The Panegyric on Theodosius

I. If there was ever anyone, august Emperor, who trembled in advance at the prospect of speaking in your presence, I sense that I am certainly that man, and I see that I can appear so to those who share in your counsel. For since it has always been fitting that you be praised beyond all former princes, and now further beyond what you have been extolled at other times, it should be fitting that you be celebrated in speech in that city whose liberty you asserted in arms, and whose dignity you have increased in the toga—by what means, I ask, shall I be able through my oration to match the majesty of you both, especially at this time, when both have so grown together that you have not yet been greater, nor she more fortunate?

To this is added the audience of the senate, for whom, since it is difficult for it to be satisfied concerning you in proportion to the love with which it is imbued toward you, it is even more difficult, by reason of its inborn and hereditary faculty of speaking, not to feel disdain at this rough and uncultivated harshness of transalpine speech, especially since it might seem an absurd and perverse boastfulness to display before them an eloquence which, flowing from their own source, has been brought by a late channel down to our own use. Reflecting on these things indeed, I am so troubled that I think not only those present today whom I behold are here, but that Catos themselves, and Tullys, and Hortensii stand by and confront me as I am about to speak, and I think all those orators are present who hear me in their descendants. Thus, beset by manifold fear, as though I did not have enough to fear in what I see, I see what I should fear.

II. What then? Has some new dread and unexpected trepidation seized me at the very moment of speaking? Nay rather, all these waves by which I am tossed on either side have long since been foreseen and anticipated by me. But when, in admiration of your virtues, I had hastened from the farthest recess of the Gauls, where the shore of the Ocean receives the setting sun, and where, as the lands fail, the kindred element mingles with them, in order to gaze upon you and adore you, so that I might also take in with my sight the good things I had received by hearing—I feared, I confess, to mar the duty of this labor by silence itself. Thus, while I interpret my boldness as a mark of obedience, while I do not think it fitting that joy and silence should meet in the same man, I have joined two very different things: fear and rashness. Indeed, this too impelled me to speak, that nothing compelled me to say it.

For no longer does a forced eulogy, nor words wrung out by fear, redeem the danger of silence. Let that gloomy necessity of a servile eloquence be gone and departed, when a savage master, courting with windy popularity every breeze of public applause, was tickled by lying flattery, when men gave thanks while grieving, and it was called an accusation of tyranny not to have praised the tyrant. Now there is equal freedom to speak and to be silent; and it is as safe to have kept silence about the prince as it is easy to praise him. It is pleasing, then, to test in speech this security restored by return from exile; it is pleasing, I say, because no emperor deserves more to be praised than one for whom it is less necessary.

III. Of you, then, the beginning of this discourse shall be that day, the augur of public felicity, which first inaugurated you into the empire. For as those who perform divine rites turn their faces toward that quarter of the sky where the light begins, so I, about to discharge the vows of words which I had long ago undertaken, shall seize upon that time in my oration when the light of Rome began. The commonwealth lay sick with innumerable ills, or rather, I should say, lifeless, the barbarian nations having overflowed upon the Roman name as by a kind of deluge. But I will spare myself the task of recounting the causes, and of offending a now appeased populace. For since the remembrance of calamities is by its own nature vivid, I fear also lest I dim this present light of joys by the mention of sorrows.

I shall do, therefore, what I have often seen excellent physicians do: I will touch with a hovering hand the scars of other wounds, once the skin has drawn itself together in health, content to have perceived, and to have asked one and all, whether, when it was clear to everyone that a remedy must be applied to the exhausted state by bringing forward some such man to the helm of public affairs, one who might guard the age of one emperor and assist the labor of the other, we could have wished for a prince of this kind. Let us then suppose the whole matter still open, and let us imagine that in a certain assembly of the whole world it is being asked who that man should be who ought to take up so great a burden, and receive the tottering fates of the Roman state.

Would he not be chosen by the votes of all men, tribe by tribe and century by century, who had a fortunate fatherland, an illustrious house, a divine form, an age unimpaired, and experience of both military and civil affairs?

IV. Let us then pursue all these points in order from the beginning proposed, and it will surely be established that he was declared prince who both ought to have been chosen by all, and out of all. For first, your mother is Spain, a land more fortunate than all other lands, upon which the supreme fashioner of things bestowed a more lavish care in cultivating and enriching it than upon other nations. She, subject neither to the heats of the south nor to the colds of the north, is warmed by the temperate balance of both poles. She, crowned on this side by the Pyrenean mountains, on that by the surges of the Ocean, and elsewhere by the shores of the Tyrrhenian sea, is enclosed, by the ingenuity of a skillful nature, as it were another world. Add so many distinguished cities, add all things cultivated and uncultivated, whether full of fruits or of flocks; add the wealth of gold-bearing rivers, add the mines of gleaming gems.

I know that the fables of poets, devised to soothe the ears, have attributed some marvels to certain nations; and granting these to be true, they are but single instances. Nor do I now sift out the truth. Let it be, as is written, that Gargarus rejoices in a rich crop of wheat, let Mevania be remembered for its cattle, let Campania be reckoned by Mount Gaurus, let Lydia be praised for the river Pactolus—provided that whatever is praised anywhere rises up in Spain alone. She bears the hardiest soldiers, she the most experienced generals, she the most eloquent orators, she the most illustrious poets: she is the mother of judges, she of princes. She sent forth the famous Trajan, she thereafter Hadrian, to the empire; to her the empire owes you. Let the land of Crete yield to these lands, boasting of the cradle of the infant Jove, and Delos, crept upon by twin deities, and Thebes, ennobled by her foster child Hercules.

We cannot be sure that what we have heard is true; Spain has given a god, whom we see.

V. There was occasion for a just compensation, that I, who had said few things about the praises of your fatherland, should at least dwell more at length in extolling the virtues of your father; but what shall I do? I suffer a strange difficulty arising from abundance itself. What, I ask, shall I do? Shall I approach what the Rhine or the Vahalis have seen? Already the Ister, bloody with Sarmatian slaughter, will present itself to me. Shall I recount Batavia, worn down by battles on land? Saxony, consumed by naval wars, will offer itself instead. Shall I tell of the Scot driven back into his marshes? Every Alaman, and both Moors, driven into trackless wildernesses, will meet me at once. Since, then, the very throng impedes selection, it is better for so great a man's deeds to be gathered into a summary than thinned out by enumeration. Let it suffice to have said this one thing: that he existed by divine gift, in whom all the virtues flourished together which are singly praised in others.

If that custom had lived on into his age, by which Roman generals took an adoptive title from the names of subdued nations—Macedonicus, Creticus, Numantinus—would not fewer surnames today be read in the records of the annals than in the titles of your house; since he himself would be called Saxonicus, himself Sarmaticus, himself Alamannicus, and one single family would display as many triumphs as the whole commonwealth has enemies?

VI. But what need is there to send our curious diligence back into the past? Let us estimate your father, Emperor, from you. Nor is the conjecture difficult. For since there are two things that make generals famous—the highest virtue, and the highest fortune—it is easy to know with what virtue he who taught you was endowed, with what fortune he who begot you was endowed. O nobility worthy of an emperor, to be the son of him who ought to have been a prince, who was able to match this pinnacle of Roman majesty not only in fortitude and wisdom, but also in the beauty and dignity of his body! How this venerable form of yours, how well matched it is to its own fortune! How, seen far and wide, it commends the empire! So that it is plainly in doubt whether virtue instills you more into our minds, or your countenance into our eyes.

Not without reason, plainly, is the opinion of the wise, who, having inquired more subtly into the workings of natural causes, have brought noble concerns to bear upon heavenly mysteries—that the most august forms are believed to draw the greater part of their nature from heaven.

For whether that divine spirit, about to come into a body, first measures out for itself a worthy lodging; or whether, once it has come, it fashions the dwelling according to its own nature; or whether the one grows from the other, and, when they have joined themselves as equals, both become greater—I will spare myself the task of probing this heavenly mystery. Let that secret lie open to you alone, Emperor, shared only with God. This I will say, which it is lawful for a man to have understood and to have spoken: that he ought to be such a one as is adored by the nations; to whom, throughout the whole world, private as well as public vows are rendered; from whom the man about to sail seeks calm weather, the man about to travel abroad seeks a safe return, the man about to fight seeks a favorable omen.

