The Ancients - Caligula

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

Caligula. One of the most infamous Roman emperors of them all. He didn't rule Rome for long, but he has gained a legacy as this incredibly evil figure. But who was the real Caligula? Did he really fall in love with one of his horses? And did he really declare war on the sea?In today's episode Tristan Hughes uncovers all this and more as he welcomes historian LJ Trafford back onto the podcast to explore the truth behind Caligula's rather horrifying legend.This episode was produced by Joseph Knight and edited by Aidan LonerganEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code ANCIENTS - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Caligula, one of the most infamous Roman emperors of the moon. He didn't rule Rome for long, but he has gained a legacy as this incredibly evil figure. He's even featured as a villain in one of my favourite sitcoms, Red Dwarf. If you know, you know. Meltdown.

So what's the story of the real Caligula? What horrific tales do we have about this emperor surviving? To what extent should we believe them? And what's behind the rather strange nickname Caligula? To explain all about this and much, much more, I was delighted to have the historian LJ Trafford return to the podcast. LJ, I've interviewed her in the past, all about sex in ancient Rome, and it was a really fun chat. So when I saw that she'd released a new book on some of the worst Roman emperors, well, a chat all about Caligula quickly followed. I really do hope you enjoy, and here's LJ. LJ, it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast.

Thank you, it's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me again. You're more than welcome. Last time, it was too long ago now, we talked about that topic of sex and sexuality in ancient Rome we're keeping on Rome to talk about Caligula LJ there's nothing quite like a chat about this emperor I feel you can never be 100% ready because he is so extraordinary and infamous today he's the kind of extreme because the book I wrote was a kind of on ancient Rome's worst emperors and I thought you can't have that book without having Caligula in because to our kind of modern minds he's the epitome of what a worst emperor is he's someone who you know spends all the money he's kind of sexually depraved he's mad people don't know how to act towards him and it's that kind of question

of that's in everybody's mind what would you do if your leader was certifiably insane? Do you play along to survive or do you make a stand? What do you do? And he features so much in kind of popular culture and is such an inspiration between various characters and various shows that, yeah, you can't talk about Caligula and be dull, I think, because it's just too interesting. Well, let's go through it. What types of sources do we have to learn more about Caligula? We have some written sources. So the one with the most detail is the Suetonius who wrote The Twelve Caesars, which is a biography of the first twelve emperors of Rome. He records all the scandalous stories that we know about Caligula. He has the piffy line halfway through where he says, so much for the man, history must

deal with the monster, which is a really good kind of turning point for everything you've got to say about Caligula. But he's writing quite a long time after Caligula has died. Caligula dies in 41 and he's writing the end of kind of first century AD, so it's quite a bit of time later. We also have an account by a guy called Cassius Dio, who again is writing even later. He's writing in the second century AD, so that's even further back. We've lost the kind of Tacitus' account, he's lost, which is unfortunate. And we do have coin records and we have kind of archaeology. So we have various bits and bobs around,

so we can try and get to the bottom of Caligula, but it's still really difficult because the kind of written sources are so entertaining and the story is so over the top that that's what we tend to concentrate on. I think that's the difficulty of it. Because some of the coins that are left tell a slightly different story. Some of the archaeology tells a slightly different story, but the overwhelming story is that he was a bonkers ruler. He was despotic, he was cruel, he was sadistic. And that's the story that's stuck. And there's very little to counter that.

People try. So you have revisionists who will say, oh, no, no, he wasn't mad, he wasn't cruel, he's been misrepresented. And then you have the revisionists of the revisionists who say, oh, no, he was, he was cruel. And this goes round in a circle and has been going round in a circle for the last 2,000 years,

which is why he's always good for discussion. Very much so. And it's interesting how you also mentioned Tacitus there, frustrating that that part of his account is missing the time of Caligula. But at the same time, he is still writing, well, a bit later, is it the late 1st century or early 2nd century AD. So in regards to literature, do we barely have anything that is contemporary with Caligula about him? We have a few. So Seneca, the philosopher Seneca, who's the kind of tutor of Nero,

he's contemporary of Caligula, just about. Josephus, who's a Jewish historian, he's almost contemporary with Caligula. And we have a guy called Philo of Alexandria, who's another Jewish historian who actually met Caligula on a kind of embassy to Rome when Caligula decided a really good idea was to put a statue of himself

in the temple in Jerusalem, which, as you can imagine, didn't go down well. Embassy was sent. But even Philo's account, he talks about there were seven months of a good reign, a golden reign of Caligula, and then it all goes wrong. And Josephus talks about 10,000 mischiefs of Caligula. So even the contemporary ones have this picture of him being slightly over the top, slightly unhinged. They're not saying, oh, he was wonderful and then everybody else later is painting in black. It's still there. There's still something

there that's not quite right with him as an emperor, even from the people who were there at the time. Chinese whispers, people talk, and then the story gets exaggerated, exaggerated, exaggerated until it probably bears little resemblance to reality. But even from sources who are close enough to him, he's not painted as a great ruler. Well, let's go through Caligula's life story then and start at the beginning. LJ, when is Caligula born and what is the context? What world is he born into? He's born on the 31st of August, 12 AD. So he's born when we've had Augustus, Rome's first emperor. And Augustus has been on the throne for 30 years now. So what we've got

is a de facto royal family is what he's born into. And Augustus is actually going to die two years later in 14 AD. And then his successor is Tiberius, who is related to Caligula. It's very complicated, the due local audience. I have to work this out in my head. So his mother is Agrippina, who is a granddaughter of Augustus. And his father is Germanicus, who is Tiberius's nephew. And his mother is Antonia, who is the daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia, who is Augustus' sister. It does get very confusing because there's a lot of intermarriage and remarriage. So he's born of a royal family, so he's kind of doubly related to Augustus. He's the direct bloodline of Augustus through both his father and his mother.

