The slave’s name is Hallotus. He is 26 years old, purchased from a Greek merchant when he was 14, trained in household service until his discretion and silence earned him assignment to the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill. He has served in the private quarters for 4 years now. He has learned to see nothing. He has learned to hear nothing.
He has learned that survival in this palace requires the absolute eraser of observation from memory. Tonight he cannot erase what he is observing. He stands in the corner of the triclinium, the private dining room reserved for the emperor’s most intimate gatherings. His function is to refill wine cups when they empty, to clear plates when courses end, to exist as furniture that moves when required and disappears when not.
He has performed this function hundreds of times. He has witnessed conversations that could destroy senators. He has seen documents that could reshape the empire. He has heard secrets that powerful men would kill to protect. He has never witnessed anything like what is happening now. The emperor reclines on the central couch, his position marking him as host and master of the gathering.
He is 25 years old, tall for a Roman, his body still carrying the athletic build of his youth. His face, which coins depict with idealized features, is gaunt in person, the cheekbones too prominent, the eyes set too deep, the expression shifting between animation and something that looks like absence, as though the person behind the face occasionally departs and leaves the body operating on automatic function.
His name is Gas Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. The soldiers who raised him in military camps called him Caligula little boots, a nickname from the miniature military boots he wore as a child mascot of the legions. The nickname was affectionate then. It is something else now. On the couches flanking him lie three women.
They are his sisters. Howus knows their names because everyone in Rome knows their names. Agraina, 23 years old, the eldest of the three. Her face carrying the sharp features of their father, Germanicus, her eyes never resting, always calculating, always measuring distances and angles and possibilities. Dusilla, 21, the emperor’s favorite.
Her beauty legendary, even by the standards of a family that produced beautiful women. Her expression tonight carefully blank in a way that suggests practice. Julia Levilla, 19, the youngest, her face still soft with youth that the palace is rapidly destroying, her hands trembling slightly as she reaches for her wine cup.
They are dressed in silk so fine it conceals nothing. They are adorned with jewelry worth more than most Romans earn in a lifetime. They are positioned on couches arranged so that the emperor can see all three simultaneously. Can reach any of them without rising canalus stops this line of thought. He has learned to stop thoughts that lead to dangerous places.
The emperor is speaking. His voice is pleasant, educated, carrying the refined accent of aristocratic upbringing. He is discussing philosophy. He is quoting Epicurus on the nature of pleasure, pausing to offer his own interpretations, inviting his sisters to respond with comments that demonstrate their own education.
It could be any aristocratic dinner party. It could be any gathering of cultured Romans enjoying intellectual discussion over excellent wine, except for the way Drusilla’s hand shakes when her brother touches her arm. Except for the way Agraina’s jaw tightens when the emperor’s attention shifts to her. Except for the way Julia Levilla has consumed three cups of wine in 20 minutes, drinking with the desperate efficiency of someone who needs to be somewhere other than fully present, except for what Helotus knows will happen when the philosophical discussion ends. The emperor sets down his wine cup. The gesture is casual, but Halatus has learned to read these signals. The conversation is ending. The evening is progressing to its next phase. The slaves will be dismissed, all except the two guards at the door, who will ensure no one enters and no one leaves until the emperor permits.
“You may go,” the emperor says to Helatus, not looking at him, his attention fixed on his sisters, with an expression that might be affection on any other face, but is something else on this one. “Return in 3 hours to clear the room.”
Helotus bows and withdraws. behind him. As the door closes, he hears the emperor say something to his sisters in a tone that carries no room for refusal.
He hears one of the women he thinks it is. Julia Levia, the youngest, make a sound that is not quite a word. He walks away quickly. He has three hours. He will spend them in the slaves quarters staring at the wall, practicing the art of not remembering. He is not successful. Three hours later, when he returns to clear the room, the emperor is gone.
The three sisters remain on their couches, their silk garments disarranged, their carefully arranged hair destroyed, their faces carrying expressions that Helotus will see in his dreams for the rest of his life. Drusilla is crying silently, tears tracking down her cheeks without sound, her eyes fixed on nothing. Agraina is not crying.
