User:Haploidavey/sandbox

Caligula's first wife was Junia Claudia, daughter of ex-consul Marcus Junius Silanus. Like most marriages in Rome's upper echelons and, perhaps, all but one of Caligula's four marriages, this was a political alliance, intended to produce a legitimate heir and further Caligula's dynasty. Junia and her baby died in child-birth, less than a year later. Soon after, Macro seems to have persuaded his own wife, Ennia Thrasylla, to take up a sexual affair with Caligula, perhaps to help him through the loss. Suetonius and Dio claim that Caligula met Livia Orestilla at her marriage to Gaius Calpurnius Piso, and abducted her so that he could marry her instead and father a legitimate heir. When she proved faithful to her former husband, Caligula banished her. The Arval Brethren's records confirm her marriage to Piso, but under ordinary Roman custom. Caligula's marriage to the "beautiful... very wealthy" and extravagant Lollia Paulina was quickly followed by divorce, on the grounds of her infertility. His fourth and last marriage, to Caesonia, seems to have been a love-match, in which he was both "uxorious and monogamous", and fathered a daughter whom he named Julia Drusilla, in commemoration of his late sister. Caligula's contemporaries could not understand his attraction to Caesonia; she had proved herself fertile in previous marriages but also had a reputation for "high living and low morals", very far from the model of an aristocratic Roman wife. Tales reported by Josephus, Suetonius and the satirist Juvenal regarding Caligula's sexual dynamism are inconsistent with rumours that Caesonia had to arouse his interest with a love potion, which turned his mind and brought on his "madness". Barrett suggests that this rumour might have had no foundation other than Caligula's quip that "he felt like torturing Caesonia to discover why he loved her so passionately.