Public profile Caligula shared many of the popular passions and enthusiasms of the lower classes and young aristocrats: public spectacles, particularly gladiator contests, chariot and horse racing, the theatre and gambling, but all on a scale with which the nobility could not match. He trained with professional gladiators and staged exceptionally lavish gladiator games, being granted exemption by the senate from the sumptuary laws that limited the number of gladiators to be kept in Rome. He was openly and vocally partisan in his uninhibited support or disapproval of particular charioteers, racing teams, gladiators and actors, shouting encouragement or scorn, sometimes singing along with paid performers or declaiming the actors' lines, and generally behaving as "one of the crowd". In gladiator contests, he supported the parmularius type, who fought using small, round shields. In chariot races, he supported the Greens, and personally drove his favourite racehorse, Incitatus ("Speedy") as a member of the Green faction. Most of Rome's aristocracy would have found this an unprecedented, unacceptable indignity for any of their number, let alone their emperor.
Public profile Caligula shared many of the popular passions and enthusiasms of the lower classes and young aristocrats: public spectacles, particularly gladiator contests, chariot and horse racing, the theatre and gambling, but all on a scale with which the nobility could not match. He trained with professional gladiators and staged exceptionally lavish gladiator games, being granted exemption by the senate from the sumptuary laws that limited the number of gladiators to be kept in Rome. He was openly and vocally partisan in his uninhibited support or disapproval of particular charioteers, racing teams, gladiators and actors, shouting encouragement or scorn, sometimes singing along with paid performers or declaiming the actors' lines, and generally behaving as "one of the crowd". In gladiator contests, he supported the parmularius type who fought using small, round shields. In chariot races, he supported the Greens, and personally drove his favourite racehorse, Incitatus ("Speedy") as a member of the Green faction. Most of Rome's aristocracy would have found this an unprecedented, unacceptable indignity for any of their number, let alone their emperor.