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- It was mid-afternoon

on the 22nd of January, 41 A.D.

In the morning, the emperor Caligula

had been to the theater.

He had a bit of a hangover,

so he decided to skip lunch and freshen up

with a quick bath.

That's where he was going, all on his own,

down a back alleyway in the palace compound

when he was jumped by a posse of soldiers.

The first blow to his neck, or some said to his chin

didn't kill him, but the next 30 or so did.

One nasty rumor is that the assassins ate his flesh.

Caligula was just 28 years old.

He'd been in power for less than four years.

It was an extraordinary moment in Roman history.

Only Rome's third emperor, it's Caligula

who has come to stand for the corruption, horror,

and excess of Imperial Rome.

Psychopath and depraved,

he is said to have ruled by the sword,

to have made his horse into a constable,

and to have insisted he be worshiped as a living god,

and ever since, he has become a template for tyranny,

with chilling echoes right up to our own age.

One of Caligula's favorite sayings was let them hate me,

so long as they fear me.

But, how much of his story is true?

On the throne for just four short years,

Caligula has left us little physical evidence,

and to get the myth means a detective hunt

for clues all over the Roman world.

From the battlegrounds of his war hero father in Germany,

to the island of Capri, where people said he was schooled

in the art of imperial power,

to the astonishing luxury of his life as emperor.

I'll uncover a Rome full of intrigue,

murder, and dynastic power,

and come face to face with not just a monster,

but the man.

Who was Caligula?

And, why has he gone down in history

as one of Rome's biggest villains?

(haunting music)

(melancholy piano music)

The first clear sight we have of Caligula

in any historical record is a long way from Rome.

From about the age of two,

Caligula spent his childhood on the road,

on the empire's northern frontier,

parceled around from army camp to army camp,

with his mum and his dad,

one of Rome's most charismatic military commanders.

By now, Rome had been under one man rule for just 50 years,

and a generation after the first emperor Augustus,

power was in the hands of one family; Caligula's.

His father was Germanicus,

the blue-eyed prince of the imperial family.

The nephew of the emperor Tiberius,

and himself intent for the throne.

His mother was Acropena,

the granddaughter of the first emperor, Augustus,

who was himself the adopted son of Julius Cesar.

In the world of ancient Rome,

you didn't get more blue-blooded than Caligula.

He was born Gaius Cesar Germanicus,

a name he inherited from his father.

It means something like thrasher of the Germans.

And these were the family's fields of honor.

The killing fields where Caligula's

ancestors cemented their reputation and political power.

Today, the Roman museum in London has been built

not far from one of the legionary camps

where Caligula spent time as a boy.

Inside, there is a remarkable collection

of Roman military gear,

from medals of honor,

to portraits of Caligula's dad, Germanicus,

and mum, Acropena, dished out to soldiers,

to what was then, the most technologically advanced

armor and weaponry on the planet.

There're cavalry helmets and daggers,

the remains of frighteningly powerful crossbows,

and rainstorms of piercing arrows.

All of which remind us that Caligula's

childhood playground was not some cozy peacekeeping mission,

but a vicious warzone.

But, perhaps, the museum's most intriguing artifact,

is also its most humble.

This is a perfectly preserved Roman Caliga,

a standard, army-issue soldier's sandal,

made of tough leather with hobnails on the sole.

If there's one object that's really associated

with Caligula, it's the Caliga.

The story goes that when he was a boy,

and he was living on military camps with his parents,

his mum had him dressed up in the uniform

of an ordinary Roman soldier,

right down to the Caligi.

He was a kind of baby squaddy,

a legionary mascot,

and when we can think of the name Caligula,

as a rather grand, imperial name.

In fact, it was a little boy's nickname.

It means little boots, booty-kins,

or the kid in the Caligi.

When he grew up, Caligula hated it.

It must have seemed as if he was being called

Emperor Diddums, or something,

and, if you'd have asked him what his name was,

he would've said, quite correctly,

his name was the Emperor Gauis.

The fact that, even now,

we still call him bootykins,

shows just how successful his enemies were

in pouring scorn over him.

He himself would've been horrified,

to think of us calling him Caligula.

(bell ringing)

In the 1960's, in this small hilltop town in Umbria,

a group of workers dug up an enormous bronze statue

of Caligula's father, Germanicus,

that once stood, on what was probably an army parade ground,

on the edge of town.

(triumphant music)

It shows him in the classic pose of an imperial leader,

arm outstretched addressing his troops,

and standing beneath him,

one can't but help the status and glamor

of the man in whose shadow

the little Caligula grew up.

One theory is that the statue was put up by Caligula himself

after becoming emperor,

in memory of the event that

radically changed the course of his life.

For in 19 A.D., when Caligula was just seven,

Germanicus suddenly died on a mission to Syria,

poisoned, he claimed from his deathbed,

by the Roman governor Piso,

even, perhaps, under the orders of his own uncle,

the emperor Tiberius.

