Sometime between 37 and 41 CE, the emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus — known to history as Caligula — reportedly expressed his intention to appoint his favorite horse, Incitatus, as consul of Rome. The story has survived two millennia, become one of the most-cited accounts of imperial Roman decadence, and is repeated to this day as evidence of the madness of one of antiquity’s most notorious rulers.
The problem is that no one knows with any certainty whether it actually happened.
What is certain is that Incitatus existed, that Caligula treated him with extraordinary privileges, and that the story of the would-be consul reveals as much about the nature of Roman imperial power as it does about how history gets written — and distorted — by those who survive to tell it.
Who Was Incitatus?
The name Incitatus means, in Latin, “the swift one” or “he who accelerates” — a direct reference to the animal’s speed. He was a racehorse, likely of noble breeding, used in the chariot races at the Circus Maximus, Rome’s most popular mass entertainment venue.
Chariot racing was the Roman equivalent of a combination between Formula 1 and professional football: crowds of hundreds of thousands, colossal wagering, fierce rivalry between factions (Green, Blue, Red, White) with strong political undertones, and racehorses treated as elite athletes. Owners of winning horses accumulated fortunes, fame, and considerable political influence.
Caligula was an avowed fanatic of the Green faction. His obsession with Incitatus was not, in context, eccentric within the world of Roman racing — it began, at least, as a fan’s passion for his favorite champion.
What Do the Sources Actually Say About How Caligula Treated Incitatus?
The primary sources on Caligula’s behavior toward Incitatus are the historian Suetonius, writing roughly eighty years after the events, and Cassius Dio, writing more than a hundred years later. Both had political reasons to portray Caligula in the darkest possible terms.
According to Suetonius, Caligula gave Incitatus a marble stable, an ivory manger, purple blankets (a color reserved for royalty), jeweled collars, and housed him in a residence staffed with servants and furnished to receive guests. The emperor reportedly invited Incitatus to his own dinner table and offered him gilded food.
Cassius Dio adds that Caligula promised to appoint Incitatus as consul — and might have followed through had he not been assassinated before he could act on it.
Political Provocation or Madness?
Modern historians offer an alternative reading to the traditional narrative of imperial insanity. The argument runs as follows: Caligula was a skilled political operator who used absurdity as a weapon.
Appointing a horse to a prestigious political office would not have been proof of mental illness — it would have been a deliberate humiliation directed at the Roman Senate. The implied message: the senators are so useless that a horse could perform the same function with equal competence. It was political insult disguised as eccentricity.
There are historical precedents for this kind of reading. Roman emperors used demonstrations of arbitrary power — extravagant sacrifices, impossible demands, public humiliations of aristocrats — to keep the Senate in a state of helplessness. The arbitrariness of power was itself a tool of control.
Was Caligula Actually Insane?
The question of Caligula’s “madness” is more complicated than the popular narrative suggests. The surviving sources were written by members of the senatorial aristocracy — precisely the class that Caligula systematically humiliated. No source favorable to the emperor survived, because the groups who might have supported him were not the ones writing history.
There is evidence that Caligula suffered a serious illness shortly after taking power — possibly encephalitis, hyperthyroidism, or temporal lobe epilepsy — and that his behavior changed substantially afterward. But “changed” is not the same as “became insane.” What the sources record as madness may be, in significant part, progressive autocracy and systematic cruelty — behaviors that absolute rulers tended to develop regardless of any underlying medical condition.
What Happened to Incitatus After Caligula’s Death?
Caligula was assassinated on January 24, 41 CE, by members of the Praetorian Guard, after a reign of less than four years. He was 28 years old.
What happened to Incitatus after that is not recorded in any historical source. The horse simply vanishes from the narrative with the emperor’s assassination — a detail that says something, in itself, about the nature of the horse’s fame. Incitatus was famous not for his own merits but as an extension of Caligula’s personality. Without the emperor, the horse ceased to exist as a historical character.
The new emperor, Claudius — Caligula’s uncle — assumed power under chaotic circumstances. There is no record that he maintained any special treatment for his predecessor’s horse.
Why Has the Story Lasted Two Thousand Years?
The persistence of the Incitatus story across two millennia has several explanations. The simplest is that it is a compelling story — it contains the elements that make narratives memorable: power, absurdity, the inversion of normal order, and an animal in the role of an unwilling protagonist.
But something deeper is at work. The story of Incitatus has become an archetype — the narrative of the powerful figure who exercises authority so arbitrarily that he inverts the normal logic of the world. It is a metaphor for any situation in which authority becomes so disconnected from reality that it begins to resemble a parody of itself.
In modern political commentary, the name Incitatus appears regularly whenever a writer wants to suggest that a particular leader is operating at the same level of disconnection from reality that tradition attributes to Caligula. The horse who may never actually have been nominated consul has become the definitive reference for the absurdity of unchecked power — which is, perhaps, a more interesting fate than any actual Roman consul ever achieved.
