Some days are worse than others. For the Roman empire the 31st of August was a bit of a downer since it marks the birth of not one but two of their least edifying emperors. Each of them had their own interesting "quirks" and both of them seemed to exist largely to point out why hereditary succession is not necessarily the best way to run an empire or, for that matter, a family. But which to choose? After careful consideration I decided to go with the one who appeared to be genuinely deranged as opposed to merely stupid, self indulgent and vicious.
So with that as an intro, happy birthday to Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus more commonly known to posterity as Caligula. Caligula was a member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty that (in the person of Augustus) actually created the empire on the ashes of the old republic. With Order 66 implemented Augustus could look forward to a long reign for himself and his descendants. The only difficulty turned out to be a depressing shortage of descendants. Augustus adopted his step-son, Tiberius, to maintain a facade of family descent and by the time Tiberius turned his face to the wall the only immediate member of his family that he hadn't done away with was his nephew, our boy Caligula. Tiberius intended Caligula to rule jointly with his grandson Gemellus however Caligula persuaded the Senate that Gemellus should be cut out of the will on the grounds that he was insane. In light of what was to come that was ironic to say the least.
At this point it has to be admitted that we don't actually know a lot about the reign of Caligula. Most of the histories written about him are lost to us and apart from the occasional snippet the only accounts of his reign come from the authors Cassius Dio and Suetonius. Suetonius is probably the more reliable since his account was written only eighty years after Caligula's death and he's therefore the closest thing we have to an eyewitness. What we do know about Caligula is all of the batshit crazy stuff he (allegedly) got up to in the few years between taking the throne and getting murdered by the Praetorian Guard.
It's fair to say that Caligula can't have been particularly popular. At least he can't have been popular with the sort of people who could make their slander last through eternity. The histories of Suetonius and Cassius Dio both tell us that Caligula was a sadistic, irrational, sexual deviant with a god complex. He'd probably make a great reality TV star. There are the famous stories; the horse as consul, seducing his own sisters, setting up a statue of himself in the temple at Jerusalem and ordering the Jews to worship him. Whether any of this is true or not is unknown. There is one interesting comment; both our historians agree that Caligula seemed a nice enough guy when he became emperor but shortly into the job he became seriously ill and when he recovered he seemed to have had a complete personality change.
Quite apart from having a gibbering loon as emperor there was a bit of a financial crisis going on and a famine as well. Caligula either caused these or at least didn't deal with them effectively. It's entirely possible that he simply wasn't very good at his job. With genuine doubts about the competence of the emperor (never mind doubts about his mental health) some of the more influential people in the empire started to discreetly explore options. When he found out Caligula indiscreetly killed them. Strangely this didn't make the surviving influential people any happier. The option exploration continued with a certain added urgency. After the emperor had been hacked into bits there was a definite need to come up with a better reason for assassination than "he couldn't manage inflation" so all of the other stories were added in as well.
Or possibly he really was barking mad and the tales that have come down to us don't even mention the half of it. I think we can definitely conclude that he was probably both unpleasant and incompetent. His successor Claudius was widely regarded as an idiot but he was a genial buffer and he lasted for years. Caligula's predecessor, Tiberius, was a paranoid sociopath who ran the empire by remote control from the Isle of Capri and murdered people all over the place but he was formidably competent and he died at the age of seventy seven. Caligula didn't see his thirtieth birthday. That probably tells us as much as we need to know about him.
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