At last, as if resolved to wage war, he drew up his army on the shore of the ocean [the English Channel – Northern France], with his ballistas and other war machines. And while no one could imagine what he intended to do, he suddenly commanded them to gather up seashells, and fill their helmets and the folds of their tunics with them, calling them ” the spoils of the sea due to the Capitoline and the Palatine.”
As a monument to his success, he erected a lighthouse, upon which, as at the Pharos of Alexandria, he ordered lights to be burned in the nighttime for the direction of ships at sea. Finally, promising the soldiers a reward of a hundred denarii each, as if he had surpassed the most eminent examples of generosity, he said “Go your ways and be merry; for now you are rich!”
But Politics is full of Slander and Libel, and Suetonius was writing decades later.
I don’t trust any of the stories about Caligula. The only surviving histories of Caligula’s reign were written by his enemies, sensationalists, or historians using those enemies and sensationalists as their resource.
If Caligula was mounting a war on the sea, why did he send his legions all the way to the English Channel? He could have just sent his troops to Ostia. Just a wild guess, but maybe his build up on the English Channel was for an aborted war on, I don’t know, England?
Yeah, Suetonius is a fun gossip but more untrustworthy than usual as a source. Seeing as there isn’t much else that survives about Caligula to verify anything, it’s hard to take at face value. We can probably surmise that the stories about how unpopular he was had some basis in fact or Suetonius would haven’t had motivation/ease to shit on him so thoroughly.
But the details on exactly how nutty he was cannot be substantiated in any fashion.
It looks like, from the time of Julius Caesar, the Romans had set up a transit route between the city of Gesoriacum (Boulogne) in Brittany and Dubris (Dover) in Kent. The Roman Navy was headquartered in Boulogne and policed these shipping lanes from there.
Two lighthouses were eventually built in Dover, but not until several years or decades after the Roman invasion of 43 AD.
As best we can tell, those two are designed to look similar to the ones built by Caligula’s crew.
So, again, this is just speculation but my feeling is that a military lighthouse, of the sort described by Suetonius, would be fairly quick-and-easy - maybe made of wood or otherwise not well constructed - and just sort of randomly placed, without much reason.
The lighthouse that seems to have existed was placed in the Navy HQ port and appears to have been of a solid construction. There’s no mention of it ever being anything other than a professionally constructed, serious bit of Roman engineering.
It was apparently updated by Charlemagne, and seems to have been repaired through the Middle ages. The location seems to have been a pretty good one.
The administration that followed Caligula’s seems to have felt like the lighthouse was good enough to match and copy in design on the other side of the shipping lines. They seem to have concurred that it was a good thing to have, and were proud enough to match the style.
Given that they attribute it to Caligula, there’s probably no reason to think that it was the product of - say - a more reasonable and informed Senate, doing good work.
So I’d probably vote that it was ordered into existence by Caligula. It probably was a very reasonable thing to build in that location and wasn’t some arbitrary, spur-of-the-moment thing. (Whether it was of a reasonable size would be a good question though. It looks like the lighthouse was between 40 and 65m tall, whereas the ones in Dover were only 24m.)
Caligula’s successor (Claudius), just a few years later, did actually go on to attack Britain. If we accept that Claudius was a smart man then we might presume that Caligula’s thought to do it was also reasonable. Building up the port that you are likely to launch out of would also be fairly reasonable.
So it does seem plausible that there was some serious plan to launch an invasion on Britain. Since, factually, there wasn’t one until the reign of Claudius, we have to assume that either Caligula was still preparing things and, for example, got assassinated before things were ready, Or, that he did decide to forego the effort, for some reason. In that latter case, whether the decision back out was so dramatic as Suetonius implies, I’d be pretty skeptical.
It looks like we can confirm, from archaeology, that Caligula was big on construction:
And, to fund that, he seemed to like to raise taxes.
We might imagine that people were a bit skeptical of all of the spending and mega-projects, especially when some of his projects seem less like public goods and more like private opulence, and they were paying for it.
Whether he was crazy like “craaaaaazy” or more just someone in the mold of Nicolae Ceausescu, I can’t say. Archaeology supports at least the latter.
[Moderating]
Posting links without explanation, and posting untranslated in languages other than English, are both prohibited here. Please explain your links.
Pedantic nit pick, but Boulogne-sur-Mer is on the opposite side of northern France from Brittany in the Pas-de-Calais. It’s close positioning to England is what allowed Stephen of Blois (count of Boulogne through his wife) to sprint across the channel in 1135 AD to seize the throne of England before even his own elder brother Theobald could react.
The story I recall reading was that Canute was annoyed at obsequious courtiers. When one or some suggested he was so awerful, he even had command over the sea itself, he took his court down to the sea and ordered the tide to stop coming in just to prove a point. Often this is retold in stories as him assuming he could order the sea to do his bidding, but instead he was simply showing the court that he was annoyed by nonsense flattery.
It is two French language pages that describe the lighthouse that does appear to have been factually constructed. That much of the story does seem to be true.
There are two (probably) smaller but similar lighthouses that were constructed in Dover, by Emperor Claudius’ administration, a few years later that still exist and there are some pictures of the original at the links.
I’d say it probably happened. At the end of the day you have a single historian (Seutonius) writing a couple of generation later, but based on first hand accounts we don’t have access to. Yeah those accounts were almost certainly written by Romans of the senatorial class who had an axe to grind.
But it’s the ancient world. If we only believe events happened that are described by unbiased primary sources, then nothing happened before like 1600, before that the human race was just sitting around doing nothing waiting for the historical record to develop
I believe that approach was tried and, after enough counterexamples came through in archaeology or some earlier records were recovered, a bit more scepticism was added in.
Generally, I’d view it as a key into the history but a questionable one without something more to unlock. Once you start getting some archaeology in there, you can start to get a sense what things actually happened, and the written history tells you what the motivations might have been.
A semi-fictional work but you might read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time.
