A sudden shock operates on the memory as well as on the hair. In Pliny's Natural History we read of one who, being struck violently and unexpectedly by a stone, forgot his letters, and could never write again; another, he says, through a fall from the roof of a very high house, lost his remembrance of his own mother, his nearest kinsfolks, friends, and neighbors; and a third, in a fit of sickness, ceased to recognize his own servants. Messala Corvinus, the great orator, being startled suddenly, forgot his own name, and was unable to remember it for a considerable time. The same thing happened to Sidney Smith, not from fear, but from absence of mind. He called on a friend, who was not at home, and he happened to have no card to leave. "What name, sir?" said the servant. "That's exactly what I can't tell you," was the reply. Augustus Caesar was not a valiant man, in the popular acceptation of the word. He shrank in his tent from the onset at Philippi, skulked in the hold of the admiral's galley during the sea-fight with Sextus Pompey in the Straits of Messina, and was a safe spectator on shore at Actium. Antony, and even his own friend and lieutenant, Agrippa, taunted him with his want of courage. He was so terrified at thunder and lightning that he always carried with him the skin of a sea-calf as an antidote. If he suspected the approach of a tempest, he ran to some underground vault until the symptoms passed over. Yet Suetonius says he once, under necessity, showed a bold front to a danger he could not avoid. He was walking abroad with Diomedes, his steward, when a wild boar, which had broken loose, rushed directly toward them. {165} Thus steward in his terror, ran behind the emperor and interposed him as a shield betwixt the assailant and himself. Augustus stood his ground, because flight was barred, and the boar turned tail. But knowing that fear, not malice, had prompted the conduct of his servant, he had the magnanimity to confine his resentment to a perpetual just. Caligula, who affected to contemn the gods, was equally terrified with Augustus at the least indication of thunder and lightning. He covered his head, and if the explosions chanced to be loud and near, leaped from his couch and hid himself under it. History mentions several sovereigns who loved war, but had no taste for personal participation in its perils. Charles the Fifth, and his son, Philip the second, are amongst the number, The leading characteristic of the latter was cruelty, a disposition generally associated with cowardice. Diocletian, after he became emperor, fought more by his lieutenants than in person. Lactantius said of him that he was timid and spiritless in all situations of danger. _Erat in omni tumultu meticulosus et animi dejectus_. [Footnote 35] [Footnote 35: Lactant. De Mortibus Persecutorum, c. ix.]