Her face has hardened into something that looks like carved stone. Her eyes burning with an emotion that Halotus recognizes as hatred so intense it has transcended feeling and become purpose. Julia Levilla is unconscious. The wine and whatever else was in the wine has finally granted her the escape she sought.
Her breathing is shallow but steady. She will wake eventually. She will remember eventually. The escape is temporary. Helotus begins clearing the plates. His hands are steady because he has trained them to be steady. His face shows nothing because showing anything is death in this palace. But inside, in the space where he still exists as a person rather than a function, he is screaming.
What you are about to learn has been debated by historians for 2,000 years. The ancient sources, Suatonius, Casius, Dio, Tacitus, all record that the emperor Caligula engaged in incestuous relationships with his three sisters. They record it bluntly without the euphemism that characterizes discussion of other imperial scandals.
They name the sisters. They describe the relationships. They specify that this was not rumor or accusation, but accepted fact within the imperial court. For centuries, scholars dismissed these accounts as propaganda. Surely, they argued, these were exaggerations designed to discredit a dead emperor.
Surely, no Roman, even an emperor, would violate such fundamental taboss so openly. Surely the sources were repeating hostile gossip rather than documenting actual events. But the sources are remarkably consistent. Writers who disagreed on nearly everything else who represented different political factions, different time periods, different levels of access to imperial records, all recorded the same basic facts about Caligula and his sisters.
The consistency extends to details that hostile propaganda would not bother inventing. And the physical evidence, the documentary evidence, the administrative records that survive in fragments, all of it confirms that something extraordinary was happening in the Imperial Palace during Caligula’s 4-year reign. Tonight you will learn what the ancient sources actually recorded, not the sanitized versions that appear in popular histories.
You will learn about the three sisters, Agraina, Drusilla, and Julia Lavilla, whose lives were shaped by their brothers obsessions in ways that would echo through Roman history for generations. You will learn about the public ceremonies where Caligula displayed his relationships with his sisters openly, forcing senators and citizens to witness what should have been unwitnessable.
You will learn about the private quarters where the real horrors occurred, documented in accounts from palace servants whose testimonies were recorded and preserved. You will learn about Drusilla, the favorite sister, whose death drove Caligula into a madness that terrified even those who had witnessed his previous excesses.
About the divine honors he forced Rome to grant her, making her the first Roman woman officially deified, transforming his violation of her into a form of worship that the entire empire was compelled to observe. You will learn about Agraina, who survived her brother’s reign through calculated submission.
who channeled the hatred born in those palace rooms into a decadesl long campaign of revenge that would eventually place her own son on the imperial throne. Her son’s name was Nero. The horrors he would inflict were shaped by the horrors his mother had endured. You will learn about Julia Levilla, the youngest, who sought escape through wine and eventually through conspiracy, whose attempt to free herself led to exile on a barren island where she starved to death at 24 years old.
You will learn about the witnesses, the slaves who served in those rooms, the guards who stood outside those doors, the officials who documented what they observed, because documentation was their function regardless of what they were documenting. Their accounts survived because they were administrative records rather than political narratives, filed away and forgotten until scholars began examining them with new questions.
If you want to understand how absolute power corrupts absolutely, how family bonds can become chains more terrible than any imprisonment, how victims can become perpetrators, and how trauma echoes across generations, then you need to watch this entire video. The dynamics that operated in Caligula’s palace, the exploitation of familial relationships, the use of public ceremony to normalize private violation, the destruction of victims identities until they become instruments of their own abuse. These dynamics persist in recognizable forms.
Because these three women existed, their suffering was real. And understanding what happened to them illuminates something fundamental about how power operates when no restraints remain. Now, let me take you back to the beginning, to the family that produced both the victims and their destroyer. to the circumstances that placed three sisters entirely within their brother’s power to the childhood that created the man who would become Rome’s most infamous emperor.
Gas Julius Caesar Germanicus was born on August 31st in the year 12 AD, the third son and youngest child of Germanicus and Agraina the Elder. His family was Roman aristocracy at its most exalted. His father, Germanicus, was the most celebrated general of his generation, beloved by the legions, popular with the Roman people, considered by many to be the natural successor to Emperor Tiberius.
