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��He is converting his philosophy into corpses and—unfortunately for us—it’s a philosophy that’s logical from start to finish.��

Rome’s third emperor, , had a short rule (A.D. 37-41) yet left a lasting legacy of carnage and brutality. Born Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus but nicknamed Caligula meaning “little boot�� in reference to his military uniform, his tyrannical reign of terror and fiscal irresponsibility led to his assassination when he was 28 years old. While surviving sources are few, there is reason to believe his first few months as emperor were noble and tame and many believed mental illness may have contributed to his sadism. Albert Camus�� first play, Caligula, harnesses the story of the tyrant emperor in four acts that examine Camus�� ideas of absurdity, reinterpreting the historical figure through 20th century philosophical discourse (though Camus claimed it was not a philosophical play). Through a rather Nietzschean “will to power,�� Camus depicts Caligula embracing absurdity through calculated logic, exemplifying the ideas that anything is possible and man must replace God as Caligula attempts to recreate the randomness of death and the arbitrariness of life while seeking to create meaning out of meaninglessness. An eminently readable work, Caligula interrogates heady ideas and thrives on drawing discomfort from the audience in a violent saga of absurdity, power and revolt.

The assassination of Caligula, depicted by Giuseppe Mochetti

Camus began writing Caligula in 1937, and though he finished in 1939 it underwent several revisions before it was finally staged in Paris after the war. As he writes in his introduction, Camus intended himself to strut and fret his hour upon the stage as Caligula, and what a role it is with on stage murders and plenty of shouting and emotion. Camus adapted the play—primarily Cherea’s role—to fit his changing views on absurdity, though also, as Oliver Gloag argues in his book on Camus, in response to Hitler and the occupation of France. Lines were cut to ensure it didn’t seem apologetic for tyrants, and added Cherea’s line about fighting ideas ��whose triumph would mean the end of the world�� as a direct callout against the Nazis. Gloag argue’s Cherea exists to tone down the absurd as ��nihilistic purity was no longer defensible�� In the essay Camus and the Theater, Christine Margerrison writes that Camus expressed frustrations that the play was often misunderstood, being mistaken as an existentialist work (he , and considered existentialism ��philosophical suicide��), being mistaken as a critique of Jean-Paul Sartre (he wrote it before the rise of Sartrean existentialism), or being a critique against tyrants or communism. Many of these elements are justifiable interpretations (or present in other works) though Camus stressed they overlooked the main purpose of the dilemas of freedom and violence, a revolt of the powerful against society, and an expression of living in absurdity through logic.

French production of Caligula, 1945

This is an excellent play, and Camus launches us into the start of Caligula’s reign of violence by first showing the emperor in a moment of vulnerability. Following the death of his sister, Drusilla, Caligula contemplates that ��life is quite intolerable,�� existence is absurd, and regrets being unable to obtain the literal moon to have something absurd, something ��which isn’t of this world.�� What use is power if one can’t have the moon? It is a pivotal moment, one that hardens into a sadism where he has ��resolved to be logical�� and seeks freedom at the expense of others.

��I’m surrounded by lies and self-deception. But I’ve had enough of that; I wish men to live by the light of truth. And I’ve the power to make them do so. For I know what they need and haven’t got. They're without understanding and they need a teacher����

The tyrannical ruler can, arguably, be seen as a tyranny of the academics and philosophers of the time as well, which Camus delves into more critically in The Fall. He seeks to punish his subjects, to become a god of sorts in the absence of one as he sees it. As Camus wrote in his notebooks ��. If this world is meaningless then …it is on us to create God...we have only one way to create God and that is to become God.�� He first has everyone make a will to the State and decides he will execute people at random, like the arbitrariness of death (��It has dawned on you that a man needn’t have done anything for him to die.��), and thus fund the empire. ��If the Treasury has paramount importance, human life has none,�� he says (feels a critique on government and capitalism in general there), and preaches that ��this world has no importance; once a man realizes that, he wins his freedom.�� This is a very different revolt than the sort he would be noteworthy for discussing in books like The Rebel, though Camus also implies the teachings of Caligula are not his own (another aspect that frustrated him when viewers assumed that was his aim). Though years of senseless and random murder does not make the people happy, and Caligula knows he is backing them into a corner that can only lead to his own murder at their hands.

