Caligula built his reputation as the emperor who took on the ocean itself, though the most famous detail of that story turns out to be fiction. The young ruler, who took power in 37 AD as a beloved son of a war hero, reportedly marched his entire army to the Channel Coast as if to invade Britain, then ordered his soldiers to gather seashells instead. The biographer Suetonius recorded that Caligula called the shells the spoils of the ocean. Historians continue to debate what actually happened, with some suggesting a mutiny was punished and others suspecting a mistranslation.
But despite popular belief, Caligula never declared war on the sea god Neptune. That claim comes from a 20th-century novel, not any Roman source. What Caligula definitely did was declare himself a god. He built a temple to himself with priests and a golden statue dressed each morning to match his own outfit.
He reportedly held conversations with the statue of Jupiter and invited the moon to share his bed on bright nights. When a crowd cheered for the wrong chariot team, he allegedly wished the Roman people had a single neck so he could cut through all of them at once. His favorite saying, lifted from an old tragedy, was reportedly that people could hate him all they wanted, so long as they feared him. The famous tale of Caligula making his racehorse Incitatus a consul also needs qualification.
The horse was genuinely pampered with a marble stall, an ivory manger, and a staff of servants, and Caligula reportedly invited the animal to formal dinners. But the sources only say he planned or joked about the consulship. Most historians now read it as a calculated insult to the Senate, a way of suggesting a horse could do their jobs just as well as they could. He also built a bridge of boats across the Bay of Baiae after an astrologer told the old emperor that Caligula had no more chance of ruling than of riding a horse across that bay.
Once in power, he spent two days riding back and forth over his boat bridge in a golden cloak, purely to prove the prediction wrong. The cruelty extended beyond theater, with reports that he forced fathers to attend the executions of their own sons and had a writer burned alive over a pun he took the wrong way. In 41 AD, an officer of his own guard named Cassius Chaerea, a man Caligula loved to mock for his high voice, cornered him in a palace corridor and cut him down. Before judging these emperors too harshly, it is worth understanding who recorded their stories.
Almost everything known about them comes from a small group of writers who could not stand them. Suetonius wrote his gossipy biographies decades after the events. Cassius Dio, a senator, wrote more than a century later. And the Historia Augusta was written by an anonymous author so fond of inventing material that scholars treat him as a novelist, complete with fabricated documents and quotes.
These were upper-class men writing about emperors who had taxed them, ignored them, executed them, or stolen their spotlight. Mary Beard, a prominent historian of Rome, notes that some of the dirt does not survive a careful read. The famous claim that Caligula slept with his sisters may rest partly on a mistranslation about seating arrangements at dinner. Even after scrubbing out the nonsense, however, plenty remains backed by hard evidence in statues, coins, and ruins that still stand today.
Nero became emperor at 16 with his scheming mother Agrippina pulling the strings. Agrippina had very possibly poisoned her husband, the Emperor Claudius, to put her boy on the throne. Nero reportedly tried to poison his mother three times and failed each time because she had spent years dosing herself with small amounts of poison to build immunity. He then had a special boat built designed to collapse at sea, but Agrippina could swim and paddled to shore.
Nero dropped the clever plan and sent soldiers to stab her. According to the story, she told them to strike her in the belly, the wound that had produced such a son. His love life was no gentler. He is said to have killed his pregnant wife Poppaea with a kick during an argument, though many historians suspect she actually died from complications in pregnancy and the kick is the lurid version.
He reportedly had a young man named Sporus, who resembled the dead Poppaea, castrated, dressed as an empress, and married him in a full public ceremony. In a separate wedding, Nero married a freedman named Pythagoras and played the role of the bride. Nero was convinced he was a great artist and performed on stage for hours, entering himself into Greek competitions. Nobody was allowed to leave during his performances, with guards locking the exits.
Writers claim women gave birth in the seats and men faked their own deaths to be carried out. When he toured the games in Greece, the contests were quietly fixed so he won every event, including a chariot race he did not finish after tumbling out partway. In July of 64 AD, a fire tore through Rome for days, gutting most of the city. The claim that Nero fiddled while Rome burned is false on two counts.
