A (5:41)
Pontius Pilate was the Senator of Judea under the Roman Emperor Tiberius. Back to the story. So his father, Germanicus, was loved, but his father wasn't, you know, the Emperor. His father wasn't necessarily even like the highest ranking noble. He was just a beloved statesman. And when he suddenly died in 19 AD, ancient sources at the time, again, conspiracy land. All right, they say that he was poisoned. Caligula was then fatherless at the age of seven. Now, his mother's accusations against Tiberius kind of sealed their fate. Over the next decade, Caligula watched his family just get destroyed. His mother was exiled to starve on a barren island. His brothers were in prison. One of them was murdered. The other one was like, basically driven insane over this trauma and then the whole state coming down on them. So his family is basically just like, yo, you killed our dad, husband, brother, whatever. And they're like, nah, we didn't. And on top of that, we're going to kill all you guys and get you out of here because you guys are stirring up trouble for the Emperor. So by age 20, Caligula was like the only young man that survived this purge of his family. So he learned a brutal lesson very early that mercy is weakness and trust was fatal. You understand? His father, Germanicus, trusted the state that he trusted the justice system. He trusted everyone in Rome. And it got him killed. Then came a twist that would shape everything. Tiberius summoned the young man to live with him on Capri. So for six years, Caligula played a courtier. He was, you know, kind of hiding his rage beneath the mask. And ancient sources even hint that then his cruelty and his obsession with performance and proving people wrong was actually, you know, beginning to come up. But it was still hidden behind, you know, sort of this facade. So when Tiberius dies in 37 AD, the mask comes off and Rome sees underneath who this guy Caligula actually is. So by March, 37 AD, Emperor Tiberius is dead. The news goes across Rome and everyone's talking about it. Everyone's excited. Cause they hate Tiberius. They love Germanicus. And so after 23 years under this paranoid, bitter ruler, Rome believed salvation had finally arrived in the form of a young man with the legendary name in this heroic bloodline. The son of Germanicus, Tiberius had named joint heirs, which was strange for the time, but he appointed Caligula, you know, this beloved child of this great heroic man, and then his teenage grandson, Tiberius Gemellus. Now, that arrangement lasted exactly as long as it took Caligula to come back from the outskirts of the Empire and go back to Rome. Caligula convinced the Senate to throw out the will and, yeah, just burn it, forget that it ever happened. And he argued that the old emperor must have been out of his mind to suggest handing power to this little teenage brat that doesn't know anything, probably with low T. So with the one with. It's probably true. The kid is probably a sugar addict. Low T, dude. So with one smooth maneuver, okay, this, you know, gets the Senate kind of fired up. And he eliminated his only rival basically bloodlessly and just by convincing a couple old senators. So in the early days when, you know, Caligula takes over, everything's going great. He starts handing out like these generous bonuses to the guards and to the legions and all the soldiers. He welcomed back a bunch of political exiles and gave them their property back. And most remarkably, he gave every Roman citizen a bunch of money. Literally started just handing out 400 sesterces to everyone, about $1,000 in today's money. And it cost the state nearly a billion dollars to actually fund all the citizens. So the mood in Rome is electric. People are fired up. Within three months, Romans had sacrificed over 160,000 animals celebrating this new emperor. Caligula is the man. Big C in the building. Then in Alexandria, the philosopher Philo Described how all the world was filled with expectation and prayers for his prosperity. Caligula showed like, oh, this guy's a genius. He knows how to get people on his side. He has the right name, comes from the right family, and. And he, you know, kind of handled Tiberius's memory in an interesting way. Instead of trashing the man who literally probably killed his dad, destroyed his entire family, put Rome into the mud, he gave Tiberius this big funeral and actually declared him divine. He was like, tiberius is a great man and I'm just honored to carry on the throne. I'm just doing my best. And the Senate approved. And at the same time, Caligula made a public show of honoring his own murdered family. He personally sailed to the islands where his mother and brother had died. He gathered their ashes and brought them back to Rome for a proper funeral. And these weren't just like, you know, sentimental gestures about how emotional he was that his family had died. They're calculated moves. Caligula is positioning himself both as a good son, right to his mom, and a good brother to his brother and just a real family man, but also a traditional Roman by honoring the past, but still, you