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Historical person
12–41
Caligula was the third Roman emperor, ruling from AD 37 to 41. Ancient sources portray a reign that began with popularity but became associated with autocracy, court terror, financial pressure and conflict with the Senate before his assassination by guards.
In Margaret George’s The Confessions of Young Nero, the narrative follows Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, the future emperor Nero, from his endangered childhood under Caligula to the opening years of his own reign.
In non-fiction, Caligula is discussed in Lindsay Powell’s Germanicus, L. J. Trafford’s Ancient Rome’s Worst Emperors, Lindsay Powell’s Tiberius, Mary Beard’s Twelve Caesars, and Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome. In Lindsay Powell’s Germanicus, the final chapters examine the persecution of Germanicus’s widow and children under Tiberius and Sejanus, and the survival of his public image through Caligula, Claudius and later Roman memory.
Historical context
Series
The Claudius Series is Robert Graves’s two-volume fictional memoir of the Roman emperor Claudius and the Julio-Claudian dynasty. I, Claudius follows the imperial family from Augustus to Caligula through Claudius’s wary, observant voice, while Claudius the God covers his own reign and the forces that undermine it. Together…
All books in this series
The Damned Emperors series retells the reigns of Caligula, Commodus, Domitian and Caracalla through people close enough to witness their private fears and public violence. Each novel sets later hostile traditions against the personal, dynastic and political pressures that shaped an emperor condemned by Roman memory. Rather than…
All books in this series
The Roman Trilogy follows Rufus, a young slave whose skill with animals brings him from the gladiatorial world into the dangerous centre of imperial power. In Caligula he becomes keeper of the emperor’s elephant and is caught among the conspiracies surrounding a ruler feared for cruelty and unpredictability.…
All books in this series
Margaret George’s Nero duology reconstructs the life of Rome’s last Julio-Claudian emperor, beginning with a childhood in which imperial blood makes Nero a target and ending with the collapse of his reign. Told largely through Nero’s own perspective, the series follows his passage through the courts of Caligula…
All books in this series
Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
