Word: caligula
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...centuries fishermen on little (one square mile) Lake Nemi, 20 miles from Rome in the Alban Hills, reported mysterious fouling of their nets and shadowy hulks beneath the blue-grey water on clear days, told tall tales of two legendary floating palaces once belonging to monstrous Emperor Caligula, now rotting in the mud. In 1446 curious Cardinal Prospero Colonna made the first attempt to raise the pleasure barges, succeeded only in irreparably damaging their superstructures with the iron grappling hooks...
...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...
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...