23. Was it a difficult work?
24. What followed the building of the bridge?
25. What was the event of this second campaign?
26. What advantages arose from this conquest?
27. Did Trajan suffer prosperity to make him neglectful of his duties?
SECTION II.
With fatal heat impetuous courage glows.—Johnson.
U.C. 860.
A.D. 107.
1. It had been happy for Trajan's memory, had he shown equal clemency to all his subjects; but about the ninth year of his reign, he was persuaded to look upon the Christians with a suspicious eye, and great numbers of them were put to death by popular tumults and judicial proceedings. 2. However, the persecution ceased after some time; for the emperor, finding that the Christians were an innocent and inoffensive people, suspended their punishments.
3. During this emperor's reign there was a dreadful insurrection of the Jews in all parts of the empire. This wretched people, still infatuated, and ever expecting some signal deliverance, took the advantage of Tra'jan's expedition to the east, to massacre all the Greeks and Romans whom they could get into their power. 4. This rebellion first began in Cyre'ne, a Roman province in Africa; from thence the flame extended to Egypt, and next to the island of Cyprus. Dreadful were the devastations committed by these infatuated people, and shocking the barbarities exercised on the unoffending inhabitants. 5. Some were sawn asunder, others cast to wild beasts, or made to kill each other, while the most unheard-of torments were invented and exercised on the unhappy victims of their fury. Nay, to such a pitch was their animosity carried, that they actually ate the flesh of their enemies, and even wore their skins. 6. However, these cruelties were of no long duration: the governors of the respective provinces making head against[Pg. 322] their tumultuous fury, caused them to experience the horrors of retaliation, and put them to death, not as human beings, but as outrageous pests of society. In Cy'prus it was made capital for any Jew to set foot on the island.