Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - History's Worst F*ckboys: Emperor Caligula

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Have you ever heard of the Emperor who made his horse a senator? Seems like a top bloke, right? Today on Betwixt the Sheets we’re going to meet (possibly) the most debauched Roman Emperor.From stealing brides from their wedding days to an unhealthy obsession with his sister, who was Caligula and was he a f*ckboy? Kate is joined by historian Alexander Meddings to find out. Alexander is a Rome-based historian and travel writer. He leads tours of the Appian Way - one of the most important roads of Ancient Rome.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.If you'd like to get in touch with the show you can contact us at [e-mail] 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.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister, and you're listening to Betwicks the Sheeds, where we rip the knickers off history. But before we can listen any further, I do have to tell you. This is an adult podcast, Pokemon by adults, other adults, bads, doughty things and an adulty wake covering a range of adult subjects,

and you should be an adult too. I don't know why I have to keep telling you that. Isn't that what we're all here for in the first place? Right, on with the show. Hello, betwixters, and welcome to Casa Caligula. It is 39 AD and the year is already hotting up. The Imperial Gardens up here on the Esqueline Hill offer a welcome break from the intense sun,

as well as the crowds and the smells of the city. Here there are fountains of clear, cool water, hand-painted birds and floral designs on marble, thermal baths decorated with precious coloured stones and sculptures. So many sculptures. There are certainly slaves here, but you won't hear them. Those voices, they are the guests of the emperor. I wonder who he has over today.

There are stories, of course. Maybe you've heard the tales of debauchery going on within these tranquil walls. You wouldn't know it being here today, but with such lavish tastes, it isn't hard to believe that the Emperor Caligula is a bit, shall we say, gluttonous with his desires. I wonder if that spreads to. to his sex life. What do you look for a man?

Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect coppents of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, with me, Kate Lister. Last week, we rifled through the Little Black Book of Lord Byron to find out if he really really,

he was a historical fuckboy. This week, we're entering the halls of real power. We're heading back a few millennia and we're going to meet one of Rome's most debauched emperors, allegedly, Caligula. Ruling the empire from 37 to 41 AD, Caligula is often mentioned as the emperor who made his horse a senator. His rule ended only when he was assassinated, but why was he so hated? Did he really get divorced after just one day of marriage?

and did he really sleep with his sisters? Hmm. Well, I am joined from Rome, no less, by Alexander Meddings, and he is going to help us find out. Sandals on, let's do it. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Alexander Meddings. How are you doing?

I am great, thank you. Thanks having me on. Well, thank you for coming on, because this is part of our new mini-series on historical, to use the term the kids, use fuck boys. And as a specialist in Roman history, you must have come across a fair few of them. Oh yeah. I mean, it's about finding out which of the Caesars weren't fuck boys. That's kind of the trick. Have you been able to find that out? Have you got one that was just really well-behaved,

that was just looking around going, I don't know what's going on here? No. I mean, even the ones that die within a few months still manage to fit a fair amount in. So, no. We are here to talk about one of the most notorious, I think, Caligula. What a strange reputation he's got not a good one. And I'm really interesting the question, and we'll tease this one out, was he what we could call a fuckboy? We have to define terms here, I suppose. Or was he just weird with what he liked to do?

And what's the difference between the two? But before we even get to that, I suppose we have to cover who was Caligula? Can you give us his origin story? Right. So Caligula was Rome's third emperor, and he was part of a dynasty known as the Julio Claudians, which starts with Augustus in the last few decades of the first century BC, and it ends with the all-singing or dancing emperor Nero in the 60s, AD. Caligula's real name was actually Gaius Julius Caesar. He's the third son of Germanicus and Agrippina the elder, who are Rome's celebrity couple.

They're like the Braddon Angelina. They were really popular, weren't they? Yeah. I mean, think kind of Will and Kate, but with the persecution narrative and public sympathy of Harry and Megan. Yeah, framed very well. Okay, yeah, like it.

So the first few years of his life are spent away on campaign with his father Germanicus, who, as his name suggests, is basically beating up the Germans with the dirty great Roman sword. While away in Germany, Calicula is adopted

as a mascot by the legions. And the legions dress him up in a little kind of legionary outfit complete with little boots called Caligas or Caligolas as the diminutive is. And that's how he gets his nickname. Caligula.

That's it. Throughout his entire life, he's basically called Booty Kins or Little Cadet Kid or something like that. That's got to really stick in the crawl. Did he like that? No, he hated it.