know, offering hope for what the future of the Empire had. So for a moment, it seemed like Rome found the perfect ruler, right? They had gone through so much with all these bad emperors, but finally they got this young guy. He's beloved by the people, he's generous to the military. He's handing out cash to everybody. He's politically, you know, savvy. He's balancing the old with the new. But things didn't stay this way for long. But for a brief time, it was working. Trade was bustling. People are putting money into Rome. You know, the. Everyone's in a great mood, literally. The treasury built up by Tiberius's years of penny pinching are actually overflowing with wealth. And according to Philo, the empire under Caligula's early rule had universal peace and prosperity. It was the best that Rome had been done, been doing in literal decades. But underneath this beautiful golden surface, cracks are starting to show. And the same trauma that helped Caligula survive in Tiberius's shadow. Being in the courts, having his whole family be destroyed and not showing anything. The boy who watched his dad literally get murdered, allegedly poisoned. I don't want to get sued by the state of Tiberius. Allegedly. Now, with unlimited power in his hands, the truth is coming out. And the wounds that he had been hiding are now starting to tear open. The first breakdown in Caligula's reign comes just seven months in. All right, October in 37 AD, Caligula gets sick, like really sick. And we still don't know exactly what happened. There's still a lot of historical debate over what it was. Maybe it was like a fever that affected his brain or some epilepsy or a stroke, no one really knows, but the effect is unmistakable. Suetonius, one of the historians I talked about earlier, he wrote that it revealed not sickness of the body, but corruption of the mind, transforming Caligula from, you know, this reasonable man into a tyrant. And the first sign of what was coming. Remember Tiberius Gamelus, the co heir, the grandson that Caligula just kind of pushed out on day one? Well, he's about to become his first victim. He accused the boy of treason and orders Gamelis to commit suicide. That's the sentence. Hey, put a gun in your mouth, like literally. That's what he says. Off rip. I don't know if we can even say that, but that's what he said. And the terrified teenager is now forced to commit under military supervision. Brutal. And this wasn't just about eliminating a rival, right? He's starting to get paranoid. He's starting to see threats everywhere because again, his dad was, you know, beloved. He was a hero amongst the Roman people and gets killed by the emperor. So once that switch kind of flips in his brain, things start to get weird. Caligula starts showing up, like to public events, dressing up as different, different gods. He starts demanding people to worship him. He builds a temple specifically for him. Sacred altars, sacrifices, priests for Caligula to on like, it's hard to really wrap your head around. This guy's like, guys, I'm a God and you got to worship me as such. And it was no longer like this performance piece. It was just a complete like, rupture, detachment from everything that Roman emperors had carefully balanced since Augustus. Caligula wasn't like being pretend like, oh, I'm like a God, or you know, I'm from the lineage of the. He's like, I'm God. So his treatment of the Senate started to reveal a lot more, right? How do you think a God's going to treat like these lowly little statesmen? You know, he had once shown restraint and respect and, you know, diplomacy. Now he's just straight up humiliating people. He's forcing them to run alongside his chariot like servants, forcing them to wait on him like, feast, as if like they're like waiters and shit. He even made some of them fight in the arena for his Amusement like this is senators. These are not like other people he's just paying to do it. It's like these are people that have high ranking status within the Roman society. But if you really want to see how far he, he goes around December, his sister Drusilla dies. And Caligula, you know, according to our sources, is incredibly close to her. Maybe too close, but I'll let you speculate on what that means. His reaction to her death is intense, maybe disorder. Okay? His grief turns something surreal. He says, I'm a God. Also, my sister that just died, she's a goddess. And then he creates a cult in her honor and says, all right, you people now worship my sister that just passed away. Like, this is beyond mourning. I don't know what stage of grief this is, but this is indicator that someone is losing grip on reality. So now we're barely eight months in and this guy that everyone loved for a little bit is gone. And in his place is now this guy who's like, I'm a God, my sister's a God. And is starting to use fear and almost, you know, creating like this police state to actually, you know, change the way that people are seeing him. And now everywhere he looks, he's just seeing enemies. He's just like, I'm surrounded by ops, okay? Now this treasury, remember it was overflowing