Ancient World Review

The Education Of Julian The Apostate

Flavius Claudius Iulianus Augustus (331 - 363 AD) was a great man and one of the last true Romans. He is more commonly known today as Julian the Apostate, the name he was given by the Christian church for his determined attempt to restore paganism in the dying Roman empire.

Born in Constantinople in 331, Julian was "placed in the care of an Arian bishop" as a child and "from 342 was confined for six years on an imperial estate in Cappadocia," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised). "He impressed his Christian tutors there as a gifted and pious pupil, but his reading of the Greek classics was inclining him in private to other gods."

Christians who read and think too much tend to lose their faith, even if they're "heretics" like the Arians. "In 351, as a student of philosophy, [Julian] encountered pagan Neoplatonists and was initiated as a theurgist by Maximus of Ephesus," a Neoplatonist philosopher and magician who should be commemorated by pagans everywhere for the role he played in converting Julian to the traditional beliefs of the ancients.

Related: The philosophy of Neoplatonism.

Julian played a double game for years while waiting to see if he would be executed or made emperor. "For the next ten years Julian's pagan 'conversion' remained a prudently kept secret," according to the OCD. "He continued his studies in Asia and later at Athens until summoned to Milan by [Constantius II] to be married to the emperor's sister Helena and proclaimed Caesar with charge over Gaul and Britain."

Julian fought successful campaigns against the Alamanni and Franks that made him very popular with the army, which mutinied and declared him emperor after Constantius "ordered the transfer of choice detachments to the east..." (OCD). Luckily, civil war was avoided when Constantius died later that same year (361) and Julian took over Rome.

He publicly declared his paganism, purged the imperial court, issued a declaration of general religious tolerance that "foreshadowed a vigorous program of pagan activism in the interest of Hellenism," restored "the temples and finances of the ancestral cults," and established "a hierarchy of provincial and civic priesthoods." During the process, "Christian churches and clergy lost the financial subsidies and privileges gained under Constantine and his successors."

Julian discriminated in favor of pagans, but, unlike the Christians themselves, he didn't believe in using violence to persecute the people who didn't share his beliefs. Instead, he tried to marginalize Christianity, partly through argument, such as in his essay Against the Galileans, which is still well worth reading.

Julian's "learning and literary talent" as well as his control of the Roman legal apparatus could have changed the future course of the world in dramatic ways, but he was killed in a "minor skirmish" in his war against Persia after only three years in power. Wounded on June 26, 363, he died three days later on June 29, a  day which should also be commemorated by pagans.

By the time of Julian, Rome was already in serious trouble and the western empire would collapse around a hundred years later. Ultimately, Julian was fighting a rearguard action against Christianity, but his reforms might have made a difference if he had lived longer. After all, Christianity owed much of its influence to official support and a lot of important people converted in order to gain the favor of the court. Once that support had been removed, who knows what might have happened?

The real Rome was a pagan, not a Christian, empire. In Julian's day, the empire was being destabilized and distorted beyond recognition by a foreign religion and Julian might have been able to turn that around. 

"One of the persistent themes of Julian's antagonism towards the Christian church was his belief that they were troublemakers, causing political discord in any community where they formed the majority: 'they turn everything upside down.'" -- from the introduction to "Julian's Against the Galileans," edited and translated by R. Joseph Hoffmann, Prometheus Books, 2004.

Here's to Flavius Claudius Iulianus Augustus. Rest in peace.

Cambridge And Heidelberg Announce Major Project To Digitize Treasured Medieval Greek Manuscripts

Video from 2013.

"Hundreds of medieval and early modern Greek manuscripts – including classical texts and some of the most important treatises on religion, mathematics, history, drama and philosophy – are to be digitised and made available to anyone with access to the internet." Source: Archaeology News Network.

The Cambridge Digital Library.

Ancient Egyptian Shipwreck Proves Herodotus Was Right

"One of the most elusive boats from the ancient world — a mysterious river barge that famed Greek historian Herodotus described nearly 2,500 years ago — has finally been discovered." Source: Live Science.

"Herodotus dedicated 23 lines of his 'Historia' to this type of boat, known as a baris, after seeing the construction of one during his travels to Egypt in 450 B.C. In his writings, Herodotus described how the long barge had one rudder that passed through a hole in the keel, a mast made of acacia wood and sails made from papyrus."

The Enigma Of The Etruscans

According to Wikipedia, "there are two main hypotheses as to the origins of the Etruscan civilization in the Early Iron Age: autochthonous development in situ out of the Villanovan culture, or colonization of Italy from the Near East." In other words, Etruscan civilization either developed locally from the Villanovan Culture in Italy or the Etruscans were the descendants of migrants from the east.

DNA evidence has supposedly established that the Etruscans originally came from the area of modern Turkey:

"...the Etruscans, whose descendants today live in central Italy, have long been among the great enigmas of antiquity. Their language, which has never properly been deciphered, was unlike any other in classical Italy. Their origins have been hotly debated by scholars for centuries." Source: The Guardian (2007)

"Genetic research made public at the weekend appears to put the matter beyond doubt, however. It shows the Etruscans came from the area which is now Turkey - and that the nearest genetic relatives of many of today's Tuscans and Umbrians are to be found, not in Italy, but around Izmir."

This is an old story and the findings could be inaccurate or misleading. For instance, it might be possible that the modern Tuscans and Umbrians used in the DNA tests were more closely related to Turkish people than they were to the ancient Etruscans. Also, the connection between the Etruscans and the area of modern Turkey may be due to the fact that the Villanovans developed from the earlier Bronze-Age Urnfield Culture which covered a large area of central Europe. It's possible that eastern peoples migrated into central Europe and then spread into Italy, where some of them eventually laid the foundations for the Villanovan Culture and then the Etruscan civilization.

The theory that the Etruscans emerged locally from the Villanovan Culture in Italy apparently goes back to the Italian historian Massimo Pallottino. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "Pallottino's hypothesis of ethnic formation in Etruria itself has long provided the best explanation of the facts." This doesn't necessarily contradict the idea that the Etruscans were descended from eastern migrants through the Villanovan Culture, however.

The picture is still very murky. For instance, ancient Greek historians such as Herodotus wrote that the Etruscans were descended from a group of Greek colonists from Lydia and linguistic analysis of the Etruscan language might support that view. According to the OCD, "the only language that has so far been shown to be 'related' to Etruscan, i.e. to be descended from a common source, is the pre-Greek idiom of Lemnos, and the evidence even for this is limited to a few texts. It may at best provide an argument in favour of the view championed by Herodotus that the Etruscans originated in the region of the Aegean and Asia Minor."

The Satires Of Juvenal

"Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. AD 55-138) captures the splendor, the squalor and the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. In The Sixteen Satires, he evokes a fascinating world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shameless sycophants, aging flirts and downtrodden teachers." -- Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires, Penguin Classics, Third Edition.

Note: An excellent, unabridged reading of the Satires is available from Audible.com.

"[Juvenal was] known primarily for the angry tone of his early Satires, although in later poems he developed an ironical and detached superiority as his satiric strategy," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised). "...virtually nothing is known of his life...the absence of dedication to a patron in Juvenal's Satires may suggest that he was a member of the elite. The few datable references confirm Syme's assessment that the five books were written during the second and third decades of the 2nd cent. AD (or later), at about the same time as Tacitus was writing his Annals."

Comment: Juvenal is my favorite Roman poet. Earthy, cynical, outraged, comically obscene, his poetry seems strangely modern and I can sympathize with his disgust at the corruption, stupidity and perversity of the world he lived in. In that regard, human nature being what it is, very little has changed over the last 2000 years.

