Was Emperor Caligula Really A Psychopath? | Caligula | Real Royalty

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 down a back alleyway in the palace compound when he was jumped by a posse of soldiers the first blow to his neck or some said to his chin didn't kill him but the next 30 or so did one nasty rumor said that the assassins ate his flesh caligula 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 is caligula who has come to stand for the corruption horror and excess of imperial rome psychopath and depraved he is said to have ruled by the sword to have made his horse into a console and have insisted he be worshipped as a living god and ever since he's 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 but how 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 [Music] so the first clear sight 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 parcel 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 caligulus 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 agrippina 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 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 honour the killing fields where caligula's ancestors cemented their reputations and political power today the roman museum in zanton has been built not far from one of the legionary camps where caligula spent time as a boy inside there is a remarkable collection of roman military gear from medals of honor with portraits of caligula's dad germanicus and mum agrippina dished out to soldiers to what was then the most technologically advanced armor and weaponry on the planet there are cavalry helmets and daggers the remains are frighteningly powerful crossbows and rainstorms are piercing arrows all of which remind us the caligulous childhood playground was not some cozy peacekeeping mission but a vicious war zone but perhaps the museum's most intriguing artifact is also its most humble this is a perfectly preserved roman caliga a standard army issue soldier sandal made of tough leather with hobnails on the sole if there's one object that's really associated with caligula it's the kaliga the 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 squaddy the legionary mascot and we tend to think of the name caligula that's rather grand imperial name in fact it was a little boy's nickname it means little boots bootykins or the kid in the caliguy when he grew up caligula hated it it must have seemed as if he was being called emperor diddums 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 bootakins 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 it shows him in the classic pose of an imperial leader arm outstretched addressing his troops and standing beneath him one can't help but sense the status and glamour 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 germanicus suddenly died on a mission to syria poisoned he claimed from his deathbed by the roman governor piezo 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 piezo 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 piso 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 que legionis this is mass communication roman style it's a major attempt to get the official message across everywhere it's hard not to think it all might not have been too little too late the suspicions circling around germanicus's death would mark the start of an increasingly bitter feud between caligulas mother agrepina and the palace convinced the agrippina 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 [Music] 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] tucked away in a museum on the island is one small trace of caligula stay here 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 tiberia 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 [Music] and the poolside fun he had a troop of 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 agrippina was beaten up she lost her sight in one eye she went on hunger strike was force-fed until finally she starved to death not only that both his brothers came to violent ends 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 then the vaults of the british museum is one macabre momento from capri that sums up the young caligula's life in the emperor's court looks like a real skull but actually it's an extraordinary 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 but if you put it back in the context of the imperial court there are more sinister messages for a start there's the violence of the emperor himself anyone sitting around this at the imperial dining table still being aware but 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 what does she do what all good imperial princesses should do she just goes on eating in fact we're told that when caligula was on capri and his relatives were being bumped off one by one he learned never to show any emotion at all underlying all this nastiness was an issue that the roman empire always struggled to work out the problem of succession even though roman power had now become a family business since the founder of the dynasty augustus there was no fixed system for passing the power on a fatal flaw that colours 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 libya didn't have children with each other even though each have 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 jockey for power there's the legions in the provinces there's the imperial bodyguard in rome you've got the torches 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 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 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 a little boy named tiberius gemilis murdered because he's somebody else who could have been an emperor and what's amazing is that for the first hundred years of the empire this there's not a single emperor about whose death there isn't some kind of allegation that he was bumped off you know that the poisoned mushrooms had done him in and there is 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 of the praetorian guard to do it for him because empress had people who do the smothering for them [Music] however 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 he was just 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 a dynasty and to 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 grandfather the mausoleum of augustus [Music] at the capitoli museums 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 ossa these are the bones in fact the ashes of agrippina the daughter of marcus agrippa the granddaughter neptus dewey ought of augustus the first emperor who's now a god a dewist and she's the wife the oxo of germanicus caesar the golden boy of the empire and she's the mother murtress of gaius caesar augustus germanicus princeps 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 and 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 