trace of the Stoic teaching which is still recognizable is that, if the spirit of man be a god within, we ought to venerate it accordingly; the only trace of the old physical culture is the recommendation to play with the hoop and not with dice. Instead of the old practice of "lucubration," we have a recommendation always to be awake most of our time, since long repose supplies nourishment to vices. Taciturnity is the quality upon which the author insists oftenest, except, perhaps, self-knowledge and equity, never condemning others at the risk of being condemned one's self. There are few rules for getting money, many for saving it, and still more for reconciling ourselves to the loss of it. The device for getting which he seems to trust the most is throwing a sprat to catch a whale. On the other hand, it is a bad thing to marry a wife for her dower, because she cannot be got rid of if she is troublesome. The old Roman misogyny appears for the most part in a mitigated form. A wife is not to be trusted when she complains of servants; she only does it because you are fond of them. But if she is a good manager she may expect you to put up with her tongue. Temperance is recommended more than once on the ground of health, and once at least industry is recommended on the same ground that indolence wears away the body when the mind is unstrung. The author is frugal in religion: he would have the calf grow up to plough, and propitiate the deity (to whom blood is an offence) with frankincense. Perhaps the dislike to blood savors of an approximation to Christianity, and this is quite of a piece with the writer's evident horror of divination in all forms: he objects to it not merely because it multiplies anxiety to no good purpose, but because of the presumption of prying into the ways of Heaven. It is part of prudence with him to anticipate the worst, as well as to calculate the consequences of actions.

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CHAPTER V.

AUGUSTAN HISTORIES.

If we wish to measure the whole extent of the intellectual decadence accomplished in the course of the third century, we need only compare the Augustan history with Suetonius, and the comparison is the more instructive because the Augustan history was to a considerable extent an official work. Napoleon wished to provide for an official history of France by subsidizing an official continuation of Velly, in order to discourage writers who might have taken a revolutionary or reactionary view of the past. In the same way Diocletian. and Constantine seem to have thought it would be a good thing to have an authorized continuation of Suetonius. From Nerva to Heliogabalus the work was actually done, but from the point of view of an emperor who respected himself and his office it was done badly. Marius Maximus, a man who had been in high office all his life (his career culminated under Alexander Severus), had written the lives of the emperors; but he had been immensely long, he had been very discursive, he had gone so far into all legendary questions, whether genealogical or topographical, that he was classed not with the pure "historians," but with "the mythical historians." His abbreviators are fond of observing upon his verbosity; and yet it appears that he did not aim at fine writing, for he is classed with Suetonius among writers who tried to give facts simply, and contrasted with eloquent writers like Livy, Quintus Curtius, and Pompeius Trogus. What he seems to have aimed at was a complete collection of all kinds of details, credible or incredible, embracing everything from the earliest origin of an emperor's family to all the measures of his reign, all the omens that foretold his empire and the loss

of it; all his personal habits, all his vices, all his friends: the whole being copiously illustrated by extracts from official documents and private correspondence, and ornamented here and there with more or less imaginary speeches, for speeches addressed to the army were not put on record like those of the senate, where the reporters went into so much detail that it was known exactly how often the senate shouted in chorus on a change of emperors.

But Marius Maximus was not merely lengthy and frivolous, he was also, from one point of view, incomplete: he confined himself to reigning emperors who had really governed the Roman world with some legitimate title; he did not give a satisfactory account of the numerous pretenders who for a shorter or longer time held an army or a province, nor of the members of reigning dynasties who never got beyond a more or less titular rank. It was a nice question sometimes whether a pretender had ever assumed imperial rank, or whether a particular member of a reigning house had ever received the title of Augustus; but, upon the whole, the safest rule was to insert everybody, for the benefit of emperors who were curious about their predecessors, and liked to be able to turn to the appropriate article in a chronological series of biographies. Sometimes the compiler felt that there was not room for a whole book about insignificant persons like the younger Maximin, or the two elder Gordians; but even when two or more emperors were put together in a book, each still had his own division.

