Original subtitles

Narrator: On January 22, 41 AD,

Rome's third emperor was going for an afternoon bath

in his palace compound

when a group of soldiers ambushed him,

beating him to death.

Beard: Caligula was just 28 years old.

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

Narrator: It was an extraordinary time in Roman history.

The third of Rome's emperors, Caligula is known

for excessive paranoia and carnage

during his short reign

one of Caligula's favorite sayings was let them hate me

so long as they fear me.

Narrator: But how much of this story is true?

And who was he really?

Now, professor of classics Mary beard is on a hunt

for answers uncovering the truth

about Caligula's fascinating history,

exposing damaging myths from his successors

and coming face-to-face with why Caligula

has gone down in history as one of Rome's biggest villains.

♪♪

Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, best known

by his childhood named Caligula was born on August 31, 12 ad.

As great-grandson of Augustus, the first Roman emperor

of the imperial dynasty,

Caligula was a born-and-bred aristocrat.

In the world of ancient Rome,

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

Narrator: As the son of Rome's distinguished

military general, Germanicus, Caligula spent

most of his childhood on the road

as his father traveled from army camp

to army camp on military campaigns.

Today professor of classics, Mary beard,

is visiting the Roman museum in Sandton,

built near one of the battlefields Caligula

visited as a boy.

Inside the museum there is a remarkable collection

of Roman military gear.

But perhaps the museum's most intriguing artifact

is also its most humble.

This flawlessly preserved hobnailed military sandal boot

or Roman Caligae is made of tough leather.

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.

Narrator: While his proper name was Gaius,

the diminutive childhood nickname Caligula,

meaning roughly little boots, stuck.

The fact that even now we still call him Booty kings

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.

Narrator: In 19 ad, tragedy struck

the once decorated family.

When Caligula was seven years old,

his father mysteriously died on a mission to Syria.

Suspicion spread throughout Rome.

Some claimed the Roman governor Piso

was involved in poisoning him.

Others believe Germanicus' death

was orchestrated by Caligula's uncle emperor Tiberius.

When the news of Germanicus' death reached Rome,

there was an absolute explosion of grief.

Life stopped it said, ordinary people wept in the street.

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

Narrator: Eventually Piso was put on trial,

but a few days into the hearing, he committed suicide

and the trial was turned into a public investigation.

This is a copy of that public inquiry,

the formal report inscribed in bronze

dated the 10th of 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 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 is be inscribed

[speaking native language] In the winter quarters

of each legion.

[ Speaking native language ]

This is mass communication Roman-style.

It's a major attempt to get the official message

across everywhere.

Narrator: But the suspicion surrounding Germanicus' death

didn't stop there.

After Germanicus died, Caligula's family

fell from favor in the eyes of emperor Tiberius.

Convinced that Caligula's mother, Agrippina,

and older brothers were plotting against him,

Tiberius banished them from Rome

and sent them to live on a remote island

off the coast of Italy.

But surprisingly, Caligula was spared.

In 26 ad, 12 years into his reign,

Tiberius withdrew to the island of Capri.

From Capri, he ruled the empire by proxy

from a suite of imperial villas built high into the cliffs.

In 31 ad at just 19 years old,

Caligula was summoned by Tiberius to live with him.

Tucked away in a museum on the island

is one small trace of Caligula's stay here.

This might 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 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 like the kid?

Or was he here to be groomed to be emperor

and learn to start building like an emperor should?

Narrator: Roman writers later surmised that it was here

that Tiberius cooled the young Caligula

in the dark arts of tyranny and excess.

The stories are varied and they range

from fantastical to downright chilling.

Some account stated that Caligula witnessed

remarkable brutality during his tenure at Tiberius' side.

In fact while Caligula was living in the lap of luxury,

his mother Agrippina was beaten so badly

that she went blind in one eye.

She eventually refused to eat and starved to death

his brothers also suffered violent deaths.

Beard: 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.

Narrator: In the vault of the British museum

is one McCobb memento from Capri

that sums up the young Caligula's life

in the emperor's court.

This life-like marble skull

is a representation of the poker face

it took to survive Tiberius' court

and a reminder of the consequences

if one failed to do so.

Beard: We're told that when Caligula was on Capri

and his relatives were being bumped off one by one,

he learned never to show any emotion at all.

Announcer: Underlying this constant family turbulence

was the messy matter of succession.

Succession pose a problem for the Romans for two reasons.