When news of Germanicus's death reached Rome,

there was an absolute explosion of grief.

Life stopped, it's said.

Ordinary people wept in the street.

They wrote up on the walls, give us back Germanicus.

The only people not grieving

were the emperor and his mother.

They weren't seen in public,

and they didn't authorize a full state funeral,

when the ashes of Germanicus came home

to be put in the family tomb.

Eventually, Piso was put on trial,

but a few days in,

he conveniently committed suicide,

and the trial was turned into something

more like a public inquiry,

and this is a copy of the record of that public inquiry.

The formal report inscribed in bronze,

dated the 10th of December 20 A.D..

Basically, the message is,

the only person guilty here was Piso,

conveniently dead,

but the most extraordinary bit of the document,

and it's real point, is down here,

where it says that one of these reports is to be inscribed

in the chief city of every province,

and that it's to be inscribed in Hibernes,

in the winter quarters of each legion.

(speaking in foreign language)

This is mass communication, Roman style.

It's a major attempt to get

the official message across, everywhere.

It's hard not to think it all might not have been

too little too late.

The suspicion circling around Germanicus's death

would mark the start of an increasingly bitter feud

between Caligula's mother Acropena, and the palace.

(haunting piano music)

Convinced that Acropena and her sons

were plotting against him,

Tiberius banished her to a remote island

off the coast of Italy.

And, shortly afterwards, in 31 A.D.,

he summoned the young Caligula, age 19 or so,

to the island of Capri in the bay of Naples.

This was the seat of Tiberius's power away from Rome.

It was from here that he ruled the empire by proxy,

from a whole suite of imperial villas,

built high into the cliffs.

Tucked away in a museum on the island

is one small trace of Caligula's stay here.

This may not look very much.

Just like a bit of old Roman brick stuck in a wall,

but actually it's the only physical evidence

that we have Caligula's presence on Capri,

'cause it's got his name stamped across it,

Gauis Cesar, and that raises the question

of what he was doing here,

and why Tiberius brought him,

and there've been all kinds of theories.

Was he here to be under surveillance,

or is he here because Tiberius like the kid?

Or, was he here to be groomed to be emperor,

and learn to start building like an emperor should?

Away from prying eyes, it was here,

Roman writers later surmised,

that Tiberius schooled the young Caligula

in the dark arts of tyranny and excess.

The stories they told of what Tiberius got up to here

are all fantastical sex and violence.

Those people he wanted to get rid of,

he had chucked over the cliff,

and he stationed a platoon of sailors

in boats at the bottom

to finish them off with their oars

if they weren't yet dead.

As for poolside fun, he had a troop of little boys,

his little fishes, he called them.

They'd been specially trained to swim between his thighs

while he was in the pool, and nibble his genitals.

Whatever Tiberius really got up to,

we do know that Caligula's time in his charge

was defined by remarkable brutality.

much of which was aimed at his own family.

While Caligula was living in the lap of luxury,

his mother, Acropena, was beaten up.

She lost her sight in one eye.

She went on hunger strike, was force-fed,

until finally she starved to death.

Not only that, both his brothers came to violent ends.

One by one, Caligula had lost his father,

and his mother, and his two older brothers.

He, and his sisters, were the only ones in the family left.

It's a chilling reminder that in Rome,

the closer you were to power, the harder it was to survive.

In the vaults of the British museum,

is on macabre memento from Capri,

that sums up the young Caligula's life

in the emperor's court.

It looks like a real skull, but actually,

it's an extraordinarily lifelike work of art made of marble.

This must've made a stunning centerpiece

on the imperial dining table.

Rich Romans loved the idea of eat drink and be merry,

because tomorrow you'll die,

but if you put it back into context

of the imperial court,

there're more sinister messages.

For a start, there's the violence of the emperor himself.

Anyone sitting around this at the imperial dining table

must've been aware that their lives hung on a knife's edge,

that they could be flavor of the month one minute,

and dead the next.

The best advice was never to let your feelings show,

keep poker-faced, and there's a horrible story

of an imperial princess, who was dining one evening,

with her brother, he keels over, dead,

probably poisoned.

What does she do?

What all good imperial princesses should do,

she just goes on eating.

In fact, we're told that when Caligula was on Capri,

and his relatives were being bumped off one by one,

he learnt never to show any emotion at all.

Underlying all this nastiness,

was an issue that the Roman empire

always struggled to work out, the problem of succession.

Even though Roman power had now become a family business,

since the founder, Theo Augustus,

there was no fixed system of passing the power on.

A fatal flaw that colors the whole Caligula story.

- Succession plays the problem for the Romans

for two reason.

First, the emperor isn't a real job.

It's supposed to be a bundle of personal powers,

and so you couldn't pass those on in a normal way.

But, the other problem is that Augustus and Olivia

didn't have children with each other,

even though each had children with other people,

and what that means is there isn't a clear line

of succession, a son to follow a father,

a grandson to follow a son,

so when an emperor begins to seem a bit sick

or unreliable, or gets old,

all sorts of groups begin to drop you for power.

