Never did a fairer scene undergo a worse degradation; and here, in one or other of the twelve villas which Tiberius had built, and among the azure grottoes which he caused to be constructed, the youthful Caius[23] grew up to manhood. It would have been a terrible school even for a noble nature; for a nature corrupt and bloodthirsty like that of Caius it was complete and total ruin. But, though he was so obsequious to the Emperor as to originate the jest that never had there been a worse master and never a more cringing slave,--though he suppressed every sign of indignation at the horrid deaths of his mother and his brothers,--though he assiduously reflected the looks, and carefully echoed the very words, of his patron,--yet not even by the deep dissimulation which such a position required did he succeed in concealing from the penetrating eye of Tiberius the true ferocity of his character. Not being the acknowledged heir to the kingdom,--for Tiberius Gemellus, the youthful grandson of Tiberius, was living, and Caius was by birth only his grand-nephew,--he became a tool for the machinations of Marco the praetorian praefect and his wife Ennia. One of his chief friends was the cruel Herod Agrippa,[24] who put to death St. James and imprisoned St. Peter, and whose tragical fate is recorded in the 12th chap. of the Acts. On one occasion, when Caius had been abusing the dictator Sulla, Tiberius scornfully remarked that he would have all Sulla's vices and none of his virtues; and on another, after a quarrel between Caius and his cousin, the Emperor embraced with tears his young grandson, and said to the frowning Caius, with one of those strange flashes of prevision of which we sometimes read in history. "Why are you so eager? Some day you will kill this boy, and some one else will murder you." There were some who believed that Tiberius deliberately cherished the intention of allowing Caius to succeed him, in order that the Roman world might relent towards his own memory under the tyranny of a worse monster than himself. Even the Romans, who looked up to the family of Germanicus with extraordinary affection, seem early to have lost all hopes about Caius. They looked for little improvement under the government of a vicious boy, "ignorant of all things, or nurtured only in the worst," who would be likely to reflect the influence of Macro, and present the spectacle of a worse Tiberius under a worse Sejanus.
[23] We shall call him Caius, because it is as little correct to write of him by the sobriquet Caligula as it would be habitually to write of our kings Edward or John as Longshanks or Lackland. The name Caligula means "a little shoe," and was the pet name given to him by the soldiers of his father, in whose camp he was born.
[24] Josephus adds some curious and interesting particulars to the story of this Herod and his death which are not mentioned in the narrative of St. Luke (Antiq. xix. 7, 8. Jahn, Hebr. Commonwealth, § cxxvi.)
At last health and strength failed Tiberius, but not his habitual dissimulation. He retained the same unbending soul, and by his fixed countenance and measured language, sometimes by an artificial affability, he tried to conceal his approaching end. After many restless changes, he finally settled down in a villa at Misenum which had once belonged to the luxurious Lucullus. There the real state of his health was discovered. Charicles, a distinguished physician, who had been paying him a friendly visit on kissing his hand to bid farewell, managed to ascertain the state of his pulse. Suspecting that this was the case Tiberius, concealing his displeasure, ordered a banquet to be spread, as though in honour of his friend's departure, and stayed longer than usual at table. A similar story is told of Louis XIV. who, noticing from the whispers of his courtiers that they believed him to be dying, ate an unusually large dinner on the very day of his death, and sarcastically observed, "Il me semble que pour un homme qui va mourir je ne mange pas mal." But, in spite of the precautions of Tiberius, Charicles informed Macro that the Emperor could not last beyond two days.
A scene of secret intrigue at once began. The court broke up into knots and cliques. Hasty messengers were sent to the provinces and their armies, until at last, on the 16th of March, it was believed that Tiberius had breathed his last. Just as on the death of Louis XV. a sudden noise was heard as of thunder, the sound of courtiers rushing along the corridors to congratulate Louis XVI. in the famous words, "Le roi est mort, vive le roi," so a crowd instantly thronged round Caius with their congratulations, as he went out of the palace to assume his imperial authority. Suddenly a message reached him that Tiberius had recovered voice and sight. Seneca says, that feeling his last hour to be near, he had taken off his ring, and, holding it in his shut left hand, had long lain motionless; then calling his servants, since no one answered his call, he rose from his couch, and, his strength failing him, after a few tottering steps fell prostrate on the ground.
The news produced the same consternation as that which was produced among the conspirators at Adonijah's banquet, when they heard of the measures taken by the dying David. There was a panic-stricken dispersion, and every one pretended to be grieved, or ignorant of what was going on. Caius, in stupified silence, expected death instead of empire. Macro alone did not lose his presence of mind. With the utmost intrepidity, he gave orders that the old man should be suffocated by heaping over him a mass of clothes, and that every one should then leave the chamber. Such was the miserable and unpitied end of the Emperor Tiberius, in the seventy-eighth year of his age. Such was the death, and so miserable had been the life, of the man to whom the Tempter had already given "the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them," when he tried to tempt with them the Son of God. That this man should have been the chief Emperor of the earth at a time when its true King was living as a peasant in his village home at Nazareth, is a fact suggestive of many and of solemn thoughts.
CHAPTER V.
THE REIGN OF CAIUS.
The poet Gray, in describing the deserted deathbed of our own great Edward III., says:--