This is the story of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. Known to us as Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. Or just “Nero”. On this episode, we ask – how is it possible that a man tutored and guided by one of the most famous Stoic philosophers, Seneca, would end up with the reputation as one of history’s worst tyrants?

The first 50 years of Tiberius Claudius Nero’s life was a mixture of wealth, power and cruelty. With symptoms similar to cerebral palsy, the young Claudius was called “a monstrosity of a human being, one that Nature began and never finished” – by his own mother. He was kept out of public life and power by his adoptive grandfather, Augustus, and his successor, Tiberius. He was treated as a fool and a joke by his nephew, Caligula. But after Caligula’s assassination, he took power by force, becoming Rome’s first true IMPERATOR.

To kick off our Caligula series, we are doing a commentary on the 1979 epic film, CALIGULA. Written by Gore Vidal, directed by Tinto Brass, produced by Bob Guccione, starring Malcolm McDowell, Hellen Mirren, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud, Teresa Ann Savoy, fucking, sucking, anal fisting, disembowelling, beheading, and more dicks and pussies than you can count. It’s truly a masterpiece that you need to give a second chance.

It’s 70 CE, the walls of Jerusalem are crumbling, and the city is eating itself alive — literally. In this episode of Life of Caesar, Cameron and Ray wade deep into Josephus’s harrowing account of the final, grinding assault on the Antonia Fortress and the Temple Mount, where the siege of Jerusalem has reached a level of horror almost beyond comprehension. Titus is still trying to take the city intact, still offering surrender terms that rebel leader John of Gischala keeps refusing, even as 600,000 corpses have been thrown out of the gates and the starving population has been reduced to eating dung, leather belts, and — in one unforgettable episode — a widow named Mary from Perea who roasts and eats her own infant son, leaving even Jerusalem’s most hardened killers staggering into the street in shock. Meanwhile, the Roman assaults keep producing their own gruesome catalogue of disasters: brave volunteers like Sabinus the Syrian and the Abian centurion Julian charge the walls in spectacular solo acts of courage, only to be undone by the cruel physics of hobnailed caliga boots sliding out on blood-slicked marble floors. A trumpeter and sixteen centuries break into the Antonia in a daring pre-dawn raid, a legionnaire named Longus cuts his own throat rather than surrender or burn, and a soldier called Artorius survives a sixty-foot jump by landing on — and killing — his tentmate Lucius, who had agreed to catch him in exchange for his inheritance. Through it all, Josephus insists it wasn’t the Romans but God himself who condemned the Jews, a theological contortion Cameron links to the writing of the Gospel of Mark and the birth of Christianity from the ashes of the Temple. There’s also a lengthy and highly entertaining detour into medieval witch trials, broomsticks, and the surprisingly pharmaceutical origins of flying — Cameron has been reading Carlo Ginzburg, and he has things to tell you about salves and sticks that will change how you watch *Wicked* forever.