Real Roman History30 Jul

Episode 70. Caligula: The Principate Without Restraint

Works CitedPrimary Sources

Acta Arvalia for 37 to 41 CE. Fragmentary but informative for the public cult activities and the official framing of the reign.
Cassius Dio. Roman History, Book 59. The Greek-language summary, written approximately two centuries after the events. Supplements Suetonius in important respects.
Coinage of the reign. The official imperial coinage is unusually informative for Caligula's image-management priorities, particularly the depictions of his sisters during the early reign.
Josephus. Jewish Antiquities, Books 18 and 19. Substantial first-century material on the Temple statue crisis and the assassination conspiracy. Josephus preserves the most detailed surviving account of the assassination itself, at Antiquities 19.17 to 113.
Philo of Alexandria. Embassy to Gaius (Legatio ad Gaium). The contemporary first-person witness. Philo led the Jewish delegation from Alexandria that met Caligula in Rome in 39 to 40 CE. The closest thing we have to a contemporary inside account of the emperor in operation.
Seneca. Various references across the philosophical works. Seneca lived through the reign as a young senator. His references to Caligula are scattered but valuable as contemporary aristocratic perspective.
Suetonius. Life of Caligula. The principal narrative source. Written around 120 CE, eighty years after the events. Hostile, methodologically committed to court gossip, and the source of most of the famously sensational material. Used throughout this episode with the source-criticism approach the historiographical section discusses.
Tacitus. Annals. The books covering Caligula's reign (Books 7 through 10) are entirely lost. This is one of the most severe source-gaps in the imperial sequence.

Secondary Sources

Barrett, Anthony A. Caligula: The Corruption of Power. Yale University Press, 1989; revised edition, 2015. The standard modern English-language treatment. Sympathetic but careful. The reference for most analytical decisions in this episode.
Barrett, Anthony A. Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire. Yale University Press, 1996. Relevant for the broader Julio-Claudian context and the sisters.
Shotter, D. R. Tiberius Caesar. Routledge, 1992. Relevant for the broader Julio-Claudian context.
Wilkinson, Sam. Caligula. Routledge Historical Biographies, 2005. Shorter; useful as a sourcebook approach.
Winterling, Aloys. Caligula: A Biography. University of California Press, 2011; original German edition, 2003. The major recent revisionist account. Argues that the bizarre behaviour in the sources represents deliberate political acts later distorted by hostile traditions.

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