[-4-] Gaius inevitably went so by contraries in every matter that he not only emulated but even surpassed his predecessor’s licentiousness and bloodthirstiness, for which he had censured him; but of the qualities he had praised in him he imitated not one.  Though he had been the first to insult him, the first to abuse him, so that others thinking to please him in this way made use of rather heedless freedom of speech, he later lauded and magnified Tiberius, going to the point of punishing some for what they had said.  These, as enemies of the former emperor, he hated for their injurious remarks, and he hated equally those who in way praised Tiberius, as being the latter’s friends.

Though he had put an end to complaints arising from maiestas, he made these the cause of many persons’ downfall.  Though according to his own account he dismissed the anger that he felt toward those who had united against his father and his mother and his brothers (and burned their letters), he yet put to death great numbers of them on the basis of evidence contained in such documents.  He did, to be sure, really destroy some papers, but not those which held definite incontrovertible proof; of these he made copies.  Besides, though he at first forbade any one to set up his images, he went on to manufacture the statues himself.  Whereas once he requested the annulment of a decree that sacrifice should be offered to his Fortune, and had this action of his inscribed on a tablet, he afterward ordered temples and sacrifices to be prepared for him as for some god.  He delighted by turns in vast throngs of men and in solitude; he grew angry if requests were preferred, or if they were not preferred.  He would start out on enterprises with the greatest amount of dash, and then carry them through in the most sluggish manner.  He both spent money most unsparingly and showed a thoroughly sordid spirit in exacting it.  He was alike irritated and pleased both at those who flattered him and at those who spoke their own minds.  Many who were guilty of great crimes he neglected to punish and many who had done no wrong he ruthlessly slaughtered.  Among his associates he made some the recipients of excessive adulation and others of excessive insult.  Consequently, no one knew either what to say or how to act toward him, but all who met with success obtained it as the result of chance rather than of rational calculation.

[-5-] That was the kind of emperor into whose hands the Romans had now fallen.  Hence the deeds of Tiberius, though they were felt to have been most grievous, were still as far superior to those of Gaius as the deeds of Augustus were to those of his successor.  For Tiberius always held the power in his own hands and used other people to help him carry out his wishes:  Gaius, on the other hand, was ruled by charioteers and by gladiators; he was the slave of dancers and other theatrical performers.  Indeed, he always kept Apelles, the most famous of the tragedians of