They were so pleased by this letter of mine that they voted me a golden statue - no, it was three golden statues - but I vetoed the motion on two grounds. One was that I had done nothing to earn this honour; and the other,, that it was an extravagance: I did allow them, though, to vote me three statues which were to be put up in prominent places in the City; but the most expensive one was to be of silver, and not solid silver at that, but a hollow statue filled with plaster. The other two were of bronze and marble respectively. I accepted these three statues because Rome was so full of statues that two or three more would not make much difference, and I was interested to sit for my sculptured portrait to a really good sculptor, now that the best sculptors in the world were at my service.
The Senate also decided to dishonour Caligula by every means in their power. They voted that the day of his assassination should be made a festival of national thanksgiving. Again I interposed my veto and, apart from annulling Caligula's edicts about the religious worship that was to be paid to himself and to the Goddess Panthea, which was the name he gave my poor niece Drusilla whom he murdered, I took no further action against his memory. Silence about him, was the best policy. Herod reminded me that Caligula had not done any dishonour to the memory of Tiberius, though he had good cause to hate him; he had merely abstained from deifying him and left the arch of honour which had been voted to him uncompleted.
`But what shall I do with all Caligula's statues?' I asked.
'That's simple enough,' he said. `Set the City Watchmen to collect them all at two o'clock to-morrow morning when everyone is asleep and bring them here to the Palace. When Rome wakes up it will find the niches and pedestals unoccupied, or perhaps filled again with the statues originally moved to make room for them.'
I took Herod's advice. The statues were of two sorts - the statues of foreign Gods whose heads he had removed and replaced with his own; and the ones that he had made of himself, all in precious metals. The first sort I restored as nearly as possible, to their original condition, the others I broke up, melted down and minted into my new coinage. The great gold statue that, he had placed in his temple melted down into nearly 1,000,000 gold pieces. I do not think I mentioned about this statue, that every day his priests - of whom I, to, my shame, had been one - clothed it with, a costume similar to the one he himself was wearing. Not only did we have to dress it in ordinary civil or military costume with his especial badges of Imperial rank, but on days when he happened to believe himself to be Venus or Minerva or Jupiter or the, Good Goddess, we had to rig it out appropriately with the different divine insignia.
It pleased my vanity to have my head on the coins, but this was a pleasure which prominent citizens had enjoyed under the Republic too, so I must not be blamed for that. Portraits on coins, however, are always disappointing because they are executed in profile. Nobody is familiar with his own profile, and it comes as a shock, when one sees it in a portrait, that one really looks like that to people standing beside one. For one's full face, because of the familiarity that mirrors give it, a certain toleration and even affection is felt; but I must say that when I first saw the model of the gold piece that the mint-masters were striking for me, I grew angry and asked whether it was intended to be a caricature. My little head with its worried face perched on my long neck, and the Adam's apple standing out almost like a second chin, shocked me. But Messalina said: 'No, my dear, that's really what you look like. In fact, it is rather flattering than otherwise.'
`Can you really love a man like that?' I asked.
She swore that there was no face so dear to her in the world. So I tried to get accustomed to the coin.
Besides Caligula's statues a good deal of his wasteful expenditure was represented by gold and silver objects in the Palace and elsewhere which could also be removed and converted into bullion. For instance, the golden door-knobs and window-panes and the gold and silver furniture in his temple. I removed it all. I gave the Palace a great clearing-out. In Caligula's bed-chamber I found the poison chest which had belonged to Livia and of which Caligula had made good use, sending presents of poisoned sweetmeats to men who had drawn their wills in his favour and sometimes pouring poison into the plates of dinner-guests, after first distracting their attention by some prearranged diversion. (He experienced most pleasure, he confessed, in watching them die from arsenic.) I took the whole chest down to Ostia with me the first calm day of spring and, rowing down the estuary in one of Caligula's pleasure-barges, dumped it overboard about a mile from the coast. A minute or two later thousands of dead fish came floating up. I had not told the sailors what the chest contained and some of them grabbed at the fish floating near, meaning to take them home to eat; but I stopped that, forbidding them to do so on pain of death.
Under Caligula's pillow I found his two famous books, on one of which was painted a bloody sword and on the other a bloody dagger. Caligula was always followed by a freedman carrying these two books, and if he heard something about a man which happened to displease him he used to say to the freedman, ` Protogenes, write that fellow's name down under the dagger' or `write his name down under the sword.' The sword was for those destined to execution, the dagger for those who were to be invited to commit suicide. The last names in the dagger-book were Vinicius, Asiaticus, Cassius Chaerea, and Tiberius Claudius - myself. These books I burned in a brazier with my own hands. And Protogenes I put to death. It was not only that I loathed the sight of this grim-faced, bloody-minded fellow who had always treated me with insufferable impudence, but that I was now given evidence that he had threatened senators and knights to write their names down in the book unless they paid him large sums of money. Caligula's memory was so bad at this time that Protogenes could easily have persuaded him that the entries were his own.
When I tried Protogenes he insisted that he had never uttered any such threats and never put any name down in the book except at Caligula's orders. This raised the question of the authority sufficient for a man's execution. It would be easy for one of my colonels to report to me dishonestly one morning: 'So-and-so was executed at dawn in accordance with your instructions of yesterday.' If I knew nothing of the matter it would merely be his word against mine that I had issued these instructions; and, as I am always ready to admit, my memory is none of the best. So I reintroduced the practice, started by Augustus and Livia, of immediately committing all decisions and directions to writing. Unless a paper could be, produced by my subordinates giving signed orders from me for any strong disciplinary action that they had taken or any important financial commitment or startling innovation in procedure that they had made, such action must not be regarded as authorized by me, and if I disapproved of it they must bear the blame themselves. In the end this practice, which was also adopted by my chief ministers in dealing with their own subordinates, became such a matter of course that one hardly ever heard a word spoken in government offices, during working hours, except for consultations between heads of departments or visits from City officials Every Palace servant carried a wax-tablet about with him in case it, should be needed for special orders to be, written upon.