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The Praetorian cohort was a select body of troops instituted by Augustus to protect his person, and consisted of ten cohorts, each of one thousand men, chosen from Italy. This number was increased by Vitellius to sixteen thousand, and they were assembled by Tiberius in a permanent camp, which was strongly fortified.

Here the centurion handed Paul over to the prefect of the praetorian guards, by whom he was subjected to a merely nominal custody, although, according to Roman custom, he was chained to a soldier. But he was treated with great lenity, was allowed to have lodgings, to receive his friends freely, and to hold Christian meetings in his own house; and no one molested him.

But Misitheus died, perhaps by poison, in the course of the campaign; and to him succeeded, as praetorian prefect, an Arabian officer, called Philip. The innocent boy, left without friends, was soon removed by murder; and a monument was afterwards erected to his memory, at the junction of the Aboras and the Euphrates.

So, while neither my great grandfather nor any of my ancestors of the Tremelian family was ever called Scrofa, yet as I am not less than the sixth of our family in succession who has attained praetorian rank, it ill becomes me to run away in the face of your challenge, so I will tell you what I know about swine.

"Dear me!" said Edie, with affected surprise; "weel, I thought there was naething but what your honour could hae studden in the way o' agreeable conversation, unless it was about the Praetorian yonder, or the bodle that the packman sauld to ye for an auld coin." "Pshaw! pshaw!" said the Antiquary, turning from him hastily, and retreating into the house.

For we are maintaining all the grants made by Caesar; and men of praetorian rank, Philadelphus Annius, and that innocent Gallius; and men of aedilitian rank, he on whom I have spent so much of my lungs and voice, Bestia, and that patron of good faith and cheater of his creditors, Trebellius, and that bankrupt and ruined man Quintus Caelius, and that support of the friends of Antonius Cotyla Varius, whom Antonius for his amusement caused at a banquet to be flogged with thongs by the public slaves.

To remove Piso, the proposal was made that he should be sent as quaestor with praetorian powers to Hither Spain; to which Crassus consented, in the hope of securing through him the resources of that important province for the insurrection. Proposals going farther were prevented by the tribunes.

On April 8, A.D. 217, having quitted Edessa with a small retinue for the purpose of visiting a famous temple of the Moon-God near Carrhaa, he was surprised and murdered on the way by Julius Martialis, one of his guards. His successor, Macrinus, though a Praetorian prefect, was no soldier, and would willingly have retired at once from the war. But the passions of the Parthians had been roused.

In this very Social War, when the soldiers with stones and clubs had killed an officer of praetorian rank, his own lieutenant, Albinus by name, he passed by this flagrant crime without any inquiry, giving it out moreover in a boast, that the soldiers would behave all the better now, to make amends, by some special bravery, for their breach of discipline.

Papinian, the brave praetorian prefect, one of the most learned lawyers of his time, had incurred Caracalla's fury by refusing to say that the murder of Geta was not without excuse; and his noble answer, that it was easier to commit fratricide than to defend it, cost him his life.