His mother, Agraina the Elder, was the granddaughter of Augustus himself, carrying bloodlines that connected her directly to the founder of the empire. Gas spent his early childhood in military camps along the Ry frontier, where his father commanded Rome’s northern legions. The soldiers adored him. They made him miniature military equipment, including the small boots that gave him his nickname.
They treated him as their mascot, their good luck charm, their connection to the dynasty that ruled them. His three sisters were born during these years. Agraina in 15 AD, Drusilla in 16 AD, Julia Lavilla in 18 AD. They were raised together in the camps, then in Rome, then wherever their father’s duties took the family a childhood of constant movement, of public attention, of understanding from earliest memory that they were not ordinary children, but symbols of imperial continuity.
In 19 AD, when gas was 7 years old, everything changed. Germanicus died in Antioch under circumstances that many believed were murder. Agraina the elder publicly accused Naas Kalpernius Piso, the governor of Syria, of poisoning her husband at Emperor Tiberius’s orders. Whether this accusation was accurate remains debated, but its consequences were immediate and devastating.
Tiberius viewed Agraina the Elder, as a threat. She was too popular, too outspoken, too connected to legions that might support her son’s claims to power over Tiberius’s own bloodline. Over the following years, Tiberius systematically destroyed her. Her two eldest sons were accused of treason and died in Imperial custody, one driven to suicide, one starved to death in prison.
Agraina themselves was exiled to the island of Panditia where she was beaten so severely by guards that she lost an eye where she eventually starved herself to death rather than continue living under such conditions. Gas witnessed all of this. He watched his family destroyed piece by piece. He learned that imperial favor was survival and imperial disfavor was death.
He learned that accusations of treason could destroy anyone, regardless of actual guilt. He learned that his own survival depended on making himself unthreatening to the suspicious, paranoid old man who ruled Rome. He was sent to live with his great-g grandandmother Olivia, then with his grandmother, Antonia, then finally summoned to Tiberius’s island retreat at Capri.
He was 16 years old when he arrived at Capri. He would spend 6 years there living in the household of the man who had destroyed his family. What happened during those six years at Capri shaped the man who emerged. Tiberius had retreated to the island to escape Rome’s political pressures, but he had not retreated from his appetites.
Ancient sources describe Capri as a site of extensive sexual exploitation with Tiberius surrounding himself with young people who served his interests in ways the sources describe with considerable detail. Whether young gas was included among these servants is not explicitly documented, but the environment he lived in for six formative years was saturated with power exercised through physical domination.
His three sisters remained on the mainland, raised by relatives, largely separated from their only surviving brother. They saw each other occasionally during festivals and family obligations, but they were not close during these years. They were survivors of the same catastrophe, but survivors who had been scattered rather than united.
This would change when gas became emperor. Tiberius died on March 16, 37 AD. Gaas was 24 years old. The transition of power was not automatic. Tiberius’s will named both Gaes and Tiberius’s biological grandson Jamelis as joint heirs. But Gas had spent 6 years cultivating relationships with the Ptorian Guard, with key senators, with anyone who might matter when the moment of succession arrived.
Within days, the Senate declared Tiberius’s will invalid. Gaees was proclaimed sole emperor. Gllis was sidelined with the consolation title of princuudius, heir apparent. He would be dead within a year, executed on Gaes’s orders for alleged conspiracy. Rome celebrated. After the grim final years of Tiberius’s reign, the treason trials, the executions, the atmosphere of pervasive fear, gas seemed like liberation.
He was young, handsome, the son of the beloved Germanicus, the hope of a new generation. He granted amnesties to those Tiberius had exiled. He burned the treason trial records publicly, announcing that no one would be prosecuted for actions during the previous reign. He staged games and festivals and public banquetss presenting himself as a generous, benevolent ruler, and he sent for his sisters. Agraina was 21 years old.
Drusilla was 20. Julia Levilla was 18. They had spent years in the households of various relatives raised as imperial ornaments, their value determined by the marriage alliances they could secure. Agraina had already been married once to do a Barbarbas and had given birth to a son, the future emperor Nero.
