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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?

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 learned 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 of the dynasty,
Augustus, there was

no fixed system
for passing the power on -

a fatal flaw that colours
the whole Caligula story.

Succession posed 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,

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 courtiers.

You have the ex-slaves in the palace

who want to know who's going
to own them next

and then you've got
various imperial women

trying to get their sons into power.

So it's a very, very unstable
situation.

Is it that instability
and the uncertainty of it all

that both produces real violence

and also allegations and rumours of
violence?

That's right.

The 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
when he takes power?

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

a little boy named Tiberius Gemellus,

murdered because he's somebody else
who could have been Emperor.

What's amazing is that, for the
first 100 years of the Empire,

there's not a single Emperor

about whose death there isn't some
kind of allegation

that he was bumped off,

that the poisoned mushrooms
had done him in.

There is that story of Caligula who,
some people said,

had 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
to do the smothering for them.

However Tiberius really died,
two days after his death

on March 18th, 37 AD,

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 have
seemed the best choice.

As the childhood
mascot of the troops

and the son of the great Germanicus,
he had the support of the army.

And, as the great-grandson
of Augustus,

he could claim a direct blood line
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 these
family connections.

Braving the stormy seas, he made
a great song and dance of bringing

the ashes of his dead mother back to
Rome, burying her with his own hands

here in the enormous family tomb,
built by his great-grandfather,

the Mausoleum of Augustus.

BELL TOLLS

At the Capitoline Museums 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 Agrippina,

the daughter of Marcus Agrippa,

the grand-daughter, NEPTIS DIVIAVG

of Augustus, the first Emperor,

who's now a god, a Dyeus.

And she's the wife,
the UXOR of Germanicus Caesar,

the golden boy of the Empire

and she's the mother, MATRIS,

of Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus,

PRINCIPIS, the Emperor Caligula.

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

This is his manifesto
to his right to imperial rule.

But there was another way in which
Caligula could get

the message across about
who was now in charge,

by the money he minted,
stamped with his portrait,

on which he showered
down on the people of Rome.

Caligula is supposed to have been
absolutely spectacularly generous.

He's 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'd also go home with a message

because one of the ways
that Emperors could

get their version of events

and 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 shows Caligula on one side,

his father, the great Germanicus,
on the other.

Another shows a carriage parading
a statue of his mother

in celebrations
founded in her honour.

And even more important,
this one shows Caligula sacrificing

a bull at the temple of his
great-grandfather, the god Augustus.

This one has an even more
pointed message.

On the one side, there's 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, ADLOCUT,
short for adlocutio,

the speech of the Emperor,
to his troops and underneath, C-O-H,

short for COHORTES,
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.

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 portrait busts were sent
out across the Empire to be copied

and turned into a whole
gallery of imperial statues.

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 established on the throne,

one of the ways 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.

There were the aqueducts,
the Aqua Claudia and the Anio Novus,

bringing water from over 40 miles
away to the centre of Rome.

The Obelisk that now stands in front
of St Peter's 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 Palatine 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 building was destroyed
in the great fire of Rome in 64 AD,

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 Palatine Hill.

Caligula also inherited vast
pleasure gardens called Horti,

on the outskirts of the city.

One of them, the Horti Lamiani,

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 Philo,
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 Philo 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.

But it doesn't cut much ice with
Caligula, who simply says,

"So you're the god-haters who don't
think I'm a god, then?"

And he follows that up by asking,

"And, anyway,
why don't you eat pork?"

One of the Jews thinks quickly
on his feet and said,

"Well, quite a lot of people
don't eat a lot of things.

"I mean, some people
don't eat lamb."

"I'm not surprised," said Caligula,
"It tastes horrible."

And the flunkies all laugh.

It's a wonderful and horrible
vignette of the day-to-day

exercise of imperial power.

There's no cruelty here,
there's no violence.

There's even a bit 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.

For one of the ways Emperors
dazzled you with their power,

rammed it in your face, was with
the very trappings of their world.

And it's from the pleasure
gardens that we can still find

traces of Caligulan splendour.

