After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Who Was Ancient Rome's Darkest Emperor?

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

There are a disturbingly high number of contenders for the title of Rome's Darkest Emperor - so as you can imagine, things get extremely disturbing in this episode.Joining Anthony and Maddy to introduce you to a couple of them, is Rome-based historian and tour guide, Alexander Meddings.Edited by Tom Delargy. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And in today's episode, we'll be asking the question, who was ancient Rome's darkest emperor? Now, there are, of course, a few candidates. But today we're jumping straight to that depraved megalomaniac, Caligula. Under the heat of the Roman sun and the shocked hush of onlookers, once nobleman robed in. senatorial purple now knelt on all fours stripped of dignity, confined in iron cages barely large enough to allow them draw breath. They are reduced to quivering animals. And what, you may ask, was the crime that had laid them so low, naught more than a careless remark about a gladiator display and a failure to swear loyalty to the Emperor's divine spirit, and so their fate was sealed. Others fared even worse.

Dragged into the arena not to fight, but to serve as examples. Some were branded, some thrown to wild beasts. Some Caligula ordered to be sawn in half, a method of execution so brutal, so slow, it was spoken of in hushed tones even amongst Rome's hardened executioners. There had been no trials, no charges systematically laid out, as we might have expected, no defence offered. Caligula did not need reasons to be cruel, only whims.

And Rome watched in silence. If they were appalled, it only strengthened his resolve. Let them hate me, he once spat between gritted teeth, so they but fear me. And so Caligula's cruelty was not hidden. Instead, it was staged, ritualized, normalized. Today we enter the long dark shadow of absolute power where the boundary between man and monster vanishes

and terror wears a laurel crown. This is after dark, and this is the history of Rome's darkest emperor. Hello and welcome back to After Dark. Now, as with any history, the further we get from it, the more chance there is that its horrors are, I suppose, lost to us, or at the very least, their sharp edges soften from focus. But today, we're going right back in time to the dark side of ancient Rome to get to know perhaps its darkest emperor, Caligula. Helping us get to know this tyrant is Rome-based historic history. historian and travel writer Alex Meddings. Alex, welcome to After Dark. Hello, thank you for having

me on. We're so happy to have you. Now, I don't want to dive straight in with the pseudo-psychology, but I do think it's fascinating that Caligula has something of a messed up childhood. I think it's fair to say. So let's start at the beginning of his story and what is so wrong with those early years? So Caligula is born in the year 12, which is the penultimate year of the reign of Rome's first emperor Augustus. And Augustus has come to power after about a hundred years of civil war and the fall of the Roman Republic. Caligula is part of the aristocracy. He's part of a family which is kind of Rome's celebrity family of the age. The golden couple, his parents, are a man called Germanicus, and his mother is called Agrippina, Agrippina the elder. And they're

very much the kind of pot and becks of the age, only with more military heft. And from a young young-aged Calicula is paraded around the provinces while his father is away on military missions. And so he spends his infant years in Germany, where he becomes a darling, a mascot of the camp of the legions, and he's dressed up in a little legionary outfit and paraded in front of all the soldiers. Part of this outfit are the Caligas that he has to wear these boots. And because they're little boots, they're called Caligolas. So this is where he gets the nickname from. That is so cute. Like, I'm sorry to interrupt your flow there, but like, If we didn't know what was coming, Little Boots as a nickname is the cutest thing in the entire world.

Bootykins, but you wouldn't want to be known as that, would you, if you're like a big powerful military figure? People have called me worse, Alex. Sorry, I interrupt. Sorry, you keep going. After he spends some time in Germany, he then moves with his family to Greece, where we're told he gives a speech at the age of six in front of a big packed-out crowd of Athenians. And so he clearly has a very sharp mind. All the sources are completely inaccurate and a gift for public speaking. And then his family move on to Antioch in the ancient province of Syria. And this is where things start to go horribly wrong. So his father, Germanicus, dies in Antioch.

The story goes that he is poisoned by his enemies, specifically by a man called Gaius Calpurnius Pizzo, who was sent by the reigning emperor Tiberius to do away with him. And this kind of persecution narrative will stick throughout the reign of Caligula. Caligula very much believes that he was raised in a family that was heavily persecuted by the state, by the emperor at the head, and also by the senators doing the emperor's bidding and passing the laws, enabling these people to be prosecuted. Whether or not Germanicus actually was poisoned is up for debate.

