He was assassinated by the Praetorian Guard in AD 41.Ĭaligula’s successor, Claudius, was an improvement but, despite the favourable picture in Robert Graves’s famous book I, Claudius, not by much. The story of his making his horse a consul, meanwhile, may have been exaggerated, but it was not out of character.Ĭaligula’s unforgivable mistake was to jeopardise Rome’s military reputation by declaring a sort of surreal war on the sea, ordering his soldiers to wade in and slash at the waves with their swords and collecting chests full of seashells as the spoils of his ‘victory’ over the god Neptune, king of the sea and by his failed campaign against the Germans, for which he still awarded himself a triumph. After a promising start to his reign he seems to have set out specifically to intimidate and humiliate the senate and high command of the army, and he gave grave offence, not least in Jerusalem, by declaring himself a god even the Romans normally only recognised deification after death.Ĭaligula instituted a reign of terror through arbitrary arrest for treason, much as his predecessor Tiberius had done it was also widely rumoured that he was engaged in incest with his sisters and that he lived a life of sexual debauchery, and this may well be true. There are plenty of other contenders for worst Roman Emperor – Nero and Commodus for example – but Caligula‘s mad reign sets a high standard.
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