May 26, 2010 • 19 mins
According to most popular accounts, Caligula was an insane, cruel and bizarre emperor. But how reliable are those stories? Join Katie and Sarah as they take a look at Caligula's life -- and try to separate the facts from the rumors -- in this podcast.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and our subject
for today is known as being a paranoid tyrant in
(00:21):
a megalomaniac. He's rumored to have committed incest with his
sisters and to have elevated his horse to the consulship.
And he gets his nickname, which means little boots, because
his father used to dress him up in these cute
little army sandals and take him on campaign with him.
And this is actually relevant to some of the events
(00:41):
of today, as Sarah is taping her sandals back together
as they broke. Yes, I broke them on my way
into recording and was hobbling around, So I guess I'm
like Caligula in one respect. Caligula was the third Emperor
of Rome. His real name as Gaius Caesar, but none
of us call him that. But he was so unpopular
(01:03):
that it's hard to know what's really true and what
isn't about him because, guess what, the Roman historians really
didn't like him, so their accounts are almost completely unreliable.
Encyclopedia Britannica says accounts of his reign by ancient historians
are so biased against him that the truth is almost
impossible to disentangle, which is where we got our title.
(01:27):
That always makes it a little bit nervous, but it
also usually means it's going to be a fun podcast.
So let's see how it goes. To give a little
family history. Gaius Caesar was born in a d. Twelve,
the great grandson of Augustus, and he's actually related to
the emperor on both sides, and he was partly raised
in the household of Augustus's wife, Empress Olivia, And that's
(01:50):
where we're going to start this family history, because she's
known for her intrigues, and those very intrigues make his
rule possible in an indirect sort of way. So Olivia
is probably best known for plotting on behalf of her son,
who wasn't Augustus's son. It was her son by her
first marriage, Tiberius. And the thing is, even though Augustus
(02:11):
didn't have a legitimate son, he wasn't interested in making
his stepson Tiberius his air Now he wanted pretty much
anybody else. Yeah, but but Olivia wasn't going to have that,
and hey, the chosen heir is just kind of kept
on dying, and Olivia perhaps, yeah, thanks Olivia maybe, and um,
eventually Augustus is like, all right, well, I guess I'll
(02:33):
settle on Tiberius. And it's rumored that Olivia may even
have done in Augustus himself when it seemed that he
was wavering on his commitment to Tiberius as air. She
was a motivated woman, a devoted mother apparently. So Tiberius
does become emperor, and he's not terrible. He's a pretty
competent damning with faint prayer well, and he's a he's
(02:57):
a competent statesman as well. But he's uncomfortable in this
position that his mother's mock nations have forced him into,
and so as he gets older, he removes himself more
and more from public life and eventually spends the last
ten years of his life in this semi retirement in Capri,
which you've got to admit, that's a weird thing for
(03:18):
an emperor to do. Well, and that's not the only
weird thing he did. This is where all the Bizarro
rumors start, because Tiberius on capri this uh no holds barred.
He starts uh planning these things, planned, planning orgies with
men and women. There are girls and boys dressed up
(03:40):
as nude nymphs, and uh pan to wander around the woods.
We've got Egyptian pornography, and the part that I can't
say really terrible. He maybe hires little kids to act
as minnows and um swim around and nit bat him
under the water. So if you ever get asked to
(04:02):
play sharks and minnows, make sure it's not Tiberius's version.
But while Tiberius is off in this freaky retirement, he's
letting the guy he left in charge, the praetorian Prefect,
Lucius Elias Saanas, get a little too powerful. We have
a little note on names too. I think we're gonna
go with the um reconstructed classical names instead of the
(04:27):
modern pronunciations. But we might go back and forth to
warn you. But Sianas started thinking at some point that
he would do away with the airs and perhaps become
emperor himself. But Tiberius has got other problems, and he's
dealing with them in another kind of way. He's worried
that his nephew and heir. The general Grammaticus might be
(04:51):
having ideas kind of similar to say Trees, and this
idea yeah treason. This idea is thinking that he doesn't
want to wait around for the old emperor who's often
retirement to actually die. So mysteriously, Germanicus dies on campaign
in Syria in a d. Nineteen, likely on Tiberius's orders.
