Original subtitles

Rome... the greatest empire the world has ever seen.

With our grip on the Mediterranean, we conquer all.

Deep into Africa and as far north as Britannia.

And all under the ultimate control of one man, the Emperor.

Or so it seems.

HORSE NEIGHS

Let emperors strut the world stage.

And let us, the humble women in the wings,

build our dynasties.

For the first time,

we are seeing women altering the history of the western world.

Julia.

Messalina.

Agrippina,

and of course, me, Livia.

All women who can shape the world, changing it forever.

The empresses are the ones

that actually push the emperors into position.

Driven by sex, power and violence.

But if you slip for even an instant, you're going to be torn to shreds.

My name is Livia Drusilla.

I nurture the first great imperial dynasty.

Augustus,

Tiberius,

Caligula,

Claudius, and Nero.

One way or another, they are all men under my control.

Without Livia pulling the strings,

would any of them have reached the heights that they did?

There's nothing she won't do to protect her dynasty.

This is the strangest,

baddest family that history has ever known.

It may take a Caesar to lead an empire,

but it takes a woman to make it work.

Everyone thinks they know the true story of Rome,

but nobody knows it like me because I lived it.

And it was I who ruled Rome.

When I was young, I was so beautiful.

I was the greatest prize in Rome.

But I was just a humble senator's daughter.

Yet I still became the most powerful woman in the world.

Forget what you think you already know.

I am about to tell you the real story

of the world's greatest, bloodiest dynasty.

It's time for my son Tiberius

to become the second emperor of Rome.

Under my guiding hand, of course.

But he's about to slip the reins and drag the Imperial Court

into an age of depravity that shocks our world.

But then his successor, my wicked, entitled grandson Caligula,

will put all of Tiberius' successes in the shade,

threatening to ruin the Empire itself.

I am only 15 when our beloved Republic

sees its first great dictator, Julius Caesar, murdered.

Years of bloodshed and civil war follow.

50 years on, and my beloved husband Augustus rules undisputed.

The first true emperor of Rome.

With me by his side at every step.

Now, tragedy.

No sooner have I charmed Augustus to make my son Tiberius his heir

than Augustus dies.

Poison is to blame,

someone very close, the poisoner.

Who? My lips are sealed.

Tiberius knows that he owes his power to his mother.

Livia knows this as well, and because of that,

Livia is determined to help Tiberius on his way

as he learns the ropes of being a new emperor.

Ancl initially, this seems to work quite well.

My dear Tiberius woos the public as only a great soldier can.

He wages war against the unruly,

unwashed Germanic tribes who humiliated Augustus.

He crushes them, bringing home

the priceless eagle standards they stole from Augustus.

Morale is riding high.

The people adore him.

He's a great general. He's a successful soldier.

But that's very different from being a politician.

Ancl above all, he didn't play the games

that were needed politically to maintain power,

which Augustus played perfectly.

Tiberius was the opposite of Augustus.

Tiberius' reign starts off quite well.

He seems to make an effort to treat the Senate

with as much respect as possible,

but quite quickly, things start to degenerate.

Tiberius becomes increasingly tyrannical,

increasingly paranoid.

You start to see cracks in that relationship

between Tiberius and Livia.

They are not a completely solid force,

because one of the early acts the Senate wants to do

is to honour Livia by giving her the title of Mother of the Nation.

And Tiberius says no, he doesn't allow that honour.

He basically vetoes it.

The ingratitude, the paranoia, the foolishness.

Fear not. I won't go quietly.

But other women are less resilient to his cruelty.

Within a year of coming to power, he's settling scores.

And the first target is his wanton ex-wife, Julia,

who humiliated him with her promiscuous ways

and now lives in exile, banished from men and wine.

The only punishment that could truly hurt her.

He actually worsens Julia's situation in exile.

He cuts off the allowance that Augustus had allowed her.

He cuts off even her supply of food.

Ancl lets her starve to death.

Julia is just the start.

My son's mission is to destroy all his enemies,

both real and imagined.

It's here that things turn really dark.

There are a lot of infamous stories of Tiberius' reign,

but one that goes down in the history books is his introducing

of the so-called Treason Trials.

Tiberius now makes it treason for people to speak against him.

He could pull you in and murder you for any charges.

It becomes quite quickly a reign of terror.

