he boot too big

Or, a tour through the atrocities of Emperor Caligula of Ancient Rome.

Hi friends!

We’re sort of swinging for the fences with today’s dirtbag, but I’m in a “go big or go home” sort of mood, so I’m gonna roll with it. Sometimes you’ve got people who are subtly shitty, and then sometimes you’ve got…this guy. The human race contains multitudes.

Who is this Granddaddy of Garbage Behavior, you ask? None other than Mr. Yikes himself:

Caligula, the Roman Emperor Who Literally Nobody Liked Except for One Specific Horse, Which Probably Thought He Was Pretty Okay, Insofar as Horses Think Things

the face of a man who would murder you for fun

This isn’t Dirtbag Nation’s first foray into Ancient Rome, and I doubt very much it shall be the last. The most recent Roman we profiled, Empress Livia, happens to be Caligula’s grandma. So it’s no wonder where he…got some of this.

Caligula was born in the year 31 CE with the official name Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, which is almost literally every name a male person in first-century Rome was allowed to have, as far as I can tell. The name “Caligula” is a nickname his mom gave him, meaning “little boots,” because he used to stomp around in big boots pretending to be a grown-up soldier.

I remember this meme literally every time I think about Caligula

Capri, Son

Caligula didn’t have a happy childhood, by which I mean that the ruler at the time, his uncle, Emperor “Mama’s Boy and Colossally Useless Noodle” Tiberius, killed all of his family members one by one. Then, when Tiberius was in his 70s, he retreated from Rome to the island of Capri, which was a thing he did from time to time. Tiberius liked to spend time on his own private Sadness Island, where he would stare out over the waves and listen to whatever the 1st century CE equivalent of “The Sound of Silence” was.

Weirdly, Tiberius decided to bring Caligula with him to Capri. You know, the kid whose entire immediate family he murdered. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tiberius died during this trip, with Caligula being one of the only witnesses.

Tiberius’s murder villa in Capri, which is giving me major White Lotus S2 vibes

Historians are annoyingly hesitant to say that Caligula killed Tiberius. Sure, the emperor was in his 70s and lots of people hated him. But Caligula had motive. Caligula had opportunity. And, as my grandma used to say when she accused Colonel Mustard while playing Clue, “it just sounds like something he would do.”

Anyway, with Tiberius out of the way, Caligula became Emperor of Rome at the age of 24.

I’ve Got a Fever, and the Only Prescription Is Murdering My Entire Family

Surprisingly, the population of Rome was on Caligula’s side at first. Contemporary sources describe cheering crowds hailing him as “our baby” (weird), and his popularity grew rapidly. I don’t usually quote Wikipedia articles verbatim in this newsletter, but this one is so funny I have to:

I literally choked on my coffee

This honeymoon period of Nice Caligula lasted about seven months, until the young emperor fell ill. Many suspect this illness to be the result of poison, a thing I also suspect. Ancient Rome loved poisons the way Tudor England loved naming people Thomas: too much for its own good.

you can replace “Kuzco” with the name of literally any Roman emperor and the quote holds.

Historians have lots of theories about why this illness-slash-poisoning fucked Caligula up so bad. Maybe it caused clinical insanity. Maybe he became paranoid thinking everybody wanted to poison him. Maybe he was given a magic potion by a witch. Maybe he had a near-death experience and thought “life is short, may as well make my horse a senator.” Who’s to say. I’ve had migraines that made me want to declare myself god and burn down a city, so in that respect, I get it.

Whatever the cause, once Caligula recovered from his mysterious poisoning, he immediately started murdering people. First to go was his cousin Tiberius, presumably because he was on a kick of murdering everyone named Tiberius. Next on the list were his grandmother, his father-in-law, his brother-in-law, and absolute heaps of other people to whom he was not directly related.

He couldn’t murder his mother (Shitty Old Tiberius had already done that), but he did start spreading rumors that his mother was the product of an incestuous relationship between the former Emperor Augustus and his daughter. This strikes me as a weird and counterproductive rumor to start about your own mother, but who am I to judge.

