Historiography Saturday: Caligula

Caligula (“little soldier’s boot”) was the nickname of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, one of the more notorious Roman emperors. While the firsthand accounts of his reign have nearly all been lost to history, the surviving contemporary and posthumous accounts do not paint a flattering picture: over a short period the new emperor went from a beloved favorite of the army to a leader known for irresponsible spending habits and wanton cruelty. When he planned to move to Alexandria from Rome, a political play that would have crippled the Senate, he was assassinated.

From the initial biographies to an infamous film adaptation, Caligula’s story has been used as a morality play for the past two millennia, making it difficult to discern what his reign was really like. The more outrageous claims, like his relationship with his favorite horse, were likely rumors, but broader accusations of sexual deviancy (incest and homosexual relations, for example) are more difficult to address, along with the assertion that he was insane, in part due to a Roman cultural meme that paired perversity and madness with poor governorship. (Seneca’s description of Caligula as appallingly ugly and pale might be a more accessible ad hominem to a modern audience.) It is possible that Caligula was bisexual, but not impossible that accounts of him as the passive partner in same-sex intercourse were intended as slander given the Roman expectations for adult male sexuality.

Emperor Hadrian

Though he is now known for the massive, eponymous wall he constructed that defined the boundaries of Roman Britain, it took more for Hadrian to earn his place as one of the Five Good Emperors of Rome. Machiavelli hypothesized that Hadrian’s adoption was the key to his benevolent dictatorship, which was marked by a patronage of the arts and a scaling back of conquered territories. His philhellenism (obsession with Greece) spawned the revival of the beard as a fashion choice, which endured among the Romans for generations after his death. This is not to suggest that his reign was without bloodshed: his occupation of Roman Judaea was especially nasty, and rife with anti-Jewish policies.

As with all figures from historical Rome who engaged in same-sex relationships, Hadrian’s sexual orientation is difficult to translate into a modern paradigm. Online sources vary on how much interest he had in women, but he is known to have had such a close bond with a male youth, Antinous, that upon the teenager’s death from drowning, Hadrian mourned by erecting a city – and a cult – in his honor. Due to the ambiguity, he is tagged ‘bisexual’, ‘gay’, and ‘pederasty’.