5 Sexual Atrocities That Defined Emperor Caligula

The corridors of Caligula’s palace were not filled with the sounds of political discourse but rather with the desperate pleas for mercy from those who had fallen under his tyrannical rule. Under his reign, the elite of Rome found themselves ensnared in a new category of terror, one that forced fathers to auction off their daughters’ purity and husbands to cheer while their wives were subjected to public humiliation. This was not the result of random insanity; it was a calculated system of cruelty that had become the norm, meticulously recorded as if it were a mundane expense of the empire. Every horror had a price, an entry number, and a procedure, as the greatest empire of the ancient world bowed before a machine of organized depravity.

To understand how Rome descended into such depths, we must first look back to the moment when a smiling young man was hailed as its great hope. Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, known as Caligula—a nickname derived from the little soldier boots he wore as a child—was the adored son of a beloved Roman general. His rise to power was celebrated like a miracle, with the populace rejoicing for a full 100 days. To the citizens, he represented the continuation of a legendary dynasty, and senators finally felt relief after the suffocating paranoia of Emperor Tiberius. No one anticipated that this charismatic, well-educated young man would become the architect of the most structured system of moral corruption Rome would ever witness.

Caligula’s early years were a blend of privilege and trauma. He grew up among soldiers revered by the legions who adored his father, yet he also witnessed the darker side of imperial politics: the suspicious death of Germanicus, likely through poison, and the destruction of his own family. His mother, Agrippina the Elder, was exiled, and his older brothers were executed or locked away. Caligula learned to survive by playing a role—harmless, foolish, non-threatening. His time in Tiberius’s palace taught him a critical lesson: in Rome, survival depended on deception, and he became a master at pretending.

When Caligula first took the throne, everything appeared promising. He cut taxes, released political prisoners, organized spectacular public games, improved infrastructure, repaired roads, and generously rewarded the legions. Rome adored him; women scattered flowers in his path, children sang songs in his praise, and senators fought for his attention. It seemed as though Rome had finally entered a golden age after years of fear under Tiberius’s rule. Unlike his predecessor, who isolated himself on Capri, Caligula walked openly among the people, joined public celebrations, and shared meals with senators, appearing approachable and almost divine in his popularity.

However, everything changed in the autumn of 37 AD when a mysterious illness struck him down. He spent weeks on the brink of death, suffering from fevers that defied belief, violent convulsions, and delirious episodes where he claimed to converse with Jupiter. Rome was paralyzed with fear; priests made endless sacrifices to the gods, and some citizens vowed their lives to save the emperor. When he finally recovered, something fundamental within him had shifted.

The first sign of this transformation was subtle: he commanded that every statue of every god in Rome have its head replaced with his own likeness. Following that, the change became impossible to ignore. Caligula’s demeanor darkened; his once warm and lively eyes turned hollow and predatory, his pupils unnaturally wide. He developed relentless insomnia, wandering the palace at night, whispering to statues and responding to unseen enemies. Servants often found him naked in the palace gardens, covered in soil, claiming he had been planting Rome’s destiny. But what he planted was the foundation for his descent into darkness.

Caligula’s early obsessions began with his sisters, Drusilla, Julia Livilla, and Agrippina the Younger. They were no longer just family; they became the first victims of a state policy that would soon unfold. His fixation on Drusilla was the most extreme; he treated her as if she were his empress, seating her in places reserved for imperial wives at public events. When Drusilla died in 38 AD, Caligula spiraled into a frantic rage, ordering an official mourning period so strict that laughter, bathing, and even family meals were forbidden. Anyone who displayed happiness faced execution.

With Drusilla gone, Caligula’s attention turned to his remaining sisters and then to the daughters and wives of Rome’s elite. This marked the beginning of a systematic approach to sexual atrocity. Caligula forced noble women to engage in acts with senators while he observed from a specially crafted golden throne, taking notes on who seemed eager, who hesitated, and who merely tried to be polite. These notes were later used as political leverage; a senator who behaved enthusiastically toward Julia Livilla suddenly began supporting every imperial decree without question, while another who showed reluctance found his young son missing, returned to him harmed forever.

The signal was unmistakable: neutrality did not exist in Caligula’s Rome. Everyone could be transformed into either an offender or a victim, often both. Roman physician Lucius Scribonius Largus left behind writings hidden for centuries in a villa near Pompeii, detailing how Caligula forced him to examine noble women and girls, assessing their fertility and capacity for repeated use. These examinations, humiliating and invasive, were conducted in front of the emperor himself, who would ask degrading questions about each woman’s body, turning personal depravity into a bureaucratic structure.

Caligula established a machine designed to crush dignity, eliminate resistance, and turn Rome’s nobility into obedient instruments of his power. Prices were set for various acts: 16 sesterces for a night with a senator’s wife, 2,000 for his virgin daughter, and 5,000 if he wanted both at once. Payments did not disappear into private pockets; they flowed directly into the imperial treasury, disguised as voluntary contributions for the good of the state.

The palace itself became what Caligula insisted on calling a “temple of divine service.” This was no metaphorical rebranding; he refitted rooms, corridors, and rituals to function like a sacramental machine. Each chamber had a name and a function: the Room of Jupiter, used for ritualized abuses; the Chamber of Venus, where noble matrons were forced into reenactments of mythic scenes; and the Hall of Priapus, where acts of humiliation were carried out against those Caligula chose. Lavish frescoes adorned these spaces, transforming the travertine halls that had once hosted political debates into venues of debauchery.

The senators who had built Rome were made to walk these same corridors, forced to bear witness to the horrors while remaining silent. The system was intricate beyond imagination. First in the chain were senators’ wives, drafted into what Caligula called the “imperial cult.” They followed schedules, wore designated uniforms, and performed rituals according to strict timetables. Next came daughters, some as young as 12, eased into the regimen under the pretense of divine instruction.

But Caligula didn’t stop at humiliation; he initiated a program of selective breeding. Women deemed most fertile were compelled to bear children destined to be raised as imperial dependents, separated from their fathers and trained from infancy to serve court needs. Every conception, every birth, and every infant death was meticulously recorded. Many pregnancies ended in desperate attempts to prevent childbirth, a grim statistic documented by scribes.

Men were not exempt from Caligula’s depravity. He ordered the feminization of the sons of patrician houses, dressing them in diaphanous saffron tunics, painting their faces, and teaching them to move and gesture in ways he found pleasing. These boys were paraded at banquets and auctioned for the night. For Caligula, involvement was rarely about desire; it was about domination. Each public violation was a deliberate political statement.

Perhaps the most savage innovation was how he enlisted families in their own ruin. Many parents were forced to witness and collude in the degradation of their wives and daughters. Torchbearers in processions, signatories on contracts consenting to the service of their women, the Senate was pressed to pass laws cloaking abuse with religious legitimacy. One such statute declared the emperor’s body sacred, framing any union with him as a form of worship.

Caligula discovered a cruelty beyond physical force: coercive complicity. He didn’t only attack families from the outside; he turned them into instruments of their own destruction. Senator Cornelius exemplified this tragic fate. When he publicly refused to hand over his wife, Libya, he faced fatal consequences. The next morning, Cornelius’s eight-year-old son was discovered on the Senate steps, mutilated, alive, and bearing a message carved into his flesh. The warning worked; that afternoon, Cornelius delivered Libya to the emperor.

Months later, when she conceived by imperial decree, Cornelius was forced to recognize the child as the legitimate heir, abandoning any claims from his other offspring. Humiliation became law. The Senate voted unanimously that any child of the emperor, regardless of origin, outranked sons born in lawful marriages.

Running this apparatus required an administration rivaling Rome’s civil government. Hidden clerks maintained meticulous registers in a sealed archive beneath the Palatine. Each file followed a template: victim’s name, age, social rank, physical description, acts performed, duration, degree of apparent cooperation, resulting pregnancies, fees paid, physicians who examined the women, records of injury or illness, midwives present at forced births, guards who escorted them, and accountants who tallied revenues. The emperor charged for these services, and the proceeds flowed into imperial coffers.

Hundreds of individuals became cogs in this machine: prosecutors of propriety, caretakers of ritual clothing, official midwives, scribes who wrote the lists, guards enforcing the timetables, and accountants balancing the books. The dispersion of responsibility made it easier for individuals to avoid moral ownership. No one stood alone as a monster; everyone could claim they were merely fulfilling a role.

Certain nights were ritualized as spectacles, particularly during full moons. Caligula staged lunar fertility rites in a converted private amphitheater, turning it into a pagan temple. He arranged matches with carefully selected participants: gladiators famed for their vigor, Nubian captives from the empire’s frontiers, and even animals on occasion. Husbands sat in the galleries, forced to maintain composure while their wives were degraded below them.

Caligula orchestrated every detail like a ringmaster, deciding pairings, numbers, duration, and body positioning using a gilded baton topped with phallic symbols. Scribes documented everything: names, events, timings, and notably performative episodes. What unfolded was less chaos than a theater of dominance, an institution where human suffering was converted into pageantry and commodified.

An entire shadow economy grew around the palace’s needs. Vendors sold ointments and eyewashes claimed to ease pain, clandestine apothecaries supplied abortions, and tutors taught young survivors how to mimic compliance. Doctors opened practices focused on repair and reconstruction. Everyone who touched the system charged a fee; everyone who touched it profited.

Greed lubricated complicity. Vanity, fear, and ambition became incentives to look away, to obey, to participate. The horror lay not just in Caligula’s capacity for atrocity but in how he engineered a society where such acts paid. All of Rome became entangled in the crime. Merchants who sold luxurious goods knew precisely where the sudden fortunes of senatorial families originated—payments for silence and participation. Priests offered blessings for unions everyone knew had been forced, while poets penned verses that turned state-sanctioned horrors into mythic glories.

Official histories never recorded the suffering endured by the bodies in the palace, but those bodies told their own stories. Scars formed like a private alphabet of pain; bellies swelled with pregnancies; women tried to hide beneath layered garments; faces stopped smiling, their muscles of joy atrophied from years of disuse. There was Valeria, the daughter of a senator, who fell entirely silent after months of ongoing abuse. Doctors confirmed her vocal cords worked; she simply lost the language to describe her suffering.

Caligula’s obsessions evolved into ritualized cruelties. He took perverse satisfaction in forcing mothers to watch the damage inflicted upon their daughters, then reversing roles to compel mothers into the very acts inflicted on their children while narrating the scene as though reciting poetry. This was not random cruelty; it was a warped doctrine. By destroying maternal love, childhood innocence, and paternal honor, he believed he was unmaking the moral foundations that had held Rome together.

Attempts to resist were desperate and often fatal. Some women stole poison from palace gardens, while others disfigured themselves with knives or burns, hoping to render themselves useless to the system. But imperial physicians were skilled in restoring life and appearance; many suicides were reversed and returned to the spectacle, often punished with additional public humiliations to deter others.

Caligula had not simply indulged in depravity; he had written the instructions for turning atrocity into governance. The manual for institutionalized cruelty, the registers, the powers, the legal precedents did not vanish with his corpse. They could be rewritten, reissued, adapted. Without protective families and laws to shield the vulnerable, new generations learned that certain evils survive beyond their architects, passing from one set of administrators to another like a contagious legacy.

The echo of that night was the most damning testament. Men applauded an act of murder with the same hands that had once held torches for the rituals. The empire moved on outwardly, but inwardly, the wounds remained. The children marked by the program, the women who carried their secrets into old age, and the men who justified their compliance all became part of a long, dark inheritance.

Caligula had not simply indulged depravity; he had engineered a society where atrocity paid. The horror was not just in his actions but in the very system that allowed such horrors to flourish.