No. No, no. Any contemporary accounts we have of him refer to him as Gaius. He wanted to be Gai. But he's called Bootykins. You wouldn't like that. You wouldn't like a little nickname from when you were a tiny kid given to you.

Oh, all right. He's starting to fall into focus now. Yeah, I'm starting to get us. Yeah. All right. He would hate that. But he's an army brat, basically. He's growing up.

He's an army brat. He's a cadet kid on the front lines. But that one anecdote we have is that's it as far as any happy childhood memories are concerned. Because Germanicus goes and dies in 1980. He's poisoned by his enemies. Many say Tiberius, the emperor at the time, had a hand in things. And when Germanicus dies, Rome breaks out in the most extreme form of public mourning. If we believe any of the sources, it's just completely insane.

So people start ransacking temples in their grief, they throw out the household gods. We're told that many of Rome's enemies agree truces temporarily because they feel they've suffered a loss as well, which again is just completely insane. Wow, that is very extreme. And new fathers, fathers of newborn kids, leave their babies exposed outside because they can't deal with the grief of raising them in a world without Germanicus. So, yeah.

I'm getting a sense here of that there's some issues with the sources. As a historian, when you're reading this, is there like a line in this, and you're like, well, I'm prepared to believe that people were very sad, but, like, abandoning babies to die and enemies going, look, all right, we feel quite, sad about this too. That seems extreme. It's so extreme. Yeah. It always gives me a giggle, though. I mean, you also have like Parthian kings who say, we will abstain from banqueting out of respect for him,

because that's like the best thing a Parthian king could do to show respect, right? I suppose what we could perhaps take away from that is even if those stories are not true, and they sound a little bit suspect to me, but they are testament to the esteem that this man was held in. Yeah, he was the prince that was promised. And his wife Agrippina uses his funeral to stir up the Romans against Tiberius, to accuse Tiberius of having had a hand in his assassination by poison. At the funeral. At the funeral.

That is some high-level scheming on the part of Agrippina. It is. And it's also just really not a good idea against an emperor like Tiberius. Right. And so what happens next is that all of Caligula's, family. So his mother and his two elder brothers are arrested, exiled, sent away to far away islands and starve to death. What is it with the islands in ancient Rome? Of people being constantly sent to these islands where they starve to death? I know. And these are really popular tourist islands

now like Ponsor-Band-Dar. That's awful. But you go there with this knowledge, you're like, you really didn't want to go to Ponsor 2,000 years ago. No. All right. So Tiberius is, I've not heard good things about him. I've heard many, many bad things, including that he was a pederast, basically. I've heard the stories about his little fishes, quote, that he used to call the children. Indeed, who are trained to swim between him while he's in Bath on Capri and nibble at his genitalia.

Yes. Yeah, it depends which sources you want to believe. depends how far you want to believe them. So there is this really thick, invective tradition against Tiberius, which has him as a sadomasochist, as a pervert. It says that the walls of his palace on Capri were adorned with the kind of pornography you see in Pompey, in the brothel, for example. It also says that he had a group called his tightbums.

He had a group of boys. He liked to call his tightbums for reasons that we probably don't need to go into. And he would get them to perform. threesome's in front of him to stimulate his flagging libido in old age. I hadn't heard that one. Wow. Okay. It's like an evening round at Tiberius's is, that's not going to be a good night for most people. If you believe the traditions. But then there's another tradition that says that he's a bit of a kind of pub quizer. He likes getting astrologers and scholars over and having fierce intellectual debates and he likes writing histories and books on grammar.

Okay. As a historian, what do you think? I know that we'll never ever know forever, but just what's your thoughts on it? I think like Freshers Week, you can do both. You can study by day and you can go wild at night. Yes, that is true, isn't it? Yes. I think most of the stories are probably ratcheted up to blacken his reputation because it was in the interest of his successors to do that. We will never really know. unless we uncover some more sources. But this is Caligula's grandpa, is that right? It's his great uncle.

