Caligula

Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus was born in AD 12, the son of the popular general Germanicus. As a small boy in his father's camps on the Rhine he wore a miniature soldier's uniform, and the troops nicknamed him Caligula, little boot. He succeeded Tiberius in March AD 37 to great public joy. Philo of Alexandria, who later met him, writes that the whole empire celebrated his accession, and that a grave illness late that year marked a turn for the worse.

Almost everything we read about him comes from writers hostile to his memory. According to Suetonius, he demanded divine honors, humiliated senators and ruled by fear. Cassius Dio tells similar stories, including the plan to make Incitatus consul. Some modern historians read many of these episodes as calculated insults to an aristocracy he despised, sharpened in the retelling. On 24 January AD 41, officers of the Praetorian Guard led by the tribune Cassius Chaerea killed him in a covered passage on the Palatine. He was twenty-eight.