Did Caligula really have a killing machine? Btw, I did not see the movie, Caligula, but heard about this being it was in that movie.
I know he was bloodthirsty, but this seems a Hollywood fiction.
Couldn’t find it in Suetonius’s Gaius.
Probably not. :’) There’s no mention of it anywhere. Even the famous anecdote about his making his horse a Senator is not exactly square — he actually joked about it and threatened to make his horse a Senator.
Caligula had ships built for the purpose of transporting the enormous, single-piece columns quarried in Egypt for his temple on the Forum. Even bigger was the ship he had built to transport the 300+ ton obelisk that stands today at the Vatican. Caligula’s successor Claudius had that ship towed out and sunk, endfirst, to serve as the form for the concrete (the Romans had marvelous concrete, including types that would set up underwater) which became a crucial part of the structure of the artificial harbor he had built to service Rome’s maritime traffic.
That ship (or rather, what remains of it) is probably still down there, preserved by the concrete.
Caligula also had two ships made for Lake Nemi — they may have been a pair of the column-haulers, or may have just been built for this — and those were filled with all kinds of mechanical contraptions both for utility and for recreational uses. They were found and dug up, I believe during Mussolini’s regime, and were in great shape, were studied for some years, then wound up getting destroyed during WWII. Oh well.