Panegyricus

Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin

1| Well and wisely, Conscript Fathers, did our ancestors establish the custom of beginning speeches, like actions, with prayers, because they held that men could undertake nothing duly and nothing with foresight without the help, the counsel and the honoring of the immortal gods. And by whom should this custom be practiced and observed rather than by a consul, or when more than when, by order of the senate and with the authority of the commonwealth, we are called upon to give thanks to the best of emperors? For what gift of the gods is more excellent or more beautiful than an emperor who is pure and upright and most like the gods themselves? Even if it had still been in doubt whether rulers are given to the earth by chance and accident or by some divine will, it would nonetheless be clear that our emperor was appointed by the gods. For he was not chosen by the hidden power of the fates, but was found by Jupiter himself, openly and in plain view: chosen, indeed, among the altars and the shrines, and in the very place where that god dwells, as manifest and present there as in the sky and the stars. All the more fitting and right is it, then, that I should pray to you, Jupiter Best and Greatest, once the founder and now the preserver of our empire, that I may be granted a speech worthy of a consul, worthy of the senate, worthy of the emperor; that freedom, good faith and truth may stand firm in everything I say; and that my speech of thanks may be as far from the appearance of flattery as it is from any compulsion.

2| For my part, I think that not only the consul but all citizens must strive not to say anything about our emperor in such a way that the same thing might seem capable of being said about another. Away, then, with those cries that fear used to wring from us; let us say nothing of the kind we said before, for we endure nothing of the kind we endured before; and let us not proclaim the same things about the emperor [openly] as before, for neither do we say the same things in private as before. Let our speeches mark the difference between the times, and let it be understood from the very kind of thanks we give to whom they were given, and when. Let us nowhere flatter him as a god, nowhere as a divinity; for we are speaking not of a tyrant but of a citizen, not of a master but of a father. He regards himself as one of us, and he stands out and rises above us all the more because he thinks himself one of us; and he remembers that he is a man no less than that he is set over men. Let us, then, understand our blessings and prove ourselves worthy of them by the use we make of them, and let us reflect again and again how shameful it would be to show greater deference to emperors who rejoice in the slavery of their citizens than to those who rejoice in their freedom. The Roman people, indeed, keep their discernment of emperors: with the same harmony with which a little while ago they acclaimed another as handsome, they acclaim this one as most valiant; and with the cries with which they once praised another's gestures and voice, they praise this one's devotion, self-restraint and gentleness. And what of ourselves? Is it our emperor's divinity that we are all accustomed to celebrate, or his humanity, his moderation, his approachability, as love and joy carry us along? And what could be so befitting a citizen, so befitting a senator, as the surname BEST, which we have added? The arrogance of earlier emperors has made it peculiarly his own. And how shared, how equal, is our cry, HAPPY ARE WE, HAPPY IS HE! And our alternating prayers, MAY HE DO THIS, MAY HE HEAR THIS, as though we would not say it unless he did it? At these cries he is even suffused with tears and deep blushes. For he recognizes and feels that they are said to him, not to the emperor.

3| So let the restraint that we all kept in that sudden glow of devotion be maintained by each of us individually and on reflection as well; and let us recognize that no kind of thanks is more sincere or more welcome than the kind that imitates those acclamations which have no time for pretense. As far as I am concerned, I shall labor to make my speech conform to our emperor's modesty and moderation, and I shall consider no less what his ears can bear than what is due to his virtues. It is the great and unaccustomed glory of the emperor to whom I am to give thanks that I am less afraid he will think me sparing in his praises than excessive. This is the one concern, the one difficulty that besets me: for to give thanks to one who deserves them is easy, Conscript Fathers. There is no danger that when I speak of his humanity he will think he is being reproached with arrogance; when of his frugality, with extravagance; when of his clemency, with cruelty; when of his generosity, with avarice; when of his kindness, with spite; when of his self-control, with lust; when of his industry, with idleness; when of his courage, with fear. Nor am I even afraid that I will seem grateful or ungrateful according to whether I say enough or too little. For I observe that even the gods themselves are pleased not so much by the carefully composed prayers of their worshippers as by their innocence and holiness, and that he is thought more welcome who brings to their shrines a pure and chaste mind than one who brings a studied hymn.

4| But the decree of the Senate must be obeyed, by which it was resolved, for the public good, that through the voice of the Consul, under the title of giving thanks, good emperors should recognize what they are doing, and bad ones what they ought to do. This is now all the more solemn and necessary because our father restrains and suppresses private expressions of thanks, and would stand in the way even of public ones, if he allowed himself to forbid what the Senate commands. In both, Caesar Augustus, you show moderation, both in not allowing thanks to be given to you elsewhere and in allowing them here. For this honour is not paid to you by yourself, but by those who give the thanks. You yield to our feelings, and the necessity is not ours, to proclaim your gifts, but yours, to hear them. Often, Conscript Fathers, I have turned over silently in my mind what sort of man, and how great, ought to be he by whose rule and nod seas, lands, peace and wars are governed; yet when in the meantime I imagined and shaped an emperor fitting for power made equal to the immortal gods, it never occurred to me to conceive, even in a wish, one like the man we see. One man has shone in war, but faded in peace; another the toga honoured, but not arms as well; one sought reverence by terror, another love by kindness; one lost in public the glory he had won at home, another at home the glory won in public. In short, no one has yet appeared whose virtues were not harmed by some neighbouring vice. But to our Emperor what harmony, what concord of all praises and of all glory has fallen! How nothing is taken from his severity by his cheerfulness, nothing from his dignity by his simplicity, nothing from his majesty by his kindness! His strength, his stature, the nobility of his head, the dignity of his face, and besides this a maturity of age that has not bent, and hair, adorned, not without some gift of the gods, with the early marks of old age to increase his majesty: do they not proclaim the emperor far and wide?

5| Such ought he to be whom neither civil wars nor a commonwealth crushed by arms, but peace, and adoption, and at last the divinities won over by prayer on earth, gave us. Or was it right that there be no difference between an emperor whom men had made and one whom the gods had made? Of whose judgment and favour toward you, Caesar Augustus, the proof shone out at once, when you were setting out to join the army, and by an unaccustomed sign. For other emperors either the abundant blood of victims or the left-handed flight of birds announced to those who consulted them: to you, as you went up the Capitol according to custom, there came the cry of citizens, though they were not intending it, as to one already emperor. For the whole crowd that had settled on the threshold, when the doors were thrown open at your entrance, greeted you, as it thought at the time, as a god, but, as the outcome showed, as emperor. Nor was it taken otherwise by all. For you yourself were unwilling to understand: you refused to rule, you refused; which was well in one who was to rule. And so you had to be compelled. You could not, moreover, be compelled except by the danger of your country and the tottering of the commonwealth. For you were set against taking up the empire, unless it had to be saved. Wherefore I think that that very madness and stir in the camp arose because your modesty had to be overcome by great force and great terror. And just as whirlwinds and storms commend the calm of sea and sky, so, I should believe, that tumult went before in order to increase the welcome of your peace. The condition of mortals has these changes, that adverse things are born from favourable, and favourable from adverse. God hides the seeds of both, and most often the causes of good and bad lie hidden under a different appearance.

6| A great disgrace, indeed, was stamped on that age, a great wound on the commonwealth. The emperor and parent of the human race was besieged, captured, shut in: the most gentle old man had taken from him the power of saving men; and there was torn from the emperor that which is the happiest thing in the principate, that nothing is done under compulsion. Yet if this was the only course that would bring you to the helm of public safety, I am close to exclaiming that it was worth it. The discipline of the camps was corrupted so that you might come as its corrector and reformer: a most wicked example was introduced so that the best might be set against it: in short, an emperor was forced to kill those he did not wish to kill, so that he might give an emperor who could not be forced. Long since you deserved to be adopted; but we should not have known how much the empire owed you, if you had been adopted earlier. The time was awaited in which it should be clear that you had not so much received a benefit as given one. The shaken commonwealth fled into your bosom, and, with the empire collapsing upon its emperor, it was conferred on you by the voice of the emperor. You were besought and summoned by adoption, as great commanders were once wont to be recalled from foreign and distant wars to bring help to their country. So son and father, in one and the same moment, each did the greatest service to the other: he gave you the empire, you gave it back to him. Alone, therefore, down to this age, for so great a gift you made the exchange equal by receiving it, nay rather you put under obligation the giver himself: for with the empire shared, you were made more anxious, he more secure.

7| O new and unheard-of road to the principate! No desire of your own, no fear of your own, but another's advantage, another's fear, made you emperor. You may seem to have gained what is the highest among men; yet happier was what you left behind: under a good emperor you ceased to be a private man. You were taken up into a partnership of labours and cares, and it was not the pleasant and prosperous side of that station but its harsh and hard side that drove you to take it on. You took up the empire after another had come to regret having taken it up. There was no kinship between the adopted and the one who adopted, no tie, save that each was the best of men, the one worthy to be chosen, the other to choose. And so you were adopted not, as one man after another was before, to please a wife. For it was not a stepfather but an emperor who made you his son, and with the same spirit in which he was the father of all, the deified Nerva became your father. Nor is it fitting that a son be taken in otherwise, if he is taken in by an emperor. Would you, about to hand over the Roman Senate and People, the armies, the provinces, the allies to a single man, receive your successor from the lap of your wife? Would you look for the heir of the supreme power only within your own house? Would you not cast your eyes around the whole city? And would you not reckon as nearest to you, as most closely bound to you, the man you found the best, the one most like the gods? He who is to rule over all ought to be chosen out of all. For you are not, as emperor, going to give a master to your own little slaves, so that you could be content with a kind of necessary heir, but an emperor to citizens. That is proud and kingly, unless you adopt one who it is agreed would have ruled even if you had not adopted him. Nerva did this, judging it made no difference whether you begot or chose, if children are adopted without judgment just as they are born: except that men bear more evenly one whom an emperor unluckily begot than one whom he badly chose.

8| He therefore carefully avoided this mischance, and took into his counsel not only the judgments of men but of the gods as well. And so your adoption was carried out not in a bedchamber but in a temple; not before the marriage bed but before the couch of Jupiter Best and Greatest: by which at last not our servitude but our freedom, safety and security were founded. For the gods claimed that glory for themselves: theirs was the work, theirs that empire; Nerva was only a minister: and he who adopted you obeyed as much as you who were adopted. A laurel had been brought from Pannonia, the gods so arranging it, to adorn with the emblem of victory the rising of an unconquered emperor. This the Emperor Nerva had placed in the lap of Jupiter: when suddenly, greater and more august than usual, having called together an assembly of men and gods, he took you as his son, that is, as the one help for failing affairs. Thence, as though he had laid down the empire, with what security, with what glory he was glad (for how little difference is there whether you lay down or share the empire, except that the latter is harder?), as if leaning on you present, supporting himself and his country on your shoulders, he grew strong in your youth and your vigour! At once every tumult subsided. That was not the work of the adoption, but of the adopted: and indeed Nerva would have acted rashly if he had adopted another. Have we forgotten how lately, after the adoption, the sedition did not cease but began? That would have been an incitement to anger and a firebrand of tumult, had it not fallen upon you. Is there any doubt that the emperor, who had lost respect, was able to give the empire through the authority of him to whom it was given? At once son, at once Caesar, soon Emperor, and sharer of the Tribunician power, you were made all things alike and at once: things which, shortly before, a true father conferred on his other son alone.

9| This is a great proof of your moderation, that you pleased not only as successor to the empire but also as partner and associate. For a successor must be had, even if you do not wish; an associate need not be had, unless you wish. Will posterity believe that one begotten of a father who was a patrician, ex-consul and triumphator, when he commanded an army, the bravest, the most distinguished, the most devoted to him, was not made emperor by that army? That to the same man, when he governed Germany, the name Germanicus was sent from here? That he himself did nothing to become emperor? That he did nothing except what he deserved and obeyed? For you obeyed, Caesar, and reached the principate by compliance, and nothing was done by you more in the spirit of a subject than that you began to rule. Already Caesar, already emperor, already Germanicus, absent and unaware, and after so many names, so far as concerned you, a private man. It would seem a great thing if I said, You did not know you were to be emperor: you were emperor and did not know that you were. But when the messenger of your fortune came to you, you would indeed have preferred to be what you had been, but it was not open to you. Would you not obey your emperor as a citizen, your commander as a legate, your father as a son? Where then would be discipline? where the custom handed down from our ancestors of undertaking, with even and ready mind, whatever task the emperor might impose? For what if he had entrusted you with province after province, war after war? You would think he could use the same right in recalling you to the empire as he used when he sent you to the army; and that it made no difference whether he ordered a legate to go or an emperor to return, except that there is greater glory in obedience in that which one wishes less.

10| The authority of the one who gave the order was increased by the fact that his authority had been brought to the extreme of danger: and that you might think the one who commanded should be obeyed the more, this was brought about by the fact that he was less obeyed by others. Besides this you heard the agreement of the Senate and People. That judgment, that choice, was not Nerva's alone. For men everywhere were asking this same thing in their prayers; he merely took it first by the right of an emperor, and was first to do what all were about to do. And indeed, by Hercules, this deed would not please all so greatly, had it not pleased before it was done. But with what restraint, good gods, you tempered your power and fortune! An emperor in titles and portraits and standards, but in modesty, labour and vigilance a commander and legate and soldier, when already you were going far ahead of your own standards and eagles, you claimed from that adoption nothing but a son's devotion and a son's obedience, and prayed for a long life and a long glory for this name. The providence of the gods had advanced you to the first place; you still wished to stay in the second, and even to grow old there: you seemed to yourself a private man so long as there was another emperor. Your prayers were heard, but only so far as it was useful to that best and most holy old man, whom the gods claimed for heaven, lest he do anything mortal after that divine and immortal deed. For this reverence is owed to the greatest work, that it be the last, and its author at once consecrated, so that someday among posterity it might be asked whether a god had already done it. So he was public parent by no title more than that he was yours. With vast glory and vast fame, when he had abundantly proved how well the empire sat on your shoulders, he left the world to you and you to the world; dear to all and longed for by that very fact, that he had provided against being longed for.

11| Him you honoured first with tears, as befitted a son, then with temples, not imitating those who did the same thing but with another mind. Tiberius dedicated Augustus to heaven, but to introduce the charge of treason: Nero dedicated Claudius, but to mock him: Titus dedicated Vespasian, and Domitian Titus: but the one so as to seem a god's son, the other a brother. You brought your father among the stars not to frighten citizens, not to insult the divinities, not to honour yourself, but because you believe him a god. This counts for less when it is done by those who think themselves gods also. But although you may worship him with altars, couches and a priest, you make and prove him a god by nothing more than by being such a man yourself. For in an emperor who has yielded to fate after choosing a successor, the one and likewise most certain proof of divinity is a good successor. Has any arrogance, then, come to you from your father's immortality? Do you rival these most recent men, idle and proud from the divinity of their parents, rather than those old and ancient ones? who won this very empire, which enemies had lately invaded and scorned; since of an emperor driven back and put to flight no greater proof was held than if a triumph was celebrated. So they had raised their spirits and shaken off the yoke: and they were no longer contending with us about their own freedom but about our servitude: and they would not even enter a truce except on equal terms, and they dictated terms before they would accept any.

12| But now terror and fear have returned to all, and the wish to do as they are told. For they see a Roman leader, one of those old and ancient ones, to whom plains covered with slaughter and seas stained with victories gave the name of commander. We receive hostages, therefore; we do not buy them: nor do we bargain, with huge losses and immense gifts, to appear as victors. They ask, they beg; we grant, we refuse, both from the majesty of the empire: those who have obtained give thanks; those who have been refused do not dare to complain. Would they dare, who know that you sat down beside the fiercest peoples at the very time that is friendliest to them and hardest for us: when the Danube joins its banks with frost, and, hardened by ice, carries huge wars on its back: when wild tribes are armed no more by weapons than by their own sky, their own star? But when you were close by, just as if the turns of the seasons had been changed, they were held shut in their hiding places; our columns rejoiced to range over the banks, and to use another's opportunity, if you allowed it, and of their own accord to carry their own winter to the barbarians.

13| Such was the reverence for you among enemies: what among soldiers? How did you win their admiration? When they bore hunger with you, bore thirst with you; when in that exercise on the Field you mingled the emperor's dust and sweat with the soldiers' squadrons, differing from the rest in nothing but strength and excellence; when in free combat you now brandished weapons at close quarters, now received those brandished at you, quick to rejoice in the soldiers' courage and glad whenever a heavy blow fell on your helmet or your shield; (for you praised those who struck, and urged them to dare: and they were already daring;) when, as spectator and umpire of men entering contests, you adjusted their arms, tried their weapons, and if anything seemed too hard for the one receiving it, you brandished it yourself. What of when you brought comfort to the weary and aid to the sick? It was not your custom to enter your own tent before you had visited those of your fellow soldiers, nor to give rest to your body except after everyone. For this admiration an emperor would not seem to me worthy, if he were such among the Fabricii, the Scipios and the Camilli. For then the ardour of imitation and always someone better would have kindled him. But after the zeal for arms was transferred from the hands to the eyes, from labour to pleasure; after at our exercises it is not some veteran, who has the honour of a mural or civic crown, who stands by, but a little Greek master: how great it is [alone] out of all to rejoice in the ancestral way, in ancestral virtue, and without rival and without example to strive with oneself, to contend with oneself, and, as he rules alone, so to be alone the one who ought to rule!

14| Were these not your cradle, Caesar, and your first training, when as a mere boy you increased your father's glory with the Parthian laurel, and already then earned the name of Germanicus, when you restrained the ferocity and pride of the barbarians by great terror at the report that reached them from close by, and joined the Rhine and the Euphrates by the fame of the admiration you won? when you traversed the world not more with your feet than with praises? always greater and more famous among those whom you were afterwards to meet. And you were not yet emperor, not yet son of a god. Germany is protected and divided off by very many peoples and the nearly boundless waste of the land lying between, and then by the Pyrenees, the Alps, and other immense mountains, unless they are compared with these. Through all this space, when you led the legions, or rather (such was the speed) swept them along, you never looked back for a carriage, never for a horse. A light one followed along, not as support for the road but as an ornament, and with the others: as one for which you had no use, except when on the day of a halt you stirred up the nearest plain with your briskness, your running about and your dust. Shall I wonder at the beginning of the labour, or at its end? It is much that you persevered; more, that you did not fear you could not persevere. Nor do I doubt that he who summoned you from Spain in the midst of those German wars as his strongest support, himself idle and envious of others' virtues even when he needed their help, conceived so great an admiration for you not without a certain fear, as great as that which the son of Jupiter, after cruel labours and harsh commands, always unconquered and unwearied, brought back to his king; when, in one expedition after another, you were found worthy of yet another commission.

15| As tribune, in your tender years, you travelled lands very far apart with the strength of a man: Fortune already then forewarning that you should long and thoroughly learn what you were soon to teach. For you were not content merely to have glimpsed the camp and to have passed through a short military service, as it were, but you served as tribune in such a way that you could at once be a general, and had nothing to learn at the time for teaching. In ten years of service you came to know the customs of peoples, the sites of regions, the advantages of places, and the differing temper of waters and sky, as you were used to bear your native springs and native star. How often you changed horses, how often worn-out arms! There will come a time, then, when posterity will be eager to visit, and to hand on to their descendants to be visited, what plain drank your sweat, what trees gave you shelter for rest, what rocks for sleep, and finally what roof you filled as a great guest: just as the sacred footprints of mighty commanders were then shown to you yourself in the same places. But that is for the future: for the present, any soldier a little older is reckoned as having you as a fellow soldier. For how few are there of whom you were not a comrade before you were emperor! Hence it is that you call nearly all by name, that you recall the brave deeds of each, and they have no wounds received for the commonwealth to count out to you, to whom you were at once the praiser and the witness.

16| But your moderation deserves still more to be proclaimed, that, brought up on the praises of war, you love peace: and because your father was a triumphator, or because a laurel was dedicated to Jupiter of the Capitol on the day of your adoption, you do not for that reason seek triumphs on every occasion. You do not fear wars, nor do you provoke them. It is a great thing, Emperor Augustus, a great thing to stand on the bank of the Danube, certain of a triumph if you crossed; and not to desire to fight with those who refuse: of which the one is achieved by courage, the other by moderation. For that you yourself do not wish to fight is moderation; your courage brings it about that your enemies do not wish to either. The Capitol, therefore, will someday receive not mimic chariots nor the images of a false victory, but an emperor bringing back true and solid glory, peace, tranquillity, and the submission of enemies so openly avowed that there was no one left to conquer. This is more beautiful than all triumphs. For never has it happened that we conquered, except out of contempt for our empire. But if some barbarian king should advance to such insolence and madness as to deserve your anger and indignation: he, whether defended by an intervening sea, or by immense rivers, or by a sheer mountain, will find all these so easy and so yielding to your valour that he will think the mountains have sunk, the rivers dried up, the sea cut off, and that it is not our fleets but the very lands that have been brought upon him.

17| I seem already to see a triumph heavy not with the spoils of provinces and gold wrung from allies, but with enemy arms and the chains of captured kings. I seem to recognize the mighty names of chieftains, and bodies not unworthy of the names. I seem to look upon floats laden with the monstrous daring of the barbarians, and each man following his own deeds with bound hands: then yourself aloft, standing on the chariot over the back of conquered peoples; before the chariot, however, the shields which you yourself have pierced. Nor would the spolia opima be lacking to you, if any of the kings dared to come to hand-to-hand fight, and did not shudder at the reach not only of your weapons but of your eyes and threats, though the whole field and the whole army were set between. You have deserved, by your very recent moderation, that whenever the dignity of the empire forces you either to bring war or to repel it, you will seem not to have conquered in order to triumph, but to triumph because you have conquered.

18| One thing after another comes to my mind. For how splendid it is that you restored the discipline of the camps, which had lapsed and been extinguished, driving out the evil of the preceding age, idleness and stubbornness and the disdain of obeying? It is safe to earn reverence, safe to earn affection: and no commander fears either not to be loved by his soldiers or to be loved; and thus, secure alike about offence and favour, they press on with their works, attend the exercises, and fit out arms, walls and men. For he is not an emperor who thinks that what is prepared against enemies hangs over himself and is aimed at himself: that was the belief of those who, when they did hostile things, were afraid. They, therefore, rejoiced that military pursuits grew sluggish, that not only spirits but the very bodies grew faint, and that even swords were dulled and blunted by neglect. Our commanders, moreover, feared not so much the plots of foreign kings as of their own emperors, nor so much the hands of enemies as the hands and steel of fellow soldiers.

19| It is the nature of the stars that the rising of stronger ones obscures the small and faint: likewise on the Emperor's arrival the dignity of the Legates is overshadowed. You, however, were greater than all indeed, but greater without diminishing anyone: each man kept the same authority when you were present as when you were absent: indeed to many reverence had even been added by the fact that you too revered them. And so, dear alike to the highest and the lowest, you had so mingled emperor and fellow soldier that you both strained the zeal and labour of all, as a taskmaster, and eased them, as a sharer and partner. Happy those whose loyalty and industry were approved not through go-betweens and interpreters but by you yourself, not by your ears but by your eyes! They achieved that even absent you trusted no one more than yourself about the absent.

20| Now the longings of the citizens were calling you back, and love of country overcame the love of the camp. Then came a peaceful and modest journey, such as plainly of one returning from peace. Nor indeed shall I put among your praises that on your coming no father, no husband was alarmed. In others chastity is affected; in you it is inborn and natural, and among those things for which you cannot claim credit. There was no tumult in the requisition of vehicles, no fastidiousness over lodgings; the allowance was the same as for others; in addition a retinue that was lightly equipped and obedient: you would say some great commander, and you above all, was going to the armies: so little, or at least so slight, was the difference between an emperor already made and one soon to be. How unlike was the passage of another emperor recently! if indeed that was a passage and not a plundering, when he practised the driving off of hosts' goods, and everything to right and left was burned and ground down, as if some force, or those very barbarians whom he was fleeing, had fallen on it. The provinces had to be persuaded that that journey was Domitian's, not an emperor's. And so, not so much for your own glory as for the common good, you set out in an edict what had been spent on each of you. Let an emperor grow accustomed to settling his accounts with the empire: let him go out, let him return, as one about to render an account; let him proclaim what he has consumed. So it will be that he does not consume what it would shame him to tell. Besides, future emperors, whether they wish it or not, will know, and, with the two examples set before them, will remember that men will form their guess about their character according as they choose the one or the other.

21| Did you not, by so many and such great merits, deserve some new honours, new titles? Yet you even refused the name of father of your country. How long a struggle we had with your modesty! how slowly we won! That name, which others took up on the very first day of their principate, like Emperor and Caesar, you put off until you too, a most sparing appraiser of your own benefits, acknowledged that you now deserved it. And so it fell to you alone of all to be father of your country before you were made so; for you were so already in our minds, in our judgments: and it made no difference to the public devotion what you were called; except that it seemed ungrateful to itself if it called you emperor and Caesar rather than father, when it experienced you as a father. With what kindness, what indulgence do you exercise that name! how you live with your fellow citizens as a parent with his children! how, returned an emperor, who had gone out a private man, you recognize and are recognized! You think us the same, yourself the same: equal to all, and greater than the rest only in being better.

22| And first, what a day that was, on which, awaited and longed for, you entered your city! Even this very fact, that you entered, how wonderful and joyful! For your predecessors used to be borne in and carried: I do not say in a four-horse chariot and with white horses, but on the shoulders of men, which was more arrogant. You, loftier and taller than others solely by the height of your body, celebrated not some triumph over our endurance but over the pride of emperors. And so neither age nor ill health nor sex held anyone back from filling their eyes with the unaccustomed sight. The little ones knew you, the young pointed you out, the old marvelled; even the sick, neglecting the orders of their physicians, crept forward to the sight of you as though to health and recovery. Then some declared they had lived long enough, having seen you, having received you; others, that they must live all the more now. Even the women then felt the greatest pleasure in their fertility, when they saw for what emperor they had borne citizens, for what commander soldiers. You could see the roofs crowded and straining, and not even a spot left empty that could take only a tiptoe, unsteady footing; the streets filled on every side, and a narrow path left for you; the people eager on this side and that, everywhere equal joy and equal shouting. The joy at your coming was felt as equally by all as you came to all: and that joy itself grew with your entrance, and was increased almost at every step.

23| It was welcome to all that you received the senate with a kiss, as you had been sent off with a kiss; welcome that you marked the distinguished men of the equestrian order by the honour of their names without a prompter; welcome that, when you greeted your clients, you added, almost unasked, some tokens of familiarity. Yet more welcome that you advanced gradually and calmly, as far as the crowd looking back allowed; that the people who ran to meet you stood around you also, indeed above all you; that on the very first day you entrusted your side to everyone. For not hemmed in by a band of guards, but surrounded on every side now by the flower of the senate, now by that of the equestrian order, according as one or the other kind of throng had grown stronger, you followed your lictors, silent and quiet: for the soldiers differed from the people in nothing, in dress, calm or modesty. And when you began to climb the Capitol, how glad for all was the memory of your adoption! how special the joy of those who had first hailed you as emperor in the same place! Indeed I should believe that your god himself felt a particular pleasure in his work. When indeed you stood in the same footsteps in which your father stood when about to bring forth that mighty secret of the gods, what joy among the bystanders! how fresh the shout! how like that day was to the day that begot this one! how full of altars, how august with victims everything was! how the prayers of all were gathered upon the safety of one! since they understood that they prayed for themselves and their children in what they prayed for you. From there you went to the Palatine indeed, but with such a countenance, with such moderation, as if you were seeking a private house: the rest each to his own household gods, to repeat their proof of joy where there is no necessity of rejoicing.

24| Such an entrance would have burdened another; you are daily more admirable and better, in the end such as other emperors only promise they will be. You alone, therefore, the lapse of time commends and enlarges. For you have joined and blended the most opposite things, the assurance of one long reigning and the modesty of one beginning. You do not press down the embraces of citizens to your feet, nor return a kiss with your hand. The Emperor keeps the kindliness of face and the modesty of hand that he had before. You walked on foot; you walk; you rejoiced in labour; you rejoice; and all those things around you are the same, Fortune has changed nothing in yourself. It is free, when the emperor goes through the public way, to stand still, to run to meet him, to accompany him, to pass by: you walk among us, not as though your presence were a favour granted; and you give access to yourself not so as to put us in your debt. Whoever has come up sticks to your side, and each man's own shame, not your pride, puts an end to the conversation. We are indeed ruled by you, and subject to you, but as we are to the laws. For they too govern our desires and lusts, yet move with us and among us. You stand out, you rise above, as honour does, as power does, which are over men indeed, yet are men's. Before you, emperors, from disdain of us and a certain fear of equality, had lost the use of their feet. They, then, the shoulders and necks of slaves carried above our faces; you, fame, glory, the devotion of citizens carry above emperors themselves; you are raised to the stars by the ground shared with all, and by the emperor's footprints mingled with ours.

25| Nor do I fear, Conscript Fathers, that I may seem too long, since it is most to be desired that the things for which thanks are given to the emperor should be many: which indeed it will be more respectful to keep whole and untouched for your own thoughts than to pick at and touch briefly; because it generally follows that things one is silent about seem to be as great as they are. Unless indeed it pleases to touch lightly on the tribes enriched, and the congiarium given to the people, and given in full, when the soldiers had received a part of their donative. Or is it the mark of a mean spirit to pay promptly rather to those who could more easily be refused? Yet even in this difference the principle of equality has been kept. For the soldiers were made equal to the people in that they received a part, but first; the people to the soldiers in that they received later, but the whole at once. And with what kindness it was divided! how great was your care that no one should be left without a share of your liberality! It was given to those who after your edict had been inserted in place of the struck-off: and those also were made equal to the rest to whom it had not been promised. One was kept back by business, another by ill health, this man by the sea, that by rivers: there was waiting and provision, so that it should count against no one that he had been sick, or occupied, or, finally, far away: let each come when he wished: let each come when he could. It is magnificent, Caesar, and yours, to bring the most distant lands near, as it were, by the genius of generosity, and to shorten immense distances by liberality: to step in against mishaps, to meet fortune, and strive with every means that no one of the Roman people, when you gave the congiarium, should feel that he had been more a man than a citizen.

