Was Caligula Really the Worst Roman Emperor? | With Professor Mary Beard

it was mid-afternoon on the 22nd of January 41 A.D in the morning the emperor Caligula had been to the theater but he had a bit of a hangover so he decided to skip lunch and freshen up with a quick bath that's where he was going all on his own Dana back Alleyway in the palace compound well he was jumped by a posse of soldiers blow to his name son said to his chin didn't kill him for the next 30 or so did one nasty rumor said that the Assassins ET his flesh filigula was just 28 years old he'd been in power for less than four years it was an extraordinary moment in Roman history only Rome's third emperor it's Caligula who has come to stand for the corruption horror and excess of Imperial Rome psychopath and depraved he said to have ruled by the sword to have made his horse into a consul Ruby insisted he be worshiped as a living God and ever since he has become a template for tyranny with chilling Echoes right up to our own age one of Caligula's favorite sayings was let them hate me so long as they fear me much of his story is true on the throne for just four short years Caligula has left us little physical evidence and to get behind the myths means a detective hunt for Clues all over the Roman World from the Battlegrounds of his war hero father in Germany to the island of Capri where people said he was schooled in the art of Imperial power to the astonishing luxury of his life as emperor I'll uncover a Rome full of intrigue murder and dynastic power and come face to face with not just the monster but the man so who was Caligula and why has he gone down in history as one of Rome's biggest villains foreign [Music] the first clear site we have of Caligula in any historical record is a long way from Rome from about the age of two Caligula spent his childhood on the road on the Empire's Northern Frontier parceled round from army camp to army camp with his mum and his dad one of Rome's most charismatic military Commanders by now Rome had been under one man rule for just 50 years and a generation after the first Emperor Augustus power was in the hands of one family caligulas his father was germanicus the blue-eyed Prince of the Imperial family the nephew of the emperor Tiberius and himself tipped for the throne his mother was agropina the granddaughter of the first Emperor Augustus it was himself the adopted son of Julius Caesar in the world of ancient Rome you didn't get more blue-blooded than Caligula [Music] he was born Gaius Caesar germanicus a name he inherited from his father meaning something like Thrasher of the Germans and these were the family fields of Honor The Killing Fields where Caligula's ancestors cemented their reputations and political power today the Roman Museum in zantan has been built not far from one of the legionary camps where Caligula spent time as a boy aside there is a remarkable collection of Roman military gear Medals of Honor with portraits of Caligula's dad germanicus and Mama gropina dished out to soldiers to what was then the most technologically advanced armor and weaponry on the planet Cavalry helmets and daggers The Remains are frighteningly powerful crossbows and rainstorms of piercing arrows all of which remind us the Caligula's childhood playground was not some cozy peacekeeping Mission but a vicious war zone but perhaps the fact is also its most humble this is a perfectly preserved Roman caliga a standard Army issue soldiers sandal made of tough leather with hop Nails on the sole there's one object that's really associated with Caligula it is Story Goes that when he was a boy and he was living on military camps with his parents his mum had him dressed up in the uniform of an ordinary Roman soldier right down to the Cali guy he was a kind of baby squatty legionry mascot and we tend to think of the name Caligula as rather Grand Imperial name in fact it was a little boy's nickname it means little boots bootykins or the kid in the Cali guy when he grew up Caligula hated it must have seemed as if he was being called it Emperor didoms or something and if you'd have asked him what his name was he would have said quite correctly his name was the emperor Gaius the fact that even now we still call him bhutokins shows just how successful his enemies were in pouring scorn over him he himself would have been horrified to think of us calling him Caligula in the 1960s in this small Hilltop town in Umbria a group of workers dug up an enormous bronze statue of Caligula's father germanicus that once stood on what was probably an army parade ground on the edge of town [Music] pose of an imperial leader arm outstretched addressing his troops and standing beneath him help but since the status and glamor of the man in whose Shadow the little Caligula grew up one theory is that the statue was put up by Caligula himself after becoming emperor in memory of the event that radically changed the course of his life for in 1980 when Caligula was just seven jamalicus suddenly died on a mission to Syria poisoned he claimed from his deathbed by the Roman governor pizo even perhaps under the orders of his own Uncle the emperor Tiberius when the news of germanicus's death reached Rome there was an absolute explosion of grief life stopped it said Ordinary People wept in the street they wrote up on the walls give us back germanicus the only people not grieving were the emperor and his mother they weren't seen in public and they didn't authorize a full State funeral when the ashes of