Let us, by way of example, take a short
chapter from the diabolic life of Caligula: In what way did he treat his
nearest and tenderest female connections? His mother had been tortured and
murdered by another tyrant almost as fiendish as himself. She was happily
removed from his cruelty. Disdaining, however, to acknowledge any
connection with the blood of so obscure a man as Agrippa, he publicly gave
out that his mother was indeed the daughter of Julia, but by an incestuous
commerce with her father Augustus. His three sisters he debauched. One
died, and her he canonized; the other two he prostituted to the basest of
his own attendants. Of his wives, it would be hard to say whether they
were first sought and won with more circumstances of injury and outrage,
or dismissed with more insult and levity. The one whom he treated best,
and with most profession of love, and who commonly rode by his side,
equipped with spear and shield, to his military inspections and reviews of
the soldiery, though not particularly beautiful, was exhibited to his
friends at banquets in a state of absolute nudity. His motive for treating
her with so much kindness, was probably that she brought him a daughter;
and her he acknowledged as his own child, from the early brutality with
which she attacked the eyes and cheeks of other infants who were presented
to her as play-fellows.
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