because Tiberius was, you know, so cheap with stuff. Well, it's starting to drain. And they're losing money. All the goodwill that he inherited from the people and the, you know, vast wealth that the Roman Empire collected, it's all going away. And yet, for all that chaos, Caligula still knew how to protect himself. So he moved really quickly against threats. So he saw this guy, you know, Gemellus, the grandson, he saw him as an issue and said, you know what, we're going to get rid of him and we're going to avoid any type of revolt. He's treasonous. We're getting him out of here. Humiliates the Senate, but not enough to make them really try to like form a violent coup, but just enough to keep everyone, you know, just, just checking everyone kind of lil bro and the whole squad. So he's becoming a monster. But he's moving with some strategy for now. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I have a story to tell you. Fun fact, after you have a child, your testosterone naturally goes down. It's a way for you to like, become like more empathetic and more in touch and like protect Your kid and stuff. And I didn't really believe that. But then I had a baby like a year ago and I started to feel it around. 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He would appear in public dressed not just as, like a general, but as Mars or Apollo or Jupiter, and not even like a special occasion, like a holiday. They just was just a regular day. One day he's a war hero, the next day he's the sun God. And people are watching when the line between like, you know, ruler and, like, performance art is now completely gone. And the scale of these performances is bizarre. At one point, he built a bridge across the Bay of Naples. And this is a massive body of water. And it's not a stone bridge. This is a bridge made of ships. So just imagine, okay, three miles of vessels of these boats chained together. And the reason is that he wanted to gallop across in full costume, playing this conquering hero. And these are not just displays their ways for the Roman public to observe him and to see him as a God. He wanted to basically ride off onto the water, walking on the water like a God would. And he didn't just stop at, like, playing God. He started to rewrite the rules of society to fit this fantasy, the way he saw himself. One of his craziest moves, he starts chopping off the heads of these divine statues and replacing them with his own. And he's not just asking for worship. He's literally tearing down the boundary between God and him. Like, imagine someone becomes president and starts chopping off, you know, statues of Jesus and is like, put my head on Jesus, I'm God. I'm actually that guy. So the Empire is now no longer a, you know, republican disguise. It's now just full on theater. And this guy is the star of the show. Now, ancient sources claim that Caligula burned through enormous sums of money. Suetonius mentions 2.7 billion. This is, like, difficult to really fathom how much money that was at the time. And what's certain is that, you know, regardless of the exact amount of money. His building projects and the spectacles that he was doing were expensive and absolutely caused a strain on the treasury. And the consequences of, you know, these public works projects are vast. So in eastern provinces, his madness almost creates an entire war. He decided to put a statue of himself as Jupiter, the king of all the gods in the Roman pantheon, inside the Temple of Jerusalem. So just as, like, a caveat, at this point, the Roman Empire has gone so far as to, you know, control Judea, like we talked about before. And he knows that, you know, this place in Jerusalem is a very important place, you know, to the Christians, to the Jews that live there, and all the other sort of polytheistic groups that are kind of in that region. And the holiest site in Judaism is the Temple of Jerusalem. So the governor of Syria stalls because the governor that's controlling the province is like, dude, we can't put you as a God inside the Jewish temple. Like, this is going to cause a massive revolt. The people are going to be pissed. And so he's literally waiting and filibustering. He's like, yeah, we'll build it, we'll build it. Let's do it in a couple months. Let's do it in a couple months. And he's pushing it off and just waiting for Caligula to die, because he knows that if they put the statue up, the entire region is going to be in revolt. He's going to have a war on his hands. So even diplomatic meetings became this crazy political theater. So when the philosopher Philo came from Alexandria with a delegation to, you know, plead for the protection of the Jewish community that was being persecuted at the time, Caligula didn't even listen. He just wandered around his garden, you know, during the whole meeting, and was just too busy, like, admiring his surroundings and, you know, just acting like what he thought a God would do. Just kind of, like, looking at stuff, like. And he was doing that instead of actually governing or, you know, talking to anyone, but yet he still held on to the power. And