536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)

28:40And so the moment Caligula falls ill, it looks like he's going to die. All the heavyweights in his administration are scrabbling around trying to work out who his successor will be. And the obvious successor is this young lad, Gamalus, kind of, you know, 13 or 14 by this point, Tiberius' only grandson. So they are going off and kind of paying court to him and preparing to elevate him to the throne. and meanwhile there is this absolute toady this lick spittle a guy called attenius who swears a solemn oath that if only the gods will restore caligula to health then he will go into the arena and fight publicly as a gladiator and obviously doesn't he doesn't expect that this would happen it would be unthinkable for someone of his rank and age to go into the arena and fight a trained killer but you know he's basically hedging his bets if if caligula survives and then it'll be great.

29:32You know, he'll approve of his loyalty. And if he doesn't, then no one will remember it. Caligula does recover, I think against the odds. And he rises from his sickbed and he's informed what Artanius has done and also more significantly what the captain of the Praetorians and, you know, his leading senatorial backers, what they've been up to going around and paying court to Gemellus. And he moves with absolute lethal dispatch. So first off, he sends two soldiers to Gemellus who sit the boy down and take out their knives and show Gamalus had the best way to kill himself and then stand there and watch while Gamalus kills himself.

30:08And that's the end of him. Gamalus's would-be patrons, including the prefect of the Praetorians, are likewise ordered to commit suicide, which they do. And Attanius, this guy who has vowed that he will fight a gladiator if only Caligula recovers. Well, so this is what Suetonius says happened. Caligula takes him at his word and he forces this poor guy. I mean, he's not at all the kind of person who is fitted either by background or I think by physique to face up to a trained gladiator out into the arena. Attanius is killed very briskly. He's dragged off with a hook across the sand. his body is dumped and Caligula's sense of humour has this kind of bloody punchline and people in the arena undoubtedly found it funny I mean it's exactly the kind of joke that would have appealed to a to a crowd of people gathered to watch blood sports but it also sends a pretty chilling message to the Roman elites that you know there's no more Mr Nice Guy and there's the definite sense that Caligula has been biding his time and now that he has the evidence that some of the senate have been conspiring against him as he sees it by kind of going after Camelos he is ready for the kill and Suetonius um he he has this kind of wonderful pivot in his biography it's one of I think the single greatest line ever written in any biography ever where he writes enough of the princeps what remains to be described is the monster right so the monster is coming and we will be back after the break

31:57welcome back to the rest is history enough of the princeps what remains to be described is the monster so tom you described this as your favorite line in the history of biography and we are moving now caligula has been clearly very shocked by the speed with which people move to associate themselves with a potential successor when he fell ill and you know politically that makes sense that he would be insecure and he would wish to um he's looking for enemies but from this point onwards in the biography suetonius is really going beyond that and he is basically saying Caligula is a dyed-in-the-wool, inveterate, debauched, depraved monster.

32:41And talk us through some of the examples, Tom, that he gives of this kind of behaviour. Right. So there are various examples that Suetonius gives of the character of a monster that he says Caligula has. Perhaps the most shocking is that Caligula demands worship as a god. So Augustus is worshipped as a god, but not in his lifetime. Augustus had really stamped down against any thought of that. But Caligula, Suetonius says he's all in. So Suetonius reports that Caligula orders some of the most famous statues of the gods from Greece, brought to Rome. He replaces the heads of the gods with his own head.

33:15Senators compete to serve him as priests. They offer up all kinds of sacrifices to him. So Suetonius specifies flamingos, peacocks, black grouse, two varieties of guinea hen, pheasants. There are times when Caligula will dress up as various gods, so sometimes as Jupiter, even shockingly as Venus. And there are other times where he will claim to be talking to Jupiter. So this is all clear evidence of either monstrousness or insanity or both. Suetonius says that he essentially goes out of his way to humiliate the elites in every way he can. And obviously the most humiliating thing that you can do to a senator is to treat him as a slave.