(05:12):
Then in twenty three Germanicus' son Drusus dies, and then
in thirty one his son Julius caesar Nero dies, and
in thirty three his widow Agrippina dies, So we've got
this whole family almost the whole family wiped out, so
there's just one son left, who is of course Gayus
(05:32):
or little Caligula. But back to our Sanus plotline, Tiberius
may have done away with one of his own heirs,
Germanicus himself, but Sayanas takes care of his other heir,
whose tiberius own son, Drusus, who died under strange circumstances.
So eventually Saianas only has three people in his way.
(05:53):
We have the Emperor Tiberius, Germanicus's surviving son Caligula, and
Drusus's son Tiberius. Gamalus, so the heirs of the original heirs,
and then the emperor himself. So Sayana's plots to kill
the whole family. He's going to wipe them all out.
But he's found out before he can execute his plan,
(06:14):
so he and the rest of the Praetorian prefect are
arrested and strangled and actually torn to pieces by a mob.
So no light punishment here for for plotters. So we've
got Caligula now as an heir to the emperor, and
with his position that as secure as it can be
in Imperial Rome. The young Caligula goes off to live
(06:36):
with his uncle at the kind of freaky Capri villa
in a d thirty one, And this is the point
where his cruelty may have made its first appearance. And
it's also when he may have started incestuous relationships with
his sisters. Again to those not entirely trustworthy accounts. Yeah,
but by March thirty seven Tiberius dies. Of course, we've
(07:00):
got to throw in the possibility that Caligula himself did
Tiberius in and maybe mothered him with a pilly. Yeah,
which is a cruel way to go, I guess. But um,
there's one little problem still for for our main guy here.
He's not the sole heir, and he's supposed to share
the throne with his cousin Tiberius Gimalists, but that's obviously
(07:23):
not going to work out, of course, not so the
praetorian Prefect Nevius Cortes Sutorius Macro and the Senate decide
that Caligula will be the sole ruler, and it's not
long before his cousin, Tiberius Gimalists winds up dead. So
people are pretty happy with their young emperor Caligula, though,
(07:44):
you know, they've had Tiberius, who's been this sort of
sour old man who lives in Capri all the time
and never really bothers much with things the average people
are gonna like, like circuses and games. So they had
this twenty year old new emperor, and he's a blood
real lative of Augustus, who obviously is popular guy, and
(08:04):
he seems like he's going to be a pretty fair
level headed ruler. I mean, the first thing he does
is reimburse Romans who had been financially crushed under Tiberius's
oppressive taxes. When he gets rid of the sales tax,
he offers amnesty for people who are imprisoned or exiled
under Tiberius, and he starts staging games and entertainment for
(08:26):
the people, which sounds like a lot of fun, doesn't it.
But it sounds like a medici dec Yeah. Well, things
take a turn, though, and at about seven months into
his reign, Caligulu it's very very sick and the people
are really upset about this, and he recovers, and some
historians think that his illness drove him mad. Others say
(08:47):
that the evidence for that is really murky, and some
of it is just playing made up. You know, maybe
it's another sort of smear campaign by later historians. But
whatever happens, whether the illness drives him to insanity or
if his sort of cruel meglomaniac side just appears. Several
months into his rerain, things start to go downhill for Caligula. Yeah,
(09:10):
it gets very very weird. And all of this stuff
happens or not in a very short span of time,
and it's almost easier to contemplate it thematically rather than chronologically,
So that's what we're going to do. He isn't loyal
to his supporters. He drives Macro, who was the prefect
we talked about to commit suicide, and this was the
(09:32):
man who had helped him secure his throne, a man
who'd taken risks for him. So that's a that's a
bad start already. If you're not um keeping the people
who are most loyal to you alive and close to you,
and you know you you'll need allies throughout your reign.
So that's our first bullet point, and our second one
is that he thinks he's divine, which, as we've learned
(09:55):
in previous podcasts, is a risky stance to take. He
replaces Olympian heads with his own. He almost provokes a
Jewish revolt by ordering in the year forty that he
be worshiped in the temple. Herod Agrippa persuades him to
recall the order. She's a pretty good call, and um,
we have some archaeological evidence to back this up to.
