Caligula goes mad 12 months earlier

Here's another Caligula POD.

According to a program I just saw on Caligula, he started out as a decent emperor, got sick 6 months after his coronation, and went nuts shortly after that.

In this timeline, the illness that causes Caligula to go mad occurs 12 months earlier. As a result, he is not made emperor.

How does the empire evolve? Who is elected emperor, if anyone? Does Rome go back to a republican form of government? A constitutional monarchy (like in the other Caligula POD)? Note that there is no adoption involved here, so it's not obvious who the next ruler would be.
 
I suspect something similar to OTL happens. Both of Germanicus's other sons were dead, and Claudius was left standing as the only adult male who was a reasonable choice for emperor, so the Praetorian Guard dragged him out of hiding to elect him.

I see no reason why this should cause Rome to revert back to republicanism, and they were already in effect a constitutional monarchy, though no one would ever dare admit it. We saw that after the death of Nero, who might've easily have given the Romans reason to hate emperors, the government didn't change, and a power struggle simply ensued. Claudius gets chosen and everyone moves on, unless I'm missing something.
 
First, the illness probably didn't cause him to go mad; it just aggravated what was already there. Normal children don't poison their fathers, for example. Caligula was both intelligent and unstable; sooner or later he would have gone over the edge, illness or no illness.

Second, by the time Caligula becomes Emperor Claudius is the only surviving heir, and the Pretorians are in the driver's seat, politically speaking. Seeing that they exist only so long as the Empire exists they are not about to let the Senate back into power. If Caligula loses it earlier they will quietly do away with him and put Claudius on the throne, as Vinland said.
 
First, the illness probably didn't cause him to go mad; it just aggravated what was already there. Normal children don't poison their fathers, for example.

And neither did Caius Germanicus, nicknamed Caligula. Graves made that bit up. (In fact, Germanicus most likely died of throat cancer, and his widow Agripina the Elder made up the poisoning charges against Tiberius in one of her numerous poorly thought-out power grabs.) Actually, I feel I have to make something clear--we really have a very poor idea of what Caligula was like as Emperor. All of our sources were written years later, and make no effort to even pretend to be objective. Needless to say, as the first Emperor to get himself assassinated, there was something of a vested interest in making Caligula look bad--especially on the part of "True, all the plotters were my friends, AND I was escorted away by several of them from the scene of the murder shortly before it occured, but trust me, this was a complete surprise to me" Claudius. He seems to have been a troubled man--but whether or not he was completely insane is tough to determine. What records we have show that many civic projects that Claudius gets credit for were begun by Caligula. But then, he did get himself killed, and as Tiberius showed, that takes some doing.
 
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I think a better way of putting that would be to say that Caligula, whatever his deep personal flaws, paid too much attention to the head count and too little to the 35 families. Fiscally, Caligula is literally the best Emperor Rome ever had, and a fair bit of money got turned around into public works, entertainment and welfare projects. But entertaining the head count at the expense of the nobility is not a good survival tactic.

Agree that Claudius will simply reign earlier.
 
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