Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Tiberius and his Island of Depravity About this episode The Roman Emperor Tiberius has a harrowing reputation based on stories surrounding his latter years on the island of Capri. Stories of debauchery and abuse of the worst kind. But who was Tiberius and where does the truth lie?
Kate Lister is joined by is Rome-based historian and tour guide Alex Meddings.
This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
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1:19 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Leester. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. Right now, everybody, I want our serious faces on because this is quite a serious fair dues warning. This episode is going to be discussing child abuse, sexual assault, murder, ritual sacrifice. It's just, it's a, it's a dark one, okay? It's going to, like, imagine the worst things you can think of, and that's what we're going to be talking about. So if you don't want to listen to this today, just breeze on by and we'll catch you next time. For the rest of you, let's crack on.
1:59 Kate Lister? Is there anything better than feeling the sun on your face? The fresh sea air and the sound of the ocean? I've been to the Bay of Naples a bit for work recently, and the ruins of Pompeii are above us on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. This time, though, it's time to relax and look out across the turquoise sea. Who wouldn't want to come here for a bit of rest and relaxation? People have been doing it since, well, since the Roman times and probably before. And some of those Romans weren't even meant to be on holiday. Some of them were supposed to be governing the Roman Empire. Yeah, Tiberius, we're looking at you. From where I'm sitting on the coast of the Bay of Naples, I can see the island of Capri. And this, this is the island where the Emperor Tiberius,
2:42 Kate Lister? a hugely powerful man, spent most of his time. But what was he up to over there on that island? Hmm. Well, if the rumours are to be believed, nothing good and everything bad.
3:16 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. On this podcast, we have met the scandalous, the shameful and the downright bad Byron. Today, I'm sorry to say that we might be descending to an even lower level of depravity as we go back to the times of the Roman Empire to talk about the Emperor Tiberius and what he did on his own island of depravity. The rather fabulous Alexander Meddings is back with us once again to explore just how much truth there is to the very sordid rumours that swirl around this emperor. Well, all right, everybody, I think that's enough warning. If you're still here, shall we do it? All right, let's do it.
4:06 Kate Lister? Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Alexander Meddings. How are you doing?
4:12 Speaker 02 I am great, Kate, thank you. How are you doing?
4:15 Kate Lister? I'm doing fabulous. How's Italy? I've always got such weather envy whenever I talk to you. Is it fabulous and sunny and gorgeous?
4:22 Speaker 02 At the moment, it's a lovely day today. It is a lovely day. Although we've just had monsoon season, like all through January and February, it's just been hammering it down. And it looks like we've finally come out of that. But that was grim and unexpected in equal measure.
4:34 Kate Lister? It's not been too great here, actually. But you know, we're getting sidetracked already. I can't, I can't ask you. But I have to ask you about nasty things that did happen in Italy, because we are here to talk about Tiberius.
4:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, he's an odd emperor, isn't he? He doesn't really have the same reputation, I guess, as the likes of Caligula or Nero, but he does go down as a proper wrong 'un, which may or may not be misguided. I guess we'll tease it out today.
5:03 Kate Lister? Okay, because if you stopped like your average person on the street and said, "Name me five shithead emperors", I don't know if Tiberius had come into it for most people. Like you said, you'd go Caligula, you'd go Nero.
5:16 Speaker 02 Maybe Commodus from Gladiator, or King Phoenix.
5:19 Kate Lister? Yes. Or Lagabalus, maybe you'd go for that one. I don't know if Tiberius... He's fun, isn't he? So, right, so there'll be people listening to this who are just going, "Well, I've never even heard of him", so let's give us a bit of background. Give me dates, give me his origin story. Where did he come from? Tiberius, the Emperor.
5:38 Speaker 02 Sure. So, Tiberius Claudius Nero, or Tiberius Claudius Nero is his name, is he's born in 42 B.C., so the dying days of the Roman Republic, two years after the assassination of Julius Caesar. And he's born to proper blue-blooded aristocratic parents. His father is also called Tiberius Claudius Nero, which is thoroughly unhelpful for us modern historians trying to work out who's who. And his mother, Livia Druilla, they find themselves on the wrong side of the civil war. So they back the wrong horse. They back Pompey against Caesar and then Antony against Octavian.
6:19 Speaker 02 And they spend the first part of Tiberius's life, the first few years, on the run in exile.
6:25 Kate Lister? Oh, they really did back the wrong horse there then. Okay.
6:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, they totally screwed it. Um. And Tiberius from a young age is surrounded by danger. So we're told that once in Greece, he and his mother are caught up in a forest fire and her hair is singed and nearly burnt to death. And then eventually she's allowed to return to Rome. Um. She's allowed to return from this exile and she catches the eye of the young Octavian. He will later go on to be Rome's first emperor Augustus, and he falls madly in love or lust with her.
6:57 Kate Lister? Right.
6:57 Speaker 02 Um. Forces her to divorce Tiberius Claudius Nero.
7:01 Kate Lister? Oh, right.
7:02 Speaker 02 Um. Marries her and then kind of adopts Tiberius into the family. Although Tiberius still kind of remains under the authority of his father, but he's also been adopted into the imperial family or what will soon become the imperial family. It is, yeah. Um. But he's not groomed for power from a young age. He's definitely not groomed to be the emperor one day or the prince. Because Augustus has grandkids. He has a daughter, Julia, who has five kids with a guy called Marcus Agrippa. Who is Augustus's right hand man.
