Rhine and the Danube. To
the undiscerning eye of the vulgar, Philip appeared a monarch no less
powerful than Hadrian or Augustus had formerly been. The form was still
the same, but the animating health and vigor were fled. The industry of
the people was discouraged and exhausted by a long series of oppression.
The discipline of the legions, which alone, after the extinction
of every other virtue, had propped the greatness of the state, was
corrupted by the ambition, or relaxed by the weakness, of the emperors.
The strength of the frontiers, which had always consisted in arms rather
than in fortifications, was insensibly undermined; and the fairest
provinces were left exposed to the rapaciousness or ambition of the
barbarians, who soon discovered the decline of the Roman empire.

Chapter VIII: State Of Persion And Restoration Of The Monarchy.--Part I.

Of The State Of Persia After The Restoration Of The Monarchy
By Artaxerxes.

Whenever Tacitus indulges himself in those beautiful episodes, in which
he relates some domestic transaction of the Germans or of the Parthians,
his principal object is to relieve the attention of the reader from a
uniform scene of vice and misery. From the reign of Augustus to the time
of Alexander Severus, the enemies of Rome were in her bosom--the tyrants
and the soldiers; and her prosperity had a very distant and feeble
interest in the revolutions that might happen beyond the Rhine and the
Euphrates. But when the military order had levelled, in wild anarchy,
the power of the prince, the laws of the senate, and even the discipline
of the camp, the barbarians of the North and of the East, who had long
hovered on the frontier, boldly attacked the provinces of a declining
monarchy. Their vexatious inroads were changed into formidable
irruptions, and, after a long vicissitude of mutual calamities,
many tribes of the victorious invaders established themselves in the
provinces of the Roman Empire. To obtain a clearer knowledge of
these great events, we shall endeavor to form a previous idea of the
character, forces, and designs of those nations who avenged the cause of
Hannibal and Mithridates.

In the more early ages of the world, whilst the forest that covered
Europe afforded a retreat to a few wandering savages, the inhabitants
of Asia were already collected into populous cities, and reduced under
extensive empires, the seat of the arts, of luxury, and of despotism.
The Assyria