VII. For some time now, as I see, you disdain this glory; but permit me to set among the parts of your praises those things which used to be praised alone in others. Your virtue merited the empire, but to your virtue your beauty added its vote. The one brought it about that you ought to become prince, the other that it was fitting. Or do we think that anything was overlooked in the declaration of your rule, when we see that even the reckoning of your very years was taken into account? Of this matter indeed our ancestors had such great care that not only in obtaining the highest magistracies, but even in seeking praetorships or aedileships, the age of the candidates was scrutinized, nor did anyone prevail so much by nobility, or favor, or wealth, as to seize hastened honors before the years prescribed by the electoral law. And not without reason. For even those who are destined to come into the adoption of virtue nevertheless stumble, though they do not fall, in that slippery period of adolescence.

Do I not speak of the most illustrious men of the Roman name, the Sullas, the Catuli, the Scipios, whom luxury claimed for itself for a while? Even though changed winds carried them back in the end to a better harbor, still the whirlwind of vices tossed them long, and age scarcely recovered them, shipwrecked and wave-tossed, from those errors in which they had been submerged. Well, then, did all things fit together, and to the countless other things that concurred, the years too joined their own vote, which alone, in a man of perfect goodness, possess the good of two ages together, the virtue of youth and the maturity of age. Perhaps you ought to have entered upon empire earlier, that you might have reigned the longer; but without danger of setting a precedent, care will be taken that you shall have lost nothing. What you have lost from the past is to be compensated by a longer life. It matters little when a thing began, which shall have no end.

VIII. Thus far, Emperor, let these gifts of the fates have been extolled in you; now let us advance our step to those things which you owe to yourself. For that former glory of yours in warfare, which you sought through so many trials of labors, is not to be ascribed to fortune. Fortune indeed can even be reproached on this score, that him whom she had destined for the scepter and the throne she never treated indulgently. But as strict fathers are harsher toward those sons whom they love more, so fortune trained you through many wars, and through the most difficult times of the commonwealth, while she was fitting you for empire. And before I come to those deeds which you performed in mature age, I will touch briefly upon that shared soldiery of yours with your divine father, the winters spent under canvas, the summers sweated out amid wars, the days and nights consumed in fighting or in keeping watch, the gravest battles fought on land and sea.

Not so enduring was the young Africanus in the first rudiments of soldiery under his father Paulus, nor did the boy Hannibal enter the Spanish tents with a like disposition, nor did Alexander, not yet the Great, fill the Philippic camps with a more certain hope of future virtues. Though ennobling antiquity, the amplifier of truth, has endowed these men with the greatest praise, nothing more has flattery bestowed upon them than that it should make widely known that in those years they followed the camps of kings or generals, in which you performed so many brave deeds that not only would Alexander, or Africanus, or Hannibal have wished to see them while they were still learning, but their parents and instructors would have wished to perform them while they were still teaching.

IX. How ever hidden are the counsels of fortune! Who, I ask, in the affairs of state at that time would have thought that that enemy of yours had been withdrawn from his military post to a life of rest? For in truth fortune, in adorning him who was to be emperor, wished for that reason that he be for a little while a private man, so that, since you already abounded to the full in the arts of war, you might, in a season of leisure, be rendered experienced in the practice of civil life. And I reckon your leisure ahead of the business of others. For it was not pleasant shores, nor retreats arranged for the changing seasons, that possessed you, but whether you gave your time to the country or to the towns, you increased alike your substance and your fame.

And in the cities indeed you won over men of every age and rank by these or those kindnesses, aiding the interests of your friends and the affairs of the absent by your diligence, counsel, and substance. Then again, if it pleased you to exchange the towns for the country, did you not, forgetful of city life, follow the pursuits of a farmer? I hear too, Emperor, and I believe, that you often imposed upon yourself certain labors, lest you should contract sluggishness of body, and that by some kind of work you always scoured away the rust of insidious leisure. So the rustic Curii, so the old Coruncanii, so the venerable names of the Fabricii, when truces had suspended wars, lived among their ploughs; and lest virtue should grow languid in repose, men who had triumphed, having laid their laurels in the lap of Capitoline Jove, turned to farming.

Hence it is that we have heard of fasces given to men while sowing, and of the palm-embroidered robes sent along with their curule chairs into the fields, of consular farmers and shepherds clad in the trabea, and of dictators dressed among the herds. But those men indeed were bound to labor by the narrowness of their household means, since their own suburban gardens, the steep Janiculum, and the acres confined within the pomerium had to be turned by the plowshare or the mattock, nor was it any wrong that the work should return to its masters when there were none to whom they might give orders. Want detracts from the praise of endurance: labor without necessity is of greater example.

X. Assuredly divine things rejoice in perpetual motion, and eternity is quickened by ceaseless activity, and whatever we men call labor is your very nature. As the unwearied revolution wheels the heavens, as the seas are restless with their tides, as the sun knows not how to stand still, so you, Emperor, have ever been kept in exercise by an unbroken succession of tasks returning as it were in a circle upon themselves. Scarcely had you succeeded to the roofs of Spain, when already you were sheltered under Sarmatian tents. Scarcely had you hung up your arms after service, when already, armed, you pressed upon the enemy. Scarcely had you seen your own Hiberus, when already you were stretching forth toward the Ister.

Not even then, when you had been advanced to a higher rank, and might only command, and share your leisure amid your labors, and, glory once won, enjoy honor as it were laid up in store—not even then did you relax your effort, but you were first, or among the first, to go through all the tasks of camp life: to stand before the standards, to keep watch by lot, to bear rampart-stakes, to seize ground in advance for battle, to go out on reconnaissance, to lay out the camp, to be first into battle, last to leave it, a general in counsel, a soldier in example: so that even then it could be understood that others fought for their emperor, but you for yourself. Yet this above all is wonderful, that while you did everything that you ought to command, you did nothing in order that you might command.

XI. Proof of this is that day, the author of the common good, on which, when you were called to undertake the commonwealth, you begged to be excused from the empire offered to you: nor did you do this merely for appearance's sake, that you might seem to be compelled, but earnestly, and for a long time, and as though you meant to obtain your request. For indeed there was no cause for pretense. For it was not the emperor alone who solicited you, both at home and as if putting you to the test, but publicly, and in the assembly, and in such a way that he could no longer do otherwise. So that, unless you had refused the empire with unfeigned sincerity, you might have desired it in safety.

At this point the commonwealth must needs be represented as expostulating with you, which, having fallen back from the height of hope into utter dread because of your delay, addressed you, surely, in some such words as these—though you alone could hear them: "Have the fates delayed me too little hitherto, Theodosius, that you too should attempt to increase the delays of the fates? Or do you not know that my substance is being consumed moment by moment? Do you not know that I am dwindling away for you and yours? Whatever the Goth wears away, whatever the Hun seizes, whatever the Alan carries off, Arcadius will one day miss it. I have lost the unhappy Pannonias; I mourn the death of Illyricum; I behold the destruction of the Gauls. The elder of the princes does not suffice for so great wars; the other, though he is destined one day to be most valiant, is as yet a child.

Do you hesitate to take up one who has collapsed, and, that you may delay nothing further, one who must be restored late? Is this the thanks you render me, that I desired you even in my happier days? When Nerva held me in tranquility, when Titus, the love of mankind, when Antoninus, memorable for piety, possessed me; when Augustus adorned me with walls, Hadrian imbued me with laws, Trajan enlarged me with boundaries, I still seemed to myself too little blessed, because I was not yours. What would you do for me if you were your own master? Behold, my lord entreats you, behold he who is still your lord entreats you, and he who could compel prefers to obtain by entreaty. An empire that is conferred by an emperor—it is no more permitted to you now to refuse it, than it was permitted before to desire it."

XII. You alone, therefore, Augustus—alone, I say, of all who have hitherto reigned—showed that you were worthy to be a prince before you became one. Others were set over the commonwealth by the purchased votes of legions, others by a vacant court, others by royal kinship: neither ambition, nor opportunity, nor nearness of blood made you emperor. For you were a stranger to the imperial family, and were adopted as a third, and were compelled against your will—against your will, I say. Hear this, you public parricides, who, forgetting your faith, have seized the scepters of your masters, and, bargaining for empire at the price of life, with peril no less than crime, have bought the royal name at the price of blood: sovereignty suffers rejection, and the sole "canvassing" of the candidate is that he not be declared!