(10:18):
In two thousand three, excavations in the Roman Forum confirmed
that he had incorporated the ancient temple of Castor and
Pollox into his own palace, which is totally sacrilegious and uh,
it's probably refitted after his reign. Well, and now onto
perhaps the most persistent of the rumors about him, which
(10:40):
was this strange relationship with his sisters, especially Drusilla, and
it's possible that he was contemplating some sort of Ptolemy
style brothers sister alliance. Cleopatra yes, and three of his
sisters get huge public honors. They were included in the
soldiers Oath of Allegiance, and some very since nationalized rumors
(11:01):
have him impregnating Drusilla and then ripping out her womb
and his impatience to see the baby. But Drusilla does
die in thirty eight, probably not because of that um,
but when she dies, he consecrates her as a goddess,
so she's the first Roman woman to be declared of
(11:21):
a god by the emperor like this. It's a very
unusual thing to do and very strange honor. And he
banished his remaining two sisters in thirty nine after he
learned that one of their lovers and the widower of
Drusilla were involved in a plot against him. The Calicula
obviously has these strange personal inclinations which get him into
(11:43):
trouble down the road, but his politics also aren't anything.
They don't endear him to the public in any way.
He's a megalomaniac, as we've mentioned several times already, and
he basically rules part time because he's so busy staging
all these elaborate proofs of his own in importance. And
one example of this, a very famous example, is when
(12:04):
he builds a bridge of ships across the Bay of
Naples and thirty nine and then rides across them wearing
Alexander's breastplate, all to to disprove the prophecy that he
had as much of a chance of becoming emperors riding
a horse across the bay. So it's just this weird thing,
you know, maybe one of the made up stories about Caligula,
(12:28):
but just a good peek into his character. Yeah, very
very insecure. And he also wasted time concocting extraordinary methods
of torture, like covering someone in honey and releasing the
bees or feeding them to animals, or shutting them up
in tiny cages. And the other problem is that no
(12:51):
one was safe from his wrath, and he couldn't be
trusted and also couldn't trust anyone else. He got more
and more paranoid the farther into his rain that he got,
and the macro relationship proves this. Somebody who clearly should
have been a trusted ally of his done in He
supposedly made it an offense for anyone to look at him.
(13:13):
Another thing he was very insecure about. He was balding,
but very her suit on the rest of his body.
But you can't be a part time emperor, you know,
spending all your money on parties and torturing and not
go broke. Eventually a lesson. Yeah, it's a lesson for
any future emperors out there. So soon enough, Caligula has
nearly bankrupted the public treasury, so he starts doing some
(13:36):
pretty unpopular things like reinstating trees and trials for his
own financial benefit, confiscating the property of the elite citizens,
and bumping up the taxes. And according to the BBC,
he may have also figured that he needed some sort
of military glory to of validate his reign, but he
(13:56):
couldn't be bothered with it, either because of a lack
of funds, you know, he just had already spent spent
most of his money on other stuff, or because he
wasn't interested. In the year forty, he plundered gall and
headed north. But he must not have done too impressive
of a job because his triumph consisted solely of fake
(14:17):
Germans slaves dressed up like gals. And he was planning
on heading across the channel to invade Britain, but stopped
for some reason, and instead he had his men go
after Neptune. Yeah, he figured he had defeated Neptune somehow,
and his men were going to collect seashells, which they
considered spoils of the conquered sea God, So declaring war
(14:40):
on God's that's another major step for Caligula. I think,
despite his personal strangeness, his biggest mistakes were angering the
Senate and the Praetorian Guard. He didn't pay the guard,
and even if you don't have money, you still find
some way to pay your guard. It's a major major
Mista become Caligula's part, and he goes out of his
(15:03):
way to humiliate the Senate. And the best rumor about
him ever, in my opinion, is that he promotes his
horse in Catadas to the consulship. And we of course
talked about this in our battle Horse episode. Um in
Catadis was not, uh not going to make the list
just on his battle horse Stabbus alone, so we made
him a bonus horse, just because what other horses are senators?
(15:25):
So some of these senators and guard members start plotting,
and in January forty one, Caligula was killed at the
Palatine Games by a tribune of the Praetorian Guard and others.
He's stabbed in the genitals, if that gives you an
idea of what people thought of him, and his wife
and baby daughter were killed too, along with most of
his family. The Guard spares his uncle Claudius, who becomes
(15:48):
the next emperor, and only the common people really more
in Caligula because he has spent so much on games
and entertainments for them and uh, couldn't really bankrupt them.
But going back to that whole disentanglement idea, With few
reliable sources, it's been very difficult for historians to decide
what to make of him, this insane sounding, spoiled, paranoid man.