And Caligula is, when he has no family left, apart from his grandmother, Caligula is summoned to Capri, and he's raised as an adolescent by Tiberius. So Caligula has to watch all of this stuff going on, and he has to dissimulate. He has to pretend that he's totally cool with it all, because if he looks upset or angry or threatening,

then he will be bumped off as well. That would mess you up, wouldn't it? Your whole family is being murdered around you and you have to go and live with the person who's probably doing it and pretend you're completely fine with all of this. Right. And this goes a long way, I think,

to explaining why Calicula had issues, to put it mildly, as an adult. To say the least. He was also a bit of a fuckboy on Capri, though, Calicula. Oh, was it? Tell me. He does a bit of dissimulation, so he does a bit of pretending everything's fine and staying in line. But then we're also told by Suetonius that he loved going out late at night, disguised in a wig and a long cloak,

to engage in gluttony and adultery and to seek out dancing and singing performances. And Tiberius lets him get away with this in the hope it might calm his vicious character. And I'm thinking if even 1% of the stories about Tiberius are true, then going out dancing, and singing in a wig is kind of tame. That's very tame, isn't it? But the idea that he's doing this to try and calm Caligula down, that's interesting as well. Because it doesn't sound like from the stories

that he would be somebody that would let anybody be uncalm in their presence without sending them off to an island somewhere. Allegedly he was told in a prophecy that he was rearing a viper who was going to be the viper for the Roman people. And so he's always a little bit wary about letting Caligula indulge too much in his vice. But broadly speaking, Tiberius, boo, Germanicus, yay, how did people feel about the young Caligula, this alleged Viper?

Was he popular? I mean, I know he wasn't in power at this point. What was his PR team doing? Did he have good public relations? He did, and he comes to power quite quickly. So Tiberius dies on Capri. Many say that Caligula had a hand in that, not least because he managed to seduce the wife of the Batorian Guard by promising her empire, which is proper fuckboy behavior. That is, isn't it? Oh, that is.

I'll call you in the morning, I promise. Honestly, it'd be amazing. We'll work it all at lies. Right. Nowadays, it's like a dinner out and maybe a weekend break or something. Then it's, I give you the empire. That would work. That's a line, isn't it?

There's not many people that wouldn't be seduced by that. All right, okay. So that's interesting. he's already got that reputation, possibly bumped him off. They all seem to meet pretty violent ends, all the emperors. They really do. They really do.

Very few of them die a natural death. Augustus died a natural death, but he's really the only one that comes to mind. In rivaled age, too, in his 70s, yeah. So Tiberius and his little fishies gone, then what happens? So Caligula is proclaimed the emperor, and the only other person potentially standing in his way

is Tiberius' grandson called Tiberius Gamelis, but Gamelis is a bit too young. Calicula returns to Rome, and he is hailed as a hero. He's given a hero's welcome. He's very much seen at this point as the son of Germanicus, as Rome's golden boy. So Oettonius tells us that 160,000 animals are slaughtered to celebrate his extension to the throne. Odd choice there, Rome. That's... It's a terrible time to be an ox. Great time to be a Roman citizen. all the box is going, yay, it's like they want us to do what? What? What? What? What? What? What's happening? Oh, bless them.

But they're not happy unless they're sacrificing something. I have learned that about the Romans. And it starts really well, his reign. He lowers taxes. He publishes public accounts. He reintroduces literature that Tiberius had banned. He puts on lots of games and spectacles. And he himself, as a populist, is a spectacle. So he rides through the streets of Rome in a chariot. He showers the people with gold. Quite literally, from the top of the Basilica Yulia in the forum. That's clever, isn't it? If you're going to win people over, how old was he when he was doing this?

He is 25, I believe, when he comes to power. He's 25, and he's dead by 29. Spoiler alert. Wow. He doesn't last particularly long. What happened to the little boy that could have been, dare I ask? Was it an island? It wasn't an island, actually. No, it was quicker than an island.

So Calicula falls sick late in the year 37, the same year he becomes emperor. And everybody thinks he's going to die. And so they start lining up a successor. And that successor is the little boy, Tiberius Scamelis. But Calicula recovers. And when he recovers, you could say that a monster emerges in place of a man. And so he has seen what people are willing to do. He has seen that the Senate have no loyalty to him.

and they were complicit in the murder of his family and his dynasty. And so he goes on a massive revenge spree. So Tiberius Gamelis is made to commit suicide. Oh, no. He was only little, wasn't he? I don't think he was a teenager. I'm saying like, oh, but honestly, as Collegular gets going, that really is the least of it, isn't it?

I'll be back with Alexander and Collegular after this short break. This illness that he had, there's been a lot of debate around that as to what happened because as you were saying, he started really strong. Like the people can't get enough of him. He's a rock star. He's doing everything right. And I suppose if Tiberius was away on Capri, having a young emperor back in Rome, being visible must have been a real big thing. But then this illness. And he's out of action for a long time, isn't he? Yeah, it's a few months. What was it? Do you think? I know, I know we weren't there. But like, what do you think? Do you recover from syphilis?

