Book 9

1.pr. ON LUXURY AND LUST Luxury too, an alluring evil, which it is somewhat easier to accuse than to avoid, let it be inserted into our work—not, indeed, that it may receive any honour, but so that, recognizing itself, it may be driven to repentance. Let lust be joined with it, since it arises from the same beginnings of vices; nor let them be separated either from reproach or from correction, bound together as they are by a twin error of the mind.

1.1. C. Sergius Orata was the first to set up hanging baths. This extravagance, begun from slight beginnings, advanced almost to whole seas of suspended hot water. The same man, of course, lest he should have his gluttony subject to the judgment of Neptune, devised private seas for himself, by intercepting the waves with estuaries and shutting up separate shoals of various fish behind moles, so that no storm fell so savage that Orata's table did not abound in a variety of dishes. With spacious and lofty buildings too he pressed upon the shore of the Lucrine lake, deserted up to that time, in order to enjoy a fresher use of shellfish; and there, while he plunged himself too greedily into the public water, he came to trial with Considius the tax-farmer. In which L. Crassus, pleading the case against him, said that his friend Considius was mistaken in thinking that Orata, removed from the lake, would lack oysters: for, if he were not allowed to seek them from there, he would find them on his roof-tiles.

1.2. To this man, surely, Aesopus the tragic actor ought rather to have given his son in adoption than to have left him heir of his goods—a youth of a luxury not only abandoned but even frenzied. It is agreed that he was wont to set out little birds, commendable for their song, bought at enormous prices, in place of fig-peckers, and to sprinkle his drinks with pearls of great value dissolved in vinegar, desiring to throw away as quickly as possible his most ample patrimony as though it were some bitter burden. Those who followed the sect of these two, the one an old man, the other a young one, stretched out their hands further: for no vice ends where it begins. Thence fish dragged from the shores of the ocean, thence chests of money poured into kitchens, and the pleasure of eating and drinking found at the cost of estates.

1.3. To our city, moreover, the end of the second Punic war and the conquest of Philip, king of Macedonia, gave the confidence for a more licentious life. At which time the matrons dared to besiege the house of the Bruti, who were prepared to interpose their veto to the abrogation of the Oppian law, which the women desired to be repealed, because it permitted them neither to use a garment of varied colour, nor to have more than half an ounce of gold, nor to ride in a yoked vehicle within a mile of the city, except for the sake of a sacrifice. And indeed they obtained that a right preserved for twenty continuous years should be abolished: for the men of that age did not foresee to what kind of adornment the persistent zeal of that unaccustomed gathering tended, or how far the audacity victorious over the laws would pour itself out. But if they could have foreseen the apparatus of the female mind, to which every day something more sumptuously novel is added, they would have resisted luxury rushing in at its very entrance. But why do I speak further about women, whom both the weakness of their mind and the denial of more serious occupations urge to confer all their zeal upon a more careful adornment of themselves, when I see that the men of former times, both of name and of outstanding spirit, slipped into this byway unknown to ancient self-restraint? And let this be clear from their own quarrel.

1.4. Cn. Domitius, in an altercation that had arisen, reproached his colleague L. Crassus, because he had pillars of Hymettian marble in the portico of his house. Crassus at once asked him at how much he himself valued his own house, and when he answered "six million sesterces," said, "By how much, then, do you think it would be worth less, if I should cut down ten little trees from it?" "Even by three million sesterces," said Domitius. Then Crassus said, "Which of us, then, is the more given to luxury, I, who bought ten pillars for a hundred thousand sesterces, or you, who reckon the shade of ten little trees at the sum of three million sesterces?" A speech forgetful of Pyrrhus, unmindful of Hannibal, and now yawning in the abundance of overseas pay! And yet how much more cramped than the buildings and groves of succeeding ages, which they brought in; and they preferred to leave to posterity a refinement begun by themselves rather than to retain the self-restraint received from their ancestors.

1.5. For what did Metellus Pius, the leading man of his times, mean then, when in Spain he allowed his arrivals to be received by his hosts with altars and incense? When he gazed with glad mind upon walls covered with tapestries of Attalus? When he allowed the most elaborately prepared games to be interposed among huge banquets? When he celebrated feasts in a palm-embroidered robe, and received golden crowns let down from the ceilings as though upon a heavenly head? And where these things? Not in Greece nor in Asia, by whose luxury severity itself could be corrupted, but in a rough and warlike province, especially when the most keen enemy Sertorius was blinding the eyes of the Roman armies with Lusitanian weapons: so far had his father's Numidian camp slipped from his memory. It is clear, then, by how swift a passage luxury flowed in: for he whose youth saw the ancient morals, his old age began the new.

1.6. A like change appeared in the house of the Curiones, since indeed our forum beheld both the most grave severity of the father and the sixty million sesterces of debt of the son, contracted by the infamous injury of noble youths. And so at the same time and in the same household dwelt different ages, the one most frugal, the other most worthless.

1.7. But the trial of P. Clodius—with how great luxury and lust it abounded! In which, so that the defendant, evidently guilty of the crime of unchastity, might be acquitted, the nights of matrons and of noble young men, bought at a great sum, were paid out to the judges in the place of a wage. In which outrage, so foul and so manifold, you would not know whom first to detest, him who devised that kind of corruption, or those who allowed their chastity to become the surety of perjury, or those who exchanged their religion for debauchery.

1.8. Equally disgraceful was that banquet which Gemellus, a tribune's constable of free blood but, by his office, disfigured into a servile condition, prepared for the consul Metellus Scipio and the tribunes of the plebs, to the great shame of the state: for, having set up a brothel in his own house, he prostituted there Munia and Flavia, both renowned, the one for her father, the other for her husband, and the noble boy Saturninus—bodies of shameful submission, to be the mockery of drunken lust! Feasts for a consul and tribunes not to be celebrated, but to be punished!

1.9. But chiefly criminal was the lust of Catiline: for, seized by a mad love of Aurelia Orestilla, when he saw one obstacle preventing them from being joined in marriage, he made away by poison with his own son, whom he had as his only one and now of pubescent age, and at once kindled the marital torch from his pyre, and discharged his childlessness to his new wife in the place of a gift. Then, conducting himself as a citizen with the same spirit with which he had conducted himself as a father, he paid the penalty equally to the shade of his son and to his country, wickedly assailed.

1e.1. But Campanian luxury was exceedingly useful to our state: for, embracing with its enticements Hannibal, unconquered in arms, it handed him over to be conquered by the Roman soldier. It called forth that most vigilant leader, it called forth that most keen army, to sleep and pleasures, with lavish feasts, abundant wine, the fragrance of unguents, and a too-wanton use of love. And then at last was Punic ferocity broken and bruised, when the Seplasia and Alba began to be its camp. What, then, is fouler than these vices, what even more ruinous, by which virtue is worn away, victories grow languid, glory lulled to sleep is turned into infamy, and the strength of mind and body alike is overpowered, so that you would not know whether it should be held more pernicious to be captured by enemies or by them?

1e.2. These same vices entangled the city of the Volsinians too in grave and shameful disasters. It was opulent, it was ordered in morals and laws, it was held the capital of Etruria: but after it had slipped into luxury, it fell into the depth of injuries and baseness, so that it subjected itself to the most insolent domination of slaves. These, at first very few daring to enter the senatorial order, soon seized the whole state, ordered wills to be written at their own pleasure, forbade the banquets and gatherings of freeborn men, married the daughters of their masters. Finally they sanctioned by law that their debaucheries should go unpunished among widows and married women alike, and that no maiden should marry a freeborn man whose chastity someone of their own number had not first tasted.

1e.3. Come now, Xerxes, rejoicing in luxury through the remarkable display of his royal wealth to such a degree that by an edict he set forth a reward for whoever should find a new kind of pleasure—how great a ruin of a most ample empire did he escape, while he was captivated by excessive delights!

1e.4. Antiochus too, king of Syria, was an example of no greater self-restraint. His army, imitating his blind and senseless luxury, had for the greater part golden nails fastened to its sandals, and procured silver vessels for kitchen use, and set up tents adorned with woven figures—a desirable plunder to a greedy enemy rather than any hindrance to one energetic for conquering.

1e.5. For king Ptolemy lived as an appendage of his own vices, and was therefore called Physcon. What was more worthless than his worthlessness? He forced his elder sister, married to their common brother, to marry himself. Then afterwards, having ravished her daughter by force, he dismissed the mother herself, to make an empty place for marriage with the girl.