(16:12):
And one thing to consider is that he may have
had a really twisted sense of humor. Yeah. Historian Michael
Grant wrote that Caligula had an irrepressible, bizarre sense of
the ridiculous, deliberately designed to shock, but frequently taken by
his alarm subjects too seriously notoriously absurd traditions, such as
(16:33):
the story that he intended to give a consulship to
his favorite horse in Gatatas, no doubt originated from his
continual stream of jokes. Probably he remarked that Incatatas would
do the job as well as most of the recent incumbents.
And meanwhile he ordered silence in the entire neighborhood to
prevent the horse from being disturbed. So yeah, this shows
how maybe somebody who said these really weird off the
(16:56):
cuff things could build up this reputation as a complete
lunatic pretty quickly. And another account of his strange sense
of humor had him auctioning off public properties to make
money and taking a sleeping senators nods as bids for
thirteen expensive gladiators. But we also have probably the more
(17:17):
famous argument um, and we can go with Roman historian
Sweetonia's for this, who said that Caligula could not control
his natural cruelty and viciousness, but he was a most
eager witness of the tortures and executions of those who
suffered punishment, reveling at night, and gluttony and adultery disguised
in a wig and a long robe. So yeah, that's
(17:39):
definitely the Caligula who we're most familiar with, just the cruel,
vicious tyrant of an emperor. But either way, Caligula likely
foreshadowed certain cracks and a still relatively new imperial system,
and they pop up again and again as the system
keeps producing these young, unskilled rulers who are addled from
(18:00):
birth and show no aptitude for leadership. Caligula craved absolute power,
but he had none of the talent, responsibility, or respect
that he needed to back it up. And we're going
to close with a likely apocryphal quote of Caligula's, but
a very disturbing one, and one that sort of epitomizes
that the danger of the imperial system. He's supposed to
(18:24):
have said to his wife, off comes this beautiful head.
Whenever I give the word, if only Rome had one neck,
and uh yeah, putting all the power in in one
man's hand, essentially, even though it's not officially like that,
the emperor clearly has the power in this this time.
If you would like to pass judgment on Caligula, email
(18:45):
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(19:07):
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and our subject
for today is known as being a paranoid tyrant in
(00:21):
a megalomaniac. He's rumored to have committed incest with his
sisters and to have elevated his horse to the consulship.
And he gets his nickname, which means little boots, because
his father used to dress him up in these cute
little army sandals and take him on campaign with him.
And this is actually relevant to some of the events
(00:41):
of today, as Sarah is taping her sandals back together
as they broke. Yes, I broke them on my way
into recording and was hobbling around, So I guess I'm
like Caligula in one respect. Caligula was the third Emperor
of Rome. His real name as Gaius Caesar, but none
of us call him that. But he was so unpopular
(01:03):
that it's hard to know what's really true and what
isn't about him because, guess what, the Roman historians really
didn't like him, so their accounts are almost completely unreliable.
Encyclopedia Britannica says accounts of his reign by ancient historians
are so biased against him that the truth is almost
impossible to disentangle, which is where we got our title.
(01:27):
That always makes it a little bit nervous, but it
also usually means it's going to be a fun podcast.
So let's see how it goes. To give a little
family history. Gaius Caesar was born in a d. Twelve,
the great grandson of Augustus, and he's actually related to
the emperor on both sides, and he was partly raised
in the household of Augustus's wife, Empress Olivia, And that's
(01:50):
where we're going to start this family history, because she's
known for her intrigues, and those very intrigues make his
rule possible in an indirect sort of way. So Olivia
is probably best known for plotting on behalf of her son,
who wasn't Augustus's son. It was her son by her
first marriage, Tiberius. And the thing is, even though Augustus
(02:11):
didn't have a legitimate son, he wasn't interested in making
his stepson Tiberius his air Now he wanted pretty much
anybody else. Yeah, but but Olivia wasn't going to have that,
and hey, the chosen heir is just kind of kept
on dying, and Olivia perhaps, yeah, thanks Olivia maybe, and um,
eventually Augustus is like, all right, well, I guess I'll
(02:33):
settle on Tiberius. And it's rumored that Olivia may even
have done in Augustus himself when it seemed that he
was wavering on his commitment to Tiberius as air. She
was a motivated woman, a devoted mother apparently. So Tiberius
does become emperor, and he's not terrible. He's a pretty
competent damning with faint prayer well, and he's a he's
(02:57):
a competent statesman as well. But he's uncomfortable in this
position that his mother's mock nations have forced him into,
and so as he gets older, he removes himself more
and more from public life and eventually spends the last
ten years of his life in this semi retirement in Capri,
which you've got to admit, that's a weird thing for
(03:18):
an emperor to do. Well, and that's not the only
weird thing he did. This is where all the Bizarro
rumors start, because Tiberius on capri this uh no holds barred.
