Alone, with no sisters now to elevate to the divine honors of the Roman Olympus, Caligula was reduced to hunting for wives in the families of the aristocracy.  But it seems that even there could be found no great abundance of women who had all the necessary qualities to make them the Olympian consorts of so capricious a god.  In three years he married and repudiated three—­and in a very strange manner, if we are to trust the ancient accounts of Caligula’s loves.  The first was Livia Orestilla, the wife of Caius Piso.  The emperor, who had seen the woman at the marriage celebration, became, we are told, so infatuated with her that he obliged the husband to divorce her; he then married her, and a few days later repudiated her.  Caligula is said to have compared himself on this occasion to Romulus who ravished the Sabine woman, and to Augustus who raped Livia.  The second was Lollia Paulina, wife of Caius Memmius, proconsul of a distant province.  Caligula heard of the prodigious beauty of Lollia’s grandmother.  The portrayal of her charms made him fall in love with her granddaughter, though absent and distant.  He gave orders for her immediate recall to Rome, and as soon as she could be divorced from her husband he married her.  This union, like the former one, lasted only a brief time.  The third wife was Milonia Caesonia, and to her Caligula was more faithful, though from the accounts of ancient writers she appears to have been much older than he, rather homely, and already a mother of three daughters when he first loved her.  It is difficult to determine how much truth there is in these reports:  Caligula was, it is true, a raving maniac, and his frenzy became more accentuated when under the sway of love—­a passion which deranges somewhat even wise men.  It is not strange, therefore, that in regard to women he may have been guilty of even greater excesses than he was capable of in his dealings with men.  Yet some of these accounts seem a little incredible even when ascribed to a madman.  However that may be, Livia Orestilla, Lollia Paulina, Milonia Caesonia are figures without relief, shades and ghosts of empresses, no one of whom had time enough even to occupy the highest post.  In vain the people expected that there would appear in the imperial palace a worthy successor to Livia.  Caligula, like all madmen, was by nature solitary, and could not live with other human beings:  he was to remain alone, a prey to his ravings, which became even stranger and more violent.  He now wished to impose upon the empire the worship of his own person, without considering any opposition or local traditions and superstitions.  In doing this he did violence not only to the civic and republican sentiment of Italy, which detested this worship of a living man as an ignoble oriental adulation, but also to the religious feeling of the Hebrews, to whom this cult appeared most horrible and idolatrous.

[Illustration:  The Emperor Caligula.]