Executions are a daily occurrence,

even on sacred days like New Year's Day.

No-one was spared, even women and children.

They were dragged with hooks

from the Stairs of Mourning right to the Tiber,

and thrown away as if they were nothing more than trash.

No-one in Rome felt safe.

The age of Augustus seemed like a distant memory.

Tiberius sees enemies everywhere

until there is only one person whom he really trusts, Drusus,

his 29-year-old son from his first marriage.

Sadly, Drusus, who has his father's temper,

makes a mortal enemy of Tiberius' right-hand man,

the conniving, ruthless Sejanus.

Sejanus decides to do away with Drusus.

He does so by seducing Drusus' wife,

and together they slowly poison him.

So it looks like Drusus dies of a natural death.

Dies of illness over a period of time.

His beloved son, his priceless blood heir, murdered.

Tiberius' reign descends into full-blown, rage-filled tyranny.

I think the death of Drusus

was the last bit of humanity left in Tiberius.

The loss of his son, the loss of power for someone

who was used to being in power and in control,

I think absolutely broke him.

Ancl he goes on to become one of the worst figures in Roman history.

My whole life, I worked to make him Emperor.

And now my wretched son is throwing it all away...

...dragging my dynasty into a nightmare of torture,

paedophilia and murder.

You see some of the most horrific rumours

emerging from the whole of this period.

LIVIA: For 12 years, Rome is in the iron grip of my son,

the second Emperor Tiberius.

When he spills German blood, the people cheer.

He restores our pride and secures our peace.

Then he ignores the hard won love of his people.

Paranoid, he slaughters the innocent and guilty alike.

Worst, he turns his back on me.

And without a woman to guide him, there really are enemies everywhere.

Tiberius is in his 60s now.

He's had enough of Rome.

Either he's paranoid of being assassinated,

or he's just fed up of being in the public eye.

Ancl he wants a retreat to a quiet life, to seclusion.

Tiberius' popularity begins to crumble.

His mood darkens, and he becomes tired of running the empire.

He retires to Capri.

Capri, I never cared for the place.

A dreary island full of wasps,

much like the Senate Tiberius was desperate to escape.

But so distant from his duties,

a man's mind can wander into darkness.

Once he's vacated Rome,

he has this additional layer of freedom

that he wouldn't have when he's being looked upon

by this very sort of crowded population.

So on the island of Capri,

he really gives full rein to his desires.

He gets to Capri, and it's like there's a kind of Pandora's box

of perversion is opened and something flies out.

Give him credit where credit is due,

Tiberius does his self-imposed exile in style.

His Villa ofjupiter is spectacular,

perched high on the cliff tops.

Free from prying eyes, no excess is spared.

Tiberius' life on Capri is rich material

for scandal-mongering historians.

He didn't have an attachment

to physical or material luxury in Rome.

He was much more serious minded.

Ancl if we believe the ancient record,

then Tiberius nevertheless gave in to a life of incredible licence.

Ancl that situation is the perfect environment

for... for rumours to start to grow.

People are like,

"Why is Tiberius not at Rome? What is he hiding from us?"

The stories very quickly circulate that he's gone to Capri.

Not because he doesn't like being involved in politics,

it's to hide the depravity that's going on.

On Capri, he tries to gain this isolation,

this seclusion from the rest of the world.

Ancl straight away,

you see some of the most horrific rumours emerging

from the whole of this period.

The Villa ofjupiter on Capri

has these incredibly steep cliffs going right down to the sea.

Ancl so Tiberius can take people that he is suspicious of

for nice little cliff-side walks, and then throw them off.

There's a 297 metre tall cliff

in which he would just push them off, get rid of them,

and then get on with his day as if nothing had happened.

The Tiberius leap will be the moment when transgressors will die,

but only after an intensely painful period of punishment,

which would frequently involve, we're told, some element of torture.

Capri is a den of iniquity,

and my son Tiberius is at the centre of it all.

And don't just take my word for it.

Even that pedant of a historian, Suetonius, cannot turn a blind eye.

Suetonius is the one who has the great line about it,

where he says about Tiberius,

"His criminal obscenities are almost too vile to discuss,

"let alone believe."

"Almost" being the key word here, cos Suetonius then goes

and lists them all, one by one by one.