First, the emperor isn't a real job.

It's supposed to be just 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 Livia 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 jockey for power.

There's the legions in the provinces.

There's the imperial bodyguards in Rome.

You've got the [indistinct],

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 it's that instability

and 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 have been an alternative.

And what does Caligula do and he takes power?

One of the first things he does is he has his cousin,

little boy named Tiberius Gemellus murdered

because he's somebody else who could have been emperor.

There is that story of Caligula who some people said

that actually smothered Tiberius when he was asleep

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 who do the smothering for them.

On march 18, 37 ad, two days after Tiberius' death,

the senate declared Caligula to be Rome's third emperor.

He could now triumphantly return to Rome

as the ruler of the known world.

At first Caligula's accession was welcomed in Rome,

but the empire would soon find out that Caligula's

new found power would unveil his dark nature.

♪♪

Narrator: Just two days after the death of emperor Tiberius in 37 ad,

24-year-old Caligula was named the third emperor of Rome.

At first, the people of Rome welcomed Caligula's accession.

As the son of the great Roman general Germanicus,

he had the support of the army.

And as the great grandson of the first Roman emperor

Augustus, he could claim a direct bloodline

back to the dynasties founder.

Initially, Caligula appeared to be a promising young ruler.

One of the first things he did was give his mother, Agrippina,

a formal burial in the family tomb,

the mausoleum of Augustus.

At the Capitoline museums in Rome,

Caligula's mother's tombstones

still remains today, and it's so much more

than just a grave marker.

Beard: [ Speaking native language ]

These are the bones, in fact, the ashes

of Agrippina, the daughter of Marcus Agrippa,

the granddaughter [Speaking native language]

Of Augustus, the first emperor, who's now a god.

And she's the wife, of Germanicus Caesar,

golden boy of the empire.

And she's the mother [Speaking native language]

Of Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus

[speaking native language] Emperor Caligula.

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

This is his manifesto to his right to imperial rule.

Narrator: Another way Caligula displayed his power

was by the money he minted, stamped with his portrait.

Caligula was supposed to be an absolutely

spectacularly generous.

He said on some occasions to have gone up

to the first floor of a building in the forum

and actually thrown money, thrown coins at the crowd.

They would have got some good cash to take home,

but more important in a way,

you'll also go home with a message

because one of the ways that emperors

could get their version of events

or their slogan across to the Roman people at large

was to put him on the coins.

Narrator: Caligula's coins emphasized his royal ancestry,

and another key component in his rise to power...

The military.

On the one side is a really gorgeous portrait

of Caligula and his name here, Gaius Caesar,

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 native language],

short for speech of the emperor,

to his troops.

And underneath COH, short for

[speaking native language]

The cohorts of the praetorian guard.

And the message of this is clear.

Whatever family background you have,

whatever deals you've done,

nobody in Rome can become an emperor

unless they've got the support of the army.

♪♪

Narrator: Once established on the throne,

another way Rome's new emperor cemented.

His power was to build.

Some of Rome's most iconic ancient monuments

date back to Caligula's reign,

including two major aqueducts and the Vatican obelisk.

And then there was the most obvious statement

of Caligula's power...

The imperial headquarters on the palatine hill

whose Latin name [speaks Latin] gives us our own word, palace.

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

Caligula also inherited vast pleasure gardens called

Horti on the city's outskirts.

One of them, the Horti Lamiani still exist today.

It's the site of the only eyewitness account

from Caligula's reign

recorded in the book "the embassy to Gaius."

The account was written by Philo, a Jewish philosopher

from Alexandria who describes his diplomatic mission to Rome

petitioning for the emperor to secure the rights

of the Alexandrian Jewish community.

But during his plea for political equality,

Caligula's interests are elsewhere.

When Philo and his delegation get to their appointment,

they discover that the emperor's mind

is actually on home improvements.

And there's troops around after him

through the gardens as he goes

from pavilion to pavilion planning his makeover.

Narrator: According to Philo's account, the emperor's true intentions

quickly became clear from the moment

they entered his presence.

Beard: When they get his attention,

they bow down to the ground,

but it doesn't cut much ice with Caligula.

It simply says, "so, you're the god haters.

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

And he follows that up by asking anyway,

"why don't you eat pork?"

Narrator: In the end the emperor ordered Philo

and his colleagues to leave.

This dismissal was documented evidence

that Caligula's greed directly impacted his people.

