Barber Stephen - Caligula: Divine Carnage: Atrocities of the Roman Emperors

Ever since the cinematic holocaust of Tinto Brass blood-splattered porno epic Caligula in 1980, connoisseurs of visceral history have thirsted for more information and details on the pleasuredomes and necrodromes of Ancient Rome. Yet the true glories of the Roman Empire the slaughter, the sexual depravity, the insanity were virtually impossible to glean from the handful of arid, academic texts available. Finally, here is a book which counts a book which pointedly eschews the mind-numbing minutiae of politico-military history and instead brings the glorious, often shocking decadence of Ancient Rome to bloody, pulsating life.

Here are the incredible cruelties, vices and vanities of emperors such as Caligula and Claudius [see Chapter One], Nero [see Chapter Four], Commodus [see Chapter Three] and Heliogabalus [see Chapter Four] in uncensored and vivid relief.

Although Augustus, the first emperor, was a model of decency and restraint, his successor Tiberius (emperor from AD 1437), notoriously set the tone for imperial debauch in his latter years, when he retired to Capri in around AD 30 [see also Chapter One]. Here, he surrounded himself with young male concubines and indulged in endless orgies of sodomy, cock-sucking and coprophilia. It is reported that the walls of his villa were daubed with vast and complex pornographic friezes which would have shamed de Sade. Not content with enticing mullet to nibble his crumb-coated genitals as he reclined in the tepid rock pools, Tiberius was also in the habit of glazing his penis with milk and honey so that unweaned babes would eagerly suckle at his glans, innocently guzzling the old wretchs torpid emissions.

Yet the excesses and vices of the more infamous tyrants were often matched by lesser known monsters such as Vitellius, whose brief 9-month reign was marked by gluttony, sloth and cowardice and ended in him being hideously tortured and butchered, and then hurled bit by bit into the River Tiber. Vitellius, one of the hundreds of boy prostitutes under Tiberius in Capri, went on to work as courier/catamite for Caligula, Claudius and Nero in turn, and had become emperor by default in AD 69, following the respective decapitation and suicide of Galba and Otho, Neros transitory successors.[1]

Then there was Domitian, emperor from AD 81961, who favoured freaks and was always accompanied to the games by a stunted, gibbering pinhead draped in drool-streaked purple robes. Domitian even bought and trained his own legion of achondroplasic dwarf gladiators, who he sent into the arena to combat topless, ferocious female fighters armed with tridents in grotesque and bloody gavottes of death. Attributed with great phallic power, these dwarfs were watched in naked training by the finest ladies in Rome, who coveted their out-sized generative members.[2]

Domitian meanwhile lusted after prostitutes and courtesans without surcease, and delighted in depilating their succulent pubic mounds by hand-held tweezers before penetration. Rumours of his incest and pederasty abounded. With gleeful hypocrisy he also inflicted awful punishments on the Vestal Virgins, burying the Chief Virgin alive for the sin of fornication and having her lovers horse-whipped to a bloody pulp in the Forum (a tradition upheld by later brutes such as Caracalla [see Chapter Three], who executed four Vestals in this manner during his murderous regime). Domitian also added refinements to the torture of Christians and other fringe cultists, introducing the insertion of burning reeds into the glans penis and localized immolation of the testicles in reprisal for their lunatic heresies.[3] Always in dread of assassination he even lined the imperial palace with mirrored marble so he could see behind him at all times he finally inaugurated a vicious, paranoiac pre-emptive killing program in AD 93 that lasted for over two years; senators, officers and family members alike were poisoned or put to sword until Domitian himself was hacked to bloody fragments by conspirators, to be remembered with the same fearful disdain as Tiberius or Caligula by future generations[4].

Yet these purple, gore-tainted snapshots are but a taste of the delights and delirium to follow. Whether your appetite for carnage on a grand scale was whetted by Caligula, or even perhaps by the more recent Gladiator with its leering depiction of Commodus, in the ensuing pages you will surely find true and lasting satiety.

James Havoc

[1] Vitellius had been succeeded as emperor in AD 69 by Vespasian, who died from a torrential, bowel-shredding diarrhoea attack after drinking tainted spring water, and in AD 79 by the unpopular Titus, a shameless libertine noted only for his nocturnal debauches with catamites and sperm-drinking eunuchs, who also fell foul of disease and expired in a welter of blood-streaked malarial vomit (it is also reported that Domitian, to usher Titus on his way to hell, had his death-bed packed with ice and snow).

[2] Freak culture thrived throughout the centuries of Empire; dwarfs of either sex could be purchased in the Forum Morionium and female hunchbacks, cripples or pinheads were much sought-after as concubines. Magicians and soothsayers would oft cause freaks to be disembowelled alive, divining the future by sifting through many a deformed set of steaming, uncoiling viscera. Augustus, the very first emperor, had a pet dwarf named Lucius, and many of his successors similarly enjoyed the company of human anomalies at imperial court or in their harems. Caligula reputedly gave his slavering retinue of dwarf clowns the absolute power over life and death. It is also reported that the Romans did not hesitate to create and nurture such creatures by brutally contorting, snapping or severing the limbs of infants.

[3] It was Domitian who perpetrated the second major persecution of the Christians, following in the footsteps of Nero who, seeking scapegoats for the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64 which many believed to have been started by Nero himself in order to clear land for his enormous new palace and grounds, the Golden House inaugurated the first of many brutal mass purges against this insurgent monotheistic cult. Nero had thousands of them severely tortured, dressed in the skins of wild beasts and finally either torn to shreds by starving mastiffs or tied to stakes and crosses and set on fire while still alive, making screaming human torches to illuminate the streets and arenas of Rome by night.

Although Christians had fallen foul of previous emperors in smaller numbers (Caligula favoured profound facial disfigurement by branding-iron, or sawing in half), a noble pattern for their relentless mass murder was now established, and flourished through subsequent years of Empire marked by such notable peaks of ferocity as the capture and execution of Saint Blandina and her followers in AD 177, at about the time of the accession of the Emperor Commodus. This atrocity occurred at Lyons, where Christians found themselves at odds with the Roman cult of Cybele. In 177 the Christian Easter clashed with the orgiastic Cybeleian rites; it was the perfect excuse for another purge. Blandina and her followers were tracked down, captured, and put to a slow death in the arena over six days. Stripped naked and bound to stakes, the Christians were exposed to the mauling of wild beasts of every description, so that the skin and meat was gradually eaten or clawed away from their bones as they clung to the hideous vestiges of life. Many of these beasts were specially trained to sexually violate and sodomize their prey before dismemberment; female prisoners doused in civet grease were often raped half to death by feral dogs or buggered by baboons beneath the spectators gaze, before being duly devoured.

Blandina herself, after a prolonged labial mangling, was hurled into a huge frying-pan of boiling oil and half cooked. Then she was wrapped in a net and thrown before wild bulls; finally, after being trampled and gored to the point of extinction, her throat was cut from ear to ear and her spinal cord severed.