The deed was done as follows:  Gaius was celebrating a festival in the palace and was attending to the production of a spectacle.  In the course of this he was himself both eating and drinking and was feasting the rest of the company.  Pomponius Secundus, consul at the time, was taking his fill of the food as he sat by the emperor’s feet, and at the same time kept continually bending over to shower kisses upon them.  Gaius himself decided that he wanted to dance and act as a tragedian.  The followers of Chairea could endure it no longer.  As he went out of the theatre to see the boys of most noble lineage whom he had imported from Greece and Ionia to sing the hymn composed in his honor, the conspirators wounded him, then intercepted him in a narrow passage and killed him.  When he fell to the ground none of those present would keep his hands off him but they all savagely stabbed the lifeless corpse again and again.  Some chewed pieces of his flesh.  His wife and daughter were immediately slain.

So Gaius, who accomplished all these exploits in three years, nine months, and twenty-eight days, learned by actual experience that he was not a god.

Now he was openly spurned by those who had been accustomed to do him reverence even when absent.  His blood was spilled by persons who were wont to speak and to write of him as “Jove” and “god.”  His statues and his images were dragged from their pedestals, for the people in particular retained a lively remembrance of the distress they had endured.

  All the soldiers in the Germanic division raised an outcry and their
  remonstrance extended to the point of indulging in slaughter.

Those who stood by remembered the words once spoken by him to the populace:  “How I wish you had but one neck!” and made it plain to him that it was he who had but one neck, whereas they had many hands.  And when the pretorian guard, filled with consternation, began running about and demanding who had slain Gaius, Valerius Asiaticus, an ex-consul, took a remarkable mode of bringing them to their senses, in that he climbed up to a conspicuous place and cried out:  “I only wish I had killed him!” This alarmed them so that they stopped their outcry.

All such persons as in any way acknowledged the authority of the senate obeyed their oaths and became once more quiet.—­While the overthrow of Gaius was thus being accomplished, the consuls Sentius and Secundus forthwith transferred the funds from the treasure-chambers to the Capitol.  They stationed most of the senators and plenty of soldiers as guards over it to prevent any plundering being done by the populace.  So these men in company with the prefects and the circle of Sabinus and Chairea deliberated as to what should be done.

[Footnote 1:  Emended by Boissevain from the “four” of the MS.]

[Footnote 2:  Boissevain restores the MS. “ten” in place of the “twelve” of Robert Estienne.]