Juvenal coined the phrase "bread and circuses" to describe the political system of Rome in his day, a system which still exists in modern America, a country where at least half the population is receiving some form of government benefits and tens of millions of plebs work themselves into a lather over mass sports spectacles like the Super Bowl every year. And if you think we're all that different from the mobs who attended the gladiatorial fights and animal hunts at the Colosseum, it should be noted that gladiator-like mixed martial arts arena fighting has seen a surge in popularity. Juvenal attended the games in Rome and he could be particularly acerbic about the degeneracy, excess and status-seeking of some of the spectators:

"To go to the games, Ogulnia hires dresses, attendants, a carriage, cushions, a baby-sitter, companions, and a little blonde slave-girl to carry her messages. Yet what's left of the family plate, down to the last salver, she'll hand out as a present to some smooth athlete. Many such women lack substance [wealth] - yet poverty gives them no sense of restraint, they don't observe the limits." -- Satire VI.

Note: I've copied these passages in prose form in order to save space.

If Juvenal could see the crowds at a modern Super Bowl, he'd probably have a heart attack. An impoverished aristocrat -- at least when he was writing the early satires -- he was highly indignant about the way he was shoved aside to make way for wealthy low-lives at the games:

"The hardest thing that there is to bear about wretched poverty is the fact that it makes men ridiculous. 'You! Get out of those front-row seats,' we're told. 'You ought to be ashamed - your incomes are far too meager! The law's the law. Make way for some pander's son and heir, spawned in an unknown brothel; yield your place to the offspring of that natty auctioneer with the trainer's son and the ring-fighter's brat applauding beside him!'" -- Satire III.

Like so many other Romans, Juvenal's poverty reduced him to depending on a wealthy patron for the necessities of life. The second-class treatment he received at the hands of this patron didn't do much to improve his mood, especially when he considered the profligacy of his "betters:"

 "...when has there been so abundant a crop of vices? When has the purse of greed yawned wider? When was gambling more frantic? Today men face the table's hazards with not their purse but their strong-box open beside them...Isn't it crazy to lose ten thousand on a turn of the dice, yet grudge a shirt to your shivering slave? In the old days who'd have built all those country houses, or dined off seven courses, alone? Now citizens must scramble for a little basket of scraps on their patron's doorstep." -- Satire I.

Juvenal's Rome was a behavioral sink, a decadent and dangerous city where whores, criminals and morons rose to the top and lorded it over the ordinary citizens who probably counted themselves lucky if they could make it through the day without being robbed or stabbed to death. Most of the population lived in hazardous tenements run by greedy landlords who were only interested in swindling the tenants crammed together in fire-trap buildings that could collapse or burn to the ground at any minute:

"...here we inhabit a city largely shored up with gimcrack stays and props: that's how our landlords postpone slippage, and -- after masking great cracks in the ancient fabric -- assure the tenants they can sleep sound, when the house is tottering. Myself, I prefer life without fires, without nocturnal panics. By the time the smoke's reached the third floor -- and you're still asleep -- the heroic downstairs neighbor is roaring for water, shifting his stuff to safety. If the alarm's at ground-level, the last to fry is the wretch [on the upper floor] among the nesting pigeons with nothing but tiles between himself and the weather." - Satire III.

Juvenal was the Hunter Thompson of his day, ranting about everything from the mobs on the street and the degenerates in high office to the promiscuity of Roman women and the grotesque spectacles of the theater and games. Later in his life, he apparently came into some money and mellowed a little -- but not much. He was essentially a conservative, but unlike Tacitus, who focused on the moral decline of the Rome aristocracy, Juvenal describes in lurid detail the day-t0-day life of the average citizen. I don't have the space to give more than a few quotes from the Satires, but they're full of juicy details and your view of ancient Rome will never be quite the same again after you read them. Highly recommended.

The great Auberon Waugh. In this interview, he seems kind of dismissive of Juvenal's scorn for Roman society, which is pretty odd coming from somebody like him. To see what I mean, you should check out The Diaries Of Auberon Waugh, a collection of his Private Eye writings (1976-1985), aptly described on Amazon as the "venomous, abusive, irrational, fantastical, hugely bigoted diary of a ranting maniac." Highly recommended.

Henry VIII's Hampton Court Palace

"The original Tudor palace was begun by Cardinal Wolsey in the early 16th century, but it soon attracted the attention of Henry VIII, who brought all his six wives here. Surrounded by gorgeous gardens and famous features such as the Maze and the Great Vine [1], the palace has been the setting for many nationally important events." Source: Historical Royal Palaces.

[1] " A nearby conservatory houses the 'Great Vine', planted in 1769; by 1968 it had a trunk 81 inches thick and has a length of 100 feet. It still produces an annual crop of grapes." (Wikipedia)

"The palace houses many works of art and furnishings from the Royal Collection, mainly dating from the two principal periods of the palace's construction, the early Tudor (Renaissance) and late Stuart to early Georgian period. In September 2015, the Royal Collection recorded 542 works (only those with images) as being located at Hampton Court, mostly paintings and furniture, but also ceramics and sculpture." Source: Wikipedia.

The palace was apparently built on top of other previous structures. "The archaeological remains on the site are integral to our understanding of the development of the palace. Partial excavation has shown that remains of the 12th century grange [farmhouse or estate?], 15th century house and many Tudor buildings survive below-ground. The site holds a high degree of potential for further investigation and will contain archaeological and environmental information relating to its occupation, use and history. " Source: Historic England.

Comment: According to Wikipedia, this beautiful palace is located "in the borough of Richmond upon Thames, 11.7 miles ... southwest and upstream of central London ..." (Emphasis added) More precisely, the palace is in East Molesey in Surrey, "a wealthy county due to economic, aesthetic, conservation and logistical factors." In other words, Hampton Court Palace is currently insulated to a large extent from the crime and rapid Islamification taking place in London, but I have to wonder how long that will last.

The UK's idiotic immigration policies have already transformed London out of all recognition and the problem continues to accelerate. According to Wikipedia, "[t]here were 607,083 Muslims reported in the 2001 census in the Greater London area. In the 2011 census Office for National Statistics, the proportion of Muslims in London had risen to 12.4% of the population (21% of England's Muslims). In the boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets, the percentages of Muslims were over 30%." I'm not sure what the current numbers are, but the trend is as obvious as it is suicidal.

The national treasure of Hampton Court Palace is only around 12 miles from Central London. If present trends continue, how long will it be before the palace is turned into a mosque or simply blown up? Ten years? Twenty? If you think this couldn't happen, you haven't been paying attention. London museums have already had to increase their security in response to the threat of bombs and back in 2016 the authority in charge of historical palaces requested additional funds to meet the threat of terrorism. And anti-terrorism pedestrian barriers have already been installed in Surrey, the county where the palace is located.

Hampton Court Palace is a kind of time capsule haunted by ghosts. If things don't change in Britain, this incredible monument to the past may disappear completely even if it doesn't end up as a pile of rubble like the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.

Video from 2009.

Medieval Archive Reveals How Nun Faked Her Own Death To Escape Convent

Video from 2017. Closed captions helpful.

"A nun who faked her own death, an archbishop who went into battle with an army of clergymen, and why being a priest was the most dangerous job of the Middle Ages: these are just some of the stories beginning to emerge from fourteenth-century records held in the University of York’s archives." Source: Archaeology News Network.

"Joan of Leeds was fed up of her life in a medieval nunnery. By 1318, her urge to escape the vows she had pledged to poverty, chastity and obedience had grown so strong that she resorted to faking her own death."

Note: According to the story, Joan faked an illness and her own death, then tricked the other nuns into burying a dummy. This seems unlikely, to say the least -- unless the other nuns were blind as bats -- but apparently some of them helped her to pull it off:

"A number of Joan's fellow nuns aided and abetted her plan, although it is less certain whether they did so willingly or were tricked into helping her. Believing—or pretending to believe—her to be dead, and to being deceived by the dummy, they buried it as her—with full Catholic rites—'in a sacred space amongst the religious of that place', wrote Archbishop Melton [who discovered her escape]. Joan's motives for escaping the nunnery are unknown, but the Archbishop put it down to a desire to follow 'the way of carnal lust', which she was unable to do in orders having taken vows of poverty and chastity."