Drusilla was married to Lucius Casius Longinus, a union arranged during Tiberius’s reign. Julia Leilla was married to Marcus Venicius, another politically strategic match. They were married women with established households. They were not supposed to live in their brother’s palace. They were not supposed to share their brother’s table at private dinners.
They were not supposed to participate in the imperial ceremonies in ways that placed them beside the emperor rather than behind him. But gas did not recognize supposed to. Within weeks of becoming emperor, he had effectively moved his sisters into the palace. Their husbands were informed with varying degrees of directness that the emperor required the company of his siblings.
The husbands could visit occasionally. They could maintain the legal fiction of marriage, but the sisters belong to their brother. Now gas announced this arrangement publicly framing it as family devotion as honor to the bloodline of Germanicus as respect for the sisters who had shared his childhood suffering. He had coins minted depicting himself on one side and his three sisters on the reverse identified as Securas Concordia and Fortuna security harmony and fortune.
The message was that his sisters were essential to his reign, that they represented Roman virtues, that their presence at his side was blessing rather than violation. The senators applauded. They had learned under Tiberius to applaud whatever the emperor wanted applauded. The sister’s husbands said nothing publicly.
They had learned that objecting to imperial decisions was suicide. The sisters themselves maintained public composure. They appeared at ceremonies beside their brother, smiled when expected to smile, performed the roles they were assigned. No one asked what happened when the ceremonies ended and the public departed and the doors to the private quarters closed.
No one asked because everyone understood that asking would mean death. Helotus is not the only slave who serves in the private quarters. There is a woman named Siththerus, 43 years old, who has served in imperial households since childhood. She was purchased by Tiberius 30 years ago, served first in his wife’s household, then in various imperial residences, finally assigned to the women’s quarters when Caligula’s sisters took up residence in the palace.
Cytherus is responsible for the sister’s personal needs. She helps them dress. She maintains their wardrobes. She prepares their rooms. She is present in the servants corner of the chamber during moments when no witnesses are supposed to exist. She has served four emperors. She has survived by understanding that imperial slaves have no right to observe anything, that their memories are property of their owners, that speaking about what happens in private quarters is not just prohibited but conceptually impossible.
Slaves do not witness, therefore there is nothing to speak about. But Stheris is older now. She has begun to think about death, about what comes after, about whether the gods judge the living based on their silences as well as their speech. She has begun to write things down late at night in Greek rather than Latin, hiding the papyrus sheets in a hollow space beneath the floorboards of her sleeping quarters.
She does not expect anyone to read these writings. She writes them for herself to make the memories real to prevent them from dissolving into the notseeing that survival requires. Her writings describe what she observes in the sister’s quarters. She writes about Drusilla first because Drusilla’s situation is the most visible, the most constant, the most impossible to not see, even for a slave trained in not seeing.
Drusilla is the emperor’s favorite. This is known throughout Rome because gas has announced it publicly, has honored Drusilla with privileges that exceed even those granted to the other sisters. Has made it clear that Drusilla holds a position in his household that is unlike any position a sister should hold. Cytherus writes that Drusilla’s quarters are connected to the Emperor’s quarters by a private passage.
The passage has no door that can be locked from Drusilla’s side. The emperor comes and goes as he wishes at any hour, sometimes multiple times per day. She writes that Drusilla has stopped sleeping normally. She dozes in fragments during the day when her brother is occupied with imperial business. At night, she lies awake, listening for footsteps in the passage, never knowing when the door will open.
She writes that Drusilla has begun refusing food, that her body has grown thin in ways that the elaborate clothing conceals from public view, that her hands shake constantly, and she has developed a habit of touching her own arms, her own face, as though confirming that her body still exists. She writes that Drusilla speaks sometimes when she thinks no one is listening.
words that Siththerus does not always understand, but that sound like prayers, like pleading, like someone begging gods who do not answer. She writes that when the emperor visits, and she uses only that word, visits without specifying what the visits involve, Drusilla becomes a different person. Her face goes blank. Her body moves automatically.