There are young children, young boys and young girls,

who are brought to the villa for Tiberius' sexual pleasure.

He has abused these small boys.

He has a team of what he calls his minnows.

As he swam, they swam below him and nibbled his genitals.

These minnows...

...peasant boys, most likely, and hardly missed, I suppose.

But there are limits even an emperor cannot break.

And Tiberius has crossed that line.

These stories that, you know, he interrupted a religious ceremony

because he took a fancy to the boys taking part in it.

He rapes the boys,

and when they complained, he has their legs broken.

Even being friends with Tiberius comes with its own problems.

My son has a very dark sense of humour.

Tiberius tricked male guests

into drinking enormous quantities of wine.

When they were drunk beyond reason,

he then tied their penises tightly with string

so that they couldn't possibly pee.

The pain was excruciating. They writhed on the floor.

They begged for release, and Tiberius laughed.

It's three years since Tiberius leaves Rome

and his Imperial responsibilities behind.

But in an age of prosperity and peace, the people barely notice,

and the Senate manage the Empire in his absence,

under the watchful eye of the leader of the Imperial Guard.

Thankfully, I, as mother of the Emperor,

remain in Rome to maintain a sense of Imperial control.

Tiberius becomes quite resentful of his mother's political status,

but more so, he becomes resentful of the notion

that somehow him becoming Emperor is her doing and not divine right.

Ancl so, eventually,

this relationship really breaks down.

Livia's power and influence over Tiberius declines.

He sidelines her politically.

The gods are loosening my grip on my deviant son's rule.

I sacrifice everything to secure his throne.

And now my 86 years are weighing heavy.

Livia suffered a fall in her old age.

Her death was certainly protracted enough for Tiberius

to have returned to Rome to see her before she cited.

And she wafted. And she wafted.

But he didn't come.

Tiberius doesn't leave Capri,

doesn't go to her deathbed to be with her in her last moments.

Is it too much to ask that my ungrateful swine of a son,

who I made Emperor, respects his mother with a visit?

She then died at the age of 86.

Everyone awaited for the Emperor's presence,

but Tiberius cared so little that he kept them waiting,

to the point that the body had decayed

and had to be buried out of necessity

rather than out of funeral rites.

When Livia died,

the Senate agreed to build an arch in her honour.

Ancl Livia would have been the first woman in Rome

to receive such an honour,

but Tiberius ensured that this arch was never built.

Tiberius flat out refuses.

This is not what Tiberius wants.

He does not want his mother getting further honours

even after she's dead.

Turning his back on me,

Tiberius now has no mother, wife, or goddess to guide him,

and no son to claim his throne.

The fool needs to name a successor

if our dynasty is not to die with him.

There is a big problem for Tiberius

in that, if he doesn't have any sort of heir at all,

then what's to stop another senator from saying,

"Well, look, the Emperor is nearly dead. He's very old.

"He's going to go away soon, one way or the other.

"Nature will do it. Why don't I get in first?"

Tiberius invites, under conditions of utmost secrecy,

a member of his family to share his self-imposed exile with him.

A teenage boy called Caligula.

An odd choice, but he has good blood.

After all, he is my great-grandson.

Unfortunately, Tiberius,

thinking Caligula's parents are plotting against him,

has them killed,

and his brothers too for good measure.

Leaving poor little Caligula the last man standing

and the very last choice as a successor to Tiberius.

Tiberius takes in Caligula because he doesn't have a son,

and he's aware that he,

like Augustus before him, is going to need a successor.

The mind of a tyrant is always hard to understand.

To everyone's surprise,

Caligula was taken under Tiberius' wing,

probably because he needed company,

but most importantly because he needed an accomplice.

So Caligula goes to Capri,

and he basically now has to stay with the man

who has ordered the executions of several members of his family,

and just stay there and basically be emotionless,

to not fight Tiberius, to be his heir,

and to just kind of be there passively

and watch what Tiberius is doing.

He was a teenager,

and it's said that Caligula, actually, there,

is witnessing things he'd never seen before in Rome.

Increasingly depraved way of life for both men.

The decision to bring Caligula to Capri

would turn out to be one of Tiberius' worst.

Tiberius needs Caligula

because he needs someone to say there's a future,

and Caligula is all that's left now.