1e.6. In keeping with its kings, therefore, was the people of the Egyptian nation, who, having gone out of the walls of their city under the leadership of Archelaus against A. Gabinius, when they were ordered to surround their camp with a palisade and ditch, all cried out that this work should be contracted out to be done at public expense. Wherefore minds so enervated by delights could not sustain the spirit of our army.

1e.7. But more effeminate still was the multitude of the Cyprians, who endured with an even mind to have their queens mount their chariots upon the bodies of women constructed, as it were, into steps, so that they might set the print of their feet more softly: for it would have been better for men, if only they were men, to lack life than to comply with so dainty a command.

2.pr. ON CRUELTY This is the partnership of vices: of the wanton countenance and the eyes clinging to ever-new desire, and of the mind flowing in dainty adornment and flitting through the various motions of enticements. But the bearing of cruelty is grim, its appearance savage, its breath violent, its voice terrible, all things full of threats and bloody commands. To grant it silence is to add increase: for what limit will it set for itself, if it has not been recalled even by the reins of reproach? In short, since to be feared lies with it, to hate lies with us.

2.1. L. Sulla, whom no one can sufficiently worthily either praise or blame, because, while he sought victories, he displayed a Scipio to the Roman people, and while he exercised them, a Hannibal—for, having admirably defended the authority of the nobility, he cruelly flooded the whole city and all the parts of Italy with rivers of civil blood—ordered four legions of the opposing party, which had followed his pledge, to be cut down in the public villa which was in the Campus Martius, while they in vain implored the pity of his deceitful right hand. Their pitiable cries the ears of the trembling city received; the Tiber, impatient of so great a burden, was forced to carry their bodies, mangled by the sword, on its bloodied waters. Five thousand men of Praeneste, called out beyond the walls of the town with hope of safety given through P. Cethegus, when they had thrown down their arms and stretched their bodies on the ground, he had killed and at once scattered through the fields. Four thousand seven hundred slain by the edict of his dire proscription he entered in the public records, so that, of course, the memory of so glorious a deed should not fade away. Nor content to rage against those who had disagreed with him in arms, he added to the number of the proscribed even citizens of quiet mind, sought out by a name-caller on account of the greatness of their money. Against women too he drew his swords, as though too little glutted by the slaughter of men. This too is a token of his insatiable ferocity: he wished the severed heads of the wretched men, all but retaining their countenance and breath, to be brought into his sight, so that he might devour them with his eyes, since with his mouth it was wicked. How cruelly, moreover, did he conduct himself toward the praetor M. Marius! Whom, dragged through the mouths of the crowd to the tomb of the Lutatian house, he did not deprive of life before he had torn out his unhappy eyes and broken each part of his body. I seem scarcely to be telling things like the truth: but he even slew on the spot M. Plaetorius, because he had fallen lifeless at his torture—a novel punisher of pity, with whom to look upon crime with reluctant mind was to commit crime. But did he at least spare the shades of the dead? Not at all: for the ashes of C. Marius, whose quaestor, though afterwards his enemy, he had once been, he dug up and scattered in the channel of the Anio. Lo, by what deeds he thought the name of fortunate should be claimed!

2.2. Yet C. Marius lightens the odium of this cruelty: for he too, by an excessive desire of persecuting his enemies, wickedly drew his anger, by butchering with ignoble savagery the most noble body of C. Caesar, a consular and censorian, and indeed at the tomb of a most seditious and abject man: for this alone was wanting to the evils of the then most wretched state, that Caesar should fall as an expiation for Varius. His victories were almost not worth so much, for, forgetful of them, he earned more guilt at home than praise in warfare. The same man for some time held the severed head of M. Antonius with joyful hands amid his feasts, with the utmost insolence of mind and words, and allowed the sacred rites of his table to be contaminated by the blood of a most distinguished citizen and orator; and he even received into his bosom P. Annius, who had brought it, spattered with the traces of the fresh slaughter.

2.3. Damasippus had no praise to corrupt, and so his memory is censured by a more licentious accusation. By his order the heads of the leading men of the state were mingled with the heads of victims, and the headless body of Carbo Arvina was fastened to a gibbet and carried about. So far either the praetorship of a most disgraceful man availed much, or the majesty of the state nothing.

2.4. Munatius Flaccus too, a keener than more commendable defender of the Pompeian name, when he was being besieged by the commander Caesar, shut up within the walls of Ategua in Spain, exercised his maddened cruelty in the most savage kind of frenzy: for all the citizens of that town whom he had perceived to be more devoted to Caesar, he slew and hurled from the walls. The women too, the names of their husbands who were in the opposing camp being called out, so that they might behold the slaughter of their consorts, and the children placed upon their mothers' laps, he butchered. Some infants he ordered to be dashed to the ground in the sight of their parents, others to be thrown up and caught on spears. These things, intolerable even to hear, were administered at a Roman's command by Lusitanian hands—by the protection of which people Flaccus, walled about, was resisting with crazed obstinacy the divine resources of Caesar.

2e.1. We shall now pass over to those things in which, though there is equal grief, yet there is no blush of our state. The Carthaginians, having cut off the eyelids of Atilius Regulus and shut him in a machine in which sharpened goads stood out on every side, killed him by sleeplessness and the continuous strain of pain alike—a kind of torment scarcely worthy of him who suffered it, most worthy of those who devised it. Using the same cruelty, they laid our soldiers, reduced into their power in a certain sea-fight, beneath their ships, so that, crushed by their keels and weight, they might glut a barbarian ferocity by an unaccustomed manner of death, intending to violate the very sea by fleets polluted with so foul a crime.

2e.2. Their leader Hannibal, whose virtue consisted for the greater part of savagery, made a bridge of Roman bodies over the river Vergellus and led his army across, so that the land might experience the wicked passage of the Carthaginian land-forces as equally as Neptune did that of the naval ones. The same man would leave our captives, worn out by burdens and the march, with the front part of their feet cut off. But those whom he had led into his camp, joining pairs, generally of brothers and kinsmen, he forced to fight it out with the sword, nor was he glutted with blood before he had reduced them all to a single victor. With just hatred, then, but a tardy punishment nevertheless, the senate drove him, become a suppliant of king Prusias, to a voluntary death.

2e.3. As much, by Hercules, as it drove king Mithridates, who by a single letter destroyed eighty thousand Roman citizens scattered through the cities of Asia for the sake of trade, and sprinkled the hospitable gods of so great a province with unjust, but not unavenged, blood, since indeed it forced his spirit, struggling against the poison, at last to succumb with the greatest torment, and at the same time gave expiations for those crosses by which, on the advice of the eunuch Gaurus, lustful in his compliance, criminal in his command, he had afflicted his friends.

2e.4. Of Zisemis, son of Diogyris, king of Thrace, although the ferocity of the people itself makes his cruelty less to be wondered at, yet the rage of his savagery makes it to be related: for him it was no crime either to cut living men in half through the middle, or to force parents to feed on the bodies of their children.

2e.5. Again Ptolemy Physcon emerges, a little before the most foul example of lustful madness, the same to be reported among the chief tokens of cruelty: for what is more savage than this deed? His own son named Memphites, whom he had had by Cleopatra, the same his sister and wife, a boy of free-born form and best hope, he ordered to be killed in his sight, and at once sent the head and feet, cut off, covered with a cloak in a casket, as a birthday gift to the mother—just as though he himself were exempt from the disaster which he was inflicting on her, and not the more unhappy because, in their common bereavement, he had rendered Cleopatra pitiable to all, himself hateful. So much, with blind frenzy, does every cruelty boil up at its highest, when it has found a defence from itself: for when he observed with how great hatred his country held him, he sought a remedy for his fear in crime, and, in order to reign more safely with the plebs butchered, surrounded a gymnasium crowded with youth with arms and fire, and slew all who were in it, partly with the sword, partly with the flame.

2e.6. Ochus, moreover, who afterwards was called Darius, bound by the most holy oath of the Persians not to kill any one of the conspiracy which had with him crushed the seven Magi, either by poison or by sword or by any violence or by want of food, devised a crueller manner of death, by which he might destroy those hateful to him without breaking the bond of his religious obligation: for he filled with ashes a place fenced in with high walls, and, placing over it a projecting beam, he would set on it those received kindly with food and drink, from which, lulled to sleep by slumber, they would fall into that treacherous heap.

