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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But I don't think you need it as an explanation because I think it's actually fairly clear where Caligula is coming from. And we've already hinted at it in this episode, which is that Caligula is a populist, or to put it in Latin, a popularis. And we've talked before, both in this series and in the podcast more generally, about how politics in Rome is about vibes rather than about policy.
It's about whether... you appeal to the kind of traditional elites or whether you appeal over their heads to the masses. And you've got to remember that the autocracy established by Augustus has only been in existence for 60 years. And the concrete hasn't set. People who are ruling as emperors are trying to work out what policy they should adopt, what role should be.
I mean, and the people all around him are as well. And Augustus had embodied the popularist tradition and the kind of the more aristocratic traditionalist perspective. Tiberius had been a traditionalist. Caligula... I think partly out of temperament and partly because he correctly recognises the weakness of the Senate, goes all in with the popularist tradition.
So his instinct is to kind of flatter and woo the people, to give them the entertainments that he himself enjoys. And of course, the spectacle of his enjoyment... makes him very, very popular with the people and conversely to kind of turn against the Senate and rather than to appease senators, to crush them. And it's a strategy to which he brings very distinctive qualities.
And I think that one of them clearly is a certain relish for cruelty and domination. I think that the sources are just too insistent on that for us to kind of, you know, whitewash it. I think he clearly was, you know, In that sense, a completely terrifying man.
A very nasty piece of work. And with a particular focus, I think, on sexual humiliation. Again, even if the stories about him sleeping with senators' wives in dinner parties or setting up a brothel on the Palatine are exaggerated, the fact that these stories are told... clearly are drawing on authentic memories of the trauma that senators were made to go through.
And for reasons, again, that we've talked in this series, striking at an aristocratic Roman sense of sexual self-respect is absolutely devastating to their whole sense of status. Caligula correctly identifies that as the way to really kind of break them.
It's so shocking that... Obviously, some of his supporters, some of the people who are prone to support him, just kind of laugh in admiration at how far he has pushed things. And this is a strategy that Nero will adopt as well. And it was a strategy in a kind of much more modulated sense that Julius Caesar had done too.
You know, that you shock people and the shock becomes kind of politically charged. And...
Right. And I think also it's the fact that they have the blood of a god in their veins. And so they can cast themselves as being somehow more than mortal. They're doing the kind of things that gods would do or heroes in Greek mythology. This is very overt with Nero. But it's, I think, pretty clearly the same with Caligula. I think he is kind of blazing that as a policy for an emperor to follow.
I mean, you have to basically be a descendant of Augustus to do it, which is why when Nero dies and there are no more descendants of Augustus to rule as emperor, that tradition ends. But both of them are kind of making play with it. And...
He fuses that sense of essentially behaving like a God, behaving like a kind of, you know, one of a hero from Greek myth with a genius for spectacle and an eye for recognizing how to undercut the privileges and assumptions of the Senate. And the single best example of this, again, a very well-known story,
is that he builds this huge three-mile pontoon bridge in the Bay of Naples, or specifically in the Bay of Bailly, and he then parades across it. First time he rides on a horse, and then he rides in this kind of great chariot. And Suetonius offers this not as an example of his monstrosities, but as one of the good things, you know, one of the positives of his reign.
And in fact, Suetonius' grandfather had watched it and had said how amazing it was. And we don't know exactly when he does this, but I think the likeliest date is when he comes back from Germany and Gaul, because I think it's pretty clear that what he's doing is staging a triumph to upstage all triumphs. Because to hold a triumph on the sea, I mean, that's the kind of thing a god does.
But also triumphs, there's a set route in Rome that you follow, and it's up to the Senate to license them. And Caligula is saying to the Senate,
So this is the last kind of attribute that Caligula brings to his model of kind of targeted terrorism, you might say, which is that he's funny. And people like humour in a domineering political figure. You know, there's kind of contemporary evidence for that, I would say.
And Caligula is, you know, we've said all along that there is a kind of vein of dark comedy in Suetonius's portrait that I think derives from Caligula himself in large part. Suetonius, I think, doesn't get the point of Caligula's joke about his horse. So it's popularly said that Caligula made his horse a consul. That's not what Suetonius says. Suetonius says that he planned to make Incartatus.
a consul. He also claims that Suetonius loves incartatus, which literally means hotspur. So he gives incartatus a stable fashioned out of marble, an ivory manger, purple saddlecloths and collars studded with jewels. And he bestowed as well a fully furnished mansion. Now, all of these are basically the markers of senatorial status. It's what senators want and have.
And to be a consul is the ultimate dream of any ambitious senator. And Caligula, by giving Incitatus a palace and by saying that he can make him a consul, is effectively undermining all the pretensions of the senatorial class. He's saying, you know, I can make my horse a consul or I can make you a consul. It's very humiliating for the Senate. It's very funny for Caligula.
But of course, in the long run, the joke is on him because actually nobody today remembers the joke. It just confirms his reputation as a madman. And it's, you know, the other example of the joke being on Caligula is the fact that Cassius Carrier ends up killing him. And my own suspicion is... I mentioned I went in and talked to the writers of Succession, the Murdoch's as the Caesar's drama.
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