Caligula Was Raised in a Palace of Perversions, and it Showed
Caligula’s (12 – 41 AD) epic perversions might be explained by his upbringing: he was raised by his uncle, the Roman emperor Tiberius – a seedy creep, as seen in a previous entry. Tiberius spent much of his reign as a recluse in a pedophilic pleasure palace, only surfacing every now and then to order the execution of enemies, real or imagined. His victims included Caligula’s mother and two brothers, whom Tiberius accused of plotting against him. He also probably had Caligula’s father poisoned.
Getting raised in such an unwholesome environment was bound to mess up Caligula. He hid whatever resentments he might have harbored against his homicidal uncle, and succeeded to the throne – reportedly after smothering a bedridden Tiberius to death with a pillow. The combination of sudden freedom from the ever present threat of execution, coupled with unlimited power, warped Caligula’s mind, and he plunged into an orgy of extravagant spending and hedonistic living. A soothsayer had once predicted that Caligula had as much chance of becoming emperor, as he did of riding a horse across the Bay of Baiae. So early in his reign, Caligula had a bridge built across the bay, then rode his horse across it while clad in the armor of Alexander the Great.
As to deviancy, among the sundry depravities attributed to Caligula was his habit of telling his wife, whenever he kissed her: “you know, I can have that lovely neck slit whenever I want“. He also had sex with his own sisters – as contemporaries put it: “He lived in habitual incest with all his sisters, and at a large banquet he placed each of them in turn below him, while his wife reclined above“. At dinner parties, Caligula would frequently order the wives of his guests to accompany him to his bedroom, where he would ravish them. Once he was done, Caligula would return to the party and rate his victim’s performance, berating the cuckolded husband if he thought the wife’s performance had been unsatisfactory.
He had utter contempt for Rome’s senatorial class and went out of his way to demonstrate just how much he loathed them. To humiliate Rome’s patricians, Caligula turned the imperial palace into a brothel, in which he compelled the wives of leading Roman senators and other high-ranking dignitaries to serve as prostitutes. To further show his contempt for the senators and the Roman Republic for which they pined, Caligula had his favorite horse made consul – the Republic’s highest magistracy.
Examples abounded of Caligula’s unhinged behavior, such as the time he started giggling uncontrollably at a party. When asked what was so funny, he replied that he thought it was hilarious that with just a signal, he could have anybody present executed on the spot. On another occasion, at an arena, Caligula was informed that there were no more criminals to throw to the beasts. So he ordered that a section of the stands – whom he indicated to his guards by pointing at two hairless spectators and saying “from baldhead to baldhead” – be thrown to the wild animals.
Caligula went on to declare himself a god, and had the heads removed from various deities’ statues, and replaced them with his own. He also once declared war on the sea god Neptune, marched his legions to the sea, and had them collect seashells to show the deity who was boss. Eventually, the weirdness got too much, and his Praetorian Guard murdered him in 41 AD. As an ancient writer put it: “On that day, Caligula finally learned he was not a god“.