"Enough of the Princeps, what remains to be described, is the monster..." The Roman emperor Caligula endures as one of the most notorious figures in not only Roman history, but the history of the world. Famed as a byword for sexual degeneracy, cruelty and corruption, the account of his life written by the Roman historian Suetonius has, above all, enshrined him as such for posterity. Throughout the biography there is a whiff of dark comedy, as Caligula is cast as the ultimate demented caesar, corrupted absolutely by his absolute power and driven into depravity. Born of a sacred and illustrious bloodline to adored parents, his early life - initially so full of promise - was shadowed by tragedy, death, and danger, the members of his family picked off one by one by the emperor Tiberius. Nevertheless, Caligula succeeded, through his own cynical intelligence and cunning manipulation of public spectacle, to launch himself from the status of despised orphan, to that of master of Rome. Yet, before long his seemingly propitious reign, was spiralling into a nightmare of debauchery and terror…. Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the most notorious emperor in Rome: Caligula, a man said to have slept with his sister, transformed his palace into a brothel, cruelly humiliated senators, and even made his horse into a consul. But what is the truth behind these horrific legends? Was Caligula really more monster than man...? Pre-order Tom Holland's new translation of 'The Lives of the Caesars' here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/279727/the-lives-of-the-caesars-by-suetonius/9780241186893 _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Video Editor: Jack Meek Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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The enormity of his crimes was all the worse for the outrageous quality of the things he said. When his grandmother Antonia sought to give him some advice, he not only ignored it, but told her, When he exiled his sisters, he warned them that he had swords as well as islands.
When he had someone killed, it was invariably by means of repeated delicate incisions so that, as he notoriously liked to express it, a man would die knowing that he was being put to the blade. When a case of mistaken identity led to the wrong man being executed, he declared that the person put to death had no less deserved to die.
He liked to quote the proverbial line from the tragedy, "'Let them hate, provided they fear.'" Once, at an elegant banquet, he suddenly burst out laughing, and when the consuls who were reclining nearby politely inquired of him what had prompted such laughter, he answered, Why, only that with a single nod I could have either of your throats cut here and now.
Angered, when a crowd cheered on contestants who were competing against his own favourites, he cried out, If only the Roman people had a single neck! So that is from the biography by Suetonius of Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, who many listeners will better know as Caligula.
Caligula's name, Tom, is one of the most notorious, not just in Roman history, but in all history, as a byword for sadism, tyranny, depravity and debauchery. And today... we're going to find out how much of this is propaganda and how much of it is rooted in political reality.
So let's put into context from the first century AD, Caligula is the third emperor and he succeeds Tiberius, who he did last time, in the year 37. And he only rules for four years, right? That's right.
And then he gets murdered by his own guards at the age of 28. And in that time, he doesn't win any great military victories. He's not responsible for any great monuments. And yet, as you say, I mean, he has to be up there with Julius Caesar, Augustus.
And Nero.
Nero as one of the most famous Romans who's ever lived. And as you say, I mean, right up to the present day, complete byword for cruelty. And also for sexual depravity. Yeah. Because he was, what was it, that thing, that kind of sub-porn film. From the 70s. Where John Gilgit embarrassed himself by... Sitting in a bath. Yeah.
So, yeah, so the kind of the flavour of scandal and depravity hangs over him. And some of the episodes from his life, I mean, you know, they're very well known. So he's said to have slept with his sisters, turned his palace into a brothel. Yep. He likes to humiliate senators, so he'll have them kind of run by his chariot or serve him at dinner, kind of dressed up as slaves.
The consuls forget his birthday, and so he sacks them. And probably the most notorious story of all at least this is how it's understood, is that he made his horse in Catartus a consul. Yes. Actually, that's not quite what Suetonius says, but we'll be looking at that and perhaps teasing out what that whole story might have been.
And when you were reading that, people on the YouTube will have been able to see that, but when you talked about having throats cut, you turned and kind of grinned at me in a menacing way. And I think there is a slight element of kind of very, very dark comedy about that. About me or about Caligula, or are we the same?
About you, about Suetonius' account, and perhaps about Caligula himself, wouldn't you say? I mean, there's a kind of quality of grand guignol. About all three of these people. So I think Suetonius is clearly revealing. I think there's a certain quality of black humour there. And actually, when I was translating, I felt it very, very kind of vividly.
But it's clear that this is often Caligula's as well. So there was one particular account which I absolutely loved because it actually reminded me of the malevolent dwarf Quilp in Charles Dickens's old curiosity shop. And it's Suetonius' description of Caligula standing in front of a mirror.
Though he had a naturally off-putting and hideous face, he worked diligently in front of a mirror to make it even more so, contorting it into all kinds of fearsome expressions. Yeah, that's what I do. People who've watched the YouTube will be able to see. So I guess the question is, pretty much as it was where we were talking about Tiberius yesterday, is what is going on?
How do we explain all the horrors and the depravities and these kind of grotesque anecdotes that sometimes shade into the kind of the blackest kind of comedy? Did they actually happen? Yeah. If they did, what's the explanation? Was Caligula mad? Was he a sadist? Or is it a bit like we decided, I think, that Tiberius was? Has he been the victim of fake news?
Right, exactly. And we are, for Caligula, unusually dependent on one source, aren't we? Because we have Tacitus for Tiberius, but we don't have Tacitus for Caligula. There are fragmentary sources or smaller sources like Seneca or Josephus for Caligula, but Suetonius is the only full one. And it's from Suetonius' biography.
I mean, it is actually in many ways one of the great biographies in all literature. I think it really is, yes. It is from Suetonius' biography of Caligula, really, arguably even more so than his biography of Nero, that we get the sort of stereotypical image of the demented Roman emperor who has been driven into total depravity by absolute power. I mean, that's what this is, isn't it?
It's a model of absolute power corrupting.
Yeah, and I guess that's why Suetonius' portrait of Caligula has been so influential, because absolutely that idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely, Caligula seems to be the model illustration of that. So since Suetonius is so important to our understanding of Caligula, and it's played such an important role in propagating the image of him as the kind of ultimate mad, bad emperor,
I think it's important to trace in some detail exactly what it is that Suetonius has to say about his life and reign. And one thing that will strike anyone who reads it immediately is how incredibly important in Suetonius' account of Caligula the emphasis on his bloodline is, on his pedigree, on his ancestry. And the reason for that, of course, most obviously, is that he comes to power.