Will posterity, when it comes, believe this one day, and will it grant us so glorious a credit, as to allow that in our very age there occurred what has found neither rival nor precedent in all the ages before or since? But whoever has come to know the principle and the reasoning of your life will unhesitatingly give credence, and will not doubt that you refused an empire which you meant to rule in just this manner. For it is they, they who eagerly desire kingdoms, whose delight is a life unbound by laws, whose cruelty requires the right and impunity to slay the uncondemned, whose greed to plunder others' goods, whose lust to defile what is honorable. What did it matter to you to become a prince, you who, even as emperor, were going to remain a private man? Unless perhaps today you are more lax in the observance of chastity, or less fearful of human blood, or more covetous of others' property.

You are the same man you were, and you are permitted, by yourself, only so much as was permitted by the laws. You experience the highest right as the power and abundance to bestow favors, not as security in wrongdoing. The principate has granted you but one thing: that we might all be certain that, even under other emperors, you lived by your own laws. For he who does nothing licentiously when he has the power, never truly wished to.

XIII. Indeed, as soon as you had proved yourself worthy of empire, not content merely to have yourself withdrawn far from vice, you added the task of correcting the vices of others; and this with such moderation, that you seemed rather to persuade to what was honorable than to compel it. And because, either through the long habituation of the East, or through the laxity of many emperors before you, so great a luxury had infected certain persons that the ingrained custom of extravagance seemed by no means likely readily to submit to remedy, lest anyone should think himself wronged, you wished the reform to begin with yourself, and by reducing palace expenses, and not only by rejecting excessive outlay but by adopting a barely sufficient allowance, you corrected willing subjects in a matter most difficult by nature. For who could take it ill to be restrained to the measure set by the prince himself?

Or grieve at being deprived of his private luxury, when he saw the emperor, master of all things, lord of lands and men, living sparingly and contentedly, easing his long fasts with modest, camp-style food? When besides the whole court was more austere than Spartan gymnasia, abounding in examples of labor, endurance, and frugality? That not a single man was found who dared demand for the royal larder fish from distant shores, a bird of foreign air, a fruit out of its season? XIV. For those delicate and dissolute men, such as the commonwealth has often produced, thought themselves ill-provided unless luxury had reversed the seasons, unless roses floated in winter cups, unless in summer they had chilled Falernian wine twice over with generous gems of ice. For their gluttony our world was too narrow.

For, valuing the dishes set before them not by flavor but by cost, they were satisfied only with those foods which the farthest East, or the Colchian dwelling outside the Roman empire, or seas notorious for shipwrecks had sent, foods which the perils of nature, reluctant and resisting as it were, had wrested away. Not to mention that fowlers were often enrolled in the provinces by a shameful levy, and that companies of huntsmen, led under the standards, served for banquets—do we not know that the courses, not merely the dinners, of a certain former emperor were once valued at a hundred million sesterces, drawing on the fortunes of equestrian estates? Your feasts, Emperor, more frugal than common tables, are furnished from the fruits proper to each place and season. Hence there has grown up, in rivalry among all, a shame of luxury and a cultivation of thrift, and, while the threats of law rested quiet, each man privately came to feel remorse for himself.

For so it is, so it is: a correction that is commanded exasperates men, while it is most winningly enjoined by example. XV. But while these things, and others in this manner, were shaping the character and institutions of men, I feel that nothing has contributed more effectually to the abandonment of vices and the adoption of virtues, than that you have always given yourself to such men as public imitation ought to aspire to—men who, as they might easily have been your compliant disciples, were equally to be sought as masters by others. To say nothing of those whom that very first day of your nascent reign presented to you, endowed with such virtues that they seemed chosen not merely in proportion to the number needed, but as the very flower of abundance—how many, and of what character, did you afterward select, to whom you entrusted the guardianship of provinces, to whom the supreme command of military affairs, to whom the secrets of your counsels?

Therefore, since this selection has been twofold, one by judgment, the other by chance, it is uncertain whether your wisdom or your fortune has sought out the better men, since you have both those accepted and those found to be such, that the former deserved to be retained, and the latter deserved to be chosen. XVI. Has any emperor ever thought that the cultivation of friendship deserved praise in a king? This was reckoned a lowly virtue, and it was doubtful whether it was judged a virtue at all, considered unworthy of palaces, fit only for private perils. Hence you would more easily find one who produced money from the treasury than one who produced loyalty from the heart. The best of them enriched, but did not also love; knew how to be of use, but did not know how to love.

You have called friendship—a name formerly private—not merely within the palace, but, clad in purple and bound with gold and gems, you have received it upon the throne, and have asserted by deed, not by words, that the mind of a prince ought to be the more benevolent to his own the more excellent his fortune is, since you deal with equal loyalty and capacity, and, as emperor, bestow upon your intimates what, as a private man, you would have desired for yourself. And yet what wishes could have grasped what most men have obtained under your rule? Nor do I now speak of those honors which must, of necessity, be conferred by any emperor on someone. Is some general advanced? The discipline of the camps requires it. Is a prefect raised up? A head must be set over the province. Is a consul created? The year must have a name. Thus in those very greatest and most splendid benefactions there is some advantage to the giver himself.

From you, by a new kind of benevolence, this honor was shown to friends, that it belonged wholly to those upon whom it was conferred, and nothing of it redounded to you save the pleasure of giving. Though you had at home sons, those twin hopes and eyes of the commonwealth, you postponed their magistracies and adorned your friends with the consulship. If, by heaven, that divine man, the author of the public happiness, your father, were still alive, what else would he have expected of his son, than that his grandsons be preferred? You gave to your friends, then, what you could not have given even more to your father. O singular counsel of your benevolence! You increase in time a dignity which had no increase to gain from greatness. Your friends were proclaimed consuls before your sons, because they could not be more than consuls.

XVII. Let antiquity now go forth, displaying itself, and let it boast those examples spread abroad in countless monuments of literature. Let it proclaim the loyalty of Pirithous, and praise the office of the Phocian youth, sung on every stage; let it mention too, if it pleases, Pythias and Damon, of whom the one offered himself as surety for a friend's death, the other came in time for the day set for the death he had pledged. Even granting that we believe these things true, which, arranged by the falsehoods of poets for the applause of the theaters, owe their credit only to their age—can we, by believing, achieve more than to suppose that these men, esteemed for the praise of friendship, were more careful of their friends than of themselves? But since, by nature's own arrangement, we love our children more, as a rule, than ourselves, he has surpassed every example who preferred to himself those friends whom he preferred even to his own children.

But you, indeed, to relieve the shame of those who owe you a debt, do not wish to seem to bestow what you confer upon your own, but to repay it. Let us humor you, then, and, reckoning the sum of your benefactions according to your own wish, let us suppose that whatever you grant to your intimates is not so much expended as repaid; and yet, when you enrich with such honors, at the mere hint of acquaintance, or even a single meeting, men with whom friends themselves might be content—do you not wish to prove to all that he who is good is a friend to you? To whomever any public office has been entrusted, a reward is promised and given. Let lowly and obscure virtue blame itself and its own darkness, virtue which did not offer itself to be tested. What suffices your own conscience is this: he who has been approved has been honored.

XVIII. Yet I should like you to tell me whence it comes, that though you pay your promises to so many, you know what you have promised to each, nor does either the care of the state, or that very throng of your own benefactions, confuse you, so that you should be either sparser, or slower, than the time or manner in which you might deceive. What modest debtor so repays a loan on the appointed day, as you weigh out what you promise? Nor should the negligent think themselves able to impose upon you. Daily we search into your benefactions, and gather our memory, and lest oblivion should lie in wait for each of us singly, each of us confers with another. We cannot find a single one whose hope and expectation you have, I will not say deceived, but—which is a more delicate complaint—delayed. Do you think, emperor, that I alone marvel at your benevolence? Yet I marvel also at your memory.

For to what Hortensius, or Lucullus, or Caesar was recollection ever so ready at hand, as your sacred mind, at the place and moment you have appointed, restores every deposit? Do you yourself remind yourself? Or, as they say the Fates stand by that god who shares your majesty, with their tablets, so does some divine power serve you, which writes down and prompts what you have said? Nothing do you ever promise with the lips' first edge, but you add faith to the promise, and ratify the words with the deed. No one now, no one believes that the benefits you have given are to be reckoned from the time when you gave them, because what you pledge is so certain, that it seems already received at the moment you pledge it.

