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Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Alexander Severus, for example, regularly supplied girls and boys with education at public expense ; under Trajan there were 5000 children so honoured.

With such able emperors as Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius the State was safe; but the wise men of Rome had foreseen that a tyrant or weak and inexperienced ruler, under this system, might plunge the empire into confusion and ruin. Yet they had made no provision against such a contingency.

Yet these exceptions are temporary or local; the body of the nation has escaped the yoke of the most powerful monarchies: the arms of Sesostris and Cyrus, of Pompey and Trajan, could never achieve the conquest of Arabia; the present sovereign of the Turks may exercise a shadow of jurisdiction, but his pride is reduced to solicit the friendship of a people, whom it is dangerous to provoke, and fruitless to attack.

The strength of Hatra was great, as had been proved by Trajan and Severus; its thick walls and valiant inhabitants would probably have defied every attempt of the Persian prince to make himself master of it by force. He therefore condescended to stratagem. Manizen had a daughter who cherished ambitious views.

He declares that "those things which are most valued are empty, rotten, and trifling," these are his very words; and that the real life of the people, even in the days of Trajan, had ceased to exist, that everything truly precious was lost in the senseless grasp after what can give no true happiness or permanent prosperity.

He was more than venerated in his day, and his fame as a wise and good man has increased with the flight of ages. This illustrious emperor did not belong to the family of the great Caesar. That family became extinct with Nero, the sixth emperor. Like Trajan and Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius derived his remote origin from Spain, although he was born in Rome.

During ten seasons of severe persecution, which occurred under the reigns of the emperors Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Septimus Severus, Maximus, Decius, Gallus, Valerian, and Diocletian, the Christians suffered every indignity that their relentless persecutors could heap upon them.

The arena was expensive, but the drain was elsewhere. A little before, a quarrelsome people, the Dacians, whom it took a Trajan to subdue, had overrun the Danube, and were marching down to Rome. Domitian set out to meet them. The Dacians retreated, not at all because they were repulsed, but because Domitian thought it better warfare to pay them to do so.

Of the five spirits that composed the eyebrow, the one nearest the beak was Trajan, now experienced above all others in the knowledge of what it costs not to follow Christ, by reason of his having been in hell before he was translated to heaven.

The heathen knew nothing of what happened in these meetings, and fancied that a great deal that was shocking was done there; and Trajan ordered that Christians should be put to the torture, if they would not confess what were their ceremonies.