Ancient Jewish Magic

Notes: These fantastic old manuscript pages are from a 2010 (?) exhibit at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. According to the Jewish Magazine (2010), "Jews [in the ancient and medieval worlds] were reputed to possess much knowledge about magic: amulets and spells to heal from sickness or harm one’s enemies, mystical incantations to ascend to heaven or bring angels down to earth, and information about the beneficent angels who assisted humans in their fight against the demons of illness and madness. Jewish magic has been part of folk Jewish knowledge and elite rabbinic practice through the years."

Jewish magical papyri and inscriptions have been discovered which date back to the Second Temple Period. The Bible forbids the practice of magic, but at the same time "the text of the Bible could be used as a source book for potent curses," according to Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (p.185). For example, "the Jewish gravestones from Acmonia ... invoke 'the curses in Deuteronomy' upon anyone who should violate the burial site."

The Bible isn't the only source of information on Jewish magic. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, "more abundant information is found in post-Biblical literature, especially in the Babylonian Talmud, where the great number of the passages alluding to magic furnishes incontrovertible evidence of its wide diffusion. It was, however, only the practice of witchcraft which was prohibited, for a knowledge of magic was indispensable to a member of the chief council or of the judiciary, and might be acquired even from the heathen. The most profound scholars were adepts in the black art, and the Law did not deny its power."

Magical techniques are also found in some of the esoteric teachings of the Kabbalah. According to Wikipedia, "the Magico-theurgical tradition of Practical Kabbalah (in often unpublished manuscripts) endeavors to alter both the Divine realms and the World. While some interpretations of prayer see its role as manipulating heavenly forces, Practical Kabbalah properly involved white-magical acts, and was censored by kabbalists for only those completely pure of intent. Consequently, it formed a separate minor tradition shunned from Kabbalah." This Kabbalistic tradition has been described by some Christians as "black magic" and Kabbalah in general has become popular with celebrities and the New Age movement.

Ancient Jewish magical teachings probably originated in the pagan world. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, "The diversity existing within ancient Jewish magic and the essential contradiction between witchcraft and monotheism are in themselves evidences of foreign influence on the system. The scholars of the first centuries of the present era refer frequently and unanimously to Egypt as the original home of magic arts ... In the Bible the real homes of all varieties of witchcraft are given as Egypt ... and Babylon ... It is very probable that in this respect both countries influenced Israel, and their political power and high civilization made it inevitable that that influence should be deep, although the lack of historical data renders it impossible to determine its extent or trace its course."

Judaism has its own roots in polytheism, however, so some of its magical teachings could have been passed down from very ancient times, but there was so much cross-fertilization that the ultimate source of any specific teaching probably can't be identified with any certainty. Egypt and Babylon weren't the only foreign influences at work in Palestine over the centuries. Persians, Egyptians, Jews, Phoenicians, Macedonians, Arabs and Romans all came together in the Near East at one time or another, leading to a fantastic mix of religious, philosophical and cultural ideas. Mystery schools, dying-and-resurrected gods, mystical symbolism, ancient deities, eastern magic, Hellenism, Egyptian cultic practices -- all came together on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.

Jewish magic is a classic example of what I guess you could call occult syncretism.

St. Cuthbert's Gospel, The Digital Dark Age & The Decline In Basic Literacy

Video from 2012.

"The [St. Cuthbert's Gospel], which is a manuscript copy of the Gospel of St John, is the earliest intact European book and is intimately associated with Cuthbert, one of Britain's foremost saints. It was created in the late 7th century in the north-east of England and placed in St Cuthbert's coffin, apparently in 698. It was discovered when the coffin was opened in Durham Cathedral in 1104 on the occasion of the removal of Cuthbert's body to a new shrine. The Gospel has a beautifully-worked, original, red leather binding in excellent condition, and is the only surviving high-status manuscript from this crucial period in British history to retain its original appearance, both inside and out." Source: British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog.

Note: "With a page size of only 138 by 92 millimetres (5.4 in × 3.6 in), the St Cuthbert Gospel is one of the smallest surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. The essentially undecorated text is the Gospel of John in Latin, written in a script that has been regarded as a model of elegant simplicity." (Wikipedia)

Comment: This fantastic book is over 1300 years old, but it's still perfectly clear and legible. Compare that to the average lifespan of digital documents, which can probably be measured in a few decades at most.