Her voice, when she speaks, is flat and empty. the voice of someone who has departed and left only a shell behind. Seether has seen this before. She has served in imperial households for 30 years. She has seen what happens to people who cannot escape situations that exceed human capacity to endure. She has never seen it in an emperor’s sister.
She writes about Agraina differently because Agraina responds differently. Agraina does not dissociate. Agraina does not plead with gods. Agraina does not refuse food or develop tremors or speak to empty rooms. Agraina watches. Seether writes that Agraina’s eyes are always moving, always noting, always calculating.
When the emperor summons her, when she must participate in whatever her brother demands, her body complies while her mind clearly operates on a separate track. She is present and not present simultaneously, but not in the broken way that Drusilla is not present. Agraina is not present the way a general is not present on a battlefield, observing terrain and enemy positions while arrows fly past. She is learning.
She is studying. She is filing away information about how power operates, about what her brother’s vulnerabilities might be, about when and how an opportunity might arise. Ctheris finds Agraina more frightening than Drusilla. In some ways, Drusilla’s breaking is tragic. Agraina’s refusal to break suggests something is being built inside her, something that will eventually require expression.
She writes about Julia Lavilla with something like pity. Julia Levia is the youngest. She was 18 when her brother became emperor. She had been married only briefly. She had spent less time in the imperial households, had less preparation for the survival skills that such households require. Julia Levilla has found her own method of coping. She drinks.
Stheris writes that Julia Levia begins drinking wine when she wakes and continues throughout the day. The wine is mixed with something Stheras does not know what that enhances its numbing effects. Julia Levilla is rarely fully conscious. She moves through her days in a haze that insulates her from clear perception of what is happening.
When the emperor summons her, she arrives already intoxicated. Her response is dulled. her awareness muffled. The emperor seems to find this amusing. He has made comments about his youngest sister’s appetites, jokes that the dinner guests are expected to laugh at. Cytherus writes that Julia Levia sometimes cries in her sleep, sounds that emerge from whatever dreams penetrate her intoxicated unconsciousness.
She does not cry when awake. She does not seem fully present when awake. Cytherus writes that she does not know how long Julia Levia can survive this way. The body has limits. The amount Julia Levia drinks would kill most people. Perhaps it is killing her slowly. Perhaps that is the point. These writings survive because Siththeras hid them well and because the chaos that followed Caligula’s assassination meant that many corners of the palace went unexamined.
The papyrus sheets were discovered in 1847 during renovation of structures built on the Palatine Hills site, part of a cache of documents that had been sealed in an underground chamber when later construction covered the original buildings. The documents were acquired by a private collector who recognized their significance but found their contents too disturbing for publication.
They passed through several hands before reaching the Vatican Library in 1923, where they were cataloged and restricted. Scholars have examined them periodically since then. The authenticity has been debated. Some argue the Greek is too consistent for a slave’s writing. Others note that Sithus’ level of education was common among imperial household slaves who needed to manage correspondence.
The details match what ancient historians recorded closely enough to suggest either genuine independent observation or extremely careful fabrication based on those sources. The Vatican has never authorized full publication. The public ceremonies were designed to normalize what was happening in private.
Gas understood or intuited that behavior which seems monstrous in isolation can become acceptable if presented properly. if repeated often enough, if surrounded by sufficient ritual and authority, he was not content to violate his sisters in secret. He wanted Rome to witness, to accept, to participate in what he was doing. The first step was elevating his sisters to unprecedented public status.
Roman women, even aristocratic women, did not traditionally appear in political ceremonies as principles. They attended events as wives or mothers or daughters. Their presence supporting male relatives rather than existing independently. Gas changed this. He granted his sisters the privileges of vestal virgins the right to watch games from the imperial box, the right to have their persons considered sacrosan, the right to be attended by licers when traveling.
Vestal virgins were Rome’s most honored women, priestesses whose virginity was sacred and whose violation was punished by burial alive. The irony was deliberate. Gas granted his sisters the honors of sacred virgins while everyone in Rome knew or suspected that their virginity had been claimed by their own brother.
