expectations of Probus were too often disappointed. The impatience
and idleness of the barbarians could ill brook the slow labors of
agriculture. Their unconquerable love of freedom, rising against
despotism, provoked them into hasty rebellions, alike fatal to
themselves and to the provinces; [49] nor could these artificial
supplies, however repeated by succeeding emperors, restore the important
limit of Gaul and Illyricum to its ancient and native vigor.

[Footnote 45: He distributed about fifty or sixty barbarians to a
Numerus, as it was then called, a corps with whose established number we
are not exactly acquainted.]

[Footnote 46: Camden's Britannia, Introduction, p. 136; but he speaks
from a very doubtful conjecture.]

[Footnote 47: Zosimus, l. i. p. 62. According to Vopiscus, another body
of Vandals was less faithful.]

[Footnote 48: Hist. August. p. 240. They were probably expelled by the
Goths. Zosim. l. i. p. 66.]

[Footnote 49: Hist. August. p. 240.]

Of all the barbarians who abandoned their new settlements, and disturbed
the public tranquillity, a very small number returned to their own
country. For a short season they might wander in arms through the
empire; but in the end they were surely destroyed by the power of
a warlike emperor. The successful rashness of a party of Franks was
attended, however, with such memorable consequences, that it ought not
to be passed unnoticed. They had been established by Probus, on the
sea-coast of Pontus, with a view of strengthening the frontier against
the inroads of the Alani. A fleet stationed in one of the harbors of
the Euxine fell into the hands of the Franks; and they resolved, through
unknown seas, to explore their way from the mouth of the Phasis to
that of the Rhine. They easily escaped through the Bosphorus and
the Hellespont, and cruising along the Mediterranean, indulged
their appetite for revenge and plunder by frequent descents on the
unsuspecting shores of Asia, Greece, and Africa. The opulent city of
Syracuse, in whose port the natives of Athens and Carthage had formerly
been sunk, was sacked by a handful of barbarians, who massacred the
greatest part of the trembling inhabitants. From the Island of Sicily,
the Franks proceeded to the columns of Hercules, trusted themselves to
the ocean, coasted round Spain and Gaul, and steering their triumphant
course through the British Channel, at length finished their surprising
voyage, by landing in safety on