He becomes emperor, he becomes princeps, the first man in Rome. by virtue of his descent from Augustus, who is not just the first emperor, but by this point is a god. And Caligula is descended from Augustus very much through the female line. So his grandmother is Julia, who was Augustus's only child and herself got destroyed in a sex scandal.
And his mother is Agrippina, who was Augustus' last surviving grandchild, who we heard about in the previous episode, falls out with Tiberius. Tiberius imprisons her on an island. She goes on hunger strike and dies of starvation. But it's not just the female descent. It's not just the descent from his mother's line that amplifies Caligula's status as the best-bred man in Rome.
There's also his father. And this is a guy who is so dashing, so heroic that throughout his life and in the decades that follow, he is commemorated as the absolute darling of the Roman people. And this is a guy who rejoices in the name of Germanicus. And Suetonius tells us that when Tiberius dies, there is this great kind of upsurge of public, almost ecstasy.
And it's not, Suetonius says, just because Tiberius had died, but because the son of Germanicus has come to power. So he writes, the entire mass of the people classed the memory of his father, Germanicus, to their hearts. So it Suetonius recognises this, and in his biography, he gives us a very detailed account of Germanicus.
It's almost a kind of biography within the broader biography of Caligula. I mean, you could almost say he's the 13th Caesar.
So he's a guy who never gets to become emperor, but Suetonius really goes into his story. So tell us a little bit about Germanicus, because basically Suetonius thinks that Germanicus is the best man who's ever lived, brilliant at everything, top of the class, brilliant speaker, brilliant scholar, all of this kind of stuff.
So he writes about Germanicus in the way that you, if you had a fake Reddit account, would write about yourself on the Restless History Reddit account? I actually don't, just to be clear. I don't have a fake Reddit account. No, of course you don't. But just suppose, just suppose. So this is what Suetonius has to say about Germanicus, who, as you say, he thinks he's absolutely brilliant.
It is the broad consensus that no one has ever combined all the blessings of body and spirit to the degree that Germanicus did. Conspicuous equally for his good looks and his courage, he was brilliant both as an orator and as a scholar, in Greek as in Latin, celebrated for his generosity of spirit and remarkably successful in his endeavors to secure people's devotion and inspire their affection.
I would write that up myself.
I'll tell you, I think Theo, our producer, has a fake Reddit account and I think he goes onto a Reddit and just slags us off. And he would probably say this next thing because Suetonius says of Germanicus that he has very spindly legs. That's his only drawback. Right.
That's the kind of thing Theo might say of us. Although even then, Germanicus bulks them up. It's a bit like me with my trainer. I've bulked my legs up. It's uncanny. I've bulked them up so much that I'm ripping my trousers apart like the Incredible Hulk. Right. Right. Okay. So Germanicus, he also has a brilliant pedigree, which of course Caligula then inherits.
So he's the grandson of Livia, who is, you know, who marries Augustus, which makes him the nephew of Tiberius. And he's, you know, as we said, he's the absolute golden boy. And so this is why Augustus marries him to his own granddaughter, Agrippina. Basically, Germanicus is being groomed to succeed Tiberius.
And the sense is, certainly with Suetonius, but more generally with Roman historians, that if Germanicus had managed to live, then this would have been brilliant. The world would have been great. Everyone would have been happy. So Germanicus is kind of deliberately trained to be kind of schooled in all the arts required to be an emperor.
So he is sent off by Augustus to succeed Tiberius as commander of the German legions. Because obviously... to be a Caesar above all, you need to be able to command the loyalty of the legions. And he does very well, or at least it seems that he does. So his name Germanicus is a kind of honorific.
He gets it because he is marching out across the Rhine to exact vengeance on the German tribes for their massacre of Varus's three legions. And he's endlessly burning villages and putting German tribes to the sword. And back in Rome, they think this is brilliant. So they call him Germanicus.
Although actually, it's evident that Tiberius thinks he's a bit of a show pony and thinks it's actually all a bit of a wasted effort. But the point is that it creates a great stir back in Rome. And so... Makes people love him even more. And he's popular not only with the Roman people, but with the legions themselves who were stationed on the Rhine. He's very charismatic.
He's a very successful general. He clearly cares for the legions. And one of the markers of that is that very unusually, and in fact, almost illegally, he has his wife, Agrippina, and... their children with him. And this includes the very young Gaius. Gaius is just a kind of little toddler at this point. And the soldiers, you know, he's their little pet.
And so they make him a legionary outfit and he kind of walks around, toddles around the camp in his armor and his military boots, which in Latin are caligae. So they call it caligula, which are Little boots. Yeah. So that's where the name Caligula comes from.
And in fact, when Augustus dies, there are mutinies all along the line of the Rhine because they're unsure what the kind of political situation is. And they're threatening essentially to reject Tiberius as emperor. And... The only thing, Suetonius says, that stops them from launching a full-scale rebellion is the appearance of Caligula.
And Germanicus says, if you don't calm down, I'm going to remove Caligula from the camp because I can't trust you to look after him. And this, Suetonius says, shames them into behaving a bit better. Do you think that story is true? Well, there's a much fuller account of this in Tacitus. And yeah, it does seem a trifle more complicated than that.
Right, yeah. I was going to say, it seems a bit unlikely. If you're really serious about having a mutiny, the sight of a child is unlikely to... They don't have the soul of Hallmark greetings card writers, do they?
They're clearly very sentimental about him. And that vein of sentimentality about Caligula as this darling little boy is definitely a part of... his public image when he becomes emperor.
Right. So going back to his childhood, he and his family, so Germanicus is sent out to the east by Tiberius to be the big man in the east, isn't he? Right.
So that's broadening his range of experiences. Yeah. And that's where it all goes wrong for Germanicus. Again, very detailed account of this in Tacitus. Suetonius gives a much more truncated account, but essentially what happens is Germanicus is sent out to the east as Tiberius' plenipotentiary, but...
