Thanks SteveH. This is also the Digest ping topic, and apologies for the recent falloff in GGG digest pings!
Posted on 01/16/2021 4:05:22 PM PST by LibWhacker
The fourth of the 12 Caesars, Caligula — officially, Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus — was a capricious, combustible first-century populist remembered, perhaps unfairly, as the empire’s most tyrannical ruler. As reported by Suetonius, the Michael Wolff of ancient Rome, he never forgot a slight, slept only a few hours a night and married several times, lastly to a woman named Milonia.
During the four years that Caligula occupied the Roman throne, his favorite hideaway was an imperial pleasure garden called Horti Lamiani, the [fake news edited out] of its day. The vast residential compound spread out on the Esquiline Hill, one of the seven hills on which the city was originally built, in the area around the current Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II.
There, just on the edge of the city, villas, shrines and banquet halls were set in carefully constructed “natural” landscapes. An early version of a wildlife park, the Horti Lamiani featured orchards, fountains, terraces, a bath house adorned with precious colored marble from all over the Mediterranean, and exotic animals, some of which were used, as in the Colosseum, for private circus games.
When Caligula was assassinated in his palace on the Palatine Hill in 41 A.D., his body was carried to the Horti Lamiani, where he was cremated and hastily buried before being moved to the Mausoleum of Augustus on the Campus Martius, north of the Capitoline Hill. According to Suetonius, the elite garden was haunted by Caligula’s ghost.
[*snip*]
The dig, carried out beneath the rubble of a condemned 19th-century apartment complex, yielded gems, coins, ceramics, jewelry, pottery, cameo glass, a theater mask, seeds of plants such as citron, apricot and acacia that had been imported from Asia, and bones of peacocks, deer, lions, bears and ostriches.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I’d have thought there would have been beavers in Caligula’s garden.
A fragment of Accius’ play Atreus features the line oderint dum metuant (”let them hate, so long as they fear”), later an infamous motto of Caligula.
Great book and a great way learn Roman history. Livia doesn’t come off well.
The fourth of the 12 Caesars, Caligula...
The 12 Caesars is a reference to Suetonius' work "The Twelve Caesars", but for the sake of nitpickers out there, Caligula was a mere nickname (that he hated) for Emperor Gaius, and he was only number three on the formal list of emperors. Imper iter was an informal, acclamation type title, and was applied to Pompey and others before it was applied to Gaius Julius Caesar.
Thanks SteveH. This is also the Digest ping topic, and apologies for the recent falloff in GGG digest pings!
I, Claudius is not a great way to learn Roman history, it's a TV version of a couple of entertaining trash romance novels. And, definitely worth seeing. I've been considering starting my annual binge-watch this month. :^)
I Claudius faithfully follows the history of the Caesars as relayed by Suetonius and Tacitus.
Graves’ two books are historical novels, not works of history. There are invented characters, the conversations are largely imaginary. So, no, not history. In the miniseries, Sejanus bloody stabbing is (sort of) shown, while the real Sejanus was strangled.
Yet the story, the events and the main characters are true to history. Like all good historical fiction.
And yet, they aren’t. Historians write history, novelists write fiction.
Yet the book was researched massively. One can be a novelist and historian as Robert Graves is. Most of us consider historical research to be history. I learned much more about Roman history and culture from I Claudius than I did from Gibbon’s Rise and Fall.
A person can also pick up a lot of British history from reading the Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser.
Today’s politicians aren’t any different........................
Caligula’s Roman Palace Discovered
The Telegraph (UK) | 8-8-2003 | Bruce Johnson
Posted on 8/7/2003, 7:30:54 PM by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/960158/posts
Roman dig backs ancient writers’ portrait of megalomaniac Caligula
Guardian | Aug., 03 | John Hooper
Posted on 08/29/2003 3:54:32 PM PDT by churchillbuff
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/972985/posts
Stanford, Oxford archaeologists find evidence that depraved tyrant annexed sacred temple
Stanford Report, September 10, 2003 | September 10, 2003 | BY JOHN SANFORD
Posted on 09/12/2003 1:57:26 PM PDT by vannrox
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/981470/posts
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