In fact, during the 1870s excavators made an astonishing

discovery in a Caligula pleasure garden

that shows the true extent of the emperor's

personal obsession with extravagance.

100 of precious stones, rubies, garnets,

carnelians, pieces of rock crystal

and Amber are embedded in amazing filigree silver

and gold frames.

When this stuff was first discovered in the 1870s,

no one could quite work out what it was.

An idea was that they come across a throne room,

but there's just so much this time.

I think we have to imagine precious stones

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 is to like slippers with pearls sewn into them,

which if you ask me,

is a far cry from those little military boots

he started out with.

Narrator: 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, Livia,

whose home Caligula spent time in as a boy.

It's a utopian scene.

The trees are full of perfectly ripe fruit.

Every flower is in bloom,

and in the gleam of the flickering lamps

2000 years ago it would have been hard to know

whether we were looking at

a real garden or a painting of one.

Of course that sort of illusionism

is one of the most impressive trademarks of Roman art,

but it's also slightly unsettling

the blurring of the boundary between the fake and the real

is one of the factors about Roman culture that made it

so scary.

Narrator: Appearances were always deceiving in the Roman court,

but with Caligula's rule, deception reached

new and unpredictable heights.

There are stories of Caligula offering guests food

only for them to realize it was made of gold.

Other accounts have stated that Caligula surprised

his opponents by using a real sword

during gladiator practice

while his unsuspecting rival wielded a wooden fake.

Because of his volatile nature and extreme paranoia,

even the seemingly harmless could and often did prove fatal.

♪♪

Narrator: In imperial Rome, conspiracies were constant

and paranoia was pervasive.

In this world where the emperor was always watching his back,

the people he often ended up trusting

the most were the ones he owned... his slaves.

In a museum in Rome is the record of the staff

from one of Caligula's actual palaces.

Each one tells us what they did.

Here's one, for example.

[ Speaking native language ]

Means ball player,

but perhaps [Speaking native language]

Was a personal trainer.

We've got [Speaking native language]

A helmsman, perhaps on the imperial yacht.

But perhaps my favorite of all this chap here,

[speaking native language].

That could be short for [speaking native language]

Or Venice just might have being a watchman or spy.

But it could also be short for [speaking native language],

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

Narrator: While some of Caligula's slaves

were primarily focused on his comfort,

others were charged with reinforcing his power

over the Roman aristocracy.

Some played a vital role

in the palaces strategy of control and fear.

[ Speaking native language ]

He's the guy who controls

the guest list at the palace dinner parties.

Now, Roman aristocrats wouldn't touch

this a 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 supposed to have one called Protogynous

who carried around with him under each arm

with more than a bit of menace and a bit of ham

acting at the same time two different files,

one labeled dagger, the other labeled sword

as if they contain the lists inside 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 most of them.

But in the end, didn't actually do

Caligula or any good.

Some of them are supposed to have been involved

in the final plot to kill him.

Announcer: At the height of his reign, Caligula passed a law

that prevented anyone from mocking his appearance.

A man who projected strength and power was also fueled

by his own insecurities and paranoia.

He learned an important lesson under Tiberius

from the tragic fate of his own family.

Conspiracies were an absolutely inevitable

part of imperial life.

If Caligula's always 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 there are people within the extended family

who accept that Rome is a dynastic autocracy

of which they are part but want themselves rather

than Caligula to the autocrat.

But there's also another type of potential opposition,

which is people who don't think that Rome naught 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 type.

It's the family trying to replace him

from one of their own number

that looks like it's the most important

that we have most evidence for.

Yes. His brother-in-law

Aemilius Lepidus was executed for plotting against him,

and his wife, Caligula 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.

Historians have theorized

that Caligula's distrust in his family

was one of the turning points in his reign,

marking his transition from a young emperor

with promise to a maniacal monster

fueled by his extreme paranoia and lust for power.

But the fact is that this is the period of Caligula's life

during his time in power about which we know the least.

Were these conspiracies real?

Were the salacious stories of Caligula's cruelty true?

Or did his successors rewrite history

to villainize the man they murdered?

♪♪

Narrator: Today the story surrounding the life of emperor Caligula

have reached legendary proportions,

making it hard to separate fact from fiction.

At first, Caligula succession was welcomed in Rome.

But Caligula proved to be so cruel and paranoid

that some have even attributed his actions to madness.

