History's Worst F*ckboys: Emperor Caligula

Have you ever heard of the Emperor who made his horse a senator? Seems like a top bloke, right? Today on Betwixt the Sheets we’re going to meet (possibly) the most debauched Roman Emperor. From stealing brides from their wedding days to an unhealthy obsession with his sister, who was Caligula and was he a f*ckboy? Kate is joined by historian Alexander Meddings to find out. Alexander is a Rome-based historian and travel writer. He leads tours of the Appian Way - one of the most important roads of Ancient Rome. This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. If you'd like to get in touch with the show you can contact us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera. Demonic possessions. Cursed mirrors. Bigfoot. Poltergeists. Exorcisms. Near-death experiences. Unsolved mysteries. Missing persons. Each week, we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.

• 1:14Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister, and you are listening to Betwixt the Sheets, where we rip the knickers off history. But before we can listen any further, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast poking my adults, other adults about dirty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. I don't know why I have to keep telling you that, but isn't that what we're all here for in the first place? Right, on with the show.

• 1:45Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters, and welcome to Casa Caligula. It is 39 AD and the year is already hotting up. The Imperial Gardens up here on the Esqualine Hill offer a welcome break from the intense sun, as well as the crowds and the smells of the city. Here there are fountains of clear, cool water, hand-painted birds and floral designs on marble, thermal baths decorated with precious coloured stones and sculptures. So many sculptures. There are certainly slaves here, but you won't hear them. Those voices, they are the guests of the emperor. I wonder who he has over today? There are stories, of course.

• 2:28Kate Lister?

  Maybe you've heard the tales of debauchery going on within these tranquil walls. You wouldn't know it being here today, but with such lavish tastes, it isn't hard to believe that the Emperor Caligula is a bit, shall we say, gluttonous with his desires. I wonder if that spreads to his sex life?

• 2:54Speaker 02

  What do you call him, mad? Oh, money, of course.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning him up and pushing the button.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time! Goodness has nothing to do with it, d'ry.

• 3:22Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheet, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Last week, we rifled through the little black book of Lord Byron to find out if he really was a historical fuckboy. This week, we're entering the halls of real power. We're heading back a few millennia and we're gonna meet one of Rome's most debauched emperors, allegedly, Caligula. Ruling the empire from 37 to 41 AD, Caligula is often mentioned as the emperor who made his horse a senator. His rule ended only when he was assassinated, but why was he so hated? Did he really get divorced after just one day of marriage? And did he really sleep with his sisters? Hmm?

• 4:04Kate Lister?

  Well, I am joined, from Rome no less, by Alexander Meddings, and he is gonna help us find out. Sandals on, let's do it.

• 4:17Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheet. It's only Alexander Meddings. How are you doing?

• 4:24Speaker 04

  I am great, thank you. Thanks for having me on.

• 4:26Kate Lister?

  Well, thank you for coming on because this is part of our new mini-series on historical, to use the term the kids use, fuckboys. And as a specialist in Roman history, you must have come across a fair few of them.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. I mean, it's about finding out which of the Caesars weren't fuckboys. That's kind of the trick, I mean.

• 4:48Kate Lister?

  Have you been able to find that out? Have you got one that was just really well behaved? That was just looking around going, I don't know what's going on here?

• 4:54Speaker 04

  No. I mean, even the ones that die within a few months still manage to fit a fair amount in. So, no.

• 5:02Kate Lister?

  We are here to talk about one of the most notorious, I think, Caligula. What a strange reputation he's got. Not a good one. And I'm really interested in the question, and we'll tease this one out. Was he what we could call a fuckboy? We have to define terms here, I suppose. Or was he just weird with what he liked to do? And what's the difference between the two? But before we even get to that, I suppose we have to cover who was Caligula. Can you give us his origin story?

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Right. So, Caligula was Rome's third emperor, and he was part of a dynasty known as the Julio Claudians, which starts with Augustus in the last few decades of the first century B.C. And it ends with the all-singing, all-dancing Emperor Nero in the 60s A.D. Caligula's real name was actually Gaius Julius Caesar. He's the third son of Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder, who are Rome's celebrity couple. They're like the Brad and Angelina.

• 6:05Kate Lister?

  They were really popular, weren't they?

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, think kind of Will and Kate, but with the persecution narrative and public sympathy of Harry and Meghan.

• 6:15Kate Lister?

  Okay, yeah, framed very well. Okay, yeah, like it.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  So the first few years of his life are spent away on campaign with his father Germanicus, who, as his name suggests, is basically beating up the Germans with a dirty great Roman sword. While away in Germany, Caligula is adopted as a mascot by the legions. And the legions dress him up in a little kind of legionary outfit, complete with little boots called caligas or caligolas, as the diminutive is. And that's how he gets his nickname.

• 6:45Kate Lister?

  Caligula.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  That's it. Throughout his entire life, he's basically called Bootykins or Little Cadet Kid or something like that. That's got to really stick in the craw.

• 6:54Kate Lister?

  Did he like that?

• 6:55Speaker 04

  No, he hated it. No, no, no. Any contemporary accounts we have of him refer to him as Gaius. He wanted to be Gaius, but he's called Bootykins.

• 7:05Kate Lister?

  Oh, that, you wouldn't like that, would you? Like a little nickname from when you were a tiny kid given to you. Oh, all right. He's, he's starting to fall into focus now. Yeah, I'm starting to guess. Yeah. All right. So he would hate that. But he's an army brat, basically. He's growing up.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  Army brat. He's a cadet kid on the front lines. But that one anecdote we have is that's it as far as any happy childhood memories are concerned, because Germanicus goes and dies in 1980. He's poisoned by his enemies. Many say Tiberius, the emperor at the time, had a hand in things. And when Germanicus dies, Rome breaks out in the most extreme form of public mourning. Really, if we believe any of the sources, it's just completely insane. So people start ransacking temples in their grief. They throw out the household gods. We're told that many of Rome's enemies agree truces temporarily because they feel they've suffered a loss as well, which again is just completely insane.

• 8:03Kate Lister?

  Wow, that is very extreme.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  And new fathers, fathers of newborn kids, leave their babies exposed outside because they can't deal with the grief of raising them in a world without Germanicus. So, yeah.

• 8:17Kate Lister?

  I'm getting a sense here of that there's some issues with the sources. As a historian, when you're reading this, is there like a line in the sand where you're like, well, I'm prepared to believe that people were very sad, but like abandoning babies to die and enemies going, look, all right, we feel quite sad about this too. That seems extreme.

• 8:37Speaker 04

  It's so extreme. Yeah. It always gives me a giggle though. I mean, you also have like Parthian kings who say, we will abstain from banqueting out of respect for him because that's like the best thing a Parthian king could do to show respect, right?

• 8:50Kate Lister?

  I suppose what we could perhaps take away from that is even if those stories are not true, and they sound a little bit suspect to me, but they are testament to the esteem that this man was held in.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was the prince that was promised. And his wife Agrippina uses his funeral to stir up the Romans against Tiberius, to accuse Tiberius of having had a hand in his assassination by poison.

• 9:15Kate Lister?

  At the funeral?

• 9:17Speaker 04

  At the funeral.

• 9:18Kate Lister?

  That is some high level scheming on the part of Agrippina.

• 9:22Speaker 04

  It is. And it's also just really not a good idea against an emperor like Tiberius.

• 9:27Kate Lister?

  Right, okay.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  And so what happens next is that all of Caligula's family, so his mother and his two elder brothers are arrested, exiled, sent away to far away islands and starved to death.

• 9:41Kate Lister?

  What is it with the islands in ancient Rome of people being constantly sent to these islands where they starve to death?

• 9:49Speaker 04

  I know. And these are really popular tourist islands now, like Ponza and the day.

• 9:55Kate Lister?

  That's awful.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  But you go there with this knowledge, you're like, you really didn't want to go to Ponza 2000 years ago.

• 10:02Kate Lister?

  No. All right. So Tiberius is, I've not heard good things about him. I've heard many, many bad things, including that he was a pederast, basically. I've heard the the stories about. His little fishes that he used to call the children.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  Indeed, who are trained to swim between him while he's in Bath on Capri and nibble at his genitalia. Yes. Um, yeah, it depends which sources you want to believe in. It depends how far you want to believe them. So there is this really thick invective tradition against Tiberius, which has him as a sadomasochist,

• 10:43Speaker 04

  as a pervert. It says that the walls of his palace on Capri were adorned with the kind of pornography you see in Pompeii, in the brothel, for example. It also says that he had a group called his tight bums. He had a group of boys he liked to call his tight bums for reasons that we probably don't need to go into. And he would get them to perform threesomes in front of him to stimulate his flagging libido in old age.

• 11:06Kate Lister?

  I hadn't heard that one. Wow. Okay. It's like an evening round at Tiberius's is that's not gonna be a good night for most people.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  If you believe the traditions, but then there's another tradition that says that he's a bit of a kind of pub quizzer. He likes getting astrologers and scholars over and having fierce intellectual debates. And he likes writing histories and books on grammar.

• 11:31Kate Lister?

  Okay. As a historian, what do you think? I know, I know that like we'll never ever know forever, but just what's your thoughts on it?

• 11:39Speaker 04

  I think like freshers week, you can do both. You can study by day and you can go wild at night.

• 11:45Kate Lister?

  Yes, that is true, isn't it?

• 11:48Speaker 04

  I think most of the stories are probably ratcheted up to blacken his reputation because it was in the interest of his, of his successors to do that.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  We will never really know unless we uncover some more sources.

• 12:02Kate Lister?

  But this is Caligula's grandpa, is that right?

• 12:06Speaker 04

  It's his great uncle and Caligula is, when he has no family left apart from his grandmother, Caligula is summoned to Capri and he's raised as an adolescent by Tiberius. So Caligula has to watch all of this stuff going on and he has to dissimulate. He has to pretend that he's totally cool with it all, because if he looks upset or angry or threatening, then he will be bumped off as well.

• 12:32Kate Lister?

  That would mesh you up, wouldn't it? That if like your whole family is being murdered around you and you have to go and live with the person who's probably doing it and pretend you're completely fine with all of this.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Right. And this goes a long way, I think, to explaining why Caligula had issues, to put it mildly, as an adult.

• 12:53Kate Lister?

  To say the least.

• 12:55Speaker 04

  He was also a bit of a fuckboy on Capri, though, Caligula.

• 12:58Kate Lister?

  Oh, was he? Tell me, tell all.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  He does a bit of dissimulation, so he does a bit of pretending everything's fine and staying in line. But then we're also told by Suetonius that he loved going out late at night, disguised in a wig and a long cloak, to engage in gluttony and adultery and to seek out dancing and singing performances.

