Caligula

they will utter something you might think the mark of a great spirit, as did Gaius Caesar, who, angry at the heavens because a thunderstorm was drowning out the pantomimes—whom he imitated more zealously than he watched—and because his revelry was frightened by lightnings (very ill-aimed ones, at that), called Jupiter to battle, and that to the death, shouting out that Homeric line:

Lately Gaius Caesar, in one day, scourged and tortured Sextus Papinius, whose father was of consular rank, Betilienus Bassus his own quaestor, the son of his procurator, and others, both senators and Roman knights—not for the sake of inquiry but for the pleasure of it;

then he was so impatient of postponing the gratification which his cruelty demanded, vast and without delay, that, walking in the colonnade of his mother's gardens that separates the portico from the riverbank, he beheaded some of them by lamplight, along with married women and other senators.

and when Suetonius says, that Caligula was on the point of converting the power of a prince into that of a king;

Thus Caligula is praised for having, in the beginning of his reign, restored to different Princes along with their crowns, the intermediate revenues of their kingdoms.

He had also asserted, that tyrants ought to be deposed and punished, as in the cases of Nero and Caligula.

He did not anticipate a Caligula, nor do they a French revolutionary assembly.

Gaius Caesar, the great-grandson of the deified Augustus, my great-uncle, in about the first years of his youth lost his most beloved brother Lucius—himself the prince of the youth, and his brother the prince of the same youth—amid the preparations for the Parthian war, and was wounded much more grievously in mind than he was afterward struck in body;

Gaius Caesar, when he had lost his sister Drusilla—that man who could no more grieve than rejoice in a princely fashion—fled the sight and society of his fellow citizens, was not present at his sister's obsequies, paid his sister no funeral rites, but at his villa at Alba relieved the woes of that most bitter funeral with dice and gaming-board and other diversions of this common sort.

Yet I cannot, now that I have gone round all the Caesars from whom Fortune snatched away brothers and sisters, pass over this one, who must be set apart from the whole company of the Caesars—him whom Nature brought forth for the destruction and reproach of the human race, by whom the empire was scorched and utterly overthrown, and which now the clemency of the gentlest of princes restores.

1 Gaius Caesar gave Pompeius Pennus his life, if he gives who does not take it away;

3 Caesar has all things, his privy purse only his private and own;

We may instance the view of Caligula on the jus respondendi of the jurisconsults.

The same Brutus says that Gaius Caesar sailed past Mytilene because he could not bear to see a man so disfigured.

Gaius Caesar—whom Nature seems to me to have brought forth in order to show what the highest vices could do in the highest fortune—dined on a single day at the cost of ten million sesterces;

He had Valerius Asiaticus among his closest friends, a fierce man, and one hardly likely to bear another's insults with an even mind;

he was angry with Herennius Macer because he had greeted him as "Gaius," nor did a chief centurion go unpunished for having called him "Caligula";

Gaius Caesar, among the other vices in which he abounded, was carried by a wondrous lust for insult to brand everyone with some mark—though he himself was the most generous material for ridicule:

Likewise Caius Caesar, also called Caligula, three years, eight months, twelve days.