A lot of people died in that part of the world, including a later emperor Trajan. In fact, the woman who was accused of poisoning, Germanicus, died herself. So it's quite possible that this is just kind of a bout of typhoid or malaria or something going around. But nevertheless, the narrative sticks that Germanicus has been poisoned. Agrippina returns to Rome with Caligula and with his two elder brothers. And she spends the next 10 years basically shouting at Tiberius, the emperor, say, you had my husband killed and rallying people to her cause, which clearly doesn't go down very well with Tiberius.

So when Caligula is no more than a teenager, she is imprisoned by a figure called Sejanus, who is a Praetorian guard working hand in hand with Tiberia. And he kind of rallies the emperor and the senators against Agrippina, has her sent to an island and imprisoned. In the same year, he has Caligula's eldest brother, also imprisoned, and he will later die in exile, apparently starving to death and eating the mattress, the stuffing of his mattress in a vain hope to stay alive. And Caligula is sent to go and live with his great grandmother, Livia, who was Augustus' first wife.

This is a really evocative idea that you're bringing up here, Alex, of actually, you talked about this kind of persecution idea, but it does seem that he was kept under thumb to a certain extent as long as Tiberius was around and there was a lot of control going on in terms of where he can be, who he can be with, what he's allowed to do. but we know that there's a transition into power eventually. So how does that transition come about and how does he move away from this kind of essentially house arrest position that he's in? Good question. He first moves to house arrest on the island of Capri under Tiberius' direct supervision. So Livia dies and then he goes briefly to live with his grandmother, Antonio, who also then dies and he goes then to live with Tiberius on the small island of Capri.

and it's kind of during this time on Capri that Caligula is groomed for power. We're told by the machinations of the Praetorian prefect, a figure called Macro, who becomes the prefect after Sir Janus, the previous prefect falls from grace when he tries to move against Tiberius and ends up getting executed. So Macro grooms Caligula for power. Apparently one of the ways he does this is he sort of prostitutes his own wife, and he gives his own wife over to Caligula, and so they can form this kind of infernal threason together,

which will, I don't know, bring Macro and his wife closer to the centre of power. And after about 10 years, or slightly less than that, actually, in the year 37, Tiberius eventually snuffs it, back on the mainland, not far from modern-day Naples. After living a particularly, if we believe the source is debauched life over on Capri, where all sorts of dark things go on. Alex, you mentioned macro there. And first of all, for anyone who doesn't know, can you explain what a prefect is in this context?

But also, he is implicated in quite serious ways in the rise of power. There's a suggestion that he's not just making his wife sexually available, but that he is committing certain violent acts on behalf of Caligula. So can you speak a little bit to that? Yes. So the Praetorian Prefect is essentially the head of the Praetorian Guard. And the Pretorian Guard are the personal bodyguard of the Emperor. and they play a really fundamental role in imperial history

because they're the only armed guard that are allowed in the city of Rome and say what they say goes. And we'll see this with the death of Caligula and the accession of his uncle Claudius that basically the Senate can dream whatever they want. They can dream about the restoration of a republic. That's fine. But if you don't have the swords and the military heft, nothing's going to get done.

So the Praetorians are often the ones who prop up an emperor, put an emperor in power. and then when they tie over an emperor, they do away with him. The question about the role that Macro plays in Caligula's rise to power, there are stories that Macro has Tiberius murdered. But Tiberius dies in his 70s. He's been in ill health for quite a long time. Whether or not Macro gives him the final coup de grace is something we'll never really know.

But whether or not Macro is driving a lot of the violence that takes place on Capri, we don't know. but we do know that a lot of violence does take place on Cadbury. There are lots of executions for people who are conspiring against Tiberius. Tiberius launches a lot of what we call maestas or treason trials. And it's said to execute people in very, very horrible ways. One of which is making them jump off or rather walk off something called Tiberius's leap and fall into the sea from a very great height on the villa of Jupiter.

Creative. Yeah. I want to know what has placed macro in this position. Why is he able to move these power players, even if he's not doing the killing and the getting rid of Tiberius? Why has Caligula been aligned with him, or has he chosen Caligula? And what position in society is he occupying that has allowed him to do this? I think, yeah, comes back to what Maddie was saying about that role of the prefect. It's very much that Macro has chosen Caligula.

