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Camus completed Caligula when he was 25. The play begins with the death of Drusilla, and the turning point of Caligula's life. The work itself is about cruelty and the arbitary exercise of power. Written in 1938 and first performed in 1945, no-one was left with any doubt of the influences and inferences of the play. Consider the time of writing. The world had witnessed dictators from both ends of the political spectrum espousing and putting into practice fantastic ideological plans. Mussolini bragged about a building a "New Rome"; Hilter guaranteed an "Aryan" empire; Stalin assured the necessity of his purges in the bringing about of a communist utopia [Stephen Bronner Camus: Portrait of a Moralist. (1999)].
After the death of his sister/lover, Caligula realises a fact: "men die and they are not happy". He is experiencing the absurdity of human existence. Caligula wants to make the impossible, possible. He has realised the meaningless of the world and wants to make everyone else aware of it. The plan is to make everything in life obviously meaningless. He arbitrarily kills and makes ludicous decrees such as a new order of merit based on the number of times a man visits the emperor's brothel (which he has staffed with the wives and mistresses of the Patricians).
Calgula's acts are not one's of random madness, each of his bizarre prouncements has a curious logic to them. When it is pointed out that he is a terror to the Roman people, he [feigns] surprise, reiterating the fact that what he's doing is a gift to the people - letting them understand the meaningless of life. Afterall, he adds, in the time he's been emperor, he hasn't gone to war, saving thousands of lives. But of course, Caligula is no hero, he represnts the governments of Camus' time and the suffering their arbitary rule creates.
A criticism of the play is that although Caligula represents the authoritarian powers of the day [Fascism, Nazism, Communism] these powers did not express the meaningless of life. Camus does not want us to resign ourselves, as Caligula does, to the absurd but neither did the proponents of Nazism et al. If we are to be cautious against the spead of totalitarianism, then we can be so without needing to be aware of the absurd nature of the world [Bronner (1999)].
However, as an elboration of the absurd, the play succeeds and works in addition with Camus' Myth and Stanger in helping us understand a difficult philosophical idea.
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