And his father, Germanicus, has been fighting out against the German troops in the Rhine. He's kind of a hero, kind of a war hero. He's described as almost like the perfect man by kind of Suetonius. And apart from the fact he's got slightly bandy legs, which gives us all hope. And his mother Agrippina, she's the epitome of a Roman woman. She's married, she's got six children, she's got three boys and three girls. So she's done what every Roman woman should do. She's the epitome of virtue. So he's got kind of two perfect parents in him. And that's the world he's kind of born into,

into this royal family that's kind of been set up by Augustus. He has quite a traumatic childhood. He's with, when Augustus dies, some of the German legions are a bit, there's some kind of revolts. And he's actually there with his family at the time. And Germanicus holds him up to kind of quell down the German legions and he's just a little boy, he's only about two.

And they look on him and they feel shame at how they've behaved as they can see this little boy held up before them. Hang on, so the troops are revolting and Germanicus, to stop the revolt, he just holds up his baby son or his toddler son. Well, he'd become a kind of mascot of the legions. They'd made him like a little of mascot of the legions they'd made him like a little military uniform the soldiers and this is where we get the name caligula from because he's actually called gaius and in all the sources he's called gaius he's

emperor gaius but caligula is a nickname because they made us little army boots and army boots are called a caligari so what it is caligula essentially translates as booty kings. So they'd made him this little military uniform. So he'd become a kind of a little mascot of the soldiers. So they kind of felt shamed to see how their behaviour was affecting their little favourite, their toddler favourite. So, I mean, that's going to be quite traumatising as a toddler. And, you know, I mean, it gets worse and worse for him as his childhood goes on, unfortunately, because the imperial family is very contentious. There's lots of favourites.

There's lots of infighting. It's all about who is going to be the heir. We've got the Emperor Tiberius on the throne. There's two camps. Tiberius has a son and a grandson on one side, but on the other side, you've got Agrippina and Germanicus with a direct line to Augustus, because Tiberius is just a stepson of augustus they're the bloodline so you get this kind of competition between the two sets there's a lot of kind of infighting and he has yeah it's

not a happy childhood because basically his family get picked off one by one the classic one is in robert graves and i claudius where you know kind, where all Augustus's heirs die over his 30 years of power. And they all have fevers or they fall off a horse or have an injury and they're all kind of fairly, they're accidental. And then Robert Graves reads a story around this that Livia is a serial killer bumping everybody off so she can get her son on the throne. But with Caligula's family, it is generally suspicious suspicious these are not kind of made up deaths so I mean his father Germanicus dies out in the east when Caligula I think is seven oh there's the Germanicus and Piso isn't it that whole story very suspiciously he he's gone over to the east and they've had a

falling out him and Piso who's I think the governor of Syria and then Germanicus dies very young in his 30s and it's highly suspicious so highly suspicious as a murder trial that piso and his wife have poisoned germanicus and the question kind of hanging over him is is it at the behest of the emperor tiberius to get rid of germanicus because germanicus is young and popular and you know and attractive and all the things that tiberius he's kind of in his 50s is not at this point so that's one suspicious death. And then his family get picked off one by one because they're accused of plotting against Tiberius. So his mother, Agrippina, and his older brothers, they're all exiled. Then these are not nice exiles. They've banished to islands and Agrippina is beaten so hard by a

guard that she loses an eye. His brother, Drusus, is starved and he's so hungry that he eats the contents of his mattress to survive. So they're all horrible deaths. And it turns out that these plots that supposedly they've been doing against the Emperor Tiberius have all been set up by a guy who's been standing just quietly in the background beside Tiberius, who's a guy called Sejanus, who's the Praetorian prefect. And he has some delusions of grandeur, whether he wants to be emperor or whether he's evolved in a kind of relationship with Tiberius's son's wife, Livilia. And Tiberius's son is another one who mysteriously dies quite young. So he's gone, Agrippina's gone, Agrippina's sons have gone, and all we've got is kind of Tiberius's grandson. So whether Sejanus thinks he marries Lovilla

and he becomes a kind of regent to the infant, you know, Tiberius's grandson, or whether he has such delusions of grandeur he thinks he's going to be emperor, which seems unlikely. But yeah, he's basically just picked off Caligula's family one by one by one. And he's got to the point where he is

setting up Caligula to go next and he's putting the case against him. And it's Caligula's grandmother, Antonia, who gets word to Tiberius that this is happening and that it's all Sejanus' fault. Because Tiberius has been on the island of Capri for the last 10 years. He's kind of effectively walked away from Rome.

