his name, and in the composition of
which he was certainly concerned. All these works, and especially the
applause won by the public reading of his poems, would have given him
that high literary reputation which we know him to have earned. It was
not, however, this reputation, but the brilliancy and eloquence of his
orations at the bar which excited the jealous hatred of the Emperor.
Caius piqued himself on the possession of eloquence; and, strange to
say, there are isolated expressions of his which seem to show that, in
lucid intervals, he was by no means devoid of intellectual acuteness.
For instance, there is real humour and insight in the nicknames of "a
golden sheep" which he gave to the rich and placid Silanus, and of
"Ulysses in petticoats," by which he designated his grandmother, the
august Livia. The two epigrammetic criticisms which he passed upon the
style of Seneca are not wholly devoid of truth; he called his works
_Commissiones meras_, or mere displays.[25] In this expression he hit
off, happily enough, the somewhat theatrical, the slightly pedantic and
pedagogic and professorial character of Seneca's diction, its rhetorical
ornament and antitheses, and its deficiency in stern masculine
simplicity and strength. In another remark he showed himself a still
more felicitous critic. He called Seneca's writings _Arenu sine Calce_,
"sand without lime," or, as we might say, "a rope of sand." This epigram
showed a real critical faculty. It exactly hits off Seneca's short and
disjointed sentences, consisting as they often do of detached
antitheses. It accords with the amusing comparison of Malebranche, that
Seneca's composition, with its perpetual and futile recurrences, calls
up to him the image of a dancer who ends where he begins.

[Footnote 25: Suet. _Calig._ liii.]

But Caius did not confine himself to clever and malignant criticism. On
one occasion, when Seneca was pleading in his presence, he was so
jealous and displeased at the brilliancy and power of the orator that he
marked him out for immediate execution. Had Seneca died at this period
he would probably have been little known, and he might have left few
traces of his existence beyond a few tragedies of uncertain
authenticity, and possibly a passing notice in the page of Dio or
Tacitus. But destiny reserved him for a more splendid and more
questionable career. One of Caius's favourites whispered to the Emperor
that it was useless to extinguish a waning l