7:38 Kate Lister? Upon the island.
7:39 Speaker 02 She does. She's one of the many who end up on an island.
7:44 Speaker 02 Through all of her sexual escapades, or so the sources say.
7:47 Kate Lister? So many islands.
7:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, poor Julia. I have a lot of time for Julia. I mean, she's Augustus's daughter. She's made to marry a guy called Marcus Agrippa, who is her father's contemporary, exactly the same age. Um. And he's a plebeian of all things, so not only is he an older man, but he's a commoner, which can't have been good for the blue blooded Julians. Agrippa dies quite suddenly over in the Balkans and um Tiberius, who as a young man has been happily married to a lovely woman called Vipsania, and they've had a child together called Trusus. He is forced to divorce Vipsania and marry Julia.
8:24 Kate Lister? There's a lot of forcing to divorce in this family.
8:27 Speaker 02 There really is.
8:28 Kate Lister? Yeah.
8:29 Speaker 02 And he's done really dirty here, poor Tiberius, because it's kind of one of those, it's one of those unspoken familial agreements and arrangements that you will offer your father pietas, piety, you'll be kind of, you know, good and loyal towards him, but in exchange, you don't expect that he's going to force you to divorce your wife and marry his daughter, who's also your stepsister.
8:51 Kate Lister? Oh.
8:51 Speaker 02 Who you don't get on with, you've been raised in the same family, you know, it's.
8:55 Kate Lister? Why, why is this happening? Because I was, I was gonna just ask you then, did he have a happy childhood? But it doesn't sound like it would have been very happy. Was his, was his first marriage happy, when he was made to divorce?
9:07 Speaker 02 It does seem so, it does seem so. And we're told later on, after he's been forced to divorce Vipsania and marry Julia, that he one day sees Vipsania walking through the forum, I think it is. And he can't hold back his tears. He's so upset to see her because he can't be with her anymore. And then Augustus arranges it that he'll just never see her again. So she's kind of just conveniently shipped off.
9:31 Kate Lister? Why does that happen? Why does his stepdad so object to him marrying this, this last that he seemed to be quite pleased with?
9:38 Speaker 02 It's all about bloodlines. It's about uniting two strong bloodlines, the Claudian bloodline, of which Tiberius is, is a part, and the Julian bloodline, which is that of the dominant family at the time. And the family that will go on to essentially produce the first emperor, Augustus.
9:56 Kate Lister? Right, okay, okay. A happy second marriage?
10:01 Speaker 02 No, not even slightly. No, they're chalk and cheese. I mean, Tiberius is a very conservative, austere, military figure. He's also a raving misogynist. And they all kind of are, but he in particular.
10:15 Kate Lister? I was gonna say, who wasn't?
10:19 Kate Lister? But particularly bad even for the standards of the day?
10:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, he seems to have hated the fact that his mother had any influence or sway and he really didn't like Julia's
10:29 Speaker 02 kind of liberation, let's say, because Julia sees herself as a bit of a big deal. She is the the daughter of Rome's first emperor.
10:38 Speaker 02 She likes to make a big song and dance about that and Tiberius thinks that frankly, she belongs behind closed doors back in the domus.
10:47 Kate Lister? Wow, okay.
10:49 Speaker 02 Making the togas and all of that.
10:51 Kate Lister? So we have a weird childhood. This sounds like with his mother being forced to marry somebody else and then he's going to grow up in this kind of like mashed together family, but he is, which is part of, but he's also kind of not a part of. Then he gets married. It's quite happy, but then that all gets wrecked by his stepdad.
11:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:12 Kate Lister? It's not, yeah, okay, I can see where the anger comes from. Do we get any, it's not great, is it? Do we get any sense of like what he was like as a person? You were saying that he's quite austere and he's a misogynist. Like if you're going to go and have a pint with him, what would he be like?
11:28 Speaker 02 You wouldn't really want to go and have a pint with him. You wouldn't, you wouldn't mind serving under him. So he's a great soldier. And he's, he kind of likes to partake in the hardships of his men. So we're told that while he's away on his many campaigns and he has, he celebrates many victories and kind of outstanding achievements while he's away on campaign in Germany or in Parth, you know, Armenia. It's said that he will sleep on the ground next to his soldiers and, you know, he'll kind of shun a tent. Doesn't need a tent, that's all too woke. He also will kind of, you know, sit and have his meals on the ground with the soldiers. He kind of acts like one of them. On the other hand, he is a big disciplinarian, but on the other hand, he's also very cultured. His Greek is fluent.
12:11 Speaker 02 He's a literate man, as in he really enjoys literature. He enjoys mythology. He's big into astrology. Just a bit odd at the time, but he's big into his superstitions. He's clever, a good military strategist, good military soldier, and a very able administrator, as we find out as he gets older.
12:32 Kate Lister? Okay.
12:34 Kate Lister? Okay, all right, yeah, I'm getting a type here. Did the soldiers like him? Did they appreciate all of this? I'm gonna rough it with you lads and...
12:42 Speaker 02 It seems so.
12:43 Kate Lister? Oh, they did.
12:43 Speaker 02 I mean, our sources are lacking really when it comes to representing their opinions, but the sources speak very highly of him and his kind of behaviour among the soldiers from early on in his reign. So they're probably preserving something of the common attitude of the soldiers.
