previous next
[19] This persistent purpose of his increased, spurred on as it was both by his own greed and that of persons who frequented the court at that time, and opened the way to fresh [p. 199] desires, and if any mention of mercy was made—which rarely happened—called it slackness. These men through their bloodthirsty flatteries perverted in the worst possible direction the character of a man who carried death at the tip of his tongue, 1 and blew everything down with an untimely hurricane, hastening to overturn utterly the richest houses.

1 Cf. xviii. 3, 7, vitae potestatem et necis in acie linguae portantem.

Ammianus Marcellinus. With An English Translation. John C. Rolfe, Ph.D., Litt.D. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1935-1940.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Introduction (John C. Rolfe, Ph.D., Litt.D., 1940)
load focus Introduction (John C. Rolfe, Ph.D., Litt.D., 1939)
load focus Introduction (John C. Rolfe, Ph.D., Litt.D., 1935)
load focus Latin (John C. Rolfe, Ph.D., Litt.D., 1935)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: