One night in the year 38 AD, a body was taken from the imperial palace. It was a clandestine operation, marked by the absence of name, the absence of a funeral, and the absence of a single witness. The palace guards remained silent, their eyes fixed firmly on the ground, because they understood, with the primal instinct of the condemned, that speaking out meant certain death. And it was not the first time such an event had occurred, nor would it be the last. In just three years of Caligula’s rule, Rome had transformed into a city where the citizens feared even the sound of their own breathing. It was not a plague, it was not the devastation of war, and it was not a famine; it was simply one man.
Historians have spent centuries attempting to explain the nature of his reign. They have searched for terms like madness, cruelty, or something much worse—something for which the Latin language did not even possess a word. Suetonius recorded only a small portion of what transpired, and even that limited account was enough to make readers drop the scroll in horror. But the real truth lay deeper, darker, and far more terrifying. It was not merely about the physical violence; it was about what Caligula did to people, to their minds, to their will, and to their destiny. History did not forget him, but in many ways, history hid him. Today, we bring that truth to light.
Gallo Julio César Germanicus. That was his full name, a man who initially inspired hope in an entire nation. When he ascended the throne in the year 37 AD, Rome erupted in a cacophony of joy. People flooded the streets, their faces illuminated by the glow of torches as they wept with happiness. After the dark, suffocating, and paranoid reign of Tiberius, the new emperor seemed like a divine salvation. He was young, handsome, and the son of the beloved Germanic general. The Senate watched him with expectant hope, and the people viewed him with pure adoration. Nobody suspected who they had truly placed upon the throne.
The first few months were impeccable, almost bordering on perfection. Caligula freed political prisoners, reduced the crushing weight of taxes, and organized grand games that delighted the masses. The crowds shouted his name with such ferocity that the very columns of the forum seemed to tremble. But even then, at the very inception of his rule, some began to notice strange, unsettling things. The courtiers whispered that at night he did not sleep. They spoke of him wandering the palace in the darkness, barefoot and entirely alone, talking to an invisible audience. Sometimes, he would stop before a window, spending hours staring unblinkingly at the moon. Nobody paid these observations much heed at the time; everyone attributed his behavior to the exuberance of youth and the crushing, unseen weight of imperial power. They were wrong.
Approximately eight months after beginning his reign, Caligula fell seriously ill. A fever consumed him for several weeks, a sickness so severe that the royal doctors did not dare to offer a prognosis. All of Rome prayed for his recovery. The temples were packed to capacity, and people offered their own lives to the gods as sacrifices, pleading for his survival. He did recover, but the man who emerged from that bed was not the same person who had entered it. Historians continue to debate to this day what exactly that disease was. Some believe it damaged the part of his brain responsible for control and compassion. Others think the disease simply acted as a catalyst, revealing what had always been hidden inside him, while others say it quite bluntly: he lost his sanity and never regained it.
The first victim of the new Caligula was his own twin co-emperor, a young man whom he himself had named heir. He was executed without trial, without explanation. One morning, he simply vanished from sight, and by nightfall, he was dead. When a senator cautiously approached the emperor to ask for the reasoning behind this, Caligula merely smiled. Everyone who witnessed that smile described it in the same way. It was not evil, and it was not triumphant; it was simply empty, as if nothing human remained behind it.
The next to disappear was the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, the man entrusted with the emperor’s life. Then followed several senators, and then an old advisor to his father. Each time, there was no explanation. Each time, there was only silence. The palace began to change from within. The servants stopped looking at one another. The guards learned the art of not asking questions. Everyone understood a singular, terrifying truth: curiosity cost you your life.
Caligula began spending his nights in the throne room. The servants who were sent to check if he was there returned pale and silent. One of them later wrote a single sentence in his memoirs, and only one:
“I saw her face in the moonlight and regretted having entered.”
What exactly did he see? His writings never explain it. The pages following that sentence were torn out. By the end of his first year in power, Rome no longer recognized its emperor. The young man for whom the people had prayed and whom they had adored had vanished. In his place sat someone else, possessing the same face and the same power, but holding a completely different view of the people around him. He did not see them as citizens or as subjects; he saw them as material. And the most terrifying thing was yet to come, because power is always a test, but Caligula turned it into something entirely different. It was not a tool of government or a responsibility, but a personal theater where everyone around him was simply an actor, and he was the only spectator—the only one who decided who would make it to the end alive.
By the year 39 AD, the palace lived under new, unwritten, but absolute rules.
First rule: never look the emperor in the eye without his permission.
Second rule: never enter his chambers without being called.
Third rule: never, under any circumstances, ask where someone who was alive yesterday had disappeared to.