13:00 Kate Lister? And he's good at soldiering? That's something he's good at?
13:04 Speaker 02 Oh, he's brilliant. You can definitely say at least on two occasions, Tiberius saved the burgeoning Roman Empire.
13:11 Kate Lister? Wow, okay.
13:12 Speaker 02 So the first is when there's a revolt over in Pannonia, which is kind of modern day Central Europe, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech Republic area. There is a revolt there in 6 AD, which he managed to put down. In 9 AD, he managed to stem the tide of Germans, who, having just defeated a commando Gavris at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, could have spilled south, past the Rhine and down onto the Italian peninsula, and Tiberius managed to shore that up. And he has many other victories prior, as does his brother Druusus, but then Druusus dies just a few years after Tiberius is forced to divorce Vipsanius. So he suffers two big personal losses. And then he fucks off to Rhodes.
13:57 Speaker 02 He's done. In his mid 30s, he goes, actually, I don't want to be around anymore. And he kind of just retires and goes and just attends philosophy lectures and dresses up as a Greek.
14:07 Kate Lister? I understand that. I do understand. I think everybody gets to about their mid 30s and sort of looks around and goes, actually, this is all shit. I just want to go and live in a little house in a forest and 10 chickens. Everybody has that. That's what he's done.
14:20 Speaker 02 I think I'm at that stage now.
14:21 Kate Lister? Are you at that stage?
14:22 Speaker 02 I'm at that stage.
14:23 Kate Lister? I passed that stage a long time ago. Everybody I know has that moment of just like, actually, this is, this is bollocks. I'm just gonna go and live by the seaside and collect shells.
14:31 Speaker 02 Just looking at barley.
14:33 Kate Lister? That's what they want to do. But the thing is, is how do you go from that? How do you go from, right, no, fuck this, I'm off to Rhodes to go and do a philosophy degree or whatever it was that he decided he was gonna go to.
14:43 Speaker 02 Basically, essentially, yeah.
14:46 Kate Lister? How do you go from that to like, well, hang on, now you're the emperor? Because that, it doesn't sound like that's something he was pursuing.
14:52 Speaker 02 No, and it was, it was never really a given that he would become emperor because Augustus has got these two grandsons through his daughter Livia and her marist Marcus Agrippa called Gaius and Lucius. And it's expected that they will go on to continue Augustus's legacy and to become his heir. The thing is that they both die, probably of the plague, but our sources all suggest it's the machinations of Livia. Tiberius is his mother and Augustus is wife. Always blame the woman for poisoning, basically.
15:21 Kate Lister? Yeah, stick them on an island, another one.
15:26 Speaker 02 Cunning Livia actually manages to escape an island to her credit. She must be one of the only junior Claudian women, yeah.
15:33 Kate Lister? Well, okay, nice. So the two heirs, they have either died of natural causes or very unnatural causes. We're not absolutely sure. But does that mean that it would definitely have been Tiberius? Was there anyone else in the frame?
15:47 Speaker 02 At this point, it's pretty much gonna be Tiberius. And also, he's very capable as well.
15:52 Kate Lister? He sounds like he's quite capable. He sounds like, I know that like, we're living in a world where it's like you want politicians to be like, you know, celebrities and like exciting and the drop, but you don't really. That's shit is what you want is just from your politicians. You want boring sensibleness. That's what you want. And he sounds like that's him.
16:10 Speaker 02 Spot on. Yeah, he's not a populist, so he's not remotely in the cast of Augustus, who likes to dig deep into the imperial treasury and sponsor lots of games or Caligula or Nero. He's an austere, quite reluctant ruler who has a lot of pedigree, a lot of experience.
16:29 Speaker 02 He comes across as quite bitter, but I think part of that is the fact that he didn't become a ruler by merit, but it was because he was forced into the position by being the adopted son of an emperor. I think he would have quite liked it if he could have actually got there by his own credentials.
16:46 Kate Lister? Okay, so how does he get there? Obviously, people have to die, but I'm just like, what was the sort of series of events? And do we have anything from the time to gauge his reaction to that?
16:57 Speaker 02 Sure. So you have the death of Lucius and Gaius, so Augustus's expected heirs. And then Tiberius is eventually recalled from Rhodes. He spent about eight years there. He'd actually asked to come back earlier, but Augustus throwing a salt says, no, you're going to bloody well stay there. But eventually, he's recalled, he's made Augustus's partner, let's say. He's kind of, he's given the consulship, so he's made his equal. And from this point on, it's very clear that he's going to be the heir. And then after this, you get those two episodes I mentioned a moment ago, where he essentially saves Rome twice, firstly from a revolt, and then from marauding German tribes.
17:38 Kate Lister? Must have been quite popular, then?
17:40 Speaker 02 I think so. I think so.
17:42 Kate Lister? Okay, early days, quite popular.
17:44 Speaker 02 All of his sources give him a really good write-up, at least at the beginning, and many give him a pretty good write-up at the end as well, which is why he's such a weird figure. Because usually with Roman history and emperors, you get this pattern, right? We've seen it already with the episodes on Caligula of Nero of just decline. They start with promise and potential, and then they decline. With Tiberius, that's kind of the canon, but then there's also an idea that actually he was pretty efficient throughout.
18:09 Kate Lister? Interesting. Okay. All right. So Augustus dies.
18:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, he drops dead in 14 AD. Tiberius is by his bedside. Apparently, they spend a good day while Augustus is in ill health, kind of discussing how they're going to manage the handover of power. Augustus dies in 14, and then essentially, Tiberius immediately...
18:33 Speaker 02 Secures the loyalty of the Praetorian Guard, of the military.
18:37 Kate Lister? Yes, I've learnt from you that that is essential. You've got to have them on side.
18:41 Speaker 02 Yep, fundamental. Yeah, because they're the ones who are propping up your power. They're the only military force allowed in Rome as well. Augustus doesn't die in Rome. He dies, I think, in a place called Nola, which is outside. His body is brought into Rome. Tiberius accompanies it. He goes to the Senate. And then what happens is really obscured in the sources, but it seems like there's a big kind of backwards and forwards between him and the senators about him taking power and what that's going to look like. Tiberius is kind of trying not to be the executive and the princeps. He's trying not to be the sole ruler, like a naked autocrat. That's a horrible image, but.
19:21 Kate Lister? So is he trying to like reduce his own role? Is that what he's doing? He's like, look, I'll be the emperor, but I don't really want to be the emperor.
19:27 Speaker 02 Yeah.
19:28 Kate Lister? Like, can we do a job share? Oh, really?
19:31 Speaker 02 Essentially, yeah, because he is a republican through and through. And it's one of his many contradictions. He's a dyed-in-the-wool republican who's forced into a position of autocracy. So he still reveres the Senate. He will still apparently make way in the streets for consuls, which he shouldn't be doing. Sometimes there'll be a vote and he'll go over onto the side with fewer supporters. He'll go onto the losing side and no one else will follow him. Can you imagine if that happened in BMQs today? Or, you know, if it happened in politics today, it would be really bad.
20:09 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Alexander after this short break.
20:17 Kate 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.
20:59 Kate Lister? This is not the person I was expecting you to describe. I quite like him.
21:04 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:06 Kate Lister? He sounds like quite a nice person.
21:07 Speaker 02 He's all right. I mean, all of the kind of raving misogyny aside and ill discipline aside, he's all right. I also have a little bit of sympathy for him too, because clearly there were lots of issues of misunderstanding throughout. That's kind of a key theme throughout his life. There's an amazing episode on Rhodes, which always makes me laugh, where apparently one day he informed his attendants he wished to go for a stroll into town and to go and visit someone who was sick. And his attendants completely misunderstand this and they round up everyone on Rhodes who's sick and they gather them in the public portico and they kind of arrange them according to their affliction. So it's like lying there like coughing and whatever. And then Tiberius turns up absolutely devastated, like, what have you all done?
21:52 Speaker 02 It's like, we've got all of the sick for you, sire. And he goes around just apologising to all of them, going, I'm so sorry about this. Please go back to your beds.
22:01 Kate Lister? That's bonkers.
22:03 Speaker 02 And the same.
22:04 Kate Lister? But he sounds quite nice. He sounds like if he was around today, he'd be a trade unionist. He sounds like that's.
22:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, kind of like a very conservative trade unionist. Yeah, he's an odd one. He's an odd one. And there were lots of misunderstandings too with the Senate, because they're trying to force power onto him that he's really reluctant to take. Describing him as nice, I'm not so sure. And especially as time goes on, you get all of these stories about sadism and sexual debauchery. But again, how much of this is true and how much of this is just a typical portrait of a tyrant? Really hard to say.
22:42 Kate Lister? Well, see, this is the thing. But early doors, he seems that he's doing a reasonable job of emperoring. And if you were living underneath his regime, you might think that it's okay. And when I say nice, I just mean comparatively. I just mean like compared to the other ones. So like, you know, it's, they're all awful. But I just wasn't expecting you to present this guy who, you know, apologized to the sick. We even cared about the sick, quite frankly.
23:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's curious, isn't it?
23:09 Kate Lister? Or cared about his soldiers. That's not the Roman emperors that we know. But it doesn't last because we do start to get these awful stories about him. So he doesn't seem that he's excelled. No, no, he was a good emperor, but he doesn't seem to have enjoyed it. He doesn't want to be doing it almost.
23:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, he's very reluctant. He describes ruling the empire as like holding a wolf by the ears. So he's acutely aware that at any point it can turn around and just bite your head off.
23:36 Kate Lister? Okay.
23:37 Speaker 02 But he does it, he does it with a few people to help him as well. So he defers a lot of matters to the senate because he thinks that they are the kind of natural, the natural wielders of power and executives of government. He has his own kind of successor lined up, who is Germanicus, his nephew. So he's his brother's son. But Germanicus goes and dies over in Syria in the year 19, which kind of puts an end to those plans. Germanicus is also Caligula's father.
24:12 Kate Lister? Ah, yes.
24:13 Speaker 02 And then his own son, Druusus, then dies as well, which is far from ideal in the year 23. And then he has this figure called Sejanus, who is the Praetorian prefect. He's the head of his Praetorian guard, who essentially rules the empire in Tiberius's stead. When Tiberius just kind of fucks off to Capri this time, he retires.
24:41 Kate Lister? Well, let's talk about him fucking off to Capri because that's a weird move for an emperor to do, isn't it?
