chapter 7 Caligula and Drusilla in the Modern Imagination
Emma Southon1
History tends to be what you make it, each generation has its own view of Roman emperors.2 ⸪
The emperor Gaius, better known as Caligula, remains one of the most en- during characters of the imperial Roman world. He has been the subject of a variety of modern day works in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from hardcore pornography, to burlesque shows, to comic books, to musicals.3 Throughout this process of interpretation and reinterpretation, Gaius has been reduced from a complex human being to a compilation of the set pieces and anecdotes that form his modern biography. At the centre of these set pieces lies his relationship with his sister Drusilla, said to be incestuous. This rela- tionship has been portrayed in every twentieth and twenty-first century repre- sentation of Caligula’s life, but these portrayals have not been consistent. The changes in the representation of Caligula and Drusilla though can be useful, and can offer a perspective on the changing nature of the relationship between the modern West and classical Rome. At the Beauty, Bravery, Blood and Glory conference that gave rise to this volume, Monica Cyrino asked of images of
1 Thanks go to all those who attended the Beauty, Bravery, Blood and Glory conference in Ramat Gan and Beer Sheeva, 2013 for their comments and suggestions. Also I extend my gratitude to Conor Sally for reading and commenting on early drafts. 2 Gore Vidal in The Making of Caligula, directed by Giancarlo Lui (Shenley, Arrow Films, 2007), dvd. 3 Caligula and Messalina, directed by Bruno Mattei (New-Anspach, Laser Paradise, 1981), dvd; Caligula’s Spawn, directed by Lloyd A. Simandi (Hilversum, Three Line Pictures, 2009), dvd; Caligula Maximus, directed by Alfred Preisser (New York, 2011), Burlesque Performace; John Wagner, Judge Caligula (London: Titan Books, 1991); David Lapham, Caligula (Rantoul, il: Avatar Press, 2013–2016); Caligula the Musical: An Ancient Glam Rock Epic, directed by Eric Svejcar (New York: ny Musical Theatre Festival, 2004), Broadway Musical.
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Rome “Are we the striving, determined Romans on screen?”4 and Caligula of- fers us a lens through which to find answers to this question. The incest at the centre of characterisations of Caligula is a single point of reference for—in dif- ferent works—his madness, his brutality, his Romanness and his vulnerability. This paper explores three twentieth century representations of Caligula and Drusilla: Robert Graves’s 1934 I, Claudius, the 1976 bbc adaptation of the same, and the 1979 Penthouse production Caligula.5 Each approaches Caligula’s in- cest differently, and thus each presents the viewer with a different relationship with Rome and Roman morality. The life of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, third emperor of the Roman empire (37–41 ad) and better known as Caligula, is recorded in very limited sources, and mainly survives in the biography written 70 years after his death by Suetonius. This biography, which focuses on the sensational and the shocking, documents a great many alleged crimes by Caligula, including a paragraph in which he is accused of living in “habitual incest with all his sisters … Of these he is believed to have violated Drusilla when he was still a minor … The rest of his sisters he did not love with so great affection, nor honour so highly”.6 In addition, Suetonius notes that when Drusilla died Gaius mourned so heavily that he instituted a strict public mourning period, left the city to mourn and added his sister’s name to his oaths.7 Given the lack of other accounts of Gaius’s life, and the sensational popularity of Suetonius’s biogra- phies, this account of Gaius’s relationship with his sister has been read as the immutable and rigid “history” of Caligula and Drusilla, frozen into a series of set pieces. The childhood incest, the desperate mourning and the notion that he “loved” her above his other sisters are fundamental to the story of Caligula. Moreover, this is one of the few extracts of Suetonius’s biography that seems to offer an insight into Gaius’s inner life, and so this relationship has been seen by
4 Monica Cyrino, “Virtuous Vices of the House of Batiatus”, paper presented at the Beauty, Bravery Blood and Glory conference, Israel, June 2013. 5 All references to the film here refer to the Uncut, 2 hour and 36, minute version released on dvd by Arrow Films as the “Imperial Edition”. There are 42 known versions of Caligula, many of which are now lost, and this is considered to be the most comprehensive edition. Details of the differences can be found at the excellent website Caligula.org. “Caligula: The Multiple Version”,