Well, if it’s 24 January, it must be… yes, the 1,983rd anniversary of Caligula declaring “I am alive!” Unfortunately, he was shouting these words defiantly at his Praetorian Guard at the time, because they were repeatedly stabbing him.
He was either stabbed in the neck and then the chest, or had his jaw broken with the blow of a sword. Either way, “he lay upon the ground and with writhing limbs called out that he still lived” (according to Suetonius in The Twelve Caesars, written about 80 years later), which did him little good, encouraging his attackers, as it did, to “dispatch… him with thirty wounds”.
Why, though? Why would they want to do this to a man who had granted bonuses to the military, made treason trials a thing of the past, published accounts of public spending, helped people who lost their belongings in fires, and restored elections?
Well…
I mean, I suppose it might have been all the murdering, torturing and incest. Suetonius says, for example, that “when cattle to feed the wild beasts which he had provided for a gladiatorial show were rather costly, he selected criminals to be devoured … without examining the charges [they faced]”. And that “He forced parents to attend the executions of their sons” inviting one to dinner immediately afterwards. Perhaps most charmingly of all, “He had the manager of his gladiatorial shows beaten with chains in his presence for several successive days, and would not kill him until he was disgusted at the stench of his putrefied brain.”
After that, the fact that “He lived in habitual incest with all his sisters” is just detail, really, isn’t it?
Well, it was to the Senate, who only moved against him when he declared that he was moving to Alexandria to be worshipped as a god. This would mean Rome — i.e. them — losing power, so naturally they all said to themselves: WELL, THAT’S ABSOLUTELY THE LAST STRAW.
Some accounts of Caligula’s life suggest that the decent, sensible stuff he did mostly happened in the first few months of his reign, and that he only went off the rails after recovering from an illness in October 37. Given that that might have been a poisoning, we can perhaps sympathise with his becoming a tad suspicious of those close to him, but… well, there are ways of approaching these matters.
One odd little detail in his story is that “He banished from the city the sexual perverts called spintriae”, by which Suetonius meant young male prostitutes (whose name, you will be delighted to hear, derives from the Greek word σφιγκτήρ for the anal sphincter).
Obviously, it’s the people who cater to the sexual appetites of the powerful who suffer, rather than the powerful themselves. Stands to reason. What’s remarkable is that Caligula was “persuaded not to sink them in the sea”. And when a chap’s prepared to be that reasonable, it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about, really, isn’t it?
