Priscus, for a poem composed on the death of Germanicus. On the other
hand, he seems to have had a sincere love of literature,[11] though he
wrote in a crabbed and affected style. He was a purist in language with
a taste for archaism,[12] left a brief autobiography[13] and dabbled in
poetry, writing epigrams,[14] a lyric _conquestio de morte Lucii
Caesaris_[15] and Greek imitations of Euphorion, Rhianus, and
Parthenius, the learned poets of Alexandria. His taste was bad: he went
even farther than his beloved Alexandrians, awaking the laughter of his
contemporaries even in an age when obscure mythological learning was at
a premium. The questions which delighted him were--'Who was the mother
of Hecuba?' 'What was the name of Achilles when disguised as a girl?'
'What did the sirens sing?'[16] Literature had little to learn from
Tiberius, but it should have had something to gain from the fact that he
was not blind to its charms: at the worst it cannot have required
abnormal skill to avoid incurring a charge of _lese-majeste_.

The reign of the lunatic Caligula is of small importance, thanks to its
extreme brevity. For all his madness he had considerable ability; he was
ready of speech to a remarkable degree, though his oratory suffered from
extravagant ornament[17] and lack of restraint. He had, however, some
literary insight: in his description of Seneca's rhetoric as _merae
commissiones_, 'prize declamations,' and 'sand without lime' he gave an
admirable summary of that writer's chief weaknesses.[18] But he would in
all probability have proved a greater danger to literature than
Tiberius. It is true that in his desire to compare favourably with his
predecessors he allowed the writings of T. Labienus, Cremutius Cordus,
and Cassius Severus, which had fallen under the senate's ban in the two
preceding reigns, to be freely circulated once more.[19] But he by no
means abandoned trials for _lese-majeste_. The rhetorician Carinas
Secundus was banished on account of an imprudent phrase in a _suasoria_