I have heard people say it might have been some kind of breakdown because, as you were saying, a very different person emerges. He definitely suffers a breakdown upon the death of his favourite sister, Drus Silla. And so even though earlier on I mentioned the fact that all of his family are dead, that's actually just the brothers, the male line and his parents. He still has three surviving sisters. and the big thing about Caligula's debauched sex life is his incest with his sisters, right? That's how writers get at him because Caligula parades his sisters really quite publicly because they are the only legitimate succession if something happens to him. Coins are really interesting in this.

I won't talk too much about coins because it can be a little dull, but the coins issued by Caligula contain our first ever portrait of a living female figure in the form of his mother. They do have this attitude of like, men are amazing, men are, are they all women too? Yeah, I guess they're are. But men are amazing. And they can really easily just ignore women.

It's a very odd attitude, even though they're all over the place. But Caligula's celebration of his sisters and him pushing them forward into, I'm not sure if he gave them titles, but it's quite a prominent public space that he's pushing them in. That must have rattled a few cages.

Absolutely. And he does give them titles. He calls them Sororez Augusti, so the Sisters of Augustus. So that's a quasi-religious title. He also gives his sisters and his grandmother the privileges of Vestal Virgins. Oh, hello. She's no small feat. No.

Are they virgins? No. I mean, Drusilla's married to a bloke who later on will launch a conspiracy against Caligula. Definitely not. Definitely not virgins. And if we believe the sources against Caligula, then he himself, deflowered Drusilla when they were both kids. All right, so let's talk about this one then.

Is this another Roman historian giving it all? Oh, they were so upset. All the babies died and Tiberius had a band of tight bums, whatever it was. Is this just more Roman propaganda? What is our evidence that he did have an unusually close, suspiciously close relationship with his sisters? He clearly felt very attached to Drusilla.

I think he was setting her up. up as Empress. Not to marry her, but she would have been the successor had something happened to him. And he clearly has a very close bond with her, because when she dies, he does genuinely lose his mind. He forbids laughter in public. He forbids people banqueting with their family. Oh, God. Oh, like, we're going there. Wow. Okay. We're going there. Yeah, he goes completely batch it crazy for quite a long time, and he never really recovers from that. But the incest accusation regarding his other sisters is, I think, entirely fabricated. I think we can be very confident of that.

Okay. Why did you say that? If it were remotely true, one of his contemporary sources of which a couple survived would have mentioned it. I have no doubt Seneca, for example, would have mentioned it. Yeah, he didn't pull his punches, did he, Seneca? He would have mentioned that. I think so. Somebody would, but it only appears later.

Okay. All right. So this is further down the line that people are writing this. but Drusilla, what is it? Is Drusilla younger, older? So she was younger by about four years. Okay. Do we know why they were, again, we don't have the sources really, but why they would be so close? Were they on Capri together? Did they spend time together as children? We just don't know.

They spent time together as children. They weren't on Capri together. It's really when Caligula gets back that he starts elevating them to these positions of power. But the sources are just outrageous. So the accusation is that Caligula, bitually indulged in incest with all of his sisters and his wife at crowded banquets. And he made them take turns in lying beneath him while the wife lay above. Okay. Okay. Who's saying that? Who says that? Suetonius, our main source. He's a biographer from the first century AD, more or less, and second century. He's writing under the Emperor Hadrian. In fact, he's expelled from Hadrian's court for

possibly getting too close to Hadrian's wife. So he's also a bit of a shaggar. Excellent. Yeah, I don't think there's any truth in that whatsoever. But the fivesome image at a crowded banquet really does stay with you. That really does, doesn't it? Imagine being like the butler or the person that has to clear up after that. I've just like, oh, God. Other rumours I've heard about him, and they may have come from that film,

Collegular, from the 70s. Oh, the porno. Yes. That's exactly that one. Was that Roddy McDowell? I can't remember. Yeah, Malcolm McDowell. And Helen Mirren.

And Helen Mirren, yes, she was in it. The story that he deflowered the virgin brides of his friends on the day of their wedding. Is that recorded anywhere? He stole wives at weddings. He wasn't so much into, well, maybe they were also virgins at the time. I mean, that would have been the practice. So, yeah, we could go with that. But the focus is less on him deflowering them and more on him stealing the property of senators.

Ah, there you go. There's that Roman logic again. There you go. Horrible Romans. Being generally horrible. They really are quite brutal in the way they look at this. All right, so he's stealing property. And that's insulting and humiliating on purpose, right? He loves humiliating the Senate. And the people probably love him for that.

