orations at the bar which excited the jealous hatred of the Emperor. Caius piqued himself on the possession of eloquence; and, strange to say, there are isolated expressions of his which seem to show that, in lucid intervals, he was by no means devoid of intellectual acuteness. For instance, there is real humour and insight in the nicknames of "a golden sheep" which he gave to the rich and placid Silanus, and of "Ulysses in petticoats," by which he designated his grandmother, the august Livia. The two epigrammetic criticisms which he passed upon the style of Seneca are not wholly devoid of truth; he called his works _Commissiones meras_, or mere displays.[25] In this expression he hit off, happily enough, the somewhat theatrical, the slightly pedantic and pedagogic and professorial character of Seneca's diction, its rhetorical ornament and antitheses, and its deficiency in stern masculine simplicity and strength. In another remark he showed himself a still more felicitous critic. He called Seneca's writings _Arenu sine Calce_, "sand without lime," or, as we might say, "a rope of sand." This epigram showed a real critical faculty. It exactly hits off Seneca's short and disjointed sentences, consisting as they often do of detached antitheses. It accords with the amusing comparison of Malebranche, that Seneca's composition, with its perpetual and futile recurrences, calls up to him the image of a dancer who ends where he begins. [Footnote 25: Suet. _Calig._ liii.] But Caius did not confine himself to clever and malignant criticism. On one occasion, when Seneca was pleading in his presence, he was so jealous and displeased at the brilliancy and power of the orator that he marked him out for immediate execution. Had Seneca died at this period he would probably have been little known, and he might have left few traces of his existence beyond a few tragedies of uncertain authenticity, and possibly a passing notice in the page of Dio or Tacitus. But destiny reserved him for a more splendid and more questionable career. One of Caius's favourites whispered to the Emperor that it was useless to extinguish a waning lamp; that the health of the orator was so feeble that a natural death by the progress of his consumptive tendencies would, in a very short time, remove him out of the tyrant's way.