tesy of
manner, so that he conferred a fresh lustre on the glory of his
ancestors, and was an ornament to his posterity, by the memorable
actions which he performed in the office of prefect, to which he was
twice appointed.

17. At the same time, this circumstance came to crown the other
splendid actions of Valens, that, while in the case of others he gave
way to such furious violence, that he was even vexed when the severity
of their punishment was terminated by death, yet he pardoned
Pollentianus, the tribune, a man stained with such enormous wickedness,
that at that very time he was convicted on his own confession of having
cut out the womb of a living woman and taken from it her child, in order
to summon forth spirits from the shades below, and to consult them about
a change in the empire. He looked on this wretch with the eye of
friendship, in spite of the murmurs of the whole bench of senators, and
discharged him in safety, suffering him to retain not only his life, but
his vast riches and full rank in the army.

18. O most glorious learning, granted by the express gift of heaven to
happy mortals, thou who hast often refined even vicious natures! How
many faults in the darkness of that age wouldst thou have corrected if
Valens had ever been taught by thee that, according to the definition of
wise men, empire is nothing else but the care of the safety of others;
and that it is the duty of a good emperor to restrain power, to resist
any desire to possess all things, and all implacability of passion, and
to know, as the dictator Caesar used to say, "That the recollection of
cruelty was an instrument to make old age miserable!" And therefore that
it behoves any one who is about to pass a sentence affecting the life
and existence of a man, who is a portion of the world, and makes up the
complement of living creatures, to hesitate long and much, and never to
give way to intemperate haste in a case in which what is done is
irrevocable. According to that example well known to all antiquity.

19. When Dolabella was proconsul in Asia, a matron at Smyrna confessed
that she had poisoned her son and her husband, because she had
discovered that they had murdered a son whom she had had by a former
husband. Her case was adjourned--the council to whom it had been
referred being in doubt how to draw a line between just revenge and
unprovoked crime; and so she was remitted to the judgment of the
Areopagus, those severe Athenian j