[Sidenote:—­5—­] [But Antoninus was so anxious to appear to love Cilo that he declared:  “Those who have plotted against him have plotted against me.”  Commended for this by the bystanders, he proceeded:  “Call me neither Hercules nor the name of any other god;” not that he was unwilling to be termed a god, but because he wished to do nothing worthy of a god.  He was naturally capricious in all matters, and would bestow great honors upon people and then suddenly disgrace them, quite without reason.  He would save those who least deserved it and punish those whom one would never have expected.

Julianus Asper was a man by no means contemptible, on account of his education and good sense as well.  He exalted him, together with his sons, and after Asper had walked the streets surrounded by I don’t know how many fasces he without warning insulted him outrageously and dismissed him to his native place [Footnote:  I.e., Tusculum.] with abuse and in mighty trepidation.  Laetus, too, he would have disgraced or even killed, had this man not been extremely sick.  So the emperor before the soldiers called his sickness “wicked,” because it did not allow him to display wickedness in one more case.

Again he made way with Thrasea Priscus, a person second to none in family or intelligence.

Many others also, previously friends of his, he put to death.]

[Sidenote:—­6—­]

  “Nay, I could not recite nor give the names all over”

[Footnote:  From Homer’s Iliad, II, verse 488.] of the distinguished men whom he killed without any right.  Dio, because the slain were very well known in those days, even makes a list of them.  For me it suffices to say that he crushed the life out of everybody he chose, without exception,

  “whether the man was guilty or whether he was not “;

[Footnote:  From Homer’s Iliad, XV, verse 137.] and that he simply mutilated Rome, by rendering it bereft of excellent men. [Antoninus was allied to three races.  And he possessed not a single one of their good points, but included in himself all their vices.  The lightness, the cowardice, and recklessness of Gaul were his, the roughness and cruelty of Africa, the abominations of Syria (whence he was on his mother’s side).] Veering from slaughter to sports, he pursued his murderous course no less in the latter.  Of course one would pay no attention to an elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, and hippotigris being killed in the theatre, but he took equal pleasure in having gladiators shed the greatest amount of one another’s blood.  One of them, Bato, he forced to fight three successive men on the same day, and then, when Bato met death at the hands of the last, he honored him with a conspicuous burial.