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Swift. Partial. Swift. The dunghill! Swift Too arbitrary. Nerva was deified for uniting, Imperium et Libertas. Swift. "Libertas" underlined and "nego" written in the margin. Is that book to be bought or borrowed?
L. A. Florus, who flourished during the reign of Trajan, has left a series of sketches of the different wars from the days of Romulus to those of Augustus. Frontinus epitomized the large histories of Pompeius. Marcellinus wrote a history from Nerva to Valens, and is often quoted by Gibbon.
Their contemporary, Marius Maximus, continued the series of biographies of the Emperors begun by Suetonius, carrying it down from Nerva to Heliogabalus; but the work, such as it was, is lost, and is only known as the main source used by the earlier compilers of the Augustan History. Verse-making had fallen into the hands of inferior grammarians.
But note this: Domitian was killed, and Nerva came to the throne, and Rome had leave to breathe freely again, in five years before the half-cycle of shadows should have ended: the two years of Nerva, and the first three of Trajan, we may call borrowed by the dawning manvantara from the dusk of the pralaya that was passing.
The terrified planters hastened to Syracuse, to compel the Roman governor to suspend such unparalleled administration of justice; Nerva was weak enough to let himself be terrified, and in harsh language informed the non-free persons requesting trial that they should forgo their troublesome demand for right and justice and should instantly return to those who called themselves their masters.
Now let it be recollected that this continual and astonishing decline of agriculture, and disappearance of the rural cultivators in the latter stages of the Roman empire, took place in an empire which contained, as Gibbon tells us, 120,000,000 of inhabitants, and 1600 great cities, was 3000 miles long and 2000 miles broad, contained 1,600,000 square miles, chiefly fertile and well cultivated land, which embraced the fairest and most fertile portions of the earth, and which had been governed for eighty yers under the successive sway of Nerva, Adrian, Trajan, and the two Antonines, with consummate wisdon and the most paternal spirit.
On arriving at Rome he was brought before Domitian; and when, very inconsistently with his wish to shield his friends from suspicion, he launched out into praise of Nerva, he was forced away into prison to the company of the worst criminals, his hair and beard were cut short, and his limbs loaded with chains.
The death of Domitian occurred in A.D. 96, and his successor, the humane Nerva, recalled those who had been exiled because of their faithfulness to Christianity; and John returned to Ephesus, where he spent the remainder of his days, dying a natural death at the advanced age of about one hundred years.
In the department of oratory may be mentioned Cornelius Fronto, who flourished under Domitian and Nerva, and was endowed with a rich imagination and a mind stored with vast erudition in Greek and Latin literature, Symmachus, distinguished for his opposition to Christianity, and Cassiodorus, minister and secretary of the Emperor Theodoric.
He kept himself free from the subtlety of its poison, from the microbes of Rome as well. He was in Cologne when Domitian died and Nerva accepted and renounced the throne. It was a year before he ventured among the seven hills. When he arrived you would have said another Augustus, not the real Augustus, but the Augustus of legend, and the late Mr. Gibbon.
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