Preserving digital files is a labor-intensive process. According to the Digital Preservation Coalition, the longevity of these documents can be extended with periodic refreshing (moving a file from one physical storage medium to another), migration (changing them from one format to another) and emulation (creating software that can read a variety of formats), but only a small percentage of the digital material being produced today will ever get this kind of archival treatment.

Physical books, on the other hand, will last for centuries, if not millennia, if they're kept in relatively dry, shaded and -- as in the case of the St. Cuthbert Gospel -- airtight spaces. And they frequently don't need any specialized handling at all to survive for thousands of years. For instance, look at all the ancient papyri scrolls that have been discovered which are still readable. When it comes to longevity, the old technologies are still the best and this includes things like photographs recorded on film rather than digital media:

"We know that photographic negatives, transparencies and prints last a long time. They are reliable forms of storing data. Recently the Royal Geographic Society reprinted Frank Hurley's pictures from the 1913 Antarctic Exhibition - from his original glass negatives, nearly 100 years old. An example of how robust the storage medium was - remember these negatives had been in sub-zero conditions and transported across an ocean in a tiny lifeboat!" (Digital Preservation Coalition)

The digital revolution which was supposed to make us all smarter has not only shortened the lifespan of books but has actually caused a general decline in reading and writing. The number of people who read for pleasure has been going down for decades now. The deterioration in writing skills is obvious all over the western world, and cursive handwriting is no longer being taught in many schools. One of the consequences of this is that "toddler's’ excessive use of touchscreens is leaving the muscles in their hands so weak they cannot grip a pencil," according to the Sunday Express.

What does this have to do with the Cuthbert Gospel? Nothing directly, I guess, but look at what the Gospel represents. What we have here is an approximately 1,300-year-old book which has survived into an age when print is dying in favor of digital media with an average lifespan of less than 20 years. The Cuthbert Gospel was written by hand -- a skill that most people don't learn or use anymore -- in a language that most people can't understand -- that came down to us from a period that most people don't know anything about (they don't know the most basic facts about their own history, never mind the Middle Ages).

I wouldn't call this progress. The Cuthbert Gospel, among other things, is a reminder of how much the West has deteriorated.

Note: The entire Cuthbert Gospel can be viewed online in the British Museum's digitized manuscripts collection. Scanning the book not only helps to preserve it, but makes it available to people who can't visit the museum for one reason or another, but I have to wonder if the digitized version will last anywhere near as long as the original.

Was Caligula A Victim Of Ancient Propaganda?

If immortality means that people remember your name, then the "mad Roman emperor" Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, more commonly known as Caligula, is definitely immortal. Everybody's heard of him even if they've never cracked a history book, which just goes to show that being a "good ruler" doesn't necessarily guarantee that your name will go down in posterity. Moral, competent leaders come and go, fading into obscurity, but villains like Caligula live on forever in movies, plays, novels and TV productions. The only problem is that most of what we think we know about Caligula -- the long litany of crimes that make him so famous -- probably isn't true.

Caligula is the most notorious Roman emperor, with a reputation for insanity, cruelty and sexual depravity based almost completely on his depiction in the media and in absurd sensationalized films like Bob Guccione's pornographic Caligula, one of the vilest, most degenerate and unhistorical movies I've ever seen. This image of Caligula as an insane emperor is so ingrained in popular culture that most people would automatically reject the idea that it's probably not accurate.

If you're interested in actual history instead of lurid Hollywood pseudo-history, you should read "Caligula: The Corruption of Power" by Anthony A. Barrett, a fantastic revisionist biography that I'm planning to review in more detail later. One of the interesting things you'll learn is that everything we know about Caligula is based on just a few biased and generally unreliable ancient sources:

"The quintessential mad despot, Caligula had inspired plays, films, several series for television. Yet while the public at large seems to find him irresistible, academic biographers have tended to give him a wide berth. Nor is this surprising. The loss of the relevant books of the most important ancient commentator on the Julio-Claudian period, the historian Tacitus, means that we have to rely for our information on markedly inferior sources, in particular the late historian Dio and the biographer Suetonius." -- Caligula: The Corruption of Power, Barrett, 1989, p. xv, Forward.

