spent thirteen years in travelling and reforming the abuses
of the empire, A'drian at last resolved to end his fatigues at Rome.
2. Nothing could be more grateful to the people than his resolution of
coming to reside for the rest of his days among them; they received
him with the loudest demonstrations of joy; and though he now began to
grow old and unwieldy, he remitted not the least of his former
assiduity and attention to the public welfare. 3. His chief amusement
was in conversing with the most celebrated men in every art and
science, frequently asserting, that he thought no kind of knowledge
inconsiderable, or to be neglected, either in his private or public
capacity. 4. He ordered the knights and senators never to appear in
public, but in the proper habits of their orders. He forbade
masters to kill their slaves, as had been before allowed; but
ordained that they should be tried by the laws. 5. He still further
extended the lenity of the laws to those unhappy men, who had long
been thought too mean for justice: if a master was found killed in his
house, he would not allow all his slaves to be put to the torture as
formerly, but only such as might have perceived and prevented the
murder.

6. In such employments he spent the greatest part of his time; but at
last finding the duties of his station daily increasing, and his own
strength proportionally upon the decline, he resolved on adopting a
successor, and accordingly chose Antoni'nus to that important station.

7. While he was thus careful in providing for the future welfare of
the state, his bodily infirmities became so insupportable, that he
vehemently desired some of his attendants to dispatch him. 8.
Antoni'nus, however, would by no means permit any of the domestics to
be guilty of so great an impiety, but used all the arts in his power
to reconcile the emperor to sustain life. 9. His pain daily
increasing, he was frequently heard to cry out, "How miserable a thing
it is to seek death, and not to find it!" After enduring some time
these excruciating tortures, he at last resolved to observe no
regimen, saying, that kings sometimes died merely by the multitude of
their physicians. 10. This conduct served to hasten that death he
seemed so ardently to desire; and it was probably joy upon its
approach which dictated the celebrated stanzas that are so well
known;[7] and while repeating which he expired, in the sixty-second
year of his age, after a prosperous reig