of common jest. He filled the Capitol with images of himself, and a colossal statue towered for a time over the temple roofs.(329) The son and brother of emperors, already exalted to divine honours, he went farther than any of his predecessors in claiming divinity for himself, and he allowed his ministers and court poets to address him as “our Lord God.”(330) His lavish splendour in architecture was to some extent justified by the ravages of fire in previous reigns. But the £2,400,000 expended on the gilding of a temple on the Capitol,(331) was only one item in an extravagance which drained the treasury. Its radiance, which dazzled the eyes of Rutilius in the reign of Honorius,(332) was paid for in blood and tears. The emperor, who was the ruthless enemy of the nobles, like all his kind, was profusely indulgent to the army and the mob. The legions had their pay increased by a fourth. The populace of Rome were pampered with costly and vulgar spectacles,(333) as they were to the end of the Western Empire. Domitian’s indulgence of that fierce and obscene proletariat was only a little more criminal than that of other emperors, because it ended in a bankruptcy which was followed by robbery and massacre. While the rich and noble were assailed on any trivial accusation, in order to fill an empty treasury, the beasts of Numidia were tearing their victims, gladiators were prostituting a noble courage in dealing inglorious wounds in the arena, and fleets of armed galleys charged and crashed in mimic, yet often deadly, battle in the flooded Flavian amphitheatre.(334)