Suetonius wrote The Twelve Caesars in the early 100s AD: biographies of Rome's emperors from Julius Caesar through Domitian. This life is Gaius Caesar, Germanicus's son, nicknamed Caligula — Little Boots — for the army shoes he wore as a child on the Rhine in Germany. It is Rome after Tiberius.

A city tired of a grim old ruler makes him its darling. He spends that hope in four years. Illness, or something that looks like it, turns him capricious: his horse Incitatus, a bridge of boats at Baiae on the Bay of Naples, seashells gathered as Ocean's spoils, a temple to his own spirit. The Senate is humiliated. The Praetorian Guard, the emperor's bodyguard, learns it can kill the man it made. Cassius Chaerea and palace officers cut him down in a covered corridor. Claudius is found hiding and lifted on their shields. This is the short, grotesque story of a young emperor.