Page:Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.djvu/489

 who, wishing to act cautiously and in conformity to the constitution, confronted a man named Esaias with some others who were in prison on a charge of adultery with Rufina; who had attempted to establish a charge of treason against Marcellus her husband, formerly in a situation of high trust. But this act led to his being despised as a dawdler, and a person little fit to carry out such designs with proper resolution, and so he was removed from his place of deputy.

45. He was succeeded by Simplicius of Emona, who had been a schoolmaster, but was now the assessor of Maximin. After receiving this appointment, he did not grow more proud or arrogant, but assumed a supercilious look, which gave a repulsive expression to his countenance. His language was studiously moderate, while he meditated the most rigorous proceedings against many persons. And first of all he put Rufina to death with all the partners of her adultery, and all who were privy to it, concerning whom Ursicinus, as we have related, had already made a report. Then he put numbers of others to death, without any distinction between the innocent and the guilty.

46. Running a race of bloodshed with Maximin, as if he had, as it were, been his leader, he sought to surpass him in destroying the noblest families, imitating Busiris and Antaeus of old, and Phalaris, so that he seemed to want nothing but the bull of Agrigentum.

47. After these and other similar transactions had taken place, a certain matron named Hesychia, who was accused of having attempted some crime, becoming greatly alarmed, and being of a fierce and resolute disposition, killed herself in the house of the officer to whom she was given in custody, by muffling her face in a bed of feathers, and stopping up her nostrils and so becoming suffocated.

48. To all these calamities another of no less severity was added. For Eumenius and Abienus, two men of the highest class, having been accused, during Maximin's term of office, of adultery with Fausiana, a woman of rank, after the death of Victorinus, under whose protection they were safe, being alarmed at the arrival of Simplicius, who was as full of audacity and threats as Maximin, withdrew to some secret hiding place.