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.
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And that's where it all goes wrong for Germanicus. Again, very detailed account of this in Tacitus. Suetonius gives a much more truncated account, but essentially what happens is Germanicus is sent out to the east as Tiberius' plenipotentiary, but Tiberius has also sent out one of his kind of aristocratic mates, a guy called Piso, to be governor of Syria, basically to keep an eye on Germanicus.
And the two of them have a spectacular bust up. Germanicus falls ill, dies, and on his deathbed accuses Piso of having poisoned him. And the news that their favourite has not only died, but quite possibly been poisoned when it reaches Rome. I mean, it has a devastating impact and a great kind of rolling surge of sentimental grief completely takes Rome over.
Quite analogous to kind of the Princess Diana situation, which Agrippina then massively ramps up by returning to Rome, holding the urn with Germanicus ashes in it, kind of walking into Rome, clutching it with her, you know, tear streak face and her disheveled hair. And everyone in Rome just goes completely berserk with grief and anger because they blame Piso for his death.
And this anger also kind of involves Tiberius because they think that Tiberius isn't showing adequate grief. So rather like with the queen. Yeah, exactly. So Piso ends up committing suicide because he knows that basically he's doomed. And Tiberius, who is not a sentimental man at all, views it with utter contempt in a kind of Duke of Edinburgh style perspective.
And so it's no wonder that he and Agrippina don't get on, having had that kind of, you know, that kind of relationship. And of course, in due course, Agrippina ends up dead and Caligula's two eldest brothers end up dead, presumably on Tiberius's orders. So... The whole Germanicus story ends very, very sadly with Caligula's two eldest brothers having been eliminated by Tiberius.
He is now the sole surviving son of Germanicus and the sole surviving great grandson of Augustus, which makes him the obvious successor to Tiberius, which in turn makes his position very, very exposed and precarious.
Well, I think it's slightly more complicated than that because essentially the idea is that it's perfectly legitimate for an aristocrat to succeed to the estate and the fortune and the titles and the glory of his ancestors. No one has a problem with that.
And so the pretense is that the August family, the family of Augustus, are just a family like any other, even though obviously what it brings is the rule of the world. So there is a kind of a veiled hypocrisy about it. You are right. Of course, effectively, it is a monarchy, but nobody wants to admit that. Augustus doesn't want to admit it. Tiberius doesn't want to admit it.
The Senate don't want to admit it. You know, everyone keeps it under a veil. And this will become important in explaining... Caligula's policy as emperor and why he becomes so unpopular with the Senate. But in the meanwhile, he is very exposed. So Tiberius does have a grandson of his own, who's a very little boy called Gemellus. But Caligula, he turns 18. He's summoned by Tiberius to Capri.
And Suetonius is... predictably very vituperative about what Caligula gets up to on Capri. So he writes, "...the island proved a treacherous place for him, rife with attempts either to trick or to pressure him into airing his grievances against Tiberius.
But refusing to take the bait, he behaved as though nothing had happened to his family and their ruin had quite slipped his mind, dismissed the wrongs done him with a straight face so convincing that it and was so ready to cringe and crawl before his grandfather and his courtiers that it has been said of him, quite justifiably, that never was there a better slave nor a worse master.
I mean, how can we rely on this? But
again the kind of the resonance of of the myth is so overwhelming that it kind of becomes historically significant in its own right so tiberius watches caligula it is said encourages him in you know joining in watching tortures or erotic floor shows or whatever and is supposed to have said of of caligula that he was rearing someone fated to prove a viper to the roman people
I mean, that's most improbable. Tiberius was, he felt that he was a deep patriot. He would not have wanted to rear a viper. But this is the perspective that will come to be put on it because, of course, Suetonius and other historians know what is going to happen, know the kind of man that Caligula is going to be. So 16th of March, 37, Tiberius dies.
Inevitably, there is what Suetonius describes as a plausible rumor that Caligula is responsible for it. So Suetonius says that Caligula poisons Tiberius. When he doesn't die, he then smothers him with a pillow. And then when that doesn't work, he strangles him. The death of Rasputin or something. Exactly. But presumably this is all taking place in an empty room. So how anyone would know?
I mean, you don't know. And so Caligula then becomes Princeps. Effectively, there isn't anyone else who can... take his place. Gemellus is still, I think he's eight or nine, something, so no way that he can succeed. And so he becomes emperor. And he does so as someone with very, very little experience of public life in Rome.
of how the Senate functions, of the role played by the magistracies, all of these kind of things, which, of course, both Augustus and Tiberius had absolutely been raised in before they became emperor. He also has no military experience. He doesn't really have any friends or allies among the senatorial elite.
And so you may wonder, well, that being so, how could this very young man possibly succeed to the role of the world? And the answer is, is that Caligula clearly has a very kind of unsentimental and you might say pitiless intelligence. And the reason that he hasn't bothered working out how the Senate behave or, you know, the role of the consuls or anything
is that he's recognised that that effectively doesn't really matter anymore, that there are much more significant centres of power in the state, of which the most obvious is this group of guards called the Praetorians. So a Praetorium is the military headquarters and the Praetorian guards are the guards that traditionally look after someone who is in military command.
And Augustus, in his role as supreme commander of the various legions across the empire, You know, he has to have his own Praetorian. And so he has his Praetorian guards and Tiberius has them as well. And he has built the Praetorians a great military base and the walls of Rome. And Caligula has recognized that this is what matters.
Showing 361–380 of 535 · page 19 of 27
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