He starts uh planning these things, planned, planning orgies with
men and women. There are girls and boys dressed up
(03:40):
as nude nymphs, and uh pan to wander around the woods.
We've got Egyptian pornography, and the part that I can't
say really terrible. He maybe hires little kids to act
as minnows and um swim around and nit bat him
under the water. So if you ever get asked to
(04:02):
play sharks and minnows, make sure it's not Tiberius's version.
But while Tiberius is off in this freaky retirement, he's
letting the guy he left in charge, the praetorian Prefect,
Lucius Elias Saanas, get a little too powerful. We have
a little note on names too. I think we're gonna
go with the um reconstructed classical names instead of the
(04:27):
modern pronunciations. But we might go back and forth to
warn you. But Sianas started thinking at some point that
he would do away with the airs and perhaps become
emperor himself. But Tiberius has got other problems, and he's
dealing with them in another kind of way. He's worried
that his nephew and heir. The general Grammaticus might be
(04:51):
having ideas kind of similar to say Trees, and this
idea yeah treason. This idea is thinking that he doesn't
want to wait around for the old emperor who's often
retirement to actually die. So mysteriously, Germanicus dies on campaign
in Syria in a d. Nineteen, likely on Tiberius's orders.
(05:12):
Then in twenty three Germanicus' son Drusus dies, and then
in thirty one his son Julius caesar Nero dies, and
in thirty three his widow Agrippina dies, So we've got
this whole family almost the whole family wiped out, so
there's just one son left, who is of course Gayus
(05:32):
or little Caligula. But back to our Sanus plotline, Tiberius
may have done away with one of his own heirs,
Germanicus himself, but Sayanas takes care of his other heir,
whose tiberius own son, Drusus, who died under strange circumstances.
So eventually Saianas only has three people in his way.
(05:53):
We have the Emperor Tiberius, Germanicus's surviving son Caligula, and
Drusus's son Tiberius. Gamalus, so the heirs of the original heirs,
and then the emperor himself. So Sayana's plots to kill
the whole family. He's going to wipe them all out.
But he's found out before he can execute his plan,
(06:14):
so he and the rest of the Praetorian prefect are
arrested and strangled and actually torn to pieces by a mob.
So no light punishment here for for plotters. So we've
got Caligula now as an heir to the emperor, and
with his position that as secure as it can be
in Imperial Rome. The young Caligula goes off to live
(06:36):
with his uncle at the kind of freaky Capri villa
in a d thirty one, And this is the point
where his cruelty may have made its first appearance. And
it's also when he may have started incestuous relationships with
his sisters. Again to those not entirely trustworthy accounts. Yeah,
but by March thirty seven Tiberius dies. Of course, we've
(07:00):
got to throw in the possibility that Caligula himself did
Tiberius in and maybe mothered him with a pilly. Yeah,
which is a cruel way to go, I guess. But um,
there's one little problem still for for our main guy here.
He's not the sole heir, and he's supposed to share
the throne with his cousin Tiberius Gimalists, but that's obviously
(07:23):
not going to work out, of course, not so the
praetorian Prefect Nevius Cortes Sutorius Macro and the Senate decide
that Caligula will be the sole ruler, and it's not
long before his cousin, Tiberius Gimalists winds up dead. So
people are pretty happy with their young emperor Caligula, though,
(07:44):
you know, they've had Tiberius, who's been this sort of
sour old man who lives in Capri all the time
and never really bothers much with things the average people
are gonna like, like circuses and games. So they had
this twenty year old new emperor, and he's a blood
real lative of Augustus, who obviously is popular guy, and
(08:04):
he seems like he's going to be a pretty fair
level headed ruler. I mean, the first thing he does
is reimburse Romans who had been financially crushed under Tiberius's
oppressive taxes. When he gets rid of the sales tax,
he offers amnesty for people who are imprisoned or exiled
under Tiberius, and he starts staging games and entertainment for
(08:26):
the people, which sounds like a lot of fun, doesn't it.
But it sounds like a medici dec Yeah. Well, things
take a turn, though, and at about seven months into
his reign, Caligulu it's very very sick and the people
are really upset about this, and he recovers, and some
historians think that his illness drove him mad. Others say
(08:47):
that the evidence for that is really murky, and some
of it is just playing made up. You know, maybe
it's another sort of smear campaign by later historians. But
whatever happens, whether the illness drives him to insanity or
if his sort of cruel meglomaniac side just appears. Several
months into his rerain, things start to go downhill for Caligula. Yeah,
(09:10):
it gets very very weird. And all of this stuff
happens or not in a very short span of time,
and it's almost easier to contemplate it thematically rather than chronologically,
So that's what we're going to do. He isn't loyal
to his supporters. He drives Macro, who was the prefect
we talked about to commit suicide, and this was the
(09:32):
man who had helped him secure his throne, a man
who'd taken risks for him. So that's a that's a
bad start already. If you're not um keeping the people
who are most loyal to you alive and close to you,
and you know you you'll need allies throughout your reign.
So that's our first bullet point, and our second one
is that he thinks he's divine, which, as we've learned
(09:55):
in previous podcasts, is a risky stance to take. He
replaces Olympian heads with his own. He almost provokes a
Jewish revolt by ordering in the year forty that he
be worshiped in the temple. Herod Agrippa persuades him to
recall the order. She's a pretty good call, and um,
we have some archaeological evidence to back this up to.
(10:18):
In two thousand three, excavations in the Roman Forum confirmed
that he had incorporated the ancient temple of Castor and
Pollox into his own palace, which is totally sacrilegious and uh,
it's probably refitted after his reign. Well, and now onto
perhaps the most persistent of the rumors about him, which
(10:40):
was this strange relationship with his sisters, especially Drusilla, and
it's possible that he was contemplating some sort of Ptolemy
style brothers sister alliance. Cleopatra yes, and three of his
sisters get huge public honors. They were included in the
soldiers Oath of Allegiance, and some very since nationalized rumors
(11:01):
have him impregnating Drusilla and then ripping out her womb
and his impatience to see the baby. But Drusilla does
die in thirty eight, probably not because of that um,
but when she dies, he consecrates her as a goddess,
so she's the first Roman woman to be declared of
(11:21):
a god by the emperor like this. It's a very
unusual thing to do and very strange honor. And he
banished his remaining two sisters in thirty nine after he
learned that one of their lovers and the widower of
Drusilla were involved in a plot against him. The Calicula
obviously has these strange personal inclinations which get him into
(11:43):
trouble down the road, but his politics also aren't anything.
They don't endear him to the public in any way.
He's a megalomaniac, as we've mentioned several times already, and
he basically rules part time because he's so busy staging
all these elaborate proofs of his own in importance. And
one example of this, a very famous example, is when
(12:04):
he builds a bridge of ships across the Bay of
Naples and thirty nine and then rides across them wearing
Alexander's breastplate, all to to disprove the prophecy that he
had as much of a chance of becoming emperors riding
a horse across the bay. So it's just this weird thing,
you know, maybe one of the made up stories about Caligula,
(12:28):
but just a good peek into his character. Yeah, very
very insecure. And he also wasted time concocting extraordinary methods
of torture, like covering someone in honey and releasing the
bees or feeding them to animals, or shutting them up
in tiny cages. And the other problem is that no
(12:51):
one was safe from his wrath, and he couldn't be
trusted and also couldn't trust anyone else. He got more
and more paranoid the farther into his rain that he got,
and the macro relationship proves this. Somebody who clearly should
have been a trusted ally of his done in He
supposedly made it an offense for anyone to look at him.
(13:13):
Another thing he was very insecure about. He was balding,
but very her suit on the rest of his body.
But you can't be a part time emperor, you know,
spending all your money on parties and torturing and not
go broke. Eventually a lesson. Yeah, it's a lesson for
any future emperors out there. So soon enough, Caligula has
nearly bankrupted the public treasury, so he starts doing some
(13:36):
pretty unpopular things like reinstating trees and trials for his
own financial benefit, confiscating the property of the elite citizens,
and bumping up the taxes. And according to the BBC,
he may have also figured that he needed some sort
of military glory to of validate his reign, but he
(13:56):
couldn't be bothered with it, either because of a lack
of funds, you know, he just had already spent spent
most of his money on other stuff, or because he
wasn't interested. In the year forty, he plundered gall and
headed north. But he must not have done too impressive
of a job because his triumph consisted solely of fake
(14:17):
Germans slaves dressed up like gals. And he was planning
on heading across the channel to invade Britain, but stopped
for some reason, and instead he had his men go
after Neptune. Yeah, he figured he had defeated Neptune somehow,
and his men were going to collect seashells, which they
considered spoils of the conquered sea God, So declaring war
(14:40):
on God's that's another major step for Caligula. I think,
despite his personal strangeness, his biggest mistakes were angering the
Senate and the Praetorian Guard. He didn't pay the guard,
and even if you don't have money, you still find
some way to pay your guard. It's a major major
Mista become Caligula's part, and he goes out of his
(15:03):
way to humiliate the Senate. And the best rumor about
him ever, in my opinion, is that he promotes his
horse in Catadas to the consulship. And we of course
talked about this in our battle Horse episode. Um in
Catadis was not, uh not going to make the list
just on his battle horse Stabbus alone, so we made
him a bonus horse, just because what other horses are senators?
(15:25):
So some of these senators and guard members start plotting,
and in January forty one, Caligula was killed at the
Palatine Games by a tribune of the Praetorian Guard and others.
He's stabbed in the genitals, if that gives you an
idea of what people thought of him, and his wife
and baby daughter were killed too, along with most of
his family. The Guard spares his uncle Claudius, who becomes
(15:48):
the next emperor, and only the common people really more
in Caligula because he has spent so much on games
and entertainments for them and uh, couldn't really bankrupt them.
But going back to that whole disentanglement idea, With few
reliable sources, it's been very difficult for historians to decide
what to make of him, this insane sounding, spoiled, paranoid man.
(16:12):
And one thing to consider is that he may have
had a really twisted sense of humor. Yeah. Historian Michael
Grant wrote that Caligula had an irrepressible, bizarre sense of
the ridiculous, deliberately designed to shock, but frequently taken by
his alarm subjects too seriously notoriously absurd traditions, such as
(16:33):
the story that he intended to give a consulship to
his favorite horse in Gatatas, no doubt originated from his
continual stream of jokes. Probably he remarked that Incatatas would
do the job as well as most of the recent incumbents.
And meanwhile he ordered silence in the entire neighborhood to
prevent the horse from being disturbed. So yeah, this shows
how maybe somebody who said these really weird off the
(16:56):
cuff things could build up this reputation as a complete
lunatic pretty quickly. And another account of his strange sense
of humor had him auctioning off public properties to make
money and taking a sleeping senators nods as bids for
thirteen expensive gladiators. But we also have probably the more
(17:17):
famous argument um, and we can go with Roman historian
Sweetonia's for this, who said that Caligula could not control
his natural cruelty and viciousness, but he was a most
eager witness of the tortures and executions of those who
suffered punishment, reveling at night, and gluttony and adultery disguised
in a wig and a long robe. So yeah, that's
(17:39):
definitely the Caligula who we're most familiar with, just the cruel,
vicious tyrant of an emperor. But either way, Caligula likely
foreshadowed certain cracks and a still relatively new imperial system,
and they pop up again and again as the system
keeps producing these young, unskilled rulers who are addled from
(18:00):
birth and show no aptitude for leadership. Caligula craved absolute power,
but he had none of the talent, responsibility, or respect
that he needed to back it up. And we're going
to close with a likely apocryphal quote of Caligula's, but
a very disturbing one, and one that sort of epitomizes
that the danger of the imperial system. He's supposed to
(18:24):
have said to his wife, off comes this beautiful head.
Whenever I give the word, if only Rome had one neck,
and uh yeah, putting all the power in in one
man's hand, essentially, even though it's not officially like that,
the emperor clearly has the power in this this time.
If you would like to pass judgment on Caligula, email
(18:45):
us at History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com
and let us know what you think. You can also
follow us on Twitter at mist in History or join
our Facebook fan page. And if you'd like to find
out a little more about Roman history, you can come
search our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
(19:07):
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out the stuff you missed in History Class blog on
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