happened, change in her behaviour to her elder one; but she seemed to look upon Geta’s death as an unavoidable dispensation of fate. In the year 212, Caracalla gave himself up to the most wanton cruelties and extortions: these last were still more systematic than those of Commodus, who practised them in Rome only, whereas Caracalla carried them on at the same time in the provinces. It is a very just remark of Gibbon’s, that the tyranny of the Roman emperors weighed most heavily on Rome, and was less felt in the rest of Italy, and least of all in the provinces, which were sometimes worse off under the good emperors than under the bad ones. Caracalla, however, unfortunately for the provinces, travelled through them, and there his savage rage was yet greater than at Rome itself; he brought with him fell bloodshed into those hapless countries,—into Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt,—and drove the inhabitants to despair: the only thing that he cared for, was to satisfy his soldiers. The prætorians had been re-established by Severus, but on quite a different footing. Whereas formerly they had been a sort of janissaries, only that they did not leave Rome, it being even doubtful whether they ever accompanied the emperors in their wars; Severus now formed an entirely new guard, of three or four times the strength of the old one, as many indeed as thirty or forty thousand men; these he picked out from the legions, and he gave them double pay and higher rank. Under Severus and Caracalla they were no longer left behind in Rome, but they accompanied the emperors on their journeys and expeditions: thus Caracalla took them with him to the East. The most dreadful of Caracalla’s deeds was the massacre at Alexandria, where he enticed the inhabitants to come out of their city; made them feel quite secure; and then ordered his soldiers to slaughter them all. The people of Alexandria had provoked him, as they had done almost all the emperors, even the best of them: Alexandria and Antioch were the seats of wit, which spoke out in the theatres, or was placarded in pasquinades. They had now lashed the Roman tyrant for the murder of Geta, and this he never forgave. Caracalla granted the right of citizenship to all the subjects of the Roman empire; that is to say, the _peregrinitas_ was abolished throughout the whole of it: thus the _vicesima hereditatum_, which had until then been raised from Roman citizens, was made general, and he moreover raised it into a _decima_. Yet the _Latini_ still remained after this; only there was no more _peregrinitas_ for communities: in the case of freedmen, however, a different law might apply. Caracalla raised the taxes to an intolerable height, merely that he might have the means of winning the hearts of the soldiers: Severus had already said that the emperor who was sure of the army had nothing to fear.