Caligula

Cherea and Scipio discuss the assassination plot. Cherea wants Scipio’s support and participation, but Scipio still feels too much affection for Caligula to be a part of it. Helicon appears and summons Cherea and some of the patricians to Caligula. This alarms the patricians, who think they may have waited too long. Caligula’s appearance, however, does not undo their plot. He wants them to see his performance, to share an “artistic emotion.” He emerges in a ballet skirt and performs a grotesque dance move and orders them to relate their appreciation for his artistry. While he is offstage, Caesonia informs them that Caligula has vomited up blood, fitting some of the rumors they have heard about his illness.

In the polite rhetoric normally used for expressing devotion to emperors, one patrician cries out to the gods to save Caligula, pledging an enormous sum of money should they do so. Another pleads for Jupiter to take his own life rather than the emperor’s. While these requests are customary and not to be taken literally, Caligula emerges and cheerily orders the literal repayment of both pledges: wealth from one and the execution of the other.