2e.7. More open and more foul was the cruelty of the other Ochus, surnamed Artaxerxes, who buried alive up to the head his sister Atossa, who was at once his mother-in-law, and his uncle, with more than a hundred sons and grandsons, set in an empty space, he transfixed with javelins, provoked by no injury, but because he saw that in these the greatest praise of uprightness and bravery among the Persians consisted.

2e.8. Roused by a like kind of rivalry, the city of the Athenians, by a decree unworthy of its glory, cut off the thumbs of the youth of Aegina, so that that people, powerful in fleets, might not be able to come down with them into a contest of naval strength. I do not recognize Athens borrowing a remedy for its fear from cruelty.

2e.9. Savage too was that inventor of the bronze bull, in which men shut up, with fires placed beneath, were forced, by a long and hidden torment, to give forth their bellowing breath, so that their wailings, uttered with the human sound of the voice, could not implore the pity of the tyrant Phalaris. And because he wished pity to be wanting to the wretched, he, shut up first in the most foul work of his own art, deservedly inaugurated it.

2e.10. Nor indeed were the Etruscans too little ferocious in devising a punishment, who allowed the bodies of the living, bound and tied face to face with corpses, so that each part of the limbs was fitted to its corresponding part, to rot away together—bitter torturers of life and death alike.

2e.11. Just as those barbarians, who, they say, after the entrails and viscera of slaughtered cattle have been taken out, insert men into them, so that only their heads project, and, that they may last longer for punishment, prolong the unhappy breath with food and drink, until, putrefying within, they are torn by the creatures which are wont to be born in decaying bodies. Let us complain now with the nature of things, because it willed that we should be subject to many and harsh discomforts of ill health, and let us bear it ill that the condition of heavenly strength was denied to the human state, when mortality itself, at the impulse of cruelty, has devised so many torments for itself.

3.pr. ON ANGER OR HATRED Anger too and hatred raise great waves in human breasts, the former swifter in its onset, the latter more persistent in its desire of harming, each a passion full of consternation and never violent without torment to itself, because, when it wishes to inflict pain, it suffers, anxious with bitter solicitude lest vengeance should not come to pass. But the surest images of their characteristics are those which the gods themselves willed to be seen in famous persons, either by some saying or by a too-vehement deed.

3.1. When Livius Salinator, about to wage war against Hasdrubal, was leaving the city, and Fabius Maximus advised him not to come down into the battle line before he had learned the strength and spirit of the enemy, he replied that he would not let slip the first opportunity of fighting; and being asked by the same man why he wished to join battle so hastily, he said, "That as quickly as possible I may take either glory from conquered enemies or joy from prostrated citizens." Anger and virtue then divided his speech between them, the one mindful of his unjust condemnation, the other intent on the glory of a triumph. But I do not know whether it belonged to the same man to say this and so to conquer.

3.2. A man of ardent spirit and accustomed to warlike deeds the goads of anger drove to this; but C. Figulus, a most gentle man, most renowned for the peaceful study of the civil law, they rendered unmindful of his prudence and moderation: for, kindled by grief at the defeat of his consulship—the more so because he remembered that it had been given twice to his father—when on the day after the elections many had come to him to consult, he dismissed them all, declaring beforehand, "Do you know how to consult us, but not how to make us consul?" A thing gravely and deservedly said, but yet somewhat better not said: for who can be wisely angry at the Roman people?

3.3. And so not even those are to be approved—although their deed was protected by the splendour of their nobility—who, because Cn. Flavius, once of the most humble lot, had attained the praetorship, offended, threw away the golden rings from themselves and the trappings stripped from their horses, attesting the impotence of their grief by all but professed mourning.

3.4. Such are the movements of anger of individuals or of a few against the whole people; those of a multitude toward leading men and its generals are of this kind. When Manlius Torquatus was bringing into the city a most ample and most glorious victory over the Latins and Campanians, and all the elders, exulting with joy, came to meet him, none of the younger men advanced to meet him, because he had struck with the axe his young son who had fought most bravely against his command. They pitied a man of their own age punished too harshly: nor do I defend their deed, but I point out the force of anger, which was able to divide both the ages and the feelings of a single state.

3.5. And the same was able to do so much that it held immovable the whole cavalry of the Roman people, sent by the consul Fabius to pursue the forces of the enemy when it was both safe and easy to destroy them, mindful of an agrarian law obstructed by him. It even made the army hostile to the leader Appius, whose father, while he strove for the eminence of the senate, had most keenly attacked the advantages of the plebs, and forced it by a voluntary flight to turn its back to the enemy, lest it should win a triumph for its commander. How often a victor over victory! It rendered its congratulation, in the case of Torquatus, to be scorned; in the case of Fabius, its most beautiful part to be omitted; in the case of Appius, the whole of it to be set after flight.

3.6. Come now, how violently did it conduct itself in the breast of the whole Roman people at that time when by its votes the dedication of the temple of Mercury was given to M. Plaetorius, a centurion of the first rank, the consuls being passed over—Appius, because he had obstructed relief being given to his own debt, and Servilius, because he had protected the cause he had undertaken with a languid advocacy. Do you deny that anger is effective, at whose urging a soldier was preferred to the highest command?

3.7. Anger indeed not only trampled commands underfoot, but even wielded them without self-control: for Q. Metellus, when as consul first, then as proconsul, he had subdued almost the whole of both Spains, after he learned that Q. Pompeius the consul, his enemy, was being sent as his successor, dismissed all who only wished their service ended, gave furloughs to those seeking them without the causes being examined or a time appointed, exposed his granaries to plunder by removing their guards, ordered the bows and arrows of the Cretans to be broken and thrown into a river, and forbade fodder to be given to the elephants. By these deeds, as he indulged his desire, so he corrupted the glory of his magnificently accomplished achievements, and, a braver victor over enemies than over his own anger, lost the deserved honour of a triumph.

3.8. What of Sulla, while he complies with this vice—did he not, much foreign blood being poured out, at last pour out his own too? For at Puteoli, burning with indignation because Granius, the leading man of that colony, was too slowly paying the money promised by the decurions for the rebuilding of the Capitol, by too great an agitation of mind and an immoderate impulse of voice, his chest being burst, he vomited up his breath mixed with blood and threats—not now sunk in old age, since he was entering his sixtieth year, but raging with a lack of self-control nourished by the miseries of the state. Therefore it is doubtful whether Sulla or Sulla's anger was extinguished first.

3e.pr. It neither pleases me to seek examples from the unknown, nor is it without shame to reproach the greatest men with their vices. But since the good faith of my undertaking advises me to embrace whatever is most excellent, let my inclination yield to the work, provided that the conscience of one narrating necessary things does not fail to approve gladly the glorious ones.

3e.1. Alexander his own anger all but dragged down from heaven: for what prevented him from rising thither, except that Lysimachus was thrown to a lion, and Clitus run through with a spear, and Callisthenes ordered to die, so that he rendered, as conquered, his three greatest victories by as many unjust slaughters of friends?

3e.2. How vehement, moreover, was Hamilcar's hatred toward the Roman people! For, gazing on his four sons of boyish age, he used to declare that he was rearing as many lion-cubs for the destruction of our empire. Worthy nurslings, which were turned, as it came to pass, to the ruin of their own country.

3e.3. Of these Hannibal so early followed his father's footsteps that, when his father was about to carry his army across into Spain and was on that account sacrificing, the boy of nine years, holding the altars, swore that, as soon as he could by his age, he would be the most keen enemy of the Roman people, and by most persistent prayers wrung out a comradeship in the impending war. The same man, wishing to signify with how great hatred Carthage and Rome were at variance with each other, having struck his foot upon the ground and raised the dust, said that then there would be an end of war between them, when one or the other had been reduced to the condition of that dust.

3e.4. In a boyish breast so great was the force of hatred able to do; but in a woman's too it availed equally much: for Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians, when, busy about the dressing of her head, it was announced to her that Babylon had revolted, with one part of her hair still loose at once ran to storm it, nor did she reduce the comeliness of her hair to order before the city to her power. Wherefore her statue was set up at Babylon in that guise in which she hastened with headlong speed to exact vengeance.

