The Most Famous Italian: Caligula’s Horse
Someone asked, Who’s the most famous Italian in history?
It tickled my national pride a bit. A couple of weeks ago, I found out I’m twenty-five percent Italian. I could have said Super Mario and called it a night.
Instead, I wrote: Caligula’s horse.
The joke writes itself.
When Caligula named his horse Incitatus consul, he did not mock the Senate. He completed it. In his view, the chamber was already a chorus of braying asses. He simply added another creature, one that for once brought a certain dignity to government. The first politician who could not lie.
Incitatus was the perfect stand-in: loyal, mute, photogenic. No scandals, no leaks, no late-night tweets. Imagine the headline: “The President declined to comment, but looked majestic.” In an age of managed optics and teleprompted sincerity, that is practically statesmanship. Power no longer needs intelligence. It needs symmetry.
If Caligula’s horse is a fitting emblem for our politics, Caligula himself is the model citizen of our age. He did not just want more. He wanted everything, and he wanted it now. He was history’s first man of infinite appetite.
When the world was not enough, he demanded the sea. He once led an invasion of Britain, ordered his soldiers to stab the waves, then dressed some of them as prisoners of war and brought back seashells as trophies. A fake victory for a fake war.
Modern leaders do the same. The trophy is no longer territory. It is the video-clip. Caligula understood virality long before the algorithm. Give the mob a spectacle, and they will invent the meaning themselves.
That is not madness one could say, that is marketing. It is the same pageantry we live by, the illusion of conquest to distract from impotence. Caligula’s decadence was handmade. Ours runs on automation.
Caligula wasted pearls. We waste the planet. His orgies were intimate. Ours are online. His power was divine. Ours is human, all too human. Different times, same hunger.
And the violence? He brought it to the arena. We stream it on demand. It hums through the news, drips from our phones, hides in our cells. We pretend it is distant, but the world still runs on cruelty. We have simply outsourced it better.
Caligula’s madness looks less like a warning now and more like a prototype.
He was the first man to mistake indulgence for freedom, to want control without purpose, pleasure without consequence, worship without gods. He died at twenty-eight, burned out by his own infinity. His empire collapsed from indulgence and exhaustion.
It is obvious we are on the same track.