Many of the most enduring Caligula tales,

like his favorite horse holding political office

are still debated by scholars.

But none are more contentious

than the rumors surrounding his sex life.

As he became more paranoid,

he began to exercise his power in more extreme ways.

It was said he turned his palace into a brothel,

love dressing up in women's clothing

and was so insatiable for sex

that he wore out his male partners.

These stories may have been embellished over the years

because they only first appear in sources

written years after his death

primarily by the second century biographer Suetonius

and they reveal as much about the anxieties of the Roman elite

as they do about Caligula.

So you get these tales about we go to dinner with Caligula,

you take your wife.

And then in the middle between courses,

you suddenly discover that the emperor's gone

out of the room with your wife.

They come back a bit later.

They all look a bit flushed, and then they have bruises.

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

Yeah, and I think associated with those stories,

there's the account of how people

come into the banquet.

Caligula's sitting on his couch,

people file past the end

and he acts like someone at a slave market.

You know, sort of 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 as a boy

he 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 these this Suetonius stuff

where he's talking about granny finding them in bed.

And it is quite interesting that even Suetonius

is only saying people used to say that

the gossip was, where's it quite clear that incest took place.

When it gets to the detail, it's all...

Keep in the distance.

Yes, and I think even Seneca, who's pretty much

Caligula's contemporary,

he does talk about when Caligula's sister

Drusilla dies, Caligula's excessive grief for Drusilla,

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 a terrible state.

But he doesn't link that to perverse sexuality.

I mean, I think there's also this sort of

dynastic aspect of it.

I mean the stories about incest are partly about their anxieties

about the way that powers 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

who have through a proper process in the senate,

it's, you know, it's one family that's holding on to power.

And the women in that family then have an influence

in a way they never had

previously done under the Roman republic.

So really what these stories tell you

they're telling us about power?

I think that's right. There he is, a youngish man.

He's not a great military leader and thing like that,

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

and his relations with the senate clearly very uneasy.

So they tell these these stories about his outrageous behavior.

Without the military pedigree or political experience

to earn the elite's respect.

It's hardly surprising he would search for alternative

means of exerting his authority.

One method 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 said to have insisted on being worshipped as a god

in his own lifetime.

Narrator: And to make matters worse,

we're told he transformed the most symbolic space in Rome,

the people's forum, into his own stage

to be worshipped.

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 Capitoline hill

to talk to Jupiter there,

and then built a bridge between the palatine and the Capitoline

to make those conversations a bit easier.

Narrator: Like so much of Caligula's life, his efforts to deify himself

were so fabled historians were unsure

of what was fact or fiction, that is until modern

archaeologists made a momentous discovery.

♪♪

Narrator: Today historians often refer to Caligula

as a vicious, paranoid narcissist

who deemed himself a god

when in fact much of what we think we know

about Caligula remains unproven.

But archaeologists Henry Hurst has uncovered hard evidence

of Caligula's efforts to deify himself.

Caligula's fabled personal walkway between the palace

and the most important places in the city

may have actually existed.

We dug over all of this area,

and we're very lucky in that we found some unusually

well dated remains and we could date them

pretty much to around 40 ad, 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.

And then where we are, a big enclosure

with a central monument, and the combination of that

and this grand courtyard and room

makes one think of some sort of a palatial complex.

And on the other side of that wall is

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.

What about the story of Caligula's fantastical bridge

to Jupiter on the Capitoline hill?

Which, if true, would have spanned

a distance of over 820 feet

and been 98 feet above the ground.

The sane and traditional view of this

is that the bridge was just a timber footbridge.

So you wouldn't find any traces archaeologically,

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

What it looks really like

is a peer of the 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 are having a bridge for it

to be effectively one story high

so you could link these things all at first floor level.

Like raised walkway and then up to the Capitoline.

And then eventually up to the Capitoline, yes.

It's a tantalizing clue to the length Caligula

went for his own self-aggrandizement.

But it also points to the difficulty experts

have in separating fact from fiction.

After just four years in power,

there is limited archaeological evidence

that can be tied to Caligula for certain.

But there is one site not far from Rome that can be.

This is lake Nemi, one of Caligula's

favorite places, and it's where all the myths come together...

The uncontrolled extravagance, the divinity and the violence.

It was known in the ancient world

as the speculum dianae, the mirror of Diana.

And in the 1930s it was the site of one of the most remarkable

finds in Roman archaeology.