26| When the day of the congiarium drew near, swarms of infants and a people yet to be used to sit along the streets and watch for the emperor's going out in public. It was a labour for parents to display their little ones and, having set them on their necks, to teach them flattering words and coaxing sounds: they gave back what they were told. And most of them dinned the emperor's deaf ears with vain prayers; not knowing what they had asked, what they had not obtained, they were put off until they plainly knew. You did not even endure to be asked, and although it would have been most delightful to your eyes to be filled with the sight of the Roman offspring, you nevertheless ordered all to be received and entered on the rolls before they saw you or approached you: so that from infancy they should experience the public parent in the gift of upbringing; that they should grow at your expense who would grow for you, and reach their years of service on your maintenance, and all owe to you alone as much as each owes to his own parents. Rightly, Caesar, do you undertake at your own cost the hope of the Roman name. For there is no kind of outlay more worthy of a great emperor, one who will deserve immortality, than that which is spent on posterity. The rich are encouraged to rear children by vast rewards and equal penalties; for rearing the poor there is one reason, a good emperor. If he does not cherish, increase and embrace with a generous hand those begotten in confidence in him, he hastens the setting of the empire and the setting of the commonwealth, and in vain do the leading men protect, with the people neglected, a head that is failing in its body and will totter with unsteady weight. It is easy to guess the joy you felt when the shout of parents, children, old men, infants and boys welcomed you. This was the first voice of your little citizens to fill your ears, to whom, when you were to give maintenance, you granted this greatest thing, that they did not have to ask. Above all, however, you are such a man that under you it is a pleasure, and an advantage, to rear children.

27| No parent now dreads anything for a son except the changes of human frailty; nor is the anger of the emperor counted among incurable diseases. Great indeed is the encouragement to rear children, to bring them up in the hope of maintenance, in the hope of congiaria; greater still in the hope of freedom, in the hope of security. And so let an emperor bestow nothing, provided he takes nothing away; let him not feed, provided he does not kill: and there will be no lack of those who long for sons. On the contrary, let him bestow and take away; let him feed and kill: he will in a short time have brought it about that all repent not only of their descendants but of themselves and their parents. Wherefore I would praise nothing more in your whole liberality than that you give the congiarium from your own, the maintenance from your own: and that from you the children of citizens are not nourished, like the whelps of wild beasts, on blood and slaughter: and, what is most welcome to the recipients, they know that what is given to them has been snatched from no one, and that with so many enriched, the emperor alone has been made poorer: although not even he. For he to whom everything of all belongs has himself as much as all have.

28| Your manifold glory calls me elsewhere: but where? as though I had already sufficiently revered and marvelled at your pouring out so great a sum of money, not, as one conscious of some crime, to turn talk away from pursuing it; nor to hold back the gloomy and sad talk of men with more cheerful matter. You have bought off no guilt with a congiarium, no cruelty with maintenance, nor was your cause for doing good that you might do ill with impunity. By that outlay love was sought, not pardon; and the Roman people left your tribunal bound by obligation, not merely placated. For you offered the congiarium glad to the glad, and secure to the secure; and what emperors before threw to the swollen passions of the people to soothe hatred of themselves, this you gave as innocently to the people as the people received it. A little fewer than five thousand, Conscript Fathers, were the freeborn whom our emperor's liberality sought out, found, and enrolled. These, the support of wars, the ornament of peace, are fed at public expense, and learn to love their country not only as a country but as a nurse. From these the camps, from these the tribes will be filled; from these someday will be born those who need no maintenance. May the gods give you, Caesar, the age you deserve, and preserve the spirit they have given: and how much greater a throng of infants you will see enrolled again and again! For it increases and grows daily: not because children are dearer to parents, but because citizens are dearer to the emperor. You will give congiaria, if you wish; [you will provide maintenance, if you wish:] yet they are born because of you.

29| I reckon the abundance of the grain supply to be like a perpetual congiarium. Care of this once added no less glory to Pompey than canvassing driven from the Field, the enemy driven from the sea, the East and the West traversed in triumphs. Nor did he open the roads in a more civil spirit than our father does, by authority, counsel and good faith; he opens harbours, has restored roads to the lands, the sea to the shores, the shores to the sea, and has so mingled different peoples in commerce that whatever was produced anywhere seemed to be born among all. Is it not given to see that, without injury to anyone, every year overflows for our uses? For the harvests are not, as if taken from an enemy, snatched away and doomed to perish in granaries, carried off while allies cry out in vain. The peoples themselves bring down what the earth bore, what the star nourished, what the year yielded: nor, pressed by new levies, do they fall short of the old tributes. The treasury buys whatever it seems to buy. Hence plenty, hence a grain supply, about which bidder and seller agree: hence satiety here, and nowhere hunger.

30| Egypt used to boast, in nourishing and increasing its seeds, that it owed nothing to rains and sky: since, always watered by its own river, and not wont to grow rich by any other kind of waters than those it itself had brought down, it was clothed with such crops that it vied, as though never to yield, with the most fertile lands. This land, by an unforeseen drought, withered to the point of the harm of barrenness: because the sluggish Nile had raised itself in its bed slowly and languidly, though even then it was to be compared with huge rivers. Hence a great part of the lands, accustomed to be submerged by the wandering river, glowed white with deep dust. In vain then did Egypt wish for clouds, and look back to the sky, when the parent of fertility himself, drawn in and shrunken, had held back the fruitfulness of that year in the same narrows in which he had held back his abundance. For that wandering river, when it is spread out, had not merely halted and stuck within the seized borders of the hills, but had also slipped back with a calm and soft glide over the flat and holding soil, and had not yet added enough moisture to the dry lands. And so the region, cheated of its flooding, that is of its fertility, called for Caesar's help, as it is wont to call for its river: nor was the span of its misfortunes longer than the time it took to report it. So swift, Caesar, is your power, and so intent and girded on all things alike is your goodness, that for those who have suffered something sadder in your age, it is enough for remedy and safety that you know.

31| For all peoples, indeed, I pray fertile years and thankful lands: yet I should believe that through this state of Egypt Fortune wished to try your powers, and to await your vigilance. For since you deserve that all things everywhere be favourable, is it not plain that if anything adverse befalls, material and a field are laid out for your praises and your virtues, since favourable things prove men fortunate, adverse ones prove them great? It had long been commonly said that our city could not be fed and sustained except by the resources of Egypt. That windy and insolent nation was proud that it fed a conquering people, and that on its river, in its ships, lay our abundance or our famine. We have poured back to the Nile its own supplies: it received the grain which it had sent, and carried back the harvests that had been conveyed away. Let Egypt learn, then, and believe by experience, that it does not furnish us with food but with tribute: let it know that it is not necessary to the Roman People, and yet let it serve. After this, if it will, let the Nile love its own bed and keep the measure of a river: this is nothing to the City, nor even to Egypt, except that from there vessels are sent back empty and vacant, like those returning, and from here full and laden, such as are wont to come; and with the office of the sea reversed, let winds that carry and a short voyage be sought from here instead. It would seem a wonder, Caesar, if the grain supply of the City had not felt an idle Egypt and a Nile that held back: it has overflowed even to there by your resources and your care, so that it was proved at once that we can do without Egypt, and that Egypt cannot do without us. It would have been all over with that most fertile nation, had it been free: it was ashamed of unaccustomed barrenness, and blushed at its hunger no less than it was tortured by it; when it was relieved by you alike in its need and its shame. The farmers marvelled at full granaries which they had not filled themselves, from what fields that harvest had been brought up, or in what part of Egypt there was another river. So by your kindness the land was not niggardly, and the Nile, compliant, has often flowed more bountifully for Egypt, but never more bountifully for our glory.

32| How pleasing it now is that all provinces have come into our trust and dominion, since there has come an emperor who transfers and returns the fruitfulness of lands now here, now there, as time and necessity demanded! who feeds and protects a nation severed by the sea as though it were some part of the Roman people and commons! The sky has never had so great a kindness as to enrich and cherish all lands at once: he drives out from all alike, if not barrenness, at least the evils of barrenness: he brings in, if not fruitfulness, at least the goods of fruitfulness: he links East and West by alternating supplies, so that all peoples may take in turn what is produced and desired everywhere, and learn how much more useful it is for those serving in a discordant liberty that there be one whom they serve. For while the goods of all are separate, each one's evils fall upon individuals; but when they are shared and mingled, the evils of individuals belong to no one, and the goods of all to everyone. But whether some divinity belongs to lands, or some genius to rivers, I pray both that soil and the river itself, content with this kindness of the emperor, may store the seeds in a soft bosom and restore them multiplied. We do not indeed ask back the interest: let it nevertheless think it must be paid, and excuse the deceptive faith of a single year by all years, and by all ages after, so much the more because we do not exact it.

33| Satisfaction was given both to the interests of citizens and to those of allies. A spectacle was then seen that was not enervated, nor loose, nor such as to soften and break the spirits of men, but one that inflamed them to noble wounds and contempt of death: since even in the bodies of slaves and criminals the love of praise and the desire of victory were seen. What liberality, then, in giving it, what justice he showed, untouched by every partiality, or above it! What was asked was granted: what was not asked was offered. He pressed on of his own accord, and urged us to desire it: and even so there were more things unlooked for, more sudden. How free, too, was the zeal of the spectators, how secure their favour! No one was charged, as used to happen, with disloyalty because he hated a gladiator: no one, made from spectator into spectacle, atoned for his wretched pleasures with the hook and the flames. Mad was that man, and ignorant of true honour, who gathered charges of treason in the arena, and interpreted it as being despised and scorned unless we also revered his gladiators, as cursing himself in them, as violating his own divinity, his own godhead; since he thought himself the same as the gods, and the gladiators the same as himself.

34| But you, Caesar, what a beautiful spectacle you have given us in place of that detestable one! We have seen the informers put on trial, like highwaymen, like robbers. They had settled not on a wilderness, not on a road, but on the temple, on the forum: no will was any longer safe, no status certain: neither childlessness nor children availed. The avarice of emperors had increased this evil. You turned your eyes to it, and as you had earlier restored peace to the camps, so afterwards you restored it to the forum: you cut out the evil within: and with farseeing severity you took care that a state founded on laws should not appear overthrown by laws. Although, then, both fortune and your liberality have offered us things to look upon, as they did, now the huge strength of men and their equal spirits, now the savagery of wild beasts, now an unknown gentleness; now those secret and hidden resources, first made common under you: yet nothing was more welcome, nothing more worthy of the age, than that it fell to us to look down from above on the upturned faces of the informers and their twisted necks. We recognized them and enjoyed it, when, like expiatory victims of public anxiety, over the blood of the guilty, they were led to slow punishments and heavier penalties. They were heaped into vessels hastily got together, and given over to the storms. Let them depart, let them flee the lands laid waste by informing: and if the waves and tempests have spared any of them for the rocks, let him inhabit bare crags and an inhospitable shore: let him lead a hard and anxious life, and, with the security of the whole human race left behind his back, mourn.

35| A memorable sight, a fleet of informers given over to all the winds, forced to spread sail to the tempests, and to follow the angry waves, to whatever rocks they bore them. It was a delight to look out at once from the harbour on the scattered vessels, and, beside that very sea, to give thanks to the emperor, who, with his clemency kept safe, had entrusted the vengeance of men and lands to the gods of the sea. How much the difference of times can do was then most plainly known, when to the same cliffs to which before the most innocent had been fastened, now the most guilty were fastened; and when all the islands, which a short time ago the throng of senators, now that of informers, filled, whom you have put down not only for the present but for eternity, shut up in that net of penalties. Do they go to snatch other men's money? Let them lose what they have: are they eager to drive men from their household gods? Let them be driven from their own: nor let them, as before, offer that bloodless and iron brow to be wounded in vain by pricks, and laugh at their brands; but let them see losses equal to the reward, and have no greater hopes than fears, and fear as much as they were feared. With a mighty spirit the deified Titus had provided for our security and vengeance, and was therefore made equal to the divinities: but how much more worthy of heaven, someday, are you, who have added so many things to those on account of which we made him a god! This was the harder because the Emperor Nerva, most worthy of you as son and successor, after he had added certain great things to the edict of Titus, seemed to have left nothing for you, who have devised so many things as if nothing had been found before you. How much favour each of these, if dispensed singly, would have added to you! But you poured out everything at once; as the sun and the day are brought forth not in some part, but all at once, and not for one or another, but for all in common.

36| How pleasing it is to see the treasury silent and quiet, and such as it was before the informers! Now that is a temple, now truly a god, not a despoiling-place of citizens and a cruel receptacle of bloody plunder, and in the whole world till now the one place in which, under the best of emperors, the good would be no match for the bad. Yet the honour of the laws remains, and nothing is wrenched away from the public advantage: no penalty has been remitted to anyone, but vengeance has been added, and the only change is that now it is not informers but the laws that are feared. But perhaps you do not restrain the privy purse with the same severity as the treasury. On the contrary, with so much the greater, as you believe that you may do more with what is your own than with what is public. Your agent, and even your procurator, is told: Come to court: follow to the tribunal. For a tribunal also has been devised for the principate, equal to the rest, unless you measure it by the greatness of the litigant. Lot and urn assign a judge to the privy purse: it is allowed to challenge, it is allowed to cry out: I do not want this one, he is timid and understands little of the blessings of the age: I do not want that one, because he loves Caesar bravely. The principate and freedom use the same forum. Which is your chief glory, the privy purse is more often beaten; its cause is never bad, except under a good emperor. This is a great merit: greater is it that you have such procurators that your fellow citizens, for the most part, would prefer no other judges. It is free to the one pleading to say: I do not want to choose him. For you add no necessity to your gifts, as one who knows that this is the sum of imperial benefits, if one may also not use them.

37| The burdens of empire forced most taxes into being, which served the common good but did harm to individuals. Among these the Twentieth was devised, a tolerable and easy tax for heirs who were outsiders, but a heavy one for members of the family. And so it was imposed on the former and remitted for the latter; it was evident, of course, with what grief men would bear, or rather would refuse to bear, the pinching and scraping away of something from goods they had earned by blood, by kinship, and finally by community of sacred rites, goods they had received never as another's property to be hoped for, but as their own, always possessed, and to be passed on in turn to the nearest heir. This gentleness of the law was kept for the old citizens; the new ones, whether they had come into the citizenship through Latium or by the emperor's favor, were held as complete strangers to those to whom they had been most closely joined, unless they had obtained the rights of kinship at the same time. So the greatest benefit was turned into the gravest injury, and Roman citizenship became a thing like hatred and discord and bereavement, since it tore apart the dearest pledges of affection, though their own dutifulness stayed whole. Yet there were found men with so great a love of our name that they thought Roman citizenship a fair exchange for the loss not only of the Twentieth but even of their ties of kinship; but it ought to have fallen freely above all to those by whom it was valued so highly. Therefore your father decreed that what had passed from a mother to her children, or from the children's goods to the mother, even if on acquiring citizenship they had not received the rights of kinship, should not be liable to the Twentieth. The same exemption he granted to a son in his father's goods, provided he had been brought back under his father's power; for he judged it shameless, arrogant, and almost impious that a tax-farmer should be inserted into these relationships, and that the most sacred bonds should be cut apart, as though by the intervention of the Twentieth, not without some guilt; and that no tax was worth so much that it should make children and parents strangers.

38| So far he went: more sparingly, perhaps, than befitted the best of emperors, but not more sparingly than befitted the best of fathers, who, when about to adopt the Best, did this also as a most indulgent parent: content to have tasted certain things, or rather merely to have pointed them out, he kept for his son a large and almost untouched field for doing good. At once, then, your generosity added to his gift, so that, as the son was exempt in his father's estate, so the father should be exempt in his son's inheritance, and should not, at the very moment he ceased to be a father, lose this too, which he had been. Admirably, Caesar, you do not allow the tears of parents to be taxed. Let a father possess his son's goods without diminution, and let him not receive a partner in the inheritance who has no share in the grief: let no one summon fresh and stunned bereavement to a reckoning, or force a father to know what his son has left. I magnify the emperor's gift, Conscript Fathers, when I show that his generosity has a reason in it. For a generosity that has no reason behind it must be judged ambition, boasting, extravagance, anything rather than generosity. It was worthy, then, Emperor, of your gentleness to lessen the injuries of bereavement, and not to suffer anyone, after the loss of a son, to be afflicted with yet another pain. Even so the thing is abundantly wretched, for a father to be sole heir to his son: what if he were to receive a co-heir not from the son? Add that, since the deified Nerva had decreed that children should be released from the obligation of the Twentieth in their father's goods, it was consistent that parents should obtain the same exemption in their children's goods. For why should a greater honor be held for descendants than for ancestors? Or why should the same equity not run backward also? You, Caesar, removed that exception, the condition that the son had been in his father's power: looking, I think, to the force and law of nature, which has always ordered that children be under their parents' authority, and has not, as among cattle, so among men, given power and command to the stronger.

