er number of gladiators than the law permitted and because he
often had recourse to them himself. So people bought them for large
sums, some through need of the men, others thinking they should
gratify him, and the largest number (in case they were reputed to be
property-holders) out of a wish to avail themselves of this pretext for
spending some of their substance and thus by becoming poorer save
their lives.

Yet, in spite of this action of his, he afterward put out of the way by
poison the best and most famous of these slaves. He did the same also in
the case of rival horses and charioteers, being greatly devoted to the
party that wore the frog green and from this color was called the Party
of the Leek. Even now the place where the chariots practiced is called
Galanum. One of the horses, that he named Incitatus, he invited to
dinner, offered him golden barley, and drank his health in wine from gold
goblets. He took oaths by the same beast's Guardian Spirit and Presiding
Fortune and promised besides that he would appoint him consul. This he
would certainly have done, too, if he had lived longer.

[-15-] Now formerly for the purpose of providing funds it had been voted
that all those persons who had wished to leave anything to Tiberius
and were alive should at their death bestow the same upon Gaius. The
publication of a decree was deemed necessary to prevent its seeming that
he could break the laws in securing by inheritance such gifts; for he
had at the time neither wife nor children. But at the time of which I am
speaking he proceeded to levy for himself without any vote absolutely all
the property of men who had served among the centurions and had after the
triumph which his father celebrated left it to somebody other than the
emperor. When not even this sufficed, he hit upon the following third
means of raising money. There was a senator, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo,
who had noticed that the roads during the reign of Tiberius were in bad
condition and was always nagging the road commissioners about it and
furthermore kept making a nuisance of himself before the senate regarding
the matter. Gaius took him as a confederate and through him attacked
all those, alive or dead, who had ever been road commissioners and had
received money for repairing the highways. He fined both them and the men
who had secured any contracts from them, on the pretence that they had
spent nothing. For this help Corbulo was at the time made cons