Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/223

The Roman Empire at its Height 157 poems and then wrote his immortal ^Eneid, a sort of continua- tion of the Iliad, in which he describes the fall of Troy, the coming to Italy of ^Eneas, whom he represented as the ancestor of the Caesars. Livy wrote his great history of Rome, from which we get a large part of our information in regard to the develop- ment of the Roman State down to his time. II. SUCCESSORS OF AUGUSTUS: POLICY OF TRAJAN AND HADRIAN 248. Death of Augustus; his Successors. Augustus died A.D. 14. There was no law providing for the line of succession in the Empire. As Augustus had no male heir, he had asked the Senate to associate with him in the government his stepson Tiberius, an able soldier who succeeded him. The chief thing to be noted in his reign is that he no longer allowed the Roman populace to go through the farce of approving what the emperor had already decided upon ; so even the appearance of government by the Roman people disappeared forever. We can mention only a very few of the Roman emperors who succeeded Tiberius. Some of them were good and efficient ; some of them followed careers of vice and wickedness. Of the latter class Nero (A. D. 54-68) is the worst example. He is accused of having his wife and mother and his old teacher, Seneca, killed and of setting fire to Rome in order to witness the spectacle and have the pleasure of rebuilding the town. There is no evidence that he really com- mitted this crime. He put the blame for it on the Christians, who were now beginning to appear in Rome, and had many of them executed with horrible tortures. So Nero's name has come down to us as one of the blackest in history. A revolt in the army finally caused him to commit suicide. After Nero's death there was a struggle between rival candi- dates for the throne, and Vespasian, an able general, finally won in the year 69 of the Christian Era. With him began a century of general peace under good and efficient rulers who brought the Empire to its highest point of prosperity and general content.