24:48 Speaker 02 It, yes and no. I think at this time, it's really difficult to kind of ascertain what's expected of an emperor because it's still very early days and we're not entirely sure what the role entails. From very early on, Tiberius spoke about retirement, which is again, something I can totally. It's very zeitgeist. I can totally empathise with him here. Even before becoming emperor, he just bangs on incessantly about one day being able to retire. And going to Capri, in a sense, is basically that. It's after he's lost so many people along the way, including his, you know, his wife and his brother and his son, who it later turns out was probably murdered by Sir Janus, his Praetorian prefect, he's just had enough.
25:28 Speaker 02 And he retires on a pretty nice but very unfashionable Greek island. I say Greek because it's kind of Greek in culture.
25:38 Kate Lister? When you, when you say he retires, like, what does, what does that mean? Did you just, I'm not emperoring anymore, but you are the emperor. You are the emperor. Like, you have to emperor. You can't not. It doesn't have a retirement plan. It's not, it's what, what's happening?
25:51 Speaker 02 I guess it is what he decides it to be. He kind of leaves Sir Janus in Rome to effectively govern independently from about the year twenty six onwards. Tiberius, at this point, is in his sixties and, yeah, he just goes to Capri so he can, if we believe the sources, drink himself to death, have lots of debauched sex and just kind of get away from all of the responsibility of ruling an empire.
26:15 Kate Lister? He's delegating.
26:16 Speaker 02 He's delegating. And he's also very laissez faire. He kind of just leaves governors in position. He doesn't really like to get involved unless there's a particular disaster he has to attend to. Again, I have a bit of sympathy there. I mean, it's not easy to rule an empire without digital communications.
26:33 Kate Lister? I would absolutely retire. I would, I would have fucked off a long time ago and gone, I think you guys can take it from here. Thank you very much. I'll be off. But how did that go down in Rome? Like, you and me saying, I totally get what you're doing there. Were, were the people in Rome also saying, absolutely no problem. You go off to Capri. We're fine without you?
26:55 Speaker 02 No, they're not happy at all. Or at least the sources that we have, which are often senatorial, are not happy. They're very suspicious for a start. And they kind of think if you are hiding away on a big craggy, rocky island out to sea off the Bay of Naples, you've got to be up to some dodgy stuff. Right, there's no way that he's gonna be hiding from Rome for no reason.
27:16 Kate Lister? Oh, it's all feeling horribly modern. It's an island with powerful men on it where awful things happen. Oh, no. Okay.
27:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, Epsine's island rears its head.
27:28 Kate Lister? Yes.
27:29 Speaker 02 Indeed.
27:29 Kate Lister? It is. It is. Okay. I want to be very careful before drawing parallels, but yeah, that is definitely. Oh, right. Okay. So he's off to Capri and I can understand why people at the time would be like, well, hang on a minute. Aren't you supposed to be the emperor?
27:42 Speaker 02 Yeah. And it's far from ideal also that while he's away, Sigenus goes in very, very hard on what we call myestas trials, treason trials. So essentially, um, he puts quite a few people to death, including Germanicus's remaining families. So Agrippina, Germanicus's kids, apart from Caligula. There's a bit of blood being spilled in Rome in Tiberius's absence, but not as much as we would think. If you, if you read the sources, you would think that blood is literally flowing through the streets under Tiberius. But about 50 or so people are accused of treason. About half of them are acquitted. It's, it's pretty tame in comparison to modern.
28:19 Kate Lister? But they're being accused and condemned under some prick that's not actually the emperor. The emperor's fucked off to Capri. So like, I still, I can still understand that even if it was a small number, you'd be like, um, excuse me.
28:31 Speaker 02 Exactly. It's a dereliction of duty on the part of the emperor and essentially you're letting someone without any credentials really, from a relatively low-born family rule in the emperor's stead.
28:40 Kate Lister? Imagine that. Imagine somebody with zero credentials, no experience, being elevated to a position that high in the government and allowed to do whatever they wanted. Shocking.
28:51 Speaker 02 Perish the thought. Imagine that.
28:53 Kate Lister? Oh, no. God. God. Right. Okay. So I guess people are angry then. Does, does, does Tiberius know they're angry? Does he care that they're angry?
29:03 Speaker 02 That also seems to suggest he gets very paranoid as time goes by. So he retreats to Capri when he's in his sixties and he does seem, if we follow these kind of character portraits of him, to be a kind of angry, paranoid old man. There's another very funny story, which I, I don't think is true because it's, it reads too much like a kind of parable, but there's a story of a fisherman. On Capri, who manages to scale the kind of craggy rock face to get up to Tiberius's palace, Villa Jovis at the top. And he brings the emperor mullet, brings him a large fish, which he wants to give the emperor as a gift. And Tiberius sees this guy, he's totally startled, how the hell did you evade my security detail?
29:46 Speaker 02 And he has the fisherman's face scrubbed with that fish.
29:51 Kate Lister? What?
29:52 Speaker 02 It's kind of anger about how did you get here? And then the fisherman cries out halfway through, well, at least I didn't bring the lobster that I was going to give you instead. And then Tiberius goes, right, fetch the lobster, come and get the lobster. And then the Praetorians have this guy's face mangled with a lobster instead.
30:07 Kate Lister? That didn't happen. What? Even the logistics of that.
30:12 Speaker 02 Right, scaling a scaling a cliff face with a mullet.
30:17 Kate Lister? Or trying to like scrub someone's face with a mullet. I don't know, I don't know. But these are the kind of stories that are circulating about him at the time.
30:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
30:25 Kate Lister? Is that he will attack you with a cliff face.
30:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, that falls into, I guess, what you call a kind of sadism category of all of the bad stuff he's doing. You've got kind of sadism, you've got lots of drinking going on, which is again, it's quite funny because his name is Tiberius Claudius Nero. That's how they would have called him, but they they come up with a nickname for him, which is Biberius Caldius Nero. Biberius comes from the word be better, to drink. Caldius means hot, it's an adjective, and Nero means unmixed wine, which is, it's funny by Roman standards, they're like calling him like a drinker. I mean, take what you can get with ancient Roman humour, but apparently he's a big drinker. So he never did when he was a young man in the army. He kind of retreats into the bottle a little bit.
31:12 Speaker 02 He has drinking companions who, again, if we believe the sources, apparently he would fill them full of wine and then tie ligatures around their penises to stop them from pissing. And then kind of derive great satisfaction from the suffering that they exhibited and all of that kind of thing.
31:37 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Alexander after this short break.
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32:54 Kate Lister? It gets dark, it gets really dark. And well, you know, I'll have given everyone a fair dues warning before the show, but we'll just give it another one now, is that this is, the stuff that he's accused of is horrific, isn't it? So, I mean, you know, putting bows around people's penises when they've passed out is...
33:12 Speaker 03 Barely touches the science when it comes to it.
33:14 Kate Lister? Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about some of the things that he was accused of doing on this island. We've got this paranoid drunk man doing, doing what?
33:23 Speaker 03 So he has groups of young boys and girls called his tight bums, who he gets to perform threesomes in front of him to kind of excite his flagging libido in old age.
33:36 Kate Lister? What sources is this? Like, who's saying this stuff?
33:39 Speaker 03 So primarily, we've got Suetonius, who is a biographer. He's kind of like a, I like to think of him as kind of ancient Daily Mail columnist, writing about 90 years after the events he describes.
33:50 Speaker 02 In this case, and then you also have Tacitus, who is more like an economist journalist. He's good on the history, good on the, good on the economics, good on the foreign policy stuff. He also goes in quite hard on some of this rumour, but he's less explicit. He's less colourful in his portraits. It's really Suetonius who starts off by saying, I couldn't possibly name all of the debauchery going on on this. I'll go on then. And so then he goes into a lot of detail about what's going on. So there are the tight bums. There's allegedly a sex library that he has as well. So when he's getting these people to perform in front of him, if they don't know a particular position or a move,
34:30 Speaker 02 Tiberius encourages them to consult a library. So he'll come pull out a book and he'll show them what he wants to see.
34:36 Kate Lister? Okay.
34:37 Speaker 02 It's a bit odd. So you get a sense that he's a bit of a kind of scopophile, right? There's a lot of voyeurism going on.
34:43 Kate Lister? Yeah, okay. I mean, it's really bleak. It's really nasty. It's, it's like the worst things that you can think of doing. There's mass child abuse. There's stories about abusing babies. There's, there's murder, obviously.
34:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's the, it's the baby stuff that's the most disturbing. And that's the stuff that really sticks with you. I remember reading this at university and thinking like, this cannot be, this cannot be true. This has got to be just invective against tyrants, the stuff with kids. And then you look to more recent history and you think, God, I mean, maybe there's a nugget of truth to it.
35:14 Kate Lister? Yeah. That's, that's the really scary thing with this stuff, isn't it? Is because if you're a person with like a decent moral compass, who, you know, you just try and live your life and do nice things and you know right from wrong. You hear stuff like this and you're like, look, that's so extreme. That can't possibly have been true. It can't possibly have been true. But really, what we're all kind of saying is that we couldn't conceive of it. Because thankfully, we, that, we can't imagine, but that doesn't mean that these things didn't happen. And that's a really scary lesson that you do have to learn in life is just because you can't conceive of it happening, unfortunately, doesn't mean that it didn't happen.
35:48 Speaker 02 Exactly. We, I mean, we can look at more modern figures and we can try and apply a lens of psychoanalysis, right? So I guess you can look at things like sociopathy or narcissism. You, you can't diagnose figures from antiquity and we don't have the weight of evidence. We only have the stories, but it's about, as you say, being able to conceive of it being true. And when you see parallels, maybe that becomes easier.
36:11 Kate Lister? Do you think that? There is truth to this because one of the other things that I've learnt from you about all the Roman emperors is that once they've gone, the smear campaign begins. And there is a lot of stuff about a lot of the emperors that it's that there's very few of them that once they're actually dead and gone, everyone's going, well, they did a fabulous job. What a nice person that was is they all like the stuff about Caligula came out after he'd after he'd gone. I mean, you know, there's stuff at the time, but it's the same with Nero. It's like, and you're constantly trying to pick it apart of like, did this actually happen? So I guess what I'm saying is, what's your take on this? Do you think that there is truth to this?
36:46 Speaker 02 It's so hard to say, isn't it? I mean, we'll never know. And I know this sounds like I'm trying to get out of it, but we will never be able to reconstruct the person behind the stories that have been told of them at this point. We just don't have the weight of evidence, the specificity of it. So kind of the stories of these, these kids who he calls his little fish. And he, he trains them to swim between his thighs as he's, as he's going for his morning swim and kind of nibble at his genitalia or whatever. It seems so specific, you could go one way or another. It could, it could be, it could be coming from a source within the, the palace on Capri saying, look, this, this is what's happening. Or it could be the fetid imagination of Suetonius, who's just trying to imagine the most tyrannical behaviour possible.
