Cuirass Bust of Caligula, AD 37–41
Caligula in armour, carved during his four-year reign and now in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen (inv. 1453). Few portraits of him survive: after his murder in AD 41 the senate had his images taken down, and most were recut into someone else.
The games were the part of the reign that reached everyone. Caligula spent on spectacle at a rate his predecessor had deliberately avoided, added days to the calendar, distributed money at the shows, and used the arena to conduct public business that had previously been done in the senate — including the humiliation of men who would later kill him. Whether that was madness or a deliberate politics of the crowd is the argument the sources cannot settle for us. See public spectacle and social order in early imperial Rome.
CC BY-SA 2.0 — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
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