There's the legions in the provinces,

there's the imperial bodyguards in Rome.

You've got the courtiers,

you have the ex slaves in the palace,

who wants to know who's going to own them next,

and then you've got various imperial women

trying to get their sons into power,

and so it's a very, very unstable situation.

- And, is that instability, the uncertainty of it all,

that both produces real violence, and also

allegations and rumors of violence?

- That's right, first thing that Tiberius does

when he succeeds Augustus is he sends a boat to an island

on which one of his relatives has been kept in exile

for decades, to have the boy killed,

because he could've been an alternative,

and what does Caligula do when he takes power?

One of the first things he does

is he has his cousin, a boy named Tiberius Gabellus,

murdered because he's somebody else

who could've been emperor.

- What's amazing is that in the first

100 years of the empire, there's not a single emperor,

about whose death their isn't some kind of allegation,

that he was bumped off, y'know?

That the poisoned mushrooms had done him in.

There is that story of Caligula,

who, two people said, had actually smothered

Tiberius when he was sleep in order to take power himself.

- And, the other story is he got the captain

of the Praetorian guard to do it for him,

because emperors have people

to do their smothering for them.

(spooky piano music)

- However Tiberius really died,

two days after his death, on March the 18th, 37 A.D.,

the senate declared Caligula Rome's third emperor.

He could now triumphantly return to Rome

as the ruler of the known world.

He was just 24 years old.

At the time, he must've been the best choice,

as the childhood mascot of the troops,

and the song of the great Germanicus,

he has the support of the army,

and as the great grandson of Augustus,

he could claim a direct bloodline

back to the founder of the dynasty.

And to the adoration of the crowds,

one of Caligula's first acts as emperor

was to make a huge play of his family connections,

braving the stormy seas,

he made a great song and dance

of bring the ashes of his dead mother back to Rome

to bury her with his own hands,

here in the enormous family tomb,

build by his great grandfather,

the mausoleum of Augustus.

(bell ringing)

At the capital museum in Rome,

the whacking tombstone Caligula put up to his mother

still survives, and it's so much more

than just a grave marker.

It starts by saying Ossa,

these are the bones, in fact the ashes of Acropena,

the daughter of Marcus Agrippe,

the granddaughter of Neptus,

of Augustus, the first emperor, who's now a god, a dio,

and she's the wife of Germanicus Cesar,

the golden boy of the empire,

and she's the mother, matre, of Gauis Cesar Augustus

Germanicus Winkeps, the emperor Caligula.

In a way, it says just as much about Caligula.

This is his manifesto, his right to imperial rule,

but there was another way in which Caligula

could get the message across about who is now in charge,

by the money he minted, stamped with his portrait,

and which he showered down on the people of Rome.

Caligula is supposed to be

absolutely, spectacularly generous.

He's said to have, on some occasions,

gone up to the first floor of a building in the forum,

and actually thrown money, thrown coins at the crowd.

They would've got some good cash to take home,

but, more important, in a way, you also go home

with a message, because one of the ways

that emperors could get their version of events,

of their slogans across to the Roman people at large,

was to put them on the coins.

So you literally carried around

the imperial propaganda in your pocket.

In Caligula's case,

they hammer home the point about the royal blood

flowing through his veins.

This one says Caligula on one side,

his father, the Great Germanicus, on the other.

Another shows a carriage parading a statue of his mother,

in celebration, founded in her honor,

and, even more important, this one shows Caligula

sacrificing a bull at the temple of

his great grandfather, the god Augustus.

But, this one has an even more pointed message.

On the one side there's a really gorgeous portrait

of Caligula, and his name here, Gauis Cesar,

but on the other, you can see what must be him

standing on a box, his arm outstretched,

and he's talking to a group of soldiers,

and it says at the top,

(speaking in foreign language)

The speech of the emperor to his troops,

and, underneath C-O-H, short for Cohortes,

the cohorts of the Patorian Guard,

and the message is this, is clear.

Whatever family background you have,

whatever deals you've done,

nobody in Rome can become an emperor,

u less they've got the support of the army.

And this is what many modern despots and tyrants

have also discovered.

Without the support of the troops,

you're either deposed, or you're dead.

These coins give us an idea

of how an emperor branded his image

in the days before TV and radio.

Alongside stamping his face on the cash,

cheap cameos of Caligula were cut from glass and clay,

and portraits were sent out across the empire

to be copied and turned into

a whole gallery of imperial statues,

and if you've ever wondered why there are so many heads

and so few bodies,

one reason is that the heads

were always meant to be replaceable.

You can see just how easy it would be

to take one head out and pop another one in.

Once estabilshed on the throne,

one of the ways that Rome's new emperors

cemented their power was to build.

And, even if Caligula ruled for just four years,

we know that some of Rome's most iconic, ancient monuments

started life under his watch.

