people depends, ought to be watched over by the
combined zeal of all men; and for the sake of insuring this more
completely, when any treasonable enterprise is discovered, the Cornelian
laws have provided that no rank shall be exempted even from torture if
necessary for the investigation.

18. But it is not decent to exult unrestrainedly in melancholy events,
lest the subjects should seem to be governed by tyranny, not by
authority. It is better to imitate Cicero, who, when he had it in his
power either to spare or to strike, preferred, as he tells us himself,
to seek occasions for pardoning rather than for punishing, which is
characteristic of a prudent and wise judge.

19. At that time a monster, horrible both to see and to describe, was
produced at Daphne, a beautiful and celebrated suburb of Antioch;
namely, an infant with two mouths, two sets of teeth, two heads, four
eyes, and only two very short ears. And such a mis-shapen offspring was
an omen that the republic would become deformed.

20. Prodigies of this kind are often produced, presaging events of
various kinds; but as they are not now publicly expiated, as they were
among the ancients, they are unheard of and unknown to people in
general.

XIII.

Sec. 1. During this period the Isaurians, who had been tranquil for some
time after the transactions already mentioned, and the attempt to take
the city of Seleucia, gradually reviving, as serpents come out of their
holes in the warmth of spring, descended from their rocky and pathless
jungles, and forming into large troops, harassed their neighbours with
predatory incursions; escaping, from their activity as mountaineers, all
attempts of the soldiers to take them, and from long use moving easily
over rocks and through thickets.

2. So Lauricius was sent among them as governor, with the additional
title of count, to reduce them to order by fair means or foul. He was a
man of sound civil wisdom, correcting things in general by threats
rather than by severity, so that while he governed the province, which
he did for some time, nothing happened deserving of particular notice.

[102] Patroclus, the companion of Achilles.

[103] The Trojan war. See the account of the pestilence, Homer Il. i.
50.

[104] _i.e._, +loimodes+, from +loimos+, pestilence.
Pandemic means "attacking the whole people." Epidemic, "spreading from
individual to individual."

[105] Ammian alludes to the expedition of Ulysses and Diom