Annals of Tacitus which
contained the reign of Caius, but more than enough to revolt and horrify
is preserved in the scattered notices of Seneca, and in the narratives
of Suetonius in Latin and Dio Cassius in Greek.

His madness showed itself sometimes in gluttonous extravagance, as when
he ordered a supper which cost more than 8,000_l_; sometimes in a
_bizarre_ and disgraceful mode of dress, as when he appeared in public
in women's stockings, embroidered with gold and pearls; sometimes in a
personality and insolence of demeanor towards every rank and class in
Rome, which made him ask a senator to supper, and ply him with drunken
toasts, on the very evening on which he had condemned his son to death;
sometimes in sheer raving blasphemy, as when he expressed his furious
indignation against Jupiter for presuming to thunder while he was
supping, or looking at the pantomimes; but most of all in a ferocity
which makes Seneca apply to him the name of "Bellua," or "wild monster,"
and say that he seems to have been produced "for the disgrace and
destruction of the human race."

We will quote from the pages of Seneca but one single passage to justify
his remark "that he was most greedy for human blood, which he ordered
to stream in his very presence with such eagerness as though he were
going to drink it up with his lips." He says that in one day he scourged
and tortured men of consular and quaestorial parentage, knights and
senators, not by way of examination, but out of pure caprice and rage;
he seriously meditated the butchery of the entire senate; he expressed a
wish that the Roman people had but a single neck, that he might strike
it off at one blow; he silenced the screams or reproaches of his victims
sometimes by thrusting a sponge in their mouths, sometimes by having
their mouths gagged with their own torn robes, sometimes by ordering
their tongues to be cut out before they were thrown to the wild beasts.
On one occasion, rising from a banquet, he called for his slippers,
which were kept by the slaves while the guests reclined on the purple
couches, and so impatient was he for the sight of death, that, walking
up and down his covered portico by lamplight with ladies and senators,
he then and there ordered some of his wretched victims to be beheaded in
his sight.

It is a singular proof of the unutterable dread and detestation inspired
by some of these Caesars, that their mere countenance is said to have
inspired angu