§. 5. Mishaps.
Besides this deluge of blood, which overflowed the City continually, there was also this year a deluge of water. For Tiber rose so high and violently into the Town, that many Streets became navigable, and where men had walked lately on their feet, they might have passed now up and down in ships. And a greater misfortune happened this year likewise by the contrary element: for a terrible fire consumed the buildings of the mount▪ Aventine and that part of the Circus that lay betwixt that and the Palace; For the repair of all which again, Tiberius out of his own Treasure gave a great sum of money: Tacitus saith Millies Sestertium, which according to the value and reckoning of our English coin amounted to eight hundred thousand pounds, within nineteen thousand. A sum not strange in an Emperors coffer at Rome, where the vastness of the Empire brought in vast revenues, but somewhat strange out of the purse of Tiberius for so good a purpose, whose covetousness was larger than those whole revenues. And therefore as I cannot but observe the difference of Dion about this liberality of the Emperor from Tacitus, and the difference of his translator from his Text; so can I not but conceive his computation and account to be the more probable in regard of the niggardise of the Emperor. For whereas the sum of Tacitus is eight hundred thousand within nineteen, he hath so far come short of such a reckoning, that he maketh nineteen thousand pounds to be the whole ac∣count. For Tiberius, saith he, gave 〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉, two thousand and five hun∣dred thousand, meaning 2500 sestertia, and each sestertium containing a thousand Sestertios, this accreweth to about the sum last named, of 19000 l. and yet hath his translator forsaken his Greek, and followed Tacitus Latine, to so vast a difference.