Caligula is often painted as a raving lunatic by first-hand accounts. Whether everything said about him is totally accurate is up for debate.
In Henry Grady Weaver’s novel ‘The Mainspring of Human Progress,’ he hints at Caligula’s reign as not as bad for the people as some highly-regarded Emperors.
The following excerpt outlines this-
“Caligula, for instance, merely wasted goods in riotous extravagance and tortured just a few hundred of his subjects for his personal enjoyment. The majority of people always get along comparatively well under a ruler like Caligula. It was the sober, ascetic, industrious Augustus Caesar, who toiling for the welfare of his empire and its people, who began the destruction of Rome and laid the foundation for the misery and human degradation which Europeans suffered for centuries thereafter. He launched a planned economy which was to serve as the basis of the Roman world peace. The Roman legions gave it to all the people of the then-known world- as fast as they could be conquered. From Africa and Asia and England that peace extended, and it was designed to last forever. The hair-splitting economic regulations were perfected by Diocletician, whose stern directives were so efficiently administered that farmers could no longer farm; and many of the businessmen, faced with starvation, committed suicide in preference to being executed for black marketing. There was no work for the workingman, so the beneficent government stepped in and, by taxing the rich, managed for a while to provide the populace with bread and circus tickets. But that was no solution. The improvement was short lived. Money can’t buy good unless the goods are produced. The mounting taxes put more and more people out of business. An increasing amount of workers were forced onto tax-supported relief until there was not enough productive energy at work to pay the tax bills. The great Roman Empire- with its plan for a thousand years of peace and security- collapsed into the Dark Ages. That was the work of the best of emperors.”
From what I am receiving from his words- Although Caligula was a villainous ruler, the infrastructure was stable. Greater leaders that followed him destroyed the Empire. This inspires me to find more information on Caligula’s infrastructure, but most of the information about him comes from his maniacal practices. Do any Roman history buffs have any insight they would be willing to part with?
Even before getting to Caligula, there are some fundamental problems with how the author of the quoted passage is handling Roman history that ought to be addressed. The author states that Augusts created a "planned economy" for the empire. This is simply untrue. To actually set goals, quotas, and prices on an empire-wide scale would have been beyond the administrative capacity of the empire (the Roman empire had very few bureaucrats, fewer than contemporaneous Han China and far fewer than any twentieth century nation in which planned economies were actually put into practice). Nor did Augustus have any particular desire to implement a planned economy. The ideological underpinnings for such an exercise were as absent as the bureaucratic know-how. What Augustus and the other emperors actually wanted was to ensure that the army on the borders was fed and paid, and that the city of Rome did not starve (for at over a million people, she had long since outstripped the capacity of her hinterland to feed her). These tasks were typically accomplished by enticing merchants to do what the emperor wished. Merchants who brought grain to the capital for instance, could receive tax exemptions, Roman citizenship, and re-compensation should their ship sink. A bureaucracy known as the annona was tasked with monitoring grain supplies in the city and arranging contracts for new grain providers. In the event that prices rose too high for the lower classes to afford food, the emperor would subsidize them. Such subsidies were absolutely typical in antiquity: the emperors were merely following in the footsteps of centuries of Greek and then Roman practice.
It is in the light of such subsidization that one ought to see Diocletian's actions. Your author seems to have in mind Diocletian's Price Edict, an imperial decree which sets the maximum price on a wide and eccentric list of goods, from barely flour to lionesses. How it was created, why the prices were set where they were, and how (and if) it was enforced are all open scholarly questions. About the only thing one can be sure of is that your author's view that it was the end result of centuries of fiscal manipulation is entirely wrong. The edict was part of a broader set of reforms Diocletian enacted to attempt to solve what is known today as the Third Century Crisis, fifty odd years of constant civil war that had led to economic collapse and rampant inflation. It was, in other words, a solution to an actual problem, not an attempt to plan the economy. In a similar vein, the emperors did not increase taxes on the rich, but because of the economic downturn, tax revenue declined, and laws about tax-dodging became more strident. As the economic conditions that had once made taking grain to Rome worthwhile changed, emperors began to try and compel merchants to do what earlier rulers had tried to induce them to do. The use of the stick rather than the carrot seemed justified because emperors like Diocletian were convinced that bad men (speculators, price gougers, and the like) were responsible for economic woes. Once more then, there is no attempt to plan the economy, only a desire to fulfill a few basic needs (feeding the army and the city). The argument of planned versus free economies is a modern one which had no bearing on imperial economic thought: emperors neither interfered more than was strictly necessary, nor refrained from interfering if they thought it would be advantageous to do so.