Two enormous floating palaces that were so large and lavish

that they've become symbols of Caligula's excess

towards the end of his reign.

Suetonius has left us a vivid description

of other Caligulaian boats so luxurious

they had jeweled prows, sails of purple silk

and bathrooms of alabaster and bronze.

Long thought to be a myth, the boats of Nemi

hint the stories might in fact be true.

Along with his lavish boats,

the emperor also visited lake Nemi's

ancient shrines and temples.

One of them raises questions about how cognizant

Caligula was of his own impending doom.

This was once the sanctuary of Diana,

a richly decorated temple in a grove of sacred trees

overseen by the Rex Nemorensis or king of Nemi.

He wanted to become king of Nemi.

You came to the sanctuary, you went and found

the special sacred tree.

You pulled off a branch.

If you manage 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've also got a death sentence

because someone else will be along sooner or later

to challenge you.

Narrator: The ritual of Nemi harken back

to a very primitive level of ancient Roman religion.

Caligula was said to have revived it with relish

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

However clever Caligula might have been, in the end,

it didn't save him.

On January 22, 41 ad, 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 due in part to a graphic account

written by a Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus.

Now professor Peter Wiseman is taking Mary to the exact spot

where Caligula was attacked by his own personal security force.

What happened in this alleyway would end the young rulers life

and forever decide how the world remembered Caligula.

♪♪

Narrator: Emperor Caligula has paranoia was severe and renowned,

but it wasn't enough to protect him from a violent end.

In 41 ad he was murdered by some of the very few people

he trusted to keep him safe.

Today, professor Mary beard is meeting up

with professor Peter Wiseman

to visit the site of Caligula's assassination.

Wiseman: He sees coming towards him

a colonel of the praetorian guard called Cassius Chaerea.

[Indistinct], who we thinks is safe.

Cassius Chaerea, however, is the leader

of the assassination conspiracy.

And Chaerea draws his sword

and he brings it down as hard as he can.

Gaius is staggering around totally disoriented,

and the guy who actually gave him

the final blow was a man called Arcyon,

so is the one who has the credit

for the assassination of the emperor Gaius Caligula.

Are people pleased the tyrant's dead?

Some people thought that,

but you have to understand about Gaius 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 a great-great-grandson of Julius Caesar

all these were popular heroes.

He was that 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 are also involving a senior senators.

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

It seems that Chaerea and the others were idealistic

enough to believe that in killing Gaius

they will put an end to what we call the principate.

There wouldn't be an emperor anymore.

But in the end, they get this very, very brief

little flowering of what looks

if it might be about to become the overthrow of autocracy

entirely and the return to the republican,

little bit of debate.

And then half an hour later, they found Caligula's uncle,

Claudius, to put back on the throne.

That's because we praetorian guard itself

depended on there being an emperor.

It was the ultimate betrayal and a chilling reminder

that in imperial Rome it was not the emperor,

but the army who held the reins of power.

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

which adds to his terrible reputation.

There's evidence of his reputation being defamed

before his body went cold.

To justify his assassination, the new regime condemned him

as a tyrant.

His uncompleted building projects were then taken over

and inscribed with Claudius' name.

His coins were defaced, his initials

symbolically scratched out,

and on many of his official statues,

the heads were either replaced or destroyed.

And at the Monte Martini museum in Rome,

there's a strange sculpture of Caligula's uncle

the new and in many ways just as vicious emperor

which underscores the hasty and superficial transition of power.

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

It's a bit middle-aged and frowny,

just how Claudius is often shown.

But he's got this strangely bouffant fringe.

If you go up above him,

you can see the whole booth or hairstyle

has been roughly chiseled off.

What's going on is that a statue of Caligula

has been changed into a statue of Claudius.

And it looks pretty weird, except if you imagine

that this head would be on a full-length statue

and if you get low down, well, actually he works pretty okay

as Claudius from this angle.

Well, it's a way of saying Caligula is obliterated.

Claudius is now on the throne.

A sneaking suspicion that he also says

actually the new emperor

is only the old emperor with a recut face.

Narrator: This hybrid head gives us a clue

as to why it has always been hard

to come face-to-face with the real Caligula.

In the bloody transition of power,

his real face has been lost.

As time passed, the man and the myth

have become almost impossible to separate.

Regardless, Caligula's story of excess paranoia and cruelty

is a compelling reminder of the perils of power

and how quickly it can be destroyed.