the reason is because he understood one thing better than anyone. The Roman mob. He was feeding them, he was entertaining them. He was letting the senators fight each other in arenas for all the people to watch. He was giving them games and feasts and these dramatic shows, and he was just acting like, you know, this. This star, like this frontman, and these are all tools that kept the people loyal. So there's a quote, actually. Even as the Senate ground their teeth and the provinces trembled, the people stayed loyal. This is what People talk about when they say, like, bread and circuses, you know, like, you just give the people bread and a little show, and they'll just kind of. They won't be too mad about the corruption and the insane, you know, madness that the leader has. But beneath all these costumes and the circuses and everything like that, there is a calculation. He knew how to play the part of emperor well enough to survive. So while he was, you know, God, the cracks are spreading and the madness is fully taking over. So now by 39 AD, his palace is just a temple. His daily routine is like a ritual. According to Suetonius, he was alleged to have regular conversations with Jupiter, the king of the gods, talking to, you know, Jupiter as equals. And so the guards are reporting that he's having, like, these long conversations late at night. And when they look in the room, there's no one there. He's talking to God, to Jupiter. He's just like, yeah, dude, you're my homie. Like, we got to figure out this whole Rome thing together. It's just you and me, Bonnie and Clyde. And now he's just fully living in this, like, delusional world where he thinks that he's talking to God. Rome had always been careful with divinity, okay? They had seen what happens when people, you know, think that they're gods and rule with power. So, you know, emperors would get deified, but typically after they died and even then with some type of restraint. But Caligula just completely shattered this. He said, no, no, I'm. I'm a God now, and I want temples and priests, and I want everyone to offer sacrifices in my name, all that kind of stuff. His surviving sisters, actually, Julia Lavilla and Agrippina, got actually swept up into this fantasy. He brought them to ceremonies where they were worshiped as divine figures alongside him. And there was even rumors of, like, you know, some incest stuff. And we don't necessarily know the full truth, but what's clear is that Caligula was creating a royal family not bound by, you know, the laws of Rome, but by whatever divine laws he wanted. And the senators were just humiliated in these endless rituals. And they would mouth words with, you know, like, almost prayers to him with, like, this fake emotion. And their faces were kind of just, you know, silent. They would look at the ground during these, you know, Senate meetings. And Caligula loved it. He extended ceremonies just to watch Rome's old aristocracy, like, squirm and sweat under his gaze. But it gets even worse because at one point, a senator's son actually criticized one of Caligula's, you know, very ostentatious performances. And Caligula didn't take kindly to this type of criticism. So what does he do? He has the kid tortured to death in front of his own father, and Caligula praises him for his restraint. It was literally just a test. It was a show of loyalty. Like, yo, I'm gonna kill your own son, and you're not gonna do shit about it. It's crazy. And the empire's finances, I'm glad you asked, they're draining, okay? The funds are going to these temples and, you know, roads and aqueducts and all that stuff are falling apart. No money is actually going to infrastructure. Tax collectors are now more ruthless because the treasury is running dry. So they're actually trying to get more money out of the people. And Caligula is just spending it like a God, you know? So the motto that sums up his reign says, let them hate me so long as they fear me. That is a phrase from the poet Asius that Caligula allegedly said about himself. And these aren't the words necessarily of, like, an actual, you know, psychotic person. They're the words of someone that understands power so deeply that he chooses to wield that power like a weapon. So by 40 AD, Caligula's reign was about to go completely off the rails. He'd blown through all the money. The provinces are pissed. They're getting taxed at an insane rate, and they're not getting anything for it. So what do they do? He manages to piss off literally everyone, and people are done. The Senate is done. The military's fed up. They're not getting paid anymore. The average person is like, this is getting a little crazy. And what's wild is that the first real threat didn't come from a foreign enemy. It came from his own family. So his uncle Claudius, this was sort of like a docile, stuttering scholar that everyone kind of was just like, yeah, it's like a nerd. He quietly was becoming interested, and people were very desperate, and they started to see him as someone that could potentially help. He wasn't really plotting anything. But when your empire is