1995/07/01 by Susan Wood · 4 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical and Religious Studies of Rome #Classical Antiquity Studies #Byzantine Studies and History
paper · doi:10.2307/506945
openalex publication_date 1995/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/19
During the principate of Caligula, women of the imperial family achieved unprecedented public honors. The vilification of this hated emperor in later tradition, however, tends to follow a predictable format that includes charges of disregard for the most sacred taboos, in particular the prohibition against incest. The reputations of Caligula's sisters have consequently suffered "collateral damage" that distorts their true historical significance. This paper supplements a critical reading of the ancient historians with the iconographical evidence of coins and of sculpture, in which Caligulan portrait types for Agrippina II and Drusilla can be at least ten tatively distinguished. I contend that Caligula's sisters owed their public honors to their potential to bear Julian children. Drusilla, the heir to Caligula's imperium in his will of A. D. 37, was probably intended to produce male heirs while her husband wielded actual power. Her deification after her untimely death was an attempt to make the best of dynastic disaster by keeping her in public imagery as a symbolic genetrix of the Julians. Provincial coinages suggest that the consecration was well received, while the public presentation of all three sisters in statuary groups seems to grow logically from existing practices among aristocratic private families. Caligula's glorification of his sisters, like his demand for divine honors, appears to have been a rational decision later distorted by hostile writers as evidence of psychotic arrogance.