Macro sees in Caligula somebody that the Roman people can rally behind. someone who's going to bring him incredible personal benefit. A large reason for this is because of bloodlines. So Caligula is related to Augustus through his mother, matrilineal line. And bloodlines are fundamental in early imperial history. It's all about whether you can claim blood dependency from Rome's first emperor. And so Macro knows that with this bloodline and with the prestige that Germanicus and Agrippina wielded, there's no doubt Caligula will make a successful emperor.

There's no doubt he'll become emperor if Macrose says so, and he gets the Praetorians and the soldiers to acclaim him. In classic Roman style, Alex, I think what we have is this very intimate family drama with these little exterior players coming in and out of that sort of almost domestic setting. But of course, this is a family drama that's playing out on a scale that's going to impact the whole Roman Empire. And I'm just wondering at this point, what do the public, what do the Roman public make of Caligula? Is he a popular choice, or is he someone who's just been brought in? You mentioned that he's got that, you know, the very legitimate bloodline claim to Augustus. But is that enough for the Romans to accept him at this moment in time? At least our sources suggest it is.

So Caligula is very much kept out of the public eye until he becomes emperor in the year 37 at the age of 25. And then he's brought very immediately into the public eye. So after Tiberius's death, he's brought into Rome. and he does all of the right things at the beginning of his reign. His reign starts off brilliantly. He is very much the golden boy of Prince that was promised. So he starts by showering the people with gold, putting on spectacles, reintroducing literature banned under Tiberius.

He marches into the Senate House and he says, fathers, which is, as you would address the Senate at the time, fathers, I promise to be your son and your ward, and I promise to let you guide and govern me. So he's engaging in this double speech. which exists in Roman imperial politics, in which the emperor pretends not to be the emperor, but he pretends to be the first among equals, and that the Senate really hold the power, when in reality they don't. So he does all the right things. He even claims to burn all of this

incriminating evidence that Tiberius was holding on Capri, which could have done in for some of the senators in the Senate at the time. But Caligula says, you know, there will be no return to these treas and trials. I will get rid of all this evidence. And he does burn copies. Swiped is a new movie inspired by the provocative real-life story of the visionary founder of online dating platform Bumble. Played by Lily James, Swiped introduces recent college grad Whitney Wolf as she uses extraordinary grit and ingenuity to break into the male-dominated tech industry, paving her way to becoming

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Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. In the ancient world, disaster was always lurking. Earthquakes and volcanoes flattened and buried mighty cities in an instant. Drought and plague wiped out civilizations without mercy. This month on The Ancients from History Hit, the podcast that brings the distant past roaring back to life. We'll discover how disaster reshaped civilizations and the world itself. Listen now on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. when you said one of the ways in which he was kind of winning people over was by putting on spectacles because in my head, I was like, what's so great about glasses in the ancient world that he has won them over? And that thought lasted for a good 10 seconds until I was like, wait, Anthony, this is not what he's saying. Now, I have a description here of Caligula, which I think is quite interesting. I'm going to read it out and then we'll have a quick discussion about it. It says he was very tall and extremely pale with an unshapely body and a very thin neck and

legs. His eyes and temples were hollow. His forehead, broad and grim, good lord. His hair thin and entirely gone on top of his head. So we're not, I don't want to cast any aspersions, but we're not potentially talking about a sex symbol here, Alex. No. And of course, if you look at any of the portraiture from his reign or the coins, you don't see that kind of sunken eyes and the receding hairline. They all kind of look like kind of buff Jimbrose with decent hairlines. I have to say this very tall and extremely pale version is like he sounds like exactly the kind of person I would have fancied when I was like 60 but good for me he's an emo yeah exactly exactly yeah I'm I'm sold on this completely but it is interesting because I think it's quite hard to get to who

colligula is as a person I mean you talked to Alex about the narrative of him as a child and whether we can get to the truth of that I mean probably never will be able to but they kind of that he was this great orator at the age of I think you said six or seven that he is this sort of charismatic, interesting child. And then he has this physicality as he's an adult that isn't perhaps that appealing, certainly in terms of like, I guess, Roman beauty standards and especially Roman masculinity. So is he still charismatic? Is that what's carrying him in this world, this charisma? It's more bloodlines. And I think it's more just among at least the common people, the plebeian masses. It's more just not wanting to rock the boat and just wanting a

supply of games and bread and entertainment and not having to return to Civil War. In terms of Caligula's physiognomy, we really don't know what he looked like. All of the sources that describe that come from a little bit later on. And also our later sources generally are pretty awful. And one of them is Suetonius, who is a biographer who's really not interested in history, but he's interested in kind of meeting his own preconceptions of what an emperor should be. and he believes any anecdote you throw in front of him. We have a couple of contemporary sources who do describe Caligula's intense gaze

