There’s been some pretty groundbreaking news this week.
Nope, not Joe Biden winning the White House or Covid surpassing Gangnam Style as Asia’s most viral export. This week’s big news comes from Rome, where archaeologists have discovered the emperor Caligula’s palace and gardens on the Esquiline Hill.
Archaeologists made the discovery while excavating beneath a doctors’ pensions institute on Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II. And let’s face it – their timing has been superb. Doctors must be so busy holding back the rising tide of daily infections that they have neither the time nor energy to set their retirements in order, meaning less need for admin and more time for archaeology.
See, every cloud has a silver lining. Non tutto il male viene a nuocere. And what we can all agree has been a total clusterfuck for the rest of humanity can at least be chalked off as a small success for ancient archaeology.
Whenever I hear that archaeologists have found something new in Rome, I always hope it relates to Caligula. He’s a frustratingly enigmatic emperor, endowed with a paltry patchwork of primary sources and embarrassingly little in the archaeology department.
We like to think we know a lot about him: that he was insane, that he tried to make his horse a consul, and that he declared war on the sea. But when it comes to Caligula, we are all ultimately Jon Snow. We know nothing. And we can only hope that continued excavations of Caligula’s palace bring more of his life to light.
Many Stories about Caligula Were Embellished or Invented.
Caligula was as popular among Rome’s senatorial elite as a coughing fit among a church congregation. And problematically for Caligula, it was the senatorial elite who wrote the history.
Granted, he was no saint. You don’t need a degree in psychology to imagine that the purging of his family as a child, his captivity on Capri with the emperor Tiberius (who purged them) as a teenager, and the degeneracy and constant threat of execution that surrounded him there shaped a deeply disturbed young man.
But the charges of insanity levelled against Caligula surely speak more of our senatorial authors’ inability to come to terms with the autocratic system they found themselves operating within than the actual autocrat under whom they served. To a political class quite so proud, it was simply inconceivable to admit they had become largely irrelevant as Rome reverted to one-man rule after 500 years of the Roman Republic. So by deeming the autocrat himself to be deranged, rather than the autocratic system they found themselves having to prop up, they could save face and convince themselves they still had relevance.
This is all quite conceptual, so let’s use an example.
Take the story of Caligula trying to make his horse a senator. I’d suggest this was probably a case of him losing his cool with an incompetent senator by screaming “even my horse could do a better job than you!” which is what I imagine the upper classes scream at their screens every time Boris Johnson appears on TV to address the nation.
Or there’s the time he marched his army up to the English Channel to wage war against Neptune – god of the sea. (Incidentally, the remains of a Roman fort built by Caligula have been discovered just outside Amsterdam) Sure, he might just have been insane, and thought making his men pick up seashells was a good use of legionary manpower. But I’d put my money on there having been a mutiny. The legions had mutinied before against Caligula’s vastly more experienced father Germanicus on the River Rhine. It’s not hard to imagine them doing so again, especially given Caligula’s inexperience and how terrifying they imagined Britain to be as a mysterious, far-away land of fearsome islanders.
You can imagine the enraged emperor admonishing the legions in an outburst of sarcasm, shouting: “You won’t cross the Ocean to expand the glory of the Roman Empire? Then you shall have your victory here, over Neptune, and over his terrifying forces – the shells of the sea” (Or something like that but in Latin). But when the Roman forces returned to Rome empty-handed, not having added any more territory to the Roman Empire, it was more expedient for senators to lay the blame at the feet of the emperor.
This Is Why I’m thrilled with the Discovery of Caligula’s Palace
Archaeology isn’t fraught with the same problems as history.
True, you have to contextualise and cross-reference what you find within the written history, but material findings can contradict as well as complement the status quo. And revising what we think we know is what keeps history going, and keeps me in a job.
For example, archaeologists recently confirmed that our ancient authors significantly exaggerated the extent of the Great Fire of Rome 64 AD, which they alleged was masterminded by the emperor Nero. Tacitus and Suetonius speak of two-thirds of the city being destroyed, but recent evidence shows that less than 15% of the city was consumed by the blaze.
Why the discrepancy between the authors and the archaeology?
Because, according to one academic, Nero made the senatorial elite dig deep into their pockets to fund social welfare programmes in the wake of the blaze. The fundamentally conservative senatorial elite were outraged at having to support Rome’s poor and destitute, so they spread stories that Nero had started the fire which devastated the imperial capital. True, Nero’s decision to build an enormous golden palace on land cleared by the fire didn’t exactly douse the rumour’s flames. But we can’t all be perfect now, can we.
What have archaeologists found in Caligula’s Palace?