• 13:18Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 13:19Speaker 04

  And Tiberius lets him get away with this, in the hope it might calm his vicious character. And I'm thinking, if even 1% of the stories about Tiberius are true, then going out dancing and singing in a wig is kind of tame.

• 13:33Kate Lister?

  That's very tame, isn't it? The idea that he's doing this to try and calm Caligula down, that's interesting as well, because it doesn't sound like, from the stories, that he would be somebody that would let anybody be uncalm in their presence without sending them off to an island somewhere.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Allegedly, he was told in a prophecy that he was rearing a viper, who was going to be the viper for the Roman people. And so he's always a little bit wary about letting Caligula indulge too much in his vice.

• 14:01Kate Lister?

  But broadly speaking, Tiberius, boo. Germanicus, yay. How did people feel about the young Caligula, this alleged viper? Was he? Popular, I mean, I know he wasn't in power at this point. What was his PR team doing? Did he have good public relations?

• 14:21Speaker 04

  He did, and he comes to power quite quickly. So Tiberius dies on Capri. Many say that Caligula had a hand in that, not least because he managed to seduce the wife of the Praetorian Guard by promising her empire, which is proper fuckboy behaviour.

• 14:35Kate Lister?

  That is his name. Oh, that is. I'll call you in the morning, I promise. Honestly, it'd be amazing. We'll work it all out. Lies.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  Right. Nowadays, it's like a dinner out and maybe a weekend break or something. Then it's, I give you the empire.

• 14:50Kate Lister?

  That would work. That's a line, isn't it? There's not many people that wouldn't be seduced by that. Alright, okay. So he's, that's interesting. He's, he's already got that reputation. Possibly bumped him off. They all seem to meet pretty violent ends, all the emperors.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  They really do. They really do. Yeah. Very few of them die a natural death. Augustus died a natural death, but he's really the only one that comes to mind. Yeah. In ripe old age too, in his 70s. Yeah.

• 15:16Kate Lister?

  So Tiberius and his little fishies, gone. Then what happens?

• 15:21Speaker 04

  So Caligula is proclaimed the emperor, and the only other person potentially standing in his way is Tiberius's grandson called Tiberius Gomulus. But Gomulus is a bit too young. Caligula returns to Rome and he is hailed as a hero. He's given a hero's welcome. He's very much seen at this point as the son of Germanicus, as Rome's golden boy. So Etonius tells us that 160,000 animals are slaughtered to celebrate his extension to the throne.

• 15:48Kate Lister?

  Odd choice there, Rome. That's...

• 15:52Speaker 04

  It's a terrible time to be an ox, great time to be a Roman citizen.

• 15:56Kate Lister?

  All the poor oxes going, yay. It looks like they want us to do what? What? What? What's happening? Oh, bless them. But they're not happy unless they're sacrificing something. I have learnt that about the Romans.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  And it starts really well, his reign. He lowers taxes, he publishes public accounts, he reintroduces literature that Tiberius had banned. He puts on lots of games and spectacles, and he himself, as a populist, is a spectacle. So he rides through the streets of Rome in a chariot. He showers the people with gold, quite literally, from the top of the Basilica Julia in the Forum.

• 16:30Kate Lister?

  That's clever, isn't it? That, if you're gonna win people over. How old was he when, when he was doing this?

• 16:36Speaker 04

  Uh, he is 25, I believe, when he comes to power. He's 25 and he's dead by 29, spoiler alert.

• 16:44Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  He doesn't last particularly long.

• 16:46Kate Lister?

  What happened to the little, the little boy that, that could have been emperor, dare I ask? Was it an island?

• 16:52Speaker 04

  It wasn't an island, actually, no, it was quicker than an island.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  So Caligula falls sick late in the year 37, the same year he becomes emperor. And everybody thinks he's gonna die. And so they start lining up a successor and that successor is the little boy Tiberius Gomelus.

• 17:09Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  But Caligula recovers. And when he recovers, you could say that a monster emerges in place of a man. And so he has seen what people are willing to do. He has seen that the Senate have no loyalty to him. And they were complicit in the murder of his family and his dynasty. And so he goes on a massive revenge spree. So Tiberius Gomelus is made to commit suicide.

• 17:32Kate Lister?

  Oh no, he was only little, wasn't he?

• 17:35Speaker 04

  I don't think he was a teenager.

• 17:37Kate Lister?

  I'm saying like, oh, but honestly, as Caligula gets going, that, that really is the least of it, isn't it?

• 17:48Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Alexander and Caligula after this short break.

• 18:05Kate Lister?

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• 20:52Kate Lister?

  This illness that he had, there's been a lot of debate around that as to what happened, because as you were saying, he started really strong, like the people can't get enough of him, he's a rock star, he's doing everything right. And I suppose if Tiberius was away on Capri, having a young emperor back in Rome, being visible must have been a real big thing. But then this illness, and he's out of action for a long time, isn't he?

• 21:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a few months.

• 21:19Kate Lister?

  What was it? Do you think, I know, I know, we weren't there, but like, what do you think?

• 21:25Speaker 04

  Do you recover from syphilis?

• 21:29Kate Lister?