Go on. Give me some other Caligula Burns then when he's really on a role here. So apparently he condemns the Roman people to hunger by arbitrarily closing. the granaries. Again, that's insincerty. That's dumb. Why would you do that? That's just, what? It doesn't make much sense. He has a drama composer Burns to Death in the middle of the arena because one of his lines contains a doubtful joke and Caligula's kind of into literature. Right. Okay. I mean, that's pedantic to an extreme degree. It's so pedantic. People would watch it, though. Yes, they would. They would. And I know academics as well, who've spotted errors in works before and they would not be beyond doing something.

something like that, the rage that it provokes. What about the story you made is horse a member of the Senate? Ah, okay. So that's, for my money, that's an example of Calicula's quite wicked sense of humour. Okay. He's essentially saying to the Senate, you are all so useless. I might as well make my horse a senator or a consul. Or he's basically just saying, I can do whatever I want.

I actually have no need of you guys. And I'm going to give all of my horse the trappings of a console, including the stables, the purple blankets. So he gets purple blankets, which are the colour of royalty. He gets his own stables, gives him all of the trappings of a console, what one of the elite would expect. And I think this has just been misinterpreted as an example of Kiliqilis madness. I see. So it's not that he genuinely thought his horse could be a console.

This was him sticking two fingers up again at the Senate. Absolutely. I mean, it's an example of his madness, right? but it's too easy to describe him as mad. It's far too easy. And I think a lot of what he does can be construed as basically him just holding a mirror up to the senators, showing them how servile and useless they are, and demonstrating that he has absolute power to do whatever he wants,

whether it's make his horse a console or shag their wives in front of them, which he also does. Oh, does he do that? Oh, dear. One of the other things I've learned about the Romans, though, is if they want to insult somebody or if they want to discredit them, their go-to burn is that they are sexually debauched. You see that cropping up in the strait, like in political debates, there are people standing up and going, yeah, but you give head to slave girls when they're on their period. And like in a political debate, you just going, what?

Could this just be more of that of like he was, he's so wicked and evil that, of course he was doing these things sexually that were horrendous? It's hard to know. I think there is enough weight of tradition there that it's entirely possible that the Senate suffered a lot of humiliation and sexual humiliation at his hands. I don't think it's just a case of just making up stuff out of nowhere. I don't think it would have washed. And you said that he has a vicious sense of humour and we do have some evidence for that because we have the account of, was it a group of Jewish people went to go and see him to try and book an appointment with him? Tell us that story. So this is the only source we have written by someone who met Caligula. And it's by a Jew from Alexandria called Philo of Alexandria. Presumably he had another name, but we now know him as Philo of Alexandria. And essentially the Jews of the city are being persecuted.

And so Philo and an embassy set out to go and meet Caligula and to go and petition him to protect their rights. And they're trying to tie him down when they arrive. And he's busy just wandering around the Imperial Palace. kind of taking care of all matters interior decor and not actually receiving embassies like a good emperor should. And then he essentially goes,

he makes eye contact briefly with Philo. And he goes, ah, your people are the ones who don't eat pork and who won't sacrifice to me, right? I'm a god, you should. And that's the meeting. Then he sends them away. I mean, it's funny now. You kind of look at it and you're like,

that's so weird that he did that. But it does encapsulate something quite cruel and dismissive about him, that these people have gone to see him to be like, please, please, could you stop as being murdered? And he's more interested in his interior design projects. And when he does see them, he just takes the piss out of their religion. I think he sees them as a threat. There's another story in which Caligula tried to install his statue

of his godhead inside the temple of Jerusalem, but it was just about talked down from doing it. Oh, okay. I think with the Jews in particular, he's trying to send a message because he sees them as a threat. He sees monotheism as a big threat to the Roman Empire where you worship all gods and the emperor, especially because the emperor's a god, right? I'll be back with Alexander and Collegular after this short break. We should talk about his wives, because as well as allegedly seducing women left, right and centre, members of the Senate and just generally humiliating people, he did get married. He did. He had four wives.

The first is a woman called Junior Claudela who dies on Capri in childbirth. We know nothing else about it. Was he sad about that? Did he lose his shit about that? We have no idea. Probably not, because that's roughly the same time as he's trying to hit on the wife of the Praetorian prefect

to get close to Tiberius and take him out. He moves on very quickly. Yeah, probably overnight. Fuck boy. I know. The second Livia Orestilla is originally married to another guy and Caligula is invited as a guest to their wedding, and at the wedding feast, he steals her away.

