but in
its maker there is another and a more interesting one yet. Eliminate
Caligula, and Nero, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla and Heliogabalus
would never have been. It was he who gave them both raison d'etre and
incentive. The lives of all of them are horrible, yet analyze the
horrible and you find the sublime.

Fancy a peak piercing the heavens, shadowing the earth. It was on a
peak such as that the young emperors of old Rome balanced themselves, a
precipice on either side. Did they look below, a vertigo rose to meet
them; from above delirium came, while the horizon, though it hemmed the
limits of vision, could not mark the frontiers of their dream. In
addition there was the exaltation that altitudes produce. The valleys
have their imbeciles; it is from mountains the poet and madman come.
Caligula was both, sceptred at that; and with what a sceptre! One that
stretched from the Rhine to the Euphrates, dominated a hundred and
fifty million people; one that a mattress had given and a knife was to
take away; a sceptre that lashed the earth, threatened the sky,
beckoned planets and ravished the divinity of the divine.

To wield such a sceptre securely requires grace, no doubt, majesty too,
but certainly strength; the latter Caligula possessed, but it was the
feverish strength of one who had fathomed the unfathomable, and who
sought to make its depths his own. Caligula was haunted by the
intangible. His sleep was a communion with Nature, with whom he
believed himself one. At times the Ocean talked to him; at others the
Earth had secrets which it wished to tell. Again there was some matter
of moment which he must mention to the day, and he would wander out in
the vast galleries of the palace and invoke the Dawn, bidding it come
and listen to his speech. The day was deaf, but there was the moon, and
he prayed her to descend and share his couch. Luna declined to be the
mistress of a mortal; to seduce her Caligula determined to become a god.

Nothing was easier. An emperor had but to open his veins, and in an
hour he was a divinity. But the divinity which Caligula desired was not
of that kind. He wished to be a god, not on Olympus alone, but on earth
as well. He wished to be a palpable, tangible, living god; one that
mortals could see, which was more, he knew, than could be said of the
others. The mere wish was sufficient--Rome fell at his feet. The patent
of divinity was in the genuflections of a nation. At once he had a
t