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Friday, July 23, 2010 - 7:52 PM
That same year twelve famous cities of Asia fell by an earthquake
in the night, so that the destruction was all the more
unforeseen and fearful.
Nor were there the means of escape usual in, such a
disaster, by rushing
out into the open country, for there people were
swallowed up by the yawning
earth. Vast mountains, it is said, collapsed; what had
been level ground
seemed to be raised aloft, and fires blazed out amid
the ruin. The calamity
fell most fatally on the inhabitants of Sardis, and it
attracted to them
the largest share of sympathy. The emperor promised
ten million sesterces,
and remitted for five years all they paid to the
exchequer or to the emperor's
purse. Magnesia, under Mount Sipylus, was considered
to come next in loss
and in need of help. The people of Temnus,
Philadelpheia, Aegae, Apollonis,
the Mostenians, and Hyrcanian Macedonians, as they
were called, with the
towns of Hierocaesarea, Myrina, Cyme, and Tmolus,
were; it was decided,
to be exempted from tribute for the same time, and
some one was to be sent
from the Senate to examine their actual condition and
to relieve them.
Marcus Aletus, one of the expraetors, was chosen, from
a fear that, as
an exconsul was governor of Asia, there might be
rivalry between men of
equal rank, and consequent embarrassment.
To his splendid public liberality the emperor
added bounties no
less popular. The property of Aemilia Musa, a rich
woman who died intestate,
on which the imperial treasury had a claim, he handed
over to Aemilius
Lepidus, to whose family she appeared to belong; and
the estate of Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire,
a wealthy Roman knight, though he was himself left in
part his heir, he
gave to Marcus Servilius, whose name he discovered in
an earlier and unquestioned
will. In both these cases he said that noble rank
ought to have the support
of wealth. Nor did he accept a legacy from any one
unless he had earned
it by friendship. Those who were strangers to him, and
who, because they
were at enmity with others, made the emperor their
heir, he kept at a distance.
While, however, he relieved the honourable poverty of
the virtuous, he
expelled from the Senate or suffered voluntarily to
retire spendthrifts
whose vices had brought them to penury, like Vibidius
Varro, Marius Nepos,
Appius Appianus, Cornelius Sulla, and Quintus
Vitellius.
About the same time he dedicated some temples
of the gods, which
had perished from age or from fire, and which Augustus
had begun to restore.
These were temples to Liber, Libera, and Ceres, near
the Great Circus,
which last Aulus Postumius, when Dictator, had vowed; a
temple to Flora
in the same place, which had been built by Lucius and
Marcus Publicius,
aediles, and a temple to Janus, which had been erected
in the vegetable
market by Caius Duilius, who was the first to make the
Roman power successful
at sea and to win a naval triumph over the
Carthaginians. A temple to Hope
was consecrated by Germanicus; this had been vowed by
Atilius in that same
war.
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