With other guides Tiberius journeyed through lands where dreams come true.  Aristeas of Proconnesus led him among the Arimaspi, a curious people who passed their lives fighting for gold with griffons in the dark.  With Isogonus he descended the valley of Ismaus, where wild men were, whose feet turned inwards.  In Albania he found a race with pink eyes and white hair; in Sarmatia another that ate only on alternate days.  Agatharcides took him to Libya, and there introduced him to the Psyllians, in whose bodies was a poison deadly to serpents, and who, to test the fidelity of their wives, placed their children in the presence of snakes; if the snakes fled they knew their wives were pure.  Callias took him further yet, to the home of the hermaphrodites; Nymphodorus showed him a race of fascinators who used enchanted words.  With Apollonides he encountered women who killed with their eyes those on whom they looked too long.  Megasthenes guided him to the Astomians, whose garments were the down of feathers, and who lived on the scent of the rose.

In his cups they all passed, confusedly, before him; the hermaphrodites whispered to the rose-breathers the secrets of impossible love; the griffons bore to him women with magical eyes; the Albanians danced with elastic feet; he heard the shrill call of the Psyllians, luring the serpents to death; the column of Panchaia unveiled its mysteries; the Hyperboreans the reason of their fear of life, and on the wings of the chimera he set out again in search of that continent which haunted antiquity and which lay beyond the sea.

IV

THE PURSUIT OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

“Another Phaethon for the universe,” Tiberius is reported to have muttered, as he gazed at his nephew Caius, nicknamed Caligula, who was to suffocate him with a mattress and rule in his stead.

To rule is hardly the expression.  There is no term in English to convey that dominion over sea and sky which a Caesar possessed, and which Caligula was the earliest to understand.  Augustus was the first magistrate of Rome, Tiberius the first citizen.  Caligula was the first emperor, but an emperor hallucinated by the enigma of his own grandeur, a prince for whose sovereignty the world was too small.

Each epoch has its secret, sometimes puerile, often perplexing; but in its maker there is another and a more interesting one yet.  Eliminate Caligula, and Nero, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla and Heliogabalus would never have been.  It was he who gave them both raison d’etre and incentive.  The lives of all of them are horrible, yet analyze the horrible and you find the sublime.