Admittedly, the discovery of Caligula’s palace hasn’t sent shockwaves through the academic status quo. Rather than being a modest and homely estate, the sheer scale of the site pays testament to the emperor’s excesses. As well as identifying an enormous luxurious villa and multi-levelled gardens, archaeologists have discovered the remains of various animal fauna (including ostriches, deer and even a bear) suggesting this is where Caligula kept his own personal menagerie.
The images below show an artist’s reconstruction of how the gardens may have looked, some of the frescoes recovered there so far, a marble step connecting two levels of the garden, and where the villa has been located in relation to the rest of the city.
What’s so exciting about the discovery of Caligula’s Palace on the Esquiline Hill is that we most probably have an ancient author to go with it. What’s even better is that I reckon this ancient author depicts Caligula in a pretty realistic light, as an irascible pampered prince more concerned with his interior decor than the plights of his people.
The author in question was a Hellensitic Jew from Alexandria called Philo Judaeus (or Philo to his mates). He has left us a text called “On the Embassy to Gaius” which describes his journey to Rome and audience with Caligula, whose full name was Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (or Gaius to his mates). The reason for his journey was to petition the emperor over the persecution of the Jewish community of Alexandria by the Greeks. But before it had even arrived in Rome, the embassy found itself having to plead with the emperor over another issue: his intention to erect a statue of himself inside the Temple of Jerusalem.
Philo describes the build-up to his meeting with Caligula as follows:
“Caligula sent for the managers of two gardens on the Esquiline Hill, the Maecenatian and the Lamian gardens, which are near one another and close to the city, and where he had spent three or four days, for this was the place in which this theatrical spectacle, aimed at the happiness of a whole nation, was intended to be enacted in our presence. He commanded all the outer buildings to be opened for him, as he wished to examine them all minutely.”
Here we have an emperor who is more interested in inspecting his property than hearing petitions from embassies. And the property he’s inspecting on the Esquiline Hill is almost certainly the site which has just been excavated. Caligula’s behaviour, as we’ll come to see, is typical of that of a Roman aristocrat – tending to his estate, ordering his inferiors around, the usual stuff. The emperor comes across arrogant, sardonic, odious, but not mad.\
Philo goes on:
As soon as we were introduced into his presence, the moment that we saw him, we bent to the ground with all imaginable respect and adoration, and saluted him calling him emperor; and he replied to us in such a gentle and courteous and humane manner that we not only despaired of attaining our object, but even of preserving our lives; for, said he, “You are haters of God, inasmuch as you do not think that I am a god, I who am already confessed to be a god by every other nation, but who am refused that appellation by you.”
Caligula’s mockery of Philo and his Jewsish companions for not worshipping him as a god could be read in several ways. Madness, for thinking he was a god. Arrogance, for demanding he be worshipped as one. Or it could be that he wanted to impose uniformity over worship in the Roman Empire.
Roman religion was polytheistic, meaning you could worship whichever, or however many, gods you liked, so long as you included the Roman deities. From the Age of Augustus onwards (31 BCE – 14 CE), emperors too were worshipped as gods, so Caligula’s demands are not unreasonable here. But they do come up against Abrahamic monotheism. Philo continues:
“While he was interrogating us about not sacrificing to him, he entered into the outer buildings, examining the chambers of the men and the chambers of the women, and the rooms on the ground floor, and all the apartments in the upper story, and blaming some points of their preparation as defective, and planning alterations and suggesting designs, and giving orders himself to make them more costly.
We followed him up and down through the whole place, being mocked and ridiculed by our adversaries like people at a play in the theatre; for indeed the whole matter was a kind of farce: the judge assumed the part of an accuser, and the accusers the part of an unjust judge, who look upon the defendants with an eye of hostility, and act in accordance with the nature of truth.”
Things thereafter went south for Philo, and was meant to be an embassy to secure the emperor’s protection of the Jew descended into farce. Caligula continued to dart around the gardens, inspecting their buildings and making off-handed comments. “Why don’t your people eat pork?” Caligula asked. “For the same reason you don’t eat lamb,” Philo replied. “You’re right,” the emperor mused. “It’s not very nice…”
Caligula never conceded to Philo’s request to intercede on behalf of the Alexandrian Jews. The embassy was cut short when, tired of their company, Caligula declared the hearing over. His final comments about Philo’s embassy, and the last shred of evidence we have for him on his Esquiline estate, went: “These men do not appear to me to be wicked so much as unfortunate and foolish in not believing that I have been endowed with the nature of a god.”
Philo believed divine justice would follow the emperor’s arrogance, telling his companions to keep heart and be patient. He must have felt somewhat vindicated that within the year Caligula was hacked to pieces on the steps of his theatre on the Palatine. Murdered by the same Praetorian Prefect the emperor had mocked mercilessly for his effeminacy.
This final episode, like the embassy on the Esquiline, paints Caligula as arrogant, sarcastic, and characteristically unfit to be emperor. Not someone who was mad, just someone who was bad.