These rules were never written down, for everyone simply knew them because those who did not know them could no longer tell the tale. Caligula began to carry out public executions with chilling meticulousness. It was never chaotic or done in a fit of rage; everything was calculated, almost like a work of art. He chose the moment carefully, often during banquets when the hall was full of guests, when people were laughing, drinking wine, and feeling secure. It was precisely then that the soldiers would enter.
Suetonius described one of those banquets with terrifying accuracy. Caligula suddenly burst into laughter in the middle of dinner. The two consuls sitting beside him, confused, politely asked what he found so amusing. He looked at them, smiled with that same empty smile, and said quietly:
“I simply thought that all I would have to do is give a signal and they would both have their throats cut immediately.”
The laughter in the room died instantly, and the silence that followed lasted for a long time. Nobody knew if it was a dark joke or a death sentence. And that was precisely the method: to keep people in a permanent state suspended between fear and hope, never allowing them to know if they were safe or if they were already condemned. That psychological tension destroyed people more than any physical torture ever could. The senators attended the sessions not knowing if they would return home. The generals received rewards without understanding if it would be the last thing they would ever receive. Even his own personal guard lived in terror.
But the psychological pressure was only part of it, because Caligula was not satisfied with fear alone. He went further, into places where no ruler of Rome had ever ventured. He began demanding public humiliations of the senators—no executions, no confessions, just conscious, deliberate, and documented humiliation. One of Rome’s most influential senators was forced to run alongside the imperial chariot for several kilometers under the blazing sun, dressed in his full ceremonial toga, forced to smile while doing so. Another senator, a man with an impeccable military reputation, was forced to serve the table like a common slave in front of a room full of guests, in front of his own family.
Caligula observed all of this with the expression of a man trying to solve a complex puzzle. He studied every reaction, memorizing every expression on their faces. That was not simple cruelty; it was a system. It methodically destroyed people’s ability to resist, step by step, humiliation after humiliation, until they themselves ceased to consider themselves worthy of rebelling. The historian Cassius Dio wrote that Rome at that time resembled a city after an invisible siege. The walls were still standing, the temples remained open, and the markets continued to operate, but something inside the people had broken. There was an emptiness in their eyes and a caution in every movement, as if each person carried within them a constant, silent, and endless fear. At the center of it all, in the palace on the Palatine Hill, sat a young emperor watching, planning, and waiting, for he had reserved the worst for those he considered truly interesting.
What did he do with them? Rome remained silent on that matter for a very long time. There are things that power does to a person slowly, almost invisibly. First, you make decisions, then you stop explaining them, and then you stop feeling the need to give explanations altogether. Caligula traveled that path faster than any other man in the history of Rome. By the year 40 AD, he was no longer considered simply an emperor; he was considered a god, not metaphorically or symbolically, but literally.
He ordered architects to connect his palace with the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill by means of a special, covered passageway, so that he could visit a god, or, as he himself put it, so that the god could visit him. The priests of Jupiter were ordered to address him as an equal deity. Those who refused disappeared in less than a week. Caligula began to appear in public dressed as the gods—sometimes as Jupiter, with a lightning bolt in his hand; other times as Neptune, with a trident; and on other occasions, dressed as the goddess Venus, complete with a wig and makeup. The Senate observed all of this in absolute silence. Nobody laughed, and nobody protested, because everyone already knew the price of opposing him.
But the madness did not end there. Caligula summoned the moon. Not metaphorically—literally. According to the testimonies of his courtiers, he would go out onto the balcony at night and speak loudly to the moon. He invited her to share his bed and threatened her if she didn’t appear sufficiently radiant. One night, he woke up the entire palace with his screams. The servants burst into the room and found him standing in the middle of the throne room, staring at the ceiling, whispering something in an unknown language. When an advisor cautiously approached, Caligula turned slowly and said in a low voice:
“She has come at last. You scared her off.”
The next morning, the advisor was executed. The official reason recorded in the documents was a single word: interference.
But the real horror did not begin with the gods or the moon; it began with real people—specific people whom Caligula personally chose. Historians call this period his experiments, and apparently, Caligula called it something else. He began to summon people who seemed to be chosen at random—merchants, soldiers, sometimes even the sons of noble families. They were brought to the palace, well-fed, and given the best rooms. Then, a few days later, they began to change. Witnesses described it with difficulty, desperately searching for the right words. The person would return from the palace, but they looked different. They spoke more slowly, reacted with a delay, as if something inside them had been rearranged.
A Roman physician who examined several of these people left written records behind. He could not give a diagnosis. He didn’t know a single Latin word to describe what he was seeing. He wrote only one sentence:
“This is not a disease of the body. Someone did something to what’s inside.”
What exactly was happening to those people inside the palace? No source describes it directly; either the witnesses didn’t know, or they did know and preferred to take that secret to their graves. And while Rome tried to understand what kind of horror it was facing, Caligula was already preparing his next move—the move that would make even his most loyal followers start thinking about assassinating him.
