Word: caligula
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...heart had gone out of the act. The speech over, the Blackshirts, innocent of their error and still warm with the thought of comforts to come, hurried out and treated the town to a mass souse such as Rome has not seen since the days of Caligula...
Claudius the God picks up the first-person narrative where /, Claudius dropped it, at Claudius' unwilling coronation as Emperor. Middleaged, ugly, crippled, the despised fool of his family as he had been the butt of his nephew Caligula's court, Claudius had only one desire: to keep out of the limelight, end his days plodding away at his secret historical writing. Furthermore, he was a convinced Republican and thought Emperors a bad thing for Rome. Because his only choice, however, was between the throne and an ignominious death, he sat down in the imperial seat with what grace...
Cried Mayor Walmsley: "Huey Long . . . that madman! . . . coward! . . . pirate! . . . Caligula! . . . Nero! Attila! Henry VIII! Louis...
Thanks to his sagacity and his apparent incompetence, Claudius came unscathed through the ruthless realpolitik of Augustus' reign, the tyrannies of Tiberius', the craziness of Caligula's. A Roman of the old school, nostalgic for the Republic, he saw that Rome was headed in a showier direction. His stoicism kept him fairly equable through bankruptcy, an accusation of treason, a near-drowning, when he was thrown into the River Rhone by Caligula's orders. In the sabbatanic orgies at the palace Claudius played well his appointed role of buffoon, bided his time. But when a conspiracy...
which does not derive from some suggestion or hint in some classical authority, and some of the most surprising apparent inventions have historical foundation." Some of them: the haunting to death of Germanicus at Antioch; Caligula's bridging of the Bay of Baiae; Tiberius' ingenious cruelty to a fisherman he suspected of trying to poison him; the song Julius Caesar's veterans sang at his French triumph...