Tiberius has also sent out one of his kind of aristocratic mates, a guy called Piso, to be governor of Syria, basically to keep an eye on Germanicus. And the two of them have a spectacular bust up. Germanicus falls ill, dies, and on his deathbed accuses Piso of having poisoned him. And the news that their favourite has not only died, but quite possibly been poisoned when it reaches Rome.
It has a devastating impact and a great kind of rolling surge of sentimental grief completely takes Rome over. quite analogous to kind of the Princess Diana situation, which Agrippina then massively ramps up by returning to Rome, holding the urn with Germanica's ashes in it, kind of walking into Rome, clutching it with her, you know, tear-streaked face and her dishevelled hair.
And everyone in Rome just goes completely berserk with grief and anger because they blame Piso for his death. And this anger also kind of involves Tiberius because they think that Tiberius isn't showing adequate grief. So rather like with the queen. Yeah, exactly. So Piso ends up committing suicide because he knows that basically he's doomed.
And Tiberius, who is not a sentimental man at all, views it with utter contempt in a kind of Duke of Edinburgh style perspective. And so it's no wonder that he and Agrippina don't get on, having had that kind of, you know, that kind of relationship. And of course, in due course, Agrippina ends up dead and Caligula's two eldest brothers end up dead, presumably on Tiberius's orders.
The whole Germanicus story ends very, very sadly with Caligula's two eldest brothers having been eliminated by Tiberius. He is now the sole surviving son of Germanicus and the sole surviving great grandson of Augustus, which makes him the obvious successor to Tiberius, which in turn makes his position very, very exposed and precarious.
Although at that point, if he's the obvious successor, the post of princeps, of emperor, has clearly degenerated into a monarchy, hasn't it? If the obvious successor is the only person left from the dynasty and the only thing that makes him an obvious successor is his bloodline.
Well, I think it's slightly more complicated than that because essentially the idea is that it's perfectly legitimate for an aristocrat to succeed to the estate and the fortune and the titles and the glory of his ancestors. No one has a problem with that.
And so the pretense is that the August family, the family of Augustus, are just a family like any other, even though obviously what it brings is the rule of the world. So there is a kind of a veiled hypocrisy about it. You are right. Of course, effectively, it is a monarchy, but nobody wants to admit that. Augustus doesn't want to admit it. Tiberius doesn't want to admit it.
The Senate don't want to admit it. Everyone keeps it under a veil. And this will become important in explaining... Caligula's policy as emperor and why he becomes so unpopular with the Senate. But in the meanwhile, he is very exposed. So Tiberius does have a grandson of his own, who's a very little boy called Gemellus. But Caligula, he turns 18, he's summoned by Tiberius to Capri.
And Suetonius is predictably very vituperative about what Caligula gets up to on Capri. So he writes, "...the island proved a treacherous place for him, rife with attempts either to trick or to pressure him into airing his grievances against Tiberius.
But refusing to take the bait, he behaved as though nothing had happened to his family and their ruin had quite slipped his mind, dismissed the wrongs done him with a straight face so convincing that it beggared belief."
and was so ready to cringe and crawl before his grandfather and his courtiers that it has been said of him, quite justifiably, that never was there a better slave nor a worse master.
And there's also this stuff about... So Suetonius has obviously painted a picture of Tiberius and Capri that is very... damning, shall we say. And Suetonius also says that Caligula was able to suck up Tiberius because he shared his cruelty and deviant appetites, doesn't he?
He likes watching people being tortured and he dresses up in drag and, you know, all of this kind of thing, which I'm guessing you will say is part of the sort of the fake news edifice that has been constructed around Tiberius.
How do we know? I mean, how can we rely on this? But
again the kind of the resonance of of the myth is so overwhelming that it kind of becomes historically significant in its own right so tiberius watches caligula it is said encourages him in you know joining in watching tortures or erotic floor shows or whatever and is supposed to have said of of caligula that he was rearing someone fated to prove a viper to the roman people
I mean, that's most improbable. Tiberius was, he felt that he was a deep patriot. He would not have wanted to rear a viper. But this is the perspective that will come to be put on it because, of course, Suetonius and other historians know what is going to happen, know the kind of man that Caligula is going to be. So 16th of March, 37, Tiberius dies.
Inevitably, there is what Suetonius describes as a plausible rumor that Caligula is responsible for it. So Suetonius says that Caligula poisons Tiberius. When he doesn't die, he then smothers him with a pillow. And then when that doesn't work, he strangles him. The death of Rasputin or something. Exactly. But presumably this is all taking place in an empty room. So how anyone would know?
I mean, you don't know. And so Caligula then becomes Princeps. Effectively, there isn't anyone else who can... take his place. Gemellus is still, I think he's eight or nine, something, so no way that he can succeed. And so he becomes emperor. And he does so as someone with very, very little experience of public life in Rome.
of how the Senate functions, of the role played by the magistracies, all of these kind of things, which, of course, both Augustus and Tiberius had absolutely been raised in before they became emperor. He also has no military experience. He doesn't really have any friends or allies among the senatorial elite.
And so you may wonder, well, that being so, how could this very young man possibly succeed to the role of the world? And the answer is, is that Caligula clearly has a very kind of unsentimental and you might say pitiless intelligence. And the reason that he hasn't bothered working out how the Senate behave or, you know, the role of the consuls or anything
is that he's recognized that they that effectively doesn't really matter anymore that there are much more significant centers of power in the state of which the most obvious is this group of guards called the praetorians so a praetorium is the military headquarters and the praetorian guards are the guards that traditionally look after someone who is in military command and augustus in his role as supreme commander of the various legions across the empire
You know, he has to have his own Praetorian. And so he has his Praetorian guards and Tiberius has them as well. And he has built the Praetorians a great military base and the walls of Rome. And Caligula has recognized that this is what matters. And so he's made sure to square them and particularly the head of the Praetorians, a guy called Macro.
He also, of course, has the blood of the deified Augustus in his veins. So there's a touch of the divine there. And the people, as we've said, adore him because he is the son of Germanicus. And so when Caligula accompanies Tiberius's body to Rome, He is mobbed and cheered the whole way.
And again, to quote Suetonius, ecstatic crowds of well-wishers called him their shining light, their chick, their poppet, their baby boy. The senators, you know, they're watching this and thinking, oh, lordy. I mean, there's nothing we can do about this. And so they vote, the 24-year-old Caligula, all the powers that it had taken Augustus a lifetime to accumulate.
