d be turned into a
restaurant, where the girls dance tarantella for a few coppers; that a
toothless hermit should occupy a cell upon the very summit of his Villa
Jovis; and that the Englishwoman's comfortable hotel should be called
_Timberio_ by the natives! A spiritualist might well believe that the
emperor's ghost was forced to haunt the island, and to expiate his old
atrocities by gazing on these modern vulgarisms.

Few problems suggested by history are more darkly fascinating than the
madness of despots; and of this madness, whether inherent in their blood
or encouraged by the circumstance of absolute autocracy, the emperors of
the Claudian and Julian houses furnish the most memorable instance.[1]
It is this that renders Tiberius ever present to our memory at Capri.
Nor will the student of Suetonius forget his even more memorable
grand-nephew Caligula. The following passage is an episode from the
biography of that imperial maniac, whose portrait in green basalt, with
the strain of dire mental tension on the forehead, is still so beautiful
that we are able at this distance of time to pity more than loathe him.
'Above all, he was tormented with nervous irritation, by sleeplessness;
for he enjoyed not more than three hours of nocturnal repose, nor even
these in pure untroubled rest, but agitated by phantasmata of portentous
augury; as, for example, upon one occasion, among other spectral
visions, he fancied that he saw the sea, under some definite
impersonation, conversing with himself. Hence it was, and from this
incapacity of sleeping, and from weariness of lying awake, that he had
fallen into habits of ranging all night long through the palace,
sometimes throwing himself on a couch, sometimes wandering along the
vast corridors, watching for the earliest dawn, and anxiously wishing
its approach.' Those corridors, or loggie, where Caligula spent his
wakeful hours, opened perchance upon this Bay of Naples, if not upon the
sea-waves of his favourite Porto d'Anzio; for we know that one of his
great follies was a palace built above the sea on piles at Baiae; and
where else could _Pelagus_, with his cold azure eyes and briny locks,
have more appropriately terrified his sleep with prophecy conveyed in
dreams? The very nature of this vision, selected for such special
comment by Suetonius as to show that it had troubled Caligula
profoundly, proves the fantastic nature of the man, and justifies the
hypothesis of insanity.