germanicus came home to be put in the family too eventually Pisa was put on trial but a few days in he conveniently committed suicide and the trial was turned into something more like a public inquiry and this is a copy of the record of that public inquiry the formal report inscribed in bronze dated the 10th of December 20 A.D basically the message is the only person guilty here was Pisa conveniently dead but the most extraordinary bit of the document and its real point is down here where it says that one of these reports is to be inscribed in the chief city of every Province and that it is to be inscribed in hibernis in the winter quarters of each Legion curious this is mass communication Roman style it's a major attempt to get the official message across everywhere hard not to think it all might not have been too little too late the suspicion suspicious circling around germanicus is death would Mark the start of an increasingly bitter feud between Caligula's mother agropina and the palace foreign ER and her sons were plotting against him Tiberius banished her to a remote island off the coast of Italy and shortly afterwards in 31 A.D he summoned the young Caligula aged 19 or so to the island of Capri in the Bay of Naples this was the seat of tiberius's power away from Rome it was from here that he ruled the Empire by proxy from a whole Suite of Imperial Villas built high into the cliffs [Music] way in a museum on the island is one small trace of Caligula stay here [Music] this may not look very much just like a bit of old Roman brick stuck in a wall but actually it's the only physical evidence that we have of Caligula's presence on Capri because it's got his name stamped across it Gaius Caesar and that raises the question of what he was doing here and why Tiberius brought him and there'd been all kinds of theories was he here to be under surveillance was he here because Tiber is like the kid or was he here to be groomed to be Emperor and learn to start building like an emperor should away from prying eyes it was here Roman writers later surmised that Tiberius schooled the young Caligula in the dark arts of tyranny and excess the stories they told of what Tiberius got up to here are all Fantastical sex and violence those people he wanted to get rid of he had chucked over the cliffs and he'd stationed a platoon of sailors in boats at the bottom to finish them off with their oars they weren't yet dead and the Poolside Fun he had a trooper little boys his little fishes he called them they'd been specially trained to swim between his thighs while he was in the pool and nibble his genitals whatever Tiberius really got up to we do know that Caligula's time and his charge was defined by remarkable brutality much of which was aimed at his own family for while Caligula was living in the lap of luxury his mother agropina was beaten up she lost her sight in one eye she went on Hunger Strike was force fed till finally she starved to death not only that both his brothers came to Violent ends [Music] one by one Caligula had lost his father and his mother and his two Elder Brothers he and his sisters were the only ones in the family left it's a chilling reminder that in Rome the closer you were to power the harder it was to survive in the vaults of the British museum his one Macabre Memento from Capri that sums up the young Caligula's life in the empress Court looks like a real skull but actually it's an extremely lifelike work of art made of marble this must have made a stunning centerpiece on the Imperial dining table Rich Romans loved the idea of eat drink and be merry because tomorrow you'll die he put it back in the context of the Imperial Court there are more Sinister messages for start there's the violence of the emperor himself anyone sitting around this at the Imperial dining table must have been aware their lives hung on a knife edge that they could be flavor of the month one minute dead the next the best advice was never to let your feelings show keep Poker Face there's a horrible story of an imperial princess who's dining one evening with her brother he kills over dead probably poisoned you do what all good Imperial princesses should do she goes on eating in fact we're told that when Caligula was on Capri and bumped off one by one he learned never to show any emotion at all [Music] underlying all this nastiness was an issue you that the Roman Empire always struggled to work out the problem of succession [Music] family business T Augustus there was no fixed system for passing the power on a fatal flaw that colors the whole Caligula story succession posed a problem for the Romans for two reasons first the emperor isn't a real job it's supposed to be just a bundle of personal powers and so you couldn't pass those on in a normal way but the other problem is that Augustus and Olivia didn't have children with each other even though each of them had children with other people and what that means is there isn't a clear line of succession a son to follow a father a grandson to follow a son so when an emperor begins to seem a bit sick or unreliable or gets old all sorts of groups begin to jock you for power there's the legions in the provinces there's the Imperial bodyguard in Rome you've got the coaches you have the ex-slaves in the palace who want to know who's going to own them next and then you've got various Imperial women trying to get their sons into power and so it's a it's a very very unstable situation it is that instability and the uncertainty of it all that