have been broken indeed had he lived to witness
the difficulties in which Rome was plunged at his death, the spread of
the Jewish revolt in Asia and Palestine, the aggressions of the Moors,
the Scythians, and the Britons at the most distant points of his
dominions.

The momentary success of the insurgents of Cyprus and Cyrene had
prompted a general assurance that the conquering race was no longer
invincible, and the last great triumphs of its legions were followed by
a rebound of fortune still more momentous.

The first act of the new reign was the formal relinquishment of the new
provinces beyond the Euphrates. The Parthian tottered back with feeble
step to his accustomed frontiers. Arabia was left unmolested; India was
no longer menaced. Armenia found herself once more suspended between two
rival empires, of which the one was too weak to seize, the other too
weak to retain her.

All the forces of Rome in the East were now set free to complete the
suppression of the Jewish disturbances. The flames of insurrection which
had broken out in so many remote quarters were concentrated, and burned
more fiercely than ever in the ancient centre of the Jewish nationality.

Martius Turbo, appointed to command in Palestine, was equally amazed at
the fanaticism and the numbers of people whose faith had been mocked,
whose hopes frustrated, whose young men had been decimated, whose old
men, women, and children had been enslaved and exiled. Under the
teaching of the doctors of Tiberia faith had been cherished and hope had
revived. Despised and unmolested for fifty years, a new generation had
risen from the soil of their ancestors, recruited by the multitudes who
flocked homeward, year by year, with an unextinguishable love of
country, and reenforced by the fugitives from many scenes of
persecution, all animated with a growing conviction that the last
struggle of their race was at hand, to be contested on the site of their
old historic triumphs.

It is not perhaps wholly fanciful to imagine that the Jewish leaders,
after the fall of their city and Temple and the great dispersion of
their people, deliberately invented new means for maintaining their
cherished nationality. Their conquerors, as they might observe, were
scattered like themselves over the face of the globe and abode wherever
they conquered; but the laws, the manners, and the traditions of Rome
were preserved almost intact amid alien races by the consciousness that
the