4.pr. ON AVARICE Let avarice too be dragged forth, the tracker of hidden gains, the most greedy whirlpool of manifest plunder, happy neither in the fruit of having nor most wretched in the desire of seeking.

4.1. When a certain man had forged a false will for the very wealthy L. Minucius Basilus in Greece, and, to confirm it, had inserted into the tablets as heirs the most powerful men of our state, M. Crassus and Q. Hortensius, to whom Minucius had been unknown, although the fraud was evident, yet each, desirous of money, did not repudiate the gift of another's crime. How great a fault I have related how gently! The lights of the senate-house, the ornaments of the forum, the crime which they ought to have punished, invited by the catch of dishonest gain, covered with their authority.

4.2. But it showed somewhat greater strength in Q. Cassius, who in Spain dismissed Silius and Calpurnius, caught with daggers for the purpose of killing him, having bargained for five million sesterces from the one, six million from the other. Lo, the man of whom you might doubt that, if as much again were given, he would have offered his very throat to them with an even mind.

4.3. But before all, avarice possessed the heart of L. Septimuleius, who, when he had been an intimate of C. Gracchus, brought himself to cut off his head and carry it about the city fixed on a pike, because the consul Opimius had proclaimed that he would weigh it out in gold. There are those who relate that he filled the hollowed part of the head with molten lead, so that it might be the heavier. Let that man have been seditious, let him have perished as a good example; yet the criminal hunger of a client ought not to have hungered even for these injuries to a man lying low.

4e.1. The avarice of Septimuleius deserved hatred; but that of Ptolemy, king of the Cyprians, is to be accompanied with laughter: for when he had snatched together great wealth by anxious meanness, and saw himself about to perish on account of it, and therefore, all his money placed on ships, had advanced into the deep, so that, the fleet being scuttled, he might perish by his own choice and the enemy might lack the plunder, he could not bring himself to sink the gold and silver, but carried home what was to be the reward of his death. Beyond doubt this man did not possess riches, but was possessed by riches—in title king of the island, in spirit a pitiable slave of money.

5.1. ON PRIDE AND LACK OF SELF-CONTROL And, that pride too and lack of self-control may be placed in view: M. Fulvius Flaccus, consul, colleague of M. Plautius Hypsaeus, when he was introducing most pernicious laws to the state about giving citizenship to Italy and about appeal to the people for those who should be unwilling to change their citizenship, was with difficulty driven to come into the senate-house: then, to the senate, partly advising, partly begging him to desist from his undertaking, he gave no answer. He would be held a consul of a tyrannical spirit, if he had conducted himself in this way against a single senator, in the way in which Flaccus behaved in despising the majesty of the whole most ample order.

5.2. This majesty was outraged with the utmost insult by M. Drusus, tribune of the plebs, too: for he thought it too little to have driven the consul L. Philippus, because he had dared to interrupt him as he was haranguing, headlong into prison with his throat twisted—and indeed not by a constable but by his own client—so violently that much blood was poured from his nostrils; but even, when the senate had sent to him to come into the senate-house, he said, "Why does it not rather itself come into the Hostilian senate-house, near the rostra, that is, to me?" It irks me to add what follows: the tribune despised the command of the senate, the senate obeyed the words of the tribune.

5.3. How insolently, moreover, did Cn. Pompeius act! Who, coming out of the bath, left Hypsaeus, a defendant on a charge of bribery, prostrate before his feet—a noble man and his friend—lying there, trampled upon with an insulting word: for he replied that the man was doing nothing else than delaying his dinner; and conscious of this saying he could dine with an untroubled mind. He even, in the forum, did not blush to demand from the judges, in the place of a favour, his father-in-law P. Scipio, liable under the laws which he himself had carried—and that too in the greatest ruin of illustrious defendants—violating the condition of the state by the blandishments of the marriage bed.

5.4. Foul alike in deed and in word was the banquet of M. Antonius: for when the head of the senator Caesetius Rufus had been brought to him, the triumvir, while the rest turned away from it, ordered it brought nearer and considered it long and carefully. Then, while all awaited what he would say, he said, "This man I have not known." A proud confession about a senator, an uncontrolled one about a slain man.

5e.1. Enough about our own people: let foreign examples now be added. The virtue and good fortune of king Alexander exulted by three most evident steps of insolence: for through disdain of Philip he took to himself Jupiter Ammon as his father, through weariness of Macedonian manners and dress he assumed Persian garb and institutions, and, despising the mortal condition, he emulated the divine, nor was he ashamed to dissemble that he was a son, a citizen, a man.

5e.2. Now Xerxes, in whose name pride and lack of self-control dwell, by his own right so insolently—when, about to declare war on Greece, he had summoned the leading men of Asia—said, "Lest I should seem to have used only my own counsel, I have gathered you together. But remember that you must rather obey me than advise." Arrogant, even if it had befallen him as a victor to seek his palace again: from one so shamefully defeated, you would not know whether it was said more insolently or more imprudently.

5e.3. Hannibal, moreover, elated by the success of the battle of Cannae, neither admitted any of his fellow citizens into his camp nor gave an answer to any except through an interpreter. He spurned even Maharbal, who before his tent affirmed in a clear voice that he had foreseen how within a few days he should dine in the Capitol at Rome. So divided is the companionship of good fortune and moderation.

5e.4. But there was, as it were, a rivalry of insolence between the Carthaginian and the Campanian senate: for the one was bathed in a bath separate from the plebs, the other used a different forum. That this custom was retained at Capua for some time is clear too from the speech of C. Gracchus written against Plautius.

6.pr. ON TREACHERY Let now a hidden and insidious evil, treachery, be dragged from its lurking-places. Its most effective strength is to lie and to deceive; its fruit consists in some crime committed, then sure, when it has surrounded credulity with wicked bonds, bringing as much harm to the human race as good faith affords of safety. Let it have, therefore, no less of reproach than that wins of praise.

6.1. In the reign of Romulus, Spurius Tarpeius was in command of the citadel. His maiden daughter, having gone out beyond the walls to fetch water for the rites, Tatius corrupted, that she might receive the armed Sabines with her into the citadel, she having bargained as a wage for what they wore on their left hands: now on these were armlets and rings of great weight of gold. The column of Sabines, having gained the place, killed the girl who was demanding her reward, overwhelmed with their arms, just as though they had discharged the promise, because they had carried that too on their left hands. Let reproach be absent, because the impious betrayal was avenged with a swift punishment.

6.2. Ser. Galba too was of the utmost treachery: for, the people of three states of Lusitania being summoned together as though he were going to treat of their advantage, he chose and disarmed eight thousand, in whom the flower of the youth consisted, and partly butchered, partly sold them. By which crime he surpassed the greatest disaster of the barbarians by the greatness of his guilt.

6.3. Cn. Domitius, moreover, a man of the highest birth and great spirit, too great a desire of glory forced to become treacherous: for, angry at Bituitus, king of the Arverni, because he had urged his own people and that of the Allobroges, while Domitius was still tarrying in the province, to flee to the right hand of Q. Fabius, his successor, he, summoned under the pretence of a conference and received in hospitality, bound him and had him carried to Rome by ship. His deed the senate could neither approve nor rescind, lest Bituitus, sent back to his country, should renew the war. Therefore it relegated him to Alba for the sake of custody.

6.4. The murder of Viriathus too admits a double accusation of treachery—in his friends, because he was killed by their hands, and in the consul Q. Servilius Caepio, because he was the instigator of this crime by promising impunity, and did not earn the victory but bought it.

6e.1. But, to contemplate the very fountain of treachery: the Carthaginians, simulating that they were carrying him home, drowned in the deep Xanthippus the Lacedaemonian, whose excellent service they had used in the first Punic war, and by whose help they had captured Atilius Regulus—seeking what by so great a crime? Was it that no partner of their victory should survive? He survives nevertheless, and indeed with reproach, whom without any loss of glory they might have left unharmed.

6e.2. Hannibal, furthermore—when the men of Nuceria had gone out at his urging, with two garments each, from their city girt with impregnable walls, did he not strangle them with the heat and smoke of the baths, and the senate of the Acerrani, called out beyond the walls in the same way, throw into the depth of wells; and did he not wage a war against good faith itself more keenly than against the Roman people and Italy, rejoicing in lies and deceit as though in glorious arts? By which it came about that, though otherwise about to leave a notable memory of his name, he set it in doubt whether he ought to be held a greater or a worse man.