The aqueducts, the aqua claudia, and the andean north,

bringing water from over 40 miles away

to the center of Rome,

the obelisk that now stands in front of St. Peters

is also Caligulan, shipped over from Egypt

on an enormous, specially built boat.

And then, there was the most obvious statement

of Caligula's power.

The imperial HQ on the Paletine Hill,

whose Latin name, Palatium,

gives us our own word, Palace.

Most of what we now see here

dates from long after Caligula's death.

His own buildings were destroyed

in the great fire of Rome in 64 A.D.,

but it seems that Caligula was the first emperor

to remodel the imperial residences,

to make them more palatial, in our terms.

The emperor didn't just live on the Palentine hill.

Caligula also inherited vast pleasure gardens called Horti,

on the outskirts of the city.

One of them, the Horti Lamiarni

is still a garden of sorts in modern Rome,

and it's the location of the only eye-witness account

of Caligula in action that we have.

It was written by Phylo, a Jew from Alexandria,

who had come to petition the emperor

against political discrimination back home,

and it's a rare glimpse of Caligula the emperor

face to face with his subjects.

When Phylo and his delegation get to their appointment,

they discover that the emperor's mind

is actually on home improvements,

and they traipse around after him through the gardens,

as he goes from pavilion to pavilion,

planning his makeover.

When they get his attention,

they bow down to the ground.

It doesn't cut much ice with Caligula,

who simply says, so you're god haters.

You don't think I'm a god, then?

And, he follows that up by asking them,

anyway, why don't you eat pork?

One of the Jews thinks quickly on his feet,

and says, well, quite a lot of people

don't a lot of things.

I mean, some people don't eat lamb.

I'm not surprised, said Caligula.

He tastes horrible.

And, the Phyluns all laugh.

It's a wonderful and horrible vignette of

the day to day exercise of imperial power.

To know cruelty here, there's even violence,

there's even bits of banter,

but all the same, it's humiliating.

Caligula's message is quite clear.

My fancy window glass is more important

than the Jews of Alexandria.

It's a revealing story,

and it also tells us a lot more

than we might think about imperial luxury.

One of the ways emperors dazzled you with their power,

rammed it in your face

was the very trappings of their world,

and it's from the pleasure garden

that we can still find traces of Caligulan splendor.

From them have come some of the most impressive

and famous statues of ancient Rome,

such as the Discobala, the discus thrower,

the version of an earlier Greek masterpiece.

There's the Maid of Ancio,

found at the palace where we think Caligula was born,

and the sleeping hermaphrodite,

a wonderfully urbane joke,

the kind the palace just loved.

On the one side, she's a luscious, sleeping woman.

On the other, she's definitely more of a bloke.

And, in the 1870s, excavators dug up an astonishing find

in one of the imperial pleasure gardens

that used to be Caligulas.

Hundreds of precious stones, rubies, garnets,

carnelias, bits of rock crystal and amber

embedded in amazing frames of filigry silver and gold.

When this stuff was first discovered in the 1870s,

no one could quite work out what it was.

One idea is that they'd come across a throne room,

but there's just so much of this stuff,

I think we have to imagine precious stones

were literally embedded in the palace walls,

twinkling in the lights at night, looking amazing,

or perhaps a bit tacky during the day.

We do know that Caligula was dead keen on pearls,

and one contemporary witness says he actually liked

slippers with pearls sewn into them,

which, if you ask him, is a far cry

from those little military booties he started out in.

It's a cute vision, a newly crowned emperor,

showing off his pearled slippers to his flunkies,

but it's also another example of how the imperial family

lived the ostentation of their world

to unsettle and disarm.

This is one of the most iconic and impressive

imperial paintings from ancient Rome.

The so-called garden room,

designed for Caligula's great grandmother, Olivia,

in whose home, Caligula spent time as a boy.

An impossibly utopian scene,

the trees all full of perfectly ripe fruit.

Every flower was perfectly in bloom,

and in the bloom of the flickering lamps, 2,000 years ago,

it would be hard to know whether it was a real garden

or a painting of one.

And, of course, that sort of illusion

is one of the most impressive trademarks of Roman art,

but it's also slightly unsettling.

The blurring of the boundaries

between the fake and the real

is one of the factors about Roman cult culture

that made it so scary.

You never quite know whether what you're looking at

is real or an imitation, pretense or reality.

On the one hand, what you think is real

turns out not to be, and there's a great story

about going to dinner with Caligula,

looking at the fantastic spread, it all looks wonderful,

until you spot the food on the table is made of gold.

It's very precious, but what're you supposed to do?

Do you pretend to eat it?

And, on the other hand, what you think is fake

can turn out to be deadly real.

Another story of Caligula having what looked like

a practiced gladiatorial bout with an opponent

with wooden swords, except Caligula had a real weapon.

So, this all looks very impressive.

