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The surviving fragments of the Annals and Histories leave three great pictures impressed upon the reader's mind: the personality of Tiberius, the court of Nero, and the whole fabric and machinery of empire in the year of the four Emperors.
Henceforth the annals of this country furnish us with little more than catalogues of the bishops and dukes, who were still, at times, nominated by the emperors; and of the domains granted out by them to different indigenate families; with accounts of the atrocious cruelties exercised by these lords over their vassals; and with anecdotes of the prowess of the natives in several expeditions into Italy and Palestine, in which they still voluntarily accompanied the emperors.
The vanity of Nero was astonishing, but so was that of most of his successors. The Roman emperors were the sublimest coxcombs in history. In men born to stations which are beyond ambition, all aspirations run to seed. Plut. in Sympos. It does not appear that at Elis there were any of the actual contests in music and song which made the character of the Pythian games.
"The trunks contain perhaps the coffins of the imperial ancestors, which have been removed from the Kapuzinergruft, in order to save them from the French," said an honest tailor to his neighbor, and this romantic idea rolled immediately, like an avalanche, through the vast crowd. "They are removing the remains of the old emperors from Vienna!" wailed the crowd. "Even the tombs are no longer safe!
Behind them, the facade of the palace displayed above the three arcades of the first story, in the intervals of the windows, on long tables, busts of Roman emperors. The house was placed between two tall pavilions which their great slate roofs made higher, over pillars of the Ionic order.
Philip, in his youth had taken to wife a daughter of Duke George of Saxony, but soon repented of his ill-considered resolve, on the ground that she was of an unamiable disposition and was afflicted with bodily infirmities, and accordingly proceeded to look elsewhere for a mistress, after the fashion only too common at that time with emperors and princes, but scarcely commented upon in their case.
At Jerusalem were now three factions raging furiously. Eleazar, son of Simon, who was the first cause of the war, by persuading the people to reject the offerings of the emperors to the Temple, and had led the Zealots and seized the Temple, pretended to cherish righteous wrath against John of Gishala for the bloodshed he had occasioned.
The Manchu Emperors soon became almost completely Chinese, but differences of dress and manners kept the Manchus distinct from the more civilized people whom they had conquered, and the Chinese remained inwardly hostile to them.
Under the emperors, the senate was armed with the power of criminal jurisdiction; and as the senate was the tool of the imperator, he could crush whomsoever he pleased.
Diocletian chose his son-in-law Galerius, and sent him to fight on the Danube; and Maximian chose, as Cæsar, Constantius Chlorus, who commanded in Britain, Gaul, and Spain; and thus everything was done to secure that a strong hand should be ready everywhere to keep the legions from setting up Emperors at their own will.
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