st fortunately accepted, if not
believed, as a fact.

The Senate had decreed to Trajan as many triumphs as he chose to
celebrate. For the first time a dead general triumphed. When Trajan
was deified, he appropriately retained, alone among the emperors, a
title he had won for himself in the field, that of "Parthicus." He was
a patient organizer of victory rather than a strategic genius. He
laboriously perfected the military machine, which when once set in
motion went on to victory. Much of the work he did was great and
enduring, but the last year of his life forbade the Romans to
attribute to him that _felicitas_ which they regarded as an inborn
quality of the highest generals. Each succeeding emperor was saluted
with the wish that he might be "better than Trajan and more fortunate
than Augustus." Yet the breach made in Trajan's _felicitas_ by the
failure in the East was no greater than that made in the _felicitas_
of Augustus by his retirement from the right bank of the Rhine.

DIOCLETIAN

(245-313)

[Illustration: Circus scene. [TN]]

Caius Valerius Diocletianus, one of the most famous of the Roman
emperors, was, as De Quincey says, "doubtless that man of iron whom
the times demanded." He was born at Dioclea, in Dalmatia, some say at
Salona, about A.D. 245 according to some, but others make him ten
years older. His original name was Diocles, which he afterward changed
into Diocletianus. He is said by some to have been the son of a
notary, by others the freedman of a senator named Anulinus. He entered
the army at an early age, and rose gradually to rank; he served in
Gaul, in Moesia, under Probus, and was present at the campaign against
the Persians, in which Carus, then emperor, perished in a mysterious
manner. Diocletian commanded the household or imperial body-guards
when young Numerianus, the son of Carus, was secretly put to death by
Aper his father-in-law, while travelling in a close litter on account
of illness, on the return of the army from Persia. The death of
Numerianus being discovered after several days by the soldiers near
Calchedon, they arrested Aper and proclaimed Diocletian emperor, who
addressing the soldiers from his tribunal in the camp, protested his
innocence of the death of Numerianus, and then upbraiding Aper for the
crime, plunged his sword into the traitor's body.

The new emperor observed to a friend that "he had now killed the
boar," punning on the word Aper, which means a bo