And obviously they're not particularly happy about that. They must stick in their craw. Yeah, what can they do? They've just got to suck it up.
And right from the start, Caligula proves himself a master, doesn't he, of playing to the people, to the gallery. He reminds me a bit of the guy who's the ruler of Chechnya, who's called Ramzan Kadyrov. who also succeeded, you know, he succeeded his father. It's not really a monarchy, but he's always like wrestling bears and trying to hang out with Hollywood film stars and stuff.
And Caligula is very much of that ilk, isn't he? He likes a sensational, melodramatic, crowd-pleasing gesture.
Yeah, he does. And again, I was thinking perhaps of Charles Spencer. That's from the first one. Yeah.
Those are three people who aren't often bracketed together.
No. But in that speech that Charles Spencer gave at his sister's funeral, which kind of really ratcheted up the sense of kind of melodrama and emotional intensity, Caligula, he recognises that his status as the son of Germanicus and of Agrippina... is an important part of his kind of mythos of his image.
So the moment he's arrived in Rome and become emperor, as soon as he'd done that, then he's off on a ship off to the prison islands where his mother and his elder brother had died. And he scoops up their ashes and he returns to Rome and he sails up the Tiber. He's on this great ship with his standard fluttering proudly in the prow.
And he lands and he then walks, rather as his mother had walked with the ashes of Germanicus, he walks with the ashes of his mother and his brothers to the great mausoleum of Augustus on the Campus Martius where he lays them. And he does this, Suetonius specifies, at midday when the city was at its busiest. So he wants everyone to see him. And he then goes out of his way
to kind of issue proclamations, essentially saying, you know, the grim age of Tiberius is over. It's a golden age has come. I am a kind of shining model of munificence and benignity. So he issues amnesties to all those who are facing trial on charges that had been brought against them while Tiberius was living. He revives the popular elections.
So the elections, you know, for magistracies that Tiberius had abolished. And this goes down well with the people. And he gives a solemn promise that he will never do anything to make anyone hate him and will never give ear to informers. So this is his manifesto. Also in contrast to Tiberius, very pointed contrast to Tiberius, he lays on all kinds of spectacular shows.
So we talked in the previous episode how Tiberius despises the things that the mass of the people like. He has no time for gladiatorial shows. Tiberius's idea of a good time is to have a kind of pub quiz. He likes setting quizzes on literary matters and things like that. That's his idea of a good time. Not Caligula's.
So there are gladiators, there are beast shows, there are chariot races and Caligula particularly likes chariot races. You know, he identifies very strongly with one of the particular teams, kind of backs them very strongly and he loves scattering largesse. So he will do this thing where there are kind of tokens and he'll throw these tokens out into the crowd and
And depending on which token you pick up, you will get something. So it might be, I don't know, just a barn or something, or it might be a villa. So he likes to sit there and watch people scrabbling and elbowing each other out of the way to grab them.
And so it only says he was tireless in promoting shows of every description on stages across Rome and sometimes even did so by night, making the whole city blaze with light.
24.
24, has never held a senior command, has never held a senior office, and they must be thinking, this is mad. I mean, why is this bloke ruling Rome? He's completely out of his depth, but also he's against everything that we stand for, which is tradition, integrity, seriousness, all of these things.
Yeah, and the Roman tradition, which had been manifest throughout the Republic, is that it's brilliant to be old. So that's why Republican portrait busts, they're always showing themselves with kind of sagging jowls and crow's feet and everything like that. And there's an instinctive sense that young people...
are just kind of naturally violent and aggressive and haven't learnt to temper their appetites. And Caligula seems set on kind of illustrating this. So they resent the way that he kind of makes jokes and he sniggers loudly, which is obviously very off-putting if you're giving a grand oration in the Senate. They hate the way that he's always going on about chariot racing.
Caligula has a kind of thing, I mean, it's basically kind of a bit like driving a very fast sports car. He has an insane number of horses that draw him on his chariot through the streets of Rome. He's cutting a dash in a way that they find very, very offensive. And of course, you know, all these gladiator shows and stuff, I mean, it's expensive. Tiberius had been very, very abstemious and mean.
So the treasury is quite full, but Caligula's kind of burning through it at an absolute rate of knots. But they haven't really got any choice except to hold their breath and cross their fingers and trust that everything works. will be okay.
And it is a good sign for them that along with all his other kind of measures designed to make him look good, he said that there aren't going to be any more treason trials. We're not going to have them. So you can rely on that. So the first eight months of his rule, you know, there were worrying signs, but there hasn't been kind of any major confrontation between Caligula and the Senate.
And then in October 37, so as you say, eight months after coming to power, Caligula falls ill. And this is a very dangerous moment because this isn't a formal monarchy. There aren't set rules establishing how, you know, when one princeps dies, a new princeps comes to power. And so the moment Caligula falls ill, it looks like he's going to die.
All the heavyweights in his administration are scrabbling around trying to work out who his successor will be. And the obvious successor is this young lad, Gemellus, kind of, you know, 13 or 14 by this point. Tiberius' only grandson. So they are going off and kind of paying court to him and preparing to elevate him to the throne.
And meanwhile, there is this absolute toady, this lickspittle, a guy called Atanius, who swears a solemn oath that if only the gods will restore Caligula to health. then he will go into the arena and fight publicly as a gladiator. And obviously, he doesn't expect that this would happen. It would be unthinkable for someone of his rank and age to go into the arena and fight a trained killer.
But he's basically hedging his bets. If Caligula survives in it, then it'll be great. He'll approve of his loyalty. And if he doesn't, then no one will remember it. Caligula does recover, I think, against the odds.
And he rises from his sickbed and he's informed what Artanius has done and also more significantly what the captain of the Praetorians and his leading senatorial backers, what they've been up to going around and paying court to Gemellus. And he moves with absolute lethal dispatch. So first off, he sends two soldiers to Gemellus.
who sit the boy down and take out their knives and show Gemellus the best way to kill himself and then stand there and watch while Gemellus kills himself. And that's the end of him. Gemellus's would-be patrons, including the prefect of the Praetorians, are likewise ordered to commit suicide, which they do.
