ll of you who go through life humbly and without power are
trained to submit obediently to the will of Heaven. Cilo taught me to
place my own power, and the greatness of the realm which it would be
incumbent on me to reign over, above everything, even above the gods. It
was impressed upon you and yours to hold the life of another sacred; to
us, our duty as the sovereign transcends this law. Even the blood of a
brother must flow if it is for the good of the state intrusted to us. My
nurse had taught me that being good meant doing unto others as we would
be done by; Cilo cried to me: 'Strike down, that you may not be struck
down--away with mercy, if the welfare of the state is threatened!' And
how many hands are raised against Rome, the universal empire, which I
rule over! It needs a strong hand to keep its antagonistic parts
together. Otherwise it would fall apart like a bundle of arrows when the
string that bound them is broken. And I, even as a boy, had sworn to my
father, by the Terminus stone in the Capitol, never to abandon a single
inch of his ground without fighting for it. He, Severus, was the wisest
of the rulers. Only the blind love for his second son, encouraged by the
women, caused him to forget his moderation and prudence. My brother Geta
was to reign together with me over the empire, which ought to have been
mine alone as the first-born. Every year festivals were kept, with
prayers and sacrifices, to the 'love of the brothers.' You have perhaps
seen the coins, which show us hand in hand, and have on them the
inscription, 'Eternal union'!

"I in union--I hand in hand with the man I most hated under the sun! It
almost maddened me only to hear his voice. I would have liked best of all
to spring at his throat when I saw him with his learned fellows
squandering their time. Do you know what they did? They invented the
names by which the voices of different animals were to be known. Once I
snatched the pencil out of the hand of the freedman as he was writing the
sentences, 'The horse neighs, the pig grunts, the goat bleats, the cow
lows, the sheep baas.' 'He, himself,' I added, 'croaks like a hoarse
jay.'

"That I should share the government with this miserable, faint-hearted,
poisonous nobody could never be,--this enemy, who, when I said 'Yes,'
cried 'No!' Who frustrated all my measures,--it was impossible! It would
have caused the destruction of the state, as certainly as it was the
unfairest and unwisest of th