falling apart, even the idea of someone sane starts, you know, looking pretty appealing to these desperate senators and these commanders. Claudius himself wasn't dangerous, but he represented hope. People saw him. They were like, this guy comes from the same family. He's noble himself. Maybe, just maybe, Claudius can take over. And so that's one issue for Caligula to, you know, keep in mind. And then you have the Praetorian Guard. This is Rome's elite bodyguards who are sworn to protect the Emperor. But here's the thing. They're also sworn to protect Rome. And in this moment, those are looking like two different things. You have this emperor that's almost at odds with Rome. Then you have the Roman people that are getting hurt by the Emperor. So what does the Praetorian Guard do? Especially their commander, Cassius Caria. So Caligula had, you know, just a desire to torment this guy for no reason. Okay, now remember, Cassius Carrier is not some nobody. He's the head of of the Praetorian Guard. But for months, every day, the Emperor would mock his voice and he would make fun of him, say he wasn't a man, he was just being a dickhead. Okay, but this was on purpose because he was trying to grind him down psychologically. He was trying to make him feel so small. But the issue with a guy like this is you start to, you know, make people want to snap. But then came what might be the final straw for Rome's elite. Caligula announces something that will make everyone lose their minds. He plans to abandon Rome. Yes. Caligula says, you know what? This town sucks. We're moving the entire imperial capital to Alexandria, literally. Alexandria in Egypt, where he claimed people actually understood divinity and they would worship him properly. And, you know, they actually know what it means to be ruled by a God. So to the Rome's ruling class, this wasn't just another crazy thing. This is like an actual threat. Okay? Alexandria meant that they'd lose everything. Their power, the influence, the entire world. The Egyptian priests would now take over the role of the Roman senators. And for the ruling class, that was not an option. And with all of this, you know, the money is absolutely drying up. He's selling off everything. He's starting to sell furniture and family heirlooms and gladiators. At one auction, a senator dozed off, and Caligula decided that every head nod that the senator would do was a bid. And the poor guy woke up and realized that he bought 13 gladiators on accident. Now, that might just be a story, but that goes in the history book for the kind of guy that Caligula was. Now, the military situation is just as crazy, right, because you have these, like, tough Roman soldiers, and your emperor, your literal emperor, drags you to a fake campaign in, like, Gaul or something, and you're marching with, you know, the legions to the English Channel, where he declares victory over Neptune, the sea God. And he has you collecting seashells as spoils of war for destroying Neptune. Like, the whole thing is just crazy. These are literal veterans who bled under Augustus, under Tiberius, and now they're doing, like, these role play, like, reenactment things against fake entities just to appease the emperor. So as you can see, everyone is pissed. By 40 A.D. people aren't just talking about, you know, getting rid of him in whispers, they're actually meeting about it. Okay? Because you got to understand, he pissed off everybody. Pissed off the military, pissed off his own bodyguards, pissed off the ruling elite, pissed off the other provinces, like the people in Judea that are like, you're not going to put a statue of you in our temple. I mean, that's basically everyone. And then just the average citizen is just like, oh, we don't have any more money to, like, pay for roads and aqueducts. And, like, we can't do trading and, you know, commerce. And people aren't spending money in our empire anymore. All right? So senators who literally hated each other for years and now suddenly, like, bonding, they're coming together over this shared enemy. Military officers aren't asking if the emperor might fall. They're just trying to figure out when. Even people in Caligula's own court, the people that are supposed to, like, be guiding him, are starting to back away, unwilling to defend this regime that they just can't even understand. And Caligula could sense that something was going on. So he doubled his personal bodyguard count, started changing bedrooms every single night so that people didn't know where he was sleeping, and lashed out with these, like, random, brutal punishments. But he never understood that the real danger wasn't in the shadows. It was standing right next to him. All those people that he had been mocking, humiliating, ignoring, ridiculing, and his paranoia is now through the roof. And here's the ironic part. It doesn't make him more careful. It just made him more unpredictable. So in this imperial Rome, being unpredictable was way more dangerous than being insane. In the end, it came suddenly, but not before Caligula gave everyone one final insane display that just absolutely