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Caligula: Divine Carnage: Atrocities of the Roman Emperors
Caligula is the most notorious of the Roman Emperors, a vile degenerate who seduced his own sister, installed a horse in the Roman Senate, turned his palace into a brothel, married a prostitute, tortured and killed innocent citizens on whims, and committed countless other acts of madness, cruelty and deviancy. Award-winning writers Stephen Barber and Jeremy Reed document in full the atrocities of Caligula and also the other mad Emperors, including the deranged Commodus and Heliogabalus, the teenage ambisexual sun-god. Also included is a bloody history of Gladiators and that depraved circus, the Roman Arena. This is a shocking catalogue of ancient perversity and decadence. The greatest history of Caesaral carnage ever written. -- Bizarre Magazine
156 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
October 16, 2019
** Warning – contains distasteful material, unfit for most people**
This is a very (very) silly torture-porn book which can only be recommened to fans of Deathgasm (Jason Howden, 2015) or Centuries of Torment by the band Cannibal Corpse (2008). They would love it.
What was I doing reading it? Funny you should ask – I was asking myself the same question. I thought – you, yes, you - reader of Ulysses and Winnie the Pooh, are now reading Caligula Divine Carnage, subtitle : Atrocities of the Roman Emperors.
Explain!
Well, you see, I recently read My Lives by ubersophisticate man of the world Edmund White, a guy who knows how to string a sentence together. In that book he mentions that this other guy has written his biography and the other guy is Stephen Barber. When I checked out Stephen Barber on Goodreads I found he'd also written this one.
I was intrigued.
Of course it could be there's two Stephen Barbers. It wouldn't be the first time Goodreads has concertinered two people with the same name. (Or should that be concertina'd? But I don't like that apostrophe. It makes me uneasy.) Googling didn't help, so until I'm told otherwise I think this is the same Stephen Barber who wrote The Burning World, a biography of Edmund White.
In which case, I have a message for Edmund :
You really should read this one. Do you really want this guy writing your life? I think not!
In his note on sources Stephen dismisses the tedious standards to which historical works are held in a rather grand manner:
It would require the most omniscient oracle to say what was authentic
Meaning – for the purposes of this book I've decided to believe only the most insanely lurid fantasies spun around these mad Roman emperors by the sadistic pornographers of the last two thousand years.
I don't boggle easily but I was all a-boggle on the very first page of the foreword. We are discussing Tiberius, the emperor prior to Caligula :
Not content with enticing mullet to nibble his crumb-coated genitals as he reclined in the tepid rock pools
A mullet:
Well, I tried this once and really the crumbs just dissolve in the water before the mullet get interested, so frankly I don't believe Emperor Tiberius did any such thing. More like he said he'd like to try it. Now, on the second page of the foreword we have this, an early description of the Brazilian wax :
Domitian meanwhile lusted after prostitutes and courtesans without surcease, and delighted in depilating their succulent pubic mounds by hand-held tweezers before penetration.
I don't believe this one either – it would take hours and I think one's ardour would be considerably diminished long before any serious depilation had been achieved.
I was glad to read that even Emperors didn't get everything they wished for:
Although Tiberius's last wish had been that one of his most well endowed slaves should bugger his corpse, nobody could be found who was prepared to do so, despite considerable financial incentives.
As you see, the torture porn is laced with a little understated wit on occasion.
So this book is a list of repetitive horrors and maimings and slaughterings inflicted on all and sundry by Caligula, Commodus and Heliogabalus, three of the the four truly crazy Emperors. But it's so over the top that not only can the top no longer be seen but it's now only a distant memory to this book. I just didn't believe any of it. E.g.
A special miniature amphitheatre was erected where the plebeian scum could for a small fee sit and watch their Emperor bugger his sister on a stage of solid gold.
Sorry, just no. No he didn't. Stop writing this stuff, Stephen Barber. Really. Even if it's just for money. Stop metaphorically buggering these corpses!
Okay - some light relief: which pop song not only uses the word plebeian but rhymes it too?
****
Update :
Note on Stephen Barber : Googling now does help, and confirms that it's the same guy, who clearly is a professor of art history at Kingston School of Art in London by day, and a scurrilous compiler of pornohistory by night. Also, his Edmund White biography was published in 1999, two years before Caligula, and from what the Amazon reviews say it's a serious, sensible and excellent work.
This is a very (very) silly torture-porn book which can only be recommened to fans of Deathgasm (Jason Howden, 2015) or Centuries of Torment by the band Cannibal Corpse (2008). They would love it.
