hand to keep its antagonistic parts together.  Otherwise it would fall apart like a bundle of arrows when the string that bound them is broken.  And I, even as a boy, had sworn to my father, by the Terminus stone in the Capitol, never to abandon a single inch of his ground without fighting for it.  He, Severus, was the wisest of the rulers.  Only the blind love for his second son, encouraged by the women, caused him to forget his moderation and prudence.  My brother Geta was to reign together with me over the empire, which ought to have been mine alone as the first-born.  Every year festivals were kept, with prayers and sacrifices, to the “love of the brothers.”  You have perhaps seen the coins, which show us hand in hand, and have on them the inscription, ‘Eternal union’!

“I in union—­I hand in hand with the man I most hated under the sun!  It almost maddened me only to hear his voice.  I would have liked best of all to spring at his throat when I saw him with his learned fellows squandering their time.  Do you know what they did?  They invented the names by which the voices of different animals were to be known.  Once I snatched the pencil out of the hand of the freedman as he was writing the sentences, ’The horse neighs, the pig grunts, the goat bleats, the cow lows, the sheep baas.’  ‘He, himself,’ I added, ’croaks like a hoarse jay.’

“That I should share the government with this miserable, faint-hearted, poisonous nobody could never be,—­this enemy, who, when I said ‘Yes,’ cried ‘No!’ Who frustrated all my measures,—­it was impossible!  It would have caused the destruction of the state, as certainly as it was the unfairest and unwisest of the deeds of Severus, to place the younger brother as co-regent with the first-born, the rightful heir to the throne.  I, whom my father had taught to watch for signs, was reminded every hour that this unbearable position must come to an end.

“After the death of Severus, we lived at first close to one another in separate parts of the same palace like two lions in a cage across which a partition has been erected, so that they may not reciprocally mangle each other.

“We used to meet at my mother’s.

“That morning my mastiff had bitten Geta’s wolfhound and killed him, and they had found a black liver in the beast he had sent for sacrifice.  I had been informed of this.  Destiny was on my side.  This indolent inactivity must be brought to a close.  I myself do not know how I felt as I mounted the steps to my mother’s rooms.  I only remember distinctly that a demon cried continually in my ear, ’You have murdered your brother!’ Then I suddenly found myself face to face with him.  It was in the empress’s reception-room.  And when I saw the hated flat-shaped head so close to me, when his beardless mouth with its thick underlip smiled at me so sweetly and at the same time so falsely, I felt as if I again heard the cry with which he had cheered on his horse.  And I felt . . .  I even felt the pain-as if he broke my thigh again with his wheel.  And at the same time a fiend whispered in my ear:  ’Destroy him, or he will kill you, and through him Rome will perish!’