And so they can control what news gets to him. And so Sejanus has been controlling what news has got to Tiberius. So people do debate how much knowledge Tiberius had about Sejanus has been controlling what news has got to Tiberius. People do debate how much knowledge Tiberius had about Sejanus' plotting, whether he is as ignorant as it appears. But yes, Antonia manages to get word to him about what's happening. And Sejanus is invited into the Senate House. He thinks he's going to be promoted. And he stands there all ready, puffed up, ready to hear his promotion. promotion and basically his list of crimes are read out to him in a letter from Tiberius who says to the

people present arrest this man which is one hell of a moment one dramatic moment you know to be standing there thinking you're going to be promoted and then your death sentence is read out oh goodness me so this is Caligula's childhood this is Caligula in the imperial family in the royal family watching his entire family being wiped out one by one by one, knowing that he's next. And then what happens after that is almost even worse in that Tiberius invites him over to Capri as his heir. And so he's forced to go to spend time with this guy who's killed his family. And he can't show any kind of displeasure. He can't show any kind of displeasure he can't show any kind of upset about it he's got to you know maintain a face well thank you uncle tiberius you know the pressure and he's only 19 at this point the pressure on a kind of young man to maintain that face in this

kind of atmosphere with this man who's killed your entire family it's a messed up childhood it's probably one of the most messed up childhoods of any emperor i think. And you can't imagine what it must have been like for that young figure. As you say, you see your family getting knocked off one by one by one. And as you say, ultimately knowing that you're going to be next. Obviously, I mean, surely that must contribute to his mental health and so on and so forth like that. But going on, with Tiberius, as he's's getting old as he's still at capri and from what you've mentioned earlier about sejanus i know it's debated but it sounds like tiberius is being controlled manipulated and he's frail is he popular with the people with the senate or do they want

something very different they want something very different very badly when you look at it i mean again tiberius is subject to lots of revisionists. Emperor-wise, he does a good job because Augustus creates this thing called emperor. It's not actually a job. It's not actually a role. It's a series of powers that Augustus has just got one by one by one. There's no job of emperor to hand over. When you get to this first succession between Augustus and Tiberius, it could have completely fallen apart, this idea of having an emperor. The whole thing could have just been forgotten. But that's not what happens.

Tiberius manages to hold it together. He holds the empire together. He leaves a staggering amount of money in the treasury. I think it's 270 million or it might even be billions, sesterces. He leaves the state in a good state. But the downside of that, administratively, he's great. The downside of that is there's been a whole series of treason trials

under Tiberius where it's all gone. This is Sejanus probably stirring and getting rid of his senatorial kind of adversaries as well. But they've had all these kind of maestous treason trials. So there's a lot of senators who have been exiled or executed on trumped-up charges, probably put up by Sejanjanus so they're quite happy that tiberius is gone and for the people they haven't seen their emperor for 10 years he's not been there there's a gap to be filled and yeah tiberius is elderly he's in his 70s he's been in capri and the most because he's been capri people have made

up the most ridiculous kind of stories or kind of sexual depravity about him, which have got back to Rome, which has not helped his reputation in any way, shape or form. And he's kind of abandoned them. He's abandoned Rome. He's abandoned the people and they feel it. So they're ready for change. And Caligula, I think he's 25 when he becomes emperor. And he's the son of a war hero and the martyr Agrippina, who was wrongly accused and killed by the dastardly Sejanus. So he comes in as fresh blood. And the succession itself, is it pretty straightforward seeing as Tiberius has already named him his heir? Are there any other challenges to Caligula or is him becoming emperor when Tiberius dies? Is that pretty straightforward? It's sort of straightforward. There's still Tiberius's grandson, Gemellus, who's still a child. And he's kind of named sort of joint emperor, but Caligula's the kind of superior.

Gemellus does not last very long into Caligula's reign. But this is what happens when Tiberius became emperor. Augustus' grandson, Agrippus Postumus, he's pretty soon bumped off. So any kind of rivals, anyone who might threaten your throne gets bumped off. But yeah, it's a fairly smooth succession because everybody wants Caligula to inherit. Everybody wants rid of Tiberius. And there's rumours that Caligula maybe hurries it along. The new Praetorian guard, Macro, was said to have smothered Tiberius with a pillow because they'd thought Tiberius had died and there was all celebration and Caligula's going to be emperor. And then he woke up again.

And so it was all a bit embarrassing. So to save themselves embarrassment, the rumour is that Macro smothered him. Whether that's true, I mean, he was in his 80s when he died. So, you know, whether it's true or not is one thing or another. But yeah, it's a smooth succession. It's a welcome succession. You know, the Senate are quite happy for him to be emperor. The people are very happy.

You know, when he comes back to Rome from Capri, there's people lining the streets, you know, calling him sweet names, our darling people lining the streets, calling him sweet names, our darling, our chicky. He goes in very, very popular. He also goes in with not a lot of experience compared to, say, Tiberius, who becomes emperor in his 50s. And he's had a number of public positions under Augustus. He's served in the military. He's been on campaign. Caligula's coming in without that kind of background. He's coming in without any experience, which I think is probably quite telling for what happens. It's quite a funny one, isn't it? Because although Tiberius has all these negative

connotations with his rule and he's old and he's boring and he's abandoned the Roman people, he's gone to Capri and yet he has had that experience. And when he dies, the empire seems to be in a pretty good spot when Caligula he goes to Rome straight away is it very much he's embracing that picture of him as being almost the complete contrast of Tiberius he's young he's exciting he's sought after and also he's leaving Capri he is coming back to Rome the center of the empire this idea of the man at the top retreating to this island, he's throwing cold water over that. That's gone.

