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| Caligula was born into an
illustrious Roman family. His father was Germanicus, a hugely
popular and talented general, who, before his early death, was seen as the natural heir of
the reigning Augustus. “Caligula,” in fact, was a fond nickname meaning
“Little Boots” (his real name was Gaius) given to him by the soldiers in
Germanicus’ legions who loved to see the young boy roaming around the camps dressed
up in a military uniform. When the cruel and unpopular Emperor Tiberius (who had succeeded
Augustus) died, therefore, Caligula was swept into office on a wave of good will. For the
masses were under the illusion that he possessed all the virtues of his father Germanicus
and could restore the lustre Augustus had put on the Empire previously founded by Julius
Caesar. But Caligula turned out to be the most insane of the crazy Caesars of
Rome -- his evil deeds surpassed both Tiberius
who reigned immediately before him or Nero shortly after. |
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| The main source of details regarding the reign of
the Emperor Caligula is Lives of the Twelve Caesars by the Roman biographer
Suetonius who began by briefly noting a few good policy decisions early in his reign and
then says “so much for the prince, now for the monster.” What follows is a
string of lurid but fascinating stories about the perverse habits and sick antics of the
Caligula monster which has become a stereotype of mad tyranny in the popular imagination.
This image of the emperor who decided to make his favorite horse a Roman magistrate lends
itself to all sorts of artistic exploitation: Bob Guccione’s notorious Penthouse film version of
Caligula, Robert Graves’ novel and BBC serial I Claudius
(adapted into a 1972 stageplay by John Mortimer), Seinfeld one-liners, etc. Albert Camus
was more explicit than most regarding the source of his play, pointing out in his preface
to the first English translation, that “Caligula was composed in 1938 after
a reading of Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars.” |
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| Indeed every incident and detail of
Caligula’s reign in Caligula is adapted from from Suetonius: Caligula’s
disturbing traits or symptoms of lunacy (his infatuation with distorting his own face in
the mirror, a moon fetish, chronic insomnia, emotional fits, disgusting table manners);
insane political policies (forcing Romans to disinherit their offspring and will their
possessions to the State Treasury, opening a Public Brothel populated by wives of
patricians and bestowing an Order of Merit to the most frequent customers, closing
granaries and declaring famine); cruel and paranoid antics (murdering patricians’
relatives arbitrarily, using banquets as occasions to rape patricians’ wives and
boast about it, poisoning patricians because Caligula thought they thought he was
poisoning them); megalomania and exhibitionism (dressing up as Venus and declaring himself
divine, writing a treatise on executions, performing dances in front of patricians,
organizing bizarre poetry contests); and the circumstances of Caligula's death. |
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| Since Camus spent a great deal of time in the
1950’s writing (and producing) stage adaptations of works such as Faulkner’s Requiem
For A Nun and Dostoievski’s The Possessed, Caligula might be
considered a dramatic adaptation of Suetonius’ biography. The source of the
1950’s adaptations was fiction, so this would mean treating the genre of Caligula
as “historical drama” -- although of a special sort. The first theatre company
Camus founded in 1936, Theatre du Travail, for instance, was heavily influenced by the
dramatic theories of Piscator and Brecht, and its productions often involved dramatizing
historical events. There are remarkable similarities, moreover, between the dramaturgical
evolution of Caligula and Brecht’s Life of Galileo: both were
originally written in 1938, “rewritten” during the war and then first performed
in 1945. And finally, if post-war Galileo audiences thought about the
double-edged sword of science in the context of the atomic bomb, it is well-known that
part of the fascination of Caligula for Parisian audiences lay in their desire to
reflect on the perverse logic of political tyranny in the aftermath of Mussolini and
Hitler. |
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| The big problem with this line of interpretation,
however, is that Brecht consciously constructed the ambiguity of Galileo, the scientist,
after studying diverse material (and he expended great effort in using set and costume
design to foster historical roots within an authentically Renaissance atmosphere). For his
aim of provoking a dialectical understanding of 20th century scientific culture depended
on some kind of historical fidelity. Suetonius’ notoriously unreliable history, on
the other hand, cannot support this Brechtian intention. Prominent 20th century
classicists have tried undermine the popular image of Caligula by reconceiving him as an
intelligent and much-maligned ruler. And it is interesting that these scholarly
investigations recently seem to coming back to the conclusion that Caligula was in
fact insane -- though the most likely 20th century parallels to Caligula’s
monstrosities are Idi Amin and the Emperor Bokassa rather than Mussolini, Hitler or
Stalin. The crux, however, is that Camus’ dramatic purpose had nothing to do with
history; hence the accuracy of the Suetonius’ stories is irrelevant. Perhaps Eric
Freeman has put it best: Suetonius provided Camus with a sequence of crazy situations
rather than a “saga of consecutive and logically motivated deeds in a dramatic
order,” and these situations were permeated by an atmosphere of “terror,
suspicion and decay” which could result in death at any moment. This was “the
ideal raw material out of which to forge a myth of the absurd.” |
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| To conceive Caligula as a dramatic
“myth” stresses Camus’s break from what has been called his “Brechtian
apprenticeship on the theatre” and leads one to think about the play in the context
of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, Artaud’s theorizing, and the Jean Genet of The
Balcony and The Blacks. Still, to think about the play as a myth of the
“absurd” suggests just how he adapted Suetonius’ material to this
particular end. In Suetonius, for example, Caligula was distraught at the death of his
sister Drusilla but his mental sickness had long been apparent. Whereas in Caligula,
this event completely transforms the Emperor because Camus represents him as a
“perfect” ruler before he runs away after Drusilla’s death. When he returns
obsessed with possessing the moon, moreover, one must understand his insanity as part and
parcel of a lucid insight into the absurdity of life. Drusilla’ death, therefore, is
just “a symbol of a truth that makes the moon necessary to me.” The truth is
that “men die, and they are not happy,” and this sets up Camus’ most
radical twist on Suetonius: Caligula is motivated by the good intentions of changing the
world for the better by teaching Romans the fundamental truth that society represses. |
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| In sum, the violent, perverse antics of
Camus’ Caligula is pure Suetonius, but when they are represented as the
methods of a teacher concerned with pure enlightenment, the terrifying Roman atmosphere is
more reminiscent of Ionesco’s The Lesson than other artistic representations
of Caligula. This connects with Camus’
persistent denial that Caligula was no more a “philosophical” play than a
“historical” one. After all, Caligula realizes that his discovery of the absurd
is a “childishly simple and obvious truth,” and there is little logic in
Caligula’s manic syllogizing. A person seeking an exposition of the absurd must go to
The Myth of Sisyphus, and even though the play (early interpretations
notwithstanding) is concerned with rebelling against the absurd as much as the absurd
itself, one must go to The Rebel for a critical analysis of rebellion. After all,
the audience obviously knows from the beginning what Caligula only realizes at the end:
that his form of rebellion is a “wrong path.” The play does not argue for, but
rather presupposes both the absurdity of life and the perversity of Caligula’s
rebellion against this truth. Yet there is a big difference between dramatic and
philosophical premises. Ordinary people discover Caligula’s truth all the time. Camus
uses them to create a world -- a myth -- in which ordinary people can imagine what might
happen if they confronted the absurdity of life but rebelled against it from a position of
absolute power. |
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