Caligula, History, and the Erotic Imagination

Caligula would seem obvious material for a lusty Hollywood biopic. This chapter offers a brisk summary overview of how the screen portraits, drawing primarily on ancient sources and modern novels, led the way to Caligula. Caligula's notoriety inspired numerous low‐budget and strictly fictional...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inA Companion to the Biopic pp. 159 - 189
Main Author Hunter, I.Q
Format Book Chapter
LanguageEnglish
Published Hoboken, NJ, USA John Wiley & Sons, Inc 25.11.2019
Subjects
ancient sources
Caligula
erotic imagination
fictional sexploitation films
lusty Hollywood biopic
modern novels
screen portraits
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Summary:Caligula would seem obvious material for a lusty Hollywood biopic. This chapter offers a brisk summary overview of how the screen portraits, drawing primarily on ancient sources and modern novels, led the way to Caligula. Caligula's notoriety inspired numerous low‐budget and strictly fictional 'sexploitation' films, mostly Italian, in which his partner in sexual misdeeds is often Messalina, his uncle Claudius' proverbially lascivious fourth wife, 'one of the most notorious aristocratic sluts in history' and 'a cinematic natural'. In truth, Caligula's depiction within fictional screen adaptations as villainous sideshow rather than leading man is not so very different from the other emperors’. Surprisingly few biopics have been made about either them or indeed other major Roman figures. People can briefly survey how screen depictions of Caligula integrated ancient scandalous rumours into their narratives, before turning to Caligula, which is ‘a dramatisation of all the most scurrilous stories in Suetonius'.
ISBN:1119554810
9781119554813
DOI:10.1002/9781119554783.ch10