19 Next, with thorough insight
into the feelings of his province, and taught also, by the experience of others,
that little is gained by conquest if followed by oppression, he determined to
root out the causes of war. Beginning first with himself and his dependants, he
kept his household under restraint, a thing as hard to many as ruling a
province. He transacted no public business through freedmen or slaves; no
private leanings, no recommendations or entreaties of friends, moved him in the
selection of centurions and soldiers, but it was ever the best man whom he
thought most trustworthy. He knew everything, but did not always act on his
knowledge. Trifling errors he treated with leniency, serious offences with
severity. Nor was it always punishment, but far oftener penitence, which
satisfied him. He preferred to give office and power to men who would not transgress,
rather than have to condemn a transgressor. He lightened the exaction of corn
and tribute by an equal distribution of the burden, while he got rid of those
contrivances for gain which were more intolerable than the tribute itself.
Hitherto the people had been compelled to endure the farce of waiting by the
closed granary and of purchasing corn unnecessarily and raising it to a
fictitious price. Difficult byroads and distant places were fixed for them, so
that states with a winter-camp close to them had to carry corn to remote and
inaccessible parts of the country, until what was within the reach of all
became a source of profit to the few.
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