germanicus on the other another shows a carriage parading a statue of his mother in celebrations founded in her honor and even more important this one shows caligula sacrificing a bull at the temple of his great-grandfather the gorge augustus but this one has an even more pointed message on the one side there's a really gorgeous portrait of caligula and his name here guys caesar but on the other you can see what must be him standing on a box his arm outstretched and he's talking to a group of soldiers and it says at the top ad locket short for ad locutio the speech of the emperor to his troops uh and underneath coh short for cohortese the cohorts of the 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 alongside stamping his face on the cash cheap cameos of caligula were cut from glass and clay and 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 [Music] 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 anio novus bringing water from over 40 miles away to the centre of rome [Music] the obelisk that now stands in front of saint peter's 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] the emperor didn't just live on the palatine hill caligula also inherited fast pleasure gardens called haughty on the outskirts of the city [Music] 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 had 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 traipse 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 it simply says so you're the god haters you don't think i'm a god then and he follows that up by asking and anyway 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 tastes horrible and the flunkies all laugh it's 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 but all the same it's humiliating caligula's message is quite clear my fancy window glass is more important than the g's of alexandria it's a revealing 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 discobolos the discus thrower the version of an earlier greek masterpiece 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 the 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 of 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 but i think we have to imagine precious stones literally embedded in the palace walls twinkling in the lights at night looking amazing or perhaps a bit tacky during the day we do know that caligula 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 he started out with it's a cute vision a newly crowned emperor showing off his pearled slippers to his flunkies but it's also another example of how the imperial family used the ostentation of their world to unsettle and disarm 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 calicula 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 but it's also slightly unsettling the blurring of the boundary between the fake and the real is one of the factors about roman court culture that made it so scary you never quite know whether what you're looking at is real or an imitation pretence 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 that 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 that 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 everyday palace life a threat if we think about it from the empress point of view that worked both ways the labyrinthine 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 did 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 in this world where the emperor was always watching his back the people he 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 here's one for example saturninus fire that's short for sphyrista sphyrista means ball player but perhaps saturninus was a personal trainer uh we've got our gaius he's a gubernator the helmsman perhaps on the imperial yacht but perhaps my favorite of all is this chap here venustus speck now spec could be short for speculator so venustus might have been a watchman or spy but it could also be short for specularis in which case he was the guy who made the mirrors it's a wonderful snapshot of the underbelly of court life but it'd 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 a fetus here he's an invitator he's the guy who controls the guest list at the palace dinner parties now roman aristocrats wouldn't have touched this kind of job with a barge pole but 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's 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 contained 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 is paranoid about his own security and not unreasonably has he no doubt learnt from the fate of his own family under tiberius conspiracies were an absolutely inevitable part of imperial life if caligula's always looking behind him if he's always watchful are there people who really are out to get him yes there were people out to get him and i think there were of 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 autocrat 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 uh run by the roman aristocracy run by the senate 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 what most we have most evidence for yes his brother-in-law um emilius lepidus was executed for plotting against him and his wife caligula's sister 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 a week yeah then 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 but the fact is that this is the period of caligula's life his time in power about which we actually know the least were these conspiracies real conspiracies was this the moment that he started to lose his grip we 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 inkitatus that's speedy his own palace that he fed him oats mixed with gold that he made him a console of rome the fact is that no ancient writer ever says that caligula made his horse a council what 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 and 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 just 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 we found that she nicknamed one of them prime minister and it wasn't just stories of unbridled excess much of what else was thought wrong with caligula came down to his sex life it was 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's style we'd be bound to cast caligula in the lead and if these 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 you 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 bed is she yeah and and i think associated with those stories there's there's the account of how um people come into the banquet caligula's you know on his couch people file past the end and he'd act like someone at 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 drew cilla 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 stuff where he's talking about granny finding them in bed i mean it's quite interesting that even suetonius is only saying