and his kind of quite extreme stare, and he had a very kind of sinister expression about him. So it does seem that there is kind of, there's no smoke without fire. He was definitely a very intense person. I think he was charismatic. He was no doubt bright. He had a wicked sense of humour, by which I mean a very dark sense of humour,

which we'll see later on when we talk about some of the really cruel things, he did. There's a lot of psychological kind of manipulation going on. But he was a great speaker. Apparently words would pour out of him when he was giving speeches, but not in a controlled Roman way. A Roman orator should speak slowly in measured terms with the restrictive toga kind of holding their posture in place. Caligula's like a modern stereotypical Italian, just like throwing out hand gestures all the time. But he's witty and he's bright. that's very interesting that you say that it's not what you would have imagined from somebody in his position at that time because as I was looking into some of the research for this episode, that's exactly what I was thinking. I was like, this is not what I'm expecting to find. This person is not doing the things that I'm expecting a person in his position to be doing. But you also mentioned Alex there. You said sinister. You mentioned dark. And so let's start to go in that direction now because that's why that's why we are all assembled here. Tell us how. things start to go from this person who is, you know, somewhat, if not celebrated, or though probably

celebrated, accepted, to then things taking a bit of a darker turn. So the first few months of his reign go really well, and then Caligula falls sick. One eyewitness account suggests this might have been a mental breakdown, brought on by all of the stress of ruling an empire without any preparation. But it seems that he falls sick. He nearly dies. And while all of this is going on, macro and the other big players in the Senate start prepping somebody else for the throne. They start prepping Caligula's kind of co-ruler, Tiberius' grandson, a young teenager or kind of a boy called Tiberius Gamelis. And when Caligula recovers, he very swiftly has Gamelis executed, or rather a Praetorian goes to

Gamelis and gives him a sword and Gamelis says, well, what am I meant to do with this? because he's so young, he doesn't understand how to properly commit suicide. And then Caligula has macro taken out, and he has some other senators done away with. So this is the first of three major conspiracies, and this is when things start to turn, because Caligula realizes actually all of this stuff the Senate say about worshipping the ground he walks on and someone descended from Augustus can do no wrong. We would never wish to get rid of Sire. Actually, it turns out that the first opportunity they'll do away with him and move on to the next person.

I'm going to go back to the pseudo-psychology now, so bear with me, but I'm really interested in the idea that he sort of turns on, yes, obvious enemies, for example, Tiberius Gamalus, the other possible person to take the throne in this moment. But the fact that he turns on macro is so fascinating. He obviously feels so kind of isolated and threatened that he cannot trust anyone. Talk to me then, Alex, about how Caligula views himself. What's his sense of self like at this moment? Because it sort of goes off the graph a bit, doesn't it? It really does. And as I mentioned before, it's very difficult to get any sense of the real colligula and certainly how he saw himself because our sources are so distorted. And they're written by precisely the people that he persecuted throughout his reign. But my sense is that when Macro is killed, his restraining influence is removed. And then the only people he has to turn to are his sisters.

So both older brothers are dead. His mother is dead by this point. He has three younger sisters who have survived. He's particularly close to one of them, a sister called Drusilla. And when you say particularly close, Alex? Right. Well, if we want to believe Suetonius and are more scandal-laced sources, he was caught in Flagrantia with her when they were both no more than infants,

really, when they were like five, six, seven years old. And they would also regularly... Took a turn. I was not expecting. No, same. Oh, yeah. I'm actually going to choose not to believe that then. I think that's ridiculous.

I'll give another one then. How about at banquets, he would spit roast himself between his sisters and his wife of the time. He had four wives in total. So they would kind of take it in turns in a kind of modern, ancient form of a spit roast. And he would be in the middle, one would be on top, one would be below. And some poor slave would be cleaning up afterwards. It was far from spit roasts. I was rare. Let me just say that. This is shocking me to my very core. But such was the ancient

world, I suppose. Yeah. This is what Suetonius, I think, imagined and his more kind of fervent dreams went on behind the closed doors of the imperial palace. This is the thing, right? We need to kind of place that, as you keep saying, this is what Suetonius is saying. This is what you're saying, this is what he imagined. We don't necessarily know that there's any contemporaneous factual support for any of that, right? This is all something that's done afterwards. On the contrary, I think we have pretty good evidence it didn't happen because we have a contemporary author called Seneca. He was a great Stoic philosopher, later tutor to the Emperor Nero, and he was involved with one, possibly two of Caligula's sisters for which he was banished.

