Bartolome Esteban Murillo The Little Fruit Seller painting

Bartolome Esteban Murillo The Little Fruit Seller paintingFilippino Lippi The Marriage of St Catherine paintingFilippino Lippi Allegory painting
-when rich provincials came to the City they were always invited to dinner at the Palace and a friendly gamble afterwards. They were astonished and dismayed by the Emperor's luck: he threw Venus every time and skinned them of all they had. Yes, Caligula always played with weighted dice. For instance, he now removed the Consuls from office and fined them heavily on the ground that they had celebrated the usual festival in honour of Augustus's victory over Antony at Actium. He said that it was an insult to his ancestor Antony. (By the way. he appointed Afer to one of the vacant Consulships.) He had told us at dinner a few days before the festival that whatever the Consuls did he would punish them: for if they refrained from celebrating the festival they would be insulting his ancestor Augustus. It was on this occasion that Ganymede made a fatal mistake. He cried: "You are clever, my dear! You catch them every way. But the poor idiots will celebrate the festival, if they have any sense; because Agrippa did most of the work at Actium and he was your ancestor too, so they will at least be honouring two of your ancestors of three."
Caligula said: "Ganymede, we are no longer friends."