The Historians' History of the World 06

Soon after this, there being a general tranquillity, he ordered a few Germani of his guard to be carried over and concealed on the other side of the Rhine, and word to be brought him after dinner, in a great hurry, that an enemy was advancing. This being accordingly done, he immediately posted away with his friends, and a party of the horse-guards, into the adjoining wood, where lopping the branches of some trees, and dressing them up in the manner of trophies, he returned by torchlight, upbraiding those who did not follow him, with timorousness and cowardice; but presented the companions and sharers of his victory with a new kind of crown, and under a new name, with the representation of the sun, moon, and stars upon them, which he called exploratoriæ. Again, some hostages were by his order taken out of a school, and privately sent off; upon notice of which he immediately rose from table, pursued them with the horse, as if they had run away, and coming up with them, brought them back in chains; proceeding to an extravagant pitch of ostentation likewise in this military comedy. Upon again sitting down to table, when some came to acquaint him that the army was all come in, he ordered them to sit down as they were in their coats of mail, animating them in the words of a well-known verse of Virgil.

In the meantime, he reprimanded the senate and people of Rome by a very severe proclamation, “for revelling and frequenting the diversions of the circus and theatre, and enjoying themselves in their country-houses, whilst their emperor was fighting, and exposing his person to the greatest dangers.”

At last, as if resolved to make an end of the war at once, drawing up his army upon the shore of the ocean, with his ballistæ and other engines of war, whilst nobody could imagine what he intended to do, on a sudden he commanded them to gather up the sea shells, and fill their helmets, and the laps of their coats with them, calling them, “the spoils of the ocean due to the Capitol and the Palatine.” As a monument of his success, he raised a high tower, upon which he ordered lights to be put in the night-time, for the direction of ships at sea; and then promising the soldiers a donative of a hundred denarii a man, as if he had surpassed the most eminent examples of generosity, “Go your ways,” said he, “and be merry; go and be rich.”

Upon his applying himself to make preparations for his triumph, besides prisoners and those who had deserted from the barbarians, he picked out the men of greatest stature in all Gaul, such as he said were fittest for a triumph, with some of the most considerable persons in the province, and reserved them to grace the solemnity; obliging them not only to dye their hair of a yellowish colour, and let it grow long, but to learn the German language, and assume the names commonly used in that country. He ordered likewise the galley in which he had entered the ocean, to be carried a great part of the way to Rome by land, and wrote to the collectors of his revenue in the city, “to make proper preparations for a triumph against his arrival, at as small expense as possible; but such a one, however, as had never been seen before, since they had full power and authority to seize the estates of all men whatever.”

In person, Caligula was tall, of a pale complexion, ill shaped, his neck and legs very slender, his eyes and temples hollow, his forehead broad and grim, his hair thin, and about the crown quite decayed. The other parts of his body were much covered with hair. On this account, it was reckoned a capital crime for any person to look down from above, as he was passing by, or so much as to name a goat. His countenance, which was naturally hideous and frightful, he purposely rendered more so, forming it by a glass into the most horrible contortions. He was crazy both in body and mind, being subject when a boy to the falling sickness. When he arrived at the age of manhood, he would endure fatigue tolerably well, yet so that occasionally he was liable to a faintness, during which he remained incapable of any effort, even for his own preservation. He was not insensible of the disorder of his mind, and sometimes had thoughts of retiring to purge his brain. It was believed that his wife Cæsonia had administered to him a love-potion which threw him into a frenzy. What most of all disordered him was want of sleep, for he seldom had more than three or four hours’ rest in a night; and even then he slept not soundly, but disturbed by strange dreams; fancying one time that the ocean spoke to him. Being therefore often weary with lying awake so great a part of the night, he would one while sit upon the bed, and another while walk in the longest porticos about his house, and now and then invoke and look out for the approach of day.