But Seneca makes no mention of this, and he really doesn't like Caligula. He's got an axe to grind with him. But he mentions nothing about incest, and he totally would have done if there was any grain of truth. Yeah, that's so compelling, isn't it? People though do, as you say Seneca's not the only person to have an axe to grind in terms of Caligula's behavior, how he presents himself. And I'm thinking in particular about how Calicula really not only goes against the grain of what Roman masculinity should be in terms of how he holds himself, how he presents himself, but also he declares himself a god, doesn't he? And he actually has, is it statues of various gods, sort of remade in his own image? Like the actual heads of

these statues are replaced as him. I mean, that must have pissed a lot of people off, right? This is the narrative, yeah. So we can be fairly certain that he tried to install his statue in a temple. But this temple was in Jerusalem, and the narrative is written by Jewish sources. And it's like, oof, that was a diplomatic and political blunder of enormous proportion. But there's no real evidence he tried to declare himself a god in Rome. Being worshipped as a god throughout the east of the Roman Empire was quite common. Being worshipped in various municipalities throughout Italy,

that could happen as well, but it tended to happen once an emperor died. But there's not a lot of evidence that Caligli was worshipped as a god. Rather, and this is a really difficult distinction to make, even for ancients, so never mind for us. Divine aspects of his character were worshipped, like his genius, as they called it, or is Newman, his godhead. But he wasn't worshipped as a god per se. He did, however, we think dress up as a god quite a lot. Caligula loved dressing up, and he loved cross-dressing. I think this is accurate.

Very interesting. You're going to dislike me for asking this question, but I kind of have to now that you've said this. I'm thinking, and please forgive me for thinking this, as you're describing this kind of cross-dressing and this quasi, shall we say, God-like status, that I'm thinking in terms of Gladiator 2. And the kind of representation of that power at that strata, there's some crossover there. Do we know if there's anything to be said about that? Or is it just, is it just, is just whatever. No, I think I think you're spot on. I mean, if you're referring to the kind of two evil emperous in Gladiator 2, Kada-Kalakata, they draw heavily on Caligula. So the idea of looking very pale and dressing up very elaborately, the idea of shock.

So they really like to shock and they really like to torment the poor Senate. And then I think in Gladiator 2, one of them, Kadaala has a pet monkey, which he tries to make a console in the same way that Caligula is accused of trying to make his horse in Kitatas, a console, which I have no doubt was nothing more than a joke that's been taken massively out of context. Along the lines, I might as well make my horse a console. You guys are so useless. Yes, yeah, yeah. And it comes back to what you said about his sort of weird sense of humour that it's obviously very dark at times, but also maybe people just didn't really fully grasp it at the time. Talking of a sense of humor, one of the things that

I've read about Kulikula is that he launches various military campaigns, including trying to invade Britain. He sends the troops all the way to the French coast, and then when they get there, calls it off and says, go and collect some shells as your spoils of war. Is this true? Because that, I mean, that's hilarious and outrageous. It is. It's one of my favourite stories from Israel, that one, yeah. So you're quite right. In the year 40, he starts his campaigns over in Germany, and then he moves up to the northern coast. Yes, the story goes, he lines his forces up on the coast, including like siege artillery and all of the stuff. He sets out to sea on a little trirem, a little boat, and then returns very swiftly, gets back off the boat, stands up on a

big platform, and commands the soldiers to pick up seashells, declares victory over Neptune, Poseidon, and then orders them to march back to Rome. Al-Lora, I think. Yeah. This could be seen as an example of his madness, right? Occam's razor, I guess. The simplest explanation is, okay, he's completely mad. No, Emperor in his right mind, would do this.

