Incitatus

Incitatus

Incitatus was Roman emperor Caligula's favored horse. Its name is a Latin adjective meaning "swift" or "at full gallop".

According to Suetonius's "Lives of the Twelve Caesars", Incitatus had a stable of marble, with an ivory manger, purple blankets, and a collar of precious stones. Others have indicated that the horse was attended to by eighteen servants, and was fed oats mixed with gold flake. Suetonius also wrote that Caligula planned to make Incitatus a consul. Caligula even procured him a wife, a mare named Penelope. It has also been said Caligula claimed his horse to be a 'combination of all the gods' and demanded that he be worshiped as such.

The horse would "invite" dignitaries to dine with him in a house outfitted with servants there to entertain such events.

Caligula's Folly

Historical revisionists like Anthony A. Barrett in "Caligula: The Corruption of Power" (Yale, 1990) question the negative portrait of Caligula. They ascribe Caligula's treatment of Incitatus as a way of ridiculing and angering the Senate, rather than a proof of his insanity. They suggest that later historians like Suetonius and Dio Cassius were motivated by the politics of their times and that their histories were distorted by the desire to include more colorful, but perhaps less reliable sources.

Incitatus appears as a fable character in issue 22 of the comic "Jack of Fables".

ee also

*List of historical horses


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