��Other artists create to compensate for their lack of power. I don’t need to make a work of art; I live it.��

Camus delivers a fascinating dichotomy with Caligula embracing the absurdity of existence and believing ��freedom has no frontier,�� or ��one is always free at someone else’s expense�� with the people who tend to avoid metaphysical thoughts of existence. We are disquieted by the action, with on stage murders, sexual assaults and constant humiliation. There is a counter-balance, however, in Cherea who on one hand understands Caligula’s quest for the absurd (and perhaps shares it) but cannot abide by the violence. He, in turn, also does not wish to commit it and struggles despite organizing an assassination. As Colin Davis argues in his essay Violence and Ethics in Camus, Cherea is an expression of what Camus wrote in his essays Neither Victims Nor Executioners that violence is ��at the same time inevitable and unjustifiable�� as well the teachings in The Rebel of ��conceding the existence of an ethical dilemma but endeavoring to overcome it.��

We also have Scipio who also seems a foil to Caligula, ��perhaps because the same eternal truths appeal to us both,�� as Caligula observes, and is frustrated with Caligula’s rejection of beauty through his brutality. Though Caligula is not a hero, he is still an expression of Camus�� idea of revolting against the absurdity of existence, and Scipio rejects Caligula raging against the heavens and predicts ��god-men�� will rise against him. As Alba della Fazia Amoia writes in her book of Camus criticism, ��[Caligula’s] deliberate irrationality makes him a dadaistic figure, hihilitic in character and inevitably self-destroying�� and compares his body count to a plague—which caught my attention as Camus�� The Plague also features a group of men not conspiring but organizing to fight back the irrationality and arbitrariness of death in a sort of personified form. Though there the response is one that is more clearly “good�� and justifiable (I love the line by Cherea here that ��some actions are…more praiseworthy,�� though Davis says 'more beautiful' is a more accurate translation, and gets at what I'm attempting to say here) and not actually violent where here the revolt is one of bloodshed. As Caligula’s dying words are ��I’m still alive�� we see that, though his body may have succumbed to death, his spirit of violence is very much alive in the new “will to power�� (as Friedrich Nietzsche discussed, something Camus toned down in the play due to the Nazi’s embrace of his philosophy) enacted by the conspirators who have slain him. The moral dilemma of violence and freedom speaks loudly in the silence after the curtain falls.

��All I need is for the impossible to be. The impossible!��

Caligula is part of what Camus termed the “Cycle of the Absurd�� along with The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, but of all of them it seems to most leave us in a ponderous state as it asks us how people can apply meaning to meaninglessness, either by challenging the gods or becoming a god oneself, and then justify our actions for freedom in the face of violence or without causing harm to others. This is a subject of ethical living Simone de Beauvoir would address in The Ethics of Ambiguity and here we have Camus directly confronting the audience with that question to take home and grapple with. Caligula is an interesting play that works well as an exciting look at Caligula as a historical figure through modern philosophical inquiry while also functioning as another critical expression of Camus�� canon of ideas. I also enjoy seeing how his ideas morph over time, both in conjunction with his other works but also in response to the history that was happening in real time during the 30’s and 40’s. A problematic figure, but a brilliant one nonetheless, Albert Camus is a wonderful mind to see at work, especially one that can fret about the stage as it does here in Caligula. Also huge shoutout to Kushagri for inviting me to read this together, you should definitely check out her review here too!

4.5/5

��Yet, really, it’s quite simple. If I’d had the moon, if love were enough, all might have been different.��