Ancl I think witnessing the murder of his family members,

and then being brought up

in this incredibly strange environment

by the uncle that had murdered them,

maybe contributes to Caligula not being...

the most well-adjusted man.

That's bound to make you look around pretty nervously and think,

"Well, I've got to tow the line very, very carefully."

The saying "keep your friends close and your enemies closer"

is usually good advice.

Tiberius is about to realise that keeping his family close

is probably the worst advice that anyone could give him.

Tiberius, he's a very old man.

Hardly anybody has seen him for a long, long time.

And it shouldn't really surprise anybody when he falls ill.

Least surprised is cunning little Caligula,

watching from the wings.

As my son's grip on power falters,

this is a golden opportunity to seize the crown.

Tiberius appears to die,

and the people around him rush to acclaim Caligula

as the next Emperor.

Ancl everyone is excited because Caligula,

he's seen as young blood, a fresh face.

This is the dawn of a new era.

The old, boring, pretty infamous Emperor Tiberius is dead.

Ancl then it turns out that Tiberius isn't dead after all.

Rather than let this word spread,

as they're already celebrating the accession of Caligula,

the head of the Praetorian Guard, a man called Macro,

he gets a pillow and he smothers Tiberius in his bed

just to make sure that he's dead and to avoid any embarrassment.

There's a rumour that he's actually been smothered

on the orders of Caligula.

And by doing so, Caligula got rid of, first of all,

somebody who had tortured his family, tortured his life,

but also the only person

standing in the way of ultimate power.

Caligula, to give him credit, is our first emperor to show

that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

But when he loses his last female anchor,

a deranged torrent of vengeance consumes Rome.

LIVIA: The dynasty I founded as the first Roman empress

continues with my great-grandson, Caligula,

the youngest and dumbest emperor Rome has yet known.

Tiberius may introduce tyranny to the Imperial Court,

but he is at least prudent with the Empire's wealth.

Caligula? Not so much.

When Tiberius dies,

he leaves the treasury in a really good position.

There is tonnes of money because he's been really careful with it.

Ancl with him dies an accomplished bureaucrat,

a man of extraordinary military record, senatorial record.

Ancl he's replaced by somebody who,

in terms of training in the way Rome works,

is effectively a child.

After 22 years of Tiberius' miserly rule,

Rome is desperate for change.

Caligula, unknown, untested, is their great new hope?

Oh, dear.

A 24-year-old boy by the name of Caligula

becomes the most powerful man in the world.

He hasn't had a career.

He hasn't clone anything by Roman standards.

This is a new chapter.

Caligula leaves Capri and he returns to Rome.

He is young, he is energetic.

People line the streets

and they celebrate Caligula's arrival.

He gives money out to people in Rome. He feasts them.

He declares public games on a lavish scale.

People are initially very excited when Caligula becomes Emperor,

and the initial signs are very promising.

So people are encouraged.

My great-grandson loves to put on a show,

no matter the cost.

An expensive, cheap trick

pioneered by Caesar to win over the masses.

But it works. All they need is a little blood, bread and wine,

and they'll be eating out of your hand.

It was an almost sure-fire way

of garnering at least short-term public support

to stage an elaborate spectacular.

DOGS BARKING He's a showman at heart.

He just has this urge to put on this spectacle,

to make everything bigger and gaudier and more colourful.

My dear great-grandson plunders the Empire for lions and tigers

to fight his gladiators.

Feeding them is an expensive business.

But Caligula, always ingenious,

cuts his costs by feeding them on Rome's undesirables.

It's win-win.

He loved gladiators.

It just wasn't bloody enough for him.

Cos, contrary to belief,

there are rules involved in gladiator fights.

He threw all those away.

He wanted more bloodshed.

It's more exotic, it's more spectacular.

It's more lethal.

But it's also... It's a time when,

in most cases, he can go there and the crowd is loving him

because he's giving them just what they want.

There's no doubt the young buck knows how to play a crowd.

But fate has other plans.

People are excited about Caligula's reign at the start,

but things start to go downhill very quickly. He gets ill.

It does seem to be a very serious illness,

to the fact that many people believe that he won't survive.

It's a wake-up call to Caligula.

He's become Emperor and everyone's cheered him,

and he's gone and spent all his money

and everybody's cheered him.

