Res Gestae

Raised to the highest rank in Fortune’s gift, he experienced her fickle changes, which make sport of mortals, now lifting some to the stars, now plunging them in the depths of Cocytus. But although instances of this are innumerable, I shall make cursory mention of only a few.

It was this mutable and fickle Fortune that changed the Sicilian Agathocles from a potter to a king, and Dionysius, once the terror of nations, to the head of an elementary school, at Corinth.

She it was that raised Andriscus[*](For Andriscus and other names in 31–33, see Index.) of Adramyttium, who was born in a fullery, to the title of the Pseudo-Philip, and taught the legitimate son of Perseus the blacksmith’s trade as a means of livelihood.[*](Cf. Plutarch, Aem. 37.)

She, too, delivered Mancinus, after his supreme command, to the Numantians, Veturius to the cruelty of the Samnites, and Claudius to the Corsicans, and she subjected Regulus to the savagery of the Carthaginians. Through her injustice Pompey, after he had gained the surname Great by his

Eunus, too, a workhouse slave, commanded an army of runaways in Sicily. How many Romans of illustrious birth at the nod of that same arbiter of events embraced the knees of a Viriathus[*](Flor., i. 33, 15 ff.) or a Spartacus How many heads dreaded by all nations has the fatal excutioner lopped off! One is led to prison, another is elevated to un-looked-for power, a third is cast down from the highest pinnacle of rank.

But if anyone should desire to know all these instances, varied and constantly occurring as they are, he will be mad enough to think of searching out the number of the sands and the weight of the mountains.

So far as I could investigate the truth, I have, after putting the various events in clear order, related what I myself was allowed to witness in the course of my life, or to learn by meticulous questioning of those directly concerned. The rest, which the text to follow will disclose, we shall set forth to the best of our ability with still greater accuracy, feeling no fear of critics of the prolixity of our work, as they consider it; for conciseness is to be praised only when it breaks off ill-timed discursiveness, without detracting at all from an understanding of the course of events.

Hardly had Gallus been wholly stripped in Noricum, when Apodemius, a fiery inciter of disorder so long as he lived, seized and carried off Caesar’s shoes, and with such swift relays of horses that he killed some of them by over-driving, was the first to arrive in Milan as an advance informer. Entering the palace, he cast the shoes at Constantius’ feet, as if they were the spoils of the slain Parthian king. And on the arrival of the sudden tidings, which showed that an apparently hopeless and difficult enterprise had been carried out to their satisfaction with perfect ease, the highest court officials, as usual turning all their desire to please into flattery, extolled to the skies the emperor’s valour and good fortune, since at his beck two princes, though at different times, Veteranio[*](He joined in the attempt of Magnentius; see note 2, p. 3. The name seems really to be Vetranio.) to wit and Gallus, had been cashiered like common soldiers.

So Constantius, elated by this extravagant passion for flattery, and confidently believing that from now on he would be free from every mortal ill, swerved swiftly aside from just conduct so immoderately that sometimes in dictation he signed himself My Eternity, and in writing with his own hand called himself lord of the whole world—an expression which, if used by others, ought to have been received with just indignation by one who, as he often asserted, laboured with extreme care to model his life and character in rivalry with those of the constitutional emperors.

For even if he ruled the infinity of worlds postulated by Democritus, of which Alexander the Great dreamed under the stimulus of Anaxarchus, yet from reading or hearsay he should have considered that (as the astronomers unanimously teach)

And now, after the pitiful downfall of the murdered Caesar, the trumpet of court trials sounded and Ursicinus was arraigned for high treason, since jealousy, the foe of all good men, grew more and more dangerous to his life.

For he fell victim to this difficulty, that the emperor’s ears were closed for receiving any just and easily proved defence, but were open to the secret whispers of plotters, who alleged that Constantius’ name was got rid of throughout all the eastern provinces and that the above-mentioned general was longed for both at home and abroad as being formidable to the Persian nation.

Yet in the face of events this high-souled hero stood immovable, taking care not to abase himself too abjectly, but lamenting from his heart that uprightness was so insecure, and the more depressed for the single reason that his friends, who had before been numerous, had deserted him for more powerful men, just as lictors are in the habit of passing, as custom requires, from magistrates to their successors.