The subsequent triumph does not appear on the column.  It is said that ten thousand beasts were slaughtered in the arenas, slaughtering, as they fell, a thousand of their slaughterers.  But the spectacle, however fair, was not of a nature to detain Trajan long in Rome.  The air there had not improved in the least, and presently he was off again, this time on the banks of the Euphrates, arguing with the Parthians, avoiding danger in the only way he knew, by facing it.

It was then that the sheen of the purple glowed.  If lustreless at home, it was royally red abroad.  In a campaign that was little more than a triumphant promenade he doubled the empire.  To the world of Caesar he added that of Alexander.  Allies he turned into subjects, vassals into slaves.  Armenia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, were added to the realm.  Trajan’s footstools were diadems.  He had moved back one frontier, he moved another.  From Britain to the Indus, Rome was mistress of the earth.  Had Trajan been younger, China, whose very name was unknown, would have yielded to him her corruption, her printing press, her powder and her tea.

That he would have enjoyed these things is not at all conjectural.  He was then an old man, but he was not a good one—­at least not in the sense we use the term to-day.  He had habits which are regarded now less as vices than perversions, but which at that time were taken as a matter of course and accepted by everyone, even by the stoics, very calmly, with a grain of Attic salt at that.  Men were regarded as virtuous when they were brave, when they were honest; the idea of using the expression in its later sense occurred, if at all, in jest merely, as a synonym for the eunuch.  It was the matron and the vestal who were supposed to be straight, and their straightness was wholly supposititious.  The ceremonies connected with the phallus, and those observed in the worship of the Bona Dea, were of a nature that no virtue could withstand.  Every altar, Juvenal said, had its Clodius, and even in Clodius’ absence there were always those breaths of Sapphic song that blew through Mitylene.

It is just that absence of a quality which we regard as an added grace; one, parenthetically, which dowered the world with a new conception of beauty that makes it difficult to picture Rome.  Modern ink has acquired Nero’s blush; it comes very readily, yet, however sensitive a writer may be, once Roman history is before him, he may violate it if he choose; he may even give it a child, but never can he make it immaculate.  He may skip, indeed, if he wish; and it is because he has skipped so often that one fancies that Augustus was all right.  The rain of fire which fell on the cities that mirrored their towers in the Bitter Sea, might just as well have fallen on him, on Vergil, too, on Caligula, Claud, Nero, Otho, Vitellius, Titus, Domitian, and particularly on Trajan.