What was I doing reading it? Funny you should ask – I was asking myself the same question. I thought – you, yes, you - reader of Ulysses and Winnie the Pooh, are now reading Caligula Divine Carnage, subtitle : Atrocities of the Roman Emperors.
Explain!
Well, you see, I recently read My Lives by ubersophisticate man of the world Edmund White, a guy who knows how to string a sentence together. In that book he mentions that this other guy has written his biography and the other guy is Stephen Barber. When I checked out Stephen Barber on Goodreads I found he'd also written this one.
I was intrigued.
Of course it could be there's two Stephen Barbers. It wouldn't be the first time Goodreads has concertinered two people with the same name. (Or should that be concertina'd? But I don't like that apostrophe. It makes me uneasy.) Googling didn't help, so until I'm told otherwise I think this is the same Stephen Barber who wrote The Burning World, a biography of Edmund White.
In which case, I have a message for Edmund :
You really should read this one. Do you really want this guy writing your life? I think not!
In his note on sources Stephen dismisses the tedious standards to which historical works are held in a rather grand manner:
It would require the most omniscient oracle to say what was authentic
Meaning – for the purposes of this book I've decided to believe only the most insanely lurid fantasies spun around these mad Roman emperors by the sadistic pornographers of the last two thousand years.
I don't boggle easily but I was all a-boggle on the very first page of the foreword. We are discussing Tiberius, the emperor prior to Caligula :
Not content with enticing mullet to nibble his crumb-coated genitals as he reclined in the tepid rock pools
A mullet:
Well, I tried this once and really the crumbs just dissolve in the water before the mullet get interested, so frankly I don't believe Emperor Tiberius did any such thing. More like he said he'd like to try it. Now, on the second page of the foreword we have this, an early description of the Brazilian wax :
Domitian meanwhile lusted after prostitutes and courtesans without surcease, and delighted in depilating their succulent pubic mounds by hand-held tweezers before penetration.
I don't believe this one either – it would take hours and I think one's ardour would be considerably diminished long before any serious depilation had been achieved.
I was glad to read that even Emperors didn't get everything they wished for:
Although Tiberius's last wish had been that one of his most well endowed slaves should bugger his corpse, nobody could be found who was prepared to do so, despite considerable financial incentives.
As you see, the torture porn is laced with a little understated wit on occasion.
So this book is a list of repetitive horrors and maimings and slaughterings inflicted on all and sundry by Caligula, Commodus and Heliogabalus, three of the the four truly crazy Emperors. But it's so over the top that not only can the top no longer be seen but it's now only a distant memory to this book. I just didn't believe any of it. E.g.
A special miniature amphitheatre was erected where the plebeian scum could for a small fee sit and watch their Emperor bugger his sister on a stage of solid gold.
Sorry, just no. No he didn't. Stop writing this stuff, Stephen Barber. Really. Even if it's just for money. Stop metaphorically buggering these corpses!
Okay - some light relief: which pop song not only uses the word plebeian but rhymes it too?
****
Update :
Note on Stephen Barber : Googling now does help, and confirms that it's the same guy, who clearly is a professor of art history at Kingston School of Art in London by day, and a scurrilous compiler of pornohistory by night. Also, his Edmund White biography was published in 1999, two years before Caligula, and from what the Amazon reviews say it's a serious, sensible and excellent work.
September 1, 2023
Combines the unflinching ahistoricism of Herodotus with the morbid depravity of de Sade. It's actually incredible how completely divorced from reality this book is. It's like to the already untruthful Suetonius what Ao3 Hamilton fanfiction is to the already untruthful musical.
My absolute favourite lie in here was that there was a trick gladiators did where they would spell out "Caligula" with the blood of their beaten opponent, and use the cut off head to dot the "i". This is the most blatant lie I've ever seen, I'm so obsessed. Ignoring the fact that bestie Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus hated the nickname Caligula, and that lower case letters as we know them were in their very infancy, dotted "i" in particular wasn't in use until, from what I can tell, the 11th century? Fucking CE?
Lurid, shallow, disgusting, offensive and almost entirely invented. 4 stars. Kinda slayed. Although I still don't know what the fuck that is on the cover!!! Can anyone tell me?
My absolute favourite lie in here was that there was a trick gladiators did where they would spell out "Caligula" with the blood of their beaten opponent, and use the cut off head to dot the "i". This is the most blatant lie I've ever seen, I'm so obsessed. Ignoring the fact that bestie Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus hated the nickname Caligula, and that lower case letters as we know them were in their very infancy, dotted "i" in particular wasn't in use until, from what I can tell, the 11th century? Fucking CE?
Lurid, shallow, disgusting, offensive and almost entirely invented. 4 stars. Kinda slayed. Although I still don't know what the fuck that is on the cover!!! Can anyone tell me?
