If there was one foreign king who inspired the Romans through the sheer extent of his militaristic achievements, it was the ancient world’s live-fast, die-young poster boy: Alexander the Great.
Even in antiquity, Alexander’s reputation was legendary. The young Macedonian conquered most of the known world—Greece, Egypt, Persia, Asia Minor and parts of India all the way up to Pakistan, before dropping dead (perhaps from some tropical disease; perhaps from exhaustion) in Babylon, aged just 33.
Alexander’s exploits inspired generations of Romans who regarded themselves as his heirs as masters of their new world. At least in this respect, the emperor Caligula was no different. In Alexander, Caligula saw a figure well worth emulating—a leader whose many military victories he, as a young emperor at the head of the army, could one day hope to replicate.
In reality, however, Caligula would replicate only Alexander’s vices—his violence, alcoholism, and megalomania. But Caligula wasn’t the first Roman leader to tap into Alexander’s potential as a model for imitation. Generals of the Roman Republic also drew heavily on the Macedonian’s great legacy, beginning with Pompey “Magnus” (that’s Pompey the Great) and Julius Caesar.
As a young man, Pompey was often compared to Alexander in terms of his looks. His biographer, Plutarch, concedes the resemblance may have been exaggerated, but that didn’t stop people from talking about it.
Pompey’s hair was inclined to lift itself slightly from his forehead, and this, with a graceful contour of face about the eyes, produced a resemblance, more talked about than actually apparent, to the portrait statues of King Alexander. Wherefore, since many also applied the name to him in his earlier years, Pompey did not decline it, so that presently some called him Alexander in derision. Hence, too, Lucius Philippus, a man of consular rank, when pleading in his behalf, said that he was discovering nothing strange if, being Philip, he loved Alexander.
Plutarch, Life of Pompey, 2
Pompey also drew comparisons by dint of his skill as a general and military achievements. Here, it seems he went well out of his way to promote the comparison, even wearing what he claimed to be Alexander’s chlamys (a type of short tunic) during his military triumph over Mithridates in 61 BC.
Alexander also occupied the mind of Pompey’s great rival, Julius Caesar. Plutarch tells us about a particularly weepy reading session that took place in Spain when Caesar was a young man:
Once Caesar was at leisure, and was reading from the history of Alexander. He was lost in thought for a long time, and then burst into tears. His friends were astonished, and asked the reason for his tears. “Do you not think,” said he, “it is matter for sorrow that while Alexander, at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet achieved no brilliant success?”
Plutarch, Life of Caesar, 11
Suetonius also tells us of Caesar bursting into tears because he hadn’t genocided as many people as Alexander before his 34th birthday. (This time it is a statue that sets him off, rather than a work of literature). But regardless of the source, the hold Alexander had over Rome’s generals is clear.
The fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire, and the replacement of warring generals with a de facto absolute monarch, saw little shift in attitudes towards Alexander. Roman emperors also drew on Alexander’s currency as an example of valour and military virtue. The first emperor, Augustus, had considerable respect for the great Macedonian. On his visit to Egypt in 31 BC after defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium, he made a special trip to Alexander’s tomb in Alexandria.
The emperor reverentially laid flowers and a golden crown across the Macedonian king’s body. When asked whether he’d like to see the tombs of the Ptolemies, he sneered, replying:
“I’ve come to see a king, not a row of corpses.”
Upon his return to Rome, Augustus decorated the capital with paintings and statues of Alexander, including two paintings by the renowned Greek artist Apelles which he displayed in his forum. The message was clear. In making the association between himself and Alexander, Augustus was announcing himself as the new cosmocrat or world conqueror. But there was a crucial difference: Augustus would be better. For as the emperor himself once said, while Alexander had been so obsessed with conquering that he’d never bothered to consolidate his empire, he had no intention of making the same mistake.
The Roman who was most similar to Alexander the Great was not Augustus, however, but Caligula’s father, Germanicus. Germanicus travelled to Egypt in around 18 CE on a tour of the province, and at one point, he gave a speech in Alexandria, some of the words of which have been preserved on a piece of papyrus. Amongst the usual rhetoric, Germanicus talked in lofty terms about Alexander as “the hero and founder of Alexandria whose goals of conquest he also shared.”
This comparison was not lost on others.
The historian Tacitus, writing about the aftermath of Germanicus’s death by poisoning, said that there were some who compared the young Roman prince to Alexander the Great. Both had been very handsome and of noble descent, both had died in faraway lands, and both had possibly been poisoned by their countrymen. But Tacitus makes the point that Germanicus was the better man. Unlike Alexander, he didn’t need scores of wives, banquets or binges to keep himself happy. Roman simplicity was good enough for him.
Why Caligula turned to Alexander
To be a Roman emperor, you had to be a military man; and if you weren’t a military man, you at least had to pretend to be. Caligula was only 25 when he came to power, and although 25 years was more than enough time for most aristocratic Romans to gain valuable military experience, Caligula had spent his teens and early twenties shut away on the Island of Capri with Tiberius. There he had been forced to keep his head down, trying to survive the toxic environment of paranoia, executions, and—if we believe the sources—the emperor’s increasingly twisted sexual degeneracy.
It makes sense that when Caligula eventually came to power, he had to look for inspiration elsewhere. For sure, his father Germanicus provided a great role model. But Germanicus was long dead, and his consignment to the underworld meant he had never come to realise his potential on earth. Then again, his father had taken an incredible role model of his own in Alexander; one who was daring, driven and oozed militarism. Why shouldn’t Caligula do the same?
