Thanks for the answer. Interesting stuff.
Saw the so called ‘killing machine’ tape on youtube, seemed ridiculous. More like something out of Rollerball.
Too bad about those ships, darn.
Yeah, Caligula wasn’t the worst behavin’ emperor, even among the Julio-Claudians, his failing was he didn’t accomplish anything. Sometime in the past, oh, five or ten years, someone I knew online said he’d read about a great pile of Roman-era dead (from the arena, presumably) which only started to decay when they were exposed to air during excavations under Mussolini. That too is ridiculous of course, probably was WWII-era propaganda.
One of the most believable fictional versions of Caligula can be found (of all places) in a book by Edgar Rice Burroughs. But alas, it just isn’t true (for the most part). If I were writing historical fiction about that time, I’d have Claudius as the key figure in the conspiracy to murder Caligula, I just don’t buy that a somewhat kooky, physically disadvantaged, chronically ill family scandal could be such a successful emperor (not least in surviving to become emperor) without having a hand in his own success.