And Atanius, this guy who has vowed that he will fight a gladiator if only Caligula recovers. Well, so this is what Suetonius says happened. Caligula takes him at his word and he forces this poor guy. I mean, he's not at all the kind of person who is fitted either by background or I think by physique to face up to a trained gladiator out into the arena. Atanius is killed very briskly.
He's dragged off with a hook across the sand. His body is dumped and Caligula's sense of humour has this kind of bloody punchline. And People in the arena undoubtedly found it funny. I mean, it's exactly the kind of joke that would have appealed to a crowd of people gathered to watch blood sports.
But it also sends a pretty chilling message to the Roman elites that, you know, there's no more Mr. Nice Guy. And there's the definite sense that Caligula has been biding his time And now that he has the evidence that some of the Senate have been conspiring against him as he sees it by kind of going after Gamellas, he is ready for the kill.
And Suetonius, he has this kind of wonderful pivot in his biography. It's one of, I think, the single greatest line ever written in any biography ever. Where he writes, enough of the princeps. What remains to be described is the monster.
So the monster is coming and we will be back after the break. This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. Now, Tom, you and I often hear about the red flags that we should avoid. But what if we focused more on looking for green flags in our friends and in our partners, indeed, in our producers? Now, if people aren't sure what they look like, therapy can help you identify green flags.
It can allow you to actively wave them and identify them in your own relationships. So, Tom, can I ask you, do you have any relationship green flags? I certainly do.
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Dominic, what do you find useful about Nord?
Well, Tom, as you know, I am absolutely passionate about NordVPN. One of the things I love about them is their Threat Protection Pro, an absolutely brilliant antivirus tool. It is so effective and so powerful. It is integrated directly into the NordVPN app. So what it does is it protects you from phishing and other cyber threats.
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The link is also in the episode description box.
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Welcome back to The Rest is History. Enough of the princaps. What remains to be described is the monster. So, Tom, you described this as your favourite line in the history of biography, and we are moving now. Caligula has been clearly... very shocked by the speed with which people move to associate themselves with a potential successor when he fell ill.
And, you know, politically that makes sense that he would be insecure and he would wish to, you know, he's looking for enemies. But from this point onwards in the biography, Suetonius is really going beyond that. And he is basically saying Caligula is a dyed in the wool, inveterate, debauched, depraved monster. And talk us through some of the examples, Tom, that he gives of this kind of behaviour.
Right. So there are various examples that Suetonius gives of the character of a monster that he says Caligula has. Perhaps the most shocking is that Caligula demands worship as a god. So Augustus is worshipped as a god, but not in his lifetime. Augustus had really stamped down against any thought of that. But Caligula, Suetonius says he's all in.
So Suetonius reports that Caligula orders some of the most famous statues of the gods from Greece. Brought to Rome, he replaces the heads of the gods with his own head. Senators compete to serve him as priests. They offer up all kinds of sacrifices to him. So Suetonius specifies flamingos, peacocks, black grouse, two varieties of guinea hen, pheasants.
There are times when Caligula will dress up as various gods, so sometimes as Jupiter, even shockingly as Venus. And there are other times where he will claim to be talking to Jupiter. So this is all clear evidence of either monstrousness or insanity or both. Suetonius says that he essentially goes out of his way to humiliate the elites in every way he can.
And obviously the most humiliating thing that you can do to a senator is to treat him as a slave.
So Suetonius specifies that he would brand senators, equestrians who had offended him with branding irons, after which, Suetonius writes, he would condemn them either to the mines or to the building of roads or to be thrown to wild beasts or to be shut up in cages on all fours like animals or to be sawn in half. So none of that's fun.
He takes his vendetta against the elites, even to the extent of toppling their ancestors. So statues of famous men from Rome's past, Suetonius says, are toppled and smashed to pieces. And he also says that members of the aristocracy with famous names, they're told to get rid of these names. So the Pompeys, for instance, Pompey the Great, they have this name Magnus.
They're told they can't use that anymore. That would be the kind of example. And there's also very kind of pointed sexual humiliations that he inflicts on them. So he will invite senators and their wives to dinner. And while they're kind of lying there, Caligula will appraise the various wives of these senators.
If there's one that he particularly feels drawn to, he'll take her away, sleep with her. and then send her back to her husband, all kind of disheveled and is making it very clear what's happened. Caligula will then come back and offer a kind of commentary on her performance. And the wretched husband just kind of lies there looking a bit sick.
And this is where the detail comes in that Caligula sets up a brothel in his own great palace on the Palatine Hill above the Forum. And he staffs it with married women and boys, both of whom are of very high status. So, I mean, all good stuff.
So let's dig into this a little bit. So obviously, because we don't have many other sources here, it's pretty hard for us to get a sense of how grounded in reality these accusations are. You make the point, don't you, that Suetonius doesn't present this as a continuous chronological narrative. It's just a sort of bullet-pointed list of the bad things that Killigiller is supposed to have done.
Yeah, that's right. And so it is difficult to get a sense of it as a narrative, but I think it's just about possible if you map Suetonius' account with the various other fragments of evidence that we have to kind of get a narrative of Caligula's reign. So he comes to power, first eight months, it's kind of okay.
There's nothing particularly shocking from the senatorial point of view that's happening, even though there is a sense of menace. Then he falls ill. When he recovers, he eliminates Gamalus, his own conceivable rival, and anyone who he thinks might be a kind of particular figure of opposition to him.
And he continues in the wake of his recovery from that illness to pay lip service to his partnership with the Senate in the way that Augustus had done, in the way that Tiberius had done. But then it seems that two years into his reign, he's finally had enough and there is this most spectacular showdown. And he summons the Senate and addresses them
and expresses to them in the most bold, uncompromising way, his utter contempt for everything that they represent. He strips away all these hypocrisies that we were talking about earlier, this pretense that the Senate in some way have any autonomy or power. that Rome is a partnership between the Princeps and the Senate. He says this is absolute nonsense. It's ludicrous.
The idea that Rome is a republic, madness. I am a monarch. I have complete authority over you. You are nothing. You are worms. And just for good measure, he then announces that he is reintroducing the treason trials that he had announced were cancelled with such trumpeting two years before. And the Senate... are so stunned by this that they don't really know what to say.