From them have come
some of the most impressive

and famous statues of Ancient Rome,

such as the Discobulus,

the discus-thrower, a version
of an earlier Greek masterpiece.

There's the Maid of Anzio

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 Caligula's.

Hundreds of precious stones,
rubies, garnets, carnelians,

bits of rock crystal and amber

embedded in amazing frames of
filigree silver and gold.

When this stuff was first
discovered in the 1870s,

no-one could quite work
out what it was.

One idea was 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 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 used 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.

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

used 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 Livia,

in whose home
Caligula spent time as a boy.

It's an impossibly utopian scene.

The trees are all
full of perfectly ripe fruit.

Every flower is perfectly in bloom

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

it would be 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
court culture that made it so scary.

You never quite know

whether what you're looking at is
real or an imitation.

Pretence 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 that the
food on the table is made of gold.

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

Can you pretend to eat it?

And on the other hand,

what you think is fake
can turn out to be deadly real.

There's another story of Caligula
having what looked like

a practice 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, but it reminds
us that there's a more shadowy,

sinister world of smoke and mirrors
in the Imperial Court.

It's a perfect example
of the choreography of threat

that lurked beneath
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,

from visiting dignitaries and spies

to the collectors
of the Imperial rubbish.

It must have been
a security nightmare.

How did the Emperor
ever know who was who?

And how did he marshal
his own security?

They did have a system of passwords.

The Emperor would issue
a new one each day

and you would have to say the word
if you were challenged.

But that wasn't enough for the most
anxious of emperors.

One of them is said

to have had the walls of the palace
lined with mirrors

so he really could see who was
coming up behind him.

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 wall
of the 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,
"Saturninus Svaia".

That is short for "Svairista".

It means ballplayer, but perhaps
Saturninus was a personal trainer.

We've got Argaeus,
he's a Gubernatio,

the helmsman, perhaps,
on the Imperial yacht.

But perhaps my favourite of all
is this chap here, Venustos Spec.

Spec could be short
for "speculatos".

Venustos might have been
a watchman or spy.

But it could also be
short for "specularius",

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

It's a wonderful snapshot
of the underbelly of court life.

But it would be a mistake to think
that they were just lowly servants.

Some of them played a vital role

in the palace's strategy
of control and fear.

Aphetos, 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 is supposed to have had
one called Protogenes,

who carried around with him
under each arm,

with more than a bit of menace and
ham-acting at the same time,

two different files,

one labelled "dagger",
the other labelled "sword",

as if they contained
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
it didn't do Caligula any good.

Some of them are supposed
to have been involved

in the final plot to kill him.

This is now one of the most powerful
images of Caligula that we have.

A man who was paranoid about his own
security, and not unreasonably.

As he no doubt learned from the fate
of his own family under Tiberius,

conspiracies were an absolutely
inevitable part of Imperial Life.

If Caligula is always looking behind
him, if he is always watchful,

are there people who
really are out to get him?

Yes, there were people
out to get him,

and I think they were of two
quite different types.

Either they are people within
the extended family who accept

that Rome is now a dynastic
autocracy of which they are part,

but want themselves, rather than
Caligula, to be the autocrat.

But there's also another type
of potential opposition,

which is people who don't think

that 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 type,
the family trying to replace him

from one of their own number,
that looks like the most important.

We have most evidence for it. Yes.

His brother-in-law,
Aemilius 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 is quite right
to be looking over his shoulder

because the people who've got
the knife out are likely to be

the people he's hanging out with
most days of the week. Yes.

And he doesn't know how many
of them there are.

Ever since, historians have wanted
to make this family plot

one of the turning
point in Caligula's reign

that marked his transition from
golden boy with promise

to 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.

Were these conspiracies
real conspiracies?

Was this 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 have come to define
Caligula mostly start.

And perhaps the most famous
is that he gave his favourite horse,

Incitatus, that's "Speedy",
his own palace.

That he fed him oats mixed with gold

and that he made him
a consul of Rome.

The fact is that no ancient writer
ever says that Caligula

made his horse a consul.

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 banter,
a Caligulan joke.

I can imagine him at dinner
one evening with his friends

among the aristocracy and he's
trying to needle them a bit.

