Gaius Caligula is know as the mad emperor, the one who made his horse a consul. But has he simply been a victim of circumstance and rumour? In this marvellously entertaining, illuminating novel, Allan Massie paints a revelatory portrait of Caligula's life and times.
It's hard, when reading Caligula, to get Robert Graves's Claudius books out of your mind. It seems, to me anyway, that Massie had a similar problem. Caligula covers much over the same period that Graves covered in I, Claudius (or I, Clavdivs as it was affectionalty known chez Auz). Massie, though, seems totally offended that Graves rehabilitated Claudius and spends every opportunity he can hammering Claudius back into the drooling idiot box.
Sometimes he even conspires to combine it with waving off Caligula's mad acts. At one stage, Caligula puts forward Claudius as consul alongside himself and recieves the suggestion that “you might as well make your horse a consul as Claudius”. At other points Claudius is accused of slobbering pederasty, alcoholism or just being plain boring. Even his ascension to Emperor is questioned, that it was masterminded by Agrippina (who was later to marry him when he was Emperor).
It could be argued that this is simply the views of the stories un-named narrator (who is the first husband of Caligula's fourth wife Caesona, mis-identified as Lucius in some reviews [probably meaning Lucius Cassius Longinus, who was Caligula's sister Drusilla's first husband]), but Massie leaves no clues to this.
But enough of that - how does Massie fair in his rehabilitation attempt? There's not one hundred percent agreement that Caligula was actually mad - some have said he was just completely unprepared for being Emperor and took his ultimate authority too far. Massie eschews that line though and has Caligula descending into madness whilst explaining away any mad acts. Making his horse consul is one example, explained away by the joke about Claudius. Another, when Caligula has a bridge of boats made across the Bay of Baiae becomes a training exercise for an engineering corps.
The return of the failed invasion of Britannia with loot consisting of seashells becomes a misunderstanding of the troops nickname for engineers huts: muscali. Later a list of bloody murders (which may have come from I, Claudius... but my copy is in storage somewhere) that runs to a page and a half is dismissed out of hand as wearisome, absurd and, ironically in light of the narrator's lack of name, written anonymously, “the refuge of the scoundrel”. Of the accusation that Caligula once whored out the entire imperial palace and his sisters, not a mention is made, which is also the fate of the accusation that it was Caligula who killed his own father. Caligula's predecessor, Tiberius, even gets a polish (Massie also wrote Tiberius in the early 90s - though whether the two books match I don't yet know). His alleged sexual perversions during his self-imposed exile on Capri are waved away as “nonsense” - although there is a reference to his “German boy”.
All this revisionism of the revisionism aside, the book is well written and interesting. Massie's framing device of having the narrator write his secret history before presenting a sanitised version to Agrippina works reasonably well, though it's not possible to actually get into Caligula's thoughts the same way as Graves did by writing Claudius's “autobiography”. The attempt to tear down Graves's Claudius spoils it somewhat though.