in that incomprehensible chaos which was Rome. Caligula jeered at
everybody; everybody jeered at Claud.

The latter was a fantastic, vacillating, abstracted, cowardly tyrant,
issuing edicts in regard to the proper tarring of barrels, and
rendering absurd decrees; declaring himself to be of the opinion of
those who were right; falling asleep on the bench, and on awakening
announcing that he gave judgment in favor of those whose reasons were
the best; slapped in the face by an irritable plaintiff; held down by
main force when he wanted to leave; inviting to supper those whom he
had killed before breakfast; answering the mournful salute of the
gladiators with a grotesque Avete vos--"Be it well too with you," a
response, parenthetically, which the gladiators construed as a pardon
and refused to fight; dowering the alphabet with three new letters
which lasted no longer than he did; asserting that he would give
centennial games as often as he saw fit; an emperor whom no one obeyed,
whose eunuchs ruled in his stead, whose lackeys dispensed exiles,
death, consulates and crucifixions; whose valets insulted the senate,
insulted Rome, insulted the sovereign that ruled the world, whose
people shared his consort's couch; a slipshod drunkard in a tattered
gown--such was the imbecile that succeeded Caligula and had Messalina
for wife.

It were curious to have seen that woman as Juvenal did, a veil over her
yellow wig, hunting adventures through the streets of Rome, while her
husband in the Forum censured the dissoluteness of citizens. And it
were curious, too, to understand whether it was her audacity or his
stupidity which left him the only man in Rome unacquainted with the
prodigious multiplicity and variety of her lovers. History has its
secrets, yet, in connection with Messalina, there is one that
historians have not taken the trouble to probe; to them she has been an
imperial strumpet. Messalina was not that. At heart she was probably no
better and no worse than any other lady of the land, but pathologically
she was an unbalanced person, who to-day would be put through a course
of treatment, instead of being put to death. When Claud at last
learned, not the truth, but that some of her lovers were conspiring to
get rid of him, he was not indignant; he was frightened. The
conspirators were promptly disposed of, Messalina with them. Suetonius
says that, a few days later, as he went in to supper, he asked why the
empress did not ap