  I have heard people say it might have been some kind of breakdown, because as you were saying, a very different person emerges.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  Hmm. He definitely suffers a breakdown upon the death of his favourite sister, Dru Silla. And so even though earlier on, I mentioned the fact that all of his family are dead, that's actually just the brothers, the male line, and his parents. He still has three surviving sisters. And the big thing about Caligula's debauched sex life is his incest with his sisters, right? That's how writers get at him, because Caligula parades his sisters really quite publicly, because they are the only legitimate succession if something happens to him. Coins are really interesting in this. I won't talk too much about coins, because it can be a little dull. But the coins issued by Caligula contain our first

• 22:18Speaker 04

  ever portrait of a living female figure in the form of his mother.

• 22:23Kate Lister?

  They do have this attitude of like, men are amazing, men are, are there all women too? Yeah, I guess there are. But men are amazing. And they just, they can really easily just ignore women. It's a very odd attitude, even though they're, they're all over the place. But Caligula's celebration of his sisters and him pushing them forward into I'm not sure if he gave them titles, but it's quite a prominent public space that he's pushed them in. That must have rattled a few cages.

• 22:50Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And he does give them titles. He calls them Sorores Augustae, so the Sisters of Augustus. So that's a quasi-religious title. He also gives his sisters and his grandmother the privileges of vestal virgins.

• 23:03Kate Lister?

  Oh, hello.

• 23:04Speaker 04

  Which is no small feat.

• 23:05Kate Lister?

  No. Are they virgins?

• 23:07Speaker 04

  Uh, no. I mean, Drusilla's married to a bloke who later on will launch a conspiracy against Caligula.

• 23:14Kate Lister?

  So definitely not.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Definitely not virgins. And if we believe the sources against Caligula, then he himself deflowered Drusilla when they were both kids.

• 23:24Kate Lister?

  All right. So let's talk about this one then. Is this another Roman historian giving it all? Oh, they were so upset. All the babies died and Tiberius had a bound of tight bums, whatever it was. Is this just more Roman propaganda? What is our evidence that he did have an unusually close, suspiciously close relationship with his sisters?

• 23:45Speaker 04

  He clearly felt very attached to Drusilla. I think he was setting her up as empress, not to marry her, but she would have been the successor had something happened to him. And he clearly has a very close bond with her because when she dies, he does genuinely lose his mind. He forbids laughter in public. He forbids people banqueting with their family.

• 24:08Kate Lister?

  Oh, like that we're going there. Wow. Okay.

• 24:10Speaker 04

  We're going there. Yeah. He goes completely batshit crazy for quite a long time and he never really recovers from that. But the incest accusation regarding his other sisters is, I think, entirely fabricated. I think we can be very confident of that.

• 24:26Kate Lister?

  Okay. Why'd you say that?

• 24:27Speaker 04

  If it were remotely true, one of his contemporary sources, of which a couple survived, would have mentioned it. I have no doubt. Seneca, for example, would have mentioned it.

• 24:36Kate Lister?

  Yeah. He didn't pull his punches, did he, Seneca? He would have mentioned that.

• 24:39Speaker 04

  I think so. Somebody would, but it only appears later.

• 24:42Kate Lister?

  Okay. All right. So this is further down the line that people are writing this. But Drusilla, what is it? Is Drusilla younger, older? Like?

• 24:50Speaker 04

  So she was younger by about four years.

• 24:52Kate Lister?

  Okay. Do we know why they were, again, we don't have the sources really, but why they would be so close? Were they on Capri together? Did they spend time together as children? We just don't know.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  They spent time together as children. They weren't on Capri together.

• 25:06Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  It's really when Caligula gets back that he starts elevating them to these positions of power. But the sources are just outrageous. So the accusation is that Caligula habitually indulged in incest with all of his sisters and his wife at crowded banquets and he made them take turns in lying beneath him while their wife lay above.

• 25:26Kate Lister?

  Okay, okay. Who's saying that? Who says that?

• 25:29Speaker 04

  Suetonius, our main source. He's a biographer from the first century A.D. more or less, and second century. He's writing under the emperor Hadrian. In fact, he's expelled from Hadrian's court for possibly getting too close to Hadrian's wife. So he's also a bit of a shagger.

• 25:46Kate Lister?

  Excellent.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't think there's any truth in that whatsoever, but the fivesome image at a crowded banquet really does stay with you.

• 25:52Kate Lister?

  It really does, doesn't it? Imagine, imagine being like the butler or the person that has to clear up after that of just like, oh, God. Other rumours I've heard about him, and they may have come from that film, Caligula, from the seventies with, was it?

• 26:06Speaker 04

  Oh, the porno, masturbating as a.

• 26:09Kate Lister?

  That's exactly that one. Was that Roddy McDowell? I can't remember is that the young Caligula?

• 26:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren.

• 26:17Kate Lister?

  And Helen Mirren, yes, she was in it. The story that he deflowered the virgin brides of his friends on the day of their wedding. Is that recorded anywhere?

• 26:30Speaker 04

  He stole wives at weddings. He wasn't so much into, well, maybe they were also virgins at the time. I mean, that would have been the practice. So yeah, we could go with that, but the focus is less on him deflowering them and more on him stealing the property of senators.

• 26:45Kate Lister?

  Ah, there you go. There's that Roman logic again.

• 26:48Speaker 04

  There you go. Horrible Romans. Being generally horrible.

• 26:53Kate Lister?

  Really are quite brutal in the way they look at this. Alright, so he's stealing property. And that's insulting and humiliating on purpose, right?

• 27:01Speaker 04

  He loves humiliating the Senate and the people probably love him for that.

• 27:05Kate Lister?