37:28 Speaker 02 I think I probably fall more into the latter camp on this. It is quite a common theme or a topos in ancient literature, which is that the more solitary you are, the more vicious you become and the more vicious you are, the more you retreat into solitude. So, but him putting himself on an island away from the watching eyes of the capital doesn't help any of this. And it feeds these rumours.
37:50 Kate Lister? No. How many sources are there? Cause I suppose that would be a sort of a type of evidence in and of itself. It's like, is there a wide range of sources? Are lots of people saying this? Is it coming from just one place?
38:01 Speaker 02 It's coming from two sources, really. It's coming from three, if you count a guy called Cassius Dio is writing significantly later. All of it's probably based on a lost source, which we no longer have. There's an excellent academic who sadly recently passed away called Edward Champlin, who's tried to make the argument, and I think quite convincingly, that the lost source is Completely misinterpreting what's going on on the island as a kind of performance. Like, there's a lot of theatre going on and there's lots of this kind of spectacle. I guess this kind of feeds into why we see Tiberius as a voyeur. But essentially, he's trying to recreate all of these scenes from mythology. And essentially, you've got sources that are just completely misunderstanding this. But, sorry, to return to your question, you have you have those sources.
38:44 Speaker 02 And then you have some contemporary sources, which are a lot more praising of the emperor. There's a guy called Velius Patriculus, there's another called Seneca the Elder, but they are. Well, Velius serves under Tiberius, so a lot of people think that that makes him not particularly reliable.
38:59 Kate Lister? I suppose we have Caligula as well, his nephew that lived with him on this island. Did he ever say anything about his time on Capri with his, is it his uncle?
39:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, his great uncle. I mean, the sense we get from Caligula is he's trying to dissimulate. So he's doing whatever he can to survive. He's watching all of this debauchery play out and he's looking like he enjoys it. Cause he doesn't want to attract any unwanted attention or look like he's standing up to Tiberius. But then other sources say that Caligula goes in really hard as well. But then, I mean, Suetonius tells us in his biography on Caligula that Caligula exceeded Tiberius's debauchery by dressing up, wearing a wig and going dancing late at night. And that doesn't seem as bad.
39:41 Kate Lister? Oh, it's not even close.
39:42 Speaker 02 As Peter Piddin.
39:45 Kate Lister? That's not even in the same ballpark. That's, okay, wow.
39:49 Speaker 02 Again, it suggests confused sources based on another source that maybe didn't quite understand what was going on. Or possibly this captures absolutely what was going on. And again, it goes back to what you were saying earlier about you and I not being able to conceive of this kind of stuff.
40:03 Kate Lister? Yeah, because we can't conceive, but doesn't mean it didn't happen. So plus, all that we can say with any certainty is that there were rumours, like, and maybe not even rumours, outright accusations. But after the fact.
40:16 Speaker 02 I think after the fact, yeah, I mean, you would have probably had rumours swirling around Rome while Tiberius is in Capri in his sixties as an old man. Everyone's probably thinking, what's he doing over there? Oh, he's just.
40:28 Kate Lister? Yeah, what's he doing?
40:29 Speaker 02 I mean, there was lots of wordplay as well. They called, um, they called him an old goat, um, kind of, uh.
40:36 Kate Lister? Yeah.
40:36 Speaker 02 Kind of abusing various does, the does of the women he's abusing over on Capri. And that's a play on words on the name of the island Capri, uh, Capra, it means goat in Italian today.
40:49 Speaker 02 There are rumours swirling for sure, but I think most of this tradition really settles in the, in the generational two afterwards.
40:55 Kate Lister? How long is he doing all of this on Capri for, before he eventually pops his clogs?
41:00 Speaker 02 About 10 years, more or less 10 years.
41:02 Kate Lister? 10 years?
41:03 Speaker 02 I mean, he dies as an old man.
41:04 Kate Lister? That's a long time, isn't it?
41:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, he's very old when he dies.
41:07 Kate Lister? What's he die of nastily, let's hope?
41:09 Speaker 02 Not really. So he kind of makes a couple of plans to return to Rome, but never follows through with them. So he leaves Capri a couple of times. The last occasion he leaves, he gets to about the fifth mile on the Appian Way. And he, he kind of looks in his bag and he finds that his pet snake, who he always carries around with him, has died and been eaten by ants. And he sees this as a bad sign. He sees this as a sign that if he returns to Rome, he too will be devoured by the army or some shit like that. I don't. And so he turns back, he goes to Missenum, um, which is a town kind of on the, on the coast, facing out to Capri, which is out to sea.
41:45 Speaker 02 And then he falls sick, he falls ill, but he doesn't let it show. So it's not like there are any signs in his speech or slurring speech or any kind of physical weakness.
41:55 Kate Lister? Right.
41:56 Speaker 02 Must be lovely for his subjects, right, as opposed to modern, modern comparisons? He even goes to the games, we're told, at a place called Cersei, and he throws javelins, a couple of boars in the arena. As a six, as a 77 year old man, which is.
42:13 Kate Lister? Who's ill?