7.1. ON VIOLENCE AND SEDITION But, that deeds of violence and sedition both toga-clad and even armed may be related: L. Equitius, who pretended that he was the son of Ti. Gracchus and was seeking the tribunate against the laws together with L. Saturninus, when he had been led into the public prison by C. Marius, who was holding his fifth consulship, the people, having burst the bars of the prison, snatched him out and carried him on their shoulders with the utmost eagerness of spirit.

7.2. And the same people tried to lay low with stones the censor Q. Metellus, because he was unwilling to receive the census from Equitius as the son of Gracchus, when Metellus affirmed that Ti. Gracchus had had only three sons, of whom one, serving campaigns in Sardinia, another, an infant, at Praeneste, and a third, born after his father's death, at Rome, had died, and that the unknown baseness ought not to be inserted into a most distinguished family; while meanwhile the improvident rashness of the excited multitude—O for the shamelessness and audacity!—aimed at the consulship and the censorship and harassed its own leading men with every kind of insolence.

7.3. The former sedition was only frenzied; this other was even bloody: for the people, when nine tribunes had already been created and there remained two candidates for one place, first by violence drove Nunnius, the competitor of Saturninus, into a private house, then, having dragged him out, slew him, so that by the slaughter of a most blameless citizen the means of obtaining power might be given to a most foul man.

7.4. The consternation of creditors too blazed up in an intolerable manner against the life of Sempronius Asellio, the city praetor. Him, because he had undertaken the cause of debtors, the creditors, stirred up by L. Cassius, tribune of the plebs, while he was making a sacrifice before the temple of Concord, forced to flee from the very altars beyond the forum, and, as he hid in a little shop, tore to pieces, still in his praetextate toga.

7M.1. The condition of the forum is to be detested; but if you look to the camp, an equally great indignation will arise. When the province of Asia had been decreed to C. Marius, as a private citizen, by the Sulpician law, that he might wage war against Mithridates, the soldiers butchered Gratidius, the legate sent by him to the consul L. Sulla for the purpose of receiving the legions—indignant beyond doubt because they were being forced to pass over from the highest command to one who was in no office. But who could endure a soldier correcting the decrees of the plebs by the death of a legate?

7M.2. That was an army so violent against a proconsul; this other was against a consul: for Q. Pompeius, Sulla's colleague, who by the order of the senate had dared to make for the army of Cn. Pompeius, which he had for some time held against the will of the state, the soldiers, corrupted by the enticements of the ambitious leader, attacked as he was beginning to sacrifice and slew like a victim; and so great a crime, the senate-house confessing that it yielded to the camp, went unavenged.

7M.3. That army too was wickedly violent which deprived of life C. Carbo, the brother of Carbo three times consul, because, on account of the civil wars, he had tried to bind more strictly and rigidly a military discipline that had been relaxed, and thought it better to be defiled by the greatest crime than to change depraved and foul morals.

8.pr. ON RASHNESS The impulses of rashness too are sudden and vehement, by whose blows the minds of men, shaken, are able neither to discern their own perils nor to follow the deeds of others with a just estimation.

8.1. How rashly did the elder Africanus cross from Spain to Syphax with two quinqueremes, about to deposit his own safety and that of his country alike in the faithless heart of a single Numidian! And so by a slight moment the chance of the greatest matter wavered, whether Syphax should become the slayer or the captor of Scipio.

8.2. For the doubtful attempt of C. Caesar, although it was protected by the care of the heavenly powers, can yet scarcely be related without a shudder of the mind: since indeed, impatient of the too slow crossing of his legions from Brundisium to Apollonia, having gone out from a banquet under the pretence of ill health, his majesty concealed in a slave's garment, he boarded a little boat and made from the river Aoüs for the jaws of the Adriatic sea in a savage storm, and at once, the ship being ordered to be steered into the deep, much and long tossed by contrary waves, at last yielded to necessity.

8.3. Come now, how execrable was that rashness of soldiers! For it brought it about that A. Albinus, an outstanding citizen in nobility, character, and the completion of all honours, was overwhelmed with stones in the camp by the army on account of false and empty suspicions; and—what admits of no addition of indignation—when the leader begged and beseeched, the power of pleading his cause was denied him by the soldiers.

8e.1. And so I wonder the less that with the savage and cruel mind of Hannibal there was no place for the defence of an innocent helmsman, whom, as he sought Africa again from Petilia with his fleet and was driven by the current into the strait, while he did not believe Italy and Sicily to be divided from each other by so small a space, he killed as though a treacherous director of his course, and afterwards, the truth being more carefully examined, then acquitted, when nothing further than the honour of a tomb could be given to his innocence. Therefore a statue on a high mound, watching over the narrow and surging sea, was set up as a token both of the memory of Pelorus and of Punic rashness to the eyes of those sailing this way and that.

8e.2. Now the city of the Athenians was rash even to the point of madness, which condemned to death by a capital judgment ten of its commanders all together—and indeed coming from a most beautiful victory—because they had not been able to commit to burial the bodies of the soldiers, the savagery of the sea preventing them, punishing necessity when it ought to have honoured virtue.

9.pr. ON ERROR Nearest to rashness is error, as equal to it in causing harm, so one that anyone would more easily pardon, because not of its own accord, but excited by empty appearances, it involves itself in fault. How widely it wanders in the breasts of men, if I should try to embrace, I should be liable to the very vice of which I speak. We shall therefore report a few of its slips.

9.1. C. Helvius Cinna, tribune of the plebs, making for his home from the funeral of C. Caesar, was torn to pieces by the hands of the people in place of Cornelius Cinna, against whom they thought they were raging, angry with him because, although he was a kinsman of Caesar, he had delivered before the rostra an impious speech against him when he was wickedly murdered; and they were driven on by that error so that they carried the head of Helvius, just as though it were Cornelius's, on a javelin around the pyre of Caesar—a pitiable expiation, of his own duty, of another's error!

9.2. For error forced C. Cassius to exact penalties from himself: for, amid that varied and, to the leaders themselves, unknown outcome of the battle of four armies at Philippi, the centurion Titinius, sent by him at night-time to spy out in what state the affairs of M. Brutus were, while he sought frequent departures from the road—because the obscurity of the darkness did not allow him to distinguish whether enemies or comrades met him—returned too slowly to Cassius. Cassius, thinking that he had been captured by the enemy and that all had fallen into their power, hastened to end his life, though both the enemy's camp had in turn been taken and the forces of Brutus were for the most part safe. But the virtue of Titinius is not to be blotted out by silence: he stuck for a little while with his eyes, stunned by the unexpected spectacle of his leader lying low; then, dissolved in tears, "Although unwittingly, commander," he said, "I was the cause of your death, yet, lest that very thing go unpunished, receive me as the companion of your fate"; and over his lifeless body he plunged his sword up to the hilt into his own throat, and, the blood of both mingled, a double victim lay—this of devotion, that of error.

9.3. But a false opinion brought, I do not know whether, the chief injury upon the household gods of Lars Tolumnius, king of the Veientines: for when in a lucky throw of the dice he had said in jest to his fellow player "Kill," and Roman envoys had by chance come in, his attendants, driven on by the error of the word, by killing the envoys transferred the game into a command.

10.pr. ON VENGEANCE The stings of vengeance, moreover, are as just as they are keen, which, when provoked, are roused, desiring to repay the grief received with grief; to embrace these more widely is not to the purpose.

10.1. The tribune of the plebs M. Flavius brought before the people a motion concerning the Tusculans, because he said that by their counsel the people of Velitrae and Privernum were going to rebel. When they had come to Rome as suppliants, with their wives and children, covered with squalor, it happened that, the rest of the tribes following the salutary opinion, the Pollian tribe alone judged that they ought to be publicly scourged and beheaded, and the unwarlike multitude sold under the crown. On which account the Papirian tribe, in which afterwards the Tusculans, received into citizenship, had very great influence, never made any candidate of the Pollian tribe a magistrate, lest any honour should reach by its votes that tribe which had taken away from them, as far as in it lay, their life and liberty.

10.2. That vengeance, indeed, both the senate and the consensus of all approved: for when Adrianus had harassed with a sordid command the Roman citizens who dwelt at Utica, and on that account had been burned alive by them, neither was any inquiry held in this city about the matter nor any complaint stirred.

