med to approach the last and
fatal moment of its dissolution. Six emperors in turn succeeded to the
sceptre of Philip and ended their lives, either as the victims of
military licence, or in the vain attempt to stay the triumphal eruption
of the Goths and the Franks and the Suevi. In three expeditions the
Goths seized the Bosphorus, plundered the cities of Bithynia, ravaged
Greece, and threatened Italy, while the Franks invaded Gaul, overran
Spain and the provinces of Africa.

Some sparks of their ancient virtue enabled the senate to repulse the
Suevi, who threatened Rome herself, but the miseries of the empire were
not assuaged by this one triumph, and the successes of Sapor, king of
Persia, in the East, seemed to foreshadow the immediate downfall of
Rome. Six emperors and thirty tyrants attempted in vain to stay the
course of disaster. Famine and pestilence, tumults and disorders, and a
great diminution of the population marked this period, which ended with
the death of the Emperor Gallienus on March 20, 268.

_V.--Restorers of the Roman World_

The empire, which had been oppressed and almost destroyed by the
soldiers, the tyrants, and the barbarians, was saved by a series of
great princes, who derived their obscure origin from the martial
provinces of Illyricum. Within a period of about thirty years, Claudius,
Aurelian, Probus, Diocletian and his colleagues triumphed over the
foreign and domestic enemies of the state, re-established, with a
military discipline, the strength of the frontier, and deserved the
glorious title of Restorers of the Roman world.

Claudius gained a crushing victory over the Goths, whose discomfiture
was completed by disease in the year 269. And his successor, Aurelian,
in a reign of less than five years, put an end to the Gothic war,
chastised the Germans who invaded Italy, recovered Gaul, Spain, and
Britain from the Roman usurpers, and destroyed the proud monarchy which
Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, had erected in the East on the ruins of the
afflicted empire.

The murder of Aurelian in the East (January 275) led to a curious
revival of the authority of the senate. During an interregnum of eight
months the ancient assembly at Rome governed with the consent of the
army, and appeared to regain with the election of Tacitus, one of their
members, all their ancient prerogatives. Their authority expired,
however, with the death of his successor, Probus, who delivered the
empire once more fro