Never did a fairer scene undergo a worse degradation; and here, in one or other of the twelve villas which Tiberius had built, and among the azure grottoes which he caused to be constructed, the youthful Caius[23] grew up to manhood. It would have been a terrible school even for a noble nature; for a nature corrupt and bloodthirsty like that of Caius it was complete and total ruin. But, though he was so obsequious to the Emperor as to originate the jest that never had there been a worse master and never a more cringing slave,--though he suppressed every sign of indignation at the horrid deaths of his mother and his brothers,--though he assiduously reflected the looks, and carefully echoed the very words, of his patron,--yet not even by the deep dissimulation which such a position required did he succeed in concealing from the penetrating eye of Tiberius the true ferocity of his character. Not being the acknowledged heir to the kingdom,--for Tiberius Gemellus, the youthful grandson of Tiberius, was living, and Caius was by birth only his grand-nephew,--he became a tool for the machinations of Marco the praetorian praefect and his wife Ennia. One of his chief friends was the cruel Herod Agrippa,[24] who put to death St. James and imprisoned St. Peter, and whose tragical fate is recorded in the 12th chap. of the Acts. On one occasion, when Caius had been abusing the dictator Sulla, Tiberius scornfully remarked that he would have all Sulla's vices and none of his virtues; and on another, after a quarrel between Caius and his cousin, the Emperor embraced with tears his young grandson, and said to the frowning Caius, with one of those strange flashes of prevision of which we sometimes read in history. "Why are you so eager? Some day you will kill this boy, and some one else will murder you." There were some who believed that Tiberius deliberately cherished the intention of allowing Caius to succeed him, in order that the Roman world might relent towards his own memory under the tyranny of a worse monster than himself. Even the Romans, who looked up to the family of Germanicus with extraordinary affection, seem early to have lost all hopes about Caius. They looked for little improvement under the government of a vicious boy, "ignorant of all things, or nurtured only in the worst," who would be likely to reflect the influence of Macro, and present the spectacle of a worse Tiberius under a worse Sejanus. [Footnote 23: We shall call him Caius, because it is as little correct to write of him by the _sobriquet_ Caligula as it would be habitually to write of our kings Edward or John as Longshanks or Lackland. The name Caligula means "a little shoe," and was the pet name given to him by the soldiers of his father, in whose camp he was born.]