that both produces real violence and and also allegations and rumors of violence that's right the first thing that Tiberius does when he succeeds Augustus is he sends a boat to an island on which one of his relatives has been kept in exile for decades to have the boy killed because he could have been an alternative and what does Caligula do when he takes power one of the first things he does is he has his cousin the boy named Tiberius gamalus murdered because he's somebody else who could have been Emperor what's amazing is that for the first hundred years of the Empire there's not a single Emperor about whose death there isn't some kind of allegation that he was bummed off you know the poison mushrooms had done him in and there is that that story of Caligula who some people said had actually smothered Tiberius uh you know when he was you know asleep in order to take power himself and the other story is he got the cap the praetorian guard to do it for him because Empress have people who do the smothering for them foreign Tiberius really died two days after his death on March the 18th 37 A.D the Senate declared Caligula Rome's third emperor he could now triumphantly return to Rome as the ruler of the known world 24 years old at the time he must have seen the best choice as the childhood mascot of the troops and the son of the great germanicus he had the support of the army and as the great grandson of Augustus he could claim a direct bloodline back to the founder of the dynasty the Adoration of the crowds one of Caligula's first acts as Emperor was to make a huge play of these family connections braving the stormy seas he made a great song and dance of bringing the ashes of his dead mother back to Rome burying her with his own hands here in the enormous family tomb built by his great grandfather the mausoleum of Augustus [Music] in Rome the whacking Tombstone Caligula put up to his mother still survives and it's so much more than just a grave marker it starts by saying awesome these are the bones in fact the ashes of agropina the daughter of Marcus Agrippa the granddaughter neptus of Augustus the first emperor who's now a god a dewas and she's the wife the oxor of germanica Caesar The Golden Boy of the Empire and she's the mother mattress of Gaius Caesar Augustus germanicus rincips the emperor Caligula in a way it says just as much about Caligula this is his Manifesto to his right to Imperial rule but there was another way in which Caligula could get the message across about who was now in charge by the money he minted stamped with his portrait in which he showered down on the people of Rome Caligula is supposed to have been absolutely spectacularly generous he said on some occasions to have gone up to the first floor of a building in the Forum and actually thrown money thrown coins at the crowd they would have got some good cash to take home but more important in a way you'd also go home with a message because one of the ways that Emperors could get their version of events on their slogans across to the Roman people at large was to put them on the coins so you literally carried around the Imperial propaganda in your pocket in Caligula's case they Hammer home the point about the royal blood flowing through his veins this one shows Caligula on one side his father the great dramaticus on the other [Music] shows a carriage parading a statue of his mother in celebrations founded in her honor an even more important this one shows Caligula sacrificing a bull at the Temple of his great grandfather the god Augustus one has an even more pointed message on the one side there's a really gorgeous portrait of Caligula and his name here guy Caesar but you can must be him standing on a box his arm outstretched and he's talking to a group or soldiers and it says at the top ad look cute short for Adler coutio the speech of the emperor to his troops uh and underneath coh short for cohortes the cohorts of a praetorian guard and the message of this is clear whatever family background you have whatever deals you've done nobody in Rome can become an emperor unless they've got the support of the army and this is what many modern despots and tyrants have also discovered without the support of the troops you're either deposed or you're dead [Music] these coins give us an idea of how an emperor branded His Image in the days before TV and radio [Music] side stamping his face on the cache cheap cameos of Caligula were cut from glass and clay portrait busts were sent out across the Empire to be copied and turned into a whole gallery of Imperial statues and if you've ever wondered why there are so many heads and so few bodies one reason is that the heads were always meant to be replaceable you can see just how easy it would be to take one head out and pop another one in once established on the throne one of the ways Rome's new Emperors cemented their power was to build and even if Caligula ruled for just four years we know that some of Rome's most iconic ancient monuments started life under his watch there were the aqueducts the aqua Claudia and the anionoas bringing water from over 40 miles away to the center of Rome [Music] the Obelisk that now stands in front of Saint Peters is also caligulan shipped over from Egypt on an enormous specially built boat and then there was the most obvious statement of Caligula's power the Imperial HQ on the Palatine Hill whose Latin name palatium gives us our own word Palace most of what we now see here dates from long after Caligula's death his own