can read this
coarse and particular private conversation of the two emperors, without
assenting to the justice of Gibbon's severe sentence. But the authorship
of the treatise is by no means certain. The fame of Lactantius for
eloquence as well as for truth, would suffer no loss if it should be
adjudged to some more "obscure rhetorician." Manso, in his Leben
Constantins des Grossen, concurs on this point with Gibbon Beylage, iv.
--M.]

After the elevation of Constantius and Galerius to the rank of Augusti,
two new Coesars were required to supply their place, and to complete the
system of the Imperial government. Diocletian, was sincerely desirous
of withdrawing himself from the world; he considered Galerius, who had
married his daughter, as the firmest support of his family and of the
empire; and he consented, without reluctance, that his successor should
assume the merit as well as the envy of the important nomination. It was
fixed without consulting the interest or inclination of the princes of
the West. Each of them had a son who was arrived at the age of manhood,
and who might have been deemed the most natural candidates for the
vacant honor. But the impotent resentment of Maximian was no longer to
be dreaded; and the moderate Constantius, though he might despise the
dangers, was humanely apprehensive of the calamities, of civil war.
The two persons whom Galerius promoted to the rank of Caesar, were much
better suited to serve the views of his ambition; and their principal
recommendation seems to have consisted in the want of merit or personal
consequence. The first of these was Daza, or, as he was afterwards
called, Maximin, whose mother was the sister of Galerius. The
unexperienced youth still betrayed, by his manners and language, his
rustic education, when, to his own astonishment, as well as that of the
world, he was invested by Diocletian with the purple, exalted to the
dignity of Caesar, and intrusted with the sovereign command of Egypt
and Syria. [5] At the same time, Severus, a faithful servant, addicted to
pleasure, but not incapable of business, was sent to Milan, to receive,
from the reluctant hands of Maximian, the Caesarian ornaments, and
the possession of Italy and Africa. According to the forms of the
constitution, Severus acknowledged the supremacy of the western
emperor; but he was absolutely devoted to the commands of his benefactor
Galerius, who, reserving to himself the intermediate countries fro