In other words, we don't know nearly as much about Caligula as we think we do. Most of his image is a masturbatory Hollywood concoction based very loosely on a few unreliable ancient sources. If you read those sources, then read Barrett, a hazy but very different picture of who he actually was starts to emerge.

Image based on period portraits and sculpture.

I don't have the time or space to get into all the details here, but if Barrett is correct, it would appear that Caligula was the victim of an ancient smear campaign designed to justify his assassination to the masses and bolster the reputation of his successor, Claudius. (Note: that's my own conclusion, not Barrett's). For instance, Suetonius' admittedly entertaining biography of Caligula is an obvious hit piece accusing him of the most outlandish crimes and atrocities, including incest with his sister, but as far as that last charge goes, it was common in Roman politics to accuse your political enemies of all kinds of sexual degeneracy. Spreading malicious rumors for political purposes isn't a modern invention.

Even Suetonius' biography isn't completely negative, however. Caligula is described as a fairly competent, though inexperienced, ruler who later turned into a "monster" for some unknown reason. The impression I get from reading Barrett and Suetonius is that Caligula wasn't really interested in running the empire; like Nero, he was much more interested in the arts, especially acting, music and singing, tastes which would have made him appear effeminate and decadent in the eyes of the elite. Early in his reign, he became seriously ill and Suetonius implies that his sickness may have unhinged his mind. Even if that's true, however, many of the crimes he is accused of are unbelievable and almost certainly never happened.

Caligula had his vices, no doubt, but even if they were exaggerated (or concocted) by ancient propagandists like Suetonius, that doesn't mean that he was actually a good emperor living a chaste and moral life. He wasn't, but it's doubtful if he would have been smeared so viciously if something else hadn't been going on. The fact that he was brutally assassinated by his own Praetorians after a few short years in power shows that he had made powerful enemies among the ruling elites.

A coin depicting Gaius Caligula.

Caligula was the victim of a political conspiracy. That's a historical fact. We'll never know for sure because of the scarcity and anecdotal nature of the sources, but it appears that he was murdered because he tried to eliminate the political enemies he suspected (with justification) were trying to get rid of him. In other words, they killed him before he could kill them, a common scenario in ancient and medieval monarchies. If Caligula was paranoid, he probably had good reason.

After his murder, his enemies had to justify his assassination to the people, who apparently had a great deal of affection for this "cruel tyrant:"

"Caligula began his reign as the darling of the masses--Suetonius speaks of the immensus civium amor ('the massive affection of his fellow-citizens'). It also seems clear that he stayed popular with the ordinary people right up to the end, and indeed their reaction to the news of his death seems to have caused the sources some embarrassment." -- Caligula: The Corruption Of Power, Barrett, p. 229

Caligula was popular with the masses (1). This is critical. His murder--and the murder of his family--had to be justified to the people and the best way to do that was to portray him as an insane monster who had to be put down like any mad dog. Politics back then wasn't so different than it is now. For example, look at the way Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi were demonized or the way the Germans were portrayed as inhuman baby killers during World War I. These days, the mass media handles the propaganda. Back in ancient Rome, they didn't have television or radio, but that's the only real difference.

(1) "Gaius' accession was greeted with widespread joy and relief, and his civility promised well." (Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. revised).

The popular image of Caligula isn't historical. His reputation as an insane monster was first created by ancient writers with a murder to justify and a talent for pandering to the decadent tastes of the mob, tastes that apparently haven't changed at all since the days of ancient Rome. The real Caligula, whoever he was, has been transformed into a sensationalized tabloid demon by the modern media and the mob laps it up, just like it did two thousand years ago.

The ironic thing is that if it weren't for this sensationalized image, most people wouldn't even know Caligula's name. It's one of those bizarre twists of history that his enemies, the very people who worked so hard to destroy him, ended up making him immortal.