Or it could be an example of a mutualist. So when Caesar, before Caesar crossed over back in the 50s BC, Julia Caesar, the soldiers nearly mutinied because the Romans were terrified of Britain. They saw it as a kind of wild land full of druids and magic and charioteers and terrible weather. Not too different to like 28 years later, which has just come out. It's like, there be the infected that stay away from this island. And so if the soldiers are nearly mutineing under Julius Caesar, the great warlord, what hope is 28-year-old, tall, lanky pale bloat without any military experience got. So it could be a

mutiny, and Caligula then decides to humiliate the soldiers by getting them to pick up seashells. But why would you do that if you want to survive? Like, imagine you've got angry soldiers and then you humiliate them further. That's like a fast-track to being shanked, isn't it, by an angry soldier? And so then where are we left? Maybe it's a military drill. Maybe when he goes out to sea, he's actually receiving a British hostage. And so he can go back actually claim a victory over the sea, but actually the sea represents Britain. We fundamentally don't know. What we do know is he builds a lighthouse near where this happens. And so I suspect he was planning on invading later. I really like all of this context. This is really good,

Alex. Thank you. You're helping us get the reality from the myth. And this is what I love so much about ancient history in particular, as someone who works on the 18th century and has often copious amounts of written sources, that these gaps and this speculation, it's so, it's so exciting and so interesting. And I think any one of those theories takes you down a different road of who Caligula is who he's trying to be publicly what the people under his command think of him. Obviously, you're talking about the potential there already of some kind of coup against him within the military and things are going to take some downward spirals. They don't necessarily stay stable throughout his reign. So when do things start to go wrong

for him? There are three big coups that we can discern from the sources throughout his reign. And they happened in his first year, in 37, which is the one that Macro and Gamalas are involved in. There's another in 39, which his sisters, surviving sisters, are apparently involved in. Jerusalem's ex-husband, a guy called Lepidus, who Caligula was probably grooming as his successor before Caligula had any children of his own. And then there's another one, and it's actually one, we think, orchestrated by the military in Germany. And this is the one that Caligula goes to put down when he heads up north. He goes to put down. He goes to put down a brewing military coup d'etat.

Every time there's a conspiracy against him, things go downhill. And it seems like the climax comes in the year 40 when Caligula marches into the Senate House and he says it exactly as it is to the Senators. And he goes, I know exactly what you are. You're a bunch of servile sycophants who'll say anything just to survive and pretend you have any power. But I'm not playing this game anymore. Actually, I hold the cards.

I am now going to act in entirely my own interests. and this is where the quote comes from, I don't care if you hate me as long as you fear me. And then he drops the mic, so to speak, and he walks out. And the Senate replied to this by becoming even more sycophantic and dedicating a holiday to Caligula's mercy. That's fascinating, because you talked to the beginning, Alex, about the importance of the emperor, Caligula or otherwise,

their relationship with the Senate, and that idea of presenting as all equals, even if that is not the actual system that you work and exist within. And he's completely flipped the narrative here. He's gone in and just said, as you say, kind of just said whatever's on his mind and told it the way it is. Why is their reaction? I mean, is he, how terrifying is he to these people?

I mean, you've kind of hinted at some of the darker things that he's done, but let's get into that because I just can't see why the Senate at this point wouldn't be like, I'm sorry, what? You're going in the bin. Like, that's enough of you. What's going on? He's very scary. And so it's at this point that he starts to,

what I interpret as inflicts psychological, torture upon the senators. So you get stories like he will invite three men of consular rank, so the three most senior senators in the land, to the imperial palace in the middle of the night. He'll have them bought their under-armed guard. And then he'll make them sit on a wooden bench in the dark, waiting for their throats to be cut. Only, instead of that happening, Caligula will appear, dressed up in kind of performance dress,

holding castanets with some flute girls in the background, and he'll perform a dance and a bit the sing-song and then he'll send the senators back home. It's just messing with them, I think. He's basically, I mean, again, this has been interpreted as his madness, but I like to think of it as basically, this is sinister stuff. This is going, I control your sleeping schedule. I control your life. And I'm going to make you just witness these spectacles, which I'm just going to kind of inflict upon you. Swiped is a new movie inspired by the provocative real-life story of the visionary founder of online dating platform Bumble.

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but that only lasts four years because very quickly he is assassinated, right? He's afraid of conspiracies. He's paranoid about conspiracies throughout his reign. This is where a lot of the executions and the murders come from. You would think with the reign of Gallagula that the list of assenators who was killed would be like as long as a Leonard Cohen song, right? It's actually quite short, but those who were killed were pretty short were involved in conspiracy. Or Caligula just suspects them of conspiring against him. Ultimately, though, he was justified, right?

I mean, his suspicions were confirmed because he was ultimately done away within a conspiracy. And so this takes us to the year 41. The events are a little bit garbled. The narrative is very garbled. We have several sources, but they're all kind of conflicting in the detail. But we can roughly reconstruct that Caligula is attending some games on the Palatine Hill. in a temporarily erected theatre. And he's had a really lovely morning.

