Читать книгу The Empresses of Rome онлайн

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We are credibly told that Caligula then made love to Ennia, wife of the Prefect of the Guard. Sejanus had persuaded Tiberius to form a corps of “Prætorian Guards,” an Imperial body-guard which was destined to have a disastrous influence on the future of Rome. The actual prefect or commander of this regiment, Macro, was the most powerful person in the suite of Tiberius. With or without his connivance, his wife yielded to Caligula, on the condition that he should marry her when he became Emperor. Macro and Ennia accompanied Caligula when he bore the will and the ashes of Tiberius to Rome. A gloom had settled over Italy during the later years of Tiberius’s reign, and men hailed the young Caligula as the sun and the blue sky are hailed after days of dark tempest at sea. Standing by their flower-girt altars, coming out with torches at night, people greeted him with frantic epithets of affection. He was their “star,” their “chicken,” their “dear child,” as he had been to the soldiers in Germany years before. Not that he was a handsome youth. His frame was thin and lanky, and his movements awkward. He was prematurely bald, and his sunken eyes looked out with a scowl from his pallid face. But he was the son of Germanicus, the grandson of Julia. All the follies which the family had perpetrated were forgotten.