Doug Stanhope
speaker
535 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Doug Stanhope’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I think it's important to trace in some detail exactly what it is that Suetonius has to say about his life and reign. And one thing that will strike anyone who reads it immediately is how incredibly important in Suetonius' account of Caligula the emphasis on his bloodline is, on his pedigree, on his ancestry. And the reason for that, of course, most obviously, is that he comes to power.
He becomes emperor, he becomes princeps, the first man in Rome. by virtue of his descent from Augustus, who is not just the first emperor, but by this point is a god. And Caligula is descended from Augustus very much through the female line. So his grandmother is Julia, who was Augustus's only child and herself got destroyed in a sex scandal.
And his mother is Agrippina, who was Augustus' last surviving grandchild, who we heard about in the previous episode, falls out with Tiberius. Tiberius imprisons her on an island. She goes on hunger strike and dies of starvation. But it's not just the female descent. It's not just the descent from his mother's line that amplifies Caligula's status as the best-bred man in Rome.
There's also his father. And this is a guy who is so dashing, so heroic that throughout his life and in the decades that follow, he is commemorated as the absolute darling of the Roman people. And this is a guy who rejoices in the name of Germanicus. And Suetonius tells us that when Tiberius dies, there is this great kind of upsurge of public, almost ecstasy.
And it's not, Suetonius says, just because Tiberius had died, but because the son of Germanicus has come to power. So he writes, the entire mass of the people classed the memory of his father, Germanicus, to their hearts. So it Suetonius recognizes this, and in his biography, he gives us a very detailed account of Germanicus.
It's almost a kind of biography within the broader biography of Caligula. I mean, you could almost say he's the 13th Caesar.
So he writes about Germanicus in the way that you, if you had a fake Reddit account, would write about yourself on the Restless History Reddit account.
No, of course you don't. But just suppose, just suppose. So this is what Suetonius has to say about Germanicus, who, as you say, he thinks he's absolutely brilliant. It is the broad consensus that no one has ever combined all the blessings of body and spirit to the degree that Germanicus did.
Conspicuous equally for his good looks and his courage, he was brilliant, both as an orator and as a scholar, in Greek as in Latin, celebrated for his generosity of spirit and remarkably successful in his endeavors to secure people's devotion and inspire their affection. I would write that up myself.
Although even then, Germanicus bulks them up. It's a bit like me with my trainer. I've bulked my legs up. It's uncanny. I've bulked them up so much that I'm ripping my trousers apart like the Incredible Hulk. Right. Right. Okay. So Germanicus, he also has a brilliant pedigree, which of course Caligula then inherits.
So he's the grandson of Livia, who is, you know, who marries Augustus, which makes him the nephew of Tiberius. And he's, you know, as we said, he's the absolute golden boy. And so this is why Augustus marries him to his own granddaughter, Agrippina. Basically, Germanicus is being groomed to succeed Tiberius.
And the sense is, certainly with Suetonius, but more generally with Roman historians, that if Germanicus had managed to live, then this would have been brilliant. The world would have been great. Everyone would have been happy. So Germanicus is kind of deliberately trained to be kind of schooled in all the arts required to be an emperor.
So he is sent off by Augustus to succeed Tiberius as commander of the German legions, because obviously he To be a Caesar above all, you need to be able to command the loyalty of the legions. And he does very well, or at least it seems that he does. So his name Germanicus is a kind of honorific.
He gets it because he is marching out across the Rhine to exact vengeance on the German tribes for their massacre of Varus's three legions. And he's endlessly burning villages and putting German tribes to the sword. And back in Rome, they think this is brilliant. So they call him Germanicus.
Although actually, it's evident that Tiberius thinks he's a bit of a show pony and thinks it's actually all a bit of a wasted effort. But the point is that it creates a great stir back in Rome. And so... makes people love him even more. And he's popular not only with the Roman people, but with the legions themselves who were stationed on the Rhine. He's very charismatic.
He's a very successful general. He clearly cares for the legions. And one of the markers of that is that very unusually, and in fact, almost illegally, he has his wife Agrippina and their children with him. And this includes the very young Gaius. Gaius is just a kind of little toddler at this point. And the soldiers, you know, he's their little pet.
And so they make him a legionary outfit and he kind of walks around, toddles around the camp in his armor and his military boots, which in Latin are caligae. So they call it caligula, which are little boots. So that's where the name Caligula comes from.
And in fact, when Augustus dies, there are mutinies all along the line of the Rhine because they're unsure what the kind of political situation is. And they're threatening essentially to reject Tiberius as emperor. And The only thing, Suetonius says, that stops them from launching a full-scale rebellion is the appearance of Caligula.
And Germanicus says, if you don't calm down, I'm going to remove Caligula from the camp because I can't trust you to look after him. And this, Suetonius says, shames them into behaving a bit better. Do you think that story's true? Well, there's a much fuller account of this in Tacitus. And yeah, it does seem a trifle more complicated than that.
They're clearly very sentimental about him. And that vein of sentimentality about Caligula as this darling little boy is definitely a part of...
Showing 341–360 of 535 · page 18 of 27
← Previous
Next →