And now, his military expedition having ended without shedding the blood of a foe, Caligula's insane thirst for blood arose, and he determined to glut it out of the ranks of his own army. There were in it some regiments which had mutinied against his father on the death of Augustus. He ordered these to be slaughtered for their crime. Some of his higher officers representing to him the danger of such a proceeding, he changed his mind, and gave orders that these legions should be decimated. But the whole army showed such symptoms of discontent with this cruel order that Caligula was seized with consternation, and fled in a panic to Rome. On reaching the city the senate proved bold enough to vote him an ovation instead of the triumph on which he had set his mind. Incensed at this, he met the advances of the patricians with stinging insults, and perhaps determined in his mind to be deeply revenged for this premeditated slight. Whatever he had in view, he did not live much longer to afflict mankind. Four months more brought him to the end of his flagitious career. There was a brave soldier of the palace guard, Cassius Chaerea by name, who happened to have a weak voice, and whom Caligula frequently insulted in public for this fault of nature. These insults in time grew heavier and viler than the veteran could bear, and he organized a conspiracy with a few others against the emperor's life. Meeting him without guards, the conspirators assailed him with their daggers and put an end to his base life. Thus died, after twenty-nine years of life and four years of power, one of the vilest, cruellest, and maddest of the imperial demons who so long made Rome a slaughter-house and an abomination among the nations. _THE MURDER OF AN EMPRESS._ Nero was lord of Rome. Chance had placed a weak and immoral boy in unlimited control of the greatest of nations. Utterly destitute of principle, he gradually descended into the deepest vice and profligacy, which was soon succeeded by the basest cruelty and treachery. And one of the first victims of his treachery was his own mother, who had murdered her husband, the Emperor Claudius, to place him on the throne, and had now committed the deeper fault of attempting to control her worthless and faithless son. She had threatened to replace him on the throne with his half-brother Britannicus, and Nero had escaped this difficulty by poisoning Britannicus. She then opposed his vicious passions, and made a bitter foe of his mistress Poppaea, who by every artifice incensed the weak-minded emperor against his mother, representing her as the only obstacle to his full enjoyment of power and pleasure.