March 12, 2014
I first stumbled upon this book at a public library, in Australia, in the history section. This proved rather misleading, as this book does not have an ounce of historical fact in it. Divine Carnage is little more than a silly gore porn book, relentlessly exaggerating the negative aspects of Roman history and society in ludicrous ways. Despite its lack of educational value, the book has a strong hilarity factor if you are strong enough to cope with the constant gore and ridiculous sexual perversions the authors describe in great detail. Some passages are so outlandish that you'll find yourself shaking with barely supressed laughter. Here is one of my favourite passages:
"The animal used most frequently in the arena was the legendary Libyan lion: the most magnificent specimens of this mutant species grew to eleven feet in length, with enormous paws armed with razorsharp claws of saber-size dimensions; even their engorged testicles were as large as a man's head. The Libyan lion was the ultimate killing machine, especially if deprived of its usual diet: in the wild, on the then-fertile terrain of the Idehan Marzuq, it could lay waste to two hundred wildebeests and ostriches in one sitting. Armies of slaves were expended to capture those majestic beasts – they were impervious to tranquilizer arrows, and the only way to subdue them was for a particularly handsome slave to present his shapely, exposed anus to the lion's mighty sexual apparatus; then, once the act of copulation (which invariably proved terminal for the unfortunate slave, due to unsustainable blood loss) reached its critical point and the lion was momentarily distracted, a gang of a hundred or more whooping slaves would wrestle the lion to the ground and throw a net over it."
The authors seem to have an unhealthy obsession with sodomy as the book is rife with descriptions of the act. They even claim that Caligula's sister Drusilla succumbed to excessive anal penetration. To those who've seen the 1976 crap-piece "Caligula", you may see striking similarities between this book and the film and I believe the authors did little more than plagiarise ideas and scenes from it. The infamous head-cutting machine is referred to as fact in Divine Carnage, which should set off a few warning bells in the historically-minded or those who've seen the film.
It is best to read this book as a comedy. It's ridiculous, over the top, and written in such ludicrously hyperbolic tones that it'll provide quite a few hearty laughs. I wouldn't recommend it to the gullible or the sensitive. The latter would be shocked by all the gore and sexual violence.
"The animal used most frequently in the arena was the legendary Libyan lion: the most magnificent specimens of this mutant species grew to eleven feet in length, with enormous paws armed with razorsharp claws of saber-size dimensions; even their engorged testicles were as large as a man's head. The Libyan lion was the ultimate killing machine, especially if deprived of its usual diet: in the wild, on the then-fertile terrain of the Idehan Marzuq, it could lay waste to two hundred wildebeests and ostriches in one sitting. Armies of slaves were expended to capture those majestic beasts – they were impervious to tranquilizer arrows, and the only way to subdue them was for a particularly handsome slave to present his shapely, exposed anus to the lion's mighty sexual apparatus; then, once the act of copulation (which invariably proved terminal for the unfortunate slave, due to unsustainable blood loss) reached its critical point and the lion was momentarily distracted, a gang of a hundred or more whooping slaves would wrestle the lion to the ground and throw a net over it."
The authors seem to have an unhealthy obsession with sodomy as the book is rife with descriptions of the act. They even claim that Caligula's sister Drusilla succumbed to excessive anal penetration. To those who've seen the 1976 crap-piece "Caligula", you may see striking similarities between this book and the film and I believe the authors did little more than plagiarise ideas and scenes from it. The infamous head-cutting machine is referred to as fact in Divine Carnage, which should set off a few warning bells in the historically-minded or those who've seen the film.
It is best to read this book as a comedy. It's ridiculous, over the top, and written in such ludicrously hyperbolic tones that it'll provide quite a few hearty laughs. I wouldn't recommend it to the gullible or the sensitive. The latter would be shocked by all the gore and sexual violence.
January 31, 2018
Step One: Take a sip of wine whenever the author mentions "plebian scum"
Step Two: Take a sip of wine whenever there's gratuitous anal sex (Note: By "gratuitous" I mean "Not included in even the most biased sources from the ancient world, ie. Tiberius wanting to have someone penetrate him anally post-mortem)
Step Three: Take a sip of wine whenever the author seems to have taken one or two cues from the Marquis de Sade (If I wanted to read 120 Days of Sodom in the original 18th century purple prose, I would do it myself, thank you very much.)
Step Four: Take a sip of wine whenever the author gets even the most basic names wrong, such as the name of the emperor who exiled Ovid.