Yeah, I mean, he comes in and he makes a big show of his bloodline to Augustus. So one of the first things he does, he brings over the ashes of his mother and his brothers from the islands where they've died. And they have a big kind of ceremony where they are properly entombed. And Agririppina having been a favorite of the people they all there's big parades people watching this and he makes a big show of family you know sisters appear on the

coinage that added into kind of the oaths that the soldiers say about wishing for the emperor's health and his sisters and so he makes a big thing about his family and you know because he's got this horrible childhood though you know there's a lot of pity and sympathy for him i'm not saying he plays upon it i think he generally feels it but you know but he stresses this kind of idea of his family and his lost family and kind of venerating them so yeah he plays up to that and plays up to the role of this new young emperor one of the other things he does that pleases the senate is he says he's not going to listen to these informers who are are the ones who were setting up these treason trials. He draws a line under that.

All those days are gone and he brings back a lot of senators who've been exiled. So he comes in undoing a lot of the bad stuff that Tiberius did and throws magnificent games and things like that for the people. And hands out money to them. people so and you know hands out money to them so again the generous not the mean stingy saving money tiberius old man the kind of the young energetic throwing money about making himself popular so that's also what he does alongside honoring his family as he mentioned there and bringing back these senators it's to reach out to the people of rome themselves it's by using the money now available to him to host these massive events these games i'm guessing chariot races and stuff like that build new buildings as well monumental

buildings or to help with sanitation does he do all of that to try and improve his popularity at the start yeah he does i mean there's a kind of the augustus playbook which is you know how to be an emperor what you need to do and you know keep the senate happy keep the people happy keep the soldiers happy by giving all three of them money and it's about building stuff in terms of building he's kind of he finishes off a lot of projects that other people have started there's no kind of like coliseum kind of style legacy but you know he finishes off things like aqueducts and temples being begun by augustus or tibria so he finishes those kind of things off so he does the buildings and he does magnificent games at last from kind of dawn till dusk

and invents a new sport called pamphor baiting which is probably horrific to us but it's the sort of thing that Romans like so pamphor baiting something to do with pamphors that's probably quite horrific to think about but Suetonius says he puts on many plays so many that Suetonius can't be bothered to name any of them

it's just like oh there were lots of plays. There was lots of games. It was all magnificent. And, you know, at games, he's throwing out gifts to the audiences and everything. So there's a sense of keeping everybody happy, bread and circuses and all that. When does it start to go wrong? When did the cracks start to emerge that, on Caligula might not be the savior the the ideal emperor that we were hoping for yeah it's quite difficult to pinpoint but people tend

to look at two events and it's interesting that people do look at uncertain events because they're external events because then it's nobody's fault so Caligula falls ill quite early in his reign within a year and he's very seriously ill and he looks like he might well die and the people are beside themselves and there's lots of prayers and looks like he might well die and the people are beside themselves and there's lots of prayers and that and some guy foolishly says oh you know to the gods oh if the emperor survives i will you know i will kill myself to you know to save the emperor which you know obviously when he wakes up is one of the first kind of things he calls in you know you said you said you do it do it so the people kind of pick that up as if he'd been ill

and something's happened to him and when he wakes up he's you know a different person because this is certainly you know in kind of i claudius they pick this up as a kind of a changing point also his favorite sister drusilla dies i think it's about 38 so a couple of years in his sister dies and he's absolutely grief-stricken by that and that is another point that kind of people pull up of oh that's that's when he changed so there seems to be sort of two years where it's a bit of a honeymoon and everything's running fine and then you know again that piffy suetonius quote so much for the man now history must deal with the monster and that's what changes but some of the stories that connect with caligula are also connected to his childhood so i don't think there is particularly one kind of turning point i think he probably does a lot of good and

bad things side by side but we like to kind of think that there has to be a reason, there has to be a cause. So we draw a kind of arbitrary line. And certainly, I guess some of the senators maybe draw an arbitrary line because then it's something external. It's nobody's fault that Killigler goes slightly bonkers and starts executing people. It's not their fault. You know, he fell ill. It's all to do with that with that or yeah his sister died and that just drove him mad it's nothing to do with anything we're doing it's putting an external kind of thing on it but yeah so it starts to unravel and yes from the early days of you know kind of saying he's not going to listen to informers he really does target the senate and he really does target them in kind of sadistically cruel

kind of ways and yeah in a way that is you know guaranteed to humiliate them he goes out of his way to kind of humiliate them which is the mark of his reign this kind of sadistic kind of humiliation of people which is quite a change from this golden boy who comes in at the beginning Before we go to the whole question of why he does this and why he changes so rapidly on this, the main question, first of all, is how, in what ways does Caligula start to torture, to really be cruel towards these elite figures of Roman society? He just seems like he sends them to the mines as punishment, which should not be a punishment for kind of senatorial, you know, a punishment for a kind of senator is to be exiled. Or the classic

one is, you know, the emperor will withdraw his friendship, a very stinging revoke, which sounds like being let off lightly compared to being in the arena with lions eating your face but on Roman honour that's a very serious kind of thing or you'll be invited to commit suicide or something like that but Caligula, he sends him to the mines

