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Post by merkavah12 on Mar 11, 2011 9:27:51 GMT
Was Caligula really as vile and vicious as historians have painted him or was he a victim of a smear campaign?
What brings this up? A comment that reads thus:
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Post by humphreyclarke on Mar 11, 2011 13:00:01 GMT
I agree with the comment (except for the scientific method bit!) - you have to be very careful with the sources, all of which are very hostile to Caligula. It was usual in the nineteenth century to take them more or less at face value and portray Caligula as a deranged madman. However it seems he was very popular with the masses and behaved sensibly in every phase of his reign. A more modern interpretation from Anthony S Barrett ' Caligula -the corruption of power' is that while he was not clinically mad, he was so obsessed with his own importance as to be devoid of any sense of moral responsibility. He seems to have been less a potty eccentric and more of a frightening Stalin-esque figure - capable of statesmanlike acts by morally neutral and with a cruel and sadistic streak. He seems also to have has a somewhat dark and off-beat sense of humour. From Barrett (215)
Inevitably many of Caligula’s jokes must have been much funnier at the time, and would have been helped by having an appreciative and captive audience. His humour seems invariably to have been in bad taste, and it is hardly surprising that it has been used to create such a negative impression of him. When a man thought rich, for example, was eliminated for his money, but turned out to own nothing, Caligula reputedly commented, ‘He died in vain’. When selecting prisoners from a row to be slain he pointed to their line, with a bald man at either end, and said ‘From the bald-headed one to the bald-headed one’, an expression that seems to have become proverbial.
Hahaha - OK, it's not very funny (still better than James Franco's routine at the last Oscars though)
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