Congratulations, you've either passed out or have died of alcohol poisoning and you haven't even made your way out of the Introduction. Either way, the memory of this awful torture porn vaguely disguised as "history" will hopefully be wiped from your mind. Would that we all could be so lucky.
Step Two: Take a sip of wine whenever there's gratuitous anal sex (Note: By "gratuitous" I mean "Not included in even the most biased sources from the ancient world, ie. Tiberius wanting to have someone penetrate him anally post-mortem)
Step Three: Take a sip of wine whenever the author seems to have taken one or two cues from the Marquis de Sade (If I wanted to read 120 Days of Sodom in the original 18th century purple prose, I would do it myself, thank you very much.)
Step Four: Take a sip of wine whenever the author gets even the most basic names wrong, such as the name of the emperor who exiled Ovid.
Congratulations, you've either passed out or have died of alcohol poisoning and you haven't even made your way out of the Introduction. Either way, the memory of this awful torture porn vaguely disguised as "history" will hopefully be wiped from your mind. Would that we all could be so lucky.
December 24, 2012
Lost interest after Chapter 1. No references to any sources made it just repetative. As was the reference to the Romans as 'plebeian scum' all the time.
April 2, 2017
This is the most ridiculous attempt at a 'history' book I have ever read.
January 1, 2008
Definitely not for the faint of heart or easily offended. I laughed myself silly.
January 28, 2019
I wish I could give this junk less than one star.
September 3, 2008
Pretty much the perfect airplane read ( second only to my beloved book of black box transcripts.) Page after page of detailed roman atrocities so extreme and fantastical you become half convinced the authors are weaving this book out of their own perverse and ennervated dreamworld.
barber seems to have become a specialist in wandering these dark alleys of the human psyche as it is projected into history and writing about it in a way that is both challenging, poetically truthful ( in the herzogian sense) and highly entertaining. i highly recommend anything by this author.
barber seems to have become a specialist in wandering these dark alleys of the human psyche as it is projected into history and writing about it in a way that is both challenging, poetically truthful ( in the herzogian sense) and highly entertaining. i highly recommend anything by this author.
August 15, 2010
Wow this was really depraved in some areas. It's quite a graphic account of what went on with the emperors, sexual exploits, punishment and the slaughter they put upon animals and humans alike. Reading it you can't help but think (well I did) that you were reading a made up story as its barbaric to think humans behaved like this.
Very interesting reading but would not recommend it for the faint hearted and even those who aren't easily shocked might find this pretty gruesome.
Very interesting reading but would not recommend it for the faint hearted and even those who aren't easily shocked might find this pretty gruesome.
February 12, 2010
Short but sweet. Covers more about the particular state of Rome rather than the actual atrocities committed by this infamous Caesar. It spares no details regarding the lurid sex and violence of the times.
September 20, 2019
As someone who enjoys Roman history I would recommend staying far away from this. I gave up on page two where it asserts that Tiberius planed to force everyone in the empire to spend 100% of their time emulating his sexual experiments.
February 9, 2022
The literary equivalent of a bum fight, a hysterical medley of cum and gore and excess that just piles on with each success generation of imperial sinfulness.
It's all absolutely nonsense, a pantomime of allegedly real atrocities, that nonetheless is extremely endearing and entertaining.
It's all absolutely nonsense, a pantomime of allegedly real atrocities, that nonetheless is extremely endearing and entertaining.
August 1, 2009
Out-Caligula's the movie, if you can imagine that.
August 9, 2009
This book is amazing, but not in a good way.
December 3, 2020
Essentially a Roman Hoollywood Babylon - an openly fraudulent history of Roman atrocities that is far more focused on capturing the myths of Caligula, Heliogabalus, and others than it is depicting fact. Goofy, scandalous, and an enjoyable(???) read.
June 4, 2022
It relied too much on scandal and gossip - shock value of descriptive incest, etc. (wtf), they didn't acknowledge alternate views of history as it cites this crap as 100% definitely real.
They didn't even properly cite references.
I despise not finishing books but I just couldn't with this one.
They didn't even properly cite references.
I despise not finishing books but I just couldn't with this one.
August 9, 2023
Reads too much like an historical book version 9f the now defunct newspaper the news of the world.sensationalism at it's best.too Much given over to the scatological side of the emperors life.i cannot believe it took two authors to write this book.
November 15, 2021
Perhaps one of the worst, most disgusting, and completely made up history books I've ever seen and will probably will ever see. Obviously written by a fetishist for fetishists. Utterly degenerate.
April 21, 2022
I enjoyed the first chapter, but subsequent chapters felt like the first being chewed up and regurgitated. I ended up skimming through Heliogabalus' chapter and dropping it afterwards.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews