United States or Laos ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
This he succeeded in doing by drawing her into conversation at the door of her monument, while three men scaled the window and snatched out of her hand the dagger with which she would have stabbed herself. Octavianus, henceforth called Augustus, began by promising his soldiers two hundred and fifty drachmas each as prize money, for not being allowed to plunder Alexandria.
He received not a single wound, either because the gods admired his bravery and protected him, or else because he appeared to his foes to be something more than man. After this exploit we are told that the Ephors crowned him for his bravery, and fined him a thousand drachmas for having fought without his shield.
How he accompanied his young wife to Europe and there lived by the coining of her voice into drachmas, as her father had done before him, needs not to be told here; nor yet how she was divorced from him, and made another matrimonial venture in partnership with De B . I have nothing to do with him or her, after the bargain and sale of which she was the object, and the consequences which immediately resulted from it; and here, accordingly, I take my leave of them.
But when the tribunes answered his threats by vowing that they would fine him fifty thousand drachmas unless he ceased his interference with the people's right of voting, he retired to his own house, and after a few days laid down his office on pretence of sickness.
At this time, Chrysogonus, Sylla's emancipated slave, having laid an information about an estate belonging to one who was said to have been put to death by proscription, had bought it himself for two thousand drachmas.
For, as already related, Nymphidius Sabinus, captain of the guards, together with Tigellinus, after Nero's circumstances were now desperate, and it was perceived that he designed to fly into Egypt, persuaded the troops to declare Galba emperor, as if Nero had been already gone, promising to all the court and praetorian soldiers, as they are called, seven thousand five hundred drachmas apiece, and to those in service abroad twelve hundred and fifty drachmas each; so vast a sum for a largess as it was impossible anyone could raise, but he must be infinitely more exacting and oppressive than ever Nero was.
For he ordained that every host should allow his guest four tetradrachms each day, and moreover entertain him, and as many friends as he should invite, with a supper; that a centurion should receive fifty drachmas a day, together with one suit of clothes to wear within doors, and another when he went abroad.
"My friend," said he, "you ask what I am loath and sorrowful to give, but as I never yet in all my life was so thankless as to refuse you, I must gratify you in this also." After they had all drunk of it, the poison ran short; and the executioner refused to prepare more, except they would pay him twelve drachmas, to defray the cost of the quantity required.
What! you unappeasable rich, coining the sweat and blood of your workmen into drachmas, understanding the law of supply and demand as mandatory and justifying your cruel greed by the senseless dictum that "business is business;" you lazy workman, railing at the capitalist by whose desertion, when you have frightened away his capital, you starve rioting and shedding blood and torturing and poisoning by way of answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists, applauding with indelicate palms when one of your coward kind hurls a bomb amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you imbecile politicians with a plague of remedial legislation for the irremediable; you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many "solutions to the labor problem" as there are dunces among you who can not coherently define it do you really think yourself wiser than Jesus of Nazareth?
The next day he went to the camp, and distributed a bounty of twelve hundred and fifty drachmas a man amongst them; then commended them for the regard and zeal they had for his safety, but told them, that there were some who were intriguing among them, who not only accused his own clemency, but had also misrepresented their loyalty; and, therefore, he desired their assistance in doing justice upon them.
Word Of The Day