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extreme old age. On her death, he broke her will, as carelessly as he had broken her heart; he persecuted, or put to death the few friends adversity had left her, and forbade the senate to render to her memory those honours, which that servile body had decreed to the widow of Augustus. Frankly avowing his envy of Priam, who had survived all his kindred, he continued to sacrifice to his cruelty, to his avarice, and to his fears, friends, relations, and the opulent of all classes; so that in Rome there was not one family, which might not reproach him for the loss of a father, a husband, a brother, or a son.

To this Augustan age of crime, for ever memorable, in the fasti of human wickedness and weakness, is referable that sacrifice, which, however propitiatory and predestined in a spiritual sense, well belonged, as a human fact, to the iniquity of this dark epoch.*

* "Tertullien en racontant cet evenement, dit que Pilate, étonné des prodiges qui suivirent la mort du Sauveur, en rendit compte à Tibère; et que ce prince ayant proposé au Senat de mettre Jesus au rang des Dieux, ce corps s'y opposa: il ajoute que l'empereur menaca de mort tous ceux qui accuseraient les chrétiens. Mais Tertullien est le seul historien qui rapporte ce fait. La religion n'a pas besoin de fables pour se défendre, et Tibère était le prince le moins digne de connaitre et de protéger un culte si moral."-Ségur Hist. Universel.

CHAPTER IV.

The Women of Rome-Under the Empire continued.

TIBERIUS having oppressed the world for twentytwo years, was murdered in the midst of his disgusting vices, by the favourite he had chosen for his successor," a serpent," (as he himself said,) "whom he had reared for the Roman people, a Phaeton for the world!" The people, when they learned his decease, became frantic with joy; and heedless of the future, in the joy of a momentary liberation, gave free vent to their feelings: but the senate, whose slavish habits the tyrant's death could not disturb, preserved unbroken their hypocrisy ; and gave to him who was unworthy to be accounted a man, a place among the gods.

Among the untranscribable vices and crimes of the Emperor Caligula, the most fatal, if not the most extravagant, were directed against the morals and the happiness of woman; and from the attempts of his brute passions and tyrannical power, even the females of his own family were not exempted.

The unworthy son of Germanicus, (so early torn from the arms of his illustrious mother, to be reared in the vicious court of his father's murderer, among slaves and parasites, and the enemies of his house,) started, like his predecessor, with qualities which recalled his noble origin, and seemed to justify the hopes held out by a precocious genius, and promised virtues. But the illusion (if it indeed existed) was but short-lived; and when he raised a courtezan to the throne of the Empire, and placed her in the college of the priesthood, when he made his horse a consul, built a temple to himself, and defied the power of Jupiter, when he fed his wild beasts with human victims, and studded the manger of his charger with precious stones, when he avowed his wish " that the Romans had but one head, that he might destroy all at a single blow," and attempted their destruction by famine, through his monopoly of corn,-it became but too evident that the master of mankind was mad.

Yet, among the many victims of his insane caprices, not one, during his three years' reign, dared offer opposition to his frantic career, save only an aged woman. His grandmother, Antonia, the still surviving mother of Germanicus, whose long widowhood had been devoted to the education of her noble son and his less worthy brothers, alone remonstrated with Caligula, and reproved, if she could not reform, his monstrous vices. "Fear you not the Gods?" she asked, "fear you not the laws?" "The laws," replied Caligula; my will alone is law;" and the death of Antonia, which followed quickly on the interview, was a scarcely noticed confirmation of the fact.

Caligula died by assassination-the natural death of a reckless despot, -the common "temperament" of irresponsible power in all ages. His successor, the stupid, sensual, and cruel Claudius, was well calculated to perpetuate the combination. This promising pupil of Titus Livius, the historian, was dragged from under a bed (where he had concealed himself during the commotion of Caligula's death) to assume the throne.

The grandson and ward of Livia, he for a while upheld the popular prejudice in his favour, by the exhibition of some false lights of intellect and humanity, the fading rays of an artificial but unavailing education. He soon, however, gave up the struggle between nature and precept; and, incapable of exercising the power forced on him by the accident of birth, and after many proofs of uncontrollable voluptuousness, and of hopeless imbecility, he permitted the reins of government to fall into the hands of the woman, whom his freedmen and parasites had chosen for his wife,that woman whose name shame might be ashamed to write, did not historic truth demand the record, -the infamous Messalina Valeria.

When the depravity of man placed this worst of women in the highest station, and gave her power over the lives of myriads, there were still in the capital of the world women of unblemished virtue, of great genius, and of high acquirements,-women, who, like the sisters of Claudius himself,

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