42:13 Speaker 02 Who's ill, which is mightily impressive. But then he comes a cropper when he, when he takes, well, in Italian today, they're called colpodaria. So he, he catches a chill, he catches a draft of air. Um, while he's not feeling very well, and apparently this really does for him. Italians still today believe that if you go out with wet hair and a breeze goes on you, then you're going to get really sick and maybe get a flu and die or something. Um, so essentially this happens, he catches a chill, he retires to his villa in Messenum, thoroughly intending to wait for a storm to pass and then go back to Capri. The storm never passes, his condition worsens and then he dies. And exactly how he dies, we're not sure because our sources at this point, they peel off from one another.
42:58 Speaker 02 Some suggest that Caligula and Macro, who is the head of the Praetorian Guard now that Sir Janus has been executed by Tiberius. Um, some suggest that those two have him suffocated, some suggest that they gradually have him poisoned. The most likely story from a source, um, near the time Seneca the Elder is that he essentially just gets out of bed one day looking for attendance, falls over and just dies by his bedside. Quite normal.
43:29 Kate Lister? Okay. Quite normal, I suppose. So what's his legacy then? Just sort of try and round this off because it's, it's so, you know, I feel a bit bad now about saying he sounds quite nice because he doesn't now. He sounds horrendous, he sounds like an absolute monster. But I'm just trying to like piece this together because this is a very complex legacy that we've been left. So what do you think his legacy is?
43:55 Speaker 02 It's really tricky, isn't it? Um, now you ask a great question and I find he's a very difficult emperor to talk to, not least because he rules for so long. Um, and he, he clearly had lots of potential and he clearly was very, very good, at least at the beginning. Whether or not we believe all of this sadism, sexual perversion and stuff that clouds a later part of his reign. That's essentially what we're left with. So I think it's his debauchery and it's his later years on Capri that have coloured our interpretation of his reign. But in terms of a character assessment, I, I find him quite human. He's a man of many, many contradictions, you know, republican force into a position of autocracy, a lover of Greek culture, but also, you know, austerely Roman and.
44:40 Speaker 02 He's kind of, you know, very much a product of Roman culture, a reluctant leader who's forced into a position of power when he doesn't really want it. I was thinking just when prepping for this, like of modern comparisons and he's somewhere between kind of a Jon Snow Game of Thrones, I don't want it type figure. Part of him is a bit kind of Churchill, you know, it's kind of typical conservative military figure. Good administrator, but had lots of defects and did lots of terrible things elsewhere.
45:10 Kate Lister? Unless all of the rumours were were true and then he's a completely different character, isn't he?
45:15 Speaker 02 Then he's essentially Epstein, isn't he?
45:18 Kate Lister? Yeah, then he's awful.
45:19 Speaker 02 And the parallels of Epstein Island are really intriguing, especially when you consider the kind of company he's keeping. I mean, we also know, and this is an aspect we don't talk about with him, but he likes to surround himself with the leading intellectuals of the day and engage in lots of debate. It's very kind of, you know, Chomsky, Epstein, it's, there's loads of this. He likes to surround himself with people of influence, possibly to make himself feel superior. We also know that he likes to quiz people, but over really pedantic details just to elevate himself. So there's an insecurity. It's very familiar through a different cultural lens.
45:56 Kate Lister? It is, isn't it? And the the inclusion of an island, I think, is something that we can see parallels with as well. It's this idea of like, what happens there? What happened there? Who was there? And this like that we don't know. So there's this great, like, missing chunk of information. And I'm not saying that these things didn't happen because quite clearly they did. But you can see how like the rumours and the concept of an island takes on a life of its own, doesn't it?
46:23 Speaker 02 You're quite right.
46:24 Kate Lister? Of like, what was happening there?
46:25 Speaker 02 You're quite right. The the ancients, the Romans have a particular mistrust of islands, the island of Britain included, and they see them as kind of strange places where lots of kind of bizarre, unique ethnographies and cultures all grow up. And this is definitely the case in Capri too. They're doing Tiberius a disservice in many ways too, because this was a really fashionable part of the empire. This is, a lot of the Roman elite love to go and holiday in Campania. And they like to go and take its waters, the thermal waters. Perhaps Tiberius is taking this for his own conditions. We're told that in Old Age, he's got like lots of eruptions on his face and it's entirely plausible, he's going there simply just to, as a bit of a spa beauty treatment type thing.
47:05 Kate Lister? Yeah.
47:05 Speaker 02 But it's all of this mistrust about islands that you mentioned that feeds into the story we tell about him.
47:13 Kate Lister? Alexander, you have been fascinating. I don't know if we're any closer to knowing the truth about this.
47:19 Speaker 02 Sorry about that.
47:20 Kate Lister? Either fabulous or awful human being.
47:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, alas, that's the problem with Tiberius.
47:25 Kate Lister? But you've done such a good job of explaining him.
47:27 Speaker 02 Thank you.
47:28 Kate Lister? And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
47:31 Speaker 02 The best place would probably be my personal website, which is alexandemeddings.com.
47:37 Speaker 02 And I do lots of tours throughout Rome and Italy. Actually, I'm going to Capri on Monday with a group of US high schoolers. So I'll be going easy on some of those more sensational stories, I think.
47:49 Kate Lister? Yes. Turn it right down for them, I think.
47:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think so. For the job security. Try not to get fired.
47:57 Kate Lister? Well, thank you so much for dropping by. You're marvelous.
48:00 Speaker 02 Thank you very much for having me.
48:06 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much 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. In case you missed it, we have been exploring the golden age of Hollywood all this month. Full glitz, glamour, murder and sex symbols. And if you'd like us to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Hannah Fyodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, The Twixt Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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