10e.1. Famous in vengeance was each queen, both Tomyris, who ordered the severed head of Cyrus to be plunged into a skin filled with human blood, reproaching him with his insatiable thirst for gore and at the same time exacting the penalties for her son slain by him, and Berenice, who, bearing heavily the interception of her son by the treachery of Laodice, mounted her chariot armed, and, having pursued the royal attendant, the minister of the cruel work, named Caeneus, whom she had vainly aimed at with her spear, laid him low struck with a stone, and, her horses driven over his body, made her way through the hostile columns of the opposing party to the house in which she supposed the body of the slain boy to be hidden.

10e.2. Whether a sufficiently just vengeance carried off Jason the Thessalian, who was preparing to make war on the king of the Persians, is of ambiguous estimation: for when Taxillus the gymnasiarch had complained that he had been struck by certain young men, he permitted that he should either exact thirty drachmas from them or inflict ten blows on each. The men who had been beaten, when he used the latter penalty, killed Jason, estimating the measure of the punishment by the grief of the mind, not of the body. But by a small incitement of free-born shame the expectation of the greatest matter was undermined, since in the opinion of Greece as much was placed in the hope of Jason as in the achievement of Alexander.

11.pr. WICKED SAYINGS OR CRIMINAL DEEDS Now, inasmuch as we pursue both the good and also the bad of human life by setting in place the images of examples, let wicked sayings and criminal deeds be reported.

11.1. From whom, moreover, should I rather begin than from Tullia, because in time it is a most ancient, in conscience a wicked, in report a monster-like example? When she was being carried in a carriage and he who drove the team, the reins jerked, had halted, she demanded the cause of the sudden delay; and when she learned that the body of her slain father Servius Tullius lay there, she ordered the vehicle to be driven over it, so that she might come the more quickly into the embrace of his slayer Tarquinius. By so impious and so shameful a haste she defiled not only herself with eternal infamy, but even the very street with the surname of crime.

11.2. Less atrocious was the deed and saying of C. Fimbria; but if each be estimated in itself, both were most audacious. He had brought it about that Scaevola should be slain at the funeral of C. Marius. After he learned that he had recovered from his wound, he set about to accuse him before the people. Being asked then what he was going to say against a man to whom, for the holiness of his character, no worthy enough praise could be rendered, he replied that he would reproach him because he had received the weapon too sparingly into his body. A licence of frenzy to be accompanied with the groan of an ailing state!

11.3. L. Catiline, moreover, when in the senate M. Cicero said that a conflagration had been stirred up by him, said, "I perceive it, and indeed, if I cannot quench it with water, I will quench it with ruin." What else should we think of him than that, driven by the goads of conscience, he carried himself through as the defendant of a parricide he had begun?

11.4. The breast of the Magian Chilo too was distracted by madness, who with his own hand took away the life given to M. Marcellus by Caesar—an old friend and companion of Pompeian service, indignant that some of his friends were preferred to him by Marcellus: for, as Marcellus was making again for the city from Mytilene, whither he had betaken himself, he stabbed him with a dagger in the harbour of the Athenians, and at once made for the things that incited his frenzy, to butcher them—an enemy of friendship, an interceptor of a divine benefit, a bitter blot upon the public religion, as far as it concerned the recovery of the safety of a most distinguished citizen.

11.5. This cruelty, to which nothing seems able to be added, C. Toranius surpassed by the atrocity of a parricide: for, having followed the party of the triumvirs, he disclosed to the centurions who pursued him the hiding-place, the age, and the bodily marks by which he could be recognized, of his proscribed father, a praetorian and distinguished man. The old man, anxious rather about the life and advancement of his son than about his own remaining breath, began to ask them whether he was safe and whether he satisfied the commanders. One of them said, "By that man whom you so greatly love, pointed out, you will be killed by our service, on your son's information"; and at once he ran his sword through his breast. And so the unhappy man collapsed, more wretched in the author of his murder than in the murder itself.

11.6. The bitterness of this fate L. Villius Annalis drew by lot, who, going down into the Campus to the quaestorian elections of his son, when he learned that he had been proscribed, fled to his client. But that he might not be safe by his loyalty was effected by the crime of the wicked youth, since indeed, leading the soldiers along the very footsteps of his father, he set him before them to be killed in his own sight—twice a parricide, first by counsel, again by spectacle.

11.7. Not even Vettius Salassus, when proscribed, had too little a bitter end. Him, hidden, did his wife hand over to be killed—what shall I say, or did she slay him herself? For how much lighter is a crime from which only the hand is absent?

11e.1. But that deed, because it is foreign, will be related with a more tranquil feeling. When Scipio Africanus was celebrating the memory of his father and uncle with a gladiatorial show at New Carthage, two sons of a king, whose father had recently died, came forth into the arena and promised that they would there fight it out about the kingdom, so that they might make that spectacle more illustrious by their combat. When Scipio had advised them to prefer to decide by words rather than by the sword which of them ought to reign, and the elder was now obeying his counsel, the younger, relying on the strength of his body, persisted in his madness, and, the contest joined, the more obstinate impiety was punished with death by the judgment of fortune.

11e.2. Mithridates, moreover, was much more criminal, who waged war about dominion not with his brother over the paternal kingdom, but with his very father. He who in it either found any men as helpers or dared to invoke the gods is held in especial wonder.

11e.3. Although why should we wonder at this as something unusual to those peoples, when Sariaster against his father Tigranes, king of Armenia, so agreed with his friends that they all let blood from their right hands and drank it in turn? I should scarcely endure a man making a covenant by so bloody a conspiracy for the safety of a parent.

11e.4. But why do I pursue these things or why do I dwell on them, when I see all crimes surpassed by the mere thought of a single parricide? With every impulse of mind, therefore, with all the strength of indignation, I am carried, by a feeling more pious than strong, to tear it to pieces: for who, when the loyalty of friendship was extinguished, could drive with words sufficiently effective into the depth of deserved execration one who tried to bury the human race in bloody darkness? You, of course, more savage than the monstrousness of maddened barbarism, were able to seize the reins of the Roman empire, which our prince and parent holds with his salutary right hand? Or, with you master of your frenzy, would the world have remained in its condition? The city captured by the Gauls, and the river Cremera defiled by the slaughter of three hundred men of a famous family, and the day of the Allia, and the Scipios crushed in Spain, and the lake Trasimene, and Cannae, and the frenzies of the civil wars dripping with domestic blood, you wished to bring back by the mad designs of your frenzy, and to surpass. But the eyes of the gods kept watch, the stars retained their vigour, the altars, the sacred couches, the temples were walled about by a present divine power, and nothing which ought to have kept watch over the august head and the country permitted itself torpor; and above all, the author and guardian of our safety, lest his most excellent deserts should collapse in the ruin of the whole world, provided by divine counsel. And so peace stands, the laws are strong, the sincere course of private and public duty is preserved. But he who, the bonds of friendship being violated, tried to overthrow these things, crushed with all his stock by the might of the Roman people, pays even among the shades below—if indeed he was received there—the punishments he deserves.

12.pr. ON DEATHS NOT COMMON The condition of human life, moreover, is contained chiefly in its first and last day, because it makes the greatest difference under what auspices it is begun and with what end it is closed; and therefore we judge that man only to have been happy to whom it fell both to receive the light prosperously and to render it back peacefully. The course of the middle time, as fortune has guided the helm, is passed through now with a harsh, now with a tranquil motion, always less than our hope, while it is both eagerly stretched out by our prayers and generally consumed without reason. For even if you wish to use it well, you will make even a small life most ample, by surpassing the number of years by the multitude of your works: otherwise, what is the point of rejoicing in an inert delay, if you spin out life rather than approve it? But, not to wander further, I shall make mention of those who were carried off by a kind of death not common.

12.1. Tullus Hostilius, struck by a thunderbolt, was burned up with his whole house. A singular lot of fate, by which it happened that the pillar of the city, snatched away in the very city, could not be honoured by his fellow citizens even with the last honour of a funeral, reduced by a heavenly flame to this condition, that he had the same household gods for both palace and pyre and tomb.

12.2. It is scarcely like the truth that in snatching away the breath joy could have the same power as a thunderbolt; and yet the same had power. For, the disaster which had befallen at the lake Trasimene being announced, one mother, made to meet her safe son at the very gate, expired in his embrace; another, when she sat at home in mourning at a false report of her son's death, was struck lifeless at the first sight of his return. An unusual kind of mischance! Those whom grief had not extinguished, joy consumed. But I wonder the less, because they were women.