He forces the guy, Calpanius Bezo, to divorce her, and he steals her away. But then he realizes that she will never really come to love him because she loves Pizzo. And so he divorces her the next day. So that's a wild three days. Wow. So two for two.

Two for two. And then he goes through a period in which all of their names have to rhyme. So we have Lollina Paolina. Jesus Christ. Same thing. He steals her from the wedding. They last about six months together and then he divorces her because she is infertile apparently. And his punishment for this is that she can never ever associate

with another man. Fuck by behaviour indeed, right. Just know why I was expecting decent husband behaviour from this person? He just went home of an evening and they just cuddled up and watched the Roman equivalent of Netflix or like, I don't know why I presume it wasn't going to be awful. Of course, it's going to be awful. So who's the fourth then? He's leaving this trail. The fourth is the one that sticks. So in a sense, he does kind of Netflix and chill a bit with the fourth one. Her name is Milonia

Kaisonia. Sounds a bit like Melania, not to invite comparisons. Maybe more between him and anywho. They get married in about 39 to 40 AD. She's significantly older than him. She already has three children, which is strange and remarked upon. Okay. And juvenile, a satirist writing a few decades later, suggests that the reason Caligula was mad is because she was poisoning him. Nah. The date's don't fit. Right. But it's typical, blame the woman, right? It's typical of that whole stick. Is she the one that Helen Mirren played in the film Colligula? Yes. And she was like a massive, massive goer. That was the story in the film. Is that any bearing in reality? Pretty much. The one sentence we have on her from Suetonius says that she was devoted to luxury and

sexual excess. There we go then. Right. So maybe they're well matched. Maybe it was just a match made in, well, hell, quite frankly. But they have a baby, don't they? They do. They have a young daughter. They have a young daughter together. And when she gives him a daughter, he views her as a goddess. who views this woman as the one he will stay with forever. I think he loves her. I think Caligula loves Caesonia. But he also does really weird stuff with her. Like he parades her in front of the soldiers,

dressed in a kind of military uniform. He parades her naked in front of his friends. It's given Kanye, Kanye with Bianca, parading her in front of people in a weird show. I don't know why I've gone there. I shouldn't make that comparison. No, no, no, it's a good one. I like that one.

But he must be pretty into her and obsessed with her. Like, to be doing that. like showing her off like that. He is, but he's got it wrong because he should really be parading her, especially naked in front of his friends, if she is a young and beautiful childbearing woman. But she's not.

So again, this is an example of him just getting it wrong, of him not knowing what the socially acceptable norms are. It's just a really interesting example of what happens when you take somebody that already has a lot of issues and you just give them unfettered power and they're surrounded by people. He must have been surrounded by people that were just too terrified to say no to whatever hairbrain scheme he'd come up with.

Yeah, he definitely was. He had lots of, well, the Senate are completely sycophantic. He manages to convince senators to run alongside his chariot for miles. Oh, Jesus. That's so, it's so humiliated that. Like, come on, guys. And they fight to become part of his priesthood. So they will try and outbid each other and do whatever they can to become a priest to a living emperor.

who was celebrated as a god by this stage. So he has the sycophantic senators and then I think he probably kind of like the bully at school. I think he's got a group of mates around him who just laugh at all his jokes and they tell him that everything he touches turns to gold.

Giving J.D. Vance. Yeah. Yeah. I know that the other people he was surrounded by. It's just all sounding horribly familiar like when you're talking about this stuff of like people coming up with mad ideas in power

and just being surrounded by people that go, yeah, that sounds. sounds great. Let's definitely do that. Only, yes, man. Nothing can go wrong. But I do know that the people you had to have surrounding you to retain any kind of power in Rome, if you were the emperor, was the Praetorian Guard. Because without that, you're just one person shouting mad crap on your own, aren't you? Who were the Pretorian guard?

And why did they stand by him for as long as they did? Because he's showering them with money. There you go. It's not in their interest to go and find somebody else. There isn't really anybody else. I mean, Caligula is descended by blood to Augustus, to the First Emperor, through his mother, through the matrilineal line. And so Caligula is the most legitimate emperor.

There is. This is also still the very, very early days of the imperial system, of the Principate, as it's called. And so it's not really clear how it's going to work, whether it's going to be a kind of blood succession or... inherited from, you know, your father or... But they're making it work at the moment by basically just getting into power and paying off the Praetorian Guard. And they're the only guard in Rome is swords.

And so what they say, what you say with their protection, goes. Are they like bodyguards? Is that who they are? Yeah, they are. Caligula also has a separate guard called the German Guard, who are a bunch of really burly German blokes, who, as we'll see later, when Caligia is assassinated, end up fighting with the Pretorian Guard.

because it's the Praetorians who off him. Oh, well, that didn't go his plan then, did it? The Praetorian guards, they're the ones that would kind of be with him all the time. And if he said something like, seize him, they would be the ones to, like, jump in. And they're basically the muscle, aren't they? They're the muscle. So when he's picking people up off the streets and having them executed, it's very unlikely he's doing any of that himself.

He's just sitting there, cup of tea, or the equivalent, some horrible garum fish sores covered stuff. And he's just watching for his own entertainment. So how does that go wrong then? If he's paying him off, there must have been an attitude of like, look, we know he's not great, but he's the only one we've got, so we're going with him. What went wrong? And how did they bump him off? So it's not the first conspiracy against him.

There is another one about a year or two earlier, led by Drusilla's ex-husband. But Caligula puts it down really, really quickly and brutally. And he has his other two sisters exiled where they will remain until Caligula's dead. So no one really dares rise up against him after that until the head of the Praetorian Guard, who is a guy called Cassius Cairea, can't take it anymore. So Cassius is a big muscular, gym bro kind of, you know, big stocky-billed Praetorian. But he has a little bit of a high-pit's voice that Caligula constantly takes the piss out of. Right.

So Caligula's mocking him all the time for his effeminacy. and whenever Kaira asks Caligula for the daily watchword, the secret code to give to all the other Praetorians, instead of saying something serious like Securitas or Jupiter, Caligula says things like Priapus, which is the god of fertility with a big raging hard on in all of his defictions, or Venus, which is like, I don't know, the modern equivalent would be like Cupcake or Giggles.

Right. Okay, okay. So, like military passwords that are just silly. Yep. Which, again, would probably be really funny if you're on his side. Today's password, sire, giggles. Oh, God, big buttoned, big willies. Oh, dear.

Right, yeah, I can see how that would grate on you if you were a very serious Praetorian guardsman. Is that why they did it then, just because they couldn't stand the nicknames anymore? That's the story we've got. I mean, he had his supporters. People were like, oh, that would be fantastic. If you could actually take him out, that would be great. Also do his family in the meantime.

That would be wonderful. And then we can restore the Republic. So the senators are very much on board, but they're also cowards, and they don't want to get involved themselves. Yeah. So what happens is we're in the year 41 in January, I believe. So a nice cold January day in 41 AD. Caligula is just coming back from the theatre,

which is a temporary theatre he's erected near the Palatine Hill. And he's had a great day at the theatre. He's been watching all of the senators scramble for seats at the beginning because he's removed their privileges. So then they're just like fighting commoners trying to get the best seats and the commoners are fighting back. Just chaos. He really is a shit.

He's such an asshole. But it's quite funny. I mean, it's like watching the House of Lords kind of like scramble around. You know what I mean? It really depends what viewpoint you've got here, doesn't it? Because I can see how that is.

Yeah, that's a really vicious sense of humour, but that is quite funny. It's really grim. Unless it was happening to you in, which case. Unless it's happening to you, but it's a spectacle. And it's the senators who write the history. So the ones who are fighting for seats and are having to like, you know, watch a performance with some guys' massive head in front of them. They can't see anything. They're the ones writing the history. The ones who found it really funny were illiterate for the most part. So Caligula is heading

back to indulge in a massive lunch. And he's briefly pulled away while he's going down this corridor. And he's told to go and watch a performance that some young aristocrats from Asia Minor are putting on. And if he could just go by and encourage them. And he says yes, which is really good of him, because it's presumably some terrible amateur dramatics by a bunch of Greek trustafarian kids. It's going to be terrible. Yeah. Okay. That's odd that he would say yes to that. But he agrees to go and watch. And as he's making his way there, he bumps into Cairoa. And Karea asks him for the day's password. Caligula probably just says something like Dick Ed or something else. And Kaira just pulls his sword out and he slashes Caligula. He cuts his jaw.

off, or cuts his jaw almost in two, and throws into the ground. It's kind of weirdly comical, even at the end. So, Killiculars there writhing around going, I'm not dead, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And then Kaira's kind of stabbing him, and then the others join in, and some other guards are stabbing him. Then they cut his genitals off. That's overkill, isn't it? You didn't need to do that.

It's massive overkill. And then they eat his flesh, apparently, according to what? one account. Too far. Too far. You could wound that back in a few notches and everything would have been a lot better. That to me sounds like another Roman, like, are you exaggerating that story? That sounds a bit like that.

What's the point of that story? Why cut his genitals off? Why eat his flesh? Yeah, the flesh eating's wild, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, is that just like he's definitely dead. We ate him. Yeah, the genitals bit, the flesh eating, I really don't know.

I'm not sure I want to know. But, I mean, it shows the strength. of ill will towards him, I suppose. The genital mutilation, I think, is partly about how he sexually humiliated a lot of people, a lot of senators, senators' wives, and so they're going to do it back to him. And it's also partly about ending the bloodline once and for all. So people can hold his cock and balls up and be like, that's it for the Julian's. That's it.

They're gone. It's a hell of an end for a fuck boy as well, isn't it? is to have your willie cut off and paraded around. What happened to his wife and his baby? Even worse. So his wife is hunted down in the palace and stabbed to death. And his baby daughter, it can't be more than one or two years old,

is picked up and bashed against a wall. Oh. And Suetonius tries to justify this in his account of the death by saying that she had inherited her father's savagery because she would try and scratch the faces and bite the faces of those who held her. So Suetonius has never met a baby. Calm down, Syriotonius.

What they've done there is they've literally wiped out, not only him, but any future chance of any succession from him whatsoever. Exactly. No more issue. That's the end of the line. The Senate briefly talk about restoring the Republic, and they all head off very excitedly at one of Rome's seven hills to discuss how they're going to put plans in motion.

Meanwhile, the Praetorians are running around the palace. They find Claudius, Caligula's uncle, hiding behind a curtain. and they go, he'll do, and they put him on a litter, bring him to their camp, and they say, he's ours now. This is the problem with every single one of these assassination attempts is they've got nothing sensible lined up afterwards. Like, the Praetorian Guard need to have an emperor. He's the one who pays their bills. And it never ever works. A few people go, should we have a republic? And then someone goes, we can just have this guy as the emperor again.

They go, oh, all right then. And then he's terrible too. Well, it's a hell of an ending for Caligula And I started by saying, do you think that we could call him a historical fuck boy? How much of his sexual excess and debauchery do you think contributes to his legacy and even to his death? I mean, if he'd been completely chased,

do you think it would have still been awful? I think sexual excess plays a really big role in his life and that really characterizes his reputation afterwards. I also think he did engage in an awful lot of fuckboy behaviour. And he just shagged around an awful lot, both with women and with men. There's a consul called Valerius Catullus, who proclaims quite publicly that he had bugged the emperor and was quite exhausted by his sexual demands. So Calicula is active, he's passive, he's shagging anybody with a pulse.

He falls in love with an actor called Manesta and goes and passionately kisses him on stage whenever he performs, which would have been so shocking for a Roman senator, it would be like, I don't know if I can say this, it would be like kind of King Charles getting up on stage at the Royal Variety Performance and French kissing a nipple tasseled stripper. That's kind of the level of that's kind of the level when it comes to an emperor on stage. It would make a few headlines back, wouldn't it? It would definitely, yeah. And when it came to sex, like his excess of it was like a deliberate performance and a deliberate fuck you to convention and again to the Senate of I'm not going to behave in any way that you deem decent and sensible.

I'm just going to completely upturn everything. I think so. He's not unique among the emperors for being very sexually active and engaging in lots of sexual humiliation. I mean, also Augustus, funnily enough, according to Suetonius, behaves exactly like Caligula did. He invites senators to dinner, to banquets, and then he will publicly take away the woman

that he is most attracted to, the wife he's most attracted to, have his way with her, and then bring her back all disheveled, you know, cheeks, ears, burning, and comment on her performance. Caligula is accused of doing the same thing, but for Augustus, apparently,

Suetonius tells us, he did it more for policy than for lust. It's politics. What a lot of shit. I know, right? How is that? politics. Talking about trade deals, well. Maybe we'd get more things done if we can do like that. Just not televised, please. No good God. Alexander, you have been wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much.

If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Best place would be my website, which is alexandermedings.com, and I offer guided tours around Rome, mainly on the Appian Way. So come and join me. Love to show you around. And thank you so much for having me It's been loads of fun, thank you. Thanks for listing and thanks to Alexander for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like with you and follow along whatever it is you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or perhaps you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com.

Coming up, we have got episodes of my most favourite royal mistress, Nell Gwynn. We have more fuckboys and an examination of what it meant to be ugly throughout history. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced. by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets of the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.