XIX. Now this very fact, that you promise beforehand, does it not proceed from the utmost purity and candor of your mind? For whose spirit is it, neither to weary men's prayers, nor to employ art in making gifts difficult, but to announce beforehand what is to be granted, so that the sense of good things may be the more prolonged, and sudden felicity may not strike men dumb, and render them like the ungrateful? For our minds, unequal to sudden emotions, are alike thrown outside themselves by joy and by grief, if it seize upon them unaware. Did not that most renowned mother of Roman piety, terrified by the news of the disaster at Cannae, stiffen into death at the return of the son she was mourning, nor could the joy that survived be equal to the bereavement? Being conscious, therefore, of the heavenly secret and of the natural deposits, you prefer that benefits should come to men as things hoped for, rather than come upon them unhoped for. Nor without reason.

For as the fleeting pleasure of sudden successes seizes hold, so it departs; a longer felicity it is, to wait in security. And so, whereas hitherto it had been ordained by nature that men should not know their own goods, and should only then begin to rejoice in their felicity when they had begun to be fortunate, you, by promising beforehand what was to be granted, have discovered a time which nature had withheld from us, so that those whom the attainment alone used to delight, the very attaining might also delight.

XX. When, with equal kindness, you wished to honor more men than the places of honor could admit, and the material was too narrow for your will, nor could your mind, however wide the empire, be contained, whomever you had not yet advanced by any rank, you nevertheless consoled with your notice. And I know not whether for some that consolation has not sufficed. That man was honored by your speech, that one made happy by your table, that one consecrated by your kiss. Thus for all who, with you as prince, rightly trusted in themselves, either advancement in rank followed, or humanity gave satisfaction—humanity, I say, which in an emperor is as illustrious as it is rare. For since pride is the inseparable attendant of the fortunate, it has fallen to scarcely anyone both to abound in fortune and to be lacking in arrogance.

Of this our ancestors were so weary, that they always accounted contempt more grievous than servitude, and by their impatience of it were driven, after the warlike Tulli, and the sacrificing Numas, and Romulus the founders, to hate the kingship down to its very name. Finally, they condemned that very Tarquin with this final curse and reproach, and though the man was headlong in lust, blind in avarice, monstrous in cruelty, mad with fury, they called him only "the proud," and thought the reproach sufficient.

But if it were permitted by the nature of things, that that champion of Roman liberty, Brutus, hater of the kingly name, restored to a borrowed life, should behold your age imbued and filled with zeal for virtue, frugality, humanity; should see no trace anywhere in the whole world of pride, lust, cruelty; and should now see you yourself, both in public and in private, living with the sternness of the ancient generals, the chastity of the pontiffs, the moderation of consuls, the affability of candidates—he would surely change, so long after, his own judgment; and while approving of Roman dignity and liberty, and necessarily confessing that under you as emperor the state is in a better condition than it would have been under himself as consul, he would have to admit that it was Tarquin who ought to have been removed, not the kingship.

XXI. But as we are accustomed to do when we enter great cities, first to view the sacred buildings and the shrines dedicated to the highest divinity, then to admire the forums, and the gymnasiums, and the walks extended along their porticoes: so, in your praises, having venerated the sacred rites of the palace, and institutions to be equated with the ceremonies of old, we now advance our step to those things which, situated in the midst and serving the public uses, benefit not part, but the community as a whole, and are enclosed not by walls, but by the world, and are covered not by a roof, but by the sky.

Such, first, is this: that we do not immediately seize upon the highest matters, that you confess yourself frequent in going out to peoples who await you, nor do you suffer merely to be seen as accessible, but easy of approach, you receive from close at hand the prayers of your people: so that whoever the petitioner may be, even if he has deserved—though this is rare—a refusal, he still carries away the consciousness of having seen a divine presence. But how different was the custom of those former princes, whom it is well known whom I mean, who thought that royal majesty was diminished and made common, unless it were consulted by hidden veneration, shut up within the recesses of the palace like some Vestal secret, unless, lying hidden within the domestic shadow, they were walled about by contrived solitude and widely procured silence.

Nay, if ever they could come into the light and endure the day, they were carried forth in litters and covered chairs, and, wrapped about closely on every side and above with a very dense tortoise-shell of men and arms, moved slowly and by measured pace. Then the people were driven far off, nor did the idle hand of the attendant fail to drive back the crowd with the lash: so that there might be secrecy even in public. But this our emperor is brought forth to be viewed by all, nor can this common day and sun be seen more freely than our emperor. Nay, since things permitted breed a neighboring disdain, never does he satiate the eyes of those who marvel. More and more his presence is sought, and—strange to say—even while present, he is longed for.

XXII. Shall we marvel that in your own cities, and by your own peoples, you are seen, you whom scarcely any foreign nation on its own soil has not seen, and that so often, that your countenance is almost as well known to barbarians as to us? Nor without reason, since, spending every summer abroad, every winter at home, you have divided the seasons of the year equally between citizens and enemies: and if there be any barbarians who have not felt the thunderbolt of your valor, struck with terror at the mere name, and as if stunned, they remain quiet. For, O emperor, not only do those nations tremble at your auspices, whom the intervals of forests, or rivers, or mountains separate from our world, but also those whom nature has set apart, inaccessible through eternal forests, or divided by perpetual winter, or cut off by intervening seas.

Not the Indian is safe by his ocean, nor the Bosphoran by his cold, nor the Arab, secure beneath his noonday sun; and where the very name of Rome had scarcely reached before, her empire now arrives. Shall I say that the Goths, received into servitude, furnish soldiers for your camps, tillers for your lands? Shall I say that the rebellious Saracens have paid the penalty for their violated treaty? Shall I say that the Tanais has been forbidden to the Scythians, and the unwarlike bows even of the fleeing Albanian? Whatever nation of barbarians has ever been formidable to us by strength, ferocity, or numbers, either counts it good fortune to remain quiet, or rejoices, as though a friend, if it serves. Persia herself, once the rival of our state, and famed for the deaths of many Roman generals, excuses by her submission whatever harshness she has ever shown toward our princes.

Finally, that very king of hers, who before disdained to confess himself a man, now confesses his fear, and worships you in those very temples in which he himself is worshipped: sending embassies, offering gems and silk, and, to crown it, providing triumphal beasts to be yoked to your chariot; and though not yet bound by treaty, he is already a tributary to your worship.

XXIII. Yet, emperor, lest you think that I shall say everything merely to please the ear, you may be astonished at your Gallic triumphs—we are indignant. While you were advancing, conquering, into the remotest parts of the earth, while beyond the boundaries of things, and the limits set by nature, you were extending the kingdoms of the East, while you were hastening toward those natives of the first light, and even, if such a thing exists, to the very couch of the sun, the tyrant found opportunity for his crimes in secrecy. Oh, from how small beginnings come the greatest evils! Thus, almost to the utter destruction of the Italian race, the band of gladiators burst forth when the school of Cnaeus Lentulus was broken open. Thus wars fought by consuls with uncertain fortune were kindled by a Cilician pirate. Thus, while fugitives bore arms, Roman spears long yielded to the iron of the slave-pens. Who did not, at the first report of this new crime, laugh at the man?

For the matter seemed beneath the dignity of anger, when a few men, mere islanders, were kindling a conflagration for the whole continent, and those exiles of the world were clothing their own exile in royal garb? Yet what great convulsions was fortune bringing to birth, what a great evil for the state was this pestilence, growing to be extinguished, reserving for you how great a glory? Especially since, through the perfidy of the leaders, through the defection of the legions, whatever had been armed for the state had been turned against the state.

XXIV. Yet I do not wish in every respect to burden either the deed or the fate of the wretched, who, while unhappily trusting the purple-clad executioner who boasted of both kinship and favor with you, committed the gravest of all crimes—affection for the innocent. I understand into how difficult and rocky a place I have come. For while your ears shrink from the recalling of that season of purification, yet they seek praises; and it belongs to your glory that the evils gone by should be reckoned to the commendation of present blessings, while on the other hand your supreme clemency prefers that its own benefit should be diminished, rather than swelled by the enumeration of sorrows—it will be necessary that I, whether silent about the public misfortunes, or speaking of them, be either ungrateful to virtue, or burdensome to piety. Yet, emperor, grant a little patience to your feelings.

