Salvaging Caligula

Nineteen centuries of foundered orgy looked up at the hydroairplane which last week waltzed high over Lake Nemi in the Alban hills back of Rome. And Giuseppe Cultrera, Etruscan scholar in the plane,* looked down from the vantage of his flying height through Nemi's waters and could see what none but groping divers theretofore had seen--the sunken Golden Barge whereon epileptic Emperor Caligula/-, great-grandson of Augustus, and his minions held their carouses.

Two vessels lie on Lake Nemi's bottom. Centuries of slime cover them, and rocks that have slipped from the steep sides of the Alban crater which contains the lake. One of them, the smaller, is certainly Caligula's. Treasure hunters since the 15th century have tried to raise the barge, un successfully and to its great damage. Some years ago one adventurer yanked loose a lead pipe. On it was an inscription which referred to Caligula. The float was decorated with marble, mosaics and carved woodwork.

Where past salvagers failed to raise Caligula's barge, Premier Mussolini's scientific henchmen were last week succeeding by an inverse procedure. Four great electric pumps, which they had set up at Lake Nemi's edge, were lowering the water level. By April 21, the 2,280th anniversary of Rome's legendary founding, they must, according to their instructions, uncover the vessel. Last week only a few feet of water remained above it. It is probable that the pumpers will make their schedule and the curious may gloat at the water-logged site of Caligula's orgies.

Exactly 1,888 years ago last week Caligula was assassinated for insult to a Praetorian tribune. He was only 29, but into the few years of his manhood he packed a rare amount of extravagance, cruelty, debauchery.

He was a tall, pale, ill-shaped scoundrel, with scrawny neck and spindly legs. His body was very hairy, and on that score, in his foppishness, he was very sensitive. Whoever mentioned a goat in his presence he butchered incontinently. His face was naturally ugly. Nonetheless he practiced grimaces before mirrors to achieve an awful, imperious scowl.

From the Egyptians, through Augustus, he developed the idea of his own divinity. He had the heads of the sculptured gods chopped off and his own countenance cemented to the torsos. He had a good image of himself built and worshipped as a god. Each day he clothed it with duplicates of his own gaudy, jeweled garments.

He had the unnatural inflection that, 1,500 years later, Cesare Cardinal Borgia inclined to--incest with his sisters. His fancies led him to roast people alive, feed others to wild beasts. He loved to mutilate children, women, men. At executions he made victims' parents attend and after the slaughter dine with him, to enjoy their obsequious gagging.

In Caligula's time, 12-41 A.D., the popular rendezvous of Rome's patrician bounders was Lake Nemi (Nemorensis Lacus). There among symbolic oak trees was the Temple of Diana, richest in Latium. Diana was the moon goddess, Caligula's unreachable hope. Every time she was full he would stretch out his arms to her, implore her to his embraces.

Despite all his obsessions and oppressions, Rome's citizens, soldiers and provincials admired Caligula. That was not his real name. His real name was Gaius Caesar. But, because he was charming as a little boy when he plopped in soldiers' boots along the Rhine with his father Germanicus, everyone called him, and con tinued to call him through his short life, Caligula. Caligula means "Little Boots."

Presumably it is for the memory of Caligula the soldier, rather than Caligula the desperate debauchee, that Premier Mussolini's engineers and archaeologists are laboring at Lake Nemi.

*U. S. antiquarians know him well as the director of Rome's Musco di Villa Giulia.

/-Practically all the Julian clan had unbalanced minds. Julius Caesar, Augustus' uncle, had epilepsy.