It was satire
Mary Beard: Caligula, 26 April 2012
Caligula: A Biography
by Aloys Winterling, translated by Deborah LucasScheider, Glenn Most and Paul Psoinos.
California, 229 pp., £24.95, October 2011,978 0 520 24895 3 Show More
by Aloys Winterling, translated by Deborah LucasScheider, Glenn Most and Paul Psoinos.
California, 229 pp., £24.95, October 2011,
“... King Canute has had a raw deal from history. He took his throne down to the beach in order to show his servile courtiers that not even a king could control the waves (that was in God’s power alone). But, ironically, he is now most often remembered as the silly old duffer who got soaked on the seashore because he thought he could master the tides. When, for example, Ryan Giggs tried last year to use a super-injunction to stop the swell of news about his private life, he was hailed as ‘the King Canute of football ... ”