The Horse at Dinner — Caligula: The Horse in the Senate

Not enough for what? For office, it was whispered in Rome. Suetonius ends his description of the stable with a sentence that made Incitatus a legend: it was also said that the emperor intended to make him consul. Cassius Dio, a historian writing a full century later, goes further: Caligula promised the horse a consulship and would have kept his word had he lived longer.

Note the verbs: “it was said,” “intended,” “promised,” “would have kept.” Neither author writes that the horse took office. There is no year of appointment and no name of a consul he would have replaced. But Dio adds a detail no one remembers: the emperor made the horse his fellow priest, in the temple of his own cult.

Where did the idea come from, then? Scholars have three hints, and none is dull. The first, from Winterling: it was a mockery of the senators and their ambitions. If honors can be given to a horse, they are not worth much. The second, from David Woods: the joke may have grown out of a misreading of the name of the senator Asinius Celer, which sounds like “swift donkey.” The third, from Henri van Nispen: horses had been surrounded with reverence in Greece and Rome for centuries, and the emperor may simply have been playing with this tradition.

To understand the horse, you have to understand the circus. Rome cheers for the racing factions, each with its own color, and Caligula backs the Greens so passionately that, according to Suetonius, he dines and spends the night in their stable. To one of the drivers, Eutychus, he gives two million sesterces at a single banquet. Dio adds that the place where the emperor practiced chariot driving is still called the Gaianum today.

How do we know this? Suetonius writes around AD 120, nearly eighty years after Caligula’s death. Dio does so later still, almost two centuries after the events. Both rely on earlier historians whose works are lost, and most of those authors belonged to the Senate, that is, to people who feared the emperor and hated him.

There are also authors closer to the events. Philo of Alexandria saw Caligula with his own eyes. Josephus, writing at the end of the 1st century, left the fullest account of the assassination. When in this episode we say something is certain, it will mean that at least two independent authors describe it.

Let us leave the horse in the stable. More interesting than whether he was ever consul is who the man who loved him so much really was. More interesting still: in the first months there is no mention of any horse at all. Rome loved Caligula before it got to know him.