33:57So Suetonius specifies that he would brand senators, equestrians who had offended him with branding irons, after which, Suetonius writes, he would condemn them either to the mines or to the building of roads or to be thrown to wild beasts or to be shut up in cages on all fours like animals or to be sawn in half. So none of that's fun he takes his vendetta against the elites even um to the extent of toppling their ancestors so statues of famous men from rome's past suetonius says are toppled and smashed to pieces and he also says that members of the the aristocracy with famous names they're told to get rid of these names so the pompeys for instance pompey the great they have this name magnus they're told they can't use that anymore that would be the kind of example and there's also very kind of pointed sexual humiliations that he inflicts on them so he will invite senators and their wives to dinner and while they're kind of lying there Caligula will appraise the various wives of these senators you know if there's one that he particularly feels drawn to he'll take her away um sleep with her and then send her back to her husband all kind of disheveled and it's making it very clear what's happened yeah Caligula will then come back and offer a kind of commentary on her performance and the wretched husband just kind of lies there looking a bit sick uh and this is where the detail comes in that Caligula sets up a brothel in his own great palace on the Palatine Hill above the Forum and he staffs it with married women and boys both of whom are of very high status so I mean right good stuff so let's let's dig into this a little bit so obviously because we don't have many other sources it's pretty hard for us to get a sense of how grounded in reality these accusations are you make the point don't you that suetonius doesn't present this as a continuous chronological narrative it's just a sort of bullet-pointed list of the bad things that killer killer is supposed to have done yeah that's right and so it is difficult to kind of to get a sense of it as a narrative.

36:09But I think it's just about possible if you map Suetonius' account with the various other fragments of evidence that we have to kind of get a narrative of Caligula's reign. So, you know, he comes to power, first eight months, it's kind of okay. There's nothing particularly shocking from the senatorial point of view that's happening, even though there is, you know, a sense of menace. Then he falls ill. When he recovers, he eliminates Gamalus, his own conceivable rival, and anyone who he thinks might be a kind of particular figure of opposition to him. And he continues in the wake of his recovery from that illness to pay lip service to his partnership with the Senate in the way that Augustus had done, in the way that Tiberius had done.

36:56But then it seems that two years into his reign, he's finally had enough and there is this most spectacular showdown. And he summons the Senate and addresses them and expresses to them in the most bold, uncompromising way, his utter contempt for everything that they represent. He strips away all these hypocrisies that we were talking about earlier. This pretense that the Senate in some way have any autonomy or power, that Rome is a partnership between the Princeps and the Senate. He says this is absolute nonsense. It's ludicrous. The idea that Rome is a republic, madness. I am a monarch. I have complete authority over you.

37:46You are nothing. You are worms. and just for good measure, he then announces that he is reintroducing the treason trials that he had announced were cancelled with such trumpeting two years before. And the Senate are so stunned by this that they don't really know what to say. And Caligula sweeps out and they all just kind of sit there, ashen-faced, as Private Eye would put it. And the following day, they all kind of reconvene and they pass a formal vote in which they formally thank Caligula for his sincerity and the intelligence of his comments. They praise him for his piety and they say such wonderful clemency from Caesar.

38:34Even though we're worms, he's still, you know, we should offer him multiple sacrifices as a way of expressing our gratitude for his clemency and his general all-round decency. So it's a massive grovel. Crikey. So I question to you, Tom. So I compared him with Ramzan Kadyrov in the first half. You could compare him with Kim Jong-un in North Korea. Again, hereditary, but not in a monarchy, right? So my question is, what's the power base for doing this? So he hasn't had a command. He doesn't have powerful allies or hasn't, before he became emperor, he didn't have powerful allies in the Roman establishment.

39:09How can he possibly do this, stand up to these very powerful, prestigious patrician people and boss them around in this way? He has the Praetorians. He has lavished bribes on the Praetorians. They are the only soldiers in Rome. So as long as he has the Praetorians on board, there's nothing really that the Senate can do. He also has lavished money on the legions, because ultimately, one of the other many hypocrisies that Caligula is kind of ripping to shreds is the idea that the role of the Princeps is as anything other than a military commander. Right. You know, he is basically, I mean, he's not drawing attention to it deliberately, but he is making manifest that the underpinning of the entire system that Augustus has set up, which is supposed to be this partnership between the emperor and the Senate, is actually founded on the support of the legions.