For if in prosperity the recollection of past miseries is sweet, if it pleases sailors to remember storms, physicians to remember diseases, why should you not also hear our misfortunes, that you may recognize your own benefits? Whence then shall I begin, if not from my own Gaul's misfortunes? Which, of all the lands that pestilence had occupied, not unjustly claims for herself the privilege of miseries, having been forced to bear, not merely with her ears, whose sense is lighter, but before her very eyes, the victory of Maximus, the destruction of Gratian. Other wounds, it must be confessed, our neighbor Italy shows, and the adjoining Spaniard; but each of them has, in his utmost grief, his own consolation. The one did not see the tyranny; the other saw the slaying of the tyrant. We were the first to receive the onset of the raging beast, we glutted his savagery with innocent blood, we satisfied his greed with public poverty. Upon us his cruelty, now secure, and his avarice, still insatiable, exercised itself.

Elsewhere the public evil either began, or ceased; in Gaul it settled down to stay.

XXV. Who could compare himself to us in calamity? We bore the tyrant both together with others, and alone. Why should I recount the cities emptied of their citizens, the deserted places filled with fugitive nobles? Why the property of men who had held the highest honors confiscated, their civil status reduced, their very lives taxed for gold? We saw dignities reduced to mere numbering, and men stripped of the consular robe, and old men who had outlived their fortunes, and the lamentable security of infants playing beneath the very auctioneer's rod; while meanwhile we wretches were forbidden to act as wretches, nay, we were even compelled to feign happiness, and though at home, and in secret, we had entrusted our stolen grief only to our wives and children, we went forth in public with a countenance that did not match our fortune. For you would have heard the informer say: "Why does that man walk so sadly? Is it because he has become poor from being rich?

Does he not rejoice that he still lives?" "Why does this man defile the public day with mourning garb? He grieves, I suppose, for his brother. But he still has a son." Thus, for fear of losing the rest, it was not permitted even to mourn what had been lost. So we put on faces serene amid clouded minds, and, after the manner of those who, having tasted the juice of Sardinian herbs, are said to die laughing, we imitated joy while grieving. There is some solace for calamities in having shed tears over one's woes, and in having eased the heart with sighs. There is no greater punishment than to be wretched, and not be seen to be so. Amid all this there was no hope of satisfying the plunderer. For, contrary to what nature dictates, satiety did not follow abundance; the hunger for possession grew daily, and what had been gained only inflamed the madness for acquiring more.

As drink inflames the thirst of the sick, as fire is not smothered by dry fuel, but increased, so riches, wrung out by the public destitution, sharpened the greed of a starving mind.

XXVI. He himself stood, clad in purple, beside the scales, and, pale and gaping, watched anxiously the shifting of the weights and the tremors of the balance. Meanwhile the spoils of the provinces were being brought in, the plunder taken from exiles, the goods of the slain. Here gold was weighed that had been torn from the hands of matrons; there, amulets snatched from the necks of orphans; there, silver drenched with the blood of its masters. Everywhere money was being counted, treasuries filled, bronze piled up, vessels broken apart; so that to anyone beholding it, it seemed not the dwelling of an emperor but the den of a robber. And yet a robber makes use of his plunder, and restores to himself what he has taken from others; nor does he beset roads and mountain passes merely to heap up and bury a treasure, and be wretched along with his crime; but that he may supply his gullet and belly, and lack nothing for his expenses.

For he both squanders and neglects, with the same ease in losing as in acquiring. But that pirate of ours heaped up, to perish for himself and for us, whatever he had swept together from every quarter, into that Charybdis of his cave. Do I say Charybdis? She, though she swallows full-laden ships, is nevertheless said to cast back wreckage, and to fling out upon the shores of Tauromenium the vessels whirled up from the deep. But our goods went by one and unbroken road to the treasury; that common abyss never vomited back any remnants of them, any fragments, even when glutted, at last, to loathing.

XXVII. It is the last defense of wicked princes, that they take away for the sake of giving, and seek to deprecate the odium of plunder by the magnitude of their gifts; but what a monstrous reasoning it is—that one has taken from everyone what no one shall possess! And indeed, though the avarice of private men is evil, still it has some excuse: poverty is feared, and provision is made for old age, and regard is had for an heir. What cause of covetousness can he allege, who possesses as much as exists anywhere? Nay rather—if it is right and pious for mortals to form judgments about heavenly things—I should believe no greater felicity belongs to princes than to have made others happy, and to have intervened against want, and to have conquered fortune, and to have given to man a new destiny. And so, to an emperor who rightly estimates his own majesty, that ought not to seem so truly his own which he has taken away, as that which he has given.

For since all things revolve within himself—just as that ocean which embraces all things receives back from the lands the waters which it supplies to them—so whatever flows from the prince to the citizens returns in abundance to the prince; and a munificent emperor consults well both his substance and his fame. For he gains glory when he gives money that is destined to return.

XXVIII. But to that man indeed every method of seeking praise seemed foolish, who—besides the hatred of every good example implanted in the worst of men—having fixed the height of felicity in possessing and in doing harm, labored not only to seek as much as possible, but to leave nothing to anyone. For he did not, as is the custom of kings, keep watch over the working of mines, that he might bring hidden goods of nature into use, and provide riches that made no one poorer. He thought too little precious the gold which the Bessian prospector or the Gallaecian searcher had dug from the veins of mountains or the gravel of rivers; he believed that purer and more splendid which grieving men had given up, which the tears of men, not the waters of rivers, had washed, and which had not been dug up out of caverns in the earth, but had been hewn out of the necks and throats of the slain.

Thus, while both the pen and the sword of the pitiless tyrant were feared, poverty had passed into the realm of prayer, and, that we might escape the executioner, we wished to fall to the slave-dealer. And if to anyone he seems, among all his other crimes, to have been less cruel, let him call to mind the death of your own, triumphant Bauto, and of you, robed Merobaudes. Of these, the one, after the highest magistracies, and consular purples, and a whole senate of honor gathered as it were into one house, was forced to renounce his own life; the other had his throat crushed at home by the hands of British henchmen, and was branded with the infamy of a woman's death, that he, a man most devoted to the sword, might seem, forsooth, to have preferred to perish by the noose rather than by the blade.

But perhaps in their case the tyrant might be thought to have had some special grounds of hatred; for both had stood in the battle-line of Gratian, and Gratian had loved them both: what shall we say of those who, unacquainted with honors and with princes, and famous only among their own, poured out their noble souls beneath the executioner? XXIX. I speak of the deaths of men, when I recall that the descent went even to the blood of women, and that no sparing cruelty raged against the sex which wars themselves spare? But no doubt weighty and invidious causes lay beneath it, that the widow of a renowned bard should be dragged with the hook to punishment. For the charge brought against the widow, and even cast in reproach against her, was excessive religion, and too diligent a cultivation of the divine. What greater accusation could a priestly accuser bring?

For there was, yes there was, this kind of informer too, who, priests in name but in truth henchmen, and even executioners, not content to have stripped the wretched of their ancestral patrimonies, falsely accused them even unto blood, and pressed hard upon the lives of defendants already reduced to poverty. Indeed, though they had stood by at capital trials, though they had drunk in with their ears and eyes the groans and torments of the wretched, though they had handled the weapons of the lictors and the fetters of the condemned, they carried their hands, polluted by contact with punishment, back to sacred rites, and defiled with their very bodies ceremonies which they had already polluted in their minds. This Phalaris held them among his friends; they were in his sight, and even in his embraces; nor without reason, since from them at once came all his heart's desires—for the greedy, the goods of the rich; for the bloodthirsty, the punishment of the innocent; for the impious, the outrage of religion.

XXX. At length God turned His eyes back upon us, and, intent upon the good things of the East, looked also upon our evils, and cast this madness before that most accursed head, that he should not fear to break the treaty, to violate the law of nations, to declare war. Am I to think it happened without divine power, that he, who under the name of peace might have played the game and reaped the reward of impunity for his first crime by remaining quiet, raised a second and a third standard of civil brigandage, and, having crossed the Cottian Alps, threw open also the barriers of Julia, and imposed upon you, O Emperor, the necessity of conquering, though the pledge of pardon was still preserved? He was driven, I believe, headlong, because the commonwealth was already, by its avenger close at hand, demanding vengeance, and the master destroyed by open parricide sought from him the penalties he owed.

