Res Gestae

Accordingly, when Silvanus had been slain at Cologne, as has been related, the emperor learned of it with inconceivable joy, and swollen with vanity and pride, ascribed this also to the prosperous course of his own good fortune, in accordance with the way in which he always hated brave and energetic men, as Domitian did in times gone by, yet tried to overcome them by every possible scheme of opposition.

And so far was he from praising conscientious service, that he actually wrote that Ursicinus had embezzled funds from the Gallic treasury, which no one had touched. And he had ordered the matter to be closely examined, questioning Remigius, who at that time was already auditor of the general’s office of infantry supplies, and whose fate it was, long afterwards, in the days of Valentinian, to take his life with the halter because of the affair of the embassy from Tripoli.[*](Cf. xxviii. 6, 7 and xxx. 2, 9.)

After this turn of affairs, Constantius, as one that now touched the skies with his head and would control all human chances, was puffed up by the grandiloquence of his flatterers, whose number he himself increased by scorning and rejecting those who were not adepts in that line; as we read of Croesus,[*](Cf. Herodotus, i. 33.) that he drove Solon headlong out of his kingdom for the reason that he did not know how to flatter; and of Dionysius, that he threatened the poet Philoxenus[*](Cf. Diod. Sic. xv. 6, and see Index.) with death, because when the tyrant was reading aloud

But this fault is a pernicious nurse of vices. For praise ought to be acceptable in high places only when opportunity is also sometimes given for reproach of things ill done.