whom he had associated with himself in the empire. The contending factions promptly fraternized with each other. The Senate was easily persuaded to acquiesce in an appointment to which it could make no resistance, and was glad perhaps to return to the principle of hereditary descent, illustrated by the august names of Severus and Antoninus.

But neither by these names nor that of Bassianus is the new emperor commonly known to us. The deity of the Sun whom he served was worshipped at Emesa under the title of Elagabalus, and the same designation was attached to his chief pontiff. The ideas of the youthful aspirant were wholly Oriental. He knew nothing and cared nothing for the principles of Roman sovereignty. He continued to serve his elemental fetich, and introduced the rude black stone which represented the Sun in his country among the personal images of the Roman divinities. He appeared in the streets of the city in the loose costume of the Oriental priesthoods, painted and bedizened; but his luxury and dissipation were even more shocking than his dress and accoutrements. The rule of a wretched creature, debased by a grovelling superstition, by vile effeminacy, and a total absence of intellectual and moral dignity, was more degrading to the Romans than that of any tyrant or monster who had preceded him, and marks even more strongly the complete denationalization which had befallen them. The Roman people had, indeed, almost ceased to be Roman. They had become a mixed residue of all races, among whom the manners of many countries mingled in a confused medley. From this period the literature of Rome has entirely disappeared. All we know of the thoughts and habits of the age is derived from the scanty notices of Greeks, Gauls, or Africans and other foreigners; and even these tell us little of the ideas current in the capital of the world around.

The vices of Elagabalus were for the most part confined to the palace, where his lust and licentiousness reigned supreme. The disgust of all classes, both civil and military, became at last apparent even to his own household. His grandmother Mæsa, who seems to have retained a certain power over him, persuaded him to raise his cousin Alexander, a youth of better promise, to partnership with him; but no sooner had he thus elevated him than he conceived unbounded jealousy of his superior talents and popularity, and purposed to degrade him. But it was already too late. The prætorians determined to protect the younger prince. Though for a moment they held the life of their earlier favorite sacred, they soon had occasion to resent his interference with their caprices, broke out into sedition, and asssassinated him. Alexander, who also assumed the name of Severus,

A.D. 222.

CHAP. LXVIII.

ALEXANDER SEVERUS.

561

was readily accepted as his successor, and reigned, under the guardianship of his mother Mamaa.

The character of this prince is represented to us as the most amiable in the whole series of the Cæsars. His reign was undoubtedly one of the most prosperous. For many years at least the empire was vexed by no foreign wars. His subjects were relieved from the taxation imposed by the necessities of military leaders or licentious profligates. Great progress continued to be made in the digest of the law: the name of Ulpian, his minister, stands pre-eminent in the records of the Roman jurisprudence. Alexander succeeded to power at the tender age of seventeen, and he may be excused for the only weakness he exhibited in yielding too much to the influence of his mother, a crafty woman, who, while she refused the title of Augusta and the show of political authority, was for too long a period the actual directress of her son's administration, and seduced him into some acts of injustice and cruelty towards his wife and his father-in-law. There was, indeed, no escape for the emperor from the exactions of the prætorians. As soon as these arrogant soldiers found that the child whom they had placed on the throne was resolved to keep them under due control they murmured and mutinied against him. Their discontent, however, vented itself not upon the emperor, but his minister. The citizens actually rose in arms to defend Ulpian, but their efforts were vain; he was seized and massacred within the walls of the palace. Alexander was saved, indeed, from the shame of surrendering him; but he was constrained to dissemble with the mutineers, and overlook their offence, till an opportunity occurred for avenging the assassination upon Epagathus, their leader. Nor, indeed, was the young emperor wanting in firmness, where firmness would be of any avail. The legions were corrupt, and in their impatience of inactivity often broke out into sedition. But Alexander was at no loss to repress them. It is with some agreeable surprise that we read how on one occasion he succeeded in quelling a tumult in his camp by threatening, like Cæsar before him, to address them not as soldiers," but as citizens." Alexander modestly declined the title of Antoninus, which had been hitherto assumed by the princes of his race. He might shrink, as a mere student in literature and science, from comparison with the two first emperors who had made the name illustrious by their renown as philosophers. Alexander forbore from associating himself with any one of the schools. His familiarity with their tenets was no doubt slender, nor was he endowed, perhaps, with a capacity for penetrating deeply into them, or holding them firmly. He was eminently an eclectic in his tastes and views. He glanced with a tranquil interest at the writings of the poets,

66

66

the orators, and the philosophers; he read with curiosity the ac counts of the good and wise wherever they were to be found. He set up in his private chapel, as objects of devout contempla tion, the images of the greatest teachers of mankind, such, it is said, as Orpheus and Abraham, and even Jesus Christ. In the attitude he bore towards the moral teaching of antiquity he faithfully represented that of his generation. It is gratifying to remember that he never deviated from the path of toleration to persecute the Christians. The temper of the times, cheerful and contented as at this crisis it generally was, made no such cruel demand upon him. He at least was better than Trajan, more generally fortunate than Aurelius.

