In fact the Caesars and the Flavians met the same fate; the two lines began and ended alike; the former with Augustus and Nero, the latter with Vespasian and Domitian; first a despot, able, cold, and as capable of cruelty as of moderation, then a tyrant, atrocious and detested.  And both were extinguished without a descendant.  Then a rare piece of good fortune befell the Roman world.  Domitian, two years before he was assassinated by some of his servants whom he was about to put to death, grew suspicious of an aged and honorable senator, Cocceius Nerva, who had been twice consul, and whom he had sent into exile, first to Tarenturn, and then in Gaul, preparatory, probably, to a worse fate.  To this victim of proscription application was made by the conspirators who had just got rid of Domitian, and had to get another emperor.  Nerva accepted, but not without hesitation, for he was sixty-four years old; he had witnessed the violent death of six emperors, and his grandfather, a celebrated jurist, and for a long while a friend of Tiberius, had killed himself, it is said, for grief at the iniquitous and cruel government of his friend.  The short reign of Nerva was a wise, a just, and a humane, but a sad one, not for the people, but for himself.  He maintained peace and order, recalled exiles, suppressed informers, re-established respect for laws and morals, turned a deaf ear to self-interested suggestions of vengeance, spoliation, and injustice, proceeding at one time from those who had made him emperor, at another from the Praetorian soldiers and the Roman mob, who regretted Domitian just as they had Nero.  But Nerva did not succeed in putting a stop to mob-violence or murders prompted by cupidity or hatred.  Finding his authority insulted and his life threatened, he formed a resolution which has been described and explained by a learned and temperate historian of the last century, Lenain de Tillemont (Histoire des Empereurs, &c., t. ii. p. 59), with so much justice and precision that it is a pleasure to quote his own words.  “Seeing,” says he, “that his age was despised, and that the empire required some one who combined strength of mind and body, Nerva, being free from that blindness which prevents one from discussing and measuring one’s own powers, and from that thirst for dominion which often prevails over even those who are nearest to the grave, resolved to take a partner in the sovereign power, and showed his wisdom by making choice of Trajan.”  By this choice, indeed, Nerva commenced and inaugurated the finest period of the Roman empire, the period that contemporaries entitled the golden age, and that history has named the age of the Antonines.  It is desirable to become acquainted with the real character of this period, for to it belong the two greatest historical events—­the dissolution of ancient pagan, and the birth of modern Christian society.