which is a deliberate humiliation and he'll do things like he'll invite parents to watch the execution of their sons and he'll be very jolly to execution of their sons so invite them right and he'll be very jolly to them and invite them around for dinner and chat to them and be very jolly and then execute their sons in front of them and things like that and someone who was thrown into the arena and was shouting about his innocence was pulled back out and then Caligula had his tongue cut out because he was making too much noise and thrown back in and there's the stories of you know

people being beaten to death over days for some crime. The famous one is he made the kind of retort that he would rather make his horse a senator, of how useless he feels they all are. So yeah, it's all these stories of the deliberate humiliation. And there's one time where he invites them around to a kind of midnight meeting. Everybody's absolutely terrified that they're there for the chop. And he just does a little dance for them. So it's a kind of midnight meeting. Everybody's absolutely terrified that they're there for the chop. And he just does a little dance for them. So it's a kind of psychological terror as well of just making people feel that he could kill them. He says at one point,

I wish Rome just had one neck so I could slit it, as if he just wants to kill everybody at once. And he kind of bemoans there's been no great disasters in his reign. Augustus kind of lost three legions in Germany under kind of a virus. They were slaughtered by the Germans. And there'd been a horrible earthquake under Tiberius. And he wants more drama. He wants some great disaster.

So there's a kind of delight in death in his personality and a kind of sadistic glee almost at killing people. He has people pulled out of the audience if they make a noise during his favorite actor's performance and has them scourged which is you know if you've ever seen that mel gibson film but um the life of christ and you see scourging what scourging is it's a very horrific whipping you know it's really really nasty so and there's another one where on a hot summer's day he says oh let's pull back the awnings from the amphitheater so that everybody you know gets sunstroke or sunheat and so yeah it's this deliberate kind of sadistic kind of

crawl kind of picking on people and enjoying it almost that is the kind of mark of his reign it is horrific and because there are so many examples of it is this mainly from suetonius does suetonius as this biographer biographer, after he's talked about the good early start and then how it all changes and the monster starts to appear, does Suetonius almost relish enlisting one cruel act of Caligula after another at targeting these senators? He adds all of the stories just to further demonise this main character of his biography. Suetonius always splits his biographies into the kind of good acts and the bad acts. In Caligula, the good acts take up eight chapters. The bad acts take up 38 chapters. And if you take,

like, say, Domitian, who's meant to be a similarly bad emperor, that's about half and half. So, you know, it shows just how kind of weighted it is. I mean, Seutonius would say things like, some people have said, it has been said that. So there's a bit of hedging his bets. I mean, he's a biographer, he's not a historian. He records all the gossip and the stuff about Tiberius and Caligula is kind of completely insane, but he's recording it and it tells us, even if you discount some of it as probably exaggeration, it tells us what Caligula's reputation was way back then, that it wasn't a great reputation that he'd gained, even if some of the stories are maybe a little bit exaggerated.

You can imagine, if you can't slag off the emperor when he's alive, when he's dead, you're just going to let fall, aren't you? You're maybe going to try and outdo the guy on the next couch's story and embellish it a little, make yours a little bit extreme. You just lost your father. Well, I lost my mother, my father, my sister, brother to caligula you know are there many cruel acts done by caligula at these dinner parties when he's either entertaining or being entertained by senators by the elites the classic story is that he basically at his dinner parties he walks around

the couches and picks up the senator's wives and takes them off in front of the senators has sex with them returns them to their couch and then tells their husband how bad they were in bed or whatever and gives them full that's again the kind of sadistic humiliation enjoyment of humiliating people in public kind of thing so that that's the kind of classic story and he you know he doesn't dress like a emperor should he dresses like kind of no mortal man he wears clothes that are quite outlandish that maybe would be considered a bit feminine whereas you know silk sometimes which is more of a woman's garment and things like that so yeah he's not he's not playing the role of emperor as it should be because the role of emperor is

about keeping the senate on side it's about keeping them honoring them enough that so they don't plot against you and give them enough power but not too much that they're a threat to you so it's a quite a delicate line to kind of walk which augustus who's got a lot of charisma and ability walks really well and which tiberius who's very very capable isn't very charismatic kind of falls off hence all the treason trials and clearly doesn't it doesn't even try after a while he's not he's not just jumps up doesn't even try after a while he's not he's not just jumps up a cliff he jumps up a cliff he's not interested in keeping them on side he has no interest in them being you know they should be his support in everything he does and he has no

interest in in doing that and he has no interest in appearing to be like a kind of man of the people like an ordinary guy like augustus would call himself first citizen rather than you know emperor he has no interest in pretending he's anything, you know, emperor. He has no interest in pretending he's anything but, you know, absolutely in charge. And he's going to show he's absolutely in charge. And you can, I guess you can kind of speculate that's because of his childhood, a kind of a fear of, you know, if your mother, who's a granddaughter of Augustus, can be killed like that, you could be killed. And whether it, you know, it stems from them, he's got to show that he's powerful and that he's in control, very possibly.