building was destroyed in the great fire of Rome in 64 A.D but it seems that Caligula was the first emperor to remodel the Imperial residences to make them more palatial in our terms [Music] live on the Palatine Hill Caligula also inherited fast pleasure Gardens called haughty on the outskirts of the city one of them the haughty lamiani is still a garden of sorts in modern Rome and it's the location of the only eyewitness account of Caligula in action that we have it was written by Philo a Jew from Alexandria who'd come to petition the emperor against political discrimination back home and it's a rare glimpse of Caligula the emperor face to face with his subjects when Philo and his delegation get to their appointment they discover that the emperor's mind is actually on home improvements and they traips around after him through the gardens as he goes from Pavilion to Pavilion planning his makeover when they get his attention they bow down to the ground but it doesn't cut much ice with Caligula he simply says so you're the god haters you don't think I'm a God then he follows that up by asking in any way why don't you eat pork one of the Jews thinks quickly on his feet and said well you know quite a lot of people don't eat a lot of things I mean some people don't eat lamb I'm not surprised it's a Caligula it's horrible and the flunkies all laugh is a wonderful and horrible vignette of the day-to-day exercise of Imperial power there's no cruelty here there's no violence there's even a bit of banter all the same it's humiliating Caligula's message is quite clear my fancy window glass is more important than the Jews of Alexandria story and it also tells us a lot more than we might think about Imperial luxury for one of the ways Emperors dazzled you with their power rammed in your face was with the very trappings of their world it's from the pleasure Gardens that we can still find traces of caligulan splendor from them have come some of the most impressive and famous statues of ancient Rome such as the discobelos The discus thrower the version of an earlier Greek masterpiece good there's the maid of anzio found at the palace where we think Caligula was born and the sleeping hermaphrodite a wonderfully Urbane joke the kind that Palace just loved on the one side she's a luscious sleeping woman on the other she's definitely more of a bloke and in the 1870s excavators dug up an astonishing find in one of the Imperial pleasure Gardens that used to be caligulas hundreds of precious stones rubies garnets carnelians bits of rock crystal and Amber embedded in amazing frames a filigree silver and gold when this stuff was first discovered in the 1870s no one could quite work out what it was one idea was that they'd come across a throne room but there's just so much of this stuff that I think we have to imagine precious stones literally embedded in the palace walls and tweakling in the lights at night looking amazing or perhaps a bit tacky during the day we do know that killagila was dead keen on pearls and one contemporary witness says he actually used to like slippers with pearls sewn into them which if you ask me is a far cry from those little military boots you started out with cute vision a newly crowned Emperor showing off his pulled slippers to his flunkies so another example of how the Imperial family used the ostentation of their world to unsettle and disarm this is one of the most iconic and impressive Imperial paintings from ancient Rome the so-called Garden Room designed for Caligula's great-grandmother Olivia in whose home Caligula spent time as a boy it's an impossibly utopian scene the trees are all full of perfectly ripe fruit every flower is perfectly In Bloom and in the Gloom of the flickering lamps two thousand years ago it'd be hard to know whether we were looking at a real Garden or a painting of one and of course that sort of illusionism is one of the most impressive trademarks of Roman art it's also slightly unsettling blurring of the boundary between the fake and the real is one of the factors about Roman culture that made it so scary you never quite know whether what you're looking at is real or an imitation tense or reality on the one hand what you think is real turns out not to be and there's a great story about going to dinner with Caligula looking at the Fantastic spread it all looks wonderful until you spot the food on the table is made of gold it's very precious but what you're supposed to do can you pretend to eat it and on the other hand what you think is fake can turn out to be deadly real it's another story of Caligula having what looked like a practice gladiatorial bout with an opponent with wooden swords except the Caligula had a real weapon so this all looks very impressive it's all very lovely but it reminds us that there's a more shadowy Sinister world of smoke and mirrors in the Imperial Court [Music] it's a perfect example of the choreography of threat that lurked beneath every day Palace life threat if we think about it from the emperor's point of view that worked both ways the Labyrinth signed corridors of the palace were teeming with people visiting dignitaries and spies to the collectors of the Imperial rubbish it must have been a security Nightmare how the emperor ever know who was who how did he Marshal his own security they did have a system of passwords the emperor would issue a new one each day and you'd have to say the word if you were challenged but that wasn't enough for the most anxious Empress one of them is said to have