That was not confidence, but madness; not rashness, but necessity; nor did he of his own accord provoke you to war; but he could no longer refuse the punishment. Otherwise, how could he have conceived so great an audacity, as to dare to rush upon the sword and go to meet death, being so cowardly and so fearful of death that he could not afterward even kill himself when conquered? And for you indeed, Augustus Emperor, to assert the commonwealth and claim the victory, it would have sufficed to come to the war even alone. For if once masters, about to fight against rebellious slaves, carried whips into the battle-line, and such was the force of conscience that the armed turned back from the unarmed, and those who had offered their breasts to death gave their backs to the lash—would you not too, with your legions idle, have seemed to have settled the whole affair?

XXXI. Could he have endured your presence, and borne the very glance of your eyes—he who was once the most contemptible little slave of your household, and the standing menial of servile tables? Would not the whole recollection of his past and of yours have overwhelmed the man at once? Would he not have reproached himself that you were the son of a man of triumph; he, of an uncertain father? That you were the heir of a most noble family; he, a client? That you had been, for all past time, the leader of the Roman army, the patron of liberty; he, an exile from the world, a fugitive from his fatherland?

And now, indeed, that you were emperor, in the very bosom of the commonwealth, desired by the suffrage of all the soldiers, by the consent of the provinces, and even by the ambitious wish of the reigning emperor himself; while he, in the remotest corner of the earth, with the legions unaware, with the inclinations of the provinces hostile, and with no auspices whatever, had aspired to that stolen tyrant's name? And finally, that with you stood good faith; with him, perfidy; with you, right; with him, wrong; with you, justice; with him, injury; with you, clemency, chastity, religion; with him, impiety, lust, cruelty, and the whole fellowship of crimes and of the vilest vices? Let us question the very facts, and, by that surest form of inference, gather what he was about to do from what he had already done. Can it, then, be doubted at all what he would have done in that man's presence, whom he did not even see, but fled from?

XXXII. Although, therefore, O Emperor, you might have made light use of such an enemy, and were coming not so much to join battle as to exact punishment from a criminal head, yet you conducted the war with such great counsels and such great calculations, as if you were about to contend with some Persian, or with Pyrrhus, or with Hannibal himself. For first you confirm, by pledge given and received, the good faith of the kings by whom the frontier of the East is bounded, so that you might move abroad in security, if you had left nothing at home to arouse anxiety or suspicion. Then you divide your forces threefold, so that you might overwhelm the enemy's audacity with a multiplied terror, and surround his flight on every side. Finally, you grant to the peoples of the barbarians, who vowed to offer you voluntary service, the office of fellow-soldiers, so that both the frontier, freed of suspected forces, might grow quiet, and an auxiliary might be added to your army.

By this kindness of yours all the Scythian nations were drawn in and flowed together in such swarms, that you seemed to have levied a conscription among the barbarians, for the very men you had released from service among your own. O thing worthy of record! There marched under Roman leaders and standards an enemy who had once been Roman, and he followed the standards against which he had once stood, and the cities of Pannonia, which hostile devastation had lately emptied, were filled again by the soldiery. That Goth, and that Hun, and that Alan answered to his name, took his turn at watch, and feared to be noted as absent. There was no tumult, no confusion, no plundering, as might be from a barbarian. Nay, if ever the grain supply grew scarcer, he bore the want patiently, and by sparing eased the ration he had straitened by numbers; demanding, for all reward and all pay, but this one thing, to be called yours. How great is the ambition of virtue!

You received a benefit which you might charge to your own account. XXXIII. Antiquity thought it worthy of record, that once, in the war of Actium, foreign Egypt mixed her arms with Roman leaders and Roman movements, and the matter was believed to have so much of novelty in it, that, unless it had frequently gone into literature, its credibility with posterity might have suffered. For what writer of annals, or of poems, has kept silent about your fleets, O Cleopatra, and your ships plated with ivory, and your purple sails with gilded ropes? Indeed, the story has been so often retold, that it seems rather to have been often repeated by the same writers than to have ever been left unmentioned by anyone. I will not dispute about the leaders. For not, I will not say the conquered Antony, but even the conquering Augustus, could equal our prince. What, at least, in other respects do we find similar?

Especially if we compare, on either side, the aspect of the events and the times, and set the peoples of each before our eyes. Those men, setting sail, had been borne by a fleet given to the winds; these men were completing a long march under the burden of arms. Those men had been enticed by a queen sighing with a foreign flame; these were carried away by love of praise and the care of sharing in glory. Those had been sent forth by the warm Pharos, and soft Canopus, and the Nile, nurse of soft peoples; these had been poured out by the threatening Caucasus, and the stiffening Taurus, and the Ister, hardener of mighty bodies. Those, gleaming through in tender garments, and scarcely enduring even the light linen while shunning the sun, carried sistra shaken with alternating jingle; these, laden with breastplates and enclosed in iron, were roused by the broken voices of trumpets and the blare of mighty horns.

What comparison, then, could there be of these peoples, even if there were not so great a dissimilarity of causes—that by the one side the enslavement of the Roman Empire was sought, by the other, liberty was reclaimed. Whence it seemed to you, O Emperor, all the more unworthy that anyone could be found a partner in that guilt, whose avenger the barbarian himself professed to be.

XXXIV. But those men indeed, staining the first-fruits of the war with wicked blood, became an example matching penalty to guilt. Siscia is witness, witness too that most splendid clash upon the Save—if it may be called a clash, in which the soldier, full of spirit against public traitors, so attacked that neither the number of those resisting, nor the depth of that great river, delayed him; but though breathless and covered with dust from so long a march, he spurred on his horse, joined the river by swimming, leapt upon the bank, and caught them, at last, ready and waiting. This account is more drawn out than the matter itself was. Scarcely had the unconquered force crossed the river, when it already held the field of battle. Scarcely had it found the enemy, when it was already pressing him hard. Scarcely had it seen their breasts, when it was already cutting down their backs.

The rebel column was given over to its owed destruction; impious throngs rolled in their own blood; a single slaughter covered whole fields, and everything far and wide was hidden beneath unbroken heaps of the dead. Now those who had hastened to the walls to put off death were either leveling the ditches with corpses, or being impaled upon stakes set against them, or closing with their deaths the gates which they had thrown open by their sally. But those whose flight was blocked by the impassable river banks, gathered in trembling groups, and clinging each to another, were massed together over the steep banks. The river foams, discolored with blood, and rolls its lingering course, scarcely working its way through the struggling corpses; and, that it might claim for itself a special share in your service, it swallowed up in its greedy whirlpools that very standard-bearer of the sacrilegious faction, and, that death might not even attain burial, hid away his corpse.

Must it not be believed that the river too, in both ways, strove for your vengeance—by aiding the victory, and by forestalling clemency?

XXXV. Behold for you another battle, and another victory. Marcellinus was leading beloved cohorts into battle, and that Fury of civil war was sweeping along the very strength of the nefarious faction, all the bolder than the rest of the henchmen in that the brother of the tyrant was rendering more strenuous service to the tyrant. At this indeed your army rejoiced most of all, since it saw itself provoked of its own accord, having feared nothing more than to be feared; so much so that, with camps set against camps, since it could not join battle on the day that was fast declining, it kept vigil in hope of victory as the light was coming, and accused the slow sun, the deserting day, of the yearly span of a summer's night.

Behold at last the light, and now the whole field bristled with the army: cavalry divided into wings, light-armed skirmishers before the standards, cohorts arranged by companies, and the squared legions, moving at full pace, had occupied the whole broad space over which the eye could range. Not yet was valor being tested; already discipline was winning. But after both battle lines had advanced within range of the javelin, and clouds of darts and arrows had been poured out from both sides, and the matter came to sword-hilts, the soldiers, mindful of their former valor, of the Roman name, and finally of their emperors, fought the public cause with their hands. The enemy, thinking of their hired service, of Italy torn to pieces, and of hope left only in the sword, fought with gladiatorial desperation, and did not yield ground, but stood their ground, or fell in it.

XXXVI. But when the battle-line was driven back, the front loosened, and confidence turned to flight, they rushed headlong, or fled in a mass, and in their haste hindered one another. Armed and unarmed, whole and wounded, first and last, were mingled together. The soldier pressed on from a distance, at close range, with swords, with spears, striking with point and with edge. Some hamstrung the fleeing, others pierced their backs, or, where they could not overtake by running, caught them with javelins. Arms, weapons, horses, men, living and slain, bodies face down and face up, lay everywhere, or in heaps. Some fled with mutilated and severed limbs, in whatever part of themselves remained; others were overtaken by the pain of their wounds; others carried the deaths they had received into the woods and rivers. There they poured out their last breath in admiration of your name, and in detestation of their own leader. There was no end to the slaying and the pursuing, until at length death took the enemy from the victors, and night took the day.

But how much better did that band take counsel, which, with standards lowered, begged for pardon of necessity, and pressing the earth with kisses, cast down before your footsteps the bodies and arms to be trampled? Whom you passed by not proudly, as though conquered, not in anger, as though guilty, not carelessly, as though scarcely worth the trouble, but, treated with gentleness and generosity, you ordered to be Roman. The allied columns are joined, and under one head the diverse members of the state grow together. Both armies are borne along with equal joy. This one rejoices in its own deed, that one in pardon, and both in victory.

XXXVII. Nor did loyal Emona hesitate any less, when it was announced that you would come, but poured forth through its flung-open gates to meet you, and, as all longing is impatient once hope has come, scarcely believing that it lay open for you as you came, hastened to run out to meet you as you were about to arrive. Fear indeed feigns joy, as we know, but the betraying countenance so proclaims the innermost feelings of the mind, that in the mirror of the brow the image of the soul stands revealed. As that city, breathing again after a long siege—since the tyrant had worn it down as it lay before the Alps like the very threshold of the war—so exulted with such simple joy that, were it not true gladness, it would have seemed excessive. Crowds came to meet you, dancing in troops. Everything resounded with song and with castanets. Here a chorus sang you a triumph; there, on the contrary, one sang funeral dirges and a burial song for the tyrant.

There one wished the vanquished a perpetual departure; here another wished the victors a frequent arrival. Now wherever you turned your step, they followed, ran about, went before; indeed they blocked the very roads by which you were being carried. No regard for oneself or for you restrained anyone from that pleasing injury done to you by the stubbornness of their rejoicing. Why should I recount the joyful gathering of the free nobility before its walls, the senators conspicuous in snow-white robes, the priests of the municipalities revered in their purple, the priests distinguished by their peaked caps? Why the gates crowned with green garlands? Why the streets rippling with hangings, and the day made longer by lit torches? Why the crowd of households poured out into the public streets, old men congratulating on the years granted them, boys vowing you long service, mothers rejoicing, and maidens now secure? You had not yet finished the whole war, and already you were celebrating a triumph.

XXXVIII. Meanwhile Maximus was going, and looking back behind him at you, flying off like a madman, thunderstruck. He followed no plan, no reasoning, nor even hope, which is the last thing to abandon men; rather he entangled himself in the very wanderings of the road, and now to the right, now to the left, now meeting his own tracks, wove an uncertain path in doubtful windings. How often, do we suppose, did he say to himself: Where shall I flee? Shall I try war? That I should sustain with a part what I could not bear with the whole of my forces! Shall I bar the Cottian Alps? Because the Julian Alps served me so well! Do I seek Africa? Which I have drained. Do I return to Britain? Which I have abandoned. Do I trust myself to Gaul? But I am hated there. Do I commit myself to Spain? But I am known there. What then shall I do, caught between arms and hatred? I am pressed from behind by enemies, from the front by my crimes.

Had I died, would I have escaped? But behold, neither does the hand follow the mind, nor the sword the hand; the blade slips, the right hand trembles, the mind fails. Oh how difficult it is even for the wretched to perish! So, just as wild beasts enclosed in nets, after long seeking an exit, and having despaired of it, stand still, and out of fear do not flee, so he, bound by the very fear that drove him, hurled himself into the town of Aquileia; not to defend his life by resisting, but not to delay punishment by evading it. And yet what further delay could there have been from him? Since the soldier, burning, pressed so closely upon his tracks and his back, that the vengeance which followed, hastening, seized nearly all the pomp that was to accompany it.

XXXIX. Rightly indeed did that kindred invention of painters and poets, feign Victory as winged, because for men who go along with Fortune, there is no running, but flying. That army, snatched from the farthest recess of the east by hastened marches, wearied by so many nations left behind, by so many rivers to swim across, by so many mountains to climb, set in another world, and, I might almost say, under another sun, joined Illyricum to Aquileia in the space of a single day's light. Yet they claim nothing for themselves on this account, and if ever they gather circles of admirers, or prolong our banquets with talk, limiting all their own effort to the bounds of the Alps, they deny that such speed is owed to themselves, since they see that they arrived without experiencing the labors, at a place to which they had not felt themselves going.

Rather, they deny that they were carried by their own bodies, but say that, as though borne through certain images of dreams while absent, they lent to the carrying winds the idle service of their limbs. Nor is the belief doubtful. For if once our stern ancestors believed that the twin Castors, distinguished by white horses and starry caps, washed the Thessalian dust and blood in the waters of the Tiber, and both announced the victory and claimed credit for the campaign, why should we not think that some acknowledged care of the immortal god was applied to your and the public vengeance? Unless perhaps the Roman state demanded a greater exertion of divine favor to be increased by a Macedonian kingdom, than to be freed from tyrannical servitude. But I, indeed, if heavenly zeal is to be weighed according to the dignity of causes, would rightly contend that your cavalry were borne and lifted by winged Pegasi, your infantry by winged sandals.

For it is not because divine beings disdain to reveal themselves to mortals that we should therefore doubt that things not seen have happened, since we see happening things which we would have doubted ought to happen at all.

XL. Narrowly indeed does he weigh your fortune, Emperor, whoever believes of you only that which can be done by human means. When I see that from the Julian Alps, with idle and unemployed sword, there was not a battle but a triumph, should I hesitate to call it a certain special campaign of your good fortune? We know indeed, Emperor, that you administered all things in such a way that your successes cannot be credited to themselves alone; but you must confess that, as much as you accomplished in the war, so much did your Fortune accomplish after the war. If we were to give her a voice, and a judge, would she not enumerate her own service at length, and, while granting much to your virtues, claim some part for herself? And why, I ask, should we not grant that we hear the claims of both sides, since the victory is yours?

I hear Constancy say: I undertook a savage and dangerous war; I hear Patience recall: I endured the immense journey, the season of the year always burdensome, often under arms, often fasting; I hear Prudence maintain: I divided the soldiery, and multiplied terror by art; I hear Fortitude assert: I fought twice with the enemy, twice I conquered; and finally all cry out: What do we owe you, Fortune, whom we ourselves made? But if she should say: I aided the haste of the soldiers, I hindered the flight of the enemy, I forced Maximus into the walls, and the one whom you were forcing to die, I kept alive for his master—I do not see what judgment there can be, except that, while this side claims credit for the tyrant's flight, that one claims credit for his custody; and the republic, which is equally obligated to both, joins the two together in such a way that it confesses it owes victory to the one, and vengeance to the other.

XLI. But neither do you disown or deny the gratitude owed for the benefit. For although you accomplished through yourself what you wished, yet through Fortune you obtained more than you wished. Come, if you please, consult your past thoughts, and question your prayers. Did you hope for more than that Maximus be announced to you as slain, than that his half-dead head, its eyes not yet closed in complete death, be brought back from the battle-line, than, at most, that he be captured either fleeing or resisting? But since what happened was rather this—did you even wish that he should preserve himself for you, that he should not wish to bring about his own death, and yet be able to?

Great indeed, I confess, and indeed greatest, is the love of light to human breasts, and destruction is a horror to them, but only so far as either the former can be desired, or the latter avoided. But if the final hour has stood over one's head, and the day has come that will never return, and death has confessed itself present, then the last things are not feared, since they are certain. Hence the fear of the accused lasts up to condemnation, afterward comes stunned stupor, and out of desperation, security, and a voluntary hastening to the place of punishment, with the executioner not even dragging them. Not to speak of those who, striking a bolder bargain with the fates, forestalled an uncertain outcome with a certain one; not to mention slaves, who have avoided the lash by hanging, and fled their masters' anger even to the point of leaping from heights—who ever feared beyond hope? Who therefore refused to kill himself, in order that he might be killed?

Unless indeed another's hand is lighter than one's own, or a private death is more shameful than a public one, or it is a longer punishment to fall upon the sword oneself, and to load the body with a wound, and to receive destruction all at once entire, than to divide the punishment, to bend the knee, to stretch out the neck for the blow, perhaps not a single one.