stems from them he's got to show that he's powerful and that he's in control very possibly is canigula's cruelty targeted just towards the elites and the senators or does it also at times he just terrorizes normal everyday people too i think it does like we said about this story about the kind of awnings people being pulled out the audience if they made a noise during his favorite actor's performance and being kind of physically punished i think the key is that you know he's not warned when he dies when nero dies the people are distraught and they leave little figures of Nero and they, you know, they're really upset about it. And you get a whole series of people pretending to be Nero and people are very happy, you know, pretending he's still alive. So there's a popularity element there to Nero. You don't get that when Caligula dies. It's

not kind of mass wailing. What you get is a ghost story that his ghost is kind of terrorising the place where he died. He's terrorised by his ghost and so they have to kind of, I think, move his bones or something from there so that the spectre that's terrorising the person that lives there goes. So you get a ghost story after Caligula dies. You don't get any kind of nice, kind of, oh, the people were really upset and there was rioting and there was this, that and the other. So you can't have been that popular with the people. doesn't seem to be but i mean most of it's directed at the senate but when an emperor is like in the theater he's on public display this is the way in which the people can kind of petition the emperor and if he's pulling people

out the audience and scourging them that doesn't give a great impression of him as a kind of man of the people although you just give them loads of money, so maybe, you know, bounce it out. Just don't go to the theatre when he's there. Take the money and run. He starts to think that he is actually a god. This is never a good sign with an ancient ruler in ancient biographies when they start to believe when they're still alive that they are a god. So, LJ, what is the story behind this in Caligula? In Suetonius, Suetonius claims that he wanted to call himself king from the very beginning, which is not a great start. And then as it goes on, he starts to believe he's a god and he has a temple set up with a statue of himself in, which he changes the clothes on. So the god has his own natural clothes on. It's kind of a life-size statue of himself. It's a fine line

again that he crosses because emperor worship was a thing, but they kept it out of Rome. So Augustus tolerated it. He tolerated kind of temples you know that would venerate him but if they were in the east or just far enough away from rome so it doesn't look like you're worshipping a kind of living being as a god so long as it was outside of rome and tiberius has a similar kind of he finds it distasteful but he'll tolerate it if you know the people of whatever province want to put up a temple. And you have temples put up later, ones like Domitian put it up, to the genus of the Flavians, which is still worshipping him. But there's a line in between that we're not worshipping a living man,

we're worshipping the genius of a living man, or we're not worshipping a living man. That's the thing that strange Easterners do. We don't do that. So it's like he crosses that line and has a temple with a statue of himself in Rome, allegedly, as we should say with most of this stuff, that crosses that kind of line between man and God. And yeah, it's said that he thought he was the Emperor Jupiter and he dressed up as God and he dressed up as Venus, the goddess Venus as well. And the situation of wanting to put a statue of himself in the temple in Jerusalem, which did not go down well at all. But when you look at the kind of

coinage, he's not, you know, with someone like Commodus, he actually does kind of declare himself a god and does declare himself Hercules, and there's evidence for it. With Caligula, he appears in coinage, but there's not any kind of great declaration of, you know, I am a god anywhere. So it's again, has it been embellished? Has it been exaggerated from him having a temple in Rome dedicated to the imperial family, which is a step beyond or whether he genuinely thinks he believes he's a god? It's dubious, but it's quite possible with absolute power, as they say.

You could easily fall into that thinking you're a god. So yeah, it's hearsay, I guess, is my answer. There's some evidence that, yeah, he goes beyond the way he dresses. He dresses up as gods and things like that. Some sections that he kind of goes beyond, but whether he actually believes he's god and makes people think he's a god, again, it's one of those some-people-say stories from kind of Suetonius. Let's talk a bit about Caligula's sex life, because this is very interesting and it kind

of crosses two books that you've done, one on the worst emperors and another on sex and sexuality in ancient Rome. We've already highlighted how Caligula at dinner parties allegedly would take away senators' wives and have sex with them. But this is just the start. There is so much more to Caligula's sex life to unpack than just the wives of senators. Yes, he's a kind of taboo buster. It's like every kind of taboo that you have in ancient Rome about sex, he busts every single one of them, kind of one by one.

He's accused of incest with his sisters, which should be pointed out that pretty much everybody in ancient Rome, an elite man, is accused of incest of one sort or another. It's a general kind of insult thrown about, but he was said to have committed incest from being caught by his grandmother Antonia as a child in bed with his sister Drusilla. And he was said to have continued and slept with all three of his sisters continually. It's another dubious story because it's one that kind of crops up later. Tacitus doesn't mention it, for example, who's a bit near it. It feels like something, Suetonius mentions it in depth,

as he would because he can't resist a good line line of gossip and it feels like it's a later story because it doesn't get mentioned in the earlier sources so it shows you how reputations get blacker almost as time goes on yeah sex wise he got through i think it was three wives very quickly one he married i think she was marrying somebody else at the time and he decided he was going to marry her instead so he gets through a number a number of wives and then he in same-sex relations he was having an affair with the actor Munster who later goes on to have an affair with a Messalina Claudius's wife which is you know relatively okay because actors are kind of that which is kind of lowest of the low so it's kind of you know it's it's a bit dubious to have an affair with an actor, but it's not too dubious.

But yeah, there was relations with men. The Roman elite male is always meant to play the active part in it. And there was a senator's son who said, he'd be buggered the emperor and quite worn himself out in the process. So that was a kind of Caligula playing the passive role, which was not what an elite Roman male should do.

