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Historical person
12–41
Caligula was the third Roman emperor, ruling from AD 37 to 41. Ancient sources portray a reign that began with popularity but became associated with autocracy, court terror, financial pressure and conflict with the Senate before his assassination by guards.
Caligula was born in Antium and died in Palatine Hill. Caligula also held the offices or ranks of Augustus and Roman consul. Caligula belonged to the Julio-Claudian dynasty; Julii Caesares and operated within Ancient Rome.
In L. J. Trafford’s Ancient Rome’s Worst Emperors, the selected cases include notorious figures such as Caligula, Commodus and Elagabalus alongside less predictable choices including Galba, Vitellius, Nerva, Gordian I and Valentinian II. Ancient histories, senatorial hostility and posthumous propaganda are tested rather than accepted at face value. In Douglas Jackson’s Caligula, Rufus is a young slave apprenticed to an animal trainer who supplies the gladiatorial arena. His gift for handling dangerous creatures brings him to the attention of Caligula, and he is taken into the imperial household as keeper of the emperor’s elephant, Bersheba. Further fictional perspectives on Caligula can be found in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ I Am a Barbarian. For broader historical treatment of Caligula, see Lindsay Powell’s Germanicus and Lindsay Powell’s Tiberius.
Periods
Series
Lucius Cominius Tullus begins as a newly promoted centurion on Rome’s German frontier, where a wager on a foot race draws him into a deadly dispute. Years later, he marches east with Governor Varus and three legions, unaware that Arminius has united German tribes and prepared an ambush…
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The Claudius Series is Robert Graves’s two-volume fictional memoir of the Roman emperor Claudius and the Julio-Claudian dynasty. I, Claudius follows the imperial family from Augustus to Caligula through Claudius’s wary, observant voice, while Claudius the God covers his own reign and the forces that undermine it. Together…
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The Damned Emperors series retells the reigns of Caligula, Commodus, Domitian and Caracalla through people close enough to witness their private fears and public violence. Each novel sets later hostile traditions against the personal, dynastic and political pressures that shaped an emperor condemned by Roman memory. Rather than…
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The Roman Trilogy follows Rufus, a young slave whose skill with animals brings him from the gladiatorial world into the dangerous centre of imperial power. In Caligula he becomes keeper of the emperor’s elephant and is caught among the conspiracies surrounding a ruler feared for cruelty and unpredictability.…
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Margaret George’s Nero duology reconstructs the life of Rome’s last Julio-Claudian emperor, beginning with a childhood in which imperial blood makes Nero a target and ending with the collapse of his reign. Told largely through Nero’s own perspective, the series follows his passage through the courts of Caligula…
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
