How's about Caligula (Latin: Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus;[1] 31 August 12 AD – 24 January 41 AD), also known as Gaius; Roman Emperor from 37 AD to 41 AD.
There's a cool History Channel program about Caligula going around on cable, in which it describes
Caligula, the youthful Roman Emperor
-who was fascinated with Egyptian Pharaohs
-who despised the idea of a more democratic Roman Republic, in which the Emperor's power was moderated by the Senate,
-who had his familial rivals for the throne (including his innocent 14 year old nephew) banished or assassinated, or forced them to take their own lives,
-who was a heavy duty, indulgent libertine and partier,
-who had a torrid and public affair with his youngest sister, despite the contemporary prohibition against incest in Roman Culture
-he had aristocrats and High Roman Senators tortured and killed, sometimes for vain and trivial reasons; supposedly Caligula like to make sure that the person slowly died, fully aware of their life draining away,
-Caligula increased the violence and gore in The Colliseum by feeding human prisoners to the carnivores when there were shortages of livestock, and he greatly increasing the number of Gladiatoral matches and deaths involving both animals and people, and he also prolonged the violence by carefully matching the combatants and by controlling their weaponry,
-Caligula proclaimed himself to be a living Roman God, and demanded to be worshiped accordingly - too much for even the Praetorian Guard, so Caligula was of course assassinated one day.
The theme of the History Channel show is, "Was Caligula really insane?" - i.e., mentally ill - supposedly he once directed his legions, who were preparing to invade Britain, to attack the ocean at Normandy, then had his troops gather seashells, and at one point he wanted to make his favorite race horse his consul to the Senate...but the show's thesis is that he wasn't psychotic, only that he was pulling a lot of gaslighting to confuse his enemies.
But IMO Caligula does seem to fit the criteria for moral Insanity:
...physician James Cowles Prichard coined the term in 1835 in his Treatise on insanity and other disorders affecting the mind. He defined moral insanity as: "madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the interest or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucinations"...Prichard was indebted to the work of physician Philippe Pinel, [who] had described mental diseases of only partial, affective, insanity. His concept Manie sans délire (Latin - mania sine delirio; French - folie raisonnante or folie lucide raisonnante, monomanie affective; German - Moralisches Irresein) referred to insanity without delusion. That is, the sufferer was thought to be mad in one area only and thus the personality of the individual might be distorted but his or her intellectual faculties were unimpaired.
quoted from Wikipedia, "Moral Insanity."
Although Caligula banished one of his sisters, she later gave birth to none other than Nero, yet another Roman Emperor with malignant narcissistic and/or antisocial traits (suggesting an underlying genetic substrate - although Nero's father was a criminal). Caligula and Nero both behaved in ways that led Stone (1998) to first describe Roman Emperor Syndrome in connection with psychopathy, as "the quest...for the complete subjugation and the slow and painful destruction of other human beings."
IMO opinion if you watch the 2000 movie "Gladiator," there's obviously a lot of Caligula in Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus.
later,
orion
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