into a long speech, he ran over the house to give orders about the windows; then returning, he asked again what they had to say, and then, when they began their speech again, ran off to look at some pictures. Finally he sent them off, with the observation, “These are not such bad fellows after all, but they are great fools for not believing me to be a god.”[146] No man ever spilt blood more lightly, with more refinement in cruelty, or with less excuse. He had no rivals to fear, no conspiracies to provoke him; but selfishness seemed to have stifled every humane feeling, and to have left him a prey to the guidance of his evil passions, unrestrained by that natural abhorrence of blood which few even of the worst entirely overcome. To relate one half of his atrocities would weary and disgust the reader: the few here given are selected to show how closely levity was mingled with brutality. He asked one who had been banished by Tiberius, how he employed himself in exile. “I besought the gods that Tiberius might perish, and you be emperor,” was the courtly reply. Thinking that those whom he had banished might be similarly employed, he sent persons around the islands of the Mediterranean, the abodes usually prescribed to those unhappy men, commissioned to put all to death. Cowardly as cruel, he was conscious that the prayer merited a hearing, and had superstition to fear, though not religion to venerate or obey. A civil officer of rank, resident for the sake of his health in Anticyra (an island of the Ægean Sea, celebrated for the growth of hellebore), requested the extension of his leave of absence. Caligula answered, “that blood–letting was necessary, where so long a course of hellebore had failed,” and sent at the same time an order for his execution. The joke, such as it is, appears to have been the only provocation to this act. Imperial wit need be brilliant if it is to be displayed at so high a price. It was his frequent order to the executioner, whose work he loved to superintend, “Strike so that he may feel himself die.” When, by a mistake of name, one man had suffered for another, he observed that both deserved alike; and here he probably stumbled upon a truth. One of his exclamations is notorious: “Oh that the Roman people had one neck!” In a similar spirit he lamented that his reign was distinguished by no public misfortunes—he should be forgotten in the prosperity of the age. It was a mistaken diffidence: he might have trusted in his own powers to avert such a misfortune. Another source of bloodshed was his profuse expenditure. Within a year he spent the treasure left by Tiberius, amounting to twenty–two millions sterling, and then supplied his extravagance by every species of extortion. He abrogated the wills of some, because of their ingratitude in not making his predecessor, or himself, their heir; those of others he annulled, because witnesses were found to say that they had meant to do so; and having thus