and their women
with them, and at last pressing about a huge cauldron that is filled
with poison, fighting among themselves for a cup of the brew, and
rolling on the ground in the convulsions of death. Farther on is the
treasure of the king. To hide it he had turned a river from its source,
sunk the gold in a vault beneath, and killed the workmen that had
labored there. Beyond is the capture of the capital, the suicide of the
chief, a troop of soldiers driving captives and cattle before them, the
death of a nation and the end of war.

The subsequent triumph does not appear on the column. It is said that
ten thousand beasts were slaughtered in the arenas, slaughtering, as
they fell, a thousand of their slaughterers. But the spectacle, however
fair, was not of a nature to detain Trajan long in Rome. The air there
had not improved in the least, and presently he was off again, this
time on the banks of the Euphrates, arguing with the Parthians,
avoiding danger in the only way he knew, by facing it.

It was then that the sheen of the purple glowed. If lustreless at home,
it was royally red abroad. In a campaign that was little more than a
triumphant promenade he doubled the empire. To the world of Caesar he
added that of Alexander. Allies he turned into subjects, vassals into
slaves. Armenia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, were added to the realm.
Trajan's footstools were diadems. He had moved back one frontier, he
moved another. From Britain to the Indus, Rome was mistress of the
earth. Had Trajan been younger, China, whose very name was unknown,
would have yielded to him her corruption, her printing press, her
powder and her tea.

That he would have enjoyed these things is not at all conjectural. He
was then an old man, but he was not a good one--at least not in the
sense we use the term to-day. He had habits which are regarded now less
as vices than perversions, but which at that time were taken as a
matter of course and accepted by everyone, even by the stoics, very
calmly, with a grain of Attic salt at that. Men were regarded as
virtuous when they were brave, when they were honest; the idea of using
the expression in its later sense occurred, if at all, in jest merely,
as a synonym for the eunuch. It was the matron and the vestal who were
supposed to be straight, and their straightness was wholly
supposititious. The ceremonies connected with the phallus, and those
observed in the worship of the Bona Dea, were of a nature that