Not only were grand and gifted men like Julius and Augustus Cæsar, but despicable and contemptible tyrants like Nero and Commodus, raised to the rank of immortals. And, not content with making gods of emperors, the Romans made goddesses of their royal women. Caligula had lived in incestuous intercourse with his sister Drusilla; nevertheless, he had her immortalized and worshiped as a divine being. This same Caligula who was a monster of depravity, insisted on being worshiped as a god in the flesh throughout the Roman empire, although the custom had been not to deify emperors until after they were dead. The cowardly and obsequious Roman senate decreed him a temple in Rome. The royal rascal erected another to himself, and appointed his own private priests and priestesses, among whom were his uncle Claudius, and the Cæsonia who afterwards became his wife. This temple and its ministry were maintained at an enormous expense. Only the rarest and most costly birds like peacocks and pheasants, were allowed to be sacrificed to him. Such was the impious conceit of Caligula that he requested the Asiatics of Miletus to convert a temple of Apollo into a shrine sacred to himself. Some of the noblest statuary of antiquity was mutilated in displacing the heads of gods to make places for the head of this wicked monster. A mighty descent this, indeed, from the Olympian Zeus of Phidias to a bust of Caligula! Domitian, after his deification, had himself styled "Lord and God," in all documents, and required all his subjects to so address him. Pliny tells us that the roads leading into Rome were constantly filled with flocks and herds being driven to the Capital to be sacrificed upon his altar.[154] The natural and inevitable result of the decay of the Roman religion was the corruption and demoralization of Roman social life. All experience teaches that an assault upon a people's religious system is an assault upon the entire social and moral organization. Every student of history knows that a nation will be prosperous and happy to the extent that it is religiously intelligent, and in proportion to its loyalty to the laws of social virtue, to the laws of good government, and the laws of God; and that an abandonment of its gods means the wreck and dissolution of its entire social structure. The annals of Rome furnish a striking confirmation of this fact. The closing pages of this chapter will be devoted to a short topical review of Roman society at the time of Christ. Only a few phases of the subject can be presented in a work of this character. II.--GRÆCO-ROMAN SOCIAL LIFE