[Footnote 241: The favorable judgment which history has given of Geta
is not founded solely on a feeling of pity; it is supported by the
testimony of contemporary historians: he was too fond of the pleasures
of the table, and showed great mistrust of his brother; but he was
humane, well instructed; he often endeavored to mitigate the rigorous
decrees of Severus and Caracalla. Herod iv. 3. Spartian in Geta.--W.]

The crime went not unpunished. Neither business, nor pleasure, nor
flattery, could defend Caracalla from the stings of a guilty conscience;
and he confessed, in the anguish of a tortured mind, that his disordered
fancy often beheld the angry forms of his father and his brother rising
into life, to threaten and upbraid him. [25] The consciousness of his
crime should have induced him to convince mankind, by the virtues of
his reign, that the bloody deed had been the involuntary effect of fatal
necessity. But the repentance of Caracalla only prompted him to remove
from the world whatever could remind him of his guilt, or recall the
memory of his murdered brother. On his return from the senate to the
palace, he found his mother in the company of several noble matrons,
weeping over the untimely fate of her younger son. The jealous emperor
threatened them with instant death; the sentence was executed against
Fadilla, the last remaining daughter of the emperor Marcus; [251] and even
the afflicted Julia was obliged to silence her lamentations, to
suppress her sighs, and to receive the assassin with smiles of joy and
approbation. It was computed that, under the vague appellation of the
friends of Geta, above twenty thousand persons of both sexes suffered
death. His guards and freedmen, the ministers of his serious business,
and the companions of his looser hours, those who by his interest had
been promoted to any commands in the army or provinces, with the long
connected chain of their dependants, were included in the proscription;
which endeavored to reach every one who had maintained the smallest
correspondence with Geta, who lamented his death, or who even mentioned
his name. [26] Helvius Pertinax, son to the prince of that name, lost
his life by an unseasonable witticism. [27] It was a sufficient crime
of Thrasea Priscus to be descended from a family in which the love
of liberty seemed an hereditary quality. [28] The particular causes of
calumny and suspicion were at length exhausted; and when a senator
was accused