Caligula Didn't Waste HIS Life!

[mallorys_camera]

I woke up panicked in the middle of the night, thinking, You are wasting your life!

Of course, that’s not an unusual way for me to wake up in the middle of the night, covid-19 or no covid-19.

But it did make me start thinking—for a couple of minutes anyway—what not wasting my life might look like.

Ten published novels? A Booker Prize or two?

A fabulous marriage to a man who looks something like Eric McCormick only with whiter hair?

A passport with visa stamps from Bhutan, Uzbekistan and Tashkent?

My very own Bravo reality TV show?

Of course, the irony that I was now wasting my life by thinking about wasting my life did not escape me, so after a couple of minutes of this, I started watching I, Claudius. I’m up to Caligula’s reign.

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Much of what we know about Caligula comes from the historian Suetonius. Tacitus wrote about Caligula as well, but those volumes of his Annals, helas!, are lost.

Suetonius was kind of the ancient Roman equivalent of a columnist for The Daily Mail—very entertaining reading! But truthful? Hmmmmmm…

Gore Vidal’s description of puzzling through Suetonius’s Life of Tiberius pretty much parallels my own. I stumbled across a moldy, unexpurgated copy of Lives of the Twelve Caesars in the dusty stacks of the Hunter College High School library and decided to practice my Latin translation skills on it.

…atque etiam quasi infantes firmiores, necdum tamen lacte depulsos, inguini ceu papillae admoveret, pronior sane ad id genus libidinis et natura et aetate….

WHAT THE FUCK?

That was the year when I won Top Student in Hunter’s Latin Contest, by the way.

I can’t remember whether Robert Graves wrote I, Claudius before or after he translated Lives of the Twelve Caesars, but the former is pretty much based on the latter.

Fun pop culture factoid: Tony’s mother Livia in The Sopranos?

Completely an homage to the “historical” Livia. (I suppose we can use that word since Suetonius is described as an historian.) Wife to the Emperor Augustus, mother to the Emperor Tiberius, great-grandmother to the Emperor Caligula.

Anyway, according to Suetonius, Caligula was a psychopath who bankrupted the Roman treasury; engaged in incestuous relationships with all three of his sisters; cut the fruit of his incestuous union with his sister Drusilla out of her womb with a dagger (whereupon she bled to death); and promoted his horse Incitatus to the consulship. Oh, and then there was his Gallic campaign: Reportedly, Caligula marched his armies to the shores of Normandy where he commanded them to scour the sands for seashells!

Caligula did not waste his life!

Are any of those things true?

Well, probably the bit about bankrupting the Roman treasury. That bankruptcy led to a widespread famine in which many, many, many people died.

Probably the bit about the Normandy campaign as well. There’s some evidence that Caligula intended to return to Great Britain, and this would have been the scouting expedition.

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Anyway, I, Claudius is truly brilliant despite its poor 1970s production values. I cannot describe how fabulous the acting is. Utterly riveting. And the screenwriter keeps most of Robert Graves’ exceedingly odd and poetic dialogue.

I am thinking, too, that someone should write a novel about Suetonius.

But it won’t be me because I’m too busy wasting my life.