![]() ![]() He was just 24 years old and in charge of an empire.Īndrew Wallace-Hadrill: He was in a very, very difficult position. Through some combination of flattery and deceit, Caligula managed to survive here for six years with the man who may have killed much of his family. It sits high on a cliff, and it's said Tiberius would have people who crossed him tossed onto the rocks below. Mirella Serlorenzi (Translation): It was clearly a garden because we found in the layers traces of the roots of the plants And in this part here, the staircase connected the various levels of the garden.Īnderson Cooper: Is it possible to walk on it? Mirella Serlorenzi, director of excavations for the Italian Ministry of Culture, took us to a small staircase normally closed to the public and brought us to the level of the ground during Caligula's time.Īnderson Cooper: And so back then in the First Century, 2,000 years ago this was outside? through the 5th century A.D., like this drinking glass that somehow survived largely intact for 1900 years. It contains thousands of items from the 2nd century B.C. The office building's completed now and last month Rome's newest archeological site, the Nympheum Museum, opened in the basement, preserving some of the excavation, and suggesting what a lush and lavish place this once was. It took archeologists nine years to carefully recover more than a million pieces of the past, while an underground parking garage and modern building was built around them.Įverything found was taken to a large warehouse, where it was closely analyzed, logged into a database and - when possible - painstakingly restored. Recreations from Rome's superintendent of antiquities give some sense of the sprawling grounds and buildings enjoyed by emperors and their guests for about four centuries. In ancient times this was one of a number of tranquil garden estates located about ten minutes by carriage from the bustling Roman forum. When a pension fund for Italian doctors called Enpam started digging an underground parking garage for its new office building in the Esquilino neighborhood of Rome. What are these stories worth? How can you pin them down?Īrcheology can help pin down the past, but in a city full of amazing ruins not much directly linked to Caligula had been discovered - that is until 2006. It's like all those leaky people in Buckingham Palace. ![]() But Suetonius often had to rely on second-hand stories and gossip from members of the imperial court.Īndrew Wallace-Hadrill: These members of the court, you know, it's like staffers in the White House. ![]() 121, 80 years after Caligula's death by Suetonius, a well-known biographer and adviser to later emperors. Wallace-Hadrill says Robert Graves' novels were largely based on stories published around A.D. In the show, Caligula turns his palace into a brothel, makes his horse a high-ranking senator and declares himself a living god.Īnderson Cooper: Pretty spectacularly?īut Wallace-Hadrill does believe Caligula could be very impulsive and brutal, and he doesn't rule out the possibility that he may have had a severe physical or mental disorder.Īndrew Wallace-Hadrill: I think there's a serious danger that Caligula was pathological, that he actually didn't care about the hurt he caused. What most people know about Caligula comes from this iconic BBC series "I, Claudius," which was based on two historical novels by Robert Graves. The temples and palaces of ancient Rome may have crumbled long ago, but the legend of one of its oddest emperors lives on. Could we discover some new fragments of truth in Caligula's Gardens? We were more than happy to go to Rome, to find out. But for years scholars have been re-examining parts of Caligula's story to see if history has it right. He's been portrayed in history as one of the most deranged and despicable Roman emperors ever to rule. Caligula became the third emperor of Rome in A.D. The site turned out to be what Italian archeologists believe was once "the pleasure gardens" of the Roman emperor, Caligula - where some 2,000 years ago all sorts of lavish parties, royal intrigue, and debauched behavior likely took place. When workers broke ground on an underground parking lot in the heart of Rome 15 years ago, they had no idea what their backhoes were about to unearth. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |