Gaeta historical timeline

The first substantial settlements in the territory go back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries BC. Afterwards the whole coastal area of the gulf formed part of the region populated by the ancient Aurunci — the Oscan-speaking Italic tribe that inhabited ancient Caieta by the tenth or ninth century BC, on the slopes of the Torre di Orlando. Only in 345 BC did the territory come under Rome's influence.

The name has never been settled, and four ancient explanations survive. Strabo does not speak of the city at all but only of the gulf, called Kaiata, from a term used by the Laconians for hollow things — a clear reference to the wide inlet; the same author reports that others derive it from the name of Aeneas's nurse. Diodorus Siculus linked the territory to the myth of the Argonauts, deriving the name from Aietes, the mythic father of Medea. Virgil, in the Aeneid, found its origin in the name of Aeneas's nurse, Caieta, buried by the Trojan hero on this spot during his voyage towards the coasts of Latium — and Dante, almost as if to assert the historicity of the Aeneid, confirmed the event. Other sources take the name from Eete, son of the sun god Helios, whose nickname is "The Eagle", the epithet supposedly given because the city's unusual geography recalls that bird's head.

Under Rome it became a resort. With its temperate climate, like neighbouring Formia and Sperlonga, Caieta became one of the earliest locations of villae maritimae — seaside villas and luxurious retreats for the Roman elite, owned for example by Scipio Africanus and Gaius Laelius — and it was linked to the capital by the Appian Way and its extension, the Via Flacca.

The owners are a roll call. The remains of the monumental villa of Lucius Marcius Philippus, stepfather of Augustus, are in the Arcella area. Lucius Munatius Plancus, consul in 42 BC, had a vast villa on Monte Orlando overlooking the gulf, and his mausoleum, built at the end of the first century BC, is still an impressive monument in a large clearing within it. Lucius Sempronius Atratinus — suffect consul in 40 and 34 BC, propraetor in Greece in 39 BC, and first admiral of Mark Antony's fleet from 38 to 34 BC — probably lived here too, as his mausoleum suggests. Domitian also had a villa in the area, and Antoninus Pius restored the port, given its strategic relevance.

In the early Middle Ages, after the Lombard invasion, Gaeta remained under the suzerainty of the Byzantine Empire — and then, like Amalfi, Sorrento and Naples, appears to have established itself as a practically independent port carrying on a thriving trade with the Levant.

In 840, for fear of the Saracens, the inhabitants of neighbouring Formiae fled to Gaeta.