daughter in marriage. (But he knew well enough that, while pretending to
want to marry her, he in fact was anxious to detach the Parthian
kingdom.) So he damaged a large section of the country around Media by
means of a sudden incursion, sacked many citadels, won over Arbela, dug
open the royal tombs of the Parthians, and flung the bones about. The
Parthians would not engage him at close quarters, and therefore I have
had nothing of especial interest to record concerning the doings of that
expedition except, perhaps, one anecdote. Two soldiers who had seized a
skin of wine came to him, each claiming the booty as entirely his own.
Being bidden by him to divide the wine equally they drew their swords
and cut the wine skin in two, apparently expecting each to get a half
with the wine in it. They so dreaded their emperor that they troubled
him even with such details and showed such scrupulousness as to lose
both wineskin and wine.

Now the barbarians took refuge in the mountains and across the Tigris in
order to perfect their preparations. But Antoninus suppressed this fact
and, assuming that he had utterly vanquished a foe whom he had not even
seen, he displayed becoming pride; and, as he himself wrote, he was
particularly gratified because a lion ran down from the mountains and
fought on his side.

[Sidenote:--2--] Not only in other ways did he live unnaturally and
transgress laws, but in his very campaigns [[lacuna] but truth; [Footnote:
Here begins the parchment codex, Vaticanus 1288. See Volume I, page 8.]
for I have run across the book written by him about it. He understood so
well how he stood with all the senators that, in spite of many protests,
their slaves and freedmen and intimate friends were arrested by him and
were asked under torture whether "so-and-so loves me" or "so-and-so
hates me." For the charts of the stars under which any of his foremost