Ancient History Encyclopedia. National Geographic Türkiye. REVIEW: Caligula: A Biography - Reviews. In the long history of Roman emperors, it’s the mad ones who mostly linger in popular memory. That certainly includes Caligula—meaning “little boots,” the nickname he picked up as a child dressed in miniature legionary gear—who ruled Rome from 37 to 41 CE. (Viewers of the 1976 BBC dramatization of I Claudius will recall him as the character, played by John Hurt, who came out from a room, blood-splattered after a fatal encounter with his pregnant sister/wife, and muttered to Derek Jacobi’s Claudius: “Don’t go in there.”) Guilty of incest with his sisters, a sadistic torturer and mass killer, an emperor who declared his intention to name his horse Incitatus to one of the highest state offices, Caligula has always been portrayed as flat-out crazy.
Guilty as charged, concludes Swiss historian Winterling, except for that first, crucial accusation. (Oh, and the incest charge, which didn’t surface until a century after Caligula’s death.) Pergamon: Panorama of the Ancient Metropolis, on View in Berlin. Marketplace of the ancient world: Roman remains near Tambaram show 2,000-yr-old trade links. Cleopatra. Where, oh where is Cleopatra? She's everywhere, of course—her name immortalized by slot machines, board games, dry cleaners, exotic dancers, and even a Mediterranean pollution-monitoring project. She is orbiting the sun as the asteroid 216 Kleopatra. Her "bath rituals and decadent lifestyle" are credited with inspiring a perfume. Today the woman who ruled as the last pharaoh of Egypt and who is alleged to have tested toxic potions on prisoners is instead poisoning her subjects as the most popular brand of cigarettes in the Middle East.
In the memorable phrase of critic Harold Bloom, she was the "world's first celebrity. " If history is a stage, no actress was ever so versatile: royal daughter, royal mother, royal sister from a family that makes the Sopranos look like the Waltons. Yet if she is everywhere, Cleopatra is also nowhere, obscured in what biographer Michael Grant called the "fog of fiction and vituperation which has surrounded her personality from her own lifetime onwards.
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