rigor, crimes and
factions, mischievous arts and pernicious connivance, the luxurious
growth of a feeble and oppressive government, were eradicated throughout
the Roman world. [87] But if we attentively reflect how much swifter is
the progress of corruption than its cure, and if we remember that the
years abandoned to public disorders exceeded the months allotted to the
martial reign of Aurelian, we must confess that a few short intervals of
peace were insufficient for the arduous work of reformation. Even his
attempt to restore the integrity of the coin was opposed by a formidable
insurrection. The emperor's vexation breaks out in one of his private
letters. "Surely," says he, "the gods have decreed that my life should
be a perpetual warfare. A sedition within the walls has just now given
birth to a very serious civil war. The workmen of the mint, at the
instigation of Felicissimus, a slave to whom I had intrusted an
employment in the finances, have risen in rebellion. They are at length
suppressed; but seven thousand of my soldiers have been slain in the
contest, of those troops whose ordinary station is in Dacia, and the
camps along the Danube." [88] Other writers, who confirm the same fact,
add likewise, that it happened soon after Aurelian's triumph; that the
decisive engagement was fought on the Caelian hill; that the workmen of
the mint had adulterated the coin; and that the emperor restored the
public credit, by delivering out good money in exchange for the bad,
which the people was commanded to bring into the treasury. [89]

[Footnote 87: Vopiscus in Hist. August. p. 221.]

[Footnote 88: Hist. August. p. 222. Aurelian calls these soldiers Hiberi
Riporiences Castriani, and Dacisci.]

[Footnote 89: Zosimus, l. i. p. 56. Eutropius, ix. 14. Aurel Victor.]

We might content ourselves with relating this extraordinary transaction,
but we cannot dissemble how much in its present form it appears to us
inconsistent and incredible. The debasement of the coin is indeed well
suited to the administration of Gallienus; nor is it unlikely that the
instruments of the corruption might dread the inflexible justice of
Aurelian. But the guilt, as well as the profit, must have been confined
to a very few; nor is it easy to conceive by what arts they could arm a
people whom they had injured, against a monarch whom they had betrayed.
We might naturally expect that such miscreants should have shared
the public detestation with the