Res Gestae
Ammianus Marcellinus
Ammianus Marcellinus. Ammianus Marcellinus, with an English translation, Vols. I-III. Rolfe, John C., translator. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press; W. Heinemann, 1935-1940 (printing).
While among the Persians (as I have already related)[*](xxvii. 12, 11 ff.) the perfidy of the king was arousing unexpected disturbances, and in the eastern regions
And although, after long consideration of various circumstances, well-grounded dread restrained me from giving a minute account of this series of bloody deeds, yet I shall, relying on the better morals of the present day, set forth briefly such of them as are worthy of notice and I shall not be sorry to tell concisely what I have feared from events of antiquity.
When in the first Medic war the Persians had plundered Asia, they besieged Miletus with mighty forces, threatened the defenders with death by torture, and drove the besieged to the necessity, overwhelmed as they all were by a weight of evils, of killing their own dear ones, consigning their movable possessions to the flames, and each one striving to be first to throw himself into the fire, to burn on the common funeral pyre of their country.
Soon after this, Phrynichus composed a play with this disaster as its plot, which he put upon the stage at Athens in the lofty language of tragedy. At first he was heard with pleasure, but as the sad story went on in too tragic style, the people became angry and punished[*](With a fine of 1000 drachmas. The play was the Capture of Miletus, produced soon after 494 B.C.; cf. Herodotus, vi. 21.) him, thinking that
But let us come to our subject. Maximinus, who formerly held the office of vice-[*](368 A.D.) prefect at Rome, was born at Sopianae, a town of Valeria,[*](Formerly a part of Pannonia (cf. xix. 11, 4).) of very humble parents, his father being an accountant in the governor’s office[*](Cf. praesidialis apparitor, xvii. 3, 6.) and sprung from ancestors who were Carpi, a people whom Diocletian drove from its ancient abode[*](I.e., from Dacia, 294–6.) and transferred to Pannonia.
Maximinus, after some slight study of the liberal arts, and after acting as a pleader without acquiring distinction, became governor of Corsica, also of Sardinia, and finally of Tuscia.[*](Etruria (in 366).) then, because his successor lingered too long on the[*](369–70 A.D.) way, although transferred to the charge of the city’s grain supply, he retained also the rule of Tuscia, and at the beginning acted with moderation, for a three-fold reason.