[Sidenote:—­7—­] This matter came to my own ears, and another thing that I saw I shall now describe.  There is in the city of Mallus, in Cilicia, an oracle of Amphilochus, that gives responses by means of dreams.  It had given warning also to Sextus, in a way that he indicated by a drawing.  The picture that he put on a board represented a boy strangling two serpents and a lion pursuing a fawn.  I was with my father, then governor of Cilicia, and could not comprehend what they meant until I learned that Sextus’s brothers had been, as it were, strangled by Commodus (who later emulated Hercules), just as Hercules, when an infant, is related to have strangled the serpents sent against him by Juno:  similarly, the Quintilii were hanged; I learned also that Sextus was a fugitive and was being pursued by a more powerful adversary.

I should render my narrative unduly irksome, were I to set down carefully every single man put to death by this ruler,—­all that he despatched because of false information, because of unjustified suspicions, because of notable wealth, because of distinguished family, because of unusual education, or for any other excellence.

[Commodus displayed in Rome itself many marks of wealth and very many more, even, of love for the beautiful.  Indeed, he performed one or two acts of public benefit.  Manilius, a kinsman of Cassius, who had been secretary of his Latin letters and had possessed the greatest influence with him, was caught after a flight, but the emperor would not listen to a word of his, though he promised to lay a great deal of information, and burned all the conspirator’s documents without reading them.]

[Sidenote:  A.D. 184 a.u. 937] [Sidenote:—­8—­] He had also some wars with the barbarians beyond Dacia, in which Albinus and Niger, who later fought the emperor Severus, won fame, but the greatest conflict was the one in Britain.  When the tribes in the island, passing beyond the wall that separated them from the Roman legions, proceeded to commit many outrages and cut down a general, together with the soldiers that he had, Commodus was seized with fear and sent Marcellus Ulpius against them.  This man, who was temperate and frugal and always followed strict military rules in regard to food and all other details when he was at war, became in course of time haughty and arrogant.  He was conspicuously incorruptible in the matter of bribes, but was not of a pleasant or kindly nature.  He showed himself more wakeful than any other general, and, as he desired his associates also to be alert, he wrote orders on twelve tablets (such as are made out of linden wood) [almost] every evening, and bade a man carry them to various persons at various hours, that they, believing the general to be always awake, might not themselves take their fill of sleep.  Nature had made him able in the first place to go without sleep and he had developed this faculty a great deal more by abstinence from food. [Of scarcely