Caligula with Mary Beard

It was mid-afternoon on 22nd January, 41 AD.

In the morning, the Emperor Caligula had been to the theatre,

but 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.

The next 30 or so did.

One nasty rumour said 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.

Rome's third emperor is 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 consul,

and to have insisted he be worshipped 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 favourite 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 behind the myths 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 the monster, but the man.

So who was Caligula?

And why has he gone down in history as one of Rome's biggest villains?

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,

parcelled round 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 tipped for the throne.

His mother was Agrippina,

the granddaughter of the first emperor Augustus,

who was himself the adopted son of Julius Caesar.

In the world of Ancient Rome,

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

He was born Gaius Caesar Germanicus, a name he inherited

from his father, meaning something like Thrasher of the Germans.

And these were the family fields of honour, the killing fields

where Caligula's ancestors

cemented their reputations and political power.

Today, the Roman Museum in Xanten 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 honour,

with portraits of Caligula's dad Germanicus and mum Agrippina,

dished out to soldiers, to what was then

the most technologically advanced armour and weaponry on the planet.

There are 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 cosy peacekeeping mission, but a vicious war zone.

But perhaps the museum's most intriguing artefact

is also its most humble.

This is a perfectly preserved Roman caligae, 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 caligae.

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 caligae.

He was a kind of baby squaddie, the legionary mascot.

And we tend to think of the name Caligula as a rather grand

imperial name. In fact, it was the little boy's nickname.

It means little boots, bootykins or the kid in the caligae.

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 have said, quite correctly, his name was the Emperor Gaius.

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 have been horrified to think of us calling him Caligula.

In the 1960s, 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.

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

arm outstretched, addressing his troops.

And standing beneath him, one can't help but sense the status

and glamour 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 AD, 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 the 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 authorise 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 10th December 20 AD.

Basically, the message is - the only person guilty here was Piso,

conveniently dead.

But the most extraordinary bit of the document,

and its 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 is to be inscribed in hibernis,

in the winter quarters, of each legion, cuiusque legionis.

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 suspicions circling around Germanicus' death

would mark the start of an increasingly bitter feud

between Caligula's mother Agrippina and the Palace.

Convinced that Agrippina and her sons were plotting against him,

Tiberius banished her to a remote island off the coast of Italy.

And shortly afterwards, in 31 AD, he summoned the young Caligula,

aged 19 or so, to the island of Capri in the Bay of Naples.

This was the seat of Tiberius' 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

of Caligula's presence on Capri

because it's got his name stamped across it, Gaius Caesar.

And that raises the question of what he was doing here and why

Tiberius brought him, and there have been all kinds of theories.

Was he here to be under surveillance?

Was he here because Tiberius liked 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 cliffs.

And he'd stationed a platoon of sailors in boats at the bottom

to finish them off with their oars if they weren't yet dead.

And for poolside fun, he had a troupe 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.

For while Caligula was living in the lap of luxury,

his mother Agrippina 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 elder 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 one macabre memento from Capri

that sums up the young Caligula's life in the Emperor's court.

Looks like a real skull, but actually,

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

This must have made a stunning centrepiece

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 in the context of the imperial court,

there are more sinister messages.

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

Anyone sitting round this at the imperial dining table

must have been aware that their lives hung on a knife edge,

that they could be flavour of the month one minute, and dead the next.

The best advice was never to let your feelings show.

Keep poker-faced.

There's a horrible story of an imperial princess

who's dining one evening with her brother.

He keels over, dead, probably poisoned. What does she do?