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Caligula Synopsis |
Caligula Extarct
I didn't set out to write a book about Caligula. I began by researching the story of the elephant which accompanied the Emperor Claudius when he invaded Britain in 43 AD. But Claudius's life and Caligula's are inextricably intertwined and I became drawn to this fascinating figure who has been demonised by history.
Caligula's story has three primary sources, each of which must be read carefully to separate fact from fiction, or propaganda dictated more by the times in which the writer lived than the reality of his subject's life. Taken at face value Caligula has no redeeming qualities, but human nature teaches us that behind every monster there is a man, and that even the most terrible of dictators and psychopaths sometimes shows a human face. I discovered in Caligula a young man driven by a desperate need to emulate the reputation of his father, Germanicus. Germanicus's achievements before he died - when Caligula was a young boy - can be questioned, but not the image created by the mythmakers who turned him into the noblest Roman of his age. Caligula would have grown up knowing that his father should have been Emperor before him and been determined to create a Rome worthy of him. The accounts agree that he began well, but soon struck out at anyone he considered a rival. Clearly he felt threatened. Who could he trust? The answer was his family, his sisters Agrippina, Livilla, and most of all Drusilla. It is possible that when Drusilla died it affected him so badly he became the man history now knows.
Rufus, Cupido and Fronto all began as names, culled from the various publications I'd read. But, as is the way of books, they became as familiar to me as workmates. Caligula himself, Claudius, his aide and spymaster,Narcissus, and many of the residents of the palace are all historical figures.
My insights into Caligula form the spine of the book. I feel they shed a unique fictional light on the mind of a man living in perpetual fear of assassination in a world where luxury must never be mistaken for security and where there are no barriers to his cruelty or his obsessions.
The Rome I have created isn't the Rome of philosophers and orators, it's the Rome of animal trainers, gladiators and bakers; an earthy Rome dominated by the need to ensure the next meal, where the bloodlust of the mob is never far from the surface and where Rufus must learn difficult lessons if he is to survive. Each piece of research took me closer to what I believe is the real Rome of the 1st century. I worked from a very basic map of the city, yet when I finally visited the Forum and the Palatine last year the streets and the scale were just as I had imagined them, palace windows where I had placed them, and even the sewer openings existed where I believed they should be.
To research Caligula I read many dozens of books on Rome and Romans, and studied probably hundreds of pertinent websites. Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio Cassius gave me a solid foundation, and various scholarly works, some of them obscure, allowed me to build upon it. The letters of Pliny the younger helped me find an authentic voice for the better educated of my Romans. The streets they walk are real streets; the food they eat is the food they would have been served; the triumphs they enjoy and the humiliations they suffer are as real as I and known history can make them.
If 'Caligula' has a subtext it is the nature of freedom. Rufus's hopes of being freed are dashed when he is bought by the Emperor, but he soon realises that in the tyranny Rome has become, no-one is free, from the meanest slave to the man who lives in constant insecurity in his marble palace on the Palatine Hill. Caligula is as much a prisoner of his circumstances as the condemned men who fill his jails and torture chambers or the reluctant beauties he commands to share his bed each night. Ultimately, death is his only escap - the immortality of a God his only hope.
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