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BOOK III, CHAPTER I. 1. When Nero was informed of the disasters in Judaea, though seized with consternation and alarm suppressed however as was natural, he assumed, in public, a haughty and indignant air. Attributing what had occurred rather to the negligence of his general, than to the valour of the foe, he deemed it becoming in one who sustained the weight of the empire to treat misfortunes with stately contempt, and show himself possessed of a mind superior to every reverse. His mental perturbation, notwithstanding, was betrayed by his thoughtfulness. 2. Deliberating to whom he should confide the east, which was already in commotion, and whose task it should be at once to chastise the Jewish insurgents, and to impose a timely check on the surrounding nations, who were catching the contagion, Vespasian alone could he find adequate to the emergency, or able to support the burden of so vast an enterprise ; a man who from youth to age had spent his life Ln military service; who for the Romans had formerly pacified the west, when disturbed by the Germans; and to whose arms they owed the acquisition of Britain, hitherto unknown. This last was a conquest, on account of which his father Claudius, without any toil on his own part, had obtained a triumph. 3. Auguring favourably, therefore, from these facts, and seeing his years steadied by experience, and that, together with his own approved fidelity, his sons were a pledge, and their vigour a hand, for the execution of their father's sagacious counsels God also, perhaps, providentially directing the whole Nero sent him to assume the command of the armies in Syria, paying him, in consequence of the urgency of the occasion, many soothingand flattering compliments, such as necessities of the kind demand. Immediately on his app...