XLII. And yet when he thought he must finish matters with his own sword, did he not fear rather fire, red-hot plates, the cross, the sack, and whatever else he deserved? Never indeed did he think so well of his crimes as to be able to hope for the death by which he perished. If then the guilty man could not presume upon pardon, nor the enclosed man hope for flight, nor the man about to die fear death, and if, of the last things, a voluntary death ought certainly to seem lighter than a compelled one, a private death more honorable than a public one, and finally a death seized upon quicker than one awaited—can anyone doubt that, in that which he had no reasoning power over, Fortune was at work? It was she, she, who blinded the tyrant's counsels, she who dulled both his mind and his sword, she who struck and stayed the hand ready for the wound.

Unless indeed you, venerable Gratian, were besieging your executioner accompanied by avenging Furies, and, an angry, threatening shade, were shaking before his face and eyes torches smoking with infernal fires, and scourges crackling with twisted serpents, lest he should have leisure for an honorable death, lest he should pollute that royal and sacrosanct garment with impious blood, lest the vesture once yours, and thereafter to belong to your brothers, should receive death-dealing blood even while being avenged, lest finally the tyrant's own hand should avenge you, and you should owe to Maximus even his own death.

XLIII. And plainly all things fell out in such a way that vengeance seems not merely preserved, but arranged. For whence, I ask, this sudden reversal, that he who had feared to meet his end no longer feared to seek it out, and that boldness brought forth what fear had shut up within? Here now was no further delay for matters that hastened onward. At once the bravest commanders girded themselves to arrange the triumph; the diadem is struck down from his head, torn from his shoulders, the ornament plucked from his feet—in short, the whole man is fitted for destruction. Publicly the public despoiler is stripped bare, his rapacious hands are bound, his legs, once fugitive, are laid bare; and thus at last he is presented to your eyes, such as it was fitting a captive be presented to a victor, a slave to his master, a tyrant to an emperor.

Nor would you, with your clemency, have wished him to come into your sight, lest that funereal man should defile those eyes wholesome for all, had you not wished to refute rumor and clear yourself by that same witness by whom you had been accused. A wicked mind has strength, has I know not what inner executioners of its own, or conscience itself is its own executioner; or, what I rather believe, to be questioned by you is more severe than any inquisition. At your first word confession was shaken from that nefarious breast, nor could he even hesitate or mutter, but had to lay bare his whole design—namely, that he had used the pretext of your favor, since he could not otherwise have won the alliance of the soldiers, unless he had feigned you as the author of his usurpation.

XLIV. And after this utterance did you not order him to be raised upon the cross, not to be sewn into a sack, not to be torn to pieces, not, finally, to have that tongue guilty of so great a lie plucked out by the roots, together with that part of the vital organs whose fabrication it had spoken? Nay, you had already begun to hesitate about his death, and had cast down your eyes, and suffused your face with a blush, and spoke with pity. But it is well that you cannot do all things. You are avenged even against your own will. He is therefore snatched from sight, and, lest anything might be permitted to clemency, is borne to death amid countless hands. Behold again, Emperor, you turn away, and are burdened by the account of that tyrant's end. Now, now be at ease; I shall observe the custom of your clemency; what you did not wish to see, you shall not hear.

Hither, hither, devoted bards, gather all the labors of your learned nights; celebrate this in every tongue and in every writing. Nor be anxious about the perpetuity of your works. That eternity which you were wont to bestow on history will come to you from history itself. You too, to whom the happier lot has fallen to give fame to deeds by your art, despise those common themes of ancient fables, the labors of Hercules, and the Indian triumphs of Liber, and the wars of the serpent-footed monsters. Let skillful hands rather depict these deeds, let these deeds be wrought; with these let the forums, with these let the temples be adorned; let these be rendered in ivory, these in marble, let these live in colors, let these move in bronze, let these increase in value with gems.

XLV. It belongs to the security of all ages that what has been done should be seen, so that if anyone should ever conceive wicked designs, having reviewed the monuments of our times, he may drink in innocence through his eyes. Whoever shall think of clothing his shoulders sometime with the royal purple, let Maximus stripped of it meet him. Whoever shall desire gold and gems for his private feet, let Maximus appear to him bare-footed. Whoever shall meditate placing a diadem upon his head, let him behold the head of Maximus torn from his shoulders, and the body without a name. We know indeed that nothing need ever be renewed, since the Roman empire will always belong either to you or to yours; yet it belongs to the twofold security of the commonwealth, that what cannot happen should also not be feared.

But however the hands of artists may render the works of your virtue to the eyes of curious posterity, when the imitation of painters and sculptors shall follow you surmounting the ridges of the Alps, or swimming rivers thrown in your way, or trampling the hostile army beneath your triumphal footsteps, by what sky-blue, by what pigment, by what bronze or gold, Emperor, shall your clemency be depicted, by which you, victor even over victory itself, so laid aside all wrath together with your arms, that no one fell after the war, certainly no one after Maximus? A few of the Moorish enemies, whom, about to die, he had shut in with himself like an infernal band, and two or three trainers of a raging gladiator having been slain as an expiation of the war, all the rest, embraced by pardon, he enclosed as it were in a certain maternal bosom. No one's goods were confiscated, no one's liberty fined, no one's former rank diminished.

No one was marked with disgrace, no one with reproach, or even touched with chastisement; the guilt of the capital crime was atoned for at most by the annoyance of the ears. All were restored to their own homes, all to their wives and children, all, finally—what is sweeter—to their innocence. See, Emperor, what you have gained by this clemency. You have brought it about that no one, though conquered, should seem conquered to himself while you are the victor. You were watching these things from your hills, Rome, and, exalted upon your seven citadels, you were borne higher still by joy. XLVI.

You, who had experienced the furies of Cinna, and Marius cruel after his exile, and Sulla made fortunate by your disaster, and Caesar merciful even toward the dead, used to tremble at every trumpet-call of civil commotion; you who, besides the slaughter of soldiers perishing on both sides, had mourned the lights of your senate extinguished at home, the heads of consuls fixed upon pikes, Catos driven to death, mutilated Ciceros, and unburied Pompeys; to whom the fury of citizens torn into factions had brought heavier losses than the Carthaginian threatening at your gates, or the Gaul received within your walls; to whom the day of Allia, more disastrous than Emathia, the Colline gate more deadly than Cannae, once left scars so deep that, having always experienced your own valor more grievously than that of an enemy, you feared nothing more than yourself; you have seen civil war ended by the slaughter of enemies, by the peace of soldiers, by the recovery of Italy, by your own freedom.

You have seen, I say, civil war ended, for which you could decree a triumph. XLVII. Thus far, most august Emperor, it has been lawful for me to have handled your past deeds. But since the time bids me remember present things, I would rather make an end of my speech than usurp the office of that most ample order. Pardon will, I trust, be granted in some measure to pious boldness, if I seem to have laid claim to what is common, not to have seized what belongs to another. It has been permitted me to tell what you did bravely and successfully among barbarian peoples and in distant provinces for the highest good of the state, both with your divine favor assenting and the senate approving.

But those things which have been done and are being done at Rome must be entrusted to Roman talents—what sort of day your first entrance brought to the City; what you were in the senate-house, what on the rostra; how, following now by chariot, now on foot, the procession of the preceding litters, distinguished by your alternating gait, you now triumph over wars, now over pride; how you showed yourself a prince to all together, a senator to each individually; how, by your frequent and citizen-like progress, you visited not only the public works, but consecrated also private houses with your divine footsteps, the military guard removed, safer in the watchfulness of public love. Let these things be praised by the tongues, by the voice, I say, of those who will be able both more worthily to proclaim the greatest matters of common joy, and more justly to declare what is properly their own. O my fortunate journey! O labors well undertaken and well spent! In what blessings do I share! For what joys am I prepared!

What marvels shall I recount, upon my return, to the cities of Gaul! By what crowds of astonished peoples, by how great a throng of listeners shall I be surrounded, when I shall say, I have seen Rome, I have seen Theodosius, and I have seen both together; I have seen him the father of the prince; I have seen him the avenger of the prince; I have seen him the restorer of the prince! Distant cities shall gather to me; from me every pen shall receive the order of the deeds performed; from me poetry shall take its theme; from me history shall take its credibility. I shall repay you, Emperor, for this wrong, if, whenever I myself shall have said nothing about you worthy to be read, I shall instruct those who are to be read.