Caligula

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1944

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Summary

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Act III

Act IV

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Mirrors

Mirrors appear throughout the play. While other characters might interact with a mirror briefly—as Caesonia does on occasion—they become a focal point for Caligula alone. Caligula interacts with a mirror before he interacts with any humans. On his first appearance, Caligula catches sight of his reflection. His last interaction in the play—other than with his assassins—is also with a mirror.

While Caligula is usually in complete command of others, he always comes up short when he sees himself. For someone who is so set on pursuing the impossible, on achieving the level of godhood, it is a rude awakening to be faced with his own image, with all the imperfections and limitations that image might imply. The mirror forces him to confront the reality that he cannot control himself and his own destiny.

Mirrors afford Caligula the opportunity for self-reflection. Most of his conversations with other characters border on the absurd, but when confronted with a mirror, Caligula must wrestle with his own inner contradictions. Self-reflection leads him, on two occasions, to striking or smashing the mirror. At the end of Act I, he hits the mirror with a gong-hammer to efface his reflection. Only after does he feel in control of the situation once again.

He shatters the mirror at the end of his soliloquy in Act IV, just before his death. He “rises, picks up a stool, and returns to the mirror, breathing heavily. He contemplates himself, makes a slight leap forward, and watching the symmetrical movement of his reflected self, hurls the stool at it, screaming” (73). Caligula is enraged that he can’t manipulate his own image in the same way he manipulates others. He can’t make his image bend to his will. It simply does whatever he does, illustrating his lack of freedom.

Performances

The emperor often performs, ranging from his attempt at religious theater, when he plays the goddess Venus, to his attempts to entrap the patricians. He also compels performances from others, as with the poets’ competition. These performances are meant to reflect that the way people live their lives is an act. Caligula is poking fun at meaningless rules and behaviors, which he sees as just as absurd as his own attempts to play Venus or to convey an “artistic emotion” through a dance move. If nothing matters except the bleak reality of death, then any social conventions amount to little more than playacting.

The Moon

The moon represents the pursuit of the impossible. Upon his first appearance, Caligula confesses to Helicon that he has been roaming the countryside, trying to capture the moon. Coming on the heels of his sister Drusilla’s death, Caligula’s quest for the moon represents his attempt to wrestle with the idea of love and death’s finality. He perceives love—the kind of love which most people regard as meaningful—as impossible, contradicted by the logic of mortality, in which all affections and attachments fall away to nothingness. To counter death’s meaninglessness, he pursues the impossible, symbolized by the moon.

The moon has dual meaning as a symbol of love. This can be seen most clearly in Caligula’s conversation with Helicon in Act III, in which the emperor fantasizes about the moon as if it were a lover: “Slowly, shyly she approached, through the warm night air, soft, light as gossamer, naked in beauty. She […] glided to my bed, poured herself into it, and flooded me with her smiles and sheen” (46).

The moon’s connection to love and the impossible is seen again at the end of the play, when Caligula rejects the last traces of affection in his life by murdering Caesonia, and then reflects upon his failure to capture the moon: “If I’d had the moon, if love were enough, all might have been different” (73). The kind of love which brings meaning to one’s life is equated with the impossible, like seizing the moon. Caligula admits that such possibilities cannot be real when death is the only thing that matters.