39| Nor was he content to have taken the first degree of kinship away from the Twentieth: he exempted the second as well, and provided that a brother should be left free in his sister's goods, and the sister in her brother's, and that a grandfather and grandmother should be left free in those of a granddaughter and grandson, and they in turn in theirs. To those also to whom Roman citizenship had been opened through Latium he granted the same indulgence, and he joined the rights of kinship among them all together, at once and equally, in the manner of nature; things which earlier emperors were eager to have asked of them one by one, not so much with the mind to grant as to refuse. From this it can be understood what kindness, what spirit it took to gather and bind together families scattered and, so to speak, torn apart, and to bid them be born again; to bestow what was denied, and to grant to all what single persons often had not obtained, and finally to snatch from himself so many occasions of conferring favors, so numerous a store of putting men under obligation and of reckoning it to their account. It seemed unworthy to him, I believe, that a man should be asked for what the gods had given. You are sisters and brother, grandfather and grandsons; what reason is there, then, to ask that you be so? You are so by yourselves. And what? With all the rest of his moderation, he thinks it no less invidious to give an inheritance than to take it away. Gladly, then, approach the honors, take up the citizenship; no one cut off from this tie of kinship will be left stranded like a lopped-off trunk: all will enjoy the same pledges as before, but more honorably. And not even the remote degree of kinship, one already failing, will be compelled to pay the Twentieth on any amount whatever. For the common parent of all has fixed a sum which a tax-farmer can bear.

40| A small and slender inheritance will be free of the burden of the Twentieth; and if the grateful heir so wishes, the whole of it will serve the tomb and the funeral. No watcher, no censor will stand by. Whoever receives a modest sum from anyone's estate may hold it without anxiety and possess it in peace. The law of the Twentieth has been framed so that its danger cannot be reached except by wealth. The injustice has been turned into rejoicing, the injury into a prayer: the heir hopes that he may owe the Twentieth. It was added that those who for such reasons owed the Twentieth at the date of the edict, but had not yet paid it, should not pay it. Yet for the past not even the gods can bring help; you nevertheless brought help, and provided that each man should cease to owe what he would not afterward have owed. You have achieved the same as if we had never had bad emperors; with that disposition, if nature allowed, how gladly you would have poured back their blood and goods to so many plundered, so many butchered! You forbade the exacting of what had begun to be owed in an age not yours. Another man might be angry with the stubborn, and punish slowness in paying with a penalty of double or even quadruple; you think it makes no difference to the injustice whether you exact what ought never to have been owed or decree that it be owed.

41| You will bear with a consul's care and anxiety, Caesar. For when I reflect that you are the same man who remitted the contributions, paid the donative, offered the congiary, drove out the informers, and moderated the taxes, you seem to me to need questioning: have you reckoned well the revenues of the empire, or does an emperor's frugality have such great power that it alone suffices for so many expenses, so many outlays? For what is the reason why for others, who seized everything and kept what they seized as though they had seized nothing, everything fell short, while for you, who give so much away and take nothing, everything is left over? Emperors have never lacked men who, with solemn brow and stern eyebrow, stubbornly stood by the interests of the treasury; and the emperors themselves were of their own accord greedy and rapacious, and needed no teachers; yet they always learned more from us against ourselves. But to your ears the approach has been blocked to all other flatteries, and above all to avaricious ones. So they are silent and still, and since there is no one to be persuaded, there are no persuaders. Whence it comes that, though we owe you very much for your own character, we owe you more for ours.

42| Both the treasury and the public chest were enriched not so much by the Voconian and Julian laws as by the unique and singular charge of treason, brought against those who were free of any charge. The fear of this you have removed entirely, content with a greatness which none lacked more than those who claimed majesty for themselves. Loyalty has been restored to friends, dutifulness to children, obedience to slaves: they show respect, and they obey, and they have masters. For now it is not the slaves who are friends of our emperor, but we; nor does the father of his country believe himself dearer to other men's slaves than to his own citizens. You have freed all men from the accuser in the household, and with one sign of public safety you ended that war, so to call it, of slaves, in which you did no less for the slaves than for the masters. For you made the latter secure, the former good. In the meantime you do not wish to be praised, and perhaps it is not a thing to praise; yet it is welcome to those who remember that emperor who suborned slaves against the lives of their masters, and pointed out charges which he punished as though they had been brought in, a great and unavoidable evil, one to be suffered by each man as often as he had slaves like their emperor.

43| In the same class must be placed the fact that our wills are safe: not one man is heir of everyone, now because he has been named, now because he has not been named. You are not summoned by false or unjust tablets. To you there flees no one's wrath, no one's disloyalty, no one's madness; you are not named because another has given offense, but because you yourself have deserved it. You are written in the wills of friends, and passed over in those of strangers; and there is no difference between a private man and the emperor, except that now you are loved by more, for you also love more. Hold this course, Caesar, and it will be proved by experience whether it is more fruitful and more abundant for an emperor, not only for praise but for money, if men are willing to die with him as heir than if they are compelled. Your father gave much away, and you yourself have given. Let the recipient have proved ungrateful: still there remain those who enjoy his goods, and nothing from them comes back to you except glory. For a grateful debtor makes generosity more pleasant, an ungrateful one more famous. But who before you set this praise above money? How few of the emperors counted not even what came from his own as his, within our patrimonies? Did not the gifts of the Caesars, like those of kings, resemble hooks smeared with bait and snares covered with prey, since, as if drained and entangled out of private fortunes, they carried back with them whatever they had touched?

44| How useful it is to have come through adversity to the enjoyment of good fortune! You lived among us, you were in danger, you were afraid; such was then the life of the innocent. You know, and you have learned by experience, how greatly even those who make them so hate bad emperors. You remember what you used to wish with us, what you used to complain of. For you act as emperor by the judgment of a private man; nay, you show yourself better than the one whom you used to pray for. And so we have been so formed that, we for whom the height of our prayers was an emperor better than the worst, can now bear only the best. No one, then, is so ignorant of you, so ignorant of himself, as to covet that place after you. It is easier for someone to be able to be your successor than for anyone to wish it. For who would of his own will undertake the mass of your cares? Who would not shrink from being compared with you? You yourself have also learned by experience how burdensome it is to succeed a good emperor, and you offered it as your excuse to the man who was adopting you. Or are these easy and slight things to rival, that no one now pays for his safety with disgrace? Life is safe for all, and the dignity of life; nor is he any longer thought prudent and wise who spends his days in darkness. For under an emperor virtues have the same rewards as in the days of liberty; nor is the reward of good deeds only in conscience. You love the steadfastness of citizens, and upright and lively spirits you do not, as others did, crush and press down, but you cherish and raise up. It profits to be good, when it is enough and more than enough if it does no harm: to these you offer honors, to these priesthoods, to these provinces; these flourish in your friendship, these in your esteem. By this prize set on integrity and industry the like are sharpened, the unlike are drawn on: for the rewards of good and bad men make men good and bad. Few are so strong in character that they do not seek or shun the shameful and the honorable according as these have turned out well or badly; the rest, when the wage of toil is given to idleness, of watchfulness to sleep, of frugality to luxury, pursue those very same arts by which they see others have succeeded; and what sort those men are, such they wish to be and to seem; and while they wish, they become so.

45| And the earlier emperors, with the exception of your father, and besides him one or two more (and I have said too many), rejoiced rather in the vices of the citizens than in their virtues: first, because each man's own nature is pleased in another; next, because they thought those more patient of slavery whom it befitted to be nothing but slaves. Into the laps of these they heaped everything; but the good, shut away in leisure or neglect and as if buried, they brought out into the light and day only by informations and dangers. You choose your friends from the best, and by Hercules it is right that those should be dearest to a good emperor who were hateful to a bad one. You know that, as lordship and principate are different by nature, so the emperor is more pleasing to no men than to those who most resent a lord. These, then, you advance, and you show forth, as a pattern and model, what school of life, what kind of men pleases you; and therefore you have not yet accepted the censorship, nor the prefecture of morals, because you prefer to try our characters by favors rather than by remedies. And besides, I do not know whether an emperor does more for morals who allows men to be good than one who forces them. We are pliable, led in whatever direction by the emperor, and, so to speak, we are followers. For we long to be dear to him, to be approved by him; which unlike men would hope for in vain: and by the continuance of our compliance we have come to the point that nearly all men live by the morals of one. Moreover, things are not so badly arranged that we who are able to imitate a bad emperor should not be able to imitate a good one. Only go on, Caesar, and your resolve, your acts will have the force and effect of a censorship. For the life of the emperor is a censorship, and a perpetual one: to this we are steered, to this we are turned; nor do we need command so much as example. For fear is an unfaithful teacher of what is right. Men are better taught by examples, which have this good in them above all, that they prove that what they prescribe can be done.

46| And what terror could have accomplished what reverence for you accomplished? Someone once obtained that the Roman people should suffer the show of the pantomimes to be abolished; but he did not obtain that they should wish it. You were asked for what another had forced, and what had been a necessity began to be a favor. For the demand on you to abolish the pantomimes was made with no smaller a chorus of voices than the demand on your father to restore them. Both were right: for it was proper both that those whom a bad emperor had abolished should be restored, and that, once restored, they should be abolished. In those things which bad men do well, this measure must be kept, that it should appear the author was displeasing, not the deed. The same people, then, who were once spectators and applauders of an emperor on the stage, now turn away even from pantomimes and condemn effeminate arts and pursuits unbecoming to the age. From this it is plain that even the common crowd takes in the discipline of its emperors: a thing which would be most severe if done by one man, they have all made their own. Honor to you for this glory of dignity, Caesar, by which you have brought it about that what before was called force and command is now called morals. They have chastised their own vices, those who deserved to be chastised; and the same men are the correctors who were the ones to be corrected. And so no one complains of your severity, and it is free to complain. But since it is so arranged that men complain of no emperor less than of the one about whom they are most free to complain, in your age there is nothing in which every kind of men does not rejoice and delight. The good are advanced; the bad, which is the most tranquil condition of a state, neither fear nor are feared. You heal errors, but for those who beg it; and to all whom you make good you add this praise, that you do not seem to have compelled them.

47| What of the life, what of the morals of the young? How like an emperor you shape them! What honor you have for teachers of speaking, what regard for professors of wisdom! How under you the studies have regained breath and blood and fatherland! In earlier times savagery punished them with exile, when an emperor conscious of all vices banished arts hostile to vices, no more from hatred than from awe. But you hold those same arts in your embrace, in your eyes and ears. For you practice whatever they teach, and you love them just as much as you are approved by them. Is there anyone who professes the studies of humanity who would not praise, among all your qualities, and even in the first place, the ease of access to you? With a great spirit your father inscribed this citadel, before you emperors, with the name PUBLIC HOUSE; yet in vain, unless he had adopted one who could live there as in a public place. How well that inscription agrees with your character! And how you do everything as though no one but you had inscribed it! For what forum, what temples, are so open? Not the Capitol, nor that very seat of your adoption, is more public, more everyone's. There are no barriers, no graded steps of insult, nor, when a thousand thresholds have been passed, always something hard and obstructing beyond. Great was the stillness before you, great after you, yet nearest to you the greatest: so great a silence everywhere, so deep a modesty, that the examples of restraint and tranquillity are carried back from the emperor's house to small household gods and a narrow hearth.

48| And how you yourself receive everyone! How you wait! How you pass a great part of your days, among so many cares of empire, as if in leisure! And so we come together, not stunned as at other times, nor as men who would risk their lives by arriving late, but untroubled and cheerful, when it suits us. And when the emperor is admitting us, sometimes there is something that keeps us at home as more necessary: we are always excused to you, and never need to be excused. For you know that each man does himself the kindness of seeing you, of attending you; and so much the more freely and for the longer you provide the supply of this pleasure. Nor does flight and emptiness follow your levees. We linger, we stay, as in a common house, which lately a most monstrous beast had fortified with the greatest terror: shut up as if in a cave, now he lapped the blood of his kinsmen, now he came forth to the slaughter and murder of the most distinguished citizens. At the doors there hovered horror and threats, and equal fear for those admitted and those shut out. Besides this, he was himself terrible even to meet and to see: pride on his brow, anger in his eyes, a womanish pallor on his body, on his face shamelessness suffused with much red. No one dared approach or address him, as he always sought darkness and secrecy, and never came out of his solitude except to make a solitude.

49| Yet within those very walls and ramparts by which he seemed to guard his safety, he shut up with himself treachery and ambush, and the god who avenges crimes. Punishment thrust aside and broke through his guards, and through narrow and blocked approaches burst in no differently than through open doors and inviting thresholds; far from him then was his divinity, far those secret bedchambers and cruel retreats into which fear, and pride, and the hatred of men drove him. How much safer now, how much more secure is the same house, since it is defended not by watches of cruelty but of love, not by solitude and bars but by the crowds of citizens! Do we not learn, then, by experience, that the most faithful guard of an emperor is his own innocence? This is the unapproachable citadel, this the unassailable fortification, to need no fortification. In vain will he gird himself with terror who has not been hedged round with affection: for arms are provoked by arms. Do you, moreover, spend only the serious parts of your days in our sight and company? Is it not the same throng, and the same fellowship, that attends your relaxations? Is not your food always in the midst of us, your table always common? Is there not mutual pleasure from our dining together? Do you not draw out talk and give it back? Does not humane kindness lengthen the very time of your banquets, though frugality shortens them? For you do not, before midday, gorged from a solitary dinner, loom over your guests as a watcher and noter of them; nor, full yourself and belching before the fasting and empty, do you set out food, or rather throw it out, that you scorn to touch, and then, having hardly endured that proud pretense of dining together, return to a secret gluttony and hidden luxury. And so we do not admire gold, or silver, or the exquisite contrivances of dinners, but your sweetness and pleasantness; of which there is no satiety, since all is sincere, and true, and adorned with dignity. For no mysteries of foreign superstition, nor obscene wantonness, wander about the emperor's tables: but kindly invitation, and liberal jests, and honor for learning. Hence your sleep is sparing and brief, and no time is shorter for you, out of love for us, than what you pass without us.

50| But since we enjoy your possessions as sharers in them, how much our own things, those we have, are truly our own and ours! For you do not, having driven out the former masters, surround every pool, every lake, even every woodland pasture, in an immense possession; nor do rivers, springs, and seas serve the eyes of one man. There is something that Caesar sees as not his; and at last the empire of the emperor is greater than his patrimony. For much from the patrimony he brings back into the empire, which earlier emperors held, not that they themselves might enjoy it, but that no one else might. So into the traces and seats of noble men equal masters move, and no longer are the lodgings of the most distinguished men worn down with a slave as inhabitant or fall prostrate in foul desolation. It is given to look upon most beautiful houses, enlarged and flourishing, their neglect wiped away. This is your great service, not to men only, but to the very roofs: to halt ruins, to drive out solitude, to rescue vast works from destruction in the same spirit in which they were built. Those things are mute indeed and lack life, yet they seem to feel and to rejoice, that they shine, that they are frequented, that at some time they have begun to have a master who knows. There circulates under the name of Caesar an enormous list of things for sale; so that the avarice of that man should be detested, who coveted so many things when he had so many superfluous. Then it was deadly in the emperor's eyes for one man to have a roomier house, another a pleasanter villa. Now the emperor seeks masters for these same places, and installs them himself: those very gardens of a once great commander, that suburban estate that was never anything but Caesar's, we bid for, we buy, we fill. So great is the emperor's kindness, so great the security of the times, that he thinks us worthy of the emperor's things, and we do not fear that we seem worthy. Nor do you only give your citizens the means of buying, but you bestow and present all the most delightful things: you present, I say, the very things for which you were chosen, for which you were adopted; you transfer what you received by judgment, and you believe nothing more yours than what you hold through friends.

