[Sidenote:—­5—­] Now it was in Marcus’s war against the Germans (if mention ought to be made of these matters), that a captive lad on being asked some questions by him rejoined:  “I can not answer you because of the cold.  So if you want to find out anything, command that a coat be given me, if you have one.”—­And a soldier one night, who was doing guard duty on the Ister, hearing a shout of his fellow-soldiers in captivity on the other side, at once swam the stream just as he was, released them, and brought them back.

One prefect of Marcus’s was Bassaeus Rufus, a good man on the whole, but uneducated and boorish, having been brought up in poverty in his early youth. [Wherefore he had been disinclined to go on the campaign, and what Marcus said was incomprehensible to him.] Once some one had interrupted him in the midst of trimming a vine that wound about a tree, and when he did not come down at the first bidding, the person rebuked him, and said:  “Come down there, prefect.”  This he said thinking to humiliate him for his previous haughtiness; yet later Fortune gave him this title to wear.

[Sidenote:—­6—­] The emperor, as often as he had leisure from war, held court and used to order that a most liberal supply of water be measured out for the speakers. [Footnote:  This refers to the contrivance known as the clepsydra or water-clock, which measured time by the slow dropping of water from an upper into a lower vessel, somewhat on the plan of the hour-glass.] He made inquiries and answers of greater length, so that exact justice was ensured by every possible expedient.  When thus engaged he would often hold court to try the same case for eleven or even twelve days and sometimes [Sidenote:  A.D. 172 (a.u. 926)] at night.  He was industrious and applied himself diligently to all the duties of his office; and there was nothing which he said or wrote or did that he regarded a minor matter, but sometimes he would consume whole days on the finest point, putting into practice his belief that the emperor should do nothing hurriedly.  For he thought that if he should slight even the smallest detail, it would bring him reproach that would overshadow all his other achievements.  Yet he was so frail in body that at first he could not endure the cold, but when the soldiers had already come together in obedience to orders he would retire before speaking a word to them; and he took but very little food always, and that at night.  It was never his custom to eat during the daytime unless it were some of the drug called theriac. [Footnote:  See Galen, On Antidotes, Book Two, chapter 17, and On Theriac (to Piso), chapter 2.] This drug he took not so much because he feared anything as because his stomach and chest were in bad condition.  And it is related that this practice enabled him to endure the disease as well as other hardships.