Dio's Rome, Volume 2: An Historical Narrative Originally Composed in Greek During the Reigns of Septimius Severus, Geta and Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus: and Now Presented in English FormCassius Dio Cocceianus
History
Dio's Rome, Volume 2: An Historical Narrative Originally Composed in Greek During the Reigns of Septimius Severus, Geta and Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus: and Now Presented in English Form
Cassius Dio Cocceianus
Rome -- History
[-8-] These were the feelings of the departing throng: and those left
behind had to face a different, but equally unpleasant situation. Bereft
of the association of their nearest relatives, deprived, as it were, of
their guardians and far from able to defend themselves, exposed to the
enemy and about to be subject to the authority of him who should make
himself master of the city, they were themselves distressed by fear both
of outrages and of murders as if they were already taking place. In view
of these same possibilities such as were angry at the fugitives, because
they themselves had been left in the lurch, cursed them for it, and
those who condoned their action because of the necessity still felt
consequent fears. The rest of the populace entire, even if they
possessed not the least kinship with those departing, were nevertheless
grieved at their fate, some expecting that their neighbors, and others
that their comrades would go far away from them and do and suffer many
unusual things. Most of all they bewailed their own lot, seeing the
magistrates and the senate and all the rest who had any power,--they
were not sure whether a single one of them would be left behind,--cast
out of their country and away from them. They reflected how those men,
had not many altogether dreadful calamities fastened themselves upon the
State, would never have wished to flee, and they likened themselves,
made destitute of allies, in every conceivable respect to orphaned
children and widow women. Being the first to await the wrath and the
lust of the oncoming foe, they remembered their former sufferings, some
by experience and others by hearing it from the victims, all the
outrages that Marius and Sulla had committed, and they therefore did not
look to Caesar for moderate treatment.[68] On the contrary, because his
army was constituted very largely of barbarians, they expected that
their misfortunes would be far more in number and more terrible than
those of yore.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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