those who were most highly rated, and said to the company, "You people,
you play for a few drachmas; but as for me, I have just won by a single
throw one hundred and fifty millions." At the rumor of a plot hatched
against him in Italy, by some Roman nobles, he sent for and sold,
publicly, their furniture, jewels, and slaves. As the sale was a
success, he extended it to the old furniture of his own palaces in Italy:
"I wish to fit out the Gauls," said he; "it is a mark of friendship I owe
to the brave performed the part Roman people." He himself, at these
sales, performed the part of salesman and auctioneer, telling the history
of each article to enhance the price. "This belonged to my father,
Germanicus; that comes to me from Agrippa; this vase is Egyptian, it was
Antony's, Augustus took it at the battle of Actium." The imperial sales
were succeeded by literary games, at which the losers had to pay the
expenses of the prizes, and celebrate, in verse or prose, the praises of
the winners; and if their compositions were pronounced bad, they were
bound to wipe them out with a sponge or even with their tongues, unless
they preferred to be beaten with a rod or soused in the Rhone. One day,
when Caligula, in the character of Jupiter, was seated at his tribunal
and delivering oracles in the middle of the public thoroughfare, a man of
the people remained motionless in front of him, with eyes of astonishment
fixed upon him. "What seem I to thee?" asked the emperor, flattered, no
doubt, by this attention of the mob. "A great monstrosity," answered the
Gaul. And that, at the end of about four years, was the universal cry:
and against a mad emperor the only resource of the Roman world was at
that time assassination. The captain of Caligula's guards rid Rome and
the provinces of him.

He did just one sensible and useful thing during the whole of his stay in
Gaul: he had a light-house constructed to illumine the passage between
Gaul and Great Britain. Some traces of it, they say, have been
discovered.

His successor, Claudius, brother of the great Germanicus, and married to
his own niece, the second Agrippina, was, as has been already stated,
born at Lyons, at the very moment when his father, Drusus, was
celebrating there the erection of an altar to Augustus. During his whole
reign he showed to the city of his birth the most lively good-will, and
the constant aim as well as principal result of this good-will was to
render