s son Julian, were sent
under a strong guard into Italy; and before they reached the palace of
Ravenna, they met the ministers of death.

At a time when it was universally confessed, that almost every man
in the empire was superior in personal merit to the princes whom the
accident of their birth had seated on the throne, a rapid succession of
usurpers, regardless of the fate of their predecessors, still continued
to arise. This mischief was peculiarly felt in the provinces of
Spain and Gaul, where the principles of order and obedience had been
extinguished by war and rebellion. Before Constantine resigned the
purple, and in the fourth month of the siege of Arles, intelligence was
received in the Imperial camp, that Jovinus has assumed the diadem at
Mentz, in the Upper Germany, at the instigation of Goar, king of
the Alani, and of Guntiarius, king of the Burgundians; and that the
candidate, on whom they had bestowed the empire, advanced with a
formidable host of Barbarians, from the banks of the Rhine to those of
the Rhone. Every circumstance is dark and extraordinary in the short
history of the reign of Jovinus. It was natural to expect, that a
brave and skilful general, at the head of a victorious army, would have
asserted, in a field of battle, the justice of the cause of Honorius.
The hasty retreat of Constantius might be justified by weighty reasons;
but he resigned, without a struggle, the possession of Gaul; and
Dardanus, the Praetorian praefect, is recorded as the only magistrate who
refused to yield obedience to the usurper. When the Goths, two years
after the siege of Rome, established their quarters in Gaul, it was
natural to suppose that their inclinations could be divided only between
the emperor Honorius, with whom they had formed a recent alliance,
and the degraded Attalus, whom they reserved in their camp for the
occasional purpose of acting the part of a musician or a monarch. Yet in
a moment of disgust, (for which it is not easy to assign a cause, or a
date,) Adolphus connected himself with the usurper of Gaul; and imposed
on Attalus the ignominious task of negotiating the treaty, which
ratified his own disgrace. We are again surprised to read, that, instead
of considering the Gothic alliance as the firmest support of his
throne, Jovinus upbraided, in dark and ambiguous language, the officious
importunity of Attalus; that, scorning the advice of his great ally,
he invested with the purple his brother S