Caligula
Religion

"Of all the manifestations of wild and extravagant behaviour exhibited by Caligula during his brief reign, nothing has better served to confirm the popular notion of his insanity than his apparent demand to be recognised as a god."

Philo, Caligula's contemporary, claims that Caligula costumed himself as various heroes and deities, starting with demigods such as Dionysos, Herakles and the Dioscuri, and working up to major deities such as Mercury, Venus and Apollo. Philo describes these impersonations in a context of private pantomime or theatrical performances he may have witnessed or heard of during his diplomatic visit, as evidence that Caligula wanted to be venerated as a living god. Philo, as a Jew and a monotheist, took this as proof of the emperor's insanity;

Caligula's impersonations had a precedent; Augustus had once thrown a party in which he and his guests dressed up as the Olympian gods; Augustus was made up and dressed as Apollo. No-one was thought insane in consequence, and none claimed to be the god they impersonated; but the event was not repeated. It showed near-blasphemous disrespect to the gods in question, and insensitivity to the population at large - the feast was staged during a famine. Coin issues of the official Roman mint, dated to the early 20s BC, show Octavian as Apollo, Jupiter and Neptune. This too may have been thought a transgression, and was not repeated. Caligula took his own impersonations less seriously than some, certainly less seriously than Philo did. According to Dio, when a Gallic shoemaker laughed to see Caligula dressed as Jupiter, pronouncing oracles at the crowd from a lofty place, Caligula asked "and who do you think I am?" The shoemaker answered "a complete idiot". Caligula seems to have appreciated his straightforward honesty.

Dio claims that Caligula impersonated Jupiter to seduce various women; that he sometimes referred to himself as a divinity in public meetings; and that he was sometimes referred to as "Jupiter" in public documents. Caligula's special interest in Jupiter as Rome's chief deity is confirmed by all surviving sources. Simpson believes that Caligula may have considered Jupiter an equal, perhaps a rival.

According to Ittai Gradel, Caligula's performances as various deities prove no more than a penchant for theatrical fancy-dress and a mischievous desire to shock; as emperor, Caligula was also pontifex maximus, one of Rome's most powerful and influential state priests. The promotion of mortal rulers to godlike status, to honour their superior standing and perceived merits, was a commonplace phenomenon among Rome's eastern allies and client states; during their eastern tour, Germanicus, Agrippina and their children, including Caligula, were officially received as living deities by several cities of the Greek East. In Roman culture a client could flatter their living patron as "Jupiter on Earth", without reprimand. The divi (deceased members of the Imperial family promoted to divine status) were creations of the Senate, who voted them into official existence, appointed their priesthood and granted them cult at state expense. Cicero could protest at the implications of Caesar's divine honours while living but address Publius Lentulus as parens ac deus (parent and god) to thank him for his help, as aedile, against the conspirator Catiline. Daily reverence was offered as a matter of course to patrons, heads of household and the powerful by their clients, families and social inferiors. In 30 BC, libation-offerings to the genius of Octavian (later Augustus) became a duty at public and private banquets, and from 12 BC, state oaths were sworn by the genius of Augustus as the living emperor. Notwithstanding Dio's claims that cult to living emperors was forbidden in Rome itself, there is abundant evidence of municipal cult to Augustus in his lifetime, in Italy and elsewhere, locally organised and financed. As Gradel observes, no Roman was ever prosecuted for sacrificing to his emperor.

Caligula seems to have taken his religious duties very seriously. He found a replacement for the aged priest of Diana at Lake Nemi, reorganised the Salii (priests of Mars), and pedantically insisted that as it was nefas (religiously improper) for Jupiter's leading priest, the Flamen Dialis, to swear any oath, he could not swear the imperial oath of loyalty. Caligula wished to take over or share the half-finished but splendid Temple of Apollo in Greek Didyma for his own cult. Seemingly, his statue was prepared, but possibly not installed. When Pausanias visited the still-unfinished temple a century later, its cult statue was of Apollo.

Suetonius and Dio mention a temple to Caligula in the city of Rome. Most modern scholarship agrees that if such a temple existed, it was probably on the Palatine. Augustus had already linked the Temple of Castor and Pollux directly to his imperial residence on the Palatine, and established an official priesthood of lesser magistrates, the seviri Augustales, usually drawn from his own freedmen to serve the genius Augusti (his "family spirit") and Lares (the twin ancestral spirits of his household). Dio claims that Caligula stationed himself to receive veneration, dressed as Jupiter Latiaris, between the images of Castor and Pollux, the twin Dioscuri, to whom he referred – humorously – as his doorkeepers. Dio's claim that two temples were built for Caligula in Rome, is unconfirmed. Simpson believes it likely that Caligula, voted a temple on the Palatine by the Senate, funded it himself.

An embassy from Greek states to Rome greeted Caligula as the "new god Augustus". In the Greek city of Cyzicus, a public inscription from the beginning of Caligula's reign gives thanks to him as a "New Sun-god". Egyptian provincial coinage and some state dupondii show Caligula enthroned; the first reigning Roman princeps to be described as the "New Sun", (Neos Helios) with the radiate crown of the Sun-god, or of Caligula's divine antecedent, the divus Augustus. Caligula's image on other state coinage carries no such "trappings of divinity". Compared to the full-blown cults to major deities of state, genius cults were quite modest in scope. Augustus, once deceased, was officially worshipped as a divus – immortal, but somewhat less than a full-blown deity; Tiberius, his successor, forbade his own personal cult outright in Rome itself, probably in consideration of Julius Caesar's assassination following his hubristic promotion as a living divinity. Augustus, and after him, Tiberius, insisted that if temples to honour them in the provinces were proposed by the local elite, they must be shared by the "genius of the Senate", or the personification of the Roman people, or the genius of Rome itself.

Dio claims that Caligula sold priesthoods for his unofficial genius cult to the wealthiest nobles, for a per capita fee of 10 million sesterces, and made loans available to those who could not afford immediate full payment. His priests supposedly included his wife, Caesonia, and his uncle Claudius, whom Dio claims was bankrupted by the cost. The circumstances mark this out as private cult and personal humiliation among the wealthy elite, not subsidised by the Roman state. Throughout his reign, Caligula seems to have remained popular with the masses, in Rome and the empire. There is no sound evidence that he caused the removal, replacement or imposition of Roman or other deities, or even that he threatened to do so, outside the hostile anecdotes of his biographers. Barrett (2015) asserts that the "emphatic and unequivocal message of the material evidence is that Caligula had no desire for the world to identify him as a god, even if, like most people, he enjoyed being treated like one." He did not demand worship as a living god; but he permitted it when it was offered; Imperial etiquette, and the examples of Augustus and Tiberius, would have him refuse divine honours but thank those who offered them, inferring their status as equal to his. He seems to have taken his own genius cult very seriously but his fatal offense was to willfully "insult or offend everyone who mattered", including the military officers who assassinated him.
change_case:capital_word_frequency[5]