The fiddle had not been invented yet, and Nero was not even in the city. The historian Tacitus, the best source for this period, says Nero was at his villa in Antium, about 35 miles away, and that he hurried back, organized relief, and opened his gardens to shelter the homeless. A rumor circulated that he sang about the fall of Troy while watching the flames, but even Tacitus reports it as gossip. When people began muttering that Nero started the fire himself to clear space for building, he needed a scapegoat and chose the Christians.
Tacitus describes Christians wrapped in animal skins and torn apart by dogs, nailed to crosses, and set alight as human lamps in Nero’s gardens after dark, while the emperor strolled among the crowd dressed as a charioteer. On the ashes he built the Golden House, a sprawling palace complex with a dining room that may genuinely have rotated and a private artificial lake. Suetonius claims Nero sighed with satisfaction that he could at last live in a style fit for a human being. Beside the palace stood a bronze statue of Nero around 30 meters tall.
That statue, the Colossus, is very likely where the Colosseum, built later on the drained lake, got its name. Nero’s run ended in 68 AD when the army and senate branded him a public enemy. Cornered, he had a servant help him take his own life, reportedly sighing what an artist the world was losing. The strangest twist is that the common people had adored him, and for years afterward, impostors appeared around the empire claiming to be Nero returned from the dead.
Marcus Aurelius was the philosopher emperor, but his son Commodus decided his true calling was the arena. Emperors were supposed to watch the games from a safe distance. Commodus jumped into the sand and fought as a gladiator hundreds of times by some accounts, though that number comes from the least trustworthy source. The fights were rigged, as opponents understood that wounding the emperor was a fast way to die.
He charged the city a fortune for every appearance while real gladiators fought for scraps. He turned the slaughter of exotic animals into a personal pastime, reportedly killing lions, leopards, elephants, and even a giraffe. All of this played out during the Antonine Plague, a brutal epidemic carrying off a huge share of the population. He loved to dress as the demigod Hercules, and statues of Commodus posing as Hercules survive to this day.
He ordered everyone to address him as the son of Zeus. He renamed Rome after himself and renamed all 12 months of the year after his own names and titles. The historian Cassius Dio, who was actually in the stands, describes Commodus shooting the heads off running ostriches with crescent-bladed arrows, then strolling over to the senators, holding up a severed ostrich head, and grinning as if to promise they were next. Dio admits the senators had to chew the laurel leaves out of their wreaths to stop themselves from laughing and getting executed.
It ended on the final day of 192 AD when his own inner circle, including his mistress, tried to poison him. When he threw it back up, they sent in his personal wrestling partner, a man named Narcissus, who strangled the emperor in his own bath. Elagabalus became emperor at around 14 and was dead by 18. He owed his crown to his grandmother Julia Maesa, who spread a rumor that the boy was the secret son of a beloved past emperor and bribed the army into backing him.
He came from Syria, where he served as priest of a sun god named Elagabal, worshipped in the form of a large black cone-shaped meteorite. When he took the throne, he brought the rock with him, parading it into Rome on a jeweled chariot and building it a grand temple, trying to rank his desert sun god above Jupiter himself. The establishment was horrified, and this part is confirmed by his official coins, which show the meteorite. He led wild public ceremonies, dancing backward around the altars, and reportedly forced Rome’s most senior officials to take part in rites for a foreign deity.
Then he married a Vestal Virgin, Rome’s holiest priestesses sworn to absolute chastity on penalty of being buried alive. He married one named Aquilia Severa anyway, announced their union would produce god-like children, divorced her, and later married her all over again. A lot of what comes next is from the unreliable Historia Augusta, so it should be handled with care. He is said to have smothered dinner guests by dumping rose petals on them from a false ceiling, which is almost certainly invented.