people used to say that the goss it was was he's quite clear that incest took place when it gets to the detail it's all into 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 drew cilla died 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 he dashes back to rome he tries 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 men to another lot of middle-aged men you know through a proper process in the senate it's some you know it's one family that's holding on to power and the women in that family then have an influence in a way they never had previously done under the roman republic so really what these stories are telling us they're telling us about power i think that's right that he is a youngish man um 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 they tell these these stories about his outrageous behavior perhaps this is a clue to one of the problems of caligula whereas augustus and tiberius had come to power after prominent military careers botakins was thrust on the throne at just 24. without the military pedigree or political experience to earn the elites respect it's 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 worshipped one story was that he turned the temple of caster and pollock's into the porch of his own house and used to go and sit there between the statues of the gods waiting to be worshipped another story was he used to go up to the capitoline 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 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 rain 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 pollocks 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 which if true would have spanned 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 up over in the kappa 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 pier of the of the roman bridge at verona these looked 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 so raised walkway and then up to the capitol line and then eventually up to the capitol line yes it's just a small block of marble a tantalizing clue to the lengths caligula went for his own self-aggrandizement but it also points to the difficulty we now have in separating fact from fiction after just four years in power there's little hard archaeology that we can tie to caligula for certain but there is one site not far from rome where we can this is lake navy one of caligula's favorite places it's where all the myths come together the uncontrolled extravagance the divinity and even the violence [Music] it was known in the ancient world as the speculum diana the mirror of diana and in the 1930s it was the site one of the most stunning finds in roman archaeology 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 would 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 gaius caesar augustus germanicus these are caligula's barges it's a bit hard to know what a water pipe's doing on a boat they can't be ordinary boats perhaps they're bringing the water to caligula's hot tub under the stars suetonius has left us a vivid description of other caligulan boats so luxurious they had jeweled prows sails of purple silk and bathrooms of alabaster and bronze long thought a myth the boats of naomi 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 was that what caligula was up to the boats of naomi 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 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 nemorensis first of all he was a runaway slave and secondly in order to get the job he had to kill the present incumbent if you 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 and of course you also got a death sentence because someone else will be along sooner or later to challenge you ancient writers tell us about seeing the priest in this sanctuary he had a sword in his hand and he was always looking fertilely about him for obvious reasons the ritual of naomi harked 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 naomi as an 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 ten months and eight days in power and if the facts of caligula'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 calaria who he knows of old so he thinks he's safe cassius carrier however is the leader of the assassination conspiracy when 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 guys caligula are people pleased some people thought that what you have to understand uh 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 of augustus he was a great great grandson of julius caesar all these were popular heroes he was their popular hero 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 guard yes a small group of senior officers who are also involving senior senators it's a question what they expected to happen afterwards it seems that kyrea and the others were idealistic enough to believe that in killing gaius they would put an end to what we call the principate there wouldn't be an emperor anymore but in the end i get this very very brief little flowering of what looks as if it might be about to become uh the overthrow of autocracy entirely in the return to the republic a little bit of 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 it was the ultimate betrayal and a chilling reminder that in imperial rome it was not the emperor but the army who held the reigns 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 to justify his assassination the new regime condemned him as a tyrant his uncompleted 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 not 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 but he's got this strangely buff-on fringe and if you go up above him you can see that whole buffalo hairstyle has been roughly chiseled off what's going 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 have been 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 i'm sneaking suspicion that he also says actually the new emperor is only the old emperor with a re-cut face [Music] this 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 and to find him 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 navy and if 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 were the stories of murder and madness created as much by calicular himself to further a culture of fear or were they spun just like his nickname bootikins 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 2 000 years now caligula has 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 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 roam of the monster sure they left him in bits on the palace floor but all they got was more of the same

Channel: Real Royalty

Views: 307,203

Keywords: real royalty, real royalty channel, british royalty, royalty around the world, royal history

Id: Xfjw5H6x6Ks

Length: 58min 34sec (3514 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021