Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Posted to Facebook yesterday. I had been recalling Albert Camus’s play Caligula (adapted into English by Justin O’Brien), which I happened to see in February 1960, during its famously brief — one month long — run at the 54th Street Theatre in NYC — which led me to investigate Wikipedia’s long and intricate entry on

Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (31 August 12 – 24 January 41), better known by his nickname Caligula …, Roman emperor from AD 37 until his assassination in AD 41.

and then to write on FB:

Was just musing on TFG as the new Caligula (vengeful, unclear on the separation of his personal fortune and the state’s coffers, declaring himself a god, etc.) when I thought to look for parallel uses in the press. I bring you

the Daily Beast in 2011, Benjamin Netanyahu as the new Caligula; the Times (of London) in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, the new Caligula; the Irish Times in 2016, [Helmut Grabpussy], the new Caligula?; POLITICO.eu in 2020, Boris Johnson the new Caligula

(there are probably more)

Then a brief FB exchange on the phenomenon:

— Robert Coren: Remarkable how many people take him as a role model (or how readily the press chooses that particular analogy).

— AZ > RC: Certainly, the press reaches easily for the analogy. But you could argue that there’s a style of authoritarian leadership that crops up again and again.

That would be worth commenting on.

This entry was posted on October 25, 2024 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Figurative language, History, Language and politics, Names, Nicknames, Plays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.