ns of Sparta at 33,000--M.]

Chapter X: Emperors Decius, Gallus, Aemilianus, Valerian And Gallienus--Part I.

The Emperors Decius, Gallus, Aemilianus, Valerian, And
Gallienus.--The General Irruption Of The Barbari Ans.--The
Thirty Tyrants.

From the great secular games celebrated by Philip, to the death of the
emperor Gallienus, there elapsed twenty years of shame and misfortune.
During that calamitous period, every instant of time was marked, every
province of the Roman world was afflicted, by barbarous invaders, and
military tyrants, and the ruined empire seemed to approach the last and
fatal moment of its dissolution. The confusion of the times, and the
scarcity of authentic memorials, oppose equal difficulties to the
historian, who attempts to preserve a clear and unbroken thread of
narration. Surrounded with imperfect fragments, always concise, often
obscure, and sometimes contradictory, he is reduced to collect, to
compare, and to conjecture: and though he ought never to place his
conjectures in the rank of facts, yet the knowledge of human nature, and
of the sure operation of its fierce and unrestrained passions, might, on
some occasions, supply the want of historical materials.

There is not, for instance, any difficulty in conceiving, that the
successive murders of so many emperors had loosened all the ties of
allegiance between the prince and people; that all the generals of
Philip were disposed to imitate the example of their master; and that
the caprice of armies, long since habituated to frequent and violent
revolutions, might every day raise to the throne the most obscure of
their fellow-soldiers. History can only add, that the rebellion against
the emperor Philip broke out in the summer of the year two hundred and
forty-nine, among the legions of Maesia; and that a subaltern officer,
[1] named Marinus, was the object of their seditious choice. Philip was
alarmed. He dreaded lest the treason of the Maesian army should
prove the first spark of a general conflagration. Distracted with
the consciousness of his guilt and of his danger, he communicated the
intelligence to the senate. A gloomy silence prevailed, the effect of
fear, and perhaps of disaffection; till at length Decius, one of the
assembly, assuming a spirit worthy of his noble extraction, ventured to
discover more intrepidity than the emperor seemed to possess. He treated
the whole business with contempt, as a hasty and inco