wretch had prolonged his life for nine days by gnawing the stuffing of his pallet, and complacently records every sigh and groan he uttered; even to the last desperate imprecations which he heaped on his tormentor's head-every syllable duly vouched by the testimony of slaves who had been set to watch his last hours. Caius, the youngest son of Germanicus, alone escaped, in consequence of his almost constant residence with the Emperor. But retribution was at hand for Sejanus. He had awakened the Emperor's suspicions by asking the hand of Livia, the widow of his son Drusus; and a letter from the aged mother of Germanicus completed his ruin by revealing his ambitious schemes, and the crimes with which he pursued them. So the imperial dissembler wrote to Sejanus a most gracious and loving letter, conferring the Consulship upon him; and by the courier who carried that letter, he despatched another to the Senate, accusing him of high treason. When Sejanus came to the Senatehouse to receive the long-coveted dignity, one of the Senators named Macro arose, read the Emperor's letter, and arrested him as a traitor. Amidst loud plaudits, the fallen favourite was sentenced to death; and, as he was hurried along from the Senate-house across the Forum to the Mamertine dungeons, for execution, he had a foretaste of the bitterness of death, in seeing numbers busy in the overthrow of his statues, with ropes and hatchets. Singularly enough the effigies of their public men, conspicuous in the Sacred Way, or honourably reared in halls or theatres, often diverted the fury of the enraged populace from the originals. To crush the marble image of the detested personage, even to powder; to break up the gold or brass for the melting-pot, and consign to base uses the hated limbs and lineaments, was the first impulse of the scorn and passion of a Roman mob, and often saved his palace from destruction, and his family from

A FALLEN FAVOURITE.

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14-37.] outrage. But their hatred to Sejanus was so intense that after his execution in the depths of his horrid dungeon, the populace clamoured for his body, attached a hook, and dragged it with yells of rage to the Tiber. Their fury did not abate till all his friends and relatives were put to death, and their property confiscated. Tiberius, on his island, had suffered hours of intense and restless anxiety, for he knew the boldness and talent of his traitorous minister, and when the news of the execution arrived, his rugged nature was softened with a sense of deliverance, and a few iron tears glistened on his cheek.

The bold and crafty Macro was now prime minister, and made it his first care to discover the aged Emperor's probable successor. No easy task, for Tiberius astutely kept his courtiers attached to his side, by persistently refusing to indicate by word or gesture to whom he would bequeath his throne. Still as he had named the young Tiberius and Caius as the heirs of his immense treasures, permitted them to reside in his island, and seemed to enjoy the adroit flatteries of the latter, Macro took pains to obtain influence over Caius, and was confirmed in his opinion that he had rightly guessed, when the old tyrant, whom nothing could escape, muttered one day- You leave the setting, to worship the rising sun.' Young prince Caius was very popular, especially amongst the soldiers, as the son of Germanicus. In infancy he had been bred up in the camp, accoutred in the dress of a common soldier, and it was from the rough military boots, or caliga, which he wore, that the soldiers gave him the familiar nickname of Caligula. The Mutiny on the Rhine had been actually quelled by showing to the troops their little pet and playfellow. But the cruel and jealous Tiberius crushed in the little soldier that military spirit-so admirably called by Tacitus the 'virtue of an imperator'-by depriving him of his noble

mother's care, and removing him to the imperial palace, in order to rear him up in perfect subserviency to himself. So when the young prince, in the very dawn of consciousness, found himself a suspiciously-watched inhabitant of the palace, and closely attached to the person of the all-dreaded Emperor, he felt it to be his only hope of life to study to clothe his countenance, day by day, with the expression assumed by Tiberius; to penetrate his sentiments; and echo, as it were, his very words, as the very humblest of his fawning flatterers; and thus he became as accomplished a dissembler as the Emperor himself. But Caius was daily imbibing from a Jewish prince ideas of oriental splendour and despotism, which strangely contrasted with his servile station.

