Caligula was misunderstood.

The Roman Senate did tend to smear its enemies pretty flagrantly. It's amazing just how many wives of disgraced men just so happened to be complete whores.

I think Caligula quite disliked the Senate and viewed them pretty poorly. Which is why, if the accounts are to be believed, Caligula wanted to make his horse a consul in an effort to degrade and insult them.

I hear it may just have been a joke. As in he was so exasperated with them that he just said "****ing hell I'll just make my horse god damn consul" and then the Senate pretended to take it seriously when denouncing him. Which of course doesn't sound at all like the kind of petty, dumb **** that drives politics to this day.

He never actually did it and we don't know if he was serious - probably was a joke. Yeah, we haven't evolved much in 2000 years unfortunately.

The problem with historical accounts, when we go as far back as Caligula, is that the original sources are only a handful, and it's difficult to know how much of what you read was influenced by the biases of the historian.

I tend to think that many of the claims about Caligula are highly exaggerated and have been overblown throughout the years. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it Caligula that ordered the first large scale aqueducts project in Rome?

Also, much of what has entered the public consciousness about ancient history is more directly related to ancient historical fiction that corroborates original sources rather than the origins themselves.

Yes. I tried to make that point frequently when I taught history. It’s largely mythology. A simple exercise for advanced junior high schoolers was read this account and this account and Venn diagram the two accounts. I also had them do that with my lectures vs the textbook. And I also had a full class set of American history textbooks from the early seventies.

It’s strange to quote you twice but the original sources or primary sources are still often fictionalized and mythologized and blurred by presentist goggles.

Hey... psssst! Yeah you! Shhhh, not so loud. Want some fried chicken?

What you guys said about Caligula is really interesting. Of course I'm aware that historical sources are unreliable, but basically everything I know about ancient Rome comes from my childhood obsession with it, so back then I didn't question anything and the ideas I picked up just stuck. I want to read up on it again now