on the hackneyed theme of tyrannicide.[20] A writer of an Atellan farce
was burned to death in the amphitheatre[21] for a treasonable jest, and
Seneca narrowly escaped death for having made a brilliant display of
oratory in the senate.[22] He also seriously meditated the destruction
of the works of Homer. Plato had banished Homer from his ideal state.
Why should not Caligula? He was with difficulty restrained from doing
the like for Vergil and Livy. The former, he said, was a man of little
learning and less wit;[23] the latter was verbose and careless. Even
when he attempted to encourage literature, his eccentricity carried him
to such extremes that the competitors shrank in horror from entering the
lists. He instituted a contest at Lugudunum in which prizes were offered
for declamations in Greek and Latin. The prizes were presented to the
victors by the vanquished, who were ordered to write panegyrics in
honour of their successful rivals, while in cases where the declamations
were decided to be unusually poor, the unhappy authors were ordered to
obliterate their writings with a sponge or even with their own tongues,
under penalty of being caned or ducked in the Rhone.[24]

Literature had some reason to be thankful for his early assassination.
The lunatic was succeeded by a fool, but a learned fool. Claudius was
historian, antiquary, and philologist. He wrote two books on the civil
war, forty-one on the principate of Augustus, a defence of Cicero, eight
books of autobiography,[25] an official diary,[26] a treatise on
dicing.[27] To this must be added his writings in Greek, twenty books of
Etruscan history, eight of Carthaginian,[28] together with a comedy
performed and crowned at Naples in honour of the memory of
Germanicus.[29] His style, according to Suetonius, was _magis ineptus
quam inelegans_.[30] He did more than write: he attempted a reform of
spelling, by introducing three new letters into the Latin alphabet. His
enthusiasm and industry were exemplary. Such indeed was his activity