40:05That's what matters. And so it's not surprising that senatorial opponents of Caligula recognize this as well. and of course the commanders of the legions are themselves senators and so there is a conspiracy against him and it's not surprising that it's focused not in Rome but on the Rhine which is where that you have the highest concentration of legions in the entire empire and it seems to have involved numerous senators two of Caligula's sisters interestingly and most dangerously of all the guy who effectively has the command of the legions on the Rhine, who is a very seasoned general and a very experienced guy at kind of negotiating all the various changes in regimes and things, a man called Guy Tullicus.

40:54And again, the accounts of this are very garbled, but you can kind of piece together that Caligula is alerted to what's happening. And he moves with very, very impressive energy and speed, sets off from Italy for the Rhine. It's his first trip outside Italy as emperor. Descends and surprises Gertulicus, who is arrested and executed. Caligula's sisters are sent to prison islands. So that thing you read at the beginning about Caligula saying to them, you know, I have swords as well as islands. So in other words, stay on the island and stay put or else I will have you hacked to death with swords.

41:27And the Senate then endures this absolute reign of terror. So Caligula goes to Germany. This is when he raises more legions. It's when he does that whole thing with the shells on the shore of the channel, which we talked about in our series on Roman Britain, and which I frankly said then and repeat, I have no idea what's going on with that. I mean, there are so many theories we don't know. It's an example of, I think, of just how garbled lots of the stories that are told about Caligula becomes. But anyway, he then comes back from Germany in Gaul. And while he's in Gaul, he's met by various emissaries from the Senate.

42:03and Caligula tells them, I no longer acknowledge your authority. I despise you. I do not recognize that you have any kind of role to play in the running of the empire. And it's on his return to Rome, it seems that the horrors and the outrages that Suetonius lists, which we just went through, that they seem to have been perpetrated. And it's a reign of terror that that works because the Senate is effectively left completely broken. You know, they feel powerless before him. They grovel before him and just, you know, like trying to avoid a bully's eye. So this is the moment really for the first time since, really for the first time since Augustus inaugurated the empire.

42:48It's the first time that somebody has torn away what Augustus had worked so hard to create, which was the veil of legality and tradition. and somebody has just said, that's all rubbish. This is a pure military dictatorship. I am the dictator and I will humiliate you, I will torture you and I will kill you if you step out of line. And I think that that's why he has the fame that he does. So in recent times, he's become almost a kind of existential hero. Yeah, Albert Camus wrote a play about him. So this notion that politics is purely about power and Caligula is perhaps the emperor who most brutally demonstrates that, most brutally recognizes it.

43:31But having said that, he does make one terrible mistake. So you, you know, you ask, well, what's the basis of his power? The basis of his power is his popularity with Praetorians. And so it is foolish of him then that he can't, you know, Caligula does seem to have loved a joke and he can't resist making a joke even about praetorians and there is one praetorian in particular um a guy called cassius kyria who's actually rather like me he's massive you know huge gym toned body enormous rippling muscles but has a perhaps a slightly effeminate voice uh a slightly soft voice and so um colligula finds that the combination of you know the the muscle man and the kind of the slightly female sounding voice.

44:17Very amusing. Yes. And so Suetonius writes, Caligula would make Priapus or Venus the watchword. And sometimes when the Tribune had reason to thank him for something, Caligula would hold out his hand to be kissed, then make an obscene gesture with his fingers. It's obviously very funny for all Caligula's hangers on. You do that with Theo. I do. I do. So the time will come where he will inflict a terrible vengeance, because what happens is that Cassic Iria and various other Praetorians organise a conspiracy. And this is much more fatal. As is proven on the 24th of January, AD 41, Caligula is about to leave for Alexandria.

44:54So there's, you know, if you're a conspirator, you need to get a move on. And that day he's staging games in this great temporary theatre on the Palatine. Caligula seems to be in an absolutely brilliant mood. He hasn't reserved any seats for the senators. So he sits there and enjoys watching them scrabble and try and get the best seat. He finds that very funny. He also finds it very funny when a flamingo is sacrificed and the blood of this flamingo splashes all over one of the senators, you know, blotting his robe. And so Klingit has a good laugh about that as well. Lunch comes. He decides he'll go and eat in the privacy of his own palace.

