A lot of men have probably wished for four more years. A little under that time after assuming absolute power, Gaius Caesar was dead, assassinated by the men who were paid to protect him. We more usually know him as Caligula: a man who revealed himself to be every kind of monster soon after becoming emperor of Rome.
It probably wasn’t his depravity that did for Caligula, however: if our sources are to be believed, sexual deviance was pretty much par for Roman emperors. Abusing so much power must have been irresistible. Perhaps the reasoning was that when you’re a star, they let you do it. The real problem for the men surrounding him was his unpredictability. At the time of his death, he was pondering giving high political office to Incitatus, his favourite horse.
As the imperial biographer Suetonius tells us, Caligula was fond of teasing the chief of the Praetorian guard, a man named Cassius Chaerea. And Chaerea eventually bit back, stabbing Gaius in the neck. Other guards piled in and Gaius was soon dead of multiple stab wounds. More bodyguards then appeared on the scene and killed some of the assassins and various innocent bystanders. When an autocrat goes down, it seems, the damage can be indiscriminate.
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