Confronting Evil summary

For five centuries, Rome ruled the world. At its height, it fielded 250,000 soldiers and governed two million square miles on three continents. From Britain to Persia, Roman civilization was preeminent, embodied in its coins, forums, aqueducts, and amphorae brimming with Italian wine and olive oil.

It took centuries to construct the Roman colossus, but encroaching Germanic tribes toppled it within decades. The final blow came in 476 CE when a barbarian soldier overthrew Rome’s last emperor and proclaimed himself King of Italy. 

Historians point to various factors to explain Rome’s fall: economic decline, strategic blunders, disease, and political instability all figure in their analyses. But there’s a shorthand answer, too: the misrule of evil men. 

Caligula was one of them.

Romans knew little about the 24-year-old Caligula when he became emperor in 37 CE, but they did know his father: Germanicus, a general famed for his patriotism and bravery in battle. Germanicus’ reputation lent his son legitimacy, and the latter’s promises to lower taxes, grant exiles amnesty, and fund games made him popular. Rome, it seemed, had been blessed with a considerate ruler. 

Caligula, though, soon fell seriously ill. He recovered, but his brush with death left a mark. He became erratic, fearful, suspicious. Unable to tell friend from foe, he had advisors tortured and exiled his sisters. Distrustful of Rome’s senate, he humiliated its members. When they protested, he appointed a horse to the senate: their words, he implied, carried as much weight as a nag’s whinnying.

Caligula’s reign of terror was as absurd as it was brutal. One day, he was proclaiming himself a living god; the next, he was presiding over glitzy public executions for his own amusement. There were unspeakable acts of sexual sadism as well as routine shakedowns. Those who crossed him were exiled or killed – so, too, were many who didn’t. 

Caligula wasn’t the first mad emperor. His terrible innovation was to strip away the pretense. His predecessors – the psychopaths included – had cloaked their wishes in the language of norms, laws, and customs. That had constrained them: only so much carnage and corruption could be justified within those limits. Caligula dropped the mask. The law was what he said it was; if he said something else tomorrow, well, that was the law too. 

Patriotism, honesty, and civic virtue were superfluous in Caligula’s Rome: getting ahead – or simply keeping your head – required blind obedience to the whims of the fickle god-emperor. The courageous suffered; the craven flourished.

Now, Rome’s political “immune system” was still functional during Caligula’s time: we know as much because its guardians assassinated the tyrant in early 41 CE. But there were more Caligulas to come – his great-nephew Nero, who became emperor thirteen years later, was one of them. Each did their bit to chip away at Rome’s values and hollow out the institutions that gave them shape. And that’s how the Roman colossus came to have feet of clay.