45:33so he stands up and heads off towards his own private quarters he's just about to go inside when he's approached by a courtier who tells him that some greek boys of very noble background have been rehearsing a musical in his honor and so caligula turns aside to inspect them and actually i think that's the kind of interesting example of caligula not as a monster i mean that's quite You know, he's told these boys have been rehearsing. He kind of breaks off from going to lunch to go and hear them because, you know, he clearly recognises that they will appreciate that. And he's walking down this passageway to go and listen to these Greek boys when he runs into Cassius Kyria.

46:15And Cassius Kyria asks for the day's password. And as usual, it's an insulting one. So, you know, I'm a massive girl's blouse, something like that. And Cassius Kyria is not amused. He draws his sword and he strikes at Caligula's neck. It misses and hits the shoulder blade. Caligula stumbles, crashes down onto the ground, but he's still very much alive. He's followed by his litter bearers. They have kind of great wooden poles and they come to the rescue of Caligula. Again, a kind of illustration of the way in which he can command a degree of loyalty. But there's no prospect of them being able to defend Caligula because Cassius Carrier is backed up with Praetorians who have, you know, they have hard steel.

46:56and Caligula is soon kind of on the ground being slashed to pieces by a kind of hail of swords. He's dead. Cassius Kyria decapitates him. We're told that several of the Praetorians stab their swords through Caligula's genitals. So again, this idea of kind of sexual humiliation, which Caligula had repeatedly practiced and now it's kind of inflicted on him. and there are even rumours that some of them pick up and eat his flesh which I'm sure is exaggerated so this is where Josephus comes into his own the the great Judean historian he has quite a detailed account that seems to draw on quite authoritative sources and so Caligula perishes as he had lived kind of shadowed by by horror by horrific rumour and by kind of malevolent jokes and that is the end of him and so as we approach the end of this episode it's probably time to just try and kind of go through and work out what kind of credibility can we put on this how can we make sense of all these seemingly mad stories that are told about so possibility number one obviously and this i'm sure is the case for some of the stories is that they are just not true that they're either propaganda or they're literary formulae or they are, you know, sort of folk urban myths, rather like there are loads of urban myths about politicians today that people believe, aren't there?

48:25I mean, you know, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, you know, Donald Trump, whoever it might be. There are lots of stories that people tell and swap, but we know ourselves that there might be a kind of metaphorical truth to them, but no literal truth. Right. So there is one... obvious example of that. There's one story that's told about him that we can be, I'd say, kind of 99 % sure isn't true. And that's the story that he committed incest with his sisters. So he has three sisters and his favourite is called Drusilla. And he is clearly devoted to her. When he falls ill, he names her as his heir, which is a striking thing for a woman in a society as patriarchal as Rome to be appointed the heir of a princeps.

49:11She then dies and he does genuinely seem to have been kind of crazed with grief and he proclaims her as a god and we know that that happens because we have kind of independent evidence for it. But the idea that he'd been sleeping with her or that he'd been sleeping with his other two sisters, we can be confident that that's not true. I think for two reasons. The first is that the notion that a powerful Claudian and Caligula is, as well as being a Julian, a Claudian, sleeps with his sisters is an absolute stereotype. It's told about Claudian after Claudian after Claudian. So it's an accusation that is just kind of waiting to be served up.

49:53I mean, you might still say, well, I mean, that doesn't prove that it didn't happen in this case, but it kind of does. And I'll quote you, a German scholar, Alois Wintling, who's written brilliantly about Caligula. He points out not only that Suetonius is the first to mention it, but also that there were contemporaries of Caligula who were familiar with aristocratic circles in Rome and well-informed and who heap invective on the emperor. They would hardly have failed to mention such a charge had it been in circulation then. So they would have mentioned it. Yeah, that makes total sense. Suetonius is the first person to mention it.

50:23Therefore, we can be fairly confident that that accusation isn't true. But that explanation doesn't wash with everything that is told about him, because there are substantiating reports that suggest that some at least of these stories are true. So how do we explain them? And another possibility, which, again, Suetonius is the first to suggest, is that Caligula was mad. So Suetonius writes, it is my theory, and I have no doubt it is the correct one, very modestly, that his mental infirmity was due to the coexistence within his personality of twin but directly contradictory flaws, extreme self-confidence and abject timidity.

