never spat, never was seen to
change countenance, and that he never in all his life ate any fruit I
pass over, as what has been often related before.

8. Having now briefly enumerated his good qualities with which we have
been able to become acquainted, let us now proceed to speak of his
vices. In other respects he was equal to average princes, but if he had
the slightest reason (even if founded on wholly false information) for
suspecting any one of aiming at supreme power, he would at once
institute the most rigorous inquiry, trampling down right and wrong
alike, and outdo the cruelty of Caligula, Domitian, or Commodus, whose
barbarity he rivalled at the very beginning of his reign, when he
shamefully put to death his own connections and relations.

9. And his cruelty and morose suspicions, which were directed against
everything of the kind, were a cruel addition to the sufferings of the
unhappy persons who were accused of sedition or treason.

10. And if anything of the kind got wind, he instituted investigations
of a more terrible nature than the law sanctioned, appointing men of
known cruelty as judges in such cases; and in punishing offenders he
endeavoured to protract their deaths as long as nature would allow,
being in such cases more savage than even Gallienus. For he, though
assailed by incessant and real plots of rebels, such as Aureolus,
Posthumus, Ingenuus, and Valens who was surnamed the Thessalonian, and
many others, often mitigated the penalty of crimes liable to sentence of
death; while Constantius caused facts which were really unquestionable
to be looked upon as doubtful by the excessive inhumanity of his
tortures.

11. In such cases he had a mortal hatred of justice, even though his
great object was to be accounted just and merciful: and as sparks flying
from a dry wood, by a mere breath of wind are sometimes carried on with
unrestrained course to the danger of the country villages around, so he
also from the most trivial causes kindled heaps of evils, being very
unlike that wise emperor Marcus Aurelius, who, when Cassius in Syria
aspired to the supreme power, and when a bundle of letters which he had
written to his accomplices, was taken with their bearer, and brought to
him, ordered them at once to be burned, while he was still in Illyricum,
in order that he might not know who had plotted against him, and so
against his will be obliged to consider some persons as his enemies.

12. And, as some