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Caligula, Part 2 of 2

This entry is part 14 of 14 in the series Evil Dudes In History

Evil Dudes In History

Kevin, Joe, and Toren conclude Caligula’s history, an exploration of explanations for his behavior, plus pop culture!

Music: “The Killing Type” by Amanda Palmer & The Grand Theft Orchestra

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8 Responses

  3. I suspect the reason they dashed Drusilla against a wall was that they felt icky about stabbing a baby. If Caligula was on his third wife by the time he died, and she was pregnant when they married, the baby must have been that, a baby, barely a toddler. Perhaps the soldiers felt that it’d be a quicker death against the wall than via the sword. Dunno. It might explain why people thought Drusilla was nasty as a baby though, scratching at the eyes of others with sharp nails – pretty much all babies do this! They have frickin’ sharp nails because they’re paper thin by stiff (cf kitten claws) and eyes are interesting things to reach for, and they’re not very coordinated so any grab they make at a person’s face is likely to end up with one of the fingers in the person’s eye.

    Will have to find this film. Sounds fascinating!

    Great intermission music too. Wonderful stuff.

  4. Just a thought on the evil-o-meter. Not to excuse Mr. Caligula, but I think that the evilness of a dude or a dame should be judged against the context of what level of evilness that can be expected in the setting in where they live. For example, HItler, Stalin and Koch were active in creating and/or upholding new systems of evilness (genocide, the camps etc), and Bundy created a very personal system of evilness (centered on himself and his actions) that were in a big part new. But what Mr. Caligula did seems to be more what was accepted, and sometimes “needed” to consolidate his political grip on the senate, the praetorian guard and on Rome. Of course the things he did to do this were decidedly dickish, but were they any different from what other emperors of senators did? I think that is a super-important point to stress, the difference between being evil in a evil setting, and to create a new setting that is more evil than the previous one, and I think that a big part in what makes Mr. Caligula evil is that he introduces new dickishness and thereby made the political/social context more dickish as a whole. As i said, I’m not trying to excuse what he did, but I think that it is an important difference between acting like a dick if acting like a dick is expected of you on one hand, and to create new systems of more extreme evilness on the other.

    Also, Heliogabalus, Jay! I can recommend the super-weird rock opera about him by the even more weird slovenian art-rock band devil doll (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st_R2WEN1eQ).

  5. I recall in the Asterix and Obelix series the Roman orgy types dissolving pearls in vinegar, and having no idea why.

  6. So apparently there was this child murderer in japan in the 1980’s known as the otaku murderer responsible for the miyazaki murders. Not sure if his campaign was long enough to warrant a spot on evil dudes and dames, but he did some fucked up shit. His name was tsutomu Miyazaki if you guys wanted to check it out. Just heard about him on the internet and thought that he would be perfect for evil dudes and dames. Keep up the good work!