There comes a point when fear ceases to hold people back. When terror becomes so commonplace that it ends up transforming into determination, the breaking point is reached. Rome reached that point in January of 41 AD. But before reaching that final resolution, Caligula had still done many more things. Toward the end of his reign, Caligula stopped hiding the true nature of his actions, not because he had lost caution, but because he deemed it unnecessary.
He began summoning the senators’ wives to imperial banquets without their husbands. The husbands stayed at home waiting, not daring to ask, not daring to protest. In the morning, the women returned, and no one ever spoke aloud about what had happened during the night. Suetonius describes a scene with chilling historical detachment. Once, Caligula sent a senator’s wife back after one of these banquets, and the next day, in front of the entire Senate, he publicly described in graphic detail the night he had spent with her. The senator sat motionless, his face like stone, because the only alternative was death. This was not desire, and it was not passion; it was a tool. Caligula methodically destroyed the dignity of anyone who might pose a threat. He made them complicit in their own humiliation. He robbed them of the right to feel anger, because anger requires dignity. And dignity was the first thing he destroyed.
His sister Drusilla died in 38 AD, officially from illness. Caligula declared a period of mourning on a scale Rome had never seen. He forbade laughter throughout the empire, forbade bathing, forbade family dinners, and ordered the execution of several people simply for smiling on the day of her death. Afterward, he declared her a goddess, ordered a temple to be built, and appointed priests in her honor. But in the private records of that time, the few that survived, people described their relationship with very different words—words that even in Rome were considered unthinkable. What truly bound the emperor and his sister? The sources describe it through hints, fragments, and half-sentences, as if even 100 years after her death, writing it outright would still be impossible.
The last months of his reign were the darkest. Executions increased to several a day, and the reasons became increasingly absurd. One man was executed for being too loud in the emperor’s presence. Another was executed for placing an inappropriate man on his mule. A third died simply because Caligula had a nightmare about him. Rome no longer tried to find any logic, because there was no logic—only the will of a single man, absolute, unchecked, and completely disconnected from reality.
And then, for the first time in a long time, some people made a decision. Officers of the Praetorian Guard, several senators, and a freedman met in secret, spoke in whispers, and set a date. On January 24, 41 AD, Caligula was returning from theatrical games through an underground passage in the palace. The guard had been intentionally distracted. The first blow was struck by the tribune Cassius Chaerea. Then came another, and another. Suetonius wrote that he received 30 stab wounds. His body was found by servants, with no guards, no witnesses, in an underground corridor, in a place where no one could hear.
Caligula ruled for three years, 10 months, and 8 days. In that time, Rome changed forever. Not because of laws, not because of wars, but because of a single man who understood, before anyone else, that the most terrifying weapon of power is not the sword, but the knowledge that people will endure anything to survive. Rome survived; Caligula did not. But the shadow he cast on history did not disappear with him. It remained as a reminder of how far power can reach when there is no one left capable of stopping it.
History rarely tells the truth at first. It whispers, it hints, it hides the most important things between the lines. Thousands of pages have been written about Caligula, but the real answers are not in the official chronicles; they are in small notes, in letters that survived by accident, in the testimonies of people who saw everything and still chose to write.
One of them was a Roman aristocrat named Valerius Asiaticus. He attended Caligula’s banquets several times. He survived, returned home, and wrote a letter to a friend in Alexandria. That letter survived purely by chance within another archive. Historians only discovered it in the 19th century, and when they read it, they remained silent for a long time. Valerius Asiaticus didn’t write about executions or madness. He wrote about eyes, about the way Caligula observed people during banquets.
“He studied us,” Valerius Asiaticus wrote, “like a child studies an insect.”
Before he tore off its wings, there was no hatred and no anger in his gaze, only curiosity—cold, endless, and inhuman. Valerius Asiaticus described one particular night. Caligula invited a talented, respected young officer with a brilliant career ahead of him to his table. All night long, he showered him with praise, poured him wine with his own hands, and laughed at his jokes. The officer left the banquet euphoric, happy, and convinced that his future was just beginning. Valerius Asiaticus saw Caligula’s face the instant that officer turned his back on him and described it in a single sentence:
“I understood at that moment: that man is already dead; he just doesn’t know it yet.”
The officer was executed three days later, without cause and without explanation. Caligula felt no hatred toward him; he had simply finished observing him, and that was the most terrifying thing of all. In him, there was no rage, no vengeance, and no madness in the usual sense. There was an absolute, almost clinical, indifference toward human life. People were, for him, interesting experiments, as long as they didn’t become boring, useful until they ceased to be so. And as soon as they stopped entertaining him, they disappeared.
