rule over! It needs a strong 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