And what an example it was! The extravagance of the Claudian Caesars and the last Flavian has become a piece of historic commonplace. Every one has heard of the unguent baths of Caligula, his draughts of melted pearls, his galleys with jewel-studded sterns and gardens and orchards on their decks, his viaduct connecting the Palatine with the Capitoline, his bridge from Bauli to Puteoli, and many another scheme of that wild brain, which had in the end to be paid for in blood.(180) In a single year Caligula scattered in reckless waste more than £20,000,000.(181) Nero proclaimed that the only use of money was to squander it, and treated any prudent calculation as meanness.(182) In a brief space he flung away nearly £18,000,000. The Egyptian roses for a single banquet cost £35,000.(183) He is said never to have made a progress with less than a thousand carriages; his mules were shod with silver.(184) He would stake HS.400,000 on a single throw of the dice. The description of his Golden House is like a vision of lawless romance.(185) The successors of Galba were equally lavish during their brief term. Otho, another Nero, probably regarded death in battle as a relief from bankruptcy.(186) Within a very few months, Vitellius had flung away more than £7,000,000 in vulgar luxury.(187) Vespasian found the exhaustion of the public treasury so portentous(188) that he had to resort to unpopular economies and taxation on a great scale. Under Domitian, the spectacles and largesses lavished on the mob undid all the scrupulous finance of his father,(189) and Nerva had to liquidate the ruinous heritage by wholesale retrenchment, and the sale even of the imperial furniture and plate,(190) as M. Aurelius brought to the hammer his household treasures, and even the wardrobe and jewels of the empress, in the stress of the Marcomannic war.(191)