25.  Was this cruelty punished?

26.  What followed this dangerous insurrection?

SECTION III.

  Trajan and he,[6] with the mild sire and son
  His son of virtue; eased awhile mankind;
  And arts revived beneath their gentle beam.—­Thomson.

1.  Having spent thirteen years in travelling and reforming the abuses of the empire, A’drian at last resolved to end his fatigues at Rome. 2.  Nothing could be more grateful to the people than his resolution of coming to reside for the rest of his days among them; they received him with the loudest demonstrations of joy; and though he now began to grow old and unwieldy, he remitted not the least of his former assiduity and attention to the public welfare. 3.  His chief amusement was in conversing with the most celebrated men in every art and science, frequently asserting, that he thought no kind of knowledge inconsiderable, or to be neglected, either in his private or public capacity. 4.  He ordered the knights and senators never to appear in public, but in the proper habits of their orders.  He forbade masters to kill their slaves, as had been before allowed; but ordained that they should be tried by the laws. 5.  He still further extended the lenity of the laws to those unhappy men, who had long been thought too mean for justice:  if a master was found killed in his house, he would not allow all his slaves to be put to the torture as formerly, but only such as might have perceived and prevented the murder.

6.  In such employments he spent the greatest part of his time; but at last finding the duties of his station daily increasing, and his own strength proportionally upon the decline, he resolved on adopting a successor, and accordingly chose Antoni’nus to that important station.

7.  While he was thus careful in providing for the future welfare of the state, his bodily infirmities became so insupportable, that he vehemently desired some of his attendants to dispatch him. 8.  Antoni’nus, however, would by no means permit any of the domestics to be guilty of so great an impiety, but used all the arts in his power to reconcile the emperor to sustain life. 9.  His pain daily increasing, he was frequently heard to cry out, “How miserable a thing it is to seek death, and not to find it!” After enduring some time these excruciating tortures, he at last resolved to observe no regimen, saying, that kings sometimes died merely by the multitude of their physicians. 10.  This conduct served to hasten that death he seemed so ardently to desire; and it was probably joy upon its approach which dictated the celebrated stanzas that are so well known;[7] and while repeating which he expired, in the sixty-second year of his age, after a prosperous reign of twenty-one years and eleven months.

11.  Titus Antoni’nus, his successor, was born at Lavin’ium, near Rome, but his ancestors came originally from Nismes, in Gaul.  His father was a nobleman, who had enjoyed the highest honours of the empire.