mt that the
goddess Fortune said to him, "I stand before your door weary; and unless I
am speedily admitted, I shall fall into the hands of the first who comes
to seize me." On his awaking, when the door of the house was opened, he
found a brazen statue of the goddess, above a cubit long, close to the
threshold, which he carried with slim to Tusculum, where he used to pass
the summer season; and having consecrated it in an apartment of his house,
he ever after worshipped it with a monthly sacrifice, and an anniversary
vigil. Though but a very young man, he kept up an ancient but obsolete
custom, and now nowhere observed, except in his own family, which was, to
have his freedmen and slaves appear in a body before him twice a day,
morning and evening, to offer him their salutations.

V. Amongst other liberal studies, he applied himself to the law. He
married Lepida [653], by whom he had two sons; but the mother and
children all dying, he continued a widower; nor could he be prevailed
upon to marry again, not even Agrippina herself, at that time left a
widow by the death of Domitius, who had employed all her blandishments to
allure him to her embraces, while he was a married man; insomuch that
Lepida's mother, when in company with several married women, rebuked her
for it, and even went so far as to cuff her. Most of all, he courted the
empress Livia [654], by whose favour, while she was living, he made a
considerable figure, and narrowly missed being enriched by the will which
she left at her death; in which she distinguished him from the rest of
the (404) legatees, by a legacy of fifty millions of sesterces. But
because the sum was expressed in figures, and not in words at length, it
was reduced by her heir, Tiberius, to five hundred thousand: and even
this he never received. [655]

VI. Filling the great offices before the age required for it by law,
during his praetorship, at the celebration of games in honour of the
goddess Flora, he presented the new spectacle of elephants walking upon
ropes. He was then governor of the province of Aquitania for near a
year, and soon afterwards took the consulship in the usual course, and
held it for six months [656]. It so happened that he succeeded L.
Domitius, the father of Nero, and was succeeded by Salvius Otho, father
to the emperor of that name; so that his holding it between the sons of
these two men, looked like a presage of his future advancement to the
empire. Be