  Go on, give me some other Caligula burns then, when he's really on a roll here.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  So apparently he condemns the Roman people to hunger by arbitrarily closing the granaries. Again, that's insuited.

• 27:16Kate Lister?

  That's dumb. That's, why would you do that? That's just, what?

• 27:20Speaker 04

  Doesn't make much sense. He has a drama composer burnt to death in the middle of the arena because one of his lines contains a doubtful joke and Caligula's kind of into literature.

• 27:29Kate Lister?

  Right, okay. I mean, that's pedantic to an extreme degree.

• 27:33Speaker 04

  It's so pedantic. People would watch it, though.

• 27:36Kate Lister?

  Yes, they would. They would. And I know academics as well who've spotted errors in works before and they would not be beyond doing something like that, the rage that it provokes. What about the story made his horse a member of the Senate?

• 27:50Speaker 04

  Ah, okay, so that's, for my money, that's an example of Caligula's quite wicked sense of humour.

• 27:57Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  He's essentially saying to the Senate, "You are all so useless. I might as well make my horse a senator or a consul." Or he's basically just saying, "I can do whatever I want. I actually have no need of you guys and I'm going to give all of my horse the trappings of a consul, including the stables, the purple blankets." So he gets purple blankets, which are the colour of royalty. He gets his own stables, gives him all of the trappings of a consul, what one of the elite would expect. And I think this has just been misinterpreted as an example of Caligula's madness.

• 28:30Kate Lister?

  I see. So it's not that he genuinely thought his horse could be a consul. This was him sticking two fingers up again at the Senate.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, it's an example of his madness, right? But it's too easy to describe him as mad. It's far too easy. And I think a lot of what he does can be construed as basically him just holding a mirror up to the senators, showing them how servile Useless they are and demonstrating that he has absolute power to do whatever he wants, whether it's make his horse a consul or shag their wives in front of them, which he also does.

• 29:04Kate Lister?

  Oh, does he do that too? Oh dear. See, one of the other things I've learnt about the Romans though is if they want to insult somebody or if they want to discredit them, their go to burn is that they are sexually debauched.

• 29:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:16Kate Lister?

  You see that cropping up in the straight, like in political debates, there are people standing up and going, yeah, but you give head to slave girls when they're on their period. And like in the like in a political debate, you're just going, what? Could this just be more of that of like, he was, he's so wicked and evil that of course he was doing these things sexually that were horrendous.

• 29:38Speaker 04

  It's hard to know. I think there is enough weight of tradition there that it's entirely possible that the Senate suffered a lot of humiliation and sexual humiliation at his hands. I don't think it's just a case of just making up stuff out of nowhere. I don't think it would have washed.

• 29:55Kate Lister?

  And you said that he has a vicious sense of humour and we do have some evidence for that because we have the account of, was it a group of Jewish people went to go and see him to try and book an appointment with him? Tell us that story.

• 30:10Speaker 04

  So this is the only source we have written by someone who met Caligula. And it's by a Jew from Alexandria called Philo of Alexandria, presumably had another name, but we now know him as Philo of Alexandria. And essentially the Jews of the city are being persecuted. And so Philo and an embassy set out to go and meet Caligula and to go and petition him to protect their rights. And they're trying to tie him down when they arrive and he's busy just wandering around the Imperial Palace, kind of taking care of all matters interior decor and not actually receiving embassies like a good emperor should.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  And then he essentially goes, he makes eye contact briefly with Philo and he goes, "Ah, your people are the ones who don't eat pork and who won't sacrifice to me, right? Ah, I'm a god, you should." And that's the, that's the meeting. Then he sends them away.

• 31:01Kate Lister?

  I mean, it's, it's funny now. You kind of look at it and you're like, that's so weird that he did that. But it does encapsulate something quite cruel and dismissive about him, that these people have gone to see him to be like, please, please, could you stop us being murdered? And he's more interested in his interior design projects. And when he does see them, he just takes the piss out of their religion.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  I think he sees them as a threat. There's another story in which Caligula tried to install his statue of his godhead inside the temple of Jerusalem.

• 31:33Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  But was just about talked down from doing it.

• 31:36Kate Lister?

  Oh, okay.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  I think with the Jews in particular, he's trying to send a message because he sees them as a threat. He sees monotheism as a big threat to the Roman Empire, where you worship all gods and the emperor especially, because the emperor's a god, right?

• 31:57Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Alexander and Caligula after this short break.

• 32:15Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right. It took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera. Demonic possessions. Cursed mirrors. Bigfoot. Poltergeists. Exorcisms. Near-death experiences. Unsolved mysteries. Missing persons. Each week, we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.

• 33:33Kate Lister?

  We should talk about his wives, because as well as allegedly seducing women left, right, and center, members of the Senate, and just generally humiliating people, he did get married.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  He did. He had four wives. The first is a woman called Junia Claudilla, who dies on Capri in childbirth. We know nothing else about her.

• 33:52Kate Lister?

  Was he sad about that? Did he lose his shit about that?

• 33:54Speaker 04

  We have no idea. Probably not, because that's roughly the same time as he's trying to hit on the wife of the Praetorian prefect to get close to Tiberius.

• 34:02Kate Lister?

  Okay, so he's moved on.

• 34:04Speaker 04

  He moves on very quickly. Yeah, probably overnight.

• 34:07Kate Lister?

  Fuck, boy.

