result, had to build a new drainage system. To Trimble, such an act points to someone with no sense of constraints. "Caligula associated himself with the gods," she said. "He played fast and free with the public streets of Rome."

However, she cautioned that even though evidence points to Caligula's divine pretensions, it does not necessarily mean he was insane. Rather, he may have taken a cue from Eastern Mediterranean notions of royalty. "In what is now Turkey and Egypt, there was a tradition of rulers setting themselves up as apart from mortals," she said. "But in Rome, this didn't work at all. Power there was articulated in mortal terms."

In any case, "clearly something is very, very wrong" with the way Caligula conceived of his authority, she added. His contemporaries, it seems, felt the same way. A group of conspirators, including members of his own guard, murdered him just four years after he had assumed power.

Trimble, Wilson and Arya believe that Claudius, Caligula's successor, demolished the palace extension to the temple and restored the street. The scholars said they hope to return to the site, possibly next year, to continue the excavation. Their success in doing so depends on securing the necessary permits and funding, according to Trimble.