🏛️ Gorgocutie explains
Okay mythobabes, we’re entering bananas territory — this is Caligula, and the meme barely exaggerates.
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as Caligula (“Little Boots”), was Rome’s third emperor, reigning from 37 to 41 AD. The first six months were great — he freed political prisoners and held lavish games. Then a severe illness (possibly encephalitis) hit him, and he emerged as an absolute lunatic.
Some of his greatest hits: declaring himself a living god, building a floating bridge of boats across the Bay of Baiae just to ride his horse across it, planning to make his favourite horse Incitatus a consul, and — yes — sleeping with married noblewomen and then talking about it in detail with their husbands. The ancient sources (Suetonius, Cassius Dio) claim he’d host lavish banquets and then take the wives of prominent senators aside while the husbands watched.
This meme imagines Caligula pulling that exact stunt at Lucullus’s famous gardens — Lucullus was a Roman general famous for his obscenely luxurious banquets, so the venue choice is chef’s kiss.
The punchline is that the guests are annoyed but not surprised. That’s what it was like being a Roman senator under Caligula. And yes, he was assassinated four years into his reign by his own Praetorian Guard. Shocker.
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