A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

death a German soothsayer who had prophesied bloodshed. Domitian scratched a pimple on his
forehead and made it bleed, commenting: ‘I hope this is all the blood that needs to be shed.’ He
asked his servant the time, and the man - who was in the plot - answered ‘Six o’clock.’ Domitian
heaved a sigh of relief and went off to his bath. On the way there, he was told that a man had
arrived with news of another plot and was now waiting in his bedroom; so Domitian hurried back.
The assassin was waiting for him, holding a list of names of people supposed to be in the plot; as
Domitian read it, the man stabbed him in the groin. Domitian grappled with him and fought like an
animal. He shouted to his boy to hand him the dagger from under his pillow, then run for help. But
the conspirators had removed the blade of the dagger and locked the door. Domitian tried lo
wrestthe knife away from the assassin, and cut his fingers to the bone; then he tried to claw out the
man’s eyes. The assassin managed to go on stabbing until Domitian collapsed and died. The news
of his death brought universal rejoicing. His name was removed from all public monuments.
And at last, even Rome had learnt the lesson: that power can turn a despot into a homicidal maniac,
and that the solution was not to leave the choice of emperor to chance or heredity but to select him
with some care. The result was five excellent rulers - Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus and
Marcus Aurelius - and almost a century of peace and prosperity. Nerva, selected by the senate, was
seventy at the time and died two years later. But he had chosen as his successor a brilliant general,
Trajan, who proved to be a second Julius Caesar. In his nineteen-year reign he conquered the
Dacians to the north of the Danube and the Parthians to the east of the Euphrates, and pushed the
bounds of the Roman Empire to its farthest limits. What he failed to see was that, in over-extending
Rome’s manpower, he was leaving a considerable problem to most of his successors - a problem
that would be solved only with the final collapse of the empire nearly four centuries later.
However, his successor - his cousin Hadrian - recognised the problem, and began his reign by
contracting his eastern boundaries. This had the desired effect, and enabled Hadrian to spend most
of his long reign making a leisurely tour of his empire. The roads were now safe, the seas free from
pirates. As he wandered at large from Egypt to Scotland, Hadrian built roads, aqueducts, theatres,
bridges, temples, even cities - the discovery of concrete enabled his engineers to build faster and
more magnificently than ever before.
Hadrian had the interesting idea of choosing two emperors to reign jointly, like the consuls of old;
they were called Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus; and since both were little more than children
when Hadrian’s health began to fail, he appointed a caretaker emperor, Antoninus Pius. In the old
days this would have been a certain formula for murder and despotism; but Hadrian had chosen
well. Antoninus ruled peacefully for twenty-three years, and had Hadrian declared a god.
When the two consul-emperors came to the throne - in 161 A.D. - the age of peace had come to an
end. For almost half a century, Rome had basked in a golden age; now the barbarians were again at
the frontiers. The result was that Rome’s only philosopher-emperor, Marcus Aurelius (his fellow
emperor died after eight years), had to spend most of his reign raising armies and marching to
remote parts of his empire.
Marcus Aurelius was a stoic, and the stoics regarded life as a difficult voyage in which most men
are shipwrecked; they felt that man’s only chance of escaping shipwreck was through reason and
self-discipline. The emperor had good reason to take a stoical view of existence; he had to jot down
his famous Meditations in his tent between battles. His wife Faustina was constantly unfaithful, and
his son Commodus was a spoilt young man who became one of the worst emperors Rome had ever
known. At one point, Marcus Aurelius even had to sell all the treasures in his palace to replenish