12.3. M'. Iuventius Thalna, consul, colleague of Ti. Gracchus consul for the second time, when in Corsica, which he had recently subdued, he was sacrificing, having received a letter announcing that supplications had been decreed to him by the senate, reading it with intent mind, a mist arising, collapsed before the little altar and lay dead on the ground. What else should we think than that he was killed by too great joy? Lo, to whom Numantia or Carthage might be handed over to be destroyed!

12.4. Of somewhat greater spirit was the leader Q. Catulus, given by the senate as a sharer in the Cimbrian triumph to C. Marius, but of a more violent end: for, ordered to die afterwards by this same Marius on account of civil dissensions, he killed himself shut up in a chamber smeared with fresh lime and heated thoroughly by much fire. His . . . so dire a necessity became the greatest blush of Marian glory.

12.5. At which storm of the state L. Cornelius Merula too, consular and flamen Dialis, lest he should be a mockery to most insolent conquerors, in the sanctuary of Jupiter, his veins cut, escaped the announcement of an insulting death, and the most ancient hearth was wet with the blood of its own priest.

12.6. Keen too and spirited was the departure from life of Herennius the Sicilian, whom C. Gracchus had used both as a soothsayer and as a friend: for when on that account he was being led to prison, dashing his head against its doorpost, he fell at the very entrance of disgrace and gave up his breath, by one step nearer than public punishment and the hand of the executioner.

12.7. By a like impulse of death, C. Licinius Macer, a praetorian man, the father of Calvus, a defendant on a charge of extortion, while the votes were being counted, climbed up to a balcony. Since indeed, when he had seen M. Cicero, who was convening that court, laying down his praetextate toga, he sent to him to say that he had perished not as a condemned man but as a defendant, and that his goods could not be subjected to the spear; and at once, with the handkerchief which he happened to have in his hand stuffed into his mouth and throat, his breath shut in, he forestalled his punishment by death. On learning this, Cicero pronounced nothing about him. Therefore an orator of illustrious genius was rescued both from the poverty of his property and from the charge of a domestic condemnation by an unusual kind of his father's fate.

12.8. The death of this man was brave; those of the following were most ridiculous: for Cornelius Gallus, a praetorian, and T. Etereius, a Roman knight, were carried off during the use of love. Although, to what end is it to scoff at the fates of those whom not their own lust but the principle of human frailty carried off? For, the end of our life being exposed to various and hidden causes, sometimes things that are undeserving occupy the title of the supreme fate, since they rather coincide with the time of death than themselves summon death.

12e.1. There are also foreign deaths worthy of note. Such, before all, was that of Comas, who, they say, was the brother of Cleon, the greatest leader of the brigands: for, led before the consul P. Rupilius after Henna, which the robbers had held, had been reduced into our power, when he was being questioned about the strength and attempts of the fugitives, taking time to collect himself, he covered his head, and, leaning on his knees, with his breath compressed, amid the very hands of his guards and in the sight of the highest command, rested in the security he had longed for. Let the wretched torment themselves for whom to be extinguished is more useful than to survive, in trembling and anxious counsel seeking by what means they may go forth from life: let them sharpen the sword, temper poisons, grasp nooses, look around at vast heights, as though great apparatus or an exquisite contrivance were needed for the partnership of body and mind, cohering by a weak bond, to be sundered. None of these did Comas use, but his soul, shut up within his breast, found its own end: for, in truth, that good is not to be retained with too great zeal, whose perishable possession could be so easily shaken loose and slip away by so light a breath of violence.

12e.2. But the departure of the poet Aeschylus, as it was not voluntary, so on account of the novelty of the mischance is to be related. In Sicily, having gone out beyond the walls of the city in which he was staying, he sat down in a sunny place. Over him an eagle bearing a tortoise, deceived by the brightness of his head—for it was bare of hair—dashed it against him as though against a stone, so that, the shell broken, it might feed on the flesh; and by that blow the source and origin of the stronger tragedy was extinguished.

12e.3. The cause of Homer's death too is reported to have been not common, who in the island of Ios, because he could not solve a question put by fishermen, is believed to have been consumed by grief.

12e.4. But Euripides was ended somewhat more atrociously: for, making his way home from a dinner of king Archelaus in Macedonia to his host's house, he died torn by the bites of dogs—a cruelty of fate not owed to so great a genius.

12e.5. Just as those departures of illustrious poets were most unworthy both of their characters and of their works, so was Sophocles, now in extreme old age, when he had submitted a tragedy to the contest, long anxious at the doubtful outcome of the votes, yet at last victor by a single vote, had joy as the cause of his death.

12e.6. Philemon, moreover, the force of immoderate laughter carried off. Figs prepared for him and placed in his sight, an ass began to consume; he called out to a boy to drive it away. When the boy came up after all had now been eaten, "Since," he said, "you were so slow, give the ass now some unmixed wine"; and at once, accompanying the wit of his saying with frequent gasps of guffaws, he burdened his aged throat with the joltings of his breath.

12e.7. But Pindar, when in the gymnasium, his head placed upon the lap of a boy in whom he uniquely delighted, he had given himself to rest, was not known to have died before, when the gymnasiarch wished to close that place, he was in vain roused. To him indeed I should believe were granted, by the same kindness of the gods, both so great poetic eloquence and so peaceful an end of life.

12e.8. As to Anacreon too, whom, having passed the usual measure of human life, while he was nourishing the slender and feeble remains of his strength with the juice of dried grapes, a too obstinate delay of a single seed in his parched throat carried off.

12e.9. I shall join those whom both their purpose and their end made alike. Milo of Croton, when, making a journey, he had seen an oak split in a field by wedges driven in, relying on his strength approached it, and, inserting his hands, tried to tear it apart. The tree, the wedges being shaken out and it recalled to its own nature, compressed them, and offered him, with so many gymnastic palms, to be torn to pieces by wild beasts.

12e.10. Likewise the athlete Polydamas, forced by a storm to enter a cave, when, by the too great and sudden rush of water, it was shaken and falling, while his other companions went out in flight from the peril, alone remained, as though about to sustain on his own shoulders the mass of the whole ruin; but, overpowered by a weight more powerful than any human body, he had as the sepulchre of his senseless deed the hiding-place he had sought from the rain. These men can furnish a lesson that by too great strength of limbs the vigour of the mind is dulled, as though, nature refusing the bestowal of both goods, it were above mortal felicity for the same man to be both most strong and most wise.

13.pr. ON THE DESIRE OF LIFE But because we have touched in our discourse on departures from life both chance and manly, and some even rash, let us now subject to our estimation the nerveless and effeminate, so that by the very comparison it may be clear how much braver, and even wiser, the desire of death sometimes is than that of life.

13.1. M'. Aquilius, when he could have been extinguished gloriously, preferred to serve Mithridates basely. Whom would not someone deservedly call more worthy of a Pontic punishment than of a Roman command, since he brought it about that a private disgrace became a public blush?

13.2. Cn. Carbo too is of great shame to the Latin annals. In his third consulship, led to punishment in Sicily by order of Pompey, he begged of the soldiers humbly and tearfully that he might be allowed to relieve his bowels before he expired, so that he might enjoy the use of the most wretched light a little longer, drawing out his delay so far that his head was cut off while he sat in a filthy place. The very words of one relating so great a disgrace struggle with themselves, neither friendly to silence, because it does not deserve to be hidden, nor familiar to relation, because they are loathsome to tell.

13.3. What of D. Brutus—with how great dishonour did he buy a scanty and unhappy moment of life! Who, caught by Furius, whom Antonius had sent to kill him, not only withdrew his neck from the sword, but even, being advised to offer it more steadfastly, swore in these very words, "So may I live, I will offer it." O wretched delaying of fate! O stupid faith in swearing! But you, immoderate sweetness of retaining the breath, suggest these frenzies, overcoming the measure of sound reason, which has taught us to love life, not to fear death.

13e.1. The same sweetness forced king Xerxes to pour out tears for the armed youth of all Asia, because within a hundred years it would die. He seems to me to have bewailed in appearance another's condition, in truth his own—happier in the greatness of his wealth than in any deeper feeling of mind: for who of moderate prudence would have wept that he was born mortal?

