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15In order to provide him with funds, it had been voted earlier that all persons still living who had wished to leave anything to Tiberius should at their death bestow the same upon Gaius; for, in order to appear to have the right to accept inheritances and receive such gifts in spite of the laws (inasmuch as he had at this time neither wife nor children), he caused a decree to be issued by the senate. 2But at the time of which I am speaking he seized for himself, without any decree, absolutely all the property of those who had served as centurions and had after the triumph which his father celebrated left it to somebody else than the emperor. 3When not even this sufficed, he hit upon the following third method of raising money. There was a senator, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, who had noticed that the roads during the reign of Tiberius were in bad condition, and was always nagging the highway commissioners about it, and furthermore kept making a nuisance of himself to the senate on the subject. 4Gaius now took him as an accomplice, and through him attacked all those, alive or dead, who had ever been highway commissioners and had received money for repairing the roads; and he fined both them and the men who had secured contracts from them, on the pretence that they had spent nothing. 5For his assistance in this matter Corbulo was at the time made consul, but later in the reign of Claudius, he was accused and punished; for Claudius not only failed to demand any sums that were still owed, but, on the contrary, took what had been paid in, partly from the public treasury and partly from Corbulo himself, and returned it to those who had been fined. 6But this took place later. At the time of my narrative not only the various classes already named, but also practically everybody else in the city, was being despoiled in one manner or another, and no one who possessed anything, whether man or woman, got off unscathed. For even if Gaius did permit some of the older people to live, yet by calling them his fathers, grandfathers, mothers, and grandmothers, he not only milked them while they lived but also inherited their property when they died.
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