He was conscious of his tendency to wrath and resentment and excused both in an edict; he also drew a distinction between them, promising that the former would be short and harmless and the latter not without cause.. After sharply rebuking the people of Ostia, because they had sent no boats to meet him when he entered the Tiber, and in such bitter terms that he wrote that they had reduced him to the rank of a commoner, he suddenly forgave them and all but apologised. He repulsed with his own hand men who approached him in public at unseasonable times. He also banished ® a quaestor’s clerk without a hearing, as well as a senator of praetorian rank, although they were blameless: pleading a suit emperor; the former for going too far in against him before he became the latter, because, when aedile, he had fined the tenants of Claudius’s estates for violating the law forbidding the selling of cooked victuals, and had whipped his bailiff when he remonstrated. And with the same motive he took from the aediles the regulation of the cook-shops.¢ He did not even keep quiet about his own stupidity, but in certain brief speeches he declared that he had purposely feigned it under Gaius, because otherwise he could not have escaped alive and attained his present station. But he convinced no one, and within a short time a book was published, the title of which was “ The Elevation of Fools” and its thesis, that no one feigned folly.