shattered any chance that he could be emperor any longer. By January of 41 AD, the Emperor announced this over the top festival that was supposed to reveal his divine nature to all of Rome. Everyone would see that he truly is a God. So Caligula himself is going to appear as Jupiter, obviously king of the gods. And he would have, you know, this fake thunder thing that would happen by rolling these bronze balls around with, like, a lighting effect from Torches. And. And it wasn't just like some entertainment. In Caligula's mind, this was a sacred ceremony. It's gonna be a big public moment. It was gonna cost a lot of money. Everyone has to go, and they're gonna see that he truly is a God. For the conspirators, led by the humiliated Praetorian Commander, Cassius Correa. Remember the guy that he was mocking his voice, saying that he was a, you know, just a loser, along with a bunch of senators and officers, basically everyone, the festival was basically their last shot. Okay? If Caligula actually managed to pull off another big show and wow the crowds, and he might actually be able to win back the average dumb guy's loyalty and continue his reign. So they put together a massive plan. Senators, knights, soldiers, people that have literally battled each other, hated each other. You know, within these, you know, political courts, you know, how politics get. They were like, all right, let's come together in a rare moment of us versus him. And the Jewish historian Josephus gives us a play by play of how obsessively these guys planned everything. Escape routes, backup plans, contingencies on the contingencies. They weren't letting this go to waste. This was their one shot. So 1-24-41 AD Caligula showed up to some theatrical performances that were a part of this festival, you know, a few days leading up to the big. The big moment. And the conspirators had picked this, you know, exact place because it was perfect. He was in public, but away from most of his bodyguards. So as Caligula walked through this narrow kind of underground passage to get to the theater, Cassius Karia approached him and just was acting like it was ruined business, right? Because, again, this is the head of the guard. Like, this is the guy that's going to go talk to him, give him a little security briefing. Here's what happened. Cassius Caria, literally the head of the guard, goes up and he says, what is the day's password? Now, this is just a, you know, standard security protocol that they do with all the people going through this passage. That's. It's basically like a military watchword that Roman guards would use to confirm identity. And they had to ask it to everyone. Caligula answers, jupiter. The irony is perfect. The man who claimed to be a God was about to die while saying the name of the supreme deity that he claimed to be. Then Caria strikes, and the blow is quick. And then the others jump in immediately. And within minutes, the man who had been terrorizing Rome is dead. His desperate screams for mercy are just drowned out by the festival noise nearby. The very festival that he had planned for himself. And what happened next really showed just how completely alone Caligula was. The Praetorian Guard, they didn't lift a finger to help him. The people that weren't even in on the conspiracy, they saw it happen. They were like, took long enough. The Senate was literally like, all right, the public's restored. We got rid of the crazy tyrant. We can all go back to not having a God that's walking around on water. You know, this is so much better. But that fantasy lasted only like five minutes before. Soldiers are literally like, all right, well, who's going to be the new emperor? We got to find someone. And they go into the palace and they look behind a curtain and they see two little feet sticking out under the curtain, two little sandals, and they're just kind of wiggling and they go, I think he's here. They pull back the curtain and they find Claudius. This is literally Caligula's uncle. This is the brother of Germanicus. This is the last guy from this family that was, you know, so sort of prosecuted in Rome. And they're like, you know what? You're going to be the emperor. You're one of the good ones. You're from this heroic bloodline. We need you. So the Roman people who once cheered when Caligula came to power, they heard about his death and they were like, thank God. And perhaps the most brutal testament to how isolated he was was that according to Suetonius, his only freedman, like a former slave that was bound by law to serve him, dared to actually touch the Emperor's dead body. They quickly cremated this former emperor God thing because no one else wanted to even be involved. The man who demanded worship from millions died completely abandoned by every single person who once worshiped him. So within hours, the Empire had a new ruler. Claudius, not chosen by the Senate or the people, but literally, like, declared Emperor by the soldiers who understood Rome couldn't afford to be leaderless even for a day. So the curtain fell on Caligula's insane four year reign. But Rome's stage was