Egyptian cults which
Tiberius, with his "old-Roman" sympathies, had fiercely combatted.
Furthermore, we see Caligula prohibiting the festival in commemoration
of the battle of Actium, which had been celebrated every year for more
than half a century. At first sight the idea seems absurd; but it must
not be considered a caprice; for with this act Caligula was intending
to initiate the historical rehabilitation of Mark Antony, the man who
had tried to shift the center of Roman politics from Rome to
Alexandria. The emperor meant to make plain to Rome that she was no
longer to boast of having humiliated Alexandria with arms, since
Alexandria would henceforth be taken as a model in all things.

[Illustration: Claudius, Messalina, and their two children in what is
known as the "Hague Cameo."]

Just as the dynasty of the Ptolemies had been surrounded by a
semi-religious veneration, Caligula, inspired as he was by Egyptian and
Ptolemaic conceptions, sought to have this same veneration bestowed
upon his entire family--that family which under Tiberius had been
persecuted and defamed by suits and decimated by suicides through the
envy of the aristocracy, which was forever unwilling to forgive its too
great prestige. Caligula not only hastened to set out in person to
gather up the bones of Agrippina, his mother, and of his brother, in
order to bring them to Rome and deposit them piously in the tomb of
Augustus,--that was a natural duty of filial piety,--but he also
prohibited any one to name among his ancestors the great Agrippa, the
builder of the Pantheon, because his very obscure origin seemed a blot
upon the semi-divine purity of his race. He had the title of Augusta
and all the privileges of the vestal virgins bestowed upon his
grandmother Antonia, the daughter of Mark Antony and the faithful
friend of Tiberius; he had these same vestal privileges bestowed upon
his three sisters, Agrippina, Drusilla, and Livilla; he had assigned to
them a privileged position equal to his own at the games in the circus;
he even had it decreed that their names should be included in the vows
which the magistrates and pontiffs offered every year for the
prosperity of the prince and of his people, and that in the prayers for
the conservation of his power there should also be included a prayer
for their felicity. This was a small revolution from the
constitutional point of view; for the Romans, though allowing their
women ample freedom to occ