After Marius Maximus, the compilers had no satisfactory material. There was a Junius Cordus, who had the ambition of continuing Marius Maximus; but he was even more frivolous than his predecessor, and does not seem to have paid so much attention to serious history; besides, he did not give a complete account of every emperor, though he had been careful to pick out the obscure ones. He appears to be the chief authority for the life of Albinus, the competitor of Severus; he is not quoted before; he continues to be quoted down to the end of the dynasty of the Gordians. After this compilers had to depend upon the Greeks, whose activity in compiling

more or less fabulous histories of recent events continued through the third century, quite unabated by the criticisms of Lucian and Herodian. Hence, when a serious writer like Flavius Vopiscus was asked to undertake a life of Aurelian by his friend Tiberianus, a man of high rank, the only resources Tiberianus could place at his disposal were official documents and Greek books.

The work of compilation proved tedious: this is proved by the insertion of non-official works in what was meant to be an official compilation, and by the length of time which the work was upon hand. It only amounts to two moderate volumes of the Teubner series—at least this is all that is left of it, and there is no evidence that there ever was much more: it is quite clear, also, that the different works comprised in it were composed at intervals through a space variously estimated at from twenty-five to thirty-two years. The latest editor, H. Peter, relying on tolerably satisfactory internal evidence, places the lives of Hadrian, the elder Ælius Verus, Didius, Severus, and Niger by Ælius Spartianus, the life of the Pretender Avidius Cassius by Vulcacius Gallicanus, and those of Antoninus Pius and his two adopted sons by Julius Capitolinus, and that of Macrinus, who seized the empire on the death of Caracalla, between A.D. 292 and 305, marking Hadrian and Antoninus Pius as doubtful. Between 303 and 305 Trebellius Pollio, the most careless of all, had written the lives of the Philips, the Decii, the two Valerians, and the two Gallieni, and the thirty tyrants (as those officials were called who, during the paralysis of the central government, held the revenues of their provinces on their own account for a longer or shorter period), and also Claudius, the first of the Illyrian emperors who restored the empire.

The life of Aurelian mentions that Constantius was emperor, and what Diocletian used to say when he was once more in private life. Soon after Vopiscus wrote on Tacitus and Florianus, the successors of Aurelian, and then on Probus, whom he idealizes probably in honor of Constantine, who admired him; and, as he speaks of a civil war, it is natural to think of that of Maxentius in A.D. 312.

After this Vopiscus wrote on three or four insignificant pretenders under Carus, Carinus, and Numerius, and declined to go further, because Claudius Eusthenius, the secretary of Diocletian, had written the lives of that emperor and his three colleagues each in a separate book; and even when an emperor had been deified, it was not wholly safe to write about him.

Constantine, who had a great admiration for the name of Antoninus, insisted that Ælius Lampridius, whom it is hard to distinguish certainly from Elius Spartianus, should write the life of Heliogabalus as late as A.D. 324, for he speaks of following up the lives of Claudius, Aurelian, and Diocletian, with Licinius, Severus, Alexander, and Maxentius, "whose power," he tells Constantine, "has come into your hands." Now Licinius was not finally overthrown till A.D. 323. The defeat of Licinius is mentioned also in the thirty-fourth chapter of Julius Capitolinus on the Gordians, and the works of the same author on Maximus and Balbinus are probably of the same period.

Spartianus was at work at the same time on the two sons of Severus. He had begun with the intention of treating all the emperors, great and small, legitimate or illegitimate, from the accession of Nerva to that of Diocletian at any rate; and, as he is much the best of the six writers whose remains are huddled together, it is curious that we have only fragments of him supplemented by their inferior work, if he ever carried out his intention. One is inclined to suspect that the continuation of Suetonius proved a more thankless task than he anticipated; he was probably an official of the imperial chancery in a subordinate position, who found he was equally unlikely to be rewarded or pressed to complete his work. The same may perhaps be said of Julius Capitolinus, who seems originally to have intended a complete work upon the whole series of emperors who bore the title of Antoninus, though with respect to the only two who honored it, and to Verus, who, in the judgment of contemporaries, did nothing to disgrace it, he was forestalled by Spartianus.

As for Vopiscus, he seems to have done as much as he in