# Loeb Suetonius prints the received story that Incitatus was to be made consul

Date: 1913

## The fact

Rolfe’s Loeb transmits the horse-consul anecdote as part of the vita. The story is received gossip, not a surviving senatus consultum naming a horse.

## Context

Hostile biography uses animals to say the senate was a prop. Upgrading the joke into a Fact of equine office would be invention. Keeping it as a printed smear is honest.

[Caligula](/people/caligula) is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Official edition, museum, or agency page and an independent publisher independently describe this instrument.

Official or archival record: Suetonius, Caligula — LacusCurtius (Loeb English) (https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Caligula*.html; LacusCurtius / University of Chicago).

## Significance

A horse-consul tale is a corruption-caption of low confidence, not a gazette notice.

A horse-consul tale is a corruption-caption of low confidence, not a gazette notice.

## What is established and what is not

Established as a dated public record of this instrument.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.

## People

- Caligula: https://factrail.ai/people/caligula

## Drivers

- Institutional Corruption: https://factrail.ai/drivers/institutional-corruption

## Sources

- https://www.livius.org/articles/person/caligula/
- https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Caligula*.html

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/cal-incitatus-consul-story