Caligula

Based on Wikipedia: Caligula

The Boy in the Little Boots

Picture a toddler waddling through a military camp on the frozen frontier of Germania, dressed in a tiny soldier's uniform complete with miniature armor and army boots. The hardened legionaries, men who had seen brutal combat against Germanic tribes, found it adorable. They gave the boy a nickname that would follow him through history: Caligula, meaning "little boot" or "booties."

He grew to hate that nickname.

The man we call Caligula was actually named Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, and he would become one of history's most notorious rulers—a byword for madness, cruelty, and excess. But the story of how that little mascot became an emperor, and what he actually did with power, is far more complicated than the legends suggest.

Born Into Chaos

Gaius was born on August 31, in the year 12 of the Common Era, into what we might call Roman royalty. His family tree reads like a who's who of the early Roman Empire. His father, Germanicus, was a celebrated military commander and nephew of the reigning Emperor Tiberius. His mother, Agrippina the Elder, was the granddaughter of Augustus himself—the founder of the Roman Empire. Through his father's side, he was descended from Mark Antony, the famous lover of Cleopatra.

This pedigree made young Gaius precious and dangerous in equal measure.

The Roman Empire had only existed for about forty years when Gaius was born. Augustus had transformed Rome from a republic into what was effectively a monarchy, though Romans hated that word. The official line was that Augustus was merely the "first citizen"—first among equals. In reality, he held absolute power. But there was no clear system for passing that power to the next generation. Each succession was a crisis waiting to happen.

Germanicus was wildly popular. The soldiers loved him. The common people adored him. He was handsome, charismatic, and victorious in battle. When Gaius was just two or three years old, the family accompanied Germanicus on campaign in the north. The sight of the tiny boy in his soldier costume delighted the troops, creating a bond between the future emperor and the military that would prove crucial decades later.

A Triumph and a Tragedy

In 17 CE, when Gaius was about five, Rome celebrated one of its greatest honors: a triumph for Germanicus. A triumph was an elaborate victory parade through the streets of Rome, a spectacle of power and glory granted only to the most successful commanders. Germanicus rode in a chariot while his children—including little Gaius—rode with him, basking in the cheers of the crowd.

It was the last happy moment the family would share.

Shortly after the triumph, Germanicus was sent east to tour Rome's allied kingdoms and provinces. The family went with him. At one stop, six-year-old Gaius gave a public speech—a remarkable detail that hints at the intelligence he would later be known for. But somewhere on that journey, Germanicus fell ill.

He lingered for weeks, growing weaker. Before he died, at just thirty-three years old, Germanicus became convinced he had been poisoned by the local governor. Many Romans believed the order had come from Emperor Tiberius himself, who saw the popular Germanicus as a threat to his own position.

Whether or not that was true, the death of Germanicus set in motion a chain of events that would shape Gaius's entire life.

Survivor

Agrippina returned to Rome with her six children and her husband's ashes. She was not the type to grieve quietly. Proud and ambitious, she made no secret of her belief that her sons should eventually rule Rome. This did not sit well with Tiberius.

The aging emperor grew increasingly paranoid. He saw conspiracies everywhere, and Agrippina's open ambition confirmed his fears. The relationship between the imperial widow and the emperor deteriorated into open hostility.

Tiberius forbade Agrippina to remarry—a new husband might become a rival for power. Then, in 26 CE, he did something extraordinary: he withdrew from Rome entirely, retiring to the island of Capri off the coast of Italy. He would never return to the capital. From his island retreat, Tiberius ruled the empire through intermediaries while the political situation in Rome festered.

One by one, Gaius watched his family destroyed.

His mother and his older brother Nero were tried for treason in 29 CE and sent into exile. Gaius, now a teenager, was shipped off to live with his great-grandmother Livia, Tiberius's mother. When she died two years later, he moved again, this time to his grandmother Antonia Minor. His other older brother, Drusus, was declared a public enemy and also exiled. Both brothers eventually died in their exile—one by suicide, one by starvation.

His mother starved to death too, whether by her own hand or by imperial neglect.

Of all the children who had ridden in that triumphant chariot, only Gaius and his three sisters remained alive. And they remained alive, historians believe, only because they were too young and too politically insignificant to seem threatening.

The Viper's Nest

In 31 CE, the nineteen-year-old Gaius was summoned to Capri to live with Tiberius directly. This was an extremely dangerous promotion.

Tiberius's court on Capri was a place of intrigue, suspicion, and sudden death. The emperor trusted almost no one. He had recently destroyed Sejanus, his powerful Praetorian prefect, who had accumulated so much influence that Tiberius had come to see him as a threat. Anyone could be next.

