Caligula Staffers Feel Snubbed By Roman Social Scene

“I ​was at the Forum, chatting up this freeborn woman. We’re flirting and checking out the papyrus together, and she’s like, “What do you do?” and I was evasive, because this isn’t my first rodeo or even my first ostrich race and I know how closed minded and bigoted Romans are against Caligula. So I dodged the question and said I work for “The Republic”. She got suspicious and signalled her slave who went and found out who I was. That was the end of that. She actually spat in my face. “Had any orgies with your sisters lately?” she yelled. Of course I would never have an orgy with my sisters, and what Caligula does in his personal life is his own business, we knew we weren’t crowning a boy scout, but that doesn’t stop people from judging me. I’m just a magistrate doing my job. I bet this never happened to Tiberius’s staffers.”

— Seneca

“Last night, I was at the baths of Agrippa just about to dip into the caldarium, and the attendant Albus asked me to leave. “Your boss gets off watching people being eaten by wild animals,” he said. “How can you live with yourself?” It’s so hypocritical because Augustus did almost the same thing, he was just as bad even if he wasn’t a raving lunatic who raped the sons and daughters of consuls. Just once I’d like to see someone protest that smug Augustus, who didn’t even grow up in Rome. But they don’t. Caligula Derangement Syndrome strikes again.”

— Claudius

“We get zero respect in Rome, and then on top of that, we’re working in this completely paranoid palace environment where if we make one wrong step, we know that Caligula could hang us upside down and saw us in half. So there’s that additional pressure too.”

— Junius

​“I’m still pretty steamed about what happened at the baths. Albus’s actions say far more about him than about me. I work for an Emperor whose name will be synonymous with depravity and sadism and the worst excesses of a morally corrupt empire. I can live with myself. Can Albus say the same after being so impolite?”​

— Claudius again

“Caligula isn’t his real name, you know. The name means​ ‘Little Boots’ because when he was a kid, he was dressed up in military garb and soldiers made fun of him. Ha! Please don’t tell Caligula I talked about his little boots.”​

— High-ranking Caligula administration official

​“Oh, it’s brutal. I was in the amphitheatre watching a bestiarii gore a bear, and this rhetorician spotted me and pointed his finger, and soon everyone was glaring and shouting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” I had to leave before the ostrich race even started. And yes, it’s true that Caligula probably killed his grandmother, that is something he would do, and I get people aren’t happy about it. And also he lied about conquering Britain and tried to pass a bunch of seashells off as war spoils and fool all of Rome into believing he was a great warrior. And he brought back the treason trials just to make a profit. And he sleeps with the wives of Senators and then brags about it. And he tried to appoint his horse as a consul. And he cut off the head of our deity statues and replaced them with his own image. And he forces the people of Rome to worship him as a God and demands that a statue of himself be built in the Temple of Jerusalem because what could possibly go wrong there? And he bashed the head of a priest with a hammer as he was sacrificing to the gods. Fine. His policies are unpopular. I get it. That’s still no reason for citizens to behave so uncivilly. It’s just politics. When did people become so rude?”​

— Lucius

​“Poor Junius. What a thing to do to a man’s urethra. Oh well, that’s what happens to leakers when Little Boots is in charge… Please don’t tell Caligula I said that.”​

— Claudius

Some inspiration for this piece here:

-According to Politico, young Trump staffers dodge the question of where they work because too many people don’t want to date them

“Her actions say far more about her than about me” — Sarah Sanders, after being asked to leave a restaurant on moral grounds

“Shame! Shame! Shame!” — Protesters at a Mexican restaurant shouting at Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielson after she publicly defended Donald Trump’s child separation policy