I'm not quite sure which I saw first, as my first ever John Hurt role. It might have been his depiction of Richard Rich from the Fred Zinnemann film adaptation of Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, which used to be one of my moral touchstones. But it's more likely that I saw "I, Claudius" first. He's been a favorite actor of mine for a long, long time.
When I was an atheist I thought the idea of a human being claiming to be a god was purely ridiculous, and my opinion hardly needed to change when I converted to Catholicism. Neither Christianity (of my old-fashioned sort) nor atheism has much use for "superstition", i.e. supernatural beliefs outside accepted doctrine. Christianity says superstitions are pointless because there's only one all-encompassing God enforcing a fixed set of rules; atheism says there's a fixed set of rules, but no gods at all. From either viewpoint, Caligula looks ridiculous. He's a puny human being, easily made into mincemeat. How can he possibly be a god? (It's curious how many people thoughtlessly accept the assertion that a god must necessarily be immune to death, even though there's heaps of dying gods.) It's only in recent years that I've felt like maybe I can understand poor old Caligula a little better.
Did Caligula once regard the statue of Jupiter as sacrosanct? Did he once see the statue as a vessel for divinity—something far more powerful and mysterious than an ordinary physical object, a thing sculpted by ordinary humans? Probably he did...as a child, perhaps. Children (those who have not yet had joy crushed out of them anyway) have a much easier time with seeing ordinary objects as more than they are. C. Caesar Augustus Germanicus, in his youthful innocence, must surely have revered that golden statue of Jupiter, and felt through it the power of the Roman god of sky and storm.
Thus consider how liberated the Emperor Caligula must have felt in the moment when he realized, all in a flash like one of Zeus's thunderbolts, that it also just a statue, and he had the power to destroy it.
~Χαρά