Dios Rome, Vol. 6 | Page 3

clamorous objections. Therefore Antoninus,
out of respect and fear for them, met the party, and, shielding Cilo with
his cavalry cloak,--he was wearing military garb,--cried out: "Insult not

my father! Strike not my nurse!" The tribune charged with slaying him
and the soldiers in his contingent lost their lives, nominally for making
plots but really for not having killed their victim.
[Sidenote:--5--] [But Antoninus was so anxious to appear to love Cilo
that he declared: "Those who have plotted against him have plotted
against me." Commended for this by the bystanders, he proceeded:
"Call me neither Hercules nor the name of any other god;" not that he
was unwilling to be termed a god, but because he wished to do nothing
worthy of a god. He was naturally capricious in all matters, and would
bestow great honors upon people and then suddenly disgrace them,
quite without reason. He would save those who least deserved it and
punish those whom one would never have expected.
Julianus Asper was a man by no means contemptible, on account of his
education and good sense as well. He exalted him, together with his
sons, and after Asper had walked the streets surrounded by I don't
know how many fasces he without warning insulted him outrageously
and dismissed him to his native place [Footnote: I.e., Tusculum.] with
abuse and in mighty trepidation. Lætus, too, he would have disgraced
or even killed, had this man not been extremely sick. So the emperor
before the soldiers called his sickness "wicked," because it did not
allow him to display wickedness in one more case.
Again he made way with Thrasea Priscus, a person second to none in
family or intelligence.
Many others also, previously friends of his, he put to death.]
[Sidenote:--6--]
"Nay, I could not recite nor give the names all over"
[Footnote: From Homer's Iliad, II, verse 488.] of the distinguished men
whom he killed without any right. Dio, because the slain were very
well known in those days, even makes a list of them. For me it suffices
to say that he crushed the life out of everybody he chose, without
exception,
"whether the man was guilty or whether he was not ";
[Footnote: From Homer's Iliad, XV, verse 137.] and that he simply
mutilated Rome, by rendering it bereft of excellent men. [Antoninus
was allied to three races. And he possessed not a single one of their
good points, but included in himself all their vices. The lightness, the
cowardice, and recklessness of Gaul were his, the roughness and

cruelty of Africa, the abominations of Syria (whence he was on his
mother's side).] Veering from slaughter to sports, he pursued his
murderous course no less in the latter. Of course one would pay no
attention to an elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, and hippotigris being killed
in the theatre, but he took equal pleasure in having gladiators shed the
greatest amount of one another's blood. One of them, Bato, he forced to
fight three successive men on the same day, and then, when Bato met
death at the hands of the last, he honored him with a conspicuous
burial.
[Sidenote:--7--] He had Alexander on the brain to such an extent that he
used certain weapons and cups which purported to have belonged to the
great conqueror, and furthermore he set up many representations of him
both among the legions and in Rome itself. He organized a phalanx,
sixteen thousand men, of Macedonians alone, named it "Alexander's
phalanx," and equipped it with the arms which warriors had used in his
day. These were: a helmet of raw oxhide, a three-ply linen breastplate,
a bronze shield, long pike, short spear, high boots, sword. Not even this,
however, satisfied him, but he called his hero "The Eastern Augustus."
Once he wrote to the senate that Alexander had come on earth again in,
the body of the Augustus, [Footnote: Antoninus meant himself.] so that
when he had finished his own brief existence he might enjoy a larger
life in the emperor's person. The so-called Aristotelian philosophers he
hated bitterly, wishing even to burn their books, and he abolished the
common messes they had in Alexandria and all the other privileges
they enjoyed: his grievance, as stated, was the tradition that Aristotle
had been an accomplice in the death of Alexander.
This was the way he behaved in those matters. And, by Jupiter, he took
around with him numbers of elephants, that in this respect, too, he
might seem to be imitating Alexander, or rather, perhaps, Dionysus.
[Sidenote:--8--] On Alexander's account he was fond of all the
Macedonians. Once after praising a Macedonian tribune because the
latter had shown agility in jumping upon his horse, he enquired of him
first: "From what country are you?" Then, learning that he was a
Macedonian, he