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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It's obviously very funny for all Caligula's hangers-on. You do that with Theo. I do, I do. So the time will come where he will inflict a terrible vengeance, because what happens is that Cacicairea and various other Praetorians organise a conspiracy, and this is much more fatal. As is proven on the 24th of January, AD 41, Caligula is about to leave for Alexandria.
So there's, you know, if you're a conspirator, you need to get a move on. And that day he's staging a games in this great temporary theater on the Palatine. Caligula seems to be in an absolutely brilliant mood. He hasn't reserved any seats for the senators, so he sits there and enjoys watching them scrabble and try and get the best seat. He finds that very funny.
Also finds it very funny when a flamingo is sacrificed and the blood of this flamingo splashes all over one of the senators, you know, blotting his robe. And so Caligula has a good laugh about that as well. Lunch comes, he decides he'll go and eat in the privacy of his own palace. So he stands up and heads off towards his own private quarters.
He's just about to go inside when he's approached by a courtier who tells him that some Greek boys of very noble background have been rehearsing a musical in his honour. And so Caligula turns aside to inspect them. And actually, I think that's the kind of interesting example of Caligula not as a monster. I mean, that's quite, you know, he's told these boys have been rehearsing.
He kind of breaks off from going to lunch to go and hear them because, you know, he clearly recognizes that they will appreciate that. And he's walking down this passageway to go and listen to these Greek boys when he runs into Cassius Kyria. And Cassius Kyria asks for the day's password. And as usual, it's an insulting one. So, you know, I'm a massive girl's blouse, something like that.
Cassius Carrieri is not amused. He draws his sword and he strikes at Caligula's neck. It misses and hits the shoulder blade. Caligula stumbles, crashes down onto the ground, but he's still very much alive. He's followed by his litter bearers. They have kind of great wooden poles and they come to the rescue of Caligula.
Again, a kind of illustration of the way in which he can command a degree of loyalty, but there's no prospect of them being able to defend Caligula because Cassius Carrieri is backed up with Praetorians who have They have hard steel. And Caligula is soon kind of on the ground being slashed to pieces by a kind of hail of swords. He's dead. Cassius Chaerea decapitates him.
We're told that several of the Praetorians stabbed their swords through Caligula's genitals. So again, this idea of kind of sexual humiliation, which Caligula had repeatedly practiced, and now it's kind of inflicted on him. And there are even rumours that some of them pick up and eat his flesh, which I'm sure is exaggerated. So this is where Josephus comes into his own, the great Judean historian.
He has quite a detailed account that seems to draw on quite authoritative sources. And so Caligula perishes as he had lived, kind of shadowed by horror, by horrific rumour and by kind of malevolent jokes. And that is the end of him. And so as we approach the end of this episode, it's probably time to just try and kind of go through and work out what kind of credibility can we put on this?
How can we make sense of all these seemingly mad stories that are told about it?
Right, so there is one... Obvious example of that. There's one story that's told about him that we can be, I'd say, kind of 99% sure isn't true. And that's the story that he committed incest with his sisters. So he has three sisters and his favourite is called Drusilla. And he is clearly devoted to her.
When he falls ill, he names her as his heir, which is a striking thing for a woman in a society as patriarchal as Rome to be appointed the heir of a princeps. She then dies and he does genuinely seem to have been kind of crazed with grief and he proclaims her as a god. And we know that that happens because we have kind of independent evidence for it.
But the idea that he'd been sleeping with her or that he'd been sleeping with his other two sisters, we can be confident that that's not true. I think for two reasons. The first is that the notion that a powerful Claudian, and Caligula is, as well as being a Julian, a Claudian, sleeps with his sisters is an absolute stereotype. It's told about Claudian after Claudian after Claudian.
So it's an accusation that is just kind of waiting to be served up. I mean, you might still say, well, I mean, that doesn't prove that it didn't happen in this case, but it kind of does. And I'll quote you a German scholar, Alois Winteling, who's written brilliantly about Caligula. He points out not only that Suetonius is the first to mention it.
but also that there were contemporaries of Caligula who were familiar with aristocratic circles in Rome and well-informed and who heap invective on the emperor, they would hardly have failed to mention such a charge had it been in circulation then. So they would have mentioned it.
Suetonius is the first person to mention it. Therefore, we can be fairly confident that that accusation isn't true. But that explanation doesn't wash with everything that is told about him. because there are substantiating reports that suggest that some at least of these stories are true. So how do we explain them?
And another possibility, which again, Suetonius is the first to suggest, is that Caligula was mad. So Suetonius writes, it is my theory, and I have no doubt it is the correct one, very modestly, that his mental infirmity was due to the coexistence within his personality of twin but directly contradictory flaws, extreme self-confidence and abject timidity.
but again if he'd been mad contemporaries would have pointed it out they don't Is there not a claim when he fell ill? Yes, it's a popular theory. I don't think there's any evidence for that at all.
Right, so that's why Suetonius mentions that he's both extremely self-confident and abjectly timid. I mean, I think that's exactly the kind of... example that suggests it. But I mean, that could be true, but it doesn't mean he's mad. And in fact, Caligula seems to have had considerable political acumen. I mean, what he does to the Senate is very, very brutal, but pretty effective.
And when there is that military uprising against him, I mean, he outsmarts a seasoned military commander. So, you know, he may be malevolent, he may be pitiless, he may even be sadistic, but
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