The Roman philosopher Seneca, who survived Caligula’s reign, wrote about him after his death, weighing each word with extreme caution, but there is one passage that completely breaks with that prudent tone. Seneca wrote:
“Nature produces such men very rarely, and thanks be to the gods for it, not to show us evil, but to show us how fragile the boundary is between a man and that which it could become.”
That boundary in Caligula disappeared completely. Nobody knows exactly when it happened. Perhaps during that illness in the year 37 AD, perhaps much earlier, in his childhood spent in military camps, surrounded by death, betrayals, and endless political cruelty. Or perhaps it was never different. Perhaps the mask of humanity only held for the first few months and then fell away, revealing what had always been there: cold, curious, and completely incapable of feeling compassion.
Rome survived Caligula, but all those who stayed close to him for too long took something with them, something dark, something impossible to explain, something that didn’t even have a name, as if simply being near him left an invisible but permanent mark. Those who survived never spoke of it out loud, only sometimes waking up in the middle of the night and lying in the dark for hours without being able to remember exactly what they had dreamed, but knowing with absolute certainty that they had seen his face again.
There comes a point when fear ceases to control people, when horror becomes so commonplace that it ends up transforming into determination. Rome reached that point in January of the year 41 AD. But before he got there, Caligula had still done many more things. Toward the end of his reign, Caligula stopped hiding the true nature of his actions, not because he had lost caution, but because he no longer considered it necessary. He began to summon the wives of senators to imperial banquets without their husbands. The spouses stayed at home waiting, not daring to ask, not daring to protest. In the morning, the women would return, and no one ever spoke aloud about what happened during the night.
Suetonius describes a scene with chilling historical detachment. Once, Caligula returned a senator’s wife after one of these banquets and the next day, in front of the entire Senate, publicly described in brutal detail the night he had spent with her. The senator remained seated, motionless, with a stone-like face, because the only alternative was death. That wasn’t desire, it wasn’t passion; it was a tool. Caligula methodically destroyed the dignity of anyone who might pose a threat. It made them complicit in their own humiliation. It robbed them of the right to feel anger, because anger demands dignity. And dignity was the first thing he destroyed.
His sister Drusilla died in the year 38 AD. Officially, due to illness, Caligula declared a period of mourning of an intensity never before seen in Rome. He banned laughter throughout the empire. He forbade bathing, forbade family dinners, and ordered the execution of several people simply for smiling on the day of her death. He then declared her a goddess, ordered a temple to be built, and appointed priests in her honor. But in the private records of that time, the few that survived, people described their relationship with very different words, words that even in Rome were considered unthinkable. What truly united the emperor and his sister? The sources describe it through hints, fragments, and half-sentences, as if even 100 years after his death, writing about it directly would still be impossible.
The last months of his reign were the darkest. The executions increased to several a day, and the reasons became increasingly absurd. A man was executed for coughing too loudly in the presence of the emperor. Another was killed for putting an inappropriate man on his mule. And a third was executed simply because Caligula had a nightmare about him. Rome no longer tried to find any logic, because there was no logic; there was only the will of a single man, absolute, uncontrolled, and completely disconnected from reality.
And then, for the first time in a long time, some people made a decision. Officers of the Praetorian Guard, several senators, and a freedman met in secret, spoke in whispers, and set a date. On January 24, 41 AD, Caligula was returning from some theatrical games through an underground passage of the palace. The guard had been intentionally dispersed. The first blow was struck by the tribune Cassius Chaerea. Then came another, and another. Suetonius wrote that he received 30 stab wounds. His body was found by the servants, without guards, without witnesses, in an underground corridor, in a place where no one could hear.
Caligula ruled for three years, 10 months, and 8 days. In that time, Rome changed forever, not because of laws, not because of wars, but because of a single man who understood before anyone else that the most terrifying weapon of power is not the sword; it is knowing that people will endure anything in order to survive. Rome survived, Caligula did not, but the shadow he cast on history did not disappear with him. It remained as a reminder of how far power can go when there is no one left capable of stopping it.
Caligula ruled for less than four years, but the mark he left did not disappear in 2,000 years. And not because he was the cruelest ruler in history—history has known worse men—and not because he was crazy. Madness can be explained, it can be understood, it can even be forgiven. Caligula is terrifying for another reason: because he was possible. He grew up in a seemingly normal family. He learned, he laughed, he loved, and then he became what he became. And that only means one thing: the boundary between a human being and what they can transform into is much more fragile than we would like to believe.
Rome thought it knew its emperor. Rome was wrong. History remembers his name, not as a simple lesson about power, not as an example of madness, but as a mirror in which any society at any time can see what happens when a single person places himself above any law, above any morality, and above any other human being. Caligula died in an underground corridor. Alone, without guards, without last words. His body remained there for hours before anyone dared to enter. Rome breathed a sigh of relief, but did not begin to speak immediately, because there are things that, even after the death of the person who committed them, remain too difficult to say out loud.
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