Gaius survived by becoming invisible. He suppressed any sign of resentment over his family's destruction. He was polite, deferential, and obedient. Ancient sources describe him as a natural actor who recognized the mortal danger of his situation and played his part perfectly. One contemporary observer wrote that there had never been "a better slave or a worse master."

The historian Tacitus saw this submissiveness as evidence of a monstrous character hiding behind a mask. But the modern historian Alois Winterling points out the obvious: speaking up would certainly have cost Gaius his life.

Gaius found an ally in Naevius Sutorius Macro, the new Praetorian prefect who had helped bring down Sejanus. Macro protected the young man and vouched for him to Tiberius, portraying Gaius as friendly and devoted to Tiberius's grandson, Gemellus. Behind the scenes, Macro was positioning himself for the succession, and Gaius was his chosen candidate.

Learning to Dissemble

What was Gaius actually like during these years? The sources describe him as intelligent, well-educated, and an excellent orator. He was cultured and well-read. He also developed skills that would serve him well—and badly—as emperor: the ability to hide his true feelings, to play a role, to wait.

Tiberius seems to have had mixed feelings about his young ward. According to the biographer Suetonius, the old emperor saw through Gaius's act and recognized something dangerous underneath. Suetonius quotes Tiberius as saying that allowing Gaius to live would prove the ruin of everyone, that he was "rearing a viper for the Roman people and a Phaethon for the world." Phaethon was the mythological boy who drove his father's sun chariot and nearly set the world on fire.

But this judgment comes from sources written long after Caligula's reign, when his reputation was already fixed as a monster. Winterling argues that Tiberius, who was famously poor at reading people, probably did not actually possess this supernatural foresight. What seems more likely is that Tiberius simply had no better options, and Macro ensured that Gaius stayed useful and unthreatening until the moment was right.

In 35 CE, Tiberius named Gaius as joint heir alongside Gemellus, his own grandson. Gemellus was still a child, not yet old enough to hold office. If Tiberius lived long enough for Gemellus to grow up, the succession might go differently. But Tiberius was in his mid-seventies, and despite his apparent good health, time was not on his side.

The Emperor Is Dead

On March 16, 37 CE, Tiberius died at the age of seventy-seven. The ancient sources could not resist adding drama to the event: various accounts suggest that Gaius, perhaps with Macro's help, actually murdered the old man by smothering him or withholding food. Other sources, including the Jewish writers Philo and Josephus, describe a natural death.

The truth is unknowable, but the result was immediate and decisive.

That same day, members of the Praetorian Guard hailed Gaius as emperor at Misenum, where the court was staying. Two days later, the Senate in Rome ratified the choice, granting him sweeping powers. By the end of March, Gaius had entered Rome as its new ruler.

He was twenty-four years old. He had no military experience. He had held only a minor political office. And in a single day, he received powers that Augustus had accumulated gradually over decades.

The Golden Age

The Roman world rejoiced.

After the grim later years of Tiberius—the paranoia, the treason trials, the emperor's long absence from Rome—the young, handsome son of the beloved Germanicus seemed like a fresh start. Gaius was received with what sources describe as ecstatic enthusiasm. Three months of public celebration welcomed his reign.

And at first, Gaius lived up to the hopes placed in him.

He gave Tiberius a magnificent funeral and delivered a tearful eulogy, playing the part of the dutiful heir. He was generous with the Praetorian Guard, doubling the bonus Tiberius had promised them and taking personal credit for the payment. He gave cash gifts to every citizen in Rome. He announced ambitious building projects.

Most importantly, he put on games. Romans loved public spectacles—chariot races, gladiatorial combat, theatrical performances—and Gaius provided them on a grand scale. Philo, who was there, describes these early days as universally admired. Josephus, writing a generation later, claims that for the first two years of his reign, Gaius ruled fairly and earned goodwill throughout the empire.

Gaius honored his murdered family. He put his father's portrait on coins. He renamed September after Germanicus. He gave extraordinary privileges to his grandmother and his three sisters, including his favorite, Drusilla. In a remarkable gesture, he named Drusilla as his heir—an almost unthinkable honor for a woman in Roman society.

He was careful with the Senate, at least initially. Though he had been granted power to make any laws he chose, he showed studied deference to the senators, reassuring them that he would be guided by their wisdom. He asked them to approve divine honors for Tiberius and gracefully accepted when they refused—a small gesture that showed respect for their opinion, or at least the appearance of it.

Power Without Restraint

But there was a fundamental problem with Gaius's position, one that would define and perhaps explain what came later.

Augustus, the founder of the empire, had understood something crucial: Roman nobles had not forgotten the Republic. They had voluntarily surrendered their ancient powers to Augustus, but they resented the loss. Augustus maintained a careful fiction that he was merely first among equals, not an absolute monarch. He exercised self-restraint, showed deference to the Senate, and behaved as though the old constitutional norms still applied. It was a performance, but a necessary one.