He's saying, "Oh,
you're a right hopeless lot,

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

And that then goes down in history
as if he was serious.

But anyway, we all do love
stories about monarchs

and their pampered pets.

Just think of our fantasies
about Queen Elizabeth

and her corgis,
how they have diamond collars

and they eat out of silver bowls

and they're served by footmen
in uniform.

I wonder what we'd say

if we found that she'd nicknamed
one of them Prime Minister?

And 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
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 byword 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 three sisters.

If we were making a porn
movie, Roman-style,

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

And if these stories
have been added to

and embellished over the years,

they actually first appear
in sources

written years after his death,

mostly by the second century
biographer Suetonious.

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,

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

Yeah,
and associated with those stories,

there's the account of how people
are coming to the banquet,

Caligula is on his couch,
people file past the end

and he acts like someone at a slave
market,

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,

by humiliating the elite
in all sorts of different ways.

This is one way amongst many.

But perhaps the most damning story
was Caligula's incest

with his favourite 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 this Suetonious stuff,

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

it's quite interesting that even
Suetonius is only saying,

"People used to say that.
The gossip was..."

Whereas he's quite clear that
incest took place,

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

Kept at a distance.

Yes. I think even Seneca, who is
pretty much Caligula's contemporary,

he does talk about
when Caligula's sister Drusilla dies,

Caligula's excessive
grief for Drusilla.

He 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.

He goes around in a terrible state.

But he doesn't link that
to perverse sexuality.

I think there's also
the dynastic aspect of it.

The stories about incest are partly
about their anxieties

about the way that power is now
transmitted in the Roman world.

Instead of it going from one
lot of middle-aged men

to another lot of middle-aged men

through a proper process
in the Senate,

it's one family that's
holding on to power

and the women in the family then
have influence in a way

they never had previously done
under the Roman Republic.

So really what the stories are
telling us,

they are 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.

His relations with the Senate
are clearly very uneasy.

So they tell these stories
about his outrageous behaviour.

Perhaps this is a clue to
one of the problems of Caligula.

Whereas Augustus and Tiberius had
come to power after prominent

military careers, "Bootikins" was
thrust on the throne at just 24.

Without the military pedigree
or political experience

to earn the elite's respect,

it's hardly surprising that he might
cast around

for alternative,
more king-like 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 is said to have insisted

on being worshipped as a god
in his own lifetime.

And to make matters worse, we are

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.

It's even said that he had
flamingos sacrificed to him.

If there's now nothing left of these
buildings above ground in the Forum,

archaeologist Henry Hurst has
uncovered evidence beneath

that suggests they might not be
entirely fantasy.

We dug over all of this area
and we're very lucky

in that we found some
unusually well-dated remains.

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.
Then where we are, a big enclosure

with a central monument.

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.

And what about Caligula's
fantastical bridge to Jupiter

on the Capitoline Hill,

which, if true, would have spanned
a distance of over 250 metres,

and been 30 metres above the ground?

The 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 Capitoline

so you wouldn't find any traces
archaeologically.

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

What it looks really like is a pier
of the Roman bridge at Verona.

These look like that quite a bit, so
we thought, is this a bridge pier?

And in favour of that is this
question of levels

because the temple behind us there
is one storey up from where we are.

There's also the story about how
Caligula threw coins

from the roof of the Basilica Julia,
also one storey 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 storey high

so that it could link these things
all at first floor level.

So a raised walkway
and then up to the Capitoline.

And then eventually up to
the Capitoline, yes.

It's just a small block of marble,
a tantalising clue

to the lengths Caligula went for
his own self-aggrandisement.

But it also points to the difficulty
we 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 site
not far from Rome where we can.

This is Lake Nemi,
one of Caligula's favourite 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 Dianae -

the mirror of Diana.

And in the 1930s,

it was the site 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 excess
towards the end of his reign.

And unsurprisingly, it was Italy's
20th-century tyrant, Mussolini,

who spent a fortune raising them
from the mud and installing them

in a huge museum at the end
of the lake.

The shells of the boats were
tragically destroyed

in the Second World War.

Now we've only got models, but much
of the hardware still survives.