And Caligula sweeps out, and they all just kind of sit there, ashen-faced, as Private Eye would put it. And the following day, they all kind of reconvene, and... They pass a formal vote in which they formally thank Caligula for his sincerity and the intelligence of his comments. They praise him for his piety. And they say, such wonderful clemency from Caesar.
Even though we're worms, he's still, you know... We should offer him multiple sacrifices as a way of expressing our gratitude for his clemency and his general all-round decency. So it's a massive grovel.
Crikey. So my question to you, Tom, so I compared him with Ramzan Kadyrov in the first half. You could compare him with Kim Jong-un in North Korea. Again, hereditary, but not in a monarchy, right? So my question is, what's the power base for doing this? So he hasn't had a command. He doesn't have powerful allies yet.
or before he became emperor, he didn't have powerful allies in the Roman establishment. How can he possibly do this, stand up to these very powerful, prestigious patrician people and boss them around in this way?
He has the Praetorians. He has lavished bribes on the Praetorians. They are the only soldiers in Rome. So as long as he has the Praetorians on board, there's nothing really that the Senate can do. He also has lavished money on the legions because ultimately,
One of the other many hypocrisies that Caligula is kind of ripping to shreds is the idea that the role of the princeps is as anything other than a military commander. He is basically, I mean, he's not drawing attention to it deliberately, but he is making manifest...
that the underpinning of the entire system that Augustus has set up, which is supposed to be this partnership between the emperor and the Senate, is actually founded on the support of the legions. That's what matters. And so it's not surprising that senatorial opponents of Caligula recognize this as well. And of course, the commanders of the legions are themselves senators. And so Caligula
There is a conspiracy against him. And it's not surprising that it's focused not in Rome, but on the Rhine, which is where you have the highest concentration of legions in the entire empire.
And it seems to have involved numerous senators, two of Caligula's sisters, interestingly, and most dangerously of all, the guy who effectively has the command of the legions on the Rhine, who is a very seasoned general and a very experienced guy at kind of negotiating all the various changes in regimes and things, a man called Gaitulicus. And
Again, the accounts of this are very garbled, but you can kind of piece together that Caligula is alerted to what's happening and he moves with very, very impressive energy and speed. Sets off from Italy for the Rhine. It's his first trip outside Italy as emperor. Descends and surprises Gertulicus, who is arrested and executed. Caligula's sisters are sent to prison islands.
So that thing you read at the beginning about Caligula saying to them, I have swords as well as islands. So in other words, stay on the island and stay put or else I will have you hacked to death with swords. And the Senate then endures this absolute reign of terror. So Caligula goes to Germany. This is when he raises more legions. It's when he does that whole thing with the shells on the...
on the shore of the channel, which we talked about in our series on Roman Britain, and which I frankly said then, and repeat, I've no idea what's going on with that. I mean, there are so many theories. We don't know. It's an example of, I think, of just how garbled lots of the stories that are told about Caligula becomes. But anyway, he then comes back from Germany in Gaul.
And while he's in Gaul, he's met by various emissaries from the Senate. And Caligula tells them, I no longer acknowledge your authority. I despise you. I do not recognise that you have any kind of role to play in the running of the empire.
And it's on his return to Rome, it seems that the horrors and the outrages that Suetonius lists, which we just went through, that they seem to have been perpetrated. And it's a reign of terror that works because the Senate is effectively left completely broken. You know, they feel powerless before him. They grovel before him and just, you know, like, trying to avoid a bully's eye.
So this is the moment, really, for the first time since... Really, for the first time since Augustus... inaugurated the empire, it's the first time that somebody has torn away what Augustus had worked so hard to create, which was the veil of legality and tradition. And somebody has just said, that's all rubbish. This is a pure military dictatorship. I am the dictator. And I will humiliate you.
I will torture you. And I will kill you if you step out of line.
And I think that that's why he has the fame that he does. So in recent times, he's become almost a kind of existential hero.
Yeah. Albert Camus wrote a play about him.
So this notion that politics is purely about power and Caligula is perhaps the emperor who most brutally demonstrates that, most brutally recognises it. But having said that, he does make one terrible mistake. So you ask, well, what's the basis of his power? The basis of his power is his popularity with Praetorians.
And so it is foolish of him then that he can't... Caligula does seem to have loved a joke. And he can't resist making a joke even about Praetorians. And there is one Praetorian in particular, a guy called Cassius Kyria, who's actually rather like me. He's massive, you know, huge gym toned body, enormous rippling muscles. but has perhaps a slightly effeminate voice, a slightly soft voice.
And so Caligula finds the combination of, you know, the muscle man and the kind of the slightly female sounding voice very amusing. Yes. And so Suetonius writes, Caligula would make Priapus or Venus the watchword. And sometimes when the tribune had reason to thank him for something, Caligula would hold out his hand to be kissed, then make an obscene gesture with his fingers.
It's obviously very funny for all Caligula's hangers-on.
You do that with Theo.
I do. I do. So the time will come where he will inflict a terrible vengeance, because what happens is that Kassi Kyria and various other Praetorians organise a conspiracy. And this is much more fatal. As is proven on the 24th of January, AD 41, Caligula is about to leave for Alexandria. So there's, you know, if you're a conspirator, you need to get a move on.
And that day he's staging a games in this great temporary theatre on the Palatine. Caligula seems to be in an absolutely brilliant mood. He hasn't reserved any seats for the senators, so he sits there and enjoys watching them scrabble and try and get the best seat. He finds that very funny.
Also finds it very funny when a flamingo is sacrificed and the blood of this flamingo splashes all over one of the senators, you know, blotting his robe. And so Caligula has a good laugh about that as well. Lunch comes, he decides he'll go and eat in the privacy of his own palace. So he stands up and heads off towards his own private quarters.
He's just about to go inside when he's approached by a courtier who tells him that some Greek boys of very noble background have been rehearsing a musical in his honour. And so Caligula turns aside to inspect them. And actually, I think that's the kind of interesting example of Caligula not as a monster. I mean, that's quite, you know, he's told these boys have been rehearsing.
