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Did these words perchance reach Caligula's ears he would no doubt even at this eleventh hour have refused to trust himself to the praefect; he would rush back into the palace, like a tracked beast that seeks its burrow, and all the sorrow and the renunciation of the past twenty-four hours would turn to the bitter fruit of uselessness. Fortunately Caligula's senses were dulled by his own terrors.
At length Caligula's terrible tyranny was brought to a sudden end by his assassination; and Agrippina, in consequence of this event was not only released from her thraldom but raised to a still higher eminence than she had enjoyed before. The circumstances connected with these events will be related in the next chapter. Plots against Caligula. Cassius Chærea. Chærea's bravery. His legion mutinies.
Caligula's words in business was always few and bitter. "You see them mountains," said he, pointing. "And you seen that colonel man that owns railroads and cuts more ice when he goes to the post-office than Roosevelt does when he cleans 'em out. What we're going to do is to kidnap the latter into the former, and inflict a ransom of ten thousand dollars." "Illegality," says I, shaking my head.
"Good-evening, Monsieur l'Abbe," he said; "you can go down by way of Caligula's palace." Delightful was Pierre's relief when he was at last able to rest for a moment on one of the marble seats in the garden. There were but few clumps of trees, cypresses, box-trees, palms, and some fine evergreen oaks; but the latter, sheltering the seat, cast a dark shade of exquisite freshness around.
But it seems that even there could be found no great abundance of women who had all the necessary qualities to make them the Olympian consorts of so capricious a god. In three years he married and repudiated three and in a very strange manner, if we are to trust the ancient accounts of Caligula's loves. The first was Livia Orestilla, the wife of Caius Piso.
There was one man alive in Rome at the present moment who thought to become the successor of Caligula; that one man would be bold enough to woo and win Dea Flavia for wife. Caligula's one coherent thought ever since Caius Nepos had betrayed the conspiracy to him, was the desire to know who that man was likely to be. That was the man he most hated the unknown man.
And that, at the end of about four years, was the universal cry: and against a mad emperor the only resource of the Roman world was at that time assassination. The captain of Caligula's guards rid Rome and the provinces of him. He did just one sensible and useful thing during the whole of his stay in Gaul: he had a light-house constructed to illumine the passage between Gaul and Great Britain.
Caligula was a poet in love with the moon. The kaiser is a poseur in love with himself. One of Caligula's many diversions was killing his people. Such slaughter as the kaiser has effected consists in twenty-five thousand head of game. The career of Caligula is horrible, yet in the horrible is sometimes the sublime.
Wretched indeed and pitiable are those where injustice and cruelty hold sway, where burdens ever greater and more grievous are laid upon the people by tyrants like those who now abound in Italy, whose infamy will be recorded through years to come as no less black than Caligula's or Nero's. Guicciardini, with pregnant brevity, observes: 'The mortar with which the states of the tyrants are cemented is the blood of the citizens.
Drifting with the throng, Taurus Antinor, still holding his trembling companion by the wrist, soon found himself being carried down the long flight of steps which leads from the heights crowned by Caligula's palace to the Forum below.
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