No doubt whose boats these are!

It says
Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.

These are Caligula's barges.

It's a bit hard to know what
a water pipe is doing on a boat.

They can't be ordinary boats.

Perhaps they're bringing water to
Caligula's hot tub under the stars.

Suetonius has left us a vivid
description

of other Caligulan boats,

so luxurious that they had jewelled
prows, sails of purple silk,

and bathrooms of alabaster
and bronze.

Long thought a myth,

the boats of Nemi hint
that they might in fact be true.

For alongside the naval hardware
of the ships are glimpses

of astonishing imperial luxury.

There are rows of columns
made from Grecian marble,

sinister sculptures of Medusa heads,

and huge golden hands,

beautifully sculpted mooring rings
of wolves and lions,

and balustrades
cast in solid bronze.

There have been all kinds of
theories about what these boats

were actually for.

Some people have thought
they must have 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 loved
nothing more

than to build out onto water.
Was that what Caligula was up to?

The boats of Nemi 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 the sanctuary of Diana

and that was the priest in charge,
the so-called King of Nemi,

the Rex Nemorensis.

First of all, he was a runaway
slave, and secondly,

in order to get the job, he had to
kill the present incumbent.

If you wanted to become Rex here,
you came to the sanctuary,

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,

but of course 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 sanctuary.

He had a sword in his hand

and he was always looking furtively
about him, for obvious reasons.

The ritual of Nemi harked 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 King of Nemi

as an uncanny double
of the Emperor of Rome.

Both were looking behind their
backs,

and maybe Caligula had
spotted that too.

However knowing Caligula might have
been, in the end it didn't save him.

On 22nd January, 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,

thanks to a graphic account written
by a Jewish historian,

Flavius Josephus.

Peter Wiseman is taking me
to where he thinks is the exact spot

where Caligula, the Emperor Gaius,

was set upon by members of his
own personal security force.

He sees, coming towards him,

a colonel of the Praetorian Guard
called Cassius Chaerea,

whom he knows of old. So,
he feels safe. He thinks he's 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 Aquila,
so he's the man who has the credit

for the assassination of the Emperor
Gaius - Caligula.

Are people pleased - a tyrant is
dead? Some people thought that.

What you have to understand
about Gaius Caligula is that he was

enormously popular with
the ordinary population.

He was a Caesar, who was the son
of Germanicus,

he was the great-grandson of
Augustus,

he was the great-great-grandson
of Julius Caesar.

All of 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 take-out 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 Chaerea

and the others were idealistic enough
to believe that, in killing Gaius,

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

There wouldn't be
an emperor any more.

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

of what looks as if it might be
about to become the overthrow

of autocracy entirely,

and the return to the republic,
the 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 the
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,

I think, to his terrible reputation.

There's evidence that
attacks on his memory began

almost 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's name.

Some of his coins were defaced,

his initials symbolically scratched
out,

and in many of his official statues,

the heads were either replaced
or destroyed.

At the wonderful
Montemartini Museum in Rome,

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

the new and in many ways
just as vicious emperor,

which underscores the shifty
awkwardness

of the transition of power.

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

It is a bit middle-aged and frowny,
just how Claudius is often shown,

but he's got this strangely
bouffant fringe.

And if you go up above him, you can

see the whole bouffant hairstyle
has been roughly chiselled off.

What has gone 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 have been on a full-length
statue, and if you get low down,

well, actually, he works pretty
OK as Claudius from this angle.

Now, it's a way of saying
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 re-cut 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
on 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 boats,
found at the bottom of Lake Nemi.

And 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.

Were 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
nickname, Bootikins,

to blacken his name and to
justify his violent assassination?

Whatever the truth,
it's in the story of Caligula

that all the elements of tyranny
as we now recognise it

come together for the first time.

And perhaps that's why he's left
such a powerful imprint

on our world.

For almost 2,000 years now,

Caligula has made people
reflect on power and its abuse.

The man and 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,

and about the delusions
of an autocrat,

and about his fearful isolation.

But, for me, Caligula also turns
the 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 rid Rome

of the monster, sure - they left
him in bits on the palace floor -

but all they got
was more of the same.

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