So that's another kind of too dubious buster. And the sleeping and the sleeping with senators wives i mean kind of freeborn women are protected by all kinds of laws in ancient rome so that's a real big taboo and he later on he said to have you know set up a brothel in the palace there was a great involved kind of freeborn women for sale as well so they were forced to perform in this brothel so it's pretty much everything that you shouldn't do as a kind of Roman male is ticked off bit by bit by bit. I was about to say, it's not just he's testing the limits of what was acceptable for a Roman elite man, let alone a Roman emperor.

He's gone far beyond, he's run a marathon beyond those limits by this point, hasn't he? At least according to what the sources say. Yes, again, it's that kind of deutonium. Some people say that. You feel a lot of this is kind of invented, but you did get through a number of wives and things like that because you can when you're emperor and you can kind of turn them over

and get a younger model or whatever you want. But I mean, Caligula throughout it seems to be kind of testing what it means to be emperor and what being emperor allows you to do. So he's testing all these limits of, you sense how much he can get away with taking these senators' wives off in front of them. Nobody complains and he sees he can get away with that.

So that pushes him in that extra step further and the extra step further you know you target some senators and nobody says anything nobody stands up to them stands up to you about it or complains and you can do more and more and more and yeah it feels like he's kind of testing how much he can get away with and the answer is yeah and if pretty much anything let's move on and talk quickly before we get to his end his infamous end itself about Caligula and the army this is a really interesting one I wanted to talk about because you've already highlighted at the beginning of Caligula's life he spent time in an army camp with his dad Germanicus on the borders of Germania hence the name Caligula and so on and so forth

does Caligula keep his reputation as being, you know, very popular with the army into his reign? No, not really. He goes on campaign and it's a farce from beginning to end. He goes to Germany to fight some German tribes or whatever, but there are no German tribes to fight. So they kind of get some people to kind of hide in the woods and pretend to be the enemy so that he can go and capture them and have a triumph because he's captured these people who have been set up, you know, as the enemy. So he's looking whether they're creating this kind of fantasy world for him to give him a chance to be the kind of conquering general he wants to be. And they just set it up for him. And the most infamous one is he decides to invade Britain and he lines up all the troops on the beach and they're getting ready to you know get on the boats to go across and conquer britain and he then orders them to

pick up seashells instead and then declares a victory over neptune because they've just you know they've collected so many seashells and that's the kind of story that kind of gets picked up as that oh he's really is mad this is not just somebody testing the power and seeing what he can get away with this is a sign of kind of. And various people have kind of picked this apart and there's kind of claims that, oh, it's a translation error because the Latin word for seashells is very similar to kind of military huts, which seems a bit tenuous. There's one way of people putting it.

And then there's a suggestion, when Claudius invaded Britain, he had faced a mutiny of troops who didn't want to cross the ocean and punish them as a result. And people suggested maybe something similar happened in this case, but nobody recorded that it did happen. So again, that's even more tenuous because there's no kind of evidence or mention of a mutiny. So that seems unlikely. But to my mind, it kind of does fit into this kind of wanting to humiliate a whole hardened Roman legions and you get them to pick up seashells. You know, again, it's testing your power as emperor, what people are going to allow you to get away with, making them collect seashells like their kind of children and, you know, pile them all up. It's in that kind of humiliation kind of thing

a bit, I suspect, or he could have just been completely mad and just thought he'd beaten Neptune. We will never know, but I think it fits into that pattern of wanting to humiliate whole groups of people just because he can. We'll certainly visit that question of was Caligula mad or not very, very quickly. But just before we get to that, let's talk about the end of Caligula. It's quite a short reign in the end, isn't it? Because what ultimately happens to Caligula? He gets stabbed to death very bloodily, as a lot of emperors do, only five years into his reign. Emperors face plots all the time, so it's not a unique experience. But he's not killed. You'd

think he'd be killed by a senatorial conspiracy, wouldn't you? They'd all club together and get rid of him. Or you'd think somebody would do a brave thing, for the good of Rome, I'm going to kill him. But it's not that. He basically gets killed by one of his guards because he made fun of his voice. The guard in particular, who's called Cassius, ironically enough, had a very high-pitched voice. So Caligula would just make fun of it and he'd set the watchword and it'd be something like Venus, luscious Venus. He was just making fun of him, basically. And that's all it took. I mean, behind a lot of assassinations are some really very petty reasons. The original Cassius, who was involved in assassinating Julius Caesar, again, they claimed liberty and all this kind of thing. But he was

actually, one of the reasons it's given in Plutarch is that he was annoyed that Caesar had nicked his leopards one time for a show that he was going to put on his idol. So, you know, behind kind of grand nobile, there's always something quite petty at the bottom of these kind of assassinations. And this was a particularly petty one in that yeah he just had enough he'd he just pushed him too far and he stabbed to death on the way to the theater in this covered walkway sutonius mentions that in this kind of stab fest that happens because the german bodyguards of kiliglia then start stabbing back and at that time a load of what sutonius calls inoffensive senators are also murdered as kind of passers-by, which I feel a bit sorry for them. They're just being inoffensive and they just happen to get caught

in this kind of stab fest that happens. So yeah, he's bloodily stabbed to death and it's just like a complete mess. But yeah, it's not a grand senatorial conspiracy. It's because he made fun of somebody's voice. There were grand conspiracies against him because his three sisters he actually exiles because they were caught in a conspiracy against him. So, you know, part of the reason why he gets more extreme, you have to say, because there is a reality behind his paranoia in a way. You know, if your own sisters who you love beyond everything are plotting against you,

then yeah, you're going to get even more cruel, aren't you, to try and stamp out these plots. You're going to try and make people fear you even more to to survive there's a conspiracy that's earlier than that one that's quite early on his reign that's quite mysterious it gets mentioned by cassius dio where he gives a speech to the senate and kind of mentions to them oh you were the people who um you sided with sejanus and tiberius you puffed up sejanus and tiberius and It's almost like he suddenly realises at a certain point, after all the kind of when he started, everybody's calling him sweet names and he's their pet, he's their darling, that something happens and he realises who they really are.

