Book 14
1.3
There stood out among their lesser atrocities, when their unbridled power had already surpassed the limits of unimportant delinquencies, the sudden and awful death of one Clematius, a nobleman of Alexandria. This man’s mother-in-law, it was said, had a violent passion for her son-in-law, but was unable to seduce him; whereupon, gaining entrance to the palace by a back door, she presented the queen with a valuable necklace, and thus secured the dispatch of his death-warrant to Honoratus, at that time Count of the East;Comites originally were companions of an official on his travels, as Catullus accompanied Memmius to Bithynia; cf. Horace, Epist. i. 8, 2, etc. They gradually became his advisers, and later they were appointed to various duties as his deputies. They differed in rank; the Comes Orientis was of the second grade spectabilis), see Introd., p. xviii. and so Clematius, a man contaminated by no guilt, was put to death without being allowed to protest or even to open his lips.
