for victories. The common
use of silken robes prevailed, the textile arts were encouraged, and
above all was the anxious care about the kitchen. Vast spaces were
sought out for ostentatious houses, so vast that if the consul
Cincinnatus had possessed as much land, he would have lost the glory of
poverty after his dictatorship.

6. To these shameful vices was added the loss of military discipline;
the soldier practised songs instead of his battle-cry, and a stone would
no longer serve him for a bed, as formerly, but he wanted feathers and
yielding mattresses, and goblets heavier than his sword, for he was now
ashamed to drink out of earthenware; and he required marble houses,
though it is recorded in ancient histories that a Spartan soldier was
severely punished for venturing to appear under a roof at all during a
campaign.

7. But now the soldier was fierce and rapacious towards his own
countrymen, but towards the enemy he was inactive and timid, by courting
different parties, and in times of peace he had acquired riches, and was
now a judge of gold and precious stones, in a manner wholly contrary to
the recollection of very recent times.

8. For it is well known that when, in the time of the Caesar Maximian,
the camp of the king of Persia was plundered; a common soldier, after
finding a Persian bag full of pearls, threw the gems away in ignorance
of their value, and went away contented with the mere beauty of his bit
of dressed leather.

9. In those days it also happened that a barber who had been sent for to
cut the emperor's hair, came handsomely dressed; and when Julian saw
him, he was amazed, and said, "I did not send for a superintendent, but
for a barber." And when he was asked what he made by his business, he
answered that he every day made enough to keep twenty persons, and as
many horses, and also a large annual income, besides many sources of
accidental gain.

10. And Julian, angry at this, expelled all the men of this trade, and
the cooks, and all who made similar profits, as of no use to him,
telling them, however, to go where they pleased.

V.

Sec. 1. And although from his earliest childhood he was inclined to the
worship of the gods,[121] and gradually, as he grew up, became more
attached to it, yet he was influenced by many apprehensions which made
him act in things relating to that subject as secretly as he could.

2. But when his fears were terminated, and he found himself at liberty
to d