Caligula’s biographer, Suetonius, tells us that while Caligula was visiting Egypt, he stole Alexander’s breastplate from his sarcophagus in Alexandria. Whether this is true or not, we’ll never know. But the authenticity of the breastplate isn’t as important as the fact that Caligula claimed it was real. We’re told that Caligula would often wear Alexander’s breastplate and dress up as the great Macedonian; one of the many costumes in his wardrobe as well as those of Bacchus, Jupiter, Venus, and even the moon (Caligula liked dressing up a lot).
The big occasion on which Caligula donned Alexander’s breastplate was when he constructed a bridge of ships across the Bay of Baia sometime in 39 AD. After spending the day riding up and down it on horseback—supposedly to retrospectively disprove a prophecy that he would sooner ride across the waters of Baiae than become emperor—he spent the evening leading some kind of military procession which quickly descended into a Bacchic rave. So much alcohol was consumed that several of Caligula’s companions fell into the water. Instead of helping them out, however, the emperor ordered them to be held underwater with oars as he fell about laughing.
Caligula also introduced Rome to an eastern practice called proskynesis. Though it had different forms, it traditionally involved bowing and kissing a ruler when greeting them, thereby treating them as a god. From our sources, it seems proskenysis was rife at Caligula’s court. The later emperor Vitellius once shamed himself by falling at Caligula’s feet and addressing him as if he were a god. Another man, Pompeius Pennus, was spared his execution by Caligula, and was made to kiss the emperor’s left foot as a thank you. And at Caligula’s last meal before his assassination, we’re told that one of the consuls for that year passed the evening showering kisses on the emperor’s feet.
The proskynesis was also associated with Alexander. He introduced it at his court in Bactria, Central Asia, in around 327 BC, demanding that Greeks, Macedonians, and Persians perform the act whenever they greeted him. This may have been caught up with Alexander’s “delusions of grandeur”, to put it lightly (or “belief he was a god” to put it bluntly).
Alexander claimed divine descent from Zeus Ammon, and with Caligula too being the first emperor to demand worship as a god, it’s more than likely that Caligula looked to Alexander when introducing this to his court. Unfortunately for him—as his assassination would ultimately prove—in doing so he made a fatal error of judgement.
Alexander’s reputation during Caligula’s reign
There was a considerable amount of interest in Alexander during Caligula’s reign, with his name cropping up time and again in writing about philosophy, morality, and personal conduct. Unlike the writing that had come before, however, remarkably little of it was positive: mostly relating to his cruelty, insatiable appetite for death, and raving alcoholism.
There was also a lengthy historical biography about the Macedonian, written during this period by one Quintus Curtius Rufus, which gives us more information about the Macedonian conqueror than almost any other source. In the book, Alexander starts his reign well but soon becomes corrupted by the luxuries of the East (sound familiar?), changing how he dressed, demanding worship as a god, and drinking excessively. So excessively, in fact, that on one occasion he burns down a city and on another he murders his close friend, Cleitus.
Caligula’s reign had a similar trajectory, and it’s unlikely the parallel was accidental. When Caligula ascended to the throne in 37 AD, aged just 25, the Roman people were full of hope. This was, after all, the son of Germanicus, the prince that had been promised, and a ruler with a direct bloodline to Augustus.
Caligula’s reign did in fact start well.
For the people, he put on games and spectacles, including the sacrifice of 160,000 animals (we might rightfully doubt that figure, but we should not doubt the spectacle). For the Senate, he humbled himself as their son and ward, and promised to share power with them. Caligula published public accounts, paid the Praetorian Guard handsomely, and reintroduced banned literature. He also made a point of burning evidence relating to treason trials under Tiberius (though it would later transpire that he kept copies).
But a mysterious illness that nearly killed him a few months into his reign tipped him into (a probably completely justified) paranoia. He seems to have become increasingly cruel, executing or exiling those he perceived as a threat, and accepting worship as a god from the sycophantic senators who surrounded him.
One final anecdote, which others have overlooked, to my mind confirms Caligula’s close association with Alexander. In the days following Caligula’s assassination at the hands of his praetorian prefect in 41 AD, angry mobs (for when are mobs never angry) ran amok through the city, tearing down the emperor’s statues and defacing his images in a practice we now call damnatio memoriae or “damnation of memory.”
But we’re told by Pliny the Elder that Caligula’s image wasn’t the only one people wanted wiped out.
I’ve already mentioned how in the Forum of Augustus there were two paintings of Alexander by the renowned artist Apelles. We’re told that shortly after coming to power, Claudius decided to erase Alexander’s face from these paintings and replace it with that of Augustus. This doesn’t make much sense; it’s hard to imagine what Claudius, as a historian, would have had against Alexander, especially as his brother Germanicus had managed to forge an association with him so successfully. It does make sense, however, if we see it as an indirect attack on Caligula.
Caligula had wanted to milk Alexander for his militarism. He’d styled himself (quite literally, by wearing Alexander’s breastplate) as a young prince who would lead by example, conquer nations, and restore Rome to greatness.
But he did none of this. As Caligula’s reign progressed and the blood started to flow, his association with Alexander only served to reawaken those negative associations—cruelty, inebriation, and aspirations to divinity. To what extent this was deserved, we do not know. But it soured Alexander’s reputation in Roman culture for generations to come.
