L'Italo-Americano

HERITAGE HISTORY IDENTITY TRADITIONS PEOPLE THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 28 L'Italo-Americano presenting earlier rulers as monsters. Historiography, however, did learn its lessons, a n d c o n t e m p o r a r y w o r k s openly warn that Caligula's biography is one of the most distorted in Roman history, shaped by elite resentment, retrospective justification, and literary convention. But within that context, small details matter, so histo- rians cannot simply discard hostile sources; rather, they need to examine how those sources operate, and what assumptions they reveal. A joke about failed hellebore treatment only makes sense if medical knowledge was com- mon currency among Rome's ruling class and, perhaps even more crucially, the anec- dote survives because it was intelligible to its audience. Luke and Koh's contribution lies, then, in treating that intelligibility as historical evi- dence. Some of you may wonder why Roman emperors had good reasons to be interested in medicine… well, the impe- rial court was a dangerous place, where illness, poison- ing, and rumor overlapped and where medical knowl- edge offered protection, but also control. Knowing which substances healed and which killed, how long treatments were expected to take, and what options followed failure, t e r e d , t h e t w o h i s t o r i a n s developed a careful but inter- esting argument: Caligula did not practice medicine, but he likely knew enough about it to use its language convinc- ingly. This reading gains weight when placed alongside other ancient testimony, including that of Philo of Alexan- dria, one of Caligula's most hostile contemporaries who, in On the Embassy to Gaius, accused him of perverting "Apollo's art of medicine," turning healing into a means of destruction. The point was meant as condemnation, of course, but it rests on the a s s u m p t i o n t h a t C a l i g u l a u n d e r s t o o d t h e c u l t u r a l authority of medicine well enough to invert it. Even in attack, in other words, Philo presents an emperor fluent in t h e s y m b o l i c l a n g u a g e o f healing. Understanding why this matters requires stepping back to consider what we actually know about Caligula: his reign lasted only four years, from 37 to 41 AD, and t h e s u r v i v i n g n a r r a t i v e a c c o u n t s w e r e w r i t t e n decades later by authors with strong political and moral agendas. Suetonius, whose Lives of the Caesars provides many of the most sensational a n e c d o t e s , w r o t e u n d e r emperors who benefited from could be a form of power. In this environment, medicine and politics were never fully s e p a r a t e : r e m e d i e s c o u l d become threats, and thera- p e u t i c l a n g u a g e c o u l d b e turned into mockery or men- ace. S e e n f r o m t h i s a n g l e , Caligula's medical awareness does not certainly soften his reputation; if anything, it makes it sharper because a ruler who understands how healing is supposed to work, and chooses to parody that process through violence, appears more calculating, not less. The guillotine-like finali- ty of his order mirrors the precision of the medical logic he invokes, and knowledge becomes another tool, not a mitigating factor. Ultimately, the value of Luke and Koh's research lies in how it complicates our image of Caligula. Ancient history is often flattened by repetition, with famous fig- ures reduced to caricature through centuries of retelling but, by slowing down and examining a single line in a hostile source, the authors remind us that even the most infamous emperors operated w i t h i n r e a l i n t e l l e c t u a l worlds: they read, listened, learned, and applied what they knew, sometimes in hor- rifying ways. What emerges is a portrait that remains disturbing, but a l s o m o r e h i s t o r i c a l l y g r o u n d e d , a s i t s h o w s a leader who performed power in a language his contempo- raries recognized, drawing on shared assumptions about medicine, authority, and the body. Caligula remains con- troversial. Mad, even. But he was legible to his contempo- raries. In the end, this is what careful historical work can offer: restoring texture and depth to the past. By paying attention to how ancient peo- ple talked, joked, and threat- ened others, historians can recover the frameworks that made those actions meaning- ful at the time; in Caligula's case, that framework includ- ed medicine, not as a force f o r c a r e , b u t a s a n o t h e r domain he understood well enough to bend to his will. required. The story has usu- ally been cited as evidence of casual cruelty, delivered with a grim punchline but Luke and Koh point out that the c o m m e n t o n l y w o r k s i f Caligula and his audience understood the medical logic behind it. In Roman medicine, helle- bore was a recognized treat- ment, particularly associated with Antikyra's reputation as a therapeutic destination; bloodletting, meanwhile, was widely regarded as a follow- up intervention when other remedies failed. Read in this light, Caligula's remark sug- gests not random sadism, but a n e m p e r o r i n v o k i n g a shared framework of medical r e a s o n i n g , e v e n a s h e weaponized it. The cruelty remains, of course, but it is no longer unthinking: it is deliberate, informed, and precise. Luke and Koh situate this moment within a broader c u l t u r e o f e l i t e m e d i c a l a w a r e n e s s i n t h e e a r l y Roman Empire, where edu- cated Romans were expected to recognize common treat- ments, famous healing cen- ters, and the logic of thera- peutic escalation. Drawing on ancient medical texts, manu- script traditions, and ethnob- otanical research to recon- struct how hellebore was understood and adminis- F or most people, the name Caligu- l a f u n c t i o n s a s s h o r t h a n d f o r c r u e l t y , e x c e s s , and instability so extreme that it became almost mytho- logical. Ancient biographers portrayed him as a ruler who delighted in humiliation, vio- lence, and theatrical displays of power, and later genera- tions rarely questioned that image; yet new research sug- g e s t s t h a t e v e n t h i s m o s t notorious of Roman emper- ors may not fit quite as neatly into the role of irrational madman as tradition has long insisted. The shift comes from a c l o s e r e a d i n g o f a s m a l l , u n s e t t l i n g a n e c d o t e p r e - served in ancient sources, brought to the attention of the wider public in July 2025, when Yale University pub- l i s h e d a s u m m a r y o f n e w s c h o l a r s h i p e x a m i n i n g Caligula's apparent familiari- ty with Roman medical p r a c t i c e , b a s e d o n a r e a s s e s s m e n t o f a s t o r y recorded by Suetonius. The underlying academic article, published earlier that year in the Proceedings of the Euro- pean Academy of Sciences and Arts by Trevor S. Luke and Andrew J. Koh, does not argue that Caligula was compassionate, rational, or misunderstood in any moral sense; instead, it suggests that he likely possessed a working knowledge of elite medical thinking of his time, a n d t h a t t h i s k n o w l e d g e played a role in how he exer- cised power. The episode in question involves a Roman senator w h o s o u g h t t r e a t m e n t i n A n t i k y r a , a G r e e k t o w n famous in antiquity for its use of hellebore, a potent plant employed to treat a range of conditions, including mental illness. According to Sueto- n i u s , w h e n t h e s e n a t o r requested an extension of his m e d i c a l l e a v e , C a l i g u l a ordered him executed and remarked that when helle- bore had not worked for so l o n g , b l o o d l e t t i n g w a s Emperor Caligula is notorious for his evil antics, but historians have been reconsidering some aspects of his life (Image created with DALL-E 2) W a s C a l i g u l a o n l y a m a d m a n ? N e w r e s e a r c h complicates the picture LUCA SIGNORINI

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