He would auction whatever properties were left over from a theatrical show; driving up the bidding to such heights that many of those present, forced to buy at fantastic prices, found themselves ruined and committed suicide by opening their veins. A famous occasion was when Aponius Saturninus fell asleep on a bench, and Caligula warned the auctioneer to keep an eye on the senator of praetorian rank who kept nodding his head. Before the bidding ended Aponius had unwittingly bought thirteen gladiators for a total of 90,000 gold pieces.

While in Gaul Caligula did so well by selling the furniture, jewellery, slaves, and even the freedmen of his condemned sisters at a ridiculous overvaluation that he decided to do the same with the furnishings of the Old Palace. So he sent to Rome, where his agents commandeered public Conveyances, and even draught animals from the bakeries, to fetch the stuff north; which led to a bread shortage in the City, and to the loss of many law-suits, because litigants who lived at a distance were unable to appear in court and meet their bail. He then used all kinds of tricks for disposing of the furniture; scolding the bidders for their avarice, or for their shamelessness in being richer than he was, and pretending grief at this surrender of family property to commoners. Discovering that one wealthy provincial had paid the Imperial secretariat 2,000 gold pieces to be smuggled into a banquet, Caligula was delighted that the privilege of dining with him should be valued so highly and, when next day the same man turned up at the auction, made him pay 2,000 gold pieces for some trifling object—but also sent him a personal invitation to dinner.

The publicans were ordered to raise new and unprecedented taxes, and found this so profitable that he detailed his Guards colonels and centurions to collect the money instead. No goods or services now avoided duty of some kind. He imposed a fixed tax on all foodstuffs sold in any quarter of the City, and a charge of 2½ per cent on the money involved in every lawsuit and legal transaction whatsoever; and devised special penalties for anyone who compounded or abandoned a case. Porters had to hand over an eighth part of their day’s earnings and prostitutes their standard fee for a single act of intimacy—even if they had quitted their profession and were respectably married; pimps and ex-pimps also became liable to this public tax.