Ass-Loads of Money

In addition to all the murders, Caligula spent absurd amounts of money on elaborate palaces and big parties. He would murder people so he could steal their estates, levied taxes on prostitution, and started stealing grain boats so he could use them for his own parties or make floating bridges out of them just for fun.

just a bunch of dudes and a horse getting drunk on a trampoline

The total expenditure during his first year as emperor was 2.7 billion sesterces, a number that means nothing to me but sounds bad because of the word “billion.” Further research tells me a sesterce was worth about two and a half donkeys, which means that Caligula bought himself a billion donkeys’ worth of bullshit per year, if that helps.

Caligula also feuded with the Roman Senate, about which Wikipedia says “The subject of their disagreement is unknown.” In the next sentence, Wikipedia mentions that Caligula executed at least a dozen senators, at least two of whom had committed the crime of forgetting his birthday. So maybe that… had something to do with it? But what do I know.

[John Mulaney Voice] There’s a HORSE in the SENATE

This is all pretty bad, you say. And I would agree with you! But it’s not necessarily worse than any other shitty Roman emperors. No, the reason I induct Caligula into the Dirtbag Hall of Fame is because of the panache with which he swan-dived off the deep end.

Being emperor is one thing. But Caligula decided also to make himself a god. Not just any god, either. Like, the Big Daddies. He would show up at state occasions dressed as Mercury, Venus, Apollo, and Jupiter, and he signed public documents as “Neos Helios,” AKA The New God of the Sun. Say what you want about Caligula—and I will—I’m seriously considering signing books like that in the future.

Caligula, slaying (metaphorically and literally)

Side note: as I noted in the Darnley newsletter, lots of contemporary historians like to throw out Caligula’s sleeping with men and wearing women’s clothing as another sign of his depravity, in the same sentence as murder. We’re all in agreement here that gender and sexuality are not the reason Caligula is a dirtbag, I hope. Tangentially, however, John Hurt’s Caligula in I Claudius, is a queer icon and I wish more people knew about it. He made the role so camp I should have packed bug spray. It is spectacular. Slay, Caesar.

God I just *clenches fist* love him so much

There’s all sorts of unhinged other shit that went down during the four years of Caligula’s reign. Lots of murder, obviously, but also extremely weird murder. Like the time Caligula got bored at a gladiator match and decided to feed an entire section of the audience to the lions during intermission. There are also heaps of incestuous rumors about Caligula and his sisters, though we should all know by now to take incest rumors with a grain of salt, given that Caligula was just creating them himself about eight paragraphs ago.

There’s also the rumor that Caligula appointed his horse Inciatus to the Roman Consulate and planned to make him both a senator and a priest. Historians are adamant that this didn’t actually happen, because historians generally are wet blankets and don’t want me to have any fun.

Inciatus: I’m sorry WHOMST is a senator

And then there’s just the weird stuff. Like how he used to consume meals of pearls dissolved in water. Or how he used to receive political council from the literal moon like he was on Bear in the Big Blue House. (A link for readers who either weren’t or didn’t have Millennial kids.) Historians are like 99% sure he didn’t murder his pregnant sister Drusilla and eat her fetus, but, like, the fact that we’re having that conversation at all sorta gives a sense of what we’re talking about.

Assassination Station

Now, if you know one thing about Roman Emperors, it’s probably that they were notoriously easy to stab. So in the year 40 CE, a bunch of unhappy Roman soldiers decided that now was the time to shish kebab Caligula. The guards attacked the emperor in a tunnel underneath the imperial palace and stabbed him 30 times, just to make absolutely sure. They also stabbed his wife and child to death, which I frown upon.

adding “stabbed entirely too many times” to my Dirtbags Through the Ages bingo card

Caligula was burned and his body scattered during the Sack of Rome 400 years later, so alas I cannot include him on my hopefully-upcoming “Travel the World to Spit on the Graves of People I Hate” tour. He was succeeded by his uncle Claudius, AKA the only family member Caligula had not already murdered. Claudius would reign for about 15 years until his wife murdered him with mushrooms, but that’s a different story.

It would take so much research for me to write a novel set in Ancient Rome, but goddammit I want to. The raw material is just so wild.

Anyway, that’s all for today. Thanks as always for joining me on this tour through history’s very worst. I’ll be back in two weeks with more bullshit. Until then, be well, and see if you can figure out how to get a horse on the ballot for the 2024 US elections, we’ve got plenty of time,

-Allison