The Polyhistor

A From this discipline, the rationale for all subsequent time was founded. Truly, although both this and many other things are owed to the times of Augustus, who almost alone possessed affairs without example, so many and such great adversities are found in his life that it is not easy to discern whether he was more calamitous or more fortunate. First, because Lepidus the tribune was preferred over him when he petitioned his uncle for the mastership of the horse, accompanied by a certain note of ill-omen in the undertakings. Soon came the college of the triumvirate, with the overwhelming power of Antonius, the subsequent envy of the Philippi proscription, the abdication of the posthumous Agrippa after his adoption, then the distinguished penitence for his loss, the Sicilian shipwrecks, and the shameful concealment in a cave there: numerous seditions of soldiers, the anxiety of Perusia, the detected adultery of his daughter, and her parricidal intent: and with no less disgrace, the accusation of his granddaughter, the death of his sons, and the loss of his children, not only the grief of childlessness but the pestilence of the City, famine in Italy during the Illyrian war, the distress of military affairs, a diseased body, the insulting dissent of his stepson Nero, and the thoughts of his wife and Tiberius that were not sufficiently loyal, and many more in this manner. Yet, as if mourning his era, a scarcity of all crops followed his final days. But lest what had occurred might seem fortuitous, impending evils appeared with no uncertain signs. For a certain Fausta from the common people produced quadruplets in one birth, two males and two females, portending with monstrous fertility the indication of future calamity: although the author Trogus affirms that in Egypt septuplets are born from one womb at the same time. This is less surprising there, since the Nilus Nile river, with its life-bearing drink, fertilizes not only the fields but also the wombs of humans. Indeed, we read that Cn. Pompeius presented Eutychide, a woman of Asia, who it was established