And in reference to Silanus they said, "Silanus was a most
 
ridiculous person when he took it into his head that a father-in-law would have as much influence with his son-in-law as a real father has with a son. And yet even real fathers who are in a private station submit to their sons when they are in great offices and in places of high authority, being quite content with the second place; but this foolish man, even when he was no longer his father-in-law, kept on claiming privileges which did not belong to him, without perceiving that with the death of his daughter the connexion which had originated in the marriage of Caius with her had also died, for intermarriages are the bonds which unite families between which there is no kindred, changing alienation into near connexion; but when that bond is dissolved, then the union is dissolved likewise, especially when it is dissolved by a circumstance which cannot be altered or remedied, namely, by the death of the woman who was given in marriage into another family."
 Such conversations as these were held in every company, the speakers being wholly influenced by their wish that the emperor should not appear to be cruel; for as they had hoped that such humanity and gentleness was seated in the soul of Caius as had not existed in either of the previous emperors, they thought it would be a most strange thing if he now made so great and so sudden a change to an entirely contrary disposition.
 Having now, then, entirely accomplished the three undertakings above-mentioned, with reference to three most important divisions, two of them belonging to the country, one to the class of counsellors and the other to the knights, and the third affecting his own relations, and considering that now that he had thus put down the mightiest and most powerful of his foes, he must have struck all the rest with the utmost terror, alarming the counsellors by the death of Silanus (for he was inferior to no one in the senate), and the knights by the execution of Macro (for he, like the leader of a chorus, had long been considered the very first man of the knights for reputation and glory), and all his blood relations by the slaughter of his cousin and joint inheritor of the kingdom, he no longer chose to remain fettered by the ordinary limits of human nature, but aspired to raise himself above them, and desired to be looked upon as a god.