• 34:08Speaker 04

  I know. The second, Livia Orestilla, is originally married to another guy, and Caligula is invited as a guest to their wedding, and at the wedding feast, he steals her away. He forces the guy, Calperius Piso, to divorce her, and he steals her away. But then he realizes that she will never really come to love him, because she loves Piso, and so he divorces her the next day. So that's a wild three days.

• 34:37Kate Lister?

  Wow. So two for two.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Two for two. And then he goes through a period in which all of their names have to rhyme. So we have Lolena Paulina.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  Same thing. He steals her from the wedding. They last about six months together and then he divorces her because she is infertile, apparently. And his punishment for this is that she can never, ever associate with another man.

• 35:01Kate Lister?

  Fuckboy behaviour indeed. Right. Do you know why I was expecting decent husband behaviour from this person? Yeah, he was just, he just went home of an evening and they did, they just cuddled up and watched the Roman equivalent of Netflix. Or like, I don't know why I presumed it wasn't going to be awful. Of course, it's going to be awful. So who's the fourth then? He's leaving this trail of-

• 35:23Speaker 04

  The fourth is the one that sticks. So in a sense, he does kind of Netflix and chill a bit with the fourth one. Her name is Melonia Caesonia. Sounds a bit like Melania, not to invite comparisons. Maybe more between him and anywho. They get married in about 39 to 40 AD. She's significantly older than him. She already has three children, which is strange and remarked upon.

• 35:48Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  And Juvenal, a satirist writing a few decades later, suggests that the reason Caligula was mad is because she was poisoning him. Nah.

• 35:59Kate Lister?

  No.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  The dates don't fit.

• 36:01Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  But it's typical blame the woman, right? It's typical of that whole stick.

• 36:05Kate Lister?

  Is she the one that Helen Mirren played in the film Caligula?

• 36:09Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 36:10Kate Lister?

  And she was, she was like a massive, massive goer. That was the story in the film. Is that any bearing in reality?

• 36:16Speaker 04

  Pretty much. The one sentence we have on her from Suetonius says that she was devoted to luxury and sexual excess.

• 36:23Kate Lister?

  There we go then. Right. So they, maybe they're well matched.

• 36:27Speaker 04

  I think so.

• 36:27Kate Lister?

  Maybe it was just, it was just a match made in, in, well, hell, quite frankly. But they have a baby, don't they?

• 36:33Speaker 04

  They do. They have a young daughter. They have a young daughter together. And when she gives him a daughter, he views her as a goddess. He views this woman as the one he will stay with forever. I think he loves her. I think Caligula loves Caesonia. But he also does really weird stuff with her, like he parades her in front of the soldiers dressed in a kind of military uniform. He parades her naked in front of his friends.

• 36:54Kate Lister?

  It's giving Kanye, Kanye with Bianca, parading her in front of people in a weird show. I don't know why I've gone there. I shouldn't make that comparison.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  No, no, no, it's a good one. I like that one.

• 37:05Kate Lister?

  But he must be pretty like into her and obsessed with her, like to be doing that, like showing her off like that.

• 37:11Speaker 04

  He is, but he's got it wrong because he should really be parading her, especially naked in front of his friends. If she is a young and beautiful, childbearing woman, but she's not. So again, this is an example of him just getting it wrong, of him not knowing what the socially acceptable norms are.

• 37:28Kate Lister?

  It's just a really interesting example of what happens when you take somebody that already has a lot of issues and you just give them unfettered power and they're surrounded by people. He must have been surrounded by people that were just too terrified to say no to whatever harebrained scheme he'd come up with.

• 37:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, he definitely was. He had lots of, all the senate are completely sycophantic. He manages to convince senators to run alongside his chariot for miles.

• 37:54Kate Lister?

  Oh, Jesus, that's so, it's so humiliating that, like, come on, guys.

• 37:59Speaker 04

  And they fight to become part of his priesthood. So they will, they will try and outbid each other and do whatever they can to become a priest to a living emperor, who is celebrated as a god by this stage. So he has the sycophantic senators and then I think he probably, kind of like the bully at school. I think he's got a group of mates around him who just laugh at all his jokes and they tell him that everything he touches turns to gold.

• 38:21Kate Lister?

  Giving J D Vance, yeah.

• 38:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:24Kate Lister?

  I know that the other, other people he was surrounded by, it's just all sounding horribly familiar. Like when you're talking about this stuff of like people coming up with mad ideas in power and just being surrounded by people that go, yeah, that sounds great. Let's definitely do that. That's just wow.

• 38:41Speaker 04

  Nothing can go wrong.

• 38:43Kate Lister?

  But I do know that the people you had to have surrounded and surrounding you to retain any kind of power in, in Rome, if you were the emperor, was the Praetorian Guard. Because without that, you're just one person shouting mad crap on your own, aren't you?

• 38:58Kate Lister?

  Who were the Praetorian Guard and why did they stand by him for as long as they did?

• 39:03Speaker 04

  Because he's showering them with money.

• 39:05Kate Lister?

  There you go.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  It's not in their interest to go and find somebody else. There isn't really anybody else. I mean, Caligula is descended by blood to Augustus, to the first emperor, to his mother, through the matrilineal line. And so Caligula is the most legitimate emperor there is. This is also still the very, very early days of the imperial system of the principate, as it's called. And so it's not really clear how it's going to work, whether it's going to be a kind of blood succession or inherited from, you know, your father or, but they're making it work at the moment by basically just getting into power and paying off the Praetorian Guard. And they're the only guard in Rome with swords. And so what they say, what you say with their protection goes.