51| The same man is as sparing in building as he is careful in preserving. And so the roofs of the city are no longer shaken, as before, by the hauling of huge stones. Houses stand safe, and temples no longer totter. It is enough for you, and more than enough, having succeeded a most frugal emperor; you prefer to cut back and lop off something from what the emperor left as necessary. Moreover your father withdrew from his own uses what the fortune of empire had given; you withdraw from yours what your father did. But how magnificent you are toward the public! On one side porticoes, on the other shrines are pushed forward with hidden speed, so that they seem not finished, but only changed. Here the immense flank of the Circus rivals the beauty of temples, a seat worthy of a people victorious over nations, and no less worth seeing itself than the things that will be watched from it: worth seeing both for its general appearance and because the place of the commons and of the emperor is made equal. For along the whole length there is one aspect, everything continuous and level, and the emperor watching has no platform more his own than the things he watches. Your citizens will therefore be able to look at one another in turn: it will be given them to behold, not the emperor's bedchamber, but the emperor himself, sitting in public, among the people, to whom you have added five thousand places. For you had increased their number by the ease of the congiary, and had ordered a greater number to be taken on for the future by the pledge of your generosity.

52| If another had provided even one of these things, a head with rays and a seat among the gods would long since have stood for him in gold or ivory, and he would be invoked with more solemn altars and larger victims. You enter shrines only to worship; for you the greatest honor is to keep watch before the temples and to be set before the doorposts. So it comes about that the gods keep the highest summit among men, since you yourself do not covet that of the gods. And so your statue we see in the forecourt of Jupiter Best and Greatest, one or two, and these of bronze. But a little while ago all the approaches, all the steps, and the whole precinct gleamed on one side with gold, on the other with silver, or rather were defiled: when, mixed with the statues of an unclean emperor, the images of the gods looked sordid. These, therefore, of bronze and few, remain, and will remain as long as the temple itself; those of gold and countless paid their offering to public joy by slaughter and ruin. It was a delight to dash to the ground those most arrogant faces, to press on with iron, to rage with axes, as if blood and pain would follow each blow. No one was so restrained in joy and late rejoicing as not to think it a kind of vengeance to see the lacerated limbs, the mutilated members, and finally the fierce and dreadful images thrown down and smelted in the flames; so that out of that terror and those threats they were turned by fire to the use and pleasures of men. With similar reverence, Caesar, you allow thanks for your kindness to be rendered not at your Genius, but in the presence of the divinity of Jupiter Best and Greatest: that we owe to him whatever we owe, that whatever good you do is the gift of him who gave you. Before, indeed, huge herds of victims along the Capitoline way, intercepted for a great part of themselves, as it were, were forced to turn aside from the road: since the most terrible likeness of the most savage lord was honored with as much blood of victims as he himself poured out of human blood.

53| Everything, Conscript Fathers, that is said or has been said by me about other emperors has this purpose, to show how our father reforms and corrects the ways of the principate, corrupted and depraved by long custom. Besides, nothing is praised, without comparison, with sufficient gratitude. Moreover, this is the first duty of loyal citizens toward the best emperor, to pursue the unlike. For he will not have loved good emperors enough who does not hate bad ones enough. Add that there is no greater or wider service of our emperor than that it is safe to attack bad emperors. Has Nero slipped from our grief, though lately avenged? He would permit, I believe, that the fame and life of that man be torn at who was avenging his death; and he would not interpret as said against himself what is said about one most like him. Therefore I, Caesar, compare to all your gifts, and put before many, the fact that it is allowed us to be avenged daily on bad emperors even for the past, and to forewarn future ones by example, that there is no place, no time at which the shades of deadly emperors rest from the curses of those who come after. With the more constancy, Conscript Fathers, let us bring out both our griefs and our joys: let us rejoice in what we enjoy; let us groan over what we suffered. Both must be done at once under a good emperor. Let our private talk, let our conversations, let the very thanksgivings do this; and let them remember that an emperor in safety is best praised if his predecessors who deserved otherwise are blamed. For when posterity is silent about a bad emperor, it is plain that the present one does the same things.

54| And what place was left unaware of wretched flattery, when the praises of emperors were celebrated even in the games and at the contests, were danced, and were broken up, to every kind of mockery, with effeminate voices, measures, gestures? But this was shameful, that at the same time in the senate and on the stage they were praised, by the actor and by the consul. You have removed the arts of the stage far from your cult. So it is serious poems, and the eternal honor of the annals, that pay court to you, not this brief and shameful proclaiming: nay, the very theaters will rise in reverence for you with the greater unanimity, the more the stages are silent about you. But why do I wonder at that, when even those honors that are offered you by us, you either taste most sparingly or are accustomed to refuse altogether? Nothing before was done in the senate so common, so small, that those on whom the necessity of giving an opinion had fallen did not dwell on the praises of the emperors. We were consulted about increasing the number of gladiators, or about establishing a guild of carpenters: and as though the bounds of the empire had been extended, now huge arches, and inscriptions that would rise above the pediment of temples, now even months, and these not single ones, we dedicated to the name of the Caesars. They suffered it, and rejoiced as if they had deserved it. But now who among us, as if forgetful of the man about whom the matter is referred, spends the duty of giving his opinion on the honor of the emperor? This steadiness of ours is praise of your moderation: we obey you in that we assemble in the senate-house not for a contest of flatteries, but for the practice and function of justice, to render this gratitude to your simplicity and truthfulness, that we believe you wish what you wish and do not wish what you do not wish. We begin from there and end there, from which under another emperor we could not begin, nor in which end. For others too have declined most of the honors decreed them; no one before was so great that it was believed he did not want them decreed. This I think more splendid than any inscriptions, since your name is cut not on beams or stones but on monuments of everlasting praise.

55| It will go down through the ages that there was an emperor to whom, flourishing and unharmed, only moderate honors were decreed, and more often none. And indeed, if we wished to contend with the necessity of earlier times, we should be beaten: for pretense is more inventive in devising than truth, slavery than liberty, fear than love. At the same time, since all novelty has long since been used up by flattery, no new honor toward you remains except that we should at some time dare to be silent about you. Come now, if ever our dutifulness has broken silence and overcome your modesty, how few and how modest are the honors we decree that you do not refuse! so that it may appear that you repudiate the greatest honors not from pride and disdain, since you do not scorn lesser ones. This is finer, Caesar, than if you refused them all: for to refuse all is ambition; it is moderation to choose the fewest. By this tempering you take thought both for us and for the treasury: for us, because you free us from every suspicion; for the treasury, because you set a limit to its expenditure, as one who will not need to refill it, if drained, from the goods of the innocent. Your likenesses stand, then, such as were once dedicated to private men for outstanding services to the commonwealth. Statues of Caesar are seen of the same material as those of the Bruti and the Camilli. Nor does the cause differ. For they drove kings and a victorious enemy from the walls: this man keeps off and removes kingship itself, and whatever else captivity breeds; and he holds the seat of the emperor so that there may be no place for a master. And to me, looking at your wisdom, it seems less strange that you either beg off or moderate those mortal and perishable inscriptions. For you know where the true and everlasting glory of an emperor lies: where the honors are over which flames, old age, and successors have no power. For arches and statues, altars even and temples, oblivion demolishes and darkens, and posterity neglects and plucks at them; by contrast, a spirit that scorns ambition and subdues and bridles boundless power flourishes by the very passage of time, and is praised by none more than by those who are least obliged. Besides, as soon as anyone has become emperor, his fame is immediately eternal, though uncertain whether good or bad. It is not, then, a perpetual fame, which remains whether he will or no, that an emperor should desire, but a good one: and that is prolonged not by images and statues but by virtue and services. Nay, even these lighter things, the form and figure of the emperor, neither gold nor silver can express and keep better than the favor of men. And this falls to you abundantly and in full measure, whose most joyful face and lovable countenance sits in the mouth, the eyes, and the mind of all citizens.

56| You have noticed, I believe, Conscript Fathers, that for some time I have not been choosing what I relate: for my purpose is to praise the emperor, not the emperor's deeds. For even bad men do many praiseworthy things; only the best man himself can be praised. Wherefore there is no greater glory of yours, august Emperor, than that for those who give you thanks nothing needs to be veiled, nothing needs to be left out. For what is there in your principate that anyone's speech ought to leap over or pass by? What moment, or rather what point of time, is barren of kindness or empty of praise? Is not everything of such a kind that he seems to have praised you best who has narrated most faithfully? Whence it comes that my speech spreads out almost without measure: and yet I am speaking of a reign not two years old. How much I have said of moderation, and how much more remains! such as that second consulship, which you accepted because the emperor and father was bestowing it. But after the highest power of empire, and with it the power over all things, and over yourself too, was transferred to you by the gods, you refused a third consulship, though you could have played so good a consul. It is great to postpone an honor; to postpone glory, greater. Should I wonder at a consulship held, or at one not accepted? held not in the leisure of this city and the innermost lap of peace, but beside barbarian peoples: as they used to do whose custom it was to exchange the bordered toga for the general's cloak, and to follow victory into unknown lands. It was fine for the empire, glorious for you, when allies and friends came to you in their own country, in their own dwellings. Handsome was the sight of a consul: after many ages a tribunal built of green turf, surrounded with the honor not only of the rods but of javelins and standards. The majesty of the presiding officer was increased by the differing dress of the petitioners, their discordant voices, and the speech that was rarely without an interpreter. It is magnificent to give justice to citizens; what, to enemies? It is handsome to occupy a fixed portion of the forum; what, to press savage plains with the curule chair and the victor's foot? To overlook threatening banks is safe and quiet; what, to spurn barbarian uproar, and to quell the terror of the enemy by a display no less of togas than of arms? And so they saluted you as emperor, not before your images, but yourself present and listening: and the name which others earned by subduing enemies you earned by despising them.

57| This is the praise of a consulship held; here is that of one put off, that at the very beginning of your principate, as though already excused from honors and satiated, you refused a consulship which new emperors used to transfer to themselves from others for whom it was destined. There was even one who, at the end of his principate, wrenched away and seized a consulship which he himself had given, and which was already for the most part held. This honor, then, which emperors both at their beginning and at their end covet so much as to take it away, you yielded to private men, when it lay free and unclaimed. Was a third consulship invidious for you, or a first for an emperor? For the second you entered as emperor indeed, but under an emperor: and nothing can be reckoned to your credit in it, whether of honor or of example, except obedience. And is it so? A city that saw consuls five times, and even six, not those who were created as liberty was already expiring, by force and tumult, but men who, set aside and absent, had the consulships carried to their farms: in this city, you, the emperor of the human race, refused a third consulship as too heavy? Is one who is Augustus, and Caesar, and Father of his Country so much more moderate than even the Papirii and the Quinctii? But them the commonwealth summoned. What? Does not the same commonwealth summon you? Not the senate? Not the consulship itself, which seems to itself to be raised and to grow on your shoulders?

58| I do not call you to the example of him who by continuous consulships had made a certain long and undivided year: I compare you with those who, as often as they were consuls, certainly did not serve themselves. There was in the senate a man consul three times, when you were refusing a third consulship. Our unanimity had imposed on your modesty some burden, that as emperor you should be consul as often as a senator of yours; through excessive modesty you would have refused that, even as a private man. Does the son of a consular and triumphal man, when he is made consul for the third time, rise too high? Is this not owed him? Not earned by the distinction of his family alone? It fell, then, to private men to open the year and unlock the calendar: and this too was a sign of restored liberty, that the consul was someone other than Caesar. So, when the kings had been driven out, the free year began; so, long ago, servitude was thrust out and brought private names into the calendar. Wretched in their ambition were those who were always consuls as they were always emperors! Though it can seem no more ambition than envy and spite to possess all the years, and to hand on that highest ornament of purple only after it has been plucked and its bloom taken. But which should I admire first, your greatness of spirit, or your modesty, or your kindness? It was greatness of spirit, to abstain from an honor always sought; modesty, to yield; kindness, to let others enjoy.

59| But it is now time for you to do something for the consulship itself, to make it greater, and more august, by taking it up and holding it. For to refuse it too often has that ambiguous interpretation, or rather that one, as though you thought it lesser. You refused it as the greatest; but you will be able to persuade no one of this, unless at some time you also do not refuse. When you decline arches, trophies, statues, your modesty must be granted pardon; for those things might indeed be dedicated to you: but when we ask [that you take up and hold the consulship, we ask] that you teach future emperors to renounce idleness, to put off their pleasures for a little while, and for a little while, at least for a very brief time, as if roused from that sleep of good fortune, to put on the bordered toga, which when they could give it they seized; to mount the curule chair, which they hold back; to be, in short, what they coveted, and not wish to become consuls only in order to have been consuls. You held a second consulship, I know: that you could reckon to the armies, to the provinces, even to the other nations, but not to us. We hear indeed that you discharged every function of a consul; but we hear it. You are said to have been most just, most humane, most patient; but you are said. It is right that now and again we should trust our own judgment, our own eyes, and not always fame and rumors. How long shall we, absent, rejoice about one absent? Let it be allowed to find out whether that second consulship itself brought you any pride. Much does an intervening year avail in changing the character of men, more in that of emperors. We have learned, to be sure, that all virtues are present in one on whom some virtue falls: yet we long to find out whether now too a good consul and a good emperor are one and the same thing. For besides the fact that it is arduous to take on two powers at once, and these the highest, there is also some difference in each, since it befits an emperor to be as like as possible to a private man, a consul as unlike as possible.

60| And I see that last year the chief reason for refusing the consulship was that you could not hold it while absent: but now that you are restored to the city and to the public prayers, what is there in which you would more approve yourself than in what and how great were the things we longed for? It is little to come into the senate-house unless you also convene it; to be present at the senate unless you also preside; to hear those giving their opinions unless you also ask them in turn. Do you wish to restore to its majesty that most august tribunal of the consuls? Mount it. Do you wish reverence to stand firm for magistrates, authority for the laws, restraint for petitioners? Come. For what it would matter to the commonwealth, if you were a private man, whether it had you only as a consul or also as a senator, know that it now matters whether it has you only as emperor or also as consul. By so many and such great reasons, although the modesty of our Emperor struggled hard against them, it yielded at last. But in what manner did it yield? Not so as to make himself like private men, but to make private men his equals. For he accepted a third consulship in order to give one. He knew the moderation of men, he knew the shame of those who would not bear to be consuls for the third time, except with one who was three times consul. That was given in the past, though sparingly, to partners in wars, sharers of dangers; but you have granted it to singular men who deserved well and bravely of you, yet in the toga. You are bound by the care of both, by the watchfulness of both, Caesar. But in an emperor it is rare and almost unheard of that he should think himself under obligation, or, if he thinks so, should love it. You owe, then, Caesar, and you pay. But when you make men consuls for the third time, you seem to yourself not a great emperor, but a friend who is not ungrateful. Nay, even certain quite modest services of citizens you raise to something greater by the strength of your fortune. For you bring it about that each man seems to have given you as much as he has received from you. What shall I pray for this kindness? Only that you may always oblige and be obliged; and that you may leave uncertain whether it is more to the advantage of your citizens to owe to you, or to have given to you.

61| I seemed, for my part, to be looking upon that ancient senate, when, with a man thrice consul sitting by, I saw a consul designate for the third time asked for his opinion. How great they were then, and how great you! It happens, to be sure, that bodies however lofty and towering, set beside taller ones, shrink; likewise that the highest dignities of citizens are, as it were, pressed down by comparison with the summit of yours, and the nearer they have risen to your greatness, the more they seem to have descended from their own. Yet those men, though you could not make them equal to yourself, though you wished it, you have set so high that they are seen as far above the rest as they are below you. If you had conferred the third consulship of one man on the same year as yours, it would be taken as proof of a vast spirit. For as it belongs to good fortune to be able to do as much as you wish, so to greatness it belongs to wish as much as you can. Praiseworthy indeed is the man who deserved a third consulship; but more he under whom he deserved it: great and to be remembered is the man who received so great a reward; but greater he who gave it to the receiver. What of the fact that you adorned two at once, for their third consulship, with the sanctity of being your colleague? so that no one may doubt that this was your chief reason for extending your consulship, to embrace the consulship of two, and to give yourself as colleague not to one. Each had lately held a second consulship, given by your father, that is, by how much less than by you?; to the eyes of both the rods, laid down a little before, were still wandering; in the ears of both there still sat that solemn cry of the lictors and the herald before them; when again the curule chair, and again the purple: as of old, when the enemy was at hand and the commonwealth was brought to the utmost danger and demanded a man proved in honors, consulships were not given back to the same men, but the same men were given back to consulships. So great is your power of doing good that your indulgence rivals necessity. Just now they had put off the bordered togas; let them resume them: just now they had bidden the lictors go; let them recall them: just now their congratulating friends had withdrawn; let them return. Is that the nature of a man? The power of a man? To renew joys, to restore gladness, to give no rest to congratulations, nor allow other intervals for repeated consulships except while they are being ended? May you do that always, and may neither your spirit nor your fortune ever tire in this work. May you give third consulships to as many as possible, and when you have given third consulships to very many, may there still always remain more to whom you owe them.

62| Of all the benefits that are bestowed on the deserving, the joy overflows not more to the recipients themselves than to those like them: but especially from the consulship of these men such great gladness has come not to some part of the senate but to the whole senate, that everyone seems both to have given and to have received the same honor. For these are the very men whom the senate chose, and indeed first, when in reducing the public expenses it put the best men in charge of each. This, then, this is what drew them deep into the mind of Caesar. Have we not often enough found by experience that it is the condition of things that the favor of the senate either helps or harms with the emperor? Was not, a little while ago, nothing more deadly than that thought of the emperor? This man the senate approves, this one is dear to the senate. He hated those whom we loved; but we also those whom he did. Now between emperor and senate there is a contest in love for each most worthy man. We point out in turn, we trust in turn, and, what is the greatest sign of mutual love, we love the same men. Therefore, Conscript Fathers, favor openly, love steadily. Love no longer has to be hidden for fear of harming, nor hatred suppressed for fear of helping. Caesar approves and disapproves the same as the senate. He has you in council when you are present, and when you are absent too. He made consuls for the third time those whom you had chosen; and he did it in the order in which they had been chosen by you. Great is your honor in any case, whether he loves most those whom he knows to be dearest to you, or prefers no one to them, though he loves someone more. Rewards are set before the older, examples before the young: let them go, let them throng the houses, at last safe and open: whoever looks up to men approved by the senate, he above all wins the emperor's favor. For he thinks that what is added to each man is added to himself: and he places no glory in being greater than all, unless those whom he is greater than are very great. Stand firm, Caesar, in that principle of your purpose, and believe us to be such as each man's reputation is. To this give your ears, to this your eyes: do not look back at secret estimates, whisperings that lie in wait for no one more than for listeners. It is better to trust all than individuals: for individuals can deceive and be deceived: no one has ever deceived all, nor have all deceived anyone.

63| I return now to your consulship: although there are certain things that belong to the consulship, yet came before the consulship. First, that you were present at your own elections, a candidate, not only for the consulship but for immortality, and glory, and an example which good emperors would follow and bad ones would marvel at. The Roman people saw you in that ancient seat of its power: you endured that long chant of the elections, and a delay no longer to be mocked: and you were made consul as one of us whom you make consuls. How few of the preceding emperors held that honor as due to the consulship, or to the people? Did not some, limp with sleep and overflowing from yesterday's dinner, await the messengers of their elections? Others, indeed, were wakeful and sleepless, but within their own bedchambers, they were plotting exile and slaughter for the very consuls by whom they were being proclaimed consuls. O crooked ambition, ignorant of true majesty, to covet an honor which you disdain, to disdain what you have coveted: and when you look out from the nearest gardens upon the field and the elections, to be as absent from them as if you were separated by the Danube and the Rhine! Would you turn away from your own honor the suffrages you hoped for, and, content to have ordered yourself proclaimed consul, keep not even the pretense of a free state? Would you keep away from the elections, shut up and hidden, as though there a consulship were not being given to you but your command taken away? This was the conviction of the proudest masters, that they would seem to cease to be emperors if they did anything as senators do. Most, however, were kept away not so much by pride as by a certain fear. Did they, conscious of debaucheries and unclean nights, dare to pollute the auspices, and to defile the consecrated field with a wicked footstep? They had not so far scorned gods and men as to be able to bear the eyes of men and gods cast upon them in that most spacious seat. For you, on the other hand, both your moderation and your sanctity urged that you present yourself to the religion of the gods and the judgments of men.

64| Others deserved the consulship before they received it; you deserved it while receiving it too. The ceremonies of the elections had been completed, as far as the emperor was concerned, and already the whole crowd had stirred itself to go, when you, to the amazement of all, approach the consul's chair: you offer yourself to be bound to words unknown to emperors, except when they compelled others to swear. Do you see how necessary it was not to refuse the consulship? We should not have thought that you would do this, if you had refused. I am amazed, Conscript Fathers, and do not yet trust enough either my eyes or my ears: and I ask myself again and again whether I heard it, whether I saw it. The Emperor, then, and Caesar, and Augustus, the Pontifex Maximus, stood before the lap of the consul? And the consul sat, with the emperor standing before him? And he sat undisturbed, unafraid, as though it were the custom to do so? Nay, as he sat he dictated the oath to the one standing, and the other swore, and pronounced and spelled out the words by which he devoted his own head and house to the wrath of the gods, if knowingly he deceived. Great, Caesar, and equal is your glory, whether emperors afterward do this or do not. Is any proclamation worthy enough, that the same man did as consul for the third time what he did the first? The same as emperor as when a private man? The same as emperor as under an emperor? I do not know now, I do not know, whether that is finer which you swore with no one leading the way, or this which you swore with another leading.

65| On the Rostra too, with like scrupulousness, you yourself placed yourself under the laws: the laws, Caesar, which no one has written for an emperor. But you wish nothing more to be allowed you than us: so it comes about that we wish you more. This I hear now for the first time, learn now for the first time: the emperor is not above the laws, but the laws above the emperor: what is not allowed to the other consuls is not allowed to Caesar as consul. He swears to the law with the gods attending; for to whom would they attend more than to Caesar? He swears with those looking on to whom the same oath is to be sworn: not unaware, besides, that to no one is it more a matter of conscience to keep what he has sworn than to him whom it most concerns not to be forsworn. And so, when about to leave the consulship, you swore that you had done nothing against the laws. This was great when you promised; greater after you made it good. To come forward so many times upon the Rostra, and tread that place which the pride of emperors had never mounted, here to take up and here to lay down magistracies, how worthy of you, and how different from the habit of those who, after a consulship held a very few days, or rather not held, threw it away by edict! This in place of an assembly, in place of the Rostra, in place of an oath: that, of course, the ends might agree with the beginnings: and that by this alone they might be understood to have been consuls themselves, that others had not been.

66| I have not leapt over the consulship of our Emperor, Conscript Fathers; but I have gathered into the one place whatever had to be said about the oath. For we ought not, as with a barren and meager subject, to draw out and scatter the same form of praise, and handle it again and again. The first day of your consulship had dawned, on which you entered the senate-house and exhorted us, now singly, now all together, to resume liberty, to take up the cares of what was, as it were, an empire shared by all, to watch over the public interests and rouse ourselves. All before you said these same things; yet no one before you was believed. Before our eyes were the shipwrecks of many, whom an unforeseen whirlwind had struck down after they had been carried out on a treacherous calm. For what sea is so faithless as the blandishments of those emperors, in whom there was such fickleness, such deceit, that it was easier to have them angry than favorable? You, however, we follow untroubled and eager wherever you call. You bid us be free; we shall be. You bid us bring into the open what we think: we shall bring it. For until now we did not hold back through some cowardice and inborn torpor: terror, and fear, and that wretched prudence born of dangers warned us to turn our eyes, ears, and minds away from the commonwealth (there was, in fact, no commonwealth at all). But now, relying and leaning on your right hand and your promises, we unlock mouths fenced in by long servitude, and loosen a tongue bridled by so many evils. For you wish us to be such as you bid us be, and nothing in your exhortations to be painted over, nothing underhanded, in short nothing that is prepared to deceive one who believes, not without danger to the deceiver. For no emperor has ever been deceived, except one who first deceived others.

67| I seem, for my part, to have seen this feeling of the common parent, both from his speech and from the very delivery. How great was the weight of his thoughts! How unaffected the truth of his words! What assurance in his voice! What affirmation in his face! What faith in the eyes, the bearing, the gesture, in short in the whole body! He will always hold, then, to what he urged: and he will know that we, as often as we make trial of the liberty he gave, are obeying him. Nor need he fear that he will think us incautious if we use the faithfulness of these times steadily, we whom he remembers to have lived otherwise under a bad emperor. To utter vows both for the eternity of the empire and for the safety of the citizens? rather, we were accustomed to do so for the safety of the emperors, and because of them for the eternity of the empire. It is worth noting in what words these vows for our empire were undertaken: IF YOU HAVE RULED THE COMMONWEALTH WELL AND FOR THE ADVANTAGE OF ALL. Worthy vows, ever to be undertaken and ever to be paid. The commonwealth, with yourself as author, Caesar, has made this bargain with the gods, that they should keep you safe and unharmed, if you have kept the others so: if not, that they should turn their eyes from the guardianship of your [head], and leave you to vows that would not be undertaken openly. Others wished themselves to survive the commonwealth, and did so: for you your own safety is hateful, if it is not joined with the safety of the commonwealth. You allow nothing to be wished for you, unless it profits those who wish; and every year you send the gods into council about yourself; and you require them to change their decision if you cease to be such as you were chosen. But with a vast confidence in yourself, Caesar, you make a pact with the gods, that they keep you if you deserve it: though you know that whether you deserve it, no one knows better than the gods. Does it not seem to you, Conscript Fathers, that he turns these things over with himself by day and night? I, for my part, have armed even the hand of the prefect against myself, should the advantage of all so demand: but I do not beg off either the wrath or the neglect of the gods: rather I pray and beseech that the commonwealth may never undertake vows for me against its will; or, if it undertakes them against its will, that I may not be bound by them.

68| You take, then, Caesar, the most glorious fruit of your safety from the agreement of the gods. For since you make the exception, that THE GODS SHALL KEEP YOU ONLY IF YOU HAVE RULED THE COMMONWEALTH WELL AND FOR THE ADVANTAGE OF ALL, you are certain that you govern the commonwealth well, since they keep you. And so for you the day passes untroubled and glad, which held other emperors in care and fear: when, in suspense and stunned, and putting little trust in our patience, they awaited from this side and that the messengers of public slavery. And if by chance rivers, snows, or winds had held some back, they at once believed this was what they deserved; and there was no difference in their terror: for the reason that, since a bad emperor fears any more worthy man as his successor, and since there is no one who is not more worthy, all are feared. Your security is not put off by the delay of messengers, not by the slowness of letters. You know that oaths are sworn to you everywhere, since you yourself have sworn to all. No one withholds this from himself. We love you, indeed, in so far as you deserve; but we do this not out of love of you, but of ourselves: and may no day ever dawn on which not our advantage but loyalty, Caesar, makes vows for you. Shameful is the protection of an emperor for which a man can be reckoned a creditor. One may complain that emperors do not inquire into our private affairs, except those whom we hate. For if good emperors had the same care that bad ones had, what admiration of you everywhere you would find, what joy and exultation! What talk of all men with their wives and children, even at their household altars and hearths! You would know that those most tender ears are being spared. And besides, though hatred and love are opposites, they have this in common, that we love good emperors more unrestrainedly where we hate bad ones more freely.

69| Yet you took a proof of our affection and of our judgment, the greatest you could take in person, on that day when you so looked after the anxiety and the sense of shame of the candidates that no one's joy was troubled by another's sadness. Some departed with joy, others with hope: many had to be congratulated, no one consoled. Nor for that reason did you exhort our young men any the less to go round the senate, to make their petition to the senate, and so to hope for honors from the emperor if they had sought them from the senate. And in that connection, if any needed an example, you added that they should imitate you. A steep example, Caesar, and one which no candidate can imitate any more than any emperor can. For what candidate, even for one day, is more reverent toward the senate than you, both in your whole life and in that very time in which you judge of the candidates? Did anything else than reverence for the senate prevail with you, to offer to the young men of a most distinguished family the honor owed to their birth, but before it was owed? At last, then, nobility is not obscured but illumined by an emperor; at last those grandsons of mighty men, those descendants of liberty, neither does Caesar frighten nor does he fear them: nay, by hastening their honors he enlarges and increases them, and gives them back to their ancestors. If there is anywhere anything of ancient stock, anything of remaining distinction, he embraces it and revives it and brings it forward for the use of the commonwealth. There are in honor among men, and in honor of reputation, great names out of the darkness of oblivion, through the indulgence of Caesar, whose it is both to preserve nobles and to make them.

70| One of the candidates, as quaestor, had presided over a province, and in it had founded the revenues of a most distinguished city by an outstanding settlement. This you thought should be reported to the senate. For why should the condition, under you as emperor, who surpassed the distinction of your birth by your virtue, be worse for those who deserved to have noble descendants than for those who had had noble parents? How worthy of you, to announce these things always about our magistrates, and to make men good not by the punishments of the bad but by the rewards of the good! The young men were kindled and raised their spirits to emulate what they saw praised: and there was no one whom this thought did not come over, since he knew that whatever was done well by anyone in the provinces, you knew it all. It is useful, Caesar, and salutary for the governors of provinces, to have this confidence: that for their uprightness and industry the greatest reward is ready, the judgment of the emperor, the vote of the emperor. Until now, however, minds however sincere and upright, even if it did not twist them, a wretched but true reflection nevertheless dulled. For you see: if I do something well, Caesar will not know; or if he knows, he will not give testimony. So that same neglect, or malice, of emperors, since it promised impunity to bad counsels and no reward to right deeds, did not deter the one from crime, and did deter the other from deserving praise. But now, if anyone has governed a province well, to him a dignity won by virtue is offered. For the field of honor and glory lies open to all: from it let each seek what he desires, and, having gained it, owe it to himself. For the provinces too you have for the future taken away both the fear of injuries and the necessity of accusing. For if the men they have thanked are advanced by it, they will not be driven to complain of anyone. And besides [it is clear] that nothing helps a candidate more toward the following honors than those already completed. Best is a magistracy sought by a magistracy, an honor by an honor. I wish that he who has governed a province should cite, not only the letters of his friends, nor entreaties coaxed out by a conspiracy in the city, but the decrees of colonies, the decrees of states. Cities, peoples, nations are well inserted by the votes of consular men. The most effective kind of canvassing for a candidate is to give thanks.

71| Now with what assent of the senate, with what joy was it received, when you met the candidates with a kiss, as you named each! stepping down to the level, and as one of those congratulating. Should I wonder at you more, or blame those who made that seem great? when, as if fixed to their curule chairs, they put forth only a hand, and that hesitantly and sluggishly, like men reckoning it to your account. There befell, then, our eyes an unaccustomed sight, the emperor and a candidate [of a knight] standing together: [there fell to us] to behold one who gave honor equal to those who received it. Which deed of yours was celebrated by the whole senate with what true acclamation, ALL THE GREATER, ALL THE MORE AUGUST! For he to whom nothing remains to increase his eminence can grow only in one way, if he lowers himself, secure in his greatness. For the fortune of emperors is no further from any danger than from humility. To me, in truth, it was not so much your humanity as the earnestness of it that seemed admirable. For when you lent to your speech your eyes, your voice, your hand: as if you had entrusted those same things to another, you fulfilled every measure of courtesy. And even when the supporters of the candidates received their names with the honor they usually give: you too were among those receiving, and out of the emperor's mouth that senatorial assent was heard: and what we rejoiced to give by way of testimony before the emperor to the deserving, was given by the emperor. You made them, then, THE BEST in saying so: and not only the life of the men themselves was approved by you, but the judgment of the senate, and it rejoiced that it was honored no less than the men whom you praised.

72| For as to your prayer that the very ordering of the elections might turn out well and happily FOR US, FOR THE COMMONWEALTH, FOR YOU: is it not such that we ought to reverse this order of the vows? and entreat the gods, in short, that all you do and will do may turn out prosperously FOR YOU, FOR THE COMMONWEALTH, FOR US? or, if one should wish more briefly, FOR YOU ALONE? in whom both the commonwealth and we are. There was a time, and too long it was, when some things were adverse and others favorable to the emperor and to us: now things are common to you with us, as joyful as sad: and we cannot be happy without you any more than you without us. Or, if you could, would you have added at the end of the vows, THAT THE GODS MAY ASSENT TO YOUR PRAYERS ONLY IF YOU HAVE CONTINUED TO DESERVE OUR JUDGMENT? So far above everything do you set the love of your citizens that you wish to be loved first by us, then by the gods, and so by them, if you are loved by us. And indeed the ends of earlier emperors taught that not even the gods love any whom men do not love. It was hard to match these prayers of yours with praises: yet we have matched them. What ardor of love, what goads, what torches supplied us with those acclamations! They were not the voices of our talent, Caesar, but of your virtue and your deserts: such as no flattery ever invented, no one's terror ever wrung out. Whom have we so feared that we should feign these things? Whom have we so loved that we should declare these things? You know the necessity of slavery: when did you hear anything like it, and when did you say it? Fear contrives many things, but such as show they were sought by unwilling men; the invention of anxiety is one thing, of security another; one the discovery of the sad, another of the glad; pretense could produce neither. The wretched have their own words, the happy their own: and even if the same are now said by both, they are said differently.

73| You yourself are witness what joy was in every face. No one kept his cloak or dress, which he had only just put on. Then the roofs echoing with voices, and nothing shut enough against such shouting. Who then did not leap up from his place? Who felt that he had leaped up? Much we did of our own will, more by a kind of impulse and command. For there is in joy too a force that compels. Did your modesty at least set a limit to it? For the more we were checked by you, the more we blazed up, not from stubbornness, Caesar: but as it is in your power whether we rejoice, so how far is not in ours either. You yourself too confirmed the sincerity of our acclamations by the truth of your tears. We saw your eyes grow moist, your face cast down with joy, and as much blood in your face as there was modesty in your mind. And by this we were the more inflamed to pray that there might never be a different cause for your tears, and that you might never [wipe] your brow. Let us ask this very [temple], these seats, as if they would answer, whether they ever saw the tears of an emperor: but the tears of the senate they have often seen. You have burdened future emperors: but our descendants too. For these also will demand of their emperors that they deserve to hear the same: and those will be indignant that they do not hear it.

74| There is nothing I can say more fittingly than what was said by the whole senate: O HAPPY YOU! When we said it, we marveled not at your wealth but at your spirit. For this at last is true happiness, to seem worthy of happiness. But among the many things said that day wisely and gravely, there was above all [this]: TRUST US, TRUST YOURSELF. This we said with great confidence in ourselves, but with greater in you. For one man may perhaps deceive another, but no one will have deceived himself. Let him only look into his life, and ask himself what he deserves. Therefore it gave credit to our voices with the best of emperors, which among bad ones it took away. For although we did what lovers are accustomed to do, they nevertheless believed themselves not to be loved. Besides this we prayed that THE GODS MAY LOVE YOU AS YOU LOVE US. Who would say this either of himself, or to an emperor who loved us moderately? For ourselves indeed this was the sum of our vows, that THE GODS MAY LOVE US AS YOU DO. Is it true, what we cried out among these things: O HAPPY WE! For what is happier than we, for whom it is no longer to be wished that the emperor love us, but that the gods love us as the emperor does? A state devoted to religious observances, and always dutifully deserving the indulgence of the gods, thinks that nothing can be added to its happiness, except that the gods should imitate Caesar.

75| But why do I pursue and gather up the particulars? As if I could either embrace in speech or follow in memory what you, Conscript Fathers, resolved to send into the public record and to engrave in bronze, lest any forgetfulness intercept it. Before, only the speeches of emperors were usually committed to eternity by this kind of monument: our acclamations were shut up within the walls of the senate-house. For they were such that neither the senate nor the emperors could boast of them. But that these should go out to the multitude and be handed down to posterity was in the public interest and in the public dignity: first, that the world might be brought in as witness and party to our dutifulness: next, that it might be plain that we dare to judge of good and bad emperors, not only after their time: last, that it might be learned by experience that we were grateful before as well, but wretched, since we were not permitted before to prove that we were grateful. But with what eagerness, what effort, what shouting was it demanded of you that you should not suppress our feelings and your own deserts! and finally that you should provide for the future by example! Let emperors too learn to tell true acclamations from false, and let them owe it to your gift that they can no longer be deceived. The road to good fame is not to be prepared for them, only not to be abandoned by them: flattery is not to be driven away, but not to be brought back. It is clear both what they should do, and what they ought to hear if they do it. What now should I pray on behalf of the senate, over and above what I have prayed with the whole senate, except that the joy you then showed in your eyes may cling to your mind? May you love that day, and yet surpass it: may you deserve new things, hear new things: for the same things cannot be said except on account of the same deeds.

76| Now how ancient, how consular it was that for three whole days the senate sat after your example, though meanwhile you did nothing beyond a consul! Each man put whatever question he pleased: to dissent, to withdraw, and to offer the commonwealth the full benefit of his judgment, was safe: we were all consulted, and even counted: and the opinion prevailed that was not the first but the better. But who before dared speak, who dared open his mouth, except those wretches who were asked first? The rest, fixed and stunned, bore that mute and seated necessity of assent with what pain of mind, with what shuddering of the whole body! One man and he alone gave the opinion which all would follow and all disapprove, above all he himself who had given it. So true is it that nothing displeases all more than what is done as though it pleased all. Perhaps an emperor in the senate composed himself out of reverence for it: but once out, he at once took himself back into the emperor, and was accustomed to drive away, neglect, and despise all the duties of a consul. He, however, was consul as if he were only consul: he thought nothing beneath him except what was beneath a consul. And first, he came out of his house in such a way that no apparatus of imperial arrogance, no tumult of forerunners held him back. There was one delay at the threshold, to consult the birds and to revere the warnings of the divinities. No one was jostled, no one pushed aside: such was the quiet for travelers, such the modesty of the rods, that for the most part another's crowd compelled both consul and emperor to halt. His own attendance was so moderate, so restrained, that some ancient and great consul seemed to be walking under a good emperor. His way led more often to the forum, but frequently also to the Campus.

77| For he himself attended the elections of the consuls; he took as much pleasure from their proclaiming as before from their designation. The candidates stood before the emperor's curule chair, as he himself had stood before the consul's: and they were bound to the words to which a little before the emperor himself had sworn; one who thinks there is so much in an oath that he demands it of others also. The remaining part of the day was given to the tribunal. There, indeed, what scruple of equity! what reverence for the laws! Someone would approach him as emperor: he would answer that he was consul. No magistrate's right, no one's authority was lessened by him: it was even increased; since most matters he sent back to the praetors, and in such a way that he called them colleagues: not because it was popular and pleasing to the hearers, but because he thought so. He placed so much dignity in the office itself that he judged it no greater that some one should be called colleague by the emperor than that he was praetor. Besides this he was so constant on the tribunal that he seemed to be refreshed and restored by the labor. Which of us takes the same care, the same sweat? Who so serves or suffices for the honors he has sought? And indeed it is right that he who makes the consuls should excel all other consuls so far: for it seemed unworthy even to Fortune that one should be able to give honors who could not discharge them. Let him who is about to make consuls teach, and persuade those about to receive the highest honor, that he knows what it is that he is about to give: thus it comes about that they too know what they have received.

78| For this reason the senate more justly both asked and bade you to take a fourth consulship. Believe, from your own compliance, that this word belongs to command, not to flattery: that in no matter more should either the senate demand it of you, or you grant it to the senate. For as of other men, so of emperors, even of those who seem gods to themselves, all lifetime is short and frail to each. And so it befits every best man to strive and struggle that he may benefit the commonwealth even after himself, by monuments, namely, of moderation and justice, which a consul can establish in great number. This surely is your intention, to recall and bring back liberty. What honor, then, ought you to love more, what name ought you to use oftener, than that which restored liberty found first? It is not less the part of a citizen to be both emperor and consul together than to be consul only. Take account also of the modesty of your colleagues; colleagues, I say: for so you yourself speak, and wish us to speak. The memory of their third consulship will be a burden to their modesty until they see you consul. For what is enough for an emperor cannot but be too much for private men. Grant, Caesar, to those who pray, and and grant us the fulfillment of the vows which you are accustomed to support before the gods, and which lie in your own power.

79| Perhaps a third consulship is enough for you: but for us it is the less enough. That one taught us and led us to desire to have you as consul again and again. We should press it more mildly if we did not yet know what sort of man you were going to be. It was more tolerable that a trial of you be denied us than the use of you. Will it be given us to see that consul again? Will he hear, and give back, the voices he did most recently? And will he offer joy as great as he will himself take in? Will he preside over the public gladness, its author and cause? And will he try, as he is wont, to restrain our feelings, and not be able? Will there be for the dutifulness of the senate and the modesty of the emperor a happy and splendid contest, whether it be defeated or whether it conquer? I, for my part, anticipate some unknown joy, greater than the last. For who is of so weak a mind as not to hope for a consul the better the more often he has been one? Another man, if he had not at once given himself to idleness and pleasure, would still have restored himself from his labors by leisure and quiet: this man, released from the cares of a consul, took up those of an emperor, so careful in his tempering that neither as emperor did he seek the office of consul, nor as consul that of emperor. We see how he meets the longings of the provinces, the petitions even of individual cities. There is no difficulty in hearing, no delay in answering: they approach at once, they are dismissed at once: and at last the crowd of embassies shut out no longer besieges the emperor's doors.

80| What of all his judicial hearings, how mild a severity, how unrelaxed a clemency! Your seat is not for enriching the treasury, nor is there any other reward of your verdict to you than to have judged well. Litigants stand before you anxious not about their fortunes but about your estimate; nor do they fear so much what you think of their case as what you think of their character. O truly the part of an emperor, and even of a consul, to reconcile rival cities, to restrain swelling peoples not more by command than by reason: to intervene against the injustices of magistrates, and make undone whatever ought not to have been done: finally, in the manner of the swiftest of stars, to look upon everything, hear everything, and, when invoked from anywhere, to be present at once, like a divinity, and stand by! Such things, I should think, are what the parent of the world himself governs by his nod, if ever he has lowered his eyes to the lands and deigned to count the fates of mortals among divine works: from which part of his cares he is now free and released, and is at leisure for heaven alone, since he gave you to fulfill his office toward the whole race of men. For you fulfill it, and are equal to him who commissioned you, when every day of yours is laid to rest with the greatest benefit to us and with praise to you.

81| But if ever you have made an even account with the business that flows in on you, you count a change of labor as a kind of refreshment. For what relaxation is there for you except to range the woodland pastures, to rouse wild beasts from their lairs, to cross the huge ridges of mountains, and to set your foot on bristling rocks, helped by no one's hand, no one's footstep; and among these things, with pious mind, to approach groves and to meet divinities? Of old this was the trial of youth, this the pleasure; with these arts future commanders were schooled: to contend in running with fleeing beasts, in strength with bold ones, in cunning with crafty ones: and it was counted no mean glory of peace that the inroad of wild beasts had been removed from the fields and the labor of the countrymen freed, as from a kind of siege. That glory those emperors too claimed who could not go to the hunt themselves: they claimed it, however, by gathering with feigned skill beasts that had been tamed and broken in cages and then let loose for their own mockery. For him an equal sweat in capturing and seeking, and the highest and also the most welcome labor, to find. And indeed, if ever it pleased him to carry the same strength of body out to the seas, he does not follow with eyes or hands sails that merely float: but now he sits at the helm, now he strives with the strongest of his companions to break the waves, to tame the resisting winds, and to cross the opposing straits with oars.

82| How unlike that man, who could not bear the leisure of the Alban lake, and the torpor and silence of Baiae, nor even endure the beating and crash of oars, but shuddered at each stroke with shameful dread. And so, far from every sound, unshaken himself and unmoved, with his vessel tied up and bound fast, no differently than some expiatory victim, he was drawn along. A foul sight, when the Emperor of the Roman People followed another's course and another's pilot, as though in a captured ship. Nor even the rivers and streams were free of that deformity. The Danube and the Rhine rejoiced to carry that glory of ours, with no less shame to the empire that Roman eagles, Roman standards, in short a Roman bank, looked on at this than that the enemy's bank did: the enemy's, whose custom it is to range over those same rivers, now stiff with frost, or overflowing the plains, now liquid and flowing along, in vessels, and to cross them by swimming. Nor yet would I greatly praise in itself the hardness of body and of arms: but if a spirit stronger than all the body rules these, one that no indulgence of fortune softens, no imperial abundance twists toward sloth and luxury; then, whether he exercises on mountains or at sea, I shall marvel at a body glad in its work and limbs growing by labors. For I see that from ancient times the husbands of goddesses, and the sons of gods, were made famous no more by the dignity of their marriages than by these arts. At the same time I reflect, since these things are his sport and diversion, what and how great those serious and strenuous pleasures must be, and from what he withdraws into such leisure. For there are pleasures from which one best judges each man's gravity, sanctity, temperance. For who is so dissolute that some appearance of severity does not settle on his occupations? It is in leisure that we are betrayed. Did not most emperors devote this same time to dice, debauchery, and luxury, filling the relaxations of serious cares with a strain of vices?