13e.2. I shall now report those who, holding some men suspected, sought a more exquisite guard of themselves: nor shall I begin from the most wretched, but from him who is believed to have been among the few most happy. King Masinissa, placing little trust in the breasts of men, walled his safety about with a guard of dogs. To what purpose so widely-extending an empire? To what so great a number of children? To what, finally, the friendship of Rome bound by so close a goodwill, if for guarding this he thought nothing stronger than the bark and bite of a dog?

13e.3. Than this king more unhappy was Alexander, whose heart on this side love, on that fear, tormented: for when he was held by an infinite ardour for his wife Thebe, coming to her from his feasts into the bedroom, he ordered a barbarian pricked with Thracian marks, with drawn sword, to go before him, nor did he commit himself to the same bed before he had been carefully searched by his guards. A punishment composed by an angry divine power, to be able to command neither lust nor fear. Of which fear the same was both the cause and the end: for Thebe, her anger roused by his concubinage, killed Alexander.

13e.4. Come now, Dionysius, tyrant of the Syracusans—how long a tale is there of this torment! Who carried through a domination of thirty-eight years in this manner. His friends removed, in their place he substituted men of the most ferocious nations, and most strong slaves chosen from the households of the wealthy, to whom he might commit his sides. Through fear of barbers too he taught his daughters to shave him. And of these very women, after they approached an adult age, not daring to entrust the steel to their hands, he established that they should singe his beard and hair with the glowing shells of walnuts. Nor did he act a less safe husband than father: for, bound at the same time by marriages to two women, Aristomache of Syracuse and Doris of Locri, he never sought the embrace of either except after she had been searched, and even surrounded his bedroom couch, just as a camp, with a broad ditch, into which he received himself by a wooden bridge, when he had himself carefully bolted with an inner bar the door of the bedroom, closed on the outside by the guards.

14.pr. ON RESEMBLANCE OF FORM About the resemblance of the face and of the whole body men endowed with deeper learning dispute more subtly, and some of them are of this opinion, that they think it corresponds to origin and to the connection of blood, and they draw no small argument from the other animals, which are generally born like their begetters. Others deny that this is a fixed law of nature, but that the appearances of mortals are assigned as the chance lot of conception offered them, and that therefore for the most part from handsome parents deformed and from robust ones weak offspring are produced. Therefore, since this question is in doubt, we shall report a few examples of resemblance observed among strangers.

14.1. To Pompey the Great, Vibius, of free-born stock, and Publicius, a freedman, were so similar that, their condition exchanged, both Pompey could be saluted in them and they in Pompey. Certainly, wherever either Vibius or Publicius had come, they turned the faces of men toward themselves, each man noting the appearance of a most eminent citizen in persons of middling rank.

14.2. This chance mockery indeed penetrated to him as though hereditary: for his father too seemed so similar to Menogenes his cook that a man both most powerful in arms and fierce in spirit could not avail to repel from himself that sordid name.

14.3. But Cornelius Scipio, a young man of outstanding nobility, when he abounded in very many and most distinguished surnames of his family, was branded in the common talk with the servile appellation of Serapio, because he was exceedingly like a victimarius of this name. Nor did either the uprightness of his character or the regard for so many ancestral images help him not to be spattered with this insult.

14.4. A most well-born college of the consulship was that of Lentulus and Metellus. Both were on the stage all but gazed at on account of their resemblance to actors. But the one drew the surname Spinther from a certain player of second parts; the other, had he not received that of Nepos from his character, would have had that of Pamphilus, a player of third parts, to whom he was reported to be most similar.

14.5. But M. Messala, consular and censorian, was forced to receive the name of Menogenes, and Curio, abounding in all honours, that of Burbuleius—the former on account of the look of his face, the latter on account of a like movement of his body—both the name of a stage-player. Let these things about our own people be enough, since they are both of distinguished persons and are made famous by no obscure renown.

14e.1. To king Antiochus one of his peers, himself too of royal stock, named Artemo, is reported to have been exceedingly similar. Him Laodice, the wife of Antiochus, when she had killed her husband, for the sake of disguising her crime laid on a couch just as though it were the sick king himself, and, the whole people being admitted, deceived them by his speech and his very similar countenance; and men believed that by the dying Antiochus Laodice and her sons were being commended to them.

14e.2. But Hybreas of Mylasa, an orator of copious and excited eloquence, the eyes of all Asia all but assigned as a brother-german to the slave of a man of Cyme who collected the scrapings of the gymnasium: so matched were they in the outlines of the face and of all the limbs.

14e.3. But that man, who in Sicily is agreed to have been exceedingly like the governor of the province, was of a saucy spirit: for, when the proconsul said that he wondered why he was so like himself, since his father had never gone to that province, "But mine," he said, "went to Rome": for, the chastity of his own mother having been provoked in jest, he avenged it by throwing back the suspicion in turn upon the proconsul's mother, more boldly than was fitting for one subject to the rods and axes.

15.pr. ON THOSE WHO, BORN IN THE LOWEST PLACE, TRIED BY A LIE TO INSERT THEMSELVES INTO THE MOST DISTINGUISHED FAMILIES But this rashness is tolerable and perilous to one man only. The kind of shamelessness that follows is neither to be endured in any way and is widely perilous both privately and also publicly.

15.1. For, to pass over Equitius, a monster coming from Firmum in Picenum, already related in the earlier part of this book, whose evident lie in embracing Ti. Gracchus as his father was, by the turbulent error of the crowd, walled about with the most ample power of the tribunate—Herophilus, an eye doctor, by claiming C. Marius, seven times consul, as his grandfather, brought it about that several colonies of veterans and splendid municipalities and almost all the guilds adopted him as their patron. Nay, even when C. Caesar had admitted the people into his gardens, the young Cn. Pompeius having been crushed in Spain, Herophilus, in the next intercolumniation, was saluted with an almost equal zeal of crowding. And unless the divine strength of Caesar had withstood this blush-worthy storm, the state would have received a similar wound to that which it had received in Equitius. But, relegated beyond Italy by Caesar's decree, after he was received into heaven, he returned to the city and brought himself to form a plan of killing the senate. On which charge, slain by order of the fathers, he paid in prison the late penalties of a spirit ready for the contriving of every crime.

15.2. Not even the most excellent divine power of the deified Augustus, even now ruling the earth, was untried by this kind of injury. There arose one who dared to feign that he was born from the womb of his most distinguished and most holy sister Octavia, and, on account of the great weakness of his body, was retained by the man to whom he had been given as if his own son, with the man's own son substituted in his place—saying this, of course, so that at the same time the most holy household gods should be robbed of the memory of their true blood and stained by the sordid contagion of the false. But while with sails full of shamelessness he was borne to the highest step of audacity, by the command of Augustus he was fastened to the oar of a public trireme.

15.3. There was found too one who said that he was the son of Q. Sertorius, whom his wife could be compelled by no force to acknowledge.

15.4. What of Trebellius Calca—how assertively did he carry himself as Clodius! And indeed, while he contended about his goods, he came down into the court of the Hundred Men so favourably that consternation of the people scarcely left any place for just and fair verdicts. Nevertheless in that inquiry the conscientiousness of the judges yielded neither to the calumny of the claimant nor to the violence of the plebs.

15.5. Much bolder was that man who, when Cornelius Sulla was master of affairs, burst into the house of Cn. Asinius Dio and drove his son from the paternal household gods, vociferating that not he, but himself, had been begotten by Dio. But after Caesarian equity restored the state from Sullan violence, the helm of the Roman empire being held by a juster prince, he gave up his breath in public custody.

15e.1. Under the same guardian of the state, in a like lie, a woman's rashness was suppressed at Milan. Since indeed, when a certain woman, as though it had been falsely believed that Rubria had perished in a fire, tried to insert herself into goods in no way pertaining to her, and there were not wanting to her either the splendid witnesses of that region or the favour of the Augustan cohort, on account of the unconquerable steadfastness of Caesar she went off frustrated of her wicked design.

15e.2. The same guardian of the state forced a certain barbarian aiming at the kingdom of Cappadocia on account of his outstanding resemblance, as though he were Ariarathes—whom it was clearer than daylight had been killed by M. Antonius—although his head, propped up by the credulous support of almost all the cities and peoples of the East, madly threatened the empire, to undergo a just punishment.