• 39:51Kate Lister?

  Are they like bodyguards? Is that who they are?

• 39:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, they are. They are. Caligula also has a separate guard called the German Guard, who are a bunch of really burly German blokes who, as we'll see later when Caligula's assassinated, end up fighting with the Praetorian Guard. Because it's the Praetorians who off him.

• 40:08Kate Lister?

  Oh, oh, well, that didn't, that didn't go as planned then, did it? The Praetorian Guards, they're the ones that would kind of be with him all the time. And if he said something like sees him, they would be the ones to like jump in and they're basically the muscle, aren't they?

• 40:21Speaker 04

  They're the muscle. So when he's picking people up off the streets and having them executed, it's very unlikely he's doing any of that himself. He's just sitting there, cup of tea or the equivalent, some horrible garam fish sauce covered stuff, and he's just watching for his own entertainment.

• 40:35Kate Lister?

  So how does that go wrong then? If he's paying them off, there must have been an attitude of like, look, we know he's not great, but he's the only one we've got. So we're going with him. What went wrong? And how did they bump him off?

• 40:45Speaker 04

  So it's not the first conspiracy against him. There is another one about a year, a year or two earlier, led by Drusilla's ex-husband. But Caligula puts it down really, really quickly and brutally. And he has his other two sisters exiled, where they will remain until Caligula's dead. So no one really dares rise up against him after that, until the head of the Praetorian Guard, who is a guy called Cassius Caereya, can't take it anymore. So Cassius is a big... Muscular, gym bro, kind of, you know, big, stocky build Praetorian. But he has a little bit of a hype, it's voice. That Caligula constantly takes the piss out of.

• 41:27Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  So Caligula's mocking him all the time for his effeminacy. And whenever Caereia asks Caligula for the daily watchword, the secret code to give to all the other Praetorians, instead of saying something serious like "Securitas", or Jupiter, Caligula says things like Priapus, which is the god of fertility with a big raging hard on in all of his definitions. Or Venus, which is like, I don't know, the modern equivalent would be like cupcake or giggles.

• 41:57Kate Lister?

  Right, okay, okay. So like military passwords that are just silly.

• 42:03Speaker 04

  Yep, which again would probably be really funny if you're on his side.

• 42:10Speaker 04

  Today's password sire, giggles.

• 42:12Kate Lister?

  Oh, big buttons, big willies. Oh dear. Right, yeah, I can see how that would grate on you if you were a very serious Praetorian guardsman. Is that why they did it then? Just because they couldn't stand the nicknames anymore?

• 42:25Speaker 04

  That's the story we've got. I mean, he had his supporters. People were like, oh, that would be fantastic. If you could actually take him out, that would be great. Also do his family in the meantime, that'd be wonderful. And then we can restore the Republic. So the senators are very much on board, but they're also cowards and they don't want to get involved themselves.

• 42:41Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  So what happens is we're in the year 41. In January, I believe, so a nice cold January day in 41 AD, Caligula's just coming back from the theatre, which is a temporary theatre he's erected near the Palatine Hill. And he's had a great day at the theatre. He's been watching all of the senators scramble for seats at the beginning because he's removed their privileges. So they're just like fighting commoners, trying to get the best seats and the commoners are fighting back. Just chaos.

• 43:08Kate Lister?

  He really is a shit.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  He's such an asshole.

• 43:11Kate Lister?

  He really is.

• 43:13Speaker 04

  But he's quite funny. I mean, it's like watching the House of Lords kind of like scramble around. You know what I mean?

• 43:19Kate Lister?

  It really depends what viewpoint you've got here, doesn't it? Because I can see how that is. Yeah, that's a, that's a really vicious sense of humour, but that is quite funny. Alright.

• 43:27Speaker 04

  It's really grim.

• 43:28Kate Lister?

  Unless it was happening to you, in which case.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  Unless it's happening to you, but it's a spectacle and it's the senators who write the history. So the ones who are fighting for seats and having to like, you know, watch a performance with some guy's massive head in front of them. They can't see anything. They're the ones writing the history. The ones who found it really funny were illiterate for the most part. So Caligula's heading back to indulge in a massive lunch and he's briefly pulled away while he's going down this corridor. And he's told to go and watch a performance that some young aristocrats from Asia Minor are putting on. And if you could just go by and encourage them. And he says yes, which is really good of him because it's presumably some terrible amateur dramatics by a bunch of Greek trushterfarian kids. It's going to be terrible.

• 44:11Kate Lister?

  Yeah, okay. That's odd that he would say yes to that.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  But he agrees to go and watch. And as he's making his way there, he bumps into Kyreia. And Kyreia asks him for the day's password. Caligula probably just says something like dickhead or something else. And Kyreia just pulls his sword out and he slashes Caligula. He cuts his jaw off or smacks, cuts his jaw almost in two and throws him to the ground. It's kind of weirdly comical even at the end. So Caligula's there writhing around going, I'm not dead, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

• 44:45Speaker 04

  And then Kyreia's kind of stabbing him and then the others join in and some other guards are stabbing him and senators are stabbing him. Then they cut his genitals off.

• 44:53Kate Lister?

  That's overkill, isn't it? You didn't need to do that.

• 44:55Speaker 04

  It's massive overkill. And then they eat his flesh, apparently, according to one account.

• 45:00Kate Lister?