already being set for whatever drama would come next. The fallout from Caligula's reign cut deeper than, you know, just his bloody ending. It literally shattered the systems that upheld Rome itself. And here's why it's crazy. Caligula's madness wasn't just his own. It was a failure of everyone that was supposed to check him right of Course, in that time, you have emperors that rule with an absolute power, but you have senators and generals and guards and men who had ruled provinces and led armies and, you know, other people that are supposed to have some type of oversight on what he's doing. And instead of checking him or standing up and stopping it, they just contorted themselves rather than confront the emperor's insanity until finally someone was brave enough to do it. The government literally was just twisting itself into these crazy shapes to actually accommodate this guy's delusion. And Caligula maybe in some ways, was good because he just tore off the mask that a lot of the previous emperors had carefully maintained. Augustus and Tiberius pretended Rome was still a republic. Caligula demanded worship as a living God and treated the senate like servants. And after him, the pretense was gone. Emperors just ruled as dictators, and the Republic of Rome was just a memory. The treasury, once overflowing, was now, you know, emptied out, basically looted by Caligula himself. And forced all the future rulers to squeeze the province and every surrounding province for every coin that they had. What's up, people? We're gonna take a break because we got new merch. That's right. It is the holiday season. And the good folks over at Camp R D have been cooking up in the lab. We got the Christmas sweaters with the aliens. We got the Christmas sweaters with the conspiracy vibes you already know. I mean, this one might be my favorite one. A Christmas tree full of aliens, full Christmas sweater energy. And then, of course, if you just want something simple, you know, you bust out the camp logo tee with the little Christmas lights on it. Come on, bro. Get cute for Christmas, okay? It is a holiday season, all right? We're celebrating the birth of the savior, okay? And what better way to do it than to cop a couple threads for the person in your life that you know that loves a campsite that loves hanging with us every single week. And right now, we're running a promo through the holidays. That's right. Use the promo code. Christmas camp for 15% off. I just made that up on the spot. But I think we can do it, right? I'll call some people. Christmas camp for 20, for 15% off. Sure, 16% off. Whatever you say, Mark. Should we give them more? One more. 17% off. People, we don't. I think this is gonna work. I'm not positive we're gonna see if we can do it, but I'll. Yeah. Check it out, guys. We got all the camps stuff going until the end of the Year. Check it out. Thank you guys so much for supporting the show. I love you all. God bless and merry Christmas. What's up, people? We're going to take a break really quick because I have amazing news. I'm coming on the road. That's right. My very first headlining tour. Where I'm going to every city that will possibly allow me to go there. Hoboken, New Jersey. I'm going to Salt Lake City. I'm going to Washington, D.C. and Charlotte, North Carolina, in February. Those tickets will be announced soon. And of course, I'm doing my monthly show at Mary Lou in New York City on December 16th. The best comics in the city will be coming out, and I'll be working out some new material. It is a grand old time. You can get all the tickets at Mark Yagnon Live, and I'll see you guys there. Let's get back to the show. So the effects of this tyranny lasted long after Caligula's death. And the biggest lesson here, I mean, that I think is probably important for everyone to think about, is when you have this absolute power, reality is negotiable. Like, you can just kind of invent your own idea of who you are and who other people are and this place that you rule, what it really is. Like, you say you're divine and people worship you. You can do anything you want. So, as Philo even says, Caligula was corrupted by the greatness of his authority. Literally, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And he lost all sense between this line between man and God. I've heard the saying that the mask ate the face, that you actually put on a mask to pretend to be something else. But after enough time, that mask becomes who you are. And I think this is the exact case with Caligula. The system didn't have the checks in place in order to remove this mad emperor, except murder. And that's what they had to do. So this created a systemic collapse. The Empire's fate was on one man's sanity. And, you know, he just, within four years, became Rome's most lasting warning. That power doesn't just corrupt. It can literally recreate reality itself. So next time you see someone in power, you know, pushing the boundaries, trying to, you know, control every single facet of your country's government, just think about Caligula. You know, just. You just think about Caligula, okay?
