The king of the Armenians had a dispute with his own children and Antoninus summoned him in a friendly letter with the avowed purpose of making peace between them:  he treated these princes in the same fashion as he had Abgarus.  The Armenians, however, instead of yielding to him had recourse to arms and not one of them thereafter would trust him in the slightest particular.  Thus he was brought by experience to understand how great the penalty is for an emperor’s practicing deceit toward friends. [The same ruler assumed the utmost credit for the fact that at the death of Vologaesus, king of the Parthians, his children proceeded to fight about the sovereignty; what was purely accidental he pretended had come about through his own connivance.  He ever took vehement delight in the actions and dissensions of the brothers and generally in the mutual slaughter of foreign potentates.] He did not hesitate, either, to write to the senate regarding the rulers of the Parthians (who were brothers and at variance) that the brothers’ quarrel would work great harm to the Parthian state.  Just as if barbarian governments could be destroyed by such procedure and yet the Roman state had been preserved!  Just as if it had not been, on the contrary, almost utterly overthrown!  It was not merely that the great sums of blood money given under such conditions to the soldiers for his brother’s murder served to demoralize mankind:  in addition, vast numbers of citizens had information laid against them,—­not only those who had sent the brother letters or had brought him presents [Footnote:  Reading [Greek:  dorophorhesantest] (Reimar) for the Ms. [Greek:  doruphoraesantes].] when he was still Caesar or again after he had become emperor, but all the rest who had never had any dealings with him.  If anybody even so much as wrote the name of Geta, or spoke it, that was the end of him then and there.  Hence the poets no longer used it even in comedies. [Footnote:  Geta was a common name for slaves in Latin comedy.  It came into Rome through Greek channels and was originally merely the national adjective applied to a tribe of northern barbarians.] The property, too, of all those in whose wills the name was found written was confiscated.

[Many of his acts were committed with a view to getting money.  And he exhibited his hatred for his dead brother by abolishing the honor paid to his birthday, by getting angry at the stones which had supported his images, and by melting up the coinage that displayed his features.  Not even this sufficed him, but more than ever from this time he began his practice of unholy rites and often forced others to share his pollution by making a kind of annual offering to his brother’s Manes.]