the future for appearing to be opposed to his policy.  Afterwards, however, she was intending to take measures that would enable her to get away by ship, if possibility still offered, when he ordered her, etc.] as [lacuna] cooeperated [lacuna] and letters [lacuna] of Macrinus [lacuna] some for which [lacuna] judgment [lacuna] fearing that she might be deprived of the title of Augusta and to [lacuna] native country be forced to return [lacuna] to fear [lacuna] go to Rome [lacuna] Macrinus [lacuna] seeming to do the opposite [lacuna] how [lacuna] might depart and he ordered her to depart from Antioch with all speed and go whithersoever she would. [And when she heard what was said in Rome about her son] she no longer cared to live.  The cancer in her breast, which, for a very long time had remained stationary in its progress, had been made angry and inflamed by the blow which she struck her chest on hearing of her son’s death; this helped to undermine her constitution and she made sure of her demise by voluntary starvation.

[Sidenote:—­24—­][And so this queen, sprung from a family of common people and raised to a high station, who had lived during her husband’s reign in great unhappiness on account of Plautianus, who had beheld her younger son butchered in her own lap and had borne ill-will to her elder son while he lived, finally receiving such tidings of his assassination, withdrew from power while in the full flush of life and thereafter did herself to death.  Hence a person reviewing her career could not deem infallibly happy all those who attain great authority; indeed, in no case unless some true and undefiled pleasure in life belongs to them, and unswerving, permanent good fortune.—­This, then, was the fate of Julia.  Her body was taken to Rome and placed in the tomb of Gaius and Lucius.  Later, however, both her bones and those of Geta were transferred by her sister Maesa to the precinct of Antoninus.

[Sidenote:—­25—­] Nor was Macrinus destined to survive for long,—­a fact of which he doubtless had previous indications.  A mule bore a mule in Rome and a sow had a little pig with four ears and two tongues and eight feet.  A great earthquake occurred, blood flowed from a pipe, and bees formed honeycombs in the Forum Boarium.  The hunting-theatre was smitten with thunderbolts on the very day of the Vulcanalia [Footnote:  August twenty-third.] and such a blaze ensued that all its upper circumference and the whole circuit of construction and the ground-level were burned and thereupon the rest of it caught fire and fell in ruins.  No human aid availed against the conflagration, though every possible stream of water was directed upon the blaze, nor could the downpour from the sky, which came in great amount and violence, accomplish anything.  The force of both kinds of water was exhausted by the power of the thunderbolts, and to a certain extent, at least, the building only received additional injury; [Footnote:  Reading [Greek:  prosesineto](Bekker).] wherefore the gladiatorial spectacle was held in the stadium for many years.