It's all very lovely, which it reminds us

that there's a more shadowy, sinister world

of smoke and mirrors in the imperial court.

(dramatic music)

It's a perfect example of the choreography of Suret

that lurks in everyday palace life.

A threat, if you think about it

from the emperor's point of view

that worked both ways.

The labyrinthine corridors of the palace

were teeming with people.

Agents, dignitaries, and spies,

and the collectors of the imperial rubbish.

It must've been a security nightmare.

How did the emperor ever know who was who?

How did he martial his own security?

They did have a system of passwords.

The emperor would issue a new one each day,

and he would have to say the word,

if you were challenged, but that wasn't enough,

for the most anxious emperors.

One of them is said to have had the walls of the palace

lined with mirrors, so you really could see

who was coming up behind.

In this world, where the emperor

was always watching his back,

the people he ended up trusting the most

weren't just his personal security force,

but also his slaves.

And, high up on the walls of the museum in Rome

is the record of the staff

for one of Caligula's actual palaces.

Each one tells us what they did.

Here's one for example,

Saternina Spira, that's short for Spirista.

Spirista means ball player,

but perhaps Saternina was a personal trainer.

We've got Ardaeus, he's a gubernaut,

or a helmsman, perhaps, on the imperial yacht,

but perhaps my favorite of all is this chap here,

Venustus Schpeck, now Schpeck could be short for

Speculatl, so Venustus might've been a watchmen or a spy,

but it can also be sort for Specularius,

in which case he was a guy who made the mirrors.

Some wonderful snapshots of the underbelly of court life.

Would it be a mistake to think

that they were just lowly servants?

Some of them played a vital role in the palaces strategy

of control and fear.

Aphitos here, he's an invitato,

he's the guy who controls the guest list

at the palace dinner parties.

Now, Roman aristocrats wouldn't have touched

this kind of job with a barge pole,

but these guys could have quite a lot of power,

and, Romans told quite a lot of sometimes wild stories

about just how powerful these imperial slaves

and ex-slaves were.

Caligula's supposed to have had one called Protogenes,

who carried around with him, under each arm,

with more than a bit of menace, and a bit of hammocksing

at the same time, two different files.

One labeled dagger, the other labeled sword,

and they contained the lists in side

of who was to be put to death, and how.

It's not hard to see why the emperor relied on these guys.

They didn't represent a direct threat to him.

They weren't going to become emperor themselves,

and, after all, he owned them.

But, in the end, it didn't actually do Caligula any good.

Some of them are supposed to have been

in the final plot to kill him.

This is now one of the most powerful images

of Caligula that we have.

A man who is paranoid about his own security,

and not unreasonably, as he no doubt learnt

from the fate of his own family under Tiberius,

conspiracies were an absolutely inevitable part

of imperial life.

If Caligula's looking behind him, if he's always watchful,

are there people who really are out to get him?

- Yes, there were people out to get him,

and I think there were two quite different types.

Either, they're people within the extended family

who accept that Rome is now a dynastic autocracy

of which they are a part,

but want themselves rather than Caligula to be autocrat,

but there's also another type of central opposition,

which is people who don't think Rome ought to be

a dynastic autocracy at all,

and they want to put the clock back to the republic

run by the Roman aristocracy, run by the senate.

- But, it's really the first time,

it's the family trying to replace him

from one of their own number,

but it looks like it's the most important.

The most evidentful.

- Yes, his brother in law, Emilius Lepidus,

was executed for plotting against him,

and his wife, Caligula's sister,

and also Caligula's other surviving sister

were both exiled as a result,

so clearly Caligula saw this as a threat

from those closest to him, inside the family

to his own position.

- So, in a sense, he's quite right

to be looking over his shoulder,

because the people who got the knife out,

are likely to be the people he's hanging out with

most days of the week.

- Yeah, but he doesn't know how many of them there are.

- Ever since, historians have wanted to make this family

plot one of the turning points in Caligula's reign

that marked his transition from golden boy with promise

into the maniacal monster we've all come to know,

but the fact is that this is the period of Caligula's life,

his time in power, about which,

we actually know the least.

Are these conspiracies real conspiracies?

Was it the moment that he started to lose his grip?

We don't know.

What we do is that this is when the stories

of madness and excess that've come

to define Caligula mostly start.

And, perhaps the most famous

is that he gave his favorite horse,

Inca Tartus, that's Speedy, his own palace,

that he fed him oats mixed with gold,

and he made him a consule of Rome,

and the fact is that no ancient writer

ever says that Caligula made his horse a constable.

What they say is that he planned to,

or that people said he planned to.

I'd be pretty certain that what underlies all this

is a bit of batter, a Caligulan joke.

I can imagine him at dinner one evening

with his friends among the aristocracy,

and they start to needle him a little bit,

and he's saying, oh, you're a hopeless lot.

I'd rather have my horse consul than one of you,

and that then goes down in history

as if he were serious.

