An Egyptian Representation of Gaius Caligula?- Joe Geranio

 IMPORTANT ROMAN MARBLE HEAD OF OSIRIS WEARING AN ATEF-CROWN

Most probably a representation of the emperor Caligula as Osiris and as an Egyptian king.

Ex Levasseur collection, Paris, early 19th century; Alexandre Asper collecttion, Le Plessis-Robinson, France.

Ca. AD 37-40

H. 17 5/8 in. (45 cm.); 24 in. (61 cm.) with the stand.

From early youth Caligula had shown a great inclination for the products, myths, and men of Egypt, a culture then greatly admired and greatly feared by the Romans. For instance, we know that all his servants were Egyptians, and that Helicon, his most faithful and influential freedman, was an Alexandrian. But shortly after his elevation to absolute power this admiration for the land of the Ptolemies and Pharaohs became more of an obsession that impelled him to attempt to bring his own reign into connection with the policies of his great-grandfather Mark Antony. He sought to introduce into Rome the ideas, the customs, the sumptuousness, and the institutions of the Ptolemaic pharaohic monarchy, to make of his palace a court similar to that of Alexandria, and of himself a divine king, worshipped by his subjects.

Historians have represented this intention as the perverse delirium of an unbridled sensuality, but there was perhaps more politics in his madness than perversity; for it was an attempt to introduce into Rome the dynastic marriages between brothers and sisters which had been the constant tradition of the Ptolemies and the Pharaohs of Egypt. For centuries in Egypt, this practice was looked upon as a sovereign privilege that brought the royal dynasty into relationship with the gods. By means of it, the royal family preserved the semi-divine purity of its blood.

Caligula now decided to transplant this custom to Rome with all the religious pomp of the Egyptian monarchy, and thus transform the family of Augustus, which had been merely the most eminent family of the Roman aristocracy, into a dynasty of gods and demigods the focus of which would be Caligula and his sister Drusilla like another Arsinoë and Ptolemy, whom the Alexandrian throngs had worshiped on the banks of the Nile as Osiris and Isis. The idea had already matured in his mind at the end of the year 37. This is proved by a will made at the time of an illness that he contracted in the autumn of the first year of his rule. In this will he appointed Drusilla heir of his empire, a folly in light of Roman law, which did not admit women to the government, but it proves that Caligula had already thought and acted like an Egyptian king. He also formerly declared her a goddess, to whom all the cities must pay honors. He had a temple built for her, and appointed a body of twenty priests, ten men and ten women, to celebrate her worship; he decreed that her birthday should be a holiday, and he ordered the statue of Venus in the Forum to be carved in her likeness. He rebuilt part of the Isaeum Campense in Rome in Egyptian style and set up a statue of Drusilla as Isis. He also renovated the Serapaeum in the Campus Martius with a shrine to the divine couple.

From RAG FOR EDUCATIONAL USE ONLY.

• Main Author:
    Geranio, Joe.
• Title:
    Portraits of Caligula : the seated figure? / Joe Geranio.
• Host Publication:
    In: The Celator Vol. 21, no. 9 (Sep 2007), p. 6-26 : ill.
• Year:
    2007

See D. Boschung , "Die Bildnisse des Caligula", Gerbruder Mann (1989).

For Educational Use Only.