had the walls of the palace lined with mirrors so he really could see who was coming up behind him [Music] in this world where the emperor was always watching his back the plea ended up trusting the most weren't just his personal security Force but also his slaves and high up on a wall of a museum in Rome is the record of the staff from one of Caligula's actual palaces each one tells us what they did one for example saturninus Spire that short Forester means ball player but perhaps saturninus was a personal trainer we've got our gayath he's a gubernator the Helmsman perhaps on the Imperial yacht but perhaps my favorite of all is this chap here vernustis book our spec could be short for speculators so Venus might have been a Watchman or spy but it could also be short for specularius in which case he was the guy who made the mirrors It's a Wonderful snapshot of the underbelly of Court life but it would be a mistake to think that they were just lowly servants some of them played a vital role in the palace's strategy of control and fear our fetus here he's an invitar tour he is the guy who controls the guest list at the Palestinian parties no Roman Aristocrats wouldn't touch this kind of job with a barge Pole these guys could have quite a lot of power and Romans told quite a lot of sometimes wild stories about just how powerful these Imperial slaves and ex-slaves were Caligula is supposed to have had one called protogenes who carried around with him under each arm with more than a bit of Menace and a bit of ham acting at the same time two different files one labeled dagger the other labeled sword as if they contain the lists inside of who was to be put to death and how it's not hard to see why the emperor relied on these guys they didn't represent a direct threat to him they weren't going to become emperor themselves and after all he owned most of them but in the end didn't actually do Caligula any good some of them are supposed to have been involved in the final plot to kill him this is now one of the most powerful images of Caligula that we have a man who was paranoid about his own security a lot unreasonably as he no doubt learned from the fate of his own family under Tiberius conspiracies were an absolutely inevitable part of Imperial life if Caligula is always looking behind him if he's always watchful are there people who really are out to get him yes the world people out to get him and I think there were two quite different types either there are people within the extended family who accept that Rome is now a dynastic autocracy of which they are part but want themselves rather than Caligula to be the autograph but there's also another type of potential opposition which is people who don't think that Rome ought to be a dynastic autocracy at all when they want to put the clock back to the Republic run by the Roman aristocracy romello but it's really the first type it's the the family trying to replace him from one of their own number that looks like it's the most important one of those we have most evidence for uh yes his brother-in-law um Emilia's lepidos was executed for plotting against him and his wife Caligula and also Caligula's other surviving sister were both exiled as a result so clearly Caligula saw this as a threat from those closest to him inside the family to his own position so in a sense he's quite right to be looking over his shoulder because the people who've got the knife out are likely to be the people he's hanging out with both days of the week yeah and he doesn't know how many of them there are ever since historians have wanted to make this family plot one of the turning points in Caligula's Reign that marked his transition from Golden Boy with promise to the maniacal monster we've all come to know fact is that the period of Caligula's life is a time in power about which we actually know the least conspiracies real conspiracies was this the moment that he started to lose his grip don't know what we do is that this is when the stories of Madness and excess that have come to Define Caligula mostly start and perhaps the most famous is that he gave his favorite horse in katatus that's Speedy his own Palace that he fed him oats mixed with gold that he made him a Consul of Rome the fact is that no ancient writer ever says that Caligula made his horse a console they say is that he planned to or that people said he planned to I'd be pretty certain that what underlies all this there's a bit of banter a caligulan joke I mean I can imagine him at dinner one evening with his friends among the aristocracy and he's trying to needle them a bit he's saying oh you're a hopeless lot I'd rather have my horse console than one of you and that then goes down in history as if it was serious but anyway we all do love stories about monarchs and their Pampered Pets think of our fantasies about Queen Elizabeth and her corgis how they have diamond colors and they eat out of silver bowls and they're served by footmen in uniform I wonder what we'd say if you found that she nicknamed one of them prime minister door is of unbridled excess much of what else was thought wrong with Caligula came down to his sex life said he turned his Palace into a brothel loved dressing up in women's clothes and was so insatiable for sex he wore out his male partners for us Caligula has become more than anything a byword for sexual excess and perversion we can hardly hear his name without Conjuring up images of drunken orgies sex in the wrong place with the wrong people with little boys married women virgins and most notoriously with his own Three Sisters if we were making a porn movie Roman style we'd be bound to cast Caligula in the lead stories have been added to and embellished over the years they actually first appear in sources written years after his death mostly by the second century biographer suetonius and they tell us just as much about the anxieties of the Roman Elite as they do about Caligula so you get these tales about go to dinner with Caligula Senator and you take your wife and then in the middle between courses you suddenly discover that the emperor has gone out of the room with your wife and they come back a bit later they all look a bit flushed and then the emperor says oh she's not very good in but it is she yeah and I think associated with those stories there's there's the account of how people come into the banquet Caligula is going to own his couch people file past the end and he acts like so I wanted a slave market you know sort of checking out the girls trying to decide which one he's going to select for later so this is how the emperor shows his power is by um humiliating the elite in all sorts of different ways and this is one way amongst many but perhaps the most damning story was Caligula's incest with his favorite sister Drusilla with whom as a boy he was said to have been discovered in bed by his own grandmother there's no actual accusation of incest by anybody contemporary absolutely contemporary with Caligula is there and even these um the suetonius staff where he's talking about granny finding them in bed and it is quite interesting that even suetonius is only saying people used to say that the gossip was was he's quite clear that incest took place when it gets to the detail it's all in the distance yeah yes and I mean I think even Seneca who's pretty much Caligula's contemporary he does talk about when when Caligula's sister Drusilla dies Caligula's excessive grief for Drusilla that she he kind of doesn't know what to do with himself he dashes off to the country dashes back to Rome he tries to to console himself with gambling and you know he goes around in a terrible state but he doesn't link that to perverse sexuality I mean I think there's also the sort of dynastic aspect of it I mean the stories about incest are partly about their anxieties about the way that powers now transmitted in the Roman world that instead of it's you know going from one lot of middle-aged man to another lot of middle-aged men through a proper process in the Senate it's um you know it's one family that's holding on to power and the women in that family then have you know influence in where they never had previously done under the Roman Republic so really what these stories telling us they're telling us about power I think that's right that he is a youngish man he's not a great military leader or anything like that but he's got all this power as leader of the Roman world and his relations with the Senate are clearly very uneasy so that they tell these these stories about his outrageous behavior [Music] perhaps this is a clue to one of the problems of Caligula whereas Augustus and Tiberius had come to power after prominent military careers bootykins was thrust on the throne at just 24. the military pedigree or political experience to earn the elites respect the hardly surprising he might cast around for alternative more king-like models of leadership and that included presenting himself as both Emperor and God the boundary between Roman emperors and the gods was always a fragile one but Caligula trampled right through it he said to have insisted on being worshiped as a God in his own lifetime and to make matters worse we're told he transformed the most symbolic space in Rome the people's forum and his own stage to be worshiped one story was that he turned the Temple of caster and Pollux into the porch of his own house and used to go and sit there between the statues of the Gods waiting to be worshiped another story was he used to go up to the capital line hill to talk to Jupiter there and then built a bridge between the Palatine and the capital line to make those conversations a bit easier it's even said that he had flamingos sacrificed to him if there's now nothing left of these buildings above ground in the Forum archaeologist Henry Hurst has uncovered evidence beneath that suggests they might not be entirely fantasy we dug over all of this area and we're very lucky in that we found some unusually well-dated remains and we could date them pretty much to around 40 A.D around the time of Caligula's reign and what they consisted of was a large Courtyard going that way towards the hill and behind it a very Grand room and a grand Courtyard and then where we are a big enclosure with a central monument and the combination of that and this Grand Courtyard and room makes one think of some sort of a palatial complex and on the other side of that wall is the Temple of Castro and Pollux yes so the story that Caligula extended the palace out towards the Forum and made the temple his vestibule seems quite possible because these remains are huge and palatial and very close to the back of the Temple and what about Caligula's Fantastical bridge to Jupiter on the capitoline hill true would expand a distance of over 250 meters and been 30 meters above the ground the sane and traditional view of this is that the bridge was just a Timber Footbridge which went from somewhere high up using the roofs of buildings and ended out over in the