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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Appearances
And so he's made sure to square them and particularly the head of the Praetorians, a guy called Macro. He also, of course, has the blood of the deified Augustus in his veins. So there's a touch of the divine there. And the people, as we've said, adore him because he is the son of Germanicus. And so when Caligula accompanies Tiberius's body to Rome... He is mobbed and cheered the whole way.
And again, to quote Suetonius, ecstatic crowds of well-wishers called him their shining light, their chick, their poppet, their baby boy. The senators, you know, they're watching this and thinking, oh, lordy. I mean, there's nothing we can do about this. And so they vote, the 24-year-old Caligula, all the powers that it had taken Augustus a lifetime to accumulate.
And obviously they're not particularly happy about that. They must stick in their craw. Yeah, there's nothing, you know, what can they do? They've just got to suck it up.
Yeah, he does. And again, I was thinking perhaps of Charles Spencer. That's not the first one.
No. But in that speech that Charles Spencer gave at his sister's funeral, which kind of really ratcheted up the sense of kind of melodrama and emotional intensity. Caligula, he recognises that his status as the son of Germanicus and of Agrippina is is an important part of his kind of mythos, of his image.
So the moment he's arrived in Rome and become emperor, no sooner has he done that than he's off on a ship off to the prison islands where his mother and his elder brother had died. And he scoops up their ashes and he returns to Rome and he sails up the Tiber. He's on this great ship with his standard fluttering proudly in the prow.
And he lands and he then walks, rather as his mother had walked with the ashes of Germanicus, he walks with the ashes of his mother and his brothers to the great mausoleum of Augustus on the Campus Martius where he lays them. And he does this, Suetonius specifies, at midday when the city was at its busiest. So he wants everyone to see him. And he then goes out of his way
to kind of issue proclamations, essentially saying, you know, the grim age of Tiberius is over. It's a golden age has come. I am a kind of shining model of munificence and benignity. So he issues amnesties to all those who are facing trial on charges that had been brought against them while Tiberius was living.
He revives the popular elections, so the elections, you know, for magistracies that Tiberius had abolished. This goes down well with the people. And he gives a solemn promise that he will never do anything to make anyone hate him and will never give ear to informers. So this is his manifesto.
Also in contrast to Tiberius, very pointed contrast to Tiberius, he lays on all kinds of spectacular shows. So we talked in the previous episode how Tiberius despises the things that the mass of the people like. He has no time for gladiatorial shows. Tiberius' idea of a good time is to have a kind of pub quiz. He likes setting quizzes on literary matters and things like that.
That's his idea of a good time. Not Caligula's. So there are gladiators, there are beast shows, there are chariot races. And Caligula particularly likes chariot races. You know, he identifies very strongly with one of the particular teams, kind of backs them very strongly. And he loves scattering largesse.
So he will do this thing where there are kind of tokens and he'll throw these tokens out into the crowd. And depending on which token you pick up, you will get something. So it might be, I don't know, just a barn or something, or it might be a villa. So he likes to sit there and watch people scrabbling and elbowing each other out of the way to grab them.
And so it only says he was tireless in promoting shows of every description on stages across Rome and sometimes even did so by night, making the whole city blaze with light.
Yeah, and the Roman tradition, which had been manifest throughout the Republic, is that it's brilliant to be old. So that's why Republican portrait busts, they're always showing themselves with kind of sagging jowls and crow's feet and everything like that. And there's an instinctive sense that young people...
are just kind of naturally violent and aggressive and haven't learnt to temper their appetites. And Caligula seems set on kind of illustrating this. So they resent the way that he kind of makes jokes and he sniggers loudly, which is obviously very off-putting if you're giving a grand oration in the Senate. They hate the way that he's always going on about chariot racing.
Caligula has a kind of thing, I mean, it's basically kind of a bit like driving a very fast sports car. He has an insane number of horses that draw him on his chariot through the streets of Rome. He's cutting a dash in a way that they find very, very offensive. And of course, you know, all these gladiator shows and stuff, I mean, it's expensive. Tiberius had been very, very abstemious and mean.
So the treasury is quite full, but Caligula's kind of burning through it at an absolute rate of knots. But they haven't really got any choice except to hold their breath and cross their fingers and trust that everything works. we'll be okay.
And it is a good sign for them that along with all his other kind of measures designed to make him look good, he said that he's, you know, there aren't going to be any more treason trials. We're not going to have them. So you can rely on that.
So the first eight months of his rule, you know, there were worrying signs, but there hasn't been kind of any major confrontation between Caligula and the Senate. And then in October 37, so as you say, eight months after coming to power, Caligula falls ill. And this is a very dangerous moment because this isn't a formal monarchy.
There isn't really, there aren't set rules establishing how, you know, when one princeps dies, a new princeps comes to power. And so the moment Caligula falls ill, it looks like he's going to die. All the heavyweights in his administration are scrabbling around trying to work out who his successor will be.
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