Pretty as the story is, we must prefer the more prosaic account given us by Suetonius, who lived in the next generation. Domitia felt that the Emperor had at last conceived a design on her life, and she sent her steward to despatch him. He offered Domitian a fictitious report of a plot, and stabbed him while he read it. Other servants rushed in at the signal, and completed the assassination. It is the one action that historians have recorded to the honour of the twelfth Empress of Rome, and we leave her company with little regret. She was an ordinary woman of the patrician world at the time--fair, frail, accomplished, and luxurious. With the death of her husband she merges in the indistinguishable crowd of selfish and wayward ladies on whom Juvenal was then beginning to pour his exaggerated rhetoric. It remains to describe very briefly how the sceptre passes into the nobler hands of the Stoic Emperors and their wives. The throne was offered to, and accepted by, M. Cocceius Nerva, an aged noble of known moderation and long public service. He at once removed all traces of the hateful reign of his predecessor, and entered upon a sober and useful administration of the Empire. He was in the later sixties of his age, and we find no mention of a wife. But the task of enforcing sobriety on so corrupted a population was too great for his age and moderate ability. A conspiracy against him was discovered. He disarmed the conspirators by inviting them to sit by him in the theatre, and even putting a sword in their hands and asking them what they thought of its keenness; but he saw that a stronger man was needed, and he chose as his colleague Marcus Ulpius Nerva Trajanus, a Spaniard of great military ability and commanding personality, who was then at the head of the troops in Germany. Nerva died soon afterwards, and, with the accession of Trajan, we come to the thirteenth Empress of Rome and the commencement of a new and more splendid chapter in the story of the Empire. CHAPTER VIII PLOTINA “If,” says Gibbon, “a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus”; and he observes of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius that “their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.”