One thread deserves real care. The contemporary writer Cassius Dio claims Elagabalus wore makeup and wigs, preferred to be called lady rather than lord, called a male charioteer his husband, and offered doctors a fortune to surgically give him a woman’s body. Some modern voices read this as an early trans story, but many historians push back, noting Dio was hostile, far from Rome, and using effeminacy as a standard Roman way to smear an enemy. At 18, the guard turned on him, killed him alongside his mother, and dragged their bodies through the streets before tossing him into the river Tiber.
Caracalla managed to secure his place on this list in a single afternoon. He was supposed to share the throne with his younger brother Geta, and the two hated each other so thoroughly that they reportedly discussed splitting the empire in half. Instead, Caracalla arranged a peace meeting in their mother’s apartments, then had his soldiers burst in and cut Geta down. Geta died bleeding in the arms of their mother, Julia Domna, who was herself wounded trying to shield her son.
Caracalla then ordered Geta erased from history, scrubbing his face off paintings and chiseling his name off monuments, a punishment called damnatio memoria. A few years later, the people of Alexandria mocked him with street theater about the murder. Caracalla invited the city’s young men to assemble, supposedly to honor them, then turned his troops loose. Cassius Dio says more than 20,000 people were slaughtered.
Between the atrocities, Caracalla was obsessed with Alexander the Great, dressing as him, copying his poses, making a pilgrimage to his tomb, and raising a military unit he called his Alexander phalanx. Despite all the blood, he left two marks on history that had nothing to do with killing. He issued an edict granting Roman citizenship to nearly every free man in the empire, and he built the Baths of Caracalla, a public complex so colossal its ruins still stop tourists today. Not every imperial oddity gets a blockbuster.
Some just get a strange habit. Domitian, before he grew into a paranoid, murderous emperor, spent hours alone every day catching flies and stabbing them one by one with a sharpened pen. The habit was so well known that when a visitor asked whether anyone was with the emperor, a courtier reportedly answered, not even a fly. He also gets blamed for the black banquet, where he invited nobles into a pitch-black room done up as a tomb, sat each beside a gravestone carved with that guest’s own name, and had naked boys painted black serve the food, letting every guest assume he was the dinner.
That tale comes from a single source written long after the fact. As his reign went on, Domitian grew so afraid of assassination that he reportedly had the walls of his palace walkways lined with polished, mirror-bright stone so he could always see what was behind him, a decision that might be the sanest on this entire list. Then there was Tiberius, the emperor who quit. He walked away from Rome entirely, moved to the island of Capri, and let a scheming deputy run a reign of terror in his name.
The lurid stories about his island activities are almost certainly hostile invention, but the plain fact underneath is stranger. The most powerful man on Earth looked at his job and decided to retire to a cliffside villa and never come back. The deputy he left running the city, a guard commander named Sejanus, used the vacuum to purge rivals until Tiberius decided he was a threat and had him torn down. Finally, at the end of the empire in 410 AD, the emperor Honorius was hiding out in Ravenna, more interested in his prize chickens than his crumbling realm.
When a messenger cried that Rome had perished, Honorius was devastated because he owned a pet hen named Roma. Once it was explained that it was only the actual city of Rome that had fallen to the barbarians, he relaxed, relieved his bird was fine. The story is probably too perfect to be true, written about a century later, but it captures the mood of an empire steered by a man whose priorities were fowl. So were these men genuinely insane or just spectacularly badly reviewed?
The honest answer is a bit of both. Strip away the propaganda and you are still left with real cruelty, real megalomania, and real corpses. The Golden House was real. The Hercules statues are real.
The murdered brother and the burning Christians are horribly real. But the writers preserving this history belonged to the same class the emperors humiliated, taxed, and killed, and they had every reason to turn flawed, frightening men into cartoon monsters. As Mary Beard notes, even if every story were true, it barely changed how the empire actually ran. The roads still got built, the taxes still got collected.
The madness at the top was loud, but the base just kept grinding along. Two thousand years later, we are still telling their stories, which, for a pack of attention-starved megalomaniacs, might be the only thing they ever truly wanted.
