(Note: I wasn’t sure where to put this, so I picked IMHO. IMHO, they’re both so bad that it takes a personal opinion to differentiate the level of “bad” they both sunk to.)
I’m reading Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars and I’ve just reached the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. I got to thinking: which one was the worse emperor, Nero or Caligula? Let’s look at some of the highlights of their reigns, in no particular order:
Nero
Killed his mother
Bankrupted the economy
“Persuaded” many nobles and Senators to commit suicide
“Persuaded” Roman citizens to leave him money and property in their wills
Took said money and property even if they were still alive
Burned Rome
Fiddled while Rome burned
Built a huge palace that, according to popular graffiti, threatened to take over Rome
Kicked his wife Poppaea to death while she was pregnant
General depravity and inability to keep it in his pants
Caligula
Bankrupted the economy
Incest with his sister Drusilla
Thought he was a god
Built a palace for his horse
Was rumored to be thinking about appointing said horse for a consulship
Killed many family members
Killed several Senators
Committed adultery with many noblewomen, at dinner even
Came back and bragged about said adultery at the dinner table
Sent the legions out to collect sea shells
General depravity and inability to keep it in his pants
Points in his favor
His name translates, roughly, to “Bootsie.” Emperor Bootsie.
First few months of his reign were promising until he fell mysteriously ill
Slight hijack, perhaps - but is Suetonius the best source for this discussion? My understanding, perhaps mistaken, is that he had a penchant for exaggeration. Sort of a tabloid historian.
At least Nero got things done (include major arson for the sake of city renovation).
My vote: Commodus. THAT’S Batshit Insane (at least according the our tabloid sources here). Makes Caligula look like Teddy Roosevelt.
Decided that he was a reincarnation of Hercules and liked to fight in the arena, usually against feeble animals.
Every time he’d do the arena thing he’d charge the city a million sesterces – (one was about a dollar, perhaps) which wounded the economy quite a bit.
Maybe had an affair with his sister, had a harem of about 300 men and women
Renamed the city of Rome Colonia Commodiana, renamed all the months of the calendar after himself—using middle names and such—renamed the senate the Commodian Fortunate Senate, renamed the army the Commodian army, etc etc.
Eventually decides that tomorrow he is going to walk into senate dressed as a gladiator and take rule of senate as consul.
Enough is enough and his cousin/ mistress hires a wrestler to strangle him in his bath.
Wasn’t he the emperor in Gladiator? The one who murmured “Do you remember what our father told us?” in his sister’s ear during a tense moment? (The response at the movie theater I was at: “Don’t have sex!”)
Nero gets a bad rap. Well, sort of. He was a very popular emperor, especially early on, except with the senatorial classes (where much of our ‘evidence’ comes from).
He did go completely off the rails at the end. But it seems what he realy wanted was to be a performer, not an emperor.
Caligula appears to have been debilitated very early on in his reign and was generally No Good.
Caligula easily gets my vote. His actions freaked out lots of important people and made them insecure.
If I may play Devil’s (Emperor’s?) ADvocate, as both Suetonius and Michael Grant point out, they all did useful things – they kept ridiculously long hours for state affairs and held sessions for the commons and the like, and Suetonius lists the good things they got done (EVen Caligula). So they weren’t complete wastes of time. But combining almost total power with an ill-defined and pretty messy process of selecting and supporting the new ultimate ruler is clearly a BAD IDEA. The Romans really could have used some sort of Constitution setting out how to select the next God-For-A-Term instead of simply letting such a system grow organically. They would’ve avoided a lot of waste and bloodshed. Still, it lasted a long time – longer than our experiment in democracy has, so far, so who am I to criticize?
Commodus was bad enough, but don’t get your “facts” about him from the movie [B[Gladiator**.
Also, re: Nero, it appears that the fire of Rome in 64AD was, most likely, accidental. According to Tacitus, Nero spared no effort to fight the fire, paying from his own pocket for the efforts to combat the disaster.
But, of course, the stories that have come to us are contradictory. All in all, however, and taking into account that the fire destroyed Nero’s palace as well, I incline myself towards the theory that the fire was accidental in origin.
Caligula could plead the diminished capacity defense.
Elagabalus was assassinated at 18, so he would be tried as a minor.
Nero was raised in a corrupt, dog-eat-dog environment, after the moral environment that Augustus had created had been destroyed (which is more than we can say in Tiberius’ defense) and only acted according to conditoning.
But Commodus was the son of the last great Stoic philosophers, and was a morally culpable spoiled brat.
He was just typical of those emperors who just didn’t particularly want to rule the world. He wanted to be a musician, singer, actor and gladiator. The big problems started when he decided to actually go and do those things. For all its upward mobility, Roman society was extremely class-based, and musicians, actors and gladiators occupied an entirely unacceptable social level. This was slave & Greek work; Romans from good backgrounds might occasionally hire them but they did not become them. Imperators especially. It was scandalous, and not in an amusing way. This was on the level of the President spending half his work week as a male prostitute at a construction site. All that comes after has to seen in the light of a leader who was probably decent to mediocre, but villified by his peers and contemporaries for his indecent pursuits. And unfortunately, for all his efforts, Nero just wasn’t very artistically talented.
Amusingly, Caligula was far more malicious, and probably more gifted. This guy had comic written all over him. For all his apparent insanity, his sense of humor was an example of classic Julio-Claudian deadpan absurdity. The horse as consul still makes me laugh, there was a man that missed his calling.
According to my chemistry book Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry by Geoff Rayner-Canham, it is likely that a lot of the roman emperors suffered from lead poisoning, due to the way they used to prepare wine.
Nero had excellent people working for him, most notably Seneca and Burrus. Things went sort of downhill for Nero after he had Seneca kill open his veins. The cut scene (I kill me!) in Tacitus is not really fair, but Tacitus loathed Seneca and was not one to portray him in a very good light.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned, but could be considered a possible cause for some of the emperors’ more extreme behavoir later in their careers was mental debilitation due to syphilus (SP?).
The harems and “extreme” sexual activities of both Nero and Caligula have been previously mentioned, and with the documented mental degradation that Syph. can produce could have been a contributing factor to their “odd” behavoir.
Combine that with the megalomania and paranoia that the positions entailed, and you would get some outstanding wierdness.
I have no site(s) to verify that they had the disease, but given their sexuial appitites and behavoir, it seems probablistic.
I recall Jared Diamond saying that syphilis probably came to Europe from America. Even if it was in Europe earlier, there is no evidence that the Roman emperors suffered from it.