These senators, they're not his friends. They're the people who condemned his family. They signed these kind of documents that Sejanus put in front of him. They acted as kind of witnesses. And it's like the kind of wool is pulled from over his eyes at a certain point and he realises what they are. And yet he stands up in the Senate and he condemns them for saying such nice things to him when they said such nice things

to Janus and Tiberius who they now, you know, kind of slag off in front of him and, you know, say the worst things about. He kind of realises, and I think that explains a lot of his behaviour, that kind of realisation that the Senate was complicit in his family's death and that they're not his friends explains a lot of his behaviour, that kind of realisation that the Senate was complicit in his family's death and that they're not his friends and they said all these nice things to the same people who they now denounce. And I think that explains a lot about why he kind of turns. I

think there's a kind of turning point where he realises, where he sees them for what they are. And then it's, you know, whether it's revenge or just self-preservation, the more he hits at them, the harder he hits at them, the less likely he feels that they're going to turn on him. Which is true, they don't succeed in assassinating him. It's the guard that do. So Caligula perishes and he's almost 30 years old at this time, isn't he? He's still very, very young. His reign is very, very short. And ultimately, very quickly after, you have Claudius, the Emperor Claudius, who invades Britain and will rule for more than a decade afterwards.

He succeeds Caligula. Do you think then Caligula was mad, bad, or something completely different? I think it's very difficult. People try to diagnose mental illness from 2,000 years ago. I don't think you can do it. I think there's not enough evidence. I think he was something else. I think he was something else I

think like I say I think he came in actually feeling very you know puffed up as emperor and everybody treating him like this golden child and he felt very special and center of attention and the people loved him and senate loved him and everybody loved him and then I think something happens and there's a plot of some sort or maybe when he was ill they were thinking about who should succeed him thinking he's going to die and I think that kind of lifted the wool from his eyes and he sees the senate for who they are and I think he fears him I think his childhood is kind of one of fear and terror and he's trying to protect himself so I think it probably does make him slightly unhinged doesn't it because his paranoia is so all-encompassing and the way he treats people and the way he tests what it is to be emperor is slightly unhinged. But I don't know if I go as

far as mad because I think he knows what he's doing. I think to class as madness is really kind of people who don't maybe have control of their actions. They don't know what they're doing almost. I think he knows what he's doing. I think he knows what he's doing very well and he's enjoying it so that maybe makes him, I don't know, a sociopath or something like that, a psychopath maybe but I don't think it makes him kind of mad as such because I think he's fully aware of what he's doing

and there are reasons behind what he's doing it's not just come out of nowhere like the Senate would like to sort of claim or he just turned he just turned on us for no reason I think there is reason behind this there is method in my madness as hamlet once says you know there's reasons behind it it's not just mindless cruelty it's cruelty

with a point behind it how has caligula his reputation his story how has it influenced the creation of certain evil figures of villains in let's say tv shows or films i can remember years back a series called babylon 5 i don't know if you remember that science fiction series they had a kind of mad king figure that again was kind of based on caligula and it was like the officials around him how do you deal with a mad king what you know how do you how do you manage it kind of thing so yeah i think he's been the inspiration and he's popped up in episodes of Red Dwarf we've had Caligula

as a character and they're on a planet of kind of Madame Tussauds waxworks gone mad oh the wax planet oh I love Red Dwarf yes and it's like

Elvis and the goodies versus all the most evil people in the world including Caligula yeah I mean if you say most evil emperors you know or any Roman emperor

the first one people are going to come up with is Caligula he makes, I mean, if you say most evil emperors, you know, or any Roman emperor, first one people are going to come up with is Caligula. He makes it into a Smith song, doesn't he, as well? He's become a pop culture reference. Everybody knows his name, as opposed to some other emperors later on who you, Constantius or whatever, you know, Domitian, people haven't heard of. Everybody's heard of Caligula.

He's like a poster boy for kind of evil, evil emperor kind of thing or evil ruler. LJ, this has been fantastic. Last and certainly not least, you have written a book that also includes this story of Caligula. Yes, I've just finished the book, Ancient Rome's Worst Emperors. They're not all like statistically cruel like Caligula. There's some who are just like a bit incompetent and just promoted above their means. But Caligula certainly features in there because I think everybody would expect Caligula to be in a worst emperor's book but yeah there's some other ones that you won't have heard of some more obscure ones in there as

well to find out about well on that note LJ it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today thank you very much for having me it's been a lot of fun well there you go there was lj trafford talking all things caligula i hope you enjoyed today's episode last thing from me wherever you're listening to the podcast whether that be on apple podcasts on spotify or elsewhere make sure that you are subscribed that you are following the ancient so that you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.