light. Crassus said, "You will not." The other rejoined, "You will order
yourself to be awakened then." To which Crassus replied, "Surely, I said
that you would not be troublesome."

To return to the Cæsars. The humorous vein which we have traced in the
family descended to Augustus--the great nephew of Julius. Some of his
sayings, which have survived, show him to have been as pleasant in his
wit as he was proverbially happy in his fortunes.

When the inhabitants of Tarraco made him a fulsome speech, telling him
that they had raised an altar to him as their presiding deity, and that,
marvellous to relate, a splendid palm tree had grown up on it: "That
shows," replied the Emperor, "how often you kindle a fire there." To
Galba, a hunchback orator, who was pleading before him, and frequently
saying, "Set me right, if I am wrong," he replied, "I can easily correct
you, but I cannot set you right."

The following will give a slight idea of the variety of his humour.

When he heard that, among the children under two years old whom Herod
had ordered to be slain, his own son had been killed, he said, "It is
better to be Herod's pig than his son." Being entertained on one
occasion with a very poor dinner, and without any ceremony, as he was
passing out he whispered in the ear of his host, "I did not know that I
was such a friend of yours." A Roman knight having died enormously in
debt, Augustus ordered them to buy him his bed-pillow at the auction,
observing: "The pillow of a man who could sleep when he owed so much
must be truly soporific." A man who had been removed from a cavalry
command and asked for an allowance, "not from any mercenary motive, but
that I may seem to have resigned upon obtaining the grant from you," he