[77]
] Heliodorus, who managed his correspondence: "Caesar can give you money and honor, but he can't make you an orator." Favorinus was about to bring a case before the emperor in regard to exemption from taxes, a privilege which he desired to secure in his native city. Suspecting, however, that he should be unsuccessful and be insulted in addition he entered the courtroom, to be sure, but made no other statement save: "My teacher stood this night in a dream by my side and bade me do service for my country, since I have been born in it."
4
Now Hadrian spared these men, although he was displeased with them, for he could find no satisfactory pretext to use against them that might compass their destruction. But he first banished and later actually put to death Apollodorus the architect, who had planned the various creations of Trajan in Rome,--the forum, the odeum, and the gymnasium. The excuse given was that he had been guilty of some misdemeanor, but the true reason was that, when Trajan was consulting him on some point about the works, he had said to Hadrian, who broke in with some remark: "Be off and draw gourds. You don't understand any of these matters." It happened that Hadrian at the time was pluming himself upon some such drawing. When he became emperor, therefore, he remembered the slight and would not endure the man's freedom of speech. He sent him his own plan of the temple of Venus and Roma by way of showing him that a great work could be accomplished without his aid, and he asked Apollodorus whether the structure was a good one. The latter in his reply said about the temple that it ought to have been made to tower aloft in the air and have been scooped out beneath. Then, as a result of being higher, it would have stood out more conspicuously on the Sacred Way, and might have received
A.D. 117 (a.u. 870)