Caligula with Mary Beard (2013) - full transcript

Two thousand years ago one of history's most notorious individuals was born. Professor Mary Beard embarks on an investigative journey to explore the life and times of Gaius Julius Caesar ...

It was mid-afternoon on 22nd January, 41 AD.

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.

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.



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 consul...

and to have insisted
he be worshipped as a living god.

And ever since,
he is 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 4 short years,
Caligula is 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?

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,

Parceled ground 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, Caligula's.

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...

who 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 honor, the killing fields...

where Caligula's ancestors cemented
their reputations and political power.

Today, the Roman Museum
in Xanten 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
Armour and weaponry on the planet.

There cavalry helmets and daggers.

The remains of frighteningly powerful
crossbows and rainstorms of piercing arrows.

All of which remind us
that Caligula's 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 caligae, a standard army issue...

soldier's sandal, made of tough
leather with hobnails on the sole.

If there's one object that's really
associated with Caligula, it's the caligae.

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 caligae.

He was a kind of baby
squaddie, the legionary mascot.

And we tend to think of the name Caligula...

as a rather grand imperial name.
In fact, it was the little boy's nickname.

It means little boots,
booty-kins or the kid in the caligae.

When he grew up Caligula hated it...

must've seemed as if he was being
called Emperor Diddums or something.

And if you'd have
asked him what his name was...

he would've said, quite correctly,
his name was the Emperor Gaius.

The fact that even now,
we still call him Booty-kins...

shows just how successful his
enemies were in pouring scorn over him.

He himself would've 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 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 19 AD, when Caligula
was just seven, Germanicus

suddenly died on a mission to Syria,
poisoned he claimed from his deathbed...

by the Roman Governor Piso, 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's 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 tomb.

Eventually, Piso 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.

Formal report inscribed in bronze.

Dated 10th December 20 AD.

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...

inscribed in the chief city of every province

and that it is to be inscribed
in Hibernis, in the winter quarters...

of each legion, cuiusque 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' death...

would mark the start of
an increasingly bitter feud...

between Caligula's mother
Agrippina and the Palace.

Convinced that Agrippina and her
sons were plotting against him...

Tiberius banished her to a
remote island off the coast of Italy.

And shortly afterward, in 31 AD...

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' 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.

Tucked away in a museum on the island
is one small trace of Caligula's 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 have been all kinds of theories.

Was he here to be under surveillance?
Was he here because Tiberius liked 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 stationed a platoon
of sailors in boats at the bottom...

to finish them off with
their oars if they weren't yet dead.

And for poolside fun, he had a troupe 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 in 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.

In the vaults of the British Museum
is one macabre memento 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 extraordinarily lifelike
work of art made of marble.

This must've 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 more sinister messages.

For a start, there's
the violence of the Emperor himself.

Anyone sitting round this
at the imperial dining table...

must've been aware that their
lives hung on a knife edge,

that they could be flavour of the
month one minute and dead the next.

The best advice was never to let
your feelings show, keep poker faced.

There's a horrible story of an imperial princess
who's dining one evening with her brother.

He keels 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 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.

So you couldn't pass
those on in a normal way.

But the other problem is that Augustus and
Livia didn't have children with each other...

even though each
had children with other people.

An 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,
the imperial bodyguards in Rome...

you got the courtiers, you
have the ex-slaves in the palace

who want to know who's going to own them
next and then you got various imperial women

trying to get their sons into power.
So it's a very, very unstable situation.

Is it that instability
and the uncertainty of it all...

that both produces real violence
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've 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 Gemellus, murdered...

because he's somebody
else who could've been Emperor.

What's amazing
is that, for the first 100 years...

of the Empire, there's not a single
Emperor about whose death isn't...

some kind of allegation that
he was bumped off, that...

the poisoned mushrooms had done him in.

There is that story of
Caligula who, some people said...

had actually smothered
Tiberius, you know, when he was...

asleep in order to take power himself.

