Caligula
Subtitle: a biography
By: Aloys Winterling ; translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider, Glenn W. Most, and Paul Psoinos
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 227
ISBN-13: 9780520248953
Subjects: History; Biography; Emperors
Work titles: Caligula
Description: The infamous emperor Caligula ruled Rome from A.D. 37 to 41 as a tyrant who ultimately became a monster. An exceptionally smart and cruelly witty man, Caligula made his contemporaries worship him as a god. He drank pearls dissolved in vinegar and ate food covered in gold leaf. He forced men and women of high rank to have sex with him, turned part of his palace into a brothel, and committed incest with his sisters. He wanted to make his horse a consul. Torture and executions were the order of the day. Both modern and ancient interpretations have concluded from this alleged evidence that Caligula was insane. But was he?

This biography tells a different story of the well-known emperor. In a deft account written for a general audience, Aloys Winterling opens a new perspective on the man and his times. Basing Caligula on a thoroughly new assessment of the ancient sources, he sets the emperor's story into the context of the political system and the changing relations between the Senate and the emperor during Caligula's time and finds a new rationality explaining his notorious brutality. --Book Jacket.
Notes: Originally published in German: München : C.H. Beck, c2003, with title Caligula : eine Biographie.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 215-218) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: A mad emperor?; title: Childhood and youth; title: Two years as princeps; title: The conflicts escalate; title: Five months of monarchy; title: Murder on the Palatine; title: Conclusion: Inventing the mad emperor; title: Epilogue to the English edition.