83| This is the first thing that great fortune has: it allows nothing to be covered, nothing hidden: of emperors it lays open not only the houses but the very bedchambers and innermost retreats, and sets out and displays all secrets to be known by fame. But for you, Caesar, nothing could be more suited to glory than to be inspected through and through. Splendid indeed are the things you put forth in public; but not less those you hold at the threshold. It is magnificent that you hold yourself back and recall yourself from every contagion of vices, but more magnificent that you do so for your own people. For by how much it is harder to answer for others than for oneself, by so much is it more praiseworthy that, being yourself the best, you have made all around you like yourself. To many illustrious men it has been a disgrace that a wife was taken on too heedlessly or retained too patiently: so domestic infamy destroyed those distinguished abroad: and what kept them from being counted greatest citizens was that their husbands were lesser. For you a wife turns to honor and glory. For what is more holy than she? What more ancient in virtue? If the Pontifex Maximus has to choose a wife, would he not choose either her or one like her (but where is there one like her?)? How she claims nothing for herself from your fortune except joy! How steadily she reveres not your power but you yourself! You are for each other what you were: you approve one another equally: and prosperity has added nothing to you except that you began to learn how well each of you bears prosperity. How modest she is in dress! How sparing in attendance! How like a citizen in her walk! This is the husband's work, who so imbued, so trained her: for the wife the glory of compliance is enough. When she sees how no terror, no ambition accompanies you, should she not herself walk in silence too? And imitate, so far as her sex allows, a husband who goes on foot? It would be becoming in her even if you did the opposite. But under this modesty of her husband, how much deference a wife owes her husband! how much a woman owes herself!

84| And your sister, how she remembers that she is a sister! how in her your simplicity, your truthfulness, your candor are recognized! so that, if anyone compares her with your wife, he is forced to doubt which is more effective for living rightly, to be well brought up or to be happily born. Nothing is so prone to rivalries as emulation, in women especially: and it is born chiefly of close association, is fed by equality, and flares up into envy, whose end is hatred. All the more to be thought admirable is it that for two women in one house, and of equal fortune, there is no contest, no contention. They look up to each other, yield to each other: and though each loves you most unreservedly, they think it makes no difference to them which of them you love more. The same purpose is theirs, the same course of life, and nothing from which you could perceive they are two. For they strive to imitate you, to follow you. So each has the same manners because each has yours: hence moderation, hence also a lasting security. For they will never run the risk of being private women, who have not ceased to be. The senate had offered them the title of Augustae, which they vied in declining, as long as you had refused the appellation of father of your country: or because they judged there was more in it if your wife and sister were said to be so than if they were called Augustae. But whatever reason urged on them so great a modesty, they are the more worthy to be and to be held august in our minds because they are not so called. For what is more praiseworthy in women than if they place true honor not in the splendor of titles but in the judgments of men, and make themselves equal to great names even while they refuse them?

85| Already also in the minds of private men that ancient good of mortals, friendship, had grown old and faded, and in its place had come flatteries, blandishments, and a pretense of love worse than hatred. For in the household of emperors only the name of friendship remained, empty, of course, and mocked. For what friendship could there be among those of whom some seemed to themselves masters, others slaves? You have brought back this friendship, driven out and wandering: you have friends because you are yourself a friend. For love is not commanded, as other things are commanded of subjects: nor is there any feeling so upright, and free, and impatient of domination, nor any that more demands a return. An emperor may perhaps, unjustly, yet still be hated by some, even if he himself hates no one: to be loved he cannot be, unless he himself loves. You love, then, since you are loved, and in what is most honorable on both sides your whole glory lies: being made superior, you descend to all the duties of familiarity, and from emperor you lower yourself to friend; nay, you are never more emperor than when you play the friend out of the emperor. For since the fortune of emperors needs very many friendships, the chief task of an emperor is to provide friends. May this school of yours always please you, and may you hold to this, with your other virtues, most steadily: and may no one ever be persuaded that it is lowly for an emperor, except to hate. The most delightful thing in human affairs is to be loved, but no less to love: you enjoy each in such a way that, though you yourself love most ardently, you are loved still more ardently: first, because it is easier to love one than many: next, because you have such ability to oblige your friends that no one, unless he is ungrateful, can fail to love you the more.

86| It is worth recording what torment you laid upon yourself in order to refuse your friend nothing. You let go a most excellent man, dearest to you, unwilling and sad, as if you could not keep him. How much you loved him you learned by longing, torn and parted from him, while you yielded and were overcome. So, what is unheard of in speech, when the emperor and the emperor's friend wished different things, that was done which the friend wished. O deed to be committed to memory and letters! to choose a prefect of the guard not from those who push themselves forward but from those who draw back: and to give that same man back to the leisure he stubbornly loves: and, though you yourself are stretched with the cares of empire, not to begrudge anyone the glory of quiet. We understand, Caesar, how much we owe you for that laborious and busy post, when leisure is both sought from you and granted by you as the best of things. And I hear what confusion was yours when you escorted him as he departed! For when you had escorted him, you did not restrain yourself from giving him an embrace and a kiss as he went out upon the shore. Caesar stood on that watchtower of friendship, and prayed for the seas, and a swift return (if only he himself had wished), nor could he bear to see him go without following him again and again with vows and tears. As for the generosity, I say nothing. For with what gifts can this care of the emperor be matched, this forbearance, by which you deserved that he seemed to himself too strong, and almost hard? Nor do I doubt that he turned over in his mind whether to turn the helm back: and would have done so, except that it is happier and sweeter than even the very companionship of the emperor to long for an emperor who longs. And he indeed enjoys, as the greatest fruit of the office he took up, so the greater glory of the office laid down: you, however, by that ease of yours, achieved that you seem to hold no one against his will.

87| This was the act of a citizen, and most fitting to the common father, to compel nothing, and always to remember that no power can be given to anyone so great that liberty is not more welcome than power. You are worthy, Caesar, to entrust duties to those who wish to lay them down; to grant, unwillingly indeed, but still to grant, release to those who ask it; not to think yourself abandoned by friends who beg for rest; always to find both those whom you may call back from leisure and those whom you may restore to leisure. You also, whom our father deigns to look upon familiarly, cherish the judgment he has of you: this is your task. For an emperor, when he has shown in one man that he knows how to love, is free of blame if he loves others less. And who could love him moderately, when he gives no laws of loving, but receives them? One prefers to be loved in his presence, another in his absence: let each be loved as he prefers; let no one come into weariness by presence, no one into oblivion by absence. Each holds the place he once earned; and it is easier for the face of an absent man to drop from his eyes than for affection to drop from his mind.

88| Most emperors, though they were masters of the citizens, were slaves of their freedmen: by their counsels, by their nod they were ruled: through them they heard, through them they spoke: through them, nay from them, even praetorships, and priesthoods, and consulships were sought. You have for your freedmen the highest honor indeed, but as freedmen; and you believe it suffices them abundantly if they are thought honest and thrifty. For you know that great freedmen are a chief sign of an emperor not great. And first you keep in your service no one who is not loved by you, or by your father, or by some best one of the [emperors]; and at once, every day thereafter, you so shape these same men that they measure themselves not by your fortune but by their own: and they are so much the more worthy to have every honor paid them by us, because it is not necessary. Was it for just reasons that the Senate and People of Rome added to you the surname of THE BEST? It was ready, indeed, and lay in the open, yet it was new. You may know that no one before deserved what would not have had to be thought out, if anyone had deserved it. Or would it have been better to call you THE HAPPY? That is given not to character but to fortune: better THE GREAT? There is more envy in that than beauty. The best of emperors adopted you into his own family, the senate into the name of THE BEST. This is as much your own as it is your father's; nor does he who calls you TRAJAN designate you more definitely and distinctly than he who calls you THE BEST: as in old days the Pisones were pointed out for thrift, Laelius for wisdom, the Metelli for dutifulness. All these are contained at once in that one name. Nor can anyone be thought best unless he is more outstanding than all the best men in each one's own praise. Rightly, then, after your other titles this was added for you, as the greater. For it is less to be emperor and Caesar and Augustus than to be better than all emperors and Caesars and Augusts. And so that parent of men and gods is worshiped first under the name of BEST, then of GREATEST. All the more splendid is your praise, since it is agreed that you are no less best than greatest. You have gained a name which cannot pass to another, except that in a good emperor it will appear borrowed, in a bad one false: which, though all afterward may usurp it, will always nevertheless be recognized as yours. For as by the name AUGUSTUS we are reminded of him to whom it was first dedicated, so this title of THE BEST will never return to the memory of men without you, and as often as our descendants are compelled to call someone the best, so often will they recall who deserved to be so called.

89| With how great a joy you now rejoice, deified Nerva, when you see that he whom you chose as the best both is and is called the BEST! How glad you must be that, compared with your son, you are surpassed! For in nothing else is the greatness of your spirit better approved than that, being best yourself, you did not fear to choose a better. But you too, father Trajan (for you also, if not the stars, yet hold the seat nearest the stars), what pleasure you take when you behold that tribune, that soldier of yours, so great an emperor, so great a ruler! And with him who adopted him you contend most amicably, which was finer, to have begotten such a man or to have chosen him! Honor to you both for your mighty service to the commonwealth, on which you have conferred so great a good! Though to the one of you your son's virtue has given triumphal honors, to the other heaven: your praise is not less, that you have these things through a son, than if you had earned them yourselves.

90| I know, Conscript Fathers, that other citizens, and consuls above all, ought so to be affected as to think themselves bound publicly more than privately. For as it is more right and fine to hate bad emperors for the common injuries than for private ones, so good ones are more handsomely loved for what they do for the human race than for what they do for individuals. Since, however, it has become the custom that the consuls, when the public thanksgiving has been delivered, also declare in their own name how much they owe the emperor: grant that I discharge this duty not more for myself than for my colleague, Cornutus Tertullus, a most distinguished man. For why should I not give thanks for him also, to whom I owe no less? Especially since the most indulgent emperor has granted to both of us, in our harmony, things which, even if he had conferred them on only one, would have bound both of us equally. Each of us that despoiler and butcher of every best man had blasted with slaughters of friends, and with a thunderbolt hurled at one nearest. For we boasted of the same friends, we mourned the same friends lost: and as now hope and joy, so then grief and fear were common to us. The deified Nerva had this honor from our dangers, that he wished to advance us, if less as good men, still to advance us: because it would be a sign of a changed age that those flourished whose chief prayer before had been to slip from the emperor's memory.

91| We had not yet completed two years in a most laborious and important office, when you, best of emperors, bravest of commanders, offered us the consulship, so that the glory of speed was added to the highest honor. So great is the difference between you and those emperors who sought praise for their benefits out of difficulty, and thought honors more welcome to the recipients if despair first, and weariness, and a delay resembling rejection had turned them into a kind of stigma and shame. Modesty prevents us from reviewing with what testimony you adorned each of us: that you equated us, in love of the right, in love of the commonwealth, with those old consuls. Whether deservedly or not, let us not dare to decide either way; because it is neither right to detract from your assertion, nor easy to admit that what you have said about us, especially so splendid, is true. You nevertheless are worthy to make those men consuls of whom you can say such things. Grant pardon: among these benefits of yours, what is most welcome to us is that you wished us to be colleagues again. So mutual affection, so consistent a course of life, so one and the same principle of purpose demanded: and its force is such that the similarity of character lessens the glory of our harmony, and it would be as wonderful if one of us disagreed with his colleague as if with himself. It is not, therefore, temporary and sudden that each of us rejoices in his colleague's consulship as if it were his own a second time; except that those who become consuls again are indeed bound twice, but at different times: we receive two consulships together, together we hold them, and each in the other is consul, but both a second time and equally.

92| And how remarkable it was that you gave us, while we were prefects of the treasury, a consulship before you gave us a successor! One dignity was increased by another: the honor was not merely continued but doubled, and it anticipated the end of our other office, as though merely following it were too little. So great was your confidence in our integrity that you did not doubt you would act without prejudice to your own diligence if you did not allow us to become private citizens after the most important of offices. And what of the fact that you conferred our consulship on us in the same year as your own? So it is on no other page than the one that will receive you as consul that our names too will be added to the calendar of consuls, at whose head you yourself will be written. You deigned to preside over our elections, you deigned to lead us in reciting that most sacred formula; by your judgment we were made consuls, by your voice we were proclaimed, so that you were at once the supporter of our honors in the senate house and their proclaimer in the Campus. As for your having assigned to us that month above all others which your birthday adorns, how splendid that is for us! It will fall to us to celebrate by edict and by spectacle that day, glad with a threefold joy: it took away the worst of emperors, it gave us the best, and it brought forth one better than the best. Under your eyes a chariot more majestic than usual will receive us; we shall be carried along eagerly amid favorable omens and rival vows, which will be offered to you in your presence, uncertain from which side the louder cheering reaches our ears.

93| Above all, however, it seems we must proclaim that you allow those whom you have made consuls to be consuls; for no danger, no fear of the emperor weakens and breaks the spirits of consuls; there will be nothing we must hear against our will, nothing we must decree under compulsion. The office keeps and will keep the reverence due to it, and we shall not lose our authority in exchange for our security. And if anything should perhaps be taken from the eminence of the consulship, the fault will be ours, not the age's. For it is possible, as far as the emperor is concerned, it is possible for consuls to act as the emperors acted before. Can we make you any return equal to your benefits? None, except this: that we always remember that we have been consuls, and your consuls; that we think and vote as befits men of consular rank; that we conduct ourselves in the commonwealth in the belief that there is a commonwealth. Let us not withdraw our counsel or our labor, nor think ourselves cut off and, as it were, discharged by the consulship, but rather bound and fastened by it; and let us hold the same place in labor and care that we hold in reverence and dignity.

94| At the end of my speech, I, as consul, pray on behalf of human affairs to the gods who protect and guard our empire, and above all to you, Capitoline Jupiter, that you look with favor on your own benefits and add permanence to such great gifts. You heard what we used to pray for under a bad emperor; hear now what we wish for one utterly unlike him. We do not burden you with many vows. For we do not pray for peace, for concord, for security, for wealth, for honors: there is one simple vow of all of us, embracing all of these, THE SAFETY OF THE EMPEROR. Nor are we laying any new task upon you. For you took him into your protection even then, when you snatched him from the jaws of that most rapacious robber. Not without your help, when every lofty thing was being shaken, did this man, who was loftier than all, stand unshaken. He was passed over by the worst of emperors who could not be passed over by the best. You sent clear signs of your judgment when you gave up your name and your honor to him as he set out for the army. You, speaking your mind through the voice of an emperor, chose him as a son for that emperor, as a father for us, as a supreme pontiff for yourself. With all the greater confidence, therefore, in the very vows he himself orders to be pronounced on his behalf, I pray and beseech you, if he governs the commonwealth well, if he governs it for the good of all: first, that you preserve him for our grandsons and great-grandsons; and then that one day you grant him a successor whom he has begotten, whom he has shaped, and whom he has made like the man who was adopted; or, if fate denies this, that you be present in his counsel as he chooses, and show him someone whom it would be fitting to adopt on the Capitol.

95| How much I owe to you, Conscript Fathers, is recorded even in public monuments. You bore witness to my quiet conduct as tribune and my restraint as praetor; you all, in those duties too which you had laid on me because of my practice in defending the allies, gave the most venerable testimony to my steadfastness. Most recently you approved my designation as consul with such acclamations that I understand I must strive again and again to embrace this agreement of yours, to hold on to it and to increase it day by day. For I remember that it is judged most truly whether a man deserved an honor or not once he has obtained it. Only look with favor on this resolve of mine, and believe me: if, after being carried forward by a certain momentum under that most treacherous of emperors, before he declared his hatred of good men, I halted once he had declared it; if, when I saw what shortcuts to honors lay open, I preferred the longer road; if in bad times I was counted among the grieving and the fearful, and in good times among the secure and the rejoicing; if, finally, I love the best of emperors as much as I was hated by the worst, then I shall always serve your reverence in such a way as to regard myself not as consul, and soon a man of consular rank, but as a candidate for the consulship.

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