y service in the East had made his first steps towards fortune
and renown. He was essentially a soldier--a moral and a modest soldier;
a friend to justice and the public weal; grand in what he undertook for
the empire he governed; simple and modest on his own score; respectful
towards the civil authority and the laws; untiring and equitable in the
work of provincial administration; without any philosophical system or
pretensions; full of energy and boldness, honesty and good sense. He
stoutly defended the empire against the Germans on the banks of the
Danube, won for it the province of Dacia, and, being more taken up with
the East than the West, made many Asiatic conquests, of which his
successor, Hadrian, lost no time in abandoning, wisely no doubt,
a portion. Hadrian, adopted by Trajan, and a Spaniard too, was
intellectually superior and morally very inferior to him. He was full
of ambition, vanity, invention, and restlessness; he was sceptical in
thought and cynical in manners; and he was overflowing with political,
philosophical, and literary views and pretensions. He passed the
twenty-one years of his reign chiefly in travelling about the empire,
in Asia, Africa, Greece, Spain, Gaul, and Great Britain, opening roads,
raising ramparts and monuments, founding schools of learning and museums,
and encouraging among the provinces, as well as at Rome, the march of
administration, legislation, and intellect, more for his own pleasure and
his own glorification than in the interest of his country and of society.
At the close of this active career, when he was ill and felt that he was
dying, he did the best deed of his life. He had proved, in the discharge
of high offices, the calm and clear-sighted wisdom of Titus Antoninus, a
Gaul, whose family came originally from Nimes; he had seen him one day
coming to the senate and respectfully supporting the tottering steps of
his aged father (or father-in-law, according to Aurelius Victor); and he
adopted him as his successor. Antoninus Pius, as a civilian, was just
what Trajan had been as a warrior--moral and modest; just and frugal;
attentive to the public weal; gentle towards individuals; full of respect
for laws and rights; scrupulous in justifying his deeds before the senate
and making them known to the populations by carefully posted edicts; and
more anxious to do no wrong or harm to anybody than to gain lustre from
brilliant or popular deeds. "He surpasses all men in goo