tuousness,--mimes, singers,
actors, dancers of both sexes, cooks, and puppets,--should with noisy
joy break into the imperial palace, which had been official, severe,
and cold under Tiberius, and bring back pleasure, luxury, and
festivals. All hoped that under the rule of this indulgent, youthful
emperor, life, especially at Rome, would become more pleasant and gay;
and no one therefore felt disposed to protest against the official
honors which, contrary to custom, had been bestowed upon the women of
the imperial family.

In truth, if he, still harking back to Egyptian ideas and customs, had
been content with surrounding his family, especially its women, with a
respect which would have protected them against the infamous
accusations and iniquitous persecutions to which many had fallen
victims, he might have had credit for an action which was good, just,
and useful to the state. That strange condition of affairs which had
been growing up under Tiberius was both absurd and dangerous to the
country: the emperor was honored with extraordinary powers and made the
object of a semi-religious veneration; but his family, and especially
its women, were, as a sort of retribution, set outside the laws and
fiercely assailed in a thousand insidious ways. But the lunatic
Caligula was not the man to keep even a wise proposal within reasonable
limits. Power, popularity, and praise quickly aroused all that was
warped and excessive in his nature, and very soon, as he showed at the
end of the year 37, he entertained an idea which must have seemed to
the Romans a horrible impiety. His wife died soon after he became
emperor. Another marriage seemed obligatory, and he decided that he
would marry his sister Drusilla.

Historians have represented this intention as the perverse delirium of
an unbridled sensuality. It was certainly the gross act of a madman,
but there was perhaps more politics in his madness than perversity; for
it was an attempt to introduce into Rome the dynastic marriages between
brothers and sisters which had been the constant tradition of the
Ptolemies and the Pharaohs of Egypt. This oriental custom certainly
seems a horrible aberration to us, who have been educated according to
the strict and austere doctrines of Christianity, which, inheriting in
these matters the fine flower of Greco-Latin ideas, has purified and
rendered them more rigorous. But for centuries in Egypt,--that is, in
the most ancient of the Medit