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
And the obvious successor is this young lad, Gemellus, kind of, you know, 13 or 14 by this point. Tiberius' only grandson. So they are going off and kind of paying court to him and preparing to elevate him to the throne. And meanwhile, there is this absolute toady, this lickspittle, a guy called Atanius, who swears a solemn oath that if only the gods will restore Caligula to health.
then he will go into the arena and fight publicly as a gladiator. And obviously, he doesn't expect that this would happen. It would be unthinkable for someone of his rank and age to go into the arena and fight a trained killer. But he's basically hedging his bets. If Caligula survives, then it'll be great. He'll approve of his loyalty. And if he doesn't, then no one will remember it.
Caligula does recover, I think, against the odds. And he rises from his sickbed and he's informed what Artanius has done and also more significantly what the captain of the Praetorians and his leading senatorial backers, what they've been up to going around and paying court to Gemellus. And he moves with absolute lethal dispatch. So first off, he sends two soldiers to Gemellus.
who sit the boy down and take out their knives and show Gemellus the best way to kill himself and then stand there and watch while Gemellus kills himself. And that's the end of him. Gemellus's would-be patrons, including the prefect of the Praetorians, are likewise ordered to commit suicide, which they do.
And Atanius, this guy who has vowed that he will fight a gladiator if only Caligula recovers. Well, so this is what Suetonius says happened. Caligula takes him at his word and he forces this poor guy. I mean, he's not at all the kind of person who is fitted either by background or I think by physique to face up to a trained gladiator out into the arena. Atanius is killed very briskly.
He's dragged off with a hook across the sand. His body is dumped and Caligula's sense of humour has this kind of bloody punchline. And People in the arena undoubtedly found it funny. I mean, it's exactly the kind of joke that would have appealed to a crowd of people gathered to watch blood sports.
But it also sends a pretty chilling message to the Roman elites that, you know, there's no more Mr. Nice Guy. And there's the definite sense that Caligula has been biding his time And now that he has the evidence that some of the Senate have been conspiring against him as he sees it by kind of going after Gabellas, he is ready for the kill.
And Suetonius, he has this kind of wonderful pivot in his biography. It's one of, I think, the single greatest line ever written in any biography ever. Where he writes, enough of the princeps. What remains to be described is the monster.
One of my green flags is if I meet someone who loves John Lennon, I know we're going to be great friends.
As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Discover your relationship green flags with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash rest is history. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash rest is history.
So there are various examples that Suetonius gives of the character of a monster that he says Caligula has. Perhaps the most shocking is that Caligula demands worship as a god. So Augustus is worshipped as a god, but not in his lifetime. Augustus had really stamped down against any thought of that. But Caligula, Suetonius says he's all in.
So Suetonius reports that Caligula orders some of the most famous statues of the gods from Greece. Brought to Rome, he replaces the heads of the gods with his own head. Senators compete to serve him as priests. They offer up all kinds of sacrifices to him. So Suetonius specifies flamingos, peacocks, black grouse, two varieties of guinea hen, pheasants.
There are times when Caligula will dress up as various gods, so sometimes as Jupiter, even shockingly as Venus. And there are other times where he will claim to be talking to Jupiter. So this is all clear evidence of either monstrousness or insanity or both. Suetonius says that he essentially goes out of his way to humiliate the elites in every way he can.
And obviously the most humiliating thing that you can do to a senator is to treat him as a slave.
So Suetonius specifies that he would brand senators, equestrians who had offended him with branding irons, after which, Suetonius writes, he would condemn them either to the mines or to the building of roads or to be thrown to wild beasts or to be shut up in cages on all fours like animals or to be sawn in half. So none of that's fun.
He takes his vendetta against the elites, even to the extent of toppling their ancestors. So statues of famous men from Rome's past, Suetonius says, are toppled and smashed to pieces. And he also says that members of the aristocracy with famous names, they're told to get rid of these names. So the Pompeys, for instance, Pompey the Great, they have this name Magnus.
They're told they can't use that anymore. That would be the kind of example. And there's also very kind of pointed sexual humiliations that he inflicts on them. So he will invite senators and their wives to dinner. And while they're kind of lying there, Caligula will appraise the various wives of these senators.
If there's one that he particularly feels drawn to, he'll take her away, sleep with her. and then send her back to her husband, all kind of disheveled and is making it very clear what's happened. Caligula will then come back and offer a kind of commentary on her performance. And the wretched husband just kind of lies there looking a bit sick.
And this is where the detail comes in that Caligula sets up a brothel in his own great palace on the Palatine Hill above the Forum. And he staffs it with married women and boys, both of whom are of very high status. So, I mean, all good stuff.
Yeah, that's right. And so it is difficult to kind of to get a sense of it as a narrative. But I think it's just about possible if you map Suetonius' account with the various other fragments of evidence that we have to kind of get a narrative of Caligula's reign. So, you know, he comes to power first eight months. It's kind of OK.
Showing 401–420 of 535 · page 21 of 27
← Previous
Next →