Real Roman History30 Juli

Episode 70. Caligula: The Principate Without Restraint

Works CitedPrimary Sources

Acta Arvalia for 37 to 41 CE. Fragmentary but informative for the public cult activities and the official framing of the reign.
Cassius Dio. Roman History, Book 59. The Greek-language summary, written approximately two centuries after the events. Supplements Suetonius in important respects.
Coinage of the reign. The official imperial coinage is unusually informative for Caligula's image-management priorities, particularly the depictions of his sisters during the early reign.
Josephus. Jewish Antiquities, Books 18 and 19. Substantial first-century material on the Temple statue crisis and the assassination conspiracy. Josephus preserves the most detailed surviving account of the assassination itself, at Antiquities 19.17 to 113.
Philo of Alexandria. Embassy to Gaius (Legatio ad Gaium). The contemporary first-person witness. Philo led the Jewish delegation from Alexandria that met Caligula in Rome in 39 to 40 CE. The closest thing we have to a contemporary inside account of the emperor in operation.
Seneca. Various references across the philosophical works. Seneca lived through the reign as a young senator. His references to Caligula are scattered but valuable as contemporary aristocratic perspective.
Suetonius. Life of Caligula. The principal narrative source. Written around 120 CE, eighty years after the events. Hostile, methodologically committed to court gossip, and the source of most of the famously sensational material. Used throughout this episode with the source-criticism approach the historiographical section discusses.
Tacitus. Annals. The books covering Caligula's reign (Books 7 through 10) are entirely lost. This is one of the most severe source-gaps in the imperial sequence.

Secondary Sources

Barrett, Anthony A. Caligula: The Corruption of Power. Yale University Press, 1989; revised edition, 2015. The standard modern English-language treatment. Sympathetic but careful. The reference for most analytical decisions in this episode.
Barrett, Anthony A. Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire. Yale University Press, 1996. Relevant for the broader Julio-Claudian context and the sisters.
Shotter, D. R. Tiberius Caesar. Routledge, 1992. Relevant for the broader Julio-Claudian context.
Wilkinson, Sam. Caligula. Routledge Historical Biographies, 2005. Shorter; useful as a sourcebook approach.
Winterling, Aloys. Caligula: A Biography. University of California Press, 2011; original German edition, 2003. The major recent revisionist account. Argues that the bizarre behaviour in the sources represents deliberate political acts later distorted by hostile traditions.

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Episode 77. The Origins of Christianity

Works Cited Primary Sources The book of Acts. Composed approximately 80 to 90 CE by the same author as the Gospel of Luke. The principal narrative source for the early Christian community in Jerusalem...

14 Aug 52min

Episode 76. Roman Judaea: From the Covenant to Direct Rule

Works Cited Primary Sources The Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh). The principal source for the pre-Hellenistic period of the Jewish religious tradition. The five books of Torah preserve the foundational mate...

14 Aug 49min

Episode 75. Nero, Part Two: From the Matricide to the Great Fire

Works Cited Primary Sources Cassius Dio. Roman History, Book 62. Greek-language narrative covering this period. Hostile, late, dependent on earlier sources we cannot fully reconstruct. Useful as a che...

14 Aug 35min

Episode 74. Boudicca and the British Revolt

Works Cited Primary Sources Archaeology. The destruction layers at the three burned cities—Camulodunum, Londinium, and Verulamium—constitute the most substantially preserved single-event archaeologica...

4 Aug 38min

Episode 73. Nero, Part One: The Quinquennium

Works Cited Primary Sources Aurelius Victor. De Caesaribus, 5.2. The late-fourth-century source preserving the Trajanic remark about the quinquennium Neronis. The attribution is uncertain and modern s...

4 Aug 47min

Episode 72. Britain: The Province at the Edge of the World

Works Cited Primary Sources Archaeology. The body of archaeological evidence for the Roman conquest of Britain is substantial. The destruction layers at the hill forts of the West Country, including M...

4 Aug 30min

Episode 71. Claudius: The Emperor Behind the Curtain

Works Cited Primary Sources Cassius Dio. Roman History, Book 60. The continuous Greek-language narrative for the full reign. Particularly important for the Britain campaign of 43 CE, where the Tacitea...

4 Aug 57min