The half-insane Caligula had really a clearer vision of the emperor’s position than the reactionary dreamers, when he told his grandmother Antonia, “_Memento omnia mihi in omnes licere_.”(246) He did not need the lessons of Agrippa and Antiochus to teach him the secret of tyranny.(247) Yet institutions can never be separated from the moral and social forces which lie behind and around them. The emperor had to depend on agents and advisers, many of them of social rank and family traditions equal to his own. He had by his side a Senate with a history of immemorial antiquity and glory, which cast a spell on the conservative imagination of a race which recoiled from any impiety to the past. Above all, he was surrounded by a populace which took its revenge for the loss of its free Comitia by a surprising licence of lampoon and epigram and mordant gossip and clamorous appeal in the circus and theatre.(248) And even the soldiers, who were the sworn supporters of the prince, and who often represented better than any other class the tone of old Roman gravity and manly virtue, could sometimes make their Imperator feel that there was in reserve a power which he could not safely defy. Hence it was that, with the changing character of the prince, the imperial power might pass into a lawless tyranny, only to be checked by assassination, while again it might veil its forces under constitutional forms, adopt the watchwords of the Republic, exalt the Senate to a place beside the throne, and make even accomplished statesmen fancy for the time that the days of ancient liberty had returned.