This happy and tranquil reign was brought, however, to an abrupt and mournful termination. Towards the end of his brief career Alexander was engaged in a war with the Persian monarchy, which had just then risen upon the fall of the Parthian. He seems to have conducted his operations upon a large scale, but the victory, more signal than that of Arbela which has been ascribed to him, has no doubt been monstrously exaggerated, and the final result of his expedition was the loss of some earlier acquisitions in Mesopotamia. From Asia the emperor was recalled to the Danube and the Rhine to resist the Sarmatians and the Germans. Of his operations in these quarters no account remains to us; but Alexander was prematurely cut off by a mutiny of the soldiers, led by an officer named Maximinus, a Thracian peasant by origin, a man whose gigantic stature and rude prowess had attracted the favor of Severus, and now sufficed to point him out to his rudè comrades as worthy to command the legions and govern the empire. This obscure leader was saluted imperator, invested with the purple, and imposed without resistance upon the Senate and people. The degradation of Rome might now seem complete, when its chief was a mere illiterate barbarian, ig norant even of the Greek language, the common vehicle of all polished thought for so many centuries.

A.D. 235.

CHAP. LXIX. RAPID SUCCESSION OF EMPERORS.

563

CHAPTER LXIX.

The barbarian confederations.-The Franks; the Alemanni.-Irruption into Italy. The Goths cross the Euxine and ravage Asia Minor and Greece. -The Persian monarchy of the Sassanidæ.-The Saracens and other Eastern hordes.-Brigandage and general insecurity. The two Gordians. — Maximus and Balbinus.-Maximin murdered by his own soldiers.-The third Gordian made emperor.-Succeeded by Philip the Arabian, who is slain by Decius.-His persecution of the Christians. He is killed in war with the Goths.-Gallus is appointed emperor, and quickly murdered.— Rapid succession of emperors.-Valerian and his son Gallienus.-The thirty tyrants.-Aureolus.-Claudius.-Aurelian.-Tacitus.-Probus.Carus. Carinus.-Diocletian. (A.D. 235–284.)

THE usurper Maximin was followed by a succession of emperors, during whose brief and feverish or feeble reigns the empire of the Cæsars sank into still deeper weakness and humiliation. There is nothing in the slight account we have received of their character or actions to give us any personal interest in them, with at most one or two exceptions. It will be sufficient, for the sake of the ordinary reader, to record here their names and specify the means by which they successively obtained the purple, after first casting a general glance upon the relations of Rome to the communities around her. For the rulers of the state will henceforth be stationed almost wholly on the frontiers; their career, except when they are contending against domestic pretenders, will be spent in foreign warfare; the city of Rome, which has been the central point of our history, will fall altogether out of notice, nor will our attention be steadily attracted to the revolution in thought and opinion which is laboring beneath the surface, till at a later period it suddenly bursts out upon us in the triumph of Christianity.

The increasing force and activity of the barbarians on the frontier constitute the chief political feature of the period before us. The innumerable tribes which had maintained for centuries a desultory warfare with the legions on the Rhine and Danube seem to have collected their strength in three confederations, each of which in turn proved itself too strong for the resistance which the successors of Cæsar and Germanicus could now oppose to it. Along the course of the Lower Rhine, from the Main downwards, the Chatti, the Chauci, and the Cherusci were the principal tribes against which, sometimes in combination, but more often in detail,

the arms of Rome were directed. The nations in this quarter came at a later period to be known under the common designation of the Franks, and to have acted for the most part, whether defensively or offensively, in concert. After the time of Aurelius, or at least of Severus, the tide of invasion was reversed. The Roman province of Gaul became exposed to the repeated irruptions of the barbarians; the Franks, if baffled in their attacks on fortified places, spread themselves far and wide over the land; they advanced, indeed, rapidly from one devastated district to another, and made no permanent conquests; but when the resistance of the battalions on the frontier was overcome, the feeble militia of the interior could not stay their progress for a moment. About the period at which we are now arrived these rude invaders cut their way not only through the whole extent of Gaul, but penetrated into Spain; and at last reaching the coast of the Mediterranean, seized the ships in the harbors and conveyed themselves to the most distant shores, where they at last melted away and left no further traces. Under more vigorous captains the Roman power again recovered itself, and the actual limits of the tributebearing provinces suffered no permanent abatement. But the intrinsic weakness of the empire was made fully known both to its enemies and its subjects.

The tribes on the Upper Rhine and the head-waters of the Danube were known to Cæsar under the general name of Suevi. It is possible that the Chatti of Tacitus were also of Suevic origin. But these people had lost their distinctive appellation in the third century, and they, together, perhaps, with the Boii, Marcomanni, and Quadi, had become linked together in a warlike confederation under the title of Alemanni. These were the people who at this period repeatedly assailed the provinces of Rhætia and Pannonia, routing or evading the Roman garrisons on the Danube, and threatening to burst the barrier of the eastern Alps. At last, about the year 272, the Alemanni penetrated into Italy and spread desolation as far as Ravenna in the Cispadane. But here again they acquired no stronghold and gained no footing. They yielded to the influence of an enervating climate rather than to force of arms. The Romans were again made painfully sensible of the weakness of the empire, and that the capital itself, a huge city which had far outgrown its walls, lay almost at the mercy of a desperate assailant.

At this period the name of the Goths, destined to become the most formidable of the barbarians, was first made known to the Romans. On the banks of the Lower Danube the Goths and their kindred Getæ appear in the place of the Scythians and Sarmatians. After the relinquishment of the province of Dacia the Danube be