But then he's looked as if he was going to die,

and everyone's thinking,

"Well, OK, he's not gonna to be here anymore.

"So what's next?

"How do I make sure that I'm doing well under the next regime?"

When he gets better, what he realises, first of all,

is the falsity of everyone around him.

All those who, until that point, had worshipped him,

had said how wonderful he was.

Suddenly, we're thinking he was going to die,

and they were already looking at replacing him.

Caligula is openly autocratic, openly tyrannical,

and he wants to put that power on display.

So when a senator, during his illness,

sycophantically says, you know,

"I would give my life so Caligula could survive this illness,"

Caligula makes him follow through on that when he survives,

and he forces the Senator to kill himself.

Poor, orphaned Caligula

has no mother's influence to calm his cruel outbursts.

But make no mistake,

there are women pulling his strings - his sisters.

Caligula, he had three sisters - Drusilla, Livilla, and Agrippina.

He makes them very central to his rule.

Believe me, they are very close.

So close, most believe he sleeps with all three.

I'm all for keeping it in the family,

but there are limits.

Yet Drusilla is his true soulmate.

His desperate need to satisfy her whims

is the only thing that's keeping him sane.

He gives her his ring when he's ill.

Kind of indicates that she is the heir of his power.

He gives her unprecedented honours.

Caligula was very, very close to his sisters,

particularly Drusilla,

who sadly will die not long into Caligula's reign.

Ancl this is seen as another turning point in Caligula's story.

That this kind of drives him over the edge even more.

When Drusilla dies, Caligula's reaction is very extreme.

He completely falls to pieces.

He's absolutely devastated.

He barely functions,

and it just destroys him kind of emotionally and kind of mentally.

His sister Drusilla kept Caligula in check.

Now that she's dead,

he's consumed by anger at the ruling class

that manage the Empire.

Maybe Caligula starts to realise that these senators are sycophants.

They are saying what he wants to hear.

But in fact, those are the figures who ratified the order

for his mother to be exiled and killed,

for his elder brothers to be killed.

His attitude towards the Senate is dismissive, contemptuous.

He intends to inspire fear. He successfully inspires fear.

Ancl so the power that he has is absolute.

He ruled by fear.

In fact, his motto was "oderint dum metuant" -

let them hate so long as they fear me.

He grows this insatiable desire to humiliate them, to deride them.

He wants to show how much he can get away with,

almost because he is the man in charge.

So he dresses in clothing

that wasn't appropriate for a Roman emperor.

What they would class as effeminate.

He's wearing lots of silk and women's gowns.

There are even stories of him dressing up as Venus, as a goddess.

Time and again, Caligula is a man

who is using sex as an expression of power,

and I think, very definitely,

a way of expressing contempt towards the Roman senate.

His favourite trick was inviting senators and their wives to dinner.

He would walk around the couches, take the wives off,

have sex with them, return them to their husbands,

and then give the husbands a detailed report

of how bad they were in bed,

which is just like an added humiliation for them.

So much in the Roman world is about sex,

except sex.

Sex is about power.

Ancl there's no denying that Caligula had a lot of power.

For Caligula, sleeping with the senators' wives

helped him to feel great about himself,

but he also knew that, for the senators,

it would help them to understand that they were powerless.

And he was powerful.

True, he is using sex to belittle his senators,

but the wives can now speak to the Emperor

in ways their husbands never can.

This twisted pillow talk is the only way

the egomaniac is persuaded to settle down and produce an heir.

He marries a woman who is already

significantly pregnant with his child,

and they have a daughter together.

Ancl Caligula is completely enamoured of his child,

and he names her Drusilla after his beloved dead sister.

When the baby was born, he took it as good evidence

that he really was the father of this little girl,

because this little girl started scratching people's faces,

and he said, "That is a sure sign that I am the father."

A daughter can melt the hardest of hearts, but not Caligula's.

His contempt for the Senate grows stronger by the day.

There's a story that's always associated with Caligula

and this claim that he made his favourite horse a consort.

Ancl it's used as... as an indication that,

you know, he's really lost the plot and he's going mad.

It's saying to the Senate,

you've got about as much brains as my four-legged friend,

and I don't care because all the important decisions

I will make anyway.

He's saying, "I have so little respect for you

"that I think that my horse could do a better job than you are."