cupboard line so you wouldn't find any traces archaeologically but we have the mystery of what we're standing on what it looks really like is a pair of the of the Roman bridge at Verona these look like that quite a bit so we thought is this a bridge pier and in favor of that is this question of levels because the temple behind us there is one story up from where we are there's also the story about how Caligula threw coins from the roof of the Basilica Julia also one story up and that was just over there so it would be quite sensible if you were having a bridge for it to be effectively one story high so it could link these things all at first floor level it's like raised walkway and then up to the capital line and then eventually up to the capital line yes just a small block of marble a tantalizing clue to the lengths Caligula went for his own self-aggrandizement have in separating fact from fiction after just four years in power there's little hard archeology that we can tie to Caligula for certain but there is one site not far from Rome where we can this is late Nami One of Caligula's favorite places and it's where all the myths come together the uncontrolled extravagance the Divinity and even the violence [Music] was known in the ancient world as the skillum diani the mirror of Diana and in the 1930s it was the site of one of the most stunning finds in Roman archeology two enormous floating Villas that were so large and so lavish that they've become the ultimate symbols of Caligula's excess towards the end of his reign and unsurprisingly it was Italy's 20th century Tyrant Mussolini who spent a fortune raising them from the mud and installing them in a huge museum at the end of the lake the shells of the boats were tragically destroyed in the second world war now we've only got models but much of the hardware still survives no doubt whose boats these are it says guys Caesar Augustus germanicus these are Caligula's barges it's a bit hard to know what a water pipes doing on a boat they can't be ordinary boats perhaps they're bringing the water to Caligula's hot tub Under the Stars lutonius has left us a vivid description of other caligulan boats so luxurious they had jeweled prows sales of purple silk and bathrooms of alabaster and bronze long thought a myth the boats of Nami hint they might in fact be true for alongside the naval Hardware of the ships are glimpses of astonishing Imperial luxury there are rows of columns made from Grecian marble Sinister sculptures of Medusa heads and huge Golden Hands beautifully sculpted Mooring rings of wolves and lions and balustrades cast in solid bronze they've been all kinds of theories about what these boats were actually for some people have thought they must have been religious was it here that Caligula came to commune with the Goddess Diana By the Light of the Moon was one of them a temple to the Egyptian goddess Isis or were they just very lavish pleasure barges Romans with too much money love nothing more than to build out onto water is that what Caligula was up to the boats of Nami will no doubt always remain an enigma but there is one place on the lake where Caligula's intentions come into sharper Focus all around the shore were dozens of shrines and temples that went back hundreds of years and one of them raises troubling questions about whether he was a victim or actually a colluder in his own fate [Music] this was once the sanctuary of Diana a richly decorated temple in a Grove of sacred trees there was just one weird thing about the sanctuary of Diana and that was the priest in charge the so-called king of Naomi the Rex lemarensis first of all he was a runaway slave kindly in order to get the job he had to kill the present incumbent if he wanted to become Rex here you came to the sanctuary you went and found the special sacred tree you pulled off a branch if you managed to pull off that Branch you were allowed to challenge the current priest to a fight to the death if you won you became Rex yourself because you also got a death sentence because someone else would be alone sooner or later to challenge you ancient writers tell us about seeing the priest in this Century he had a sword in his hand and he was always looking furtively about him for obvious reasons the ritual of Naomi hopped back to a very primitive level of ancient religion and Caligula was said to have revived it with Glee finding a slave to come and kill the priest in charge whether Caligula did that because he wanted to inject a bit of religious reality into what had become a charade whether it was just capricious sadism we don't know but it's hard not to think of the king of Nami as uncanny double of the emperor of Rome both were looking behind their backs maybe Caligula had spotted that too however knowing Caligula might have been in the end it didn't save him on the 22nd of January 41 A.D he was assassinated after just three years 10 months and eight days in power thank you and if the facts of kagila's life might forever elude us ironically it's his death about which we know the most thanks to a graphic account written by a Jewish historian flavius Josephus Peter Wiseman is taking me to where he thinks is the exact spot where Caligula the emperor Gaius was set upon by members of his own personal security Force he sees coming towards him a colonel of the praetorian Guard called Cassius of old who he thinks he's safe Casey's career however is the leader of the assassination conspiracy and Kyrie draws his sword and he brings it down as hard