And the other story is, he got the captain
of the Praetorian Guard to do it for him.

Because Emperors have people
to do the smothering for them.

However Tiberius really died...

two days after his
death, on March 18th, 37 AD...

the Senate declared
Caligula Rome's third Emperor.

He could now triumphantly return
to Rome as the ruler of the known world.

Was just 24 years old.

At the time, he must've
seemed 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 blood line
back to the founder of the 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,
made a great song and dance...

of bringing he 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.

At the Capitoline 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, starts by saying OSSA.

These are the bones, in fact the ashes of
Agrippina, the daughter of Marcus Agrippa,

the grand-daughter, NEPTIS DIVIAVG...

of Augustus, the first Emperor,
who's now a god, a Dyeus.

And she's the wife,
the UXOR of Germanicus Caesar...

the golden boy of the Empire
and she's the mother, MATRIS...

of Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus...

PRINCIPIS, 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...

on which he showered
down on the people of Rome.

Caligula is supposed to have been
absolutely spectacularly generous.

He's said on some occasions to gone up to
the first floor of a building in the Forum...

and actually thrown
money, thrown coins at the crowd.

They would've
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 god Augustus.

But this one has an
even more pointed message.

On the one side,
it's a really gorgeous portrait...

of Caligula and his name here, Gaius 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...

ADLOCUT, short for adlocutio,
speech of the Emperor, to his troops...

and underneath, C-O-H, short for COHORTES,
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 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.

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.

If you ever wondered why there
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 Anio Novus.

Bringing water from over
40 miles away to the center of Rome.

The Obelisk that now stands in
front of St 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 AD...

but it seems that
Caligula was the first Emperor...

to remodel the imperial residences
to make them more palatial in our terms.

The Emperor didn't
just live on the Palatine Hill.

Caligula also inherited vast pleasure gardens
called Horti, on the outskirts of the city.

One of them, the Horti Lamiani, is still
a garden of sorts in modern Rome...

and it's the location of the only eye witness
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 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, who simply says...

So you're the god haters
who 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...

quite a lot of people don't eat a lot of
things, I mean, some people don't eat lam.

I'm not surprised, said Caligula, it
taste horrible and the flunkies all laugh.

It's a wonderful and horrible vignette of
the day to day exercise of imperial power.

It'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 Jews 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 it in your face, was with
the very trappings of their world.

It's from the pleasure gardens that we
can still find races of Caligulan splendor.

From them have come
some of the most impressive...

and famous statues of Ancient Rome.

Such as the Discobulus, the discus thrower,
a 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 Caligula's.

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 Th
1870s no one could quite work out what it was.

One idea was that they come across a throne
room but there's just so much of this stuff.

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...

said 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.

It's also 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 Livia...

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 2,000 years ago...

it'd be hard to know whether we were
looking a real garden or a painting of one.

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.

Pretense or reality.

On 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
supposed to do? You pretend to eat it?

And on the other hand, what you think
is fake can turn out to be deadly real.

There's another story of
Caligula having what looked like...

a practice gladiatorial bout with
an opponent, with wooden swords...

except 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.

That lurked beneath everyday palace life.

A threat, if you think about it from the
Emperor's point of view that worked both ways.

The labyrinthine corridors of the
palace were teeming with people,

from visiting dignitaries and spies
to the collectors of the Imperial rubbish...

it must've been a security nightmare.

How did the Emperor ever know who was who?
And 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 have to say the
word if you were challenged.

But that wasn't enough
for the most anxious of emperors.

One of them is said to have 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 the
wall of the 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 Svaia.

That short for Svairista,
Svairista means a ballplayer.

But perhaps
Saturninus was a personal trainer.

We got Argaeus, he's a Gubernatio, the
helmsman perhaps on the Imperial yacht.

But perhaps my favorite of all
is this chap here, Venustos Spec.

And Spec could be short for speculatos.
Venustos might've been a watchman or spy.

But it could also be short for specularius.

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.

Aphetos, here, he's an invitato.

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've 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
had one called Protogenes...

who carried around with him under each arm...

with more than a bit of menace
and ham acting at the same time.

Two different files, one labelled
Dagger the other labelled 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 it didn't 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 and not 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 is always watchful...

are there people who
really are out to get him?

Yes, there were people out to get him and I
think they were of two quite different types.

Either they 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 and they want to put the clock back...

to the Republic run by the
Roman aristocracy, run by the Senate.

But it's really the first type,
the family trying to replace him...

from one of their own number,
that looks like the most important.

- We have most evidence for it.
- Ah, yes.

His brother in law, Aemilius 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...

got the knife out are likely to be the people
he's hanging out with most days of the week.

Yes 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 point 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 come
to define Caligula mostly start.

And perhaps the most famous
is that he gave his favorite horse...

Incitatus, that's speedy, his own palace.

That he fed him oats mixed with gold
and that he made him a consul of Rome.

The fact is that no ancient writer ever says
that Caligula made his horse a consul.

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 is a bit of banter, a Caligulan joke.

Well, 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 consul than one of you.

And that then goes down
in history as if he 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 collars
and they eat out of silver bowls...

and they're served by footmen in uniform,

Wonder we say if we found that she'd
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 is 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.

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 Suetonious.

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...

you're a 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.

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 associated with those stories...

there's the account of how people are
coming to the banquet, Caligula is on his...

couch, people file past the end and
he acts like someone at a slave market...

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...

humiliating elite in all sorts of different
ways, this was 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 this Suetonious stuff, where he's
talking about granny finding them in bed.

Oh, it's quite interesting even Suetonius
is only saying, people used to say that.

The gossip was where's quite clear that incest
took place, when it gets to the detail...

- It's all...
- Kept the distance.

Yes and I think even
Seneca, who is pretty much...

Caligula's contemporary, he does talk
about when Caligula's sister Drusilla dies.

Caligula's excessive
grief for Drusilla, that...

he, he can not, 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 he, he goes around in a terrible state...

but he doesn't link
that to perverse sexuality.

I think there's also the dynastic aspect
of it, I mean the stories about incest...

are partly about their
anxieties about the way that power...

is now transmitted in the
Roman world but is instead of it...

is going from one lot of middle-aged men
into another lot of middle-aged men...

maybe through a proper
process in the Senate, it's some...

it's one family that's holding on to power
and the women in the family then have...

in a influence in a way they never had
previously done under the Roman Republic.

So really what the stories telling
us, they're telling us about power?

I think that's right, that he's a youngish
man, he's not a great military leader...

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 stories
about his outrageous behaviour.

Perhaps this is a clue to
one of the problems of Caligula.

Where Augustus and Tiberius had come to
power after prominent military careers...

Bootykins was
thrust on the throne at just 24.

Without the military pedigree or political
experience to earn the elite's respect.

It's hardly surprising that he
might cast around for alternative...

more king Ike models
of leadership an 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 is said to have insisted on being
worshipped as a god in his own lifetime.

And to make matters worse, we are told he
transformed the most symbolic space in Rome.

The People's Forum,
into his own stage to be worshipped.

One story was...

that he turned the Temple of Castor 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 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 Capitoline...

to make these 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 we...

found some unusually well dated remains.

We could date them pretty much to around
40 AD, 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 Castor 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?

Which, if true, would've spanned
a distance of over 250 metres...

and been 30 metres 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 Capitoline 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 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 that it could
link these things all at first floor level.

So a raised walkway
and then up to the Capitoline.

And then eventually
up to the Capitoline, 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...

archeology that we
can tie to Caligula for certain.

But there is one site
not far from Rome where we can.

This is Lake Nemi,
one of Caligula's favorite places.