Who can blame him for needling those impotent, self-important senators?

The Empire's middle managers,

always with their heads in the trough.

But his ego is blinding him.

And now he picks a fight with our magnificent army.

A bad mistake.

These soldiers are the Empire, and they can easily break it.

Caligula is aware he's never won any military victories for himself,

so he decides that he's going to go campaigning in Germany and Gaul,

potentially even eyeing up a conquest of Britain.

Caligula heads north with his legions,

and they go through what is now northern France.

Ancl they prepare the ships and the provisions

for an invasion of Britain.

They're going to cross the Channel.

This feared waterway to Britain, which is still quite mysterious.

But then you have this odd story.

He gets his soldiers to attack the sea.

Parades them on the beach, and they attack Neptune.

Ancl then he tells them to go and pick up seashells

on the shore in their helmets.

Ancl he claims that this is the bounty

that the sea owes to the glory of Rome.

Some people say that this is a sign of Caligula's madness.

I think it may well be a sign of Caligula

once again wanting to humiliate more people.

He's clone it with the Senate.

Now he's got these battle-hardened soldiers in front of him.

But Caligula knows that he's the man with the power,

and so he decides to humiliate them, in what way?

Than by making them as if they were children collecting seashells.

If only this moment on the beach were a one-off moment of madness.

But no. Caligula's behaviour is spiralling out of control.

In 39AD, Caligula embarked on what might seem to us today

an extraordinary folly.

Which is the bridge to nowhere.

He is going to put his power on more theatrical display

than he has ever done before.

So what he decides he's going to do

is create a bridge over the Bay of Naples,

and he does it by kind of finding all these boats,

tying them together,

and then having a dirt road built on top of these boats.

It is incredibly expensive

and extravagant, and ultimately pointless.

We know how helpful it could be to any Roman leader

to give a display of power.

Here, effectively, we have somebody riding across water,

and that absolutely fits with Caligula's idea of himself

as somebody who is more than human.

He's wearing what he claims to be

the breastplate of Alexander the Great,

and then he rides in this exceptional procession,

in which he forces the Senate to kind of take part,

across this bridge that he has created

purely for this reason.

Ancl this is just the ultimate visualisation of Caligula's power.

There's also an element of brutality in the whole thing,

which seems typical of Caligula's short reign,

because, of course, crowds of spectators gather on the cliffs.

We hear instances of spectators who plunge to their deaths

when they fall from the cliffs, straining to get a view of this.

Ancl I can't imagine that Caligula was anything but flattered

by that level of interest,

and not unduly concerned by the outcomes.

Emperor or not, Caligula must pay for his outrageous lusts.

They launch an attack that is so savage

that people claim that they'd seen people eat parts of Caligula's body.

LIVIA: My impetuous great-grandson, Caligula, parties his way

into the public's affection as their third Emperor.

He pays with money that my son Tiberius

so carefully saved for Rome.

Time for the boy emperor to grow up before he cripples our fortunes.

When Tiberius died,

he left a surplus of what we consider billions of dollars.

Within a year, Caligula had used them all up.

He led a very lavish, extravagant lifestyle.

He loved gemstones, he loved parties.

The problem is, where's the money coming from?

So he resorts to the most terrible thing.

He turns the palace into a brothel.

Not any old brothel.

A unique brothel, unique to the palace,

in that the prostitutes you could sleep with were freeborn women.

Ancl not just freeborn women, elite freeborn women.

It's a humiliation for the Senate

because it's their wives and their daughters

who are forced into prostitution to make money for Caligula.

They take us to an absolute extreme of this sense

that emperors are becoming debauched,

that they have lost their grasp on morality,

and they've also lost what should distinguish them

from the sort of ignoble common people.

This is how a debauched tyrant behaves.

It certainly shouldn't be happening publicly.

But again, when you're actually there,

do you say to the man who's got the power

of life and death over you,

"Oh, look, this is shameful. You shouldn't be doing that?"

Of course you don't.

Who wouldn't be seduced by all that power and wealth?

But Caligula is taking his role as first among equals too far.

The fool.

As you'd expect, the inevitable happens,

and Caligula proclaims himself a god.

The problem is, it doesn't really mean much

when it's you doing it and not the people.

That is not a way to win people's affection in Rome.