But anyway, we all do love stories about monarch

and their pampered pets.

Just think of our fantasies about

Queen Elizabeth and her corgies,

how they have diamond collars,

and they each have silver bowls,

and they're served by footmen in uniform,

And, what would we say, if we found that

she nicknamed one of them prime minister?

But, it wasn't just stories of unbridled excess,

much of what else was thought wrong with Caligula

came down to his sex life.

It was said that he turned his palace into a brothel,

loved dressing up in women's clothes,

and was so insatiable for sex,

that he wore out his male partners.

For us, Caligula has become more than anything,

a by-word for sexual excess and perversion.

We can hardly hear his name

without conjuring up images of drunken orgies,

sex in the wrong place, with the wrong people,

with little boys, married women, virgins,

and, most notoriously,

with his own twin sisters.

If we were making a porn movie Roman style,

we'd be bound to cast Caligula in the lead.

Unless these stories have been added to

or embellished over the years,

they actually first appear in sources

written after his death,

by the second century biographer, Centonius,

and they tell us just as much about the anxieties

of the Roman elite as they do about Caligula.

So, you get these tales about,

you go to dinner with Caligula,

y'know, you're a senator and you take your wife,

and then in the middle between courses,

you suddenly discover that

the emperor has gone out of the room with your wife.

They come back a bit later, they all look a bit flushed,

and then the emperor says,

she's not very good in bed, is she?

- Yeah, and I think, associated with those stories

is the account of how people come into the bank quick.

Caligula's getting all his cash,

people file past the end,

and he acts like someone at a slave market,

y'know, checking out the girls,

trying to decide which one he's going to select for later,

so this is how the emperor shows his power

is by humiliating the elite

in all sorts of different ways,

and this is one way amongst many.

- But, perhaps the most damning story

was Caligula's incest, with his favorite sister Drusilla,

with whom, the boy was said to have been discovered

in bed by his own grandmother.

There's no actual accusation of incest

by anybody contemporary,

absolutely contemporary with Caligula, is there?

And, even this Sartonious stuff,

where he's talking about granny finding him in bed,

I mean, it's quite interesting that

even Sartnious is saying people used to say that.

- Yeah.

- And, the gossip was it's quite clear

that incest took place, when you get to the detail.

It's all in the detail.

- Yeah, mm.

Yes, and I think even in Seneca,

he was pretty much Caligula's contemporary.

He does talk about when Caligula said Drucilla dies,

Caligula's excessive grief for Drucilla,

that he kind of, doesn't know what to do with himself,

he dashes off to the country, he dashes back to Rome,

he tries to console himself with gambling,

and he goes around in this terrible state,

but he doesn't link that to perverse sexuality.

I mean, I think there's also some dynastic aspect of it.

I mean, the stories about incest,

their anxiety is about the way that power

is now transmitted in the Roman world,

that, instead of it's going from

one lot of middle aged men,

to another lot of middle aged men,

it's now going to a proper process in the senate,

it's one family that's holding onto power,

and the women in that power have an influence

in a way they never had previously done

under the Roman republic.

- So, really what these stories are telling us,

they're telling us about power.

- I think that's right.

He's a youngish man, he's not a great military leader,

or anything like that,

but he's got all this power as leader of the Roman world,

and his relations with the senate

are clearly very uneasy,

so they tell these stories about his outrageous behavior.

(dramatic music)

- Perhaps this is a clue to one of the problems of Caligula,

whereas Augustus and Tiberius have come to power

after prominent military careers,

bootykins was thrust on the throne at just 24.

Without the military pedigree or political experience

to earn the elite's respect,

it was hardly surprising he might cast around

for more alternative, more kinglike models of leadership,

and that included presenting himself

as both emperor and god.

The boundary between Roman emperors and the gods

was always a fragile one,

but Caligula trampled right through it.

He's said to have insisted on being worshiped

as a god, in his own lifetime.

And, to make matters worse,

it was told that he transformed the most symbolic

space in Rome, the people's forum,

into his own stage to be worshiped.

One story was that he turned

the temple of Castor and Pollux

into the porch of his own house,

and used to go and sit there

between the statues of the gods

waiting to be worshipped.

Another story was he used to go up

to the capitol on the hill to talk to Jupiter there,

and then built a bridge between the Paletine

and the capital line,

to make those conversations a bit easier.

It's even said that he had flamingoes

that could advise to him.

If there's now nothing left of these buildings

above ground in the forum,

archaeologist Henry Hurst

has uncovered evidence underneath

that they might not be entirely fantasy.

- We dug over all this area,

and we're very lucky that we found

some unusually well-dated remains,

and we could date them pretty much

to around 40 A.D., around the time of Caligula's reign,

and what they consisted of was a large courtyard

going that way towards the hill,

and behind it a very grand room, and a grand courtyard,

then, where we are, a big enclosure,

with a central monument,

and the combination of that,

and this grand courtyard in the room

makes one think of some sort of a palatial complex.

