Enjoy this, the only known coin explicitly naming Caligula. Reverse type is a spintria motif. Too naughty to post here. From the collection of a certain M. McDowell Rasiel
There is a thread about this coin https://www.cointalk.com/threads/roman-coin-used-to-advertise-movie-caligula-1979.37389/
You gotta admit it's clear someone took a lot of effort and time in making this prop. They could have just tooled a real coin. It actually looks ancient. In pretty much every movie about the ancient world where I've seen coins they don't (300, Game of Thrones, Gladiator?). Wherever this is it's probably worth quite a few bucks even as a quasi-historical fantasy for all the controversy of the movie. Rasiel
Raunchy? Sure. Outrageously inaccurate? Of course. The sources for Gaius reign are just too darn sparse. But dang it all if McDowell didn't put on one hell of a performance!
To history he is known as Caligula. Ironically, if you were to call him by that name to his face, you would probably have been invited to commit suicide, or worse.
True. Just like I imagine if you were to call the emperor Antoninus by the name of Caracalla, you'd be floating as a bloated carcass down the Tiber before sundown. Most of the truly hated emperors got stuck with nicknames after their deaths. Another example is the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. I'm sure he'd be horrified to learn 1800 years later he would remembered as Elagabalus. The fact that Nero is still Nero makes me think he was not as unpopular when he died as ancient historians would have us believe. The aristocrats might have hated him, but he was popular with the masses. Which is probably why we still know him as Nero instead of Emperor Butterball, or Emperor Pantomime. I think ancient historians knew they might get away with saying some unflattering things about him after death in books that only rich Senators could afford to buy, but spreading an unflattering nickname about an emperor the masses still remembered fondly might have been a step too far, and an open invitation to be torn apart by a mob of angry citizens.
I’m not sure. He acquired the nickname Caligula from his father's soldiers during their campaign in Germania. It was a name roman soldiers gave him and not historians. He probably considered this a honorful name. Not sure though that everyone could name him Caligula. Probably not