This day marks the anniversary of the assassination of the Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus by a cohort commander and a group of dissatisfied members of the royal guard. The emperor was is more commonly known as Caligula, a nickname earned in his childhood while accompanying his father on field marches, scurrying to keep pace with the adults in his little boots. I am sure that was only earned posthumously. His removal from power makes the first known occasion in the history of the Empire that an emperor was removed from office by a grand collusion of the military and the Senate, and not the usual intrigue over succession by their own relatives.
Whether accounts of his exploits, deviancy and cruelty were wholly accurate or otherwise—victorious politicians get to write histories and not the deposed and surely there is some embellishment to make one’s predecessor more unpalatable and make the transition of power more acceptable in the eyes of the public: making a priest of his horse and threatening to promote him to Consul, pimping his sisters, torturing innocent bystanders out of boredom, &c. The list of crimes goes on, and no particular engineering project, campaign or public works attributed to his reign has much power to unsully that reputation. It would be hard to ever separate rumour and backbiting from the truth, but it does seem that Rome anointed no shortage of colourful statesmen and ambitious dynasties. Some one hundred fifty years prior to Caligua’s rule, there was a boy Caesar called
Heliogabalus, who was accused of a host of eccentricities, decadent but not inhumane and a foot-note to the Major General’s song from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. If true and not fabricated as an on-going smear campaign against his memory, it is possible that later writers and opinion-formers only were holding neutral (and not the cause for regicide) chronicles up to their own standards of morality and deportment. Of course, the near or distant past is not a distorting plain of ill-repute in itself and many figures don’t need a relativistic or revisionist lens to be qualifiedly bad. I just hope that we are able to look beyond historical prejudice and perhaps unreliable narration, sift through the muck and tell the difference.
