ten as any persons
approached the pedestal to take hold of it. So after hurling threats at
the obdurate image he set up a new one of himself.--The temple of the
Dioscuri in the Roman Forum he cut in two and made through it an approach
to the Palatine running right between the statues, to the end (these
were at all events his words) that he might have the Dioscuri for
gate-keepers. Assuming the name of Dialius [15] he attached Caesonia his
wife, Claudius, and other persons who were very wealthy to his service as
priests, receiving from each one two hundred and fifty myriads for this
honor. He also consecrated himself to his own service and appointed his
horse a fellow-priest. Dainty and expensive birds were daily sacrificed
to him; he had a contrivance by which he defied the thunder with
answering peals and could send return flashes when it lightened. Likewise
whenever a bolt fell, he would in turn hurl a javelin at a rock,
repeating each time the words of Homer: "Either lift me or I will thee."
[16] [When thirty days after her marriage Caesonia brought forth a
little daughter, he pretended that this, too, had come about through
supernatural means and gave himself airs on the fact that in so few days
after becoming a husband he was a father. He gave the child the name of
Drusilla, and taking her up to the Capitol placed her on the knees of
Jupiter, with the implication that she was his child, and put her in
charge of Minerva to be suckled.] This god, then, this Jupiter,--[he
was called by the latter name so much that it even found its way into
documents,--at the same time that all this took place was collecting
money in most shameful and most frightful ways.] One may, to be sure,
[leave out of account the wares and the taverns, the brothels [17] and
the courts, the artisans and the wage-earning slaves] and other such
sources from [every single one of] which he gathered funds; but how can
one escape mentioning the rooms set apart in the very palace and
the wives of the foremost men as well as the children of the most
aristocratic families that he shut up in these rooms and foully abused,
sparing absolutely no one in his greed for such victims, meeting with no
resistance from some [who wished to avoid showing any displeasure] but
seizing others quite against their will? [Yet these proceedings did not
displease the mob very much, but they rather delighted with him in his
licentiousness and in the fact that] he also would thro