Trajan

and if these truths should happily force their way to the thrones of princes, be it known to them, that they come attended with the secret wishes of all mankind, and tell the sovereign who deigns them a gracious reception, that his fame shall outshine the glory of conquerors, and that equitable posterity will exalt his peaceful trophies above those of a Titus, an Antoninus, or a Trajan.

Pliny, in his panegyric on the good Trajan, attests, that the Romans never omitted to begin their discourse and affairs by invoking the Deity.

Nor indeed was this law adopted by Cesar, by Trajan, or by Antoninus, whose name is still pronounced with respect by all nations;

for by a constitution of the emperor Trajan a Latinus Junianus who obtains an imperial grant of citizenship against the will or without the knowledge of his patron resembles during his lifetime other freedmen who are Roman citizens, and procreates lawful children, but dies with the status of a Latinus, so that his children are not his heirs;

nam, ut diuus Traianus constituit, si Latinus inuito uel ignorante patrono ius Quiritium ab imperatore consecutus sit, [quibus casibus] dum uiuit iste libertus, ceteris ciuibus Romanis libertis similis est et iustos liberos procreat, moritur autem Latini iure, nec ei liberi eius heredes esse possunt;

Lastly, Trajan enacted that if a Latin carry on the business of miller in Rome for three years, and grinds each day not less than a hundred measures of wheat, he shall attain Roman citizenship.

Ab Arabico autem sinu ad Indiam, Indicique Oceani insulas, et auream usque Chersonesum, quam esse Iapanem credunt plerique, etiam re Romana florente navigari solitum, iter a Plinio descriptum, legationes ab Indis ad Augustum, ad Claudium etiam ex Taprobane insula, deinde gesta Traiani et tabulae Ptolemaei satis ostendunt.

Pliny’s description of the route to the East, the embassies from the Indies to Augustus, and those from Ceylon to the emperor Claudius, and finally the accounts of the deeds of Trajan, and the writings of Ptolemaeus, all make it quite clear that in the days of Rome’s greatest splendor voyages were made regularly from the Arabian gulf to India, to the islands of the Indian ocean, and even so far as …

And now he comes under guard, to pay out the remnants of his evils here, unless you are willing to stretch out your great hand over the man who is hard pressed.

For this reason the most reverend brother Maximus, who governed our country, having suffered such things as no other man yet has — stripped of all his possessions, both what was his by inheritance and what had been gathered from former labours, and grievously afflicted in body by his wanderings up and down, and not even keeping unharmed the very right of citizenship for which it is the custom of f …

For even if what happened does not establish the man who wronged him as wicked, yet at least it shows the one who suffered to be of the most pitiable lot, since the very fact of falling into heaven-sent evils seems somehow to be a proof of being delivered over to suffering.

The first serious blows at the ancient institution are attributed to the earlier Cæsars, and some isolated interferences of Trajan and Hadrian seem to have prepared the ground for a series of express enactments which, though we cannot always determine their dates, we know to have limited the father’s powers on the one hand, and on the other to have multiplied facilities for their voluntary surrender.

Pass again to the times of Trajan:

It is embodied in the most striking manner by the legend of Trajan’s miraculous translation to Paradise, the reward of a signal act of justice;

and in a letter, in which Pliny makes application on behalf of his friend to the emperor Trajan, for a mark of favour, he speaks of him as “a most excellent, honourable, and learned man, whom he had the pleasure of entertaining under his own roof, and with whom the Edition:

Laws which Trajan in part frustrated, by forbidding Christians to be sought out;

Then Trajan wrote back that men of this kind were not indeed to be sought out, but that, if brought before the court, they ought to be punished.

Why do you trip yourself up with your own censure?

At any rate we do know that in the noblest days of Rome, its wisest and best of emperors, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius, all succeeded to the purple, not by birth, but by adoption.