e jealousy of his successors. The children
of Tacitus and Florianus were permitted to descend into a private
station, and to mingle with the general mass of the people. Their
poverty indeed became an additional safeguard to their innocence. When
Tacitus was elected by the senate, he resigned his ample patrimony to
the public service; [21] an act of generosity specious in appearance,
but which evidently disclosed his intention of transmitting the empire
to his descendants. The only consolation of their fallen state was the
remembrance of transient greatness, and a distant hope, the child of a
flattering prophecy, that at the end of a thousand years, a monarch of
the race of Tacitus should arise, the protector of the senate, the
restorer of Rome, and the conqueror of the whole earth. [22]

[Footnote 21: Hist. August. p. 229]

[Footnote 22: He was to send judges to the Parthians, Persians, and
Sarmatians, a president to Taprobani, and a proconsul to the Roman
island, (supposed by Casaubon and Salmasius to mean Britain.) Such a
history as mine (says Vopiscus with proper modesty) will not subsist a
thousand years, to expose or justify the prediction.]

The peasants of Illyricum, who had already given Claudius and Aurelian
to the sinking empire, had an equal right to glory in the elevation of
Probus. [23] Above twenty years before, the emperor Valerian, with his
usual penetration, had discovered the rising merit of the young soldier,
on whom he conferred the rank of tribune, long before the age prescribed
by the military regulations. The tribune soon justified his choice, by a
victory over a great body of Sarmatians, in which he saved the life of
a near relation of Valerian; and deserved to receive from the emperor's
hand the collars, bracelets, spears, and banners, the mural and the
civic crown, and all the honorable rewards reserved by ancient Rome
for successful valor. The third, and afterwards the tenth, legion were
intrusted to the command of Probus, who, in every step of his promotion,
showed himself superior to the station which he filled. Africa and
Pontus, the Rhine, the Danube, the Euphrates, and the Nile, by turns
afforded him the most splendid occasions of displaying his personal
prowess and his conduct in war. Aurelian was indebted for the honest
courage with which he often checked the cruelty of his master.
Tacitus, who desired by the abilities of his generals to supply his own
deficiency of military talents,