He kind of breaks off from going to lunch to go and hear them because, you know, he clearly recognises that they will appreciate that. And he's walking down this passageway to go and listen to these Greek boys when he runs into Cassius Kyria. And Cassius Kyria asks for the day's password. And as usual, it's an insulting one. So, you know, I'm a massive girl's blouse, something like that.
And Cassius, Cassius Carrieri is not amused. He draws his sword and he strikes at Caligula's neck. It misses and hits the shoulder blade. Caligula stumbles, crashes down onto the ground, but he's still very much alive. He's followed by his litter bearers. They have kind of great wooden poles and they come to the rescue of Caligula.
Again, a kind of illustration of the way in which he can command a degree of loyalty, but there's no prospect of them being able to defend Caligula because Cassius Carrieri is backed up with Praetorians who have They have hard steel. And Caligula is soon kind of on the ground being slashed to pieces by a kind of hail of swords. He's dead. Cassius Chaerea decapitates him.
We're told that several of the Praetorians stabbed their swords through Caligula's genitals. So again, this idea of kind of sexual humiliation, which Caligula had repeatedly practiced, and now it's kind of inflicted on him. And there are even rumours that some of them pick up and eat his flesh, which I'm sure is exaggerated. So this is where Josephus comes into his own, the great Judean historian.
He has quite a detailed account that seems to draw on quite authoritative sources. And so Caligula perishes as he had lived, kind of shadowed by horror, by horrific rumour and by kind of malevolent jokes. And that is the end of him. And so as we approach the end of this episode, it's probably time to just try and kind of go through and work out what kind of credibility can we put on this?
How can we make sense of all these seemingly mad stories that are told about it?
So possibility number one, obviously, and this I'm sure is the case for some of the stories, is that they're just not true. That they're either propaganda or they're literary formulae or they are... you know, sort of folk urban myths, rather like there are loads of urban myths about politicians today that people believe, aren't there?
I mean, you know, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, you know, Donald Trump, whoever it might be. There are lots of stories that people tell and swap, but we know ourselves that there might be a kind of metaphorical truth to them, but no literal truth.
Right, so there is one... Obvious example of that. There's one story that's told about him that we can be, I'd say, kind of 99% sure isn't true. And that's the story that he committed incest with his sisters. So he has three sisters and his favourite is called Drusilla. And he is clearly devoted to her.
When he falls ill, he names her as his heir, which is a striking thing for a woman in a society as patriarchal as Rome to be appointed the heir of a princeps. She then dies and he does genuinely seem to have been kind of crazed with grief and he proclaims her as a god. And we know that that happens because we have kind of independent evidence for it.
But the idea that he'd been sleeping with her or that he'd been sleeping with his other two sisters, we can be confident that that's not true. I think for two reasons. The first is that the notion that a powerful Claudian, and Caligula is as well as being a Julian, a Claudian, sleeps with his sisters is an absolute stereotype. It's told about Claudian after Claudian after Claudian.
So it's an accusation that is just kind of waiting to be served up. I mean, you might still say, well, I mean, that doesn't prove that it didn't happen in this case, but it kind of does. And I'll quote you a German scholar, Alois Winteling, who's written brilliantly about Caligula. He points out not only that Suetonius is the first to mention it.
but also that there were contemporaries of Caligula who were familiar with aristocratic circles in Rome and well-informed and who heap invective on the emperor, they would hardly have failed to mention such a charge had it been in circulation then. So they would have mentioned it.
Yeah, that makes total sense.
Suetonius is the first person to mention it. Therefore, we can be fairly confident that that accusation isn't true. But that explanation doesn't wash with everything that is told about him. because there are substantiating reports that suggest that some at least of these stories are true. So how do we explain them?
And another possibility, which again, Suetonius is the first to suggest, is that Caligula was mad. So Suetonius writes, it is my theory, and I have no doubt it is the correct one, very modestly, that his mental infirmity was due to the coexistence within his personality of twin but directly contradictory flaws, extreme self-confidence and abject timidity.
but again if he'd been mad contemporaries would have pointed it out they don't Is there not a claim when he fell ill? Yes, it's a popular theory. I don't think there's any evidence for that at all.
And that's purely because of the order of Suetonius' biography, is it? That Suetonius basically says it's after that. But I suppose it's more likely, isn't it, that he's politically either emboldened or more insecure after he knows that people have been flirting with a successor.
Right, so that's why Suetonius mentions that he's both extremely self-confident and abjectly timid. I mean, I think that's exactly the kind of... example that suggests it. But I mean, that could be true, but it doesn't mean he's mad. And in fact, Caligula seems to have had considerable political acumen. I mean, what he does to the Senate is very, very brutal, but pretty effective.
And when there is that military uprising against him, I mean, he outsmarts a seasoned military commander. So, you know, he may be malevolent, he may be pitiless, he may even be sadistic, but... I don't think he's mad.
Which matches what we know of 20th century dictators. I mean, Hitler, Stalin and so on. They may have been horrendous, but they're not clinically insane. It's too easy to say they're mad, basically.
It lets them off the hook. But I don't think you need it as an explanation because I think it's actually fairly clear where Caligula is coming from. And we've already hinted at it in this episode, which is that Caligula is a populist, or to put it in Latin, a popularis.
And we've talked before, both in this series and in the podcast more generally, about how politics in Rome is about vibes rather than about policy. It's about whether... you appeal to the kind of traditional elites or whether you appeal over their heads to the masses. And you've got to remember that the autocracy established by Augustus has only been in existence for 60 years.
And the concrete hasn't set. People who are ruling as emperors are trying to work out what policy they should adopt, what role should be. I mean, and the people all around him are as well. And Augustus had embodied the popularist tradition and the kind of the more aristocratic traditionalist perspective. Tiberius had been a traditionalist. Caligula...
I think partly out of temperament and partly because he correctly recognises the weakness of the Senate, goes all in with the popularist tradition. So his instinct is to kind of flatter and woo the people, to give them the entertainments that he himself enjoys. And of course, the spectacle of his enjoyment is,
makes him very, very popular with the people and conversely to kind of turn against the Senate and rather than to appease senators, to crush them. And it's a strategy to which he brings very distinctive qualities. And I think that one of them clearly is a certain relish for cruelty and domination. I think that the sources are just too insistent on that for us to kind of, you know, whitewash it.
I think he clearly was, you know, In that sense, a completely terrifying man.
A nasty piece of work.
A very nasty piece of work. And with a particular focus, I think, on sexual humiliation. Again, even if the stories about him sleeping with senators' wives in dinner parties or setting up a brothel on the Palatine are exaggerated, the fact that these stories are told... clearly are drawing on authentic memories of the trauma that senators were made to go through.
And for reasons, again, that we've talked in this series, striking at an aristocratic Roman sense of sexual self-respect is absolutely devastating to their whole sense of status. Caligula correctly identifies that as the way to really kind of break them.
And part of this is the assault on a series of conventions and taboos, presumably. So you talked before about him, the stuff with the gods or demanding that he's worshipped as a god. Or, most obviously, the story that goes right back to when he was on Capri with Tiberius, that he dresses as a woman.
And this is about him taking the taboos that mean so much to the established senior, you know, blue-blooded people and ripping them up and presumably delighting the mob, as it were, in doing so.
There's something almost kind of punk about it. It's so shocking that... Obviously, some of his supporters, some of the people who are prone to support him, just kind of laugh in admiration at how far he has pushed things. And this is a strategy that Nero will adopt as well. And it was a strategy in a kind of much more modulated sense that Julius Caesar had done too.
You know, that you shock people and the shock becomes kind of politically charged. And... Caligula obviously revels in experimenting with that, I think.
In that sense, Nero and Caligula are remarkably similar, aren't they? Because they're basically part of the same political tradition. They're playing to the same audience and they're kicking against the same taboos and the same class, the senatorial class.
Right. And I think also it's the fact that they have the blood of a god in their veins. And so they can cast themselves as being somehow more than mortal. They're doing the kind of things that gods would do or heroes in Greek mythology. This is very overt with Nero, but it's, I think, pretty clearly the same with Caligula. I think he is kind of blazing that as a policy for an emperor to follow.
I mean, you have to basically be a descendant of Augustus to do it, which is why when Nero dies and there are no more descendants of Augustus to rule as emperor, that tradition ends. But both of them are kind of making play with it. And...
He fuses that sense of essentially behaving like a God, behaving like a kind of, you know, one of a hero from Greek myth with a genius for spectacle and an eye for recognizing how to undercut the privileges and assumptions of the Senate. And the single best example of this, again, a very well-known story,
is that he builds this huge three-mile pontoon bridge in the Bay of Naples, or specifically in the Bay of Bailly, and he then parades across it. First time he rides on a horse, and then he rides in this kind of great chariot. And Suetonius offers this not as an example of his monstrosities, but as one of the good things, you know, one of the positives of his reign.
And in fact, Suetonius' grandfather had watched it and had said how amazing it was. And we don't know exactly when he does this, but I think the likeliest date is when he comes back from Germany and Gaul, because I think it's pretty clear that what he's doing is staging a triumph to upstage all triumphs. Because to hold a triumph on the sea, I mean, that's the kind of thing a god does.
But also triumphs, there's a set route in Rome that you follow, and it's up to the Senate to license them. And Caligula is saying to the Senate,
don't need you i'm you know i am this godlike figure i can ride over water if i want to and then the final and most famous thing making his horse a console so i know you have a very actually i've heard you explain before i think it's a very persuasive explanation of exactly what this is because effectively this is just a very very this is a satirical joke it's a joke
So this is the last kind of attribute that Caligula brings to his model of kind of targeted terrorism, you might say, which is that he's funny. And people like humour in a domineering political figure. You know, there's kind of contemporary evidence for that, I would say.
And Caligula is, you know, we've said all along that there is a kind of vein of dark comedy in Suetonius's portrait that I think derives from Caligula himself in large part. Suetonius, I think, doesn't get the point of Caligula's joke about his horse. So it's popularly said that Caligula made his horse a consul. That's not what Suetonius says. Suetonius says that he planned to make Incartatus.
a consul. He also claims that Suetonius loves incartatus, which literally means hotspur. So he gives incartatus a stable fashioned out of marble, an ivory manger, purple saddlecloths and collars studded with jewels. And he bestowed as well a fully furnished mansion. Now, all of these are basically the markers of senatorial status. It's what senators want and have.
And to be a consul is the ultimate dream of any ambitious senator. And Caligula, by giving Incitatus a palace and by saying that he can make him a consul, is effectively undermining all the pretensions of the senatorial class. He's saying, you know, I can make my horse a consul or I can make you a consul. It's very humiliating for the Senate. It's very funny for Caligula.
But of course, in the long run, the joke is on him because actually nobody today remembers the joke. It just confirms his reputation as a madman. And it's, you know, the other example of the joke being on Caligula is the fact that Cassius Carrier ends up killing him. And my own suspicion is... I mentioned I went in and talked to the writers of Succession, the Murdoch's as the Caesar's drama.
And I talked all about this period of Roman history. And one of the markers is that Nero and Sporus are constantly being name checked. But I think that the character of Roman Roy, I think, has quite a lot of Caligula in him. I mean, I don't know. I haven't asked specifically whether it was an influence. But he is called Roman. Yeah. He's the most Roman character. I mean, it's literally his name.
And his character is quite Caligula. He's a Caligula who's still waiting in the wings, I think.
But for all Caligula's spectacle and his dark humour and his kind of populist touch, I should say. He only lasts four years and he ends up dead in this extraordinary set piece, this great narrative set piece. He's been stabbed and stabbed again by Cassius Caria and his men, abandoned in an alley, And what's going to happen next? Are they going to bring back the Republic?
Is the Empire going to continue? If so, who on earth could possibly succeed? Is there anybody left from the Imperial family? And Tom, we will be answering that question next time. But of course, there's only one way that people can hear that right now, isn't there? And that's if they're members of the Restless History Club.
If they're members of our very own Praetorian Guard, they'll be able to hear it. And if you're not and you'd like to join up... you can go to therestishistory.com and hear right away what happens next after the assassination of Caligula, who comes next, and what kind of emperor he was. So, Tom, thank you very much for that.
And on that bombshell, we'll be back next time with the story of the Emperor Claudius. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.