ely desired that he might not
have to end his days as an exile on some desert island in the
Mediterranean. So much good fortune after the long persecutions of his
family profoundly disturbed his mental faculties, which had not
originally been well balanced, and it fomented in him that delirium of
grandeur which violently directed his desires toward distant Egypt, in
the customs of which, rather than in those of Rome, he, in the
exaltation of power, sought satisfaction for his imperial vanity. From
his earliest youth Caligula had shown a great inclination for the
products and the men of that far country, then greatly admired and
greatly feared by the Romans. For instance, we know that all his
servants were Egyptians, and that Helicon, his most faithful and
influential freedman, was an Alexandrian. But shortly after his
elevation this admiration for the land of the Ptolemies and the
Pharaohs broke forth into a furor of Egyptian exoticism, which impelled
him to an attempt to bring his own reign into connection with the
policies of his great-grandfather Mark Antony. He sought to introduce
into Rome the ideas, the customs, the sumptuousness, and the
institutions of the Pharaoh-Ptolemaic monarchy, to make of his palace a
court similar to that of Alexandria, and of himself a divine king,
adored in flesh and blood, as sovereigns were adored on the banks of
the Nile.

Caligula was undoubtedly mad, but his madness would have seemed less
chaotic and incomprehensible, and a thread of sense would have been
discovered even in his excesses and in the ravings of his unsettled
mind, if it had been understood that many of his most famous freaks
were moved and inspired by this Egyptian idea and tendency. In the
madness of Caligula, as in the story of Antony and the tragedy of
Tiberius, there is forever recurring, under a new form, the great
struggle between Italy and the East, between Rome and Alexandria, which
can never be divorced from the history of the last century of the
republic and the first century of the empire. Whoever carefully sifts
out the separate actions in the disordered conduct of the third Roman
emperor will easily rediscover the thread of this idea and the trace of
this latent conflict. For instance, we see the new emperor scarcely
elected before he introduced the worship of Isis among the official
cults of the Roman state and assigned in the calendar a public festival
to Isis. In short, he was favoring those