'I and Rome, Piso,' said Aurelian, 'owe much to Fronto. I confess that his spirit now possesses me. He has roused the latent piety into action and life, which I received with my mother's milk, but which, the gods forgive me! carried away by ambition, had well nigh gone quite out in my soul. My mother--dost thou know it?--was a priestess of Apollo, and never did god or goddess so work by unseen influence to gain a mortal's heart, as did she to fill mine with reverence of the deities of heaven--specially of the great god of light. I was early a wayward child. When a soldier in the legions I now command, my life was what a soldier's is--a life of action, hardship, peril, and blood. The deities of Heaven soon became to me as if they were not. And so it has been for well nigh all the years of my life. But, the gods be thanked, Fronto has redeemed me! and since I have worn this diadem have I toiled, Rome can testify with what zeal, to restore to her gods their lost honors--to purge her worship of the foul corruptions that were bringing it into contempt--and raise it higher than ever in the honor of the people, by the magnificence of the temples I have built; by the gifts I have lavished upon them; by the ample riches wherewith I have endowed the priesthood. And more than once, while this work has been achieving, has the form of my revered parent, beautiful in the dazzling robes of her office, stood by my bedside--whether in dream, or in vision, or in actual presence, I cannot tell--and blessed me for my pious enterprise--"The gods be thanked," the lips have said, or seemed to say, "that thy youth lasts not always but that age has come, and with it second childhood in thy reverence of the gods, whose worship it was mine to put into thy infant heart. Go on thy way, my son! Build up the fallen altars, and lay low the aspiring fanes of the wicked. Finish what thou hast begun, and all time shall pronounce thee greatest of the great." Should I disobey the warning? The gods forbid! and save me from such impiety. I am now, Piso, doubly armed for the work I have taken in hand--first by the zeal of the pious Fronto, and second, by the manifest finger of Heaven pointing the way I should go. And, please the Almighty Ruler! I will enter upon it, and it shall not be for want of a determined will and of eyes too used to the shedding of blood to be frightened now though an ocean full were spilled before them, if this race be not utterly swept from the face of the earth, from the suckling to the silver head, from the beggar to the prince--and from Rome all around to the four winds, as far as her almighty arms can reach.'