backs to him and were busy acknowledging the cheers of the audience after dispatching their victims, and then he killed the other three, one by one, as they came running at him, each a few paces behind the other. Caligula wept for vexation and exclaimed, 'Oh, the monster! Look, he's killed five promising young swordsmen with that horrible trout-spear of his!' When I say that I won my five thousand, I mean that I would have won it if I hadn't been tactful enough to call the bet off.
'For one man to kill five isn't fair fighting,' I said.
Up to this time Caligula had always spoken of Tiberius as a thorough scoundrel and encouraged everyone else to do the same. But one day he entered the Senate and delivered a long eulogy on him, saying that he had been a much misunderstood man and that nobody must speak a word against him. 'In my capacity as Emperor I have the right [387] to criticise him if I please, but you have no right. In fact, you are guilty of treason. The other day a senator said in a speech that my brothers Nero and Drusus were murdered by Tiberius after having been imprisoned on false charges. What an amazing thing to say!' Then he produced the records which he had pretended to burn, and read lengthy extracts. He showed that the Senate had not questioned the evidence collected against his brothers by Tiberius, but had unanimously voted for them to be handed over to him for punishment. Some had even volunteered testimony against them. Caligula said: 'If you knew that the evidence which Tiberius laid before you [in all good faith] was false, then you are the murderers, not he; and it is only since he has been dead that you have dared to blame your cruelty and treachery on him. Or if you thought at the time that the evidence was true, then he was no murderer and you are treasonably defaming his character. Or if you thought that it was false and that he knew it was false, then you were as guilty of murder as he was, and cowards too.'
He frowned heavily in imitation of Tiberius and made Tiberius' sharp chopping motion of the hand, which brought back frightening memories of treason-trials, and said in Tiberius' harsh voice, 'Well spoken, my Son! You can't trust any one of these curs farther than you can kick him. Look what a little God they made of Sejanus before they turned and tore him to pieces! They'll do the same to you if they get half a chance. They all hate you and pray for your death.
My advice to you is, consult no interest but your own and put pleasure before everything. Nobody likes being ruled over, and the only way that I kept my place was by making this trash afraid of me. Do the same. The worse you treat them, the more they'll honour you.'
Caligula then reintroduced treason as a capital crime, ordered his speech to be at once engraved on a bronze tablet and posted on the wall of the House above the seats of the Consuls, and rushed away. No more business was transacted that day: we were all too dejected. But the next day we lavished praise on Caligula as a sincere and pious ruler and voted annual sacrifices to his Clemency. What else could we do? He had the Army at his back, and power of life and death over us, and until someone was bold and clever enough to mate a successful conspiracy against his life all that we could do was to humour him and hope for the best. At a banquet a few nights later he suddenly burst into a most extraordinary howl of laughter. Nobody knew what the joke was. The two Consuls, who sat next to him, asked whether they might be graciously permitted to share in it. At this Caligula laughed even louder, the tears starting from his eyes. 'No,' he choked, 'that's just the point.
It's a joke that you wouldn't think at all funny. I was laughing to think that with one nod of my head I could have both your throats cut on the spot.'
Charges of treason were now brought against the twenty reputedly wealthiest men in Rome. They were given no chance of committing suicide before the trial and all condemned to death. One of them, a senior magistrate, proved to have been quite poor. Caligula said: 'The idiot! Why did he pretend to have money? I was quite taken in. He need not have died at all.' I can only remember a single man who escaped with his life from a charge of treason.
