"Friends! Carinus provided for our beards and sent us a barber with the rank of an Imperator; pray sit down before him and have yourselves shaved. But do you take care not to cut my soldiers' faces, my little friend, for if they should try their big razors on you, you would fare ill." The soldiers, amid loud shouts of laughter, dragged Marcius off with them, and made him shave their bristling beards. Scarcely an hour later Aevius arrived with the command to dismiss half the army at once. This enraged the Caesar and the whole body of troops. To assail their interests so boldly was presumptuous even from the Imperator. "To the funeral pyre with the messenger and his message!" cried Diocletian, and the poet had already been bound to the huge pile of logs when he sighed bitterly: "O ye gods, must I, while still living, witness my own apotheosis?" Diocletian laughed at the idea and ordered the poet to be brought down from the funeral pyre, contenting himself with putting him in the pillory, after which he sent him back to Rome with a message declaring war against Carinus. * * * * * The thunderstorm was rising, though as yet it sent forth no lightning. In Rome it was openly stated that the army sent to the West, filled with mortal hatred of Carinus, had already reached the Ister, only nothing was said of it in the Caesar's palace. There revelry was perpetual and if, from time to time, any one alluded to Diocletian's approach, he was pitilessly derided. "Who is this peasant?" asked Manlius. "Who ever heard his name among the patricians of Rome? Who knew his father? His mother, on the contrary, was known by many. She was a slave in the house of Senator Anulinus. Anulinus has a right to demand him as a fruit of his household." The courtiers laughed at the jest. "You must know him, Manlius?" "I have never seen him. I used to be where danger threatened, and I never saw Diocletian. I know him because I was told that he always led the rearguard when we were marching forward, and the vanguard when we were retiring." Peals of laughter greeted the words. "And what is the character of his army?" he was asked. "It is a valiant, obedient body. It has killed three of its Imperators. As for its courage and fearlessness, it is peerless in those qualities, for it retreated from the banks of the Tigris without having seen an enemy. When I tell you that I myself was the greatest hero among them, you can judge of the rest." "And your news of victories?" "Were two-thirds inventions. Although we sometimes gained one, we owed it to our superior numbers; but the army must now be greatly reduced by desertion and disease." This sycophantic nation liked nothing better than to hear the soldiers slandered, and therefore Manlius even slandered himself.