The course by which the Romans conquered Judea is too characteristic of their aggressive policy to be here omitted. The Republic had long cultivated an alliance with the Jewish nation, as a counterpoise to Syria and Egypt; but when those kingdoms bowed to the Roman yoke, and the Jews sought the arbitration of their old allies to compose their intestine divisions, the Roman imperator Pompeius took advantage of their weakness to invade Judea, demolish the walls of Jerusalem, desecrate the Temple, place a zealous partisan of Rome, the Idumean Antipater, on the throne, and drag off as captive their popular prince Aristobulus II., with his two sons, and a train of his subjects, to grace his own triumphal entry into 'the Eternal City.' In vain did the Jews entreat Cæsar, after his victory over Pompeius, to redress his rival's cruel policy and oppression; to do justice and to love mercy;' the ambitious imperator haughtily commanded them to submit to the supremacy of Rome.' He even placed the power more firmly than ever in the hands of Antipater, who divided his territory amongst his four sons; of whom the second Herod reunited the whole of Palestine

14-37.]

HEROD THE GREAT.

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under his sceptre, and by the patronage of Augustus became the foremost vassal king of the Roman world; his court the most brilliant; his obedience the most exemplary. He was an able and magnificent prince, who cultivated Greek literature himself, and introduced it by numerous schools and professors into his kingdom, a measure designed by him to break down the exclusive nationality of the Jews, but overruled by God's providence to the great furtherance of the Gospel. He also filled the cities of Palestine with splendid buildings in the Greek taste, adorned Jerusalem with a spacious amphitheatre, instituted games and festivals after the Roman fashion; and at the same time tried to soothe the wounded feelings of the quick and sensitive population, by the magnificence with which he rebuilt their Temple. But Herod was one of the most cruel tyrants that ever lived. It was in his reign that the SAVIOUR was born; and it was from his murderous grasp that Joseph and Mary carried Him down into Egypt. He had married Mariamne, the fairest princess of her times, who, as a granddaughter of the two rival princes of Judea, united in her own person their conflicting claims. History hardly presents a more tragic situation than that of the unfortunate Mariamne, the miserable object of a furious attachment on the part of the monster who had slain before her eyes her uncle, her brother, and her grandfather. Herod doated on her beauty, in which she bore away the palm before every princess of her time; the blood which flowed in her veins secured to him the throne which he had raised upon the ruins of her house; but her personal and political claims upon him, as well as her haughty bearing, made her obnoxious to his comparatively low-born sister Salome. So when Mariamne one day rebuked him impetuously for his barbarities, and repelled his caresses, stained as he was with the blood of her murdered kinsmen, Salome but too easily persuaded

the furious Herod, that his consort had plotted to poison him! She, the last daughter of a noble race, endured her death with such fortitude, that her admiring countrymen gave her a distinguished place in the long line of Jewish heroines. They recorded, too, with satisfaction, the tyrant's unavailing remorse, his fruitless yearnings for the victim he had sacrificed to his jealous rage, the plaintive exclamations he made to echo through his halls, and the passionate upbraidings with which he assailed her judges. They told, too, how he even strove by magical incantations to recal her soul from the spirit-land; and how, as if to drive from his mind the intolerable memory of her loss, he commanded his courtiers always to speak of her as one alive. They also observed that the sharp disease and settled melancholy, which ever after afflicted him during his long reign, was a signal and merited retribution for shedding her innocent "blood. But the unnatural tyrant was not softened by this great sorrow; several of his children were put to death by his order; and, in offering an asylum to some of his outcast family at Rome, Augustus said, 'I had rather be Herod's hog than his son!' It was to a grandson of this monster, who had been named Agrippa after the favourite minister of Augustus, that Caius attached himself, and this was the familiar friend with whom he passed all the hours he could steal from the exacting jealousy of Tiberius. From Agrippa he was never weary of hearing stories of the East; of the irresponsible rule over the life and wealth of his subjects possessed by every petty Syrian prince, unshackled by the forms or restraints of a captious or insolent Senate. He also loved to hear of the splendour with which Herod the Great had adorned Jerusalem, so as to outshine in magnificence anything which could yet be seen in Rome; especially all about the Temple, which he rebuilt and enlarged with an outer court which could con