Caligula Themes

Caligula might be mistaken at first for a historical play. The main character is lifted from history, and many of Caligula’s excesses in the play come straight out of Suetonius’s first century work Lives of the Caesars. When the play is carefully read and put into the context of Albert Camus’s other work, however, its historical content is revealed to be merely a vehicle for his philosophical concerns. More specifically, Camus uses the figure of Caligula to explore the apparent “absurdity” of human existence. Camus does not attempt to prove the validity of the absurdist viewpoint. Rather, he accepts it as a starting point for his explorations of how people live and how they ought to live.

The philosophical content of Caligula is best understood in conjunction with Camus’s essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942; The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955), written at roughly the same time. While Camus had finished Caligula in 1939, the play was not performed until 1945 and was undergoing revision during the interim. (It would be further revised for its 1958 revival.) In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus rejects two common responses to discovery of the absurd. The first, “physical suicide,” amounts to a form of submission to the absurd. Given the absence of meaning, one ceases to live. Camus also rejects what he calls “philosophical suicide.” This involves shutting down the intellect in order to avoid the logical conclusions of the absurd—this response Camus associates with conventional...