He's been watching all the senators and the common people squabble like kind of fight for seats because he's purposely removed all the senatorial seating privileges. So they're all just like fighting amongst each other. He's been having a jolly good laugh at that as of presumably all of the plebeians

who were there gathered to watch. And he retreats to the palace around lunchtime to go and get something to eat because his stomach's a bit funny. He also seems to have been riddled with lots of physical ailments throughout his life. and to take a shower, to essentially use the baths before returning in the afternoon. And on his way inside, he's stopped by none other than the Praetorian Prefect,

who is a man called Cassius Cairea. And Cairea's got a bit of a bone to pick with Caligula, because Caligula constantly takes the Mickey out of Cairo's effeminacy. So apparently, Cairo, despite being a big, buff Jimbrough, has a little bit of an effeminate voice. He's got a very high-pitched voice. And so whenever Kaira asks Caligula for the watchword, for the password of the day to give to the military, Caligula will reply with something really cheeky, like Priapus, like the ancient god for the massive raging hard-on, or like Venus,

instead of like a serious word, like Jupiter or strength and honour, that kind of thing. And so the stories kind of go that there's a call and response. Kaira asks Caligula for the watchword. Caligula gives an answer, and then Kaira gives a final retort. and then, like, slashes him or on the face or, like, stabs him. But depending on which version the watchword Caligula gives is something really offensive, the ancient equivalent of, like, dickhead or something like that. Or there's also one version I really like, which is one in which Chaira fluffs his lines.

And so Caligula says Jupiter, and Kaira says, and so your vows will be fulfilled. And there's like a momentary awkward pause, and then Kaira slashes him. It's like when a waiter says, enjoy your meal nowadays. You say, thanks, you too. It's like just, oh, and then like, then he, you know, stabs Caligula to death. I love the idea that the only way out of that awkward situation was just slash him. He's got to go.

Like, that's too embarrassing. It's mortifying. We'll have to kill him. Exactly. I mean, assassins suffer from the same social embarrassment. Yeah. And so Kyria shanks him and then a bunch of other conspirators get involved and kind of butcher his corpse. There's alleged genital mutilation.

One source, and again, this illustrates how garbled the sources are, one source says that they ate his flesh. Pretty sure they didn't have disposable barbecues for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but to be honest, Alex, at this point, nothing's going to surprise me. So, sure, why not? Yeah. And then that's it.

So the Bittorians kind of run amok throughout the palace. There's a bit of a fight with Caligula's other bodyguard called the German guard, who he handpicked as like really big, strong strapping guys from Germany. The people, interestingly, are quite angry about this. And they protested the games, and then they take to the Roman Forum to say, what's going on. Why is he being killed? So again, that reveals that he actually had quite a lot of public support. It's the senators that hated him. We have a much later, a 19th century rendering of this moment. It's suitably Shakespearean in its, we have Claudius behind a curtain, so what else

could it be? But, Maddie, in time-honoured, after dark tradition, do you want to tell us what's happening in that image? Sure. Okay, so this is a painting called, I believe, a Roman emperor, Death of Caligula, painted in 1871 by Peraphylite adjacent artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema. And it's very kind of classic to-Dama where you could almost reach through the canvas and touch that cool, smooth marble, like it's completely gorgeous. And I'm kind of distracted by the interior. There's this sort of amazing marble and mozic floor. There's beautiful kind of wall paintings behind.

But we do have the Bretorian prefect pulling back the curtain, obviously, still suffering from his social anxiety and embarrassment. and on the floor, crumpled, under the weight of this sort of enormously elaborate costume that he's got on, these fabulous, are they green-heeled boots? I mean, gorgeous. Yeah, they're delightful. Yeah, stunning. Is the emperor himself, Killikulin?

He's on the floor, he's crumpled, he's dead. There's some blood of his that interestingly has been kind of smeared on this pure white statue behind, which is quite sort of cinematic. And then to the left of this scene is the public, I suppose. is everyone who's come to see the scene heating up their barbecues and ready to eat him. No, I'm just kidding. But it's, yeah, it's a very sort of Shakespearean moment.