- And, on the other side of the wall,

there's the temple of Castor and Pollux.

- Yes, so the story that Caligula extended the palace

out towards the forum,

and made the temple his vestibule

seems quite possible, because these remains

are huge and palatial,

and very close to the back of the temple.

- [Mary] And, what about Caligula's

fantastical bridge to Jupiter

on the capitol line hill?

Were it true, it would've spanned the distance

of over 250 meters and been 30 meters above the ground.

- A sane and traditional view of this

is that the bridge was just a timber footbridge

which went from somewhere high up,

using the roofs of buildings,

and ended up over in the Palentine,

so you wouldn't find any traces archeologically,

but we have the mystery of what we're standing on.

What it looks really like is a pier

of the Roman bridge Verona.

These look like that quite a bit,

so we thought, is this a bridge pier?

And, in favor of that is this question of levels,

because, the temple behind us there

is one story up from where we are.

There's also the story about how Caligula threw coins

from the roof of the Basilica Julia,

also one story up, and that was just over there,

so it would be quite sensible if you were having a bridge,

for it to be effectively one story high,

so it could link these things

all at first floor level things.

- Raised walkway, and then up to the capitol line.

- And then, eventually up to the capitol line, yes.

- It's just a small block of marble.

A tantalizing clue to the lengths Caligula went

for his own self agrandizement.

He also points to the difficulty he now have

in separating fact from fiction.

After just four years in power,

there's little hard archaeology

that we can tie to Caligula for certain,

but there is one sight not far from Rome

where we can.

This is lake Nami, one of Caligula's favorite places.

It's where all the myths come together,

the uncontrolled extravagance,

the divinity, and even the violence.

It was known in the Ancient world

as the speculum Diani, the mirror of Diana,

and in the 1930s, it was the sight

of one of the most stunning finds in Roman archaeology.

Two enormous floating villas that were so large

and so lavish that they've become the ultimate symbols

of Caligula's success towards the end of his reign.

And, unsurprisingly, it was a 20th century tyrant,

Mussolini, who spent a fortun raising them from the mud,

and installing them in a huge museum at the end of the lake.

Shells of the boats were tragically destroyed

in the second world war,

and now we've only got models,

but much of the hardware still survives.

No doubt whose boats these are.

It says Gauis Cesar Augustus Germanicus.

These are Caligula's boaters.

It's a bit hard to know what a part is doing on a boat,

they can't be ordinary boats,

perhaps they're bringing the water

to Caligula's hot tub under the stars.

Certonius has left us a vivid description

of other Caligulan boats so luxurious

they had jeweled prows, sails of purple silk,

and bathrooms that were alabaster and bronze,

and all thought a myth, the boats of Nami,

hint they might in fact be true.

For alongside the naval hardware of the ships,

are glimpses of astonishing imperial luxury.

There're rows and columns made from Grecian marble,

sinister sculptures of Medusa heads,

and huge golden hands.

Beautifully sculpted Mooring rings,

with wolves and lions,

balustrades cast in solid bronze.

There've been all kinds of theories

about what these boats were actually for.

Some people have thought they must've been religious.

Was it here that Caligula came

to commune with the goddess Diana

by the light of the moon?

Was one of them a temple to

the Egyptian goddess Isis?

Or, were they just very lavish pleasure barges?

Romans with too much money

love nothing more than to build out onto water.

Was that what Caligula was up to?

The boats of Nami will no doubt always remain

an enigma, but there is one place on the lake

where Caligula's intentions come into sharper focus.

All around the shore were dozens of shrines and temples

that went back hundreds of years,

and one of them raises troubling questions

about whether he was a victim,

or actually a colluder in his own fate.

This was once the sanctuary of Diana,

a richly decorated temple in a grove of sacred trees.

There was just one weird thing

about a sanctuary of Diana,

and that was the priest in charge,

the so-called king of Nami, the Rex Nemorencus.

First of all, he was a runaway slave.

Secondly, in order to get the job,

he had to kill the present incumbent.

If he wanted to become Rex here,

he came to the century,

you went and found the special, sacred tree,

you pulled off a branch,

if you managed to pull off that branch,

you were allowed to challenge the current priest

to a fight to the death.

If you won, you became Rex yourself,

because you also got a death sentence,

because someone else would be along sooner or later

to challenge you.

Ancient writers tell us about seeing the priest

in this century.

He had a sword in his hand,

and he was always looking furtively about him,

for obvious reasons.

The ritual of nami harks back to

a very primitive level of ancient religion,

and Caligula was said to have revived it with glee.

Finding a slave to come and kill the priest in charge.

Whether Caligula did that,

because he wanted to inject a bit of religious reality

into what had become a charade,

or whether it was just capricious sadism, we don't know,

but it's hard not to think of the very king of Nami

as an uncanny double of the emperor of Rome,

both for looking behind their backs,

and maybe Caligula had spotted that, too.

