Caligula
A Biography
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- USD 16.99
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- USD 16.99
Descripción editorial
The infamous emperor Caligula ruled Rome from A.D. 37 to 41 as a tyrant who ultimately became a monster. An exceptionally smart and cruelly witty man, Caligula made his contemporaries worship him as a god. He drank pearls dissolved in vinegar and ate food covered in gold leaf. He forced men and women of high rank to have sex with him, turned part of his palace into a brothel, and committed incest with his sisters. He wanted to make his horse a consul. Torture and executions were the order of the day. Both modern and ancient interpretations have concluded from this alleged evidence that Caligula was insane. But was he?
This biography tells a different story of the well-known emperor. In a deft account written for a general audience, Aloys Winterling opens a new perspective on the man and his times. Basing Caligula on a thorough new assessment of the ancient sources, he sets the emperor's story into the context of the political system and the changing relations between the senate and the emperor during Caligula's time and finds a new rationality explaining his notorious brutality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lively biography of Rome's infamous third emperor, readers will not find the wild-eyed dictator the public has, for nearly two millennia, come to expect. Offering not an apology for the "mad" emperor but a thoughtful argument for his sanity, Winterling, ancient history professor at the University of Basel, Switzerland (Aula Caesaris), debunks Caligula's most grotesque and oft repeated crimes. Accounts of his incestuous relationship with his sisters and his creation of a brothel on palace grounds (with senators' wives as prostitutes) were slander by biased historical sources such as Suetonius. Caligula's supposed plan to appoint his favorite race horse as consul (the highest ranking position below emperor) and his claim to be in direct contact with various gods, says Winterling, were cruel jokes misinterpreted over time. The emperor's crossing of the Bay of Baiae on a bridge of ships was not an expensive folly but an unprecedented display of power to the Germanic tribes he was targeting. Like a police interrogator, Winterling plays his ancient sources off each other, identifying holes in their accounts, "blatant contradictions," and conflicts of interest. In this brisk and well-measured biography, Caligula emerges a troubled and cruel man, but not a crazy one. Photos.
