jealousy; considered them as friends and companions, with whom he had
shared the danger of the tyranny, and with whom he wished to enjoy
the security of the present time. He very frequently invited them to
familiar entertainments, the frugality of which was ridiculed by those
who remembered and regretted the luxurious prodigality of Commodus.

To heal, as far as I was possible, the wounds inflicted by the hand
of tyranny, was the pleasing, but melancholy, task of Pertinax. The
innocent victims, who yet survived, were recalled from exile, released
from prison, and restored to the full possession of their honors and
fortunes. The unburied bodies of murdered senators (for the cruelty of
Commodus endeavored to extend itself beyond death) were deposited in
the sepulchres of their ancestors; their memory was justified and every
consolation was bestowed on their ruined and afflicted families. Among
these consolations, one of the most grateful was the punishment of the
Delators; the common enemies of their master, of virtue, and of their
country. Yet even in the inquisition of these legal assassins, Pertinax
proceeded with a steady temper, which gave every thing to justice, and
nothing to popular prejudice and resentment.

The finances of the state demanded the most vigilant care of the
emperor. Though every measure of injustice and extortion had been
adopted, which could collect the property of the subject into the
coffers of the prince, the rapaciousness of Commodus had been so very
inadequate to his extravagance, that, upon his death, no more than eight
thousand pounds were found in the exhausted treasury, to defray the
current expenses of government, and to discharge the pressing demand of
a liberal donative, which the new emperor had been obliged to promise to
the Praetorian guards. Yet under these distressed circumstances, Pertinax
had the generous firmness to remit all the oppressive taxes invented
by Commodus, and to cancel all the unjust claims of the treasury;
declaring, in a decree of the senate, "that he was better satisfied to
administer a poor republic with innocence, than to acquire riches by the
ways of tyranny and dishonor. "Economy and industry he considered as
the pure and genuine sources of wealth; and from them he soon derived a
copious supply for the public necessities. The expense of the household
was immediately reduced to one half. All the instruments of luxury
Pertinax exposed to public auction, gold