The suggestion of poison is frivolous. Trajan had been ailing for months, and his assiduous travelling in a climate so different from that to which he had been accustomed all his life must have worn him out. He arrived in Asia Minor in the sweltering and dangerous month of August, and a touch of the enteric fever which so commonly overcame the European in the insanitary East of the time put an end to his life. Plotina had for some time urged him to nominate Hadrian as his successor. We must not hastily infer from his reluctance that he thought Hadrian unfit to succeed him. He had just left him in a position of the gravest responsibility, and must have appreciated what a great historian calls Hadrian’s “vast and active genius.” But he may not have deemed it proper for him to dictate to the Senate how they should exercise their power of choice. What actually occurred is certainly obscure. A letter was dispatched to the Senate, after Trajan’s death, in which Hadrian was nominated, and Dio says that the signature was put to this letter by Plotina. One would imagine that such a deception, as Dio represents it to be, would easily be detected and resented by Hadrian’s powerful enemies in the Senate. It is probable that, as Merivale supposes, the letter was really dictated by Trajan, and the signing of it by Plotina was only formal. We may admit Dio’s narrative of facts, yet believe that the Empress was merely carrying out Trajan’s will. On the other hand, there is no reason to quarrel with, or put a base interpretation on, her zeal for the succession of Hadrian. We shall see how well he maintained the sound work of Trajan. He was at once summoned to Selinus, to consult with Plotina and with the elderly Senator Attianus, who had been his guardian together with Trajan, and had been as zealous as the Empress in urging his advancement. They decided that Hadrian must return to his post at Antioch, and Plotina set out for Rome with the ashes of her husband in a golden urn. The last resting-place of Trajan was under the magnificent column which still bears witness in Rome to his many victories, and for centuries afterwards the most flattering compliment that the Senators could pay to an Emperor was to cry that he was “more fortunate than Augustus, and better than Trajan.”