He distributed crowns to foreign princes. Among these was his friend Herod Agrippa, whom he allowed to repair to his tetrachy in Palestine, going by the way of Alexandria. In that city Herod Agrippa’s presence was made the occasion of an insult to the Jews by the people of Alexandria. Their governor, Avilius Flaccus, knowing the repugnance of the Jews to all graven images, instigated the Alexandrians to demand that statues of the emperor be set up in the synagogues. This pleased the intolerable arrogance of Caligula. Augustus and Tiberius had allowed themselves to be spoken of as divine in the provinces, but they had forbidden the worship of their pretended divinity at Rome during their lives. A deputation of Jews went to Rome to dissuade the emperor Caligula from sanctioning any such idolatries in regard to himself. They said they had prayed for him and had offered sacrifices for him, but they feared Jehovah as the only God. They were shocked by his blasphemy and returned disheartened when he replied: “Yes; you have offered sacrifices _for_ me, but not _to_ me.” He, thereupon, issued his order that a statue of himself should be prepared to be worshiped even in the temple at Jerusalem. He went so far as to arrange for priests and sacrifices in his honor. The governor of Syria told the workmen to proceed slowly upon this statue; so that it was not completed before Caius’s death. Caligula seems really to have persuaded himself that he was a god, not one of moral purity, but, according to his own depraved idea, a god of outward and sensuous power,--a Bacchus or a Hercules. He caused himself to be adored in the Forum. He showed himself to the people, sitting between the statues of Castor and Pollux in their temple. “If you do not kill me I will kill you,” he cried out to Jupiter in a thunderstorm, and then he ridiculously invented a machine for imitating thunder. He built some kind of a lofty passageway, which was called a bridge, over the roofs of the houses from the Palatine to the Capitoline, so that he could go over and confer, as he said, with Jupiter in his temple. Merivale says that “to stand on the summit of a high basilica and scatter money to the populace seemed to him an act of divine munificence and to sail along the Campanian coast in enormous galleys equipped with porticos, baths, and banquet halls interspersed with gardens and orchards delighted him as a gorgeous parade and as a defiance to the elements.” He also constructed at great expense a bridge of boats across the bay from Baiæ to Puteoli. This he did as a token of his power to win a victory even over the god Neptune himself. It was about two miles long. We may here quote again from Merivale: