Capreae is a little island of surpassing loveliness, forming one extremity of the Bay of Naples.  Its soil is rich, its sea bright and limpid, its breezes cool and healthful.  Isolated by its position, it is yet within easy reach of Rome.  At that time, before Vesuvius had rekindled those wasteful fires which first shook down, and then deluged under lava and scoriae, the little cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, the scene which it commanded was even more pre-eminently beautiful than now.  Vineyards and olive-groves clothed the sides of that matchless bay, down to the very line where the bright blue waters seem to kiss with their ripples the many-coloured pebbles of the beach.  Over all, with its sides dotted with picturesque villas and happy villages, towered the giant cone of the volcano which for centuries had appeared to be extinct, and which was clothed up to the very crater with luxurious vegetation.  Such was the delicious home which Tiberius disgraced for ever by the seclusion of his old age.  Here he abandoned himself to every refinement of wickedness, and from hence, being by common consent the most miserable of men, he wrote to the Senate that memorable letter in which he confesses his daily and unutterable misery under the stings of a guilty conscience, which neither solitude nor power enabled him to escape.

Never did a fairer scene undergo a worse degradation; and here, in one or other of the twelve villas which Tiberius had built, and among the azure grottoes which he caused to be constructed, the youthful Caius[23] grew up to manhood.  It would have been a terrible school even for a noble nature; for a nature corrupt and bloodthirsty like that of Caius it was complete and total ruin.  But, though he was so obsequious to the Emperor as to originate the jest that never had there been a worse master and never a more cringing slave,—­though he suppressed every sign of indignation at the horrid deaths of his mother and his brothers,—­though he assiduously reflected the looks, and carefully echoed the very words, of his patron,—­yet not even by the deep dissimulation which such a position required did he succeed in concealing from the penetrating eye of Tiberius the true ferocity of his character.  Not being the acknowledged heir to the kingdom,—­for Tiberius Gemellus, the youthful grandson of Tiberius, was living, and Caius was by birth only his grand-nephew,—­he became a tool for the machinations of Marco the praetorian praefect and his wife Ennia.  One of his chief friends was the cruel Herod Agrippa,[24] who put to death St. James and imprisoned St. Peter, and whose tragical fate is recorded in the 12th chap. of the Acts.  On one occasion, when Caius had been abusing the dictator Sulla, Tiberius scornfully remarked that he would have all Sulla’s vices and none of his virtues; and on another, after a quarrel between Caius and his cousin, the Emperor embraced with tears his young grandson, and said to the frowning Caius,