Tiberius had mostly continued this fiction, though less skillfully. But Gaius had grown up watching his family destroyed by the system. He had survived by learning to hide his true self. And now, suddenly, he had absolute power.

The historian Anthony Barrett puts it simply: "Caligula would be restrained only by his own sense of discretion, which became in lamentably short supply as his reign progressed."

What Really Happened?

Here's where the story becomes complicated, because almost everything we think we know about Caligula comes from sources that were written decades after his death, by members of the very aristocracy he had humiliated and threatened.

The accusations are famous: that he was insane, that he committed incest with his sisters, that he demanded to be worshipped as a living god, that he humiliated senators for sport, that he wanted to make his horse Incitatus a consul. Later sources paint a picture of escalating madness and cruelty.

But modern historians urge caution. The ancient sources contradict each other. They were written by men who had every reason to blacken Caligula's memory. Many of the most sensational stories appear only in the latest accounts, growing more extreme with each retelling. And some of the accusations—like the famous horse story—may have originated as Caligula's own dark jokes, exaggerated by his enemies into evidence of insanity.

What seems clear is that Gaius increasingly asserted the absolute nature of his power, dropping the polite fictions that had smoothed relations between Augustus and the Senate. He concentrated power in his own hands and those of his household, sidelining the traditional aristocracy. He may have deliberately humiliated senators to demonstrate that their status meant nothing before an emperor's will.

This was not madness in the clinical sense. It was a different vision of what the principate should be—one where the emperor's power was open and unconstrained rather than hidden behind Republican forms. It was revolutionary, and the Roman nobility hated it.

Real Accomplishments

Lost in the lurid stories is the fact that Caligula's brief reign included real achievements.

He began construction of two major aqueducts in Rome: the Aqua Claudia and the Anio Novus. These massive engineering projects, later completed by his successor Claudius, brought fresh water to Rome's growing population. He invested in roads and ports. He built racetracks, theaters, and amphitheaters.

He expanded the empire, annexing the client kingdom of Mauretania as a Roman province. He attempted an invasion of Britain, though this had to be abandoned—the reasons are unclear and disputed. He also attempted to install his own statue in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, a provocative move that was only prevented by his death.

These were not the actions of a man incapable of rational planning. They suggest an emperor who was ambitious, who wanted to leave his mark, and who was willing to take risks.

The End

In early 41 CE, less than four years after his ecstatic reception in Rome, Caligula was assassinated.

The conspiracy involved officers of the Praetorian Guard—the very soldiers who had first acclaimed him emperor—along with senators and members of the court. Some of the conspirators apparently hoped to restore the Roman Republic, ending the experiment in one-man rule that Augustus had begun. Others may simply have wanted to replace Caligula with someone more amenable to aristocratic interests.

If there was a plan to restore the Republic, it failed immediately. While the conspirators were still celebrating, the Praetorian Guard found Caligula's uncle Claudius—the stammering, limping scholar whom everyone had dismissed as a fool—hiding behind a curtain in the palace. They proclaimed him emperor on the spot.

Caligula was twenty-nine years old. He had reigned for three years, ten months, and eight days.

The Man Behind the Monster

What are we to make of Caligula?

The traditional view is simple: he was a mad tyrant whose brief reign was a disaster narrowly survived. This is the version that has come down through history, inspiring everything from Robert Graves's novel to the notorious 1979 film.

But the sources for this view are problematic. They were written by men who belonged to the class Caligula had threatened and humiliated. They were written decades after his death, when the stories had grown in the telling. They contradict each other on key details. And they were written in a culture that explained political failures through personal moral failings—if Caligula's reign ended badly, it must be because Caligula was a bad person.

Modern historians have tried to look past the sensationalism. They see a young man who witnessed the destruction of his entire family, who survived by learning to hide his true feelings, and who was suddenly given absolute power at twenty-four with no training for the role. They see someone who may have tried to reform the principate in ways that threatened entrenched interests. They see a ruler whose genuine accomplishments were buried under the propaganda of those who killed him.

None of this makes Caligula a hero. Even the most sympathetic modern interpretations acknowledge that he was probably cruel, certainly arrogant, and increasingly reckless. The conflict with the aristocracy was real, and the assassins had their reasons.

But the Caligula of history was not simply the madman of legend. He was a survivor of trauma who became a revolutionary who became a corpse. The little boy in the soldier's boots, the darling of the legions, the hope of a new age—he became a cautionary tale about power and its limits.

And his nickname, the one the soldiers had given him with such affection, became a curse. Caligula. Little boot. A reminder that the men who name you can also unmake you.