ause out of them the senators were themselves chosen; these he
treated after all ignominious manner, and removed them out of his way,
while they were at once slain, and their wealth plundered, because he
slew men generally in order to seize on their riches. He also asserted
his own divinity, and insisted on greater honors to be paid him by his
subjects than are due to mankind. He also frequented that temple of
Jupiter which they style the Capitol, which is with them the most
holy of all their temples, and had boldness enough to call himself the
brother of Jupiter. And other pranks he did like a madman; as when he
laid a bridge from the city Dicearchia, which belongs to Campania, to
Misenum, another city upon the sea-side, from one promontory to another,
of the length of thirty furlongs, as measured over the sea. And this was
done because he esteemed it to be a most tedious thing to row over it in
a small ship, and thought withal that it became him to make that bridge,
since he was lord of the sea, and might oblige it to give marks of
obedience as well as the earth; so he enclosed the whole bay within his
bridge, and drove his chariot over it; and thought that, as he was a
god, it was fit for him to travel over such roads as this was. Nor did
he abstain from the plunder of any of the Grecian temples, and gave
order that all the engravings and sculptures, and the rest of the
ornaments of the statues and donations therein dedicated, should be
brought to him, saying that the best things ought to be set no where
but in the best place, and that the city of Rome was that best place. He
also adorned his own house and his gardens with the curiosities brought
from those temples, together with the houses he lay at when he traveled
all over Italy; whence he did not scruple to give a command that the
statue of Jupiter Olympius, so called because he was honored at
the Olympian games by the Greeks, which was the work of Phidias the
Athenian, should be brought to Rome. Yet did not he compass his end,
because the architects told Memmius Regulus, who was commanded to
remove that statue of Jupiter, that the workmanship was such as would
be spoiled, and would not bear the removal. It was also reported that
Memmius, both on that account, and on account of some such mighty
prodigies as are of an incredible nature, put off the taking it down,
and wrote to Caius those accounts, as his apology for not having done
what his epistle required of him;