It sort of reminds me of the curtain being drawn back. It's quite sort of Hamlet-esque, right? It feels very sort of theatrical in terms of that framing. But I think it does capture, yeah, that moment. The drama of it, the Praetorian prefect is, he's still in motion from the slashing. He's kind of his body's bent double. And the moment of this murder

is still kind of playing out in the painting that we see. So yeah, dramatic and exciting. What is the sort of long-term aftermath then, Alex, of this? Because you mentioned this kind of immediate outrage, this panic, the Praetorian guards kind of taking control of the situation. I mean, that surely sets a whole other precedent then in terms of how Rome is going to be ruled if these people can go around killing emperors and maybe replacing them. So what is, what's the impact of this long term? Yeah, you're spot on. I think the assassination of Caligula in 41 is the last time there's ever any reasonable notion of restoring the Republic. And so while all of this commotion is going on in the palace, the senators excitedly run off to the Capitoline Hill and they get together and they start discussing how they're going to restore the Republic, how they're going to take back power from the principal and from the autocrats. They haven't got a plan, which is kind of classic of these conspiracies. They're just kind of going off vibes and whims. Because, yes, meanwhile, the Praetorians find Claudius, hiding behind a curtain, as this portrait depicts, they put him on a litter and they carry him to the camp, the Praetorian camp, remnants of which still exists within the city of Rome today, next to a, in a region called Castro Pretorio.

And there, essentially, they go, right, you're not the best, but you'll do. We need a paymaster. We're not disbanding. We're on a stonking salary. We have great benefits. And we need an emperor. So that's going to be you. And Claudius, at sword point, basically concedes.

gives them a load of money and is then installed promptly on the throne. And the Senate, because the Senate have no force of their own, have to just concede and go, very good, sire. Well, all hail Emperor Claudius, I suppose. Long may he prosper. I like this idea of, I suppose, because the more we look at this execution of power and the more we look at the formulation of power across whatever century, there is always this idea that there is a head, somebody at the head of that power. And what we're seeing here is actually more often, Often than not, there is this group of people just below that who are manipulating that, who are shaping that.

And it seems to me in this context, that's the Praetorian Guard in this particular case. Alex, I want to, you know, we're talking about the dark emperors and we're talking about these awful deeds and Caligula in particular, although Caligula is now dead. Just before we go, it would be remissive as I think not to mention Nero, because we have a four-year rule for Caligula, but Nero's on there for, you know, a good 13-year. years or so. And he gets an awful lot more suffering under his belt during that time, doesn't he? So tell us a little bit about that. So, gosh, yeah, there are lots of comparisons you can draw between Nero and Calicula, at least in how they're characterised.

They both seem to go in for a fair amount of family murder. So while Caligula's doing away with Tiberius Gamelis, Nero is accused of killing his mother, Agropina, who incidentally was also Caligula's younger sister, and also Britannicus, who was his brother through relationship to Clairius. audience. Both of them are big into spectacle. So they love the games, they love performing, we are told. Nero famously performs on stage, which would have been really shocking for a Roman audience. But then so too, we're told as Caligula. And in fact, when Caligula was assassinated, we believe he was prepping for a big appearance on stage in some great tragedy. Lots of brutal murders, not just of senators, but also of Christians. So he blamed the Christians for the great fire

of Rome. They're his kind of scapegoat. And he has lots of them. them brutally crucified and then set on fire. So this kind of cruel tradition kind of runs through both narratives. I think Alex will have to have you back on for an episode on Nero because there's just, yeah, there's so much to cover. I remember watching a BBC drama years and years ago with, okay, who's the very attractive Welsh actor with the curly hair, Michael Sheen, and he played Nero. And that performance, I think I watched that, and I must have been far too young to be

watching that. I think my parents must have thought, this is about the Romans. This will be educational. And that has haunted me to this day. So we should get you and maybe Michael Sheen on to talk about Nero next time. That would be great. That would be wonderful. Yeah. You can play some muscle and get Michael Sheen on. Yeah, exactly. Michael Sheen, if you're listening, which we know you do, please come on. I think that's all we have time for in this episode. But thank you, Alex, so much for all of that. Thank you. Dark information that you've shared. Absolutely fascinating stuff. And thank you very much for listening at home. If you have ideas for future episodes, if you want to hear more from the ancient world,

get in touch and email us after dark at historyhit.com. See you next time. What's better than a well-marbled ribby sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribby sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribai you ordered without even leaving the kitty. pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply.

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An official selection of the Toronto International Film Festival, the Hulu Original Film Swiped, is now streaming only on Disney Plus.