Tradition represents all the scenes of Caligula’s visit to Gaul in a light absolutely grotesque. [Some details from Suetonius will be introduced presently.] The shout of triumph after a sortie across the Rhine in which some of his Germanic guards were brought back as sham prisoners, strikes the reader as wholly comic, but we note with indignation that at Lyons Caligula continued the disgraceful system of making money by capital sentences and criminal charges against persons of rank, and recruited his finances by putting interesting and ancient articles from the palace of the Cæsars at Rome up to public auction. The collection of an army, estimated at some 250,000 men, in the ports of the Morini on the Channel with a view to the conquest of Britain remained nothing but an empty demonstration. It may have induced the British chiefs to avert the danger by a formal act of homage and valuable presents; but tradition represents Caligula as concluding this bloodless expedition with a piece of buffoonery, and after bestowing costly gifts on the soldiers, commanding them to pick up shells on the shore as “spoils won from the ocean.” When he returned to Rome, late in the summer of the year 40, his humour assumed a more and more sinister character. He regarded his own person as divine, though he loved to appear with the attributes of the various gods and goddesses of the Græco-Roman Pantheon; and he now instituted a college of priests in his own honour, and while heaping ignominy on the most revered of ancient images of the gods, commanded that he himself should be worshipped in temples set apart for the purpose throughout the provinces. In this attempt he met with serious resistance only from the orthodox Jews. When P. Petronius, legate of Syria, received orders to set up a colossal gilded statue of the emperor in the Holy of Holies at Jerusalem, the wrath of the Jews rose to such a pitch that nothing but the sudden death of Caligula prevented the outbreak of grave trouble throughout Judea. By this time the tyrant’s popularity was declining even among the masses at Rome, whom he had pampered with games and presents; for he had lately begun to impose on the citizens of the capital a series of burdensome taxes, which were exacted with the utmost rigour. Nevertheless his fate did not overtake him till his conduct gave deep offence to several of the officers of the prætorian guard. Then Cassius Chærea, tribune of a prætorian cohort, headed a conspiracy, and aided by Cornelius Sabinus and others slew the emperor in a corridor of the palace on the 24th of January, 41 B.C.[m] SUETONIUS DESCRIBES CALIGULA For details of his brief but appalling career we cannot do better than go to the fountain head--Suetonius. There is no other important ancient source for this reign except Dion Cassius[j]; and modern research can only interpret and criticise, without adding to the original records.[a]