solitary,
and could not live with other human beings: he was to remain alone, a
prey to his ravings, which became even stranger and more violent. He
now wished to impose upon the empire the worship of his own person,
without considering any opposition or local traditions and
superstitions. In doing this he did violence not only to the civic and
republican sentiment of Italy, which detested this worship of a living
man as an ignoble oriental adulation, but also to the religious feeling
of the Hebrews, to whom this cult appeared most horrible and idolatrous.

[Illustration: The Emperor Caligula.]

In this way difficulties, dissatisfaction, and sedition arose in all
parts of the empire. The extravagances, the wild expenditures, the
riotous pleasures, and the cruelties of Caligula increased the
discontent and disgust on every hand. We need not take literally all
the accounts of his cruelty and violence which ancient writers have
transmitted to us,--even Caligula has been blackened,--but it is
certain that his government in the last two years of his reign
degenerated into a reckless, extravagant, violent, and cruel tyranny.
One day the empire awoke in terror to the fact that the imperial
family--that family in which the legions, the provinces, and the
barbarians saw the keystone of the state--no longer existed; that in
the vast imperial palace, empty of women, empty of children, empty of
hope, there wandered a raging madman of thirty-one, who divorced a wife
every six months, who foolishly wasted the treasure and the blood of
his subjects, and who was concerned with no other thought than that of
having himself worshiped like a god in flesh and blood by all the
empire. A conspiracy was formed in the palace itself, and Caligula was
killed.

The senate was much perplexed when it heard of the death of Caligula.
What was to be done? The majority was inclined to restore the former
republican government by abolishing the imperial authority, and to give
back to the senate the supreme direction of the state, which little by
little had passed into the hands of the emperor. But many recognized
that this return to the ancient form of government would be neither
easy nor without danger. Could the senate, neglected, divided, and
disregarded as it was, succeed in governing the immense empire? On the
other hand, it was not much easier to find an emperor, granted that an
emperor was henceforth necessary. In the family of Augus