as he can Gaius is staggering around totally disoriented and the guy who actually gave him the final blow was a man called Aquila so he is the man who has the credit for the assassination of the emperor Gaius Caligula are people pleased some people thought that what you have to understand about gaia's Caligula is that he was enormously popular with the ordinary population he was a Caesar he was the son of germanicus he was the great grandson of Augustus he was a great great grandson and Julius he's all these were popular Heroes he was their popular Heroes and they hated the idea that people Senators senior army officers should take it upon them to kill their man but there's a sort of irony to this isn't it because this is not an uprising of popular will this is a takeout move by the praetorian God yes a small group of senior officers who were also involving senior Senators it's a question what they expected to happen afterwards it seems that career and the others were idealistic enough to believe that in killing Gaius they would put an end to what we call the principle but there wouldn't be an emperor anymore but in the end they get this very very brief little flowering of what looks as if it might be about to become the overthrow of autocracy entirely in the return to the Republic a little bit of a debate and then you know half an hour later they find Caligula's Uncle Claudius to put back on the throne that's because the praetorian guard itself depended on there being an emperor [Music] Trail and a chilling reminder that in Imperial Rome he was not the emperor but the Army who held the reins of power but there's one final chapter in Caligula's story which adds I think to his terrible reputation there's evidence that attacks on his memory began almost before his body went cold justify his assassination the new regime condemned him as a tyrant he then completed building projects were then taken over and inscribed with claudius's name some of his coins were defaced his initials symbolically scratched out and in many of his official statues the heads were either replaced or destroyed and at the wonderful Monty Martini Museum in Rome is a strange bust of Caligula's Uncle the new and in many ways just as vicious Emperor which underscores the Shifty awkwardness of the transition of power the face looks for all the world like the emperor Claudius it's a bit middle-aged and frowny just how Claudius is often shown this from Fringe and if you go up above him you can see that whole bootho hairstyle has been roughly chiseled off it's gone on is that a statue of Caligula has been changed into a statue of Claudius and he looks pretty weird except if you imagine that this head would be on a full-length statue and if you get low down well actually he works pretty okay as Claudius from this angle now it's a way of saying Caligula is obliterated and Claudius is now on the throne sneaking suspicion that it also says actually the new emperor is only the old emperor with a recot face [Music] it's hybrid head gives us a clue as to why it has always been hard to come face to face with the real Caligula in the bloody transition of power his real face has got lost [Music] Tim you now have to look for him in other ways in the shadow of his heroic father on the Battlegrounds of Germany in the bricks of the palace on Capri where one by one he lost his family or in the Eerie luxury of his boats found at the bottom of Lake Naomi what this tells us is that some of the myths may be true the paranoia the excess even the self-proclaimed Divinity the rest we'll never know we're the stories of murder and Madness created as much by Caligula himself to further a culture of fear or where they spun just like his nickname butakins to Blacken his name and to justify his violent assassination whatever the truth it's in the story of Caligula that all the elements of tyranny as we now recognize it come together for the first time and perhaps that's why he's left such a powerful imprint on our world for almost two thousand years now caligulas made people reflect on Power and its abuse the man and the myth and to be honest you can't ever quite separate the two have raised all kinds of questions about cruelty excess but adoration about the delusions of an autocrat and about his fearful isolation but for me Caligula also turns the spotlight onto ourselves about what our own responses to tyranny should be maybe there's a lesson after all when that group of disgruntled army officers decided to rid Rome of the monster sure they left him in bits on the palace floor but all they got was more of the same [Music] [Music] thanks for watching this video on the history Hit YouTube channel you can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great films that are coming out or if you are a true history fan check out our special dedicated History Channel History hit dot TV you're gonna love it

Channel: History Hit

Views: 411,268

Keywords: history hit, history hit youtube, mary beard rome, mary beard documentary, mary beard ancient rome, emperor caligula documentary, emperor caligula death, emperor caligula, rome caligula, mary beard julius caesar, mary beard history of rome, mary beard history hit, roman history mary beard, roman history documentary mary beard, history documentary mary beard, emperor caligula mad, caligula mad emperor, ancient rome documentary, history rome documentary, mary beard historian

Id: SY4LyjKva8o

Length: 59min 26sec (3566 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2023