was to suffocate him with a mattress and rule in his stead.

To rule is hardly the expression. There is no term in English to
convey that dominion over sea and sky which a Caesar possessed,
and which Caligula was the earliest to understand. Augustus was
the first magistrate of Rome, Tiberius the first citizen. Caligula
was the first emperor, but an emperor hallucinated by the enigma
of his own grandeur, a prince for whose sovereignty the world was
too small.

Each epoch has its secret, sometimes puerile, often perplexing;
but in its maker there is another and a more interesting one yet.
Eliminate Caligula, and Nero, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla and
Heliogabalus would never have been. It was he who gave them both
raison d'etre and incentive. The lives of all of them are
horrible, yet analyze the horrible and you find the sublime.

Fancy a peak piercing the heavens, shadowing the earth. It was on
a peak such as that the young emperors of old Rome balanced
themselves, a precipice on either side. Did they look below, a
vertigo rose to meet them; from above delirium came, while the
horizon, though it hemmed the limits of vision, could not mark the
frontiers of their dream. In addition there was the exaltation
that altitudes produce. The valleys have their imbeciles; it is
from mountains the poet and madman come. Caligula was both,
sceptred at that; and with what a sceptre! One that stretched from
the Rhine to the Euphrates, dominated a hundred and fifty million
people; one that a mattress had given and a knife was to take
away; a sceptre that lashed the earth, threatened the sky,
beckoned planets and ravished the divinity of the divine.