M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
6. But the daughter of Polycrates had previously had a remarkable dream. She had seemed to see her father, raised aloft on an open and conspicuous spot, being laved and anointed by the hands of Jupiter and the Sun. The diviners read the dream as foretelling a rich and happy fortune.[1] But it turned out wholly otherwise. For Polycrates, beguiled by Oroetes the Persian, was seized and crucified. And so the dream was fulfilled in his crucifixion. For he was laved by Jove's hands when it rained, and anointed by the hands of the Sun, when the dew of agony came out upon his skin. Such prosperous beginnings as his have not seldom a disastrous ending. There should be no exultation over excessive and prolonged prosperity, no fainting away when a reverse has been sustained. You may soon hope for a victory, for Rome in her history has ever experienced frequent alternations of fortune.
7. Who is so unversed in military annals as not to know that the Roman people have earned their empire by falling no less than by felling? that our legions have often been broken and routed by the arms of barbarians? It has been found possible to subject to the yoke and to tame bulls, however savage and dangerous; and in the same way our armies have in former times been made to pass under the yoke. But those very foes, who forced us under the yoke, have our generals but a little later forced to march at the head of their triumphs and have sold them as slaves by auction.
- ↑ Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, had a similar dream, and Artemidorus (a writer of the time of Marcus), On Dreams, 4, said it signified great honours and riches.