  Too far, too far. You didn't, you could wound that back in a few notches and everything would have been a lot better. That to me sounds like another Roman, like, are you exaggerating that story? That sounds a bit like that. What's the point of that story? Why cut his genitals off? Why eat his flesh?

• 45:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, the flesh eating's wild, isn't it?

• 45:18Kate Lister?

  Yeah. I mean, is that, is that just like, he's definitely dead, we ate him?

• 45:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, the genitals bit, the flesh eating, I really don't know. I'm not sure I want to know, but I mean, it shows the strength of ill will towards him, I suppose. The genital mutilation, I think, is partly about how he sexually humiliated a lot of people, a lot of senators, senators' wives, and so they're going to do it back to him. And it's also partly about ending the bloodline once and for all, so people can

• 45:48Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 45:48Speaker 04

  hold his cock and balls up and be like, that's it for the Julians.

• 45:52Kate Lister?

  That's it.

• 45:52Speaker 04

  They're gone.

• 45:53Kate Lister?

  It's a hell of an end for a fuckboy as well, isn't it, is to have your, your willy cut off and paraded around. What happened to his wife and his baby?

• 46:01Speaker 04

  Even worse. So his wife is hunted down in the palace and stabbed to death, and his baby daughter, it can't be more than one or two years old, is picked up and bashed against a wall.

• 46:13Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  And Syrertonius tries to justify this in his account of the death by saying that she had inherited her father's savagery because she would try and scratch the faces and bite the faces of those who held her. So Syrertonius has never met a baby.

• 46:27Kate Lister?

  Calm down, Syrertonius. What they've done there is they've literally wiped out not only him, but any future chance of any succession from him whatsoever.

• 46:37Speaker 04

  Exactly. No more issue. That's the end of the line. The Senate briefly talk about restoring the Republic, and they all head off very excitedly up one of Rome's seven hills to discuss how they're going to put plans in motion. Meanwhile, the Praetorians are running around the palace. They find Claudius, Caligula's uncle, hiding behind a curtain, and they go, he'll do, and they put him on a litter, bring him to their camp, and they say, he's ours now.

• 47:00Kate Lister?

  This is the problem with every single one of these assassination attempts, is they've got nothing sensible lined up afterwards. Like, the Praetorian Guard need to have an emperor, he's the one who pays their bills. And it never, ever works. A few people go, should we have a republic? And then someone goes, we can just have this guy as the emperor again. They go, oh, all right then. And then he's terrible too. Well, it's a hell of an ending for Caligula. And I started by saying, do you think that we could call him a historical fuckboy? How much of his sexual excess and debauchery do you think contributes to his legacy? And even to his, his death? I mean, if he'd been completely chaste, do you think it would have still been awful?

• 47:43Speaker 04

  I think sexual excess plays a really big role in his life and that really characterises his reputation afterwards. I also think he did engage in an awful lot of fuckboy behaviour and he just shagged around an awful lot, both with women and with men. There's a consul called Valerius Catullus, who proclaims quite publicly that he had buggered the emperor and was quite exhausted by his sexual demands. So Caligula is active, he's passive, he's shagging anybody with a pulse, he falls in love with an actor called Manesta and goes and passionately kisses him on stage whenever he performs, which would have been so shocking for a Roman senator. It would be like, I don't know if I can say this, it would be like kind of King Charles getting up on stage at the Royal Variety

• 48:27Speaker 04

  Performance and French kissing a nipple tassled stripper. That's kind of the level of...

• 48:34Speaker 04

  That's kind of the level when it comes to an emperor on stage.

• 48:37Kate Lister?

  It would make a few headlines, that, wouldn't it? It would definitely, yeah. And when it came to sex, like his excess of it was like a deliberate performance and a deliberate fuck you to convention and again to the senate of I'm not going to behave in any way that you deem decent and sensible, I'm just going to completely overturn everything.

• 49:00Speaker 04

  I think so. He's not unique among the emperors for being very sexually active and engaging in lots of sexual humiliation. I mean, also Augustus, funnily enough, according to Suetonius, behaves exactly like Caligula did. He invites senators to dinner, to banquets, and then he will publicly take away the woman that he is most attracted to, the wife he's most attracted to, have his way with her and then bring her back all dishevelled, you know, cheeks, ears burning and comment on her performance. Caligula is accused of doing the same thing, but for Augustus, apparently, Suetonius tells us, he did it more for policy than for lust. It's politics.

• 49:39Kate Lister?

  What a lot of shit.

• 49:40Speaker 04

  I know, right? How is that politics?

• 49:45Speaker 04

  Talking about trade deals, well.

• 49:48Kate Lister?

  Maybe we'd get more things done if we could do that.

• 49:51Speaker 04

  Just not televise, please.

• 49:53Kate Lister?

  No good god. Alexander, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 50:01Speaker 04

  Best place would be my website, which is alexandermeddings.com. And I offer guided tours around Rome, mainly on the Appian Way. So come and join me. Love to show you around. And thank you so much for having me on.

• 50:13Kate Lister?

  It's been loads of fun. Thank you.

• 50:20Kate Lister?

  Thanks for listening and thanks to Alexander for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or perhaps you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. Coming up, we have got episodes of my most favourite royal mistress, Nell Gwynn. We have more fuckboys and an examination of what it meant to be ugly throughout history. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera. Demonic possessions. Cursed mirrors. Bigfoot. Poltergeist. Exorcisms. Near death experiences. Unsolved mysteries. Missing persons. Each week, we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.