Of the events which now follow, I can give you but an outline, such as every one ought to know by heart. Too great a stress was formerly laid on such a chronological skeleton of history; yet it ought not to be altogether neglected: the succession of the Roman emperors, with the dates of their reigns, is what every one ought to have in his memory. Diocletian had reigned for about a year, when, without any external cause, he took his countryman Maximian as his colleague. Of Diocletian we have many hostile accounts; but they are very much exaggerated, nor are they the only ones. It is said that his father had been a slave, or at best a freedman; by this, however, a _colonus_, perhaps is meant, that is to say, a serf from the Dalmatian frontier. He cannot himself have been a slave, as slaves were not yet at that time received in the legions: the derivation of his name from Doclea, a town on the Dalmatian frontier, is a very likely one indeed. Diocletian had risen in the army by his own merit, a fact which sufficiently refutes the charge of cowardice brought against him as well as many other great generals, such as Napoleon. Against the latter also this charge is highly unjust. He often wanted moral courage, as, for instance, on the 19th of Brumaire; but the courage of a general he had. He is taxed with cowardice in cases when he did not choose to place himself in a position in which he could neither see nor hear, and thus neglect his duties as a general; but in so doing he was perfectly justified. Only he ought to have died at Waterloo: his leaving that battlefield can never be excused.—Diocletian was, on the whole, a mild man. On two occasions only, he laid himself open to the charge of cruelty,—in his chastisement of the rebels at Alexandria, and in his persecution of the Christians, to the latter of which he was beguiled in his old age by Galerius. Maximian, on the contrary, was a coarse and cruel man, who murdered the Roman nobles to get held of their treasures; or because he had been offended; or else because their very rank annoyed him: for the senate seems now to have become more and more hereditary.