Res Gestae

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)