systematic corruption of meaning. That is the message which underlies the story about the man who had vowed his own life if Caligula recovered from his illness. The intention of this public vow, we must assume, was to draw attention to the man’s deep loyalty to the emperor, and so attract a handsome reward for his devotion; it was no indication of the man’s real readiness to die. ‘The explicit wish – for the emperor’s recovery – did not match the unstated wish: to be rewarded for their flattery.’ By taking it at face value, Caligula is ‘outing’ the insincerity, and showing that he would ‘abjure this form of communication’.

The campaign against imperial double-speak turned out to have disastrous consequences. The story of the honours given to thevery convincingly – why Caligula felt the need to attack the rhetorical conventions of imperial rule in the first place. He is also repeatedly forced to adjust a good deal of unpromising, or even conflicting, evidence to fit his basic scheme. Too often, he takes some bizarre anecdote supposedly illustrating Caligula’s madness and ingeniously reinterprets ‘what actually happened’, to end up with yet another example of Caligula’s resistance to (or exposure of) imperial double-speak and hypocrisy.

Take the story about a commercial brothel established by the emperor on the Palatine, to raise money for the imperial treasury (according to Suetonius). Installing Roman matrons and respectable boys in a lavish suite in the palace, he sent heralds out to invite anyone to come and enjoy them and lent customers money