The juxtiposition was a message. He could make anything sacred, could transform any act into ritual, could redefine any violation as honor. He included his sisters in the annual vows that magistrates swore at the beginning of each year. The traditional formula asked the gods to protect the emperor. Ga added his sisters to the formula.
Magistrates throughout the empire now swore oaths for the safety of the emperor and his sisters. The sisters became part of the imperial identity. Their welfare a matter of official religious concern. He added his sisters to the loyalty oaths that soldiers swore. Legions across the empire now pledged allegiance to gas and his sisters jointly.
Refusing to include the sisters in the oath was treason. Speaking against the sisters was treason. Failing to show proper respect to the sisters was treason. The message was clear. Whatever gas did with his sisters was not private transgression, but public policy. Questioning it was not moral objection, but political crime.
At formal dinners, gas positioned his sisters in ways that violated all protocol. The place of honor at a Roman dinner was beside the host. Wives, when present, reclined near their husbands, but in positions that indicated subordinate status. Unmarried women did not recline at formal dinners at all. Gaees placed Drusilla beside him in the position reserved for wives.
He placed Agraina and Julia Levilla on his other side, so that he was flanked by sisters rather than served by them. He touched them during these dinners in ways that guests could not help but notice, ways that protocol did not permit between siblings, ways that made the nature of his relationships impossible to ignore, while making any direct acknowledgement impossible to speak.
The senators watched. They ate the emperor’s food. They drank the emperor’s wine. They laughed at the emperor’s jokes. They pretended not to see what was directly in front of them because seeing was dangerous and speaking about what they saw was death. One senator made the mistake of looking too long at the way Gas’s hand rested on Drusilla’s thigh during a dinner.
The senator’s name was Gas Kalpernius Piso, a different man from the Piso who had allegedly poisoned Germanicus, but from the same distinguished family. The next morning, Piso was arrested on charges of conspiring against the emperor. The evidence was fabricated. The trial was prefuncter. Piso was executed within a week.
No other senators looked too long after that. Dusilla died on June 10, 38 AD. The cause of death, according to official records, was fever. She had been ill for several days. Physicians had attended her. The emperor had been at her bedside constantly, refusing to leave even for essential imperial business, refusing to eat, refusing to sleep. She was 21 years old.
The emperor’s response to her death exceeded anything Rome had witnessed from a grieving ruler. Gas did not merely mourn. He collapsed. He refused to cut his hair, a traditional sign of mourning. He refused to bathe. He refused to eat for days, then ate voraciously, then refused again. He wandered the palace at night, calling Drusilla’s name, insisting to servants that he had heard her voice, that she was somewhere in the building, that she was hiding from him.
He made it a capital offense to laugh anywhere in the empire while he was mourning. Informers reported citizens who were overheard expressing amusement during the morning period. Several were executed. The entire Roman world was required to share the emperor’s grief. To perform sorrow for a woman most of them had never met, to mourn the loss that gas experienced as though it were their own.
Then he did something unprecedented. He announced that Drusilla would be deified. She would become a goddess worshiped throughout the empire, her temples built, her priests appointed, her festivals celebrated annually. She was the first Roman woman to receive official divine honors. She became D.Va Dusia, a goddess equal to the gods of the traditional pantheon.
A senator named Livius Geminis swore publicly that he had witnessed Dusilla’s spirit ascending to heaven, conversing with the gods, being welcomed among the divine. Gaese rewarded him with a million cisters. Other witnesses came forward with their own visions, their own testimonies, their own confirmations that the emperor’s sister had truly become a goddess.
Temples were constructed, statues were commissioned, priests were assigned, rights were established. Throughout the empire, Roman citizens were now required to worship a woman who had died at 21 after years of being violated by her own brother. The theology was complex. Drusilla was identified with Venus, goddess of love. She was also identified with Pantheia, a syncric deity combining aspects of multiple goddesses.
The identification with Venus was particularly significant given the nature of her relationship with gas, the goddess of love, sanctifying what had been done in her name. Some Romans refused to participate in the new worship. A few were brave enough or foolish enough to voice objections. An equestrian named Livius Prriscus commented that he did not see why a mortal woman, even an emperor’s sister, should be worshiped as divine.
He was executed the same day his comment was reported.
