Caligula's Madness, an Annotated Bibliography: 1856--2024

This annotated bibliography was prepared by three undergraduate students at Macquarie University in Sydney in 2024. This project was completed as part of a capstone project in the Bachelor of Arts degree. Overseeing this project was Professor of Ancient History, Professor Ray Laurence, and Solutions Architect (Digital Humanities), Dr Brian Ballsun-Stanton. 

The Capstone was an experimental stream, exploring discipline-specific research projects in Ancient History in conjunction with the deep and deliberate use of generative AI. We explored the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to investigate secondary sources on Emperor Gaius Caligula, what they say about his "madness", and how this may affect his legacy. We also documented our use of AI to give suggestions on how AI can be taught in future at university.

We collected approximately 160 secondary sources on this topic and used LLMs, specifically Claude 3.5 Sonnet on Perplexity.ai, to review each source and provide a ~100-word summary of the author’s position on the mental state of Caligula. We spent approximately 13 weeks refining an effective prompt that was used to create these summaries. We cross-checked the summary with the source material to ensure accuracy. These summaries are provided beneath each bibliographic entry contained in this document. 

The purpose of this project was to critically and ethically use AI to assist in research, and to create an annotated bibliography to demonstrate the effective uses of AI. We hope that the document we have created from this project will aid future research into the “madness” of the emperor Caligula by summarising the arguments of various authors on this subject. We also hope this will be a good starting point for future students and researchers on this topic.

Sources in foreign languages are included and were translated by AI. For ease, the arguments contained in those sources are summarised in English. Entries are listed alphabetically. The date range of these sources is from 1856-2024. We noticed some common themes emerge in the sources we collected:

• Caligula being misrepresented in contemporary and ancient sources, with many of his jokes and outbursts taken as “madness”;
• Caligula being politically calculated in his actions;
• Caligula as a young, power-obsessed man, thrust into the top position;
• Caligula as a possible epileptic, which explains some of his strange behaviour.

We have included an appendix of some example prompts and answers, to show our process in forming this annotated bibliography. We hope that these prompts can demonstrate how to use AI effectively for giving summaries for sources, which can help determine if sources are useful for your research. We believe that using AI and these prompts can help save time, by providing useful information on sources that will help you eliminate the ones that are not relevant to your topic and summarise the arguments of the ones that are relevant.