(dramatic music)

However knowing Caligula might've been.

In the end, it didn't save him.

On the 22nd of January, 41 A.D.,

he was assassinated after just three years,

10 months and eight days in power.

And, if the facts of Caligula's life

might forever elude us,

ironically, it's his death about which we know the most,

thanks to a graphic account

written by Jewish historian Slavius Jocephanow.

Peter Wiseman is taking me to where he thinks

is the exact spot where Caligula,

the emperor Gauis was set upon

by members of his own, personal security force.

- He sees coming towards him, a Praetorian guard,

called Cassius Caria.

(both talking at once)

Cassius Caria, however,

is the leader of the assassination conspiracy,

and Caria draws his sword and he brings it down

as hard as he can.

Gauis is staggering around, sort of disoriented,

and the guy who actually gave him the final blow

was a man called Acquilla,

so he is the man who has the credit

for the assassination of the emperor Gauis, Caligula.

- [Mary] Were people pleased the tyrant's dead?

- Some people thought that.

What you have to understand about Gauis Caligula

is that he was enormously popular

with the ordinary population.

He was a Caesar.

He was the son of Germanicus,

he was the great grandson of Augustus.

He was the great, great grandson of Julius Cesar,

all these were popular heroes.

He was their popular hero,

and they hated the idea that people,

senators, senior army officers

should take it upon them to kill their man.

- But, there's a sort of irony to this, isn't it,

because this is not an uprising of popular will,

this is a takeout move by the Praetorian guard.

- Yes, a small group of senior officers

who were also involving senior senators.

It's a question what they expected to happen afterwards.

It seems that Caria and the others

were idealistic enough to believe that in killing Gauis,

they would put an end to what we call the Principles.

There wouldn't be an emperor anymore.

- But, in the end they get this sort of very, very

brief little flower into what looks

as if it might be about to become

an unoverthrowable entirely,

and a return to the republic,

and a little bit of a debate,

and then half an hour later,

they find Caligula's uncle, Claudius,

to put back on the throne.

- That's because the Praetorian guard itself

depended on their being an emperor.

- It was the ultimate betrayal,

and a chilling reminder that imperial Rome

was not the emperor, but the army,

who held the reigns of power.

But, there's one final chapter in Caligula's story,

which adds, I think, to his terrible reputation.

There's evidence that a tax on his memory

began, almost before his body went cold.

To justify his fascination,

a new regime condemned him as a tyrant.

His uncompleted building projects

were then taken over,

and inscribed with Claudius's name.

Some of his coins were defaced,

his initials were symbolically scratched out,

and on many of his official statuses,

the heads were either replaced or destroyed,

and the wonderful Montimartini museum in Rome,

there's a strange bust of Caligula's uncle,

the new, and in many ways just as vicious emperor.

It underscores the shifty awkwardness

of the transition of power.

The face looks to all the world like the emperor Claudius.

It's a bit middle-aged and frowny,

just as Claudius is often shown,

but he's got this strangely beaufant fringe,

and if you go up above him,

you can see that the whole boufant hairstyle

has been roughly chiseled off.

What's going on is that the statue of Caligula

has been changed into a statue of Claudius.

And, he looks pretty weird,

except if you imagine that his head

would've been on a full length statue,

and if you get low down,

he looks pretty okay as Claudius from this angle.

Now, it's a way of saying is Caligula is obliterated,

and Claudius is now on the throne.

I have a sneaking suspicion

that it also says, actually,

the new emperor is only the old emperor

with a recut face.

This hybrid head gives us a clue

as to why it's always been hard

to come face to face with the real Caligula

in the bloody transition of power,

his real face has got lost,

and to find him, you now have to look for him

in other ways, in the shadow of his heroic father,

in the battlegrounds of Germany,

in the bricks of the palace on Capri,

where one by one he lost his family,

or in the eerie luxury of his boat

found at the bottom of lake Nami.

If what this tells us is that some of the myths may be true,

the paranoia, the excess, even the self-proclaimed divinity,

the rest we'll never know.

And, are the stories of murder and madness

created as much by Caligula himself

to further a culture of fear,

or were they spun just like his name bottykins

to blacken his name, and to justify

his violent fascination?

Whatever the truth,

it's in the story of Caligula

that all the elements of tyranny

as we now recognize it come together for the first time.

Perhaps, that's why he's left

such a powerful imprint on our world.

For almost 2,000 years now,

Caligula's made people reflect on power and it's abuse.

The man, the myth, and, to be honest,

you can't ever quite separate the two,

have raised all kinds of questions

about cruelty, excess, about adoration,

about the delusions of an autocrat,

and about his fearful isolation.

But, for me, Caligula also turns a spotlight onto ourselves,

about what our own responses to tyranny should be.

Maybe there's a lesson.

After all, when that group of disgruntled army officers

decided to redream of a monster,

sure, they left him in bits on the palace floor,

but all they got was more of the same.

(epic Roman music)