Romans are religious people. They cultivate their gods.

For an emperor to claim to be a god in their own lifetime

is just not the clone thing.

Perhaps, at this point, he truly believed he was a god,

that he could make any decision he wanted without ramifications.

But, unfortunately, he was completely wrong.

Believe me, megalomania has its own unstoppable momentum.

But how many enemies can you make?

How crazy can your decisions be before the people snap?

Emperor Caligula is about to find out.

Personally, I don't believe that Caligula was mad

so much as he had moments of madness.

He was very clever, he was very astute,

but he was also very brutal, very cruel,

and he was prone to making insane decisions,

no more so than when he decides that the capital of Rome

should no longer be Rome, but Alexandria.

Throughout Caligula's short reign, we've seen this contempt for Rome,

and the ultimate expression of contempt

comes with Caligula's apparent plan

to shift the centre of power from Rome to Alexandria.

That move, that move away from Rome,

that rejection of Rome and Romanness,

that embracing of something Hellenic,

something foreign, something exotic,

which all Romans would regard with deep suspicion, is a catalyst.

Ancl at that point, Caligula has to go.

There's a poetic irony that the last day of Caligula's life

is centred around one of his passions - blood sports.

Unfortunately for Caligula, on this particular day,

the blood wasn't going to be anyone else's but his.

Sadly, the boy doesn't realise

there are greater expectations of an emperor

than cruelty and ridicule.

If you push men too far, they will turn against you.

I should know.

There is a certain member of the Praetorian Guard,

a man called Cassius Chaerea, who Caligula mocks unforgivingly.

Because Chaerea, he is a little bit past it,

and Caligula mocks him for having a slightly high voice,

and in his eyes, an effeminate voice.

Ancl ultimately, Chaerea snaps.

Ancl him and a few other officers decide enough is enough.

We are going to assassinate Caligula.

It's from this bloody and violent arena

that Caligula begins his final journey.

He leaves the games, and you've got this tunnel

that takes you from the palace to the games and back.

One of the guards asked Caligula for the password of that clay.

He responds in a contemptuous way...

...and the guard's response is to raise his sword

and strike Caligula with all his might.

Chaerea lands the first blow.

As it happens, he misses the Emperor's heart,

strikes him on the shoulder,

and the Emperor's response is to cry out, "I live. I live."

And then a great slaughter fest erupts.

Blows rain down upon him.

They launch an attack that is so savage

that people claim that they'd seen people eat parts of Caligula's body.

That's just testament to how brutal an attack this is.

The way that Caligula was murdered

shows you the amount of scorn that the upper class,

the politicians had for him.

There is chaos throughout the palace and throughout the city.

Some people say that he's alive. Some people say that he's dead.

No-one knows what's going on.

His bodyguard are going insane.

This is the end of Caligula,

but it isn't the end of the bloodbath,

because the guards recognise

that there can be no future Caligula.

Ancl so, next to be killed

are Caligula's wife and his young daughter.

Husband, wife, baby. All are dead.

And then they've got a problem of what next?

Because there isn't an heir.

As news slowly seeps through,

the Praetorians realise what's happening,

and they start searching around the palace,

trying to figure out what's going to happen next.

In the palace is the figure of Claudius.

Claudius is the uncle of Caligula who'd always been pushed aside

because he had a couple of disabilities.

He had a stammer and he had a limp.

A member of the Praetorian Guard is going through the palace

and spots the feet of Claudius

pointing out from behind the curtain.

He tears the curtain back...

"Spare me. Spare me!" shouts the man in question.

The guard raises his sword, drops his sword.

Realises that this is Caligula's uncle,

and decides that this would be a kind of a good candidate

to replace Caligula, and so falls to his knees.

Hails the elderly man as lmperator, Emperor,

Rome's fourth Emperor, Claudius.

Least likely leader of the greatest empire on earth.

Caligula's depraved behaviour

sees him cut down in just five years.

This is what happens when an emperor doesn't have

an empress keeping him in line.

Next time, from the bizarre to the ridiculous.

Now is the time for my uninspiring grandson,

Claudius, to rule over Rome.

Two women guide his reign,

Messalina the whore empress,

and Agrippina, whose lust for succession

not only dooms herself and her own son Nero,

but also brings my precious dynasty to a bitter end.