and death. Trained from his earliest youth in the exercise of arms, he
set too small a value on the life of a citizen, chastised by military
execution the slightest offences, and transferred the stern discipline
of the camp into the civil administration of the laws. His love of
justice often became a blind and furious passion and whenever he deemed
his own or the public safety endangered, he disregarded the rules of
evidence, and the proportion of punishments. The unprovoked rebellion
with which the Romans rewarded his services, exasperated his haughty
spirit. The noblest families of the capital were involved in the guilt
or suspicion of this dark conspiracy. A nasty spirit of revenge urged
the bloody prosecution, and it proved fatal to one of the nephews of the
emperor. The the executioners (if we may use the expression of a
contemporary poet) were fatigued, the prisons were crowded, and the
unhappy senate lamented the death or absence of its most illustrious
members. [93] Nor was the pride of Aurelian less offensive to that
assembly than his cruelty. Ignorant or impatient of the restraints of
civil institutions, he disdained to hold his power by any other title
than that of the sword, and governed by right of conquest an empire
which he had saved and subdued. [94]

[Footnote 92: Vopiscus in Hist. August p. 222. The two Victors.
Eutropius ix. 14. Zosimus (l. i. p. 43) mentions only three senators,
and placed their death before the eastern war.]

[Footnote 93: Nulla catenati feralis pompa senatus Carnificum lassabit
opus; nec carcere pleno Infelix raros numerabit curia Patres.
Calphurn. Eclog. i. 60.]

[Footnote 94: According to the younger Victor, he sometimes wore the
diadem, Deus and Dominus appear on his medals.]

It was observed by one of the most sagacious of the Roman princes,
that the talents of his predecessor Aurelian were better suited to the
command of an army, than to the government of an empire. [95] Conscious
of the character in which nature and experience had enabled him to
excel, he again took the field a few months after his triumph. It was
expedient to exercise the restless temper of the legions in some foreign
war, and the Persian monarch, exulting in the shame of Valerian, still
braved with impunity the offended majesty of Rome. At the head of an
army, less formidable by its numbers than by its discipline and valor,
the emperor advanced as far as the Straits which divide Europe from
Asia. He th