51:02But again, if he'd been mad, contemporaries would have pointed it out. They don't. Is there not a claim when he fell ill? Yes, it's a popular theory. I don't think there's any evidence for that at all. And that's purely because of the order of Suetonius' biography, is it? Suetonius basically says it's after that. But I suppose it's more likely, isn't it, that he's politically either emboldened or more insecure after he knows that people have been flirting with a successor. Right. So that's why Suetonius mentions that he's both extremely self-confident and abjectly timid. I mean, I think that's exactly the kind of example that suggests it.

51:40But, I mean, that could be true, but it doesn't mean he's mad. No. And in fact, Caligula seems to have had considerable political acumen. I mean, what he does to the Senate is very, very brutal, but pretty effective. And when there is that military uprising against him, I mean, he outsmarts a seasoned military commander. So, you know, he may be malevolent. He may be pitiless. He may even be sadistic. But I don't think he's mad. Which matches what we know of 20th century dictators. I mean, Hitler, Stalin and so on. They may have been horrendous, but they're not clinically insane. It's too easy to say they're mad, basically.

52:17It lets them off the hook. But I don't think you need it as an explanation, because I think it's actually fairly clear where Caligula is coming from. And we've already hinted at it in this episode, which is that Caligula is a populist, or to put it in Latin, a popularis. And we've talked before, both in this series and in the podcast, more generally about how politics in Rome is about vibes rather than about policy. It's about whether you appeal to the kind of traditional elites or whether you appeal over their heads to the masses. And you've got to remember that the autocracy established by Augustus has only been in existence for 60 years.

52:57And the concrete hasn't set. People who are ruling as emperors are trying to work out what policy they should adopt, what role should be. I mean, and the people all around him are as well. And Augustus had embodied the popularist tradition and the kind of the more aristocrat traditionalist perspective. Tiberius had been a traditionalist. Caligula, I think partly out of temperament and partly because he correctly recognises the weakness of the Senate, goes all in with the popularist tradition. So his instinct is to kind of flatter and woo the people, to give them the entertainments that he himself enjoys.

53:37And of course, the spectacle of his enjoyment makes him very, very popular with the people. And conversely, to kind of turn against the Senate, and rather than to appease senators, to crush them. and it's a strategy to which he brings very distinctive qualities and i think that one of them clearly is a certain relish for cruelty and domination i think that the sources are just too insistent on that for us to kind of you know whitewash it i think he clearly was you know and in that sense a completely terrifying yeah man a nasty piece of work a very nasty piece of work and with a particular focus, I think, on sexual humiliation.

54:22Again, even if the stories about him sleeping with senators' wives in dinner parties or setting up a brothel on the Palatine are exaggerated, the fact that these stories are told clearly are drawing on authentic memories of the trauma that senators were made to go through. And for reasons, again, that we've talked in this series striking at an aristocratic roman sense of sexual self-respect is absolutely devastating to their whole sense of status calicula correctly identifies that as the way to really kind of break them and part of this is the assault on a series of conventions and taboos presumably so you talked before about him um the stuff with the gods or demanding that he's worshipped as a god or most obviously the the story that goes right back to when he was on capri with tiberius that he dresses as a woman yes and this is about him taking the taboos that mean so much to the established senior you know blue-blooded people and ripping them up and presumably delighting them the mob as it were in doing so there's something almost kind of punk about it.

55:36It's so shocking that obviously some of his supporters, some of the people who are prone to support him, just kind of laugh in admiration at how far he has pushed things. And this is a strategy that Nero will adopt as well. And it was a strategy in a kind of much more modulated sense that Julius Caesar had done too. You know, that you shock people and the shock becomes kind of politically charged and Caligula obviously revels in experimenting with that I think. In that sense Nero and Caligula are remarkably similar aren't they? Because they're basically part of the same political tradition they're playing to the same audience and they're trying to and they're they're kicking against the same taboos and the same class the senatorial class.

56:23Right and I think also it's the fact that they they have the blood of a god in their veins and so they can cast themselves as being somehow more than mortal. They're doing the kind of things that gods would do or heroes in Greek mythology. This is very overt with Nero, but it's, I think, pretty clearly the same with Caligula. I think he is kind of blazing that as a policy for an emperor to follow. I mean, you have to basically be a descendant of Augustus to do it, which is why when Nero dies and there are no more descendants of Augustus to rule as emperor, that tradition ends. But both of them are kind of making play with it.

56:58and he fuses that sense of essentially behaving like a god, behaving like a kind of, you know, one of a hero from Greek myth with a genius for spectacle and an eye for recognizing how to undercut the privileges and assumptions of the Senate. And the single best example of this, again, a very well-known story, is that he builds this huge three-mile pontoon bridge in the Bay of or specifically in the Bay of Bailly. And he then parades across it. First time he rides on a horse and then he rides in this kind of great chariot. And Suetonius offers this not as an example of his monstrosities, but as one of the good things, you know, one of the positives of his reign.

57:43And in fact, Suetonius, his grandfather had watched it and had said how amazing it was. And we don't know exactly when he does this, but I think the likeliest date is when he comes back from Germany and Gaul, because I think it's pretty clear that what he's doing is staging a triumph to upstage all triumphs. Because to hold a triumph on the sea, I mean, that's the kind of thing a god does. But also triumphs, there's a set route in Rome that you follow, and it's up to the Senate to license them. And Caligula is saying to the Senate, don't need you. I am this godlike figure. I can ride over water if I want to.

58:25And then the final and most famous thing, making his horse a consul. So I know you have a very, actually, I've heard you explain before. I think it's a very persuasive explanation of exactly what this is, because effectively this is just a very, very, this is a satirical joke. It's a joke. So this is the last kind of attribute that Caligula brings to his model of kind of targeted terrorism, you might say, which is that he's funny. And people like humour in a domineering political figure. You know, there's kind of contemporary evidence for that, I would say. And Caligula is, you know, we've said all along that there is a kind of vein of dark comedy in Suetonius's portrait that I think derives from Caligula himself in large part.

59:14Suetonius, I think, doesn't get the point of Caligula's joke about his horse. So it's popularly said that Caligula made his horse a consul. That's not what Suetonius says. Suetonius says that he planned to make Incatatus a consul. He also claims that Suetonius loves Incatatus, which literally means hotspur. So he gives Incatatus a stable fashioned out of marble, an ivory manger, purple saddlecloths and collars studded with jewels. And he bestowed as well a fully furnished mansion. Now, all of these are basically the markers of senatorial status. It's what senators want and have. And to be a consul is the ultimate dream of any ambitious senator.

59:58And Caligula, by giving Incatatus a palace, and by saying that he can make him a consul, is effectively undermining all the pretensions of the senatorial class. He's saying, you know, I can make my horse a consul or I can make you a consul. It's very humiliating for the Senate. It's very funny for Caligula. But of course, in the long run, the joke is on him because actually nobody today remembers the joke. It just confirms his reputation as a madman. And it's, you know, the other example of the joke being on Caligula is the fact that Cassius Currier ends up killing him. And my own suspicion is that I mentioned I went in and talked to the writers of Succession, the Murdochs as the Caesars drama.

1:00:44Yeah. And I talked all about this period of Roman history. And one of the markers is that Nero and Sporus are constantly being name checked. But I think that the character of Roman Roy, I think, has quite a lot of Caligula in him. I mean, I don't know. I haven't asked specifically whether it was an influence. but he is called Roman yeah he's the most Roman character I mean it's literally his name and his character is quite Caligula he's a Caligula who's still waiting in the wings I think but for all Caligula's um spectacle and his uh dark humor and his kind of popular populist touch I should say he only lasts four years and he ends up dead in this extraordinary set piece this great narrative set piece.

1:01:31He's been stabbed and stabbed again by Cassius Kyria and his men, abandoned in an alley. And what's going to happen next? You know, are they going to bring back the Republic? Is the empire going to continue? If so, who on earth could possibly succeed? Is there anybody left from the imperial family? And Tom, we will be answering that question next time. But of course, there's only one way that people can hear that right now, isn't there? And that's if they're members of the Restis History Club. If they're members of our very own Praetorian Guard, they'll be able to hear it. And if you're not and you'd like to join up, you can go to therestishistory.com and hear right away what happens next after the assassination of Caligula, who comes next and what kind of emperor he was.

1:02:13So, Tom, thank you very much for that. And on that bombshell, we'll be back next time with the story of the emperor Claudius. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

1:02:29Thank you.