people, added to this wide-spread feeling of insecurity
and alarm. As Caligula, notwithstanding the pontifical sacredness of
his person, had been slain, to the apparent satisfaction of everybody,
in his palace by a handful of his supposed friends and supporters, it
seemed possible that the tragedy might easily be repeated in the case
of Claudius. Could not the whole Claudian government be
overturned,--in a single night, perhaps, as that of Caligula had been
overturned? All hearts were filled with suspicion, distrust, and
alarm, and many concluded that since Claudius had not succeeded in
ridding the empire of Messalina it would be well to rid it of Claudius.

[Illustration: Messalina, third wife of Claudius.]

So for seven years Messalina remained the great weakness of a
government which possessed signal merits and accomplished great things.
Of all the emperors in the family of Augustus, Claudius was certainly
the one whose life was most seriously threatened, especially because of
his wife. Such a situation could not endure.

It finally resolved itself into a tragic scandal, which, if we could
believe Suetonius and Tacitus, would certainly have been the most
monstrous extravagance to which an imagination depraved by power could
have abandoned itself. According to these writers, Messalina, at a
loss for some new form of dissipation, one fine day took it into her
head to marry Silius, a young man with whom she was very much in love,
who belonged to a distinguished family, and who was the
consul-designate. According to them, for the pleasure of shocking the
imperial city with the sacrilege of a bigamous union, she actually did
marry him in Rome, with the most solemn religious rites, while Claudius
was at Ostia! But is this credible, at least without admitting that
Messalina had suddenly gone insane? To what end and for what reason
would she have committed such a sacrilege, which struck at the very
heart of popular sentiment? Dissolute, cruel, and avaricious Messalina
certainly was, but mad she was not. And even if we are willing to
admit that she had gone mad, is it conceivable that all those who would
have had to lend her their services in the staging of this revolting
farce had also gone mad? It is difficult to suppose that they acted
through fear, for the empress had no such power in Rome that she could
constrain conspicuous persons publicly to commit such sacrilege.

This episode would probably be an unfa