Caligula (12-41 AD)

He came to power at twenty-four to the most enthusiastic reception Rome had given any emperor. The treasury was opened, political prisoners were freed, the oppressive machinery of his predecessor Tiberius was dismantled. For a brief moment, Caligula looked like exactly what Rome had been waiting for.

What happened next is one of antiquity's most debated questions - and one of its most lurid narratives. The declarations of divinity. The campaigns against the sea. The horse. The stories come almost entirely from writers working decades after his death, with their own reasons to discredit the Julio-Claudian line, and modern historians have picked them apart with increasing skepticism.

What nobody disputes is the ending. In January 41 AD, after less than four years in power, Praetorian officers cornered him at the Palatine Games and stabbed him to death at twenty-eight. His wife and infant daughter were killed the same day.

Whether Caligula was a sadist, a man broken by trauma, or simply a young emperor whose worst instincts were never checked by anyone with the power to do so - the answer, if there is one, lies somewhere in the gap between the stories that survived and the man they were written about.