and if it was violent, he got up and hid himself
under his bed. In his visit to Sicily, after ridiculing many strange
objects which that country affords, he ran away suddenly in the night
from Messini, terrified by the smoke and rumbling at the summit of Mount
Aetna. And though in words he was very valiant against the barbarians,
yet upon passing a narrow defile in Germany in his light car, surrounded
by a strong body of his troops, some one happening to say, "There would
be no small consternation amongst us, if an enemy were to appear," he
immediately mounted his horse, and rode towards the bridges in great
haste; but finding them blocked up with camp-followers and
baggage-waggons, he was in such a hurry, that he caused himself to be
carried in men's hands over the heads of the crowd. Soon afterwards, upon
hearing that the Germans were again in rebellion, he prepared to quit
Rome, and equipped a fleet; comforting himself with this consideration,
that if the enemy should prove victorious, and possess themselves of the
heights of the Alps, as the Cimbri [454] had done, or of the city, as the
Senones [455] formerly did, he should still have in reserve the
transmarine provinces [456]. Hence it was, I suppose, that it occurred to
his assassins, to invent the story intended to pacify the troops who
mutinied at his death, that he had laid violent hands upon himself, in a
fit of terror occasioned by the news brought him of the defeat of his
army.

LII. In the fashion of his clothes, shoes, and all the rest of his
dress, he did not wear what was either national, or properly civic, or
peculiar to the male sex, or appropriate to mere mortals. He often
appeared abroad in a short coat of stout cloth, richly embroidered and
blazing with jewels, in a tunic with sleeves, and with bracelets upon his
arms; sometimes all in silks and (287) habited like a woman; at other
times in the crepidae or buskins; sometimes in the sort of shoes used by
the light-armed soldiers, or in the sock used by women, and commonly with
a golden beard fixed to his chin, holding in his hand a thunderbolt, a
trident, or a caduceus, marks of distinction belonging to the gods only.
Sometimes, too, he appeared in the habit of Venus. He wore very commonly
the triumphal ornaments, even before his expedition, and sometimes the
breast-plate of Alexander the Great, taken out of his coffin. [457]

LIII. With regard to the liberal sciences, he was little conversa