It's where all the myths come together.

The uncontrolled extravagance,
the divinity and even the violence.

It was known in the ancient world as
the speculum Dianae, 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 become the ultimate
symbols of Caligula's excess...

toward the end of his reign. And unsurprisingly
it was Italy's 20th century tyrant...

Mussolini, who spent a
fortune rising 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 only got models,
but much of the hardware still survives.

No doubt whose boats these are, it says
Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.

These Caligula's barges.

It's a bit hard to know what a water pipe is
doing on a boat, it can't be ordinary boats.

Perhaps 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
Nemi hint they might in fact to be true.

For alongside the naval hardware of the ships
are glimpses of astonishing imperial luxury.

There rows of columns
made from Grecian marble...

sinister sculptures of
Medusa heads and huge golden hands,

beautifully sculpted mooring rings of wolves
and lions, balustrades cast in solid bronze.

There have been all kinds of theories
about what these boats were actually for.

Some people have thought
they must've been religious.

Was it here 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 loved
nothing more than to build out onto water.

Was that what Caligula was up to?

The boats of Nemi 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 Nemi.

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.

But of course you also got a
death sentence because someone else...

would 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
furtively about him, for obvious reasons.

The ritual of Nemi 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 or whether
it was just capricious sadism, we don't know.

But it's hard not
to think of the King of Nemi...

as uncanny double of the Emperor of Rome.

Both were looking behind their backs
and maybe Caligula spotted that too.

However knowing Caligula might've
been, in the end it didn't save him.

On 22nd January,
41 AD, he was assassinated...

after just three years,
10 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 up on...

by members of his
own personal security force.

He sees, coming towards him, a colonel of the
Praetorian Guard called Cassius Chaerea...

- whom he knows of old. So, he feels safe.
- He thinks he's safe.

Cassius Chaerea, however, is the
leader of the assassination conspiracy.

And Chaerea 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's the man who has the credit for the
assassination of the Emperor Gaius, Caligula.

- Are people pleased, a tyrant is dead?
- Some people, some people thought that.

What you have to understand...

about Gaius 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 the great-great-grandson of Julius
Caesar, all of 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
take out move by the Praetorian Guard.

Yes, a small group of senior officers
who were also involving senior senators.

It's a question what they
expected to happen afterward.

It seems that Chaerea 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 any more.
- 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
and the return to the republic...

little bit of debate and
then half an hour later they found...

- Caligula's uncle to put back on the throne.
- Claudius,

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...

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.

To justify his assassination, the new
regime condemned him as a tyrant.

His uncompleted building projects were then
taken over and inscribed with Claudius' 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.

At the wonderful Montemartini Museum in Rome,
there's a strange bust of Caligula's uncle.

The new and in many
ways just as vicious emperor...

which underscores the shifty
awkwardness of transition of power.

The face looks by all the world
like the Emperor Claudius.

It is a bit middle aged and frowny,
just how Claudius is often shown.

But he's got this strangely bouffant fringe.

And if you go up above him...

you can see the whole bouffant
hairstyle is been roughly chiseled off.

What has gone on
is that a statue of Caligula...

is been changed into a statue of Claudius.

And it looks pretty weird,
except if you imagine that this head...

would've been on a full length
statue and if you get low down...

well, actually, he works pretty
OK as Claudius from this angle.

Now, it's a way of saying Caligula is
obliterated and Claudius is now on the throne.

I've a sneaking suspicion
that it also says, actually...

the new emperor is only the
old emperor with a re cut face.

This hybrid head gives us a clue
as to why it's always been hard...

to come face to face with the real Caligula.

In the bloody transition of
power, his real face just 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 Nemi.

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 Caligula himself...

to further a culture of fear? Or were they
spun just like his nickname, Bootykins...

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
recognise 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 is
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, about adoration...

and 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 a monster...

sure, they left him in bits on the palace
floor but all they got was more of the same.