That was Afer, the man who had prosecuted my cousin Pulchra, a lawyer famous for his eloquence. His crime was having put an inscription on a statue of Caligula in the hall of his house, to the effect that the Emperor in his twenty-seventh year was already Consul for the second time. Caligula found this treasonable--a sneer at his youth and a reproach against him for having held the office before he was legally capable of doing so. He composed a long, careful speech against Afer and delivered it in the Senate with all the oratorical force at his command, every gesture and tone carefully rehearsed beforehand. Caligula used to boast that he was the best lawyer and orator in the world, and was even more anxious to outshine Afer in eloquence than to secure his condemnation and confiscate his money. Afer realised this and pretended to be astonished and overcome by Caligula's genius as a prosecutor. He repeated the counts against himself, point by point, praising them with a professional detachment and muttering 'Yes, that's quite unanswerable' and 'He's got the last ounce of weight out of that argument' and 'A very real dilemma' and 'What extraordinary command of language!' When Caligula had finished and sat down with a triumphant grin, Afer was [389] asked if he had anything to say. He answered:
'Nothing except that I consider myself most unlucky. I had counted on using my oratorical gifts as some slight offset against the Emperor's anger with me for my inexcusable thoughtlessness in the matter of that cursed inscription. But Fate has weighted the dice far too heavily against me. The Emperor has absolute power, a clear case against me, and a thousand times more eloquence than I could ever hope to achieve even if I escaped sentence and studied until I was a centenarian.' He was condemned to death, but reprieved the next day.
Speaking of weighted dice--when rich provincials came to the City they were always invited to dinner at the Palace and a friendly gamble afterwards. They were astonished and dismayed by the Emperor's luck: he threw Venus every time and skinned them of all they had. Yes, Caligula always played with weighted dice.
For instance, he now removed the Consuls from office and fined them heavily on the ground that they had celebrated the usual festival in honour of Augustus'
victory over Antony at Actium. He said that it was an insult to his ancestor Antony. [By the way, he appointed Afer to one of the vacant Consulships.]
He had told us at dinner a few days before the festival that whatever the Consuls did he would punish them: for if they refrained from celebrating the festival they would be insulting his ancestor Augustus. It was on this occasion that Ganymede made a fatal mistake. He cried: 'You are clever, my dear! You catch them every way. But the poor idiots will celebrate the festival, if they have any sense; because Agrippa did most of the work at Actium and he was your ancestor too, so they will at least be honouring two of your ancestors of three.'
Caligula said: 'Ganymede, we are no longer friends.'
'Oh,' said Ganymede, 'don't tell me that, my dear! I said nothing to offend you, did I?'
'Leave the table,' ordered Caligula.
I knew at once what Ganymede's mistake was. It was a double one.
Ganymede, as Caligula's cousin on the maternal side, was descended from Augustus and Agrippa, but not from Antony. All his ancestors had been of Augustus' party. So he should have been careful to avoid the subject.
And Caligula disliked any reminder of his descent from Agrippa, a man of undistinguished family. But he took no action against Ganymede yet.
He divorced Lollia, saying that she was barren, and married a woman called Caesonia. She was neither young nor good-looking and was the daughter of a captain of the Watchmen, and married to a baker, or some such person, by whom she already had three children. But there was something about her that attracted Caligula in a way that nobody could explain, himself least of all. He used often to say that he would fetch the secret out of her, even if he had to do it with the fiddle-string torture, why it was that he loved her so entirely. It was said that she won him with a love-philtre, and further that it sent him mad. But the love-philtre is only a guess, and he had begun to go mad long before he met her. In any case, she was with child by him and he was so excited at the thought of being a parent, that, as I say, he married her. It was shortly after his marriage with Caesonia that he first publicly declared his own Divinity. He visited the temple of Jove on the Capitoline Hill. Apelles was with him. He asked Apelles, 'Who's the greater God--Jove or myself?' Apelles hesitated, thinking that Caligula was joking, and not wishing to blaspheme Jove in Jove's own temple. Caligula whistled two Germans up and had Apelles stripped and whipped in sight of Jove's statue. 'Not so fast,'
Caligula told the Germans. 'Slowly, so that he feels it more.' They whipped him until he fainted, and then revived him with holy water and whipped him until he died. Caligula then sent letters to the Senate announcing his Divinity and ordered the immediate building of a great shrine next door to the temple of Jove, 'in order that I may dwell with my brother Jove'. Here he set up an image of himself, three times the size of life, made of solid gold and dressed every day in new clothes.
But he soon quarrelled with Jove and was heard to threaten him angrily: 'If you can't realise who's master
