Of course, in Caligula the mania for luxury and wastefulness operated in the most diverse areas: at feasts and meals (25), in gifts, in dress and living arrangements, and in all other things that were part of life, especially also in the furnishings of his palaces and villas and in the imperial yachts equipped and furnished with senseless luxury (25a), a but most strikingly in gigantic buildings and construction projects (26). This, too, is a trait peculiar to the inflated ideas of the ruler – one should think only of the examples just touched upon; incidentally, it is easy enough to understand this trait if one bears in mind the Caesars’ craving for fame and the desire to stand out in the eyes of posterity.
The extravagance of Caligula’s projects and the brevity of his reign meant that a number of his buildings were left unfinished. On the Palatine in Rome they still show the beginnings of “Caligula’s Bridge,” which was supposed to span the Forum, linking the imperial palace with the Capitol, the city’s sacred temple (27). He launched great aqueducts and circus buildings at the same time, and plans for constructing a canal through the isthmus of Corinth, which had been frequently discussed up to that point, were to be carried out at once (28). This passion for building was combined with a striking mania for destruction. Buildings worthy of preservation were torn down or remodeled for trivial reasons (29). But most of what was newly built carried the stamp of the bizarre. The more impossible and pointless a task appeared, the more it attracted him (30). In the Bay of Naples, remnants of a Roman harbor causeway are still called ponte di Caligula in memory of the fantastic bridge he constructed there in order to carry out some crazy idea.
Caligula had an extremely long pontoon bridge built across the Bay of Baiae and then had a veritable country road with inns and drinking water pipes constructed upon it. Dressed in the supposed armor of Alexander the Great, he led his troops across the bridge to Baiae and assaulted the peaceful city with his soldiers in order to conquer it. The next day he held a great triumphal procession on the bridge, with enormous ornamentation, make-believe booty and fake prisoners; in the end he himself celebrated, in a pompous speech and glittering festivities, the glorious campaign, the overcoming of so many hardships, as he said, and the harnessing of the ocean (31).
* * *
An insane craving for ostentation and extravagance emerges quite starkly in this famous enterprise, but at the same time also a different, quite characteristic direction that the pathological megalomania of the princes and their need for ostentation tends to take: the lust for military triumph.
(25) See e.g. Seneca, Ad Helviam de consolatione 10.4
(25a) Suetonius 36.
(26) Suetonius 21.
(27) Suetonius 22.
(28) Suetonius 21.
(29) See e.g. Seneca, De ira III, 21.5. Dio Cassius 59.28.
(30) Suetonius 37.
(31) Dio Cassius 59.17. See Suetonius 19.32. Josephus, Antiq. XIX, 1.1. Seneca, De brevitate vitae 18.5.
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