Caligula had been frankly adored; there was in him an originality, and with it a grandeur and a mad magnificence that enthralled.  Then, too, he was young, and at his hours what the French call charmeur.  If at times he frightened, always he dazzled.  Of course he was adored; the prodigal emperors always were; so were their successors, the wicked popes.  Man was still too near to nature to be aware of shame, and infantile enough to care to be surprised.  In that was Caligula’s charm; he petted his people and surprised them too.  Claud wearied.  Between them they assimilate every contradiction, and in their incoherences explain that incomprehensible chaos which was Rome.  Caligula jeered at everybody; everybody jeered at Claud.

The latter was a fantastic, vacillating, abstracted, cowardly tyrant, issuing edicts in regard to the proper tarring of barrels, and rendering absurd decrees; declaring himself to be of the opinion of those who were right; falling asleep on the bench, and on awakening announcing that he gave judgment in favor of those whose reasons were the best; slapped in the face by an irritable plaintiff; held down by main force when he wanted to leave; inviting to supper those whom he had killed before breakfast; answering the mournful salute of the gladiators with a grotesque Avete vos—­“Be it well too with you,” a response, parenthetically, which the gladiators construed as a pardon and refused to fight; dowering the alphabet with three new letters which lasted no longer than he did; asserting that he would give centennial games as often as he saw fit; an emperor whom no one obeyed, whose eunuchs ruled in his stead, whose lackeys dispensed exiles, death, consulates and crucifixions; whose valets insulted the senate, insulted Rome, insulted the sovereign that ruled the world, whose people shared his consort’s couch; a slipshod drunkard in a tattered gown—­such was the imbecile that succeeded Caligula and had Messalina for wife.

It were curious to have seen that woman as Juvenal did, a veil over her yellow wig, hunting adventures through the streets of Rome, while her husband in the Forum censured the dissoluteness of citizens.  And it were curious, too, to understand whether it was her audacity or his stupidity which left him the only man in Rome unacquainted with the prodigious multiplicity and variety of her lovers.  History has its secrets, yet, in connection with Messalina, there is one that historians have not taken the trouble to probe; to them she has been an imperial strumpet.  Messalina was not that.  At heart she was probably no better and no worse than any other lady of the land, but pathologically she was an unbalanced person, who to-day would be put through a course of treatment, instead of being put to death.  When Claud at last learned, not the truth, but that some of her lovers were conspiring to get rid of him, he was not indignant; he was frightened.  The conspirators were promptly disposed of, Messalina with them.  Suetonius says that, a few days later, as he went in to supper, he asked why the empress did not appear.